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Monthly Archives: January 2009

Adventures In Reading: Big Angry Philip Roth Edition

And so it came to pass that, on the thirty-first day of January, in this Year of Our Lord 2009, I did purchase a novel by Philip “Face-Fucker” Roth. You kind of have to know what you’re talking about if you’re talking opposition; even though every single long or short excerpt I have read from […]

LINKING TIME: Big Dead John Updike Edition

You never know for sure how girls’ minds work (do you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glassjar?)– Undeniably Great Genius John Updike, “A&P” So, John Updike’s still dead. Did you know that? It is a fact. I’ve been more or less thinking about […]

Amanda Hess! Puppies! Dark Wizards! And: The News!

Good morning! Are you ready…. FOR THE GREATEST INTERNET CROSS-BLOGGING DIALOGUE OF ALL TIME? I am just going to go ahead and assume that you are, for it has totally arrived: every Friday, the amazingly always funny and sensical Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper’s The Sexist and Me of the Blog That You Are […]

The Trials of Moderate Leadership

HEADLINE #1:Obama Signs First Piece of Legislation Into Law And it is the Lilly Ledbetter act, hurrah! This very important law (the best law ever? PERHAPS, but soon to be surpassed by my “Free Kisses from Adorable Puppies Every Day Unless You Are Allergic” bill, for which I will be lobbying hard) “expanded the time […]

Weekly Short Story Report: "A&P," John Updike

As the news of John Updike’s passing trickles down into obituaries, then appraisals, then annoying comment threads in which it is argued that feminist lit crit should just disappear because what matters is not whether John Updike created worthwhile, convincing fiction but whether he was “true to himself,” whatever that means, oh and also he […]

Compare and Contrast: John Updike

Dead; not dead.  Accurate; inaccurate.  Extremely accurate; also, timely.   Now: John Updike wrote and published an enormous amount of fiction and non-fiction, in defiance of the fact that seemingly everything he had to say about the world had been said more eloquently by someone else (see: suburban domesticity breeds conformity and destroys the soul) […]

UPDATE: Zombie Schlafly Eats President’s Brain

Has Obama already renounced his Feminist Superdude status? Because he is allegedly “begging” Henry Waxman to strip extended birth control coverage from the economic stimulus package. Now, I imagine he has reasons for this – because, you know, birth control is a vital health need, especially for poor women, and unplanned pregnancies and children increase […]

Zombie Schlafly Arises Through Dark Magic of Google; Is Cranky

It is still totally weird that Obama is President, by the way. We are about a week into it, and I still have these moments where I pause and take a second to realize how weird it is. I think the first of these moments happened when I saw a newspaper refer to “former President […]

Media Criticism Is My Hot Hot Sex

Once, in a far-away land known only as 9:30 a.m. this morning, I opened my e-mail inbox to find a message which read as follows: I haven’t yet read this… … but I suspect it might be a topic of conversation on the lady blogs tomorrow, if it isn’t already: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/25/magazine/25desire-t.html?_r=1 Or not. But I […]

Because.

Hey, did you ever read that totally weird and kind of clueless article in the New York Times about female sexuality, and think to yourself, “gee, I wish someone would pay Daniel Bergner to write – weirdly and somewhat cluelessly – about the difficult intersection of cultural representations of sex and human sexual response at […]