Hi Toasties! This week I really loved John Leavitt’s Studio Heads of the Classic Era, In Order of Personal Awfulness, which was equal parts fascinating and horrifying. (Also as the header photo suggests, I am going to see Hail, Caesar! this weekend and I am excited about it; I don’t even care about what the Coen Brothers said about “diversity,” I was raised to worship at the altar of classic movie musicals and they will not ruin this for me)
We also had Mara Wilson’s glorious How To Tell If You’re In A Mary Gaitskill Book.
“Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good, except for you.”
Drug references that went over Jaya’s head: “My thoughts: Man, Dionne is dense, Tai is obviously asking for pot. But I also don’t get why Tai is so excited about soda.” lollll
Why Mallory wouldn’t have been burned as a witch despite what she would like to believe about herself.
I loved all of your pet stories so much; thank you for sharing them with me after I lost my cat.
Can I be honest? I had a really bad day on the internet yesterday and I’d like to vent at you now. Trolls are a part of life, yes, but until yesterday it had been a good long while since anyone called me a chink. It happened just a few minutes after I tweeted something about race, so I guess you could say I brought it on myself, but honestly, what the fuck? My mentions were disgusting all day long, and by the time my husband got home my stomach was just a ball of angry knots and I was very quiet because I couldn’t really speak without snapping. The day was only salvaged because our Girl Scout cookie order came in and I got to spend the evening eating ice-cold Samoas and doing pretty much nothing else.
I always feel silly for letting online awfulness affect me! As if I should know better than to take it personally. The people who say these things don’t know you as a person. They are your grade-school bullies just trying to get a rise out of you. They are taking out their frustration and anger (with the way the country is going, and the fact they have to see and live amongst brown people, I suppose) on you. But there’s really been a ramp-up for me personally since I wrote that dinner party piece a few weeks ago (someone left a comment on that one calling me “a member of an insect race.” WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN), and my threshold for this kind of gross bullshit has really dropped.
Yesterday at dinner my daughter was talking about how much she wants to be a writer, and I was just filled with white-hot rage at the thought of anyone ever writing or speaking to her the way so many women who write online are today. It’s the sort of thing that really does affect how I feel about writing in public spaces. If I ever do stop writing things on the internet [eta: probably not gonna happen], I will not miss this part.
Anyway, that is partly why we moderate the comments here, because the least we can do is make sure you don’t see that here. No one comes for you or any of our writers on our watch. We love you too much. Thank you for always being so great and positive and supportive here, not just of writers and editors but of one another. You make this place a safe haven of kindness and decency and I treasure you.
