You know that friend you have who should really keep a blog? I have several. When I told Jess Fucking Price to get a blog she deflected it (skillfully) by referring me to a site by her college friends, Yer Sweet Chimneys. It’s a group blog with lots of categories/sub-blogs to navigate, including a cartoon .gif blog about The Insecurities of Inanimate Objects. They even have savvy internal ads for their own blogs. Mostly it makes me want to start a blog with my friends…a mini internet, just for us.
My two highlights of YSC are Sound & Vision, which is like an mp3 blog except each song is paired with a striking image, and Things to Read, Drinks to Drink, which combines two of my favorite pastimes. It’s simple: Book review + drink recipe. Staying in on a Friday? How about the Virgin Suicides and a gin martini? Home all weekend? Grab some absinthe and The Sun Also Rises.
Anyway, I have the nasty habit of half starting 14 books at once, so here’s my list of things I’m reading. Drink suggestions, please.
Books
- The new issue of Field, a review of poetry and politics from Oberlin College.
- The recent issue of Cabinet, the awesome arts and culture magazine that feels like a cabinet of curiosities and is the closest thing to my brain, in layout and focus, that I’ve ever encountered in print.
- How to be an Adult in Relationships , laugh if you will, but your childhood relationships shaped you in mysterious ways, too.
- The Invention of Everything Else, fiction about Nikola Tesla and not as good as her first book The Seas, a sort of Little Mermaid if she lived in the depressing alcoholic town in The Perfect Storm.
- Modern Life, Poems, by Matthea Harvey, one of my favorite young (30-something) poets. I took a Tin House writing workshop with her and loved her even more in person.
- The Master and Margarita, a classic in Russian literature starring the devil, and a gift from Matthew.
I’ve been having movie nights recently, but why don’t we have a reading night?
The phrase “gin martini” is redundant! If “martini” isn’t prefaced with some dumb adjective (“cranapple martini”?), it always means gin! Don’t get me started!
<3 u gin
But Plumpy, can’t you have a vodka martini?
People order vodka martinis, sure. In that case “vodka” is the dumb adjective (yeah, I said it: vodka is dumb). But a “martini”, without modifier, always implies gin!
Didn’t I tell you not to get me started?! Gin is the defining flavor in a martini. If you take that out but serve it in a martini glass, that doesn’t mean it’s still a martini! It seems like people refer to anything served in a martini glass as a martini, even if it has neither gin nor vermouth. So silly!
OKAY DONE
The blog of .gifs of sad inanimate objects is amazing! They’re all terrible puns! So terrible I can’t even comment on them there so I’m doing it here! Ah, why am I typing this and not forwarding that blog to Audrey Dilling!?
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