It's Always More Complicated

Dept, definitely, 'it's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it': Gold-covered hairballs may reveal why cats eat grass:

A mom to two tuxedo cats—Mildred and Merle—Hughes has been saving their hairballs for years, waiting for the right research project to come along. That’s just what happened when undergraduate student Kara Bensel, now an animal behaviorist at Appalachian State University, joined the lab.
Together, Bensel and Hughes clipped off bits of six homegrown hairballs and coated them in gold—a necessary step for scanning them with an electron microscope.
....
Her next question: If spiky grass helps cats expel grass from their mouths, might it also ease expulsion out the other end? She’s been storing her cats’ poop in the freezer, waiting again for the right project—and student—to come along.

Dept, counterintuitive, or maybe not? Pronatalist Policies’ Backlash in Authoritarian Regimes - they do not actually work as intended.

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Dept of All More Complicated Eugenicists: Imperialist and eugenicist Petrie also opposed Nazi advocacy for the supremacy of ‘pure races’... but on the grounds that mixing of the ‘right’ races was more eugenic.

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Dept of, as I have been saying these ages: British food was complex, multicultural and flavourful in the 18th century

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Dept of, debunking myths about Ye Medeevles, with particular reference to the Netherlands: Book review: ‘Urban Women: Life, Love, and Work in the Medieval Low Countries’ by Andrea Bardyn, Chanelle Delameillieure, Jelle Haemers

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Dept of, The Great C18th West Indian Heiress Scam: Charles James Fox and the West Indian Heiress

What We Lose When We Gamify Reading, well yeah, but this is someone who considers Middlemarch 'a slog'. I'm also, of course, thinking about previous allotropes of this kind of thing - actual libraries you could buy of The Best Books - and of course display them on your shelves - and I'm also recollecting The Provincial Lady who can never manage to actually read That Book That Everyone Is Talking About. Of reading as something that is not, reading that thing that you want to read, when you want to read it, at the speed that seems fit (which may involve stopping and starting and hiatuses).

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If not a smaller, a more connected world than people maybe think: How likely is it that Alfred the Great sent two emissaries to India in the ninth century?:

Alfred’s embassy to India thus appears to be entirely historically plausible: India, with its Christian community and shrine of St Thomas, was probably always the intended destination, and its remoteness from early medieval England the very point of the embassy.

This feels like yet another story that might perhaps account for Why Are There So Few Women In [X] Field which is not down to actual aptitude and drive: There’s a long and embedded history of abuse in chess.

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Home Free: Vivian Gornick, interviewed by Chandler Fritz

Everything depends on the writer’s relation to the first-person narrator. Some writers are released into storytelling through the fictional narrator; others are released by the nonfictional “I.” The first become novelists, the second memoirists. It’s all a matter of what kind of narrator lets you tell the story. When I was young I kept telling these stories about my mother and our neighbor Nettie, and everyone said, “That’s a novel!” But when I tried to write a novel the material just lay there like a dead dog: I couldn’t bring it to life. When I realized it was a memoir and the narrator was clearly me, suddenly I was home free.

The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus. Intriguing. When I was employed in an institution which at the time came under the aegis of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office I was obliged to attend an FCO Induction Course. This had very little relevance to my job, and among the proceedings were cautionary films about being got at by Soviet agents. In one case although the surface level involved the patsy being lured by publication in a Red journal his relationship with the tempter seemed to have definite homoerotic undertones.

In case this has passed dr rdrz by, it is now possible for ordinary people to register for access to JSTOR's massive collection of scholarly resources.

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This month's freebie from the University of Chicago Press is Courtenay Raia, The New Prometheans: Faith, Science, and the Supernatural Mind in the Victorian Fin de Siècle on psychical research.

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Okay, I know I was going off at people getting all up in the woowoo about the Pill, but this is a bit grim about Depo-Provera: Pfizer sued in US over contraceptive that women say caused brain tumours. I was raising my eyebrows at this:

Pfizer argues that it tried to have a tumour warning attached to the drug’s label but this was rejected by the US regulator, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The company said in its court filings: “This is a clear pre-emption case because FDA expressly barred Pfizer from adding a warning about meningioma risk, which plaintiffs say state law required.”

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And also in the realm of reproductive control: Of embryos and vaccines: If you REALLY want to protect the unborn... on rubella. Abortion historian notes that one reason (apart from thalidomide) for resurgence of abortion activism in UK in early 60s had been a German measles epidemic.... Also recall that my sister - who like me was not of a generation that routinely got this vaccine in childhood - when she fell pregnant with her first getting tested in the antenatal clinic to see if she needed to get the jab stat (in fact, she had high level of antibodies, so maybe we'd all had German measles among all our other many childhood ailments and barely noticed....)

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Something more agreeable: the Royal School of Needlework's Stitch Bank:

RSN Stitch Bank is a free resource designed to preserve the art of hand embroidery through digitally conserving and showcasing the wide variety of the world’s embroidery stitches and the ways in which they have been used in different cultures and times. Now containing over 500 stitches, each stitch entry contains information about its history, use and structure as well as a step-by-step method with photographs, illustrations and video.

Asking good questions is harder than giving great answers: this so resonated with my experience as an archivist: 'often when people ask for help or information, what they ask for isn't what they actually want'.

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Many years ago I used to go to a restaurant- Le Bistingo in South Ken, as I recall - that had a cartoon pinned on the wall depicting a chef bodily ejecting a diner. Waiter to observers: 'He Attempted To Add Salt'. This was rather my reaction to this particularly WTF 'You Be The Judge': Should my partner stop hankering after salt and pepper shakers?

Why do you need salt and pepper on the table, haven't you seasoned the food adequately? (oh, and btw, Gene, as a comment remarks, salt has naturally antiseptic properties*).

*I remember some historical drama of Ye Medeevles on the telly in my youth about dousing somebody's flogged back in salt water (?or rubbing it with salt) to stop it festering.

At least, I think that's sort of an unifying theme for these....

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This actually goes back to Women's History Month 2020 but I don't recollect seeing it then: Sikandar Begum, Nawab of Bhopal. Not only a fascinating and perhaps counter-intuitive story of female power in C19th India

Nawab Sikandar Begum wielded power in the doubly challenging context of a patriarchal system confronted to the British colonial rule. This woman of diminutive stature but with the most imperious gaze was the second of four female rulers to reign for more than a century over the princely State of Bhopal.
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Sikandar Begum, like the other Begums of Bhopal, was proud of her Afghan ethnicity. She refused to go into Purdah and be confined to women’s quarters and traditional activities. Her education was on par with what would have been expected from any other male ruler, both academically and physically, preparing her to rule in a male dominated field. Throughout her reign she powerfully asserted her presence in public life: she was a practiced horsewoman and participated in polo games and hunting parties. She was also trained in martial arts and could equally wield a bow, a lance or a sword. She commanded the army and inspected district offices, the courts and the treasury herself, making sure that her administration run smoothly. She would personally visit villages to ensure herself of the welfare of her people and assess the progress of the various reforms she implemented. In terms of progressive reform and advancement, Sikandar’s 21-year reign qualifies as a golden age of Bhopal’s history. Bhopal emerged from it as one of the best governed, enlightened and stable princely states. She was an effective, reform-oriented administrator, who strongly supported girls’ education (she founded the Victoria School in the centre of Bhopal to provide poor Hindu and Muslim girls basic academic skills and technical training in various trades).

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Transfeminine community building in 1980s Manchester:

In 1987 Manchester, self-identified transvestite (or ‘tranny’ as she prefers) Bev helped to establish Northern Concord, a social group run by and for transfeminine people. The name Northern Concord was chosen because ‘it was bland’ and it meant that the group would not be immediately associated with gender nonconformity. It was hoped by its organisers that this nominative ambiguity would protect members of the group from some of the threats faced by trans people in society at the time. Bev felt that there was nowhere in the city where she and her friends could comfortably go out for ‘a meal in a frock’ and her memories examined here (taken from an oral history interview I recorded with her) highlight the role of nightlife in trans community building.
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Bev’s initial dissatisfaction with the nightlife available to her in 1980s Manchester was echoed by other gender nonconforming people at the time. Across the UK, a network of transfeminine social spaces, catering in the main for transvestite and transsexual identified women, was beginning to emerge. This included the TV/TS [Transvestite/Transsexual] centre in Hoxton, London (known colloquially as French Place) and the Friendships group in Birmingham, which ran club nights at Grosvenor House, a venue that marketed itself as ‘Britain’s foremost residential club for TV/TS’s’. Like Northern Concord, these groups began offering an alternative to what Bev viewed as the ‘boring as hell’ tea and small talk that typically defined the church hall style meetings run by regional branches of other transfeminine support groups.
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Northern Concord aimed to provide an alternative to what was perceived as the unsavoury atmosphere associated with the night club Dickens, the only other place where gender nonconforming people were welcome in the city at night.
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In response to the absence of suitable social spaces, Northern Concord began to meet every Wednesday in the Rembrandt Hotel on Canal Street, in the heart of what later became the Gay Village.... Despite its ‘seedy’ location, the Rembrandt had recently been renovated by its landlord Peter Bessick, who offered Bev and her friends use of the new bistro above the pub. The group would also hire one of the hotel’s bedrooms to provide guests who were nervous about being seen in public with a safe place to change into their femme wear at the start of the night.

A different kind of unexpected: Glimpses of a Transnational Life: Frank Mathew and Imports of Everyday Goods in Fifteenth Century London, through entries in customs records:

Particularly interesting are the devotional goods such as crucifixes, paxboards (including expensive examples made of ivory) and stone and box-wood Jesus. It is difficult to know for certain what the latter objects were, but they may be examples of the small pipeclay figurines of the Infant Christ that have been discussed recently by Lieke Smits as devotional toys. Fritz Scholten has also written about small, intricately made box-wood carvings as examples of a type of ‘playful devotion’. These connections between England and the Low Countries are particularly prominent in Mathew’s stock in trade. Combining devotion and play fits well with Mathew’s other regular imports of rattles, whistles and “japes” or toys. There is something quite light-hearted about many of Frank Mathew’s imports. Rattles have been found in substantial numbers in London and are usually associated with the material culture of pilgrimage.

I'm not sure this is entirely unexpected; this almost certain chimerical crocodile keeps recurring, among other specimens of West Country cryptozoology: New crocodile warning sign appears at Bristol Harbour: A decade after the first sighting of the infamous Bristol Crocodile, a new sign has been erected warning swimmers of the potential danger.

Okay, these two go together, red in tooth and claw, what:

You thought Watership Down was grim: how about the bloody life of the alpine marmot?

The creatures’ cuddly reputation... belies a vicious reality. The life of an alpine marmot is a never-ending bloody battle for dominance.

....

The rodents live in family groups with one dominant couple and a clutch of subordinate offspring who help with raising young and providing much-needed body warmth during the long winter hibernation. Only the dominant pair may reproduce: they bully the other family members into sterility, the youngsters’ stress hormones maintained at too high a level to bear young of their own. If a subordinate of either sex wishes to reproduce, they must leave their family group and challenge another dominant marmot for its territory – or kill their parents. When a marmot wins the battle for new territory, its first act is mass infanticide. “The new dominant will kill off that year’s young so as not to have to look after them – no investment, no parenting for young that are not his own[.]”

Students made Oxford medieval capital of murder, says Cambridge research - we should note that they have not run the figures for Cambridge at the period and it's not clear that equivalent documentation survives anyway.

The team has mapped a combined 354 historic homicides across Oxford, London and York. All three cities have their darknesses, but the picture painted of Oxford in the 14th century is particularly grim. On the face of it, the city was filled with young men affiliated with holy orders and studying towards careers in the priesthood, government or other great fates. However, this system saw boys as young as 14 being let loose in a city flooded with booze and brothels. On top of that, the overwhelming majority would have carried knives.

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Oh, and on the apparently fubsy, George Formby; Anti-Apartheid Hero - Formby is I daresay best known for leaning on lamp-posts and cleaning windows:

The cheery banjulele player’s anti-fascist credentials were long established.... His affinity with the common man and underdog, whom his screen persona owes a great debt too, was just as well known. During his ENSA shows for the troops, he would famously make the officers move from their front row seats to allow the humble privates the better view of the show, whilst in 1942 George fell foul of proponents of the Lord’s Day Observance Society because of his commitment to entertaining the troops.

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I think the letter to The Guardian from Some Ancient Dinosaur Medic who claimed that women who ventured into practising Ye Healing Artz should expect This Sort of Thing has been taken down - claims about it all being about the stressful environment of medical training, they should toughen up etc. This piece suggests that that very sort of dynamic is universally damaging to medics: US surgeons are killing themselves at an alarming rate. One decided to speak out. There's also a looooong history of substance abuse issues.

Row over hanging baskets a ‘political stunt’, says Salisbury councillor.

Council leaders in Salisbury have hit back at “politically motivated” attacks on their decision to replace single-use hanging basket displays and planters provided by the council with environmentally friendly sustainable planting in the medieval city centre. As part of an effort to become carbon neutral by 2030 and encourage bees and butterflies into the city centre, the coalition-led council this week voted to pilot replacing hanging baskets with “living pillars” and “parklets”, which it hopes will provide pockets of nature in the heart of the city.

The leader of the Conservative opposition is Up In Arms, declaring it:

“ideological nonsense as per from [a] leftwing cabal” and said it was “‘incredibly unfortunate for a city with medieval roots”. She said: “For a leftwing city council to outright ban hanging baskets and other floral displays for reasons of sustainability and biodiversity suggests […] a new and undesirable avenue for ideological silliness.”

But what we note is, no-one has suggested that anyone is being stopped from hanging their own baskets of flower and foliage, only that these are not going to put up with ratepayers' money:

“You can’t really scrap hanging baskets, that’s a ridiculous exaggeration. Plenty of the shops and pubs have hanging baskets, and they can continue to do that – nobody’s banning them,”

(Re the appended music: Percy Grainger though so much associated with folksy English Country Gardens was an Australian with a mother fixation and very strong interest in BDSM.)

Apparently there is Yet Another Panic over Enid Blyton (!!!) Being Cancelled.

Lo, I Am An Old and can remember her being regularly cancelled (i.e. removed from library shelves) since the 60s for assorted reasons - prose style and impoverished vocabulary, class, race, etc etc.

Some people or at least journalists, seem to have their memories erased on a regular basis.

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Or maybe they never knew/never actually read anything before the date they officially became literate? Because I don't (see again, An Old. I was reading Wymmnyn Riting in the 60s and 70s: Motherhood was Quite The Theme, Rly): How publishing finally started telling mothers’ stories. Publishing? Publishing was presumably doing what it does, which is publishing what other people write. Telling is not in it.

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Also in I am in the camp of 'Did not do the reading' here, I don't think the writer of this piece has read either Lady Audley's Secret or much about the Constance Kent murder case (possibly scanned the Wikipedia entries, at best), because I am not sure who posits this, but claiming that LAS is based on that case is Rather A Stretch. Lady Audley has abandoned Husband no 1 and child in the colonies and Bigamously Married Up. Husband no 1 reappears in England. She pushes him into a well. I depose that this is not much like cutting half-sibling's throat and stashing the body in an unused privy-house, and confessing several years later.

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Think women have never had it so good? You should take a look at medieval days. But I think there is huge Point Thahr not entirely Misst but let slip past when perhaps it should get a bit more traction: CLASS.

We endlessly retread the lives of oppressed noblewomen, and ignore their secretly empowered lower-order sisters. Where poorer women are mentioned, glancingly, they are pitied as prostitutes or rape victims. Even writers who seem desperate for a “feminist take” on the period tend to ignore the angle staring them right in the face.

And nearly all the interesting stuff that was happening re education for women, women as doctors etc in the Victorian era, was among professional/business classes. Not ye upper 10K.

(Don't get me started on Victorian secularist Malthusian suffragist women...)

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Lady Tankerville: The botanist and secret scientist. Yes, she's fascinating: but she was NOT A SOLITARY UNICORN. I want to know if she was in touch with the kind of circles Mary Delany was involved with, who were also women all about the Linnean system. If she was a pal of Joseph Banks, he had several female friends who were pursuing botany, I really don't think it can have been that dubious and secret a pursuit.

(Though in further ways this week has been A Week, there was the failure of Teams to connect to a lecture I rather wanted to virtually attend on Tuesday: but I think this was not a failure at this end but a more general problem as someone else on Twitter copped to having the same issue and IT problems were reported.)

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Thinking beyond the 'strong woman'/'girlboss' stereotype: Jennie Jerome [not Churchill's ma], a twentieth century Victorian in the Library:

Women’s history and much of male history, too, celebrates those who break molds, lead avant-garde lives, and generally do things differently from the majority, while under pressure from society or duress from personal circumstances. Often, the women who gain attention (and readership) are wild and witty, throw parties, run away with men, or fall in love with other women, write novels or move to the deserts of the Southwest. But, what about women like Jennie Jerome?

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A rather similar critique here, in the context of ART: The Problem with the ‘Look, I Found Her!’ Trend in Art History:

It is true that some artists who are women had smaller, less conventional oeuvres compared to their male peers. Rather than acting as if this is not the case, or only looking at those who made work that competed with mainstream or avant-garde men, would it not be more worthwhile and more interesting to raise those old feminist questions about the canon itself? About what work we, the people who look at and care about art, consider impressive or important, and why, and whether those value systems still serve us?

Also interrogating canon formation: though this is more 'how some exceptional women found ways round the impediments that threatened to close down their creative ambitions, and to remind readers of the formidable extent of those barriers': Our being your equals: Eight women writers who challenge the male canon (Review of Anna Beer, EVE BITES BACK: an alternative history of English literature. Not forgotten figures, but some interesting juxtapositions and considerations of genre there.

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There are, I think, problems with this project even if one does sympathise with the desire to preserve this record: The Race to Save Fanfiction History Before It’s Lost Forever. Points out that DIGITISATION IS NOT A PRESERVATION MEDIUM unless you have longterm upgrade contingency plans in play, and that you would be doing better, in the first place, to be getting the zines into SAFE PHYSICAL STORAGE UNDER APPROPRIATE CONDITIONS.

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And this, just because it's about what you can find - well, that at least complicates the initial story that the medieval records present about who/what a woman was and what she was doing there: The Steelyard, Hansard Merchants, and a “Misliving” Singlewoman in Late Medieval London.

But in my really rather niche area of scholarship, I have come across People Having Really Weird Ideas About Sex (and, in fact, about other things*)-

- including the guy who was grimly holding on to his preconceptions about the Human Female's sexuality (the empirical basis for which seemed, ummmmm, tenuous....) at length and in detail to Alfred Kinsey, even after having read the relevant volume of the Kinsey Report.

And maybe, one supposed, these were strange rare people who had been reared by the bears of Outer Uzbekistan, but in fact, in these days of social media, one may apprehend that even with all the resources of Modern Life, Error Proliferates.

Sigh.

And as this post suggests, some of these ideas have been around since Ye Medeevles, they just take somewhat different forms (I don't think it's framed as women lusting to grab onto some of that Male Heat for their Coldness).

(And on the Too Much Hanging With Teh Wymmynz Causes Teh Gay, I was informed this was a common cliche in Australia in the 1960s? (Bulletin of Things Somebody Once Told Me in A Pub)

On the 'women really take significant pleasure in being ejaculated into' thing - which I would not say is entirely Not A Thing, but which I am very much inclined to think is largely about male projection (hurhurh) - in pursuing my niche area of study I sometimes read works by some of the less serious or more gullible sexologists of the late nineteenth/early twentieth century. In one of which I came across the Ejaculating Dildo ('can be filled with warm water, milk, or other liquid') - purported deployed by 'tribades'. (Cite to An Authority who cites Another Authority - when I pursued this An Authority does not give any very specific reference, and I discover that Another Authority wrote mostly in Czech.)

I am just, you know, somehow just a leetle sceptical about these visions that centre Ye Urgent Phallus, real or artificial.

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*I suppose there would be both copyright and data protection issues about publishing a volume of what one might loosely classify as 'Purple Ink on Graph Paper' letters (not all Strange Epistles were actually thus indited, but they were, as it were, classifiable thus).

This is depressing: The Brink of Erasure. Way back in the late 70s, when I visited the National Archives of India as a professional archivist employed at an institution to whom one might have supposed they would extend a certain mutual courtesy, I wasn't even allowed to look at the finding aids without having applied, like, months in advance, when all I wanted to do was not even look at their actual archives but get a general sense of what they held on [particular subject] for officially-sponsored research project. So I'm not at all surprised that they don't seem to have become markedly more welcoming in the interim. But the whole 'demolition of existing premises and move' would strike a chill into the heart of an archivist even without the grimmer political context given here.

The NAI collectively holds about 4.5 million files, 25,000 rare manuscripts, and more than 1 million maps, along with nearly a million Mughal Empire documents.4 The Annexe is home to a vast number of pre-1857 documents,5 as well as the Accession Records Division, which houses millions of post-Partition documents, records of the Archaeological Survey of India and editions of old Urdu language newspapers.6 That the historical value of these documents is unparalleled goes without saying. It also begs several questions. Where will the records of the Annexe be stored (and in what conditions) while the Central Vista project takes shape? Given that scholars and academics alike have to plan research schedules and write their theses and dissertations, how long will it be before documents can be accessed? With the complex narratives of religion, integration, and Partition that wind through India’s history, what do the circumstances of this transfer mean for the simple act of remembering who we are? More practically, what does this mean for the telling and teaching of history and the training of historians?

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No longer here, or if here, no longer recognisable, but at least recorded:

The Society for Photographing Relics of Old London was formed when the Oxford Arms – a traditional galleried pub – was about to be pulled down as part of the new Old Bailey development in 1875. The society subsequently campaigned to record disappearing sights, hurriedly commissioning photographs to capture buildings for posterity.

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But to decentre Eurocentricity and to think about different narratives of what we define as the Middle Ages: A Bad Cockatoo Article in The New Yorker:

Mead expresses wonderment at the idea that a cockatoo could end up in medieval Europe; the New Yorker Twitter account referred to it as a ‘rare bird from an almost inconceivable corner of the world’.
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[T]hese cockatoos are fascinating evidence of links between eastern Indonesian islands and the wider world before the first Portuguese expedition to the region in 1512. They join the myriad references to cloves, nutmeg, mace, and white sandalwood in European and other Afro-Eurasian texts from the Middle Ages in showing the extraordinary connectedness of the medieval world and the Indo-Malaysian archipelago’s pivotal place within it. These are all traces of the lives and labour of otherwise undocumented people in eastern Indonesia.