schemingreader

What I read

Finished The Edge. Well, there was a fair amount of research on Canadian railways went into that....

Shani Akilah, For Such a Time as This (2024), sortes ereader, i.e. opened up as I was scrolling my unread list - not sure how I came across this but enjoyed it, linked short stories about a group of Black British young (ish) people of diverse origins.

Forgot to mention this which I had already started last week and put to one side: Dennis Covington, Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia (1995, reissue with new afterword 2009) - I think I saw something about this somewhere and was interested in the idea. I was a bit irked at first by the style which was a certain kind of upmarket journalistic, and I was then a bit hmmm about him getting in touch with his own occluded lost in the mists family roots, but it was intriguing stuff, especially the way he got both drawn into the whole thing and then ejected by the community.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964), since we watched the movie at the weekend (Colin Firth gives with brood) and I couldn't remember the book well enough to say how it matched (it did some odd things). Not, I think, peak Isherwood.

Madeleine E. Robins, The Sleeping Partner (Sarah Tolerance #3) (2011, recently reissued) - I read the earlier ones ages ago but missed this, which I was really gripped by.

On the go

And straight on to Madeleine E. Robins, The Doxies Penalty (Sarah Tolerance #4) (2025)

Up next

No idea - though a book I requested for review has now turned up. (Also essay review I turned in months ago finally came back with some minimal edits to do.)

Thinking about the 'how can you do/think about normal innocuous quotidien things' while shocking horrors are going on -

(Am not actually going to invoke pet genre of 'look at all these novels being written at a time when World War 2 was just about to begin/beginning'.)

This was just a coincidental thing that occurred to me when I was talking about something tangentially related when being a Nexpert for a journalist yesterday.

Who wanted to know about a certain sex manual v popular in its day and its author -

In the course of which I mentioned that it was not prosecuted for obscenity** unlike Eustace Chesser's Love without Fear (1940). One would have thought that possibly people had other things on their mind in 1940 than maximising matrimonial happiness, particularly considering that families were being broken up by men being conscripted into service, women being evacuated with their children, etc etc, but anyway, it was published, and sold several thousand copies before, in 1942, it was prosecuted for obscenity by the Director of Public Prosecutions.

Again, one would think people had other things on their mind. Anyway, Chesser and his publisher decided to take the case to court and plead not guilty before a jury, bringing three medical witnesses for the defence. The jury was out for less than an hour before returning a 'not guilty' verdict.

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Yesterday saw snowdrops appearing in the local park.

*WH Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts (1940)

**However, the Pope did put it on the Index.

Should we sell our kidneys?

My feeling, on finding somebody who is apparently a reader in political theory at a well-respected institution of Teh Highah Learninz positing this, is that he may have read a lot of political theory, poor lamb, but maybe he should spend some time with dystopian science fiction if he's going to contemplate these sort of questions.

I suppose, with the Organ Donation register, there is an issue that a) it is Opt-In and b) presumably by the time many people reach that state when their organs come up for donation, those organs are probably past their Best Before date.

(I just now, in connection with an entirely unrelated transaction with a government body, was solicited to sign up with the Organ Donation Register. Already have, thanks, if anyone will want my tired old organs when the time comes.)

And on the intrusion of Commerce into this matter, has this person considered the sorts of things that have been happening - only, one admits, affecting the bodies of wymmynz? - over selling their eggs, or being surrogates, and the stories one hears are Not Pretty.

He might also consider Richard Titmuss' famous 1970 work The Gift Relationship: From Human Blood to Social Policy on blood donation:

[T]he author compares blood donation in the US and UK, contrasting the British system of reliance on voluntary donors to the American one in which the blood supply is in the hands of for-profit enterprises, concluding that a system based on altruism is both safer and more economically efficient.

In the 18th century, for example, some viewed being paid to sing as akin to prostitution, and professional opera singers, particularly women, could be deemed morally suspect. At that time, therefore, it might have seemed appropriate to subject professional singing to legal strictures, just like prostitution.

(I'm also thinking - has this one cropped up on agonyaunt or have I seen it elsewhere - of that scenario in which member of a family - even an estranged member of family - is being heavyed into being a donor for a relative because they are A Match. Was it even child adopted but later traced?)

Last week's bread held out pretty well.

Friday night supper: the hash-type-thing of boiled chopped up sweet potato, fried with chopped red bell pepper and chorizo di navarra.

Saturday breakfast roll: the adaptable soft rolls recipe, Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour, maple syrup, sultanas.

Today's lunch: Scottish Loch Trout Fillets, poached like so, with samphire sauce, served with Ruby Gem potatoes roated in goose fat, sugar snap peas roasted in walnut oil with fennel seeds and splashed with tayberry vinegar, and padron peppers.

Dr rdrz may imagine the noises I made when reading this (we get the London Standard free from our newspaper deliver people): Make America Hard Again: is there an erectile dysfunction epidemic?, particularly when I came to '“There have been huge uncertainties about male virility since the rise of feminism,” says Grossman.' and started screaming 'THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY!!!!'

Okay, there are some very creepy blokes there.

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Creepy but in a different way: I was being 'recommended' this on Kobo, Y O Y???? The Voyage Out: A Quick Read edition:

Discover a new way to read classics with Quick Read.
This Quick Read edition includes both the full text and a summary for each chapter.
- Reading time of the complete text: about 13 hours
- Reading time of the summarized text: 20 minutes

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I'm sorry, but I couldn't help flashing on to the famous phrase 'Normal for Norfolk' when reading this: Archive reveals hidden stories of Queer Norfolk:

Norfolk: That's a queer ol' place
In the depths of the Norwich Millennium Library, there’s an archive dedicated to Norfolk’s LGBTQIA+ history

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This is rather fascinating: Flap Anatomies and Victorian Veils: Penetrating the Female Reproductive Interior:

Lifting flaps that unveiled the female reproductive body for medical purposes could just as easily be interpreted as a pornographic act imbued with sexual titillation and voyeurism. The ‘obstetrical flap’ was thus understood and used as both a teaching prop and an obscene tool. It functioned as a ‘veil’ of Victorian modesty in the name of new and penetrating obstetrical knowledge and a ‘veil’ of man's apparently underlying and untamable penetrative sexual impulses.

One has rather worried about this, and it appears that there are grounds for concern: ‘That belongs in a museum’: The true ‘cost’ of detecting in England and Wales.:

My previous work has discussed various aspects of the hobby of detecting: how the context of archaeological finds is often lost, how private ownership of finds is reducing the archaeological dataset, how our obsession with monetary worth may be fueling an increase in artefact theft and, more recently, the hidden and unacknowledged costs of the hobby of detecting to the wider British public.