I’m sometimes a bit fussy about reading classic, well-known texts. I feel that there’s so much pressure on me to like them, to take something meaningful from them, so I really do have to be in the right mood for such a book. If I’m feeling in the slightest bit contrary (which is the case most of the time), it’s just not going to happen.

This is why it took me a while to read The Second Sex (which I read when I was 21 after having had it on my shelves for a good three years), and it’s why I didn’t read bell hooks’ Ain’t I A Woman until last week, after a couple of years of having my copy.

While written in 1981, this book still feels like a powerful and relevant part of feminist writing. The text – which draws particularly on American society and history – deals with the ways in which both racism and sexism have worked together to oppress black women. In this light, feminism as practised by white, middle-class feminists who are keen to keep racial and feminist struggles clearly delineated and separate (as were many black male civil rights campaigners) weren’t able to capture the different ways in which sexism impacts women of different races and classes.

Certainly while I acknowledge that the specifics of the book can be seen to be American-focused, the principles of the book have far wider applicability, and inclusion and respect for others’ viewpoints – including really hearing what those with other perspectives have to say – is something that it is worth continuing to keep working at within the feminist community. In particular, one of the excellent points that can be taken from bell hooks is that it’s neither possible nor desirable to separate ‘sexism’ from other forms of prejudice and hatred that operate in contemporary society and politics. This is something that we need to keep on focusing on within our own feminism.

I’m well-aware that as a heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied, white feminist I have a huge amount of privilege, but as I keep learning and reading (and there are some truly excellent blogs and books out there) I become more aware of the interconnections. The issues aren’t separate. For instance, sexism operates very nicely, hand-in-hand, with gender dualism and enforcing of gender roles on men and women (the only two appropriate options in this worldview): this obviously has a very specific impact on those who define, in whatever way, as LGBT. While I may reject sexism, I fit a lot of stereotyped notions (on the surface, at least): and that sexism is not something that I can separate out from the double-whammy of prejudice that hits others. It doesn’t really work to reject one aspect of this prejudice and leave the rest. We need to keep taking it on back a step, getting to the roots of it. There, I think we’ll find, that cisgender prejudice, homophobia, ableism, racism, and many other things, truly are feminist issues.

The writing in Ain’t I A Woman is incredibly forceful. There are several passages that continued to resonate with me after I’d put the book down – and I finished it a week ago! – and that I hope will keep me thinking. In a chapter entitled “The Imperialism of Patriarchy,” hooks writes:

As people of color, our struggle against racial imperialism should have taught us that wherever there exists a master/slave relationship, an oppressed/oppressor relationship, violence, mutiny, and hatred will permeate all elements of life. There can be no freedom for black men as long as they advocate the subjugation of black women. There can be no freedom for patriarchal men of all races as long as they advocate subjugation of women. Absolute power for patriarchs is not freeing. The nature of fascism is such that it controls, limits, and restricts leaders as well as the people fascists oppress. Freedom […] as positive social equality that grants all humans the opportunity to shape their destinies in the most healthy and communally productive way can only be a complete reality when our world is no longer racist or sexist.

Equally, in a chapter on “Racism and Feminism,” in which hooks examines the racism of white feminists:

Every women’s movement in America from its earliest origin to the present day has been built on a racist foundation – a fact which in no way invalidates feminism as a political ideology. The racial apartheid social structure that characterized 19th and early 20th century American life was mirrored in the women’s rights movement. The first white women’s rights advocates were never seeking social equality for white women. Because many 19th century white women’s rights advocates were also active in the abolitionist movement, it is often assumed they were anti-racist. […] In contemporary times there is a general tendency to equate abolitionism with a repudiation of racism. In actuality, most white abolitionists, male and female, though vehement in their anti-slavery protest, were totally opposed to granting social equality to black people.

An important part of feminism is continuing to challenge: not just sexism that is external to us, but the privileges and prejudices that may be internal to us. This is a challenging book, and it should be, and it’s a book that should be read. Working against racism (beyond and within the feminist movement) demands more than including one black woman as part of a panel discussion, it’s about a fundamental reworking of our approaches to feminism and racism, and that’s an ongoing process. Part of that, for me, is going to be to continue reading blogs, and books such as this. As this is the ‘famous’ text, it’s easy to forget that bell hooks wrote other books, but she did, and I certainly plan to look some more out.

This book is applicable for the Women Unbound challenge.

Courtesy of Feministing, I just can’t resist posting this video of utmost genius featuring the Bronte sisters as action powerhouses, fighting sexist oppression of the publishing industry with book boomerangs! Marvel as they take on sexist publishers everywhere!

I don’t think you can truly appreciate Jane Eyre until you’ve seen… Brontesaurus!

It’s another waffle! It’s been all go at this end lately, so I’ve actually read a couple of books that I just haven’t had a chance to review, but a nice waffle is a pretty good way to wind down on a Wednesday night.

The next book on the list is… 564!

I picked up The Letters of Abelard and Heloise in a charity shop a while ago and it’s been sitting on my ‘to read’ pile. Abelard and Heloise had a relationship way back in the early 12th century. Abelard was a well-known teacher, theologian and philosopher in the Middle Ages and Heloise was initially his pupil, but notable for her own intelligence, and had a particular gift for languages.

As with all well-known love affairs, it was not to be, and when separated after their secret marriage they became a monk and a nun respectively (Heloise later became an abbess).

This is a collection of their letters from early in their relationship, continuing for many years. The interest really lies in the force of their personalities and intelligence. There’s something quite appealing about being able to follow through a series of letters between two people exploring ideas. And I confess that a big part of the interest for me is Heloise. Abelard is undoubtedly a fascinating character, but women’s intelligence and their contributions during that time are very much sidelined in historical writing, and Heloise’s life and sharp mind is particularly fascinating.

Incidentally, if anybody is interested in reading about women in the Middle Ages, I really enjoyed Henrietta Leyser’s book Medieval Women: Social History Of Women In England 450-1500: A Social History of Women in England 450-1500.

It’s actually a really interesting period of history and my reading around it is quite sketchy, particularly fiction: I can’t think of any fiction set in the medieval period! So I’m going to open the floor up and see if anybody has any good recommendations?

The Cake Wrecks’ blog has a regular Sunday Sweets feature whcih has outdone itself today, with some awesome cakes based on children’s books!

I don’t know about you, but I’d love to chow down on some of that tasty tasty Lord of the Rings cake action. I think my favourite has to be the downright awesome Where the Wild Things Are cake, though. I’d even settle for one of the cupcakes! There’s something about seeing a book in cake format that just makes it that bit more enticing.

Get on over there and make your own mouths water. Also, don’t forget that it’s my birthday in three months…

Back when I was an eager young first year student at University, a lecturer asked a mixed-gender class who would call themselves a feminist. It was in the middle of a discussion on something else, I forget what. What I still haven’t forgotten was my one, lonely hand, waving in the breeze. That moment of disillusionment, right before the lecturer raised his own hand, declared himself to be a feminist, and turned to the rest of the class: “Why aren’t you feminists?”

It made a nice change.

Perhaps this was an anomaly. It was mixed-gender and decidedly not anonymous which can put some people off. Also, it was a class of probably about twelve people, tops, which doesn’t really count as statistically significant.

In my third year, I enthusiastically signed up for a module explicitly dealing with feminist legal issues. The same question was put to the group of us – about thirteen – in the first class. We were all women, all in theory interested in women’s studies. Once again, I was the only student to acknowledge being a feminist. And once more my spirit momentarily failed.

Only for a moment, though. I haven’t in the years that have passed shied away from calling myself a feminist (although it’s been a word hurled at me – somewhat ineffectually – as an insult). I’ve also managed to meet some wonderful feminists, on and offline, and I know that we do in fact exist. Which is why I was so excited to hear about Reclaiming the F Word: The New Feminist Movement by Catherine Redfern and Kristin Aune.

It’s split into seven sections, covering: bodies; sexual freedom and choice; violence against women; work and home; politics and religion; popular culture; and feminism itself. It’s a pretty good range of the areas in which feminists are active. While it’s impossible for one book to fully capture the entire range of feminist interests and concerns, this book does a great job of picking out some of the key issues.

Essentially, it’s a book about the relevance of feminism today, and the work that is being done by feminists (individually and collectively) in the UK. As the authors say, it’s a ‘whistle-stop tour’ but no less valuable for that. Based on a survey of 1,265 feminists – with some results included in an Appendix – the authors have incorporated survey responses, and the thoughts and views of other feminists throughout the book.

Each chapter leads in with what the issues are about, what the situation is, and how it’s harmful to women. Inevitably, these passages are the most distressing; but a huge part of feminism is about opening your eyes to those issues, seeing through a feminist lens, recognising the problems so that we can set about really deconstructing them and doing something about it. For instance, in the chapter on violence against women, not just the offensively low conviction rate for rape is discussed, but also the public perceptions and reporting of rape, and what rape victims are like and how they act, and the impact that this has.

As this book hammers home, women’s fights are not yet won. Our sexuality is not our own; we are not protected from violence, we are not believed when we report it; our talents are not recognised on the same level as those of men in the same field; we are not adequately represented in political, religious and other institutions around the world; we are not encouraged to meet our full potential except in terms of an extremely limited ‘physical’ potential that extends only so far as waxing our legs, but not sufficiently far as to recognise the accomplishments of female athletes and sportswomen.

What the writers also show, though, are the huge numbers of women (and men) who keep fighting, in a seemingly never-ending variety of ways. The pages are bursting with the activities and achievements of feminists engaging in a wide range of activism. Some of these I knew about (such as the Pink Stinks campaign), but others were new to me (like Robogals), and I found myself frequently running to my computer to look up more details about particular projects.

So much for all the people just lining up to say that young women don’t care about feminism. The mean age of survey respondents was 31, with the mode being 23.

A feminist friend of mine once told me that “patriarchy works in many ways.” She wasn’t wrong, and those ways can be both horrendously blatant and dangerously insidious; but feminists work in many ways, too, on a range of issues, and are constantly striving to de-cloak more subtle forms of discrimination, and to do something about the effects of it. It’s a tough gig, but someone’s gotta do it. Even better is when lots of people do it, and Reclaiming the F Word tells us that that’s just what is happening, and will hopefully inspire more people to take action, however they choose to do so. There are even ‘Take action!’ sections at the end of each chapter, to get the ideas rolling.

Reclaiming the F Word is a statement of why feminism is still necessary, is a recognition of the amazing work that’s being done, and is a rallying cry to women and men everywhere to get involved. It strikes a great balance between these themes, and the thorough research, clear and honest writing, and unabashed celebration of feminism in all its myriad forms mean that everybody can take something positive away from reading this book.

I know that a fair few people I know are going to be getting some strangely similar book-shaped presents in the coming months.

Saying you’re a feminist in itself isn’t always easy, and it’s even harder to keep learning about the abuses of women in the UK and around the world: to keep seeking out the information; to keep challenging misconceptions and harmful attitudes and actions, especially those of people in positions of power; to keep doing something about it. But it’s necessary, it’s worth it, and you’re not alone.

Reclaiming the F Word is due for release on 10 June 2010. I got my copy from the LibraryThing Early Reviewers programme. This book counts as part of my reading for the Women Unbound Challenge.

After reading about the wonderful Freya Stark in The Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers that I reviewed recently, I went straight out and bought a book of her travel writing for my live-in boyfriend, who has a longstanding interest in both excellent books, and in Middle Eastern history and politics. He has his own blog, at Brontides, but Fliss and I were pretty keen on hearing his thoughts over at All Lit Up, as we also like excellent books, and are pretty keen on awesome women writers. So without further ado, here is a guest review of Freya Stark’s A Winter in Arabia. Enjoy!

A Winter In Arabia by Freya Stark is not a straightforward book to read, but it is extremely rewarding for anyone with an interest in history, archaeology, the Middle East, and kick-ass female explorers who make it look easy.

The book was published in 1972, some 45 years after it was written. In it, the author chronicles the season that she spent – along with her companions – searching for the ancient city of Shabwah, the capital of the southern Arabian state of Hadhramaut. Long since lost, the city had been a capital of culture and trade in the region; Pliny catalogued it thus:

Almost in the very centre of that [South Arabian] region are the Atramitae [Hadramis] – the capital of whose kingdom is Sabota [Shabwah], a place situated on a lofty mountain. At a distance of eight posts [days' travel] from this is the incense-bearing region inaccessible because of rocks on every side, while it is bordered on the right by the ocean, from which high plateaux shut it in. The forests extend eighty miles in length and forty in width.

In search of this city, Stark travelled through pre-Westernised Yemen, detailing the culture of the people with whom she interacted and the landscapes through which she journeyed. Her heroics are matched by the land she describes; Hadhramaut is a particularly dramatic part of Arabia. Comprised of an immense valley, which runs for 160 km from open plains in the west, where the cliffs of the rocky plateaux to north and south close in about it, near Shabwah, towards the dry and inhospitable Wadi Masilah in the east, the area is a curious mix of desert and fertile river plains. The main Wadi (Wadi meaning river or river-cut valley) Hadhramaut itself is 12 km wide in some places, and is fed by innumerable tributaries, but beyond the city of Shabwah one quickly reaches the desert of Saihad – ‘an empty desert, a wilderness where the winds blow in all directions, a country where crows are king ‘. Only after travelling west across this desert for three days would one come to irrigated fields and settled lands once more, the beginnings of highland Yemen. This is the country that Stark describes.

The first thing that should be said about this book is that it is deeply poetic. Stark’s writing is fluidly lyrical, and is as evocative as it is enlightening. Her voice is not that of a dull-but-worthy academic, in pursuit of esoteric potsherds, any more than it’s an echo of the manly heroics of Thesiger and Lawrence; it’s… well. It’s a voice the deserves to speak for itself:

In the dry bed of the canal, close to where it takes off from an ancient “damir” or dam, we pitched our camp. A lithab tree (ficus salicifolia) hung above with long and pointed leaves; from its boughs my mosquito-net and the guns of the beduin were suspended… As I lay in bed I could hear Sayyid ‘Ali entertaining, and the entranced laughter of the company: he was imitating the
sayyids of Meshed, and the voices murmured on into my sleep; till a shock-headed man, creeping round my bed for his gun, woke me – the last inhabitant of Radhhain going home. I lay then, enjoying the warm delicious night. A sickle moon was shining; the pointed leaves of the lithab hung black before it, in Chinese loveliness; a small wind woke suddenly from nowhere, flapped the leaves against each other and died as it had come. The moon sank. Voices of foxes echoed in the cliffs – echoed and re-echoed, like some lost chorus high above the world. When I woke again it was to the singing of birds. The branches, so lovely against the moon, were the everyday branches of the lithab. Only their enchanted memory remained.

Stark’s writing conveys deep knowledge and understanding, but also profound affection for the land, the people, and the life that surround both. It’s not necessarily easy to read; you have to concentrate, or otherwise after an hour or so it all starts to elide into a formless mass of undifferentiated beauty. But this is a book to dwell over, and it rewards the persistent reader with keen insight and human detail.

The star of the book is the character behind the narration, however. Stark was an incredible woman. This book doesn’t document her first trip to Yemen; a previous expedition had failed due to an illness that almost killed her. Before then, she had already travelled extensively throughout Arabia, notably completing three dangerous treks in western Iran and being the first European to reach Alamut, the long-lost fortress of the Assassins. She was more than just an explorer, however, and A Winter in Arabia is littered with passages expounding upon her own philosophy (of which a lengthy excerpt can be found here). She continued to travel until her death, at the age of 100, in 1993. To experience Arabia with the benefit of her perception, humanity and fierce intellects is one of the great draws of this book.

This book deserves to be regarded as belonging to a corpus of European works which, when taken together, provide an overview – albeit Eurocentric – of pre-Westernised Arabia. The aforementioned Thesiger’s Arabian Sands is perhaps the most famous of this body of work. In many ways, Stark and Thesiger had a great deal in common. Thesiger was an explorer, too, most famous for crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arab peninsula – several times. He was only the third Westerner to do so, and often operated contrary to the wishes of the local and international authorities, but with the respect, admiration and friendship of the local Bedu – a respect that lasts to this day; an adventurer in the classic sense of the word, but also a gifted social observer. He shared Stark’s dismay at what he perceived as the growing Europeanisation of Arabia and its indigenous culture. A major theme of both books was the deterioration of an old order, just as it was about to be swept away: Thesiger’s last journey across Arabia’s sands was from the oasis of Al Ain to the trading port of Muscat, now a city in the UAE and the capital of Oman respectively. He spent nearly two months in 1949 in that interior. It now takes just under 4 hours to drive from the Hilton in Al Ain to the Sheraton in Muscat; I know because I’ve done it. Thesiger would have hated it, and the power of the book is such that it made me hate it, too, even as I was doing it.

Stark’s work evokes a similar sense of deterioration, but unlike Thesiger, the bland, monied future that she feared, cleansed of all of its identifying features by a glut of RAF bases and oil revenue, didn’t come to pass. What did come to pass was worse; an awkward halfway-house between modernity, with its guns and narcotics, and tribalism, poverty and alienation. Unable to resist the world that developed around it, and lacking the resources to preserve its heritage, the Yemen of today is a much-changed beast.

An alternative perspective on the issue comes from Geoffrey Bibby’s Looking for Dilmun. At the outline level, these books have a great deal in common; like Stark, Bibby was an archaeologist seeking the remains of a long-lost civilisation. Bibby’s obsession was the empire of Dilmun, a long-lost – and supposedly mythological – empire which was mentioned in Sumerian legend but never geographically placed. Contemporaneous with the Indus Valley civilisation, Sumer, Babylon and Akkad, Dilmun was found by Bibby on the island of Bahrain, although hints have since been found of an earlier civilisation on the same grounds; it is thus one of the oldest sites of human civilisation that we know of.

Unlike Stark, however, Bibby was an oil man himself, based in Bahrain and gifted only with an intellectual curiosity and a slightly more moralistic outlook than many of his contemporaries. Where Stark and Thesiger detailed an Arabia as yet unsullied by the graft of Europe’s finest grubbers, Bibby’s story is all about the cracks in the façade as they slowly spread, and the desperate attempt by Arabia’s last traditional rulers – such as the Sheikh of Abu Dhabi, who distrusted Bibby enough to eventually exile him despite Bibby’s professed academic and historic mission. Compare that with the reaction earned by Stark and her companions in the excerpt above!

Many of the characters and locations appear in two or even all three of these books. Between them they chart a heartbreaking story of the decline of an indigenous way of life, albeit – and this has to be stressed – from the somewhat Eurocentric perspective of a motley band of explorers and outsiders. Their value thus exceeds their individual conceits; these are more than just travelogues or historical diversions. They are records of a way of life that has deteriorated over the course of a single lifetime.

In that capacity, Stark’s work immediately stands out as the most successful. The human warmth and compassion that she has for her Yemeni and Bedu hosts is apparent on every page (“We cannot be completely isolated, like European delicacy in cold storage”), and her relationships with the people that she encounters transcend the vignette. In an early passage, she returns to one of the sites of her earlier journey, and “wonder[s] uneasily which of the many delicate causes that ruin eastern relationships could possibly have ruined my friendship with those two, Sa’id and Husain;”when, a few pages later, they reconcile, there is a sense of human connection that overcomes cultural barriers.

For me, this was a wonderful, nostalgic read. As an account of an a culture that has long since passed on, it’s stimulating. But what makes the words jump off of the page is the lucid, witty prose of Stark, and the character that lies behind it.

Death and the Penguin was a hard book for me to get my head around, and I’m still not exactly sure how I feel about it. The basic premise of the story is this; Viktor is living in the Ukraine, has adopted a penguin from the zoo, named Misha, who lives with him in his one bedroomed apartment, and wants to be a writer. Eventually he gets offered a job writing “obelisks”, obituaries for the very much still alive and not exactly snow white VIPs of Ukrainian society. Rather predictably, this does not lead to a peaceful life for Viktor and, once his first obelisk is printed, he finds himself getting ever more deeply entangled in the affairs of both government and Mafia.

However, the relatively predictable plot of the first part of the book was, surprisingly, not one of the problems I had with Death and the Penguin. No, the main problem I had with the book was, in effect, the penguin. Don’t get me wrong, writing a depressed, insomniac penguin into a book is going to get my attention, at least for a while, and Misha is an attractive character. The problem is, he is pretty much the only one, and when a penguin is your only sympathetic character, you have a problem.

Viktor, who I imagine, as the main focalizer, the reader is meant to identify with, comes across as a one-dimensional character, and that dimension is a selfish, navel-gazing, and rather unappealing character. Added to this, Viktor seemingly takes no responsibility for his own actions. Even the advent of Misha into Viktor’s life seemingly came about as the result of a chance confluence of events, as the reader is told that

Misha had appeared chez Viktor a year before, when the zoo was giving hungry animals away to anyone able to feed them. Viktor had gone along and returned with a king penguin. Abandoned by his girlfriend the week before, he had been feeling lonely.

and that haphazard approach to decision making is what seems to drive all of the action in the book.

I may be sounding like I really hated this book, but that’s not exactly true. I really enjoyed the first half of the book, before Viktor really gets himself into trouble, and there are touches of humour throughout the book (which is the least you could expect, considering the book is touted as a black comedy). The trouble is, by the time I was halfway through the book, what had amused me to begin with had become somewhat repetitive, and the second half of the book was a little bit of a slog. However, the end of the book, for me, went some way towards redeeming the book for me, but I’m obviously not going to spoiler. Beyond this, there are some interesting characters on the periphery of the story, who could have been developed further, and who I wanted to know more about. Similarly, the scheme that Viktor finds himself embroiled in could have been developed in a different direction.

To be completely fair, however, looking at the ratings the book has received online, and the quotes that adorn the cover, a lot of people obviously had a very different reaction to Death and the Penguin, and I certainly wouldn’t claim that my reaction to the book was the right one. However, looking at those quotes does make me wonder if this is not one of those books that you either love or hate, and there is certainly nothing in Kurkov’s style of writing that I found objectionable.

In the end, then, I really do feel like I have to put my dislike of Death and the Penguin down to one single factor; Viktor. I don’t mind not liking a lead character, especially when you are not supposed to, but when a story hinges on the reader caring about what happens to that character the book is almost guaranteed to fall flat. With that in mind, I couldn’t honestly recommend Kurkov’s debut, but if you feel like you want to give Death and the Penguin a go, then, equally don’t let me stop you. Personally, I won’t be rushing out to get hold of another of Kurkov’s novels, and I certainly won’t be reading the sequel to this book, Penguin Lost, but I won’t entirely rule out reading another of his books at some point in the future.

Ah, the twists and turns of the randomiser. It seems but moments ago that we were talking about Helen Dunmore, as Fliss has recently read Talking to the Dead (and the random choice this week was also discussed a little in the comments).

So perhaps the randomiser just likes there to be more discussion about Helen Dunmore in the world?

To stop tiptoeing around the book itself, welcome to the book I affectionately call… number 192! Which is A Spell of Winter by (you’ve guessed it) Helen Dunmore.

If I remember correctly, this was the fourth of her books that I read, way back in the day when I chewed through a series of them fairly rapidly before deciding that it probably wouldn’t hurt to pace myself. What I quite like remembering today is that I first cottoned onto Helen Dunmore through Fliss (amusing, as Fliss hadn’t read any of her books until last week): the writer herself was giving a reading of her latest book (Mourning Ruby, as it happens) and we decided to head over. I’d picked up a book in anticipation a week before, and a literary love affair was born.

A Spell of Winter has been one that’s stuck with me, too. Perhaps because it’s quite brutally gothic. Also, though, because it’s one of the books in which I think Dunmore really lets loose her skill with language, and it’s an intensely beautiful book to read. I don’t think the two memorable factors are at all unrelated.

There’s a short excerpt of the book up at Dunmore’s website, if you’re interested!

I confess to having had A History of Western Philosophy sit, unloved, on my shelf for far too long now. It’s not that I don’t want to read it, it’s just that it’s so huge and philosophy is so complex that I really feel that I need some proper time to devote to it.

I’m also a fan of the Routledge Classics series, I think they’ve got some good stuff in there. So I eagerly picked up a copy of Bertrand Russell’s Why I am not a Christian, which is a book of essays.

I’ll start off by saying that I enjoy reading philosophy (particularly political and legal philosophy, but also other more generalised philosophising), but I’m not a philosopher by trade. So my opinion is that of an interested but entirely unqualified reader.

That opinion that this is overall an interesting selection; but I did find it very hit and miss. There are parts which are very well-written and captured my interest – whether I agreed or not with the arguments/premises – and these tended to focus on academic freedom, scepticism in Protestant and Catholic communities, and items of historical interest, such as the essay ‘The Fate of Thomas Paine’. Paine being a pretty cool chap in his own right.

Another one that I feel is worth singling out, because it has within it both elements of the book that I really enjoyed, but also some parts that I found pretty odd (more on that later) is ‘The Existence of God – a Debate Between Bertrand Russell and Father F. C. Copleson, SJ’; a discussion between Russell and Coplestone, the latter arguing that the existence of God can be proven. It’s quite an antagonistic discussion in places, but I do like the format. I think that discussions on the subject can really – if well done – capture the positives and negatives of people’s positions, with some particular flaws noted and caught out, but I also find that it inspires me to think critically about both the initial arguments and the counter-arguments. It’s a nice little intellectual exercise, picking fault with both sides, no matter which you may overall agree with!

One particular passage which gives a bit of a flavour of the parts I think Russell deals with well is from the essay ‘Freedom and the Colleges’:

Taxpayers think that since they pay the salaries of university teachers they have a right to decide what these men shall teach. This principle, if logically carried out, would mean that all the advantages of superior education enjoyed by university professors are to be nullified, and that their teaching is to be the same as it would be if they had no special competence. ‘Folly, doctor-like, controlling skill’ is one if the things that made Shakespeare cry for restful death. Yet democracy, as understood by many Americans, requires that such control should exist in all state universities.

I think this shows just how forceful Russell can be. And this has some good positives – such as inspiring him to some rather eloquent passages, which certainly have been thought through – but also has the flip-side, in some places, of dogmatism on social issues, and rather stretching a point.

A couple of passages that I found difficult focus on the family, but there are also some odd bits in other places. From ‘The New Generation’:

Assuming the break-up of the family and the establishment of rationally conducted State institutions for the children, it will probably be found necessary to go a step further in the substitution of regulation for instinct. Women accustomed to birth control and not allowed to keep their own children would have little motive for enduring the discomfort of gestation and the pain of childbirth. Consequently in order to keep up the population it would probably be necessary to make child-bearing a well-paid profession, not of course to be undertaken by all women or even by a majority, but only by a certain percentage who would have to pass tests as to their fitness from a stock-breeding point of view.

Equally, there are some places where I felt that perhaps the limitations of the essay – and the inherent narrowness of focus – meant that some ideas which are hugely important for his theories went undiscussed. Perhaps real consideration of them would have problematised the initial argument to a degree which isn’t really accepted or noted in the essays in which they arise. For example, in ‘Can Religion Cure our Troubles?’ Russell comments on intellectual integrity, by which he means ‘the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive’ (my italics).

In theory, I agree. I do think that it’s relevant to point out, though, that ‘evidence’ can be a tricky concept. It’s not always as clear-cut as it would like to be believed. Certainly a huge part of evidence is not just the ‘evidence’ itself, but the interpretation of it. This can be seen quite clearly in the case of law, where a piece of evidence can point to two very different conclusions, depending on the approach that you take, and the theoretical tools you employ to analyse it. So to that extent, I’d probably feel the need to add a certain subjective element to the idea of intellectual integrity, as well as an objective, evidence-based, component: i.e. that there should be some form of evidence and the particular interpretation of it is genuinely believed, through the employment of rigorous analytical procedures to assess it. Y’know, it’s not as catchy, not particularly well-worded and it’s really just something I’m throwing out there, but I think it captures my point that it’s an important area to think about, if you’re going to start talking about evidence and academic freedom.

Despite its flaws – and some of them are as flaccid as just thinking that he comes across as a bit of a prat at times – it’s a thought-provoking group of essays, and worth a read. Without trying to undermine Russell, I think it’s actually worth reading for the very last essay alone, which he actually did not write. It’s an Appendix, discussing in detail the ‘Bertrand Russell case’; when Bertrand Russell was appointed as a teacher at the College of the City of New York, but was forced out by religious and other pressure groups (and a judge) based primarily on moral and religious considerations. It’s a fascinating read, and you can draw from it what you will, but it illustrates in and of itself the pressures that can exist on academic freedom.

I, like Bertrand Russell, believe that its hugely important to resist such pressures, and this book of essays can keep you thinking about why. He was one of the people who have consistently fought for academic and intellectual freedom and have paved the way for the kind of freedom of thought that students in higher education in the present day can at times take for granted.

This was applicable to the ‘Essay reading challenge’ for which I shall chalk up 14 essays out of 20 (NB: I discounted ‘Religion and Morals’ because it’s a page long, but added in the Appendix which is itself an essay. Also, it’s long, and I totally read it, so I want my credit).

You know how it is. It’s late winter/early spring and already you’re getting that little itch in your feet. You sit back and think about just how grand it would be to be trekking through northern India, exploring the Rocky Mountains, boating on Lake Baikal, enjoying the Japanese hot springs; to be frank, ‘Anywhere But Here’ is the theme of the day.

Yep, I’m experiencing extreme wander-lust. Alas for me, I have a full-time job, very little money, and I don’t have a holiday until mid-September. So it was with the purpose of doing a little armchair travelling that I picked up the rather attractive Illustrated Virago Book of Women Travellers, edited by Mary Morris and Larry O’Connor.

It does pretty much what it says on the tin, really. It’s a book filled to bursting of excerpts from the travel writing of women, from the 18th century to (nearly!) the present day, with some stunning pictures littered throughout. It’s a bit of a feast for the wannabe traveller. It’s also entirely refreshing; travel literature has historically been a male-dominated field of writing. Perhaps partly because (rich, white) men were the ones with the liberty, and ownership of their own bodies, enabling them to travel the world, and even expected to do so; travel being quite the proper thing to do for the young gentleman. It’s quite recently that women have started moving through the world more freely.

What it wouldn’t do to forget, though, is that there have been some amazing, intrepid, women travellers, who have written phenomenal works about their experiences. Sometimes they travel with male partners, other times not. There is a diversity of experience in this book (bearing in mind that due to the nature of it, the writers are still primarily white and rich), and it covers a fair bit of the globe in its celebration of women’s travel writing.

There are two many excerpts to really dig into this piece by piece, but for those who are interested, it includes pieces by Anna Leonowens (think ‘The King and I’), Willa Cather, Vita Sackville-West, Isak Dinesen, and Margaret Mead. It also introduced me to some really amazing women I’d never heard of before. I was particularly intrigued by Freya Stark; as the editors write:

She was highly valued as an expert in Arabic dialects, particularly during the war years. She has travelled extensively in every decade (except the 1990s) since World War II, visiting Turkey, China, Afghanistan, and Nepal.

Cool, right?

It’s a bit of a rollercoaster ride, but it’s worth reading for more than historical or travel-related interest; there’s some great writing and stories within it. The writers have their own distinctive styles, and I have come to think that personality comes through in travel writing in a way which is perhaps rare in other kinds of literature. Even after reading a few passages from a book, there’s a sense of being within the writers’ minds, seeing the world through their eyes. In travel literature, you really are walking a mile – generally more, actually – in somebody else’s shoes. It can be a really rewarding reading experience.

There are too many amazing passages to bring out each, but on a brief flick through I came across this by Dervla Murphy (travelling with her daughter, Rachel), which comes from a passage that I really enjoyed:

Towards dawn the rain dwindled and soon there was silence, apart from nasty squelchy noises caused by our slightest movement. As I unzipped the entrance the herbal aroma, intensified by the rain, acted on us (or at least on me) like a strong stimulant. Crawling out, I saw that we were in a slight hollow on the ridge-top, which restricted our view of the immediately surrounding terrain and emphasised the immensity of the sky. I stared in wonder at the still starry purple-violet zenith – a tinge belonging to neither night nor day. The stars vanished as I gazed. To the east lay distant chunks of mountain darkly colourless below a magnolia glow. To the west drifted royal-blue banks of broken retreating rain-cloud. I held my breath, waiting. Then the sun was up, behind the chunky mountain, and purple-violet changed to powder-blue – magnolia to the palest green – royal-blue to gold and crimson.

This was, I think, the most magical dawn I have ever attended. But when I remarked to Rachel that one wet night was a small price to pay for such an experience she merely grunted and went on wringing out her flea-bag. Perhaps at fourteen one’s aesthetic sensibilities are still latent.

It’s well worth picking this up, so long as you can cope with all of the travelling that you will inevitably want to do afterwards (even if you can’t do it). It’s nicely put together, with little introductions to each writer, and it’s a good one to pick up whenever the sky is grey, just to take yourself into a different place temporarily. The only (very small) gripe I have is that the pictures are beautiful, but I would really have liked some captions for them giving a little more detail. As it is, though, I can cope with that for a book which gave me so much satisfaction.

This book counts towards the Women Unbound challenge.