Jennifer McGrew

Naturally we love ALL costume history books, fashion history books and magazines plus related neato things!


Steele is THE authority on these subjects because she sifts the many myths about corsets from the culturally and historically situated facts. Then for some real fun, if you want your brain fully colonized by aesthetic principles underlying perceptions of beauty, sexuality and personality (which naturally also inform corset fashions and their appeal), I recommend you read Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae: Art & Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson.

There will never be enough time for this- not even for the GoodReads list. But anyway, a few more old and new favorites:

I am totally psyched I had time to reread Peter Brook again this summer. Man, I love his bombastic personality and muscular muscular style! Add him to the people I'd most like to meet. Reading his book again was almost like a spiritual experience and gives me faith in what the theater is and can do.


As a person who used to think poetry was boring and that it was mostly taught and admired by boring teachers, I've now changed my mind, especially 'cuz Camille is an advocate of one reading poetry silently to oneself and appreciating the aesthetics on the printed page! As you'll recall, as Robert Heinlein's character 'Lazarus Long' once said, "A poet who reads his work aloud in public may have other bad habits." Nuthin' worse than poetry nights at the coffee shops-yeeeech! Mmmmmmm, Camile's book is some good readin! She totally brings out the kinesthetic reader in me!

This one sort of unexpectedly colonized my head, too. I used to feel pretty laid back and indifferent to or just tolerant of religious people, considering them benign but severely misguided, and that even includes all my wacky pagan, wiccan and new-agey friends out there who aren't any more rational than the mormons or southern bible-thumpers. Harris convinces me they're all actually quite dangerous and detrimental to our social well-being and I think he's correct (although I'll NEVER treat any nice person with anything else but the greatest kindness and respect, even if it's feigned). Sorry if my true views offend any of my religious friends out there, I just appreciate his arguments and evidence about the capriciousness and arbitrariness of Christian (or for that matter, ANY) doctrine- how many so-called fundamentalists cherry pick what they want when they want it, from our own home-grown far right radicals to the likes of Osama Bin Laden. Read it and then talk to me about it, k?