Author Archives: Natalie Bennett

I’m really a Londoner now…

February 2, 2009 – 11:00 pm

I just found myself “shovelling” snow with a neighbour. I had a large garden fork which I was using to break up the snow/ice. He had a small broom to push it aside.

Don’t you just love how well prepared London is for, well, really any event at all…

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Britblog Roundup No 207

February 1, 2009 – 7:16 pm

Beginning this week by picking out a few highlights:

* On the F-word, Louise (rightfully) tears strips off an old fart who’s “making a stand” by displaying soft porn in his office. The one good thing is that he’s an elected official – I do hope the women of Nottinghamshire are fully informed of his actions before the next vote.

* Sharon on Early Modern Notes makes a critical comparison of Wikipedia and the press – and the latter doesn’t come out too well.

* Simon on LibDem Voice is meanwhile launching another swinging attack, this time on jargon – his “Genesis in PR jargon” is a hoot.

*And I may be being a touch mischievous in putting these two together, since there’s rather a lot of jargon in Stumbling and Mumling’s exploration of organisational failure, but there is an interesting thought in there about private sector failure.

Looking on the lighter side, Genna on gem-ish explains why she’s happy her school years weren’t the best of her life. And Huw indulges in a little hiccup nostalgia.

And Ed Fordham on 474 Votes to Win (what will he do after the election, I wonder?) wants to preserve an important piece of Joe Orton history, of the lavatorial kind.

Getting back into politics, Blood and Treasure analyses the relationship between Gordon Brown’s words and the sudden outbreak of British industrial anger.

And Chicken Yoghurt exposes the murky business of nuclear industry “insurance”, while The Yorkshire Ranter explores the darker depths of NHS computing.

Two Doctors have the word from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the Green Party view of the Scottish budget wrangling.

And Jim on The Daily (Maybe), who’s doing rather well just now living up to that semi-promise, explores the idea of what Progressive London means. And new blogger Joseph Healy reports back from the Convention of the Left in Manchester last weekend.

The Magistrate looks at the basic fallacy in the theory of deterrence with reference to the >reclassification of marijuana, and Witterings from Whitney suggests David Cameron should live by his own words and hold a referendum on EU membership.

In local politics, Jason Kitcat brings the details of Brighton government, with the aid of YouTube, to the voters. And yes, garbage does matter.

And Antonia has a fine tribute to Maureen Christian, Oxford Labour councillor.

In the “interesting new ideas” category is an exploration on Amused Cynicism of a proposed new broadband tax, the money to go to creative providers. I’m not quite sure how the administration would work out, but it is an interesting idea, possibly particularly for the BBC…

And on Heresy Corner, measures of religiosity and wealth in the US have been plotted against each other, showing interesting correlations – not necessarily causal, but certainly a blow to the “God will make you wealthy” crowd.

But there’s nothing new, really: Roy on Early Modern Whale is exploring an early mass murderer-cum-werewolf. And staying in history I’m going to point to one of my own, my review of the Darwin exhibition at the Natural History Museum – really worth seeing, even if it is preaching to the converted.

In the miscellaneous category:
* Jonathan on Liberal England offer his thoughts on the BBC Gaza appeal controversy, findnig some interesting evidence of differing approaches in recent history.

* On Text and the World, an exploration of the work of the feminist theorist Gayle Rubin, perhaps for the more academically inclined.

* Charles Crawford on forms of anti-Semitism.

*In the Shadow of the Olive Tree is exploring the issue of reparations.

Finally, be afraid, be very afraid. No not the economy, or the environment, but the pigeons are massing at a new HQ, and they don’t even care who knows it…

Last week’s roundup was with Mick; next week the host will be Matt. As usual, email your nominations to britblog AT gmail DOT com – don’t be shy; you can nominate yourself. And (usually) all nominations are included, whatever the politics of that week’s host…

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A canon of early modern women

February 1, 2009 – 10:52 am

There has developed, over the past decade or so, agreement on a modest canon of early modern Englishwomen’s autobiography (or life-writing – which term you prefer will show your academic associations).

It begins with Margaret Hoby, the Puritan Yorkshirewoman who would probably be astonished to know her modest daily accounting of her time of religious study, household work and village duties has come to achieve such attention.

The canon then moves on to the far more obviously formidable and Lady Anne Clifford, who was clearly constructing her text for the future, then the Civil War pair of Lucy Hutchinson and Ann Fanshawe, and the romantic Anne Halkett.

Finally, towering above them all in output and ambition is Margaret Cavendish, duchess of Newcastle, who now has a society all of her own.

Many who read and write about these texts are often concerned not with them as writing, but as evidence; these rare and valuable words, women’s accounts of themselves, are subject to anatomising and theorising, so that the words themselves almost disappear. Sharon Cadman Seelig’s Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature can in this light almost be read as a recovery of the words, and the women who wrote them.

Seelig aims to rediscover the texts as literature, to read them asking, in now what seems to be surprisingly simple terms, what did the women mean, how were they feeling, and how do I feel when I read them?

What this produces is both a celebration and a defence of the quality and value of the words in their own right. Seelig makes the obvious but oft neglected point that while these texts might waver across genre forms, lack the well-shaped purpose and direction that we’d expect from a published diary or memoir today, this is equally true of male writers of the same period. Autobiography as a form was just being developed; these women were helping to invent it as they wrote.

The light touch academic approach here makes Seelig’s book an ideal introduction to the field of early modern women’s autobiography – indeed her short account of Cavendish made me dig out a biography that has been sitting in my “to read” pile for years.

So this is an ideal, and short, introduction to these women; a pity then that it is only available in expensive hardback – this is surely a monograph that cries out for an accessible paperback.

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It’s still bad in the real world

February 1, 2009 – 1:13 am

It’s hard to drag your mind away from the latest flood of disasters in the world economy, but it’s worth remembering that the environmental disasters aren’t going away.

* A good piece in the Sunday Times sums up the dangerous state of the British bee: “In the bounteous days of teeming hedgerows and fields of clover, Britain had 25 kinds of bumble, all merrily gathering nectar and pollinating plants and trees. Three of these already have vanished, and seven more are in the government’s official Biodiversity Action Plan (Uk Bap) as priorities for salvation….Losses in the UK [of honeybees] currently are running at 30% a year — up from just 6% in 2003….Lord Rooker [in 2007], declared in the House of Lords that if things went on as they were, the honeybee in the UK would be extinct within 10 years. The situation since then has worsened, so at the best estimate the 10 years have shrunk to eight.”

* While Britain is killing its citizens in large numbers with filthy air: “More than 20 cities and conurbations were found to have dangerous levels of particulate matter between 2005-7.”

* And ocean acidity, particularly in the vital top layers, is swooping ever upward: “‘ocean acidification may render most regions chemically inhospitable to coral reefs by 2050.’ The group said that acidification could be controlled only by limiting future atmospheric levels of the gas. Other strategies, including “fertilizing” the oceans to encourage the growth of tiny marine plants that take up carbon dioxide, may actually make the problem worse in some regions, it said.

* And Australia – per capita a severe climate change criminal – is, in a rare case of natural justice, suffering badly from its early effects: “Chaos ruled in Melbourne on Friday after an electricity substation exploded, shutting down the city’s entire train service, trapping people in lifts, and blocking roads as traffic lights failed. Half a million homes and businesses were blacked out, and patients were turned away from hospitals. More than 20 people have died from the heat, mainly in Adelaide. Trees in Melbourne’s parks are dropping leaves to survive, and residents at one of the city’s nursing homes have started putting their clothes in the freezer.”

* And for a warning of the inexorable power of natural forces, there’s the news that malaria parasite is showing signs of resistance to the recently much developed, if ancient, “wonder drug” artemisinin.

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Getting back to basics

January 29, 2009 – 11:18 pm

I thought this New York Times piece brought into layman’s terms the economic/environment conundrum:

Right now, it seems almost impossible to imagine ever spending more on things except, maybe, gasoline. And yet the prospect of less consumption fills us with dread. It’s not the having less part that is frightening — people are generally happy as long as everybody’s in the same boat. What’s frightening is the fear that our system can’t handle less, and it’s not as if there’s some other system out there shouting: “Try me! Try me!”

And if you want to take a longer view, maybe we’ve got to – somehow – abolish the whole judgement implied in the word “taste”, if you follow the view that the chase for taste drives consumerism.

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Carnival of Feminists No 71

January 29, 2009 – 10:27 pm

Drumroll please…. the Carnival of Feminists No 71 is now up on Hop To It!. And a superfine collection of posts it is too; I was particularly taken by the piece about a mother telling a boy to not assume that because he couldn’t lift something, his sister also couldn’t.

But Hops also gets a special extra cheer for an innovation – a list of feminists who you should follow on Twitter. I confess that I haven’t entirely worked out myself what Twitter’s for, for me, although you will find me there, and I’ve now expanded my “Twitter-roll”. (Okay, that’s obviously not the right word – can any cognoscenti tell me what is?)

And somehow it seems to fit here; I’ve just found that Marie Antoinette has a blog – and very classy (in a positive sense) it is too.

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