Category: Internerd
Lesson for the day
| February 28, 2010 | Filled under Internerd, Shorts |
Wes Anderson on the Menil Collection
| February 5, 2010 | Filled under Internerd |
Wes Anderson hatred abounds, buy y’all can all suck it.
Anderson: I always feel like there are specific things about Houston. There’s one museum in particular in Houston. So many of the things that I’m interested in now I can sort of trace back to that museum, which introduced me to them.
Cocker: What museum is that?
Anderson: It’s called The Menil Collection. There was this woman, Dominique de Menil—I think she was French, but she had one of the great Texas oil fortunes—and her art collection was vast. She collected lots of surrealist works—Salvador Dalí and René Magritte and Max Ernst and those Joseph Cornell boxes. She also collected abstract expressionist and pop art. So there were those John Chamberlain sculptures made from smashed-up cars and Dan Flavin fluorescent tubes and pieces by Donald Judd and Cy Twombly. There’s a building they call the Rothko Chapel that’s just these [Mark] Rothko pieces. I’d never heard of any of this before I walked through those doors. But there’s no place where I feel quite as much at home as I do in Houston. Even if Houston is not the place that I find the most exciting necessarily, it’s very peaceful for me to go there, I think, because I’m from there.*
If you’ve ever been to The Menil (my favorite museum in Houston (my favorite museum in the world is The British Museum)) and then watched The Royal Tennenbaums you can see the influence everywhere, from Eli Cash’s obsession with Indian masks to the (fictional) 375th St YMCA, which I’m convinced is modeled after the Downtown Y in Houston.
* From an interview with my boyfriend, Jarvis Cocker, in Interview Magazine, via Culturemap.
Innnnnnteresting…
| February 2, 2010 | Filled under Blog, Internerd |
Columnist Ann Landers once did an informal survey of her readers back in the 1970′s. The single question she asked of them was: “If you had it to do over again, would you still have children?” A surprising 70% said “no.”
From a MeFi thread on the rudest of all rude questions, “So… when are you going to have kids?” Proving that misery loves company.
Me gusta la Vespa
| January 18, 2010 | Filled under Blog, Internerd, Video |
Helmet Hair Magazine, a Texas-based magazine catering to women who ride motorcycles, has branched into covering the scooterist lifestyle too. I have a column in their brand new section, Scooteristas Unite.
On Barthelme and seredipity
| December 23, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
It may be confirmation bias but I’m been reading about, hearing mentions of and getting recommendations for Donald Barthelme’s work a lot lately. It started earlier this year when I read The School for my creative writing workshop. I am ashamed to admit I had never read him before.
Over on MetaFilter, someone has linked to a 2003 copy of The Believer featuring a story on Barthelme and the reading list he assigned to students. The Believer has scanned the hand-scribbled list but you can also see a text version of the list.
His own book, 60 Stories is on my own personal reading list, but until I get around to buying it, I’m going to tide myself over with Jessamyn West’s collection of Barthelme links.
One more thing — I am currently a proud student of the fruits of Barthelme’s labor. He founded the Creative Writing Department at the University of Houston.
I remembered what it was like to work hard.
| December 23, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
Janice Erlbaum, who has been on a deliberate self-imposed internet hiatus for the past few months, has written an interesting post about her experiences with NaNoWriMo.
I also learned how much you can write in an hour, as long as you don’t go back and reread and try to polish things. I used to think, what’s the point, I only have an hour between appointments, I’ll skip the office today. Now I know, I can write three pages in an hour. I also know that I can get up an hour earlier in the morning if I have to, that I can stay up an hour later. I remembered what it was like to work hard.
Makes me rethink boycotting the event each year.
The perils of being female in Korea
| December 7, 2009 | Filled under Blog, Internerd |
The Awl’s take on The Korea Times’ report that one in five South Korea women are starving themselves to be “beautiful.” No shit!
If you asked a South Korean woman to draw what she thought she looked like on a wall in crayon, she would FORGET THE TASK BECAUSE SHE IS SO HUNGRY.
Even I wasn’t immune to that image pressure bullshit, when boutiques only sell one size of clothing and it’s the one you don’t fit into, when most Korean women wouldn’t dare leave the house without five layers of make-up and ten of hairspray on, when it’s the year 2009 and Korea still remains a culture where a woman’s main value is how many babies she can produce and how she’s more attractive to look at than listen to. This culminates into 99.99% of what made living there so hard for me, a feminist, an opinionated, and outspoken woman trapped in something akin to 1950s America.
Person from Porlock
| November 24, 2009 | Filled under Blog, Internerd |
I have read so much British poetry this semester. I have never been a fan of poetry but I kind of love Coleridge for his apologetic ways. “Kubla Khan” is an amazing journey into bizarre-ville.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man.
Down to a sunless sea.
Coleridge claimed that the poem was inspired by an opium-induced dream (implicit in the poem’s subtitle A Vision in a Dream) but that the composition was interrupted by a person from Porlock. A note on a manuscript by Coleridge explicitly states that he had taken opium at the time to combat dysentery.
The person from Porlock thing has me fascinated.
It has been suggested that… the Person from Porlock was in fact fictional and intended as a credible explanation of the poem’s seemingly fragmentary state as published. The poet Roger McGough also suggested this view in one of his own poems, saying “I think he got stuck.”
“Few people,” Pinsky said, “can write without procrastination, time-wasting, whining, and avoiding.” But writers hate admitting that, and may create spectacular fibs to cover it. “The most famous example is Coleridge,” with the person from Porlock, which Stevie Smith saw through. Pinsky says writers of today have “the perfect Porlockian escape: the telephone,” provided there’s no answering machine.
Eff Yeah Boston Terriers!
| November 20, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
Via Apartment Therapy, an amazing postcard series of Boston terriers on MCM-design chairs. That link lead me to the adorable blog Fuck Yeah Boston Terriers.
