Jaimy Gordon. She Drove Without Stopping. Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1990. $18.95. Jaimy Gordon has a Freudian view of the world. This is to say, for Gordon being female is an entrapment that occasions an elegiac eye in recounting how fathers first seduce, then abandon their daughters. This is also to say that She Drove Without Stopping is a shrewd fiction of an autobiography (or vice versa)...
Lynne Alexander. Resonating Bodies. Atheneum, 1989. $18.95. Imagine, if you will, that you are in love with a violin. This is not an ordinary love that you would have for a woman, for a man. Rather, this is a love that centers on a svelte, sensual and curvy viola with the charms of a sorceress, the hunger and the passion of a beautiful female. She allures no less than she entraps. Her body comes...
Christel Schmidt, editor. Mary Pickford: Queen of the Movies. University of Kentucky Press, 288pp America’s original screen darling Mary Pickford always seemed to get there first: she was the screen’s first true icon. one of the first women to start up an independent production company in Hollywood (United Artists, with D. W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and her then husband Douglas...
TASHLINESQUE: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin. Ethan de Seife. Wesleyan University Press 280pp In the annals of the Hollywood comedy, the director Frank Tashlin’s films create a place of their own, inhabiting a world at once ribald and delightfully impolite. Tashlin’s landscape is lively (evidence of ta roots in 1930s and 40s animation), politically and culturally savvy...
Entertainment is one thing, but excitement and controversy – what Margo Channing would have called “fire and music” – are quite another. Carol Dyhouse’s Heartthrobs: A History of Women and Desire offers the former, as the author relates the history of what, she says,women do and have always done: create sexual fantasies about men. This proclivity is a historical fact, she argues, before digging...
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