It's Always More Complicated

Bit of a flurry of Misguided Spam: this one is quite funny:

[W]e're working with other archivists that are offering historical resources.‍
I’m currently working with a few archivists on campaigns that are getting their sales teams meetings with warm leads every month. We’re targeting people who need historical resources using personalized email sequences.
If I could help you connect with potential clients like this, would that be helpful to you?‍

Another one of the usual 'Contribute your article/join our editorial board/reviewer team' from an international journal... offering a space for the exchange of powerful ideas among academics and experts which cannot distinguish between the title of a book I reviewed and anything I actually wrote my own self.

This one is frankly cheeky, if presumably being spammed at a vast array of people?

I am sure you're quite busy, but I would appreciate if you could take a moment to my below request.
Well, our Open Access Journal of Advances in Complementary & Alternative Medicine (ACAM) is scheduled to release its Volume 9 Issue 2 by 6thApril, but we are in deficit of one article. So, is it possible for you to support us with any of your manuscript to achieve this goal?
Appreciate if you could provide your acknowledgement within 24 hrs.

Am also being followed on Bluesky by very dubious looking 'Global' conferences within my fields of interest. Suspect these are a racket.

***

However, in realm of being A Real Nexpert, gave a presentation at Institution With Which I Am Now Affiliated yesterday and I think it went quite well, insofar as there was a certain amount of discussion and people coming up and asking questions afterwards.

Also got 2 compliments from much younger persons on hair (green streaks in) though as one was outside the Scientology HQ in Tottenham Court Road I fear this may be one of their recruitment strategies.

What I read

Finished The Doxies Penalty - I wonder where my copies of the first two in the sequence have got to? should like to revisit.

Kent Haruf, Plainsong (1999) - I think I mentioned when reading another work by Haruf that I had been intrigued by an essay in a collection by Ursula Le Guin about his novels, so I was looking out for these at 'taking a punt' prices. I feel that, um, admire the writing, the subtle subdued effects etc etc etc but not impelled to rush out and acquire everything he ever wrote.

For a massive change of pace, Megan Abbott, El Dorado Drive (2025) which was good if grim noirish about sisters who were brought up in comfort and then the economy crashed, getting caught up in a rather creepy pyramid-type scheme.

Then another change of pace, Julia Quinn, Romancing Mister Bridgerton (Bridgertons, #4) (2004) as it was on Kobo promotion and I felt maybe I should given these a whirl, but not massively taken. Kind of slow.

Then yet another Dick Francis, Decider (1993), pretty good, even if we have yet another dysfunctional privileged family (this one owns, or at least, is in the process of inheriting, a racecourse), at least one of whom is a raging psychopath. The competence-porn in this one involves architecture, in particular restoration of ruined buildings, with a side-trip to erecting a big top and how circuses deal with potential fires etc (plot-relevant).

On the go

Somebody somewhere some while ago was mentioning Somerset Maugham's Cakes and Ale (1930), which I literally read in my schooldays and never since, and had it mentally on a list to look at again, so downloaded it from The Faded Page and am well stuck in. Love Our Narrator being bitchy about Literary Circles, not so much enthralled by the actual plot.

Up next

Dunno. It's that time of year when I really have no idea what I want to read. Maybe that book about the Bigfoot Community?

That piece about people having AI spouses is online: As synthetic personas become an increasingly normal part of life, meet the people falling for their chatbot lovers.

NB we note that 'Lamar' says that the breaking point with his actual, RL, girlfriend was when he found her doing the horizontal tango with his best friend, but it's clear that there were Problems already there, about having to relate to another human bean who was not always brightly sunshiny positively reinforcing him....

what would he tell his kids? “I’d tell them that humans aren’t really people who can be trusted …

This is not entirely 'wow, startling news' to Ye Hystorianne of Sexxe: The Phenomenon of ‘Bud Sex’ Between Straight Rural Men.

I am not going to see if I actually have a copy of the work on my shelves, or if I perused it in a library somewhere, but didn't that notorious work of 'participant observation' sociology, Tearoom Trade argue that many of his subjects were not defining themselves as 'homosexual'.

I also invoke, even further back, Helen Smith's Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957 about men 'messing about' with other men in Yorkshire industrial cities.

And there is a reason people working on the epidemiology and prevention of STIs use the acronym 'MSM' - men who have sex with men - for the significant population at risk who do not identify as gay.

I had, I must admit, a very plus ca change moment when I idly picked up Katharine Whitehorn's Roundabout (1962), and found the piece she wrote on marriage bureaux. In which she mentioned that the two bureaux she interviewed tried to get their subscribers not to be too ultra-specific in their demands - that if they met potential partners in real life they would be more flexible.

Was also amused by the statement that 'Men over thirty are always very anxious to persuade me that they could have all they women they liked, if they bothered'.

Okay, my dearios, I am sure all dear rdrs are with me that tradwives are not trad, they are deploying an aesthetic loosely based on vague memories of the 1950s - and meedja representations at that - and some very creepy cultish behaviour - they are not returning to some lovely Nachral State -

And that as I bang on about a lot, women have been engaged in all kinds of economic activity THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY since economic activity became A Thing.

Why tradwives aren’t trad: The housewife is a Victorian invention. History shows us women’s true economic power

I have a spot of nitpickery to apply - it rather skips over and elides the move from the household economy into factories e.g., leading to 'separate spheres' with wife stuck at home (and even that was a very blurry distinction, I mutter); and also the amount of exploitative homeworking undertaken by women of the lower classes (often to the detriment of any kind of 'good housekeeping').(Not saying middle-class women didn't also find ways of making a spot of moolah to eke out household budget.)

And of course a lot of tradwives are actually performing as economically productive influencers: TikTok tradwives: femininity, reproduction, and social media - in a tradition of women who made a very nice living out of telling other women how to be domestic goddesses, ahem ahem.

But this did sound awfully like that spate of books where people had A Bright Idea to Do Something for A Year and got a book out of it, which was clearly the intention, and this struck my cynical ayfeist self as 'My Spiritual Pilgrimage to a Mystical Experience, Conversion, Faith, and Publishing Deal'.

Could I become a Christian in a year?

(How long did it take St Augustine? asking for a friend.)

For my perpetual Christian road-trip – beginning in the last months of 2022 and ending in early 2024 – I purchased a 21 year-old Toyota Corolla and stocked the glove box with second-hand CDs. I filled up my calendar with Christian retreats, church visits and stays in the houses of Christian strangers all across the highways and byways of the UK – Cornwall, Sussex, Kent, Hertfordshire, Birmingham, north Wales, Norfolk, Sheffield, Halifax, Durham, the Inner Hebrides – seeking out every kind of Christian, from Catholics to Orthodox Christians: Quakers, Pentecostals, Evangelicals, high to low Anglicans, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, self-professed mystics, focusing on my generation specifically, those in their 20s and 30s, the youngest set of adults in Britain.

I was also, in the light of this article today, intrigued that it was two bloke friends who set her on this path: I’m delighted to see gen Z men in the UK flocking back to church – I just hope it’s for the right reasons. So am I. I have a friend who has been involved in the much-delayed and still unsatisfactory response of the C of E to certain abuse cases and some of those seem to have been connected with cultish manifestations which were praised for bringing in that particular demographic.

(And having noted the other day that Witchfinder Hopkins was pretty much in that demographic of young men aged 18-24, I'd really like to know where these Gen Z converts are in relation to issues like ordination of women, LGCBTQ+ inclusivity, etc etc.)

‘I thought of the church as a friend and it slapped me in the face’: historian Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Church of England’s hypocrisy

For the past four years, since his retirement from university teaching, he has applied that lifelong erudition to a comprehensive and richly entertaining history of the ways in which, for 3,000 years, the church has tied itself in knots over sex (and love and marriage).

MacCulloch asked the classics professor Helen King to read his book pre-publication. King is just publishing a book on women’s bodies through the ages. “She said lots of complimentary things,” he says, “but felt there was a major omission: I hadn’t mentioned the clitoris much.”
“I was embarrassed,” MacCulloch says, “to realise that was true.”

Wow, this is terrifying: Like Jay Gatsby, He Threw Parties to Get Her Attention. It Finally Worked.:

Mr. Quintero first noticed Ms. Babai in a mutual friend’s Instagram story in 2016, when he was a freshman at Quinnipiac University and she was a freshman at the State University of New York at Albany. He asked that friend, Janice Murphy, for an introduction, but it would take four years for that moment to come. So Mr. Quintero, who became affectionately known as “Gatsby” among Ms. Babai’s friends, began hosting lavish gatherings in hopes of meeting her.

Mr. Quintero found ways to stay in touch. Most notably, he had Ms. Babai introduce him to her boss, Joseph Calabrese, the owner of a lighting design and fencing company, to talk about opportunities to work with his business, Quintero Enterprises. “Little did I know at the time, this was just another step to get closer to me,” said Ms. Babai, who coordinated their phone calls and joined business dinners.

Mr. Quintero wanted to do something “big,” he said, for the proposal in October 2023, so he rented out Barclays Center and convinced Ms. Babai to join him for what he said was an awards ceremony for women in business. As Ms. Babai entered the empty arena, she was greeted by pictures of them together on jumbotrons, flowers and a group of singers performing “Say Yes to Heaven” by Lana Del Rey. As Mr. Quintero got down on one knee, he said, “I have been waiting for this moment since the day I met you.”

***

Anthony Comstock arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 1873 with a collection of pornography and big plans for what to do with it.
Alas, it was not to engage in trade with it.

Bearing a veritable grab bag of explicit images, books, pamphlets, contraceptives, and sex toys that he had ordered expressly for the purposes of shock, he set up displays, first in the private homes of legislators and then in the office of the vice president inside the congressional building.As congressmen trooped by to gawk, Comstock spoke to them about the “nefarious business” of obscenity.

***

I feel I've heard of this, er, colourful character before, but I can't quite place them: Charlotte Bach (born Karoly Hajdu; 1920–1981) was a Hungarian-British impostor and fringe evolutionary theorist.L 'Her alternative theory of evolution acquired a cult following among prominent writers and scientists in London during the 1970s, who remained ignorant of her original identity until after her death.'

***

More fun insights from The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure: Why were Hansel and Gretel not English?:

These types of stories about hunger and famine abound in the folklore of most European societies, and embody folk memories of food scarcity. However, as the historian John Walter noted, these tropes are curiously absent from English fairy tales. Why?
Walter speculated that this reflected the exceptionally early disappearance of famine from England, centuries before the risk of famine had subsided in the rest of Europe. Famine remained a threat in most of Europe until the mid-18th century, and persisted in some areas into the 19th century and even the 20th century, especially in association with war. In England, on the other hand, the last national famine occurred in the 1590s, and the last regional famine in the 1620s.

Meet generation stay-at-home: ‘You don’t need to pay to go clubbing: you can sit at home and watch it on your phone’ This is so many generations down the line from when I was a young thing - it wasn't even so much about clubbing when I was a student, because (and this may be down to having been at an on-the fringes of the conurbations campus uni) there were various events involving live bands or the precursors of disco actually on the premises.

Sort of resonated with something I spotted on social media where somebody had screenshotted somebody going 'how did people get together before mobile phones?' and I was very tempted to go 'Eeeeee, we'd go down to the monkey-walk':

[I]t consisted of a parade of unattached young men and women walking along from the clock on the Co-op buildings on Belvoir Road to the clock on Lashmore’s shop on High Street*. Young men would be on one side of the street and young women on the other. They would parade back and forth ‘eyeing up the talent’ as one participent put it. ‘Liaisons’ would occur and often couples would be ejected from shop doorways by the local bobby on his beat.

***

From my very first downward dog, I was hooked. But training as a yoga teacher led me to a miserable world of false promises, exploitation and near-total burnout. Could I find my way back to the mat? Some of this rather reminded me of my brief period of fairly peripheral involvement with the 'growth' or 'human potential' movement around the late 70s, where people did seem to get sucked into the cult, or rather, different manifestations thereof that were around at the time, presumably according to individual personality:

It was wildly chaotic but there was a strange kind of method to it. Something like breaking us down to build us up. We’d spend a weekend each month in her studio, then return to our lives wide-eyed and changed.

And, talking of cults, Italian researchers say that joining the mafia is like entering a cult in which members must leave behind their own identity:

Everything changes, Lo Verso said, when something disrupts the mobsters’ lives. “As long as they are integrated into the mafia family, the bosses do not show any kind of psychological suffering,” he said. “Their own ‘self’ is suppressed because they identify totally with the mafia and their thoughts conform to those of the clan. However, things change when there is a break, a detachment from the mafia, for example, when an arrested mafioso decides to collaborate with the authorities.

***

This is just me being irked, niggled and narky: maybe that is just having been part of a niche community of historians which has been WELL AWARE of these figures since the 1970s or so, has this guy ever heard of Jeff Weeks or Sheila Rowbotham(or is he just Failing to Cite)? Beyond Oscar Wilde: the unsung literary heroes of the early gay rights movement. Grump. Unsung by whom? Mutter fume.

I'm not sure my own thoughts on these come to much more than this, that I posted a couple of weeks ago, problematising Effective Altruism.

But I lately came across a couple of articles about it (and there are aspects of it that suggests that parts of it are getting cult-like, what? even before we see the crypto involvement thing):

The Reluctant Prophet of Effective Altruism

How effective altruism went from a niche movement to a billion-dollar force: Effective altruism has gone mainstream. Where does that leave it?

I am:

a) okay, I have my own criticism of what Dickens did with Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House from the angle of attitudes to gender, but the idea of 'Telescopic Philanthropy', and being obsessed about Doing Good at a great distance while neglecting the near at hand, did rather spring to mind here. Are there really no problems closer to home, I wonder? It all gets a bit into the realm of Statistics, even before the futurological lot come along.

b) The whole sense of the Othering of Objects of Philanthropy as an entirely different order of being.

c) I am wrinkling my nose at the Reluctant Prophet who is being somehow Effical by sneaking in cheap booze when he goes out drinking with his mates in the pub

d) And the whole, it is more Effical to put your Elite Mind to Making Lotsa Dosh, then giving it away, and while I concede that it is certainly on the whole more useful to give money than amateur volunteer 'help', if somebody has that Amazing An Intelligence:
i) just possibly, they could be deploying it on research towards solving these long-term problems?
ii) Wottabaht the Effics of the financial and industrial enterprises they are exhorted to go and make money in? (this strikes particularly after the Recent Discourse in which someone in particular straits was monstered for having a low-level job at Evil Corp, which, however Evil, provided employee benefits that many employers do not.)

e) I am not persuaded that it is entirely that much of an improvement to sacrifice feelings of warm fuzziness just to replace them with a sense of your effective and moral superiority in altruism.

Okay, I admit it, I want them to go away and read Middlemarch and embroider samplers with the closing passage about 'the growing goodness of the world' and 'incalculably diffusive... unhistoric acts'.

Also, stop thinking that making yourself uncomfortable has any moral value in itself.

Apparently there were hippies in the former USSR (take it away, Beatles!), and somebody has published what looks, from this review, to be an absolutely fascinating study of a small, and persecuted, counter-culture: Juliane Furst. Flowers through Concrete: Explorations in Soviet Hippieland. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.

Among other intriguing facets, I note that instead of the hippie orientalist trail leading to India, it lead to the Central Asian Islamic cultures colonised by Russian imperial ambition: 'For Soviet hippies, it was Central Asia that became their Afghanistan and India by way of the exotic landscapes, drugs, and shamans whom they could access there'.

There are also some interesting resonances in the place of women within the hippie culture:

women experienced hippie life differently. They bonded with each other, gossiped more often than men, and played both a nurturing and organizing role within hippie communities. By being able to practice free love and choose their own partners, they also freed themselves from expectations that limited their sexuality to monogamy or what was seen as a male prerogative. This also gave them power over their male counterparts, because “at times men suffered from the free love hippie girls bestowed freely on others” (p. 411). Yet emotions and love were still important to them. Fear of pregnancy and the attendant burden of raising a child alone was often present in their minds. Female anxieties such as these were just too often filtered out from hippie memory. Time and aging were also more keenly experienced by women than men. “Female hippie lives were often shorter and resulted in family and children rather than legendary status” (p. 425). The ambiguities of women’s experience as hippies meant that they often “censored themselves to silence,” thus writing themselves out from hippie history and ceding the ground to having it shaped mostly by male recollections.

(But I also, knowing v little about the subject, wonder how they would slot in to a longer history of counter-cultural movements and religious cults in the region?)

***

Now, these bozos fit right in to that cryptocurrency cruise ship which failed to give much thought to the fact that, er, remaining seaworthy is a major desideratum, and that similar community where there was no communal arrangement for collecting garbage or ensuring bear-proof bins and bears took over the town:

Anarchy in paradise: how a fringe community descended into darkness (Prince Kropotkin and the other great names in the philosophy of anarchism are creating earthquakes as they rotate in their graves at the concept of 'anarcho-capitalism'.

(This appears to means going to some country which they can regard as a playground for putting their somewhat inchoate beliefs into practice without undue interference.)

It is not, shall we say, all about Mutual Aid and Cooperation but more like Hobbes' State of Nature, red in tooth and claw, and that's before the murders.

***

However, one must concede that Charles Fourier's vision of an anti-capitalist utopia, while it has its attractive aspects, also makes some sweeping assumptions about social organisation ('Fourier believed that there were 810 different personality types, so each phalanstery should be comprised of 1,620 inhabitants — one personality type of each sex').

I thought this was generally of considerable interest - Meet Eva Frank: The First Jewish Female Messiah (though I would not be entirely astonished to be informed that actually, there was more of a tradition...) -

- but I was particularly struck by this:

The societal repression of female sexuality is, the unnamed Frankist writer believes, a suppression of the creative vitality of women which, when expressed, will revitalize the male sexual impulse, a development which will ultimately allow the hidden, repressed female Messiah to emerge in her full glory and thus usher in the era of Messianic redemption. She need only be seduced, encouraged to overcome her feminine shyness, and aroused to action to reveal herself. The text itself repeatedly emphasizes the desire of women to be cherished, noting how, “the whole essence of woman is to be loved, kissed, etc.,” and how society keeps the female Messiah hidden by condemning the feminine expression of sexual desire.

I.e. it's instrumental and for the benefit of the project defined by the men.

(Why, yes, I am also reminded of the cynicism about 'sexual liberation' that became so manifest in second wave feminism, as having left rather a lot out of its agenda.)

'Mother' Ann Lee, who founded the Shakers, was not having with sex at all. We feel that in an era of lack of reliable contraception and high maternal and infant mortality, she may have had a point. Trying shaking instead. (We are rather less on board with Annie Besant reneging on being a prophetess of birth control when she converted to theosophy.)