I feel that everyone who is going to read My Life in Middlemarch with us has already done so, so on June 16th, we will discuss it fully and move on! Where are we moving on to? Why, it is my very great pleasure to announce that we will be reading Roxane Gay’s critically-acclaimed and marvelously wonderful debut novel, An Untamed State. Please buy it, and please be ready to start discussing it on Monday, June 23rd. To help you back into it as lazily as possible, our first discussion will cover just the first 2742 words, which can be read HERE, for FREE. Then you’ll go “oh, of course, I must own this!” and then we’ll be in business, no? YES.
I read this terrifying cave diving narrative very frequently. Promise me, as Mallory has, that if I ever die in a tricky spot, you will make no particular effort to retrieve my body; it is just a flesh prison, and wherever it comes to rest shall be a grave:
Shirley and Herbst guess that Shaw’s narcosis was then closer to six or seven martinis. “You focus on the one thing. You don’t focus on the dive anymore,” Herbst says. “The one thing becomes everything. And I think with Dave it became the body, the body, the body.”
An incredibly topical piece on whether Led Zeppelin ripped off “Stairway to Heaven” (amongst other songs):
But songwriters from whom Led Zeppelin drew inspiration, or more, have brought legal challenges for decades, often successfully. Since its 1969 debut album, the band has altered the credits and redirected portions of the royalties for some of its biggest songs, including Whole Lotta Love and Babe I’m Gonna Leave You. A copyright infringement suit over Dazed and Confused, a defining number that formed the centerpiece of Led Zeppelin’s live shows, was settled in 2012. The rise of the Internet has made comparisons by amateur plagiarism detectives easier, with mashup videos of Zeppelin songs and their alleged antecedents appearing on YouTube.
Your RSVP for Hey Ladies: Live!
Lindsay Hunter on her post-partum depression:
My husband went back to work, and then my mom flew back to Florida, and it was just me and the baby. Alone together, but no longer the us we had been when I was pregnant. Now he was he and I was I, and I was the one whose anxiety prevented her from making enough milk for him, and he was the one still needing to be fed. I began supplementing with formula, allowing him to drift off to sleep at my breast because I knew he could just have a bottle after, and because I either had to keep finding a way to feed him, keep holding him and washing his tiny onesies, keep breathing from moment to moment, or I had to run from him and the home I loved. I’ll just fake it ‘til I make it, I’d said to my mom. Whatever you have to do, she’d said, and I loved her more than ever for not shaming me for saying I needed to fake loving my child, for maybe reaching back to her new-mom self, over three decades ago, and saying what she would have wanted to hear.
Automatic linking to any article about Judge Judy:
Judge Judith Sheindlin, the straight-talking star of “Judge Judy,” peered down at a sassy defendant with disgust. “Listen to me, Miss Fibby,” Judge Sheindlin snapped at a recent taping here. “They don’t keep me here because I’m gorgeous. They keep me here because I’m smart.”
