Hey, baby, what’s your sign?
So, according to astronomers, we’ve been fucking fools. Gotcha, suckers, you thought you were an Aries, nope, turns out you only saw characteristics in yourself because you wanted to. Really, you’re a Pisces, or whatever.
But why is this important? If Facebook posts (or any popular media outlet) are any indication of anything, people care. People are pissed that their astrological sign may have been wrong. Most of my friends on Facebook are Giant-type people, or, at the very minimum, grad school social science/humanities types, by which I mean, they’re generally critical thinkers. So am I. And yet, everyday, I hit my widget button (F4) and read my horoscope. I’m going to approach this horoscope issue two-fold: first, why people care, then, why people care. That sounds tautological, and maybe it is, but that’s what I’m doing.
“These Little Love Letters”
Katherine Mansfield to Princess Bibesco, March 24, 1921:
Dear Princess Bibesco,
I am afraid you must stop writing these little love letters to my husband while he and I live together. It is one of those things which is not done in our world.
You are very young. Won’t you ask your husband to explain to you the impossibility of such a situation.
Please do not make me have to write to you again. I do not like scolding people and I simply hate having to teach them manners.
Yours sincerely,
Katherine Mansfield
Amy McDaniel—
Something nice has come out of all this Asian mother nonsense, and it is this little essay by Wesley Yang on the Paris Review blog.
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Gucci Slope Revolution Ding Divide People
Flex Sex Drugs Money Cars Clothes Plenty of Women & Ice Cream
1. The 47th issue of Slope is up and live and overflowing with yes.
2. For NYers, on Feb 2, hit up the release party for Deb Olin Unferth’s new memoir, REVOLUTION: The Year I Fell in Love and Went to Join the War, co-hosted by the Believer. She’ll be discussing the book with Believer co-editor Heidi Julavits. 7–9pm at Powerhouse Arena.
3. Luca Dipierro has released an object made of paper full of drawing called DAS DING.
4. Redivider is running their first annual fiction contest, open until March 1
5. At Thought Catalog, The Different Types of People There are on the Internet.
Bernhard the Ever-Quotable
From Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser:
We study better in hostile surroundings than in hospitable ones, a student is always well advised to choose a hostile place of study rather than a hospitable one, for the hospitable place will rob him of the better part of his concentration for his studies, the hostile place on the other hand will allow him total concentration, since he must concentrate on his studies to avoid despairing, and to that extent one can absolutely recommend Salzburg, probably like all other so-called beautiful towns, as a place of study, of course only to someone with a strong character, a weak character will inevitably be destroyed in the briefest time.
Quiet City by Connor O’Brien
Quiet City, a wonderfully designed collection of stories by Connor O’Brien, is available for purchase, or, provocatively, pay-by-tweet or -facebook, where the PDF is made available after tweeting/facebooking it. O’Brien, in our correspondence, says:
The book is a bit of an experiment in selling literature online (it actually doubles as a test case for my PhD thesis on publishing) […] the online editions use social networking as currency: you pay with a tweet or facebook post. As a happy coincidence, the title story imagines a world in which social networking stats have superseded cash, so there’s a bit of an interesting tension there — the fiction creating the reality.
Geography Thursday: people as ‘functions of landscape’
In Jeff Malpas’s excellent book, Place & Experience: A Philosophical Topography, he writes:
In Proust’s work, persons and places intermingle with one another in such a way that places take on the individuality of persons, while persons are themselves individuated and characterized by their relation to place; persons come to be seen, to use a phrase from Lawrence Durrell, almost ‘as functions of a landscape’ – in some cases, even of a particular room or setting. In fact, the narrator of Proust’s novel, Marcel, grasps his own life, and the time in which it is lived, only through his recovery of the places in relation to which that life has been constituted. Remembrance of Things Past is thus an invocation and exploration of a multitude of places and, through those places, of the persons who appear with them.
What do you think about this? Should our characters be ‘functions of landscape’? How does thinking about characters – especially in Proust – in this way alter our experience of a text? Are we – real, live human beings, as opposed to our fictional characters – functions of our landscape?
Commence arguments.