I went to the reading of Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby’s book on Friday night at Re/Dress, a plus-sized vintage/resale boutique in Brooklyn. I’m not the world’s biggest fan of shopping, in part because at my size, it’s difficult to find *anything,* let alone anything fashionable and at the same time age-appropriate* or suitable for my body type (please let the tyrrany of the Empire waist come to an end). But I also get grumpy in stores, which makes vintage shopping kind of a trial (and when you add in the musty smell that is inevitable among vintage clothing and which also turns me off used bookstores, well), because you kinda have to look at EVERYTHING because everything is one-of-a-kind.
Not my idea of a fun way to while away the afternoon. And it’s not like I can even get into shoe shopping, because of my big feet. I do have jewelry, though! Which is important when you wear the same drab old outfit nearly every day. Continue reading ‘It’s good to have skillz’
Kate Harding and Marianne Kirby’s book is out! Lessons from the Fat-o-Sphere: Quit Dieting and Declare a Truce With Your Body is currently at #2 on Powell’s. By coincidence, it’s also International No Diet Day, and Kate would like to see the book reach #1 just because it would be too perfect.
So give Kate and Marianne some love and buy the book (preferably through Powell’s, though Amazon has it too).
That modern novels set in, say, Georgian, Victorian or Edwardian London perhaps consider *not* putting the female characters into either the “lady” or the “whore” categories, as if there were no other options? And perhaps not have the male protagonists visit brothels as a character-delineation or plot device, to show how very lonely and alienated and dissolute and ripe for redemption they are?
Because you know what really endears a character to me and makes me want to cheer him on and hope he gets the “good” girl in the end? His sexual exploitation of women in desperate straits.
And is it a coincidence that this usually happens in novels written by men? I think not.
Published at June 1, 2008
in Books.
I discover that the local used bookstore is closed.
Argh.
Guess I’ll bring them with me and start selling them on Amazon.
Dana Goldstein examines some of the complicated and problematic stereotypes and roles in the Potterverse in The American Prospect. I agree with most of her points, including the parallels to 20th-Century racist classifications — in particular, those of Nazi Germany — in the whole mudblood/halfblood/pureblood distinctions and rankings. Rowling claimed not to have seen the parallels until a visit to a Holocaust museum, but I have a hard time believing that. Continue reading ‘It’s called the “wizarding” world for a reason’
Oy. This is actually a piece written prior to the release of Book 7, but I found it while looking for something else on the Time site, and it irritates me, so what the hell.
Title? Who Dies in Harry Potter? God.
Yeah. Seriously.
I was reading the book this weekend, and it struck me how often characters said, “Thank God,” or churches were discussed, or there was Christmas and Easter mentioned. Hell, too. So God’s not entirely absent from the picture. He’s just not central to it, which seems to be getting up the author’s nose.
It starts off with a discussion of how many houses J.K. Rowling has, and how she has more money than the Queen but no middle name (the “K” was an add-on). Which sort of puzzled me, because what does that have to do with anything, let alone God? Continue reading ‘Harry Potter and the Religious Whiners’
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