DEPRESSING STUFF ON TV

Andrew Marr's BBC History of Modern Britain wends its weary way. Where it's going to we know only too well. Last week the ebullient one told us that the 1930s depression was depressing. The week before that he told us that the Roaring Twenties was roaring. The week before that he told us there was a Great War in 1914-18 and it was full of, er, war. Before that we had a Boer War (with the Boers apparently) and next week we're in for a Second World War which involved a war, apparently.

If ever you wanted proof of the need for Universities to exist in order to (at least) try to be original and show you something different, and make you think, Marr's miserable series does that. He is as incapable of telling you anything calmly as he is incapable of telling you anything original. We go Boer warring, warring warring, roaring roaring, and depressing depressing, only to be followed predictably enough in the 1940s by more warring warring, followed by more post warring, and more post warring roaring, only to be told that by the 1960s everyone was SO SHINEY NEW they were having sex whenever they wanted it EVEN THOUGH it was STILL just like the old times with more warring warring only this time in a different place called Vietnarm and with Jimmi Hendrix not Vera Lynn doing the singing singing.

Cut now to 50 years ago. Old man with bow tie walks to camera and starts somewhere you dont expect it, telling you original things that you will never forget. He looks up occasionally. Then he's finished and, not only do you now know about the Great War, you know something of war itself. He does all this withot a prop, or a gimmick, or even AN EMPHASIS. But he does it all the same. A J P Taylor may not have been propped, and he may not have been gimmicked, and he may not have been EMPHATIC, but he held you all the same.

For about tuppence by today's prices.

HEADS UP POSTGRAD HISTORIANS! We need you now more than ever.

Cut now to

'Visualising Empires Decline'

This video has been doing the rounds on Twitter recently and is an interesting way of representing the decline of Empires. It concentrates on the 'top 4 maritime empires' of the 19th and 20th centuries and is a visual emphasis of their decline. It uses coloured spots to represent the empires and demonstrates the balance of power across the last couple of centuries.



If you want to learn more here's the website

Stop Press! Heterosexual Couple denied Civil Partnership!

:O I forgot my usual saturday slot! Shame on me!

Anywho, ladles and gentlespoons, I present to thee an important milestone in the history of the fight for gender equality. The Guardian recently reported on Tom Freeman and Katherine Doyle, a heterosexual couple who wanted to get a civil partnership because 'they did not want to be seen to be colluding with the segregation that exists in matrimonial law between gay civil partnerships and straight civil marriage.'

How admirable. Unfortunately, that'd make them criminals. It's illegal for different-sex couples to get a civil partnership. The Guardian reports that 'In a democratic state, all institutions should be open to all people.' And I tend to agree. On the other hand, they could just get married...

Food for thought?

I don't think I could be described as scared of food, but some people are. A seminar will be given by Stephen Mennell (University College, Dublin) on Thursday, 26^th November 2009, at 15:00 in Physics LTA, on Fear of Food and Fear of the Sociology of Food. Sally Horrocks pointed this session out, which is being run by the media department. Alas, no mention of refreshments on the flier. See eBulletin. And don't forget the Media Zoo launch tomorrow! All these brilliant events.

Long Exposure Photography: It's not all bad

On Friday I wrote about how early photographic techniques excluded people. This was because exposure times were so long that all moving objects were reduced to little more than very faint blurs. To us Social Historians, this is not exactly a Good Thing, since the resulting photographs are profoundly different to the reality of the scene depicted.

So, today I thought I'd write about some of the positive aspects of this blurring of motion and compression of time. One thing that I find really interesting are 'desire paths': the little eroded paths made by groups of individuals who 'desire' to take a short cut.



Long-exposure photography can reveal the desire paths that don't erode an imprint. A really nice example of this is City of Shadows by Alexey Titarenko. His long-exposure shots of crowds in St Petersburg make people look like smoke, mostly flowing along the familiar paths of least resistance. People aren't excluded: they're the subject of the picture.

Perhaps the most extreme example of the long exposure is Jason Salavon's use of custom computer software to merge whole collections of unique images. For example, he has revealed the 'average Playboy centrefold' and the 'average graduation portrait'.

Again, individuals blur together to produce profoundly interesting observations about people.

Come back next Monday at 3.09am for the next installment in this humorously pompous and increasingly tiresome series!

The birth of the clinic

I'd like to say thanks to all who checked in the to the New History Lab clinic on Friday. I hope you found some cure for your various ailments. A bigger thank you to our wonderful experts (Phil, John, Evelyn and Emma). And a mention ought to be made to Colin Hide (with an 'i' - don't confuse with Colin Hyde) for his kind donation of delicious cakes. And of course Lady Cooper's excellent chairing. And what a good session on newspapers at the British Library from Andrew.

Some great ideas, and one of my own problems solved. Would this be the kind of session you'd like us to run again? I'd be interested in comments to [email protected], please.

Finally, invitations for death will be on their way soon. A reminder to please wear something black for the occasion.

The Williams Short Method

As part of my work as a poet I've conducted workshops in Leicestershire as part of a series of events called 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum'. This has taken me to places like the Public Records Office in Wigston where we've used newspapers, photographs and other artefacts and the Museum Stores at Barrow-on-Soar when people have written about a diverse range of interesting objects. I have also led groups of people on Poetry Pathways. These involved walks through a Leicestershire villages, stopping at intervals to read poems, mine or those of other poets. The last one was in Kibworth Beauchamp and I wrote this poem in response to a plaque on the side of the church.

Background

In the village of Kibworth Beauchamp, Leicestershire, at a time when smallpox was rife and a threat, especially to the poor, a plaque on the wall of the church says that a Dr Lewis Powell Williams was passing through the village bringing word about his method of ‘Inoculation without Preparation’ a short method which did not involve laborious and dangerous introduction of matter from the smallpox blisters into a wound as a means of inoculation. He was, according to the plaque, the first person to introduce this method to ‘these shores’. Unfortunately, Williams died during his visit to Kibworth.


This poem iamgines that visit.




The Williams Short Method

(January 9th 1771)

A stranger passing, this man was sealed in stone
like an unscrolled script when bone
light shone off snow

the weight of it on branches crackling
the breadth of it and crows heckling
to the left of it blood speckling

the parchment shrouds of the poor.
The day before, he saw
truth in the half-light, in a half-thawed

land, stood there, a man, before film
could capture this, flickering
across the eye of the village

and there were people bringing chairs;
each woman, man, bears
a chilled soul for a child. He hears

the birds’ wing flutter of their sighs
and rises with the Word, then dies.