On whether he would ever wax his chest for a role.

It's a funny thing,

the other day I thought about doing it.

Seriously,

I was just thinking

about doing it.

I'm not going to do it anyway, now.

I guess I would do it if I had to do it.

(Source.)

All or nothing

Magic Molly and the secret to enjoying Gossip Girl. (I think she's right.)

Gossip Girl roundup

New Yorker:

“Gossip Girl,” by its very title, promises both to tell you the secrets of the city and to remind you that you weren’t invited to the party.

New York Observer:

The facts are this [...]: Dan's father's loft—it looks to be at least 3,000 square feet—probably sells for about $600 a square foot now. That's going by the general rule of thumb that Brooklyn condos (and we'll assume it's a condo as no co-op board, even in Brooklyn, would likely let in a rock musician-turned-artist who keeps odd hours) sell for half of what they would in most of Manhattan; and in most of Manhattan, condos sell for over $1,200 a square foot on average, according to research firm Radar Logic.

(Via Chrita)

Jane Dark's Sugarhigh!:

[Gossip Girl is not a character]...It's a blog with Kristin Bell's voice, which posts news, salacious stories, gotcha pix and so forth about the popular students. It is, in short, a gossip site. The show's imagination is that celebrity journalism has made its way to high school.

Dizzies Newsfeeds for December 2

"Things happen to me with accents on 'em!": Dizzyhead Hua in the N.Y. Sun on the delightful-sounding All About H. Hatterr...Selfdivider with another great post, this one on Percival Lowell, Theodore Roosevelt, and King Kojong...The Stubblemeister has a great NYTBR piece on the story behind the placement of cigarette ads in paperbacks (from A.E. Van Vogt to The Bluest Eye; oddly, the title bar on my browser says, simply, "Essay about Cigarette Advertisements in Paperback Books"!); as a bonus, he fills his blog with a wealth of related links, and Levi picks up the scent, chasing down the possible meaning behind a pseudonym used by a book reviewer tapped by the industry to write a positive review of Smoking and Society: Toward a More Balanced Assessment, and finally pointing us Luc Sante–ward..now that's what I call Dizzyhead synergy!...Snowing in New York, time for the Psychic Envelopes' "Winter Losses" (what happened to "Indian Summer"?!)...Over at Erasing, the Batman–Proust connection...Finally saw that Gossip Girl episode Hua was blogging about, wow, in some ways the best one yet?...(More Gossip Girl stuff in today's Times: "Not that we’re obsessed or anything”)...Gotta get my hair cut...xoxo...You know you love me....GOSSIP ED....wha....

"Gossip Guy"

At the Poetry Foundation, Alice Boone has a nifty Q&A with Sophie Gee, whose novel The Scandal of the Season recreates the milieu and the writing of Pope's The Rape of the Lock. I especially like these thoughts on the tension/problem of animating the inanimate—

Gee: One of the most exciting parts of The Rape of the Lock is when Belinda heads up the Thames on the boat and the sylphs are playing around the sails and blowing on the sails. What I love about it is, if you had a videotape of that scene in real life, obviously it’s not the sylphs, it’s the breeze that’s blowing on the sails. But he manages to give the breeze a kind of translucid materiality, and the sylphs occupy the space of wind. What Pope does that’s very innovative is to assign a kind of animate spirit to inanimate materialism. The sylphs are the obvious way that he does that, but he does it less obviously with the slipper, the bell, and the things on the dressing table. What Pope is giving us is a personified inanimate world, and that explains for me why a poem that’s really rather stiff and not very lively in terms of the quantity of animation nonetheless feels very volatile and fluid and shifting.

A tribute to Loren Goodman

Blair from Facts of Life




vs.



Blair from Gossip Girl








—who would win???