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Out of Body: Reading Gender Through “Women’s Fiction”

After The Way Things Are, I began to search the shelves of the local used book stores for more Virago Modern Classics. At one of the shops on Division Street, I found a peculiarity in the shelving system: there was a section labeled CLASSICS, and a separate section labeled OLDER FICTION. Most of the authors in the Classics section were men, with a few well-known women thrown in—Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontës, Virginia Woolf. The Virago Modern Classics were shelved in the OLDER FICTION section.

I asked Dick, the owner, about this peculiar arrangement. Why, for example, was William Faulkner (the Nobel Prize winner in 1949) shelved among the Classics, but Ellen Glasgow (the Pulitzer Prize winner in 1942) shelved among Older Fiction? Was it that men became classics and women just became old? Or, not to make a gender issue out of it, why was Virginia Woolf a Classic, but May Sinclair, who first applied the term “stream of consciousness” to fiction, simply Older?

As a young stay-at-home father, I gravitated toward Virago Modern Classics because they illuminated the ordinary domestic life to which I was growing accustomed, without becoming sentimental or losing sight of the broader human concerns and higher aspirations of their female characters. For most of the history of the English novel, writing was one of the only occupations open to women, one of the only ways in which they could make their voices heard outside the nursery and the kitchen. Their writing can’t help but express the immense gulf between the expansiveness of their imaginations and the apparent narrowness of the sphere to which they were traditionally confined. But being confined to that sphere, the sphere of domesticity, they also couldn’t help looking around and seeing some of its homely significance. They couldn’t help seeing that this world of messy children and dirty floors, of broken cookers and tight household finances, was also the real world. More real, perhaps, than anything else.

Astronómovia našli gravitačné vlny, ktoré podporujú teóriu o Veľkom tresku. Jeden z členov tímu, ktorému sa ich podarilo namerať, išiel o nich neohlásený povedať jednému z teoretikov, ktorý ich pred tridsiatimi rokmi predpovedal. Video z tohto stretnutia je výborné:

o topánkach pre bežcov – staré, ale zaujímavé

Surreptitiously, Mimura made soles of two slightly different thicknesses, to compensate for the fact that Takahashi’s left leg was eight millimeters — about a third of an inch — longer than her right leg. She had tried a pair of the uneven soles before the Sydney Olympics, but felt uncomfortable.

Still, Mimura felt Takahashi needed such shoes to win and to avoid a recurrence of pain caused by the disparity in her legs. Without Takahashi’s knowledge, Mimura gave her the uneven soles, then wrote a letter of resignation, in case she failed to win gold.

“I decided to take full responsibility because I made this pair against her wishes,” Mimura said of the letter. “I didn’t have to hand it over. It’s still in my desk.”

A year later, Kastor got a first-hand look at the precision of Mimura’s work. She met him for a fitting during the 2001 world track championships in Edmonton, Alberta. Using a tape measure, Mimura spent 20 minutes measuring her feet, Kastor said, including the length and circumference of each toe, the width of her heel, the length of her Achilles’ tendon and the width of her foot at six or seven spots.

“I didn’t know you could get that many measurements for a foot,” Kastor said. “But the shoes he made fit like a glove.”

what if what if was a book? – raz si ju budem musieť zohnať

fotky z Mišových výletov v Rumunsku počas poslednej služobky tu a tu

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