Amy McDaniel—
CONTEST! My favorite line in Lost is when Sawyer walks up to Jack and Juliet mid-intense-conversation and says to them, “What yall doing, arguing about who’s your favorite Other?” In the spirit of that and mean, who is your favorite HTMLGiant troll, past or present? deadgod? MFBomb? mimi? Christopher Higgs? Mather Schneider? phmadore? What would your grandfather say if he met the troll? Winner gets to direct a bromantic comedy with the troll and any 3 of our contributors or frequent non-troll commenters.
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Why We’re All Going to Die {Thirsty as Hell}
(and it won’t matter who can string together a pretty sentence)
3 OOP BOOKS I READ RECENTLY AND LOVED
[Another not-mean post for mean-week. Sorry. I had part of this done before I realized it was mean week (duh) & wanna write about these books while they’re fresh in my head. Also, I might do this regularly because I am a major proponent of out of print books, who knows.]
I end up reading a lot of books that are out of print. Part of me feels like I do this to compensate for the fact that I no longer dedicate an excessive amount of energy to digging up & talking about lost films. Another part of me just always insists that the best shit is found by digging as deep as possible. I like looking for things, reading about lost things, and finding things that there’s not an abundance of discussion about. It makes me feel like I’m solving a mystery, and I get a major rush out of it.
I spend a lot of time combing through World Cat listings & requesting books & articles from inter-library loan networks. I also obsess over used-book meta-search engines. I also feel like, perhaps, that a lot of marginalized Other’s books end up out of print, so I sometimes tell myself that I can feel slightly empowered. This may or may not be ridiculous. Regardless, I’d like to talk about three out of print books that I recently read and enjoyed.
Blake Butler—
This is pretty wicked: Why Doc Brown is the real villain of Back to the Future [via Matt Bell]
Matthew Simmons—
Fuck Tuesday and its fucking MEAN WEEK doldrums. Here: say something mean to me. UPDATE: Or about me. UPDATE 2: added the kitty fist bump since everyone’s going after my cat and MY CAT IS A WINNER!
Blake Butler—
Learning to recognize the human is the job of Dr. Phil. The job of literature is not a job, and has nothing to do with recognition.
A Sorta Mean Review of Grease Stains etc
This morning I woke up early and read Mel Bosworth’s book, Grease Stains, Kismet and Maternal Wisdom. I read the Aqueous Books version, the original one. Apparently there was some sort of disagreement between the publisher and author, though, and Aqueous dropped it. It was quickly republished and is available again here for only $3.95. I thought I’d pan it for mean week, sorta.
The book is a quick read and a good story. The earnestness at the center is keen, the elation and vertigo and palpable excitement of infatuation. I understood the feeling from my own personal experience, so Bosworth’s accomplishment is how he draws that feeling out, how the writing comes together to remind me of that experience. READ MORE >
Doris, your door is open
"Nobel Prize was a bloody disaster" -- Doris Lessing, The Independent (2008)
Jesus lady, get a grip. So you got post-Nobel prize ennui, a plight shared by us all. Evidently, you haven’t spent any of that prize money on new clothes, just what appears to be a large bag of bird seeds (which ought to last you a while), and two plastic bins of who knows what. There’s a bunch of mint on your right, which is our way of saying “take five mojitos and call me if you’re still mourning.”
The Independent article from which this picture was culled reads like an Onion piece. Lessing laments, “All I do is give interviews and spend time being photographed.” Give this woman some Oil of Olay and an ego for god’s sake. I guess men fair better with a gentle pat on the back, their spines broken by this world. She goes on to say that her will to write is “[…] sliding away like water down a plughole,” which I guess is a tact simile. Less may be more, but Lessing is more dramatic than I imagined. Smile, not simile Doris, it’s called a camera.
Testify.
Let me take a MEAN WEEK—and HTML Giant’s usual apolitical bent—timeout to say how much I love Bishop John Shelby Spong:
I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is “an abomination to God,” about how homosexuality is a “chosen lifestyle,” or about how through prayer and “spiritual counseling” homosexual persons can be “cured.” Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy.
Much more here. Seriously, spread this link far and wide.