A while back I compared Walter Kirn with Oscar Odd McIntyre.
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It struck me that Kirn’s short takes on Twitter are a close modern equivalent of McIntyre’s short takes in print. I tried to find more of McIntyre’s real columns, without luck. Though part of his work was before the Steamboat Willie copyright threshold, his actual work is absent online. There are several good articles about McIntyre, which reinforce the parallel. Both were born in Ohio and both came from eccentric families. Both moved to NYC and applied the eccentric Midwestern viewpoint to their writing about NYC and elites.
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Now we have a more direct comparison. Kirn has written an essay that starts in the dentist’s chair and wanders through a drugged-up tour of NYC.
One of the McIntyre pieces also starts in a NYC dentist’s chair and wanders into a different kind of imaginative universe.
The story is in this episode of Club Car Special, starting at 3 minutes.