Making Good Art and the Fear of the Fraud Police

From this...

I have a growing and slightly inappropriate obsession with a married couple. I knew him first, and met her through him before I knew that they were properly serious. I follow her on twitter, him on facebook. For some reason I feel the need to keep these separate. Thanks to them, and a few other people in my life I'm thinking and doing more about my writing. I'm writing more often and I'm taking what I do much more seriously. There's a couple of pretty good videos from them at the bottom of the post.

Oz the Great and Powerful: A Blog in Two Parts

Cross-posted from my academic blog.

Part One: Oz, Disney and Authenticity

Tonight I am going to (finally) see Oz the Great and Powerful. Having heard two excellent papers on Disney’s previous attempt at an ‘official’ Oz film, Return to Oz, at the Returning to Oz: The Afterlife of Dorothy conference in February, I was in no doubt that OTGAP would be a box office smash.

Everyday Sexism and Pet Names

Yesterday a male colleague ended a phone conversation with me by saying "good girl" before the more usual "bye". Before I could think about it for too long, I tweeted the experience to @everydaysexism. Afterwards, I felt pretty awkward, both from the encounter and the instantaneous tweet. Although very few people in my department use twitter, it's fairly obvious that I'm me, as it were. I'm identified by name, but also by job and location on twitter so anyone viewing it from my organisation is likely to be see the connection. I'd worried, after when I'd had time to think, that the gentleman would be able to tell that this apparently obscure tweet was about him. He would quite rightly wonder why I hadn't raised any objection on the phone, or what was so heinous as to deserve this. I also worried that, since I knew he was senior to me, there would be repercussions. And that's just for starters. I worried, as I have done the past two times I've responded to the Everyday Sexism project, that it's all just a storm in a teacup. That now that I have somewhere that it's ok to talk about these things, I'm looking for them and seeing things as an issue that I wouldn't have not too long ago.

I'm not doing a post about International Women's Day...

Today's Google Doodle

...mainly because I'm doing a lot of reading other people articles and I'm in the office today, instead of working from home. I'm thinking about it a lot and I've been thinking about a post on the dreaded 'Women's Issues' for a while, so a post today would just be a bit of a garbled mess. There's a lot of stuff out there, so instead of reading me ramble incoherently, here a round up of some of the stuff I've read today by following the links from International Women's Day articles.