Friday Links

I bookmark a lot of stories over the week that I want to blog about.  Most of the time I don’t get to all the pieces.  So I decided that on Friday I will post the links  just so things don’t get too stale.

A Singular Woman (The Telegraph)
I know literally nothing about novelist Anita Brookner but this piece made me want to read her books. She wrote her first novel at 53 and has won the Booker Prize. This is a fascinating interview:

Of course, Brookner is completely wrong when she says she is ‘not very interesting’. She is one of the most extraordinary women I have ever met, brutally candid about her inner life, completely devoid of the consolations of self-delusion or self-pity. A conversation with her is like walking across Siberia – it may appear bleak and forbidding, but at the same time it is shockingly, exhilaratingly bracing. There is something almost heroic in her droll resistance to any glimmer of hope. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘One must be a realist.’

Another insightful Kim Voynar commentary, Mr. Hollywood and the Women (Movie City News)

Whether selling women as the objects of sexual pursuit for the male leads (Fired Up), or women as obsessed with fashion and shopping (Confessions of a Shopaholic, Sex and the City) or their relationships with the men in their lives (He’s Just Not that Into You, Sex and the City), or women in peril (Taken, Friday the 13th, Slumdog Millionaire), or a career woman learning the importance of love and a good man (New in Town), in any given week’s box office charts you can find abundant examples of the ways in which Hollywood marginalizes the societal role of women.

Movies have a tremendous reach and probably a greater influence over shaping the views of audience members than viewers want to admit or Hollywood studio heads would ever want to accept responsibility for. And while I wouldn’t want to see a world in which movies are subjected to some politically correct feminism film censorship board, it would be nice to see Hollywood reflecting more accurately the realities of the post-feminism world in which we live today — and helping to shape a tomorrow in which the idea of women as subjects controlling their own destinies — not just objects orbiting around men — are the rule rather than the exception.

Why Can’t A Woman Write the Great American Novel? (Salon)

Onto this mine-studded terrain and with impressive aplomb, strides Elaine Showalter, literary scholar and professor emerita at Princeton. Showalter has fought in the trenches of this particular war for over 30 years, beginning with her groundbreaking 1978 study, “A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists From Brontë to Lessing,” and culminating in her monumental new book, “A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx.” Billed as “the first comprehensive history of American women writers from 1650 to 2000,” “A Jury of Her Peers” has to negotiate the treacherous battlefield between the still-widespread, if fustian insistence on reverence for Great Writers and the pixelated theorizing of poststructuralists hellbent on overturning the very notion of “greatness.”