oursin: George Beresford photograph of the young Rebecca West in a large hat, overwritten 'Neither a doormat nor a prostitute' (Neither a doormat nor a prostitute)
[personal profile] oursin

Okay, my dearios, I am sure all dear rdrs are with me that tradwives are not trad, they are deploying an aesthetic loosely based on vague memories of the 1950s - and meedja representations at that - and some very creepy cultish behaviour - they are not returning to some lovely Nachral State -

And that as I bang on about a lot, women have been engaged in all kinds of economic activity THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY since economic activity became A Thing.

Why tradwives aren’t trad: The housewife is a Victorian invention. History shows us women’s true economic power

I have a spot of nitpickery to apply - it rather skips over and elides the move from the household economy into factories e.g., leading to 'separate spheres' with wife stuck at home (and even that was a very blurry distinction, I mutter); and also the amount of exploitative homeworking undertaken by women of the lower classes (often to the detriment of any kind of 'good housekeeping').(Not saying middle-class women didn't also find ways of making a spot of moolah to eke out household budget.)

And of course a lot of tradwives are actually performing as economically productive influencers: TikTok tradwives: femininity, reproduction, and social media - in a tradition of women who made a very nice living out of telling other women how to be domestic goddesses, ahem ahem.

The Plumber Appears

Sep. 12th, 2025 08:27 pm
cimorene: Blue text reading "This Old House" over a photo of a small yellow house (knypplinge)
[personal profile] cimorene
And he came and spray painted on the ground! He says that the digger dude who was never returning his calls in the spring should be less busy right now. Idk, but I hope he's right.

We might not have to have the open septic tanks for another winter!!

The Newbery Treasure Hunt

Sep. 12th, 2025 01:04 pm
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
[personal profile] littlerhymes asked which Newberies were hardest to find. As it happens, I kept a list of how I found all the Newberies, so I can answer this in some detail!

When I started this project, I was living in Indianapolis, and the Indianapolis Public Library had all the Newbery Honor books back to 1970. Since I looked this up in 2020, it’s possible they have some sort of cutoff where they keep at least one copy in the system for fifty years? Or maybe it was just a coincidence.

At any rate, the cutoff was sharp at 1970 itself, when there were three books the Indianapolis library didn't have. Through my mother, I had access to the Evergreen Library Consortium which connects libraries through Indiana. Through my father, I had access to the Purdue University libraries. Using these resources, I found two of the Honor books of 1970, except The Many Ways of Seeing: An Introduction to the Pleasures of Art, which my mother bought me as a present, which is CHEATING.

Um. I mean, thank you for the kind present, Mom!

(But it’s still not in the proper treasure hunt spirit!)

These two libraries also filled the gaps in the Indianapolis collection of the 1960s Newberys.

In the 1950s, the treasure hunt got real. I got four books through interlibrary loan. One I read on a trip to the Indiana State Library, and another I read on in the Lilly Library Reading Room in Bloomington, which conveniently has a collection of first editions of many Newbery Honor books.

I also read one through openlibrary.org, and I will note that many of the books I found through other means are available on this website. I only used it a few times for two reasons: one, the scanned books tend to give me a headache, and it’s impossible to be fair to a book while you have a splitting headache. And two, this also cut into the whole treasure hunt aspect. Does openlibrary.org bring you a book on a little pillow like the Lilly Library? Absolutely they do not.

(I also almost certainly could have gotten all the books I found in various archives and reading rooms through interlibrary loan, but again, would they have been brought to me on a little pillow? No! Sometimes one must simply embrace the thrill of the chase.)

For the 1940s, I had one Indiana State Library book, three interlibrary loans, and three Lilly Library Reading Room books. (I also read two more books on openlibrary.org, and it was the poor scanning of Eva Roe Gaggin’s Down Ryton Water that broke me.)

The 1930s were the hardest decade by far. I had twenty-three interlibrary loans, three Lilly Library books, two Indiana State Library books (I should note that the Indiana State Library doesn’t check out the older materials in its collection, so all these books I read in the library), four Lilly Library Reading Room books, and near the end of the project I discovered that the Purdue Archive had one of the books I needed, so I got to read that one in the Purdue Archive Reading Room.

The 1920s were actually easier, mostly because the Newbery Committee chose far fewer runners-up in the 1920s than the 1930s, but also because the 1920s books were beginning to come off copyright. (As of 2025, they’re all out of copyright.) So I could read many of them through gutenberg.org or Google Books, but since 1928 and 1929 were still under copyright at the time, there was still an interlibrary loan, a Lilly Reading Room book, and an Indiana State Library book.

And that is the tale of my Newbery treasure hunt! Now that I’ve finished the list, I feel a trifle bereft: what books can I have the archivists bring me on little pillows now? However, you’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve already started a small list of books that I look forward to reserving at the archives at my leisure.
dolorosa_12: (learning)
[personal profile] dolorosa_12
Happy Friday, everyone! I'm on Day 1 of a four-day weekend (to use up some annual leave that needed to be claimed by the end of September), and life is good.

Today's prompt is inspired by the fact that I'm on the final day of contributing to a long-running (presumably) market research project by Ipsos. I first ended up involved with this due to answering the door to some Ipsos recruiters many years ago when we still lived in the rental place in Cambridge, and I've been contributing to this project on an annual basis ever since. It involves logging media/internet usage and other activities every half-hour for a week, and then filling in a big survey about media and internet usage, leisure and consumer activities and so on, and I assume is used for market research around demographics, internet usage, and consumer behaviour, based on the kinds of questions being asked. It's very little work for the incentive — £40 in shopping vouchers (which this year was increased to £50) — so I'm always happy to keep doing this, since responses are anonymised.

So my prompt is as follows: have you ever been the subject of research (whether market research like this, or academic research at a university)? What was involved?

In addition to this Ipsos thing, I used to sign up for linguistics and psychology research projects back when I was a postgraduate student, although I always felt the amount of effort involved wasn't worth whatever they paid you at the end, which was usually £10, or a £10 Amazon voucher or similar. Once I had to lie in an MRI machine for close to an hour, and respond to images being shown to me. It's hard enough being in an MRI machine when it's for a medical reason, but I swore never again to put myself through that kind of unpleasantness for a research project.

What about you?

Another year, another lovely day

Sep. 11th, 2025 06:18 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
Beautiful weather and all.

**************************


Read more... )

podcast friday

Sep. 12th, 2025 07:20 am
sabotabby: (doom doom doom)
[personal profile] sabotabby
My major podcast news is that I finally finished listening to Mike Duncan's French Revolution series. A phrase I remember from the foreword to the copy of Ulysses I read as a teenager always sticks in my head: "you put it down with the triumph of a general suppressing a revolt," or something like that. I commend the effort it took to make this podcast—it's nso much research and writing and analysis and it's an incredibly good history of the French Revolution.

But.

Nothing really sticks in my head. This is possibly because Mike is more interested in dates and names than I am, and more interested in military strategy than either he claims or I can understand. But it's also a factor of his voice, which he can't really help, but I'm quite allergic to what I call NPR Voice. I just kind of drift off. It's kind of like, "this happened, and then this person did this. How droll." I have the same problem with Conspirituality sometimes, and pretty much all the time with Democracy Now. It just slides off my brain. Nevertheless it's worth listening to if that is not a problem for you.

Happy Birthday, RM!

Sep. 12th, 2025 07:09 am
stonepicnicking_okapi: namjin (namjin)
[personal profile] stonepicnicking_okapi
The thoughtful, sensitive, hardworking leader of BTS turns 31 today. Happy Birthday, Kim Namjoon! ARMY loves you. I really wish you were president of everything (including my own country).



This will never not be a banger.

(no subject)

Sep. 12th, 2025 09:42 am
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin
Happy birthday, [personal profile] davidgillon and [personal profile] surexit!

If one year's back on my shoulder

Sep. 12th, 2025 03:26 am
sovay: (Sydney Carton)
[personal profile] sovay
Not having read any of the source novels, approximately twenty minutes into the first series of Poldark (1975–77) as I lay on the couch self-medicating with the late eighteenth century, I remarked to [personal profile] spatch, "Is there any aspect of this homecoming that is not going to be a clusterfuck?" on which the answer turned out to be no, whence it seems the engine of the plot. Since I came to this show by having to wait for the third season of Turn: Washington's Spies (2014–17) to arrive at my local branch library, I was more than ordinarily entertained by the line pertaining to the hero's soldiering past, "Shocking business, eh? Losing the Colonies." The bomber leather frock coat is as impressive as advertised.

Daily Happiness

Sep. 11th, 2025 08:02 pm
torachan: a cartoon kitten with a surprised/happy expression (chii)
[personal profile] torachan
1. I took another walk after lunch today. It does feel nice to get out, even if it really was too sunny and I felt kind of drained afterwards. (I really wish the streets around my work had more shade!)

2. I think I took out just the right amount of stuffing from my new pillow. I feel like I'm sleeping more soundly with it.

3. Look at this cutie girl.

sovay: (Rotwang)
[personal profile] sovay
This afternoon my godchild's school was locked down because one of the students had a gun and the nineteenth and twentieth monarchs of the summer hatched. What am I supposed to say about the day itself? That I am reminded even without the martial canonization of a never-laid grief that nothing is easier to shovel under six feet of lime than memory? The last cousin of my grandparents' generation died earlier this week at nearly a century. The lines to the past snap fast enough, no one needs to hurry them along.

On that note, Andrew Kozma's "The Black Death" (2025). I like that Ulysses S. Grant is top of the list of historical characters Jared Harris wants to play, in part because of his civil rights commitments as president and as a counterweight to his negative figuration in the mythos of the Lost Cause. I need a door in the hall closet to BFI Southbank if they are going to keep doing inaccessibly tantalizing series like last year's complete Powell and Pressburger or, currently, Anna May Wong.

conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
We are not responsible for your lost or stolen relatives.
We cannot guarantee your safety if you disobey our instructions.
We do not endorse the causes or claims of people begging for handouts.
We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.

Your ticket does not guarantee that we will honor your reservations.
In order to facilitate our procedures, please limit your carrying on.
Before taking off, please extinguish all smoldering resentments.

If you cannot understand English, you will be moved out of the way.
In the event of a loss, you’d better look out for yourself.
Your insurance was cancelled because we can no longer handle
your frightful claims. Our handlers lost your luggage and we
are unable to find the key to your legal case.

You were detained for interrogation because you fit the profile.
You are not presumed to be innocent if the police
have reason to suspect you are carrying a concealed wallet.
It’s not our fault you were born wearing a gang color.
It is not our obligation to inform you of your rights.

Step aside, please, while our officer inspects your bad attitude.
You have no rights we are bound to respect.
Please remain calm, or we can’t be held responsible
for what happens to you.


***********


Link

Let his own words be his epitaph

Sep. 9th, 2025 05:25 pm
conuly: (Default)
[personal profile] conuly
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”

Not many of us get to die for our beliefs.

Lil Nas X

Sep. 11th, 2025 12:45 pm
muccamukk: Marjan with an armful of textbooks, about to hand out the top one. (Lone Star: Education)
[personal profile] muccamukk
I'd been kind of waiting to post about this to see if there was word if he was alright or not, which it sounds like he at least has support, which is good. The whole thing is very upsetting, and people have also been having some very bad takes.

Basically, the rapper Lil Nas X seems to have been having a mental health thing, got the cops called on him, and is now arrested on truly B.S. felony charges. I hate everything about this, especially the person who filmed him at a vulnerable moment and (probably) sold that film to TMZ. Fuck that person. Fuck TMZ, also.

Some takes from Black youtubers about homophobia in the Black community, especially in hip hop (which is not saying that the Black community is uniquely homophobic!)

[youtube.com profile] ForeignFridays: The Gay Double Standard.

[youtube.com profile] OlayandFriends: The Gay Agenda Isn't Real but Homophobia is.

A couple takes from white queer voices on how fucking racist the whole conversation has been, and also the cops dealing with mental health calls is B.S.:

Teen Vogue: Why Lil Nas X's Arrest Is More Proof Police Have No Business Treating the Mentally Ill.

[youtube.com profile] Ophie-Dokie: Lil Nas X Situation Is Disturbing.

Mingled yarn of life

Sep. 11th, 2025 08:20 pm
oursin: Brush the Wandering Hedgehog by the fire (Default)
[personal profile] oursin

Text today from my general practice to book Covid + flu jabs - actually in a months time, but I now have a slot booked.

***

Having been moaning on over at bluesky about scholars these days not acknowledging existing (older) historiography, Dept of Preening Gratification was coming across footnote cite to 30 year-old co-authored work as 'A key starting point' for certain 'productive considerations' within the field.

***

On the other prickly paw, I am still failing to get up to a proper swing at the essay review - keep niggling and picking at the bit I've already done.

Partly due to Interruptions happening.

Also partly due to not sleeping terribly well this week for some reason.

***

Discovered today that I had somehow acquired an ebook of recent work on subject I have had far too much to do with and had totally forgotten about it. Looking up an area of Mi Pertikler Xpertize, o dear, a number of niggling Errours.

***

Attended a webinar the other day where someone claimed that a certain class of records did not survive in respect of the lower orders on account They Could Not Write, and I was more, no, it's an issue of preservation, what about those postcards that I spoke about on a TV programme once - but that is such an annoying story, what DID happen to the cards after the filming? - apart from the flaunting of Being Meedja Personality, so decided not to raise my virtual hand.

wychwood: Atlantis seen under the curve of Earth's stargate (SGA - city exploring)
[personal profile] wychwood
Interminable September progresses. The next two weeks are going to be the especially busy parts, but I made fifteen portions of pasta (waiting for me in the freezer), started refusing any invitations to do anything whatsoever in September that isn't already in my calendar ("not even for your poor sick mother??" she said, and I said NO but how about the first weekend in October), and am as up together as I can manage (not terribly).

I'm also in full hibernation mode and doing nothing in my actual free time except read intensely and greedily (already finished one of the poll-winners). I haven't bought any more books since last week, though, so that's something. I'm going to bribe myself with volume 2 of Wayne Family Adventures when I survive the month, though.

Book Review: Account Rendered

Sep. 11th, 2025 01:20 pm
osprey_archer: (books)
[personal profile] osprey_archer
In the afterward to Max in the Land of Lies, Adam Gidwitz mentioned Melita Maschmann’s Account Rendered: A Dossier of My Former Self as one of the most important sources for the book, and also a book that he would urge everyone to read. Of course I had to try it, especially given that Gidwitz’s Melita Maschmann is one of the most likable characters in Max in the Land of Lies, for all that she is a true believer Nazi who, moreover, gets only very limited pagetime.

Now I realize some people may object to the idea of a likeable Nazi true believer, but I believe in order to understand evil one of the things we have to let go of is the belief that there’s any clear relationship between likability and goodness. If you will excuse a digression into quadrant theory, likability and goodness are two separate axes, and most of us are happiest with the “likable and good” quadrant and the “unlikable and bad” quadrant. Neither of these create cognitive dissonance. We want the people whom we like to be good and the people we hate to be bad.

But “unlikable and good” and “likable and bad” can both be a torment. You know that you should like so-and-so, because they’re so useful and helpful and have all the right opinions, but really you would climb out a window rather than spend an hour alone with them because they just grate on you. Or, you like so-and-so a lot, because they’re so funny and charming, and when other people say they’ve done bad things it’s probably lies, or jealousy, or a failure to understand the complexity of their character, or… oh God what if they are bad. You like them so much and they’re bad?? What does that say about you??? NO the accusations of badness are LIES.

(Or else, you insist that you never really liked them THAT much, like my friend with the Harry Potter tattoo who insists she was never THAT into Harry Potter.)

So: Melita Maschmann, likable Nazi true believer, who very slowly after the war began to look back on her former self and say, “What the fuck was I thinking?” This book, written in the form of a letter to her former best friend, a Jewish girl who had to flee Germany, is Maschmann’s attempt to figure out what, in fact, she was thinking.

The idea of the book as a letter is sometimes slightly alarming (can you imagine handing someone a book-length manuscript and saying “This is why I was a world-historically bad friend”?), but as a literary device it’s useful, because it gives Maschmann an imaginary interlocutor to pull her up short whenever she reaches a particularly “But didn’t this make you rethink your choices?” moment. Kristallnacht? The starving Poles when you were first posted to Poland? The time the local German army didn’t have enough troops to evict the Poles from their village to make way for German settlers, so you had to help? Maybe the time that you drove a truck around stealing furniture from the local Poles to give it to a German family that had settled in one of these newly emptied villages?

This last in particular was not merely wrong but also illegal even at the time, but rather oddly it’s also the only one that Maschmann didn’t have a single qualm about when she did it. The rest of these events did give her pause, but at the end of the day there’s a vast gulf between being taken aback and actually rethinking the ideology that has shaped your entire life.

Maschmann turned to National Socialism because she was an idealist who loved the idea of the National Community that cuts across classes and binds everyone together and fixes the poverty and shame that have crippled her country since the Great War. It was a way of rebelling against her parents that nonetheless embraced many of their beliefs: not only the sense that democracy had failed, but also the belief that violent competition among countries is inevitable, so although you might flinch from things you saw while invading Poland, if you didn’t invade Poland then Poland would assuredly invade you.

By this point you, my imaginary interlocutor, may well be asking, “But what part of this is likable, you monster?” Well, part of it is the fact that Maschmann had the strength of character to look back afterward and try to make sense of what she had done. This is something that most human beings seem to find almost impossible even when there aren’t war crimes involved.

Her account is clear-eyed, both in the sense of sheer observation - there’s tons of interesting detail here about life on the ground during the invasion of Poland, for instance - and in the sense that she’s trying to look at these events squarely, to explain without justifying, to say “this is what we were thinking” and hope that this might help turn other people aside if they find themselves straying into a similar path.

But even in Maschmann’s younger self, there are many appealing qualities. She was an indefatigable worker with a yearning to help people, an idealist who latched onto absolutely the wrong ideal. If she had latched onto a different ideal –

Well, the twentieth century was not short on ideals that led to mass destruction, so if Maschmann chose a different ideal, she might have been just as destructive in a different direction. Why do I find something so appealing about idealists, when ideology is used to create and justify so much suffering?

Quick note — comments

Sep. 11th, 2025 05:26 pm
dolorosa_12: (sister finland)
[personal profile] dolorosa_12
Unfortunately I need to take a preemptive (and hopefully temporary measure): screening all comments made by people not on my access list on most of my journal posts. This is because the level of filters available for comment screening are none, all, or non-access list only.

I'm hoping that this will only need to be a temporary thing and I can revert back to normal, unscreened settings, but I thought I'd take the opportunity to check if anyone subscribed to me, but not on the access list wanted to be granted access.

The vast majority of my posts have always been public, and I want to keep things that way, and I tend to defer to other people's preferences when granting access (i.e. if someone adds me as the result of e.g. a friending meme, if they subscribe only, I reciprocate, and if they grant access, I reciprocate in that way as well). But I'm not precious about this, and don't expect reciprocity.

If you're already on my access list, nothing should really change and you should be able to comment on most posts as normal. If you would like to be granted access, please comment on this post (here all comments are screened) or send me a message. If you're happy with things as they are, do be aware that future comments of yours may be screened, but I'll try to unscreen them at the point at which I reply.

I hope this makes sense — feel free to ask for clarification in the comments if you're not sure what I'm explaining here.

a very brief post

Sep. 11th, 2025 09:06 am
lirazel: the worlds "care and freedom" in various shades of blue ([misc] care and freedom)
[personal profile] lirazel
I just need to get this out.

Cut for US political talk.

I am not sorry that Charlie Kirk is no longer part of this world. But now he'll be a martyr, and martyrs are dangerous. He will probably be every bit as dangerous in death as he was in life. I don't see how this improved the world. And I am just so fucking sick of guns.

It's not that I'm never against killing dangerous political leaders. The world would have been a better place if certain dangerous but powerful people had been killed (right now Netanyahu comes to mind). But I think that it's genuinely more constructive to figure out other ways to temper or undermine their power than to resort to violence--I really just think that works better. And of course the true goal should be to keep these people from gaining power in the first place.

I don't know, y'all. Things in my country just seem very, very dark right now and this doesn't feel to me like this made it any brighter.

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