ON A GOOD DAY AND THIS IS HOW I FEEL ON A BAD ONE
This is how I feel….
on a bad day (via @bobbycaputo) and this is how I feel on a good one:
The Helens of Troy: My June Column at Bookslut
Ruby Blondell argues dazzlingly in Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation that Helen, daughter of Zeus and Leda, possessor of "the face that launched a thousand ships," was the greatest bombshell of all time. "No other character in ancient Greek myth," Blondell writes, "plays such a prominent role in so many disparate kinds of work: …
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ITALY’S MAGNIFICENT SEVEN
The damage Silvio Berlusconi has done to Italian politics and society is so overwhelmingly enormous it is very difficult as a citizen of that country (I have dual US/Italian citizenship) to feel anything but cynical and hopeless. For female Italian citizens, the situation is even more dire. Berlusconi’s blatant and public disdain for women both …
My May Column at Bookslut: TWO AMBITIOUS MIDWESTERN GIRLS: WILLA CATHER AND MARY MACLANE
For my fifteenth birthday my mother gave me Willa Cather's My Ántonia, a novel I devoured and adored. The subject -- the life of immigrant homesteaders in early twenthieth-century rural Nebraska -- was curious and compelling for a girl growing up in 1970s suburban New Jersey. The women in her story were unusually complicated, unpredictable, and …
In Praise of Fleas
Woman Catching Fleas, Georges de La Tour (ca. 1638) Along with Muriel Spark, Natalia Ginzburg convinced me that I might as well be a writer since I wanted it so bad even though I was terrified I would never be any good at it. They assured me, through their work, that being any good at …
I Died for Beauty: My April Column at Bookslut
What is it that drives a human being to pursue an idea to death? To make order out of chaos, to please, impress, defy, or outdo a parent, to win a Nobel Prize, to attain immortality, to find truth, to know beauty? Whatever the motivation, such inexorable determination has led to our greatest scientific breakthroughs. …
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The Delicate Meeting Place Between Imagination and Knowledge
“There is, it would seem, in the dimensional scale of the world a kind of delicate meeting place between imagination and knowledge, a point arrived at by diminishing large things and enlarging small ones, this is intrinsically artistic.” -Vladimir Nabokov Film by F. Percy Smith (1943)
HARDLY A FEMALE IN SIGHT: DAVID THOMSON’S THE BIG SCREEN My March Column at Bookslut
Midway through David Thomson's meandering and (self-) reflective history of world cinema, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies and What They Did to Us, he discusses British director David Lean's classic film Brief Encounter, a "woman's film" about an adulterous affair. Thomson is mystified by the film's "tacit admission of women's tragic position, …
Sisterhood at the Oscars, 1942
The story behind the picture: Olivia De Havilland (born July 1, 1916) and Joan Fontaine (born October 22, 1917) are sisters. In 1942, they were both nominated for an Oscar in the Best Actress category, Olivia for her role in Hold Back the Dawn and Joan for her role in Hitchcock's Suspicion. Joan won. "I …
Jenny McPhee 