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I don’t find it satisfactory merely to add some considerations of care to the traditional moral theories for reasons similar to why it is not enough to simply insert women into the traditional structures of society and politics built on gender domination. Feminists should understand that the structures themselves have to change. The history of ethics shows it to be a very biased enterprise. Very roughly, what men have done in public life has been deemed important and relevant to moral theory, and what women have done in the household has been considered irrelevant.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Virginia Held.
This is a collection of ghost stories “purposely without ghosts”. The epigraph, from On the Road, serves to announce the emphatic Americanness of the contents. Like Kerouac with his continuous roll of typing paper, most of the authors herein have opted for the unadorned style, which has its roots in that country’s Puritan past. The collection satisfies eminently one’s appetite for such work. There are few or no ghosts of the literary sort haunting the first hundred or so pages of this book. And then, all of a sudden, in the last story, up springs a manifestation that couldn’t be more unAmerican, in the best of all the good senses of that near-universally approbative adjective.
Tom Bradley reviews Fiddleblack‘s first annual anthology.
I don’t find it satisfactory merely to add some considerations of care to the traditional moral theories for reasons similar to why it is not enough to simply insert women into the traditional structures of society and politics built on gender domination. Feminists should understand that the structures themselves have to change. The history of ethics shows it to be a very biased enterprise. Very roughly, what men have done in public life has been deemed important and relevant to moral theory, and what women have done in the household has been considered irrelevant.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Virginia Held.
Focusing on the danger of the category “pornography” in this case entails ignoring the ways in which certain subjects (BDSM practitioners, “perverts”) are being marginalsed and, indeed, criminalised, while the vanilla heterosexual mainstream is ignored or even exculpated. For me, legal, hegemonic, heterosexual commercial pornography is much more ethically pernicious than niche kink porn, as it reifies and falsifies, by means of endless repetition, ideas of “normal” male and female sexuality, that are made in the context of a patriarchal and capitalistic society and reflect its fantasies and beliefs.
Richard Marshall interviews Lisa Downing.
I’ve always found gas-masks to be frightening, uncanny objects, portents of a rapidly approaching apocalypse. The obsession started when I was a child. I used to love a comic strip called Charley’s War written by the great Pat Mills and published in Battle: Action Force during the 80s. Unlike other strips in the comic, Charley’s War was distinguished by the brilliant realism Joe Colquhoun illustrations and the storyline – instead of being filled with daring heroics – gave some insight into the horrors of trench warfare. I recall one cover in particular: a charge by spear-brandishing German cavalry, but both horsemen and horses were wearing gasmasks and moving through a ruined wasteland. I think that image stayed with me forever: its combination of the archaic and the modern seemed to presage some deeper and more troubling truth about the world that no one was talking about.
In the third in the series, the novelist James Miller picks five objects which have influenced and inspired his writing.
Home writes with the barmy intensity of someone cancelling superfluity. He rocks ideas from serious to gimp and back without batting an eye-lid. His fix is bold: here he junks up loose first person narration as controlled and artful as anything in Foster Wallace, say, but without the grandeur and pomp swooningly all-consuming. His unapologetic venery is done as formulaic pulp grind-house sex. S&M snuff scenes in lurid and hilarious detail that cut across the artful deposits of cultural-study tropes covering the whole performance like sand are his deft stock-in-trade. It’s all a huge, like, whelm.
Richard Marshall on Stewart Home & his anti-realist novel, Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane .