A while ago now, I jokingly (sort of) declared a desire to create “Say Vagina Day”. It was a reaction to an apparent reluctance and distaste for speaking the word. New Zealand society mildly imploded in on itself when the word ‘vagina’ was spoken on a television commercial. Grown women appeared to be more comfortable …
Category: Essay
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/08/09/stop-saying-vagina/
Oct 27 2009
Rory the Tory?
File under “Who knew?” The Guardian reports that Rory Stewart has been selected as a candidate for the UK’s parliament from a safe (10,000 majority) Conservative seat. In one of those moves that makes me think that parliamentary systems are odd sometimes, one of his first actions will be to move so that he actually …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2009/10/27/rory-the-tory/
Oct 11 2007
Brown shadows
One of the things that’s generally known about Germany, but not often spoken about for various reasons(1), is how much continuity there was between the Third Reich and the early days of the Federal Republic. A certain degree of continuity is inevtiable any time a government changes; even the Bolsheviks brought back a lot of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/10/11/brown-shadows/
Jul 18 2006
Mr Commitment
Mike Gayle is a British novelist. He writes books that, if you were feeling snarky, you might call chick-lit that guys can read too. Less snarkily, he writes light contemporary drama. I’ll admit to a small weakness for the genre, at least in its British variant. Although the plots are wildly predictable, the details of …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/07/18/mr-commitment/
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2005/02/28/if-on-a-winters-night-a-publisher/
Feb 11 2005
Ray Bradbury
Through a series of stupidities, when I moved from Washington to Germany, I lost a fair number of books. Several hundred, I think, but it’s a little too sad to count them up. There was, and still may be, a list I made when packing. An indulgent winter evening’s thought is which one I would …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2005/02/11/ray-bradbury/
Jun 24 2004
A Little Greatness, Every Week
The editors at the Sueddeutsche Zeitung cobbled together a list of 50 great novels of the 20th century. With postwar German modesty, they don’t claim that it’s exhaustive, definitive or representative. Just 50. And great. The newspaper’s publishing house has been bringing one out every week since mid-March, and they’ll finish the run next February. …
Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2004/06/24/a-little-greatness-every-week/