If I lived in London, I would go to this, and I would also go to jail (GAOL, perhaps) for stealing a wedding gown and then showing up at Benedict’s house in it like Rosalie when she wastes the dude who raped her in the flashback in Breaking Dawn Pt 1. I mean, I wouldn’t hurt him, but I would have that same look of intensity, I think?
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The New Yorker unlocked its Annie Baker profile!
To watch Baker’s work is to be drawn into a world that feels as unplotted as real life (characters chat at cross-purposes; costumes and stage settings are uncannily real) but that breaks abruptly into surreal transcendence (a hula hoop being spun for almost a minute, in one case). Onstage, Baker exercises meticulous control in order to make action seem as unrefined as possible. Her characters exchange the kind of knobby dialogue you overhear in diners on Friday mornings: mothers fretting volubly about their young-adult kids’ problems, twentysomething friends chasing back bleary silence with defensive nonchalance. (“I’m really hung over so you guys will have to excuse me if I’m like a little low-energy.”) Her goal is to explore what’s left unsaid along the edges of conversation: it’s the principle of looking at familiar stars so that the galaxies that can’t be seen head on appear out of the corner of your eye.
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The glorious Patricia Lockwood on whether poetry is work:
A common refrain you hear when it comes to poetry is, “That’s not work. Picking up the garbage is work!” The people who say this are usually also the people who think that poetry IS garbage, so I’m not sure what their problem is. If you dislike trash so much then you should be happy that I’m collecting it for free, and rolling around in it for fun, and eating it for dinner, and publishing it in all the finest modern magazines. My name is A.R. Ammons actually, and I wrote a really excellent book called Rubbish, and you just need to shut up about me.
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In which Roland Barthes and Adventure Time share the stage.
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Whatever, my script was amazing. Haterz.
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Lisa Hanawalt has the greatest thing on Wylie Dufresne:
If Wylie doesn’t go as “sexy Ben Franklin” for Halloween every year, that’s a fucking waste.
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Depression and the black superwoman syndrome (RIP, Karyn Washington):
I honestly believe we’re so accustomed to delivering the strong Black woman speech to ourselves and everyone else that we lose our ability to connect to our humanness, and thus our frailty. We become afraid to admit that we are hurting and struggling, because we fear that we will be seen as weak. And we can’t be weak. We’ve spent our lives witnessing our mothers and their mothers be strong and sturdy, like rocks. We want to be rocks.
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The American Prospect has an incredible piece on trans identity:
In my most significant experience of romantic rejection, I was blindsided when a man I was dating told me he was no longer attracted to me after finding out I’m trans, even though we already had sex and he told me how much he enjoyed it. This man, who defines himself as a feminist and an LGBT ally, also went on at length about how he felt an immediate emotional connection with me. “I wish I were bisexual,” he said, as I became something other than a woman in his eyes after I recounted my history.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
Going go the Victoria and Albert Museum is probably one of my major life dreams. (Well, a small life dream, we shall say.) I read SO many books based on their collections when I was putting together papers on mourning traditions. AMAZEBALLS.
Victorian mourning traditions! One of my pet topics. God bless those wonderful Victorian weirdos and their jewelry made of human hair and their intricate mourning etiquette.
brb time to pitch another article
Yes, please. I would love to read more about mourning etiquette. Seriously fascinating stuff.
Please do! I love that stuff.
The V&A is awesome, and you get to try on different outfits from each time period they have displayed.
NO
WHAT
REALLY
IF YOU ARE LYING I WILL EAT YOUR HEART IN THE MARKETPLACE
I would never lie to Toasties.
OH
WHOA
THIS IS THE GREATEST
oh meetapossum let us be friends and put on bonnets together
Yes, please! That was the saddest part about going alone last time; I had no one to try on costumes with.
WHAAAAAT. BRB BUYING A PLANE TICKET.
OH NOES I JUST WENT LAST MONTH AND DIDN’T GO TO THIS MUSEUM MY TEETH CANNOT HANDLE THIS GNASHING
Oh wait. Does this just mean I have to go again?
Um, some of our gallery costumes had to be removed because they kept getting damaged by visitors. Soz.
(I work there).
PEOPLE ARE THE WORST. I AM SORRY.
I work there! I shizz you not. Sadly not in the Fashion & Textile dept., which is organising ‘Wedding Dresses’. But the exhibition is being constructed at the minute and it looks like it’s going to be awwwwwesome. I can REVEAL that it includes outfits worn at civil partnership/same-sex marriage ceremonies as well as hetero weddings.
When I look at my sexual attraction to trans men who have not had phalloplasty (and therefore do not have a penis) and trans women who have not had vaginoplasty (and therefore do have a penis), I am interested to learn that peen is not as central to my identify as a cis gay man as I might’ve predicted. I mean, I’m all about the peen — they can have my peen when they can pry it out of my cold, dead hands … or something — but my gayness is much more about secondary sexual characteristics and gender performance than it is about penis. I s’ppose this isn’t surprising, if we think of “sexual orientation” as being, at least in part, essentially a fetish for (a certain kind of) secondary sexual characteristics and (a certain kind of) gender performance.
It’s pretty early in the morning where I am and I’m at work, but all I want to do right now is take everyone from The Toast to a coffee shop and have a massive discussion on this issue, because I think about it all the time. What is sexual orientation, or perhaps even more basically, what is attraction? I am bisexual (which I do not appreciate the guy from the story in The American Prospect treating as the solution to all his problems, which I suspect are personal problems of a being-an-ass nature). I don’t have a “type,” and it’s always secretly confused me when people talk about having one. What do you mean, hypothetical person, when you say you only date black women? Or you only date men? What does that mean? I’m not saying that I think sexual orientation isn’t real or valid, I’m just expressing my own personal, sincere confusion.
Dude, I could talk about this all day. When I first admitted to myself that I was bi I went through this ridiculous time period when I was attracted to literally everyone of an appropriate age. I still can’t articulate what attracts me to certain people more than others but other people’s “types” fascinate me!
I don’t have a “type,” and it’s always secretly confused me when people talk about having one.
Just to be clear, having “a type” doesn’t necessarily (or even often, for many people) mean a limitation on one’s sexual orientation. I have “a type” – well, two or three types – but I’ve mostly dated people who don’t fall into those narrow categories. As ginkgotree puts it below, for some of us, a type is often “a shortcut to attraction,” but neither a guarantee nor a necessary component of attraction.
As it happens, my husband is one of my types: tall, big, barrel-chested, dark-haired, sturdy, strong. That’s part of the reason I fell so hard for him before we really knew each other, hard enough to crush on him for several years before finding a way to ask him out that didn’t make him uncomfortable at work (which was our primary place to see each other). But if he hadn’t been the sweet, thoughtful, funny person he is, the physical characteristics wouldn’t have mattered except for a passing “Mmm, handsome.”
And having one type doesn’t mean one can’t be attracted to other people, or to a range of genders, or even have another strongly attractive type. My handful of types are clear enough that my husband can often guess when I will find someone powerfully, electrically attractive. (It’s usually someone in a film, and when he points it out, it’s usually a woman. I imagine he knows when I find a friend or acquaintance powerfully attractive just as I know when he does, but we don’t usually discuss it explicitly; having these conversations about our social circle would feel obscurely rude, either to our friends or to each other. )
Thank you. This is all fascinating, and as always, your comments (and ginkgotree’s) are so eloquent and thoughtful.
For full transparency: I edited out a meaningless binary-gender phrase, and I apologize for using it. Part of me is still stuck in that binary-gender world and I unconsciously parse my attraction through it, but I’m working to get smarter about that.
I feel you. In my case, I know the term “bisexual” is both meaningless and inaccurate, since it implies a binary.
My type is definitely more personality than physical (though there are some physical attributes that always get the old motor revving. Lean but musular arms, hmmm. High cheekbones, yes. Round, firm bum, give it to me. Cold blue eyes, oh baby. Big hands PUT THEM ON ME).
Nearly all my happy and succesful relationships and friendships have been people who are a little less sensitive and serious than me, who are less of a drama monarch than I am. They are funny, and tease without being cruel. They are very clever, and often very educated, too. They can be condescending, but are capable of being told to stop it. They are passionate, and love to work with their hands. They are soppy with small animals. They get obsessive about strange and obscure things.
Soppy with small animals. Very attractive. Agreed. Love the way you put it.
Hmm, may I recommend the Cumberbatch? Based on the description in your first paragraph, that’s who springs to mind.
Eh, he looks like a squished-up alien. Also, personality wise, DOES NOT DO IT FOR ME.
Seconding the being-an-ass personal problem.
I decidedly have a type with men, but it’s less their physical traits and more of a general aura of capableness. If you lined up all the fellows in my history and snapped a photograph of them, I don’t think there would be an obvious set of physical characteristics tying together even three of them, but when you meet them, you realize that all of them project this assurance, this sense that if you were to drop them in the middle of the Amazon they’d just bushwack their way out without complaining, because that’s what needs to be done.
Meanwhile, the ladies I have been attracted to are all over the place. I like tall ladies with lots of curves and legs for days and big, rich, theatre voices. But I also had a crush on a tiny little snippet of an Indian girl in my class who had enormous eyes and a little-girl sort of way of talking, and a tomboyish blond girl who was hilarious and an excellent mimic and completely unafraid to look silly in the name of a joke. My lady-crushes always remain just that, crushes, so maybe it’s just an appreciation of awesomeness in some way. I don’t identify as bi, and haven’t had any success in pursuing sexual contact with the ladies, but I do occasionally develop these sighing sort of crushes like, “Damn, she’s just amazing.”
Just musing, really. Types are interesting. The idea of types is interesting. I imagine we’re all looking for certain characteristics in personality that we translate into physical form if we don’t have the personality part readily available. (In pictures, for example.) So if you’re attracted to, I don’t know, optimistic sorts of personalities, and our culture has trained you that blonds are more optimistic than brunettes, then you’d tend to go for blonds? That’s my best guess at ‘types’, that we’re trying to find personality traits in physical ones, with varying degrees of success. Some of them probably actually work. Like, if you’re attracted to men who are kind of stereotypically manly, looking for broad shoulders is probably a decent bet.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this has something to do with sex and gender being two completely different things.
Exactly.
Stealing the fashion exhibits at the V&A is living the dream. When I went there on a trip to London a couple years ago, it took physical effort to restrain myself from pressing my face against the glass.
YESSS!!! That exhibition is on when I will be in London. SUCCESS!!!
I went to the V&A aaaages ago and the only thing I really remember was a life-sized carved Tiger-eating-soldier figurine, which apparently could be wound up so that the tiger chomped on the soldier! Sadly it was still when I was there, but it was awesome
They have a video of it chomping now! Because it’s too delicate to chomp regularly…
They have a video? Brb, finding the chomping now
Edit: Here’s the link for anyone who’s interested.
TIPU’S TIGER!
brb changing my profile pic
OOOOOH, so because Nicole mentioned the V&A I remembered that there are museums in London (duh) and I started looking them up for my trip, and guess what I found? There’s going to be a MAMMOTH exhibit at the National History Museum from THE FIELD MUSEUM (my favourite museum ever).
MAMMMMMMOTHS!!!
Oooh, I saw that exhibit when it was at the Field Museum!! It is GOOD. Go to there in London, you will not be disappointed.
YAY I’M SO EXCITED
Aw man, I remember seeing Tippoo’s Tiger in the DK Eyewitness Book of Cats when I was a kid. It very much…captured my imagination. Running across it in the V&A many many years later was a fantastic surprise.
(Also, the V&A is pretty much the most fascinating museum ever. Assuming one likes clothes and furniture that is. But who doesn’t?!)
So how do I cut off Lisa Hanawalt’s hands and brain and put them in my body?
I want to go to a place where I could wear something like those dresses. If it has to be the past, so be it. A tech company needs to devote their energies to Time Travel Vacation Packages, where we could go on vacation for a day or a week in the past. Not to change anything , just to observe. And to wear things like those gowns.
SPEAKING OF TIME TRAVEL I just got this spam in my work email
“Etienne Steward is a clone, also known as a beta. August 9, 1897 to February 6, 1898.”
That’s fascinating! Almost worthy of a novel. I wonder if someone is trying to spread the truth through spam?
Ha! these are random phrases from Wikipedia. First part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_the_Whirlwi…
Second part: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edwin_H._Conger
<3<3<3Adventure Time<3<3<3
Replying only for user pic synchronicity 😀
I have mixed feelings about all these Adventure Time thinkpieces that are popping up everywhere. They all seem to have this undertone of, “No but it’s actually really good, I know, a cartoon, right?! But TRUST me.”
I hear you. This article is so extensive, though, that I feel it gets past that pretty quickly. A reader who sticks it out long enough to get to the Rebecca Sugar quote about animation and the sublime has probably accepted that cartoons are a legitimate subject. There’s also an interesting bit about the creators of the show not wanting to call themselves “artists” when they started out, and finally accepting it. At that point and a couple others Maria Bustillos seems to take the show more seriously (or to read it in a more intellectual manner) than they do.
Ngl, I teared up a little over the sidebar on beauty and sadness.
I dunno, I get that, but I am constantly having to remind myself that not every adult is on Tumblr or into animation or YA fantasy from the 90s, that it’s actually comparatively a pretty small amount of adults. So while it might be an annoying undertone to people steeped in already knowing cartoons can be awesome, to the broader world of culture it is still an oddity, and people are going to need some convincing.
Yeah, I guess I’m just being a total brat about this because I am typically one of those people who Doesn’t Watch Cartoons, and I was getting funny looks 4 years ago when I started watching. Now, it’s “cool” to like AT and all of these people who never gave it the time of day are telling ME why I should like it.
I realize how insufferable I sound. I’m gonna go sit in this corner now…
It’s frustrating to feel unheard by ‘the peoples’, even when we remind ourselves that they’re not a complete monolith who were all there when first we opened our mouths. That said, I’m totally an ASOIAF brat who has read all the books and has little patience for show-only-watchers crying out about spoilers, so I’ll join you in that corner.
I do share your original annoyance with that condescending tone, though. I once had to convince a friend that going to a Miyazaki movie was the best idea ever, despite her insistence that she “didn’t really ‘do’ anime”. That sort of categorical condemnation is patronizing at the best of times.
Agreed but wow, this one was really good.
This one was good! Sorry, didn’t mean to seem like I was begrudging this one in particular. I’ve just seen 3-4 others in the past week that were… not as well done, and quite condescending.
Yeah, sure poetry is work, but it’s super-privileged work that most of us garbage-collecting plebes won’t ever have the space or time to engage in.
But by all means, keep sneering lady. It’s a really good look on you.
You know, there are an awful lot of working-class writers out there.
Most poets, even the most privileged ones, don’t make a living from writing poetry. They make a living from teaching, or from editing, or from doing completely unrelated jobs. I went to a talk by one poet who said he worked on a manuscript (that later became a celebrated book) for eight years while working as a doorman at a hotel. Poetry *is* work–it’s creative work–but most poets, whatever level of privilege they have, also have paying work. Poetry is, by necessity, a second job, at least in the US.
I also didn’t really get the sense that she was sneering at people (most of us) with regular run-of-the-mill jobs that we take to stay alive and afloat so much as extending a giant middle finger to people who themselves sneer at writing (particularly poetry) as a legitimate thing worth doing for reasons other than making buckets of money. These are, I think, the same people who think it’s your own fault for being unemployed or underemployed if you majored in anything other than, like, nuclear physics (because everyone knows liberal arts/anything not designed specifically to make you jillions of dollars are USELESS etc etc etc).
The first thing would be super shitty. The second I am completely okay with, because those people are dicks.
Also I think essentializing poetry into nothing but “super privileged” work is problematic and frankly toxic. There are a lot of immigrant and working class poets and writers who are always fighting people calling their work garbage as well as their backgrounds (like family who reify art = useless because it doesn’t pay the rent) and to say it is super privileged because of history or trustafarians or patrons (while all of these are true!) and thus needs to remain there is really disheartening. Also I think there are a lot of poets who do not come from privileged backgrounds who would maybe also not agree.
Signed,
a sometimes poet and writer who makes no money from it and has worked doing things like taking out garbage and is doing nothing remotely related to poetry but is constantly battling the fatigue from thinking poetry is useless when in fact it can often times remind people to keep the fuck on going in spite of how goddamn awful everything is
Did you… read the link?
TILDA TILDA TILDA TILDA TILDA cheekboney space ruler of my HEART
I am convinced that, on my deathbed, Tilda Swinton will appear to escort me to the underworld and I am 100% okay with that.
She would look fabulous in a black cloak accessorized with a scythe.
Tilda Swinton is the epitome of psychopompery.
Look, someone has to say it: it was Eclipse, not Breaking Dawn. #noshame
There is no shame, only points.
This has been today’s edition of “Relevant Life Lessons from College Quiz Bowl.”
LOLLL I had a false memory that it came up before the wedding, but NO, you are RIGHT.
You all must read this IMMEDIATELY BECAUSE IT IS PERFECT!!!!!
Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain http://www.vqronline.org/essays-articles/2014/04/….
LOLOLOLOL “The greatest living poet, Nicolas Cage, continues to amaze us by never having written a poem at all.”
Internet Misandrists UNITE — I just had to Olivia Pope Talk Down a White Man in my office who had literally NO IDEA WHAT I DO (he first introduced himself to me AND THEN tried to talk down to me) tried to assert authority over me HE DOES NOT HAVE because I work DIRECTLY for his boss. By the end he offered to go down to Operations to get my name etched on the door and wants me to work on his strategy team.
+100 pts to the Matriarchy. Pour some rose out for the Goddess. #BeyonceonRepeatALLDAY
(this could not wait for Fri Open Thread)
Oh god I was just thinking about this this morning. Whenever I get caught in the infinite thought loop of What Even Is My Sexuality, I have to take a deep breath and just remind myself that I can be attracted to whomever for whatever reasons.
Ugh. What a perfectly timed discussion point.
yesss! Going to be in London for the V&A exhibition! I love historical fashion exhibits, I saw a Vivienne Westwood one at the National Gallery in Canberra years ago and it was amazing, they had everything from amazing ballgowns to the Sex Pistols’ costumes.
yesss! Going to be in London for the V&A exhibition! I love historical fashion exhibits, I saw a Vivienne Westwood one at the National Gallery in Canberra years ago and it was amazing, they had everything from amazing ballgowns to the Sex Pistols' costumes.
I took me until the end of this entire comment thread to realize…holy shit, it's just "jail?!" I am 36. Mind. blown. Lovely toasties, educating me so well!
A pā isn't actually a Māori meeting house – that would more like a marae, a pā is a (fortified) hill village. So if the museum has a marae in their collection (quite a few places do, I guess) but calls it a pā … grumblegrumble, must try harder.
Shit that's totally true. I'm an idiot. Oh god, I'm actually really ashamed of myself right now. Dammit! (And now I can't edit my other comments, so my idiocy will stand for the ages. cringe.)
I seem to remember it being called a pā in the museum? But googling just now there are references to a wharanui, a whare, and a marae… so dunno. It could be just my idiocy and bad remembering skills. It's called Ruatepupuke II, if you're interested in finding out more.
Eh, he looks like a squished-up alien. Also, personality wise, DOES NOT DO IT FOR ME.
Hum – maybe they have updated their stuff? But either way, don't beat yourself up, it's totally understandable to see an exhibit with multiple buildings and think to yourself, yep, village.
Actually looking at the Field Museum records for the marae (at least what a quick google search brings up) it looks like they are treating things with the proper respect and using all the real words, so, yay! Field Musem > CNN.
(TBH I still get weirdly weirded out by … like, exhibitions about tangata whenua and the cultures that are held overseas? When it's all about the immediate colonial era and very little about current realities. Then I realise I am sure to have been eating up similar exhibits and narratives about other cultures in the same way, though … waa. Anyway, thank you for the name, I have had an interesting time finding out about the Ruatepupuke II marae!)
Oh yeah, I get totally weirded out by overseas exhibits of tangata whenua and other native peoples as well. They tend to be either "look, how exotic" or "look, how just like us they are", both of which are make me feel uncomfortable.
Actually though, I went to the Museum of the American Indian in DC, and it was awful, so it's not only overseas exhibits that are like that =(
Thanks, I mean it was an honest mistake, but I do feel a certain responsibility to accurately talk about Maori (and NZ) culture when I'm overseas. I guess I'm acutely aware how little people know about tangata whenua, and given that I'm often the first/only NZer people have met, I feel that I ought to be knowledgeable about such things? And part of that is knowing the right words. I don't have any Maori heritage, so I worry often about appropriation and misrepresentation (especially given that what I say overseas is usually taken as gospel), but I think some knowledge is better than nothing? Also, (sadly) no one wants to talk about these issues in depth with me, so it's usually only a couple of remarks over a beer, i.e. I can't fuck up too much.
Anyway… far too long a reply, this has all been somewhat percolating in my head for a while.