"The global struggle for gender equality is the paramount moral struggle of this century." -Nicholas Kristoff “The clients are insecure drunks who believe whatever we tell them,” a young Cuban prostitute in a Cancun lap-dancing bar tells Lydia Cacho, a Mexican journalist who has devoted her career to investigating violence against women. “Some of them …
Happy Birthday (yesterday) Sofia Loren, Donna Popolana
"Her feet are too big. Her nose is too long. He teeth are uneven. She has the neck, as one of her rivals has put it, of 'a Neapolitan giraffe.' Her waist seems to begin in the middle of her thighs, and she has big, half-bushel hips. She runs like a fullback. Her hands are …
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Never Weaken (1921)
A half hour of some pretty inspirational filmmaking from Harold Lloyd to cheer up your day Never Weaken
THE (IMAGINED) WOMAN READER AND MALE ANXIETY: My September Column at Bookslut
Recently, in The New York Review of Books, Elaine Blair wrote, "Our American male novelists, I suspect, are worried about being unloved as writers -- specifically by the female reader. This is the larger humiliation looming behind the many smaller fictional humiliations of their heroes, and we can see it in the way the characters' …
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A Perfect Paragraph from Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford “In electing to be peculiarly English…
"In electing to be peculiarly English in habits and in as much of his temperament as he could control -- for, though no man can choose the land of his birth or his ancestry, he can, if he have industry and determination, so watch over himself as materially to modify his automatic habits -- Tietjens …
Sisters in Sicily: In Search of Mula Bandha at the Villa Zinna
As serendipity would have it, or some higher power in any case, one of the board members of the Ibla Music Festival, the graceful and joyful Rebecca Madsen, is also a recent graduate of Jivamukti teacher training. The first morning here at the glorious Villa Zinna, I came upon Rebecca under a Sicilian Carruba Tree, …
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Sisters in Sicily: Mozzarella Direct from the Bufola
Martha and I, and our families, have come to the Ibla Grand Prize International Music Competitions and Festival 2012 in Sicily for ten days inspired by the magnificent Dr. Salvatore Moltisanti, President of the Ibla Foundation. On our first night in south eastern Sicily, a World Heritage Site of Eight Late Baroque Towns, Dr. Moltisanti …
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THE SULTANA OF SUBVERSION: THREE HARD-BOILED NOVELS BY DOROTHY B. HUGHES: My July Column at Bookslut
The serial killer Dix Steele in Dorothy B. Hughes's 1947 noir classic In a Lonely Place professes to his friend Brub Nicolai, an LAPD detective assigned to the "strangler" case, to be writing a detective novel. Brub responds: "Who you stealing from, Chandler or Hammett or Gardner?" Hughes herself stole brilliantly from her fellow pulp …
I AM ITALIAN AND…
Mario Balotelli is one striker to watch in all senses. Can't wait for The World Cup in 2014.
BLOOD ON THE PAPER: THE BARBED LEGACY OF LILLIAN HELLMAN–My June Column at Bookslut
Filmmaker Elia Kazan, venting his fury against Lillian Hellman's memoir Scoundrel Time in which she skewers him and other liberal artists and intellectuals for their lily-livered performances during the McCarthy Era, raged against "this bitch with balls" who "went after what she wanted the way a man does." What Kazan once considered a vitriolic attack …
Jenny McPhee 