stillsostrange

What I read

Finished Queer Cambridge and the author is very aware that it is a microhistory of a very particular group of gay (if one can define them thus over the several generations in question) men in a very specific place, who had a considerable amount of privilege and protection, even if that was sometimes just 'we do not discuss these matters' and look away. And that not all of them were particularly nice (some of them sound horrid) and also the awareness of how being a lovely young bloke of the disposition could accrue valuable patronage (in a way that has never been open to women) - this was so much so with Dadie Rylands. Of interest, well-done, pretty well-researched but I picked up on what I thought was skipping over something I Haz Knowinz about, and which when I went back and checked my notes, yes, there WAS a connection, hah.

Then on to Rachel Ferguson, Alas, Poor Lady (1937), which is part of that cycle of novels of that period of The Horrors of the Victorian Ladies Who Failed To Marry and the lurking fate of being a Distressed Gentlewoman. It's pretty much downhill all the way - the parents are pretty hopeless in both preparing their daughters for life and actually providing for them, and then there is all the Burden of Historical Events. Ferguson is no Delafield, alas, though on the other hand this lacked the sheer excruciation of Consequences or Thank Heaven Fasting I suppose.

On the go

Some while ago somebody somewhere was mentioning the novels of Susan Howatch and I can't remember if they were specifically name-checking The Wheel of Fortune, but anyway, brought that to my mind as the one which is doing a story based on the late Plantagenets/rise of the House of Lancaster so I picked up the ebook.

This was what had me thinking of the Starkadders. In fact looking back though it is years since I read any of her books - it's a while since I even read the more recent spiritual-angst + sex ones - they tended to involve intricate and lurid family dynamics based on some historical avatar + family estate. Come on down, Flora Poste!

(Also, book for review that I have been longing to get to for months while I did the interminable essay review.)

Up next

Gosh, that's long, though. However, still have several birthday books, plus, latest Literary Review.

Maybe reading is having a moment with people going on about it in various places??

Anyway I was beswozzled, bothered and quite boggled to read somewhere - and seem to have failed to have retained a link anywhere - somebody saying they were getting back into reading, and what they found actually helped was taking the time to look up New Words They Had Not Come Across Before.

Which is the sort of thing that I remember we were given as homework once, and you know, I was hard put to it to find words in the chapters of the relevant set text that I did not know already or could work out from context what they meant or fair approximation.

I can't imagine anything more dreary, but hey, diff'rent strokes for diffr'ent folks, I am no better and neither are you, etc etc etc.

On the other hand I think I can quite get behind this, which popped up on bluesky today:

What you read is less important than whether you ever spend time thinking about what you've read.

And on reading and also writing and not always doing big showing: Say it, don't show it: A contrarian take on exposition:

almost as if the reader is being enlisted as a collaborator, using their own imagination to fill in details that are merely implied in the words of the book.

Doesn't appear to be online yet, but apparently, according to piece in Guardian Saturday, there is this horrid new trend for people to outsource chatting up to chatbots - I immediately thought CyberCyrano, because there were not a few instances when after meeting up with the silver-tongued smoothie who had been romancing them, what was discovered was a tongue-tied ditherer.

Like, I'm pretty sure there used to be guides to useful lines of chat, but this is taking it to a new level, where at points it seemed like you had chatbots pitching their woo to one another....

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Also o tempora, though I wonder whether this is in fact a new pattern at all: report on crime in London - apparently crime central is actually Knightsbridge, at least for luxury watch, handbag and jewellery theft. Because that's where they are.

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But good news about tortoises: Baby giant tortoises thrive in Seychelles after first successful artificial incubation.

Are we entirely surprised: A woman’s place was not in the home: New book challenges assumptions about women’s work in early modern history:

Far from being the unpaid homemakers and housewives of traditional historical record, women contributed to all the most important areas of the economy, such as agriculture, commerce, and care.
More than half of the work done by women in the period between the 16th and 18th centuries took place outside of the home, and around half of all housework and three-quarters of care work was conducted professionally for other households.

I posted this in a comment over at agonyaunt apropos of the woman who thinks her husband is too laid back (she sounds too tightly wound): ‘Rawdogging’ marathons: has gen Z discovered the secret to reclaiming our focus?:

Specifically, it means sitting still and staring into space for an extended period. Most importantly, without your phone.... It sounds as if the TikTok generation has somehow invented meditation. That’s one criticism levelled at rawdogging, but young people are battling monumental levels of distraction these days: while older generations had to learn to tolerate boredom, they must learn to cultivate it.

Back in the day late 70s/beginning of the 80s I encountered a person or two for whom meditation was just that, a dive into an escape from all the pressing troubles of their existing life (rather than dealing with those).

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Rather different from the early modern images of witchcraft and witches that the popular mind tries to impose on The Middle Ages: Medieval witch stories, and a literary grandmother for the Wife of Bath.

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Country diary: The unlikely success of wildlife in lead country: 'Bonsall, Derbyshire: It was, in fact, the poison in the ground that prevented this patch from becoming cattle country – then nature took care of itself'

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This is fascinating: Remembering Quintard Taylor: Historian of the Black West and beyond

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Poisoning Crimes and the ‘Mushroom Murderer’: Patterns and Precedents (Cassie Watson is one of the authors)

The fact that poisoning may not initially be suspected is yet another unique feature of this method of killing, and so proof of a criminal offence has often rested upon circumstantial evidence. The nineteenth-century development of forensic toxicology brought more cases to light and led to more convictions, but reliable toxicological and pathological evidence concerning the cause of illness and death is not the first but the second stage in a successful prosecution. There must be some formal suspicion raised first, to lead to a medico-legal investigation. Criminals might try to evade prosecution through claims of accidental poisoning, or may not be detected at all if symptoms are misattributed to other conditions.

I see estimates differ: I was working from the Sturgeon's Law that '90% of anything is crap' -

- whereas Ridley Scott is prepared to claim that '60% of films made today are “shit”, and of the remaining 40%, “25% … is not bad, and 10% is pretty good, and the top 5% is great”. and that this is pretty much so for the history of the movies over time (a fairly nuanced judgement I suppose) (though we should probably factor in the extent to which film, especially from the nitrate era, was a very frangible medium and there is a survival issue....)

From the Wikipedia article on Sturgeon's Law, some confirming opinions by other thinkerz:

'Nine-tenths of existing books are nonsense, and the clever books are the refutation of that nonsense' (Disraeli, 1870)

'Four-fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake. (Kipling, 1890)

'In much more than nine cases out of ten the only objectively truthful criticism would be "This book is worthless...'(Wot a grump George Orwell was, eh, 1946)

A 2009 paper in The Lancet estimated that over 85% of health and medical research is wasted.

(The trouble is you cannot tell in advance what is going to be, can you.)

On reflection I rather like Scott's 'not bad - pretty good - great' because one can, in fact, get enjoyment out of those levels.