It's Always More Complicated

People having been coming here for yonks and yonks, and intermingling, and exchanging DNA, and sharing culture, one is inclined to say, get over it.

DNA study shows Celts are not a unique genetic group.

The finding is the first genetic evidence to confirm what some archaeologists have long been arguing: that Celts represent a tradition or culture rather than a genetic or racial grouping. Prof Robinson noted that the results also shed light on what happened during Britain's Dark Ages, in the years between AD 400 and AD 600, after the Romans left.
Towns were abandoned; the language over much of what became England changed (to Anglo Saxon, which became English); pottery styles altered; so too even the cereals that were grown, following the arrival of people from the base of the southwest Danish peninsula and northwestern Germany (the Anglo Saxons). Some historians and archaeologists had wondered whether these changes occurred as a result of the Saxons entirely replacing the existing population as they moved westwards. That might have happened if the Saxons introduced disease, for example.
Others researchers suggested that the existing population simply dropped their old ways and adopted the Saxon way of life. The new analysis shows a modest level of Saxon DNA, suggesting that the native British populations lived alongside each other and intermingled with the Anglo Saxons to become the English.

Though apparently:

The Viking armies that laid waste to parts of England, and for a while ruled what became known as the Danelaw, left little if any genetic trace, confirming that their success was due to their military prowess rather than large-scale population movement. Likewise, the Norman conquest of England did not leave any genetic evidence.

On the question of Nashunal Identitee, I recall a book I reviewed many years since on reproductive medicine in C18th Britain and the role of Scottish practitioners and the strategic creation of a new 'British' identity (following the Act of Union).

Possibly relating particularly to London (but I suspect not quite exclusively), the non-monotone nature of the population going back in time:

Findings from Tower Hamlets archives dating back to the 16th century and “runaway notices” from 18th-century newspapers shed new light on historic Black communities – and grassroots resistance to slavery in the capital.

A quick note on A Thousand Blows, Black boxers in 1880s London, and ‘woke history’.

I hope that, when I see people very wrought up about something that does not have the same resonance for me, I do not go around saying poo-poo and declaring that they should not be feeling what they are feeling.

In fact, this may be a good time to call attention once more to my posting of the amazing Dr Petra Boyton's piece about the intention of One Direction to take a break and responses by fans, which is really, of much more general application.

This also resonates a bit with something that was touched on in conversation yesterday concerning the way appropriate behaviour and attitude gets policed in classic girls' school stories, implicitly or explicitly and usually with tacit authorial approval.

And then, today, I picked up a copy of Josephine Elder's Exile for Annis (1938) in a charity shop, in which Our Protag is described near the beginning as

She disliked on sight all people who were not just like the majority of other people. Her ambitions were to look, dress, and talk like every other healthy, athletic, intelligent girl of her age... to attain the First Tennis Six, the First hockey and cricket teams, and the Senior swimming team; to be a Senior Prefect, perhaps even Head Prefect.

What I'm reading

I seem to be a bit bogged down at the moment in the drear, and keep dipping into Claud Cockburn's Bestseller! just to get a spot of snarky humour, because o so po-faced otherwise.

Apart from one thing I'm reading for [purpose redacted] that I've already bounced off twice but feel obligated to struggle on with -

Cold ComfortThe Commune by Margaret Buckley (1993), which is sort of 'if DH Lawrence and Dame Iris Murdoch had a lovechild...', set (I would guess) sometime in the 70s. Deals with a former college lecturer who has bought a farm and proposes to cultivate it organically and also hopes to set up some kind of commune there. Various people visit with a view to either writing it up or possibly joining the enterprise or just to have a break in the countryside. Apart from the tensions in this community, there are tensions with the tenant farmer, who is using fertilisers and weedkillers and insecticides to maximise profit, is a nasty piece of work, and his family, who all seem to be about the woodshed. I mean, points for showing that hopeful commune-founder has some dodgy aspects (and I am waiting for his wife to have a screaming nervous breakdown) but yes, we've got that, move along.

Started as ongoing ebook, Hilda Vaughan, The Battle to the Weak (1925), early C20th Wales, and so far we are setting up for a Romeo and Juliet scenario between the offspring of farmers who have a longstanding feud. I do like the fact, however, that the intellectually aspirant young man has the relatively realistic dream of studying at Aberystwyth (rather than Christminster).

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What I've Just Read

Lisa Z Sigel, Making Modern Love: Sexual Narratives and Identities in Interwar Britain (2012) and Deborah Cohen, Family Secrets: Living with Shame from the Victorians to the Present Day (2013). Both of which were good, and had lots of interesting stuff and intriguing arguments, but I'm just a bit, not sure exactly, finding a tad problematic those scholarly studies which look like monographs but are several chapters of Here Are Some Things I Have Researched, Yes There Is A Theme, Really (even though My Own Next Project may well look like that itself). But both books were really readable and worth reading and I recommend them.

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What I'm About To Read

I am yearning for the new David Wishart Corvinus mystery which I have on order, as a nice contrast to the gloom, doom, and interminable yattering in my current reading. I have just received Josephine Elder's The Scholarship Girl At Cambridge, so I may take a break and read that next.

Yestreen was at a very good, if somewhat intense and perhaps rather too crammed, afternoon symposium on biography and its writing.

Just one thing that came up in a panel discussion jarred me, which was the claim that these days everybody's life is all over the net.

I feel that the people who make this claim are actually people who don't spend that much social time online and don't themselves engage in social networking beyond maybe Facebook for family photos and academia.edu, if that.

And that they're not actually talking about advanced levels of cyberstalkery ingenuity but just basic googling.

I think my invocation of the G+ nym debacle came as news to pretty much everybody in the room, just about, as did my connected suggestion that, actually, a lot of people have a significant web presence that isn't under their birth certificate/passport/driving licence name.

You can find out quite a bit about Dr [Legal Name] online, though you would have to be careful to a) distinguish me from other people of that Legal Name, at least two of whom are academics working in related areas and b) realise that some of those hits for Legal Name are indeed me doing something different from my academic/professional interests. (I am large, I contain multitudes: but I am not the baker of fancy cakes, btw.)

But what you would not necessarily find, if you didn't already know, would be me on DW/LJ, posing as an erinacine. Plus even some sites on which I appear under my real name I have under at least some level of minor stalker-prevention limitations on access.

While on top of that, even though I post quite a lot online besides basic info, it's not Everything All About My Life.

As I thought when someone was saying something about finding, if not the person the biographer was interested in actually alive themself, people who knew them, you really haven't been keeping up with the discussions within oral history, have you?

I.e. all the stuff about how people present themselves and what the silences and evasions mean, etc etc.

Even people who make a project of living their lives in the open online - how much do their observers actually know about them?

So, you know, I think a lot of the problems that biographers have always faced - does the material exist, how does one interpret it, and what does one do about the gaps and areas where only speculation can go - are going to continue to exist.

Am entirely yay about people discovering how very good Stella Gibbons' non-Cold Comfort Farm novels are, even when I think they miss the point about the ending saying that there are other things besides the Romantic Happy Ending and there is some indication that anyway as Margaret becomes less miserable about her lot she becomes livelier and to an extent more attractive. But I really liked this point:

Was it true, I wondered, that funny women writers are generally allowed only one success in their careers? Wouldn't it be interesting to examine this insight in relation to (say) Gibbons, Anita Loos and Betty MacDonald – and then dramatise one (each) of their less well-known books or novels?

Someone mentioned to me recently that Vintage Classics are bringing back a number of Gibbons' non-CCF works - a glance at their website indicates that Westwood is one of them, also Starlight, plus, perhaps inevitably, Conference at Cold Comfort Farm, and a load of others.

And on women writers deserving of rediscovery, here is one that I didn't realise had to be rediscovered... Elizabeth Mackintosh: woman of mystery who deserves to be rediscovered. Josephine Tey, an 'all but forgotten novelist'? We also feel that Mr McCrum does not, perhaps, draw an entirely clear distinction between 'rediscovering' a writer and 'intrusively trying to uncover what their reclusiveness concealed'.

Oliver Burkeman, Being hyperconscious of how you're presenting yourself is a hindrance, not a help.

It's strange, actually, that this pressure to constrain how we present ourselves should be increasing in the age of the web, which offers unprecedented opportunities to benefit professionally from being the unfocused, multifaceted people we really are. Far more than before, if your passions are gherkin-pickling and freelance legal research, there's at least a chance of making both pay.

I dunno. I suppose it's nice that people are picking up their lives and living in nice interior-designed spaces in Kabul, and I'm not convinced that this is entirely a case for the Ponceyness Police, but nevertheless there's something a bit uncomfortable about the whole thing, given the context.

Hollywood's classic murders, stalkings and deceptions would never have been possible had today's technology been around. Has this guy never sat through one of those Orange 'Don't Let A Mobile Phone Spoil Your Movie' PSAs before the main feature?

Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (because identifiably female names don't get taken seriously by publishers)

George Eliot (because Marion Evans has acquired a certain reputation that might militate against her fiction being considered on its merits)

Rebecca West (*It's complicated* - but to do with Cicely Fairfield's association with the scandalous radical feminist journal The Freewoman and protecting her family from any fall-out)

Constance Spry (because she was living with a man whose first wife wouldn't divorce him, and took his surname).

Yeah, all of them just totally sleazy and dubious, right? or they'd have used their real names.

The 'anonymity vs real name' seems to have surfaced yet again, something to do with Google Profiles?

My false binary, let me show u it.

While there may be temporary and even shared pseudonymous identities, most people who use pseudonyms use them over time, at least in specific contexts, and it's possible to track their history, assess their reputation and this is just as much an identity as the fetishised Real Name.

Some guy has apparently been expressing shock and awe that Ravelry users deploy pseudonyms and it's not a seething pit of flame-wars and trolling. Well, that would be because of the above factor. (He contrasts it with FaceBook as being site of meaningful interaction: one of the problems with FB is that it assumes that social lives are a grey plasticine blob of similarity, whereas, you know, family gatherings and get-togethers down the pub for most people involve different people and different social personae.)

There are quite a lot of people out there who share My Real Name (and the most common alternative spelling of same). This name is sufficiently common that some people have, in the past, believed me to be two people of the same name working at the same institution and doing remarkably similar things. How is knowing the Real Name (and what is the Real Name, anyway?) so much superior? (Except, of course, that if you bear me a grudge you may want to have negative impacts on my life outside whatever fora in which we had our encounters, e.g. at my place of employment. This does not strike me as a compelling argument for not using context-specific handles.)

I have been obliged to register on sites which do not allow one to register as a one-word handle, but will accept any old nonsense providing it's represented as 'first name' and 'surname' (and let's not get into the cultural assumptions embedded there...)

So how do you tell what is a Real Name? Birth certificate? deed poll showing legal assumption of new name? I don't see that this is feasible.

I see I posted at some length during an earlier iteration of this failure to get it.

Was not entirely sure of the appropriateness of the front page of Guardian G2 for the beginning of Spain week (we've had Germany, we've had France, this is part of a series about our European neighbours) - "Bienvenidos a Barcelona": A week in the life of a Spanish family.

Last time I was in Barcelona (which I since worked out was rather longer ago than I thought, sometime in the 90s), it all seemed pretty emphatic about Catalan identity. And the family in question turn out not to be locals but from Galicia.

Catalan nationalism does seem to be a bit in a state of all more complicated, but I'm not sure how much I trust that article and it doesn't seem that up to the minute.

But what do I know.

(Have recently been using an Austrian website for a rather useful bibliography: it gives 'England' as the sole pick in its drop down menu for limiting the search to the UK.... Tut.)

Because mummified heads are always popular around these parts:
Skull of French king Henri IV returned to royal family after 200 years. Head looted centuries ago by revolutionaries given to chief of Bourbon dynasty after being identified by team of scientists.

Henri died in 1610 but his skull was pillaged from a grave near Paris during the 18th-century revolution that ousted the monarchy. Since 1955 it has been kept in a tax collector's attic.

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Awwww, bless: British Council films explaining cricket, fair play and democracy to the world are released online. Website with the digitised films here.

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I like this: Ellen Willis (1941-2006), 'radical leftist writer and thinker whose true loves were pop culture, feminism, pleasure, freedom, and countercultural politics': a site bringing together such of her work as is available online. I do have all three of her published collections, obtained over the years during a time when they were not so easy to find in the UK (I bought at least one during a trip to the USA in spite of my usual policy of not buying hardbacks when travelling).

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Electromagnetic quackery, let me show you some. While looking for images for a completely unrelated presentation, ( I came across these two gems )

Oft, my dearios, have I complained (yo, they b hearin the whinge from the Moon) of that journalistic habit of saying 'secret' for things that are, in fact, merely private or little-known (little known at least to them, hem-hem). I.e. the general public do not have access (unless, say, the building is opened once a year or whatever). And why should they, they don't have access to my front room, either, and the existence of my front room is not a secret.

I may also have complained, as an archivist/historian, about people failing to differentiate the views of individuals as individuals from their expression of the position of some organisation or institution which they were representing, or even their views on the latter as communicated in private correspondence rather than as a public statement. And that these are different things, and indeed, one of the things that makes being an archivist/historian so fascinating.

There are many things that do not take place in secret which nonetheless have a presumption that they are not being broadcast to the multitudes. (Though those people who hold TMI mobile phone conversations audible to entire railway carriages, buses, etc, either did not get the memo or were absent - possibly due to those TMI symptoms? - on the day the class was held.) An invitation-only meeting is not 'secret' (unless the invites also say 'tell no-one' &/or 'eat after reading').

There are also things which are not private and not secret which are addressed to a particular group. Which may be cryptic to, or misunderstood by, people outside the group, who are nonetheless not prohibited from seeing/hearing these things. And let's not forget, quite possibly intensely boring to the outsider.

People have conversations in public spaces which are not open to everybody in that particular bit of public space - although, if the conversation is 'how do we find the Tube station?' or similar, they may be quite glad if a passerby intervenes.

Okay, if one hears something particularly juicy or amusing or simply WTF from some wally yelling into his mobile for the world to hear, one may pass it on or even post it in one's LJ/DW/on Facebook. Though as the person was presumably a complete stranger, in a non-attributable fashion.

But, it seems to me, that there is, in fact, an understanding about public space that it's divided up in a multitude of subtle ways and that it's not a free for all and there are rules of conduct and ways of negotiating it.

(How much of this is inflected by my being English, deponent knoweth not.)

There are also different levels of information about us out there, some of which we have control over and some of which we don't.

All this is possibly yet another, longwinded, tl:dr, set of thoughts about the pernicious tendency to assume that social networking is about aspiring to a homogenised blur rather than a set of different venues and negotiated places in public or semi-public spaces, and that it's not weird to want to keep things distinct.

Just as one may feel that one does not have a single monolithic identity but one that is, to various degrees, context-dependent.

Today has been, after an overcast start, an absolutely glorious day of sunshine and blue skies -

And an extremely strong cold wind.

Today we did the English-language tour of the Rathaus, which takes municipal pomposity of the later C19th in architecture and interior design to hitherto undreamed-of levels (more rooms than Buckingham Palace, they tell you - and no-one even lives in it, I so strongly suspect that an awful lot of those rooms are meagre cubbyholes for underpaid government clerks). And okay, Hamburg does have a long long history as a free port city and member of the Hanseatic League, but by the time they were doing that building, it was part of the new unified Germany. Would I be excessively cynical to wonder if the newly federated states were not altogether oblivious of the size of each others' Rathaus and engaged in a certain amount of competition?

Thence to St Nicholas, where I was persuaded to take the lift up the spire in the belief that there would only be narrow niches to look out from. In fact it was lacy stonework tracery and I spent the time cowering as close to the centre of the space as I could manage.

We also did the documentation centre on the evils of the years 1933-1945 in the crypt, and I was extremely moved and touched by the photos that the locals took of bombing damage, which was illegal to photograph or describe in any way under the Nazi regime, but which ordinary people documented nonetheless.

Then, after some difficulty in finding anywhere to have lunch, we went to the Miniatur Wunderland, which partner's brother had been particularly keen to see. In spite of the timed tickets, it was extremely chocca. Quite fun, and a lot of perhaps obsessive work has gone into it, but on grounds of aesthetics rather than realism, I personally think if you have lots of model railway lines on lots of different levels in a landscape, there should be more model trains actually whizzing around them at any given time, even if you eschew the amusing possibility of collisions, actually or closely averted.

We then went to the station to book tickets for Schleswig for tomorrow, and just as well we did, as it turned out that trains, or at least available trains, were a lot fewer than we had anticipated.

A note on food: this is the SRS asparagus season (it was just starting up when I was in Ghent), and everywhere restaurants offering huge plates of spargel with hollandaise sauce &/or melted butter, and boiled new potatoes, with ham/schnitzel/salmon etc, or just on its ownio, and I have been pigging out on huge immensely urgent phallic stalks of white asparagus, yum.