“Long before feminism made fashion a guilty pleasure, my first experience of the sisterhood among strangers took place in a communal dressing room.” Judith Thurman writes for The New Yorker about Women in Clothes and her experiences in thrift stores and clothing swaps. For more about the connections between feminism, dressing and literature, check out Rachel Signer‘s Millions review of the same anthology.
“In a communal dressing room”
Comparing Hatchets
The Omnivore has announced the shortlist for its the Hatchet Job of the Year Award, honoring "the author of the angriest, funniest, most trenchant book review of the past twelve months." Worthy candidates all, though we note that our review, written by Holloway McCandless, of Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall is perhaps even more trenchant than (and was published over a month before) Adam Mars-Jones' shortlisted review, which, like ours, found Cunningham's endless references to the literary canon tiresome.
The Lives of Movie Characters
“Writing about film applies pressure to how ekphrastic writing can be possible, let alone evocative–and further, highlights questions that pertain to all kinds of writing, from honing poetic imagery to composing entire fictive worlds: how can writing engage or transform the fidelity of its subject(s)? How do you write about something so simultaneously ephemeral and fabricated, and yet intuitively, enduringly ‘real’?” For Ploughshares, Veronica Fitzpatrick on writing about film. Pair with this Millions piece on literary magazines in film and TV.
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Inventing Language
From J.R.R. Tolkien's High Elvish to Anthony Burgess's Nadsat: the BBC takes a survey of fictional languages and the invented words that made it into our everyday speech, like Dickens's "butterfingers" and Shakespeare's "scuffle."
Poets and Tomatoes
“We are hermits, that is true. We live in tiny rooms, and we stay in those rooms hours upon hours every day, every month, every year. But we also like to walk around and throw ourselves into big crates of tomatoes, and roll around in them, and then get up all tomato-stained.” Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera talks about living life as a poet (which apparently includes a lot of tomatoes) in an interview with the Guardian.
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Hot Air
The unwritten rules of steampunk declare that in every steampunk story, the Hindenburg never caught fire, the world never lost its desire for blimp travel and the skies are dotted with hot air balloons and zeppelins. As it happens, this element of the genre stems from old utopian narratives, many of which depicted a future of widespread balloon travel. At Salon, Kyle Minor reviews the audiobook of a new history of the hot air balloon, written by Richard Holmes, that shows how the rise of air travel changed the world's imaginative territory.
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Literary Generators
Good: The William Shakespeare Insult Generator. Better: The Martin Luther Insult Generator. Best: The P.G. Wodehouse Quote Generator.
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