Society Still Has Its Problems (warning: potentially un-PC content)

BBC World News reported this morning (on Chicago Public Radio) on a British Psychological Society report that nine of ten British women still think sex should have an emotional component. This raised concerns about "whether women have really gained the sexual freedom they are supposed to have enjoyed since the 1960s." "The results," researcher Dr Hinchcliff observed with apparent perplexity, "did not fit in with images of today's independent woman who can go out and get sexual fulfilment without the ties of a relationship."

You can go to the story yourself (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4863770.stm) if you're having a hard time believing your eyes. The study didn't seem interested in men's opinions, but the assumption underlying Hinchcliff''s comments seems to be that men have already figured out how to act like animals.

What strikes me as most interesting is how open Hinchcliff is. Of course all science has its biases, but few are honest enough to admit to them. But if science is descriptive, then why should the results of this study worry anyone? If nine of ten women want emotional involvement in a sexual relationship, then it seems psychology has to work with instead of against that desire. Shoot, there may even be something to it. The radio story included comments by an author who wasn't particularly worried, figuring that sexual fulfillment might be about more than drive reduction. In Ulysses, Bloom addresses a woman as "the link between nations and generations...sacred lifegiver." Such appellation is becoming impossible in a world that, despite the warnings of C. S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, Flannery O'Connor, et al., seems intent on pursuing instinct over intimacy and hedonism over humanity.

He's alive!

It's a strange irony of literary studies that I don't read a lot. That is to say, I don't read a lot of authors who are still living (in fact, I do little else but read). Loyola's English Department hosted poet Desmond Egan recently, which gave me the chance to discover someone living and worth listening to. He's won a number of awards, but it's kinda hard to find his books. Here's an excerpt from one of 'em, which doesn't include the best of what I heard him read, but what are you gonna do. This guy happens also to be a major organizer for this Hopkins festival that happens for a week every summer in Ireland. At the mention of Ireland Katie started to think maybe there was some point to all this literature stuff after all.

Poems in Performance

So I was at this Gerard Manley Hopkins, S. J., conference over the weekend in Denver. It was a good time and I met a lot of swell people with a passion for this obscure Victorian. One of the highlights was not reading my own paper but hearing British actor Richard Austin perform a number of Hopkins's poems. GMH wrote with his ear--his poems are marked up like a music score--and believed poetry's meaning wasn't fulfilled until it was performed. Austin grew up near Hopkins's own hometown, and so may even have a similar accent as the poet. More importantly, he loves the poetry and tries to draw out its meaning and sound together in his delivery. For poems as quirky as Hopkins's, hearing them opened their pleasures up to me in a way I wasn't prepared for. You can listen to a couple poems at Austin's website, conveniently linked below:

http://www.richard.austin.sh/index.htm