Best of the Decade

Tomorrow at midnight, the aughts, the decade Time Magazine says was the worst ever, will come to a close. (The 2000's didn't seem so bad to me, but I guess I only remember part of the nineties, so I don't have much to compare it to.) Anyway, my favorite part of decade ending: the Best/Worst of the Decade Lists. Kottke.org has taken on the monumental task of curating them, in a massive list organized by category they call The Noughtie List.

My Best of the Noughtie-List List:

The Decade that Shrank the Mega-Novel

The Best Fiction of the Millennium (Pros Versus Readers)

When TV Became Art

Top Horror Films of the Decade

Ten Most Significant Visual Artists

Best Book Covers of the Decade

Best Comics of the Decade

The Decade in Poetry

The Decade in Words

5 Life Lessons Learned from Ladies of 00's Teen Films

Searching for the Real Nebraska

You might remember that back in November, we blogged about the photography exhibit Searching for the Real Nebraska: A Photo Essay on the Great Recession. On January 5, the second part of that exhibit will go up at the Center for Great Plains Studies. The Journal Star has an article about the exhibit with an interview with the photographers.

My favorite part of the interview:

Journal Star: Describe some of the lessons that you learned from different people, maybe even just beyond the lessons of the recession's impact, kind of life lessons, I guess.

Bruggeman: A lot of these small towns, they don't have big movie theaters, art houses, Broadway plays, all the things that people in big cities depend on to entertain themselves after they get off of work. They find happiness in the smaller things in life. I really learned from that that it's more than just the entertainment values of the latest craze of the Internet that make people happy. Sometimes it's family, friends, the home you live in and the dogs you raise, to even crops, just being a farmer and having land that you raised by your hands is something that makes them happy and that's what they live by.

Center for Great Plains Studies
1155 Q Street,
Lincoln, NE 68588-0214.
The gallery is free and open to the public

Happy Holidays!

Hope you're all having nice holidays!

Love,
Plains Song Review

Stereotyping by Author

Hello PSR readers! After a finals-related hiatus, we are back and blogging. Today we have a wonderfully funny, kind-of-mean list that stereotypes readers based on their favorite authors.

For example:

Vladimir Nabokov: Men who use words like ‘dubious’ and ‘tenacity’.

Friedrich Nietzsche: Sommeliers.

Cormac McCarthy: Men who don’t eat cream cheese.

Which one are you? (I tried stereotyping myself, but I couldn't pick my favorite from the list!)

Link

A Wonderful Photo

Posts have been a little bit writing-centric lately, so I thought I'd balance it with a photography post! This lovely photograph was taken by flickr user Janusfinder. I love how it captures that exact anxious feeling as the baby-sitter is about to arrive.


via joannagoddard.blogspot.com


P.S. The PSR blog is going to go on hiatus for the next two weeks, so we can deal with tests and papers. We'll return after finals are over (when I've stopped having nightmares about Chaucer and the French subjunctive).

No Name Reading Series

Have you ever been to a No Name reading? Every other Friday at 4 PM, grad students from the UNL English department head over to Sur Tango at 12th and P to read their very best work. This Friday is Alan Yates! Sounds like a lovely way to spend a Friday afternoon, right?