Links
Improv as community/business/cult has a lot of problems that would require a radical new model to fix but improv as playful art form taught me a lot about the openness to unexpected conversation & skill for listening that Austin Kleon writes about here. 🔖
🔖 I somehow missed Linda Holmes’s beautiful piece about The Muppet Movie soundtrack. She pulls out the very lines that always makes me cry. 🌈🐸🎵
🔖 I love this take. I’d love to see it even more fleshed out: WandaVision Is Basically a Retelling of the Scarlet Letter (LitHub) 📺
🔖 This piece about WandaVision & fan theories has me musing on the difference between trying to figure out who will make a cameo and, say, analyzing the cinematography in Veronica Mars to see how it draws on the visual language of noir. via Elizabeth Minkel. 📺
🔖 This piece about WandaVision and fan theories has me thinking about fannish meta and where it lives now, if anywhere.
🔖 These images of comic book heroes redrawn to have average body types are fascinating from a cosplayer’s perspective. The “real” bodies look every bit as heroic to me & I wonder if it’s bc I’m used to seeing real bodies in these costumes. via @ohBananaJoe on micro.blog.
🔖 Check out Riana Mckeith’s period-appropriate cartoon homages to WandaVision. So great! It will surprise no one that the 80s one is my fave. (via kottke.org) 📺
🔖 This is a library that is also a theater. I want to go to there.
🔖 If you love beautiful writing with a wistful vibe, you should be reading Jess Zimmerman’s Dead Channel. The latest issue talks about the erosion of physical third places during the pandemic.
🔖 Y’all, Sir Ian McKellen has been blogging about his work since he started working on “X-Men” in 1999 & I love his writing.
🔖 Go read what Tim Carmody has to say about two songs from “The Muppet Movie”. I’m hoping to be able to write a detailed response but for now I’ll just say it’s beautiful and it resonates with me deeply.
🔖 The spellbinding history of cheese and witchcraft is the witchy content I didn’t know I needed. 🧙♀️🧀
🔖 One option the New York Times didn’t mention in their piece about keeping a digital commonplace book: doing it on your own website.
🔖 This deep-dive into fans reverse-engineering knitwear like Bernie’s mittens & the fourth Doctor’s scarf sits at the center of a Venn diagram of two of my interests, fandom & textiles. I love it.
🔖 Jess Zimmerman’s latest Dead Channel compares the old Internet to Faerie & tackles what it means to know someone’s handle. It resonated especially with me bc when I recently said “I’m Kiba” to someone I know outside of fandom, she said, “YOU’RE Kiba?”
🔖 My granddaddy got his Ed. D. in 1972 and I just found the record for his dissertation in the UF catalog.
🔖 Highly recommended: Library Ambience Sounds for Studying / Relaxing White Noise.
🔖 I am a Book Person. I don’t love the shots this piece takes at Book People, but I appreciate its conclusion: it would be good to calm down about books. (The verbs attacks Book People are defending themselves against are published, rather than imagined.)
🔖 The Power of German Playwright Bertholt Brecht’s V-Effekt: Oliver Mayer discusses the connection between the January 6 insurrection and Brecht’s work with alienation.
🔖 What’s Behind the Label ‘Domestic Fiction‘?: Soledad Fox Maura writes about why we need to reconsider genre.
🔖 An old piece that the Rec Center brought to my attention: How Writing Fanfic Introduced Me To Myself.
I’ve been feeling the need to do some fun, low-pressure writing. Fic may be just the thing.
🔖 I continue to be proud of my city: Durham Moves to Protect Residents Against Natural Hair Discrimination
🔖I went into reading this expecting a fluff piece. I came out of it with a reminder of the spiritual and psychological depth of tabletop RPGs: How One Rabbi Uses Roleplaying Games to Build Community
🔖This interview is extremely validating! Just Move: Scientist Author Debunks Myths About Exercise And Sleep
🔖 Gaby has curated an amazing collection of Bernie memes. The Beetlejuice and Clerks ones are my favorites.