Snarking History - An Introduction

One of my happiest blog discoveries over the past year has been stumbling across the "Snark Squad". The raison d'etre of this blog is to provide humorously 'snarky' recap-reviews of a variety of TV shows and books. I first came to them through their painfully-funny-do-not-read-on-public-transport recaps of Fifty Shades of Grey. I thanked my lucky stars at discovering them, because it meant that I could find out what all the fuss was about without having to actually read the books. And, if their recaps are anything to go by, I had a lucky escape.

Their FSoG 'snarks' are not the friendliest review EL James has ever received, but something I love about their other recaps is that, by and large, they come from a place of love - but a place of love that recognises that, for all his awesomeness, writers such as Joss Wheedon can sometimes be just a little bit ridiculous (they do Buffy and Angel recaps as a regular feature). Such an approach is the inspiration for the series of posts that I anticipate writing over time on this blog, in between other updates. I intend to 'snark' history.

As an aspirant scholar, for the vast majority of the time I take history very seriously indeed. To me - though I am sure it is to others - the question of what people in the early modern period thought about mountains (my thesis topic) is not a trivial one. I think that understanding the past in general is a laudable and important goal, and that it is a great honour to have been given, as I have, the time and freedom to delve into the richness of past human experience. History, to me, is far more than the dramatic voiceovers of Simon Schama or the silly clothes of The Tudors. But. But. Sometimes the things that people in the past did, said, or thought, can seem just a little ridiculous to the modern eye. Sometimes it can be very difficult to resist the urge to burst out laughing in the rare books room of the Cambridge University Library. So these posts are to be an outlet, for sharing these amusing and bemusing discoveries with you all.

Of course, it is the weird stuff that can make history really interesting, and ideas that seem laughable to the modern mind can reveal, once scrutinised, a host of beliefs and understandings of the world that tell us a great deal about how different the human experience once was. So, I also hope to use my 'snark' posts not just to recount the apparently wacky things that I come across, but also to start to unravel them, and perhaps understand them a bit.

Finally, just to get you intrigued for the first 'snarking history' post - the reason I have been spurred to start this series is because, in a meeting with my supervisor this morning about the things I had discovered recently, I uttered both the term "mountain-like scrotum" and the Latin phrase, "penis terrae", i.e., the 'penis of the Earth'. And if that sort of thing doesn't require some gentle snarking, I just don't know what does. 

A case study in the (very) contemporary history of emotions

I'm not usually a commenting-on-current-affairs-kind-of-gal, at least not in a blogging sense (I may get heartily opinionated about things I know precious little about on Facebook comment threads, though). This is mainly because, largely, current affairs contentedly pass me by whilst I'm buried amidst a pile of early modern printed books. However, not even I could have missed the news, and the ensuing social media explosion, announcing that Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, died today. 

Now, I don't have any particularly vitriolic opinions on the woman myself. I studied her for A Level history and came to the conclusion that she made a lot of different decisions, some with good results, others with bad - and some whose long-term effects are still not entirely clear to us. As (if I had to declare any form of political allegiance) I would probably define myself as a socialist of some form, I disagree with a lot of the ideology behind the decisions she made whilst in power, but I have no especially strong feelings with regards to her.

I've found the discourses surrounding her death, however, really quite fascinating in terms of how it intersects with my current study which, theoretically - it is on early modern scholarly debates about mountains - is as far removed from the reaction to the death of a twentieth century politician as possible. However, many of the scholarly texts I'm currently reading (dating from between 1680 and 1700) often begin by declaring the ways in which the emotional reactions of their opponents are inappropriate; anger, passion, and temper, are all decried as 'unscholarly', even whilst those making such accusations give in to the temptation of such influences in their own contributions to the debate.

I have noticed many people - friends on Facebook and strangers on Twitter - declaring that the reactions that some have had to Thatcher's death are 'inappropriate'. Those criticising her should, some say, remember the old adage of not speaking ill of the dead, whilst those expressing happiness or joy at her departure from this mortal coil are seen as disrespectful, even disgusting. These two criticisms are obviously slightly different - I feel that this article says everything I feel is pertinent to the former (Thatcher was a public figure who divided opinion in life: in death public reaction should not be shackled by a refusal to point out the bad elements of her policy, or barred from providing a variety of views) - but the latter is, I think, a more complex issue than it seems at first sight.

I think that there certainly is something odd about a young person of, say, my generation and family background (as far as I know I do not have any immediate family members affected by Thatcher's policies during her time in power), feeling and expressing joy or satisfaction at the death of an old woman who is really by this point more a part of modern history rather than an active political player. I might disagree with what she did but it has long happened, and although perhaps her economic policies might be pointed at by some as the cause of the current recession, she never directly impacted upon my life. Politicians (or political activists) from relatively well-off families who were likewise relatively unaffected by her during her lifetime, but see her death as an opportunity to 'gloat' simply because a significant figure from the Tory past has died I also find difficult to understand. But castigating all who genuinely feel, and honestly express, relief and a sense of schadenfreude at the passing of someone who had a negative impact on the lives of thousands of people, disregards the very real impact that the actions of politicians can have on the lives of everyday people.

I say this for two reasons. The first is that I know, in a much smaller-scale way, how it feels to be negatively affected by what is nominally the decision of a single politician. If something you care about - your work, your freedom, your ability to live - is under threat or taken away, it is human nature to try to find a target for all the anger and hurt and hate that such a change causes. When governments decide things that directly affect you, you can feel completely powerless, a pawn tumbled around by a faceless, conglomerate entity. Easier by far to pick a face, a name, to impotently rage against. It is easy to look at the facts of history and say: Margaret Thatcher damaged the lives of many. But how would you, or I, feel if ours had been one of the lives damaged?

My second reason is that I always try to empathise with the emotions or passions of the historical figures with whom I'm working. To a modern eye, the debates which I'm studying seem faintly ludicrous, and it seems excessive that those involved in them should become so consumed by their arguments that they insulted one another in published works across the years and even decades. But for them, at the time, these debates  questioned the very veracity of the Bible itself - and thus, in turn, the veracity of the doctrine of salvation. For these men it was an issue of life or death. Of course they were angry. For the miners whose mines closed down under Thatcher, what happened must have struck them with a similar force. Whatever the wider economic arguments for what happened, as far as such individuals were concerned, those closures had the potential to ruin their lives and those of their families. Of course they hated Thatcher, the face of that policy, and continued to hate her throughout the years. Human beings, whether in 1690 or 1990, have always been emotional creatures.

In an ideal world, would there be people such as the one my history teacher told us about during our Thatcher classes, a man he knew who kept a bottle of champagne in the fridge for the day Thatcher died? Of course not. But in an ideal world, there would also never be social injustices. Thatcher was a politician, and she made hard decisions which had benefits for some, and disastrous results for others. Some today will grieve her death, and laud her memory, but others will not. Those who are truly joyful today will be those for whom she symbolised a time of real suffering in their lives. Criticising their emotions as improper, invalid, or even immoral is to deny how much power politicians can wield, for good or ill, in the lives of the people they serve. And just as I think that historians should try to bear in mind that the passions of the past were once real and vitally important to those who felt them, so too do I feel that this is something that modern citizens would do well not to forget.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair...

Do you know what it is like to remember something from long ago, but to be unsure whether what you recall is truly a memory, or a story that your mind made up to fill in a gap? So that is why I say that I think I remember, one Christmas evening when I was quite small - perhaps seven or eight - my Dad saying that he had forgotten a present, and taking me upstairs. I think I remember him opening his bottom drawer, and handing me a book, telling me that he had been saving it for a while until he thought I was old enough to have it. That book was The Illustrated Treasury of the Brothers Grimm.

Anyone reading this has probably figured out by now that I have something of a 'thing' for books and reading, so I of course devoured the book as soon as it was in my hands. The first story, "The Frog Prince", and the brightly-coloured illustration of it on the cover, left me sniffing slightly at the thought that I could ever have been too young for this book, but it soon became apparent that beneath the fairy-tale cover there waited for me stories that were truly dark, with illustrations that were, to an eight-year-old (and even perhaps to a twenty-one-year-old!) a little chilling. With two older brothers and no sisters, there was no Disney Cinderella for me - only the Brothers Grimm version of the story, in which the ugly sisters cut off their toes in order to try to fit Cinderella's glass slipper.

 Some of the more disconcerting illustrations from The Brother's Grimm.

I am sure my parents must have read some of the stories aloud to me, or perhaps I did to them (I fear from an early age I had a strong sense of drama when it came to reading aloud, and once exasperated my mother so much by correcting her tone and emphasis in reading the dialogue in the Narnia series that she suggested I take over), because I cannot shake the remembrance of spoken rhythm when I think of the story of "Rapunzel", in which the witch, and later the prince, sang to her window - "Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your long hair..." But when I look at the book open beside me now, I realise that memory has played its tricks on me; in my edition the word "long" is absent. But, of course, Rapunzel's hair was long - so long that it reached the bottom of the tower in which she was imprisoned.

For mostly as long as I can remember I have had long hair - not as long as Rapunzel's, perhaps, but longer than the norm, I think. I have painful memories of my mother brushing it (Loreal no-more-knots for kids was used in copious amounts in our household), and also a bemusing one of my eldest brother, not long after he'd first got a girlfriend for the first time, showing me how to brush it out painlessly starting at the bottom and working your way up - Mum had always just determinedly brushed from the top down, dragging the knots with her.  And I realised that my long hair is something I feel surprisingly strongly about, when I read this blog post, about a woman donating her long hair to a charity for making real-hair wigs for cancer victims.

In it, she speaks about the buzz that she got from doing something that she felt would make such a meaningful difference for people in need, and I toyed for a moment with the vision of doing such a thing - of giving away my hair, of proudly wearing a buzz cut and knowing that, perhaps, I had made someone suffering something that I cannot imagine feel just a tiny bit better. But I fear that I am not, perhaps, that selfless. 

The problem is - and this will probably seem ridiculous to people who are perfectly happy with short hair, or who have long hair and would lose no sleep over parting with it - that I have looked into the mirror and seen long hair framing my face for some many years that I am not sure I can imagine me without it. When I went on a month's expedition to China (which included trekking in 40 degrees heat and extremely high humidity), I actively decided that I did not want to cut my hair, though I knew it would be a bother to keep clean and brushed (not to mention out of my eyes - goodness, I hate the wind sometimes!). My logic was this: even when I had not showered for a week, even when I was wearing hiking boots, trekking shorts, and a t-shirt dripping in sweat, I could brush my hair, and that would be my luxury. In the last four years I have had it cut to shoulder-height once, because a man who had hurt me badly had praised its length. I wanted to change, and wanted to be a different person from the one he had made a fool of: cutting my hair, for me, was the biggest change I could think of.

Since then, my hair has grown out, and when I look at photos of my short (to me!) haired phase I feel a bit perplexed, because I do not look like myself. I still threaten to Mr S that I will cut it when he makes a habit of catching it in his cuffs or leaning on it, but I would never really do it, and it would not be the fact that I know he likes my long hair that would prevent me. I'm not sure if it's as simple as saying that my long hair makes me feel 'feminine', or that I want to be a princess like Rapunzel, but, perhaps it could be as simple as saying that I like it. I like the feeling of running really fast against the wind and feeling it stream behind me. I like tying it up in a bun, still damp, and letting it down hours later to see a muddle of curls. I like fiddling with it, though I have grown out of the habit of chewing on it, as I did when I was at the age of first reading The Brothers Grimm. My long hair is free, but I value it more jealously than I do anything else that I might be able to donate - more than coins, more than blood. So, much as I would like to be able to do something as amazing as the blogger linked to above, I do not think I could - because it would mean giving away part of myself.

Of course, even Rapunzel, the epitome of the long-haired heroine, lost her hair to the witch's scheming scissors. But, so long as the worst threat to it continues to be my husband's elbows at the table, my messy, not-exactly-blonde-but-not-exactly-brown, but above all long locks, will remain exactly where they are. At the very least they might come in handy if I find myself locked in a very tall tower.

Pass the Pesto!

I was thinking earlier about the fact that I hadn't written on this blog for a while. The problem is, every time I've thought of something to write about, it was food-related. But today it occurred to me that my intended reason for starting this blog was so that the things I was thinking about 'would be written'. And I have been thinking about food a lot lately. More specifically, as Mr Scribetur and I are currently considering a move which might result in reasonably tight circumstances, I've been thinking about how best to make good meals, but without spending too much.

I fear I don't have much patience for the approach of articles such as this one, which imagine that cheap cooking as a student involves only beans, eggs, or mince. Of course, I'm setting up a straw man here; although when I went to university  I was certainly given a small paperback book of student meals that had, I think, an entire section devoted to cooking with baked beans, there has been a recent shift in attitudes to student/budget food, with one self-proclaimed student chef, Sam Stern, rising to mild celebrity through providing rather more practical recipes for aspiring chefs pressed for the space, time, and range of ingredients required by some of Gordon Ramsay's more complex recipes. (One of my all-time favourite meals is his game pie, which my Mum makes at New Year, but unfortunately game pie is only budget if you're willing to do a bit of poaching...) 

At the end of the day, I think the thing about cooking on a budget is that you have to decide what it is you can put up with, because having just one very cheap meal a week can help save up for something a bit more exciting later in the week. Over the past year or so, mine and Mr Scribetur's go-to for this has been pesto pasta: the type you can buy in a small jar that does two meals easily, with some cheap olives chopped up and cheese on top. We have even had 'pesto pasta weeks', where, if we wanted to save up for a luxury, we would have pesto pasta for every other meal. From the ridiculous to the sublime, we spent the money saved on a nice bottle of whisky. Those were a few drams well-earned!

Unfortunately, I have to admit that it's got to the point where I was a bit tired of the above culinary concoction. Pesto pasta seemed to me like one of those things that is perfectly edible, and fills you up, but it's fairly neutral on the food-enjoyment scale. It isn't bad; it just isn't the kind of thing you'd ever cook for a visitor. 

Then, this week, Mr S asked me to get some food from the supermarket (having a bike, I, alas often end up being the one going into town for the shopping, as it takes half as long as walking...!), including, for one recipe he was doing, basil leaves. It seemed a bit inefficient to make from scratch something that could be bought in a jar for £1.50, but, nevertheless, I collected together the other ingredients required for home-made pesto pasta - pine nuts, and a cheap equivalent to parmesan (in this case, Grana Padano). Olive oil we had at home. The final result was this:

Combined with 200g of linguine, some more pine nuts, and a sprinkling of cheese, the result was surprisingly impressive, if I do say so myself. Certainly it tasted absolutely nothing like Sainsbury's own-brand pesto, and was a meal that was genuinely enjoyable. Certainly a bit - though not a lot - more effort than opening a jar, and probably a pound or two more. But still a very cheap meal, and also one that I wouldn't mind eating quite regularly. Also - and maybe this is just me - blending things can be very therapeutic...

I used this recipe, although I think I ended up using about half of the amount of olive oil suggested. The recipe did enough for two well-sauced plates of pasta, with about half spare for another time. So, if you're tired of baked beans or store-bought pesto, but want to save money, I would definitely recommend a bit of home-made pesto!

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P.S: The glass that the pesto is pictured in is something which gives me an inordinate amount of pleasure: it used to contain nutella. I love the fact that you can buy nutella in small jars that, once washed, make completely respectable tumblers. It's like you can eat chocolate spread and save money on glassware all at the same time...!

In sickness and in health...

There are, without a doubt, many wonderful aspects to living with one's significant other. You get to share so much - not just your leisure time (which I love - it means I can read books or surf the net to my heart's content, whilst also keeping my feet warm underneath Mr Scribetur), but also daily chores such as cooking, cleaning, doing the washing up, etc. Whilst in many cases this means that jobs are halved, as it were, there are also times when sharing can double things. Such as coming down with illnesses, for example.

I am neither a very good nurse nor a very patient ill person. When I come down with something, I have to be persuaded - usually by Mr S - that it really isn't a good idea to go cycling out into the cold just to get a book, so I can spend the day in and working. And then I grumble about my inability to do said work, even though I'm clearly not capable of much more than drinking Ribena and watching bad television (and maybe writing slightly incoherent blog posts...). When my husband gets ill, usually a few days after I've recovered from whatever bug I had and then passed on to him, I do my best to show him more sympathy than I did myself, but that's not exactly saying much. I like to 'do' things to fix a problem, and at the end of the day looking after someone who is ill - especially if you live in the same small flat together! - only involves so much active running-around-after-helpful-medicines, and a lot of sitting beside them listening to them sneeze and cough. Which in turn makes me feel guilty, both for giving him the illness and for not being able to do more, which in turn makes me visibly crotchety, which finally winds up with my feeling guilty again. So falling ill, as a member of a couple sharing a small living space, means knowing that there's a fairly high chance that you'll pass it on, and that you'll recover only to have to look after the other.

Of course, I'm not always the 'first' to catch something, which stings in a different way. It's a bit like seeing a television preview of a programme that looks really bad, but you know you're going to have to sit through it anyway. And then when symptoms do start appearing, your other half magnanimously says, with his no-longer-sore-throaty-voice, "ah, yes, and next comes the bit where the main character does x..." Or, well, you get the picture. And sometimes, because human bodies are weird that way, you get 'bonus' symptoms your partner didn't get, kind of like a blooper reel on a DVD. 

This is all more in the way of a reflection than a complaint - if I were living alone, I'd still get ill every now and then, and I wouldn't have anyone to tell me to sit down and relax, for goodness sake (you masochist), or to make me cups of Lemsip whilst I'm curled up on the sofa. And as for the looking after my partner when he's ill, though I might have the bedside manner of Dr House (or, if you want a more geeky allusion, of the holographic doctor on Star Trek: Voyager), I do it out of love. After all, though there is nothing worse than watching the person you love suffer, however mildly, there is nothing better than caring for them - in sickness and in health. I just wonder if that part of the marriage vow should come with a disclaimer* pointing out that at times there might be twice as much sickness, and half as much health as there ever was before.

*Speaking of disclaimers: Astute readers might have guessed that I am currently somewhat cold-ish. Please forgive any errors of grammar, and mentally adjust the slightly Eeyore-ish tone of the above accordingly! 

The Other Side of Fear

Written a few days ago -- but I still feel relieved!
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Relief. It is a strange feeling. It is not one I have ever had the chance to evaluate at length, but I have been feeling, and thinking about, that particular emotion very much today. Today I received some news that I have been waiting for, but fearing would not come, since the end of June last year. To all the dear friends and family who have provided comfort since that time, this is my announcement that the best - as you told me it would! - rather than the worst has at last happened. In the first minutes after getting that news, I felt sheer joy - the kind of joy that leaves you shaking, and crying, and feeling as if you could take on anything in the world. But since then this joy has settled into something quieter, but no less marvellous. Relief.

Relief, I realise now, is the other side of fear. It is what you feel when reality has been turned on its head for a time, but then rights itself. And the longer reality has been the wrong way up, the more reconciled you had got to the prospect that you might not wake up from the nightmare - the purer, the deeper, and the more, well, odd the feeling of relief is. It's like having a huge bruise, that hurts when you touch it, but then suddenly one day, though you can still see the bruise turning from purple to green, it doesn't hurt no mutter how hard you press at it. Throughout today, I have kept pressing away at the bruise I had got so used to, but there is no pain there any more. Just relief, and the promise, at last, of a future in a world the right way up.

It is hard to become unaccustomed to fear. Relieved as I am, I cannot help but think - surely this is temporary? Maybe there has been a mistake, and I'm just looking through a maze of mirrors, which make the world look the right way round, but in reality it is still topsy-turvy? But no. The relief, which is just beginning to work on healing the wounds of fear, says otherwise. It is real. The only thing to fear now is fear itself.

Relief, the release from fear, is not a steady emotion. It is like a calm ocean. It has no crashing waves, but it swells every now and then, filling your heart and splashing its salty liquid into your eyes.

Quite simply, I am relieved. And, humble, overlooked, and undramatic though that emotion may be, it is one of the best things I have felt since the end of June last year.

The Strangeness of the Past

For my MPhil in Early Modern History I am writing a thesis on the subject of early modern reactions to mountains and (if and when it happened) mountain-climbing. Right now, that means trawling through Thomas Burnet's Sacred Theory of the Earth, first published in English in 1684. This text has been used by scholars over the past sixty years or so as an exemplar of the allegedly universal early modern 'distaste' for mountains, but it is far more than that, if it reveals such at all. It is nothing less than one man's attempt to explain the physical realities of the earth by sketching its history, from Creation, to the Flood, and beyond.

Sometimes, when I have been working on a particular historical figure for a long period of time, I get to wondering what it would be like to meet them. I would definitely like to go for a drink with Sandy Irvine, for example, the 22 year-old Oxonian who died on Everest in 1924. His letters are witty, slightly cheeky, excited in tone and often badly spelt. I imagine he would be the kind of person who would tell wicked stories all evening, and who might flirt a little with girls, but always politely. Elizabeth Elstob, an early seventeenth-century Anglo-Saxonist whose letters I edited a year or so ago, would I think probably be quite trying company, at least in her later years, although through no fault of her own. In her letters one gets the sense of a woman for whom life held a great deal of melancholy, and a succession of unfulfilled promises. I think she would fill an encounter with a sympathetic ear with slightly mournful reminisces of days gone by.

Thomas Burnet, on the other hand, would be an infuriating person to spend an evening with. I envisage him as the kind of older man you might end up drawn into after-dinner conversation with, who has the smile of one who believes he has all the answers. And the problem is, he does.

I am only halfway through the first book (of, heavens help me, four), but thus far I cannot help but feel impressed by Burnet's theory. In a nutshell, it is this: the Bible, he points out, tells us that when the Flood (or, as he terms it, the Deluge) occurred, waters rose to above the tops of the mountains. As far as Burnet is concerned, this just can't be possible: there isn't enough water in the oceans or in the clouds to cover the tops of the mountains. So his answer is that the mountains could not have existed until after the Deluge - that, indeed, they were the result of it.

This simple totting up of cubits of water on Burnet's part has some interesting ramifications. He argues, next, that the ante-deluvian (pre-Flood) Earth was in the shape of a 'mundane Egg', with the fiery centre as the yolk, a watery 'Abysse' as the white, and a layer of Earth as the shell. So how, the reader asks, did all that water get out? I can answer that, says the all-knowing, infuriating Burnet: the Sun's heat gradually caused vapours to be released from the waters of the Abyss, and eventually these vapours broke out of the shell - causing the surface of the earth to crack, flooding it with water, and causing mountains to form.

The thing that really gets me about this is that, taken entirely on its own terms, it... well, it fits. My know-it-all after dinner companion has laid out a jigsaw which seems impossible and then manages to fit it together perfectly. If I didn't know the things I do know, thanks to having been born in the 21st-century rather than the 17th, I might almost be tempted to think he was right.

This, I think, is the real challenge with exploring the thinking of the past. By modern standards, Burnet's Sacred Theory is mad, silly, even. But for all that I sometimes find myself wanting to reach through my computer screen and strangle the man for being so unflappably, even smugly, convinced of his own correctness, I also cannot forget that I have a fairly considerable advantage over him. At one point, he talks about what the Earth would look like from the Moon. To me, in 2013, this seems a commonplace - images of the Earth from space abound (often on Facebook, with inspirational quotes beneath...), after all - but for Burnet, in 1784? That was a huge leap of imagination. His entire theory is an immense feat of imagination. From two sources - his observations of the world in its 'current' form, and Scripture - he then went on a journey of the mind to seek out the deep history of the earth. 

The ideas of the past may seem strange sometimes, and they may even be wrong by modern standards, but we must not forget that once, they seemed to some to be feasible, or even genius.