The Skinny Black Girl

Leave ‘Em in the Bar

Mar 05 2012

The perk that came with letting go of an Aidan was the freedom to once again play with Bigs. In the year between my last two relationships, I’d convinced myself that I matured beyond my desire to play with the Bigs of the world. That I no longer had any use for the kind of charismatic slick-talkers who are followed by a trail of drenched panties and broken hearts when they entered a room. Those guys were for 25-year-old SBG. Nice, stable boys who didn’t play games; they were the new sexy for 28-year-old SBG, right?

Eh. Not entirely.

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Skinny Bits – 3.2.12

Mar 02 2012

What happens when Mother Nature and the due date of a paper you procrastinated on happen to fall in the same week?

Hell week.

Stress. Fatigue. Anxiety. Aggravation. Horniness. Playing in a continuous loop all week. It’s a miracle that I didn’t have a nervous breakdown, cuss anyone out, or start randomly humping furniture in my apartment.

Now it’s Friday. My paper’s finished and turned in. I have one question:

Where’s the tequila?

This week was Feminist Theory week in my Literary Theory class. What did I learn? That Audre Lorde is a dope writer. The term phallocrat (coined by French feminists to describe sexist males, “fully convinced of the superiority of the male gender and the obligation of the female to concede”). And finally, that the notion of women’s rights is still fairly new to the world.

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Slow the &$!# Down

Feb 27 2012

The fun part about the Master of Fine Arts program is that you hear fun, profanity-laced catch phrases. This semester I’ve been introduced to “Make shit up” as a technique for fiction; “That shit better be true” as the barometer for non-fiction; and “Slow the fuck down” as it relates to the writing process.

Slow. The fuck. Down.

Apparently there is a school writing, pre-dating the blogosphere, where the words are considered art and not “content.” Where writers pour over text for days, months, weeks, and years; tweaking, editing, scrapping entire manuscripts and starting over, before even an editor (let alone an audience) can get a peek at what they are working on. The late David Foster Wallace said in the 1990s that television had produced a kind of lazy reader. One who didn’t want to do the mental work that came with slow reading of texts. With the lazy reader came the lazy writer, who produced solely for the sake of consumption, abandoning the art in favor of easy entertainment.

I wonder what Wallace would have to say about the blog and social media culture.

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Skinny Bits 2.24.12

Feb 24 2012

People who frequent my blog know that I’m not big on explaining or defending myself in my comment section. I’ve only recently been able to articulate why: The work for me is in the writing. While it’s always subjective, it’s also always honest and always respectful of the people in my life. When the post is done, my work is done. How it’s received is up to the reader. Of course, I prefer when readers see things the way I think I’ve explained them, but I’m not here for a debate if that doesn’t happen. People are going to see and believe what they want.

I heard a Hemingway quote in class the other day: “If I have to explain what the book is about, the explainers are out of a job.” Hov said “I’ll just write it in rhyme/and let you feel me/and if you don’t like it/then fine.”