Still on The Guardian's Private Lives advance notice mailing list... yet again, something about which I will invoke one of my private beatitudes, 'Blessed are those who, having nothing to say, refrain from saying it".

But, anyway, on the subject of advice columns, the extremely excellent Dr Petra Boynton now answers a reader's problem weekly on ( Read more... )

You read books about Polar exploration. Do you really, really, long to be stuck in a hut on the permafrost in the middle of a howling blizzard, with frostbite, scurvy, and (if your particular interest is Scott) a withering sense of failure? Or do you, like I think it might be Katharine Whitehorn, like to read about this sort of thing while sitting ( Read more... )

Oh dear, Pamela Stephenson Connolly, fantasies are not necessarily unacted desires or anything that the person having them could or would enact in The Real World.
While I've never kissed, had sex with, or fallen for a woman, my fantasies are about women. And yet I have no urge to have sex with women in real life

To which PSC is all about exploring ( Read more... )

Two pieces in today's Guardian G2 about the deplorable tendency of readers to assume that writers of fiction are just filing the names and serial numbers off reality: Melissa Benn and Linda Grant. Because if there is even one discernable point of overlap between the writer and their story (being part of a political family in Benn's, Jewish ( Read more... )

Well, this is a real head-banger: Was it ever going to work - forming a 21st-century 'tribe' online with odd trips to a Pacific island? Decca Aitkenhead investigates. Boy, this one has 'unexamined assumptions' written all over it in neon, pulsating, capital letters.
Two years ago, a pair of young British internet entrepreneurs decided to start ( Read more... )

Posted in a locked entry on my flist, this report in The Times on a survey of British sexual fantasies.* (And is it weird or utterly predictable that I've met the person behind the report?)

The lj post asks (among other things) why people don't act on their fantasies more, or at least communicate them to their partners?

And this set off the usual ( Read more... )

Stimulated by this discussion with taelle to think about the question of imaginary lands which are not wholly imaginary, but are about inhabitants of one country's imaginings either about an idealised/other version of their own land (e.g. those idealised past periods so often invoked in support of various national agendas), or their suppositions about ( Read more... )

Have finally acquired copy of Ann Norton’s much praised critical study of Rebecca West, Paradoxical Feminism. So far I am still in chapter 1 and getting rather irritated.

I am not saying that she shouldn’t be doing biographical readings/interpretations of the fiction, because there are valid things to be got out of this (particularly perhaps with ( Read more... )

According to Oliver James in today's Observer: 'There has never been a period in history when men and women have got on worse.' To which, as a historian, I say, good god, what standards is he judging by? Just for matrimonial suffering (surely the tip of the iceberg) that got into the courts from the C17th to the C19th, see Jane Cox's Hatred Pursued ( Read more... )

Obituary in today's Guardian of yet another remarkable woman, Sybil Marshall, died at 91 having 'enjoyed at least three distinct careers in a remarkable creative life'. She was a teacher in a rural primary school for 30 years, went to Cambridge aged 48 to read English, and became an acknowledged academic expert on creative primary education, in her ( Read more... )