If you could bring back to life an extinct species of human being, should you?
It could soon be possible, with plans to reconstruct the genetic map of the Neanderthals.
There are so many fascinating questions you could answer … but I suppose you’d have to say it would hardly be fair to the individual created, and could they anyway be “Neanderthal” in our culture, brought up by Homo sapiens sapiens? Probably not. They’d be a cultural hybrid, if not a genetic one.
Don’t know how I haven’t found this before (or perhaps I have and had forgotten – it happens…) the Open-Access Text Archive. Lots of US unis and libraries with some of the classics, such as Arber’s A transcript of the registers of the Company of Stationers of London, 1554-1640 A.D.
And you can add your own…
(Hat-tip to Sound and Fury.)
An account of what sounds like an interesting, non-exploitative, movie about “1950s sex symbol Bettie Page”.
Opening August 4 in the UK. (Sounds like it might have already been and gone in the US.)
A much-delayed report – you can find the first one here.
(Note, these are my thoughts and collected snippets from the sessions I attended, and should not necessarily be taken as a full reflection of what the speaker said. And I think they are accurate, but it was an intense two days. Caveat rector.)
Ryan Stephenson (University of Ottawa) A “Headachy Tomb” in the Heart of London: Women’s Writing and the British Museum in George Gissing’s New Grub Street
Marion is the only female writer in the book who uses the Reading Room, but she finds it gloomy and headache inducing “a taste of fog in the warm, heady air”.
Writing in 1891, an author for the British Library Association said that women readers entered with the air of an intruder. Throughout Britain there were separate entrances to libraries for women!!!, and separate desks; in public libraries there were separate issue desks.
This was mostly it seems to “protect” the men – it was often claimed that women were distracting, prone to gossip, giggle, even, shock horror, rustle their skirts. An article in the Saturday Review of 1886 portrayed the woman reader: “she flirts and eats strawberries behind the folios”.
A measure from 1889 in the Reading Room, that readers could not be supplied with novels within five years of publication except by special written application was seen as a measure for keeping out frivolous women.
By contrast women’s writing can be agreeably domestic and unthreatening. In the novel Dora writes from her boudoir, wears light colours, keeps up appearances, is “feminine”.
Suggested reference: Flint, The Woman Reader
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Anne Rochford, whose biography was published in 1728, had, apparently a “virtuous” ealry life, then in later years became a prostitute. She then aquired a coffeehouse – Mrs Rochford’s – that became a site for fashionable rendezvous. Her biographer said she “had something Strong in her Diversions, loved to associate chiefly with Rakes, and affected Masculine Pleasures.”
Later she attracted royal patronage (mmm), and was allowed to open a “polite Cabaret” in the Palace mews.
Clayton, A. London’s Coffee Houses: A Stimulating Story, Historical Publications, 2003, p.100
I’ve just caught up with Roy on the always excellent Early Modern Whale, and his visit to the tomb of the formidable Elizabeth Hoby. If you’re unlikely to be able to make it there yourself, this will be a pretty good replacement experience.
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