It Wasn't a Very Good Movie, but it Hit the Full Spectrum: Me, My Wife and a Lesbian Friend Crying and Crying and Crying...

The life of Iris Murdoch is in dispute, but so it goes in the seemey world of biography. (Yeah, I cried, so what?)




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My Bid is ... Everything I Have in My Pockets or You Can Take What's in this Box Covered in Question Marks.... Hmmmm?

Iris Murdoch's books aren't being burned, but the English think they might as well be... They are up for sale by her widower John Bayley and an American bidder is the first to offer the asking price. But the English are desperate to see the books to stay at a university there (the U needs £30,000 more to make the £150,000 asking price... um, in the States a university would just ask a dean to spot them the dough...) Next week a very special episode of Coronation Street will be dedicated to the struggle.



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Reading Iris

See, I want to read and like Iris Murdoch, but it's kind of like swimming in toffee for me.



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Murdoch Collection Lands in Kingston

No, not Dougie's hometown - the UK university.



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Sad, but true

A new statistical analysis of Iris Murdoch's last novel reveals she was in decline long before she was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

Reviews of Jackson's Dilemma suggested that literary editors were ahead of the medical profession in realising that Dame Iris Murdoch was in decline, though they "put it rather politely", said one of the team of neuroscientists who today publishes the first statistical analysis of her last novel in the journal Brain.

A S Byatt wrote that the structure was akin to an "Indian rope trick" in which the characters "have no selves and therefore there is no story and no novel".

Penelope Fitzgerald said that "Murdoch had let her fiction wear through", while another likened the novel to "the work of a 13-year-old schoolgirl who doesn't get out enough".

The stats about Alzheimer's frequency are very scary. Esp considering the boomers now entering that gap. Have you ever hung out with someone who's suffering? At times, it's like being with a sleepwalker - helpless and creepy.



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