January 2011
41 posts
On a certain type of morning
White running shoes and black tights: I look down at them as I urge my feet to move and think I am not ashamed. But it strikes me that I am without dignity.
This is my first day of my new walking-to-work regime: I am living in a new flat that is just close enough to make it realistic, and just expensive enough to make it necessary. At King’s Cross, I swerve in to the station: I have already...
“Redkokateri fant ima sposobnost iz prikritih znakov, ki mu jih pošilja punca,...”
– Ti in tvoj moški: zakaj sta si tako različna? - Seks in razmerja - Cosmopolitan Slovenija
Yay, I’m quoted in SLOVENIAN COSMO. I hope I am saying something smart.
“Pleased as I am that a firm line is being taken against this pair and their...”
– Sadly, Andy Gray didn’t develop his ideas about women in a vacuum | Deborah Orr | Comment is free | The Guardian (via bridgetorr)
“In 1946, I went back to Bratislava and found out that my mother and brother had...”
– The Holocaust, Rwanda, Cambodia … survivors tell their stories | World news | The Guardian
Elisabeth Donnelly: Real Amazon Reviews →
elisabethdonnelly:
One star for Laura Lippman’s Baltimore Blues: A Letdown for Rowers, January 11, 2010
By
[redacted]
This review is from: Baltimore Blues: A Tess Monaghan Novel (Tess Monaghan Mysteries) (Hardcover)
I read about one novel per decade. I picked up this one, having heard that…
tumbling maîtresse: Happy Virginia Woolf's... →
maitresse:
Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daughter of Leslie and Julia Prinsep Stephen, born on 25th January 1882, descended from a great many people, some famous, others obscure; born into a large connection, born not of rich parents, but of well-to-do parents, born into a very…
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On hardening
The first time I met you, L says, you asked me if I had any antibiotic ointment. And I thought, ‘what a wuss’.
It’s been two undergraduate degrees-worth of time since we were together in Montreal, but it’s easy to relax back in to our old ways, to sit on a sofa and talk over bad television. We recall the boys we should not have dated and the tequila we should not have...
“…makes me feel like I am working as a file clerk at an allergy clinic in a...”
– Me, to a friend, in an email: a recollection. Good times! There were about eight women working in the back room. My job (as a temp) was to file the patient’s medical records, which I greatly enjoyed reading. Life lesson: allergic reactions to broccoli do not cause male pattern baldness. One of...
On what it's like sometimes, being a woman
So. I’m moving today. The man in the van is meant to be coming at noon and around ten-thirty I realised that my four-day-old phone has stopped working. Which means that the van driver can’t communicate with me about where I am, where he can park, when he is turning up. So. This is a nightmare.
So. I go across the street to a pound shop buy some more enormous tartan laundry bags in...
“Being freed from the tyranny of the physical sheet of blank paper allows you to...”
– This Recording (via somethingchanged)
This is an interesting one. I have always written on a computer. My handwriting has become atrocious as a result. However, my gentleman friend - also a writer - writes two drafts I everything by hand. Two drafts! Oh, how I scoffed. But he explained it thus:...
“Johann: How would you feel if someone had pimped out your mother?
Kenneth:...”
– Kenneth Tong: the Transcript, Part Two (where I started getting angry) : Johann Hari
An extraordinarily disturbing interview with an apparent sociopath, by Johann Hari.
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On packing
I hate it. That’s original, right? But I really do have this belief that there are some people out there who are so good at packing that they enjoy it. I imagine that they tear brown tape in perfect lines and label each box with its contents, the elements of which are stacked ideal Tetris-like matrices so that not a whit of space is wasted. When I am mid-pack I sit in the midst of the chaos...
“Christina-Taylor Green was nine years old, and is dead. It is hard to stop...”
– Close Read: Holding Giffords’s Hand : The New Yorker
(via noraleah, via peterwknox)
“Arizona has recently passed a law allowing anybody to carry a concealed weapon...”
– US gun crime: death for sale | World news | The Guardian
On a tuna fish sandwich
I passed the audition! the sandwich says. It’s written on a green label in the shape of a starburst, lending the sandwich an air of exuberance. I passed! I can be your SANDWICH!
But the tuna nicoise sandwich is not a new sandwich; it is my old favourite sandwich that I used to eat most days for lunch, back in the old days when my job was shit but the world was my oyster. At one...
“I’m afraid I was a nuisance about money, but I have this nightmare where I...”
– John Cheever, courtesy the great Olivia Laing.
Two Americas. →
jayparkinsonmd:
Is it okay to sacrifice 31,224 people a year due to our “right” to carry guns?
The fact that there are two Americas, the educated and the uneducated, has never been so obvious. Some people who care about 31,224 dead people want to do everything possible to stop the carnage. Others want to…
What happened in Arizona yesterday has left me so aghast that I can’t write...
Joan Smith: Gender inequality, not race, fosters... →
… the common factor is a misogyny that dehumanises women and very young girls.
Too many of us treat young white women as trash →
Barbara Ellen, the Observer.
Popular New Year's Resolutions on USA.gov →
So I am writing an article on New Year’s resolutions - obviously - and discovered that the US government actually has a list of official, government-sanctioned resolutions. Which is sort of sweet. Or sinister. One of those.
Why are London buses numbered in the way that they... →
This is extremely interesting! When I first moved to London I often took the number 1 bus to college and I assumed that it must be the first, most important bus. Evidently I was wrong.
“I’m not going to be some archaic overbearing man-beast…”
– John Jannuzzi, author of To My Wife (via glamourmagazine)
Sometimes it’s all about the reporting.
Vaccine-Autism Link Not Only Wrong, But an... →
trustjondaly:
One of the most famous flawed studies ever conducted, Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s now-retracted 1998 paper that linked vaccines to autism has been found to be not a scientific error, but a deliberate…
Well, this is not surprising, but so dispiriting. For more on the subject, I highly recommend the first act of this episode of This American Life, “Ruining It For The Rest Of...
“The first hotel chain that offers an on-call psychologist will make a fortune on...”
– Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Dream Jobs That You’re Glad You Didn’t Pursue.
Truth (via fluffynotes)
“If these sorts of stories were published in Denmark, the reaction would be: what...”
– Is it better to bring up kids in Denmark? | Life and style | The Guardian
I quite love Denmark.
“When first presented with this cover, I actually cried.”
– Writings | Kiri Blakeley - Can’t Think Straight
Following yesterday’s discussions re book covers, I happened upon this heart-wrenching description of one author’s reaction to her book’s cover. Which she hated. Which still went on the book.
On eating crunchy foods while listening to my iPod
An impossible combination! Which is sad when all I am longing for is to concurrently enjoy the simple pleasures of a delicious apple and Sam Cooke.
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On archival research
My only New Year’s resolution is to finish a draft of the novel I’ve been working on for a while…at some point. Maybe before I turn 30, which is something else I’ll be doing this year. I’m not going to mention it again because talking about writing goals without having a project commissioned is a great way to not achieve writing goals.
But it’s worth...