It's Always More Complicated

The longform patriarchs, and their accomplices: Beyond the white male canon: Bernardine Evaristo’s New Statesman/Goldsmiths Prize Lecture offers a manifesto for the creation of a new, inclusive literary landscape:

This essay notes that novels by women and about women are often demeaned by the longform patriarchs and their accomplices, as “domestic”, even today, even when they are not. And even if they are, the domestic sphere is where most of us live out the majority of our lives, so what, exactly, is inferior about it? On the other hand, when male novelists write about the domestic sphere, they are considered to be ruminating on the meaning of life, the “human condition”, the state of the nation, the universe, everything.

It might appear that a certain kind of longform patriarch, and his accomplices, who have looked down their noses at everyone else since time immemorial, are on their way out, especially when some of them have been heard to proclaim that the novel is dying – and even dead. So what hope is there for them? They have consigned their own careers to an early grave. Perhaps they have no idea about the state of the novel, because they still mainly read identity novels by and about people like them. They are the true identarians who have no idea that the novel is thriving because of the fresh perspectives and narratives infusing it with new ideas, stories, cultures, life – because they don’t actually read them.

The forgotten female writers of Play for Today: 'If you failed, it was pretty public':

Apart from the masculinity of the commissioning apparatus and the shortage of women in the feeder medium of theatre, another reason for the invisibility of women may have been that feminism, though clearly a form of politics, did not fit easily into the series’ more Westminster-centric definitions of power and opposition.

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How egg freezing got rebranded as the ultimate act of self-care: The procedure has gotten a makeover thanks to fertility startups, but some doctors are pushing back on efforts to appeal to younger women.

On average, egg freezing costs $15,000-$20,000 a cycle, including medication, treatment and storage, and the average patient undergoes two cycles. “If you consider the economics of that, what a terrible investment, to spend $15K to get a 15% chance,” said Gwen Schroeder, a documentary photographer and film-maker based in Brooklyn.
....
The vast majority of patients who undergo the procedure don’t end up using their frozen eggs. The usage rate for frozen eggs ranges from about 3% to 9%. For this reason, women contemplating egg freezing can find themselves in a bind. The younger they are when they freeze, the better the likelihood that they could have a successful pregnancy, but the lower the likelihood that those eggs will get used. The older they are, the higher the likelihood that those eggs will get used, but the lower the chance of successful pregnancy.

(From 2017, but I doubt it's that much out of date) Why Giving Birth Is Safer in Britain Than in the U.S.: The U.S. and the U.K. used to have the same rate of women dying in pregnancy and childbirth. Now, Britain’s is almost three times lower. Here’s what they’re doing right:

Underlying these contrasts is a different view of the medical responsibility to mother and child. In the U.S., laudable aspirations for infant safety have intensified focus on the fetus — more sonograms, continuous fetal heart monitoring and granting rights to the unborn. But these measures may at times distract attention from the mother’s health.

By contrast, British medical professionals are legally required to prioritize a mother’s wellbeing if both she and her baby are in danger. They’re trained to stabilize mom first, and then tend to baby. “That sense that the woman (while the fetus is in utero) is the agent in charge is in place. I think that’s the right way,” said Denis Walsh, a midwife and associate professor in midwifery at the University of Nottingham. “Otherwise you start undermining individual women’s autonomy and then you go down a slippery slope.”

A group of more than 100 Italian women have asked prosecutors to investigate who is behind the burial for nearly a decade of foetuses in graves marked with the names of their mothers in a cemetery in Rome:

The burials are permitted because of a law updated in 1990 from one that was created more than 50 years earlier by Benito Mussolini’s fascist regime. Anti-abortion, Catholic and far-right groups have for years pushed for the creation of “fields of angels”, often finding support among local politicians or those working within public institutions.

But Turco, who was health minister between 2006 and 2008, activists and gynaecologists say they were not aware of the practice of naming mothers on the graves until now.

“The question of privacy is serious and we need to find out who’s responsible,” Turco said. “But it’s obvious that this initiative is the fruit of a mobilisation brought forward by Catholic groups that we perhaps underestimated – not just in Rome, but across Italy. They probably constructed relationships within the institutions and so found complicity.”

The British creativity I grew up with – in pop, fashion, poetry, the visual arts and the novel – has almost always come from outside the mainstream

A codslap (one of several) delivered to That Person Woezing About Diversity = End of Civilisation, or something.

Which sounded awfully like those wails whenever the playing field does actually become even a little more level...

I fear I have more than once perorated in this venue that the place where creative things are happening is not the mainstream/socially accepted spaces, it is among people who are vagabond players and writing things that 'only a novel' and other despised forms written by despised out-groups.

During the conference last week I consoled another scholar who was deploring the fact that at Large Conference Pertaining to Their Disciplinary Field the panels on their rather innovative work using new approaches/texts were seldom outnumbered by the audience, while down the hall, Same Old Same Old On Same Old Texts By Same Old Canonical DWMs were packed to the doors. Lo, said I, I am a historian, and innovations always start with half a dozen people being largely ignored and overlooked. (Dorothy Hodgkin doing crystallography in a curtained-off bit of corridor, e.g.)

Also, I went on, when I began in my little corner of history, there were about three other people doing work in the same general area, and I am not sure any of us had secure formal academic positions, plus maybe a few people flying under flags of convenience. And now the field has positively exploded: and, I said, the Brash White Boys are coming in.

(Of course, they will rewrite the genealogy of the discipline, she adds cynically, but I did not do so at the time.)

Have been trying to resist moaning on about an exchange on a listserv I was engaged in over the weekend, because I seem to be being grumpy hedjog going 'these people NO NUFFINK' far too often these days, and it wasn't so much, in this instance, knowing nothing as having various assumptions about the transmission of knowledge and what knowledge was getting transmitted, on certain issues to do with health and bodily understanding.

So, anyway, was thinking about this, and how this sort of knowledge is fairly ungettatable unless you have people who were writing about in diaries and letters (and even then, could have been a taboo subject they didn't even talk about to themselves or close friends/relatives) or they survived into the era of oral history.

And, even if people had access to published texts (of which indeed there were a multitude at a range of discursive levels) what did they make of them and how did they relate them to their own bodies.

Which led me on to think about folk beliefs and popular understandings, and that if I had been thinking about this sort of thing several decades ago I might well have tried to get my paternal grandmother to record an interview (though I'm not sure how successful that would have been). Because the odd things I can remember her saying about various things that were clearly about some concept of the body and health and even, in my current state of knowledge, have some resonance with bygone theories, suggest that these were, in fact, lingering on into the post WWII era.

Not that I should be surprised when there was a medical anthropology study done during the 70s in a Home Counties general practice which found that many patients were still basically operating on humoral theory.

There were a couple of things about blood that my pg used to say: 'vinegar dries your blood up' and 'it's bad blood' (of my not-infrequent nosebleeds) that make me think that something very similar was in play there.

This was well into the era when women's magazines (which were pretty much the only thing I remember her reading) were all about the up to date health info for their readership.

It's been linked everywhere and I don't feel like giving it hits but there was a lengthy post about Worldcon which amongst other gripes was 'OMG, Old People!'

As one of those greying beings who was flitting about the ExCel Centre -

- And whose first ever Worldcon it happened to be -

- Was, really, not best pleased.

It seemed to me, apart from the general ageism, to be making a dubious case that everybody over a certain age was a Benighted Dinosaur, and that (presumably therefore) everybody under a certain age was an Enlightened Being.

To which I pound my ebony walking stick on the floor, flourish my ear-trumpet, and set about me with an antimacassar set on stun.

I think we have sufficient evidence that age is not an identifying characteristic for racist, misogynist, homophobic, ableist (etc) trolls, so the idea that This Generation is Oh So Much Better than that older one over there is not really sustainable (particularly once you put ageism into that mix, no?).

While I concede that there are people who have been on the sff scene for a long time who could go up against the Bourbon Dynasty in a Learned Nothing and Forgotten Nothing Face-Off -

- am less than in any kind of sympathy with the Younger Person Who No It All and doesn't think that there is anything for them to learn.

How many books is too many books? What makes you a book hoarder? What do you do when you have too many?

This irritates me. Particularly when the ceiling for the designation 'Compulsive Book Hoarder' is a measly 1000.

I don't really think this article makes the necessary distinction between 'book hoarding' and people who keep books because Research! and Re-reading! and Future Reading! Sometimes I buy books either because who knows when I'll see another copy at affordable price or in order to have in case of future urgent desire to read or just running out of anything else to read.

I take bags of books to the local charity shops from time to time, I don't just sit on the ever-increasing pile - though I was looking at the shelves recently and thinking I might clear out some of the deadwood that I'm unlikely to read/re-read ever.

But I'm not sure there is a such a thing as 'too many books' except in the context of the contingencies of space to put them in.

My attention has been drawn to this article about OMG getting to 50 and growing old, which I'm actually finding quite annoying.

How many people can say, following a fall which (honestly) could surely have happened to anybody at anytime, like the moped/pedestrian crossing thing that happened to me in my 50s:

I’ve never regained an absolute trust that my body will automatically fall into line with my will: from now on it will falter and fail. I can no longer depend on it to function properly. This, it seems to me, is solid indication that my youth has ended and middle age begun.

To which I was thinking, no, this is a revelation that you have not been subject to a lot of the nigglesome and tiresome things about bodies to which the flesh is heir, even among those of us who would probably count as able-bodied.

Never, throughout my life, young or old, have I felt that my body will 'automatically fall into line with my will'. Migraines, menstruation, colds, fevers, food-poisoning, accidents, tripping on things, being unable to reach things on high shelves, being unable to lift more than a crtain weight, limitations on how fast I could run - all these were things which, will it as strongly as I might, I could not affect.

Surely very few people do feel that absolute surety? There must be some sense of limitation falling between the will and the capacity to embody it.

I've finally taken a look at that How Privileged Are You questionnaire, and I am -

Wow, very US-themed. (so many questions that are pretty much meaningless in UK context.)

So, particular generation.

Such, lack of international travel except possibly in a group.

When I was traveling in South Asia, back when, I was oft at that given moment the only person of my race in the airport departure lounge, train carriage, etc.

I have been randomly selected for secondary passport control checking. (And that's not counting the scary thing when changing planes in Moscow in '78.) I'm also not at all sure that being nervous in airport security lines is not one of those common nervous-making things in many people's lives, like dentists.

I regard it as a signifier of some kind of privilege to live in a city which has a decent public transport system and not to have to rely on a car.

I am also somewhat, no, make that exceedingly, irked, by the pick of 'You are heterosexual' rather than 'The relationship you are currently in conforms by outward show to society's notion of an appropriate heterosexual relationship'.

[A]University of Cambridge professor of modern German and comparative culture, Andrew Webber, branded the acclaimed literary novelist Philip Hensher "priggish and ungracious" for refusing to write an introduction to the academic's forthcoming guide to Berlin literature for free.

I do absolutely get this thing where people who make a living from writing are frustrated and annoyed about literary festivals, and a whole range of other 'institutions, organisations, literary prizes and events who expect authors to do things for very little or no money' for exposure or glory or just in order to Promote Cultural Values.

However, I suspect that differing expectations on either side of this transaction were in play. Academic culture runs a lot on doing stuff for free for credit points of other kinds. I have written book chapters for which my only reward was a free copy of the book (wheeeee).* I have read people's mss for publishers for no monetary reward but free copy of one of their books. I have read books in ms in order to provide a back-cover blurb for a free copy of the book when published. I referee articles for absolutely no reward but a conscious glow of virtue.

And, of course, you do not get paid when you publish academic articles. (These days, they ask you to front up considerable sums if you want your piece to be open access online.) I was deeply suspicious when an article in Guardian Weekend averred that during a period of financial stringency, 'Occasionally Gordon would manage to sell an academic essay'. There was a time when one got some meagre one-off sum for book chapters, but on the whole, academic essay writing is not a remumerative occupation. I suppose they might have been in a position when even tuppence ha'penny was a significant contribution to their budget...

Anyway, my feeling is that within the academic community if someone were to be asked to contribute a preface to some work within their field of interest, money would not be on their mind. (In my case, it would be did I want my name to be associated with it: I was once obliged to read an ms about which my only snap response was 'total waste of trees', which I doubt would have been usable cover copy.)

Different economies.

*Okay, now, thanks to ALCS, I do occasionally see some money from reproduction rights, all praise be to ALCS.

Richard J Evans on history, it's all more complicated and the national curriculum.

The problems of re-enactment as a form of historical research (though I can see that it has its virtues if integrated into a broader framework).

O dear: there was an article about the research in this book in the Weekend magazine last week, and, honestly, my dearios, I could not even be arsed to lift a sprat, I was sighing so deeply ('what is good is not new, and what is new is not good': it seemed very been there and done that). I think Emma Brockes pretty well nails it:

The complicating factor, of course, is that arousal does not always equal desire.
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[R]eading life through brain chemistry will get you only so far.

Two reviews of Liz Jones' autobiography: by Suzanne Moore and Barbara Ellen, and interview with Decca Aitkenhead. Or, the category of 'woman' is large, and contains multitudes.

I have a ghastly feeling that I may end up having to read this book, for a reasons some dr rdrz may wot of.

There was much that had me nodding and going 'uhhuh' in this article on TV docos by Mary Beard: the time it takes! the tedium and the repetition! But, really? her programme had an academic researcher for a couple of weeks? a proper, academic researcher? Lucky them. (Okay, I am embittered about this at the moment because I gave a fairly full response to a researcher who was trying to establish if [a certain surgical practice] was happening in the UK in the early C20th: which as far as one can ascertain, was an absolute no-no after the mid-1860s, though there is evidence of its continuing in North America. But subsequently heard from younger colleague that researcher has clearly been badgering other historians in order to find one to say that it was happening. All I can say, vibrators not involved.) But I share her hate on 'computer graphics of exploding volcanoes or B-list actors dressed up as Romans' (or the equivalents for my own dear period of interest, which tends to be 'irrelevant clip of black and white footage').

Val McDermid's more recent work is not in the generic areas I really go for, but I so concur with this:

Because it's sometimes easier to tell certain truths in a novel than through the lens of journalism or history, future readers who want to understand what living in the UK at the beginning of the 21st century was like will turn to our crime fiction. The main reason is the breadth of the lives we encompass. Murder doesn't just touch one social group. Victims and their friends and families; witnesses; killers; cops; the media – they're all sucked in to our stories, and we learn to understand their lives too.

The flipside of that expansiveness is that there's room for writers whose concern is clearly defined groups within our society. Stuart Neville writes about contemporary Belfast, but everything he says about the present is coloured by the city's history and the way lives have been distorted and disfigured by the Troubles. Anya Lipska has launched a series that promises to take us to the heart of London's Polish community. These novels offer us the exotic within the commonplace.

Reading a review of a book on the evils of sugar, I am less than impressed when the reviewer, though conceding that food manufacturers adding vast amounts of sugar to processed foods is a major issue, goes off into a diatribe about the eating habits of 'many British households' (yes, I'd like to have cites for that survey, wouldn't you?).

He claims that 'for a very large proportion of British children, eating is not a social activity at all' and that they are reduced to foraging in the fridge, reheating food in the microwave, because their households do not contain cooking equipment or a table for the family to sit round. They hardly ever see fresh food, which 'takes time to cook and therefore distracts from the distractions - sometimes called entertainment'.

Well, I can think of a lot of factors that might go to this, like living in rented accommodation that is inadequately equipped, and the ghastly stories one hears about the kinds of places councils place certain categories whom they nonetheless have an obligation to house.

Also, that the responsible adults in the household are working unsocial shifts and quite likely more than one job in order to actually have food in the refrigerator, and probably don't have energy over to go in for a great deal of cooking.

It's a very, very class-biased vision, and one with significant historical roots: we note that the supposedly feckless and improvident working class housewives investigated by the Fabian Women's Group in the early years of the C20th were found to be struggling with inadequate cooking and storage facilities.

I think somebody who is, apparently, a retired doctor, ought to consider the material circumstances that might lead to this state of affairs rather than treating it as a moral issue, or indeed, assuming that there is only one way to eat proper.

Furthermore, as a Waitrose-shopping North London, Guardian-reading woman, what strikes me about the local Waitrose is how very socially diverse the shoppers there are.