Good motto.
Author Diane Duane is creating a Sherlock-themed Tarot deck. Even if you don’t squee over Sherlock (and if so what is WRONG with you), it looks like a fantastic explanation of Tarot in general. Plus she gets to use the word “querent” a lot.
If what’s always distinguished bad writing— flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.— is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret Easton] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
Dorothy Parker’s telegram to her editor in 1945, via Elliott Holt
Oh, yes. Yes yes yes. And that totally endearing misspelling at the end…
Two sides of the same dizzy-headed lady-coin
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick on conservatives’ defense of Herman Cain:
Or take the legal stylings of Kurt Schlichter, who asserts that […] “Where sexual-harassment law once protected women from being forced to be the playthings of crude lechers, it’s been transformed to enforcing a prim puritanism that drains the humor and humanity from the workplace.”
[…]
Rep. Steve King doubled down on this theme, calling sexual harassment “a terrible concept,” and lamenting the tendency “to define an action by the perception of the perceived victim.”
Aaand from an AP article on rising gender segregation in Israel (h/t Jezebel):
Some supermarkets in ultra-Orthodox communities, once content to urge women patrons to dress modestly with long-sleeved blouses and long skirts, have now assigned separate hours for men and women - another practice seen in ultra-Orthodox communities in the U.S. Some health clinics have separate entrances and waiting rooms for men and women.
Meni Shwartz-Gera, an ultra-Orthodox journalist, says strict observance of modesty is a pillar of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and is being “wickedly” misrepresented as demeaning to women. People who dislike it can choose different options like supermarkets without special hours for men and women, he said.
“The purpose is not to denigrate women,” he said.
WOMEN, amirite?! Whether we’re getting our tits admired or being told to cover every inch of our skin, we’re incapable of realizing that we’re being PAID A COMPLIMENT.
Porn stars and genre writers are both trying, in very different ways, to satisfy a basic human need for a transcendent experience, something that takes you out of yourself. People — who feel imprisoned in these bodies, these lives, these surroundings — crave escapism and fantasy, but also a feeling of connection to a world where implausible things happen.
“
| — | Charlie Jane Anders, my ever-loving hero, responds to the Glen Duncan NYTBR piece I didn’t even know about until now. One of the advantages of overseas travel — you get to skip over all the ridiculous crap that happens at home. |
Wow..
No kidding. Steve Jobs was incredibly flexible through the hips.
In the middle of all the remembrances yesterday, I saw a few tweets along the lines of “Arab-American Entrepreneur Steve Jobs Dies”/”Why Are You Making It A Big Deal That His Biological Dad Was an Arab”/”What, You Think It Somehow Diminishes His Life?” etc. etc., and I thought, oh yeah, I totally forgot that about him. But this photo? He looks exactly, but exactly, like my father-in-law and his Syrian expat friends who all hung out together in Grenoble in the ’70s. Except Steve brought his computer, I guess.
oh man, this interview.
“This is true. My father belonged to a Jewish social club. The day of my barmitzvah he got word [through the club] that he had, no longer, a family. Everyone was gone. And he laid down in bed. I remember this so vividly. And my mother said to me, ‘Papa can’t come.’ And I was having the big party at the colonial club, the old mansion in Brooklyn. And I said, ‘How can Papa not come to my barmitzvah?’ And I screamed at him, ‘You gotta get up, you gotta get up!’ And of course he did. And the only thing I remember is looking at him when the guests burst into For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow. And my father’s face was vivid, livid, and I knew I had done something very bad, that I had made him suffer more than he had to. This 13-year-old ersatz man.”
— Maurice Sendak, interviewed at the Guardian. All octogenarian gay Jewish writer curmudgeons will henceforth be measured against him.
