The Queen Is Not Impressed.
My name is Xarissa. I'm a senior web producer at The Chronicle of Higher Education and an occasional freelance essayist.
Behind one of the houses I lived in, there was a brushy, overgrown bit of property. We called it the fox-lot because only the wild animals got any use out of it. That's sort of what I'm going for here.
• Writing
• QuestionsThe FoxLot
Love the late shift, when I can chair-dance wildly without losing credibility in front of superiors.
David Orr investigates the day jobs of some modern poets, and notes “the university job is a relatively recent development in Anglo-American poetry.” Indeed, as this playful illustration from Incidental Comics makes clear, poets have engaged in a wide array of salaried jobs – from pediatricians to bank clerks to diplomats. Previously, we took a look at writers and their day jobs, too.
| me: | what do you want to do today? |
| boyfriend: | i like the idea of a rest day. we did a lot this weekend. |
| me: | i have a movie about a child assassin. |
| boyfriend: | perfect. |
“Alienation is a sign that you understand something about the reality of the world.”
The MOOC Universe: Explore connections among the major players.
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Oh hey I made that! It’s all ‘baby’s first graphic’ over here in my cubicle.
Request Week - Jake B.
Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006
Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro
Cool.
(via fscottfitzdrunk)
“Like they say in rap songs, a cicada party don’t stop.”
Most awkward sentence ever published by The Washington Post?
“I have been a writer my entire life. As a writer, even as a child, long before what I wrote began to be published, I developed a sense that meaning itself was resident in the rhythms of words and sentences and paragraphs, a technique for withholding whatever it was I thought or believed behind an increasingly impenetrable polish. The way I write is who I am, or have become, yet this is a case in which I wish I had instead of words and their rhythms a cutting room, equipped with an Avid, a digital editing system on which I could touch a key and collapse the sequence of time, show you simultaneously all the frames of memory that come to me now, let you pick the takes, the marginally different expressions, the variant readings of the same lines. This is a case in which I need more than words to find the meaning. This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think or believe to be penetrable, if only for myself.”
— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking
“Group dynamics cannot be mapped onto individuals nearly so neatly as Marcotte attempts it. Her ideology causes her to write as if she doesn’t understand what is plain to most observers: Kate Upton is far more privileged, powerful, culturally savvy, and capable of fully exercising her autonomy than the vast majority of straight white males in America, and certainly more than a dateless, non-celebrity 18-year-old high school student on YouTube.
Speaking of ‘the dynamics of difference and power,’ as they called it at my alma mater, Marcotte, in her capacity as a regular columnist at a prestigious, internationally read Web magazine, presently possesses a lot more cultural power and privilege than the high school boy she just called “creepy,” accused of implicitly threatening Upton with being called a bitch, and told that his prom invitation is rooted in the same premise that stalkers and rapists operate under. ”
Preach, Conor Friedersdorf: “What It Means to Treat Kate Upton Like the Successful, Autonomous Person She Is”
