Linkspam loves awesome women
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: 'Don't we all write about love? When men do it, it's a political comment. When women do it, it's just a love story'. I'd suggest that in fact it's when men do it, it is about the deep chords of the human heart, when women do it it's soppy wish-fulfillment, but her formulation works as well.
Photographer Nan Goldin burst on to the art scene in 1986 with The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, hugely influential images that chronicled the druggy New York demi-monde she and her friends inhabited.:
Initially, because of her subject matter alone, she was compared to Diane Arbus, who had made her name with photographs of so-called freaks and outsiders in the 1960s. Goldin, though, says she knew nothing about art photography or documentary when she saw Arbus's work for the first time. "What I remember most is that all the queens I knew hated her. Violently. In her portraits of drag queens, she stripped them and showed them as men. To me, the queens were not men. My work was much more respectful to them.
Mary Midgley: a late stand for a philosopher with soul (is there a subtext that you only get taken seriously as a female philosopher if you are very, very, old? - note her comments about certain male philosophers as youthful firecracker prodigies). Some great quotes:
She was one of an extraordinary group of female philosophers at Oxford during the war that comprised Philippa Foot, Iris Murdoch, Elizabeth Anscombe and Mary Warnock, all of whom went on to work in moral philosophy or ethics. Was that a coincidence, I ask, or was it a female response to the male world of logical positivism that dominated British philosophy at that time?
"Well some chaps did as well," she replies. "The fact that we were all women, as I keep saying, [is because] in the war there were so few men around, and the men who were around tended to be conscientious objectors or disabled, so there simply wasn't the sort of fighting and squabbling that there was later."
In a recent letter to the Guardian, explaining why she thought there was a shortfall in women philosophers, she wrote: "The trouble is not, of course, men as such - men have done good enough philosophy in the past. What is wrong is a particular style of philosophising that results from encouraging a lot of clever young men to compete in winning arguments. These people then quickly build up a set of games out of simple oppositions and elaborate them until, in the end, nobody else can see what they are talking about."
Bless.
Rachel Cooke meets Jacqueline Wilson to talk about growing up, girls' comics and why, despite illness, she has no intention of slowing down.
Emma Thompson: the A-lister who sets her own rules. I am not sure whether yearning or shuddering is my emotion re the Effie movie.
Golden Dawn: courage of two women stems the rise of Greece's neo-Nazis: Under armed guard, the judges investigating the far-right party's criminal activities have brought it down: but it is far from out.
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And in other business:
Working on the subjects I do, I've always had a lot of time for Roy Jenkins: I may even read this biography and I am so not a reading bios of politicians person. But what with 'gay at Oxford' and 'open marriage' I may have to.
It may be a good swing at the topic, but does the world really need another book on the Maybrick mystery?
Why almost everything you've been told about unhealthy foods is wrong. Though I'm not entirely sure what '"avoid processed food"' means? a lot of perfectly healthy comestibles are processed; cooking is processing.
On that 'revolutionary' new speed-reading app:
Like so many technological fixes, Spritz and the like seem to be answering a question nobody asked. And if you do ask, you'll find that speed-reading experts say you can do better by running your finger along the page - but nobody wants to be seen doing that.
Ten best poems about spring (in English...): houndz ov spring b saying wot no Louis MacNeice, 'Spring Voices', woez, glass b falling down & down.
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