The book is in the post to my editor, yay.

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I have reactivated my LJ because there are still people over there I want to be reading.

However, I still have DW invite codes going...

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I had a dream the other night that I was teaching a yoga class, wtf?

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Further to recent post about 'designer vaginas [sic]', A Call To Monitor And Evaluate ( Read more... )

Urrggh, aaaargh, eeeeeeeuuuuuuwww, etc to the gospel that Catherine Hakim is preaching in Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital. Interview with Zoe Williams here, and you get the distinct impression that Zoe wished she'd taken a codfish with here, and review of the noxious thing by Will Self, which is a bit point thahr misst (wot duz e no about ( Read more... )

(Because it's just after the annual ritual feasting, and we don't want anything too heavy, do we? And these all seemed to mesh together.)

Kathryn Hughes on Servant Porn, actuated by the retread of Upstairs Downstairs:
Most of us, if spirited back to the lives of our grandparents, would find that we were living on the wrong side of the Upstairs, ( Read more... )

I did not realise she was dead, although it is a long time since her last book came out: Jane Rule and Desert of the Heart revisited by Jackie Kay. Though I think it's a bit odd not to mention her pioneering work on recuperating the literary traditions of lesbianism in Lesbian Images. Her other novels are also all well worth reading.

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This is a ( Read more... )

Further to my earlier post on men and litfic, do we note that most of the winners of the Bad Sex Award have been male and that the existence of the BSA seems to have induced a certain, hmmm, performance anxiety about writing about it?

On women's writing, am not going to be terribly convinced by a piece on the New Women's Confessional which avers ( Read more... )

Men Are Terribly Poor Stuff, reprised yet again: Online dating: Cyber Cyrano for hire - Too busy to chat up the suitors in your online dating account? No problem. Matt Prager will simply assume your identity and do it for you. Can I get a loud, collective *EEEEUUUUWWWW*? At least Christian had already seen and fancied Roxanne when he asked Cyrano ( Read more... )

Thinking further about people faking it and telling stories that diverge from the strict truth, and family myths as embodied in a conversation I had yesterday about doing genealogy and hearing the family story that one forebear was descended from a long line of army officers, but whose father, on investigation, turned out to be a sergeant (who had ( Read more... )

The National Archives releases a tranche of Ministry of Defence files from their UFO Dept. These can be downloaded from their site here. Overview in Guardian reportage.

John Crace has been doing Digested Reads for 10 years. I really, really liked this more or less concluding remark:
Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is a great book. It's also ( Read more... )

The magnificent Jenni Murray is interviewed in today's Guardian. More on the ghastly happy-clappy cancer cult. Also on feminism: she's very much of my generation, with the issues around marriage and mortages, but also is aware that there is current stuff going on rather than going woez woez feminism b ded or else doing a Fay Weldon wot abaht da ( Read more... )

Major London exhibition LOUISE NEVELSON: DAWNS AND DUSKS
30 April - 14 June 2009!!! Wheeee.

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Via
( Read more... )