I do not and never will understand the American suburban obsession with lawn maintenance.

No one has ever successfully explained that to me, even with as much as I know about sociology.

Yes, this is completely true. I really dislike linking to a series of tweets as I think Twitter is a terrible platform, but this time I’ll make an exception. And for brevity and non-annoyance I’ll combine some tweets, but keep the formatting.

in the 1800s “british lit” basically did not exist outside of poetry because so many novelists were women and so you can find these old screeds written by male academics of the time dismissing “that most perfidious and immaterial of things, *the novel*”

50 years before british intellectuals made Shakespeare their Homer they were calling his plays trash because women liked to go to them

the hunger games books are exceptionally good examinations of the healing and harming powers of ritual, regionalism, cyclical oppression but it will be about 25 years before someone with cachet in the lit crit field “discovers” that,  because they’re “aimed at young women”

people trash her prose because they assume its quirks and occasional awkwardness are products of inexperience, not intention

Exactly. The prose is awkward in places because those are Katniss’s thoughts. Katniss is sixteen years old. I’ve read other works by Suzanne Collins and the prose is much much (vastly!) different.

There is a reason for that. She is a pro, not some amateur pounding away fecklessly.

And just like much that was seen as “trash” is now “grand, dignified literature that no one dare question,” I think The Hunger Games books (though probably not the movies) will stand the test of time.

Collins’ prose is deliberate; I recognized the literary techniques she was employing because I care about such things, but they are subtle so I was not surprised more didn’t notice.

I was however astounded that people who should’ve noticed did not. Bias does strange things to people’s brains.

I grew up as most people who read this blog know in rural North Florida, about 60 miles from the Georgia border.

Therefore I grew up speaking with a strong Southern accent, and using all the Southernisms you’ve probably heard in movies – and many you probably have not.

I no longer do any of those things, for just this reason.

Camille Hooker, a graduate student from Clay County, recalls going to school at the University of Kentucky, 90 minutes from home, and being told she talked funny and asked if she were intimate with her cousin.

Anne Shelby still remembers decades ago as a college freshman in Louisville when she excitedly spoke up in class about a Chekhov play only to have everyone break out laughing over her hill country accent. It felt, she says now, “like I had been sledged in the face.”

When I first joined the Army and had been assigned to a group that consisted mostly of Northerners, I made the mistake of using the phrase “fixing to,” as in “I am fixing to go to the store.”

Perfectly natural to me – I’d said it my whole life. So had everyone I knew.

I was made fun of for weeks for that. I never used it in public again.

I’d lost 99% of my Southern accent already, but after that I carefully monitored my speech to make sure that I never uttered any Southernism in mixed company again.

This is great advice from Grimes. Really all of it, but particularly this.

You will never hear more people tell you that you’re wrong than when you’re succeeding.

Dead on. When you are failing and flailing other than the few who enjoy kicking someone when they are down, no one much cares about you.

When you start to succeed and then you actually do succeed, the jealous, envious, hateful and demented will emerge like vermin from the woodpile to claw, gnaw, vex and obstruct you.

It’s strange. When you succeed, it can actually feel like you’re failing because so many – vastly more – people will turn out to tear you down and diminish you.

I am sure this is 10x as true for a woman.