January 2012
a few more resolutions, some related, some not:
read 75 books. tall order! i was going to go with the more conventional year goal of 50, but i decided to set it high partly to motivate myself to read more usually speedy YA (because reading YA — like reading in general actually — is a thing i love but don’t do nearly often enough), and partly just to motivate myself to keep reading instead of, well:
this is also the year of no...
passivity is corrosive to the soul
is my motto for 2012.
the reason i picked up caroline knapp’s drinking: a love story to reread when i did was because of what i remembered her saying about the difficulty and necessity of flexing emotional muscles long out of use or perhaps never fully developed. what kept her and what she used to keep herself from needing to make the choices that built them up over time was booze, and...
December 2011
an intimate-ish new year's gathering at the house...
right?
milkeemountainmama:
fresafresca:
milkeemountainmama:
i went to the mexican store to get me some tamales and stuff for enchiladas today. and usually i hate going to the store—well, i hate checking out—because that’s the moment when i’m designated as “not mexican”—they take one look at me, and even as they speak spanish to every single person in front of me, they speak english to me. my 90...
and, okay, since i re-opened my own can of worms...
the thing that is killing me most about it is what MMM was saying here — what would happen if institutions, universities, governments looked at everyone who had committed sexual violence (never mind OTHER kinds of violence) and said, DEALBREAKER, SHUT IT DOWN! seriously. what would happen to them? what would that world look like?
what would happen if victims knew they could say “this...
i know i said i would shut up about it but uh 2012...
but this fucker does not even have a degree, neither undergrad or grad, in women’s studies? WHAT. PASADENA GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER. the academia job market is a terrifying nightmare according to everyone in it who doesn’t already have tenure, and this motherfucker is taking a job that could go to a person with ACTUAL ACADEMIC CREDENTIALS AND SOMEWHAT RIGOROUS BACKGROUND IN FEMINIST...
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that awkward moment when you realize "effeminate"...
and then you go back and reread the bits with that character and you’re like, oh maybe when another character says “oh, i beg your pardon” to him and this other guy for calling weird swimming trunks “a pansy’s trick” in front of them, maybe that should have clued you off. or else the part where in their...
“You were brought up to work—not especially to marry. Now you’ve...”
– rosemary’s mother’s advice to rosemary, the young actress whose perspective colors the first third of tender is the night, on how to proceed with her first flush of love, following a section on how she (twice a widow) had brought rosemary up with the idea of work.
“economically...
“Well, I’ve changed the course of music five or six times. What have you done...”
– Miles Davis to Nancy Reagan at a White House dinner in 1987 after she’d inquired as to what he’d done with his life to merit an invitation. source (via marxisforbros)
Eh this is completely wrong. He was actually quite fond of the Reagans. It was at a White House dinner however. Here is what...
“It was the same feeling that had oppressed her at the hotel—accustomed to...”
– fitzgerald, tender is the night. part of what i enjoy about reading old american fiction is finding ways in which our baby country has distinctly Not Changed in the past howevermany years. i mean i read the phrase “the starkest grotesqueries of a continent heavily underlined as comedy or...
“After lunch they were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over...”
– fitzgerald, tender is the night. lol i love when f. scott is a dick about his people.
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goddammit, fitzgerald
the edition i have of tender is the night quotes novelist marjorie kinnan rawlings saying of the book that she found it
disturbing, bitter, and beautiful. I am totally unable to analyze the almost overpowering effect that some of his passages create—some of them about quite trivial people and dealing with trivial situations. There is something terrifying about it when it happens, and the...
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what follows is the transcription of a sign i took...
Many Questions, Few Answers
Dinosaurs capture the imagination
They are bizarre and wonderful, but except for birds, they are all extinct. And although dinosaur fossils include bones, teeth, tracks, skin impressions, and possibly even DNA fragments, this evidence amounts to only a tiny fraction of information about what the living animals were really like.
Naturally, we want to know everything...
“Please touch this 110-year-old fish.”
– WISH, COMMAND, AMNH.
did you know that many people consider Barnum...
NOW YOU DO! #livebloggingamnh #thatsthekindofpersonivebecome
“As far as we know, feathers are unique to birds, but this doesn’t mean...”
– a glass case that asks the question “How can a bird be a dinosaur?” my love for the dinosaur wing is honestly like 30% just my love for scientists.
“Because we cannot observe the behavior of extinct animals, we will never know...”
– seriously the museum of natural history might be my single favorite place in new york city
“birds, which are living dinosaurs”
– I love you museum of natural history
basically what I have realized is
[redacted source of Internet Kerfuffle] is basically the literary equivalent, albeit (thus far and knock wood) to a less successful degree, of natalie portman. and we all know how I feel about THAT.
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“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by...”
– william faulkner, december 10, 1950, accepting the nobel prize for literature
the worst thing about it was that there were hints...
well, the worst thing about it was the writing, full stop, and… i mean, the interviewer at the rumpus (you can google that shit yourselves) calls it “riveting, fresh, and written with a distinctive new voice,” and i’m just like, are you high? did you actually, like, read it? or did you see how long it was and pretend you had, because, man, that shit was long. that was time...
confidential to a person currently something of an...
there were high schoolers in the harry potter fandom who could write circles around you.
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thing i need to read less of/possibly do less of:
writing that too self-consciously caters to its audience. i know i have an iphone, i don’t need you to remind me.
i dunno it’s a fine line between appreciated recognition and dull and aggravating insularity. there’s painting a picture with well-chosen specifics and then there’s revealing that you have a kind of boringly narrow set of interests and curiosity about the world...
starsgowaltzing-deactivated2012 asked: I wasn't offended by anything you had to say. I just wanted to clarify but thank you for your very considerate addendum. :)
chukalie replied to your post: I have Tori Amos’s album Little Earthquakes on my iTunes. Which songs on there are the best? I am too easily distracted to give them all a proper listen, just tell me which ones I should rate 4 or 5 stars so that they’re on my top rated list which is practically the only way I listen to my iTunes. (I am a shuffle demon, I disappoint most music lovers.) Anyway yes,...
quixotess asked: I have Tori Amos's album Little Earthquakes on my iTunes. Which songs on there are the best? I am too easily distracted to give them all a proper listen, just tell me which ones I should rate 4 or 5 stars so that they're on my top rated list which is practically the only way I listen to my iTunes. (I am a shuffle demon, I disappoint most music lovers.) Anyway yes, you are the best person...
starsgowaltzing-deactivated2012 asked: Something I should probably point out (and I don't expect you guys to knows this) but I'm not actually white.
A COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF THINGS WHITE PEOPLE CAN...
ajohnny:
starsgowaltzing:
Everything.
Alright, this is something I don’t understand. I don’t know if it’s a symptom of white guilt, an obsession with privilege-checking (which is another form of white guilt in some ways), or both, but I don’t understand this sort of thing. It’s like self-flagellation, but so many people seem to enjoy it! And even if it’s a well-meaning sentiment, it runs on...
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one more and then i swear i'm done, to the relief...
i’ve told this story before and i will keep it brief this time. once i knew a guy who admitted to me that he had “accidentally” raped his girlfriend. his story was actually one of those where at first glance the “standard” rape culture narrative, with the ideal of enthusiastic consent, was useful — he had ignored her no’s enough times that she had...
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“I wanted to strangle him by the balls.”
– my mom has the best insults
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A COMPREHENSIVE LIST OF THINGS WHITE PEOPLE CAN...
starsgowaltzing:
Everything.
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my mom is mad about new york times picking woody...
not gonna lie i’m too upset about this prospect to go out and fact-check this or whatever. allegedly it had to do with woody allen still producing stuff, but uh, bobby hasn’t exactly dropped off the face of the planet — his last album was, what, two years ago? and also his recent stuff is good.
CRITICAL BIAS i have no affection whatsoever for woody allen and a lot of affection...
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nickminichino replied to your quote: If she could shut up, because she has some good…
please force me to write the Lady Gaga Is a Professional Internet Feminist thing
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! YES YOU NEED TO WRITE THIS THE INTERNET REQUIRES THIS IN ITS LIFE
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“If she could shut up, because she has some good songs, right? And she has...”
– my mom read the gaga vanity fair cover story
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to my fellow members of feministe hate-readers...
you’re all great, you know that? i feel like i should be mad at you as a cover for being mad at myself because i sort of wonder if maybe we’re all just enabling each other at this point, like if it were just us we could step away but we keep having to say something about it and then needing to see what the other person is talking about and etc. etc., but i can’t. the trainwreck...
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i also kind of "love" (no i don't) how people are...
this is, i will go ahead and admit, a personal thing for me. some people i love incredibly much were heinously, hideously victimized in the worst possible way by A Public Figure Of Not Inconsiderable Renown. this Public Figure Of Not Inconsiderable Renown did many, many good things that helped many people, way more than being a sleazy mansplaining women’s studies professor who’s...
my very brief review of that holocene song which i...
~3 minutes of this would make a great closer for an episode of scrubs
so-very-random:
A lot of people don’t realize that I’m Latina, which is fine. One thing about being Latina is that there isn’t one look that comes with the territory. I don’t expect people to know my cultural background just by glancing at me. I do, however, expect that when I tell people my family is from Puerto Rico, that I will be believed and not accused of trying to be something that I’m...
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a way in which i am possibly old fashioned and out...
if i’m reading a pretty well-written piece that is written as consciously a Piece Of Writing (but not self-conscious, or at least not to a gross degree), i recoil a little at “prof.” five extra letters to get professor, and i just want the full word there, if this is the kind of thing i’ve sat down for. i just do. maybe that’s wrong.
me: it’s like, i keep going back to that post of michelle’s, and thinking about how nice it would be not to know what she was talking about. you know? like to just be, “WHAT???? that HAPPENED????” all shocked. i mean, i was shocked about it, but not… that shocked? i dunno. i guess what i’m saying is, O! I LONG FOR INNOCENCE!
nick: you should read the purity...
he wrote a post about how awesome it is to be a...
I know I’m only doing this to myself at this point, I need to stop, i need to step away from that thread,we all need to stop and hopefully the rest of you have by now in which case I apologize for bringing it up again (and I apologize for confusing/annoying anyone who doesn’t know what I’m talking about but also I envy you so hard) but people. PEOPLE.
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that's so weird that i suddenly have four tabs...
weird how that works