Movies

Movies are stories about people, animals, or robots that are told with pictures that move around and make noise. Typically you can watch a movie on a screen such as a television, movie theater or living room wall if you have a projector. Movies are kind of like books, except a million times less boring and also they take less time to finish. Some movies are great (Lawrence Of Arabia), some movies are medium (Gattaca), and some movies suck big time (Very Bad Things starring Christian Slater). Once I started to write reviews of my top 100 movies and eventually I finished in 2017.

RATING: 67%

Skinny Bitch

Smug, superficial, foul-mouthed, and ill-informed. A bottle of diet pills is cheaper and won't give you a lecture full of cuss words about how fish have feelings. Fuck.

RATING: *gag*%

(Image from womaneatscity.files.wordpress.com.)

Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism

This big, blue bastard isn't much fun to read, but at 2621 pages, it's heavy enough to kill rats in the basement apartment where you'll scour newspapers and the Internet in vain for an employer who thinks the ability to talk convoluted, academic nonsense about pop-cultural phenomena is a "skill" worth paying for. You can also burn it to stay warm. There you go, college boy.

RATING: 28%--Virginia Woolf is a genius, and John Crowe Ransom is awfully polite.

(Image from www.ebooknetworking.com.)

Bookstore Sections

I was searching for a book in Borders. Specs: a new paperback memoir by a staff writer for The Atlantic. Should have been easy to find -- New Nonfiction, right? Or New in Paperback? Bestselling Nonfiction? New in Memoir? Any featured section, face-up, next to a biography of Andrew Jackson? I couldn't find it anywhere. A search of the useless Borders computer told me it was "likely in store," but not where it was "likely" to be. Thanks for nothing, Borders computer! My boyfriend used to work at Borders, so I finally called him, described the book I was looking for, and asked if there were other memoir or nonfiction sections that I hadn't come across yet. "I bet it's in the African American section," he guessed. I argued that it wouldn't be; it wasn't a historical book or some sort of sociological case study. "Doesn't matter," he said. "Go look."

And why I'll be! There is was, right in African American, right there hidden in the back of the store. First off, don't hide new books in the back of the store and then wonder why branches all over the country are closing. Second, maybe don't file books exclusively by the skin color of their author. What do you think the average readership of The Atlantic looks like? Beloved gets to go in the Literature section, but is Zane under romance, or shelved next to The Beautiful Struggle? I haven't read a ton of Zane, but something tells me she doesn't belong on a shelf next to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

RATING: 8%

THE BEAUTIFUL STRUGGLE by Ta-Nehisi Coates: 87%

Stories

Stories are a kind of thing that are fake and lies, but everybody basically knows that so they like them anyway. Stories have many words, and people or animals known as "characters," and the characters learn something during the story or else get in a big exciting swordfight at the end to give the person reading the story a reason to have read it. Sometimes white people in creative writing programs like to write stories about other cultures to show that they are not racist, but don't worry it's all make believe and we are all better people for reading it. Stories are different from poems because they are hella long, and also people who write them can maybe make money one day doing it, not like poets, so the lesson is don't get an MFA in poetry (too late for me).

RATING: 76%, or Wait-For-The-Movie%

Bookmarks

Sometimes in life you might find yourself reading a book or something and then you have to put it down to go get the bite size pizza rolls out of the microwave. How will you ever remember your page number, which is almost certainly no more than four digits long? The best answer is to use a bookmark I guess. A bookmark will never save your life, but it will also probably never call you at four in the morning needing to get bailed out of prison for domestic assault. A bookmark can probably be used as a weapon if it is thick enough and you have the right training, but you can also give it to somebody as a peace offering if you want to stop the hate. Sometimes bookmarks can have designs on them, like maybe a funny joke about cats or a picture of Spock or some shit. I would never buy a bookmark, but I've been given them by friends or stores and that's ok, I use them 'til I lose them (motto). In conclusion I think I would have rather reviewed pizza rolls.

RATING: 61%

Ideological Critique: The Enthusiasms of Political Reduction

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses the word "nigger" over 200 times. The Merchant of Venice depicts the humiliation and ruin of a Jewish villain at the hands of a Christian majority; Othello, a negro who strangles his perfectly innocent wife. The famous first line of Pride and Prejudice can be read as a blatant formula for prostitution, if one so chooses. The women of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight inspire and manipulate their men, but don't engage in any decapitating contests themselves.

It's pretty easy to point one's finger at a work of art, especially challenging art, and denounce it as ideologically unsavory in some way. Anyone can (re)apply this or that political formula (e.g. the "Woman in the Refrigerator" or any of the other 3 million ways to reduce a story to who's-doing-what-to-whom) and bandy about the -isms of the day in a denunciatory fashion. There are people with tenure right now who have made entire careers out of doing nothing but. It's a lot harder, however, to make a sincere effort to participate in an artist's world view, to try to give him or her the benefit of the doubt, to make an honest and uncompromising critique that nonetheless adds value to the world rather than merely taking it away.

I'm talking about imaginative generosity, not apologia. And I'm not always great at taking my own advice--I talk more lazy, cheap, snide, cynical shit than a lot of people I know. I'm just saying I'd rather watch Othello than Gothika.

RATING: 8%

(Image from mincer.en.alibaba.com.)

Tahitian Victory Poncho

"Ah, Tahiti. The lush island whose carefree natives the painter Paul Gaughain used as icons of primitive bliss. The serene culture which Jean-Jacques Rousseau considered evidence that humans had been 'noble savages,' peaceful and benign, before their corruption by civilization. Unfortunately, as the anthropologist Lawrence Keeley has noted, Rousseau relied for this conclusion on reports of Tahiti that had omitted relevant parts of its history. For example: the custom in which a victorious warrior would "pound his vanquished foe's corpse flat with his heavy war club, cut a slit through the well-crushed victim and don him as a trophy poncho"" (Robert Wright, Nonzero, italics added).

This may be the most badass thing I've heard in my entire life.

RATING: Off the motherfucking chart.

(Image from www.oceansbridge.com.)

Dogs and Ponies

Dogs and ponies are our animal friends. Just don't ever feed dog food to a pony or try to put horseshoes on a dog.

RATING: 86%, because 12% of dogs and 2% of ponies will maul Glenn's face if he gets too close.






(Image from simplymarvelous.files.wordpress.com. Read Vicky Hearne's wonderful book Adam's Task for a philosophical discussion of animal personhood.)