(Source: julipinup) (photograph by Laura McPhee)
THIS IS HOW I FEEL
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, …
