Damn: I’d fled Sydney to escape, but now they’re following me.

I was going to try not to be curmudgeonly – and I’m talking about the Olympic Games if you’re that proverbial blog reader who’s just returned from Mars – but then I learnt that the softball and baseball, and 18,000 spectators, will be plonked into the gorgeous, peaceful Regent’s Park, which I count as my backyard. So I decided to let the curmudgeon out.

Since a large part of the British public already seem to think that sport (watching it on the television, not playing it, that is) is the most important thing in the world, it is hard to see how this is going to improve the nation.

This article has some fascinating figures on how fundamentalism is heading in the direction of destroying America’s technological advantage. (Although I don’t agree with its conclusion on Turkey’s membership of the EU, which sneaks into the end as though it is the writer’s pet subject.) It would be interesting to look at the parallels between America and 15th-century China, which likewise turned its back on innovation and the outside world.

* A 2.3m-year-old “factory” (via Mirabilis).

As the date for humans in America is put back significantly, to about 40,000 years, you have to think just how smart our ancestors were. The current date for the emergence on anatomically modern humans emerging is about 100,000 years ago in Africa, and if you look at some of the suggested but still controversial dates, they colonised the planet in an astonishingly short period of time. We think we live in a world of massive change, but just imagine 98,000BC (or thereabouts).

* Time magazine has caved in and handed over a confidential source. This article explains why this is a dangerous thing (although some of the commenters present the other side of the argument rather well). The problem of journalistic confidentiality isn’t going to go away.

*The women of Kuwait have made some great political advances in the past few months. This article sums them up and also has interesting figures on international representation. I didn’t know that 49 per cent of the Rwandan MPs are female.

* A popular medieval history magazine in French, Les Temps Medievaux. (Now I must get back to my French studies, soon …)

It’s ages since I read this now, but I did want to record a couple of snippets from A Life of Colette: Secrets of the Flesh, by Judith Thurman …

* It’s often forgotten that Colette was very much a journalist as well as a novelist. “She would be one of the first women to report from the front lines of World War I, and go up in an airship and an aeroplane. One of her specialties would be crime, particularly domestic violence, and criminal psychology, and she would cover some of the great trials of the century.” (p. 218)

* As the row ignited by Jacques Chirac over English food rages, we should perhaps be thankful he wasn’t commenting on female sexuality. Thurman is referring particularly to Colette’s The Ripening Seed, which a New York Review of Books review (full text requires payment) says contains her defining lines: “Ces plaisirs qu’on nomme, a la legere, physiques” (these pleasures lightly called physical.)

The biographer says: “At least since the Puritan revolution, and probably since the reign of the first Elizabeth, ambitious Anglo-Saxon daughters have been taught that their greatest worldy leverage – the route to influence in art, politics, or anywhere else in the public sphere – lies in abstention. Despite misogynistic laws and traditions, French culture ultimately prizes and respects sexual appetite and daring in women and, as these women age, values their prowess and wisdom – one reason Colette would become a national treasure.” (p. 316-7)

Is there some truth in that? I suspect there is, but looking at yesterday’s post, perhaps the absence (and always lesser importance) of the nunnery as an alternative for Englishwomen, meant celibacy IN society, as opposed to outside it, was a significant option, which it wasn’t in France – have to think about that one.

* But I have to admit, I struggled to really sympathise with the woman who “had always been a misogynist, but she became an increasingly entrenched one. In 1928 Colettette had published a polemical pamphlet entitled ‘Why I Am Not A Feminist’, explaining in her preface that ‘I have never had any confidence in women, the eternal feminine having betrayed me from the outset in the guise of my mother’.” (p. 381)

She seems, like too many successful women, to have preferred to regard herself as exceptional, above the rest of the female half of the human race. So no, I’m not a fan.

… whether you like it or not.

I have been reading about the “superfluous daughters” in early modern Italy who were, with varying degrees of force, pushed into nunneries.

Unsurprisingly, there’s little detail about the process or the fate of the women, so it is said the best account is the story in Allessandro Manzoni’s I promessi sposi, which was inspired by the life of Marianna de Leyva, known as “the nun of Monza” (Monza being a city near Milan).

After eight years of education in a convent she writes to her father saying she does not want to be a nun. Taken home, she is held in virtual solitary confinement and allowed not the smallest of pleasures. Finally she gives in and is whisked back to the convent:

“I am here,” began Gertrude, but on the point of offering the words that were to have almost irrevocably sealed her fate, she hesitated for a moment and fixed her eyes on the crowd in front of her. She saw, in that moment, one of her companions, who was watching her with an air of compassion mixed with maliciousness, and seemed to be saying, “Ah, the clever one has fallen into the trap!” That sight, reawakening with even more force in her soul all the old feelings, restored a little of her old courage and she was already searching for any answer other than the one dictated to her when, raising her eyes to her father’s face, as if to tests her strength, she saw such sinster anxiety, such threatening impatience that prompted by fear, with the same readiness with which she would have taken flight before a dreadful object, she continued, “I am here asking to be admitted to take the habit in this convent where I was so lovingly raised.”

Later, she took a lover and murdered a servant who threatened to expose her. There’s been at least one movie made of her story – it is described as “nunsploitation”, so I doubt it has much value.

The text, described as “the first modern Italian novel” is available in Penguin classics, and I note from Amazon that one of its “statistically improbably phrases” is “poor innocent girl”, which isn’t exactly resassuring as to its value as an account.

Even Google scholar doesn’t throw up anything – sounds like a topic ripe for re-exploration.

This from Musical Voices of Early Modern Women: Many-Headed Melodies, T. Lamay (ed) Ashgate, 2005, “The Good Mother, the Reluctant Daughter , and the Convent,: A Case of Musical Persuasion, Colleen Reardon, pp. 271-286.

Just learnt via the Alliance Against Urban 4x4s of a useful website through which you can fax your political representatives.

Write to them will, after you have supplied your postcode, tell you not only your MP, but also your MEPs, local councillors, etc. You can then write a message for the one of your choice, which will be faxed to them (which I suspect might have more impact, still, than an email).

My message was in support of the following early day motion:
EDM 146 – Road Traffic Emissions first put down on 19th May 2005 by Norman Baker (Liberal Democrat)

That this House notes the alarming 83 per cent increase in road traffic between 1980 and 2004 and more than a 50 per cent. increase in associated carbon dioxide emissions over the same period with road transport now accounting for 18 per cent of total UK greenhouse gas emissions and rising; further notes with regret that the UK car industry has shown the poorest rate in Europe in improving emissions of new cars with the Institute for European Environmental Policy reporting new UK cars among the highest average carbon dioxide emitters and research by the Energy Savings Trust demonstrating emissions from new UK cars now actually increasing for private car purchases; acknowledges Department for Transport research showing two-thirds of people understand that transport emissions are a major contributor to climate change; and urges the Government now to take firm steps to encourage consumers to consider environmental performance in car purchasing decisions through reform of the Vehicle Excise Duty better to reflect associated vehicle emissions.

My message said:

As a cyclist and pedestrian (and occasional driver of small cars) I find the proliferation of these monsters on our streets horrifying and terrifying, and as a citizen of the earth their contribution to greenhouse gas emmissions utterly unjustifiable.

Banning them would probably be impractical; pricing them off the road is eminently sensible.

A postscript to my post on US treatment of North Korea yesterday.

In a review of The State of Africa: The First Fifty Years of Independence by Martin Meredith in the Financial Times (their Saturday magazine book review section is almost uniformly excellent), Paul Nugent writes:

“Some of of anecdotes are priceless. One of my favourites is the story of Richard Nixon flattering Mobutu in 1970: ‘I find in studying your administration that you not only have a balanced budget but a favourable balance of trade and I would like to know your secret before meeting with the cabinet.'”
(Free registration may be required for the FT.)

If Mobutu is before your time, see here for why this is so sickening, or indeed look at the state of Congo today, courtesy of the CIA, with an estimated per capita GDP of $700.