Hi, everyone! I am back from my hiatus and have missed you awfully. For the first few weeks I was like, Yeah! Freedom! No blog posts to write!, but then pretty soon I felt forlorn at not hearing from you, and I have this new Nook where you can highlight passages, which means I don’t have to constantly be at war with myself about whether this one passage is entirely awesome enough to be worth dogearing a poor little book what never did me any harm. I can just press highlight. Er, but anyway, so, I have missed you, and…
81 CommentsReading the End Posts
Lovely people, I am bowing at last to the inevitable and going on an Official Blogging Hiatus. I have not been a reliable blogger for ages, pretty much since I moved to New York, and I’ve realized that — for the time being at least — the idea of blogging makes me tired and stressed, instead of excited and energized as in days of yore. I feel guilty when I skive off blogging to do fun New York things, and I feel guilty when I skive off social outings to do blogging. So I’m taking a break for the summer,…
80 CommentsBefore we get to the excellent Delusions of Gender, which I can’t believe it took me so long to read, a word about my blogging habits. I have been (sing it with me if you know the words) the worst blogger ever. My commute, while not bad for New York, is a time-killer, I’m trying very hard to be as social a butterfly as my introverty brain and publishing job budget will permit me, and recently I’ve been spending a lot of time trying to learn to pronounce Russian personal pronouns. They are harder to pronounce than you’d think. All…
46 CommentsYou know what I’m happy about? I’m happy that before reading The Defining Decade — which was judgmentally delivered to me at my office without any explanation I could discern as to why it was being delivered to me, so I could only conclude that the universe thinks I’m doing my twenties wrong (which I am not) and would like to help me out with it — I saw the second episode of the HBO show Girls, in which Lena Dunham’s character glances at a relationship-rules book and says that she hate-read it in the Detroit airport once. I’m glad…
21 CommentsY’all, I wish I could teleport. If I had back the two hours a day I currently spend getting to and from work, I would be the awesomest book blogger instead of the very lamest. I have been going back and forth and forth and back to work and to visit friends-and-relations, and these are good times to read but it is not the funnest reading time because I’m slightly on edge from being in transit (trains are very peaceful and pleasant, but buses and subways are not). And I would like to be using that time to catch up…
23 CommentsI’ve been meaning to post about this for ages and I kept on forgetting. Now we have discovered that Charlie Kaufman is writing The Knife of Never Letting Go movie, it feels timely for me to talk about my dream cast for these movies. This is going to be a little indulgent, but you know how there are some days when you are an unstoppable good idea machine, and your ideas please you so much that no amount of praise for your genius can ever be enough? Well, that’s what happened to me when my adjunct sister Lil Splotch posted…
26 CommentsYou know that Philip Larkin poem? You definitely do. Even if you don’t know anything about Philip Larkin you have probably heard: This Be the Verse They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do, They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you. But they were fucked up in their turn By fools in old-style hats and coats, Who half the time were soppy-stern And half at one another’s throats. Man hands on misery to man. It deepens like a coastal shelf. Get out as early…
32 CommentsMea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Here’s what happened. The lovely and beautiful Jeanne, who has probably the best blog name out there and is also just an awesome person, sent me The Gone-Away World for my birthday last year. It came in the mail and was a complete and delightful surprise, and I was so touched, and I started reading The Gone-Away World right away because Jeanne said it was one of her favorite books ever. Immediately had no idea what the hell was happening. There were, like, pigs? And some sort of pipe disaster that maybe had…
28 Comments