Rachel Profiling

She's the best, y/y?

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 12:20:00 -0500

[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, “She showed no particular talent,” Atwood remembered her fondly. She was mesmerized by this woman, who had long, thin, floating hair and would recite Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” with her eyes shut and arms outstretched.

She included the poem in “The Blind Assassin” (2000) as a kind of tribute to her teacher, Atwood said.

Unafraid to poke fun at her younger self, Atwood shared her early life plan: to churn out money-making stories during the day and devote her evenings to crafting works of staggering genius.

She tried her hand at writing True Romance stories. She described the typical True Romance cover: a woman crying, and in the background, another woman in the arms of a man.

The plots were “not difficult to devise,” she said. One man might work in a shoestore while “the other rides a motorcycle.” The woman makes the wrong choice and then “something happens on the sofa.” ”It was done with dots,” Atwood said. “‘And then we were one, dot dot dot …’”“I could do the plots,” Atwood said, “but I could not do the dots.”

After that, she decided she wanted to be a journalist, but her parents “dredged up a real journalist,” a distant family member, who told her that she’d be relegated to writing “ladies pages” and obituaries.

She decided to get a degree and teach English. After that, her plan was to run away to France, “become an absinthe drinker,” get tuberculosis and die young like Keats, having written works of staggering genius in a garret.]

[via the Salisbury Post]

Some of my traveling companions have been “training”...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 17:07:44 -0500

Some of my traveling companions have been “training” for this, which we will do up in Kingston, NY this weekend. I have not. I’m counting on my Scottish background to put me in close proximity to the luck that will apparently be overflowing from every extra-cold tap in the area.

thedailywhat: OMG! Adorbz of the Day: “Husband and husband? So...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 16:46:50 -0500

thedailywhat:

OMG! Adorbz of the Day: “Husband and husband? So that means you love each other.”

[videogum.]

I had to.

illuminations: “L’Air Fooding” - a diet for budding Baudelaires...

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:55:06 -0500

illuminations:

“L’Air Fooding” - a diet for budding Baudelaires and Futurists and French people. “The rules are simple: eat nothing, except for the water and salt soup.”

Who else cannot wait for the National Air Eating Championships? Someone is totally going to shred on some lettuce.

When Your Gmail Starts to Mock You Directly, Part #48579

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:51:00 -0500

“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. Bananas is said “imineke”, hot chili is “urusenda,” and When Will the Food Be Ready? is “Bigeze he?” I’m starting with only essential words first.

CORRECTION!: Before, I wrote that “I believe this is the exact origin of the breakdown in the middle of “All Night Long (All Night),” which was wrong, as “Jambo” is indeed a Rwandan phrase BUT Lionel Richie apparently just made the damn thing up. According to my certified fact-checker M, Richie has said this: “I called the UN and said ‘I need something African for the breakdown in this song I’m writing.’ They informed me that there are thousands of different African dialects. I couldn’t believe it. One region doesn’t have any idea what the other is taking about. So, ‘Tambo liteh sette mo-jah!’? I made it up on the spot. Now I think that ‘Jambo’ might have a meaning in Swahili (it does- “hello”), but you gotta be careful because it might mean ‘welcome’ in one dialect and you might get your head cut off for saying it in another.”

Not great, Lionel.

"Early on I tried fiction, but I wasn’t very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is..."

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:42:00 -0500

“Early on I tried fiction, but I wasn’t very good at it. I wrote a very bad novel that is thankfully sitting in a drawer somewhere. I was a schoolteacher, I taught seventh and eighth grade and I tried to write fiction on the side. I tried a few grad school programs because I didn’t know how to make it … Eventually, I was desperate for a job and there was a new newspaper opening up in Washington D.C. called The Hill. Even though my interest in politics wasn’t huge, they gave me a job as a copy editor.”

- 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 dog-eared copy of “What Color is Your Parachute?” at the Strand; 3) napping.

Amy Morton and Tracy Letts to Play George and Martha in Virginia Woolf for Steppenwolf

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:32:00 -0500

Amy Morton and Tracy Letts to Play George and Martha in Virginia Woolf for Steppenwolf:

THIS IS A REALLY SERIOUS REASON TO TRAVEL TO CHICAGO HOW CAN I GET A TICKET OH MY GOOD LORD.

This video connects a lot of unexplained elements in my life,...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:18:00 -0500

This video connects a lot of unexplained elements in my life, like a cro-magnon, or a good roll of duct tape.

Almost but not quite too cute, as usual.

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:58:46 -0500

Almost but not quite too cute, as usual.

Oh man. Amy Bloom is scary in her intellect, and I’m sure...

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:44:00 -0500

Oh 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 books? The dissonance is something I feel that the author might enjoy, perhaps revel in. Which means the blonde chippy with the mic is ultimately getting played.

"I didn’t expect to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein’s store, wearing only my..."

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:04:00 -0500

“I didn’t expect to find myself in the back of Mr. Klein’s store, wearing only my undershirt and panties, surrounded by sable. ‘Sable is right for you, Suseleh,’ Mr. Klein said, draping a shawl-collared jacket over me. ‘Perfect for your skin and your eyes. A million times a day the boys must tell you. Such skin.’”

- 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 winter, generally felt, b) the winter, as it pertains to acute needs for words that read like tea leaves, and c) the sheer number of those I have to plow through, I hadn’t picked it up. And then I did. And she may write the best opening lines I’ve seen.

So much, in so little. Via LIFE.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:20:50 -0500

So much, in so little.

Via LIFE.

"I remember only the useless things I hear—that Bob Dylan’s mother invented Wite-Out, that..."

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:46:28 -0500

“I remember only the useless things I hear—that Bob Dylan’s mother invented Wite-Out, that twenty-three people must be in a room before there is a fifty-fifty chance two will have the same birthday. Who cares whether or not it’s true? In my head there are bath towels swaddling this stuff. Nothing else seeps through.”

- Amy Hempel.

Photo

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:32:00 -0500

” Sometimes, the business part of writing grows very noxious to me, and I wonder if in heaven...

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 15:27:00 -0500

” 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 everything must have a body.”

The letters of Sarah Orne Jewett, despite being about a hundred years old now, are not a bad thing to read. At least in a song remains the same sense.

This feels undeserved. I haven’t been practicing hard at...

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:30:00 -0500

This feels undeserved. I haven’t been practicing hard at all.

"I’m still trying to find someone who recalls this movie I saw as a very young child called My Pal..."

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 21:02:51 -0500

“I’m still trying to find someone who recalls this movie I saw as a very young child called My Pal Wolf, about a little girl who takes in what she thinks is a lovely lost wolf, though it turns out he is just an escaped police dog and she has to return him to the police. Some days I feel all my work has come out of that one movie.”

- Lorrie Moore.

jeblogue: Heartbeet.

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:34:00 -0500

jeblogue: Heartbeet.

Letter-writing, V2

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:33:00 -0500

It’s 2010 and I’m starting up my second round of sending out physical written correspondence to anyone who emails me to do so in my ceaseless pursuit of the most anachronistic and expensive way to communicate with people. If you asked for one the last time and I didn’t have time to write you a letter (and I know there was more than one of you, ack), you get first dibs, so tell me so.

Licking the stamps now.

Earlier: The last time I did this.

"The cows walk around like dogs here and wander in the streets. We are spending long days and days..."

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:29:00 -0500

“The cows walk around like dogs here and wander in the streets. We are spending long days and days and nights are confused. So far no major creepy crawlers.”

- True postcard from my momma. She is in India making palates whole again, and filing the best motherly dispatches one could ask for from there.