Hedjogz luv linkspam
Dec. 1st, 2009 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
oursinInteresting piece in yesterday's Guardian G2 about books and movies that are the odd ones out in their maker's oeuvre, But are they always minor works 'that bear little or no resemblance to the works that made the authors famous'? I could make a case that it is the rather atypical Provincial Lady books and Cold Comfort Farm that are the works for which EM Delafield and Stella Gibbons respectively are famous, but which differ in significant respects from the rest of their oeuvres, which are, in both cases, interesting and worthy of attention but pretty much overlooked.
She's baaaaaaaaack. Lionel Shriver feared her older brother's weight problem would kill him. Days after she wrote this, he died. Okay, one is sorry for anyone who has lost a loved sibling, and send not to know for whom the bell tolls, etc: but is this just possibly over-making the case that it was all about obesity? When we read that it was not just that he had diabetes, but that there was an episode of congestive heart failure, that he had emphysema, and following several accidents was in chronic pain? And does 'accept[ing] the high-calorie habit as a defensible lifestyle choice' have anything to do with the fat acceptance movement, which is surely saying that there is no necessary correlation between being careless or reckless about eating and exercise, and obesity. Or possibly pointing out the issues to do with the marketing and availability of high-calorie foods.
Article in the New York Times about approaches to dealing with problems of female desire - in particular, women who want to feel urgent desire but don't. This may, of course, be due to pervasive cultural tropes of what desire is actually like and how it manifests tending to occlude how they actually experience it. I am very Always More Complicated about the findings on desire following arousal - because I think it may well be true for some but not others, &/or, as darling Stella Browne remarked 'in the same woman as at different times'. And HAI ELEFANT IN ROOM! okay, the assumed male model of desire doesn't necessarily apply to female arousal and desire, but: can we possibly ask? how far is it 100% true for Teh Menz? Is it even possible that they may be influenced, as women, or some women, seem to be, by relationship and general life issues.
From young Mozart to black holes, 350 years of the Royal Society go online. Probably omitting too much about the 262 years during which they eschewed having any icky gurlyz among their number: except for a couple of C19th ladies who with exquisite tact were willing to let their marble busts actually represent them.
Audio slide show of AIDS posters for World AIDS Day
What's red, black, and online? The Stendhal Manuscripts project. In the course of which, we discover, Madame Bovary is now in cyberspace. (O for someone to do the Bovary facebook or tweets...)
[F]requently described as Weston's great muse and the model of his middle/late years, she was also his driver, secretary, business manager and accountant, and wrote many of the texts that accompanied his photography books from the mid-1930s to 1940s.
We also discover that Charis Wilson 'was also immensely practical, working as a secretary, delivering mail or in a fish cannery when they needed funds, and handling his picture sales'. She also appears to have helped out in the darkroom. But that, and later with second husband 'working as a union secretary and a creative writing tutor', will not get a woman remembered like nude photoportraits.
- desire,
- film,
- gender,
- health,
- links,
- manuscripts,
- moral panic,
- novel,
- nudes,
- obituary,
- photography,
- science,
- scientists,
- sexuality,
- shriver,
- stds,
- women,
- women's bodies,
- writers
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no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 04:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 08:01 pm (UTC)Yes, otherwise there's such danger from those overwhelmingly common messages about how awesome it is to be fat. I mean, think of all those television shows and movies that show fat person after fat person living a happy, successful life full of love, friendship, and professional success, and not at all stigmatized or mocked. And of course our standards of beauty get fatter and fatter every year. If fat people aren't relentlessly told how unhealthy they are, how will they ever know????
*sigh*
You know, one of the reasons many fat people don't get enough exercise is because they're ashamed. They've been told so often that their bodies are hideous that they do the quite natural thing and try to hide them as much as possible, because no one wants to be stared at or laughed at.
And when I say "they," of course I mean "we." I've been bombarded with health messages about the evils of obesity all my life, and it hasn't yet made me thin. It's only made me shy, anxious, and intermittently full of self-loathing. So obviously what I and other fat people need is more lecturing about the "obesity crisis."
no subject
Date: 2009-12-02 12:05 am (UTC)Part of the problem is that it's not easy for a fat person, or a person with gray hair and stretch marks, to go to a gym, or otherwise exercise in public. My gym is good, and I gather unusual, in that nobody comments on my appearance, and the staff can understand "this is a strength and endurance program, any weight change will be an unimportant side effect." Because if they couldn't, I wouldn't have somehow magically become thin, I would have returned to being a person who exercised only by walking. (Walking isn't a bad thing, but I like the weight training.) But I also needed some self-confidence, which is not easy to come by when people tell you that you have no business being out in public in that body, or that exercise clothing doesn't come in your size because everyone knows that fat people don't exercise. It really does help to be able to get sports bras that fit, and I don't have a lot of options there. (For shorts, I stole my male partners', because a waist size that is large for me is well within the male average.)
no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 06:26 pm (UTC)In the 6th paragraph:
Having been beaten up with a metal baseball bat in 1998 and broadsided by a careless driver while on his moped two years later, he boasts that his body clinks with "24 pieces of titanium" that set off alarms at airport security. The resultant chronic pain has made it impossible for him to exercise. The fact that my brother is fat is not, altogether, his fault.
If he had been thin, I wonder if he would have been more active? I doubt it. If his orthopedic surgery had been better? If he had better pain management? That would probably have made more of a difference for his activity level and quality of life. But chronic pain is MY obsession, as obesity appears to be Lionel Shriver's.
I know chronic pain cannot always be treated effectively. But the odds are better than for long-term weight loss. There is already a global campaign to make sure obesity is thoroughly stigmatized, so doctors and patients will know they are supposed to work hard against it (even when their efforts fail, or do damage.) With chronic pain, most of the stigma goes the other way. Being able to endure pain without help indicates courage and strength. Doctors are afraid of making patients too dependent--the stigma of dependence on narcotics is extremely strong. Some also think of a medicated patient who can walk a mile as being sicker, somehow worse off, than an unmedicated patient who can only walk 100 feet. Some chronic pain cannot be treated, because a person reacts badly to all the available treatments, or because nothing helps. But there are also times when nobody has really considered trying, or recognized that it might be possible.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 09:16 pm (UTC)I have an older brother about whom I write with some reluctance, because I feel protective of him.
But not so protective that you aren't willing to publish his personal medical and physical details in a catchy article, of course.
I also can't believe she speaks approvingly of losing weight on a liquid-only diet. I've never heard or read anything good about those diets. The potential side effects are grim (a friend of mine who tried it had a lot of her hair fall out) and the odds of gaining the weight back once you return to solid foods are extremely high.
And yes, there are so many other ways she have told this narrative, instead of giving overeating the starring role. Ugh.
no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 10:45 pm (UTC)The LS piece... OMG, I couldn't read it. I want to staple "correlation is not causation" on people's foreheads. For a long time, I was overweight and out of shape because of totally unrelated breathing problems, but every time I asked I was told the breathing issues were my own fault for being overweight and out of shape. No: if you have trouble breathing whenever you exercise, you won't exercise. I finally got out of the trap by focusing on strength training and realizing that I wasn't out of shape, and then pushing until I found a doctor that would test me for breathing problems. And lo, I have asthma tests that demonstrate I don't breathe well. (It wasn't asthma, it was something else, but it was still a provable, documented failure to inhale enough fucking oxygen.) The scary thing is that I was only slightly overweight, and it was still blamed as the cause of a different, real health issue that was a major contributing factor for the overweight. Er, end rant....
no subject
Date: 2009-12-01 11:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-03 09:19 am (UTC)