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Bovary at Market, and Other News
By
Dan Piepenbring
October 10, 2014
On the Shelf
From an 1897 illustrated edition of
Madame Bovary
.
“If there is a politics of the white-collar novel in the United States, it is this:
office fiction is deliberately and narrowly construed
as being about manners, sociability, gossip, the micro-struggles for rank and status—in other words, ‘office politics’—rather than about the work that is done in offices.”
Jane Smiley on
her absent father and her upbringing
: “A girl who is overlooked has a good chance of not learning what it is she is supposed to do. A girl who is free can grow up free of preconceptions. Sometimes, from the outside, my work and my life look daring, but I am not a daring person. I am just a person who was never taught what not to try.”
The farmers-market scene in
Madame Bovary
reminds of
how the social function of such markets has evolved
: “If Emma Bovary were alive today in the small town where I used to make my home, she might be scanning the crowd on market day, but she wouldn’t be thinking ‘yokels.’ She might have a thing for the guy who sells microgreens, the one with the gray ponytail and the lingering smile who used to do something in tech.”
Shirley Temple as a troubling icon of the Depression: in the thirties, “the child became both commodity and consumer.
And Shirley was the ultimate product
, her managers capitalizing on the mania for
cuteness …
Children wanted both to have and to be Shirley. In addition to coveting the dolls and dresses, girls from Iowa to Bombay entered look-alike contests. But just what possessive desire did Shirley arouse in adults? The objects of her attention were almost invariably adult men. There was … scarcely a male lap she did not climb into on or offscreen, and there was an extravagant amount of manhandling in the films.”
Bemoaning the increasing role of the dystopian in science fiction, Neal Stephenson has started
Project Hieroglyph
: “The concept at the core of Project Hieroglyph is that science fiction creates potent images of scientific progress, images that Neal Stephenson dubs hieroglyphs, and that by making more positive and optimistic hieroglyphs, [sci-fi] can help make a better world.”
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