Sortition
The casting or drawing of lots; selection, choice, or determination by lot.
An act or instance of determining by lot.
And thus by extension: The ancient art of choosing members of government by lottery, as practised by the ancient Athenians and still in our modern jury system.
Derived from the Latin sortitio, from sortiri to cast lots.
The OED tells us the first recorded use in English was in 1597.
Kate Bennett (Editor)
John Aubrey: Brief Lives with An Apparatus for the Lives of our English Mathematical Writers
(OUP; paperback, 2vv, £50, 2018; hardback, 1vv, £250, 2015)
I’ve been dipping into the paperback edition of this enormous work over the last few weeks. It is so massive – the two volumes are together almost 2000 pages! – that dip into it is all one realistically can do, hence my reluctance to write proper review.
No, almost 2000 pages is not an exaggeration. Amazon quotes the work as being 1968 pages. So no wonder OUP have split the paperback edition into two volumes.
Volume I is 900+ pages and contains John Aubrey’s Brief Lives, together with “The Apparatus …” and a 125-page extended introduction. The Brief Lives themselves are, for the first time ever, reprinted entire and complete with Aubrey’s marginalia (often heraldic drawings, but also notes). Volume II is over 1000 pages of scholarly notes and commentary on the content of Volume I plus 50 pages of index.
I really can’t do better than to quote a couple of the reviews (also quoted on Amazon) from two other Aubrey scholars:
It is not an exaggeration to claim that until Kate Bennett came along, no one properly understood what the Brief Lives are … [Her edition] marks a new beginning for Aubrey scholarship … It is fitting that such scholarly devotion, extending over two decades, should have given rise to an edition that is an innovation in its own right. Nothing like it has appeared before, and it will last, if not forever, for a very long time.
[Ruth Scurr, Times Literary Supplement]
This is an outstanding achievement and will undoubtedly be the standard edition of the Brief Lives for the foreseeable future … In its rich and varied content it is of interest … to anyone studying English learned culture in the seventeenth century, particularly historians of the Royal Society, of mathematics and of antiquarianism. Aubrey himself was acutely concerned that his works should be satisfactorily edited and made use of after his death; in this edition he is luckier than he could have hoped for.
[Kelsey Jackson Williams, History]
Having heard Kate Bennet speak at the 2016 Anthony Powell Conference in York, and been fortunate enough to sit next to her at the conference dinner, I can certainly vouch for her enthusiasm, insight and wide-ranging interests. And this is an amazing piece of work.
Laura Dodsworth, author of Manhood: The Bare Reality has a new book coming out, but unfortunately not until next February.
Its title: Womanhood: The Bare Reality.
You can, of course, pre-order it on Amazon or from the publishers Pinter & Martin.
The book promises to do for women, what Manhood did for men: tell of the variety and the stories of man and manhood. As the blurb an Amazon says:
100 women bare all in an empowering collection of photographs and interviews about Womanhood.
Vagina, vulva, lady garden, pussy, beaver, c**t, fanny … whatever you call it most women have no idea what’s ‘down there’. Culturally and personally, no body part inspires love and hate, fear and lust, worship and desecration in the same way.
From smooth Barbie dolls to internet porn, girls and women grow up with a very narrow view of what they should look like, even though in reality there is an enormous range. Womanhood departs from the ‘ideal vagina’ and presents the gentle un-airbrushed truth, allowing us to understand and celebrate our diversity.
For the first time, 100 brave and beautiful women reveal their bodies and stories on their own terms, talking about how they feel about pleasure, sex, pain, trauma, birth, motherhood, menstruation, menopause, gender, sexuality and simply being a woman.
Laura comments further in a recent Facebook post:
“A major issue for women is that men and society are really interested in defining womanhood for us and without us. A lot of the time, women don’t have an awful lot of input into the definition of womanhood, yet we’re judged against it. Women have to make choices that men don’t ever have to make.”
From Womanhood: The Bare RealityA bold first quote to share from Womanhood. I’ve already been #notallmen-ed on Twitter, so let me say, I love men, this is not anti-men. (I LOVE men.) Remember Manhood?
But this is the point; Womanhood is an exploration of female experience through the embodied stories of 100 women. We define Womanhood on our own terms and in our own words. We reveal ourselves to ourselves and to each other. And it’s about time.
Laura’s previous books (Manhood: The Bare Reality and Bare Reality: 100 Women, Their Breasts, Their Stories) were amazing, revealing and informative, so I’m really am looking forward to reading Womanhood: The Bare Reality. My copy is already on order.
Full disclosure: I was one of the 100 men featured in Manhood.
So here we are again with this months collection of quotes weird and wonderful!
VESPERS
Hush! Hush. Whisper who dares!
Little boy sits at the foot of the stairs.
Blood on his fingers
And fur on the mat:
Christopher Robin’s castrated the cat!
[John Hein]
Golden-haired boy on the edge of the street
In his tight blue jeans on his lonely beat.
Hush! Hush!
I’m rather afraid
Christopher Robin is looking for trade.
[John Hein]
You cannot overestimate the stupidity of people, yourself especially.
[Robyn Hitchcock]
Fascism is cured by reading, and racism is cured by travelling.
[Miguel do Unamuno]
I believe that when we leave a place, part of it goes with us, and part of us remains. Go anywhere in the station when it is quiet and just listen. After a while, you will hear the echoes of all our conversations, every thought and word we’ve exchanged. Long after we have gone, our voices will linger in these walls.
[unknown]
Faced with a choice between contributors offering an honest and considered assessment or mendacious buffoons with a talent for attracting attention, the BBC will consistently choose the latter. By this means it systematically distorts national life.
[George Monbiot]
Way down deep in the middle of the Congo,
A hippo took an apricot, a guava and a mango.
He stuck it with the others, and he danced a dainty tango.
The rhino said …
‘My testicle was so big, you could play it like a bongo’.
[https://twitter.com/ed_son/status/1038321780010766336]
“History” is not derived from “his story”. It’s from the Greek ἱστορία, historia, which means “inquiry”.
[Rose Eveleth]
Wellness uses terms that sound like a dog whistle for the patriarchy. Pure. Clean. Natural. This could easily be advertising for America’s next virgin bride, not a pathway to health.
[Dr Jennifer Gunter]
If we’re not supposed to have midnight snacks, why is there a light in the fridge?
[Stephen Rodda]
If people can’t face up to the fact of other people being naked … then we’re never going to get anywhere.
[John Lennon]
“I’ve often been asked, ‘What do you old folks do now that you’re retired?’ Well … I’m fortunate to have a chemical engineering background and one of the things I enjoy most is converting beer, wine and vodka into urine. I do it every day and I really enjoy it.”
[unknown]
Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
[HL Mencken]
One of our favourite Zen Masters, Brad Warner, recently wrote the ridiculousness of religions, what he called “religulous belief”. As regular readers will surmise, these are views with which I have much sympathy. However along the way Brad did explain why liturgy remains important to me despite my lack of belief in deities.
Here is an editied version of Brad’s article, as it partly explains something which has long puzzled me:
Bill Maher and like-minded people such as Richard Dawkins always make the same complaints about religions. They attack the religion’s cosmogony – its myths, its creation story, its ideas about heavens, hells, angels and all that. They point out that this stuff is ridiculous. Then they figure the job is done.
Most religions have pretty dopey stories attached to them … Even mainstream religions have ideas that sound pretty silly when you examine them; virgin birth, parting of seas, swallowings by whales, people rising from the dead, and so on. Some Buddhist ideas … are just as weird.
…
I don’t think most people join religions because they are convinced by their cosmogony. People don’t say, “You guys teach that God lives on planet Kolob? That sounds reasonable. Sign me up!”
…
Being without faith is a luxury for people who were fortunate enough to have a fortunate life. You go to prison and you hear people say, ‘I got nothing but Jesus in here.’ If you’re in a foxhole you probably have a lot of faith. I completely understand that. But how can smart people believe in the talking snake and people living to be 900 years old and virgin birth? …The answer is that we’re all in a foxhole. We’re all in prison. Maybe not literally, but metaphorically. We’re all going to get sick and die. We’re all imprisoned by society to one extent or another. Even “fortunate” people have to suffer misfortune. It’s inevitable …
People will cling to anything that makes the sadness of life a little easier to take. Being wrong but happy feels better than being right but miserable.
… Buddhism, at least in the Zen school … doesn’t insist that we have to believe in Buddhist cosmogony. Most schools of Buddhism don’t have a strong insistence on belief in Buddhist cosmogony – although some do. But the Zen school is probably the most radical in its rejection of such beliefs.
Yet … Zennies … still retain many of the trappings of Buddhist schools in which such beliefs are held more strongly. They still have ceremonies in which they honour mythological figures …
Nobody ever insists that you have to believe … yet we play along just like people who do believe these things.
… these ceremonies have practical value. They help people get along together. They give them a sense of belonging and community. Their “lies” … ease some of our worries and fears. And they can do this even if we know perfectly well they’re not true …
This is very interesting as it says to me this is (at least partly) how liturgy and ceremony work: by reinforcing community, easing worries, despite our better judgement. Although I still think there is something even deeper, more magic, about really good liturgy like Tridentine Latin Mass.
I think it may be similar to the way it feels good to hear someone you love tell you it’s going to be all right when you’re sick … We all need that …
Some good food for thought!
For this month’s Ten Things again topical …
Ten Autumn Things
Herewith are the usual monthly collection of links to items you may have missed. It’s holiday season, so there’s not been so much of interest this month.
Science, Technology & Natural World
This year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures should be good. They’re titled “Who are You?” and will apparently be all about evolution and the rise of Homo sapiens. And who better to present them than the ever excellent Prof. Alice Roberts. But I bet there will only be three lectures again this year, rather than the original six.
Talking of human evolution, the latest research suggests that one of the last traits of our primate origins to disappear was our prehensile big toes.
More prosaically, it seems that the UK has this month been plagued by social wasps. I can’t say I’ve noticed, but here anyway are five reasons we should celebrate them. Oh and there’s another reason: our beloved honey bees are descended from ancient wasps.
I’ve seen it suggested that this is old news, but there are recent reports of Pine Marten recolonising the Kielder Forest for the first time in 90 years.
Health & Medicine
There’s a brilliant plan afoot to map the location of every publicly accessible defibrillator in the UK.
And a tragic story: how smallpox claimed it’s very last known victim here in the UK.
There’s new evidence that the HPV vaccine has been responsible for a huge reduction in the rate of cervical cancer. Even better is the news from last month that HPV vaccination is to be offered to teenage boys in England.
Apparently the idea that millions of sperm are in an Olympian race to reach the egg is yet another male fantasy about human reproduction. This Aeon piece has news of what actually seems to happen. [LONG READ]
I wasn’t sure whether to put this item under science or medicine, but here’s a piece of the chemistry of foxgloves, from which we still get the heart drug digoxin.
And here’s a strange phenomenon: aphantasia – the inability to picture things in one’s mind’s eye. It sounds as if there is a spectrum of aphantasia from very lucid to nothing; I suspect I’m somewhere in the lower half as the only pictures I have of events (even significant events like our wedding) are a few “snapshot” images, whereas other people I know can run everything in full HD video in their brains. It’s very curious.
Environment
Here’s another potentially disastrous new vanity project which George Monbiot has got his knife into: the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway. The article contains links to some of the official documentation, and it doesn’t look very pretty!
History, Archaeology & Anthropology
Researchers have made a very interesting discovery of an ancient hominid girl whose mother was a Neanderthal and father was a Denisovan. It suggests that hybridisation between hominid species, and especially our close relatives, was a lot more common than was suspected.
An interesting alternative theory about the development of major monuments like Stonehenge and Easter Island. [£££]
Yet more laboratory research has led investigators to unravel the recipe for Egyptian mummification.
It been a hot summer (although writing this over bank holiday weekend it doesn’t feel that way) and the lack of rain has been a great result for archaeologists as many hitherto unknown sites have become visible in crop marks. And the use of drones has made finding them so much easier than hitherto. [Mostly images]
London
One of our favourite London bloggers has undertaken an epic journey: across London on the 51½°N line of latitude. It is documented in a series of 12 posts of which this is the first – or you can have the whole 51½°N journey in a single post. [LONG READ]
Lifestyle & Personal Development
So what is it really like being an artist’s model? A handful off London’s life models give us a few insights.
Food & Drink
Gluten is getting a bad name. Are problems with gluten in the diet a fad? Or are they a real medical issue? Joanna Blythman in the Guardian looks at some of what seems to be happening. I think the jury is still out.
Despite many people’s dislike, we all know cabbage is good for you and now researchers are suggesting it may contain anti-cancer chemicals. Well if was good enough for Diogenes …
That’s all for this month; more at the end of September.
I’d never heard of the Oxford-Cambridge Expressway, which seems to be a new mega-road linking the two university cities. And no wonder, because it seems to be being cookd up behind closed doors.
Yesterday’s Guardian ran a typically robust piece from George Monbiot attacking both the scheme and the governments approach:
Monbiot’s article links to a number of the government documents, which do seem to substantiate many of his assertions. Beyond that I leave readers to make up their own minds.
Here’s this month’s collection of recently encountered quotes.
Borges wrote that a library is a labyrinth. This is also true – the rows of bookshelves running on for miles, with paths and passageways between them, the classification of the texts working as a kind of cipher that the reader must decode in order to find what she wants. That is only the superficial idea, however. Borges meant that literature is itself a labyrinth, and that every library contains the possibility of infinite places and infinite existences. Open a book in a library and you can disappear into a world, its cities, and its landscapes. All books, in turn, are labyrinths that express the winding shapes of their writers’ imaginations. Each writer builds the labyrinth, and then leads the readers through the myriad possibilities of their tale with a thread like that of Ariadne, guiding them down the paths of their story, wherever it might take them.
[Sofia Grammatiki, quoted at https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jul/28/myth-monsters-and-the-maze-how-writers-fell-in-love-with-the-labyrinth]
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
[Lao Tzu]
Making others happy is not a question of sacrificing our own happiness. Trying to make others happy, even when we do not always succeed, is a source of great satisfaction. Anger and hatred are signs of weakness, while compassion is a sure sign of strength.
[Dalai Lama]
Any sufficiently oblivious technology is indistinguishable from malice.
[Rose Eveleth]
You don’t have to say anything to the haters. You don’t have to acknowledge them at all. You just wake up every morning and be the best you you can be. And that tends to shut them up.
[Michelle Obama]
Doors closed 15 minutes ago. As we do every evening, we’ve turned all the books upside down so the words don’t fall out overnight. It may seem like a silly waste of time, but ask yourself this; when did you last see piles of words on a Waterstones carpet? That’s right – NEVER.
[https://twitter.com/swanseastones/status/1027234913005830144]
A limerick is seldom essential,
And this one is inconsequential,
Just the standard five lines,
And some dubious rhymes,
And it’s pointlessly self-referential.
[https://twitter.com/daniel_barker/status/1027932616442474498]
The rigid low-sodium diet is insipid, unappetising, monotonous, unacceptable, and intolerable. To stay on it requires the asceticism of a religious zealot.
[Sir George Pickering, about 50 years ago, quoted at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/09/salt-not-as-damaging-to-health-as-previously-thought-says-study]
A Limerick on any occasion
Is great for debate or persuasion,
It dissipates bile
Just by raising a smile:
The perfect poetic equation.
[https://twitter.com/bernardstacey/status/1028189895519596544]
Ultimately, happiness comes down to choosing between the discomfort of becoming aware of your mental afflictions and the discomfort of being ruled by them.
[Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche]
GOING TO THE DOGS
My granddad, viewing earth’s worn cogs,
Said things were going to the dogs;
His granddad in his house of logs,
Said things were going to the dogs;
His granddad in the Flemish bogs.
Said things were going to the dogs;
His granddad in his old skin togs,
Said things were going to the dogs;
There’s one thing that I have to state –
The dogs have had a good long wait.
[Anon; quoted at https://www.facebook.com/barnabyjpage/posts/10156805118473487]
Lighthouse-keepers Trinity House own a lot of land alongside Borough High Street, which is why Avon Place … has a bicentennial mural along its length featuring Henry VIII, osteopathy and a fox chewing a brake cable.
[diamond geezer at http://diamondgeezer.blogspot.com/2018/08/51n-6.html]
