International Blog Against Racism Week

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.

People asking me last night 'what do you/are you working on?'

Duh. I flannelled and gave the general field, rather than saying: I completed my PhD over 30 years ago, I have published 6 books, 3 co-edited volumes, and getting on for 70 articles and chapters, have done assorted meedja appearances, have lost count of the reviews I've done -

Not to mention the website, the blog, the assorted things that fall into the category of other -

'My Deaaar, it's all a long story and rather complicated' and my most recent publication was not even in my field, it was being a sort of Litry Scholar.

Thing is there were some persons of maturer age there who were, I gathered in conversation, getting back into the academic swing, so I might have been doing that, rather than trying to get back up out of something of a trough?

Did mention, apropos of cute cuddly spirochaete, that I had worked on History of Loathsome Diseases of Immorality: but gee, I am large, I contain multitudes, and I have been going a long time.

ETA

Not that I consider the organisers of 'prestigious World Conference on Women’s Health, Reproduction,and Midwifery, scheduled for 08-10 June 2026, in Paris,France' to really Know Who I Am since they are begging and pleading for my attendance on the basis of my 'remarkable work' a recent review of a book on the history of abortion.

Okay, they do offer partial support for accommodation and registration, and brekkers and lunch at the conference (this implies, o horrors, breakfast sessions).

What I read

Finished O Shepherd, Speak! - as ever, Lanny manages to find himself at major historical events. A particularly fascinating thing considering that news story about Hitler's DNA - he is admitted to the bunker and takes a slice of bloodstained sofa-cover.... In the aftermath of WW2, he has been left money to work for World Peace and he and friends are working for this. One thing I do find a bit curious about Lanny's generally progressive line is that the civil rights question (was it being called that in the 30s/40s?) doesn't seem to feature: maybe because he was brought up in Europe and mostly lived there? His focus on the World Stage???

Val McDermid, The Skeleton Road (Inspector Karen Pirie #3) (2014): not sure this was really doing it for me - there was a point where it just seemed to be going on and on.

Have plunged into a re-read of Barbara Hambly's Silver Screen mysteries (getting myself back up to speed on the series with a new volume forthcoming): so far Scandal in Babylon (2021) and One Extra Corpse (2023). Possibly one reads for the evocation of Hollywood at that era rather than the actual mystery plots, but good, anyway.

On the go

Saving Susy Sweetchild (Silver Screen #3) (2024)

Still dipping into Some Men in London, 1960-1967.

Up next

I am feeling the siren call of The Return of Lanny Budd.

I also realise that I have managed to sign myself up for 3 bookgroups meeting in January, 2 online (Pilgrimage, first meeting, Dance to the Music of Time, concluding volume) and 1 in person (fairly) locally - have managed to fight off suggestion that we read the Mybuggery wot won the Booker, but am now committed to the extremely LOOOOONG new Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.

***

Further to yesterday's mysterious email from Academic Publisher, have received a further and more official-looking email today:

You may recently have received a message from us with the subject line "Welcome to [redacted] GCOP".
This email was caused by a system error. You can therefore ignore it and do not need to take any action.
Apologies for any confusion the message may have caused.

I'm pretty sure this is some kind of phishing scam, because I think an email from Esteemed Academic Publishing Conglomerate would have a more professional style about it:

[Nothing in the way of branding heading or footer...]
Hi [Name],
Welcome to the [Name of Publisher] GCOP! To get started, go to https://[name of conglomerate].my.site.com/gcopvforcesite
Username: [part of my email address].netmya

Bizarre.

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Also bizarre: partner has signed up for a hearing test in conjunction with forthcoming eye-test, and has received this upselling email (does not at present have any kind of hearing-aid) for an exciting new model on which they are offering A Deal:

Key Features:
Advanced Voice AI for natural, personalised sound
Waterproof design for everyday confidence
Built-in Smart Assistant & Telecare AI, providing on-the-go adjustments and support
Language translation & transcription capabilities
Step tracking, fall alerts & balance assessments
Customisable reminders for daily tasks
Hands-free phone calls for complete convenience

There was hoohahing going on last week on bluesky anent people pirating books on account authors do not need the money and should be creating for Love of Art.

And I will concede that when it comes to Evil Exploitative Academic Publishing Empires, I cannot get my knickers in a twist over people downloading papers for which they have not paid the extortionate fee, none of which goes to author of the paper or the reviewers who reviewed it for the journal in question (wot, me, bitter?) - in fact I will be over here cheering or offering to use such library access as I have to get access and offer a copy.

But honestly the Average Author of fictional works is not making molto moolah but is probably supporting themselves by doing something else or being supported by someone else (hey, Ursula K Le Guin? e.g. mentions somewhere she was a housewife when she first started out) and writing is not their sole occupation or source of remuneration.

And even writers who we look back on as Important and Successful had their money problems: Hardship grant applications to the Royal Literary Fund... show authors at their most vulnerable:

Nobody goes into writing for the money: today, professional authors in the UK earn a median income of £7,000, according to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. Looking at the starry names awarded grants through the RLF’s history makes clear that the challenges are not new. However, Kemp thinks the problem has become more acute in some regards. “The kinds of deal you get with a publisher as a mid-list fiction writer has gone down, down, down, down, down.” Twenty or 30 years ago, such writers could survive; it is now much tougher, he says. Big publishers are “paying large amounts of money to a small number of writers”. A “tiny percentage actually survive on what they’re making from writing.”

“On the one hand there are people like Joyce and DH Lawrence, who are early in their careers, and indeed Doris Lessing, who are struggling to get going, who have made a mark but are finding it hard to make ends meet. And at the other end there are people like Coleridge, and more recently Edna O’Brien, who have had stellar careers, and you’d have hoped actually were doing OK, but the vicissitudes of a writer’s life mean that sometimes it goes to pot.”

Many documents show writers at the most vulnerable times of their lives, often in precarious positions early in their careers; everything from feeble book sales to illness to messy marriages to grief is chronicled here.... Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, wrote in an August 1914 letter that the shock of her husband’s death “overcame me completely and now my brain will not do the poetry romance and fairy tales by which I have earned most of my livelihood”.