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Monday, September 08, 2003 Hiatus
If you're a SoulSeeker and wondering why you can't connect see here
File-sharing = sex offense Sunday, September 07, 2003 Brian Eno: A Sandbox In Alphaville
Powell's Books interviews local teen phenom Zoe Trope as her surprise hit short memoir of high school Please Don't Kill the Freshman is re-published in an expanded edition by HarperTempest
The supposedly offensive Doonesbury
As a new Vintage edition of Mary Renault's The Friendly Young Ladies is published, Charles Taylor reassesses an early and surprisingly sophisticated story which wryly and effectively gives the lie to notions of determined sexualityElsie's inability to see the pair's relationship for what it was, according to Lillian Faderman's afterword, was shared by critics of the day. "I could not quite make out what was up with Leonora," said the critic for the English newspaper the Spectator. Though had Elsie been shrewder, she might have been just as confused. Leo and Helen have been together for seven years during which both have taken male lovers (as did Renault and her lifelong partner, Julie Mullard, during the initial years of their relationship). Renault wrote the book partly in response to Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness, whose dreary title pretty much summed up what she found so detestable about the book. Neither Leo nor Helen is much affected by guilt nor by the sense that their sexual tastes should settle down on one side of the fence or the other.
You've no doubt heard of it by now, but Diane Ravitch's important new book on the censorship of education in America The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn is smartly reviewed by the New Republic's David Bromwich hereEven the most casual reader will detect the hand of the right-to-life and animal rights lobbies and maybe a patrolmen's benevolent association. A broader and more pervasive influence is the fundamentalist religious right. Test questions must "avoid any mention of fossils or dinosaurs." These topics -- one must say it again -- are forbidden, not just framed by a warning to handle with care. But how do you construct a social studies test without bringing up politics or religion? How to mention work, or employment, without trailing a fringe of a hint of its opposite, unemployment? The world in which the tests and textbooks are required to take place is not merely fictional. It is a world that has been methodically purged of reality.
Debunking myths of the Net
In case you're like me, and will probably get a new PC loaded with XP (or try to upgrade your current PC) -- like it or not -- in the next year: PC Magazine's XP Survival Guide
I hesitated posting about Chuck Palahniuk's new "travel guide" to Portland OR because I might move there and don't particularly want to publicize it; but anyone who reads it and still decides to move there, would be fine with me anyway, I suppose...Unlike other books on the region, Palahniuk doesn't dwell on magnificent hiking trails or world-class wines. Instead, he points out that "to FBI experts who profile serial killers, the Pacific Northwest is 'America's Killing Fields,' because the people are so friendly and trusting. The wilderness is always nearby. It rains, and things rot fast." There's no mention -- thank God -- in Fugitives and Refugees of Portland's famous Rose Garden, though readers will learn how Rocky Horror virgins are deflowered at the Clinton Street Theater. And, he only brings up the city's famous bookstore (of course I mean Powell's) to tell readers about its resident ghost, and the human remains that were entombed in its pillar of books. If you aren't drawn to rotten apples and black sheep, this isn't the book for you. [review]
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