Random question for Pawlu, do you run Another Liverpool Thing or have input into it?

Progressing with Lessing (heh) and really liking it. Have finished Cornel West's Democracy Matters, which was pretty good, but pretty slight, and am now also engrossed in Hervé This' fascinating Molecular Gastronomy.

Sovereign by CJ Sansom. Good stuff.

SO, I finished The Golden Notebook.

Hmm.

I liked much of it a very great deal. The treatment of madness, of political dislocation, of professional cynicism and psychological non-linearity are all very well-handled.

But, er, the sex.

I totally get that it was revolutionary for sex and sexual/psychosexual motivation to be talked about so frankly and honestly from a woman's point of view, for the sexuality of women to be presented in such a detailed and realistic manner.

But it isn't revolutionary any more. And while others have learned to do that, they've also managed to what Lessing (here, at least) can't - to also present males as rounded sexual beings, rather than barely thinking automata.

It may well accurately communicate the phenomenology of 1950s women in that regard, but it's... disconcerting.

To Nil Arshavin: yes but I've replied in more detail via pm.

Cheers

I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men which is breathtakingly wonderful stuff. Also some stuff on Moral Realism and Feminist Biology.

I've just finished 'The Writing on the Wall'', Will Hutton's book about China and where it's headed, published in 2007, it has been overtaken by events - the financial meltdown he feared has taken place but the US has elected a president with a lot of potential - it is still relevant if you wish to understand the Chinese economy and the political and economic conundrum they are facing.
Bottom line: China - big internal problems ahead...

Well worth a read.

Manuel Murillo Toro wrote:

QUOTE:
I'm reading David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men which is breathtakingly wonderful stuff. Also some stuff on Moral Realism and Feminist Biology.

OK, I'll bite: what's feminist biology about?

Got the new Landmark Herodotus for Christmas in beautiful hardcover. It is as nice a book as you could ask for- don't think I'll be able to put it down, it seems to have derailed my other reading. Great intro by Rosalind Thomas and of course the very thorough annotations and maps & illustrations throughout. Wish I'd had this edition the first time I approached classical lit.

How about a Landmark Livy, Tacitus, Arrian and Plutarch while you're at it?

Antonio - there are three main sorts of Feminist Philosophy of Science. Feminist empiricism points to occasions when masculinist/male assumptions have obscured or missed the correct interpretation of scientific phenomena. Feminist standpoint theory alleges that some scientific insights may only be accessible in the first place, at least in the context of discovery, to members of particular communities - including that of women. Feminist postmodernism goes still further, arguing that truth is particular to individual communities, and that no overarching collective consensus is possible or desirable. Feminist empiricism is pretty obviously correct. Standpoint theory probably is too, depending on how strongly you construe it. Feminist PoMo is mostly silly and likely self-contradictory. Not that those are, by its lights, necessarily legitimate criticisms...

Any or all of these can be applied to biology. For instance, a lot of the assumptions about human evolutionary history have "man the hunter" as the active agent on whom selection is acting, and to whose needs our current bodies are adapted - this has been more recently challenged by (somewhat rhetorical) reconstructions of "woman the gatherer", demonstrating that at least equally plausible alternative and female-centred selective explanations are available. Another example is the long-standing practice of seeing the sperm, rather than the ovum, as the disproportionately active, or "difference-making" gamete - compare the idea that all foeti "are female" until the Y gene kicks into effect.

Have finished that and the DFW - am now reading Steve French's Science and Ian Hacking's Representing and Intervening as PhilScience lecture-writing prep, and a Selected Poems by Paul Celan.

Given the current fantastic (for us) sterling to euro rate, I'm going to splash out on a number of books namely Blind Side, Running With Legends and either one of The Ball is Round and When Friday Comes.

Some people have already spoken about Blind Side in another thread but I've just read an excerpt and completely loved it so am going to take a risk. Any opinions about the other books though?

Cheers, Toro. Based on that description I'd probably stop at feminist empiricism as being wirth reading, but perhaps I don't unerstand the standpoint stuff well enough.

Pawlu: you cannot possibly go wrong buying The Ball is Round.

Not much reading over the hols - too much work and family and other stuff. But in the last week or so I managed to get properly busy and read Nixonland, which is absolute pure fucking genius, and Bernard-Henri Levi's Left in Dark Times which I suspect is crap but don't know enough about French politics to tell. Certainly, it's the kind of book I'd like to have a bunch of OTFers around to discuss it with.

Also, Iain Banks' Feersum Endjinn, which is the first of his novels to which I would give a resounding "meh".

Still going with the Celan, not really digging it. Finished Nancy Cartwright's (no, not that one) How The Laws of Physics Lie, and am now also reading an odd Dutch engineering/art thing on Lightness.