Internet Lovelies and other things too

I've got three quotes from the same person in this Internet Lovelies draft. That's a good indication it's ready to be purged!

But before that. I need to purge some nerdy things off my chest.

First off: I went to my first (well, first real) comic book convention this past weekend! Small Press Expo
(SPX) in Maryland. It was amazing. I got to meet so many artists and writers I admire. I also put myself into some serious debt buying up everything shiny. And oh, I could have bought so much more given the funding. Kickstarter for me to buy and review indie comics? Donate a dollar and I'll high five you in the street.

So once I finish reading and rolling around in my pile of goodies I'll make a post.

Secondly, it seems appropriate with the recent release of Grand Theft Auto 5 to remind the literary blogosphere that, no, not all vidja games are misogynistic pieces of violence-glorifying, mindless, vicarious wank-fests. A lot are, yes, but not all. Some are fucking fantastic.Some games readers would absolutely fall in love with, given the chance. And some of you now realize I've been overplaying a particular game recently and am now getting ready to promote it incessantly to an uninterested audience.

Introducing the MASS EFFECT TRILOGY! *trumpets blare*

If you're not a gamer, chances are if you've heard of Mass Effect it's due to its fans being cranky over the ending. And just to guarantee I see a few thousand hits on this post, here goes: MASS EFFECT 3 ENDING. And although it's a bit sad that the game's biggest claim to fame is its disappointing ending, it's a huge testament to exactly how much the series meant to those who played it.

It's an RPG. It's a shooter. It's an RPG shooter! But besides combining the two most popular video game genres into one package, creators BioWare made another smart move: they made the actions of the person playing the game actually mean something. The term "mass effect" doesn't just refer to the fields of energy permitting space travel in the series, but also the massive e/affect your decisions as a player will have on the narrative. And not just in one game, but in all three. Your saves are carried across between all the games, so kill someone off in the first one, and they won't be making an appearance in 2 or 3.

What else makes it great? It's a science-fiction masterpiece. It asks the tough questions, and better yet, makes you answer them. Almost like Sophie's Choice: The Videogame. Its writing isn't exactly Shakespearean, but you wouldn't know it by how much you'll fall in love with the characters. It isn't news that I'm pretty emotional--I've admitted to crying over dog food commercials. But Mass Effect 3 was the very first video game I've actually laid down on the floor bawling while playing.

 The music. It's not your standard 8-bit soundtrack. There are some really gorgeous pieces. Jack Wall and Sam Hulick did most of the composing across the trilogy, but in the third they got to collaborate with Clint Mansell. Clint Mansell, a.k.a. my favorite composer; the man behind the soundtracks to The Fountain, Moon, Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream, etc. The result:




The voice acting. Martin Sheen, Keith David, Seth Green, Carrie-Ann Moss...BUZZ ALDRIN. Enough said.

So if you're a science fiction fan but afraid all modern videogames involve running over hookers and zombies, or 13 year olds calling you a noob over a headset, give this a try. You'll love it. Just don't come crying to me when you reach the ending (it wasn't that bad).

Here's a trailer:



Another note: the trailer mentions a "very specific man," but you can make Commander Shephard any gender or race you like. Unfortunately marketing gurus don't like venturing outside the straight-white-male formula. Namaste.

Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.

most reviews seem like a combination of vague/abstract/sweeping statements, lies, inaccurate chains of thought, irrelevant information, personal prejudices, blind allegiance to traditions, personal belief in one's ability to judge for others, passive insults, reluctant/qualified acceptance of talent, asskissing, exagerrated statements, reference to older authors and his/her work as template for how one can be better, unresolved psychological issues, jealously, desire for acceptance/shittalking how 'cool' the author and his/her group is, and other insecurities/pettiness.

 Sam Pink, Link

That. All of that. It's why I don't do review-reviews. If anything I write """'''""reviews."""'''""

Next week on the Thrones season finale: Ned Stark returns as a white walker, Tyrion Lannister has a wet dream and impregnates his leather jerkin, Joffrey starts ignoring his bethrothed and focuses on playing Black Ops II full time, Melisandre gives birth to a spectral Mary Tyler Moore, Theon Greyjoy is tortured for a solid twenty minutes, Cersei goes on a tragic late night QVC ordering binge, Sansa Stark gets implants and Samwell Tarly finally shows off the depth of his wizardry by proving he is the only man in the seven kingdoms able to make it through A Dance with Dragons without falling asleep more than once.

"Dick Cheney", Link 

Admiration is often irresponsible. You love those you shouldn’t, and mistreat those who love you. Until the universe at large carpets itself wall-to-wall as a therapist’s room, we’ll just have to get by being a little sick.

Jimmy Chen, Link

Buying fancy stuff with food stamps isn't fraud -- it's just something that seems unfair to people who think a government safety net should afford poor people modest food only. More broadly, the idea is that the poor should feel poor at all times until they're not poor anymore.

Arthur Delaney, Link

Great piece on the ugliness of food stamp resentment. Another thing that's great about that last segment is how easily it can be translated into other areas of social shaming. Example "the idea is that fat people should feel fat at all times until they're not fat anymore."

this idea that we must show tolerance of those who would deny basic human rights to someone due solely to sexual preference is the most backwards and blind weapon of homophobes. We do tolerate you, Orson Scott Card. We let you live and breathe and marry and divorce and rant and write and visit your loved ones in the hospital and receive benefits when your partner dies. That is tolerance. Tolerance doesn't mean agreeing with your hateful, narrow, ancient views. It means allowing you to live your life as the little worm you are without denying any of the rights that any other citizen receives. 

Meredith Borders, Link

A terrific response to Orson Scott Card's latest plea for audiences to be "tolerant" of his intolerance, in regard to the online movement pushing fans to skip seeing the Ender's Game movie. I'm all for the movement, but at the same time, don't want to put the issue into enough of a spotlight to attract conservative bloodhounds. The kind that rallied a cry to swamp Chik-fil-a with chicken-devouring Christians.

By the way. If you're looking for a nice Chik-fil-a replacement, try Zaxby's. If you're lucky enough to live near one.

Every heartbeat is a slow death rave with only one person dancing. I turn up the sound machine, whose thick murmur I mistake for robotic sentience, a sympathetic non-language coaxing me to sleep, telling me stories about a quaint distance defined by my very absence; for utter silence is when the monologue begins, the mind’s horror film without the fake blood, only the real self. I wonder how many pills it would take to wake up next to her, the nightmare ended, morning here at last.

Jimmy Chen, Link

When I expressed to my co-workers, also having salads, that one’s shredded cheddar and jack were thick paranoid grooves in a Van Gogh sky, or that a sole cherry tomato was a flaming sun, or that one’s ranch dressing was a Pollockian explosive orgasm, they looked at me with precise nausea. We stabbed our paintings with bio-degradable forks, barely getting enough protein, convinced that if we starved ourselves, our abs would eventually show, along with our ribs. This was not anorexia, but fear of love handles; or simply, fear of love. Fear that someone might not see past the costume of fat into the real us. But here, the collective first person faints, and disappears. It is only I standing, on some invented path, overlooking quiet hysteria.

Jimmy Chen, Link 

When does this all end, though? When do we stop having to remind the world about the realities of rape culture? When do we stop having to lighten up and grit our teeth as we sit through music and movies and television shows that soften everyone’s attitudes to women, their bodies, and consent?  When do women’s bodies stop being a problem? When do we stop scrutinizing how women dress and act and flirt and fuck? When do we get a justice system that adequately punishes rapists but also treats them humanely, protects them from sexual violence, and makes a genuine attempt at rehabilitation? When will I free myself from this cage I’ve trapped myself in? When will I stop feeling like the answer to these questions is never? 

Roxane Gay, Link

And not an internet lovely, but a magazine lovely:

...I wanted the thing that prevents her from publishing her grand theory not to be misogyny but her own perfectionism. I feel like that's a much more realistic character flaw. It's also something that holds women back from presenting their ideas in the world, often because they wait until it's perfect. It doesn't stop men from bring forth all kinds of half-assed and ill-formed notions, but it seems to stop women.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Sept/Oct 2013 issue of Mother Jones

I like Elizabeth Gilbert. Fuck you.

And one last thing. An honest trailer for World War Z, which was the straw that broke the camel's back in regard to me closing down my film adaptation blog:

Internet Lovelies / Microsoft and the War Against First Sale

via reddit

As a true tsundoku-ka, let me share some non-book internet lovelies with you.

Sometimes I’ll cry and wish I saw my real, true friends more. Sometimes I’ll cry a lot and wish I was still 19 when a friend was so easy to find and you were surrounded by these huge groups of people. It didn’t matter that you loved them or even liked them. They were there and that was comforting. But now I’m 25 and everyone is moving away and moving on. I am too. I know this. So sometimes I’ll just say fuck it and do what I want because I need to not be there, wallowing, wondering, getting trapped by the pull of the internet. Online, everyone is having a better time than you. I am not strong enough to deal with that. At the end of the night, at least I can say: I was not here.  

Brittany Julious, Link

The...the Khalcheesy...

Yes. That's right. I called you a dick. Because you created this situation. You put me in this spot where my only option is to acquiesce to your demands or be the bad guy. That, my friend, is the very definition of a dick move.

Josh Olson, from "I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script", Link

In the current abortion debate, there is no talk of children. Those who are anti-abortion never mention them. They seem to be the same people who want to cut food stamps and get rid of social programs that might help children and mothers. They never talk about nineteen-year-old fetuses. They don’t talk of war or hunger or about how much it costs to buy shoes and socks and how hard it must be to have children without a washer and dryer. They never seem to take into account who the father is, or who the boyfriends might be. I never wanted to have a baby if I wasn’t positive I could give it a wonderful life and my undivided attention. I didn’t get that from my own mother. When I was little, I didn’t understand that there is no such thing as undivided attention. My feeling was I needed to become a good mother to myself before I invented a child that needed one.

Nora Dunn, Link 

via @TheLincoln

I feel so bad for anyone who watched the recent "red wedding" episode of Game of Thrones without having read the books. How are you guys holding up? Do you need a hug?

Gendered book marketing has particular impact upon boys. Girls, as Brooklyn-based author Gayle Forman explained at Reading Matters, will read across gender. But boys are often self-conscious about reading books that might be considered to be “girly”. “Why is it acceptable for a girl to enter a boy world, but not the opposite?” Forman asked.

The reason is, of course, that books exist in a society where femininity is still considered to be a second-class characteristic, and masculinity defined most strongly as an absence of the feminine. The debate about “fake geek girls” in fan culture, the current meltdown at the SFWA about sexism in science fiction and fantasy, even the furore over Faber’s chicklit reprint of Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar, demonstrate that misogyny and sexism are alive and well.

 Alison Croggon, Link

There's a really interesting Kickstarter going on now for funding an indie press called Boss Fight Books. They'll be releasing a line of books by some really incredible writers focusing on classic video games. If you donate at least $5 you'll get a digital copy of one of the books once it's released. So basically if you're interested in any of the titles, just donate to pre-order a copy.

I'm eying Super Mario Bros. 2, a.k.a. what I spent the majority of my childhood playing.

Speaking of video games, if you have an internet connection you've probably heard all about the uproar over Microsoft's reveal of the next generation of console gaming: the XBox One. Promptly rebranded by nerds as the XBone. And at first glance this may seem to have nothing to do with books, but I promise you it does.

Why was there an uproar over the XBone? Several reasons: terrible bulky design, internet connection requirement (including the need for it to be connected at least once every 24 hours otherwise it becomes a brick), Kinect sensor built-in and required to operate, the focus of the system lying much less on games and more on it as some weird TV controller, etc. But the biggest problem, the feature that could change gaming and all digital (and possibly even analog) purchases of anything in the future, is its policy regarding used games.

Here's the deal. All games played on the XBox One have to be downloaded to the cloud or the console's hard drive. If you buy a physical disc with a copy of the game on it, it will be downloaded immediately, and the disc will henceforth be dead. So if you're one of those people (me) who doesn't have a million dollars, and buys a game for $59.99, plays it for six weeks, then sells it back for $30...you're screwed. It's a complete overhaul of the used media system that's been in place for decades.

Here are the rules:

Why this matters: it's a direct attack against the right of first-sale. Which if you need a reminder, "enables the distribution chain of copyrighted products, library lending, gifting, video rentals and secondary markets for copyrighted works (for example, enabling individuals to sell their legally purchased books or CDs to others)." Publishers have looooooong been attempting to weasel their way out of this limitation of their copyright. And the digital revolution has left a perfect opening.

There's never been a question that when you buy a physical thing, legally, you henceforth own it, and can do whatever you want with it. You can trade it. Sell it. Wear it as a hat. Whatever. As long as its creator/publisher got paid at least once, during the first sale. But what happens when you buy a digital thing? Do you own a bunch of 1s and 0s? Are you renting it? Can you wear it as a hat? Good question. That's a battle still being fought between consumers and Amazon, Overdrive, iTunes, etc. It's honestly still up in the air. There's nothing like working in interlibrary loan to teach you that nobody really has copyright figured out anymore. It's more and more difficult to enforce and interpret every day.

And maybe you don't feel like this is a big deal, being unable to trade and sell used video games. After all, you can't do it with digital music (though there are ways around it), PC games/software, or most ebooks either. The difference being that console games tend to cost $60 or more. That's a lot of simoleons. Now if the games would cost about half that much, as purely untradeable/unsellable digital copies, that wouldn't be so bad. I've downloaded plenty of DLC which acts exactly like that. But there's no sign that this will be the case. Not to mention by cutting out independent game shops there will be no competition in game pricing. Weird how the biggest capitalists in the world are the ones most afraid of actual capitalism.

But if this move by Microsoft and game publishers is successful, it could revolutionize the way we interpret digital ownership, and the right of first-sale in general. It will put into question how ebooks and libraries should function. Not to mention businesses like Red Box, Blockbuster, GameFly, Replay Games, eBay, and half.com. But more importantly, LIBRARIES.

So do yourself and everyone else a favor, and please don't buy an XBox One. At least not until they change their policies. Pretty pretty please, with Super Mario Bros. 2 cherries on top?

Internet Lovelies

With the lone exception of George Clooney, no one in America ever comes out and says that not everyone wants to get married. The social compact, as expressed in political platforms, revolves around marriage and family life. The acceptance speeches at both of last summer's presidential-nominating conventions were addressed to only two demographic groups: "working families" and "families who work." That's fine, working families need the lion's share of social programs--the housing, the schools, the health care, the roads to get from the housing to the schools and the health care. But what about a shout-out to those of us single professionals who shell out gazillions of dollars in taxes to educate and care for all the working families' progeny?

Sarah Vowell, Link

Being a single, working tax payer is one of the most socialist things you can be. Add to that having a job providing free books to the public and my faded Communist Party tee (featuring Karl Marx with a lamp shade on his head and martini in hand) is looking more and more appropriate. 

I was able to meet Sarah Vowell last week, which was a pretty big highlight in what has been an overwhelmingly lightless winter. February and March can go straight to hell. Sarah is one of my favorite writers. I've read all six of her books, a read-count only surpassed by JK Rowling in terms of author loyalty (though that's more to do with addictive tales of child wizardry). She made an appearance at my alma mater, where she read from her most recent book, Unfamiliar Fishes. I was hoping she'd mention something about her next project, but she told the audience she wasn't ready to discuss it publicly. However she did read from something new, discussing the diaries of a grumpy cartographer who helped map the newly expanded western United States. It was absolutely hilarious, and I'm hoping it's a hint at what her next work will be. Books about cartography and map obsession are pretty big right now, with last year's publication of Ken Jennings' Maphead and Simon Garfield's On the Map. I'm not mapped-out yet, so bring it on.

Question: when you meet an artist, writer, musician, etc., you admire, what are you supposed to say to them? Other than blurting out something along the lines of I LIKE HOW YOU PUT WORDS TOGETHER. Or THE NOTES YOU PLAY SOUND GOOD. Because I'm lost when it comes to proper creator-fandom etiquette. They're just human beings, after all. Human beings who've heard from a thousand other nerds that they enjoy the things they've created. If you have legitimate questions, maybe that's different.

I remember several years ago when I went to a Rob Zombie concert (this librarian used to be pretty metal, albeit not with the best taste), my friend and I payed major dough so we could be the first ones let into the pit, to secure the coveted first "row," center stage. We did, along with about 50 others, and were so early that the band was still on stage doing sound check. There they were, and there we were, 10 feet away, in broad daylight and silence, and all 50 of us had no idea what we were supposed to do. There was a lot of feet-shuffling and checking of watches. Then two hours later when they took the stage, we all screamed our heads off because they were actually performing. Meeting artists when they're human, outside of the music, books, paintings or films in which they usually reside, just seems so awkward and surreal. Like you've suddenly been confronted with the fact that you're actually a stalker. A creepy stalker who's been paying for years to gain access to their inner-thoughts and emotions through the fourth wall of artistic creation.

Or maybe I'm over-analyzing this, and should just stand in line to get my book signed like everybody else.

Here are some more internet lovelies.

I don’t know about you, but any given week, I associate with, hang out with, deal with, talk with, laugh with, put up with, experience life with people who are gay, straight, bi-, brown, white, black, male, female, trans-, old, young, comfortably well off or strugglingly poor, and every mix and match possible. We are real people and we have real issues. Our lives are just as complicated as anyone else’s and just as ripe for storytelling as anyone’s.

The books I read growing up, the role model my uncle became, my own experiences and those of the people I loved, all of these conspired to make me hungry for stories, and I don’t want to be meeting the watered down worlds that don’t include facets of people that I know exist.

 Karina Cooper, Link 

Last year, when I was 33, people kept mentioning that it was my "Jesus year," the age Jesus was when he died. As in, I guess, if I hadn't saved mankind by the time I was 34, I could pretty much be counted as a failure. I'm much more concerned about my "Byron year" of 36. As in, if I haven't committed incestuous acts, gone to war, scandalized an entire nation, driven past lovers insane with jealousy, and written a few half-good manuscripts, then what the hell am I even doing with my life?

Jessa Crispin, Link

We played things on vinyl, because we were 22 and thought we were the first people to appreciate a variety of things, including wooden floors and theories of translation and our old telephone. Our landlord from upstairs would ring the phone at unsociable hours because all hours were unsociable and speak Quebecois French that I brain-translated into my-French then brain-translated into English and I have no idea what it meant but I think it meant, “Are you cold?” We called into work or university sick or university or work called into us sick — let’s just not move, either way. We made a lot of fried eggs and took it in turns to moonwalk out to the dépanneur two blocks away for cigarettes. I wore my yellow knitted socks and my pink silk dress and my grey woollen jumper and had my first encounter with the brain-dentistry of clinical depression. Once we didn’t leave the apartment for three days. The experience snowily, sleepily dusted all surfaces of human interactions — at breakfast: “We haven’t left the apartment for a week!” This was conversational exaggeration and at the same time possibly true.

Heather McRobie, Link 

That whole essay is wonderful. Check it out.

The division V.P. offered me a job after my two-week gig, which I cordially declined. I imagined myself waking up before dawn, raking bristles across my teeth, and taking the train eastward towards a spoiled sun which believes it is the center of our universe. We tell it stories of other stars, and it spits flames. Every downtown is a Jenga game about to end. Part of me wonders, regrets, what I would have become had I repeated yes like Molly Bloom. I will admit this world makes me, sometimes, want to put a rat inside someone’s asshole and record the contortions of their face simply out of aesthetic curiosity. Fortunately there is the internet, where I spend my time refreshing. The office was on the 36th floor, its spotless floor-to-ceiling windows pretending not to exist. I saw myself calmly walking to the edge and jumping off, my shadow morphing into the exact shape of my body the moment before the moment. “Sorry, waking up would be too much,” I say, unaware of the ontological metaphor. I exit his office in silent Cole Haan loafers.

Jimmy Chen, Link

 
Taken out of context the rat statement may not make sense in the passage above, but it's a reference to American Psycho. Click the link to read the entire essay. Or just go ahead and read everything Jimmy Chen's ever written, actually. I like the way you put words together, Jimmy Chen.

Internet Lovelies

Consider that this happened in an evening when the Oscar host Seth MacFarlane cracked a gag that cast George Clooney as Humbert to Wallis's unwitting Lolita, and it starts to look less like a baffling lapse, and more like frat Hollywood asserting itself over a small black girl. You can act, the jokes imply; you can even be brilliant (as Wallis is in Beasts of the Southern Wild); you can be as cute as you like in your beautiful dress and your puppy-dog handbag, and we the Hollywood fraternity reserve the right to remind you that you are nothing but female, heading for a future where, six years from now, paps aim a long lens up your skirt and everyone calls you a slut because you didn't take the precaution of binding your legs together before getting out of a car.

Sarah Ditum, in reply to a tweet from The Onion about Quvenzhané Wallis, Link

We got the joke. And understand the satire. It was just straight up the wrong word to use. And MacFarlane's Wallis/Clooney "joke" was downright disturbing.

Can't you take a joke? Yes, I can take a joke. I can take a bunch! A thousand, 10,000, maybe even more! But after 30 or so years, this stuff doesn't feel like joking. It's dehumanizing and humiliating, and as if every single one of those jokes is an ostensibly gentler way of saying, "I don't think you belong here." All those little instances add up, grain of sand by grain of sand until I'm stranded in a desert of every "tits or GTFO" joke I've ever tried to ignore.

Margaret Lyons, Link

Etc.

I assume, if you're reading this, that you are most likely a human being with eyeballs in a head on top of a torso with nipples on it sitting on a butt attached to some genitals and legs and feet. Or some approximation thereof, give or take a few limbs/eyeballs/genitals as needed. In that case, congratulations! You have a body. And your body is—truth!—naked under your clothes right now. Look to your left. Look to your right. Literally 100% of the people within your line of sight are also naked under their clothes! And if, for some reason, some of those clothes happened to come off, or go invisible, or get burned off by acid rain or the erotic ray-gun of a lecherous sex-doctor, you might accidentally behold your neighbors' nakedness. And do you know what would happen then? Literally nothing. Nothing would happen to anyone.

Lindy West, Link

Well, not nothing. But nothing harmful, at least.

One of the most erotic experiences of my life remains book-sniffing, in a Bangkok hotel room, by myself, the Dutch translation of Crime and Punishment while rolling around on a bed of loose pages from Gravity’s Rainbow.

Teddy Wayne, Link

In this book there is a whale and some men…I will not give away any names.

Lincoln Michel, from a book report constructed of sentences in negative Amazon reviews of Moby Dick, Link 

Read that whole thing, because it's hilarious.

The IKEA “Lack” side table is $9.99 if you want it in “birch finish,” and $7.99 in plain white, a color which — when not imbued with high modernist sheen — concedes to a post-industrial grim boredom, even guilt, that is always trying to find its way back into the woods. This may be Walt Whitman’s fault, who saw a “journey work of the stars” in a blade of grass, so I have him to blame for my meandering horoscope.

Jimmy Chen, Link

The problem with Sephora... is that, like many drugs, too much is never enough. Sephora is a smoke monster, a rainbow, a Mobius strip of promises. There's no getting a grip on it. There is no end. There's only more. You can chase the dragon of self-improvement slash self-enhancement slash self-acceptance until the day you die; there's always a new fragrance, a new lip color, a new miracle cream right around the corner. Sucking your bank account dry. You go in for a lip balm and come out with body polish, dry shampoo, BB cream, and Kat Von D's "Sinner" smoky eyes palette...Oodles on display, a myriad of options, infinite possibilities. When you think you've finally found the solution, the crutch, the key, either you run out and need more; they stop making it and it vanishes like so much sparkly Guerlain Terra Cotta dust; or you find that what once satisfied you no longer does the trick. A deliciously sticky honey trap, from which you never fully escape; you leave, but the pull is strong, keeping you coming back.

Fucking Sephora, man.

Dodai Stewart, Link

Sephora, a.k.a. the reason I have nine different kinds of facial moisturizer in my bathroom right now, and nine dollars in my bank account.

Let Jenna Marbles explain to you this phenomenon of "goo hoarding":

Criticisms about representations of gender (or race and other diversity) are often countered in fandom by sociological or scientific analyses attempting to explain why the inequality happens according to the internal logic of the fictional world. As though there is any real reason that anything happens in a story except that someone chose to write it that way.

Fiction is not Darwinian: It contains no impartial process of evolution that dispassionately produces the events of a fictional universe. Fiction is miraculously, fundamentally Creationist. When we make worlds, we become gods. And gods are responsible for the things they create, particularly when they create them in their own image.

Laura Hudson, Link

Every word that has ever been put to paper (or screen) is the product of some bored human writing it. I hate when people treat fictional universes like some magical reality separate from the mind of the person who created them. If a made-up world contains profound sexism, racism, homophobia, class discrimination, etc., it's either to explore said concept in regard to its existence in the real world, or it's just thrown in because the writer can't imagine a world that doesn't contain those things. Which is unfortunate and really sad.

Here's an adorable video to cheer up your dreary Tuesday.

Internet Lovelies

 Happy Holidays, from my bookshelf to yours.

Perhaps menstruation is the opposite of God. We pretend it doesn’t exist.

Jimmy Chen, Link

See also.

But I also feel weary and more than a little angry that we’re still doing this. Not that same-sex marriage is still being debated necessarily. Debate is fine, we have this thing called free speech. But it’s that we still, as a country, think our love – my love – is something to be voted on. In fact, the more I think about it the more furious I become. Rights aren’t a popularity contest. Rights aren’t a campaign. Rights are rights. I shouldn’t have to convince anyone I deserve them, I should just have them. It’s that whole inalienable thing. Alas, we aren’t there yet, as a nation. We’re still tiptoeing on the edges of equality, letting the majority decide for the minority. 

Dorothy Snarker, Link

It bothers me that you take a photo, run it through a color filter and slap some typographically “literary” text on it and consider it an album cover because, right, like your fans are all sensitive art students with melted candles and a suicidy razor blade by the bathtub; and emphatic or compulsive design seems uncool and corporatey, and your life is all about casual. Casual sex; casual resume sending; casual cereal for dinner. Every time I see one of these album covers I want to have a vasectomy and not subject my child to this world and vice versa. 

Jimmy Chen, Link

Why do I find the old jingle
“SF [science fiction]'s no good”, they bellow ’til we’re deaf.
“But, THIS is good.” “Well, then it’s not SF.”
running through my mind? A thought which also applies to mystery and other genre stories as well. Why not simply recognize that good writing is good writing, regardless of where you find it?

Kay Shapero, commenter on the article "10 Great Authors We Should All Stop Pigeonholing", Link

"The demographics are changing," [O'Reilley] added. "It's not a traditional America anymore."

How quickly we forget, how fast perspective is lost in just a few generations. Mr. O'Reilley, re-view Scorsese's "Gang's of New York," or better yet read the book "Five Points" by Tyler Anbinder. You might enlighten yourself as to what it was like for the Irish when they were the "change" the self-styled "traditional Americans" recoiled from.

America provided the chance for millions of 2nd generation Americans like me to be middle-class, upper-middle class, even tycoons. But I never let myself forget that my grandparents were peasant immigrants from Eastern Europe, and what they went through to get here, and what they endured to stay here.

Apparently all too many of us forget our not so long-ago introduction to the US. We can no longer see ourselves and our ancestors in the eyes of newer arrivals. But those new arrivals are indeed our own grandparents and great grandparents. 

 Roberthenryeller, commenter on the piece "Fox News Loses Its Mind Over Election Results, Link 

Then there’s magic. There are no excuses here. None at all. Either you have a magic system which is inclusive of women, or exclusive of women, and in both instances, FEMALE CHARACTERS ARE GOING TO HAVE OPINIONS ABOUT THAT. If you really want a patriarchal, masculine magical system, then as with politics, the most interesting thing you can do is throw women at that system, to see where the cracks are.

Tansy Rayner Roberts, Link

That's from an awesome article at Tor titled "Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let’s Unpack That." It instantly made me think of Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea series. In Earthsea magic can be performed by both men and women, but the schools that teach wizardry exclude women. And since Earthsea magic requires the knowledge of words passed down through the ages by teachers, the witches never get to become more than mid-wives and healers. The first book, A Wizard of Earthsea didn't really address this fact or give the opinions of female characters. However Le Guin made up for it in the rest of the series, all the books leading up to the introduction of Tehanu, the girl who reveals the cracks in the patriarchal system.

Imagine if a Thai company made a movie about 9/11, and that movie was specifically about the experiences of a Thai family in Tower One. Don’t worry, it’s not a bummer - it’s an uplifting story of how these people escaped death and got home safely. But imagine that, in this Thai movie, every character is Thai. There are white people running around in the background, and two of them have a couple of lines, but every single character in this story about the attack on the World Trade Center is Thai.

You’d think this was pretty weird, I bet. You’d think it displayed provincial thinking, perhaps even a cinematic xenophobia. You’d probably even laugh at how petty and small-minded this film seems. You’d dismiss it.

Turn it around (and multiply the death toll of the event by almost 100) and you have The Impossible.

 Devin Faraci, Link

That's from a review of the upcoming film The Impossible, which tells the story of a white family surviving the 2004 tsunami disaster in southeast Asia. The trailer looks terrible and completely xenophobic. Why would you decide to be in this, Ewan McGregor? I am disappointed.

I am honored to have been asked to recommend books because I love books. I mean, I love buying books. I can't say I read most of the books I buy. Recently I decided to believe that buying books is as good as reading them. I feel smarter as soon as I sign the credit-card receipt at my local independent book seller. 

Judd Apatow, Link

I love his honesty. If buying books were as good as reading them I'd be a literary savant by now.

Meanwhile, Lego has developed and marketed a line of toys specifically to girls after researching for years how to get girls to play with the toy bricks. The Lego Friends line includes a cafe, a vet's office and a pet salon. The figures, McGowan notes, are bigger and are more realistic than other figures because Lego learned that girls see them as avatars of themselves.

"By unlocking that mystery — what is it that the girls are looking for out of the play? — Lego was able to get a lot of girls and hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue just in one year, whereas they couldn't get that before," McGowan says.

Ultimately, for good or bad, there really are just fundamental differences between boys and girls, he says.

NPR article, Link

What does that last sentence mean. What does it even mean. "For good or bad." I'm trying to wrap my head around it. If you really believe there are fundamental differences between young boys and young girls, then it is neither "good" nor "bad," just reality. Although the worst line in that blurb has got to be the one claiming it's a goddamn mystery what girls are looking to get out of playtime. I might be pushing it here, but I'm guessing FUN? Not tips on how to clean, cook, feed babies, or put on eyeshadow. Just fun, fucker. Adults are the ones applying gender training motives to preschoolers' playing habits.

Diddy Kong, you bastard.

And I'm not convinced that only girls want to see "avatars of themselves" in what they play with. Isn't that desire universal? Children want to be able to see themselves in the figurines, story book illustrations, movie characters, and video game avatars they experience on a daily basis. Which is why I became so angry during my recent trip to Toys R Us to pick up some xmas presents for my nieces. They both love Mario Kart, so I was overjoyed to find an entire section devoted to it. Race tracks, plushies, figurines, etc. But hold up. None of the characters on display included Princess Peach. Or any female characters at all, for that matter, even though there are SEVEN in the actual game. Instead we get the entire array of male leads and less-than leads, including Diddy Kong. Mother effing Diddy Kong.

So yeah, real big revelation there, Lego. "Girls want to see themselves in the things they play with." Fucking rocket science. WE HAVE THIS THEORY THAT MAYBE, JUST POSSIBLY, SMALL GIRLS ARE PEOPLE TOO. JURY'S STILL OUT ON THIS ONE, WE'LL GET BACK TO YOU AFTER SOME MARKET TESTING.

/rant

Have fun and be safe out there.Wear an ugly Christmas sweater if at all possible.

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? 

Internet Lovelies

 On 'what's wrong with Prometheus':

This is why doing allegory well is hard: Your story actually has to work at a second level without shattering the viewer’s suspension of disbelief on the first level. Throughout the movie, you get the sense that the authors have decided that if it works symbolically, it doesn’t need to make sense narratively.

Julian Sanchez, Link

There was a lot wrong with Prometheus. Unfortunately I've been collecting these quotes since June and my anti-Prometheus steam has run out. But basically, what Julian said. Symbolism is well and good, but if the narrative doesn't make sense then what are you even doing. (See also Monks Flying Spaceships, A Canticle for Leibowitz).

We are devolving into a nation of people who wear their lack of concern for fellow human beings as a badge of honor. Too many people are looking for ways to justify their disdain for others, and too many news organizations are fanning the flames of such discourse.

Commenter Helane Carswell, Link

There will always be non-readers, bad readers, lazy readers – there always were. Reading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.

Julian Barnes, Link

From "Existentially-Fraught Takes On Classic Picture Books To Teach Your Kids The Meaningless Of Life Before The Internet Does":

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, You Are F-cked

Set in a dystopian future in which animals can access the internet, Brown Bear, Brown Bear, You Are F-cked tells the tale of Brown Bear, whose exorbitant internet usage gives way to his development of extremely niche tastes in music, film, literature, and food. Relating to other bears becomes increasingly difficult and tiring. He makes ‘internet bear friends’ who are moderately interested in the same kinds of media to compensate for the IRL friends he has alienated.
Brown Bear slowly gains more and more internet friendships with bears all over the globe until he stops speaking with IRL bears completely, adopts ‘freeganism,’ and relocates to a remote, sealed-off, wifi-accessible cave in Vermont, where he can comment on blogs, refresh his Facebook feed, and discover new music on Spotify uninterrupted. He slowly loses track of the days, weeks, and months, and then he dies, leaving behind his earthly possesions: several parody Twitter accounts portraying various other woodland animals and a Blogspot.

Karim Kazemi, Link

Hahhahhaahaha...oh I'm sad now.


From Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler:

In the shop window you have promptly identified the cover with the title you were looking for. Following this visual trail, you have forced your way through the shop past the thick barricade of Books You Haven’t Read, which were frowning at you from the tables and shelves, trying to cow you. But you know you must never allow yourself to be awed, that among them there extend for acres and acres the Books You Needn’t Read, the Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading, Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written. And thus you pass the outer girdle of ramparts, but then you are attacked by the infantry of the Books That If You Had More Than One Life You Would Certainly Also Read But Unfortunately Your Days Are Numbered. With a rapid maneuver you bypass them and move into the phalanxes of the Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First, the Books Too Expensive Now And You’ll Wait Till They’re Remaindered, the Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback, Books You Can Borrow From Somebody, Books That Everybody’s Read So It’s As If You Had Read Them, Too. Eluding these assaults, you come up beneath the towers of the fortress, where other troops are holding out:
the Books You’ve Been Planning To Read For Ages,
the Books You’ve Been Hunting For Years Without Success,
the Books Dealing With Something You’re Working On At The Moment,
the Books You Want To Own So They’ll Be Handy Just In Case,
the Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer,
the Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves,
the Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified.
(and so on.)

via Flavorwire, Link

I’m not going to have others deciding what I want to read. I mean that would be almost anti-literature. I couldn’t read something just to say I’ve read it. That would be like picking your college major because your parents want you to be like a landscape architect or something. I mean only about 20% or something of people even have a college degree. The entire point is to select your occupation, to attempt to create your destiny, and you’re just going to toss it away? You’re just going to abdicate free will? Fuck that. I’m not reading a damn thing for others. That would be death.

Sean Lovelace, Link

My mother doesn’t understand that there’s a Linksys WRT54G Router inside her home, grimly installed by my father at 5:00 a.m. one morning while she was still getting her beauty sleep in. She touches her iPad with tiny soft fingers, hitting “forward” in her email on all-things-annoying to this contributor and her only son. Now and then she gets kicked off the wi-fi network — however endearing the password named after her by my father, whose displays of love are limited in such I.T. manners — and, when I happen to be around one weekend, tells me to fix the internet. I explain to her that it’s either the router or Comcast, and that I can only help with the former. That the internet cannot be fixed, due to teens. “The internet,” she repeats.

Jimmy Chen, Link

Internet Lovelies

My biggest problem with grocery shopping, and it isn’t the store’s fault in the least, is that I’m a complete sucker for anything new and different. Korean barbecue sauce? Gotta have that! Bacon horseradish potato chip dip? In the cart!
Then, once at home, I open my pantry and survey the irrational amounts of sauces, mixes, exotic ingredients, and just plain weird stuff (I’m sure I bought those anchovy-stuffed olives for a reason, I just don’t remember what it was). I very rarely eat salads at home, and yet I have eight different types of salad dressing. Why? Because Bacon Ranch!
What I need, and what the grocery stores will never provide, is someone to follow me through the store and just smack my hand whenever I reach for that interesting jar of mustard or that I-never-know-when-I-might-be-in-the-mood-for-Swedish jar of pickled herring in cream sauce.

Commenter "Jeff", Link

My refrigerator is a sad thing to behold. It very rarely contains anything that's 100% edible. If some natural disaster ever barricades me in my apartment, you'll probably find me emptying out jars of curry paste and balsamic vinaigrette onto dinner plates.

I read in the newspaper that your community is mystified by the outcry from all over the country about what you have done. Well, you have discovered that Drake is a part of American civilization, and your fellow Americans can’t stand it that you have behaved in such an uncivilized way. Perhaps you will learn from this that books are sacred to free men for very good reasons, and that wars have been fought against nations which hate books and burn them. If you are an American, you must allow all ideas to circulate freely in your community, not merely your own.

Kurt Vonnegut, in a 1973 letter to Charles McCarthy, head of the Drake High School school board, who had demanded that 32 copies of Slaughterhouse-Five be burned in the school's furnace. Link

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.

Ansel Adams, in a 1937 letter to friend Cedric Wright. Link

That has to be my favorite definition of art I've come across so far.

And are you familiar with the site Letters of Note? You should be. It's only the greatest thing ever. It's a blog that shares incredibly interesting letters written by notable people from the past. Like this letter from an escaped slave written to his former master after emancipation. I want to go back in time and give that guy a high five. (btw, happy 150th Emancipation Day, D.C.!) Start browsing this site and I promise you'll only look up from the screen hours later. Reading before bed is not recommended.

Now. Let's talk Hunger Games.

Why should I care about your story? You have a bad job and want to be doing something different but feel paralyzed because of something and so you gchat with your friends all day the end. [Suzanne] Collins and [George R.R.] Martin keep you reading deep into the night because at the end of a chapter Katniss’ head suddenly falls off. And you’re like, her head just fell off??? I have to keep reading. Like holy crap. And so you stay up all night furiously turning pages. What happens at the end of your chapters? Someone doesn’t reply to your email or something. Or, like, 9/11 happens. I’m so fucking riveted.

Jim Behrle, Link

Saddest book title of all time: The Unreplied-to Email :(

Thich Nhat Hanh speaks out a lot about films and music that he thinks poison our minds. "We (writers) do not have the right just to express our own suffering if it brings suffering to others," he says. "Filmmakers, musicians, and writers need to practice Right Speech to help our society move again in the direction of peace, joy, and faith in the future."

I have a hard time agreeing with this. I do think that there are forms of entertainment whose sole purpose appears to be to excite people in unhealthy ways and generate profits. But almost every time I think I've come up with the perfect example of this, it turns out that either the makers of the thing had a higher purpose in mind than I'd imagined or that the fans of the thing got more out of it than I ever would.

I also think that many of the films, books and music that helped me get through my life -- particularly my adolescence -- would have probably been labeled "negative" by Mr. Hanh and his loyal followers. I can imagine him recommending me to watch Mary Poppins and listen to The Carpenters instead of reading Philip K. Dick and listening to the Sex Pistols. This would have ended up making me kill myself since I would never have known there were others just as dissatisfied with life as I was. At least that's how I take what he's said on the subject. And I'm certain I'm not alone in taking it that way.

In the case of Hunger Games, there's a lot of violence and ugliness. But that ugliness and violence appears to me to be intended to make an important commentary on contemporary society. So it's valid and good. You couldn't make the points they wanted to make without all the bloodshed.

Brad Warner, Link

I have a theory, and that theory is if you try to erase ugliness from your child's experience of the world (particularly entertainment-wise), the more likely it is they will turn out to be an asshole. It might would take a full-length dissertation to explain, but I'm convinced that watching crazy violent/morbid anime* as a youngster, reading A Tale of Two Cities before I even understood what monarchy meant, and listening to Alanis Morissette's Jagged Little Pill and Metallica non-stop as a pre-teen made me grow up to be a better, kinder person.

* I dare you to watch part 10 and not weep in mortification at the unfairness and temporal nature of life. But also unicorns and rainbows!

I learned a long time ago that life often introduces young people to situations they are in no way prepared for, even good girls, lucky girls who want for nothing. Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods. You lose your name because another one is forced on you. You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you. Salvation is certainly among the reasons I read. Reading and writing have always pulled me out of the darkest experiences in my life. Stories have given me a place in which to lose myself. They have allowed me to remember. They have allowed me to forget. They have allowed me to imagine different endings and better possible worlds.

and

Throughout the books, Katniss endures the unendurable. She is damaged and it shows. At times, it might seem like her suffering is gratuitous but life often presents unendurable circumstances people manage to survive. Only the details differ. The Hunger Games trilogy is dark and brutal but in the end, the books also offer hope—for a better world and a better people and for one woman, a better life for herself—a life she can share with a man who understands her strength and doesn’t expect her to compromise that strength, a man who can hold her weak places and love her through the darkest of her memories, the worst of her damage. Of course I love these books. The trilogy offers the kind of tempered hope everyone who survives something unendurable hungers for.

Roxane Gay, Link

The book wasn't perfect. Neither was the film. But my god, I'm so happy they exist. Everything about the story screamed against them becoming so outrageously popular, and yet, here they are. I love it.

Internet Lovelies

I didn’t even want to go on the date. That sounds terrible but I just went because I thought, well, he asked and, “Who am I to say no?” That sounds terrible too. I’m a feminist! I mean, come on. The entire time, I thought, “I do not want to be here. I do not want to talk to him. I want to go home.” It’s a situation I’ve been in countless times. I write about it sometimes, this sense of entrapment where I feel unduly obligated to say yes to things...

...He said something “jokingly” and inane about how if he stayed all night we could do some work together. It was supposed to be charming but it was not. I smiled and said, “No thanks.” He said, “Let’s at least finish the movie, the wine.” HULK MAD HULK SMASH MAN FACE! I politely said, “I need to end the evening,” and he was still on his own agenda. He is truly a nice guy (he is, just maybe not good at reading cues). I didn’t know what to do. I felt like… I was speaking English and I did so clearly and somehow that wasn’t translating into whatever the hell language he hears when people speak to him. For now, I am going to call that language DICK.

Roxane Gay, Link

You know that Aaliyah song, "Try Again"? Well men, please don't listen to that. If at first you don't succeed, that's it. Please stop. Because you're coming off as rapey. I'm talking to you, creepers of the library.

When I see a fresh red heart in facebook’s “is now in a relationship” status update, I secretly wait for its full metastasis into a tumor.

Jimmy Chen, Link

I picture a bunch of unsatisfied people in this country, this grand first world country with clean water and dirty Gods, going to a country with dirty water and clean Gods, to negotiate happiness, to bargain for it, to try to find “something” in a world whose atomic constituent was built, literally, upon nothing. And we wonder why we’re empty.

Jimmy Chen, Link

In support of my "save the bookstores" tips from awhile back: GalleyCat reports that the sale of mass market paperbacks is down 41% from last year. If you're a small indie bookstore, you should maybe consider discontinuing selling cheap paperbacks of bestsellers. The consumer type for this market is more likely to own an e-reader. Or will just buy them from the grocery store anyway, along with their frozen burritos. Do you sell frozen burritos in your bookstore? Then stop selling James Patterson.

Remember the VIDA statistics I talked about last year? Well they're just as dismal this year. We're in the future!

I personally was on Facebook for two weeks as part of a piece of journalism I was writing — it seemed sort of dumb to me. Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose…it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters…it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium.

People I care about are readers…particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.

Jonathan Franzen, Link

*cough* *hack* Sorry, just trying to wave away this cloud of 'smug' that materialized from my computer monitor and enveloped itself around me.

Franzen, you don't need to yak about yourself. Freedom was an Oprah's Book Club pick. A writer who uses social media to gain an audience for their work can be "serious." Whatever you mean by that. Although in my opinion being part of Oprah's book club automatically strips you of whatever "seriousness" you once held, in my own interpretation of the term.

I've never attempted a Franzen novel, mostly because he says shit like this all the time. And writes vaguely misogynistic articles about Edith Wharton. I've always found it difficult to separate the artist from the art. No matter how many times the Ender's Game series is recommended to me, my mind keeps going back to the fact that Orson Scott Card is a hateful homophobe. And maybe I'm missing out on some really good books. But there are a lot of good books out there--more than I'll ever have time to read--so I may as well support the ones written by 'good' authors.

I'm a bit on the defense here because I spend a disproportionate amount of each day on twitter; that most "irresponsible medium." I don't do it for recognition or to market myself (what would I even be marketing!?). I don't care how many followers I have. I just enjoy having a creative outlet that's challenging and allows me to be anonymous (translation: this blog has my full name attached to it, so dick jokes are kept to a minimum. Hi future employers!).

I understand what Franzen is saying about "writing a novel without a P." The format of twitter is a gimmick. You get just 140 characters. It's a challenge that he would utterly fail; you can't craft a tweet containing a word like 'semaphoring' and expect it to fit under the limit. But no one's trying to tweet longwinded intellectual arguments--the medium just doesn't support it. That's no reason to completely dismiss it. As Roxane Gay aptly puts it, "It’s like Franzen is saying, 'I cannot swim in my car and therefore my car is not useful.'" I have been introduced to SO many great writers through twitter (albeit ones Franzen probably wouldn't consider Serious™). And they didn't need Oprah to gain my attention. Just great writing.

Internet Lovelies

There's a librarian themed Ryan Gosling tumblr.

Through the long span of reading it and not reading it, just looking at it, or carrying it around, I kept thinking about art. It’s power, its lack of power, what it does to the hypercultured; I’d call most readers of this blog hypercultured. Does it blunt us to the real trauma around us? To the relationships and forms that are actually unavoidable? I wouldn’t be surprised. I do know that art really can “humanize” someone, in that it can make them really aware of other minds and ways of life, painfully & acutely aware, for the first time. It’s becoming harder to fight off the idea that art is best as a benign storehouse for excess energy, for ideas or behaviors that would normally be considered weird or offensive, and that, at its best and most beautiful, is contagious and hooks people into its practice and community, in order to grow itself as a form of human activity; but why fight this? In other words, art as/is the least harmful cultural node.

Ken Baumann on reading 2666, Link

Least harmful? Possibly. But there is this Flavorwire list of the most dangerous novels of all time.

The deep foundation of the US – so went my thinking – was not the comparatively recent 18th-century Enlightenment structures of the republic, with their talk of equality and their separation of church and state, but the heavy-handed theocracy of 17th-century Puritan New England, with its marked bias against women, which would need only the opportunity of a period of social chaos to reassert itself.
...

I made a rule for myself: I would not include anything that human beings had not already done in some other place or time, or for which the technology did not already exist. I did not wish to be accused of dark, twisted inventions, or of misrepresenting the human potential for deplorable behaviour. The group-activated hangings, the tearing apart of human beings, the clothing specific to castes and classes, the forced childbearing and the appropriation of the results, the children stolen by regimes and placed for upbringing with high-ranking officials, the forbidding of literacy, the denial of property rights: all had precedents, and many were to be found not in other cultures and religions, but within western society, and within the "Christian" tradition, itself.

Margaret Atwood on A Handmaid's Tale, Link

One day I'm going to spell "quince" in Scrabble. Until then I'll stick to the tried and true "qi".






MC Lars "Annabel Lee R.I.P." animated by "internet friend" John Sasser

Go to BetterWorldBook's Shop From Work sale and click the "Boss Button".

Graphic novelist Nate Powell answers the ShelfAwareness "Book Brahmin" questionnaire in an interesting way. I love his answers. A reader after my own heart.

Other updates:

- My laptop died so I bought a MacBook Pro. I'm scared of it and I feel like I'm supporting something evil. Like "the Empire" or something. And not the record store Empire.
- Driving home the other night I became momentarily convinced that I should drop everything and go back to school to become a screenwriter. I've never attempted to write a screenplay before. If I won the lottery I think I would try to write a screenplay and force someone to film it. How much would Tarantino cost.
- I've been reading nothing but trashy paperbacks and it's why I haven't had any quotes to share lately. Unless you want me to share passages with too many pronouns and descriptions of outfits in them. Sometimes I need to read bad things.
- My hair smells really good right now.
- Last weekend I went to a Tool concert. They're one of my favorite groups. I wrote my senior thesis while looping the album 10,000 Days. Someone commented that I didn't look like a Tool fan. Earlier in the week a patron refused to believe I wasn't a student. I still get carded at R movies. When in Best Buy, I'm typically followed by a trail of dudes in blue shirts who are convinced I don't know what I'm doing. One actually tried to talk me out of getting my DSLR last year. "Yeah this is a pretty advanced camera....here we got some pink ones over heeeeere...." I get called "sweetie" a lot. My appearance seems to be a constant source of disappointment to others. This isn't an emo moment. I just think it's funny that my baby face and gender will never allow me to be taken seriously outside of things to do with Miley Cyrus, sprinkles and rainbows.

Or it could be this cupcake shirt I'm wearing.

Internet Lovelies

Daniel Clowes' cover for the New Yorker

"Where are the books?"
"Um, they're over here on the bottom shelf. But wouldn't you rather have a Simpsons themed Monopoly board? Or perhaps you'd like to browse our 32 different varieties of moleskine notebooks?"

So many bookstores (and online book retailers) have become like pharmacies; barely even carrying the things they were created to sell. My local CVS (aka Snuggie Outlet) doesn't carry Tylenol. The biggest pharmacy in town doesn't have Tylenol. TYLENOL. My god but they have waffle irons.

A book — a real book — is one choice, taken from a pile, opened and entered as its own singular, separate world. Once chosen, you are not holding the constant opportunity to alter or improve your choice, or simply change it just for the sake of restless change. You are there, now, without the relentless pressure of the fact that you could always be, and maybe you should be, maybe you’d be happier or more productive or different, doing something else.

KJ Dellatonia, Link

Imagine the least funny joke you can imagine and then imagine having to see that joke repeated for a hundred minutes while someone punches you in the face with the sharpest knife in the world while also pouring gasoline into the cuts and occasionally burning you with white hot fire. That’s a moderate approximation of the experience of watching this movie.

Roxane Gay on watching Jack and Jill, Link

It's also the experience of watching Carlos Mencia try to perform comedy. OHHHHHHHHHHHHHH. Snap.

Nothing will trickle down to you unless you shake the clouds. Time to make it rain updwards.

Jim Behrle on occupying American poetry, Link

I think mostly what this is about, is whether you’re the type of person who writes something on the Internet and feels secure/smug/confident or the type who is immediately racked with regret and self-doubt and self-loathing...

But there is that compulsion to say something. (Dare I say?) to say anything.

Elizabeth Ellen, Link

I'm that second type of person. Whenever I get a comment, facebook like, retweet, etc., evidence that whatever bullshit I've been spewing forth has actually been read, I become a nervous wreck. Whenever I comment on message boards or other people's blogs, I immediately close out of the window and log out of email, terrified of any response back. Or no response at all. It's complicated.

Hi! I have social anxiety disorder. Even on the internet! (fun!)

There's a list of the 56 Best/Worst Similes in this blog post from House of Figs. Whether they're the best or worst is up to you. But they're all hilarious. Here's a sample:

5. John and Mary had never met. They were like two hummingbirds who had also never met.

16. Long separated by cruel fate, the star-crossed lovers raced across the grassy field toward each other like two freight trains, one having left Cleveland at 6:36 p.m. traveling at 55 mph, the other from Topeka at 4:19 p.m. at a speed of 35 mph.

17. Shots rang out, as shots are wont to do.

43. The knife was as sharp as the tone used by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) in her first several points of parliamentary procedure made to Rep. Henry Hyde (R-Ill.) in the House Judiciary Committee hearings on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton.

And my all time fave:

51. It came down the stairs looking very much like something no one had ever seen before.

That sentence is so intriguing! What is "it," and what could it possibly look like? My mind goes immediately to Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase, but I've seen it before, so it obviously cannot look like that. The mystery!

I feel like I've used too many exclamation points today.

:(

Whatever. I'm just gonna watch this 50 times over and then play some Simpsons Monopoly.