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Sarah Ménage
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Writer and performer based in Bristol.
Writer and performer Sarah Ménage was born and brought up in Stratford-on-Avon, with an older sister, an older brother, a younger brother and two younger sisters. She spent her twenties in London, where she studied Medicine for two years, and Drama for three, winning her Equity card on the alternative comedy circuit, before fleeing to Bath and eventually discovering the many marvellousnesses of Bristol. She has one grown-up son and lots of nephews and nieces.
The name Ménage (which means household) comes from great great grandfather John Baptiste (aka Gustave) who bigamously married English girl Naomi Starters in 1839. Since the marriage was illegal, the British Ménages ought really to be called Starter Writer and performer based in Bristol.
Writer and performer Sarah Ménage was born and brought up in Stratford-on-Avon, with an older sister, an older brother, a younger brother and two younger sisters. She spent her twenties in London, where she studied Medicine for two years, and Drama for three, winning her Equity card on the alternative comedy circuit, before fleeing to Bath and eventually discovering the many marvellousnesses of Bristol. She has one grown-up son and lots of nephews and nieces.
The name Ménage (which means household) comes from great great grandfather John Baptiste (aka Gustave) who bigamously married English girl Naomi Starters in 1839. Since the marriage was illegal, the British Ménages ought really to be called Starters. On her mother's side great great great grandfather James Cathrow Disney, Somerset Herald and fantasist, believed himself to be a bastard son of George IV. The story has not been proved false. Sarah recently embraced her (Galway and Belfast) Irish ancestry and established her dual nationality; and displays her Irish passport with very little encouragement or excuse.
Sarah has also written two albums of songs, WHO NEEDS A MAN and IN A MOOD. Songs attached to the novels - Love In A Wet Climate, The Glass Girl, They Fuck You Up, How To Make Life Nice and Molly's Daughter - will be released with others on STRIPPED DOWN DITTIES. Even sooner they will be available as downloads from sarahmenage.com. ...more
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You can work in bed. Like Proust!
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Trying to get readers.
My next writing projects are: reinvigorating and releasing in some form the 1812 backstory to How To Make Life Nice which was s…moreTrying to get readers.
My next writing projects are: reinvigorating and releasing in some form the 1812 backstory to How To Make Life Nice which was stripped out of the published book; editing and publishing my previous two novels - Love In A Wet Climate and The Glass Girl; and exploring narcissism and possibly hypnosis in a future novel. I'm thinking of writing about a love affair with an extremely narcissistic character, and because of my interest in the late Georgian period, I'd like to include references to Byron.(less)
My next writing projects are: reinvigorating and releasing in some form the 1812 backstory to How To Make Life Nice which was s…moreTrying to get readers.
My next writing projects are: reinvigorating and releasing in some form the 1812 backstory to How To Make Life Nice which was stripped out of the published book; editing and publishing my previous two novels - Love In A Wet Climate and The Glass Girl; and exploring narcissism and possibly hypnosis in a future novel. I'm thinking of writing about a love affair with an extremely narcissistic character, and because of my interest in the late Georgian period, I'd like to include references to Byron.(less)
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How To Make Life Nice
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The Glass Girl
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Consolations for a maturing woman
1. It beats the alternative
2. You’re younger than you will be
3. It happens to us all
4. Men become more interested in your mind than your body
5. Invisibility is quite a gas


Published on September 21, 2016 12:46
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Welcome to the new normal Naomi Klein: prejudiced, narcissistic, chippy, control freaky and obsessional. I could add envious, humourless and bitchy, but I don't want to be unkind. It's hard to believe that this mish-mash is from the confidently intel
Welcome to the new normal Naomi Klein: prejudiced, narcissistic, chippy, control freaky and obsessional. I could add envious, humourless and bitchy, but I don't want to be unkind. It's hard to believe that this mish-mash is from the confidently intelligent writer of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine - the critic of capitalist branding goes on and on about building and protecting her personal brand; the illuminator of disaster capitalism doesn't seem to recognise how covid (and climate 'breakdown') was/is hyped and exploited in order to benefit billionaires. I wonder if the real Naomi Klein has been replaced by an AI clone. She certainly spent too long online during lockdown. She had an absolutely awful time of it - 'It scrambled my personal world'... 'I woke up every morning exhausted, and stared at my various screens in a stultified gaze.' That's why I don't want to be mean. Well, we all suffered, a few to the point of suicide, but some of us, like the eponymous so-called 'doppleganger' Naomi Wolf, realised that anti-covid measures were unnecessary, ineffective and abusive; therefore a front for a different agenda altogether; and one to be resisted. I agree that Wolf sometimes goes too far (I've always thought so) and she's probably been naive in trusting Bannon's gift of a platform; but she's a published and respected writer in the same business (and previously on the same side) as Klein, and deserves a bit more respect. Klein misrepresents Wolf's error in her book 'Outrages', for example, calling it a 'debacle', and seems to glory in the possibility that she was embarrassed by having to correct it. (Wolf is insouciant and calm on this matter - calmness is a quality Klein says she admires, but seems to lack.) Klein calls Wolf a 'poor researcher' but doesn't critically engage with that research and has herself singularly failed to research: dietary supplementation (especially of vitamin D), hydroxychloraquine, ivermectin, remdesevir, midazolam, ventilation, mathematical modelling, mortality statistics, masking, vaccine injury, medical industry corruption, media corruption, medical 'philanthropy', pandemic planning, the WHO, CEPI, GAVI; and the economic realities and financial planning concomitant with the whole covid shitshow. She allows of no response from Wolf herself. Had she actually debated some of the issues, she might have understood Wolf's fears, challenged her excesses, and found common ground. Klein's polemic is light on facts, figures, evidence, but heavy on labels - fat-phobe and gym rat, for example! (Perhaps she put on weight during lockdown? Plenty of us did, it was one of the more visible lockdown assaults on public health.) I could only read this huge block of sustainable forest while armed with a pencil so I could underline nonsense, contradict false claims, and identify dogma, exaggeration and logical fallacy - mostly straw man, damning by association and ad hominem - while conceding an occasional - sometimes part-sentence - tick of agreement. Klein's Jewishness gives her licence to say interesting things about Israel, for example. She's well read and quotes from diverse sources on lots of subjects. If you're into dopplegangerness as a thing in itself, this book would be a useful reference. And of course she does care about people, especially us powerless ones. And, also of course, she's good with words. On that subject: I noted which words and phrases she places within quotes - for example, 'blood-brain barrier', 'bodily autonomy', 'strong immune system', 'lipid nanoparticles', 'groupthink', 'shadow banned', (and there's an extremely peculiar one on the cover slip - 'the children'!) - as if these things don't exist or deserve consideration; while there are plenty of words which ought to be within quotes but aren't - 'pandemic', 'vaccine', (cynically redefined by pandemic profiteers) 'anti-vaxxer', 'cis men', 'gender-affirming medical care', 'climate pollution' (!), 'far-right'. She uses the words 'conspiracy' and 'conspiracist' interchangeably with the phrases 'conspiracy theory' and 'conspiracy theorist', and with no critical awareness. To use her own terminology ('conspiracy smoothie'), she seems to have swallowed the globalist agenda smoothie in one gulp - it's all one slick piece - gender non-orthodoxy, critical race theory, pro-(trademarked)Science, climate alarm, pandemic alarm - she's downed the lot without any scrutiny of the individual parts. So various ideologies are conflated ('QAnon-tinged Covid denialism'), while on the other hand she counterpoises concerns that are not contradictory, for example assuming that if you recognise one form of tyrannical abuse (pandemic measures), you don't care about other forms of abuse (colonialism, racism). She recognises the perils of projection, that habit of attributing your own flaws to a projected other; goes so far as to quote from Graham Greene's Ways of Escape: 'Had I been the imposter all the time? Was I the Other?' cf 'Are we the baddies?!' (Mitchell and Webb.) But she doesn't take that one small step aside from the mirror (and the black mirror) to look for a broader perspective which would elegantly explain the whole shebang. The result is a peculiar form of mind-fuckery. The same kind of cross-eyed wobble portrayed on the cover. She was familiar, is now alien. She's 'the double of a double', and 'reality is somehow warping'. Orwell already coined it: War is Peace, and so on. Incidentally, in spite of its aptness for covid times (Information is Disinformation, Cruelty is Kindness), there's only one reference to 1984: '... Have you forgotten doublethink?' Klein manages to remember and forget it at the same time; she's doing it. Towards the end of the book she calls for unity, yet has slated, smeared and othered all those of us who spot that we are deliberately divided (to be conquered) by billionaires - for profit and - judging by their gleeful expressions when delivering bad news - amusement. She calls political alliances between right and left 'diagonalism', then smears it as far-right! What's wrong with diagonalism, I wonder. Perhaps it's too painful an affront to Klein's apparently fragile sense of identity. There's another issue that may be too painful for Klein to contemplate with an unprejudiced gaze: her son has autism. She criticises other parents of autistic children for wanting to discover the cause, mitigate the consequences, and in the case of vaccine injury, bring the perpetrators to account. In believing that their child may have been harmed by an avoidable procedure to which they consented, those parents show admirable fortitude. Klein reckons that her age at conceiving was the most likely causative factor. There's a fatalism in that - he's the son he was always going to be. Maybe she needs to be more compassionate of other parents suffering the same difficult situation, and of herself too. She might also notice that the rate of SIDS went down during lockdown when children weren't getting 'their' routine vaccines. Correlation doesn't prove causation, though, as we know. At least, we knew that before covid changed all the rules. Naomi Klein, at least please allow that other parents also love their children! Like you, they want to protect them, for example, from bodily interference, poisoning, indoctrination, and, yes, grooming without the inverted commas. (Is it not grooming to discuss masturbation and sexuality with a child who hasn't yet shown any autonomous interest? Check out school curricula before you go off on one against the 'far-right'.) Klein couches any parental intervention as a form of 'control'; (see p197 where every mention of 'control' could be replaced by the words 'protection from control'). Hey, control is exactly what your so called doppleganger is fighting! She jeers at pre-natal yoga, superfoods, 'vibrant health', and maligns the billion dollar supplement industry, (a necessity now 'big ag' has depleted our food); without calling out the far more lucrative and destructive billion dollar vaccine industry. Her leftiness is a given, but she failed to recognise the Canadian truckers' protest as an expression of worker solidarity against tyrannical power. (She accuses them of stealing a banner from the indigenous population, as if the two forms of tyranny were mutually exclusive.) She opposes fascism, but fails to recognise that the covid new normal: draconian rule, relentless propaganda, censorship, deplatforming, scapegoating ('pandemic of the unvaccinated'), invitation to snitch on non-conformers, was itself the totalitarian creation of an unholy alliance between government and corporate power. There are occasional flashes of insight eg 'I don't doubt there are other conspiracies that have managed to stay secret' or 'their "question everything" led to many of us not questioning enough' or 'it's perfectly reasonable to worry about a vaccine for a novel virus if you're pregnant' (thanks, Ms Klein!) but these flashes find no combustible fuel in the brainwash that was once a mind. No, I don't want to be unkind. She's still clever. It's instructive to examine the intellectual acrobatics involved in her defence of the indefensible, in her accommodation of cognitive dissonance. A lot of word play. It's frustrating that she refuses to take that small sideways step, but I'm actually sad about it, not cross. Naomi Klein was important to my own understanding of the world. I searched for her opinion in 2020, assuming she'd be calling out the con. I was severely disappointed. Perhaps, unlike those powerless ones she wants to represent, she is too invested in the system to see through it. Note which Naomi's book is promoted by the mainstream press. Which Naomi comes up on Google? Which bookstores stock 'Doppleganger', and where can you find 'The Bodies of Others'? ...more |
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Jan 20, 2024 08:17AM
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