Envy

So I start off the day by reading, in a review of Mary Gaitskill's new book, an offhand reference to a novelist named Ben Kunkel, as though of course everyone reading NYRB knows who he is. And I do, because I went to college with him, though this is the first I've heard of his current literary celebrity. So I can add him to the long list of classmates (Jed Purdy, Nell Freudenberger, Garance Franke-Ruta, etc. etc. etc.) who have gone on to make their livings as writers, while I have not. I torture myself reading a piece on him in The Observer, in which he is described as "the new sensation of literary New York" and "editor of a small but influential cultural magazine." Oh well then, I've got a new grain mill, and man, can I bake a mean loaf of bread from fresh-ground hard red spring wheat.