![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
hanneblank's journalLog in Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more
| You are viewing hanneblank's journal Log in Create a LiveJournal Account Learn more | Explore LJ Culture Entertainment Life Music News & Politics Technology |
 | |||
|
new article up online
Just in time for the Decemberween season, Reflection's Edge asked me for some ramblings on the topic of fiction and research. I obliged, and Verisimilitude and the Competent Con: Research for Fiction is now live on their site for your reading enjoyment. In other news, I continue to plow through revisions to the virginity book. It's been occupying a huge amount of time, primarily because I've been tasked with shortening the book as much as possible. No small task, given that the ms. I handed in was 1069 pages long. I keep track of the starting and ending wordcount and page count for the chapters as I go, so that I have some idea of how much I've managed to shorten things (it helps me gauge how much shorter I'm making it, since I'm looking at it on a screen and not as a pile of pieces of paper that gets smaller as I throw things out). When I sent off the revised first half of the book last week, I totaled my revisions statistics for that half of the book and discovered that in revising I managed to cut 21,338 words out of it, a fairly respectable sum. 313 pages to 242. Since then, I've revised two chapters of the second half and yanked about 9500 words out of those, and the work of shortening it -- while not leaving out anything important, and making sure that everything I leave in the book still works the way it should, which is the time-consuming part -- continues apace. It's very hard, not so much because I'm cutting my own writing (every writer needs to be able to do that) but because I already feel like there is so much that I have left out of this book that I would've liked to have included, and every time I shorten it the heaps of info on the cutting-room floor just get deeper. And on that note, I was deeply amused to note the following bit in my December monthly horoscope forecast on Susan Miller's AstrologyZone site, in regard to an opposition between Saturn and Neptune in the current Piscean chart: A writing project that is artistic / literary, journalistic, or commercial (in research, sales, marketing, public relations) seems to be taking up an inordinate amount of your time. You seem to have fallen behind again over the past two months and are frantically working to catch up. Mars in your solar third house of communication has been retrograde since October 1, so you may have had to revise part of the document in October or November. Doing so probably seemed harder than it would have been if you had started from scratch! She couldn't be more right, including that I should be done with the revisions by December 10 if I continue at my current pace. Score one for the astrologers, eh? Let's just hope that she's right about the rest of the (rather sunny!) forecast as well.
|
|||
| |||
|
All queries, comments, etc. should go to the editors in question. I am not personally connected with this book, and am presenting the CFS as a courtesy to those of you who may be interested. -- HB ====================== She's Such a Geek An Anthology by and for Women Obsessed with Computers, Science, Comic Books, Gaming, Spaceships, and Revolution Slated for Fall 2006 Geeks are taking over the world. They make the most popular movies and games, pioneer new ways to communicate using technology, and create new ideas that will change the future. But the stereotype is that only men can be geeks. So when are we going to hear from the triumphant female nerds whose stories of outer space battles will inspire generations, and whose inventions will change the future? Right now. Female geeks are busting out of the labs and into the spotlight. They have the skills and knowledge that can inspire social progress, scientific breakthroughs, and change the world for the better, and they're making their More than anything, She's Such a Geek is a celebration and call to arms: it's a hopeful book which looks forward to a day when women will pilot spaceships, invent molecular motors, design the next ultra-tiny supercomputer, write epics, and run the government. We want introspective essays that explain what being a geek has meant to you. Describe how you've fought stereotypes to be accepted among nerds. Explore why you are obsessed with topics and ideas that are supposed to be Possible topics include: · what turned you into a geek Editors: Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders are geeky women writers. Annalee is a contributing editor at Wired magazine and writes the syndicated column Techsploitation. Charlie is the author of Choir Boy (Soft Skull Press) and Publisher: Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, publishes groundbreaking books by and for women in a variety of topics. Deadline: January 15, 2006 Length: 3,000-6,000 words Format: Essays must be typed, double-spaced, andpaginated. Please include your address, phone number, email address, and a short bio on the last page. Submitting: Send essay electronically as a Document or Rich Text Format file to Annalee Newitz and Charlie Anders at sheissuchageek@gmail.com. Payment: $100 plus two books Reply: Please allow until February 15 for a response. If you haven't received a response by then, please assume your essay has not been selected.
|
|||
| |
|
Heads Up, Kansas...
Just a heads-up to any of my readers who are, or know, young Kansan women and/or their current or former sexual partners: a report in this morning's Kaiser Family Foundation newsletter states that the KS Attorney General Phill Kline (R) has been examining records of live births and subpoenaing medical records from clinics that provide abortion services and is apparently having all the records combed for any evidence of anyone under age 16 (age of consent in KS) having been impregnated by a legal adult (i.e., someone 18 years of age or older). It is being legitimized by the trotting-out of an (as yet not independently verified) statement on the part of the GA's office that approximately half of the cases the GA's office has subpoenaed involve a female between the ages of 10 and 13, which is a move to draw the public's attention to the idea that this investigation is related solely to nonconsensual, abusive sexual contact between pre-pubescent or pubescent children and adults. Past experience in watching other stat-rape witch hunts in other states, like California's for example, tells me that this is not likely to be the case at all. Although there will probably be a small percentage of cases caught in the net that do constitute forcible rape/abuse, the bulk of cases that end up being brought as a result of these kinds of "law enforcement" efforts tend to involve people of lower socioeconomic brackets, frequently Latina/o, African-American, or poor (often rural) whites who were engaged in consensual relationships and consensual sex. One of the things you should be aware of here is that it looks like they're going after anyone who technically meets the conditions of violating the letter of the law. If a woman was under the age of 15 when she became pregnant -- even if she was over 16 at the time that she visited her gynecological provider or family planning clinic to either give birth or obtain an abortion -- and the AG's office believes that her partner was above the age of majority, there's going to be someone poking way into her business real soon now, and into the business of her partner(s) as well as soon as they can track them down, and I would not be at all surprised if the AG's office fully intends to bring statutory rape and/or child sexual abuse charges. Please be aware that because Kansas law does not acknowledge the ability of women under age 16 to consent to sex, this means that these investigations may affect ANYONE who might fall under this category, even if their relationship and whatever sex took place inside it was fully consensual. This may include cases in which the partners are married. In some cases, statutory rape law is also applied to married couples (there are states in which a young person may legally marry with parental consent at an age younger than the state's age of consent); since minors can marry with parental consent in Kansas, this may apply to some of the Kansas cases in question. If you are, or know someone who is, a young woman (or the current/former partner of a young woman) who might be affected by the current investigation and subpoena of records in Kansas, be advised that this is going down. You may wish to contact a lawyer if you consider yourself at high risk of being investigated, to find out what your rights and responsibilities are here according to Kansas state law. |
|
| |
|
Consider the Eunuch
Those of you curious about the virgin book can get a small sample of it by going here and clicking on the PDF for "Consider the Eunuch." This is a section that is unfortunately, for reasons of length, being cut from the final version of the book, but which is fairly demonstrative of the way I write history, the sorts of issues I work with in the book, and the kinds of content and historical information you will find in the book as a whole. I'll leave the PDF up for a couple of weeks. Enjoy! -- Hanne |
|
| |
|
I'll be in New York next week to speak at this event. It's open to the public; all the info you could possibly need is right here. If you come, please feel free to come up and say howdy. THE WOMEN’S NATIONAL BOOK ASSOCIATION Dangerous Books A discussion and Q & A with: Organized by: TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11 Small Press Center Admission: Free for WNBA members. $10 for nonmembers; $5 for students w/ID and Small Press Center members. No RSVP necessary. General Information and media inquiries: |
|
| |||
|
I just realized tonight that part of what I'm feeling is grief and loss. Not depression, thank you very much all the same, but the "post-partum depression" diagnosis doesn't fit: depression is an entirely different critter. This is grief and loss, frequently mistaken for depression but not the same thing at all. I'm grieving the loss of the book. Yes, I said loss. I'm done with the virginity book because I had to be done, it had to get done. But I'm not done in the elated "I'm finally finished, I conquered it!" way. I'm done in the "We have unfinished business but we had to part" way... the way when you know you can't solve everything so you just have to tie up as many loose ends as you can, say good bye, and make the best of it. ( Cut for length & maundering, so click if you'd like to read the rest. )
|
|||
| |
|
Aux armes, citoyens.
Preaching to the choir time, folks. I do hope that those of you who read this who are USAian will take some sort of action... if not on your own behalf, on that of someone who isn't yet old enough to know how much this stuff matters. http://www.scarleteen.com/blog/index.htm So. Please, if reproductive freedoms matter to you (and they damn well should), please take a moment to write a letter to the FDA weighing in. If only to tell them why they have no business at all subjecting drug approval for ANY demographic to the weight of public opinion. Deputy Commissioner Lester Crawford's email is : deputy.commissioner@fda.gov or you can send snail mail to him at the Food and Drug Administration / 5600 Fishers Lane / Rockville, Maryland 20857 My letter is below. Feel free to borrow from it at will. Dear Dr. Crawford, |
|
| |
|
You know, I just realized that a few entries ago there was a substantial typo. The book is not 101 pages long in typescript. It is 1001 pages long in typescript (12 point Courier, one inch margins, doublespaced -- standard format). That's rather a difference. Sorry for any confusion. |
|
| |||
|
Sing ho for the life of a writer...
For those who would like to get some idea of exactly what I've been doing lo these last couple of years, I've just updated my website to add an overview of the book and a FAQ incorporating the kinds of questions I've been getting most frequently since I began working on it. And now that that's done, I think I'm going to go back to nursing an end-of-summer head cold and figuring out how to jump-start myself through the post-book ennui.
|
|||
| |
|
SEXUAL HEALING: HANNE BLANK'S SEX BOOK BENEFIT for HURRICANE KATRINA How it Works: 2. Those wishing to reserve a book or other item should email hanne at hanneblank dot com and identify which item(s) you wish to reserve. When I get your email I will send you a PDF form to fill out and mail to me along with your check or money order (no, I do not do PayPal). 3. I will inscribe, sign, and ship out your book or other item either to you or to the recipient of your choice upon cashing your check/money order. Lipstick kiss-prints available at no extra charge. 4. ALL PROCEEDS FROM THIS BENEFIT WILL GO TO THE AMERICAN RED CROSS FUND FOR HURRICANE KATRINA RELIEF. That's right, I'm donating the books, the postage, the packing, etc. All told, I'm putting up about $760 in merchandise here and probably another hundred bucks in postage... the rest is up to YOU. On to the BOOKS! 17 copies of Zaftig: Well Rounded Erotica (2001, Cleis Press) About the book: "Edited by Hanne Blank, Zaftig is a juicy romp of lusty stories celebrating big-bodied women. Voluptuous steamy tales of women and their male and female admirers spill over with sexual delight. Includes well-known erotica writers Heather Corinna and Lori Selke as well as Blank herself." 13 copies of Best Transgender Erotica, coedited with Raven Kaldera (2002, Circlet Press) Because this book is now out of print, the minimum donation is $25. About the book: "Best Transgender Erotica is a profoundly moving and remarkable book. Born out of the trans community and co-edited by Raven Kaldera, an intergendered FtM transman and general mover-and-shaker in the trans world, it is the first book of erotica to address the myriad aspects of transgenderism. This collection of 23 stories features work from both trans activists and seasoned erotica authors (some of whom, it might be noted, hold claim to both titles). The stories range from side-splittingly funny lustful comedies to deeply poignant love stories -- but all with some of the hottest sex scenes I've ever encountered. And the characters are equally diverse and fascinating -- there are crossdressers, pre-ops, post-ops, non-ops, intersexed, genderqueers, androgynes, butches, femmes, and a few that simply defy definition." (from this review) 5 Copies of Shameless: Women's Intimate Erotica (2002, Seal Press) About the book: "A daring darling from the Live Girls series offers a collection of provocative, confessional stories sure to inspire one-handed reading. This isn’t dusty, for-ladies-only fiction, just high-quality erotica that doesn’t require a whips-and-chains appetite for thorough enjoyment of each sensual, sometimes wicked admission. Recalling the sweat and sizzle of an old affair, a woman wonders if her former lover can ever forgive her for having ended up with his wife. A Haitian couple reveals the passion born of desperation and the searing fires of loss and love. A young woman abroad loses her virginity to a sophisticated older man in a scorching-hot life lesson in sexual possibility. Ovulation brings sweet, slippery horniness--and volatile, supercharged impregnation fantasies--to a childless-by-choice bi-chick. And a pregnant bitch goddess recounts the night she took over her husband’s body the same way her growing baby took over her own: relentlessly and with delicious, paradoxical pleasure and pain. The memoir-like style of these stories allows the reader to devour private letters, peek into diaries, and listen to the most intimate confessions of women acting out in inspirational sexual abandon. Seasoned editor Blank has collected only the hottest, most “confidential” and scintillating erotic moments by expert eroticists including Dawn O’Hara, Adhara Law, Lisa Bland, and others." (Libido) 2 copies of Unruly Appetites (2003, Seal Press) About the book: "This book is one of the more delicious erotic anthologies I've come across in a long time. Hanne Blank's writing is titlating, imaginative and will keep on the edge of your seat/sheets. There are so many stories with differing themes, combinations and moods that there is absolutely something for everyone. Finally, a writer who can combine hot sex and emotion together. I think my favorite story is Sauce for the Gander, a fun but unconventional look at a relationship with a woman who loves both her boyfriend and her girlfriend. Totally sexy, unexpected but not stupid cheesoid wacka wacka porn. Also The Princess and the Tiger will make the top of your head pop open with it's fantastically seductive story." -- a random Amazon.com reviewer (this is probably my favorite review of any of my books, just for the phrase "stupid cheesoid wacka wacka porn." COLLECTOR ITEMS 2 copies of Big Big Love used as demo copies during seminars/book tour events. They're marked "BROWSER COPY ONLY" and "NOT FOR SALE" and have been handled a bit... own a little slice of smutty history for a minimum donation of $25. 1 copy of Penthouse, February 2003 -- this issue contains a version of my short story "Lust, Debt, and a Practical Education." The issue was an advance-of-release copy and bears an "ADVANCE COPY" sticker on the front cover. Minimum donation $50. |
|
| |
|
Almost There!
Having been heads-down for a while, I am happy to announce that all this work is indeed paying off: last night I finished a complete draft of my last chapter for the virginity book. All 101 pages of it. (No, this is not a short book.) There is still an editing pass to do before it's really done, of course, but completing the draft is a pretty important milestone. After all, it's hard to edit anything if you don't have anything to edit. Today's going to be devoted to tidying up bibliographical loose ends and to doing that editorial pass. Rather than filling the book with footnotes or endnotes -- the book is intended for an intelligent and educated but non-academic audience, and I know that seeing all those spiky little superscript numbers turns off or intimidates a lot of non-academically-inclined readers -- I've made the decision to use footnotes only occasionally and for what is essentially color commentary. Documentation and bibliography are going into a "selected bibliography" section at the end of the book, with sources grouped first by chapter and then by theme. My thinking is that grouping the sources this way will give readers a good and intuitive way of navigating the bibliography, and additionally will let them zero in on specific subjects of interest more easily. I think this is a particularly important thing to be able to do with a survey-style history. Anyhow, this means preparing a great big document at the end of the book that is all bibliography, and while I have 90% of the data all set and ready to go, bibliography is finicky in terms of formatting and suchlike and so I need to spend some time making sure that it all looks the way it should. It's boring and time-consuming work, but I think I'm going to try to look at it as being restful, particularly after the headache-inducing intense analysis and writing that I've been having to do throughout the writing process. I also have a short epilogue to write. But that should go quickly. And then I will send it all off to my editor and my agent and it'll be their problem for a while. -- Hanne |
|
| |
|
The writing is coming along for this last chapter. I'm thirty-odd pages in, and closing in on being halfway through the chapter, which is just about what I'd hoped for. If I can bring in the second half of the chapter in a similar number of pages it'll be just right. In other news, it looks like the Irish Family Planning Association is mounting a substantial campaign to attempt to create legal provisions for safe, legal abortions on demand in that country. This coming at a time where there is so much anxiety here about the current vacancy in the Supreme Court, and the possibility that there might be an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade that could succeed if a sufficiently socially conservative candidate is chosen for the job, certainly gives me pause. I'm now imagining a world where American women are refused abortion unless the life of the mother is in danger -- the current situation on the ground in Ireland -- but Irish women are able to walk into their local reproductive health clinics and obtain abortions without unnecessary restrictions when and as they have recourse. I wonder, would American women (who could afford it) then fly to Ireland to get abortions, much as approximately six thousand Irishwomen now travel to England every year to obtain the abortion services they cannot get at home? -- Hanne |
|
| |
|
A public service announcement:
Heather Corinna One-Woman Show Opening @ The Independent: 8.7.05 Sunday, August 7th 7PM - 10PM (guests may remain until close) @ The Independent (2nd floor, Calhoun Square, Lake and Hennepin, Minneapolis) Eighteen photography and mixed-media pieces from women's sexuality activist, educator, artist and author Heather Corinna, showing through September 7th. ======= Heather has been one of my dearest friends and partners-in-crime for many years now. If you're anywhere in the Minneapolis area, I do hope that you can go check out this wonderful show. And if you can't make it opening night, do stop in sometime during the month that it's up, won't you? (P.S. Art patrons who actually buy works by independent artists earn extra stars for their heavenly crowns. It's really true, I asked the Pope.) |
|
| |
|
From the No Comment department, Research Division:
I am not aware that it is known to the scientific world that the hymen of the negro woman is not at the entrance of the vagina, as in the white woman, but from one and a half to two inches from its entrance in the interior, with an opening below for the passage of the menses. At the end of this article, we also find the following Editor's Note: "We trust this second communication will call forth decided facts either corroborating or refuting his observations, as to the correctness of which we ourselves, we confess, have not been able to overcome some doubts. Surely there must be many physicians, both North and South, who are able to throw light on this, if true, certainly very remarkable anatomical feature in the Negro race, which thus far would appear to have escaped scientific observation. -- THE EDITOR" My job, welcome to it. -- Hanne |
|
| |
|
As I type, I am printing out the 92-page resource/reference document I've compiled for myself for the purpose of writing the last chapter and the epilogue of the virginity book. Mind you, this 92-page research document is for a chapter which I am hoping to keep down to a relatively slender 75 pages or so, but no matter: this is how I have learned that I must do things as an historian-who-writes-books. The biggest and most important step is not just gathering the information, which is its own job, but digesting it to the point where I know roughly how the chapter needs to be structured, and then sifting through all the information I've gathered and digested and making my own personalized reference document containing all the bits of it that I feel I am in fact likely to use when I write. The writing, when I finally get there, feels a bit like an afterthought. It's definitely anticlimactic. I've already had the thrill of discovery in the research phase, the plodding of coping with other people's statistics, the agony of fumbling toward synthesis (and the occasional joy of intellectual breakthroughs along the way), the optimistic pleasure of outlining, and the overwhelmed monotony of sifting back through all the research to transcribe and compile page upon page of direct quotations from the literature I've been reading. Writing it down, after all that, is a strange process. Throughout it, I must remind myself repeatedly that no, everyone in the world does not know all this stuff, that no, this is not a redundant exercise, it's just that I've been immersed in it 12 hours or more a day, every day, for the past N-number of weeks and after eating, drinking, and breathing it for that long it rather makes sense that I assume it's all old hat. This afternoon I've got to go look at a few very last-minute resources at the Johns Hopkins libraries -- there may be one more trip, over to the Institute for the History of Medicine libraries, partway through the trip just to check on a few things, but I'm not sure if I'll need it or not. And then? Well, then, to quote The Boss, and furthermore to cite the very song I'll be quoting from about 3/7 of the way through this last chapter, "...my car's out back if you're ready to take that long walk From your front porch to my front seat The door's open but the ride ain't free..."
-- Hanne |
|
| |
|
Reposted from the KAISER DAILY REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH REPORT A service of kaisernetwork.org http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyrepor Reposted from the KAISER DAILY REPRODUCTIVE HEALTH REPORT Barbara Mikulski (D-MD) is my Senator, and she will be getting a thank-you letter in the mail from me pronto. If you are an American and are concerned with the upcoming confirmation hearings in regard to the Supreme Court vacancy and their potential impact on reproductive freedoms (as well as personal privacy and many other related issues), I strongly recommend that you contact your Senators as well. Pointing out the good example set by Sens. Mikulski, Feinstein, Stabenow, Murray, Landrieu, Boxer, and Clinton may encourage other elected representatives to join them in their efforts. And if one of the Senators involved is your Senator, do consider writing her to say "well done!" Support is important... and when you consider that most of the letters people write to their elected officials are complaints, I should think that occasional bouts of praise mean that much more. |
|
| |
|
Last week our household was asked to participate in a major media survey conducted by a company called Scarborough Research. As part of the survey we were asked to fill out a television diary for a week, a la the Nielsen Ratings booklets that some of you might be familiar with. This was a ridiculously simple thing to do because we don't watch TV in this household. It took about 3 minutes to go through the booklet and write "None" and put a zero in the "hours" column, sign it, and get it ready to send back to the survey people. As I was doing so it occurred to me that while the Belovedary has only been a non-TV watcher for about 7 years, since moving in with me, in a little more than a year, I will have been a non-television watcher for 20 years. And, as I periodically do when something brings it to my attention, I got to thinking about television and not watching it and just how very different that makes me in a culture – in a world, honestly – where watching television is pretty much the norm everywhere the infrastructure and economics can support it. |
|
| |
|
A Basket of Data, Having Spent All Week Shaking the Statistical Trees
I've spent the majority of this week looking over surveys and reports of behavioral research dealing with sexuality, and specifically dealing with virginity and virginity loss. I would estimate that I've gone through six hundred pages of written material, give or take a bit. I've examined statistics from the USA, Canada, Ireland, the UK, Finland, France, and Germany, and from the 1950s to the present. Here's what we know, in a rough outline, about virginity loss (NB: when "virginity loss" is defined as "first experience of penis-in-vagina heterosexual intercourse) in the industrialized West, with an emphasis on the USA (since that is where the lion's share of the available researches have been carried out): -- A relatively small proportion of people experience sexual debut prior to the age of 15, but percentages vary distinctly by population. Males are more likely to have intercourse prior to age 15 than females. In the USA, African-Americans of both sexes are disproportionately represented in this group, with males outnumbering females handily. Both in the USA and elsewhere, girls and boys from poorer families are more likely to experience earlier sexual debut than those from wealthier ones. -- Socioeconomic status of families is directly linked to age at virginity loss in general. The higher the family's socioeconomic status, the more likely the daughters of those families are to lose their virginity relatively late. Males of high socioeconomic status families, however, are not likely to have a delayed sexual debut, but it is also not necessarily likely to be earlier than the average. ( More juicy bits behind the cut. ) |
|
| |
|
The Unasked, Unanswered, and Unanswerable Questions vs. What Little We Do Know , and Why It Matters
In working on this book, there have been three things that have repeatedly managed to surprise me: how much we don't know about virginity, how much we cannot know about virginity, and how frequently we manage to ignore the first two things. The public health, behavioral, and sociological research is paltry and overwhelmingly of a vintage that is no more than my own (i.e., dating from the 60s or later). The empirical medical evidence is skimpy prior to the 1860s, and even then, medical methodologies used in assessing matters sexual have often been pretty iffy. The post-1960 research that does exist is primarily American, tends to approach virginity issues from the perspective of pathology (i.e., approaching it as a matter of "premarital sex" or virginity loss as the cause of STD transmission and unplanned pregnancy), and most studies are pretty limited in their sample size and scope. Regardless of the time period, the information (whether it is structured as research or merely transmitted as cultural truth) we have about virginity often also encodes some pretty overt political or social agendas; depending on the source and the era it also might have an obvious religious or moral agenda besides. The overall picture is roughly this: prior to the last third of the twentieth century, what we know is very scattered and haphazard. With a few limited exceptions -- early C20th Brazil produced a number of fine and still relevant studies of decently large populations, for instance -- the information about virginity that was published was mostly anecdotal, often based on misconceptions or grounded in bias so overt that the evidence is useless except as evidence of the types of bias that come into play, and many times seems to appear almost at random. Finding information requires a lot of digging and a lot of close reading, and individual nuggets of data can only really be assessed on their own separate merits because the sources and methodologies behind those sources are too diverse and often too informal to allow for comparison. ( Quite long, so click for more if you want it. ) |
|
| |
|
Harry Potter and the Age of Consent
As everyone (who has not been living under a rock for the past month or two) probably knows by now, the sixth of J.K. Rowling's legendarily, massively, enormously popular Harry Potter books hits the streets in a matter of days. While I am not a HP fan, don't find the characters particularly interesting, and in fact find the books pretty much unreadable, I am quite curious to find out what this next book holds. Why? Because our teenaged wizard has reached the British age of consent, that's why. As I work on the last chapter of my own book, which as many of you already know is a history of virginity, one of the topics I'm discussing is how virginity has figured in twentieth (and early twenty-first) century pop culture. I'm very curious to see whether Ms. Rowling -- who has been reasonably forthcoming with dealing with a variety of adolescent issues in the books to date -- decides to take on the problem of whether and how Harry gets his ashes hauled. ( Read more... ) |
|
