I do not know if you have heard (ideally you follow her on Twitter) but our beloved Roxane Gay of NEW VERTICAL FAME has, like so many literary heroines, suffered a very unpleasant fall in her home, and is now in The Hands of Medicine, so we are a) very sorry that her birthday is rich in opiates but poor in walking, and b) postponing her launch until she pronounces herself both ready and joyous to begin! In the meantime, please enjoy this essay in The New Inquiry about how great she is:
Gay began by reading her live-tweeting of the legendary September issue of Vogue, and each tweet mocked the composition of white people pictured in the magazine’s glossy ads. Everyone was with her, laughing at the impossibility of white beauty that few white women in the room could ever manage. But when Gay talked about the effect seeing movies like The Help and Rosewood had on her, the mood shifted just a bit. She announced, with the same matter-of-factness as she used when talking about The Hunger Games as a post-traumatic-stress narrative, that after seeing these films she couldn’t be around white people for a little while. I could see the expression on the young white women’s faces change. I’ve seen that look before—that slightly pained, slightly irritated expression white people get when they’re reminded that they are the descendants and beneficiaries of systems that oppress people of color. You could practically see #notallwhitepeople flash over their heads. I imagine it must be compelling to have a funny, strong BLACK ♀ speaking to the popular culture so many young white women enjoy. To watch that same critic turn her sharp attention on you must be jarring. It’s as if readers and critics alike want to focus on the feminist part while forgetting the black woman part of the Gay equation. Gay might be your BFF when it comes to Beyoncé, Outlander, and Hunger Games, but she is not your Girlfriend Intervention.
If you were thinking about sending me a Halloween-themed pitch, let me take this opportunity to gracefully decline and direct you elsewhere. We have like two ghost-tours pieces and scary movies and other stuff all lined up, and we feel GREAT.
Speaking of Halloween, Autostraddle did a run-down on the Buffy costumes of your dreams.
diversity in kids’ tv, man:
Diversity also makes sense for business. Dora The Explorer, for instance, started out as a little white girl named Tess before Nickelodeon executives asked the show’s creators to convert her into a bilingual Latina, citing some research on how Latinos were the most underrepresented minority on television. Neither of the show’s creators spoke Spanish or knew anything about Latino life, but they hired a Latino writer and several savvy consultants and language experts. Thus the Dora empire was born.
“Tell Me a Story With a Happy Ending”:
We listened to our new friends’ advice and bought the kids clothes from the outlets, until it came to coats. “On coats, we don’t compromise,” I told my wife. “Not in central Illinois, not for the kind of winter they promised we’d have.”
And you know, it’s because of you that I’m not being stingy about coats. You probably don’t remember, but when we once shared a taxi from Leipzig to Berlin, maybe fifteen years ago, you told me a story about your father, and one sentence is engraved in my mind: “He survived because he took a coat.”
“On coats, we don’t compromise,” I told my wife. “We have to buy the best, the most expensive.”
Some serious Picture Day chops on these kids.
“Dear Television” has a killer rundown of the fall shows:
Phil: I re-watched The Big Chill a couple weeks ago — much love, Goldblum — and there’s a scene in which Mary Kay Place says, “They’re either married or gay. And if they’re not gay, they’ve just broken up with the most wonderful woman in the world, or they’ve just broken up with a bitch who looks exactly like me.” I’m not saying Lawrence Kasdan invented that line, but that joke is at least 30-years-old. And it was trying to be a sharp social comment then. Manhattan Love Story actually ended its pilot with it. These people really get it.
I just got Katha Pollitt’s new book about abortion via a publisher, and this piece in ELLE about it is a great read:
In several meetings at work in which this essay was discussed, I noticed that none of the other editors in the room, all of them pro-choice, could bring themselves to utter the word abortion; it was “Laurie’s pro piece,” or her “memoir.” I know that my colleagues, many of whom are my friends, were just trying to be kind when they referred to my “reproductive rights” story. The truth is, I felt uncomfortable saying it out loud too. Abortion is a conversational third rail, women’s dirtiest dirty laundry, to mix metaphors. Because the other thing about living in a political culture where a single-cell zygote is constantly being called a “person” is that there is a penumbra of shame surrounding abortion. For myself, however, I wonder: Am I really ashamed—and, if so, what is it exactly that I’m ashamed of?
I had MY abortion in college, and I feel like I felt shitty about it for about two years, then stopped caring, and now I feel so grateful and relieved when I think about it and what it made possible for me, and I have literally zero guilt or regret at this point in my life, and obviously you can have many many reactions to having had an abortion, but I am a) happy to wave my little personal flag of “do not give the tiniest of shits now” and b) I try to be pretty open about it? That’s not an option available to everyone, which I’d like to see given more space here; there are so many women living in communities or in families where being open about it would be a disaster, so if you CAN be open about it, I think it’s a good thing to do. Whenever I have an appointment with my midwife, she or her nurse or a student says “how many times have you been pregnant?” and I say “three” and she says “so, you are pregnant now and you have one child and a (sympathetic face) miscarriage?” and I try to be really firm and pleasant and say “no, I had an elective termination in college” in a tone that brooks NO SYMPATHY and that’s my tiny little Utah activism.
