Songs and S'Feminism

The Kodaly Method

Very interesting song styling - I might try it to improve my singing :p
Also, anything whose creator's name is ZOLTAN gets my vote!

I'm also giddy and excited because they have released a new English translation of Simone De Beauvoir's 'The Second Sex' (yes, I'm a terrible English person who doesn't speak French, and am endlessly jealous of those who do. My conversational German could probably get me by though...). Radio 4 informed me that originally, the book sold incredibly well in France, and was there purchased by an American woman. She assumed it was a rather more clinical and sex-based book (missing the point somewhat) and passed it on to a French-speaking zoo-ology student friend of hers for translation. The poor feller took it on all by himself and thus, as is often the case, many nuances of the language were lost and several awkward mistakes were made. I can't remember the examples mentioned but there was a very odd one where the phrase that would equate to 'the human condition' became something like 'women's activities', or a similar absurd term that seems couched in the 50s rhetoric of happy housewives.
One of the other guests did comment that Beauvoir was, in spite of her brilliance and perspicacity, very scornful of the 'traditional' aspects of women, such as bearing children and taking a partner, or even being a house-wife. She herself lived alone, with Sartre as her long-term lover (I cannot imagine) and thus was an "unconventional" female figure, at least, very much so for the decades she lived through. But as was pointed out, this doesn't mean that the feminine aspects of women as they are traditionally seen (and still regularly enforced) should be totally disregarded as archaic and thoroughly unfeminist. More that they should be embraced by men too.

I'm also waiting on a new translation of Heidegger's Being and Time that makes fucking sense. I think it's out in 2010.... the future!!!