“That’s totally barbaric!” — Hermione Granger
Note: All quotes are from the Harry Potter films.
Will Varner / BuzzFeed / Warner Bros.
Thursday, October 15, 2015
29 Hilarious Tweets Only "Harry Potter" Fans Will Appreciate
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 15, 2015
Taylor Swift Wrote A Novel At The Age Of 14
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 15, 2015
Because obviously.
Taylor Swift is a rare and mystical human who has the ability to write lyrics that millions of people around the globe can relate to so hard.
In an interview for GQ magazine's November cover, she reveals that apart from her life-changing lyrics, she also wrote a non-autobiographical novel at the age of 14, titled A Girl Named Girl, "about a mother who wants a son but instead has a girl."
instagram.com / Via gq.com
Which, as interviewer Chuck Klosterman notes, would undoubtedly become a best-seller in probably 45 seconds after the moment it was released.
alonewithchangingminds.tumblr.com
These Three Questions Will Determine Which "Harry Potter" Book Is Most Like Your Life
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 15, 2015
Let’s sort this out!
What It's Like To Write The Most Hyped Book Of The Year
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 15, 2015
City on Fire is one of the year’s biggest books — and I mean that literally. Garth Risk Hallberg’s novel clocks in at a massive 944 pages long, spanning nine characters wrestling with their sense of place in the decaying cityscape of late-‘70s Manhattan. It is an ambitious and confident novel, particularly for a debut author, that summons the universality of aspirations, expectations, and loneliness, but grounds them in a specific time and place.
When I spoke with Hallberg earlier this year at BookExpo America in May, he was amid a publishing industry–focused publicity blitz. The stacks of advanced copies of City on Fire were given away quickly to conference attendees, along with cute promotional City on Fire matchbooks, beneath a giant City on Fire banner. But can a novel hyped heavily within an industry break out as a mainstream success?
Hallberg didn’t seem worried. Like his novel, he came across as self-assured — not necessarily about the book’s commercial potential, but about the work he had created. He talked at length about City on Fire’s cultural inspirations (Harriet the Spy, punk rock, Billy Joel), actively avoiding the internet, and the eerie parallels between New York during the “bad old days” of the ‘70s and the decade following 9/11.
Kevin Nguyen: What inspired the book?
Garth Risk Hallberg: The big, vague answer to that question is that I’ve always been in love with the city, ever since I was a little kid first entering it through Harriet the Spy and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing and Stuart Little and all these iconic New York books. Later, as a teenager, I was kind of a punk-rock kid, and there’s no more meaningful time or place in the history of punk rock — or at least I like to think so, anyway — than New York in the mid-‘70s. In some ways it must’ve been gestating for a long time.
The more approximate inspiration for the book was kind of the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in 2001. This place I’d dreamed about for so many years and that I’d spent half my life trying to get to suddenly seemed on the verge of destruction. How terrifying that was, and how sad that was, and, in some strange way, how clarifying that was. When something is at risk or in danger or about to be lost, those are the moments you start to realize how much it means to you.
Mark Vessey
One thing I remember about that time, amid all the grieving and all the fear and all the great sense of loss, [is that] it was also one of the times in my historical moment when I remember people collectively — as a country, as cities, as groups of friends, as families — not just thinking about but openly discussing, Why are we here? What do I really want to do with my life? What kind of society are we going to have in the future? What’s the world going to look like?
That time of possibility, for me, was 2001, 2002, 2003. I was living in Washington, D.C., then, but I was making trips up to New York then and I just needed to make contact with my friends who were living here.
I was listening to — weirdly enough — a Billy Joel song on an early-generation iPod about the blackout of ‘77 and I was on a bus in New Jersey looking out across the Meadowlands at the skyline — the now altered skyline — and listening to this song about the blackout and danger and fear and terror and panic and disorder and chaos and hope and possibility and meaning and change and connection, and that’s the historical moment of the song. And I thought, Oh my god, we’re living through that moment again.
KN: Have you been working on the book since 2001, 2002?
GRH: I got off that bus and I went to Union Square and I sat down and wrote a page. It was within 30 seconds, while the song was playing, I thought, There’s gonna be this book and all these characters. The characters were coming and all these phrases were coming, including the scale of it. I sat down an hour after just to get down some notes, and I wrote this scene and the scale of it scared me so much. I was 25 and I thought, I don’t have the chops to write this. This is crazy. And I closed the notebook and I put it in a drawer and thought I would maybe come back to it 10 years when I’m a better writer.
Four years later was actually when I came back to it. I couldn’t stay away from it any longer. Four years is right as the financial crisis was starting to happen, and one of the other weird parallels between our time and that time is that there’s this massive fiscal crisis in New York in 1975, which in many ways set the stage for the iconic scenes of disorder and decay that came out of the blackout. The city went into technical bankruptcy and was bailed out.
I remember going into an art exhibition in Chelsea in the fall of 2008 and walking in and everything is normal and walking out and my friend checks his phone and says, Oh my god, the stock markets are crashing; the world economy is going to come to a halt. Another near-death experience, and that happened in ‘75 too. That was the time I picked back up writing it.
KN: The origins of City on Fire are starting to become mythical. Here’s this relatively unknown debut novelist. The rumor was that the original first draft was 1,200 pages; you kept it in a drawer for a long time. Are you worried that the expectations will overshadow the reception?
Knopf
GRH: That’s just not really my problem. That’s somebody else’s problem at this point.
Reading isn’t about managing expectations. In certain ways, writing is. You’re trying to send signals early in a book about what might be coming later, but I think worrying about the kind of chatter around a book is something I try and stay as far away from when I’m reading.
KN: Is it hard to keep that noise out of your life?
GRH: Yes, super deliberate. Fingers crossed, I would like to be able to preserve the kind of internal quiet. The writing that feels the best to me, I experience sometimes, is a kind of weirdly deep listening — like it feels like if you just listen hard enough the next sentence will tell you what it needs to be. That requires making these deliberate choices to not lose track of the next sentence because you’re like, Is something out there in internet world? Definitely something is happening out there in internet world at any given moment, but the likelihood that it’s something that can’t wait until that evening for you to find out about it is very small.
When something is at risk or in danger or about to be lost, those are the moments you start to realize how much it means to you.
KN: Have you done interviews since the book sold?
GRH: I guess I have done a couple of interviews, and doing some more today. It’s wild. It’s exciting to see the book in people’s hands. It’s crazy to imagine that people want to dive into something so big. I know when I’m reading something I love I never want it to end, so I’ve always gravitated toward these big world-building [novels] — Lord of the Rings, Bleak House, Little Dove, Middlemarch — I’ve always loved those worlds you could just dive into.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
***
Kevin Nguyen is the editorial director of Google Play Books. He has written for Grantland, The Paris Review, The New Republic, and elsewhere.
Christopher Walken Reading Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" Will Get You Hard For Halloween
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 15, 2015
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered about more cowbell.
Let's face it: You're probably a total bookworm.
An English major with a creative writing minor perhaps?
Jersey Films
And you literally love all things literature.
And there's a likelihood that you're down with alliteration, too.
Which is why nothing on God's good Earth could be better than listening to The Raven...
Edgar Allan Poe, yasssssssss.
Read by professional creep-master Christopher Walken.
Mandalay Pictures / American Zoetrope
31 Hilarious Harry Potter Posts That Totally Nailed It
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 15, 2015
Harry Potter fans have jokes for days.
This accurate analysis of Harry's character development.
When Potter fans found the perfect images for this meme.
Warner Bros. / Via come-alongmerlin.tumblr.com
This imagining of what life must be like for drunk Ravenclaws.
Via neilpatrickheaven.tumblr.com
When the Potter fandom invaded this non-Potter post.
26 Pictures Only “Harry Potter” Fans Will Think Are Funny
Posted by Unknown on Thursday, October 15, 2015
Hogsmeander your rear-end over here and laugh.
The duality of Daniel:
Hagrid's shocked revelation:
The ONLY door that matters:
Via pinterest.com
Dumbledore's point system:
Via likealaugh.org
Wednesday, October 14, 2015
You Can Watch This Guy Write A Book In Real-Time Right Now
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, October 14, 2015
How I Earned My Porn Star Name
Posted by Unknown on Wednesday, October 14, 2015
Dan Meth / Via BuzzFeed
In Las Vegas, I was 21. We’d been there three days, and I was learning my new name. A stranger was teaching it to me in the ballroom. The women changed their clothes again and again; they passed in parades of Technicolor latex, in white dresses and nurse hats, in fishnet and lace. On a table nearby, a woman climaxed. I was at the booth with Seven. We posed beside a table of free sample DVDs and a television that played 10-minute loops of us being tied and untied. She wore a black silk overbust corset and sucked on a cherry Blow Pop. Pink rope impressions were pressed into her wrists and shoulders. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I’d seen. I was wearing her boots. They were a size too small, knee high, stiletto, black patent. My toes had been numb for hours. You couldn’t have paid me to take them off.
A man said, “You’re Lorelei.”
I paused a moment before saying, “Yes.”
He said, “I’ve seen you.”
That was the first time.
If you talk to a performer — say her name is Lily Black — remember I am making this up — at some point, Lily might say, “Sometimes I have to take Maria out for a night. Sometimes Maria needs a night out.” When she says that, she’ll be talking about herself. She isn’t crazy or confused. She knows exactly who she is.
I know exactly who I am.
We calculate and divide to keep ourselves safe — in the tangible ways, sure, but also safe from unguarded inquiry.
Every time I meet a stranger, I do this math: How much do you know about me already? What, if anything, do you deserve to know? At a holiday party surrounded by women my age, by mothers in Saturday lipstick, I won’t lie exactly, but I will evade. If you tell me a dirty joke, I’ll pretend I haven’t heard it before. I never cash my checks with the teller anymore. My name is the last thing I will tell you.
It isn’t that I don’t trust you — but I don’t. It isn’t that my birth name doesn’t fit me anymore — but it doesn’t. Everything I’ll tell you is both true and not true. There are a few things I was born with, but most of what I own, I made up. Most of what I own, I earned. Day by day and scene by scene. This isn’t about confusion, it’s about context.
Dan Meth / Via BuzzFeed
I’m 33, and for 14 years, I have sold my naked image. I have made my body public. At this point, I have been a whore for nearly as long as I wasn’t one. I’ve spent my entire adult life hustling. Pornography has made me who I am. I am Lorelei Lee — and also, I am not. I’m big sister to four siblings, 33-year-old child of a single welfare mother. I’m a queer woman, a porn star, a dominatrix, a stripper. I’m a wife in Saturday lipstick. I’ve done nearly everything a person can do without clothes on. I am paid to lie to you, but I often tell the truth.
For a while, there were places where I would use my birth name, and there were places where I would be Lorelei. I divided it up — public and private — until the division became more rigid, the private more precious. There was a day when I decided not to be promiscuous with my origin. There was a day when I decided that I had earned my new name. It belongs to me now.
Here’s what I’ve learned: Our names are constructs, just as our bodies are. It was by stealing a name, by hiring out my body in performance, that I truly began to own both.
Dan Meth / Via BuzzFeed
I took on the name Lorelei at 21. It was three years after my first naked performance, when I’d used a name the producer had given me. When I was 19 and naked in a stranger’s house in Chula Vista, spreading my legs on a washer-dryer, they called me Carolyn, but that name was never mine.
I sold cigarettes in bars as Lulu. I’d grin out from my pink dress, click my high-heeled shoes, and proffer my heavy box of chewing gum and tobacco, king-sized candy bars and light-up silk flowers, pressing my breasts into the goods to make them cost more. I’d say “I’m Lulu,” and the tourists and the boys stumbling into bachelor parties at the North Beach strip clubs would say, “Did your mother give you that name?” And I would lie and lie. The dancers on break, smoking in the doorways, bought packs of Parliaments with $10 bills they peeled off hairband-secured rolls of cash.
“I’m Lulu,” I’d say.
“Me too,” they’d reply.
I became Lorelei tied up in someone’s living room in Sacramento, wearing $3 thongs from the sidewalk bins on Mission Street. I became Lorelei in a red leather jacket and nothing else, squatting on a staircase of perforated metal in the dark, holding for the flash. I became Lorelei in Chinatown, high on Vicodin just to alleviate the boredom of posing. I became Lorelei in a basement in Livermore, faking orgasms badly in knee socks, fucking myself in an old elementary-school desk chair with a cheap plastic vibrating dildo. I became Lorelei on my knees in front of four naked men in a shoot house kitchen, clinging to pink satin beside a swimming pool at a Los Angeles mansion, tied in rope and hung upside down from a tree in upstate New York, on a green felt pool table with spit sprayed across my face and loving the strangeness of strangers’ bodies in close-up, loving the seamed scars and discoloration and dimples and forgotten hairs, scent of salt and flowers and smoke, infinite variation. I became Lorelei in cars, in trains, and taxis and buses, hungry and tired at 2:00 a.m., at 6:00 a.m., at 3:00 in the afternoon, fingering a new white envelope of hundreds, pulling a twenty for cab fare from a just-counted stack, pressing my forehead to the cool windshield in slow traffic on the 405 with five days worth of thousand-dollar checks in my shoot bag. I became Lorelei in the restaurant at the top of the Hard Rock Hotel in January, fist-sized goblets, plate-glass wall glossing the neon, white linen in my lap, when I leaned over to Seven and whispered, “I will never wait tables again.”
Naming a thing makes it real.
Dan Meth / Via BuzzFeed
In Las Vegas, I was 25, in a rhinestone dress on the red carpet, holding Annette’s hand. The line of photographers held out their microphones and flashed their camera lights.
The reporter from CBS This Morning said, “Are you a porn actor?”
I said, “Sometimes I act, and sometimes I don’t.”
We were scared and young. We wore cheap silk and paste jewels. I thought Annette was the most beautiful woman I’d seen. I was still so easily shamed. If you called me a whore then, I’d flinch.
My entire family saw that red carpet footage. They called my mother and asked her, “Does she hate herself?”
I resent even having to tell you that the answer is no.
Here’s the thing about coming out: It doesn’t happen just once. It isn’t a thing you do and get done. It happens again and again. It happens over and over and over, and it is never over.
I earned my name in Washington, D.C., where the summer steamed the bushes and sent waves of green heat into my face, evoking my childhood. I had traveled there to be a witness in John Stagliano’s obscenity trial, and my attorney argued that I should be allowed to use my name in court, that my safety relied on it. The prosecutor objected, said that to use my name would “legitimize” me. As though illegitimate were my appropriate status. I’m still angry. Every day, around the world, the legitimate humanity of sex workers is dismissed. We are told we should be punished and then policies are enacted to punish us. Or we’re punished by those who know that committing violence against a whore is too frequently state sanctioned. I know, she was just doing her job. The judge never ruled on my name. The case was dismissed before I could be called to testify.
I earned my name in 2008, traveling ill dressed through six weeks of winter with the Sex Workers’ Art Show, ice under my flats in Ann Arbor, in Williamsburg, in Asbury Park. Twelve of us traveled in two vans. All of us artists, all of us sex workers. All across the country we danced and sang and took our clothes off, we covered ourselves in glitter and lit ourselves on fire and read our stories out loud. ABC News called us a “traveling sex show.” Protesters sang hymns in a circle outside one auditorium. At the College of William and Mary, police officers positioned themselves in the front rows of the audience, in case we might need arresting. All of it — every snow-calmed college campus, every Holiday Inn with its basket of apples, every epithet and dirty joke reversed, every roadside toilet, dusk rush of dark trees past the passenger window, Midwestern strip club cup of ginger ale, backstage sequin and chalk dust and sweat, and the terror and thrill of standing up on that stage night after night to tell one true story to hundreds of hushed faces — all of it was hard and beautiful. At Harvard, the walls were old brick and polished wood, a gleaming gold-pale I will forever associate with academic wonder. If you licked those beams, they’d taste like money. A flavor recognizable only after you’ve starved for it.
Before we left, I had considered using another name, a third name, a writer's name. But Annie Oakley, the visionary woman who ran the show, told me she had already sent out materials that said “Lorelei.” That I ended up using the name I’d already made, the name I’d been earning for years — the name under which I’d done a thousand things the world still wants to shame me for — this experience changed my life. This six weeks of coming to know myself as an artist, of learning my name one more time, this time as an artist’s name, this, finally, is what allowed me to understand that I was never splintered, that whatever I am — slut, whore, sister, freak, artist, wife — all of it is truly, wholly me.
If you call me whore now, I’ll tell you: You have no idea.
And still, I may be making a mistake, telling you anything.
At a bachelor party in 2010, I’m giving a lap dance. I kneel between a man’s denim legs, look up at him. He says quietly, searching my face, “Do you really like this?” He says, “What’s your real name?” I smile, bat my false eyelashes and cover his face with my breasts.
Whatever name I choose, that is my real name.
***
Lorelei Lee has been an adult film performer since 2000 and a director since 2009. Her writing has appeared in Salon, The Rumpus, Wired, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is a contributor to The Feminist Porn Book and the co-writer of About Cherry, distributed by IFC Films. You can find her tweeting about politics and books @MissLoreleiLee, and about naked people @XOXOLoreleiLee.
Excerpted from Coming Out Like A Porn Star. To learn more, click here.
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