It's Always More Complicated

I happened to post over on the site formerly known as Twitter about Angela Thirkell - somebody posted an image of a painting of her, under her (first) married name (to the alcoholic gay domestic abuser) and I did 'better known as' quote-repost, and clearly there are a lot of covert Thirkell-fans out there.

But I was a bit took aback by somebody who claimed that the Barsetshire novels are 'a real-time cultural history of the UK from interwar to postwar periods', which is, my dearios, to boggle at, surely, and being somebody who is wont to wax pedantic and nitpick errors, I suggested that they covered a rather specific slice and that I could argue that there was a strong element of fantasy (Barsetshire as Thirkell-land/Trollope fanfic), but that one can enjoy them anyway. (One can surely enjoy e.g. Wodehouse without wanting it to be social realism?) and got a snarky response about 'Sorry for enjoying the books in a different way from you'. Huh? It wasn't about enjoyment, it was about classificatory accuracy, I say, sitting over here with South Riding.

Given, you know, I am an actual historian of the period in question and have read a lot of other writers ditto - and now, I want the cross-over in which the Provincial Lady goes to talk at one of the Women's Institutes in the Barsetshire area and comments in her diary.... (talking of snark).

And this sort of thing is why I do not do universal recommendations even to people with whom I have a significant community of tastes.

On reading more generally, apparently the yoof of today are being put off by the way it is taught with grammar drills and counting adverbs and what have you. I think back to the days of my own youth - well primary school - and annoying readers (there was one called Reading for Meaning, a title which still exists but the books seem entirely different) which gave you some text and then a set of tedious questions that you were supposed to answer on it, blah.

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I have another bluesky invite code which I don't think anyone has dibsed in advance.

In the course of Current Research I have acquired scholarly (well, that's what it's intended to be, it's issued by a university press, so) edition of a novel by somebody who was Much More Famed For Other Things.

I have not only writ upon This Person, fairly extensively over the years, I have writ specifically on this fairly dreadful novel, which, I may add, I originally read as a photocopy - remember xeroxes??? - of the copy in the university library of person who had asked me to contribute a chapter to an edited volume about it.

Does this get mentioned in the introduction? Is it cited in the bibliography? Is it 'eck.

Introduction also perpetrated Errour that I took issue with in that article and in other places concerning whether V Woolf alluded to the novel in A Room of One's Own - this is a real stretch and I am prepared to bore for Europe on the reasons why your case does not hold up.

So I am in a bit of a miff of outraged vanity here, only slightly mollified by having come across - by doing a spot of due diligence, Unlike Some People, she huffs - two articles about a somewhat obscure novel I'm writing on, one of them, by a strange coincidence, by the very editor of aforementioned edited volume, what're the odds, eh?

(Though, fairly neglected early C20th women writers, actually, it's not that improbable.)

Am currently reading, or trying to read, book for review.

And apart from the fact that I am not sure that it is doing any very necessary work, or maybe that is just because it is working in a newish field adjacent to my own, on a topic that I have had a lot to do with over the years -

I feel myself being rather nitpicky with it, as in, looking at the bibliography and going 'Y No [X, Y, never mind Y no MEEEEEEE?]' who I would have thought had done significant pertinent work.

And there is the Thing that is entirely wrong about the Heated Debate around VD prophylaxis and the British Army, which admittedly is about a sentence but footnoted to someone who I fancy would not like it attrib to them.

And there is the comparison between a French woman novelist and Jane 'Austin', and while national character may have had a bearing, writing at opposite ends of the C19th and being in entirely different social milieux probably had quite a bit to do with their differences.

While there is that thing, that I have noticed in other works, which I put down to spell-checkers only noticing whether a word is correctly spelt, not if it is a word which actually makes sense in the context. Which gives the sense of the author having thrown words which sound vaguely like the word intended at the page, and is really rather annoying.

Are these things edited? Do they go out to external readers? Answer comes there none.

This is published by what purports to be the academic arm of a major publisher at eyewatering price.

(I don't think I mentioned here the suggestion, some while ago, of Madame C- C- among Good Boss Models?)

But anyway, yesterday Alison asked 'Let’s talk about how your field is represented — or more likely, misrepresented — on TV and movies or books'.

And very shortly the archivists and librarians started chipping in! concerning Gross Misrepresentation in meedja, not to mention stereotyping.

The NO! NOT THE WHITE GLOVES!!!! discussion appears to have got broken off and occurs a bit lower down here and here.

I really don't think I need to invent myself a pseudonym and sign in, these complaints are generic to everyone, pretty much, who works in these fields, sigh.

In my own experience I have come across Egregious Errors in works set in institutions that I actually worked in - no, it really doesn't work like that, no no no - but I was pretty sure that 'being admitted into the stacks to fossick about among the records' in a French provincial archive was cloud-cuckoo-land. There was also the cozy 'humorous' mystery set in a rare books collection in which they appeared to be letting random people just roam the stacks (subplot involving somebody replacing books with Some Other Books), or rather, the books were all out there where people could wander among the shelves.

Okay, the whole Twitter/Musk thing seems to be extremely up in the air and (self-reflexively, what) full of sound and fury and who knows what it signifies and how everything will pan out...

But all the people running around going 'move to X or Y' different social media platform -

- sure, I would like to see more people on Dreamwidth! - hello, any new people! -

- no way is Dreamwidth doing the same sort of thing as Twitter or Facebook or the various other places where people hang out.

The different places are not fungible and they are different ecological niches.

I do different things involving different people on Twitter than I do here -

And some things which have gone the way of the dodo I still mourn, there were listservs which had lively debates back in the day and while there are still one or two maybe still going like that, the main set of academic listservs I'm still subscribed to are not conducive to the same back and forth (may be network-dependent?).

I've also been thinking - while thinking of 'social media' as comprising this diversity of spaces and potentialities of interaction - of the discourse that it's a horrible snakepit of toxicity.

And okay, there is a lot of that, but there are also a lot of unhistoric acts of pleasantness and random acts of kindness and positive connections? And people giving good advice? In various places.

Perhaps it is not entirely a Pollyannaish glow of positivity to shaming-quote-tweet anything which invokes 'dusty archives' especially if somebody purports to have discovered something 'lost' in them. Or point people at more reliable sources for certain canards about the Victorians... But at least I'm not actually deliverately searching out instances, just tackling them when they cross my horizon?

You know, I would be a bit more convinced by this (article about The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes), if the author were not described as holding a post which does not exist - people are not Professors of 'the University of London' but of one or other of the constituent colleges federated to it. This may be a reporter's error, I suppose. There had also been a similar previous case, although it had only involved being listed in the Peerage as the heir, rather than actually succeeding: Michael Dillon. (Would like to check Clare Tebbutt's work on 'sex-change' cases of the 30s, too.)

But you know me and revelations about history of startling secret cover-ups...

(Okay, that thing about the Mountbatten papers is still muttering on, if we are talking about cover-ups.)

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Again, I'm a bit 'is this really a secret history?' about this: ‘Sex workers, reggae girls, squatters, all the ones who didn’t fit in’: how Rebel Dykes reveals a secret lesbian history. Some of that reminds me of heated hoohahs in the feminist periodicals back in the day - a forgotten rather than secret history?

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Are we surprised: Nazis based their elite schools on top British private schools.

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Somebody gets perhaps a little over-excited on first looking into Victorian pornography - or at least, over-generalising (#NotAllVictorians is I think appropriate). It was a very niche genre! But even so, has struck a very interesting and previously unexplored (to my knowledge) element, i.e. menstruation (NSFW, and usual content warnings for Victporn).

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Not exactly news to anyone who works on STIs in the early C20th, military health in WW1 and related issues: These Are The Forgotten Sex Workers Of The First World War Who Played An Important Role In Soldiers' Lives. The historiography on prostitution and its control around the front line and concern about this particular threat to military efficiency exists.

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Happy 50th. Predictor: The First Home Pregnancy Test.

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WOULDN'T YOU LIKE TO KNOW THE TRUE SIGNS OF WITCHCRAFT, IN CASE THOSE DANGEROUS AND DEADLY VOICES COMES FOR YOU OR SOMEONE YOU LOVE? THE VOICES NEVER STOPS UNTIL IT DESTROYS YOU! deeply weird and in design terms, a real blast from the past.

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This Ghost Town’s 'Curse' Isn't What You Think:

For years, guilty souvenir-takers have been sending those letters to the park staff, detailing the misfortune they believe has plagued them ever since -- and desperately sending their “cursed” items back. Yet the most curious thing about this so-called curse isn’t even how deeply people believe in it: It's how it began. This myth did not originate with superstitious Gold Rush prospectors, or credulous ghost hunters. It was started by the California Department of Parks and Recreation itself -- and it's had an effect the state parks service didn't expect.

Everything You Thought You Knew About ‘Hobo Code’ Is Wrong. Incongruously, I am reminded of those articles that pop up from time to time about the alleged 'fan' code of Victorian ballrooms and similar. People like to think there are secret signaling systems? (Well of course there was the handkerchief code, but that was specific to particular settings where everybody knew what it meant, not bat-squeaks between strangers in public spaces.)

UK women are being ‘used as guinea pigs’ by ‘abortion reversal’ doctors: or so they say...

“We do help hundreds of women every day in the UK,” said a tired-sounding American woman who spoke to an openDemocracy undercover reporter in the middle of her night. “We’re like the international abortion pill reversal line.”
....
[T]he Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC), which is a UK anti-abortion group, says the APR network’s 24/7 helpline has “surged with emergency calls amidst [the] coronavirus lockdown”. Its website also claims that this US-based network “includes UK based doctors”.

So I'm wondering if any of the claims of these people are actually true, given that their own cited numbers wobble wildly from 'We do help hundreds of women every day in the UK' to 'APR’s proponents claim at least 60 women in the UK requested it in the first half of 2020' to 'She also claimed that in the UK “we’ve done about 100 [treatments] now.”'.

Perhaps my own view on this is skewed from years of delving into the history of women's desperation in search of ending unwanted pregnancies? I honestly don't believe that women go through the process of obtaining the abortion pill and then go 'oops! better slam on the brakes and go into reverse!'

Okay, history records instances of men slipping their lovers abortifacients or supposed abortifacients when they did not want to be burdened with a pregnant girlfriend or responsibility for her child, but is that a scenario likely to be very prevalent in C21st? that if discovered might drive a woman to this extremity?

Smuggler found with nearly 1,000 cacti and succulents strapped to her body: maybe I am a bad bad person with a twisted mind, but I found myself thinking Her Kink Is Okay, It's Just Not My Kink, also there are rules about importation of biomaterials into New Zealand...

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Dept of, I had issues with this publisher when I did a book with them, involving them wanting to use for the cover a photo of a woman who was not, in fact, included in the text, when there were a significant number of women who were included and of whom there were images available (one of which we eventually went with):

There is a book coming out on Jane Austen and Critical Theory. The cover image depicts a woman in C18th dress with a fair amount of decollettee, sitting at a desk with books and a pair of compasses.

This is not just Any Old C18th Woman looking vaguely thoughtful.

This is Emilie du Chatelet, who was a) French b) predeceased Austen by several decades and c) a significant woman intellectual in her own right. Also shagged Voltaire.

Y O Y

As far as I can tell from the contents list, there is no conceivable connection.

Hystoryan is hysterykal.

Ten debut novelists - predicatably litfic and photogenic and mainstream published, siiiigh and all about the beginnings and the relatively young. Okay, they are becoming more diverse, modified yay.

And here we have the rediscovery, not for the first time, of the unexpected virtues of a despised genre, though, honestly, I am not sure all the works under discussion are what one would normally classify as 'bonkbuster': What trashy novels taught me about life. What does unite them is that they are by women, about women, and for women. And meant to be pleasurable reads.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are some historical events that novelists just keep on revisiting and reworking: I think I first read a historical novel about this Jacobean murder case when I was 13 and I very much doubt it is the only one: A Net for Small Fishes by Lucy Jago. (And doesn't one of the dons at Somerville want to interrogate Harriet Vane about the Overbury case at some point in Gaudy Night?) Some years back I read an sf novel by LA Taylor, The Fathergod Experiment (1999, apparently recently re-released as ebook), in which the central plot appeared to me to be closely based on this case, but with (can't lay my hands on my copy, which is somewhere around) alien anthropologist observers?

Talking of anthropology and participant observation, A man's world… Tabitha Lasley's extraordinary account of the lives of offshore oil workers - okay, it is probably not in the least like Rosemary Daniell's 1985 Sleeping with Soldiers: In Search of the Macho Man, which also included a stint working on an oil-rig.

I see that it's been changed in the online version, but in the print edition the headline of this review was 'Impotence isn't a joke': also it is NOT THE SAME THING AS INFERTILITY and I am aghast that this misapprehension is still going around.

- and I will go around being pedantic with it, as my dr rdrz are aware. (e.g. Sid says, actually you could cure syphilis before penicillin, it just took rather a long time and a course of painful injections. Plus, penicillin was not a viable treatment before the early 1940s... I'll shut up now.)

Part of this was being an archivist, which is the kind of job in which one tends to accrete all sorts of misc info and partly it was doing research in niche fields, but anyway.

However, sometimes one observes people making bloopers which are such enormous bloopers that even people who are probably not massive experts in the field or the period are going - Wait, WHAT?

This was an assumption about global mobility. I would murmur that medievalists are oft pointing out that goods and people were circulating a whole lot more than people may suppose during that era.

But the period in question was the nineteenth century. Yes, my dearios, the century in which M. Jules Verne was able to write as a plausible thing Around the World in Eighty Days (1872), and the USP of this was not the circumnavigation aspect, but the speed with which it might be accomplished.

Siiiigh.

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I was also moved to a further deep sigh by the ongoing saga of the Reclaim Her Name debacle - apparently they asked NK Jemisin to let them use a short story of hers for free to advertise the Women's Prize. She uses initials to differentiate her fiction-writing identity from her academic-writing identity (as, it happens, do I), and not for any reason of concealment of gender.