The Bluestocking, vol 126: Diamonds and Difficulty
Happy ... Saturday!
Less than two weeks until Difficult Women is finally out (argh) and I've had a lot of fun doing a Twitter thread of some of my favourite bits.
In turn, that has led me to hear about other ABSOLUTE MADNESS which endured far longer than you'd think. One example: after I posted about the 1982 El Vino case, where Tess Gill and Anna Coote took a pub to court because it wouldn't serve them at the bar, I was sent this piece about Irish pub's refusal to serve women with pints. (Half pints for the little lady!) Here's the jawdropper of a sentence: "It wasn’t until 2000’s Equal Status Act that the sexist practice was outlawed".
Here are all my events for Difficult Women. And here is the Guardian's extract, which fuses together the introduction and conclusion into one unholy Big Thought.
Helen
The Rock
A big diamond is always a surprise. On January 26, 1905, at an open-pit mine in South Africa, a worker informed his manager, Frederick Wells, that a shiny object in the sidewall of the pit was reflecting the rays of the setting sun. The mine belonged to a South African of Irish descent named Thomas Cullinan. The site had not been in production long, and the pit was only some thirty feet deep. Wells clambered down and prized out the shiny object with his pocketknife. “Cor,” he said. “Mr. Cullinan will be pleased when he sees this!”
The diamond weighed more than thirty-one hundred carats. Up to that point, the largest diamond ever recovered was the Excelsior, which was found at Jagersfontein, in South Africa, in 1893; weighing nine hundred and ninety-five carats, it remains the fourth-largest diamond ever found. News of a diamond three times the size of the Excelsior reached Cullinan that night by telegram, at a dinner party he was hosting. Cullinan handed the telegram around the table and told his guests, “I expect they are wrong. It is probably a large crystal.”
I defy you to read this and not end up Googling all the diamonds mentioned. Spoiler: they all look like huge slabs of ice.
Basic Book-Buying Bitches
The unfortunate truth about American Dirt is that everything people find offensive about it — the sensationalism, the violence, the italicized Spanish words and phrases sprinkled throughout the text like little spicy accents — make it profoundly attractive to average readers who just want an exciting yarn. When writers complain that publishers don’t pay a million bucks for #OwnVoices memoirs from migrant authors, what they’re actually bemoaning is the American public’s stubborn refusal to develop more sophisticated literary tastes.
As a companion, read this piece on My Dark Vanessa, which an another author (who hasn't read it) claims is plagiarised from her book. Plagiarised not in a lifted-word sense, but in sharing themes and story beats. The writer of My Dark Vanessa has now outed herself as a sexual abuse survivor to claim the right to tell that story (which, I don't need to remind you . . . is fiction).
There's a dynamic here I keep bumping into, which is an undertow of genuine, structural complaint (publishing is very white and middle class) which keeps surfacing in small, individual, unfair pockets of criticism. It's like someone burping when they really need to be properly, thoroughly sick. Sorry. Or another, better, metaphor.
Confessions From Behind the Paywall
The rise of the paywall press and the decline of mainstream media coverage of government aren’t causally connected. But the two trends coincide with a palpable populist outrage, in which average Americans are suspicious of how their tax dollars are being spent and observe Washington insiders operate at ever-greater levels of power and secrecy. The irony is that policy journalism in Washington is thriving. It’s just not being written for you, and you’re probably never going to read it.
Corporates are paying thousands of dollars/pounds for the latest policy news from governments . . . at a time when conventional news outlets are struggling to staff their newsrooms.
The Scream is Fading (And So Is Van Gogh)
What this painting looks like now . . .
. . . and what it originally looked like.
Quick Links:
"Freshly made pasta is drying on the wooden bannisters lining the hall of a beautiful home in Denver, Colorado. Fox-hunting photos decorate the walls in a room full of books. A fire is burning. And downstairs, a group of liberal white women have gathered around a long wooden table to admit how racist they are." Amazing story. Women's appetite for guilt-tripping themselves is astounding. Someone commission me to write this as a play.
The most common AirBnB scams. I found this through Alex Hern's newsletter, which is great if you are interested in tech/boardgames/Pokemon.
Merchandise corner
If you have spare cash, want to support women-led businesses AND make a donation to Women for Refugee Women, the Difficult Women merchandise is here!
There are necklaces from Wear and Resist:
And sweatshirts/totes from Lisa Macario:
See you next time!