Richard Lawson is divine on Stonewall:
Stonewall insists, with its hokey story about Danny’s personal growth and struggles with his family back home in Indiana, that what actually happened isn’t good enough. That no one will care unless there’s a beautiful young white man at the center of the story. Because who is more wonderful, compelling, appealing than that? Which may sadly be the opinion of certain corners of the market, but who cares about those people. They have plenty of movies made for them. Meanwhile, there are plenty other recent movies that aren’t catered to their narrow tastes but that have done just fine.
What this really is, I think, is the filmmakers tending to their personal preferences and prejudices, and then blaming the system. Darn it, this is how it has to be, because that’s how the world is. We have to literally see a black character hand Danny a brick so Danny can be the first to throw it and the first to cheer “Gay power!” (This is the moment my screening audience, of professional critics, was lost to groans and laughter for the rest of the movie.) We simply must redirect as much history as possible through a white, bizarrely heteronormative lens, or else, the thinking goes, no one will care. People like Emmerich throw up their hands at this supposed inevitability and say, “That’s just the way it is.”
Roxane’s “Not Here To Make Friends” is going to be in The Best American Essays 2015, not under an Asian penname:
As a writer and a person who has struggled with likability — being likable, wanting to be liked, wanting to belong — I have spent a great deal of time thinking about likability in the stories I read and those I write. I am often drawn to unlikable characters, to those who behave in socially unacceptable ways and say whatever is on their mind and do what they want with varying levels of regard for the consequences. I want characters to do bad things and get away with their misdeeds. I want characters to think ugly thoughts and make ugly decisions. I want characters to make mistakes and put themselves first without apologizing for it.
Masquerade sold two million copies in the first few years, and readers went mad—sometimes literally—trying to suss out the location of the golden hare. Based on hunches, resonances, illusory references, coincidental results from imagined codes, and genuine mistakes, “Masqueraders” dug up acres of countryside, traveled hundreds of thousands of miles, wrote tens of thousands of letters to Williams, and occasionally got stuck halfway up cliffs or were apprehended by police while trespassing on historic properties. Masquerade’s simple, elegant puzzle was couched in a lush landscape of visual symbolism and wordplay, and as it turns out, there’s no better way to distract people from a genuine plan than by concealing it inside a bunch of random noise. Given enough unrelated, unnecessary information, human brains will construct the decoy patterns all by themselves.
Michelle Dean on Vera Caspary:
In a recent piece about the book “Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 50s,” edited by Sarah Weinman and published this month by the Library of America, Megan Abbott, a woman crime writer of the 2000s, pointed out that “women are the primary readers of crime fiction.” There is, Abbott noted, a popular theory about this: “that women savor the victim role,” that they “are masochists, unable to rise above the roles assigned them by the patriarchy.”
Abbott rightly refuted this theory, in part by detailing the virtues of the suspense novels that the collection reprints, which do not, in fact, gives us female characters who are mere “victims or corpses.” She might also have pointed to the women who wrote them—Vera Caspary, for instance, who does not, for one moment in her long, unusual life, seem to have imagined herself a victim of anyone or anything.
I participated in The Hairpin’s One Big Question feature again!
How to pester someone appropriately (personally, I respond very well to people playing dumb, so YMMV):
Don’t play dumb. Sometimes the follow-up comes across as clueless. “Oh I don’t really know how this works and I’m new to this, so I hope I’m not totally screwing up. I want to know if you think I should write this blog post,” like you’re their agent already. It shows that you don’t know this process, which is good reason to say no to you. People think they will disarm you but it doesn’t work.
Renée Elise Goldsberry, the BEST part of Hamilton, was the last actress to play Mimi in Rent and she was rad:
ugh i wants it i wants my precious
My friend Carrie’s new puppy loves her slanket:
I told my dad about the Jesus thing, so we can speak openly about it again. He took it pretty well! He did suggest it wouldn’t be the worst idea to get a full blood work-up done, in case there was a medical explanation for my conversion to Christianity, and he still has hopes that I might pivot in my loyalty:
