Culture

Don’t Look At This Link Till You Get Home

Comics, Culture, Internet, Sexuality
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'...and then they lezzed up'
'...and then they lezzed up'

Oo-er Missus Wikicommons….

I was a bit shocked, I admit, when I found these pronographic cartoons (your mileage may vary) by 18th century satirist Thomas Rowlandson portraying our antecedents – how shall I describe it – doing what comes naturally, in colour and in great detail.

This collection of respectable (it’s Georgian, innit) wickedness has well over a thousand bookmarks on delicious alone, which is unsurprising given Rowlandson’s explicit lubriciousness. I’m only surprised it doesn’t have more. I haven’t checked Digg.

Me? I only came across it by accident whilst googling for satire and cartoon archives, I swear.

Though I knew his political cartoons such is my usual tunnel vision I had no idea Rowlandson had drawn pornography, or even that you could get such things on Wikipedia. That seems astonishingly naive of me given that well-thumbed (no, that is not a euphemism) copies of both Cleland’s Fanny Hill and Defoe’s Moll Flanders sit on my bookshelves: I’m not a modern-day Mrs. Grundy who tries to play down the Georgians’ robust attitude to sex.

But I wasn’t aware just quite how robust it was. After having seen Rowlandson’s naughty cartoons I’m not surprised that Austen’s heroines were always blushing.

I’ll never read her or Maria Edgeworth with the same eyes again. Where’s my copy of Castle Rackrent? I feel a re-read coming on.

ObDisclaimer

Emphatically Not Safe For Work or if you are a minor or in a repressive jurisdiction.

It really is very naughty indeed.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Want

Culture, Life under Capitalism
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Charlie Brooker suggests alternative videogames:

Super Squabble Champ IV: This game consists of nothing but petty relationship squabbles in which your character is endowed with the mystical ability to zip back in time and record footage of your partner being a massive bloody hypocrite, then zoom back into the present to play it all back on a giant screen in front of their eyes until they quiver and break down and confess that you were 100% right all along. Then you get a million points and it plays a little song.

I’d buy it.

Waltz with Bashir: Israeli propaganda

Culture, Gaza, Israel/Palestine
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Gideon Levy demolishes the supposedly humanitarian message of Waltz with Bashir:

Hollywood will be enraptured, Europe will cheer and the Israeli Foreign Ministry will send the movie and its makers around the world to show off the country’s good side. But the truth is that it is propaganda. Stylish, sophisticated, gifted and tasteful – but propaganda. A new ambassador of culture will now join Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, and he too will be considered fabulously enlightened – so different from the bloodthirsty soldiers at the checkpoints, the pilots who bomb residential neighborhoods, the artillerymen who shell women and children, and the combat engineers who rip up streets. Here, instead, is the opposite picture. Animated, too. Of enlightened, beautiful Israel, anguished and self-righteous, dancing a waltz, with and without Bashir. Why do we need propagandists, officers, commentators and spokespersons who will convey “information”? We have this waltz.

The waltz rests on two ideological foundations. One is the “we shot and we cried” syndrome: Oh, how we wept, yet our hands did not spill this blood. Add to this a pinch of Holocaust memories, without which there is no proper Israeli self-preoccupation. And a dash of victimization – another absolutely essential ingredient in public discourse here – and voila! You have the deceptive portrait of Israel 2008, in words and pictures.

This is not an uniquely Israeli disease of course. Just look at the endless stream of “sensitive”Vietnam movies that came out of Hollywood from the eighties onwards, which exclusively focused on American pain, with only lip service paid to what America did to Vietnam. Here in the Netherlands, we can’t shut up about what happened to us in World War II, but the independence struggle of Indonesia is only remembered in the context of Dutch suffering during the Japanese occupation.

(Via Socialist Unity.)

From Survivors To Complete Wusses, In Only 4 Centuries

Climate change, Culture, UK politics
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[Image by Tim Ackroyd]

If you’re stuck indoors this weekend, fed up of the cold and snow, the New Scientist has a fascinating article up that puts the country’s latest inconvenience into some perspective:

1709: The year that Europe froze

[…]

On the night of 5 January, the temperature fell dramatically and kept on falling. On 10 January, Derham logged -12 °C, the lowest temperature he had ever measured. In France, the temperature dipped lower still. In Paris, it sank to -15 °C on 14 January and stayed there for 11 days. After a brief thaw at the end of that month the cold returned with a vengeance and stayed until mid-March.

[…]

Fish froze in the rivers, game lay down in the fields and died, and small birds perished by the million. The loss of tender herbs and exotic fruit trees was no surprise, but even hardy native oaks and ash trees succumbed. The loss of the wheat crop was “a general calamity”. England’s troubles were trifling, however, compared to the suffering across the English Channel.

[…]

There was worse to come. Everywhere, fruit, nut and olive trees died. The winter wheat crop was destroyed. When spring finally arrived, the cold was replaced by worsening food shortages. In Paris, many survived only because the authorities, fearing an uprising, forced the rich to provide soup kitchens. With no grain to make bread, some country people made “flour” by grinding ferns, bulking out their loaves with nettles and thistles. By the summer, there were reports of starving people in the fields “eating grass like sheep”. Before the year was out more than a million had died from cold or starvation.

More…

Now that’s what I call weather.

Reluctant as I am to agree with the Loathsome Hoon on anything at all, I do think those delicate flowers who’re complaining because they have to get out and dig their own driveways need to get a bit of gumption, a shovel, and start digging.

On the other hand, I do understand that the snow and the days of enforced idleness (not to mention the childcare chaos caused by stoppages and closures) are yet more burdens to be borne by a population weighed down by worry about their jobs and whether they can afford to pay the heating bill or the mortgage. People are understandably boilingly angry at the government for any number of malfeasances and disasters, but feel powerless to do anything about it. They need a target for rage.

Hence the recent massive increase in BBC complaints, the kerfuffle over Carol Thatcher and now the whinging about the weather. All that anxiety and anger has to blow off at something or it’ll explode.

Howver it’s been barely a week of cold and snow; nobody’s starving, as yet, no significant numbers have died from cold, most people have heating, lighting, food and power. Given those advantages I’m sure we can cope with a bit of snow. They did in 1709, and they had none of those things.