“At the end of every hard-earned day people find some reason to believe,” Bruce Springsteen sings in the final song on his 1982 album Nebraska, the making of which is the subject of the latest paint-by-numbers music biopic. Springsteen leaves the implication of the titular observation of “Reason to Believe” ambiguous: is it a pathetic reflection of our inability to face the bleak truth about our lives, or a testament to the indomitable spirit of hope?
As Drift Senior Editor (and diehard Bruce fan) Erik Baker argues in his Issue Sixteen essay, a version of this debate has been raging in a rather unlikely sphere: self-help literature. The genre’s familiar sunny optimism now faces a challenge from a rash of authors, writing under the banner of “philosophy,” who urge readers to modulate their expectations, reassess their beliefs about what matters, and accept that they won’t get all they want out of life. But the philosophers’ correctives have problems of their own, Baker explains. They risk a self-regarding complacency that can turn as politically disastrous as any positive-thinking bromides.
Read Baker’s essay online today, and subscribe to read the full issue when it arrives.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life | Self-Help Gets Philosophical
ERIK BAKER
That there is now such a demand for books about the inevitability of failure and the wisdom of not giving a fuck suggests that many of us today suspect that our selfhood is a flimsy foundation on which to build a life, inadequate to the insuperable obstacles that prevent us from imposing our designs on the reality we inhabit. We’ve been tricked, or have tricked ourselves, into overestimating our own agency — and we hope a firm Stoic hand can smack us back into perspective.
Happy Halloween! In a special slate of spooky Mentions, you can find a haunted house stripped of actors and fun, twins with shotguns, and a possibly possessed and highly charismatic lunatic.
Viola’s Room
THEATER
The target audience for The Shed’s latest immersive offering appears to be bats: visitors are instructed to surrender their phones, remove their footwear, and “follow the light,” only to be repeatedly plunged into pitch blackness, groping along corridors like penitents in a haunted house stripped of actors and fun. Based on a wisp of a gothic tale about a princess obsessed with a moonlit maze, the nearly hour-long guided crawl across grassy carpets, sand, and gravely symbolic set pieces feels at once too long and too short. (Daisy Johnson wrote the somnolent script, which is conveyed to us, in Helena Bonham Carter’s feathery ASMR voice, through bulky headsets.) Any feeling of suspense is mostly of the will-I-get-a-fungal-foot-infection variety.
Rhoda Feng
Foreclosure Gothic
FICTION
In FENCE editor Harris Lahti’s debut novel, houses aren’t the only things that are torn apart and rebuilt. With tight, lyrical prose, Lahti follows a father and son duo, Vic and Junior Greener, as they flip foreclosed homes around the Hudson Valley. The two meet an assortment of mysterious characters, like the seven-foot-tall garbageman who leaves a grease stain when his head hits the Greeners’ ceiling, or the wealthy, incestuous couple who may or may not keep their mother chained up, or the twins with shotguns who confront Vic to try to get their uncle’s smut collection back from the Greeners’ latest flip, only for Vic to pay them to help rip up the carpet. There isn’t much closure in Foreclosure Gothic, only a reminder that, while none of us ever go home again, we never really leave it either.
Robert Warf
Dourifs imprisoned in hospitals
FAMILY MATTERS
Take a moment to consider the beguiling, poignant symmetry in the series of events that have befallen members of the Dourif family. In The Exorcist III (1990), the brilliant, reliably batshit Brad Dourif plays the Gemini Killer, a possibly possessed and highly charismatic lunatic, straitjacketed and stashed away in an empty wing of a Washington, D.C. hospital. (He had to put up with the same business in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but the Gemini could eat Billy Bibbit for lunch.) Now, on HBO’s The Pitt, Brad’s daughter Fiona plays Cassie McKay, one of the attractive, harried E.R. doctors, who cannot leave her workplace without being arrested, thanks to a court-mandated ankle monitor. Both are charming and clever; both flail bitterly against the sinister forces confining them (for Brad, it’s the demon Pazuzu; for Fiona, it’s the Pittsburgh Probation Court). None of the nurses at Pittsburgh Trauma have been decapitated, as they were in The Exorcist III’s Georgetown University Hospital. But there’s always next season.