Summer: SO MANY THINGS, from the Magritte exhibit at SFMOMA, to the Rube Goldberg exhibit at the Jewish Contemporary Art Museum on Mission St., to the Redwood City Century 20, where we saw Jurassic Park last weekend (Bryce Dallas Howard forever!)
On Now, San Francisco 2018
June 26, 2018 at 9:43 pm (Artists and Writers, destinations, Movies, Recommended)
Tags: art, exhibits, museums, Redwood City, San Francisco, summer, summer movies, thrillers
Opening Sentence, Work-In-Progress: Blue Water, Distant Shores (Working Title)
June 26, 2018 at 5:02 pm (Filipino Writers, Women Writers, Writing)
Tags: historical novel, history, Spain, The Philippines, work-in-progress
Backstory: A young Spanish priest makes it to the Philippines. His assigned task: fighting demons. It is 1755.
The old servant woman who greeted Matias at the door led him into a tiled foyer in which were aligned three austere-looking chairs of soot-black wood.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
Jane Austen, Process
June 26, 2018 at 4:38 pm (Artists and Writers, Books, Lists, Recommended, Women Writers)
Tags: Anthony Lane, book lists, inspiration, Jane Austen, novel, reading lists, review, The New Yorker, work-in-progress, writing process
- On March 18, 1817, Jane Austen stopped writing a book. We know the date because she wrote it at the end of the manuscript, on January 27th of that year. In the seven weeks in between, she had completed eleven chapters and slightly more than nine pages of a twelfth — some twenty-three thousand five-hundred words. The final sentence in the manuscript runs as follows: “Poor Mr. Hollis! — It was impossible not to feel him hardly used; to be obliged to stand back in his own House and see the best place by the fire constantly occupied by Sir H.D.”
— Anthony Lane, Last Laugh: Jane Austen’s Final, Surprising, Unfinished Novel
(The New Yorker, 13 March 2017)
To read:
- Sanditon (her last novel, unfinished)
- Persuasion
- Northanger Abbey
Many Sides
June 26, 2018 at 3:41 pm (Artists and Writers, Conversations, Food and Drink)
Tags: causes, politics, The New Yorker, Twitter
The New Yorker‘s Adam Gopnik on Sarah Huckabee Sanders and who deserves a place at the table:
- Never before in American politics has there been so plausible a reason for exclusion from the common meal as the act of working for Donald Trump.
@realDonaldTrump:
- The Red Hen restaurant should focus more on cleaning its filthy canopies, doors and windows (badly needs a paint job) rather than refusing to serve a fine person like Sarah Huckabee Sanders. I always had a rule, if a restaurant is dirty on the outside, it is dirty on the inside!
So Ironic, on So Many Levels
June 26, 2018 at 6:04 am (Artists and Writers, Recommended, Surprises)
Tags: art, essay, Mondays, politics, The New Yorker
Self decided to throw out all her New Yorkers that are older than 2017.
She had them as far back as 2011, there were stacks and stacks of them all over the place. Who was she kidding? She’d be dead before she got to read through all the piles.
Now, she pulls out the 3 April 2017 issue and reads a piece written by Andrew Marantz for the Talk of the Town:
- A few years ago, after he starred in Transformers, the actor Shia LaBeouf seemed poised to become the next Johnny Depp; instead, he started behaving more like the next James Franco.
Despite that opening sentence, the piece is not really about Shia. It’s about 4-chan trolls, the “men whose main goal is to be the chaos they wish to see in the world,” who “turned Pepe the Frog, once a benign cartoon, into a neo-Nazi icon.”
They infiltrated one of Shia’s performance art events. The actor confronted them “and got arrested.” The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, which was sponsoring the live event, “cancelled the project.”
The actor was undeterred and decided to continue his live stream from another venue, moving to Albuquerque, New Mexico. The trolls found him.
So Shia LaBeouf was actually one of the first people to tangle with the trolls and he showed plenty of gumption. He moved his project to Greenville, Tennessee. The trolls found him there, too. He moved to Liverpool, England, and the day after he resumed his live streaming project, “British trolls” found him and “the live stream went dark.”
They targeted the actor, and no one stood up for him. Not then. In the end, he simply ran out of energy (or money).
Who would have thought it would be Shia to become an early target. What this piece shows is that, even for someone with gumption and determination and resourcefulness, it is difficult to endure this kind of intense, organized hatred. Self is sure Shia was taken aback. As self was taken aback recently when someone on Facebook posted that the Red Hen owners had been visited by the Secret Service. She went over to yelp and saw that the restaurant’s reviews had been hijacked by hundreds of tweets bearing the Nazi swastika. Using the same tactics they used to call David Hogg, a Parkland school shooting survivor, a Nazi, these trolls were now calling the Red Hen owners Nazis.
And today someone in the GOP had the nerve to put out a hashtag called ‘civility’? Seriously? Our communities are under attack, our kids are under attack, and they want us to be ‘civil’? Trevor Noah was right: the way to deal with a lying, self-proclaimed martyr like Sarah Huckabee Sanders is to present her with an empty plate and say, there’s your order. She’d say, there’s nothing on this plate. The comeback would be to feign total shock and amazement and insist: There is. You’re just too simple to see it.
Because, no joke, Sarah Huckabee Sanders is on tape saying, “Let me try putting it into simple sentences, which is apparently all you can understand.”
A White House spokesperson actually said this to the White House press corps. And, maybe they were too shocked or something, because not one reporter took her to task for this insult. They just let it go.
It would be wonderful if, at the next White House Press Briefing, none of the press showed up. Sarah Huckabee Sanders would be left talking to an empty room. Let’s see what she does then.
She tweeted after she was turned away by the Lexington, VA restaurant, using her official (i.e. White House) twitter account.
There is not one single professional public servant in the current administration. They all assume a personal slight is a matter of national security. Oh please.
Let’s be clear: Sarah Huckabee Sanders earns 165k a year. And she resorts to Twitter knowing full well that trolls will descend and overwhelm the restaurant. She knew it would happen, and she used her official Twitter account. Is this not a horrible, horrible mis-use of public (official) twitter accounts? Yet Huckabee Sanders did it, which shows her vindictiveness and pettiness and meanness.
The President sends out tweets at 3 a.m. and rains insults on everyone. Is this not also a mis-use of a public (official) twitter account? Where is the respect for the office? No, Donald et. al. These accounts are not simply for your personal use. Your tweets may be entertaining but surely the American people have better things to worry about than your feelings of rejection.
Stay tuned.
