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Thanks to “pure serendipity“, Crook had chanced upon the largest collection of unpublished letters by the author of Frankenstein to be discovered in decades.

The letters date between 1831, nine years after the death of her poet husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, and 1849, when Mary Shelley was already unwell with the brain tumour that would kill her two years later, and show a woman who was skilled in charming favours from friends, bursting with pride in and concern for her teenage son – and not unconcerned with frivolities…

Shelley’s letters were written between 1831 and 1849 to Horace Smith and his daughter Eliza. The friendship between Smith and Shelley had been known before, but the letters show her personality — loyal, grateful and attentive, Crook says, as well as revealing her “charming wheedling side.”

Shelley was the daughter of proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the wife of Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. He died in a boating accident in 1822. The Shelleys had one surviving child, a son who was also named Percy.

“Percy is growing up a very fine young man & developing tastes & talents that would remind you of his father,” she wrote. When he was at Cambridge, she wrote, “he is getting all that we could wish — he is getting very liberal — & has so much character & talent — though still shy — that I have every hope for his future happiness.” Praising his sweet nature, she admits, “I am mortified he is not taller.”

My dearest Percy,

I am so glad to hear that you have been developing your tastes and talents liberally while at school. Pray do not disturb yourself over not having been sent down yet. I remain confident that any son of Percy Shelley will find a way to insult his tutor and find himself rusticated before Michaelmas. Have you remembered to publish atheistic tracts insulting the dons? Be sure to publish atheistic tracts insulting the dons, if you haven’t already. I do hope you have reminded any peers you might find yourself seated next to at dinner that eating the mangled flesh of lambs is a vomitous stain upon the soul of man. I often find myself thinking, in between things like inventing Gothic literature, that any son of Percy Shelley who could make it through a term without reminding the son of a peer that eating the mangled flesh of lambs is a blot on the escutcheon of humanity must be hardly a son of Percy Shelley at all.

Assuming that you are the son of Percy Shelley, of course; the summer of 1818 is mostly an opium haze, and I did take an awful lot of boat rides with Lord Byron that July. You know what can happen on a boat ride with Lord Byron. Ours was a very open marriage, your father’s and mine. Full of Lord Byrons and Gallic highwaymen and what have you. Generous in spirit and liberal-minded in bed. Lord Byron, of course, was a reasonably tall man, so then again maybe it wasn’t him at all. Must have been at least five foot eight, Byron was. Whoever your father is, I remain most lovingly,

Your mother,
Mary

P.S. I do hope you are wearing the shoes I sent you (they have lifts in them) [to make you look taller]

Read more The Lost Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley at The Toast.

The author was inspired by #NYTwomensobits.

Read more Misandrist Obituaries at The Toast.

Some scholars claim that Poe invented the detective story, but my money’s on WILKIE COLLINS (1824–89), who wrote dozens of books and scores of stories and essays (many now hidden in the bound periodicals section of the library) to great acclaim. The wonderful, fat, twisty-turny thrillers we still read — The Moonstone (1868), The Woman in White (1860), and No Name (1862) — turn on the detection of clues and expose the truth in a shimmer of thievery, deceit, and undependable identities. Blame the latter on the sewing machine! In mid-Victorian cities, the advent of mass-manufactured clothing made it much more difficult to read a man’s social class: the same factory workers who cut the cloth for the middle-class’s garments also wore them. But you could still discern a man’s identity by his shoes — which were made by hand — and Collins’s attention to such detail is the engine of the detective novel. Like his friend and occasional publisher Charles Dickens, Collins took up social commentary in his writing: No Name exposes the unjust legal situation of children of unmarried parents, while the rigid skeleton of class supports the other novels. Collins died of a stroke no doubt related to his opiate addiction (he suffered from gout); he’d lived just long enough to see the 1887 publication of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet, which introduced the magnificent detail-detector Sherlock Holmes.

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: Paul Scheerbart, Gypsy Rose Lee, Elvis Presley, David Bowie.

READ MORE about men and women born on the cusp between the Retrogressivist (1815–24) and Post-Romantic (1825–33) Generations.

Few things in life are certain, but there is one area of human behavior I fancy myself something of an expert — in fact, I rate my own judgment in this area so highly that I can confidently claim to predict the response of every conscious being with 100% accuracy, should you find yourself in a wagering mood. This is a social experiment that will require a little effort on your part, but I guarantee you will find events unfold exactly as I predict. Humans are all alike in this way.

Step the first: Visit a friend who owns a cat at a time when both cat and human are at home.

Step the second: Wait to be introduced to the cat, or for the cat’s name to be brought up in some slightly more organic fashion.

Step the third (this is crucial): At some later point in the conversation, refer to the cat by an incorrect gender.

Step the fourth: Wait. No one – no one – will let this minor, harmless error go. Every living, breathing person on this planet will immediately respond with “Actually, [s]he’s a boy/girl.” Everyone will say this. It does not matter if they are not the sort of person ordinarily given over to correcting others in conversation, or if they are particularly fond of their particular cat, or if they are the most gender-neutral, open-minded pansexual who ever went by “xie/xirr.”

They will tell you that you have misgendered their cat, even though cats do not appear to have visible genitals in the first place, and in all likelihood their cat was neutered years ago. Most likely their cat has never once engaged in the act of copulation. Their cat does not wear clothes or feel defined by societal gender roles. For all practical purposes, their cat has no gender. The gender of a cat is one of the least important things in the world. If this cat were to somehow transform, Tiresias-like, from male to female in the next instant, it is highly likely that nothing about its (or its owner’s) life would change a jot. And yet people cannot resist from adhering to a course of strict and constant accuracy when it comes to the gender of a cat. It is inexplicable.

Misgender a fish or a bird and it is likely you will hear nothing. No one can misgender a dog; female dogs have those unsettling little nipple-pellets running along the length of their midsections and science has not yet found a way to make dog penises invisible. But misgender a cat and you will never have a moment’s peace til your error is corrected.

I do not pretend to know why this is. I do not know what good it will do you to know this. But it is true, and perhaps that is enough.

Read more Predicting Human Behavior With 100% Accuracy: Misgender a Cat at The Toast.

Previously in Literary Trysts It Gives Me Great Joy To Think About: Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman totally did it.

There are precious few things in life worth knowing; the fact that celebrated American novelist Alice Walker and legendary folk singer Tracy Chapman had a romantic relationship in the middle of the 1990s is one of them. What. Yes. Hi. What. No. Yes. In a way, somehow I think I have always known. For a period of several years, the woman who wrote “Fast Car” and the woman who wrote The Color Purple regularly held hands and made out and arranged their dinner plans together, because we live in a world of great joy that delights in presenting the sorry, tired masses of humanity with improbable, perfect combinations.

This is the sort of fact that is not nearly as widely known as it ought to be. Tracy Chapman, it is true, in addition to looking like the lady fox from Robin Hood come to grinning, blushing life, is also a reserved and private sort of person, who does not go about regularly trumpeting the fact that she has known a Pulitzer prizewinner biblically, but it is nonetheless true and we ought to wake our own romantic partners up with a reminder of it every day. “Wake up, my love,” the partnered among us should whisper with every dawn. “Remember that Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker were once united in love and companionship and did the Jumble together on weekends.”

Right now a tumult of questions and feelings are fighting for ascendency within the labyrinth of your confused bowels; allow them to have it out. At some point in human history Alice Walker asked Tracy Chapman out on a date, and then they went steady. If they gave letterman jackets along with the Pulitzer (and I have no reason to believe they do not), Tracy would have worn Alice’s all through the winter of ’96.

“Where’s Tracy?” people who knew her would have asked at the time. “Where’s Tracy Chapman, who has the voice of the whole earth in her throat?”

“Tracy’s with Alice,” people who knew would reply. “Tracy’s with Alice Walker, who has written great and glorious words and has an intellect and a spirit of white-hot and dancing fire, her girlfriend, and they are eating frozen yogurt together.”

From an interview in The Guardian a few years ago:

I tell her people are still fascinated by her love affair with the singer Tracy Chapman in the mid-1990s. Moments earlier she had said firmly but politely that she didn’t want to answer any questions about her family life. (Her daughter Rebecca, from her marriage to Levanthal, published a frank memoir in 2000 in which she criticised the self-absorption of both parents after their divorce.) So I was surprised to see her face light up at the mention of Chapman. “Yeah I loved it too. Absolutely.”

Why was it kept so quiet at the time? “It was quiet to you maybe but that’s because you didn’t live in our area,” she answers with a throaty laugh. She has written about the relationship in her journals, which she plans to publish one day. So why did they decide against using their relationship to make a big social impact like other celebrity lesbian couples, such as Ellen DeGeneres and Anne Heche, have in the past?

Laughing throatily, Alice Walker put down her giant ostrich quill and closed her Relationship Journal — the cover was a color of jewels that hadn’t been discovered yet — and closed her eyes. Her throat laughed some more. “Someday I will publish this,” she announced to her lovers’ reminiscences stenographer. He clapped, also with his throat. It sounded like a flock of flamingos taking to the sky all at once. 

She — they — were right to do it, of course, but imagine just for a moment if the face of celebrity lesbianism in the mid-90s had not been Ellen and Anne (oh, Anne) but motherfucking Alice Walker and Tracy goddamn Chapman. Imagine the men’s hats; imagine the tortoiseshell glasses; imagine the poetry readings and the matching, understated silver jewelry. It would have been a glorious world. I would have lived in it gladly and with my whole heart.

The idea seems to amuse her. “I would never do that. My life is not to be somebody else’s impact – you know what I mean? And it was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody’s business but ours.”

“Our love is our own business, Tracy Chapman,” Alice Walker — the woman who invented Shug and Celie with her own brain — said quietly one evening in 1995, after they had finished wrapping one another in linen and reading Rilke aloud in their Hummingbird Maze. “It is the business of none but Alice Walker and Tracy Chapman.”

Tracy only gave her a smile, but there was a world within it.

“Tracy Chapman,” Alice Walker said, “Let us go and have dinner together, and hold hands, for we are in love. Let us go out and get muffalettas, and then let us return home again and make transcendent love the likes of which even the dead cannot ignore, and then you can accompany me while I receive the Lillian Smith Award from the National Endowment for the Arts.”

Tracy nodded. “Let us do so. Let us take a fast car,” for Tracy could not resist the occasional topical joke. And Alice smiled, to see Tracy so pleased with herself. “Let us go get muffalettas.”

And they did.

Read more Literary Trysts It Gives Me Great Joy To Think About: Tracy Chapman and Alice Walker Used To Go Out (With Each Other) at The Toast.

Andrew Ferguson of The Weekly Standard has a good piece about the writer I called “the great Bierce” in this LH post from a few years ago; the occasion is the centennial of Bierce’s departure for a fate that is still unknown, and it’s a useful introduction for those unfamiliar with the writer. What surprises me is how widespread such unfamiliarity appears to be:

“We have produced but one genuine wit,” H. L. Mencken wrote, in a survey of American letters: “Ambrose Bierce. And save to a small circle he is unknown today.” Mencken was writing decades after Bierce had gone off to Mexico, by which time his life was best remembered for the way he had left it. And the circle of those who read him is even smaller now, needless to say. When the Library of America finally got around to issuing a canonical selection of his writing, in 2011, the single volume (Philip Roth got nine!) was relatively slender; it was the 219th in the library’s series of great American writers. …

The problem with “writers’ writers”—as many readers have discovered—is that they are seldom “readers’ writers.” It depends on the readers as much as the writers, of course, and today’s readers might find they have caught up to Bierce’s jaded view of war, politics, romantic love, religion, family life, and nearly everything else. When he is remembered these days it is usually for the short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” which, until recently, was one of a handful of short stories—along with “The Lottery,” “The Most Dangerous Game,” “To Build a Fire,” and a few others—that no student could escape an American high school without having pretended to read.

“Until recently”? Do students really no longer have to read those classic stories? (Insert laudator temporis acti rant here.) Another passage that gave me a start of — not surprise exactly, but recognition of a previously unassimilated fact:

As the best of his biographers, Roy Morris Jr., has pointed out, he was the only American writer of any consequence to fight in the war. The future men of letters of his generation managed somehow to be elsewhere when the bodies began piling up. William Dean Howells spent the 1860s in Venice. Twain, after a fortnight with the Confederate Army, went as far west as he could get. And the two Henrys, James and Adams, watched the carnage from afar, Adams from London, and James from the killing fields of Harvard Yard.

The whole thing is worth reading. Thanks, Paul!

Don’t let your life be governed by what disturbs you.
– Abu-al-Ala al-Ma’arri [973-1052]

Previously: Male comedians in drag, ranked by attractiveness.

No woman, regardless of orientation, can long resist a boyish woman dressed in a well-tailored men’s vest. Whether it was this scene from Just One of the Guys:

Or this scene from Young Americans:

there came a time in your young and vibrant life when you were shocked to alertness by the quick-moving, wicked-smiling presence of a woman dressed as a man on a screen in front of you, and that alertness has lived in your stomach ever since. Let us rank these women now in order of how they won and wrung our eager hearts, because who is there to stop us?

23. Amanda Bynes, She’s The Man. Awful. Just awful. It’s like she’s not even trying. Do you know who is a more convincing boy than this? Vanessa Bayer as Jacob the Bar Mitzvah boy on Weekend Update. Have some respect for the craft.

22. Julie Andrews, Victor/Victoria. It’s a little unfair to put her in the same category as the others, because she does spend a lot of the movie playing a man pretending to be a woman. Nevertheless, a verdict must be reached: not great. Stylish, but not great. Sort of like Fred Astaire’s bloodless twin. I respect the hell out of her, but I do not want to seize her by the bowtie and become one. It’s the eyebrows.

21. Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore, Charlie’s Angels. Included mostly because of how good Lucy Liu looks in this shot. Diaz is nice enough, in a slight, anemic, “ah-me-I-was-a-pale-young-curate-then” sort of way. There is something horribly unsettling about Drew Barrymore in drag. He is not un-handsome, but he is not right. Like something very small and very determined is wearing Will Forte as a suit.

20. Rachel Stirling, Tipping The Velvet. Maybe the only actually lesbian character on this list. I regret to inform you that I do not find Nan to be particularly convincing. It’s partly the eyebrows, but that’s not the only drawback. She looks like one of the thousand other soft butches in newsboy caps who were standing outside smoking in front of The Abbey and The Cubbyhole and the Lexington in 2003. 

19. Anita Yuen, He’s A Woman, She’s A Man. Perfectly nice, but unremarkable.

18. Ossi Oswalda, I Don’t Want To Be A Man. Perhaps a trifle too round-faced, but exceedingly pleasant. Strangely reminiscent of Dave Foley, who many have noticed looks like Isabella Rossellini when he dresses like a woman; the gender serpent eating its own tail. 

17. Keira Knightley, Pirates of the Caribbean II. Just for a few minutes, if I recall, and it wasn’t terribly convincing, but she makes for an enchanting boy. I’ll never understand why she isn’t a bigger lesbian icon, Bend It Like Beckham aside.

16. Alana Austin, Motocrossed. There is not a very good reason for a Disney Channel movie to be on this list; this is a very chaste and heterosexual film about a girl who likes to race dirt bikes, but I watched it every day for an entire summer until obsessively rewatching what I wanted but didn’t understand made me dizzy.

One of the most difficult parts of male drag for women to pull off is the jawline; men have almost no fat in their faces, which I will not criticize them for here. Find the right jawline and you’re halfway there.

15. Imogen Stubbs, Twelfth Night. Almost, but not quite, a Cary Elwes type. A lack of something, although she rolls up her sleeves nicely during the pool scene.

14. Tilda Swinton, Orlando. It grieves me deeply that Tilda Swinton does not rank higher on this list. By all rights she should, this David-Bowie-lookalike shapeshifting gender wraith. By all rights she should be queen and master of this list, sailing it around the midnight seas. But nobody looks their best in a curly ginger wig and a foppish ruff. Only magnificent.

13. Pretty much everyone in the Takarazuka Revue. “A Japanese all-female musical theater troupe based inTakarazuka, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. Women play all roles in lavish, Broadway-style productions of Western-style musicals, and sometimes stories adapted from shōjo manga and Japanese folktales.” Second from the right, then all of them, then the second from the right again.

12. Liselotte Pulver, The Spessart Inn. GIRL ROBIN HOOD. GIRL ROBIN HOOD. If there is no part of you that has longed for the warm hands and the light laugh of GIRL ROBIN HOOD, then I do not know what to say to you. The best movies about crossdressing women generally feature rich and lusty-laughed tomboys longing to escape to the freedom of the woods. This is one of them.

11. Mulan, Mulan (live-action and animated). Put a woman in drag, and you please us for a day. Put a woman in drag and then armor, and you have the hearts of the people forever.

10. Park Shin-hye, You’re Beautiful. Everyone in this actively perfect K-drama is so floppy-haired and perfect-skinned and androgynous. It’s a wonderful festival of gender chaos, and she’s the crown jewel. If festivals had jewels, I guess.

9. Milla Jovovich, The Messenger. Overcame a disastrous haircut to still rip my heart to shreds with her impossible jaw. Joan of Arc’s not a male character, obviously, but she still passes herself off as a soldier and gets mistaken for a male at least once in the film (I think) so she stays.

8. Johanna Wokalek, Pope Joan. Flavors of Edward Norton predominate, not at all unpleasantly.

7. Salma Hayek, Frida Kahlo. I have no words. I have no words; they should have sent a poet. I WANT TO KISS YOU WITH THE KISSES OF MY MOUTH.

6. Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs. She looks like Clive Owen. The world has given us a woman with strong shoulders and glossy chestnut hair who wears immaculate ties and who walks upon the earth with her own two feet and looks like Clive goddamn Owen. Thank whatever wretched god bore you and your kin.

5. Gwyneth Paltrow, Shakespeare in Love. GWYNETH. YES. I AM HERE FOR YOU. I AM HERE FOR YOU IN THAT SAUCY LITTLE GOATEE AND THAT INSOUCIANT BLUE JACKET. I would have made out with you so hard at Homecoming. (An aside: Gwyneth Paltrow is Katherine Moennig’s cousin; they are to my knowledge the only family members on this list.) You have a weird newsletter now but once you were the boy-girl of my dreams, Gwyneth, and I’ll never forget you for that. I’m not mad you won the Oscar for this; look at this audition scene. HOT GIRL HIDDEN IN A BOYSUIT HAVING FEELINGS REAL BAD AT THE CEILING.

Voice doesn’t really work, though. Still, A+ out of 10.

4. Cate Blanchett, He’s Not There. I didn’t see this movie. Nobody saw this movie. Everybody just watched Cate Blanchett’s scenes on YouTube and wished desperately we were a cigarette between her nervous, slim fingers. I feel nothing for Bob Dylan, but I would follow Cate Blanchett’s Bob Dylan anywhere.

3. Joyce Hyser, Just One Of The Guys. “What a fox. Dresses like Elvis Costello, looks like the Karate Kid — I’m gonna get it.” You said it, Sandy. 

2. Katharine Hepburn, Sylvia Scarlett. If you have not seen Sylvia Scarlett, might I suggest doing so at your earliest convenience? It’s very exciting that she wore the occasional pantsuit in Cary Grant’s Girlfriend Gets A Job, of course, but you haven’t seen Hepburn in menswear until you’ve seen Hepburn In Menswear. (She kisses girls, and puts her hands in her pockets just so, and Spencer Tracy was a goddamned beard and I will go to my grave saying so).

1. Katharine Moennig, Young Americans. Before there was Shane, there was Jake Pratt. And it was good. Young Americans was a summer replacement for Dawson’s Creek that ran for eight episodes, all of which I carefully taped on VHS, even when my family went on vacation the week “Will Bella Scout Her Mom?” aired. I am reduced here to mere syllables: UUNF. HUUURRNNGH. AAAUUUNGH. GNEHHH.

More than almost anybody else on this list, Jake sells maleness in a wholly believable and unique way. There’s no forced “hey-dude” in her voice and very little put-on swagger in her walk. She wears masculinity as well as she wears that motorcycle jacket in episode seven.

Special Category: Music Video 

3. Lady Gaga, whatever her male Italian alter ego is. It’s a little James Deen, a little Joyce Hyser. Definitely solid. Excellent pompadour, good jawline.

2. Beyoncé, If I Were A Boy. It’s not drag, exactly, so much as it is a few props that telegraph maleness, but great God, does she look good in a uniform. Ma’am. Sir. Ma’am. Whatever pronoun you like, as long as you’re still in charge.

1. Ciara, Like A Boy. Dear Ciara, Thank you for making me gay.

Honorable Mentions

Doris Day in Calamity Jane, who is not technically cross-dressing only inasmuch as she is always female-identified and acknowledged as such throughout the movie. That said…look at her. I never thought being sexually attracted to Doris Day was possible, but here we are.

Try to imagine her saying anything other than “TITTIES” with this hand gesture. Go ahead.

Please enjoy “A Woman’s Touch” from that same movie. Hello. What? Yes. How. How. How. But yes. Hello.

Cissy Meldrum from You Rang, M’Lord? Again, not passing herself off as male — just a jolly lesbian in Edwardian-era England with a fondness for Savile Row menswear. The lesbian answer to Niles Crane.

God bless you all and keep you.

Read more Ranking Female Actresses in Male Drag at The Toast.

The following transcript of a speech given at the Ladies’ Botany Society of Philadelphia in 1874 was believed to have been lost until it was discovered last month in the attic of a house scheduled for demolition. It has been reprinted here in full for the first time, courtesy of the Lady Doctors of Pennsylvania Association.

Honored ladies of the symposium, I thank you for your invitation to speak today. I shall begin my address with no further overtures. The male of the species is perhaps more to be pitied than censured, as it is his physical inability to complete a normal, healthy menstrual cycle that is the root cause of so many of his woeful ailments.

As scientists have discovered, it is the unhealthy retention of aged or “angry” blood (generally more than 2 to 3 months old) that leads to so much of the liver agitation and spinal rage that plague our modern society. The average woman, capable of storing and regularly releasing this blood through the act of menstruation, keeps herself in constant and excellent health, and should be commended for so doing [Pause for applause].

The reason that men — poor things — commit so many murders as a sex is likely due to their failure to slough off this overabundance of old blood through the regular act of menstruation (which not only clears the body of bad blood but also the mind of anti-vitamins, as scientists have so recently and effectively demonstrated). The average male body is so overstuffed with a surfeit of old blood that he may swell as much as six feet tall, which is a height both unnecessary and grotesque for human purposes. This male blood, which is generally unable to be regularly flushed out through the womb, must find some sort of outlet, lest it tumefy and cause the man to burst (a not uncommon sight, I am told, in parts of rural Germany), which I believe is what leads to knife fights and stabbings among men. This makeshift replacement for remedy is exceedingly dangerous, but it does perform the necessary –sometimes life-saving — act of bloodletting.

It has been noted anecdotally, though not yet in a laboratory setting, that many of these men display considerably more rational and intelligent brain-power after these impromptu pseudo-menstruations. Many of you, I know, have told me stories of your own husbands behaving nearly as prudently as yourselves for days after cutting themselves accidentally in the kitchen or coming to blows outside of a public house. It remains to be seen, therefore, whether we as a group can seize upon a more regulated and humane system of replicating the effects of menstruation in our poor masculine counterparts. Imagine how improved our society might be if someday we could teach men to menstruate blood from their own wombs! [Pause for laughter.]

[Unintelligible question from an audience member] It does not seem to me to be altogether necessary to obtain the male opinion on the subject. Do we ask the dog if he prefers a place by the fire before offering him one? Is not their improvement a mutual goal of both of the sexes?

Read more The Causes of Male Hysteria at The Toast.

Previously: Making sure you get enough to eat at holiday parties.

‘Tis the season for rejoicing — but beware! One too few glasses of eggnog at the office party, or a little less champagne than you’d planned on having for New Year’s Eve, and you might just find yourself waking up at your usual hour the morning after, feeling more or less like your usual self, with no excuse to stay in bed shivering and running hot and cold all morning, then throwing up blearily for most of the afternoon.

If you’ve ever asked yourself how just one round fewer could result in the complete avoidance of regret and misery, then this article is for you. You’ll never go without the next-day heart palpitations, forearm sweats, skullbone headaches, full-body stench, the sickening sense that you will never not feel dizzy for the rest of your days, or punctuated sleep patterns that make life so interesting and hard to predict ever again. Here are some tips you can use before, during, and after a holiday celebration to make sure you wake up (if you find yourself successfully entering REM sleep at all) with a proper hangover.

1. Avoid drinking too much water. Water needlessly thins the blood. You also run the risk of fatal water intoxication. If you’re tempted to order a glass of water with your next cocktail, try smoking a cigarette instead.

2. Don’t eat anything until after you’ve created a base layer of alcohol in your stomach. You don’t have any room to spare. You want to feel drunk in your fingernails, and you don’t need a lousy cheeseburger camping out in the middle of your abdomen, absorbing all of the precious alcohol that you bought with your own money. Get drunk on your own dime, cheeseburger.

3. Mix it up. Why end the night drinking the same cocktail you began it with? Variety is the spice of life. Like the rhyme says: “Beer before liquor, you’ll find love quicker. Liquor before beer, be of good cheer.”

4. Avoid cigarettes. Unless you’re using them to resist the urge to drink water; otherwise, cigars are better. Inhale deeply. Really let the smoke settle. You want to be able to feel the outline of your lungs throbbing against your rib cage when you wake up in the morning.

5. When it comes to combining alcohol and prescription medication, trial and error is the only way to go. Do mojitos and lorazepam really impair your ability to operate heavy machinery? Are you really going to let a label directed at the general public tell you what’s right for your body? Of course not. You know yourself better than any label, and there’s only one way to find out. You’re kind of like a scientist, if you think about it, which makes what you’re doing both groundbreaking and brave.

6. It’s not just water you need to watch out for: avoid clear liquids entirely. The browner, the better. Remember, you can add red wine to anything.

7. Don’t coddle yourself the next day. Tossing restlessly in bed, churning up the sheets, furiously flinging your arm over your eyes in a futile attempt at sleep makes for such a flat hungover experience. What does it feel like to drive hungover? What does it feel like to lead a three-hour meeting? What does it feel like to vote and then do like sixty squats? That’s how your hangover can really achieve texture and dimension. It’ll feel like you’re slowly dying in so many different ways.

8. Take a couple of Tylenol. Anything with acetaminophen is fine, really; it’s time to remind your liver that it works for you, not the other way around. Get your money’s worth out of it.

9. Lean in to the experience. Remind yourself of all the nights you’ve fallen asleep in front of your laptop, all the jokes you’ve made at the expense of others. Why regret one thing when you can regret everything? Let your anxiety attack blossom and unfold at its own pace. Go to your kitchen, look at the counter in disgust, then go back to bed without doing anything. Really get a sense of what your sheets smell like. This is you time.

Read more How To Ensure A Hangover at The Toast.

1. Issa Rae in Ever After. Dougray Scott is already perfect in his role — and you know what, so is Anjelica Huston, so it would have to be just some sort of stop-motion capture situation where Issa Rae has to green-screen herself over Drew Barrymore and insert herself into the 1998 version. Not that Drew Barrymore wasn’t perfect for that role, obviously, I just think that Issa Rae would look amazing in that butterfly-wing dress and also would have some really adorable, shy chemistry with 90s-era Dougray Scott.

I mean, look at her. Look at how good she already looks in white dresses. Can’t you just see her shakily but boldly holding a sword at that evil baron and reading Thomas More and inventing Enlightenment-era feminism? And she’d tell Dougray Scott’s hairstyle to hurry up and invent public access to universities already, and he’s say “Who are you, madam, that you think like this?” and she’d say “Oh, nobody,” and he’d say “No, you are different, there’s something different about you,” and her face would grow SUFFUSED WITH LUMINOUS AND QUIET DELIGHT.

2. Phil Hartman in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

This one hurts my heart to even think about — Phil! — but it would have been absolutely perfect. It would have been his Truman Show. No one could switch as gracefully and effortlessly from bombastic self-confidence to quiet despair as Phil could.

3. A gay remake of Love & Basketball with Brittney Griner as Omar Epps’ character and Rose Rollins as Sanaa Lathan’s character. (Sanaa Lathan has to play a coach, or something, at least).

“I never asked you to choose.” “You never had to.”

“I’ll play you.” “For what?” “Your heart.”

The subtitle of this movie could be Two Perfect Sets of Arms, but I’m not married to that. Do not get me wrong, I think the original is perfect too and cannot be improved upon, but there’s something about this story that cries out for lesbian reimagining.

Also featuring a thematically unnecessary non-speaking role for a nervous-looking red-headed lady who mostly just sits in the front row during their games and brings them tea or a hot towel whenever they ask for it.

4. A version of Macbeth with Erykah Badu as Lady Macbeth and Jada Pinkett-Smith in a natty suit as her husband. I know gender-flipped Shakespeare can feel a little gimmicky, but admit that this would be flawless. Erykah could channel some really intense, powerful energies from the earth.

She would destroy the Unsex me monologue. I’m getting shivers just picturing it. I want to watch Erykah Badu murder everybody. And Jada’s always so effortlessly cool and sure of herself, but I know that she could draw on a reserve of terror and ambition and fidgetiness for this.

Also necessary: Michelle Rodriguez makes an appearance as Banquo.

5. A third, all-male remake of Steel Magnolias with B.D. Wong (Queen Latifah/Sally Field), Daniel Dae Kim (Jill Scott/Dolly Parton), John Cho (Darryl Hannah/Adepero Oduye), and Steven Yeun (Condola Rashad/Julia Roberts). Search within yourself, you know this would be amazing.

6. Nat King Cole, Sammy Davis Jr., and Ruby Dee in Some Like It Hot.

Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis would have had a weird, funny, hyperenergetic energy between the two of them for sure (Cole is Tony Curtis and Davis is Jack Lemmon, obviously), but this would really be about Ruby Dee.

This is a woman who was born to sing “I Wanna Be Loved By You” and breathe “Shell…Oil?” incredulously on a beach. I have no idea who would play Osgood, though; this is the only remaining flaw.

7. A remake of The Wiz where Janelle Monáe plays all of the characters in elaborate makeup.

I care about this more than anything in the world.

Okay, so…great talk. Someone make all of these movies, please. I’ll wait.

Read more Impossible Movie Remakes I Demand To See Nonetheless at The Toast.

by SB Sarah

Ok, dog lovers, this will hit you in the sniffle-grins. From Kathy comes Lola, The Pug That Couldn't Run.

Link!

Loca has her own YouTube channel because of course she does. 

I hope your weekend is full of lots of loved ones, furry and otherwise. 

Categories: Friday Videos, General Bitching

It was still dark out when he got the news. He was alone in his room, and then suddenly, he was not. A slender red-haired woman who had appeared at his side whispered the words, “It’s you, Adam. People has chosen you,” then quickly and gracefully flung herself out the window. He could hear screams drifting up from the street. He wiped his eyes.

“It’s me.” A grin broke out across his face, and the power of it woke the rising sun. “It’s me.”

***

The rest of the day was a rush of Coronation duties — he was carried in a pearl daïs by retired Victoria’s Secret models (the angel wings, he learned, weren’t a costume; in fact it was incredibly difficult for them to hide it off the runway) to the ceremony, declared once and for all who wore that Miu Miu wrap dress best, had lunch with Ginnifer Goodwin, left a drunk voicemail for Cee Lo Green telling him how much he appreciated him.

He’d spent most of the day trying not to think about what came next. But it came just the same. The room was dark, and warm, and small.

“Bring forth the last king,” Faith Hill intoned. “Bring forth the lamb for the slaughter.”

Adam held back a gasp as a bound and beaten Channing Tatum was led into the room. His head was lolling forward, and a guard struck him with the butt of her rifle. “Look your king in the face,” she commanded. He spit a thin trickle of blood onto the ground and did his best to open his swollen eyes. He tried to manage a smile, then grimaced in pain.

“Fancy meeting you here,” he said. It wasn’t the greatest opening line, but under the circumstances, Adam considered it pretty damn good.

“Hi, Channing,” he said quietly, feeling sick. He couldn’t bring himself to meet Channing’s gaze. He looked dumbly at the stone knife in his hand.

The ceremony began. So quickly; without any warning. I’m not ready, Adam thought helplessly, and found himself giggling softly and absurdly. No one told me it was about to start. What kind of king doesn’t even know when his own coronation starts? 

“And on the last day of the Sexiest Man Alive’s reign, he shall baptize the new Man in his blood, and with his blood shall the new Man be consecrated,” Mary J. Blige read from a book of human skin. Everyone was looking at him. Why was everyone looking at him?

“I’m sorry,” he said vaguely to the air, still looking at everything but Channing’s ruined face. “I’m really, really sorry.”

“It has happened before,” Channing said. “It will happen again. It will happen to you. Do it now.” Adam squeezed the stone knife so hard he felt the outline of it against his bones. He has a child, he thought. A wife and a child. “I can’t,” he heard himself say. “I can’t.”

Channing rattled his chains. “It’s the Sexiest Man Alive,” he growled. “I watched Bradley Cooper twitch in a pool of his own filth at my feet, and I showed him no mercy with these two hands.” There was blood on his mouth. “While I live, you cannot reign. Kill me. DO IT. Kill me. Kill me.”

Adam lifted a shaking hand and pointed the knife at Channing’s throat. “What I am about to do, I do for beauty,” he chanted.

“What we are about to do, we do for beauty,” the hooded crowd replied. Somewhere, the ghost of Ryan Reynolds smiled.

Adam moved the knife from left to right, and blood followed it. Blood covered his hands and his feet, and Adam knew that he was the Sexiest Man Alive in both name and truth. Channing lifted his eyes, and Adam finally felt equal to matching his gaze. His lips moved, but no sound issued from them.

***

When the servants entered to clear the room, they found hanging upon the wall a splendid portrait of Channing Tatum as they had last seen him, in all the wonder of his exquisite youth and beauty. Lying on the floor was a dead man, in evening dress, with a knife in his heart. He was withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.

[Image via Ryanseacrest.com]

Read more The Crowning of Adam Levine, The Sexiest Man Alive at The Toast.

Dear Pope Stephen VI:

Thank you for your application for sainthood. Unfortunately, we are unable to grant your request at this time.

When examining the merits of church prelates, the Congregation for the Causes of Saints looks favorably on efforts to strengthen the integrity of Church ecclesiastical offices. And of course no application for sainthood can be harmed if the applicant has been martyred in the name of Christ. We assume you know this, which is why you emphasize both these qualities in your letter.

However, you may not be aware that the Congregation has access to extensive historical records that do not necessarily corroborate all the material in your application packet. For instance, while we agree that the ordination of your predecessor, Pope Formosus, was irregular in several aspects, a wise and even-tempered administrator of the Church would have reacted to such problems in a forward-looking way, perhaps by reforming administrative processes to prevent them from recurring.

Instead, you dug up Formosus’s body, prop it up on a throne, and put it on trial — a trial that, from all reports, consisted primarily of yelling at said corpse. This made everyone very uncomfortable. A saint should provide a calming sense of God’s love to his flock, a sense of righteous unity in Christ, rather than a feeling of creeping, surreal horror.

In addition, while we must emphasize that we do not endorse posthumous trials or executions of any short, we feel that decisiveness and determination are also important qualities in a saint. Stripping Formosus’s corpse of papal vestments, burying it in a cemetery reserved for foreigners, then digging it up a second time and throwing it in the Tiber fails to really get at whatever point you were going for.

In regards to your so-called “martyrdom”: while the Congregation of course supports the rule of law and opposes angry mob justice, we believe that being violently overthrown by a Roman populace outraged by your deranged conduct and then getting strangled in prison does not constitute the sort of witness for Christ that most people think of when they hear the word “martyr.”

Miracles are the sort of thing that can really punch up a sainthood application. We notice you did not mention any miracles in yours, and we appreciate your honesty in this regard. We wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.

***

Dear Pope Boniface VIII:

Thank you for your application for sainthood. Unfortunately, we are unable to grant your request at this time, just as we were unable to grant your previous four requests.

We take under advisement your insistence that certain quotes have been taken out of context, or fabricated by your enemies after your death. For instance, several anecdotes have come down in which you supposedly claimed that different sins were no more harmful than “rubbing your hands together” — sodomy, for instance, or adultery, or pedophilia. You say the different variations on the story prove that this is an urban legend; we, on the other hand, would suggest that this was merely your go-to metaphor when attempting to justify un-saintly behavior.

We will pass over both the metaphor and the conduct it attempted to justify for the moment. Instead, we will bring up several other matters that concerned members of the review committee. We understand that reading the application of someone petitioning to have their semi-divine status recognized and criticizing it for a lack of humility is somewhat contradictory. Nevertheless, a review of your records demonstrates that you didn’t really try very hard to walk the line in this case.

We draw your attention, for instance, to an incident when, during a Roman jubilee year when the city was thronged with pilgrims, you appeared before them dressed in imperial robes and a jewel-encrusted crown, shouting “I am Caesar, I am emperor.” Similarly, while we understand that the Church is a multinational organization that requires money to do God’s work on Earth and do not expect its administrators to live off of stale bread donated by the pious, we feel that your accounts receivable techniques, which consisted of priests literally raking in money for you, with actual, non-metaphorical rakes, to be, as they say today, bad optics.

Finally, we must touch the circumstances of your death. Your attempt to assert supremacy over the King of France strikes us having been less a proclamation of the primacy of the spiritual realm than about your desire to boss around the King of France. Your subsequent arrest, failed attempt at suicide (by chewing through your own arm, what is that even about), release from captivity, and swift decline and death were less martyr-like that just kind of sad.

You know, 600 years before your time, the Byzantine emperor tried to arrest Pope Sergius I, and you know what happened to the soldier he sent to do that? He ended up hiding under the pope’s bed. And Sergius never got to be a saint either. We’re just saying.

***

Dear Pope John XII,

Well! Where do we even start? The Congregation for the Causes of Saints is getting pretty tired of the entitled attitude among the millennial generation, by which of course we mean people born in the last century of the first millennium A.D. We suppose that such feeling might be inevitable in someone elected pope in his early 20s thanks to his father, the Count who ruled Rome, but that doesn’t make such an attitude saintly.

We will mention only in passing some of the more spectacular accusations made against you, which include testimony that you ordained a deacon in a horse stable; ordained a ten-year-old bishop; fornicated with various ladies, including your father’s concubine and your own niece; blinded and killed your confessor; castrated and killed a cardinal; set frequent fires; toasted to the devil with wine; and invoked Jupiter, Venus and other demons while playing dice.

Granted, most of these tales come from the writings of Liutprand of Cremona, one of history’s most spectacularly energetic haters. Still, the sheer volume of accusations is, well, troubling.

More disturbing still are the multiple reports that, after you were briefly ejected from Rome by Emperor Otto I, you had your enemies mutilated. Frankly, we don’t even think a saint should have enemies. And to be blunt, we prefer that saints get mutilated rather than do the mutilating. Seriously, you can look that up.

We thank you for your time. Do Jupiter and Venus really count as “demons”? Anyway, tell them we say hi.

Read more Popes Who Never Got to be Saints at The Toast.

Well, the holidays are at last upon us, as "upon us" is a holiday's favorite place to sprawl, and that means one thing: making sure that you get enough to eat at holiday parties. There's nothing worse than waking up in January and realizing you've practiced careful moderation in the face of temptation, also watching that waistline, and cravings, and jeans that fit: food is everywhere.

Read more How To Make Sure You Get Enough To Eat At Holiday Parties at The Toast.

BURNING THE GROUND EXCLUSIVE 1988

“Together Forever” 1988 Super Dub Remix mixed by Pete Hammond for PWL.

A very rare 12″ release from Crocodile Records in the USA, giving you the very hard to get SUPER DUB Remix of Rick’s US #11 hit single “Together Forever” and a MEGAMIX on the flip side including “Don’t Say Goodbye”, “Never Gonna Give You Up”, “Whenever You Need Somebody” & “Together Forever”.

TThe mastering on this record is pretty good considering it was released on an independant label. There is a bit of a drop out during the end fade of both tracks but it doesn’t really affect the enjoyment of the record.

SDE A:
Together Forever (Super Dub Remix) 6:15
Engineer – Mark McGuire
Mixed By – Pete Hammond
Written-By – Stock – Aitken – Waterman*

SIDE B:
R. A. Megamix 9:38
Ba Don’t Say Goodbye
Bb Never Gonna Give You Up
Bc Whenever You Need Somebody
Bd Together Forever

VINYL GRADE:
Vinyl: Near Mint
Sleeve: Near Mint (generic)

U.S. CHART HISTORY:

RELEASE INFORMATION:
Label: Crocodile Records (2) ‎– STU-1873
Format: Vinyl, 12″, 33 ⅓ RPM
Country: US
Released: 1988
Genre: Electronic, Pop
Style: Euro House
Credits: Co-Producer – P. Harding And I. Curnow*
Producer – Stock Aitken Waterman*

NOTES:
B-side is a Rick Astley Megamix
Recorded & Mixed at PWL Studios 1 & 2

Find The 12″ On DISCOGS

EQUIPMENT USED:
Turntable: Pro-Ject Debut III
Cartridge: Ortofon Super
Stylus: Ortofon OM Stylus 30
Platter: Pro-Ject Acryl-It platter
Speed Control: Pro-Ject Speed Box S
Phono Pre-amp: Bellari VP130 Tube Phono Preamp
Tube: Tung-Sol 12AX7ECC803-S Gold Electron Tube
Soundcard: ESI Juli@
Record Cleaning: VPI HW 16.5 Record Cleaning Machine
Artwork Scans: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Scanner

SOFTWARE USED:
Recording/Editing: Adobe Audition 3.0 (Recording)
Down Sampling: iZotope RX Advanced 2
Artwork Editor: Adobe Photoshop CS5
Click Removeal: ClickRepair (DeClick Level 3)
FLAC/MP3 Conversion: dBpoweramp
M3U Playlist: Playlist Creator

RESTORATION NOTES:
All vinyl rips are recorded @ 32bit/float
FLAC (Level Eight)
MP3 (320kbps)
Artwork scanned at 600dpi

Username: btg
Password: burningtheground

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Over the weekend I attended an excellent new book panel on Jonathan Sperber’s Karl Marx: a 19th Century Life organized by the Labor History Seminar at the Newberry Library here in Chicago.  The general thrust of Sperber’s book is to remove Marx from the role of icon, guide, or precursor to the crimes or triumphs of 20th century communist regimes.  Marx was not a prophetic thinker, Sperber argues. Rather he was mired in historically specific battles over politics and ideology in Central Europe, and backward looking intellectually.

There were some pointed criticisms of the book, especially from Bruce Levine (U. of Illinois) and Susan Pearson (Northwestern), along with general praise and comment on the achievement of grappling with such a complex subject.  Pearson calmly skewered Sperber for relegating the role Jenny Marx and the Marx’s housekeeper Helene Demuth to a chapter on the “private Marx” when in fact it appears they were key to the social reproduction of the fetishized and very public commodity “Karl Marx,” to paraphrase from memory.

Another interesting line of discussion concerned why and how Marx became such a singular figure for socialist movements when relatively little of his writing was known outside of Germany in his lifetime, and when his economic writing was so notoriously difficult to understand.  Sperber’s answer was that Marxism should in fact be termed “Engels-ism” because it was the work of Marx’s literary executor Friedrich Engels that made Marx famous on the left.

Less commented upon was the vernacular radicalism that developed alongside Marx’s writing and reputation, and was much more influential at least into the 1930s.  In this regard, there is a fascinating passage from Floyd Dell’s “Books and Writers” column (The Progressive Woman (September 1912), p. 11).  It suggests a time when Marx was not quite so hegemonic.

“Das Kapital” is sometimes spoken of as “the Socialist’s Bible.”  It is not, for two reasons.  The first is that, even Socialists do not read it.  In this they are not without justification, for the book is, in its strictly economic parts, to any ordinary human being, unreadable.  Why any one except a mathematician should bother about those amazing equations of Marx’s I do not see, nor do I see why any one should imagine that in explicating the Socialist “theory of value” these equations have any more than a suggestive validity.  Value, like everything else, is too complex to be reduced to an equation, and there is as much truth in the soap-box phrase, “Labor is the source of all value,” as in the maddening mathematics of Marx.  The fact is, the Socialist movement is not based soley on Marxian economics, and though Marxian economics may fall, yet the Socialist movement goes on.  There is good history and good historical philosophy in the volume which make it well worth reading.  But we Socialists (as I said) do not read it.

It was Walt Whitman, Dell suggested, who had written the Socialist Bible in his “Leaves of Grass.”  Commenting on his own youthful participation in Marxist study groups, Nelson Lichtenstein, a historian of 20th century labor and capitalism, recalled his struggle to understand Marx’s “labor theory of value” and ultimate conclusion that it just didn’t make sense economically.  But morally and ethically it made a lot of sense.  Sperber’s book argues that Marx just couldn’t make the shift to positivism in the late 19th century–maybe he shouldn’t have tried?

The idea of vernacular radicalism put me in mind of the frequent question in my own research:  did early 20th century rank-and-file radicals really read any Marx?  And if they read it, could they possibly understand the complexity of Marx’s economic writing, which is famously tough reading for professional intellectuals to this day.  The question, I think is actually part of a broader skepticism about the reading practices of ordinary people–then and today.  Sure they could read, but did they really read?  Or did they just pass their eyes over the text without really getting the point.  Did they–and do they–get it?

Dell was an exceptional working-class intellectual by any measure.  But his educational background wasn’t that far off the norm for working class activists.  The son of a butcher and a teacher, he grew up on Illinois and Iowa, and left school after 2 years of high school.  He told the American Labor Who’s Who (1925) that the “most important part of [my] education [was] gained in [a] Socialist local and [the] pubic library.”  There is, in fact, evidence in diaries, letters, and publications that more-or-less ordinary working people did read and understand high brow literature and social science.  Some would fall into the category of “extraordinary ordinary people”–rank and file workers who were, I’m quite sure, smarter and better read than many professional intellectuals then or now.  In any case, it’s also worth exploring the opposite side of the question:  the non-reading of books, and whether this non-reading has any positive significance.  In other words, what impact did books and text have on those who didn’t read them very thoroughly but who circulated in a public sphere suffused with conversations about books and text?  That will have to wait for another day.

It's unsurprising to see reports indicating that the Richie Incognito's harassment of Jonathan Martin began in the upper levels of management. Via Deadspin, here is some reporting from The Sun Sentinel:

Miami Dolphins coaches asked player Richie Incognito, who was the offensive line's undisputed leader, to toughen up teammate Jonathan Martin after he missed a voluntary workout last spring, multiple sources told the Sun Sentinel.

The sources told the paper they believe that Incognito, who is accused of using racially incendiary language and bullying tactics against Martin, may have taken those orders too far...

Even though OTA workouts are voluntary, the NFL culture forces coaches to strong arm the team's leaders to make sure everyone attends. Sources say Incognito was doing his job, but they admit he crossed the line.

"Richie is the type of guy where if he's on your team you love him," a teammate said. "If he's not on your team, you hate him. Every team needs a guy like that."

A Dolphins spokesman declined comment when told about Incognito's directives from the coaching staff, saying the franchise is fully cooperating with the NFL's independent investigation, which was requested by owner Steve Ross.

There's been a lot of what my mother used to call "If I Hadda Had My Gun" talk around this story. On the one hand you have the keyboard commandos and sensitive thugs in NFL front offices popping off about "going down swinging." On the other you have players blaming Martin and invoking their own "toughness" and "manliness."

There is something bizarre about all this talk about strength and ass-kicking. No other athlete in a major sport gives so much of his body and gets so little in return than the average player on a NFL team. These are men who—on balance—earn their greatest payday in their most vulnerable and immature years. Those years are generally brief, while the injuries sustained often last a lifetime. The average NFL player emerges into the world with three years of service, and without a college degree. All the while another group of people make millions watching these young men blow out shoulders, knees, and perhaps ultimately, brains.

We all believe in the right to defend one's own body. But the ability to kick someone's ass is oft-stated and overrated. Jerry Jones doesn't want to fight DeAngelo Hall. He won't ever need to, because such is his power that he can erect a Wonderland of a stadium, reduce men to toy soldiers, and toss their battered bodies out onto the street when he's done. Pimping ain't easy, but it sure is fun.

If you squint hard enough you might dimly perceive the outlines of some phantasm, some illusion. You might see power back there behind the scrum. You might see how a national valorization of violence attaches itself to profit. On the streets of Chicago, violently confronting someone for disrespecting you is evidence of a "culture of pathology." In the NFL it is evidence of handling things "the right way."

We are being told that the NFL is filled with the "toughest of the tough," that Richie Incognito is a "tough guy." He had better be. The world is coming. And it's not a game.

Image: Heavenly Body in the Night Sky by Albrecht Durer

It's that time of year, when everyone is compiling their Best Of 2013 lists, and I keep getting asked for mine, and having to turn them all down.

Because I mean let's face it, those lists are terrible and DonnaTarttThomasPynchonBookAboutJFKorSomething is going to dominate and being the one person who is like KATHRYN DAVIS DUPLEX I DON'T WANT TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR DONNA TARTT is not an emotionally healthy place to be. And have I even read Kathryn Davis's Duplex? No. I read the excerpts in Little Star, and I heard her read part of it at a party I threw for Bookslut's 100th issue, and that seems like enough to say it is the thing from this year that should be celebrated. I'm still waiting to get to a place where I have an address so I can obtain a copy. (Soon!) I also believe that there are certain people like Kathryn Davis and Iain McGilchrist and Mary Midgley and Jarvis Cocker who we should all just be in a constant state of gratitude and beatitude for inhabiting the same space and time as them, so it doesn't matter if I read the whole book yet or not.

There's also the problem of I don't worship at the same altars as most everyone else, and oh my god it is tiring to be the eccentric weirdo who is invited along to play the role of the eccentric weirdo. I have a complicated belief system, that it is okay to read reprehensible people once they are dead, but we should not do things like give them our money when they are living. And so I refuse to separate out the art from the artist while they are up and walking around. And so I refuse to read their books or mention their names to draw attention to people who, say, write things that make it clear women don't deserve even the same quantities of air as men. I'll read Koestler, who raped women, because he is dead, and my buying his books does not give him money to gain access to more women. But I'm not going to give my money or attention to the category of writers I have internally labeled Ugh.

This is a surprisingly not-okay stance to take in the literary world.

But, some of my favorite writers and people released books this year. Like Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore's beautiful book about queerness and community and lack of and disappointment and marginalization and gentrification and sex, The End of San Francisco. God, I love that book, on a sentence level it is just heartbreaking.

And two of my favorite men released books this year. One is obviously Charles Blackstone, my managing editor and dear friend. And his Vintage Attraction made me so proud of him. Because even if one of my favorite men had not written it, I would have loved it anyway. The other favorite man is my on again off again super complicated love interest, so he'll have to go nameless and the book titleless. But it is a stunner.

And Jamaica Kincaid, one of my favorite writers, released a beautiful new book See Now Then, and was trashed for it thoroughly by gossipmongers, because writing about a man in a kind of unflattering way who may or may not be based on your ex-husband is a way worse act than, say, degrading with your descriptions the impoverished prostitutes you pay for sex in the Global South. (One of the Ughs.) And I got to write the introduction for two books this year, Ella Maillart's The Cruel Way: Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939 and Mary MacLane's I Await the Devil's Coming. And dear whoever will oversee the inevitable Freya Stark second coming, I am available to write that crazy woman's introduction, too. I like being even slightly associated with women who throw down.

Do we even need to say again, that Sarah Schulman wins the year with Gentrification of the Mind? If I ever finish writing this fucking book, I am starting work on the Literaturhaus of Sex and Death. I am serious.

(It is also hard to stay in one year, what with all of the wonderful years that already happened. I have been really excited about Albrecht Durer all year long, and he happened a while ago.)

And of course, the nicest thing to happen in 2013, other than the guy in Lausanne who played the Brazil theme song on clarinet under my window every day for a week, was the publication of Spolia and our chapbook series, Spoils. Oh, and signing a contract with the University of Chicago for my book that I need to fucking finish writing, that was nice too.

I don't know why we're doing this now. We have a lot of weeks left. Let's see what they'll bring.

Seven years ago I was walking up Fifth Avenue with David Foster Wallace. He wanted to know what I thought of The Names. That one’s the key, he said, speaking of Don DeLillo’s work like it was a safe which contained its own code. It was hat-and-glove weather. Wallace wore a purple sweatshirt. Where did I get my coat? he asked. That’s a great coat, he said. It was like something James Bond would wear. Had I been to this restaurant before?

We had just walked into Japonica, a sushi restaurant on University Place. Our interview was underway, and Wallace was already several questions ahead of nearly every writer I had ever profiled. Most writers, even the most curious one, don’t ask questions of a journalist. Nor should they, necessarily. They are the ones being interviewed, after all.

Wallace, however, seemed to think in the interrogative mode. He was tall and slightly sweaty, looking like he had just come from a run. But he seemed determined not to intimidate. He was like a big cat pulling out his claws, one question at a time. See, look, I’m not going to be difficult.

Once we got going, though—and there was a propulsive, caffeinated momentum to the way he talked—he returned, constantly, to questions. Had I ever written about my life? It’s hard, right? Are celebrities even the same species as us? Is it possible to show what someone was really like in a profile?

“These nonfiction pieces feel to me like the very hardest thing that I do,” he said, talking about Consider the Lobster, the book he had just published, “because reality is infinite.” And then. “God only knows what you are jotting.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about this encounter lately. For the past fifteen years, I have interviewed a lot of writers. A few hundred—perhaps too many, but why not say yes? Shortly out of college a friend gave me a vintage set of The Paris Review Book of Interviews. They exhaled the flinty musk of a cigar smoker’s home, and were as snappy as the lining of a 1940s dinner jacket. Read More »

I. The Ubiquity of Prince Ephemera

Hilton Als wrote one of the strongest memoir pieces in recent–as well as not-so-recent–memory, published by Harper’s under the title “I Am Your Conscious, I Am Love: A Paean To Prince.” The masterful way in which Als deconstructs abstract gender identities is applied to formulate a personal saga. Particularly, the convoluted nature of Prince’s prowess as a performer is digressed in dichotomies of masculinity and femininity, interspersed with the intentionality Prince used over time to navigate the audience’s perception of him.

Regardless of how Prince ultimately chooses to use his heightened sexual appeal in both male and female forms, its magnetic verisimilitude shines through. Prince’s appeal defines him. Als presented a seriocomic anecdote in which Jamie Foxx confessed his temporary gayness in the presence of Prince, who confessed he was drawn to him “cause he was pretty. He looked like a deer or something, or a fawn…”

Vanessa Grigoriadis also highlighted the irresistible wetness of his eyes in a cover story for a recent V Magazine: “his extremely large, liquid eyes seem to occupy half his face,” she observed. I interviewed Grigoriadis on her experience interviewing Prince, the legendary performer who continues to astound audiences with his musical gift and artistic mystique.

Grigoriadis succinctly presents his contradictory nature by underlining the numerous antitheses that can be used to describe him (yet under no circumstances define him): “A devout Jehovah’s Witness since 2001, he writes music that is explicit about both Jesus and sexual desire. He’s a black man with light skin who usually dresses in clothes that seem inspired by female icons, from Twiggy to Marie Antoinette. A heterosexual man who deeply worships sexually confident women, he nonetheless wants to dominate them.”

II. Grigoriadis’ Perspective

ET: How did you set up and prepare for the interview?

VG: I didn’t set it up myself. They [V Magazine staff and Prince] actually set it up themselves. So I didn’t have anything to do with the logistics. He did request to see three of my pieces, so we had to send him my articles, but I didn’t actually have anything to do with the logistics of setting it up.

I have been a big fan of his my entire life. I probably respect him more than anybody else. As a musician, he is someone whose songs I made up dances to in sixth grade with my friends, so I have admired him my whole life, really. I was really excited to meet him, because he is known to be a “funny” interview; he is an individual who says exactly what’s on his mind.

ET: Do the majority of attendees know the rules before they attend? (strict enforcement of no cameras, no cellphones during the concert)

VG: I wouldn’t call it a majority. When we went to this concert in Orange County the security guards asked us to do the same thing: stop using all phones, cameras and technological devices. People understand, they don’t cause a scene.

ET: Is Prince a technophobe or is his aversion towards technology rooted in his desire to control the ownership rights of his work?

VG: He has certainly kept himself more ‘pure,’ or some people would just think it is backwards in terms of the way he is with technology. He doesn’t really want his music to be on every available channel, he doesn’t want his videos to be all over Youtube.

ET: Do you think he can afford to abstain from using the Internet because there is no need for him to engage online, or because he favors catering to a more dedicated audience?

VG: I think that it is probably both. He is definitely curious about wanting to have his primary fanbase be a live audience/fanbase. Ideally, he wants his songs to be consumed by his loyal fans and by people who come to see him live. That is really his priority and main emphasis: performing live.

Prince has the luxury of making himself less available because of his established position as an artist on a grand scale. Very few people who are young don’t use the online networks available to them; that’s the way the system works now.

Actually, there’s also very few older artists who have the status that Prince has, where he doesn’t have to place his music online, make portions of his performing available on the Internet.

He can pack any mid-to-large size arena and do two shows; that is very unique. He has the stamina! He is like Willie Nelson in terms of energy. He can really criss-cross on not only a national, but also a global level. I do think that is remarkable: he is unique.

ET: You asked him about his opinion on the difference between men and women, and he didn’t really provide an answer. (Prince’s response:“If we didn’t have to go to a party, we could talk about that.”) Why do you think that is?

VG: It is hard to say if he was looking for an easy way out of that question, or if it just was an inappropriate time. The interview was for a fashion magazine, and it took place at 2AM, so perhaps it wasn’t the moment to have that kind of “heavy” conversation.

ET: It almost seems like he personally chose what to expand on and didn’t want to talk about his views on gender.

VG: Yeah. I think that’s somewhat true. He could have definitely talked about it had he wanted to talk about it. He just didn’t.

My opinion is that he has been somewhat misunderstood on a lot of those topics, so he is wary of them. Again, addressing gender wasn’t really necessary, due to the thematic focus of the magazine being fashion. It wasn’t about pushing him to talk on topics he does not talk about.

ET: Prince rejects the idea of a set routine when performing, following his instinct and spontaneously choosing the song order every time he performs. Does this appear controlling to you?

VG: I think most artists are controlling. There is always somebody in the band who is pretty dominant. But I also think that you know… he is Prince!

He gets away with what he wants to get away with, he is a songwriting genius, certainly an inspiration for these women (3RDEYEGIRL) who are in the beginnings of their careers. They are so young, it is such a privilege and an exciting lesson for them to follow his lead.

ET: Your most challenging question centered on how Prince balances religious faith with the main subject of his songs: sexual desire. Prince laughed in response, and stated: “Now we know what you’re going to write about. We were waiting for your thread,” before starting to form a response prior to ultimately refusing to answer the question. Did you find his tone accusatory in this instance? When I read the interview, I personally interpreted the dialogue to be confrontational, almost indicative of the desire to maintain power throughout the exchange.

VG: Oh no! I did not think that! I think he was just saying ‘I figured out what you are going to write about.’ Generally people talk to their managers, guessing ‘What does she want to write about?’ That might be addressed before, so they can prepare their answers accordingly. In this case they were like ‘Oh, now I know,’ once religion and sin came up. I think he was starting to respond, but he eventually decided not to.

ET: What were the three stories of yours you ended up sending prior to the interview?

VG: I sent my stories on Patti Smith, Devendra Banhart, and Karl Lagerfeld.

III. When Princes Tweet

In attaining a deeper understanding of the elements that make Prince a music powerhouse, his insistence on being a private individual is immediately transcendent. While direct autobiographical elements exist in his work–and are particularly evident in the 1984 film Purple Rain, which chronicles the artist’s transition to a star/conglomerate–he was never willing to become a public person, outside of his music. In the modern reality of creative individuals’ living in public via their online simulacra, Prince resists the virtual immersion most of his colleagues have already underwent.

His outspoken stance against new media does him no harm: it might even strengthen his brand as the primary focus becomes performing live, intimately. Rolling Stone’s “50 Greatest Live Acts Right Now” ranks Prince & 3RDEYEGIRL at the second position, solely following the lead of Bruce Springsteen, while still placed ahead of seasoned industry leaders such as Jay-Z and The Rolling Stones.

Despite his strong aversion towards technology, the quixotic quest that preceded the identification of the extraordinary talent he would eventually mentor–3RDEYEGIRL–was conducted using the very same technology, the same means on which he refuses to featured his work on: 3RDEYEGIRL was a YouTube discovery.

“I’m trying to get these women’s careers started, because they’re all so talented. It’s not even about me anymore,” Prince told Grigoriadis, and it seems like he fully meant it. His dedication to buttressing 3RDEYEGIRL is manifested in his endeavor to tweet via the 3RDEYEGIRL twitter account. While generating tweets may seem like a small gesture for most, it is grand coming from Prince. It shows his dedication to help his larger cause: these women deserve all the success he can get them. Prince’s love was never easy, but he would die 4 them.

Read more What We Talk About When We Talk About Prince at The Toast.

Worried about what to wear this Halloween? Worry no more. (Some costumes may require a working knowledge of Edwardian-era architecture/light hand replacement.) This year, why not try dressing as:

…bell “Captain” hooks? Slash at the twin crocodiles of racism and sexism with the hooks of righteousness and self-knowledge.

…Radclyffe Hall? For a group costume, get a friend to go as The Well of Loneliness. 

…Ursula “The K is for Sea Witch” LeGuin? Just wear your regular Ursula costume, but smile warmly and build rich universes wherever you go. 

…Octavia and Judith Butler? Bodies That Matter, tuxes that flatter.

Lord Audre Lorde, ruler of all she surveys? Master’s tools not included; master’s house does not come pre-assembled. 

Text, puns, and concept by Mallory Ortberg. Jen Hickman is a comic artist and illustrator with a penchant for drawing luxurious hair, arguments, arguments in the rain, and small spats between minor background characters.

Molly Brooks is a freelance illustrator/bookbinder/comicker from Nashville.

Read more Trick, Treat, or Overthrow: Advanced Feminist Cosplay at The Toast.

Watching Game of Thrones is an interesting undertaking if you’re a woman who likes women. One the one hand: hey, a fantasy series with lots of distinct female characters who are, on the whole, about as developed as you’re likely to get in a mainstream franchise set in a world that draws a significant amount of inspiration from ye olde chattel days. On the other hand: seven hells, does a lot of woman-hating happen on this show. You can argue about whether it’s a misogynistic series or just a series set in a misogynistic world (or both), but the fact is that the majority of the female characters’ storylines involve dealing with the worst dudes you can imagine. Like, would-literally-be-twirling-their-mustaches-if-both-hands-weren’t-busy-committing-all-this-sexualized-violence dudes.

So how to give these fabulous women the storylines they deserve? The answer is, as always, for them to give it to each other.

A disclaimer: these may be George R.R. Martin’s characters, but we don’t play by his rules. All characters who are minors in the storyline as it stands should be understood to be shipped only once they have reached an appropriate age, because just because GRRM thinks it’s chill for people to get married at thirteen doesn’t mean it is. Moving on.

The beauty of having so many female characters in the series is that the possibilities truly are endless. You want some femme powerplays? Can I interest you in some Sansa/Margaery?

Are you imagining me opening a trenchcoat to reveal innumerable pockets full of tiny women making out? I hope so.

You like femme powerplays just fine, but you prefer them with more fire and murder? Allow me to introduce you to Daenerys/Melisandre.

Think of your own “hot” pun, I’m not going to do everything for you.

You’re down with murder, but prefer more of a scruffy boi-ish vibe? Yara/Ygritte is here to fulfill your every desire.

These two already have the “lesbian merge” thing going on. Meant for each other!

We’ve got something for almost every taste (assuming your taste runs to white women, because this series remains a bastion of white patriarchy and weird, racial crowd-surfing). Try to stump me. You can’t. You’re in the market for blonde monarchs with arranged marriages, dead husbands, and incestuous histories who want each other dead? That’s pretty niche, but Game of Thrones gives you Daenerys/Cersei and doesn’t even judge you for it.

Their accessories are all pointy, so it’ll be convenient for them to try to stab each other post-coitally.

Have most of these women met in canon yet? Nope, because Game of Thrones has a thousand storylines and also because patriarchy. Is that important to my fantasy life? Not in the slightest. You could spend your time arguing with me, or you could spend it thinking about Ygritte and Yara having filthy sex by a fire they built after slaughtering a thousand dudes. Your priorities are up to you.

I’ll be honest with you, though, friends: I come here with an agenda. I want to show you the light of Game of Thrones femslash, yes…but I also have a particular pairing in mind. A beautiful pairing. A pairing that deserves its own series of seven thousand-page books. I speak to you of the power and the glory of Sansa/Brienne.

Nothing matters to me but this.

If the epic butch/femme vista you see before you is not enough to convince you in and of itself, don’t worry. I went to a liberal arts college, y’all, and I’m about to unpack some goddamn text.

Sansa

Sansa Stark is the character most hated by dudebro fans, which is how you know she’s actually the best. She starts the series as an idealistic believer in fairy tales (“All she wanted was for things to be nice and pretty, the way they were in the songs.” – an actual quote from the first book). The eldest daughter of a noble family, she idolizes knights and queens and life at court. Until, you know, all the murder. And manipulation. And being forced to stay engaged to this walking, talking frowny face:

This is Joffrey. You know that creeping sense of dread you get when you see a group of leering, shouting teenage boys out in public? Joffrey is the embodiment of that, only much worse.

Nothing good ever happens in Game of Thrones, especially not to Sansa or anyone in her family, and the other characters make sure to remind her of it.

“Sansa had no choice but to explain about heroes and monsters. The king’s councilor smiled…’Life is not a song, sweetling. You may learn that one day to your sorrow.’” — A Game of Thrones

That councilor ends up being a sexual predator who’s obsessed with her because she reminds him of her mom, so, you know, he’s not wrong.

WHO HURT YOU? Just kidding, I already know, it’s everyone.

Sansa watches her family members executed, is forced to remain engaged to an abusive blonde wig, narrowly avoids sexual assault, loses even more family members, and finds herself with absolutely no one she can trust. Her body, marriage, and life are used as poker chips by more powerful people, and she isn’t even allowed to sit at the card table. By the second book, her disillusionment is complete, displaying a lack of faith in the men around her that many of us may be familiar with:

“Knights are sworn to defend the weak, protect women, and fight for the right, but none of them did a thing… the Hound hated knights … I hate them too, Sansa thought. They are no true knights, not one of them.” — A Clash of Kings

“They are children, Sansa thought … They’ve never seen a battle, they’ve never seen a man die, they know nothing. Their dreams were full of songs and stories, the way hers had been before Joffrey cut her father’s head off. Sansa pitied them. Sansa envied them.” — A Storm of Swords

That “Hound” she mentions is a warrior who hates knights so much that he refuses to be knighted himself. He is violent and cruel, but he still earns a small amount of sympathy from Sansa, because Sansa is the best and also too traumatized to know better. You can see him lurking ominously in the background three pictures up. They have conversations like this:

“True knights protect the weak.”

[The Hound] snorted. “There are no true knights, no more than there are gods. If you can’t protect yourself, die and get out of the way of those who can. Sharp steel and strong arms rule this world, don’t ever believe any different.”

Sansa backed away from him. “You’re awful.”

“I’m honest. It’s the world that’s awful.” — A Clash of Kings

Some (generally male) fans like to deride Sansa as “boring” and “stupid,” because they have terrible opinions and also (as previously discussed) because of the patriarchy. Many of them compare her negatively with her little sister Arya, a tomboy who solves her problems using edged weapons.

The post Femslash Friday: Sansa/Brienne, A Lady And Her Knight appeared first on The Toast.