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karigee

Midwestern New Yorker. Always reading. Eyesight: artificially enhanced, still abominable. Laugh: yes! extra loud. Attitude: seldom serious. Follow-through: rock solid. Full-time interactive project manager, occasional web content strategist, crackerjack copywriter & proofreader. //can't stop proofing// Loves foreign films, hot dogs, travel, polka dots, modern technology, old-fashioned manners, books in any format, the word "gubernatorial," and the mighty, mighty exclam.


!!!

In other words, keeping things classy 24/7.

Posts

  • September 03, 09:43 PM

    A Place of Greater Safety

    Law of Suspects. Suspects are those: who have in any way aided tyranny (royal tyranny, Brissotin tyranny ...); who cannot show that they have performed their civic duties; who do not starve, and yet have no visible means of support; who have been refused certificates of citizenship by their Sections; who have been removed from public office by the Convention or its representatives; who belong to an aristocratic family, and have not given proof of constant and extraordinary fervor; or who have emigrated.

    It will be alleged later (by Citizen Desmoulins) that 200,000 people are detained under this law. The Watch Committee in each Section is to draw up lists of suspects, take away their papers and detain them in a secure place. These places will be called "National Buildings"—convents, vacated châteaux, empty warehouses. Collot d'Herbois has a better idea. He suggests that suspects be herded into mined houses, which can then be blown up.

    ***

    Decree of the National Convention: "The government of France is revolutionary until the peace ... Terror is the order of the day."

    — A Place of Greater Safety, by Hilary Mantel

    Historical fiction, this is, and it weighs a ton. For two weeks this book has haunted me, and I almost gave up halfway through. Halfway through when I reached the one short paragraph devoted to the Princess de Lamballe, noted friend of Marie Antoinette, notable for the horrific manner of her death (ugh, I'll lead you this far but no farther). I read that one paragraph—Mantel, with a killer instinct for detail, chooses the grisliest of the rumors and adds a swipe of dialogue, shouted to the former Queen of France from the streets below her prison cell, something like "Come to the window and say hallo to your friend"—and that night when I turned out the lights and rolled over in the dark, I swear to god I felt a hand stretch across my face. On went the lights and into a cupboard went the book. As if it could be unread! Fiction didn't do this: history did this. And did you know that a 30-year-old stuffed animal—a French dog, by the way, a childhood Le Mutt named Floppy—is no safeguard against the ghosts of the September Massacres? Stupid frog dog. Off with your head!

    Anyway, there was no sleep that night, my friends, and I'm not sure why I was surprised. Turns out all of my favorite places were once prisons! This busy square, where a bright red tour bus sat parked in July, 99% of the people in this book were guillotined there! And not gently! How any sort of democratic society ever crawled out of the bumblefuck that was this revolution may be one of the greatest miracles invented by man. We are talking about a monumental circle jerk of idiocy and hubris—has no one ever heard the phrase "power vacuum"?—and Mantel feeds it out at a steady, relentless pace, over 750 pages, like the beating of the telltale heart. Never in my life have I been so glad to reach The End.

  • September 03, 06:10 PM

    My Daughters in New York

    What streets, what taxis transport them
    over bridges & speed bumps—my daughters swift

    in pursuit of union? What suitors amuse them, what mazes
    of avenues tilt & confuse them as pleasure, that pinball

    goes bouncing off light posts & lands in a pothole,
    on to pop up & roll in the gutter? What footloose new

    freedoms allow them to plow through all stop signs,
    careening at corners, hell-bent for the road to blaze straight?

    It's 10 P.M. in the boonies. My children, I'm thinking
    you're thinking your children are waiting

    for you to conceive them while you're in a snarl
    with my sons-in-law-to-be who want also to be

    amazing explorers beguiled by these reckless night rides
    that may God willing give way to ten thousand good mornings! 

    — James Reiss

    "What suitors amuse them, what mazes of avenues tilt & confuse them..." Lord! Go on and bless the rhymers, those twisty few. "...I'm thinking you're thinking your children are waiting"—that's the kind of thing I sing-song to myself when I go skipping down sidewalks or stand brushing my teeth. "...may God willing give way to ten thousand good mornings!"—that's the kind of music I swallow whole. Delicious.

  • September 03, 08:05 AM

    French Fridays

    Let's hark back to gladder days, when J.Crew still dressed humans. In Paris. In the fall.
  • September 02, 12:19 PM

    My thoughts exactly

    An open letter to all of advertising and marketing, via Chris Glass:

    I don't know if there's been some terrible misunderstanding, where you got the idea that I'd really like the prospect of coming home from work and spending my valuable free time taking part in your stupid idea about sausages, or tea, or washing bloody powder, or pretty much anything else for that matter. But here's the thing. I don't. I don't want to make a film, or draw a picture, or nominate a friend. Or compose a soundtrack or re-edit your advert. Really, I don't.

    Also maddening are food magazines that insist I go to their website to get a recipe. Haven't I purchased your product already, thereby entering into an explicit understanding that you would in kind provide any and all recipes referred to within the confines of the printed, collated, and bound matter lying open before me without demanding that I perform yet another action in order to find the information I was promised?

    In other news, why do some ladybloggers refer to intimate family members by names like "Husband" and "Baby," as if their home lives are a roleplaying exercise devised by a corporate human resources department? It smacks of vassalage to me, in which the womenfolk have assumed the overlord reins. Nicknames or name replacements used in the interest of privacy I understand, but something like "Husband just sold Toddler in order to finance his rooftop beekeeping venture" seems a little off the rails. By erasing given names and omitting the association provided by the simple use of "my," are they not reducing whole persons to a singular purpose defined solely by the relationship? Or maybe they're trying to be Amish.

    Ack, the internet is driving me bats.

  • August 30, 10:21 AM

    Paradise

    I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

    — Jorge Luis Borges

    [Steve McCurry's Blog via Bobulate]

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