Philobiblon

The First Carnival of Feminists has made it on to the MSNBC linklog. Thanks Will.

Now dragging myself out to lunch, an hour after getting up. (The joys of working nights – though only for another three and a half weeks!) I always order spaghetti carbonara, on the ground that it is bacon and eggs, so you can almost call it breakfast.

Coming up this afternoon – I’m writing it here because then I’ll have to get it done – a review of an excellent book on women in computing. Also in the pipeline is a rave review of a book about a women in medieval England.

They’re written in my head – just got to get them into Blogger. (Would be nice if you could just plug in a lead.)

Well that is stretching it a little, but I like the tale of Margery Starre, who in Cambridge on June 16, amidst the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 (Wat Tyler’s), tossed the ashes of burnt documents to the winds, cring “away with the learning of clerks! away with it!”

(From “The Imaginary Society: Women in 1381”, Journal of British Studies 40 (April 2001), pp. 159-183.

The next Carnival of Feminists, the second, will be hosted on Personal Political on 2 November.

The call for submissions is already up . If you’ve got a great post already up send it along, or if you’ve had one brewing in the back of your mind for a while, get it into the blogosphere in time.

If you inexplicably missed the first Carnival it is here.

And you’ll always be able to find out about the carnival on its home page.

There’s an entirely sensible campaign now in the UK to encourage people to switch off appliances left on standby, saving both greenhouse gas emmissions and money.

I try hard to be environmentally friendly – low-energy light bulbs and appliances, using cycling and public transport etc, but I confess my computer CPU isn’t switched off from one week to the next. (Although I do switch off the screen.)

The problem is it takes so long to fire it up again. And it seems strange that this problem hasn’t been solved – it is one of the primary annoyances of computing. And it also drives us mad at work, where an average of several crashes per computer per working day (usually right on deadline) wastes huge amounts of time in restarting. (I used to believe the claim that Apples never crashed – Hah!)

But finally, it appears, there is a solution in sight. About time!

Australian editors are traditionally interested in the Northern Territory only for crocodile wrestling stories and lurid murder trials, the latter category in which the Falconio murder trial definitely falls.

(A brief summary: a British couple were driving along an Outback highway. She reports that their car was flagged down, the man was shot, she was tied up, but fled and hid in the bush for five hours, before flagging down a passing truck. The boyfriend is presumed dead, but no body has been found.)

As might be predicted, media coverage depicting Darwin as “Hicksville” has upset the locals. The Chief Justice is ensuring he gets his name in all the papers, asking of the writer of the offending article: “How did he get out? Presumably by horse and carriage?” Entirely in line with the script.

Also in line with the script, all aspects of the reputation of the dead man’s partner is being trashed in court, despite the fact that she is a victim of forced imprisonment, serious assault etc and spent many hours in fear of her life. The fact that all of the details she gave of her ordeal, no doubt in a state of shock soon after, and subsequently, don’t exactly square up, is hardly a surprise. From what I know of the nature of memory in shocking circumstances (some from personal experience), she will have eventually constructed out of fragmentary memories a coherent narrative for herself; there’s nothing solid about memory.

Actually, she’s already been found guilty of not being sufficiently “womanly” – ie breaking down in public – just like Lindy Chamberlain.

.. at Saturday’s conference.

Bishop Francis Godwin, author of the (posthumously published in 1638) Man in the Moone, which might be called the first piece of science fiction. His central character, writing what is structured as autobiography,, “translated from the Spanish”, is a priest who reports on training swan-like birds to carry him on their annual migration to the moon. There he finds a utopia with no disease, no crime etc, and is told that anyone who shows any problems is shipped down to Earth, thus explaining why it is is such a sinful place.

John Wilkins, the first secretary of the Royal Society, who knew its author, actually revised a scientific paper to take account of it. The book, taken at face value by most readers, went through more than 20 editions in the next two centuries, also being translated into French, German and Dutch. Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe both read it.

Robert Recorde (c.1510-1558) “the most important teacher of mathematics of the English Renaissance, also a neo-Platonist. He wrote books, in English (importantly) on arithmetic, astronomy and algebra, some in the form of what would now be called “teach yourself”. Claim was laid for him as having “laid the foundation for mathematics and technical learning in general society”. He was also a civil servant and got himself into trouble in Ireland, eventually dying in prison.

Sir George Beeston who was knighted after fighting with Drake et al against the Spanish Armada, and has a lovely tomb in St Boniface Church in Bunbury.

William Cornysh (or Cornish, a Renaissance musician, introduced by a researcher who has the lovely plan to research the lives of “nobodies”, one being an anonymous person – a delightful idea.

The idea of David Rizzio, the Italian, supposed to be the lover of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was murdered with such dramatic political consequencies. He was seen as the prototype for the Italian lovers and Catholic villians of Elizabethan and later drama.

I also learnt about the contradictory funeral monuments of the wonderful Elizabeth Hoby, and the way people used almanacs as frameworks for their “diaries”, also sometimes commenting when the weather forcast was wrong!