I have half a dozen drafts sitting in my inbox on all kinds of topics–race representation in video games, The Last 5 Years, my confused feelings about the Wolf Hall BBC adaptation–and an equally mismatched collection of links in my bookmarks. And sometimes you have to just finish one thing, just so you can prove to yourself that you can finish anything, so this weekend the thing I can finish is a collection of unrelated links.
First and most importantly: you can now donate to support VIDA. I’ve written about what VIDA means to me before, but here is the elevator pitch: they provide empirical data about how many men and women are published or reviewed in literary magazines. Some argue that this is nit-picking or bean-counting, but the fact is that since VIDA began publishing its counts, many publications have taken steps to reach greater parity, and have been successful. Other publications have made it clear that gender parity is not a matter of interest or importance to them. It has been a revealing exercise.
I wasn’t able to donate enough to get any swag, but I was happy to be able to donate something. And if they ever make VIDA tote bags available for sale, I will probably buy one. I love tote bags.
The 6-minute Saving Mr. Marbles video is worth a full watch: it tells the story of one of the last currently operating marble manufacturers in Latin America, and it is a beautifully scored smorgasbord of lovely and weird vintage mechanics and many shots of gorgeous glass orbs, some still glowing from the furnace. It made me feel about ten years old: playing marbles was a thing of the past when I was a kid, but the marbles themselves were an inexpensive nostalgia item at many a flea market, and I would sometimes buy a bag after an afternoon of following my mom around a warehouse full of old furniture and salvage. I kept a jar of them and periodically sorted them by color, size, or type (purie, steely, swirly, and so on), like a dragon with its hoard.
Speaking of a love for beautiful but weird old-fashioned things: toile. So pretty, so classist and wrong.
An oral history of the last days of Mad Men.
I’ve already posted this to Tumblr, but “Lighten Up” is a gorgeous comic about coloring comics–the mechanics of creating shades of skin tone in different lights, and the politics of same.
I’ve been wondering how the Prado museum was going to make its Touch the Prado paintings for the visually impaired. Well, here they are: beautiful and amazing.
Gallimaufry, by the way, is an old-fashioned word for medley, or more literally a kind of stew. Says Wiktionary: “probably from a combination of Old French galer (‘to have fun, to enjoy oneself’) and Old Northern French mafrer (‘eat gluttonously’).” Awesome, definitely adding that to the food lexicon.
Sara Davis 