The Victorian-livin’ couple, I am not yet done talking about them:
Neither my husband nor I have ever had a cellphone; I’ve never even had a driver’s license. On special outings when Gabriel and I go cycling together, I ride a copy of a high-wheel tricycle from the 1880s. Gabriel has three high-wheel bicycles, and he has ridden them hundreds of miles. On our vacation just last week, we rode our high-wheel cycles more than 75 miles along a historic railroad route between abandoned silver mines. I kept thinking of an article we had read in an 1883 cycling magazine about wheelmen riding bikes just like Gabriel’s when they took a trip out to a mine.
Or the older, even nuttier piece:
Some people feel they were born in the wrong place, or in a body of the wrong gender. I have simply always felt that I was born in the wrong time, and there is no passport nor surgical procedure to help one of my particular condition.
NOW, A MERCH ALERT!
We’re gonna be selling tote bags! WHOO. Okay, there are three different tote bags, and I’m previewing the illos here (all by Toast reader artists!) so you can express GENERAL PREFERENCES so if people are just wild about a particular one, we can make extras of that one!
The first two are really pretty and lyrical and by Megan Piontkowski:
And the third is by our own icebergmama, and I suspect it will find favor with our male readers and also people who work in more conservative offices:
So, you know, are you gonna buy a tote bag? Two tote bags? Which ones? We’re thinking they’ll be about $20 plus a couple bucks for shipping.
Michelle Dean on literary drunkards and Ernest Hemingway being a real dick to Dorothy Parker about her abortion:
Artists have rarely wanted to correct the public on this point. This was especially true of writers in the middle of the twentieth century, laboring in the long interval between Prohibition—-when writing, celebrity and drink got tangled up at the Algonquin Round Table and in the lives of modernists—and the 1970s. (Hard drugs slipped in after that but began to signify a certain cynicism rather than angst in the writer.) The trite liquor-soaked romance of their craft suited these writers, it seemed; it gave them a handy excuse. However many degenerate nights were lost at a bar, however many times a person might be rushed to a hospital with a suicide attempt, it was worth it. The blackouts and bad marriages and every sordid bit of it could be explained away by art with a capital A. Who wouldn’t trade a few years of misery to write something like Gatsby? Or A Farewell to Arms? Or “The Swimmer”? Or “Fern Hill”? Put that way, the math of art and drink comes out looking attractive, glamorous, in spite of the death and in spite of the suffering.
My friend Carrie’s new puppy is having a contemplative moment:
I liked this narrative about having OCD:
For me, the only tactic that really works to control my OCD is grinding down the obsessive thought over a long period of time. To do that, I have to look at literally the worst possible scenario — say, how long I would be in prison if I actually ran over a kid — and just come to terms with it. This means I’m actually convincing myself that the worst thing will happen, then convincing myself that it’s something I can cope with. I’ll have to repeat these rationalizations over and over again sometimes, but they’ll eventually stick and allow me to relax.
My fav soap opera, which I watch every eight months and never get lost with:
When William J. Bell and wife Lee Phillip Bell created The Young And The Restless in 1973, networks were looking to get further into the daytime soap business, not running away from it. William Bell, a protégé of soap pioneer Irna Phillips, was a hot commodity in the soap world, having written ratings-boosting runs on Guiding Light, As The World Turns, and Days Of Our Lives. CBS was so eager to be in the Bell business that the network agreed to a show before it was even created, granting him practically a free pass to create exactly the show he wanted. What he created both respected the current conventions of the genre by focusing the story on two main families, but also revolutionized it, by making younger characters the story focus and bringing Hollywood production values to daytime. Although the show struggled to gain market share in its first few years, creatively it came out of the gate extremely strong, winning the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 1975.
This is an incredible, brutally sad report on Lagos’ only rape support center, and you can follow the #SaveMirabel hashtag for more updates:
The Mirabel Centre has been open for two years and is funded by DFID, the UK’s Department for International Development. Juliet says they have seen more than 845 clients in that time. But having so many people pass through such a small space is a challenge.
“When we have to see two clients at a time, we have to vacate our admin room,” she explains.
The centre covers the cost of a victim’s medical tests – those for sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy among other things – and medication, like contraceptives and antibiotics, although the HIV test is free and the post exposure prophylaxis, an anti-HIV medication taken as soon as possible after possible exposure to HIV, is subsidised by another non-profit and then supplied and administered by the hospital.
