FEAST OR FAMINE

Hasmik Mkhitaryan’s  Café for Two: Decoding Masculinity – What Men Live By ( 2024) is set in Manhattan and is a conversation over coffee between two elderly male friends on Wall Street.   They discuss work burnout, loss of love, the weariness of divorce, and loneliness. A chapter is dedicated to each emotional phase. As they talk, they make intellectual references to classical literary novels and society’s changing norms, particularly what masculinity means in the modern age.   I like the strong introduction to the novel, setting a powerful atmosphere of the bond between the two men. I like the dialogue between them. Sometimes, it feels scripted and repetitive, but overall, the tone is conversational storytelling in a gentle, philosophical way – sometimes sad, but always open and honest.    To each other, they have nothing to hide. Their emotional pain is raw and real. The narrator’s friend talks of keeping up appearances and expectations in the professional wor...

  Nine  women artists from the ArTchipel collective  are exhibiting their artworks in the Paris town hall of the 6 th  arrondissement from 14 December 2024 to 13 January 2025. The e xhibition  includes  painting s   and sculptures.   The themes for the collective exhibition are:  eight islands, eight planets, eight universes   – to ” affirm the parallel worlds, underground or celestial, which beat, sing and only ask for our listening to make a symphony. ”   The 9 female artists are: Cyb, Maÿlis de Chambure, Ange Debroise, Tat Duvillier, Marie-Astrid Grivet, Emilie Riggs, Claire Sevaux, Alessandra Solima, and Catherine Webb.   C yb calls h er  pictorial approach " I nsurrection of  C olo u r"   and says,  "Colo u r is what pushes the limit, what finds space and convulses time . "   Maÿlis de Chambure ’s creations suggest escape, inviting the viewer to “wander and get lost in the twists and turns of ...

Joan of Arc  by Mary Gordon (2000) is described as the ‘provocative biography’ of France’s Joan of Arc who, female, illiterate, and seventeen years old, led an army to defeat the English in the fifteenth century.   Joan of Arc (1412-1431) - Jeanne d'Arc - had early victories, but was essentially a failed soldier, a young girl in men’s clothes, and a ‘lunatic’ with voices in her head, who was captured, sent to trial, condemned as a demonic heretic, and burned to death at the age of nineteen. It took 500 years for the Catholic church to apologize, pardon her, and make her a saint in 1920.     Why is she so revered?   Her success was brief – five to nine months ‘at best’ – the rest was a series of defeats, and her life was lost early. Yet all of her predicitons came true.    There have been thousands of books about the brief life of Joan of Arc, but this one asks questions and seeks answers. Why would a young rural girl listen to voices in her head t...

  Iliennes: Souvenirs de vacances sur une ile bretonne  (2013, French edition) – Islanders: Memories of Holidays on an Island – is set on a French island from 1925 to 1968 - the island of Hoedic in Brittany in the north-west of France.   The author had three aunts – sisters Marie, Esther, and Eléonore. Esther and Eléonore lived together – one thin, the other big; one joyous and the other serious. Beautiful and intelligent Marie lives with her husband and five children.   It was a time before electricity, make-up, and anti-wrinkle cream, when everyone lived a simpler life. When mail took three days to arrive. For their holidays on the small island, they could be together, listening to the jazz records of Louis Armstrong, Billy Holiday, Django Reinhardt, and the unrequited love songs of Edith Piaf.   Over 40 years of holidays, the story focuses on her aunts with little reference to men – but they are there, in the background – the fishermen and their boats. The au...

  A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton (2007) is set in America from 1947 to 2007. It is Hillary Clinton’s life as a student, a human rights advocate, a legal professional, a democrat, and First Lady to President Bill Clinton (in office from 1991 to 2001).    The biography begins with Hillary Clinton’s parents and her childhood. It depicts her early leadership qualities and her strong advocacy beliefs during her Wellesley College and Yale Law School years, particularly in children’s rights. It details her relationship with Bill Clinton from the time they met at Yale. It discusses her response to Bill’s scandals and public reactions.   Journalist and author Carl Bernstein uses the media, letters, campaign records, and interviews to understand the trajectory of a complex woman in a deeply scrutinized relationship as a governor’s and a president’s wife. Despite the historical times and public pressures, Bernstein says she remains her own person with in...

  Dina Oganova’s ’Tell Your Daughters’ photography exhibition appears in the Museum of Modern Art in Tbilisi, Georgia, from 10-24 June 2022.   The exhibition ‘Tell Your Daughters’ tells the stories of more than 20 women through visual art and documentary photography.   The Georgian office of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), with the Embassy of Sweden, organized the exhibition to communicate human rights related issues, particularly to advocate women’s and girl’s empowerment. The project was initiated under the UN Joint Program for Gender Equality, and also supported by Kolga Tbilisi Photo.   It focuses on bodily autonomy and bodily integriy – the power for women and girls to determine their own choices about their bodies and to have the information, services, and means to do so, free from discrimination, coercion, and violence.   Dina Oganova is a freelance Georgian documentary photographer working in Georgia and the Caucasus region. She was the first...