Holy Fool
Postscript No. 8 | Theodore Gary on Joshua Block, Dostoevsky, middle school boys, and authenticity
THE NEW CRITIC — POSTSCRIPT
*What follows is a conversation between Theodore Gary and the founding editors of The New Critic. The Postscript is a supplement to Theodore’s essay “Freak Show,” a story about the less glamorous characters who prowl the fringes of the attention economy, one a mistreated alcoholic, the other a Catholic karaoke performer.
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Below we discuss WorldofTShirts’s campus visit to the University of Illinois, the origins of Michael DeCoste, middle school boys, and the end times of streaming.
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.*
ELAN How did you first come across WorldofTShirts?
THEODORE He came to campus is what happened. He was here at [the University of Illinois] Urbana-Champaign right when I was sort of germinating on the idea [of writing the piece]. I was just going to write about Michael DeCoste, and I had spoken to DeCoste — I’d just sort of talked with him informally. And then I came home, and I was talking to my roommates, and they were like, “Oh, yeah, you know, WorldofTShirts came to campus.” I was like, “Who the hell is WorldofTShirts?” And then one of my roommates explained it to me, and he explained it very matter-of-factly, “Oh, it’s this guy who, you know, he’s taken advantage of by his managers, and they do this and this and this.” And as he explained it, I just became more and more viscerally disgusted. It was as if he was describing our lawn in terms of matter-of-factness. This is sort of the germ of the piece — I was like, how the hell can you not be just viscerally disgusted by all this? And how does it not make you angry that this exists? And that’s what I’m trying to explore in my writing.
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