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Books Politics

Notes from Rebuilding Britain’s Blitzed Cities: Hopeful Dreams, Stark Realities by Catherine Flinn

December 2, 2018 – 10:31 pm

p. 152 We have also seen how the wartime rhetoric of positive planning carried an assumption that central government would logistically and financially assist the cities in the rebuilding process. In the end, quite the reverse occurred: the central government hampered the process at least as much as it helped, and a minimal, if not miniscule – amount of financial assistance was given to blitzed cities. The role of private investment has also been shown to have significant impact on the rebuilding of cities – logistically, financially and visually…. The discourse of blame still seen today is directed at architects and planners, but overlooks the economic constraints, the involvement of many different actors and the very different ideology of the postwar era.”

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Books Environmental politics History

Notes from A Rich and Fertile Land: A History of Food in America

July 25, 2018 – 8:37 pm

p. 66 Many historians consider a smallbook of recipes published by Amelia Simmons in 1796 to be the first American cooker book because it contains American ingredients married to British culinary practices. Simmon’s recipes call for maize (still called Indian meal), pumpkins and cranberries among others. Thomas Hariot, John Smith and William Bradford among the earliest Englishmen in America would have readily taken to these dishes, but other early colonists did so only out of necessity. All spoke of the abundance of native American foods and how well people could fare upon them. Hariot declared that “Indian corn yields 100 London bushels while in England wheat yields 40 … Plus one man can in 24 hours of labor produce enough to last 12 months. .. once maize reached Europe it was destined to be food for poor backcountry folks and food animals.”

p. 67 “Nor was the corn produced in the same way as that used at least y Native peoples of New England. No patches were cut out of nutrient-rich forests, then left to fallow. Instead, corn came to be grown as a commoditized crop in larger cleared fields, sent to powered gristmills and then sold cheaply. Thus was a pattern set for America’s food and the way that it was and is produced.”

p. 239 The overwhelming majority of the millions who streamed into the United States between 1880 and 1920 came from eastern, southern, north and central Europe. Italians, mostly from south of Rome and Sicily, numbered more than 5 million. One-third returned after making enough money to purchase a farm or business back home; some of these food companies then shipped products such as olive oil to America. Two million Jews who fled pogroms and conscription in Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Messarabia found their way to America… some 1.5 million Norwegians, Swedes, Finns and Danes fled poverty and political difficulties to settle in the rural and urban upper Midwest. Greeks, mainly from the poorest upland regions of the Peloponnese, numbered about 400,000 in the same period… some traditional foodways remained within communities. Germans had the most powerful effect on American food from the mid-19th century, as in lager beer, sausage culture, bread, sauerkraut. But if it comes to numbers of dining places, then one might argue for Chinese. in the 21st century there are roughly 41,000 Chinese restaurants in America, a number far outstripping hamburger and mid-level restaurant chains. .. famous for two Americanized dishes, chop suey and chow mien… Around 1890 New Yorkers, especially the ‘Bohemian’ crowd seeking new taste sensations, began going to Chinatown for these bargain dishes. The same happened in other cities such as Chicago, where cheap Chinese eateries opened in the red light district for louche clientele.”

 

p. 300 Hamburger chains abound., not so with hot dogs. … perhaps it is that from their beginning as street food in the late 19th century, hot dogs have ramified into many regional and local styles, their differences celebrated by local communities and widely noted in the press… the food chain from animals to factory may be in the hands of a relatively few restaurant and processing companies, but absolute hegemony, not the cultural kind at least, does not work.”

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Books History Women's history

An Australian Girl in London (1902)

July 9, 2018 – 1:09 pm

p. 277 “Australia is still Australia. I am faithful to her in every bone and fibre. When I think of her an impression of dazzling wealth flashes across my brain, and an intoxicating odour of gumtrees steals powerfully over my senses, and I grow dizzy with happiness at the sight and scent of my country. But London is stronger. London drives out the gums. London hangs pictures , and plays, and cathedrals, and operas, and intellects all over the Bush and the dazzling gold. And I say to myself, in unmistakeable language, ‘I don’t want to go back It’s so far, far away. It’s the other end of the world. I don’t want to go back yet.’

It is not only the Londoness of London that has me prisoner. It is its nearness to other places. Can you understand that it is a few hours to Paris, to Holland, to Ireland and to Scotland. I could not believe it at first. Think of this. I can get to Greece – yes, there really is a place called Greece – more quickly than you can get to Perth….

P. 279 “go back to Australia, and the whole world vanishes, like a dream, and becomes, after a time, only a dream again.”

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Books Feminism Women's history

Notes from Rebel Girls: How Votes for Women Changed Edwardian Lives

July 9, 2018 – 1:08 pm

p. 102

“On Monday 4 February (1907) two of the striking weavers appeared in the magistrates’ court, accused of unlawful violence. The weighty Lancashire textiles trade unionist, David Shackleton MP, alarmed at suffragette incitement of his members, arrived in Hebden Bridge and condemned the violence. Letters critical of the suffragettes began to appear in the local press. Nonetheless, even on the eve of their trial, Adela Pankhurst and Jennie Baines continued to address open air meetings.

On Thursday 7 February, Jennie Baines and Laura Wilson appeared before Todmorden magistrates. Both denied the charges” and refused to pay fines or sureties. Laura retaliated: ‘I shall not find sureties to keep the peace… I shall not pay any fines or costs imposed on me by men who do not allow me to have a woman in Court to plead with me. I refuse to be bound over. That afternoon, both women were taken by trains to Leeds’ forbidding Armley gaol, the first suffragettes to be incarcerated in a |Yorkshire prison. They were seen off at the station by a handful of sympathisers. That night in Hebden Bridge, Adela plus Laura’s husband George Wilson justified what had occurred: the only way to settle strikes was by labour representation in parliament. (However, while still defiant, there was no longer the fill-the-gaols incitement: two imprisonments were sobering enough.) Even though their son was only five years old, George’s loyalty to Laura during her imprisonment contrasts with Hannah Mitchell’s experience: ‘Most of us who were married found that ‘Votes for Women’ were of less interest to our husbands than their own dinners. George Wilson’s commitment vividly illustrates how suffragette militancy within local West Riding communities sprang from labour movement solidarities which the WSPU could conveniently tap into.”

p. 103 “Nationally, early 1907 was a time of tremendous WSPU optimism and growth. The leadership exhorted supporters that ‘The help of every woman in the country is needed now if the fetters are to be struck off that keep women a subject race.’ It was indeed about this time that a Hebden Bridge WSPU branch was formed. On the night of Saturday 9 February, just two days after Jennie Baines and Laura Wilson were carted off to Armley, a local mass indignation meeting was held. The joint Hebden Bridge branch secretaries were Edith Berkley, another experienced fustian clothing machinist, and Louie Cobbe, Lilian’s younger sister. Within a few weeks, WSPU branches sprang up like mushrooms along the Calder Valley: not only in Hebden Bridge and Halifax, but in smaller communities like Elland too.”

p. 103 Lavena (Saltonstall) even found herself at the sharp end of the local anti-suffragette backlash. She was certainly keenly aware of how a single woman, out earning her living independently of her family and speaking her own mind, was viewed by the local community. Later she recalled with vehement passion: ‘Should any girls show a tendency to politics, or to ideas of her own, she is looked upon by the vast majority of women as a person who neglects doorsteps and home matters, and is therefore not fit to associate with their respectable daughters and sisters. If girls develop any craving for a different life or wider ideas, their mothers fear that they are going to become Socialists or Suffragettes – a Socialist being a person with lax views about other people’s watches and purses, and other people’s husbands or wives, and a Suffragette a person whose house is always untidy… Who is going to tell these mothers that daughters were not given to them merely to dress and domesticate. Who is going to tell them that they have a higher duty to perform to them than merely teaching them housework? Who is going to tell them that it is as cruel to discourage a child from making use of its own talent or individuality as it would be to discourage a child from using its limbs?”

p. 107 Over 500 ILP women signed the Manifesto to the Women’s Social and Political Union published at New Year 1907. Of these, 136 came from the West Riding of Yorkshire and a further 146 from Lancashire: together they added up to well over half of all signatories. And of the 58 WSPU branches now sprung up across the country, almost a quarter lay in Yorkshire, most in the West Riding textile towns. For such Pennine textile communities in northern England were the heartland of early WSPU support. Their very names – Halifax and Hebden Bridge, Bradford and Keighley, Leeds and Dewsbury – conjured up countless bales of wool, the racket of looms, the whirr of sewing machines.”

p.302 The Third rebel girl who left Britain, Dora Thewlis, also emigrated to Australia … like so many other Edwardians, was primarily an economic migrant. Some time before 1914, along with her elder sister and about 20 other Huddersfield girls, she left in search of a better life than that offered by the long hours in the Yorkshire textile mills. Dora went to Warnambool in the Melbourne region, where she worked in blanket-weaving. .. in 1918, she married Jack Dow, a second-generation Australian, and they had two children.”

p. 303 “Lavena Saltonstall – last hear of springing to defend the broad WEA curriculum against attacks about ‘cloroforming the workers’ – remained active in the Halifax WEA until 1916. Then, in June 1917, in Halifax Unitarian Chapel, 34-year-old Lavena, now working as an electrical engineer’s clerk, married George Naket of Bradford, a 40-year-old private in the Duke of Wellington’s regiment. But after the War, this talented self-taught feminist journalist, happy to take on anti-suffragists, sadly disappears from view.”

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Books Feminism History Politics Women's history

Notes from Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne

June 1, 2018 – 7:51 pm

p. 33 For misogyny, though often personal in tone, is most productively understood as a politically phenomenon. Specifically, I argue that misogyny ought to be understood as the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance.

p. 68 According to my account, misogynist hostility can be anything that is suitable to serve a punitive, deterrent, or warning function, which (according to your theory of punishment) my be anything aversive to human beings in general, or the woman being targeted in particular. Misogynist hostility encompasses myriad “down girl” moves – so many as to make the list seem likely to be indefinitely extensible. But, to generalize: adults are insultingly likened to children, people to animals or even to objects. As well as infantilizing and belittling, there’s ridiculing, humiliating, mocking, slurring, vilifying, demonizing, as well as sexualising, or alternatively, desexualising, silencing, shunning, shaming, blaming, patronizing, condescending, and other forms of treatment that are dismissive and disparaging in specific social contexts. Then there is violence and threatening behaviours, including “punching down” – that is deferred or displaced aggression. And since, on my account, one woman can often serve as a stand-in or representative for a whole host of others in the misogynist imagination, almost any woman will be vulnerable to some form of misogynist hostility from some source or other.

p. 69 Misogyny need not and usually will not arise from specialised attitudes, like the idea that women are seen as sexual objects, viewed as sub-human, or having a hateful, detestable “essence”. Rather, it’s generally about the enforcement and re-establishment of patriarchal order and the protests when it gets challenged. Disgust flows from, and augments, these social processes.”

p. 74 misogynists may simply be people who are consistent overachievers in contr4ibuting to misogynist social environments (whether or not the system counts as misogynistic, all things considered. The point is that their efforts are pushing strongly in this direction.) Alternatively, misogynist may be people who have been heavily influenced in their beliefs, desires, actions, values, allegiances, expectations, rhetoric and so on, by a misogynist social atmosphere.”

p. 77 Many if not most of us at the current historical juncture are likely to be capable of channelling misogynistic social forces on occasion, regardless of sincere egalitarian beliefs and feminist commitments. I am sure I am no exception to this. Such channeling may take the form not only of unwitting policing and enforcing distinctively gendered norms and expectations, but also, on my analysis, over-policing and over0enforcing gender-neutral and potentially valid norms, e.g. genuine moral obligations. If the result is that we evince excessively or distinctively hostile reactions to the women implicitly deemed to be wayward in some way (again, rightly or wrongly) as compared with her male counterparts, then it will still count as misogyny that she faces in my book.”

p. 196 In June 2016, Standford Universiry student Brock Turner, age 20, was tried for treating a young woman, age 22, like a proverbial piece of meat – sexually assaulting her behind a dumpster, after a party on campus… This case vividly illustrates the often overlooked mirror image of misogyny – himpathy, as I’ll call it … it’s so common that we regard it as business as usual… The specific form of himpathy on display here is the excessive sympathy sometimes shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence. It is frequently extended in contemporary America to men who are white, nondisabled and otherwise privileged “golden boys” such as Turner, the recipient of a Stanford swimming scholarship. There is a subsequent reluctance to believe the women who testify against these men, or even to punish the golden boys whose guilt has been firmly established – as, again, Turner’s was.”

p. 263 Misogyny often involves distinguishing between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ women, by lights of their conformity to patriarchal norms and values. So, at the highest level of generality, it’s not surprising that women who aspire to be ‘good’ have social incentives to distance themselves from a woman deemed ‘bad’ as Clinton often was, and to publicly participate when she was ostracized and punished for supposed moral crimes and misdemeanours.”

p. 264 “penalizing successful women serves an ego-protective function (only) for other women. It defuses the threatening sense that a similar – and similarly good, decent and/or ‘real’ woman – is more competent or accomplished than they are. And tellingly, it appears that this is linked to a lack of self-belief that can be assuaged by positive feedback.”

p. 264 “In the days following the election, it was common for those of us grieving the result to judge the white women who voted for Donald Trump even more harshly than their white male counterparts. I was guilty of this myself. But … I subsequently came to redirect a good portion of my anger towards the patriarchal system that makes even young women believe … that they are unlikely to succeed in high-powered, male-dominated roles….It is wrong but natural to protect oneself from the prospect of threatening others who challenge one’s extant sense that one couldn’t have been the president (say), notwithstanding one’s best efforts. A way to do this is to hold that these women are different and in some way inferior or objectionable or otherwise suspect. They are, say, ruthless, callous, or uncaring. Or their success makes them witches: their power is black magic.

p. 276 Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard. “The two were consistently described in a strikingly similar way, especially given the difference between them in appearance, age and history (though not their center-left politics, notably.) The belief in female leaders in politics seems to founder even at the level of visual perception. They look hollow, stuff, wooden robotic, as well as fake and inauthentic. Their energy doesn’t appear to come from inside them: nor, it appears, do their values – which are subsequently held to be merely a product of mercurial, outward social forces.”

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Books Environmental politics

Notes from Being Ecological by Timothy Morton

May 11, 2018 – 1:31 pm

p. 44 “something about the vagueness of kinda sorta finding yourself in the Anthropocene, which is the reason why the Sixth Mass Extinction event on planet Earth is now ongoing, something about that vagueness is in fact essential and intrinsic to the fact of being in such an age. This is like saying that jet lag tells you something rue about how things are…. Heidigger’s word … is vorhanden, which means present-at-hand. Normally things kind of disappear as you concentrate on your tasks. The light switch is just part of your daily routine… Things kind of disappear – they are merely there; they don’t stick out … less weird, less oppressively obvious versions of themselves. [jetlag] when you wake up, everything is back to normal, and that’s how things actually are; they are, as Heidegger says, zuhanden, ready-to-hand or handy. You have a grip on them.”

p. 66 agriculture “the inner logic of the smoothly functioning system – right up until the moment at which it wasn’t smoothly functioning, aka now – consists of logical axioms that have to do with survival no matter what. Existence no matter what. Existing overriding any quality of existing – human existing that is, and to hell with the lifeforms that aren’t our cattle (a term from which we get chattels, as in women in many forms of patriarchy, and the root of the word capital.) Existence above and beyond qualities. This supremacy of existing is a default ontology and a default utilitarianism, and before any of it was philosophically formalized, was built into social space, which now means pretty much the entire surface of the Earth. You can see it in the gigantic fields where automated farm equipment spins in its lonely efficient way. You can feel it in the field analogs such as huge meanihngless lawns, massive parking lots, supersized meals. You can sense it in the general feeling of numbness of shock that greets the fact of mass extinction. Quite a while ago humans severed their social, philosophical and psychic ties with nonhumans. We confront a blank-seeming wall in every dimension of our experience – social space, psychic space, philosophy space. Uncannily we begin to realise that we are somewhere. Not nowhere.. this feeling of openness, this uncanny sensation of finding ourselves somewhere and not recognising it, is exactly a glimpse of living less definitively, in a world comprised almost entirely not of ourselves.”

p. 96 “what’s wrong with most human-built space in what is called ‘civilisat8ion’, that it doesn’t accommodate the beings who are already here, walking around as strays or bursting through the cracks in the concrete. These nonhumans are like uninvited guests. With human uninvited guests, we follow rules of hospitality… but with nonhumans, what is the etiquette? Well, we are perhaps reaching the point where we might want to revisit our customs, our rules, and modify them to include at least some nonhumans.”

p. 98 “The whole isn’t greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, the whole is less than the sum of its parts … a much easier way of thinking. And it’s a much nicer way of thinking – nicer to the parts, which in our case, the ecological one, means nicer to polar bears and coral. .. we have simply been passing on the normal form of holism without thinking too much .. we can .. concentrate on just the super-being, the network that the things create, we can ignore extinction.”

p. 154 “Death is comfy, as Freud observed: the tension between a ting and the beings that veer around it is lowered to zero. A cell wall is ruptured and the cell’s inside’s spill out into its surroundings. A glass shatters and the difference between itself and the space around it collapses. It’s life that is disturbing and uncanny, all those energies flowing around, exchanges happening between the inside and the outside of an organism, exchanges between organisms, in every possible physical and metaphorical (and metaphysical) sense.”

p/ 155 “Bitter is a taste that infants have, without cultural training – they can all make the wincing face of tasting bitterness from birth. Bitter is a sign of poison … but if you avoid them altogether, you also get sick. Perhaps you choose to eat burgers because you don’t like that bitter taste. So you die more quickly of a heart attack or a stroke. Life is a balance between completely avoiding stuff and dosing yourself with stuff over and over again. … washing our hands with soap all the time, and nowadays with antibacterial soap – is precisely what brings on death in various ecological forms (such as upgraded superbugs).”

p. 186 “Plastic care, stripped down and efficient, is highly toxic, especially when you scale it up to Earth magnitude and operate like that for 12,500 years. What is required instead is playful care. This doesn’t mean care that is cynical … we need … a playful seriousness. This mode would have a slight smile on its face, knowing that all solutions are flawed in some way. Expanded care, care with the care/less halo, is more likely to include more lifeforms under its umbrella, because it is less focused on sheer survival.”

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