bad art friend
Pieces like Who Is the Bad Art Friend? are why I started this blog — for my friends who don’t live on the internet. Obviously it was all over Twitter this week but I’m super curious — is there anyone out there who hasn’t heard of it? Am always reminding myself that some of my friends have jobs where they can’t spend all day reading hot takes.
Beyond being a (very long) piece that allowed us to spend all week talking about it online, Bad Art Friend is fascinating because it has so many layers.
Some thoughts — pretty much no one is likeable here. Donating kidneys are great. Using it to get credit, not so great. Shit talking someone in a group chat is fine. No way to know the person they’re shit talking will subpoena it later. Directly lifting someone’s story and writing is not so fine.
The ethical questions here are endless — starting with a question for the Times — was this piece even worth writing?
And obviously a question about writing itself — are any stories actually unique?
I’m not going to have a long take here because there is nothing at all new to say. But I do hope this is a fun read for those of you (I assume there are some of you) who haven’t read it yet.
and for those of you who are L Word fans, I lol’d at this:
what else I’ve been reading:
Slate: “Cat Person” and Me, BY ALEXIS NOWICKI
The Times piece links to this but I actually hadn’t read the latest controversy over Cat Person until this week.
The similarities to my own life were eerie: The protagonist was a girl from my small hometown who lived in the dorms at my college and worked at the art house theater where I’d worked and dated a man in his 30s, as I had. I recognized the man in the story, too. His appearance (tall, slightly overweight, with a tattoo on his shoulder). His attire (rabbit fur hat, vintage coat). His home (fairy lights over the porch, a large board game collection, framed posters). It was a vivid description of Charles. But that felt impossible. Could it be a wild coincidence? Or did Roupenian, a person I’d never met, somehow know about me?
The Atlantic: The Nasty Logistics of Returning Your Too-Small Pants, by Amanda Mull
This REALLY made me think twice about how often I order clothes online — had no idea that most weren’t returnable.
We can dispatch now with a common myth of modern shopping: The stuff you return probably isn’t restocked and sent back out to another hopeful owner. Many retailers don’t allow any opened product to be resold as new. Brick-and-mortar stores have sometimes skirted that policy; products that are returned directly to the place where they were sold can be deemed close enough to new and sold again. But even if mailed-in products come back in pristine, unused condition—say, because you ordered two sizes of the same bra and the first one you tried on fit fine—the odds that things returned to a sorting facility will simply be transferred to that business’s inventory aren’t great, and in some cases, they’re virtually zero. Getting an item back into a company’s new-product sales stream, which is sometimes in a whole different state, can be logistically prohibitive. Some things, such as beauty products, underwear, and bathing suits, are destroyed for sanitary reasons, even if they appear to be unopened or unused.
what i’ve been listening to:
Brandi Carlile: In These Silent Days
Nessa Barrett: pretty poison
L Devine: Near Life Experience Part Two