JOST A MON

You know what they say about Americans abroad: if the locals don't understand what they say, they speak louder and louder... In English. But check this:

From Andrzej Stasiuk, The Road to Babadag: Travels in the Other Europe.

For years now, people have highlighted Wikipedia's biases. The lack of coverage of topics outside a predominantly white, male interest. The lack of female editors. The drop in numbers of active editors. They have ascribed various reasons for these lacunae. They have tried to encourage new editors by promoting editathons. They encouraged university faculty to assign editorial tasks to their students. Still the biases remain.

So in my bid to make a small difference - at least where gender bias is concerned - I have been writing or rewriting a few articles. First, I thought I'd look at women novelists. The big names have a certain amount of coverage already. Recent award winners looked like a better bet. Maybe a few outside the Anglophone world, as well? I contributed: Hermione Eyre. Simone Schwarz-Bart. Hélia Correia. Michela Murgia. Ursula Krechel. Katie Kitamura. Shani Boianjiu.

Then, I cast my web a little wider. Art / Music / Acting? I contributed: Maria Yakunchikova. Mélissa Désormeaux-Poulin. Alla Sizova. Jyotsna Srikanth. Sudha Raghunathan.

Can you imagine that someone as luminous as Sudha Raghunathan had barely any coverage on the Wikipedia? Even now, it's quite limited.

Finally, I poked about the academic world. Historians? I contributed: Mridula Mukherjee. Physicists? Bimla Buti. I thought I might do more but I tell you, it's exhausting work.

You have to find secondary sources to evidence the statements you make in your article. You have to make sure that these secondary sources are 'reliable'. Often, you don't have access to scholarly journals, so you trawl through Google Scholar or Google Books and try to finesse the snippet view to find just the right text to reference. This way leads to early blindness. You have to look up interviews, reviews, controversies, photographs, material in other languages. Sometimes you have to fight off people who are protective of their pet subjects and want no correction to their articles.

As I said: exhausting.

Check out:

1. The Decline of Wikipedia.
2. Wiki editors boost entries on female scientists to mark Ada Lovelace Day.
3. Nine Reasons Women Don’t Edit Wikipedia (in their own words).
   
4. ‘Wikipedian’ editor took on website’s gender gap.
   
5. Writing Wikipedia Articles as a Classroom Assignment.
   

(Image: The Daily Telegraph.)

The heart-stoppingly gorgeous Margaret Audrey White was denied a job in the BBC as a television announcer in 1951. The reason was that her loveliness could have "alarmed timid men from Wigan and country districts". A commentator said, “Could you watch Miss White talking about depressions over Iceland and absorb what she was saying?”

She graciously accepted the decision: "I do not want to scare any timid male viewers."

Instead, she went on to become a famous bibliophile, supporter of charities, and most importantly to educate women on financial planning and cash management. It ran for eight years - very successfully - until she had to close it when the Equal Opportunities Commission said she was being discriminatory.

(Reference: Lady Wardington - obituary. The Daily Telegraph, Nov 14, 2014.)

In the early 90s, shortly after the implosion of the USSR, the world was suddenly awash with brilliant Soviet scientists and engineers who found themselves unemployed and impoverished. Many of them wanted nothing more than to continue their work, while others seized the opportunity to move to greener pastures abroad. A small number were coopted by countries and terrorists seeking nuclear and biochemical weapons know-how. In order to keep the rest from succumbing to such temptation, US institutions organised monthly stipends for them, while George Soros created the International Science Foundation to support the sciences in the former Soviet Union. Meanwhile, a large-scale emigration of Jewish scientists began to Israel, which found itself swamped by these riches.

I was at TIFR in the summer one of those years, and the notice-boards in the cafe were festooned with newspaper clippings describing efforts by various countries to attract the scientists. Some pooh-poohed the miserly stipends the US were paying out - $500 a year or so. Some marvelled at the Chinese willingness to pay top dollar for expertise. And many bemoaned Indian bureaucratic intransigence and hierarchical pig-headedness that prevented us from paying higher salaries to attract Soviet scientists than our own professors were earning. And thus a superb opportunity to revamp our scientific and technical base, and to improve the calibre of our research and our universities was forever lost.

For the Israelis, though, the incoming rush was a mixed blessing. Haaretz recently had a beautiful piece on the diaspora from the Soviet Union. The Jews of the USSR did much to change the political landscape in Israel, especially towards a conservative direction. They also added considerable fillip to cultural diversity. But many of them found it hard to adjust to their new lives. Israel did not have the capacity to accommodate every brilliant Jewish scientist who arrived. After two or three top-notch algebraic theorists arrived, for example, where would the fourth be placed? And so many a scientist, who anywhere else in the world would have been a superstar, found themselves sidelined and frustrated.

It is a heartbreaking thing when pearls are so abundant that their shine is lessened.

In the Sunday Times yesterday, Camilla Cavendish had this to say:

Ah, that good old Polish friend. When the Poles first started coming into this country a few years ago, there was general uproar. On the one hand, they were better builders than the Brits, cheaper and more reliable. Plus they didn't take tea-breaks. The middle classes loved them. On the other, they drove like they were in Poland, they ate weird food, and their numbers were straining the schools and hospitals. The working class didn't like them and the middle class suddenly wasn't all that sure they loved them either. All in all, they weren't really all that welcome.

Now that the new immigrants are from even poorer Romania and Bulgaria, the Poles are all right, and the newcomers are scum. Even the Poles have no truck with the Romanians. A Polish woman we know (not Urszula) used to work as a cleaner at various hotels. "Romanians? They are horrible. Horrible. Do you know what they do?" she said the other day. "They use bleach to clean the cups and plates, and they steal everything. The towels, the toiler paper, the little soap bars, the small shampoos..."

When we asked her why the Romanians did that, she sniffed. "They send everything back home to Romania!"

Meanwhile, why should Cavendish's Polish friend have any particular insight into Big Issue vendors? Why should we believe Urszula anyway? If Cavendish can throw anecdotes such as the one above in support of her thesis, perhaps I can be permitted one as well. I see on a regular basis exactly four Big Issue vendors. One of them is a middle-aged Englishman in a wheelchair. He is polite and wishes passers-by good evening as they head home after work. Another is a polite Eastern European man who bows to people and repeats "Good morning, have a good day" in a sing-song manner as they pass him on their way to work. A third is a quiet Eastern European woman - possibly Albanian, or perhaps Bosnian - who says 'Big Issue, please' in a tired voice. And the fourth is a Englishwoman in a wheelchair, who also smiles at people passing by. 

At least Cavendish is consistent. This is her on January 22, 2004 before the big influx of the Poles began:

Instead, the prosperous countries will have to protect their interests by making it harder to claim state benefits — the NHS being particularly vulnerable as one of the few free, universal healthcare systems in Europe. Here, our greatest allies will be the newly legalised Hungarians and Poles who have worked too hard to have a smidgin of sympathy for freeriders from back home.

After reading Andrej Longo's masterful collection of short stories, Ten (translated by Howard Curtis and long-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2014), I was moved to create a Wikipedia page for the author. A bit of digging around revealed coverage of the man's talent - in German and French and Italian - but little in English, so here are excerpts from a quick and dirty translation of Maike Albath's review of the book from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 22 September 2010.

These are tough, brutal short stories that take place in the streets of Naples between piles of garbage and the carcasses of feral dogs, in drab apartment blocks and sleazy nightclubs. They are framed within the Ten Commandments, but with the commandments turned on their heads, sometimes leading to absurd and tragic conclusions. The first commandment, for instance, 'I am the Lord your God. Thou shalt have no other gods before me', refers to the local Camorra boss, Giggino Mezzanote, from whom the narrator Papilù, a tough seventeen year-old, has always striven to stay away. But when a tough type bumps into him and his girlfriend and incites a fight, Mezzanote arrives as a saviour. Papilù has no choice: despite wanting to lead a life different from his criminal father's, he has no alternative but to seek Mezzanote's protection. It is this inevitability that makes Longo's stories so upsetting.

In another tale, a man goes with his seven year-old boy to the fair, fully knowing that he is on the verge of execution by a rival clan. 'Thou shalt not kill' is the title of this story. In yet another story, a Camorra bride has managed a social advancement yet as her wedding approaches she is seized with panic. Longo's heroes, however, never succeed in turning the tables: they are victims of the crude Darwinism of Naples, always forced to endure their downfall with stoicism.

Longo's fast and sober narrative is suffused with spare dialogue, sprinkled with dialect and an expressive language invented by himself. Ten is reminiscent of a black-and-white photograph: all outline and sharp contrast. It's a minor masterpiece of hardboiled realism.

So after weeks of abstention, I dropped by Dark Sugars, a mighty fine chocolatier on Brick Lane. The genial man behind the counter made me a quick hot chocolate and topped it off with a palmful of slivers of dark and brown chocolate. While I stood there salivating, a woman walked in and said she wanted to get a selection of salty caramel chocs.

'Which box shall I put them in?' she said.

'Whichever you like, dear,' said the genial man.'You spend your life trying to convince men they needn't tell you what to do. So don't let me tell you what to do.'

Giggles all around.

*****

I grabbed a salmon beigel and a salami beigel from the Beigel shop. £2.40 for a fine meal.

*****

The reason I went to Brick Lane was not to go to Brick Lane - because, really, Brick Lane is a bit of a sham show, especially its southern end - but rather because I was at the Calvert 22, a gallery of Russian and Eastern European works. This is in Shoreditch, and on my way back to the office, I sauntered down Brick Lane. Calvert 22 were hosting an exhibition of photographs (titled Close and Far) by Prokudin-Gorsky along with works by a bunch of modern photographers. I took a cursory look at the modern works, but spent more time admiring Prokudin-Gorsky.

What a chap. He spent years on the Czar's commission, travelling back and forth and up and down the mighty empire, snapping away at people and buildings and landscapes. Many of these areas haven't been photographed since, and many of the monuments were destroyed in subsequent wars and Communist depredations. He used a colour methodology of his own making, and produced vibrant polychrome pictures that look like they might have been taken yesterday.

The exhibition ends today, August 17, so I dare say most of you will miss it.

After England's recent and abject collapse at Lord's, I haven't felt like telling the boy that his wish has come true. For some reason, he is vehemently anti-English these days. I suspect it's because of his half-Scot pal, with whom he had a conversation as follows:

Pal: I wish Scotland would vote for independence in autumn. I don't like England.

Boy: Did you know that England ruled over India for centuries?

Pal: I can't believe they managed to rule anyone at all.

Boy: England's out of the World Cup.

Pal: Yes-s-s-s!

Boy: India's playing England at cricket.

Pal: I hope England loses.

Boy: So do I.

Wife: But, Johnny, your dad's English.

Pal: Oh yeah...

Hoda Barakat, The Tiller Of Waters.

The French feminist collective La Barbe laid into the French literary world a couple of weeks ago. In the 110 year history of the Prix Goncourt, they said, hardly any woman has won it. They said that this omission pointed to the invisibility of women writers: a hundred out of 110 Goncourt winners, and 75 out of 87 Renaudot winners were men.

So - are the literary juries misogynists and the women truly invisible? Or is this just a persistent cliche? Anne Brigaudeau did an analysis in an article published on a France TV blog a couple of days ago, when the awards season began with the Grand Prix du roman de l'Académie française, followed by the Goncourt, the Renaudot, the Femina, the Décembre, the de Flore, the Médicis, the Goncourt des Lycéens, the Renaudot des Lycéens and will end with the Interallié.

Participation in juries

It is as clear as ABC: a committee of men will naturally reward male talent, writes Anne Brigaudeau. And when the juries are chosen by appointment, it is not unexpected that men will nominate other men. This is a phenomenon that is no less rare in the 21st century than in the previous centuries. Take a look at the current composition of the juries:

The Goncourt jury is more or less fixed - 10 members, out of whom three are women (Edmonde Charlex-Roux joined in 1983; Françoise Chandernagor, since 1995; Paule Constant from this year).

The Renaudot jury also has ten members, of which only one (Dominique Bona since 1999) is a woman. The Flore has twelve jurors of which two are women. The Décembre is slightly better (five out of twelve are women) while the Médicis almost achieves parity (four of nine jurors are women).




The exception that proves the rule is the Femina, which was explicitly established as an anti-Goncourt and has an entirely female jury. But this is neatly counterbalanced by the Interallié which comprises nine men. Clearly, the men overwhelm the women in numbers, including in the Academy française, which has only six women among thirty-seven members.

Participation in shortlists

In the literary season of 2013, according to the publication list of Livres Hebdo, 36% of novels were written by women. 




How many of these novels were shortlisted for the majors? The Goncourt - one in four. The Renaudot - none out of six. The Décembre - none out of three. The Médicis - three out of eight. The Femina - two out of five. The Grand Prize - one in three. The surprises came from de Flore (four out of five) and the Interallié (three out of four). The two remaining prizes revert to the norm (Goncourt des Lycéens - one out of five, and Renaudot des Lycéens - one out of seven).

Participation among the winners

So what is the result of the 2013 awards season? Out of nine prizes awarded thus far (the Interallié comes out on the 19th), three were won by women (the Femina to Leonora Miano for La saison de l'ombre, the Médicis to Marie Darrieussecq for Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes, and the de Flore to Monica Sabolo for Tout cela n'a rien à voir aver moi). In other words, a rule of thirds applies - a third of novels published are by women, a third of the novels short-listed novels are by women, and a third of the winners are women.




Does that sound fair enough - at least as far as the 2013 season is concerned?

Unaccustomed Earth is a collection of short stories, the last three of which form a linked set, a novella. An A-Level student attending asked if this was intentional, to jar the reader into sensory  fragmentation.

Sorry. I cannot recall Jhumpa Lahiri's response.


My stomach rumbled so much during the recording I got dirty looks from my neighbours. One can turn off one's mobile, but not one's alimentary canal. I should have had lunch.

****

[In case you're wondering: I attended a recording of the BBC World Book Club of an interview with Jhumpa Lahiri about her book Unaccustomed Earth few weeks ago. There will be another one in the series soon on Albert Camus' The Outsider, to be recorded at the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris. Sadly, I won't be there, but Jhumpa Lahiri said it was one of her favourite books, and would love to call in.]

It occurs me to me that the list of books I've read over the past 31 years can be treated as a source of names. Because the vast majority are from the English-speaking world, the names, too, are a spectrum of English Christian names. I thought I might plot the lot to see what patterns might emerge.

So here's what I did: I read into an R session the names of all my authors, removed duplicates (1844 names remaining), extracted the first names, and removed all those that have only an initial (e.g. 'J.'). I ended up with 1610 first names, not all distinct, of course. Here's a random selection of them: Robin, Marta, Michael, Hanif, Brian.

Observe the Hanif (Qureishi). Not a Christian name, what?

Of these 1610 names, 637 only occur once. These are names like: Wladyslaw, Vernor, Slavenka and Pamela.

Here's a barplot of the names that occur more than once.

The labels are not very clear unless you click through and zoom. Bit of a pain, that. 

So let me do this: I'll split the plot into 4 chunks.

Unsurprisingly, the top names are all male - I think I documented elsewhere that I've read far more books by men than by women. What's interesting is that the most popular female name is Mary (9 times) and there are twenty-two male names that occur more often than that, until the most popular male name of John (46 occurrences).

This is still a tad irregular, because obviously there are names like Tom and Thomas, or Will and William, and Marie and Maria and Mary which are variants: should these be treated as different? These days there's a vogue for erstwhile diminutives to be treated as true names (there are a few Charlies I know - and they assure me they are not Charles's; likewise, Jack is an immensely popular name now). The combining of the variants into one class is not something I can do automatically with a bit of coding magic, so I have to create a new list manually.

Here I'm a bit baffled again. Are Andrea, Andrew and Andrei the same? Is every Alex an Alexandra? Some could be Alexander, of course, while others might be Alexis or Alexei. Unless I look into the antecedents of each of the names, I'm not going to be able to make much progress here.

Let me make some hand-waving assertions, though.

If I club Ann, Anna, Anne and Annie into one class, then there are 14 of these.

If I club Dan and Daniel, then there are 10 of these.

Daves and Davids together are 32.

Erics and Erichs together are 10.

Freds, Fredericks, Friedrichs together are 10.

George and Georges together are 20.

Geoffrey and Jeffrey together are 7.

Helen, Helene and Helena together are 7.

Iain and Ian total 17.

Jack and John and Johann together are 51.

Jose, Joe and Joseph together are 14.

Mary, Marion, Marie, Maria and Mari are 13.

Mike, Mikhail, Michael, Michele, Mikael and Miguel total 35.

Niccolo, Nicholas and Nick total 12.

Bob, Robert, Roberto are 30.

Stephen, Steven, Steve and Stefan are 26.

Thomas and Tom are 17.

Will, William, Willem and Bob are 25.

So what do we have?

The most popular women's names are now Ann and Mary and Helen and Jane, in that order.

The most popular men's names are John, Michael, David, Robert, Stephen, William.

Now, this website gives the top names in the US from 1900-2000. Observe that John, Michael and David were very popular in the early years, but gradually drifted down until only Michael and William remained in the top 10 in 2012. Between 1980 and 1990, John waned (heh).

Among women, Mary vanished from the top 10 in 1970; Anna and Helen were in the top 10 before the 1930s; Jane doesn't even figure in the list.

For some reason, the Scots have kept records of popular names over the last century (John tops the list till 1975, after which it plummets; Mary, Helen and Annie fade from the 1950s). Given that England and Wales have had censuses for yonks, I'm a bit puzzled that I can't readily find UK-wide statistics. Perhaps I'm not looking too closely.

But here's the thing! The Johns in my list - Bowers (1928- ), Brunner (1934-1995), Buchan (1875-1940), Creasey (1908-1973), Derbyshire (1945- ), Dickson Carr (1906-1977), Gribbin (1946- ), Fuller (1913-1990), Grant (1949- ), Grisham (1955- ), Harvey (1938- ), Norwich (1929- ), Kay (1948- ), Keay (1941- ), Lanchester (1962- ), Lawton (1949- ), le Carré (1931- ), Ford (1951-2006), Man (1941- ), Masters (1914- ), Mortimer (1923- ), McWhorter (1965- ), Reader (1937- ), Steinbeck (1902-1968), Wheeler (1911-2008), Wyndham (1903-1969) - are nearly all born in the heyday of the name. If I had the puff to look at the authors born after 1970, I'd probably find very few Johns.

On the other hand, the Anns in my list - Digby (1935- ), Weale (1929-2007), Frank (1929-1945), Dukthas (*), Lamott (1954- ), Tyler (1941- ), Fadiman (1953- ), Stothard (1983- ), Reid (1965- ), Cleeves (1954- ), Dee Ellis (??), Perry (1938- ), Proulx (1935- ), Maria Ortese (1914-1998) - are exceptions - most of them were born after the name's popularity dropped in the 1930s.

Make of it all what you will!

(* - Ann Dukthas is a pseudonym of Paul C. Doherty.)

The Royal Society for the Prevention of Beaching (Rspb) is an arcane hundred and forty year old institution. It was formed under the aegis of a noblewoman of Suffolk dismayed by continual reports of beached whales. In an age when anything was deemed possible if only dealt with in a scientific manner accompanied by a healthy dose of religious circumspection, the Rspb soon achieved considerable success.

The Rspb's members are few and retiring in outward manner and rarely seen abroad. They number only around two dozen, and do not go for secret signs of recognition unlike the Templars, Justiciars, Freemartins or, indeed, the Rspca. Election of a new member follows usually upon the death of an existing one. There is a majority of women in the organisation, who provide most of the motivation and almost all the administrative work. The role of the few men is not very clear.

In the early days of the Rspb, members worked openly to succour beached whales. Many of them were chased away or, in some cases, grievously wounded, by hungry natives intent on butchering the beasts. Around 1880, it was decided that treating injured whales stranded on shore was too restrictive a remit. It addressed only the symptoms of the phenomenon. 

One arm of the Rpsb was tasked with the creation of a worldwide network of sister societies which would work together to ameliorate the condition of the whales. This was slow going, especially in the early twentieth century, when notions of propriety and arrant sexism in the Western world (in the wake of the suffragette movement, particularly) prevented active participation among women. This is when the society became increasingly occulted. However,  the secrecy had a fortunate ramification: many women in the British Empire happily joined its chapters in Canada, New Zealand, Sri Lanka and India. (The Australians, for reasons still unclear, declined.)

A subgroup within the Rspb investigated the causes of beaching itself. They concluded after several years of study that long sandy continental shelves attracted the animals ashore because the whales could neither correctly judge the depth of the sea near the coast nor adjust for the sudden changes in tide. A geological survey concluded that the beaches themselves were to blame for the tragic fate of the whales, and a militant arm called the Rspb" (Royal society for the prevention of beaches, prime, prime) was founded. It is not clear if the appellation 'Royal' is genuine in this instance, as I have been unable to find any evidence of a Royal warrant for them. This organisation spent much time and money in developing powerful diggers which were used to penetrate the bedrock beneath the continental shelf; a mathematically precise placement of explosives would very efficaciously implode the shelf and the beach above creating a deep chasm. Whales approaching the beach would then be met by a sheer underwater cliff, their lives thus being saved. A happy side effect was, of course, a rapid increase in fishery stocks within the now deep seashore. Some of the greatest budget surpluses of the organisation came from grateful fishermen following the blasts.

The first of this series of controlled explosions was on May 5, 1942 in Norfolk; it was attributed to a secret German plan to invade Britain from the east. Several more explosions over the next twenty years have resulted in a dramatic reduction in whale beachings in the UK. 

The society has always known that this is not a permanent solution. Siltation is filling up the gorges steadily and it is only a matter of time before the beaches re-emerge. They will then have to repeat the exercise. In this quixotic venture, they are not dissimilar from other organisations such as the Society for the Painting of Bridges (SPB), who, equally esoteric, also are involved in perennial tasks (e.g. the painting of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco). There was much celebration recently when the Firth of Forth Bridge was painted end to end with a supposedly long-lasting paint. The SPB, however, knows better and, like the Rspb, remains quietly vigilant.

The boy's been much taken with Hindu mythology. Everyday he comes up with a new question. 'Why did Vishnu push Mahabali into the ground if Mahabali was a good king?' he asks. 'Was Jarasandha alive when he was born in two halves?' he wants to know. 'Who was Krishna's last wife?' he asks upon hearing of his 18,000 brides.

He has been devouring Amar Chitra Katha comics in his quest for complete knowledge of desi myth. Unlike his father who - from youth to this day - is singularly unimpressionable (some might say thick) - the boy is quick to notice and is keen in his sense of nuance. He observed, for example, that all the gods and heroes in the comics are fair, radiant, good-looking, while the asuras and villains are all dark, swarthy, moustachioed, pot-bellied and ugly.

A few weeks ago he said he wished he were a deva. He wanted to be a god of invisibility and speed, he said. He wanted to be white, he added.

I explained that skin colour was unimportant. 

'Why are the villains are all dark in the comic, then?" he said.

Those fools at Amar Chitra Katha have much to answer for. Edition after edition has appeared over the years, and the pillocks have not had the sense to change their colour biases.

'Because the cartoonists at Amar Chitra Katha are idiots who think that 'fair' is good and 'dark' is bad,' I said. 'You shouldn't believe everything you see.'

'Okay,' said the boy. 

Clearly, he was not entirely convinced.

Today I walked with him to school. On the way he asked about Ghatotkacha. I told him about Bhima and the rakshasi Hidimbi.

'Was she dark?' said the boy.

'Why?' said I.

'That is disgusting,' he said.

'Why?' said I.

'Because she might be drooling and all that. Yuck,' said the boy.

'Is she disgusting because she is dark?' I said.

'Yes,' said the boy.

'But we are dark - are you saying we are disgusting?' I said.

'No, acha,' said the boy. 'We are humans. Dark rakshasas are disgusting.'

If I weren't getting angrier and angrier, I might have appreciated his chutzpah here.

'So a fair rakshasa is not disgusting?' I said.

'No,' he said.

'Why do you think dark is ugly?' I said.

'It is complicated,' he said.

'No, it is not,' I said, positively livid by now. 

'It may not be complicated for you, acha,' said the boy, 'But it is complicated for me.'

I am sorry to say that I lost it at this point. I did not handle this well. I raved and I spluttered. I ranted and I choked.

A ten minute walk to school is hardly the occasion to be engaging in a delicate discussion of racism and biases and the like, and my explosion can't have served to convey any useful teaching moment at all.

The boy cringed at first, and then shouted, 'It is complicated, okay?'

Then he looked at my face and calmed down at once.

'Just tell me what happened to Ghatotkacha,' he said softly.

'What do you think happened?' I snapped. 'He was dark, ugly, fought in the war, and died.'

He looked a tad worried that I was still shaking with fury. Is sarcasm wasted on a seven year old? 

When we got to school, he said, 'Bye' and went in without a backward look.

[Happy new year, all.]

For a while now, there has been discussion about underrepresentation of women in various walks of life. Science and mathematics come to mind, politics, industry, the list is probably as long as the number of careers open to a human being on this planet. More recently, people have begun to raise concerns about the gross shortfall in the number of review of books written by women, or indeed, the lack of women reviewers in the various 'quality' media. For many, it boils down to a question of whether people prefer to read authors of their own gender. The question can be further nuanced - are there particular genres that appeal more to one sex than the other? Going by this recent piece in the Guardian books blog, it appears that their own reviews of nonfiction are predominantly by men, whereas fiction reviews are mainly by women. They provide statistics for major publications as well, for instance, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Review of Books. In all these, males outnumber females, both among reviewers and authorship of books reviewed.

Being at loose end, I decided to take a look at my own gender biases. I have a list of books that I've read since I was eleven or so, and I can, with a little effort, classify the authors into males and females. It turns out that I have read 2997 books by 1,641 distinct authors. Amazing. I didn't think there were that many authors on the planet. Of these, 557 were authored (or edited) by women, 2440 by men. (There were also several multi-author books, which I have ignored in the counts.) The cry goes around village - Fëanor is gender-biased! Lynch the fellow! A closer look reveals the following table of top authors:

Agatha Christie        75
P. G. Wodehouse        72
F. W. Dixon + C. Keene 42
Isaac Asimov           39
Enid Blyton            28
Georgette Heyer        26
..................     ..
Alistair Maclean       25
Piers Anthony          25
Arthur C. Clarke       18
Jack Higgins           17
Edgar Wallace          16
Arthur Conan Doyle     15

I did say that these are counts starting from my callow youth. (Okay, I admit it - the Heyers are mostly recent.) But in this top six, there are three women, two men, and one syndicate. In the next six, there are only men. If I remove these two lots, then a more representative picture should appear. When I say 'more representative', I mean 'more suitable for politically correct discourse'. Ha ha.

So now it appears that I have read 406 books by women, 2192 by men. Hmm. Right, how else can I massage these data? Maybe I read more books by male authors when I was young and pimply, and, with maturity, have switched to a more nuanced appreciation for writing? I'll split the data into (my) decades.

years           F       M       ratio
tens            71      545     12%
twenties        101     673     13%
thirties        172     707     20%
forties         69      258     21%

At least the trajectory is in the right direction. On the flip side, the authors whose books I read most in each decade are all men. Still not doing great! One final piece of analysis, I guess, would be to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction. But I'm bored now, so I'll stop here.

There's a story about a Berliner who visits Vienna and loses his way to the railway station. He accosts a local and demands, "Which way to the station?" The Viennese is taken aback but replies politely, "Sir, wouldn't it have been nicer to say, 'Good evening. I would appreciate it if you would show me the way to the station.' ?"

The Berliner stares at the Viennese in disbelief, emits a 'Ha!' and stalks off.

A few months later, the Viennese man happens to be in Berlin, and, having lost his way, asks a local for directions. The Berliner responds with a rapid-fire, "Straight 100 metres, left, then right, proceed 200 metres, turn right again, then an immediate left, and 400 metres straight."

Completely bemused, the Viennese manages to stammer out a thanks.

"Never mind the thanks!" barks the Berliner. "Repeat the instructions!"

This story, admittedly, has less to do with giving directions than with cultural differences between Prussians and the Viennese. Still, it points to a social compact - a person who is lost expects to be guided to his destination.

I suspect this is a fairly recent development in human history. For long periods, most people tended to stay within a day's walk of their homes. They were intimately tied to the local landscape. When they had to go farther, they would likely make use of networks of contacts, stepping from cousin to friend to customer. In a new village, they might stop a stranger and say, 'Do you know the way to Gulbadan the perfumer's house?' and - because most people in a village knew each other - would be guided appropriately. 

The development of cities probably did little to stymie this network of connections, although perhaps the links became somewhat more tenuous. The problem was to locate a particular person because a random man on the street would be unlikely to be acquainted with them. This was when landmarks and specific locales became important. One would ask then, 'Do you know Gulbadan who lives by the Friday mosque?' or 'Which way to the Friday mosque?' and once there, ask more specific queries.

This is all speculation - I have not done any research into the matter at all. But as street maps and particular addresses are very recent, and - even where they exist, they are not always reliable - I guess that people still need others more than ever to give them directions. 

Culture affects even this relationship. I'm not talking about the gender stereotype of men not wanting to ask for directions at all. I refer rather to the deep reluctance of some peoples to appear unhelpful, who then offer wrong or misleading directions, because some directions are better than none. Not everyone is as militarily precise as the Berliner; luckily, not everyone is as vague as the fellow at my old alma mater who sent me on  a totally wild goose-chase because he either didn't want to appear ignorant, or wanted to appear helpful.

This was shortly after I first moved into the Indian Institute of Science, a rather sprawling campus with the various department buildings hidden helpfully behind dense vegetation. Seeking the swimming pool, I stopped to ask a student for directions. 

'Ah, yes,' he said, and looked around him in every direction. 'Go down this alley and turn right at the end. You'll pass the Physics department and the library. You then turn left, go through the lecture halls, and turn right. Clear?'

I nodded.

'Then ask somebody there,' he said, and walked away.

I thought even then that the instructions were hilarious. Still, given their precision, I thought it would be a small matter to locate the swimming pool once I passed the lecture halls. Unfortunately, though, the pool was nowhere near those halls. Worse, there was nobody around to ask either. In my four years at the campus, I never ceased to marvel at the ridiculous precision and complete wrongheadedness of that student's directions. 

I never learned to swim either, but that's another story.

A recent paper (PDF!) by Mancini, Monfardini and Pasqua reveals that reading among Italian children is prompted directly by the reading done by parents. That is to say, if a parent reads in the presence of the child, the child is likelier to read than one whose parent doesn't read.

The researchers found as well that reading by mothers is more important than reading by fathers. There is both a short-term and a long-term effect. When a child sees a parent reading, he or she is more inclined to do the same (short-term effect). In households where parents read, children appear to be more inclined to read as well, even when the parents are not at that particular moment reading. Curiously, however, children tend to read for longer periods than their parents. In fact, the average amount of time spent by the Italian parents under survey was quite small - 12 minutes for mothers and 10 for fathers (with a deviation of 27 minutes for mothers and 24 for fathers). Even more curiously, if a parent reads in the presence of a child, a younger child is less likely to read than an older child.

When I was growing up, my parents used to read in my presence, my mother more than my father. I don't think they read for hours on end. I did, and so did my sister. In this, we are bang in the centre of representation in the Italian study. I can't say, however, that my sister (younger) read any less than I did. So in that, we are a bit different from the Italians. Of course, you can't infer anything about Indians' reading habits from just my example. For all I know, the same effect of parental behaviour on offsprings' reading habits applies anywhere in the world.

Although I still read quite a bit, I rarely do so at home. I'm not sure this has much of a deleterious effect on the boy's reading. After all, the Italians have established that the mother has more power to influence the kid than the father. Huzzah. If the boy ends up a lumpen element, it won't be entirely my fault.

But being unable to read at home is a source of some frustration for me. Reading while commuting is not quite as satisfying as reading while lying on the sofa with a pack of peanuts to munch on. At home, however, as soon as I try to read, I'm interrupted by the boy. He might want to read (which he does loudly), or he might want to go to the park, or he might want a drink of water, or he might want me to admire his latest Lego creation. Distractions galore.

Still, it's heartening that the boy does enjoy reading. How long that will last is anybody's guess. Will he become a lifelong slacker on the sofa with peanuts and a book? Or will he be a lifelong slacker on the sofa with beer and TV? The possibilities for slackerdom are endless.

Okay, this is too funny not to pass along. None of it is mine, and the commentary is ‘as is’.

"So just to outline here – these are makeshift helmets made by the Egyptians whilst scrapping in their current predicament. I shall guide you through these pieces of registered army kit thus:

Your classic 1979 ‘Tribottle rag’ helmet – a must in any type of combat

A late 80’s ‘boxhat’. The bloke next to him doesn’t appear too sure of its effectiveness

A renaissance period piece of brickwear teamed with a black and cream scarf. Textbook

I’m not sure that tuna sarnie he is about to lob is gonna cause to much destruction. Old skool 80’s broken bin helmet. I personally love the fact he needs to lift it up to see – does he spend the rest of the time walking in to things??

Textbook saucepaning with lifejacket combo. He does not take, ANY!!

I literally have no idea what this is.

And the winner by 100 miles. This bloke is going to war with 2 baguettes strapped to his ears and a ham salad roll sellotaped to his forehead. I’d def wanna be behind him if someone lobs a load of bricks at me."

Yes, I miss those days of paternalism. You know, when Victorian and Edwardian do-gooders decided what was good for the common classes, and pontificated at length on ways to improve their miseries, and inveighed against their loose morals and propensity to fall into sin at the slightest provocation.

So you won't be surprised that I am all for hiding crime fiction from the riff-raff. What on earth will they do with all that sensationalism? Probably go around the bend and commit hideous crimes against moral authorities such as myself.

What could be worse? Just imagine the deleterious effect on the pillars of society. Penny dreadfuls will bring the middle-class down to the level of monkeys! Shudder. Indeed, as The Times complained in 1851 (about W.H.Smith's predilection for stocking penny thrillers in their railway station stalls):

That high-and-mighty man Matthew Arnold himself was drawn into the argument. In 1880, he described crime (and related psychological thrillers and terror pulp) as 

You tell 'em, Matthew.

[You gotta read P. D. James' little gem of a book on the evolution of crime fiction, Talking About Detective Fiction, from where I got these quotes.]

Other notable tips included: feign illness if your lord's wife makes sexual advances to you; do not piss in the hall (unless it's your hall, in which case by all means feel free); do not fart indoors; and, for crying out loud, don't attack a man when he's taking a dump. I mean, really, where is your sense of chivalry?


[I'm on a bit of a trudge through medieval English history, and you won't believe the amount of filth and ribaldry and bodily function that was bandied about in this country. At least, I suspect you won't believe me, and hence these posts.


First: London Tales]