Why This Is Hell

Though I suspect it's more just 'did not bother to do any research'.

Two pieces in today's Guardian Saturday.

The one about blokes being (IMHO) totally scammed over testosterone doesn't appear to be online yet, but I, who have done my time in the noisome pits of sex-related quackery, was going: this is the latest round of what used to be rejuvenation operations of various kinds (HAI! WB Yeats!), the Blakoe energiser, electrical belts, devices to prevent the leakage of the precious manly fluids, pills to restore Lost Manhood, and I wouldn't be surprised if radium tonics had featured at some point.

The placebo reaction is a powerful thing.

And then we get The rise of the literary nepo baby? The children of famous novelists on following in their parents’ footsteps.

Well, maybe in these parlous times it does help getting an agent and one's foot in the door at a publisher? But it is hardly a new phenomenon that there is More Than One Writer In The Family.

Will concede that perhaps I am thinking of those literary families of an earlier era which were perhaps more into churning out more or less hackwork as a cottage industry (e.g. the Allinghams).

Then I bethought me that Angela Thirkell's son Colin MacInnes was also a writer, albeit, as one may see from that Wikipedia entry, a very different article from Mama, wot. (I seem to recall from the bios of her that I read that they were estranged and he was a hostile witness.)

There's also a bit of a reverse pattern in the Drabble family, whereby John Drabble took to novel-writing after his daughters. (Famous Sibling Literary Feuds....)

Story of enslaved boy featured in 1748 Joshua Reynolds portrait emerges in new study - I online attended a seminar the other week about black children in England from the C17th to C19th which leant fairly heavily on depictions in art (and also sounded a bit like the speaker had pulled out a bit at random examples from their 10 or was it more boxes of research materials) and implied that we could not know what happened to them once they were not more or less cute ornamental pets, so this article goes some way to show that sometimes the larger life story can be discovered.

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This is interesting, given that it is a phase of the parturition cycle that doesn't tend to get that much attention - okay, I have read More Than The Average Person on 'bringing on the menses' and further measures if they were not brought on, and a fair amount about actual childbirth in history: but this is a bit unusual: Anticipating Birth in Early Modern England:

Scholars have described the days leading up to birth in the early modern period as a time when women purchased linens, prepared bedchambers, and called upon the services of a midwife and their gossips. However, manuscript recipe collections reveal that preparations in anticipation of labour went beyond such measures and incorporated the consumption of specific medicines. This article studies remedies that were designed to be taken six weeks before birth to reveal, in new ways, the experiences of late pregnancy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

More exciting work from the good people at CamPop, this time circling out from the census records: By linking millions of census records across decades, researchers are turning static snapshots of Victorian Britain into dynamic life histories – revealing how people moved, worked and lived in ways never before possible.

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‘Live and let live’: Northern Ireland historian uncovers surprising era of tolerance of gay men:

Hulme said tacit ignorance and public silence enabled male queerness to flourish with only rare exposure, condemnation or regulation, with a “live and let live” ethos especially prevalent in the working class.

Muttering that this information can be found in the household recipe books at much less elite social levels, still, it's useful work if it gets people aware of just how diverse British food at that period was: The King’s Dinner: Family, nation, and identity on the British table, 1760-1820.

A further trail of thought more or less kicked off by this comment by flemmings on yesterday's post about Ursula as an anthropologist's daughter and the way that inflected her fiction -

- and then I went, hey, wasn't he part of that whole Franz Boas group that I read that book about at the beginning of 2020 (Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity) and would she not have been aware of Significant Lady Anthropologists and their work (not just her own ma) -

Like, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict?

(Maybe the forthcoming biography will shine some light there???)

Or was that going on in some entirely different compartment to the requirements of fictional narrative? (thinking of my 1920s gals and the gulf between what they were up to with their affairs and abortions and propagating birth control and what the protags in their novels were permitted to get up to.)

Or was there a whole generational thing going on there, which I sort of touched on in commenting about Mitchison on this post, though I think I could make a larger case about that generation that had had to fight for a lot of rights that were already accepted as given by UKleG's day even if there were still major constraints.

(Seem to recollect that I did not think Julie Phillips in that book on writers and motherhood quite brought out the extent to which she was writing of a very specific generation/time-period. With some exceptions.)

What I read

Finished Tales From Earthsea, The Other Wind and the pendant short pieces in The Book of Earthsea 'The Rule of Names', 'The Word of Unbinding', 'The Daughter of Odren', and 'Earthsea Revisioned'. I don't know quite what it is, I can see how good her work is, but the feeling is more of distant admiration than what I feel for my beloved favourites? Might even cop to preferring her criticism and essays to her fiction? (not the only author to whom this pertains.)

Started a Dick Francis, Bolt (Kit Fielding, #2) (1986)

- and then, feeling all a-wamble and fretted because of the insomnia thing, fell back into Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution, old favourite.

- and then returned to the horsies and the posh owners and the psycho villains.

On the go

Martha Wells, Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries #8) which arrived yesterday.

Up next

No idea, apart from the recently arrived latest Literary Review

Last week's bread held out remarkably.

Friday night supper: penne with Peppadew roasted red peppers in brine whooshed in the blender and heated.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla.

Today's lunch: diced lamb shoulder casseroled in white wine with baby carrots, chopped leeks, bay leaf, thyme, white peppercorns and salt, with a sliced potato topping (blanched in boiling water for 5 mins, brushed with melted butter, and seasoned with salt and pepper, put on for the final 45 mins or so), served with white-braised fine green beans and baby courgettes.

Apparently this is Still A Thing: Woman denied permanent birth control on NHS wins case with ombudsman. I.e. she was asking for sterilisation, and significant barriers are still being put in the way when women ask for this, compared to men asking for vasectomy.

Conceding that

Female sterilisation, or tubal ligation, is a surgical procedure that involves sealing, cutting or blocking the fallopian tubes to prevent eggs from reaching the uterus. It is usually performed under general anaesthetic via keyhole surgery and requires a few weeks of recovery. In contrast, a vasectomy is a minor outpatient procedure, typically carried out under local anaesthetic in under 30 minutes.
While both procedures serve the same purpose, permanent contraception, the ombudsman’s investigation found that the NHS was in effect treating them as different tiers of care, placing significant barriers in front of women while offering men a more straightforward pathway.
The investigation found that the ICB had denied women NHS funding based on the risk of “regret”, a criterion not applied to men seeking vasectomies.

While some of this is about its being a more serious operation, a lot of it comes down to 'maybe she will regret it'. Sigh. Not all women are happy with the various forms of long-term contraception which one 'emeritus professor' (it is not stated of what) says are equivalent and leave options open.

This is a different, and very strange, story about reproduction: ‘It’s super weird, super odd, super rare’: meet the twins who have different dads.

I think there may have been some potentially similar phenomena collected by the sort of docs who collected Weird Medical Phenomena - come on down, Gould and Pyle and their Anomalies and curiosities of medicine : being an encyclopedic collection of rare and extraordinary cases, and of the most striking instances of abnormality in all branches of medicine and surgery derived from an exhaustive research of medical literature from its origin to the present day (1901), which includes 'twins of different colour' which before DNA testing was presumably the only means by which one might even suspect a case of this sort.

Have also looked up papers of doc who also did this kind of thing and see reference to blood grouping in twins, which might also have been a clue to this? or not - would fraternal twins necessarily have same blood group.

This has felt like a week and a half.

What with the To Do list consequent upon seeing the solicitors -

- which has involved a lot of digging stuff up and delving into files and checking things and discovering inter alia that a certain publisher has been sending my statements into the void, i.e. to an email address which went defunct in 2012. And that The Textbook is actually available in an e-version that I wotted not of.

Plus there has been the less straightforward than I supposed matter of actually putting the getting civilly partnered in hand - at one point I thought this might be on hold until Jan '27 but by not doing the most utterly basic possibility at the local Town Hall, can do it within a more reasonable time-frame, contingent upon going down to the Town Hall to register with due notice....

Okay, as historian and novel-reader I can see that this is to as far as possible avoid all those sensational entanglements that are fun to read but not to endure in person.

Concurrent with this there have been other annoyances - yes, I am delighted that my review is being published, but YOY do I have to, yet again, register with the journal portal and why is this never completely straightforward?

And I think this is apposite for the undertakings of this week: ‘The reading of the will’: making inheritance law visual - wills in funerary monuments, art, literature, media.

More about the LCC and the Arts: The LCC and the Arts II: the ‘Patronage of the Arts’ Scheme

‘Protecting what matters’: a statement from the Royal Historical Society, Institute of Historical Research, History UK and Historical Association:

If the government is serious in its stated aim of strengthening the social contract, it needs to act now to support and sustain the study and practice of history across all sectors of education, in communities and in public discourse. If we are to collectively ‘protect what matters’, we challenge educational leaders, policy makers and politicians to protect and defend history.

and

New strategic vision for archives highlights how BBC Written Archives Centre falls short:

{W]e profoundly regret the decision to stop responding to enquiries from members of the public. Also, it is entirely unsatisfactory that physical access for researchers via the Caversham reading room has been reduced from three to just two days each week.
Moreover, we disagree with WAC limiting use of its facilities to just ‘writers who have been commissioned to write a book or article; those undertaking research for a commercial project, [and] academics in higher education undertaking accredited research.’ The restrictions are detailed here, and are more tightly focussed than has been the case in the past.

This is a fascinating piece on how people engage with 'dark tourism experiences': visits shaped less by exhibits, explanation panels and audio guides, and more by interactions with other visitors

This, however, is grim reading: What I Saw Inside the Kennedy Center: 'I spent 10 months working at the institution because I thought I could help protect it. What I observed there is far worse than the public knows'.

Today partner and I went to see solicitors about our testamentary dispositions, their offices are behind the Screen on the Green cinema opposite Islington Green (an in-joke that seems apropos for a certain lady's official birthday*).

Solicitors, like GPs, these days are very young, bless their little faces, awwwww.

But we had useful discussion and they seemed moderately impressed that we were fairly organised and knowledgeable and had stuff sorted out.

Though I have a whole swathe of Information to collate which I should perhaps have been doing in a more regular fashion heretofore. (General helpful hint, along with any requirements re funeral.)

And apparently - this is news to us that get our information from Victorian novels and murder mysteries - you do not actually have to sign the will/s after the ceremony if you are getting wed/civil partnered, just incorporate into the text that it is in expectation of that occurence - so we will not, as I had rather envisaged, have to dash down from the Town Hall to the solicitors to append our signatures.

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*No, I am not doing 3 Weeks For Dreamwidth after what happened last time I did that thing.