Brittany Murphy

My stepdad announced to me this morning that Brittany Murphy had died and my first thought was “ED.” I don’t know if that’s right or wrong, though evidence indicates the former.

It’s godawful sad she died, in any case, but if it was because of body-image struggles, I sincerely hope that her death will remind people just how serious EDs are. As Jezebel said, Murphy’s story is one of “self-destruction and mass-destruction, the business of creating and destroying a star; sometimes it’s caused by internal forces, and sometimes its fed by the rest of the world.”

Of course, reading about this tragedy unspools itself into all different directions when you have internet access. You start watching clips from her movie, Girl, Interrupted and reading about celebrities with EDs and thinking that you’ve probably had 500 calories today and how much does that suck? And really, if someone as beautiful as Murphy hated how she looked, what are the rest of us going to do?

Maybe I’ll just link you. Sarcastically.

Lara Stone is a fatty

It’s Posh’s fault that everyone hates their body

Everyone’s stupid, except for Nabokov

Scarlett O’Hara is awesome (no sarcasm here)

America! Misogyny! Fuck yeah!

I think you mean, “Really fucking hot in a no-nonsense way.”

I know King’s style, and it was progressive for its time, in some ways. I wish he hadn’t commented on Maddow’s appearance at all, since that action is reinforcing the same bullshit that excuses people to call her ugly. Still, it’s nice to have the King’s approval.

Nabokov on Dostoevsky, and the latter on Tolstoy

There are two kinds of people in the world: people who like Dostoevsky and people who hate him. My boyfriend likes the D and I do not. “Impassioned, idea-driven fiction?” or one of Nabokov’s many burns about his mediocrity ?

Of course, Nabokov’s opinion is one I’m gonna trust in this case, as a native Russian and student of its literature. But if you’re of the Dostoevskian persuasion, maybe you should look into this. There’s no accounting for taste. Even if Dostoevsky didn’t think Tolstoy was that great.

Bad Santa and “one-handed literature”

In case you were worried, last night’s post ended up being a little bleaker than reality played out. A friend called and I went to watch people play chess, do fake card tricks, and talk. I also got high with something a little stronger than I’m used to; I’m pretty sure there were some auditory hallucinations, which was pretty cool. Even if all I heard was this.

But I should catch up.  Emails from my cyberspace myrmidons were piling up with juicy factoids and linkies.

There is, for example, a blog on the intersection of Nabokov and pornography, which I think is worth looking into more deeply, if you’re the sort of person who is, you know, interesting.

FTBlawg:

“In his afterword to Lolita, Nabokov, suggests (remembering childhood fairy stories) that consumers of pornography needed what he called ‘sutures of sense’ so as not to feel cheated as they skip-read. He also suggested that pornographers were doomed to adding more and more characters and combinations. ‘In de Sade they call the gardener in.’”

This, too. I don’t know if I’m highlighting for the perverted or what.

“Lolita was after all first published, as Nabokov put it, ‘by a supplier of ‘one-handed literature’, before a mainstream publisher decided to cash in on scandal and greatness. In Spain, people sometimes referred to crime books as ‘el mayordomo’ – the butler.”

Apparently, people have been out to get Santa since he dropped the “six to eight black men” thing.  His hedonism, this article argues, is what pisses people off so much.

“He is anarchy incarnate, a larger-than-life figure who brings children joy and love in defiance of priggish rules and social conventions.”

santa, is that you?

Dude, I guess. But I will agree that using his weight as a target of moralizing by people who hate fat people, or, more generally, who hate people, is a very real problem. It’s gross to give a shit how much a pretend grandpa weighs. That’s like getting bent out of shape about whether or not Dumbledore is gay.

The disadvantages of being a wallflower. A lame one.

The good part about being a mentally-ill shut-in during high school is that you don’t want to go out.

an illustration of the situation

But now that I do, and I’m in my hometown, no one is around to pal around with.   Christmas sucks, because my options are playing Scrabble online with a cat on my lap and a dog in my crotch or watching Tom and Jerry with a couple of three-year-olds.

Since I’ve already seen all the episodes, Scrabble it is.  I can’t even believe I’m blogging about this; my evening could be a weak send-up of eastern elites who feel the need to alert the world about their every bowel-movement with a latte in hand.  The thing is, I’m my own caricature: a Friday night loser, whose dad even has a college party to go to (I’m not fucking kidding).  And I just found out the reason why the dog was my best friend was because she was hungry.

Not to complain too much, but this is just another reason why the season sucks.  If it’s not partying too hard like last year, it’s bending over backwards to find a party, or even a friend, that never materializes.  It’s sort of rough to go out to bars all by your lonesome if you are looking to go back home alone.

I’m not gonna panic about Nine

I knew it probably wasn’t going to be that great, objectively speaking. I mean, Fergie and Kate Hudson are in it. I think the universe is a place of balance, and if you’re going to craft a film with DDL and Judi Dench, you have to compensate by scraping the bottom of the barrel, a little bit.

I’m still going to see it, even if it seems like Fergie is the stand-out in all of this:

“Fergie, on the other hand, practically stops the movie. She’s fortunate enough to have the show’s finest and catchiest number, Be Italian, and after I watched her slink her way through it, I wished — even though I’m an adamant nonsmoker — there was a bed around so I could flop back on it and have a cigarette. Fergie, who gained some weight for this role, is a voluptuous, purely sexual presence, and a deliciously lethal-looking one: She looks as if she could crush boulders between those thighs. Imagine what she could do to Day-Lewis!”

“Fergie, as an oh-so-Fellini-esque beach drifter, turns herself into a wild electric siren.”

Yeah, this breaks my fucking heart. I’m hoping we’ll get a Christmas miracle, or something. But I will fine something to like, dammit, even if it’s only the leading man’s mug.

Night moves; nostalgia; Islam

It’s late at night, and I’m at my mother’s house. Everyone but me is sleeping; my high school friend bailed on me, and I feel sort of lonely. My man is somewhere else.

Of course it’s dark outside, but it feels particularly dark tonight. My mom’s house is big and quiet, except for the sounds of my sisters sleeping. My older sister, autistic and drowsy, told me she would have a dream about me. She let me floss her teeth and patiently allowed me to tuck her in.

That sort of thing always makes me nostalgic. It makes me feel like a kid again. And I’m home, or in the place that used to be my home. The dog knows me and my mom got me to rub her back and my stepdad and I shot the shit in the back yard. He made dinner, and it was poor people dinner (canned Campbell’s, fried onions. The man makes mashed potatoes from a box, for God’s sake. It’s actually easier for me to relate to him than with my mom in some ways, because I get the impression she was raised upper-middle-class, or something close to it) – my mom will never break him of that. That also made me feel like a kid again.

I feel sort of thoughtful right now. The internet seems small, and the things that would normally have me interested are sort of pale. I’ve been watching a video by a Wafa Sultan and her beef with Islam, but I can’t get worked up about it either pro or con. Sure, it’s my secret opinion that every religion is yet another tool to oppress people, and particularly women (which makes things awkward with my boyfriend, who is both religious and one of the loveliest people I know, and certainly the most egalitarian man I’ve ever been with) but I don’t think it’s useful to call other people stupid and piss them off by calling their faith “backwards.” They think the same of me, and what does that accomplish?

I suppose my beliefs about the evils of religion are about as irrational as I think religion is, but the best I can do is work on it. I can understand Sultan’s anger, as a person who has directly suffered from the religious culture in which I was raised, and who is aware that many more people suffer even more terribly. I respect her anger; I appreciate her self-righteousness. But there has to be a more evolved step than just arguing about it.

I hope, and guess, that at some point people will find another means of excusing their bad behavior. If a magical book or prophet or whatever doesn’t tell them to do it, something else will. People are creative; they will find a way to justify themselves, which, in a vacuum, is a fascinating talent. Maybe in the future people like some of my family members will find a futuristic reason to hate gay people, or find out a way to distinguish themselves from other people and persecute them on that basis. Like palm-clamminess. Or whether or not you like bologna (clarification: I fucking love bologna. haters can go eat some snobbyass prosciutto or whatever the hell it is that sad rich people eat instead of the fabulousness of oscar meyer).

But back to Islam. Besides the clash of religions, there is, more prominently, the clash of east and west. I wonder, if Western-European descended people, such as myself, were more familiar with Middle Eastern culture (I had no idea about falafel or anything like that until I went to college, and while we’re on that side of the world, I had Chinese food maybe twice before I turned 20), or if Islam’s representatives were a little whiter and Jesusier, if maybe the Islam pill would be easier to swallow. I find it interesting that the only thing I learned about the world’s biggest fucking religion happened during a two-week segment in seventh grade – the year before 9/11. It was not portrayed to me as a religion of hate, or of violence. I just thought their pilgrimages were awesome and strange, and also thought it was cool that Sir Edmund Hillary broke in to watch the haj.

I guess it’s easy for me to be all contemplative about it when my religion, at least where I am, is the norm. I’ve secularized myself pretty well since I dropped the religious shenanigans, so I still get surprised when I see nativity scenes and stuff, but putting myself in Sultan’s position after, say, looking a the Promise Keeper’s website makes me want to choke on some bologna, and talk about the burn of stupid and patriarchy.

Well, Fembot, calm down. There will be time tomorrow to battle the rest of the world.

Link at your leisure

Some awesome stuff I pulled together yesterday. Link at your leisure:

“clotheshorse academics.” cool.

I shouldn’t give a shit, but God these covers are cool. The sick part is that they follow an entomological theme because, as we all know, butterflies were one of Sirin’s passions. Gawker’s putting it like this, however, did dim my spirits:

“While they are sure to be the prettiest things on the trade paperback table in the front of Borders, it doesn’t mean that anyone other than former English majors are going to have any idea who Nabokov is or what his lesser works are about. There’s a contest to win a copies of the new books.”

I think authors should stop circle-jerking and just accept the fact that some people write well into their old age, and some don’t. And some die before we can find out either way. Robert Greene was, what, in his thirties when he croaked? Updike was ancient, as was Styron. And Bradbury? Isn’t that fucker still out there somewhere, churning out plays and scripts and books like the awesome bastard that he is? And what about Burgess? The man was prolific as shit, he just didn’t live as long as some of us would have liked him to.

Writerliness is subjective, so everyone should just calm the fuck down. Except for me. I don’t have to, ever.

Not that I begrudge the living scribes a little publicity. Amis is a fucking god, as were Updike, Nabokov, et al. If they need an excuse to get into the news short of flashing their twats getting out of the car at the Golden Globes, I say, have at it. But don’t try to get all empirical because a couple of big shots got erudite in their old age. Go bicker uselessly somewhere else.

While we’re on this topic, it is sort of a pity that people are more interested in Tiger Woods’ mistress than what the literati are whining about. There’s a reason why Tiger’s last name is Woods – the man is boring (streeetch). And it’s not like he was Mother Theresa having a gf – it was a rich, successful athlete. Who’s surprised? And more importantly, who can muster the energy to care?

Students attacking other people isn’t going to help anything, as much as some of the privileged white kids who go to a UC want to be freedom fighters and have “solidarity.” I can’t believe I’m being the bitchy cynic right now. Yeah I can. I’m hungry. When I hunger, no lives are spared.

Brown’s blog is hilArious

A friend, knowing I applied to Brown, linked me to this. I larfed but it also has a bunch of literary geek shit on it. I definitely recommend giving it a once-over.

True Blood?

Are they gonna come out of the coffin now?