It's Always More Complicated

Including flashbacks to a visit (that did not take place) during the early stages of lockdown.

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I am seeing a troubling pattern of people dispersing collections or not treating collections as they should be treated as research resources -

(BBC Written Archives Centre, I'm looking at you - 'structured content releases' - WE direct what you should be researching....)

There was that guy recently, an actual history professor, who uncovered a hoard of Roman coins and was about, yay, auction rooms (thought I linked this, but can't find it).

Then there is this daisy: Woman to sell hundreds of treasure pieces she found:

Her detecting skills have been so successful that her cabinet at her home in Wilden, Bedfordshire, is now full and she needs to make some space.
So on 16 May her collection of hundreds of items found in fields in Bedfordshire, Lincolnshire, Northamptonshire and Norfolk will go under the hammer and is expected to sell for about £11,000.
She says she is not auctioning her items for monetary reasons but hopes her finds will go to "someone who loves history".
....
She says since she started in 2006, she has collected "hundreds" of items, from all over the country, including her friend's garden, but will not reveal the exact locations.

And this is maybe just as sad a case of material getting dispersed into the ether when, should it be kept together in some place for the benefit of future historians, it would not only be the individual items but the synergy of the critical mass of material: The $100m pop culture collection now being broken up at auction:

Jim Irsay, the man who bought these artefacts, died last June at the age of 65. Over the past few days the billionaire’s collection was sold at Christie’s New York in a series of auctions. Irsay cared greatly about the memorabilia. You can tell that not by the most valuable items, but by the least. Buying the handwritten lyrics for Hey Jude does not prove you are a true fan. But an unused ticket from a 1966 concert, worth a few hundred dollars? That does.
Now that many of the objects have gone to the highest bidders, their fate is to be apart. That is how they began their lives, imprinting themselves on the American psyche from all corners of the world. But the shared story they tell, decades later, raises questions about who they are for, where they will go next, and to whom they truly belong.

I don't often remember much about my dreams these days - odd scenes or images - but last night I had quite a long one and though I don't remember all the details it sticks in my mind after waking.

Mostly perhaps because it is Return of That Dream, which is perhaps not a Recurrent Dream as such, as the specific details are never the same, but the as it were narrative trope of it is very similar.

I.e. I am somewhere, and I go out of a room or a space or a building for some temporary purpose and then when I go back I cannot find it or at least the way in is no longer there.

So last night I was in a church or a place set up for a church service with my mother (and I think other family members? or some other people). Waiting for the service to begin, I went out at the back for some reason, into a space which was not like the vestry/church hall/Sunday school rooms of the church of my youth, which have been wont to figure in dream-space, but somewhere which was a vague combination of a hotel/conference centre with people going about and rooms with different things going on and several floors and a lift.

I got into the lift at one point but realised I didn't want the floor it was going to.

There was also a bookshop, or more like a book-space, in the middle of the floor.

And as I was going about trying to find the way back in, with time ticking on, I was saying that this was just like that dream of mine.

Not sure I ever did get back - at one point I found myself outside whatever the building was in a space that felt a bit desolate and dangerous.

2 'People: weird':

Okay, maybe she gets a slight pass for 'we're all a bit stressed at the moment, luv', but, really: 'It devastated me': Bristol mum's fury after gender-reveal party 'ruined' - the sonogram operator '“blurted out” that the foetus was a boy during a scan'.

You could not make it up: Man acquitted of entering a home with a weapon after successful sex fantasy defence. Terrence Leroy found not guilty after proving that he was hired by another man to tie him up but given the wrong address. (Unlike the Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine novel, The Birthday Present, about the sex-game kidnapping that goes disastrously wrong.)

1 birds in Royal Park:

A priority for nature conservation in London, Regent’s Park supports one of London’s most important heronries. I don't think I've ever seen the herons in Regents Park, as opposed to the ones outside The National Archives.

1 whale (deceased) on beach:

Dead 12-metre whale washes up on beach at Clacton-on-Sea. Dead whale on beach is probably one way to keep people socially distancing...

1 wombatts:

Last night I dreamt of a wombat, and not just any wombat, a hairy-nosed wombat: Northern Hairy-Nosed Wombats at Epping Forest National Park - okay I was going WTF Epping Forest, given that my association is the ancient woodland and former Royal forest lying on the London/Essex borders (no, Good Queen Bess did not hunt that noble beast, the wombatt, here).

A few recent niggles and peeves.

Eurostar onboard wifi FAIL: I can bear with a proper announcement that alas, it is not working on this particular trip, but I am yay irked when it is, apparently, functional, only, really only in some very specialised sense that means, pretty much not, actually.

Hotel which did indeed provide free wifi but room signally lacking in power sockets: the only two not already attached to lights, fridge, tv, coffeemaker, etc, were a) clearly there for the convenience of housekeeping b) in the bathroom.

Also, bad show on the cybersecurity front with your wifi generally, hotels: apart from the one that did not even have any gesture to a password, there was the one which issued all guests with the same user login/password, which cannot be very secure. (Me, I have a VPN.)

Is it, in this day and age, really a mark of respect and esteem to address a scholar to whom you are writing for information as 'Mrs', especially when the subject was a fiery feminist of extremely radical views? Did my generation get into arguments and get considered stroppy for insisting on 'Ms' for nothing? (Quite apart from the, hello, Dr? here.)

Also the peeves are restless when I am solicited for information (at least twice in the past week) on sources or existing scholarship which I feel a scrutiny of the references in my relevant works (some of which they purported to have read) would have revealed.

Today was stressful (there was a point where it conformed entirely too closely to my travel-angst dreams) and I am grumpy.

Probably not the stretch of Broadway adjacent to where I am typing this, though the City That Never Sleeps was pretty much boogying the night away below my window last night: fortunately I had earplugs with me.

Had a long and convoluted dream that kept waking me up crying, for good and bad reasons, and I think probably had quite a lot to do with Wiscon and an international conference on women's history back to back.

Find that the coffee-shop on the corner is a bit limited in its offerings, maybe I will venture as far as the trad deli a block or so away tomorrow.

I have been imbibing the rich cultural offerings of New York today, subject to the limitations of what actually are open on Mondays. So I did the Guggenheim, which is amazing stuff from their own collections (last time I went they were refurbishing and only had a very small exhibit, and the time before it was a retrospective of Some Contemporary Artist). But this was the serious stuff collected by Solomon Guggenheim and Hilla Rebay and other collectors and was mostly late C19th-early to mid C20th stuff that I like, though a bit thin on women artists. (Is this odd, given the role of women in collecting, or had they bought in to the idea that women might be muses or connoisseurs but would never be artists?) I was particularly impressed by the stunning Kandinskys (which I don't think featured in the show of his work at Tate Modern some years ago?). What is the meaning of the one with the trilobites in the upper lefthand corner? Had he been studying illustrations of bacteria? (there was one that had shapes very like Lady Bruce's drawings of trypanosomes.) I also took a photo of Brancusi's 'The Miracle (Seal 1)', which is most extremely phallic

After lunch in the museum restaurant - alas, the cafe, with its advertised splendid views ovr Central Park, was closed - I caught a bus downtown to the Museum of Sex, because, well, I thought I should.

Which was pretty good, even if you have to go in and out directly via the shop. My one AAARGH moment was the reiteration of the Victorian vibrators/hysteria canard on one of the cases, it's the myth that will not die. And Sid was just a little disappoint that there was much less about him and his pals than there might have been.

It's presumably selections from their holdings, but I wonder to what extent a lot of the still extant materials had already been hoovered up by Prof Kinsey? Because when I visited the Kinsey Institute a couple of years ago it had some very tasty stuff.

There is a large section on animal sex: includes the sex life of the koala (apparently koala girl-on-girl is a thing?) but no wombatts. Also, the section on penguins was all about their lovely pair-bonding: was there not a manuscript by one of the Scott expedition recently discovered in which he was obliged to fall into the decent obscurity of a learned tongue to describe some of the things he saw penguins doing? (given that they already have a display about homosexual necrophilia in ducks.)

And then made my way back to the hotel to chill for a little.

Maybe some people do, and maybe for them this spam email subject line would make sense?
The sunglasses Of Your Dreams Has Arrived C Come And Get It!Amazing Price Now!
Except, you know, problem there with whether 'sunglasses' takes a singular or plural form...

Might be disturbing for people who dream about Scary Sunglasses.

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I learnt a new word today: 'screeding', as I passed by a van for Floor Screeding Services out of which a large rubber hose coiled across the pavement into a basement, twitching and heaving.

Apparently it is 'the simple act of applying a well blended mixture of Ordinary Portland Cement with graded agregates and water to a floor base, in order to form a sturdy sub-floor that is capable of taking on the final floor finish or act as a final wearing surface'.

Really not sure I shall ever have occasion to make use of this knowledge.

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If invisibles work in jobs that are unseen when done perfectly, how do they survive in a culture that seeks endless pats on the back? Was thinking on the Tube home this afternoon that the term 'rockstar archivist' is pretty much an oxymoron.

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This should possibly be posted to trennels given that current discussion is of Falconer's Lure, Y/N?

Though I thought the delay in publishing The Goshawk was because White shelved the ms for Reasons, i.e. that he had mentioned some really really rare hawks (?Harris hawks?) nesting nearby in the text and feared that unscrupulous egg-collectors would be able to deduce their whereabouts.

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Forget focusing on the under-representation of women in politics. It’s time we looked at the grossly disproportionate number of elite white men. Avoid the comments.

How long does it take for new gadgets to become part of one's dreaming world?

Had a dream the other night in which I was either reading something on the tablet, or reading it as if it were on a tablet*.

Last night I had a dream in which, due to transport problems, partner and I had got separated and I had ended up on a bus which I was not sure was even going to the right bit of destination.

Anyway, at some point I had got off and was walking around looking for the restaurant where we were supposed to be going, in sort-of the City (of London, for anyone for whom this is not the assumed subtext) -

And I was trying to locate myself via the map on my smartphone.

*I don't think I've yet done my love-song to my new tablet - about the only nark I have is that the virtual keyboard doesn't appear to have angle brackets, chiz.

Before I lived in London, my jumping-off point for the Big City was usually Charing Cross Station (in the days before it looked, from across the river, like a gigantic jukebox) - Charing Cross is, not entirely intuitively, the Centre of London for a number of purposes.

Just to complicate matters, that was when Embankment (Tube) Station was called Charing Cross, and the other two stations close by, one at least with an entrance inside the mainline station, were Strand and Trafalgar Square. (I suspect that Charing Cross Tube Station, with its habit of debouching one in places one did not expect, e.g. completely outside the station altogether, and across the road, and its general convolutions, formed the basic pattern for the Tube Station in My Dreams.)

So there was a time when that was the small bit of London I was reasonably familiar with.

O my Lyons Corner House long ago!

And Villiers Street. Where there used to be, on the corner opposite the tube station, an absolutely wonderful small bookshop full of all sorts of unexpected (new) books, where I liked to linger if I had wait for the next train.

There is also Gordon's Wine Bar, the Oldest Wine Bar in London, in the crepuscular subterranean depths of which I have at least once been (and is somewhere else that features in that London interiors book I got partner for Christmas).

The street still has a fair quotient of chain restaurants and coffee shops, but no longer the Golden Egg where I remember eating in my youth.

Returning yet again to the town where I was born, and the strange feeling -

Not just at the changes that have taken place over the years ('what used to be there?') -

but because certain parts of the town have become recurrent parts of dreamscapes.

Not necessarily the parts one would think but certain fairly banal streets, which thus gain a slightly spooky overlay even though they remain banal. Because they do not have a sinister quality and do not turn off into some entirely different landscape. And perhaps I have dreamt that enough times that I think that they should and the remaining banal is what is spooky and strange.

Somehow I seem to have got onto Harvey Nichols mailing list: the latest begins
Channel your inner lady of the manor.
Inner Lady of the Manor NO CAN HAZ.

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On possibly related topic, am currently reading in ebook Elinor Glyn's The Reflections of Ambrosine. Feeling strong desire to smack Ambrosine herself and her French aristo grandmother with some suitably socially-elevated fish, possibly a royal sturgeon. Babykins, however, society flirt, witty gossip, and pigbreeder, is totally for the win.

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Much of my dreams last night seemed to be set in Venice, which somewhat surprised me. Although I enjoyed the visit, it didn't, and probably couldn't, make the impression of the first day-trip in the early 70s.

This involved possibly the ideal approach - by hydrofoil from one of the resorts on the Istrian peninsula of what was then Yugoslavia, really early in the morning. This really beats out of hand arriving by rail or air.

Much has faded of that visit, but I remember how Venice appeared out of the sea in the early morning light. And walking round and round St Mark's Square.

(I really remember it as so much less crowded - and that would have been higher in the season too.)