It's Always More Complicated

On account of, well, long week and jetlag, things which are probably not going to get worked up into full posts.

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This government thing about sending every school in the land a copy of the Authorised Version (King James Bible)? WTF? Point what is there?

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One of the essays in Whedonistas, by a UKian person, says that Sunnydale High reminds her of her own schooldays. Again I make like a goldfish and say WTF, to me it is as the strange rites of exotic others, even without the supernatural element, but perhaps a highly academically focussed all girls grammar school in the 1960s is not the place to start comparisons from.

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Also with the WTF, came across today via a colleague a report that hard drives containing hospital records were being sold on eBay, though at least it turned out that this was not the relevant authority's mode of recycling (analogous to the incidents of files being dumped in open skips) but that someone on the staff had made off with them.

On another paw, however, relating to archival preservation, Dame Lynne Brindley of the British Library points out the ever-present dangers threatening digitally-created records.

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Talking of colleagues, I am so grateful that my immediate workmates are pretty much on the same page as me (and it is not the page with the full version of God Save the Queen on it, know what I mean?) about the upcoming long weekend. Cynicism abounding.

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This is both WTF and rather delightful: The best No 1 records: Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich – Legend of Xanadu 1968: It's a magnificent moment of mariachi melodrama and a reminder that pop can be silly and life-affirming in equal measure. It is definitely one of my somewhat secret favourites.

This pertains to that meme currently doing the rounds of being given a letter and having to think of five fictional characters (any medium) beginning with that letter and saying something about them. And sometime during last iteration of this somebody got C and said they couldn't think of anyone beginning with C (though honestly, I think this probably applies to anybody with all the letters of the alphabet in the first moments).

So I went 'C... C....' and then came up not only with 5 characters beginning with C but all with the same name.

Since I don't really want to go around begging for letters from everybody posting this meme in the hope that somebody gives me a C -

while I thought that, yay, this was actually quite a nifty thing -

Cordelias x 5:

The ur-Cordelia, loving and being silent in the face of her father's unreasonable demands.

Cordelia Aubrey in Rebecca West's The Fountain Overflows and sequels. Being an eldest myself, I do feel that perchance my darling Dame R was working off some younger sibling resentment in her portrayal of the unfortunate Cordelia, who is not the brilliant violinist she believes herself to be, is conventional, makes a surprisingly good marriage and doesn't do much thereafter but a little light meddling with etchings and fans (having done some kind of art training following the collapse of her musical ambitions): and really, doesn't much resemble the real life Letitia Fairfield who obtained medical and legal qualifications at a time when either made a woman a rara avis, and rose to become a Senior Medical Officer of the London County Council, served as a Medical Officer in the women's forces in both World Wars, etc. However, a detached and previously unpublished episode published in Rebecca West: Contemporary Critical Approaches from among West's many drafts for the Aubrey saga did at least seem to provide the beginning of some redemptive arc for Cordelia, never fully developed.

Cordelia Grey. Private detective who appeared in two novels by PD James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and The Skull Beneath the Skin, in which boring old Dalgleish did appear but played a v minor role. I wish the Baroness had done more with this character.

Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan. Need I say more.

Cordelia Chase. I was really quite angry about how her arc in Angel went - I don't think anyone should be subjected to two pregnancies of occult origin which also take over her mind and will (one is more than enough), and the whole way things resolved really irked me after she had been doing interesting growth and development (though I wasn't that sold on the emergence of romance in what had been an interesting working relationship, either).

Latterly for assorted reasons I have been given to thinking about the trope of the quest or the hero's journey and what other narratives there might be that don't involved moving from point a to point b. (Okay, maybe all narratives could be described as a journey on some level of metaphor: youth to experience, ignorance to knowledge, to enlightenment, to redemption - but doesn't this somehow weaken via generalising what is a useful trope if more contained?) And also considering the gendering of this.

(Do narratives in which the structure is one person flees from/is pursued by another count as quests or heroic journeys? - discuss, possibly with reference to Farscape.)

So I have been thinking about narratives in which the protag/s remain in the same place: this was possibly additionally provoked by that interview I linked yesterday with Aung San Suu Kyi; also by a vague recollection of my darling Dame Rebecca being a bit scathing about the New Woman novel trope of the young woman leaving home, and wishing there were more about young woman staying at home and effectively imposing her will and wishes upon her family.

Is the archetype here Penelope, sitting at home weaving and waiting and maintaining a fragile peace?

It also occurred to me that one instance of staying the same spot and doing one's duty might be BtVS - with some divagations, sure, but basically, she's staying where she's put on the Hellmouth.

What do people do that might make plots where they stay in one place?

- Building something.

- Defending something.

- Sorting something out (e.g. classic murder within closed-circle of some kind mysteries)

- Manoeuvring one's way through court intrigue (or analogous - massive corporate entity might work just as well?)

Anywa, I would be interested in other suggestions of staying in one spot plots, and of stories that involve someone doing just that.

Okay, this is a really interesting article about syncretic religious traditions in South India: but the bit that grabbed me and threw me off completely was:

Bhagavati is the pre-eminent goddess in Kerala.... she could be ferocious: a figure of terror, a stalker of cremation grounds who slaughtered demons without hesitation or compassion.

Oliver Burkeman snarks bestselling self-help guru who confesses himself thrown into rage by lack of availability of room-service.

Love by numbers: I enjoy pornography. I'd really like my girlfriend to watch it with me because I think it would make our sex more exciting. She doesn't seem that interested. How can I get her to try it?. I feel that this question could equally well be asked replacing 'pornography' with 'male adventure action movies', because he's probably thinking of something made by men, for men (unless he's somewhat unusual), that he enjoys, but doesn't necessarily offer anything pleasurable to his girlfriend (who I hope is off somewhere reading slash fanfic on the internetz, or even writing it).

Celebrity memoirs, breathless lives of 18th-century socialites and countless royal mistresses - whatever happened to the golden age of biography? And what is the future for a genre in which the best subjects have already been written about, time and again, asks Kathryn Hughes. Some cautionary thoughts here:

According to this convenient way of thinking, dressing up old subjects in new clothes becomes playful and postmodern, rather than just desperate. Yet Jerry Brotton of Queen Mary, London University... warns against being taken in by this sleight of hand. "What often happens is that a perfectly solid biography from 1978 gets rewritten with an eye to the intellectual moment, without the addition of a single bit of new information." [o dear yes]
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Why doesn't anyone say or do something about these acts of biographical cannibalism? According to literary agent Andrew Lownie, who runs the Biographers' Club (a networking organisation for practitioners), it's because the power in publishing companies has decisively passed from the commissioning editors to the sales people. "Their thinking is, if something was once a hit, then let's try it again, even though clearly there's a law of diminishing returns. Anything new or different is looked on with suspicion." Lownie's theory is confirmed by the recent experience of one writer I spoke to. Having produced a first biography that punched well above its weight, he has been looking forward to writing his second, this time on a playwright whose work he knows well. His publishers, though, are having none of it and have suggested instead that he try a life of ... Graham Greene. That Norman Sherry's authorised multi-decker Life has sucked every last shred of marrow from Greene's tired old bones seems scarcely to matter. [Tell me, who have been approached to write life of already over-biographised figure in the birth control movement, about it]
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Holroyd... believes that scholarly and innovative biographies are increasingly overlooked in favour of texts that, although fluent and timely, are closer to journalism. "One used to award literary prizes to the 'tortoise' book, the one that had taken years of archive work but was never going to be a popular hit," he recalls. These days, by contrast, juries seem keener to make sure that a crowd-pleasing title wins on their watch. Stories slipping out from judging rooms over the past couple of years suggest a growing wariness of books that appear too long, complex, or perhaps simply good-mannered to beg for easy love.
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[S]ince Foreman's unprecedented hit, photogenic young women are routinely commissioned to produce biographies of equally camera-ready subjects, regardless of whether they are equipped to do so. The results are often intellectually slight and stylistically poor. (Although this isn't always so - in which case, some rather good young women biographers are probably missing out on the critical attention they deserve.) The press releases accompanying these books are always the same, breathlessly referencing what are seen to be the author's key qualifications for the job: she went to Oxford, has done some part-time modelling and has a hobby such as grape-treading or motor-car racing. Whether she knows anything at all about her subject (and, let's be clear, a PhD is not the same as a decade of immersion in the relevant archives) is neither here nor there.

If this seems a peculiar way for publishers to pick their authors, not to mention their subjects, then Lownie can explain. "If a writer is untried, then they are, paradoxically, more attractive than one who already has form. The moment you publish your first book, you leave a paper trail. People can look up your sales figures and make a judgment about whether you are worth giving another chance. A new author, by contrast, is an unknown quantity."

Even older and not especially winsome biographers routinely feel the effect of this "anyone can do anything" culture. I have lost count of the number of times a publishing professional has suggested that I might like to try my hand at a subject from the Tudor or Stuart period (on the unspoken assumption, presumably, that my usual patch, the Victorians, is all used up).
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Still, better to seem like a dreary pedant than a rank amateur. That's what happened six weeks ago to Veronica Buckley when it emerged that, during her writing of a biography about Mme de Maintenon (yet another royal mistress), she had mistaken a fictional diary of Louis XIV for the real thing. For Brotton, Buckley's mistake is the predictable outcome of a systematic deskilling over the past 30 years. "Today's biographers simply aren't immersing themselves in the manuscript sources, but are working instead with more accessible printed versions. As a result, they fail to develop the deep familiarity with their material which would prevent such basic errors."

This reluctance to consult the primary sources is not because biographers have suddenly become lazy or stupid - in general, they are a hunched and harried crew who have to be prized away from their desks - but because they are increasingly given unrealistic deadlines to complete work.

See also the letter Nothing New (scroll down).

Why is Edward Thomas still so undervalued - supposing that he is? We get the usual story here, and there is a big hole in it. Didn't his brief burst of poetic output just possibly, in terms of the chronology, have something to do with his involvement with Eleanor Farjeon? Just sayin'.

Ben Goldacre on good codslappy form.

Shouldn't all politicians do this? opposition politicians in Australia have questioned whether the country's treasury secretary should be allowed to take five weeks' holiday to look after endangered wombats.

Posted off snarky (but less snarky than they could have been) responses to the same question cross-posted to two of my scholarly listservs - not addressing the question itself (which I suspect was a fairly off-the-wall improbable thesis to be arguing anyway) but the fact that it was asking about 'the West' and 'the western states' when, I very strongly suspect, the enquirer was really asking about the USA. As the question made no sense at all if one was talking about 'the West' in any more global geopolitical/cultural sense.

I nearly posted a rant the other day about receiving (who knows why, as I am a British/European type historian, but it might have been sent to me for forwarding to list of which I am currently - inactive - editor: I really wish people would state that that is the intention when sending out these things, as this happens not infrequently) call for contributors to an encyclopedia of 'American [phenomenon]', which a very brief scan indicated was solely about [phenomenon] in USA, even though I am sure that it was hardly unique to that particular American nation.

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I Am A Sad Person: I was disproportionately cheered this morning to discover that one of my books had suddenly leapt from an Amazon ranking in 7 figures to somewhere in the 50K range. Wheeee! Somebody bought my book!!!!

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Went to the doctor on Monday who agreed that it's a virus, and all one can do is rest until it's over, and gave me a doctor's cert for work.

Still nothing like the thing, wellness-wise, and spending a large part of the day bingeing on Buffy DVDs.

Also in major re-read phase as unable to cope with new books. Mostly (not entirely) thrillers and mysteries. Currently wallowing in Anabel Donald's Alex Tanner mysteries, a short series that came out in the early to mid 90s about a freelance television researcher based in the less glamorous bit of Notting Hill who becomes a private eye. These were very good and I still look out to see if she has done anything since, but nothing as far as I can see except a remake of Lord of the Flies with girls - I suspected that like Lauren Henderson she had gone over to the dark side (chicklit), but she just doesn't seem to have been publishing much at all. It's a pity as I thought the Tanner books were extremely good: on the other hand it's perhaps better to stop while the going's good and people are wishing you'd write more, rather than continuing to churn them out and people thinking that you're really going downhill (cf discussion about Jonathan Kellerman somewhere on my flist a few days ago; except that occasionally he does seem to get almost back on form).

( Karen Traviss, The World Before )

( Monica Ferris, Crewel Yule )

( Robert Parker, Cold Service )

( Charlotte Bronte, The Spell )

( P Y Betts, People Who Say Goodbye: Memories of Childhood )

( Seven Seasons of Buffy and Finding Serenity )

Plus, Alison Lurie re-readings.

The Good
- I have started the first pass of revision of the biography! (Da-Dah!)
- I have finally commenced the Buffy-thon I've been promising myself for months (Season 4 and onwards).
- I'm organising myself 2 days off next month to work on papers for Belgium conference, + (I hope) a long weekend at Grayshott.

The Bad
- Having assumed that the introduction of online ordering would facilitate the production of much more accurate reader usage statistics, I find this is not the case, and no way does it seem that we're going to get the kind of detail I've been able to get by painstakingly going through manual production slips. Bah.
- I have established that I do need to keep using the hydrocortisone ointment on my eyelids. On the whole, I suppose smeared glasses that I keep having to polish are preferable to blepharitis.
- Still no Melusine: in a spirit of support your specialist bookshop, I thought I'd get it when I went to Forbidden Planet, which didn't have it in stock. Having ordered it online with a promised 1-2 day delivery schedule, have I seen it yet? No. (Whiiiiiiinge.)