Philobiblon

Ten great posts from 10 new (to me) women bloggers. It is here every Friday (more or less .. sorry about last week!)

Starting with the highly topical, Sherrilyn Ifill on Blackprof.com has an interesting take on the Supreme Court’s ruling on Bush’s power grab. It seems the splits in US society are being reflected on the court. Staying with the US, on Boiling Over, Michaela B. Reid, the “angry cartoonist”, is offering a blackly comic take on Anne Coulter.

And with Wimbledon on, now’s a good time to point to Kim Pearson’s Blogher site. She’s been celebrating the efforts of Billie Jean King, and finds some prominent women today aren’t living up to the same standards.

Elle Seymour has been at the launch of an organisation called Enterprising Women, which aims to encourage business to start their own businesses. I was surprised to learn that eight or nine men are starting businesses for each woman – seems a high ratio to me, but maybe I just have lots of enterprising female friends and acquaintances.

Also on the political side (Elle is an avowed Tory blogger), I’ve just found a blog by a seriously important politician, Margot Wallerstein, an EU commissioner. And it doesn’t read at all like she set down her junior researcher to do the whole thing. In this post she’s ranging widely, from Sri Lankan conflict to cycling to work.

Kali on MySpace believes that there has to be a whole lot more dancing at the revolution before people will start coming. She believes that over decades she’s seen students become more and more captives of the media cartels.

Turning to more positive topics, the blogger at Toad in the Hole has been visiting the US’s Humboldt Redwoods State Park. Even the fallen trees are beautiful, she finds. “Trees are possibly the best dead things on the planet, by which I mean they leave the handsomest, best-aging, most community-minded (not to mention useful to humans, of course) corpses.”

Stay with nature, Anne Arkham has been visiting a friend who takes in injured wild animals for rehabilitation. Among them now is a week-old fawn. Looks gorgeous.

More personally, on Being Amber Rhea, an account of starting out as a young feminist, age five or so: “I remember the incredulity I felt … when someone would tell me, “Girls can’t [X]!” ”

Then finish with another laugh – Mary on Threadbared.com is contemplating a macrame plant hanger complete with angels. She also does some great things with old sewing patterns.

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If you missed the last edition, it is here. (If you’d like to see all of them as a list, click on the category “Friday Femmes Fatales” in the righthand sidebar. That will take you to a collection of 600 (and counting) women bloggers.)

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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” (particularly someone who doesn’t yet get many hits), drop a comment. It really does make my life easier.

The results of yesterday’s two UK byelections were delicious. They saw Blaenau Gwent (a seat formerly rock-solid miners’ Labour) elect its second successive independent MP, and the Lib Dems come precious close to knocking off the Tories in Bromley and Chislehurst. There Labour finished fourth behind UKIP (which was admittedly, I hear, throwing leaflets around by confetti and also likely to be disappointed in its vote).

OK, these are by-elections, but I can’t help wondering what would happen if a political drama that I recently reviewed were to prove prophetic. It had its Tony Blair figure call a snap election in a desperate bid to hang on to power.

Imagine an election in a month’s time. I suspect there is now such a mood in the electorate that it would behave in that mysterious, organic, curiously purposeful manner that electorates sometimes do, and choose, collectively, to end up with a hung parliament. Since none-of-the-above isn’t offered as the option on the ballot-paper, this would be the next closest option.

And were that to happen what it would also get, beyond the pleasure of expressing contempt for the political class, would be — provided the Lib Dems showed some spine — a new system of election, proportional representation. That would give the voters a chance to express a genuine preference beyond the usual current single option of “really hate this lot and only dislike that lot, so I guess I’ll have to vote for them”. It might even help re-engage the public in mainstream politics.

Perhaps I am biased by hope — that system would certainly finally give the Green Party a representation that reflected its level of support. But I don’t think it is entirely pie-in-the-sky.

Unfortunately, however, I reckon that while Blair will not be leaving by choice, and will be forced out by his party, he’s not quite megalomaniac enough to call an election. So we’re probably a long, long time out from a poll. The electorate might not be able to hold a resolution that long. Then again, if Labour keeps running around like a headless chook (to use a good Australian expression) the conviction might grow.

…to anyone who’s visiting from today’s Guardian article on women bloggers.

Do check it out if you haven’t seen it; and if you read it on the web you won’t have to look at the uncomfortably large (for me anyway) picture in today’s print edition. (There’s a lot to be said for half-column mugshots…)

…otherwise known as the US economy: half of all global exhaust emissions come from the US, and 18 per cent of the US’s total electricity consumption goes on air-conditioning, which adds up to four times as much electricity per capita as India uses for all purposes.

The latter story makes an interesting, if terrifying, case about enormous population movements into the so-called Sun Belt, where it would be impossible to live the life lived now – working hard, for long hours, and indeed consuming with equal intensity, without the box churning away in the corner. Siesta, four-hour workdays – that might make it possible, but hard to imagine mañana taking root.

So here is this enormous, quite possibly globe-killing, weapon, the US economy. Does the rest of the world have the power, the influence, the gumption, to do something about it? I fear not.

Don’t forget that the deadline for the next Carnival of Feminists is coming up fast (on Sunday night).

Clare’s had her call for submissions up for some time. “Has feminism gone to far?” is one of the topic’s she’s set, so if your indignation gene has had inadequate exercise lately, now might be the time to let that DNA rip.

She’s also particularly interested in posts on women in religion, and on what might be called the “feminist wars”. I’m sure there’ll be something about the recent “blowjob war”, but it would be nice to get beyond that…

I’m sure it is going to be a great one, so do make sure you’ve put in your submission(s)!

In Japan, the market for pencils has boomed, all thanks to some 300-year-old haiku: “First pick up your 2B…”

Matsuo Basho, often dubbed the “father of haiku”, is idolised by the Japanese. His works are drummed into every schoolchild, his deft observation of the natural world emulated by millions of haiku enthusiasts.
A publishing company sought recently to exploit that enthusiasm by creating Enpitsu de Oku no Hosomichi (Tracing the Narrow Road to the Deep North with a Pencil) — a book that has tracing paper between each page so that readers too can copy Basho’s poems as a form of meditation.
The book has sold nearly a million copies, and the effect on the pencil market has been explosive. Japanese have been flocking to stationery shops, and pencil sales have soared by about 3.5 million a month.

Then, an 18cm beetle, thought to have been extinct in Britain since the 18th century, has crawled out of a piece of oak. The giant Capricorn beetle’s immediate ancestors were probably imported, but you never know…

Cerambyx cerdo is still found in France and other parts of the Continent, but it is classified as extremely rare across its range.
The body of the adult, which lives for only a few weeks, measures 5cm, but its antennae stretch a further 11cm. These are used by males to detect the pheromone scent emitted by females.
The beetles make a screeching noise by rubbing their legs together to warn off predators and have large, powerful jaws capable of biting through wood. They can give a nasty nip if handled.
The giant capricorn was thought to have died out in Britain when the demand for timber meant that fallen oak trees were cut up and used rather than left to rot. The beetles spend two years as larvae burrowing through wood until they emerge to look for a mate.

And the British police and government deserves to fit in the same category, since they’ve apparently decided that carrying an article from a mainstream magazine, Vanity Fair, in Parliament Square is an illegal act.

Its London editor, Henry Porter, yesterday angrily wrote to the Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, over an incident in which police appeared to claim that an article in the magazine constituted “politically motivated material”….
Porter, a vocal critic of Tony Blair’s record on civil liberties, who recently took part in a detailed email exchange on the subject with Mr Blair in the Observer, said in his letter that the matter was of serious concern. “The word sedition was not used, but clearly that is the light in which the article was regarded by the Metropolitan police,” he wrote.
Porter, who has the backing of Vanity Fair’s publisher, Graydon Carter, said it was extremely worrying if police could not tell the difference between a mainstream publication and a “terrorist sheet”.

Just a short note that times and frequency of blogging might change, as today I’m starting a new job, after a few months of being a “lady of leisure”. (Huh!) It is as deputy editor of the Guardian Weekly – a compilation of the Guardian with a wide international circulation.

There’s a nice circularity about this, since I used to read it in Australia as a young journalist on my first paper. From the perspective of Henty (population: 1,000, industries: wheat and wool) it looked like the height of intellectual sophistication, and it still looks pretty damn good. I also first wrote for it in 1998, from Pyongyang.)

It is a job-share post – three days a week. So I’ll still be here quite often…

Over on Your London My London I’ve just reviewed Front Page: Celebrating 100 Years of the British Newspaper. But is it an early obituary, one pulled from the morgue just a little too soon?

Although of course the British Library will be dealing with the corpse for a long time. The Colindale repository is apparently full, the storage conditions inadequate, and a high percentage of the collection at risk, newsprint being, by its nature, a librarian’s nightmare.

My 19th-century “blogger” is today displaying a fine sceptical mind on the claim that a sign of “great men” is their ability to sleep under even massive pressure. (Her Victorian male editor, however, has swallowed the myth wholesale, in his gushing collection of notes.)

Miss Williams Wynn discusses the tales of Pitt (the Younger, I think) and the Duke of Wellington apparently being able to fall asleep under the greatest of pressures. She says:

This is called a proof of greatness of mind. I am more inclined to believe that youth, health, and fatigue produce a sort of absolute necessity for sleep, which no mental excitation can remove; and I am confirmed in this opinion by hearing that, in his after days, and especially in his last illness, poor Pitt never could sleep. The Duke of Wellington is always brought forward as the most extraordinary instance of a person who, under the most violent excitations of his eventful career, could always, and at all hours of the day or night, get sleep during any repose, however short it might be, that circumstances allowed. Perhaps great bodily fatigue enabled him to find ‘ tired Nature’s sweet restorer.’ I wonder whether he is a good sleeper now.

This is the lovely quote that starts the Carnival of Bad History No 6, just up on the Japanese Frog in a Well.

The whole nature/nurture business is a complicated one, and when you start to talk about sexuality only gets more so. As a physiology professor said to me once: “You’d like to think your sexual choices were made at a level higher than the hypothalamus.”

But it seems little doubt to me that there is a biological component to sexuality, as appears to be confirmed by a study showing that the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay.

The mechanism by which having older biological brothers affects male sexuality remains unknown, but the most popular theory is that it reflects the way a mother’s immune system reacts to carrying lots of male foetuses.
As males have a Y chromosome and females do not, a mother’s body may be more likely to recognise a male foetus than a female one as foreign and generate a strong immune response.
Other research has shown that this response can strengthen with each subsequent male pregnancy. This may affect the way that the brain develops sexually.

I do like the challenge this presents to the religious sorts: if God made everything, doesn’t this mean he made homosexuality?

But it also makes me think about the problem of trying to adjust your sexuality for your politics. I knew a few woman in my university days who decided “to become lesbians” for feminist political reasons. I respect the argument at an abstract level, but I also saw some hideously exploitative relationships result from it – almost as bad as those resulting from women consciously “just experimenting”.

I’m heterosexual. I don’t know why that is, but that is just the way my sexuality goes, quite strongly. But that makes me realise how horrible are attempts to force those otherwise inclined to conform to some form of social norm.

Sad to read that the brilliant Jerry Springer the Opera is thought unlikely to be produced again after its current regional run finishes, simply because a few religious nutters have got out their banners and keyboards.

Polly Tonybee writes:

For 552 performances in London it was a smash hit with no controversy. It even had good reviews in the Church Times and the Catholic Herald. It wasn’t until the BBC broadcast it that the evangelical extremists of Christian Voice saw their chance. Rude, lewd and raucous the show certainly is – but not enough to stop Cherie Blair taking her children to see it. Blasphemous it barely is. It is just not true that Christ is presented as a coprophiliac – but then the protesters never bothered to see the show. Even if it were blasphemy, outrage has to be tolerated. But Christian Voice got more than 60,000 people to protest to the BBC and put the home addresses of BBC executives on the internet, attracting death threats requiring police protection.
The tour was planned for 39 cities, but the furore panicked many venues, especially those run by local councils.

If you haven’t seen it yet DO! You’ve got the choice of Croydon or Brighton, for one week only.

The producers deserve your money and support, for showing the sort of courage that needs to be more widespread if we are to stop a handful of fanatics damaging our society.