I thought this graphic was not real but it is real.
Source: The New York Times
mollitudo reblogged
This Black Ribbon
A.J. Bayes’ 1889 illustration for Hans Christian Andersen’s “Little Match Girl”.
This half-hidden cynicism, this black ribbon, that runs through Christmas celebrations from the earliest surviving carols to schmaltzy holiday songs today grounds the aggressive merriment of the season with a potent understanding of how hard it is to live in the world. Christmas, like no other holiday, makes space for despair. O. Henry’s sentimental “Gift of the Magi” still deals with grueling poverty. There is so little pleasure in A Christmas Story, a cavalcade of small miseries. Home Alone’s premise is a forgotten child. Even songs with totally benign lyrics, like “Carol of the Bells,” sound as if they come out of some kind of dark, apocalyptic Christmas. (Don’t even get me started on Krampus.) For all the joy the holiday insists on, it acknowledges bleakness. For every rousing “Hallelujah Chorus,” there’s a slow, sad answer.
I wrote about one of my favorite subjects for one of my favorite magazines!
mollitudo reblogged
10 Amazing Essays from 2013
We asked Molly McArdle, writer, editor, reading machine, reviewer, and brains behind the excellent The Rumpus tumblr to pick ten favourites essays from 2013. This is what she chose:
- How to be a Stuffed Animal by Frances Stonor Saunders - The fire that destroyed P. T. Barnum’s American Museum was the spectacle to end all spectacles.
- Out in the Great Alone by Brian Phillips - The Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race pushes participants to the brink on an unforgiving trek to the end of the world.
- Girls in the Grass by Angela Sebastian - It’s the word “sis” that sends me into giggles, because “sis” is me. This summer I will have a sister.
- Here Comes Everybody by Miriam Markowitz - Women writers are far outnumbered by men in magazines and book reviews, but why?
- Emancipation by Casey Cep - Each tree and farm, street and courthouse of my home county rests on shallow-buried stories of slavery and Civil War.
- The Ghost Rapes of Bolivia by Jean Friedman-Rudovsky - For a while, the residents of Manitoba Colony thought demons were raping the town’s women. There was no other explanation.
- Teach Me How to Speak by Soleil Ho - Though it was just an errant eruption from some distant undergrad’s laptop, the music bounced off the facades of the buildings around me, gaining more and more volume with each leap.
- A Tooth for a Tooth by Jess Stoner - Modern dentistry does wonders for a rotten molar or a cracked bicuspid—it’s modern dental insurance that falls short.
- The Forgetting Tree by Rae Paris - Because on your day I ate fried scallops, drank wine, tucked your name under my greasy napkin, explained to my job how productive I was this year. This year, every day you were dead.
- How to Slowly Kill Yourself in America by Kiese Laymon - I’m a walking regret, a truth-teller, a liar, a survivor, a frowning ellipsis, a witness, a dreamer, a teacher, a student, a joker, a writer whose eyes stay red, and I’m a child of this nation.
- Invisible Child by Andrea Elliott - This child of New York is always running before she walks. She likes being first — the first to be born, the first to go to school, the first to make the honor roll.
Make sure you check out Molly’s site for stacks of great writing and reviews, or head to the The Rumpus tumblr for all kinds of literary goodness.
Here are ten essays that I loved from 2013, except for the Kiese Laymon which I just today realized was published in 2012.
Here is a piece of writing that has attained a certain length—a form that you can read, secure in the knowledge that someone did a lot of typing, and that you are doing a lot of reading. Everyone recognizes that there is virtue, or an approximation of virtue, in doing a lot of reading. Share it, this quantity of reading.
On Smarm by Tom Scocca
I am thinking so many thoughts about this smarm article. Also I think this excerpt is pretty true.
Source: Gawker
Essay Overflow
After Dan from The Electric Typewriter asked me to put together a list of my favorite essays, I got a little overzealous. My master list was something like 37 essays before I narrowed it down to the ten he posted yesterday. Still, I made the list and it'd be a shame not to share them. Here they are, grouped loosely by subject and/or style.
Civil War Essays "Whose Father Was He: Part 4" by Errol Morris Includes Civil War love letters. "How Slavery Really Ended in America" by Adam Goodheart A brief history of contrabands, "'Ifs' Defeated the Confederates at Shiloh" by Ta-Nehisi Coates Confederacy as evil empire.
Edge-of-Your-Seat Essays "The Torture Colony" by Bruce Falconer This is about a cult. It features the murder of Santa Claus. "Innocence Lost" & "Innocence Found" by Pamela Colloff Gut wrenching is really the only way to describe this. "Into Thin Air" by John Krakauer Don't go too far up mountains. "Raising the Dead" by Tim Zimmerman Don't go too far underwater.
Essays About Books "All We Read Are Freaks" by William Bowers This essay took me days and days to read, but it was worth it. Emily Dickinson & the Civil War & community college. "Up All Night" by Sherman Alexie Toni Morrison at sunrise. "Eliot and the Shudder" by Frank Kermode I just love a good George Eliot essay. "Human, All Too Inhuman" by James Wood I love this essay because☺—more than an act of critical analysis—it's a look into the mind of a great reader as he grapples with what he's reading. "Two Paths for the Novel" by Zadie Smith Which one will you take?? "The Urgent Matter of Books" by Lidia Yuknavitch Sometimes it is just good to read a passionate diatribe about reading. "A Bit of a Follow Up" by Roxane Gay A classic R. Gay smackdown.
Essays on Interesting Subjects "Balanced Diets" by Daniel Mason On eating dirt, among other things. "Generation Why" by Zadie Smith On Facebook. "Slamming Open-Mike Poetry" by Ta-Nehisi Coates On DC's slam poetry scene. "Our Technocratic Overlords" by Ta-Nehisi Coates On gentrification. "Dear Amish Diaries" by Eve Kahn On rhyming and the Amish. "When I Got Cable" by Josh MacIvor Anderson On being a child star and professional wrestling. The Shining Tree of Life by Adam Gopnik On Shakers and the trauma of hearing your parents have sex.
Essays on Urgent Subjects "Explicit Violence" by Lidia Yuknavitch On gender and violence. Nina Simone's Gun by Saeed Jones On Nina Simone and being "a black gay man in America."
James Baldwin Gets His Own Category "Notes of a Native Son" by James Baldwin Self explanatory.
Essays about Magic "Very Superstitious" by Colin Dickey I love magic.
Mean Reviews "Battle of the Manly Men: Blood Bath With a Message" by A.O. Scott Just really deliciously negative.
mollitudo reblogged
We asked Molly McArdle, writer, editor, avid reader, reviewer, and the brains behind the excellent Library Journal and The Rumpus tumblrs to pick ten favourites essays. This is what she chose:
“Atchafalaya” by John McPhee - This essay changed the way I felt about essays. I have always loved the form: it’s capacity for loopiness, it’s friendliness to digression, the space it made for beautiful language. But here, McPhee proves that the essay can do so much more: it can build worlds.
“Mister Lytle” by John Jeremiah Sullivan - There was a time in which I worked at a job that did not require me to do very much at all, and so I spent my time, tucked away in a tiny corner cubicle, reading. I cried when I read this, and my coworkers thought something terrible had happened to me, but it was just Mister Lytle, raccoon’s sharpened bone-penis and all. John Jeremiah Sullivan writes about the South like a native who’s stricken by amnesia: he has no shortage of not only familiar affection but also bewilderment, even wonder.
“What We Hunger For” by Roxane Gay - I’ve been reading Roxane Gay since she took on the overwhelming whiteness of the Best American Short Stories series in 2010 over at HTML Giant. (She was, delightfully, included in this past year’s edition.) However, this essay—one, if you follow Roxane’s work, you’ve probably read too—was a game changer. There are lines that when I reread them give me goosebumps. “Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods” and “You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you.” How many girls thought they were alone until they found an essay like this one?
“Tiny Beautiful Things” by Cheryl Strayed - I am a member of the church of Sugar. I regularly quote her in long, tough, sad conversations with my friends; and they quote her back at me. This essay of hers is one of the most important to me. (Little surprise: I have seen it make a whole room full of young women weep.) Everything in it, from “Stop worrying about whether you’re fat” to “Be brave enough to break your own heart,” from “Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet” to, especially, “Acceptance is a small, quiet room” speaks plainly and bravely and with heart. There is really nothing else like it.
“The Unlikely Influence of Dungeons & Dragons” by TNC - The reasons I love Ta-Nehisi Coates are too numerous to list here, but suffice it to say I’ve always felt he was a nerdy, inner-city kindred spirit: him reading the Monsters Manual in 1980s Baltimore, me reading Volo’s Guide to the Sword Coast in 1990s DC. I love this post (even though its really a transcript) in particular because he articulates what “high” and “low” culture have in common: beauty.
“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf - I read this in high school and it remains one of my favorite things by Virginia Woolf. It is aggressively lovely, a kind of poem. “What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fiber, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life.”
“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” by Mark Twain - There are few things in this world I love as much as a really (effectively) mean review, and this is perhaps the finest of the form. This take down of James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, which Mark Twain clearly loathed, is epic. “Personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others,” he explains, “this detail has often been overlooked” in Deerslayer.
“My Dungeon Shook” by James Baldwin - I love the love in this essay, the love and pain that seeps out of Baldwin’s letter: love for a brother, love for a nephew, pain for what the world has done to them, for what they have lost because of it. Here he says about his brother, “No one’s hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs.”
“Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter” by Marina Werner - I love fairy tales, literary criticism, and sonorous, pulpy prose. This essay, about Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, has it all: “What reader does not explore with her these passages and woodland tracks? Who does not feel the Beast’s dark carriage like a hearse rumbling towards his eerily uninhabited domain? And who does not sense, through her powerful evocations, the pricking of thorns, the jaw-cracking stringiness of granny, the jangling of bed springs, the licking of a big cat’s tongue, the soft luxurious furs and velvets and skin, and the piercing contrasts with ice, glass, metal?”
“How Men Fight for Their Lives” by Saeed Jones - This is a story I first heard my friend Saeed tell at a party. He held the room with it, it tilted on his axis. It was supposed to be wild, something crazy and, because crazy, funny—but there was always this dark, unsettling thread running through it, even during his magnetic, hilarious jujitsu demonstration. Here the darkness is not a thread but the fabric. Who reading this hasn’t felt the same way, when Saeed says (my favorite line): “I need you to know that, in that unlit, wood-floored room, I was more interested in the story of my life than my life.”
Make sure you check out Molly’s site for stacks of great writing and reviews, or head to the Library Journal and The Rumpus tumblrs for all kinds of literary goodness.
I am so appreciate of Dan / The Electric Typewriter for asking me to participate in this! My original list was like 30 essays long. Maybe I will post that later. So hard to narrow down!