LORNA SORE

Amy Dickinson (of “Ask Amy”) married a childhood friend this weekend.

Rush Limbaugh thinks Sarah Palin is a “babe.” From the same piece I found out why her kids have the names they do - Track is named after high school track meets, Bristol for Bristol Bay where they did commercial fishing, Willow for a community in Alaska, Piper is just a cool name and Trig is Norse for “strength.” So Mo-Dowd treated me right, for once!

Forbes’ list of the World’s 100 Most Powerful Women came out this weekend - Angela Merkel was #1, followed by Sheila Bair, the Chairman of the U.S.’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Indra Nooyi, the chairman and chief executive of PepsiCo. Condoleezza Rice was #7,  Nancy Pelosi came in at 35, followed by Hillary Clinton at 36.

Finally - in this impromptu feminist news tour:

A new study from York University in Toronto shows that what important executive women prize above all is emotional support, “a partner who listens to her and backs her respectfully when she’s angry or upset.” Researchers studied the attitudes of 20 married senior and executive women toward their husbands. When asked why housework was less significant, “the women explained that household help can be bought, whereas emotional support cannot.”

I am no longer embarrassed to admit how much I like classical music and jazz. I especially enjoy streaming Jazz 88. It makes me feel relieved, the same relief I feel after washing all of the dishes and then wiping off the kitchen table. I have already written here about my lack of interest in music, and how as I get older people’s music-intensity makes me uncomfortable and feel “dried up.” I’m reading The Black Prince by Iris Murdoch and got a big kick out of her description of one character as “rather aggressively fond of music.”

I hope that I’m not aggressively fond of anything except like maybe Jack Handey. Other pleasures this week include the Janet Frame story “Gorse is Not People” in The New Yorker, watching Star Trek TNG with Lawrence, reading Wonkette and making salads with sprouts, strawberries and tomatoes.

R E A D I N G

CHRISTINE SCHUTT AND DIANE WILLIAMS
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5 — 7:00 P.M.
NATIONAL ARTS CLUB
15 Gramercy Park South
212-475-3424

I don’t know if it means that I’m no longer a newcomer, or that I’m still an outsider, but this really got on my nerves.

Last summer I read all of Woolf’s novels and the toughest was The Waves so I am interested in this “multimedia” reading from the book in November. “In December of 2006, director Katie Mitchell’s multimedia adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel debuted at the National Theatre in London. This November, Lincoln Center presents the American premiere. In this special evening of readings and conversation, actors and collaborators from the Lincoln Center production are joined by scholar Edward Mendelson, whose The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life included studies of Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse. The actors scheduled to appear are Kate Duchene, Kristin Hutchinson and Liz Kettle.”

Rachel Blau DuPlessis to CAConrad:

All I can say is that I am fascinated by Loy and her manifesto; in fact have analyzed it and some of her poems in one of my books, Genders, Races, and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry. It is a very generative document, and also one so bravely, brashly critical and suspicious of culture as usual that it calls for the surgical destruction of the hymen at puberty so that girls can no longer trade their virginity for a marriage and a good establishment. To be against parasitism (i.e. marriage the old way) and prostitution (perhaps also marriage!), as she was, is to still hold a very radical, a VERY radical position on gender. However, in her life, she was also “for” really manly men and womanly women–she is interested in the extremes there, too. PLUS, and I love this, she is for “mongrel” language and diction. All cultural figures who take the risk of writing at all have to be seen as complex. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s almost midnight on a Saturday and Lawrence and my brother are watching Network and I am reading the paper and thinking about this Walter Kirn review of the newest James Wood book:

“Novels and short stories succeed or fail according to their capacity (a capacity that has progressed over the centuries rather like the march of science) to represent, affectingly and credibly, the actual workings of the human mind as it interacts with the real world. The mind and the world, as Wood defines them, are dependable, fixed phenomena, for the most part, possessed of natural, intrinsic qualities that fiction writers in their ink-stained lab coats measure, prod, explore and seek to illustrate using a rather limited range of instruments that can be endlessly adjusted. The role of these researchers’ prejudices and passions — as well as that of their social, psychological, geographic and spiritual circumstances — is barely credited by Wood.”

This comes a little later:

“Having been lashed by twice as many citations as even a formalist-cum-­structuralist should require, and having been incrementally diminished by Wood’s tone of genteel condescension (he flashes the Burberry lining of his jacket whenever he rises from his armchair to fetch another Harvard Classic), the common reader is likely to concede virtually anything the master wishes — except, perhaps, his precious time.

…But there is one question this volume answers conclusively: Why Readers Nap.”

This new theme I’ve got here is called “White as Milk” and was created by Azeem Azeez.  On Azeem’s website he says, “Got a Question? Contact me.” So after I spent hours trying to figure out why my comments didn’t import from blogger, I emailed him and asked him if he knew what I was doing wrong.

He generously offered to fixed my comments problem, and then fixed a different problem I’d been having with my archives. Incredible kindness from a stranger. Thanks, Azeem Azeez.

Last Friday, Lawrence and I went to the Tibor de Nagy gallery to see the FINAL day of an amazing Jess Collins exhibit. The gallery was small and some women were talking loudly, but it was still an excellent use of city livin.’ Last night I started work on a collage of my own. It has a loose theme of computers & kittens. My twin passions. As soon as I add a couple more kittens I will photograph it and post. Here’s a video tour of the exhibit.

My former colleague Win Rosenfeld made a video about the Breeder’s song “Drivin’ on 9.” You can also watch the video on the new, as of yet undeveloped, home of the Bryant Park Project staff.

My summer of leisure has actually begun, now that I am out of a job. I’m trying to teach myself about web design and FTP servers, so expect changes here as I screw everything up and then learn how fix it.

The Passivist is looking good.

I am reading The Dud Avocado by Elaine Dundy (thank you, Michelle).

This person typed out a bunch of lines from Two Serious Ladies: “Well, I suppose this is a great disappointment to you,” said Arnold, “but you see I have fallen in love with you. I wanted to bring you here and tell you about my whole life, but now I don’t feel like talking about anything.”

- BPP was canceled. It’s weird and depressing. There are a lot of comments here. Maybe now I can finally get my dream job.

- I’ve got new stuff in GlitterPony.

- My grandma turned 80 and we had a big party in Thomson, GA with a DJ. We ate at Sonic and Huddle House and it was excellent.

- This is funny because I actually did go to FSU: “There’s this thing about guys from FSU. They think everything’s fine, just because they went to FSU. And for them, you know, it is. Even the most mediocre mediocrity can make a nice life for himself in New York if only he went to Florida State fucking University.”

- I discovered Child Perfume. “The experience of wearing Child is enhanced by the way the fragrance touches those around you. The scent of Child is all its own. The formula has two dimensions: one of confident power, and one of enigmatic mystery. “

Oh today I saw Jason Bateman and then I saw Michael Ian Black. I ate at a delicious place called Les Enfants Terribles.

Diane Williams has new fiction on the Esquire Books blog.

- 92% of Americans believe in God or a universal spirit, Pew survey finds

- The Mind of a Female Suicide Bomber

- The Man Behind Woody Allen

- Muriel, Austin and Cecil are snails for the electronic age

- James Wood on Rivka Galchen

- Nabokov’s interview. (01) Anonymous [1962]

- Video of Paul Chan exhibit at the New Museum

“I wanted to do a cost-benefit analysis of what personal blogging had done to my offline life, and in order to do so, I had to describe that offline life.”