It's Always More Complicated

The book reviewed here has some resonance with things I've previously perorated about concerning women and C18th botany and indeed their general involvement in projects of SCIENCE before that became a Proper Profession: Anna K. Sagal. Botanical Entanglements: Women, Natural Science, and the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England.

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And on a subject which seems perennially to keep resurging - the influence of litrachur on The Young Mind - goes back a very long way: On the Role of Children’s Books Within the Realm of Social Evolution - though perhaps rather more on the visual culture, which seems to be the author's actual field.

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Two rather different recherches de feminist temps perdu: ‘It was utterly wild’: the story of a 1970s erotic magazine for women. New podcast Stiffed investigates the forgotten story of Viva - I have distant recollection either of UK edition, or similar enterprise??? Also of srs scholarly article on the rise of the glossy male magazines in the 60s and how their initial enthusiasm for 'Women's Lib' rather soon curdled, so it's interesting to see this as an initiative of the 70s.

A rather different kind of production (and I am reminded of Barbara Wilson Love Dies Twice and all those feminist presses in that: 80s Dinner Party: The Politics of Feminist Food Writing. I can't spot a copy of Sheba Feminist Press’ Turning the Tables: Recipes and Reflections from Women (1987) on my shelves (neither cookery nor feminism), but I do have a copy of Women and Health of Camden's Very Tasty from the 1990s.

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In theory a good idea and makes sense: A BPAS survey in 2015 found that 48.4% of women (out of a sample of 1000) would consider a once-a-month pill that could work after a fertilised egg has implanted in the lining of the womb. But under UK legislation, anyone who used such a pill could be prosecuted and jailed.

What it sounds like, is the 'female pill' that actually works - having read all those accounts of women routinely taking huge numbers of spurious quack remedies whenever their period was late.

Why you should be taking security advice from your grandmother - because persons of that generation have oft been online a Very Long Time and seen many scams:

Many studies have come and gone in the last couple of years declaring certain age groups to be at risk at one time or another. The interesting part is that more and more are declaring that younger age groups are at the greatest risk.

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NSFW*: It was a simpler time and they had to make their own entertainment: interview with Lisa Z Sigel about her research for her book on handmade pornography in the US, based extensively on the Kinsey Institute collections.

And at an entirely different level of the same urge: Carl Williams Rare Books offers a large collection of printed and manuscript material that has an erotic flavour, much of which was largely produced clandestinely and banned in its time and sometimes even after.

*Well, depending on your workplace.

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I know I am usually scathing about 'let's play Retrospective Diagnosis!', but I'm prepared to believe that this is much more soundly based than most ventures in that area, simply because, well, letchy old Sam P actually recorded quite a lot about his optical problems: The Big Brown Eyes of Samuel Pepys:

During the years when he was writing the diary, Pepys began to experience great pain in his eyes when reading and writing and from photophobia, which caused him to give up writing the diary. Pepys also had an ultimately unjustifiable fear of blindness.

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Reasons for under-representation: Jim Crow, Science Fiction, and WorldCon:

The full effects of Jim Crow and racism both implicit and explicit prevalent on early fandom will never be known. How do you measure the effect of those fans who wanted to attend, but were denied access to the hotel where the convention was held? How many fans were turned off by the lukewarm response from fans like Redd Boggs, who didn’t agree with Jim Crow but were willing to implicitly endorse it so that Southerners could have their own science fiction conventions? While Jim Crow is a thing of the past, it is a part of science fiction fandom history—and one which we forget only at our own peril. There was a time when white fans did nothing, while black fans had to use side entrances and were denied entrance.

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I was intrigued by this article - the whole moral panic about sunbeds had entirely passed me by - but during the 90s my then bestie 'Q' (the one who suddenly and painfully broke up with me and failed to include extensive help I had given in acknowledgements of her book) was, I think it is not unfair to say, at least somewhat addicted for some time to tanning beds, with what turned out to be detrimentally ageing effects.

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Spectacular images of Barbara Hepworth's Family of Man at Snape Maltings and how the group came to be there.

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This is really not an area I dabble in - okay, I have childhood recollections, but I do not have the investment in those memories that are mentioned here: Some Thoughts on Toxic Fandom in British Comics: but I went 'uh-huh' at this:

constantly complain that their childhoods have been ruined because a minor change has been made to a character in a comic they haven’t read for 40 years.

And pontificate generally. A certain Mr J- J- who writes on ART in The Guardian yet again makes us ask, what are they teaching them in art-critic school these days, or possibly back in the 1950s?

Godwin encouraged his daughter’s own feeling for art, taking her to studios including that of JMW Turner. But painting, like making a monster, was a man’s job.

Take that, Elizabeth Vigee-LeBrun, Angelica Kaufmann*, Mary Moser, and the ladies, who, if not actually members of the Royal Academy, exhibited in its exhibitions, of whom this article mentions a few in the early years.

Anne Seymour Damer exhibited her sculptures at the Royal Academy.

There could be all sorts of reasons why Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley turned to the pen and words rather than the pictorial arts, which had nothing to do with whether gurlz were allowed to do them in the Georgian era.

*We ourselves first encountered Angelica Kaufmann, along with so many great women of history in the 1950s - or possibly the very early 1960s - in the pages of the comic Girl (or perhaps one of its annuals) or its successor Princess - along with the Pankhursts, Marie Curie, Florence Nightingale, and Elizabeth Fry, to mention a few.

What I read

Finished A Banquet of Consequences, and, okay, family that makes the Starkadders look like the Waltons at the centre of the plot. But at least Havers is somewhat on the way to rehabilitation and not being transferred, and while I am not convinced by Lynley's new affair (I consider his new squeeze is entirely prudent to maintain high boundaries), I don't think I ever wanted to have at him with a codfish at any point in the narrative.

Allie Brosh, Hyperbole and a Half: Unfortunate Situations, Flawed Coping Mechanisms, Mayhem, and Other Things That Happened (2013), found in a local charity shop. Raced through it though on reflection not sure that it wouldn't be better read in doses.

Gave up on the romance about marrying an earl.

On the go

Max Gladstone, Two Serpents Rise (2013) - still not quite feeling it for the Craft Sequence - it's well-done, it's not doing anything I dislike, and yet somehow I feel unabsorbed.

Also picked up in a local charity shop, Jeremy Reed, The Dilly: A Secret History of Piccadilly Rent Boys (2014), which is really, really, annoying. It could be a much better book if the author wasn't so in love with his gosh-wow prose and his vision of the sexual outlaw, not to mention, checking his bloody facts - there were two chronological bloopers in the first 20 pages, a Tory politician described as a Labour MP, a confusion between the Stones' Hyde Park concert and Altamont. Also, how can anyone possibly tell if 'most' late Victorian homosexuals were being blackmailed? The book comes from a publisher I had previously considered reputable, but does not seem to have been copy-edited (this might have done something about the Did Not Do His Research factor and the annoying repetition of favoured phrases) or proof-read, and given that some passages appear to have been written while stoned and there are sentences which are not and places where you think, that is so not the word you want there, this would have improved one's reading experience considerably. There's some really interesting material there but unfortunately the generally cavalier attitude to checkable facts makes me a bit sceptical about his ethnography of gay London, or rather, the gay West End, from Wilde to the era of AIDS. I'm also wondering whether there is any unacknowledged debt to e.g. work by Matt Cook and Matt Houlbrook.

And, finally released this week as ebook (there were hard copies at Wiscon but I was in travelling mode), Liz Bourke, Sleeping with Monsters: Readings and Reactions in Science Fiction and Fantasy (2017).

Up next

No idea.

O, Talbot Baines Reed, could you be any more obvious 'Victorian boys' school slash' about your titles? - added today on Project Gutenberg, The Cock-House at Fellsgarth and Tom, Dick, and Harry. Am reminded of short story by, I think, JIM Stewart in which nephew of elderly unmarried scientist of distinction believes him to have been collecting Victorian erotica (schoolboy fladge subset) on the basis of spotting an invoice for a title of this nature at some enormous price, and when the man dies sets about burning the collection for fear of scandal. Then learns from one of the dealers with whom uncle did business that it was actually priceless collection of Victorian school stories.

John Crace's Ultimate Guide to End of Year Best Book Lists - well, it amused me:

1 The novel that would have won the Booker prize if the fools in charge had given me the job rather than that lightweight Stella Rimington.

2 The King James's Bible. The most compelling piece of poetry in the English language. Not that I've read it. Or intend to.

3 The "luminous" first novel of one of the students on my creative writing course.

4 The truly wonderful novel by my good friend that was unaccountably left off every literary prize long-list.

5 The new collection of poems and fragments from D'Erek, the authentic black voice of the underclass and the dispossessed.

6 The book that finally makes sense of string theory and shows you how to use quantum physics to get a haircut like Brian Cox.

7 The heartbreaking biography of a previously unknown major war poet who was killed on the first day of the battle of the Somme having just completed the first verse of his only poem.

8 The paperback edition of the thought-provoking novel by one of my best friends that was published in hardback last year. I know this doesn't strictly count but he doesn't have anything else out this year and it's the only way I can squeeze him in.

9 The shocking deconstruction of modern culture that revealed D'Erek was in fact a white Oxford graduate.

10 The 37-page novella about a man who doesn't have much to say that felt as rich and satisfying as many 400-page full-length novels.

11 The book whose title I can't quite remember by an author who once gave me a jacket quote.

Sense About Science publishes its annual review of celebrities' misleading claims, including Cowell's intravenous vitamins - however, an unusual deviation into sense emanating from the Duchy of Cornwall, usually associated with woowoo of the woowooiest:

Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall... had warned of the potentially damaging consequences of dieting: "A whole generation of young women could be affected," said the Duchess. "What particularly concerns me is the rise of osteoporosis in young people and its link with eating disorders."

Dietitian Sian Porter said the Duchess was on a sound footing: "During childhood and early adulthood bones develop their strength. Therefore it is very important to strengthen bones in the first 30 years of life to 'stockpile' calcium and other minerals. Following a restrictive diet, particularly cutting out food groups like dairy without substitution, can put your bone health at risk.

"As president of the National Osteoporosis Society, Her Royal Highness is clearly well informed about diet and bone health.

Boom year for the grey seal, large blue butterfly and mining bee but bad news for frogs, toads and newts.

Scott's Last Expedition marks centenary of explorer reaching pole. Exhibition at the Natural History Museum will highlight the untold stories of the expedition, including its scientific mission:

On Christmas Eve, Scott's team had treated themselves to a special meal of horse meat flavoured with onion and curry powder. "Then an arrowroot, cocoa and biscuit hoosh sweetened; then a plum pudding; then cocoa with raisins, and finally a dessert of caramels and ginger," wrote Scott.

Pandagate: anger as BBC chooses Tian Tian as December woman 2011: but is this any worse than 'one in four selected women includ[ing] those involved in marriages'? Sigh, groan, headbang, and a nicely rotted codfish to those at the BBC responsible.

However, at least Women kick back against comic-book sexism.

Exotic creatures discovered living at deep-sea vent in Indian Ocean - all of them pretty much eligible to be 'Disturbing Animal of the Week'.

Bethlehem church cleaning turns into dust-up between rival monks.

Britain has been accused of "sheltering communists" after refusing to hand over a cache of Stasi files revealing the names of British spies who worked for the East German secret intelligence agency during the cold war. Putting on my professional hat, this suggests an intriguing little problem around the Data Protection Act. Because these files sure contain sensitive information relating to named and identifiable individuals. I suspect one might have to put in an application under Freedom of Information to get access.

Food writing can be a dangerous business -

[T]he cautionary tale of the exploding churros will keep a few of us awake tonight. The precise details are too painful for me to dwell on but, briefly, a Chilean newspaper has been successfully sued for £79,000 by readers who suffered burns after attempting its recipe for the popular deep-fried snack.

A useful resource from the British Library: Timelines: Sources from History: Asians in Britain

Crime-writers names their favourite authors/shamuses: yay for Paretsky naming Georgia Strangeways!

It's a pity that the Guardian's crime reviewer seems to think a tired old trope that probably got name-checked in the Detective Club's list of don't along with mysterious arrow poisons, is a new hot thing: 'amnesia is set fair to become the crime novelist's new best friend'.

They are also all over comic books, with particular reference to Grant Morrison's Big New Book on the topic and superheroes (and not-so-superheroes).

Making up for this jaunt into the demotic fields of genre by having a swathe of litfic short stories in the Weekend Magazine.

Vauxhall Gardens: A History by David Coke and Alan Borg - review. Sounds charming, yet hard to imagine given that Vauxhall is now pretty much urban grot central.

Grace Dent compares Simon Hopkinson's cooking programme with, well, just about all the rest: 'He just made a pie very well and made me want to make it, too. This is a highly risky gimmick'.

As a clergyman with six children whose ages span 20 years, people always expect Paul Walker to be an expert on parenthood: well, at least he is not in a Yonge novel and expiring of consumption just after no. 13 makes its appearance, not, we consider, a shining exemplar to fathers everywhere.

Women and Science on the South Bank.

Stranded pilot whales prompt Highlands rescue operation

Poetry Society annual meeting ends in no confidence vote: doesn't sound as though 'shouts of rubbish and claims of incompetence' were even in rhyme.

German nudist groups see memberships shrink: Free Body Culture association claims immigrants and young people are more reluctant to bare all in public: or, of course, it could be down to people being a little more cautious about recklessly exposing their bodies to sunlight.

Another case for the Ponceyness Police! (via whatistigerbalm). Their motto: 'Wherever there is affectation, find us there; in cases of higher codswallop, call us; dedicated to the calling out of ponceyness, pointing and laughing, wherever we find it'.

Laura Barton on Otis Redding's version of 'Try a little tenderness' might just be up for a caution...

I also feel Nicholas Lezard's enconmiumising of a novel about a necrophiliac might be in need of a stern warning ('Just don't let us see you doing it again'.)

First, a poll*

( But, just in case this topic happens to be outwith yours )

*[ETA: and apparently you can't edit typos in polls after they are active...]

intertext has a lovely post about childhood reading of fantasy and sf, which reminded me of a post I meant to make and got distracted.

While on one of the panels at Wiscon I averred that reading The Left Hand of Darkness in my early 20s was what got me into reading sff. I had read sf before then, but very little of it in book form, as far as I can remember. There was one book that I acquired through the Beaver Children's Book Club, called, if I recollect aright, something like Rocket Pilot, about a space-race (and, on later reflection, manliness and coming of age issues), but most of the sf I encountered would have been in comics, from 'Dan Dare' in The Eagle to my brother's DC and Marvel comic-books. I certainly had sufficient sense of sfness - space ships and so forth - for one of my private fantasy worlds (aged around 8 or 9) to be about a space-academy.

Though now I think of it, I had read some sf during my university days - John Wyndham, Fred Hoyle, a strange dystopic book by David Karp called One recommended by my father, and Doris Lessing's The Four-Gated City ( spoiler )

I don't remember much in the way of fantasy, apart from the Narnia books, except for fairytales/folktales and some other things (thinks of the The Lily of Life and fwows up) heavily inflected by fairytale. And Arthuriana. But a lot of the classics that other people seem to have read either didn't come my way, or had not yet been published.

I'm not sure if this is related or not, but I was also thinking about how one imprints upon certain books because one read them at a certain age and in a certain phase of one's life. And sometimes they fade: there is a lovely passage in Pamela Dean's Juniper, Gentian and Rosemary in which a character describes opening a former favourite and having the sensation that someone had replaced the text with something utterly rubbishy and banal. But sometimes they remain in the realm beyond criticism. Also, there are books that one thinks that one would have loved, if only one had read them at the right time (this reminds me, coughingbear &/or frankie_ecap, I still have some of your Violet Needhams!). There are some books that I dare not pick up again for fear of disappointment.

Went to see the movie Aeon Flux yesterday with owlfish. Enjoyable in a non-taxing, non-pushing any genre or narrative boundaries way. But really not very much like the original (quite apart from the extreme stylisation of AF's look in the original, probably not achievable with a human body), except for the names of the characters and places, the general look of things, and the action of some specific scenes. Oh yes, and Sithandra's hands for feet.

The original was non-linear, surreal, weird, bizarre. (And I really must watch my tapes again, which I would have liked to have done beforehand but didn't have time.) The first AF series consisted of short violent action cartoons with no dialogue which all ended with her being killed (the cloning theme in movie might provided a retcon for this, but the original intention didn't seem to require any rational explanation). The longer narrative episodes could be watched in any order, because they don't link together in any meaningful way (as far as I can see: for all I know other fans may have made connections I haven't), they start from scratch each time. And some of them are really, really, really, strange. There was a cool detachment about the tone.

Plus, moral ambiguity is the name of the game. There's no obvious Good vs Evil going on, it's never exactly clear if we should be rooting for AF as against Trevor Goodchild, except because she is so extremely cool. The movie lost the dominatrix element, turned Una (who in the original was or had been or was going to be AF's lover, it was strongly implied) into AF's sister (though there was a strong hint of something between AF and Sithandra...), gave TG a conniving brother (Oran: there was a character in the original called, appropriately since he was pretty much a w*nker, Onan, but I don't think he was any relation to TG and in one episode was working with, or trying to contact, the Monican underground).

The AF/TG relationship is, on one level, more like Tom and Jerry than anything else: they are antagonists who need one another, who are bound by a mutual obsession that does, in the series, become overtly erotic upon occasion (the movie romanticises this). It's the ongoing dialetical struggle between binaries: good/evil, light/dark, order/chaos, Batman/Joker... etc. They can never either utterly defeat one another or form a stable synthesis.

I can see that it would be very difficult, probably impossible, to make a big-budget Hollywood movie of this without linearising the plot and rendering the deliberately incoherent, coherent. And some of it I'm not sure would work at all in live action.

So I would consider this a fun-enough movie but a rather different pleasure from the original.

And I would need to look at the spin-off comic book The Herodotus Files again in order to make any comment on how that ties in.