I'm reading Buchi Emecheta's novel "The Joys of Motherhood", set in Nigeria around WWII, and there's a bit where the white master addresses his 'house-boy' as 'baboon'. She writes:

"his laughter was inspired by that type of wickedness that reduces any man, white or black, intelligent or not, to a new low; lower than the basest of animals, for ( Read more... )

"The white cat symbolizes the silvery moon prying into corners and cleansing the sky for the day to follow... All dark, hidden places and beings are revealed in that inexorably gentle light. You can't shake your white cat because your white cat is you. You can't hide from your white cat because your white cat hides with you ( Read more... )

Fay Weldon, writing in 2002, on the suicides of Sylvia Plath (1963) and Assia Wevill (1969): "How could it happen, today's young women ask, in bewilderment? How could women see their lives only in terms of being loved or not loved by a man? The times were against them, so the times had to change. And so they did."

Russell T. Davies, in a 2016 ( Read more... )

Steven Moffat, in The Guardian, of Doctor Who:
"Young people watching have to know that they have a place in the future. That really matters. You have to care profoundly what children's shows in particular say about where you're going to be. And we've kind of got to tell a lie: we'll go back into history and there will be black people where, ( Read more... )

"Poetry... is a matter of space on the page interrupted by a few well-chosen words, to give them importance. Prose is a less grand affair which has to stretch to the edges of the page to be convincing." - Fay Weldon, Auto da Fay

I'm reading Judith Butler's essay "Imitation and Gender Insubordination". You know the thing where it's actually difficult to pin down the definition of "sex", ie "male or female" - do we count anatomy, chromosomes, genes, hormones, psychology, or what, when all of these have variations which aren't simply "male or female"? She's just pointed out ( Read more... )

"I think part of the problem is that people are frustrated that they want to see more women, doing more things, in superhero movies, and because we don't have as many women as we should yet, they're very, very sensitive to every single storyline that comes up right now."
- Mark Ruffalo on criticisms of writer Joss Whedon for Avengers: Age of Ultron ( Read more... )

Pohl also refers to his daily "regime of defacing four pages of clean paper with writing". :)

Cheeky SMH columnist John Birmingham, suggesting that Tony Abbott's parade of gaffes are a deliberate distraction tactic:

"While many of the permanently appalled whom the ABC's Chris Uhlmann refers to as 'Twitter bedwetters' were busy soaking the doona over lifestyle choices, Abbott was able to scrape off the barnacle of his disastrous Medicare co ( Read more... )

As the Wall fell, East Berlin's meticulous secret police went into a tailspin: "Stasi officers were instructed to destroy files, starting with the most incriminating - those naming westerners who spied for them, and those that concerned deaths. They shredded the files until the shredders collapsed. Among other shortages in the east, there was a ( Read more... )