Tea With Chris is a roundup of recommended links, posted every Thursday. Here are a few of our favourite things from the Internet this week:
Margaux: This song has been in my head all day. Maybe ’cause this movie is coming out. Good song for the Great Gatsby.
Carl: Linda Besner makes a stab on Hazlitt at imagining how to get people to like poetry as much as they like paintings – give it a gallery, she says. Personally I think this “singing and/or shouting it over guitars and/or turntables” plan is still a good one. People don’t like paintings that much, either.
Toronto’s Tamara Faith Berger and North Carolina’s Kate Zambreno met in NYC to talk about libertines, Sasha Grey, Bataille and lovable assholes. The Believer has a transcription.
Disasters are stories of climate and class. I hope you and your loved ones are all safe and your power is back on. That said, I don’t think it is entirely a terrible thing that well-off northerners are beginning to experience the kinds of crises that have been year-in-year-out routine for poor southern coastal communities. Not if we then start to get the idea that we should do something about it.
If you need help convincing any American friends that they should not vote for Romney, or (maybe more likely) that they should vote at all, this video made by animators from the Simpsons might be a big help:
I don’t think that I think Romney’s Mormonism should have any bearing on how people vote. But I do find the Latter Day Saints pretty fascinating. The best thing I read all week was Mike Davis’s piece about Mormonism’s repressed communist roots. and I’m looking forward to Slate’s story about the complicated experience people having being intellectuals in the LDS.
Okay, everyone, hold hands, shut your eyes tight and see you on the other side of Tuesday.
Chris: Michelle Dean laments the disappearance of witchy wickedness, the kind that frightens all the right men: “Our emblematic witch is Hermione Granger, who performs all the magic and takes none of the credit from Harry Potter. She is self-effacing and noble and never in any real danger of contamination by the dark…Which is only a shame if you think of this: just as the truly threatening witch has gone out of style, the people who most want to control women are out in force.”
Further to the Atlantic piece on disasters and class in Carl’s tea, a response that focuses on how persistent and pervasive these gulfs are: “the city that never sleeps can stay up 24/7 thanks to nocturnal bodega owners and overnight transit workers.”
I’m warily optimistic that Romney will lose on Tuesday, and elating allaying that would be, but if he doesn’t, here’s where pop music might go afterwards.
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