Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Fan Fiction
Mintjelly is coasting on the rails of human RSS. Peeps are feeding me the good stuff without my doing a thing. I may have the self control to not read the entire internet today, but I can’t be expected to ignore living breathing avatars, can I?
Exhibit A: The McGriddles Fan Fiction Community, as paid homage with a short story by Bonnie Burton (via tweet) founder of Grrl.com and woman of letters, crafts, vlogs, blogs and writer at Lucasfilm.
Is fan fiction embarrassingly awkward because it’s presumably bad writing? Because like fiction it often begins with a hangover described in the third person? Or because the writer reveals (vulnerability!) not only their writing but their (cooties!) unabashed love and obsession? Are ghost writers and writers of television shows or movies, anything that’s a spin off, just the biggest, best fan fiction writers out there? I don’t think I could write a lick of it myself, but I take comfort that people love their monkey enough to make it their muse. I can’t fairly call that lame.
I’ve noticed more people joke about what would inspire them to write fan fiction, and the funny thing is the way they sound like they’ve thought about it, they’ve gotten the urge, alone and in private, so they toss their idea out there to see what kind of reaction they get, and if their friends don’t admit to the same maybe they go online and find a group of people just like them where they’re appreciated.
I like that story.
Exhibit B: This one via Daring Fireball (via Mike laughing and me wondering what was so funny) is a classic example of the beautiful, complicated intersection of bromance and the sophisticated prank. I dub this post Fan Fiction as well. (Make sure you have sound. Watch both videos after reading. Yes, I’m the boss of you.)
p.s. Is it wrong that I want school to end so I can redesign this freaking website? You know, at least get it up to last year’s standards? I have a barrel of desires and a pocketful of plans. Bah! No time for love, Dr. Jones.
p.p.s Next imaginary band: The Living Breathing Avatars!
Friday, April 25, 2008
Dirty Girls
Yesterday’s post got me thinking about all the pleasure reading I’ve forbidden myself since starting the MFA program last September. More stifling than the anemic bank account and social anorexia, not having time for that new book, only flashing a panicked smile when someone offers a recommendation, sucks, frankly. It’s hard to explain my visceral reaction: a childish sense of deprivation when I “don’t get to have it” combined with the satisfaction of firm self control.
I can already tell you, the most delicious thing about self control is knowing when it’s time to let go. With my summer starting in a couple weeks the interim is almost over, and the payoff will be better than saving money for something special or eating healthy to lose weight. I’d say the former is to orgasm what the latter is to a shivery sneeze.
Did that make sense or am I just distracted?
School might have prevented me from eating boob cake at the launch party last week, but it won’t stop me from reading Dirty Girls: Erotica for Women, edited by Rachel Kramer Bussel. Aptly labeled “27 sexy stories to make you squirm,” these stories from the best American writers of erotica explore the minds of women as thoroughly, knowingly, and delightfully as their bodies. Take a peak at the (NreallySFW) authors and samples, as I’m currently resisting the desire to transcribe some totally NSFW excerpts because they’re just so hot.
As the New York Times Book Review article “It’s Not You, it’s Your Nightstand” claimed “literary taste has been a good shorthand for gauging compatibility,” so I would venture that a copy of Dirty Girls on your nightstand might flesh out areas of interest, interesting people, and/or people’s interesting areas.
Oh yes (yesohyes), smart is sexy, but when writers are just so smart about sexy the combination is hardcore feminine, unique stories that seem to spring from women’s fantasies, your fantasies, and maybe even your fondest memories.
Thursday, April 24, 2008
Apparently I Like the Ellipsis Today
Via Richard at Soft Skull Press: Book and Beer parings. Finally! And if you drink beer from a helmet I… I mean you… can still hold the book.
Internet: filthy street for mobs to swarm, or shining path of democracy and altruism? Um… find out on the internet as Lee Siegel and Nicholson Baker sample their April 10 debate at the NY Public Library. Lee Siegel spoke this month at The New School about his book, Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
Goodreads, the socialish bookish site, has an interview with Augusten Burroughs on his new memoir about his father, A Wolf at the Table. I think I read months ago on Burrough’s own site that he is more worried about this one, because it’s “not funny.” It hits shelves on April 29th. When I saw the release date a while back I thought, “thank god school will be almost over and I’ll be able to read it!”
I like the fun trivia on Augusten Burroughs’ author profile on Goodreads (Which of the following book covers were NOT designed by author and graphic artist extraordinaire Chip Kidd?). I must say, Chip Kidd’s cover design on Wolf actually makes me feel anxious and wary. And I have this weird reluctance to reading this book because I don’t want anything else bad to happen to him. I know it’s illogical, but that’s how good a writer he is. I’m afraid, but I can’t wait.
Earlier this year I was at a small party for Chip Kidd celebrating his book The Learners, and it wasn’t until after we arrived that Mike said, “What are you going to do if Augusten Burroughs is here?”
And then, he was there. Augusten. Tall, baseball-capped. The only other guy there in jeans except for my guy.
What did I do?! OMG OMG!!1 Well… I squealed on the inside, held my breath, nibbled a canapé, and did my best to not blush ferociously when he was engaged in conversation just to my left, or a few feet away. I caught Mike’s eye and squealed silently some more. We made secret faces at each other, and that was satisfactory. Ultimately we chatted the longest with a brilliant Broadway writer and his wife… about The Wire. (See, that’s how good The Wire is.)
I declined to weasel my way into an introduction and be that girl. It’s one thing to be a fan at a reading, another in someone’s home. What would I possibly gush, psycho fan style?
A. “Hi! Your heart and brain destroy me!”
B. “OMG we’re practically related!”
C. “Can I lick your skull?! I knew you’d wear a hat! *snniiiiiiiiff*”
Yeah, best to leave it for the future, though a more mutually reassuring situation such as we had could not be found except at a table for four. Still, feels good to speak of a rare time dignity won out over my dribbling idiot passions.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Why I live in NYC
I talked to Susan for like an hour last night, mostly about her fledgling adjustments to life somewhere in Philly. Meanwhile for me, New York has that sad “end of a novel” feeling since her leaving.
Yesterday’s installment of Eastern Standard Tribe via DailyLit featured the beginning of a rant by Art Berry, our protagonist, who is (betrayed by his friends and coworkers?!) brought forcibly to a mental hospital for impending committal.
In his first group therapy session, he describes exactly what I tried to explain to my mom when she expressed concern that the values and ideas I’d been raised with were becoming corrupted by my “environment.” My response was that I had in fact never been at home anywhere else, had always been this way (remember when I was 13? etc) and sought those more like myself, just as she had done in moving to Naples, FL where her friends and neighbors reinforce and support all of her notions about the world, both deeply and superficially. Just as my father had when he moved to Pebble Beach, California, and so on.
It all starts with the opening page of the book which asks, “would you rather be happy or smart?” Of course, your mom (my mom, hi mom) just wants you to be happy. This only creates tension when happiness looks different from person to person, so it’s harder to confirm. [update] This Flight of the Concords video is totally what my mom thinks my life is like. tee hee
I have my place and my purpose. It’s why I’m immune to Oprah.
If one day there’s any proven truth in the notion of genetic memory, this frustrated “different” feeling, this need to find, or found, a tribe will be noted in my ancestors on the Mayflower who were either annoying enough to others, or FTW enough to get on a boat and risk death rather than watch more Oprah.
OPEN QUOTES
“It’s a Tribal thing.”
“I see,” the doctor said.
“It’s like this,” I said. “It used to be that the way you chose your friends was by finding the most like-minded people you could out of the pool of people who lived near to you. If you were lucky, you lived near a bunch of people you could get along with. This was a lot more likely in the olden days, back before, you know, printing and radio and such. Chances were that you’d grow up so immersed in the local doctrine that you’d never even think to question it. If you were a genius or a psycho, you might come up with a whole new way of thinking, and if you could pull it off, you’d either gather up a bunch of people who liked your new idea or you’d go somewhere else, like America, where you could set up a little colony of people who agreed with you. Most of the time, though, people who didn’t get along with their neighbors just moped around until they died.”
“Very interesting,” the doctor said, interrupting smoothly, “but you were going to tell us how you ended up here.”
“Yeah,” Lucy said, “this isn’t a history lesson, it’s Group. Get to the point.”
“I’m getting there,” I said. “It just takes some background if you’re going to understand it. Now, once ideas could travel more freely, the chances of you finding out about a group of people somewhere else that you might get along with increased. Like when my dad was growing up, if you were gay and from a big city, chances were that you could figure out where other gay people hung out and go and --” I waved my hands, “be *gay*, right? But if you were from a small town, you might not even know that there was such a thing as being gay—you might think it was just a perversion. But as time went by, the gay people in the big cities started making a bigger and bigger deal out of being gay, and since all the information that the small towns consumed came from big cities, that information leaked into the small towns and more gay people moved to the big cities, built little gay zones where gay was normal.
“So back when the New World was forming and sorting out its borders and territories, information was flowing pretty well. You had telegraphs, you had the Pony Express, you had thousands of little newspapers that got carried around on railroads and streetcars and steamers, and it wasn’t long before everyone knew what kind of person went where, even back in Europe and Asia. People immigrated here and picked where they wanted to live based on what sort of people they wanted to be with, which ideas they liked best. A lot of it was religious, but that was just on the surface—underneath it all was aesthetics. You wanted to go somewhere where the girls were pretty in the way you understood prettiness, where the food smelled like food and not garbage, where shops sold goods you could recognize. Lots of other factors were at play, too, of course—jobs and Jim Crow laws and whatnot, but the tug of finding people like you is like gravity.
Lots of things work against gravity, but gravity always wins in the end—in the end, everything collapses. In the end, everyone ends up with the people that are most like them that they can find.”
CLOSE QUOTES
Thursday, April 17, 2008
We Tell Stories
We Tell Stories is a new website for Penguin that features 6 writers creating 6 stories in 6 weeks. Each week features a piece of “digital fiction” from an established author working with the possibilities of the internet — one story “unfolds across a map of the world” with Google Maps, another is an elaborate “choose your own adventure” type tales, and this week’s is a relationship story that you can observe getting written, an hour each night in real time.
The extra-special twist? Each of these new stories is inspired by a Penguin Classic. The story “Hard Times for Our Times - The Infographic Edition” is infected by Charles Dickens’ “Hard Times,” and so on. Cool and nerdy! Fabulous.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Pöpemöbile
The Pope’s arrival put that old Meryn Cadell song into my head, the one that goes, “we all here to see the pope, pope, pope, pope, pope.”
Her song “The Sweater” ("Girls, I know you will understand this, and feel the intrinsic, incredible emotion.") was genius before Weezer ever sung about the intimacy and depth of sweaters.
“Martina” was the first time I’d ever encountered an artistic (or any) communication of the muted, often daily, unease of being a female walking alone - at night and in bad shoes or just in general.
pump, pump, blow the dump
the steaming sewers
take the chance that only chancy chicks would take
and cakewalk home with icy brakes of spiky heels and clicks they make
and walk through your cold neighbourhood
but don’t get raped, knock on wood
Unless you’re a female you just don’t get the experience of catcalls and “playful” followers and hard-held stares. How men pretend that suddenly the whole world is small town america, - they’re just saying hi, they’re just being friendly, women like it they say, when they know full well that’s not what they’re doing and that’s why they’re shouting from cars, waiting outside of convenience stores and following you home from the mall. If a man gave them the finger, they wouldn’t say, “oh yeah! is that what you want baby!?”
If I were president (i know, i know) there would be a recipe for immediate corporal punishment: grab throat, throw to ground, beatings until there is sufficient whimpering, vary ingredients and amounts according to need. And one would be allowed to walk with a spark plug in hand, to smash the windows of offending men in vehicles who think that slowing down and pacing you while you walk is cute.
There would be public service messages on television, with rainbow graphics and shiny faces telling you to not be such an idiot all the time.
That’s just how I feel. If my humanity isn’t acknowledged I will have to act like a thing, a monster. Women don’t get credit for the courage they find and the normalcy and humor they apply to it. It takes balls to be a girl, to walk around being a girl.
The last week of my being a redhead one of my most memorable catcalls was, “Red huh?! LIKE MY DICKHEAD!”
cue Fugazi, Suggestion. shake fist. feel toothless.
Red was better than blond. Black is better than red. It weeds people out. Course, I also remember walking outside after having chicken pox for the second time (i know, i know) and I still had pox all over my face. They honked and yelled anyway, things it’s probably not legal to say to a 15 year old girl. They’re not being nice. And it’s not because you’re pretty.
anyhoo!
Meryn’s way of talking into and through her songs caught my attention. Fugazi and 7 Seconds could sing about being respectful to girls all they wanted in their prudish straight edge way, but finally, finally, someone who KNEW. It’s like she just couldn’t stop talking, couldn’t not be smart, couldn’t mimic and make the satire without also being the conscious voiceover. Like Jon Stewart talking to the talking heads. Like Henry Rollins’ spoken word but without the little pounces of violent outburst and untrustable identification with women (thanks though, i still love ya Henry!). She’s like good stand-up comedy, sung poignantly with a legitimate voice and without sentimentality.
So how cool to be reminded of her and learn that Angel Food for Thought is back in print! But how sad to read in her journal that she’s homesick the Lower East Side.
Maybe she left because that’s where the guy with the red head lives.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Gorgeous Orwell
Gorgeous redesign of Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm by Shepard Fairey, with equally important updated blurb by Penguine copy writer Colin Brush.
Brush’s article appeals to my recent irritation with the cover of Solaris, on which the blurb’s selling point was that the book had been made into a (very terrible) movie starring George Clooney. I’m gonna stop right there.
The Third Wave is Coming
Thank you, Rebecca Traister at Salon, for putting your finger on that nagging feeling I’ve been having more and more when people talk about Hillary. Extremely well-written article written about feelings and attitudes too subtle to prove outright and too ubiquitous to deny. Read all the way through.
And here is the experience and reaction again, expressed by a fourteen year old girl on Girl with Pen.
