Links (do read)
The Black History Timeline that the Guardian has been doing this week, for Black History Month (and some additional material).
Dept of Don't These People Know Anything, Anything At All?
Why steampunk as a concept makes me grind my teeth and want to hit people with codfish:
That's the great thing about this - Victorian women were repressed, but steampunk women are the opposite of that. They're tough adventurers and they've got tools and they're ready to go."
*Starts making list of Victorian women who would have had this ill-informed nitwit for breakfast, starting with QV herself.*
MI ICELANDIC SAGAS, LET ME SHOW U THEM (u iggerant pig):
Sitting in the bar is young Charlie Strand, a half-British, half-Icelandic photographer and writer who has just published a book, Project: Iceland, chronicling the lives of some of the artists, musicians and designers in the vanguard of this unexpected flowering of far-Nordic talent. He's not altogether sure where it all comes from, he admits.
"Maybe it's because the arts are so new here, there's no tradition anyone has to follow. The landscape, nature, definitely has something to do with it: there's a kind of mental freedom here, a desire to do things your own way. There's no celebrity culture, none at all. That helps. And no one makes real money being an artist in Iceland, which says a lot about their real motivation. But it's true to say there's a very unusual level of creativity here.
And that might just be why the Icelanders featured heavily in Some Book I Had To Read For The Famous Foundation Year (in the 60s, but I think it was published well before that) about the influence of climate on culture, as a society/culture which has for centuries countered expectations about the likely cultural output of a small, far-northern country with (for most of those centuries) a subsistence economy.
Could perhaps do without all the Icelanders going on about how they used to have to walk everywhere uphill in the snow and ice, on a mouthful of rotted shark, before being corrupted by Plenty.
Scots wae hae:
The French have a penchant for tartan that goes way back to the auld alliance.
The Auld Alliance - initiated 1295. Tartan invented by English textile manufacturers (with nods to Ossian, W Scott, etc), early C19th. Has at the writer with a haggis.