This week's bread: brown wheatgerm; 8:1 strong brown/wheatgerm, made up with buttermilk from open pot left over from making rolls; quite tasty but a little dense and heavy.

Friday night supper: grocery order delivered early enough that I had time to make sardegnera with chorizo de navarra.

Saturday breakfast rolls: adaptable soft rolls recipe, 4:1 strong white/buckwheat flour, dried cranberries, Rayner's barley malt.

Today's lunch: seabream fillets rubbed with salt, pepper, ginger paste and lime juice and left in the fridge for a couple of hours, then panfried in butter; served with miniature potatoes roasted in beef dripping, white-braised baby courgettes and red bell pepper, and pak choi stirfried with garlic.

Have finally received my ID card for institution of which I am now a Fellow! (still no intelligence re email address...)

Have also volunteered myself to give a presentation, some several months hence, at one of the symposia for fellows to do that.

A project which has been pootling around inconclusively for years (I was looking back over emails about it recently and it had been running even longer than I thought) may be not exactly happening in its original form, but elements of it may be actually coming into some kind of fruition.

There is an exciting if rather terrifying possibility on the horizon.

In the saga - have I mentioned the saga? - of the review essay I sent to the reviews editor and heard nada about for weeks (and sent from two email addresses in case one got spam-trapped), the very day I had been wrestling with the journal's 'submit your article online' nightmare (and was not sure any of that was really applicable to review essays), I heard from reviews editor, who has Been Away, saying oops, just got this, will read.

Also got nudged for review which had got pushed down the priority list because the book turned up rather behindhand of expectations and then a whole load of other stuff overwhelmed me. Could legit say, now working on it.

Dept of, what will they think of next (some of this is, as I remarked elsewhere, resuscitating Ye Good Ol' Victorian Quackerie - though, as we concurred, VIBRATORS ARE NOT VICTORIAN!!!): With the menopause dildo, we've officially reached peak menopause bollocks.

(Declaration of interest: I once did a podcast with the author.)

***

Dept of, well, on the topic of dildos, or at least, urgent phallicism: I spent a year dating conservative [frothingly alt-right] men:

Something about getting ready to go on these dates made me feel like I was 18 again — except now I had the ability to run professional-level background checks, which I did. Not because I was operating on preconceived notions but because the few peers I told about my mission encouraged me to. Given some of the vitriol against women in online alt-right groups, they felt I should treat every date as if it were a threat to my life. I came up with a routine: before a date, I’d tell at least three people in advance where I was going and what time they should expect to hear from me by. I enlisted a friend who’s a former Navy SEAL to be my unofficial security consultant.

And that's before getting to meet the actual doozies who are, apparently, not even the worst types on the dating apps.

***

Dept of, let's have some better news, good news about snails (the snails that one thought had been mown down in the ONward March of Progress, or at least, building much needed housing):

the snails are OK. Nothing bad is going to happen to the poor little Whirlpool Ramshorn Snail, the endangered creature which our Chancellor unfairly blamed for stopping a housing development, causing me to get grumpy on social media. But in following up to try and see what actually happened, I found out a bunch of interesting – and in my view extremely heartening – stuff.
.... it was always a false dichotomy, it was always possible to have the houses and the snails too.

Dept of gilded snails in a very different space: From snails to street signs: Soho’s history revealed on a new digital map - the snails on the facade of L'Escargot Restaurant.

***

Dept of, gosh I have met (many years ago) the curator of this exhibition: New York City celebrates the “Gay Harlem Renaissance”

Or words to that effect.

Anyway, general sense of Point Thahr, Misst, in this piece: Can I learn to be cool – even though I am garrulous, swotty and wear no-show socks?

Mind you, and perhaps this is a generational thing, I murmur, thinking of dark jazz cellars and so on, I so do not associate 'cool' with:

Cool people are desirable and in demand; others want to be them or be with them. That social clout readily converts into capital as people buy what you’re selling, hoping it will rub off on them.... A much-publicised paper recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that cool people are seen as possessing six attributes: they are extroverted, open, hedonistic, adventurous, autonomous and powerful.

And further on, we have an interview with somebody author of article considers Peak Cool:

[S]tudying fashion in London, she learned how to talk her way into fashion week events, pretending she was “supposed to be there – like, no doubt about it”, she says, eyes glinting. She then parlayed that talent for networking into styling and creative consulting work. “All the coolest people I know are hustlers,” Delaney says. “If you’ve just had it given to you, then it’s not that cool.”

Perhaps this strikes me as particularly Not Getting It because I have just been reading Eve Babitz?

And IMHO, you do not 'learn' to be cool: if you are cool, what you do is imbued with coolth, even if it doesn't tick the obvious boxes.

What I read

Finished Encampment, which was brilliant, and intense.

So intense that I had to decompress with a brief Dick Francis binge: Driving Force (1992) - a bit subpar I thought, slow start, massively convoluted plot; Wild Horses (1994) - the one involving a paraphilia I actually did a post here on back when, and making of a movie; Twice Shy (1981) which has a lot of v retro though presumably at the time cutting-edge computer nerdery involving programs on cassette tapes.

On the go

Have started - this was while I was out and about in the world last week - Peter Parker's Some Men in London: Queer Life, 1960–1967 (Some Men in London #2) (2024), since I was recording a podcast last week with the author and he assured me it was somewhat less of a downer than the previous, 1950s, volume. I think it may be a dipper-in over some while.

Still dipping in to Readers' Liberation - liked the first chapter, which is about what readers bring to the book, the second seems a bit heavier going.

Eve Babitz, Eve's Hollywood (1974) - perhaps not quite as good as Slow Days, Fast Company, but it was her first published work.

Up next

No idea: have just sent off for The Scribbler Annual but no idea when it's likely to arrive.

Not sure these links are particularly appropriate, but maybe so.

Well, I do remember her saying she scarcely noticed The Change, though she did nuance that statement by adding that she had so much else going on at the time (eldercare and other stuff) she didn't have time to notice:

Yet more on monetising the menopause: Menopause getting you down? Don’t worry, the wellness industry has a very pricey solution for you.

I am probably being horribly cynical, but when somebody goes for a home birth after a first high risk experience of parturition, one does wonder if some kind of wellness woowoo was in the mix (“She had read or heard somewhere that there was less chance of bleeding at home and that is why she wanted a home birth.”)? but this is a dreadful story: 'Gross failure’ led to deaths of mother and baby in Prestwich home birth.

This is also a really grim story about reproductive politics in Brazil: Two More Weeks: The Brutality Behind Brazil’s Reproductive Politics:

In complicated childbirth scenarios, when the life of the pregnant person and the fetus are in conflict, therapeutic abortion has historically been considered the last resort. But in Brazil, since the nineteenth century, this solution has been replaced by the cesarean operation. This was not based on medical reasons. Cesarean sections, up until the early twentieth century, were rudimentary procedures, almost always fatal to the birthing person. What motivated its adoption in Brazil was based on different logics: religious, legal, and moral. The cesarean became an acceptable alternative to abortion because it allowed the fetus to be born, even if the birthing parent died. The nineteenth-century theological and medical debates that gave rise to this sacrificial logic still shape birth in Brazil.

But I am so, so fed up of people who use 'silver bullet' when they mean 'magic bullet'!

Silver bullets kill things, werewolves, mostly, right; or just generally Bad Guys when fired by the Lone Ranger.

Magic bullets Do Good - like curing sifilis, thank you Ehrlich and Hato, they are targeted remedies.

Also, however hyperliterate I am myself and have been from a young age, I don't think it's the panacea proposed here: There is a silver bullet for childhood happiness: a love of reading.

Just because she (and I and I daresay many of you who are reading this) found our happy place in reading, doesn't mean it's going to be that for all children.

I am entirely there for emphasising the role of pleasure in reading, for

meeting children where they are. It means allowing children to read books that might be perceived as too old and too young for them; it means relishing your child’s love for comics and heavily illustrated books

But I don't think this is For Everyone any more than Going Out and Playing In the Nice Fresh Air.

And on that, I really liked this: Children should have a right to play in the streets, alleys, pavements and car parks of their neighbourhoods. Refers to a letter about children playing in streets, etc, rather than in designated playgrounds and parks:

It assumes that children should be “taken” to designated play spaces, rather than allowing for the possibility that children should be able to access playable space without adults. And, finally, it fails to acknowledge that parks and other green spaces afford only certain kinds of play, and that children demand – and deserve – diverse spaces for diverse forms of play, not just ball games, swings and slides.