College Writing for Dummies

A successful college essay is like a declaration of love: it doesn’t matter what you say as long as it sounds right. Once you’ve discovered a formula that works for you, you can use it again and again and expect similar success.

As well as being like a declaration of love, a good essay is also like a magic trick. When a magician says to you, “I’ll bet you don’t think I can make this elephant disappear,” you are liable to think that, yes, making an elephant disappear sounds pretty hard. It’s important to remember, however, that only the worst magician in history would set herself a problem to which she does not have the solution already. Likewise, you must set yourself a goal that appears impossible, but to which you already possess the answer.

The Shock of the Novel

The folks over at The Millions are making a strong bid for the title of “the VH1 of Books Blogs” with their countdown of The Best Fiction of the Millennium (So Far). And I thought Sainsbury’s was jumping the gun when they put the Christmas aisle up at the end of August. There’s no detectable humour in the introduction, so I feel relatively safe in assuming that this is an example of our culture’s obsession with hierarchical list-making, rather than an ironic “critique” of it.

The sheer hubris of The Millions’ venture is remarkable. They could have played it safe, and gone with The Decade (So Far), or even The Century (So Far). But the Millennium? Pitting the literary output of the last nine years against almost everything we think of when we think of literature? If Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections is the best we can find for number one, then all this list proves is that none of the books on it will likely be remembered in 1000 years at all. Perhaps Franzen can compete with the best of the Nineties’, maybe the Eighties’; but beyond that? It’s like forcing a child into a boxing ring because he can beat up his older brother.

Scenes from the End of Suburbia

Walking in my in-laws’ neighbourhood in Bothell, Washington, a satellite town orbiting northern Seattle, I came across an increasingly common feature of the local scenery. Hidden from the busy suburban street behind a uniform wooden fence, an entire housing development sits in an island of tranquility. One long street stretches perpendicularly from the main drag, and from it radiate three short stubs of road, their names advertised on shiny new street signs — ‘9th DR SE’, ‘20th DR SE’. Everything here is new. The sour smell of new tarmac still lingers over the freshly-paved road, and the white stripes of the pedestrian crossings glow in the sunlight. All is in place, in fact — the street lamps, bright yellow fire hydrants, large communal mailboxes — except the houses. It’s as if they simply vanished in the night.