Rex—who, it appears, actually read all, um, 6,000 or so words of the story?! I think he’s the only one; Pat Kiernan certainly didn’t—offers a really thoughtful critique of the media story I contributed to in this week’s Observer.
(Re: the P.S.: no comment. Ahem.)
(Related: Here’s a fun trick: Try to find the story on the Observer’s website. Without using my link above, duh. Ready… go! I’ll check back with you in a few [days].)
For all you Beantown-ahs out there.
Is Meterologist Todd Gross (like Noted Fashion Photographer Nigel Barker, he must always be referred to by title and full name) still around? He cracked me up.
I was always a Harvey Leonard gal myself.
I’ve reconsidered my previous stance on Victoria Floethe and decided she is worthy of active hatred.
craft supplies
fast food
linux software
hard alcohol in bottles
piggy banks and man-sized safes
library books
psychic readings
auto repairs
raccoon meat
hocked jewelry
yoga classes
candy
condoms
riverboat gambling
private eyes
This is a book review on Salon of Elaine Showalter’s book, A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx, billed as “the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000.”
There is a really interesting point here about the perception that only men can write the “Great American Novel,” something I hadn’t thought about before reading this but which seems entirely too true:
…Prose is right that many critics and editors, especially male ones, make a fetish of “ambition,” by which they mean the contemporary equivalent of novels about men in boats (“Moby-Dick,” “Huckleberry Finn”) rather than women in houses (“House of Mirth”), and that as a result big novels by male writers get treated as major events while slender but equally accomplished books by women tend to make a smaller splash.
This reminded me of a great piece Meghan O’Rourke wrote a few years ago in Slate that was “in praise of ‘small’ novels”: “[O]ur notion of the great American novel became entwined with a perception that shorter books weren’t, somehow, as serious. Seriousness required self-consciousness, and self-consciousness required expansiveness.”
Suggestion! Since it is pretty much acknowledged that NY Mag has the best restaurant listings if you have more than a passing interest in food (as in, you don’t just eat it to survive and/or you don’t think most if not all of Jeffrey Chodorow’s restaurants are not good—whoa, that was like a triple negative), I wish they would do the following: Say you have just made plans with a close friend whom you are taking out for dinner to thank her for doing you a solid, and you want somewhere that’s sort of like Blue Ribbon but isn’t Blue Ribbon, exactly, because you secretly don’t think Blue Ribbon is all that but you like the idea of Blue Ribbon a lot, and so you put Blue Ribbon into their search field and up comes the listing and then, presto, on the side, just like you’re using Netflix or Amazon, up comes a list of other recommended restaurants! Maybe they are of the “other users who liked Blue Ribbon also liked…” variety, or maybe they are of the “if you like Blue Ribbon you will also like…”, which would be more of an editorial decision instead of an automated type system where people could rate restaurants and the site would keep track of their ratings. I don’t really want a “related” recommendation, because I can already search for Italian restaurants near Union Square that are $$ or under.
From the Times, May 7, 1913:
David Minzer, 18 years old, of 132 Rutledge Street, Brooklyn, said by the police to be a gangster, met his death at the hands of rival gunmen late yesterday afternoon in the Brooklyn Plaza of the Williamsburg Bridge. The murder was staged, the gangsters who were to do the killing first scattering the crowd by firing a pistol into the air. When there was no one between them and their victim, one among their number fired a single shot. The bullet entered Minzer’s heart and he fell dead in the presence of a horror-stricken crowd that numbered many thousands, the time being in the rush hours…
Not to be outdone, a different story on the same page, about a teenage girl shot outside a school:
The police were told that the battle between the gangsters was brought about by the determination of a gang to kill “Kid” Fogey, because he had announced to them his intention of quitting them. Saturday night Fogey reiterated his determination. It was at a dance given by a local athletic club. There was a fight, but Fogey escaped. Since then several efforts have been made by the gangmen to get at Fogey. Several of his friends determined to stand by him. Word reached Fogey yesterday that gangmen had been brought from the Manhattan east side in an automobile to help kill him. They met Fogey and three other youths in Sutter, near Vesta Avenue. Fogey was unarmed and turned to run. The gangsters leaped from the automobile, guns in hand, and opened fire. Fogey’s friends faced them, returning the shots. As she and other children tried to escape Jeannette Wagner was shot.
The third story on the page was about a “half breed Indian” who got his driver’s license.
So Postcards From Yo Momma is a finalist in the SXSW Web Awards. That’ll be awarded by a panel of judges, but! You can vote for us in the People’s Choice Awards, and even more exciting, you can vote every day!
Vote.
“The Real Housewives of New York City” continues to feel especially yucky in this regard — and fraudulently offensive to a certain kind of New Yorker who would never actually envy someone like Alex.
Alex is a ding-dong visual merchandiser living in an unimaginatively appointed town house with her husband, Simon, a hotel manager, who carries himself as if he were Hugh Grant. Alex and Simon, low-grade social climbers, are presented as if they matter in New York. The new episodes have the couple vacationing in the Hamptons during the pre-meltdown summer of 2008, spending $8,000 in a single afternoon of resort-wear shopping (Simon really likes a pair of fuchsia suede loafers) and gearing up for an event for a magazine called Social Life.
Already I’m missing “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” which comparatively seems as if it were guided by the hand of Margaret Mead.
I’m ready for a new show, I think.
(Thanks Laur!)
(4 Natasha and via ninety9 whom I so <3 <3 <3 right now for posting this.)
It’s not that I begrudge anyone a trust fund; hey, you won the birth lottery! Good for you. It’s just annoying—and this is something that took me awhile to start getting over (I’m not fully 100% over it yet, hence this post), and you start getting over it when you finally accept the fact that Life Is Not Fair and once that is acknowledged, you can move on with your life and actually do shit that you care about without becoming obsessed with the fact that someone else is doing it while also being supported by said trust fund—when you are reminded of the rumor you heard once, you can’t remember where, that the Vanity Fair “researcher” job is an unpaid two-year “internship” type position.
Anyway, this is New York; there’s always going to be someone who’s getting money from their parents or someone whose dad got them an internship at Rolling Stone. Or whatever! And it sucks. But, and maybe this sounds a little sanctimonious, the less you think about those people the better. It’s not worth your time. It actually takes energy to hate people like Victoria Floethe, and I don’t really care to expend mine that way. After all, I can’t be too tired for step class.
I have never been very good at resistance. So, when I saw the story on slate subtitled, “When one’s trust fund implodes, there’s no better place to run than a gathering of the still-rich in Monte Carlo,” I knew that my reading it, hating it, and complaining to friends about it was a foregone conclusion.
And yes, the “small but helpful trust fund” is mentioned in the first line. Ew. But, okay, I’ll give the writer some amount of credit for bringing up the fact that if you’re going to write for the internet as a freelancer, you probably need a trust fund. (Like, seriously, how much is Daphne Merkin getting paid to write book reviews for Tina Brown?) These are the things that 4 am panic attacks for the trust fund unendowed are made of.
But why would you need a trust fund when New York is so full of “those incredibly rich but invariably dull hedge funders and private equity guys, bean counters and bureaucrats, so available in New York and urged on all single girls.” I believe Jezebel commenters would call my reaction to this “stabby.” Because even if, as the article suggests, all of our mothers can think of no better spouse than a hedge fund manager, can’t we all aim a little higher? Several anguished emails to friends ensue, mostly just saying, “ughhhhhhh” or “I don’t know anyone who ever dated guys in finance.”
The article ends with a dashing and mysterious stranger:
“Do you like to be treated well?” he asked, putting an arm around the back of my chair.
“Yes, please.”
Like, really, is that what she thought? I’m all for a pat kicker to wrap things up, but Fellow Lady Writers, can we all make a pact together? Can we all decide, when given a chance, to give up that cliched chick lit voice and make some attempt at showing the full rainbow of complications that is our lady experience? Please?
I wrote a story just for you! It’s about what happens when your loser boyfriend turns awesome after you break up! Here’s an excerpt!:
It’s the Butterfly Effect: one day he’s a pot-addled caterpillar barely hanging on to his barista job, begging off brunch because he’s only got $37 in his checking account, spending his nights “playing music” (his band is going to start playing shows again really soon) and eating cheese fries, and then, six months after the breakup, he’s turned into a Monarch: lost 20 pounds, has a job as a graphic designer, his band is playing the Bowery Ballroom and he has a new girlfriend (tall, blond, wearing what appears to be the $282 Vanessa Bruno sweater you eyed longingly at Stuart & Wright) who, he casually mentions when you run into him at brunch, is the heiress to a paper clip fortune.
Mr. Ross declined to comment on the closing of Collins. But in an e-mail message, he pointed out that he had been named one of the 50 hottest bachelors by Page Six magazine, part of The New York Post, which is also owned by News Corporation. Mr. Ross came in at No. 41 and was described as a “go-to smarty-pants guy.”
“I guess, what they meant to say is eligible for unemployment,” Mr. Ross wrote.
” —HarperCollins Restructures and Dismisses 2 Top Executives [NYT]Marisa’s Feminist Real Talk Corner explains why orgasms do not equal “good” sex.
Related: Marisa now has a Tumblr, and it’s awesome.
Until you’ve laid down on a massage table, naked, and had a Korean woman in a black lace bra and black (non-lace) underwear exfoliate your entire body for half an hour, including your butt crack, and you have so much dead skin—thanks, winter!—that when you open your eyes for just one second you see mounds of gray falling off your body. (The scrub comes after you’ve spent an hour moseying among the warm pool, then the hot pool, then the wet sauna, then the cold pool with the waterfall, then the body-massage-jets pool with some very strategically placed jets, then maybe the dry sauna and the rainforest shower and another dip in the warm pool.) Then you go eat some beef soup.
(Apologies to Eric Konigsberg if this post is veering too close to something that someone who likes absinthe might write. This is Balk, btw.)
