Sometimes things do move forward -
At last laws relating to access to abortion and same-sex marriage applicable to other parts of UK may now also apply to Northern Ireland.
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Even if I've been thinking that some things just come around regularly, like the discovery that O, women have been writing science fiction for A Very Long Time, and in considerable numbers, which I feel I have seen flitting by me several times over the years.
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I'm not sure one can call this the gift that keeps on giving, rather than the scandal that will not die down: What’s Missing In Naomi Wolf’s ‘Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love’ (which apparently NW tried to use her clout to censor, ahem ahem?) Makes some seriously good points, and in particular, I love this: The moment at which I genuinely threw the book across the room was thirty pages from the end, when Wolf narrates her experience of reading Amber Regis’s 2017 critical edition of Symonds’s voluminous, confessional memoirs. She implies that no one “had ever seen the complete unexpurgated memoirs” between 1949, when Symonds’s daughter viewed the manuscript in the London Library, and 2017. But while there was an embargo on this manuscript for several decades after Symonds’s death, it was in fact then opened to researchers. The Canadian literary historian who wrote the first modern biography of Symonds, Phyllis Grosskurth, published an abridged edition in 1984, which if anything overplays the text’s sexual content. I was immediately angry on behalf of the dozens of people, academics and otherwise, whose names are recorded in the London Library special collections visitors’ book and who have gone on to cite or draw on this manuscript in our published work. It is a shame that Wolf - for all that she writes with obsequious deference to scholarly expertise - does not acknowledge the existence of the vast majority of research on Symonds and his context.
Quite.
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I don't seem to have saved the link to an article I was annoyed by about marriage which seemed to be claiming that it was the actual civil status of marriage that preserved a relationship for 2 decades through various tribulations rather than, you know, the quality of the relationship.
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And, in purely personal stuff, I met a friend I have not seen for yonks for lunch and it was lovely. This entry was originally posted at https://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2947521.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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