Are you tired of looking in the mirror and wanting to have a more beautiful smile? Cosmetic dentistry can enhance your smile. Cosmetic dentistry services can help you in getting your much-desired smile by fixing gaps in your teeth, addressing chipped teeth, teeth whitening, and more.
Cosmetic dental services are often integrated with other restorative treatments to restore the form or appearance and function of your teeth. For state of the art cosmetic dental treatment in Skowhegan, Maine, you may make an appointment with Dr. Mohammed Imam and Dr. Shafiulla Khan at the Maine Center for Dental Medicine.
Top reasons for choosing cosmetic dentistry for restoring smiles include: improving dental health, raising self-esteem, improving appearance, increasing professional success, and even improving relationships.
Cosmetic dentistry provides several options to close gaps between your teeth, which include bonding and veneers. The procedure of bonding can be applied to fix smaller gaps and chips. Veneers can help in creating a whole new smile and shape for larger gaps. The process is fairly easy, but can provide huge rewards.
Teeth whitening is an excellent solution. Many methods can be used for addressing the issue, even for sensitive teeth. You should talk to your cosmetic dentist. A restored brighter smile not only makes you look younger but also increases your confidence and self-esteem.
Nowadays, many adults are choosing to straighten their teeth. For this, clear braces provide a wonderful option. People do not even notice you are wearing clear braces. You will likely feel more comfortable during social situations with a beautiful straight smile. An attractive smile will also boost your confidence.
Experts believe that amongst important physical feature, the smile outranks the body, eyes, and hair. Others may judge you by your smile. Also, your smile is an essential element by which you view and perceive yourself in the mirror each day.
Doesn't your confidence soar when people greet you with a smiling face? It activates the reward system in your brain. People are more likely to give back a smile as a result of the release of positive chemicals. Smiling and eye contact help you to be viewed as an approachable and friendly person.
Cosmetic dentistry allows you to place your best face forward. Now you can smile the way you always desired and create happy relationships not just at home but in your office as well as around town!
You feel more motivated to maintain the results with an investment in improving your smile. You may change your eating and drinking habits with an improved smile. You may start avoiding foods and drinks that can darken and stain your teeth. Avoiding items such as coffee, sodas, junk foods, and cigarettes help in improving your overall dental health.
You may experience headaches because of misaligned teeth. An unnatural bite can lead to a severe headache and tooth pain. Crooked teeth exert extreme pressure on the gums and nerves, which can send pain to your head. You can get relief by fixing the problem with cosmetic dentistry procedures like orthodontics.
Misaligned, missing, cracked, and decayed teeth can make chewing difficult and painful. You can get these problems corrected with cosmetic dentistry and make eating a pleasurable activity again.
Damaged, cracked, and chipped teeth are highly susceptible to decay. They can further lead to serious dental problems like the periodontal disease. Get these problems fixed with cosmetic dentistry and reduce the risk of gum disease.
Improve your smile, reduce your stress, and increase your happiness and confidence with cosmetic dentistry.


text:
Xbox Series X price & date revealed, Assassin's Creed Valhalla set as launch title
September 9, 2020, 3:27 PM ET
Source: Microsoft
Well, at least half of the next-gen gaming picture is complete. Preempted by leaks that threatened to mar a planned reveal set for next week, Microsoft went ahead today and gave players the news they've been waiting months to hear: when they'll get their hands on those shiny new Xbox consoles — and how much they're gonna cost.
Only a day after revealing a $299 price for the smaller, disc-less Xbox Series S, Microsoft opened the information floodgates all the way, saying the flagship Xbox Series X console will arrive with a $499 price tag, and announcing that both consoles will be available on Nov. 10. The move all but officially kicks off the next console generation, with industry watchers predicting date and pricing details on Sony's hugely anticipated PlayStation 5 are likely to follow sooner, rather than later, after Microsoft's big reveal.
Thanking fans for their patience, Xbox chief Phil Spencer told Twitter followers Wednesday that the deluge of info was meant to flood the internet a week from now — "but oh well…"
I know it's been a wait for price, date, pre-order date. Thanks to the community for their support and encouragement :-) Great to see the reactions, really proud of how the team handled the unscripted announce (was supposed to be next week but oh well...). Can't wait for launch. https://t.co/CxXWDVmmNw
— Phil Spencer (@XboxP3) September 9, 2020
Pre-orders for both consoles will open up on Sept. 22, though all this pricing and dating info weren't the only surprises to accompany the long-awaited news. In an announcement timed to match Microsoft's Xbox reveal, Ubisoft said Assassin's Creed Valhalla — the Norse-themed next installment in the hallowed action franchise — will release right alongside the new consoles as a day-one game.
Assassin's Creed Valhalla launches with Xbox Series X | S on November 10, 2020.
Build the legend of a Viking raider on any console.
Upgrade from Xbox One to Xbox Series X at no additional cost. pic.twitter.com/dGukVP5U8g
— Assassin's Creed (@assassinscreed) September 9, 2020
On top of that, Microsoft also announced a huge new perk for anyone who plans to pick up an Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription to go along with their new hardware. Access to the entire EA Play online service — which otherwise costs $4.99 per month as a completely separate buy-in — will be bundled with the Ultimate version of Xbox Game Pass (as well as Game Pass for PC) at no additional charge.
That means a $14.99 per-month Ultimate sign-up will grant you instant immersion in dozens of games in EA's library — including Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, as well as all the big EA gaming franchises you know and love — from Mass Effect to The Sims to Plants vs. Zombies to Dragon Age and more. The highest tier on Microsoft's gaming subscription menu, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate also offers day-one access to Xbox exclusives, anywhere from 2-4 free new games each month, and always-on play for a library of more than 100 titles drawn from both time-honored classics like the Halo series, as well as recent releases like Wasteland 3.
With the plan now firmly in place for Xbox fans, the ball's now in Sony's court to make the next move. As of today, pricing and release date information for the PlayStation 5 is now the biggest mystery in all of gaming — but we likely won't have to wait long before the other half of the next-gen picture is complete.
In search of Thor's ultimate nemesis, Avengers: Endgame's second biggest villain
GoldenEye 007: Footage surfaces from Rare's abandoned remake of James Bond's N64 classic

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


The Warrior Country 5K Race with the Boots & Daisy Dukes Fun Run (1/2 mile) will take place on Tree Town Festival Saturday, May 27, 2017. 10% of all proceeds go to Iowa Donor Network!
Events details can be found here or below.
Short-sleeve t-shirts while supplies last. 1st 100 participants receive goody bags.
Other drawings for all participants.


Talented youngster Shiven Khosla held top seeded Grandmaster Vladimir Baklan of Ukraine to a creditable draw in the first round of Groningen International Open chess tournament in Groningen, The Netherlands.
Playing white on the top board, it was a chanceless effort by Shiven who played solidly right through to deny the top seed a first round victory.
On a day that saw a handful of upsets, Grandmaster and former world junior champion Abhijeet Gupta survived a scare at the hands of FIDE Master Toms Kantans of Latvia.
Two Indian International Masters in the fray had an easy outing in the opener with Sahaj Grover outplaying Nick Bijlsma of Holland and Ashwin proving too good for local hopeful Julian Van Overdam.
Vahe Baghdasaryan of Armenia caused a major flutter defeating Grandmaster and fourth seed Mark Bluvshtein of Canada. The Armenian was in his element right through the game and stunned the Canadian with black pieces to open his account in style.
Amongst other important results in the day, Grandmaster Friso Nijboer of Holland also dropped a half point against compatriot Wim Heemskerk while defending champion Illya outplayed Alexander Donchenko to start his campaign on a positive note in this 56-players strong open event.
Shiven employed the Alapin Sicilian and Baklan, knowing that the opening nearly fizzles out to be completely level after correct play by black, went for one of the complicated middle game position that has lots of pieces on the board.
Shiven was undeterred in the middle game as he retained a small advantage while Baklan could not make any headway other than going for trading of pieces at regular intervals.
Both players reached a level heavy pieces endgame and after Shiven traded the rooks the outcome of the game was never in doubt. Shiven forced the draw vide perpetual checks.
Abhijeet Gupta survived a rare scare when he blundered from a winning position in the middle game.
Playing the white side of a Grunfeld defense, it was not a good start by Abhijeet who had to recover after he accidentally played a hand move only to realise that he will have to play with a stranded king in the centre for the remaining part of the game.
Kantans made an early mistake though and Abhijeet was on top with precise calculations. The Latvian sacrificed a piece which was another error giving Abhijeet a winning position instantly till disaster struck and he blundered the piece back. It was a long drill and a longer path to recovery. Kantans went for an erroneous plan again and handed the point in a study-like finish.
Sahaj Grover was not stretched in a Sicilian defense game by Nick Bijlsma and won in just 25 moves while Ashwin had to work harder for a sweet victory in the end.
(Round 1) (Indians unless stated): Shiven Khosla drew Vkladimir Baklan (Ukr); Abhijeet Gupta beat Toms Kantans (Lat); Ullrich Krause (Ger) lost to Ernst Sipke (Ned); Mark Bluvshtein (Can) lost to Vahe Baghdarsayan (Arm); Afek Yochanan (Isr) lost to Zaven Andriasian (Arm); Friso Nijboer (Ned) drew Wim Heemskerk (Ned); Christian Hess (Ger) lost to Jan Werle (Ned); Dejan Bojkov (Bul) bt Olga Stjazhkina (Rus); Mark Lyell (Eng) lost to Arkadij Rotstein (Isr); Julian Van Overdam (Ned) lost to Ashwin Jayaram.


text:
Каяса́нська сільська рада () — сільське поселення у складі Щучанського району Курганської області Росії.

Адміністративний центр — село Каясан.

Населення сільського поселення становить 1081 особа (2017; 1374 у 2010, 1519 у 2002).

Склад
До складу сільського поселення входять:

Примітки

Поселення Щучанського району

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaWikipedia


text:
Australian Literature. The Independent Woman. The Lone Hand
A Life
AWW Gen.s
AWW Gen 0
Miles Franklin
The Independent Woman
HomeFeminism
Monkey Grip, Helen Garner
January 16, 2022 January 16, 2022 wadholloway Australian, Feminism, Literature	AWW Gen 4, Book Review, Helen Garner, Melbourne
AWW Gen 4 Week, 16-23 Jan 2022
Monkey Grip (1977) is famously Helen Garner's first novel. It comes mid-generation, marking a clear point of no return, a clean break with with Australian writing's past. If any one novel represents AWW Gen 4, then this is it.
When I first read Monkey Grip I saw it in the tradition of the Beats – Kerouac, Burroughs, and as I read more widely and time passed, of Kathy Acker and Irvine Welsh, leading on to Australia's brief Grunge movement in the 1990s – Ettler, Tsiolkas, McGahan. With this re-reading, I don't resile from those connections, but I've also read a lot more Garner. This is more than just living poor and taking drugs, this is Garner's deep connection to co-operative living, to co-operation between women, to caring for others, and of course to autofiction.
The book it now reminds me of most closely is her fictionalised account of her friend's treatment for late-stage cancer, The Spare Room (2008).
In December 1972 Garner, who was then 30, was fired from her job as a teacher for talking dirty to her 11-13 year old pupils: " …the words some people think of as dirty words are the best words, the right words to use when you are talking about sex. So I'm not going to say "sexual intercourse", I'm going to say "fuck" and I'm going to say "cock" and "cunt" too, so we'd better get that straight. Is that OK?"
Joseph Steinberg writes in an ALS article that "the terms of Garner's firing inform the countercultural realism of her first novel Monkey Grip (1977), which is unabashedly fluent in, and indeed narratively yearns for, various forms of the four-letter contraband that got her sacked in the first place." He quotes Kerryn Goldsworthy: "[male] reviewers were made uneasy 'by frank, serious, knowledgeable utterances about sexuality made by a woman' in Garner's early novels and sought 'to query her status as a literary author: in a word, to sack her' (again)".
In Monkey Grip, Nora – who stands in for Garner – is a single mother, with a five year old daughter, Gracie, living in share houses, old workers' cottages in nineteenth century terraces around the CBD and Melbourne University (both presences which are felt but hardly ever mentioned); if I've got it right, first in Fitzroy, then near the Victoria Markets, and then back in Fitzroy.
It was early summer.
And everything, as it always does, began to heave and change.
It wasn't as if I didn't already have somebody to love. There was Martin, teetering as many were that summer on the dizzy edge of smack… But he went up north for a fortnight and idly, at the turning of the year, I fell in love with our friend Javo, the bludger, just back from getting off dope in Hobart.
Or as Steinberg summarises: "Nora needs to fuck Javo, Javo needs dope; Nora needs Javo not to need dope, but Javo needs it to need Nora, and Nora needs to be needed by Javo, 'must learn not to need him' though he needs her, for when it is her turn to need him he will 'he will have nothing to give'. 'Smack habit, love habit – what's the difference?', muses Nora midway through the novel."
Gracie is an odd presence throughout, bored witless in her first year at school, already able to read, and at home, a Jiminy Cricket, seeing everything, an independent spirit with her own opinions, her own life.
One of the most interesting things about the story telling is the complete absence of back story for any of the characters. You get to know them as they appear on the page, entirely without explanation. Anything that's not relevant at that moment, you don't hear about.
Kevin Brophy in another ALS essay writes about Monkey Grip's reception over time. Especially early on, male reviewers were unhappy with Garner's focus on women's issues; Garner was an author who 'talks dirty and passes it off as realism'; male and female reviewers, as was always the case with works by women, shrugged it off as a love story; almost no attention was paid to the innovation in both writing and subject matter. Brophy suggests an alternative reading, one which was resisted by nearly every reviewer:
The text proposes that people can throw conventions aside and reinvent themselves and their social relations in a process of change that is self-imposed, liminal, unpredictable and spontaneous. These new possibilities involve the reader in a world where communal living and single parenting can be the norm, where children are relatively independent and have insights to offer on the behaviour of the adults around them, a world where women insist on meeting men as equals. It is a world where a woman can speak and write of sex explicitly, dispassionately, even 'tastelessly' in a literary work — an accomplishment long granted to male literary figures. In these and other ways Monkey Grip invites readers to recognise and reassess the conventions by which they take their 'realist' fiction and by which they live.
Today, forty something years later, Garner's autofiction is still controversial. In 1977 it was just plain un-literary.
I haven't made it clear, but we make our way through a year and a bit of inner Melbourne life; hot summer days at the Fitzroy baths; cycling through Carlton and Fitzroy's achingly familiar plane tree lined streets; in and out of each others' share houses; in and out of beds in all the painful permutations of 'open' relationships; struggling to a resolution.
One last quote from Brophy:
[T]here is a further, more socially fundamental and political perspective on addiction offered in the novel. The patriarchal value system— the ideology that socialises us from childhood—is here presented as the overwhelming addiction suffered by characters who are wanting to reinvent value systems for social relations.
Garner is a revolutionary, remaking the way we think about living, about bringing up children, about relationships; remaking the way we think about Literature. If you haven't read Monkey Grip yet, do yourself a favour.
Helen Garner, Monkey Grip, Penguin/McPhee Gribble, Melbourne, 1977. 245pp.
Joseph Steinberg, Helen Garner's Education, Australian Literary Studies, 28 Oct 2021
Kevin Brophy, Helen Garner's Monkey Grip, The Construction of an Author and her Work, Australian Literary Studies, 1 Oct 1992
Lisa/ANZLitLovers is first off the block for AWW Gen 4 Week with a review of Amy Witting's, The Visit (here) and Sue/Whispering Gums has promised to be on topic in tomorrow's Monday Musings, and now (Sunday afternoon) I see she's reviewed a Janet Turner Hospital short story (here) as well.
Re my North America Project 2022, I'm sorry but it's weeks since I've been in the truck so I have not made a start on Their Eyes Were Watching God audiobook. As I have Octavia Butler's Kindred on my shelves, I am reading that and will put up a review on 31 Jan. Next month is still The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and March is Nalo Hopkinson's Midnight Robber (BIP, I know you suggested Salt Roads, thank you, but I decided to go with MR because it is earlier.) I'll advise other months, including Their Eyes, when I get more organized.
AWW Gen 4: Postmodern?
January 10, 2022 January 10, 2022 wadholloway Australian, Feminism, Literature, Writers	AWW Gen 4, Postmodernism
AWW Gen 4 is (Australian women) writers who were first published in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. I have written elsewhere that the changeover from Gen 3 was marked by the end, in Australia, of a white, Anglo monoculture – where our major 'other' was the large Irish Catholic, largely working class, minority. Gen 4, then, begins with waves of 'Mediterranean' immigration, from Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Lebanon; the 'youth culture' of the sixties; Womens Lib; Civil Rights; a release from the sexual constraints of the 1950s; much greater access to tertiary education, and indeed to late secondary education; and a widely shared prosperity which, by the end of the eighties had crashed headlong into the neo-liberalism of Regan and Thatcher (and of Keating and Howard), though it was another couple of decades before we began to recognise what we had lost.
I have a problem in that I enjoy reading Lit. Theory but very little of it sticks. There is no doubt though that at the beginning of the period, the majority of writers were still working in the Modernist tradition (see last year's Late Modernity), and that the ideas of Postmodernism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism being explored overseas, were both poorly understood and only slowly taken up.
Clearly postmodern works like Thomas Keneally's A Dutiful Daughter and David Ireland's The Unknown Industrial Prisoner, both 1971, were beacons in a sea of conventionality.
Keneally, (Bethany's Book) and probably every other author at least once, pissfarted around with the idea of conflating the book being read and the author of the book being read with the book and author being written about (which Miles Franklin did earlier and better in My Career Goes Bung); and my feelings about Peter Carey's taking up of the fashion of Magic Realism, beginning with Illywhacker (1985) don't bear repeating.
Putting the author into the work always seemed to me to be a straight riposte to the 'Death of the Author', and pointless after it had been done once; MR was a fashion that worked when used sparingly but soon became every aspiring author's new toy. If you want more, the ALS Journal has an interesting review of Maria Takolander's Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (2007)*.
Other aspects under the postmodern umbrella are irony, unreliability, commercialism, pop culture. Modernism was a serious project to understand the nature of writing and of the self; without the politics of feminism and post-colonialism, postmodernism is largely a cop out, promoted by the left and taken up joyously by the right as cover for their aversion to truth telling.
The first writer in our Gen 4, in more than one sense, is Thea Astley, whose first work, Girl with a Monkey, came out in 1958. Leigh Dale says that while Astley's fiction is post-colonial in that much of it is concerned with the consequences of the colonisation of Australia, and particularly of course, Queensland –
Astley's novels have a tendency to reject the recuperation of resistance that has been the major task of much post-colonial literary and cultural criticism, and to emphasise both the devastation caused by colonialism on indigenous populations, and the lasting refusal of colonial regimes to recognise the causes or effects of that devastation.
This is understandable, both because she is a pioneer in the recognition of the violence done to Indigenous peoples, and because "the recuperation of resistance", establishing that the Indigenous were more than just victims, is the task, in the first place, of Indigenous writers.
Astley was an innovator in her subject matter, but in her writing she was concerned to write in the Modernist tradition, seeking reassurance from Patrick White, and most similar probably in the denseness and precision of her writing to her contemporary Randolph Stow. Still, I noted in my recent review of Astley's Reaching Tin River (1990) that Astley had clearly, over time, absorbed some of the tropes of postmodernism, playfulness say, allowing two characters 70 years in time apart, to be in some way aware of each other.
Two other AWW Gen 4 writers I've reviewed this year are Sara Dowse and Carmel Bird. Bird was the recipient of the 2016 Patrick White Award. The judges wrote: "Using elements of the Gothic, fantasy and fairy tale as easily as realism, Bird can be surreal, quirky and macabre, but also humorous, humane and warm." I struggled with the postmodernism of The Bluebird Café (1990) but that might have been just me. I gave Milly Bird's The Family Skeleton (2016) for xmas. How that will go I cannot say.
Dowse I've run into a couple of times in the newspapers. In reviews of work by Australian poet Kate Jennings, and US feminist Shiela Rowbotham, Dowse revisits her own time as an activist in the sixties and seventies. In the period covered by West Block (1975-76) Dowse is already bogged down attempting to get women's policies past an unfriendly (Fraser/Liberal) government. But there was a time of hope before that.
[Kate Jennings'] Trouble has brought it back: the demos, the passion, the laughs, the daring. Subtitled Evolution of a Radical, the book is a selection of Jennings's writing from 1970 to 2010. The first entry is the raw, spitting speech Jennings hurled at a 1970 Vietnam moratorium rally on the front lawn of Sydney University – the opening salvo of Women's Liberation in Australia. Did we actually speak like that?
That day, at that moment, I was 850 kms down the road, with the Melb Uni contingent listening to similar speeches in Treasury Gardens prior to the March – 100,000 people or more, all the length of Bourke St. What a day!
My first review for the Week will be Helen Garner's Monkey Grip (1977). The women's movement for Garner's Nora is already just a hum in the background, women living co-operatively, but still seemingly at the beck and call of men.
I'm looking forward to seeing how this period, the beginning of adulthood for many of us, appears to you. And please, let me know in Comments what you hope to read (and review!).
Leigh Dale, Colonial History and Post Colonial Fiction: The Writing of Thea Astley, Australian Literary Studies, 1 May 1999 (here)
Karen Lamb, "Yrs Patrick", Southerly, Vol 72.1 2012
Sara Dowse, Trouble, Age, Melbourne, 23 April 2010
Sara Dowse, Days of Hope, Inside Story, 17 December 2021 (here)
"Maria Takolander's ambitious project, Catching Butterlies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground, seeks to clear up the confusion surrounding the literary term 'magical realism', an oxymoron which Takolander says has become 'a dumping ground for the convenient disposal of any fiction that deviates from or experiments with the rules of realism' …
Takolander goes on to argue that using MR to represent the spirit lives underlying Indigenous cultures is necessarily inauthentic. The reviewer (and I) disagree:
"However, rather than suggesting that reality itself does not exist, [non-European authors] propose that there are other ways of experiencing it. Such magical realist authors recognise and expose the cultural clashes, merges and changes in postcolonial situations, and express it through magical realism. Such works are not, or not necessarily, 'inauthentic' because they present twentieth-century versions of indigenous cultures.
Tanja Schwalm, Review of Maria Takolander, Catching Butterflies: Bringing Magical Realism to Ground (2007) in Australian Literary Studies, 1 June 2009.
Vida, Jacqueline Kent
June 7, 2021 wadholloway Australian, Biography, Feminism	Book Review, Jacqueline Kent, Melbourne, Miles Franklin, Suffragism, Vida Goldstein
Given that I specialise in unmarried turn of the C20th women, Vida Goldstein (1869-1949) is one of my favourite people, and I have been meaning to read this recent (2020) biography for some time. I finally got it on BorrowBox and listened on the way over to Melbourne. I had a heap of deliveries throughout rural Victoria and had set aside Tuesday to get them finished, but as it turns out, I finished early, Mum is unvisitable in these Covid times, and so for once I had a day off. Hence this review.
Vida Goldstein was a suffragist, a pacifist and a socialist; she stood for Federal Parliament, unsuccessfully, three times; she undertook popular speaking tours of England and the US.
Kent's biography, and her reading of it, are pretty dry. There is none of the life which made Sylvia Martin's Passionate Friends for instance so enjoyable. Passionate Friends centres on Mabel Singleton and Mary Fullerton who were committee members of Goldstein's Women's Political Association, and on their friend, Miles Franklin, but provides lots of detail about early WPA meetings.
I imagine there are not many mistakes of fact, but Kent makes a couple in regards to Franklin, whom she claims for Vida as a significant friend. MF only lived in Melbourne, Goldstein's home town, once, in about 1904. The two met then – MF had introductions from Rose Scott, the Sydney suffragist with whom she had stayed in 1902 (see My Career Goes Bung) – and they remained lifelong correspondents. They met again, briefly, in 1911, when both were in London. And except maybe in later years when MF was back in Australia and moving around a bit, that was it.
For whatever reason MF didn't attend Goldstein's meetings in 1904 – she didn't meet Mary Fullerton until the 1920s. And in London they were attracted by different branches of the suffragist movement – not mentioned by Kent. Goldstein was a firm supporter of the Pankhursts' Suffragettes, until they took a pro-war stance in 1914; while Franklin was a member of a breakaway group – the Women's Freedom League.
What really got up my nose was the sentence which went "when she was about 20 Franklin's family moved from her birthplace Talbingo to Penrith" [then a country town on the outskirts of Sydney]. Talbingo was MF's birthplace, but it was her mother's mother's home. Mrs Franklin famously rode 60 miles through the snow to get there for the confinement. The Franklin's lived at the Franklin family property Brindabella until MF was 8 or 9, when Mr Franklin moved them all to a dairy farm nearer to Goulburn. My memory is that MF had already left home before the move to Penrith and was a trainee nurse, though she was familiar enough with the town to set her second published novel there, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn.
I don't have any more criticisms, well one small one, and a surprising one coming from me, Vida is overwhelmingly parochial, nothing important (in suffragism etc) seems to happen except in Victoria. (White) female suffrage was achieved in Victoria in 1908, in NSW and Federally in 1902, and in South Aust in 1894. Rose Scott and Louisa Lawson in Sydney are barely mentioned; Goldstein's struggling newspaper the Woman's Sphere is never compared with Lawson's much more successful Dawn. The mother of Australian suffragism, Catherine Helen Spence, a South Australian, does not come into it until she congratulates Goldstein after her first campaign for the Senate.
Kent awards Goldstein the accolade "the first woman [in the British Empire] to nominate for Federal Parliament", though eventually four women stood in that 1903 election; and Spence had been Australia's 'first female political candidate' when she stood for the Federal Convention in 1897.
I'll skip over Goldstein's adherence to Christian Science, which played an important part in her life, to the extent that when she retired from politics she became a minister. There were two questions in my mind, coming into this book: How did Vida get started? and what about Cecelia John?
Kent is discreet about John, whom Sylvia Martin implies might have been in a relationship with Goldstein. John was a flamboyant type, I picture her on a white charger with a green and purple standard leading a peace march (maybe in connection with the first conscription debate of WWI). When she came into the WPA she was quickly given responsible positions and the two travelled together to England. That's about it really. One time I wrote to Martin about one of her books and suggested John might be her next subject, but probably not.
So how did Vida get started? Her father, despite his surname, was an Irish protestant (his father was a Polish Jew). Her mother, Isabella, was from the Scottish/Australian squattocracy of Victoria's Western District. Mr Goldstein was in business, in rural Victoria and then in Melbourne and was able to send Vida to PLC, Melbourne's principal girls' school (other alumnae include Henry Handel Richardson and Nettie Palmer). Both parents were involved in charities and Isabella was with Annette Bear-Crawford in obtaining the funding for Melbourne's first women's hospital, the Queen Victoria, in 1897.
Initially, Vida and her sisters supported themselves by running a co-ed preparatory school. But Vida quickly discovered an aptitude for organizing and speaking alongside her mother and Bear-Crawford, and by the time the latter died unexpectedly in 1899, Vida Goldstein was undisputed leader of the radical women's movement in Victoria.
The book goes into some detail in relation to each of Vida's campaigns, for the Senate and for the House of Representatives seat of Kooyong; her attempts to get women's suffrage through the Victorian state parliament – always stymied by the upper house, the Legislative Council; her public speaking and her newspaper.
During the War Australian suffragists generally took a pacifist position and Goldstein received some flack about her name (its German-ness rather than its Jewishness). She seems to have become increasingly open about declaring herself a socialist, without ever abandoning her essential upper-middle-class persona.
This is a book I needed to read, for all its imperfections. I'm still a Vida fan and, while I might argue with her emphases, I'm sure Kent got the facts of her life right.
Jacqueline Kent, Vida, Viking, Melbourne, 2020.
Not Meeting Mr Right, Anita Heiss
July 5, 2020 wadholloway Aboriginal, Australian, Feminism, Literature	Anita Heiss, Book Review, Sydney
ANZ LitLovers Indigenous Literature Week
Anita Heiss (1968- ) is a Wiradjuri woman, an academic and an author. I have previously reviewed her Dhuuluu-yala: To Talk Straight (here) on who should write Aboriginal stories, and plan hope to review her Growing Up Aboriginal in Australia towards the end of this Week.
As well as her academic work, Heiss has published a number of novels in the genre she likes to call Choc.Lit, ie. Chick.Lit with strong Black women protagonists. From the reviews I have looked at these are all as didactic as they are romantic. Not Meeting Mr Right (2007) was her first.
My younger daughter has been telling me off about using the expression Chick.Lit but I will leave her and Dr Heiss to fight that out between them. To be fair, I think that Gee's concern was that men were too liable to characterise women's writing as Chick.Lit. instead of engaging with their valid concerns about personal development and relationships.
Heiss's mother is a Wiradjuri woman from Cowra in central NSW and her father was born in Austria. Heiss was born in Sydney and went to an eastern suburbs Catholic girls school. Alice, Heiss's heroine, lives in the eastern suburbs, has an Aboriginal mother and an Austrian father, and teaches history at a Catholic girls school. That is not to say that Not Meeting Mr Right is autobiographical, but rather that it draws on her lived experience. At the time of publication Heiss, "who lives in Sydney, believes in love at first sight and enjoys being single!", was going on 40. Alice, who lives in a flat overlooking Bondi beach, is 28 and determined to be married before she's 30.
There is one other issue to be dealt with before I go on. And that is is that I sometimes find fiction by Australian Indigenous writers awkward to read, the most recent example being Melissa Lucashenko's Too Much Lip. That is, that the flow of the words doesn't feel right. In one of the many teaching moments spread through this book, Heiss addresses this:
I'd always thought the written and spoken word were very different in the white world. It's so obvious in their literature. Aboriginal writing is closely aligned to the spoken word. We write like we speak, and reality is, that's how our people read too.
What she leaves unsaid is that spoken Aboriginal English has significant differences, in its rhythms as well as vocabulary, from what we might call received English. I feel this sometimes just within 'white' English, moving from city to country and from lit.blogging to truck driving.
Two months after her twenty-eighth birthday Alice attends a ten-year school reunion
I'd been a self-conscious teenager who never really fit in – me being a Blackfella from La Perouse and the rest of the girls whitefellas from Vaucluse and Rose Bay. A triangular peg in a round hole, I used to say.
These days, Alice, probably shapelier and prettier than her former schoolmates, doing well as a senior teacher, is made to feel inadequate in another way. All the others are flashing engagement and wedding rings, the talk is all weddings and babies (It doesn't help that Alice's mother is applying the same pressure). Of course Alice "loves being single", but by the end of the night she has decided that she will find and marry Mr Right before she turns 30.
She calls a meeting of her friendship group and they come around immediately to begin strategising – Dannie, happily married with children; Peta, a serial dater, who does something high-powered in Indigenous Education policy; and Liz a lawyer with the Aboriginal Legal Service. The upshot is that she will do what it takes – blind dates, classified ads, attend professional gatherings … to get a man who is 'single, straight and wanting to be in a relationship', financially secure, shows affection in public etc, etc. but she will not 'put out on the first date', date friends' exes, or get picked up in a pub. There's also stuff about star signs, which I ignored.
There follows, over the course of 20 months, a series of meetings with men who might fit the bill. Her friends line her up, her mother wishes to line her up with her best friend's gay son, her garbo turns out to have a degree in something and to be an altogether nice guy; she dates white guys, Indigenous guys, a Samoan guy – who is just getting into bed when she mentions Wedding Island on the horizon and he disappears in a cloud of dust; she dates a lilywhite guy who is sure he is black – if by dating you mean drinking till you black out and waking up on the floor of a strange flat beside a man you've never seen before; early on she dates a friend of Dannie's who might be perfect but rejects him because his face is pockmarked with chickenpox scars. Yes, Alice is a lookist.
The teaching moments deal with how to introduce your Black girlfriend; 'significant moments for women in Australian history' (interestingly she has Cathy Freeman's gold medal at the Sydney Olympics but not Evonne Goolagong's 14 Grand Slams); other stuff I forgot to write down; not reading Murdoch newspapers (duh!).
A couple of guys are nearly ok. An awful lot of makeup is applied and gin drunk to not much effect. More desperation comedy than romantic comedy. But enjoyable.
Anita Heiss, Not Meeting Mr Right, Bantam/Random House, Sydney, 2007
The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf
March 31, 2020 wadholloway English, Feminism, Literature	Book Review, Modernism, Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an important early English modernist and first wave feminist, and The Voyage Out (1915) is her first novel. I have said before this is not a period I have studied, though I am well enough read in a general sense. My general intention is to make my way through all the best books, and my particular intention here is to achieve a better understanding of Australian women's works of the same period, ie. Gen 3. The Australian modernists we have looked at to date, Christina Stead, Eleanor Dark, Dymphna Cusack with Jungfrau are all a bit later than Woolf and no doubt influenced by her (after 1922 all modernists are influenced by James Joyce, but it is harder – for a layman – to tell who was influenced by Woolf or DH Lawrence, let alone lesser figures like Vita Sackville-West). Interestingly one important Australian modernist work predates The Voyage Out and that is HH Richardson's Maurice Guest (1908) which I am interested now to go back and read in this context.
The Voyage Out tells the story of Rachel Vinrace, 24 and never been kissed, set during a holiday of just a few months, undated but in one of those last few years before the Great War, on Rachel's father's steamship from London, and then in a grand hotel and nearby villa in an unnamed French possession in South America.
Rachel is travelling with the Ambroses, her Aunt Helen, beautiful, 40, her children left behind, and her uncle, an academic. She has no formal education but is a brilliant pianist, and is forthright and intelligent. It quickly becomes clear to Helen that Rachel, brought up by maiden aunts after the death of her mother, knows absolutely nothing about relations between the sexes, and she determines to take her in hand.
For a while on the voyage out Rachel spends time with the MP Richard Dalloway being (willingly) lectured to about politics and foreign affairs. Eventually he gets her alone in her cabin and of course kisses her. Which she finds interesting and not particularly disagreeable. But the Dalloways are put off at an earlier stop and disappear into another novel altogether.
Rather than travel on to the Amazon with her father, Rachel is persuaded to stay with her aunt, and so the second phase of the novel begins, in some ways a very familiar story, a dozen or so upper middle class English people, with a wide range of ages, say 20 to 80, bound in one place for a fixed period.
Two of the younger set, Susan and Ambrose, are soon engaged and are then set aside to be used from time to time by the author as an example of stock-standard unreflective coupledom. Another young woman, Evelyn, is much more interesting, maybe even standing in for the author herself. She wishes there was a Garibaldi she might attach herself to; there are always things to do, places to see; later she exclaims, "I'd give all I have in the world to help on a revolution against the Russian government, and it's bound to come." She is open about having been born out of wedlock, has an undeserved reputation for looseness, is for ever being proposed to, but is never sure that she wants to be married.
Two young men, friends in their late twenties, Hewet and Hirst attach themselves to Rachel and Helen, Mr Ambrose being locked away in his study translating a Greek poet. Hirst is ugly and hugely intelligent, on his way to being one of the great men of his generation. Hewet is a budding novelist. Hirst attempts to forward Rachel's education, but without much success. He is interested more in Helen and you keep expecting something to come of it though it never does.
Slowly, through a sea of talk and philosophising, Hewet and Rachel find themselves in love.
Evelyn had not spoken, but she had been looking from Susan to Rachel. Well – they had both made up their minds very easily, they had done in a very few weeks what it sometimes seemed to her that she would never be able to do. Although they were so different, she thought that she could see in each the same look of satisfaction and completion, the same calmness of manner, and the same slowness of movement. It was that slowness, that confidence, that content which she hated, she thought to herself. They moved so slowly because they were not single but double … Love was all very well, and those snug domestic houses with the kitchen below and the nursery above, which were so secluded and self-contained, like little islands in the torrents of the world; but the real things were surely the things that happened, the causes, the wars, the ideals, that happened in the great world outside, and went on independently of these women, turning so quietly and beautifully towards the men.
See how Woolf jumps from outside Evelyn to 'inside'. Without, yet, being stream of consciousness, her writing follows the trains of thought of each of her protagonists, and is elsewhere wonderfully descriptive of the people, the scenery, the weather. The author's feminism is quietly evident, in Evelyn for instance, but more often, as I discussed with Sackville-West (here), in putting up the conventional view and allowing us space to form our own criticisms. One of the women in the hotel, Miss Allan is employed, a teacher, writing an Eng Lit textbook, but generally all the characters would be at home in Jane Austen, independently well-off, at leisure for months at a time to work through their relationships. It is only after the War, I think, that young middle class women more or less automatically went into jobs – a fact obscured by the mythologizing around 'homemakers' in the 1950s.
The last 50 pages – of 380 – are shocking. Beautifully written, as is the whole novel, but completely unexpected. I can't say why Woolf chose the ending she did, you will have to see for yourselves.
Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out, first pub. The Hogarth Press, London, 1915. Edition pictured, Harcourt Brace, 1948. My edition Granada, 1981
Exiles at Home, Drusilla Modjeska
January 12, 2020 January 12, 2020 wadholloway Australian, Feminism, Literature, Writers	Book Review, Christina Stead, Drusilla Modjeska, Miles Franklin, Palmer
Australian Women Writers Gen 3 Week 12-18 Jan. 2020
The 1930s were remarkable years in Australian cultural history. Women were producing the best fiction of the period and they were, for the first and indeed only time, a dominant influence in Australian literature. (Modjeska, opening lines)
My own opinion is that women dominated Australian literature from the end of WWI till the rise of the baby boomers, ie. throughout Gen 3. Though I guess from 1939 on we should factor Patrick White in there somewhere.
Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925-1945 (1981) is probably the single most important work on this period, certainly as an overview, though Nettie Palmer's contemporaneous writings are also enormously valuable. HM Green devotes 550pp to 'Fourth period 1923-1950' but he is so discursive that it is difficult to use him for anything but referencing (History of Australian Literature, Vol.II).
Modjeska regards the 1920s as a bit of a desert for Aust.Lit, a hiatus between the glory days of Bulletin nationalism and the blossoming of women's writing in the 1930s. I don't totally agree with her though it is certainly true that the best women writers of the 1920s were overseas. Miles Franklin was in London and began her Brent of Bin Bin series in 1928; Henry Handel Richardson, also in London, was at the height of her career and had published five novels, including all of The Fortunes of Richard Mahoney, by 1929; Christina Stead, the best writer of this generation left Sydney for London in 1928, with A&R refusing to publish the stories that became The Salzburg Tales. But by March 1930 Miles Franklin was able to write to Alice Henry, "Australia seems to be throwing up writers like mushrooms."
For the women of the thirties writing and publishing were in some respects easier, if only because there were enough of them to offer each other a network of intellectual and emotional support …
mostly through letter writing, most famously to and from Nettie and Vance Palmer, but also through organisations such as the Fellowship of Australian Writers around Marjorie Barnard, Miles Franklin (back in Sydney in 1935) and Frank Dalby Davidson.
Until the FAW, women had been deliberately excluded from writers' societies and salons.
The major literary group of the twenties was clustered around Norman Lindsay and the magazine Vision which was edited by Frank Johnson, Kenneth Slessor, and Norman's son Jack. These writers were part of Sydney's bohemian group and their lifestyle left very little room for women.
The saddest case was Anne Brennan, daughter of the (alcoholic) poet Christopher Brennan. She apparently had an unnatural relationship with her father, fell into prostitution, hung around the Lindsay push for grog and sex, was derided by Jack Lindsay when she told him she wished to write, though one or two published pieces showed great promise, and was dead at 32 of consumption (TB).
Zora Cross was another. Her sensual poems published in 1917 and 1919 created a sensation. The push were all excited that a woman might write about sex but otherwise treated her as a joke, and she retreated into timidity (The Resident Judge has a promised posted a review of her life, which I'll repost tomorrow).
Christina Stead as a young women was drawn by Vision and the idea of bohemian life, but luckily was too driven by the idea of getting to London to attempt to join in. In For Love Alone (1945) she calls the magazine 'the Quarterly' with "drawings of voluptuous, fat-faced naked women …". But by then she is able to recognise its misogyny for what it was.
A woman writer involved with the Sydney Bohemians who appears to have been relatively unscathed, is Dora Birtles, not mentioned by Modjeska, who with her boyfriend was suspended from Sydney Uni in 1923 for the love poetry they wrote about each other. Her father forced them to marry, she went adventuring, they met up again in Greece and lived happily as writers/journalists ever after (ADB)
Modjeska says middle class women writers stayed home. But especially outside Sydney – and this seems a very Sydney-focussed book – they mixed in more serious circles, with workers and socialists. One who did though (stay home), was Marjorie Barnard, who took a history degree with honours in 1919, but was not permitted by her father to take up a scholarship to Oxford. She became a librarian, writing with her friend, teacher Flora Eldershaw. As M.Barnard Eldershaw they won the inaugural 1928 Bulletin Prize with A House is Built, jointly with Katharine Susannah Prichard's Coonardoo.
At the centre of this generation of women is Nettie Palmer, who gave up her own career as a poet to support her husband, novelist Vance Palmer (or not to overshadow him, he already had feelings of inadequacy about Nettie's monied and influential family). She was seemingly friend and correspondent with them all, and over the course of the 20s and 30s she became one of Australia's principal literary critics. Her prize-winning essay Modern Australian Literature (1924) was "the first critical essay and survey of twentieth century Australian literature." Both she and Vance worked to express a specifically Australian aesthetic.
Unlike her husband, unlike many of her writer friends, and of course most particularly communists like Stead and Prichard, Nettie Palmer rejected socialism in favour of a liberal humanism. She was blind, as many well-meaning upper middle class people are, to the constraints of class, "she avoided the avant-garde; beneath her rhetoric of a national culture, she was advocating the acceptance of a bourgeois cultural form."
Nettie's list of correspondents was extensive and many, particularly writers remote from the centres of Australian literature, like Richardson in London and Prichard in Perth, gave her credit for holding the Australian writing community together. But it is also telling whom she left out. She did not correspond with HM Green who had his own circle of correspondents, nor with Dulcie Deamer, "Queen of Bohemia", nor with any of the Lindsay set. She wrote to writers, and particularly younger writers, she thought she could bring round to her own way of thinking.
In her letters Nettie Palmer made it clear that she expected progressive writers to present a public front that was united. It is in this respect that her bossiness is most evident.
One of Nettie's 'friends' (it took them from 1930 to 1935 to get to first names) was Marjorie Barnard who was shy and for a long time had no other contact with writers outside her M.Barnard Eldershaw collaboration . It was Nettie who persuaded her to take up writing full time, Nettie who introduced her to politics, but also Nettie who came over all head prefect when Barnard turned to Pacifism at the beginning of WWII.
MBE's third novel, The Glasshouse (1936) is their first set in the present, and it discusses both feminism and class, as well as the difficulties of being female and a writer. The later Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1941 ) goes on to discuss the duty of the writer to society.
Eleanor Dark, more confident than Barnard and with intellectual, supportive husband and parents, was another Palmer correspondent who "reveals a similar pattern of moving towards a self-conscious exploration of the social situation of the writer and of the social function of literature."
Although she has earlier discussed Stead's move to Europe as motivated by her desire to be at the heart of Modernism, which in Paris in the 30s she was, Modjeska fails to mention Dark's importance in the introduction of Modernism into Australia.
By this time I am at p.100, out of 257, and you are worn out. Because of its importance to this week's theme, I have attempted to summarize rather than review. Exiles at Home is a very dense work, full of information and analysis. If you are at all interested in this period, find a copy and read it.
Drusilla Modjeska, Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925 – 1945, Sirius, Sydney, 1981
Australian Women Writers Gen 3 Week
I hope you are all well into your Gen 3 reads. Let me know when you've done a review, particularly if you think I might not otherwise see it, and I'll share it or at least make sure it's included in the end of week wrap and that it's linked from the AWW Gen 3 page.
Reviews to date –
Eleanor Dark, The Little Company, ANZLitLovers
Ruth Park, A Fence Around the Cuckoo, Travellin Penguin
Dora Birtles, The Overlanders, Luvvie's Musings
Monday Musings on Dymphna Cusak, Whispering Gums
Monday Musings on Christina Stead, Whispering Gums
Mary Durack Poem, Whispering Gums
Brenda Niall, True North: The story of Mary and Elizabeth Durack, Whispering Gums
M Barnard Eldershaw, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, ANZLitLovers
Kylie Tennant, The Battlers, ANZLitLovers
New Oz Lit Fic
May 6, 2019 wadholloway Australian, Feminism, Journal, Literature, Writers	Mary Shelley, New Releases, Palmer Report
Journal: 031
Eltham Bookshop
New Oz Lit Fic: I can't say I haven't read any, but I haven't read much. A situation I've 'undertaken' to Lisa (ANZLL) to do something about. My preferences can be covered by the words edgy, grunge, experimental, and leaving aside Gerald Murnane, I would say my favourite recent Australian was Elizabeth Tan's Rubik, and before that The Natural Way of Things, Charlotte Wood and everything by Jane Rawson (here, here and here).
For the second weekend in a row I'm stuck in Melbourne and overnighting at Mum's (during the week I wasn't completely idle, though some of Dragan's drivers were, I did a load of mining equipment to Roxby Downs (map) – a round trip of 2,800 kms according to my run sheet). So, using as my starting point a couple of Lisa's lists of prize-winners (here, here), the Stella Longlist, and your reviews, I am making up a wish list of my own, which I will take down to my local indie bookshop.
Ok, this is what I came up with:
Jamie Marina Lau, Pink Mountain on Locust Island (Reading Matters)
Ruby Murray, The Biographer's Lover (Nathan Hobby)
Pip Adam (NZ), The New Animals (ANZLitLovers)
Kristina Olsson, Shell (ANZLitLovers)
Krissy Kneen, Wintering (Readings)
Melissa Lucashenko, Too Much Lip (ANZLitLovers)
Trent Dalton, Boy Swallows Universe (Whispering Gums)
And a couple of extras, in case I run into them in the shop:
Anything by Charlotte Wood before TNWoT
Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which WG (I think) recommended, for my grandson's approaching birthday
What do you guys think? What have I missed (that fits my criteria)?
None of you has reviewed the Krissy Kneen. I enjoyed her earlier An Uncertain Grace and am tempted to put Wintering at the top of my list. Lisa I'm pretty sure would put Shell and numerous judges have put Boy Swallows Universe about which I am doubtful (on the basis of course of zero evidence).
Kate W where are you? I'd better check your Stella posts too. No, I'm afraid you didn't persuade me on Little Gods.
I think I will make Pink Mountain on Locust Island my #2. Interestingly Kate (Booksaremyfavouriteandbest) and Kim (Reading Matters) make the same complaint about "nonsensical" similes, but Kate got me at:
I understand why readers are excited by Lau – her writing is expressive and commanding, with bizarre descriptions that have you re-reading and imagining –
Like many of you I follow Kim who covers English, Irish and Canadian Lit as well as Australian, Emma (Book Around the Corner) French and European, and Naomi (Consumed by Ink) Canadian. I am tempted by nearly every new book they review but #solittletime! And of course when I do run into these books as audiobooks, which are anyway mostly mainstream, I don't connect back to the review. Case in point Herman Koch's The Dinner. However I will add one US title reviewed by Melanie at Grab the Lapels because I am absolutely determined to read it 'one day soon'.
And it's only $1.00 on A*#@*# if I ever open an account.
Has weekend off, takes Mum shopping. How'd it turn out? I wrote most of the above Sat night. Today, Sunday I tried Eltham Bookshop which honestly I didn't think was as good as its reviews. I looked at but bought neither Too Much Lip nor the prominently displayed Boy Swallows Universe. Bought a book for Gee because, well she'll have a birthday eventually, and one for Mum. Then we went round to Warrandyte and had a much more fruitful time in the second hand shop there, not to mention a very nice lunch at Next/Door.
What I Actually Bought
Kath Engebretson, Red Dirt Odyssey (2016) for Mum
Nam Le, The Boat (2008)
Gerald Murnane, A Season on Earth (2019)
Gee's present
David Ireland, City of Women (hardback, dustjacket, 1st ed.)
Another present (One author. Stories from 1910-1920)
Christina Stead, The Little Hotel (hardback, dustjacket, 1st ed.)
Christina Stead, Ocean of Story
Elizabeth Jolley, An Accommodating Spouse
Elizabeth Jolley, Milk and Honey
Kim Mahood, Craft for a Dry Lake (memoir)
Bill Wannan ed., A Marcus Clarke Reader
William Burroughs, Junky
Recent audiobooks
Judith Saxton (F, Eng), A Merry Mistress (2003) fictionalized life of Nell Gwynne
Jaqueline Winspear (F, Eng), Maisie Dobbs (2003)
Kurt Vonnegut (M, USA), Cat's Cradle (1963)
John Steinbeck (M, USA), The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Debra Webb (F, USA), Revenge (2013)
Amy Tan (F, USA), The Bonesetter's Daughter (2003)
F. Paul Wilson (M, USA), The Dark at the End (2011)
Anne McCaffrey (F, Ire), Freedom's Landing (1995)
Charles Willeford (M, USA), Miami Blues (1984)
Rob Shackleford, Traveller Inceptio (Australian new release ebook)
Haruki Murakami, What I Talk about when I Talk about Running
Thea Astley, Collected Stories (sitting neglected in the bottom of my backpack)
Currently reading on the net
Palmer Report (here). If you want to follow the inevitable collapse of the Trump presidency day by day, minute by minute, this is for you (and its slightly hysterical tone is part of its charm).
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792 (Project Gutenberg). No, I'm not really reading it but Brona has and discusses it in a must-read post (here) and she in turn references the 'Vindication' read-along on A Great Book Study (Intro, Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4 (Ruth @ AGBS doesn't seem to provide links between her own posts)).
This is all deserving of a full post but in the meanwhile let me make a couple of notes so they don't get lost:
1. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the mother of author Mary Shelley (Wiki).
2. I've always thought the major text first wave feminists like Catherine Helen Spence looked back to was JS Mills, The Subjection of Women, 1869 (Project Gutenberg). " … the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement …"
Roxby Downs: Unloading drill rig from my (red) trailer to low loader for transport into mine.
My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin
January 25, 2019 wadholloway Australian, Bush Myths, Feminism, Literature	AWW Gen 2, Independent Woman, Miles Franklin
My masters was built around My Brilliant Career, my truck is named after it, I have done innumerable (well, 23) posts about Franklin, but I have never posted a review of this her first and most famous novel. Luckily however, Emma of Book Around the Corner, last year, and now Karen of Booker Talk – who coincidentally, being respectively French and Welsh, bring an 'outsider's' perspective to the task – have stepped up to the plate for me.
Booker Talk
Every time I picked up my copy of My Brilliant Career, instead of delving straight into the narrative, I found myself simply staring at the cover image. That girl haunted me. At times it felt as if she was glaring at me, almost daring me to judge her behaviour and her attitudes. Other times it seemed more that she was asking me a question, inviting a response.
Maybe I'm making far too much of this but I certainly found the image mesmerising. The boldness of the girl's look combined with her wild, unkempt appearance also perfectly matched the character of the protagonist created by Miles Franklin, Sybylla Melvyn. Read on …
Who Does the Dishes?
November 10, 2018 wadholloway English, Feminism, Journal, Literature	Dale Spender, Katherine Mansfield
Following on from my last, I got out of Sydney ok on Wednesday morning and dropped my trailers at Tolls, Perth late Friday, hopefully to be unloaded overnight. I've been asked to turn straight around, which I've agreed to, Milly's away working on site till some time next week, but as I write, on Saturday morning, I'm yet to hear from work. Still, I can take today as a 24 hour break and leave this evening.
Despite what I wrote, I did pick up Mothers of the Novel for a while. The next authors after Aphra Benn are Delarivière Manley (1663-1724) and Eliza Haywood (1693-1756). Spender is furious that Manley worked with Jonathon Swift on the Examiner and succeeded him as editor, yet Swift is a celebrated satirist and Manley a forgotten 'gossip-monger'. Alexander Pope describes her "as one of those shameless scribblers who, in libellous memoirs and novels reveal the faults and misfortunes of both sexes, to the ruin of public fame or disturbance of private happiness." High, if unintended, praise! Spender writes:
The entry I would like to see for Delarivière Manley in the history of letters would be as follows: A prolific and innovative writer who helped to develop the genre of fiction by her use of the epistolary form and her introduction of political satire.
I have Haywood's The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751) which I had better not read until next year, until I have some Australian reading out of the way. So I will put off dealing with Haywood until then. But Spender, in lamenting that Manley and Haywood had family duties which made it difficult for them to earn an income from writing, includes by way of illustration this extract from a letter from Katherine Mansfield in 1913 to her lover, John Middleton Murry.
… the house seems to take up so much time if it isn't looked after with some sort f method. I mean … when I have to clear up twice over or wash up unnecessary things I get frightfully impatient and want to be working. So often this week, I've heard you and Gordon talking while I washed dishes. Well, someone's got to wash dishes and get food, otherwise – 'There's nothing in the house but eggs to eat". Yes, I hate, hate, hate doing these things that you accept just as all men accept of their women. I can only play the servant with a very bad grace indeed. It's all very well for females who have nothing else to do … and then you say I am a tyrant, and wonder because I get tired at night! The trouble with women like me is – they can't keep their nerves out of the job in hand – and Monday after you and Gordon and Lesley have gone I walk about with a mind full of ghosts of saucepans and primus stoves and 'Will there be enough to go round?' …. and you calling (whatever I am doing) 'Tig, isn't there going to be tea? It's five o'clock' as though I were a dilatory housemaid.
I loathe myself today. I detest this woman who 'superintends' you and rushes about, slamming doors and slopping water – all untidy with her blouse out and her nails grimed. I am disgusted and repelled by the creature who shouts at you. 'You might at least empty the pail and wash out the tea leaves!' Yes, no wonder you 'come over silent'.
Well that all sounds very familiar. I didn't go down the pub, or gamble, and I cared for and cooked for the kids when Milly was at her (part-time, manual) work. But I had satisfying full-time employment and on-going education, doing degrees part-time throughout our marriage, and Milly had neither, and I made no effort to back off, or take over housework, to give her space to do either of those things. Milly is not one who "rushes about, slamming doors" but she did try to talk and I couldn't or wouldn't hear.
Nine am. Still haven't heard. My washing's done, I'd better pay some bills, I'd better go and check my PO box! There's not much left to do except the library for more audiobooks. Food I can get at IGAs along the way, got some very sweet mandarines from a roadside stand a couple of days ago near Mildura.
Spender has made some remarks about the influence of the middle classes on eighteenth century writing, and when I have time that is what I will be following up next.
Jeff Abbott (M, USA), Panic (2005)
Gillian Flynn (F,USA), Dark Places (2009)
Camille di Maio (F, USA), The Memory of Us (2016)
Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel.
October 5, 2018 wadholloway English, Feminism, Literature	Aphra Behn, Book Review, Dale Spender, Independent Woman
For some reason the writers of my childhood, all British of course, all regarded being ruled by Kings as natural, desirable and romantic and being ruled by themselves as unthinkable, and this was particularly the case in relation to the English Civil War (1642-1651). I'm thinking of Children of the New Forest, all those Bonnie Prince Charlie stories, and the execrable Scarlet Pimpernel, which we were expected to read (uncritically!) in high school. I'm proud to say that I was an unnatural child and took the side of Cromwell and Robespierre, and of even more obscure figures like Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers.
Which is by way of coming to Aphra Behn (1640-1689) who was a novelist, a feminist and, sadly, a royalist.
I am of course slowly(!) making my way through Dale Spender's Mothers of the Novel. At this rate WG will be able to start her reading some time next year and still beat me to the end. Spender writes that when she started Mothers she thought she would find that Behn was the first woman writer, but as we saw in an earlier post she was able to push that honour back another half century, to Mary Wroth and Margaret Cavendish. Spender still claims that Behn was the first woman to earn her living by writing, but she also makes that claim for Wroth.
Excesses of all kinds were forbidden during the Commonwealth, but the opposite was true under Charles II following the Restoration in 1660. Theatre flourished –
The popularity of the stage and the revitalisation of drama – and 'immoral' and bawdy drama at that – reflected the shift in interest and taste, and suggested new realms of literary possibility.
Aphra Behn's writing reflects these times and mores, but Spender argues that 'immorality' also gave the male literary establishment the fig leaf it needed to ignore her. So, despite her 13 novels (and reams of plays and poetry), Daniel Defoe who wrote Robinson Crusoe 30 years later, is generally credited with the invention of the novel. Behn was also accused of having no Latin or Greek, but as she herself pointed out, neither did Shakespeare.
Behn's early life is unknown but it seems she sailed to Suriname in the West Indies – the setting for her most famous work, Oroonoko – in the late 1650s or early 1660s; returned to London in 1664; married Mr Behn, a merchant who died or departed soon after; was a spy for Charles in the Netherlands in 1666; incurred debts for which she was briefly imprisoned; began writing poetry and then comic verse plays, the first of which, Forc'd Marriage was produced in 1670.
She turned to writing novels after wearing out her welcome in the theatre – her plays often attacked prominent Whigs (politicians seeking to impose limits on the power of the King). Spender says this was a natural progression as there were only two playhouses in London, so limited opportunities for production, and dramas were often circulated as scripts.
This meant that Aphra Behn was quite used to thinking of the presentation of her dramatic stories in printed form. It also meant that the reading public had been prepared for prose stories in print through their familiarity with published plays.
Behn was a successful professional writer who both anticipated the desire of her public for bawdy romantic comedies and was still able to present the issues that interested her – the abolition of slavery, the lives of ordinary people, and a woman's perspective on relationships rather than deeds.
With her representation of the world which is distinctly not that of the dominant sex, Aphra Behn symbolises the nature and extent of the omissions while women are excluded from the literary canon. In her choice of subject matter, her commentary, and her style, she illustrates some of the differences in outlook between women and men; even her sense of humour – which frequently makes men the butt of the joke – contrasts markedly to the forms to which we are accustomed, and in which it is the humour of men that prevails.
Spender gets angry a lot. Justifiably I know, but wearing.
… when Aphra Behn became the first woman to seek commercial publication, she plunged right into the problem that has plagued women writers ever since. The problem of having to obtain the approval of men.
Behn believed and wrote "that justice called for a single moral standard for both sexes", but remained aware that men's occupation was obtaining a paid place in the world, while women's was obtaining a man who could support them. Spender does not say "Behn's first novel was …" but provides a list of works by and about her which goes on for two and a half pages. From it I gleaned that her novels were –
The Adventures of the Black Lady (1684)
Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave, a True History (1688)
Agnes de Castro, or The Force of Generous Love (1688)
The Fair Jilt, or The History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda (1688)
The Unfortunate Bride, or The Blind Lady a Beauty (1688)
The Lucky Mistake (1689)
The Novels of Aphra Behn (1905) includes all the above plus –
The Lover's Watch
The Case for the Watch
The Lady's Looking Glass to Dress Herself By
The Lucky Mistake
The Court of the King of Bantam
That's twelve novels, Britannica adds –
Love Letters Between a Nobleman and his Sister (1683) an epistolary novel of which Spender writes "Attributed to Aphra Behn, but not included in her 'Works'".
The first Collected Novels (with a Life) came out in 1696 and others subsequently in 1771, 1886 and 1905, so I'm not sure how Behn managed to be omitted from the canon. Wilful blindness probably, as in Australia with Spence, Praed, Cambridge, Martin. Vita Sackville West wrote a biography in 1927 – Aphra Behn, The Incomparable Astrea – and Virginia Woolf wrote glowingly of Behn in A Room of Ones Own (1928).
The Nun may in fact be two novels – The Nun, or The Perjured Beauty and The Nun, or The Fair Vow-breaker – they, along with The Fair Jilt, portray convents as little more than brothels and are, according to Spender, laugh out loud funny.
Oroonoko, a short novel which was also made into a popular play, draws on Behn's experience of Suriname (sometimes disputed but almost certainly genuine) with detailed descriptions of flora, fauna and scenery. Oroonoko had been a prince in Africa, he and his wife are enslaved and transported. He escapes, kills his wife rather than allow her to be tortured, is captured and hacked to death (So no happy ending, then!). Sackville-West suggested, "Oroonoko resembles those seventeenth century paintings of negroes in plumes and satins, rather than an actual slave on a practical plantation." But," Spender writes, "nonetheless we are provided with a horrific portrayal of slavery. There is no doubt we are intended to deplore its practices."
Project Gutenberg (here) has the works of Aphra Benn in six volumes plus Love Letters. Looking on Goodreads, Penguin Classics has published at least Oroonoko and Love Letters.
Dale Spender, Mothers of the Novel, Pandora, London, 1986
Follow The Australian Legend on WordPress.com
Pechorin's Journal
louloureads
bronasbooks.wordpress.com/
Karenlee Thompson
Death by Tsundoku
Travellin' Penguin
Adventures in reading, running and working from home
BookerTalk
JASACT
Consumed by Ink
Robert Graham's Anarchism Weblog
Australian Women Writers Challenge Blog
Intermittencies of the Mind
The Logical Place
Kim Kelly
Nathan Hobby, a biographer in Perth
debbierobson
Up the Creek with a pen ...
booksaremyfavouriteandbest
ANZ LitLovers LitBlog
Grab the Lapels
Jane Rawson
Michelle Scott Tucker
View wadholloway's profile on Facebook
Aboriginal Africa Asia Australian Biography Bush Myths Crime Fiction English European Feminism French Journal Literature Movie Novella Science Fiction Short Stories Uncategorized USA Writers YA
Aboriginal Alexis Wright Anzac Day AWW Gen 1 AWW Gen 2 AWW Gen 3 AWW Gen 4 Book Review Bulletin C21st Canada Caroline Chisholm Catherine Helen Spence Christina Stead Christos Tsiolkas Covid-19 Crime Fiction Daisy Bates David Ireland Early C20th Eleanor Dark Elizabeth Jolley Ettler George Sand Gerald Murnane Greece Grunge Helen Garner Henry Lawson Historical Fiction Independent Woman Interview Ireland Jane Austen Jessica White Joseph Furphy Katharine Susannah Prichard Kim Scott Langley Late C20th Louisa Lawson Mallee Martu Massacre Melbourne Michelle Scott Tucker Miles Franklin Miles Franklin Award Modernism Murakami New York Noongar Northern Territory NSW Nullarbor Palmer Poetry Postmodernism Pre-C20th Queensland Race Relations Rawson Riverina Stead Sydney Tasma Tasmania Thea Astley Trucking USA Victoria Western Australia YA Yamaji Young Adult
A literary blog
Cover myself with words
"There is no Frigate like a Book to take us Lands away." -Emily Dickinson
This Reading Life
A Poor Girl's Attempt to Stay Ahead of her Pile of Unread Books
An informal journal of a retired Tasmanian who loves animals, books, reading, walking, photography and sharing my world with others.
Liz Dexter muses on freelancing, reading, and running ...
Books, reading and anything else that comes to mind...with an Australian focus...on Ngunnawal Country
Adventures in reading
Jane Austen and all that - in Canberra
A word after a word after a word is power. --Margaret Atwood
Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas
Supporting and promoting books by Australian women
An Unreliable Reader
Tim Harding's writings on rationality, informal logic and skepticism
Australian Author
The life of Katharine Susannah Prichard, the art of biography, and other things
researching and writing an historical novel
Book reviews of mainly modern & contemporary fiction
fishing for words to hook readers
Delving into History...
For lovers of Australian and New Zealand literary fiction; Ambassador for Australian literature
Widening the Margins Since 2013
Author + novelist + essayist
Author, Elizabeth Macarthur


Batteries 4 C batteries required.
This is an occupied and unaffected microscope. The Geosafari talking microscope is the best telescope for kids along with its all dimensions. This toy microscope can magnify any small objects with its included specification. The product can be used as my first microscope.
This microscope features a 2 extra-large one-size-fits along with all eyepieces & rough directing knob that includes an 8x magnification. This geosafari microscope has eight-side up the system with its included left-right curative feature. Its bright LED display makes the geosafari jr talking microscope powerful and durable.
This educational baby toys or educational insights microscope include all the specifications with easy push-button function and microscope 3D view. The Non-skid feet provide the microscope amazon as a hard tool with its sample tray. The focusing knobs of this geosafari talking microscope make the product innovative. This magnifies, and the microscope for kids includes measurement of 8x dimension.
The Geosafari talking microscope delivers a real working microscope for preschoolers children. The geosafari jr encourages scientific exploration and interest in science. This educational insight microscope is made with some special features like an LCD display and toys up the closed system, and the microscopes are enough to let your child offer slides that are required.
Though we have got some negative reviews on this Geosafari talking microscope, we recommend you this durable and tough item as this is the perfect combination for your preschool going children. This is the best microscope for kids and by which your children can enjoy their playtime.
So, you can come with us to agree that this Geosafari talking microscope is able to provide your children a closer look to view shells and any other small objects. This item is oversized along with its included simple knob style. You can introduce your child to the scientific tools through this item. By this, even the younger learners can occupy the world, and it is a cool product around you!


text:
Q: Python visual module generates error message I'm new to python and i'm working thru some examples in a book. Several test cases use the 'visual' module. The visual package has been loaded on my iMac with OSX 10.13 using pip. The simple code I'm running is:
from visual.graph import *
funct1 = gcurve(color = color.cyan)

for x in arange(0.0, 8.1, 0.1):
    funct1.plot(pos = (x, 5.0*cos(2*x)*exp(-0.4*x)))

graph1 = gdisplay(x=0, y=0, width=600, height=450,
         title='Visual',xtitle='x', ytitle = ' f(x)',
         xmax = 5., xmin =-6., ymax=1, ymin = -1.5,
         foreground=color.black, background=color.white)

plotObj = gdots(color=color.black)

for x in arange(-5., 5., 0.1):
    plotObj.plot(pos = (x, cos(x)))`

The line 'from visual.graph import *' generates the following error message:
    Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "/Users/johnhanly/anaconda/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/IPython/core/interactiveshell.py", line 2862, in run_code
    exec(code_obj, self.user_global_ns, self.user_ns)

  File "<ipython-input-28-4dc5a9dddc02>", line 2, in <module>
    from visual.graph import *

  File "/Users/johnhanly/anaconda/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/visual.py", line 2
    def cli():/Users/johnhanly/anaconda/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages
              ^
SyntaxError: invalid syntax

Can anyone explain what I am doing wrong?

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaStackExchange


I have requirement for a Project Quantity Surveyor to deliver 15 new build industrial units & accompanying office space for a main contractor operating across the UK. With a business model built upon quality and not volume, they work with a select list of clients, regularly gaining repeat business.
The Project Quantity Surveyor on this programme will be taking responsibility of the project from the start and overseeing the full commercial delivery through to the project completion in October 2019.
You must have new build experience to be considered for this position and available to start from the 1st week of February 2018. UK experience is essential.


Not quite as snazzy or engaging as the original, but it's nice to see an action movie that takes aesthetics seriously. The show-down in the conceptual art exhibit was worth the price of admission.
An excellent follow-up to the surprise hit John Wick. The colorful underworld is flashier and the action is better than the first film. Keanu Reeves is giving Tom Cruise a run for his money.
Action,action,action,action and even more action !
"I'm not that guy anymore. You are always that guy, John."
Once again I couldn't withhold myself from watching a sequel, although I knew it probably would be a watered down version of the original. And yet I could not resist it. And after re-reading my review of the first movie "John Wick", I can only conclude that I was right about that. The final sentence I wrote was as follows: "I admire Reeves that he's still capable to portray a character as Wick at his age of 50 and bring this kind of personage to a higher level, but I'm afraid that this sequel will be a weak carbon copy from the original." . Unfortunately, I was right.
When John Wick came out, it was a pleasant surprise. Chad Stahelski - who once worked as Keanu Reeves' stunt double in The Matrix films, got behind the camera and turned Reeves into a stoic badass - a martial arts and gun master who wanted to be left alone but was called back in to action when his car is stolen and his dog is killed. Thus began a one-man revenge tale and woe be to those who stood in John Wick's way. And action, oh my, if you like action Wick delivered on all cylinders.
"You don't f**k with the devil then act surprised when he turns up."
John Wick: Chapter 2 is one of best and most exciting action movie I've seen in awhile. It accomplished everything it needed to do and much more. I mean, any action movie that starts with a Buster Keaton homage is always a sign of something great. A squeal that's bigger, more violent, and plenty more head shots.
Not as emotionally engaging as the first movie and it doesn't need to. In all honestly, I liked this more than it's predecessor. It expands the universe of assassins and making tension a lot higher for John. While it dose come off a bit ridiculous, but it's self aware of what it is and it's not trying to be very serious.
No posts have been made on this movie yet. Be the first to start talking about John Wick: Chapter Two!


It's been far too long since I have seen my WordPress dashboard and tapped out a post. So many things have happened since June, some great and some truly not so great, but I am still here! Is anyone still reading?
I have been inspired to get back to the keyboard following my attendance at a fabulous girlie high tea today in the home of a friend.
This annual mother/daughter event is held before Christmas each year has been going on for many, many years. The core group comprises my friend and three close family gal pals, my friend's mother and her friend (the mother of the three gals) and my friend's grandmother. Sisters-in-law, nieces and other close friends attend on occasion too. I have been a recent interloper, having only been along to the last 5 or so, and my Mum has been along a couple of times too.
We all contribute something sweet or savoury and are at the stage where if you were to not bring your signature dish – pistachio macarons in my case – there would be trouble!! I love getting a chance to anticipate and then enjoy the afternoon. The admiration of the table arrangements, the ooh-ing and aah-ing over the tiered serving dishes filled with delicacies gives us all so much pleasure – as does the eating! Today we particularly noted that moment of silence after everyone takes their first bites, right before the chorus of "mm"s and "oh, wow"s begins, along with the "yum, what's in that?" and "can I have the recipe?". Plus, an event is not complete if we haven't all taken (at least!) one photograph of all of the goodies!!
Afternoons like today certainly remind me how blessed I am… Do any of you have traditions like this?
Every so often I get together with two gal pals and cook up a storm and this year's "MasterChef Southwest" was no exception. One of my friends gives the run down – with pictures! – on her blog: http://twentyeightacres.typepad.com/blog/2013/06/masterchef-southwest.html. Such a fun time had by all!
Hi bleaders! I haven't been blogging lately due to my focus on a new job. It began as a secondment position in mid-January and after about a month I was asked if I wanted to stay on permanently. It was so lovely to have been asked, and, even better, I wanted to say yes! The new role got confirmed this week and I can't stop smiling. God promised about 2 years ago that he wouldn't leave me in my previous job (which I had been in for years and was finding increasingly stressful), and he's come through in a big way. I am really enjoying the new work and am in a lovely and supportive team. Just perfect!
I've been spending the day doing one of my "whilst on holidays I will…" list items – going through old food magazines.
I wanted to do this so I can then throw the stash away and I have been putting my scissors to good use as I oohed and aahed over each issue. I say "stash" of magazines as I inherited some MasterChef editions from a friend moving overseas, plus have my own collections of Gourmet Traveller, Feast, Delicious, etc. I have to do this type of clean out once in a while as I tend to keep them, and keep them, and keep them! I can't help it – I love their drool-inducing photography, seemingly effortless meal ideas and the glamorous travel features.
I did notice in my review today that a feature in one of the mags was an "interview a chef" page. It contained a few "what is your favourite…" details so, for a bit of fun, below is a list of mine.
Chefs: Emmanuel Mollois and Guillaume Brahimi. French men cooking French food, mm mm!
Comfort food: egg noodles slow cooked in chicken broth with cracked pepper.
Guilty pleasure: licking mixing bowl beaters, and french toast with maple syrup plus bacon.
Innocent pleasure: watching when someone takes a bite of something I've made and seeing the smile spread across their face.
Piece of equipment: my "ice"-coloured Kitchen Aid Stand Mixer. I got her for my 40th birthday and she is truly beautiful.
Gadget: a musical timer someone gave me to add to the water for boiling eggs. They come out perfect every time!
Childhood food memories: sitting on a stool in the kitchen helping Mum make cookies, and my Grandmother cooking me pancakes on our visits to the USA.
Adult food memories: an amazing multi-course meal at Commander's Palace (New Orleans, USA) in the late 1990s, and pausing to enjoy the moment and listen to the sound of 12 whisks whisking at a macaron class at Le Cordon Bleu (Paris, France) in 2011.
Foodie Movies: Babette's Feast, Big Night and Julie and Julia.
Next project: renovating my kitchen – I can't wait!
Happy New Year! Here's to more surprises, more play, more fabulous food, more kindness, more hugs, more family fun, more love, more friendly banter, more faith, more opportunities, more laughter and more poems this year than ever before!
I had a plan for a quiet night in.
Don't you just love those opportunities to get into your pjs, put on a movie and enjoy some quality time on the couch? I got home a bit early and have tried to kick back and relax, but my cat has had other ideas. She has been set on disturbing the peace.
Normally happy to lay on my lap, this evening has been different. She has been very talkative and has undertaken more reconnaissance trips than usual. I'm not sure what it is she's been seeking but I have my suspicions that the neighbour's cat has been by today so she's been on the lookout for his return, and eager to remind me (repeatedly!) what a cheeky ginger boy he is to sit outside and taunt her.
So I left the comfort of the couch and got up and involved with other things around the house. She was undaunted – her circuits and chatting continued on.
And yet, as I finish this post I notice she is now curled up and snoozing…and I can't help but smile at her peacefulness.


text:
Putin Wanted to Crush Dissent. Jailing Alexy Navalny Didn't Help...
by Srivats Lakshman
On February 2, a court in Moscow sentenced Putin critic Alexy Navalny to two years and eight months in jail. Russia's most prominent critic has inspired massive protests that have shaken the country...
There are Many Good Ideas to Tackle Inequality – it's Time We...
This is the final article in the Reclaiming the Fair Go series, a collaboration between The Conversation, the Sydney Democracy Network and the Sydney Peace Foundation to mark the awarding of the 2018...
These Five Countries are Conduits for the World's Biggest Tax...
First came the Panama Papers, then the BahamasLeaks, and now it's the Paradise Papers. Journalists continue to shed light on and raise a public outcry over the offshore financial...
'Decarbonisation' May be the Wrong Goal for Energy – Here's Why
Electricity generated by nuclear power plants, wind turbines and solar panels results in negligible greenhouse gas emissions, even when their manufacture, construction and maintenance is taken into...
How the Super Rich Conquered London
Over cups of tea in his ramshackle London home, I chatted with a novelist. It felt a valuable opportunity, given his multiple fictional treatments of London, to discuss the city's rapid changes that...
Who is More Powerful – States or Corporations?
Who holds the power in international politics? Most people would probably say it's the largest states in the global system. The current landscape of international relations seems to affirm this...
Guns, Drones and Poison: the New Age of Assassination
Nobody has officially claimed responsibility for deploying the satellite-controlled machine-gun with "artificial intelligence" used to assassinate Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen...
The Taliban Are Megarich – Here's Where They Get The Money They...
The Taliban militants of Afghanistan have grown richer and more powerful since their fundamentalist Islamic regime was toppled by U.S. forces in 2001. In the fiscal year that ended in March...
Fragments of Energy – not Waves or Particles – may be the...
Matter is what makes up the universe, but what makes up matter? This question has long been tricky for those who think about it – especially for the physicists. Reflecting recent trends in physics...
This Unbelievable Research on Human Hibernation Could Get Us to...
Journeying to Mars is seldom out of the news these days. From Elon Musk releasing plans for his new rocket to allow SpaceX to colonize Mars to NASA announcing another rover as...
What it's Like to Lose a Presidential Election?
The American public may have only recently found out who won the presidential election last month. But now they know that Republican Donald Trump hasn't been elected to a second term and that...
Are Racism and Bigotry in our DNA?
Is bigotry in our DNA, a remnant of our fear of "the other" way back when that was necessary? If so, why do some battle with their instincts while others embrace them? Humans are the most...
This Century Will See Massive Shifts in the Global Population...
A lot of the predictions we hear about the future involve a hot, crowded planet, one where we need some serious science to figure out how to feed everyone and control rising global temperatures...
The Dark Side of Plant-Based Food – it's more about money than...
If you were to believe newspapers and dietary advice leaflets, you'd probably think that doctors and nutritionists are the people guiding us through the thicket of what to believe when it comes to...
Could We live in a World Without Rules?
We all feel the oppressive presence of rules, both written and unwritten – it's practically a rule of life. Public spaces, organisations, dinner parties, even relationships and casual conversations...
Airships Are No Longer a Relic of the Past; You Could Ride in...
As concern over climate change and rising temperatures grows, the airline industry is taking heat (pun intended). Flying accounts for 2.5 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions; that's lower than...
This Startup Is Growing Sushi-Grade Salmon From Cells in a Lab
As the ills of factory farming become more pronounced, people are increasingly gravitating towards vegetarian or pescatarian diets. Besides producing a large percentage of our total greenhouse...
If a Robot Is Conscious, Is It OK to Turn It Off? The Moral...
In the "Star Trek: The Next Generation" episode "The Measure of a Man," Data, an android crew member of the Enterprise, is to be dismantled for research purposes unless Captain...
AI Will Create Millions More Jobs Than It Will Destroy. Here's...
In the past few years, artificial intelligence has advanced so quickly that it now seems hardly a month goes by without a newsworthy AI breakthrough. In areas as wide-ranging as speech...
The Scariest Things in the Universe are Black Holes and here are...
Each year Halloween is a time to be haunted by ghosts, goblins and ghouls, but nothing in the universe is scarier than a black hole. Black holes – regions in space where gravity is so strong that...


text:
Scaachi Koul
Mixed Buzzfeed What an impossible task Emily Ratajkowski gave herself—it's admirable, really, her efforts to better understand the arcane, patriarchal, racist, capitalistic measurements of physical beauty that have allowed her to be famous and successful and rich ... Honestly, the whole book is pretty depressing, a constant push-pull between Ratajkowski's self-awareness and the greater forces that commodified her ... Ratajkowski's clean, clear writing does what you want it to do; it wrestles with what it means to be conventionally attractive ... Where Ratajkowski fails is in thinking more critically about her place in the world, in the continuum of women feeling bad about their bodies, being discriminated against for their bodies, being abused and assaulted for their bodies. There seems to be almost no recognition in her writing that her body is held up as a standard — not necessarily by her, but by other people intent on maintaining the beauty status quo — used to shame people who don't look like her ... The thing that she's trying to understand in a more holistic, intersectional way is the very thing that has given her a good, comfortable life. I don't begrudge her those moments of low self-esteem or the individuals in her life who seem to think she's nothing but a body, but when taken in the larger context of fat-shaming and body discrimination, hers is an unfulfilling tale ... My Body doesn't give us any way to move forward, any idea what to do with our punishing self-hatred or the way men profit from women's beauty ... People are entitled to look however they want, Ratajkowski included, even if her body sometimes makes me feel bad about my own. That's not her fault, per se — but she is an active participant in a system that raises her up and makes me hate jean shopping. That dichotomy is missing from her reflections ... My Body doesn't cut as deep as I want, but it cuts all the same
Hanna Halperin
Rave The New York Times Book Review The extraordinary commonness of female trauma, especially at the hands of men, can work against a piece of fiction, but in the case of Hanna Halperin's debut novel, Something Wild, it does the opposite. Some version of the story Halperin tells will likely feel familiar in a way that reminds you of pressing on an old bruise you were sure had healed. Something Wild is propulsive, tender, frustrating and entirely realistic. That's what hurts so much ... creates a compelling, believable and upsetting portrayal of how trauma ripples through a family ... It's a rare story where you're somehow rooting for everyone...the book is an impressive hat trick, pulling empathy from you for so many people in one story. There are a few side plots that add little to the novel, but the core of the book is still blistering ... did something that a book hasn't done for me in a very long time — it made me weep. Not just a few tears, but big, ugly tears, embarrassing ones, the kind you'd prefer to hide in the middle of the dark, the novel wrapping me in grief and fear and fury. The familiarity of the narrative gets caught in your throat; the clarity with which these women love one another clears it. Men fail their children and wives, the court system fails them again, and it's the mothers and sisters who pull themselves back together again. Something Wild can err on the side of predictability, sure, but domestic violence is pretty predictable too ... I wish Something Wild felt foreign, I wish the plot were pure fantasy. But good books sometimes cut to the bone, and this one feels like a scythe.
Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham
Rave The New York Times Book Review The best way to read Black Futures is, frankly, as slowly as possible. At over 500 pages, it's heavy, literally and figuratively. Every page of this oversize illustrated book is dense, even when it's just a few lines of white print on black background, or a sepia portrait of Representative Ilhan Omar. The book's curators, Kimberly Drew (the former social media manager at the Metropolitan Museum) and the New York Times Magazine culture writer Jenna Wortham, advise that \'like us, this book is not linear,\' nor is it meant to be read as such; you can enter and exit the project on whatever pages you choose. This freedom creates a literary experience unlike any I've had in recent memory — once you start reading Black Futures, you are somehow endlessly reading it, even long after you've devoured every page ... its messages can and should speak to anyone ... That's where so much of the pleasure of "Black Futures" lives: in getting lost down rabbit holes, learning more about, say, Black trans visibility or Black farming or Black hair. The brief chapters reach in seemingly infinite directions, each one a portal into what could be an entire book on its own ... t's a document that could flex and change with time, that could have endless editions attached to it as Black life moves apace. For now it serves as a living and breathing memorandum, and a pressing reminder that anyone anywhere can — must — join the fight.
Mixed The New York Times Book Review In first person, Lippman is funny and sharp at her best; she can sling a hell of a one-liner ... At times, however, she's mundane in her insistence that actually, she's very troublesome. The book's title suggests someone who's living her whole life as a villain; the reality is, Lippman is someone who got in trouble with her daughter's principal for one lousy tweet. (It involved a revenge fantasy involving aforementioned schoolmates.) The rebellion that Lippman seems to want to convince the reader of is sort of tedious — her writing on menopause, though cheeky, isn't really risky in the time of writers like Samantha Irby or Patricia Lockwood, women who bare themselves in their books. Some of her writing includes strange pronouncements, like her argument that she and her husband are \'solidly middle-class people no matter what our tax return says.\' (Strange for many reasons, including the fact that her husband wrote and created The Wire along with a few other successful television shows, and thus is likely not actually middle-class) ... Regrettably, you leave My Life as a Villainess wanting more of something. More introspection on her role as an \'old\' mom, more vulnerability when she talks about her body or her father, more detail, more heart, more heft. It's not enough to just enjoy the lilt of her writing (though the chapter titled Men Explain 'The Wire' to Me made me laugh). Essay writing requires that you be not just a gifted writer — which Lippman is — but that you have a point, a purpose, an insight, or at least a memorable conclusion ... Essay writing is, indeed, the most accessible kind of writing around. But just because you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should.