In truth, freelance journalism, as a career, is mostly an anachronism. Given the rock-bottom rates on offer, few writers actually support themselves with full-time freelancing. A lucky handful churn out features for the New York Times Magazine and GQ for $2 a word and then deliver half-apologetic aw-shucks accounts of their success on the Longform podcast, which dispenses romantic tales of literary striving to a mass of naive supplicants.
But for most of us, freelance journalism is a monetized hobby, separate from whatever real income one earns. The ideal relationship for a freelance journalist to their work becomes a kind of excited amateurism. They should hope for professional success and acceptance but always keep a backup plan or three in mind. They will likely not be welcomed past the gates of full-time employment. By year five or six, they might be rebranding themselves as “editorial consultants” or “content strategists,” realizing that any genuine fiscal opportunity lies in shepherding corporate content to life.
I was 19 years old and had been living in Asheville, North Carolina for one month. Before that, I’d grown up on an isolated farm in southern West Virginia and all I had ever cared to do was read and write. In Asheville though, for the first time ever, my life was more exciting than any words. My new life was all about bodies. I lived in a two-bedroom apartment with six other people. Our bodies were young, strong and seemed endlessly replenishable. We could fill them up and run them down again. We could use them for love, for money.
I’d put in applications at every downtown restaurant and still not found a job. One afternoon, Angela told me I could have her modeling appointment if I wanted it. She’d rather go hang out with her girlfriend anyhow. Twelve dollars an hour to just sit there, Angela said, and gave me the address.
We’re used to a story that says in the second half of the twentieth century the austere international style of architectural of modernism in the West gave way to a theatrical, historicist Postmodernity. But the story of these architects illustrates that in Singapore and elsewhere in Asia it could be the other way around. For much of the late colonial period Singapore’s modern architecture borrowed its stylings from a Western past. The engineering and construction processes might have been modern but the façade was often neo-classical. The non-Western modernism that flickered into life in Singapore and South East Asia in the second half of the twentieth century was something else entirely.
There’s another interesting political tension here. Despite the Singapore government’s authoritarianism, the rapidity of development made rigid oversight impossible and gave the post-independence generation of architects’ enormous freedom. The government might have banned Cliff Richard and long hair but to a degree they outsourced the opportunity to radically reshape the urban environment. Today Singapore is a very different place. The government has become hyper sensitive to a narrow range of social demands. Inspired by Richard Florida’s ‘Creative Class’, substantial investments in the creative sector have expanded the boundaries of the permissible in civic society and enabled the staging of challenging artistic works, but arguably the overall context is one of tighter social control. While the PAP remain in office, one mode of what is effectively one-party government has given way to quite another.
Simply put, the crispy-gone-soggy (CGS) designation applies to any dish in which an element has been fried, baked, roasted, or otherwise rendered dry and crunchy, and then said crunchiness has been intentionally compromised by a delicious liquid of some variety, usually a sauce or a broth. However, this explanation doesn’t quite do the phenomenon justice. Much like pornography, it is a thing that eludes description—rather, you know it when you taste it.
The miracles never cease in Michael Bishop’s Georgia stories. Bishop has taken O’Connor’s miracles and coupled them with a conception of grace and an emphasis on survival that are all his own. The result is an entertaining, heartfelt, and often surprising collection of stories that celebrate their regional roots loudly and proudly, but are never held down by them.
Chiang’s stories are uniformly notable for a fusion of pure intellect and molten emotion. At the core of each is some deep conceptual notion rich with arcane metaphysical or scientific allure. But surrounding each novum is a narrative of refined human sensitivity and soulfulness that symbolically reifies the ideas. While this combination represents the ideal definition and practice of all science fiction, it’s seldom achieved.