If I lived in London, I would go to this, and I would also go to jail (GAOL, perhaps) for stealing a wedding gown and then showing up at Benedict’s house in it like Rosalie when she wastes the dude who raped her in the flashback in Breaking Dawn Pt 1. I mean, I wouldn’t hurt him, but I would have that same look of intensity, I think?
The New Yorker unlocked its Annie Baker profile!
To watch Baker’s work is to be drawn into a world that feels as unplotted as real life (characters chat at cross-purposes; costumes and stage settings are uncannily real) but that breaks abruptly into surreal transcendence (a hula hoop being spun for almost a minute, in one case). Onstage, Baker exercises meticulous control in order to make action seem as unrefined as possible. Her characters exchange the kind of knobby dialogue you overhear in diners on Friday mornings: mothers fretting volubly about their young-adult kids’ problems, twentysomething friends chasing back bleary silence with defensive nonchalance. (“I’m really hung over so you guys will have to excuse me if I’m like a little low-energy.”) Her goal is to explore what’s left unsaid along the edges of conversation: it’s the principle of looking at familiar stars so that the galaxies that can’t be seen head on appear out of the corner of your eye.
The glorious Patricia Lockwood on whether poetry is work:
A common refrain you hear when it comes to poetry is, “That’s not work. Picking up the garbage is work!” The people who say this are usually also the people who think that poetry IS garbage, so I’m not sure what their problem is. If you dislike trash so much then you should be happy that I’m collecting it for free, and rolling around in it for fun, and eating it for dinner, and publishing it in all the finest modern magazines. My name is A.R. Ammons actually, and I wrote a really excellent book called Rubbish, and you just need to shut up about me.
In which Roland Barthes and Adventure Time share the stage.
Whatever, my script was amazing. Haterz.
Lisa Hanawalt has the greatest thing on Wylie Dufresne:
If Wylie doesn’t go as “sexy Ben Franklin” for Halloween every year, that’s a fucking waste.
Depression and the black superwoman syndrome (RIP, Karyn Washington):
I honestly believe we’re so accustomed to delivering the strong Black woman speech to ourselves and everyone else that we lose our ability to connect to our humanness, and thus our frailty. We become afraid to admit that we are hurting and struggling, because we fear that we will be seen as weak. And we can’t be weak. We’ve spent our lives witnessing our mothers and their mothers be strong and sturdy, like rocks. We want to be rocks.
The American Prospect has an incredible piece on trans identity:
In my most significant experience of romantic rejection, I was blindsided when a man I was dating told me he was no longer attracted to me after finding out I’m trans, even though we already had sex and he told me how much he enjoyed it. This man, who defines himself as a feminist and an LGBT ally, also went on at length about how he felt an immediate emotional connection with me. “I wish I were bisexual,” he said, as I became something other than a woman in his eyes after I recounted my history.
