… actually I almost certainly haven’t got any (unfortunately, since it is now fashionable), but having just finished the Australian seasonal phone calls I thought I’d share this lovely story of a woman probably fairly described as “spirited” who twice cheated the hangman before making a success of life in Australia.

Margaret Catchpole was the sixth child of a labourer in Suffolk, and she became a servant of John Cobbold, an Ipswich brewer, promptly saving one of his children from drowning. But she then fell in love with a boatman whose day job disguised his smuggling. To keep a tryst in London she donned sailor’s clothes and stole a horse from her employer’s stable. She was caught as she sold it in London.

Back in court in Bury she was sentenced to death, but her employer’s vigorous intervention had that converted to seven years in jail. Three years into that sentence, with the aid of her lover, she broke out, “in a very bold manner” letting herself down from the spikes on the wall. She was about to board her lover’s vessel – probably in male disguise – when a scuffle broke out in which her lover was killed.

Once again she appeared before Bury Assizes and once again Chief Baron Macdonald sentenced her to death, but again this was commuted, now to transportation for life. She sailed for Botany Bay in May 1801.

There she eventually married a prosperous settler, but she did not forget her old friends, sending back curiosities from Australia, and she remains locally famous in Ipswich, with – that ultimate English fame – a pub named after her. In Australia she has the wing of a maternity hospital, for it seems there she became a midwife.
(Taken from The English Abigail, Dorothy Margaret Stuart, Macmillan, 1946.)

More here and here. And it seems the story was made into a movie in 1911 and inspired a play.

… actually I almost certainly haven’t got any (unfortunately, since it is now fashionable), but having just finished the Australian seasonal phone calls I thought I’d share this lovely story of a woman probably fairly described as “spirited” who twice cheated the hangman before making a success of life in Australia.

Margaret Catchpole was the sixth child of a labourer in Suffolk, and she became a servant of John Cobbold, an Ipswich brewer, promptly saving one of his children from drowning. But she then fell in love with a boatman whose day job disguised his smuggling. To keep a tryst in London she donned sailor’s clothes and stole a horse from her employer’s stable. She was caught as she sold it in London.

Back in court in Bury she was sentenced to death, but her employer’s vigorous intervention had that converted to seven years in jail. Three years into that sentence, with the aid of her lover, she broke out, “in a very bold manner” letting herself down from the spikes on the wall. She was about to board her lover’s vessel – probably in male disguise – when a scuffle broke out in which her lover was killed.

Once again she appeared before Bury Assizes and once again Chief Baron Macdonald sentenced her to death, but again this was commuted, now to transportation for life. She sailed for Botany Bay in May 1801.

There she eventually married a prosperous settler, but she did not forget her old friends, sending back curiosities from Australia, and she remains locally famous in Ipswich, with – that ultimate English fame – a pub named after her. In Australia she has the wing of a maternity hospital, for it seems there she became a midwife.
(Taken from The English Abigail, Dorothy Margaret Stuart, Macmillan, 1946.)

More here and here. And it seems the story was made into a movie in 1911 and inspired a play.

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bookshop, originally uploaded by natalieben.

I just found this wonderful picture of a bookshop in San Francisco that has been entirely rearranged by colour as a piece of artwork. It has been so popular that the display has been extended (or maybe they just can’t face the re-arrangement job.)

The artist, Chris Cobb, calls the work “There is Nothing Wrong in This Whole Wide World”. He said: “Even though there is so much to be unhappy about in this world, we should try to create something amazing and beautiful and interesting despite all of the problems.”

Sounds facile, but the result certainly is beautiful, and what a great way to mix up ideas, throw them together and see what emerges.

Found at Superhero Journal.

Hat-tip to Laputan Logic, I’ve just explored a fascinating collection of biblically related material, including an early anti-Christian Jewish acount of the life of Jesus, the Toledoth Yeshu, in a version dated to the 6th century:

“In the year 3671[1] in the days of King Jannaeus, a great misfortune befell Israel, when there arose a certain disreputable man of the tribe of Judah, whose name was Joseph Pandera. He lived at Bethlehem, in Judah.

Near his house dwelt a widow and her lovely and chaste daughter named Miriam. Miriam was betrothed to Yohanan, of the royal house of David, a man learned in the Torah and God-fearing.

At the close of a certain Sabbath, Joseph Pandera, attractive and like a warrior in appearance, having gazed lustfully upon Miriam, knocked upon the door of her room and betrayed her by pretending that he was her betrothed husband, Yohanan. Even so, she was amazed at this improper conduct and submitted only against her will.

Thereafter, when Yohanan came to her, Miriam expressed astonishment at behavior so foreign to his character. It was thus that they both came to know the crime of Joseph Pandera and the terrible mistake on the part of Miriam. Whereupon Yohanan went to Rabban Shimeon ben Shetah and related to him the tragic seduction. Lacking witnesses required for the punishment of Joseph Pandera, and Miriam being with child, Yohanan left for Babylonia. …

Interesting how forms of slander – such as accusations of bastardy – haven’t changed much over the years, although it does make Mary virtuous – I wonder why?

This from an University of Pennsylvania grad student’s lovely collection of material, including images of the temptation of Adam and Eve and a collection of resources on Lilith, which takes me back into the Gnostics, on whom I have posted before here and here. It also led me to the Gnosis Archive, which has many original sources.

I was about to start by saying that in spite of new technology, print materials in their content and layout have changed astonishingly little in the past 20 years, when this news arrived in my inbox:

The current issue of _National Geographic Traveler_ presents a novel fashion in captioning. The rather long captions of a photographic feature are broken into “paragraphs” indicated, not by indentation or by a line of white space, but by a red paragraph symbol.”

OK, not earthshattering, but interesting nonetheless. (From the wonderful CEL-ery.)

But, such rare and minor exceptions apart, “literature” or “art” harnessing the power of the web and its technologies has not even reached the avant-garde stage, let along the Amazon best-seller lists. Yet Hayle, in the book on which I posted yesterday pointed me to an interesting example, Lexia to Perplexia, by Talan Memmott.

It is written in a creole combination of English and computer code, and explores these from the stories of Narcissus, Echo and Minoan funerary myths. But it really is rather fun, I promise. (Although you probably need broadband.)

No, it is really not so “difficult” as it sounds. e.g.

“From out of NO.where, Echo appears in the private space of Narcissus.tmp to form a solipstatic community (of 1, ON) with N.tmp, at the surface. The two machines — the originating and the simulative — collapse and collate to form the terminal-I, a Cell.f, or, cell…(f) that processes the self as outside of itself — in realtime.”

(Hayle helpfull explains that n.tmp is the name usually given to a function that will be replaced by another, “solipstatic” – the state of mental isolation denoted by solipsism is conflated with static; I-Terminal is “I”. “Realtime is a phrase programmers use to indicate that the simulated time of computer processes is running, at least temporarily, along the time experienced by humans.”)

A lot of it is more graphic, e.g.

face >> to > other.

And to prove there can be many different forms of texts, check out the fun Geek-T, “Geek History Through T-shirts”. (There must be a paper in that for any historian of the 20th century out there.) Hat-tip to Memepool.

My final post (for the moment anyway) on gender and blogging, currently debated, well just about everywhere, but you could start with my last post here.

I finally got around to starting N. Katherine Hayles Writing Machines, which, she says, “aims to explore what the print book can be in the digital age”. This requires consideration, she says, not only of “the theories, concepts and examples”, the visual design of the book itself, “the people initiating change and resisting it, writing books and creating digital environments, struggling to see what electronic literature means and ignoring its existence altogether,” but also “narrative chapters interrogating the author’s position, her background and experiences, and especially the community of writers, theorists, critics, teachers, and students in which she moves”. (p. 9)

She says this has forced her to “become an autobiographer almost against my will”.

“I am reminded of Henry Adam’s satiric admiration of Rousseau’s determination in the Confessions that he will reveal everything about his life … If Rousseau ranks as a ten in self-display and Adams a one, I come in somewhere around three … Although there will be biographical elements in the persona who will be written in these narrative chapters, no one should confuse her with me. To mark that crucial difference,she needs a name related to mine but not the same. I will call her — Kaye.” (p. 10)

This struck me as in some ways analogous to what has been described as the “typical female academic blog” – pseudonymous, containing a large amount of personal stuff, including material about friends and colleagues.

It touches on something that I feel is some often lacking in all forms of scholarship – in the humanities and sciences – a preparedness to acknowledge where the scholar is coming from, why s/he is addressing these questions in these ways. Also lacking often is a preparedness to acknowledge that any work of scholarship is inevitably collaborative, and the nature of that collaboration will effect the result.

My reading and experience suggests that female scholars are more often prepared to these facts than male, and fields in which women are prominent are more aware of the necessity of this – perhaps women are socialised to be more aware of their own biases and weaknesses, and to be more ready to acknowledge them, and conversely, men are more often socialised to flex their egos.

Would a “male” Hayles, if this could be imagined, have thought the biographical outline important? I suspect not. And if “he” had, would it have been diluted by the persona overlay?

In many areas of academia exploration of anything “personal” is still likely to be penalised, particularly for women, these suspicious interlopers in the ivory tower. So women academic bloggers want to explore these issues – they realise it is an essential part of scholarship and life in the academe — but often they can only safely do so pseudonymously.

P.S. As I expected, the book is brilliant. I’ll post more tomorrow, and also explain the title of this post.

Additional note. I just found that CultureCat has made a collection of links to blog posts on this issue.