Category: Essay

Stop Saying Vagina

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 …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2014/08/09/stop-saying-vagina/

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 …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2009/10/27/rory-the-tory/

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 …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2007/10/11/brown-shadows/

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 …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2006/07/18/mr-commitment/

If On a Winter’s Night a Publisher

Brings forth the fiftieth and last of its great novels of the twentieth century, a resolutely head-spinning inquisition of a book by Italo Calvino, one that keeps introducing a novel titled If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. In this, the coldest week in Munich in twenty years, the series not only takes notice of …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2005/02/28/if-on-a-winters-night-a-publisher/

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 …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2005/02/11/ray-bradbury/

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. …

Continue reading

Permanent link to this article: https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2004/06/24/a-little-greatness-every-week/