Author: Brianna Goldberg

Brianna Goldberg

FACEBOOK I CAN’T EVEN DESCRIBE HOW ANGRY I AM AT YOU RIGHT NOW.

I popped in for a quick check on the latest update from my book club and then there was this “suggested post.” (Which I then wrote over in red in the attached image, to express my displeasure.)

FB, you often try to “suggest” pages to me, and I always, always, always ask you to put them away and never show them to me again.

I know you have all sorts of crazy algorithms telling you everything about me and who I like to creep and which photos of people I barely know that I linger over for too long… so why don’t you get that I hate everything you try to suggest to me? Here’s something you could suggest that I might like: CHEESE. Or TAYLOR SWIFT. Or POODLES. It’s not like I’m hard to please.

And aside from the suggested pages, you also try to get me to click on ads for sites selling engagement rings and wedding photography even though, if you read between the lines of my FB activity or spoke to me for one blinute (one billionth of a minute), you’d know I have very complicated feelings about the whole business of marriage.

And so, y’know, I feel like you’re a bit of a dum-dum when it comes to trying to sell me things. But since you’ve been a dum-dum about it, I haven’t been too angry. You just don’t know any better. You’re too duhhhh.

But now THIS? THIS?! You’re trying to make me hate my body/objectify this stranger/encourage other women to hate their bodies by “liking” a page that you deign to suggest is “inspiring”?

That girl was friggin’ gorgeous at 139 lbs. She looks malnourished and frail in the supposed “after” shot. Not to mention the fact that her eyes now appear dead and cold like the bleak winter in which your evil suggested page extends its gnarly claws.

This post made me feel physically ill and physically angry.

I am furious you put this in my consciousness.

Can’t a girl just check in on the status of her book club without being told to hate herself anymore? Seriously. No humour here. Just. Really. Asking.

You’ll Love Her! She’s Crazy!

Brianna Goldberg

newyorker:

image

“Most educated people can name half a dozen poets who are more famous for their messy lives and deaths than for their poems… The narratives endure because they align with the popular understanding of what it is to be an artist.”

Sarah Manguso writes about Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, and looks at the changing way we talk about mental illness: http://nyr.kr/1576DDa

Photograph: Contrasto/Redux.

Music Shops on Sundays: A Free Verse Poem

Brianna Goldberg

I will admit that I tend to ignore you

And forget about you, Music Instrument Stores,

until the strings on my various instruments get all grimey and oxidized and gross and I require new ones.

I would visit you more often, but then I’d “accidentally” buy more instruments.

Today, though, I have a strong yearning to play my mandolin, which is in dire, dire, dire, dire, dire need of new strings…

and yet almost all of you, Music Instrument Stores, are closed.

Why is this? Do musicians take the Christian sabbath so seriously that you would have no customers other than heathen me? Or is it that the dudes who work at them would be out too late on a Saturday night to possibly come in to work the next day? (Don’t they know that Monday is the new Saturday?)

These are my questions.

SUICIDE WATCH [LINK] : “From ballads to broadsheets, suicide fascinated 18th-century England…”

Brianna Goldberg

Tristman is convinced he can put a stop to the vulgar, messy suicides for which the English have become infamous. People who live in London but have somehow tired of life need no longer trust to chance. Now, they may repair to his stylish, centrally located suite of apartments and end their lives “decently as well as suddenly”. For the disappointed lady, Tristman offers a spacious bath in which to drown “with the utmost privacy and elegance”. Despairing actors can take their pick of daggers and poison. Soldiers will conveniently discover “swords fixed obliquely in the floor with their points upwards”.

SUICIDE WATCH [LINK] : “From ballads to broadsheets, suicide fascinated 18th-century England…”