#20: Mujerhoy

Every Saturday, along with Ideal, Andalusia’s newspaper, comes the magazine Mujerhoy, (‘Woman Today’). 

This is a rather contradictory publication. On the one hand it offers stories of women overcoming barriers of gender, class, and sometimes race and income. In recent weeks we’ve heard about Clara Peeters, a 14^th century painter who ‘swam against the current’ by creating her own works (an exhibition of these is currently at the Prado); Josephine Kulea, a Kenyan woman who founded an NGO to rescue girls at risk of genital mutilation; and Harvard professor Drew Gilpin Faust, whose mother apparently told her as a child that it was a man’s world. The narrative is usually of individual achievement in the face of family, gender, class and financial pressures. 

We also have recipes, horoscopes, lifestyle articles and short stories (two recently were about a woman who learned to accept her difficult mother and another who met a sexy dwarf in a forest). The magazine is of course full of adverts for cosmetics, clothes and cookie-cutter interviews with stars endorsing toiletries. Other articles focus on individual emotional growth and encourage looking inwards, not outwards.

This contradiction between stories of outward-looking independence on the one hand, and tips on making oneself beautiful on the other, is nowhere more stark than in the July 2016 issue, which carried an article on prostitution. ‘Linking prostitution with free time is the same as justifying kidnapping and slavery,’ said the headline. It interviewed eight people, mainly from journalism and show business, (why not women who work or who have worked as prostitutes?) all talking about how to combat the trade. ‘On this topic there is much social hypocrisy,’ commented journalist Jesús Cintora.

But turn the page, and what do we see? A fashion shot (part reproduced below) of a sad pale woman, underdressed and overthin, (in designer clothes made to look cheap), standing next to a car on a cloudy day near blocks of flats. Hypocrisy indeed. 

However, there is no doubt that women’s magazines have to perform a difficult balancing act. At the end of the day they have to make a profit, mainly through adverts, which try to sell us an ideal life and encourage discontent with our own. At the same time they need to tell women they are forging ahead and achieving more than ever before. 

One could interpret all this in a more hopeful way and say that make-up and fashion companies are subsidising stories of women’s bravery and achievement. But I wonder whether these stories of achievement themselves are a type of myth of individuals overcoming the odds – it’s very rare to read a story about collaboration between women in the pages of Mujerhoy. I suspect the veteran feminist campaigner and founder of Ms magazine Gloria Steinem would not be happy (although she is featured in this week’s edition).

The women’s magazine market is extremely competitive, and content is finely finessed for particular market segments – and stories of achievement are better in any case than tips on how to keep the curtains clean or relate to your husband’s secretary. But this isn’t saying very much. I think of advertisers and editors using whichever narrative they can sell to most readers, in order to hold onto their jobs and sell products. Perhaps it is up to us to demand, or try to create, different narratives.

Spanish translation here - a collaboration between myself, Salvadora of Asociación de las Mujeres Órgiva and Bing Translate. 

Original images © Mujerhoy

#19: Babylonian map of the world

Illustration by Minho Kwon

This has proved to be one of the objects which has stayed longest in my mind during five years spent off and on writing Curiosities from the Cabinet– a Babylonian tablet made in 700-500 BC sitting in the middle of room 55 in the British Museum. Assistant Keeper of the Department of the Middle East Irving Finkel explains that it is ‘the world’s oldest usable map’. The Babylonians who drew it were picturing their known world – a circle surrounded with a ring of ‘bitter water’ and six stylised mountains where there are wonders like ‘winged birds [which] cannot flap their own wings’, and oxen which can run fast enough to catch wild animals. 

 ‘The real principle [of the map] is to anchor in position some of the heroes and important things in mythology and odd things that were to be seen if you went far enough,’ says Dr Finkel. ‘It’s an attempt to bring a lot of disparate material under control.’

Perhaps the tablet’s staying power for me is because it is a document as much as an object. Its words and pictures throw out links to other times and civilisations, such as the Judeans who lived alongside the Babylonians and borrowed the flood myth from them (which the tablet’s script touches on), or to later medieval myths recounting the fabulous things to be seen on voyages. Also because of the questions it throws up, often unanswerable – which birds were those? Was it purely a kind of ‘mental map’, to help people understand their world, or might it have been actually used for navigation? 

After speaking to me about the tablet for half an hour at his desk in the British Museum, Dr Finkel went off script and chatted about what he thought museums were for, showing that even very experienced museum professionals still puzzle over the nature and function of their institutions. He commented:

‘Museums are not meant to be universities. In my opinion the correct way to categorise a museum is as a wonder house. The museum should be full of wonders so when you see something you think ‘I never knew they could make something that beautiful’, or ‘I never knew they had earrings like that all that time ago.’ You see something and questions present themselves and sometimes you answer them, sometimes you don’t.

‘Another idea is to connect objects typologically - toys together, cosmetics together, or glasses, dolls, tea strainers, whatever they may be. I have always loved those cases that are absolutely stuffed so every time you go there you see something you’ve never seen before. People’s lives are beset by the same problems, and by and large they tend to respond in the same ways. But the things they produce are always characteristic of their part of the world and their artistic tradition. If you put objects with the same purpose from different parts of the world together, then visitors will automatically supply their own context, and the objects will fizz into a unity.’

#18: My local library

Alexandra Park library, North London

To fight funding cuts and closures, libraries have been energetically trying to prove their worth over the past couple of decades. One way to do this is by using five categories of experience supposed to conceptualise informal learning – the kind that happens outside school or university. (These were developed by the Museums, Libraries and Archives Association and labelled Generic Learning Outcomes).

As a big fan of libraries, I will now try to use these categories to summarise what I remember learning over the past two years from books in five of my local libraries in North London – Southgate and Palmers Green (both London Borough of Enfield) and Muswell Hill, Alexandra Park and Wood Green (all Haringey).

Enjoyment, Inspiration, Creativity A lot. Fascinated to read about the development of writing from cuneiform on clay tablets to email in Steven Fischer’s A History of Writing (particularly liked the picture of bird bone tubes incised at regular intervals by Neanderthals paired with a picture of the ‘pictograms and pulse signals’ on the 1972 Pioneer 10 spacecraft which the designers hope will be readable by any alien life which happen to meet it). Also: Fischer’s A History of Reading; Rosemary Goring’s Scotland: The Autobiography (collection of disparate pieces written over a thousand years: funny, touching, intriguing); biography of Amy Winehouse by her father which seemed after a skim read to be a lot about attempts to help her stay off drugs; Janet Malcolm’s The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (an old favourite).

Knowledge and Understanding Can’t be separated from the above IMO. Felt I was getting some insight into complex physics from Steven Hawking’s A Brief History of Time since it was carefully structured, well-written and not too faux-chatty as many popular science books tend to be, which too often comes across as patronising. This was fished out of the Alexandra Park reserve collection for me a couple of times – thanks!

Activity, Behaviour, Progression Am gradually moving towards a Paleo diet (no refined carbs or sugars, no dairy) prodded partly by Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body: Evolution, Health and Disease which explains how our hunter-gatherer bodies are ill matched to a world filled with chairs, sugar, lifts and shoes. It’s also a good read apart from any health changes it provokes (Lieberman is Professor of Biological Sciences at Harvard) – did you know Neanderthals’ brains were about as big as ours? Lieberman thinks they were as ‘smart’ as homo sappy but not as creative or communicative. Also got a lot from another health-related book which I would not have seen but for a display mounted at Southgate Library.

Skills Umm… struggling a bit here. Learnt a bit about putting a ‘call to action’ on your website from a marketing book whose title I don’t remember (must try that one day) and the best way to use your LinkedIn profile (reminds me, must update mine) – from Social Media for Dummies or similar.

Attitudes and values Neanderthals rocked. The medical profession should focus more on preventing illness rather than treating it.

None of this will show up on any official statistics (how can I quantify an expanded understanding of the wonderful world in which we live?). Perhaps most of what we get from books can’t be expressed simply, let alone measured. I can say though that the NHS has already saved something due to the health-related book I read (and subsequently bought a copy of) and might save more if Daniel Lieberman is right and the Paleo diet keeps people healthier for longer. 

What I particularly love about libraries is the way you discover things by accident – this doesn’t happen so much on the cookie-controlled web. It happens in bookshops too of course, but those are diminishing even more than libraries. And you are more likely to risk reading something new if you don’t have to pay out. We need paper, we need accidental discoveries. Here’s to the value of a good local.

PS Library attendance has fallen by almost a third over the past 10 years – 48.2% of adults visited libraries in 2005/6, compared with 33.4% in 2015/16, according to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. One hundred libraries closed in 2014.

Trinity College library, Dublin

# 17: Punk 1976 - 78

It shows how mainstream punk has become when someone feels they need to subvert the punk story itself. But this has tried by a visitor to Punk 1976-78 at the British Library. ‘Punk history as defined by Malcolm McLaren’ is scrawled scornfully in marker pen on the Library’s introductory text panel (someone else has tried to scrub the comment off, unsuccessfully). The same pen has crossed out ‘Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Buzzcocks’ who the Library says ‘stimulated a nationwide wave of grassroots activity’ and has written ‘The Slits, X-Ray Spex, Siouxsie and the Banshees (what about the women?)’.

So what kind of story do we get here? There is some well-trodden ground – the influence of the Ramones and New York Dolls (the latter disintegrated ‘due to commercial indifference and unwise lifestyle choices’ we are told – I love that deadpan curatorial language!), the sweary TV interview with Bill Grundy, and McLaren and Westwood’s clothes shop SEX.

But there are also some gems for connoisseurs – a demo version of Anarchy in the UK played to record companies by Malcolm McLaren (a version rejected by the band); the 1977 contract releasing bassist Glen Matlock; and a 1974 Sex T-shirt made out of a pillowcase with the first known mention of the Sex Pistols (‘Katie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS ‘). ‘You’re gonna wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on,’ screams the shirt, giving a list of loves and hates. Hates include the National Front and ‘antiques of any sort’ as well as ‘John Osborne Harry Pinter Max Bygraves Melvyn Bragg Philip Jenkins the ICA and its symposiums’. In the loves are Walt Whitman, peace campaigner Pat Arrowsmith and Simone De Beauvoir.

Punk scholarship is a weird concept but you can’t go far in punk without meeting contradictions. It’s unclear what side of the bed Vivienne Westwood is lying on now, for example; she is a committed  environmental activist but in 2015 was voted off a speaking tour (called ‘We Are the Revolution’) by the Executive of the National Young Greens because of tax avoidance by her fashion company. Her son with Malcolm McLaren, Joe Corré, sold his Agent Provocateur lingerie chain to a private equity company for £60m in 2007, while on his website he slates those who ‘consume punk in pursuance of profit’, reported last month’s Private Eye. 

But I do miss that irreverence (am I the only one to think how docile commentary on the Royal Family is these days?). But in many ways we are not as shockable now, partly because we are more tolerant – and punk played its part in that, as the exhibition acknowledges, with sections on Rock against Racism and an audio of Linton Kwesi Johnson talking about how punk made young blacks readier to identify with whites. (‘I was going to say [the white] working class,’ says Johnson ‘… but a lot of punks were middle-class actually.’). Since it’s the British Library, there is more of a focus on documents and artwork, especially that of Jamie Reid, who designed many of the Pistols record covers. 

And what about the women? Well, they are represented in the exhibition – by video interviews with women punks 40 years later (tucked away in a corner), a huge picture of Poly Styrene in an in-your-face costume like a cross between a space suit and a lampshade – and lots of music. This is key to the success of the exhibition – lots of listening stations and an alcove dedicated to punk tracks and record sleeves. There is always a muted racket going on as you walk round, reminding you what it was all about, at least at first.

But it is 40 years later and the early days of punk are moving towards legend. These first two years tend to get much more coverage than the less sexy, less cool, more political wave of anarcho-punk which followed, with bands like Crass, and people in various corners of the globe leading alternative lives and trying to live outside mainstream capitalism. It would be much harder to put together an exhibition on that, not least because it’s still happening.

‘Even more than the boys, the girls were making it up as they went along,’ says Viv Goldman of the Flying Lizards. Punk meant, and still means, an awful lot to loads of people, from Morrissey to Kathy Burke to the exhibition visitor in bleached jeans, braces and porkpie hat looking intently at every display case while giving a running commentary to his companion, to everyone who felt liberated from school rules or suburbia or… well, just liberated. Says Gina Birch of The Raincoats, ‘It was really profound to be listened to.’

Open until October 2, free 

Picture credits:

Sniffin‘ Glue cover photo © Mark Perry

https://www.bl.uk/press-releases/2016/may/punk-1976-78-at-the-british-library

Roxy Club flyer from:

https://www.bl.uk/events/punk-1976-78

#16: The Opal Fruit tax band

It would be lovely to devote this post to another culturally multi-layered object leading us up paths of discovery, but it’s the time of year when I get angry again, and I will talk about that instead.

Yes, I’ve just completed my tax return which I try to do early to avoid nasty surprises later. I declare everything, not least because of warning stories about what happens when HMRC investigates you. One of these stories is from a writer who was told off by the tax inspector for inadvertently putting a packet of Opal Fruits and some toy golf clubs through her accounts as part of a petrol receipt. The same inspector refused to accept the writer’s travel expenses as a legitimate deduction, even though she had worked on a series of Round Britain guides (although I’m not clear whether receipts had been kept).

So why get angry? Shouldn’t we all pay the right amount of tax? Absolutely – but many large corporations do not. Two recent well-known cases are that of Goldman Sachs, which were let off about £10 million of tax by HMRC after they threatened to withdraw from a scheme theoretically meant to make them pay their share of tax. In other words – they threatened to withdraw from a scheme supposedly meant to make them pay their share of tax unless they were… let off tax. Supposedly impartial civil servants, mainly HMRC chief Dave Hartnett, accepted this in case the government were embarrassed by Goldman Sachs’s threatened withdrawal. Poor loves – but that’s what friends are for. 

Tax campaigners UK Uncut took HMRC to court for this. The deal was declared legal but HMRC were severely criticised.

Another case is that of Google, which in January this year, as some kind of goodwill gesture, offered the government £130 million from profits of an estimated £6 billion since 2005, which the government accepted. Google themselves said that governments should work together to change the rules to force corporations to pay more.

Both companies, in other words, were reversing the initials of Opal Fruits and using them on HMRC, an option which unfortunately I do not have.

This injustice is in the context of the many shocks I have experienced turning self-employed and exposing myself to the chill wind of market forces as well as greater demands on your cash – sick pay, holiday pay, pension (if you can afford one) and national insurance has to come out of the amount charged. Expenses are not even reimbursed, remember (unlike those of regular employees, including MPs); they are just tax-deductible – which means we still pay either 80% or 60% of them, depending on our tax rate.

So… roll on the day when corporations are investigated and held to account at Opal Fruit level. To that end I have written to my MP to ask that he supports efforts by international governments to force companies to be transparent about where they hold money.

To that end this year I also sent my accountant (who is excellent and unfortunately incorruptible), along with my receipts, a quotation from Shakespeare’s Pericles which sums up the situation:

Third fisherman: Master, I marvel how the fishes live in the sea.

First fisherman: Why, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones. I can compare our rich misers to nothing so fitly as to a whale; a’ plays and tumbles, driving the poor fry before him, and at last devours them all at a mouthful: such whales have I heard on o’ the land, who never leave gaping until they’ve swallowed the whole parish, church, bells, steeples and all.