For the past six years, checking Slaughterhouse90210 has been part of my morning routine. If you haven’t heard of the blog, and aren’t good at neolexic portmanteaus, Slaughterhouse90210 takes a screen shot from a TV show and places it with a quote from literature. The screengrab and the quote each underscore the other, and together they prove how literature and TV explore universal truths of the human experience. It doesn’t hurt that Maris Kreizman, the blog’s author, has great taste (to me, anyway). There’s something kind of wonderful about seeing my favorite shows paired with my favorite writers (90210/Lorrie Moore, Friday Night Lights/Haruki Murakami).
When news came out that this blog was going to become a book, I was very excited. Not just for the writer, who clearly puts so much thought into making loving and insightful pairings, but for myself. Over the years, this blog has given me so much joy, and I wasn’t able to support Kreizman’s effort in any way beyond liking her posts. A hardcover version of the blog was a way to actually back all the work Kreizman has done.
Her book, which is excellent, wouldn’t exist without the internet, and much of Kreizman’s her work is available for free there. Still, what’s free compared with compensated? In the same way people are asking where their food comes from, I hope we can start asking where our content comes from. When someone makes something great, we need to pay for it.