Saturday, February 26, 2011

and jon stewart doesn't bake a linzertorte

I just saw that Daily Show from January where Jon Stewart doesn't quite have the time to bake a linzertorte. Huh.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

motherhood, feminism, groundhogs

Just a few of the recently recurring themes here at the blog.

If David Sedaris won't do it, New Yorker poet Ellen Bryant Voigt will. Confirm the bureaucratic nature of groundhogs, that is. The beginning of her beautiful poem,

Groundhog

not unlike otters which we love frolicking
floating on their backs like truant boys unwrapping lunch
same sleek brown pelt some overtones of gray and rust
though groundhogs have no swimming hole and lunch
is rooted in the ground beneath short legs small feet
like a fat man's odd diminutive loafers not
frolicking but scurrying layers of fat his coat
gleams as though wet shines chestnut sable darker

...

Sunday, February 13, 2011

I'll get you, my little pretty!

"This is the infuriating thing that dawns on you one day: even if you would never sleep with or even flirt with anyone to get ahead, you are being sexually adjudicated." That is, of course, Tina Fey in TNY.

Apparently, about a year ago Fey was subject to some sort of "feminist" backlash. I can see where the quote above could - if you're blaming other women for this problem - come from a comic persona that spends too much time pointing fingers "in a field of slutty, slobby, neurotic [female] morons." But here she tries not to.

And I don't watch 30 Rock but the article as a whole actually helped me explore a feeling of solidarity with mothers that I don't always feel. And isn't solidarity the better part of feminism? So, paradoxically, the above gets my vote for best quote of the piece.

Unless it is the delicious description of the difference between childish and adult pleasures: "Covered in slivered almonds and soaked in booze, Italian rum cake is everything kids hate."

And also, most little girls love and admire witches, right? So what is she's worried about in the first place?

Friday, February 11, 2011

Tiger Moms and House Cats

Although I had no idea this public kerfuffle was going on, I'm glad Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about it for TNY. She took the whole thing fairly seriously, in its personal and political dimensions.

I'm also in the middle of Haggis v. Scientology. But, to quote (roughly) a recent caption contest runner-up,

"Let's make this brief. I have to go back to staring out the window."

Saturday, February 05, 2011

this is why we have a subscription

Magical Dinners is right. Korean food, Thanksgiving memories, subscribers only! I loved this, especially the part about licking the mini blinds.

Vanity Fair/Sanity Air. Just in time for Valentine's day, a love letter from James Wolcott to NPR. Wolcott puts a finger on why so much NPR (ie, Ira Glass) bugs me - no spleen! But then he moves on to the good stuff. He calls our attention to "a feminism so integrally wired into the basic circuits that it can be taken for granted, until you start listening/watching/reading someplace else." Yes, it's a seventies feminism, but it's very important. And there's something very nice about the way he segues to reflecting on this feminism from his discussion of NPR as a sound medium.

And I just read the Munro story about the pair of college sweethearts.

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