Advertisement

Sign In

The Decline and Fall of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, and Other News

By

On the Shelf

Elizabethtown-Panerai

Kirsten Dunst, the original MPDG, in 2005’s Elizabethtown.

  • A new project, “The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe,” catalogs and digitizes marginalia from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “These notes reveal a largely unvarnished history of personal reading within the early modern historical moment. They also embody an active tradition of physically mapping and personalizing knowledge upon the printed page.”
  • How will Woody Allen’s latest film fare in light of the allegations leveled against him earlier this year? “Allen dismissed the possibility that lingering outrage could affect the public’s interest in Magic in the Moonlight. ‘No thoughts like that occur to me … They only occur to you guys,’ ” said Allen, who, as coincidence would have it, is referred to as a “major-league fantasist” elsewhere in this piece.
  • Nathan Rabin has apologized for inventing the phrase “Manic Pixie Dream Girl”: “I’m sorry for creating this unstoppable monster. Seven years after I typed that fateful phrase, I’d like to join Kazan and Green in calling for the death of the ‘Patriarchal Lie’ of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope. I would welcome its erasure from public discourse.”
  • The art collector George Costakis devoted his life “to unearthing masterworks of the Russian avant-garde … but his enthusiasm met with obstacles: the difficulty of tracking down the works, the neglect they had suffered, the disbelief of widows (‘What do you see in them?’). In a dacha outside Moscow he found a Constructivist masterpiece being used to close up a window; the owner wouldn’t part with it. He dashed to the city to fetch a piece of plywood the same size, ferried it back to the dacha, and swapped it for the painting.”
  • “The history of punk is, above all, the story of the traumatic loss of its elusive essence: that brief moment in time when a new sensibility was beginning to coalesce … Punk died as soon as it ceased being a cult with no name.”