Elizabeth McCoy

A further trail of thought more or less kicked off by this comment by flemmings on yesterday's post about Ursula as an anthropologist's daughter and the way that inflected her fiction -

- and then I went, hey, wasn't he part of that whole Franz Boas group that I read that book about at the beginning of 2020 (Charles King, The Reinvention of Humanity) and would she not have been aware of Significant Lady Anthropologists and their work (not just her own ma) -

Like, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict?

(Maybe the forthcoming biography will shine some light there???)

Or was that going on in some entirely different compartment to the requirements of fictional narrative? (thinking of my 1920s gals and the gulf between what they were up to with their affairs and abortions and propagating birth control and what the protags in their novels were permitted to get up to.)

Or was there a whole generational thing going on there, which I sort of touched on in commenting about Mitchison on this post, though I think I could make a larger case about that generation that had had to fight for a lot of rights that were already accepted as given by UKleG's day even if there were still major constraints.

(Seem to recollect that I did not think Julie Phillips in that book on writers and motherhood quite brought out the extent to which she was writing of a very specific generation/time-period. With some exceptions.)

What I read

Finished Tales From Earthsea, The Other Wind and the pendant short pieces in The Book of Earthsea 'The Rule of Names', 'The Word of Unbinding', 'The Daughter of Odren', and 'Earthsea Revisioned'. I don't know quite what it is, I can see how good her work is, but the feeling is more of distant admiration than what I feel for my beloved favourites? Might even cop to preferring her criticism and essays to her fiction? (not the only author to whom this pertains.)

Started a Dick Francis, Bolt (Kit Fielding, #2) (1986)

- and then, feeling all a-wamble and fretted because of the insomnia thing, fell back into Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution, old favourite.

- and then returned to the horsies and the posh owners and the psycho villains.

On the go

Martha Wells, Platform Decay (The Murderbot Diaries #8) which arrived yesterday.

Up next

No idea, apart from the recently arrived latest Literary Review

Syphilis cases in expectant mothers have dramatically risen since the pandemic (in the USA) and there is consequently a rise in congenital syphilis:

can result in a range of negative outcomes, the most serious of which is miscarriage or stillbirth. If the fetus survives, long-term developmental delays, blindness, hearing loss, permanent teeth and bone malformation, heart defects and rashes can occur. Symptoms of congenital syphilis can happen immediately at birth, or they may not be recognized until the child is over 2 years old, when molars erupt, or as bones grow and the changes become more pronounced.
Congenital syphilis is treatable with antibiotics, which will stop progression of the disease but cannot reverse any negative outcomes that have already occurred.

And will this once more become a common tale? Telling abortion stories: The life of Florence P. Evans (1913–1935)

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This is well creepy: ‘It ruined my night’: photographers accused of targeting women at St Andrews May Dip: 'Students taking part in university’s annual ritual say images of them in swimwear are being published without consent in national newspapers':

In recent years this quirky ritual has become a target for agency and freelance photographers looking to cash in on images of students in bikinis, including some who camp out overnight on the East Sands dunes near the Fife coastal path.