Internet Lovelies

photograph by Carla C. Waldron.

our bruises have become warm places.

another morning in shivers, but my happiness feels like strawberry milk or hopscotch or warm book pages.

I like the rain when it's coming down into purple, slicing up the train window with cat whiskers, all of the light against all of the speed.

fuck sadness. you are goddamn brilliant. and you're a freak. and they hold the best half-smiles.

Death of a Typewriter, Link

Until recently, this Maple Grove Farms product has been blissfully unaware of the implications of the word “Real” before “Mint Jelly.” None of its neighboring products advertise their “realness.” Google searches have verified the realness of Real Mint Jelly’s ingredients—“a little too easily,” it thinks. Information is being withheld. Most of its ingredients are water-based, but it’s not quite a liquid. How does anyone know what chemicals are? Is water real? What is real? Real Mint Jelly has watched The Matrix trilogy over 20 times and has shrunk from 14 to 10 ounces in the past week. 

Megan Boyle, The Secret Life of Objects on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Link

Tolstoy is NOT afraid to use 100 words where 10 would suffice. I notice that men are often very comfortable doing this, writing these ridiculously long books that simply do not need to be as long as they are.

Roxane Gay, Link

It's a symptom of anxiety. A series of developments – e-books, piracy, and endless discounting – means that publishers no longer know how to sell books or make money. In desperation, they've responded by pushing authors as if they were baked beans.

There's never been a time so hard as now for writers to make a living, and even best-selling authors worry about lukewarm customer reviews on Amazon. Success feels random, as much to do with good PR as anything else, and could evaporate overnight. That Brontë woman, whatever happened to her? Never wrote a sequel, did she? Pity, I gave her three stars on Amazon. 

Joan Smith, Link

Dear Rachel Maddow circa 1998,

I would have totally crushed on you from afar in our Women in Media: Visibility Equals Power class in college. I would have followed a couple steps behind you in the annual Take Back the Night march through downtown. And then I would have sat as close as I could without being creepy in the local coffee shop while you talked with other short-haired girls wearing combat boots about oppression and empowerment. In short, I would have totally stalked you. Good thing we went to separate colleges.

Love,
Ms. Snarker circa 1998 and 2012 

Dorothy Snarker, Link 

I have a crush on 1970s Bill and Hillary.

An under-read respected journal in which you were published:

Your great 6,000 word story that was finally published in print (pgs. 22-29, Issue No 17, Vol. IV) by a respected journal which nobody read. Well, god damn it, these people are going to sit through this. Where there is lack of readership, there is also being stuck in a plastic folding-chair in a literary city somewhere between 7:00 and 9:00 p.m., that genius fuck-up-dinner-plans mound of time. Short of the fire alarm going off, these 15-17 people will come to understand exactly that horrible yet retrospectively sacred thing that happened in your childhood, through the haze of lightheadedness and needing to pee.

Jimmy Chen, You Are What You Read From, Link 

Do you recall education? I remember the swift way our interests became jobs that carved us into weird working shapes, not machines, totally human, just degraded to the point of blind roles and and dark alliances and revenge projects. It was my hope to understand how to support myself and others with ideas and sweat. But the system I endure has nothing to do with labour.

Erik Stinson, Link 

Happy Friday, I guess?