Luke > Recent Status Updates

You know an animated TV series is good when the City Lights Bookstore shows up in it as a philosophical trip.

Homvati Devi (1906-1951, Hindi) - "...[I]n 1939 [she] read her first story to an audience of fellow writers at the Nauchandi Mela held in Meerut. Her home soon became a gathering place for writers and intellectuals, who came even from other cities to discuss Hindi literature and read their work. Some of the debates...may well have changed the course of Hindi literature.

Vibhavari Shirurkar (Malatibai Bedekar, b. 1905, Marathi) - "It is not surprising that a woman writing so frankly about women's experiences shocked society at large and critics in particular...She was accused of obscenity, of indecency, of not considering the interests of society as a whole when she depicted women, of being self-centered...There were several threats against her life."

Subhadra Kumari Chauhan (1904-1948, Hindi) - "Unlike her contemporary...who set aside the writing of poetry as she moved into the nationalist struggle...Kumari wrote much of her soul-stirring poetry in the thick of it. The commitments that run through all her work are an intense patriotism, a need to secure equal rights for women...[and] a desire to break down the barriers of caste and religion..."

Sudha Chauhan (b. 1924, Hindi) - "[Her] major work for adult readers, Mila Tej Se Tej, from which we have excerpted...these accounts of her mother Subhadra Kumari Chauhan's life—a writer and an activist loved and admired by many—is as much a history of India's struggle for Independence and what it meant at the level of everyday life as it is a biography of her parents."

Mary John Thottam (1901-1985, St. Mary Begina, Malayalam) - "She describes nature as a living reality, reflecting and sharing the feelings of human beings, but the principal theme of her work is the arduous journey of the spirit from the sensuous love of the earth and its beauty toward understanding and acceptance of its metaphysical relevance."

Tallapragada Viswasundaramma (1899-1949, Telegu) - "She took part in the noncooperation movement, and in 1930 she led the women of the West Godavari region in the Salt Satyagraha, was arrested in Eluru, and imprisoned for six months. Again in 1932, she was arrested for presiding over a Congress meeting that had been banned by the imperial government."

If Vollmann hasn't read J. Bowles I'll eat my hat. He should as well, for that matter.

Google Search: Dark Fiction

Do you mean: Elfriede Jelinek

Beware those who identify with Kurtz.

Brain: No, Aubrey, you're here for the other African American Studies book. You know. For school?
Me: It's not my fault my personnal reading intersects so much with academia.
Brain: You could at least pretend to regret that.
Me: NEVER.

I'd pity Tom more for being controlled by his mother if I didn't know that it wasn't the controlling part, but the woman part, that was sending him into such tizzy.

Woolf envied Mansfield's writing, eh? Hrm...

Reading interlude: Juno Reactor VS. Don Davis - Navras

I rescind my claim that the Iliad is the oldest piece of gay fanfic.

It is odd having memories of Brittain mourning the waste of creative talent that was WWI while reading about this Tom Stearns Eliot taking advantage of it.

Unfaithfulness, homophobia, and pretty pretty words. I wonder which set of today will get the same treatment as the Eliots and the Russells when all of them are safely dead.

One factor I use to grade biographies about women is how the biographer handles their subject's menstruation events, if any there may be. Thus far, I am very satisifed. The 100+ pages of end notes also help.

Nothing like seeing the list of required reading for three (three!) upcoming Enlglish courses during a renewed bout of sickness to make you go FUCK YOU COLD. I'M GOING TO HALF PRICE BOOKS TODAY OR I'M GOING TO DIE TRYING.

JS&MN spoilers, ahoy! You can't do spoiler tags in general status updates for whatever ridiculous reason, so have a comment.

This would be going faster if I didn't stare off into the distance and mutter motherfucking stone tablets though every five pages, but there you go. Not even the xenophobia numbfuckery of the introduction can ruin that for me.

I could hardly believe it! A mild-mannered lady, mousy and thin, and she loooked as if she were at least thirty-five. And yet she had suddenly, shamelessly, lost all self control at the mere mention of Rasputin, that peasant in a pink calico smock whom I had heard ordering "Annushka" to look for the tea strainer...

Don't mind me, just driving home the fact during Women in Translation Month that it's anonymous, not anonyman.

It got really Bolaño all of a sudden and I'm loving it.

I must say, "Duty and Honor" amused me more than "The Importance of Being Earnest" ever did.

Not enough people/librarians on this site partake in Bollywood or whatever cinema is making movies about all these women. I've run across at least five films and I'm still in the early 18th century. At least Wiki's being informative about things, cause GR's pulling its usual lolnope a lot more frequently this time around.

Is it possible to create an author page without the simultaneous creation of a published written work? My current set up's a gate-keeping back of dicks when it comes to poets of the oral tradition.

Kalyanamma (1894-1965, Kannada) - "Saraswati was undoubtedly [her] major achievement. She launched it in 1921 as a slim volume of forty pages with three hundred subscribers, but it became very popular and circulation soon grew to two thousand...She was editor, proofreaded, contributor and advertising agent...[and] its principle object was the all-round development of women."

Nazar Sajjad Hyder (1894-1967, Urdu) - "[She] started writing at a very young age. Her stories and articles were published in such prestigious literary magazines as Abdul Qadir's Makhzan...[and she] was also honorary editor of Phool...and contributed to epoch-making women's magazines such as Khatoon...Ismat..., and Tehzib Niswan..."

Indira Sahasrabuddhe (ca. 1890-?, Marathi) - "...Keval Dhyeyasathi...1924, was bolder, and the position she took, unprecedented. She not only criticized the institution of marriage but also called it redundant..."...even the Western-educated characters in the novel cannot appreciate that women may want more than home, marriage, and motherhood.""