It's Always More Complicated

The name Johann Hari rings some sort of bell, and it has a certain crack of doom in it?

Your attention didn’t collapse. It was stolen.

You, dr rdrz, know me by now, and that I am a hedjog who looks askance at a lovely rosy vision of the somehow unified consciousness of the past (was that TS Eliot?), that Past when Things Were Better and we lived more in harmony with ourselves and nature.

And I think of the late C19th woezing over tit-bitty journalism - fun facts and listicles and so on, detached from any context.

And ads in magazines and books of my youth saying 'Have YOU got a grasshopper mind?' and offering remedies.

And I think it might have been Langhamer's book on women and leisure pointing out that women's work in the household was often a round of distraction, or at least bouncing between tasks and stopping the baby falling into the fire; and the reason stories and articles in women's mags were of the short length they were was so that they could be read in those brief moments while e.g. the potatoes boiled.

And of the Edwardian school children who learnt so much better once they got school meals and treated for nits and fleas.

As for those people not looking at the view but taking selfies: has this not been a plaint since the rise of cheaply available cameras and commercial film-processing?

I don't know what he's doing on social media/the web, but I observe a lot of intelligent and witty and creative interaction, I get a sense that people are out there writing and creating and researching and Doing Stuff, and indeed, Helping One Another. I will concede that this may be a rather niche corner of T'Internetz.

I.e. I would probably have guessed (and I would have been right) that my Twitter feed would be screaming WOT at the notion that there is an “untold history lesson” of what happened over three centuries of witch-hunting in the UK - described in the fine old 70s feminist spirituality woowoo term as 'the burning times', when, in England, anyway, no burnings took place and it was by no means a major site of the European witchcraze (Scotland, however...). This is not an untold history, and where are these people getting their sources? Margaret Murray??? (Visions of Professor Ronald Hutton beating his head on the desk.)

On distraction/not distraction, certainly there were people who needed to focus, for a period (sometimes long hours) so as not to fall into the machinery, or be eaten by the wild animals they were hunting, mess up the accounts they were copying (though I recall one of Sara Caudwell's mysteries turns on Hilary Tamar identifying a not unknown issue in manuscript transcription, of copying the same line twice instead of two consective lines...)

- and then they were exhausted.

And - to reiterate a theme that has come up here o so many times before - those individuals who were able to fall into an undistracted 'flow' state in most if not all cases were able to do so because somebody else, wife or other female relative or servants - was dealing with domestic distractions.

I will also allude to those discoveries that were made because somebody got distracted by that weird thing that was not the thing they were supposed to be attending to.

The Lost City That’s Not Lost, Not a City, and Doesn’t Need to Be Discovered.

Though - and this may be due to where one does one's archaeology and such-like factors - if you're going to talk about the idee fixe of 'discovering' something, isn't the classic account Schliemann digging down like a terrier after a badger until he came to what he thought was Troy...

Not to mention, the much more recent 'discovery' of the remains of the Franklin Arctic expedition, well-known in local Inuit tradition.

Do I need to say anything here about that recurrent motif of 'hidden in the dusty archives'?

And the emphasis given in reports to acquisition of archival collections and manuscript items which do not mention the processing which makes them actually accessible?

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In my own current running and finding out - actually this is not so much r & fo, it is logging into to the OED online - am getting very nitpicky.

Not sure whether this is due diligence or in the category of 'getting the review to precisely the word limit'.

It's also leading me to get somewhat narky about historically-set romances which may get the fashions spot on and so on but commit linguistic anachronism.

(Okay, I am put out because a certain word turns out to be several decades too late for me to use. Though there are probably some words I haven't checked that are out of period. Also, fears of that thing whereby people criticise for inaccuracy and they are the ones who are RONG.)

Another review of the Women and Surrealism exhibition: What happens when a muse is left to her own devices, when an object becomes a subject, when a woman is free to be herself?

The boundary between The Observer Magazine and Observer Woman becomes yet more permeable: this was in the former, am surprised it wasn't in the latter, and am generally, and I am supposed to care about this exactly why? After 20 years, two children and one affair, Sandra Tsing Loh finally called a halt to her marriage. It was too much work and too little sex. Bored now.

OW irritating as ever but in a general what-is-the-point way rather than with particular sources of annoyance, though wouldn't it be lovely if they did a piece on some philanthropist who didn't have celebrity accoutrements – the fabulous friends, the fabulous houses in Mayfair and Malibu, the fabulous parties?

More on marriage: US study says divorce is linked to age and education: Feeding data into a special 'calculator' suggests the best guarantee for a long-lasting relationship is to marry later and have good schooling behind you.

Stuff about age issues: Britain's ageing population is staying younger for longer, say medical experts. Though there are far more people in their 80s and 90s than ever before, many remain cheerfully independent; Female 'cougars' are on the prowl. Or are they just a male fantasy?.

And futher on dubious research on women: Ruth Sunderland: Stop telling me I'd be happier in the kitchen: Women may still not be exactly full of joy, but we're definitely better off than our mothers:

The very idea the women's movement has won a hollow victory is ludicrous for the simple reason that there hasn't yet been anything remotely resembling a feminist triumph. We still bear the lion's share of childcare, housework and looking after elderly relatives, and we still only earn around 80 pence for every male pound, even if we work full time.

David Mitchell on the pointfulness of apparently pointless research:

The government isn't going to pay for clever people just to sit in universities indulging their curiosity. No, they should be allocated something useful to discover and then research as hard as they can in that direction. Nothing good ever got invented by accident, apart from some silly fun stuff like the slinky, post-it notes, penicillin, warfarin and X-rays.

That breakthroughs often come by accident rather than design, from a desire for knowledge rather than a gap in the market, is so well established it's a cliche – it's one of the things that every schoolboy used to know. Why doesn't anyone at the Department of Education?

And link I forgot to post during the week and rather to my surprise haven't seen anyone else posting:
Google Books deal postponed after avalanche of criticism.

Sarah Waters on researching and writing her new novel set in World War II London (not clear to me whether she's actually looked at the copious vox pop material in the Mass Observation Archive) (and was a very minor figure in the research myself, largely consisting of giving her names of people who knew about the subject).

Recently rediscovered collection of photos documenting 'the discreet gay culture to which tsarist Russia turned a blind eye' (article cites my associate Dan Healey on the subject). Unfortunately online version doesn't have the numerous illos included in the magazine.

Another unexpected archival discovery:

Botanists hope that seeds that came to Britain as spoils of war more than 200 years ago may soon spring into bloom. More than 30 types of plant are thought to be involved in a discovery by researchers investigating files at the National Archives.

Anne Karpf on The Rights and Wrongs of Teenage Abortion.

Letters responding to Natasha Walter's recent article on feminism.

Letters blasting Peter Morris's whinge last week about fatherhood.

Some very stimulating articles in today's Guardian:

Critique of assumptions about masculinity and fatherhood:
Dave Hill on the myths about testosterone: includes the following

Lynne Segal, professor of gender studies at Birkbeck College, sees the buoyant profile that testosterone today holds as being of a piece with a "quasi-religious" overexcitement about molecular biology, and a related market for quick-fix wellbeing. Furthermore, she sees the willingness to equate a complex social concept like masculinity with a single chemical as not only mistaken but also a depressing sign of conservative times.

The more accurate the means of proving paternity have become, the more courts have promoted the significance of the biological bond, often forcing women to maintain difficult and destructive relationships with their children's fathers.

Sperm does not a father make and being a biological parent should not confer absolute rights. What matters is the social role of fatherhood: how much a man feels and acts a father.

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Report on research into women MPs and the male culture at Westminster: 'a mixture of crude sexism, patronising hostility, solidarity and hope'. How little has changed since the days of Lady Astor.

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And on health matters (and picking up on that whole 'magic bullet' syndrome that underlies the belief in the benefits of testosterone): an article on reliable sites of health/medical information - though we note that most of these sites will require people to think, analyse critically, and make up their own minds. One that sounds particularly useful is Hitting the Headlines:

HtH scans the media for stories about treatments or tests and puts a summary on site within 48 hours, the idea being that it will take you a couple of days to get to see your GP after reading the story, and the digest will help them help you. Each entry unpicks the evidence, questions the reliability of the conclusions, and gives references and consumer information.

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Scottish cardinal condemns sex education material currently in use as 'pornographic': well, he would, wouldn't he? but it's still worrying that this kind of thing could influence policy and practice.

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Further to the reports of wild boar populations in the Forest of Dean, George Monbiot discusses proposals to re-introduce large forms of wildlife into the UK. Includes a quote that I think lamentables will appreciate:

It is hard to argue with the verse, with which anyone who picks up a shotgun is instructed: "All the pheasants ever bred/ Won't repay for one man dead."

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And a note on not entirely forgotten, but less celebrated than she should be, fossil-hunter Mary Anning:

She was a lower-class woman from the sticks, but became a recognised expert in the geological field at a time when gentleman scholars ruled the roost.