Grooming

This is an internet survey. It's called, Jason Schwartzman: Do-able?

Vanity

Bethany: yep.

I wonder if youtube and such will decrease our ability to decide things.

I mean, describe things

like, we can just show exactly what we mean.

me: hyperlinking in conversation

4:38 PM Bethany: yeah.

me: yeah

Bethany: you should write a blog post.

hehe

me: i did

yesterday

Bethany: no, I meant about what I just said.

Labor

I've been reading a collection of profiles by Claudia Pierpont-Roth, who writes for the New Yorker, on notable twentieth-century (female) minds. I thought my blog's (ever-expanding, because I post so much) audience would appreciate the following:

on Eudora Welty's family/her relationship to the South--
"Her loyalty to a past and now often despised way of life was naturally intensified by a loyalty to the family she'd lost, but also, it seems, by her need to justify her years of sacrifice to them. (Compare Faulkner on the subject of the artist's sacrifice: 'If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate; the 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' is worth any number of old ladies.')"

on Doris Lessing's men-troubles--
"And the very modern 'men-babies' that the age was producing certainly weren't going to give anything--there were now spoken rules about this--even as they pillaged her emotional store and absorbed all the loving and cooking and the nursing and the sex that any sensible Victorian woman would have set at a far higher price."

Pierpont-Roth seems most interested in these women as mother-figures, and as sexual partners to men, using their intellectual work as a lens. She really hates Anais Nin. More soon.

Vanity

When asked by a colleague what brand of eyeliner I wear, I came up short. I had no idea. Our conversation stalled because of my failure to produce this information. I recently saw the Sex and the City movie, and though I don't often feel like a traitor to my sex, my first and only consistent thought was: "I really hope there are no men in this theater, and that no men I know ever watch this movie."

Labor

I promise I will post about something interesting soon. But isn't this weird? I guess movies and TV are cheaper than other forms of entertainment, or so I'll persuade myself. And I have seen some good movies in the past three months: There Will Be Blood, Harold and Maude, Murmur of the Heart. But can the same be said of the hours of Project Runway and The Office? Probably not! At a whopping 37.3%, television is clearly my cultural priority! Something needs amending.

Other notes: Though live music makes up a nice chunk of this pie chart, don't be fooled. Andy Friedman and the Other Failures and Boy Crisis make up a disproportionate amount of my musical agenda. And though that experience might help me someday write some sort of treatise on American Masculinity, I doubt it's enriching my life or elevating my taste.

Well, this is silly. But comments are encouraged! What do you think your pie chart would look like?


*Correction: On the chart, "Reading" means "going to a reading," not "reading books," which I do a lot but didn't think counted.

Grooming

I went book-shopping for the first time in months today and I thought I would share my purchases here because I'm very enthused about them and because I haven't said word one to the Internet in a long time.

A Pale View of the Hills by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye
The House Behind the Cedars by Charles Chesnutt

The Ishiguro I bought because I wanted a contemporary novel by a man. I have never read any of his novels, but most contemporary literature by men, when I'm browsing in bookstores, always gives me the feeling that I'll be plowing through a lot of jokes and wordsmithery that inevitably won't interest me. It just gives me a feeling of disconnect, or distance. But Ishiguro seems like he writes about people, their troubles, and occasionally bizarre supernatural phenomena! This is his first novel.

I am just pleased as punch to have found a purple paperback copy of The Anatomy of Criticism! I became obsessed with Northrop Frye when I was assigned him for a genre theory class. He is really the only academic writer I've read whose theories have illuminated literature for me in the way criticism is supposed to. He is an intensely organizational thinker, a categorizer, and I suppose that appeals to me (hence my interest in genre, I guess), as does his voluminous knowledge of "the canon"! Wow, am I excited.

I bought the Chesnutt because he's been on my mind since they came out with those Black History Month stamps with his mustached face on them. I read him for my favorite Wesleyan professor and thesis advisor, Sean McCann, freshman year of college. I think I liked it.

I knew this post would be a nerdfest, but I decided to risk it. Other things that I might write about soon include: project runway, lesbian porn for straight men, my sister's weekly college radio show (promo!!). Preferences?

Labor

There's this long protracted scene in the book I'm reading, Meyer by Stephen Dixon, where the protagonist lists the circumstances, in block paragraphs, of all the calls he's gotten in his seventy-some years alerting him to the deaths of loved ones. Heath Ledger died two days ago. Back two weekends, I saw a couple making sex across the street, then the woman's silhouette walking into the bathroom while the dude cleaned off his penis with his hand, sitting on the bed. That's kind of just what it's been like lately.