June 2013
5 posts
2013 Lambda Literary Award Winners Announced →
autostraddle.com
This year’s Lambda Award winners were announced yesterday evening.
May 2013
6 posts
April 2013
6 posts
March 2013
6 posts
“Even if they weren’t brave enough to go to a dance or demo, or even stand on the sidelines of a march, the papers were a lifesaver for so many people to know they weren’t alone. It’s important for people to understand the value of that, and how important it was for people who grew up thinking we were the only people like ourselves—alone in the world. That’s one of the things the gay press did. You [might] find a copy of a gay paper on the street, in a garbage can, on a subway seat, a bus seat, and it would help save your life. Just being there was life-saving.”
—
Pioneering lesbian journalist Karla Jay, in an interview in Tracy Baim’s Gay Press, Gay Power.
(Read my review on Autostraddle.)
February 2013
9 posts
“There is a danger to copyediting. You start to read in a different way. You start to see the sentence as machinery. You focus on the gears and levers that connect words to one another; you hunt for the wayward semicolon, the unintentionally ambiguous phrase, the clunky repeated word. You even hope they appear, so you can kill them. You see them when they’re not even there, because you relish slashing your pen across the paper. It gets a little twisted.”
—Truth.
“The recent explosion of extraordinary graphic novels is evidence that bias against a particular art form is likely unjustified. (A comic book? scoffs my mother when I recommend Chris Ware’s Building Stories.) Contra Tolkien, “true literature” is not inherently more progenitive. Great art of any kind can work from mind to mind. And, in the end, it is not books but great art that is sacrosanct, and it is great art that is threatened by adaptation.”
—Alan Levinowitz wrote about adapting books into movies (and sometimes back again) at the Millions. I wrote about him writing about that in this week’s Liberty Lit.
January 2013
8 posts
“‘At this time we have reason to believe the killings were gang-related and carried out by adherents of both the AP and Chicago styles, part of a vicious, bloody feud to establish control over the grammar and usage guidelines governing American English,’ said FBI spokesman Paul Holstein, showing reporters graffiti tags in which the word ‘anti-social’ had been corrected to read ‘antisocial.’ ‘The deadly territory dispute between these two organizations, as well as the notorious MLA Handbook gang, has claimed the lives of more than 63 publishing professionals this year alone.’”
—The Onion, 4 Copy Editors Killed In Ongoing AP Style, Chicago Manual Gang Violence
December 2012
11 posts
“Typography is always about writing, and writing is a graphic phenomenon. Whether typography exists in ink or pixels, or appears on books, bodies, or buildings, it turns written content into image and form.”
—Ellen Ullman, in the LA Review of Books.
“We have to remember: There is nothing wrong with women writing about themselves, their youth, their indiscretions, their habits and values and personal development. Men have been writing about this stuff for thousands of years; they call it the canon. And like their male contemporaries, a lot of this writing disappoints. When it does, there is nothing wrong with criticizing it. The thing that is wrong — really wrong — is when we forget that these kinds of stories are not the only ones that women have to tell.”
—Rebecca Traister at Salon.
“As a biracial, lipstick lesbian, I have struggled with trying to fit in many different groups. One of the best things I’ve heard is the term regulatory queerness: “a controlled or directed expectation of queer identity or expression, according to rule, principle, or law,” which is brilliantly discussed in the Peculiar Kind (at the 11:36 mark). You know, the queer community is always looking at hetero-normative expectations under the microscope, while simultaneously creating very limiting queer-normative expectations. I no longer want to live inside of those boxes.”
—Anita Dolce Vita, the managing editor for dapperQ, in an interview with Anna Pulley for Femmepire Records.
