Linkasserie: sanitation, motherhood, fatherhood, masculinity, Sissinghurst and snarkery
The waste remains, the waste remains and kills:
Two reviews of Rose George's The Big Necessity: Adventures in the World of Human Waste, which sounds like an excellent study of a neglected subject (except in the form of jokey titles like Flushed with Pride). But shouldn't the Science Editor of the Observer be a bit more aware of the history of public health and thus not encounter the concept of the importance of good sewage systems to improvements in life expectancy, morbidity reduction, etc, as if Startling New Idea?
How confident are we that this is going to get anything like the coverage that the negative spin on the topic does? 90 per cent of mothers believe their career makes them good role models - I'm not sure that the survey methodology is any more suspect than in any of the counter-examples.
Mothers and the age debate: when is it best to have babies? - well, can I wave hands, feet and prehensible tail and say that there might be different advantages/disadvantages at any age, and that these might be quite strongly inflected by economic and social factors, and that You Can't Have It All (such as the energy of youth AND the wisdom/perspective of experience) and that It's Always More Complicated?
And let's give a thought to this, while we're thinking about mothers: More than 500,000 women die in pregnancy or childbirth every year in the developing world due to lack of proper care.
Wot abaht Teh Menz???
Bloomsbury's pocket-size 100 Must-Read Books for Men is explicitly a response to Tim Lott's attack on the Orange prize as sexist, aiming to take further "the debate around whether men are neglected by the British book industry" (scroll down in order to point and mock):
A scan of the list suggests men have no interest whatsoever in serious non-fiction or novels about normal, non-transgressive relationships.... What they do apparently crave are porn, drugs and violence. Besides García Márquez, weird sex is supplied by JG Ballard, Georges Bataille, George MacDonald Fraser (because Flashman is a rapist, the accompanying blurb usefully points out), Henry Miller, Alex Trocchi and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch; druggy excess by the likes of William Burroughs, Carlos Castaneda, Bret Easton Ellis and Hunter S Thompson; violence by thrillers, non-fiction war stories and novels such as Fight Club. It is possible to feel stereotyped.
This stereotyping is rather borne out by Stephen Bayley's wittering about the sexxiness of cars: A car is the most symbolically rich thing we ever buy.... No other artefact sucks such cupidity and yearning from its consumers. Cars are overwhelmingly potent - what do you mean 'we', white middleclass man?
Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex by Andrew Wilson.
Barbara Ellen, The case against Fathers 4 Justice is now proven:
A study by the Oxford Centre for Family Law and Policy was set up by the Ministry of Justice to look into non-resident parents being awarded little or no contact with their children for the flimsiest of reasons. Last week, the study concluded that the vast majority of separated fathers enjoy access to their children. Only one in 10 cases ends up in court, the rest having been agreed between the parents. When the cases do go to court, more than three-quarters of the applicants, mainly fathers, are able to resolve contact issues, with only a small percentage denied contact altogether, in the interests of the children involved.
....
Could it be, as I have long suspected, that, for many members of fathers' groups, it's always been less about justice-seeking than it has been about attention-seeking? While these fathers' groups may have been set up with the best of intentions, they evolved all too quickly into social clubs for miserable sods who wanted a free pass to whine about women.
Indeed, these past years, isn't it arguable that these campaigning dads have done more than any spiteful female to denigrate and undermine the concept of fatherhood, not to mention make a farce of it? Consider for one moment the frightening thought patterns that lead a grown man to think dressing up as Spiderman is his best shot at being taken seriously.
....
It says something that one hears stories about how some of these campaigning dads fail to show up to see their children because they're far too busy ... campaigning to see them! It makes you wonder who's in those costumes - are they genuinely wounded and devoted dads or drama queens who find the cause far more exciting than actual fathering could ever be?
It's time for disgruntled, estranged dads to realise that women simply cannot stop men being fathers. Only men can stop men being fathers.
Kathryn Hughes reviews Adam Nicolson's book about being the chatelain (can men be chatelains?) of Sissinghurst (but fails to invoke V Sackville-West's long poem The Land, surely pertinent to offspring's agrarian ambitions?):
Reading this book, I found myself obsessing about male primogeniture. It was, after all, Vita's unfortunate gender which meant that she had to give up Knole and buy Sissinghurst in the first place. Nicolson mentions several times that he has sisters, one of them older, yet it is he who inherited the family home on the death of their father in 2004. When they get a moment off from listening to Adam bang on about the connectedness, integrity and delight that he's going to restore to their childhood landscape, don't these women, the elder one especially, feel the urge to pinch him very hard indeed?
A book which could be, but apparently is not, fascinating: The Hellfire Clubs: Sex, Satanism and Secret Societies by Evelyn Lord.
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When a debut novel arrives heralded by a seven-figure advance in America and comparisons with Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, you approach it with a mixture of curiosity and scepticism:
The elevated literary company in which it has been placed turns out to be the usual lazy shorthand of publicists and booksellers; it resembles The English Patient only in that both feature a burns victim and The Name of the Rose only in that both contain the word 'scriptorium'.
....
[T]here is no doubt that Davidson has done his research: the process of debridement, for example - the regular cutting away of putrefying flesh, 'not unlike the way a vegetable peeler removes skin from food' - is described clinically. So much so, in fact, that you suspect he has lifted much of it from medical textbooks (two are credited in his acknowledgements).
....
As a work of imagination, The Gargoyle is original and daring; the problem is that the author's talent as a writer does not match the audacity of that imagination. Davidson's prose is so lumpen and banal that his sentences make the reader wince far more than any of the medical procedures he describes. Despite all his background reading, he fails to find the alchemy that brings a story to life.
O dear, I think this sounds like a case of the poulet de bresse ruined by the crap chef.
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And Tom Holland suggests that the classics are in revival (deponent knoweth not whether this be wishful thinking).
Also, biography of the fascinating Joseph Needham, scientist, polyglot, traveller, diplomat, Christian, socialist, exponent of free love, nudist, morris dancer and Sinophile. Totally another person I need to follow up for the Future Project.