the primrose path

There's a brief interview with Doris Lessing in the Times, today. She's one of my heroes, even though I don't always like her books and certainly haven't read them all. (I'm currently in the middle of the second volume of her autobiography. The first volume Under My Skin is a major work.)

She's announced that Alfred & Emily---her most recent book imaging the life her parents might have had if WWI had never happened---will be her last book; which to me suggests she is anticipating her death. She's also claimed (though it isn't addressed in this interview) that she wishes she'd never won the Nobel Prize for literature, it has complicated her life.

There is also a photo essay about the women from the FLDS compound in Texas. An image of girls bouncing on a trampoline caught my eye. The FLDS fiasco and its resulting ripples have me thinking a lot about the following idea expressed in a recent essay from one of my other heroes (and protege of Bloom, also mentioned in the Lessing interview) Camille Paglia.

Paglia gave a lecture called Feminism Past and Present: Ideology, Action, and Reform at The Legacy and Future of Feminism conference in which she addresses some of the inherent conflict in feminist ideology and practice. One of her most pressing concerns is the following question:

Feminism certainly has an obligation to protest and, if possible, to correct concrete abuses of women and children in Third World nations. But feminism might look very different in more traditional or religious societies, where motherhood and family are still valorized and where the independent career woman is less typical or admired.

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