Molly McArdle

"You feel like eating your feelings, [and] guess what? It’s blood. You will be eating blood."

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:59:00 -0400

“You feel like eating your feelings, [and] guess what? It’s blood. You will be eating blood.”

- True Blood Season 6 Premiere Recap | Vulture

I love recaps and I love True Blood and I HATE BLOOD.

Lessons in Modern Witchcraft, Minus the Broomsticks -...

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 10:28:00 -0400

Lessons in Modern Witchcraft, Minus the Broomsticks - NYTimes.com

Other courses include “History of Witchcraft,” “Introduction to Magic,” “Spells and How They Work” and “Esbats: Celebrating the Phases of the Moon.”

Very important witch news!!

[My mother] told me that I’m the best, starting at about 2....

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 11:44:00 -0400

[My mother] told me that I’m the best, starting at about 2. “You are the best. You are the winner. Somebody else may get the trophy, but you are the best.” The best is kind of relative, it means you did your best. You are it. There’s not another Erykah. You only have one chance to be Erykah, so don’t waste time trying to figure out some shit you already know. You know who you are, you know what you want, you know what you like. Don’t second-guess yourself. Follow your heart, no second thoughts.

Erykah Badu Loves You: A Conversation With the Artist

“You only have one chance to be Erykah.”

Join me and these clipart white dudes at Blogging with Tumblr |...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 17:16:08 -0400

Join me and these clipart white dudes at Blogging with Tumblr | Queens Library. I’ll be talking about the lit community on Tumblr!

Now is as good a time as any to announce this so here goes:...

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 11:30:00 -0400

Now is as good a time as any to announce this so here goes: I’ll be leaving Library Journal to get my MFA in fiction at UMass Amherst this fall. I will miss LJ and New York so much, but I am also incredibly excited to start on this new project, this new degree! I am going to take so many weird classes.

I’m also happy to say that I’ll be working in some capacity at The Massachusetts Review and will be taking over, with my co-editor Liana Camper-Barry, the MFA program’s lit mag, Route 9. I’m going to continue to run The Rumblr, and will never stop checking the tumblarians tag like the creep I am.

Photo

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 12:11:29 -0400

Some recent Library Journal reviews. From the May 1...

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 14:57:00 -0400

Some recent Library Journal reviews.

From the May 1 issue:

Gastman, Roger. Pump Me Up: DC Subculture of the 1980s. Ginko. Mar. 2013. 320p. ISBN 9781584235132. $44.95. FINE ARTS

Gastman (coauthor, The History of American Graffiti) has spent the past two decades compiling poster art, buttons, clothing, and ephemera from the go go and punk communities that animated DC music culture in the 1980s. Through interviews with civil rights luminary Walter Fauntroy and music icon Ian MacKaye as well as essays about poster companies, music venues, and graffiti, the book chronicles the visual culture of DC’s most distinctive musical genres. Henry Rollins, former Black Flag front man and native Washingtonian, introduces the book; Cool “Disco” Dan, the underground yet ubiquitous DC graffiti artist, is profiled prominently. Gastman also directed the recent documentary, The Legend of Cool “Disco” Dan, with Joseph Pattisall. VERDICT While DC has changed radically since the 1980s, an important piece of it survives here. This celebration of a bygone DC provides a refreshing alternative to the many books that trumpet New York’s gritty past—it’s interesting to see how other American cities did it. Recommended for readers interested in graphic design, 20th-century urban histories, the visual culture of music, and all things DC.—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

From the June 15 issue:

al-Shaykh, Hanan. One Thousand and One Nights: A Retelling. Pantheon. Jun. 2013. 320p. ISBN 9780307958860. $26. F

Lebanese novelist al-Shaykh (Women of Sand and Myrrh) takes the hundreds of stories that make up the traditional One Thousand and One Nights and pares them down to a concise 19. Focusing on tales that expose misogyny—of men who kill their wives and lovers, who injure them, or who leave them for dead—al-Shaykh is interested in how women grapple with a society that is stacked against them. Gone are Aladdin, Ali Baba, and even much of Sinbad, but what remains is a haunting collection of stories about women who, if not always heroic, are resilient, funny, sexual, and, above all, smart. Anchored by two central framing narratives, the tales lead into one another like a set of matryoshka dolls. The beautiful language is deceptively simple: readers are in danger of being lulled into marathon reading sessions. VERDICT It’s no wonder al-Shaykh identifies with Shahrazad; they are very much the same. This retelling will find an eager audience in readers who love folktales, especially those with a feminist slant. Not for the faint of heart, these stories are gory, lusty, and very, very good. [See Author Q&A, LJ Reviews, ow.ly/kzWHL].—Molly McArdle, Library Journal

"The days are stuffed with panels on everything from running a store to the latest literary gadgets...."

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 19:50:00 -0400

“The days are stuffed with panels on everything from running a store to the latest literary gadgets. (Among this year’s offerings: “Your Christian Shopper Could Be Buying More” and “Libraries + Tumblr = Connecting Readers + Writers.”)”

- Expo Takes Manhattan - NYTimes.com

My panel was mentioned in the NYT!

"Rilke declined to critique [Kappus’s poetry], saying “most events are unsayable, occur in a..."

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 14:38:44 -0400

“Rilke declined to critique [Kappus’s poetry], saying “most events are unsayable, occur in a space that no word has ever penetrated, and most unsayable of all are works of art, mysterious existences whose life endures alongside ours, which passes away.” They maintained a correspondence for six years, though nine of the ten letters Rilke wrote Kappus were sent in 1903 and 1904. Rilke emphasized again and again the importance of solitude for an artist: “Nobody can advise you and help you, nobody. There is only one way. Go into yourself.””

- Happy Birthday Kierkegaard | Classic Returns

My latest Classic Returns column for LJ!

Baby’s first blurb. (Yes, I am the baby in this scenario.) (I am...

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 12:24:00 -0400

Baby’s first blurb. (Yes, I am the baby in this scenario.) (I am not actually a baby.)

"The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from..."

Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:11:00 -0400

“The brown book I carry says there is nothing stranger than to explore a city wholly different from all those one knows, since to do so is to explore a second and unsuspected self.”

- Gene Wolfe, The Sword of the Lictor

Reading about my ma today: As an employee of two years in the...

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 16:20:16 -0400

Reading about my ma today:

As an employee of two years in the CIA’s file section and the daughter of a CIA officer; Fitzgerald paid little mind to what she considered a routine report to the proper authorities.

I just love this otter so much.

Sun, 02 Jun 2013 00:22:58 -0400

I just love this otter so much.

Essay Overflow

Tue, 28 May 2013 13:00:00 -0400

After Dan from The Electric Typewriter asked me to put together a list of my favorite essays, I got a little overzealous. My master list was something like 37 essays before I narrowed it down to the ten he posted yesterday. Still, I made the list and it’d be a shame not to share them. Here they are, grouped loosely by subject and/or style.

Civil War Essays

“Whose Father Was He: Part 4” by Errol Morris
Includes Civil War love letters.

“How Slavery Really Ended in America” by Adam Goodheart
A brief history of contrabands,

“‘Ifs’ Defeated the Confederates at Shiloh” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Confederacy as evil empire.

Edge-of-Your-Seat Essays

“The Torture Colony” by Bruce Falconer
This is about a cult. It features the murder of Santa Claus.

“Innocence Lost” & “Innocence Found” by Pamela Colloff
Gut wrenching is really the only way to describe this.

“Into Thin Air” by John Krakauer
Don’t go too far up mountains.

“Raising the Dead” by Tim Zimmerman
Don’t go too far underwater.

Essays About Books

“All We Read Are Freaks” by William Bowers
This essay took me days and days to read, but it was worth it. Emily Dickinson & the Civil War & community college.

“Up All Night” by Sherman Alexie
Toni Morrison at sunrise.

“Eliot and the Shudder” by Frank Kermode
I just love a good George Eliot essay.

“Human, All Too Inhuman” by James Wood
I love this essay because☺—more than an act of critical analysis—it’s a look into the mind of a great reader as he grapples with what he’s reading.

“Two Paths for the Novel” by Zadie Smith
Which one will you take??

“The Urgent Matter of Books” by Lidia Yuknavitch
Sometimes it is just good to read a passionate diatribe about reading.

“A Bit of a Follow Up” by Roxane Gay
A classic R. Gay smackdown.

Essays on Interesting Subjects

“Balanced Diets” by Daniel Mason
On eating dirt, among other things.

“Generation Why” by Zadie Smith
On Facebook.

“Slamming Open-Mike Poetry” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
On DC’s slam poetry scene.

“Our Technocratic Overlords” by Ta-Nehisi Coates
On gentrification.

“Dear Amish Diaries” by Eve Kahn
On rhyming and the Amish.

“When I Got Cable” by Josh MacIvor Anderson
On being a child star and professional wrestling.

The Shining Tree of Life by Adam Gopnik
On Shakers and the trauma of hearing your parents have sex.

Essays on Urgent Subjects

“Explicit Violence” by Lidia Yuknavitch
On gender and violence.

Nina Simone’s Gun by Saeed Jones
On Nina Simone and being “a black gay man in America.”

James Baldwin Gets His Own Category

“Notes of a Native Son” by James Baldwin
Self explanatory.

Essays about Magic

“Very Superstitious” by Colin Dickey
I love magic.

Mean Reviews

“Battle of the Manly Men: Blood Bath With a Message” by A.O. Scott
Just really deliciously negative.

10 Classic Essays

Mon, 27 May 2013 19:27:00 -0400

10 Classic Essays:

tetw:

As chosen by Molly McArdle

We asked Molly McArdle, writer, editor, avid reader, reviewer, and the brains behind the excellent Library Journal and The Rumpus tumblrs to pick ten favourites essays. This is what she chose:

“Atchafalaya” by John McPhee - This essay changed the way I felt about essays. I have always loved the form: it’s capacity for loopiness, it’s friendliness to digression, the space it made for beautiful language. But here, McPhee proves that the essay can do so much more: it can build worlds.

“Mister Lytle” by John Jeremiah Sullivan - There was a time in which I worked at a job that did not require me to do very much at all, and so I spent my time, tucked away in a tiny corner cubicle, reading. I cried when I read this, and my coworkers thought something terrible had happened to me, but it was just Mister Lytle, raccoon’s sharpened bone-penis and all. John Jeremiah Sullivan writes about the South like a native who’s stricken by amnesia: he has no shortage of not only familiar affection but also bewilderment, even wonder.

“What We Hunger For” by Roxane Gay - I’ve been reading Roxane Gay since she took on the overwhelming whiteness of the Best American Short Stories series in 2010 over at HTML Giant. (She was, delightfully, included in this past year’s edition.) However, this essay—one, if you follow Roxane’s work, you’ve probably read too—was a game changer. There are lines that when I reread them give me goosebumps. “Sometimes, when you least expect it, you become the girl in the woods” and “You think you are alone until you find books about girls like you.” How many girls thought they were alone until they found an essay like this one?

“Tiny Beautiful Things” by Cheryl Strayed - I am a member of the church of Sugar. I regularly quote her in long, tough, sad conversations with my friends; and they quote her back at me. This essay of hers is one of the most important to me. (Little surprise: I have seen it make a whole room full of young women weep.) Everything in it, from “Stop worrying about whether you’re fat” to “Be brave enough to break your own heart,” from “Your book has a birthday. You don’t know what it is yet” to, especially, “Acceptance is a small, quiet room” speaks plainly and bravely and with heart. There is really nothing else like it.

“The Unlikely Influence of Dungeons & Dragons” by TNC - The reasons I love Ta-Nehisi Coates are too numerous to list here, but suffice it to say I’ve always felt he was a nerdy, inner-city kindred spirit: him reading the Monsters Manual in 1980s Baltimore, me reading Volo’s Guide to the Sword Coast in 1990s DC. I love this post (even though its really a transcript) in particular because he articulates what “high” and “low” culture have in common: beauty.

“The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf - I read this in high school and it remains one of my favorite things by Virginia Woolf. It is aggressively lovely, a kind of poem. “What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fiber, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As often as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life.”

“Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offences” by Mark Twain - There are few things in this world I love as much as a really (effectively) mean review, and this is perhaps the finest of the form. This take down of James Fenimore Cooper’s Deerslayer, which Mark Twain clearly loathed, is epic. “Personages in a tale shall be alive, except in the case of corpses, and that always the reader shall be able to tell the corpses from the others,” he explains, “this detail has often been overlooked” in Deerslayer.

“My Dungeon Shook” by James Baldwin - I love the love in this essay, the love and pain that seeps out of Baldwin’s letter: love for a brother, love for a nephew, pain for what the world has done to them, for what they have lost because of it. Here he says about his brother, “No one’s hand can wipe away those tears he sheds invisibly today which one hears in his laughter and in his speech and in his songs.”

“Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter” by Marina Werner - I love fairy tales, literary criticism, and sonorous, pulpy prose. This essay, about Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, has it all: “What reader does not explore with her these passages and woodland tracks? Who does not feel the Beast’s dark carriage like a hearse rumbling towards his eerily uninhabited domain? And who does not sense, through her powerful evocations, the pricking of thorns, the jaw-cracking stringiness of granny, the jangling of bed springs, the licking of a big cat’s tongue, the soft luxurious furs and velvets and skin, and the piercing contrasts with ice, glass, metal?”

“How Men Fight for Their Lives” by Saeed Jones - This is a story I first heard my friend Saeed tell at a party. He held the room with it, it tilted on his axis. It was supposed to be wild, something crazy and, because crazy, funny—but there was always this dark, unsettling thread running through it, even during his magnetic, hilarious jujitsu demonstration. Here the darkness is not a thread but the fabric. Who reading this hasn’t felt the same way, when Saeed says (my favorite line): “I need you to know that, in that unlit, wood-floored room, I was more interested in the story of my life than my life.”

Make sure you check out Molly’s site for stacks of great writing and reviews, or head to the Library Journal and The Rumpus tumblrs for all kinds of literary goodness.

I am so appreciate of Dan / The Electric Typewriter for asking me to participate in this! My original list was like 30 essays long. Maybe I will post that later. So hard to narrow down!

jamellebouie: After some encouragement from a friend, I’ve decided to use this a bit more. You can...

Sat, 25 May 2013 15:33:19 -0400

jamellebouie:

After some encouragement from a friend, I’ve decided to use this a bit more. You can still find most of my thoughts and assorted things at jamellebouie.net, but stay here for the stuff I find on Tumblr, ya dig?

Jamelle Bouie is (active) on Tumblr now so you all better follow him. He’s the dapper fellow behind Journos of Color, the hottest Tumblr this side of the dashboard. (Don’t ask me what’s on the other side of the dashboard.)

Last night I was talking to my friend Sam about social media for his band and he asked me what...

Fri, 24 May 2013 09:24:00 -0400

Last night I was talking to my friend Sam about social media for his band and he asked me what he’s supposed to tweet about. I said its like, in junior high, when you are sitting in the cafeteria with your friends and your crush is sitting at the next table over and so you start talking slightly louder than you should about things you think make you seem cool, when you try to sound like you are having so much fun. You should tweet like your crush is sitting at the next table and probably can’t hear you but maybe can hear you.

Then I advised him to post something about using his dirty wife beater as a pizza napkin.

"The animated GIF is a Brechtian medium…in that the repetition of a single gesture ad infinitum..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 11:29:00 -0400

“The animated GIF is a Brechtian medium…in that the repetition of a single gesture ad infinitum constitutes a sort of gestus—a symbolic moment that is amplified in context to represent a whole paradigm of existence.”

- Rhizome | Performance GIFs 1: Curator’s Introduction via fellow gif enthusiast John Bell.

I pronounce it with a soft g.

klovillearts: Three New Portraits <3

Mon, 20 May 2013 13:30:01 -0400

Molly

Colin

Ryan

klovillearts:

Three New Portraits

One Real and One Fake Conversation I Had with a Young White Man at a Reading Recently

Wed, 15 May 2013 18:56:00 -0400

--- --- --- One --- --- ---
Him: I've gotten really into African writers.
Me: Oh cool, like a specific country or time period?
Him: No, not really. I like it all.
...
Him: My professor has just an awesome African accent.
Me: Oh, well where is he from?
Him: Nigeria.
...
Him: He tells us just these brutal stories of African life, like will just say off hand that this guy cuts pregnant women's belly's open. Like, what?

--- --- --- Two --- --- ---
Him: I've gotten really into European writers.
Me: Oh cool, like a specific country or time period?
Him: No, not really. I like it all.
...
Him: My professor has just an awesome European accent.
Me: Where is he from?
Him: Austria
...
Him: He tells us just these brutal stories of European life, like will just say off hand that this guy imprisoned and raped his daughter for decades. Like, what?