(via instyle)

in a word: no.

i am so not down.

so this is an article telling us that jackie had soooooooooooo much money and yet it still wasn’t enough because she needed endless caboodles of money and so she spent a fortune buying mountains of clothes so that she could consign them and make more money. because jackie was a greedy bitch. JUST LIKE US!!!!!!!!!

wait up.

firstly, wtf is being sold here?

(via instyle)

I SEE NO PRODUCTS!! am i so inured to click-capitalism that i no longer even see the products being sold to me??!

that’s distressing.

also, in the video accompanying this article, there appears this line:

(via instyle)

a word salad if ever there was one, because wtf is this “multi-generational diaspora”? of the kennedys? there was a diaspora of kennedys?

anyhoooooo, this is a typical bit of clickbait, following a traditional trajectory of: jackie! claims from a recentishly published book! just like you! huzzah.

BUT, UGH.

(via instyle)

true story: onassis was wealthy. like, legitimately wealthy (not trump wealthy). onassis married jackie. as onassis’s wife, jackie had access to his wealth.

as a human being in her own right, jackie had, historically, seemed to enjoy shopping and buying fine things.

ie. consumption. ie. the thing that makes american go round and which it is, historically, our patriotic duty to do.

about a year into the onassis marriage, a former kennedy employee– mary barelli gallagher– published a memoir fully detailing how the former first lady and president kennedy frequently fought over her bills and how she often consigned her clothes for cash and privately sold objets d’art at auctions.

jackie wasn’t the only one doing these things. this was standard practice for well-to-do new york women, who had limited access to money outside of store-based charge accounts and whose husband’s expected them to be seen in new outfits, lest a repeat make it appear business was down.

in jackie’s case, there is evidence that the problem of repeating outfits was not her primary motivation. she regularly re-wore clothes, much to the consternation of the photographers whose pictures went for far less as a result. so she seems to have sold clothes because she wanted the cash.

we’re talking about a time when women could not apply for credit without a male co-signer. that wasn’t possible until the passage of the equal opportunity credit act of 1974, which went in effect in june 1976. and so, in the decades before that, for women of all classes, clothes consignment could be a way of earning quick cash.

and people needed money.

this instyle article points out that onassis gave her an allowance.

(via instyle)

which makes it sound like he handed her an envelope of cash every month.

according to most accounts, it came in the form of charge accounts at stores. and she had to file her bills with his office. after the first year of their marriage, her bills reportedly began to be met with resistance and questions.

“not one to beg,” she resorted to “sneaky” behavior, per this article.

put differently: she didn’t feel she could ask her husband for cash and she didn’t have access to money of her own.

note how that’s an interpretation which renders the act of consigning clothes more desperate than sneaky.

(via instyle)

GOOD GOD, NO!!!!! that is not the moral of this story.

the moral of this story is that women– even wildly privileged ones– have long existed in financially precarious circumstances, and still do. and that maybe we need to consider that when writing their stories, rather than simply depicting them as greedy money-grubbers.

(via NYT)

lee radziwill has died.

there. i did it. i wrote that sentence without referencing that she is the sister of jackie onassis.

this actually isn’t my chief complaint about the obituaries, as it seems inevitable and, possibly, unavoidable.

as you may or may not know, i have many complaints about obituaries and sadly the obituaries of lee radziwill are not exempt from them.

though… surprise! i’m not going to talk about the daily mail! because the daily mail is basically this and this warmed over and left out on the table to sit for a few months. and we don’t need those leftovers in our lives.

(via the daily mail)

no, i’mma talk about the washington post.

though, dear new york times, you didn’t do any better with your paragraph quoting the whispers of “maybe jackie did sleep with rfk after jfk was murdered.”

which, tbh, i am like one more shitty obit away from saying men should not write women’s obituaries, because this stuff is just beyond not ok. it is 2019. we should not be memorializing women with the tropes of yesteryear.

but here we are, in the post, running amok.

(via the washington post)

there are different ways to tell this story.

there’s the daily mail way of “THE SISTERS COMPETED FOR EVERYTHING- LOVERS! CLOTHES! SHOES! RUDOLPH NUREYEV’S ARMS- UNTIL THEIR DYING BREATHS!!! (btw, lee has now died).”

then there’s the slightly more zen way of “tra la la, a woman who was related to a famous woman and knew some famous people and lived a kind of silly life has died.”

this is, i would argue, the route of the washington post. this is, i would also argue, a very gendered thing. 

think about the intellectual somersaults taken to make george h.w. bush sound amazing when he died.

remember that? remember how odes to the WASP were published? that one was an opinion piece, yes, but my point is that we are willing to take all manner of intellectual and imaginative leaps when a man dies- in order to preserve his legacy, in order to preserve the reigning order and norms and whatever else it is we’re loathe to let go of.

this is my major complaint about obituaries– they are so worried about preserving the old order that they seldom look to the future. they also seldom look at the past through new eyes and, instead, recycle the same old stories with the same old interpretations. a reality directly connected to their production process and one which means there are stories on which we miss out.

obituaries are not handled with care.

so i am not at all surprised that lee radziwill has been memorialized in the context of being stylish and being jackie onassis’s sister. i am surprised, however, by how much ink has been spilled in mocking lee radziwill’s efforts to forge a career.

the post starts this early, with reference to her “varied career”.

(via the washington post)

that she “parlayed her cachet” suggests she did nothing throughout the 1950s, when she was in her 20s.

the myth that the bouvier girls had money is parroted.

(via the washington post)

in reality, they grew up in financially precarious circumstances. with their mother’s remarriage, yes, they lived in large houses, but they had limited access to money of their own, which they received through their father- whose wealth was on the decline- rather than their step-father, who owned all the mansions.

appearances can be deceiving.

when jackie married jfk in september 1953, the papers hailed her as an heiress.

(12 september 1953, binghamton press, pg. 1)

this was not true. these women were heiresses to nothing.

this then makes lee look like someone who grew up filthy rich and didn’t know what to do with herself in adulthood as a result:

(via the washington post)

for one thing, being brought up in great wealth is not the same thing as having great wealth. for another thing, i would like to point out the levels of judgement occurring in this paragraph.

(via the washington post)

the logic here suggests she tried to be an actor and failed and then spent all her time pursuing marriage to royalty and had to settle for a polish man, who was just one of her many husbands. which is an entirely inaccurate chronology. her acting career began in the mid- to late-60s, when she had been married to radziwill for a number of years.

what work is the “but” doing here?

(via the washington post)

she is remembered for her sense of adventure, her looks, voice and glamour?

“style” is evidently the main aspect of her legacy. which is somehow about being “queen of style” rather than actual hard work.

we are told she worked with vreeland and “inspired” saint laurent and jacobs but are given little in the way of specifics. (props to WWD for their incredibly thorough and humane reporting on how this work looked.)

(via the washington post)

she was a muse, in other words. which, as we know, is a difficult thing to quantify and deserves far more attention and credit than it typically gets.

here is my main problem though:

(via the washington post)

in quoting people magazine here, and in not including the date (which i’m assuming is the late 70s), the writer gives people the last word.

so that this rather cruel assessment of lee radziwill’s efforts to carve out a career for herself is now lee radziwill’s epitaph– she tried “on careers like so many halstons.”

(vogue, 1970s)

a memorable quote, but no effort is made to contextualize it- a circumstance which renders her rather ridiculous.

otis’s obituary of radziwill was syndicated, so this is a sentiment that also appears in the l.a. times, the telegram, and other places.

the thing overlooked in this equation is that this is someone of whom astonishingly little was expected– a privileged white woman of her time, she was supposed to marry and to marry well. AND YET SHE TRIED, for herself, to do something beyond that.

in spite of the intense pressure of having the whole world watching because she was jackie kennedy’s sister and in the face of repeated, excruciatingly public failures. (the obituaries seem almost gleeful in repeating her bad reviews.)

in her 2001 memoir, happy times, radziwill recounted how her mother had low expectations of her, always saying, “jacqueline is the intellectual one, and lee will have twelve children and live in a rose-covered cottage.”

these are women- talented, artistic, intelligent women- who weren’t expected to do anything but marry. and they needed to do so in order to financially secure their futures.

that sounds distant, like something out of a henry james novel. it was antiquated even then, and neither of the bouvier girls were drawn to it.

“i didn’t want to marry any of the young men i grew up with,” jackie told an interviewer in 1960. “not because of them but because of their life.”

look at that sentence again.

because of their life.

because, in marrying, she would be losing her own life and taking on that of someone else—the life a man had made for himself, in which, as his wife, she would be a companion, an adjunct, all of her energies funneled into him.

lee was in the same bind.

“the world i grew up in—of family business and bridge playing and special schools—that was something i wanted out of,” she later said. “it couldn’t have been more pleasant, you understand, and yet it had no meaning for me.”

and so she got out and went to europe and then she came home to america and tried theater and TV.

(by bert stern)

in happy times, she recounts telling andy warhol, “my deep regret is that i wasn’t brought up or educated to have a métier… the only thing that gives you any real sense of fulfillment is to accomplish something, no matter how small or insignificant it might be considered.”

she repeated a version of this publicly, telling the new york times in 1974, “for the first time, i really feel true to myself […] i think there’s nothing that makes you happier than to be really involved in something. i can’t imagine a totally idle life.”

what if that were the story here? the story of how a privileged white woman in financially precarious circumstances tried to do something different, tried to forge a life of her own– taking risks so she wouldn’t be reduced to just being a princess or some man’s wife or her sister’s sister.

what if this were a story of trying? and failing and trying again?

what if we took her seriously on her own terms? it’s 2019. that really shouldn’t represent such a difficult imaginative leap.

BRIEFLY, let’s discuss:

(via vanity fair)

and i’mma take like the wonkiest of wonky angles here…

WHYCOME VANITY FAIR????!?!

no, but really.

VF is known for being the venue in which jennifer aniston told us brad pitt was missing a “sensitivity chip.” there’s good gossip on its dc blogs and on the royals, that hollywood issue they publish every year around the oscars as well as, like THREE DECADES of covers about dead people.

seriously.

historically, VF has been where you go when you want new dirt on old people.

and, when they featured young, living people, those people also often were modeled to evoke old, dead people…

i associate VF with a distinctly vintage-y vibe is what i’m saying.

this may be changing.

i see that, with the end of the interminable graydon carter era, they are trying to rebrand and so have featured an alarming number of living people on their covers in the last few months, which, well, yay.

the publication has a slightly different history in it’s coverage of men though, which comes into play here in confusing ways.

there is, of course, this EPICAL ralph fiennes cover of yore.

which it is our human responsibility to never ever forget.

there’s also this tommy cruise winner from the height of his beauty days…

(my #1 life rule is never trust a man in a turtleneck, but i’m willing to make an exception here.)

i’d never much thought about the construction of masculinity in VF, but there’s a there there.

with very little wiggle room between toplessness and t-shirts apparently- excepting the middle way of an open blazer without a shirt.

i wanted to know why o’rourke would do this tease in VF. i wrote all this because i wanted to answer the question why VF– the magazine of dead people and kennedys?

is VF cool? is VF the magazine all the hip people are reading now? is this where we expect our hip candidates to come from?

but, seriously, why would VF be the route through which you’d do the finale tease of a presidential campaign you’ve been teasing for months?

there are no norms now so perhaps i’m being a fuddy-duddy. perhaps i’m missing something. perhaps beto has correctly read the room. but it seems an odd publication from which to run, no?

but then, it’s a tease. and VF has, historically, been about the tease, done stylishly and well. the promise of stylish secrets reveled, stylish confessions, stylish gossip, stylish muscles. so maybe that’s the fit.

as a white man who wants to run a presidential race and believes he was born to run a race to be president, of all the publications one could go to to announce that one has that belief and plans at some fortuitous point in the immediate near future to take up the mantle of one’s destiny to do that, it seems VF is it.

bully for him.

i keep returning to this though…

(all images via Vanity Fair)

such was the nature of 2018 that i- a woman with her good ear perpetually to the ground of celebrity gossip- TOTALLY DID NOT KNOW THIS.

not until, like, now. when i was reading an essay on memphis music and thought biography.com wasn’t enough of a credible source and wondered if there were any biographies of j.tim to recommend to this student and then………. LO.

on 29 october 2018, hindsight & all the things i can’t see in front of me apparently came into the world.

and then, a blessed 144 days of my not knowing this detail later, hindsight & all the things i can’t see in front of me came into my world.

are we surprised it looks like this?

(via amazon)

are we surprised he did this?

(via instagram)

but, also, did you think it would be so freaking big??!

(via instagram)

KK’s selfish is, like, a freaking masterpiece, and is roughly comparable in size to a large index card.

i get it. it’s a book of selfies. selfies are of a certain size. but, nonetheless, since it arrived in the mail, i have not ceased to be disappointed in its dimensions. i’ve not owned multiple rooms, much less a coffee table, in the years since, but if i had a coffee table, i would want selfish on it. alas, it would be mistaken for a coaster instead of reading material.

my point being, whycome j.tim warrants this many trees???

you recall i am not a fan, right?

i mean, it’s been a good long while, but yeah. nah.

hard pass. still. though i’ve not really thought about him in all that time.

this makes me ponder though. how vast is my bubble??! or, alternatively, how de-timberlaked is my bubble? that the man, who remains fairly famous, could release a memoir and i would not even know.

i was alive in october 2018.

life was fairly straight-forward, with minimal traumas.

i was reading the internet and writing about celebrity and memoir in october 2018.

and yet, AND YET, it took 144 days for the news that justin timberlake had published a memoir to reach me?!

it only took the pony express ten days to get mail across the country.

i feel like we have been led to expect more of the modern era.

but you know what? i kind of wish i’d never known.

because, be real, and i’m not being mean here, just being honest: do we need this bullshit?

it is like a nesting doll, my life with jackie. a series of anniversaries, each now saturated in its own memories.

because when you write about someone else, you are ultimately writing about yourself.

when you write about someone for twenty-five years, writing about that person is actually you living your life.

*

i was very young when this began.

her death was a blow i did not understand.

it intruded.

*

ten days after jackie’s death, i received this t-shirt for my birthday.

that is how young i was. this was a t-shirt i actually wanted.

*

it occurred to me this morning that i have probably thought about jacqueline kennedy onassis at least once every day in the twenty-five years since. 

which is totally my normal but also maybe kind of weird.

*

there are reasons for this.

hillary. being 12. purity culture. magazines. growing up in the south. feeling a mis-fit. the loss of david silver’s virginity on 90210. hard copy. feminism. the unrelenting drive to be a successful, attractive, interesting and valued human woman and the need for some sort of template to become that.

simply put: it was the ’90s.

or, “the late 1900s,” as my students now call them.

*

there was a time, after i’d banged out the first draft of a book that a number of people have felt is definitely unsellable and possibly unreadable, when i would just constantly, in conversation, point out that we’re all going to die.

this was, no doubt, terribly fun for the people who loved and lived with me during this time.

and so as we sat in the library talking about our research or our lives, my dear friend N would see me sit up straighter in preparation for my inevitable truth bomb, and she’d head it off. i know, i know, she’d say, gently. we’re all going to die, but can we just talk about why this professor hasn’t written me back?   

it was a time where i felt it needed to be said because that is what i had learned from writing about jackie.

i’d written an entire life in a one-year period.

i wasn’t drunk on power so much as scared shitless that it was that easy. that it happens that fast.

it all goes so fast.

*

my father always warns me that time passes so quickly. you just don’t know, he says. and i am like, no, man. i KNOW. i have SEEN. 

he doesn’t believe me.

writing isn’t the same as life, i imagine he imagines. i’m not so sure i agree.

*

life is so fragile.

that spring, after finishing the draft, i stumbled around DC like an open wound, incapable of writing, incapable of reading what i had written.

it was probably a bad time to be doing archival research at NARA on american military efforts to de-nazify the german people through the use of culture.

a bad time to be spending entire days confronting evidence of how horrible people can be. how horrible the world is. how we’re all going to die.

*

i spent so much of my life in 2015 talking about this.

the fact that we are all going to die. and also that we can never even really know ourselves, much less other people.

to the degree that my mother would casually say things like, yes, but even though we’re all zones of obscurity………..

*

it all seems rather futile. once you realize that.

beautiful but futile.

*

there was this one moment, shortly before i defended my phd the following year. in london, at the intersection of goldhawk road and shepherd’s bush, around 3 or 4 pm on an afternoon shortly after an early spring rain, where the light has that golden edge and hits the puddles at such a degree that the scene has an over-saturated instagram quality; it was a moment where i was hit hard by the fact that we–myself and all of the people physically near me in that moment– were all alive right then.

in that moment, the thing we had in common was that we were all alive then. subsequently, there was no guarantee that would be the case.

it’s fragile. and in that one moment, it seemed very easy.

in that moment, i wondered why we couldn’t all get along.

then the light changed.

*

five years ago, writing this, i was on the megabus, on my way to new york to interview gloria steinem.

today, i am alone, on a farm in mississippi, avoiding writing a book review that’s due tomorrow by writing this and reading short stories about russian immigrants.

*

i am, of course, fretful about tone. about how naive and silly and unlikeable and faux-insightful this all sounds. but i’m also very angry, because life is short and it goes so fast and we people are so often so careless, so cruel.

so there’s a part of me that truly, deeply does not care how shrill i sound.

it seems an impossibility: to simultaneously care but also not.

as a woman, i occupy so many impossibilities. this is what it is to be human, right?

*

time is like an accordion… sometimes it’s extended and stretches out so that the past feels the furthest point from where you are now. but then, other times, it squeezes in, so near there’s the sense that if the eyes could just close tighter, if you could just breathe more deeply, if you could just still yourself, you could almost get at it, almost touch it, almost feel it so that the words would come differently, better- they’d be a better fit. i’d be more dexterous with them.

i wrote that five years ago and felt myself to be terrifically profound when i was, in reality, just elaborating on a conor oberst lyric.

*

the thing that is most striking this year is how many people have died.

lee, yusha, nancy tuckerman, bunny mellon, jayne wrightsman, et al.

there was a time where i was writing letters to all of these people who had, previously, just been names in books or talking heads in documentaries. and sometimes they would write me back; other times, they’d die, like, the next week.

during this period, true story: i maintained an excel spreadsheet entitled “dead or alive.”

*

et al. = sister joanne.

i do not remember how i started writing her.

i remember i found her email online, from some book review she’d written for a blog, and asked her for an interview.

i knew of her from a 1995 discovery channel documentary on jackie that my father had taped and i’d watched at least 100 times since.

the thing is that people usually have the one story and then they tell it to everyone. so when you ask someone who’s been interviewed before to speak to you, it feels like you’re basically just asking them to tell you the same story again so that it’ll be yours.

and some times that is all you get. words you’ve already heard before.

other times, you get something altogether else.

you think you know what is coming.

you do not.

*

sister joanne and i spoke on the phone in probably 2014. maybe i wrote her a letter of thanks? or wishing her a happy easter or something.

she wrote back and we kept writing.

i met her once, during that trip to look at horrifying things in archives in DC. flew into baltimore so that we could spend an hour together.

she was 95 at the time.

we sat in an alcove, in the sunshine.

i remember how the sunlight glowed through her hair so the ends were like fairy-lights. the tiny wrinkles creasing her earlobes. how she pronounced beautiful like beauty-full.

*

it isn’t just writing. it’s living.

that’s the thing you have to remember.

that’s the part that is maybe the most profoundly weird.

in your writing life, you play with the lives of real people like they were paperdolls.

in your real life, a man who wants to sleep with you compliments you on your perfume and the words thank you, jackie’s sister’s ex-husband’s cousin, the countess, gave it to me come out of your mouth and they are actually true.

*

i had a chance to go aboard the christina. it was for sale and i emailed the agent and he let me crash a viewing.

while he showed it to clients, i wandered the boat alone.

i was there for, like, two hours. it actually isn’t that big of a ship. i spent a lot of time walking very very slow.

on four separate occasions i experienced the once-in-a-lifetime experience of entering the bar area and beholding the infamous whale testicle covered bar stools in real life.

sometime during the second hour, i began engaging in the game of trying to imagine what it must have been like, though all i felt was that it must have been claustrophobic, all closed up in there, trapped on the water, confined.

i find the ceilings in grand interiors are always disarmingly low.

*

in these moments, you find yourself waiting, looking, hoping that something will happen that you can later write about.

this is when i feel most alive: when i am living in a moment that i know i will later be writing down.

there’s tremendous freedom in the collapse, in the shrinking of the space between life and words.

*

there was a moment.

at the blue lapis fireplace in the… den? living room? i do not know what one calls such living spaces on a yacht.

but i put my hand on the blue lapis fireplace, which i’d always heard described in documentaries and in books, and i thought to myself, she must have once put her hand here too! 

and it was a moment at once deeply powerful and super lame, which is pretty much a description of the whole experience of writing biography.

it is both deeply lame and incredibly necessary to care this much.

*

five years ago, gloria steinem told me that if anyone had to write about jackie, she was pretty sure jackie would be glad it was me.

a few years before that, yusha auchincloss said that jackie would be pleased with what i was doing.

i love these statements even as they strike me as hilariously not true.

*

be kind, sister joanne wrote.

which is really just solid advice for living.

*

for reasons i will likely never fully know, twenty-five years ago, my twelve year-old self picked the recently deceased jacqueline kennedy onassis for a fairy godmother.

there is a powerful desire to do well by her. accompanied by a crushing awareness of the many ways in which it is possible to fuck it up and the inevitability that, in at least some way, i probably will, even if it’s just that i’ve committed my whole life to writing a book(s) that will never be published and done.

because words and stories matter so much and they are so slippery and we can never really know anyone, not even ourselves and so much less someone we’ve never even actually known.

but, oh, the valor in the trying and the freedom of the collapse, in the stretch and contraction of time, the fluttery beguiling sensation of having just missed catching it while still being almost very nearly there.

it’s funny- not ha, ha funny, but, like, oh the whims of life funny (which is, maybe, really just an optimistic spin on super depressing)- how you can study culture for ages and then still be surprised by it.

still be like, oh look at this gross thing i’ve seen! yay cultural analysis and phd-level thinking! huzzah! and not realize that, in seeing that gross thing that one time, you will now be seeing that gross thing EVERYWHERE ALL OF THE TIME. because that is how culture works and this gross thing is now something you’ve trained your eyes to see.

remember those magic eye posters in the 90s? where if you squinted hard enough at a mosaic of 1000 pictures of al gore or marilyn monroe, a dolphin would emerge.

i could never see the dolphin.

i’ve always resented that so i tend to lean heavily on this metaphor to boast about the things i can see.

it’s small consolation. honestly, sometimes i’d rather have just seen the dolphin.

that is all a wind up to the buffet at which we find ourselves, in the neighborhood to which i never wanted to go. we have been here before. and before. and a few times after that as well. (if you are like, oline, wtf are you talking about, go forth, catch up, come back. i do not have the energy to recap.)

lest this give you the impression that i love this party, let me be clear: i do not. i am tired of these leftovers. i would like to go home.

alas.

let’s start here:

(via the daily mail)

i will be brief.

1. just because a whole bunch of journalists call someone mysterious over a period of years, that does not mean that they actually are any more mysterious than all of the rest of us.
2. i am 1000% on board for analyzing sartorial speech, BUT…
3. SHE DOES SPEAK!!!!!!!!!!!!
4. no one listens.
5. they analyze her clothes instead.
6. this is sexist.
7. it is also an example of white privilege.

ok, that was your starter. let’s hit the buffet.

(via the daily mail)

here is the thing. YES. melania trump should be judged on her own terms. but that is actually not what this article does. (and many apologies, but our buffet is heavy on the “yes, but…” today.)

it primarily judges people who have criticized melania trump by generalizing various critiques of melania trump rather than revealing what melania trump has said and done. judging her on her own terms, which is what the article argues we should all do.

(via the daily mail)

why are people so mean to melania? that is this premise of this article.

note how this article takes for granted that people are “mean” to melania.

given that MT has previously declared herself “the most bullied person in the world,” i guess there’s an argument to be made that this is this piece’s attempt to take her on her own terms?

so, who is everyone?

(via the daily mail)

the commentariat!

and why is this concerning?

(via the daily mail)

OMG, WTF?!!?!?!!!

THIS IS EXCEPTIONAL! WE HAVE NEVER SEEN ANYTHING LIKE THIS MEANNESS BEFORE! THIS MEANNESS IS UNPRECEDENTED!!!

omg, wait. wanna see something really funny?

(via the daily mail)

isn’t that cute? michelle obama had arms and “social campaigns” and barbara bush was steely.

who has been left out of this party?

hillz! also, again, wherefore art thou, laura bush? (how is she always exempt from these lists?!)

second, my lands, get me my smelling salts, the saccharine glow we’re putting on the obama years here has given me a headache.

you remember, right?

it was quite a time to be alive.

(2008)

(via human events facebook page, july 2014)

you’ll note the introduction of the first person plural…

(via the daily mail)

WE are the commentariat apparently. WE are the mean ones.

WE need to pay more attention.

(the daily mail)

again, not entirely wrong. we do need to pay more attention- TO WHAT SHE SAYS.

but that is not the argument here.

behold her smiles, yo! is the argument here.

and also that WE need to take her one her own terms rather than be mean to her.

the article then outlines the ways in which WE are mean to her.

WE criticize her performance in her public role:

(via the daily mail)

WE forget that she did not run for office:

(via the daily mail)

WE do not like her husband.

(via the daily mail)

as a result, WE discount her as a trophy wife.

those things do happen.

BUT. and this is a big-ass BUT: if you’re going to take on her own terms, you have to freaking look at what she says.

which this article does not do.

instead it makes gross generalizations about women from eastern europe:

(the daily mail)

and, by its lack of inclusion of any of her comments on issues, suggests melania trump has no opinions.

(via the daily mail)

(via the daily mail)

yes, it that were indeed what people were doing and some do. BUT. this is hardly a majority of people. and this is disingenuous argumentation.

SHE HAS SPOKEN ON THIS.

as ijoma oluo pointed out early on, to hold her accountable for her beliefs isn’t actually to be mean or sexist. it is to hold her accountable for her beliefs.

(via twitter)

she is not silent. she is not a mystery. SHE SPEAKS!!!!!!

the continuing failure to listen and to hold her accountable for what she says is, i would argue, the sexism in play here.

there is one quote from melania trump in this daily mail article. it is, of course, about her marriage.

(via the daily mail)

so the arc here is how dare WE suggest a woman is an ornamental foil for her husband but her words only matter when she’s talking about him.

coup de grâce:

(via the daily mail)

this is rich, non?

one thing i’ve not mentioned here is that, once upon a time, MT sued the daily mail. and basically won. that is not irrelevant in this context, i think. nor in the mail‘s fairly lavish coverage of her during the trip to the UK.

but this is an interesting dog whistle, yes? look at the seeming non sequitur of “virtue signaling.”

look at how two famously liberal women have been co-opted here.

consider the mail‘s broader editorial agenda of critiquing the duchess of sussex every time she draws breath.

in placing MT with these women, in particular, the writer makes it clear that she has basically considered MT on her own terms, as opposed to melania trump’s terms, whatever those may be.

a robust analysis of what melania trump has said in public is warranted. i think that should absolutely be a part of the conversation that is being had about her in media and culture.

but that is not what we have here.

here, we have an article that starts with the contention that people are being “mean” to melania and asserts we should take her “on her own terms,” without clarifying what those are and, in turn, failing to do so.

i know, i know. this is the daily mail. this is the shit they do. i am looking for rigor in a haystack.

but this is a mode of gaslighting, yeah?

(you remember gaslighting. the daily mail explained it to us once.)

everyone is unprecedentedly mean to melania, we’re told. but… are they?

we need to stop being mean to melania! but… are we?

melania is a mystery! but… is she, really?

it’s only been two and a half years here, but the myths are already in place. and they are operative. it would behoove us all to train our eyes to see.

even though there is not a lot to say beyond the same old thing that it seems i always say, which is: OMG, why are we not better at this???!?!

it is 2019. it is twenty years later. it’s been all that time and we still suck.

(by bruce weber)

carolyn bessette kennedy may well have been a complicated woman. she may well have had a drug problem. marrying a very, very visible, probably equally complicated man may not have quite been what she expected it to be.

my question is this: does her story look any differently if it is written by someone who is not a white dude?

because it is almost always written by a white guy, it almost always is a white guy who cites as the most key evidence michael bergin’s (white guy’s) memoir, LIKE IT IS GOD’S HONEST TRUTH AND WE ALREADY KNOW THAT, rather than like it is a memoir of a former lover that presents one side of the story after the other partner in the alleged relationship had died.

michael bergin is basically the james hewitt here, and the other man is his princess in love. except he wrote after everyone else involved was dead.

so my #1 point here is GOD HELP US ALL if the story of our lives is written by a former lover after we are dead. and my #2 point is, um… qu’elle other sources????

(by bruce weber)

i am not being puritanical here. i am not quibbling over whether or not she had lovers or did drugs or had abortions. maybe their marriage was troubled, maybe they were headed for divorce. that actually isn’t what interests me at all.

my quibble is with how static this story has remained.

there is never anything new in the depiction. for twenty years it has largely been devoid of dimensionality.

she is always a coke-head, always a difficult, tempestuous woman, a woman who couldn’t cope with the circumstances she’d chosen, with the attention her marriage brought.

she has been this way for most of the twenty years since her death.

and there is always, in these pieces, a certain lack of generosity, a certain lack of care. a hint of she knew what she was getting into creeps in, a sense that she was ungrateful.

a difficult, tempestuous, ungrateful woman.

(by bruce weber)

call me madcap, but i feel like there might be a bit more to it.

he is, you will note, in contrast, memorialized as someone who could have done something.

he is mourned.

all of the covers are of him.

i get why that is. his place in history is very different. but it still irks.

(via getty images)

she doesn’t have to be a horrible bitch for him to be a sympathetic figure.

i’ve said this before, in a post on the portrayal of jackie in that episode of the crown. that the men don’t have to be monsters for the women to be interesting. but the opposite is true too. the women don’t have to be monsters either.

if she was, indeed, a horrible bitch (and it seems more likely that she was occasionally capable of horrible bitchery to the degree that we all are, while still being capable of tremendous kindness and love), she doesn’t have to be the bitchiest bitch who ever lived.

i allow that all this writing never adds up to the real person who was once there. but i maintain that we can do better. that we have an obligation to do better.

dear someone out there reading this who is not a white dude, please write the biography of this woman. i’d really like to read that some day.

(via casa gitana vintage)

for the last few weeks, i’ve been working on a thing that lacks form– it may be an article or it may be a book.

it is, undoubtedly, a story in progress.

i’ve pursued it through haphazard writing and numerous conversations over expensive dinners i can’t really afford.

still, i do not know what it will be.

(via Getty)

i think it’s something though.

there is a there there.

of that i am certain.

(Chris Kleponis-PoolGetty Images)

i’ve not written like this before.

it’s a de-stabilizing way to write.

without form.

flailing.

pitching one’s self off into the dark dark night, peering and squinting and straining deeply in, trying to make out the contours by the dim light of the half moon.

(i’ve spent a lot of time looking for jackie onassis; my astigmatism is not great.)

feeling the darkness.

finding the words.

i’ve an iron deficiency and i bruise easily right now but i’ve watched a lot of reality tv about climbing mount everest so i feel psychologically prepared for this moment.

i love it, thrive on it, even as i recognize this is an imperiling way to exist.

(AP Photo:Carolyn Kaster)

i’ve attempted to find stability, grounding, through reading… casey mcquiston’s red, white and royal blue, serhii plokhy’s chernobyl: history of a tragedy, deborah levy’s the cost of living.

(excerpt from deborah levy’s AMAZING the cost of living)

these are uncertain times.

in my academic writing, i often write about the writing of people who wrote in uncertain times, people who wrote the story as it unfolded.

it is one thing to write about those people. it is altogether something else to recognize that one is one of those people.

to try to put into words the world in which one exists.

(via Getty)

either way, however it turns out and whatever it winds up being, the thing i am writing, the thing about which i have no clue how it will turn out, it is about mysteriousness.

the myth of mysteriousness, that myth’s construction and its attraction, its privileges. 

(via Getty : Pool)

i’ve written before about how there was a time in my life where i so frequently mentioned the unknowability of other people that my mother felt the need to preface all of her insightful remarks with but of course i know that we all have zones of obscurity within us, which remain obscure even unto ourselves……….

but yeah. we are mysterious, but are some of us more mysterious than the rest of us?

that is the narrative i am not quite buying. because i don’t think it’s true.

(Getty:Pool)

what interests me is how maybe the people we read as mysterious (AHHHHHHHHHHHHHEM…… [melania!]) are not, in reality, any more mysterious than all of the rest of us, but they get read that way and they are said to be that way and then we all read them that way and then, over time, that becomes their defining characteristic.

so that when we see that person (AHHHHHHHHHHHHHEM…… [melania!]), our immediate response is omg, she’s so mysterious and enigmatic and classy and [insert any of the euphemisms for Appropriate White Femininity here].

(via Saul Loeb:Getty Images)

not because we are stupid, but because– if we read certain publications and we watch certain channels– this is the story we have been primed to see.

our eyes have been coached.

and admit it: we do so long for a coherent story.

i am so not faulting us. this is the story available to us. and so we seize it. i get it. i too long for coherence.

i am above none of this.

and, as someone who has written about jackie onassis for what feels like 1,000 years now (seriously, how are we not all dead yet?!), i am here to tell you that it is really fucking hard to get around the story you’ve been primed to see.

it is like trying to learn colors for which the words do not exist.

(Mandatory Credit: Photo by Thibault Camus/AP/REX/Shutterstock (9972872v)
The shoes of French President Emmanuel Macron ‘s wife Brigitte Macron, rear blue, and first lady Melania Trump, front, are pictured on the steps of the Elysee Palace in Paris, Saturday, Nov.10, 2018. U.S President Donald Trump is joining other world leaders at centennial commemorations in Paris this weekend to mark the end of World War I, WWI Centennial, Paris, France – 10 Nov 2018)

but stories are like earth. stories have layers. they stick around while time rolls on. they accrue. like a polaroid, they develop. and, like a bottle of fizzy water in your backpack, as you walk on, they get shaken up.

are you still with me…?????

or have i alienated you with my mixed metaphors?

(U.S. first lady Melania Trump, in high heels, sits in the front row as U.S. President Donald Trump and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in hold a joint news conference at the Blue House in Seoul, South Korea November 7, 2017. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst)

lately, i’ve been thinking a lot about space.

about claiming it.

occupying it.

taking it up.

owning it.

(via Jim Watson:AFP:Getty Images)

i am occupying other people’s houses this summer, living in other people’s spaces, so this is rooted in personal experience, the preoccupation is not coincidental.

let’s be real: for the last year and a half, my space has been borrowed.

because, like every jane austen romantic hero worth his salt and mrs. bennett’s attention, i am worth approximately £10,000 per annum.

we’re all accustomed to living on borrowed time, but what about space?

space is an integral component of the american dream, non?

how narratively apt that my Summer of Borrowed Space coincides with the 50th anniversary of our nation’s colonization of the moon.

Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis and Jackie Kennedy Onassis who is wearing her Apollo 11 Moon earrings by LALAoUNIS. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Pix Inc./The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

(sidenote: DEAR SOMEONE IN MY LIFE, LOVE ME ENOUGH TO BUY THE REPRODUCTION OF JACKIE’S APOLLO 11 EARRINGS!!!)

a few years ago, the man i was dating then asked me about so-called “man repellent clothing.” and while i instantly knew exactly what he was talking about, i struggled to define it.

i knew when i was wearing it, mind you. but i lacked the vocabulary.

but, after that conversation, every single time i put on something i intuited could be classified as man repellent, i clocked it. and was tempted to send a photograph to him so that we could, together, develop a definition.

this was something i did not do.

[WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 10: The shoes of First lady Melania Trump, on the South Lawn of the White House, on July 9, 2018 in Washington, DC. Trump is heading to Brussels for the NATO Summit. (Photo by Al Drago/Getty Images)]

which is essentially man repellent clothing, though they called it “womanspreading.”

which, well, i linguistically resent because WHY DO ALL OF OUR REAPPROPRIATED WORDS HAVE TO BE SO FRICKING UNWIELDY, but i do love the concept.

because i long to take up more space than that to which i feel entitled.

i took that academic jargon quiz. i am heteroglossia. i contain multitudes. i am here. GIVE ME ROOM.

true story: i am, perhaps unsuccessfully, trying to merge two blog posts.

one on an unrelenting hunger to take up space, to claim and consume all the space that has been denied me thus far and my very deep longing to wear truly ginormous, like really fucking dramatically figure-obliterating dresses, in order to lay claim to both that space and my own body.

the other is on silence.

melania trump’s silence, specifically.

(AP Photo:Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

these are not unrelated.

though i am not entirely convinced that there is space enough for them in one blog post.

nor that i have the dexterity to bring them together.

(whilst i am deeply convinced of my genius, the rejection is wearing, and i am merely an occupant of other people’s spaces. people, i have no room of my own.)

(via Reuters)

in first grade, my teacher– the only teacher i would ever characterize as a nemesis– told me to stop asking so many questions. to stop talking. because it was more important that the boys should learn.

when i related this story in therapy, it was the only time that the therapist seemed to break the fourth wall.

the expression on her face.

that moment remains the first time i understood the unfairness of that statement.

and possibly the only time in my life in which i have experienced the full meaning of the word aghast.

(© SAUL LOEB:Getty Images)

bell hooks has written that silence is a white woman problem.

that white women struggle to speak where, in contrast, Black women, when they speak, struggle to be heard.

what i am writing about is a white woman problem.

(AP Photo:Eugene Hoshiko, Pool)

the struggle to open one’s own mouth and speak on one’s own behalf.

a struggle at which i myself have, historically, sucked.

(via KEVIN LAMARQUE:REUTERS)

in college, i fed the correct answers to the cute boy who sat next to me in my english class. because i did not feel i had the space to speak and it was enough for me that my brilliance be filtered through him.

he was a white boy.

i am aware of how in the past, i have used white boys as a conduit for my own brilliance, how i’ve given them the answers, and a lenience, a limitless forgiveness they have, perhaps, not earned.

i am aware it is through the white boys that i have attempted to take up space.

in writing about silence, i repeatedly wind up at the idea of ventriloquism– the throwing of the voice– rather than plagiarism.

ventriloquism: an act of which i am aware i am guilty.

i have let so many men speak for me.

(OLIVIER DOULIERY-POOL:GETTY IMAGES)

confession: my voice is terribly small.

it is so loud in my head, i swear.

because of my dud ear, it sounds like i am screaming all of the time.

but i’ve done podcasts, i edit audio files, i’ve seen.

PEOPLE. THIS IS NOT AN ACCURATE REPRESENTATION OF WHO I AM.

i am so so so much more than that nearly inconsequential fine line.

i so want to be more than that fine line.

i am so afraid that that fine line is all i am.

(Yuri Gripas:Reuters)

i am struck by the fact that there is no passage in the bible where god bequeathes to man and woman a voice.

they talk back to the lord, yes, but a voice is something with which they are both created.

(Brendan Smialowski:AFP:Getty Images)

susan sontag had some thoughts…

Every era has to reinvent the project of “spirituality” for itself. (Spirituality = plans, terminologies, ideas of deportment aimed at the resolution of painful structural contradictions inherent in the human situation, at the completion of human consciousness, at transcendence.)

[….]

So far as he is serious, the artist is continually tempted to sever the dialogue he has with an audience. Silence is the furthest extension of that reluctance to communicate, that ambivalence about making contact with the audience which is a leading motif of modern art, with its tireless commitment to the “new” and/or the “esoteric” Silence is the artist’s ultimate other-worldly gesture; by silence, he frees himself from servile bondage to the world, which appears as patron, client, audience, antagonist, arbiter, and distorter of his work.

[…]

The exemplary modern artist’s choice of silence isn’t often carried to this point of final simplification, so that he becomes literally silent. More typically, he continues speaking, but in a manner that his audience can’t hear.

[U.S. first lady Melania Trump’s leopard patterned shoes are seen as she walks from her motorcade vehicle to her plane while departing Washington for a tour of several African countries from Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., October 1, 2018. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri]

specifically, what does it mean, as an immigrant, to remain silent?

i ask this as someone who tried and failed to be an immigrant, someone unable to attain any security in the foreign country in which i lived.

two things…

one:

i’m tempted to say oh but it’s so so hard, so precarious, you do not know. it’s ghastly, living with that uncertainty, that sense of not belonging, that feeling of having to bend your whole self to pass as someone who fits in.

but then, i was there for five years, and i spent four of them working with immigrant populations, trying to do something to ensure their safety, sitting alongside them in their vulnerability, comforting them as they sat there while the police circled holding their passports aloft while i held their trembling hands in mine.

(REX shutterstock)

two… in the shape of a pocket, in a passage i read during my own relatively minor immigration travails and which has stuck with me since, john berger writes:

The mouse enters the cage to take a bite. No sooner does he touch the morsel with his teeth, than the trip wire releases the door and it slams shut behind him, before he can turn his head.

It takes a mouse several hours to realise that he is a prisoner, unhurt, in a cage measuring 18cm. by 9cm. After that, something in him never stops trembling.

(Morris MacMatzen:Getty Images)

After that, something in him never stops trembling.

dear people, i am here to tell you this is true.

i was forced to leave britain a year and a half ago, and i have not felt safe since.

(AFP)

i had hoped to discuss all this in therapy but my therapist was a trump supporter and not particularly professional so all she wanted to do was talk about why hillary is so untrustworthy and what melania’s jacket meant.

this did not bring me peace.

(AFP PHOTO : Aurore Belot)

i worry i am giving her too much credit.

my work lately has been about how we all give her too much credit.

based on my own experience of navigating visas, i remain unconvinced of the legality of how she entered the country, so i can see not wanting to draw any more attention to that.

but it’s a fine line between acknowledging that someone is a human being and allowing that, accordingly, their motivations may be complex and constructing them as the most mysterious person who ever lived and, in the abyss of uncertainty that creates, imagining their motivations are entirely benign.

yes, no matter how precarious your own position, it’s peak privilege to get in and shut the door on everyone else.

but it also seems rather naïve at this point to expect anything more.

[Mandatory Credit: Photo by Evan Vucci/AP/REX/Shutterstock (10104076j)
Donald Trump Ivan Duque Maria Juliana Ruiz Sandoval Melania Trump. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump meet with Colombian President Ivan Duque Marquez and his wife Maria Juliana Ruiz Sandoval in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington
Trump US Colombia, Washington, USA – 13 Feb 2019]

(via twitter)

i once dated someone who refused to use the word evil to describe anything because he didn’t like the overtones of moral judgment.

it was too harsh a word, too strong. i do wonder, in retrospect, if he truly felt there were nothing that could rise to the occasion of being legitimately evil. but i never asked so i do not know.

this is awful. i need solace. you know where i go for comfort, no?

you guessed it! the radiant, sunshiney world of jackie dolls on etsy.

(via etsy)

my safe space.

*

she’s a bit more clara bow here than one might have imagined, yes? with the brows and the big eyes and the rosebud lips.

(via etsy)

furthermore, i like their– by whom i guess i mean the designers of madame alexander’s– assessment that the actual rosettes on the skirt were not extra enough IRL (which, if we’re being real, they were pretty effing extra to begin with) and so they needed to go bolder here.

these ones display an admirable crispness, like a pastry or a pool floatie.

they command our attention.

they will not be denied.

*

i’m reminded of being in paris this time four years ago. i stayed in a garrett, up on the seventh floor with a shared bathroom and no lift.

my most vivid memories of that period are of being winded and needing to pee. oh, and the discovery of a delightful thing called chausson aux bananes.

if i remember correctly, i’d gone to write and work, but also to see an andy warhol exhibition. (i could be wrong. there were a lot of trips to paris during this period of my life, and most all of them involved some exhibition as cover for my going to paris– rendering my being there “research” rather than sheer indolent need.)

that august, wandering the empty streets, i stumbled upon a jackie exhibition, the centerpiece of which was her wedding dress.

my french is horrid so i couldn’t read any of the signage. but, given that the dress was in the open air, positioned on what appeared to be a high thread-count table cloth and protected from vandalism by an inadequate number of velvet ropes with sizable gaps between them, i concluded this probably wasn’t the real thing.

*

here she’s a little more katherine hepburn than usual. am i wrong? do i need new spectacles?

today i look at jackie dolls and i see only actresses of yore. tomorrow? who knows.

(via etsy)

the rosettes, alas, they are less buoyant.

they will not save us.

*

i have thought about this poem every single day since i read it in the new yorker many months ago:

(via instagram)

*

(via etsy)

it is a trifle too jaunty, yeah? a little too american girls doll.

this is the scene where she sees her husband murdered, after all. it seems a bit historically inaccurate for kardashian levels of false eyelashes to be involved.

(via etsy)

we are not here for historical accuracy though, are we?

TWO SETS OF POCKETS!! two on each hip. for a grand total of FOUR POCKETS.

do we think they were real? did jackie have real pockets in her fake chanel suit? or were they sewn up- this sick fashion equivalent of trompe-l’œil? or shallow– so that you could put, like, a coin in there but, alas, not an entire finger?

(via etsy)

i’ve thought about this suit so much, but this is the first time i’ve ever considered the pockets.

*

in the shape of a pocket, john berger writes…

The mouse enters the cage to take a bite. No sooner does he touch the morsel with his teeth, than the trip wire releases the door and it slams shut behind him, before he can turn his head.

It takes a mouse several hours to realise that he is a prisoner, unhurt, in a cage measuring 18cm. by 9cm. After that, something in him never stops trembling.

(via etsy)

*

jackie had PTSD after her husband’s murder. this seems quite clear now, though it didn’t exist as a diagnosis at the time, so everyone was all why can she not handle her emotions??!?! in their diaries and letters.

it has completely undone her, they whispered, surprised.

the people around her were confused by how alarmed she continued to be in the years to come. all of which seems so hard to believe now, given what she saw.

but then consider all we have seen. does our alarm not appear insufficient?

*

the banality of evil is one of those phrases with which many of us are familiar but i don’t think i’d previously considered arendt’s usage of it. i just always assumed what she meant based on my own understanding of the words themselves rather than her philosophy.

(via etsy)

as i understand it now, arendt was making the case that eichmann was not ideologically driven. he had no ulterior motives. rather, he was an ordinary man who bumbled into doing insidious things without intending to.

this has been examined in depth by many others. as thomas white puts it there, she concluded “he performed evil deeds without evil intentions.”

(via etsy)

odd, isn’t it? how hard we work to we carve people up so that while their actions may contribute to unspeakable horrors we nonetheless pretend we can claim to correctly know their hearts. 

(via etsy)

(those earrings tho, yo! trés louis xiv. [or is this just bc i’ve been watching harlots and versailles??])

*

i, of course, believe we can never really know other people, just as we can never really know ourselves.

i hardly know my own heart most days. how can i ever claim to know yours?

(via etsy)

zones of obscurity, ftw!

which is, perhaps, why i’m so skeptical of the eagerness to attribute benign neglect and good hearts to people who are so clearly engaged in awful acts.

(via etsy)

by the banality of evil, i think i always thought that arendt meant that evil is so banal, so integrated into the everyday, so already a part of who we all intrinsically are, that we are inured to it.

not because we are not ideologically motivated or just bumbling fools riding the waves of historical forces beyond our control. but, rather, because we choose not to know, not to see.

we pretend we know the hearts of others and we pretend to know our own, in order to avoid reckoning with all that is ugly within us. so we can feel we aren’t responsible for anything that is wrong with the world in which we live, and we’re absolved from the need to do anything about it, even as we participate in it all.

but the evil is there, whether that’s a word you like to use or not.

(via etsy)

*

*

(“Our Lady Mother of Ferguson and All Those Killed by Gun Violence.”
A new icon written by Mark Dukes. )

by way of preface… my dear friend EL and i have a friendship ya’ll should all be jealous of.

for many, many reasons, one of which is that, because as part of a larger story that i will not go into here, in the last year we have often communicated through andrew garfield memes.

specifically blonde andrew garfield, to be clear.

as a way of doing life, i’d highly recommend this.

it has worked out well for us.

but, then, nothing lasts forever.

there are the things you want to write about, the things that give you pleasure. then there are the other things.

the things that give you no pleasure and maybe even hurt your heart. but you HAVE to write about them. because, until you write about them, they will not let you go.

norman mailer’s masculinity is one of these things.

who the hell in their right mind would want to write about that?!

not i. and yet…

file a very particular ensemble of andrew garfield’s in this category too.

i do not want to write about it.

and yet…

AND YET.

there are moments when one quite simply cannot ignore the horror.

no. one must engage with it, stare it down, take it apart in the most complete possible detail in order to live one’s life again.

not as one was living it before because, post-ensemble, things have inevitably changed.

there is no going back.

we are living in a post-ensemble world.

the best we can hope for is to carry on.

what ensemble is this you are speaking of, oline? you may be wondering.

how can it possibly live up to all this hype, you may ask.

this is what i’m talking about:

you ready?

MINE EYES, YO.

can you even? i’m gonna, but i cannot.

oh but wait. true story: this was last march.

this monstrosity was worn last march. (and i will say this is, comparatively, an almost flattering angle, which is to say the least unflattering of angles on a deeply unflattering outfit.)

so i’m not being timely at all in talking about it here, right?

because no one, and i repeat, NO ONE would ever wear such a monstrosity again. you would assume, yeah?

because this is clearly dreadful on every level. (if you’re like, oline, i think there are some levels on which this is not completely dreadful, fear not because i’mma change your mind in a mo.)

oh BUT WAIT.

on an episode of rupaul’s drag race uk that just aired, LO.

the ensemble is back.

(via @dragraceukbbc)

so, clearly, we need to talk.

let’s go back.

in case it’s not immediately obvious why this is so bad.

low-hanging fruit first…

these jeans are… NOT GREAT.

note the jeans on the right. the totally normal late 2010s jeans. they really put things in perspective, no?

then note the jeans on the right. (ie. bellbottoms… which they apparently call “elephant leg pants” in the UK!) specifically the hem. and how the hem makes it look like this grown man is wearing DOLL SHOES.

#NOTTHRIVING.

as a general rule, fashionably speaking, unless one is a doll, one really should not aspire to looking like one is wearing doll shoes.

WE HAVE DISCUSSED THIS. dolls are very seldom ever cute.

(via etsy)

remember tiny jfk feet?

he looks like a toy soldier, EL exclaimed of garfield. and she’s not wrong.

RIGHT?!

NO. if you are tempted to do this, i don’t want to be a snob but listen to your oline! i am here to tell you, DO NOT.

are those pants cuffed? i asked. EL looked. we think not but are not 100% sure. no to that too, k?

moving on up…

i have sympathy for this shirt. i 100000% wanted this shirt when it was a part of the victoria’s secret clothing line in 1996.

does it go with those pants? no.

does it go with doll feet? no.

DOES IT GO WITH THAT FUCKING DREADFUL OVERSIZED MUD COLORED BLAZER THAT APPEARS TO HAVE COME FROM THE PRINCESS DIANA AVOIDING THE HUNT AT BALMORAL IN THE MID-1980S FASHION COLLECTION?

no.

there was a moment where i thought this was a one-button blazer. then i realized it’s a two-buttoned blazer. and i quite honestly do not know which is worse.

what is the material? can you tell? the more i look, the more it looks like canvas. again, is that better or worse? idk. i’ve stared at this ensemble for too long. it is the best and worst of times.

what i do know, with total certainty, is that that blazer does not go with that top which does not go with those pants which do not go with those doll shoes which andrew garfield is wearing.

the thing about this ensemble is this (EL and i agree): each piece of it is distinctively not awesome on its own.

to wear those shoes with a dress suit would be meh. to wear that shirt with some black skinny jeans would be ick. to wear that god-awful blazer with anything would be game over.

BUT TO WEAR IT ALL TOGETHER.

this is a perfect storm, EL says. too true.

look at everyone else.

(via @dragraceukbbc)

they have clearly shown up for rupaul’s drag race. they are here to fashion. HARD.

garfield, in contrast, appears to have arrived straight from filming john travolta: fevered dance, behind the wiglets, the lifetime movie.

#tipsfromoline: let your base layer be oversized and your top layer fitted. with a looser shirt, this could be… something else. something, potentially, more bearable if not redeemable. but with the fitted shirt and the over-sized blazer, it looks like he caught a chill on the way from the set of john travolta: fevered dance, behind the wiglets, the lifetime movie and grabbed a three sizes two large blazer from the salvation army on the way to rupaul’s.

dear tan france, HELLLLLLLLLLP!!!!! garfield needs you.

riddle me this: are these photographs from the same day?

because that would make it incrementally less the worst thing ever, right? because then it would simply mean that garfield did two things in one day whilst wearing a deeply offensive ensemble.

what it wouldn’t mean is that he voluntarily put on this outfit twice in his life.

YOLO. how horrifying to have wasted two whole days wearing this.

to be fair though, he is joyous there.

does this outfit spark joy??

am i a horrible shrew for wanting to BURN THIS OUTFIT TO THE GROUND??

i’m waiting for it. that moment when you’ve looked so deeply into something that it suddenly assumes a new beauty. like when you think really really hard about a word. like when you think really really hard about the word orange, so hard that you briefly lose touch with the word orange and your own understanding of orange and orange begins to sound both strange and new so that when you say orange, when orange comes out of your mouth, orange sounds like something you’ve never ever said before.

and then it’s gone. it slips back into place and it seems really fucking weird that you were ever weirded out by the unfamiliarity of a word you feel you’ve always known.

i’m waiting for that moment with this outfit. it has yet to come.

(YO, IT TOTALLY HAPPENED!!!! that moment! half an hour after i wrote the above, when i was editing this post and went back and looked at the original shot from march and put in the parenthetical caveat that you already read: “and i will say this is, comparatively, an almost flattering angle, which is to say the least unflattering of angles on a deeply unflattering outfit.” THAT!!!! that was the briefly sublime moment where this outfit assumed something approaching, if not full-on beauty, at least the fashion equivalent of jolie laide and i caught myself wondering if had just written 1,500 words on an outfit that really isn’t all that bad. briefly, mind you. and then it was right back to being monstrous.)

i just googled “when did they film rupaul’s drag race uk” on the off-chance that it was THIS VERY SAME DAY. alas, this investigation has not yielded clarity.

confession: i have CSIed the shit out of these pictures in an effort to determine whether the possibility exists.

like, seriously.

did you notice he was wearing a ring on drag race? like a proper cocktail ring?

and also maybe in the march photograph?

this is literally the only part of this outfit i can get behind but it’s also an odd level of commitment to wearing this ensemble on rupaul’s drag race uk 100% exactly the same as it was worn last march.

i want to say this is phd-level thinking, but i’m pretty sure i got this attention to detail from watching murder, she wrote. (by which, let’s be real, i actually mean elvis: dead or alive?)

the question here then is this: we know we live in a world where andrew garfield wore this outfit. that has happened. we are now post-ensemble.

BUT (and, as pee-wee herman said, everybody has a big but), do we live in a world where andrew garfield decided to inflict unrecoverable aesthetic injury upon the whole lot of us TWICE? where, GOD HELP US, he might wear it again??!?!

that i do not know. but i so want to believe in the good in humanity.

and, in a world where so much seems so uncertain, i need to believe that we will never see this ensemble again.

yo. by popular demand/literally one reader’s personal request, i am here to talk about varsity blues.

no. not the james van der beek classic. dry your eyes.

nope. i’m here to talk about the modern day movie of the week starring the dowager queen of the hallmark channel, aunt becky.

ie. lori loughlin.

whose decade-long career on the hallmark channel has been so thoroughly and completely erased in response to her infraction that it raises the question of why we cannot similarly delete the horrible men from our culture.

seriously. why should i have to ever see the miramax logo again?

anyhoo. so a friend asked me to write about aunt becky and the college admissions scandal and i mulled it and thought maybe i have some Thoughts. then i went home and realized i didn’t really have enough Thoughts for a blog post. then… OMINOUS DRUMS!!!

i read this.

and now, whew, sweet lord.

to be real, i still don’t really have Thoughts, per say, so this will brief.

i am not here to revel at the idea of someone being put in jail. i do, however, accept that when people conspire and commit fraud, then they are not really in a position to say they didn’t conspire and commit fraud.

and i do think that, when one has done a bad thing, one should actually own up to that. people magazine maybe shouldn’t be one’s first port of call.

they picked the right town crier though, because these quotes? these quotes are stellar. first there is a david and goliath allusion:

(via people)

which, well, nah.

like The Government was watching garage sale mysteries and was just like, yeah, we need to make an example out of her.

while our government is capable of many abhorrent things, i just can’t help but imagine that its priorities lay elsewhere, beyond aunt becky and the chief designer of target’s mid-level clothing line.

oh but wait. it gets richer.

BEHOLD:

(via people)

dear someone, puh-lease write a play about this. and have one of those our town style narrators onstage who can deliver these lines with a straight face to us people eating popcorn in the audience.

and then have aunt becky (presumably in her career comeback, playing herself like melissa and joan rivers in tears and laughter: the melissa and joan rivers story) deliver these lines herself too.

you can see it, yeah? surrounded by remaindered mossimo target stock and discontinued when calls the heart merch, aunt becky alone onstage under a flattering pinkish light, lifting her fist to the heavens– like scarlett o’hara after she vommed that radish into the warm, red earth of tara– intoning:

i did not take the deal. to take the deal would have been to admit guilt. i am not guilty, no, nor any of my folk. if i have to be duped by unscrupulous people, as god it my witness, i would plead not guilty all over again.

and because the world is on fire and there’s the promise of john stamos seated in the front row, be real, you know we would show up. we would show up for the spectacle and we would clap for aunt becky, though we’d feel dirty doing it because we know she’s guilty. but then, so are we.

this is obviously how all good news is spread.

but, no, really. I AM HERE FOR IT.

1000%.

for further context, GQ has historicized this ensemble in relation to the broader Week of Amazing Harry Styles fashions, so this is not a stand alone incident. remember: context matters, people.

but i think it warrants a celebration all its own.

BEHOLD.

i’mma assume IMMEDIATELY ya’ll are all like: BUT, OLINE!!! you just made fun of andrew garfield’s ensemble!!!! you just mocked garfield’s princess diana blazer and disco style jeans. this isn’t fair. #JUSTICE FOR ANDREW!!!

well, people. life is not fair.

but, beyond that pearl of wisdom, there are some key distinctions.

you may remember that my issue with garfield’s look was a lack of coherence.

recall:

i have sympathy for this shirt. i 100000% wanted this shirt when it was a part of the victoria’s secret clothing line in 1996.

does it go with those pants? no.

does it go with doll feet? no.

DOES IT GO WITH THAT FUCKING DREADFUL OVERSIZED MUD COLORED BLAZER THAT APPEARS TO HAVE COME FROM THE PRINCESS DIANA AVOIDING THE HUNT AT BALMORAL IN THE MID-1980S FASHION COLLECTION?

no.

in contrast…

(via vogue)

the thing here, though, is it’s not just about the sheep. it’s about the combo. let’s scroll…

there’s the sheep sweater obvi, which is quite a statement piece.

again, in the princess diana wheelhouse (which, let me just say, if the winter trend is celebrity men wearing princess diana fashions of yore, i am here for it).

but, come with me. look beyond the sheep vortex.

for this is a spectacularly well executed look.

we’ve got a button-down shirt, sleeves rolled up, triple stripes.

apologies for the crotch shot here, but we’ve got trousers in a contrasting single stripe…also, LOOK AT THEM RINGS, YO!! my heart.

the tattoos are doing some important work here too, right? they undercut the sweater’s insouciance. that sweater is not here to play. i think we can all agree, that sweater is here to have sex with us.

the nail polish reassures that that sex will be both enthusiastically consensual and hella hot.

oh. but. wait.

coup. de. grâce.

hand on heart, i owned the shoes once. but i bought mine on the internet for £16, they had laces, and they lasted, like, a month. i mean, it was an unending stream of compliments for that month, which was nice, but they did not endure.

i’m guessing maybe harry styles did not buy these shoes on the internet. i hope they give him more than one month, because they are RAGING.

you see it, right?

the vast difference between what is happening here? why one is working and one is profoundly not? this was helpful, non?

have a good weekend. class dismissed.

people! the end of the year– nay, THE DECADE– is nigh. you know what that means… lots o lists, lots o recaps, blahbity blah blah.

but here, in jackie glamo-land, by now you maybe know it means the return of everyone’s second favorite genre (behind emotions via britney): oline trekks deep into the world of jackie dolls on etsy in order to assess our existential situation and, maybe just maybe– amid the doll feet and the uncanny– finds a glimmer of hope.

BRACE. and you’re welcome.

i want to get one thing out of the way up front.

what is going on over at the franklin mint?

(via etsy)

she looks like julia sugarbaker, non?

and like she needs to have a drink in her hand?

(via etsy)

or like she has previously had too many drinks in her hand and someone has taken the last one away but she keeps reaching for it thinking it should be there… somewhere.

(via etsy)

true story: we are all a little unsteady these days, so i can relate, but did you honestly ever think JKO looked AT ALL like julia sugarbaker?

how delightful to imagine jackie in full-on julia sugarbaker rant mode…

and yet, somehow, the resemblance is undeniable here, right?

(via etsy)

i would like to comment on two things that become apparent across the franklin mint wedding jackies on etsy.

(1) THEIR GLOVES ARE PAINTED ON.

(via etsy)

the tyranny.

(via etsy)

what is worse: painted on shoes or painted on gloves?

(2) franklin mint wedding jackie’s got bloomers. translation: this pic is apparently obligatory…

(via etsy)

(via etsy)

we, of course, learn from this that franklin mint wedding doll jackie has both painted shoes and bowed legs.

there are ways in which barbie really had it better.

it could be worse though.

(via etsy)

surely we wouldn’t wish being “in box” upon our worst enemy.

yes, being “out of box” tends to contribute to a more haggard appearance, which is to be expected with lived experience, but being “in box” comes with such resignation.

(via etsy)

a relatable cocktail of resignation/boredom.

touring india jackie gets real shoes though. bonus! though i would argue they pair awkwardly with her foam cummerbund.

both wedding jackie and touring india jackie are by the franklin mint but they look like entirely different people, right?

the 1950s were, apparently, very good for the skin.

and the lips…

(via etsy)

PAINTED LASHES, people. touring india jackie gets to kick her heels off at the end of the night, but her lashes are forever.

does she care? i think not.

(via etsy)

she stares boldly into the future with her hair net and removable shoes and gloves.

#RESIGNATION.

(via etsy)

i’d honestly not clocked before now how apparently important it is to me that dolls have the freedom to remove their clothes.

ok. so that was the starter, people. are you ready for the main? are you ready for the dolls that i emailed to myself under subjects like “BLEAK” and “ULTIMATE PATHOS”??

probably not. so let’s stay with the franklin mint for one last moment. because in addition to wedding jackie and touring india jackie, the franklin mint also offers us DEVASTATING LOUNGING JACKIE.

behold:

(via etsy)

i recognize i’m giving way too much credit to the franklin mint here because, obviously, part of the wonder of this piece is that its creator has styled it in a very particular way. the franklin mint’s main contribution is what appears to be a painted in tear or, at the very least, an excessively watery eye and period inappropriate, gossip girl levels of lip gloss.

it was entirely the idea of someone else to style this doll in homage to this mark shaw photograph:

which, ultimately, gives us, this:

(via etsy)

i need to know: is the wicker papasan chair included?? yes, yes, my friends, it is.

also, has devastating lounging jackie recently been arrested? is that why she has the plastic handcuff?

(via @firedrillfridays)

it’s frightening, the power of perspective, no? like how, from each different angle, she looks radically different.

(via etsy)

i know i’ve discussed that before here, probably in relation to these damn dolls– the horror that other people get to see our faces and our bodies from perspectives we never do. and how incredibly frightful a reality that is, even though we persist in going out the door and moving through the world every day in spite of it.

devastating lounging jackie gets that, and yet she goes on, fingers affixed…

(via etsy)

rings painted on.

(via etsy)

resigned.

is it just me or do these dolls all look more resigned than in past years? am i projecting resignation onto them all? is resignation now what i bring to the table?

i don’t know how i feel about that.

also, HOLY SHIT, that doll costs $375. i know i feel like, for that price, the jfk pic should be included.

i swear, we are about to bid adieu to our friends at the franklin mint, but one more thing before we leave…

(via etsy)

we have all been here, yeah?

(via etsy)

we may be here RIGHT NOW.

(via etsy)

especially if we’re working retail over the holidays.

(via etsy)

righty-o, goodbye, franklin mint. hello, whatever the hell this is.

(via etsy)

can you explain?

i am literally credentialed in this field and i have no fucking clue.

is this jackie as played by vivien leigh?

(via etsy)

because, um, jackie did not have green eyes.

bully for this gal though, her gloves are removable…

(via etsy)

albeit, trés trés evocative of mickey mouse.

which, let’s be real, was never really the real jackie’s vibe.

oh but wait, there’s more…

(via etsy)

sweet lord, what IS this?

the selections of scenes from jackie’s life to memorialize in dolls is downright bizarre.

even she is like, what huh?

but this is where we are in late capitalism. this jackie goes to church doll is what we get.

(via etsy)

it’s especially jarring when you’ve seen the actual woman, right? alarming to realize she was on her way to church rather than sitting in a director’s chair in a bordello.

(which, YOU KNOW, reminds me of the classic li.lo liz taylor lifetime movie

where she and burton dress like audrey hepburn in funny face and sit in director’s chairs whilst commenting on their love affair from the afterlife.)

that said, REAL LASHES. is this a victory, tho?

i’m pretty sure it’s not.

(via etsy)

i’m also pretty sure these legs…

(via etsy)

could not carry that torso.

(via etsy)

and now [TRUMPETS], let us away into the world of madame alexander.

i feel like this doll accurately captures the adventure that was 2019. do you agree?

(via etsy)

like it started ok(ish)…

(via etsy)

in box, but unrestrained.

but lo, eventually we wound up here…

(via etsy)

this is the madam alexander jackie doll of the “pre-2000s” apparently. i do not know what this outfit is, historically speaking, though i appreciate the jauntiness of that unbuttoned top button.

i do wonder what is up with the nude tights, given that one of the chief reasons people imagined, as a candidate’s wife, that she might be unfit to be first lady was the fact that she dared to go bare-legged. anyhoo.

now. NOW. we are here, yes?

(via etsy)

i think we can probably all agree that this is suboptimal.

(via etsy)

also i feel like the former first lady maybe never in real life wore sparkly tights and fabric shoes…

(via etsy)

so this is where we are. where are we going? what will 2020 look like?

HUZZAH.

(via etsy)

we want to go on this journey, right?

yes, i was a bit disturbed by my initial inability to decipher whether she’s wearing slippers or if those are her actual footbottoms, in which case her footbottoms are a mess, but then my footbottoms are perpetually a disaster so i can relate.

actually, i think these are these are train shoes, which means this jackie is a super good forward thinker, who anticipates the need for sensible shoes and plans accordingly.

(via etsy)

she is packed and ready to go.

incidentally, every time i do this there’s one picture where i am like I WANT THAT FOR MY WALL. fyi, this is that picture.

would you still be my friend if all of my wall decor were pictures of jackie dolls on etsy???

the thing about this jackie is that she seems eager, and hopeful, rather than resigned.

(via etsy)

obviously, we all have our moments.

(via etsy)

but for the most part, she seems rested and ready.

how much of her readiness is attributable to the fact that her lashes are real and her eyes open and close remains unclear.

(via etsy)

but she gazes into the future with something approaching hope.

(via etsy)

she is most just like us.

and so, with nails painted, fingers separated, real lashes, bendable joints, and a whole bunch of baggage…

(via etsy)

away we go.

(via etsy)

dear people, yesterday, mister thomas stearns eliot spoke to us from the beyond and revealed himself to be the petty jackass we always thought he was.

this may seem a digression but then that just means you never knew me in my alternate life as someone who twice attended and twice taught at the t.s. eliot international summer school. which was A Time, let me tell you.

to the degree that when tom hiddleston wore that i t.s. shirt, much of my enthusiasm about it lay in the fact that the eliot school started the following week and we could use it as the opening slide of a powerpoint presentation.

that said, in all honesty, i do not think i’ve thought about this man AT ALL in the last two years. things were going on, time passed, i taught rhetoric and tried to reshape my students’ perceptions of who can be a writer by engineering syllabi almost entirely devoid of white dudes. which means i’ve no longer spent summers thinking about the emily hale letters.

but, whew boy! here they are.

we, of course, know nothing about them yet because, i guess, researchers are queued up and reading as quick as they can but they’ve yet to report back.

what we do know is that eliot has released a statement.

let’s go.

but, wait. you know who we need for this journey, who the fates have willed be our guide??

VOILÁ!

LINDSAY LOHAN AS ELIZABETH TAYLOR IN LIFETIME’S LIZ AND DICK.

you know, that movie where they wear black turtlenecks and sit in director’s chairs in the afterlife and comment on their love.

RIGHT??! do i not have my finger on the pulse of what we need?

so yeah. um… this happened:

(and yes, i write that with a recognition that far more alarming and horrifying things have happened in the last 24 hours.)

firstly, let us enjoy that this has been designated as “GENERAL NEWS.” because, what? the eliot foundation doesn’t have a dedicated page for eliot’s posthumous love life retribution?

scorched earth would have been more apt.

secondly, i will condense the three paragraphs of this opening salvo, as such: i wrote some letters to a woman once. i am annoyed that she deigned to think she was important enough to have an archive. so i’m writing this letter to blunt the effect of her letters because i am writer, hear me roar.

cute.

i have never thought i would get along with t.s. eliot, because i’m pretty sure he was a jackass. true story: this letter, in in its entirety, has provided concrete evidence supporting those assumptions.

but let’s start at the beginning, with his charming disavowal of all autobiography and confessional writing.

this is one of the problems of having made a critical argument throughout your career that biography and the poet’s life are irrelevant.

because they aren’t. and they intrude.

so he’s saying here that only obnoxious, weak people write about themselves. and he’s not weak so he’s going to brief here. in writing about himself.

and we are supposed to swoon? we are supposed to be so pleased that he is going to pull back the curtain for us and slag the women in his life briefly?

i think we maybe, on some level, always knew that eliot would be the kind of guy who would mansplain to us why we’re all wrong for writing about ourselves in advance of writing about himself.

this disclosure really sets the tone.

i’m confused.

he thought she was going to have the archive opened straight away? so he wrote this? but she didn’t. so he wrote this in 1960 why?

“a few letters”? i feel like it was more than this. given that there are 1,131 letters in the archive, i feel like maybe “a few letters” is cutting some corners on reality here.

so he told her he loved her. he didn’t feel that love was returned.

i wonder how t.s. eliot professed his love to a woman in 1914. based on how he is talking about love here in 1960, i’m guessing it was a show to behold.

are you ready for vivienne? are you ready for the loooooooooooooongest paragraph of all time?

i actually read things now thinking about how i would mark them.

(1) this essay would be stronger if the audience weren’t called weak losers in the first paragraphs.

(2) the author’s ethos in this essay is undermined by the fact that they are participating in the introspection they just condemned. maybe just don’t condemn it in the first place.

(3) this could be five paragraphs.

but, yeah, vivienne.

the woman we all know as the woman virginia woolf once graciously referred to (in her diary, to be fair) as “this bag of ferrets that tom wears round his neck.”

a woman who suffered from endometriosis and mental health issues and lived, for 17 years, with this dude. a dude who used her life for material and her intellect for editing, then pontificated on the horrors of his marriage and slagged her and her writing until he died. AND FROM THE GRAVE.

by Lady Ottoline Morrell, vintage snapshot print, 1920

SHE THOUGHT HE HAD BEEN KIDNAPPED WHEN, IN REALITY, HE HAD ABANDONED HER.

as someone who was repeatedly pressed to define what it meant for jackie to “be in love” and to “love,” i do appreciate the candor here.

as someone who’s had a few of these “must’ve been love but it’s over now” moments myself, i also appreciate that love is complicated and sometimes hard, sometimes awful and ruinous. do i anticipate leaving letters denouncing those loves upon my death? no.

the temporality here is confusing though.

he was in love with emily hale, he believed, when he married vivienne, he later came to realize?

YA’LL.

file this under: things men got away with because they were young and stupid.

for the record: he maybe kind of loved her because he didn’t know whether he wanted to be a philosophy professor.

oh, to be used by some man to burn his boats!!! isn’t that the dream we women have all been sold? why hasn’t disney made a fairy tale of that?

let’s all watch ezra pound go under the bus… i did it for ezra! ezra made her do it! huzzah!

note the repetition of “i believe”/”i came to believe”/”i now believe” throughout this thing. the internal interrogation of the story as he’s telling it, but also the sense that he was deluded by everyone, hapless, moving through this weird world, burning his boats, and guided almost entirely by others.

his expression of his own lack of agency here– even as he writes this letter that literally sets fire to the fleet– is striking.

he was so stupid, but HE HAS SEEN THE LIGHT.

in case you’re feeling sorry for him: don’t. this letter does not embody christian forgiveness.

vivienne and pound both helped him with the waste land. he casts it as a hurculean task he could not have done without everyone around him being so awful.

PLUS. because that wasn’t enough gasoline. his horrible marriage kept him from marrying this woman who’s publishing these letters now.

think about how much rage that statement directs towards emily hale.

think about how much rage goes into this equation of emily hale with an academic career in philosophy.

years pass, he continues seeing and writing emily hale occasionally while married to vivienne. he is A DIVIDED MAN.

god help me, if a t.s. eliot biography comes out on this whole thing with the title A DIVIDED MAN, i will scream.

spoiler alert: HE WAS NOT IN LOVE WITH EMILY HALE.

if literally any other woman had come along, he would have realized he was not in love with emily hale.

alas, it took vivienne’s death to realize they had so little in common.

“SHE MAY HAVE LOVED ME ACCORDING TO HER CAPACITY FOR LOVE.”

BUT.

SHE WAS FOND OF HER UNCLE???!

AND SHE DARED TAKE CHRISTIAN COMMUNION?!?!

BUT WAIT.

this is the problem with posthumous letters.

from the grave, one does not know the discourse into which one will be entering.

were i guiding people to write posthumous letters, for this reason, i would encourage them not to.

because i think eliot thought he was being clever.

he thought through that paragraph break.

he thought (and i know, there’s a whole school of thought that we can never know authorial intent but let’s use our heads for a moment) this would be the kicker.

and, you know what? time has not been kind to this phrase.

don’t worry. the ground has been well and truly razed. we’re nearly done.

he was a divided man! a deceived man! a ghost! a hallucinated man! a pretending man! a man who was not the man he’d been in 1914!

it occurs to me that this letter is essentially covering ground that adam gopnik did much better.

but, hey, he now recognizes the only mistake that would have been greater than his first marriage would have been marriage to emily hale.

this is small, but it annoys me to no end:

props for your powers of imagination, jackass. you couldn’t imagine these women as human beings– only the other men they might have married.

we’re nearly there, i swear.

but, first, an ode to valerie, from the great poet…

incidentally, the one woman who gave her whole one life over to this man.

are you ready? BRACE.

COUP. DE. GRÂCE.

WHAT ABOUT THIS DOCUMENT BROUGHT US ANY MEASURE OF PEACE, SIR??!?!?!?!

having spent the last hour with this letter, i want to finance a monument to emily hale for having had the audacity to defy this man archivally, re-read carole seymour-jones’s painted shadow, and break shit.

badly done, tom. badly done.

i am giving myself exactly one hour and thirty-eight minutes in which to write about this. because there are 19 papers that need to be graded and i’m leaving for an estate sale with a friend at 9:45, but there are things i gots to say.

THE JESSICA SIMPSON MEMOIR IS AMAZING.

listen to your oline. this is not a lie.

it is a truth i have used what limited institutional power i have to broadcast.

yesterday, a bookshopper made a stray comment of “oh, jessica simpson has a memoir?” to her companion and i, perhaps more forcefully and more loudly than necessary in a small shop playing light jazz, declared, “YES, SHE DOES AND IT IS EXCELLENT.”

again, trust me: i speak truth.

fair warning: this is going to be a severely lacking book review because, i would argue, one of the best aspects of jessica simpson’s memoir– one of the reasons i keep recommending it to everyone– is that its allure is ineffable.

it is not at all that i have low literary expectations for jessica simpson.

this is not a marilyn monroe reading situation. this is not jessica simpson writes. i never once imagined she couldn’t.

when i heard she was publishing a memoir, i knew it would be good.

admittedly, given the ferocity of the advance press coverage, i did wonder if perhaps all of the beans would be spilled and the book might have nothing left to give. but i needn’t have worried, because, gossip-wise this is a book that giveth and giveth again. and then again.

but it’s something beyond that to, and i can’t quite lay my finger on what. which is supremely frustrating for someone who actually studies memoir and celebrity.

it’s something about the voice. it’s actually hers.

maybe she had help, maybe there was a ghost writer who worked with her, but regardless, the voice is 100% hers.

the reading experience is that of a one-on-one.

which other celebs have attempted, but my god is it effective beyond belief here.

jessica simpson and i go way back.

back to the first weekend of may 1999- when, just a few weeks shy of graduation, me and a motley sextet of sexually ambiguous high schoolers stood near a clump of trees facing the 2nd avenue stage of river stages passing judgement upon the approximately 35 teenyboppers who cared enough about jessica simpson to come see her sing at 10 a.m.

it seems important to establish where we were in my life narrative at this point in time. to make clear that i was young and impressionable and just about the most naive 17 a girl could be.

here is a picture of me and the love of my life playing at being adults at prom, a month before we saw jessica simpson on stage. (somehow we look older then than we do now.)

true story: seven months before, at a michael w. smith concert, a friend and i had asked her mother what oral sex was and whether orgasm was a synonym for papier-mâché. i’d never been kissed. my grades were my world. and then, suddenly, with the coming of spring, my boyfriend was gay and i was running with a crowd that saw concerts in daylight.

it is difficult to convey how deliciously deviant this seemed, how glamorous, how incredibly hedonistic in what i see now was such a juvenile way.

and in the midst of this there was jessica simpson.

i can’t find a picture of her from nashville, but this is apparently from 1999.

jessica simpson didn’t change my life. i know that. in reality, i promptly forgot about her. it was only years later that i even realized this famous person was the girl with the big boobs and bad backup dancers who had squinted into the sea of sweaty adolescents of which we were a dubious, judgmental part and instructed us to “do it up yo yo yo.”

and then i felt kind of bad.

the two things i vividly remember from that day?

(1) the six (seven? three?) of us, everyone but me smoking, cynics all, after very limited debate reaching the conclusion that jessica simpson wouldn’t amount to much.

(2) the 125 degree angle made by the slender bicep/elbow/forearm of the cool kid in the group, his angelic facial features distorted by a grin one would expect from the joker rather than a closeted gay southern baptist, as he recklessly flung jessica simpson’s demo (charred by a dalliance with a lighter) into the dump.

this was very long ago. we were all of us– jessica simpson included– very young. and we none of us had any clue what we were doing, engaged in performances of various kinds using scripts we’d been given.

but the thing that struck me in reading jessica simpson’s memoir is that we came from the same culture. that southern, evangelical world, characterized by a very strict set of rules for what it means to be a girl, what it means to be successful in one’s performance of being a girl, and what a good girl does and does not do.

we were both christian girls idolizing rebecca st. james, who may or may not have also been performing at that concert where my friend and i asked her mother about oral sex.

look at me bracing here, against the threat of the bouquet.

but this wasn’t the end of it.

when, in 2003, i finally started dating someone whom i’d had a crush on for years, as the battle of mosul raged on in the background on cnn, he confessed to me that he’d wanted to be with me ever since 9/11. because, after 9/11, it just seemed wrong not to be with the person you loved.

that’s how it was with jessica simpson and nick lachey, he told me. and i nodded and was deeply moved by this information that i somehow already knew.

because somehow, in the spring of 2003, the fact that 9/11 had brought jessica simpson and nick lachey back together was something people of my generation just knew. it was ambient info, floating on the air.

i do not know how we all knew this, but we did.

in early december 2006, the InTouch magazine screaming “NICK & JESS BUST UP!” landed at my door two days after i was dumped by this same someone. and i was alarmed to find that the article on how jessica simpson was drowning her sorrows in six-packs of zima hit entirely too close to home.

it is never good when the advice of a “medical expert who has never treated her but is familiar with her case” resonates.

to cope with this, i went to the rite-aid and bought a six pack of zima.

in winter 2006, having recently moved to chicago, i was walking down clark street in a rain shower and was mistaken for jessica simpson’s sister.

given my look at the time, this wasn’t entirely shocking. that i actually gave an autograph maybe was.

eyebrows were not in that year.

all that to say the obvious: oh how intimately woven into our lives these celebrities are.

but also i write that in order to think about this particular celebrity and what she has meant to women my age.

last spring, i read multiple memoirs on purity culture. they were excellent. they also all mentioned the extreme visibility of jessica simpson’s virginity in the early 2000s.

the prior year, there was a celeb on celeb dust-up online when the actor natalie portman said this in an interview:

“I remember being a teenager, and there was Jessica Simpson on the cover of a magazine saying ‘I’m a virgin’ while wearing a bikini, and I was confused,” Portman said.

“Like, I don’t know what this is trying to tell me as a woman, as a girl,” she said.

simpson responded on instagram, and portman amended her comments:

“I only meant to say I was confused — as a girl coming of age in the public eye around the same time — by the media’s mixed messages about how girls and women were supposed to behave. I didn’t mean to shame you and I’m sorry for any hurt my words may have caused. I have nothing but respect for your talent and your voice that you use to encourage and empower women all over the globe,” Portman said.

turns out simpson was confused too. #justlikeus

simpson’s book opens the door on this, revealing how she was similarly harmed by these mixed messages and by being asked, by tommy mattola at sony in particular, to embody virginal, teenage heterosexuality in a way that was neither authentic nor comfortable and, often, self-destructive.

i’m resisting the urge to say that no one looks good at the end of open book.

the men do not fare well, this is true. and, from the advanced press, one might be left with the impression of scorched earth. but it isn’t that.

rather, reading it, as someone who’s never participated in the music industry– outside of a brief stint in competitive church choir, during which i was informed it would be better for the team if i would lip-synch instead of sing– and who’s never been a celebrity nor married to a celebrity, it nonetheless feels frighteningly familiar.

i’m reminded of this essay on women and drinking. and this essay on women’ exhaustion. and this op-ed on the spectrum of sexual violence and rape.

i’m reminded of men i’ve dated and church youth group sessions i sat through. i’m reminded of all those purity pledges we signed in high school and the “true love waits” rings we wore.

i’m reminded of how fucking hard my friends and i tried to live up to something we didn’t understand, something that wasn’t possible, an idea of perfection constructed once upon a time by white men.

i’m aware how many of us are coping with the fallout of that effort in the here and now.

jessica simpson’s memoir sits within a long line of celebrity memoirs, but it also is situated in a very particular historical moment. i am not going to call her the voice of my generation (though she does feel like that for me, individually, in a way that, say, lena dunham never did). and i’m not going to say she’s the first to have written a book like this because, reading open book, i was often reminded of gabrielle union’s excellent we’re going to need more wine.

but open book hit me in a different way– a way in which race is likely relevant, because the white, southern, evangelical world simpson describes is one i also grew up in. hence the frightening familiarity. hence, maybe also, my tears at the book’s end.

part of the allure of celebrity is that they are people we know about, people we feel we know on some level because of all we know about them.

the fun of a celebrity memoir is that it confirms what we did know, and– if it’s a good one– lets us in on something we didn’t.

the value of that is that, in doing so, it tells us something not just about the celebrity’s life. it also tells us something of our own.

riddle me this: are you familiar with why prince andrew is awful? back up. do you even know who prince andrew is?? much less, why he need be deemed awful?

oh hayyy, let’s talk.

since the crown is now slated to end after season 5, we can assume it ain’t gonna get to dramatic portrayals of the now times.

and fyi, people, the now times are SUPER DRAMATIC.

you are, i imagine, like yes, yes, oline, sussexit, yada, yada, we know, we know, but yo, if you are not talking about prince andrew then, no, my friend, YOU DO NOT EVEN BEGIN KNOW.

you’ve maybe by now heard of a man named jeffrey epstein? a man who, according to ariel levy’s reporting, was trafficking and assaulting upwards of TWELVE girls per month for the last twenty years. the last twelve years of which EVERYBODY KNEW. (for more on that, here’s vicky ward’s reporting. here’s the guardian‘s reporting. here’s the miami herald‘s archive of their investigative reports on epstein.)

for now though, i wanna talk about jeffrey epstein’s BFF, prince andrew. the man who is singlehandedly responsible for the vomit face being my most frequently used emoji.

let’s use this as a jumping off point…

prince andrew is 60! an age by which we would most of us hope to know better and to be at a point of taking responsibility for our lives. alas, royalty are not #justlikeus.

prince andrew is sad. his great milestone has been diminished. there is no longer even a governmental requirement to fly flags in celebration of his birth!!! wah-wah.

how have we arrived at this sad state of affairs?

in VAIR VAIR BRIEF: jeffrey was a man with a lot of money who groomed, procured, manipulated, trafficked, and raped girls.

(let us not play cutsie and hide behind the typical language of “he had a penchant.” fuck that.)

FOR DECADES.

with the help of this woman, ghislaine maxwell.

go, do your research on that. anyhoo, these peeps were also friends with prince andrew.

because, allegedly, he loved their planes and islands and fancypants lifestyle.

and THAT’S why, after epstein was arrested for recruiting an underage woman in 2008, andrew remained his dear, good friend.

going so far as to visit him in new york city in 2010 after epstein completed his bizarro joke of a prison sentence (in which he got “work release” for up to twelve hours a day, six days a week).

here they are on their infamous tete a tete:

(Credit: Jae Donnelly)

mind you, this is AFTER epstein was convicted and served time for being a sex offender.

so this is photograph of a prince of england on a walk with someone who, if he is living by the dictates of his release (which, honestly, WHY WOULD HE IF HE IS STILL, AT THIS POINT, TRAFFICKING GIRLS?!?!?!), is listed on the local sex offenders registry.

so there is no saying that prince andrew did not know the man he is talking to in this photograph was a sex offender. that is fact.

in a completely BONKERS train wreck of interview that andrew gave the BBC last november (the train wreckyness is evident in the fact that a youtube reel condensing “the best (WORST) bits” of this interview is over ten minutes long), he said he went to nyc then to break up with epstein as a friend.

it remains unclear why this task involved a FIVE day stay in epstein’s mansion.

so, here’s the story: prince andrew continued to affiliate with a known sex trafficker/rapist, looooooong after that fact became known.

because he allegedly loved the man’s islands and planes and jet-set lifestyle.

i won’t bore you with the full richard kay piece, because it is short and stupid, and reads like fan-fic for the birthday andrew could have had had he not spent the last ten years affiliating with a predator. the flags were not raised, man. boo-fucking-hoo.

forgive me, i have no sympathy here. at the very least, he knew who he was hanging out with. at the very most, he did not care.

the part of the kay piece that has incensed me is this:

and this…

(1) this is a man covering his ass on national TV, so are we surprised he wasn’t like *JAZZ HANDS* i just really, really love sixteen year old girls?

(2) LOOK HOW QUICKLY THE WOMEN ARE DISPOSED OF IN THAT SECOND PARAGRAPH!!!!!

“it wasn’t his love of women.”

well, yeah. no one said anything about love here.

but also note the separation– the idea that jeffrey epstein’s “girl problem” is separable from his money, his dinner parties, the important people he collected. like you can take one and just leave the other behind. like the girls weren’t at the dinner parties, circulating among the important people, candy specifically for the important people.

true story: the BBC interview was bad.

heads rolled.

princess beatrice’s wedding was apparently, once again, rescheduled.

the sussexit happened and the problem of andrew receded.

along with the memory of this man going on national television and claiming that, due to his service in the falkland’s war, for a time, he had a medical condition that meant he could not sweat, and so the woman who remembers him as the sweaty man who raped her cannot possibly be telling the truth.

to which the daily mail– god bless them, sometimes they do good work– responded with a deep dive of Times Prince Andrew Was Seen Dancing/Sweating in Public.

btw, there is merch.

there is also some quality pizza express content.

because andrew said he knew he hadn’t had sex with virginia giuffre, then age 17, because– and i am not even joking– he had been at a pizza express in woking on the night in question. 

for the record, he also doesn’t remember being present in this photograph:

so the evidence here suggests that prince andrew did something bad. how bad remains unsettled, if we’re looking for definitivity. but epstein was legit a monster. post-2010, that was known.

i believe virginia giuffre when she says prince andrew raped her in 2001. i believe her because that would not be a fun thing for any woman to say out loud, much less in a court of law; because she seems clearly to have been trafficked by epstein and maxwell; and because the general vibe around epstein seems to have been trés trés anything goes, young girls included.

he had boats, islands, planes, dinner parties, at all of which entrapped girls were put on show.

it is a choice to close your eyes to what is happening in front of you.

that said, i do not think any of their eyes were closed.

so here is my ultimate beef with this dumb bit of fan fic in the daily mail.

richard kay writes this:

WHO THE FUCK IS THINKING THIS???!?!?! clearly he goes away. clearly he has been voted off the island. CLEARLY we will not be bringing him back for later seasons!!!!!! game = OVER.

but is it?

this is allegedly the queen’s favorite son.

though andrew has stepped back from royal duties, there was hullabaloo over not raising the damn flags.

harry and meghan have had a more punishing removal from the royal family than andrew has.

they have been stripped of far more, while the queen’s favorite son deferred his own birthday promotion and evades the FBI.

but, obviously, this is power. the game is never over, and it looks like epstein played a really fucking long game and will continue to do so from the beyond for quite some time.

i imagine andrew will pay no price, beyond briefly being a meme about sweating and pizza express and providing an income to others through sweating/pizza express arts and crafts available on etsy.

that’s not the end of the world, right?

once upon a time, charles was basically a pre-internet meme about a tampon and that panned out ok.

but the difference there is charles had a consensual affair. andrew is accused of raping a minor. those two things are not equal. alas, twenty years later, in the eyes of the world, they kind of still are.

a man did a bad thing, a wrong thing. but, eventually, we’ll move on and he’ll sneak his way back into public view and, slowly, like the lobsters in the pot, we’ll grow accustomed to his face and be impressed by his mother’s love for him and the memory of the horror he inflicted will drain away, because he’ll be older, feebler, less monstrous, seemingly less capable of having committed such violence, though we know in our heart of hearts he did.

that is my prophecy. please, dear world, prove me wrong.

Virginia Roberts holds a photo of herself at age 16, when she says Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein began abusing her sexually.
(Emily Michot/Miami Herald/TNS via Getty Images)

yup. ’tis time. saddle up.

as you know, this ain’t our first rodeo. we’ve peered deep into the hell hole of jackie kennedy doll photographs on etsy multiple times before.

somehow, amid 15 moves and 14 jobs and myriad other responsibilities, over the last five years, i have produced a rich seam of informal, doctoral-level scholarship on dolls. you are welcome.

#thingsforwhichtherearenonationalappreciationdays

anyhoo, TODAY.

let us begin with an acknowledgement that, much like the international public health emergency in which we find ourselves now, there seems to be no end to this. the badly photographed jackie dolls: they just keep coming.

where to begin? ah, yes, let us take check back with the vaults of the franklin mint.

you may remember, in our last pursuit of the pathos back in december (omg, am i a pathos detective?! should the name of this blog’s doll analysis companion podcast be pathos, she wrote?!!). but yeah, something effed up was happening with the franklin mint.

it was bleak.

jackie looked like drunk julia sugarbaker.

she was upskirted.

(via etsy)

and HER GLOVES WERE PAINTED ON.

(via etsy)

but that was long, long ago in the pre-pandemic way back of december. things have changed. everything has changed. there is no normal.

well, some things remain unchanged. DEVASTATED LOUNGING JACKIE is still available.

i mean, this is a proper quarantine mood, non?

but, seriously, where do we stand now, with the freshman class of jackie dolls on etsy?

BE.HOLD.

on a vair vair superficial note, she seems a bit more bosomy than before in this shot. or has her dressed slipped down? this is the problem of the off-the-shoulder dresses. they get all cocky and fancy themselves on-the-elbow dresses.

many days, i have felt like this.

truly tho, this is a masterclass in the inefficiency of blank space in advertising.

also, i say this with nothing but love in my heart, but if the sheet is going to be the dominant part of an image marketing a small doll, IRON THE FREAKING SHEET.

she looks bored.

and be-headed.

i do love the editorial decision that an up-side-down perspective of the doll in the box will aid us in our decision-making of whether or not to fork over $140! a sales innovation!

also, please note $140 is alarmingly reasonable and seems to represent something of a basement bridal jackie price.

take, for example, the closest competition, priced competitively at $141.66.

what, pray tell, are they going to do with that $1.66?!?! i gots to know.

but, alas, the situation for her here is not much improved.

WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS?!

jackie as the princess de lamballe.

do we think heads-on-pikes was the vibe for which they aimed?

this satin is super cheap looking, no? (woo! i’m extra claws out today!)
i don’t know that we’ve previously seen a photograph quite so adept at highlighting the satin’s cheapness, so well done there.

this doll is billed as “Jacqueline Kennedy Bridal Wedding Doll Large 16″ Collectible Limited Edition by Franklin Mint IOB Fine Bone China Excellent Lovely.” i do not think this large doll is any larger than all the other dolls, so that’s an odd flex.

as is this anthropologie-esque photo of her encasement:

reader, it does not get better.

AND WE ARE STILL JUST IN THE FRANKLIN MINT JACKIE BRIDAL DOLL AISLE!! (don’t worry our tour today is prolly gonna stay in the mint.)

but yeah:

i thought maybe we’d already done this one. (because, true story, when you look at 15 listings for one doll, they rather blur together) but i suspect i’d remember this:

and this:

which, were it not for the intrusion of human hands would totally be mistakable for the work of monet.

so this is bridal jackie, $199.

sporting the doll equivalent of the arm braces my aunt had to wear when she had her carpel tunnel fixed in 1991. (a piece of medical equipment that circulated as a gag gift within our family for the next four christmases.)

seriously though, what is up with the fetishization of “new in box”? it photographs so poorly.

that hairnet is not flattering.

ditto the teddy kennedy at mary jo kopechne’s funeral decorative neck brace.

and she still looks like julia sugarbaker.

(sidebar: just realized i’ve been saving all these photos in my pandemic unemployment assistance application folder! pathos abounds!)

historical fun fact:

whew, lynda rae resnick is a fun deep-dive if you’re in the mood.

but i am not in the mood because we’ve things to see yet.

ok, let’s get out of bridal, and move on over to the 1962 tour of india/pakistan part of our programming…

as you may or may not recall, that looked like this:

which has been artistically rendered as this:

now, i know we spent a lot of time over there in bridal so i’ll try to be swift, but i need you to focus.

we get a high level of detail here.

her arm seams look painful.

this hairstyle makes no freaking sense, like aerodynamically.

are velcro backed dresses the way of the future??!

let’s be fair, her gloves appear to be kneesocks, BUT– and it’s a BIG BUT– they raise an even more important question– ARE VELRO ACCESSORIES THE WAY OF THE FUTURE??

remember how i told you nothing is as it was and nothing is normal… is our bright, blazing future, when we emerge from isolation five years from now, do you think velcro will play a far more prominent role in our lives than we’ve thus far imagined?

as someone who anticipated the return to fashionability of press-on nails by a solid two and a half-years (to say nothing of home cut bangs), i’m just saying. listen to your fashion prophetess…

this doll looks very put together, untouched by the harsh times in which we now live. but pristineness comes at a premium. she’ll cost you a whopping $276.42.

not our girl over here though, my favorite of all the photographed franklin mint jackie dolls currently on etsy.

oh but hang on. you know i always have a favorite: the photographed doll who most fully speaks to the contemporary situation.

permit me a brief calvacade of past faves, first, before we get to today’s, accompanied by brief, deep thoughts from the time…

october 2015:

it reminds me of the scene from meet me in st. louis, when john truitt’s tuxedo is stuck at the tailer’s shop and esther goes running back up to her bedroom and throws herself on her bed. and when her sister rose asks what happened, esther replies, nothing, i just wish i were dead. that’s all.

because her boyfriend is unable to take her to the christmas dance and she may now have to go with her brother.

i imagine doll jackie has deeper emotional defenses. i imagine that, were doll jackie’s boyfriend unable to get his tuxedo out of the tailer’s in time for the christmas dance, she would manage stoically without wishing she were dead.

which suggests that, if it has come to this for doll jackie: the situation is dire.

december 2019:

so this is where we are. where are we going? what will 2020 look like?

HUZZAH.

we want to go on this journey, right?

yes, i was a bit disturbed by my initial inability to decipher whether she’s wearing slippers or if those are her actual footbottoms, in which case her footbottoms are a mess, but then my footbottoms are perpetually a disaster so i can relate.

actually, i think these are train shoes, which means this jackie is a super good forward thinker, who anticipates the need for sensible shoes and plans accordingly.

[…] the thing about this jackie is that she seems eager, and hopeful, rather than resigned. obviously, we all have our moments.

but for the most part, she seems rested and ready.

how much of her readiness is attributable to the fact that her lashes are real and her eyes open and close remains unclear. but she gazes into the future with something approaching hope.

she is most just like us. and so, with nails painted, fingers separated, real lashes, bendable joints, and a whole bunch of baggage… away we go.

just as a reminder, i claimed to be a FASHION prophetess. clearly, from the enthusiasm with which i greeted 2020, you may have noticed that my prophetic gifts do not extend into other realms.

so here we are deep in the throes of what i think we can all agree is a uniquely horrific year. who is the jackie need now?

here’s our girl:

for one thing, she’s a mere $50. so if you’ve been all up in your head like what am i gonna get oline for her pandemic birthday because the onassis moon landing earring replicas are just so hard to find??? voilá!

it’s the same doll we just looked at, the one testifying to our velcro future, but she really speaks to the moment here, no?

it’s something about the hair, the bare feet, the general sense of having just awoken (because this is bedhead, yeah? evocative of j.lo’s hair in maid in manhattan, when she goes home with ralph fiennes after the big party at the temple of dendur [A JACKIE SITE!!!] then wakes up in the morning with sex hair and removes her wiglet [the first movie i ever saw alone, on the day our family dog died, this moment is imprinted in my brain forever because it was my first, albeit distant, encounter with evidence that good hair wasn’t always real]).

actually, wait. more precisely, this is how one looks having awoken and thrown on last night’s clothes to go downstairs and collect the mail. that is how i look most all the time now.

THIS IS MAIL COLLECTION JACKIE!! USPS COMRADE JACKIE. as we should all be.

obviously she remains in the pocket of the big velcro lobby.

but she’s also mad fierce. like you do not want to mess with USPS COMRADE JACKIE. DEVASTATING LOUNGING JACKIE, maybe yeah, you would, but not this broad.

she’s gloved up. though she hasn’t quite let go of the hand-shaking habit…

no, jackie. no.

i appreciate her… hmm… what’s the word.

oh no, the longer i look at this image, the more she looks like trump staring down the eclipse.

but she looks concerned, which is reassuring.

we live in alarming times. she led an alarming life. the level of alarm here seems appropriate. and yet she is undaunted, though i also assume her approach is informed by facts. it seems a safe assumption USPS COMRADE JACKIE has been reading and thinking critically about the news.

do you think if i decorated my apartment with enlarged, framed photographs of jackie dolls on etsy i would ever have sex again?

head over heart, heart over pelvis.

a joke i assume will go unlaughed at because (1) it is super niche and (2) who the hell has read this far?!!

you wanted pathos?

PATHOS.

damn, this was exhausting. even jackie had to lie down.

riddle me this: is this sheet blue or white????

alright, we did some really important work today, so we’re gonna save madame alexander for another time.

i bid you adieu with this bizarro surreal pairing of a 1988 princess diana @ cannes and a jackie @ the breakers in 1962 statues who look like they’re leaving a party (on a kitchen table?!) having a laugh over a solid bit of gossip.

as i tell my students: dear heroes, take care, stay safe, bonne chance!

whew, PEOPLE. if ever there was a day built for rage?! and it is not yet noon US EST!

between the horrifying story of a police officer murdering an unnamed Black man in minneapolis, the video of amy cooper calling the police on a birder who asked her to leash her dog, the president of notre dame’s op-ed in the times about the risks we must all sustain for the education of students (ie. the continuation of american football), AND the president of purdue’s op-ed in the post about moral responsibility of reopening in the fall (ie. capitalism and the continuation of american football), i would like to go back to bed and spend the day reading my trashy novel about a kept woman falling madly in love a rake with waterloo PTSD while teaching him how to cheat at vingt-et-un in regency england.

ALAS, NO. i cannot do that, because today is also the day that the daily mail posted this nonsense.

which, if we’re in some sort of white supremacy/white fragility/white tears carnival time– and that does increasingly seem to be what was meant by “reopening”– hardly ranks supreme. but it is nonetheless, stupidly consistent with this broader alignment of the racist stars and worth a gander, especially due to the subtlety of the pandering and the broader agenda of thumbs up-ing white femininity. (please, lawd, this is not the gemini season i wanted.)

so anyhoo, some unnamed royalty-adjacent fuddy duddy white british person came out and talked to tatler (the king of fuddy duddy white british publications) about how kate middleton is a “king-maker.”

the cover looks like this:

which, well, props– much like the people over at the lifetime network, tatler clearly couldn’t give a fig about william. to the degree that they have essentially wigged him up with their logo.

so there’s a small victory for white women in dynastic families, if that’s what you’re in the mood for. i am not in the mood.

let’s take a look at the guts.

the bullets provide a summary.

do i think it is hard being royalty? probably, yes.

do i think this is how some people– kate, possibly included– feel about the current royal family situation? maybe, yeah.

do i think this article is rife with racial dog whistles and white privilege?

oh, there she is. i knew something was missing.

mayhaps you think i’m over-reacting.

mayhaps you think that all those fucking op-eds by the university presidents have addled my brains and i can no longer be logical and objective and reasonable.

mayhaps you have already noticed that you are reading me as shrill, and strident.

are you feeling exhausted? trapped?

#justlikekate

in case you’ve not been following the story of the RF in quarantine, you’ve not really missed much.

there’ve been some zooms.

for the cambridges, i would estimate there have been maybe a dozen zooms? give or take a few. i do not have the heart for actual numbers today, but let’s just say there have NOT been daily zooms.

there was initially a slow start to the zooms as well.

first, following the lead of britain’s prime minister who initially thought it might be most convenient to just let people die, prince william laughed about covid.

then, he and kate went to meet first responders in person, beyond a point at which it would have been reasonable to expect them to socially distance.

then they went into isolation. and eventually, around april 8th, they began zooming.

all that to say, “a host of virtual appearances” is a bit… charitable.

in mid-may, elle described it as “several.”

i would be beneficent and say they have, since then, done a few more.

but is that a “host”? what even is a “host”? 15? 4? dear daily mail, i’mma need you to define your terms.

but my point is, yes, they have done some things. have they been constantly busy, zooming all over, doing everything? no. they have not. are they holding up the sun in the sky? no. have you been doing more zooms than them? probably yes.

so the emotional escalation to “fury” in the next paragraph…

specifically in regard to a “larger workload,” is provocative.

oh lo, mythical workload! where art thou? we have not yet seen thy fruits!!!

so what we have here is an “unnamed source” blabbing to tatler that duchess kate is “furious” with her sister-in-law. because she and her husband left the royal family– seemingly the only tenable solution the couple were able to find/offered in response to the unrelenting british racism they experienced for the whole prior year.

a great look, kate.

oh but wait. wait for it, ya’ll.

i don’t have any siblings or in-laws but likening your in-laws to child murderers really doesn’t seem like the best means of healing a family breach, no?

people with happy relationships with their in-laws, tell me if i’m wrong.

these paragraphs are hilarious.

because, let’s be honest, this is a pair of people who have been, for nigh on ten years now, repeatedly characterized as “work-shy.” so forgive me for not entertaining their grievance.

but also what is meghan and harry’s “behavior”? from what we’ve read so far, yes, they sound decadent. “an $18 million mansion in beverly hills”! holy smokes!

but recall: they are in america because america seemed like the safer, less racist place.

AMERICA, YO!!!

that says a lot, no, re: how bad it had to be?

you are maybe like, oline, THIS HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH RACE?? what is wrong with you? what are  you banging on about?? 

well (as you know by now surely, as my dad always says): wrongadoodle.

i wrote before about how we have to train ourselves to see this shit. white people, looking at us! i wrote about this in response to that fucking awful article about how, due to the one-drop rule and cecil beaton’s misogynistic/racist musings on her body, jackie kennedy was really one of the first Black first ladies, and, subsequently, a letter to the editor that called michelle obama “that one.”

i wrote last year:

in eloquent rage (2018), brittney cooper writes: “white women’s sexuality and femininity is used not just as a tool of patriarchy but also as a tool for the maintenance of white supremacy” (185-186).

how might that look, you wonder? et voilá: “class, style, correct behavior”!!

it’s easy to see how that’s about femininity, “correct” and “appropriate” femininity. but, to be pedantic for a mo, we need to start training our eyes, especially our white eyes, to see how in being about that this is also very very very often also about race. because, in america, “correct”, “good”, “appropriate” femininity is white.

this seems an especially vital skill to cultivate in a universe where we are so eager to erase the contributions of a Black first lady that Blackness is claimed for jackie using early 20th century race law.

look at that quote again.

you don’t have to name a person to demean them.

you also don’t have to explicitly evoke race to evoke race.

that right there– that comment about kate “dressing appropriately,” in the broader context of the piece it almost seems like a non sequitur. it’s also a dog whistle.

that is a dig at a Black woman– a woman who was repeatedly, in the british media, slagged as being inappropriate. even as she hit the ground, assuming a substantial royal schedule from day 1.

so forgive me my failure of imagination here:

ok, life is short and we don’t have time for all this shit, so let us make haste.

further light is shed on The Falling Out at the Wedding (which, if you follow these things properly, has long been a big deal [though it was not, if i remember correctly, a scene in the lifetime interpretation!!!]):

i mean, historically, tights do lead to tears but, also, what a stupid hill to die on.

next…

is the point of this article to make us love kate? because it seems to be having the opposite effect on me.

well now, this is not exactly the same thing as being beloved, is it?

impenetrability is starting to sound rather nightmarish to me at the mo.

this sounds exhausting:

as does committing to years of fury against a Black woman for her quite obviously sensible attitude towards tights and her family’s decision to leave a toxic work/family environment.

oh, let’s hang out here for a sec:

for one thing, charles and camilla have been active too, if we’re measuring in awkward claps and zooms.

for another thing, have you forgotten?

yup, he’s still here.

and the FBI is still trying to get to him.

so how noble of the cambridges to “lead the royal family’s efforts” with their “host” of zooms. what with so many other family members affected by their closeness to an alleged rapist of underage girls.

ok, at last, voilá! the denouement!

we’re straying from tatler here, shifting to entertainment tonight and middleton family mouthpiece katie nicholl:

THIS IS BRITAIN, she tells us. this is the future! a “relatable” family!

race is not mentioned once in this article. you could read this whole thing and have no idea meghan markle was Black– only that she’s “selfish,” possibly distant, aloof, unrelatable, insufficiently appreciative of the ways of yore like tights and talking to servants, and living in an $18 million mansion in beverly hills.

the article never states that the mansion is rented or borrowed.

the article in no way presents meghan’s side of the story; as a result, it tacitly accepts all the claims made therein.

the article also does not indicate that it is appearing in a paper currently being sued by the sussexes.

you picked up that it’s propaganda, right?

(CW: rape)

always use the active voice. that is what mrs. reynolds taught us in AP english. that is what so many of my english teachers have told me since. what they did not tell us was the cost. (<- engaging opening anecdote)

they made it sound so easy. dear people, it is not. (<- connecting with the audience through a direct address)

the thing is, the whole language works against us. the sentence structures work against us. the institutions do not love us and neither do our words.

because it is far, far easier, in english at least, for me to have been raped than for a man to have raped me, for men to have raped me.

(ambiguity (n.): the quality of being open to more than one interpretation; inexactness.)

i was raped. i was raped. i was raped. (on at least three occasions that i remember.)

that is a sentence (those are sentences…) that flow so much easier.

it’s prettier. more palatable. and i do so want to set you all at ease. (<- be attentive to the audience’s comfort and they’ll be more easily persuaded)

that is part of the problem. even as he was raping me, his comfort was my primary concern.

(“Let’s work on paragraph breaks. How might you use those to heighten the drama? As a rule of thumb, whenever a new idea is introduced, we want a break, but we can also use paragraph breaks to make certain ideas stick out, and also to heighten the drama.”)

to be clear, i am speaking here only for myself. everyone is different. everyone’s experiences are different. this is mine. (<- it’s useful to clarify the essay’s scope)

i was raped. 

a man raped me. 

ask yourself (<- connecting with the audience through a direct address): which one of those sentences makes you most uncomfortable? (<- a rhetorical question is one where the questioner does not expect an answer)

for me, it is the latter. a man raped me and yet the statement that i was raped sits more easily with me– the one he raped!

because i can work with that. i can work with having been raped. i, evidently, cannot work with having had men rape me.

how fucked up is that?

riddle me this: would you rather i was raped or that a man raped me? asking for a friend. (<- connecting with the audience through a direct address/humor/alienating overuse of rhetorical questions)

i teach first year college writing. (<- appeal to ethos)

i am teaching first year college writing in a pandemic. (<- appeal to ethos/kairos) teaching first year writing in a pandemic, my only goal is to keep them writing. i don’t care whether or not they use the passive voice. we are all just trying to survive.

a man raped me three days before the start of spring semester. (<- appeal to logos) that is no way to begin things, let me tell you. (<- appeal to ethos)

what a wild ride, these first 100 days. what a time to be alive. what a time to be almost completely numb. what a time to be teaching a special topics course on writing & anger! (<- appeal to logo/pathos)

when my students say they’re tired, i remind them that they have every right to be. this is, after all, a year that started with an insurrection (<- appeal to logos) and they exclaim “oh yeeeeah,” because they maybe kinda sorta forgot because, let’s be real, a whole hell of a lot has happened since then. (<- appeal to pathos)

a man raped me on a third date. ten days after the insurrection and three days before the start of the teaching for spring semester, four days before the inauguration. (<- appeal to logos/pathos?)

108 days ago from today. (<- appeal to logos/kairos?)

after dinner and before dessert. (<-be specific!!)

the thing that happens when you are a teacher who exudes warmth is that you hear that a lot of horrifying shit is happening to your students.

the thing that happens when you are moderately open on twitter and instagram about having been recently raped is that you hear a lot of horrifying shit has happened to your friends.

the thing that happens when you mention in your academic scholarship at a conference that you have recently experienced sexual assault is that a progressive, white, cis man will try to open up space for you to discuss it further. like this was a fucking consciousness raising session. like you paid your 40£ to talk about your rape instead of your research on kim kardashian.

 (“Think about what you’re trying to persuade them of and what they need to know to get there, then fill in the blanks explicitly so they don’t have to guess. Remember: we’re not writing mysteries!”)

the thing you need to know is that when i tell you, i am in control.

when anything else happens with it, i am not and that is fucking terrifying.

(“There were a number of places I’ve marked where it would help to be more clear about what your pronouns refer to, so that’s something to look out for.”)

by “it” i mean “the story of my having been raped by a man.”

note how “it” is so much cleaner, so much easier, so much prettier. the pronoun lets us elide so much.

(“Watch out for typos when proof-reading. Typos are small details but they affect our own credibility with our audiences.”)

the thing that happens when you have been raped by someone that you know, when you have been raped before that by someone else that you know, when you have been told by your church and their god that sex outside of marriage is bad and you do not have the language for what has happened to you, is that you will do everything in your power to make it not be bad, to make it not have happened, to make it not actually be what it really was and also to make whatever it was entirely your fault. you will internally rewire yourself to not trust what you know deep, deep down to be 100% true.

you will tell yourself you are unreliable. you will tell yourself you are crazy. ignorant of what has happened because you do not yet have the words or the intellectual frameworks to tell them, subsequent boyfriends will say things that reinforce these lies you’ve told yourself and you will tell yourself all those lies again. and you will work so very, very hard, you will extend so much effort to protect all of the people around you from just what a horrible, crazy, disgusting liar you are.

(“your anger isn’t really described here, is it? The essay doesn’t really indicate your own emotions on the subject.”)

in teaching, there’s this point in the semester where, if i’ve got their trust, i suddenly become privy to the panorama. and, quite abruptly, it’s like holy fucking shit.

because so suddenly you’ve an understanding of the full complexity of all our lives. and the full wonder of how, in the middle of all that, we try to do things like write essays and turn in homework on time and produce a fairly respectable works cited page. (<- appeal to pathos)

you would not look at me and know i have been raped. that i’ve been raped multiple times and also been in a long-term abusive relationship.

you would not look at me and know that the biographer charles j. shields sexually harassed me over a series of emails.

you would not look at me and know that, at a brunch at my parents’ house in 2002, a church friend of theirs– IN FRONT OF THEM– stuck his hand down the front of my low-rise jeans.

you would never know that the primary reason i have not reported this most recent rape to the police is due to a sexually violating experience with a cop on the night of my college graduation.  (<- appeal to logos [ie. logos as historical fact])

you may actually know me really really well and know none of those things or only a fraction. 

you may be reading this now and thinking i’m a whole other person from the one you thought you knew. i assure you, i am not. still me! 

and that those things have happened isn’t even remotely among the most interesting things about me as a person. but they have happened. all of them have happened.

my point not being that i am in any way special, but rather that this is the extent of the problem.

it is not that all women have a story. it is that most women have a whole bible of them.

this is nothing new but it bears repeating.

you would know none of this if i did not tell you. you could know me for a hundred years and never know two men have raped me (one repeatedly and over a period of 2 1/2 years) and at least 7 others have committed offenses of serious sexual assault/sexual harassment. (<-appeal to logos/pathos)

you are dependent upon me telling you that. (<- appeal to ethos)

and i tell you that knowing that when i do, odds are maybe 50/50 that you’re going to give all of the men in all of my stories the benefit of the doubt. (<- it can be persuasive to anticipate audience reactions/hostility)

i wrote all that then saw this series of tweets:

because this was not the first time a man raped me, i was really struck, this time, by the fact that we never know which time we’re raped will be the last time we’re raped.

and so i hesitate to refer to this as the last time i was raped, because, really, who knows? it is the most recent time i was raped. that is what i know. (<- in our writing, it’s important to be factually accurate)

my first sexual experience in college was being raped by my boyfriend. true story: that is not a situation that sets you up for greatness.

the last time i was raped, by which i mean maybe not the last but surely the most recent, was eerily similar.

the conventional wisdom is that, if you’ve been raped once, it’s easier for you to be raped again.

i’m sorry. apologies. i’m writing in the passive voice again.

correction: the conventional wisdom is that, if a man has raped you before, it’s easier for another man to rape you later.

i write about time and language and the way story telling inhibits the way we understand what is happening to us in our own lives.

we can see this in how, when my boyfriend raped me in college, the language for what had happened did not exist for me. the concepts to capture what continued to happen were not available.

abstinence only ed didn’t teach us about sex– only that if you had it, your whole life would be ruined. the president had said oral sex wasn’t sex. the southern baptist church had raised a generation of women to believe that their only value came from being canvases for and background characters in the lives of men.

i thought date rape happened on a first date, not in the confines of a long-term relationship. i thought you had to be a home-owner, or at least a renter and not in a dorm, to experience domestic violence. i only realized forced oral sex counted as sexual assault while hearing the testimony of harvey weinstein’s victims in 2017. i only heard the term “intimate partner violence” in late 2020. i only found the phrase “coercive control” when FKA twiggs started talking about what shia labeouf did to her.

in my classes and my research, i’m obsessed with definitions, with finding the right word and defining our terms. in part, because that enables clearer communication in our writing. but also because putting language to an experience is a really fucking powerful thing. 

violence is so often so casual, so matter-of-fact. violence doesn’t necessarily feel violent. rape doesn’t always feel as you expect it.

very often, it just feels like dating. 

[^please pause and sit with that thought.]

this whole semester, i’ve been teaching a class on writing & anger while holding so fucking much in.

when i think about the boyfriend who repeatedly raped me in college, i want to die. when i think about the man who raped me between the insurrection and the inauguration, between dinner and dessert, i want to set the whole fucking world on fire.

i’m writing this now (<- appeal to kairos), because mother’s day is approaching. and, this year, i am so very grateful for my mother, who is really fucking amazing and whom i completely adore.

i am grateful to her for having been there always but especially these last few months, these first 100 days. i am grateful that our relationship is such that i could tell her this had happened. and also that i could ask her to tell my father, so that i was spared that ordeal.

dear men, live your lives and raise your sons such that no woman or girl ever has to ask her mother to tell her father she was raped by you or them.