Philobiblon

… although I doubt you’ll have to think long and hard, to find a topic appropriate for International Blog Against Sexism Day. Whether you vent your speen on the subject just about every day (like me), or usually fume in silence, this is a day to put your heart where your brain is …

And the day – March 8. International Women’s Day, of course. But you knew that.

Men are particularly encouraged to participate.

Dry, serious scholarship, disapassionate criticism – that’s the theory of research and reviewing of the arts. But emotion it seems, is breaking out all over.

First, a German academic has claimed that not only does she know with certainty what Shakespeare looked like, she also knows how he died.

Prof Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel said she could prove that there were at least four surviving portraits of the playwright. … Startlingly, she said swellings close to Shakespeare’s left eye, which she says are clear in several of the contested portraits, are evidence that he had lymph cancer. By dating the portraits, she said, it was likely that he had suffered for around 15 years in increasing pain and died from it.

Now of course, what Shakespeare looked like on one level doesn’t matter one jot, but there is human curiosity – and an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery opening soon, which happens to claim that only one of the portraits is actually of the bard.

So distinctly unacademic language – “rubbish” is not usually an academic word, at least in reference to a scholar’s work.

Then in Germany, a critic has been punished for a nasty review by having a dead swan dumped in his lap. After this his notes were snatched and he was chased from the theatre in the middle of the performance, in fear at the least of his bodily integrity.

The unfortunate critic, Gerhard Stadelmaier, of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, became a target because of his old-fashioned ideas about how theatre should be staged.
“This rubbish theatre has gone too far,” he said yesterday. “It is robbing us of our imaginations. When blood is called for you do not have to squirt syrup. Sex and desire do not have to be made flesh. You don’t have to show everything, but you do have to act.”

The actor claimed that he was merely trying to involve the audience.

I hereby put it on notice that although I’m a theatre critic, I’ll pass on the swans, or even sparrows, thanks.

… is now up on Mind the Gap, and the team in Cardiff have done a spectacularly good job. There’s a feast of good writing there, and some startling ideas: I had never heard of “Prozac feminism” before.

The number of new (to me) bloggers there is delightful – one of the main reasons why I started the Carnival of Feminists was to try to get different groups and networks in touch with each other, and I hope it is achieving that.

Mind you, contemplating this carnival left me wondering “how many feminist blogs are there in the world?”

If you take a baseline figure for total blogs of somewhere north of four million, (yes I’ve seen much larger, but I’m trying to get at an “active” figure), combine that with the fact about 60 per cent of those are run by women, that produces 2.4 million blogs.

Now I don’t think I’d be going too far – in fact I’m probably being conservative, in saying that 10 per cent of those women, at least, must be feminist, whether they’d use that label or not. (If they occasionally post “it’s not fair” in relation to gender – or proclaim their right to be who they want to be, and to do what they want to do, I’d class that as feminist.)

So there must be at least 240,000 feminist blogs out there. Well we’ve highlighted a few hundred in the editions thus far, but there are still plenty yet to be “discovered” by the carnival.

Perhaps you could tell the next host, Uma on Indian Writing, about one you know. (Email indianwriting AT gmail DOT com, or use the submission form.)

It is astonishing that anyone should even think that destroying a 5,000-year-old large and complex religious site to make gravel was an acceptable option – but the Thornborough Henges are still not definitively safe:

A full public inquiry is now likely over the fate of land surrounding Thornborough Henges, three giant discs encircled by earthen ramparts which have survived from a complex of eight erected around 5000BC in the Vale of York.
The quashing of the plan by North Yorkshire county council was welcomed by English Heritage and the British Council for Archaeology which have ranked the complex as a “northern Stonehenge”. Although short of dramatic stone relics, the area is rich in burial mounds, traces of settlements and an formal avenue which may have been used for ceremonial funerals.

Archaeology now can out of very faint evidence make a great deal, and imagine how much more could be done in 50 years’ time … there don’t need to be great lumps of stone lying around for a great deal to be learnt.
****
Not in the news again: a 76-country study, the Global Media Monitoring Project, has found “women continue to be underrepresented, and sometimes outright ignored, as subjects of and sources for news“.

“From Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, we see the same patterns of under-representation and stereotyped portrayal of women in the news,” said Anna Turley, coordinator of the most recent monitoring effort. “The reason for these patterns is complicated. From the story angle and the choice of interview questions to the use of language and the choice of images; all these have a bearing on the messages that emerge in the news. These patterns are deeply rooted not only in professional practice, but in wider social assumptions about female and male attributes, roles and competencies.”

***
Don’t know how I’ve missed it, but the Guardian has a cycling correspondent. This week was, apparently the start of the racing season – brrr, I shiver to think of it – and there’s also a complicated debate about how inflated your tyres should be when travelling in the cargo hold of an aircraft. For those who like trivia.

The latest Carnival of the Vanities , No 179,is now up on A DC Birding Blog. Why am I mentioning this particularly? Because John very kindly made my Old Bailey Women Burglars post, the first “editor’s pick”. Thanks!

There are also excellent science posts – particularly the Darwin one – and a generally interesting collection. Do check it out.

“The future George IV loved such social occasions, and in the Battle Royal (1788)…he is to be seen watching the match he has arranged between a working woman, ‘Big Bess,’ and his hanger-on Major William Hanger. The match fought at Plymouth lasted only five minutes, concluding with a knock-out blow and Big Bess being carried in triumph through the town exclaiming, ‘I have done the Major!'”
This is from, I believe, the essay “Equivocations of Gender and Rank,” Eighteenth-Century Life 16:1 (Winter 2002), 70-93. It was posted to the 18th-century email list by the author, Betty Rizzo.