It's Always More Complicated

I initially saw this because somebody on Facebook posted the video: Boyfriend proposed during the marathon she trained 6 months for, and in the list of Inappropriate Times and Places to Propose, while she is actually running a marathon is very near the top, right? it's bad enough for bloke to be waiting with ring and maybe flowers at the finish line (for many observers, marathon proposals are about men stealing the spotlight).

Run, girl, run.

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To revert to that discussion about The Right Sort of Jawline and Breathing Properly the other day, TIL that mouth taping is (still) A Thing, and Canadian researchers say there’s no evidence that mouth taping has any health benefits and warn that it could actually be harmful for people with sleep apnea.

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Since I see this is dated 2020, I may have posted it before: but hey, let's hear it for C18th women scholars of Anglo-Saxon Elizabeth Elstob, Old English scholar, and the Harleian Library. I think I want to know more about her years in the household of Margaret Cavendish Bentinck (1715–1785), duchess of Portland, who I know better through her connection with Mrs Delany of the botanically accurate embroidery and collages of flowers.

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I like this report on the 'Discovery of Original Magna Carta' because it's actually attentive to the amount of actual work that goes into 'discovering', from the first, 'aha! that looks like it might be' to the final confirmation.

In case anyone hasn't seen it, a woman got a sexist message complimenting her on her appearance on LinkedIn (that's right, on a site that's for making professional contacts) from a senior male in the same profession. She called it out on Twitter and got the usual troll-back, including being called a Feminazi by the DM.*

So there is a lot of 'woez woez men are not allowed to give compliments anymore DETH OF SIVILIZASHUN' as per usual going on.

I think people need to think through what they're doing with a compliment.

a) You are genuinely praising something appropriate about a person in the context within which you are giving the compliment. (There are contexts within in which 'Looking Good!!!' may be entirely good ton: we just do not think a professional networking site is one of them.)

b) You think that you are in a position vis a vis the person where you're entitled to judge entirely irrelevant things about them and they should like it if your verdict is complimentary. Because POWER itsa compliment!!!

c) You are trying to ingratiate yourself with a person. See a) above if you do not want to evoke the cringe reflex.

This is brought to you by somebody who was described in the acknowledgements of an academic monograph as 'petite and charming' by somebody to whom I had given the extensive benefits of my professional expertise in the course of their archival research. This is not how it's done, folks!

*Though this may be considered an accolade? If there are backhanded compliments, maybe there are backhanded insults?

Current events have me thinking over my own experiences with sexual harassment and things which were not, in fact, sexual harassment.

I don't think it was just Being The 70s and me being young and naive that meant I didn't see work colleague The 70s Swinger as a harasser. The 70s Swinger might have indicated that he would love to make sweet horizontal music with one, but didn't pressure, took a refusal, and indicated that should one ever change one's mind, he'd be delighted to oblige. (There is a character like this in Kingsley Amis's otherwise fairly toxic novel, Take A Girl Like You - which totally against all sense and reason made it onto some list of Great Romantic Litfic, pass a sickbag - who indicates to the heroine that if she were ever interested in developing their relationship, that would be absolutely splendid, but doesn't harry her: and also points out to the protag that raping the heroine when she is incapably drunk is not a good thing to have done - we are not entirely sure whether the author takes the same view.)

I am not sure whether this was innate personal virtue or a result of having been involved in The Swinging Community, which one is given to understand was all about respecting people's boundaries and not being creepy (at least in its rhetorical claims).

Whereas in my next job, I was at a party in the associated Academic Centre, at which I was conversing with one of the academics, who kept trying to put his arm around me. Okay, I did not find him attractive, but even if I had, I would not have considered this appropriate behaviour in the light of venue, and degree of previous acquaintance, and would have reassessed any marks I'd previously awarded for attraction. Anyway, I kept detaching the arm and eventually walked away, and blow me, Harassing Academic went and complained to Former Line Manager (still ongoing Line Manager at that time) that I was being 'unfriendly'. And believe it or not, she conveyed this message and suggested I should resume conversing with him. WTF.

However, unlike the unfortunate students and postgrads in the centre, I was not obliged to be nice and suck it up.

There was also, probably around the same time, a late-middle-aged bloke who was mainly i/c audiovisual stuff and general housekeepery things. Who was wont to grab one in an ostensibly non-sexual way that was still inappropriate - I still remember the time he was running the video for an onsite conference, at which I was slightly late to a session already in progress, and he gripped my arm extremely hard and more or less dragged me to an empty seat (yeah, I know: most people would just point it out). There was a general unease that meant that I steered well of him clear at any work events at which the drink had been flowing.

It's not clear to me whether in either of the above instances there was any more intended than just this relatively innocuous yet deeply annoying violation of personal boundaries in public spaces: yet I would define these as harassment and 70s Swinger's expressed desire for Going The Whole Way on some mutually agreed occasion as not.

As I am sure has been remarked by more than one commentator, if a bloke is unclear as to the distinction between flirtation or harassment, he's probably Doin It Rong.

I was bothered by reading this the other day: U Be Dead is a TV drama based on the real-life case of a stalker and her victims.

This seems to me one of those tropes where the fictive presentation of same is inversely proportional to its real-life occurrence - see also, for another example, The Story of Adele H, also 'based on a true-life case'.

And I have been thinking that (probably) most rl instances of stalking are men-on-women. But the other way round seems to be more popular as a narrative trope (cf the Saracen lady who pursued her crusader from Jerusalem to London knowing only his name and whence he came).

And then it came to me while cleaning the kitchen today -

Woman stalking man = UNNATURAL!!! she is pathetic creature whom nobody could actually love anyway. The very fact that she is interested in a man who barely recognises her existence is a clear sign of pathology and her utter failure to conform to appropriate feminine role of waiting around like a flower for a bee to pollinate it.*

So the trope has creepy yet pathetic vibes.

Man stalking woman = ROMANCE!!! book after book and movie after movie and song after song tell us that if he only persists long enough in hounding her footsteps, making unwanted declarations, leaving embarrassing gifts, etc, she will melt into his arms, because Teh Wymmynz really like creepy stalker-like manifestations of devotion from men whose existence they have barely noticed. Or have noticed only to shudder.

Or am I missing something here?

*Except in the few cases when she is pursuing some male with whom there already exists a state of reciprocal passion but from whom she has been torn apart by events beyond either of their control, see Saracen lady above, at least in the version in Thomas B Costain's The Black Rose.

This guy, in fact, is on the coelocanth list for being a living fossil:
A Tory MP has bombarded the government's equalities watchdog with a series of extraordinary letters about race and sex discrimination, in a one-man campaign against "political correctness".:

In the latest of 19 letters sent since April 2008, and likely to dismay equal rights campaigners, Philip Davies asks Trevor Phillips, chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission: "Is it offensive to black up or not, particularly if you are impersonating a black person?"

Yet another guy who tells the world about his extreme activities and near-death experience doing same.

Stuart Jeffreys (yet again), along with the other characters in this incredibly icky anecdote:

At university I remember fancying an unattainable woman. For her birthday, I bought her a copy of Borges's Labyrinths. What a loser. My rival bought her split-crotch knickers, and was soon exchanging more with her than lecture notes.

Can you see what I did wrong yet? I sought, paternalistically, to buy her something I thought she should read, and at the same time tried to persuade her by the nature of the gift that I was the kind of cultured ponce she should be dating. But she didn't appreciate Borges or me imposing my (frankly superior) literary tastes on her. In one ill-considered purchase, I destroyed £6.99 of value and blew the chance to get into her unspeakably tacky knickers. True story.

Message from owner of scholarly list I subscribe to, forwarding a message from another list-member, asking can I 'look into this'.

'This' being a duff link to a paper posted on the list last week, for which
- no URL or page title is given
- on a subject which a moment's consideration might indicate is Not My Field except in the most tangential of ways.

But the author's first name is the same as mine!

Except, when I went to the list archives and looked for the title of the post the forwarded email related to, it's actually The Other Spelling and an entirely different surname.

How is it that I ended up doing this 'looking into'?

Probably the same set of nerve-endings that yesterday led me to get far too involved in trying to ascertain a rather opaque issue about a copyright holder, rather than simply digging out the address of the family of the individual whose papers the item was amongst as the enquirer requested: because I'm 99.9999 recurring certain that the person who created the file was not the person who created that specific item. Not that I found anything more definite. Person or persons unknown, alas.

I'm not sure if this is pedantry, a mongoose-like tendency to 'run and find out', or a mixture of both, which inconveniences me far more than anyone else.

Dept of No Shit, Rly? we'd never have guessed, what amazing things educational researchers can reveal to us:

Children's lives are being impoverished by the government's insistence that schools focus on literacy and numeracy at the expense of creative teaching, the biggest review of the primary school curriculum in 40 years finds today. Though I'm a bit beswozzled to imagine ways in which you could have genuinely creative teaching without some fairly solid base of literacy and numeracy. The headline actually suggests that it's the culture of tests (rather than what taught) which is impoverishing education.

Unesco unveils its first comprehensive database of endangered tongues.

It is known as The Tin Book and was co-authored by a fascist-sympathising Italian artist who, 100 years ago today, said all libraries should be destroyed.

With wonderful irony, the British Library announced yesterday that it had bought an edition of the book, an artefact that is at once rare, unusual and significant.

The library has spent £83,000 on this pivotal work in the development of the Italian Futurist art movement. Entitled Parole in Libertá Futuriste Olfattive Tattili Termiche (Words in Futurist, Olfactory, Tactile, Thermal Freedom), it may not have the snappiest of titles, but the 27-page metal book is a thing of considerable beauty and exemplifies the mad dynamism and energy of the Futurists.

Footnotey to both the above, or at least, a connection, discovered quite recently (review in the TLS) that Venetian is not a dialect of Italian, but a distinct (and older) language. A number of Venetian words have been assimilated into English, presumably picked up as souvenirs on the Grand Tour.

Alexander Chancellor (scroll down) points out that the BNP's new CD of of' songs celebrating British wartime patriotism features artists from groups it has traditionally disparaged as neither British nor patriotic enough; for most of them are either Jewish or black.... The BNP would seem to have scored something of an own goal'. Larfing like drayne over here. Apparently Dame Vera Lynn, at 90-something, is yay pissed off and going to law over being included, bless.

Also bless, Ann Billson: On film: Where are the meaty comedy roles for women? And I totally recc her little book of collected film reviews, Spoilers, published by lulu.com. Anyway, give the woman a C A Lejeune memorial award.

The problem with putting people into ticky-tacky boxes and assuming that defines them: Sue Tilley, who the media just plain did not get when Lucien Freud's painting of her broke price records;

Tilley's bizarre double life is quite extraordinary. She started working at Camden job centre in her early twenties, made a friend there who took her out clubbing, and within a few weeks she'd met Leigh Bowery. He was just "a London boy" at the time but he became the founder of "London's Studio 54", the club Taboo, as well as a performance artist, fashion designer, pop star and model for Freud, and Tilley says that knowing him changed her life. "He'd have been jealous about the painting. It'd all have been down to him, of course. But then, to be honest, it was, really."

She wrote Bowery's biography after he died of Aids in 1994, and "the funny thing is that Hello! did an interview with me after the sale where they photographed me in a frumpy dress looking like an old woman in some house they hired in Kilburn and a film director read it on a plane and now he's got in touch saying he wants to make my book into a film".

But then, as Tilley says, "that sort of stuff is always happening to me". Every new generation that discovers Leigh Bowery also discovers Sue Tilley. Her newest celebrity friend is "Mark from Westlife - he's obsessed with Leigh and he found me on Facebook and invited me round to dinner". And after I've finished grilling her on her year, I turn my tape recorder off, and she suddenly remembers about the film she was in, Flashbacks of a Fool, starring Daniel Craig. That's her second Daniel Craig film (previously she was 'Woman in the Colony Rooms' in Love is the Devil, about Francis Bacon). And through it all, there's always been the job centre.

"People are so snobby about it and I think, 'You're the fools! Who's got a pension? I'm not the one going to be redundant in this recession.' And, anyway, there's nothing wrong with having a proper job, is there?"

Missing the point somewhat? From letters to the Observer Review Section:

Last week I read something that left me very depressed: beauty pageants at universities around the country.

What is worrying is the absence of women speaking out about the sinister trends. Something has horribly gone wrong in the last 20-30 years with regards to attitudes to women and women's rights in this country.

But a really, really annoying letter in the main section doesn't appear to be available online - basically, men don't really want kidz, women make them father them, the men get used to it, but women have Ever So Much Deeper connections with their offspring, blah-de-blah-de-blah-de-blah employment parental leave etc etc etcd.

Yoko Ono: that sounds like a serious traumatic life.

Dear Lionel: we so second this desire: The clamour of verbiage in my head can become a tyranny. I yearn to shut up. And we note that the Observer now let's greengrocer's edit it's subheading's.

Dept of really, really creepy people who turn up in groups at funerals of people they don't even know. Lifez: they should getz sum.

And seen during the week: Nicole Kidman was persuaded to play the didgeridoo on German TV. Okay, this may be really culturally insensitive on her part and she should perhaps know better, and might even deserve a sound codslapping, but I think I might also award null points to 'award-winning actor, screenwriter and Aboriginal language teacher called Richard Green' who delivered himself of this diatribe:

"It bastardises our culture. I will guarantee she has no more children."
....
"It is not meant to be played by women," Green continued, "because it will make them barren."

Feeling somewhat less blah today - the gusty blustery wind seems refreshing and bracing, at least while the sun is out.

Also revivifying: delicious tapas lunch with rahael - excellent company and conversation.

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About 90,000 pages of manuscripts, field notes, photographs and sketches connected with Charles Darwin are being placed online, where they can be viewed free.

Digging up treasures: Kew shows off plant pictures in new gallery. I was going to say 'Yay! and look how many of them were women, and, like Marianne North, who has her own gallery at Kew, made daring expeditions to paint flowers in situ all over the world', and then I came across this gem of aaaaaaarghness:

One artist well represented in the opening exhibition is Rory McEwen, who died aged only 50 in 1982 but whose skills influenced many botanical artists and whose paintings of tulips became so famous that one was named after him.

He has also been credited with inspiring more men to get involved. Sherwood said: "Botanical art had this kind of elderly spinster by the kitchen sink reputation and he had a vision, a different vision, but he also studied the past. He showed it wasn't a cissy thing if you like, an effeminate or female thing."

Men molest dolphin - and not one hundred miles from the family home.

I believe that it's relatively common for people to dream about being naked or inadequately clad in circumstances in which this is far from appropriate.

How common is it to dream that one is in some kind of work or social situation, adequately covered but by a far from elegant dressing-gown?

Last night was not the first time I have dreamt that I am wandering around in my dressing-gown, in this particular instance in what appeared to be a workplace (except, nothing like my actual workplace). And even having someone dash up to me demanding to talk to me about their research as a matter of urgency, and me pointing out that the time was hardly suitable, I was still in my dressie.

Mind you, there was also a passage in the dream about a series of art installations that were being done themed on members of staff, and much to my rather flattered delight one was for me - it was like a small room in a museum that you could look into with various bits and pieces (including , for some reason, several coats and jackets of mine that have long since gone wherever garments go to their last repose, or at least the charity shop, one of them at least something I hardly ever wore) on a coatrack, along with the table with an archive catalogue on it, some bookshelves and a chair.