Still waiting for a Witty Title

One of those weeks in which I set out blithely hoping to get certain projects if not actually done, somewhere along the way.

HAH.

Honking great metaphor midweek: set out on what we expected to be a relatively uncomplicated journey, only to find that there was no interchange to the Piccadilly line as anticipated, as a substantial portion of it was closed. There had been no notices or announcements about this, WOT, TfL? and one doesn't normally anticipate this kind of thing in the middle of the week rather than at the weekend. So we had to reconfigure our journey on the hop, not ideal.

Other things were more in the nature of interruptions or distractions, but I had not had on my to-do list contacting our solicitors with a query about mortgages leasehold status of flat (context is downstairs neighbour contacted us as is proposing selling in near future and discovers that mortgage [OOOPS: the leasehold, which impacts on availability of mortgages, duh] should be extended, dares say this also applies to us). (Proputty-proputty-proputty....) Will say our persons of law were very expeditious about getting back on this, even if the one we actually dealt with in the summer was on hols.

This all rather fragmented the time I was hoping to devote to Things.

Okay, I am sounding out a huge INFAAAMY on these two:

Dept: price of everything, value of nothing: If British Library reading rooms become ‘co-working spaces’, what, exactly, is a national library for?: 'The plan to generate revenue from areas currently used by the public is causing bitter dispute, and raises fundamental questions'. Shocking issues of underfunding.

Further lack of attention to vital historic records, the ongoing depressing saga of the BBC Written Archives.

Okay, I'm glad to hear about this initiative? Wildlife Trusts hit £30m target to buy and rewild huge Northumberland estate: but is there the same kind of impulse towards libraries, archives, museum collections? (The Cinema Museum seems optimistic that its Crowdfunder will reach its target and save the museum.)

(Adding yet again that there is still a week to vote in the National Trust AGM.)

This is just weird Disbelief as Tasmanian Tiger head found under bed - I can't imagine what it can have been like under that bed if they hadn't noticed a taxidermied thylacine head lurking there, I really want more about how they found it rather than all the 'it was an extinct marsupial' type info.

For lo, I have been aware that literary scams are rife: Fake film deals and emails from top agents: who is behind the explosion in literary scams? -

- but in spite of the absolute torrent of dodgy journals very tangential, if that, to my scholarly interests and the equally spurious-looking conferences (even if they are in lovely spots) -

- I really did not anticipate that somebody - a 'Book Marketing and Specialist' - pulling one of these here scams might do so for, believe it or not, The Textbook. (As opposed to my work in rather different field....)

Makes a big deal that it was costing £££ on Amazon (which, I concede, some sellers are asking for, I suspect, the now oop hardback edition), that it had few ratings, no reviews, blah-blah.

(Some of us count the reach of our works in CITATIONS and I must say, it crops up quite a lot? So people must be accessing it somehow.)

Anyway, scamster-ladybot proposes that I should produce a Kindle edition, reprice the paperback, and go all out to market my book to The Youngs via TikTok, Instagram, etc, with buzzy little bitties about The Victorianz and so on.

I do not think there is any comprehension that, hello, this book is actually published by An Esteemed Academic Publisher, and okay, I do think the pb could cost a bit less but it is by no means the exorbitant price posited by scambot, furthermore an ebook exists though I surmise has to be accessed via some walled-garden app.

I did not really expect that my response that they should take all this up with Marketing Dept at Esteemed Academic Publisher would do any more than relieve my feelings, but, lo and behold, A Reply.

Actually, I don't think it's a reply or a response, it's a chasing email: 'I just wanted to follow up to see whether you would be interested in receiving a detailed proposal specifically tailored to your book.'

I am tempted to bop off a reply of 'I should cocoa' just to see what comes back (maybe the promised detailed proposal?)

What I read

Finished The Love Surgeon - not a terribly cheering story even if the awful things the guy was doing finally got ventilated and women did take cases to court and a certain amount of guardrails got put in place around actual informed consent and medical staff who were not docs getting their concerns properly heard and so on. But having read this only today The shocking rise of rib remodelling: ‘I wanted that hourglass shape’ mucking about with women's bodies Because They Can still a thing; and of course there was the Vaginal mesh implants scandal.

I therefore went on and finished Points of Departure, before moving on to Dorothy Richardson, Dawn's Left Hand (Pilgrimage, #10) (1931), for the reading group.

Following which I felt like something that would be a complete contrast, and some weeks ago RD Wingfield's A Killing Frost (2008) was a Kobo deal - years ago I read some of the earlier ones in this series, 'Jack' Frost is the antithesis of police sleuths like Dalgliesh or Lynley, being lower-class, crude, etc, and starting out as a Detective-Sergeant in a grotty provincial town teeming with grotty provincial crime. In this one he's risen to Detective-Inspector but at odds with the brass above him. Not sure I feel inspired to go back over the series (this was the last entry and published posthumously).

Then re-read of Alison Lurie, Words and Worlds: From Autobiography to Zippers (2019) - one of those volumes collecting assorted essays, obits of friends, etc. Delphinium Books do not seem great on copy-editing, though I was vastly entertained by the thought of Mel Brooks' (rather than Mel Gibson's) Passion of Christ.

Also read the latest Literary Review

On the go

MR Carey, Outlaw Planet (2025) which is a standalone in the Pandominion universe, but drawing on a swathe of the tropes of The Western, with clearly massive galaxy-spanning stuff having gone on in the backstory.

Still working on the books for essay review.

Up next

The Scribbler Annual #2 has arrived.

Also I guess I need to get stuck into Annie Ernaux, The Years (2008) for in-person reading group.

Also Yet Another book for review has arrived, and also an academic press is sending me a comp copy of a work Within My Sphere of Interest.

A seasonal roundup of recent scholarship on where the academic study of magic, witchcraft, etc, is at the moment: a minor flood of new retrospective pieces.

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This is not a happy story: The Cork women who helped build the State were left with almost nothing: New research uncovers the poverty, neglect and quiet desperation faced by Cork women who fought during Ireland’s revolutionary period:

The nuclear family was at the inviolate centre of a newly independent Ireland and there was no natural place for the one in four single women living within in.
In the Irish Free State of 1926, the number of unmarried women was 50% greater than in England and three times greater than in the US. That was partly due to a continuation of landholding and marriage patterns that emerged after the Famine, with one son inheriting the farm and one daughter a dowry.
While it is true to say that all female activists had difficulty persuading the pensions board that their service had been important, the lack of financial support was felt particularly acutely by single women.

More cheerful news: More than 1mn antiquities returned to countries of origin - though I'm raising my eyebrows a bit at this:

That number excludes the “Black Swan hoard” of Peruvian gold and silver coins, salvaged from a 19th-century Spanish shipwreck, which accounted for 595,000 of the total 1mn objects. The hoard was returned to Spain, Peru’s former colonial power, in 2012 by the US company which had claimed it.

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Inside the Friends of Friendless Churches:

In the past decade, 3,500 places of worship have closed around the UK, mostly in rural hinterlands such as Gumfreston. Morley’s five-person team has saved more than 70 churches, chapels and meeting houses since the charity was founded by Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, a Welsh journalist, scientific writer and Anglican churchman, in 1957.

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The Mass Observation archive is still going, and soliciting Observers

This week's bread: a loaf of Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour, turned out quite well.

Saturday breakfast rolls: the ones loosely based on James Beard's mother's raisin bread, 50/50% light spelt and einkorn flour, which turned out rather well.

Today's lunch: a sort-of curry of Belazu Mixed Beans (couldn't find a recipe that fitted ingredients I had, so improvised), purple and white sweetstem cauliflower curry from the recipe in Jack Santa Maria's Indian Vegetarian Cookery, sauteed Portobellini mushrooms from the recipe in Dharamjeet Singh's Indian Cookery, and rice with whole spices rather loosely based on a recipe in Madhur Jaffrey's Introduction to Indian Cooking (I just bung the spices in the water rather than sauteeing them, and then the rice, first).

Now I want somebody to write the actual history (now that Virago has been done, and the history of Silver Moon bookshop, is anyone doing Pandora Press or Sisterwrite on Upper Street?), given that websites can vanish, but this is good to be going on with: The Women’s Press (1977-2003): and to this global online, ongoing ARCHIVE. The Women's Press were perhaps rather more demotic in their selection of materials than Virago and had strong sff and crime lines, I am sure I am not the only one who still has their distinctive black and white striped spines adorning my shelves.

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While as long-time flaneuse of Fitzrovia I am saddened by what appears to be the demise of Pollock's Toy Museum at that historic location, though it seems to still be flourishing in Leadenhall Market, and, of all places, Croydon, Persephone Books are apparently moving in to those premises - having moved out of the metropls to Bath some years ago.

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Gay Print Culture: A History of Gay Magazines in Mexico, Canada, and the United States:

I became interested in the history of gay periodicals in 2015, as an M.A. student at the University of Toronto. My readings and coursework at that time focused mostly on the histories of gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ activism, and they sparked my curiosity about the role of print media in the formation of gay identities and communities.

And in Dept, il ne manque que ca, for this week, I was obliged to make a phone-call to my GP practice because there is significant delay on getting a repeat prescription going on. Their site not helpful. Apparently my designated pharmacy has submitted an order which is awaiting approval. It would help if this sort of thing was indicated.

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While in Dept, price of everything, value of nothing: Claude Monet's 'Iris' becomes most expensive artwork sold at auction in France, Sotheby's says

Yes, I am earwormed with Money and copy/pasting Monet to the words.

I observe that a) some of those links are dead and that b) horrors, I did not include the stonking version by the divine Smokey Robinson and the Miracles:

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Dept of, author has form for being cringe-makingly awful: He has clearly done lots of research, but has chosen to put it at the service of creating a Wilde who is fatally less interesting and moving than the original.

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Dept of, What, ONLY ONE: that thing (can't find it online, was in today's Guardian Life and Arts section about The Book That Changed Your Life. Let me sit down and start working on a list....