Rebecca Solnit, giving ZERO FUCKS, on the 80 books no women should read:
Norman Mailer and William Burroughs would go high up on my no-list, because there are so many writers we can read who didn’t stab or shoot their wives (and because one writer everyone should read, Luc Sante, wrote an astonishingly good piece about Burroughs’s appalling gender politics 30 years ago that was a big influence on me). All those novels by men that seem to believe that size is everything, the 900-page monsters that, had a woman written them, would be called overweight and told to go on a diet. All those prurient books about violent crimes against women, especially the Black Dahlia murder case, which is a horrible reminder of how much violence against women is eroticized by some men, for other men, and how it makes women internalize the hatred. As Jacqueline Rose noted recently in the London Review of Books, “Patriarchy thrives by encouraging women to feel contempt for themselves.”
Chirlane McCray on maternal depression (so important, and also, Chirlane is everything.)
Fay Wells on the experience of having a white neighbor call the cops on her for getting locked out (nineteen cops came, because OF COURSE that makes sense):
Later, I learned that the Santa Monica Police Department had dispatched 19 officers after one of my neighbors reported a burglary at my apartment. It didn’t matter that I told the cops I’d lived there for seven months, told them about the locksmith, offered to show a receipt for his services and my ID. It didn’t matter that I went to Duke, that I have an MBA from Dartmouth, that I’m a vice president of strategy at a multinational corporation. It didn’t matter that I’ve never had so much as a speeding ticket. It didn’t matter that I calmly, continually asked them what was happening. It also didn’t matter that I didn’t match the description of the person they were looking for — my neighbor described me as Hispanic when he called 911. What mattered was that I was a woman of color trying to get into her apartment — in an almost entirely white apartment complex in a mostly white city — and a white man who lived in another building called the cops because he’d never seen me before.
Cool women writing about the pieces of lesbian cultural history that resonate most for them (I used to work in a womyn’s bookstore, so I have read literally all of these and love them):
Shockproof Sydney Skate by Marijane Meaker, 1972
I wish my first glimpse of lesbian culture had come from this hilarious, glamorous, and aspirational novel about a teenager who, unbeknownst to his mother, has unlocked the secrets of the coded language she uses when gossiping with her lesbian circle. Those witty, beautifully attired, hard-drinking New Yorkers sometimes found true love and sometimes got their hearts broken, but they always seemed glad to be gay. (Instead, it was Going Down With Janis, a biography of Janis Joplin that had been passed around school so many times the pages featuring lesbian sex scenes were almost transparent.) —June Thomas, editor, Outward at Slate
The immigration iliad (this is a great look at how impossible the barriers to legal immigration can be, even for people with a lot of educational and legal advantages on their side):
Although my family and I were as broke as broke can be and could not afford a lawyer, an administrator at the non-profit where I was volunteering that summer put me in touch with a well-regarded immigration attorney for a series of pro-bono consultations. The attorney patiently explained to me that returning to Santo Domingo was far too risky. Because I’d overstayed my tourist visa as a child, I’d be subject to a ban on reentry; it was also extremely likely that I’d be denied a student visa. I was told that my two main options were to hope for immigration reform — the very first version of the DREAM Act had been introduced in 2001 — or to marry a U.S. citizen.
Even at 17, I knew a fraudulent marriage could land me in serious hot water, so I wasn’t on board with the second option; all I had was hope. I enrolled at Princeton in the fall of 2002, and administrators reworked my financial aid by extending a university-backed loan to cover what I would have earned working.
Tom and Lorenzo do a deep dive on Clueless fashion:
This is Dionne’s second style mode: wearing slightly parodic, ramped-up versions of African-American-inspired styles. The hair and beret are Reggae-inspired and the animal prints and low-slung tight pants are straight out of contemporaraneous hip hop. There’s this constant sense that she and her boyfriend Murray, who is always portrayed in slightly exaggerated (but not much) versions of ’90s rap-inspired styles (Timberland boots, Kangol hats, and pants falling off), are quite deliberately asserting themselves as representatives of black culture in this mostly lily-white and highly privileged setting. So is her crazy hat in the first scene just a crazy hat? Or is it another in a line of subtle ways she’s interpreting her cultural background in a place that’s somewhat bereft of it?
Rolling Stone talked to Bernie:
To address America’s economic imbalance, you’re proposing a platform of democratic socialism – what does that mean to you?
Our goal should be a society in which all people have a decent standard of living, not a society in which a few people have incredible wealth while 47 million live in poverty. What it means to me in English is a national health care program that guarantees health care to all people. It means high-quality public education from preschool through graduate school – and one of the important points of the platform that we’re running on is to make public colleges and universities tuition-free. Anybody in this country, regardless of their income, should be able to go get a higher education.It means dealing with the fact that significant numbers of people in this country are paying a very large proportion of their incomes in housing. It means that if you’re gonna work 40 hours a week, you don’t live in poverty; that we raise the minimum wage to a living wage.
Our beloved Jaya on hair products, mixed girls, and standing too long in the drugstore aisle wondering what to buy:
The first time I saw Mixed Chicks Leave-In Conditioner, it knocked me on my ass. I had that moment marketers spend countless hours and dollars to engineer, where a consumer is struck with the thought “Finally, a product that was made for me!” As the child of an Indian father and a white mother with a head of curls, I spent my adolescence as a bathroom chemist, mixing products to create something that would keep my hair from frizzing while also avoiding the greased wig look. It worked sometimes, but mostly I spent high school in braided pigtails to avoid the whole thing. Mixed Chicks called to me in a way nothing had.
I learned more about colorblindness today, and it was fascinating:
A common misconception is that colorblindness has to do with an insufficient supply of rod and cone cells in the eye. It’s actually only the cones that play a part in colorblindness, and the issue isn’t with quantity—even severe sufferers boast the standard 6 or 7 million—but of these cells’ behavior.
All cone cells are armed with molecules called photopigments, which absorb light particles, i.e. photons, allowing for the interpretation of color. The cones in the eye of a typical viewer separate into three types, each responsible for taking in different lengths of light waves: L-cones perceive long-wavelength light, which translates chiefly to the color red; M-cones perceive medium-wavelength light, which translates chiefly to green; and S-cones perceive small-wavelength light, which translates chiefly to blue. The countless combinations of these kinds of waves hitting the eye at different volumes result in the million different colors that the average person observes over the span of his or her life—or even in a single day.
The cones in someone with colorblindness don’t distinguish between light waves quite as well. For most, the problem is one of egregious overlap of wave absorption within a single cone. When an L-cone takes in too much green light, or an M-cone too much red, the eye will have problems differentiating between these colors. This results in a number of difficulties, including the classification of certain objects’ colors and the distinction between disparately colored objects as just that.
I used to work in a womyn’s bookstore
Um why is this a parenthetical aside and not a full-length autobiographical essay?
Reading that William Burroughs thing reminded me of a radio 4 documentary (rebroadcast by This American Life) about William Burroughs. It was SO GOOD. And Will Self is on it, basically pulling WS apart for making heroin look glamorous and oh, MURDERING HIS WIFE.
I mostly find Will Self completely insufferable, but occasionally he elicits a kind of grudging respect. He is essentially an arsehole, and then suddenly he’ll say something I find myself agreeing with. Still tend to avoid him though.
Will Self and his family once came to a children’s show I was stage managing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. My best friend, who was playing a goofy pantomime villain, adores him, and panicked before finally deciding to go on stage and just be as excellent as possible. While the play was going on, I slipped out, went to the bookstore across the street, bought one of his books, and snuck back in, so my friend could pretend that she’d just been casually reading one of his books.
Will Self fell asleep during the play (which, whatever, it was for children), but at the end my friend went up to him, got her book signed, and talked to him about her dissertation, which he thought was so interesting that he gave her his email if she ever wanted to talk about the subject.
Anyway, I still don’t love Will Self’s novels, but I like him as a person.
haha that’s really cool. Yeah, not really a fan of his novels, but he does manage to articulate stuff that other people don’t manage to (such as, if you fire a gun at your wife’s head, you are definitely trying to murder her)
In all of his writing – including articles – and interviews he comes across as an insufferable prick, but then I suppose no one’s an insufferable prick all the time.
Actually that’s not true, but you get my drift.
I reviewed a talk Will Self gave about his EXTREME WALKING from airports to city centres, etc. He was intense and occasionally scathing, until the audience Q&A when the sweet old ladies of Shoreham completely disarmed him with their sympathy, asking whether he ever got lonely, and if his feet hurt. http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/8383863.Will_Self_…
Oh, Sussex. You’re the best.
I really like his novels. Can’t say as I’ve read any interviews, but I certainly don’t find his fiction insufferable.
The hipster infatuation with Burroughs has always made me a little sick. Every Thanksgiving, someone at Boing Boing will repost his “Thanksgiving Prayer”, which includes the line, “Thanks for laboratory AIDS.” Buh-what? In general, he was the sort of superannuated rich kid who produced books that were much more admired than read.
I want Tom and Lorenzo to analyze every media franchise’s costuming for me. They are just so utterly delightful and snarky and pick up on so many things I’ve never noticed. They single-handedly made me more interested in fashion.
Excuse me, I need to go watch Clueless again…
Their Musical Mondays posts slay me. Vagina hats!
I kept watching Mad Men LONG after I was bored of it because their recaps were just so great.
I just kept reading the Mad Style posts without watching the show.
I had no idea there was that much plaid, or how much I wanted someone to enumerate the plaids of Clueless for me! (The Plaids of Clueless: YA romance or lo-fi indie band name?)
YA romance, for sure
Why not both?
Did not understand fashion at all.
Read their Mad Style posts.
Am suddenly interested in fashion.
Co-signed 100%. I knew nothing about fashion before Mad Style, then stuck around to read their other posts, because they’re pretty damn entertaining and sharp. Now I have, like, an idea of what major houses specialize in! Also I know more about celebrities and teen pop stars than I ever cared to. But they’re also the ones who first tipped me off about OITNB, before it became a big thing.
I’ve never really read Tom and Lorenzo but that Clueless article makes me want to start. It was so good!
I love Tom and Lorenzo! A part of me is kind of amazed that they hadn’t actually talked about Clueless before because it really is one of the best examples of hella clever film costuming from the 90s.
OMG yes, their Mad Men commentary is so awesome it made me love the show even more. I would legit pay money to listen to them do commentary tracks for basically anything.
Also, I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him, except for his recurrent attacks on Jennifer Weiner in interviews.
<3 Rebecca Solnit.
BTW: great segue to tell you about the perfect example of mansplaining I encountered yesterday. A dude approaching our bi-weekly Stich ‘n’ Bitch group… to tell us about this knitting related site. Which, btw, was a site where you can buy hand-knitted stuff: admittedly related to knitting, but not really something knitters have any need for!
Coming to post that exact quote!
Out of curiosity, which knitting related site?
A Dutch one called Granny’s Finest
That guy sounds really annoying, but this website is pretty cool. This model is rocking that headband, and now I want one:
I do love that they use the “grannies” as models as well as as knitters! But it was too clearly a case of “I vaguely remember something to do with knitting. Must enlighten these knitting women!”
I love the Dutch word for online shopping cart. Winkelwagen!
Also, holy shit the comments to the Solnit article are replete with mansplaining!
I am honestly baffled that so many people missed the point of that article quite so widely, and on top of it were so confident in their incorrect-ness that they felt the need to leave comments.
I shared on Facebook and my antagonistic brother commented “must be hard to be the only person who knows how to do” gender” right.” I didn’t really know what to do with any of that (from the bizarre interpretation of the essay to the scare quotes on “gender”) so I just didn’t reply.
Just say fuck off. And don’t reply to any further comments. That’s what I do with antagonistic men (my brother is thankfully a bit more enlightened). They need to be told, but they don’t need your energy. Though ymmv on how much of a stink you want to cause, if that’s the kind of thing that would cause a stink with your brother.
I’ve been known to just double down on cheerful trolling. I’m not quite as surgically adept as Mallory, but it’s easy enough to leave a cheerful “Why yes it is, thanks for noticing! :D” on those things. Any other reader who understands what’s going on will get the trolling, and the antagonist doesn’t really have anywhere else to go with it.
I enjoy replying to such comments with only a link to this gif: http://i.imgur.com/dcJ2MLH.gif
But one of the points is that the books on her list show only one way to do gender, and there is more than one way to do it “right”…
And when Solnit clearly made a point of saying “not all men” (in very nice language tho) and adding male authors to her list of favorites! I don’t know whether she did that in pre-emptive defense or if they were genuine comments or both, but I hate to think of her sitting down to write this and thinking “welp, gotta soften the blow.”
“There are, of course, authors who happen to produce very good work despite being men. Here are some of them. Now, may we return to the main point? Thank you.”
One of the more attractive traits of mansplainers is their compulsion to respond to EVERYTHING, even if it’s only a one word “Yeah.”
That’s some grade-a shade. Some fun (read: idiotic) mansplaining going on in the comments of that article. How surprised are we?
AUGH why. Why do men think every thought in their head is AMAZING and HELPFUL and MUST BE SHARED RIGHT NOW, OBVIOUSLY. (Answer: the patriarchy.)
And AT LENGTH! How many precious minutes of your life did you waste typing that block of text diarrhea, Mr. Mansplainer?
I know so many people who are charmed to be approached in public when knitting. But I have never known what to DO with ‘my grandma used to knit’. Like, swell, everyone’s grandma’s used to knit, because it was how you clothed yourself and your family. Wanna talk with me about the politics of hand crafting across the ages? No? Good because I also don’t want to talk to you, random, probably male, stranger.
Also the ones who say ‘awww! You look so homely doing that!’ I *think* you mean ‘home-y’. But then again maybe not?
My university town had a second story womyn’s bookstore named “Mrs. Dalloway’s”.
It was tiny, and filled with independent press lesbian murder mysteries and the most recent edition of Our Bodies, Our Selves.
I found my first home away from my parents on that bookstore’s bulletin board. A long running co-op near the university.
(edit – meant to respond to betsaroo)
There are not nearly enough lesbian murder mysteries in my life.
Prior to my last move, I released all my old ones into the wild, along with the collection of 1980’s feminist sci-fi.
I really enjoyed the spirit of the Rebecca Solnit rant, but did anyone else find something about the style really difficult to process?
I kept getting confused because when she referred to a list, I wasn’t ever sure if she meant the Esquire list of men’s books or her own list of authors women don’t need to read. (By the end I had finally worked out that the latter doesn’t exist and the title of the essay is just a reference the former. Good job, me.) I still liked it, though!
I kept looking for a real list, too!
Yes! I think the fact that she kept saying “the list” to refer both to her own imagined list and the Esquire list was a big part of my bafflement.
It made me think of the thing that Mallory wrote about the books that every guy ever has read. Probably a lot of overlap there.
IT WAS NICOLE
NICOLE WAS THE DUMPY NERDETTE WHO WROTE THAT LIST
nevar forget
Right you are, and my bad.
Yes! I always have a hard time processing her writing style for some reason!
I felt the formatting was a bit off-putting moreso than her writing.
I too was disappointed to see there was no actual list. There should be one.
Ladies– I am hosting a FriendsGiving this wkd and I am very excited generally, but even more so that people are really #LeaningIN to the whole thing and contributing pretty elaborate dishes to the potluck!
Also trying to coordinate a low drama Christmas holiday because there are some DYNAMICS in my fam. Based on some self care books + blogs on this subj, consensus is setting clear boundaries, limiting time, creating space for yourself etc. I’m considering turning the wk-long break into fun travel time for me and the male-companion, possibly a roadtrip through the SW? So any suggestions you have on places/ food in AZ / NM/ TX I’ll take them!
New Mexico!!!! I mainly know about Santa Fe and it’s immediate environs but have only good things to say. The Range Cafe in Bernalillo is fantastic as are the Bite and the Plaza Diner in Santa Fe. While in New Mexico, just generally try to have as many green chile cheeseburgers, green chile enchiladas, and sopapillas as you possibly can.
As far as places, Ojo Caliente is a hippie hotspring about 2 hours outside of town that has classed it up a bit and is a lovely place to spend time. 10,000 waves is an excellent japanese inspired spa in Santa Fe. Also I believe that the opera offers behind the scenes tours which are super cool!
My favorite place in New Mexico is Rancho de Chimayo http://www.ranchodechimayo.com/#welcome2
I’m so jealous that you’ll go there in the winter, it’s so beautiful
Good luck with the low-drama Christmas, and sympathy from another with some DYNAMICS.
If wacky history and abandoned buildings are your kind of thing, AZ is full of ghost towns that you can just get to off of the highway and walk around in. I roadtripped through the state a few years ago and stopped at breweries and ghost towns, and it was super fun!
My favorite was Two Guns / Canyon Diablo, which is basically the exact stereotype of a lawless wild west saloon town. Just get a load of this stuff. How can you NOT want to go to a place where, “The center street, however, was not named Main Street, but “Hell Street.” There are ruins of all the old wild west buildings, but someone later tried to turn the town into a campground and abandoned THAT, so there are these old cowboy themed murals painted on newer buildings on the ruins of the old ones. It’s neat!
YES this exactly! I’ll also take brewery recommendations!
For breweries, Flagstaff AZ was my favorite area. There are quite a few breweries in the city and I thought they were all super great! Historic Brewing, Flagstaff Brewing Company, and Mother Road are the ones I specifically remember, although I went to others there. Not sure how far south you want to go but I can tell you I was not able to find good beer in Phoenix – maybe a local would know better than I!
Phoenix local here! I second your recommendation to visit Flagstaff – it’s a great town and has good beer! Phoenix has great beer, but the places are kind of spread out. Angel’s Trumpet in downtown Phoenix has about 30 rotating beers on tap. At least 6 are always local brews. Then there is the Phoenix Ale House, San Tan Brewing, and of course, locally-beloved Four Peaks Brewery. The Sonoran Brewing Co has a delicious white chocolate ale.
For other places to visit in AZ, Jerome, Clarkdale, and Cottonwood are all near each other. They are in the Verde Valley, in between Flagstaff and Phoenix. Jerome in particular is known for its ghosts.
Seconding ALLLLLL of these suggestions! And hello other Phoenix local! 🙂
I grew up in NM! Northern NM is gorgeous, but I will also give a plug for Southern NM since you are going in the winter when it is not hot as blazes. My family used to camp every winter at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, which I highly recommend if camping is your thing. It has a nice campground and visitors center, and great hiking up a beautiful canyon. Plus, it is just a short drive from Alamogordo, which has a good Air and Space Museum, and White Sands. Also in Southern NM, Carlsbad Caverns, which can be touristy, but is still really cool.
In Northern NM, Taos is beautiful and full of cool museums. I especially recommend the Nicolai Fechin House and art museum, the Kit Carson museum, and Hacienda de los Martinez. Plus, Taos has a lot of art galleries and the ski hill, if that’s your thing. Santa Fe has an excellent Georgia O’Keefe museum, plus all of the Plaza area is cool for old buildings,little shops, and museums. My favorite place to eat is Gabriel’s, which is north of Santa Fe most of the way to Pojaque. Excellent New Mexican food, and the tableside guacamole, fajitas, and margaritas are fantastic! Also, if you make it to Los Alamos or Espanola, try El Parasol for more delicious New Mexican food!
If you like the mountains, the Jemez Mountains above Los Alamos have Bandelier National Monument, the Valle Caldera (one of the largest volcano calderas in the country), and the hot springs at Jemez Springs. If you go through northeastern NM, Clayton Lake is cool – interesting rock formations and dinosaur footprints!
New Mexico is full of interesting little state parks and monuments, so if that’s your thing, I definitely recommend looking up what else might be along your route. I think NM is a really rewarding place to take a road trip if you are interested in getting off the interstates and driving all the little state roads!
I live in New Mexico and I love travelling around the state because it never ceases to amaze me. Northern New Mexico is wonderful mountains and trees. Taos is perhaps one of my favorite places. It’s a bit like what Santa Fe was before Santa Fe became Disney does adobe (although I don’t doubt that Taos will probably eventually go that way as well).
If you can afford it, and if there’s room, in Taos there is a B&B near the square called the Mabel Dodge Luhan House. It is where Ansel Adams decided to take up photography. It is where Georgia O’Keefe first fell in love with New Mexico. Dennis Hopper bought it in the 60s and turned it into some sort of weird commune. It’s a gorgeous adobe house and most of the rooms (if not all) have kiva fireplaces where you can burn good-smelling pinyon wood. The breakfasts are the stuff of dreams, and every time we went to breakfast all the other guests were writers, artists, historians, and scientists. (Also, Mabel Dodge Luhan was a pretty interesting lady. She is well-worth reading about if you can.)
Now if you want to do Southern New Mexico, there’s a lot to do down here! (And the weather is warmer than up north, obviously.) I’ve heard good things about Alamogordo and all their museums, and it’s near White Sands National Monument which is great fun! You can rent sleds and slide down the massive dunes. (Or, if you’re cheap like me, just try to slide down ’em on your bottom.) 3 Rivers Petroglyphs is an excellent BLM site with a pretty easy hike and thousands of petroglyphs. Truth or Consquences is an OK town but with hot springs. You can stay at hotels that have private springs in the room, or a public spring where you can soak outdoors. There’s an excellent Italian restaurant there, too. Not too far from T or C is a small town called Hillsboro with an excellent winery called Black Range. The owners are lovely and it’s great to go to their tasting room and chat. Down the road from Hillsboro is a ghost town now run by the BLM called Lake Valley which is free and filled with lots of fun history.
Further south you might go through Hatch, the green chile capital of the world, where you really don’t need to stop unless you (1) want to pick up some killer chile, including dried red or (2) go to Sparky’s for some green chile cheeseburgers. You might take another route where you pass San Antonio, home of the first Hilton Hotel. In San Antonio are The Owl Café and The Buckhorn Cafe which have been locked in a green chile cheeseburger battle for years. (I’m team Owl.)
Further down is Las Cruces, which is the second largest city in New Mexico. Cruces has some nice little museums, Prehistoric Trackways National Monument (where there are some pretty amazing ancient animal tracks and loads of fossils), fun hikes at Dripping Springs (beautiful hikes and one has an old ranches and other buildings you can check out, another has a cave where an old hermit used to live), and a nearby Spanish Colonial town with a great old square (Mesilla). Bosque brewery has a taphouse in Cruces, and the Spotted Dog brewery in Mesilla is also pretty good. There are about a million excellent restaurants, too (La Posta if you want margaritas and have money to spend, Andele for the best tacos al carbon, La Nueva Casita Cafe for their tacos estrella, Day’s Hamburgers for the best green chile cheeseburgers, and much more). VIntage Wines in Mesilla is a wine bar where you can try wines from all over the state. Across the street is a tiny indie theatre that has one showing a day and popcorn with real butter–it’s worth going in if you’re there before a show to check out the murals on the adobe walls inside.
There are actually genuinely good wineries throughout the state, especially up north. If you end up in Deming, for whatever reason, St. Clair winery is a nice stop (they also have a bistro in Cruces). For whatever reason we’re seeing a lot of Tempranillos which delights me to no end.
Honestly, wherever you go in New Mexico you’ll probably have an adventure. It’s such a fun, weird state. (If you make plans and want specific suggestions for Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, or Cruces, let me know! I’d offer to take you out for beer and tacos if you come to Cruces, but I’ll be out of town.)
Have THE MOST fun!
Where were you when I did a road trip through the Southwest last year? Now I need to do another one to hit all these awesome places!
If you ever come back, let me know! The husband and I take weekend trips around the state a few times a year so we’ve been building up an excellent list of Things to Do and Places to Eat. (Especially the latter.)
Of course, I’m sure you had a blast on your trip! The Southwest is full of so much to do you almost have to try to be bored.
We did! It was my first trip to the Southwest — husband grew up in Texas and did periodic road trips with his family, but I’d never been, so he was really excited to show me everything. We flew into Las Vegas and drove through to Houston. The only bad part was that I was newly pregnant and my morning sickness started the day we left, so I didn’t get to enjoy much food — definitely a reason to go back!
ohhh I spent so much of my life in new mexico and arizona! so I have lots of ideas about this! luckily for you, there are loads of other great ideas and you have pretty much endless rabbit trails to follow.
if you go to flagstaff, take time to explore and go to sedona through oak creek canyon – sedona itself is pretty woo+$$$, but the area around it is amazing. there’s also a metaphysical department store (does it bill itself as this? did I just start calling it that?) that I always enjoy poking around in, because (a) crystals, (b) info on vortexes, and (c) alll the woo you could ever want in one place.
jerome is a very cool old mining town that is tiny and has good wine and beer and food and walking, and the drive to it is beautiful.
if you end up in phoenix for some strange reason, you should eat breakfast at matt’s and have drinks at hanny’s, which is an old department store transformed into a delightful bar.
if you are in the south, and go to tucson, go explore the sonoran national forest! because it’s amazing! and tucson is lovely. there’s a restaurant/bar in the west university area called the b-line that we would go to often, and hello they have a rotating pie case and delicious drinks.
it’s 100% worth it to bring a cooler and stock up on roasted green chiles in southern new mexico; hatch and the surrounding communities always have them frozen since the season is over. red chiles dried, too. oh my east coast self is missing my southwest food! in santa fe, my favorite breakfast is the tune-up.
have fun! just a few thoughts off the top of my head. 🙂
First, good luck with the FriendsGiving it sounds great! And whatever Christmas plans you end up with, best of luck and good wishes!
Texas is also great, but it is a gigantic state that requires a lot of driving. If you were to do AZ/NM, I would recommend stopping by Big Bend National Park for day hiking/camping. It’s going to be cold b/c its a desert, but it is stunningly beautiful. I would recommend the south rim loop. You have to be into camping though b/c there is not much else in the area. Also, it is a great place to go star gazing, and there is McDonald observatory in the area (145 miles).
If you want to go further in to Texas (depending where you’re starting from) I would recommend the Hill Country. Towns like Fredericksburg have a heavy German influence and they decorate the town for Christmas and have Weihnachtsmarkts. Fredericksburg also has a WWII Pacific Museum (named after Nimitz, a hometown boy), if you’re into that sort of thing. The Hill Country also has wine/wine tours/ lots of nature/ artsy things to do, and it’s fairly close to Austin and San Antonio (100-150 miles), which both have a lot going on.
Meet me for lunch or dinner! I can meet you and male-companion at a restaurant in Houston or Austin or nearer my home in between. rmcd 1974 (at) hot mail
NOTED!
Fredericksburg and Wimberley are both good for weekend-type vacations – you’ve got lots of pretty wineries and good food.
I don’t have location recommendations because I haven’t been to NM in 20 years (Nana lived there, then moved here) but wherever you go you have to try the sopapillas. All of them.
If you go through southern NM, the Smokey Bear Museum is a fun stop (and in some fantastically beautiful mountains). It’s a tiny place but it’s perfect to take a break and stretch your legs at. If you are going between Roswell (fun!) and I-25 on 380, it’s a roadside stop.
Toasties, I know that I am extremely late to the party, but… Hamilton.
I’d been avoiding it because I thought maybe I’m not American enough (I am 0% American) to understand the references and appropriately appreciate its brilliance. I was very wrong!
The only way it could be more perfect is with less Jefferson/Madison and more Schuyler sisters. I mean Alexander Hamilton is pretty interesting too but Eliza and Angelica?!
WELCOME 😀
I know, I want to know everything about Eliza and Angelica!
Have you looked up the songs on genius.com? I’m USian, and the annotations filled me in on a bunch of references to stuff I wasn’t familiar with.
Genius was a life-saver for Hamilton.
If only it had been a life-saver for the actual Hamilton.
This exchange is brilliant, may I screenshot it on Tumblr?
Sure thing. 🙂
Cool! Thanks a lot.
This exchange is brilliant, may I screenshot it on Tumblr? Sorry to be so forward.
Of course.
Great! Thank you.
This is now on the schedule for my next listen-through!
This exchange is brilliant, may I screenshot it on Tumblr? Sorry to be so forward.
I would be fine with that!
Thank you! It is for a good cause.
Am most of the way through the Hamilton bio but for real I want an Angelica biography SO BAD.
There will be one of both sisters…in five years. https://twitter.com/theferocity/status/6626668812…
WELCOME.
I AM GOING TO PILE ON:
If you want videos check out my playlists. If it so pleases you.
Hamilton Trash + Lintrash YouTube Playlists
You’ll find some other Hamilton/LMM playlists on my channel as well.
Also the
60 Minutes segments
I agree about the ladies, but I tend to think he did the best he could for them within the constraints of the story, and there is all kinds of feminist stuff in there. I’ve got some Tumblr links discussing that that I can find (please ask me to find them). Also there’s this:
How the Hero of Hamilton the Musical Is a Woman
I AM HAMILTON TRASH. WELCOME.
More piling on. These tracks got yanked off the Tumblr I pulled them off of, but they’re great, so I tossed them into a Soundcloud playlist. Hamilton Cut/Altered/Extended Tracks. Please enjoy! There is more Angelica Schuyler and it’s fantastic.
Whoo! Thank you! I haven’t seen these collected in one place ANYWHERE.
I would like to see the tumblr links!
Alright, should have them later today.
Okay, something came up, but I’ll put them here when I get them (maybe not till tomorrow) as well as in tomorrow’s LRU. Already found a few.
Most Americans know NOTHING about Hamilton except maybe a grade school memory that he had the duel with Aaron Burr. Probably a fair number think he was a president because he is on money, if they’ve ever noticed that he is on money.
The other day I was staring at a $10 in the drive through and my partner was all “you’re daydreaming about Hamilton aren’t you!?!”
And Peggy!
SOLNIT FOR EVER, BURROUGHS NEVER!
Also, on a serious note, someone in another excellent network of mostly women today suggested calling one’s elected representatives, if one is a US citizen, and letting them know you *support* funding for the program helping refugees coming to our shores. She added this helpful link for finding your rep and senators and their contact info: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members
PLEASE DO THIS! (I would like some nice calls today)
Is there any difference in relative effectiveness of e-mailing vs. calling? I tried calling yesterday, expecting a machine, and when a live human being answered, I panicked and hung up. So I sent an e-mail instead.
Also, here’s a fact that can be put into representative e-mails and phone calls. Of the 750,000 refugees admitted since 9/11, none have been arrested on domestic terror charges (two have been arrested for terrorism-related charges, but neither were planning an attack on America) (Source: The Economist).
They both eventually go to the same place, but calling has a more immediate impact in that human beings in the offices hear you and can pass that on. (also will probably enjoy hearing from someone nice.)
^THIS IS TRUE.
Thank you! I will take a deep breath and steel myself for making a phone call next time. 🙂
I’m not sure I could be nice to Ted Cruz’s people about policy. Also, HOLY GERRYMANDERING, BATMAN.
A few people on a facebook group I’m in reported that they called the governor in Utah to vote their support for his stance (he’s the only Republican governor to say his state will keep accepting refugees), and his secretary was so incredibly happy to hear supportive comments. It sounds like they’ve been dealing with a lot of hateful ones.
Relevant to the Toast’s interests? http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-3486…
100%.
do you really think that cat stevens/yusef islam is reallllllyyyy a contender for another verse, though? he always seemed so much more chilled out than the other fellas on that list.
“A few black women were offended because they felt like we were making ourselves separate and better,” says Levy, and some white women thought the word “chicks” derogatory.”
I’ve never thought of “chicks” as being derogatory before now! I guess I missed that white woman memo!!
(not to totally reduce a really interesting article to one quote, thatjust stood out to me)
I guess I kinda see it? It’s kinda like calling grown women “girls”. But obviously there’s a big difference between anybody using a word to describe themselves and other people using it to describe them.
I think it’s mostly offensive when men are “men” and women are “chicks.” But, like you said, LOTS of women call themselves & their women friends “chicks” and are very happy & unoffended.
It feels different for me whether a man is using it or a woman I know and like is using it. Also I never hear it in my circles? To me it sounds kind of like a sexualized and infantilizing form of calling women “girls.”
It’s infantalizing, like babe, baby, kitten, etc. As with anything, YMMV.
Thank you, I was casting about for “infantilizing” and not finding the word in my brain when I wrote my comment.
No problem! I had some trouble bringing it to mind, too.
While we’re on the subject, how do the women here feel about being called “guys” in direct address? I’ve seen it used a lot online by women in their 20’s in a really positive way. I wonder about it every time I use it on here. Personally I like it since the female analogue is “girls” and that obviously is not good for general usage. (Well I suppose it would be “gals,” but that’s archaic.)
I use “guys” to address groups of people of any gender (I am 26). I also call people “girl” regardless of gender, which I think I started doing in a semi-ironic “hey girl” sort of way but has since crept into my regular speech (as so often happens).
I’m 100% on board with calling everyone “guys,” but that’s probably just because my mom’s done it my whole life so it doesn’t sound weird to me. The way she uses it, it’s just a generic form of address. She even says it to her dogs, like, “Ok, guys, time for a walk!”
Pets, of course. I can call everything “guy” or “guys” actually, including, often, objects. In the car once I told my friend “Turn after this white guy goes by” and he was like, “Excuse me? So that’s how you define people?” or something like that, and I said no, I’m just talking about that white truck. I got that from my mom, too, that I can remember. (I grew up in northeast Indiana, FWIW.)
It seems to me that “guys” is creeping towards gender-neutral territory and I’m all for that. We don’t have a good gender-neutral casual alternative and I’m in favour of taking things from men in general.
yes, I like this argument!
I’ve been consciously trying not to use “guys” for a year or two now, and it’s kinda hard. “Folks” works sometimes, “y’all” would work, but I’m not a Southerner and don’t particularly want to pretend to be one, “gang” gets a lot of use. There are words out there, but there’s nothing that rolls off the tongue (slash that I have been socially conditioned to accept) like “guys”.
I guess I don’t see much difference between using “guys” as a gender-neutral term and using “man” (like, “the race of man”) to describe humans as a group. It seems like they both set man as the default/normal, even if the usage is largely gender-neutral.
I hate the “man” = “human” usage, which I’m glad to see dying out (from what I read/hear), but I’m cool with “guys” = “people.” Mostly? It would be much better if it didn’t have a gendered origin/primary meaning. Wish there was something better. I don’t know why it doesn’t strike me as as off as using “man” in a “gender neutral” way. Maybe it should.
I am fine with it! But I think I might be an outlier; I also am fine with being addressed as “dude” or “bro” in the singular and sometimes refer to myself as a guy, a dude, etc. in spite of mainly identifying as a lady. I generally assume that plural “guys” is okay for any group, regardless of its gender makeup, with exceptions for groups containing the couple of women I know personally who I know don’t care for it; the best genderless alternative I’ve come up with is “y’all.”
I have to really watch myself because my best friend and my closest family members (all women) and I use ‘dude’ and ‘bro’ and ‘man’ (as in, ‘hey, no worries, man!’ to show we are really 10)% not bothered by a thing). And I catch myself about to say it to my genderqueer and trans friends and X-| to that.
Oh, EVERYBODY (and sometimes things) has been slang “man” to me before for purposes like that. The more I think about this the more there is to it–all the times I would and would not use “man” toward a woman compared with toward a man.
Reading this, I realize I use “dude” like that too–although I don’t use the word often anyway–but never “bro.” I’m mostly aware of that word used in a (deservedly) derogatory or sarcastic way about “dudebro” culture or people. But I was just never socialized with the word otherwise, other than knowing of it in AAVE.
I don’t think it’s a big deal, but I usually don’t refer to a mixed-gender group as “guys”. I use “gals” all the time, but then I’m from Texas and it doesn’t feel odd or archaic. Just like when referring to mixed groups, I usually default to “y’all”, “everyone”, or “people”. For example, “Ok people, it’s time to get to work!” or “Hey everyone, what do y’all want on your pizzas?”
But it’s definitely *not* a big deal, and I don’t mind at all if other women use “guys” in a gender-neutral way.
Oops, I totally forgot about regionalism IRT the usage of “gal”–kept thinking about movies from the 40’s or something. D’oh. Thanks for being nice about it!
I use “guys” all the time for mixed-gender groups. I also say “y’all” not because I’m from the South (I’m not) but because I’m annoyed that English lacks a second-person plural.
And I will call basically anyone “dude,” because I was a teenager in the ’90s.
I’m fine with guys and pretty much consider it gender neutral. But one of my colleagues sometimes uses “gents” as an email opener (for emails addressed to a male group, but where women may be cc’d), and it makes me cringe every time.
I use “guys,” “bros,” and “dudes” as gender neutral forms of plural direct address, but I also grew up in California.
I really wish English had a “vous” that wasn’t “y’all.”
I operate in a lot of queer circles where the only polite option is Gender-Neutral Everything. I generally go with “folks” or “you’ns.” “Yinz” when I’m in Philly, because fuck Philly.
I use “you guys” as a gender neutral plural for a group of 2+ people – but I’m from the Midwest so I think I’ve done that since I could talk, pretty much.
I use “guys” and “dude” for all genders, but one I’ve been noticing myself use more often is “friends”. As in “Hey, friends!” I think I picked this up from a woman I worked with.
To me it just sounds dated (maybe because of that old Simpsons episode where Bart’s first words to the feminist grad student are ‘So you’re one of those “don’t call me chick” chicks?’)
I remember having a big argument with my mother about this, because the girls in my social group and I all used ‘chicks’ and it was a strong identifier for us and felt good to use. And she was like ‘no it’s demeaning never say it again because ~~feminism~~’ I remember feeling really hurt and confused (I would have been about 14 I guess) and not being able to articulate how it was upsetting because she was taking our women-centric identifiers away from us, in the name of feminism. I think about that feeling a lot as a reminder to me to tread softly when I deal with other women with things like these, because I don’t know their subcultural context, and that is an important thing.
Is Sansa a direwolf? She looks like what I imagine a direwolf puppy would look like.
She looks so wise already
GUYS my worlds are colliding! I’m working on a book with Tablet writer Mark Oppenheimer, who is also the host of Tablet’s “news of the Jews” podcast, Unorthodox. Today on the show? Mallory “Dear Motherfuckin’ Prudence” Ortberg! And also Bat Sheva Marcus, sex therapist and president of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance!
http://www.tabletmag.com/podcasts/195202/the-bird…
This is very exciting and am downloading this podcast now! Can’t wait to listen.
Yeeees I never listen to.podcasts but I will listen to this one!
I just want to say that fellow Toastie evieskye and I are having an amazing chat about who would win the Degrassi Hunger Games (all generations) and she made a great point about how Snake and Spike must be past victors and that’s why they made it to Degrassi: The Next Generation, and it is brightening up my morning to no end.
ahahahha. Degrassi is my jam. Who from the new round of kids would make it? And what do you think of the concept of Next Class?!
We haven’t established an ultimate victor but here is a non-exhaustive list of characters I think would get pretty far:
– Holly J. Sinclair
– Paige Michalchuk (she would form an alliance with Marco and ultimately betray him)
– Yick Yu (his family escaped war-torn Vietnam, he clearly comes from a long line of survivors)
– Spinner (he overcame nut cancer, he can overcome a few fellow tributes)
– Joey Jeremiah
– Alli and Sav Bhandari (they’re both popular and well-liked enough that they could get pretty far into the Games with the alliances they’d form)
I think it would come down to Yick and Kathleen, because she would want it more than anyone else.
I read this as “fellow Toastoyevsky” and thought it was brilliant.
I found Baby-Sitters Club/Hunger Games and it made my life complete.
http://archiveofourown.org/works/1121401
I am 41 years old, and I still want to wear the iconic yellow Clueless outfit. Everything about the outfits in that movie is perfect.
Guys, have you seen this?
In the video below from the 2015 College Unions Poetry Slam Invitational, the two Eastern Michigan University students perform their spoken word poem “Lost Voices” and discuss white privilege, reproductive rights, male privilege and dating while black.
But instead of telling stories from their own lives, Bostley and Simpson tell one another’s experiences. The result is a powerful commentary on white privilege and male privilege, respectively.
(I think I’ll need to watch it a few more times before I’ll be able to talk about it in my own words.)
Wow wow wow wow thank you
Just your description of it made me cry. Going to it now.
Oh my god everyone go watch this. When you are in a place for a lot of feelings. These people are amazing.
GodDAMN I am about to cry in Panera.
And you know what, I have been avoiding putting any of the great SJW (thank you, reactionary douchebags, for that wonderful term) content that comes across my dashboard on Tumblr on my Hamilton blog, but this is going on there. There’s some talk now about “white women could play the principals because they’re oppressed too” and… this is relevant.
Oh my, would you mind telling me what your Hamilton blog handle is? There cannot be enough Hamilton content on my dash.
I hadn’t heard any “white women could play the principals because they’re oppressed too” talk, but wow. It’s one of those arguments that feels fundamentally wrong, but it’s so hard for me to articulate why.
Also, I especially love SJW because those are my initials, and for most of my life I’d despaired of ever finding something they’d stand for (my brother has BMW, which he’s quite chuffed about).
I think my articulation of “why” has settled at “because that isn’t the angle of oppression that this piece is attacking.”
Also “POC have been told for years and years that if we want representation we should make our own thing. So we made our own thing, and now white people are demanding to be included in it.”
I had not heard this thing before, but this was my reaction to it too, upon some thought.
Yes, white women could play roles of those people, in a thing. But this is not that thing and it is not FOR us. It is importantly FOR POC. It is fucking shitty to be playing oppression olympics with it, and it’s typical white bullshit if I may say so, to be like ‘oh a thing! I’ll take it! What do you mean I’m not allowed to have this *one specific thing* even though I have access to many other things? How dare you!?!’ Being a person who is oppressed for another reason doesn’t actually dilute the shittiness of that – like what if a white gay dude said the same thing? No, thanks, white people, please cut it out.
I also have the initials SJW, and get a kick out of bugging mra’s accusing me of being an SJW with “yep, that’s my name!”
I responded to someone complaining that SJW run Twitter with “I didn’t know I ran Twitter?!? **feels powerful**” which was pretty fun.
Here! http://howdoyouwritenonnnstop.tumblr.com/post/133…
Yeah unfortunately some folks are saying–or assuming–that. Really just seeing the mockery or refutation of the idea on my dash. Such as the above, and this:
duvallon:
jfc i haven’t gotten this worked up in a very long time
note to white friends, followers, and passers-by: until we reach absolute racial parity on broadway and don’t look back, no one in hamilton other than king george should be played by a white actor. i don’t care if it’s an all-female cast, i don’t care if there are no POC in your theater community, i don’t care if you’re white and can spit the fastest rhymes in america. if you think you deserve a role in this production just because you think you’re talented enough, you need to educate yourself better on the history of racial discrimination in the entertainment industry and really reflect on your values as an artist.
recognize that this exceptional show is a space that has been meticulously and painstakingly carved out exactly for the people who are most often excluded from the narrative of american history. the choice to actively cast non-white actors is not a novelty or a gimmick–it’s actively and fearlessly subverting the status quo. it is an exception in this industry, not a rule.
respect that for so many people, this is the first time they’ve gotten to see themselves play someone other than a gangster, a slave, a whore, a caricature–respected for their talent and craft as artists and storytellers. for young actors of color, these are roles that finally exist for them.
remember that despite hamilton’s success, the entertainment industry is still predominantly lily-white and–for the most part–actively resists diversification. there are more than enough roles out there right now for white actors. your careers and personal ambition can afford to let us have this.
endsequence:
not even parity on broadway– im gonna bite the bullet and say in entertainment & society
the entire musical is rap and r&b with some forays into southern hiphop (and the songs by the one white principal being a play on british pop) so… white folks profiting from black music in a production specifically crafted for nonwhite actors in a society inherently hostile to poc and built on rewarding white folks for cultural appropriation is exactly what LMM is writing against, so
(LMM, paraphrased: ’if your cast looks like the actual founding fathers, u fucked up’)
i mean we know people are gonna do it anyway and it’s not like we can stop them, but let’s just establish the baseline here
Daaammmmnnn that was so good.
The tags on the Solnit piece are no Toast tags, but they are good tags. I love the good comments, too – how great would that comment section be if the no-jerks policy was as strict as the one here? (But of the bad comments, my favorite genre is “There is nothing you shouldn’t read! Read everything! Don’t censor your own reading!” Dude. No. Life is too short, can’t read literally everything, don’t wanna err on the side of more misogynists.)
When we were talking books the other day someone wanted to talk about Huntress? I finished last night & wrote a spoiler-y review here and will totally talk about it / argue about the ending mostly.
“Read everything! Especially these ~special~ misogynists who have been read and discussed time and time again! Don’t censor yourself by pushing them to one side in favour of people who won’t hurt your soul! Read everything!’
Prick.
That was me! I agree about the pacing of it but I accepted that as the price I’m paying for a fantasy world that includes people that look like me.
[spoilers below] can I do a cut tag on Toast?
And personally, I loved the ending to bits. Taisin and Kaede are teenagers and it would not have sat well with me if they pulled each other away from their callings for the sake of their relationship.
[spoilers] eeee, I am glad you liked the ending as well. I would have been so worried about them if they just wrote everything off for love! And I felt like the book had plenty of hints (Mona!) that their chosen paths aren’t straight & narrow.
[/spoilers]
too much physical description of characters is a thing that bugs me in writing, too…every time I read “her brown eyes” or “her dark hair” I was like “ok, self, you are NOT going to be annoyed by this, because in this case it’s VITAL.”
Um, from the Esquire piece Solnit refers to: “Which goes nicely with the comment for John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: “Because it’s all about the titty.”
The actual fuck? Anybody reading The Grapes of Wrath for the titty will be sorely disappointed.
A group of my friends are working to sponsor a refugee family to come over, and it’s been incredibly discouraging to see the 180 turn from some relatives after the Paris attacks. Fortunately, the rest of our communities are incredibly supportive, but the change in our social media feeds has been noticeable.
I really want to get into arguments with people to get them to think about compassion, and to think about how many of their ancestors came over as refugees, (“that Loyalist ancestor you’re so proud of?? War refugee!” … I’ve been listening to too much Hamilton), but I can’t see them getting past their Islamophobia
Discussions that I’ve seen happening have, for me, really nailed home the point that fear is an incredibly powerful motivator. People have literally begun manufacturing reasons to be afraid and this feeds their rampant racism and Islamophobia. They have made themselves so afraid over these made up reasons, they absolutely will not consider alternatives to this crazy thinking.
And its very like watching my OCD riddled brain step out of my head and become a person. I just want to scream: “you realize you sound like a LITERAL insane person. I take medicine so my brain doesn’t do what you’re making yourself do. WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
It’s frustrating and heartbreaking and I have now given a considerable sum to a whole bunch of charities to offset their horribleness.
I know police brutality against black Americans isn’t exactly news, but Minneapolis is hurting right now. On Sunday, November 15th, Jamar Clark was shot by the police – witnesses say he was in handcuffs. Protesters have been occupying the 4th precinct police station for five days now, and last night the police violently escalated the situation. The MPD had the audacity to say that the protesters were macing themselves when many video accounts show officers macing people directly in the face. All of the news coverage has been conflicted at best and deliberately inflammatory at worst. For updates, check #4thPrecinctShutdown and #Justice4Jamar.
<3 to all of you in Minneapolis.
:hug: Minneapolis feels like my “other” hometown–my mom’s side of the family is all there and has been since my grandparents moved there in 1946. This is awful.
I am all about the expanding natural hair movement and also spent my adolescence trying to fix my hair, which basically meant putting it up in a pony tail or having triangle hair. I have curly frizzy white girl hair and I am going to try mixed chicks conditioner when I get paid on friday as part of my rotating stable of conditioner.
I generally wash my hair once a week and condition every other day all week. Washing involves 4-5 different kinds of conditioner. One for the ends during my weekly shampooing, one after, another after that, and one that I leave in for 5 minutes and wash out, and then leave in conditioner when I’m done. Plus hair oil.
Curly hair tips/routines here?
So, the cheapest things for curly hair that are often found to improve it are:
1) not washing too often
2) rinsing your conditioner out with cool water (esp if humidity makes your hair frizz; the cool water apparently helps prevent your hair from absorbing the humidity in the air and frizzing out)
3) using a t-shirt or microfiber towel to wrap wet hair to dry, rather than rubbing it dry or using a terrycloth towel.
Seconding the t-shirt tip! I do the towel turban with an old t-shirt instead of a towel after my shower and it works really well (it’s actually called plopping which is a weird word for it, but it’s not quite the same as the tuban twist thing, here’s a video of how it works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aq4tDMf__YU)
I have 3A white girl curls, and I have also spent a lot of my life trying to keep the frizz down. I also only shampoo once a week or so and double conditioner every day. It doesn’t always work with the mid-Atlantic humidity where I live, but it’s better than nothing. And I’ve found that mousse works best in my curls as opposed to gel or hair oil. A professional stylist can get the hair oil stuff to work in my hair, but every time I try it at home I make a mess and it makes my hair greasy. I use Garnier curl construct mousse every day. Let it air dry, never brush or comb it, the usual.
Also I cannot recommend enough splurging for a good haircut from someone trained to cut curly hair. Like, it makes such a huge difference. It can be hit or miss finding someone the first few tries, but someone who knows curls will be able to give you a cut that minimizes frizz and won’t triangle out too badly (unless you’re like me and only get your hair cut like every 6 months, then you might get some triangle towards the end there).
Honestly though, I think curls are just kind of a “do what you can and pray it works every day” kind of thing. My hair is nowhere near as bad as it was in middle/high school, but it’s definitely still a day to day thing for me. Either it looks good, or I’ll end up pulling it back once I get to work because it’s obviously not going to cooperate.
The best things I’ve added to my hair routine are curl creams (I like Aveda’s and also Alaffia Beautiful Curls products) and “The Wet Brush” detangling brush. I have shoulder-length thick, coarse white-girl curly hair. I wash it once a week or so. Daily, I rinse it in the shower, twist-don’t-rub dry with a towel, put in cream, brush out, scrunch it up a little and pat into shape when almost dry, then leave it the heck alone. Less touching = less frizz.
T-shirt tip was great! I forgot about that one. I splurged on a microfiber towel as well, which is pretty nice since I’m hate blowdrying and live up north. I also wear my hair on the top of my head with a scrunchi when I sleep so the full force of my hair will not be diminished by gravity, the weight of my head, or the expectations of others.
I’ve used Devacurls stuff before, and still do, but it’s ridiculously pricy. A cheaper option is Renpure Solutions, which you can get at Target and smells like mint! Right now, my conditioning routine is HATED FUNKY SMELLING CONDITIONER (which is almost empty), Renpure, Devacurl, Not Your Mother’s Curly Conditioner, Ouidad leave in conditioner, grape oil product I got in one of those subscription boxes on the ends and then like Garnier fructis cream gel for styling. I’ve always had good luck with the Garnier curly hair products, tbh. If my hair is dry and just needs a pick-me up, I use their spray in gel.
My mom has wavyish hair (almost straight) and so all the hair care tips I’ve gotten for curly hair have come from women of color, for which I am eternally grateful. I don’t know what I’d be doing if I didn’t take their advice (Probably brushing my hair flatish and looking like a texas beauty queen).
My hair is just… big. Like it doesn’t matter what I do to it, it’s mostly just big and curly and big.
Yeah, my mom has stick straight hair that doesn’t hold a curl even with a gallon of hairspray on it, so she really was no help at all when I was younger (and still occasionally tries to finger comb my curls out as a sign of affection because she doesn’t get the whole “no brushing” thing). The internet has been my go-to for advice since I was about 16, I lurked on naturallycurly.com a lot when I was in high school, and Lorraine Massey’s Curly Girl book was a huge game changer for me in 11th grade (my sisters, who both have my mom’s hair, used to call my hair “Gimli hair” after the Lord of the Rings movies came out, because I guess it looked like messy dwarf hair. This was not good for my middle-school self-esteem).
I occasionally splurge on Devacurls and Ouidad stuff, but usually I stick with what I can get in Target. Suave Naturals line conditioner and Nexxus Humectris conditioner are my two main conditioners. Sometimes I will do a deep-condition, but I don’t have a standard brand that I use for that. Garnier cream gel is my go-to gel if I’m out of mousse or something, but it tends to weigh down the curls so I lose volume and they look a bit limp. Garnier’s curl line is definitely one of the better ones though! I have DevaCurl Ultra Gel right now too, but I bought it over the summer and it was not good with the humidity. It will probably be good in January/February though, so I might try switching over to that instead of mousse closer to Christmas.
And the “Hair Romance” blog is my favorite for updos and pulled back styles that look good on curly hair! The blogger has natural curls and will sometimes post styles that she wore when her hair was blown straight, but more often will post what they look like with her curls! Very helpful when you’re looking for party styles and don’t want to straighten your hair!
I recently discovered Miss Jessie’s brand “Multicultural Curls,” and it’s a game changer. It’s kind of light, though, and it sounds like you have tighter curls/more frizz than I do. I like a lot of the Mixed Chicks products, but yeah, Miss Jessie’s is the beeeeeeest.
I have 3a (white girl spiral curls), don’t do anything fancy with it, and I don’t experiment with products. I just shampoo, leave in the conditioner for as long as possible, dry it, let it do its thing. I do love my hair but I think I need a break… I’ve been considering a brazillian blowout. Now that it’s cold I won’t mind doing touch-up blowouts/straightening.
Two game-changers for me were 1) learning that though my hair is curly/dry, it is also pretty fine and I didn’t necessarily need a heavy conditioner, or lots of conditioner. I use the DevaCurl conditioner now, and though it’s moisturizing, it’s not very heavy (I do use a deep conditioner once in a while); and 2) adding product to my hair while I’m still in the shower and my hair is pretty wet. A tiny bit of the DevaCurl Believe In (dumb name, great product!) scrunched into wet hair, then I gently scrunch my hair dry with a towel and I’m good to go.
Gnashing my teeth at the Bernie thing. Literally gnashing them.
Didn’t know I could actually do that.
What exactly makes your teeth gnash, dear bighairnoheart?
I live in Vermont. It is a personal hatred. I’ve met the man. It’s allowed.
Also this.
People in Vermont are extraordinary people. If you stay in the state of Vermont, you don’t make a lot of money, in general. If you want to make money, you go to Boston or you go to New York City. So people who were born there, who stay there, they stay there because they’re attracted by both the physical beauty of the state and the human beauty of the state. And that makes a very, very good state.
His notion of the state he represents is totally directed at a small, privileged part of it and I literally could not be angrier.
I can see that 100% – I so far like him more than HRC but my exposure to Vermont has been a combination of the Vermont Studio Center and friends who went to university at various VT schools, so my knowledge is quite limited.
That being said: I am from a place where people like to wax poetic about the Beauty! and the Resourcefulness! and the Etc! while ignoring crushing poverty in most of the state and it makes me want to throw fireballs like none other, so I got you there.
Yeah. Before moving back here I lived in Appalachia and the Ozarks and there’s that same sort of generational mountain poverty here, but at the same time a dichotomy that I never really saw in either of those places between the haves and the have nots. Probably because of the proximity to Boston and NYC and the large amount of people who move here from there. There are people who buy houses in Vermont, move their families there, but work in Boston or NYC and come up on weekends. Because they can afford it. And there that man is rhapsodizing about it all and ‘oh, if the people who live here wanted to leave and wanted to make money they’d move to New York.’ I worked two jobs, one full one part, for fifteen bucks an hour and still couldn’t afford the cost of living here and I live in an area that is considered “cheap.” (Eight hundred a month plus utilities for two rooms.) You don’t leave if you want to make money. You leave if you want a decent standard of living. Heck, I know people who’ve left just to afford having kids. And it shows. The concentration of Bernie stickers in Burlington or Montpelier versus the noticeably poorer parts of the state (which is pretty much everywhere else that isn’t a ski resort) is telling.
Augh. Just augh. That quote and the other bits in that interview where he was talking about Vermont just sent me through the roof. I live among poor people, I am a poor person from a long line of poor people who have mostly risen above it, and this sort of thing pushes all my buttons.
Hmm, yeah, I like Bernie but he still seems to do a good bit of the White Politician Rich Dude bloviating. As someone who has been on welfare + making whatever I could on odd jobs that gives me the hardcore side-eye.
I quite like him, but every time he talks about gun control, and especially guns and ~people with mental problems~, I roll my eyes hard-core. He is really bad on those issues.
Unsure if you were referring to that part of the interview, of course!
Couldn’t even bring myself to read the interview. Just the excerpt was enough.
People in Vermont are extraordinary people. If you stay in the state of Vermont, you don’t make a lot of money, in general. If you want to make money, you go to Boston or you go to New York City. So people who were born there, who stay there, they stay there because they’re attracted by both the physical beauty of the state and the human beauty of the state. And that makes a very, very good state.
People stay because they can’t get out. Because they have no education, because they have no opportunities, because there are no jobs, because there is no money, because everything goes to paying taxes. They only stay if there’s no other choice. If you actually want to live a decent life, you leave. The only people who have the luxury of choosing to stay for the scenic beauty have the money to make living here possible.
Excuse me while I find something to be sick in.
Yeah, that is completely a fairly critique. And especially coming from someone who claims to be all about lifting up low-income and working class folks, really hypocritical of him.
Based on his track record with Vermont itself there just seems to be a much larger disconnect than people realize. But I am living it and it drives me nuts. I want him to tell the unemployed, the addicts, the ones who have to walk three miles or more to the grocery store, all my fellow welfare receivers, the resettled refugees, the farmers who’ve lost their farms, the small business owners who can’t stay in business… that they’re all staying “because they’re attracted by both the physical beauty of the state and the human beauty of the state.” Say it to my face, Sanders.
But clearly we all just want money so we should move to Boston or New York.
I am literally angry with rage right now.
I am curious as well, although I’ve admittedly not read the interview (and probably won’t).
I just dislike him. Intensely. I live in an incredibly poor, incredibly soul crushing part of Vermont and he is forever associated with Burlington and those sorts and I just hate how I’ve seen some of his supporters hold up Vermont as this gleaming beacon and have they tried living there?
But no more. This is religion, politics and the great pumpkin territory.
Got it. I haven’t been following everything too closely, cause meh politics in a campaign season get so repetitive and uninteresting so fast (for me anyway), so most of my exposure to him is posts of things he’s said that people on Facebook have liked.
I wouldn’t have thought Rebecca Solnit capable of being wrong about anything and yes I do know what a rhetorical flourish is but this is pretty awful, mainly because it uses women’s best (only?) group trait against us, which is our natural inclination to do what we are told not to do. this is pretty much the only real across-the-board gender difference that isn’t completely made up garbage, that men will see a list of Books To Read for Men and start earnestly reading them and having anxieties about not having read them, whereas the only way to get women to do the same is to give us a list of Books we Shouldn’t Read. so a lot a LOT of young women and girls are going to run off and read a bunch of Bukowski now and maybe Solnit can stand to have that on her conscience. I know I couldn’t.
but secondarily it’s wrong [ALTHOUGH I DO KNOW WHAT RHETORIC IS] because I can’t even imagine the mindset of not reading a book because it hates you and is all about how you are no good for or at anything. like people who tell you not to know about world problems because it’s only depressing. how can you not want to KNOW. or, how can you be so docile as to believe you do know, only because you got a description of it second- or third-hand and believed it without ever checking the source. What would my life be if I hadn’t thumbed through The Prisoner of Sex in a Barnes & Noble twenty years ago? I’d be a lot more tolerant of and friendly to Men of the World, that’s for sure, and what a disaster that would have been for us all.
I can definitely see your point. I had to do some reading up on Kerouac & the Beats in college (including reading “On the Road” which I’d never read in high school) and I feel like it was an important revelatory moment for me. Reading Kerouac’s writing and reading about these dudes and the women they were jerks to and realizing just how un-cool and un-genius they were was a good thing for me because it helped me mentally puncture this concept in my head of The Great Men of Culture. Not just in the “these guys ain’t so great” sense, but also understanding and deconstructing for myself just WHY they got to be so popular and “important” to our cultural canon. Sometimes, you gotta understand a patriarchy in order to dismantle it.
That’s a group trait of women? Really? (This is a genuine question, but you don’t have to answer. Whenever I’m told that I shouldn’t do A Thing, I don’t do it. I also get very anxious that I may have, at one point, accidentally, done The Thing, and therefore done something Wrong. I haven’t noticed this tendency as being widely different from other women I know.)
well no, not actually. but if there were any, it would be the big one.
if I must be serious — and judging from all the comments above, I must be — it is a lot less likely for men to be rebels than for women to be. this is because the vast majority of things men are told that they must do and be are desirable things, and therefore they are conditioned throughout their lives to find firm authority and directions congenial and comforting. “fuck you, I’m not in the smarter half of humanity just because you say so, I won’t be in charge just because you tell me to” is not something that occurs readily to the mind. so when it comes time to rebel against something real, they don’t know how, they’ve never developed the instinct. (I personally love elaborate hierarchies, it’s a dangerous taste, but because i had the good fortune not to be a man, I never learned to love my place in them. thank god.)
but then when you’re told to be a lesser creature in every aspect of life, it’s harder to comply than to resist, whether or not you have an ideology to back you up. it’s not natural to falsify your existence forever. like when you compress a spring with your thumb and finger, you can do it forever but let go for just even a second and it’ll take your eye out. that’s why even the most conservative and conventional of women usually have some kind of fight festering in them somewhere, frequently expressed through subtle means. it makes me glad whenever I see it, even though it’s not usually anything to do with feminism as usually understood.
so – no, it’s not real, but it’s much more real than any other theoretically feminine trait.
I understand what you’re saying now! Thank you. That was beautifully put, and I particularly love the “they’ve never developed the instinct” comment. However, interestingly, I’ve arrived at the same place of “rebelling against the big things” from the complete opposite angle. In my worldview, questioning power structures, supporting the underdog, and advocating for reform to oppressive societies all fall under the category of “Things One Is Supposed to Do.” I would say that this isn’t particularly radical of me–I’m a Christian, and Jesus is pretty dang emphatic about the importance of advocating for the oppressed. But your comment gives me a new framework for understanding how so many people ostensibly coming from the same moral tradition as me focus on completely different parts of the Bible. I’ll be doing a lot of thinking now on the ways men vs. women express rebellion.
(And I, too, have a worrying love of elaborate hierarchies. They’re so fascinating!)
I’m glad I read this comment. It sort of spells out something that one of my friends has remarked on to me several times. I was raised in a very conservative Christian religion. I have a sister and two brothers. My sister and I are very different in personality but we both eventually rebelled and left our religious upbringing. My brothers are very firmly entrenched in the religion we left.
My friend has commented that of course they stick with the religious teachings which tell them that as men they have all the power and they are the most worthy and of course my sister and I were more likely to leave it behind. It’s so much harder to stay with something that is telling you that you are less than and that you don’t deserve an equal say.
It would also explain why mom was always a bit more lenient than my dad.
Yeah, I’m confused by that too. I’ve never associated that as being either a stereotype or a real trait of women. I feel like we’re raised more to be demure and not make trouble (eg do what we’re told).
I disagree with you. I don’t think you can say that women’s ‘best group trait’ is doing what we’re told not to do: I mean, the list of things women do because they’re told they ought to do them is endless. Rebecca Solnit is not saying ‘Don’t read these books’ in a vacuum: she’s saying them in the face of lists – that often aren’t exclusively aimed at men – which insist you ‘ought’ to read these authors. You *have* to read Kerouac, you *have* to read Bukowski, you *have* to read Burroughs, and women are often told you *have* to read them and get over your dismay and disgust at their misogyny in order to see their greatness. I put On The Road down halfway through because I couldn’t bear another passage about how awful these stupid women were, trying to hold us back man, these stupid women being petty and stupid by asking us to take some responsibility for ruining their lives. Fuck those women. No, fuck you Kerouac.
So many young women read these books and are hurt by them, because they’re told that these are *great books* and the pinnacle of literary culture, and if you’re someone that loves books, to see books hate you is awful. All Solnit is saying is you don’t have to read these books. There are many authors out there who are just as good, or better and can teach you just as much, or more, who don’t hate you.
Also, not reading a book because it hates you is not the same as not paying attention to current affairs because they’re depressing. We get the message that men hate us in so many other ways, we don’t have to read books that hate us too.
This comment from somewhere on The Toast a while ago summed it up for me (though apparently I didn’t save who wrote it! If it was someone reading this, come forth and claim your wisdom for yourself).
“Tropic of cancer was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me when it came to midcentury asshole male writers.
There’s this moment, quite early on, when he says “I will ream out every wrinkle in your c*nt” and I just couldn’t take it any more. So I threw the book across the room and didn’t pick it up again. I was/am just so tired of the misogyny, the silenced women, the arrogance, the male writers who indulged their every desire, who treated everyone around them like garbage, who just took whatever they wanted from people less powerful than themselves and called it revolution. Who claimed they were breaking down repressive social norms but who just reenacted their white, male, heterosexual privilege over and over and over again because their revolution wasn’t about solidarity, or building a new society but was instead about their own selfish desires. And I said to myself that I just couldn’t take once more book about middle class white men being assholes to everyone around them and calling it deep, of them thinking that they are the only ones with feelings and then shoving their incredibly banal feelings down our throats like a small child screaming for attention or that one dude in your first year philosophy class who had to explain everything to you terribly slowly in tutorial because the only possibly reason you could be disagreeing with him was because you didn’t really understand the *profundity* of what Nietzsche was really saying.
So I don’t read any of them anymore, and my life is much better. (Sorry about the rant, I apparently still have a lot of feelings about this!)”
I remember at about fourteen feeling like I *had* to love William Burroughs, and being deeply uncomfortable because I recognized how very not okay I felt about him and his voice, how endangered I felt in his world, and how much I could not relate his gross wallowing to world-breaking counterculture genius. I liked his words and wanted to understand what he was doing, but it was like taking boxing lessons from someone who was actually indifferent to whether or not it killed me. I remember being so despairing because I didn’t see an alternative or an escape route, and the great love for his work that was just around me made me feel like I should be aware that that same level of selfish, dangerous indulgence William Burroughs personified lived in everyone around me. It was deeply depressing and frightening.
I want an alternative to that. I want my daughter to read problematic, gross, women-hating books and be able to engage them at their value critically and artistically without having it be The Only Option or feel like it represents the world, or all there is on a subject or to art in general. I say that as someone who attended art school, and waded through a LOT of “classics” in a variety of mediums, and had to swallow and purge a lot sexist, racist, classist, ableist garbage. I found a way to appreciate some works for their values while not drowning in their disgustingness, but damn if there isn’t a lot of disgustingness.
Discourse is imperative, so that problematic material is given its appropriate context. That’s a good argument for reading garbage literature, and an even more important argument for making sure it’s not entirety of what constitutes “must read/watch/see/listen” lists.
I was just talking to a friend about how many Chuck Palahniuk books we read when we were in middle/high school because we wanted to be Cool and how great that moment was when we decided he sucked and we would never pick up one of his books again.
Yes. I want to be able to read these books, if I choose to do so, without feeling shitty about my intelligence if I don’t like them.
I still, as a 32 year old, feel grateful for every instance of an article like this. Because I need permission. Because I was told too many times that I wasn’t like other girls, that I got it, that I was SMART, because I liked or understood the right things. And now any time there’s a ‘classic’ that I haven’t read or didn’t like, I feel guilty and scared, like it will disqualify me from being worthy as a human.
Fuck that. These books exist. There may or may not be good things about them. They may or may not be worth reading. They are in no way intrinsically better than thousands of other books, whose authors happen to think I am a human and my experience with and opinion of their book is valid. Not ‘right’ but that I am allowed to have an opinion about it. I felt so often that my options with these man books were ‘love it or shut up’. No room for ‘well I like this about it but this other bit is awful’ because they are celebrated as Great Novels. If you don’t like them you probably read ROMANCES or something. (yes I fucking read romances, because I read for fun and romances are fun)
Anyway, I guess I am mad about this thing. Reading this article was like standing under a fan on a hot summer’s day. I needed it, and I’m glad that it exists. I note that she does say ‘read whatever you want’. It’s just giving us permission not to, and not to want to, and not to want to see these authors held up above other authors – especially in lists like the Esquire one which seem to hold them up above other authors BECAUSE of their toxic masculinity.
If this was tongue-in-cheek then I apologize for the upcoming earnest comment: I think we all have a pretty good idea of how terrible men are without reading their terrible books and playing into the idea that Jerk Writer is a genius and everyone has to just get past the fact that he killed his wife/hated and misunderstood all women/whatever, because he’s just such a genius and you can’t be culturally literate without reading him. I wish I had read something like Solint’s article much earlier in my life, because I spent a lot of time thinking I had to keep trying to like these assholes, and I was unsophisticated for being offended by them.
I will repay earnestness with earnestness – all of the Western canon is my private personal property, so I am touchy about being told what is best for me to do with it; in one sense this is true for everyone just so long as they are human, but specifically as we are women, the ways in which most Great Books insult and degrade us independently of the ways in which they may be works of genius make them our playground, morally and practically. Women may wish to avoid e.g. Bukowski because he sucks, I have advised this myself, but while we may be hurt and even harmed by continual literary insult to and lies about us, it is men who run the real risk of being permanently morally deformed by such works. you see it every day. I am humorless about being directed not to read anything in the way that some people are humorless about feminism (that is: because it is more important than anything), but the people who really need to be guided away from dangerous books for their own health are men, always men.
you do not, I do not have to read a book only because it is good, let alone like it only because it is good. confusing moral terribleness and artistic terribleness is a factor in e.g. Solnit making special allowances for Fitzgerald (!!!!!!!) re: his writings about women just because she has a Hemingway to juxtapose with him who’s even worse. ruling out books based on misogyny is a fine criterion for reading choices or for canon construction, I of course think that. but it becomes a problem when it leads to tortured special pleading for books one wishes to rule in, as though one must pretend that they are not misogynist in order to call them good. that I think is very bad for the sprit of criticism, even the spirit of glib and blithe Internet literary criticism, which is the only kind I do.
as to the idea that you don’t learn anything about the foulness of male human nature from books that you wouldn’t automatically learn from the School of Life, I disagree comprehensively and across the board. but I can accept that people vary in this regard.
mostly my bottom line on this is that women have been shoved out of history and literature or ignored or treated as irrelevant, as readers and critics as much as as creators and writers and shapers, and there is no degree or nuance of telling me that a world isn’t mine that I will accept. It’s not FOR you is not a line I like to hear from my allies, I get it enough from my enemies. history hates me, but it still belongs to me, whatever men think about it – I am well aware that much of 20th century male-authored lit is a garbage heap, but it’s women’s garbage heap to the exact degree that we want it to be. nobody can throw it away for me but me.
I wasn’t quite getting what you were saying until that last paragraph. It’s hard for me to feel that I’m being told that I ought not to get something profound and important out of a text that I might have read independent of anything I know about the author’s life or writings outside of that text. I adore Kundera. I am profoundly moved by so much of his work and it is so important to me, and I do feel at times that I’m being told that I am a Bad Feminist if I don’t want to give that up because of his misogyny. Kundera has taught me to love myself, not hate myself; even if he hates me, if his works hate me, my own experiences also matter, and I can own those in a way that make me feel more powerful than the writer or his hatred.
(Note: I’m using Kundera as an example; I know very little about him besides what he himself has written, and though I’ve been repeatedly told that he is a misogynist, I don’t actually know what the basis of that assertion is.)
So much of my training in literary criticism was all about reading the text for itself independently of the author’s biography– including performing a feminist critique of a text that might reveal something problematic in it despite the fact that the author was a woman with the best of feminist intentions. I can’t unlearn that; I can only learn on top of it. So my reading life is layered, and what Solnik is talking about is one layer of that life, but it ought not to have to be the entire thing.
That said, I am not sure that was the intention of her article– to actually literally dictate what women should not read. It struck me as a snide, tongue-in-cheek rebuttal to lists telling men what they SHOULD read– she does say, at the start, that she doesn’t actually want to dictate to anyone what to read or not.
I adore Kundera. I am profoundly moved by so much of his work and it is so important to me, and I do feel at times that I’m being told that I am a Bad Feminist if I don’t want to give that up because of his misogyny.
if people say this I’d tell them that no-one but a feminist is qualified to critically judge or be moved by anti-feminist work. it’s no more than the truth.
Really and honestly I think any and all “bad feminist” discourse is reprehensible because it actively seeks to reinforce age-old discourses about women being solely creatures of feeling and not creatures of thought. thus, we aren’t correct or incorrect about facts, we aren’t engaged in critical analysis, we aren’t making good or faulty assessments of artistic works, we aren’t capable of making errors or thoughtfully engaging the errors of others without being monsters; we are just only Good or Bad. if only I could learn to be a thought leader, that’s what I’d get every feminist to agree with me on: don’t be good, don’t be a good anything: be right.
(edit: won’t I feel dumb if this is actually the thesis of Bad Feminist. even if it is, I detest the discourse too much to even want to engage with a cogent critique of it.)
I’d also keep going – feeling and experiencing is ALSO a valid source of information and wisdom. I go up in flames every time someone tries to argue with me from a “rational” perspective, not recognizing that they are incapable of being fully rational and their ideas are still generated from feelings that shaped their interpretation of observation and perceived fact. It is one of the most insidious tools of institutionalized sexism to avoid giving women a voice in any discussion regarding our own welfare, to say nothing of being given whatever share we can earn of academic of professional respect. Rationality and logic as having masculine provenance and the means of devaluing women’s voices makes me helplessly furious. Naturally, being furious, means I no longer have a vote to throw down on whether or not that’s okay because, oops, feelings!
I’m also in favor of having enough stability of the respect garnered women as thinkers that women can not only eschew being good but also being silent for fear of being wrong, because it hurts their credibility too much. I want the freedom to occasionally be just outright wrong, and then still have the chance to learn or gather more information and come back to it with something better and not lose professional or personal credibility because of it.
Yes to your last point. I think she framed it that way to play off the original list, but the article itself read more like she was speaking to people (women) who had ALREADY read a bunch of this stuff because it’s the same tired Pinnacle of Serious Literature crap that gets shoved down our throats by both our schools and our culture at large. It’s not “don’t read Hemingway,” it’s “actually, you can think that Hemingway’s writing is overwrought sexist garbage and still be an intelligent, literate person, thanks but no thanks dudebros of the internet.”
Yes. I just read something the other day where Hemingway was thrown out as an example of good writing and thought “really? That’s who you go with?” because I momentarily forgot that people outside of the Toast bubble still think (or believe they’re supposed to think so won’t say otherwise) that he’s like the pinnacle of skill.
I definitely thought I was supposed to like Kerouac, Bukowski and Hemingway when I was young and was sort of confused that I didn’t and worried it somehow meant I was less smart or missing something. I recognized some of the sexism and had that feeling that these texts weren’t for me, didn’t include me, and even explicitly excluded me – but still also had this feeling that liking them was the right, smart thing to do. That’s the damaging shit I see being taken apart in this article.
Kerouac, I *wanted* to like but couldn’t. Hemingway, even as a 10th grader I thought, “I like the portrayal of a mind falling apart in ‘A Way You’ll Never Be.’ Too bad he can’t write female characters for shit.”
I dated a guy who was super into Bukowski, tried a few pages, said, “I don’t understand what you see in this. It’s like writing ‘Women suck’ on a canvas, using his own shit as a medium.” You would have thought I’d just tarred and feathered his sainted grandma. (He also extremely dug Henry Miller and Hunter S. Thompson.)
Really, everything that I needed to know about how our relationship was going to be, I could have known from the fact that he was an MFA creative writing student who never read a book by a woman unless he was assigned to, and sometimes not even then.
In colourblindness news, please watch this DELIGHTFUL video where a guy tries out a pair of colour vision correcting glasses that his boyfriend gave him for his birthday, without knowing what they are: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WCcxwieuDH0
The manufacturer’s site explain how they work. There’s a very enlightening diagram that helped me understand exactly what red-green colourblindness is! I know Nicole linked an explanation but I can’t help myself…
Essentially, each of the three types of cones are sensitive to a certain band of wavelength, and the red band and the green band overlap a bit. But if the cones’ abilities overlap almost entirely, BOTH cones will react to green AND red light indiscriminately. The brain gets two signals at once, which is only supposed to happen if the cones pick up a yellow wavelength, since yellow light is part of both the red and the green cone’s area of responsibility. So, everything red or green is interpreted as different shades of dark yellowish colours.
What these glasses do is that they separate red and green light clearly by blocking the middle wavelengths. They’re covered with a thin layer that is opaque for exactly the right wavelengths, but otherwise transparent. Now, the red cone can pick up the red light without the green cone yelling in its ear, and the green cone can react to the green part of the spectrum without the red cone going “wait, was that for me? Am I supposed to fire now? I’m going to fire now”. The brain finally gets clear signals and can construct the colour experience based on three different signals instead of only two. And the cute boyfriend’s conscious mind is blown because it’s suddenly having a totally new sensory experience. Just imagine wearing these in a Pride parade!
This is ADORABLE. Technology is wonderful sometimes.
(Someone has to figure out a way to disable vertical filming on cell phones. That would also be wonderful.)
That was awesome, IS THIS PURPLE?? WHAT THE FUCK??
Reminds me of the video of the baby with a new cochlear implant and hearing its mother’s voice for the first time.
I had the exact same thought.
Being colorblind myself I may have to try these…
Unnntil I saw the price for those frames. Think I’ll stick with my mild colorblindness for now.
Life: affirmed
Oh that was great and I definitely just wasted an hour looking at lots of other Enchroma videos!
I’m doing my Intro to Queer Studies final project on the Lesbian Herstory Project: I’m developing a plaque for it for the National Parks Service. Those artifacts would be a great part of my project. Now I have to read Harriet the Spy again….
I loved re-reading childhood favorites to de-stress during finals time in school. Harriet came through for me a few semesters.
Queers and the National Parks Service, you say? Does it relate to the Lesbian National Parks Service from Banff? If you’re unfamiliar you may enjoy this: http://cws.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/cws/articl…
Toasties!!! Unfortunately the kidney infection is being an asshole and a trip to urgent care appears to be in my future. I am in denial about the upcoming bills.
BUT OH MY —GIS Day went well.
I now have a dilemma, grad school related. I can’t type it all out on my phone, so ill check back in in an hour or so. It’s quite a saga.
Kidney infections are the wooooooorst, I am so sorry.
Dear world, please let CCoryy catch a break for once.
I don’t have a ton of opinions about what books people should read (I know, I’m on the wrong website). But I read mostly history, and a couple months ago Rebecca Solnit had a Harpers column called “Shooting down man the hunter” which I pretty much tore out and taped to my fridge, because it was such a perfect screed against the misogynistic misuse and misinterpretation of history.
I will have to read that.
Oh man, “The Mother of All Questions” in Harper’s last month? Feels on top of feels.
“Harriet the Spy… is really a portrait of the artist as a young lesbian.”
MIND.
BLOWN.
I am late! So this might not be seen but Idea Channel ran a thing on Ronbledore yesterday! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40egrwx44vw
Ah I just saw this today! My boyfriend loooooves Idea Channel and played this while we were eating breakfast and I was like ARE THEY GONNA MENTION THE TOAST???? Sadly they did not (but I would not be at all surprised if what’s-his-face Idea Channel guy is a fan).
I kept thinking he would! Mike’s usually so thorough and clearly Mallory is a major Rombledore scholar
AHHHH COLOR VISION! I read a couple years ago this super interesting article(? blogpost?) about research into the development of human distinguishment of color and how the theory was that we developed the ability to see red in order to see berries but that there was reason to believe (based on the wavelength of red that we are primed to distinguish) that it might have been instead to see other people blushing.
And now I’m really curious to reread that again because I wonder now if that conclusion was racist (i.e. from investigating the color of white people blushes…)
The first Mallory-helmed Dear Prudence DID NOT disappoint! She’s going to own that column as long as she wants it.
Yep, my only qualm was the letter about the wife who watches too much TV. Probably due to personal projecting I felt like the answer could have been less “have a very serious discussion about how important it is to you that you both be more social for the sake of saving your marriage” and more “maybe you could recognize that some people need lazy/chill nights after a long day of work to unwind and you guys will probably need to work out a compromise that ensures she gets her TV time and you get your social time without either of you being miserable.”
Yes, and it’s amazing how many letters she can get through by actually giving advice, rather than sermonizing.
This is off topic but I need to vent. Our (white male) CEO sent out an email about International Men’s day kind of joking but kind of not that he is glad to finally get recognized because he was getting depressed and it has caused a whole email chain of responses, all from women in the office, about how men are great and we couldn’t live without them. I want to reply that it is also World Toilet day and I know which I would miss more.
I LOVE YOU.
I second that love
That’s…disheartening.
Toasts, I sent in applications for like 5 jobs, got 2 interviews, got 2 second interviews, and now I think I have to choose between 2 jobs. Do I pick the ridiculous, probably slightly unstable one that pays more and has a better title, or the normal boring-ish one with stuff like a 401K? (I am leaning towards the crazy one but also having imposter syndrome.)
Never take the safe option! Stretch yourself, you’ll do much better than you ever expected! (At least that’s what I keep telling myself when these situations come up for me)
Good luck!
Better title, as long as your coworkers/supervisor seem stable enough to put in a good word with you. Job-hopping is a reality of life these days. 401k is super good, but likely you can hold out for something less boring-ish that has those kinds of retirement benefits.
Also, likely, we’re all going to work until we die.
Pick the ridiculous one that pays more, but also set up a Roth IRA. Impostor syndrome is real, but you don’t have to listen to that shitty little voice if you don’t want to (even if it sounds like your own voice). Even if it’s unstable and doesn’t last forever, it’s experience to get your next job, which might be super stable et al.
Go for the more interesting one, given it sounds like you will do pretty well getting another job in your field if it falls apart. But first make sure it actually pays more, taking into account what you will have to pay for health care, and any 401k match, etc. That stuff adds up fast.
Ridiculous how, though? If it’s ridiculous because you’re getting a read on the culture there and everyone seems kind of nuts…?
I… I thought there would actually be a list.
I was actually quite disappointed there wasn’t! Arguing over internet lists is one of life’s great joys!
It says there’s a list! There’s a list in the title! I’m very literal sometimes!
I’m colorblind and not particularly fussed about it, although those special glasses are intriguing. I took the test on that company’s website to confirm my colorblindness would be alleviated by the glasses (unsurprisingly, they are pretty sure that it would be!), but then when they were describing some of the characteristics of my type of colorblindness, they hit me with something that knocked me on my ass. Are you ready for this?
For people with normal color vision, there is universal agreement on what certain “unique colors” look like. However due to the significant spectral shift of the M-cone, moderate deutans may perceive these colors to have different spectral locations, for example, something as ordinary as peanut butter, which should look brown, appears to be green for someone with color blindness!
Be serious here for a second, Toasties. Peanut butter isn’t green?!
No, peanut butter is not green. It is light brown.
But if you’re colour blind how do you know what green is?! Huzzah, logic! *tips fedora like the asshole I am*
It’s a kind of orangy light brown. I had no idea that colorblindness could cause a shift like this!
I mean… *hits pipe* color’s really pretty much just a collective agreement, right? So, if you… *is just fucking bogarting the pipe, like an asshole* see it as green, isn’t it actually green? What is perception?
I know this is a joke but it is interesting to think abut (being colorblind myself). On the one hand, there is an objective measure to color (wavelength of light) and on the other, there is interpretation by our brains (subjective). So I guess it depends on how you define color?
I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me way too long to realize it was a joke.
sorry dude, its brown 🙂
I would probably buy green peanut butter, though.
Pistachio butter is pretty good.
Nope, it’s orangey brown.
Apparently it can go the other way too. A friend in high school was color blind, and he was a big fan of the show Invader Zim, particularly the character GIR. GIR, for those unfamiliar, is an eccentric little robot from an alien planet. When he wants to go incognito amongst humans, he wears a dog “disguise” – the joke being that it is a very poor disguise. While my friend got the joke because of the big, obvious zipper on GIR’s costume, he was shocked to learn that, in addition to the zipper, GIR’s dog costume was bright green. He thought it was just a brown costume.
Fay Wells’ story is absolutely horrifying. And she is one of the few Americans with the resources to pursue justice for her personal violation by the police–and is still getting nothing for the trauma she was subjected to.
As a white kid at a white school with white teachers, I received a grave miseducation on the current state of racism and the ongoing civil rights movement in America. (Same for the women’s movement, especially IRT reproductive rights.) It ended in the 60’s–MLK was awesome–some individuals are still a little racist but basically we got it fixed, yay! Thank god it’s not like it was in the bad old days! (Nevermind that our schools were obviously segregated and unequal…)
Yeah. We, the privileged, we’re lulled into thinking there was nothing else to do–nothing else we had to do–no responsibility for the origins and ongoing injustice of our privilege (which was never acknowledged). It is embarrassing that so many white people my age have been so slow to wake up and look around, and realize that everyone in the country desperately needs a mass civil rights movement and an ongoing, reinvigorated women’s movement.
Everything about that story is appalling, but especially where she writes: “A wrong move, and I could have been shot.” –when, really, every detail of that situation affirms that she could easily have been shot without making any wrong moves at all.
I forgot “Never read the comments. Never read the comments.” God forbid someone sound DISTRESSED after being faced with almost 20 armed officers at their own door, or that her neighbor apologize for almost getting her killed instead of telling her to fuck off.
The nerve of those officers saying she should have come out YELLING that it was her house? I’m truly at a loss for words.
Did you guys know that Lizzy Caplan, Jillian Bell & Ilana Glazer are in The Night Before?
Now I know what I’m seeing on Thanksgiving!
Kicking myself for not buying Shockproof Sidney Skate when it turned up at the thrift store a few months back. I really need to live near a library again.
In case any of your family or friends post that dumbass jellybeans analogy to try to explain why we shouldn’t take in refugees: Syrian Refugees, Jelly Beans, and Murderers. (I don’t always recommend MR, but the writers are intelligent and occasionally have some good points. Skip all comments.)
Thanks for sharing Dan-el Padilla Peralta’s immigration piece! As the partner of someone working here with an H-1B visa, but who is also trying for permanent residency through his work, it has been really eye opening at how frustratingly complex the system is. I previously worked with families with varying immigration status and considered myself fairly well informed about the process- but getting a first hand view continues to be really informative.
real talk- it’s fucking frustrating and difficult as heck- and that’s with a master’s degree and significant training in a highly specialized field! i can only imagine the pain and frustration people without the resources we have access to experience.
Good afternoon, Toast. 3 things –
1. I very much enjoyed the piece about books no woman should read. 7 years ago I dated a Burroughs-obsessed manboy who fancied himself a worldy occultist and oh-so-much smarter than I and I looked up to him and his Opinions and now, years, later, it feels so good to be coming from a place of self-assurance in a happy marriage where I can say lol no, Burroughs and his ilk are garbage and you no longer have the power to make me feel like garbage.
2. Is anyone else looking forward to the Jeopardy Tournament of Champions finals tonight and tomorrow? I’m really hoping adorable musical theater nerd and possible robot Matt Jackson takes it.
3. I just need to shout this into the void where my friends won’t see it: STOP TRYING TO MAKE ME PLAY D&D I COULD NOT BE LESS INTERESTED. (I mean, I could be under the right circumstances, but this particular group takes it very seriously and I would only be interested in playing very casually while very drunk.)
I understand point 3, but it makes me a little sad, because I cannot find a decent gaming group and miss my old one something fierce.
I just learned that there is virtual tabletop D&D on Steam and my life has been changed for the better.
I read point 2 and I was all “OMG I NEED TO POINT MY TOAST-READING FRIEND TO THIS COMMENT” and then I rechecked your username and you are actually my friend. <3
People on twitter are so negative about Matt and it makes me sad. :/
2. YES!!! I can’t wait to see him duke it out with Alex “What is Aleve?” Jacob, oh man. (though honestly I don’t know who I want to win! I’m fond of both.)
Has David Beckham killed Chris Hemsworth yet???? Or did he escape with Adam Levine? http://the-toast.net/2014/11/19/chris-hemsworth-s…
The Toast is the only good thing about People’s Sexiest Man ridiculousness.
I have been wondering this myself. I trust we will find out in the fullness of time.
Toasts, I finally saw Crimson Peak last night and I loved it, but all my friends are like, “Meh, it was mediocre at best,” and all the parts they’re saying detracted from the film are the parts that I loved best, and NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ME AND MY LOVE FOR SLOW-PACED GOTHIC HORROR. TT_TT
I LOVE IT TOO! DOES THIS HELP!?
http://cleolinda.livejournal.com/1095767.html
(Not my blog, though Cleolinda is one of my absolute favorite fandom writers.)
YES IT DOES!
Seriously though one of the major criticisms I’ve heard from their friends is, “I could see the twist coming from a mile away!” And I’m like, what twist? There is no twist. They foreshadow quite effectively what’s going on, and then they deliver on their foreshadowing. Since when did a movie need a “twist” to be good?!
YES! I do not understand the “sigh so predictable” critique of this movie. That is the POINT. It may help that I’m not a scary movie person in general, so I’m not usually looking to be shocked and horrified by the films I go see?
I am going to be a little cash-strapped over the holidays, but I am trying to talk myself into pre-ordering the bluray anyway. The movie’s already out of local theaters. :/
“YOU NEED A BREAK FROM THE MURDER HOUSE, EDITH, LET’S GO FUCK AT THE POST OFFICE”
I’m dead. From LOL’ing.
So, uhm, has anyone seen any improvement to the site layout since the big post a few weeks ago?
I thought there was a fix for the typeface but it’s impossible for me to tell if i remembered to shift for my I’s when typing comments, and it’s equally difficult to tell when reading, unless there’s an l and an i right next to each other (in which case, there’s a height difference, but I’m not sure which is which!)
This has made for some confusing name-parsing, especially.
The faint grey behind the comments is nice, but I can’t see it on my laptop at home 🙁
I don’t think there’s been much change? On mobile, I’m still having nested comments become ever more narrow until there’s not even a full word on each line.
This is moderately off topic but In Our Time is talking about Emma this week and my brain kept supplying the relevant Clueless characters/scenes to all of the learned scholarly debate.
!! I must listen to this.
Toasts I know this is open thread material and the open thread is tomorrow, but I’ve been offered a job interview that’s halfway across the country and I haven’t gotten a confirmation on the time yet and ticket prices are rising as we speak and I have also had three times my normal amount of caffeine today which was probably a bad decision.
Anybody know of a cheaper way to get to Seattle from Chicago? Catapult, maybe?
Have you checked out Skiplagged? Chicago’s a hub, so getting here can frequently be cheaper if you’re willing and able to use a hidden city trip.
Alas, I’m trying to squeeze this whole thing into one day so I don’t have to take more time off work than is absolutely necessary, so most of the usual travelhacks aren’t saving me much. What it comes down to right now is that I can get a reasonable price to get there for an afternoon interview, but if they want me in the morning, it’s going to be painful. And of course the first time they offered me was in the morning. HR is seeing if the locals can reschedule, but agh I hate waiting.
Maybe this still won’t work with your schedule, but just to be clear, with Skiplagged you actually buy a multi-leg trip and only use the first leg. (You can’t check bags because they would get sent on the second leg.) It’s possible they could have some cheap morning flights.
Anyway, congrats on the interview offer!
Oh, I have tried. I have tried and tried and tried. There just isn’t an overnight to Seattle! Or Portland, which is a little cheaper. Nor is there anything dirt cheap to LAX, from which I could get any old red-eye to the northwest and make it work.
I blame Microsoft’s company jets. If their people were flying commercial, there’d be a red-eye.
Aw. Good luck though!!
If anyone’s currently dealing with a deficit of male tears in their life, the comments section on this post is golden (the post itself is also pretty fun):
http://www.buzzfeed.com/scaachikoul/tk-ways-to-ce…
these comments are amaaaaaaazing
“I can’t think of a post in the past long while where masculinity/maleness is celebrated in a traditional, “just because” kind of way.”
Well, I guess kudos on him for being upfront that he’s whining because he doesn’t want to have to do anything to be celebrated by scores of strangers. Isn’t just existing while male enough?
I honestly cannot get over the number of comments that are like “can’t we just have ONE DAY to celebrate men?????”
EVERY DAY IS THAT DAY YOU DINGDONG
Male tears (+Hamilton) give me life. I definitely needed these lols today!
But MISAAAANDRY!!!
As a teenage babysitter I tried to read Mailer one night when there was nothing on tv and I was bored. Nope. Even then I could feel the mysogyny ooze through the pages.
I’ve always resented Norman Mailer for being what I find when I go to that section of the bookshop to look for something by Sara Maitland. Read her instead, she’s fabulous.
Toasties, if you can spare some cash, please do something nice for a stranger. Lu is a friend of mine who has been hideously screwed over by the UK benefits system, which includes suddenly deciding that she’s not disabled after all, cutting off her income, and asking for thousands of pounds back. She was still pretty damn disabled last time she checked. Here is her GoFundMe page. She is very lovely, snarks beautifully, runs a Misandry Fridays on her Facebook page for heaven’s sake, and what more could a Toastie ask for?
If you’re not aware of the UK benefits system, it is utterly terrible and causes huge numbers of deaths (over 70 last I checked) every week. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve started to ask around the UK disability charities to find out if anyone is interested in setting up a Disability Day of Remembrance. I was nearly one of the death stats myself three years ago.
I recommend you repost about your friend in tomorrow’s open thread. You’re a good friend.
Yep, hopefully I will remember and be online at the appropriate time.
I actually met her when she first set the GoFundMe page up, she’s a friend of my partner’s. It was very much a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god moment, I’ve been through the mill with the benefits system myself, and I managed to get the sods to give me proper benefits and can now afford to pay it forward a bit. So we got chatting, and she is a sweetheart.
So my new rule with male authors is to fire them if they have no idea how women work in general (physically or emotionally). Like I remember reading Henry Miller as a young troublemaking teen looking for sexy bits and getting to some passage where he has long exhausting misogynistic sex with some women and when he has sex with one of them he observes she’s tight, basically, because she probably hasn’t had sex with more than half a dozen men before. And as a teenager I was like, “Um, ok, maybe he knows more than I do about vaginas?” but now I’m like, “THAT IS NOT HOW VAGINAS WORK, HENRY MILLLARRR.”
The COSTUMES!
The OVERWROUGHT SYMBOLISM!
The ACTING!
The GHOSTS!
I thought it was just the right amount of scary. It has more creepiness and a general sense of menace than the jump scare stuff. (Although I thought it has just the right amount of jump scares too. Like when she thinks the dog is in the closet…!)
Can somebody delete the post from GISDayDrama? (I didn’t know guest posting meant I couldn’t edit, and I probably need to edit or delete details from that)
pretty please?
Can somebody delete the post from GISDayDrama? (I didn't know guest posting meant I couldn't edit, and I probably need to edit or delete details from that)
pretty please?
http://suzukiertigasurabaya.web.id http://hargaertigasurabaya.net