S. Worthen | Weblog

Are they going to eat me alive?’: trail runners become prey in newest form of hunting:

Would you like to be chased by a pack of hounds? It’s a question often put to highlight the cruelty of hunting, because the answer would seem to be no. Or so you would think.
Yet increasing numbers of people are volunteering to be chased across the countryside by baying bloodhounds in what could soon be the only legal way to hunt with dogs in England and Wales, rather than pursuing animals or their scents.

Maybe this would have struck differently - jolly countryside japes? - if this had not been the same week in which there was

a) a review of the new remake of The Running Man:

Ben signs up for a top-rated reality TV show called The Running Man; he has to go on the run across the US, hunted by professional killers, and if he can survive for 30 days, he gets a billion dollars. But all too late, he realises that these shark-like fascist TV execs aren’t going to play fair.

b) this creep-making report: Italy investigates claims of tourists paying to shoot civilians in Bosnia in 1990s:

[J]ournalist and novelist Ezio Gavazzeni, who describes a "manhunt" by "very wealthy people" with a passion for weapons who "paid to be able to kill defenceless civilians" from Serb positions in the hills around Sarajevo.
Different rates were charged to kill men, women or children, according to some reports.

Adults can draw what they see, the real thing, in their pictures. Children, though, draw the “idea” of what appears in their heads. [p. 82]

Translated from the Japanese by Jim Rion, this short illustrated novel seems at first to be three tenuously-connected novellas. The first begins with a blog on which a man posts some pictures drawn by his wife, who died in childbirth. Each picture has a number... The second story is about a small boy who draws a picture of the apartment block where he lives, and scribbles out the windows of his home. And the third pertains to a grisly unsolved murder mystery, and the implications of the sketch found with the corpse. Gradually, it becomes clear that these are all the same story, or at least all revolve around the same individual.

Last week's bread actually held out pretty well, though was rather dry by the end, however, that meant there was enough left to make a frittata with pepperoni for Friday night supper.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, which for an experiment I tried making with Marriage's Golden Wholegrain, fairly pleasant but I think nicer with strong white.

Today's lunch: bozbash, with Romano peppers, aubergine, okra, baby courgettes, fresh coriander, crushed 5-pepper blend, dried basil, and finished with tayberry vinegar. Was going to serve couscous with this but I was not impressed by the way this turned out given the instructions on the packet. Not really necessary, anyway.

The Spanish government has granted citizenship to 170 descendants of volunteers in the International Brigades in recognition of their fight against fascism.

The daughter of a Manchester man who volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War has reflected on his "incredible feat of solidarity" as her family is set to become Spanish citizens.

‘We don’t even know all of what we have.’ Howard fights to preserve Black newspapers.

“We don’t even know all of what we have,” Mr. Nightingale marvels.
The basement is a trove of artifacts, including old editions of Black-owned newspapers that tell the life of Black Americans during the 19th and 20th centuries. Articles cover slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights era. The archive project, which is part of the university’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, is bringing to life the faces of yesterday by merging them with the digital world of today. This way, the hope is, they won’t be lost ever again.

Disentangling obscured women: One Artist – ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ – Dismembered To Create Two: or The Importance Of Biography:

Googling ‘Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd’ led me to the ArtUK page for ‘Mary Katharine [sic] Constance Lloyd’, which included birth and death dates and a short biography[i]. It was then only the work of a moment to discover on Ancestry that the woman with the given dates was not a Mary Katherine Constance Lloyd but a Katharine Constance Lloyd. How peculiar, I thought, and looked again at the ArtUK page. It then seemed obvious that the paintings displayed were unlikely to all be by the same hand. Four, including the one described by Birrell in the chapter on ‘Mary’, might be classed as ‘impressionist’, while the others were formal portraits of worthy 20th-century gentlemen, attired in various robes of office.
A little more online research established that there was, indeed, another artist with a similar name, Mary Constance Lloyd, and that a succession of art reference works had carelessly blended their two lives together – to create ’Mary Katharine Constance Lloyd’. I suppose it is a measure of how little importance is attached to the lives of such women artists that in 50 years no author had bothered to research either subject ab initio – but, when compiling a new biographical dictionary or making a footnote reference, had merely copied the – incorrect – information.

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We are always up for some toad-related phenomena around here: Newly identified species of Tanzanian tree toad leapfrog the tadpole stage and give birth to toadlets. How about that.

I don't think we actually have to claim she invented science fiction, because to the best of my recollection and without going and looking it up, various people in the C17th were doing similar things. Also, honestly, why can we not claim women among the Great Eccentrics of History? What we like about Margaret Cavendish is that she appears to have heartily embraced this identity rather than having it plonked upon her by a judgemental world: The Duchess Who Invented Science Fiction.

Though I am slightly muttering under my breath about the women of the time who were also Doing Science and Being Intellectual in a rather less flamboyant fashion e.g. Lady Ranelagh, and indeed women in the Evelyn circle....

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Quiet persistence and a lucky combination of first husband dying after a few years of marriage and sympathetic second husband (see also Mrs Delany): Mary Somerville – the first scientist - she taught Ada Lovelace, plus she lived to be 92. (You know, I am sorry for those women in science who died tragically young, but we hear a lot less about the ones like Dorothy Hodgkin who had a long and spectacularly effective career in crystallography while suffering from rheumatoid arthritis and actually GOT THE NOBEL. I also mark her up for persistence in humanitarian concerns.)

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Okay, Amy Levy did die, by her own hand, distressingly young: but her personal archive, up till now in private hands, has now been acquired by the University of Cambridge Library: The archive of enigmatic 19th-century writer Amy Levy has a new home at Cambridge University Library

Noted as of interest a day or so ago, ‘I don’t want anyone to suffer like I did’: the intersex campaigners fighting to limit surgery on children - am a bit gloomed to think that this is Still An Issue because I look back and surely this was brought to wider attention, oh, at least twenty or years ago?

Ah. A little delving shows me that the person I remember as doing pioneering research on the subject, published around the late 90s, and also involved in intersex activism, has become A Figure of Controversy and I think we probably do not mention them.

But quite coincidentally this emerged today: who, according to work done by A Very Reputable Scientist sequencing DNA which does appear to be his, had a Disorder of Sexual Development (as intersex conditions are sometimes termed)? Did Hitler really have a ‘micropenis’? The dubious documentary analysing the dictator’s DNA.

Here is a thoughtful and nuanced piece by an actual scientist taking issue with some of the more tabloidy accounts A slightly different take on the news that Hitler’s DNA reveals some genetic anomalies. The most interesting thing to me is that history has a profound capability for irony.

That Hitler himself had a condition that was discovered and named by a Jewish man who also held some responsibility for the scientifically misguided murderous policies of the Nazis is at least a reflection that history is often imbued with a sense of complex and confusing irony.

Even in Deptford, you can’t carry bodies far in daylight... [loc. 1402]

In which William Shakespeare is suspected of the murder of Christopher Marlowe, and makes common cause with Marlowe's sister Ann (formerly Will's lover) to find out who really killed Marlowe, and why. Well-researched, witty historical whodunnit with a credible denouement and some excellent dialogue (Jenkin is an award-winning scriptwriter) and lots of period detail. Also, set in my neck of the woods...

The premise sounded excellent, but didn't quite ring true for me.( Read more... )

What I read

Well, most of the time it was One Clear Call, which had (as had preceding volumes) a certain amount of resonance with contemporary events.

Read The Scribbler Annual no 1, which was a change of pace.

On the go

Dipped a bit more into Some Men in London, 1960-1967.

Started the final book in my review pile, which is pretty good though also raises, I think, some interesting points for discussion. (And as a rather tangential thought, during the heyday of lesbian murder mysteries from feminist presses, were there any set in wymmynz communes?)

Have also started a re-read of The Golden Notebook - given how long it is since I last read it, so much seems very familiar.

Up next

Still haven't got to the latest Literary Review. Otherwise, dunno.

... it had been said -- it had been believed -- that much of the old, deep magic of Alinor before the coming of the Empire was gone.
The Fall of the Empire had made it clear that that magic was only quiescent... [Plum Duff, loc. 126]

Reread, because (as per the final line of my February 2023 review of Plum Duff) the seventh book in the series really is due soon... I note that on first reading, I found this wintry novel, full of solstice cheer and ancient traditions and the threat of the Dark, less enjoyable than the 'cosier, more mannerist' novels that preceded it. I do think it feels as though the scope of the story is expanding rapidly:  but given the miracles and wonders of the previous pair of novels, that makes more sense to me this time around.( Read more... )