la_marquise

I'm not a huge fan of sport, apart from tennis, and I'm more than capable of ignoring major sporting events while they're on. I'm also not at all a fan of competitions based on nationality, because to me, it seems they encourage all the worst forms of nationalism, jingoism and stupidity. In some cases, they fan conflict and hatred. There was a discussion of the skills and physical talents needed by sprinters last night on the BBC that I found disturbing, creepy and offensive, because it bordered on racial stereotyping, this time with 'genetics' as an excuse. I am going to write to them about this.

However, my mother came to stay with us last weekend, and she does like to watch the Olympics. So, while she was here, we spent a fair amount of time doing so, particularly track and field, which are her favourites. And I noticed something.

I'm feeling better than I have in years about my body. I'm not particularly fit, I'm not fashionably thin, I'm not pretty. But for the last week or so, I've felt at home in this too-tall, not-thing-enough, not-toned enough, not-young enough (all my usual mantras) body. It *works*. My legs can run -- not fast, but they do it happily. I can bend and reach, twist, turn and shape, I can pick up things and move them and make them, and it's all good. I feel normal.

It's down to all those fantastic women who I see using their talented bodies on the television, all those runners and shot-putters, tennis players, rowers, weight lifters, swimmers, riders, boxers, discus and hammer throwers. They are tall and short, they have broad shoulders or wide hips, they are large and small, they have long legs and short legs, square faces, round ones, oval ones. They're all different. Most of them are un-made up, they show me their everyday faces. The ones who are made-up (with the exception of the gymnasts, who are the sole ones who worry me) are clearly doing so for their own reasons and amusements. They have long hair and short. They are of all races. But what they have in common is that they live openly, unashamedly (as far as I can tell) in their bodies. They aren't airbrushed or photo-shopped, dressed to 'hide figure faults' or posed for specific angles. They just are. And I'm loving it. I love all these bold, brave, talented, *real* women. They make me proud of them, of their skill and talent and courage. They make me happy to have a female body, even though mine is nowhere near as fit, as young. They make me feel that I'm normal, because variety is normal.

I want them on my screen every day, because I love this feeling. I know that in a few weeks it will be back to ideals and horrors -- perfect women and 'failed' ones who are too big, too plain, too old, not good enough. That depresses me. I want younger women than me to see the variety of other women, to see women who love who they are, women who are clearly talented and gifted and wonderful without the trailing back-stories that tv drama demands. I want us all to feel that it's all right to be us, in all our sizes and races, ages and shapes. Thank you, Ye Shiwen, Tirunesh DiBaba, Shelly-Ann Fraser Price, Jessica Ennis, Shara Proctor, Nicola Adams, Gabrielle Douglas, Sanya Richards-Ross, Nadzeya Ostapchuk, Joanna Rowsell, Zhou Lulu, and all your sister athletes. You are making the world a happier place for other women.
And I'm really looking forward to the paralympics and even more awesome women.

Skirt of the day: green silk wrap.

Today's veto has really depressed me. Not the detail, but because of the triumphalist Little Englandism that it has brought crawling out of the woodwork. We need Europe to secure our long-term future. This isn't about 'sovereignty', it's about kow-towing to Big Capital and it's needs. The US won't support us even if we wanted it to (and opinions vary on that). I am sick and tired of the triumph of prejudice.
Off into the Word Mines to carve out some more Red Fantasy. A bas les aristos!

I'm not a fan of Orson Scott Card for all sorts of reasons, but his latest book may be a new depth of prejudice from him.
There's a review here.

I don't know what history is for. Back when I was still teaching in universities, I'd get asked that a lot, on open days and at social events. Yes, but what is history for? What good is it? Why should we spend time and money and attention on it, when there are so many other things that are more important/relevant/money-making/shiny. It's an obvious question, I suppose, and and understandable one, if also somewhat impertinent ('Justify your job to me! At once! I pay tax!')

This is what I used to say -- what I'd hear my colleagues saying, what I still hear historians saying, over and over. 'Well, history is about how we got to where we are now. It helps us understand the things about us, the events, the conflicts, the problems. It helps us locate ourselves and our responsibilities, it helps us understand why others bear us ill-will, why we are culpable, what we should strive to learn and what we should try and do better. It helps us understand why the country we live in behaves as it does, and what the old tensions are.' More concisely, as Eliot put it, history is now and England (or Somalia or Guangzhou or Wichita or Perth or Saint-Iago-de-Compostela or Harare or Rio de Janeiro or Pune or wherever it is we find ourselves). History is how we got here and why.

But, of course, it's not that easy, because history is so vast, so manipulable, so shifting and uncertain and so full of holes made by bias and prejudice, by accident or design, by privilege and by privation. It's a weapon in the hands of the ambitious and the victorious, the designing and those with agenda. To Bede in the early eighth century, it was a tool to glorify the works of God and the saints in converting the Anglo-Saxons. But it was not just that: to him, it was also about striving for accuracy in reporting and about honesty about what you have read and learnt from others, about respecting that there might be multiple versions, multiple stories. He gives us some of those, and he comments on what he records, too -- this I learnt from X, who was a witness, and this from Y, about whose accuracy I am unsure. This I found in this text, and this in another, and I find them likely, or unlikely, or confused.

Bede was a good historian, of his kind and time. Not all historians are as rigorous. The anonymous monk or monks who compiled the History of the Britons somewhere in north west Wales in the first part of the 9th century did not trouble to name his sources, nor to analyse their relative value or believability. A lot of what he -- or they -- included is of debatable historical value -- folk tales about Arthur, scurrilous politically motivated attacks on the traditions of the neighbouring kingdom and its ancestor figures. Some of it may have been deliberate -- HB was compiled at a time of political change in Wales, when a new dynasty had imposed itself in Gwynedd -- NW Wales -- and was seeking both to justify its new status by manufacturing links to those it had displaced and to expand its control -- and justifications for the same -- into other areas of Wales.

It's a truism that history is composed by the victors, that the narratives of the losers, of the displaced and dispossessed are elided or erased. The voices of the poor and the unprivileged are largely silent. What did the women of Gwynedd think, in 9th century Wales? I don't know. I have no way of knowing. They are silent. They remained silent for most of the middle ages, in that region. Men sometimes wrote down their names, almost always in the context of the men who controlled them -- who they married, who they gave birth to. We don't know what the bondsmen who inhabited the lands of the nobles thought or did, either, or the freemen of low status, or even most of the nobility. We know who won what battle, but not why it was fought. Historians -- my kind of early mediaevalist, anyway -- build pictures from incomplete pieces, hunt for clues in sources that were never meant as history -- homilies and poems, riddles and grave inscriptions -- make guesses, try and understand. There were 97 men who claimed to be kings in Wales during the 11th century. I can't tell you what a single one of them looked like, what they thought about what they did, what they believed, what they worried about. In a handful of cases, I can offer an informed guess. That's as good as it gets, in my kind of history.

There are many, many histories, many, many levels of recording, many potential sources. There are many many ways of reading and interpreting those sources. My interpretation is not that of the late R. R. Davies, or of the great Sir John Lloyd. And that's just academic differences. Some interpretations hurt. Some distort, lie, destroy, colonise, kill. When you lay your hands on someone's history, you lay your hands on their culture and identity, too. Some post-modernists might have it that all versions, all interpretations are simply competing narratives, of equal value. I don't believe this. It's one thing to disagree over the motives of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn when he burned Hereford in 1056. It's another to label someone else's past 'primitive' or 'inferior' or 'evil' because it differs from yours. When my father's people forbade my mother's people from speaking their own tongue and teaching their own history, it wasn't about narratives, it was about cultural attack and colonialism. It was about erasing the Other, about declaring one history superior in order to destroy another. The English narrative -- of 'civilising' the Welsh -- is not equal to the Welsh one of oppression. It's a vast and vicious cultural judgement, made by those with power against those who lack it. It's the trick of the oppressor everywhere, to deride, deny and wipe out the stories that disagree with theirs.

And, just as the world is full of histories, it's full of people trying to use them, in all sorts of ways, to claim land, to claim power, to separate themselves, to justify this war or that, to explain why women -- or children -- must be treated like this and men like that, to make themselves feel better or others worse. When you read history, any history, the first question is always 'what does this writer want me to think?'

We can't avoid history, it's everywhere. We can't escape it, either. We have, willy-nilly, to live with it. But when we ask what it's for, we need to stop and think, too, why we need to know that, what our motives are, what we hope to get out of the answer, and how our questions and conclusions may affect others. Governments are very often very interested in how history is taught in schools -- and in what history. There's a good reason for that. History shapes us. And he -- it's usually a he -- who controls which histories are remembered and which ignored gets to shape how others think and act and feel.

History is. Histories are. They matter. And in a sense, they aren't for anything. That's the wrong question, it starts with a very western, very modern assumption that everything has to be obviously and economically useful. They are who we are and that's what matters.

Skirt of the day: long black cotton.

So I'm having some difficult thoughts around writing, and permission, and agency, and privilege. And these are, as is common with me, jumbling and tumbling round in my head, getting mixed up, leaking colours into one another and generally making me dizzy and unsure of where I stand.
And it's May, which may well be relevant. I am, not to put to fine a point on it, rubbish at May. My annual Achilles Heel, it brings me down without fail year on year on year. So though I'm thinking -- and I am thinking -- I'm thinking through that lens of too-bright, too-light, ever-stressing May, when the blossom blows off the trees and the leaves unfold, and the days grow longer, and I drop back into gloom.
Permission is one of my issues. The more anxious I am, the less certain I become of my right to do anything, apart from tasks that benefit others. It's always allowed for me to clean the bathroom, but eat cake, or go for a walk, or write -- that's another matter. It might impinge on someone else, it might take from someone else, it might waste time better spent on someone else, it might (in the case of cake) lead to me becoming even more unacceptable. When I sold Living With Ghosts -- in May, as it happened -- my second thought was guilt about a friend I might be harming by gaining this contract. (The first was delight. I'm selfish.) I am never completely happy that I'm allowed to write in the first place. The issue of what I'm allowed to write is even worse.
Let's unpack this a little and look at what I am in quasi-sociological terms. I'm white, slimmish (not enough, imho) first-generation-lower-middle-class, very well educated (though not privately educated), articulate, reasonably physically fit, variably mentally fit, provided with comfortable living conditions by my partner (a huge privilege which daily awes me, in fact, because the marquis is astonishing), heterosexual, English-speaking, cis-gendered to name only an inadequate few things that privilege me in my culture. It is, by most standards, easy for me to sit down and write. I have time and space and equipment, I have books for research, very privileged access to great libraries, trained academic skills to help with what I want to study. My white skin doesn't get me stared at or suspected when I go places. My femaleness doesn't impede my access to education and knowledge anything like as much as it did for my mother's generation or for far too many women in other countries. My sexuality allows me to be demonstrative with the marquis in public safely. My sexuality and skin colour allow me to recognise myself in the daily norms of both my immediate culture and much of wider international culture.
My culture does impose some expectations and limitations on me. Being female is the biggest, probably. Class, here in the UK, is another. I am mostly out of my comfort zone, class-wise, in my daily life. My parents both come from working class backgrounds (Welsh miners and Herefordshire farm and factory workers) and took the common post WW2 route out of their families' circumstances by becoming teachers. As a child, I grew up with books, parents who valued learning and could give me time to learn, and a mother who loved books, reading, writing and always encouraged me in that area. (My mother is wonderful. The more I think about it, the more lucky I feel in her.) But that lower-middle-classness has its own problems. We're not the people who lead, we're not the people with contacts, we're not members of the Old Boy Network. My attitudes and assumptions are off-kilter to the dominant high- and political- cultures of my country. I am, largely speaking, more left-wing, more touchy, less socially smooth, less southern (and that's a big one), less glossy than most of the people with whom I regularly associated. At the university at which I studied, I was definitely Not-One-Of-Us to a lot of people -- wrong schools (ordinary comprehensive, not expensive private or ultra-posh Public -- [for non-Britons, comprehensives are run by the state, Public Schools are very upmarket fee-paying schools, still largely male-dominated]). I was not the kind they wanted at dinner tables (wrong politics and wrong small talk) or to appoint to the really desirable jobs (not likely to make Us feel comfortable). My family don't have, have never had, those oh-so-useful path-smoothing contacts that can ease many from higher social brackets into desirable jobs and positions of influence. When it came to writing, my family don't, for instance, know 'someone in publishing' who could give me a useful hand. I'm not sure to what extent the latter can confer an advantage, but observation suggests that it can make things easier, at least.
Being female puts me into a certain set of boxes, though. There are clear if infrequently expressed ideas out there about what men and women should write. (These are changing. But they're still there.) Fantasy, rather than sf -- yes, women write sf, and hard sf at that, but the perception remains that hard sf readers are more likely to be male and more likely to prefer to read male writers. Romance, or things with a romance element. (If you doubt this, ask yourself why Catherine Asaro -- who has a PhD in Chemical Physics -- includes romances in her physics-based plots, and seems, indeed, to be expected to do so by readers, where Stephen Baxter, say, isn't.) Books focussing on things socially defined as small -- relationships, domesticity, emotions, family, detail --- rather than the 'big' matters of adventure and war, politics and power. Of course, women write about the latter too, but it's much harder for them to be seen to be doing it. They are more likely to be overlooked, elided or dismissed, omitted from coverage, forgotten. I am thinking here of certain pairs, of men and women who are all fine writers but whose critical and popular acclaim are widely divided. George R R Martin and Kate Elliott. Patrick Rothfuss and Barbara Hambly. China Mieville and Mary Gentle. These are 6 of the best writers I can think of. But in all cases, both are in the same area, but the man gets the bulk of the attention. It's in the water, in the culture. Women's writing isn't as important (and, in the case of Gentle, women's innovations in writing are more easily forgotten or attributed elsewhere).
Even so, though, despite this -- despite my less-than-perfect class background, my gender, my coming from the wrong place (and the Midlands is the bit of the UK you all forget, d*mn your eyes, but that's another post) -- I still have it good. I get, by and large, to write about what I want to. No-one expects me to confine myself to one set of my ancestors, to a set of interests associated with my skin colour, to one region or set of cultural things. I have a lot of freedom. (We are not, here, talking about commerciality. That's a separate matter.) I can go where I want, pretty much, in my words. There's even a commonly expressed trope about how writers should be free to roam where they will, use what they will, for the sake of Art.
The problem is that we're not all equally free to roam.
And yet, and yet... One of my perpetual niggles is what to me feels like the vast Americanisation of my Celtic (maternal) past. It makes me angry, it makes me feel dispossessed (and, if I see another American trying to tell European writers what they can and can't write about in terms of European history or culture, I may explode messily). But this is a very small thing, it really is. I'm a privileged white British woman. Those US writers annoy the hell out of me, yes, but what they write doesn't harm me, it doesn't affect the way I am treated everyday. If I feel denied, elided, pushed aside, I can complain to my compatriots without fear of reprisal. My diamond shoes are pinching.
The fact is that there are millions of people who don't have shoes of any kind, who are derided and ghettoised, ignored, elided, patronised, and, denied any kind of permission at all.
In the face of that.... should I be writing at all? That looks like a stupid question, a May brain poor-me question, but I don't mean it that way. I am trying, badly, clumsily, to unpack my privileges and responsibilities, the things that my country have done (so many of them so bad), the debts I owe personally and politically. And...
I don't know. I don't even know if I know what I'm asking. But I'm thinking, I'm thinking hard and wondering what I can do not to make things worse.

Dear Prime Minister,

So it's appropriate to tell a female colleague to 'Calm down, dear' in public, is it, and then claim that it was a joke and a cultural reference, and that makes it okay? It's appropriate that your boon companion (and our chancellor of the exchequer) to find it hilarious? It's appropriate for one of your other ministers and fellow travellers to make a speech claiming that it is all the fault of middle class women if working class men haven't gone to university, because those women used space when they could have got married and had children?

I didn't vote for you. I probably would never vote for you and your party, because I oppose what you stand for. But you just ensured that I will never under any circumstances develop any respect for you, either.

yours,

La Marquise.


For those outside the UK:
Cameron's remarks
Angela Eagle responds

This blog supports the University and College Union strike today.
Our sector did not cause the economic downturn. We didn't cause the one before that, either. We work hard, we contribute to society and we are good at our jobs. We deserve fair pay, conditions and pensions. We do *not* deserve to see those cut to pay for a deficit caused by others.

(Note to the unwise: I come from a family of union activists. My whole family work in the education sector. I know what I'm talking about. Anyone taking the 'teachers and lecturers have it cushy line' may not like the response they get from me.)

So, senatorial pressure has helped cause an ISP to terminate its hosting of WikiLeaks. (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-knocked-off-net-dns-everydns)

Hmmm... Curious how that freedom of speech thing is so often defined so very narrowly.

So the same Ugandan newspaper that recently launched an attack on gay people in public life is now calling for homosexuality to become a capital offence.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/21/ugandan-paper-gay-people-hanged

The paper is supporting a parliamentary bill which is partially promoted and sponsored by certain US evangelicals. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/13/death-penalty-uganda-homosexuals They justify their interference in terms of 'morality' and a perverted version of Christianity which panders to their own ignorance, prejudice and cruelty.
Shame on them. This is not faith. It's oppression, pure and simple.

If you were to ask me what I believe in, on most days I would probably say 'I'm not sure.' What I believe in shifts with circumstances, with the angle of the light and the phases of my mind. There are days when I talk to saints, to trees, to the breath of the wind. I talk to my late and missed Caspian cat and to the feel of wherever I am. I am prone to admiring something -- a rock, a leaf, a waterfall -- and saying 'thank you.' I believe in evolution and randomness and the unexpected.
I don't usually go to churches or temples or mosques or synagogues, though when I find myself in them, I feel it right to be respectful. I am prone to quiet words with whoever is listening (or not listening), even if that listener is some natural force. The belief is in the words, not in the listening. I am part of the texture of this world and I honour that, whatever its causes and origins. I like to say thank you, even if no-one cares, because I was brought up that way.
I have great respect for people who live their lives meaningfully, with care, with thought, whether they place that meaning in a deity or in science. But the key word is thought. I do not respect those who expose blind doctrine, who judge and rant and bully. They are not, to me, people of faith but people of ignorance, who cling to what they have been told without question and seek to impose it on others. I don't respect the killing of others in the name of faith or political ideology. I mourn for those who suffer as the result of such actions.
But what above all I believe in is education. Not rote-learning of rules and doctrines, not brain-washings and brow-beatings into the acceptance of some 'fact', but real education that endorses questioning and searching, thinking and examining, watching and listening and trying to understand. I believe in compassion for others, all others, not just for people like oneself, and in taking away barriers, not building them higher.
Burning books teaches nothing worth knowing, except, perhaps, that the book burner is ignorant or arrogant or power-hungry or afraid.
The best memorial we could build would be one of dialogue, of charity in its older sense, of tolerance and understanding and acceptance that we do not all have to be the same. Because no-one should have to die because someone noisier than they are, stronger than they are, more stupidly, blindly certain than they are wants to try and force the world into one narrow mould.