Just learned from my author Betsy Rubiner that some archives refer to the genre I'd call "life writing" (journals, diaries, memoir, some kinds of blogs and early social media) as "ego media".
EGO! MEDIA!
(Launch event for OUR DIARIES, OURSELVES by Betsy Rubiner at @politicsprose.bsky.social)
Whenever you come to the inevitable conclusion that there's a memoir here...my contact info is on the website
OK but Keble's word isn't "heyyyy oops we built the whole thing with midcentury concrete that is bad at being concrete and now we need to hold classes in tents for years while we fundamentally rethink this"
Those were some fun alumni magazine issues to receive 🫠
www.stcatz.ox.ac.uk/raac/
Does anyone else hear "Ro Khanna" and have to remind themselves that's a member of Congress and not a member of the Maquis resisting Cardassian domination
Fuck marry kill but the choices are different ways to cope with a global social disconnection crisis
Huh!
An exuberanly galumphing "I was born on the side of a hill" gets quoted almost as often around here as "where's my other shoe / help me find my other shoe" from She Loves Me gets sung in missing-one-shoe situations
(I have ADHD and little kids so such occasions arise frequently)
oh thank goodness
It keeps happening and yet I am appalled every time
Never in the history of the world has an agent thought "what a clever way to transgress clearly stated processes! This is a person I want to form a business partnership with and link my professional reputation to"
It has happened multiple times and it happened again today. Different guys each time. (Always guys.)
This one asked to speak to an assistant--by name--and said he wanted a personal referral from her to agents who represent his genre.
Cannot underscore enough that the way to find a literary agent is *not* to ignore all the freely available submission guidelines and instead wander around an agency's physical office until someone asks what you're doing there
Do you recite "Who would have thought the old man to have had so much poop in him" in a Lady Macbeth voice when your 3 y/o goes potty or are you normal
Black Friday reminder: You can support independent bookstores and get great deals without lining the pockets of billionaires 😌
"Extraordinarily moving, exquisitely written, and socially revolutionary...RING OF SALT glows with what we need."
Thrilled to see this rave review in the Irish Times for @betsycornwell.bsky.social's new memoir RING OF SALT!
Next time reactionary backlash jerkoffs object to "new" raceblind Disney casting I'm reminding everyone about the time we had a white king and a black queen as the parents of an Asian prince wooing Bernadette Peters' black stepdaughter in 1997 and it absolutely ruled
Oh right of course, so sorry about this Jason Alexander erasure. The Jason Alexander Cinderella also
Sick day with the 3 y/o has moved on from Frozen to the Brandy "Cinderella"
Which of course is also the Bernadette Peters Cinderella and the Whitney Houston Cinderella and the Victor Garber Cinderella and the Whoopi and...
Lesley Ann Warren is still *my* Cinderella, but man this cast is stacked
The way I went "oh god what have they done now"
The handshake meme but it's a giant family tree of Lithuanian Jews and Mayflower Puritans all agreeing everyone else has taken the Christmas decorating too far
I have weirdly moved the other direction on this, in that I went from thinking it did not matter at all to being glad my spouse's family has a similar mix of faith backgrounds
Meanwhile I told my 3 y/o she could select one book to buy. She immediately returned with three copies of a biography of Julie Andrews
At a bookstore in Bethesda where a toddler has evidently decided a copy of HARROW THE NINTH is his new emotional support object. Will not put it down
I leaned advised him to start with GIDEON but I'm not sure he quite grasped how the multivolume narrative arc is structured
Still trying to determine how my 6 y/o got the world-weary intonation of "JESUS CHRIST" that comes out when he is mildly frustrated
oh man I missed that! She's long been one of my favorite voices across twitter and here--was there context on leaving?
Obsessed with this quote--
Journalists at the Times of London reporting Americans are at a disadvantage in "sex warfare" because unlike slutty, slutty China, "by statute and by culture" we don't do that
www.thetimes.com/us/american-...
We saw this at the Kennedy Center the day the news broke about Trump firing the board, and Alex Brightman nailing everything about this part was *still* the most memorable part of the evening. I'm so stoked for the Broadway run playbill.com/article/alex...
Girls only want one thing and it's texting a journalist bizarre, vague criticisms, telling them they are not a journalist, and then trying to retroactively announce that the whole thing was off the record, which is a thing you only say to journalists
Oh no reason
This is the way
This is bizarre in a way that feels so specific to trump world
