Short Thoughts: "How [Not] To Do It"

And to those of you who realised the complicated Python joke I just made: congratulations. Now go outside and get some fresh air. I'll join you momentarily.

At the library a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of The Discovery of Jeanne Baret, by Glynis Ridley. While the book sells itself nicely -- the cover is attractive; the blurbs impressive; and the subject matter highly appealing as we'll see -- why I actually picked it up is an old Beverley Nichols book on gardens -- one of many he wrote and they're all wonderful light reading if you're looking for something so English it creaks -- where he -- or possibly the character he wrote to stand in for Aldous Huxley? -- tells the story of the discovery of the bougainvillea in tropical seas.

The story involves the simultaneous discovery that the assistant of the botanist credited with the discovery of the plant was discovered to be a woman. The story as Nichols tells it -- or retells it; I don't have the book to hand -- is pleasingly vague and focussed mostly on the discovery of the plant rather than on anything to do with the young woman...although it does suggest she had a less than pleasant afternoon with the sailors on the island where the bougainvillea bloomed so plentifully.

Ridley has discovered this story, too -- why not, after all? It's a great story! Enlightenment France, botanical discovery, trans-oceanic voyages, cross-dressing -- what's not to like? Well, lots, frankly, at least in Ridley's handling.

I must say, in all fairness, I didn't finish the book. But there are reasons and I'll get there in as short a fashion as I can. To put it as briefly as possible: Ridley commits just about every version of the sin of presentism in writing history as it is possible to commit. In addition to this, with the self-announced, loudly trumpeted goal of giving Jeanne Baret, the young cross-dressing botanist, her voice and agency as an individual back, Ridley only redefines the role of victim and Baret really moves nowhere.

Admittedly, this is not entirely Ridley's fault. Baret left only questionable written evidence behind -- some papers in the botanist Commerson's collection have been tentatively reidentified as in her hand -- and no cache of letters, diaries, or notes from any point in her life, to say nothing of the climactic voyage of discovery have been found to help along the curious researcher.

Despite this, excellent biographies have been written by historians with equally shady or scattered or shadowed evidence -- Annette Gordon-Reed, anyone? To say nothing of Laurel Thatcher Ulrich -- she had more evidence, yes, but the skull-sweat needed to make it into anything useful is just staggering.

I wish I could say that Ridley had done the same kind of work in rehabilitating Baret and bringing her back to the central role she may deserve in the botanizing of French ships in the tropics. Instead, she reduces Baret to the status of a hanger-on, even falling into the fatal trap of putting unjustified words, thoughts, and emotions into her experience to justify what to Ridley seems like the obvious. Well, yes -- it is the obvious to a 21st century reader (at least, a certain type of 21st century reader), but not so much to an 18th century French peasant woman. She probably lived with a very different type of obvious and to pretend anything else is to do a radical disservice to her.

I really wanted The Discovery... to be something better than it was; when it descended to the level of imaginary psychobiography, I was done.

What Baret did -- even when seen through the lens of other contemporary diaries and accounts -- was phenomenal, even if you only consider what she did in France: moving from the countryside to Paris with her richer, better-educated lover; leaving her family behind permanently in the south; taking over housekeeping of a Paris household; bearing a child and leaving it at an orphanage at her lover's insistence -- and then the capstone experience (if you wish to see it like that) of choosing to cross-dress and accompany said lover on a massively dangerous ocean voyage with no promise of pay-off. Are you kidding me? You couldn't write a novel that good! And to reduce Baret's choices and motivation to those of "following her lover" and "rape trauma" as Ridley does is deeply disrespectful.


Ahem.

Rant over.

And before you go on with your day, please enjoy this lovely photo of Beverley Nichols with some of his cats.

Short Thought: Reasons to Put a Book Down

I picked up Fred Inglis' A Short History of Celebrity at the library after recognizing the cover from seeing it in an advert in the London Review of Books. The premise is simple enough and pretty much all there in the title: celebrity is not a modern phenomenon -- or at least it is only if you're willing to take "modern" in the sense of the historical modern which means it's part of a period that stretches roughly back to the French Revolution or, possibly for those of us who are generously minded in these things, a few decades earlier -- say the middle of the 18th century at least. Celebrity encompasses fame, notoriety, scandal, recognition -- all sorts of things that are totally recognizable to anyone living today who has even a passing acquaintance with Hollywood, Bollywood, the BAFTAs, the Oscars, a political election, or the internet.

So far, so good, and Inglis is an amusing and highly informed writer. He takes the stance of the 'fusty but (accidentally) up-to-date old don' -- not a bad stance to take since it lets him deal in classics with as much ease as it does with recent tabloid publications. He zooms through the 18th and 19th centuries without much of a glitch; I don't know if I agree with everything he says -- if put to it, I'd probably say I think he could stand to do a bit more thinking about the differences and intersections between fame, notoriety, and celebrity as concepts. I think he conflates American and British or European culture a little too readily. But in general terms -- yes, I'll go along with what he says. Celebrities reflect something back to the culture or society from which they spring; there is a closely knit, reciprocal, sometimes damaging relationship that can prove to be entirely too hothouse for either one or both of the parties involved. Things can go to hell in a handbasket very quickly and public favor can be entirely fickle.

But.

Neither of these people are Jimmy Stewart.
But those are donuts.

Then he hits the 20th century and starts to talk about film and things all go a bit weird. When I really hit a rock and, to be honest with you, stopped reading with any attention, was when he tried to tell me that Jimmy Stewart was the star of It Happened One Night. Er. Not so much, my friends. Check himself out over there on the right. It isn't her, either.

I must admit, this is a minor point -- and yet, it kind of isn't. When it comes in the middle of a major point in Inglis' argument about the nature of stardom and celebrity and Jimmy Stewart is one of three American actors -- actors, mind you, not performers, note the gender of the pronoun -- he has chosen to represent his argument -- it kind of is a big point. It makes me wonder if he has done his research properly; it isn't as if Stewart doesn't have plenty of big-name films in his back catalogue -- or even plenty of romantic comedies, come to that: The Philadelphia Story comes zooming right to mind without much effort and that even involves Cary Grant, one of Inglis' other picks.

When Inglis also talks about Cary Grant and discusses His Girl Friday at length without talking about the story's back-history as both a stage play and a moderately successful film adaptation prior to the massively successful Russell/Grant vehicle that most people know -- I start to wonder again. But when he simply misattributes a pretty important film -- then I'm really unhappy. Not that I argue with his choice of Stewart as a seminal male performer in the history of American cinema; no, there I'm right with him. Absolutely fine choice. Grant, likewise; ditto John Wayne. No problems. But I wish I felt he'd done his homework.

As soon as he hit the 20th century -- and film and TV in particular -- Inglis' whole argument started to feel facile and glib -- Sunday supplement stuff decrying the lapses in cultural standards since "the good old days," not the intellectual exploration he had promised.

So, yes, Mr. Inglis and I are done with each other. I thank him for the amusing half-dozen chapters or so but I think he should learn to love IMdb a little bit more.

Short Thought: "The Last Place on Earth"

A few months ago I wrote a post about how I've been on a nonfiction reading kick lately. That really hasn't stopped and my last entry in the reading list was Roland Huntford's The Last Place on Earth, a sort of combo thumbnail biography of Captain Robert Scott and Roald Amundsen and Polar exploration in general, culminating with a blow-by-blow account of the English and Norwegian expeditions to discover the South Pole in 1911.

The shortest of all possible short thoughts I can come up with for this book is this: if you want to read something that will convince you that Scott was the biggest plonker of all time, read this book. Me being me, I am going to go find another biography of Scott and find out if Huntford's total lack of respect was deserved or merely the result of personal dislike. Because biographers and historians in general do like or dislike their subjects -- and I don't mean in terms of "Well, I like thinking about nationalism so I'm going to write about modern Israel" or "The Wars of the Roses are fascinating, so it's pre-Tudor England for me!" I mean that we develop real, visceral, sometimes painful and awkward attachment to or revulsion from our topics.

I read another biography recently -- Dancing to the Precipice, by Caroline Moorehead -- which is a perfect example of this problem. Moorehead is writing about the diary of a woman named Lucie de la Tour du Pin, whose life spanned all the French Revolutions to the mid-nineteenth century. She lived in France, England, and America for long periods and travelled mainland Europe fairly extensively. She and her husband were, literally, at the heart of the French court -- or Republic -- or the next court -- or the next republic. He was a career soldier and then a diplomat, quite highly respected at the time, and she was a socialite and "good wife," a career in itself. The book is based on Lucie's personal diary which looks to be an absolutely fascinating document written in later life to tell her whole life's story. Examined by a less partial historian, I think the diary would be hot stuff -- even in Moorehead's highly partial and deeply biased telling, Lucie comes out as a fascinating character.

The problem with all this is that Moorehead is so invested in Lucie being so many things -- a modern woman (read: 20th century woman) before her time; a perfect wife; a wonderful mother; a subtle diplomat; a clever hostess -- that Lucie has no faults. Her obvious self-deceptions and 180-degree changes in opinion, belief, or ideology (which come out in the longer passages from the diary despite Moorehead's brilliant ability to ignore or read over them), not to mention her ability to surf successfully through the rapidly changing and very dangerous waters of post-Revolution France speak to her being a woman with a highly flexible moral code, to say nothing of political views that could change with the lightest breeze from Paris. Not that any of this is a bad thing! Lucie was very successful at what she did: she survived, for heaven's sake, when so many others in her position did not. She was adaptable, very flexible, exceptionally intelligent, sensitive to the community around her -- I could go on. This woman was no slouch whatsoever and a less biased biographer who examined all sides of her character as revealed in the diary and other contemporary documents would have served her much better.

To return to Huntford and Polar exploration: Huntford suffers from much the same problem in regard to Captain Scott. He just can't stick him at any price. Amundsen is his ideal of a good Polar explorer -- a good explorer and leader in general -- and Scott just can't hack it at that level. Huntford doesn't quite come out and say, "Scott was a moron and he got himself and everyone in his last exploration party killed because he was, as aforementioned, a moron," but it comes close.

Even toning down Huntford's adjectives a bit, it does seem fairly clear that Scott simply wasn't very good at what he did -- or perhaps he just wasn't as good as Amundsen. What is interesting here -- and what Huntford doesn't explore very deeply -- is how both men are products of their environment and their contemporary culture. With Scott, this is a particularly interesting question since I love all 19th century British anything and he is a stone-cold 19th century British guy. He acts, thinks, talks, plans entirely from that kind of background which can only have been deeply and probably unconsciously formative of how he decided to tackle his Antarctic explorations.

Despite this, Huntford's book is a great and engaging read. This is an edited Modern Library edition -- frankly, I don't know what was edited out. It's a long book as it stands now -- over 550 pages -- and I felt swamped with detail more than once. Want to know the exact dietary details of Scott's and Amundsen's respective expeditions? It's in there; down to the calorie. Want to know about how the dietary habits of sledding dogs change in extreme weather conditions? It's in there. Want to know about the affair Fridtjof Nansen had with Kathleen Scott? That's in there, too.

So you may want a pillow to cushion it on your lap -- it's heavy, even in paperback -- and some tea to make sure you stay warm reading about them nearly freezing to death, but The Last Place is a fun, fast, entertaining read.

"...just one fucking thing after another."

And, y'know, I have yet to come up with a handier, one-phrase description of history than Rudge's from the last act of The History Boys. I'm sure there are professional historians out there for whom it sounds like anathema but, well, I only have my master's degree in history, so I barely count as professional!

Anyway, I thought for this Monday since my photos have been so boring lately -- it's difficult taking good wintertime photos when you A) have no tripod and B) can't really take off your gloves to take a picture because it's so damn cold. Possibly this is how I know I'm not a National Geographic-style photographer? If it's a choice between a photo and my fingers, I choose my fingers. Anyway, the point of this post is I thought I might comment on the highlights of my recent history reading since I've been on a serious non-fiction kick.

The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, John M. Barry. It's all in the title, to be quite honest with you: the post-World War I influenza pandemic. Although Barry uses the word 'pandemic,' which to me has global or "broader than one country" connotations, the book focusses quite tightly on the US. In fact, if you read this and come away with the idea that the US suffered more than almost anywhere else not only in the influenza pandemic but also World War I, that would be understandable. Widening the focus might have been a good idea from a historical point of view, but might have ruined the point from a medical point of view -- indeed, even from a history of medicine point of view --, since what Barry is interested in is the origin of the disease (somewhere in the midwest, apparently) and the scientific "struggle against the virus." It practically comes with its own soundtrack. Scientists are noble, disinterested, honest beings struggling valiantly to save a doomed humanity. Ok, I'm oversimplifying a little and I'm not doing Barry any favors but my suggestion would either be to go through with a highlighter and pencil and deconstruct his narrative or read it so quickly you don't have to think too much.

I wouldn't recommend it as serious academic reading, but it's on the same level as, say, a Simon Schama talking-head documentary about the history of Britain. You will almost undoubtedly learn something, but it may not be quite the thing the author intended that you learn. One thing I will say -- Barry's explanations of the medicine and science accompanying the 1918 influenza pandemic are fantastic. He has a solid knack for making what are, for me anyway, nearly incomprehensibly complex scientific concepts seem, well, quite simple or at least visualizable.

The Perfect Summer, Juliet Nicolson. Nicolson is Vita Sackville-West's granddaughter, so when she writes this kind of history, it can sometimes be less a history, and more a recounting of family gossip. This doesn't make her light, fluffy history of the summer of 1911 in Britain any less readable. The word that comes immediately to mind is "charming." If you read this and E.F. Benson's Dodo novels back to back, you'd have an...interesting, if totally one-sided, vision of Britain before the war. Nicolson makes a laudable attempt to have her story cross class lines, talking about working-class protests, the rise of the labor movement, and activist women in factories.

Nicolson is very good at pulling out personal narratives and details to give her story dimension and life and she claims several personalities as central to her story, including socialite Lady Diana Manners and poet Rupert Brooke. Also tangential to the narrative she constructs are figures including Siegfried Sassoon, Leonard Woolf, Virginia Stephen, and Queen Mary. The anecdotes she chooses are always amusing and the whole book is a light, enjoyable read.

Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century, Ruth Harris. Less fluffy; not even remotely charming; very, very interesting. So the Dreyfus Affair, yes? 1890s France; there's a spy in the French army; a Jewish officer is accused and sentenced: is he innocent or not? Well, the verdict is in, folks, and the dude was about as innocent as you can reasonably get. In fact, even after the French government made him spend lots and lots and lots of time on Devil's Island -- not a nice place -- he wanted to be reinstated in the army after his innocence was proved. One of the heartbreaks of his post-Affair life, according to Harris, was that he wasn't allowed the retroactive promotions he would have received had he remained in the service normally.

Harris takes this fairly basic story -- often reported in terms not much more complex than I have used -- and breaks it down. And then breaks that down. And then breaks that down again. The Affair divided its partisans into two fairly basic groups: Dreyfusards (innocent) and anti-Dreyfusards (guilty). Given that the Affair itself was highly charged with anti-Semitic feeling and that anti-Dreyfusard propaganda often took on a tinge that Nazi propagandists might have envied, these two "sides" often look like White Hats and Black Hats in historical hindsight. Harris' aim here is to show where that isn't quite true; a more honest retrospective might show a whole bunch of Grey Hats, with a lot of shades of grey. Leading Dreyfusards might have hated Jews personally, but thought the damage to France's reputation as the leading light of fraternal democracy being done by Dreyfus' imprisonment was too much to take. Anti-Dreyfusards, on the other hand, might have had no particularly strong anti-Jewish feeling, but have wanted desperately to support the army once the verdict against Dreyfus was given.

Harris' analysis can get weighty at times and I'm not saying this isn't a dry read. You might want a pen and paper handy to keep note of names and dates because, brother, does she go through it by the detail. You will know more than you ever wanted to know about who forged what and when. But she also makes a fascinating argument about the emergence of French nationalism, nationalism in general, and the creation of an ideology and how that may, or may not, play into state- and/or nation-building. She also picks at the perception of the Affair as an anti-Semitic precursor to Nazi Germany and at the reputation of the anti-Dreyfusards as proto-Nazis or National Front members.

So there you have it -- a few additions for your next library list.

digging with which foot again...?

so after the last couple days -- not counting fridays -- which have been pretty horror-heavy, this wednesday i need to put on the historian hat again and talk about marianne elliott's recent (-ish; i'm a bit behind the curve, really) tome, the catholics of ulster.

first: it's giant. seriously: don't plan on lugging this book around a lot if you have a bad back or stiff shoulders.

second: there are holes. i started to write that they were "significant" -- but i'm not quite sure they are really.

elliott's whole point here is to debunk a very catholic-centric, nationalist-centric, increasingly-over-the-course-of-the-20th-century-republican-centric style of irish history, and so i'm sure she knows perfectly well what she's left out and has left it out (or minimized it) for a reason.

the thumbnail "plot summary" might run something like: a history of catholics in ulster from prehistory to the good friday agreement.

there's a lot of time spent on the early years -- the prehistory through, say, the late eighteenth century bit -- and then, to my mind, ever-less time as the book ratchets on towards the end of the twentieth century. which is a shame from my point of view, because that's the bit i'm interested in. still, there is enough provocative material here to make me leave my pencil in the book as a bookmark because i was making that many marginal notes. who knows if i'll never use them for anything, but they made me feel better.

my chief argument with the book might be that as time goes by and elliott gets closer and closer to the present day and -- in all fairness -- as the republican nationalist movement gets more and more catholic and nastier and nastier with it (not that i'm implying these two things are vitally linked or inextricable or anything because that would obviously be very foolish), she gets closer and closer to being dismissive of things which i think are very important.

of course, this could just be me thinking, "but i think it's interesting! talk more about what i think is interesting!" and there are plenty of books out there that talk about nothing but the things i think are interesting -- still, i think elliott comes close to sounding rather patronizing as she tries to describe the effects that something that happened over 200 years ago can have on the present day. the historical narrative started to become a bit clogged with elliott's own personal memories of growing up in northern ireland and, while i understand that she's doing this in order to make her own potential biases and point-of-view absolutely clear, it also starts to feel that maybe what she wanted to do was write a history up to about 1950 and then write a memoir.

in fact, the more i think about it, the more i wish she had done just that: written the history through...oh, say, partition, ended that, and then written a memoir. as it was, in the final chapters, i kept wanting to say, "but, wait -- if the people in question think that's really important -- aren't you being a bit dismissive by saying it isn't? shouldn't you take into account the fact that they -- being your subject under discussion here! -- think it is?"

i apologise for not having a more coherent argument to make about the text right now; due to bad weather and a long day at work, i'm more than a little out of it. but the summing up of all this would probably read: marianne elliott. new-ish book. go forth and read it if you are interested in a) things catholic; b) things irish; c) things irish catholic.

if nothing else, her bibliography is absolutely eye-wateringly wonderful.

~ ~ ~

and since this post is (marginally) concerned with things academic and scholastic, here's something else, too.

as you may or may not know, i live in boston. as you also may or may not know, the boston public library system is facing some "economic hardship." the latest iteration of this hardship is what seems like a serious threat to close the main branch's microtext department.

when my boss told me this last friday, i squawked at her for two minutes straight about how awful this was and how "they" couldn't do this before realising: a) she isn't my old boss and wouldn't either think i was funny or sympathise; and b) "they" might very well do just that.

it is fair to say that, without the microtext room at the bpl, i could not have written the history thesis i did. without the access to the historical irish newspapers collection they house, i would have had to cut my topic in half, redirect it radically, or give up on it entirely. i'm sure there are other people out there with similar stories.

i have spent a lot of time in the microtext room and i was never the only one there even when i was there at 9 a.m. on a saturday morning or 5 p.m. on a tuesday night. patrons ranged from professional genealogists to amateur family historians; college undergraduates; other graduate students like myself; and the average run of people looking for someplace to burn a few hours because they had nowhere else to be. the room needs a new carpet; the microfilm machines need repairing; the printers need upgrading; the librarians need some new reference materials. what they do not need is to be shut down or have a huge, incredibly valuable collection doled out piecemeal among the other branches of the library.

so, as this is the biggest public soapbox i have, i'm putting it out there: please. if you have half an hour of free time and you give a damn about this amazing, marvellous, free resource in boston, send a letter; send an email; make a phone call.

SUGGESTED ACTION: We are asking all concerned individuals to write to the following contacts and let them know that the resources and staff of the Microtext Department and the Newspaper Room should not be eliminated or dispersed. If you are a Massachusetts resident or Boston Public Library patron, please indicate that in your email/letter. The Boston Public Library Annual Meeting will be held Tuesday, May 11, 2010, 8:30am, at the Copley Square Library. Let's let our voices be heard and make an impact now before that important meeting.

Contacts:

Amy Ryan, President of the Boston Public Library 

aeryan@bpl.org

700 Boylston St., Boston MA 02116

617-536-5400

Mr. Jamie McGlone, Clerk to the Board of Trustees

jmcglone@bpl.org

700 Boylston St., Boston MA 02116

617-536-5400

Mayor Thomas Menino

mayor@cityofboston.gov

1 City Hall Square, Suite 500

Boston, MA 02201-2013

617.635.4500

Photograph by Gretchichi

"and god said let newton be and there was light..."

i'm in the middle of reading thomas levenson's newton and the counterfeiter: the unknown detective career of the world's greatest scientist.

i suppose i should have realised more clearly what levenson's bias was going to be by paying slightly more attention to the post-colon title up there: "the world's greatest scientist." levenson is director of the graduate program at mit and a faculty member in their history of science writing program. i discarded it very quickly because it became clear that their priorities were not mine and, honestly, 19th-20th century ireland were going to cut next to no cheese with them, but the program looks really neat. (and a brief search on the mit website looking for more info about levenson reveals that the program no longer exists under the name i remember, so perhaps the focus has changed since the last time i looked at it.)

levenson writes exceptionally well; if he teaches his students to write like this, that program must be putting out some masterful science writers. his research, too, is solid; he states right up front what sources and collections he has relied on, where he feels the holes are, how he has tried (or failed or not bothered) to fill them, and what implications this might have for his argument. i love this kind of 'lay the cards on the table' attitude in history writers from whatever field. i'm much more likely to nod and go along with someone's argument if i know that they know where the gaps are right up front. there are gaps -- there are always gaps. you simply can't cover everything and that's okay. every history text would be about 12 volumes of 3,000 pages each if everyone tried to be comprehensive all the time. and then a further 12 volumes of footnotes and bibliography.

i have a couple of issues with the book, though. one is that levenson is very dismissive of anyone who isn't newton and newton -- and his radically new vision of the world -- is so clearly an end point for him... "there was newton and then everything was good," could be his attitude summed up in a trite little phrase. i hope that he's taking this reductionist attitude because the book is short, it's clearly meant as a pop history, and he doesn't want to get caught up in the details of debates over newtonian physics. but i find it worrying that he dismisses everyone else working in the same field at the time as being lesser than newton and therefore, implicitly, not as interesting or worthy of attention.

the second -- and more worrying from my perspective because i love print history and intellectual history -- is that, when setting up the conflict between newton (warden of the mint in the late 1600s/early 1700s) and william chaloner (professional forger, cheat, and trickster), levenson is talking about the flood of pamphlets that came out in the late 1690s to suggest ways of fixing the monetary problem in england. basically, the country was out of money. there are all sorts of reasons for this; if you want the entertaining fictionalized version of this, i urge to you read neal stephenson's baroque trilogy -- and then, please, come back and explain it to me.

levenson does a great job explaining the fiscal crisis; i nearly understood it this time 'round! and that fault is mine, not his. i find economics bewildering at the best of times. but one of the key issues in all the (very public) debate and argument surrounding the recoinage of english currency and state support for money and so on was the huge number of pamphlets and the like that got put out by almost anyone with an opinion and money to have the printing done. all sorts of people had suggestions about what should go on, including, at one end of the social spectrum, william chaloner and, for comparison's sake, at the other end, john locke.

so that's all fine and good -- but in the middle of talking about chaloner's pamphlet to suggest what he thinks would be a good idea to fix the mint -- which is really the set-up to an elaborate fraud he wants to run -- levenson suddenly refers to chaloner as being 'illiterate.' now, this may have been meant as a snide joke to point out how snobbish newton was; it may have been an editorial slip that didn't get caught in the final trimming process, but it really struck a sour note i had a hard time getting by. there wasn't any reference in the text to chaloner getting someone else to write the pamphlet for him, or anything like that, so i found the sudden reference to him as 'illiterate' baffling.

i wish i didn't have to return the book to the library tomorrow so i could finish it properly and figure out what was going on. i'll get it back out, of course, to finish it -- if for no other reason than the hope of once-and-for-all figuring out what the hell is going on in stephenson's the confusion -- and because, despite my niggling about it, it really is quite good.

"she is...not complete yet."

brief book review: the life of louis xiv's mistress, athenais, the real queen of france, by lisa hilton. i'm not bothering with the diacritics in athenais' name. i'm sure i could get blogger to add them in but, really, just imagine them. there's a long 'e' accent and an umlaut over the 'i.'

the good things: highly readable; well-written; clever; good bibliography.

bad things: hilton's attitude towards the people (women) she's writing about; lack of footnotes; poorly reproduced graphics.

taking them in reverse order: the graphics probably aren't hilton's fault. it's a trade paperback with full-color paintings reproduced in black-and-white. they're okay for reference but lousy for getting an idea of what people actually looked like. there are some interesting issues here to be discussed about the reliability of portraiture particularly if the client is the king of france standing six feet away glaring at you from behind your canvas and if you don't make him look damn good, the guards at the bastille may be your new best friends. hilton doesn't talk about this.

there are too few footnotes. there are always too few footnotes. this is my personal issue and i accept it. i love footnotes. they are your best friends when it comes to following an argument and deciding whether or not the book is worth the time you're spending on it. in this case, i'm forgiving a lot because hilton has a kick-ass bibliography, some footnotes, and has done some of her own translations.

her attitude towards the people she's talking about, however, i find somewhat more difficult to deal with. she's talking about the court of louis the xiv in the second half of the seventeenth century and specifically about louis' second mistress, athenais de montespan (married name). this is all fine and quite interesting. i can leave aside the fact that she insists that louis was the outstanding monarch of the seventeenth century (in a century which also features james i, charles i, charles ii, and james ii of england) or that louis' court was the best and the brightest ever invented (see restoration england.) everyone thinks their period and their subjects are the best and the most exciting ever. that's why we write about them. if we didn't think they were fascinating, we wouldn't spend hours and hours and hours in archives, reading rooms, microfilm rooms, library stacks, and more and more hours in front of desktops, laptops, netbooks, notebooks, legal pads, proofs, galleys, and other detritus of the publishing industry trying to tell other people about them.

but hilton's attitude towards the women she's writing about seems particularly peculiar -- she discounts anyone who wasn't deemed to be physically attractive. louis' queen, marie-therese, is described almost solely as being unattractive. other women at court who don't come up to the mark of physical beauty set by athenais are discounted as being below the required standard. some of athenais' rivals at the court -- other women, married or single, who might have been on the make for louis' affections -- are described as having the envy of unattractive women for a beautiful one. the hanoverian palatine elizabeth-charlotte -- by other accounts that i've read an incredibly influential and intelligent woman who used her time at louis' court to observe the vagaries of the french aristocracy as well as doing her best to further her own political interests from the palatinate -- is also dismissed as being plain, dumpy, and, obviously, therefore of no interest to anyone. marriages that aren't between two partners of equal attractiveness -- judged by the aforementioned standards of portraiture which i would have thought would be highly suspect -- are clearly dysfunctional and doomed to failure.

yes. thank you. because of course all motivations for women -- or, indeed, almost anyone else in hilton's account -- can be resolved down to the matter of 'who's the prettiest.'

i could get quite catty here about the fact that hilton herself, to judge from her jacket photo and author biography, is quite gorgeous and, apparently, an ex-model. i'm sure there are some interesting conclusions to be drawn here. i'm not going to do it. i feel some (bad) jokes simply make themselves.

conferences, sessions, and commentors, oh my!

so i spent yesterday at the new england historical association's spring conference in portland, maine. i got to attend two sessions (apart from the one i was presenting in) and got a truly awful lunch into the bargain. (really, guys, vegetarians do not live on salad. i assure you that we have moved beyond this. and i had no faith that the catering people were keeping beef burgers apart from veggie burgers.)

anyway, the first session i went to -- on communities and conflict in germany and yugoslavia -- was interesting. one panelist was a very nervous speaker; i wanted to reassure her that, if the audience did suddenly turn into brain-devouring zombies, she was really closest to the door and had the best chance of escape bar the chair of the panel who was a few inches closer. a professor for whom i ta'd last fall gave an excellent paper on community conflict in yugoslavia.

a friend of mine from the gslis dual-degree program and i were presenting -- not together, sequentially -- in a panel on nationalism in ireland, along with a recent post-doc. from amherst (very nice guy -- has his first book coming out in august which i have to remember to put on goodreads). we happened to have both a chair -- introduced all of us and kept time -- and a commentor who just commented on the papers. our chair was very nice, quite gracious, and, all in all, almost silent. i'm not sure he felt he could do much to restrain the commentor who, once he got rolling, had a less than collegial effect.

possibly his commentary can best be described by the fact that i later overheard him ask a colleague of his who was also at the panel, "so, was i mean enough?"

i really don't think this is the best way to judge comments you have delivered on someone else's work. i still think my mother's rule, by way of a friend of hers, applies: "you have to say one nice thing. even if you have to scrape for it. even if it's 'nice margins' or 'gosh, you spell well.' say something nice."

the only other thing i would really like to add is that, on the basis of a single publication in the field, possibly he could have found it in his heart to be just a tad more generous. the assumption that your style is the best is overbearing and unattractive in anyone, i don't give a damn who you are. and, when i spoke to him briefly after the panel to ask a question about a book he had mentioned, his attitude seemed to be that talking to me was a rather low priority on his list and, please, since i was just an annoying little student, could i just go away now? add to that the fact that, within the hour after the panel, three separate people found my friend and me to tell us not to listen to him, that he had a reputation for being ridiculously overpicky, and, honestly, his opinion only weighed that heavily with him, i think perhaps things could have gone better.

having now thought over what he had to say, read his comments, and given them due consideration, i think i can safely say that i have come up with his major objections on my own, have a list of them, and will deal with them in my thesis. so there. (insert appropriate sound of raspberry, if you wish.) other than that -- if he has any clever way in which we can magically somehow comprehend with any degree of certainty what people in the late 19th century were thinking or reading at any given moment in time, i would really like to hear about it. personally, i haven't seen the tardis around lately, so i'm thinkin' the doctor isn't about to intervene.

so, yes. could've been better. 

but the other panels were good -- there was an excellent, though short because one panellist had a family emergency and couldn't come, one on british imperialiam overseas in the afternoon. lots of stuff about metropole and periphery which i would have been better able to cope with had i not been getting an awful sinus headache. as it was, i hung on for the general outlines; both presenters were really impressive, i thought.

the speech at lunchtime, i have to say, i nearly had to take notes on. this guy -- the outgoing president of neha -- and david starkey of a few posts ago should get together and have a little pity party for the death of the white male ivory tower academic.

random linkness

i'm posting this article by victor keegan from the guardian largely because of the conversation we had in my preservation class the other day. the topic of the day was, theoretically, reformatting. really, most of the class was taken up with two things: microfilm and arguing about digitization. our professor is, somewhat unexpectedly, an absolute and total devotee of digitizing everything in sight because "that's what patrons expect."

i have to admit, i had to bite my tongue to keep from commenting, "well, they can expect it all they want."

our professor was bound and determined that everyone expected everything to be digital all the time and we should really face up to this fact and do--- something. i'm not quite sure what he wanted us to do -- even just in terms of the class -- but he definitely expected something.

one of the other students and i tried rather gingerly to point out that maybe the expectations for digital collections were different depending on what field you were in and what kind of work you were doing -- and that didn't get us very far, but it slowed him down a little. since he seemed to be basing a lot of his argument, at least for the day, on the fact that students pull the bulk of their sources from online databases and the like, i wasn't all that convinced. again a little tongue-biting was involved to keep from saying, "well, of course. we're lazy and busy and you let us get away with it. what do you expect? i would never think of trying to pull that for my history work. shall we have a discussion about differing expectations in differing fields?"

anyway, the actual article i wanted to post is this: victor keegan writing about e-readers for books. the picture alone makes it worthwhile to click in.

in the interests of tossing up a few more interesting things midweek, here's an article i haven't had time to read through fully about the new world digital library. which may seem ironic in light of my summary of class-time yesterday, but i'm okay with irony this morning. or perhaps just too tired to avoid it!

i also found roy foster's review of a new history of the 1916 easter rising. the new history looks quite interesting and i've added it to my goodreads list so, y'know, in eight months or a year or so, i'll remember to read it! but this review is also delightful because foster calmly and seriously uses the tardis as a metaphor for the dublin post office.

and a xan brooks article about re-viewing films. i recently tried to re-view a film i've never had much time for, silence of the lambs, and found i didn't have time for it for a variety of excellent reasons and gave up about 40 minutes in.

and, as an a/v treat although i have mostly already discussed this with my friends who i know are doctor who fans, the trailer for the first of the david tennant post-season 4 specials:



it aired in britain on saturday -- so far no sign of it on dvd, although i hope it will only be a matter of months!

history is a soap opera

because i know -- or strongly suspect -- that there are at least three excellent historians who happen to be female who glance at this blog now and then, i thought y'all might be interested in this link i saw on the guardian this morning. according to david starkey, women historians turn history into a soap opera. our work is substandard and we take emphasis off the real movers and shakers who are, clearly, powerful white men. i wish i were mocking his argument by making it sound stupider than it is but, sadly, i'm not.

honestly, the first thing i thought when i read this -- other than, "wow, he really is as much of a jerk as he sounds in his books" which i've never been able to read although i have tried -- was, "but, mr. starkey sir, history is often a soap opera all on its own. it needs no help from anyone of any gender." i mean, seriously. i spend about half to three-quarters of my time these days considering the situation of a bunch of incarcerated (for a wide variety of reasons spanning the range from murder to being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong name) 18-30 year old men who voluntarily gave up washing, clothes, and, a few of them, eating in order to prove a point. to prove a point. and they kept at it even when it was blindingly obvious to the passing idiot on the street that they wouldn't win! there was no hope in hell of them winning! but they did it anyway! you cannot make shit like this up!

and, really, any historian of tudor england has no room to argue about soap operas. whether you centre-stage henry or his wives, the whole thing is just one great big proto-episode of coronation street. personally, i think part of starkey's miff comes from the fact that he pouted loudly and publicly about the lack of historical accuracy of the tudors and nobody cared.

he had some good points. the screenwriters combined characters, compressed time, simplified events, simplified character -- all on a fairly minor level but enough to be a bit disconcerting if you suddenly realise that three different people have suddenly become the same person. or even if you happen to think that anyone who really behaved with the complete lack of political know-how thomas more (jeremy northam) displays in the series would have been lucky to survive a fortnight, let alone years. but the bones of the events are there and, given the nature of the televisual universe, i think starkey's pet subject got off lightly. would he have been happier had it gotten the deadwood treatment? more historically accurate, yes; probably fewer sales for his books, though, which did get a contact "high" off the series, as did several other well-known tudor historians, at least one of whom is (gasp!) female. (gosh. what will we do.) in any case, not so many people are going to rush out to buy pop histories -- which are what he writes, lets face it, and rather argumentatively in my opinion -- having been shown henry unshaven, rarely washed, rarely in court dress, aggressive, acquisitive, egotistic, self-centred, in a grubby, ill-lit, rubbish-filled castle populated largely by people who look about ten times worse than he does.

but, if nothing else, at this point in time, quibbles about female historians and the "damage" we do to "real" history are ridiculous. i don't think anyone's arguing seriously that henry is unimportant or that work on him is being hurt by work done on his wives -- or on more or suffolk or anyone else in his court. how can you really seriously set your face against a broader reconstruction of events? and it isn't like any of this is taking his job away from him -- i'm pretty sure that, unfortunately enough, his reputation and his ability to do multi-part bbc documentaries more or less on demand is pretty solid.