Ed Park - Read Harder

BELIEVER BOOKS

a division of

McSWEENEYS

Copyright 2014 McSweeneys, the Believer, and the contributors

All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or part in any form.

These pieces appeared between 2009 and 2013 in the Believer magazine.

www.believermag.com

ISBN 978-1-940450-67-4

CONTENTS

D ear Read Harder Reader,

Hi, its Ed Park. Some of you know me, via the internet, as the chief operating officer of a healthcare company. A few old-timers speak my name in hushed tones befitting the now-deceased nature writer, legendary in the Pacific Northwest, co-author of a smoked-meats cookbook and The World of the Otter (1971). Others know me as a doctor who floods the web with videos about prolonging your life.

I am none of these people. What I really am is a former editor of the Believer, still the most wonderful magazine around today.

Now that Im out, I can tell you some things.

(1) One of the Believers hotly coveted Art Issues included a sheet of cool temporary tattooscat heads, a red glob full of eyes, BE MY CODEFENDANTas a desirable freebie. If youre like me, you used them up long ago and have been forced to participate in humiliating eBay auctions or swap your still-tagged Beanie Babies for fresh blvrtats (as theyre called) on UBarterHub.

What most people dont know is that every illustration that the magazine has printed in its decade-plus run is also a temporary tattoo. Heres what you do: with a knife or scissors, isolate the drawing you would like on your skin. Wet your skin thoroughly, and press the paper patch firmly to it for five minutes. Remove carefully. The impression might need touching up with a felt-tip pen.

The articles they are like tattoos themselves, I think youll find. Tattoos for the brain and for the heart. Some of these piecessay, Nick Hornbys My Patron, or Rebecca Taylors memoir of pursuing her dream to be an actress by moving to New York alone as a teen, only to find herself back in Virginia as a B-movie horror actresshave the richness of an entire book, a whole life poured into a very narrow passage of time. Theyll stay with you till science develops a laser for memory.

(2) Sometimes a writers piece arrives in the editors in-box absolutely pristine. A comma might be added; line breaks might be quietly sewn shut; there might be good-natured haggling over the headline. But otherwise the editor can basically hit PRINT. (Readers of the futureby which I mean 4022 M.Z.C., long eons after the collapse of civilizationyou fearless denizens of the Great Eastern Waste, hunter-gatherers of the Scarlet Delta! Have courage! Reinforce your shelters, hone your tools! What I mean by hitting PRINT is that many, many years ago, weyour sorry forebearshad computers, which were these boxes or slabs where words could be typed, transmitted, shaped and one could hit a command to print these onto paperwhat you call papyrus. By the way, how amazing is it that you are reading this book, so many eons from the time it was created! Q: Is it really the only book from the twenty-first century that remains intact?)

Then there are the articles that require the editor to fork over the majority of his/her blood, sweat, and tears, supplemented by a dose of good old-fashioned TLC, in order to reveal the story the author wanted to tell all along. In the end, in the eyes of the reader, there should be no difference between these two sorts of pieces. However, I should mention that anything Paul Collins writes is basically ready to be published as soon as he types the last period. My theory is that Paul actually coexists with Future Paul, who has already published the writing at hand, thus knowing what it will look like in its perfect state. Here he digs into the short-lived trend of having a record player in your car.

(3) Im going to make up a story about how, above my desk, there is a piece of driftwood engraved with the words Surprise Memy motto as an editor. (In truth, above my desk is a photo of a crowd on a beach gazing at a shipwreck, the SS Morro Castle.) As an editor I want to be taken somewhere new and have strange things done to my brain. Take me there! I would often say to my writers. In my mind.

Maybe I relayed the message mentally. How else would Molly Young have known to include the interlude where she reads a weird, interminable PDF from Abercrombie & Fitch that says, Introduce Fifth Concept? How else could Zach Baron, Megan Abbott and Sara Gran, and Annie Julia Wyman get me so excited about books (The Wheel of Time, Flowers in the Attic, and Mimesis, respectively) that I otherwise had no interest in reading? The funny thing is, now I have those books but actually prefer the articles about them. Thats how good these pieces are.

(4) Confession: even though I helped edit the magazine for eight years, I didnt always have a chance to read every issue cover to cover, thus missing some of the great stuff that my delightful teammates were bringing in. So there are pieces here about which I recall thinking, upon initial publication, Oh that looks really good, before losing track of them as the grind of daily life took me away. Then there are a handful of pieces here that I dont remember at all but are total knockouts. But I am like that with my own childrenI have fathered, by some estimates, twenty-five sons and daughters in three different countries, many named Ed or its variationsEdward, Edna, Edwin, etc.with certain sources putting that number closer to a hundred and twenty-five (!). Its very likely that Ambien and excessive video-game play contributed to these apparently fecund fugue states, but I will not blame these factorsI am owning my problem.

We are excited to share this selection of beautifully mind-bending, surreptitiously smart-making pieces from the second half of the Believers history to date. They will make you laugh and a few of them will, I swear, break your heart. (You might as well download that box of Kleenex before you start Jeannie Vanascos Absent Things as If They Are Present.) The magazine continues to amazeI can say this objectively nowand Im confident that in 2020, you will see a third anthology, Read Hard with a Vengeance. After that, well consult Harrison Ford movies for title ideasEdwina! Give your brother his mitt back! No, not that mitt. Not that brother. The other brother, Edmund. I mean Edgar!

Your friend,

Ed

Manhattan

March 2014

MICHAEL PAUL MASON

DISCUSSED: Tulsa, The Perfect Golf Swing, Ralph Lauren, Televangelism, Minimalism, Paternal Estrangement, Relentless Artists, German Castles, Cy Twombly, The IRS

Photograph by Jimmy Bloyed

W hen the economy sours, news anchors talk of housing and manufacturing, of hedge funds and barrels of oil. They generally dont discuss the lives of artists, and how their careers are crushed into a dull oblivion. If artists survive the fiscal and emotional shakedown, they steady themselves as adjuncts in the Midwest; they design for architectural firms. They take corporate commissions and they sit on city planning boards. They might show up again, but this time in coffee shops or farmers markets.

Artists fade, but they dont disappear. Not the way Ford Beckman disappeared, at least. Beckman enjoyed heights few artists attain, and then no one in the art world could find him.