Okay. You know how authors have certain themes and tropes and whatnot they go back to over and over again, like John Irving with hookers and Barbara Kingsolver with the environment and John Updike with being a miserable washed-up  basketball player who hates women?

Future literature majors of America, take heed: based on the fiction I’ve written since college, I’m pretty sure my things are “cheating on one’s spouse with his or her sibling” and “feral cats”.

Dear Charlie St. Cloud,

I did not expect you to be good, and you certainly did not disappoint in that regard. In fact, you were embarrassing and ham-handed and rather putrid in parts. Also, Ray Liotta continues to look like a deranged axe murderer  even when he is playing a Kindly Catholic Paramedic; ergo, I suspect he was miscast.

Having said that, Charlie St. Cloud, I must admit that you succeeded verily in scratching all kinds of anti-feminist emotional itches I’d like to pretend I don’t have (I went to a snotty liberal arts college! I use phrases like “ambitious, but problematic”! I’ve read Laura Mulvey!). Frankly, the experience of watching you was like having all the stupidest, most humiliating parts of my id reflected back at me in some kind of horrifying and delightful funhouse mirror. To my chagrin, I especially enjoyed the PG-13 frolicking in the graveyard (complete with artful cutaway shot) and the scene in which Zac Ephron (spoiler alert) revives a hypothermic girl WITH THE SHEER MOLTEN POWER OF HIS HOTNESS.

Apparently the theme of this week’s media consumption is “sex with the vaguely undead,” since yesterday I finished reading Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which was shortlisted for the  Booker Prize in 2005 and has recently been made into the kind of dullish art-house fare not even Kiera Knightley will be able to convince Tom to come and see with me. The book (the story of three British kids at a weird, creepy boarding school where Something is Clearly Amiss), while haunting and smartly written, left me feeling cold and annoyed at the end, like as much as I wanted to I could never quite get to caring about any of these people. Furthermore, it did absolutely nothing for my lady bits: ambitious but problematic, indeed.

So, Charlie St. Cloud, before you sail off into the sunset of your happy ending, tell me this: what is a girl to do, if she likes her romance and her handsome men just as much as she likes not feeling like an insipid moron? Is the world at large really incapable of producing a piece of entertainment that can serve both God and mammon? Didn’t we almost have it all?

Best of luck with your future endeavors. I look forward to hearing from you.

August Around Here: In the Heights. John Mayer, Maroon 5. Rhinebeck with M (and the Clintons, natch. Mazel tov, Chelsea and Marc). Dinners on the deck. Never Let Me Go. New Orleans next week. Dresses and flipflops. Thunderstorms and air conditioning. Visits from pals. The Stand. Cocktail party with the book club ladies. Oatmeal-raisin-chocolate chips. New bar on the corner. Movies at the drive-in. Write it, send it out (rinse and repeat). Eat Pray Love and Charlie St. Cloud. Walks to the beach. New business cards. Calls home.

Also: Wyclef runs for president of Haiti! Target makes it absolutely necessary for me to buy my toilet paper elsewhere! (Tom says: “I am interested to see how long that boycott will last.” I say: “OH JUST WATCH ME.”) California cleans up its act just in time for a visit from moi!

In Conclusion: it does not say RSVP on the Statue of Liberty. Thank you.

You are my hero. I have been obsessively unsubscribing to email lists for the last two days, and it’s like the feeling I got when I finally admitted that those shirts I bought at Forever 21 were a bad shape for my boobs and that furthermore, what the hell am I even doing shopping at Forever 21?

By which I mean: LIBERATING.

From The Love Shop via Micaela.

Also, I was sort of kidding about that “shit celebrities do” thing  I said yesterday, but: COME ON, PEOPLE. Amazing. AMAZING.

Of note:

1. We saw Ovo last night! It was about eggs and dancing, jumping, flying, undulating, wackily-dressed bugs.  Basically it was awesome. Basically I wonder what it would be like if I could become an acrobat and wrap my legs around my body and have men dressed as grasshoppers toss me around as if I weighed no more than a dust mote.

2. I think the new theme of this blog is going to be: weird shit done by celebrities. For your enjoyment, Brad Paisley enters the New Yorker cartoon contest. Stars! They’re just like us!

3. The Kids Are All Right: now THIS was a movie that made me feel my feelings. Two very enthusiastic thumbs up, especially if you can arrange to see it in the middle of the afternoon in a scenic rural Massachusetts town in a theater full of delightful old people. Dear Mark Ruffalo, you are simultaneously the worst and the best, never change.

4. On the agenda for today: short ribs, flash fiction, and convincing Tom to crack my achy back.

5. I miss my family. Biological and not.

From the list:

21. Publish something scandalous under a pen name

Done and done. And I will never, under any circumstances, tell you where or what it is.

(I, uh, also hung some pictures up in my hallway!)

Dear Inception:

Sorry you were so cerebral and loveless and I guessed your ending even faster than I guessed the ending of M. Night Watermelon’s masterpiece The Village, but you were awfully nice looking and you did, for one shining moment, make me think that if JGL wanted to buy me a $9 Pabst Blue Ribbon at an annoying hipster bar, I might let him. But only if Juno was there too.

Best,

Katie

The Problem, by Richard Siken

The problem (if there was one) was simply a problem with the question. He wants to paint a bird,
needs to, and the problem is why. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows
are easy, series or sequence, one foot after the other, but existentially why bother, what does it solve?
Be the tree, solve for bird. What does that mean? It’s a problem of focus, it’s a problem of diligence,
it’s supposed to be a grackle but it sort of got away from him. But why not let the colors do what
they want, which is blend, which is kind of neighborly, if you think about it. Blackbird, he says. So be
it. Indexed and normative. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its
representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? He does, but he’s not very good at it. And just
because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished
anything. Maybe if it was pretty, it would mean something. Maybe if it was beautiful it would be true.
But it’s not, not beautiful, not true, not even realistic, more like a man in a birdsuit, blue shoulders
instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart,
which is impossible, unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself,
so that looking at the page is like looking out the window at a bird in your chest with a song in its
throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway because the hand is a voice that can sing
what the voice will not and the hand wants to do something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I
fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. Answer: be the heart.
Answer: be the hand. Answer: be the bird. Answer: be the sky.