occasionally subtle
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
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The Stonewall Inn
izzy's playlists!
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I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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Love Begins
EXPECTATIONS
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@allschoolchorus
“Artistic growth is, more than it is anything else, a refining of the sense of truthfulness. The stupid believe that to be truthful is easy; only the artist, the great artist, knows how difficult it is.”
― Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark
H/T The New Yorker's Maria Konnikova Hamilton
One of three spreads for University of Virginia Alumni Magazine from the other month- a really interesting article by Molly Minturn on Disney’s impact on social constructs and emotional development. This one was a blast to work on. Happy Monday all!
Likable
My affection for Hillary Clinton is hard to explain. It wins no fights and earns you no friends to admit it: Actual warmth, even protectiveness, toward this impossible, frustrating, contradictory, polarizing, disappointing woman. My finding Hillary intensely “likable” is weird, and I admit it. It doesn’t signify universal approval of her decisions. I can and do disagree with Hillary Clinton, regularly and strongly. But some part of me also hopes that Hillary Clinton is having a nice day.
I’ve come to believe that, in some ways, saying nice things about Hillary Clinton is a subversive act. I spent much of this year working on a long project on how women are demonized in the media. Hillary Clinton was a fairly large part of that story – she had to be; if you want to talk “women that people hate,” she’s kind of unavoidable – and I spent a while sorting through Clintoniana, dating back to the early ‘90s, to find nasty things people had said about her, or common narratives about her personality. It wasn’t pretty – the worst stuff for Hillary was way worse than I’d expected, and there was way more of it than I expected to find – but it was also illuminating, in some key ways. I got a better sense of the pressures that she has to live with, and how they’ve informed her decisions.
I also realized that, unless you really take a look at those pressures, the narrative around Hillary Clinton’s “likability” is doomed to be inaccurate, in some way. She might even be very easy to dislike, if you weren’t looking at those narratives, or if you underestimated their severity. But, in my experience, trying to parse Hillary Clinton without also parsing Hillary-Hate is like trying to drink water without touching the glass. As long as you refuse to deal with the container, the actual substance tends to stay permanently out of reach.
Keep reading
After a while Hardee asked Georgie, “What do you do for a job?” and Georgie said, “I save lives.”
Denis Johnson, from “Emergency” (thanks, greenkneehighs)
I have a couple poems coming out in the next Iowa Review! I love those guys.
I wrote an essay about my old job and what was lost there. It is called Goodbye Without Leaving. Many thanks to Nicole Cliffe and The Toast.
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you’re unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
I’m totally a metaphysical poet, with a ruff and a tiny pointed beard.
I interviewed Patricia Lockwood about her beautiful new book of poems for The Awl.
A couple weeks before she died, my grandmother told me about her honeymoon, which started on the SS Normandie. Through a friend of a friend, she and my grandfather ended up in first class, and my grandmother admired movie stars at dinner.
"Which ones?" I asked.
My grandmother looked at her hands for a moment. "Anna May Wong," she said, her voice clear. "It was the damndest thing that she didn't get the lead in The Good Earth."
I visited her every Sunday for the last four years of her life. Some weeks she had little to say, other weeks we would travel back to the 30s and 40s. I would ask dumb questions and she would tell long stories. "Tell me about Thanksgivings when you were a girl. Did you help your mother bake pies?"
"God, no. We had a cook!"
My grandmother spoke like Katharine Hepburn. She had secrets. She was born in 1917. I didn't think she would ever die.
I was scared to ask her anything serious, or tell her anything too real about my own life. Others in the family were different. My uncle, her eldest son, married his (male) partner late last year. On Christmas day, we gathered in her room. Grandmum had just passed out cards to all of us with little pictures of LL Bean slippers she had painstakingly cut out of the catalog (to say the slippers were on their way to all of us).
My uncle broke the news to her.
"Are you kidding me?" was her first response. My brother and I winced and wished for bourbon.
"No, I am quite serious," was his response.
There was a tiny silence and then my grandmother raised her head, looked my uncle in the eyes, and said, "Well, that's just marvelous. Congratulations. We will have to order one more pair of slippers."
In a WASP family, it does not get much more emotional than that.
This brilliant and beautiful piece by Molly Minturn about what her family secret means and doesn’t mean is the best thing I read this week.
Thank you all SO so so so much for all your love and support. I have finally learned how to successfully Skip It. It’s been 7 years since a black woman has been able to Skip It, so it’s a really big deal. Also, I’m not moving to LA. I got a job. Sorry for the confusion. SEE YOU NEXT SATURDAY!!
(shot and sung by my roommate Matteo Lane)
This is the way to share good news.
Plato wanted to banish poetry from the city. We think it is an essential presence in any city worth living in. This year, Boston Review published over 100 poems, including one poem every day for National Poetry Month in April. Take a look back at our twenty most-read poems of 2013 (in...
This was very nice and unexpected. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Timothy Donnelly.
I've heard a lot of critics say that Amy Adams finally gets away from the "happy princess" typecast through her role in American Hustle. What I liked most about her character's story, though, was the way it darkly mirrored a fairytale. The (fake) British accent, the big dreams, the regal beauty, the spells she casts in order to con. She's styled a bit like Kate Middleton in the above photo, no?
Christmas is like this.
Girl Most Likely
My piece on Tina Fey and her time at the University of Virginia is here.
I was a little, uh, on-edge before the interview started. Here is the transcript from the first few moments of our phone conversation.
Hi Molly, it’s Tina Fey. How are you? I’m fine. How are you? I’m well, thank you. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this interview. It’s my pleasure. I just want to get this out of the way. This is, if I were Liz Lemon, this would be like talking to Oprah. Oh, thank you. That’s very kind of you. So I’m a little nervous. No worries. But I’ve taken a beta blocker and I’m just going to do this. Okay? So let’s go. Okay.
Nailed it.
