Toronto Notes

Required Reading: November 9, 2009

by: Kate Carraway
November 09, 2009 5:00 PM
Comments: (1)

1. Women: still totally screwed. First, read Leah McLaren’s semi-recent column about how women are still totally screwed at work and everywhere else (and yes, I am blatantly ignoring the buzzier column from Saturday where she discusses her Twitter impersonator and then introduces her new, real Twitter account). Then, buy the book Women Don’t Ask, which will partly explain why women are still totally screwed. Then, read the blog The Daily Asker, which is one woman’s attempt to be less totally screwed. (NB: It occurs to me that I may have linked to The Daily Asker before, but I don't care. Is this me screwing myself? Can I blame this laziness on someone else? I'm just a girl! Waaah???)

2. It's my sister's birthday today! She used to be the Jan Brady but then got super-hot and successful so I should shut my dumb-whore youngest-child mouth. I love reading about birth order almost as much as I love my big sister (OK, not really. Happy birthday!)

3. There’s a new David Simon joint about New Orleans. No big fucking deal except for the answered prayers of every The Wire viewer ever. (Anecdote: when a former roommate heard the dialogue from the first ep of The Wire coming from my bedroom, she asked if it was my first time seeing the show, looked me straight in the eye, and said “Treasure it.”) Thanks God!

4. I was never satisfied with Toronto blogger Raymi the Minx (who, now unengaged to her man/co-documentarian Phil Ogynist, is all over the Globe and the internet). Like most of my friends, I am interested, in both sick and justifiable ways, in the photoblogged accounts of other women's lives. We want to see outfits, boyfriends, interior-decorating decisions, parties, hair. And Raymi dished out all of that, all the time, for ages. But, my most significant peeve about blogging, Twitter. et al is the amount of undue bragging that goes on. “Look at my rad new kitchen!” I’m instructed, only to click on a shot of a very average, very normal, very unworthy-of-a-click kitchen, or cake, or bike, or whatever. Such is Raymi. For every sexy, intriguing photo, there’s one of an Ikea bedspread; for every weird and interesting night out, there’s dinner in the Annex. Maybe I’m missing the overall effect of the ongoing, studied documentation, but if I’m going to devote any time to downloading photos of someone else’s life, it needs to be more exciting than my own.

5. This Paste list of the best books of the decade is BALLS!!! But Required Reading mascot Carl Wilson makes an appearance with his truly excellent Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste, so there you go (OK, and also David Foster Wallace, and Joan Didion, and David Sedaris, and Cormac McCarthy). PS: did anyone else see the Giller Prize nominees interviewed by Seamus on Canada AM today? Everybody looked terrified. Mostly Seamus.

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