It's Always More Complicated

Okay, I will concede a certain amount of frustration with getting the microfilm apparatus working, and also, the thing I wanted to look at was at the far end of the reel, and this damned automatic system, unlike the good old hand-operated ones, means one is unable to fast-forward and rapid rewind but has to sit there while it takes its leisurely time.

However, I did find the article I was looking for and was able to email a pdf to myself, so that was a win.

I then went and had a somewhat mid sushi lunch at St Pancras, followed by a coffee from the hip organic coffee place in the corner of the entrance to BL courtyard - coffee okay, service not all that, sat and drank in sunny courtyard.

Then went and picked up my books in Rare Books and Music, this was because one was Notorious Banned Book which had to be consulted at desk adjacent to Reference Desk (as most copies were destroyed and this was presumably official deposit copy of record, fair). Actually I find that the copy I have (Paris edition) is the one with preface by noted litterateur of the day.

Also looked at two works on Banned Books which referenced it, one of which was not all that (confused Joe Lyons teashops with Lyons, France) and another which I need to return to if project is a goer. Might even see if the p/back or electronic versions are available at eligible price.

Then very agreeable busride home.

Yesterday on bluesky there was pushing back at some techbro type guy who was all about he was not going to read Shakespeare for some weird reason which seemed to be that A Greater Mind might emerge in future from millions more population than were living in Shakespeare's day, or something like that - anyway, it was an argument that basically brought out my inner Elinor Dashwood that this was not someone who deserved the compliment of rational response and should be left burbling to himself. (Because we think the Lambs' Tales from Shakespeare would probably be a bit past his reading comprehension, hmmm?)

But anyway, people were arguing over this, and somebody advanced the claim that, actually it wuz The Victorians That Made Shakespeare A Thing Anyway -

And honestly I had other things on my mind at the time, and was not interested in engaging, but Srsly, WOT?

His own mates thought he was sufficiently Hot Stuff that they brought out the First Folio -

His plays were constantly being produced although we must admit 'improved' by e.g. Colley Cibber.

And, come on down, Dr Johnson, who was commissioned to edit the Plays in 1757, edition finally published in 1765: he remarked that Will by then had 'the privilege of established fame and prescriptive veneration'.

One might also argue that even before the Victorians an eponym was created by the editors of The Family Shakespeare in order to make them suitable for reading devant les enfants.

(Lambs' Tales pretty much contemporaneous.)

So while Matthew Arnold certainly wrote a sonnet invoking tropes of immortal spirit etc he was not exactly doing the 'rediscovering neglected/forgotten writer' or bigging up British bard to compete with other national bards.

Naturally, from various angles of my interests, I am going to click on a link like this, no? Pornucopia: The World’s Largest Collection of Smut, and You Can’t See It.

And while I have a certain historianly interest in the contents of the collection (though I was having a conversation with somebody a little while ago and we reckoned we would love to take a gander at Antony Comstock's Private Cupboard, because a leading smuthound must have accumulated a really outstanding filth collection, hmmmm?)

- I was going to myself with my archivist hat on, OMG, this is so many problems - there must be HUGE conservation issues, I just hope none of those porno movies are on nitrate film, but I do not think the smart money would be betting on it, and a lot of those relics are on degrading media even if they're not going to spontaneously combust. Some of them I wonder if there are actually means of playing them still.

(Tangentially I mention my wince when hearing thrilled younger scholar recount how they had listened to a 78 rpm recording in a sound archive, and I was, really???)

Then it sounds as though they are Not Keeping Up With Basic Processing ('embarrassed about the unorganized conditions', heh) which sounds as though ambitious collecting agenda has totally outrun capacity of institution to keep on top of it (should I add 'fnar fnar, nudge wink' at this point???).

Plus on the access thing and being not entirely welcoming to visitors, while - perhaps - historically collections like The Private Case (in the BL), L'Enfer (Bibliotheque Nationale), etc, were only made available to selected readers for fear of contaminating the public, in more recent days this is because this material is particularly vulnerable to to being mutilated - pages torn out or defaced, etc - which is why if you want to consult Cup. classification material in the BL you have to do so under the eye of the Librarian's Desk.

I suspect also in play is a probably legit fear of persons presenting themselves as SRS Scholars who once they are in will go BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES on the place ('wary about divulging warehouse locations', totally figures).

Over here, being niche.

This one got occluded by festivities - Converts by Melanie McDonagh review – roads to Rome:

There is, too, a notable lack of women in this book, notwithstanding chapters on Gwen John, Spark and the Oxford philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.

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Lucy Mangan on John Lewis's 'members' lounge' - I have a distant recollection that back in the day when department stores were first A Thing, they did in fact have lounges where shopping ladies could repose themselves, along with facilities. Probably not drinkies and chocs, though.

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The only known photographs of mathematician and computing pioneer Ada Lovelace have been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery just before they were expected to be sold to a private buyer. Fairly early instances of the photographic art, too.

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Murkying the waters: The Lies and Falsifications of Oliver Sacks:

Rachel Aviv explored the personal journals of the celebrated neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks. What she found was shocking: he had fabricated and embellished some of his most well-known work — like Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

On a rather different diary story: the prolonged saga of publishing Pepys: who would have believed this, over whether to go ahead and include all Samuel's more smutty adventures:

In 1960, while Penguin was being prosecuted for the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Magdalene sought the advice of its fellows on whether to proceed with a complete edition. C.S. Lewis argued that it would be ‘pusillanimous and unscholarly’ to hold back. Society, he wrote, was already so corrupted that the supposed further harm of ‘printing a few, obscure and widely separated passages in a very long and expensive book, seems to me unrealistic or even hypocritical’.

'Toad he went a-pleasuring': Toads risk their lives crossing a Somerset road to mate. This year, a patrol rescued thousands:

Charlcombe Lane is closed annually for six weeks in February and March as volunteers patrol every night from dusk to help toads, frogs and newts on their journey to their breeding lake. This toad patrol is one of more than 200 across the country that take part in the national Toads on Roads project run by the amphibian and reptile conservation charity, Froglife. Across the six weeks, more than 50 volunteers on the Charlcombe Toad Rescue group spent more than 648 hours in high visibility jackets, armed with torches, buckets and special gloves, walking slowly up and down the road.
Toads, frogs and newts are carefully picked up and taken safely in buckets to five drop off points to help them on their journey towards the lake.

Awwwww, bless.

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A rather grimmer tale - modern high-tech version of 'ooops the hospital mixed up the babbiez in the nursery and sent the wrong ones home with the parents': Legal and ethical ‘nightmare’ after woman gives birth to stranger’s child due to Monash IVF mistake:

“The evidence of it being an isolated incident is really only because they’ve never had to check or disclose,” said Dawson. “One in 18 births are IVF-conceived children, [and] if these checks and balances are being missed as recently as last year, there needs to be more record-keeping and more information.”
Leading Australian IVF specialist and former Monash IVF director Prof Gab Kovacs said there were over 100,000 IVF cycles in Australia annually, so every few years a mistake is made. “There have been mistakes recognised in the past, it’s more often that the wrong sperm is used when the sperm and the egg are put together,” he told ABC Radio Melbourne.

More on the problems generated by MODERN SCIENCE!!! in this case: Genetic descent: a new challenge for the management of human remains in museums:

Over the past year, an increasing number of UK institutions have received enquiries from customers of commercial DNA companies about individuals in their care who have been sampled for ancient DNA analysis.
Typically, ancient DNA results are published open-access and the data deposited with online databanks.
International commercial DNA companies who focus on ancestry are now using these datasets to match their customers with archaeological human remains – and advising them that they are a ‘direct descendant’ of this past individual.
Some customers, curious about their ancestry, are accessing the publications and then contacting the institutions curating the human remains. Typically, these enquiries ask for more information about the individual and their archaeological context – a request not too dissimilar from the usual range of questions received by an institution about their holdings.
But these new type of enquiry poses several challenges – foremost, that existing guidance and advice about the management of human remains published by (among others) the Advisory Panel on the Archaeology of Burials in England, does not specifically deal with this issue.

Most institutions in the UK do not have a curator dedicated solely to human remains, and many do not have an archaeology curator.
Institutional knowledge about holdings and research activities has been lost due to staff-cuts, and less well-funded institutions have been unable to continue their membership of specialist networks or other professional bodies, who can provide advice and support.
The situation is compounded by rapid developments in the methods and reliability of ancient DNA studies, which means that without specialist knowledge and access to that scholarship, understanding the issues raised by these enquiries may be impossible without help.

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Dept, 'More Money Than Sense' x 2:

Influencers 'new' threat to uncontacted tribes, warns group after US tourist arrest:

Social media influencers pose a "new and increasing threat" for uncontacted indigenous people, a charity has warned after the arrest of a US tourist who travelled to a restricted Indian Ocean island.
Mykhailo Viktorovych Polyakov, 24, allegedly landed on North Sentinel Island in an apparent attempt to make contact with the isolated Sentinelese tribe, filming his visit and leaving a can of coke and a coconut on the shore.

‘Rachel Reeves is making us move to Italy’. This person is an 'entrepreneur' with 'an MBA and PhD in finance' as well as being a reality TV star, and yet she is terrified that Italian waiters will somehow compel her to ingest pasta and pizza. (Apart from anything else, this suggests a woefully limited knowledge of the range of Italian cucina, no?) Awww, diddums.

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Did I post this before? Seized Books! An online exhibition:

LGBTQ+ books and censorship in 1980s Britain.
On 10 April 1984, Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise raided Gay’s the Word bookshop in London’s Bloomsbury.
'Operation Tiger' saw officers seize over 140 titles, worth thousands of pounds.
Bookshop staff and directors were charged with conspiracy to import so-called ‘indecent or obscene’ material.
But Gay’s the Word and their supporters fought back...

(I think I may have posted something before about this whole thing of 'posture photos' at US colleges.)

The power of creating archival silences:

From the 1910s to the early 1970s, many American universities and colleges had its students stand fully or nearly unclothed for an annual posture photo. University physical educators and physicians used these photos to assess student health, to develop college classes in posture training, and to motivate students to comply with physical education instruction. Regarding the latter, the hope was to shame students with poor posture by showing them objective, photographic proof of their unappealing, slouching features, while also prizing improvement and propping up students who exhibited “A” grade form.
....
Not able to control the security and circulation of these photos—not to mention the feeling of degradation that they caused—most universities ceased the practice of assessing posture altogether by the early 1970s. Despite this, the photographic record of the practice lived on, or at least until 1995 when a New York Times Magazine exposé titled “The Great Ivy League Nude Posture Picture Scandal,” led to the wholesale destruction of archival records. Within a matter of months of this piece hitting the newsstands, decades of recorded history were incinerated or shredded beyond recognition.

[P]osture photos of female students often went missing, purportedly stolen by their male peers. Yale men would raid Vassar’s gym for female posture photos, and then create cards that would be graded, traded, and sold.

Apparently not.

Historians who wish to portray and write a more balanced account of the past often lament that the stories of white, elite men are so much easier to find than that of historically marginalized peoples. And yet, in the case of posture photography, I see the opposite happening. In the history I tell, the white, elite, educated class had the power to erase themselves from the historical record.

‘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.”

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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.

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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.'

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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.

Yestere'en I was informed that contemporary editions of The Wind in the Willows omit 'The Piper at the Gate of Dawn' chapter.

My response was (after I had finished making like little Portly) - naturally - Kenneth Williams in Carry On Cleo

However, a little research this morning indicates that this is not, in fact, universal - even on US Amazon I found a Kindle edition in which the actual cover depicts the relevant scene. Though Kindle sample views fail to reveal actual contents and if chapter itself is included, Kobo previews do and most editions appear to contain it, though one (Dover Children's Thrift Classics) does commit expurgation.

If this does happen, one assumes it is because PAGANISM? the scene itself is a particularly sweet manifestation of the Great God Pan Thing which haunted EngLit and the English imagination from the Romantics until sometime during the post-WW1 era (cite to Ronald Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon). Is TWITW subject to bookbans across the pond?

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In further national identity issues, today is Mad Dogs and Englishmen just staying at home:

Or, alternatively, maybe it's surprising I'm here at all....

I’m moving overseas to study and my mum wants to track my phone.

As I have previously remarked, in the days when we travelled by diligence to uni and sent messages home by slow carrier pigeon except in cases of dire emergency....

Anyway, one sent maybe a postcard to say that one had arrived safely and wrote weekly or so letters to indicate that one was in health and keeping up with one's lectures and so on.

And this situation pertained for many years including travel to parts rather more potentially perilous than one's uni.

I can see the tracker thing actually being more worrying? - as in, why is she there and not other place, when there might be some perfectly harmless and innocent explanation, but someone who is doing this in the first place is probably set to get in a wrought-up state.

Then there was this posted to agonyaunt: I don’t want to put her off reading by telling her she can strictly only read books aimed at 12-year-olds, but I also don’t want to let her read books that might expose her to harmful/adult content.

Looking back, I did post a while ago about Penguin Books's Peacock imprint for teenagers (and having more recently re-read The Constant Nymph for research reasons, rather than just having vague memories, my bogglesomeness could not be more boggled). I guess the pitch was, books which were written in rather more sophisticated prose but (in theory) contained nothing unsuitable for The Young Person (hmmmmmm).

Though by the time those started to come out and I was spending my book tokens on them, I'm pretty sure I was already borrowing books from the main, rather than the children's, library and also - with some parental guidance - reading books from their shelves of book club editions.

How old was I when I first read Anya Seton's Katherine? Gone with the Wind? How Green Was My Valley? I think all these were before I was fourteen.

Okay, reading these alongside pony books and school stories and so on.

But, you know, I felt I had a really rather protected childhood/youth as these things went at the time. By present-day standards, however, it seems practically feral - being sent out to the shops all on my tiny tod from the age of 8 or so, as well as the above.

Looking back just now to what I was thinking about a year or so ago, I see I posted about Gillian Anderson's proposed anthology of women's sexual fantasies, in the tradition of Nancy Friday's My Secret Garden.

It all seems to have gone very quiet since then. A fair number of hits from approx a year or so ago re the project and her soliciting material.

However, there was a critique here suggesting that she was by no means boldly going where Friday had gone into the darker depths of the secret garden:

But despite her overtures to the taboo, submissions of fantasies for Anderson’s project are subject to strict guidelines. According to the guidelines—and unlike women’s actual sexual fantasies—the following are banned:
⋅ Sexual activity involving “rape,” “graphic violence” or “dangerous sexual acts.”
⋅ Anything racist, sexist or homophobic.
⋅ Anything that “advocates for readers to engage in any activity that is illegal in the United Kingdom”—such as sex in a public loo, voyeurism, or soliciting sex work on the street.
⋅ “References to real life events”—include events which only involve yourself.

People who have worked with fantasies and the distinction between fantasies and desires and the benefits of revealing to people that their apparently taboo fantasies are not as out-there and uncommon as they suppose suggest that this is a problematic path to go down, sanitising the whole thing.

Are we not, perhaps, a little reminded of that anthology of tasteful literary erotica by (carefully pseudonymised) lady writers which appeared some years ago?