Valancy's Place

Dr rdrz may imagine the noises I made when reading this (we get the London Standard free from our newspaper deliver people): Make America Hard Again: is there an erectile dysfunction epidemic?, particularly when I came to '“There have been huge uncertainties about male virility since the rise of feminism,” says Grossman.' and started screaming 'THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE OF HISTORY!!!!'

Okay, there are some very creepy blokes there.

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Creepy but in a different way: I was being 'recommended' this on Kobo, Y O Y???? The Voyage Out: A Quick Read edition:

Discover a new way to read classics with Quick Read.
This Quick Read edition includes both the full text and a summary for each chapter.
- Reading time of the complete text: about 13 hours
- Reading time of the summarized text: 20 minutes

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I'm sorry, but I couldn't help flashing on to the famous phrase 'Normal for Norfolk' when reading this: Archive reveals hidden stories of Queer Norfolk:

Norfolk: That's a queer ol' place
In the depths of the Norwich Millennium Library, there’s an archive dedicated to Norfolk’s LGBTQIA+ history

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This is rather fascinating: Flap Anatomies and Victorian Veils: Penetrating the Female Reproductive Interior:

Lifting flaps that unveiled the female reproductive body for medical purposes could just as easily be interpreted as a pornographic act imbued with sexual titillation and voyeurism. The ‘obstetrical flap’ was thus understood and used as both a teaching prop and an obscene tool. It functioned as a ‘veil’ of Victorian modesty in the name of new and penetrating obstetrical knowledge and a ‘veil’ of man's apparently underlying and untamable penetrative sexual impulses.

One has rather worried about this, and it appears that there are grounds for concern: ‘That belongs in a museum’: The true ‘cost’ of detecting in England and Wales.:

My previous work has discussed various aspects of the hobby of detecting: how the context of archaeological finds is often lost, how private ownership of finds is reducing the archaeological dataset, how our obsession with monetary worth may be fueling an increase in artefact theft and, more recently, the hidden and unacknowledged costs of the hobby of detecting to the wider British public.

So, at long last, I finally have an email address associated with My New Academic Position (this has been A Saga to do with their system upgrade).

I have also achieved reader's card for library of former workplace (spat out from the bowels of their system with A Very Old Photo of Yrs Truly).

And went and looked at the items I wanted to check, and found that lo, I was right and they did NOT have anything pertinent, as I had in fact hoped they would not. Though I had hoped to look, for another thing, at a couple of closed stack items and discovered that these cannot be ordered on a day's notice INFAMY I am sure I recall the times when there were regular deliveries throughout the day. Not actually critical, but irksome. (Also irksome was that I moaned about this on bluesky and got various responses that had no relevance at all to research libraries, in the UK, in particular this one.)

I then managed to get a digital passport photo at one of the photobooths on Euston station and have applied for a new passport, as mine is well out of date and I seem to keep seeing things that want 'government ID' to verify WHO I AM (over here, making like Hemingway....) so thought this was probably the way to go.

Also this is a trivial thing but in the course of my perambs of the day I walked past the statue of Trim, and his human.

In the niggles department, I did that thing of putting my phone down in place I never usually put it and flapping about trying to find it.

The lockers at the library have really annoying electronic locks.

Printer playing up a bit again. Though I think this really is that one has to let it mutter and sulk for a bit between turning it on and actually trying to print anything.

At which I was able to make a couple of minor contributions.

Reason why serving soldiers a very small statistical minority in divorce statistics pre-1914 (post then increased massively....): there were huge restrictions on how many could marry 'on the strength' so there were fairly few actually married in the first place. Mi knowinz on this partly from Victorian fiction (I think it features in one of Charlotte Yonge's) but mostly from Being A Historian who had to do with the Contagious Diseases Acts.

Also able to make some comments apropos of preserving archives of relevant organisations and the problems of digital records.

A lot of oh dear less change than one would like to imagine took place over time in matters of divorce, family disruption, domestic abuse, gendered assumptions, etc etc: but also, a sense that, in fact Back in The Past when women may not have had much agency, they were nevertheless using what they could get, e.g. separation law, protection orders, and various legal intricacies.

Also wondered how far they were able to manipulate (or the law was actually based on) certain patriarchal assumptions, which is what I found when reviewing book by one of the major contributors - i.e. that deserting husbands were falling down on doing patriarchy like they should, bad boy, no more right of coverture if your wife goes through a fairly cheap and simple legal procedure, post-1857.

Also there was a lot of archive love going on!

This week's bread: a loaf of Marriages's Moulsham Strong Malted Seeded Bread Flour, v nice.

Friday night supper: the sorta-nasi goreng with Calabrian salami.

Saturday breakfast rolls: eclectic vanilla, turned out quite well, but even though I upped the amount of vanilla extract, not very vanilla-y.

Today's lunch: sweet potato gratin thing, with some quite decent tapenade, served with Dharamjit Singh's spinach.

Honestly, we thought better of the Finns, being told how amazing a society they have: How would you feel if your therapist’s notes – your darkest thoughts and deepest feelings – were exposed to the world? For 33,000 Finnish people, that became a terrifying reality While the guy involved seems to have been an absolute horror from a young age in terms of hacking exploits, doxxing and swatting people, etc, we also note that there was actually criminal negligence brought against the company holding the patient data, which sounds a bit grim in terms of regulatory procedures and oversight.

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This is very peculiar, because you see 'catfishing' and you think it's about monetary fraud, but that didn't seem to be at stake here: How a friend request led a beauty queen to uncover Scotland's most prolific catfish:

[T]hey were all left wondering why she did it. "All of us were pretty much left with no answers whatsoever," Abbie says.

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Now, this is creepy: Manager of women’s football club banned for 12 years after bombarding players with indecent images:

Hamilton denied 24 FA charges of improper conduct, all relating to his time in charge of the club, but an independent regulatory commission concluded that 23 of the 24 were proven. The FA received evidence from four players and a staff member, all of whom detailed examples of Hamilton trying to elicit sexual activity between May 2022 and November 2024.
....
The commission also noted “with sadness” that one of the victims appeared to blame herself, and that more broadly the complainants “feared the consequences of complaining and that it would impact on their chances of being selected”, adding: “Worst of all, some of them somehow felt that it might be their fault.”

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Dining across the divide - this week it's the Grand Canyon - not yet online - because one of the parties is a Yaxley-Lennon fanboy.

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And this is just a minor thing that agitated the niggles and peeves when it crossed my line of sight earlier today, but if you are writing a historical novel about the first women at the University of Oxford I really don't expect it to be set in the 1920s. That was when they were first, finally, awarded degrees. They'd been studying there much longer, over 40 years.

I'd like to think, yeah, still got it, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were desperately scratching around for somebody who'd even heard the name of the author of once-renowned and now pretty well forgotten, except by specialists in the field, sex manual. Which has its centenary this year.

Anyway, have been approached by a journo to talk with them about this work and its author -

- on which it is well over 2 decades since I did any work, really, but I daresay I can fudge something up, at least, I have found a copy of the work in question and the source of my info on the individual, published in 1970. Not aware of any more recent work ahem ahem. The Wikipedia entry is a stub.

My other issue is that next week is shaping up to be unwontedly busy - I signed up for an online conference on Tuesday, and have only recently been informed that the monthly Fellows symposium at the institution whereof I have the honour to be a Fellow is on Wednesday - and I still have that library excursion to fit in -

- plus arranging a call is going to involve juggling timezones.

Still, maybe I can work in my pet theme of, disjunction between agenda of promoting monogamous marriage and having a somewhat contrary personal history....

This is being one of those weeks when I'm not sure if Mercury is in retrograde or in the opposite of retrograde, if there is an opposite.

In that some things are going unwontedly smoothly and unexpectedly well, and other things not, and plans being thwarted, etc.

E.g., further to the expeditious renewal of my library membership, I was going to boogy on down to the relevant institution to pick up my card and do a spot of light research (I think I may have copies of the books I need to look at but they are not in any of the places where I would anticipate them to be). However, it is chucking down rain in buckets, I think I will leave this until a drier day. Dangers untold and hardships unnumbered is one thing, sitting around with wet shoes in an airconditioned reading room is another.

However, in connection with the research, I remembered that Elderly Antiquarian Bookdealer/Bibliographer had mentioned to me a Person who has come up as Of Interest, and I thought I would see whether they are still around, and apparently they are at the latest report though nearly 90. And not only that, last year, why was I not told, there was published a limited edition from a small press of various of their uncollected writings, including an essay on the very person. This is something I would have bought anyway had I known it existed.

And lo and behold, I ponied up for this hardback, limited edition etc: and got a massively discounted price in their winter sale calloo callay.

On the prehensile tail, I managed to break a soup bowl at lunchtime. Fortunately not containing any soup.