Laura Sook Duncombe's previous Literary Ladies Cage Fight columns for The Butter can be found here. Hey there gal-pals! We’ve missed you! Hope all who celebrated had a safe and happy Fourth of July. We’re so excited to be back here with you for LLCF! Greetings. I am Artemis, goddess of the hunt and chastity. Along with my sister, Aphrodite, we are your hosts for the cage fight. Rules are simple: 5 rounds, one point each…
"Then he gets involved in a French Revolution, but not the big famous one, a little later one you thought you didn't know anything about." --Forbidden Broadway Vol. 2, "More Miserable."
We're going to solve this problem right now.
An Army of Lawyers Cannot Fail: "The French Revolution"
France was in debt, partially from supporting the American Revolution, but also because the nobility and the church were exempt from
Setting: A conference room in a Brooklyn hospital. There is a circle of chairs, but only two have women sitting in them, making introductions. One woman is 31, fat, with an Alternative Lifestyle Haircut, and biracial: Margaret E.I. The other woman is 18, thin, white with bobbed brown hair, and wears a remarkably preserved vintage dress. Also...she seems to be flickering in and
Well, friends, here we are! About to boldly forge into Roxane Gay's An Untamed State (remember, we're reading this handy part you can access online, please arrive prepared next Monday!), let us look back on our sweet and prickly journey through George Eliot's life and work, as well as the glorious writing of Rebecca Mead.
I feel that everyone who is going to read My Life in Middlemarch with us has already done so, so on June 16th, we will discuss it fully and move on! Where are we moving on to? Why, it is my very great pleasure to announce that we will be reading Roxane Gay's critically-acclaimed and marvelously wonderful debut novel, An Untamed State. Please buy it, and please be ready to start discussing it…
This week we made you Toast-themed T-shirts. Buy them, that you might display your Internet savviness and that I might pay my bills and buy expensive cheese for another month. Also, I got a Tumblr. What does one do with one, exactly. How do you talk at people. Is that even a function of Tumblr. So far I've just been putting some extra-long jokes on it and that seems to be working…
I gave you a brief break from our ongoing journey in pursuit of My Life in Middlemarch. That break is now over. Get back to Middlemarch, slatterns. No! We'll go into it easily, I'd love to just talk about the first three chapters. Let's! Now, last time, we talked about gawky, bookish adolescences. (Which may not have been all of you, incidentally! Perhaps some of you were poised and stylish and enjoyed drinking malteds with a…
Anne Helen Petersen on Sunday's episode of Mad Men, and fathers and daughters: In real life, teenagers don’t have the emotional vocabulary to have intense and therapeutic heart-to-hearts with their parents. The acknowledgment thereof — the very refusal to make reconciliation into a dramatic set-piece — is part of what Mad Men gets so right about Sally.
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Kate McKinnon talks about the origin of "Dyke and Fats":
No, I know, I KNOW, we said no more Harry Potter this year, but I forgot that I had accepted this ages ago, and I think you will enjoy it very much. And imagine the joy you'll get from vociferously disagreeing with their choices in the comments! Jane Austen We're starting off with a softball here - Jane, beloved Jane, is an easy choice. Her novels, occasionally dismissed by illiterate ninnyhammers as romances, are ultimately about the triumph…
After many, many months of gearing up to this by reading Middlemarch together, today we will begin talking about My Life in Middlemarch. We literally could not have given you a more manageable chunk to start with (up to page 73, or the end of Chapter Two), but since the book has only been out for a few weeks, it is very understandable if you have to slide more gradually into our…
This picture of me with Rebecca Mead? It's the best picture of me I've ever seen. You can't tell that my face is 90% gums and ears, and that I usually lose my upper lip completely when I smile. I'm going to post it every single day until it gains sentience and walks among us. So, as you may know, I went to NYC for less than 24 hours, entirely for the purpose of doing…
Hi guys! I'm in NYC next Wednesday (one night only, only night only...) for my March 5th event at the Strand with Rebecca Mead, in which I stand up and say nice and true things about her and her book, and ideally you show up and either buy a book or a gift card of similar value (online or at the door) and then we hang out after and enjoy each other's company. Anyway,…
In 2013, I made a small but very personal resolution – that I would spend the year reading only books written by women. 12 months and 40 books later, I published a piece on Flavorwire.com about the project and how it had affected my life. I merely hoped that a couple of people would be touched by the story and also decide to actively read more books by female authors, thus making small strides…
While performing at the Grammys in January, Taylor Swift’s hair did something: it flipped – or, more accurately, it was expressively tossed by the anguished throes of her head and neck. Swift did a bit of heartbreak induced head-banging, her backlit golden hair looked haloesque, and it moved fans to wallow in a briny pool of their own tears. Swift’s hairography is something worth talking about. From the blonde ringlets of her early country music…
