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I once had a colleague who’d been a little girl in the 1970s, and not a particularly poor one, yet she would shudder and say: ‘Oh, it was like Eastern Europe then, all stews and root vegetables and wet holidays in caravans.’
environmentalism, feminism, gay rights and Rock Against Racism were for many people more important as politics than the parties led by Wilson and Callaghan, Heath and Thatcher.
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- Sometimes he tells us just a little too much about the journey, how cloudy it was or how sunny, which mode of transport he used, what magazines he bought in W.H. Smith. But the point is well made when he writes:
- British politics in the 1970s, for all the Gothic prose it usually prompts, was about moments of possibility as well as periods of entropy; about stretches of calm as well as sudden calamity. Politics was rawer and more honest – in the sense that conflicts between interests and ideologies were out in the open – than perhaps we are used to nowadays. It was also more obviously connected to everyday life – not just through the much higher turnouts at general elections, but through the disruptions wrought by strikes and other shocks, by voters’ living-room lights suddenly going out.
- Patrick Jenkin, the energy minister, advised people to save electricity by cleaning their teeth in the dark (and then newspapers printed pictures of Jenkin’s own house ablaze with light). But the winter was mild and people coped. Output per labour hour actually increased. Workers worked harder over shorter weeks and then went home to trim the wicks of antique oil lamps and pay more attention to their children and gardens. The three television channels closed down early at 10.30 p.m., streetlights were dimmed, offices cooled their heating to 65ºF; but the world did not collapse
- Raphael Samuel, quoted by Beckett, thought that ‘strikes, for those who took part in them, took on something of the character of [religious] Revivals . . . an occasion for mass conversion, a time when all things are made anew.
- Trade unions became an immovable fact of everyday life; they were, as Beckett writes, at their zenith. From friends on unsympathetic newspapers I learned the term of art for the front-page formula that ran a big headline next to a mugshot (‘The man who is stopping your trains tonight!’). They called it the ‘crucifixion layout’. It implied that strikes were caused by some ranting Messiah leading ‘reasonable’ workers astray, rather than (as was usually the case) the same reasonable workers taking a self-interested decision to maximise their wages
- It seems inconceivable now that British governments would kowtow to, or at least try to persuade and seduce, organisations of workers rather than bankers and financiers (‘Vote Barclays, cut out the middle man’). But the economy was different then. Most of the heavy industry and infrastructure were publicly owned. British power stations and steel plants burned British coal. British-owned factories still made ships, cars and lorries, railway locomotives and textiles. We smoked British brands of cigarettes, drank our own Watneys, ate our own sweets. Not all of these products were flawless and often the quantities they were made in were diminishing, but they moored Britain to ways of thinking and living that were all its own. On the day Britain joined the EEC in 1973, the Daily Mirror published a survey into British attitudes towards the social changes that membership might bring. Only 18 per cent of those polled favoured all-day pub opening, only 23 per cent regular wine with meals, only 13 per cent continental breakfasts over bacon and eggs, only 5 per cent Sunday shopping. This might suggest a reasonably happy – if high-fat – contentment with the way things were.
- (Lessing, Drabble, Spark) from what he calls the ‘crisis fiction’ of the time, but crisis seems too noisy a word. What I remember is the kind of hush that comes down in a fog. We ambled onwards. Politicians became blurred silhouettes in the distance.
- One thing about decades it may be important to understand is that the actors and a lot of the scenery date from previous ones. They don’t arrive at the studio flat-packed and in mint condition, the common fault of historical feature films in which, say, a 1920s romance will have a 1920s house with a 1920s cocktail cabinet and a 1920s car in the drive, none of them with a speck of dust or a scratch of wear and tear
- If greater equality nourishes happiness and the public good, as many have come to believe, then it should never be forgotten that in the late 1970s Britain became a more equal country than it had probably ever been and certainly than it has been since. Beckett’s book is not all out revisionism; the facts of industrial turmoil can’t be revised away. But that one fact of greater equality suggests that the received wisdom of the 1970s as Britain’s nightmare decade is little more than a politically convenient libel which suits a narrative of redemption

23 Jun 09

"The Second Coming" and "A Vision"

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William Butler Yeats poetry analysis poetic estética history

Yeats had written in 1900 that: ‘It is only by ancient symbols, by symbols that have numberless meanings besides the one or two the writer lays an emphasis upon, or the half-score he knows of, than any highly subjective art can escape from the barrenness and shallowness of a too conscious arrangement, into the abundance and depth of Nature. The poet of essences and pure ideas must seek in the half-lights that glimmer from symbol to symbol as if to the ends of the earth, all that the epic and dramatic poet finds of mystery and shadow in the accidental circumstances of life’ (‘The Philosophy of Shelley’s Poetry’, E&I 87).

19 Jun 09

Shorpy Photo Archive | History in HD

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vintage b&w history Photography

17 Jun 09

Gender Ideology & Separate Spheres - Victoria and Albert Museum

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19 century society history engl2045 english literature victorian women studies feminism

Changing patterns of patriarchal authority fell within a wider scenario of expanding rights and diminishing subservience for many people, including employees and young people. In some ways resistance to change in gender relations thus represented a symbolically concentrated reaction against general democratisation. Early Victorian gender prescriptions featured men as industrious breadwinners and women as their loyal helpmeets. Reinforced by social philosophers like Auguste Comte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and John Ruskin, this developed into a mid-century doctrine of 'separate spheres', whereby men were figured as competitors in the amoral, economic realm while women were positioned as either decorative trophies or spiritual guardians of men's immortal souls. From the 1860s, to this social construct the Darwinian theory of 'survival of the fittest' added a pseudo-scientific dimension which placed men higher on the evolutionary ladder.
'The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation, and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest... But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle - and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision... She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise -wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she many never fail from his side.' (John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 1865, part II)
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- From infancy onwards, gender inequity permeated all aspects of British life. 'Think what it is to be a boy, to grow up to manhood in the belief that without any merit or exertion of his own ... by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race,' wrote John Stuart Mill in his 1867 polemic against 'The Subjection of Women'
- Whereas in 1800 the majority of Britons had a predominantly practical education, acquired at home and at work, by 1901 formal learning at primary level was universal, with higher instruction available to the better-off. It is worth noting that girls were beginning to move on to university study by the 1860s.
- the classicist Jane Harrison (1850-1928), who trenchantly observed how scholarship was dominated by 'that most dire and deadly of all tyrannies, an oligarchy of old men'
- Nationally (which in this period included the whole of Ireland as well as Scotland, England and Wales), male employment shifted from agriculture to heavy industry, manufacturing and transport, with an accompanying increase in clerical and professional occupations. Men also left domestic service, which remained the largest category of female employment throughout the period (employing 10 percent of the female population in 1851, for example, and over 11 percent in 1891). Women also worked in textile mills, potteries, agriculture and garment-making, as well as in seasonal or unrecorded employment, especially laundering.
- Compared to the 20th century, there was indeed some contraction in the work open to women, as protective legislation barred their employment underground or overnight.
- Generally, male workers strove to secure wages that enabled wives to be full-time mothers - an aspiration in tune with bourgeois notions of orderly domestic bliss. The organised labour movement was overwhelmingly male, with a few trade union activists such as bookbinder Emma Paterson (1848-86)
- It is calculated that while most men worked, only one-third of all women were in employment at any time in the 19th century (as against two-thirds in 1978, for comparison.)
- From the mid-century, educated women began to prise open certain professional and clerical occupations, partly in response to the powerful Victorian 'gospel of work' that castigated idleness, partly to provide for the perceived 'surplus' of single women, and partly for the sake of self-fulfilment. As a result of these struggles, by 1901 here were 212 female physicians, 140 dentists, 6 architects and 3 vets. Over a quarter of professional painters (total 14,000) and over a half of musicians (total 43,230) and actors (12,500) were female.
- Women ran the house, undertaking domestic work and child care themselves, as well as supervising the servants employed to cook, clean, carry coal and run errands. Moreover, almost from time immemorial, with a 'work-basket' to denote her tasks, each girl and woman was a needleworker, responsible for making and mending clothes and household linen. One major change in the period was the invention in the 1850s of the domestic sewing machine, which greatly assisted both private and commercial dressmaking. By 1900 ready-made garments were increasingly available in shops.
- All women are likely, at some period of their lives, to be called on to perform the duties of a sick-nurse, and should prepare themselves for the occasion when they may be required,' noted Mrs Beeton. Professional nurses might be hired, but in many homes 'the ladies of the family would oppose such an arrangement as a failure of duty on their part'.

16 Jun 09

America and the Utopian Dream

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politics exhibit history ejemplo

31 May 09

meine kleine fabrik: The Old Lady's Looking A Bit Stiff

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death marriage debt bizarre history

18 May 09

Cabinet Magazine Online - The Cosmonaut of the Erotic Future

levitation

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history history of science viajeros mythology Contemporary art Photography

Levitation derives from the Latin levitas, meaning lightness. The term would appear to have been coined as the opposite of gravitation, sometime in the early seventeenth century when humanity’s conception of the cosmos was being revolutionized by Brahe, Copernicus, and Kepler.
Levitation is also related to levity, to the lighthearted, the frivolous, and the fun. The link between levitation, levity, and laughter was made explicit in the 1964 Walt Disney classic Mary Poppins (as we’ll see, the the 1960s was an absolutely crucial decade for levitation). Near the end of the film, the curmudgeonly bank director miraculously ascends as he goes into hysterics at an employee’s little joke.
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- combining the technology of aviation with Christian mysticism, is Blaise Cendrars’s Le lotissement du ciel (literally "The Parceling of the Sky" but translated as Sky Memoirs). Begun during World War II and published in 1949, Cendrars’s book presents a kind of literary collage. Prose poetry, exotic travelogues, personal memoirs, and found texts, including scholarly documents, are all pasted together in a complex construction. Cendrars is renowned as an adventurer, and the stories he recounts here do not disappoint: there is his trip across Siberia with a jewelry merchant, his pilgrimage to a strange Brazilian doctor obsessed with Sarah Bernhardt, his voyage from Rio to Cherbourg with 250 tropical birds (none survive the boat ride), his work as a war correspondent for British headquarters in Paris. But it is the death of his son Rémy, a pilot who perished in the early months of the war, that provides the novel’s "center of gravity." Often Cendrars’s "parceling of the sky" is interpreted as an act of mourning
- St. Joseph of Copertino, famed levitator, as the patron saint of French aviators.
- First, Joseph was the only saint ever to have succeeded in flying backwards: retrorsum volantem. Cendrars was especially delighted by this fact. Second, Joseph was a total imbecile who (ironically) became the patron saint for candidates for the priesthood and people taking university degrees. So, what we have in effect is a dim-witted backwards-flying priest, a role that would have been perfect for Jerry Lewis in his prime.
- I think it would not be terribly controversial to call Yves Klein the artist-levitator of the twentieth century. Indeed, with Klein, levitation becomes a veritable revolutionary program. In his 1959 manifesto Overcoming the Problematics of Art, the artist proclaims: "We shall thus become aerial men. We shall know the forces that pull us upwards to the heavens, to space, to what is both nowhere and everywhere. The terrestrial force of attraction thus mastered, we shall literally levitate into a complete physical and spiritual freedom!
- The artist’s audacious plunge is that of a saint announcing the dawn of a new era,⁴ an epoch of immateriality where buildings will be fashioned from air currents, color dissolved into the void, and life and art merged in blissful union. In the caption beneath the photograph, it is written: "Today the painter of space must, in fact, go into space to paint, but he must go there without trickery or deception, and not in an airplane, nor by parachute, nor in a rocket: he must go there on his own strength, using an autonomous, individual force; in short, he must be capable of levitation."
- Of course, it is ironic that The Leap Into the Void is precisely a doctored photograph, an early and masterful example of image manipulation before the days of Photoshop. As much as it may aspire to "True Life," art, after all, remains a matter of illusion. The photograph was staged on October 19, 1960, with Klein’s judo pals holding a blue sheet to catch the levitating artist
- If the classical ideal of art is a kind of elevation, lifting up or spiritualization, one way of characterizing contemporary art is as an "art of the fall."⁶ Rather than the miraculous flight of the saint, its iconic figure is the well-timed tumble of the slapstick artist.
- "The cosmonaut of the erotic future" is a phrase that occurs once, in passing, in the 14 March 1962 session of Lacan’s seminar Identification
- How does the analyst interpret Gagarin’s voyage? Lacan paints a vivid portrait of the cosmonaut as living pulp implanted in a tin can, quivering flesh plugged into a complex technological apparatus. If for Freud man had already become a "prosthetic God,"⁷ in the era of the cosmonaut he would seem to be relegated to a button pusher, utterly dependent on the machine that supports his life functions and extends his limited sensorium.
- Gagarin himself, together with Soviet psychologist Vladimir Lebedev, stated plainly: "The main function of the operator in the ‘man-machine’ system, provided it functions normally, is to take the reading of instruments
- Compared to the Christians, levitation is not really a Jewish strong point. One can, of course, find some scattered episodes of miraculous flight in the Old Testament, but the phenomenon of levitation, especially as ecstatic experience, is largely absent from the Jewish tradition.
- What does space flight signify for the Jewish philosopher? The first thing that strikes the eye is the way that Levinas puts Gagarin and Heidegger back to back. Strange comparison: what do the Russian cosmonaut and the rustic thinker of Todtnauberg have to do with one another? In fact, they represent absolute antipodes: Soviet Communism and German Fascism, technological wizardry and technophobic anti-modernism, vita activa and vita contemplativa. Most importantly, for Levinas this impossible couple stands for the choice between "enlightened uprootedness" (enracinement éclairé) and "earthly attachment" (attachement terrestre). By voyaging into space, man leaves behind his mythic homeland: even further, he discovers that this hallowed place was never anything but superstition and idolatry. Levitation makes of the human being a creature of the universe. Against the philosopher of the forest clearing, Levinas defends the astral desires of technological man.
- In brief, Gagarin is the ultimate figure of exile: a man without roots in a cosmic desert without horizon or end. Mel Brooks once made a comedy sketch called "Jews in Space," but Levinas goes even further: in the vast expanses of space, we are all wandering Jews.
- Yet as a certain literature would have it, the power to fly, far from being a vain aspiration, is a most ordinary and general human capacity. Everyone can fly. Only, we have forgotten how to do so.
- One of Eugene Ionesco’s lesser-known plays, A Stroll in the Air, first performed on December 15, 1962 (a little more than one month after the release of Dmytryk’s film on St. Joseph), suggests that salvation lies in reclaiming our innate levitative powers. When Monsieur Bérenger rises into the sky one Sunday afternoon, he explains his behavior to dubious onlookers thus: "Man has a crying need to fly.... It’s as necessary and natural as breathing .... Everyone knows how to fly. It’s an innate gift but everyone forgets."

08 May 09

Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress)

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Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (Prints and Photographs Reading Room, Library of Congress)

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