This soaring and glorious meditation on the Iliad made me feel I’d learned something that only Simone Weil could teach me. In a way though it made me sad to read this essay, because I realized once again how few women write like this, absolutely sure of their superior intellect and expertise, and with absolute authority, and without a hint of apology for taking command of their thesis and telling the reader what’s what. No throat clearing clauses like “I’m not sure but” or “It’s possible that…”. Just a rush of knowledge written without doubt or equivocation.

Susan Sontag wrote this way. So did Gertrude Stein. Camille Paglia writes this way. In her case I disagree with most of what she writes but I still love what I would call her …a word comes to mind…see, here is the problem, the word that comes to mind is “I love her ballsy-ness.” My language for the act of writing with unapologetic authority is corrupted by a learned cultural sense that to write this way is inherently male. That's bad. ( )