Ridiculous

I found out only recently, and with great irritation, that the translator of the standard English version of the epic of Gilgamesh, N.K.Sandars, was called Nancy and was a woman. I don't know why she would conceal her name in this way, or whether it had anything to do with her sex, but I could not help thinking about the way that Joanne Kathleen Rowling's publishers shortened her name to JK to prevent readers realizing that this author of adventurous stories about two boys and a girl was a woman herself. And then there is the strange phenomenon of the illustrious (if bitchy) British writer universally known as A.S.Byatt. I am not often heard to take this kind of positions, but I find this simply ridiculous. That in this day and age, the identity of a woman should be disguised in order to enter her into the artform practiced by Deborah the prophetess, by Sappho and the other Earthly Muses, by the Virgin Mary (the Magnificat), St.Hildegard of Bingen, Christine de Pisan, Teresa of Cartagena, Vittoria Colonna, St.Teresa of Avila, Madame de Lafayette, Madame de Sevigne', Jane Austen, Annette von Droste, the Bronte sisters, Louisa May Alcott, Mrs.Gaskell, and so on and so forth and so following, is ridiculous... sorry to repeat myself, but what other word is fitting? Or rather, it should be ridiculous, were it not that nobody can find the force to laugh. Have they ever gone away, the days of George Eliot, George Sand, and Currer Bell?

Er... sad news?

I would not wish anyone in jail, let alone a South African one. But as someone who still carries the scars of eleven years of Meg Thug, seventeen years of Tory lies with or without her, twenty-four years straight of Tory government (yes, including the Tory Blur), I must say that my compassion for Meg Thug's son ending up in a Capetown jail is somewhat modified. [*the writer wanders away, holding both hands tightly over his mouth...*]