USA. New York City. 1940s. Shirley JACKSON, author of “The Lottery”. Contact email: New York : [email protected] Paris : [email protected] London : [email protected] Tokyo : [email protected] Contact phones: New York : +1 212 929 6000 Paris: + 33 1 53 42 50 00 London: + 44 20 7490 1771 Tokyo: + 81 3 3219 0771 Image URL: http://www.magnumphotos.com/Archive/C.aspx?VP3=ViewBox_VPage&IID=2K7O3RB9TZD5&CT=Image&IT=ZoomImage01_VForm
I will fight you for dissing Shirley Jackson, I will straight-up fight you and punch you in the face, YOURS is a sorely limited talent:
And yet — why is the vacuum cleaner company not returning my calls? — as much as one wants Jackson to be a major writer, pulls for her in fact, to read her in any kind of bulk is to confront a sorely limited talent. Like Pluto, she is an interesting flyby but not quite a planet.
no, like I will FUCK YOU UP, SON:
There’s little emotional or intellectual complexity beneath her overdetermined surfaces. She went to the well too often for gimmicks. Reading the Library of America volume of her work, published in 2010 and edited by Joyce Carol Oates (whose fiction Jackson’s sometimes resembles), was like being clouted on the head with the same stick over and over again.
Oh, a long profile of Kim Kardashian! I won’t read that, there are so many more important….
Kardashian is also at once extraordinarily human — don’t you want to hear about the way she does her makeup? — and a master of what critic Jerry Saltz has called the “new uncanny,” or art that blurs the line between human and a robot pretending to be a human. In her video game, you not only can change her clothes and hairstyle, but eye color and skin color. And over the course of the several times we meet, her skin shifts from a deep equatorial brown to a laid-out-in-Palm Springs honey to a morning soy creamer, depending on the makeup and tanning spray. “Something about Kim is very appealing to digital natives,” says prominent tech journalist and Re/code editor Kara Swisher. Kardashian also says things like this: “When I go on vacation, I only go to the beach certain times of the day, and lay out by the pool the rest of the time,” because the sun is often too flat, and if someone takes a picture of her, she’ll get caught looking less Kim Kardashian-like than she’d like. “In Miami, I’ll get up at six and swim in the ocean at seven in the morning right before the harsh sun comes up — and the pictures always look amazing.”
Podium girls, maybe we could stop using them?
By using podium girls while continuing to exclude women from most of the race, Le Tour is – intentionally or not – telling elite women that models, not athletes, belong in front of the cameras. Media ignores our races because “no one will watch them”, despite the fact that women’s sports break viewership records when properly covered and marketed. It would be a boon to women’s cycling if the only race the rest of the world cares about also showcased the full strength, grit, and ingenuity of world-class racers like Anna van der Breggen.
An interview with UnREAL‘s Prince Charming (spoilers, obvs):
Adam seems like a pathological narcissist. Would you agree?
Yeah, I’d agree. He can be nice with everyone, but at the end of the day, he comes first. And I think a lot of people don’t realize that when they might be around him because he seems to be involved and makes people feel like they have a connection, but he’s kind of every man for himself. That’s how he sees it.
Meet the marital rape deniers (it’s not just Trump’s lawyer):
I got Matt and Jaya into Silicon Valley, which is always a personal triumph, so I had to share this again:
I just…I love this show so much? It makes me so happy.
I don’t pretend to like the Kardashian clan. I don’t watch their show or buy their clothes (but I do play the game, obsessively). But I am distinctly uncomfortable with a certain strain of criticism of the family that trashes them for basically, being feminine. “What are they famous for? Doing nothing and wearing makeup!” And yeah, a lot of sins can be cast at their feet. But you cannot tell me they aren’t savvy businesspeople, or they can’t work the game to its fullest extent. I will gladly agree that Kim’s fashion sense is pretty antithetical to my own and that I think they’re pretty over saturated. But Kim and her family are damn successful at what they do, and if her success comes in the shape of a super-feminine woman who does whatever she wants…I like that too.
The criticism definitely does seem largely rooted in misogyny. A lot of people seem enraged at her because she became famous through a sex tape. The other day, I heard a radio DJ dismiss her as a “whore” and deplore the fact that she was on the cover of Rolling Stone.
I never had very strong opinions about her either way, but the continued criticism is making me more pro. If you’re a woman and tons of people seem to hate you for no substantive reason, then you’re probably doing something right.
Kind of how I decided a while back to like Zooey Deschanel despite not particularly caring for anything she appears in 🙂
“If you’re a woman and tons of people seem to hate you for no substantive reason, then you’re probably doing something right.”
I’m gradually realizing this too and letting go of so much irrational hate for “vapid” celebrities unless they’re actively doing something harmful. Liberating. I still get irritated, but it’s getting better. Life’s too short.
I just scrolled through facebook and someone had shared a photo of graffiti saying “stop making stupid people famous.” And I’m like, ok, can we just admit a lot of pop culture is objectively kinda dumb and that’s the way we like it? We like cheesy melodrama and we like escapist-fantasy thrillers or romances and we like bad puns (I like bad puns) and we like goofball comedies and this is fine, whatever.
I suspect my friend was thinking more of Republican presidential candidates than Kardashians, though, which I can get behind.
Also it’s not as if “what people generally think of as stupid” is naturally occurring as if it were, IDK, selenium or something. And there is an intensely gendered pattern to “things we consider most stupid” vs. “this isn’t stupid because I am a dude and enjoy it even though it contains, objectively, the same stuff.”
e.g., this description of a Mary Sue
Generally I think that people should just like what they like and not give a crap about what other people are liking and what bearing that has on the things that THEY like (spoiler: no bearing at all) as long as it’s not, you know, harmful.
I think the fact that they are very savvy about marketing themselves and their lifestyle is often overlooked.
I mean, I spend most days doing nothing and wearing makeup and my net worth remains pretty miniscule.
I’ve never watched their show or bought any of their stuff, but I loooove profiles like this one that just talk about how these “stupid Kardashians” are super brilliant at what they do.
I agree with you. Kim is an extraordinarily savvy businessperson, and doesn’t get nearly enough credit for it. I’ll even expand on this : Kim Kardashian is a superb manager.
Her business has a single product line : herself. As manager of this business, Kim has :
1. identified what she needs to do to build that product line
2. hired people who know more than she does, and
3. trusted them to execute their ideas
Occasionally, you see a manager who does two of these, but it’s rare to get one who does all three. Kim is killing it here.
As an example, look at her Paper magazine photoshoot. I don’t expect that Kim necessarily knew who Jean-Paul Goude is, but not only was she perceptive enough to get a person on her team who would think of hiring him, but as an excellent manager, she trusted that person enough to go forward what was objectively a risky and outré plan (“let’s get the guy who did all of Grace Jones’s photomanipulated images and let him run wild with his very niche personal style”). Hiring the right person and trusting them to execute on their area of expertise paid off by bringing her product to a whole new level of exposure, and incidentally breaking the Internet.
Same deal with her selfie book : it’s significant in the first place there’s someone on her team who said “OK, let’s do this basically as a Richard-Prince-meets-Bruce-Nauman commodity art piece,” but it’s even more significant that she signed off on it. That’s another objectively left-field plan from someone who obviously specializes in that intersection of art and commerce, but it fits perfectly with her core product line and expands on it in an unexpected way. Very smart. Good management.
tl; dr: I would pay good money to see a “manage your business the Kim Kardashian way” book.
She’s a pure hustler, and sexism is 99% of the critique of her. And pair her with Kanye, who is himself a nexus of similarly unfounded criticism, and you’ve got a perfect vortex for assholes to complain about celebrity culture and engage in their own small-minded racist, sexist bullshit.
This is actually outstanding.
it has just occurred to me that Trump is famous for being a good manager and Kim is not and WTF, guys, WTF.
and Kim has not declared bankruptcy multiple times and screwed over various business partners (AFAIK).
OMFG thanks for this comment.
>>. I don’t expect that Kim necessarily knew who Jean-Paul Goude is
I am intrigued – why would you not expect that? She is someone whose entire business for getting on the better part of a decade has been style, photography, and image – why do you think that she wouldn’t have an immensely detailed professional knowledge of who does what and how?
Agree! I was especially uncomfortable with the wave of vitriol unleashed by NPR listeners after she was a guest on “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!”
Sometimes I feel uncomfortable to be an NPR fan, knowing what company I’m in. Because this is pretty much spot on: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/a_fine_whine/2…
I would have been pro having her on even if she had been a “meh” guest, but she was legitimately charming! I had no opinion of her other than I was impressed at her business savvy, particularly around the video game, but she was a really good guest! Better than most of the ones they get (sorry Vivek Murthy).
She strikes me as profoundly aware of exactly how she’s perceived by the culture, and has the preternatural ability to exploit or subvert that reputation as the situation demands.
Not to mention that if you don’t care about something you can just… not care about it? But so many people care a GREAT DEAL about letting us know that they don’t pay attention to the Kardashians, nope, don’t even know who they are, never mind that my eye is twitching right now. And the same people tend to use her as proof that everybody else in America is a drooling, bovine idiot who does nothing all day but eat french fries and think admiringly about Kim Kardashian. And that sentiment is far stupider and more offensive to me than anything Kim has ever done.
Yes, exactly. I don’t care about superhero movies or Marvel or whatever, so my solution is that I don’t read about it or talk about it. I certainly don’t go around ranting about the destruction of American culture and how nobody reads literature any more in favor of comic books and raving about the end of civilization. I just….ignore it. See? See how easy it is?
I’m always a little disturbed at how often people end up bringing the whole “ruining my childhood” refrain into things. There are people for which nostalgia has achieved near-godlike status.
OH MAN. When that (super-cute) baby was born, I made a Facebook post about how a lot of people who klaim not to kare about the Kardashians were doing an awful lot of talking about them and hoo boy people got mad.
As a woman and as someone who’s largely indifferent to the Kardashian machine, I refuse to accept the monstrous commercial construct that is Kim Kardashian as an ambassador or as representative of femininity or super-femininity, and I disagree with a tacit acceptance of “doing nothing and wearing makeup” as feminine.
That’s fine and you’re entitled to your opinion, but my argument was more along the lines that while Kim poses as being ultra feminine, in reality she is a businesswoman and a damn fine one. She makes it appear that her life is wearing makeup and doing nothing, incurring a lot of wrath from people who associate her with some sort of depraved Babylonian excess, but she’s done quite a lot and accomplished quite a lot. She does make a representation of one type of femininity, regardless of whether you agree with it, and it’s a representation that’s been very successful commercially.
There’s no contradiction between the careful constructs of femininity that Kim Kardashian presents to the world and being a damn fine businessperson. The fact that the exact opposite is the case may have more to do with the barrage of criticism she gets than misogyny does. It’s certainly my criticism of her.
As a feminist who thinks the things she has done and accomplished, aside from enriching herself and her family, are limited to being a really good cog in a fundamentally misogynist commercial machine that will help make another generation of girls into efficient, miserable consumers who dislike their own bodies and pay huge percentages of their income to cosmetically and surgically alter themselves in an almost invariably self-defeating quest for personal wealth, the fact that she has used her own agency instead of things being done “to her” is not a plus.
I think this is a good explanation of what makes me uncomfortable about Kim Kardashian. I am not sure there’s anything particularly good about being a damn fine businesswoman, if the business you’re running is essentially a franchise of the patriarchy.
I am not super-into hating on Kim Kardashian, though, I don’t feel like she’s any worse than a million other people currently running roughshod over humanity.
You’re right. Appearances to the contrary I actually am usually indifferent to her because she is just one buzz in the cacophony of misogynist enculturation. But it riles me when I see a suggestion that she deserves respect for participating in that enculturation really lucratively. She doesn’t even have a rags-to-riches story like Katie Price or Pamela Anderson; she was someone of public interest at the time her sex tape came out because of the man she was with and because her very rich father had helped to successfully defend a wife killer.
Basically, she’s found a way to monetize what the patriarchy insists women should do for free (be decorative), and people hate her for it.
I heard on the news that Channing Tatum is no longer going to be in that Gambit movie, and that everyone is speculating as to why.
I would like to fill this absence of evidence with the suggestion that it is Tatum’s feminist awakening that made him realize that Gambit is a gross creep, and also there is no way that movie wasn’t leaning heavily on his gross creepiness.
http://io9.com/what-on-earth-could-make-channing-…
I haven’t seen any of the X-Men movies but I vaguely had a crush on Gambit years ago from the Saturday morning cartoon (Robin Hood the fox, too, I think I probably have company here). Can you recap his gross creepiness?
I recommend these X-Men recaps from ComicsAlliance — here are all the ones tagged with “That Scumbag Gambit“!
Highlights include: hitting on Jubilee, who is a teenager! Trying to make out with Rogue while she is asleep! Showing up to a mission briefing dressed like Don Johnson from Miami Vice and clearly smelling like Drakkar Noir!
“clearly smelling like Drakkar Noir!”
*cackles for days* Now I want an article listing which X-dudes smell like which cheesy, awful colognes.
Wolverine smells like Old Spice, though. Old Spice and Canadian pine trees.
And flannel. Warm, fuzzy flannel.
I love Nightcrawler, but you know he’s gotta be sporting something like Acqua Di Gio.
Cyclops has been wearing the same Gap scent since the 90s and sees no need to change.
Yes! 100% agree re Gap Scent, but which one? http://www.theawl.com/2013/03/what-your-gap-fragr… I say Heaven or Dream.
Oh, Heaven for sure. Preppy and bland.
yeah, I was trying to think of what kind of utterly characterless cologne Cyclops would put on every morning like clockwork, and “Gap Generic” is probably it
Welp, I’m out then. I instantly associate the scent of Old Spice with my dad and going to church. So that would ruin Wolverine for me forever.
In my opinion, Wolverine is actually the best when he’s sort of the Angry Old Dad of the X-Men.
Wolverine would 100% have a subscription to Dad Magazine.
Hey bub, that’s not how you mount overhead storage.
Wolverine : http://www.malinandgoetz.com/perfumery/8565710050…
Rouge : http://www.malinandgoetz.com/perfumery/8565710050…
I read that as Draaakaaaaar Noooooooiiiirrr. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6yttOfIvOw
Chris Sims is really not one to point fingers.
This is so disappointing! I also left off reading X-men in the 90s, but it’s stayed a little bubble of warm fuzzies in my memory, something like ginkgotree mentions below. I’m really sad, but unsurprised to see how misogyny has bubbled to the surface.
I’m familiar with Chris Sims’ background; I don’t think it changes the fact that Gambit is pretty unequivocally scummy.
Probably; I’d stopped reading X-Men on a regular basis before he debuted, and he always struck me as yet another Claremont character with no real solid basis in his assigned ethnic background, just a collection of catch phrases and a few words in French sprinkled in his dialogue.
And, for fairness’ sake, I’d also point out that Sims has apologized for his behavior (and also acknowledges that that apology may not be enough to regain people’s trust), and has otherwise generally been one of the better critics in comics. It’s just that, for me, and maybe only for me, he’s lost his privileges to have his commentary on this subject taken seriously.
The hyper-stereotypical accent alone is enough IMO.
The sheer quantity of Accent Badness in X-Men comics is sincerely like… 60% of the reason I don’t read them. (Plus 30% too picky about characters I like to truly enjoy a huge ensemble cast, 10% generalized WHY IS IT SO HARD TO START READING A NEW COMIC, WHY ARE THERE 17 ISSUE #1’S IN THE LAST FIVE YEARS, etc.)
Normally, the io9 commenters are a semi-reasonable bunch (aside from the occasional gamergater overlap from Kotaku), but boy they seem to hate Channing Tatum.
I usually hate it when people declare that something others hate is jealousy, but I think that might actually be applicable in this situation.
Speaking as someone who was once chief among that number, many years ago, I can say with some certainty: yeah. Yeahhhhh.
I think probably everyone here knows my feelings about Channing Tatum, and I thought his casting as Gambit was a terrible idea from day one.
Who the fuck is this man to come at Shirley Jackson? How DARE YOU.
My man should be careful dropping lines about being “clouted on the head with the same stick over and over” lest he start giving people ideas.
The moment he wrote that Harold Bloom said everything that needed to be said about Shirley Jackson, I was out.
YEP. I got to that part and was just like “welp, therrrrrrre it is.”
Okay, then why is this man foisting his mediocre opinions on the rest of us?
He is no one, he doesn’t exist, and that article doesn’t exist. Shirley Jackson is amazing.
Yeah, suuuuuuuure it’s not about the fact that she wrote about the domestic sphere. Suuuuuuuuure. (Also, let’s talk about how good her essays about her family are.)
I know, all I read from that review was “entirely too much discussion of women’s concerns, and as a man, I couldn’t possibly be expected to find any meaning or interest in it. Zero stars”.
And yes, I laughed all the way through Life Among the Savages. She is unbelievably witty and hilarious.
I couldn’t even make it to the end of the link round up. I don’t think I’ve ever been so incensed by a book review.
There’s a fantastic and positive review of LET ME TELL YOU in the August issue of BookPage–I happened upon it last night and realized I’m one of those people who stopped at The Lottery and really need to correct that. Negative reviewer can suck it.
Maybe he didn’t bring up Castle or Hangsaman because he didn’t want to give us silly Jackson-loving ladies any ideas. Ideas like the sugar bowl.
Here for that Kim K profile, can’t wait to read it over lunch. I love celebrity profiles, they’re as revealing about the author (and the society that shaped the author) as they are about the celebrities, which is the interesting part. I also feel a mild mix of respect and pity for Kim–wouldn’t call myself a fan (have never seen the show nor played the mobile game) but am closer to fan than to hater– and will be interested to see how the piece informs that opinion.
Toasters, what are the best celeb profiles you’ve read? This Pam Anderson piece in Elle last year broke my heart.
This isn’t quite relevant, but I’m going to piggy back on your comment to say that after seeing Trainwreck, I am writing EVEN MORE Edith Zimmerman/Chris Evans fanfic in my head. (Due to this, if you don’t already know.)
DID YOU NOTICE? IT’S THE SAME PLOT AS FIFTY SHADES OF GREY!!!
I just love that and can’t get over it.
Definitely the GQ profile on Chris Evans. SO. GOOD.
OMG. I’m only a few paragraphs in but HIS MOM.
*thanks the heavens for this gift*
“And from ten minutes into that first interview, when he reached across the table to punctuate a joke by putting his hand on top of mine, Chris kept up frequent hand holding and lower-back touching, palm kissing and knee squeezing.”
unnnnnnngh
HIS FLIRTING ABOUT HER NAME!!! ok i’ll stop
IT’S SO AMAZING WE WILL NEVER HAVE A PROFILE THIS AMAZING AGAIN
………….
He showed up in aviators, a red T-shirt, and a backward baseball cap pulled down to his eyebrows. “How aggressive can I be?” Chris grinned. “Shots?” It turned out the bar was beer-and-wine-only, though, so he got a Sam Adams in a liter-sized stein that he said made him “feel like a Viking.”
where has this been my whole life??? how have i not read this already??? i… i….
I’ll be in my bunk.
Chris is “kind of a big dork,” his mother told me. “At 30 he still knows all the words to songs from The Little Mermaid.”
SRSLY THO this interview is a gift from on high and goddamn is Edith the luckiest woman in the world
“Boom.” He high-fived me. It’s hard to say which he did more: high-five when he was pleased about a joke of his or mine, or make jerk-off gestures when he was sick of hearing himself talk.
Is it too late to change my name to Edith?
“This is why I hate myself in interviews. All of a sudden, you stop and you’re like, ‘Chris, how dare you?’ I don’t live in Darfur. I have both legs.”
“But you can’t walk around all the time being like, ‘I’m so grateful I’m not in Darfur.’ ”
“But why?” he asked.
“Because you can’t,” I said.
I…. everything about this piece is perfect. I am going to spend all day trying to get work done, coming back to read a paragraph of this piece, getting distracted, posting it here, adding a gif…. by the end of the day, i will be posting basically the entire piece into here. This needs to stop.
EVERYONE. PLEASE BE AWARE THAT EVERY WORD OF THIS PIECE (with the possible exception of the typo “ercise”) IS UTTER PERFECTION, AND YOU SHOULD PROBABLY HAVE THIS THING IN YOUR LIFE. This message was approved by Coset The Table.
NO PLEASE CONTINUE TO POST WITH GIFS, THIS IS WHAT IS GETTING ME THROUGH THE DAY. Knowing I have brought such joy to someone’s life…it’s what I live for.
IF YOU INSIST:
slightly edited convo with mr. table (note, earlier this week he bought a captain america tee at target that looks like it’s going to bleed like crazy):
me: (sends link)
this piece.
this piece is life changing.
i should have become a journalist.
i should have become an Edith.
I should have become THAT EDITH
WHY HAVE I NOT BEEN DRUNK WITH CHRIS EVANS
I AM MISSING OUT {mr. table}
I AM MISSING OUT ON LIVING LIFE TO THE FULLEST
him: Oh Jesus christ
me: I’m going to need you to wash that captain america tshirt so you can start wearing it.
him:Its been washed once
I’ll wash it again and dry it
I can’t decide how weird it would be if I asked for one of those life-size Captain America cutouts for Hannukah….
There is a person at my place of work, who is high enough up the food chain to no longer be in a cube, but instead she has an actual office with an actual door. In her office, she has a life size cardboard cutout of a player for the Red Sox, positioned in a way that looks mid-swing to me? And every time i walk by, I think…. these are the grownups?
Same thing with West Wing and that annoying episode where Josh is an asshat to the woman wearing a Star Trek pin. It is absurd that it’s perfectly “socially acceptable” that Josh Lyman is a human who gets so thrown off his game by the Mets losing that the staff of a different candidate knows he’ll be off his game, it’s perfectly fine that he go off the deep end because the Mets “can’t throw strikes”, and that sports fandom is fine, but a small trek pin is unprofessional???????????
well that went off topic real fast.
Okay, back to the regularly scheduled squeeing:
“Is it going well?” he asked.
“It’s going really well,” I said.
“Nailing it?”
“You’re nailing it.”
“You’re nailing it also,” he said. “I’m going to write an article about you.”
The only thing missing from this article is Chris laughing and grabbing his left boob (or Edith’s left boob…)
I mean, let me be clear. the whole “how aggressive can I be? shots?” thing? I don’t really drink. It’s not that I never ever drink. It’s that when i drink, I drink part of one drink, and even that’s not common. But I have deeply fond memories of going to parties at UMass as one of a couple sober people, with TOTAL FUCKING MEATBALLS like Chris Evans. Doing things like getting trashed out of their mind on their birthday because people handed them shots, and once that happens, in their worldview, you have to take the shot, there is no choice, you are required to take that shot. Or the guy who walked into an applebees and asked for the whatever drinks menu by name because he knew that applebees didn’t call them shots or hard liquor, they had some other weird name for it (what do i know, i don’t drink, that particular day was more than a decade ago), and he wanted to go to fencing practice not-quite-sober. and then you see them the next morning in the dining hall, and they high five you for the fact that you obviously went home last night with someone now at their table instead of going back to your own school and you’re not sure if they’re still drunk or just hung over and you’re not sure if they know who you spent last night with, but they clearly don’t care, because there’s no shame, you’re just one of the guys, but not in the gross way of “you’re the cool girlfriend, unlike those crazy chicks” but instead in the way of “you’re our friend too, even if we have very different beliefs about the best weapon in UT2K4”.
And I love those guys, those are my boys, especially the ones that went from republicans with reagan posters on the wall to intersectional feminists, and evans reminds me of all the best parts of those dudes, only he looks better in a tight white tshirt, and I’m guessing he’s the sort of dude who is better in bed after at least 4 drinks but definitely not more than about 7 (…………. that range is going to depend on how much of him there is, which is going to depend on what movie he’s currently filming, so, uh, y’know. that’ll move a bit)— basically, you want him just uninhibited enough to lose that he is
“a little bit out of his brain”,
but, y’know, everything is still working like it’s supposed to, and you don’t feel like you’re taking advantage,
and i am DEFINITELY NOT oversharing here like crazy. nope. nuh-uh. this is 100% imagination. Yup. Any similarities to actual people I know who absolutely read the toast but probably not the comments are purely incidental, at least i combined at least 4 people in here, and oh god i need to stop before i get myself in even more trouble.
I feel like the regular sharing of this article is a beautiful internet rite of passage.
Oh my sweet Jesus. I’m actually grinning. It’s like the best Mary Sue ever, except that it’s REAL! *swoon*
My love for that profile will never, ever die.
Tom Junod’s profile of Fred (“Mister”) Rogers is the one that always kills me. http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/interview…
This is the answer.
Now I am trying not to cry at work.
Thank you so much for this. I am trying really, really hard not to cry at work but I don’t think I can fight it.
So, I just cried throughout that entire piece. He was such an amazing person, I don’t know what I’d do if I heard something horrible about him.
I’m only partway through this profile and already so weepy. LOVE.
I still think a classic of the genre, Frank Sinatra has a Cold, is really worth reading: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a638/esq1003…
And the author of the profile never even talked to Sinatra!
John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Axl Rose. And there’s a great piece about Wayne Newton from EW’s glory era that’s only available on the internet in part – Newtons/Laws of (Emotion).
From the Axl Rose piece–“He is from nowhere.”
His nowhere is my hometown. I went to his high school. I played in that park.
Fascinating read, thanks for sharing!
Wow, that’s amazing! I re-read that piece now and then, it shouldn’t work – JJS can be so indulgent – and yet, it does, damn near perfectly.
I told myself I wasn’t going to be angry today, and now I’m angry, because FUCK THAT GUY. FUCK HIM RIGHT IN THE EAR. There are three unassailable heroes to me: Shirley Jackson, Kate Bush, and Maleficent. Trash them at your peril.
Here for Kate Bush. Loved her in the 1970s with an obsession that alarmed my friends, until, of course, they borrowed my albums and then they too *looooooooved* her.
When I die, they will bury me with my copy of Hounds of Love.
Where should I start with Kate Bush please? The only song I know by her is Running Up That Hill and I looooooove it.
I would start with her first album, The Kick Inside from 1978 and then, as Stef said, The Hounds of Love (1985). The Kick Inside has Kate using her really high voice, but you soon fall in love with the album after listening to it several times. Oh, on youtube, listen to the song The Man with the Child in His Eyes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olF5kBaKgQw
So, I’m a relatively recent convert to Kate Bush, in that I only truly fell in love with her in 2012. Previously, I had been a full Vestal at the altars of Bjork and Tori Amos, whom I still worship but now recognize that they are the holy and blessed disciples of her Quirkiness Kate Bush.
One day they will collaborate on an album and I will buy it to torture my children with from now until the end of time.
The release date will become the New Year, as time will begin again.
We will look upon the Three Faces of God, and know that She is real.
Do you mind elaborating on your love of Maleficent? I am interested! (the other two need no explanation)
Well, it was a little tongue-in-cheek (I like the rule of three and also have a Maleficent Funko Pop figurine on my desk that caught my eye when I made my post) but I loved the Angelina Jolie movie much more than I had expected. There’s one scene in that movie toward the end that gives me the same (loud) reaction as Eowyn’s “I am no man” bit in LOTR.
If you put a penis on Pluto, would it then qualify as a real planet?
If it were MY penis, I suspect it would remain a “dwarf planet.” 🙁
:/
Why do you think NASA was doing its test run on Mars?
“Doctors and astrophysicists agree, it is not recommended that you put your penis on Pl—”
[line of men is already out the door]
“Did you hear us, we said it is not—-”
“LET US INTO YOUR ROCKETSHIP”
Try as you might, unless SpaceX really gets its act together, the rocketship will always be a publicly-owned penis.
1. It’s ridiculous to judge a writer by her unpublished and unfinished work–stories she herself decided weren’t up to her standards.
2. Maybe the reason Shirley Jackson seems ‘full of gimmicks’ and ‘overdetermined’ is the same reason Shakespeare is full of clichés: because later writers have imitated them to the point of tedium.
3. In conclusion, get off Shirley’s lawn.
Every time I see this shit, I realize how important it is for writers to destroy work they don’t want published. There are so, so many works out there, by so many authors, that they obviously never would have published while they were alive (or collections of letters that are clearly private, or what have you). This is actually easier now than in the past, but it would require some technical aptitude – basically, store your work on a server that self-destructs if you put in the wrong password or if you don’t enter a password for X number of days. If you’re loved, no one will ever respect your privacy and there will always be someone working to make money off your corpse.
Yesssss, particularly to that last sentence. This is how I feel about the creep show around Harper Lee’s “new” book.
I also think that, generally, collections of short stories should be kept together. Like there is an actual reason that authors arrange things in the groupings they do.
How dare he indeed. He wouldn’t know emotional complexity if it punched him in the face. Which it should.
Freddie Stroma (Adam on UnREAL) was also Cormac McLaggen in the Harry Potter movies and has a degree in Neuroscience. I have been in love with him for YEARS.
And I am ALWAYS here to discuss/have a gif party for Silicon Valley. SPREAD THE WORD IT IS THE GREATEST
So a friend (Who’s a self proclaimed Gilfoil… I’m working on him.) got me into Silicon Valley and then I binged. I binged so hard. I love it because I come from a business background and watching all their mistakes is like ‘How did you not think of that!’ but my developer friend insists that programmers don’t think like that and we had a screaming row about it. Ahh friendship.
However, I did see someone whining about the women on the show, something along the lines of ‘There were no women, so they put women in, but they didn’t do a good job so they just shouldn’t have bothered’, which struck me as a bit, like, are you never happy? Personally the first season did a pretty good job of realistically portraying the lack of women in this world, and pointed out its lack of women a few times, and the women they added in the second season were all pretty cool, especially the Dev who just fucks with the guys the whole time, there’s an example of making a female character who fits in and is just one of the guys
TL:DR v. good show.
have yall seen the website? http://www.piedpiper.com/
(potential spoilers if yall haven’t seen the s2 finale)
the bios are so so good
Uuugggh yes silicon valley. I started watching it because of the buzz, but didn’t have high expectations. And then I LOVED it!!! Especially the part where you start out hating Erlich and then by the end you realize it’s the bestest of them all.
I will never not laugh at “this guy FUCKS”
Jared will always and forever be my favorite, just slightly ahead of Erlich and his ridiculousness
Jaaaared!! his is a pure beauty, untainted by modern life. sigh.
Jared. I love Jared. I love how completely misguided he is, but gosh darn isn’t he trying.
“How much would it be worth to you if I told you I had a GPS app called Pied Piper tracking the location of your child? I can follow your child anywhere and there is nothing you can do to stop me. Most missing children are never found. Interested, very interested, or very interested?”
which one which one which one which one which one
The quote where I fell deeply in love with Silicon Valley (I started in season 2):
Zach Woods is HBO’s secret comedy MVP. He’s barely in Veep, but goddamn if his character isn’t super creepy weird and hilarious. Still one of the best Jonah takedowns ever.
“You’re not even a man, you’re like an early draft of a man where they sketched out a giant mangled skeleton, but they din’t have time to add details like pigment of self-respect.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=unlS-MmCvLI
I liked this, but the second half of that quote is the best part.
Oh, it most definitely it is. I just didn’t want to ruin that portion for anyone who hadn’t heard it in all its terrible disgusting dead dick glory.
“This guy fucks” and the tip-to-tip efficiency bit are the two greatest things to happen on television in a LONG time.
Middle out hand-jobbing. Genius.
ugh why isn’t this on netflix
I think I’ve had it waiting in the wings for a while now. That GIF alone has convinced me.
That’s it, this is officially the next show on my list to catch up on.
I swear to God I could watch an hour of Jared asking terrified people, “Which one?” over and over again obliviously.
“Like Instagram. That was a location-based check-in service when it started, and then they pivoted. Or Chat Roulette. That was social media, okay, and then they pivoted to become a playground for the sexually monstrous.”
i do so very much hope that someday an outtake reel of Jared surveying people about the pivot comes to light. would watch!
Ok, so I got bored with Silicon Valley very quickly because it was so. very. male. Are people finding it good in spite of that, or does it get better on that front?
I loved it in spite of it, but it does get better in S2, where they bring in more female characters and Monica plays a larger role.
right? I also have a feeling I’d like it more if I watched it with someone so I wouldn’t just turn it off in horror. I usually like Mike Judge stuff because everything ends up fine or ok in the end, but I get really anxious when characters do dumb or awkward stuff and especially if they lose money….and the fact that it’s all dudes makes it EVEN MORE AWKWARD, somehow.
Season 1 is hit-or-miss for me, since it is, as you say, so very very dudely. S2 adds two more excellent female characters, has lots more background female workers, and won me over completely and totally. Like, “quoting it on a daily basis” won me over.
CECIL THE LION YOU GUYS :'(
I know! Why anyone would want to shoot a helpless old lion is beyond me.
I am so angry about this. I just don’t understand why someone would pay ridiculous amounts of money (more than £30,000!) to shoot a lion. It’s a shitty thing to do anyway, and to want to do it enough that you’re paying so much for it (rather than doing it because you are a farmer where there are lions and want to protect your livestock, or are really poor and feel like poaching is your only option, or if a lion is literally attacking you right this second) just feels horrific. That man is an arsehole.
Man, there’s a lot that I understand about hunting in principle — like, you got to keep the deer population down, or you got to keep the boar population down (you FOR REAL need to keep the wild boar population down, those things are walking catastrophes), and yeah, obviously kill a thing for meat and eat it, that is what everyone does, that is part of society.
I don’t get hunting a lion. This isn’t the Bronze Age, you’re not fucking Hercules, you didn’t have to strangle that motherfucker to wear it as a skin. You shot it with a crossbow, and when it didn’t die right away, your buddies with high-powered rifles stepped in and killed it. What the fuck is the point of that?
I don’t get how people can even talk about how “beautiful” something is and then just shoot it. What is the idea here, that you see something beautiful and that makes you excited to kill it? What the hell is this?
Well, beauty is ephemeral. So what better way to make something more beautiful than making completely sure it’s ephemeral by killing it?
Sport hunting never had anything to do with culling populations, or food.
Dentist dude is the contemporary equivalent of those British assholes who traipsed around their empire shooting lions and tigers and bears (oh my) so they could mount their heads as trophies on the walls of their wretched little billiards rooms.
Oh, in this case definitely; I am just trying to draw a distinction between him and my local Pennsylvania deerhunters who, however much they might be doing it to satisfy an intrinsic sociopathic bloodlust, do at least serve a practical purpose vis-a-vis the deer population.
Hunting wild animals for meat is in some ways arguably more humane than the way we raise domestic meat animals in the US, because at least they don’t spend their whole lives in cages up to becoming someone’s dinner. And hunting animals that have healthy populations or that are at risk for over-population makes sense to me, and again, if you’re going to use the animal, go for it.
Killing a predator that is a threat to you or the people/animals you are responsible for, again, makes sense.
But big game sport hunting just seems to me both cruel and an exercise in pure ego. Your penis isn’t any bigger cause you shot a lion, bro.
I’m not even sure you have to throw the “arguably” in there. I think hunting your own meat is way more moral than buying factory farmed meat. It bugs me that the current “normal” is people who are super skeeved out by the idea of seeing an animal die, but happily eat their cruelly raised meat multiple times a day. I avoid saying judgy things with individuals I encounter about it, but it baffles and bothers me.
Well, but a wild animal has a much higher likelihood of dying from disease or injury or starvation than a domestic one, and those are all really unpleasant ways to go, plus as others have discussed, some hunters are not very good at getting clean kill shots and the animals do suffer for a bit. And there is the element that some hunters clearly enjoy the “killing things as a hobby” element, which is a little disturbing.
(On the pro-hunting side, there’s also the fact that it is in many ways more environmentally friendly – it’s local product, you’re not polluting as much, no one’s cutting down forests to make deer habitat, etc)
Well, also the disease issue does crop up with domesticated animals, for example the cullings that happened around foot & mouth disease, etc. And then there’s the issue of the antibiotics that are given to factory farmed animals to prevent them from catching diseases despite the overcrowding, which has the trickle down effect of helping along antibiotic resistant strains. Not to argue about overall likelihood, just to point out that there are some wrinkles there.
But the difference is that people who buy meat from factory farms are supporting the cruel conditions in which the animals are raised. People who hunt are not supporting a system in which animals die of disease or starvation; that system is nature, and it will exist whether we hunt or not.
Exactly. As far as I’m concerned, hunting your meat is the moral choice. You know where your meat came from, you know what kind of life the animal led, and you know how many animals’ lives have gone to put food on your plate. If you are going to eat meat, and you want to do it in as responsible a way as possible, hunting is the way to go. It really bothers me that people who eat meat from a different animal every day feel that they can condemn subsistence hunters on moral grounds, just because they, unlike the hunters, have the luxury of not thinking about the deaths they cause.
I subscribe to the Barbara Kingsolver philosophy that killing predators, unless you have a super specific reason like it is a particular animal that is endangering humans or whatevs, is immoral from an ecological and biological standpoint (see: Prodigal Summer.)
Prey animals are just that: they are biologically meant to be prey. They reproduce quickly. If you kill a deer there will be another deer to replace it in short order.
Predators do NOT reproduce quickly. It takes a few years to train a baby bear, or big cat, or wolf, to learn all the things they need to know to be bad-ass hunters. And often raising babies is a group project to which several females contribute. I read that this is probably a death sentence for Cecil’s six cubs, because whatever male lion takes over as the alpha will probably kill them. The time and care that those mama lions have put into their babies, who are now probably doomed, breaks my heart. It is a pointless waste.
yeah, and with the except of housecats, there are very few predators that are in danger because of over-population.
Plus predator over-population tends to resolve itself quickly, because very shortly there will not be enough food for them all.
Predators also tend to keep all of the other animal populations in the food chain at proper ratios. For a very basic example, wolves and mountain lions keep deer populations in check, so the deer don’t eat too much vegetation, which is important because vegetation supports smaller mammals and insects.
Exactly! And yet when I petition the city council to reintroduce wolves and mountain lions into Valley Forge National Historical Park to keep the deer and toddler populations in check, people just laugh at me!
I keep wondering if it isn’t possible to move the cubs to another preserve, or a zoo, or something, both to keep them alive, and to protect and perpetuate the species.
They fucking lured Cecil out of the park. They lured him from a safe zone so they could slaughter him, FOR FUN. It is literally nauseating.
I’m an equestrian, I’m a country girl, I understand the need to keep the populations of some animals down, and I (kind of) understand hunting for sport (we don’t have gun culture where I’m from). I’m not against hunting animals that are not endangered, so long as its a clean and quick kill (not into dogs ripping up foxes) and that you at least end up eating what you kill where possible.
I do not, and will never, understand the desire to go out and kill things for fun. Big game hunters seem to be people who want a ‘bigger challenge’ or something exotic to show off to their friends, but I do not understand getting pleasure from killing an animal. I certainly do not understand doing it as a holiday.
I haven’t read much about this lion story, I try to avoid all stories about big game hunters, but someone in work was talking about it so I gathered a few details.
First off, where does one get the desire to go out and pay a huge amount of money to kill an animal, what the hell. Then I found out that he used a bow, shot the lion AND THEN TRACKED IT FOR 2 DAYS. That is not good hunting, that is not good in anyway. And the guy in work was like ‘He was really dedicated, he did a good job’ stfu, he deliberately made an animal suffer unnecessarily while killing it for no reason at all.
I dunno, around here at least, the people who participate in deer hunting and give me all those excuses about keeping the population down and whatnot, are still also talking about how fun, exciting, and challenging it is, which to my mind is still incredibly disturbing because you are still killing something as your hobby.
That’s a shame & more than a little creepy tbh. All the hunters I know (including one wonderfully skilled bow hunter & all-around amazing woman) hunt for food, never as “entertainment” or culling. Venison is delicious, & a couple of deer can feed you and your friends and their families for a year, not to mention using the bones & hide.
Deer populations in North America have exploded, & it’s all thanks to the reckless hunting of wolves & coyotes over 2 centuries. 🙁 Even with the slow reintroduction of wolves to their old habitats, it’s not enough to bring up their populations & decrease the number of deer.
Yeah, it seems to me like there is a HUGE difference between hunting prey species like deer and hunting apex predators like lions and wolves. Predators already have their populations controlled by the available prey and (especially) habitat.
Talking about wolves here, because I don’t know as much about lions–In a normal year, half the wolf pups in a given litter will die, and a bunch of young adult wolves will strike out from their home packs, not find any available territory to claim, and starve or be killed by other wolves. When there isn’t room for the territory to expand, the population will remain within a reasonably stable upper limit. There are important conversations to be had in the US about how far we’re willing to let wolf territory reach, and how to set and maintain those boundaries, and what the rules should be around farmers with livestock. It seems like it’s been nearly impossible to have those conversations on the public stage while wolves bounce off and on the endangered species list again and again. But sport hunting doesn’t really address any of those issues.
Yeah, I think that there’s no getting around the fact that it’s going to be “exciting” — it’s always exciting to do something at least nominally dangerous, to succeed at something difficult, no matter what it is. And the fact is, a lot of these guys (I know many around here) would totally be into it even if there WEREN’T good reasons to keep the deer population down.
It is kind of gross, especially when they try to turn it around. “You eat meat, and you don’t think twice about where it came from!”
Yeah, man, that’s why I can do it. Because if I think too long about killing animals — even animals that notionally I’m killing for a practical purpose — it makes me feel bad. Why do you think that makes me the one who’s fucked up?
I don’t know, I see a fundamental difference between raising animals for meat and slaughtering them as quickly and painlessly as possible, and hunting an animal in the woods for fun, stalking it while it bleeds to death through the woods, and having FUN while doing so.
I would be a lot more comfortable, frankly, if people who hunted could be honest about why they do it.
Also, ALSO: most of the people who hunt don’t stalk jack shit. They sit in a deer blind (a camouflaged sniping booth), in camoouflaged clothing, with scent camouflage, and they put out food and/or salt for the deer, and shoot them when they come to eat. So, basically, they are deer murdering. There’s no damn skill involved at all. Including the shooting.
But yeah, fun and challenging. You know how you can tell a hunter went out and actually tracked and tried to find a deer to kill? They came back empty-handed.
I don’t disagree that, whether or not one is morally superior, they’re at least categorically different. I still feel bad about it sometimes, though, and this doesn’t cause me any cognitive dissonance.
There may be a fundamental difference, but both (at least the way we typically do it in the U.S.) are shitty–animals raised for meat may be slaughtered as quickly and painlessly as possible, but at factory farms they live in truly heinous conditions. A wild animal may be killed inhumanely, but at least s/he has his/her freedom up until then. I don’t know which is worse.
I know all about factory farms, for sure, but I think there’s something really sick and wrong about a person who thinks it’s fun to kill animals. I was trying to avoid saying that outright because I understand that it’s inflammatory to a lot of people, but at the end of the day, your hobby involves killing animals for fun and I think that’s messed up.
I can get behind that.
I’ve known a few people who’ve hunted, and they have fun doing it, and none of them think the suffering of the animal is the fun part. They like being in the woods for a week. They like the feeling of accomplishment from getting a clean kill and breaking down the entire animal themselves, knowing that nothing edible is going to waste. They like feeling self-sufficient. They like coming home after a week and having enough meat to last for months. None of them are sick or messed up.
See I think this is where it gets inflammatory for some people, because I think someone who would enjoy killing an animal, dismembering it, and eating it when they really don’t have to has something wrong with them. I’ve also known a lot of people who hunt, and knowing that about them makes me feel like I can never trust them or feel safe around them.
There are a lot of people who enjoy eating an animal when they don’t really have to. Do all non-vegetarians have something wrong with us, or is it just the people who actually kill the animals who are screwed up? I’m defensive on this subject because I live in Alaska and most of my family hunts, and I trust them all and feel safe around them. The only reason I don’t hunt is I’m a hypocrite. I would rather eat one moose over the course of a year, and know that all my meat comes from a single animal that had a happy, free, natural life, than eat meat from God knows how many potentially ill-treated animals, but I don’t want to be the person who kills the moose. Does that make me a better or more trustworthy person than my cousin, who straight-up refuses to eat corporate meat out of concern for the animals, but who unlike me is willing to be the person who shoots the moose? If your argument is just that everyone should be a vegetarian, and that hunting and buying meat are equally wrong, fine. But I’m really uncomfortable with the idea that the difference between a decent person and a person who can never be trusted is that a decent person lives in willful denial of the amount of killing he or she is responsible for.
You can go ahead and be defensive because I realize what I’m saying is really shitty but you’re also not going to convince me otherwise, so I’m going to go ahead and bow out of what has become a useless and anger-making discussion on all sides.
Plus, “have to” is such a fuzzy line for food, which is 1. necessary to live and 2. costs money. Nobody “has to” eat meat, but most people do. Similarly, nobody “has to” hunt if they live near a grocery store and have “enough money” to buy the food there, but hunting does save hundreds of dollars. There has to be some room between “it is wrong to kill for the fun of killing” and “the only ethical way to kill something you will eat is if you act really sad and mopey about it.”
Plus, I can have fun in the woods for a week and feel accomplished about all kinds of things that don’t end in killing an animal.
I’m in your camp, Poire…I currently live in a rural community where hunting wild game is an accepted social norm and most hunters I know fit your description perfectly.
As for “but factory farmed animals are killed humanely”….UM, NO. Their living conditions are pretty heinous as well and that’s why I’ll always choose an elk sausage over a cheap hotdog.
Opting for wilful ignorance and carrying on doing the thing you’d find wrong (if you weren’t pretending you didn’t know better) is never a morally superior option. I’ve gone on hunting trips before basically cause if I’m gonna keep consuming animal products I might as well come to grips with what that entails, and you know something, it is fun. It’s a lot more complicated and skilled than it looks to city folks sitting back and belching out something about dumb sadistic rednecks over their battery-cage cutlet, you get to know what it is you’re eating and where it comes from and how it lived, there’s some visceral reward to it from the bit of you that’s an omnivorous primate whose heritage is out-hunting every other macrovertebrate on the planet, it takes you out of the kind of numbing consumerist bubble folks out here seem to work very hard to erect around themselves where food just comes from the store and the world beyond that has nothing to do with them. And you get frankly a whole hell of a lot of cheap, ethically-sourced meat for the work (or, as often, nothing. We’re not great hunters), which isn’t otherwise an option for most of us who can’t afford vanity farms.
Likely the most ethical option in the face of the fact that your lifestyle calls for the deaths of conscious things is to go vegan, but that’s not really gonna happen here, so might as well go into it with eyes open and figure out your relationship with your food from there, get the good from it you can.
this also has absolutely nothing to do with popping over to someone else’s country to have a team of retainers herd a rare animal you’re not gonna eat into your sights so you can pull a trigger and claim bragging rights
I think it takes a certain ruthlessness to kill an animal that is disturbing to me. It *is* hypocritical to eat meat without being willing to kill it yourself, but for me living with that disconnect and becoming uncomfortable with it was a step in my progression to no longer eating meat. If I were the kind of person who was able to kill animals, or who enjoyed killing animals, then I probably would never have stopped eating them.
I should preface this by saying I have never hunted in anyway, even though it is a large part of a world I am in.
Hunting where I’m from is done with horses and hounds, and everyone gets dressed up, loads up on whiskey, and goes galloping across fields and tries to kill themselves in the most imaginative way, all while supposedly chasing a fox, but no one really gives a fuck about the fox, and often they don’t catch one at all. The hounds are only there to give you something to chase with the horses, and ‘Drag’ hunts have become very popular in Ireland in the last 20 years (also in the UK where it was forced by the hunting ban, but they’re clinging on harder), part of the hunt team goes ahead and ‘drags’ a scent for the hounds to follow, then there is a pre-planned (safer) route, everyone gets to follow some hounds, and (hopefully) no foxes get hurt. We get to preserve the sport, get all the fun of it, without actually killing animals. There’s still a few ‘real’ hunts around, and one or two stag hunts a year, buts its more about the horses and the party afterwards really
Other than that, only farmers have guns and only hunt/kill animals when they threaten their crops or livestock (so rabbits, foxes, that kind of thing). There is a bit of pheasant shooting among the country toffs, but the birds are bred specially, and I don’t think its all that popular.
I think in the US, the guns play a big part of it from what I gather. Its an excuse to get out your big, unnecessarily high-powered penis replacement and blow some poor animal away.
TL:DR in Ireland the hobby of hunting is less about the actual killing and guns, more about the galloping and drinking. I think in the US its a lot about getting to show off your big gun
You have a really good point about the cultural context, but an awful lot of drag hunts do ~just happen~ to scare up a fox somewhere along the route, though. There are definitely some disingenuous hunting arseholes out there.
And the current push to bring hunting back (plus the huge protests when the hunting ban was first introduced) suggests that, sadly, an awful lot of hunters don’t feel that drag hunts preserve all of the fun things about hunting – they still want to be able to kill foxes. This makes me slightly wary of the whole “it’s about the experience, not the killing” rhetoric, because there are clearly so many people for whom without the foxes it’s not “proper” hunting.
what on earth does foxhunting have to do with any form of subsistence hunting or even thirty-degrees-removed-from-subsistence trophy hunting, it’s an old toff bloodsport on the order of bearbaiting. you’ve spent a hintillion dollars per ounce of animal to watch small and innocuous vermin get torn apart by dogs and you don’t eat the damn fox, like it’s great that you’ve partially removed the fox from the equation and made it just one big horsie ride but this is still decisively on the hiring staff to push a lion into your arrows side of the equation vs. deer hunting
I don’t think it does, although fox hunting (as opposed to stag hunting, which is what the toffs did originally) did start as a way to keep the fox population down. My comment was in response to the comment above about how hunting as a hobby is weird because your hobby is about killing things
Culturally, between hunting in the US and hunting in the UK/Ireland, its a very different focus. Foxhunting is much more about the horses and enjoying the day out, although it is still a sport based on killing an animal (but this aspect is loosing popularity), whereas from what I can gather, hunting as a hobby in the US is about getting to kill things with your big guns.
And legit, if we hadn’t murdered all the apex predators in the first place, deer population control wouldn’t be much of an issue.
If they REALLY wanted a bigger challenge, they’d strip naked and walk into the damn jungle and see how they fared against lions. Fuck that guy and people like him.
But they don’t want a bigger challenge. That’s just it. They want to reinforce their false sense of dominance by taking advantage of tools made by other people in order to “prove” how great/badass they are.
(I know you know that already, I’m just . . . mad.)
hunting pigs probably presents ten times more immediate risk and physical challenge than popping a lion (with a team of staff to set everything up right for you) but then I guess you’re not spending a ton of money to pop off to someone else’s country and destroy something irreplaceable
I am also uncomfortable with hunting as a sport. I am related to many sport hunters. It has been a tradition in my family as far back as my ancestors were literate. Probably further back, but there are no records to check. But I don’t have to like it.
So, this I understand: when a hunter puts an arrow or bullet into an animal, the hunter is honor-bound to track that animal in order to kill it as quickly/humanely as possible.
It is unacceptably cruel, according to the hunters in my family, to allow an injured animal to suffer just because you missed a clean kill shot and because you are too lazy to track it. The hunters I know are disgusted with those who abandon a wounded animal and just go home. Tracking day and night until you can end its pain is the only honorable option at that point.
That’s how it stands in my family’s culture. I am not defending the sport. I am presenting a viewpoint I understand regarding one aspect: tracking a wounded animal.
I understand the idea of wanting a clean kill, and if you fuck up you fix it.
What I don’t understand is using a weapon where you can’t guarantee (as much as possible) a clean kill, if you’re not proficient enough with a bow to hit your mark, don’t fucking use a bow. But no, he probably wanted to show off. And if you can’t make a clean shot regularly with a gun, maybe you shouldn’t be hunting? (I say this as someone who has never shot a gun, and couldn’t hit a target to save my life. Just one of the many reasons I don’t go out and shoot animals….)
You found it. The upside to the tradition. I knew I could count on Toastfriends for deep consideration.
Yes, the you-fuck-it-up-you-fix-it tradition (I like your phrasing) has some very good results. In my family, no hunter is every as quick to take a shot after their first hours-long tracking of a wounded animal. Forever after, that hunter will be more patient, will wait for a clear angle on a guaranteed kill shot, will let pass opportunities to shoot for fear of causing an animal pain – and causing themselves the arduous work of tracking.
This tradition also limits when a hunter is willing to allow a teen to shoot on a hunt. The adult hunter is responsible for any shot taken by the hunter they invited, adult or child. If your invited hunter wounds an animal, you’re tracking along with them. So, in my family, children with desire and appropriate temperament are allowed to go along and observe on a hunt. But it is years before they are allowed to take a shot at an animal. After years of some adult observing their target practice. That adult wants to wait for the kid to be a very good shot. And the kid is dragged along for as long as it takes to track any animal they wound. Again, it limits their willingness to take chancy shots in the future.
I still don’t like hunting and wish my family would just quit. But I’m proud of how some of my family’s traditions limit the barbarity. The hunt only overpopulated prey species. They never take immature animals or nursing mothers. They watch populations for sustainability and shoot only males when stats dictate. They also eat every bit of their kill, or have their butcher donate the meat to a homeless shelter.
That’s how my people do, exactly, except that the area they live in is so poor that there’s a specific charity to donate hunted meat to that pays for the approved processing so it can legally be distributed. You wound, you track, or you’re a scumbag & no one will hunt with you. Basically every family out there either hunts or has a meat share to let their land be hunted because the deer overpopulation is so bad they’re showing up with birth defects and trashing cars. None of them revel in the delight of killing things that I’ve noted, they revel in the “this will help us stretch the grocery budget.”
Bows are also nearly silent, as a news report I saw pointed out, which makes them ideal for poachers and other reprehensible lowlifes.
I also should put here that yesterday I donated to National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative & here’s the link for anyone else that’s interested: http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/big…
I didn’t think I was particularly passionate about animals and hunting, but when I heard even a bare summary of what happened, my immediate thought was “I’d like to put a bounty on his head and see how much he likes being tracked and killed for sport.” And it does not feel particularly immoral.
All men must die.
Except The Few Good Ones. Like GruntledDave and Jaya’s Matt.
And Dakimel’s partner. He’s safe, too. Sorry I left him out. Have I met any other ToastMen?
The army of ToastDads?
Will also add braak to the list. And the guy who writes scathing restaurant reviews for the NYT. They are national treasures.
Mine is very, very good. I think we should keep him.
Dude has a history of illegal hunting and then hiding behind plausible deniability. He also had a sexual harassment suit brought against him by one of his employees.
The fact that Cecil’s cubs may also die just compounds all this tragic fuckery:
“Dr Andrew Loveridge, one of the principal researchers on the project, told the publication that Cecil and another male lion named Jericho led two prides with six lionesses and a dozen young cubs, and he feared for the safety of the cubs now Cecil had been killed.
“Jericho as a single male will be unable to defend the two prides and cubs from new males that invade the territory. This is what we most often see happening in these cases. Infanticide is the most likely outcome,” he said.”
Why am I not surprised about the sexual harassment thing? He seems like someone who believes wholeheartedly that his position of relative wealth and privilege means that the world is his playground and other beings are there to serve his desires. 🙁
I really, really hope he loses all his patients. Who the hell would want to let this guy root around in their mouth? Ugh.
I literally recoiled from my screen when I thought about this. GET AWAY FROM MY MOUTH, PATHETIC TROPHY HUNTER.
There is something stomach churning and inexorably immoral about people standing and smiling over the dead carcass of an animal that they killed for no reason at all! There is no getting around this, no argument at all that can make these actions okay, IN ANY WAY SHAPE OR FORM! These images disturb me on a very deep level and make me want to steamroll (literally) the insects in them! I hope this man’s dental practice collapses around him, I hope he dies a penniless, sad little man!!! I see that picture of that beautiful lion and see his life has more meaning and worth than these men!!! He wanted nothing from no one and they wanted his life! Seems fair to me………..EYE ROLL I hate people!!
It’s slightly off-topic, but I want to punch Marco Rubio in the dick SO DAMN HARD for hooking his bullshit staged “Planned Parenthood kills babies!” outrage engine up to the legitimate “WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO KILL CECIL” train.
Just… no. No, you don’t get to do that. Fuck you. Fuck you once for butting your smug stupid pasty face into a conversation about animals that you have no interest in to begin with, and fuck you twice for perpetuating the farce that is the Right’s determination to destroy abortion and affordable women’s health care services in this country. GAH.
About the Podium Girls article, the same fight has been stewing in F1 for a while now but has recently intensified. In recent criticisms about the sport (of which there are many), more and more fan polls & reporters have been going around asking whether it’s necessary to have “Grid Girls” anymore. I’m happy to say a lot more male fans have been speaking out against it than in the recent past, but the crochety old male fans of the sport are steadfastly against it for all the usual reasons. The few female F1 fans like me have been fighting the use of Grid Girls since forever, but lords it’s been so hard. 🙁
This seems a specious argument against an artist: ” She went to the well too often for gimmicks.”
You mean, like Degas and his dancers? Monet and his garden? Faulkner and his Southern Gothics? Hemingway and manly bullfights?
Robert Frost and New England?
It’s not a gimmick if it’s a man? Got it.
Brava!
Have you read Amal El-Mohtar’s thing about this? https://storify.com/didic/on-bad-reviews-and-gend…
The variety among 5 stories written by women are comparable to varieties in burger toppings. Because if a woman wrote it, it’s a burger. “Problems in [women’s] lives”–witch’s curse, marital problems, artistic exploitation, sexual harassment, ghosts–are basically burgers. Because those things are sufficiently similar, being experienced by women, that they’re essentially the same as onion rings vs ketchup.
But the whole thing is worth reading.
Ooh, hey, a new Monette story!
(And thanks for that Storify link, hugely satisfying.)
That Uncanny cover image is cool and mind-blowing, too!
Sometimes I wonder if reviewers should not see an author’s name, and have to experience something gender blind. Like when orchestras started having people audition behind a screen so the judges could not see who was playing.
If they read a book, they wouldn’t know a woman had written it. Would they say the same things?
It is wearysome in 2015 to STILL have to argue that women’s stories = human stories.
I mean, this is why women publish under their initials or pen names, right? like JK Rowling instead of Joanne Rowling, I thought was deliberately chosen exactly for that reason.
Or George Sand instead of Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin.
I had a college professor who did this. We’d leave our names off our papers, then turn in a cover sheet with a sigil of some sort, matching the one we’d drawn on the paper. After she’d finished the grading, she’d reunite the paper with its cover sheet to return them to us.
A SIGIL? Did you go to fucking Brakebills Academy? I feel cheated, we just had numbers.
I mean, she told us to come up with a symbol or a doodle or something to put on our papers. Sigil was my own addition to the story.
Let’s add Neil Gaiman to this list please. I adore his work, but it’s a handful of originals followed by numerous derivatives (fight me).
Also, that is a terrible sentence. “She went to the well too often for gimmicks.” I suppose this means “she went to the gimmick-well too often,” and got changed because what is a gimmick-well. But really, it’s like: I would have come up with a gimmick, but I just have NO TIME because I’m all the time going to and from this damn well; if only I had running water my stories might have some decent gimmicks in them.
It looks like Republicans of old
liked sex with wives out cold
So I have been told, if I may be so bold
So Brian Greene has said
if your good wife appears dead
you may go ahead, in your marriage bed
For them rape is just more sex
with fewer social checks
women are objects; as it says in sacred texts
The GOP’s obsession
with sexual indiscretion
should teach us all a lesson; in sexual repression
So the GOP is vexed
what male privilege will they lose next?
they’re ugly when perplexed; who knows what they’ll say next?
librarymole.tumblr.com
I wrote some verses for this that were so completely inappropriate that I want you to know that I am “thinking of the children and the elderly” and leaving them out.
/nyuk.
From the KK article:
“I am so not the type of girl who carries a dog in my purse,” she explains
very obvious Paris Hilton shade and I am here for it, considering PH treated KK so poorly in the past.
The PH clone is definitely the very best part of the KK game.
edited by Joyce Carol Oates (whose fiction Jackson’s sometimes resembles)
I resent this association. I have no doubt that Shirley Jackson would be the best kind of internet troll had she lived into the Twitter Age, and would openly scoff at the kind of unironic fuckery JCO gets up to on that platform.
1962 : Shirley Jackson publishes her final novel.
1964 : Joyce Carol Oates publishes her first novel.
“whose fiction Jackson’s sometimes resembles,” indeed.
YES THIS I was just looking up these dates myself.
Am I really dense, or does Shirley Jackson’s fiction not particularly resemble Joyce Carol Oates’ at all?? I admit I’ve only read 3 or 4 of Oates’ bajillion books.
I’m with you, they are wildly dissimilar. But you know, they DO have so many defining qualities in common! Such as being uninteresting to this dude!
But they’re by ladies! Which is an automatic qualifier of being exactly the same!
If I had to stone someone
for artistic infractions
I’d choose Kim Kardashian
and not Shirley Jackson
Or you could say: “hey, Kim Kardashian doesn’t appeal to me” instead of suggesting that she’s lesser to the point of deserving violence for her supposed artistic transgressions?
Seriously, this is pretty nasty, especially considering that stoning has often been a socially imposed punishment for women whose sexual behavior has violated social norms.
Sorry, the stoning is a reference to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”
Didn’t come through, bud. Not cool.
I understood it, thanks, but it was still a pretty pointless jab.
I got the reference, but I do not think it was a good idea.
It is your website. You may delete it with my blessing, if that is your desire.
At this point, I would rather leave it so that the other commenter critiques make sense, but this sort of thing is better off staying on your linked Tumblr. It is not going out on a limb to state that a dude (or a woman) writing a poem joking about stoning a woman is not the sort of thing we want on The Toast.
We got that, we just didn’t like it or approve of it.
“Her art of narration stayed on the surface, and could not depict individual identities. Even ‘The Lottery’ wounds you once, and once only.”
Oh my GOD shut UP Harold Bloom.
Here’s the thing. The Lottery isn’t even my favorite of her short stories, but she does tend to use similar twists toward the end of her stories, and it’s true that you only feel shock at the twists in your first read-through. But it still sticks in your craw. It’s like she’s pulled back a curtain and revealed the real festering ugliness of the world, because there is something unsettlingly true and recognizable in her bizarre, suburban dystopias. When I first read “The Renegade” I couldn’t stop thinking about it for weeks.
So maybe her dialogue isn’t like Toni Morrison’s and her prose isn’t like Virginia Woolf’s. That’s true of Raymond Carver and Ernest Hemingway. Jackson’s writing style was perfect for her genre.
What a narrow view of art.
I don’t read many of her short stories *because* they still shock and twist into my brain every time I read them. It’s a visceral experience I am not always up for in casual reading. I love her more humorous stories about her family (though they also have a certain suburban dystopia undertone to them) because the shock is not there, or at least, not right up front, it’s later after you think about the setup to the ‘funny’ situation.
Even her ‘surface’ narration has quick, unnerving glimpses into darker depths, but maybe that reviewer was unable to grasp the subtext?
And, since I’m opinionating (ha!)–as far as ‘great writers and writing’ go, I never want to read another short story, novel, thinkpiece, essay or other writing about some middle aged guy’s problems with his penis, masculinity, and ‘ungrateful’ ‘mysterious’ women.
How could you think that “The Lottery” wounds you but once. Yes, there is a twist, and it’s shocking, but it doesn’t climax and then resolve – it keeps spiraling upward in horror and leaves you completely stranded. And then upon a reread, when you know what’s coming, every single detail is sharply terrifying, it’s delicious. Agh, now I’ve gotten myself all worked up over this idiot’s terrible ideas!
I suggested reading her short stories in my book group and a woman (maybe in her 60’s? Definitely of an age to be retired), said she was both weary and interested because she still felt horrified by her memory of reading The Lottery in high school. “Wounded only once” is not an accurate descriptor her.
The surface narration is deliberate – it keeps us from really knowing the characters, which is the whole point; Jackson often write about the rot or horror under typical suburban life and she could not have done that if she was always pulling the curtains back. You need to be able to build a sense of mystery for her kind of fiction to work.
So, I finally did the sense8 binge over the past few days, and now I’m really working out what I think of it. Obviously the politics and representation and all of that is so comforting to see, and it was very very shiny, but I’m still working out whether I hated the writing or similar. SPOILERS BELOW!
But I think I’m mostly squicked out by the romance plot, and I wish it didn’t feel the show was being so thoroughly of two minds about it. I mean, they lampshaded the hell out of his hero complex and calling it quite toxic but then also portrayed it as Transcendentally Shiny Perfection.
So, I dunno, maybe it’s a long game on that, but I still feel like I’m at odds with the show by wanting so hard to root against it.
ahhhh I like the show so much!!!
I dunno, I like the romances because it reminds me of Drift Compatibility, and also because I like romances that are really smooth and sweet? Like I hate stories that make romance too convoluted.
But another thing with this show is that it makes me feel very warm and fuzzy and they do that by making things seem easy. I also really disliked the Icelandic woman because she made Riley feel ashamed about the romance, rather than just simply warning against it.
Yes, we probably will agree to disagree on many of these things, then. I tend to get bored very quickly with “warm and fuzzy” if it’s the only thing going on. And I much prefer that my characters, especially, get to be complex human beings with many facets, so I spent a lot of time wishing they got to be more than just their assigned tabletop RPG roles.
Also, I was really quite bored by Pacific Rim (aside from the robots fighting monsters part, obvs), so hooray for the diversity of life. 😛
Which romance? I thought the way that one of them ended for the season “this is why you should do x thing with x person” was pretty messed up. Like, one person witnessed this perhaps justified (depending on your point of view) but still horrifying act and you pull the “I’m bad news, baby” card? Nooo thank you, that smacks strongly of Romanticizing an Obvious Red Flag to me.
The “you can do this because I love you” for the other one really rubbed me the wrong way, too, but I think that had a lot to do with my distaste for her being so fragile and damsel-ed or whatever. But I do also really like this show!!
yeah, that part was dumb. It didn’t make any sense at all?
I think in that situation perhaps my annoyance at being told to do something for love might be strong enough to snap me out of a tundra-trance, otherwise yeah, wth man.
Yeah, no, I’m definitely bothered by the one between White Knight Savior Complex and Lost Girl.
I’m A Monster and Passive Scientist were actually mostly fine by me. Both when they were quietly doing their thing as a side plot – I appreciated that if we had to do On-Screen Budding Romance, it was a minor thing, with a couple interesting things to do with how the sensate connection changes calculations about intimacy and agency. And I’m mostly okay with when they spun him out into ultra-violence – although I think they’re walking closer to losing themselves in old tropes, here, so I’m hoping they can walk a line near them without going over the cliff of boring.
But the way the show puts White Knight and Girl With Traumatic Past front-and-center feels so heavy-handed and exactly in the middle of Super True Love Story territory. Look at this shiny, shiny love between these shiny blond heterosexuals! And then it also explicitly points out all the ways that this might not be the world’s healthiest relationship. And it pulls off a “now the *damsel* is the rescuer!” switch. But I’m left… rooting against these two, some as individuals and a lot as a couple. Without a clear sense of whether I’m where the show wants me to be, or I’m just bored of where the show wants me to be, or what.
I don’t know a fuckin’ thing about the Kardashians besides what gets relayed to me second-hand by my sister (not much). However, I refuse to believe they’re completely brainless, because it’s clear that a lot of thought and effort goes into maintaining the image they present, Kim especially. I’ve never been comfortable with the way people tend to treat successful women, especially in the entertainment business, and a lot of the things people say about Kim – and her fans – say a lot more about themselves than they do about her.
(I fully recognize that there are some very legitimate criticisms you can level against her. I’m referring more to the “she’s a brainless slut and so is anyone who likes her” quips that get thrown around so often.)
I read the profile because I got really bored yesterday. She’s not well-educated,no, but the woman is a long way from stupid. She knows what she wants and she figures out how to get it, and on a day to-day basis that means a lot more than being able to discuss the works of Thomas Pynchon. I think people (men) are just uncomfortable with the idea that someone primarily famous for being really good-looking is also, like, a human being,
OK am I the only one really concerned that Brian Greene likes to have sex with his wife WHILE SHE IS UNCONSCIOUS? Like, is his wife concerned?????
I haven’t yet seen any of her work yet, but this interview with Jill Soloway is so good I want to go watch everything she’s done.
I recommend watching her 2007 speech for NOW, it’s great. And check out her essay, Diamonds.
Sometimes I want to cry when I think about how much I love Silicon Valley.
Ok this is late in the day, but I know some Toast-folks are writers:
http://www.restlessbooks.com/prize-for-new-immigr…
Writing award for first-generation Americans who have not previously had books published in English. Prize is $10,000 advance and publication by Summer 2016. No entry fee.
I need advice, Toasties!
A friend and I went on a trip earlier this month. I was the one in charge of booking tickets, hotel, etc so it all went on my card. Friend partially reimbursed me at the time, with the understanding that she’d give me the remainder when she received a large payment she was expecting.
She got the payment, as expected, but hasn’t paid me back the remainder of what she owes yet. She’s been very busy with life stuff – she’s moving this weekend and starts grad school later in August – so I don’t think she’s intentionally being a flake, but still. My finances are squeezed from the expense of the trip and I could use the breathing room.
So my question is: how soon is too soon to ask her about the rest of the money? Should I wait until after she moves? After she starts school? I’m not in immediate danger of starving or anything, so I can wait in theory, but it’ll be uncomfortable.
Ask her now! The earlier you ask the nicer you can be about timing, don’t wait until you’re in dire straits and have to demand immediate payment. It’s not like paying someone money takes a lot of time, she can take ten minutes to Venmo/Paypal/write a check.
This is a good point – the sooner you ask, OP, the nicer you can be about it, and make it sound like just a normal follow-up question hat everyone is expecting to take place. The longer you wait the more awkward it’ll be and the ruder you’ll feel (even though you’re not being rude by asking to be paid back!) and the more strained the conversation will probably end up being. Niceness isn’t necessary in a situation like this, but it makes everything so much easier and better to deal with on your end if you can feel like you’re asking nicely instead of nagging.
I really think you should remind her now. If she’s forgotten, she’s going to be budgeting and spending like that entire payment belongs to herself, and by the time you bring it up, she’ll likely say, “Whoops, all gone!” And as you said, you need the money now — you can’t afford to wait until she scrounges up the rest.
I’m all for the straightforward question: “Hey friend, can you pay me what you owe for our trip?”
Good friend: “OMG yes, thanks for reminding me, I’ve been so busy I forgot! I’ll transfer the money today!” And does it.
Or: “I’m sorry for the delay. I’ve run into extra expenses and can’t pay it all at once. Can we figure out a payment plan that works for both of us?” And sticks to it.
Bad friend: “Excuse, waffling, excuse, maybe if, excuse” If you open with a simple straightforward question then it’s on her to come up with excuses and a payment timeline. If you open with something like “Friend, I know you’re busy with moving and school, and it’s not a big deal or rush, but can you tell me when you’ll repay me?” Bad friend will agree with you. “Yes, I am busy, I’m glad you’re not in a rush, I’ll let you know” and you’ll be waiting a while, probably.
I recommend an immediate “hey, I was looking at my end-of-month credit card statement, and it reminded me that I still need my X dollars from you for our trip! PayPal is easiest for me, but I can also do a check!”
These criticisms of Shirley Jackson and the common criticisms of Kim Kardashian look to me like two sides of the same coin. How dare Shirley Jackson’s fiction and memoir be preoccupied with the cruel mundanities of women’s lives, with the tedious awfulness of an imagination capable of horrors being tethered by waiting around for the children to finish lunch or the vacuum-cleaner repairman to call back? How dare Kim Kardashian employ her conventionally attractive face and figure and her interest in fashion to build an empire out of an involuntary notoriety*? I can’t say I get Kardashian’s appeal, but I’ve never read or heard a dismissal of her that didn’t rely on misogyny.
*I have a special brand of side-eye reserved for those who greeted KK’s magazine-cover nudity with a derisive “we’ve already seen it!” If you can’t distinguish between the betrayal of a leaked sex tape and the consensual, intentional staging of a photo shoot, kindly fuck off.
No, that’s not fair. Skip the kindly.
Yes yes yes yes yes
How much you wanna bet that dude doesn’t have the same scorn to heap on the heads of the various male writers of Jackson’s generation who wrote about The Most Tragic Disaffection of the White Suburban Man Who Doesn’t Seem to Have Much Wrong in His Life, Really (except creeping ennui and a wife obsessed with what he considers trivial mundanities which may include things like child-rearing).
Like, when Rabbit Angstrom does it, it’s ART and PROFOUND and THE HUMAN CONDITION blah blah.
I adore Buffy, and most Whedon stuff in general (partly, yes, because of getting into it at a formative age), but when the Avengers film came out I remember hearing people raving about how hilarious and brilliant the quippy dialoque was. I watched it a month or so ago for the first time and was distinctly underwhelmed.
It sounds like the Jackson book is a cash grab of half-finished stuff better left in the circular file, and that’s fair to say. What’s not fair is the idea that a bad book that she would no doubt be mortified by means she’s a bad writer. That’s like judging Tupac by whatever compilation of demos his family put out last.
The NYT have a second, more legit, review of the Jackson book in the Sunday page. Paul Theroux agrees that much of this material is not great, as previously-unpublished miscellanea tends to be, but his appreciation for her is SOLID.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/02/books/review/le…
I'm not usually wild about Paul Theroux, but that's quite good.