oursin | Entries tagged with mass observation

So, it looks probable that I am coming up to be the next person to suggest A Book for the in-person reading group.

And I recently had a flash of inspiration, why not something by Naomi Mitchison?

Except that when I come to Do The Research, hardly anything is at present actually in print, chiz chiz chiz.

I really don't think I can moot The Corn King and the Spring Queen which is Very Long.

We're doing a memoir for the meeting next week so perhaps not Among You Taking Notes.

Otherwise it's The Blood of the Martyrs, about the early Christians, not perhaps as good as the earlier Classical Antiquity novels, or Travel Light, which is not my own favourite among her fantasy works.

I really fancied blowing their minds with Memoirs of a Spacewoman but although there is a Kindle edition of the Italian translation, if you want to read it in English secondhand copies come pricey.

(INFAMY!!!)

So I have to think of something else.

To switch to an entirely different track, maybe Rosamond Lehmann, Dusty Answer, the archetypal Sad Girl Novel?

Hell, maybe I should go for Cold Comfort Farm.

Like they would have painted a sinister sixth finger (come on down Mr Cromwell insisting on the warts): Hidden detail found in Anne Boleyn portrait was ‘witchcraft rebuttal’, say historians. Hmmm. Oh yeah? Am cynical.

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Overlooked women artists (maybe I will mosey on down to the Courtauld....): The Courtauld’s riveting, revelatory and deeply researched show of ten lost female painters looks afresh at the golden age of British landscape art:

Some of Mary Smirke’s pictures were ascribed to her brother and Elizabeth Batty’s entire output was assumed to have been her son’s.

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Men are poor stuff. Men are terribly poor stuff. Men covertly filming women at night and profiting from footage, BBC finds.

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The Black Beauty in the White House: this is actually about the famous horse book, which was written in a house of that name. In Norfolk.

This is the story of a child from a coastal town in Norfolk, who would go on to influence life around the world and who is just as famous today. Not Horatio Nelson, but rather Anna Sewell, the author of Black Beauty. She managed to not only influence the lives of people but also horses (and possibly many other animals as well) with the story, published only a few months before her death.

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This looks fascinating though I need to read it a lot more closely: Right place, right time: Luck, geography, and politics:

On 12th May 2020, Mass Observation collected c5,000 diaries from people across the UK. Many of these diaries mention luck and many of these luck stories are geography stories. Geographers, though, have not written much about luck. In this article, I review the literature on luck from within and beyond geography to construct a working definition and geographical approach to luck. The working definition describes luck as chance, fortuitous, unexpected events that were beyond the control of those for whom they are now significant. The geographical approach distinguishes four geographical aspects of luck: the geometry of luck; lucky places; right place, right time; and the practical sphere.

I Can't Believe That I Forgot To Mention:

NAOMI MITCHISON!!!

Admittedly this was a time when, however much she was a heroine of mine, she was even more niche (or, I suppose, given her plethora of interests and activisms, niches) than she is now. It was at a reading in one of the smaller (in fact, very small) venues in the Royal Festival Hall complex, organised by the archivist of Mass Observation, so I guess this was about the time NM's MO diary was being published? Though she was actually reading her poetry. Early to mid 80s.

So after the reading I had some chat with my archivist mate on certain matters of mutual interest, and then, the initial rush to speak to NM having dispersed somewhat I ventured to go and say how much I was a fan, and did she ever think of reissuing her 1930s publisher-expurgated novel with the cuts restored? Alas, she said, doubted that the original text remained in its intact state. Also saw her (but not, as I recall, to speak to) at a JBS Haldane Centenary thing at the Science Museum some few years later.

Other rather niche writer of similar period I met - at least a bit niche/neglected at the time, her books are now having a revival - Celia Fremlin. Actually met her some time in the 90s because I was visiting her husband, who was involved in a progressive organisation of the 30s in which I was interested. She was interesting but a bit scary.

Plus, one day in the mid 80s I was attending a seminar at the academic department associated with My Former Workplace, and for some reason the polymathic Jonathan Miller ('theatre and opera director, actor, author, television presenter, humourist and physician') was attending. I was able to correct a comment he made about Criysede in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde ending up with leprosy - that actually happens in Henryson's version of the tale, The Testament of Cresseid, wow, such pedant.

I daresay everybody reading this is by now aware of the existence of The Queue, which is now stretching out very likely at least beyond Inner London if not beyond the outer limits of the Great Metropls.

I am rather in concurrence with this article: I’m an expert in crowd behaviour – don’t be fooled that everyone queueing in London is mourning the Queen, in particular:

And then there are many whose presence in the Queen’s mourning crowds has precious little to do with the Queen. They simply recognise that these are events of major significance. If the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace brings along spectators to view the spectacle, the changing of the monarch brings them along in spades. They want to be able to say: “I was there. I am part of history.” Linked to this, people want to be able to say: “We were there.” Parents can tell their children in later years: “You and your granny were both at the Queen’s funeral procession,” after Granny herself has died. Shared attendance at such a meaningful event serves to bind families together across the generations.

I'll bet Mass Observation had directives (if they still do directives) ready to go well before the actual date, in readiness, given that one of their first efforts was (if I recollect aright) the coronation of George VI.

And I sort of see that, but I am also of the opinion that much of history and what is really significant is happening quietly and initially unobserved, or only by a handful of people.

I really don't have much time for Cyril Connolly, especially after reading DJ Taylor, Lost Girls: Love, War and Literature: 1939-51, but I do rather like this line from The Unquiet Grave (1944):

When very bored recite: 'It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionize the whole course of our life and alter the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates'.

I also think of that 1980s sf series by MA Foster (The Transformer Trilogy) in which the protag advances from bringing down a regime by assassinating a fairly obscure minor bureaucrat (rather than an obvious high profile target) to destablising a situation simply by moving a thing from one side of their desk to the other.

What’s in a Name? Erasing women writers in the name of uplifting them:

It is easy to get caught in the trap of historical revisionism when it comes to women writers, but this revisionism is rarely along progressive lines – despite its claims. Instead, it is a conservative reimagining of women struggling to survive in a man’s world that erases the long and fascinating history of women writers and their achievements, contributions and impact. The truth is much more exciting.

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Diane Watt, a professor of medieval literature, shows that the earliest English women writers lived centuries before Julian of Norwich or Margery Kempe:

Women’s contributions to medieval literary culture have been obscured for complex and various reasons, and misconceptions remain about their involvement in literature in the premodern period in Europe as both creators and consumers. Watt’s study ends in 1100, but misconceptions govern the entire medieval period. There is a common assumption, for instance, that the first women authors were nuns who, educated in Latin at a convent in order to read scripture, learned to write only in order to write about God.

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Snoop-Women with Notebooks: Naomi Mitchison, Mass Observation, and the Gender of Domestic Intelligence:

[T]he subsequent turn towards quantitative data devalued women’s experiences by favoring institutionalized patriarchal approaches to analyzing public opinion.

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Mary Vezey, Sarah Chapone, and the Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives (1732-35) (CW for domestic violence):

Media reports could be driven by commercial interests and might seek to sensationalize and to entertain from the misery of others. But they might also do more. Chapone recognized such reports as double-edged swords, ones that might on the one side defend the despotic power of husbands but which might also, potentially, cut complacency to the quick and thereby prompt reforms of the laws.

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Before the vote was won: women and politics, 1832-68:

Although females were excluded from the parliamentary franchise before 1918, it would be wrong to suppose that they were previously unable to play any part in parliamentary politics. Our research on the House of Commons, 1832-68 project continues to highlight the role of women in many aspects of Victorian politics.

I was looking at this: 31 Morning Journaling Prompts that Will Change the Way You Think:

Successful people all over the world—those who consistently make positive changes in their lives—reflect daily and learn from their life experiences. And they often use some kind of journal to accomplish this.

Okay, I feel like sending him a copy of Barbellion's Journal of a Disappointed Man just for some contrast, but I suppose he is talking about the journal as a personal tool rather than something that might have literary or historical merit and reach beyond the individual diarist.

While Samuel Pepys was a successful person in terms of his worldly career as an administrator, he is famous for writing a diary which I'm not sure filled this worthy role in his life, even if it owed something to the Puritan tradition of self-examination (?).

I suppose that it is not impossible that somebody who began journalling by this rather by the numbers method might nonetheless come to write something that would be worthy of being shelved with the great diaries of the past? Just as some people who began writing diaries for Mass Observation about their day-to-day lives as social observation came to write with much more inner depth and personal meaning.

Anyway, it's provided me with a prompt for today's post.

And, of course, occasion to bring out my EM Delafield Provincial Lady icon.

What I read

This was a week of entirely self-indulgent re-reading of things first read within the relatively recent past: as opposed to re-reading something I read decades ago.

On the go

Marilynne Robinson, The Givenness of Things: essays (2015) which is good but something I only really want to read a little of at a time.

Research reading: have actually managed a little more of the book on the rise of Child Guidance in the UK, and have started (in order to cite in a paper I am giving at a conference at which the author might be present), Nick Hubble, Mass Observation and Everyday Life: Culture, History, Theory (2005), which has been sitting around waiting for me to get to it for quite a while - think it was a freebie for reviewing an ms or a proposal for the publisher. Useful.

Having also started in on the book I am supposed to be reviewing.

Up next

Dunno: am about to do some travelling (out bakson) so may get to some of the things still patiently waiting on the Kobo. Though I also have to read somebody's dissertation (fortunately not a long one) in order to talk to them about it next week.

You know that ghastly future where we are all under surveillance all the time, and our protags have to try and break out from under...*

Well, some people appear to be running towards this with arms outstretched for Big Welcoming Hug, going 'O Hai, I can haz panopticon!!!':

Mr. McDonough is in the forefront of efforts to change that, to record instantaneously the major intellectual events in our lives. He will be the first living archive at Stanford University.

This means that the architect, a leader in sustainable development, has started filming all of his meetings and recording all of his phone conversations. He will send them in something close to real time to Stanford, which will be making much of the material immediately accessible on the Internet. Even presidents are not observed so closely and so continuously.
....
Gordon Bell of Microsoft Research won wide notice a couple of years ago for his “life-logging,” which involved putting everything he had accumulated, written, photographed, presented and owns (like CDs) into what he called his “local cyberspace.” That, however, was a personal initiative, not a collaboration with an institution.

“I think this will become a common practice,” Mr. Ubois said. “Now that we know technologies go obsolete, it will be even more important to archive things contemporaneously.”

Okay, bludd thikkt with cold, etc, but, as an archivist, am pretty much sure this Will Not Happen. The article goes on:

The traditional format with archives went like this: aging famous person puts together his correspondence and drafts, hires an agent and sells the material to the institution that offered the most loot. Stanford, for instance, paid $1 million for Allen Ginsberg’s 300,000-item archive in 1994. Scholars would then slowly come pick through the material, which sometimes carried restrictions for decades.

which makes me giggle, because this is not, on the whole, a model with which I am familiar.

It is much more likely that aging famous person left their papers in a complete mess, divided between their office and their home (where they will be distributed in various locations) and archivist is called in by desperate executors/family members who want to sell the house and just want to get all this stuff out.

And even if we don't find that the most important stuff was stored in the bit of the attic where the roof leaked or the mice nested, there will almost certainly be gaps in the record.

Then, of course, there are the times when one approaches Aging Famous Person or Significant Organisation to discover that keeping their records beyond the time of immediate use was So Not A Priority, even if they weren't regular clear-out documentation managers.

So honestly, I can quite envisage some people recording every moment, just as there are people who keep everything and even hire storage lockers or pay commercial storage firms to store it all in. But also people who are quite the reverse.

I cannot help thinking that this is about egotism rather than long-term historical value. Though concede that I would be fairly cool with Mass Observation-style records of ordinary people going about their quotidien trival round and common task.

*Though in Triton, Delany kind of undercut that by having everybody being (randomly?) videoed but able to access random moment of their record in public booths for a small payment.

Scholarly activities:
- Paper for Belgium conference now has beginning, middle and end, also coherent (I hope) transitions where there were rather abrupt jumps from one topic to another, and some points left open for (possible) expansion in discussion period. Will tweak and polish over weekend.
- Report on revised proposal for book, previous proposal for which I was rather negative about some months ago. However, it's now phrased less in impenetrable jargon and more in language accessible to the Common Reader, and if author can keep this up throughout, looks quite promising.
- Report on book ms.

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Nightmare lunch:
Project Archivist and Conservator are leaving so all department (except person on external training course) went out for lunch at nearby pasta place which has previously been found satisfactory. Nearly half-an-hour before we got in our orders for main courses was not a good sign, especially when the waitress expressed concern that we were all ordering different things, and this might take more time (I am Not An Expert on the restaurant business, but, hello, surely this is something they must encounter quite often? - also, if this is problem, why so many options on menu?). And then it took nearly an hour until we got our main courses, fortunately we had ordered some bruscheta to nibble on while waiting. Food was good when it arrived, but service definitely classifiable as diabolical - when the mains began to arrive it was in fits and starts with significant gaps, something that's only forgivable at Waggamama when they tell you upfront that this is going to happen.

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Rant du jour:
Article brought to my attention via carandol, on Mass Observation's 'Little Kinsey' sex survey of the late 1940s:

The Kinsey Report of 1948 famously lifted the lid on American sexual behaviour. But when a similar study was conducted in Britain the following year, the findings were so outrageous they were suppressed. Only now have they been revealed.
....
Yet when a group of young researchers set out to probe British sexual behaviour in 1949 their findings were considered so outrageous they were instantly swept under the carpet; banished to the archives of a university.

Where, in fact, along with the rest of the MO archives, they have been extensively used by researchers over the past 20-30 years, including moi, plus the report of 'Little Kinsey' was published in extenso in 1995, edited by Liz Stanley, as Sex Surveyed. This is the classic journo 'I haven't heard of this before, it was kept a deep dark secret and this is a Revelation', along with the profound misapprehension of what archives actually do (duh). Also, would you believe that the reason it didn't get published was Rather More Complicated than this makes out?

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Mad Amazon irony
In my recommendations: Mike Featherstone, Undoing Culture: Globalization, Postmodernism and Identity (Theory, Culture & Society S.): and for why? 'because you rated Cold Comfort Farm'. I think this should be known as 'Mybug's Revenge'.

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It's Always More Complicated

The wandering thoughts of a wandering hedgehog

Entries tagged with mass observation

Well, that hinders my plans

Things

Further encounters with fame

Performative Britishness, what

Not, really, hidden - maybe you weren't looking

I suppose this is sort of meta...

Wednesday stirs dull roots with spring rain

This was not the dystopia we anticipated

Friday evening round-up