21st
So the other day Sam and I went to the Shouts & Murmurs thing at The New Yorker Festival, and George Saunders read this piece, “Nostalgia,” from a few years ago that was so funny I snort-laughed. Here is an excerpt:
Same deal with violence. I remember how stunned we all were when the Cain-and-Abel thing happened. What, what? we kept saying. He bludgeoned his brother? With a rock? I remember the first time a severed limb was shown on TV. People were running out of their houses screaming. And it was just a fake leg, in a cartoon! Imagine how horrified those screaming people would be now, when, for example, you can log on to the “Evidence of Evil” Web site and they’ll send you a boxful of bloody prosthetics, which you can reassemble into a crack-addicted whore, who will then emit some clues through her computerized voice box—and when you think you know who murdered her you enter the name of the killer on the Web site and, if you’re right, you’ll get to see a short clip of her making love with her killer moments before he hacks her to bits while she has a flashback of her mother beating her with a chair leg.
