It's Always More Complicated

In my post about manners yesterday, conuly brought up in the comments a couple of posts to Ask A Manager from An Awful Young Man, who, on the evidence given, probably knows all the intricacies of cutlery and which way to pass the port, but is unfit for release into general society:

First post:

I was travelling home on a packed train with my bike. Suddently, I was approached by a lady who asked me, rather rudely, to give my seat to a man, her father, who was travelling with her. Since I was sitting on a regular seat (not a seat designated for disabled passangers) and had to read some materials to prepare for my interview, I ignored her. Unfortunately, when I was getting off the train, I accidentally moved my bike in a way that it caught and left dirty stains on her coat. I did not think much of this till the next day when I ran into the same woman and one of directors in the lift in my office building. It transpired that she is the CEO’s wife. She said nothing and did not acknowledge me, but it was very clear to me that she recognised me.

Second post:

I wish I had been told the receptionist/janitor/security guard story by career services at my university, which is one of those prestigious English ones. (Note from Alison: This is a reference to advice that you should be polite to receptionists/janitors/security guards when interviewing.) We get a lot of tips about how to write our resume and cover letter and how we should conduct ourselves during interviews, but not this type of real life recommendation.

But, my dearios, is this not a positively archetypal morality tale? At least one of the commenters pointed out its resemblance to Folktale Motif of Young Man on Quest who Fails to Help Old Woman, Bad Luck Eventuates/His Despised Younger Brother Does Help Her, Go Him, Wealth and Princess Are His Lot.

So there's that one.

It could also make a 'Sliding Doors' tale where the different outcomes of doing the wrong and right thing change destiny.

Or maybe he's condemned to repeat that journey and interview over and over again, Groundhog Day style, until he Learns His Lesson.

Or, maybe this is one of those novels that takes An Incident and does it from different viewpoints and that while to Mr I Am The Main Character here, this is all terribly important, there are other people who are going about their lives and barely noticing him unless they have to, and even then they have their own concerns.

‘I thought of the church as a friend and it slapped me in the face’: historian Diarmaid MacCulloch on the Church of England’s hypocrisy

For the past four years, since his retirement from university teaching, he has applied that lifelong erudition to a comprehensive and richly entertaining history of the ways in which, for 3,000 years, the church has tied itself in knots over sex (and love and marriage).

MacCulloch asked the classics professor Helen King to read his book pre-publication. King is just publishing a book on women’s bodies through the ages. “She said lots of complimentary things,” he says, “but felt there was a major omission: I hadn’t mentioned the clitoris much.”
“I was embarrassed,” MacCulloch says, “to realise that was true.”

Wow, this is terrifying: Like Jay Gatsby, He Threw Parties to Get Her Attention. It Finally Worked.:

Mr. Quintero first noticed Ms. Babai in a mutual friend’s Instagram story in 2016, when he was a freshman at Quinnipiac University and she was a freshman at the State University of New York at Albany. He asked that friend, Janice Murphy, for an introduction, but it would take four years for that moment to come. So Mr. Quintero, who became affectionately known as “Gatsby” among Ms. Babai’s friends, began hosting lavish gatherings in hopes of meeting her.

Mr. Quintero found ways to stay in touch. Most notably, he had Ms. Babai introduce him to her boss, Joseph Calabrese, the owner of a lighting design and fencing company, to talk about opportunities to work with his business, Quintero Enterprises. “Little did I know at the time, this was just another step to get closer to me,” said Ms. Babai, who coordinated their phone calls and joined business dinners.

Mr. Quintero wanted to do something “big,” he said, for the proposal in October 2023, so he rented out Barclays Center and convinced Ms. Babai to join him for what he said was an awards ceremony for women in business. As Ms. Babai entered the empty arena, she was greeted by pictures of them together on jumbotrons, flowers and a group of singers performing “Say Yes to Heaven” by Lana Del Rey. As Mr. Quintero got down on one knee, he said, “I have been waiting for this moment since the day I met you.”

***

Anthony Comstock arrived in Washington, D.C., in January 1873 with a collection of pornography and big plans for what to do with it.
Alas, it was not to engage in trade with it.

Bearing a veritable grab bag of explicit images, books, pamphlets, contraceptives, and sex toys that he had ordered expressly for the purposes of shock, he set up displays, first in the private homes of legislators and then in the office of the vice president inside the congressional building.As congressmen trooped by to gawk, Comstock spoke to them about the “nefarious business” of obscenity.

***

I feel I've heard of this, er, colourful character before, but I can't quite place them: Charlotte Bach (born Karoly Hajdu; 1920–1981) was a Hungarian-British impostor and fringe evolutionary theorist.L 'Her alternative theory of evolution acquired a cult following among prominent writers and scientists in London during the 1970s, who remained ignorant of her original identity until after her death.'

***

More fun insights from The Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure: Why were Hansel and Gretel not English?:

These types of stories about hunger and famine abound in the folklore of most European societies, and embody folk memories of food scarcity. However, as the historian John Walter noted, these tropes are curiously absent from English fairy tales. Why?
Walter speculated that this reflected the exceptionally early disappearance of famine from England, centuries before the risk of famine had subsided in the rest of Europe. Famine remained a threat in most of Europe until the mid-18th century, and persisted in some areas into the 19th century and even the 20th century, especially in association with war. In England, on the other hand, the last national famine occurred in the 1590s, and the last regional famine in the 1620s.

Dept of, human/animal commensality, of a somewhat unexpected kind: The hyenas of Harar: how a city fell in love with its bone-crunching carnivores:

As human-wildlife conflict increases and habitats shrink, the question of how communities can live in coexistence with large predators becomes increasingly pressing. In Harar, the animals act as the city’s garbage-disposal system, entering at night through a series of “hyena doors” built into the walls and eating entrails dumped in the streets. Abbas is a longtime human ally, one of the “hyena men” of the city. He learned his trade from his father, Yusuf, who started tossing scraps to hyenas while feeding his dogs decades ago.
....
In Harari folklore, hyenas also act as mediums that can communicate with the town’s dead saints and transmit messages from the townspeople. This is reflected in the local word for hyena: waraba, or “newsman”.

Dept of, do you really mean 'EVERY author'????: Every author wants to write a book like David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. Query: might this be a generational thing? Even so.

***

Dept of, paging EM Forster perhaps?: The Head of English at a Lincolnshire secondary school discusses the crisis in education and her mission to make literature live for a new generation:

In her experience, teenagers can be switched off by the notion that they need to love books. “Let’s think about loving stories instead, the discussion of individuals’ experiences of the world, and the way that different people experience their reality.”

Dept of, O Tim Dowling (and his missus) nevairr evairr change:

I like having the piano in the kitchen because it takes up a lot of space in my shed, and also because I can serenade my wife during cocktail hour. I think she would enjoy this more if I could play the piano.

Dept of, wot, not paging Mad William and 'Jerusalem'? Another England by Caroline Lucas review – seeing green. I mean, I am entirely on board for somebody pointing out the alternative visions of England (but only going back to the Chartists? the Diggers and Levellers would like a word....). And I do like that she seems to be onto the nostalgic appeal of 'idyllic rural landscapes full of birdsong and blacksmiths toiling at their anvils, rather than the four-fifths of the population who actually live in cities and towns', though I think we can also point a finger at e.g. William Morris and Edward Carpenter for this. In fact the whole English pastoral nature-worship thing is (it can be argued) a product of urbanisation.... But I guess that's outwith her remit in this book.

Very fine weather today, and I must say, there is a very fine effect of the bare trees in the pocket park and adjacent gardens when it is this bright and sunny and blue-skyey.

In toally unanticipated ornithology, I was looking out of the kitchen window, and saw a flight of three magpies, which is a little unusual. I see that the various rhymes give different meanings for the omen: wedding, funeral, girl, take your pick.

And then I saw a whole [collective noun for magpies] conventicle, gulp, mischief, tidings or tribe gathering in one of the slightly more distant trees, far enough away and a bit occluded by nearer trees that I could not count them accurately but there might have been ten or even a dozen. Again, rhymes differ and not all even go that high.

Since I normally see magpies singly or maybe in twos ('Good morning, Mr Magpie, or Ms Magpie as the case may be') this seemed perhaps more portentous than it really is.

Given the somewhat criminous nature of magpies, one wonders what they were up to. Planning a heist? Dividing the spoils? Having a territorial squabble?

This is a great article about tattoos: Convicts and the Cultural Significance of Tattooing in Nineteenth-Century Britain - points out that convicts are pretty much the only demographic for which bodily identifying marking like tattoos would have been being recorded during the period in question, pre-photography. (Mentions passing reference in Mayhew to costermongers being macho about getting tattooed, but otherwise, tattooing more generally would have been under the radar.) Makes some really good and useful points. I was particularly taken by the the suggestion that, no, maybe those markings weren't speshul gang signifying signs, and that a lot of the imagery was Less Meaningful and More Stock Items and Aesthetic Preference than conveying covert messages.

***

O dear, dearie, please not to do that, swapping one myth for another myth, and yours I suspect comes out of suspect seventies woowoo anthropology and folklore studies: I want to teach my kids about the shamanic origins of this intriguing but overly caricatured figure [Santa Claus]: One historian, Ronald Hutton, told NPR that the theory of a mushroom-Santa connection is flawed - we think that that highly-esteemed historian was very very restrained in not saying Total Bollocks, which I am sure he was thinking.

I suspect that this theory goes back all the way to John Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

***

This is an older post, and annoyingly the article it is riffing off is paywalled and doesn't seem to give me the option of logging in via my institution: Through a two-way looking glass, you see your Alice: is feminist biography necessarily a modernist pursuit?.

Given that this person just gave up, even though there was masses of material, and this was happening a year after I had published a biography which had involved scurrying around chasing up bits and scraps of evidence in all sorts of unpromising sources, I did not have a lot of sympathy. Also Susan Pedersen got a great biography out of Eleanor Rathbone who was also pretty much a Public Woman and about whose private emotional life there is a good deal of opacity.

'Do we have to write histories only of relateable people?'

What I read

Simon Brett, Death and the Decorator (Fethering #21) (2022): one of the better ones, I thought.

Colin Spencer, Backing Into Light: My Father's Son (2013). Covers a fair amount of the same territory as the 'Generation' quartet - interesting that he says that Sundy as well as Matthew was him or used elements of him, which makes that climactic flood scene with her young son a bit creepy, honestly (but doesn't cop to Reg, hmmm). It's a bit tell-all about the famous closeted gays of pre-decriminalisation era he copped off with. One annoying thing (on the publisher rather than him) - careless copy-editing/proof-reading, is this just not happening anymore?.

Ronald Hutton, Queens of the Wild: Pagan Goddesses in Christian Europe: An Investigation (2022). Hutton digging into the creation of traditions and where they originate from and how they seldom go back to Ye Deepe Rootes even of the medeevles, never mind primeval, is always worth reading. While suggesting things are actually more weird and interesting and fluid and that people are constantly overwriting longstanding practices with New Stuff. If I should ever meet him I would be making like a dumbstruck goldfish with fangirl awe.

Julie Phillips, The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem (2022). I feel this is just a bit woolly around the edges - 'here are some women who were mothers and creatives (except that at least one was actually an academic)' and I'm not sure quite what the criteria for selection were, given that she never quite hones in on the fact that the bulk of them were of a Very Specific Period with lives/careers traversing the awful 50s through the 60s into the late C20th via feminism even though does evoke parallels/not parallels. Not all - gets in two of my earlier C20th pets, B Hepworth and N Mitchison and I will mark her up for a citation there! And, okay, contraception, available abortion, yay, but I think antibiotics and not dying in childbirth or of septic abortion might be in the narrative somewhere? Plus, I don't think A Carter was startling MODERN UNPRECEDENTED late motherhood in 40s because - I could not help thinking, what with the trip to Japan an'all - the trajectory had some similarities to Marie Stopes (and I can think of other instances).

On the go

Still intermittently dipping into Pin Money even though the pdf continues to play silly buggers with the ereader.

Have just started Susan McCabe, H. D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism (2021).

Up next

I think that will keep me going for a while!

Women have a variety of methods for contraception, but only two methods are commonly available to men: condoms and vasectomies. Both methods have their drawbacks.

But that wasn't actually the main that struck me about this: Heating Up Testicles With Nanoparticles Can Work as Male Contraception. Here's How.

Because I have a distant recollection of coming across Ye Urban Folklore in the Dayz of My Yoof about men warming up the relevant parts as a preliminary precautionary measure (mind you, there was also the thing about strapping the luminous-dialled watch to them for a dose of radiation for the same purpose). In Hunter Davies' 1965 novel, Here We Go, Round the Mulberry Bush, lads commend to one another taking a hot bath immediately before getting into a leg-over situation, and also the watch thing, with warnings not to leave it too long for fear of permanent infertility.

Plus, of course, with slightly more medical and scientific cred, men who wanted to beget offspring and were having difficulty due to lowish sperm count were told to cast off tight underpants that overheated the organs.

Nanocontraception is based on the idea that nanoparticles – here, about 100 nanometres in diameter, or roughly one-thousandth the width of a piece of paper or of a strand of human hair – can somehow be delivered to the testicles, where they can be warmed. If you could warm up the testicles just a bit, you would have a way to turn sperm production on and off at will because the warmer they get, the less fertile they become. But it's a delicate process because the testicles can be irreversibly destroyed if they become too warm; the tissue dies and can no longer produce sperm, even when the testicles return to their normal temperature.

[M]agnetic nanoparticles were injected into mice's veins, and then the animals were anesthetized. A magnet was then placed next to their testicles for four hours, drawing the nanoparticles there. This procedure – injection followed by magnetic targeting – was performed daily for one to four days. After the last day of treatment, an electric coil was wrapped around the testicles, through which a current was passed. This induced a magnetic field that heated up the nanorods and, therefore, the testicles. Similar temperature increases – from a baseline of 29 C to between 37 and 42 C – were observed through this method. The more days a mouse had been injected with nanorods, the hotter its testicles became. Hotter testicles led to their atrophy and shrinkage, but they showed gradual recovery both 30 and 60 days after treatment as long as testicle temperatures didn't reach 45 C. Fertility was down seven days after treatment – in some cases, fertility was completely eliminated – but it also showed gradual (though not complete) recovery after 60 days.

[D]etailed studies will be required to establish that nanocontraception is not toxic for men. It is also more difficult to put a man under anesthesia for four hours and wrap an electric coil around his testicles than it is to do the same thing on a mouse. Instead, Sun hopes to be able to deliver the magnetic nanorods orally and find another way to direct them to the testicles. And it is uncertain how many men will be comfortable with shrunken testicles, even if they recover their original size with time.

What I read

Finished The Library of the Dead and you know, I was really expecting rather more about the actual library? it doesn't really feature very much. My cavils of last week pretty much remain. Okay, there was a Brounie at one point (trad Scottish folklore), but....

Naomi Mitchison, To the Chapel Perilous (1955) - apparently this is at last being reprinted in the Naomi Mitchison Library by Kennedy and Boyd, yay! - I have the fleetingly available early 2000s paperback reprint which I reread with great pleasure (some while since I did so - recent work on Naomi has involved the later sf and the realistic and polemic work of the 30s).

Robert B Parker, Sudden Mischief (1998) - because indecision/accessible shelf.

Angus Wilson, Late Call (1964) - which turned out to be in an easily gettatable place rather than a high shelf - and is still lovely. (But sigh, the wonderful TV serialisation doesn't appear to be available on DVD.) I'd forgotten that there's - not an actual redemptive moment for Sylvia's awful son Harold at the end, but the recognition that he is actually good for something (teaching basic literacy), even if it's not being a wonderful son or father or many of the things he would like to be.

Simon Brett, Guilt at the Garage (A Fethering Mystery Book 20) (2021), which I only just found out about. I thought this was quite a good entry in this series.

Angela Thirkell, Happy Return (1952). Seriously phoning it in on this one, Angela, in fact one gets the sense you were desperately trying to find some way out of a rambling narrative that was going on and on and on. Plus further minus points for the rah-rahing over the return of Tories to power and Churchill as PM.

On the go

Have just started Sherry Thomas, Miss Moriarty, I Presume? (Lady Sherlock #6), just out.

Up next

Latest issue of The Scribbler has arrived.

Also, have downloaded Cyril Hare, An English Murder, from The Faded Page, following the discussion of Country House Murder Mysteries.

I’m Bridget Christie, a comedian, but I don’t just see comedy. Last weekend I went to a spellbinding exhibition of British folk art called Ritual Britain, set perfectly in London’s atmospheric Crypt Gallery in the bowels of St Pancras New Church in London.

And one might feel a leeeetle boggled at all this rather pagan remnant stuff in the crypt of a church:

Morris dancers, druids, the Burryman – they’re all in Ben Edge’s spellbinding collaboration with the Museum of British Folklore, showcasing customs that stretch back into the mists of time.

I did rather like this, which seems to be going some way towards recognising the mutability of festivals and rituals:

For Edge, it doesn’t matter that so many of the original meanings have been lost. It’s precisely this lack of clear, historical facts that makes these bizarre customs so appealing to him as an artist. The uncertainty creates a space for us to insert ourselves into them. It allows us to embellish and add to them – and it’s in the retelling of these stories that we keep them alive. They’re not relics from another time. They tell us who we used to be, but they also tell us who we are now, and who we want to be. They change and evolve just as we do – and they’re changing all the time. In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, many Morris dancing groups, such as the Hook Eagle Morris men, changed their black face paint to blue. Other groups refused to, claiming they’d be disrupting an ancestral tradition.

And reading this, I'm afraid I just thought: 'that was very rude'

Edge’s obsession with folklore began by accident one day five years ago when he was on his way to meet the Ravenmaster at the Tower of London, but spotted a line of druids walking along the road and followed them instead.

Because I don't think the motif of the Chosen One being someone reared in (relatively) humble circumstances but of actually elite birth is particularly British?

(Especially when the examples given are precisely 2 distantly separated in time, King Arthur and Harry Potter.)

This was claimed as being about the Dead Hand of British Classism by somebody on Twitter yestereen.

I have a feeling that there were probably lots of Heroes concealed for reasons of Prophecy (e.g. Achilles among the women) or Danger from Enemies in the annals of myth and lore.

Quite apart from the possibility that some people might take, person reared in a humble environment but of Distinguished Lineage to be Christ-metaphor....

I would point out that Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud was the person who theorised The Family Romance by which the child, dissatisfied with their actual parents, fantasises that their real parents are different and far superior (in some way or another). Does this not suggest the foundation for a very potent narrative trope that can run and run?

Okay, there is certainly a Dead Hand of British Classism, but it has not, in fact, prevented the rise to power, influence and acclaim of individuals of despised/marginalised classes, genders, sexualities and ethnicities over the centuries.

There is, of course, Oxfordianism, the attempt to take away accomplishments of some person by saying they were really those of a person of elite status.

I am not sure, however, that even this is particularly British or even specifically English. I seem to recall that there is or was a long-standing theory in certain French circles that Joan of Arc could not possibly have been a humble shepherdess (this is voiced by a haughty aristo in one of Nancy Mitford's books), even if the whole 'secret scion of the Merovingian dynasty' is, I suspect, batshit niche. (Or not? I dunno. There was certainly a whole book or even several.)