It's Always More Complicated

‘An experiment in ritual humiliation’: would a month of rejection therapy make me fearless? Ummmm: do you not feel a certain qualm at involving people non-consensually in your therapeutic journey? Okay, it looks as though he a) didn't actually ask a stranger for a hug (ugh to the max) and b) at least he wasn't posting all these encounters on TikTok? And he does admit:

I also begin to feel guilty that I have mistreated this cyclist somehow; that this bizarre interaction will play on his mind and that he’ll wonder why he was targeted. I suppose the TikTokers who do the challenge view their victims as collateral damage in their quest for viral fame, but I’m not even going to achieve that.

***

One of those creepy persons with a Greek statue as their user icon on formerly-Twitter, whingeing 'Is there a more depressing trend than churches becoming coffee shops?', who is clearly about preserving churches as dead spaces of Luvverly Past Cultural Achievement: I saw this under this quote-tweet kicking back and went on to point out the actual history and reality:

The history of St Mary Aldermary is really interesting: it’s been destroyed so many times, not least in both the Great Fire and the Blitz. It hosts the Moldovan Orthodox Church in London as well as the Moot community, who set up the coffee shop as part of their ministry.

(And presumably people who whinge on thusly have never given thought to the centuries of people redoing churches, in particular, of course, Victorian restoration.... Someone there was woezing about nasty folding chairs instead of pews, I bet those were in their day Nasty Victorian Pitchpine Pews, yeah? now consecrated by AGE.)

***

I may have mentioned the Brixton Gay Squats of the 70s and the everything-in-common including underwear, but honestly, I think even they might have drawn the line at toothbrushes: Apparently there was a pot of toothbrushes in their bathroom growing up, and when it came time to brush their teeth, everyone would just go for the nicest-looking one..

We shared toothbrushes – we have done it our entire lives. I still do when I go home. I genuinely don’t think there’s anything unusual about it. My mum would replace the toothbrushes once a month, so that was fine. I thought everyone did it. It didn’t occur to me that it was disgusting. Edward didn’t know for a really long time that everyone in my house was using his toothbrush when he stayed over. He used to be like, “Why is my toothbrush wet?” I didn’t say anything for a while. But he had a very beautiful, pristine toothbrush, whereas Mum used to just get a pack of Aldi ones. My siblings wouldn’t have known it was his, though. They would have just seen it and thought: “I’ll be using that one tonight.” Edward saw one of my brothers using his toothbrush once and felt absolute horror. He started hiding it when we went to stay, and he still does. My siblings thought: “Why is he freaking out? We all share in this house.” Even though we’re adults, they see sharing toothbrushes as totally normal, as I do.

Will confess that I did not even know that 'rhythmic gymnastics' was a thing, let alone an Olympic sport (will also confess that there are LOTS of things I do not know are Olympic sports until the Olympics come round and suddenly everybody is talking about them).

But it sounds like a classic 'backwards and in high heels' thing that gets put down for being done not just by women but by wee gurlyz, and with an emphasis on aesthetics:

Rebecca Liu, ‘A lesson in loss, humility and absurdity’: how rhythmic gymnastics took over my childhood:

Where artistic gymnastics – the one with the beam and the bars, the one with triple backflips and the constant risk of broken bones – is dignified and athletic, rhythmic gymnastics is frilly and absurd. How is this even a sport? Why is it part of the Olympics? These are the usual criticisms. In return, embattled admirers will point out that rhythmic gymnastics is extremely difficult, actually. There is immense skill involved in those backbends and leaps; besides, have you tried throwing and catching a ball while holding your foot above your head?

I loved the rush of feeling my body stretching and moving, propelled by the hope that I, too, might one day be as graceful as that ribbon-throwing Olympian. Under the tutelage of two kind teenage sisters, I began my education. Rhythmic gymnastics, I learned, is not just about sparkly leotards and ribbons; it is about sparkly leotards and ribbons and the ball, rope, hoop and clubs (in reality, two small batons). For each apparatus, rhythmic gymnasts have a separate routine.... The movements, set to music, are instead rooted in dance and ballet. You have leaps and jumps; rotations, otherwise known as spins and pirouettes; and balances (just throw your leg out behind you to make an arabesque, then bend your knee and kick your foot towards your head, then catch it. Easy!). As you perform these movements, you must also effortlessly juggle, spin, throw and catch your ribbon or ball or rope or hoop or clubs. Yes, it is a real sport. Judges score each routine by two criteria: the difficulty of the moves, and the execution of the performance.

[R]hythmic gymnasts must not only endure pain, but smile through it, too.... It is easy to see how rhythmic gymnastics is constricting. What is harder to see is how liberating it can feel. When I was on the floor, there was a deep pleasure in letting the audience, and myself, know that I could triumph over impossible demands. Under the scrutiny of judges, competitors and the crowd, I knew that I was here to conquer. My smile felt less sweet and obliging than a dark challenge: go on, idiot, underestimate me.

Gymnastics unlocked something sublime and powerful, opening up planes of existence normally closed off to girls: the feeling of bloodlust pumping through my body, the hunger for glory, and the all-consuming joy of losing myself in something greater. Yes, these dark emotions were channelled through something extremely girly. But these hyper-feminine things – like gymnastics, like dance, like pageants – were, and remain, some of the few ways in which women can experience those feelings without censure.

The trajectory for rhythmic gymnasts, with its demand for a particular bodily type, also hypes up to the max that much longer pernicious yet pervasive narrative of 'girlhood shut down by puberty/encroaching womanhood'. Is this actually necessary? could the moves still be accomplished by more mature figures? I looked back at this: Memmel has flouted what is perhaps the most foundational notion in gymnastics training: that the world’s most talented gymnasts, after peaking in their teens, inevitably burn out before mature adulthood.

O, Jonathan Jones, the ponceyness that never stops giving: Oxford’s online Bodleian archive: illumination for all.

Yes, okay, these digital initatives are a great thing, but this isn't even one of the pioneering efforts.

But it raises the question of what great libraries are for: is the research they make possible just for PhD students assembling demographic data on medieval Norfolk or should the rich, aesthetic delights of illuminated manuscripts, 18th-century caricatures and scientific illustrations be available for us all to enjoy as art?

One way libraries are opening their secret worlds to everyone is by putting some of their most curious or majestic items online.

Well, we take off quite a lot of points for that 'opening their secret worlds' line. And does anyone who's actually worked in one think that 'monastic secrecy' is actually a thing or has been for, oh, really quite a long time?

We also, as someone who has dealt with special collections from both sides, have a bit of an irk on for people who value the aesthetic over the other things that rare materials can provide, and knowing that there is all sorts of exciting stuff in archives and manuscripts that is not going to push his buttons and ring his bell, because it doesn't have any particular visual pzazz, feel there is a lot of point thahr misst.

We feel that this is not entirely distinct from the mindset that used to cut out plates or illuminations, and the circulation via sale-rooms of individual pages of manuscripts with pretty pix on them.

Article with much of which I am in substantial agreement about the massive hubris of architects and their lack of feeling for the lived environment.

Though, for the record, and in the light of the recent Hardy post, I feel some people might dissent from the suggestion that

Thomas Hardy, to judge from Max Gate, the house he designed for himself in Dorchester, made the right choice when he elected to abandon architecture in favour of writing.

Also feel his scorn for the planned and designed community has skipped right over the delight that is Hampstead Garden Suburb.

However, while I'm not yet calling for a ponceyness ASBO for Mr Meades, I do think the ponceyness police ought to knock on his door and caution him for this:

A writer, at least this writer – and I am hardly alone – sees entropic beauty, roads to nowhere whose gravel aggregate is that of ad hoc second world war fighter runways, decrepit Victorian oriental pumping stations, rats, supermarket trolleys in toxic canals, rotting foxes, used condoms, pitta bread with green mould, polythene bags caught on branches and billowing like windsocks, greasy carpet tiles, countless gauges of wire, flaking private/keep-out signs that have been ignored since the day they were erected, goose grass, shacks built out of doors and car panels, skeins of torn tights in milky puddles, burnt-out cars, burnt-out houses, abandoned chemical drums, abandoned cooking oil drums, abandoned washing machine drums, squashed feathers, tidal mud, an embanked former railway line, a shoe, vestigial lanes lined with may bushes, a hawser, soggy burlap sacks, ground elder, a wheelless buggy, perished underlay, buddleia, a pavement blocked by a container, cracked plastic pipes, a ceramic rheostat, a car battery warehouse constellated with CCTV cameras, a couple of scraggy horses on a patch of mud, the Germolene-pink premises of a salmon smoker, bricked-up windows, travellers' caravans and washing lines, a ravine filled with worn car tyres, jackdaws, herons, jays, a petrol pump pitted and crisp as an overcooked biscuit, a bridge made of railway sleepers across duckweed, an oasis of scrupulously tended allotments.

That's what I see: layers of urban archaeology. It's what painters such as Carel Weight and Edward Burra would have seen, what George Shaw and Julian Perry still see. A site of richness and multiple textures which feeds curiosity. It is obviously decaying. But decay, as anyone who has watched meat rot knows, possesses a vitality of its own. Such vitality is infinitely preferable to sterility and stadia.

Peasants in slums are just so picturesque, let us go to Naples and paint watercolours of them...

I am all for a certain sweet disorder and unplanned development, but I do think that kind of vitality has to be distinguished from urban grot that the people who live there would rather do without.

I.e. it's back to environments that are liveable rather than primarily arousing aesthetic emotions, of whatever kind.

Half the garden of a clifftop house fell in the sea this week. Artist Kane Cunningham is jealous – he can't wait for his cliff-side bungalow to slip off the edge.

I wish I'd bought Ridgemont House. I thought it was a wonderful work of art. There's real beauty and poetry in ­landscape erosion. If you look at the photograph of the raw exposed cliff, overlooking ­Oddicombe Beach in Devon, it looks like a blood-red spleen, as if the landscape itself is bleeding.
....
[M]y house, which I use as a studio to work on my landscape paintings, is only 9ft away from the cliff-edge, and could fall at any moment.... I'm going to turn the moment my studio collapses into an art work: I've set up cameras to film it, and I've commissioned music and poetry to celebrate it. Both our houses punch a hole in what we think of as the value of property, and remind us of our moral and ethical responsibility to nature.... you can build a house by the edge of a cliff – or buy one – and when nature decides to do its thing, you've got no chance. When my studio disappears, I'll have no sense of loss – that will be its beautiful final act. The sooner it goes, for me, the better.

***

I have created a Mrs Delany Exhibition Expedition Scheduling filter - I have put on it everybody who expressed interest in going to this. If you can see my previous post, you're on it. If not, and you would like to be, let me know in comments.

(And resisting the temptation to entitle this 'Horsey keep your tail up'.)

Article in today's Guardian on the controversial movie that attempts to humanise the bizarre world of zoophilia.

Devor decided that a highly stylised approach would be the most effective to counter the widespread dismissal of these men and their orientation. Anyone seeking titillation will be disappointed. "I aestheticised the sleaze out of it," says Devor.

And on the relationship between the animals' visible arousal and actual consent - did they really want to have sex with a human? I think we should be told.

Problematic, and rather creepy. I think there is a distinction to be made between having loving and caring relationships with animals, and using them for sex. The arguments seem very similar to those sometimes invoked to justify paedophilia.