February 2009
49 posts
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All my friends are leaving Sydney.
It’s...
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Simone de Beauvoir shares her daily routine →
INTERVIEWER
People say that you have great self-discipline and that you never let a day go by without working. At what time do you start?
DE BEAUVOIR
I’m always in a hurry to get going, though in general I dislike starting the day. I first have tea and then, at about ten o’clock, I get under way and work until one. Then I see my friends and after that, at five o’clock, I go back...
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“Realising you’re in a cage doesn’t teach you how to get out of it. Whether or...”
– littlesparrow
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Bloggers v Journalists, round 378
AKA: Got speakers for my Sydney Writers’ Festival panel?
It seems a lot of journalists view bloggers as one big “amateur night” - people who wish they were writing for the mainstream media but can’t get a gig (see Walkley Awards, 2008). Similarly, there are plenty of bloggers who view newspaper and magazine writers as under-exercised cows, complacent due to freely...
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Healthy party snacks →
One of my favourite Tumblr newcomers is The Nutrionista. She writes about food in a way that’s healthy, but also creative, delicious and fun. I’ve been drawing heavily upon her site for dinner inspiration recently.
In this post, she responds to my request for advice on healthy party foods. Because even if you love cupcakes, Easter eggs and sangria (as I do), there’s only so much...
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Painting the walls grey
Vibewire’s National Coordinator, Annie Le Cavalier, came up with the brilliant idea of turning our redesign-the-enterprise-hub working bee into a “paint party”.
Sure, the change was primarily semantic, but it also worked.
Annie and Will sign their names on the graffiti wall (since painted over, I assume).
Julia and Kirsten do likewise.
Annie paints over her nemesis, the...
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10 Writing Tips, courtesy of Ben Wasser →
My favourite is number two. Especially when dealing with long, complicated, constantly evolving arguments or narratives:
2. Delete nothing. Move it to the side, save it for later, or keep it for posterity. That includes ideas, points, arguments, sentences, sections, characters, etc.
I also like this one (know your narrative!):
4. Never write a list of things you want to “include”...
WatchJulia Allison speaks with one of every media hag’s heroines, The Daily Beast’s (and former New Yorker and Vanity Fair editor) Tina Brown. I kept a sign above my desk at my old job reading “What would Tina Brown do?” - the answer usually being “demand rewrites and cut substandard copy”.
Anyway, it’s really great to see Julia’s savvy, engaged,...
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She's Just Not That Into You →
This article is from FHM, but it’s hilarious and I thoroughly approve. Not because I’m a man hater (it’s from a men’s magazine!), but because it’s true.
Found at work this evening. Going home now!
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Check out Squashed's response to my post last week... →
It’s so good, I’ve reblogged the entire post for you (something I almost never do). He writes:
Rachel has some very interesting thoughts on the Manic Pixie Dream Girl. As she writes, “Manic Pixie Dream Girls are bright, quirky and whimsical, bringing sass and joy into the lives of otherwise joyless men. The difference between MPDGs and real life...
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“People would come into it and say, ‘Oh wow, Warhol can make me famous - and...”
– Photographer Billy Name on Andy Warhol’s Factory. The quote that has stuck with me from my Warhol research more than any other - mostly because it’s so damn true in my experience of indie media communities.
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Seeking the Interesting →
A really, ahem, interesting post from one of Tumblr’s favourite writers, mills.
He writes:
We say: “I want to be a writer,” or “I want to be a photographer”; or we say: “I want to take interesting photographs,” or “I want to write interestingly,” or “I want to be interesting.” This is itself interesting. What do we really want...
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Courtney Martin is one of the most (possibly THE... →
So I direct you to her 2007 essay for Alternet on love as a political act.
An excerpt:
bell hooks, the guru of love as revolution, wrote: “The moment we chose to love we begin to move towards freedom.” I think she’s wrong, but not by much.
…
It is the moment we critically and consciously choose how to shape our love that we move towards freedom. It is a critical...
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“Obama’s speechwriter is sooooo 2008. [Redacted] is so 2009. Happy...”
– The lovely Jean Hannah Edelstein says text messages just don’t cut it when it comes to Valentine’s Day, but what can I say? I couldn’t resist.
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WTF? We're supposed to hate other women because... →
jgh wrote:
That’s news to me.
Not to mention, since when is it true that:
Men never go for quirky girls except in Judd Apatow movies!
Did nobody read my post the other day? (Well no, probably not.) And doesn’t Julia herself like to play at quirky? That was what this was about, right?
(via singlescoop)
Victorian bushfires may have killed up to a... →
news.com.au wrote:
[And t]hose animals still able to may wait several weeks before walking out of fire-affected forest, Gayle Chappell from the Hepburn Wildlife Shelter said.
So sad. If you’re concerned about the animals affected by the bushfires, please consider donating to Wildlife Victoria. I donated to both them and Red Cross Australia (for the human victims of the fires) on...
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Adding to the List of Things I Would Appreciate... →
Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947–1963 by Susan Sontag.
(via melissa)
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Oh shit. I think I'm a Manic Pixie Dream Girl. →
I love this article, found via Racialicious’s review of this blog’s current deeply superficial obsession: He’s Just Not That Into You.
I’ve written before about the “alternative” female stereotypes in films like Garden State and Elizabethtown, but I’ve never seen it articulated quite so well or completely.
Manic Pixie Dream Girls are bright, quirky and...
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So, I finally saw He's Just Not That Into You last...
There were no big surprises (especially given Jezebel’s liveblog last week), but it wasn’t as bad as I expected it be. Judged solely on its merits as a romantic comedy, it was even amusing and enjoyable.
I’m still with Dodai on this bit, though:
“How can you trash a movie you haven’t even seen?” someone asked. I explained that I was insulted by the premise,...
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“As everyone knows, the less complex and nuanced the positions on a blog are, the...”
– Alan Jacobs (via Andrew Sullivan) Haha, so true. I think this is true of most media, though. Long essays in the New Yorker/Atlantic/Monthly etc - and quality books - excepted. And even then, these are usually distilled in other media to their simplest, often kind of bastardised, form.
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Prattle of the sexes →
Rachel Hills February 8, 2009
He’s Just Not That Into You may have tapped into the Zeitgeist, but it’s time to move on.
Illustration: Simon Rankin
I NEVER really liked Greg Behrendt. You might recall him as the Sex and the City writer-turned-author who, a few years ago, was all over TV informing lovelorn ladies with no-nonsense charm that He’s Just Not That Into You. Simple...
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Only one in four eligible black teens has received... →
File under: health, inequality.
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Ha! Reminds me of a conversation at work the other...
Jenna Maroney: Look at Dr Baird. How'd you get a picture of him?
Liz Lemon: I told him his haircut was exactly what I've been trying to describe to my barber. Yeah, smooth, I know.
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Saturday afternoon 30 Rock break. Jack Donaghy...
Jack Donaghy: Those are your new interns.
Liz Lemon: Aren't they a little old and overdressed?
Jack Donaghy: They're all former investment bankers who were laid off in the economic crash that Nancy Pelosi caused. They've got zero real world skills, but God they work hard.
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On my flight home today
katoleary wrote:
I started writing an essay on why writing about feminism is an exercise in futility. (The irony was not lost on me, which is why I will not post said essay here.) I don’t know if that’s true, necessarily, but it often seems like the only people it benefits are those who already hold feminist values. I learn a lot from reading the words of other feminists, and they open my...
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tumblr indy awards →
mariadiaz wrote:
Well, over a month later, I finally compiled the results. I only got a handful of nominations, my corner of the Tumblr-verse is small and so the reach just wasn’t that big, but who doesn’t love a good old ego boost, right?
Here is the list of everyone who was nominated. The reason it may look weird is not everyone nominated people for stuff in every category. If...
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My workmate Sam sent me this killer article about... →
And I like it.
Queerty writes:
This is a romantic comedy that is neither romantic nor comedic. The women are either flighty airheads or delusional stalkers, and for a movie set in Baltimore, there’s only one black character in the main story that has any lines. And he’s a waiter! Who speaks twice! Presumably all the other black folks were busy selling crack to Bubbles on The Wire.
While...
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“To be female is to be subjected to a constant barrage of relationship advice...”
– Excerpt from the article I’m currently writing.
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Just googled 'he's just not that into you book'... →
My 2009 one will be much better, of course. Me being four years older and all.
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Woot. Just got commissioned to write an op ed...
(Well, a lot more than that, but I’d like to perfect my rhetoric before I elaborate.)
Now I just need to make it good.
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The Blow - Hey Boy
I love this song because it...
“Tracy Harper and Jessica Simpson show that there is no place where you are safe...”
– You’re not fat, redux redux (via sarahchristine)
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Author Curtis Sittenfeld on the difference between...
Julia being the marginally famous, Laura being the ridiculously famous.
Gradually, your fame settles on you, it’s like a new coat or a new car that you become used to, but it continues to provoke odd and awkward behaviour in others. At your public events, people you never knew, friends of friends of friends, your college boyfriend’s aunt, the neighbor of your plummer - they, too,...
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“This view forgets that the ‘I’ in STI stands for ‘infection’, and infections...”
– Line from the article I’m currently writing.
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Are romantic comedies getting stupider, or am I... →
The wary reaction of several male acquaintance of mine to this blog might suggest the latter, but the idiotic trailers I had to sit through the other week while waiting for Revolutionary Road to start (“Do you think we accidentally walked into the wrong film?” I asked Monica) suggest otherwise.
You’ve probably all seen the one for He’s Just Not That Into You, but check out...
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January 2009
90 posts
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Sera Beak on finding your purpose →
“Although your intuition might lead you (or might have already led you) toward a role that might not seem all that glamorous, it doesn’t make it any less important or meaningful or soul-rocking. There might be thousands of first-grade teachers, but only you can give hope to those specific children in that specific children at that specific time. Let’s face it, not everyone can be a...
