Masculinity & Femininity

There must be a new OU session starting. I'm getting a lot of hits from Google searches from "Masculinity & Feminity - Pygmalion - Medea" and such like. So there's a lot of visits to my previous page

I'm sorry it hasn't been too illuminating for you eager students, but nice to have you visit all the same. As Garrison Keillor says -Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

Nuala O'Faolain

I've just begun to re-read Are You Somebody by Nuala O'Faolain. I loved this book and was sad when I read that Ms. O'Faolain had died (obituary).

It is a book of searing honesty and pathos, and I'm re-reading it partly as a result of a converstaion I had with the writer . He was telling me that, after a long run of writing science fiction which had attracted no real audience, he had decided to write a memoir. Well, I thought it would be a brilliant memoir as he has lead the most fantastic, not say bizarre, life. The gist, he explained, was how he had arrived at the place he is now, i.e. a tent on Loch Lomond-side.

Anyway, not to pre-empt The Writer's memoir, I loved Ms. Faolain's book because of her ability to bear her soul on the page. She was hurtful to no-one, except perhaps herself, although that would probably be inevitable, re-visiting as she was many painful memories. I believe it was, ultimately, cathartic and redeeming.

I hope The Writer reads the book and takes it to heart , like I did.

End of Intermission

Hello again. I've not been away, I've just been blogging lazy. You know how it goes, you just can't get past that feeling of ennui, and it's just too much effort to open the laptop and log in. It happens to the best bloggers and goodness knows I'm far from the best.

I've edited the list of books read and it's not very impressive, is it. Anyway fuck it, I enjoyed them. Except Island of Terrible Friends by Bill Strutton. This book was published in the 1961 when the World War II was fresh in people's minds and there was a market for memoirs and biographies of the great war heroes. I remember as a boy being an avid reader of the biographies of war heroes like Leonard Cheshire VC and others. Anyway this book was the story of a surgeon, Major James Rickett,based on Island Vis off the coast of then Yugoslavia during the latter part of the war when the Yugoslave partisans, backed by units of allied troops, used Vis as a base for harrying the Germans on the adjacent islands of Brac, Hvar, and Korcula as well as the mainland around Split.

Frankly it was a poor read. I learned almost nothing about Major Rickett other than what he did, and that he was a brave and professional surgeon and soldier. The author treats his subjects with a superficiality that is deeply frustrating and one wonders why, when (as stated in the acknowledgement) he was greatly assisted by Dr. Rickett and his wife, he never got past recording events to ask about the lives behind them. Nevertheless it was in other ways instructive in its descriptions of the occupation of Vis by the partisans and their allies and the bravery of their actions in the the campaign to defeat the Nazis in Yogoslavia is reflected in some measure in the book. About the inhabitants of Vis, i.e. the native islanders I learned nothing at all, which is a pity as that is what I'd learn a little more of when I bought it.