The other day, Rob posted what I thought would be the funniest thing of the week: the Garfield comic strip with the cat himself erased. It's brilliant--go have a look.
But then today, Qwags sent me this link to the Acephalous blog. I am still chortling. So, so true....
In other news, I've been cutting my work with rereading those volumes of Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern series that the Jesus College light reading room offers...or perhaps I should say I have been cutting my novel-reading with a little work! I first discovered these books 22 years ago: at the time, they gave me a different and much-needed world to escape to in the overwhelming family-wide vortex of confusion, grief, and guilt that surrounded the death of my grandmother. Reading them now, I still adore the world of the dragonriders, but am struck at how conventional and limiting it could be for women. I guess the idea that a woman could be a harper or a gold dragon's rider was exciting to me at 12, but now I wonder why no women are Masterharpers or riders of bronzes.... (The easy answer is "Because Anne McCaffrey said so," and that is, of course, the answer I'll have to accept. But still. I do appreciate the way that she--even in the 60s when the first novels were published--wrote in gay men as a very normal part of Pernese life, though there's not a lesbian to be found in the novels so far as I can tell.)
The [academic] Book I'm Not Reading: Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Yes, I think women should definetely be allowed to be Master Harpers. Grrrrrrr. And dragonriders too, of course, though not being able to ride dragons is somehow less if a personal issue.
Post a Comment