Betty Friedan died on February 4, in 2006, on her 85th birthday. Germaine Greer (who knew Germaine Greer was funny) wrote a wonderful memorial at the time, in the Guardian UK

In 1972, Betty and I, and Helvi Sipila of the United Nations, were together in Iran as guests of the Women’s Organisation of Iran, and once again I had difficulty in dissociating myself from Betty, who would usually take over my allotted speaking time as well as her own and inveigh against younger feminists who burned bras and talked dirty.

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Germaine Greer has a new book, Shakespeare’s Wife, coming out any minute now. A long and interesting review in the New York Review of Books, where I seem to patch up my education nowadays (having little formal,) gives one a sense of the range of possibilities in life at that time, as well as how history is done. I find this sort of thing, readable scholarship, a relief. From? From the ever-floating body of, er, knowledge that is the Interwebs. Where one can read forever, find anything—yet who shall say what the core is? The canon. Canon in the sense of, say, polar opposite of bone stupid. Which seems to be having what must have been a long awaited field day, because anyone can blog about anything. The pity is that, in some atavistic reflex, we tend to assign some vague legitimacy to that which appears in print. Aha, but here the print is merely carefully arranged electrons, courtesy of your favorite blog service. It’s all an illusion. Machine language tells the machine what to make of it so as to become, as they say, Human-Readable. I write it myself, albeit in a simple-minded way, every time I post with HTML, and I can tell you … count on nothing. Wear your best tin-foil hat. Be careful out there. Read the rest of this entry »