March 2010
31 posts
How M & I Talk About Passover
R: jew your ear off?
R: jews your own adventure?
M: just another day in my Semite-charmed kind of life
M: (do not want something else, tho)
“I wish I was Mexican, or Hebrew, I mean Jewish, I mean Israeli, or Mexican...”
– James Franco’s fiction is now in Esquire. I can’t even evaluate it at this point. Thoughts?
How the News Gets Lemon-ade
As people reading the Internet may have noticed, there’s been a lot of theorizing about Tina Fey lately, particularly centered on her 30 Rock superego Liz Lemon and whether or not she’s a good feminist, or maybe a terrible icon for women and beyond. I believe as much in taking TV seriously as the next person, so I’ve been enjoying the circus. My favorite thing so far, though, has...
Doree linked to this NYTM article by Dominique Browning, former editor of House and Garden, which she is valiantly refusing to read until she gets the print edition (I repeat: valiant!). But I couldn’t resist, as unemployment stories, and especially those of women in the areas of media/film/art/publishing/TV/fashion/the arts/any somewhat frivolous yet completely consuming treadmill-career...
“On Sw!pe’s back cover is a copy of a letter written to The New York Times...”
– Ok so I love this. The guards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have banded together with other city guards to make an art and literature review. A beautiful, $20 hard-stock MAGAZINE, in these times, penned and edited by people who get varicose veins and knob-knees at the expense of making sure the...
Submission Calls: PhD In Gaga Studies
Via HTMLGiant: “Uber cool Kate Durbin has created a new journal called Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga . Right now it features work from Meghan Vicks (a doctoral student of Comparative Literature at CU Boulder) and htmlgiant comrade Brian Oliu. Here’s the scoop.”
Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga is a new technological breed of journal...
Psychology Today Has Given Us All Permission to Be...
But this research also means that we can feel fine about connecting our way, opting for deep conversation over cheery chit-chat. The next time someone accuses you of being “too intense,” skip any shame that person is trying to lay on you. Discussing the weather doesn’t do much for us, discussing the state of the world is better in every way. We thought so, and now the research...
“In what will likely remain one of the most bizarre announcements this week, the...”
– Via Movieline. Okay.
She's the best, y/y?
[Atwood told her audience in the Duke Family Performance Hall that she would speak about something she’d never spoken about before: “influences you didn’t know were influences while you were having them.”The first such influence she mentioned was her 11th grade English teacher. Although this teacher, when asked about her former pupil’s early promise, had replied,...
When Your Gmail Starts to Mock You Directly, Part...
“A Dan Rather Reports producer needs immediate assistance translating Kinyarwanda to English for a television news piece currently in production. This is a paid assignment. If you are fluent in Kinyarwanda and English - or know some who is - please contact [retracted] ASAP!”
Upon investigation into a job I’ll never have, I am finding that Kinyarwanda is a stellar language....
“Early on I tried fiction, but I wasn’t very good at it. I wrote a very bad...”
– The Lost City of Z author and New Yorker contributor David Grann’s audio tales of early floundering in the world of letters is about as encouraging as anything else on the Internets at this minute. It is certainly quicker than 1) reading Po Bronson’s entire website; 2) tracking down a...
Amy Morton and Tracy Letts to Play George and... →
THIS IS A REALLY SERIOUS REASON TO TRAVEL TO CHICAGO HOW CAN I GET A TICKET OH MY GOOD LORD.
WatchAlmost but not quite too cute, as usual.
WatchOh man. Amy Bloom is scary in her intellect, and I’m sure somewhat of a frightening-yet-revered character to her trembling 18-year-old students at Yale, and yet she gets the funniest “news segment” treatment here. An offhand Camus quote about the right to self-select behavior but not objects of affection, followed by stock techno cue-up music and a panning shot of a stack of...
“I didn’t expect to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein’s store,...”
– For some reason, I had not read Amy Bloom’s first collection of short stories, Come to Me, until oh, 20 hours ago. That striking Chip Kidd cover stared at me from my shelf, but given the number of lady-penned short story collections I’ve been waist-deep in lately as a result of a) the...
“I remember only the useless things I hear—that Bob Dylan’s mother invented...”
– Amy Hempel.
” Sometimes, the business part of writing grows very noxious to me, and I wonder if in heaven our best thoughts — poet’s thoughts, especially — will not be flowers, somehow, or some sort of beautiful live things that stand about and grow, and don’t have to be chaffed over and bought and sold. It seems as bad as selling our fellow beings, but being in this world...