Wednesday, August 22, 2007
Amanda's Book: The Perfect Gift
Thought Experiments regular Recusant emails to tell me I am 'one of the finest book reviewers in the land' - 'One of"!!?? - and I should really be getting hold of an advance copy of Amanda Marcotte's It's a Jungle Out There: The Feminist Survival Guide to Politically Inhospitable Environments. He is probably right, though I think I could get away with just reviewing the title. Is it not, for example, amazing how effortlessly she transfers the prose style of her blogging to the composition of fabulously clunky sub-titles and stale titles? Amanda, meanwhile, tells us that the cover design 'rocks my socks off'. It consists of a staggeringly original image of a large ape carrying a scantily-clad woman. How do they come up with these things? I can heartily recommend this book; it is the ideal Christmas present for the patriarchal pig who has lost the will to live.
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A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
she's a phenomenon.
ReplyDeleteit's retro-cheesy. is that the actual cover or just a sketched-out idea (or whatever they call it in publishing high command)
Also, Ian, being able to write is no qualification for writing a book
ReplyDeleteand being able to read won't be of much use to the rest of us.
ReplyDelete"Thought Experiments regular Recusant emails"??? Did Marcotte write that?
ReplyDeletehe's right of course, you're brill, you'd be either heartened or alarmed to know how vital being able to read your stuff is to my survival when bored to death at work. This is partly because yours is just about the only blog that hasn't been blocked at work (at the NHS, though, so who knows?), but also because you're intelligent etc. but not a twat. Most intelligent people are twats.
Oh, do go and look at the comment thread to the piece. It is quite the best yet.
ReplyDeleteIt seems some people have become upset at the 'racist symbolism' used. The Pandagonettes(?!?)are having to defend their heroine in terms they would normally scoff at when it comes from their opponents, and the blessed Amanda is busily denying all responsibility.
recusant, that is an amazing thread. Watching leftists finger-point interminably about who or what is racist is a bit like what I imagine having a stroke is like. First the fingers go numb...then the hand...then the...
ReplyDeleteWhat is the real hoot is to see all these presumably white bloggers get lathered about whether the picture of the horny gorilla is racist. They don't seem to even notice the woman is portrayed as a lavicious tart.
It's hard to know who is serious and who is having fun over there, but surely this line deserves an award of some kind: White women enslaving disabled gorrillas and using them as a form of personal transportation is wrong, imho.
Pandagonistas is the proper term, I believe. Under the circumstances (well-displayed on that thread) "contortionists" comes to mind as the best synonym for the moment.
ReplyDelete"LaVICIOUS" -- I like it, Peter. Good neologism for her.
ReplyDeleteAnd I think she should go to England and write a "Survival Guide to Political Hospital Environments." Bet she could fix your NHS, eh?