This criticism of “Shooting an Elephant” has always seemed utterly bizarre to me. It’s a story about a dumbass kid trying to regulate a bunch of strangers who hate his guts, and it’s told from his perspective. What could “agency” for nonwhite characters possibly mean in this context, and why would the narrator care…

holy fucking christ did you have a stroke or something, or is your editor a cinderblock?

but gaining what looks like 50lbs of muscle on a ectomorphic(that means skinny for the uninitiated) body type ? Keep dreaming.

For the moment, let’s ignore the greater mass of nonsense in your post to to focus on one particular grain:

Have you read The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky? Fucking wrecked me worse than anything short of straight Holocaust or gulag literature.

How many memoirs are really that good? When’s the last time you a) actually finished reading an entire memoir and b) felt fully satisfied—that it was time well spent?

This is fantastic stuff, but I’d like to put in a word of hatred for the SBD of Franzen’s oeuvre, The Karl Kraus Project. One of the worst, most inexplicably-published things I’ve read in the last decade. Motherfuck that book.

Roberto Bolano. Savage Detectives is hot as fuck.

“fat bag of lame try too hard”

"My particular belief system is a merger of Theravada Buddhism and the science of the Akashic field and M Theory."

If we're listing some of the endless po-faced pseudo-denouncements of ISIS from Islamic groups, don't leave out Cage! For anybody who didn't hear, they're the lovable bunch of "human rights advocates" who stood up to inform us that Jihadi John was all puppies and rainbows until those mean security people started…

That's what's so great about the whole idea of "privilege": if you're a member of the designated "privileged group" you've got that wonderful invisible knapsack full of goodies permanently stapled to your back, and it can never, ever, ever fall off, regardless of the actual shape of your life.