How long does the average marriage last? Amanda Vickery in the Times Literary Supplement finds out from Maureen Waller's history of "marital making and breaking", from the 15th to the 21st century - from Margaret Paston in 1465 to Heather Mills McCartney in 2008.
"Today the average marriage lasts an estimated eleven years. Marriages in the past were no lengthier, but were divided by death, not divorce. As Maureen Waller concludes, “it was all too easy to enter a marriage but virtually impossible to end an unhappy one”. It was a peculiarity of English and Welsh church customs built on medieval canon law (unlike the Scots and other European states which introduced reform in the sixteenth century) that an exchange of vows between consenting adults (fourteen was the male age of consent, sixteen the female) in the presence of two witnesses was enough to create a solemn and binding marriage. However aggrieved the parents or aghast the community, the public promise “I take you for my wife/husband” in a field, a lane or a tavern made an indissoluble contract. Any subsequent marriage by one of the parties, even with full clerical pomp in a cathedral, would nevertheless be deemed bigamous. Waller cites the vicar of Tetbury’s surprised discovery, when he drew up a census in the 1690s, that half his parish were “clandestinely married”.
Even the vaguer vow in the future tense “I shall take you for my wife/husband” (one day maybe, if I still find you attractive), could be binding if followed by sexual consummation. And how many men made empty promises on a dark night in the grip of lust? The room for misunderstanding was vast. Or as the Victorian legal historian F. W. Maitland sagely concluded: “of all people in the world, lovers are the least likely to distinguish precisely between the present and future tenses”. More here.
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Feeding the future
"How can science help us feed the world? In this guest post on the Oxford Science blog, plant scientist Penny Sarchet highlights "work at Oxford into new crops that use less resources and can cope with our changing climate. The current growth rate of the global population is predicted to reach 10 billion by 2050. To feed this many people, food production worldwide will need to double during a period when climate change will worsen, fossil fuels will dwindle, and water availability will become unpredictable.
In addition, if we are to protect what biodiversity we can, this doubling of agricultural output must take place using the same amount of farmland, without impacting upon remaining natural habitats.
To tackle this problem, scientists in Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences are aiming to develop high-yield crop strains which will be better adapted to this climate-altered, resource-poor agricultural landscape of the near future." More here.
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The New York Review of Books Blog
I hadn't been aware of the The New York Review of Books Blog, even though this blog regularly quotes from the Review itself. Having now found it, I will be a regular reader. The NYRB blog has since last October, "posted over eighty pieces on subjects ranging from Guantanamo to Almodóvar's latest film, to food in postwar Britain, to the disappearance of a Bolivian glacier; many of these posts have introduced lines of reporting, comment, and argument that had been previously unknown or overlooked by the American press. We've had a series of posts on the Afghan surge, on climate change, on prison abuse, on the Internet, and on the pleasures of reading". The blog is here.
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Visit Abba World!
The London Times reports that in two weeks time, Abba World — the world’s first officially endorsed Abba exhibition — opens at Earl’s Court. "Among this labyrinthine, interactive stroll through the Swedish monoliths’ success, it would be nice to think that the organisers will have set aside some sort of memorial to that evening in Finsbury Park. Some sort of Abba-fying console, perhaps, which allows visitors to mix t Frida and Agnetha’s deathless harmonies into Anarchy in the UK, say. It’s a notion that, as it happens, isn’t so far from the truth. Among the displays of original costumes (including the clashing satin and suedes of their Eurovision-winning performance), the original Arrival helicopter and specially filmed contributions, the exhibition features the Tretow MIX Challenge, which enables visitors to create an Abba-style mix using elements of existing songs and whatever they care to add.
Arranged as a “walk-through”, the exhibition takes you through more than 20 “rooms”, each of them themed around an aspect of the Abba story.
But if you stick at it long enough pop is a meritocracy. Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell’s study of the amount of time that the Beatles spent together in their early years, revealed a prosaic but undeniable truth about genius. Without long, tedious application, the years of mistakes made in relative anonymity, genius has nothing from which to grow. Gladwell could just as easily have studied Abba and come to the same conclusion." More here.
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Why are they burning books in South Wales?
The Guardian newspaper has found out that "Pensioners in Swansea are supposedly burning books to keep warm. What are the alternatives to such a barbaric practice? "Book burning seems terribly wrong, but we have to get rid of unsold stock for pennies and some of the pensioners say the books make ideal slow-burning fuel for fires and stoves," one charity-shop assistant said.
In the name of civility, we must stop this outrage – even if some of the books might be remaindered celebrity autobiographies. So, while we await the fruits of our politicians' promises to tackle fuel poverty, here are some alternative sources of cheap heat:
• Telephone directories. Do the neighbourly thing and direct a directory towards someone who could make better use of it than as a glorified door stop. Rip off any shiny covers, though; when burned, plastic-coated paper produces nasty pollutants such as dioxins. For the same reason, never burn plastic food packaging.
• Cowpats. Hundreds of millions of people around the world use dried dung as a domestic fuel source, so why shouldn't we? Well, there is one good reason: on a mass scale, in places such as India, the burning of dung causes considerable localised air pollution. But a few dried cowpats tossed on the fire at home probably won't trigger an environmental armageddon.
• Wooden pallets. Most industrial estates will have surplus pallets. Ask if you can take one to break up for use as kindling or as an alternative to logs.
• Newspaper briquettes. If you're still intent on combusting hard-crafted words, then you might as well set fire to this very newspaper instead. Buy yourself a briquette press, soak a load of old copies in the bath, then spend a few hours making your own paper briquettes. Once dry, they will burn much like logs".
More here.
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India's sacred extremes
William Dalrymple's new book on India is covered in depth in the Times Literary Supplement. (Dalrymple will be visiting Australia in March) "A Sufi saint, a Tibetan monk, a sacred prostitute and six others - these are the subjects of William Dalrymple's study of Indian spirituality in all its variety. Wendy Doniger finds that behind the colourful religious festivals lie individual suffering and bitterness.
If you believe that anyone is mad to believe in anything at all, the people in this book are surely among the maddest. But they have found a world of peace and love to live in, and they don’t kill anyone. Some are full of joy, though many of them also mention, in passing, their enduring unhappiness, and end up saying, well, life is like that; there is always sadness. Why did these people choose peaceful, if often painful and/or anti-social, ways of life instead of striking back at the society that made them miserable? The writer in the shadows does not ask, but he skilfully points us where he wants us to go. Here is religion at its most extreme, and often ugliest, but also religion responding to human life at its most extreme, and ugliest, and responding in a way that the walking wounded of the material world find healing." More here.
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Act now to save our birds, says Margaret Atwood
In a long article in The Guardian, Margaret Atwood writes "Birds have always been endowed with symbolic portent – from Chekhov to Hitchcock to Twitter. We ignore their decline at our peril.
How to justify the ways of men to birds? How to account for their attraction for us? (For, despite Hitchcock's frightening hunt-and-peck film, The Birds, it is mostly an attraction.) Why is Chekhov's play called "The Seagull" instead of "The Sea Slug"? Why is Yeats so keen on swans and hawks, instead of an interesting centipede or snail, or even an attractive moth? Why is it a dead albatross that is hung around the Ancient Mariner's neck as a symbol that he's been a very bad mariner, instead of, for instance, a dead clam? Why do we so immediately identify with such feathered symbols? These are some of the questions that trouble my waking hours.
More here.
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Odd book title
Helmut Puff. Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland 1400-1600.
Chicago UP. 2003.
Debbie Campbell reports that Libraries Australia records seven holdings in Australian, including one at the ANU: http://trove.nla.gov.au/work/1641 0710?selectedversion=NBD24074820< /a>.
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