crookedeye

What I read

Finished The Life Revamp - okay, not mind-blowing?

Having another bout of lower-back misery, re-reads of KJ Charles, Any Old Diamonds (Lilywhite Boys, #1) (2019), Gilded Cage (Lilywhite Boys, #2) (2019) and Masters in This Hall (Lilywhite Boys, #3) (2022). Still querying the understanding of the divorce law at the time.... (there seems to be an assumption at one point that spouse in prison was grounds??).

On the go

Started Upton Sinclair, Dragon's Teeth (Lanny Budd, #3) (1942). This is the one with spiritualism taken in the serious experimental fashion of the times along with New Thought, besides the whole international political situation. Also, spot-on fashions in child-rearing, though I don't think Truby King was actually name-checked over the strict 4-hour feeding regimen!

Set to one side as Vivian Shaw, Strange New World (Dr Greta Helsing, #4) came out yesterday.

Still dipping into Melissa Scott, Scenes from the City.

Still working on the book for review, which is rather dense: excellent work but not exactly light reading.

Up next

Should get to Anthony Powell, Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960) in preparation for online discussion group.

Discovered that there is a new work by Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death: A meditation (2024), a memoir generated by a serious accident at the age of 85.

Still have not got round to latest Literary Review.

Today partner and I did make it through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered (actually, 2 Tubes, 1 Overground, and a walk through Belair Park) to Dulwich Picture Gallery for the Tirzah Garwood exhibition.

Also a certain amount of queuing even if we had timed entry tickets, as due possibly to the way things were laid out there was a certain amount of clumping up around the early parts of the exhibition.

But really rather good - got the impression that Garwood was an artist who was having fun with her art rather than Suffering For It, as well as, like so many female artists of her day, working in a whole range of media and crafts. E.g. her work on marbled paper seems to have been a significant contribution to the family income at certain points. Also did embroidery, quilting, collages, etc and there's a lot of playfulness to her work. Though also I found a number of her 'house' pictures verging on the unheimlich (a certain Shirley Jackson-esque note?)

Did a fairly quick walk round the rest of the gallery after we'd done the exhibition (not our first visit) and then home by a different route - the other Dulwich station, Overground plus Tube. Nostalgia of train passing through vistas of South London.

There’s no excuse for ugly people’: controversial dentist Mike Mew on how ‘mewing’ can make you more attractive:

The orthodontist’s strange mouth exercises are beloved by incels seeking a manlier shape – and a fast-growing TikTok trend in classrooms around the world. So why has he been struck off the dentists’ register?

But honestly. This is probably because I have an perhaps unusual knowledge of medical (including dental) quackery and its promotion, and common themes are:

There Is One Big Reason For All Your Problems

And

One Simple Trick (which I have) To Fix Them.

(Cites here, so that you know that I am not making this up all out of my own head, to Alex Comfort, The Anxiety Makers, Ann Dally, Fantasy Surgery, and a tip of the hat to Rob Darby, A Surgical Temptation.)

Okay, this is at the other end of the alimentary canal to Sir Arbuthnot Lane's Cure For All Evils (caused by Chronic Intestinal Stasis), but I think we can see the pattern repeating here.

Not saying that maybe, somewhere in this, there is something that may be helpful in some, specific cases, but let us consider e.g. radium in the 1920s. Yes, it was really, really useful in treating certain forms of cancer: it was not a cure-all and downing massive amounts of radium tonic just left a person, well, radioactive, if the tonic actually contained any active principle at all.

I am also boggled at the assumptions about beauty, and trying not to comment on this guy's own appearance, but to remark that the Hapsburgs ruled swathes of Europe for centuries without manly square jaws, hmmm, plus, has this chap ever been into an art gallery in his life??? Is there one pattern of beauty or are there many?

Just reading what he thinks the epitome makes me want to assert the true loveliness of consumptive pallor, heightened by just a touch of hectic feverish flush, wilting picturesquely on a fainting couch.

What I read

Finished Dance and Skylark, which was a bit slight (felt there was a certain unresolved slashy subtext going on between Stephen and his former Greek-American wartime comrade in arms, hmmm) though I marked it up for the women characters looking as if they might be a bit one-dimensional and then revealing other facets.

Katherine V Forrest, Delafield (2022) - Kate Delafield, still retired, dealing with a stalker who is a woman who her poor handling of a case way back in her career led to being falsely imprisoned, and now released through the Innocence Project, also her PTSD issues, etc, also old relationship stuff.

Long Live Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood - Persephone edition, 2016, initially published in limited edition 2012 - her memoir written when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy in the 1940s, for her family, edited with some supplementary material by her daughter. Said a bit about it here.

Ursula Whitcher, North Continent Ribbon (2024) - v good.

KJ Charles, The Henchmen of Zenda (2018), re-read because not feeling up to much.

On the go

Still dipping into Melissa Scott, Scenes from the City.

Have started the other book for review - wow there is a lot of insider baseball stuff about the Parliamentary toings and froings over the legislation in question, or maybe I mean, how the sausage got made - and maybe my general state at the moment is not quite in the right space.

Just started, Kris Ripper, The Life Revamp (The Love Study #3) (2021) because it was on offer in my Recommended for You on Kobo today.

Up Next

New Literary Review.

Otherwise, not sure.

Since we are hoping to get to the Tirzah Garwood exhibition at Dulwich before it closes, I have finally got round to reading Long Live Great Bardfield: The Autobiography of Tirzah Garwood (Persephone 2016).

I think my original interest was because I thought her arty circles would intersect a bit more with my fubsy progressives, but although a few familiar names surfaced less so than I had anticipated.

However, in an episode rather counter to the kind of narrative one expects in arty boho circles of the period, in 1942 she had a therapeutic abortion in the local hospital, which is a thing I have never come across among all the tales of pills, backstreet operators, sleazo Harley street docs, dodgy nursing homes, etc, pre the 67 Act. She had just had a mastectomy - this was in fact what led her to start writing the autobiography for her family - and became pregnant only a few months later (!!!???). This was deemed entirely grounds for a termination, but even so, doing ward rounds with medical students, the surgeon remarked that it was 'illegal' but that provided medical opinion agreed that continuing pregnancy and childbirth would be dangerous, No Jury Would Convict. This was very few years after the high-profile Aleck Bourne case, that docs were justified if the woman would be left a 'physical or mental wreck'.

I also find this rather resonant, in view of the current situation with women getting charged under the 1861 Act.

The other thing that struck me was that Garwood and her circles could easily be hanging out on the periphery of Dance to the Music of Time - every so often they get invited to a country house or interact with the local gentry, and at one point have to do with a socialist peer who has an encampment of Basque refugees on his estate....

(Larfs liek a hysterykle drayne.)

Life and work of Thomas Hardy to be performed at Stonehenge: Readings and performances will be staged at the ‘misfortune of ruins’ that long fascinated the writer.

The novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was fascinated by Stonehenge, using what he described as “the temple of the winds” both as a setting for one of his most striking scenes and as a lifelong inspiration, a pathway back into ancient times.
In what is being billed as a unique performance, the life and work of Hardy is being showcased at the great stone circle in Wiltshire as part of Salisbury international arts festival.
....
An orchestra will play music, ranging from the sort of folk tunes Hardy may have been familiar with to pieces by Gustav Holst and Peter Warlock.
....
It is believed to be the first time that a performance incorporating Hardy’s life and work has been staged at Stonehenge.
Lesser said: “Hopefully* it’ll be lovely weather and you’ll have this marvellous atmosphere as the evening develops with the light changing and these wonderful words of Hardy.”

I don't suppose they are going to represent Hardy in his lighter and realistic vein:

Last week's bread held out very well, right up until the point when it did something quite spectacular in the mould department, fortunately there was still a roll left from the weekend.

Friday night supper: (I had been hoping it would hold out for frittata, sigh) ven pongal (South Indian khichchari).

Saturday breakfast rolls: basic buttermilk, 3:1 Marriage's Light Spelt Flour (end of the bag), and Marriage's Golden Wholegrain Bread Flour, which worked rather well.

Today's lunch: sweet potato gratin, shallots rather than onion as I had some left from the other week, and kalamata olive tapenade; served with spinach sauteed more or less according to Dharamjit Singh's recipe in Indian Cookery (really doesn't need added water), and gingery healthy-grilled baby courgettes (teriyaki rather than tamari, and I really didn't think marinade needed extra salt).