AUTHOR & TRANSLATOR
During the American Revolutionary War, women up and down the East Coast spied for the rebels. They also spied for the British. They carried messages across enemy territory and through enemy lines. They reported on gun emplacements and recounted conversations overheard among officers about military strategy. Philadelphia women brought key military intelligence on the British …
Continue reading "“THESE ARTFUL JEZEBELS”: ON AMERICAN SPIES: My September Column at Bookslut"
Recent studies on the appalling gender (mis)representation on TV have led some media analysts to conclude that the more television a boy watches, the more sexist he becomes, while the more a girl watches, the fewer options she believes she has in life. I am a television addict but resisted the TV series Game of …
Continue reading "THE DANGEROUS WOMEN GAME: My August Column at Bookslut"
In 1907, the French filmmaker, playwright, journalist, feminist, and political activist Germaine Dulac (1882-1942) gave a lecture on the "international task of French Women." She urged her audience to "create things anew and according to your own spirit" and to organize into cooperatives and unions. Tami Williams's in-depth historical study and critical biography Germaine Dulac: …
Continue reading "THE “PURE CINEMA” OF GERMAINE DULAC: My July Column at Bookslut"
The Pity Party This update is long and a bummer so don't read if you don't want to hear me complain & vent with potentially TMI. I’ll start with the good news... At my nasty temporary job I’ve met an employment attorney who says he’ll take my EEOC lawsuit for free. He’s also hitting on …
Continue reading "The Pity Party, a found poem by Carolyn Bi, with illustrations by Hannah Hoch"
"If everyone were to remember what comes out of their butt, everyone would be more generous, show more solidarity," says Tui, in Letters from a Seducer, concluding one of literature's greatest discourses on farting during sex. Shocking, exquisite, mesmerizing, metaphysical, and, above all, obscene considerations abound in three recently, masterfully translated novels, With My Dog …
Continue reading "The Obscene Hilda Hilst: My June Column at Bookslut"
ON A GOOD DAY: AND THIS IS HOW I FEEL ON A BAD ONE:
"Sometimes we'd make a six-hundred-mile jump and stop only once," Billie Holiday wrote in her autobiography Lady Sings the Blues (1956) about touring in the Jim Crow South. "Then it would be a place where I couldn't get served, let alone crash the toilet without causing a scene. At first I used to be ashamed. …
The first of a few unforgettable times I saw Mavis Gallant was in 2004 in Paris. She was eighty-two and had agreed to meet me for an interview at the Café Dome in the Boulevard Montparnasse, around the corner from the apartment where she had been living for decades. When I arrived at the old …
"'Gentlemen Prefer Blondes' resonates today, as it did nearly a century ago." -Elizabeth Taylor, literary editor, The Chicago Tribune "First published by Liveright in 1925--and now brought back into print by the same house--the novel will find a new audience to delight, amaze and amuse." -Valerie Ryan, Shelf Awareness "I first saw the movie Gentleman …
Continue reading "New Edition of Anita Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes with an introduction by me"
On a good day: And this is how I feel on a bad one:
Jenny McPhee 