Posts Tagged by Reading
“To Kanye”
| February 23, 2010 | Filled under Blog |
— verb (used with object)
1. to demonstrate male privilege right egregiously, to interrupt the woman speaking and dispense your “wisdom”
The inimitable Jessica Hopper used this term in a recent blog post about a man in her gardening class who kept trying to finish the (female) master botanist’s sentences with incorrect information. Constantly.
…never raising his hand, dragging the class down with his exercise of his male right to be a non-stop and vocal authority without being an authority at all.
See also: male answer syndrome. To her credit, Hopper somewhat excuses the guy, since he is, after all, a product of environmental conditioning, but good god, I don’t know where she found the inner strength to do so.
I got so mad, even though he was totally a grandpa and sometimes that is just how grandpas are and there is no amount of coughing or annoyed looks that could possibly stop him. The first 49 years of his life his everyday just enforced that he was the boss of the gals. Any and all gals.
So glad she wrote that last part because it gave me a new perspective of the misogynistic cantankerous British expats who loitered nightly at the Foreigner’s Club in Korea, sailors have lived their whole lives surrounded by other brutish men and living in countries (like Korea) where women are still expected to make perfect, subservient silent wives. Then I come along, with my opinions and other unladylike traits, and you can imagine what happened.
Hopper’s post came right after I read Jessica Valenti’s blog about her recent WaPo post, “For women in America, equality is still an illusion.” Valenti’s received hundred of comments from angry, angry men:
furiously denying that sexism exists by…well, being sexist.
The comments are not for the faint of heart. Every last one of them is Kanye-d to the extreme.
I just remembered, though, being on a historical tour of Communist Prague, me and CLH with a young-ish tour guide (maybe 35?) and three old Swedish men. One of the Swedish men was SO ADAMANT about finishing the guide’s stories, proving his wealth of historical knowledge, interrupting to ask innane questions and one upping the guide at every chance. So maybe it has as much to do with agism as sexism. Or maybe that old man was just an entitled ass.
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.
More books than time
| December 28, 2009 | Filled under Shorts |
I have frequently fretted about my to-read list, which is topping 300 books, and I can’t even manage to read a book a week. At that rate it’ll take me six years to finish the books on my list right now, which multiply exponentially as each day passes.
Right now I’m reading The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life and here is an appropriate quote from Winston Churchill on owning more books than you’ll ever be able to read:
“If they cannot be your friends, let them at any rate be your acquaintances.”
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.
More tales from the Wall
| November 10, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
Der Spiegel has an excellent account of the events of the Berlin Wall’s destruction.
The Legend of Boggy Creek
| October 30, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
For Halloween: here’s a story my dad used to tell me when I was a kid. Dad loves ghost stories and on long late drives to Dallas to visit my sister* he used to try his hardest to freak me out. This one was especially effective.
*Happy birthday to little sis, who turns 22 today!
Pale Horse, Pale Rider
| October 28, 2009 | Filled under Shorts |
Recommended humpday reading: If the swine flu thing has you remotely paranoid, try reading Katherine Anne Porter’s definitive short story “Pale Horse, Pale Rider.” Based on her own near-death experience during the WWI flu outbreak. I discovered and fell in love with Porter recently during a class that I hated, but it was almost worth taking the class for the discovery alone. Oddly, Porter seems to be one of the forgotten authors of the 20th century. Her other stories, all largely biographical, are also good.
“Izzy” by James Ellroy
| October 14, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
Izzy was out in back. Izzy was relaxing in the sun. What’s up, Daddy-O? Stray pit. Year old. She was too cool for school. Cocaine white and leather brown. She had cute in spades. Brooks felt kicked in the gut. Brooks felt his breath go. Brooks felt like he was going to boo-hoo-hoo. Fucking dog. Snap out of it, Brooksy. Snap-snap. Brooks caught himself — all stiff and starched. Bingo, baby. Open the car door, and Izzy’s in like you-know. Fucking L.A.
Pet adoption ads as written by esteemed authors both living and deceased, via the Houston Press. Fucking L.A.
Rosemary’s Baby
| October 8, 2009 | Filled under Internerd |
I try not to get too political around here, or too current event-sy, but the Polanski case has really got me all pissed off and some of the people who are coming to his defense are downright disappointing. Like this self-proclaimed feminist.
At the risk of sounding too didactic, I’d like to ask this favor of you. Please go read this excellent blog post about the definition and consequences of rape culture.
Worth it
| September 10, 2009 | Filled under Blog |
I watched from my ex-pat residence in Korea as Anderson Cooper stood on the streets of New Orleans in the days after Hurricane Katrina. And three years later, I sat in a hotel room in Berlin and watched as he stood on the shores of Galveston Island, wondering if my house would be flooded when I got back from vacation.
I was lucky to not have suffered damage in either storm, and to have missed out on the weeks of power outages, roads clogged with debris and subsequent flooding due to our city’s wonderful civil engineering. But I wouldn’t have complained. It’s all a part of living in Houston.
That’s the idea behind the Houston: It’s Worth It ad campaign, and if you live here you already know all about this. But HIWI is a nicely subversive way to answer all those people in other parts of the country who love to tell me how much this town sucks (99% of whom have never lived here or even visited).
HIWI has released a book, HIWI:Ike chronicling our beloved city’s adventures with Mother Nature in the shadow of the other “big storm” a state over and a few years before. Ike made landfall in Galveston on Sept. 13 of last year, but many of the small beach communities along the Texas Coast were hit far worse (and received far less help) than Galvez Town.
Tonight, DOMY will host a sale and booksigning with the creators of HIWI. Check my friend Bargas’ contribution to the book on page 149.
