notes

Things I'm reading in Australia:

If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

The Believer, September 2010

The Bible

Picnic At Hanging Rock

Being Alive (poetry anthology)

The Consolations of Philosophy

I also feel that I might suddenly, intensely, start to miss all the people back home while kayaking in a remote corner of Tasmania. 

Angela McRobbie (from Postfeminism and Popular Culture):

When in a TV advertisement (1998/9) another supermodel, Claudia Schiffer, took off her clothes as she descended a flight of stairs in a luxury mansion on her way out of the door towards her new Citreon car, a similar rhetoric is at work. This advert appears to suggest that yes, this is a self-consciously “sexist ad,” feminist critiques of it are deliber ately evoked. Feminism is “taken into account,” but only to be shown to be no longer necessary. Why? Because there is no exploitation here, there is nothing remotely naïve about this striptease. She seems to be doing it out of choice, and for her own enjoyment; the advert works on the basis of its audience knowing Claudia to be one of the world’s most famous and highly paid supermodels. Once again, the shadow of disapproval is introduced (the striptease as site of female exploitation), only instantly to be dismissed as belonging to the past, to a time when feminists used to object to such imagery. To make such an objection nowadays would run the risk of ridicule. Objection is pre-empted with irony.

A word I like: genuflect

Are physical spaces commensurable? Yardsticks are necessarily reductive (?)

Looking for local scholarship opportunities opens up depressing future after depressing future...

To bake: savory caramelized onion muffins