January Auto-Fun Archives

1.30.08
quote: "If reality isn't my picture of it, I'm lost." (Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless)
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links: On Second Person (@NYMag Book Review), The Antinomian Crisis, by Jean Gallagher (@pebble lake review), Can The Novella Save Literature? (@The Guardian UK), Amateur Photo Contest: Hoodies (@nerve.com), Gay For Pay (@Radar)
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1.29.08
quote: "I want to pick lemons off my tree and sell this house and go everywhere." (Eileen Myles)
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links: RECAP! The L Word, Episode 504 (@autostraddle), The Murky Demimonde of Amazon's Top Reviewers (@Slate.com), Books That Make You Dumb (@Virgil Griffith), Nominate Me For Lesbo Blog of the Year! (@TLL)
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1.28.08
quote: "The internet is, for loners, an absolute and total miracle. It is, for us, the best invention of the last millennium. It educates. It entertains. It transforms. It facilitates a kind of dialogue in which we need not be seen, so it suits us perfectly. It validates. It makes being alone seem normal. It makes being alone fun for everyone." (from Anneli Rufus' "The Loner's Manifesto")
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link:Ten Famous Writers Reveal Their Works That Never Made it Into Print (@Independent UK),Dr. Dippy, Meet Dr. Evil (@NY Times), The Ballad of Heath and Michelle (@Radar Archives)
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1.27.08
quote: "There are so many different ways to be connected to people. There are people you feel an unspoken connection to, even though there's not even a word for it. There's the people who you've known forever who know you in this way that other people can't because they've seen you change. They've let you change." (My So-Called Life)
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link:Exercpt from "The Face of Seung-Hui Cho" (@n+1), A President Like My Father: Obama (Caroline Kennedy @The NY Times), Nominate Me For Lesbo Blog of the Year! (@TLL),
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1.26.08
quote: "I don't know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life, anybody's life, my life. All he'd wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where did I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got?" (Bladerunner)
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link: Primary Choices: Hilary Clinton (@The NY Times), My Preferred Medium is Prejudice (@fourfour), A Life Less Cartoony (@The National Post)
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1.25.08
quote: "The reading of these [excellent] books seems to perform a curious couching operation of the senses; one sees more intensely afterwards; the world seems bared of its covering and given an intenser life. Those are the enviable people who live at enimity with unreality; and those are the pitiable who are knocked on the head by the thing done without knowing or caring. So that when I ask you to earn money and have a room of your own, I am asking you to live in the presence of reality, an invigorating life, it would appear, whether one can impart it or not." (Virginia Wolff, A Room of One's Own)
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link: Finally Good News w/r/t Publishing (@mediabistro), Calling Out of Context: I Worked the Phones at the Victoria's Secret Catalogue (@nerve.com)
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1.24.08
quote: "Big city, hmm? Live. Work, huh? But. Only peoples. Peoples is peoples. No is buildings. Is tomatos, huh? Is peoples, is dancing, is music, is potatoes. So, peoples is peoples. Okay?" (Pete, The Muppets take Manhattan)
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link:The Ticking is the Bomb (@Esquire Magazine), Nominate Me For Lesbo Blog of the Year! (@TLL)
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1.23.08
quote: "There is one lovely word, darling, you have underlined to make me pull myself off better. Write me more about that and yourself, sweetly, dirtier, dirtier." (James Joyce)
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link:Kickstart My Heart (@n+1), NEW L WORD RECAP: Episode 503: Lady of the Lake (@Autostraddle), Heath Ledger, Alex Balk Finally Says Goodbye to His Soul (@Gawker), Nominate Me For Lesbo Blog of the Year! (@TLL)
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1.22.08
quote: "I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books; I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me." (Herman Hesse, Demian)
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link: NEW L WORD RECAP: Episode 503: Lady of the Lake (@Autostraddle), Poem:Science Fiction (@The New Yorker), Have You Had Your Oates Today? (@Post-Gazette)
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1.20.08
quote: "Here's a secret: Everyone, if they live long enough, will lose their way at some point. You will lose your way, you will wake up one morning and find yourself lost. This is a hard, simple truth. If it hasn't happened to you yet, consider yourself lucky." (Nick Flynn, Esquire Magazine: "The Ticking is the Bomb: A Memoir of Torture.")
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link: Should Nabakov's Final Work Be Destroyed? (Slate.com), Planet Podcast for Episode #502 (@The Planet Cast), Is the Bookworm an Endangered Species? (@Harper's), James Joyce's love letters to Nora.
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1.19.2008-1.20.2008
quote: there is. no fun. (carly, alex, riese, haviland, et al.)
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1.18.2008
quote: "I'm on vacation. Oh, and if anyone asks, I'm also on smack." (Peter, The Family Guy)
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links: What's in a Font? (@The Atlantic), Shoplifting from American Apparel (@Vice Magazine)
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1.17.2008
quote: "Writing is what I did when I was alone with no one watching me or telling me what to do. I could do whatever I wanted." (Kathy Acker)
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links: In Praise of Melancholy (@Chronicle of Higher Ed), The MySpace Suicide Hoax (@The New Yorker)
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1.16.2008
quote: "How naive of me to suppose that I could track down a past moment of reverie and precisely recover it in words. I find it impossible to determine which of those two records is the more accurate one, because together they constitute the memory that is left of the event." (Jonia Agee, Harper's)
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links: Bookslut @ PW, Are You There God, It's Me Jamiroquai (@archewood), I Really Actually Liked Him A Lotalot: Actor Brad Renfro Dies at 25.
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1.15.2008
quote: "Marco enters a city: he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical place of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches." (Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities)
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link:Q&A with David Mamet (@NY Mag), Lozo's Open For Business (@wdwgdab), Effective Social-Climbing on Facebook (@RADAR)
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1.14.2008
quote:
I keep unplanning the same Sunday. Leg/and flower, breeze and terrier, I have no garden/and couldn't be happier. Please, don't lose me/here. I am sorry my clutch is all/tendon and no discipline: the heart is a severed/kind of muscle and alone. I can hear yours in your room. I hear mine/in another room. In another's." (Brenda Shaughnessy)
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link:Recap: Episode 502, The L Word (@Autostraddle), Anon: The Best Writer Ever (@The Guardian UK)
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1.13.2008.
quote: "The art of losing isn't hard to master;/so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster." (Elizabeth Bishop, from "One Art")
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link: Has Gawker Jumped the Snark? (@NYTimes), Essay About Popular Adaptations of Classic Literature (@NYTimes Sunday Book Review), The Case Against Starbucks (@Washington Monthly).
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1.12.2008
quote: "So it's not that kind of optimism -- a crisis out of which a reversal will erupt. Nor is it of an apocalyptic nature where a revelation of truth will take place. This is why there's a great, pervasive depression, because there's no revelation forthcoming --- that's the revelation! There's no sudden revolution or reversal to be hoped for (nor necessarily to be desired)." (Avital Ronell)
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link: read this NOW-Just Because I'm a Fag, It Doesn't Mean I'm a Bitch(@fourfour)
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1.11.2008
quote: "Hyperbole is the single most crucial tool in any writer’s war chest. More important than paper or any writing implement. Without it, there would be no poetry—no written communication of any kind. Eventually people would stop talking, their mouths would seal over, no one could eat food, and everyone would die—slowly and grossly, with blood spurting out from our eyes like from ebola. Thank God as big as ten thousand football stadiums! Thank Jesus who’s prettier than Marilyn Monroe and Ru Paul combined! Thank the universe’s most ultimately awesomest chocolate cake and all that is sacred and holy in this great country of ours for hyperbole!!!!!!!!!!" (jennifer knox in a bookslut interview)
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links: interview w/jennifer knox (@bookslut), music after the apocalypse & 3 other poems (@coconut seven), BRILL: murder unscripted - law & order w/o writers.
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1.10.2008:
quote:"My experience of life as essentially unhappy and uncontrollable taught me to examine the way people, including myself, create survival systems ... for themselves in unorthodox and sometimes apparently self-defeating ways. These inner worlds, although often unworkable and unattractive in social terms, can have a unique beauty and courage." (Mary Gaitskill)
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links: Michael Musto Has a Blog! (@Village Voice), New Planetcast (@The Planet Podcast), The Death of High Fidelity (@Rolling Stone)
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1.9.2008

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1.8.2008


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1.7.2008
quote:"No one has normal healthy relationships. My theory, that I have yet to put into practice, is that you pick someone slightly less crazy than you." (Billy, Six Feet Under)
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links:Interview w/Will Self on Psychogeography (@World Hum), Help your Heart With Exercise-and Booze (@The Guardian UK).
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1.6.2008
quote:“It’s a pity if someone… has to console himself for the wreck of his days with the notion that somehow his voice, his work embodies the deepest, most obscure, freshest, rawest oyster of reality in the unfathomable refrigerator of the heart’s ocean, but I am such a one, and there you have it.” (Leonard Cohen)
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link: The L Word Episode 501 RECAP on AutoStraddle, Why I Write: Joan Didion (1976 NYTimes), The History of Glamour: Teresa Duncan (@Vanity Fair), Who Pays for Sex? You'd Be Surprised (@Times Online UK)
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1.5.2008
quote: "Leave everything. Leave Dada. Leave your wife. Leave your mistress. Leave your hopes and fears. Leave your children in the woods. Leave the substance for the shadow. Leave your easy life, leave what you are given for the future. Set off on the roads."
André Breton
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links:I Always Skip the First 100 or So Pages of a Biography, Childhoods Are Never Interesting (@The Guardian UK), Interview with Leisha and Kate (@AfterEllen)
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1.4.2008
quote:“My true place in the world, it turned out was somewhere beyond myself, and if that place was inside me, it was also unlocatable. This was the tiny hole between self and not-self, and for the first time in my life I saw this nowhere as the exact center of the world." (Kathy Acker)
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links: The 2008 Poetry Forecast (@Possum Ego), About Facebook (@The Nation)
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1.3.2008
quote:"Literature is the one place in any society where within the secrecy of our heads we can hear voices talking about everything in every possible way." (Salman Rushdie)
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link:The Science of Dreams (@telegraph uk), Sex! Drugs! Study Hall! Choose Your Racy Teen Novel (@RADAR Online), The Reading Cure (@Guardian Unlimited Books)
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1.2.2008
quote: "If you're not spending every waking moment of your life radically rethinking the nature of the world - if you're not plotting every moment boiling the carcass of the old order - then you're wasting your day." (Douglass Coupland, "Girlfriend in a Coma.")
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links: Jesus Christ Decides He Doesn't Want to Celebrate His Birthday This Year (@McSweeny's), The Secret Library of Hope (@The Nation), Ode to the Midwest (@Poetry Magazine)
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1.1.2008
quote: "I'm awake; I am in the world--/I expect/
no further assurance./No protection, no promise." (from "Stars," by Louise Gluck)
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link: The L Word S5, Ep1 Pre-cap (@Autostraddle), The Best of the Best and the Worst (@The UK Sunday Times)

Complete List of Reader-Submitted Ideas for the Top Ten

1. Riese's most played songs on itunes
2. Riese's favorite things to put in her mouth.
3. Things to Do on a Snow Day
4. REASONS HAVILAND WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD...
5. Reasons why the gays always win arguments.
6. Reasons Hollister was created by the devil.
7. Stage plays/musicals that have been adapted to screen where the film version has been as good (if not better) than the original.
8. Favorite songs of all time that make Riese want to get up and dance no matter what.
9. Phrases that people say that make Riese cringe on the inside.
10. Styles (clothing, hair, etc.) Riese wants to come back (ie: side ponytails, acid washed jeans, parachute pants, mullets)
11. Best CDs of all time.
12. Movies that Riese doesn't want to admit that she's watched.
13. Reasons why Riese is obsessed with Detroit
14. Reasons why gay parents are the best thing ever
15. Reasons to call into work
16. Why Jew is the new Black
17. Why Riese doesn't do Sports
18. What Riese should be/have been doing instead of writing top 10s
19. Reasons commenting on autowin is better than bedtime
20. Movie/tv scenes to cry to
21. Riese's ideal boy/girl as composed of the top ten personality traits/physical characteristic/style points/whatevs from various peeps of admiration.
22. Countries to live in when old and rich
23. Memory-pregnant childhood/adolscent things hiding in the recesses of Riese's mind
24. Songs to sing/dance along to
25. Music-related memories
26. Places to drink
27. Top ten of top tens
28. Things That'll Never Get You A Date With Riese
29. Things That'll Surely Get You A Date With Riese
30. Things That Riese Would Do For Free
31. Things That Riese Wouldn't Do If You Paid Her A Million Dollars
32. (Famous) People Riese Is Attracted To
33. Top Ten Drunken Memories
34. Reasons Lint is the New Cashmere
35. Reasons Haviland should watch Empire Records
36. Most comment-garnering posts
37. Reasons people read my blog
38. Great cups of coffee
39. Blank is the new blank for 2008
40. Auto-universe Collisions with the 3-D Universe
41. First 10 thoughts that pop into my head
42. Top 8 things happening on 125th Street right now
43. Ways to eat a Reeses
44. Smells/songs tied to a memory
45. Things I should do at least once or only once or never or everyday
46. Ways auto-apparel can improve your life
47. Builders/Architects Who Just Didn't Get It...featuring the 10 most out-of-place eyesores of new construction in NYC
48. Funtastic things to do with your fave inanimate object (e.g., bottles of vodka)
49. Which L-word character are you? Create the test...everyone auto-wins!...except if you land on Papi b/c she's in the vortex with Mark creating nonconsensual vlogs or whatevs
50. Inappropriate sexual advances made by Lozo (successful and/or failed)
51. Creative uses of/ mock ad campaigns for Auto-Win Apparel (The pics/vlogs of Riese and Hav will make or break this one)
52. Anything Tegan and Sara related
53. Pics of Riese, Hav, Carly and the rest of the Auto-Win team sporting boy shorts
54. All-time fave places to visit after getting hopped up on smack and nose candy
55. Reasons why Mr. redacted is probs still reading Riese's blog...and loving it!
56. Things Riese'll do when her t.v. show gets picked up and Riese becomes rich and famous
57. Comments/suggestions Riese'll make to your BFF, Ilene Chaiken, when she comes to her senses and starts answering Riese's calls.
58. Things people should tell you within the first month of knowing them.
59. Books (or anything) that are overrated but you'll hear everyone say they are just fantastic anyway (and you'll agree).
60. Things Riese Wishes She Could Do
61. Things Riese just wants to throw out there (Riese's height, Lozo's, etc).
62. Automatics (.38, winners, straddles, apparel).
63. Worst moments of The L Word
64. Ways to get your own vodka on the cruise this summer, so you don't have to pay $9/drink.
65. Strangest emails sent to you by readers.
66. Reasons not to gouge out your eyes after seeing Kate hanging out with Paris pictures.
67. Memoirs
68. Shows Riese refuses to watch

"Each From Different Heights" by Stephen Dunn

That time I thought I was in love
and calmly said so
was not much different from the time
I was truly in love
and slept poorly and spoke out loud
to the wall
and discovered the hidden genius
of my hands
And the times I felt less in love,
less than someone,
were, to be honest, not so different
either.
Each was ridiculous in its own way
and each was tender, yes,
sometimes even the false is tender.
I am astonished
by the various kisses we're capable of.
Each from different heights
diminished, which is simply the law.
And the big bruise
from the long fall looked perfectly white
in a few years.
That astounded me most of all.

[1989. Stephen Dunn, Between Angels.]