The Sabbatical Report: On being a citizen of this world

The opportunity to spend 50 nights in London came at a crossroads in my life. I thought it would be a kind of swansong, wrapping up my English research to focus on something closer to home: Australian archives, Australian themes, more easily achievable. That’s not going to happen. 

 

An archive at the end of a gravel driveway in Canberra does not have the same energy as an archive reached by way of the cobblestones of  the ancient Clare Market, and a 150 yard journey passing through five hundred years of history in bricks and stone, and half a million people.

 It is more than 50 years since I left London as a child. I thought it was symbolic to spend one night of Sabbatical here for every year I have been away. It would lay to rest the inexplicable yearning, because whichever side of the world I am on, I ache for the other side. I would be satiated.

I have observed this call of home in others and regarded it as misplaced ethnocentrism, as though something in the old world is intrinsically superior to the new. These, I thought, are the emotions of ungrateful and unsettled people. I am deeply attached to the Australian landscape and the seasons of the place where I live, its ancient culture. But it has taken a lifetime to discover all this. But then, although I don’t believe I am ethnocentric, I love London more now, than ever before. Not satiated.

The Sabbatical Report: Crouching women, trousered sisters and fractured memories

I closed my research on the theatrical agent Richard Warner with his death in 1914, by writing an academic paper that was published, done and dusted. I could not find a marriage for his daughter Miriam, and the most informative records are only released when they are 100 years old. I had originally intended to write a book on all of the Warners and their interminable retinue of relations: actors, agents, comedians, musicians, operatic singers, and some marvellous identities called Principal Boys in the Music Halls - we might think of them as cross-dressers today - but that idea was shelved.

But the whole topic of Warner Brothers came alive again after I met up with cousins in London (2C3R is the term – some of them are 3C4R – indicating how far removed they are from the mainline of my own family tree). Miriam lived on! Family branches tend to research their own interesting character and preserve their legend, which helps the big picture. Meeting  much removed cousins has been such a joy for me....and most informative!

The Sabbatical Report: Fighting friends

A very frank exchange of views: Fighting friends and the making of a productive scholarly culture

 Malinowski is regarded as the father of social anthropology, and he rates among the great thinkers of the 20^th Century (all of whom had complicated Eastern European names).

Malinowski

He is not my research subject, but I cannot ignore him. He was the intellectual son of the Seligmans - they were his benefactors, his mentors, encouragers, and they enabled him to take the first professorial chair in anthropology at the London School of Economics. He needed a wage and they didn’t.

All relationships of beneficence are fraught:  that was the important lesson of colonialism. and it demonstrates how charity disempowers. Entitlement lives alongside resentment, the desire for independence, to do it alone, and an unwillingness to recognise that someone else – parental figures – are enablers. Anyway, Malinowski’s relationship with his doctoral supervisor Dr Charles Gabriel Seligman (known to everyone as Sligs)  and Brenda Seligman, the woman who had the big bank account, was uniquely angst driven. He lived in their house, eat at their table, and he could be their harshest critic.

Early morning rain in Drury Lane

It is 7am and raining in Drury Lane, in the centre of Covent Garden, and the only disturbing sound is the long beeps of a truck reversing into the back of the Irish Pub. I did hear the Irish Pub sending its customers home as I was dozing off last night, but a fifth floor apartment with triple glazing is good insulation against the frantic bustling world of Central London.

Simon Winchester, narrative non-fiction - telling the back-story

Simon Winchester writes the most compelling history. I’ve just listened to two books he produced out of one research project – The Professor and the Madman;  The Meaning of Everything

http://www.simonwinchester.com/  

Both books are about the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and they are not his latest work.  Sounds dull? I devoured the stories.  What is compelling about crusty scholarly hermits, mostly male, all old, beavering away on A-is-for Alphabet?  It’s their back stories, the depth of detail, the curious, eccentric, unbelievable intimacies of the tale. No character is without complexity.

 The archival work Winchester undertook would have been mammoth because the OED took decades to evolve and produced millions of scraps of paper from thousands of collaborators throughout the world.  The making of the OED was a long, laborious project that produced something like 15 discrete volumes of the OED – most of us have the little blue version that we had to buy for High School (back in the day…) One of the big problems for the original editors was whether the dictionary would ever make enough money to justify the £40,000 invested in it. Today I’m sure the Oxford University Press is doing nicely -  it’s available online by subscription, and there are many specialist dictionaries, some of which I own, and others that I covet.

The reason I listened to these books is because I have always liked the way Winchester tells history, and I am confident he has millions more readers than the average academic who plods through every dense sentence providing references and attributions and citations ad nauseam. Certainly fiction writers depend on our research for the historical accuracy of their stories, but Winchester captures the spirit of fiction in his facts.

Uncluttering my antiquities into the digital age

I decided to devote this week to digitizing.

 I’m never actually disorganised – I can usually locate a single volume amidst 3000+ books and I know what is in my three filing  cabinets – but in a digital age, is all this paper really necessary? 

Sometimes just the sheer volume of paper is overwhelming, and I revisit notes, trawling through my scratchings  instead of moving on confident that I have already captured some essence.

I have been building a digital system for several years, but not in a sustained way  –  this week I think I crossed the Rubicon. An academic entrenched in the past does not need to live in that forest of paper trails.

I’m not sure who will be interested in reading this blog, because you may not have the massive volume of data to cope with. But uncluttering is becoming an art form – there are personal trainers in the field. While Marie Kondo and the other Japanese experts are dealing with designer wardrobes, I have books, journal articles, notebooks, archival documents such as newspaper clippings, wills, company data, census data, etc…by the ton.  Getting bits of paper organized is worth the effort, and I thank the other bloggers who have helped me on my way.
http://www.elizabethcovart.com/work-flow-organize-research-writing/
 https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/41711738 

Gall, Wormwood and the Jewish mother

There may be Jewish Feminists but they do not represent Jewry. Feminism will never cross the Jewish threshold. It is gall and wormwood to the Jewish mother. Percy Cohen  (1904) Jews and feminism, The Westminster Review (October, p462)

The old motherhood statements are probably worth examining. They popped up again after Brexit, when the quantity of a woman’s progeny was touted as a quality for the new PM. I am a bit of an expert on this subject, in fact, by some standards I am a top candidate for British Prime Minister as I am currently bringing up my ninth (and absolutely final child…although I have said that on two previous occasions), That is a lot of kids by any standard.

 Please bear in mind that the majority were accidental, non-biological, and some were shorter term than others, but for most of my adult I have been cooking and cleaning up after 2-5 kids – the current ones are aged 17 and 25 so not children – living in my house.

Sabbatical Report. Zangwill The Jewish Dickens and feminist.

There were some men who set out to empower women, whether it was their daughters, wives or friends.  Israel Zangwill is one of them. His name never gets a knowing nod these days. But he had an unforgettable profile, and a  long lean shape, perfect for caricature.

 Pacifist, Zionist, author, he was a convinced feminist at the fin-de-siecle, but his endorsement of feminist causes was not merely a polite nod to emerging ideas. He did everything with consuming commitment. It cost him his reputation and respectability in some circles.
Meri-Jane Rochelson has written a meticulous account of Zangwill's journey into women's suffrage in Jewish Culture and History (1999) and she is the avowed expert on Zangwill himself. Her book devoted to the man came out in 2010: Zangwill, a Jew in the Public Arena.

The Sabbatical Report - Speaking up

Cherishing illusory notions – they talk about emancipation when all they mean…is that women should…neglect her special functions in order to undertake responsibilities foreign to her whole nature (1904, Cohen, P. Jews and Feminism, The Westminster Review)

Speaking up most unnaturally

 

Research is a lot like knitting – you get so absorbed in the colourful threads that are coming together that you hardly realise it has taken on a life of its own.

At least, that’s how I knit and do research. The last jumper I made for my son Gabe is now being unraveled and re knitted because it was just too, too big. Many other people are far more disciplined. They learned to color within the lines, or make sure their swatches are accurate!

Please note that in the first two paragraphs I have managed to refer to domestic matters, because I do not want to be regarded as unnatural by Percy Cohen (quoted above). Here comes the emancipated female academic talking about her research…

The Sabbatical Report - Feathers

 My research during the next six months is for a book I am writing with a working title of "Feathers". The word is significant because all of the women I am writing about had feathered nests, in other words, enough money to allow them to pursue the things that interested them. These were women who lived in the late 19th and early 20th century whose families allowed and encouraged their intellectual work. They worked alongside men, sometimes husbands but often not,  and ultimately their names were associated with some of the greatest minds of the 20th Century, such as Einstein, Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and lesser known but important reforming intellectuals such as Cornford and Popper.

Court Leys, Oxford, the home of Brenda Seligman whose independent wealth  funded some of the earliest anthropological work in Papua-New Guinea and Australia. She grew iris here and entertained Malinowski.

 Doing this kind of research straightens out my thinking, because like most people I have absorbed Downton Abbey as a kind of arbiter of all things early 20th Century England. Few people lived like that, and although my research subjects had lovely homes and a few servants, they were middle class people without aspirations relating to money and class. Some of them had inherited enough from the Salaman ostrich feather fortune (feathers again!) to never need to worry about work, but they chose to work very hard and made significant contributions to their communities and the academies. None of them lived the lives of the rich and famous. The Salamans were smart with money, and knowing ostrich feathers might go the way of Dutch tulips, they had a huge property investment portfolio in London, which kept about 40 descendants in groceries for more than 50 years.

California Lilac, a weed needing the right rotten spot

A wonderful sea of weeds in a good marriage of colour and shape

Weeds, by definition, are vigorous. They spread, flourish, self seed, and that is precisely why we have a negative perception of them. Then we go out and buy exotic things that are not vigorous or hardy, that are attention seeking, sniveling shriveled up things that will not co operate.  I have decided that it is easier to change my perception of some of the weeds in my garden, that try to coax along the exotics in such dry reactive clay.

I have written about the elegant, shimmering sea of Agapanthus that rise up along my borders every Christmas. Regardless of the purists and town councils that want to eradicate sweet Agapanthus, she deserves a place to flourish and bless us with her brilliant seed heads every summer. She will grow where other things will not - rotten spots.

This summer I would like to pay homage to the California Lilac (Ceanothus) who thrives in hot dry spaces. She survives on poor clay soils, shooting out her angular shiny dark green foliage, rapidly expanding, and blessing the horizon with shafts of flower heads. In the picture above the California Lilac is the second row of blue at the back, behind the common lilac.