[F]or real, people buy them. One of my best-selling audiobooks is a book that is so bad I created a second pseudonym to record under, because I didn’t even want my first fake name associated with it. It was a collection of short erotic stories that were so terrible the author included a recipe for meatballs when he ran out of ideas. But I sexy-read the shit out of it, and last month I received a royalty check for $623.30.
What it takes to succeed in the industry:
There are various skill levels when it comes to dirty-book reading.
I humblebrag and mambleyag that I am remarkably good at it. I’ve got a nice, low voice that easily sounds like a man’s or a woman’s (important for sexy-reading scenes between male and female characters); I’ve got suitcases of character voices, an ear for accents and years of experience storytelling and doing solo performance. I’ve got no problem locking myself in a closet for two days in order to finish a nine-hour book. (I’m proud to say that my studio has graduated to a walk-in closet from underneath the comforter in the middle of the floor). I love learning new words and proper pronunciations and playing all the parts, no matter how cheesy or racy or weird the script may be.
I won’t lie though: it’s kind of hard being so happy with my job, but not really being able to share my work with most of my friends and family. I’ve played clips for my boyfriend and a few close friends, but aside from that, most people get a weird look on their face when I hint at the bisexual paranormal three-way I narrated today.
There are precedents for such reclaiming—pejorative words like “queer” and even “slut,” for instance, which their targets have taken over and brandished with pride. But maybe a more apt comparison would be the word “nerd.” “Nerd” used to be a put-down—and it used to cover boys more often than girls. Like “bossy,” it wasn’t really that harsh, but it wasn’t nice, either. It actually had a gender dimension, too, because it called out brainy boys who were not athletic or aggressive. It was a dis of boys who lived in their heads and wore pocket protectors and ate their lunch indoors, playing chess. Just as “bossy” might be said to undermine female leadership, “nerd” might be said to have undermined male intellectualism.
But now “nerd,” and its close cousin “geek,” are words that lots of people are happy to identify with, humble-bragging about their obsessive expertise.
Update from a reader:
If you’re going to talk about the (mis)appropriation of “nerd,” you gotta include this Portlandia PSA; it’s weirdly heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time:
In another video from the TV writer and showrunner, he shares one of his least favorite plot conveniences:
The Bill Pullman reference he makes is from Sleepless In Seattle (representative clip here). With regards to another set of cliches the Mars series avoided, Nolan Feeney praises the show’s complex depiction of inequality:
Race and class are often intertwined in [the show’s fictional town of] Neptune, but Veronica Mars often served as a good reminder that they’re not to be conflated. One of the series’ recurring conflicts is between the PCH Bike Club, a largely Latino motorcycle gang, and the obnoxious 09ers, rich kids from Neptune’s über-wealthy 90909 zip code, but the show never suggests only white kids can be rich kids and only minorities can be poor. Jackie Cook, a second-season addition played by Tessa Thompson, was both black and one of the richest girls in school. In one episode, while investigating a series of muggings, a classmate tips Veronica off that the culprit might be targeting the “coconuts”—Latino and Latina students criticized for being “brown on the outside, white on the [inside].” The PCH gang does engage in criminal activity, but their crimes are repeatedly contrasted against the transgressions of the rich, which are often worse. And in Season Two, it’s a rival gang made up of mostly working-class Irish-Catholics that’s dealing the hard drugs (to the parents of 09ers) and making people “disappear.” Veronica Mars didn’t entirely subvert stereotypes, but it usually tried to at least complicate and challenge them.
Arielle Duhaime-Ross adds that the series also took on rape in ways no other show had:
Exceptionally smart writing and acting aside, the date rape story-line is what made this particular teen drama different from all that ones that aired before it. Unlike most televised rape accounts, Veronica was no damsel in distress waiting to be rescued. She had agency and was given a voice that went deeper and was more honest than any of its predecessors. Throughout the television show, Veronica has nightmares about the night she was assaulted. Viewers also find out in the second season that Veronica has an STI as a result of her rape, making the assault all the more realistic. Needless to say, the teenager ends up developing a keen distrust of the men around her, affecting all her future relationships throughout the show. But despite getting laughed out of the police chief’s office when she comes forward about her ordeal, Veronica never loses sight of the fact that she is not to blame for her rape—and neither do the show’s viewers, who are treated to a dramatic story-line that is both realistic and empowering. For fans and haters alike, Veronica Mars remains the only American television series that successfully depicts the long-term effects of this type of sexual violence.
In our final video from Rob, he explains why he always wanted the character of Veronica to be written as a “porcupine”:
Rob Thomas is an American producer, director and screenwriter, best known for the TV series Veronica Mars and Party Down. A year ago, he launched one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time in support of the Mars movie. (Our discussion thread of the innovative, Dish-like project is here.) The movie is now out in theaters and video-on-demand. Rob’s previous Ask Anything videos are here.
A reader joins the discussion on the comparative appeal of languages:
Count me as one vote against the beauty supremacy of French – though it may just be my frustration with either reproducing or understanding its pronunciation. I was surprised to read Dreher’s opinion that swept all East Asian tongues under the same blanket! In college I switched from studying Japanese to Chinese in part because I grew enamored of the sounds I overheard in my Chinese-speaking friends’ conversations (Japanese to me sounds elegant, but not really beautiful). And while Mandarin Chinese is music to my ears (except in the sibilant Taiwan accent), Cantonese actually makes my stomach turn a bit.
I also find German rather gorgeous, especially the way it tends to be spoken by women. I can’t listen to any Scandinavian language with a straight face.
English went astray, aesthetically speaking, with its hard A and I sounds … but it indeed has many lovely specimens, like the word “resplendent,” for example. And English’s melting-pot nature also confers the advantage that one can select words originating from different language families for their sonic and cultural associations. Basic examples would be using tons of straight-from-Latin words to sound legalistic, old Germanic ones to be punchy and down-to earth, or French cognates to sound poetic and fussy.
Another:
Your post on how languages sound reminded me of one of my all-time favorite clips from the Catherine Tate show. I’ve probably watched it a dozen times, and it still makes me laugh every time:
“Sex is difficult to write about because it’s just not sexy enough. The only way to write about it is not to write much. Let the reader bring his own sexuality into the text. A writer I usually admire has written about sex in the most off-putting way. There is just too much information. If you start saying “the curve of . . .” you soon sound like a gynecologist. Only Joyce could get away with that. He said all those forbidden words. He said cunt, and that was shocking. The forbidden word can be provocative. But after a while it becomes monotonous rather than arousing. Less is always better. Some writers think that if they use dirty words they’ve done it. It can work for a short period and for a very young imagination, but after a while it doesn’t deliver. When Sethe and Paul D. first see each other [in Beloved], in about half a page they get the sex out of the way, which isn’t any good anyway—it’s fast and they’re embarrassed about it—and then they’re lying there trying to pretend they’re not in that bed, that they haven’t met, and then they begin to think different thoughts, which begin to merge so you can’t tell who’s thinking what. That merging to me is more tactically sensual than if I had tried to describe body parts,” – Toni Morrison.
In the 1980s, the novel’s attack on conservative social mores resonated with the liberal and iconoclastic zeitgeist of a newly opened China; in the early 1990s, its cynic and frustrated tone gave expression to the despondency of Chinese youth, who had just seen their democratic ideals crushed by the massacre of student protesters in central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. The 21st century, which has brought China unprecedented material wealth and social inequality, has granted the book new relevance.
Huo Er Deng, or the Chinese incarnation of Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye’s protagonist, speaks a language uncannily similar to that of a stressed student in a competitive Shanghai high school, or a disgruntled migrant worker serving a difficult boss, or a bored scion – in Chinese slang “rich second generation” – struggling to lead a meaningful life. Indeed, who would understand “phony” better than a generation weighed down by spiritual discontentment and the pressures of modern life, one whose grievances are still muffled by party control?
In September, Reed Johnson noted that Russians feel a similar affection for the book they call Over the Abyss in Rye:
First introduced to readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Salinger’s novel became an instant sensation among Soviet readers in the 1960s, and it has remained a classic. The Party authorized the novel’s translation believing that it exposed the rotting core of American capitalism, but Soviet readers were more likely to see the novel in broader terms, as a psychologically nuanced and universally appealing portrait of a misfit who rebels against the pieties of a conformist society. For a postwar intelligentsia chafing under repressive Communist rule, Holden Caulfield’s voice was electrifying – who knew phony better than these daily consumers of official Soviet language? Teenagers adopted their hero’s speech patterns—or their Russian equivalents – even though the world of The Catcher in the Rye, with its private schools, hotel trysts, and jazz clubs, existed across a great abyss.
Photographer Sarolta Bán connected her work to a cause:
Budapest, Hungary-based photographer Sarolta Bán is best known for her stunningly surreal scenes that include sky high paintbrush trees and flying origami birds. To help change the perception of abandoned shelter animals, and to help find them homes, she recently embarked on a new series that all feature a furry friend. The project is called Help Dogs with Images.
On her Facebook page, she’s asked her over 103,000 fans to share a photo of a dog, cat or other animal who needs a home. To increase their visibility, she will create a spectacular photo montage of them and then share that image on her Facebook page. As a nice gift, the future owner of that animal will get a free print of the picture.
Bán’s work is so successful because its soulfulness never veers into saccharine or cutesy territory; each image is hopeful yet serious, its emotionality heightened by stark contrasts and high resolutions. In one desperately heartrending photograph, a dog and cat watch an hourglass begin to count down; each knows the gravity of his situation, and they are left within a darkly tinted frame, anticipating uncertain futures. Shining canine coats and piercing feline eyes entreat the viewer to consider the dignity, humanity, and thoughtfulness that each creature possesses.
See more of Bán’s work here, and submit your own photos of homeless animals here.
In Meyers’ view, advertising is not something appended to radio and TV broadcasts or shimmied into the pages of newspapers and magazines. Advertising has been both the dog wagging the tail and the tail wagging the dog, sometimes occupying points in between, its symbiotic relationship with popular media forever ebbing and cresting. And while the past never predicts the future, this book gives readers a peak around the media future’s corner. …
I’m no media purist. Like Meyers, I appreciate that advertising has never stood outside news creation. Without advertising, the daily newspaper, the news broadcast, the news magazine and news on the Web would scarcely exist. One of the things that has prevented advertisers and their clients from controlling the whole ball of wax in the past has been the sheer capital costs of building out a newspaper — its presses, circulation, ad sales, news collection, etc. But the affordability of Web, which has benefited such new entrants as Gawker, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Vox and the rest, will also benefit advertisers and their clients. If the advertising industrial complex masters editorial creation in a future media season — becoming such a big dog that it needs no tail to wag — old news hands might come to regard the era in which gobs of sponsored content propped up ailing news properties as “the good old days.”
When even the lefty Guardian is now merged with Unilever, I think it’s already here. Check out this breathless piece of enthusiasm about the merging of journalism and advertizing. And, yes, it was a sponsored post.
Human rights groups have criticized the Globe Theater for planning to take a touring production to North Korea:
The Globe will perform the play in the secretive state in September 2015 as part of a global tour marking the 450th anniversary of the English playwright’s birth. “We do not believe that anyone should be excluded from the chance to experience this play,” the theatre said in a statement.
But Phil Robertson, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division, said exclusion would be the order of the day if the performance went ahead in Pyongyang. “It’s going to be an extremely limited, elite audience that would see a production in any case,” Robertson told AFP on Tuesday. “It would have to be in Pyongyang, which is a showcase city whose residents are selected to live there because they have shown their loyalty,” Robertson said. “So there’s a strict pre-selection process involved right from the off.”… Amnesty International urged the theatre to “read up” on the reality of North Korea before going there. “No tragic play could come close to the misery that the 100,000 people trapped in the country’s prison camps endure – where torture, rape, starvation and execution are everyday occurrences,” Amnesty said in a statement.
Mark Lawson thinks the Globe should go ahead with the tour, arguing that North Korea is not apartheid-era South Africa:
The obvious reference point in any discussion about which stamps actors should have on their passports is the boycott of South Africa by the theatrical union Equity and other representatives of the entertainment industry, which ran from 1965 until the Mandela presidency. … [T]here was a solid logic to the embargo on exporting drama to South Africa. The plays would be performed in venues operating a policy of segregation, with the result that touring productions participated in and legitimized apartheid. The governments during the discriminatory years also strictly censored the sort of material that was admitted.
Hateful as the North Korean regime is, the situation is significantly different. The Globe will presumably have no control over the makeup of the audience, but the choice of play is its own, and the use of Shakespeare’s plays as a weapon against repression has an honorable history.
Zeljka Marosevic looks back at that “honorable history”:
When Prague was under the rule of Russia, the Czech author and philosopher Pavel Kohout ran a politically charged production of Macbeth, and the staging of this was later used as the basis for Tom Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth. Not only this, but PEN actively encouraged Harold Pinter and Arthur Miller to go to Turkey in 1985; “when the dramatists challenged the prevailing political climate so fiercely that they were ejected from a dinner at the US embassy.” And it’s not just Shakespeare that has been used as a kind of theatrical intervention. Susan Sontag’s staging of a production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo made its mark in a city that was undergoing the longest siege in the history of modern warfare.
Meanwhile, Tierney Sneed marvels at how dramatically attitudes toward cultural diplomacy have changed in less than 10 years:
In 2008, the New York Philharmonic performed in Pyongyang upon invitation from the North Korean government amid US efforts to engage North Korea in nuclear weapons talks. When the Philharmonic agreed to play in 2007, a George W. Bush administration official defended the trip – which the State Department helped to coordinate – calling it a sign that “North Korea is beginning to come out of its shell,” and that it represented “a shift in how they view us, and it’s the sort of shift that can be helpful as we go forward in nuclear weapons negotiations.” PBS even broadcast the concert.
However attitudes toward North Korea have changed since Kim Jong Un took over upon his father Kim Jong Il’s 2011 death, says Sheila Smith, a senior fellow in Asia studies at the Council of Foreign Relations. “There’s now an increasing hesitancy to allow informal arts diplomacy between [North Korea] and other countries” she says, as the regime under Kim Jong Un has engaged in increasingly provocative behavior. … “It can actually run the risk of enhancing a regime that is guilty of oppression,” Smith says.
I humblebrag and mambleyag that I am remarkably good at it. I’ve got a nice, low voice that easily sounds like a man’s or a woman’s (important for sexy-reading scenes between male and female characters); I’ve got suitcases of character voices, an ear for accents and years of experience storytelling and doing solo performance. I’ve got no problem locking myself in a closet for two days in order to finish a nine-hour book. (I’m proud to say that my studio has graduated to a walk-in closet from underneath the comforter in the middle of the floor). I love learning new words and proper pronunciations and playing all the parts, no matter how cheesy or racy or weird the script may be.
The Dish 