Jeremy Gordon will be reading at Difficult to Name on Saturday, December 9.
I saw you wrote about "Call It What You Want" and made a reference on Twitter to Taylor Swift sending cease and desist letters to anyone who speaks on her name, but what do you think of Reputation overall?
Reputation sounds like the invented soundtrack to the white Ghost in the Shell, like pump-up music for the next New York Times-approved neo-Nazi rally. Jack Antonoff should accept his destiny as a peddler of pleasantly mawkish rock anthems aimed at people who regularly update their LinkedIn accounts and reunite fun., instead of pushing our favorite pop stars to make darker—and frequently worse—music. "Getaway Car" and "New Year's Day," the critically-agreed-upon best songs, would struggle to crack the top 30 of Taylor's discography. The villainous cosplay reminds me of one of those Ricky Gervais tweets where he insists he doesn't care how much you're offended, even though he can't stop talking about it. That said, I enjoy the record.
Do you have a favorite holiday tradition?
Every Christmas, when our family luncheon is over and the presents have been exchanged, my cousins and I go back to the city from the suburbs, and proceed to get riotously stoned for several hours, playing video games and Cards Against Humanity and eventually getting dim sum for dinner. My cousins all have different personalities, and I cherish the one time a year when we're all together by ourselves, allowing us to refresh our understanding of each other, overcoming whatever potential disagreements through the understanding that we're family and we love each other, even when someone starts talking about whether 9/11 was an inside job.
What can people expect from your reading?
My reading will attempt to prove the existence of God.