The gems for me were: the title essay, the essays on writing-namely 'Thank You, Esther Forbes', 'Mr. Whereas DFW is nervous in the high-strung neurotic sense and is constantly worried about seeming pretentious, which itself is a kind of pretension, GS is more comfortable in his skin, his open-mindedness, pacifism, and general wonder in the world. Saunders is less 'brainy', if you want to call it that. But they write with a similar style, both tending to write about writing what you are now reading and often openly discussing the difficulties of being lucid, which (paradoxically?) makes for more lucid writing. So I had never read GS before, neither his fiction nor non-fiction, and DFW is a hard act to follow, let me tell you. Oh, and it's fucking hilarious, which when you think about it, why shouldn't it be? There is a nice confluence between this book and DFW's Consider the Lobster- in particular the last of Wallace's essays, which is on American talk radio, segues seamlessly into the Saunders' first essay, 'The Braindead Megaphone', which is as good an essay on the dumbing influence of mainstream media as I've ever read. His favorite charity is a project to educate Tibetan refugee children in Nepal. He conducted a Guest Workshop at the Eastman School of Music, Fall 1995, and was an Adjunct Professor at Saint John Fisher College, Rochester, New York, 1990-1995 and Adjunct Professor at Siena College, Loudonville, New York in Fall 1989. Petersburg, Russia, Summer 2000), Brown University, Dickinson College, Hobart & William Smith Colleges.

He has also been a Visiting Writer at Vermont Studio Center, University of Georgia MayMester Program, University of Denver, University of Texas at Austin, St. He has been an Assistant Professor, Syracuse University Creative Writing Program since 1997. Saunders received an MA with an emphasis in creative writing in 1988. He has also worked in Sumatra on an oil exploration geophysics crew, as a doorman in Beverly Hills, a roofer in Chicago, a convenience store clerk, a guitarist in a Texas country-and-western band, and a knuckle-puller in a West Texas slaughterhouse.Īfter reading in People magazine about the Master's program at Syracuse University, he applied. He worked at Radian International, an environmental engineering firm in Rochester, NY as a technical writer and geophysical engineer from 1989 to 1996. in Geophysical Engineering from Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. George Saunders was born Decemand raised on the south side of Chicago.

The braindead megaphone essay