My return trip from Canada sucked me into one of those whirlpools of related reading that leaves you rather breathless. In my case, that meant following up my previous book on Wallis Warfield with Caroline Blackwood’s The Last of the Duchess: The Strange and Sinister Story of the Final Years of Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, and then into Dangerous Muse: The Life Of Lady Caroline Blackwood, which was just…(kisses fingers appreciatively), and finally left me with Great Granny Webster, Blackwood’s best novel, which Philip Larkin cast the deciding Booker Prize vote against because it was based on insufficiently fictional people. Suffice it to say, I am now ALMOST tired of deranged British aristos and drunks and mad painters and mad poets, but not quite? You would be quite happy with any of these books, as well as Blackwood’s daughter’s wonderful memoir, Why Not Say What Happened?
Mallory and I have a new Toast Stance which cannot possibly wait for the next installment.
CON:
Tagging eighty people in a photo, which, when the tagged person clicks on it in a panic, because some people have a great horror of being tagged in photos, reveals itself to be merely a photograph of the tagger’s new baby, they just wanted to make sure you were forced to go look at it.
The social compact is hereby dissolved. throws chair through starbucks window, steals several bags of chocolate-covered coffee beans
Game of Thrones. DUUUUUUUUUUDE.
An ex-con on Orange Is the New Black (don’t talk too much about the second season today! we have a dynamite series of pie charts and diagrams on it for you on Thursday!):
So you weren’t a smart-ass in prison?
Dude, if you ever saw me in the prison element, you would have thought I was brain damaged. Seriously. How I am now is not how I was in prison. And I don’t mean that in an “it was a long time ago, I’ve turned my life around” way. I mean that I kept my mouth zipped in prison. I would sometimes go for days and only say maybe five words to people. I kept my mouth shut, and if I thought someone was an idiot or annoying, which happened all the time, I kept it to myself. I wanted to get the hell out of there, and talking shit to people was a definite way to make my stay longer.
I watched Maleficent this weekend, and am happy to talk about a) how I was rooting for Angie to fuck ’em all UPPPPPPPPP and b) how not one single solitary male character could get it. You couldn’t give us one srsly good-looking man? and c) how many potential MISANDRY gifs I want you to make for me from it.
My dad is visiting, so mostly we’ve been watching the World Cup, and it’s been pretty great. He knows everything about soccer! Ask him about the career of some rando on Uruguay’s team and he’ll be all “well, he was born in Paysandu, came up through the youth system…” I have also learned that if Frodo had given my father the Ring, he would have started off by giving every single Italian player a yellow card for diving, but it wouldn’t stop there. Oh, no. It wouldn’t stop there.
I did not actually see Frozen, but that song is a weak-ass rip-off of the VASTLY superior “Defying Gravity,” and also Mallory informs me that a young woman gave up a perfectly dope ice fortress for no good reason.
Super great Paris Review interview with August Wilson:
INTERVIEWER
Can you say what first drew you to the theater?
WILSON
I think it was the ability of the theater to communicate ideas and extol virtues that drew me to it. And also I was, and remain, fascinated by the idea of an audience as a community of people who gather willingly to bear witness. A novelist writes a novel and people read it. But reading is a solitary act. While it may elicit a varied and personal response, the communal nature of the audience is like having five hundred people read your novel and respond to it at the same time. I find that thrilling.
