“Yes, I am wearing the leather gloves. Yes, I am aware that they add a Patrick Bateman edge to the whole look. I’m okay with that. Do we have to go over who I am again?”
(via meesters)
Oh hello, favorite new blog.
Pretty Standard
“Sara Watson took three weeks to transform the car.”
This is definitely what you wear to take your students on a tour of urban architecture in the Magic School Bus.
Infinite
You were the first and only person I wanted to talk to when I heard about David Foster Wallace.
Dear Future America's Next Top Model Contestants
If Tyra asks you about your favorite heroine in English literature, like she did to that Harvard girl on Wednesday, there’s really only one acceptable answer: Rosalind, the heroine of “As You Like It.” First of all: Shakespeare. Tyra will love that — shows you’re sophisticated. Second, Rosalind is a strong woman. We all know how ANTM feels about strong women. And third, Rosalind spends most of the play disguised as a young boy while hanging out with the man of her dreams. She needs to really sell the outfit, even as she’s trying to let her inner self shine through. This involves a lot of smiling with her eyes and, of course, being fierce — just like America’s Next Top Model! (You’re welcome.)
In other news, I’m pretty sure Gossip Girl is actually Serena’s grandmother CeCe.
Joyce Carol Totes
Granted, I have a massive girl-crush on Curtis Sittenfeld, a crush so powerful it withstood the experience of reading The Man of My Dreams in hardback as soon as it came out (in terms of letdowns, roughly the same as being the first person in line at the midnight showing of Harold and Kumar II). And granted also, I think Joyce Carol Oates is kind of a hack, what with her sixty different literary novels about serial killers in love with their sisters. Her latest, btw, is about JonBenet Ramsey, making her both suspiciously prolific and about ten years too late.
What I’m saying is that I might be biased, but I still think Oates’s review of Sittenfeld’s amazing-sounding new novelization of the life of Laura Bush, American Wife, is kind of bogus. Look, for example, at this put-down of Prep:
Much acclaimed at the time of its publication in 2005, the tersely titled “Prep” is not a brilliantly corrosive adolescent cri de coeur like J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye,” still less a powerful indictment of conformist American racist society like Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” but an unassuming coming-of-age memoirist fiction tracing the adventures and misadventures of a Midwestern girl…If Lee Fiora is a 21st-century American-girl pilgrim of sorts, her quest isn’t for a searing and illuminating truth but a girl’s wish to be “popular” with her peers and to be noticed.
One of the crazy things about fiction is that there’s often a difference between the intentions of the protagonist and the intentions of the novel itself. Yes, Lee really just wants to kiss Cross Sugarman (for the record, so do I) but that doesn’t make the book somehow untrue, or uninterested in the truth. In fact, what makes Prep so good is its relentless devotion to accuracy, to making Lee utterly unlikeable in a very realistic way.
Or take this awesomely condescending little paragraph:
Curtis Sittenfeld surely did not intend to create, in this mostly amiable, entertaining novel, anything so ambitious — or so presumptuous — as a political/cultural allegory in the 19th-century mode, yet “American Wife” might be deconstructed as a parable of America in the years of the second Bush presidency: the “American wife” is in fact the American people, or at least those millions of Americans who voted for a less-than-qualified president in two elections — the all-forgiving enabler for whom the bromide “love” excuses all.
Yeah, I’m sure that while thinking about Laura Bush for like two years, it never crossed Sittenfeld’s mind that her relationship with W might be an allegory for the country’s.
Obviously, I really, really want to like American Wife. And Oates ultimately seems pretty positive about it, despite all her Prep-bashing. Actually, the only thing in the review that makes the book seem disappointing are the excerpts: “Was I mutable, without a fixed identity?” the Laura Bush character muses. (I’m going to guess the answer is “yes.”) Still, Laura Bush’s life story is pretty fascinating, and there’s no one else I’d trust to do it justice; even Tony Kushner’s play about her, from around 2003, was totally unsastisfying in its look at Laura-Bush-as-person, as opposed to Laura-Bush-as-wife-of-monster. Maybe Curtis could do Sarah Palin next!
The Best Idea I Had All Summer
Referring to the cat as “Ball-of-fur Eliasson.”
Didn't the Onion Call This?
New York Magazine, yesterday:
Will McCain’s Surrogates Bring Up Barack Obama’s Destitute Kenyan Brother?
The Onion, August 13:
Obama’s Hillbilly Half-Brother Threatening To Derail Campaign
Capsule Review: Vicky Cristina Barcelona
It’s sweet that Woody Allen thinks a post-collegiate free spirit ScarJo type would never have had a threesome before.
