January 2012
9 posts
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(Also at some drunk point on New Year’s Eve KK convinced me to join Instagram, where I am also Zanopticon, if you want to find me.)
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Getting Rid of Some
My friend A, yesterday: “Sometimes people ask me what going to high school in LA was like, and my response is, well I did let an itinerant sixteen year old coke dealer live in my house for a couple of days senior year.” More on that on EmilyBooks!
emilybooks:
by Zan Romanoff
J was a curly-haired sophomore who drove what we called the party car: whenever he showed up he would unload...
December 2011
5 posts
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Yesterday at dinner K, JS & I took advantage of the ‘Kutsche’s brown paper tablecloths and made lists: five small superpowers we’d like to have, potential autobiography titles.(JS’s was Covered in Lipstick or a series of puns on his actual name, which invites them; K’s was Sexualize at Will, I think, though we might have eventually come up with a better one.) At...
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What You Deserve
Yesterday M texted to say that she’d written “about sex” for EmilyBooks; my iPhone autocorrected my response of “heyyyyy!” to the less salacious, more problematic “hefty!”
It turns out that this essay is not really “about sex” (though my standards on that front are probably internet-skewed at this point) but it is really great— as was...
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Not That Anyone Asked
Some of the Best Things I Read This Year, Culled A Little Bit From My Brain and Email But Mostly From This Tumblr:
The Percentages: A Biography of Class, Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown
Taste Has Never Met Shame: I Love You, Connor Oberst! by Ben Dolnick
Cowgirl Mouth, by Molly Lambert (though almost anything else she wrote could go here, too)
Yes There are Grocery Stores in Detriot, by James...
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There’s something obviously shameful about being an actual adult who reads fantasy fiction pitched at a young adult audience: they’re books about teenagers, for chrissakes, people who still live with their parents, and are fighting vampires or werewolves, or turning into vampires or werewolves. The idea that I’ll ever be a teenager again, beset by the woes of puberty and AP Calc and my own...
November 2011
3 posts
dmmadmin asked: Hey I was wondering if you have read Didion's Blue Nights? I am a little hesitant to buy it. This is going to sound slightly dumb but I am afraid it will make me ultra depressed and I'll end up like Elizabeth Wurtzel: complaining about everything, listening to Bruce Springsteen, and trying to become a lawyer. Any thoughts on it would help! -M
October 2011
5 posts
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Not The Border But The Space
Some thoughts and feelings on the fear of calling yourself a feminist (and how Ellen Willis can help you with that) from yrs truly.
emilybooks:
by Zan Romanoff
For many years I did not consider myself a feminist. If you had asked me I would have denied that I was one; I would have equivocated about “not being sure what that meant,” about equal rights vs. exceptionalism, about the various...
Wallace and Wurtzel struck up an intense extended... →
September 2011
1 post
My favorite verbal Rorschach test is “ED,” which in high school I always assumed to mean eating disorder and then learned, just before college, as early decision. Now, though, after a year+ long search, I only ever hear it as executive director.
August 2011
15 posts
It seemed like everyone wanted to get together Saturday: it was all invitations to slow-smoked pork, Apples to Apples, Hurricanes or Dark and Stormys and bunches of us gathered somewhere, eying the rain, laughing about the weather. The impulse was understandable— everyone safe together— but we kept calling them parties. No one could shake the implication that mostly it was going to be...
grayandgreen asked: Hi Zan. I wasn't sure how to find your email, so I thought I'd send my message in the Ask feature. I wanted to congratulate you on a beautifully-written piece on The Paris Review. I ordered Girl Crush Zine and I can't wait to read the whole thing. I hope you'll keep writing!
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Someone else will say it’s Hancock Park, which it... →
This piece is the truest thing about Los Angeles that has ever been written. Thomas Guides and Happy Foot Sad Foot. My god.
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(I wrote this about a month ago, shelved it for edits and promptly forgot about it until E mentioned Walking and Talking in an email this weekend. So! Here is a thing for Monday, and the last thing about marriage for a good long while. Promise.)
I read Seventeen until I was fifteen, at which point I moved on to Cosmo; I spent middle school watching television shows about high school and high...
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To my eyes the tattoo has settled into the... →
This.
(Previously: this.)
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What was more incredible? That he'd "dressed up"... →
Swamp Thing I Apparently you’ve got to be vulnerable if you want anything to happen, and on the other side of it you’ve got to be unfathomably strong in order to get by. In order to get through the attacks and rejections occasioned by vulnerability you’ve got to be almost invulnerably strong. It’s a difficult road map to fold, friends. The shifts in logic are very subtle, they have ...
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I took an ill-advised nap yesterday afternoon and woke up when I was supposed to be leaving for the rehearsal, sprawled out on my little twin bed in cutoffs and a tee shirt, raw and confused and still helplessly sleepy as I put on a dress and some earrings and tumbled out the door. I drove the freeway I took to high school and listened to loud hip hop to keep from crying— about what...
Recent realization: I am not very good at talking about, writing about happiness. My default modes are elegiac or wry, which is to say wistful about the recent past or dismissive of the present. I don’t think of myself as an ironist (I have very earnestly terrible taste and I will inflict it on you mercilessly) but there it is: all distancing techniques designed to keep me from sounding smug...
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July 2011
11 posts
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But I’ve come around to the fact that a lot of... →
I just really want to start a zine called AHH!dulthood about this very thing, about the immediately post-collegiate years as a series of seemingly insane compromises between participating effectively in the structure of the grown up world and still feeling your own life to be pretty deeply fucked. It would be about signing government documents recommending a friend for security clearance while...
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At one point in the conversation people began... →
I’ll give you that there is a distinct difference between books read when you’re young, the kind that inform not just your mental landscape but its architecture, the things about the world that you believe to me true, and the kind that you love as an adult for their style and sentences, their ability to reflect on and perhaps clarify the world you already know. I loved a million...
This is probably the first and last time you will see my name on a Contributors list alongside Jennifer Egan’s. I could not be one bit more excited about it, or Girl Crush in general.
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You know, I’d be more upset about the sheer volume people I know who have recently gotten engaged if it weren’t for the fact that I was socialized almost exclusively by the Los Angeles Bar & Bat Mitzvah circuit, which has prepped me with all of the necessary (and otherwise useless) skills: translating dress codes into dresses, making conversation with a tableful of strangers,...
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June 2011
9 posts
