(no subject)

Happy birthday, rachelmanija!

Bits and bobs

The book is in the post to my editor, yay.

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I have reactivated my LJ because there are still people over there I want to be reading.

However, I still have DW invite codes going...

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I had a dream the other night that I was teaching a yoga class, wtf?

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Further to recent post about 'designer vaginas [sic]', A Call To Monitor And Evaluate Female Genital Cosmetic Procedures - which appears to be US-based.

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Kathryn Hughes underwhelmed by Heyer bio.

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O Marina Warner, surely not?

a pioneering "calligramme", or picture-poem, in the form of a mouse's curving tail for which Dodgson razored every typographic character individually and pasted it down.

Wasn't this happening in C17th? though only example I can think of offhand is Herbert's Easter Wings.

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I was going to say that this was a bit off Persephone's usual beat, but then remembered that No 1 was Cicely Hamilton's unrelenting WWI downer, William - An Englishman.

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Oliver Burkeman nails the widespread misattribution of inspirational quotations.

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And because I have failed to find a wider context for these:
'Wyvern' (Col A R Kenney-Herbert), Culinary Jottings for Madras (1885):

No more useful present could well be given to a young lady commencing house-keeping that a set of silver, or silver-plated, coquilles (scallop shells).

(I would so like Wyvern to meet Mrs Hauksbee, but Simla would not have been his hill-station - frequent allusions to the Nilgherries.)

And, cited in Gordon and Nair, Public Lives: women, family and society in Victorian Britain (actually pretty much exclusively Glasgow, but a very worthwhile read on the subject):

Then came the sweet course. At the foot of the table there was usually a dish of macaroni and cheese, more especially for masculine tastes.

(Real Men don't eat 'spun sugar and pastry, filled with luscious preserves' - more fool them.)