The Bluestocking, vol 135: Burial, Malarial, Aerial
Happy Friday!
For the Atlantic this week, I've written about how if Daniel Hannan thinks business has to take precedence over everything else in the coronavirus recovery, maybe we should cancel Brexit. Well, it's about other stuff too.
In my free time, I haven't been watching Normal People, like normal people, but instead tried Sky's original drama Catherine the Great, starring Helen Mirren. I had high hopes it would be super-camp, which were boosted when the title sequence featured a horse galloping over some landscape. But sadly not. It doesn't really know what its tone is. The execution of a conspirator was supposed to be Very Serious, and this was signalled by using a sombre Instagram filter over the lens. However, the final scene was Catherine's incredibly gruff and manly rejected lover, Count Orlov, sobbing over being dumped while wearing a frock and a huge powdered wig. This wasn't explained until Helen the Great herself stood up, dressed as the principal boy in a pantomime, and you realised the court was having a gender-swapped ball.
Please enjoy the gifs and screengrabs below responsibly, but if you want cross-dressing military heroes in your period drama, then I recommend the BBC's Versailles instead. (Or as I think of it, Gardens & Shagging.) Come to think of it, Catherine the Great was pretty Gardens & Shagging too, and getting to see the incredible fountains at Peterhof, where it was filmed, almost offsets all the period drama cliches, like someone striding purposefully down a long gallery, shot from behind, or someone being interrupted crossly with important state business while knobbing a topless prostitute.
Philippe of Orleans in Versailles. Nothing but respect for MY cross-dressing military veteran.
Also, I don't know why anyone is worried about us running out of TV if there is no production for nine months or more. HAVE YOU SEEN HOW MUCH TELEVISION THERE IS TO CATCH UP ON? My Now TV list is frankly intimidating. I've only just reached Series 4 of 30 Rock.
Suggestions for obscure period dramas I might like are very much appreciated. Anyone who suggests Reign will be made to wear a dress with illusion netting sleeves and hide in a cupboard saying things like, "I'm afraid you have the advantage over me, sire".
PS. A reader who is an actuary got in touch to say that, contra my last newsletter, there are many rhymes for "actuarial":
burial malarial aerial (or ariel) secretarial kinda pushing it, but venereal or mercurial almost work.
Look, if Eminem can rhyme "orange" with "door hinge" (Bluestocking 133) then these are perfectly acceptable. Thank you!
PPS. Another reader, David Beer, has submitted a list of alternatives to "lockdown" (Bluestocking-I'm-going-to-say-133 too). Please enjoy:
The shutup The easedown The slowdown (or the slowup) The hometime The stayput The stationmaker The nestsitting The ensconcement The massbubbling Solitudenetworking The holdstill
Wish I still had abs like this after six weeks without the gym.
Women academics seem to be submitting fewer papers during coronavirus
Astrophysics is one field in which covid-19 seems to be having a disproportionate effect on female academics, said Andy Casey, an astrophysics research fellow at Monash University who analyzed the number of submissions to astrophysics “preprint servers,” where academics typically post early versions of their papers. For The Lily, Casey compared data from January to April in 2020 to the same time period in previous years, noting “perhaps up to 50 percent more productivity loss among women.” Especially because women are already underrepresented in astrophysics, Casey said, the drop off has been easy for editors to spot.
...
This evidence is anecdotal: Some journals say they’ve seen no change, or are receiving comparatively more submissions from women since self-quarantine began. But the anecdotes are consistent with broader patterns in academia, says Gonzales: If men and women are at home, men “find a way” to do more academic work.
When men take advantage of “stop the clock” policies, taking a year off the tenure-track after having a baby, studies show they’ll accomplish far more professionally than their female colleagues, who tend to spend that time focused primarily or solely on child care. Some of the responsibilities are determined by biology: If a woman chooses to breast-feed, that takes up hours every day. Women also face a physical recovery from giving birth.
Ohrly, how unexpected.
Rory Kinnear absolutely werking this huge powdered wig.
The Dark Hero of the Information Age
But Margaret was in some respects even crazier than Wiener. She had emigrated from Germany to America at the age of fourteen. She was a fervent admirer of Adolf Hitler and kept two copies of Mein Kampf displayed prominently in her bedroom, one in German and one in English. She made no secret of her political views, to the intense annoyance of Wiener, who was himself Jewish and had many friends who were victims of Nazi persecution. When the daughters were teenagers and began to acquire boyfriends, she made their lives miserable by accusing them of nonexistent sexual delinquencies. When they once went out with a girlfriend and came home with their ears pierced, Margaret was furious and accused them of trying to seduce their father. As a result of her paranoid accusations, both daughters escaped from home as soon as they could and thereafter had little contact with her or with Wiener.
I recently signed up for an NYRB subscription, so expect a lot of their content over the next few months as I work through the archives. One of the interviewees for the new series of The Spark is an AI expert, and his book quotes "the father of cybernetics", Norbert Wiener.
This piece illustrates vividly why I love biography so much. It's just so weird. People are so weird. Not only did Norbert Wiener invent the "Wiener measure" (arf arf), which is "a rigorous way to talk about the collective be-havior of wiggly curves or flexible surfaces", but his wife sounds absolutely nuts. For clarity, she was doing this whole Hitler adoration business DIRECTLY AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR. Read the room, Margaret.
Rejected title: 2 Catherine 2 Furious
Quick Links
We are living in the age of "ground zero empiricism, and observing as if our lives depended on it."
"It’s like living with a partly full bladder all your life." Haunted by this quotation about how writers who don't know themselves get blocked. It's from a New Yorker piece on Anatole Broyard, who didn't want to be a "Negro writer", and so passed as white.
The poet Eavan Boland died this week. Her poem, "Quarantine", is beautiful.
"Rape victims aren’t even a group; they have no unifying traits. . . When one looks at a series of fabricated sexual assaults, on the other hand, patterns immediately begin to emerge. The most striking of these is that, almost invariably, adult false accusers who persist in pursuing charges have a previous history of bizarre fabrications or criminal fraud. Indeed, they’re often criminals whose family and friends are also criminals; broken people trapped in chaotic lives." What kind of person makes a false rape accusation?
How Alex Jones of Infowars's rants would sound as a folk song.
"A new paper just published in Philosophical Psychology by Uwe Peters, Nathan Honeycutt, Andreas De Block, and Lee Jussim examines whether the political views of academic philosophers are associated with willingness to discriminate against peers in grant applications, paper acceptances, symposium invites, and hiring decisions. Spoiler alert: they are."
This is a blogpost comparing Devs, which I loved, with Arcadia, which is my favourite Stoppard play. Joy!
When people talk about the difference between older and newer trans narratives, point them to this piece from an Orthodox Jew who grew up not even knowing boys and girls had different bodies, but hating their own genitals and being sure that they "should" have been a girl.
This Kristin Chenoweth performance of the Cabaret song "Maybe This Time" is the vocal equivalent of "chewing the scenery".
Hope the shutup is bearable . . . see you next time.