Philobiblon

Having just cycled through the West End of London at 5.30pm on a Saturday after the end of daylight saving, I can now provide an official diagnosis: people who drive cars in the area (London’s shopping heart) on the weekend are clinically insane (and mostly blind).

I cycle mostly through the city and East End and there, while you have to watch out for the young hoons showing off their hotted-up Hondas, generally drivers in their old jalopies are sane and sedate.

In the West End the cars are about 10 times as expensive, and their drivers display about one tenth of the sense. They have engines that could be going 100 times as fast, so they have to race to the next red light (200m up the road, where they’ll wait for two minutes). They have never been introduced to their indicators, or learnt to that some roads have vehicles travelling two ways (so swerving around the speed humps might put them right across your path); indeed the notion that there might be other road users has never entered their tiny little brains.

Of course the size of their brains is demonstrated by their use of cars in the West End at all, the rate of vehicular progress being roughly equivalent to half walking speed. But I guess if you’ve already spent all that money on proving your anti-social, polluting credentials, you’ve got to show it off, instead of joining the sensible people on the Tube.

To the “gentleman” in the enormous Mercedes with the car door open across the entire lane down which I was cycling, I’m really sorry I didn’t kick it closed – I thought, silly me, that there might be a little old lady arranging herself inside, not that you’d opened it up just for when you found all of your boutique shopping wouldn’t fit in the boot.

You’d think these people were beyond treatment. I can, however, offer a prescription. During the week the congestion charge is £8; I’m sure raising it to £80 on weekends, when few people can have a professional need to drive there, (with an exemption for cars transporting disabled persons) would provide a quick and effective cure.

The next call for submissions is up on Sour Duck, and it is for something a bit special and different.

There’s a theme: 1970s feminist thought. However, this won’t be a nostalgic look at “second-wave feminism”. Oh no. I’m looking for pieces that engage with the themes and ideas of 1970s feminism, while applying them to current events, or looking to the future.
You might say it’s a “1970s into 2000” Feminist Carnival issue.
Examples of topics to consider:
women and men in the workplace (e.g., creating an even playing field, and equal pay for equal work)
reproductive freedom (with the advent of “the pill”) & sexual liberation (“sex is fun!”)
healthcare reform (1970s feminists took on the medical establishment and effected significant change. What else needs to be changed? Can 1970s tactics prove effective again?)
Those are just a few ideas to get you started. What I’m looking for is engagement with that era’s feminist thought.
And while I’m looking for substance, please don’t feel you need to be some sort of an expert on 1970s feminism. Just write from the heart.

Sour Duck lists some of her favourite links for thinking about the Seventies, to encourage you in this direction, but if you’ve got a post on a different topic, don’t despair, there’ll also be a “more general “Editor’s Feminist Cafeteria” section, serving a buffet of feminist posts unrelated to the set topic”.

Nominations go to: duck DOT sour AT gmail DOT com

(And there’s 11 “sleeps” to go before it is posted, as your mother used to tell you about Christmas …)

Technorati tags: feminism, feminist, feminist carnival, The Carnival of Feminists.

I get a regular catalogue from a London seller of second-hand and antiquarian books relating to women and feminism. (Email me if you want details.)

In this morning’s I was struck by one entry: Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, List of Candidates for the November Election 1870. The description says:

“This booklet contains the biographical details of 156 women who were applying to the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution to become annuitants. The Institution elected five annuitants who were each given £20 per annum. ‘In addition to the 10 shillings collected for the highesy unsuccessful candidate, the Board proposes to lessen the disappointment of failure by giving 10 shillings to each of the next five upon the poll.’ Each of the candidates has set out details of her life and penury – one can sense the quiet desperation – and each has a named proposer.”

So you had about a 3 per cent chance of success, and your entire personal circumstances were printed for the world to read – aren’t you glad you live in the 21st century!

If you’ve got a spare £75, I can supply the details. I’m sure it would make fascinating reading, and it won’t interfere with anyone’s privacy now.

Miss Frances Williams Wynn is today getting an account of a hurricane in Jamaica in 1815.

Unfortunately the name of the author of the letter is not given. I assume it is not FROM Miss Williams, since although the frank expressions of fear at one point made me think it might have been written by a woman, the reference then to a surgeon extracting a bullet from the writer led me to decide it was highly likely to be from a man. (A woman might be shot in a variety of circumstances, but it is hard to imagine her referring to it this casually.)

The other thing that struck me is that while a hurricane might be terrifying enough now, you at least usually get considerable warning and a chance to prepare not only physically but also mentally. In the days before weather forecasts, that wasn’t the case. You had no idea what was coming, or what stage any assault by the elements was at – was this point the worst, or was it about to get a whole lot worse?

This certainly sounds about as bad as it could be:

As a last resource and almost forlorn hope, we betook ourselves to a cellar under the ruins of the house, trying to hope that, if the walls fell in (and we heard stones dropping from them every instant), they might not beat in the floor of the dining-room over our heads and crush us with their fall. That they would fall, we had no doubt; and a very, very slender hope that the flooring would withstand them, and no possibility of escape.

This was about eight in the evening, when the night was just setting in. Our cellar was about nine feet square: up to our knees in water from the torrents of rain falling through the unroofed ruin above us, under a constant shower-bath in that cold climate that very cold night, in the instant expectation of being crushed to death or horribly mangled, we remained the whole of that dreadful night.

Our party consisted, besides myself, of Mr. A., Dr. M., the overseer, the bookkeeper, four black men, and four black women with their six children.

From a hugely important and fascinating book, Women Latin Poets, by Jane Stevenson (on which more soon) comes a lovely image of a rich, aristrocratic poet Sulpicia and her slave Petale, who was employed as a lectrix ( reader-aloud, as it is rather inelegantly put in English), around the start of the common era. The slave may well have been Greek, for she had a son with a Greek name, Aglaos. (I know that male Greeks of this time not uncommonly sold themselves into slavery as a way of making their way in the world; perhaps this was true for women too?)

On the slave’s gravestone is a poem stating her age, 34, achievements, and virtues of the deceased in a conventional way. Stevenson suggests it is likely Sulpicia wrote the words. “The lack of any clauses referring to the grief of those she left behind produces a relatively impersonal effect, which would not be inappropriate for a mistress memorializing a valued servant whose role would necessarily have caused them to spend considerable time together”.

Passer-by. Observe the ashes of Sulpicia the lectrix/the lectrix of Sulpicia,
to whom the slave-name ‘Petale’ had been given.
She had lived thrice ten years plus four,
and on earth, she had brought forth a son, Aglaos (‘glorious’);
She had seen all the good things of nature, and was strong in artistry;
she was splendid in beauty, and had grown [mature] in intellect.
Envious Fortune was unwilling that she should spend a long time in life:
the Fates’ distaff itself failed them.

(I’ve put the Latin at the bottom of this post, for those who can benefit from it. Sadly, I can’t.)

Stevenson: “The emphasis on this as a servile name implies she had a non-servile name, suggesting that Petale was manumitted on her deathbed.” (She would then have taken on the name Sulpicia.)

Just imagine in happier times, the two of them, Sulpicia reclining in her chambers, listening to poetry, perhaps while mulling over her own verses – an antidote to all of those I, Claudius images.

Sulpiciae cineres lectricis cerne viator
Quoi servile datum nomen erat Petale
Ter denos numero quattuor plus vixerat annos
Natumque in terris Aglaon ediderat
Omnia naturae bona viderat arte vigebat
Splendebat forma, creverat ingenio
Invida fors vita longinquom degere tcmpus
Noluit hanc fatis defuit ipse colus.

(This all from pages 42-44)

I’ve embraced change all my life – get positively antsy if at least the possibility of it isn’t visible. (And yes that’s probably reflected by the fact that I’ve not lived in one house for three years in the 20 years since I left home – and rarely in the same city/country for longer than that – although I do think there’s enough in London to keep me interested.)

And I hope to stay this way. There’s a general truism that older people get “more set in their ways”, yet I suspect a lot of that is based on the generation that is old now or has been old in the recent past. They knew all of the turmoil and upheaval of the Second World War, and in general after that immediately sought stability and calm in their lives, which then, I’d suggest, became a habit.

And with the Baby Boomers now entering or approaching old age, we’re already seeing that they will be different. Just look at all the “silver surfers” (and “silver bloggers”), you see in the local library.

With the aging societies in which we now live this is an economic and social issue, not just an issue of irritating, fussy old relatives.

The MIT’s Technology Review is asking the question what does it mean for science? Is it true that old scientists can’t have new ideas?

Broadly I’d agree with their conclusion, that the claim is nonsense. And it strikes me that our (and their) views over this are still much influenced by the Romantic idea of lone genius, of a man (and this vision usually is associated with a man) having a sudden “ah-ha” moment that comes from nowhere.

And of course ideas don’t just arrive in a vacuum and are then embraced as brilliance; they only arise, can only arise, in a social milieu ready to accept and embrace them, and that already has the framework of the ideas within it.

So, unlike buses, if one Einstein hadn’t come along, there’d have been another one shortly. And she or he might have been aged 25, or 65.