YEAH, man:
We’re gonna be talking more about books to read later today, but Emily Gould did this great roundup of fall reads and I am INSPIRED by it and have saved several of them from my give-to-the-women’s-shelter stack of galleys.
Everyone is linking to this with I NEVER FORGOT ANASTASIA KRUPNIK so I’ll skip that part:
Do you get a lot of Anastasia-obsessives contacting you?
The Anastasia days predated email, but one of my favorite letters I’ve ever gotten came from a kid who told me that she loved the Anastasia books; she loved how Anastasia had to take care of her baby brother all the time, because her mother worked. The funny thing was, none of what she described in her letter was in the book. Clearly, this was what was going on in her own life — she had to take care of her brother because her mother worked. Anastasia didn’t do any of those things. But it was a neat example of how a child can so deeply enter a world of a book that it molds into her own life.
Oh, wow, AHP did a GREAT job on why the TV coverage at the NY Times is so bad:
The “Angry Black Woman” piece, as it has now come to be known, was written by the Times’ chief television critic, Alessandra Stanley. It was racist, factually incorrect, and demonstrated an overarching lack of familiarity with Shonda Rhimes’ work in particular and contemporary television in general.
Others have outlined exactly how and why with incision. But for those familiar with Stanley and television criticism at the Times, it was but the most recent and flagrant in a long history of gaffes, misunderstandings, and sublimated dismissals that demonstrate an insulting lack of investment in the medium. As Vox culture editor and television critic Todd VanDerWerff told BuzzFeed News, “The Times thinks of TV as fundamentally vapid, so it produces dismissive criticism about the medium, and so far as I can tell, this is historically true of the publication.”
When Jennings showed up in March 1945, at age 20, there were approximately 70 women at Penn working on desktop adding machines and scribbling numbers on huge sheets of paper. Adele Goldstine, a mathematician who was married to the Army’s liaison with the ENIAC team, was in charge of recruiting and training. “I’ll never forget the first time I saw Adele,” Jennings said. “She ambled into class with a cigarette dangling from the corner of her mouth, walked over to a table, threw one leg over its corner, and began to lecture in her slightly cleaned up Brooklyn accent.” For Jennings, who had grown up as a spirited tomboy bristling at the countless instances of sexism she faced, it was a transforming experience. “I knew I was a long way from Maryville, where women had to sneak down to the greenhouse to grab a smoke.”
I continue to be fascinated and terrified by Su Meck’s story (the shit with her husband that comes up, Jesus):
Su was taught to braid and make a tuna-fish sandwich and Jazzercise, all of which she picked up quickly. She passed a “safety evaluation” that involved crossing a street, walking in a crowd, and riding a bike. On June 7, she was deemed “severely impaired” in attention, language comprehension, abstract reasoning, and judgment and “moderately impaired” in memory and calculation. Three days later and just 19 days after sustaining her injury, with an IQ assessed at somewhere between 70 and 100 and the visual and spatial skills of a 6-year-old, having made “remarkable improvement in all areas,” her deficits “resolved,” and all skills apparently “within normal limits,” at least “80 percent back to normal,” she was discharged, with no additional therapies or rehabilitation recommended, save psychological assessments to address lingering issues deemed “nonorganic.” In a blue Chevy Malibu driven by the man who’d been introduced as her “husband,” she sat silently, looking out the window at each piece of the almost everything she did not know, including, as they pulled into the driveway of the one said to be hers, inside of which waited the two little people said to be her “children,” to whom she was said to be their “mother”—home.
Okay, one more thing about the Mitfords!
This whole thing by Sarah Miller is kind of stupendous and great:
During the school year, we had a housekeeper at home. My mother insists the housekeeper wasn’t full time, but there has to be some reason I don’t really know how to make a bed and am not very neat and yet, somehow, also have extremely high standards of cleanliness. The housekeeper made a lot of meals, but whenever we said that what we were eating was good, my mother would point out that she had picked out the recipe, and then she would try to convince you that this was important, even though no one cared. My mother thought that meant we didn’t care about her, but that wasn’t it. We just didn’t care where the food came from. People cook — particularly women, but not only women — because they think people are going to notice them, and love them, but almost no one thinks about who made what they’re eating or how it got on the table. They’re just hungry, and they eat, and they sometimes say thank you, and then they forget about it.
Look, we’re going to link to ALL the Phil Hartman stories, deal.
