malka

What I read

Finished the short stories in The Cost of Lunch - very good, I thought, as someone who at some point rather ghosted on Piercy's novels.

PD James, The Murder Room (2003) - still can't remember if I'd previously read this one. There was a character appeared early on whom I recognised, but I think it may have been because he cropped up as an unlikely mate of Dalgleish (but is not Dalgleish entirely unlikely all round?) in one of the others. There was a lot of unlikely/improbable in this, not to mention the 'nature-turned-sour-in-'er-veins' element. Query: does the late PD approach more and more to the late other James?

Jordan Hawk, Widdershins (2012). Hawk is someone whose works one tends to get recommended if one has purchased anything by e.g. KJ Charles or Cat Sebastian, and this was having an offer. Unfortunately I found the style clunky and the matter derivative even if I managed to force myself to finish it. And on 'derivative': feisty lady Egyptologists, just saying. I can see that it was in this case plot-relevant that somebody had recently excavated a mummy, but, still.

Margery Sharp, The Gipsy in the Parlour (1953). Now, that is how you do nuanced and complicated Strong Women Characters, whether that means a) vivid or b) who act upon the plot rather than adorn it or have it act upon them. But without being pistol-toting mommas.

On the go

Margery Sharp, The Innocents (1972).

Still on the go, still rather irritating me, The Fraternity of the Estranged. Using really old works on The Victorians for a Bit of Background, and not really thinking about Wider Context (still, just the bit I was reading today made me think, whoah, were they thinking they had a Bradlaugh and Besant moment on their hands? - even if they were wrong. Useful for my own purposes!). Also, embrace the power of 'and'! and multiple reasons for Doing A Thing.

Up next

Dunno.

Lately brought to my attention by way of a scholarly mailing list: A Singular Aspect of Plausibility: The Trajectory of a Victorian Serial Con Artist.

Thia adduces a contemporary account which indicates that it had been quite possible to trace the intricacies of the you-could-not-make-it-up career of

the great and ingenious humbug, Alexander Charles Tucker, alias Marco Emile de St. Hilaire, alias Marquise [sic] de St. Hilaire, alias Alessandro Vittalinian Borromeo M. D., M. A., "one of the elect Counts of the Holy Roman Empire in the Pontifical degree," heir apparent to the Duc de Garibaldi (!), lecturer on mesmerism, revolutionary orator, and candidate for the town council of Bradford.

Like some squalid reptile, wherever he crawled he left his poisonous slime behind him -- a train of misery and suffering that followed him, and more or less affected every one with whom he came in contact.

Bread during the week: a loaf of Shipton Mill 3 Malts and Sunflower Seed Organic Brown Flour.

Saturday breakfast rolls: brown grated apple with mixed spice.

Today's lunch: savoury clafoutis, with chopped red and yellow bell peppers, aubergine, courgettes, a little onion and garlic; served with okra roasted in pumpkin seed oil, and buttered spinach.

But I responded to this post by thawrecka the other day about male readers of uber-blokish books complaining that books by women were 'sexist' (cue Vagina Dentata and the Feral Pussies 'If I boggled at misogyny it would take up all my time') -

And lo and behold, there were two pieces in Guardian Weekend today about woman-centric media and how that gets dissed and yet how refreshing it is to see the stories that aren't all about MENZ -

(Yes, yes, we know, heresy, blasphemy, witches, etc etc)

Hadley Freeman: I have a reliable rule of thumb when it comes to art made for women and largely by women: if men sneer at it, the problem isn’t with the art but with the men. Nothing scares a certain type of man more than art that isn’t for him.

Bim Adewunmi: For whatever reason, I have been consuming a lot of women’s stories recently. Poetry, theatre, film, TV, the visual arts – it doesn’t matter what the medium is, I just want to climb in and stay there. Finding the sweet spot in a woman’s life, when something vital is suddenly unlocked and she steps more fully into herself, is a treat for me.

So much that.

And I was made to think once more about my unease with certain SRS women novelists who seemed to have internalised that view that Virginia Woolf criticised:

This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.

My attention was recently drawn (I've forgotten exactly how) to the fact that a posthumously discovered memoir or autobiographical fragment by Jane Rule had been discovered among her archives at the University of British Columbia and published in 2011 (why was I not told, though I see from looking back over my posts the fact of her death had similarly passed me by).

It ends perhaps earlier in her life and career than one might have liked - just as she was emerging from adolescence, with a clear sense of her own identity as a lesbian - but still a text well worth having out there. Not only for its record of coming of age as a young woman conscious of her own desires towards women at a time when this was particularly difficult: a period when the idea of the lesbian had come to public consciousness and was pathologised and stigmatised;* but also for being extremely well-written as we should expect from the author of her body of novels** and non-fiction.

I see that many of her works are now being reissued as ebooks, but at rather eye-brow raising prices.

*I have argued here and there that a lot of the early historiography on ideas of female same-sex desire and emotion in the earlier C20th was reading back this pop-Freudian inflected view of the late 40s/50s onto a period when it really wasn't being applied.

**I was just glancing at her pioneering study, Lesbian Images (1975), on 'what images of lesbians women writers have projected in fiction, biography, and autobiography', and see that in the introduction she suggests that at that period she was being considered 'a political sell-out... writing books which don't suggest that the lesbian way of life is the best way of life for everyone in all circumstances'. That subtle nuanced take is pretty much what I remember of her novels.