I Love You, Three Dimensional Well Written Character

Dear Millicent,
I am trying to find a phrase for the female bromance, and am not having much luck: sismance (sounds like a goiter), ladymance (sounds like a medieval weapon), cronemance (I kind of like this, but it makes me think Dune), girlcrush, or the brit term for falling in love at boarding school — –’having [...]

Read Full Post »

Star Trek: I Love You, Man.

Dear CF,
Once, when I was fifteen and full of good ideas, I ditched my Mock Trial team at the courthouse and betook myself to an outdoor mallish esplanade that featured, among the dingy doughnut and copy shops, a clothes store and a decadent movie theater of the sort that has elaborate curlicues painted in gold. [...]

Read Full Post »

Breaking News: Look at These Pants

The company that sells them also boasts of offering “the lowest jeans in the world,” which, surprisingly, are not the above.
(Related: Breaking News: Look at This Cake and Breaking News: Look at This Dress)

Read Full Post »

The Art of The Comment

Dear Millicent,
I have been thinking of your profile of Jezebel and its evolutions, and agree with the tensions you noted between taking things to task and supporting everybody. It is a problem when every viewpoint is humanized (though, isn’t that an accomplishment of empathy, or just a distracting use of pathos?), and echoed in pop [...]

Read Full Post »

Splash, Yes!

A little delightful interlude of sequins, and recommended afternoon restorative (if you drank all the rose’ and are out of eclairs) :

Read Full Post »

Judging Jezebel

Dear CF,
What a delicious problem you’ve brought to our picnic table. Of course feminism shouldn’t be divisive. It should be like being pro-human, or pro-kid. BUT. By the time I finished this post I realized I was defending divisiveness and having a problem, not with feminism, but with how it gets tacitly defined (or rather [...]

Read Full Post »

Ladytalk: Slate’s XX Factor Can Suck It

Dear Millicent,
As I bet you know, Slate revealed XX Factor yesterday, its lady blog, with the tag line “What Women Really Think.”   The tag line irks me.  It reminds me of some scotch ad from the sixties, where a sultry woman has an eyebrow raised at a man in an ascot holding up his drink.  [...]

Read Full Post »

Mother’s Day

Chum o’mine,
I thought of you on Mother’s Day. I hope it has cooled off in your city. While it was hot for you, the air here was sodden and unraining, the kind of day where you wear a cardigan and sweat through it after walking a block.
I spent Mother’s Day with mine. It was her [...]

Read Full Post »

10 Lessons from Amy Bloom’s Away

Dear Millicent,
It has been very hot in my city, and I don’t have air conditioning.  This, combined with the end of the semester,  means that I have had a luxurious kind of insomnia for the past couple of days: no sleep, and no alarm clock.  So, it’s me and the cat entertaining ourselves until [...]

Read Full Post »

Cars as Imperfect Metaphor, and So On

Dear Millicent,
The invisible car of your earlier post seems fitting for the case of Diamond: hours of work culminating in a skewed background, and the artist’s face foremost in the frame.  Cars…a possible symbol for the genre (drive, every day use, pre-tuned stations, and the same mess in most)?
My first thought reading your post was [...]

Read Full Post »