October 20th, 2009
Mark Bostridge reviews, The Blue Hour: A Portrait of Jean Rhys by Lilian Pizzichini.
Lilian Pizzichini’s The Blue Hour is a compact examination of what it felt like to be Jean Rhys, the writer who ended her days staring at the world through the bottom of an empty whisky bottle. More than 20 years ago, Carole Angier’s biography was a sprawling epic whose accumulation of jagged detail came to reflect the messy, bewildering nature of Rhys’s pain-stricken existence. Pizzichini is heavily indebted to Angier’s research, but her book has more in common with the spare, broken rhythms of one of Rhys’s novels or short stories, though she attempts to do what her subject would never have countenanced: to explain the psychological turmoil that made Rhys a great modernist writer as well as the most impossible of human beings.
Read the complete review at The Observer.
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October 13th, 2009
Lorrie Moore reviews Benjamin Moser’s, Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector, at the New York Review of Books.
Before beginning this review, I took a quick unscientific survey: Who had read the work of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector? When I consulted with Latin American scholars (well, only four of them) they grew breathless in their praise. She was a goddess; she was Brazilian literature’s greatest writer. Further inquiry revealed some misunderstandings about her life, a life that clearly had reached mythic proportions, with a myth’s errors and idiosyncratic details. Still, Lispector was held in reverent esteem by all four, though one believed she had died tragically in a fire (not so, although in her forties Lispector was burned on one side of her body, including her right hand, by a fire she accidentally started by smoking a cigarette in bed). Others were under the impression that she was a lifelong lesbian (also not so).
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July 21st, 2009
CFP: for short essays (1-2 pages) on various aspects of women’s experience in Second Life.
Go here for more info.
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July 17th, 2009
Rebecca Donner reviews the novel, A Short History of Women by Kate Walbert, at bookforum.com.
Multigenerational novels about women often elicit analogies to tapestries—relationships are interwoven, themes are intertwined, and there is much braiding of narrative strands. Let us not likewise domesticate Kate Walbert’s remarkable novel A Short History of Women, which traces five generations back to Dorothy Trevor Townsend, a Cambridge-educated suffragette who commits suicide for her cause.
Read the complete review.
Tags: Book Review
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July 9th, 2009
Elizabeth Lund reviews Poems from the Women’s Movement by Honor Moore for the Christian Science Monitor.
This “landmark collection” is powerful precisely because it is not a manifesto. Instead, the power of these poems comes from the fact that one writer after another – from the 1960s to the 1980s – dared to say what hadn’t been voiced before. In doing so, they helped other women – from scholars to housewives and mothers – find the courage to challenge the status quo as well.
Read the complete review.
Tags: Book Review
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July 8th, 2009
Feminists’ Night at the Movies
8:00 PM - 10:00 PM
Location: Palmer House, Room: Chicago Room
Featuring three films from the Women Make Movies catalog:
Women’s Kingdom: a film by Xiaoli Zhou and produced by Xiaoli Zhou & Brent E. Huffman. With breathtaking imagery shot in a remote area of southwest China, this short documentary offers a rare glimpse into Mosuo culture, one of the last matriarchal societies in the world, virtually unheard of until 10 years ago. Mosuo women enjoy great freedoms and carry great responsibilities. As the outside world encroaches, bringing 21st century conveniences, tourism, pollution, and mainstream ideas about femininity, these extraordinary women must meet complex new challenges to preserve their extraordinary culture.
Guerillas in Our Midst: a film by Amy Harrison. Through interviews and art-world footage, this film presents a savvy exploration of the machinations of the commercial art-world during its boom in the 1980s, and brings the Guerrilla Girls to the screen. This anonymous group of art terrorists has succeeded in putting racism and sexism on the agenda in the art-world since 1985, and their witty and creative tactics have changed the face of political and cultural activism.
To See If I’m Smiling (Lir’ot Im Ani Mehayechet): a film by Tamar Yarom. In this award-winning documentary, the frank testimonials of six female Israeli soldiers stationed in Gaza and the West Bank pack a powerful emotional punch. The young women revisit their tours of duty with surprising honesty and strip bare the stereotypes of gender differences in the military. With archival footage, personal material, and compelling testimonies, the documentary explores the ways that gender, ethics, and moral responsibility intersect during wartime.
Tags: Chicago, Conference
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July 6th, 2009
WSS members may be interested in some of the Grassroots Programs planned for the Annual Conference in Chicago.
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July 6th, 2009
The ACRL 101 session at the ALA Annual Conference in Chicago will be held Saturday, July 11, from 8:00-10:00 a.m. in Ballroom IV of the Chicago Sheraton Hotel. Also check out the Making the Most of Your 1st Conference Tipsheet from ACRL.
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July 6th, 2009
Please join us for the annual Introduction to Women’s Issues discussion, rotated each year among the SRRT Feminist Task Force (FTF), the ACRL Women’s Studies Section (WSS) and the Committee on the Status of Women in Librarianship (COSWL).
Introduction to Women’s Issues
Saturday, July 11: 1:30-2:30 PM
McCormick Place West W-176b
Topic: Women and Workload: Strategies for Empowerment
As budgets shrink, repositories and staff consolidate, and job responsibilities multiply, managing workload is a major struggle for many librarians. This year’s topic for Intro to Women’s Issues will be an informal discussion of strategies for balancing workload and additional job responsibilities, and also for knowing when/how to say “no” to new projects and assignments. We will additionally consider the impact of gender–studies of women in academia, for example, have found differences in job satisfaction between men and women related to work-life balance issues, types of committee and service appointments, and research collaborations. Are there similar differences in librarianship?
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July 6th, 2009
Please join your fellow WSS members this Saturday, July 11 from 6:00-8:00pm-ish at BIN 36 wine bar (339 N. Dearborn near the House of Blues) for great conversation, delish appetizers, and all-around good times. We’ll be walking up there as a group after the General Membership Forum, but feel free to drop by as your schedule allows.
For our other events and meetings in Chicago, please see our conference information web page.
Tags: Add new tag, ALA, Annual, Chicago, program, programs, WSS
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