So he tells himself he' s a better writer than Jane Austen. Or Virginia Woolf. Or... really, any woman

Just before boarding a flight taking me home to Seattle this afternoon, I read this.* For a moment, I felt the disorientation of someone who'd been flung back in time to 1970. But then the obnoxious voices of Airport CNN televisions blaring in stereo from each side of me (way to go, MSP!) battered their way into my consciousness, voices babbling of two alternate futures for the US (or was it the world) that US politicians would soon be choosing from (for us lesser folk, presumably, since we apparently don't get a say in such matters). And of course I knew, then, that it was really 2011, and it hadn't been I who'd ventured out of her time, but a certain delusional Nobel Laureate.

Now that I'm both home and safely back in the 21st century, I think I'm going to take a bath. The steller's jay in my cherry tree sounds as if it's laughing its head off.
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*Here's the choicest bit:

In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose", was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of Austen he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".

He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."

The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.

He added: "My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don't mean this in any unkind way."