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london, originally uploaded by natalieben.

An impulse purchase at the London Review of Books bookshop turned out well.

This little publication is packed with articles, stories and pictures of the less-fashionable parts of London and interesting facts, surprisingly well edited and put together*.

The contents of Smoke: a london peculiar include

* a history of elephants in London – the first was in 1255, a present from Louis IX to Henry III.

* “Rodent Rovings” – in Philpot Lane there is apparently a 19th-century building bearing a carving of two mice nibbling cheese – apparently a builders’ initiative to commemorate the plague they had to work through. (Have to go looking for that.)

* There’s a warehouse of the north circular between Walthamstow and Edmonton that has a regularly changed feature “Veneer of the Week”. Apparently there’s 70 to circulate among.(I used to drive this road quite often, but never noticed this “feature”.)

* I learnt about Northolt, on one of the ends of the Central Line: “It’s not even a non-place, to use Auge’s term, just a bus stop on the way to Heathrow. Northolt has good company in the excised remains of the county of Middlesex, though. JG Ballard’s Shepparton is on the other side of the airport catchment area and somewhere in the Enfield enclave is a place called Ponders End, from where Norman Tebbitt hails. And I’m sure Stevie Smith was talking about Northolt when she made the jibe about what Town Hall terms “greater metropolitan areas” being all sub and no urb. It is enough to make Henri Lefebvre weep into the lap of one of his secretaries.” (From “Flight Paths”, Paul Castro)

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*No I don’t know the editors, nor am I being paid by them.

More here.

Yesterday afternoon to Sir John Soane’s Museum on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. It is one of those wonderfully idiosyncratic, personal collections, maintained much as he left it in the early 19th century, that have a charm no professionally curated exhibition can match.

My favourite area was “the crypt”, done up to feel like a mausoleum, packed with mainly Roman funerary monuments and plaster models of “modern” graves, but at its centre is the spectacular stone sarcophagus of Seti I, carved from a single piece of calcite.

It is enclosed in its own glass carriage, complete with wheels, which is presumably how it arrived in 1824, when Soane bought it after the British Museum declined to pay the discoverer, Giovanni Belzoni, a circus strongman and “archaeologist” (they don’t make ’em like that any more), the £2,000 he wanted for it.

You can just imagine it being formally wheeled into place, with Soane and his invited guests (1,000 came over three evenings) watching by the light of candles and lamps – more than a little spooky.

You’d think someone would have painted the scene, but the museum attendants didn’t think so. A web search produces a catalogue of the museum, which indicates there is a folder of 53 drawings of the sarcophagus by Joseph Michael Gandy, an employee of Soane’s, but I have a feeling these may be recordings of the item itself, rather than of its arrival.

Soane died in 1837, so living, just, into the Victorian era. It is interesting, however, that this is very much a Renaissance house – everything is assembled on the basis that the ancients, particularly the Greeks and Romans, are the model from which all inspiration should spring. I suspect by the time of his death Soane was very old-fashioned, but it is still a reminder how close we are to a time when the past was seen as more advanced than the present.

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india, originally uploaded by natalieben.

I blogged a few days ago about the postcards I am buying as presents (for several people now; if you have a good idea why not use it more than once.)

Above is one of the results, a lovely little piece of Orientalism produced by “The Phototype Company Bombay”, labelled “wood cutters”,
and posted from India in 1915 to Miss F. Birch, 6 Rockingham Parade, Uxbridge, Middlesex.

Part of the discussion that arose around my last post was how such cards were used as a cheap form of communication for prosaic matters, and this one certainly lives up to the billing.

It reads:
Dear Flo, Have run out of PCs. [presumably postcards] Will send them as usual next week when I shall have obtained a fresh supply. Love to all, Perle (?).

You’d reckon the recipient would be a bit disappointed with that, although perhaps they really just wanted the picture.

The other thing that leaves me wondering is the shape of the saw. I’ve used a (straight) cross-cut saw, worked by two people, which is a very effective tool, but I can’t understand why you would want to make it this shape. (Yes I do ponder some peculiar things.)

Making babies
* Unimpressed.net describes how the idea that life begins at conception is a misogynist one, assuming that what is important about the child comes from the male contribution of chromosomes, thus ignoring all of the work that the woman does with her body to produce the baby.

News is all a matter a perspective
* From Iviews – “Christian Suicide shooter Kills Innocent Americans: Experts also believe that the inspiration for the terrorist act came from the belief that the killing would be forgiven.” (Hat-tip to Slit.)

In the House, but why?
* Women now hold a quarter of the seats in the Australian House of Representatives, and a third of those in the Senate, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. What a pity its headline is “Women the power behind the PM”.

No bag thanks
* Also in Australia, supermarkets have cut the number of plastic bags they hand out by 30 per cent, although other shops have barely started on this blindingly simple, obvious, and even cost-saving environmental measure. So why has this move not even started in Britain? I spend an amazing amount of time telling shop assistants, often two or three times: “No bag thanks. No, really. No bag!” Most look as though no one has ever said that to them before.

Towards the end of True North, the second volume of her memoirs, Jill Ker Conway gets to her research work on American women who pioneered access to tertiary education and the professions, which was later published as The First Generation of American Women Graduates.

My post on the first part of the memoir is here.

She writes of her subjects, who include Jane Addams, Florence Kelley and Ellen Gates Starr:

“Every one … had been a rebel, either refusing marriage or insisting on a very unconventional union. They had all founded institutions or professions for women, and … they had all been powerful social critics. … Some were privately conscious of a drive to power. …
In real life their language was pungent, their schedules were enough to daunt a professional athlete, and, for those who worked with them, their force of character was something of primal dimensions.
… but when time came for each of these women to write her memoirs, each presented herself as the ultimate romantic female, all intuition and emotion, tugged by the heartstrings to random encounters with the important causes, which, in reality, this group of women had discovered and led.” (p149-150)

She looked to other periods and found the same pattern. In the 1960s, she says, the explanation she devised was that “the social system operated not merely to repress libido (as Freud thought), but to repress other powerful human feelings, and to prevent them from being brought to consciousness. That would mean that a woman could live her whole life seeking power and influence for the causes she favored, but not be conscious of any but the approved spectrum of emotions allocated her in the patterning of gendered temperaments.”

Later, she says, educated by her own experience, “I also learned that in American society, a woman who does not fit the romantic stereotype of the female has difficulty mustering public support. Then I understood that it was possible my subjects told their story the way they did because they didn’t want to damage the public response to their reforms.” (p. 151-2)

After all of that, how does she describe her entry into public life, as vice-president of the University of Toronto? “Although I thought of myself as a mature professional, with aspirations to make a difference in the scholarly profession in whish I had worked. it had never entered my mind that I had any talent for running things.” (p. 205)

As she takes on the role, “I was startled to discover that I was also a symbol for legions of other women … Without planning to I’d become a public person.” (p. 215)

Again, when she goes to Smith College, it is because a friend nominates her, and so out of politeness she goes to see the “Search Committee”. Then, what do you know, she has the job.

You’d think an academic would see the pattern, but then again maybe I am being too hard on her. Maybe it was her Freudian explanation, maybe it was because even in 1994, when she was writing True North – and maybe still in 2005 – it is unacceptable for a woman to declare ambition, for fear it might harm her cause.

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In my posts on Ker Conway I may not have provided an overall coherent biography – my aim was rather to speak of the elements of her life that interested me most; there’s a good summary overview here. And I discover from this there is a third, relatively recent (2002) volume, A Woman’s Education covering the Smith years. Standby for a commentary.

I’ve already posted on how much I identified with the first volume of the memoirs of Jill Ker Conway, a historian probably best known as the first female president of Smith College here and here.

After taking the slow boat from America, the second volume, True North, has just arrived, and while I directly identify with it less – since she gets married and to some degree “settles down” in this one – I still found it a riveting read.

She starts off being perhaps unsurprisingly gushy about Harvard when she first arrives: “Within weeks I began to see myself as perfectly normal, like all the other lively people around me. These people weren’t the alienated left intellectuals of Australia, or the wistful exiles from Oxbridge I knew in Sydney. They were young, lively and ambitious, and I was like them. (p. 23)

But she does eventually arrive at a more balanced view, especially when one of her housemates is denied the cherished lectureship at Harvard because she is female, despite winning the prize for the best English thesis in her year.

And she has a further rebuff for Harvard’s current, clinging-on-by-his-fingernails, boss, about the perils of being a female grad student, which I know haven’t changed at all:

“Women negotiating this Herculean set of tests encountered another hazard by the mere fact of being female. There was no way to expiate the invitation refused, however gracefully, or the sexual innuendo deliberately misunderstood. A woman’s work had to be just that much better, more theoretically daring, more brilliantly researched to shame naysayers with ulterior motives. As I watched my friends run the course, it was clear that the tenderest male egos were in the sciences, and that those of us who were humanists lived in a world where chances of giving offence were fewer than for those who worked day in and day out in tight-knit laboratory teams.” (p. 31)

Then there’s some good advice on research topics from her supervisor: “I told him I had decided to do my research on one of America’s great Progressive women reformers, Jane Addams. When I said I wanted to study how she had led her generation of American women to solve the problem of gaining access to higher education … he was approving. We both knew that experience had been my own personal dilemma in Australia. ‘One’s research should always involve some element of therapy,’ he said smiling. ‘It only count if it’s really close to the bone.'” (P. 34)

Agreed: although I’d add that it only counts if you also understand that it is close to the bone.

With her new husband — married perhaps unsurprisingly just before she was about to have to go back to Australia to confront her terrible mother again (Ker Conway seems a bit short of self-awareness here) she then moves to Canada, which she is determined to find much better than Australia.

Although she does admit one similarity:

To be continued …