 |
|
|
In Paperback
Now! Thursday July 28th/Friday 29th: Tracy on BBC-5's Up All Night 9:30 pm Eastern USA/2:30 am GMT with Dr. Petra and Dotun Read an excerpt |
|
|
| Sunday, March 13, 2005 Almost Pink? Thanks to Adam Ash, I've just been alerted to this new piece on Beatrice.com by Jennifer Wiener (author of Good In Bed.) According to Jennifer, "respectable" fiction written by women takes a pretty formulaic approach to men: they're "cads and dodgers, liars and cheats, plagiarists and philanderers... And if you crave a happy ending, forget about that, too. The best you can get is ambiguity, perhaps tinged with the faint hope of things getting better." Indeed. So formulaic writing's not just a "chick thing" after all. It may even be a "woman" thing -- a, gasp, feminist thing? Once it was fashionable to divide American authors into the pale face types (think "Washington Square")and the redskin genre (the carryings on of Walt Whitman.) Now we have Meg Wolitzer and Jennifer Weiner categorizing female novelists as Pink Ladies (spinners of confectionary chick lit) or Grey Ladies (the highbrow team.) But why are we so bogged down in the here and now struggle between candy-pink (Confessions of a Shopaholic) and almost-black? (Unless -- yes, that's a real book title.) What I recommend, if you want to understand the history of chick lit -- and I know you really want to -- is a long session with Claudine. She was Colette's first fictional creation. Quite pink, I'd say, and not at all gray. For an informed take on the Claudine series, you need Judith Thurman's bio of a great chick writer who just kept evolving. It's not that Claudine (at school, in Paris, married, and more) holds the key to ALL things chick. There are plenty of other early examples. But this is a good place to start: An omni-edition with an intro by Thurman. Personally, I cut my teeth on the tiny trashy paperback Claudines -- no highbrow overview to offset the girlish voice of these stories. And I preferred having Claudine doled out in cupcake portions. But I enjoy anything by Thurman concerning anything by Colette. What she saw at the revolution... A more nuanced reading of the situation in Lebanon is provided by Mary Wakefield in The Spectator this week. More nuanced than what? you ask. I think it's like the price of the yacht. If you have to ask, well, just read what she has to say. It's the March 12 issue, cover story: A revolution made for TV. Worth registering for... and very down to earth. http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=5793 Lie back and think of Edith... Could the 21st century Wharton turn out to be a man? My review of Snobs by one Julian Fellowes just went up at Asian Review of Books. Also check out, in ARB, Shahbano Bilgrami's recent review of In Times of Siege and other cool stuff. Such as? Well, how about The Ramayana for Children, beautifully sorted out here by Karmel Schreyer. http://www.asianreviewofbooks.com/arb/article.php?article=520 Wednesday, March 02, 2005 Quote of the Day "Autodidacts can never be done with learning. Your average complacent graduate has some notion of their own intelligence, but autodidacts are only familiar with their ignorance." -- Don Paterson, poet and winner of the Forward, TS Eliot and Whitbread poetry prizes Here, he explains why this is so: http://education.independent.co.uk/news/story.jsp?story=615190 It's because the autodidact "will never have a certificate that says 'OK - you can stop, now'..." A fascinating discussion about the school-leaving age and the role of education. Recommended reading. |