This week, the talented Kelly Link’s Get In Trouble is out this week. You can read a story from the collection here.
Kore Press is having a short fiction contest and I am the judge and perhaps you should enter because there is quite a prize involved. The deadline is Valentine’s Day.
If you are intrigued by mass hysteria, this story is for you.
If you have ever wondered what life was like in 1848, well, there’s also an essay about that. When I think back to those days, I think “slavery” and am then overcome with gratitude for the 20th and 21st centuries which are marginally better. Also, showers and toilets are cool.
To get dressed in 1848, you have to put your socks and shoes on first. Then comes your underwear, corset, petticoats—thirteen if you’re pursuing the height of fashion—then the skirt, and finally, your bodice. If you try to put your shoes on last, as we do today, you will find you have made a mistake. You can’t bend over with a corset on and your feet are fully lost in the fluff of your skirts.
With NPR’s The Howard Project, four members of the class of 2015 will be keeping audio diaries about the challenges they are facing as graduation looms.
If you don’t want to ship your friends glitter, you can also ship them nothing and if you are doing so, you have money to waste and you can feel free to waste it on me and my desire for a tiny baby elephant.
There is new fiction from the one and only Toni Morrison in The New Yorker.
It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs for me to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black. I’m light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann’s father. Ain’t nobody in my family anywhere near that color. Tar is the closest I can think of, yet her hair don’t go with the skin. It’s different—straight but curly, like the hair on those naked tribes in Australia. You might think she’s a throwback, but a throwback to what? You should’ve seen my grandmother; she passed for white, married a white man, and never said another word to any one of her children. Any letter she got from my mother or my aunts she sent right back, unopened. Finally they got the message of no message and let her be. Almost all mulatto types and quadroons did that back in the day—if they had the right kind of hair, that is. Can you imagine how many white folks have Negro blood hiding in their veins? Guess. Twenty per cent, I heard. My own mother, Lula Mae, could have passed easy, but she chose not to. She told me the price she paid for that decision. When she and my father went to the courthouse to get married, there were two Bibles, and they had to put their hands on the one reserved for Negroes. The other one was for white people’s hands. The Bible! Can you beat it? My mother was a housekeeper for a rich white couple. They ate every meal she cooked and insisted she scrub their backs while they sat in the tub, and God knows what other intimate things they made her do, but no touching of the same Bible.
The Internet is terrible at archiving itself.
A couple of months ago, I pitched a feature on the music industry that I was totally qualified to write. But the editor questioned my experience: What exactly had I published about the music industry? By my count, over two thousand blogposts since 2009. But the links to my author pages bounced back because the websites had disappeared. Five of years work apparently evaporated from server racks somewhere in New Jersey, as if I had never written anything at all. Come to think of it, had I?
Fictional rich control freak with issues, excerpts thereof.
An essay from Butter columnist Mensah Demary.
Here is what it takes to restore an old theater in Brooklyn.
One of the first things an architect must decide when restoring a historic building is to when, exactly, he is restoring. “We like to pick opening day,” said Adam Field, a project architect at Martinez+Johnson Architecture, which worked on the restoration of Brooklyn’s Kings Theatre.
Sometimes, people come together and do good for a fellow human.
Detroit native James Robertson’s 1998 Honda Accord quit on him some 10 years ago, but he didn’t quit on life. For 10 years since losing his wheels, Robertson has walked some 21 miles a day, to and from his house in Detroit to his factory job in Rochester Hills, Mich., and in over 10 years, Robertson hasn’t missed a day of work.
HEH.
Tags: humpday, link roundup, the internet
To be fair, the garment workers’ condition wasn’t random mass hysteria like, say, that one town that danced itself to death. It was huge freak-outs that started after the girls found out they were working in a factory that had been built over a crematorium.
but real talk, the reflecty-ness of that staircase would cause me to fall down it daily.
I actually flinched when I scrolled down to that photo. It hurts me.
All I can think of seeing that building is the Gehry documentary I watched, where his work process is basically to crinkle shit up and glue it together.
Which, okay, I guess that’s a valid life plan? But that staircase, I kind of can’t tell where it is.
Oh sure, I mean the whole thing is terrible really.
the entire building makes me nauseous and nervous. nope!
SIGH. As with so many things, I was heartwarmed by the car-buying story until I read the comments. “This should show all those layabouts that you can work an honest job no matter what!” Can we not just be happy about a nice thing without taking it to a place of “And THAT’S why we don’t need to bother guaranteeing everyone a living wage! AMURICA!”. Now I am sad and I request alternate options for the warming of my cold heart.
Right? It’s incredible what he did, but it doesn’t mean walking 21 miles a day to work is a practical solution for everyone.
and the amount of money raised for him at this point could probably run a bus line for a year! Which is, like, bootstraps culture in a nutshell. Blergh.
This. It’s awesome that all those people helped him out, I can’t help wondering how many other people could benefit from the nonexistent bus route that wasn’t there for him.
If you’re on Instagram, I recommend the “2sisters_angie” account. It’s a little girl who makes outfits out of paper and I spent last night scrolling with exploding ovaries.
Yeah, it’s wonderful that people pitched in and bought him a car, but why is his job paying him so little he can’t afford a car? Why is there no bus system? Why are people forced to spend eight unpaid hours a day just on transportation so they can work? Everything is terrible!
And his boss is holding him up as a paragon that other employees should aspire to. “*HE* can get to work, why can’t you?” Go fuck yourself, boss.
Seriously, FUCK that guys’ boss. How about you give your employees paid vacation, asshole? Or maybe a living wage, considering you’re making over 100k a year? Dickbutt.
I have a whole book called “Everyday Life in the 1800s” (as well as one called “What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist–The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century England”) so I thank you for alerting me to the Lohman piece.
The second one is BRILLIANT and very funny, though slightly confusing sometimes. I believe it is American and it sometimes explains things that I find bleeding obvious.
I thought I’d seen the worst that 50 Shades of Blargh had to offer, but:
“‘Do you do this to people or do they do it to you?’ His mouth quirks up, either amused or relieved. ‘People?’ He blinks a couple of times. as he considers his answer. ‘I do this to women who want me to.'”
WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUCK
Jesus fuck all.
Is this a Jian Ghomeshi quote? /sarcasm but not really
Eurrrrrrgh. But y’know, that’s actually quite accurate to what Christian Grey is in real life. Delusions of grandeur, too.
I’d pick that Gehry paper bag over any number of godawful buildings here in Ottawa, such as
the hideous main branch of the public library
the hideous National Arts Centre
the hideous police headquarters
and any number of government office buildings that I won’t inflict on your poor eyes so early in the day. This city’s composition is like 60% stultifyingly ugly concrete shells.
The library is just A TERRIBLE BUILDING. It’s horribly designed both inside and out and generally painful to interact with in any capacity. I hate it hate it HATE IT and preferred almost any other branch.
There’s been a lot of talk about building a new one in the next few years precisely because of how terrible the current building is. It’s due for a lot of repairs and improvements that would be expensive enough that just scrapping the whole thing and starting over is a better idea.
Aw, I kinda like that ugly library.
Yeah, I don’t get the intense reaction to brutalist architecture. Maybe I just don’t have a taste for these things but I looked at all of those pictures and thought “yes, those are fine buildings you have.”
It’s not brutalist architecture per se. There are some brutalist buildings that I really like, such as Habitat 67 in Montreal or whatever the heck this is. But the ones in Ottawa that I linked to above are just featureless, often windowless grey or brown cubes with no visual interest whatsoever. I think we deserve nicer buildings to look at and live/work in.
Whoa, both of those are super cool. I guess I’d rather look at a boring gray wall than some of the other dumb stuff you see on buildings?
It’s the Geisel Library in San Diego!
I love Brutalism and I love those. It’s true the interiors in Brutalist buildings tend to be really poorly designed though.
As an alumnae of both SFU (http://www.sfu.ca/aboriginalgrad/sfu-library-services-that-support-indigenous-research-and-knowle.html) [I don’t know how to make pretty links, but this gives the idea!] and of Ottawa, I see both sides. I loved the architecture at SFU, and I actually enjoy a lot of the buildings in downtown Ottawa. They can be hard to be in, though.
(The main branch of the Houston Public Library looks like this, which is maybe the problem. I have been conditioned to think that main libraries are SUPPOSED to be unattractive, featureless concrete boxes with maybe a couple of non-90-degree angles thrown in for interest.)
Is Ottawa policed by the Borg?
Seriously: how is that drab cube not hurtling through space, assimilating bald space captains?
Maybe it is! I can’t vouch for what the cube does when I’m not there in person to keep an eye on it. (I live really close by so I literally have to see it EVERY SINGLE DAY unless I don’t leave my apartment, which sometimes feels like a preferable alternative to gazing upon its soulless form yet again.)
Maybe this isn’t the place…but where I live a new central library just opened and it is GORGEOUS. I live within walking distance so I go there all the time and I love it.
Halifax central library
AGREED. I completely forgot about how horrible that public library building is.
I will add that 90% of the buildings on the University of Ottawa’s campus also are concrete hulks, with few windows, and nonsensical layouts.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thu…
I actually had a slightly hard time finding because uOttawa’s promotional team only uses photos of the 1-2 historical buildings that weren’t torn down, and buildings that have been built in the past 15 years.
I do really like the new social sciences building and its enormous living plant wall. But I agree on the rest of the buildings.
Oh, the new buildings are lovely! And they hide the older ones from an outside view.
It’s just the poor students who are stuck inside, looking out.
Don’t forget the Supreme Court!
I think there’s actually a thing to be written on how the architecture of the civil service reflects the government’s (and to some degree the nation’s) view of the role of the civil service, but I’m not half smart enough to write it.
I have no issue with the SCC because it’s one of the least ugly buildings in that part of town. I like the roof and its tiny little windows because it reminds me of the infinitely creepy houses with eyes that I saw in Sibiu a few summers ago.
Ugh, I haaaate the Supreme Court building. The proportions seem so peculiar to me, and the windows are so tiny! The highest court in the land should be substantially more inviting and open, in my books.
And OMG those eyeball roofs are CREEPY 🙁
“Don’t be shy, baby, you can come inside me if you want.”
AAAAAAAAAAAH NO NO NO.
Thanks for the Kelly Link heads-up! I absolutely love both Magic for Beginners and Stranger Things Happen.
Get in Trouble is FANTASTIC, so glad to see it mentioned here!
Me too! Magic for Beginners is my favorite. I loved every story.
She is amazing!
More on Detroit’s public transportation system. Helping out 1 guy is great but the whole system is fucked up.
IT’S. SO. BAD.
Also, the article on the 1920s movie palaces speaks to me on all the levels. Our town has a mini-palace that’s been lovingly restored, and a downtown opera house, and they’re absolute marvels and a huge draw to our downtown–which has been totally revitalized since they reopened. Thanks, Michael Moore!
Traverse City is such a cool town!
I grew up in a town with a 1920’s theater that my mom and two other ladies formed a group to buy and restore. Because of that, I grew up in that theater. My dad ran the projector, my mom sold tickets, and I took tickets until I got old enough to help sell concessions. It was seriously the best.
For a while, there was someone posting the entirety of 50 Shades on AO3, but with Hannibal characters instead of the Twilight substitutes. It was delightful and completely unnecessary and it’s obviously gone now for copyright infringement but DAMN if I didn’t love the irony.
But if you’re really interested and you don’t want to give EL James your money, Mark Oshiro is currently reading the entire book on YouTube and making ridiculous comments about it, so you feel a little less guilty.
WELP, THERE GOES MY DAY.
YOU’RE JUMPING IN AT THE BEST TIME BECAUSE TODAY HE GETS TO ~THE INCIDENT THAT THEY AREN’T PUTTING IN THE FILM AND THAT FUCKS EVERYONE UP~
I want to know what “the incident” is but I don’t want to read the book to find out D:
Here is Jenny Trout’s chapter review for it. Go with God, my friend.
Oh god I had forgotten about reading about that in other recaps/summaries and now I wish I hadn’t clicked to satisfy my curiosity.
Also, I’m newly skeeved by my SIL’s love for this series. (she’s so naive, though! i can’t imagine she has any idea about how fucked up the central relationship is, and enjoys the fantasy aspect anyway, like some people say they do)
D:
Jennytrout.com! She’s some sort of genius, this one. Her recaps are priceless!
Yes! I’m also a big fan of http://50shadesofsuck.tumblr.com/. So, so funny.
That is my FAVORITE.
I haven’t read any of the 50 Shades books, but everything I’ve read about the storyline makes it so clear (to me) that it’s fanfiction. And a specific sort of fanfiction – not the kind of things people would say “oh but this is really good, fanfiction can be legitimate” but the kind of id-fic that people know is bad and problematic but hits a favorite trope. Nothing about reality, all about the fantasy of luxury and constant great sex. It’s fascinating to see how popular that kind of thing is when given a “mainstream” platform.
“I’d like to bite that lip” is not a sexy thing to say. It is weird and gives me the heebie-jeebies.
I also once worked as a historical interpreter in an 1848 historical site — although we did third-person interpretation because the logistics of the site would have been too difficult if we had had to pretend it was 1848 the whole time. (It was a much smaller site, only one house, belonging to a specific famous dead person whom we obviously could not interpret.)
I was costumed as a maid-of-all-work and I swept and dusted and scrubbed the floors and hand-washed the laundry and beat the dust out of rugs in my heavy dress, two or more petticoats, wood-soled boots, and cotton cap (plus shawl or cloak in the winter). No corset because I was a maid, although there was boning in the bodice of the dress to achieve the correct silhouette. Also, the thing about 1848 fashion is that the correct silhouette also involved making your shoulders look as wide as possible, so the shoulder/upper sleeve of the dress is really tight in order to force you into the right position. And there’s padding between your boob and your shoulder to make it look like a straight line.
Anyway, my years doing costumed interpretation taught me that it is WAY easier to get used to putting on and taking off and moving around in and just generally doing stuff in all those layers than one would expect. You stop noticing them pretty quickly and you just instinctively know how your body can move, where your skirts will go when you turn around. You automatically reach for your skirts as you go up the stairs (to the extent that when I had changed back in my street clothes and was going home for the day, I would sometimes grasp at air and have a moment of disorientation to find that I DIDN’T have skirts to scoop up). Now when I read historical fiction where women are so conscious of their clothes and the ways they are constrained by them, it doesn’t ring at all true.
(tbqh the shoes were the hardest part to get used to, because the flats were not left-right differentiated and the boots had WOODEN SOLES WHICH ARE NOT COMFORTABLE WHEN YOU HAVE TO SPEND THREE HOURS STANDING UP WASHING LINENS)
(this post brought to you by a bee in my bonnet and not enough coffee)
I’m reading “How to be a Victorian” and the author talks a lot about how she’s done different types of work in the dress of the period, it’s fascinating
Yes! I just finished that this weekend and I loved how she was able to talk about real experience of the clothing and the washing and how it really works much better than we would assume, with our constant showers and floppy clothes. Though I also have to say that life in the working classes and below sounds like utter, utter hell, worse than what I know of any earlier time, and the whole concept of death as a release really makes sense. “I’ll rest when I’m dead” becomes a promise and a treat.
I am fascinated by your post. Thank you.
I spend summers doing 1890s third person interpretation and I agree on the clothes. I’m one of the few that wears a corset (it’s all volunteer, so the costumes are only as accurate as the budget will allow), but I sing praises of how comfortable it is and how lovely it makes my posture.
Ooh! Not an S-bend corset, I hope. Those ones legit look like they could cause spinal cord problems 🙁 …but the other thing people tend to forget about is that if you’ve worn corsets daily for most of your adult life, it can be uncomfortable to go for long period without them because you don’t have the same muscles built up in the same places, e.g. to be able to keep your back straight and upright for the whole day. So, no, going without a corset wouldn’t necessarily have felt like “freedom” to an 1890s lady!
1890s skirts are cut a little closer to the body than 1840s ones, but what I kept having to explain to people was that your legs have SO much more freedom in those dresses than they do in jeans! You could do the SPLITS in those dresses. Assuming you can do the splits. Like you could sit cross-legged and no one would even KNOW. So comfy. Especially in winter when you get to wear a quilted petticoat and carry a flannel or wool shawl around your shoulders, which is basically like walking around all day wrapped in blankets (which I WISH I could do at my current job…)
Oh goodness no, not the S-bend corset. It’s a living history homestead, so we’re showing very working class history.
My favorite part of the clothes are that it doesn’t matter if I feel like my thighs are looking chubby or my tummy feels too big. I put on a corset, my petticoats and my skirt and I have a lovely silhouette (if you ignore how silly leg of mutton sleeves make anyone look). Also, with doing a lot of homesteading chores (I’m mostly in the garden), the corset acts like a weightlifter’s belt and makes lifting things much easier.
Also, I agree that shawls are basically the best thing ever.
The Toast Commune will have shawls available to everyone, everywhere. Corsets are optional.
I have very mixed feelings about the car-buying story. On one hand, it’s great that this guy’s problems are mostly/probably solved, but there are so, so many more people suffering from a lack of public transportation options or who are forced to spend money they don’t have on cars to keep their jobs. Back when all of PA was searching for Eric Frein (the man who shot 2 cops), a similar thing happened. There was a guy who looked like him who kept being stopped by police because he was walking alone on pretty desolate roads. It turned out that he couldn’t afford a car and had to walk to his second-shift job. There was a GoFundMe, and people bought him a car. It’s sort of like the school in Brooklyn that’s getting all the attention and money from Humans of New York–it’s fantastic, but what about all of the other schools that don’t go viral? To me, it’s a slightly worrying trend.
CityLab has a better breakdown of why this isn’t a 100% feel-good story.
I always cringe to see viral fundraising stories. We see a something like this and get to feel good and think it’s all solved when the guy gets his car. But what about the bazillions of people whose stories aren’t quite staggering enough to get our attention (his shift and commute were 20 hours a day?? WTF!). Or the people who aren’t as sympathetic on camera, or who don’t have the know-how or connections to start a successful facebook page, or who don’t speak english?
I did appreciate that the kid who did this acknowledged his privilege, saying that he thought about what he would do in this situation and realized that his parents could help him or he could pay for an Uber. Hopefully he knows that his good deed was fixing things for just one person who is affected by a deeper systemic issue.
There are a sufficient number of links in here about archival and preservation-type things and that pleases me.
Also I’ve never been more tempted to shell out for a New Yorker subscription than reading that Toni Morrison blurb…
The preservation-ness pleases me too!
And oh, friend, here is something to make your Wednesday evening more beautiful: Sweetness, by Toni Morrison, no subscription required!
Here’s the kickstarter we should all be giving to this morning: security cameras for beleaguered toy stores! http://www.salon.com/2015/02/04/sex_shop_crimes_h…
I like two blocks away from the Kings Theater and I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT THIS RESTORATION. It’s beautiful, Diana Ross played last night, and they’ve hired a bunch of people from the neighborhood to work there. I really think this is going to be a wonderful thing for the neighborhood!
Might I suggest that people worried about their work disappearing from the Internet embed that picture of Beyoncé (you know, that one) in all of their articles? That shit ain’t going nowhere.
Has anyone else read the Kelly Link story? Let’s discuss!
Yes and I really liked it but was confused at the end. SPOILERS: did she just abandon Ophelia at the house???
I think so–I think the protagonist tricked Ophelia so that she could be free. So I assume that now that Ophelia has slept in the room, now she has to stay and take care of the Summer People. At least, that was what I got from it.
Poor Ophelia! Although she did say she wanted to help…
but can we also talk about this story?? because i just read it and i feel confused and also like everything is haunted. http://recommendedreading.tumblr.com/post/1099724…
I started rereading that story and every line I want to be like, this is why I love her writing so much! Every line!
Regarding life in 1848: I remember well into the 1970s and 1980s, my grandmother and her sisters cooking on a wood stove — we had a lake cabin up north, and every summer our food was prepared on the stove. You had to get the wood down to embers so it would be a steady temperature. To cool down a too-hot castiron pan, you moved it to the side. Food was kept warm on a shelf above the stove. I didn’t find it odd, that we used a wood stove, because my great-aunts still had kerosene lanterns and outhouses on their properties … I think, in the Midwest, in the country, “old ways” lasted well into the 20th Century. We could have weather-caused power outages that lasted for a week and we’d be fine.
into the early 90s, i regularly spent time with family in southern indiana who had a wood stove and kerosene lanterns. i was delighted every single time we got to make REAL Pop Corn on that stove <3
We heated with a woodstove in the house where I grew up. MrChouffe’s family had an outdoor toilet until he was five or so.
I cooked on a wood stove when I volunteered on an organic farm in 2009! I made the somewhat bizarre choice to do this in the wintertime, in Minnesota, so the stove was extremely important. It was an impressive bit of engineering–I’ve never had such an easy time building fires as I did lighting that stove, and it provided most of the heat in the main room. I know it was something of an antique, though, and stoves like that might not really be available for purchase anymore.
You can get new ones! They sell them in what my household affectionately calls the Amish catalog.
That’s nice to know! The farmer in this situation talked a lot about the difficulty of finding replacement parts, maybe because the particular stove was so old. There were some Amish families in the neighborhood, actually. I don’t know what their cooking setup was like.
The newer models are more efficient and pollute less, so if you got a new one it would probably warm your house even better. I live without running water and heat with a woodstove, and it’s really not that big a deal, although we go through a lot of firewood. It’s easy to get used to having an outhouse and showering at the gym – what’s a pain is doing dishes and trying to keep the place presentable when your water comes out of a jug rather than the tap.
Wood cookstoves aren’t incredibly easy to find, but wood heating stoves are fairly readily available. I actually work for a dealer of wood stoves (and gas stoves, and fireplaces and whatever, but we’re all really in it for the wood stoves). We have plenty of customers who use their wood stove to heat most of their house in the winter.
“Mr Gehry said he had designed a “flexible” building with only a few fixed parts, allowing the building to be changed over time to meet the changing needs of its users.”
Like, eventually they can just change it to have normal walls and stuff, thereby meeting the needs of a business school.
I actually love Gehry and his bananas stuff, and I mean, good for people doing crazy shit. But let’s be real, it’s crazy.
OMG ALSO the part of the Gehry article that says ‘Undulating brickwork and large glass panels have created a “curtain wall”.’ is very funny to me.
It’s not a “curtain wall”. It’s a curtain wall. That’s the what the exterior part of any building is called. The curtain wall.
Heh. Clearly, the author of the article was skeptical.
The Toni Morrison piece in the New Yorker is from her new novel God Help The Child and I got to read an advance copy and it is very very good so mark your calendars! April 21!
Re: Mass hysteria. There is a book by anthropologist Aihwa Ong about factory workers in Malaysia. These Malaysian women work in factories for IBM making tiny microchip thingies, and their bosses are mostly Chinese men. Every now and then Ong says that the workers freak out and SEE DEMONS IN THE WOMEN’S BATHROOMS EATING TAMPONS. They then say they can’t work until the bosses call in some local spiritual healers to get rid of the demons. Ong says that this is probably a way that the workers can ‘strike’ without really engaging in political action that will get them fired. (***I might be misremembering this book, but I hope not, bc demons eating tampons is such a great image.)
Losing all my work is exactly why I have PDFs of some of my articles (although I have already lost some good ones cuz the site went down before I had a chance to convert them to PDF.)
Losing all my work is exactly why I have PDFs of some of my articles (although I have already lost some good ones cuz the site went down before I had a chance to convert them to PDF.)
this is just to say that I hate every single thing about 50 shades. glorification of abusers in a thin bdsm disguise. ugh.