An interview with Claudia Rankine:
On Thursday morning, I spoke on the phone with the poet Claudia Rankine, who was visiting St. Louis and Ferguson, about Hughes’s poem, and about Rankine’s new book, “Citizen: An American Lyric,” which will be published in October by Graywolf Press. “Citizen” opens with a series of vignettes, written in the second person, that recount persistent, everyday acts of racism of a kind that accumulate until they become a poisonous scourge: being skipped in line at the pharmacy by a white man, because he has failed to notice you in front of him; being told approvingly, as a schoolchild, that your features are like those of a white person; being furiously accosted by a trauma therapist who does not believe that the patient she is expecting could look like you.
If you are a writer of color and want to sink your teeth into writing a piece on The Negro Motorist Green Book, I sure would like to hear from you (nicole at the toast dot net.) I have earmarked one of our donations for this purpose and I will hide it from all other freelancers until I get the right pitch.
We can talk about Doctor Who on Wednesday. Not before. We can talk about the VMAs now, however. And if, by some chance, you want to talk about Don’t Legalize It: Best Buds, the newest straight-to-DVD Trailer Park Boys movie which I watched last night and is amazing, I’m here for that too.
All I ever want to read are things about old SNL actors, tbqh:
It was a crystallizing moment for Chevy, an instant when he realized that everything was going to change. It was also, according to those who worked with him, one of the few times Chevy Chase ever ran from stardom. More than most people who become famous very fast, Chevy walked into fame with his eyes open, expecting it, taking it as his due, seldom pausing to wonder why it was happening to him. Which is not the same as saying he took fame in stride.
I know he’s a colossal dick but he was really sexy in the 1970s.
All about Lisa Hanawalt’s new show on Netflix. HORSES:
Picture fashion godhead Anna Wintour riding confidently astride an ostrich’s bare back. If it’s difficult to imagine, there’s a workaround: Lisa Hanawalt has already breathed life into this very idea in her unhinged book, My Dumb Dirty Eyes. Many aspects of the artist’s singular style can be summarized in this one image–a preoccupation with wildlife, the subversion of celebrity, and bizarre visual combinations with their own internal logic. It’s no coincidence that these themes also describe Netflix’s first animated series, BoJack Horseman, since Hanawalt designed its characters as well.
“She took off his shirt, his skin glistening in the sun like a glazed doughnut. The glaze part, not the doughnut part.”
I always got hives from that scene in the Laura Ingalls Wilder book where she had to diagram sentences to get her teacher’s license, and this is the SAME GODDAMN FEELING.
This ran on Friday, don’t miss it.
I know we already talked about “More Adventurous” but it was also the album I was listening to when I started dating my husband (along with, weirdly, “Boys and Girls in America” by The Hold Steady) so I am attached to it and this piece is really good.
Check out the SACK on this motherfucker, renting this place.
oh god i love breakfast sandwiches so much look at all these breakfast sandwiches
