Dave Eggers in the news

I hope that if today's release of the San Francisco Panorama, Dave Eggers' adventure in print journalism , accomplishes anything, it's to disabuse Dave Eggers of the notion that any one single person can save print journalism, and even if someone could, it will definitely not be Dave Eggers.

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Where the Wild Things Aren't: Here

Death by Orphans posted a thorough review of Dave Eggers' New Yorker short story based on Where the Wild Things Are, which is also, of course, the basis for the upcoming film. Paul manages to approach the topic from an admirably fair and balanced perspective that we here at Indichik would, naturally, never attempt to replicate.

Be the Dog? No thanks.

There's a play called "Be the Dog" premiering at the New York Fringe Festival later this month. According to the article on BroadwayWorld.com, it is "based on the short stories of Dave Eggers, Be the Dog celebrates and ridicules a world of complicated human relationships - through the eyes one simply exuberant dog...Written by Emily Kaye Liberis, it was produced as her senior thesis project at Boston University's School of Theatre in 2007. She developed it there with director Jason McDowell-Green."

So this...this pretty much exemplifies what is wrong with everything. That some poor, misguided theatre student couldn't find any better material to waste two years working on than a bunch of crappy experimental fiction by the most overexposed writer imaginable. Couldn't she at least have stretched a out a little bit? To Aimee Bender, maybe? Or even Amy Hempel? Or, you know, somebody new? Oh yeah, and if that weren't enough, we have to capitalize on the whole "Marley and Me" lovable dog trend, too.

"Be the Dog" premieres at the Robert Moss Theatre. Tickets are $15. 440 Studios is located at 440 Lafayette St. between Astor Place and East 4th St. directly across from The Public Theater. Elevator to the 3rd & 4th Floors. Here's the complete schedule:

Wednesday, August 26 @ 6.15pm
Wednesday, August 26 @ 9.45pm
Friday, August 28 @ 4.15pm
Saturday, August 29 @ 10.00pm
Sunday, August 30 @ 12.00pm

Woof.

Stuff White People Don't Like: Supercilious, Faux-Racially Insightful Humor Blogs

Stuff White People Like: White people like creative writing, ha ha! Vintage clothing, ho ho! Girls with bangs, he he! Yuk yuk, it's funny because we're so lame! The blog is ostensibly written as if it's addressing people of color as some kind of "field guide to whitey," but personally, I'm not aware that any of my friends of color have ever read it. Nor am I aware of any ofThen again, people of color don't have any strong affinity for Jeff Foxworthy or Pluggers, either, nor do their elite hip urban literati friends. SWPL is no different from these, it's just that instead of defining "white" in terms of this:

It's now defined as this:

In fact, this site's sole raison d'etre is so that a certain type of white person who's never identified with their trailer-dwelling brethren over yonder, the target of traditional "cracker" humor, can allay their guilt by pretending to understand what people of color think is ridiculous about them. The fact of whether it's operated by a white person or a person of color is more or less irrelevant, as far as I'm concerned, since it's clearly written by someone who comes from the very same culture he or she is lampooning. Which is exactly why I find it so disingenous, because, at it's core, this isn't "stuff white people like": it's stuff hip educated urbanites of any color like. Quite simply, this is class conflict, and yet it's being wrongly framed as a racial one. Yo homies, SWPL has taken race-baiting to a whole new level.