Friedrich --

Have you ever run across Norah Vincent's columns? She's feisty and brainy -- a tough-minded, rightish-leaning lesbian contrarian, and one of a kind.

And now she's started a blog, here. What a pleasure to read someone so sharp on politics who's just as brainy (let alone shrewd and openminded) about cultural matters. All too rare. Here, for instance, she is on R. Crumb:

As for Crumb’s alleged misogyny, I think this has always been a wrongheaded charge. Crumb’s women are striding, zaftig Amazons who embody Crumb’s clear, and if you saw the 1994 documentary “Crumb,” confessed reverence for women. The man may be a perpetually arrested adolescent, emotionally stunted and relationally inept in almost every way, but, much to his credit, he is both well aware and makes no secret of his condition. In Crumb’s work, women have all the power. His drawings are the landscape and expression of the harmless, and often hilarious heterosexual male id, in much the same way that the Tom of Finland cartoons are, in all their throbbing exactitude, the expression of the homosexual male id. In Crumb’s mind, men, enslaved by their irrepressible desires, are the ones constantly humiliating themselves in the skirt chase.

Best,

Michael