Philobiblon

Posting from the free internet at Singapore airport. Why can’t Heathrow or Charles de Gaulle be like this? Everything is clean, easy-to-find, and it all just works! Checking in with BA at Heathrow was its normal bedlam – haven’t they noticed there are never enough staff?

Anyway, please excuse any infelicities in this post – after a 12-hour stopover in the airport hotel I’m not in too bad a condition for the onward leg to Australia in general, except my stomach thinks it is dinner time, even though the sun is just rising over the airport (not that you can see it through the mist) and my head isn’t sure what time it is. Blogger’s slow, so does that mean it is US peak time? (Not sure any more!)

Plane reading was Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver – 900 pages of well-reviewed historical novel seemed about right for 12 hours. It wasn’t quite, however, since it is a bit too slow and discursive for that job, although a fine novel in many respects. I’ll be reading the next two volumes, but at a more leisurely pace.

There are lots of wonderful details. A couple I wrote down:
* Bewilderment, in its ancient and literal sense of being cast away in a trackless wild … (p. 47)

* The origins of the cravat were apparently “Louis XIV’s Croatian mercenaries had made a practice of tying their giant, flapping lace collars down so that gusts of wind would not blow them up over their faces in the middle of a battle or duel” (p. 179

* But on p. 649 there are dacoits in India, isn’t this a bit early for the world have made it to Europe?

The main female character Eliza, later “Countess de la Zeur”, is an absolute delight – she spends her youth in an eastern harim, and has the wits and knowledge to prove it, plus a healthy dollop of physical courage. Her sometime companion, a self-declared Vagabond, is also lovely – seemingly heavily based on the picaresque novels of the time.

The tying-togther male, if not central character, is Daniel Waterhouse. I don’t know if he’s historical, I guess so? He’s left at the end having the operation for “the stone” that Pepys had, and we know he survives. But he does seem a bit flat: maybe in the next volume?

For those unaware of the novel is the 1660s to 1680s (although it also ventures into the early 18th century, starting with a Boston (US) witchburning, the significance of which has yet to be established. This book also leaves one of the main characters on a boat pursued by a determined pirate – I don’t mind multi-volume works, but I do think each should stand on its own.

This is a minor quibble, however. I do feel that Quicksilver took me out of 747 cattleclass into another world. It is great on descriptions of cities, and vignete character sketchs. I enjoyed the time with Liebnitz (presented as a rather decent character), Isaac Newton (rather less so) and Robert Hooke (unusually sympathetically treated, although perhaps not if you are a dog-lover).

I wasn’t really in the mood to get heavily into the intellectual history, but there’s plenty there to ponder, and a prodigious amount of research. Tougher editing might have benefitted this book – there is perhaps a 600-pager in it struggling to get out – but it is well worth sticking with the slow patches.

Next, The Da Vinci Code. Everyone I respect has slated it, but for the second-half of a 24-hour journey the intellectual level seems about right, and I do have an alternative if it drives me mad.

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vesuvius, originally uploaded by natalieben.

* Above is Sir William Hamilton’s drawing of an eruption of Vesuvius in the 1760s or 1770s – something to think about next time you are visiting Pompei. It is from a lovely little online exhibition from the University College London special collection. There’s also images from original texts by Copernicus, Gallileo and John Wilkins’ (then anonymous) 1638 conclusion that there was life on other planets.

* Just when you think America is going back to the 19th century, you come across an article like this, about “big business” providing transgender employees with medical expenses and unisex bathrooms.

* Every woman (and man) in journalism should read this piece. And television is just as bad.

* Humans are programmed to co-operate. There’s now evidence to take on the Right’s Hobbesian views. (Via Arts and Letters Daily.

* An argument for racial, but not racist genetics. And some fascinating information about the “Sonic hedgehog” mutation. (Via ditto)

* Islamic women (at least in the West) are making a move to lead prayers, seemingly an extremely radical step. Which reminds me of the brave woman in Bahrain on whom I posted in November. I haven’t been able to find out what happened to her. Anyone know?

*If you fancy dining with a knight and his lady in a medieval castle, the recipes are here, together with a great deal of other fascinating material on medieval life. (Hat-tip to Bibe’s box.)

I’m frantically busy, so what am I doing, taking internet quizzes. (Only while eating breakfast, honest!)

So thanks to Scribbling Woman, I’ve found out via this quiz that my ideal historical job would be to be a Viking warrior. The other suggested alternatives included an “arming squire with its potential to become a knight”, “topman” (sic), “powder monkey”, “Riding officer”, “Petardier’s assistant” or “Guillemot-egg collector”. But Viking sounded best.

I’ve been reading Margaret Atwood’s The Journals of Susanna Moodie, a collection of poems inspired by the writer on whom I posted yesterday. I was particularly taken by the piece called “The Immigrants”.

… “I see them coming
up from the hold smelling of vomit,
infested, emaciated, their skins grey
with travel; as they step on shore

the old countries recede, become
perfect, thumbnail castles preserved
like gallstones in a glass bottle, the
towns dwindle upon the hillsides
in a light paperweight-clear.

They carry their carpetbags and trunks
with clothes, dishes, the family pictures;
they think they will make an order
like the old one, sow miniature orchards,
carve children and flocks out of wood

but always they are too poor, the sky
is flat, the green fruit shrivels
in the prairie sun, wood is for burning;
and if they go back, the towns

in time have crumbled, their tongues
stumble among awkward teeth …”

(pp. 32-33)

It struck me that what is different about the immigrant experience in the late 20th and early 21st century, compared to the 19th, is that no one now is heading for the countryside. You get enormous migration within countries from rural to urban areas (but almost never the reverse, except for comfortably-off people “downsizing”, which is not the same thing at all), and when people cross borders they are almost always heading for the capital city of their destination state.

What does this mean? I suspect it makes the whole experience less innocent, more frightening and daunting, for there are all of the social obstacles, as well as the practical ones.

But although today it would be different, I couldn’t help imagine being in those “infested” holds, or trying to smuggle myself into the back of a lorry. It would do us all well to remember that, however unlikely it might seem, one day it could be us.

I’ve been pondering lately how women were, and it seems in some cases still are, taught to be, and rewarded for being, utterly helpless and hapless, as though this were an admirable trait.

The topic came up one night when I had a lot of ironing, which I did while watching a rather inane British commercial television show, Midsomer Murders, set in stereotypical current-day home counties villages in which every male is a solicitor or in the City, or a retired minor TV star, while the women are “homemakers”, spending all that money on huge fancy homes, mostly set around the village green on which cricket is being played.

It is not quality television, but nonetheless one scene really left me fuming. The main detective and his young sidekick are locked in a cellar with a woman of the “homemaker” type. (Her husband has been involved in a scam; she thought there was something wrong, but “thought it better not to ask about it”.) There’s a bit of discussion about whether there’s enough air, will they die etc, then the woman lies down and goes to sleep, leaving it to the men to try to saw their way out through the door.

Now, yes, this is a silly show, but some writer must have thought that this was believable behaviour for this sort of character. (And she wasn’t central to the show so no particular point was being made about her as a character.)

Then I had cause to meet (and I’m anonymising here because I don’t want anyone to be identifiable) a woman who must be in her early 40s, married to a considerably older man in a socially important well-paid job requiring a very high degree of education. Her manner could only be described as fluttery – in the best Victorian form – and when confronted with even a minor problem her reaction was to ask me, who she scarcely knew, to solve what was really quite a personal familial issue. I couldn’t help feeling that if faced with a real crisis her reaction would probably be to faint gracefully.

These incidents coincided with my reading of Susanna Moodie’s Roughing It in the Bush (1852), an account by one of the sisters of Agnes Strickland of being a gentlewoman pioneer (and eventually a very poor one) in Canada.

She has to do at times quite rough work, and cope with extremely difficult circumstances, yet she reports, indeed celebrates, her helplessness in many situations.

Fairly early on, Moodie, now probably in her late 20s, reports she “found myself at night in a house entirely alone. [Actually her child is sleeping, but I don't suppose that counts.]

“Hour after hour wore away, and the crowing of the cocks proclaimed midnight,and yet they came not. [Her husband and their servant] I burnt out all my wood, and I dared not open the door to fetch more. The candle was expiring in the socket, and I had not the courage to go up into the lost and procure another before it went finally out. Cold, heart-weary, and faint, I sat and cried. …” (p. 196)

Later she reports of her fear of walking through the woods alone with her sister, although she admits there is no rational basis for this. “This foolish dread of encountering wild beasts in the woods I never could wholly shake off, even after becoming a constant resident in their gloomy depths … The cracking of an old bough, or the hooting of the owl, was enough to fill me with alarm, and try my strength in a precipitate flight.” (p. 260)

And she never gets over her fear of cattle. After some years in the woods one day she is forced to do the milking, “when a very wild ox we had came running with headlong speed from the wood. All my fears were alive again in a moment. I snatched up the pail and, instead of climbing the fence and getting to the house, I ran with all the speed I could command down the steep hill towards the lake shore; my feet caught in a root of the many stumps in the path, and I fell to the ground, my pail rolling many yards a-head of me.” (p. 370)

Now maybe Moodie was just conforming to Victoria stereotypes of womanhood here, but I don’t think so; the passages just ring too truly. But it does demonstrate what damage learned helplessness can do in making people live a life of fear.

How many women are living this way today? Probably more than I’ve previously imagined, I’ve now concluded.

(Quotes from Virago edition of 1986)

“Where are all the female bloggers?” HERE, in my weekly “top ten”. Why “femmes fatales”? Because these are killer posts, selected for great ideas and great writing, general interest and variety.

* Pinko Feminist Hellcat suggests that while the religious Right complained about Bill Clinton’s narrow definition of “sexual intercourse”, their own much-loved abstinence education programmes are producing the same ideas in their offspring. (Warning: not for the easily offended.)

* On Blogcritics Yvonne DeVita commemorates Women’s History Month with a post on the Women’s Rights National Historical Park that focuses on Amelia Bloomer and her courage in standing up against one of the most painful human weapons – ridicule – in promoting the garment that bears her name.

* Would you like a cup of tea? Shaula Evans, writing on the Canadian group blog Tsuredzuregusa, explores the complexity of that question in Japan, Korea, the United States, Canada, and that special, and she thinks unattractive, state of Starbucks.

* Personal political takes a quick skip across the British election campaign (the vote hasn’t been called yet, but the campaign is on) before settling in to ponder how Britons expect children as young as four years and two months to cope with a formal classroom setting.

* Media girl defines, bluntly and angrily, why “women’s issues” are majority issues.

* Petite Anglais celebrates the joys of a Paris spring, including white blossom, cheerful birds, sunlight filtering through the shutters and a toddler learning to count.

* Dawn Olsen concludes that the Right might be right, as she calls for “zero tolerance” for crimes against children.

* Give me spirit fingers finds some Chinese leopard “porn” (safe for the office; they really are animals) and muses how it relates to aging men, aphrodisiacs and young mistresses.

* If you think you’re snowed under with work, study or life, consider the task facing Molecular Revolution, who before an April 8 exam plans to relearn Old English and read Vanity Fair, among scores of other texts.

* All accounts I’ve read of high schools in the United States, and the horrific events that so often seem to happen in them – as again this week – suggest they can be terrible places for those who can’t or won’t “fit in”. I am Dr Laura’s worst nightmare reports on how such attitudes most usually work out, however, with the “odd one out” harming themselves – in this case a 14-year-old girl who killed herself. Read it and weep for a wasted life.
(This post dates from early March, but I’ve only just found it and thought it worthy of as wide an audience as possible.)

If you missed last week’s inaugural edition, it’s here.

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Please: In the next week if you read, or write, a post by a woman blogger and think “that deserves a wider audience”, send me an email (natalieben at gmail dot com) or drop a comment here.

Disclaimer: the views here might not reflect my own. I’m trying to choose from as wide a range of female bloggers as possible.

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london, originally uploaded by natalieben.

An impulse purchase at the London Review of Books bookshop turned out well.

This little publication is packed with articles, stories and pictures of the less-fashionable parts of London and interesting facts, surprisingly well edited and put together*.

The contents of Smoke: a london peculiar include

* a history of elephants in London – the first was in 1255, a present from Louis IX to Henry III.

* “Rodent Rovings” – in Philpot Lane there is apparently a 19th-century building bearing a carving of two mice nibbling cheese – apparently a builders’ initiative to commemorate the plague they had to work through. (Have to go looking for that.)

* There’s a warehouse of the north circular between Walthamstow and Edmonton that has a regularly changed feature “Veneer of the Week”. Apparently there’s 70 to circulate among.(I used to drive this road quite often, but never noticed this “feature”.)

* I learnt about Northolt, on one of the ends of the Central Line: “It’s not even a non-place, to use Auge’s term, just a bus stop on the way to Heathrow. Northolt has good company in the excised remains of the county of Middlesex, though. JG Ballard’s Shepparton is on the other side of the airport catchment area and somewhere in the Enfield enclave is a place called Ponders End, from where Norman Tebbitt hails. And I’m sure Stevie Smith was talking about Northolt when she made the jibe about what Town Hall terms “greater metropolitan areas” being all sub and no urb. It is enough to make Henri Lefebvre weep into the lap of one of his secretaries.” (From “Flight Paths”, Paul Castro)

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*No I don’t know the editors, nor am I being paid by them.

More here.

Yesterday afternoon to Sir John Soane’s Museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It is one of those wonderfully idiosyncratic, personal collections, maintained much as he left it in the early 19th century, that have a charm no professionally curated exhibition can match.

My favourite area was “the crypt”, done up to feel like a mausoleum, packed with mainly Roman funerary monuments and plaster models of “modern” graves, but at its centre is the spectacular stone sarcophagus of Seti I, carved from a single piece of calcite.

It is enclosed in its own glass carriage, complete with wheels, which is presumably how it arrived in 1824, when Soane bought it after the British Museum declined to pay the discoverer, Giovanni Belzoni, a circus strongman and “archaeologist” (they don’t make ‘em like that any more), the £2,000 he wanted for it.

You can just imagine it being formally wheeled into place, with Soane and his invited guests (1,000 came over three evenings) watching by the light of candles and lamps – more than a little spooky.

You’d think someone would have painted the scene, but the museum attendants didn’t think so. A web search produces a catalogue of the museum, which indicates there is a folder of 53 drawings of the sarcophagus by Joseph Michael Gandy, an employee of Soane’s, but I have a feeling these may be recordings of the item itself, rather than of its arrival.

Soane died in 1837, so living, just, into the Victorian era. It is interesting, however, that this is very much a Renaissance house – everything is assembled on the basis that the ancients, particularly the Greeks and Romans, are the model from which all inspiration should spring. I suspect by the time of his death Soane was very old-fashioned, but it is still a reminder how close we are to a time when the past was seen as more advanced than the present.

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india, originally uploaded by natalieben.

I blogged a few days ago about the postcards I am buying as presents (for several people now; if you have a good idea why not use it more than once.)

Above is one of the results, a lovely little piece of Orientalism produced by “The Phototype Company Bombay”, labelled “wood cutters”,
and posted from India in 1915 to Miss F. Birch, 6 Rockingham Parade, Uxbridge, Middlesex.

Part of the discussion that arose around my last post was how such cards were used as a cheap form of communication for prosaic matters, and this one certainly lives up to the billing.

It reads:
Dear Flo, Have run out of PCs. [presumably postcards] Will send them as usual next week when I shall have obtained a fresh supply. Love to all, Perle (?).

You’d reckon the recipient would be a bit disappointed with that, although perhaps they really just wanted the picture.

The other thing that leaves me wondering is the shape of the saw. I’ve used a (straight) cross-cut saw, worked by two people, which is a very effective tool, but I can’t understand why you would want to make it this shape. (Yes I do ponder some peculiar things.)

Making babies
* Unimpressed.net describes how the idea that life begins at conception is a misogynist one, assuming that what is important about the child comes from the male contribution of chromosomes, thus ignoring all of the work that the woman does with her body to produce the baby.

News is all a matter a perspective
* From Iviews – “Christian Suicide shooter Kills Innocent Americans: Experts also believe that the inspiration for the terrorist act came from the belief that the killing would be forgiven.” (Hat-tip to Slit.)

In the House, but why?
* Women now hold a quarter of the seats in the Australian House of Representatives, and a third of those in the Senate, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. What a pity its headline is “Women the power behind the PM”.

No bag thanks
* Also in Australia, supermarkets have cut the number of plastic bags they hand out by 30 per cent, although other shops have barely started on this blindingly simple, obvious, and even cost-saving environmental measure. So why has this move not even started in Britain? I spend an amazing amount of time telling shop assistants, often two or three times: “No bag thanks. No, really. No bag!” Most look as though no one has ever said that to them before.

Towards the end of True North, the second volume of her memoirs, Jill Ker Conway gets to her research work on American women who pioneered access to tertiary education and the professions, which was later published as The First Generation of American Women Graduates.

My post on the first part of the memoir is here.

She writes of her subjects, who include Jane Addams, Florence Kelley and Ellen Gates Starr:

“Every one … had been a rebel, either refusing marriage or insisting on a very unconventional union. They had all founded institutions or professions for women, and … they had all been powerful social critics. … Some were privately conscious of a drive to power. …
In real life their language was pungent, their schedules were enough to daunt a professional athlete, and, for those who worked with them, their force of character was something of primal dimensions.
… but when time came for each of these women to write her memoirs, each presented herself as the ultimate romantic female, all intuition and emotion, tugged by the heartstrings to random encounters with the important causes, which, in reality, this group of women had discovered and led.” (p149-150)

She looked to other periods and found the same pattern. In the 1960s, she says, the explanation she devised was that “the social system operated not merely to repress libido (as Freud thought), but to repress other powerful human feelings, and to prevent them from being brought to consciousness. That would mean that a woman could live her whole life seeking power and influence for the causes she favored, but not be conscious of any but the approved spectrum of emotions allocated her in the patterning of gendered temperaments.”

Later, she says, educated by her own experience, “I also learned that in American society, a woman who does not fit the romantic stereotype of the female has difficulty mustering public support. Then I understood that it was possible my subjects told their story the way they did because they didn’t want to damage the public response to their reforms.” (p. 151-2)

After all of that, how does she describe her entry into public life, as vice-president of the University of Toronto? “Although I thought of myself as a mature professional, with aspirations to make a difference in the scholarly profession in whish I had worked. it had never entered my mind that I had any talent for running things.” (p. 205)

As she takes on the role, “I was startled to discover that I was also a symbol for legions of other women … Without planning to I’d become a public person.” (p. 215)

Again, when she goes to Smith College, it is because a friend nominates her, and so out of politeness she goes to see the “Search Committee”. Then, what do you know, she has the job.

You’d think an academic would see the pattern, but then again maybe I am being too hard on her. Maybe it was her Freudian explanation, maybe it was because even in 1994, when she was writing True North – and maybe still in 2005 – it is unacceptable for a woman to declare ambition, for fear it might harm her cause.

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In my posts on Ker Conway I may not have provided an overall coherent biography – my aim was rather to speak of the elements of her life that interested me most; there’s a good summary overview here. And I discover from this there is a third, relatively recent (2002) volume, A Woman’s Education covering the Smith years. Standby for a commentary.

I’ve already posted on how much I identified with the first volume of the memoirs of Jill Ker Conway, a historian probably best known as the first female president of Smith College here and here.

After taking the slow boat from America, the second volume, True North, has just arrived, and while I directly identify with it less – since she gets married and to some degree “settles down” in this one – I still found it a riveting read.

She starts off being perhaps unsurprisingly gushy about Harvard when she first arrives: “Within weeks I began to see myself as perfectly normal, like all the other lively people around me. These people weren’t the alienated left intellectuals of Australia, or the wistful exiles from Oxbridge I knew in Sydney. They were young, lively and ambitious, and I was like them. (p. 23)

But she does eventually arrive at a more balanced view, especially when one of her housemates is denied the cherished lectureship at Harvard because she is female, despite winning the prize for the best English thesis in her year.

And she has a further rebuff for Harvard’s current, clinging-on-by-his-fingernails, boss, about the perils of being a female grad student, which I know haven’t changed at all:

“Women negotiating this Herculean set of tests encountered another hazard by the mere fact of being female. There was no way to expiate the invitation refused, however gracefully, or the sexual innuendo deliberately misunderstood. A woman’s work had to be just that much better, more theoretically daring, more brilliantly researched to shame naysayers with ulterior motives. As I watched my friends run the course, it was clear that the tenderest male egos were in the sciences, and that those of us who were humanists lived in a world where chances of giving offence were fewer than for those who worked day in and day out in tight-knit laboratory teams.” (p. 31)

Then there’s some good advice on research topics from her supervisor: “I told him I had decided to do my research on one of America’s great Progressive women reformers, Jane Addams. When I said I wanted to study how she had led her generation of American women to solve the problem of gaining access to higher education … he was approving. We both knew that experience had been my own personal dilemma in Australia. ‘One’s research should always involve some element of therapy,’ he said smiling. ‘It only count if it’s really close to the bone.’” (P. 34)

Agreed: although I’d add that it only counts if you also understand that it is close to the bone.

With her new husband — married perhaps unsurprisingly just before she was about to have to go back to Australia to confront her terrible mother again (Ker Conway seems a bit short of self-awareness here) she then moves to Canada, which she is determined to find much better than Australia.

Although she does admit one similarity:

“We both drank too much. We had come honestly by the excess as part of our British inheritance. England, the font from which both Canada and Australia drew their inspiration, was a culture of drink, rather than food and sex. Transposed to the colonies, this cultural theme conspired with the deprivations of pioneering to produce a world more reliant on booze than music, art or dance to foster the Dionysian side of life.” (p. 78)

To be continued …