Monthly Archives: July 2010

Books Environmental politics

Food – how are we doing?

July 19, 2010 – 11:04 am

I’m currently reading Nature and Power, by Joachim Radkau, which is powerful and very interesting – nothing less than an attempt to set the framework for a mature study of environmental history.

But one fact in it really brought me up short. Before 1945, the vast bulk of the world depended on locally grown foodstuffs – very little was moved much distance at all – when you think about it every town in grain-growing areas of any size had a mill and presumably sold most of its flour more or less locally, and international trade was negligible.

Yet now, we’ve got vast amounts of bulk transports, and huge international transfers. In half a century, and I suspect lots of that change has happened in only the last 30 years or so, there’s been a huge unplanned, unconsidered, unmonitored change in how our most basic need is met.

Now I’ve been reading about the terrible rice crop in Vietnam, dreadful conditions in China, about the drought striking the Russian and central Asian breadbasket, and it has been extremely dry in much of Britain and France … and so I wondered how we are doing.

Looking around led me to this excellent overview from the London Review of Books, and to the US Department of Agriculture June report (which seems pretty sanguine – although some of the weather has happened since then – and it does predict a 7.5m tonne fall in wheat crop), and a very useful FAO summary site.

And today the Guardian reports that speculators are getting heavily into the whole business – just what we all don’t need.

So the short-term answer seems to be “worry”, and the longer-term answer is “be very, very worried”.

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Feminism Women's history

Popular and lasting female role models for girls in literature?

July 15, 2010 – 6:42 am

I was walking through the Morvan hills in Burgundy yesterday, as pretty well in the middle of nowhere as you can be in Europe. So while there might have been trickling streams, an ash forest, an undergrowth of holly, not “hop scrub”, and really nothing very much at all reminiscent of Australia, I still found myself reciting The Man From Snowy River (Banjo Paterson’s great coming-of-age poem), and then rollicking my way tunelessly through Wild Rover. (Lucky there really was no one within coo-ee.)

But then I got to thinking about the content of these, and why these two tales – one of a boy becoming a respected man, the other of a man who’s been sowing his wild oats coming back into the fold – are the two that have stuck with me, nearly word-perfect, from childhood. And about the fact that both of the central characters are male.

Banjo Paterson of course is the quintessential poet of male Australian mateship; I know far less well many others of his poems, and the romance of humans overcoming natural adversity might be more than a little to blame for my first degree being in agricultural science. (That and the fact I was 17 when I decided to do it.)

But then I tried to think of similar songs or poems about women overcoming adversity, about girls becoming successful women, about straying women returning to the mainstream successfully, and I couldn’t think of any.

I used to be able to recite Little Boy Lost (from dreadful elocution lessons when I was supposed to be being taught to speak “ladylike”), which has a weeping and wailing mother, and … well when it comes to traditional culture, what I learnt in my youth and stuck with me, for brave, resolute, daring, successful women, I drew a total blank.

(With the generalised exception of pony club books – a staple of my pre-teen years, and perhaps the attraction of those has something to do with the fact that girls in them are allowed to do dangerous things, to get hurt, to struggle, persevere, and triumph – not something common in other genres.)

Other than that my childish heroes were rugby league players – they were the only admired people I knew about, and my dreams were – so extraordinarily – of footballing glory (still unrealisable for the girls of today).

Yet I can think of historical female characters who’d make great bases for such a literary project. Women who hid their sex to go off and fight in wars; the biblical Judith, who killed Holofernes (but if you think of most of the depictions of her they’re not exactly positive); pioneer women of the American West … the list could go on and on, and yet somehow none of this really seems to have inspired the songs and poems that have lasted in popular culture.

So I wondered how different it is today. As my office would tell you, pop culture isn’t exactly my special subject. I thought of Lara Croft, not that I know much about her, but she seems to be a genuinely heroic female character. And after that I drew a blank.

So I wondered. Are girls today growing up (anywhere in the world) offered equivalent female coming of age tales to The Man from Snowy River? Are they offered tales of women who went off the rails, had a roaring good time, then got it back together again? (And I’m talking here primarily about pre-teens, when so much character-forming is done.) Will they be remembering them 30 years later?

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Blogging/IT

Britblog Roundup No 276

July 11, 2010 – 5:21 pm

Welcome, to a Britblog roundup compiled from my Burgundy terrace, courtesy of the neighbour’s Wifi. I could brag about the glorious weather, the nut-hatches and great tits at the bird feeder and the glorious view down the valley, but given its summer holiday season many others will be enjoying similar soon, if not already.

But the blogging certainly hasn’t stopped (or indeed the political activity), so to work…

Starting with what is undoubtedly the story of the week: cutbacks, slicing and more destruction from our new government. Jess on The F Word covers the gender implications, Molly on Gaian Economics wonder how export-led growth is going to work if every country is trying to do it, and Jane considers the cost of cutting the Census.

More broadly, The Nameless Libertarian offers their judgement on the claim that this is the best government in a generation. Personally, I’ve no doubt this is going to be an unmitigated disaster, but I entirely agree that the standard has been set very, very low…something really needs to be done to improve the quality of the British political class…

…like proportional representation, for example.

That – or at least the weak and tiny improvement to the voting system represented by the AV referendum, was another major subject of the week. Jim on The Daily (Maybe) offers an essay on the alternative vote, and Andrew Dodge questions the subject.

And the final major issue of the week was anonymity for rape accused: Jess McCabe on The F Word sets out the parliamentary debate (very much split on gender lines), and The Partisan explores how misogynist lawmaking. And on a semi-related issue The New Adventures of Juliette explains that thuggishness and violence in men has nothing to do with sexual practices (might not be considered safe for all workplaces).

Also raising important issues:
* Brian Barder explores a report on Indeterminate Sentences
* Penny Red looks at the cost of internships
* The Magistrate lauds the end of blanket use of stop and search powers
* Random Acts of Reality explains how targets damage patient care

Going international, A Very British Dude is praising the Chinese in Africa, Charles Carwford considers British ambassadorial residences, and Odessablog fancies being Her Majesty’s man.

Turning to the media world, Jack of Kent follows the amazing saga of Hackney council, the Tory mayoral candidate, and theofficial threats. It’s a long tale, but one well worth reading through as a cautionary example.

Blogging is put under the microscope, including some serious number-crunching, by Diamond Geezer. It seems blog-roll aren’t what they used to be. (Which reminds me, really must find the time to clean up mine…)

And Mark Reckons that the Times really hasn’t got the paywall worked out.

While on (Una)Musings, the pleasures and pains of the writing life are under the microscope, while Christine on Open Minds and Parachutes wonders just what an environmental journalist should do.

And then a skip around the pleasures of life, to prove that blogging doesn’t have to be about politics and serious stuff: West Hampstead Life is reviewing what sounds like a good new restaurant (more blogging like this please – saves people visiting the bad ones!), and from Warsaw there’s an exact description of how to find “proper” British fish and chips.

Eoghan O’Neill is reviewing The Misanthrope at the Comedy Theatre, Ornamental Passion is visiting the traditional explorers’ hangout Stanford, and Earthenwitch offers some delightful-sounding recipes without fancy titles or too much fuss about precise measurements.

Finally, I can’t think of a category for this one, but I certainly enjoyed it: Heresy Corner has put some serious thought into the abilities of Paul the Psychic Octopus (who I confessed had previously escaped my attention). And ditto with Early Modern Whale’s visit to a (possibly) dumb 17th-century fortune-teller.

You can’t say there isn’t plenty of variety in British blogging.

That’s all for this week … nominations please for next week to britblog AT gmail DOT com – and your host will be Matt Wardman. (And all nominations (with very rare exceptions) will be included – that’s the rule for the roundup.)

But before I go, I should remind everyone about the Total Politics Best Blogs poll. Don’t forget to vote!

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Books Women's history

Theodora – but not quite Theodora

July 7, 2010 – 5:47 pm

First published as Book Review: Theodora: Actress. Empress. Whore. by Stella Duffy on Blogcritics

Theodora, wife of the Emperor Justinian, is perhaps my all-time favourite Roman empress – what’s not to like about a character who even her sworn enemy and libeller credited with saving her husband’s throne with resolute courage. So when I read good reviews of Stella Duffy’s fictional biography, I couldn’t resist.

The fact is, however, that he only major source we have for Theodora’s life is Procopius, who’s far from well inclined towards her in his Secret History, usually taken as his real views. There’s something about the slurs against her – that she was a teenage actress and whore, famous for her pornographic acts with geese – that draw questions in my mind. How is that women whom ancient (and not so ancient) historians never find their female characters just simple, garden-style sex workers, but make them always famous for their perversities?

Still, Duffy has chosen to go with the basic biographical outline provided by Procopius, and for the opening sections of the book, as Theodora is a young girl training for the Byzantine stage, then a star upon it, works pretty well.

We disappear into the back streets and sleazy alleys of Constantinople, its scents and colours, and I’ve no doubt Duffy has done her research on street names and geography. (There’s a bibliography for those who’d like to go further in non-fiction.)

And Duffy seems to capture well the mindset of a girl and a class of women who expect to have to make their own way in the world, through means that they mightn’t always like (not least for the social stigma), but are resigned to. There’s a sense here that she might have caught something real about a pre-Christian morality, although of course Christianity is fast taking hold in Theodora’s world.

The novel works less well, however, when Theodora, now a fugitive thief far from the city she calls home, hooks up with the quasi-heretic Alexandrian Patriarch Timothy, and has, she tells other characters, a not-quite Damacene conversion. She rejects as hysterics the conventional conversion narrative – liked that, for there must have been plenty of such scepticism at the time – but there’s never any real feel that sometime has changed in this character, although Duffy appears to want us to believe that it has.

Once again back in Constantinople, Duffy’s excellent on life inside the royal palace, its claustrophobia and fear, as Theodora winds her way into the life of Justinian, now heir-apparent to the aging Justin. It’s to the author’s credit, too, that she doesn’t try to make this a romance genre novel – strongly resists putting modern conventions of romance into the mind of either character.

But there’s a dryness to all of this, a dutifulness to the storytelling, that doesn’t quite grab the reader in the way this great character of history should.

The novel ends with the coronation – I can feel a sequel coming on, but I’m afraid I won’t be looking out for it. Much better try, I’d suggest, a non-fiction account of Theodora’s life.

(This novel is available in the UK, but appears as yet unavailable in the US.)

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Environmental politics

Mares milk, viper’s venom and really serious decadence

July 7, 2010 – 4:24 pm

The time has long gone when anyone seriously tried to claim that it was decadence that did for the Roman empire – all those larks’ tongues and luxury silks – but in so many ways there’s a “last days of the empire” feel about life today.
And that’s not just because of two articles I noticed today – one in the Autun edition of Le Journal de Saone-et-Loire, and the other in an April copy of Macleans, which has just made its way around our village to me. (Can’t say English-language magazines aren’t well used here.)

Locally, just up the road from us, near the Gallo-Roman citdel at Bibracte, is a new farm, specialising in mare’s milk, mostly, it would seem, for cosmetics. No objection, per say, although I can’t help wondering what they do with the male foals, knowing what happens to dairy calves. Still, one can’t help thinking of Cleopatra and those fabled baths…

Seriously madder, I learn of a $525-a-jar cosmetic, the no-so-secret ingredient of what is the venom of the temple viper, Tropidolaemus wagleri, which “works in a similar way to Botox, which paralyses the muscles that cause facial wrinkles”. Poison away those wrinkles…

But no, my favourite example is still the billboard-sized screens showing adverts in Tube stations in London – with the latest climate change predictions ringing in my ears, the idea that we are producing carbon dioxide for this purpose still tops my list of decadent madness.

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