1.30.08
quote: "If reality isn't my picture of it, I'm lost." (Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless)
**
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)
**
1.29.08
quote: "I want to pick lemons off my tree and sell this house and go everywhere." (Eileen Myles)
*
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)
**
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")
*
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)
**
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)
*
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),
**
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)
*
link: Primary Choices: Hilary Clinton (@The NY Times), My Preferred Medium is Prejudice (@fourfour), A Life Less Cartoony (@The National Post)
**
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)
*
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)
**
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)
**
link:The Ticking is the Bomb (@Esquire Magazine), Nominate Me For Lesbo Blog of the Year! (@TLL)
**
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)
*
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)
**
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)
*
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)
**
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.")
*
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.
**
1.19.2008-1.20.2008
quote: there is. no fun. (carly, alex, riese, haviland, et al.)
**
1.18.2008
quote: "I'm on vacation. Oh, and if anyone asks, I'm also on smack." (Peter, The Family Guy)
*
links: What's in a Font? (@The Atlantic), Shoplifting from American Apparel (@Vice Magazine)
**
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)
*
links: In Praise of Melancholy (@Chronicle of Higher Ed), The MySpace Suicide Hoax (@The New Yorker)
**
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)
*
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.
**
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)
**
link:Q&A with David Mamet (@NY Mag), Lozo's Open For Business (@wdwgdab), Effective Social-Climbing on Facebook (@RADAR)
**
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)
*
link:Recap: Episode 502, The L Word (@Autostraddle), Anon: The Best Writer Ever (@The Guardian UK)
**
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")
*
link: Has Gawker Jumped the Snark? (@NYTimes), Essay About Popular Adaptations of Classic Literature (@NYTimes Sunday Book Review), The Case Against Starbucks (@Washington Monthly).
**
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)
*
link: read this NOW-Just Because I'm a Fag, It Doesn't Mean I'm a Bitch(@fourfour)
**
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)
*
links: interview w/jennifer knox (@bookslut), music after the apocalypse & 3 other poems (@coconut seven), BRILL: murder unscripted - law & order w/o writers.
**
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)
*
links: Michael Musto Has a Blog! (@Village Voice), New Planetcast (@The Planet Podcast), The Death of High Fidelity (@Rolling Stone)
**
1.9.2008
**
1.8.2008
**
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)
*
links:Interview w/Will Self on Psychogeography (@World Hum), Help your Heart With Exercise-and Booze (@The Guardian UK).
**
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)
*
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)
**
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
*
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)
**
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)
*
links: The 2008 Poetry Forecast (@Possum Ego), About Facebook (@The Nation)
**
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)
*
link:The Science of Dreams (@telegraph uk), Sex! Drugs! Study Hall! Choose Your Racy Teen Novel (@RADAR Online), The Reading Cure (@Guardian Unlimited Books)
**
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.")
*
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)
**
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)
*
link: The L Word S5, Ep1 Pre-cap (@Autostraddle), The Best of the Best and the Worst (@The UK Sunday Times)
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Monday, January 14, 2008
Complete List of Reader-Submitted Ideas for the Top Ten
- Riese's most played songs on itunes
- Riese's favorite things to put in her mouth.
- Things to Do on a Snow Day
- REASONS HAVILAND WILL TAKE OVER THE WORLD...
- Reasons why the gays always win arguments.
- Reasons Hollister was created by the devil.
- Stage plays/musicals that have been adapted to screen where the film version has been as good (if not better) than the original.
- Favorite songs of all time that make Riese want to get up and dance no matter what.
- Phrases that people say that make Riese cringe on the inside.
- Styles (clothing, hair, etc.) Riese wants to come back (ie: side ponytails, acid washed jeans, parachute pants, mullets)
- Best CDs of all time.
- Movies that Riese doesn't want to admit that she's watched.
- Reasons why Riese is obsessed with Detroit
- Reasons why gay parents are the best thing ever
- Reasons to call into work
- Why Jew is the new Black
- Why Riese doesn't do Sports
- What Riese should be/have been doing instead of writing top 10s
- Reasons commenting on autowin is better than bedtime
- Movie/tv scenes to cry to
- Riese's ideal boy/girl as composed of the top ten personality traits/physical characteristic/style points/whatevs from various peeps of admiration.
- Countries to live in when old and rich
- Memory-pregnant childhood/adolscent things hiding in the recesses of Riese's mind
- Songs to sing/dance along to
- Music-related memories
- Places to drink
- Top ten of top tens
- Things That'll Never Get You A Date With Riese
- Things That'll Surely Get You A Date With Riese
- Things That Riese Would Do For Free
- Things That Riese Wouldn't Do If You Paid Her A Million Dollars
- (Famous) People Riese Is Attracted To
- Top Ten Drunken Memories
- Reasons Lint is the New Cashmere
- Reasons Haviland should watch Empire Records
- Most comment-garnering posts
- Reasons people read my blog
- Great cups of coffee
- Blank is the new blank for 2008
- Auto-universe Collisions with the 3-D Universe
- First 10 thoughts that pop into my head
- Top 8 things happening on 125th Street right now
- Ways to eat a Reeses
- Smells/songs tied to a memory
- Things I should do at least once or only once or never or everyday
- Ways auto-apparel can improve your life
- Builders/Architects Who Just Didn't Get It...featuring the 10 most out-of-place eyesores of new construction in NYC
- Funtastic things to do with your fave inanimate object (e.g., bottles of vodka)
- 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
- Inappropriate sexual advances made by Lozo (successful and/or failed)
- Creative uses of/ mock ad campaigns for Auto-Win Apparel (The pics/vlogs of Riese and Hav will make or break this one)
- Anything Tegan and Sara related
- Pics of Riese, Hav, Carly and the rest of the Auto-Win team sporting boy shorts
- All-time fave places to visit after getting hopped up on smack and nose candy
- Reasons why Mr. redacted is probs still reading Riese's blog...and loving it!
- Things Riese'll do when her t.v. show gets picked up and Riese becomes rich and famous
- Comments/suggestions Riese'll make to your BFF, Ilene Chaiken, when she comes to her senses and starts answering Riese's calls.
- Things people should tell you within the first month of knowing them.
- Books (or anything) that are overrated but you'll hear everyone say they are just fantastic anyway (and you'll agree).
- Things Riese Wishes She Could Do
- Things Riese just wants to throw out there (Riese's height, Lozo's, etc).
- Automatics (.38, winners, straddles, apparel).
- Worst moments of The L Word
- Ways to get your own vodka on the cruise this summer, so you don't have to pay $9/drink.
- Strangest emails sent to you by readers.
- Reasons not to gouge out your eyes after seeing Kate hanging out with Paris pictures.
- Memoirs
- Shows Riese refuses to watch
Tuesday, January 1, 2008
"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.]
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.]
Saturday, December 29, 2007
Autowin/Autostraddle Soundtrack Track Listing
Everyone who ordered Auto-Merch pre-Christmas got a CD filled with unidentified tracks. Isn't this fun, like a mystery game where you don't know what music you're listening to? If you've managed to get through the whole CD without killing yourself and want to know why, here's a hint:
OK ... because itunes is weird and has even more feelings than I do, there's two versions of the CD.
**
Soundtrack Version #1:
1. Your Ex-Lover is Dead - Stars
2. Good Luck (featuring Lisa Kekaula) - Basement Jaxx
3. Don't Cry Out - Shiny Toy Guns
4. Cruel and Clumsy - Chris Pureka
5. This is Everything - Tegan & Sara
6. If I Ever Feel Better - Phoenix
7. Piece of Me - Britney Spears
8. You Wouldn't Like Me - Tegan & Sara
9. Fidelity - Regina Spektor
10. Hear Me Out - Frou Frou
11. Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley
12. Umbrella - Rihanna
13. Heart - Stars
14. Manic Depression - Jimi Hendrix
15. Because of You (Jason Nevins Remix) - Kelly Clarkson
16. Say So - Uh Huh Her
17. Ave Maria - Franz Schubert
18. All I Want For Christmas is You - Mariah Carey
**
Soundtrack Version #2:
1. Your Ex-Lover is Dead - Stars
2. Good Luck (featuring Lisa Kekaula) - Basement Jaxx
3. Don't Cry Out - Shiny Toy Guns
4. Cruel and Clumsy - Chris Pureka
5. Lilac Wine - Jeff Buckley
6. This is Everything - Tegan & Sara
7. Hear me Out - Frou Frou
8. Fidelity - Regina Spektor
9. You Wouldn't Like Me - Tegan & Sara
10. Piece of Me - Britney Spears
11. If I Ever Feel Better - Phoenix
12. Umbrella - Rihanna
13. Heart - Stars
14. Because of You (Jason Nevins Remix) - Kelly Clarkson
15. Manic Depression - Jimi Hendrix
16. Say So - Uh Huh Her
17. All I Want For Christmas is You - Mariah Carey
18. Ave Maria - Franz Schubert
OK ... because itunes is weird and has even more feelings than I do, there's two versions of the CD.
**
Soundtrack Version #1:
1. Your Ex-Lover is Dead - Stars
2. Good Luck (featuring Lisa Kekaula) - Basement Jaxx
3. Don't Cry Out - Shiny Toy Guns
4. Cruel and Clumsy - Chris Pureka
5. This is Everything - Tegan & Sara
6. If I Ever Feel Better - Phoenix
7. Piece of Me - Britney Spears
8. You Wouldn't Like Me - Tegan & Sara
9. Fidelity - Regina Spektor
10. Hear Me Out - Frou Frou
11. Hallelujah - Jeff Buckley
12. Umbrella - Rihanna
13. Heart - Stars
14. Manic Depression - Jimi Hendrix
15. Because of You (Jason Nevins Remix) - Kelly Clarkson
16. Say So - Uh Huh Her
17. Ave Maria - Franz Schubert
18. All I Want For Christmas is You - Mariah Carey
**
Soundtrack Version #2:
1. Your Ex-Lover is Dead - Stars
2. Good Luck (featuring Lisa Kekaula) - Basement Jaxx
3. Don't Cry Out - Shiny Toy Guns
4. Cruel and Clumsy - Chris Pureka
5. Lilac Wine - Jeff Buckley
6. This is Everything - Tegan & Sara
7. Hear me Out - Frou Frou
8. Fidelity - Regina Spektor
9. You Wouldn't Like Me - Tegan & Sara
10. Piece of Me - Britney Spears
11. If I Ever Feel Better - Phoenix
12. Umbrella - Rihanna
13. Heart - Stars
14. Because of You (Jason Nevins Remix) - Kelly Clarkson
15. Manic Depression - Jimi Hendrix
16. Say So - Uh Huh Her
17. All I Want For Christmas is You - Mariah Carey
18. Ave Maria - Franz Schubert
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Auto-Fun Archive: December
12.31.2007
quote: ""We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
*
link: The Golden Suicides (@Vanity Fair), 2007: The Year in Pictures (@The New York Times), The Books of The Year 2007 (@Guardian Unlimited Books)
**
12.30.2007
quote: "What I've learned about comedy people is that they are define by the harshest level they've been to, their personal Aushwitz." (Bob Saget, Esquire, "What I've Learned")
*
link: The Amateurs' Hour: Is the Internet destroying our culture, or is it just annoying our snobs? (@Reason Magazine)
**
12.29.2007
quote:'They always say how mean I am. But let me tell you, the smart ones get it. When I took out the jokes about Cher, she said, "Why am I not in your act anymore?" (Joan Rivers)
*
links: "I Did it for Science: Jen Miller's Sex & The City Endurance Post" (@nerve) "Inside Apple Stores, A Certain Aura Enchants the Faithful" (@NY Times), Lozo's Year-End Wrap-Up Post
**
12.28.2007
quote: "Here I sat on a boulder by the winter-streaming river and put my head in my hands and considered time--which is next to nothing, merely what vanishes, and yet can make one's elbows nearly pierce one's thighs." (Galway Kinnell, "The Road Between Here and There")
**
link: Vulture Celebrates the Year in Vulture (@nymag), The Trouble With Mary: Beyond Belief (@The National Post)
**
12.27.2007
quote: "And how else should an angel land on earth but with the utmost difficulty? If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain, we will have to drag them out of the skies, and the efforts we expend to draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst." (Tony Kushner, on a letter tacked to the backstage bulletin board for the cast & crew of Angels in America)
*
link: The Guardian's 2007 in Books Quiz, "Alma" by Junot Diaz (@ The New Yorker)
**
12.26.2007
quote: "God, there is so much emotion to navigate where family's concerned. Vicodin, anyone?" (Aunt Sarah, Six Feet Under)
**
link: What's Wrong With the American Essay (Cristina Nehring @truthdig)
**
12.25.2007
quote: "Jesus' words have become so perverted over time -- it's been like a game of telephone. If he existed he would fuckin' kill himself." (Sarah Silverman)
*
"For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might
be saved." (John 3:17)
*
links: Sedaris and Crumpet the Elf: A Holiday Tradition (@NPR), Buzzwords 2007: All We Are Saying (@NYTimes)
**
12.24.2007
quote: "This house is so full of people it makes me sick. When I grow up and get married, I'm living alone." (Kevin McAllister, Home Alone)
**
link: You Are What You Read (NY Times), Sacha Baron Cohen: Killing Off Borat (@Daily Telegraph), Auto Apparel Store obvs (!!)
**
12.23.2007
quote: "I'm very sane about how crazy I am." (Carrie Fisher)
*
link: Sacha Baron Cohen: Killing Off Borat, Auto Apparel Store obvs (!!), Reasons to Love New York (@NY Mag), Esquire's 10th Anniversary 'What I've Learned' (@Esquire)
**
12.22.2007
quote: "Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers." (Rainer Maria Rilke)
*
links:The Twilight of the Books: What Will Life Be Like If People Stop Reading (@The New Yorker), Bonfire of the Disney Princesses (by Barbara Ehreich @The Nation), Year in Review (@NY Magazine)
**
12.21.2007
quote: "Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." (Abraham Heschel)
*
link: "One Day" (Poem, Grace Paley) (@The New Yorker)
**
12.20.2007
quote: (from Our Town, Thornton Wilder)
Emily: Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you. [she looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly, through her tears:] Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?
Stage Manager: No. [pause] The saints and poets, maybe -- they do some.
*
links: Are We Not Men? Down the Ladder From Playboy to Maxim (@The Atlantic), The Hollywood Guide to Drinking (@nerve.com)
**
12.19.07:
quote: "Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." (Abraham Heschel)
*
link: "One Day" (Poem, Grace Paley) (@The New Yorker)
**
12.18.07:
quote: "I have asked my mother if she regrets her marriage, her choices, and she has told me it is pointless to regret. That she did what she could do. What more can we ask of ourselves? I want to tell her, but do not, that we must ask for so much more, for everything, for love and tenderness and decency and courage. That we must be much more than comfortable, that we must be better than we think we can be, so if in some foreign tongue, we are confronted with those childhood questions -- "Qui etes-vous? Qui suis-je?" --we will not be afraid to answer." (E.J Levy, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," Salmagundi '05)
*
link: Next Stop, Never-Never Land: ANTM Finale Recap (@fourfour), We Need to Talk About Pecan: Three brilliant novelists on Christmas Cooking (@The Guardian UK), The Etiquette of Telecommunications (@The Economist)
**
12.17.07:
quote: Sooner or later you have a finished manuscript more or less. People look at it ina a vaguely troubled sort of way and say, "I'll bet becoming a writer was always a fantasy of yours, wasn't it?" Your lips dry to salt. Say that of all the fantasies possible in the world, you can't imagine being a writer even making the top twenty. Tell them you were going to be a child psychology major. "I bet," they always sigh, "you'd be great with kids." Scowl fiercely. Tell them you're a walking blade. (Lorrie Moore, 'How to be a Writer')
*
link: An Exhaustive List of Links to Every Year-End List(@Filmalicious),On Facebook, Scholars Link Up with Social Data (@NY Times), Turning Free Web Work Into Real Book Sales (@NY Times)
**
12.16.07:
quote:"Sometimes I see myself fine, sometimes I need a witness and I like the whole truth, but there are nights I only need forgiveness. Sometimes they say "I don't know who you are but let me walk with you some" And I say "I am alone, that's all, you can't save me from all the wrong I've done." But they're waiting just the same with their flashlights and their semaphores, and I'll act like I have faith and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends." (Dar Williams)
*
links: Gone Wild and Gone All Wrong: Joe Francis in Jail, holla (@NY Times), When the Bullies Turned Faceless: Cellphone cameras and text messages, social networking websites, e-mail and IM, all give teenagers more ways to play tricks on one another. (@NYTimes), Every Loo Must Have One: Bathroom Books (@Guardian UK)
**
12.15.2007
quote: "We don't know what humans are like. And the ground is not economics; it's not like people do everything they do for economic reasons. You've got to look at the imagination; you've got to look at sex. We have no way of describing these things using the language we have." (Kathy Acker)
*
links: The Hate That Hate Doesn't Produce: "Fall From Grace") (@fourfour), Nancy Redd Sees Vulva Everywhere: "Body Drama" (@New York Mag)
**
12.14.2007
quote: "For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me, in saying it, to understand it." (from Rilke, "Requiem for a Friend")
*
links:Kids Say the Most Homophobic Things (@youtube), NY Magazine's Best of 2007 (@NY Mag), Feministing Holiday Gift Guide (@feministing), Nerve.com Holiday Gift Guide (@nerve)
**
12.13.07
quote: "This happens. This is something that happens." (Stanley, Magnolia)
*
links: "Bill and Hillary Clinton's Pitch in Iowa: 'I Love the 90's'" (@NY Times), Lily Allen Joins Orange Prize Judges(@Guardian UK)
**
12.12.07: DO THIS "Listen, my truest love ..." (Stephen Dunn)
links: The Charity Buzz Auctions Benefiting the Paris Review, Listening to Films, Radar Reviews "Helevectia"
*
12.10.2007
quote: "Well, you and I have different management styles. I believe work should be fun, and you try to crush people's spirits. What's next, Michael? Are you going to make dancing illegal? Is this the tiny town from Footloose?" (Lindsay, Arrested Development)
*
links: The Best Year-End Books List I've Seen @ (The Year in Reading/The Millions), The King of Sentences, by Jonathan Lethem (fiction @ The New Yorker), Shopping with Kate Moenning (@YouTube).
**
12.9.2007
quote: "Trees in their youth look younger/than almost anything/I mean/In the spring/When they put forth green leaves and try/to look like real trees/Honest to God/I can see them trying." (Jack Spicer)
*
links: From The Sunday NY Times -- Radiohead: Pay What You Want For This Article,Your Child's Disorder May Be Yours, Too, The Year of Dressing Dangerously: Monthly Party Gives 1992 Its Due
**
12.8.2007
quote: "Books made people different, she thought. That's why Dolores felt different every day, after every book. It felt as if every book she read somehow altered her chemical constitution." (from "The Darling," Scott Bradfield.)
*
link: "Bloggers v. Criticism, Intro: The Critical Condition" (@TimeOut), nerve's new Hollywood Sex Scene Database (@Nerve)
**
12.7.2007
quote: "My candle burns at both ends/ It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends/It gives a lovely light." (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
*
link: Autostraddle Season Five Recap Trailer Vlog #3, Laureate Attacks Poetry Teaching (@BBC News), Hollywood's Plastic Surgery Obsession (@ RADAR online), Is an "Arrested Development" movie in the works? (@ AfterEllen),
**
12.6.2007
quote: "I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is 'depressing' because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty" stories, in which every problem is an occasion for a joke, "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown-ups now, we get to stay in the kitchen when the other grown-ups talk." (Tobias Wolff, Intro to Vintage Book of Contemporary Short Stories)
*
link: Permalancers Get Cancer Too! (@Gawker), Return to Fat Camp @ fourfour, Marcel Berlins on the Last Lines to a Story He Adored by Raymond Carver, "I Feel Betrayed ... I Think." (@guardian uk)
**
12.5.07
quote:
Rebecca: This is so bad, it's almost good.
Enid: This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.
(Ghost World)
*
link: Interview with Dani Who Still Has a Shot at Love! (@afterellen), Rachel Started Her Blog Again!, Viacom Screws Everyone (@gawker), 2007 Holiday Gift Guide: Music, Books, Fashion, Home, Dining & Wine (@The NY Times), Asperger's Syndrome Gets a Very Public Face (Heather from ANTM) (@The NY Times)
**
12.4.07
quote: "In my opinion, all men are islands. And what's more, now's the time to be one. This is an island age. It helps to think of the day as units of time, each unit consisting of thirty minutes. Most activities take about half an hour. Taking a bath. Doing the crossword. Exercising. Three units. Carefully trimming my perfectly unkempt hair, two units, easy. All in all, I had a very full life." (About a Boy)
*
link: ANTM Recap @fourfour, Books on a Plane (@Book Cannibal), "Found Objects" by Jennifer Egan (@The New Yorker), "Gawker" Obituary (@n+1),
**
12.3.07
quote: "Feeling screwed up at a screwed up time in a screwed up place does not necessarily make you screwed up." (Pump up the Volume)
*
link haze: New Dolly Parton Video featuring Amy Sedaris! (@Queerty), The Encyclopedia of Lesbian Movie Scenes (seriously, exhausting resource heaven), Two Gawker Editors Decide Not To Be Douchebags (@NYmag), Disney's $4 Billion "Princess" Brand (@Newsweek), What's Wrong With the American Essay? (@truthdig), "Is Reading Just About Making You Look Cool?" (@the Guardian UK)
**
12.2.07
quote: "People say with the book sometimes, "How did you write this book, it has no self-pity? It's compassionate. Dah, dah, dah."I say you should have seen the drafts. They are full of self-pity and ridiculous rages. And I edited them out mostly because when you look at the stuff on page it doesn't ring true, actually. It does feel like a diversion from the essential state. Which, hopefully if you can get to it, is a little purer." (Nick Flynn)
*
link: The Classless Utopia of Reality TV (@The NY Times), Pulse: The Glamour Girl (What Serena van der Woodsen is wearing) (@The NY Times)
**
12.1.07
quote: "Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again. But life goes on." (Blow)
*
link: The New York Weekend From Hell (@Gawker), From Lowest to Highest: The Levels of Greatness a Fiction Writer can achieve in America (@The Stranger)
quote: ""We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come." (Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being)
*
link: The Golden Suicides (@Vanity Fair), 2007: The Year in Pictures (@The New York Times), The Books of The Year 2007 (@Guardian Unlimited Books)
**
12.30.2007
quote: "What I've learned about comedy people is that they are define by the harshest level they've been to, their personal Aushwitz." (Bob Saget, Esquire, "What I've Learned")
*
link: The Amateurs' Hour: Is the Internet destroying our culture, or is it just annoying our snobs? (@Reason Magazine)
**
12.29.2007
quote:'They always say how mean I am. But let me tell you, the smart ones get it. When I took out the jokes about Cher, she said, "Why am I not in your act anymore?" (Joan Rivers)
*
links: "I Did it for Science: Jen Miller's Sex & The City Endurance Post" (@nerve) "Inside Apple Stores, A Certain Aura Enchants the Faithful" (@NY Times), Lozo's Year-End Wrap-Up Post
**
12.28.2007
quote: "Here I sat on a boulder by the winter-streaming river and put my head in my hands and considered time--which is next to nothing, merely what vanishes, and yet can make one's elbows nearly pierce one's thighs." (Galway Kinnell, "The Road Between Here and There")
**
link: Vulture Celebrates the Year in Vulture (@nymag), The Trouble With Mary: Beyond Belief (@The National Post)
**
12.27.2007
quote: "And how else should an angel land on earth but with the utmost difficulty? If we are to be visited by angels we will have to call them down with sweat and strain, we will have to drag them out of the skies, and the efforts we expend to draw the heavens to an earthly place may well leave us too exhausted to appreciate the fruits of our labors: an angel, even with torn robes, and ruffled feathers, is in our midst." (Tony Kushner, on a letter tacked to the backstage bulletin board for the cast & crew of Angels in America)
*
link: The Guardian's 2007 in Books Quiz, "Alma" by Junot Diaz (@ The New Yorker)
**
12.26.2007
quote: "God, there is so much emotion to navigate where family's concerned. Vicodin, anyone?" (Aunt Sarah, Six Feet Under)
**
link: What's Wrong With the American Essay (Cristina Nehring @truthdig)
**
12.25.2007
quote: "Jesus' words have become so perverted over time -- it's been like a game of telephone. If he existed he would fuckin' kill himself." (Sarah Silverman)
*
"For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might
be saved." (John 3:17)
*
links: Sedaris and Crumpet the Elf: A Holiday Tradition (@NPR), Buzzwords 2007: All We Are Saying (@NYTimes)
**
12.24.2007
quote: "This house is so full of people it makes me sick. When I grow up and get married, I'm living alone." (Kevin McAllister, Home Alone)
**
link: You Are What You Read (NY Times), Sacha Baron Cohen: Killing Off Borat (@Daily Telegraph), Auto Apparel Store obvs (!!)
**
12.23.2007
quote: "I'm very sane about how crazy I am." (Carrie Fisher)
*
link: Sacha Baron Cohen: Killing Off Borat, Auto Apparel Store obvs (!!), Reasons to Love New York (@NY Mag), Esquire's 10th Anniversary 'What I've Learned' (@Esquire)
**
12.22.2007
quote: "Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers." (Rainer Maria Rilke)
*
links:The Twilight of the Books: What Will Life Be Like If People Stop Reading (@The New Yorker), Bonfire of the Disney Princesses (by Barbara Ehreich @The Nation), Year in Review (@NY Magazine)
**
12.21.2007
quote: "Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." (Abraham Heschel)
*
link: "One Day" (Poem, Grace Paley) (@The New Yorker)
**
12.20.2007
quote: (from Our Town, Thornton Wilder)
Emily: Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anyone to realize you. [she looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly, through her tears:] Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?--every, every minute?
Stage Manager: No. [pause] The saints and poets, maybe -- they do some.
*
links: Are We Not Men? Down the Ladder From Playboy to Maxim (@The Atlantic), The Hollywood Guide to Drinking (@nerve.com)
**
12.19.07:
quote: "Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy." (Abraham Heschel)
*
link: "One Day" (Poem, Grace Paley) (@The New Yorker)
**
12.18.07:
quote: "I have asked my mother if she regrets her marriage, her choices, and she has told me it is pointless to regret. That she did what she could do. What more can we ask of ourselves? I want to tell her, but do not, that we must ask for so much more, for everything, for love and tenderness and decency and courage. That we must be much more than comfortable, that we must be better than we think we can be, so if in some foreign tongue, we are confronted with those childhood questions -- "Qui etes-vous? Qui suis-je?" --we will not be afraid to answer." (E.J Levy, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," Salmagundi '05)
*
link: Next Stop, Never-Never Land: ANTM Finale Recap (@fourfour), We Need to Talk About Pecan: Three brilliant novelists on Christmas Cooking (@The Guardian UK), The Etiquette of Telecommunications (@The Economist)
**
12.17.07:
quote: Sooner or later you have a finished manuscript more or less. People look at it ina a vaguely troubled sort of way and say, "I'll bet becoming a writer was always a fantasy of yours, wasn't it?" Your lips dry to salt. Say that of all the fantasies possible in the world, you can't imagine being a writer even making the top twenty. Tell them you were going to be a child psychology major. "I bet," they always sigh, "you'd be great with kids." Scowl fiercely. Tell them you're a walking blade. (Lorrie Moore, 'How to be a Writer')
*
link: An Exhaustive List of Links to Every Year-End List(@Filmalicious),On Facebook, Scholars Link Up with Social Data (@NY Times), Turning Free Web Work Into Real Book Sales (@NY Times)
**
12.16.07:
quote:"Sometimes I see myself fine, sometimes I need a witness and I like the whole truth, but there are nights I only need forgiveness. Sometimes they say "I don't know who you are but let me walk with you some" And I say "I am alone, that's all, you can't save me from all the wrong I've done." But they're waiting just the same with their flashlights and their semaphores, and I'll act like I have faith and like that faith never ends, but I really just have friends." (Dar Williams)
*
links: Gone Wild and Gone All Wrong: Joe Francis in Jail, holla (@NY Times), When the Bullies Turned Faceless: Cellphone cameras and text messages, social networking websites, e-mail and IM, all give teenagers more ways to play tricks on one another. (@NYTimes), Every Loo Must Have One: Bathroom Books (@Guardian UK)
**
12.15.2007
quote: "We don't know what humans are like. And the ground is not economics; it's not like people do everything they do for economic reasons. You've got to look at the imagination; you've got to look at sex. We have no way of describing these things using the language we have." (Kathy Acker)
*
links: The Hate That Hate Doesn't Produce: "Fall From Grace") (@fourfour), Nancy Redd Sees Vulva Everywhere: "Body Drama" (@New York Mag)
**
12.14.2007
quote: "For somewhere there is an ancient enmity between our daily life and the great work. Help me, in saying it, to understand it." (from Rilke, "Requiem for a Friend")
*
links:Kids Say the Most Homophobic Things (@youtube), NY Magazine's Best of 2007 (@NY Mag), Feministing Holiday Gift Guide (@feministing), Nerve.com Holiday Gift Guide (@nerve)
**
12.13.07
quote: "This happens. This is something that happens." (Stanley, Magnolia)
*
links: "Bill and Hillary Clinton's Pitch in Iowa: 'I Love the 90's'" (@NY Times), Lily Allen Joins Orange Prize Judges(@Guardian UK)
**
12.12.07: DO THIS "Listen, my truest love ..." (Stephen Dunn)
links: The Charity Buzz Auctions Benefiting the Paris Review, Listening to Films, Radar Reviews "Helevectia"
*
12.10.2007
quote: "Well, you and I have different management styles. I believe work should be fun, and you try to crush people's spirits. What's next, Michael? Are you going to make dancing illegal? Is this the tiny town from Footloose?" (Lindsay, Arrested Development)
*
links: The Best Year-End Books List I've Seen @ (The Year in Reading/The Millions), The King of Sentences, by Jonathan Lethem (fiction @ The New Yorker), Shopping with Kate Moenning (@YouTube).
**
12.9.2007
quote: "Trees in their youth look younger/than almost anything/I mean/In the spring/When they put forth green leaves and try/to look like real trees/Honest to God/I can see them trying." (Jack Spicer)
*
links: From The Sunday NY Times -- Radiohead: Pay What You Want For This Article,Your Child's Disorder May Be Yours, Too, The Year of Dressing Dangerously: Monthly Party Gives 1992 Its Due
**
12.8.2007
quote: "Books made people different, she thought. That's why Dolores felt different every day, after every book. It felt as if every book she read somehow altered her chemical constitution." (from "The Darling," Scott Bradfield.)
*
link: "Bloggers v. Criticism, Intro: The Critical Condition" (@TimeOut), nerve's new Hollywood Sex Scene Database (@Nerve)
**
12.7.2007
quote: "My candle burns at both ends/ It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends/It gives a lovely light." (Edna St. Vincent Millay)
*
link: Autostraddle Season Five Recap Trailer Vlog #3, Laureate Attacks Poetry Teaching (@BBC News), Hollywood's Plastic Surgery Obsession (@ RADAR online), Is an "Arrested Development" movie in the works? (@ AfterEllen),
**
12.6.2007
quote: "I have never been able to understand the complaint that a story is 'depressing' because of its subject matter. What depresses me are stories that don't seem to know these things go on, or hide them in resolute chipperness; "witty" stories, in which every problem is an occasion for a joke, "upbeat" stories that flog you with transcendence. Please. We're grown-ups now, we get to stay in the kitchen when the other grown-ups talk." (Tobias Wolff, Intro to Vintage Book of Contemporary Short Stories)
*
link: Permalancers Get Cancer Too! (@Gawker), Return to Fat Camp @ fourfour, Marcel Berlins on the Last Lines to a Story He Adored by Raymond Carver, "I Feel Betrayed ... I Think." (@guardian uk)
**
12.5.07
quote:
Rebecca: This is so bad, it's almost good.
Enid: This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again.
(Ghost World)
*
link: Interview with Dani Who Still Has a Shot at Love! (@afterellen), Rachel Started Her Blog Again!, Viacom Screws Everyone (@gawker), 2007 Holiday Gift Guide: Music, Books, Fashion, Home, Dining & Wine (@The NY Times), Asperger's Syndrome Gets a Very Public Face (Heather from ANTM) (@The NY Times)
**
12.4.07
quote: "In my opinion, all men are islands. And what's more, now's the time to be one. This is an island age. It helps to think of the day as units of time, each unit consisting of thirty minutes. Most activities take about half an hour. Taking a bath. Doing the crossword. Exercising. Three units. Carefully trimming my perfectly unkempt hair, two units, easy. All in all, I had a very full life." (About a Boy)
*
link: ANTM Recap @fourfour, Books on a Plane (@Book Cannibal), "Found Objects" by Jennifer Egan (@The New Yorker), "Gawker" Obituary (@n+1),
**
12.3.07
quote: "Feeling screwed up at a screwed up time in a screwed up place does not necessarily make you screwed up." (Pump up the Volume)
*
link haze: New Dolly Parton Video featuring Amy Sedaris! (@Queerty), The Encyclopedia of Lesbian Movie Scenes (seriously, exhausting resource heaven), Two Gawker Editors Decide Not To Be Douchebags (@NYmag), Disney's $4 Billion "Princess" Brand (@Newsweek), What's Wrong With the American Essay? (@truthdig), "Is Reading Just About Making You Look Cool?" (@the Guardian UK)
**
12.2.07
quote: "People say with the book sometimes, "How did you write this book, it has no self-pity? It's compassionate. Dah, dah, dah."I say you should have seen the drafts. They are full of self-pity and ridiculous rages. And I edited them out mostly because when you look at the stuff on page it doesn't ring true, actually. It does feel like a diversion from the essential state. Which, hopefully if you can get to it, is a little purer." (Nick Flynn)
*
link: The Classless Utopia of Reality TV (@The NY Times), Pulse: The Glamour Girl (What Serena van der Woodsen is wearing) (@The NY Times)
**
12.1.07
quote: "Sometimes you're flush and sometimes you're bust, and when you're up, it's never as good as it seems, and when you're down, you never think you'll be up again. But life goes on." (Blow)
*
link: The New York Weekend From Hell (@Gawker), From Lowest to Highest: The Levels of Greatness a Fiction Writer can achieve in America (@The Stranger)
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Auto-Fun Archive: Novemeber
11.30.07
quote: Love is not/enough. We die and are put into the earth forever./We should insist while there is still time. We must/eat through the wildness of her sweet body already/in our bed to reach the body within the body.
(from "Tear it Down," Jack Gilbert)
*
link: Everybody Needs Writers (The Guardian Books), Gifts You Give Yourself (Nico Muhly)
11.29.07
quote: "Harry, you're going to have to try and find a way of not expressing every feeling that you have every moment that you have one." (When Harry Met Sally)
*
link: New AutoStraddle, w/Vlogs!, FourFour's ANTM recap
11.28.07
quote: "Why not make your life easier? I mean, life is so fucking hard, even when it's easy." (Margaret, Six Feet Under)
*
link: This Always Makes Me Happy, (DD), Full Throttle (SFU), Dance With Me (Angels in America), Brenda Dickinson: Welcome to My Home.
11.27.07
quote: "But there come times--perhaps this is one of them when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die; when we have to pull back from the incantations, rhythms we've moved to thoughtlessly--" (Adrienne Rich)
*
link: Calling All Angels (SFU)
11.26.07
quote: "For the explosive word /falls harmlessly/eternal through/the compact generations/and except for you/nothing/denotates/its sweet-scented dynamite."
*
link: Subject, Verb, Object (poem @ The New Yorker)
11.24.07
quote: Occasionally something will give pleasure, will actually charm or divert or entertain, will, to use that terrifying word, disarm. Insofar as our fearful, compulsive, rigid natures allow, I think we should welcome what follows, since for natures of this kind, there is no embrace until one has been disarmed. (Louise Gluck, "Fear of Happiness," The Michigan Quarterly Review)
*
link: 100 Notable Books of The Year @ The NY Times, A Few Words With Chevy Chase @ NY Mag, Have Mercy! A "Full House" Marathon @ EW's PopWatch.
11.23.07
quote: "These subversive characters [Huck Finn and Jim], like Ellison's Invisible Man, Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Hurston's Janine -- all outcasts who refuse to comply -- are part of a tradition in American fiction. Like Huck, they risk hell but trust their own instincts and experiences above static convention. They are thoughtful and reflect upon these experiences; they are critical not just of others but of themselves, and they act upon their reflections. This is the American idea I would like to return to: a slight subversion, an instinctive urge to do the right thing, which, in the eyes of the "correct" world, might seem to be exactly the wrong thing." (Azar Nafisi, on "The American Idea" in The Atlantic Monthly)
*
link: Ali Smith's "Literary Top Ten" (pulp net)
"Things I've Bought That I Love" (Office writer Mindy Kaling's blog, hilarious)
11.22.07
quote: "Happy Thanksgiving! The Apple Store has my computer for 3-5 days, I am obvs dying a slow and painful death. Luckily, I'm using Hav's laptop right now, and there will be a Vlog." (Riese, "Haviland's MacBook")
*
link: Johnny McGovern's Plymouth Rock Band Gay Pimpin' Thanksgivin' (LogoOnline/Carly's hot editing skills, holla!)
11.21.07
quote: "A woman with desperately bony calves, made stark by her big high heels, grinned at someone across the room, her grin a signal of deep things inside both of them that nobody else could see. Sometimes I saw the goodwill and the deep things and longed to know them. Sometimes I saw the thrusting jaw and the bony calves and thurst up my nose. Because I could never fully have either feeling, I stayed detached. It was as if I were seventeen again and longing to live inside a world described by music-- a world that was sad at being turned into a machine, but ecstatic, too, singing on the surface of its human heart as the machine spread through its tissues and silenced the flow of its blood. In this world, there were n good things, no vulgar goodwill, only rigorous form and beauty, and even songs about mass death could be sung on the light and playful surface of the heart." (Mary Gaitskill, Veronica)
*
(NY Times NEA report goes here)
Four Four's ANTM Recap
11.20.07
quote: "It is worse even than you expected, stepping out into the morning. The glare is like a mother's reproach. the sidewalk sparkles cruelly. Visibility unlimited. the downtown warehouses look serene and resetful in this beveled light ... You know for a fact that if you go out into the morning alone, without even your sunglasses--which you have neglected to bring, because who, after all, plans on these travesties?--the harsh, angling light will turn you to flesh and bone. Mortality will pierce you through the retina." (Jay McInerney, "Bright Lights Big City")
*
link: Watch Bad Girls video recaps on Logo [edited by Carlytron!]
11.19.07
TEGAN AND SARA CONCERT DAY
*
quote: "You're always sort of on the edge of life when everything could end. Obviously not everyone feels that way, but certainly for me, I feel like nothing lasts forever. I'd like everything to last forever, but it doesn't necessarily. So I always feel like I'm on guard, and I'm always on edge. That song is sort of like a reminder to be caught up in the moment and a reminder that we are right next to each other and feel very different." (Tegan)
*
links: Tegan and Sara fan-site, Tegan & Sara cover "Umbrella", music video of "The Con," "Back in Your Head," playing "I Know I Know I Know," playing "Dancing in the Dark" at a radio station interview.
11.18.07
quote: (riese get with it)
link: Everybody is Happy Now - Margaret Atwood on "A Brave New World" @ The Guardian
11.16.07
quote: "Have you grown any this year? I've hardly grown at all. Not up and not out, either. But I have learned a lot." (Judy Blume, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself)
*
link: Salon's Sexiest Men Living (includes Ira Glass, Strongbad, Kanye West and Junot Diaz. Holla.)
11.15.07
quote: "I love the good home/cliches can find in an authentic voice." (Stephen Dunn, "Loves")
*
link: The New Online Star System: complete guide to what web video is worth a click (New York Magazine), Join the Auto-Win/Straddle Facebook Club NOW
11.14.07
quote: "Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction." (Vladimir Nabakov)
*
links:-I Wrote This In 1999 About my Dad
-FourFour's Recap of America's Next Top Model: "Fat Chance."
-Join the Auto-Win/Straddle Facebook Club NOW
11.13.07
quote: And we turn him into an anecdote, with no teeth, and a punchline you'll tell for years to come: "Oh, that reminds me of the time the imposter came into our house." "Oh! Tell the one about that boy." And we become these human jukeboxes spitting out these anecdotes to dine out on like we're doing right now. Well I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience. How do we hold onto the experience? (Ouisa, from John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation")
**
Nerve Film Lounge: Five Conversations about Fast Times at Ridgemont High
link: The entire lesbian storyline of British series "Sugar Rush" on youtube.
11.11.07
quote: "What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and--let's be frank--fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life's efforts bring you. The mystery is all." ("People Like That Are The Only People Here," Lorrie Moore)
*
link:The entire lesbian storyline of British series "Sugar Rush" on youtube.
The Way We Eat: The Hollywood Diet @ NY Times.
11.10.07
quote: "In one of the dialogues," I said, "Phaedrus asks Socrates whether it's better to spend your life with someone who you're compatible with, like a friend, or someone who you're crazy for, someone who'll make your life a living hell."
"And what does Socrates say?" Henry said.
"He says you should be with someone you can get along with, and he spends thirty pages proving it ... logically ... like a theorem." I watched the shadow of relief cross the faces of both men.
"Then," I said, "he changes his mind."
"And says you should be with the person who makes your life a living hell," Henry said.
"What he says," I said, "is that when we fall full tilt in love with somebody, it's because our soul recognizes another soul that it was mingled with on some previous plane."
"Socrates says full tilt?" Carter said.
"He says, but what is man's logical reasoning, compared to the power of divine madness?"
[from "The Moon is a Woman's First Husband," by Pam Houston]
*
link: FIRED! by Annabelle Gurwitch
11.9.07
quote: "For the explosive word/falls harmlessly/eternal through/the compact generations
and except for you
nothing/denotates"
-[from "preamble," cocteau]
*
link: Alison MacLeod's Top 10 Short Stories [The Guardian Unlimited Books]
11.8.07
If you & I were talking right now and I said "happy birthday!" and you said "It's your mom's birthday!" I'd be like, "IT TOTALLY IS."
*
quote: "Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. " [Allen Ginsberg]
*
link: BIG NEWS YOU GUYS: Haviland has redesigned her website. No more scrolling. Word up to a;ex vega and stef. I wrote the bio, obvs.
11.7.07
quote: "Human flesh needs human flesh. Because only flesh is value," R continued, "I'm increasing my suffering 'cause I have to be stronger to be a writer. I'm training myself." Humans always look for a reason for their suffering. (Kathy Acker)
*
link: "Flying to America" by Donald Barthelme reviewed by Sam Anderson [New York Magazine] (he said "totes"!)
11.6.07
quote: "Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance." (Henry Miller)
*
link: fourfour's Recap of the ANTM clip show (he said "true story"!!)
Playboy Blog - How Dirty Are You? (I'm totally quoted!!)
11.5.07
quote: "From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?" (Ernest Hemmingway, The Paris Review Interviews)
*
link: The Autumn of the Multitaskers [The Atlantic]
11.4.07
quote:
Lester Burnham: You don't think it's kinda weird & fascist?
Carolyn Burnham: Possibly, but you don't want to be unemployed.
Lester Burnham: Oh well, all right, let's all sell our souls and work for Satan because it's more convenient that way.
(American Beauty)
*
link:"The Accidental Plagiarist" Virginia Quarterly
11.03.2007
quote:"Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever." [George Orwell, 1984]
*
link: Frederick Seidel : The Motorcycle Diarist [New York Times]
11.02.2007
quote: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." (George Orwell)
*
link: "How to be a Writer" by Lorrie Moore (New York Times, 1998)
11.1.07
quote:
"In Manhattan, I learned a public kindness
was a triumph
over the push of money, the constrictions
of fear. If it occurred it came
from some deep
primal memory, almost entirely lost --
Here, let me help you, then you me,
otherwise we'll die."
(From "Kindness," by Stephen Dunn)
*
links:
"Consolation and the Order of the World," by Charles Wright
"The Great Novel I Never Read," Slate Magazine, [Writers Confess What They Haven't Read]
quote: Love is not/enough. We die and are put into the earth forever./We should insist while there is still time. We must/eat through the wildness of her sweet body already/in our bed to reach the body within the body.
(from "Tear it Down," Jack Gilbert)
*
link: Everybody Needs Writers (The Guardian Books), Gifts You Give Yourself (Nico Muhly)
11.29.07
quote: "Harry, you're going to have to try and find a way of not expressing every feeling that you have every moment that you have one." (When Harry Met Sally)
*
link: New AutoStraddle, w/Vlogs!, FourFour's ANTM recap
11.28.07
quote: "Why not make your life easier? I mean, life is so fucking hard, even when it's easy." (Margaret, Six Feet Under)
*
link: This Always Makes Me Happy, (DD), Full Throttle (SFU), Dance With Me (Angels in America), Brenda Dickinson: Welcome to My Home.
11.27.07
quote: "But there come times--perhaps this is one of them when we have to take ourselves more seriously or die; when we have to pull back from the incantations, rhythms we've moved to thoughtlessly--" (Adrienne Rich)
*
link: Calling All Angels (SFU)
11.26.07
quote: "For the explosive word /falls harmlessly/eternal through/the compact generations/and except for you/nothing/denotates/its sweet-scented dynamite."
*
link: Subject, Verb, Object (poem @ The New Yorker)
11.24.07
quote: Occasionally something will give pleasure, will actually charm or divert or entertain, will, to use that terrifying word, disarm. Insofar as our fearful, compulsive, rigid natures allow, I think we should welcome what follows, since for natures of this kind, there is no embrace until one has been disarmed. (Louise Gluck, "Fear of Happiness," The Michigan Quarterly Review)
*
link: 100 Notable Books of The Year @ The NY Times, A Few Words With Chevy Chase @ NY Mag, Have Mercy! A "Full House" Marathon @ EW's PopWatch.
11.23.07
quote: "These subversive characters [Huck Finn and Jim], like Ellison's Invisible Man, Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Hurston's Janine -- all outcasts who refuse to comply -- are part of a tradition in American fiction. Like Huck, they risk hell but trust their own instincts and experiences above static convention. They are thoughtful and reflect upon these experiences; they are critical not just of others but of themselves, and they act upon their reflections. This is the American idea I would like to return to: a slight subversion, an instinctive urge to do the right thing, which, in the eyes of the "correct" world, might seem to be exactly the wrong thing." (Azar Nafisi, on "The American Idea" in The Atlantic Monthly)
*
link: Ali Smith's "Literary Top Ten" (pulp net)
"Things I've Bought That I Love" (Office writer Mindy Kaling's blog, hilarious)
11.22.07
quote: "Happy Thanksgiving! The Apple Store has my computer for 3-5 days, I am obvs dying a slow and painful death. Luckily, I'm using Hav's laptop right now, and there will be a Vlog." (Riese, "Haviland's MacBook")
*
link: Johnny McGovern's Plymouth Rock Band Gay Pimpin' Thanksgivin' (LogoOnline/Carly's hot editing skills, holla!)
11.21.07
quote: "A woman with desperately bony calves, made stark by her big high heels, grinned at someone across the room, her grin a signal of deep things inside both of them that nobody else could see. Sometimes I saw the goodwill and the deep things and longed to know them. Sometimes I saw the thrusting jaw and the bony calves and thurst up my nose. Because I could never fully have either feeling, I stayed detached. It was as if I were seventeen again and longing to live inside a world described by music-- a world that was sad at being turned into a machine, but ecstatic, too, singing on the surface of its human heart as the machine spread through its tissues and silenced the flow of its blood. In this world, there were n good things, no vulgar goodwill, only rigorous form and beauty, and even songs about mass death could be sung on the light and playful surface of the heart." (Mary Gaitskill, Veronica)
*
(NY Times NEA report goes here)
Four Four's ANTM Recap
11.20.07
quote: "It is worse even than you expected, stepping out into the morning. The glare is like a mother's reproach. the sidewalk sparkles cruelly. Visibility unlimited. the downtown warehouses look serene and resetful in this beveled light ... You know for a fact that if you go out into the morning alone, without even your sunglasses--which you have neglected to bring, because who, after all, plans on these travesties?--the harsh, angling light will turn you to flesh and bone. Mortality will pierce you through the retina." (Jay McInerney, "Bright Lights Big City")
*
link: Watch Bad Girls video recaps on Logo [edited by Carlytron!]
11.19.07
TEGAN AND SARA CONCERT DAY
*
quote: "You're always sort of on the edge of life when everything could end. Obviously not everyone feels that way, but certainly for me, I feel like nothing lasts forever. I'd like everything to last forever, but it doesn't necessarily. So I always feel like I'm on guard, and I'm always on edge. That song is sort of like a reminder to be caught up in the moment and a reminder that we are right next to each other and feel very different." (Tegan)
*
links: Tegan and Sara fan-site, Tegan & Sara cover "Umbrella", music video of "The Con," "Back in Your Head," playing "I Know I Know I Know," playing "Dancing in the Dark" at a radio station interview.
11.18.07
quote: (riese get with it)
link: Everybody is Happy Now - Margaret Atwood on "A Brave New World" @ The Guardian
11.16.07
quote: "Have you grown any this year? I've hardly grown at all. Not up and not out, either. But I have learned a lot." (Judy Blume, Starring Sally J. Freedman as Herself)
*
link: Salon's Sexiest Men Living (includes Ira Glass, Strongbad, Kanye West and Junot Diaz. Holla.)
11.15.07
quote: "I love the good home/cliches can find in an authentic voice." (Stephen Dunn, "Loves")
*
link: The New Online Star System: complete guide to what web video is worth a click (New York Magazine), Join the Auto-Win/Straddle Facebook Club NOW
11.14.07
quote: "Whenever in my dreams, I see the dead, they always appear silent, bothered, strangely depressed, quite unlike their dear bright selves. I am aware of them, without any astonishment, in surroundings they never visited during their earthly existence, in the house of some friend of mine they never knew. They sit apart, frowning at the floor, as if death were a dark taint, a shameful family secret. It is certainly not then — not in dreams — but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle-tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction." (Vladimir Nabakov)
*
links:-I Wrote This In 1999 About my Dad
-FourFour's Recap of America's Next Top Model: "Fat Chance."
-Join the Auto-Win/Straddle Facebook Club NOW
11.13.07
quote: And we turn him into an anecdote, with no teeth, and a punchline you'll tell for years to come: "Oh, that reminds me of the time the imposter came into our house." "Oh! Tell the one about that boy." And we become these human jukeboxes spitting out these anecdotes to dine out on like we're doing right now. Well I will not turn him into an anecdote, it was an experience. How do we hold onto the experience? (Ouisa, from John Guare's "Six Degrees of Separation")
**
Nerve Film Lounge: Five Conversations about Fast Times at Ridgemont High
link: The entire lesbian storyline of British series "Sugar Rush" on youtube.
11.11.07
quote: "What makes humans human is precisely that they do not know the future. That is why they do the fateful and amusing things they do: who can say how anything will turn out? Therein lies the only hope for redemption, discovery, and--let's be frank--fun, fun, fun! There might be things people will get away with. And not just motel towels. There might be great illicit loves, enduring joy, faith-shaking accidents with farm machinery. But you have to not know in order to see what stories your life's efforts bring you. The mystery is all." ("People Like That Are The Only People Here," Lorrie Moore)
*
link:The entire lesbian storyline of British series "Sugar Rush" on youtube.
The Way We Eat: The Hollywood Diet @ NY Times.
11.10.07
quote: "In one of the dialogues," I said, "Phaedrus asks Socrates whether it's better to spend your life with someone who you're compatible with, like a friend, or someone who you're crazy for, someone who'll make your life a living hell."
"And what does Socrates say?" Henry said.
"He says you should be with someone you can get along with, and he spends thirty pages proving it ... logically ... like a theorem." I watched the shadow of relief cross the faces of both men.
"Then," I said, "he changes his mind."
"And says you should be with the person who makes your life a living hell," Henry said.
"What he says," I said, "is that when we fall full tilt in love with somebody, it's because our soul recognizes another soul that it was mingled with on some previous plane."
"Socrates says full tilt?" Carter said.
"He says, but what is man's logical reasoning, compared to the power of divine madness?"
[from "The Moon is a Woman's First Husband," by Pam Houston]
*
link: FIRED! by Annabelle Gurwitch
11.9.07
quote: "For the explosive word/falls harmlessly/eternal through/the compact generations
and except for you
nothing/denotates"
-[from "preamble," cocteau]
*
link: Alison MacLeod's Top 10 Short Stories [The Guardian Unlimited Books]
11.8.07
If you & I were talking right now and I said "happy birthday!" and you said "It's your mom's birthday!" I'd be like, "IT TOTALLY IS."
*
quote: "Poetry is the one place where people can speak their original human mind. It is the outlet for people to say in public what is known in private. " [Allen Ginsberg]
*
link: BIG NEWS YOU GUYS: Haviland has redesigned her website. No more scrolling. Word up to a;ex vega and stef. I wrote the bio, obvs.
11.7.07
quote: "Human flesh needs human flesh. Because only flesh is value," R continued, "I'm increasing my suffering 'cause I have to be stronger to be a writer. I'm training myself." Humans always look for a reason for their suffering. (Kathy Acker)
*
link: "Flying to America" by Donald Barthelme reviewed by Sam Anderson [New York Magazine] (he said "totes"!)
11.6.07
quote: "Night is longing, longing, longing, beyond all endurance." (Henry Miller)
*
link: fourfour's Recap of the ANTM clip show (he said "true story"!!)
Playboy Blog - How Dirty Are You? (I'm totally quoted!!)
11.5.07
quote: "From things that have happened and from things as they exist and from all things that you know and all those you cannot know, you make something through your invention that is not a representation but a whole new thing truer than anything true and alive, and you make it alive, and if you make it well enough, you give it immortality. That is why you write and for no other reason that you know of. But what about all the reasons that no one knows?" (Ernest Hemmingway, The Paris Review Interviews)
*
link: The Autumn of the Multitaskers [The Atlantic]
11.4.07
quote:
Lester Burnham: You don't think it's kinda weird & fascist?
Carolyn Burnham: Possibly, but you don't want to be unemployed.
Lester Burnham: Oh well, all right, let's all sell our souls and work for Satan because it's more convenient that way.
(American Beauty)
*
link:"The Accidental Plagiarist" Virginia Quarterly
11.03.2007
quote:"Whether he went on with the diary, or whether he did not go on with it, made no difference. The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed— would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper— the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever." [George Orwell, 1984]
*
link: Frederick Seidel : The Motorcycle Diarist [New York Times]
11.02.2007
quote: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act." (George Orwell)
*
link: "How to be a Writer" by Lorrie Moore (New York Times, 1998)
11.1.07
quote:
"In Manhattan, I learned a public kindness
was a triumph
over the push of money, the constrictions
of fear. If it occurred it came
from some deep
primal memory, almost entirely lost --
Here, let me help you, then you me,
otherwise we'll die."
(From "Kindness," by Stephen Dunn)
*
links:
"Consolation and the Order of the World," by Charles Wright
"The Great Novel I Never Read," Slate Magazine, [Writers Confess What They Haven't Read]
Friday, November 23, 2007
Azar Nafisi: "The American Idea: Sivilization"
On the first page of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck informs us that the Widow Douglas decided to take him up and "sivilize" him, but
The way Huck subverts a whole way of living, a way of thinking and relating to the world,by misspelling a word is to my mind a pure expression of the American idea. That idea is always threatened by another: the secure and smug world from which Huck and Jim turn away. Throughout the book, Huck and Jim turn the "decent" and "sivilized" world on its head, and we come out in the end with a new definition of these words.
These subversive characters, like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Zora Neale Hurston's Janine -- all outcasts who refuse to comply -- are part of a tradition in American fiction. Like Huck, they risk hell but trust their own instincts and experiences above static convention. They are thoughtful and reflect upon these experiences; they are critical not just of others but of themselves, and they act upon their reflections. This is the American idea I would like to return to: a slight subversion, an instinctive urge to do the right thing, which, in the eyes of the "correct" world, might seem to be exactly the wrong thing.
The idea that I want to believe America was founded on also depended on challenging the world as it is and, by standing up to civilized society, redefining it. That idea was essentially based on a poetic vision, on imagining something that did not exist. It has been pointed out that the man who wrote the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence -- who could state with simplicity and beauty that every individual has the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- was himself a slaveowner. Jefferson lived in a slave-owning society, one in which half of the non-slave population, the women, were not equal citizens. Yet for all its flaws, that society's saving grace was its foundation on a certain set of beliefs that transcended on the individuals, their prejudices, and their times and allowed for the possibility of a different future, foreshadowing a time when other women and men, a Martin Luther King Jr. or an Elizabeth Cady Stanton, could take their ideas and words and suffuse them with new and risky and bold meanings, and with new dreams.
Huck closes his adventures with this statement:
This, of course, is the whole point: In order to keep the American idea fresh and new, it must be constantly challenged. For the American idea to endure, we have to "light out," and to find new ways to resist the "sivilizing" impulse of the Widow Douglases and Aunt Sallys among us.
And yet today it seems that America, gripped by social and political crisis, has become almost forgetful of that idea. Cyncial, shallow, defensive and at the same time arrogant and greedy, it is unfaithful to its instincts and refuses to be reflective, mistaking blame for criticism and self-criticism, and believing that success at any cost is more important than failure with honor, taking as its idea the Widow Douglas's paradise rather than Huck Finn's hell.
The question is: Can we still hope to be a little less "sivilized"?
By Azar Nafasi, Atlantic Monthly November 2007, "The American Idea"
it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out.
The way Huck subverts a whole way of living, a way of thinking and relating to the world,by misspelling a word is to my mind a pure expression of the American idea. That idea is always threatened by another: the secure and smug world from which Huck and Jim turn away. Throughout the book, Huck and Jim turn the "decent" and "sivilized" world on its head, and we come out in the end with a new definition of these words.
These subversive characters, like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, F. Scott Fitzgerald's Gatsby, Zora Neale Hurston's Janine -- all outcasts who refuse to comply -- are part of a tradition in American fiction. Like Huck, they risk hell but trust their own instincts and experiences above static convention. They are thoughtful and reflect upon these experiences; they are critical not just of others but of themselves, and they act upon their reflections. This is the American idea I would like to return to: a slight subversion, an instinctive urge to do the right thing, which, in the eyes of the "correct" world, might seem to be exactly the wrong thing.
The idea that I want to believe America was founded on also depended on challenging the world as it is and, by standing up to civilized society, redefining it. That idea was essentially based on a poetic vision, on imagining something that did not exist. It has been pointed out that the man who wrote the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence -- who could state with simplicity and beauty that every individual has the right to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" -- was himself a slaveowner. Jefferson lived in a slave-owning society, one in which half of the non-slave population, the women, were not equal citizens. Yet for all its flaws, that society's saving grace was its foundation on a certain set of beliefs that transcended on the individuals, their prejudices, and their times and allowed for the possibility of a different future, foreshadowing a time when other women and men, a Martin Luther King Jr. or an Elizabeth Cady Stanton, could take their ideas and words and suffuse them with new and risky and bold meanings, and with new dreams.
Huck closes his adventures with this statement:
But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.
This, of course, is the whole point: In order to keep the American idea fresh and new, it must be constantly challenged. For the American idea to endure, we have to "light out," and to find new ways to resist the "sivilizing" impulse of the Widow Douglases and Aunt Sallys among us.
And yet today it seems that America, gripped by social and political crisis, has become almost forgetful of that idea. Cyncial, shallow, defensive and at the same time arrogant and greedy, it is unfaithful to its instincts and refuses to be reflective, mistaking blame for criticism and self-criticism, and believing that success at any cost is more important than failure with honor, taking as its idea the Widow Douglas's paradise rather than Huck Finn's hell.
The question is: Can we still hope to be a little less "sivilized"?
By Azar Nafasi, Atlantic Monthly November 2007, "The American Idea"
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