I sometimes abuse ampersands

I am given to understand that there is a campaign afoot to get a Blue Plaque for Dame Rebecca, as, quite shamefully, there is not one already.

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Dorset Archives Trust seeks donations for archive catalogue: we feel they might foreground rather more than they do that this is for the papers of Sylvia Townsend Warner???

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The Woman Who Invented the Penny Bank - I do not think I had heard of Priscilla Wakefield before.

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Ladies of the Lights: Female Lighthouse Keepers in the UK and the US (Of course I knew about Grace Darling, even before Jessica Mitford wrote about her.)

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Sadder stories of women: Hidden lives of female prisoners past and present:

The lives of female prisoners in the 19th Century and those experiencing the criminal justice system today are not dissimilar, a charity worker has said.
An exhibition at Newcastle Cathedral is documenting the untold stories from female prisoners at the former Newcastle Prison, which stood in the city's Carliol Square between 1828-1925.

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Hmmmm. While I would certainly agree that female desire is not taken seriously enough: A very paternalistic attitude’: why is female desire still not taken seriously?, I am massively, massively, massively cynical about the potential of the 'pink pill' or female viagra as I had several posts here some years back about the very unprepossessing results produced*. In particular I adduce this link to the ever sensible Dr Petra Boynton's thoughts. Is this just being bigged up by pharma entrepreneurs???
*And, of course, the notion that you can fix women's libidos with a magic bullet pill.

This week's bread: a loaf of Marriage's Organic Country Fayre Malted Brown Bread Flour: quite nice but turned out a bit crumbly??

Friday night supper: ersatz Thai fried rice with chopped red bell pepper and chorizo.

Saturday breakfast rolls: Tassajarra method, strong brown flour, a spot of Rayner's barley malt extract, cinnamon, raisins, okay (cinnamon a bit past its BBF).

Today's lunch: a pie (bought-in puff pastry) of silken tofu + baby spinach + fresh coriander and flat leaf parsley + garlic - okay, but perhaps a little bland; served with steamed asparagus splashed with melted butter with lime juice and lime zest, and padron peppers.

Imagine! a good old fashioned scam without embedded link to dodgy site or anything, wow, the nostalgia is nostalgiaful, eh?

My humble greetings,
I feel the need to approach you securing and moving my late father fund. It's just My urgent need for a foreign partner/investor. I have a significant fund to transfer. My Whatsap [---] for more details

This had a charming naivety lacking in yet another solicitation to become involved with some academic journal, in this case:

Given your expertise and contributions to medical and surgical research, we believe your involvement would greatly strengthen the journal’s academic quality and reputation.

Plus they not only want a CV they want a photo. Tempted to send them one of the photobooth efforts I got done for passport purposes, which have 'inmate of criminal lunatic asylum, c. 1880' vibes.

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In other nostalgic news, apparently the annual eight-day Thomas Hardy fest still occurs.

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And I was utterly charmed when finally flicking through the pages of the most recent Travel Which to discover Madison WI rated one of the top less-visited North American cities (cannot find this online), bless, with particular mention of the Monoma Terrace.

Though I am honestly boggling a bit at the decision to run an article on North American cities as touristic destinations at the present time, even if a significant proportion of the actual recommendations do turn out to be in Canada.

What We Lose When We Gamify Reading, well yeah, but this is someone who considers Middlemarch 'a slog'. I'm also, of course, thinking about previous allotropes of this kind of thing - actual libraries you could buy of The Best Books - and of course display them on your shelves - and I'm also recollecting The Provincial Lady who can never manage to actually read That Book That Everyone Is Talking About. Of reading as something that is not, reading that thing that you want to read, when you want to read it, at the speed that seems fit (which may involve stopping and starting and hiatuses).

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If not a smaller, a more connected world than people maybe think: How likely is it that Alfred the Great sent two emissaries to India in the ninth century?:

Alfred’s embassy to India thus appears to be entirely historically plausible: India, with its Christian community and shrine of St Thomas, was probably always the intended destination, and its remoteness from early medieval England the very point of the embassy.

This feels like yet another story that might perhaps account for Why Are There So Few Women In [X] Field which is not down to actual aptitude and drive: There’s a long and embedded history of abuse in chess.

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Home Free: Vivian Gornick, interviewed by Chandler Fritz

Everything depends on the writer’s relation to the first-person narrator. Some writers are released into storytelling through the fictional narrator; others are released by the nonfictional “I.” The first become novelists, the second memoirists. It’s all a matter of what kind of narrator lets you tell the story. When I was young I kept telling these stories about my mother and our neighbor Nettie, and everyone said, “That’s a novel!” But when I tried to write a novel the material just lay there like a dead dog: I couldn’t bring it to life. When I realized it was a memoir and the narrator was clearly me, suddenly I was home free.

The Cold War and the Soviet KGB's Same-Sex Entrapment Operations in the 1950s and 1960s: The Perpetrator in Focus. Intriguing. When I was employed in an institution which at the time came under the aegis of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office I was obliged to attend an FCO Induction Course. This had very little relevance to my job, and among the proceedings were cautionary films about being got at by Soviet agents. In one case although the surface level involved the patsy being lured by publication in a Red journal his relationship with the tempter seemed to have definite homoerotic undertones.

So, I may have mentioned I would be giving a paper in one of the Fellows' Symposia of the Institution with which I am now affiliated, coming up over the horizon very soon. And I had originally intended to revisit some research I did Before Events Intervened and Do Something with that, but it has not been coming together as I should like, needs more percolating I think. So I am instead returning to a project I put aside when other things supervened and demanded my attention, for which I did a preliminary paper or two, and can spruce up and get, I hope, some feedback on, and maybe kickstart this back into action.

Meanwhile....

I think I mentioned being solicited to give an entertaining and instructive talk on the history of johnnies/baudruches some months hence, which I have a fair amount of material already on hand for. However, what the organisers would like is An Image for publicity purposes, fairly soonish, and REALLY. One is tempted to go with the Dudley Hoard which require a good deal of imagination to reconstruct for their original purpose.

Younger scholar whom I have been somewhat informally mentoring has now submitted their PhD thesis and would like me to read it, and think of what might come up in viva.

The project which I was involved in for some considerable while which went very weird last year, with me being somewhat accidental being left out of the loop for some months due to error in email address, so I never really got the full story, is being revived in a smaller and more defined way as a journal special issue edited by Old Friend and Me.

Meanwhile I am in the process of getting the latest volume of the Interminable Saga prepped for publication.