The British creativity I grew up with - in pop, fashion, poetry, the visual arts and the novel - has almost always come from outside the mainstream

A codslap (one of several) delivered to That Person Woezing About Diversity = End of Civilisation, or something.
Which sounded awfully like those wails whenever the playing field does actually become ( Read more... )

I recently averred, my dearios, that my research methodology is arcane, idiosyncratic, and uncommunicable, and probably unreplicable.

However, I realised today that (apart from the 'cites?' and the 'take down the references') I do have a research methodology.

It's called applying seat of pants to seat of chair and reading (may be books/articles, ( Read more... )

Came across this whilst perusing a stack of elderly Times Highers whilst ensuring that the readers had the items they had requested and were not busily engaged in destroying or stealing them:
An English-language journal has recently been launched in Germany that focuses on "failed" research. That is, it publishes material rejected by mainstream ( Read more... )

Inspired by an exchange on one of my scholarly lists this morning in which someone said they were not intending reading new book on a particular subject because they'd already read previous works addressing it.

Excluding the possibility that a new work might, you know, bring something new to an existing debate...

And recognising that I am myself ( Read more... )

Somebody on my reading list linked what was really rather a good article on research for historical novelists and re-enactors and the difference between primary, secondary and tertiary sources, plus, how other people's historical novels are not evidential documentation and do not constitute srs research.

Except that they seemed completely to ( Read more... )

Yes, it's the detailed deconstruction of the Freeman-Mead controversy, which I always feel Freeman basically cheated on in the first place by only starting it once Margaret Mead was safely dead. This book does nothing to change my feelings that Freeman's case was always a bit dodgy (different informants, different periods, different genders, and ( Read more... )

Further to report yesterday in my link roundup about a coarse bawdy poem 'Extempore upon a Faggot' which a young scholar has claimed (and got widely reported to the press) to be by Milton, because it's called 'Extempore upon a Faggot, by Milton' in the early C18th miscellany under examination.

SOURCEZ U HAV NOT CHECKT THEM.

A spot of googling has ( Read more... )

Call for Papers: Feminism, Blogging, and the Historical Profession ( Read more... )

Some months ago I posted about my immediate reaction to the concept of Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 by Lisa Appignanesi. A few weeks ago I dispatched an essay review of same to A Specialist Journal.

Writing that essay was the underlying reason for my solicitation of instances of Mad Male Writers & Artists - ( Read more... )

I know it's in the poorest of ton to quote compliments that people have made one, but this, from callunav was very thought-provoking and I don't think I can go into the thoughts that riffed off it without citing:
You demonstrate - habitually, maybe even casually - that it's entirely possible and useful to explore at least a part of a complicated issue, and ( Read more... )