lynn phillips & maggie cutler

two names, one writer

Category: 4. SL4B, the book

Self-Loathing for Beginners the book: here find news, purchase information and stories about it.

The DILFIT Fashion Disaster Award Alert…

Back in the spring of 2008, I created the DILFIT Awards for Self-Loathing in Fashion. My list of winners ran in The New York Times’ T Magazine. (“DILFIT,” as you have no doubt guessed, is the acronym for “Do I Look Fat In This?”)

I had hoped to bestow the DILFITS annually, but, lazy worm that I am, I haven’t. I am happy to announce, however, that there is a winner for the 2012 Spring and Summer season.

Rei Kawakubo's cotton ball gown SS2012

Comme des Garcons gown 2012

It is Rei Kawakubo, whose inspired creation—pictured here—so perfectly reflects the “complexity and feminist ambivalence” that Vogue’s Sarah Mower admired in the Japanese designer’s Comme des Garcons collection for Spring.

On days when a woman applies too much eye makeup, and it smears all over her face when she tries to remove it, and rubbing only makes her skin look raw, and she’s knee-deep in used cotton balls and late for work, or a date, and it’s that time of the month, this is surely what she will want to wear to flagrantly and stylishly express her dismay at being herself.

The white boots, which reminded Style.com’s Tim Blanks of technician-wear appropriate for a post-tsunami nuclear reactor melt-down, or “equally….sixties couture a-go-go,” will show off every bit of mud a determinedly self-loathing woman drags herself through.

And, yes, you will look fat in it.
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If you have a nominee you would like me to consider, I’d love to issue further awards. Please use the contact form and include a link to the image as well as your reasons why the outfit reflects, soothes, illuminates or compliments self-loathing.
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A Dorothy Parker Quote for Fall

“There, but for a typographical error, is the story of my life.”

— Dorothy Parker, when her host told her that guests in another room were “ducking for apples.”

dorothy parker

Photo by George Platt Lynes 1943

When I first heard this quote, it took me a minute to add it up; then I laughed out loud. I still do, every time I run across it. If you’re hungry for more, the Dorothy Parker Society Onlinemaintains a laundry list of lively links to all things Parker.

Parker is a great model for self-loathing women in comedy who want to use their air of self-respect to good advantage. Chelsea Handler (My Horizontal Life: A Collection of One-Night Stands) is funny because she has no class at all, but Parker was a class act who got comic mileage out of tossing her dignity into the crowd…like a wedding bouquet.

In SL4B, I used this quote as the heading for a chapter called, “Food for Self-Loathing.”

Top Ten Secret Commandments for Self-Loathers

These commandments are so secret, most self-loathers don’t even know when they’re following them.


1.  Thou shalt not compromise thy principles, ever.
2.  Thou shalt be best at everything, else thou hast failed.
3.  Thou shalt be chill; let nothing get to thee.
4.  Thou shalt eschew banality, nor be ordinary.
5.  Please thee thy crazy parents, be they satiable
    or be they not.
6.  Thou shalt feed the hungry—every living one of them.
7.  Feel at all times happy, for moodiness is an abomination.
8.  Remember: to err is regrettable, to forgive thyself, defeat.
9.  Thou shalt trust thine own judgement, yea, even when thou art nuts.
10.  Thou shalt not self-loathe.

From SL4B; “the Building Blocks of Self-Loathing,” page 29

Now You Can Self-Loathe in London, Liverpool

aurum press ed SL4BAurum Press, Ltd. is bringing out an English edition of Self-Loathing for Beginners, re-entitled I Can Make You Loathe Yourself: The Infallible Step-by Step Programme for Lowering Your Self-esteem. Evidently, there’s a popular series of motivational books that begin with “I Can Make You…” (Rich, Successful, Gullible, etc.), and this new title is a riff on that. The target pub date is October 25th. The text will remain basically the same, with a few updates and cross-cultural adjustments.

Waterstone’s, London’s largest bookstore, plans to push it for Christmas, along with sugarplums, I hope, and a few well-deserved lumps of coal.

Mortifyingly Cheap!

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