“The style of failure… lives in the life and works of Patricia Highsmith, for example, who wrote hateful letters to her mother and in her notebooks scribbled of her strong desire to be disinvited to friends’ dinner parties.”
- Judith Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure
HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY FROM SERIOUS LADIES!
RIP UNA MULZAC
Do read Sarah Weinman’s profile of 70s New Yorker film critic Penelope Gilliatt, a serious lady gone bad!
She divorced two husbands (Roger Gilliatt, a noted neurologist at NIH, and the playwright John Osborne, who fathered daughter Nolan in 1965 and left her for her best friend), fell into affairs with Mike Nichols and Edmund Wilson, and attempted suicide at least once. She consumed herself with work throughout her relationships… Her drinking became so bad that…extra minders from the fact-checking department shadowed her to make sure she sat through the entirety of the movies she reviewed.
Osborne also accused her of sleeping with all of her profile subjects!
Martha Nussbaum this week at Stanford, promoting her book about how citizens who can read and write and think make democracy possible (duh!)
While I find her thesis obvious, I’m not as sure about this leather fishnet poncho. Balmain? I like a move away from the plain ol’ black blazer, but why cover up these guns?
To protest a bill that would require women to undergo an ultrasound before having an abortion, Virginia State Sen. Janet Howell (D-Fairfax) on Monday attached an amendment that would require men to have a rectal exam and a cardiac stress test before obtaining a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication.
“We need some gender equity here,” she told HuffPost. “The Virginia senate is about to pass a bill that will require a woman to have totally unnecessary medical procedure at their cost and inconvenience. If we’re going to do that to women, why not do that to men?”
We certainly enjoyed stem cell researcher Joanne Kurtzberg’s righteous indignation on 60 Minutes tonight. We enjoy (what seem to be her signature) overalls and turtleneck even more.
WE DRESSED ALIKE!
(via disorganization)
We would like to say that Serious Ladies offered excellent benefits, including an in-house Iyengar Certified Yoga Instructor, cute ergonomic chairs, generous, discounts on Ferragamo pumps and Swedish-equivalent maternity leave. Anyone who can make that happen gets to be CEO automatically!
Anyways, we hope you all read the New Yorker profile on pianist Helene Grimaud:
Whenever Grimaud can manage, she doesn’t perform at all: she is at a conservation center for wolves that she co-founded, in 1999, in northeast Westchester County, where she helps care for the animals. Grimaud does not relish the stiffness of the classical world. In a 2004 photograph of her, prized on the Internet, she is rehearsing with an orchestra wearing what looks like a wife beater; more recently, she apologized to a music reporter for showing up for an interview smelling of deer meat.
Later, she shows up to practice with her concert blouse in a paper sack! Seriously!
