It's Always More Complicated

In fact, this guy seems really self-aware about the dangers of falling into the 'there's no knowledge but I knows it' just because he's got the Nobel for A Particular Thing:

A big problem is that people think you have something sensible to say about nearly everything. Over time it can become dangerous, as you start to believe that perhaps you do know about nearly everything. This is a disease I have called “Nobelitis”, which I sincerely hope I have managed to avoid, largely because of the efforts of my family, friends and colleagues in keeping me in order.

I don't know if anybody else was following that thing over on the site formerly known as Twitter where somebody posted shot of a letter to the press by somebody whose elite education had not led him to know better, saying that he couldn't really deal with anyone who had not, like him, been to Eton.

I could not trace that quotation I had in the back of my mind about the chap who had been Head of School at Eton thinking the rest of life was downhill from that, but I found in my current reading, biography of mathematican/economist/philosopher Frank Ramsey (intersects with So Many of My Interwar People), his comment, on leaving Winchester (in 1919, already a socialist, go him):

The reason people say this is the happiest time of one's life is simply that it is true for most most people, for e.g. F- will never again possess despotic power as he does now. He can be witness judge and executioner all in one: he can abuse juniors as he will never again be able to abuse people... He can go about imagining he is upholding the foundations of the College and talk rot about prefectorial dignity and people being above themselves.

And on people who become delusional, I am not yet sure if I should be worried that I am being followed on bluesky by somebody with a name very similar to somebody no historian in my area would wish to be followed by or remotely in the vicinity of, or whether this is somebody with an unfortunately similar name (they do appear to be as far as I can tell in Australia or NZ and concerned about things like current Indigenous questions).

Has menstrual activism lost sight of the bigger picture? Thought this was interesting about wanting to have one -shot magic-bullety simple solutions to A More Complicated problem, and that while one deosn't want to downplay the value of providing the facilities for menstrual management, yes, the bigger issue of continuing stigma is the elephant in the room. Also on the importance of matching your solution to people's situations (e.g. badly thought-through distribution of menstrual cups without the necessary backup for sterilisation etc).

This resonated for me with this review of Alison Heller, Fistula Politics: Birthing Injuries and the Quest for Continence in Niger, which suggests more complex narratives, and that solutions are more systemic than quick fix, attractive though those seem. I was struck by this 'Nigérien cultural ideals around childbirth, which expect women to labor quietly and without complaint, oftentimes for days', which surely feeds in to that pernicious narrative about 'natural' African women who unlike 'civilised' Western women give birth 'without making a fuss'. Whereas it's culturally constructed.

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Isaac Baker Brown Memorial Ignominy Award for overweening surgical arrogance around the female organs: Bristol surgeon ‘harmed’ 203 women with unnecessary operations: Anthony Dixon performed pelvic floor surgery instead of offering less invasive alternative treatments. (I am not sure why 'harmed' is in quotation marks there.) At least he has been struck off by the General Medical Council - because sometimes one has felt that actually being incompetent at their job was the least of considerations in play with the GMC.

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And further on male arrogance, combined with national stereotypes, yet another instance of 'perhaps that narrative of les Francais, so very cool and sorted about l'amour, has been covering up some seriously dodgy stuff' emerges: The Fall of the ‘Sun King’ of French TV, and the Myth of Seduction: Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, known as a great seducer, has been accused by more than 20 women of rape, sexual assault and harassment in France’s belated #MeToo reckoning.

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And something rather sweeter: Mirabelle, Valentine and Serenade: the forgotten teen romance comics that defined an era: One historian is on a mission to track down the titles that stirred the hearts of a generation of British girls:

It was harder to find old issues of the romantic comics than more traditional titles from the era, which may have been to do with the way they were treated by their readers. Boys might have been more likely to collect their comics, while girls’ titles were perhaps seen as disposable ephemera to be got rid of after reading.

However, I'm just slightly raising my eyebrows that a bloke comics historian is writing on them, though at least his editor 'did a PhD in girls' comics'. Feel this could really do with input from e.g. Carol Dyhouse.

Some things just keep on giving.

Who, in an interview which is supposed to be about the books on their bookshelves

- which, you know, one would take to be about the books one is reading/has read/intends some day to read -

starts showing off the multilingual translations of their own books?

Okay, I have a brag shelf - actually, I have two, one at home and one at work - not that they include any translations except the articles that were being published in non-English publications anyway - but if someone asked me about the books on my shelves (the floor, the coffee table, the settee, etc etc etc), I sincerely hope I would start raving about my amazing collection of the works of my beloved Dame Rebecca and how I have a complete set of Antonia Forests but woe, woe, some are disintegrating Puffin editions.

Or my collection of Historically Significant Works on Sex gleaned from the remoter corners, bottom shelves, top shelves, etc of secondhand bookshops over the years.

Or obscure but deserve to be known better works of sff by women gathered over the decades.

I.e. something that would say something about me that wasn't 'Me! Me!! Meee!!!'

(Am somehow thinking of dear Oscar's comment on the rage of Caliban on not seeing his face in a mirror.)

Yes, it's the detailed deconstruction of the Freeman-Mead controversy, which I always feel Freeman basically cheated on in the first place by only starting it once Margaret Mead was safely dead. This book does nothing to change my feelings that Freeman's case was always a bit dodgy (different informants, different periods, different genders, and doubtless different questions asked - of course they were not going to have identical findings, but honestly, is it really the habit of experienced anthropologists to take as gospel what their male informants tell them a) about the virtuousness of their unmarried sisters and b) about their own sexual exploits? and assume that these automatically trump what girls themselves told someone else decades previously?).

Shankman reveals just how dodgy (and bizarrely obsessive, since he published two books about it) Freeman's case was. I didn't realise that his entire case was about tearing down only Coming of Age in Samoa, which Mead deliberately wrote as a popular account of her Samoa fieldwork (very much her anthropological apprenticeship), on which she also published a ethnographic field report which one gathers is as dry and professional as anyone might wish, and which he ignored. Also totally leaving out all her other, subsequent, work on different cultures, in museum anthropology, in syntheses, etc.

This book is not uncritically hagiographical about Mead and Coming of Age in Samoa, but on the whole, she comes out of this a great deal better than Freeman, including being open to listening to views she didn't agree with and even advocating for their hearing.

Vast swathes of Mead's career were not all Freeman left out in his critique. Shankman's micro-readings and comparisons indicate: selective quotation, misinterpretation of what he does quote, leaving out anything that might contradict his picture, and not giving anyone access to his sources, such as an interview with a very elderly Samoan woman who had been one of Mead's informants. I.e. it all looked very scholarly, and he made a big thing of how many sources he had consulted and FACTS he had ascertained, but it had shot off at some fairly extreme angle from the actual processes of academic argument and debate. For someone who made a big deal of how SCIENTIFIC he was, Freeman does seem to have rather ignored Popper's notions about falsifiability, in spite of frequently name-checking him.

It is clear that, at the very least, Freeman was a troubled man with a lot of problems. During his fieldwork in Sarawak there was some kind of weird episode involving Tom Harrisson, and in later years he was given to writing long letters to people who disagreed with him, including threats to destroy their careers in the discipline.

What he did vis-a-vis Mead, as Shankman states, was to create a good story which could be presented in a way that was attractive to the media (controversy!) even though right from the get-go fellow-anthropologists were more hesitant to accept Freeman's conclusions, or downright critical. His line intersected with concerns of the period in which he published his attack on Mead, and although it doesn't seem that there was actually a lot of difference between Mead's and Freeman's positions on the interactions of nature and culture, he presented her as a simplistic cultural determinist and made his position very attractive to biological determinism, which was having a serious resurgence at the time.

Shankman, whose area is also Samoa, is additionally interesting on changes in Samoan society between the time when Mead was working and when Freeman was, and in particular, examines the response of Samoans themselves to both anthropologists.

This is a very rich book - including Shankman's personal encounters with both Mead and Freeman, though as a junior colleage, indeed, his first meeting with Mead was as an undergraduate, in both cases. It's illuminating about that difference between how work is regarded by people in the field and non-experts (about which I have some striking examples myself that I could give, and have on occasion) and how certain works (both Mead's and Freeman's) became popular in specific historical contexts, and in particular the role of the media and being media-savvy.

Though on that point, there is an amusing bit of meta of which Shankman is obviously not aware in his citation of some contentions on sexuality in the Jazz Age from The Technology of Orgasm... which also has its moments of wild segues from possibility > likelihood > certainty in constructing its case.

I also wonder whether Shankman is possibly overlooking the attractions of attacks on a Powerful (and indeed sexy) Mother Figure and the feeding of misogynistic attitudes into the furore and the proliferation of the meme of Mead Wuz RONG.

Hey folks! It's Germaine's annual deviation into sense! She takes something like a dugong to thwap Stephen Bayley's loathsome production, an expensive coffee table book called Woman as Design:

Women are no likelier than any other animal to have been designed, but Bayley insists. "The female body is a masterpiece of design: an eternal natural classic as well as an inexhaustible source book of inspirational form and detail." Needless to say, menstruation, that stunning triumph of design, is nowhere mentioned in his book. He steers clear of childbirth, too. Bayley's examples of consummate womanhood are all the usual suspects, from the Mona Lisa to Kate Moss, women whose images are so familiar that only photo agencies can have wanted to see them replicated yet again.

When the verbiage is shaken down, we discover that for Bayley the imaginary brief is to design a fuckable thing. That is why defecation and urination (not to mention menstruation) happen in a dinky little out-of-the-way nook, so that they don't need to be revealed until Bayley and his ilk are beyond being revolted. How clever. Then there are the breasts, page after weary page of fetishised breasts. All but a very few of them are high, hemispherical, pale-nippled and – except for those on Leni Riefenstahl's pubescent Maasai girl, described by the caption writers as "this African tribal figure" – teutonic. A lot of them are upside down.

But otherwise, go Germaine!!

Also, go Charlie Brooker, who takes a well-pickled shark to Damian Hirst:

Overvalued, irksome, conceited, pudge-faced, balding, boring, awful celebrity art nob Damien Hirst has apparently become embroiled in a ludicrous feud with a 19-year-old graffiti artist called Cartrain. Hostilities erupted in 2008, when Cartrain created a sarcastic collage that included an image of Hirst's stupid bling-encrusted skull "artwork" (the one that reportedly sold for £50m at auction, although that figure is disputed by virtually anyone who still retains some degree of faith in humankind).

When Cartrain's humorous collages were put up for sale online, Hirst reportedly complained to the Design and Artists Copyright Society. The website selling Cartrain's works buckled under legal pressure and surrendered the collages, along with an apology.
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Obviously, this involved some chutzpah on Hirst's part, when you consider how much of his own output involves the witless appropriation of pre-existing material.
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But the Hirst-Cartrain battle resumed in July this year, when the latter strolled into Tate Britain and allegedly removed a box of pencils from Hirst's art installation "Pharmacy". Cartrain then created a mock ransom note, demanding the return of his collages in exchange for the pencils. If the artworks weren't given back, then the pencils would be "sharpened".

All rather daft and annoying. But a few weeks ago, Cartrain was arrested by Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad and told that the pencils had been valued at £500,000.
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It was an absurd tantrum over intellectual property rights, the big guy versus the little guy

I also giggled and went 'You go girl' to Decca Aikenhead, because although my interest in Zac Goldsmith is somewhere in the negative numbers, I loved this:

Much has been written about his beauty, but it's still a shock to see in real life – the sort of physical perfection which makes all those clichés about gilded youth suddenly make sense, with his sculpted cheekbones, bee stung lips, honied voice and tall, liquid grace. When he talks, he tends to duck his head and glance upwards, like Princess Diana – a mannerism simultaneously coy and commanding.

Also bless for this guy, Luol Deng: Britain's secret superstar, 'a former Sudanese refugee from south London who has played at the peak of American basketball for the past five years':

And yet it was in Britain, in a humdrum corner of the Midlands, that Deng chose to do his most personal motivational work this summer. At his annual week-long camp, kids arrived from London, Birmingham, Sheffield, Manchester and Newcastle to learn from a sportsman they all revere.

Spotted in the wild today, Virago reissue of Stella Gibbons' delightful Nightingale Wood. Unlike Cold Comfort Farm, but charming nonetheless. (The intro by Sophie Dahl looked extremely slight, however.)

[T]his enchanting selection of writing from books by seven Victorian female horticulturists will both nourish your soul and tell you what to do about geranium droop: this is in the audiobooks roundup, but presumably is also available in print form.

Two new books on the menopause. Is Going Through The Change the new hot thing?

Another daft hook for a travel book.

Wow, Dept of Nifty Damn-with-Faint-Praise: Tom Holland on Frank McLynn's new big fat book on Marcus Aurelius:

The general reader, whose interest may have been piqued by a reading of the Meditations or a viewing of Gladiator, is likely to find much of it intimidatingly dry, for when discussing the social and economic background to Marcus's reign, McLynn is much given to the lengthy rehearsal of lists. Conversely, specialists may well find many of its conclusions decidedly eccentric; McLynn is nothing if not aggressively opinionated. Yet with just a bit of cutting, and just a little less self-indulgence, this would be a most enjoyable and valuable book.

And further on leaders and power: To the Ancient Greeks, hubris was an act of arrogance and presumption that offended the gods. For Lord Owen, leader of the ill-fated SDP in the 1980s, and himself accused of overweening pride during those turbulent times, it is a medical disorder that can turn prime ministers and presidents into despots.

Ben Goldacre suggests that media reporting of suicides may be TMI.

And review of interesting-sounding novel about scientific fraud, or is it?

Women politicians and personal sartorial style -even the French find this a hard line to negotiate, with bonus comments on the way they are used to put down British women in politically powerful positions.

The BNP - still totally failing Cluefulness 101. Wot next, we ask ourselves, mindful of their recent Vera Lynn debacle - the Red Choir does The Internationale?

Oh, I wish that The Guardian put its Saturday 'Disturbing Animal Picture of the Week' in its online version. Last week the spineless hedgehog (waaaaah), this week, the naked mole-rat (who so ought to be called Little Willy, yes, sometimes I am 13).

Thinking about anonymity, internet personas, social capital, different spaces etc (following furore on whether people who use pseudonyms online as opposed to real names or own initials are sneaky cowards).

I have an online presence (via listservs, website, etc) in what is essentially my historian/archivist capacity, with some divagation into the world of sff.

However, a lot of that relates to my public professional life and I think of LJ as a different, informal, social space, which is not the library or the seminar room, and I don't necessarily want people stalking me following me from those spaces into my front room or even into the pub in which I'm socialising with friends. On the other hand, I don't keep that part of my life a dead secret from my LJ world and pretend I'm someone entirely different. (Except for the hedgehog thing.)

As far as names go: mine is fairly common and there are least two academics in fields not particularly distant from my own who have the same one, with the same spelling and all, and both possibly occasionally get irritated at people who think that they're the one who does syphilis, masturbation, etc, in historical context.

So even if I used my own name it wouldn't necessarily indicate anything about who I was: and: what does a name mean, anyway? I have been to academic conferences in my area when people have said 'So you're - -!!', but there are huge swathes of spaces even within the general disciplinary field where I don't suppose my name is even recognised, let alone carries any particular weight.

The social/cultural/intellectual capital accrued to a persona in one space isn't transferable to other spaces (this is a bit like writers' Russian royalties in roubles under the USSR, which they had to go there to spend). You have to accrue that capital within each particular space, though it can help to have friends or at least acquaintances who are already there (though that can also work the other way...) You can't go around saying 'Don't You Know Who I Am?' all over the place without people coming back and saying 'Who are you?' - and even if they do know Who You Are, what they may know is 'So Up Themselves They Can See Their Tonsils From Below'.

Most people aren't exactly the same person in all conceivable interactions: we all have personas (I will invoke That Really Helpful Archivist Helping Clueless Enquirer, vs Snarky Archivist Bitching To Colleagues). They are not lies, they are different expressions in different circumstances.

And re the sub-furore of whether having personal negative issues with other parties (ever) means that one should recuse oneself of any intervention in a matter at all.

Okay, there are cases when there might be personal grudges being worked off: but there are also cases in which a personal history of problems can be seen to fit into a larger pattern of bad behaviour.

A couple of cases of my own are of a book I reviewed and a thesis I examined, in which my amour propre was significantly wounded by the failure to acknowledge or cite my work in ways I thought appropriate. However, in the case of the book this was clearly part of the general strategy of claiming a far greater originality than was actually the case by occluding a significant number of earlier contributions to the field which it was, however, clear were known to the author; and in the case of the thesis was part of a wider failure to engage with a fairly substantial amount of existing secondary literature. (Though I suppose I would say that, wouldn't I?)

Sometimes one's own experience is part of the evidence.

*W H Auden, The Orators (1932), dedication to Stephen Spender

Some recent snippety things:

Thrusting their arms skywards and chanting Orphic hymns, Greek pagans yesterday made a comeback at the Acropolis:

Ignoring a sudden rainstorm and irate officials, white-clad worshippers gathered before Greece's most sacred site and invoked Athena, the goddess of wisdom, to protect sculptures taken from the temples to the new museum. It was the first time in nearly 2,000 years that pagans had held a religious ceremony on the site.

"Neither the Romans nor the Ottomans or any other occupational force ever took anything from this holy site," said Yannis Kontopidis, one of the high priests who officiated over the affair.

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A woman believed to be the last surviving female veteran of the first world war has died.... Gladys Powers died aged 109 in British Columbia, Canada, on August 14. Still 3 WWI veterans among us, apparently.

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Pot reviews kettle: Toby Litt on Richard Price's Lush Life: 'the reason I found Lush Life so difficult to keep going with is that it is monumentally conceited'. Hmmmmmmmm. Caliban seeing his face in the mirror?

Kathryn Flett in the TV reviews in today's Observer remarks:

Finally, a word in the Dawkins shell-like for future TV appearances: intellectual arrogance is a terribly unattractive quality in a man, particularly one allegedly clever enough to know better.

Am now trying to work out where the line falls between an attractive confidence in one's own opinions, and opinionated arrogance that those are the only opinions that are worth holding.

From Madonna to Kylie, from Ricky Gervais to Paul McCartney, A-list actors, comics and singers are reinventing themselves as children's authors. And are usually absolute crap. I also wonder, about the argument that they decide as they make up bedtime stories for their sproglings, that they are yay good at this and ought to publish - to what extent are they actually unconsciously plagiarising tales told to them or read in their own infancy? I mentioned, in the good recent discussion over in sartorias's lj about kidzlit in which some of these points (e.g. preachy, preachy, preachy, not a good USP) got ventilated, the 'From the Pulpit' leading article in the most recent Literary Review (this has got a bit more sophisto with its website, but this particular item isn't online) by Amanda Craig (children's books reviewer for The Times) on the assumption, both by assorted celebs and authors known for their adult lit, that anyone can write kiddylit. As she points out a) it ain't that easy, you know and b) you are going up against Giants of the genre who are still being republished and read after 100 years or so. (Come back when you can write or draw as well as Beatrix Potter.)

She was a glamorous aristocrat; he was the proudly working-class leader of the fledgling Labour party. And I can't help wondering whether, if they had actually married, someone else might have been the first Labour PM, who that might have been, and whether it would have been a good or bad thing.

A controversial study in 2000 recommended caesareans for breech births. But is the move to surgical intervention really best for mothers? Makes point I have heard before, that if people don't see and learn to cope with the less common things that may happen in obstetrics, they panic when faced with them and reach for the scalpel.