Category: Internerd
Pawdrophenia
| May 5, 2010 | Filled under Internerd |
My first slideshow ever went live on the Houston Press website last night, pictures from Jen’s third annual Pawdrophenia scooter ride benefiting SMART Animal Rescue. I fell in love love love with a pug with a bum leg but CLH would never let me take home another dog. He was so sweet. His name was Obie.
More pictures of the ride on Flickr.
Is it weird that I think Junichiro Koizumi is atrractive?
| May 4, 2010 | Filled under Internerd |
I am in the depths of finals, desperately trying to finish up two papers before 5 p.m. today. Only then can I emerge from my dungeon, covered in grime and pale from lack of sunlight.
One paper is about sexual tourism and the other is about something I haven’t quite figured out yet, which sucks because it’s totally due in six hours. In the meantime, I wish I was working on something like this: the feminist implications of Dirty Dancing
It is easier to ask for forgiveness than permission
| April 22, 2010 | Filled under Internerd |
The other day Matt K and I were talking about regret. I never had any for a long time. Decades. And then I had a ton. There is still wishful thinking and a sense of time wasted. I did a lot with my time, but there was so much I never even attempted because I thought for sure I would be bad at it. Or good at it. This is why I never learned to ollie very well and why I didn’t pursue writing as a legit career until I was about 28. At 28, I had been freelancing steadily for 12 years and publishing a zine, and I still was under the mistaken belief that I did not have what it took to be a writer. Matt convinced me I should try, and I did, and I realized about three weeks into “trying” that could have been writing full time for years, and my cowardice — fear of my own ambition got in the way. And that is my regret. That I lived without a sense of permission for so long.
Words I really needed to read just now, in a time of self-doubt, from a writer and a woman I admire.
Two hearts, two hearts
| April 19, 2010 | Filled under Internerd |
The Tacita Dean kick continues, unabated.
I was going to start by bringing up the one thing in your work that I know has influenced my own work, which is the green ray, because I put that little bit of dialogue in Middlesex about people talking about a green ray, which I learned about from you, not having seen your film The Green Ray. I think you said that you got the green ray in the film, but it never appears in any single frame. But you can see it momentarily when the film is running. Is that right?
Jeffrey Eugenides interviews Tacita Dean for BOMB Magazine, circa 2006.
More info on the green ray.
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.
