Review: ‘Bono on Bono: Conversations with Michka Assayas’

Bono.

Amazing how one word - even a name - can have so much impact and register so deeply in your consciousness, isn’t it? There is probably hardly anybody who comes to this review and reads it that doesn’t have an inkling that this word, this name - Bono - means something. Read more

Review: ‘J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century’ by Tom Shippey

I’m influenced by good work, that’s it. If its good, it’s an influence.

There are several authors who stand out in our civilization, but none so recently or so much as J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the Lord of the Rings who has perhaps had as much influence on culture as any other arising from the 20th Century. The Hobbit and LotR were novels among others that my siblings and I consumed with great gusto. My sister and I still read fantasy, and now I’m writing my own. Read more

Blowing the Myths of Sexuality - Making Headway in the Gender Wars - The Intimate History of the Orgasm

I managed to read a lot of books in 2007 despite a pretty hectic schedule, though not as many as I would have liked to read. However, the pile on the shelf that is yet to be finished and reviewed is diminishing, and I am very pleased that I have managed to erode it.

One of the books that had the most profound impact on me -and each has in different ways - is one that is related, at least for me, to the Gender Wars that are the subject of discussion and articles at Engender Truth. O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm by James Margolis helped to shred the vestiges of ideas that wouldn’t die, values from an age that would have us consider sex as dirty, unwholesome, and unnatural while at the other end of the scale desiring women to be baby factories to increase the ranks of the faithful.

This book was a gift from another and I had had it for several years before I began to read it and I thought it may take some time to get through it, but once I started reading I found it compelling in terms of style, wit and sincerity.

It was fascinating (and serendipitous) to be reading this at a time when Emmah Williams was having “a discussion” (flame war) with ‘a man’ who insisted that female orgasm is a myth. Here today in the 21st Century I find it astounding that such an idea should still exist in the minds of some men. A man like that needs to read a book like ‘O.‘ Though it is perhaps doubtful that a man with such prejudicial and selfish views of women would ever manage to open his mind enough to let some truth in, let alone the pages of a book, and a nonfiction one at that. No, such a man is probably dedicated to comic strips and action movies and gets a hard on watching pistons move in engine blocks.

I didn’t know what to expect of Jonathan Margolis’s book. It could have been prurient; it wasn’t. It could have been dry and dull, filled with this and that scientific study and figures. It wasn’t. It was frank, honest, humorous and entertaining. It laid the history of orgasm at my feet and went as far back in history as could be reasonably expected, while crossing cultural boundaries and making comparisons that taught me lessons that we in the West would do well to learn. It opened my eyes to the different ways in which the human race and its many cultures have dealt with sexuality and gender relationships and that was both fascinating and intriguing. I laughed as different fallacies were exposed and rejected. The insights it gave into these cultures made me realize the source of different oppressions and liberated my thinking from ideas that don’t belong in 21st Century living.

Quite simply O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm changed my outlook on sexual mores and history, gave me insight into the vast array of human sexuality, and how it has changed and developed through time. This is important for me, because as a fantasy author, one is working with metaphor, and as Ursula K. Le Guin, author of the Eathsea Series said:

“The fantasist…may be talking as seriously as any sociologist about human life as it is lived, and as it might be lived, and as it ought to be lived. For as great scientists have said, and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope.”

I’m nearly finished reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, after which I’ll be reading the sequel Collapse, How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. These are books I have read or am reading to help me understand and define the world I’ve been creating for The Helm and the Horde. They have broadened my understanding about how our world works, and offered alternatives for a fertile imagination, and aid the building of a world and the defining of 14 different cultures that are part of a story I’ve been working on for what seems like an age, but I haven’t spent as long at it as JK Rowling’s 17 years yet.

Robert Henri’s “The Art Spirit”

22nd June 2004 held a very special moment for me.

I remember vividly, even writing now, three months later, how relieved I felt.

It was raining heavily in the garden. Rain meant no more suffering from my summer ailment: hay fever. As the rain began its rhythmic rapping against the windows and the roof, and as the blurry sting in my eyes began to allay, I found myself in a contemplative mood. Robert Henri’s book seemed apt for such a mood.

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