Blog

Honestly

My secret desire to rap began somewhere in the awkwardness of high school when I heard a couple of older kids rapping along to the Minneapolis based hip-hop group Atmosphere: “I’m bigger than Jesus and bigger than wrestling, bigger than the Beatles, and bigger than breast implants… »

The Ungrateful, Ef-Bombing Blogger

If you haven’t seen it, Julie & Julia is a movie (based on a book) about a late twenty/early thirty-something, who suddenly realizes her career is going nowhere. To change this fact she begins a self-imposed quest to cook every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering The Art of French Cooking within 365 days, and to blog about the experience along the way.

I saw Julie & Julie in the theatres with my mother. As we walked out she exclaimed, “I should do a blog. I could write about something.” I was in the second month of my very first blog, and quietly thought, oh sure, anyone can blog. It’s so easy. Just look at my two meager entries (one being the ever essential, “My blog will be about XYZ”).. »

Exit Through the Gift Shop, or Not

Exit Through the Gift Shop, British street artist Banksy’s recent film, lacks the clean, high-definition crispness and the color popping magnificence of modern documentaries. It isn’t beautiful at all.. »

Scatterbrain

I was joking with a friend the other day about what would happen if we could give a peasant from the Middle Ages a Macbook. I’m pretty sure they’d deal with it in the same way Zoolander does in the scene where he tries to extract the files that are “in the computer.”. »

We Need a Hero

During my late 20’s, I stopped writing. I was a college grad, married, moving into my first home and I felt like I should focus on being a “grown-up” which, for some reason, didn’t seem to involve me writing poems anymore or reading comics.

As my 30’s loomed, I wasn’t hearing the sound of a biological clock because I had already decided not to have children, but I was listening to a “what is my life all about” constantly tocking. I found myself taking quizzes out of self-help books that were supposed to tell me what I wanted to do when I grew up even though I already had a full-time, white-collar, career based job.

What was missing?. »

I’m a guy like me!

by Andrew Panebianco

It is the stated policy of this journal that we publish work by or regarding people born between 1973 and 1993. This is the span of years we’ve chosen to refer to as The Splinter Generation - a period or group or collection of voices whose experiences we wish to explore and chronicle.

If you’re reading this, you probably know that already.

So we’re operating on the notion that there’s some cohesion to be found within the guts of this age - some intrinsic sameness crafted by common experience. Sometimes I believe this. Other times I don’t.

I teach English lit to freshmen at a university in Philadelphia, and my students come in every possible variety. I teach students of every race and gender and sexual identity. I have good students, bad students, brilliant students, not-so-brilliant students. Individuals, all. But in spite of that individuality, there is still this one thing I’ve found that serves as the universal constant to which they all adhere. I’ve come to see it as a form of cultural currency - a universal language - a social Esperanto, if you will.

I speak, of course, of Family Guy.

Family Guy is the one thing that all of my students seem to know, believe and understand. The travails of the Griffin family are universally accepted to be the funniest events ever to come into existence, and so, as members of a television-saturated generation, the show for them becomes the spice of ordinary conversation. Family Guy is the wellspring of hundred and hundreds of well-intentioned impressions. It’s the community metaphor well. And they’ve all got buckets. They toss lines back and forth, interrupting each other’s reminiscences with sudden giggles and laughter. They already know the punchline, you see. Because they’ve seen every episode. Twice.

On one level I can understand this. Because like my students, I and others of my age (mid to late 20s) also have a social Esperanto. We have volumes of quotes and references at the ready. Only they don’t come from Family Guy. They come from The Simpsons. And despite my fervent love of that show, it history and the role it has played both in my life and my culture, I have to recognize that when it comes to my students, I’m speaking a dead language. “People still watch that?” they say, “I don’t get it.” Like I’m speaking Aramaic or something.

This, I think, is one of the most important distinctions between the middle splinters (20s) and the late splinters (teens) - they grew up in Quahog, Rhode Island, while we all hail from Springfield, Wherever. For them, Family Guy is the funniest thing on the planet. For me, it’s kinda meh. On some level I just don’t get it. It’s a bunch of references. A whole lot of bawdy, pop culture references tied together by the bickerings of a. »

The iPad & the Future of Reading

The other day, while in an Apple store to buy a gift card, I stopped and messed around with the iPad for a few minutes. My first concern was trying to get the hang of a skateboard game, which had me using my fingers to tilt and turn and (not) ollie. The game proved to. »

“Facebook is the New Universe”

Back during the Dot Com bubble, you could hardly open a newspaper without running into an article talking about how the internet would radically change life as we know it. There was a lot of hyperbole involved, and in retrospect, life as we knew it didn’t so much radically change as slowly migrate into the. »

Not Your Mama’s “I Think We Should See Other People”

So what exactly is the difference between polyamory and non-exclusive dating, if none of the people involved are. »

We’re Blogging, And On The Radio!

We’ve been busy here at Splinter. We’ve recently started a blog, and head poetry editor Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo has a radio show on the World Wide Radio Network called Splintered Thoughts.

So if you have a moment, come by and see what us editors are writing and talking about. Click through for links. »

Six Degrees of Robert Langdon

So a few days ago I was watching Angels and Demons (don’t judge me) with my friend Matt. When the movie’s action halted (for the third time) in order to lay down some clumsy exposition, Matt sighed and asked a seemingly obvious, but nevertheless powerful question: “What the hell do people see in this [stuff]?”

It’s a good question. As much of a lit-snob as I can be - I can’t deny that Dan Brown has caught on to something. Nearly everyone I know, from the cognoscenti to the dope-patrol has read at least one Dan Brown novel - or at least they gave it an earnest try.

What does Dan Brown do that makes people like him so much? More pointedly, what might this have to do with The Splinter Generation?

Well, for one - I believe Robert Langdon (the Tom Hanks character) to be a stunning example of the Hipster pinup-girl. He’s the master of the esoteric - a symbologist. A character who knows absolutely everything about subjects we’ve never even heard of. He can (and often does) namedrop obscure figures and events of history in casual conversation. He’s a character whose importance and popularity are directly proportional to how exhaustively pedantic he can be. Robert Langdon is an action hero in rumpled corduroy. I can’t tell you how many people I know who try for this.

More importantly, though - what I find most interesting about Dan Brown’s success, is that it seems to connect to a larger trend in popular entertainment.

Dan Brown is writing about the interconnection of things. In the silly worlds of his literature, history is not just some pile of dusty corpses and yellowed pages. It is instead a trail of breadcrumbs leading to something of unquestionably melodramatic importance (the supposed war between faith and science, for example - or an attempted abduction of Christ’s pouty progeny). History isn’t about the past, according to Dan Brown - it’s about the present. It’s everywhere - in every painting and sculpture - in architecture - in religion. We are all caught and tangled in its web, and it is only our illusion that we exist beyond it. Brown’s Langdon suggests to us that if we look closely at the symbols, we can see how interconnected all things actually are.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that A. he’s doing this on purpose, or B. he’s any good at it (for further evidence on this, I direct you here). But Langdon has been whispering in my ear for a few days now… and I can’t help but see a bit of what he’s talking about.

I think it’s safe to say that over the last decade, our society, in its fervent attempt to digitize absolutely everything on the planet, has grown more and more remote. This is the central irony of the internet generation - we’re all so connected, that we’re disconnected. . »

Splinters to the Rescue!

I was sitting in my blue bathrobe one gray afternoon when I realized the Splinter Generation was going to save the world. The US markets had closed a few minutes earlier and I had MSNBC on in the background.
The night before, channel-surfing to the Science Channel, I discovered that a former classmate and Splinter Jeff Lieberman. »