Summertime, and the living is easy…as long as I have two air conditioners in every room. The Young Master is off at YMCA camp, learning to shoot a bow and arrow, so that he can provide food for us during the impending collapse of civilization. At Winning Writers, our North Street Book Prize for self-published
July Links Roundup: I Don’t Need to Calm Down Read More »
Happy Pride Month! I have briefly paused my efforts to buy every possible gay nerd tank top, to bring you this list of lovely links. Sometimes I look back on my Harvard undergraduate career as a conservative journalist and wonder what would have happened if I’d remained on the Federalist Society fast track to networking
June Links Roundup: If This Is Success, Give Me Failure Read More »
In mid-May, I attended the biennial Queers and Comics conference at the School of Visual Arts in NYC. Kids, you too can grow up to be a novelist and purchase books like Hard to Swallow as “research”. Apart from the fact that SVA is very poorly ventilated and has insufficient bathrooms, I had an inspiring
Graphic Novels and Comics Roundup: Mama Tits, Pregnant Butch, and More Read More »
Spring flowers have bloomed in the Happy Valley, and we just celebrated Pride here in the lesbian capital of America. I do love our bohemian small-town paradise, mostly, but one aspect of granola-mom culture that I could do without is the suspicion toward Western medicine, particularly mental-health drugs like antidepressants and ADHD treatments. I was
May Links Roundup: Happiness Comes in a Pill Read More »
Happy Spring, friends! I have tempted fate this morning by putting away the Young Master’s snow pants, which means that Western Massachusetts will probably be hit by an unseasonable blizzard soon. Flowers and songbirds are still in short supply in our chilly region, but I’ve got a nice crop of links for you this month.
April Links Roundup: Gaslighting and Magic Read More »
Just as today we debate “separating the art from the artist” when an influential creator’s bad behavior comes to light, the early Christians were split over the standards for mediating their own sacred inspiration. A purist breakaway group in North Africa in the fourth century contended that clergy had to be morally blameless, or else
March Links Roundup: Sacred Arts, Imperfect Mediators Read More »
As a good queer aesthete, I don’t place much weight on “the natural” as a prescriptive concept, but I still love a quirky story about nonhuman creatures who defy our narrow social categories. This rare gynandromorph cardinal flips the bird at binary ideas of gender, as reported at the blog Towleroad: “Half-Male, Half-Female Cardinal Goes
February Links Roundup: Birds Do It, Trees Do It Read More »
Tidying-up guru Marie Kondo is trending this winter since her new show started on Netflix. Thrift shops are reportedly experiencing a surge in donations of books, clothes, and household items that no longer “spark joy” for their owners. Meanwhile, social media debates are raging about Kondo’s out-of-context quote about owning only 30 books, while feminist
Facing Literary Impermanence With Marie Kondo Read More »
Good News…or FAKE GOSPELS?! No classic text is safe from the Trump Effect in Paul Fericano’s satirical verse collection Things That Go Trump in the Night (Poems-for-All/YU News Service, 2019). Famous lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Henry Kissinger, Humphrey Bogart, Bing Crosby, and many others are reworked into zingers that reference the Cheeto-in-Chief and his
Poems from Paul Fericano’s “Things That Go Trump in the Night” Read More »
Happy Advent and Hanukkah to my readers! This year, to honor my ancestors and the victims of anti-Semitic violence in Pittsburgh (and elsewhere), I’ve begun lighting Hanukkah candles again. As I did at his age, the Young Master loves the ritual of selecting the colors for each night, and seeing the little flames cheer up
December Links Roundup: We’ve Always Been Here Read More »