It's Always More Complicated

And in the purlieux of those famed writers of the creepy, MR James and AC Benson.

Though, honestly, I am getting somewhat Charles Williams' metaphysical thrillers vibes from all this:

Orr has used Cambridge University as a recruitment ground to bring students into a hard-right, theocratic political project aimed at bolstering talent in Farage’s party.
Sources across the university have raised urgent concerns about the safeguarding risks to students in Orr’s orbit.
....
Orr’s extensive Cambridge compound provides accommodation for at least half a dozen postgraduate students, though it is not clear whether this is on a fee-paying basis. Through his lawyers, Orr has defended the practice as being common in Cambridge, though fellow academics say that it is highly unusual.

Orr is one of the Reform officials lately suspended over foreign money donations following a sting operation. Yeah, professor of Efficks, what?

I am just slightly boggled to discover that this gentleman is a)married and b) to an Anglican (female) vicar, when one would think that such a creature would be anathema to him, but what do I know.

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Also creepy, but in a known and even predictable way, Jonathan Jones reviews the Bayeux tapestry: 'Then I saw two bare-chested female centaurs' (of course you did, Jonathan) and he also notes

Naked bodies emerge from their armour, pale and oddly beautiful – the complete ones, at least – as these medieval geniuses show they can depict, through embroidery, incredibly gentle, intimate nudes whose dead flesh fills the battlefield with pathos.

To the Royal Academy for the Renaissance Nude exhibition - that young fella who appears on the posters and publicity is, believe it or not, one of some several St Sebastians included. In the full length thing one may discern one very discreet arrow. From his expression, he must be high on endorphins?

Anyway, not only is it fairly equal opportunity nudes - because yr Renaissance painters were, we depose, v much about ye manly beauty, no? - also includes the ageing/grotesque etc body. We may also discern that it is possible to find reasons to depict naked flesh when painting saints, the damned, biblical scenes (several Bathshebas but to my surprise, no Susannahs), mythical scenes, allegories, and people in (pretty much contemporary) bathhouses. Over a range of media.

Including Books of Hours. Imagine my entire shock upon reading the explanatory text stating that while Bathsheba in some royal lady's Book of Hours is discreetly robed as she bathes, even if observed by pervy King David, in ones made for elite gentlemen she is - surprise! - as nature intended. Very devotional.

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In other news, I see that Firefox has now restored the add-ons it had removed/disabled earlier on. I hope this state persists.

via that estimable rounder-up of links, hano:
The great Ivy League nude posture photo scandal.

Yes, interesting, but:

An archivist comments that in the UK, this kind of runaround would be (or should be) obviated by resort to the National Register of Archives (and even lacking that admirable resource, wouldn't a national collection of anthropology be a logical starting, rather than finishing, place?).

Archivist also enquires, re the 'made to look at negatives' thing: were the actual photographs in the archive at all, or did just the negs survive? I have in my career catalogued a not insignificant number of collections containing negatives without any corresponding prints. Archivist also notes that given the sleaze factor of these photos, celebrated in song, story, anecdote and comedy routine, it seems entirely legitimate that the person i/c the collection invokes a higher level of access for people who want to look at them.

It also seems to me that this is just one particularly newsworthy instance of students being an available population to do research on, with particular reasons for compliance, even if they realise that what's being asked isn't actually required of them.

Back in the dear departed days when I first went to the Institution of Highah Learninz where I did my first degree (when dinosaurs roamed the earth, etc), as I recall a not inconsiderable number of hours during fresher induction days involved doing Tests, as far as I recollect as part of an IQ research project. Goodness knows memory has faded, and those days were a fog due to unexpected arrival of extremely painful period* along with all the other confusions of the time, but this vague recollection remains. And even in the late 60s I don't recollect anyone asking about it or refusing.

Students have been (I suspect) for a quite a long time one of those captive populations beloved of researchers in the biological and social sciences. Apart from above mentioned tests I was later on in my university career a participant in a research project to do with T-groups for sensitivity training**, but that was entirely voluntary.

But the author of the article is clearly more interested in the nude photos and the dodgy pseudoscience behind them.

On which, literary allusions to Sheldonian theories to do with somatotypes: Aldous Huxley in Eyeless in Gaza, as I recall, and Robertson Davies having his usual fun playing with them in The Rebel Angels.

*This one possibly outclassed in inconvenience even the one that began on Delhi airport, after I had checked my bags containing the necessities, prior to a lengthy and complicated journey back to the UK.

**Jury still out on whether this conveyed any benefit whatsoever.

Men Are Terribly Poor Stuff, reprised yet again: Online dating: Cyber Cyrano for hire - Too busy to chat up the suitors in your online dating account? No problem. Matt Prager will simply assume your identity and do it for you. Can I get a loud, collective *EEEEUUUUWWWW*? At least Christian had already seen and fancied Roxanne when he asked Cyrano to do the literate stuff for him.

Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on home smoking - alas, less helpful than I had hoped because he, like all the books I've found on the subject so far, is all about the SALT. I have managed to produce some extremely acceptable smoked food without brining or rubbing with vast quantities of sodium chloride.

Oliver Burkeman on the virtues of imperfection. Fails to mention the necessity of leaving some slight flaw for the soul to escape, lest it be trapped in the work (if this was ever a concept, I think I found in a poem by D H Lawrence about Navajo blankets, which I somehow doubt to be an entirely reliable source).

Helen Fielding: 12 things I love about Blighty: I know it's so LA to be creepily upbeat, but being back in England is awfully nice.

Frances Spalding finds much to enjoy in a biography of a bohemian couple who lived the artistic life to its extremes, though I must say, these two artists also sound very, very annoying and being able to get away with bad behaviour in a v gendered way.

And on this The Patience Stone by Atiq Rahimi, like the reviewer, I am more than a little iffy about presenting a woman as Everywoman, rather than as an individual subject, and double that if she is an Afghan woman. I am perhaps too much reminded of Marina Warner in Monuments and Maidens about the plethora of statues and imagery representing women as abstractions, and the very few of individual identifiable women.

Steve Roud, a folklorist of great experience and distinction, is fascinated by the way we massage details into stories and prefer them to the more prosaic reality; or, as he puts it, the "grain of untruth" that lies at the heart of urban legend.

Kathryn Hughes praises Chloë Schama's digging into a court case which inspired one of Collins's lesser known novels, Man and Wife (1870).

And for anyone who hasn't seen the latest update on this extraordinary case: Historian Orlando Figes admits posting Amazon reviews that trashed rivals. And a fairly bizarre column by one of his trashed rivals.

Penelope Cruz edits Vogue 'plus-size' edition. Plus-size in this context meaning up to UK sizes 12 and 14, though even so, someone makes the argument "it's not such a good thing to show plus-size because it's not really physically healthy and not always flattering to fashion." How sizes 12 and 14 amount to pathologically unhealthy obesity (problematic enough a concept in itself) alas escapes me.

[H]as the naked calendar gone beyond a joke? We asked feminist Sali Hughes and naturist Sam Hawcroft to argue the case. I am so Point Thah U Hav Misst It about the naturist's claims.

Cod-faking scandal.

In today's Guardian Mr Mybug Stephen Bayley, Mean feminazis b attackin me woez woez Why my book [Woman As Design] is not sexist. I think possibly the only cliche he omits is 'naked female human form divine': otherwise it's straight bingo-card stuff

My research in the area will not threaten the likes of Professor Steve Jones*, but there is some discussion of evolutionary biology**
....
The book is intended as a history of how we perceive women, and the ferocious response from neo-prudes*** has made the book part of that history. It is also deeply revealing of schisms in contemporary feminism. Jenni Murray is the proprietor of a sexist ghetto called Woman's Hour (why no Man's Hour on Radio 4?)****
....
Another critic was inalienably disgusted that a double-page spread compared a car's radiator grille to the vulva. If you find female sexual parts disgusting, then I sympathise. But my point was not that men see cars as sexual objects (a valid point, but the subject of another book I must write soon). Instead, I was explaining how the commercial failure of the 1958 Ford Edsel, as research showed, was sourced in the astonishing morphic similarity I illustrated. So, on US highways, you had a chrome version of the vagina dentata, the vagina with teeth***** – a symbol both alluring and threatening, and one of the most basic constructs in anthropology.
....
Certainly, it would be impossible to deny that female breasts are the focus of much erotic curiosity from heterosexual men, but I insistently make the point that there is no ideal, that preferred shapes and types change in history. Put it this way: one of the first images of a breast in Woman As Design is attached to the Venus of Willendorf (c25,000BC), and one of the last is attached to the similarly ample Beth Ditto (2009)******.
....
[M]y observations about the cultural history of the breast... were inspired not only by a measure of pleasant personal observation, but also by scholarly books written by those most refined and liberal feminists, Marina Warner and Marilyn Yalom.*******

*No, RLY??!!
**We are not surprised, are we, my dearios?
***Awwww, bless, how adorably retro can you get? I suppose he thinks calling them 'neo-prudes' rather than just 'prudes' is somehow happening and now and edgy rather than a rather old tired and empty response to feminist critiques of male exploitation of the female body.
****The old ones are always the best, aren't they, duckies? We wonder - the year being 2009 - that Mr B has never come across the countervailing argument that ALL TEH OTHER HOWRZ BELONG 2 TEH MENZ.
*****Trying not to larf like drain - thinks 'DON'T MOCK' in chiding Frankie-Howerd-voice.
******We are inclined to think that that is not an image of a breast attached to Ms Ditto, and we are rather disturbed by the concept of attachable, and therefore presumably also detachable, boob-parts.
*******We hope they are too refined to projectile-vomit at this nauseating and condescending description.

Does this encourage us to change our ideas about this project? Apart from the generally poor ton of whingeing when someone dares to criticise, I am far from being persuaded by his arguments. If arguments they may be termed.

There are interesting and thought-provoking articles to be written about the nude male in European art, but I'm not persuaded that this is one of them. Given that it begins with the allegation that 'always' since the Greeks, because the only always I can always agree with is that It's Always More Complicated. And when the author claims that 'We like to think of the past as an icy monolith - as cold as Canova - from which we romantically escape', he has me hissing 'What do you mean, we, white man?' And I may not be a classicist, but I'm not exactly happy with monolithic accounts of 'the Greeks' and 'the Romans'.

An annoying example of someone who thinks he knows all about the Victorians and their motives in photographing exotic cultures: because of course all Victorians, whether colonial administrators, missionaries, anti-slavery campaigners, or anthropologists, were all the same and actuated by the same motives, naturally. IAMC, sir.

Nicholas Lezard salutes Peter Linebaugh's work of 'proper' history, The London Hanged

A nice little puff for Slightly Foxed: the arrival of the latest issue having been one of the pleasures of the past week.

In praise of gram (besan) flour, made from chickpeas.

Happy birthday, Doris Lessing! (a 'Today's Birthday' which doesn't seem to be anywhere on the Guardian website), b. 1919 in Persia. Refused to be a Dame, but is a Companion of Honour.

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Ronald Pearsall, author of dubious 'classic' work on Victorian Sex, The Worm in the Bud, dies. This is a maddening work, for which RP must have done massive amount of primary research, but since there are no notes and no adequate bibliography, one can't tell, and has no idea where some intriguing items might be located. Obituary makes clear he was pretty much a hack.

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Three items which seem to me to have cross-currents of resonance and synchronicity:

Stomach-turning article on 'lad mags': Janice Turner, 'The misogyny of the new breed of lads' mags is breathtaking'. 'It's just fun' is surely a common get-out phrase of sexual harassers? so I hardly think it's a legit excuse for these guys. 'Health is boring' - and the target group is the peak at-risk for testicular cancer. I am creeped out by the 'women as consumer objects for the male' attitudes described (flashing back to my post earlier in the week about prostitutes and punters). And the attitude to sex which is about large fake boobs (these must lack sensation? inquiring minds would like to know) and how to 'get' women to perform certain acts for the male. The emphasis on women conforming to certain norms of attractiveness seems to me to be about the woman as object to show off to the other lads - this week I had a spam which seemed to me to encapsulate what this is all about 'Is yours bigger than all your friends?' (cue Woody Allen comment about the revisionist approach to Freud which attributes penis envy to males...)

And why are women willing and even eager to be photographed for these noxious emanations of sexist culture? I can think of several reasons: a) they've bought into the idea that it's all fun, or at least that it would be boring and uncool to have any objections b) we are constantly being told that women today are in a constant state of anxiety about the acceptability of their bodies: so being acceptable to this picky audience might actually be experienced as affirmation of attractiveness c) well, maybe they are doing it in a spirit of irony, which just goes to show that irony is an inflection that many people are insensitive to (is there something people can take for irony-deficiency?).

A very different view of the female body in interview with artist Jenny Saville:

( 'Could I make a painting of a nude in my own voice?' )

And yet another review of Strauss's The Game, along with something called The Layguide, by Steven Poole, who deems them to be 'present[ing] themselves as geeks' guides to seduction, but... actually faintly homoerotic':

Women are trophies or tokens in an endless quest for esteem and standing between the adherents of "pickup", both in real life and on the internet message boards where people post tips and stories.

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More cheeringly, Lyndall Gordon on ' the creative power of sympathy' and bonds between women.

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The pleasures, as opposed to the pains and problems of motherhood: 'Jackie Clune feels like cracking open a bottle of champagne every time she looks at her gorgeous triplets. So why do other mothers think she has suffered some terrible misfortune?'

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'Will the lemurs, man's long-lost cousins, survive the destruction of Madagascar's forests?'