Philobiblon

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a Dorothy L Sayers fan, so when Sharon on Early Modern Notes mentioned a new Harriet Vane novel, I was on Amazon in a flash. It turns out that Thrones, Dominations is a fragment written by Sayers in 1936 and worked up by a modern writer, Jill Paton Walsh.

Now I know: this is unPC, it is not really a Sayers, dead writers should be allowed to rest in peace etc, etc … but Harriet Vane, and Lord Peter Wimsey, are two “people” you just want to spend more time with.

So does it work? Well I’m almost sorry to admit that it does.

The book starts a bit slowly, and is rather too overtly “psychological” in places, but it has settled down well by the middle section. And the end is Peter’s mother, the Duchess, writing in her diary in a way that I find greatly endearing.

For those who like “closure”, it also completes the story by telling of the couple’s Second World War and after.

This is apparently carried in the next book, produced in the same way, A Presumption of Death.

Even if slightly guiltily, I guess I’ll have to buy that too.

All over the UK papers yesterday was the story “Desperate to be housewives: young women yearn for 1950s role as stay-at-home mums”, this version from The Independent:

They are the generation of women who grew up expecting to have it all. No longer forced to choose between children and a career, they were set to embrace superwomanhood by doing both – while holding down a perfect relationship and keeping a spotless home in their spare time.

But modern woman has taken a reality check. The average 29-year-old now hankers for a return to the lifestyle of a 1950s housewife. The daughters of the “Cosmo” generation of feminists want nothing more than a happy marriage and domestic bliss in the countryside, according to a survey.

Research into the attitudes of 1,500 women with an average age of 29 found that 61 per cent believe “domestic goddess” role models who juggle top jobs with motherhood and jet-set social lives are “unhelpful” and “irritating”. More than two-thirds agree that the man should be the main provider in a family, while 70 per cent do not want to work as hard as their mother’s generation. On average, the women questioned want to “settle down” with their partner by 30 and have their first child a year later….

For suggestions of why this is a bad idea, they might want to consult Purple Pen’s account of the position of her sister, or read The Women’s Room, which made me realise at age 16 why what my instincts told me was right, you always need your independence.

This isn’t usually a medical blog, although I do have an interest in medical matters arising largely from one of the few worthwhile science courses I ever studied – second-year physiology, which involved doing hideous things to pithed toads and anaethetised rats that weren’t going to emerge from their sleep. This made it hard to forget the lesson, even if understanding what is happening when you are in pain is not always a positive thing.

But I got this in an email today and since it doesn’t seem to have got lots of publicity, certainly in the UK, I thought it worth promulgating.

Sometimes symptoms of a stroke are difficult to identify. Unfortunately, the lack of awareness spells disaster. The stroke victim may suffer brain damage when people nearby fail to recognize the symptoms of a stroke. Now doctors say a bystander can recognize a stroke by asking three simple questions:
*Ask the individual to SMILE.
*Ask him or her to RAISE BOTH ARMS.
*Ask the person to SPEAK A SIMPLE SENTENCE
(Coherently) (ie. It is sunny out today)

If he or she has trouble with any of these tasks, call an ambulance immediately and describe the symptoms to the dispatcher.

There’s more detail here.

In the recent light reading category has been this JK Jerome “popular classic”. I get the impression that every British person read it at school at some time, but it didn’t make it on to the Australian curriculum.

It is in a curious way like reading 1984, because many of the images and ideas have already been encountered elsewhere. As this site suggests, Jerome’s hapless, impractical males falling into endless ultimately harmless scraps can now be seen in every second sitcom. What was perhaps original at the time (1889), now falls curiously flat. But perhaps it was innovative – I can’t think of an earlier set of contra-heroes as these.

I’m afraid my favourite character was the dog, a fox-terrier, who did not appear nearly often enough. But I did enjoy the following scene, which very much reminded me of an incident with my dog Beanie.

“Half-way up the High Street a cat darted out from one of the houses in front of us, and began to trot across the road. Montmorency gave a cry of joy — the cry of a stern warrior who sees his enemy given over to his hands — the sort of cry Cromwell might have uttered when the Scots came down the hill — and flew after his prey.
His victim was a large black Tom. I never saw a larger cat,
nor a more disreputable-looking cat. It had lost half its tail, one of its ears, and a fairly appreciable proportion of its nose.
It was a long, sinewy-looking animal. It had a calm, contented air about it.
Montmorency went for that poor cat at the rate of twenty miles an hour ; but the cat did not hurry up—did not seem to have grasped the idea that its life was in danger. It trotted quietly on until its would-be assassin was within a yard of it, and then it turned round and sat down in the middle of the road, and looked at Montmorency with a gentle, inquiring expression, that said; “Yes ! You want me ?”
Montmorency does not lack. pluck,; but there was something about the look of that cat that might have chilled the heart of the boldest dog. He stopped abruptly, and looked back at Tom.
Neither spoke ; but the conversation that one could imagine was clearly as follows :—
THE CAT : “Can I do anything for you ?”
MONTMORENCY : “No—no, thanks.”
THE CAT : “Don’t you mind speakng, if you really want anything, you know.” ^
MONTMORENCY (backing down the High Street) : “Oh, no—not at all—certainly—don’t you trouble. I—I am afraid I’ve made a mistake. I thought I knew you. Sorry I disturbed you.”
THE CAT : “Not at all—quite a pleasure. Sure you don’t
want anything, now ?’
MONTMORENCY (still backing): “Not at all, thanks—not at all —very kind of you. Good morning.”
THE CAT : “Good morning.”
Then the cat rose, and continued his trot; and Montmorency, fitting what he calls his tail carefully into its groove, came back to us, and took up an unimportant position in the rear.
To this day, if you say the word “Cats!” to Montmorency, he will visibly shrink and look up piteously at you, as if to say:
“Please don’t.”
(p. 128, JK Jerome, J.W. Arrowsmith, 1948 edition)

I was also directed to the reading by a recent purchase, To Say Nothing of the Dog, by Connie Willis, which is billed as:
“a science-fiction fantasy in the guise of an old-fashioned Victorian novel, complete with epigraphs, brief outlines, and a rather ugly boxer in three-quarters profile at the start of each chapter. Or is it a Victorian novel in the guise of a time-travelling tale, or a highly comic romp, or a great, allusive literary game, complete with spry references to Dorothy L. Sayers, Wilkie Collins, and Arthur Conan Doyle? Its title is the subtitle of Jerome K. Jerome’s singular, and hilarious, Three Men in a Boat. In one scene the hero, Ned Henry, and his friends come upon Jerome, two men, and the dog Montmorency in–you guessed it–a boat. Jerome will later immortalise Ned’s fumbling. (Or, more accurately, Jerome will earlier immortalise Ned’s fumbling, because Ned is from the 21st century and Jerome from the 19th.)”

I read a good review of it, but we’ll see …

P.S. Doesn’t it seem odd now the way in older books punctuation marks are all set off by spaces. (I OCRed this and haven’t changed it.) I wonder when, and why, the change occurred? World War II paper shortage perhaps?

Having been tied up with other things, I haven’t managed to put together an appropriate post for International Women’s Day, but then there’s so many great ones out there I hardly need to.

So choose your reasons to say thanks to a feminist

or, check out some women’s history links, or a selection of quotes.
(My favourite was Soujourner’s Aint I a woman?. )

or, read the web edition of a book covering the History of International Women’s Day.
(Hat-tip to Thoughts of an Average Woman.)

LATE ADDITION: Detrimental postulation has an excellent commemorative post on Alexandra Kollontai, the “the Bolshevik feminist writer, politician, activist and diplomat”. Don’t miss it, even though the poster is a bloke.

On that note I thought I should check my blogroll. There are as I write 183 blogs on it, of which about 60 are clearly written by women, about 80 by men, and the rest either joint blogs or written in a way that the gender of the blogger is not obvious. (I haven’t gone hunting around to work it out if this is the case.)

That statistic surprised me a little, since I would have thought women would predominate, since my interests do have a distinctly feminist slant. But I think where the tilt towards men comes is bloggers about some of the obscure countries in which I have an interest, and also from people in interesting workplaces. (I don’t have a female nurse or female doctor’s blog for example – anyone know any good ones?)

So come on you women in farflung parts of the world and in interesting jobs – blog away!

Quick question: does anyone know why my Sitemeter “By Referrals” sections is just one long lists of “unknowns”? Is there a button you have to press somewhere there or on the Blogger to make the feature work?

(I’ve been enjoying so many other people’s posts on “weird Google searchs that brought people here” I’d like to see for myself on my site.)

All help gratefully received!