Expanding Emily Dickinson’s Wardrobe
This past weekend I sort of wandered around Brooklyn. As I jaunted past a 
two-story Burger King, humming my favorite Lesley Gore tune of the moment, I ran smack dab into the ghost of Emily Dickinson.
“Hi,” I said to Emily’s ghost, calmly. I had no reason to be flummoxed since this sort of thing occurs frequently.
“Never mind the chitchat,” replied Emily (rudely, if you ask me). “Let’s get down to brass tacks. A cute and charming 21st-century poet has translated every single one of my verse compositions, attracting new fans and admirers. I certainly don’t want these fans and admirers to only see me in my one outfit – my white cotton dress. I want the world to think that I am a fashion-conscious girl who possess a plethora of clothes. Can you assist me in expanding my wardrobe?”
Adam Robinson—
VIDA has tallied the gender (im)balance in The Best American series. In their press release they ask, “What careers stalled because gender bias plays a role in preventing a writers’ work from reaching a national audience?”
It’s a scary thought. Is it also a fair question?
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Bitches Be Trippin’
I love the Urban Dictionary because they seem to have a definition for everything. I spend a lot of time looking up dirty words and phrases. I learned what a snowball was via Urban Dictionary. It has nothing to do with the snow, that’s for sure. I love the phrase “Bitches be trippin’.” I don’t know why. On a whim, I decided to look up the phrase on Urban Dictionary. Sure enough, there was a definition. According to them, the phrase is “used primarily by heterosexual males to justify the irrational behaviors of women.” For example, when women bring attention to certain pervasive and longstanding disparities, one might say, “I don’t know what all the fuss is about. Bitches be trippin’.”
Four Brief Notes of Varying Significance
If you’re interested in antique printing, there’s a whole plant for sale in Boston.
I love stand up comedy so I really enjoyed this profile of comedian Greg Giraldo and his untimely passing in The Awl.
Mima Simić writes a disturbing account of how her work was edited, without her approval, for Best European Fiction 2011, by an editor at Dalkey Archive. One of the edits assigned a gender to the narrator when the gender ambiguity was a deliberate authorial choice. It’s not a good situation.
Vida released a count for how women writers are represented across several publications great and small during 2010. Meghan O’Rourke responds at Slate. The numbers are not surprising. The issue is, of course, more complex than mere statistics but statistics are always a good place to start. I find the numbers disheartening. Actually, I think it’s fucked up. I do. I understand if you don’t and why. We’ve had this conversation already but I thought I would share the latest numbers.
Five Preoccupations of the New Guy
I’m happy to join the party at HTMLGiant. Here is a picture of me and two of my other personalities, all of us looking like serial killers:
I bring at least five preoccupations to HTMLGiant:
1. The talk people talk in the places they be. For example Richard Price, in the interview that serves as his introduction to Three Screenplays: The Color of Money, Sea of Love, and Night and the City:
I often think of New York and night simultaneously. I think about New York in the night, and I think of it as this great urban, nocturnal ocean, in that all the characters, all the inhabitants of New York, are various forms of prey-fish or lantern-fish, you know, these strange fish that you rarely see except from these superbathyspheres. I’ll often indulge myself in secondary and tertiary characters. Look, here comes a Wang-fish! Here comes a goddamn dragon-fish. What the hell is that! All all my characters are floating in this fluid urban night, and they’re looking for things. Somebody might be looking for love, somebody might be looking for power, somebody might be looking for redemption of some kind. But basically I think of my people as floating . . . in an ink black sea, in the New York nocturnal sea.
2. Literature is a big tent. Zadie Smith said that, and I agree. I had an argument here with my buddy Chris Higgs about it. I disagree with half the READ MORE >
