On How To Get And Keep A Mentor
I haven't tried to pick anyone's brains lately, but I'm still feeling guilty and scolded after reading this. Maybe that's just my immediate kneejerk reaction to being told that I need to write a thank-you note, though, regardless of the circumstances.
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On What Books Make You Cringe To Remember?
I can't believe no one here mentioned Gone with the Wind, but I'll throw myself on a sword here and do it. It was my favorite book. I was obsessed with both the book and the movie, and in love with both fictional Rhett and his embodiment in Clark Gable. In tenth grade, I told my history teacher that I thought we should read GWTW when we studied the Civil War because you could learn so much about different battles.
If you want to know what cringing at past literary taste feels like, imagine how I felt when I got to college and re-read it. Oh. Hello. Racism. Sickening, cowardly, despicable racism, on like every fucking page.
In a way, I'm glad I had the experience of repudiating GWTW because there's no way to be complacent about my ability to recognize racism. It's like, I know I can be wrong about things, so I better keep on my toes. I tend to listen when people tell me things I love might be problematic, because I know I can't necessarily trust my own instincts.
Still, I cringe like a motherfucker whenever I remember that history class.
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On Paying Back Your Friends: A Conversation
Reading this in conjunction with the "When Your Boss is Your Friend" piece makes me think that the Mike/Logan friendship is complicated in a way that is making my heart feel a confused sort of ache.
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On "Almost Alcoholics" Just Not Trying Hard Enough
The other book in this series (The Almost Effect Series) is called "The Almost Psychopath: Do I (Or Does Someone I Know) Have a Problem With Manipulation and Lack of Empathy?"
"http://www.thealmosteffect.com/books/almost-a-psychopath/
I a.) call bullshit on this whole idea, and b.) really, really want to wrap this book up and give it anonymously to a bunch of my friends and family just to see what kind of consternation it will cause. Do you think that makes me almost a psychopath?
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On 32 YouTube Comments Inspired by Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey”
I read the lyrics for this song when I was ten or so in a book of piano music my teacher had given me. And I ran in and told my mom how I'd found SUCH a pretty song and it was my favorite now. And my mom looked at me with a mixture of amusement and disgust and told me that the song was terrible and that I should go pick another one. That was the first time anyone ever judged me for my musical taste, but it sure as shootin' wasn't the last.
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On 'The Thorn Birds': When Young, Sexy, Straight Priests Roamed The Earth
@Limaceous Yes, yes, yes, yes to ashes of roses, and that scene with the dress. Some people think they have to take fancy drugs in order to see a "new" color; but ashes of roses has existed in my mind since I was ten, and is glorious.
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On 100 Great (Not Best!) Songs of 2011
It drives me crazy when people who put out these lists attempt to be comprehensive, as though they're doing genres that they're not familiar with a favor by including them. If you don't know much about Latin music, it doesn't do me much good to listen to whatever recommendations you can scramble to put together at the last minute; nor am I particularly interested in what the dorks over at Paste have to say about hip-hop. It's better 10x better to be honest about what you're listening to than to say, "Oh, and here are five Latin albums that I've listened to once each that I hear are good." Frankly, anyone who listened to all genres, equally, without favoritism, is probably not someone whose musical tastes I'd trust. All best-of* lists should heretofore come with an asterisk that says, *"according to the person who wrote this list", and then we can stop the handwringing and start listening to the music.
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On The Man Who Makes Money Publishing Your Nude Pics
@EFFY I completely agree, and I find the article's relatively blase tone completely off-putting. To me, what's at issue is less the unauthorized posting of nude pics (which is disgusting, but all over the internet these days) than the active targeting - for harassment and mockery - of the subjects involved. To me, that speaks not of internet freedom or sexual openness but of a kind of sadism that goes way beyond anything in run-of-the-mill porn.
People looking for amateur porn can find it anywhere, and they don't need to know the names of people involved. People who prefer this site want to know that the naked girls they're looking at are humiliated, upset and unwilling. These viewers are getting off not on nudity but on lack of consent, and to me that is disturbing as fuck.
The joyful judgment running rampant even in these comments, "Oh, you should have known better, if you take nude pictures you have to expect this kind of treatment" echoes the kind of moralizing, exploitative sexuality of an earlier era. This isn't some new mindset of the baby internet generation...it's straight outta the Puritan playbook: "your sexual behavior is disgusting and degrading, therefore, you deserve the hypersexualized punishment that I am about to take great pleasure in meting out to you." Whipping, a day in the stocks, a wave of degrading facebook messages - nothing gets the repressed sadists off as much as a good dose of public sex shaming.
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On 'Gone With The Wind': Devil In A Black Bombazine Dress
@Nicole Cliffe@facebook I found it! And I read it! And I would send it along if I had any idea how. It left me with...mixed feelings? to say the least? Here is the last paragraph.
Gone With the Wind was published in the depths of the Great Depression. The years of the Depression were followed by the Second World War. It is not hard to see how it spoke to an American audience of that period. The economic and social disaster that the Civil War brought to the white aristocracy of the old South is a good metaphor for the economic and social dislocation that millions of ordinary Americans experienced between 1936 and 1946. Suddenly vast numbers of people were devastated by hunger, homelessness, and joblessness. Often, however, they were also freed from middle class gentility; women especially were freed from propriety; classes were mixed up; immigrant groups became richer and freer in the experience of America; war made women independent of men as never before. Here in Gone With the Wind appeared a woman of singular energy, who had the courage and invention to survive the horror and chaos of the war years, the courage to throw off the teachings of her mother, and finally the courage to live for herself without a man (even free of pesky children, as Bonnie Blue falls to the ground from her horse, indulged just as Gerald O'Hara had been in the same dangerous sport; both of them tiresome nuisances, however dear they may sometimes seem to bel, but most important of all, to be true to the code of money rather than gentility. The makers of the movie version understood this better than Mitchell, as one would of course imagine since the money perspective is so profound in the making of film. In the final scene of the first half of the movie (a far better half, indeed, and building so well to this finale) Scarlett shouts out to the heavens, "If I have to steal or kill--as God is my witness, I'm never going to be hungry again." It is a moment of great triumph, even if Scarlett feels herself to be speaking out of desperation, since at that moment she throws off the shackles of her childhood culture and of her womanhood, and adopts the masculine stance that has energized the United States of America and made it great from its inception.