Reading this review of a book which kicks off as a reversal-riff on Kafka's 'Metamorphosis', and then proceeds into what even the reviewer suggests is 'slightly clunking' political satire. We note that the author has suggested that his protag champions an 'unorthodox economic theory', which is one that seems similar, but not entirely the same, to ( Read more... )

I was somewhat niggled, possibly even peeved, when I came across this in the Media bit of today's Guardian:
“The only ground rule I am going to set is you can’t mess around with Thought for the Day,” he says. “People need to be clear you can’t use the guest editorship as a lever to do a secular Thought for the Day or a backdoor way to open up a ( Read more... )

I think I have got all I can reasonably expect to get out of the papers I was looking it, have all sorts of new leads and a whole array of bubbling new thoughts as a result.

In other business, I had a delightful evening out yesterday with
( Read more... )

Though, this is annoying, an intriguing article on mythmaking around women's fertility decline and ticking biological clocks in the Observer Magazine 410s with this message: 'Sorry - the page you are looking for has been removed. This may be because of a legal objection, a rights consideration or for another reason.' Because I thought it was making ( Read more... )

( Read more... )

Dept of vain adornment of the body and Middlemarch allusion.

These are not wonderful photos, but they may provide some idea:

( Necklace with codfish motif )

Further to the post the other day about the 'Beautiful People' dating site that got hacked, and reading this piece of comment by Tanya Gold in yesterday's Guardian.

In this she cites an exchange in Kingsley Amis's Take a Girl Like You, in which an (unattractive, male) character says to the (attractive, female) lead character:
"There is one barrier ( Read more... )

It was meant to be a dating website exclusively for the use of "beautiful men and women", where members ruthlessly selected and excluded those who did not match their definitions of good looks.

But, allegedly, a disgruntled employee released a virus on it that signed up 30,000 'ugly' people.

We do wonder if these people are 'ugly' by any ( Read more... )

Artist, activist and Bob Dylan's muse who resisted the role of handmaiden. Actually, what we get from that is that Suze Rotolo also resisted the role of muse itself: she left him for months while she went to study art in Italy (go sistah go sistah!), where she
read Françoise Gilot's Life With Picasso, in whose pages she encountered "revelations, ( Read more... )

Was having a train of thought this morning -

Which started with thinking about physical appearance (which has been coming up in various places) and that line in, could it possibly have been The Female Eunuch, about the benefits to Mary Ann Evans of being plain in her youth and the costs to V Stephen of being beautiful -

And whether, had my ( Read more... )