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.

Digging up the dirt on what's in my garden

 This big disc of iron has cast into it the name of John Bellamy, Byng Street, London.  It is a proud announcement that it is a valuable and significant item.

I included this photo in my last blog because the artefact has just been returned to the garden, this time on display rather than buried.

It is now a piece of landscape memorabilia, and I prefer the fact that it's more than a store-bought bit of rustica.

I wondered briefly if this thing had history, and when I finally sat down with a cup of tea after hours in the garden, I realised I needed to know more about Mr Bellamy's iron works.

I have an entire rust gallery of found items, mostly mechanical curiosities or farm equipment. This house had been in the same family for more than 70 years when we came, and nothing seems to have ever left the property. With no rubbish service, everything was buried.

When I tapped the Bellamy information into Google I was rewarded with a  history of the iron foundry company from 1860 to 1937, as well as half a dozen other interesting sites. Bits of iron like this are actually a valued curiosity for particular people who collect iron lids, and academic papers have been written about them, mentioning John Bellamy and listing other manufacturers of ship's tank lids Link: Shipping tanks

Here is an extract from Michael Pearson's paper in Australian Historical Archaeology.

"The ship tank was invented by Richard Trevithick, the prominent Cornish engineer of the industrial revolution, and his partner John Dickinson, in 1808. Their patent specifications of 31 October 1808 described well the advantages of developing the new container, which was the first to challenge the wooden barrel in its particular uses. The new ship tank was described as being for:

... the purpose of containing, enveloping,

preserving and securing from damage the several

articles of merchandise and other goods, whetherin

the solid or in the liquid form, which are taken on

board ships and other vessels to be transported or

consumed... And further, we do make our said

packages, vessels or receptacles of such figures or

forms that they fit exteriorly to each other,"

Today we would simply call these shipping containers.

Once I knew what the iron lid was, I realised that it probably fits into the  massive cast iron tank that I can see from my kitchen window, rusting away next door at the derelict school.  It probably arrived here in the early 1870's. According to one author, shipping tanks were abandoned on gold mining sites all over Australia and New Zealand, and re purposed as water tanks, dog kennels and domestic  storage containers. Below is an example of a lid in situ, made by another company.

A web site has been dedicated to the study of tank lids
Link: .http://www.ozwrenches.com/tank-lids-london.htm