September 02, 2006
What I've Been Doing
Jewelry design (?!?)
Posted by hissycat at 02:07 PM | Comments (3)
June 06, 2006
I Think I'm Winning
I'm currently engaged in a war with my upstairs neighbor. I was wakened (at noon) by heavy metal. I watched Law & Order: CI at the highest volume possible. Her music was down by the time it ended. Now, more throbbing metal. Really, wall pounding stuff. My response: blast back Pet Sounds.
Posted by hissycat at 02:58 PM | Comments (36)
June 01, 2006
Spam The Masterpiece
Along with this blog, I've been neglecting the hissycat email account. I finally checked it today and found several dozen spam emails containing large excerpts of Anna Karennina.
One email, with the subject line **VL-JUNK** Love is the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real, contained this passage:
shoulders and his eyebrows. The recollection of his wife's last act had so incensed him that he had become frigid, as at the beginning of the conversation. "I am very grateful for your sympathy, but I must be going," he said, getting up. "No, wait a minute. You must not ruin her. Wait a little; I will tell you about myself. I was married, and my husband deceived me; in anger and jealousy, I would have thrown up everything, I would myself.... But I came to myself again; and who did it? Anna saved me. And here I am living on. The children are growing up, my husband has come back to his family, and feels his fault, is growing purer, better, and I live on.... I have forgiven it, and you ought to forgive!" Alexey Alexandrovitch heard her, but her words had no effect on him now. All the hatred of that day when he had resolved on a divorce had sprung up again in his soul. He shook himself, and said in a shrill, loud voice:-- "Forgive I cannot, and do not wish to, and I regard it as wrong. I have done everything for this woman, and she has trodden it all in the mud to which she is akin. I am not a spiteful man, I have never hated anyone, but I hate her with my whole soul, and I cannot even forgive her, because I hate her too much for all the wrong she has done me!" he said, with tones of hatred in his voice. "Love those that hate you...." Darya Alexandrovna whispered timorously. Alexey Alexandrovitch smiled contemptuously. That he knew long ago, but it could not be applied to his case.
Posted by hissycat at 01:25 AM | Comments (16)
April 12, 2006
Punk Rock Librarian
This article from the NYT is brimming with my favorites: lesbians, archives, librarians, low-brow ephemera. Barnard librarian Jenna Freedman, who is quite clearly the most awesome person on earth, has spearheaded the college's scholarly collection and new digital catalogue of zines. You can check out what Barnard has online here.
Posted by hissycat at 12:01 AM | Comments (27)
April 11, 2006
My New Favorite Blog: Literally
I'm not-- it may or may not suprise you to know-- a grammer fascist. I am neurotic and self-punishing, maybe, but I'm forgiving when it comes to other people. I'm not like that bitch who wrote that stupid Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The one bad grammer tic that I find really peevish is misusing "literally" so that it means its opposite-- "figuratively" or "metaphorically." Actually, I don't think I think anything of it when someone uses it conversationally-- in telling a story, say. Like I said, I give people more leeway with the things that come directly out of their mouths on the ground that one just has to take for granted that 99.98% of anything that anyone says, self included, at any given time is likely to be just unbearably stupid. The chances for anything coherent coming out at all are amazing. People are literally just making stuff up as they are talking. But it really, really bothers me when I see the misuse in print. In that case, we can infer that time has elapsed since the author made stuff up and the offending phrase is reaching the reader's eyes and mind. There is less excuse, especially if editors and publishers were involved. I remember Alex getting really worked up over a specific example of this-- I can't remember what it was exactly-- that he found in a book he'd just bought in Kepler's. We were sitting outside at sundown and I was wearing my green skirt from Prague, I remember for some reason, that was the Spring Onion Slayer was abroad. Tess and Brett were browsing inside. Alex and I were outside, smoking and egging each other on to get really bitchy and pissed off about absurd grammer.
All this is the long of saying, I really, really love this weblog.
Posted by hissycat at 03:02 PM | Comments (12)
Sex is for Fags
Abstinence-only Coolness for Boys
Posted by hissycat at 07:49 AM | Comments (231)
March 31, 2006
The Price Of Salt
I know it's early for for the Paperback of the Week, but since Maud pointed yesterday to an exhibit of Patricia Highsmith's life taking place in Switzerland I thought it would be an opportune moment to share one my favorite lesbian pulp novels-- one of my favorite novels, period-- with anyone who happens to be reading.
Patricia Highsmith wrote The Price of Salt in 1950 and published it in 1951 under the pen name Clare Morgan. It is a strange, beautiful novel; a romance about two women, and a suspence novel, too. It is deliciously moody and strange. I wrote a blurb about Price of Salt on Wikipedia, if you'd like more background info (be kind-- I wrote it either right after or right before I was finishing my thesis, so I was totally cracked out and my spelling is totally cracked out. Also, I just checked that outside link-- which I so did not add-- and it leads to the dumbest review/ essay I have ever read ever. Please don't read it. It will only discourage you/ make you sad.) There are no murderers, but there is a private detective and a cross-country chase and all kinds of issues about identity.
The Price of Salt is one of the four novels I covered in my thesis on lesbian pulps (the other three were Spring Fire, Odd Girl Out, and The Girls in 3-B). This sounds really corny, but I got really attached to Carol and Therese. I lived with them day in and day out for so very long. I miss them.
On a side note, the article Maud linked to I found to be very, very strange. It's titled, first of all, "Patricia Highsmith's secret life revealed." And then there's this:
"We didn't know until now how intense or excessive her love life was when she was young," Ulrich Weber, the curator in charge of the author's literary archive, told swissinfo.
"She experienced her homosexuality and didn't suppress it, as was the case for her fictitious hero, Tom Ripley."
"Excessive"? I find that to be a rather odd remark for a biographer to make about a subject. Or anyone. In any event, Highsmith made no secret of her sexual preferences. In the introduction Highsmith wrote to the Naiad Press reissue of The Price of Salt in 1986 that comes across pretty clearly (I don't know if this essay is included in the 2004 WW Norton reissue of the Price of Salt, which was released under the name Patricia Highsmith, because I don't own and haven't had a chance to take a look, but if not try to get your hand on the old Naiad edition. They're still around in used bookshops and they have that essay which provides some interesting publication history.) Descripitions of her in her youth paint her as a WASPish, butch lesbian. She lived in Greenwich Village, frequented dyke bars, and vacationed on Fire Island. I once heard a radio interview in which Marijane Meaker, a lover of Highsmith's and the author of the lesbian pulp Spring Fire, the memoir Highsmith: A Romance of the Fifties, described Pat as looking like Prince Valiant. It's hard for me to understand what the curator is finding so surprising unless it just never occured to him that even in the 1950s lesbians had lesbian sex.
The article also says nothing about her rabid anti-semitism and racism. I love Highsmith's writing. I think she is a fascinating artist, but she was, by all accounts a very difficult person.
Posted by hissycat at 04:16 AM | Comments (516)
