It's Always More Complicated

'My dear boy, why don't you try acting?' (attested from the mouth of Dustin Hoffman, to whom Olivier addressed this plea when Hoffman was going to extreme Method lengths).

Experience: I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while performing Julius Caesar.

And this was not a dreadful error in the props room or something out of a murder mystery:

It was the Exeter University theatre society’s annual play at the Edinburgh fringe and I’d landed the part of Cassius in Julius Caesar. The director decided that instead of killing himself, Cassius would die during a choreographed fight with his rival, Mark Antony. We also chose to use real knives, which sounds absurd, but we wanted to be authentic. The plan was for the actor playing Antony to grab my arm as I held the knife, and pretend to push it behind my back. We must have rehearsed the sequence 50 times.
We were about halfway through our month-long run, performing to a decently sized audience. Dressed in our togas, with the stage dark and moody, we began the fight as usual. Then something went wrong.
There was a sharp piercing feeling. The knife was supposed to have been quietly slipped to me – instead, it had gone into my back. I realised what had happened while acting out my character’s death, and thinking: I have to lie here until the lights go down.
....
When a doctor told me I’d come close to dying, and that the play had to stop using real knives, I remember thinking: “You just don’t understand theatre.”

What next - real poison where text requires? What was the director thinking? I would think using Real Knives might make it less authentic with choreographing to ensure Doing No Harm

Welsh farmer pleads guilty to stealing more than 70 sheep from neighbour.

The term 'rustled' is invoked: 'At least 73 ewes in lamb were rustled in March'.

Alas, this does not sound at all like the Old West of the movies of my youth:

[He] told the court he had acted because of financial pressure but understood his actions were “unacceptable”, BBC Wales reported. Williams added that he “deeply” regretted stealing the sheep and “feels ashamed”.

Woman who calls herself ‘UK’s poshest thief’ fined for stealing Le Creuset cookware:

A former criminology lecturer who calls herself the “UK’s poshest thief” has been fined for stealing more than £1,000-worth of Le Creuset cookware, steaks, wine and gin.
Pauline Al Said and her husband, Mark Wheatcroft, have been fined £2,500 between them after the thefts from a garden centre and a branch of Marks & Spencer.
....
Representing themselves, the couple, from Southsea in Hampshire, told Portsmouth crown court their actions were on the “lower end”.

I also think it is tacky to call yourself 'UK's poshest thief' and a pretty sure sign that you are a very long way from being the C21st equivalent of Raffles the Amateur Cracksman.

Dr rdrz may recall a post some years ago about the world of GIANT VEGETABLES and their growers -

- which was initially recalled to my mind by a report of super-sized Brussels sprouts. Not sure that size is what one wants in a Brussels sprout.

But on gigantic fruit and veg, how scary is this?

Huge monumental fruit and veg dotted about the landscape:

There are at least 23 big durians scattered throughout countries – including Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand – in which it is revered as king of the fruits.... From Nambour, Queensland to Bathurst, South Africa to Sarikei, Malaysia, there are about 45 big pineapples around the world. There are, Clarke has found, also about 106 apples, 53 oranges and 12 onions.

Apparently there is an iconic, Heritage Listed, Huge Pineapple in Queensland.

Okay, I have mentioned in the past that I can get to quite a number of Distinguished Figures in British Culture with very few degrees of separation, if we are playing that game, through having met the offspring of M Stopes and of S Pankhurst, and knowing Antiquarian Bookseller who is one of those connected people.

And then the thing with person I worked with who had met Dadie Rylands, and the various people I encountered in the course of professional encounters who had known e.g. the Mitfords.

Also my gay historian mate who as a very young grad student went to dinner with Isherwood (unnamed in the relevant volume of the Diaries, I note, chiz).

But lo and behold I was boggled while reading Ann Rower this week, because I think of her as very much of that US 60s/70s artist/writer generation, very out there, taking hallucinogens with Timothy Leary (except apparently Leary, who sounds a right wanker, didn't actually take them himself, handed them out and then Observed The Effects), etc etc. Circles v remote from me.

But then there was a mention - in the sections from the more recent period - of someone who is actually a FaceBook friend of mine, though I don't think we've ever met in person* - gay historian/activist in New York, - as a friend of hers and I was 'wow, small world'.

*I think we must have met through the long-gone listserv I ran back in the 00s.

And no, this is not me getting my historian nitcomb out for some historical or historically-inflected fantasy work.

This is a novel set in what is apparently The Present Day, within a decade or so, in New York City about a reasonably affluent, educated, etc, middle-class couple, with one child with special education needs.

I can perhaps just about believe that the ditzy wife is using a diaphragm + gel for contraception, but honestly, I would not have thought that an entirely sound choice given that they do not seem to be aiming to increase the family. Given that she is a habitual over-sharer, I am a bit surprised she does not provide TMI on her contraceptive choices to some entirely inappropriate person in the course of the narrative.

Anyway, at one point she thinks she has fallen pregnant.

Perhaps my US readers can enlighten me - is it not possible to walk into a drugstore and purchase home pregnancy tests in your fair country? I can see that heading down the line this may indeed become an issue, but as at say 5-10 years ago?

At no point do Our Married Couple contemplate this. There is a whole lot of blahblah about how inconvenient that her gynaecologist has gone away for a short break so she cannot go in for a test there - and when she finally does it is a blood test (???).

There is a whole - I'm not sure one could call it exactly a subplot - a minor motif, around husband's very young secretary being very new to adulting and finding him a Fount of Wisdom on all sorts of bits of common worldly knowledge, but I can't help thinking that she might be a bit more sussed on this particular thing.

I suppose our protags are Gen X, rather than Millenials, but (IR Hystorianne, also a mate of mine has just writ The Definitive History of the Rise of the Pregnancy Test) the first home pregnancy test came out in the 70s. It was, we will concede, a good deal more faffsome than the current model.

In the way that these things do, something flitted across my sight-line and caught my attention and I went WTF, because in the realm of Making New Year's Resolutions and Setting Intentions for The Coming Year and so on, I was not sure how, outside certain extremely niche conditions, this could possibly work.

Or are there actual certain provisos that are inexplicit as this is framed?

Giving up shopping.

Um.

I can see 'Not Buying Certain Luxuries', eschewing fast fashion and 'shopping the wardrobe', getting books from the library and eschewing Evil Website, being generally mindful about Is This Really Necessary, etc etc -

But even if a person is growing their own food, are they growing ALL OF IT? throughout all seasons of the year??? (And suppose some essential tool breaks and they need a new one?)

Or have they done a massive binge-shop before midnight on 31 Dec and stocked up with food that will keep in some manner or other - I assume with functioning freezers and so on they are not going to be living on salt pork and hard tack (are these even obtainable these days? - maybe re-enactors?) - but even so.

Ditto for toiletries and cleaning necessities.

(Which all requires space to put these things, no? as well as financial resources to make the initial outlay.)

One may also suppose that these are people who, if they have some small sock or underwear or footwear related disaster, that is not their only sock/pair of knickers/shoes and there is a backup supply.

Then, there are the unanticipated Things Going Phut: last year we had the kettle, the hoover, and a fan heater turn up their toes. (Also my phone getting more and more like a consumptive Victorian heroine.)

No, I just don't see it.

Have just been reading (part of the 'what-do-tiggers-eat?' phase) Georgette Heyer, The Quiet Gentleman (1951).

Thoughts while reading:

Hmmmm, is this where subsequent writers have got the idea that it was SOP for heirs to aristocratic titles to join the Army and fight Boney - because this was a fairly unusual case with complex family dynamics?

Have I read this before, or am I just by this time genre-savvy enough to spot the Real Villain?

Did the lovely and naive Marianne really have an equine-related accident or was she trying to contrive a 'chance meeting' with glamorous newcomer?

O dear Georgette, you really cannot get by without injuring or striking with disease at least one and possibly more members of the cast for Plot Reasons, can you?

Thoughts on finishing:

WHAT???? Okay, Georgette, were you hoping, in 1951, that nobody knows what 'Jamaica estate' implies*? Or didn't you care? After all, I daresay readers (? and moviegoers?) were still yumming up Gone with the Wind.

I am reading ebook of 2022 reissue. There is no delicate disclaimer that I can find about 'period detail', and I do see that it could not really be rewritten in some inoffensive fashion in the manner of the much shorter passage in The Grand Sophy pertaining to the Jewish moneylender.

But quite apart from UGH, and one's imaginings about the WOKE current National Trust guides at Stanyon Castle (bless), Gervase St Erth is about to marry Drusilla Morville, daughter of Radicals, Republicans, potential Pantisocratists, adherents of Wollstonecraft, etc etc etc.

They are pretty much set up as figures of fun: but, can we imagine that they do not have about their house at least one Wedgwood 'Am I Not A Man And A Brother?' sugarbowl if not the whole crockery set, were active in agitation about the abolition of the slave trade (which occurred some while before the date this must be happening), and are probably gearing up to revive the movement to abolish slavery altogether.

Is Drusilla going to enquire about the sourcing of sugar at Stanyon and in the other establishments?

If anyone wants to write this fanfic, I am very up for it.

*Okay, don't suppose there would be any possibility to do the equivalent of 'language fails!/Go out and govern New South Wales', sending the miscreant to the Antypods instead at the period in question: though I think free settlers were gradually becoming a thing.

But really right at the end of the designated time-slot, sigh.

That sort of thing puts the whole day out.

Still, got a fair amount of research reading done.

And in idle noodling around in interims, I am, lo, given to boggle, yea, verily

Did Rome fall due to dysgenics? A new paper finds that educational attainment polygenic scores were high in Romans during the Republic period, and fell during the imperial period. This suggests that dysgenics is associated with empire decline.

But anyway, Dorothy-Parkering: HOW COULD THEY TELL??!! except by doing something that looks like science but I think this is pretty much a classic (C wot I did thah?) instance of perhaps historians/classicists will be fooled by the appearance of SCIENCE and EQUATIONS, and vicky-verky. While muttering about lead piping and Christianity and plagues and the helluva long time, like centuries, over which the Roman Empire was actually declining, and that it was not a straight line down at that.

(Plus, um, the Republic period, wasn't there a lot of civil war and dictatorships of an unstable nature and so on happening?)

Am also boggling at a lady who wants her new book to be classified as romance even though it pretty much lacks all the constituent ingredients that would make it Romance: Why “Romance” No Longer Means the Protagonist Has to End Up in a Relationship. There are, honestly, other genres out there - I seem to get a lot of books which sound like this sort of thing popping up in my recommendations? People point out that This Is So Not What Romance Readers Expect.

Am not sure whether this is entirely like the person who decided carrots had too much sugar, so instead of making carrot cake as per recipe with carrots, substituted kale (WTF), and was surprised when it turned out nasty and dry. I am sure one can make tasty kale patties or whatnot but not starting from a recipe for something entirely different and raising expectations for nice soft gooey carrot cake.

Currently working on this rather short talk as part of panel I am supposed to be doing, in which I shall be saying something about Naomi Mitchison's Comments on Birth Control (1930) -

- a slim pamphlet (based on the talk she gave at the World Congress on Sexual Reform the previous year) published in Faber and Faber's 'Criterion Miscellany' series which:

consisted of short works (30 to 60 or so pages) by authors and public figures active in the late 1920s and early 1930s in the UK. It was an offshoot of the journal Criterion, edited by T.S. Eliot from 1922 to 1939.

I cannot even. On the other paw, looking at the list of other titles and authors, they do include quite a few that one would not consider an obvious match with Eliot.

This article indicates that Mitchison had submitted directly to Faber and Faber and that TSE did not have much, if any, input.

But I sure do boggle because not only is it about contraception (and why it is still Not All That) but, being Our Naomi, not at all all about Ye Monogamous Marital Relationship...

I will also add here a delightful fact that I think is in June Rose's biography of Marie Stopes, that Marie sent her poetry to Eliot at Faber and received a polite rejection that it was not quite in line with what Faber was publishing, poesy-wise.

In related very niche Mitchisoniana, I was lately looking at the odd copies of a short-lived journal she was associated with at around the same time, and realised that I had acquired these at Quite A Snip for an assorted set, because looking it up on Bookfinder.com, individual odd copies (I was hoping to make up the complete run) go for more than I spent on that.

I suppose that there is some arcane law of Parliamentary protocol that means nobody can actually pick up the Mace and conk BJ with it and have him carried out unconscious?

I see all over the place people going 'Worst PM EVAH' and the only reason I am not so doing is that I really don't know enough about C18th PMs to be absolutely sure, because I suspect some of them were pretty bad, going on into early C19th, really - 'I met Murder on the way/He had a face like Castlereagh' - in spite of, many many years ago having endeavoured to read Namier's History of Parliament, which is a strong contender for driest work ever.

***

In other news - I am not sure this actually counts as the lighter side:
Taiwan kidnapping charges over botched marriage proposal dropped: Prosecutors decide woman bundled into suitcase and driven off in car boot was surprise gone wrong

In March, 24-year-old Yang, of the north-western city of Taoyuan, decided to propose to her girlfriend, Huang. She wanted the experience to be memorable, so she hired two men through a part-time job search app to stage a “kidnapping”.... [T]he men burst into Huang’s flat in the early hours of 17 March. They took her away in a large suitcase. which they placed in the boot of a car and drove towards the local household registration office, where marriage certificates are issued.
....
Sensing the car had stopped, Huang found a way to open the suitcase and and the car boot. According to local news reports, she jumped out and shouted: “Help! I was kidnapped.”
....
The two men said the original plan was that they would park outside the registration office, where Yang would propose to Huang. They also said they had intentionally left the suitcase zip loose so that Huang would not suffocate.

And was there any intention of putting the proposal on TikTok...?