fitzcamel

I will concede that this piece on sperm donation is not about dodgy docs or freelance 'donors' but it still all sounds fairly spooky: Why are sperm donors having hundreds of children? Because while, okay, some criteria seem reasonable:

Rules vary across the world, but in the UK you also have to be relatively young - aged 18-45; be free of infections like HIV and gonorrhoea, and not be a carrier of mutations that can cause genetic conditions like cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and sickle cell disease.

From this small pool of donors, some men's sperm is just more popular than others.
Donors are not chosen at random. It's a similar process to the savage reality of dating apps, when some men get way more matches than others.... "You know if they're called Sven and they've got blonde hair, and they're 6 ft 4 (1.93m) and they're an athlete, and they play the fiddle and speak seven languages - you know that's far more attractive than a donor that looks like me," says male fertility expert Prof Allan Pacey, pictured, who used to run a sperm bank in Sheffield.

I am over here muttering 'Morlock Power!'

On men spreading it about, historically speaking: the challenges of illegitimacy when exploring genealogy and how to find that shadowy figure who is not on the birth certificate/in the baptismal register. (With luck he had a bastard sworn upon him when that was a thing, otherwise it's a lot more work and a lot of surmising.)

Let's blame the woman, let's let's let's, she probably did something wrong: Marked: Birthmarks and Historical Myths of Maternal Responsibility - which just mutatates and mutates, no?

A conversation with historian Dagmar Herzog on Fascism’s Body Politics and disability under fascism in her new book, The New Fascist Body

And I think relating to all these sorts of issues: Reproductive norms: stigma and disruptions in family-building:

Our expectations of conception, reproduction, and family-building are imbued with reproductive norms. In our younger years, we may imagine and expect that we will have a certain number of children at specific ages or points in the life-course, and in particular circumstances. We may think that conception will be straightforward, pregnancy will pass without complications, and our children will be healthy and without disabilities or impairments. We may have hazy, dreamy ideas of what our children will be like and perhaps more defined ideas of what we will be like as parents.

Suddenly it seems like Christmas is more imminent than I thought - I was going, oh, it is only the beginning of December, and now we are nearly 2 weeks in and aaaaargh.

Anyway, I have managed to get off the book tokens for the great-nieces and nephews - I was waiting on my sister coming back to let me know that, yes, they are all still readers, and then looked again at her email in which she said, would let me know if not....

So I got on to that and I had clearly erased from memory how immensely tiresome Waterstones site is should you want to purchase physical gift cards for several people, you have to make a separate purchase for each one, moan groan, and quite soon reached point where credit cards went 'we are sending you OTP' as you put in details yet another time.

Am feeling a bit generally fratchy today after a night troubled with resurgence of hip issue - probably due to a certain amount of standing about at Institution of Which I Am Honoured to Be A Fellow's Party yestere'en.

Had a moderately agreeable time and pleasant conversation but am still irked that the email issue remains unresolved.

Also, having determined to ring opticians to confirm appointment for dilation test - after a very satisfactory, insofar as holding one's head in awkward positions and having lights flashed in one's eyes can be thus designated, eye-test on Wednesday, at which it was determined I did not need new glasses, hooray, hooray, person I was dealing with right at the end looked at my notes and asked how long it was since they did a dilation test, which resulted in booking me in for a week's time. However, did not get any confirmation, odd I thought since they had been inundating me with texts and emails reminding me of the eye-test. So I was going to ring them but then they rang, going ooops, we are actually closed that day for training, can we reschedule. So rescheduled.

This is rather news to me - I think of people protesting the enclosure of commons as doing this a) a lot earlier and in more rural parts: Today in London’s parklife: 1000s destroy enclosure fences, Hackney Downs, 1875:

The 1870s were a high point of anti-enclosure struggles in the London area, following on from a decade of (mostly, though not exclusively) peaceful campaigns to prevent large open spaces being developed in the 1860s. Wanstead Flats in 1871, Chiselhurst Common in 1876, Eelbrook Common (Fulham) in 1878, all saw direct action against fences, as part of long-running resistance against the theft of common land.
....
Many of these struggles were characterised by the large-scale involvement of radical movements, as London radicals, secularists and elements who would later help to form socialist groups made open space and working class access to it a major part of their political focus. Radical land agitation, notably through the Land and Labour League, was beginning to revive the question of access to land as a social question, and within cities this manifested as both battles to defend green space, and propaganda around the theft of the land from the labouring classes.

Centuries of hard fought battles saved many beloved places from disappearing, and laws currently protect parks, greens and commons. But times change… Pressures change. Space in London is profitable like never before. For housing mainly, but also there are sharks ever-present looking to exploit space for ‘leisure’. And with the current onslaught on public spending in the name of balancing the books (ie cutting as much as possible in the interests of the wealthy), public money spent on public space is severely threatened.
Many are the pressures on open green spaces – the costs of upkeep, cleaning, maintenance,
improvement, looking after facilities… Local councils, who mainly look after open space, are struggling. Some local authorities are proposing to make cuts of 50 or 60 % to budgets for parks. As a result, there are the beginnings of changes, developments that look few and far between now, but could be the thin end of the wedge.
So you have councils looking to renting green space to businesses, charities, selling off bits, shutting off parks or parts of them for festivals and corporate events six times a year… Large parts of Hyde Park and Finsbury Park are regularly fenced off for paying festivals already; this could increase. Small developments now, but maybe signs of things to come. Now is the time to be on guard, if we want to preserve our free access to the green places that matter to us.

HEIR, the Historic Environment Image Resource:

HEIR’s mission is to rescue neglected and endangered photographic archives, unlock their research potential, and make them available to the public.
HEIR contains digitised historic photographic images from all over the world dating from the late nineteenth century onwards. HEIR’s core images come from lantern slide and glass plate negatives held in college, library, museum and departmental collections within the University of Oxford. New resources are being added all the time, including collections from outside the University.

Dragon’s teeth and elf garden among 2025 additions to English heritage list:

The heritage body publishes a roundup of unusual listings to draw attention to the diversity of places that join the national heritage list for England each year.
As well as the anti-tank defences, this year’s list of 19 places includes a revolutionary 1960s concrete university block, a model boat club boathouse built in 1933 by men who were long-term unemployed, and a magical suburban “elf garden”.

Art history is too important to be the preserve of the privileged:

The act of looking has become commodified as technology companies ‘mine and sell our attention like coal’, as Kee writes. Letting art history become endangered and drift further into elite status is not only unfair, it’s also perilous. ‘Art history gives you tools to interpret the visual world and makes you more of a critical viewer of political messages, advertising and a barrage of social media images,’ says Perry. ‘It’s dangerous if you can’t examine these things critically.’

What I read

Finished Saving Suzy Sweetchild, which has our protag not only dealing with the usual movie hassle but being called in to deal with the papers of a suddenly deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances academic, as well as (with the usual cohorts) trying to work out what exactly the game is with the apparent kidnapping for ransom of child star, who is beginning to age out of cuteness. We observe that the classic sleuths may sometimes have had two mysteries on their hands but very seldom had to multitask like this.

Some while ago I read an essay by Ursula Le Guin on the novels of Kent Haruf: I fairly recently picked up Our Souls at Night (2015), which is more or less novella length, as a Kobo deal, and it was well-written, and unusual if very low-key, and I daresay I might venture on more Haruf but am in no great rush to do so.

Then on to Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953) - perhaps not quite as good as the earlier entries in the series - some of it felt a bit info-dumpy - Lanny and his friends who are promoting peace face the problem of Soviet Stalinist Communism in the Cold War era. I can't help contemplating them and thinking that they are probably going to be sitting targets for HUAC in a few years' time, because they are coming at the issue from a democratic socialist perspective and I suspect their Peace Program is going to be considered deeply sus by McCarthyism. Also, Lanny jnr is going to be of draft age come the 1960s....

On the go

To lighten the mood, Alexis Hall, Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot (Winner Bakes All #3) arrived yesterday.

Up next

The new (double-issue) Literary Review

Also (what was in the straying parcel last week) Dickon Edwards (whom some of you may remember from LJ days?) Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1.

London Pride has been handed down to us:

Busiest Thoroughfare of the Metropolis of the World - review of book on the history of The Strand.

Over 250,000 images of London from the collections at The London Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery

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Heritage endangered:

On an old cobbled street in a market town, residents say hundreds of years of history are disappearing before their eyes as thieves keep stealing large slabs of Yorkshire stone.

The Royal Society of Medicine is putting some of its rarest books and photographs up for sale at Christie’s this month. Is this a case of medical negligence? Screaming. The GMC should strike them off.

Rare piece of Australia's Indigenous history captured on camera in the desert

According to a local anthropologist in Broome, the photos were taken by a nurse who was volunteering at the La Grange mission.
In his opinion, the images are extraordinary — one of the rare moments of "first contact" on the Australian continent to be captured on camera.
The originals were donated to a Catholic Church archive, which is not accessible to the public.
But it turns out there are copies. On a dusty CD buried in the boxes of an elderly author.

And at this I can only fall on the floor, weeping and going 'the horror, the horror': [S]ome AI chatbots (such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Bard and others) may generate incorrect or fabricated archival references.

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Gender and learning:

The Real Way Schools are Failing Boys - though possibly, just de-emphasise competition, for starters???

Estrogen levels predict enhanced learning (at least in rats....)

Margaret Atwood seems to be claiming some kind of unusual prescience for herself when writing The Handmaid's Tale:

Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, Atwood said she believed the plot was “bonkers” when she first developed the concept for the novel because the US was the “democratic ideal” at the time.

I think the idea of a fundamentalist, patriarchal, misogynist backlash was pretty much in people's minds?

I've just checked a few dates.

At least one of the potential futures in Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976).

Margaret O'Donnell's The Beehive (1980) .

Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue (1984) and sequels.

Various short stories.

Various works by Sheri Tepper.

I'm probably missing a lot.

And assorted works in which there was an enclave or resistance cell of women embedded in a masculinist society.

I honestly don't think a nightmare which was swirling around at the time is something that can be claimed as woah, weird, how did I ever come up with that?

I'm a bit beswozzled by the idea that in the early-mid 80s the USA was a shining city on a hill, because I remember reviewing a couple of books on abortion in US post-Roe, and it was a grim story of the erosion of reproductive rights and defensive rearguard actions to protect a legal right which could mean very little in practice once the 1977 Hyde Amendment removed federal funding, and an increasingly aggressive anti-choice movement.

What is this that this thing is, when, okay, one is aware of all the woozing and grumbling about the various delivery services, but here is the ROYAL MAIL being pretty bad.

Yesterday I had an email saying they had delivered a parcel.

There was no parcel.

I looked at the proof of delivery and behold, that was Not Our Front Door they were sticking it through, it was the wrong colour and one could see the corner of a glass panel (ours is solid wood).

So I went on to their site to try and delve a bit further and, my dears, it is HORRENDOUS, one suspects it is designed to make people Just Give Up.

For example, the 'contact us' link, that actually goes to a 'Help and Support' page that lists a whole range of possible contingencies that one has to sort through to discover one that matches the occasion.

And once I had come across the Advice relating to item (presumably) misdelivered to wrong address, advice was, to contact the sender.

I have no bloody idea who the sender was being as how I was not even expecting a Royal Mail delivery, have been back over my emails and texts and no, I did not receive any previous message involving that particular tracking code.

There is a passing allusion to possible scanning errors.

The only means of contacting them is by phone, and when I tried, and had made my way through the menu options, the wait to speak to a person was 50 minutes.

I am leaving all this pro tem in case a) it was misdelivered and gets put back into the system b) it never actually existed in the first place.

But, really.

And in other, perhaps more minor (?) annoyances of Modern Life, what is this thing that this thing is of 'Cooking Instructions on Back of Label'? that you then have to detach, in the hope that it will actually come off in one piece that one can actually decipher....

ETA Parcel has now turned up, either in today's post or popped through letter box by neighbour to whom it was delivered in error.... Is friend's book I was in anticipation of.