Being A Genius Has Its Perks

Say you are awesome. Say you are really awesome. Say you were awesome enough to receive $500,000 with “no strings attached” to do with whatever you please, simply because you are awesomely capable of deciding how to spend that much money on advancing your awesomeness. That would be awesome.

This “awesome award” is also known as the “genius grant” also known as the MacArthur Fellowship. The Foundation recently announced its 2006 receipients, who will cash in over the course of five years.

I was overwhelmingly happy to see George Saunders make the list. I guarantee that Saunders does satire better than anyone else writing right now, and everyone is doing satire right now. His use of the question mark is unparalleled. His stories are, simply put, delicious. Anyone who’s read The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil or Pastoralia knows what I’m talking about.

Or, just read this:

At Sea Oak there’s no sea and no oak, just a hundred subsidized apartments and a rear view of FedEx. Min and Jade are feeding their babies while watching How My Child Died Violently. Min’s my sister. Jade’s our cousin. How My Child Died Violently is hosted by Matt Merton, a six-foot-five blond who’s always giving the parents shoulder rubs and telling them they’ve been sainted by pain. Today’s show features a ten-year-old who killed a five-year-old for refusing to join his gang. The ten-year-old strangled the five-year-old with a jump rope, filled his mouth with baseball cards, then locked himself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out until his parents agreed to take him to FunTimeZone, where he confessed, then dove screaming into a mesh cage full of plastic balls.

Yum.

Posted by: Lindsay Patterson in Uncategorized | Permalink