Pasties trump Dragon

Ugh. Marvellon makes me feel gross. It's a tired, oft-asked question but still in urgent need of an answer: how have we been able to send men to the moon, teach gorillas sign language and still not found a pill to make me not have babies that doesn't make me wake up with the pasties? Lady has suggested looking into IUDs. I don't know - when I was 12 I read Everything You Need to Know About Sex* *but were afraid to ask and the author mentioned the stories about babies being born clutching IUDs - but then, that author was an asshole. This is what Wikipedia has to say.

Otherwise, I'm about halfway through a book called Happiness: a History by Darrin McMahon. I like it - he writes cute - but I think the principal attraction is that it's like a trip down memory lane in terms of my undergrad degree. In this book, he discusses perceptions of happiness since classical Greece using that same great survey of Great White Man books we studied. Which are fine books - I never had a problem with their Great White Maleness since it's of such importance to know the accepted canon even if it sometimes looks like the half-nonsensical ranting of sexually frustrated clerics to you cough Aquinas cough.

Some boys, however, did have a problem in the third year of our programme, when we hit the Renaissance and beyond and suddenly lots of women writers came into the curriculum. They should have sucked it up. Humanism and the Enlightenment meant women's intellectual contributions were going to be taken more seriously so it makes sense we who study those periods should also take them more seriously. But as importantly, there have been more women than men going into liberal arts degrees for years . . . of course the demographic of the studied authors is going to change, emphasis is going to change, and academic priorities are going to change from being very evidently skewed towards formerly predominant male authors and male students for hundreds of years to, well, not. That's not political correctness, that's reality; if you don't like it, then get a degree of Heavy Lifting or write a book like McMahon's that focusses on that Great White Male canon.

But try to make it as good as this book. He's critical and thorough, but with a light touch that makes this something I can pick up and put down pretty easily. I guess I'll be able to decide if I love it when it comes to the end and I see how he ties this canon into modern psychology . . . I have confidence in him, though. Unlike Wim Wenders, whose The Soul of a Man about J.B. Lenoir and Skip James was a mess that made the subjects seem unimportant and unassociated with anything. Ugh, Wim Wenders. He should go back to making movies about angels.