ben white

I have a letter (yes, an actual letter) published in this issue of The Dirty Napkin, which is an awesome publication with intimidating contributor bios. The wonderful editors have also decided to make my audio reading one of the handful available to non-subscribers—so anyone can listen to me read it (beware).

The epistle is an interesting (pretty much dead/dying painfully) form. The email missive, the AIM conversation, the cacophony of “tweets”—these successors do not quite make for a true spiritual supplantation. The epistle has a practical purpose (to convey a message), but its literary merit (if it exists) can be unrelated altogether. It may even be a pleasant surprise.

A bizarre conundrum:

If you make a return to Bed Bath & Beyond with a gift receipt, you get a gift card for store credit.

If you make the same return without a receipt, you get a store credit receipt: a regular-looking paper receipt with some old-fashioned highlighting and a signature or two or three.

Now, the receipt can be used in any store for any item. In other words, just like a gift card. What possible reason is there for using an easy-to-lose wrinkle-prone receipt for returns instead of a gift card (like every other store in the 21st century)? And if I have a gift card, why can’t I just add the return value onto it so I don’t have to carry around two pieces of paper and one piece of plastic in order to buy overpriced curtain rods?

If it has the exact same buying power, why make a distinction in the first place?

An old-school New Yorker-esque self-consciously-super-pretentious non-fiction profile piece was published a few days ago in issue six of The Legendary.

On a related note, I actually thoroughly enjoyed that class. Granted, during senior spring, even reading a male classmate try to channel Jane Austen every week is better than biochemistry.