Changes and Books
It's time to update my profile on LibraryThing, which begins:
“I'm a poverty-stricken student who spends an unhealthy amount of time wondering where I can possibly fit new bookshelves in my bedroom.”
No longer a poverty-stricken student, I’m now a poverty-stricken young worker trying to find my way through the the corporate maze (and haze). I finished Oxford in the summer of 2009 and found the job in Dublin not too long afterwards.
The bookshelves problem became acute several months ago when my boyfriend moved in with me, and eased up recently when we added new ones at a level we could just reach. It will soon be solved entirely by his departure to West Africa. It’s intended that the stint last only for two years or so, and the nature of the job he’s taken up means he’ll have plenty of opportunities to come home. I’m reasonably confident we won’t stray, but less confident that I’ll deal well with his absence.
I’m updating my LibraryThing because of a weekend trip to London which resulted in a foot injury and a bunch of fascinating nonfiction books from the Charing Cross Road. I’ve spent all evenings but two this week being a shut-in with a pile of pillows and a pile of books, and here’s what I’ve read.
Quiet Killers: The Fall and Rise of Deadly Diseases by Robert Baker.
Here’s a book that did exactly what it said on the tin. The familiar grim reapers of smallpox, TB, yellow fever and of course bubonic plague (separated neatly from its more lethal offshoot, pneumonic plague) were paraded, and the attempts to investigate and cure them. I was particularly struck by the awful descriptions of yellow fever given my proposed visit to West Africa at Christmas! There’s a vaccine but no cure. The mosquito-as-vector theory was first established by the awful method of asking a soldier if he was afraid of a little bug and getting him to volunteer for a bite. (He survived; a happy ending in a way.)
Recent diseases were given equal space. It was interesting that the book had been published when the avian flu scare was abating but before swine flu had come on the scene. Baker wrote that if asked to guess the nature of the next big scare, he would say: i) it will be a virus; ii) it will come from animals but eventually transmit between humans; iii) it will arise in an area of the world with a primitive healthcare system. All correct.
Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy
The Myths of Liberal Zionism by Yitzhak Laor
Under the cut, I consider these two very different books for the reason that they both attack sacred cows. (Sacred cows I hadn’t been much aware of beforehand, which made them more interesting and doubtless more persuasive.) Duffy’s book is a carefully ordered attack on the consensus that the project to restore Catholicism was not only heavy-handed but also mediocre, unimaginative and doomed from the start. He even uses the word ‘heroes’ on the last page. Laor’s is an odd fish, just like the anthropomorphic herring in the last chapter. It begins with a general theme, then narrows into an attack. This attack is on the consensus that prominent Israeli intellectuals A. B. Yehoshua and especially Amos Oz are sincere, talented or committed to the peacefulness they profess: in short, it attacks the idea that they’re to be admired at all.
The conviction that so repugnant a regime cannot have been effective and must have been a mistake, even from the regime’s point of view, is deeply entrenched in the historiography of the period.
I remember reading a letter of Trajan’s in secondary school in which he expressed concerns that his regime was burning people alive under false suspicion. He stressed the importance of making absolutely certain a person was a Christian before burning them alive. I found it fascinating at the time that I was sitting in a nominally Protestant school being taught that the letter gave evidence of how humane Trajan was. We’re taught to be similarly context-sensitive, and similarly generous, towards medieval judges who refused to accept local prejudice and demanded ‘evidence’ before condemning a witch to the stake. What makes ‘Bloody Mary’ so different? Even John Foxe, a man determined to discredit his former associates, reports that bishops delayed for months before burning a defiant Protestant, trying to secure a conversion. They seemed genuinely distressed that a person who had been baptised a Catholic (as they all were) should condemn themselves to hell. They accepted and indeed encouraged half-hearted recantations, hoping that a daily life of Catholic behaviour would in time lead to inward conformity and thence to heaven.
The great majority soon reverted to Catholicism, Duffy reports. Nobody had really liked the rapacious reign of Edward, and Henry VIII had never bothered much about Christ’s presence in the sacrament once the Pope had been got out of the way. Burnings slowed after a couple of years not because the campaign wasn’t working - as we would all like to believe - but because it was.
He dismantles some other myths: that the leaders Mary cobbled together were mediocre (university-trained theologians almost to a man, led by a cardinal who had come within one vote of being Pope); that preaching was considered unimportant (letters and rulings of the time talk about the utmost necessity of good preaching in every parish); that the regime failed to use the printing press (simply wrong).
I suspect it’s because the personalities of Henry VIII’s reign and Elizabeth I’s are so familiar to us all. Look at The Tudors! Look at The Other Boleyn Girl! Look at Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Years! All of these arise from and reinforce a culture that’s so interested in the periods that they now seem as familiar and comfortable as an old sock. Elizabeth’s reign has been glorified, for a number of decent reasons. Henry’s hasn’t, but that’s not the point.
It’s frightening to think that in just four years of the decade that separated those familiar old reigns, 274 people were burned alive for professing their faith. The excuse of “that was then and this is now” no longer holds good, it seems. It’s frightening - and here I tread on dangerous ground - that the Protestantism ushered in for shabby reasons under Henry and cleaned up and entrenched under Elizabeth came so close to obliteration before it had settled in. Protestant England is an important aspect of England’s identity, after all, and pre-Protestant England isn’t given the identity of ‘Catholic England’.
So it may be easier to think of Mary’s reign as a nasty punctuation mark which never reached the hearts of the people.
Laor’s book is a simpler, if more puzzling, text. Some of the literary mincemeat is so swoopingly well-done I sputtered:
Dear reader, should you have failed to read these classics, you can now imbibe of them indirectly through the meditation of Amos Oz’s aunts and grandmothers. This is the same classic canon as that of yesterday and the day before, for this is an eternal list and the Oz family has thrived under its protective shade. The narcissistic delight, dear reader, is all yours, thanks to the ideal self of the author.
I had been expecting a book by an Israeli dissident that echoed a few sentences I read in an article recently: that many Israelis identifying as social liberals were developing a solipsism about the Occupation, ignoring it rather than attempting to integrate it into their worldview, Israelview. Instead I got half a book of personal attack and half a book about an Israeli fantasy of being Westerners, and successful attempts to woo European Christians into believing it so that the two societies could present a pre-Holocaust “Judeo-Christian” identity that never really existed, and thus unite against Islam.
I couldn’t say whether this analysis of an Israeli fantasy is correct or not, but this sentence about photographs that Israel releases certainly rings true:
Every day there were photographs of “chicks”, most of them blondes, all of them soldiers in the “innocent” army.
They do tend to be very light-skinned and light-haired in those pictures, don’t they? Laor reports that popular literature up until the 1980s was full of Israeli-born blonds, “contrasting with the Diaspora Jew”. He theorises in fact that this was halted by the cinema, since it was impossible to find enough blond Israeli actors.
The book introduced its fascinating theme and then dived soon into tearing down the intellectuals. There’s a combination of glee and rage in Laor’s attitute and if half of what he says is true I can’t blame his frustration - Amos Oz has received eighteen awards, according to Wikipedia, since 1984! Mostly from European institutions. The bits quoted from his autobiography do seem extremely empty and self-serving, and Laor rages against the injustice of his autobiography being seen throughout Europe and Israel as ‘also the story of a nation’ when not a single non-Ashkenazi Jew appears. Laor also accuses him of erasing the identity of Holocaust victims in order to propitiate Europeans. Oz described European Jewry as “over-enthusiastic Europhiles... who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage...” wanted to “break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship...” It sounds servile.
Fully one-third of the book is devoted to Oz-bashing, after which we come to Yehoshua. Here Laor may not be against the consensus. Wikipedia it is true mentions only that he is known for being “an ardent, untiring activist in the Israeli Peace Movement” but the top Google search I found is an article in Haaretz where Gideon Levy writes an open letter to Yehoshua opposing his position that war is the only way to win peace.
For the nature of the war proposed, Laor quotes a 2004 Haaretz article of Yehoshua’s:
“We will not have to run around looking for this terrorist or that instigator - we will make use of force against an entire population. We will use total force”.
Laor links him with the theme of Europhilia by discussing the distate Yehoshua has expressed for his Mizrahi, non-European background, on many occasions. Then the book closes with a scene from Hanoch Levin’s play Those Who Walk In Darkness, about a thought of a Polish herring who longs for a delicate, heavenly spirit of the Sorbonne. Levin, Laor explains, has not been translated into English and is unlikely to be, because “the West asks our writers to represent “a collective”. But real writers are not ambassadors.”
Hmm. I haven’t properly reviewed this book at all, just tried to verbalise what it seemed to be about. It’s an angry polemic which makes me feel angry. I feel especially angry reading of an Israeli propaganda campaign to make Europe believe that Israel is a European frontier now that Mossad has compromised the security of my country, and other European countries, by stealing our passports to make their assassination squads more effective. But I need to know more background. Any suggestions for further reading?
Gendered Fields: Women, Men & Ethnography edited by Diane Bell, Pat Caplan and Wazir Jahan Karim.
I don’t possess the vocabulary to properly discuss a text aimed at academics (it’s been a while since sociolinguistics class and I remember ‘discourse’ but forget ‘hermeneutics’) but many of the 15 articles were powerful. A male contributor confronted head-on the notion that exploring a gendered situation was all about women figuring out where they stood. Male anthropologists must realise that they too are gendered, and must accordingly realise that the actions of those they study are affected by the gender of the fieldworker. Saddest were the descriptions of the Lisu of Thailand and the Kalentan of Malaysia, societies where women had been equal participants in the economy. Stripping away of old livelihoods meant that men travel outside the community to find work and women are left as frustrated dependants.
The collection was published in 1993. A quiet trend that Bell noted in her introduction has I think grown since then: the popularity of the ‘confessional’ or autobiographical style of anthropological publications, previously a style marginalised as unprofessional and feminine.
Midwifwery and Medicine in Early Modern France and Louise Bourgeois by Wendy Perkins. Misleading rubbish. I gave up on it when it became clear that it would do little but paraphrase obscure midwifery manuals from c. 1600, without bothering to compare the techniques to the modern day, explain what a ‘clyster’ was or even on many occasions remember to translate from the original French of the period, while at the same time complaining about how tricky the contents were!
“I'm a poverty-stricken student who spends an unhealthy amount of time wondering where I can possibly fit new bookshelves in my bedroom.”
No longer a poverty-stricken student, I’m now a poverty-stricken young worker trying to find my way through the the corporate maze (and haze). I finished Oxford in the summer of 2009 and found the job in Dublin not too long afterwards.
The bookshelves problem became acute several months ago when my boyfriend moved in with me, and eased up recently when we added new ones at a level we could just reach. It will soon be solved entirely by his departure to West Africa. It’s intended that the stint last only for two years or so, and the nature of the job he’s taken up means he’ll have plenty of opportunities to come home. I’m reasonably confident we won’t stray, but less confident that I’ll deal well with his absence.
I’m updating my LibraryThing because of a weekend trip to London which resulted in a foot injury and a bunch of fascinating nonfiction books from the Charing Cross Road. I’ve spent all evenings but two this week being a shut-in with a pile of pillows and a pile of books, and here’s what I’ve read.
Quiet Killers: The Fall and Rise of Deadly Diseases by Robert Baker.
Here’s a book that did exactly what it said on the tin. The familiar grim reapers of smallpox, TB, yellow fever and of course bubonic plague (separated neatly from its more lethal offshoot, pneumonic plague) were paraded, and the attempts to investigate and cure them. I was particularly struck by the awful descriptions of yellow fever given my proposed visit to West Africa at Christmas! There’s a vaccine but no cure. The mosquito-as-vector theory was first established by the awful method of asking a soldier if he was afraid of a little bug and getting him to volunteer for a bite. (He survived; a happy ending in a way.)
Recent diseases were given equal space. It was interesting that the book had been published when the avian flu scare was abating but before swine flu had come on the scene. Baker wrote that if asked to guess the nature of the next big scare, he would say: i) it will be a virus; ii) it will come from animals but eventually transmit between humans; iii) it will arise in an area of the world with a primitive healthcare system. All correct.
Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor by Eamon Duffy
The Myths of Liberal Zionism by Yitzhak Laor
Under the cut, I consider these two very different books for the reason that they both attack sacred cows. (Sacred cows I hadn’t been much aware of beforehand, which made them more interesting and doubtless more persuasive.) Duffy’s book is a carefully ordered attack on the consensus that the project to restore Catholicism was not only heavy-handed but also mediocre, unimaginative and doomed from the start. He even uses the word ‘heroes’ on the last page. Laor’s is an odd fish, just like the anthropomorphic herring in the last chapter. It begins with a general theme, then narrows into an attack. This attack is on the consensus that prominent Israeli intellectuals A. B. Yehoshua and especially Amos Oz are sincere, talented or committed to the peacefulness they profess: in short, it attacks the idea that they’re to be admired at all.
The conviction that so repugnant a regime cannot have been effective and must have been a mistake, even from the regime’s point of view, is deeply entrenched in the historiography of the period.
I remember reading a letter of Trajan’s in secondary school in which he expressed concerns that his regime was burning people alive under false suspicion. He stressed the importance of making absolutely certain a person was a Christian before burning them alive. I found it fascinating at the time that I was sitting in a nominally Protestant school being taught that the letter gave evidence of how humane Trajan was. We’re taught to be similarly context-sensitive, and similarly generous, towards medieval judges who refused to accept local prejudice and demanded ‘evidence’ before condemning a witch to the stake. What makes ‘Bloody Mary’ so different? Even John Foxe, a man determined to discredit his former associates, reports that bishops delayed for months before burning a defiant Protestant, trying to secure a conversion. They seemed genuinely distressed that a person who had been baptised a Catholic (as they all were) should condemn themselves to hell. They accepted and indeed encouraged half-hearted recantations, hoping that a daily life of Catholic behaviour would in time lead to inward conformity and thence to heaven.
The great majority soon reverted to Catholicism, Duffy reports. Nobody had really liked the rapacious reign of Edward, and Henry VIII had never bothered much about Christ’s presence in the sacrament once the Pope had been got out of the way. Burnings slowed after a couple of years not because the campaign wasn’t working - as we would all like to believe - but because it was.
He dismantles some other myths: that the leaders Mary cobbled together were mediocre (university-trained theologians almost to a man, led by a cardinal who had come within one vote of being Pope); that preaching was considered unimportant (letters and rulings of the time talk about the utmost necessity of good preaching in every parish); that the regime failed to use the printing press (simply wrong).
I suspect it’s because the personalities of Henry VIII’s reign and Elizabeth I’s are so familiar to us all. Look at The Tudors! Look at The Other Boleyn Girl! Look at Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Years! All of these arise from and reinforce a culture that’s so interested in the periods that they now seem as familiar and comfortable as an old sock. Elizabeth’s reign has been glorified, for a number of decent reasons. Henry’s hasn’t, but that’s not the point.
It’s frightening to think that in just four years of the decade that separated those familiar old reigns, 274 people were burned alive for professing their faith. The excuse of “that was then and this is now” no longer holds good, it seems. It’s frightening - and here I tread on dangerous ground - that the Protestantism ushered in for shabby reasons under Henry and cleaned up and entrenched under Elizabeth came so close to obliteration before it had settled in. Protestant England is an important aspect of England’s identity, after all, and pre-Protestant England isn’t given the identity of ‘Catholic England’.
So it may be easier to think of Mary’s reign as a nasty punctuation mark which never reached the hearts of the people.
Laor’s book is a simpler, if more puzzling, text. Some of the literary mincemeat is so swoopingly well-done I sputtered:
Dear reader, should you have failed to read these classics, you can now imbibe of them indirectly through the meditation of Amos Oz’s aunts and grandmothers. This is the same classic canon as that of yesterday and the day before, for this is an eternal list and the Oz family has thrived under its protective shade. The narcissistic delight, dear reader, is all yours, thanks to the ideal self of the author.
I had been expecting a book by an Israeli dissident that echoed a few sentences I read in an article recently: that many Israelis identifying as social liberals were developing a solipsism about the Occupation, ignoring it rather than attempting to integrate it into their worldview, Israelview. Instead I got half a book of personal attack and half a book about an Israeli fantasy of being Westerners, and successful attempts to woo European Christians into believing it so that the two societies could present a pre-Holocaust “Judeo-Christian” identity that never really existed, and thus unite against Islam.
I couldn’t say whether this analysis of an Israeli fantasy is correct or not, but this sentence about photographs that Israel releases certainly rings true:
Every day there were photographs of “chicks”, most of them blondes, all of them soldiers in the “innocent” army.
They do tend to be very light-skinned and light-haired in those pictures, don’t they? Laor reports that popular literature up until the 1980s was full of Israeli-born blonds, “contrasting with the Diaspora Jew”. He theorises in fact that this was halted by the cinema, since it was impossible to find enough blond Israeli actors.
The book introduced its fascinating theme and then dived soon into tearing down the intellectuals. There’s a combination of glee and rage in Laor’s attitute and if half of what he says is true I can’t blame his frustration - Amos Oz has received eighteen awards, according to Wikipedia, since 1984! Mostly from European institutions. The bits quoted from his autobiography do seem extremely empty and self-serving, and Laor rages against the injustice of his autobiography being seen throughout Europe and Israel as ‘also the story of a nation’ when not a single non-Ashkenazi Jew appears. Laor also accuses him of erasing the identity of Holocaust victims in order to propitiate Europeans. Oz described European Jewry as “over-enthusiastic Europhiles... who believed in its moral superiority, appreciated its ballet and opera, cultivated its heritage...” wanted to “break through its cool hostility with frantic courtship...” It sounds servile.
Fully one-third of the book is devoted to Oz-bashing, after which we come to Yehoshua. Here Laor may not be against the consensus. Wikipedia it is true mentions only that he is known for being “an ardent, untiring activist in the Israeli Peace Movement” but the top Google search I found is an article in Haaretz where Gideon Levy writes an open letter to Yehoshua opposing his position that war is the only way to win peace.
For the nature of the war proposed, Laor quotes a 2004 Haaretz article of Yehoshua’s:
“We will not have to run around looking for this terrorist or that instigator - we will make use of force against an entire population. We will use total force”.
Laor links him with the theme of Europhilia by discussing the distate Yehoshua has expressed for his Mizrahi, non-European background, on many occasions. Then the book closes with a scene from Hanoch Levin’s play Those Who Walk In Darkness, about a thought of a Polish herring who longs for a delicate, heavenly spirit of the Sorbonne. Levin, Laor explains, has not been translated into English and is unlikely to be, because “the West asks our writers to represent “a collective”. But real writers are not ambassadors.”
Hmm. I haven’t properly reviewed this book at all, just tried to verbalise what it seemed to be about. It’s an angry polemic which makes me feel angry. I feel especially angry reading of an Israeli propaganda campaign to make Europe believe that Israel is a European frontier now that Mossad has compromised the security of my country, and other European countries, by stealing our passports to make their assassination squads more effective. But I need to know more background. Any suggestions for further reading?
Gendered Fields: Women, Men & Ethnography edited by Diane Bell, Pat Caplan and Wazir Jahan Karim.
I don’t possess the vocabulary to properly discuss a text aimed at academics (it’s been a while since sociolinguistics class and I remember ‘discourse’ but forget ‘hermeneutics’) but many of the 15 articles were powerful. A male contributor confronted head-on the notion that exploring a gendered situation was all about women figuring out where they stood. Male anthropologists must realise that they too are gendered, and must accordingly realise that the actions of those they study are affected by the gender of the fieldworker. Saddest were the descriptions of the Lisu of Thailand and the Kalentan of Malaysia, societies where women had been equal participants in the economy. Stripping away of old livelihoods meant that men travel outside the community to find work and women are left as frustrated dependants.
The collection was published in 1993. A quiet trend that Bell noted in her introduction has I think grown since then: the popularity of the ‘confessional’ or autobiographical style of anthropological publications, previously a style marginalised as unprofessional and feminine.
Midwifwery and Medicine in Early Modern France and Louise Bourgeois by Wendy Perkins. Misleading rubbish. I gave up on it when it became clear that it would do little but paraphrase obscure midwifery manuals from c. 1600, without bothering to compare the techniques to the modern day, explain what a ‘clyster’ was or even on many occasions remember to translate from the original French of the period, while at the same time complaining about how tricky the contents were!