I hate what I am writing right now, but I have to just bang it out. What I’d like to do is look at blogs all day. The blogosphere is aflutter over the news that People magazine chose angel Lupita Nyong’o as their Most Beautiful Person. I’m sort of disappointed that a contrarian feminist writer (paging Roxane Gay!) didn’t write an op-ed titled: “Why Do We Even Have Most Beautiful Lists Anymore? And Who Even Reads People? AND WHERE THE FUCK IS THE DAMN MALAYSIAN AIRPLANE?”
Struggling Through
April 23, 2014JUST GET A FUCKING TWITTER ACCOUNT ALREADY
April 21, 2014If William Faulkner were alive, he’d get an artistic restraining order against James Franco.
How to Spend Sunny Afternoons
April 20, 2014Contemplating, not for the first time, whether or not the menstrual blood sex scene in Endless Love has anything to do with the halakhic idea of a woman being niddah, what with “Scott Spencer’s” constant pitting of the Butterfields’ WASPiness against the semitic Axelrods.
Good… Er, Decent Company?
April 17, 2014“Also, [John Cheever’s mother] had a ‘primitive horror of being photographed,’ such that her own son had little idea what she’d looked like as a younger woman until, one day, he discovered her portrait in an old Woman’s Club program; when asked about it, she explained that her look of composure had been managed by holding her infant son––John himself––on her lap. (‘I was cropped’).* At the time, it might have seemed liek so much winsome eccentricity, but it was less amusing later, when Cheever himself became a virtual prisoner of anxiety. ‘I blame her, I do,’ he wrote a week after her death in 1956, ‘for having conveyed some of her morbid fears to me.’
“*A home movie survives from the thirties or forties in which Cheever’s mother is seen walking briskly past the camera with a tight smile. When the photographer persists, she thrusts a hand toward the lends. One thinks of Honora Wapshot: ‘In all the family albums she appeared either with her back to the camera as she ran away or with her face concealed by her hands, her handbag, her hat or a newspaper.”
Kindergarten Poetry
April 16, 2014Last night at a Seder I sat across the table from a beautiful little girl. She had enormous bright eyes, a plucky attitude, and curly hair that was highlighted so perfectly there could be no doubt no one had ever put chemicals in her tresses. She knew she was cute, and beamed at me whenever I directed questions at her. “How old are you?” for instance. She said four, but she would be five soon. “When is your birthday?” “In the fall,” she said. “When in the fall?” I asked. “When the leaves fall.”
Happy Almost-Birthday/Passover
April 15, 2014
They’re ready to go!
A Tweet
April 10, 2014I want to have a roundtable on social media with Jonathan Franzen and Fran Lebowitz. I probably should get some people to represent the other side, but why bother?
Sei Shonagon: Feminist?
April 8, 2014From The Pillow Book:
“When I make myself imagine what it is like to be one of those women who live at home, faithfully serving their husbands––women who have not a single exciting prospect in life yet who believe that they are perfectly happy––I am filled with scorn. Often they are of quite good birth, yet have had no opportunity to find out what the world is like. I wish they could live for a while in our society, even if it should mean taking service as Attendants, so that they might come to know the delights it has to offer.”
Filed Under “Way Too Fucking Soon”
April 8, 2014Lily Allen’s condolence Tweet about Peaches Geldof:
“My thoughts are with Peaches’ family at this awful time,” singer Lily Allen tweeted. “I hope they get to grieve in peach. Peaches, rest in peace gorgeous girl.”
Hm. Mistake the result of:
1. NY Daily News
2. Twitter
3. Lily Allen
4. Lily Allen’s HORRIBLE sense of humor
Treif Alert!
April 2, 2014More freelancer problems: some days you spend all afternoon trying to draw portraits of Clarice Lispector, and they all turn out wrong, because she just looks too damn happy.
This week, if nothing else, at least I finally read The Passion of G.H., which has been on my list for at least five years. It was strange and boring and exhilarating and transcendent and crass all at once. Thanks, Lispector! In the translator’s note was this fittingly eerie anecdote about Clarice’s interaction with a super fan:
“A friend in Brazil told me of a young woman in Rio who’d read Clarice Lispector obsessively and was convinced––as I and legions of other Clarice devotees have been––that she and Clarice Lispector would have a life-changing connection if they met in person. She managed to get in touch with the writer, who kindly agreed to meet her. When the young woman arrived, Clarice sat and stared at her and said nothing until the woman finally fled the apartment.”
Holy fuck! Can you imagine this face staring at you for even more than one second?
In other news, two days ago, while napping after reading a passage, I dreamed I very reluctantly choked down grilled snake.
