Friday five or so

[oursin]

Suspend your belief on a very fragile thread - though it is a rom-com, so being prepared to accept the dubiously realistic is there from the get go: Tartan and tinsel: a Scottish castle-dwelling novelist on Brooke Shields’ new romcom: [T]his is not a film you want to get into authenticity arguments with.... Obviously, they have never had a conversation with Historic Environment Scotland about changing one tiny windowsill in a protected building. Myles is theoretically impoverished, but he has never had to sell any of the paintings or antique furniture.... At one point, Sophie mentions that she has bats in her bedroom and nobody does what they normally do in Scotland: freeze and swear among themselves never to mention it again, in case your house is immediately confiscated as a bat sanctuary.
Not so much. Did Not Do The Research, as, Research? What Research?
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This is a story to make archivists laugh, cry, shake their heads, and swap similar tales over drinks: Logbooks linked to Antarctic explorers Shackleton and Scott found in storage room. ‘Priceless’ artefacts recording details of the famed expeditions of the 1910s were discovered in the vaults of New Zealand’s meteorological service: “No one had any idea that they even existed. I mean, it’s long forgotten, they’ve probably been sitting on the same shelf for 50 years,” Alder said.
Groans: The artefacts were in excellent condition, he said, because they had been housed in a cool dark room. “There’s almost no deterioration whatsoever. It’s amazing, because they have been written in old ink with quill pens.”
Let's preserve them by digitising them - oh wait...
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I think I may have posted here a bit about this saga some while ago: The great yellow golliwog panic of 1961. You know what I would really, really like to hear about this: some little old lady who was at the unnamed school in question to turn up and say, 'oh, that's what we said, but it was a wind-up, we just liked making and wearing them' (or it had some innocuous meaning).
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This is Male authors: the sun also sets not a very good article. Glancing over literary pages there still seem to be a lots of novels by blokes being published, and the reviews being by same, I am by no means convinced that the field is as heavily feminised at the author seems to think, just because for a few years and for a few awards women have been getting a crack of the whip for once, and there are one or two getting critical acclaim and mega-deals. O hai, here comes that dreadful scribbling sisterhood again, woe, woe, infamy, infamy.

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And I can only smirk and shake my head when he suggests that male authors can find a niche in genre fiction (like wot the wymmynz have done for lo, generations). Maybe this is not quite as bad as that Giles Coren piece (which appears to be behind a paywall: 'Men are write-offs when it comes to novels... it’s clear writing is no job for a man'.
Poor dears.
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From that note, I think I will conclude with this piece on the stereotyping of the working-class hero as the white male industrial worker. (Though I did at one point mutter, 'what about the matchgirls?' simply because they are such an iconic example of women's labour activism.)

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