Links of the Day

Posted by Susan

A few links, some of them Ed-approved.

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• I recently read (and highly recommend) Wendy Doniger's new book, The Woman Who Pretended to Be Who She Was, the third in a trilogy of works about confused or ambiguous identities (frequently) in erotic situations. Doniger uses a variety of sources (primarily B-movies, the plays of Shakespeare, and Hindu mythology) to examine the theme of self-impersonation. An essay ("The Mythology of Self-Imitation in Passing: Race, Gender, and Politics") adapted from the book is available here. As with many of Doniger's works, half the fun is in reading her notes, in which I learned not only of the existance of an article entitled "The Erotics of the Wet Sari in Hindi Films", but this anecdote about the filming of Dr. Zhivago:
  

  
  For the scene in which the students march down Gorky Street singing the Communist anthem, the "Internationale," and are trampled to death by the charging Cossacks, they rounded up hundreds of Spanish extras and began to teach them the "Internationale". Soon, they realized that the extras already knew the "Internationale". They were old Spanish civil war fighters who had long pretended to be loyal to Franco and were now "pretending" to be communists, singing the song they had sung a quarter of a century ago, now imitating again the very people (the 1918 Russian communists) they had imitated in 1938.
  

  
  (She goes on to add that difficulties arose when secret police began to observe the extras to see who really knew the song, at which point they all refused to sing).
  
• Wondering what happened to Alan Keyes? Apparently he's still in Illinois and may be considering running for governor in the upcoming elections. The Illinois Leader reports that Keyes held the initial meeting of Cook County United this evening, aiming to convene "40-50 of the best conservative activists in Cook County." I was especially charmed by the description of Keyes as "the Elmer Gantry of Illinois politics". UPDATE: Looks like Keyes can't run for governor--one has to be a resident of Illinois for three years before running. So sad.
  
• Noted excellent (though legally sketchy) wine store Sam's Wine & Spirits has started a twice-weekly wine blog, Case by Case. Written by Bill St. John, a columnist for Wine & Spirits, this week's recommendation is a Malbec (hurrah!).
  
• A recent ruling by the European Patent Office will restrict the patents held by Myriad Genetics on the breast cancer susceptibility gene BRCA1, reports Nature. Previously, all clinical tests for mutations in BRCA1 had to be carried out in Myriad's Salt Lake City labs. The new ruling restricts Myriad's patent to only one probe that tests for the gene. However, Myriad retains its patent on the N-terminal deletion mutant that is the most common cause of familial breast cancer in Ashkenazi Jews.
  

Posted by Susan at January 28, 2005 11:45 PM