SHORT VERSION: Peter Handke’s A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (Wunschloses Unglück) is a stroke of genius! LONGER: A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is a short story about the suicide of a poor, sad and disillusioned Austrian woman who happened also to be Peter Handke’s mother. The book was written in 1972, shortly after the woman’s death. This…
Tag: feminism
Men are all brothers … ?!
Yesterday I read a bit about Oulipo. While reading I discovered this beautifully arranged picture of a part of the group, but couldn’t help noticing that there weren’t any women around … (I am, after all, on a quest for literary foremothers). In A Room of One’s Own Virginia Woolf writes: “we think back through our mothers…
To look one’s age
I went to see the The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel at the movies yesterday. It’s not an outstanding film, its entertaining, but not exceptional in any ways – other than this; the characters actually looks their age. Look at Judy Dench: isn’t she beautiful?! Wouldn’t it just be fantastic if young girls, women and old…
The Voyage Out
Inspired by Caroline’s beautiful review I’ve started reading Virginia Woolf’s first published novel: The Voyage Out (1915). Throughout The Voyage Out, writes Suzanne Raitt in The Cambridge Companion, Rachel (the heroine of the story) fights, just like Virginia Woolf herself, to develop a voice to which people will listen: Each of the ladies, being after the fashion of…
After the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning?
Today I have been studying the extraordinary work on ordinary life by the American artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. I am especially interested in how she presents her own invention Maintenance Art as a feminine antagonism to the male dominated Avant-garde. Mierle Laderman Ukeles: Washing/Tracks/Maintenance, 1973. She argues that the two, Maintenance Art and Avant-garde follow two…
sub rosa 