Now I shall thrill you with seven facts about me. Here are the rules for thrilling others in turn:
• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.
In the spirit of laziness, I’m going to match my facts to Mr. Marcotte’s:
1. I am a grad school dropout. Washington State University. Would have had my Master’s in English Literature (pronounced: “lit-rit-shuh”) in 1997. Instead, I dropped out and got a low-paying job copyediting a dirt bike magazine. Huh huh huh. “Supermotard.” Huh huh huh.
2. I sang a lot in high school and college. In the former, I sang alto and was always cast as the town whore in the school musical. In the latter, I sang first soprano and nearly had a heart attack singing a solo in the Carmina Burana whilst under the influence of five cups of very strong coffee.
3. I once broke my foot playing paintball. I jumped into a foxhole and landed wrong. (That’s what she said.)
4. In ninth grade, I wrote half an epic poem about The Smiths. It fizzled out after 30 pages. But what pages they were…
5. I was my high school band drum major. I spent 10 minutes of every Friday night leading 100 similarly unathletic kids in an attempt to distract you from getting a sloppy joe at the concession stand at halftime. You know who you are.
6. I have seen every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer no fewer than 10 times. It’s no Paradise Lost, but it’s not entirely dissimilar.
7. I once co-choreographed and performed a large-scale lip sync and dance number to TMBG’s Fingertips.
People about whom I would like to know more facts:
Ryan Sims (bonus if he can do it entirely with song lyrics)
Wilson Miner
Laura Brunow Miner
Mark Trammell
Julie Melton
Lawrence Yang
Matt Rubin
Now I shall thrill you with seven facts about me. Here are the rules for thrilling others in turn:
In the spirit of laziness, I’m going to match mine to Mr. Marcotte’s.
People about whom I would like to know more facts:
I’m not talking about Lulu or Blurb. I’m talking about publishing the olden, moldy, Miss Havisham-y way: Finding an agent, shopping a book around, securing a deal, getting a write-up in any publication with the words “New York” in the title, selling even a modest amount of copies, and going on a book tour where you drink $2 bottles of treacly chardonnay out of plastic cups and make obscure jokes that people wearing thick plastic-framed glasses, $200 jeans, and worn-out Chuck Taylors — in other words, people painfully, exactly like me — will Twitter about later.
So why would any author in his or her right mind complain about getting published the old-fashioned way? Easy! Because his or her book has been banished to the dark side of the publishing moon: the Young Adult market.
At least, that’s been the prevailing sentiment amongst authors who thought they had written Oprah’s Book Club novels only to find their publisher pimping it to the WB crowd. Which, as this article wisely concludes, is a big fat load of horseshit.
True, it is strange that publishers and marketing departments have tunnel vision concerning coming-of-age books. If it’s about anyone under the age of 18, well, then it’s clearly meant for readers under the age of 18. By that logic, only rabbits should be reading Watership Down.
But maybe it’s something less demographic and more stylistic that makes a publisher say “this is a Young Adult book.” Maybe it’s a certain unselfconsciousness of voice. A directness, a purity, a lack of pretense. And maybe that is something to celebrate, not denigrate.
Now comes the part where I say “some of my favorite books are Young Adult books.” And I list books like Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and John Knowles’s A Separate Peace and E.L. Konigsburg’s From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler and practically everything by Neil Gaiman. To paraphrase The Smiths, don’t forget the books that made you cry and the books that saved your life. I’ll wager a good portion of yours have “Young Adult” somewhere on the title page, too.
And thank the stars for that. And for J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer and Christopher Paolini and every other writer who isn’t arrogantly ashamed to write for young adults. Without them, it won’t matter how many endnotes David Foster Wallace can fit on a page or what the Cormac McCarthy body count is. Without them, there will be no more readers.
]]>After I saw his cover for On the Road, I spent hours poring over Jez’s work. As a result, I discovered that Jez is a writer’s designer. He appreciates the written word, he takes inspiration from it, and he incorporates it into his visual designs in both obvious and subtle ways.
So I did what any self-respecting copywriter/design fangirl with her own sporadically updated, loosely web content-focused website would do: I asked Jez for an interview.
As it turns out, Jez Burrows is also a scholar and a gentleman. I know this because he said so. Not in so many words. Rather, in these...
BRONWYN: After the 2008 Penguin Design Awards were announced, a lot of people responded more favorably to your second-prize-winning cover design for Jack Kerouac’s On The Road than they did to the judges’ choice for first prize. Perusing some comments on the web, I’m finding that many people who loved your entry haven’t read On The Road — unlike the Penguin judges, who have. Do you think it’s more important to craft cover designs for classics that appeal to new readers of these works or to existing fans?
JEZ: I think I’d lean toward appealing to new readers over appeasing old ones, but I think there’s room for a cover that can do both. Those covers for the Penguin Classics Deluxe series (particularly the Chris Ware and Tom Gauld ones) are a good example; they’re beautifully illustrated and finished, to a point where I think they could easily snare both kinds of people.
The submission guidelines for the Penguin Design Award ask you to include “a couple of sentences on which Penguin cover you most admire and why.” What did you say?
I said Derek Birdsall’s cover for Chosen Words by Ivor Brown, but my answer to that question changes literally every time I’m asked. There are too many beautiful covers in Penguin’s history to choose just one. I think the Birdsall cover appeals to the design nerd in me; the one who likes grids a little more than is socially acceptable. There were plenty of covers that showed off just how versatile that famous Marber grid was, but Chosen Words is one of my favourites. That Penguin Classics Deluxe series I mentioned is pretty wonderful, too.
One of your projects, I Am The Friction features “short stories inspired by illustrations” and “illustrations inspired by short stories.” I think people often conjure images associated with stories they read, but do you find yourself conjuring stories associated with images you see?
Not often, no. I enjoy doing it, and I think it made for some interesting results in that book, but it’s not my first inclination when I see really great images.
What is your first inclination? Is it more emotional?
I’d say so. But also practical, perhaps? As I designer I find it quite hard to look at an image without trying to work out how it was made, or why the colour scheme works, or a hundred other things that I might be able to learn from and apply to future work of mine.
You created a set of postcards called “Be Good To Them Always,” inspired by a song on The Books’ “Lost and Safe” album. That song contains a quote from W.H. Auden that appears on your “A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods” print. (I read a review of “Lost and Safe” that misprinted the lyrics of “Be Good To Them Always” as “A culture is no better than its words,” which I thought was a funny little malapropism.) Did you know of the Auden quote first or did the album lead you to it?
No, no. I wasn’t familiar with that Auden poem before hearing that song, but I immediately felt a massive kinship with it when I did. Around that time I’d been starting to think a lot about work involving town and countryside (having moved from a very rural area to a big city to study graphic design), and that poem was a huge catalyst for continuing to explore that idea. I’m still very interested in it. It’s definitely a big part of who I am.
How do you respond to these intersections of literature and music in your design work?
I’m really fascinated by language and peculiar turns of phrase. Sometimes it’ll be short quotes or lyrics — as in “Be Good To Them Always” — and sometimes entire bodies of work, like the Destroyer’s Rubies print I recently put out. That print is by far one of the most satisfying things I’ve worked on. I’m actually planning a series in a similar vein. Indie rock and infographics make pretty good partners, I think. I just started transcribing the next album a couple of days ago.
Your answer to the If You Could project’s central question “If you could do anything tomorrow, what would it be?” was “start writing a novel.” Your response is comic, but what kind of novel would you write?
A commercially dubious one, probably. When I was reading for my final year dissertation, I found a brilliant quote in a very dry book about pop music and semiotics that said something along the lines of “all art aspires to the instancy of music.” I don’t think that’s strictly true, but I definitely sympathise with the idea. I love language and I know it can do incredible things, but if I ever come close to writing something that even barely approximates the feeling I get from music, I’ll be happy.
Who writes the sorts of novels you wish you could write?
As far as writers go, Jonathan Safran-Foer probably comes closest to writing what I wish I was writing. Quaint but not sickly, tricksy but not arrogant, and immaculately detailed — not to mention emotionally exhausting (in the best possible way). Other than that, I’m a McSweeney’s faithful and a longtime fan of Haruki Murakami. I’ve also just recently gotten into George Saunders.
]]>This time, it’s of the musical variety. Behold this article and video in which the ironically mustachioed* frontman of a band called Creaky Boards accuses Chris Martin of stealing a song called, not-mustache-ironically, “The Songs I Didn’t Write.”
To this, I say: Meh. It sounds sorta similar, but not similar enough. Then again, what is similar enough?
Ask the folks at the UCLA Law School Copyright Infringement Project. They’ve cataloged musical plagiarism suits by song, so you can get the inside legal scoop on, say, George Harrison v. the Chiffons (actually Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music), or better yet, Fantasy v. Fogerty.
The best thing about this site is the dry legal analysis that accompanies each case study. Take Tin Pan Apple v. Miller Brewing, for example. Once upon a time, Miller Brewing asked rap group The Fat Boys to star in an advertisement, but The Fat Boys declined because they were underage (Aw!). Miller then just went ahead and stuck Joe Piscopo in an inflatable fat suit and had him perform a thinly veiled version of the Fat Boys’ “Stick ’em.” Thus:
This case considers a nettlesome but ineluctable issue in many music infringement cases: at what point do non-protectible [sic] compositional elements like rhythmic motives, instrumental sounds or performance techniques, through their particular combination, become original expression? In the instant case, does the plaintiffs’ use of both a tongue trill and a “hugga hugga” call within the same work mean that they can prevent others from using the same combination of sounds in another work? The court did not decide this ultimate question, but did find that given that merely a “dash” of creativity will satisfy the originality requirement needed for copyright protection (citing Gasté v. Kaiserman [1988] — documented on this website) a jury might find that the Fat Boys’ use of these sounds in “Stick ‘em” constitutes protectible [sic] expression. Given the possibility of a jury determining this, the court denied the defendants’ request for summary judgment.
The ruling went the Fat Boys’ way and “hugga hugga” calls earned copyright protection.
Amen to that.
*Is a mustache really ironic if everyone knows you’re being ironic? Does mustache irony then more closely resemble classical dramatic irony wherein the consequences of the mustachioed personage’s actions are unknown to him but known to his audience? Like what if Jocasta was all “ooh, Oedipus, I really like your ‘Mustache Rides: 10¢’ shirt!”
]]>Thanks to the staggeringly well-read (20 percent!) Sameer for bringing the list to my attention, and to Jason Kottke for bringing it to his.
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
Nowhere Man - Aleksandar Hemon
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Amsterdam - Ian McEwan
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Enduring Love - Ian McEwan
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro
Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
The Stone Diaries - Carol Shields
The Virgin Suicides - Jeffrey Eugenides
Black Dogs - Ian McEwan
Downriver - Iain Sinclair
Possession - A.S. Byatt
Sexing the Cherry - Jeanette Winterson
Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Watchmen - Alan Moore & David Gibbons
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Márquez
Contact - Carl Sagan
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Hawksmoor - Peter Ackroyd
The Piano Teacher - Elfriede Jelinek
Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Sea, The Sea - Iris Murdoch
The Virgin in the Garden - A.S. Byatt
Interview With the Vampire - Anne Rice
Crash - J.G. Ballard
The Black Prince - Iris Murdoch
Slaughterhouse-five - Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
The Nice and the Good - Iris Murdoch
Pilgrimage - Dorothy Richardson
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Collector - John Fowles
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
A Severed Head - Iris Murdoch
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Once and Future King - T.H. White
The Bell - Iris Murdoch
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Under the Net - Iris Murdoch
Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
Casino Royale - Ian Fleming
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton
Native Son - Richard Wright
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Remembrance of Things Past - Marcel Proust
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
Death in Venice - Thomas Mann
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Yellow Wallpaper - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
She - H. Rider Haggard
Silas Marner - George Eliot
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot
The Marble Faun - Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
The House of the Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick - Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
The Pit and the Pendulum - Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher - Edgar Allan Poe
Frankenstein - Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
Emma - Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Adventures of Caleb Williams - William Godwin
The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Aesop’s Fables - Aesopus
I just don’t care for them. Moodboards, that is, not my friends.
Moodboards smack of college dorm room walls: wall-size visual identity crises. “Who am I? Why am I here? What shoes best describe my personality?” All reasonable questions when you’re 17 and have listed your major as “undeclared.” But in a professional context, they appear, to me anyway, as an act of desperation. They are often futile exercises in finding a point of view — by having absolutely no point of view whatsoever.
And I think that’s insulting to us as creative professionals.
Why? Because every creative person has a point of view. Every audience has a point of view. Every client has a point of view. And if you don’t know what all of those are before you start tacking random scraps of magazinery to a piece of foam core, you’ve got much bigger problems than finding an X-Acto knife with which to mutilate last month’s issue of I.D.
Also, by their very nature, moodboards are derivative. It may be true that there are no new ideas. But do we have to be so blatant about it? How can looking at someone else’s interpretation of the soul of a sports car possibly inspire an honest interpretation of the soul of, well, whatever it is we’re trying to find the soul of? I believe that images don’t asexually reproduce from other images. That words don’t grow like mold atop other, older words. I believe creative inspiration is more intangible than that.
That’s not to say we shouldn’t all gleefully do our homework. Reading, watching films, listening to music, taking pictures. These are things we do because we need to. We crave creative stimulus. We hunger for art. And as we feed that hunger, we also feed our individual artistic sensibilities. In other words, we find our point of view. From there, it’s just a matter of putting pen to sketch pad or keyboard to cursor. We’re still exploring new territory, but we’re exploring it with a map, some trail mix, and one of those flannel-covered canteens of cool mountain spring water.
Moodboards are Paris in Las Vegas. They are a bad cover version of your favorite song. They are carob chip cookies. They are pale imitations of true inspiration.
I prefer the real thing.
]]>Billed as “digital fiction from Penguin,” We Tell Stories presents interactive stories from six different authors (or, technically, seven, since Nicci French is “the pseudonym for the writing partnership of journalists Nicci Gerrard and Sean French”) over the course of six weeks. Since I rambled on about how difficult it was for me to read long-form fiction online in my last post, I thought I’d give We Tell Stories a try.
And I think Penguin has cracked it.
The first installment, The 21 Steps by Charles Cumming, is meant as an homage to John Buchan’s The 39 Steps, and it’s a fast-paced little adventure story accompanied by Google map routes (complete with “secret” messages tagged with green arrows) that follow the protagonist through his exploits. You read The 21 Steps in speech bubbles that serve as “pages,” with anywhere from one word to just a few paragraphs per bubble. The experience of reading a story in these small, bite-sized pieces kept me engrossed, online, for a solid hour. That’s right: Despite my earlier protestations about the inherent distractions of the web, I read a short story online, without interruption, and I enjoyed the crap out of it.
The 21 Steps isn’t high literature. It’s completely plot-driven and scores about zero on the emotional inspiration scale, but as a genre piece, it’d be pretty compelling in print. Combine that with even this most rudimentary form of interaction — following someone’s movements across a map — and you get a little taste of what Wilson called “the incredible power of immersion.” And what do you know? The 21 Steps was designed and built by Six to Start: a company that creates “Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) [that]...use multiple media — the web, email, IM, mobile phones, radio, newspapers, TV and live events — to tell a story to hundreds of thousands of people, who can follow and influence the game in real time.”
Six to Start was at SXSW with Cross-Media Cross-Pollination: Mashing Up Video Games and ARGs, but I missed it, and it looks as though a podcast and/or video hasn’t been posted. I’ve yet to play an ARG, and I’m sure it’s exactly the type of thing I could become completely obsessed with for a few months, then burn out and never look back. (Probably exactly why I haven’t played one...). But I could read stories like The 21 Steps all day long. Merely manipulating the presentation of an otherwise fairly straightforward standalone narrative to take advantage of the medium — in this case, the web — may make digital fiction a viable alternative to (though, again, never a substitute for) the book.
I can’t wait for week two.
]]>Jeff Gomez can be kind of ham-fisted and just as bitterly sarcastic as the publishing-industry Luddites he criticizes when he argues against ignoring the realities of our digital world in favor of clinging to some antiquated notion that books are precious artifacts that define us as a civilization. (“The Beverly Hills Diet is a book. Does that mean The Beverly Hills Diet is intrinsic to our humanity?”), but I’m beginning to see his point.
As a technophile, I should embrace any means by which ideas are disseminated electronically. And I do. I read online all the time. I even write about reading online. But I still have this block when it comes to reading narrative fiction — and long-form non-fiction — onscreen. It’s not because I feel the computer is impersonal. I freaking love my computer. It’s not because I can’t “curl up” with digital words. I do that all the time. (My MacBook is so nice and warm! So cozy!) What bothers me about reading long-form writing onscreen is that, well, I can’t. I can’t focus for long enough because I’ve subconsciously trained myself to behave differently with onscreen text than I do with text on paper.
Naturally, it’s the Internet’s fault. I spend my entire day flitting between blog post, Flickr photostream, online news article, iChat, and email. The things I read online have to be packaged up in nice, easily digestible maki rolls of information so I can read them in intervals (or read them later). Otherwise, I tune out. There’s too much competing for my attention on that bright, shiny screen. And Gomez’s assertion that the failure of eBooks is a failure to provide digitized books for existing devices (i.e., the iPhone) rings false to me because there’s plenty to distract me even on my iPhone. (Seriously. I’m dropping pins all over the place these days.)
I still love books. I love them in spite of what Gomez seems to think is a foolish attachment to the packaging surrounding ideas, when what we should be treasuring are the ideas themselves. And I’m by no means alone in my love for books. But maybe, just maybe, I’m hopelessly out of touch.
Because, according to Gomez, your average teenager does not love books. She doesn’t give a crap about books. She may still care about ideas, and she may read and read and read those little bits of written information on the web, but she doesn’t read books. I may have pooh-poohed Steve Jobs’s specific “people don’t read” statistic, but I’m not so naive that I believe — in the face of all the evidence — that reading isn’t in serious trouble.
I get indignant about the death of print because I do genuinely believe that the book is still the best, most convenient, least distracting way to disseminate long-form writing. To Gomez’s point, though, that doesn’t matter if the next generation can’t be bothered to read at all. It could be that in order to save reading, we’re going to have to deliver words in a format that the next generation has already adopted and not insist on clinging to the belief that the book is sacred.
I’m not sure this will work. It certainly hasn’t so far. eBooks keep failing just as literacy rates drop. Should we make everything in print available digitally? Absolutely. If it encourages someone who might not otherwise read to do so, by all means. But will someone really read a novel on his iPod or iPhone or laptop when music, video, blogs, email, and text messages can — and will — wrench his attention away at any given moment?
That leaves us with some sort of dedicated reading device, like the Kindle. Except, as I’ve said before, the Kindle doesn’t improve on the book. (Gomez would argue that it does, but I wonder how often he uses the World Clock on his iPod. Just because something has more features doesn’t mean you’re going to use them.) That leaves us with the book. And with self-publishing sites like Lulu.com, who stand to make a lot of cash riding The Long Tail.
I may be forced to eat my words about the book vs. the digital book. I’m prepared to do that. I’m just not prepared to give up my books.
]]>“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
-Steve Jobs on the Amazon Kindle
I could spend the rest of this post saying things like “hey, Steve, doesn’t that mean that sixty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or more last year?” Or pointing in the direction of the nearest behemoth bookstore superchain whilst making “duh” face. Or mentioning that I don’t think Amazon became the number-one online retailer in the universe by selling flyfishing accessories.
The comments on every site that published this quote are positively aglow with this kind of gleeful reactionary outrage. All over a statistic I can’t find anywhere — except in that quote.
This is because crazy genius billionaires make stuff up.
In fact, most crazy geniuses become billionaires by making stuff up. iPod? That’s a word from a language I invented when I was eight in order to secretly communicate with my imaginary dog-faced friend, Jorb from Orb. Okay, no. But it could have been, for all its made-upedness. And the iPod itself is a shiny fruit fallen to earth from an enchanted tree in a mystical fairy land populated entirely by crazy geniuses.
Really great ideas tend to be unique. Or, at least, they transform just-okay ideas into really great ideas by adding something unique.
If the Kindle fails, it won’t be because it’s ugly or because it uses only one font or because people don’t read anymore. It will fail because of a lack of imagination. The book was a fucking great idea. Seriously ace. Thank you, Aldus Manutius, you 15th-century Venetian crazy genius. The Kindle is not a unique idea, nor does it improve on Manutius’s really great idea.
Arthur C. Clarke, who has written way more about failure of imagination, once said, “Nothing will ever replace books. They can’t be matched for convenience, random access, nonvolatile memory (unless dropped in the bath), low power consumption, portability, etc.”
Of course, that hasn’t stopped Clarke from giving Amazon whatever permission it needs to turn some of his works into Kindle editions. But, hey: Crazy geniuses can also become billionaires by hedging their bets.
]]>I do this All. The. Time. It’s like I feel obligated to fill any empty space with words, even if those words amount to nothing more than completely useless commentary on what I’m currently doing.
“Puttin’ on my headphones.”
“Goin’ to the kitchen.”
“Lookin’ for my Sharpie.”
“Delete!”
I rarely make New Year’s resolutions, but as this is occurring to me so close to January 1st, I think I’m going to try to be more respectful of the space words occupy instead of letting them pile up in the air like non-biodegradable disposable diapers or those hangery things that hold new pairs of socks together.
I will also endeavor to curb my use of cheap vending machine trinkets such as “like,” “sweet,” and “awesome,” as they seem somewhat undignified for a woman of my advancing age.
I will likely fail to do either of these things. But at the very least, I will think more about where my words come from and if they should be wasted on something like “now, where are my keys?”
Maybe I should just blurt out non sequiturs that have nothing to do with my current actions. I could sharpen a pencil (something I practically never do) and say “just walkin’ the gerbil.” Or put on my coat and say “Pinchbeck!” That way, I could usher underused words into the world. So they can get out. Stretch their consonants. Get some exercise.
Snaffle!
]]>Web copywriters need to get hired in the first place. Then we* can enjoy the dubious luxury of going on strike. The picket signs will read thusly: </p>
No. Instead, I’m going to write about music!
I love British music. Britpop, Britrock, even a bit of Britclassical. I listened to British music almost exclusively in my youth. I grew up in a small town on the edge of Appalachia, and British music talked about things I had absolutely no frame of reference for. Which was awesome. I wanted to be British quite badly, in fact. But I’ve been listening to more and more American music over the last five or so years. And I’ve been wondering why that is. And if there’s a difference between the souls of the two. And this is what I’ve come up with. (Sweeping generalizations, go forth and prosper.)
We had Pearl Harbor and 9/11. But Britain had the Blitz. We had 1776. But Britain had 1066. Even if rock ‘n’ roll was born in America, the sneering cynicism that often accompanies it is very British indeed. I hear the inevitability of disappointment in British music. British music has been there and done that. British music likes to smirk and say “I told you so.”
I hear hope in American music. Lost hope, maybe, but hope nonetheless. In American music, jilted lovers are always surprised. Cars are always cool. The moon always looks sooo pretty — even when your heart is busted into a billion tiny pieces.
Sometimes I don’t want to hear hope. Sometimes I want to be snarky in a different accent and with better shoes. It’s the writer in me. Snarkiness is next to godliness. Sometimes, though, hope just suits me better.
Also, I’m American. And I’m learning to deal with that.
*I’m speaking of the royal we here. I am one of the few, the happy few, who is paid to be a full-time web copywriter. Praise Jeebus.
]]>How refreshing, then, to learn of cynical fortune cookies. I tire of cryptic pronouncements and mindless proverbs issuing forth from the hollow recesses of my dessert. I want a hint of bile mixed in with my fried rice and hot ‘n’ sour soup. Not literally, of course. Unless that’s the secret ingredient in Eric’s mango chicken, in which case, keep it coming.
But let’s try to be equitable here. Let’s recognize that we all need a little encouragement now and then. Let’s see some “you look fabulous” or “you’re so clever” or “have you lost weight?” fortunes. Or, better yet, let’s expand the reach of tiny, written messages beyond the crunchy-yet-largely-flavorless folds of ethnic cookiedom. Let’s leave them on pillows. Let’s pass them in class. Let’s stuff them into our coworkers’ mobile phone holsters in much the same way one might stuff a crisp Hamilton into the G-string of a particularly bendy stripper.
And on today of all days, this our sacred day of make-believe, let’s endeavor to be honest and good.
Even when we’re wearing fake animal parts.
Amen.
]]>That's the thing about books. If I could, I'd build a room entirely made out of books. I love the way they smell. I love the way they feel. I love the things they say. I'm starting to sound like I'd come on to a book in a bar, which I very likely would. You know, depending on its cover.
But most importantly, I'm no worse off for reading 20 pages of a book and putting it back on my shelf then I am for not reading those 20 pages at all. I come back to books after many years, either to read them again or to read them for the first time. I have an entire kingdom of discovery just waiting for me on my cheaply chic Crate & Barrel folding shelves. (Those things come in very handy when you move as much as I do.) I read two, three, four books at once and finish one. I follow the trail of references from one book to another. If I don't find my way back to the first one, well, that's fine. I mean, it's all about the journey, not the destination, right?
So I want to take this opportunity to offer some liberating words to those of you who claim you don't have the attention span or the time or the interest to finish a book: Fuck finishing. Start and see where that takes you.
]]>This is a difficult thing for many of my friends to reconcile. I am not a girly girl. But I am a girl. Which means, by all rights, I should not give a crap what quarterback rushed for 1,039 yards last season, who fractured his fibula, who got arrested for illegal dogfighting, or who’s being sued for giving someone herpes. (Interestingly, only one player that I know of has accomplished all of these feats, and his real name is not Ron Mexico.)
If I were just watching football on TV, I probably would give less of a crap about these things. However, I play fantasy football. Which means I have to pretend that real-life football guys play on an imaginary team that I own. For money. Only they don’t listen to me no matter how much I yell at them. This makes yelling at other people whose real-life football guys can’t hear them pretty much the best part of fantasy football.
Since this blog is meant to be at least peripherally related to the written word, I should probably try and do a better job of linking language with fantasy football. But I can’t. Other than the yelling.
What I can do is fulfill my promise to the herd of randy, unwashed armchair quarterbacks with whom I have consented to play in my second fantasy football league this season and ask if there are any other women who would like to join our league. Previous fantasy football experience is required, and you can apply for the job by sending me an email with the subject line “Boys Are Smelly.”
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