(Source: mollylambert)
Kate Bush - “Wuthering Heights” (via suicideblonde)
This morning I listened to a discussion on the ABC Radio National Book Show about popular songs inspired by literature, and the two presenters marvelled at the young Kate Bush’s precocious insight into desire and adult womanhood, ventriloquising the character of Catherine Earnshaw in the song “Wuthering Heights.”
Later I was reading “The Glass Essay” from Anne Carson’s Glass, Irony and God:
She lives on a moor in the north.
She lives alone.
Spring opens like a blade there.
I travel all day on trains and bring a lot of books—
some for my mother, some for me
including The Collected Works Of Emily Brontë.
This is my favourite author.
Also my main fear, which I mean to confront.
Whenever I visit my mother
I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë,
my lonely life around me like a moor,
my ungainly body stumping over the mud flats with a look of transformation
that dies when I come in the kitchen door.
What meat is it, Emily, we need?
And I started to think about other women of the moors – isolated, precocious, prodigious – and the strange and knotty web of inheritances knitting Emily Brontë, Kate Bush, Anne Carson, the ABC Radio National Book Show, and a grey Monday in Melbourne.
Yvonne Todd, January, 2006
From the Queensland Art Gallery collection (currently on show at the NGV):
“Yvonne Todd’s fascination with the dark side of beauty emerges from her investigation of photography. Using her technical expertise, Todd shows us that there is always something more to what we see in a photograph, even if it is more artifice.
In January 2006, we are presented with Todd’s version of ‘January Wayne’, the tragic young heiress of Jacqueline Susann’s 1973 bestseller Once is Not Enough – a carefully made-up and Photoshopped muse with an anxious expression and bloodshot eyes. Todd’s January, about to consume a sugarcube laced with hallucinogens that would result in her disappearance – as it did the character in Susann’s book – presents an obscure mix of pathos and glamour, sexuality and creepiness.”
One day in a Kabul bookstore I found a collection of landays—”short ones”—the two-line poems the Pashtuns recite to each other at the village well or at wedding celebrations. The book, originally published as Suicide and Song, was compiled by Sayd Bahodine Majrouh, a celebrated Afghan poet and writer assassinated while in exile in Pakistan in 1988. He first collected women’s landays in his native Kunar River Valley. Majrouh, a humanist, found glory in these cries from the heart, which defy convention and in many ways mock male honor. From cradle to grave, the Pashtun woman’s lot is one of shame and sadness. She is taught that she is undeserving of love. This is why, Majrouh wrote, landays are “a cry of separation” from the idea of love and a revelation of the misery of misalliance.
A woman’s husband is often either a child or an old man forced on her through tribal bonds:
Have you with your white beard no shame? You caress my hair and inside myself I laugh.
Tauntingly, a woman lances a man’s virility:
In battle today my lover turned his back to the enemy. / I am ashamed of having kissed him last night.
Or voices her frustrated desire:
Come, my beloved, come quickly and be close to me! / The “little horror” lies in slumber and you may kiss me now.
The “little horror” is the man a woman is forced to marry, a kind of dupe. Only without his knowledge will she find true love. As Majrouh understood them, Pashtun women, for all their submissiveness, have always lived in a state of deep craving for rebellion and for the pleasures of earthly life. He called his book Suicide and Song because these two acts are how they protest their anguish.
— Elizabeth Rubin, “Afghan Women,” National Geographic MagazineIf you are a man, putting a picture of yourself on the cover implies some self-seriousness, especially if you are handsome. If you are a woman, putting a picture of yourself on the cover implies frivolity or that you are a C-List celebrity trying to sell books. Most serious new books do not have author photos on the front.
Unless you are Patti Smith. If you are Patti Smith you can do whatever the fuck you want. Also if you are Susan Sontag or Joan Didion or Hannah Arendt. People take a woman seriously so long as she is not also trying to seem beautiful. If she can fake a lack of vanity, or transform her vanity into an attack on generalized female vanity.
— In Which We Pay Mind to Author Photographs and Facebook: This Recording by Molly Lambert (via doree)Girl Detective Chronicles, by Rishma Dunlop
Long after my mother thought I was asleep,
late into the night, I would read under the
covers with a flashlight.
How I loved them, the stories about the
girl detectives, reading and recording the
world in notebooks – Harriet the Spy,
the ones who solved crimes with their
wits, their brains, their All-American good looks.
I drove that blue roadster with Nancy
Drew, dated Ned, looked lovely and charming
and desirable at college football games.
And how I dreamed of being Cherry Ames, student
nurse, with her stylish cap and uniform, her black
hair and rosy cheeks, her boyfriends and her adventures.
And when I grew up, I became them, Nancy and Cherry.
I cut off my long black braids, styled my hair into a bob.
I became the girl detective, the nurse, capable of building
nations and soothing the hearts of men
for awhile.
Reading Ladies Home Journal, by Rishma Dunlop
Reading my mother’s magazines
Ladies Home Journal and Miss Chatelaine
pictures of women with cinch-waist dresses,
bouffant hairdos. They ride in convertibles
headscarves keeping every hair in place.
These women are so happy with their pink and aqua
kitchen appliances. In one ad for Scott toilet paper,
the woman wears an evening gown in the exact
pastel blue of the toilet paper and Kleenex tissue.
These women use Yardley Lavender and Cashmere Bouquet
talcum powder. They buy new davenports and credenzas. Pictured
in exotic landscapes in their underwear, they dream in their Maidenform
bras and girdles that promise to set them free.
The ad I like best is for the black lace corset called a Merry Widow.
Under the sedate hairdo and perfect makeup of the model, her Max Factor
red lips whisper It’s simply wicked what it does for you. Care to be daring,
darling?
‘It’s lame to call them poetesses,’ said Pancho.
‘You’re supposed to call them poets,’ said Barrios.
‘But are there lots of them?’
‘Like never before in the history of Mexico,’ said Pancho. ‘Lift a stone and you’ll find a girl writing about her little life.’ — From Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives (via monicalong)
Jonathan Rauch, “Caring for Your Introvert,” The Atlantic.
“We can only dream that someday, when our condition is more widely understood, when perhaps an Introverts’ Rights movement has blossomed and borne fruit, it will not be impolite to say “I’m an introvert. You are a wonderful person and I like you. But now please shush.”
“I don’t need to relate to her,” Jones says of Betty Draper, the show’s most unsympathetic character. “The biggest obstacle for me is not to judge her.” (via Inside ‘Mad Men’: On Set and Behind the Scenes of the Emmy- Winning Show)
Justin Fitzpatrick, Sylvia Plath and the Worry Bird, 2008
(via lovingsylvia)
Incoming Malthouse Theatre Artistic Director Marion Potts gives the 2010 Rex Cramphorn Memorial Lecture, in Melbourne, September 2010.
“I want women to stop being burdened by the many voices that question their legitimacy and erode their faith in themselves. Why are we being made to hold meetings and form alliances which place even more scrutiny on us? It’s essential that we do it, but I resent having to. But more importantly how can we get this to stop being an issue? It goes right back to the question of agency. How can women have an impact on the world around them if they are never allowed to imagine one on stage? Or if all they see on stage is one that re-enforces the dominant paradigm and almost teaches them to value what they’re not?
This idea of theatre as the place where we vent, explore, deliberate, imagine who we want to be needs to be at the heart of the company’s work. I want it to be reflected in the collegial and collaborative way I work, not set out as some kind of charter. It needs to be borne of what we do in the rehearsal room, to extend and permeate through the company’s culture in everything from our Education Program to our HR practices. It needs to be felt by our audiences, not told to them, it needs somehow to seep out of the bricks and mortar of our building.
…
By way of conclusion - I have to remind everyone that Paul Keating was the last Prime minister to have attended the performance of a major organisation. Or perhaps that’s not a conclusion but an incitement to discourse… in any case we invite Julia Gillard to a theatre nearby, anytime soon.”
Love, Lust and Lies (2009) is the fifth (and last) installment of Gillian Armstrong’s 7-Up style longitudinal documentary series following the lives of three Adelaide women. Armstrong was commissioned to make the first film in 1976, when she herself was only 26, eventually selecting her three teenage subjects at a South Australian youth group.
(Australians can watch the documentary for free on iView for the next twelve days…)
