Academia: A Community for Academics and Interested

This is being one of those weeks when I'm not sure if Mercury is in retrograde or in the opposite of retrograde, if there is an opposite.

In that some things are going unwontedly smoothly and unexpectedly well, and other things not, and plans being thwarted, etc.

E.g., further to the expeditious renewal of my library membership, I was going to boogy on down to the relevant institution to pick up my card and do a spot of light research (I think I may have copies of the books I need to look at but they are not in any of the places where I would anticipate them to be). However, it is chucking down rain in buckets, I think I will leave this until a drier day. Dangers untold and hardships unnumbered is one thing, sitting around with wet shoes in an airconditioned reading room is another.

However, in connection with the research, I remembered that Elderly Antiquarian Bookdealer/Bibliographer had mentioned to me a Person who has come up as Of Interest, and I thought I would see whether they are still around, and apparently they are at the latest report though nearly 90. And not only that, last year, why was I not told, there was published a limited edition from a small press of various of their uncollected writings, including an essay on the very person. This is something I would have bought anyway had I known it existed.

And lo and behold, I ponied up for this hardback, limited edition etc: and got a massively discounted price in their winter sale calloo callay.

On the prehensile tail, I managed to break a soup bowl at lunchtime. Fortunately not containing any soup.

At least, I found a whole foods supplier which had - among other things like wheatbran which looked like it would not be like the sawdusty stuff Ocado have lately been purveying under that name - things like Medium Oatmeal! Wheatgerm! and POMEGRANATE VINEGAR!!! which I have been complaining everywhere were No Can Haz. Also kasha (I did have kasha but on recently examining the package found that its BBF was way back last summer).

And conveyed to me with remarkable expedition even if I didn't pony up for the expedite delivery option.

Slight whinge at DPD for just leaving it on the step and not even ringing the bell.

Also, I discovered that my library card for Former Workplace expired several years ago. On emailing about renewal (as I have a need to Go In and Consult Things) got a next day response saying they can renew if I send in scan of appropriate ID and address verification, and pick up card when I go in.

This somewhat makes up for:

a) the two reviews I did last year which still sit in limbo with the relevant editors.

b) the two feelers put out for books to review, ditto, such that I am hesitant to put out another for a different book to a different journal in case I end up yet again with stack of books for review.

c) local history society which I contacted last year apropos 2 volumes of its proceedings which are Relevant to My Interests and which after some initially encouraging response has gone silent.

Am still miffed about either inadvertently deleting or not being sent Zoom link for the last Dance to the Music of Time discussion.

and am baffled by the ongoing situation 'The server is taking too long to respond' of the Mastodon instance I frequent, which has now pertained for nearly 5 days.

That piece about people having AI spouses is online: As synthetic personas become an increasingly normal part of life, meet the people falling for their chatbot lovers.

NB we note that 'Lamar' says that the breaking point with his actual, RL, girlfriend was when he found her doing the horizontal tango with his best friend, but it's clear that there were Problems already there, about having to relate to another human bean who was not always brightly sunshiny positively reinforcing him....

what would he tell his kids? “I’d tell them that humans aren’t really people who can be trusted …

This is not entirely 'wow, startling news' to Ye Hystorianne of Sexxe: The Phenomenon of ‘Bud Sex’ Between Straight Rural Men.

I am not going to see if I actually have a copy of the work on my shelves, or if I perused it in a library somewhere, but didn't that notorious work of 'participant observation' sociology, Tearoom Trade argue that many of his subjects were not defining themselves as 'homosexual'.

I also invoke, even further back, Helen Smith's Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957 about men 'messing about' with other men in Yorkshire industrial cities.

And there is a reason people working on the epidemiology and prevention of STIs use the acronym 'MSM' - men who have sex with men - for the significant population at risk who do not identify as gay.

I had, I must admit, a very plus ca change moment when I idly picked up Katharine Whitehorn's Roundabout (1962), and found the piece she wrote on marriage bureaux. In which she mentioned that the two bureaux she interviewed tried to get their subscribers not to be too ultra-specific in their demands - that if they met potential partners in real life they would be more flexible.

Was also amused by the statement that 'Men over thirty are always very anxious to persuade me that they could have all they women they liked, if they bothered'.

Last week's bread held out for most of the week.

Friday night supper: ven pongal (South Indian khichchari).

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, 50:50% wholemeal/strong white flour, maple syprup, dried cranberries, turned out nicely.

Today's lunch: game crumble - the game mix (partridge, pheasant and venison) casseroled in red wine with onion, garlic, bay leaf, juniper berries, coriander seed, 5-pepper blend and salt, before putting the crumble topping (mixture of approx 2:1:1 wholemeal flour/strong white flour/pinhead oatmeal) on for the final half-hour; served with tenderstem broccoli tips which I cooked thusly - sizzled some chopped ginger and cumin seeds in oilve oil, turned the broccoli in this, added some water and steamed for half an hour, turned out rather well although I think the original recipe said fennel seeds....; and stirfried tat soi.

Of course it would be Jonathan Jones making these overheated speculations, wouldn't it? Did Leonardo da Vinci paint a nude Mona Lisa? I may have just solved this centuries-old mystery.

We do wish he would go and look at some landscapes, or maybe abstracts, for a change, though doubtless he would find some female sexual symbolism to perve over there.

Cannot help feeling that he is just some point on a spectrum away from this very weird - not sure if it entirely constitutes a subculture? The Goon Squad: Loneliness, porn’s next frontier, and the dream of endless masturbation Very NSFW and rather creepy - the author in an interview cops to Perverse Exhilaration which may have something to do with discomfort at the tone as well as the actual matter?

There was a piece in Guardian Saturday about people who fall in love with their AI companions, and want to marry then and have children with them, and apparently some women also bond with them, but so far this is not online that I can find. Based on a book that's coming out?

Steps towards identifying new Black voters in 18th-century Westminster and Hertfordshire, way back in 1700s, when being able to vote meant having certain property qualifications e.g. being a householder.

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What did the Romans ever do for us? Not so much of the benefits we're always told: Urban populations in southern Britain experienced a decline in health that lasted for generations after the Romans arrived.

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The history of mutual aid organisations: Prior to the development of government and employer health insurance and financial services, friendly or ‘benevolent’ societies were an important part of many people’s lives.

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There are no pure cultures: All of our religions, stories, languages and norms were muddled and mixed through mobility and exchange throughout history (and I don't seem to have saved the links about the numbers of immigrants in medieval England....)

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This is an older link I don't think I ever posted: Vitriol to Corrosive Fluid: ‘Acid’ Assault in the Twentieth Century:

There seems to have been a spike in cases in the late 1960s, but the pattern established in the nineteenth century was clearly at an end. With fewer cases occurring, and fewer making headline news, the incidence of this unique offence continued to fall until its reappearance in a different guise in the twenty-first century. However, the ongoing digitization of late twentieth-century newspapers may yet reveal further cases.

Have this rather silly fun playlist:

Let's do

The Martian Hop

Though by now it's mostly dispersed - still lying in parts.

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Yesterday had that exasperating thing of asking what I thought was a question for very specific thing (not even for myself, for someone who didn't have access to this particular knowledge-resource) and got, okay, one really good response that was right on point, and several which demonstrated that actual humans are quite capable all by themselves of hallucinating what the question actually was and providing answers entirely tangential and Point Thahr Misst.

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I have had to do with this campaigner: ‘Women have to fight for what they want’: UK campaigner’s 60-year unfinished battle for abortion rights over archives of campaigns she was involved in (I even, as I recollect, suggested an appropriate riposte - a bouquet of parsley - to some weird hostile message sent to her by the notorious Victoria Gillick.)

Pretty much her contemporary, I don't think I ever met the recently-deceased Molly Parkin, but I certainly read various of her writings, including most of her various 'bonk-busters' - I'm not sure they entirely fit that category - which seem to have fallen out of print, at least, they do not seem to have enjoyed e-revival.