Friendly Murmurs

Things happen over a long term.

Things that look at the time like a failure or even a disaster may be sowing seeds or releasing spores and having an impact that will go on.

Or even have a counter-intuitive impact at the time: okay, The Well of Loneliness got convicted for obscenity in 1928 but 1000s of women realised they were not alone just from reading the reports in the newspapers, and 1000s of them wrote to Radclyffe Hall.

Just because something does not endure does not endure does not mean it had no influence.

Am currently reading book by a friend which makes quite a thing of long-term impact of small obscure organisations of early C20th I worked on.

Was a piece in Guardian Saturday today which doesn't appear to be yet online which was doing the ever-recurrent WO about 'I see no feminists' and I wonder what they expect them to look like and perhaps they are supposing something flashy and dramatic, which can be appropriate at times. But the work is not necessarily drawing attention to itself.

Further thought: I was a bit irked to see this: Lifeline is both a musical following Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the first antibiotic and a warning about the threat of superbugs in the present day, because the Fleming narrative erases the immense amount of work that Florey, Chain and Heatley had to put in to make pencillin actually viable.

Gosh those people with the archivists' sales team are persistent! I've heard again - okay, different name and email, exact same wordage - TWICE, second time with added 'Worth a chat?'

No, sir, not in the least.

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This week I got the Authors Licensing and Copyright Society payout, which was an agreeable sum, maybe it would not actually support me in My Old Age, but it is Better Than A Bat In The Eye With A Burnt Stick. Furthermore, as it is itemised - all the tiddly sums that get totted up - it is a Revelation of what works of mine are still being looked at, wow.

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Church attendance report pulled after YouGov finds 'fraudulent' responses:

A report claiming the number of young people attending church in England and Wales had skyrocketed has been retracted, after the underlying data was found to be flawed.
The Bible Society's "Quiet Revival" report had been widely reported on since its publication last year and became an accepted part of discourse among many Christians.
Now YouGov, which carried out the research, has told the Bible Society that an internal review of the data found that some of the respondents who completed its survey were "fraudulent".
It has said that quality control measures, which usually remove such responses, were not applied due to human error.
....
But academics questioned the findings, pointing out that the results seemed out of step with other data. Results from the long-running British Social Attitudes Survey, and even the Church of England's own figures, show a long term decline in church attendance.
Experts said that YouGov's methodology - gathering data from volunteers who received cash rewards for their time - left it vulnerable to "bogus respondents" skewing the data.

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Pepys ‘curated’ letters to conceal being offered enslaved boy as bribe – research:

Howe wrote to Pepys to “crave your acceptance” of a “small” enslaved boy, which “I brought home on board for your honour … Hoping he is so well seasoned to endure the cold weather as to live in England.”
Pepys wrote back indignantly rejecting the offer. But Edwards argues this was not because of ethical concerns about slavery, but the optics of looking like a man who could be bribed.

This is quite resonant with discussion I was having this week apropos of my 1930s feminists and the less visible ways in which the work was happening, so much so that it's been supposed (it was being claimed at the time) that Feminism Woz Ded: The Way of Water: On the Quiet Power of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Activism.