(no subject)

I had forgotten how deeply and truly tired antibiotics make me.  All I want to do is curl up in a quiet little ball and sleep.

So!  Since my brain is apparently good-for-nothing, which movie should I watch tonight - "Mirrormask" or "The Last Seduction?"  Additional suggestions welcome in the comments.

My Life in Clothes, or, Why I Hate MFA* Writing

Present tense.  Terse.  Loaded with implications.  Basically, the kind of writing that Stephen King accuses Harold of in The Stand.

My Life in Clothes is the kind of book that I ought to like, at least on paper: each chapter is marked by some garment and its contribution to self-image.  However.  instead, I'm rolling my eyes at the pretension.  She doesn't talk about clothes, either (I feel bait-and-switched): instead, it's all casual segues from, like, an overpriced bra her mom wanted to buy to the abuses that she suffered in her childhood, from the pedal-pushers she wears to meet a former lover onto their torrid resumption of a tawdry affair.  Ugh.

It seems like this is a subgenre within a sub-genre that might be doomed: the last book in this style I read was called something like "Little Black Dress," but it appears that I either hid it well enough to not be ashamed of myself for having bought it, donated it to some unworthy cause, or otherwise jettisoned it (and when I try to search on Amazon, all I get is a bunch of suggestions for "Mennonite in a Black Dress," which, no).  That one wasn't quite as pretentiously depressing (depressingly pretentious?), but the narration was equally self-obsessed and tiresome, if in a fluffier mode.  Perhaps - heavens forfend! - this implies that women with an interest in their own attire are tiresome and self-obsessed?

Nah.  Out of a sample-size of two, I merely choose to believe that they're bad writers.

Really bad writers.  Be warned, y'all. 

* To be fair, it doesn't seem this one has gotten an MFA.  Nevertheless, her work bears the deadly stamp.  If you, Dear Reader, have an MFA, please do not take this as a personal criticism, but accept it as a tongue-in-cheek jab at your most loathsome classmate.  In turn, when you jibe at self-important academics and their addiction to jargon, I will know that you do not mean me.