A long time ago when I was studying agricultural economics, we were taught about The Tragedy of the Commons as a simplistic piece of propaganda for laissez-faire capitalism. The story goes that if something is not owned by someone everyone will exploit it until it is destroyed; the “obvious” answer is to privatise it.

Hence I was very pleased to read yesterday about a success of the commons, how in Woking “rough music” (i.e. loud public shaming rituals, like the charivaris discussed last week) was used to protect the common, being directed against those who overstocked the common or cut excessive quantities of woof or turfs (?) from it.

This from E.P. Thompson, Customs in Common, The Merlin Press, London, 1991, p. 519. (Thanks to Sharon from Early Modern Notes for directing me to it.)

Was blog-browsing (or should I say blog-commissioning – you’ll have to read my website to get that) and came across an interesting website:

Directory of Open Access Journals
In their own words:

Welcome to the Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. We aim to cover all subjects and languages. There are now 1248 journals in the directory. Currently 320 journals are searchable on article level. As of today 59830 articles are included in the DOAJ service

It includes 31 history journals, from the History of Intellectual Culture to Nordic Notes (curiously coming out of Australia).

As part of my relaxed cultural weekend, in addition to art and theatre (the “Bollywood” production of Twelfth Night, an excellent idea not as well executed or developed as it might have been but still well worth seeing), I read Louise Welsh’s Tamburlaine Must Die, an imagining of Christopher Marlowe’s explanation of his own fate at Deptford.

It’s had mixed reviews, see a selection here. The language doesn’t always seem appropriate, but the pace is brilliant and the mentality of late Elizabethan London seems to me just right: the amorality, the fatalism, and the fervent but unreliable passions. You might ask where I’m getting that sense from and I guess to a large extent Shakespeare: a nice little piece of consilience.

More on Vanessa Bell. (Although I’m not usually into the Bloomsbury set, I think I would have liked her.)

“Her love of strong shapes and unusual colours was deeply rooted, and in her heart she was quite unapologetic. She could be fiercely condemning of other people’s taste when it fell into what she saw as the fatal traps of prettiness and refinement. Staying with her lady artist friends Ethel Sands and Nan Hudson in Oxfordshire she found herself repelled by the contrived and excessive care that had gone into their choice of decor – everything matched, merged and chimed; she found it dispiriting.” (p.111,112)

Having been scarred for life by a youthful exposure to such “taste”, and cushions always at a 45-degree angle, I can only sympathise.

“At Asheham, the Bell’s first Sussex home, Vanessa hung up flame-orange curtains lined with mauve. At Wissett Lodge, her rented home in Suffolk, she and Duncan distempered the walls a brilliant blue, and dyed the chair-covers with coloured ink. They even painted the hens’ tails blue. When they moved to Charleston Vanessa pained her bedroom black with red strips down the corners. Her son Quentin’s early years in London were stamped with the consciousness the the family were quite different from their neighbours – because all the other houses in Gordon Square had sober front doors while theirs was “a startling bright vermilion”. (p.115)

Let’s see: my hall and study are brilliant pink, my bedroom turquoise, my living room deep blue: getting there!

From: Among the Bohemians, Experiments in Living 1900-1939, Virginia Nicholson, Viking, London, 2002.

I also had a look at the Courtauld general exhibition, and was particularly taken by two paintings, both of women who seem to me sad.

The first, unoriginally, since everyone in the gallery stopped to look at it, and it is widely used in publicity material, was Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.

The woman is described as a barmaid, but she seems far too well-dressed, and too vulnerable, to be that. The back view of her, which is almost but not quite a reflection, makes her look like a schoolgirl, with her ears reddened with embarrassment as the sinister-looking man leans towards her.

A really disturbing image.

The other piece that struck me, Vanessa Bell’s Conversation, is less obviously confronting, but my reading of it is the woman on the left in black, who is speaking is telling some tale of familiar misery that the other two fashionably dressed women have heard many times before, and while they’re putting on a sympathetic front, they’re a bit bored with it. The reproduction doesn’t really do it justice: go and see it would be my recommendation. (She was the sister of Virginia Woolf, by the way.)

Went today to the exhibition at the Courtauld on 19th-century photography of “The Near East”, Photographic Recollections: Ancient and Islamic Monuments in the Near East 1850-1880 (which finishes on September 26).

There was something very odd about looking at many of the places that I’ve seen in person through the lenses of 150 years ago. It took me a while to work out what it was; not just the sepia, or the effect of early photographic techniques, but the fact that the spaces are all so empty. There are often a few figures arranged artistically, but otherwise these are photos of vast open spaces that today would always be packed with people: a reminder that population growth doesn’t just consist of bare statistics.

But what I found most interesting was the changing technical nature of photography over the period. Two views of the Qani-Bay Al-Mohamadi Mosque in Cairo brought this out.

The first, taken by Robertson and Beano in 1857, has a soft, almost water-colour-like quality, influenced, the caption said, by the early salt-paper negatives, but also by the tradition of Romantic drawings, with that said small group of figures arranged to give scale and local colour. One taken about a decade later, by Hammerschmidt, was done with a wet colloid negative, producing a sharp image almost like an architectural drawing, and in this there were no people and what the caption described as an “almost archaeological focus” on the monument itself.

No doubt times were changing, but the possibilities of technology were also affecting the way in which viewers of the photos could look at them: something of Marshall McLuhan’s “the medium is the message”. (Not that I’m a great fan of his; in my mass comm studies days I was severely disappointed when I got to read him at length; he was great at soundbites but lousy at sustained argument.)

These wet colloidal negatives had to be prepared on site, so Francis Frith, so the label said, had a special wicker-work dark-room wagon made for his expeditions. He wrote the locals decided it must be his harem, “full of moon-faced beauties, my wives all! – and great was the respect and consideration which this procured for me.”

I was rather taken with two pics of Palmyra, possibly taken by Joseph Bonomi, later curator of the Soane Museum. In the technique he used, the photographer had to cover the sky on the negative with black paint, to make it appear light, but this was done clumsily, and in one place the sky behind an entire row of appears dark; rather like me trying to publish a website or blog, I felt!