Thinking, following the seminar yesterday, which was, very approximately speaking, by a person not born and brought up in the UK about emotion, embodiment and embarrassment at least in a certain generational swathe of the UK population (who later indicated that having that perspective was not insignificant in directing research interests), and a ( Read more... )

Two articles in today's Guardian G2 section between which I though there were some resonances about what art should be like/for.

Interview with Wole Soyinka*, whose play 'Death and the King's Horseman' is being produced at the National. About which:
His starting point... was a vivid episode from western Nigeria's colonial period, in which a ( Read more... )

Ulp, two months plus or minus since I last did one of these - even if one was a short month and even if I did do some posts on particular books.

Biographies, memoirs, lives, diaries

( Martha Sherrill, The Buddha from Brooklyn )

Is it really terribly culture-bound of me? I would have thought that even if someone didn't read English, and thus could not understand 'No Entry', the fact that it was in red, and preceded by a red X, was pretty standard international signage convention for 'Not This Way'. Yet as I debouched from the exit gate at Euston this morning, I nearly ( Read more... )

I was recently watching a documentary on fetish in the world today (to which I made some minor historical contributions).

Among the talking heads was the film critic Derek Malcolm, wittering on about the difference between the UK film Personal Services (1987, directed by Terry Jones), based on the real-life Cynthia Payne case, and Just Jaeckin's oh ( Read more... )

Okay, part of this is probably the irritation at being faced by what is in fact a detailed copy-edit when I was anticipating just proofs for correction, in the light of having this to-do list if not exactly planned out in detail, on my agenda for this week off. I did not expect to be still deep, no sign of end of the tunnel, in working on this ( Read more... )

In the wake of reading Julie Phillips' extremely excellent James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (which I am reviewing elsewhere, so This Is Not a Review, merely a recommendation), I have been thinking various thoughts about women and writing and women and being able to pursue a trajectory in life which doesn't conform to the ( Read more... )

Lionel Shriver in yesterday's Guardian on women and their discomfort about ambition: except that I'm not entirely persuaded that some of the phenomena she describes are about gender rather than right- vs left- pond cultural norms...

Another article about the medicalisation of female sexuality and the marketing of 'quick-fix' pharmaceutical ( Read more... )