Alizah Salario

Please don’t hate me.

I know we’ve all got our pleather thongs bunched up over the Kardashian kerfuffle. Real or fake, for money or for love,  it’s Kim K..’s life – and she’s now alone. For reals. So why is America taking it so personally?

Aren’t we, like, totally over marriage? Considering that many successful, independent women have resigned to, shall we say, less than stellar husband choices (exhibit A: Kris Humphries) should we even be surprised?  I’m not really sure about the rest of the country, but I can tell you why I care. If you have an overbearing mother, a sister with whom you fight constantly but still consider your best friend, or are a petite white girl who doesn’t look like she belongs on The Hills and has butt and not a pancake for an ass, you might, on some level, be able to relate to the Kardashians (Surprise! I have all three).

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The problem with writing about a book like Jeffery Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot is that everyone and their three-legged dog has something to say about it. 

Then there was this week’s Modern Love, which pointed out that we often choose lovers not because they’ll make great partners, but because they fit an epic love story. Who we think we should love has less to do with the object of affection than with the love story we hope to write. This is the reason can’t bring myself to date online - not out of shame, but simply because I don’t want my love story to start on the Internet. (Okay, I tried it once. Not a huge fan.)

But here I go digressing and confusing love stories with love. They are quite distinct, and this is exactly what Euginides is trying to reconcile in The Marriage Plot, or perhaps, more accurately, what I was trying to negotiate as I read it. Oh, how the swift undertoe of love can seem so separate from the actual relationship! How the supposed euphoria is really just a guise for the extreme solitude of the lover in love! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Our privileged protagonist, Madeline, became an English major at Brown for the most banal of reasons: she loves to read. But here, loving to read means more than loving the experience of reading. Madeline is the type of person who defines herself by books: from the Madeline wallpaper in her childhood bedroom to A Lover’s Discourse, which serves as balm for her broken heart, books become the metric by which her life is measured. So as she works on her thesis – The Marriage Plot – about literary courtship and marriage of the Victorian era, we can be certain her story – the one Eugenides is writing – won’t end up like a Jane Austen novel.

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When I lost my iPhone in the back of a taxi a few weeks ago, I decided I wouldn’t replace it. My incessant checking of Gmail, Facebook and Twitter had bred a certain gadget co-dependency that I felt rather ashamed of. I had become that girl walking down the street while texting without looking where she was going. I’m also the girl who has to check her phone in the middle of meals, meetings, and otherwise important events. Rude? Maybe. But you’re probably that girl or guy, too. Still. Perhaps the iPhone mishap was a blessing in disguise. I replaced it with a $20 go-phone, which is the modern-day tin-can-on-a-string equivalent: it makes calls and texts. That’s it. No photos, no email, no Internet – and worst of all, no Tweets. I’d survive. Maybe.

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Want to come over and watch MSNBC?

I don’t get bunny ears. Are they sexy because they seem docile and coquettish, just like the furry creatures that procreate a lot? Or have they simply become associated with sex after years of Playboy-inspired scantily clad bunny Halloween costumes?

It turns out a lot of people are skeptical about bunny ears. NBC’s sitcom The Playboy Club premiered last week to a swift backlash against the show’s regressive portrayal of women. At The Washington Post, network television’s fall lineup of shows depicting grown women as kewpie-dolls in kitschy uniforms had critic Hank Stuever asking a simple yet provocative enough to warrant all caps question: WHAT THE [EXPLETIVE] HAPPENED TO WOMEN?

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If we’re going to judge books by their covers, then what does a glossy pastel paperback branded with toothpick legs, towering stilettos, the occasional cupcake, and a title written in the loopy script of a lovesick teenager say about the story of the grown women between the covers?

British author Polly Courtney didn’t want her latest novel, It’s a Man’s World (given the tagline “but it takes a woman to run it”) marketed as “chick lit,” that sub-genre of fiction often stigmatized as the cotton candy of literature: saccharine, insubstantial fluff that dissolves the minute it comes into contact with a warm brain. So when her publisher, HarperCollins, gave the book a “condescending and fluffy” makeover — complete with a cover spotlighting slender gams and pointy heels — Courtney subsequently announced she won’t be working with them again. She spoke to the Guardian about her decision:

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I fear I’ve reached my saturation point with fiction. When the inner workings of novels start to become transparent, is it time to stop reading – or just time to start thinking about them differently? I think, in fact, it’s simply time to start why books do what they do. Here’s a old essay I wrote on the topic — and Elif Batuman’s The Possessed –that suddenly seems relevant.

“I fake it so real, I am beyond fake.” When Courtney Love sings “Doll Parts,” she may not realize she’s summing up the contemporary novel.

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I hesitate to write about something as intimate and inconsequential as my hair, but if the New York Times can devote an entire fashion & style column to curls and waves then my unkempt tresses warrant one wee little blog post.

Curly-haired Greek

After a lifelong love/hate relationship with my frizzy waves, I got a keratin straightening treatment for the first time about six months ago (thank you Groupon). I walked into the salon with my hair resembling a tangled rat’s nest and came out feeling like a sleek mermaid goddess. The stylists all told me my hair looked ah-ma-zing, which further reinforced how awful I must have looked before. The only problem? I didn’t feel like myself. I felt like I was masquerading in someone else’s hair.

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Whenever I check my site stats on Google Analytics (which is embarrassingly often) I notice that my search engine traffic stems from one particular search: Jersey Shore. Sometimes it’s “Jersey Shore Analysis” or “Jersey Shore Critique.” I wrote one post on the subject way back when, and though I’ve written about important, highbrow junk too — Malick and Herzog, Foster Wallace and Whitman — this one little ‘Shore post continues to be my jackpot. So. I’ll write it again. Jersey Shore Analysis. The Situation. Juiceheads. GTL. Abs. Beer, pouf, pickles, Snooki. J-Woww. Snooki, Snooki, Snooki.

I hope someone out there finds this useful.

Hey. Whatever works.

Oh James. No you didn’t. Yes, apparently, you did. The question is why. I’ll have you know I’ve created some invisible art myself, and it’s hanging up right now on my invisible walls. James, I like the concept. I really do – we all see the world differently, so let us impose our own imaginings onto a blank canvas. That way we can all create, and therefore all be artists.

This is why I adore you. You manage to devise and create exposure for projects that actually make people think.

I had zero interest in seeing Cowboys and Aliens primarily because of my low tolerance for gratuitous violence. The title alone made it obvious there would be lots of close-ups of gaping stomach wounds of unknown origins — of which there were many — and thus, I got squeamish just thinking about it. I really didn’t need to see Paul Dano hocking a loogie, and I really, really had no desire to witness Hollywood-conceived Sinister Slimy Outer Space Creature #472. I went because, well, let’s call it movie collateral. I go to see a film about cowboys and aliens yukking it up, and my [redacted because it's complicated] has to watch When Harry Met Sally with me on a biannual basis. [...]