NYT obituary smackdown: lauren bacall vs. lorin maazel edition

Posted on by

lauren-bacall-creative

if celebrities play out our societal anxieties, hopes, dreams, blah blah blah on a conveniently more manageable, individualized scale then obituaries do the same for biography.

it’s all here, gang. i’ve said this before and i’ll say it again: we write women’s lives differently than we write the lives of men. EVERYWHERE. even obits. (btw, this inequality isn’t gender limited, obvi. it extends to race, class, region, etc. but i write about life writing and gender so this is about life writing and gender.)

exhibit A: bacall.

Continue reading →

the briefest possible commentary on biebloom (a saga in which leo “SUMMER OF MY LIFE” dicaprio is, of course, involved)

Posted on by

so i was toying with the idea of writing something about biebloom (ie. bedlam starring justin bieber and orlando bloom) then i heard my former forever love leo “SUMMER OF MY LIFE” dicaprio was involved in the melee and thought yeah, probably oughta.

THEN the daily mail posted this amazingly helpful diagram and companion article illustrating how pretty much most of B-list hollywood (+ my former forever love leo “SUMMER OF MY LIFE” dicaprio- who defies limitation to a single hollywood hierarchy) can all be connected to miranda kerr’s Web of Doom.

web of doom

so let’s unpack, ya’ll.

Continue reading →

writing around hillary rodham clinton

Posted on by

it’s slowly dawning that i’m maybe going to spend my adult writing career writing around hillary rodham clinton. (as opposed to my juvenile writing career which was all about horrible poetry and civil war novels.)

by this i mean writing about a trilogy of female lives that i see as being deeply embedded in the issues HRC raised for me as a teenaged girl. so HRC is there without my actually writing about her. because i don’t want to write about her. because, this many years removed from the 1990s, hillary hurts.

pol_hillary03__01__630x420 Continue reading →