Philobiblon

If so, you might want to read this book review on H-Travel. The book is about the encounters between souvenir sellers in Sumatra and Western tourists, and sounds like many a scene that I’ve seen.

In fact as I write, eight masks, from eight countries look down from the wall at me. Those are Indonesia, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, China, Tibet (although bought in India), Egypt, Thailand and southern India. I know they’re tourist “tat”, but they’re still evocative!

A lot of what I read is about gender issues, sexuality and similar, and an email exchange off-blog recently made me think about why these are valuable beyond simply the information they contain. Studying these areas provides a continual reminder that other cultures, other times, other people don’t see the world in the same way you do and make you realise the unthinking assumptions that underlie anyone’s world view.

Looking at Lovemaking: Constructions of Sexuality in Roman Art 100BC – AD 250, by John R Clarke certainly does that. It examines artistic representations of sex in Roman art, rejecting in general a reliance on texts, invariably written by elite males, and tries to use the details in the art, its nature and distribution, to get at an understanding of how other Roman groups saw sex.

One possible reaction was laughter, although a very different laughter to the embarrassed titters of a school group when sex-ed comes around. So the famous Pompeii Priapus has an apotropaic function at the entrance to the passageway into the house, to ward off the Evil Eye.

Since a small penis was considered beautiful, a large penis, as with a dark skin, blonde hair, deformities and other departures from the Roman ideal, was a cause for mocking, powerful laughter. (For the Romans compassion for difference or disability was not an admirable characteristic.) “”Art from both the Hellenic and Roman period frequently represented dwarfs, hunchbacks, or people with enlarged heads; such use of malformations in art for the sake of comedy is quite common”. (p. 238)

Talking about a similar figure from the Timgad Northwest Baths, of a macrophallic Ethiopian: “Levi points out that in antiquity people believed that atopia or unbecomingness dispelled the Evil Eye, … as well as normal beings represented in indecent attitudes, making vulgar gestures or noises … Laughter is the opposite pole of the anguish produced by the dark forces of evil”. (p. 131)

Priapus is also seen often, for the same reason, at crossroads.

So that was perhaps the main reason for “unbecoming” depictions of lovemaking, a category that would not correspond in any way to our classifications, or indeed, as Clarke points out, our ideas of “explicitness” or “soft-core/hard-core”. Priapus was “nothing core”.

Clarke argues that the Suburban Baths at Pompeii, where containers for clothes left by customers were identified by a series of explicit little paintings, provide an escalating scale of Roman shock. Pretty bad was anything that affected the purity of the mouth, particularly for men. “It was the organ of speech and above all the organ of public oratory. Social interactions also focused on the clean mouth, since it was customary for social equals to kiss when greeting each other … In invective literature, the worst possible insult is to accuse a man of fellating another man, and the worst possible threat against a man is that of forcing him to fellate someone.” Even worse was providing the same service for a woman. (p. 224)

A male accepting penetration was even worse, although there was no shame in being the penetrator. (Much like in many Middle Eastern cultures today.) The most extreme painting in the baths has five participants combining all of these, supposed, on Clarke’s reading, to provoke helpless laughter.

But sexual depictions could also have other readings. Clarke suggests that the paintings in many of the Pompeii villas, up to the richest, often mixed more or less indiscriminately with non-sexual images, were simply reading sexual art as part of the expected range in an educated, discerning collection. As the gift of Venus, sexual pleasure was something a rich person might expect to enjoy in abundance.

Even in the famous Pompeii Lupanar (brothel), he argues the depictions of sex, usually read as being indications of services offered, are actually depictions of luxurious aristocratic lovemaking in a place where nothing like that was on offer. “The profile of the sex-for-sale business that emerges is one of freedmen buying slaves (both male and female) specifically for use as prostitutes…. The range of prices for these prostitutes’ sexual services varied from 2 asses (the cost of a cup of common wine) to 16 asses.”

The paintings are also a reminder that the Romans had almost no concept of privacy as we understand it. Clarke argues that in the famous Warren Cup, the young servant boy looking out of the scene probably represents the viewer, but in other cases servants are shown in rooms where lovemaking is occurring, going about their business and ignoring the sex. He argues that this is again an indication of luxury – the servants, usually young and beautiful, adding to that.

This is not a very readable work (anyone looking for titillation will be seriously disappointed); the author is setting out a detailed academic arguments, but I found it well worth ploughing through, for the understanding it gives for ancient objects that are still treated with discomfort, disdain, and even disgust, in academic contexts that should know better.

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I might note as a postscript that the book presents some lovely examples of Victorian utter misreadings, some of which persist until today. So a room with a painting of a couple on a bed on one side and on the other showing three women is interpretted as “on the right a woman consults a female panderer; on the left she gets her wish – a male prostitute. At best, this interpretation rests on flimsy visual evidence; at worst, it reveals Victorian notions that prostitution must be at the root of any representation of a man and woman enjoying sex.” (p. 105)

Similar the House at IX, 5, 16 at Pompei… August Mau supposed that “the four erotic paintings of room ft (a fifth is destroyed) could be put only in a room of a building where sex was for sale. He implies that no decent person would have such pictures in his bedroom. Mau’s construction of ‘decency’ for the Pompeian owner and his guests is, of course, highly suspect. As a 19th-century Christian gentleman of the Victorian period, Mau was the product of an acculturation with regard to sex that could find even the glimpse of a woman’s ankles ‘indecent’.” (p. 178-9)

Scholarship since then has, I think, in general greatly improved, although I’m rather less confident about popular understanding.

Just found a fascinating new e-text, Making Both Ends Meet: The Income and Outlay of New York Working Girls, by Sue Ainslie Clark and Edith Wyatt, New York, The Macmillan Company, 1911.

It presents a good argument to be thankful for living in the 21st century:

“Lucy Cleaver, a young American woman of twenty-five, … had entered one of the New York department stores at the age of twenty, at a salary of $4.50 a week.

In the course of the five years of her employment her salary had been raised one dollar. She stood for nine hours every day. If, in dull moments of trade, when no customers were near, she made use of the seats lawfully provided for employees, she was at once ordered by a floor-walker to do something that required standing.

During the week before Christmas, she worked standing over fourteen hours every day, from eight to twelve-fifteen in the morning, one to six in the afternoon, and half past six in the evening till half past eleven at night. So painful to the feet becomes the act of standing for these long periods that some of the girls forego eating at noon in order to give themselves the temporary relief of a foot-bath. For this overtime the store gave her $20, presented to her, not as payment, but as a Christmas gift.

The management also allowed a week’s vacation with pay in the summer-time and presented a gift of $10.

After five years in this position she had a disagreement with the floor-walker and was summarily dismissed.

She then spent over a month in futile searching for employment, and finally obtained a position as a stock girl in a Sixth Avenue suit store at $4 a week, a sum less than the wage for which she had begun work five years before. Within a few weeks, dullness of trade had caused her dismissal. She was again facing indefinite unemployment.

Her income for the year had been $281. She lived in a large, pleasant home for girls, where she paid only $2.50 a week for board and a room shared with her sister. Without the philanthropy of the home, she could not have made both ends meet.

It was fifteen minutes’ walk from the store, and by taking this walk twice a day she saved carfare and the price of luncheon. She did her own washing, and as she could not spend any further energy in sewing, she bought cheap ready-made clothes. This she found a great expense. …

After giving practically all her time and force to her work, she had not received a return sufficient to conserve her health in the future, or even to support her in the present without the help of philanthropy. She was ill, anæmic, nervous, and broken in health.”

I have been reasonably restrained this month, but did splash out at the OUP sale, which produced the following bargains:

* England: an archaeological guide, Timothy Darvill, Paul Stamper and Jane Timby, which reminds me that one of these days I must get to Grime’s Graves in Norfolk, which are not burial places but Neolithic flint mines. Worked between 3,000BC and 1,900BC, there are traces of at least 350 shafts spread over nine hectares, the guide says.

“Calculations suggest that 1,000 tons of overburden was removed to create a single shaft, which yielded approximately 8 tons of nodular flint. The exploitation of the mine could have been undertaken over a period of two to three months by a workforce of 15 to 16 people. If all the flint won from the mine was converted into axes in an efficient manner something like 10,250 blades could have been produced; even at worst over 6,000 axes could have been made. The whole site may have produced between 2.5 million and 5 million axes during its working life.” (p. 232-3)

That’s what you call an industry, at a time well before you’d expect to be using the word.

* Oxford Archaeological Guides: Southern France, Henry Cleere

* The Enigma of Easter Island, John Flenley and Paul Bahn

* The Renaissance Bazaar: From the Silk Road to Michelangelo, Jerry Brotton. The blurb says it “explodes the myth of the European Renaissance as a founding moment of cultural superiority; it was the time when East and West encountered each other as equals”. Sounds like it should be a good companion to the Turks exhibition.

* A Land of Liberty: England 1689-1727 Julian Hoppit (because I’m unable to resist a cheap reference book).

* Agnew Bowker’s Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England, David Cressy. (More on this soon.)

Purchased elsewhere:

* Behsharam (Shameless), a play by Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti, bought as a small gesture of solidarity for the author, whose latest production was stopped by Sikh religious protests. A Guardian review of this play here.

* North Korea: Another Country, Bruce Cumings, because having been there around 10 years ago, I want to catch up on the latest.

* Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism, by Susan Jacoby, because it would be nice to think there was one.

… so just a couple of quick offerings:

Since Alexander the Great keeps popping up, I’ll note an interesting website, “Beyond Renault”, which looks at fictional representations of him after you-know-who. (Hat-tip to The Little Professor.)

And since I’m in this part of the world, I have to mention a fascinating post on Rhine River about Catalhoyuk, the famous Neolithic settlement in Turkey. It suggests the village/town was not a place you’d want to spend your holidays.

On a feminist note, Picturing Women “explores how women are figured, fashioned, turned into portraits, and told about in words and pictorial narrative”. The online version of a gallery show, it has some fearfully vicious images – check out particularly the caricatures. Some can be sent as e-postcards. (Hat-tip to Scribbling Woman.)

Finally, some advice from Mark Twain: “Write without pay until somebody offers pay. If nobody offers within three years the candidate may look upon his circumstances with the most implicit confidence as a sign that sawing wood is what he was intended for.” (From the Freelance daily newsletter)

The second part of the RA Turks exhibition that particularly took my fancy was the gallery dedicated to Mehmet II, the conqueror of Constantinople. It is one of those cases when you realise turning your historical lens around 180 degrees produces interesting thoughts. Usually, of course, we are thinking about 1453 as the end, final and definitive, of the “Roman” empire, but what happened was the expansion of a culturally rich, booming empire across an important psychological point.

The commentary says that with the city repopulated with a multicultural, multi-ethnic mix, it resumed its place as a great cultural centre.

There is evidence of this in display of a few of the books that Mehmet commissioned, written in Greek, Latin, Arabic and Persian. Notable is a gorgeous map of Europe (pretty accurate) based on Ptolemy’s Geography, by a Greek scholar who had converted to Islam, and two histories, one by another Greek Kritoboulos and the other by one of Mehmet’s secretaries, Turstan Bey, both of which compare the Ottoman Sultan to Alexander the Great.

They’ve arrived. No, I don’t mean the Turks, but the hordes of visitors at Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years: 600—1600 AD. It was like a rugby game in there today, albeit a very polite one.

But the exhibits, if not perhaps the exhibition, deserve the attention.

I only had an hour to spare, and so concentrated on two sections. Doing it in parts, if you possibly can, is undoubtedly the way to go; the span is so broad, the flood of empires of which you’ve never heard before (or at least I certainly hadn’t) so overwhelming.

I learnt that the people called the Turks first appear in history in the 6th century AD, when they established ties with the Western Wei dynasty (535-51) in China. They are, on the Silk Road, at the very crossroads of the world, as is made clear in rooms two and three, where all of the exhibits are religious, but pick your religion. There’s Buddhism, Nestorian Christianity*, Manichaeism, Mazdaism (a local form of Zoroastrianism), and some of the carved stone statues (used as gravemarkers) look distinctly animist to me, although that’s not specifically mentioned that I saw.

Marking graves with stones was one of the characteristics that continued through centuries and religions. I was taken with a humble gravestone, a triangular lump of basalt worked only on one side to produce a flat surface. It was scratched, almost graffitied, with a Nestorian cross, and the label said “identifies the deceased, a Turkic maiden, and her death year, ‘the year of the dragon’ using a 12-year animal cycle adopted by the Turks”.

(NOTE TO CURATOR: we want names! This maiden wasn’t anonymous when she was buried, why should she be now?)

It is displayed with several similar gravestones, and a note that many of these were found in Semirechye (modern Kakakstan and Krygyzstan). I will confess I was unaware of a country of the former name and I only got eight Google hits – is it maybe a quasi-autonomous republic of somewhere? They weren’t clear. Anyone who knows, please comment! (If it is a country, is this a record minimum for Googling?) (ADDITION: I meant Kakastan – sorry I realise this wasn’t very clear!)

One of the similar gravestones, from 1302, is dated “according to the era of Alexander the Great”, showing how his influence lingered in the region, as I’d previously learnt at the Musee Guimet.

Opposite were some stakes of a form that I’ve never seen before. Carefully shaped into an octagonal cross-section, up to a metre or so in length, covered in writing (Uighur), they seem to have been driven into the floor of temples to record the contributions of benefactors. One temple in Khocho seems to have been entirely founded by a woman, but again, no name is given!

This delightfully eclectic period seems to have come to an end in the late 900s, when there were mass conversions to Islam and significant migrations.

I said the exhibits were great, but sadly not so the exhibition. Perhaps it is showing signs of the internal wrangles at the RA – the people-flow seems very badly arranged (objects that can be seen from all sides only have labels on one, crowding everyone together), the print on the labels is far too small, so the RA visitors, who aren’t on average on the young side, were almost pressing their faces up to the surface to read them, and the explanatory panels so packed with names, dates and times as to be almost incomprehensible – a dictionary reference rather than an explanation.

Still, the objects are wonderful – go anyway!

*There’s a great deal on Nestorian Christianity in China on this site.

Julia Gillard has withdrawn from the contest for the leadership of the Australian Labor Party. That’ll teach her: next time she’ll put apples in the fruit bowl, (except of course that kitchen photo will pursue her forever).

Lenny Ann Low says: “There are times when even the most cynical of us have unavoidable patriotic, lump-in-the-throat moments … ”

Ah, no.

But if you want to be cheered up, particularly is you are a sub-editor (copy-editor for Americans), check out The Onion for Someday, I will copy-edit the great American novel.

The first essay in the Yourcenar collection on which I posted yesterday is a comparison of the state of Rome as recorded in the Historia Augusta (which covers the second and third centuries AD).

This site, which has the – almost – complete set in Latin and English, rather unkindly describes it as a “mockumentary”.

Yourcenar would agree with that conclusion, but her main point is, for her, a rather conventional one, that the “decline” of Rome in this period is being mirrored as she writes: “We have learned to recognize that gigantism which is merely the morbid mimetism of growth, that waste which makes a pretense of wealth in states already bankrupt, that plethora so quickly replaced by dearth at the first crisis … that atmosphere of inertia and panic, of authoritarianism and of anarchy, those pompous reaffirmations of a great past amid present mediocrity and immediate disorder, those reforms which are merely palliatives … The modern reader is at home.” (Pages 22-3; written in 1958 – and boy could she write)

But what did take me was the reflection she makes about how today’s times might be seen not as something new, but merely as an extension of Roman times “… Hitler waging his last battles in Sicily or in Benevento like a Holy Roman emperor of the Middle Ages, or to Mussolini .. strung up by the heels in a Milan garage, dying in the 20th the death of a third-century emperor.” (pp. 21-2)

It left me musing about how a historian in 3,000AD, or 4,000AD, assuming of course that there is any such creature – and the way we are going with the environment it may well have a carapace and lots of legs, so think a bit differently to we do – might sum up the history of the world before the time it gets interesting, the last millennia or two for her. (Much as I skipped over the Hittites and neo-Hittites in Syria a couple of days ago.)

Of course the themes would depend on this creature’s own concerns; she might want to do decadent decay, if she thought her own society was decaying, as did Yourcenar, or she might even want to do Victorian era-style growth towards a glorious present.

But it is salutary to think how unimportant most of the things that we anguish over today would be, and to consider what elements of today’s politics and society might be thought important.

I’ve always thought of Piranesi as a sculptor; when I look several times a week at the giant, spectacular, if rather ugly “Piranesi vase”, which towers above your head in a riot of decorated marble in the Enlightenment gallery in the British Museum, that’s perhaps not surprising, but I’m learning from Marguerite Yourcenar that he was primarily, and probably most importantly, an artist and engraver.

He produced “coffee table books” (no they hadn’t invented “coffee tables” then, but it describes their nature – something that was a status symbol as well as a beautiful text) – that sold to the same clients as bought his “restored” sculptures. (Sometimes so restored there was only a tiny fraction of ancient material involved.)

Piranesi was very much of the artisan class, although he was ennobled by the Pope in 1767. Yourcenar is interesting on the way in which he did not regard himself as an “artist” in the prima dona-ish way that is often regarded today.

“To the last he docilely follows custom, which consists in numbering on the plates each part of the structure, each fragment of ornament still in place, and making certain explanatory notes in the lower margin corresponding to them, without it ever occurring to him, as it certainly would to an artist nowadays, that these schoolbook specifications or engineering diagrams might diminish the aesthetic or picturesque value of his work.” (p. 98)

Yourcenar (writing in the Sixties) notes that about a third of the structures Piranesi recorded did not survive, and many more had been significantly modified or “restored” in unsympathetic ways. His work is thus a hugely valuable record of what has been, only relatively recently, lost.

He did, however, have an “artistic” side, expressed in the curiously modern-feeling Imaginary Prisons (1745). Supposed to have been done while he was suffering from a fever (quite likely malaria), they have a haunting, frightening insanity reminiscent of the late Goya.

Yourcenar says they are unlike anything that came before, but presage much to come. They “may well be one of the first and most mysterious symptoms of that obsession with torture and incarceration which increasingly possess men’s minds during the last decades of the 18th century. One thinks of Sade and the dungeons of the Florentine villa in which his Mirsky imprisons his victims … both express that abuse which is somehow the inevitable conclusion of the Baroque will to power.” (p. 118)

The prints are here. See also an essay by Aldous Huxley on the Prisons etchings, and a piece on a modern exhibition they inspired.

(The Dark Brain of Piranesi and Other Essays, Marguerite Yourcenar, Trans. Richard Howard, 1980)

… particularly female politicians. Julia Gilliard is vying for the leadership of the Australian Labour Party. But her kitchen looks too empty. That obviously rules her out then.

This story, while still dwelling on her single, childless condition, at least manages to say something about her politics.

If you need cheering up after that, check out this pleasant little essay in response to that inevitable question when a woman reaches a certain age: Are you pregnant yet?

A sample: “Is there any carbon-based life form who wouldn’t rather be relaxing in a café with a warm, spicy cup of tea than scraping pudding from the ceiling or having someone claim they’ve ruined their life?”

Not yet on top of my inboxes at the end of the week, but I thought I’d share a few gems I’ve found thus far.

First up today’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography character of the day is Mary Carleton (nee Moders), better known as the “German Princess”. That last was the role she played in life, and on the stage. From humble beginnings, she learnt the manners, the language and the skills to pass herself off as aristocracy, and when finally exposed, having escaped a bigamy charge, she played herself upon the stage. Were she alive today, she’d undoubtedly be on I’m a Celebrity … And, probably, her story would also end badly, although not on the scaffold.

A review of Phillip Taylor’s Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnamprovides a glimpse of the rise of the “the Britney Spears of the Vietnamese religious world”, the goddess Ba Chua Xu, the “Lady of the Realm”.

An interesting thought, perhaps, for cross-cultural comparisons: “The author further elaborates on this popularity in the context of Vietnam’s late socialism that is marked by a thriving, urban-based economy. To the same extent as the vibrant markets are dominated by commanding women, the world of spirits, with whom a significant number of them enter into a symbolic, reciprocal relationship of support and indebtedness, is predominantly inhabited by female deities.”

An announcement introduces Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton’s Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, which sounds like fascinating attempt to tell the history of the colonialism around the world (including Ottoman and Han) from a gender perspective.

“Discussing subjects as diverse as slavery and travel, ecclesiastical colonialism and military occupation, marriage and property, nationalism and football, immigration and temperance, Bodies in Contact puts women, gender, and sexuality squarely at the center of the “master narratives” of imperialism and world history.”

Finally, and I take no responsibility if this damages your wallet (it has already done mine), Oxford University Press is having a direct sale, with many books 75 per cent off. If you are in Europe or the Middle East it is here, America here. I don’t know about Australia, Asia or other parts.