On Being Misunderstood

On the last Queer Eye for the Straight Girl, a show I find immensely disappointing but keep watching in hope it improves, they made over a young woman who looked like a whore. A really cheap whore. They gave her a bunch of tips on how to look less like a whore and kept saying things like "I can't believe you have a degree from George Washington -- you can't tell by looking at you!" She agreed with them, but didn't seem to want to not look like a whore. There was also a whole weird daddy approval thing that made me a little uncomfortable, but I digress.

Last week I mentioned the Daisy Fried article that gave a brief shout out to No Tell Motel. Molly and I appreciated the article, we really did, but we didn't quite know what to make of the description "emphasizes the ironically breezy or breezily ironic." Sure, some of the poems we publish are sardonic, but the majority aren't. At least we don't think they are.

We wrote off the comment as suffering from the requirements of the soundbyte blurb. So I understand why Kemel from MiPO was also struck by Fried's description of their pub. But imagine my chagrin when Kemel went on to write "Accordingly, Fried's soundbyte-length synopses largely avoid concrete descriptions of the zines' poetries. The exception to this is her calling No Tell Motel's poetry "ironically breezy, or breezily ironic," which I find to be an apt and remarkably deft encapsulation of No Tell's fare."

Aack!!!

When one person says it, you can write it off as her getting it wrong. When two people see it that way, well, maybe we are applying our mascara a little too heavy. Maybe our design does add too much context to the poems. Maybe word of our discrete dalliances has gotten out.

But we like looking pretty. We don't want to cover our bosoms!