Linkasserie

[oursin]

Just too late for IBARW:

So horrific are the images conjured up by 'Strange Fruit' that Billie Holiday always performed it with her eyes closed. Caryl Phillips, who used the title for his first play, traces the song's dark history.

Australian novelist Kate Grenville found success with novels about her country's violent history.

International Slavery Museum opens in Liverpool next week.

And some other stuff:

Germaine Greer on Ann Hathaway.

Kathryn Hughes on Penguin's publication of 20 (short) pieces of classic romantic and erotic literature and the Industrial Revolution.

Hermione Lee applauds Alison Light's Mrs Woolf & the Servants.

Shop til you drop C18th style: John Mullan goes on an 18th-century shopping expedition in John Styles and Amanda Vickery's Gender, Taste, and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700-1830.

Colin Greenland's Sarah Hall's futuristic fable, The Carhullan Army makes it sound as if the separatist feminist commune includes a significant Starkadder contingent:

Over the fetid gloom of Rith brood the dark moors and fells, thrusting through the soft verdure of the lowlands like primeval, inescapable truths. Hall's prose is chunky with local language, colour and landscape: bothies, bields, becks and corbies, hefted flocks and droves of heather.

Ben Goldacre goes WTF, and so do I.

EEEEEE! these were even scarier as a full-page spread in the Guardian Weekend Magazine

Comments

[forthwritten.livejournal.com]

I'm sure I remember seeing posters for a club night called "strange fruit"...not quite sure what the promoters were thinking, or indeed if they were.

I'm looking forward to the International Slavery Museum opening - the Transatlantic Slavery Gallery was very interesting if occasionally not terribly accessible (lots of printed information, which I liked and read most of but which my friends read a bit more selectively). Having spoken to several people involved in the project, I'd be interested to see what form it takes.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

EEEEEE! these were even scarier as a full-page spread in the Guardian Weekend Magazine

I grew up in that wretched town and now lemur_catta wants a set.

Styles and Vickery

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

And Amazon goes ka-ching!

However, this: "In the 1780s, the traveller John Byng was one of many to note that fashionable display was now not limited to the wealthy. "I meet milkmaids on the road with the dress and looks of Strand misses."

has been the complaint for as long as there have been social classes. Why did they keep passing and passing and PASSING sumptuary laws? Because people have always bought the finest clothes they could afford, proper places be damned.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Re the meerkats: I look forward to breaking m31andy's brain with those.

No, no, I had nothing to do with a certain magazine being dedicated to meerkats recently.

[ankaret.livejournal.com]

*joins you and Ben Goldacre in horror*

I think that actually trumps the time that a cheery young volunteer at the holiday playscheme for children at my brother Gavin's school climbed into the minibus, noticed two Downs Syndrome kids and announced brightly 'Oh! Are they brothers?'

[zandra-x.livejournal.com]

I'd love to have meerkats standing guard in my backyard, but from the expressions on those pictured, they look like "Meerkats of the Apocalypse".

(And LJ may have gone completely mad, but when I click on the Mrs. Woolf article, LJ opens on my posting page, as though I clicked on the pencil on my user page. I tried it half a dozen times.)

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Fixed - I think my browser did that thing where it suddenly switches the page you're looking at while I was copying the URL.

Mores on that Ben Goldacre column

[drasecretcampus.livejournal.com]

At: http://www.badscience.net/?p=477

Re: Mores on that Ben Goldacre column

[oursin.livejournal.com]

As I commented in someone else's discussion on this, apart from the sprinkling on top of a few odd snippets of stuff that probably weren't part of the c. 1900 consciousness, I could easily believe this to be something dug up from the unpublished papers of the noted Italian physical anthropologist and criminologist Cesare Lombroso (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesare_Lombroso), famed for his 'born criminals' hypothesis.

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Starnge Fruit is one of less than half a dozen songs to have had a whole book devoted to tehir history, by David margolick in this case. It's a fascinating tale and a recommended book.

[hafren.livejournal.com]

I thought the Greer article had way too much "might have" and "could have" about it - it was little more than speculation really.