It's Always More Complicated

Singapore man sues woman for just wanting to be friends, not partners. She clearly went further than most people would think necessary in trying to deal with this delusional creep:

The woman first met Kawshigan in 2016, according to court papers, and problems began to arise in 2020 when they became “misaligned” about how they saw their relationship. “While the defendant only regarded the claimant as a ‘friend’, he considered her to be his ‘closest friend’,” the court papers say. The defendant requested for their interactions to be reduced, the judgment said, which caused displeasure to the claimant, who felt this would constitute “taking a step back in the[ir] relationship”. The defendant emphasised the need for boundaries and urged him to be “self-reliant”. The judgment said the woman participated in counselling for 18 months after Kawshigan previously threatened legal action against her, alleging that he had suffered emotional trauma after being told she regarded him only as a friend. “While the defendant had hoped that the counselling sessions would help the claimant come to terms with her decision to not pursue a romantic relationship with him, this was not the result.

Back in the day (it was only repealed in 1970-something), Breach of Promise actions could only be brought by the woman, on account of (okay, by 1970 this did look weird), getting married had substantial value in a woman's life and being thwarted by Some Cad had material consequences: meant she might have missed other opportunities and lost the marriageability window, suffered reputatational damage, costs of buying trousseau, etc; things which did not pertain to Blokes.

***

In further 'Menz? Delusional or What?' there was the guy who got into a snit when his wife failed to introduce him, who had never flown a plane, as a pilot at a do with her work colleagues. His reaction is not, one feels, going to do her much good in her professional setting.

***

Conversely, and springing off from that, on not giving credit for actual achievements:AITA for wanting my husband to say I am an author? because it is not her dayjob:

I am 31, I wrote 7 books and 6 of them are published. I have 4 publishers in Canada. I sometimes do book fairs and presentations. And have a check once a year for each book. Anyway, my husband said that I am not an author, because I do not do that for a living. And that he would be upset if someone said they were and later on learned it was just a hobby.

***

Okay, we have all had the experience of taking something out of the wardrobe and oops, stain, unwearable, but most of us will then put it in 'for washing/dry-cleaning' basket/sack/pile rather than throwing it out: You be the judge: should my husband stop throwing away his ‘old’ clothes?:

I don’t really have the time to sort through my shirts and trousers every morning, seeing which ones are stained and which ones aren’t. I’d rather keep a collection of entirely clean clothes.

***

I thought this was interesting, for certain meanings of interesting: ‘They don’t want you to be a sex worker – they just want to pay you for sex’:

“The stigma of being a John doesn’t get talked about as much as the stigma of being a sex worker, but the idea of being a John is seen as desperate and they like to think of themselves as people that can access young hot pussy because of their wealth and status. It’s an ego-affirming thing. The fantasy is that it’s old-fashioned chivalry.”

***

Further dodginess in Effective Altruism movement: These Women Say It Has a Toxic Culture Of Sexual Harassment and Abuse - I must say, those descriptions of exhortations to join in 'polyamory' sound like good old polygamy to me? and a lot of pressure to 'keep any call-outs in-house to preserve the good name of the movement'. Ahem.

Dept of, what kind of person knowingly buys a ticket for Marat/Sade, and then leaves, disgusted, partway through the performance?
People have been walking out of the RSC's risqué new production of Marat/Sade. W! T! F!

Dept of filth! filth! in a less metaphorical sense:
Is your world awash with germs? Only one in 10 of us wash our hands after going to the toilet – yet as a society we have never found the idea of germs more disgusting. Why the confusion? (perhaps I should send Ms Barton a copy of Ginny Smith's Clean which demonstrates the effort put into to keeping self and immediate environment clean 'throughout history').
The mission to clean up Mount Everest. Environmentalists in Nepal are pressing the government to keep the Himalayas free from litter

Dept of Thespia: The women actors of the 17th century may not have been respectable – but at least they had steady jobs:

[W]omen then had much more stable careers than today: they were usually attached to one particular theatre, and got to play a wide variety of roles. That repertory system doesn't really exist now, and actors are much more likely to be pigeonholed.

***

Dept of Dungeon Flaming with Light, Chains Falling Off, etc: I now have a print-out and a CD with burned version of The Textbook, Revised Edition, sitting on my desk at home, waiting for an opportunity to get to a post office.

O dear, I seem to have the okkards today, or the world has, lots of dropping stuff and tripping and minor computer hassles. Possibly due to not sleeping very well last night, due to twingey knee, which I suspect not so much hip-related as to rather dim action of mine on the legcurl machine at the gym yesterday.

***

Reading this this morning in Guardian G2:

It's one of the great myths of our age, and one you hear voiced by middle-class professionals regularly. Poor people in developing countries are much happier than rich people like us in the west. They're too busy trying to survive to worry about the little things that get us down. Depression, or at least a mild sense of unease, is an affliction unique to the west.

Which made me think of them waking up and going 'O happy happy day! Still haven't got the Black Death/cholera/syphilis/puerperal fever/etc. And the scurvy/rickets/rheumatism isn't so very bad this morning.'

When Huizinga in The Waning of the Middle Ages (good grief, first published 1924, and it was still a set book for my Medieval History course) suggested that in the late MA pleasures might have been more intense, I think it was because they were rare and life was so miserable, that sitting in front of a roaring fire drinking mulled wine in your furlined gown in the depths of winter was absolutely ecstatic. Not that your Medeeevle Peepul had a less stressful life and could just kick back and smell the flowers (over the pervasive stenches...)

Being alive and staying alive and coping with life has always, I would suggest, been stressful, whatever the particular stresses of a given historical moment. Just maybe they had fewer bigger stresses and we have more smaller, but even that, I suspect, is open to question.

Lit (or at least, non-genre) fic:

George Eliot, Middlemarch (1872), for the uncountableth time, on the plane. Age cannot wither, nor custom stale.

( E H Young, The Curate's Wife )

( May Sinclair, The Judgment of Eve )

( Margaret Buckley, A Woman's Man; with Family Portrait )

( E F Benson, Lucia Risng )

( Margery Sharp, Something Light, and Cluny Brown )

( Rumer Godden, A Breath of Air )

( Madeleine L'Engle, A Winter's Love )

Other:

( Virginia Smith, Clean: A History of Personal Hygiene and Purity )

( Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters )

( Katharine Whitehorn, Selective Memory )

James Fenton, Was Shakespeare, or was his father, a Catholic, or a crypto-Catholic?:

Were they connected to Jesuit missionaries operating undercover in Warwickshire? These questions are asked in an article in the TLS of March 16. The answer to the latter question appears to be a resounding raspberry, which is interesting, since the authors of the article appear well-qualified to judge.
....
A point these scholars make is that no useful discussion of Shakespeare and Catholicism can be undertaken unless a clear distinction is drawn between passive nostalgia for the "old religion" and active participation in the Counter-Reformation.
....
What there is evidence for is a series of misreadings of texts, to make for instance Warwickshire look like a hub of Jesuit activity, and to conjure up a picture of Jesuits handing out in the 1580s the sort of booklets that are only found in the 17th century. From there it is a short step to the belief that Campion himself reconciled John Shakespeare to the Catholic Church.
....
So, once again, we can say: we have been ambushed by bosh. For some reason, Shakespeare as Shakespeare is not interesting enough for the sort of taste that dabbles in this area. It has to be Shakespeare and the great pyramid of Ghizeh, Shakespeare and the knights templar, Shakespeare and the missing Lancashire years (under the name Shakeshafte) leading to Shakespeare and the Jesuits and, of course, Shakespeare and the gunpowder plot.

Ben Goldacre also addresses the careful cherrypicking of evidence by people who want to claim a 'scientific' basis for their assertions:

The more I see of the world the more it strikes me that people want more science, rather than less, and that they want to use it in odd ways: to abrogate responsibility, validate a hunch, or render a political or cultural prejudice in deceptively objective terms. As long as you cherry pick the data and keep one eye half closed, you can prove anything with science.

George Gissing was unlucky in love. But he was still able to create some of the best female characters in Victorian fiction, argues James Campbell. Which might be why one continued to read Gissing in spite of his making T Hardy look like Sunny Jim - and why have I not read any Gissing for far too long? (The answer is probably, so many books, so little time, and the tbr pile that ate North London.)

Emily Cockayne's account of dirt, disease and bugs in the 17th and 18th centuries, Hubbub, is not for the squeamish, says Kathryn Hughes. Yes, very likely, but what we also discern from various s ources is that there was quite a high level of disgust at dirt and disorder (even before you get to J Swift-levels of squeamishness): also if you look at modern ads for cleaning products, do we not get a constant sense of lurking menacing DIRT and FILTH and GERMS? (which at least the C18th did not have to worry about.) How far are dirt and filth objective categories (paging Mary Douglas)?

Ditto how far are clutter and mess objective categories which require constant neatening and tidying? Giles Foden suggests that a recent book on the subject provides an interesting, but ultimately inadequate, analysis.

Jackie Kay on Scotland and the history of the slave-trade.

Will GPS make maps obsolete? Stephen Moss investigates.

On the creepy obnoxious low-life who infest the discussion boards at the Guardian elsewhere: how many of them are journalists conducting an experiment like Tim Jonze as 'Tarquin Vilenose'? I'm not sure if it's worse if they are or if they aren't.