Posts by Jolisa
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Funny how "feminisms" implies diversity and broad church, but "feminists" implies the Borg.
Snap!
Plus, the debate over terms and goals and such goes back waaay more than a generation. I'm thinking of another Emma who had a fraught relationship with the idea of feminism, while living a life that in many respects was a radical and inspiring embodiment of it. From a recent LRB review of the 2 vol. documentary history of Emma Goldman's frankly amazing life,
While acknowledging the great advance formal equality represented, Goldman chastised middle-class feminists, claiming that their "grandmothers had more blood in their veins, far more humour and wit, and certainly a greater amount of naturalness, kindheartedness and simplicity than the majority of our emancipated professional women who fill our colleges, halls of learning and various offices."
(She may well have been right about the wild grandmothers and all, but -- bloodless, humourless and unnatural? Cool, cruel, and complex, like it's a bad thing? Damn!)
Still, hard to be down on the woman who unwittingly kind of invented Dance Dance Revolution in a roundabout sort of way, even if what she actually said was: "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things."
*Steve Fraser, "Propaganda of the Deed", LRB 26 Feb 2009
-
No, no Jolissa - never pluralise "feminist". It will only lead to such constructions as "Feminists think that...".
Oh those wayward extra s's! How come they always migrate into my name, grr..
-
I don't know if Lindy West's review was "feminist" or not, but it ended up being so deeply fucking stupid and irony-deficient
Mixed feelings on that one. I laughed, when I first read it. I love it when women are funny and rude at the same time (a rare delight - see also Helen Razer on vajazzling Louis Nowra). Hyperbolic satirical polemic is (or should be) fun, and almost by definition, completely offensive. We occasionally welcome that style of rhetoric around these parts, even...
But West's argument didn't jibe with my experience of the film, and on re-reading the review it fell apart in so many, many, problematic ways (rape jokes, sex-worker-flippancy). I wouldn't call it stupid; I'd call it a performance piece that would have totally worked in the lunchroom, but has a more complicated life on the never-fading, endlessly retweetable page.
-
...or be seen as a humourless penis-hater
Man, who doesn't hate humourless penises?
So I thought that rustling sound was all the PAS blokes running to get their bargepoles. But wait! They're up for discussion! Truly, we live in a new century.
Ian, in the late 80s/early 90s you could have been a "pro-feminist," from memory, but I'd have to check with Party Central to be absolutely sure. I mean, Head Office.
We also might have briefly called you a SNAG.
With regard to the word feminism itself, I'm loath to throw the definitional baby out with the semantic bathwater. For me, remembering to pluralise feminism (and feminists) helps to counteract any polarising or homogenising effect.
Also, the "zmz" sound you get when you say "feminisms" is totally vuvuzela-esque.
</soccerjack> -
Looks like the rest of us will have to ... take up the Slack.
True, I have been Slacking off (well, working like billy-o on something else). Time to Slack on again.
-
First Al and Tipper, now this?
Sigh. I guess we'll always have Devonport.
Thank you for many a considered chortle (and a few excellent IRL tipples) over the years. You will be greatly missed, but the lucky stray animals will have you all to themselves now.
-
You should be proud, Briar - it's a wonderful book and a real heirloom for all. Glad to help with its delivery.
Also I never noticed the pun until Jolisa pointed it out (above).
Actually, I had never noticed it either, even after I (apparently) pointed it out. I wonder if it worked as a pun in Shakespeare's time? Or if dusting is entirely a post-17th C activity?
Somebody - might have been Frank Kermode, or Stephen Greenblatt; I can't remember - pointed out that 'chimney-sweepers' was Warwickshire dialect, used to describe a dandelion seed-head.
Absolutely gorgeous, and I had to go googling. The dandelion connection seems to be an obscure point of contention among those who favour Marlowe as the author of some or all of the plays. And Marjorie Garber is credited with making the link (although possibly she was citing someone else?) here :
In Elizabethan London, poor children ("lads and girls") were sometimes employed as chimney-sweepers because they had bodies small enough to fit, and of course "coming to dust" was for them all in a day's work; the lines' great power lies in the modulation from the mundane to the mortal—from the dust in the chimney to the dust of death. But chimney-sweepers (as Marjorie Garber points out in her great book Shakespeare After All ) was also a colloquialism for dandelions (whose blooms resemble brooms), and when dandelions turn from spring gold to summer dust, that dust is fertile; they are sprouting the seeds of next spring's crop. The elegy, which seems on its surface to pronounce a universal doom, hints quietly at continuities—even at resurrections.
-
-I have a revered old old family receit for "dolphin pie" (and we aint talking mahimahi here. Or a French princeling.)
It may resolve argument...Sod the T-shirts, I'm holding out for the PAS cookbook.
-
Dejected Tail is a well-known post-traumatic psychosomatic injury
That was my operating assumption the last time Huckle came home from a catfight with a noticeable droop. A couple of days later, his tail was still drooping, and I discovered - an hour before the babysitter was due to arrive on the night of my 40th birthday -- that there was in fact a horrible festering bite underneath the fur.
How much I love my cat: I took him straight round to the after hours vet in all my finery. How much my partner loves me: he paid for dinner AND the ruinous vet fees that quadrupled the cost of the evening, without a murmur of complaint.
(This is the man who regularly revives the line from the New Yorker article about kidney transplants for cats: "Why not just perform a collar transplant instead?").
-
... as chimney-sweepers, come to dust." One of the loveliest lines in the world, and always delivered, in my mind at least, by Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins garb.
David, I'm so very sorry to hear about your grandmother. My condolences to all of you, most especially your grandfather.
I'm honoured to have helped with the book's delivery, and delighted that your gran lived to see it.
(But I can't shake the suspicion that if only I'd posted the book via surface mail, she'd have held on for the additional 6-8 weeks it would have taken to arrive in NZ... now, that might have been a cunning plan.)