April 2011
21 posts
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March 2011
36 posts
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"You do a fantastic job. World's best dad."
I want to take a quick second to talk about fatherhood in the Twilight series (you can file that one under: Sentences I’m Sure We’ve All Uttered at One Point or Another). Charlie Swan is easily the worst father in American literature. He is absent for chapters upon chapters, then arrives in Bella’s thoughts as an impediment to action, or an excuse for her to leave one setting or...
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Reading Jonathan Franzen on Purpose
Is The Corrections a better novel than The Twilight Saga: Eclipse? Absolutely.
Do I find myself slogging through the last thirty pages of The Corrections, wishing that instead I was hanging with my undead and emotionally abusive crew in Forks, Washington? Absolutely.
There is no love in The Corrections. Why did Jonathan Franzen think it would be a good idea to write 566 pages about characters he...
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“Vendela Vida, Dave Eggers’s wife, is one of the talentless favored...”
– I am taking time out of my day in order to call Anis Shivani the worst, even though I feel quite sure that he makes a calculated effort to be the worst. I don’t necessarily disagree with most of what he’s saying about the New York Times Book Review; I just wish he wasn’t such a...
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Corrections
Oy. I’m re-reading J. Franz’s The Corrections for class, and I don’t even want to talk about some of the things I underlined and wrote “So good!” next to when I read it for the first time at the age of 18. Suffice to say, at the age of 18 I was under the impression that being an American in the 21st century was an extremely difficult thing.
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“Now, for some of you it doesn’t matter. You were born rich, and...”
– Herman Blume
Quick Tips for Improving Your Posture:
Walk into a Panera Bread at the same time as a gaggle of six or seven freshman girls. You will know they are freshmen by their faces—the dumb, open faces of babies. Follow them haltingly to the counter, where they express their displeasure with the slow service by rolling their eyes, stomping their Uggs. They will order salads. They will wait for each of their friends to be served, taking...
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“‘There is a large American on the train,’ said M. Bouc, pursuing his...”
– Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
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Small Victories
I made baked macaroni and cheese for an MFA potluck last night. I met some prospective students, explained to them what a great city Pittsburgh is for hermits. I think I came across very well. I took most of my own meal home and found today that it heats up nicely, but needs more salt.
I have successfully remembered every compliment I’ve been given over the last month. I have successfully...
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“Low expectations are not a recipe for good self-care. You get sour; you drink...”
– S.J. Culver, “On Expectations (And a Writer’s Lack of Shame)”
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Additional Papers About "The Twilight Saga" I Feel...
“How White Is Too White in Twilight?: Trick Question; You Can Never Be Too White in Twilight.”
“When Edward Talks About His Dark Past Drinking Human Blood But Maintains That He Never Drank ‘The Blood of Innocents,’ There’s an Abortion Allusion Happening in There, Am I Right?”
“Does Anyone Else Find it Weird That Stephenie Meyer Had the Dream That...
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Important Glimpses into My Adolescence:
In high school, we divided our crushes into Tier One crushes (True Love) and Tier Two crushes (Weird Guys We’d Settle For). None of them dated us.
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“Smith was 29 when she recorded Horses. Joan Didion was 29 when she wrote her...”
– Ann Friedman on Patti Smith at This Recording.
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"College was Plan B."
“I was still hoping for Plan A, but Edward was just so stubborn about leaving me human…”
I started reading New Moon on Friday, in a crepe shop. I have never been the kind of person who is uncomfortable eating meals alone, especially when I have a book with me. But on Friday, I was doing all sort of weird arm gymnastics to keep the cover of my book from being visible to any other...
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Disappointments of "The Adjustment Bureau":
Less John Slattery screen time than expected
Strong undercurrents of Manic Pixie Dream Girl-ism
At no point does any character say, “You just got ADJUSTED!”
Satisfying Elements of Same Film:
Matt Damon’s toothy grin
Two lines of dialogue from Jennifer Ehle
Their hats have magical powers.
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“We live in a strange and terrible time for women. There are days, like today,...”
– Just a tiny part of Roxane Gay’s excellent article that sums up exactly how I’ve been feeling about 2011.
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Pitt graduate fiction students honor a professor... →
amywhipple:
Absolute shout-outs from Bill O’Driscoll to my beloved Katie Coyle, Travis Straub, Steve Gillies, Julie Draper, and Beth Steidle. How awesome are they?
(This is the moment that starts a literary revolution. Someday, a historian will point to this article and say, Here. It all started here.)
It is so very much earlier than I am ever awake and so I am having a wide range of...
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“14. Does your character have a particularly attractive scent that doesn’t...”
– I am taking the Universal Mary Sue Litmus Test on Stephenie Meyer’s behalf. (“‘It is partially your fault.’ His voice was wry. ‘If you didn’t smell so appallingly luscious, he might not have bothered.’”)
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Reading "Twilight" on Purpose, Chapter 19:
One thing that reading Twilight on purpose is beginning to prove to me is how little stock readers must put into plot—not good plot, necessarily, just any plot at all. Twilight moves very slowly for a book about vampires, which is maybe the problem you run into when your main vampire characters are Good—the threat that one of them could at any moment rip Bella Swan’s throat open...
“So is a billion dollars cool? He ponders the question carefully. “No, it’s not,”...”
– Sean Parker, interviewed in the Financial Times about his thoughts on The Social Network. (via thebronzemedal)
Sean Parker, really taking the wind out of my “You know what’s cool?” sails.
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booksinthekitchen asked: RE: Dudes, ladies:
Do you feel it's at all inappropriate to write from the other gender's perspective? I'm not sure I'd ever write something from inside a woman's head -- mostly because I think the basic pie chart of what occupies mental real estate is, in some sense, different (and in ways I don't understand or can't confidently quantify).
Do you feel it's at all inappropriate to write from the other gender's perspective? I'm not sure I'd ever write something from inside a woman's head -- mostly because I think the basic pie chart of what occupies mental real estate is, in some sense, different (and in ways I don't understand or can't confidently quantify).
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Ladies and Dudes, Dudes and Ladies
It’s a few days old now, but Sonya Chung’s essay at The Millions about writing across gender is making me think about things, especially since I keep writing stories narrated by young men. For instance, I didn’t know that “Brokeback Mountain” was the first story Annie Proulx published under her own name, at the age of sixty-four:
The author’s first stories, twenty...
