February 2012
40 posts
I can’t remember which of you recommended Beautiful Curls for curly hair, but I took that advice and ran with it, and a week later, my hair is already softer and curlier. (I have curly hair, but it’s on the looser end of the spectrum, so some days, it’s like, “Well, we could be curly, but we’re kinda tired, so tomorrow maybe?” and just kind of hangs there limply. I tried the No Poo stuff but don’t like how it smells and I felt like my hair was never clean. So far so good on the Beautiful Curls front, though!)
Daniel McCutchen and the Art of Long-Term Planning
Daniel McCutchen, the rare righthanded changeup specialist, wore number 34 last season. AJ Burnett also likes to wear #34. Rather than the standard number-for-Rolex deal, Daniel McCutchen thought long-term.
A.J. Burnett, who took McCutchen’s No. 34 jersey, will start a College America 529 plan for McCutchen’s daugher, McCutchen said. Not quite yet — the child has to be born first so she can get a Social Security number — but soon.
“When a veteran comes in and takes a number, some of the guys usually get something,” McCutchen said. “I know he has kids. He asked me what I wanted, I brought that up.”
You know, I liked it better when my athletes blew their money on cars, jewelry, and houses with two swimming pools. Made their lives seem much more glamorous.
This is really sweet. miss u, AJ!
John Cusack: The World's Soggiest Actor →
blog.moviefone.com
Poor lad can’t afford an umbrella. Please give, won’t you?
“I gave her my heart and she gave me a pen!”
The Death of Chick Lit →
salon.com
Chick lit was at its hey day around the time that I was moving to New York in the early aughts, so I read a whole lot of novels with shoes or pink cocktails on the covers, because a lot of the stories resonated with me—my first months in New York, I was 22, I had a job as an editorial assistant, and I was still smarting from a fairly dramatic break up, so I liked this idea of the woman who doesn’t quite have her shit together but does have a job, an apartment in the city, a circle of witty friends, and who finds love in the end.
I burned myself out on the genre, but I think it’s the same with many literary trends: once something becomes A Big Deal, publishers buy a hundred books like it, and soon shelves were flooded with these narratives of clutzy urban women with media jobs who always end up with the guy their mother wants to set them up with instead of their swarthy jerk boss.
To my mind, chick lit is feminist in the same way romance novels are feminist—these are narratives about career-driven women wherein the focus of the story is on the woman and her journey toward self-actualization/happiness/success/love/whatever. Sort of a bildungsroman for 20-something women with more cocktails and designer handbags. In a lot of ways, that’s an accessible kind of feminism, but it has a lot of limitations as well.
The main problem of books written by women in the mid-2000s was that publishers, in an effort to exploit the trend, packaged a lot of books written by women to look like chick lit novels even when they weren’t, which left “chick lit” as this undefined thing with vaguely Sex and the City-esque characteristics, and the name itself is fluffy and dismissive. It’s an old problem—a man writes a book about a relationship and it’s called literature and given a prominent spot in the bookstore. A woman writes the same book and it’s a romance and is shelved in the red ghetto in the back.
So apparently the trend of the frothy pink novel is on the decline and this may or may not be a cause for concern.
But I have a theory!
I think that with the coming of our digital overlords that soon any kind of fiction you want to read will be readily available, at least in ebook form. I think we’ll see revivals of late, lamented genres (such as Westerns). I think smaller niche presses will take over a larger share of the market and offer readers more options. Whether having a glut of books to choose from is good or not is debatable, and I’m not saying all of these will be good books, but I think that as long as there are readers who want to read about martini-swilling Manhattanites, those books will continue to be available.
Although the feminist in me is not that sad to see “chick lit” go as a genre label, if it is indeed on its way out.
