It's Always More Complicated

What I read

Finished Dream Count - not quite up to her earlier works? all being a bit of the moment (starting in lockdown and so on)? Will see what comes out in discussion.

Mick Herron, Clown Town (Slough House, #9) (2025) possibly getting that series-dip effect a bit? And was I really supposed to be flashing on the Marx Brothers' stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera during one particularly fraught episode?

Matt Lodder, Tattoos: The Untold History of a Modern Art (2024), which was very impressive (and copiously illustrated) and one guesses a bit of a passion project*. Interesting that there is a recurrent theme of tattooing coming out from being a subcultural thing among lowlives: when the story in fact is that they were the ones for whom body art would be being recorded for identification, in muster-rolls or prison records etc, and people of more genteel status would not be In The Record as being inked unless for some unusual particular reason. And that its being/becoming a fashionable thing has cycled around or maybe always been there. Also fascinating the links between tattooers and the development of a subculture/s.

*Yes, we would like to see what he's got portrayed....

I intermitted this with JD Robb, Framed in Death (In Death, #61), which had come down to the (nostalgic) price of old mass-market paperbacks (now defunct). Not one of the stronger entries, yet again, serial killer with very specific modus.

On the go

Eve Babitz, I Used to Be Charming: The Rest of Eve Babitz (2019) collection of her journalism, 1975-1997.

Up next

Well, I don't suppose that the books from local history society - which I have now been informed are available and can be purchased - will arrive very shortly, so dunno.

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

From all overish:

Grab the nearest book.
Turn to page 126
The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.

Huh. The nearest book is (probably) Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood (1974), and the sentence is

'And songs.'

Hmmmmm.

Alternatively, the nearest book is Callum G Brown, 90 Humanists and the Ethical Transition of Britain: the Open Conspiracy, 1930-80, in which p 126 is a blank page between chapters.

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I rather liked this, because it accords with a lot of my own feelings that The Internet is not entirely a seething pit of toxicity and there are, actually, benefits:

[A]s someone who, like millions of others, lives in a different place to where I grew up, interacting with other people’s lives online and posting about my own could still provide a surprisingly wholesome function. It’s not just about bitching about my ex-classmates being arrested or getting into multi-level marketing scams. It’s also a way to stay connected, to feel less homesick.
During the pandemic, and before that when I had to isolate myself during chemotherapy, social media wasn’t just a distraction; it was a lifeline. It was a way to feel sane and engaged with people I couldn’t reach out and touch. If we couldn’t be together in person, I could at least see snippets of their world.
Even now that I am free to be out and about, I miss those snippets. I wish we weren’t too cool or too bored or too frightened of being judged to invite each other into our online lives a bit more. I think it’s time to bring back that connection.

*Though I had a version of 'the place that was there just now has disappeared' dream last night, where I was in some kind of train station, or maybe it was a platform with indicators, and saw a destination and time that I didn't need at that moment, and went back again because that was now what I wanted, and of course it was all different. Symbolickal?

This week's bread: the Collister/Blake My Favourite Loaf, strong white/wholemeal/light spelt flour. Okay, but not as nice as sometimes.

New Year's Eve evening meal: partridges with ducky little bacon weskits, pot-roasted in brandy and port (the drainings of the port, less than I thought we had) (one of them for some reason turned out partially undercooked, not sure why that was); served with cornmeal cakes, which for some reason turned out less satisfactory than usual, possibly the batter was a tad too slack, fine green beans and sliced baby peppers roasted in walnut oil with fennel seeds and splashed with gooseberry vinegar and cauliflower florets roasted in pumpkin seed oil with cumin seeds and splashed with tayberry vinegar.

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, light spelt flour, worked rather well.

Today's lunch: kedgeree with smoked haddock and quails' eggs (the rice took an unconscionable time to cook and possibly I slightly I overdid the cayenne), and a salad of little gem lettuce, white chicory and baby tomatoes dressed with salt, pepper, lime juice and avocado oil.