we flew out to arizona for my stepsister's wedding at the beginning of the month. she's the last member of my immediate family and stepfamily to marry, a detail most of us don't think about very much and a couple of us think about so intensely that i imagine one of those movie scenes where a bunch of buzz-cut, midcentury-ed-harris-y dudes in a control room applaud a wall of monitors and slap each other's backs and shake hands with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, and also they are all simultaneously jane austen characters. the wedding was in sedona, a place joe and i lunched in with my in-laws maybe 15 years ago that i am old enough to consistently associate with axl rose and stevie nicks' fajita roundup. it was very scenic! we didn't see very much of it, as we drove up from phoenix midday on a friday and decamped in the early afternoon on a sunday, but i appreciate why people associate it with vortices and very much appreciate that it's home to the flagship location of the rock store i favor when we're meeting joe's family up in flagstaff. my stepfamily is...colorful, and i've spent a lot of time on the metaphorical and literal treadmill over the last year thinking about what i would or wouldn't say to the estranged member of it who crashed my grandmother's memorial service during the first trump administration (he served in that one and is serving in this one, and though he is too stupid to be effective at much of anything i resent quite energetically the way others have stooped for him); that time he and his wife approached me and, off guard, i chatted politely with them. joe feels very strongly that i should hold my tongue in person for the sake of the mutuals i esteem, and i feel that's how we slide into fascism and fantastize about picking pieces of his equine teeth out of my knuckles. one of my sisters and i talked about this at length and she was going to wear a rainbow pin to wedding events to telegraph, among other things, her disinterest in engaging; ultimately she did not, but her sons and i did. i couldn't tell you if someone told the garbage relative that i wasn't interested in interacting with him; i moved to the other side of a few rooms out there in arizona, and ultimately i'd decided that if i had to say anything to him i would just say no.
my father gave a speech the night of the rehearsal dinner, which was maybe a big deal or maybe not; we met the bride when i was in my twenties and she was barely a teen, so i think there was a lot more riding on how everyone else moved through that event than on how i did. i love her, and i'm glad for her that she's had someone other than her own terrible father to help her figure out how the world is put together; i'm proud of him for standing up for her in ways said terrible father couldn't or wouldn't. i think my empathic imagination is respectable, but i don't have any idea what it would be like to be her, not really. when she was in college she got a tattoo on her instep that says INHALE / EXHALE, but thanks to the dodgy script and, you know, this universe's dodgy script it appears to read INHALE WHALE. that's what i think it must feel like to be her; inhale whale. at a post-rehearsal reception she told me very sweetly that i was welcome to take molly with everyone at the afterparty the next day, and i leave it to you to decide whether or not that is something i did. speaking of choosing one's own adventures, the sister who pussied out of wearing a pin to wedding stuff (i kid, mostly, she is a kinder person than i am) got this bracing library book in which one of the decision-tree outcomes was getting enslaved by christopher columbus, a work that could be in some peril now that the administration is purging public collections. i am rooting for the woke choose-your-own-adventure book; hopefully someone sneaks it to the little girl whose horse-faced dad is dead to me, a towheaded little sprite who skipped down the aisle at the wedding with her anti-vax mother, who sported a slit-to-the thigh, sheer and boned layer cake of nude tulle like the onlyfans tooth fairy.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
10.26.24 [on the F train]
it's hard not to slip into the dire belief that if i'm not going to pennsylvania and canvassing or spending all spare time phone banking or both that the country will slide into fascism and it will be all my fault. i sent 300 letters to georgia and feel good about them, and i know that we're all trying to correct for what we now think of as complacency leading up to hillary clinton's loss in 2016, but i should not have pitched a big story that's coming due on 11/7, or pushed another big story's deadline to 11/4, or both, right? i've been making little swiftie-style beaded bracelets and sending them around the country to friends and family—PGH FOR HARRIS WALZ, WHEN WE FIGHT / WE WIN, WRONG RALLY—which doesn't make a lot of sense, but here we are.
the half marathon last weekend was surprisingly okay! mysterious things happened to the ball and toes of my right foot around mile 11, so i started folding in a bit of walking at that point, but my average pace ended up being around a minute slower than what i ran in the NYRR's new york half in 2015, which is not so terrible. i wasn't going to undertake another half until this one again next year, maybe, but i got an email about entering the lottery for that NYRR race, which isn't until march and is so popular that my chances of a spot are slim—i don't think i've ever made it through that lottery, i've had to fundraise my way in with charity slots—so eh, why not? i'll have enough time to train properly for it, and i've enjoyed creeping back up into running more than 5K at a stretch. my body doesn't love those long runs, not that it ever did, really, but their utility for smoothing out my nerves in the years since i stopped drinking has been undeniable.
to my great surprise, i got a shoutout in the annual nature and science writing anthology i've been courting for the last couple of years. my philip k. dick joke title, out there in bookstores forever! i actually updated my website bio to include the longlisting and wondered if i'm any more likely to score an agent for the book i'm hoping to write; dare to dream, or something. i revisited the exchange i had with an agent a decade ago after an editor connected us and he maintained that i should have a proper proposal, which would include a couple of completed chapters, before shopping myself around for representation. so what i'm currently doing—slowly picking up secondhand paperback copies of related nonfiction and working my way through them with dogearing because i keep forgetting i have sticky notes next to my bed, makes sense? i would like to apply for a writing residence to work on part of this, that was always one of the sub-projects that attracted me to a longer project, but i'm still unclear on where i'm supposed to be in the book process when i do. maybe it's time to actually start asking friends with longform credits about that?
these overlapping big stories standing in the way of my saving democracy have netted me more practice with interviews than i've had in a long time. they're exhausting, first dates and blue-book final exams all at once, but they're also satisfying in the way that Having Written is satisfying. maybe they will generate the momentum that will tow me through a massive manuscript, though i really need to jump on that if so, since my principal subject's surviving children are quite old. i rationalize my shyness in relation to them by telling myself that the book is and isn't about her, it's really about all the things she touched and, you know, the real book is the friends you make along the way, but that's not really so. i need to hitch up my big-girl pants and talk to her kids while there's still a chance they'll talk to me. if i can make myself vulnerable to astrophysicists and entomologists, surely i can make myself vulnerable to them.
the half marathon last weekend was surprisingly okay! mysterious things happened to the ball and toes of my right foot around mile 11, so i started folding in a bit of walking at that point, but my average pace ended up being around a minute slower than what i ran in the NYRR's new york half in 2015, which is not so terrible. i wasn't going to undertake another half until this one again next year, maybe, but i got an email about entering the lottery for that NYRR race, which isn't until march and is so popular that my chances of a spot are slim—i don't think i've ever made it through that lottery, i've had to fundraise my way in with charity slots—so eh, why not? i'll have enough time to train properly for it, and i've enjoyed creeping back up into running more than 5K at a stretch. my body doesn't love those long runs, not that it ever did, really, but their utility for smoothing out my nerves in the years since i stopped drinking has been undeniable.
to my great surprise, i got a shoutout in the annual nature and science writing anthology i've been courting for the last couple of years. my philip k. dick joke title, out there in bookstores forever! i actually updated my website bio to include the longlisting and wondered if i'm any more likely to score an agent for the book i'm hoping to write; dare to dream, or something. i revisited the exchange i had with an agent a decade ago after an editor connected us and he maintained that i should have a proper proposal, which would include a couple of completed chapters, before shopping myself around for representation. so what i'm currently doing—slowly picking up secondhand paperback copies of related nonfiction and working my way through them with dogearing because i keep forgetting i have sticky notes next to my bed, makes sense? i would like to apply for a writing residence to work on part of this, that was always one of the sub-projects that attracted me to a longer project, but i'm still unclear on where i'm supposed to be in the book process when i do. maybe it's time to actually start asking friends with longform credits about that?
these overlapping big stories standing in the way of my saving democracy have netted me more practice with interviews than i've had in a long time. they're exhausting, first dates and blue-book final exams all at once, but they're also satisfying in the way that Having Written is satisfying. maybe they will generate the momentum that will tow me through a massive manuscript, though i really need to jump on that if so, since my principal subject's surviving children are quite old. i rationalize my shyness in relation to them by telling myself that the book is and isn't about her, it's really about all the things she touched and, you know, the real book is the friends you make along the way, but that's not really so. i need to hitch up my big-girl pants and talk to her kids while there's still a chance they'll talk to me. if i can make myself vulnerable to astrophysicists and entomologists, surely i can make myself vulnerable to them.
08.17.24 [on the F train]
chocolate-chip raindrops this morning, the kind that might or might not add up to one wet cookie when i get off the train in queens. i should really start carrying a little fold-up tarp or industrial garbage bag for my tote, which would compact and travel much more imperceptibly than a full-fledged umbrella and protect the only stuff that really can't get wet. i'm semi-paused on almost all work right now, as the new third-party payment-processing contractor that handles compensating contractors like me for my biggest client has now taken almost a week to renew my apparently-expired approval, a slot canyon that seems to have affected me first among the client's freelancers and which seems unbelievable even by generic-corporate-fuckery standards (i am denied access to all of the client's assets and tools, so i can't research or build a damn thing). it's been fewer than 90 days since they approved my initial contract, a process more invasive than the blood and urine draws i underwent for my yearly physical yesterday (a background check, seriously? for a writing-jokes-about-couches gig?). this has meant that i've had luxurious stretches of time in which to run errands (with the understanding that i had to be able to sprint home at any moment) and that my schedule for the next month and counting is absolute hash, as all kinds of stuff has accordioned down the line. i generally don't care all that much about when things happen, despite my procrastinator's fundamental fear-based obsession with deadlines, but i am almost incandescent with rage about this shit; this processing contractor has already demanded invoices from my other clients to make sure my work is diversified to a degree that satisfies them—so infantilizing i don't know what to tell you—and if, say, the most pressing piece i've got pending isn't sorted before tuesday night, its editor is going to have to reassign it and i lose $600 for work that's already taken me more than two hours. i don't have any colleagues in this scenario, not really—everyone's either someone who offers me work or someone whose incompetence prevents me from doing work—so i can but holler here, since anything else would make me a real bummer to hire again. freelancers are supposed to be cool girls.
a friend of ours has taken a full-time gig with the harris-walz campaign and is either moving or has moved to delaware for the next few months. i have a theory that going up there with jigsaw puzzles and snacks would technically be infrastructural, which seems to underwhelm joe. i think we've scrubbed most of our travel plans for the fall—we've both booked solo trips out west to visit family, but he doesn't have the vacation days to really unfurl the way we like to until the end of the year, and we're already committed to a thing with my folks in the spring—so, like: delaware! it would be so cheap, i bet, and i could pretend it's comparable with door-knocking! i know that's not so, at least the door-knocking part, but i'm working my way up to more full-contact election suport.
i took the ferry out to the rockaways for the first time in several years a couple of weeks ago, at the invitation of a friend who rented a place out there for part of this summer. the stretch of beach she favors is vastly superior to the crazy-crowded portion i used to visit, and her car-based setup camps rings around the towel-and-tote situation that was all i was used to bringing out with me. i told her quite a bit about what i called 'the beach companion i lost to her office-based job,' though i didn't really get at all the reasons that relationship fell apart, at least partially because i myself don't know. could she smell the loss on me? i felt like i reeked.
a friend of ours has taken a full-time gig with the harris-walz campaign and is either moving or has moved to delaware for the next few months. i have a theory that going up there with jigsaw puzzles and snacks would technically be infrastructural, which seems to underwhelm joe. i think we've scrubbed most of our travel plans for the fall—we've both booked solo trips out west to visit family, but he doesn't have the vacation days to really unfurl the way we like to until the end of the year, and we're already committed to a thing with my folks in the spring—so, like: delaware! it would be so cheap, i bet, and i could pretend it's comparable with door-knocking! i know that's not so, at least the door-knocking part, but i'm working my way up to more full-contact election suport.
i took the ferry out to the rockaways for the first time in several years a couple of weeks ago, at the invitation of a friend who rented a place out there for part of this summer. the stretch of beach she favors is vastly superior to the crazy-crowded portion i used to visit, and her car-based setup camps rings around the towel-and-tote situation that was all i was used to bringing out with me. i told her quite a bit about what i called 'the beach companion i lost to her office-based job,' though i didn't really get at all the reasons that relationship fell apart, at least partially because i myself don't know. could she smell the loss on me? i felt like i reeked.
07.06.24 [on the J train]
biden's disastrous debate appearance last week and the supreme court's even more disastrous ruling on presidential immunity this monday added up to the first time in a long time that i've truly felt the kind of liquefying panic i felt the night of the election in 2016, the kind that meant self-care also performed as self-care, like hey look at how productively i'm thinking about and processing this: i signed up for this morning's clinic-defense shift, reactivated my account at ye olde get-out-the-vote letter-writing site and claimed 100 prospective voters, started running a few miles every time i feel like throwing up, and so on. it is not really working. i tend to lean on or at least talk this stuff out with joe when apocalypse feels extra-imminent, but he has...i want a metaphor that gets at how bad things are without blame or rancor, and i don't really have one. i am tired of meeting him in brooklyn for movies and feeling like i'm coming home alone even though i'm not. i'm tired of waking up from a nap after one of these clinic shifts and realizing i'm eating dinner alone even though i'm not. i understand that we are more than our most pernicious afflictions—god i'm grateful that people who love me have been able to see me through mine, because there have been some doozies in the last few years, thanks for nothing, brain chemistry and alcohol—but it's really hard to accept, as my therapist says i must, that the person i love isn't going to change for the better and the best i can hope for is to become someone who can get by without expecting anything from them. i have never been able to handle being left or feeling like i've been left, and here i am, with the only obvious relief i can see planted on the other side of my acting the way i've always told myself no one ever would, not if they really loved you or if you were really worth loving. is this like the sensitive new-age version of living long enough to become the villain? it is hard to watch the world and your partner fall apart at the same time and feel like there's essentially fuck-all you can do about either one.
01.07.23 [on the J train]
if i had taken communications classes in college instead of lurching into and through my current career like an ewok in an imperial walker i would maybe know what to call the unpleasant shiver of self-awareness one experiences when one is revealed to be representative of a particular demographic (pardon the word salad here, i've only been awake and caffeinated for a bit) - you know, like when you're showering at a youth hostel in amsterdam and the guy in the stall next to you turns out to know your ex-boyfriend and also be a regular at the indie coffee shop you favor a few suburbs up the freeway back home in southern california. the unheimlich of realizing you're a type? this is not quite like when your phone correctly predicts what you're about to search for, but there is a flip side of this, a bourgeois relief when you realize strangers (or artificial intelligences, i guess) already know what you want.
this is all a very inelegant ay of saying i was starting to type WHAT POWERS DOES A GHOUL HAVE and my phone leapt to search results about the speaker of the house, which is in fact the other repulsive and luckless being i have been thinking a lot about this week. on the first or second day of unsuccessful kevin mccarthy coronation i was out for a walk and got an "it's hakeem jeffries" text that i initially thought was from joe - holy shit, i thought, six republicans grew consciences and formed a coalition of the comparatively sane with the democrats! - but it was actually a fundraising bot à la all the "nancy pelosis" that u up?'ed me this fall. i had kind of wanted to get a pool together to take bets on how many votes kev and company would shamble through but i couldn't decide what the prize for the most accurate guesser would be (the buy-ins would go to some charity, i hadn't decided which yet. the aclu?) but i live in fear of getting punished for misrepresenting contest rules, an aversion i developed when i got stuck managing back-of-the-book fine print as a magazine editor that might be with me for good. anyway, congratulations, SPINO, i hope your portrait is a corker.
on ghouls, i just finished bones & all the book, and was reminded in the acknowledgements that the author wrote her "eaters" (it is the story of young people who eat people) as ghouls rather than cannibals, a distinction in her mind that involved their being supernatural beings and not twentieth-century donner partiers or something. this comes up both in the piece that interested me in the book in the first place and in a lithub piece that makes an admirable effort to tease apart the difference between ghouls and cannibals (and the former in camille deangelis's 2015 book vs. the latter in luca guadagnino's 2022 movie with david kajganich's screenplay, which for my money deserves an oscar nomination for some killer edits). there's a lot to break down there, no pun intended, and even more if you engage with the idea that deangelis wrote her book around the time that she became vegan and intended it to address the ethical problems with eating flesh - and i don't want to be unkind, but i think that theme doesn't land very well for me at all, though i certainly care about the subject - but one big clunker is that the layers of compulsion and need aren't exposed with much clarity. in the book the only supernatural power the eaters seem to have is that they can devour whole people (per the title) very quickly and leave only scraps, whereas in the movie eaters aren't that efficient but can smell each other from, in some cases, a significant distance? which seems at least preternatural if not supernatural? (this is the trouble with writing on a train.) in the book the ghoulish urges read a bit more like kink: the antihero can only eat people he despises and the antiheroine can only eat people who desire her (except for her babysitter, which is apparently a different case because she ate her when she was a very small child). also, ghouls are pretty universally, canonically repugnant, and scavengers, and...necrovores? is that what i mean? mark rylance's character, sully, only eats people who have died, but unless you're a massive dragon, a particularly gifted vivisectionist, or the water snake i caught and fed a tadpole on a camping trip in mendocino when i was a merciless tween naturalist, you kill things in the process of eating them (the only character in the book or the movie who eats only part of someone is one who eats their own hand or hands like an autophagous fast-food mascot). inconsistent rules is one of my pet peeves in stories of the supernatural; my other is when vampires get all forrest gump-y and traipse through history only meeting famous people and writing shakespeare's plays.
anyway: ghouls! the ghouls in the book are on their supernatural road trip in the late '90s during clinton's impeachment trial, and its musical references suffer accordingly (no joy division here; one charater asks another if they like shania twain). the villain has a backstory that makes him considerably less interesting, and the endings don't land very well. deangelis was super gracious about and appreicative of all of the strenous adaptation kajganich did, to her credit, though even that adaptation left me fuzzy on the moral and practical distinctions between ghoulishness and cannibalism, but for my part, after watching like 36 hours of congressional shenanigans this week i can't even tell you if house republicans are ghouls or cannibals, so i respect people who can put themselves out there as a general proposition.
completely unrelated: dr. john wyatt greenlee's english eel-rents of the 10th-17th centuries! "any eel-rent noted as having one eel due represent a place where the record is unclear about the number of eels due (such as the rent due for the mill at wolvey in 1251, which called for the mill to pay 1/2 of all the fish and eels caught there to ivo de dene). in each of these cases, the actual number of eels due almost certainly exceeded one."
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 are house republicans ghouls or cannibals?
02 how many eels does it cost to live where you live?
03 should i report on the train itself when i'm writing on the train?
on ghouls, i just finished bones & all the book, and was reminded in the acknowledgements that the author wrote her "eaters" (it is the story of young people who eat people) as ghouls rather than cannibals, a distinction in her mind that involved their being supernatural beings and not twentieth-century donner partiers or something. this comes up both in the piece that interested me in the book in the first place and in a lithub piece that makes an admirable effort to tease apart the difference between ghouls and cannibals (and the former in camille deangelis's 2015 book vs. the latter in luca guadagnino's 2022 movie with david kajganich's screenplay, which for my money deserves an oscar nomination for some killer edits). there's a lot to break down there, no pun intended, and even more if you engage with the idea that deangelis wrote her book around the time that she became vegan and intended it to address the ethical problems with eating flesh - and i don't want to be unkind, but i think that theme doesn't land very well for me at all, though i certainly care about the subject - but one big clunker is that the layers of compulsion and need aren't exposed with much clarity. in the book the only supernatural power the eaters seem to have is that they can devour whole people (per the title) very quickly and leave only scraps, whereas in the movie eaters aren't that efficient but can smell each other from, in some cases, a significant distance? which seems at least preternatural if not supernatural? (this is the trouble with writing on a train.) in the book the ghoulish urges read a bit more like kink: the antihero can only eat people he despises and the antiheroine can only eat people who desire her (except for her babysitter, which is apparently a different case because she ate her when she was a very small child). also, ghouls are pretty universally, canonically repugnant, and scavengers, and...necrovores? is that what i mean? mark rylance's character, sully, only eats people who have died, but unless you're a massive dragon, a particularly gifted vivisectionist, or the water snake i caught and fed a tadpole on a camping trip in mendocino when i was a merciless tween naturalist, you kill things in the process of eating them (the only character in the book or the movie who eats only part of someone is one who eats their own hand or hands like an autophagous fast-food mascot). inconsistent rules is one of my pet peeves in stories of the supernatural; my other is when vampires get all forrest gump-y and traipse through history only meeting famous people and writing shakespeare's plays.
anyway: ghouls! the ghouls in the book are on their supernatural road trip in the late '90s during clinton's impeachment trial, and its musical references suffer accordingly (no joy division here; one charater asks another if they like shania twain). the villain has a backstory that makes him considerably less interesting, and the endings don't land very well. deangelis was super gracious about and appreicative of all of the strenous adaptation kajganich did, to her credit, though even that adaptation left me fuzzy on the moral and practical distinctions between ghoulishness and cannibalism, but for my part, after watching like 36 hours of congressional shenanigans this week i can't even tell you if house republicans are ghouls or cannibals, so i respect people who can put themselves out there as a general proposition.
completely unrelated: dr. john wyatt greenlee's english eel-rents of the 10th-17th centuries! "any eel-rent noted as having one eel due represent a place where the record is unclear about the number of eels due (such as the rent due for the mill at wolvey in 1251, which called for the mill to pay 1/2 of all the fish and eels caught there to ivo de dene). in each of these cases, the actual number of eels due almost certainly exceeded one."
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 are house republicans ghouls or cannibals?
02 how many eels does it cost to live where you live?
03 should i report on the train itself when i'm writing on the train?
01.20.21
four years ago i helped a woman at penn station get to her train, which was also my train. we were both going to washington for the inauguration; i told her i was going to protest. "oh," she said, looking me up and down. "are you going to hurt me?" i stayed with my dear friend jacob's family, and his elder daughter pulled out an impressive array of craft supplies to help us make our signs. on the morning of the march, when the streets were so crowded we didn't get anywhere near the main gathering area and its speakers, the biggest roar that rippled through the people around me was for john kerry as he strolled with us for a bit. i imagined that i would be in washington again today, no matter who topped the platform.
11.4.20
my friend F, a restaurant critic i met at a chef's dinner on a press trip in orlando years ago who told me that same night that his daughter had just been diagnosed with cancer and a car had crashed through the front wall of his house, just texted and said he'd been assigned to be my emotional support canadian and i cried all over my big stupid phone.
11.02.20
i'll be getting up in about five hours to shower and head across the street for my day of work at the polls. i was assigned a "relief" position, which...means i get there first thing and then wait for people to get tired, i guess? i am imagining and hoping that i'll just get sent out to keep an eye on the line outside until someone needs me, as this shift is something like 250% as long as the tribeca film festival volunteer stints that occasionally made me feel like i had actually left my idling body, but we will see what we will see. i have already voted, and i feel good about running back across the street to grab extra clothing and, like, a sandwich, so i'm not going to pack my old tote like i'm heading off to summer camp.
i finished as much of the work-work i have to do for the next few days as i could, at least for tonight, so that anxiety has receded and let the naked moonlit political fear roll up my shore like a dead leviathan. god, how it smells.
i finished as much of the work-work i have to do for the next few days as i could, at least for tonight, so that anxiety has receded and let the naked moonlit political fear roll up my shore like a dead leviathan. god, how it smells.
08.31.20
it's ten before midnight and one of my twentysomething neighbors is running laps along the paved path in our garden, arms bent and tucked, gait jittery, which can only mean one thing: he's trying not to turn into a werewolf. i should have stopped him, as i'm sympathetic: the corn moon and his increased power and impulses to prowl and howl are seasonal and beyond his control. (better the lower east side than the moon.)
growing claws is wild, no? first the toe boxes of your shoes constrain you, then you start scissoring your sheets in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden you're shattered in the moonlight, dumb and hungry and awake to the fact that you might need to be an animal for the first time in your life.
one of my dearest friends grabbed me on election day in 2016: we are the people who run into the fire. he was wrong, and we have been so complacent, but i have broken for lycanthropy.
growing claws is wild, no? first the toe boxes of your shoes constrain you, then you start scissoring your sheets in the middle of the night, and all of a sudden you're shattered in the moonlight, dumb and hungry and awake to the fact that you might need to be an animal for the first time in your life.
one of my dearest friends grabbed me on election day in 2016: we are the people who run into the fire. he was wrong, and we have been so complacent, but i have broken for lycanthropy.
06.28.20
[Martha] Gellhorn told [John Simpson, the BBC's world-affairs editor] about attending John F. Kennedy’s Inauguration ball. Gellhorn was alone and feeling out of place when she sensed the President and his entourage moving in her direction. “There was Kennedy himself coming towards her with all the hangers-on and the freaks and the creeps,” Simpson said. “And, as he walks up to her, and she said, ‘Oh, fuck. He’s gonna make me Secretary of State.’ ” It wasn’t that. Kennedy had heard that Gellhorn used to live in the White House and might know of a way to sneak out from time to time. “ ‘Darling’—she called him ‘Darling’—‘That’s easy,’ ” Simpson continued, in a broad American accent. Gellhorn told the President about a small gate at the back of the property. “There’s only one guy in charge of it,” she said. “Roosevelt used to just give him money all the time.”
(sam knight, "a memorial for the remarkable martha gellhorn")
07.16.19
the dirty dozen {recurring dreams}
01 the kitten will die if someone doesn't do something
02 we have to leave new york city
03 y kant lauren type
04 time is running out in san francisco, but what about a burrito
05 accidental commitment to grad school
06 iceland
07 david bowie and i have the talk
08 this whole apartment must be painted and furnished
09 no traffic on the service road
10 pregnancy
11 swimming as shortcut
12 punching donald trump
01 the kitten will die if someone doesn't do something
02 we have to leave new york city
03 y kant lauren type
04 time is running out in san francisco, but what about a burrito
05 accidental commitment to grad school
06 iceland
07 david bowie and i have the talk
08 this whole apartment must be painted and furnished
09 no traffic on the service road
10 pregnancy
11 swimming as shortcut
12 punching donald trump
03.09.17
we are on the move again, this time to arizona, where my in-laws have gone unvisited for nearly two years. we keep trying to trick them into visiting us here in new york, but they run a bar by themselves and also i think get a bit itchy when they spend too much time in the city. so we will meet them in flagstaff, in a little airbnb where we will wear pajamas and watch television and no one will have cancer (take that, mother-in-law's cancer!). joe seems deeply invested in driving us to the grand canyon, which gives me pause; i have always suspected it would activate some dormant thanatotic desire in me and i'd become a helpless death-hamster. i have informed him of this.
i decided to wear red and a feisty pin and attend my weekly shift at ye old charity bookstore yesterday, since refraining from work that benefits some of the most vulnerable women in my city seemed like a questionable interpretation of what assorted activists were promoting. i was catcalled in my redness by someone to whom it was insignificant, and while i considered informing the caller of the position i represented i decided it was more expedient to hurry to the store, where about half of the female staff was missing and our manager, a man, wore an elizabeth warren shirt. i had to sneak out after an hour or so to interview a (female) doctor for a story i filed this morning. i made no purchases and ignored joe's request for me to pick up his laundry on the way home, and here we are and the world is like new, by which i mean scuffed in ways most of us tend to ignore.
i decided to wear red and a feisty pin and attend my weekly shift at ye old charity bookstore yesterday, since refraining from work that benefits some of the most vulnerable women in my city seemed like a questionable interpretation of what assorted activists were promoting. i was catcalled in my redness by someone to whom it was insignificant, and while i considered informing the caller of the position i represented i decided it was more expedient to hurry to the store, where about half of the female staff was missing and our manager, a man, wore an elizabeth warren shirt. i had to sneak out after an hour or so to interview a (female) doctor for a story i filed this morning. i made no purchases and ignored joe's request for me to pick up his laundry on the way home, and here we are and the world is like new, by which i mean scuffed in ways most of us tend to ignore.
01.23.17
it turned out that michael w. fox's latest "animal doctor" column in the washington post's home and garden section was the perfect thing to read as i drank my coffee before the women's march in DC. readers wrote in about their dogs.
Dear Dr. Fox:
I was very surprised to see your mention in a recent column of fragrant scent spots on dogs.
I have a 5-year-old miniature black-and-tan dachshund, and several years ago, my kids and I discovered a spot on her that we later came to describe as her "sweet spot." It is on her breastbone, and I can only describe it as a very subtle flowery smell, but I can't put a flower name to it.
L.B.
Dear Dr. Fox:
We rescued a blue brindle greyhound. She smelled like baby powder until the day she passed. There didn't seem to be any particular area on her body from which the smell emanated, but we loved to stick our noses in her soft, silky fur and breathe in her scent. Of course, the noseful of hair was a drawback. Subsequent greyhounds have been scentless.
G.C.
[...]
Dear Dr. Fox:
I currently have a shelter-adopted mutt mother dog, Sunnie, and her son, Danny, who smells like brown sugar. He is now 7, and the smell is a bit fainter, but it is still there, mainly along his neck and also a bit on his chest.
No matter how long we go between baths, he never smells doggy. His mama smells feral. Not doggy—feral. She has a faint musky odor; your nose has to be in her fur to notice it, but it's there. Too long between baths, and she will feel a bit oily. And, yes, they do have popcorn-smelling feet, too. My 12th birthday gift (oh so many decades ago) was Sandy, a basenji, and her stomach smelled like rosewater and her feet like popcorn.
B.W.
12.24.16
Oh it's Christmas so we'll stop
'Cause the wine on our breath puts the love on our tongues
So forget the names
I called you on Christmas Eve
In fact forget the entire year
Don't reflect just pretend and you won't feel scared
You won't feel a thing
'Cause it's all been tucked away
And once you're tucked in bed
You'll hold on to the day for the last few seconds
Your cradled face is protected from the wind
And I'll protect you I promise I will
And the rest of our lives will be just like Christmas
With fewer toys
You're a good girl I'm a good boy
So I thought
(frightened rabbit, from "it's christmas so we'll stop")
[T]ime is neutral. It can be used either constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this morning that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our nation, the extreme rightists of our nation—the people on the wrong side—have used time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well be that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the vitriolic words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say, "Wait on time."find holiday (and year-round) volunteering referrals from new york cares here.
(from martin luther king, jr's sermon at the national cathedral, 03.31.68)
find a local coat drive here.
read up on the women's march on washington here.
12.01.16
december will be a month of odd feats, i think. i have a dozen assignments due by the 21st; i'm running my last 10K of the year on the 17th; i'm going to run at least a hundred miles by new year's eve. i'd like to read another dozen books or so, and to have a complete first draft of one of the essays for my book proposal. i'm hoping to see the floor of the closet at some point.
condé nast announced today that it will shutter self's print edition. self's fact checking team was, is known for its rigor; as a magazine research chief, i looked to their guidelines the first time my managing editor asked me to draw up instructions for contributing writers. good night, ladies.
a high school acquaintance and i snarked at each other on a mutual friend's facebook wall yesterday morning and afternoon. we were talking about trump's flag-burning tweet, in theory, but at some point he noted that he'll "no longer read or accept the NYT as a valid source until they admit they helped CLINTON cheat and terminate those who proofed stories with her campaign." o facts; o, sources. my december assignments are all for websites associated with television networks, and they are as apolitical as assignments can be; social media and ye olde book proposal get all of my spiky feelings about journalism and truth for the rest of the year.
condé nast announced today that it will shutter self's print edition. self's fact checking team was, is known for its rigor; as a magazine research chief, i looked to their guidelines the first time my managing editor asked me to draw up instructions for contributing writers. good night, ladies.
a high school acquaintance and i snarked at each other on a mutual friend's facebook wall yesterday morning and afternoon. we were talking about trump's flag-burning tweet, in theory, but at some point he noted that he'll "no longer read or accept the NYT as a valid source until they admit they helped CLINTON cheat and terminate those who proofed stories with her campaign." o facts; o, sources. my december assignments are all for websites associated with television networks, and they are as apolitical as assignments can be; social media and ye olde book proposal get all of my spiky feelings about journalism and truth for the rest of the year.
11.28.16
leaving the country the day after trump's victory felt, to be honest, like leaving a deathbed; on wednesday afternoon, the airport was crowded with tearful travelers clustered around televisions. i wanted to be with the marchers on 57th street instead of waiting for a plane. in the afternoon i texted a friend and asked if we could come to her place for thanksgiving after all; of course, she said, of course. none of us wanted to be alone.
europe had a little of everything for us. the milanese told us we'd elected our own berlusconi,* and that we'd survive, as they had. a frenchman at a wine shop had nothing but contempt for clinton: "better the bastard who stands up and tells you he is a bastard," he sniffed. "she hides." an older german woman in david bowie's neighborhood bar walked over and showed us her copy of der spiegel. tourists were photographing themselves in front of FUCK DONALD TRUMP! on the berlin wall. an older german man spoke of anti-american corners of berlin and begged us to take a cab home. we had long conversations with all of them, and hummingbird meals of news when we got home each night. who anticipated such bitter nectar?
when we got back to the city last week, i resolved to talk to my family before announcing that we were bowing out of the holidays (my stepbrother became a trump supporter this summer, and i strongly suspected he was going to associate with trump in the future, so i was no longer interested in spending time with him). they both confirmed my suspicions and beat me to the punch, suggesting—ever so gently—that it would be easier this time if we went our separate ways.
joe and i also had train tickets, purchased back in june, for washington in january; i'd felt way back then that we were inviting catastrophe by assuming we'd be celebrating the inauguration, but i told myself that i'd be there as a protester if i wasn't there as a reveler. i adjusted the tickets this weekend and will be part of the women's march on washington.
my father and i met at columbus circle on saturday for a walk through central park. i proposed, spit and post-nasal drip ready at the back of my throat, we enter on the other side of the trump international building, but the police on the sidewalk turned us away; if we didn't have business inside, we couldn't pass. when we emerged from the southeastern corner of the park a few hours later, dozens of officers darkened the pavement above the apple store on fifth avenue. across the street, hundreds, thousands of birds sang above us in a single tree before the plaza hotel. a pendant in the chandelier of sound: "there's a cardinal up there," i said.
*related, from this week's new yorker: can women bring down trump?
europe had a little of everything for us. the milanese told us we'd elected our own berlusconi,* and that we'd survive, as they had. a frenchman at a wine shop had nothing but contempt for clinton: "better the bastard who stands up and tells you he is a bastard," he sniffed. "she hides." an older german woman in david bowie's neighborhood bar walked over and showed us her copy of der spiegel. tourists were photographing themselves in front of FUCK DONALD TRUMP! on the berlin wall. an older german man spoke of anti-american corners of berlin and begged us to take a cab home. we had long conversations with all of them, and hummingbird meals of news when we got home each night. who anticipated such bitter nectar?
when we got back to the city last week, i resolved to talk to my family before announcing that we were bowing out of the holidays (my stepbrother became a trump supporter this summer, and i strongly suspected he was going to associate with trump in the future, so i was no longer interested in spending time with him). they both confirmed my suspicions and beat me to the punch, suggesting—ever so gently—that it would be easier this time if we went our separate ways.
joe and i also had train tickets, purchased back in june, for washington in january; i'd felt way back then that we were inviting catastrophe by assuming we'd be celebrating the inauguration, but i told myself that i'd be there as a protester if i wasn't there as a reveler. i adjusted the tickets this weekend and will be part of the women's march on washington.
my father and i met at columbus circle on saturday for a walk through central park. i proposed, spit and post-nasal drip ready at the back of my throat, we enter on the other side of the trump international building, but the police on the sidewalk turned us away; if we didn't have business inside, we couldn't pass. when we emerged from the southeastern corner of the park a few hours later, dozens of officers darkened the pavement above the apple store on fifth avenue. across the street, hundreds, thousands of birds sang above us in a single tree before the plaza hotel. a pendant in the chandelier of sound: "there's a cardinal up there," i said.
*related, from this week's new yorker: can women bring down trump?
05.12.16
the dirty dozen {twelve of my favorite passages from martin millar's lonely werewolf girl}
01 "The flat remained exactly as the Guild provided it. He didn't rearrange the furniture, buy himself a new set of sheets, or hang a calendar on the wall. Such things were inconsequential to him. The only thing he cared about was hunting werewolves."
02 "It was the room she used for her private conferences and in homage to this there was a painting on the wall by Velasquez of two ambassadors. This was one of the finest pictures by Velasquez in private hands, and did not appear in any of the standard lists of the painter's works."*
03 "'Doesn't Apthalia the Grim spend her time waiting on quiet roads, trying to ambush lonely travellers?' asked Thrix.
'Not so much now,' replied Malveria. 'These days she's more interested in fashion. And since she had her warts removed and her nose done, and started buying her clothes from Dior, rather than simply robbing the corpses of her victims, she is not so bad looking, I admit.'"
04 "The Enchantress noticed Dominil's T-shirt under her open coat.
'What's the writing?'
'The band's set list.'
Thrix read it with interest.
'Stupid Werewolf Bitch? Evil White-Haired Slut?' She laughed. 'They wrote two songs about you.'
'Three,' said Dominil. 'They encore with Vile Werewolf Whore.'
05 "'You seem uncomfortable,' said Dominil. 'Is there some problem with the sorcery?'
'None at all,' replied Thrix. 'I'm uncomfortable because I'm in a bar in Camden with a lot of nineteen year old boys gawking at me.'"
06 "'This daughter will now attempt to see what label is on the clothes when the Princess disports her unpleasant figure at the Empress Asaratanti's party celebrating the one thousandth anniversary of her victory over the ice dwarves from the north.'"
07 "'I would so much like to kill that Princess. Do you know she had the effrontery to insinuate that I was generously proportioned? She accused me of hiding my excess weight! Which is absurd. Of course it can be done—I believe her mother the Empress Asaratanti has long concealed several hundred pounds of ugly fat in another dimension—but such tactics are not necessary for the extremely slim Queen Malveria. Last year my devotees added the title Slenderest of Queens to my many existing names, quite unbidden by myself.'"
08 "'Where's the Vermeer?'
'I lent it to the National Gallery.'
Markus was surprised.
'Just because I'm Mistress of the Werewolves doesn't mean I have no sense of duty to the wider public. It's the modern world dear, we all have to make a contribution.'"
09 "Moonglow was such a kind soul. It was one of the things Daniel liked about her. That and her pretty face, her long black hair and the really attractive nose stud."
10 "Kalix wrote a new entry in her journal. The Runaways are the Queens of Noise. Today I killed two hunters. Or yesterday."
11 "'Well, Malveria, these are clearly intended as dresswear only. You can't expect a fashion item to stand up to ritual sacrifice on the volcano. I've told you before about choosing the right footwear for the right occasion.'"
12 "Everyone of importance would be there, even the ladies from the court of the iron elementals, and they hardly ever went out to social events."
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 if you were supernatural, would you share your secret masterpieces with the mortal public?
02 donald trump, hillary clinton, and bernie sanders: who's the vampire, who's the cyborg, and who's the alien?
03 what would you conceal in another dimension?
04 there are apparently two sequels to this scottish werewolf novel. should i read them?
05 on non-werewolf novels, how unlike graham greene's other stuff is travels with my aunt?
*secret masterpieces are one of my favorite supernatural fiction subthemes. our friend lesley has a salvador dalí portrait of her grandmother hanging in her hallway, which is why it's so easy to play "vampire, cyborg, or alien?" with her.
01 "The flat remained exactly as the Guild provided it. He didn't rearrange the furniture, buy himself a new set of sheets, or hang a calendar on the wall. Such things were inconsequential to him. The only thing he cared about was hunting werewolves."
02 "It was the room she used for her private conferences and in homage to this there was a painting on the wall by Velasquez of two ambassadors. This was one of the finest pictures by Velasquez in private hands, and did not appear in any of the standard lists of the painter's works."*
03 "'Doesn't Apthalia the Grim spend her time waiting on quiet roads, trying to ambush lonely travellers?' asked Thrix.
'Not so much now,' replied Malveria. 'These days she's more interested in fashion. And since she had her warts removed and her nose done, and started buying her clothes from Dior, rather than simply robbing the corpses of her victims, she is not so bad looking, I admit.'"
04 "The Enchantress noticed Dominil's T-shirt under her open coat.
'What's the writing?'
'The band's set list.'
Thrix read it with interest.
'Stupid Werewolf Bitch? Evil White-Haired Slut?' She laughed. 'They wrote two songs about you.'
'Three,' said Dominil. 'They encore with Vile Werewolf Whore.'
05 "'You seem uncomfortable,' said Dominil. 'Is there some problem with the sorcery?'
'None at all,' replied Thrix. 'I'm uncomfortable because I'm in a bar in Camden with a lot of nineteen year old boys gawking at me.'"
06 "'This daughter will now attempt to see what label is on the clothes when the Princess disports her unpleasant figure at the Empress Asaratanti's party celebrating the one thousandth anniversary of her victory over the ice dwarves from the north.'"
07 "'I would so much like to kill that Princess. Do you know she had the effrontery to insinuate that I was generously proportioned? She accused me of hiding my excess weight! Which is absurd. Of course it can be done—I believe her mother the Empress Asaratanti has long concealed several hundred pounds of ugly fat in another dimension—but such tactics are not necessary for the extremely slim Queen Malveria. Last year my devotees added the title Slenderest of Queens to my many existing names, quite unbidden by myself.'"
08 "'Where's the Vermeer?'
'I lent it to the National Gallery.'
Markus was surprised.
'Just because I'm Mistress of the Werewolves doesn't mean I have no sense of duty to the wider public. It's the modern world dear, we all have to make a contribution.'"
09 "Moonglow was such a kind soul. It was one of the things Daniel liked about her. That and her pretty face, her long black hair and the really attractive nose stud."
10 "Kalix wrote a new entry in her journal. The Runaways are the Queens of Noise. Today I killed two hunters. Or yesterday."
11 "'Well, Malveria, these are clearly intended as dresswear only. You can't expect a fashion item to stand up to ritual sacrifice on the volcano. I've told you before about choosing the right footwear for the right occasion.'"
12 "Everyone of importance would be there, even the ladies from the court of the iron elementals, and they hardly ever went out to social events."
imaginary reading group discussion questions
01 if you were supernatural, would you share your secret masterpieces with the mortal public?
02 donald trump, hillary clinton, and bernie sanders: who's the vampire, who's the cyborg, and who's the alien?
03 what would you conceal in another dimension?
04 there are apparently two sequels to this scottish werewolf novel. should i read them?
05 on non-werewolf novels, how unlike graham greene's other stuff is travels with my aunt?
*secret masterpieces are one of my favorite supernatural fiction subthemes. our friend lesley has a salvador dalí portrait of her grandmother hanging in her hallway, which is why it's so easy to play "vampire, cyborg, or alien?" with her.
02.27.16
phyllis rose's the shelf (in which she reads her way through the LEQ-LES shelf at the new york society library, a subscription library on the upper east side i'm ashamed to have never visited) has been sizzling across my synapses for the last few weeks. her curiosity is a thing of beauty—i adore how she develops extratextual relationships with some of her authors, hunts down answers about cover art from a designer, and watches and rewatches footage from one author's funeral on youtube—and i thrill to the way she accepts responsibility for keeping literary culture alive (and urges other readers to do the same). i'd love to curl up and make myself inconspicuous in a wrinkle in her brain for a day. a smattering of favorite passages:
it's been a good year for reading thus far, so good that i have yet to make much progress in 2015's version of BOOKS I READ, IN ORDER OF HOW INTERESTED I WAS IN SLEEPING WITH THEM BENEATH MY PILLOW (STRONGEST CANDIDATES FIRST), AND HAIKU DISCUSSION. i forced my sister to take the first of elena ferrante's neapolitan novels back to california with her last week; i'd have insisted on all four, really, but it's impolite to inflict that much ballast on air travelers. if you, dear internets, have yet to read them and can endure the phase shift they could precipitate (i found myself reading for an extra three or four hours a night, which meant that for most of january i turned off my light and rose again in the morning with the people of hawaii rather than my neighbors in new york city), get on that.
i'll be turning in a piece on my third half marathon this friday. how did i get here?
*stanford has been thoroughly coed since it admitted its first students in 1891, by the by.
**a full timeline of women's suffrage is here. in 1919, belgium extended the right to vote in national elections to "the widows and mothers of servicemen killed in World War I, to the widows and mothers of citizens shot or killed by the enemy, and to female political prisoners who had been held by the enemy." other gals weren't welcome at the polls until 1948.
***similarly, ye olde charity bookstore cafe doesn't accept donations of textbooks, tech manuals, or travel guides.
****don't read it on a kindle. fuck amazon, now and always.
A friend of [Rose's daughter-in-law] attended high school where the drama teacher was a megalomaniac control freak. Although everyone knows that musicals for amateur performance should be chosen to provide the maximum number of easy singing roles, he chose to do Phantom of the Opera, which has relatively few parts and difficult music. The drama teacher himself played the Phantom, and the best singer in the school played Christine. All the other kids played candlesticks in the chandelier.rose writes that she enjoys hearing from readers of her books when they contact her to offer praise and is rather displeased when they pepper her with inquiries, which makes sense; i'd be pretty displeased if someone wrote me just to ask me to prep for their book club on their behalf. it has been brought to my attention that i tend to ask a lot of questions when i meet people, so it's probably not a good idea for me to reach out to rose—but i might not be able to resist a fan letter. the shelf has wound me up.
[...]
I remember taking a ship from Naples to Istanbul in the summer of 1974 and seeing a man reading Fear of Flying in Spanish, laughing out loud. I never saw such universal appeal again until a Samburu warrior in Kenya asked me to send him tapes of the Harry Potter movies.
[...]
A woman who was hired as an editorial assistant at a major publisher in New York in the early 1960s recalls how, on the first day of work, the twelve new assistants were separated into male and female groups, the men set to reading manuscripts, the women to typing. Another woman recalls learning that she had scored the highest on a chemistry final in college, asking if that meant she was getting an A, and being told that only one A could be given and a boy needed it more than she did. Others recall days when Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth didn't admit women, to say nothing of the Century Association in New York and Mory's in New Haven.* Someone else reminds us that in France, women could not vote until after World War II.**
[...]
I asked a friend who works for a small public library how they choose books to get rid of. Is there a formula? Who makes the decision, a person or a committee? She told me that there was a formula based on the recommendations of the industry-standard CREW model.
CREW stands for Continuous Review Evaluation and Weeding, and the manual uses "crew" as a transitive verb, so one can talk about a library "crewing" its collection. It means weeding but doesn't sound so harsh. At the heart of the CREW method is a formula consisting of three factors—the number of years since its last copyright, the number of years since the book was last checked out, and a collection of six negative factors given the acronym MUSTIE, to help decide if a book has outlived its usefulness. M. Is it Misleading or inaccurate? Is its information, as so quickly happens with medical and legal texts or travel books, for example, outdated?*** U. Is it Ugly? Worn beyond repair? S. Has it been Superseded by a new edition or a better account of the subject? T. Is it Trivial, of no discernible literary or scientific merit? I. Is it Irrelevant to the needs and interests of the community the library serves? E. Can it be found Elsewhere, through interlibrary loan or on the Web?
[...]
Since every system of elimination is based, no matter what they say, on circulation counts, the number of years that have elapsed since a book was last checked out, or the number of times it has been checked out overall, if you feel strongly about a book, you should go to every library you have access to and check out the volume you care about. Take it home awhile. Read it or don't. Keep it beside you as you read the same book on a Kindle, Nook, or iPad.**** Let it breathe the air of your home, and then take it back to the library, knowing you have fought the guerrilla war for physical books.
[...]
Traditionally, fiction assumes that an event like the death of a wife and child should be dramatized at a length appropriate to its gravity. [Alain-René Le Sage, author of Gil Blas] pivots from one state to another with no more than "But, alas!" and although Gil Blas tells us he couldn't eat, fell into a deep depression, and might have died if Scipio had not forced him to sustain himself, there is no plumbing the depths of his soul. We are left to imagine his anguish: "Let the reader conceive...the sorrow with which I was seized."
There is a certain wisdom to this approach in fiction, as in life. When a child dies, when a spouse dies, one feels the grief that one feels when a child dies or a spouse dies. There's no point in trying to describe it. How much does it hurt to have your arm pulled from the socket? It hurts as much as having your arm pulled from the socket.
it's been a good year for reading thus far, so good that i have yet to make much progress in 2015's version of BOOKS I READ, IN ORDER OF HOW INTERESTED I WAS IN SLEEPING WITH THEM BENEATH MY PILLOW (STRONGEST CANDIDATES FIRST), AND HAIKU DISCUSSION. i forced my sister to take the first of elena ferrante's neapolitan novels back to california with her last week; i'd have insisted on all four, really, but it's impolite to inflict that much ballast on air travelers. if you, dear internets, have yet to read them and can endure the phase shift they could precipitate (i found myself reading for an extra three or four hours a night, which meant that for most of january i turned off my light and rose again in the morning with the people of hawaii rather than my neighbors in new york city), get on that.
i'll be turning in a piece on my third half marathon this friday. how did i get here?
*stanford has been thoroughly coed since it admitted its first students in 1891, by the by.
**a full timeline of women's suffrage is here. in 1919, belgium extended the right to vote in national elections to "the widows and mothers of servicemen killed in World War I, to the widows and mothers of citizens shot or killed by the enemy, and to female political prisoners who had been held by the enemy." other gals weren't welcome at the polls until 1948.
***similarly, ye olde charity bookstore cafe doesn't accept donations of textbooks, tech manuals, or travel guides.
****don't read it on a kindle. fuck amazon, now and always.
02.18.15
[Sarah Sophie] Flicker helps run a women's-rights campaign called Lady Parts Justice, "to keep women up to date on what's happening with their uteruses," and she sees the [Elizabeth] Warren movement "as a bit of political theatre." "I'm just interested in moving Hillary [Clinton] to the left," she said. But I'm Warren-curious—which I guess is like bi-curious."nader had no moments.
That's what I am!" Kathleen Hanna, a musician, said, holding a veggie burger. (Also on offer: "Butterscotch Frozen Thing with Sour Apricot Sorbet.") In the nineties, Hanna helped to launch the riot-grrl movement; one of her songs features antiwar speeches by Al Sharpton and Susan Sarandon over a dance beat.
[...]
[Beastie Boy Adam] Horovitz was standing with Hanna—they're married—who says that she likes Warren, but that her primary concern is a Democratic victory in 2016. "I just want to make sure some weird fucking Nader thing doesn't happen." Horovitz looked down. "I might have been responsible for that one, too," he muttered. In 2000, the year Nader siphoned votes from Al Gore, Horovitz contributed a song to a Nader campaign compilation. "I mean, he had his moments!" Horovitz said defensively. "He just wouldn't go away." He shrugged and took another bite of the Frozen Thing.
(reeves wiedeman, from "the artist vote," new yorker 02.16.15)
10.16.13
From: 1
To: 2, 3
ok, today's brainstorm need: making a "drowning pool" ophelia-type candy vortex in a glass jar out of blue sour straws for our goth party. what kind of figurine or image do i put at the bottom of the vortex?
From: 2
To: 1, 3
The grieving lady face from Edward Gorey? Phyllis Schlafly? Martha Stewart?
From: 3
To: 1, 2
John Boehner?
To: 2, 3
ok, today's brainstorm need: making a "drowning pool" ophelia-type candy vortex in a glass jar out of blue sour straws for our goth party. what kind of figurine or image do i put at the bottom of the vortex?
From: 2
To: 1, 3
The grieving lady face from Edward Gorey? Phyllis Schlafly? Martha Stewart?
From: 3
To: 1, 2
John Boehner?
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