An English Mystery

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“The English have for centuries been a mystery to the peoples of other countries, and failure to solve this mystery has led the stranger to use all sorts of epithets.”

In June 1945 this sentence began the dictation passage in an exam paper for the Certificate in Proficiency in English. Around then my father, a student from Mosul in Iraq stranded in England by the war after arriving in London in the 1930s, was taking courses in Phonetics and Spoken English at University College (now UCL, University College London). Phonetics on a Wednesday afternoon with Mr J. T. Pring, the Grammar of Spoken English on a Tuesday afternoon with Mrs Hyacinth Davies.

I had no idea when I studied at UCL that my dad had ever been there. I found out recently through reading a collection of exam papers, timetables and regulations he gave me years ago. I assumed he’d expected me to find them useful for teaching English language and literature early in my academic career, so naturally I ignored them. But now I see them as comprising a rare miniature archive of data about provision for an influx of wartime refugees and (ex) service personnel. It’s also evidence of the educational approach taken under the great linguistics scholar and teacher Professor Daniel Jones (tagged the Real Professor Higgins by his biographer), and of older expectations of essential knowledge for foreigners about English culture, society, social class and language variety.  Cambridge University set the exams in collaboration with the British Council. My dad’s practice papers from 1944 included translation from Arabic into English, and specific questions for people in the services. Candidates whose mother tongue was not English were required to translate both from and into English. In 1945 papers were provided in Arabic, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Russia, Serbo-Croat, Slovene and Spanish. Candidates could also give advance notice of requests for other languages.  

But there must have been so much more to try and understand about the English, for a young man coming to London in the 1930s when Mosley’s Blackshirts and other fascists were on the streets. How could he fathom English antisemitism? I know that must have been a question he tried to answer as I also have a collection of his books addressing that mystery. He owned Maurice Samuel’s The Great Hatred (1943), The Rev. A. Cohen’s pamphlet The Psychology of Antisemitism (1942), Louis Golding’s The Jewish Problem (1939, first published November 1938 and reprinted four times soon after), James Parkes’ An Enemy of the People: Antisemitism (1945), and  Parkes’ The Jew and His Neighbour, his “study of the causes of antisemitism”  (1938 edition, first published 1930), which my dad bought or was given in May 1941 according to his handwritten date on the flyleaf.

I can’t tell you what he made of them. But reading these older attempts to understand the mystery of English antisemitism brings back memories of experiencing it firsthand. It’s also depressing that those old examples and arguments are like so many still around today.

One of the authors, James Parkes, an ordained clergyman in the Church of England, made a lifelong study of antisemitism and helped found the Council of Christians and Jews. He wrote extensively about Christian antisemitism and saw that as a continuing problem. In his earlier book first published in 1930 Parkes took a long historical view and tried to account for antisemitism even-handedly as it were, by describing the effects of centuries of discrimination and oppression on Jewish lives, customs and characteristics. It’s meant to be a sympathetic narrative which urges readers to be more understanding, while at the same time it locates some “causes” in the targets of antisemitism. His attempt to explain why they are so disliked while saying it’s not entirely their fault does as much to confirm as to challenge the various stereotypes of Jew. So naturally Parkes’ conclusion was that it’s not just antisemites who need to address their behaviour. Parkes explained the origins of the Russian forgery Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the absurdity of its claims that Zionism is about world domination.  But rather chillingly, writing in the 1930s he also discussed at length what he described as problematic about the existence of a large population of Jews in Poland.

His later book as you would expect – he wrote some parts in 1944 and others in 1945 – is a far more serious, analytical study of antisemitism as a political phenomenon in Europe and around the world. Instead of his previous focus on the history of the Jews, we get a focus on the historical, political, and economic contexts for local outbreaks and eventually the systematic spread of antisemitism. He dealt with the specifics of antisemitic campaigns and pogroms in numerous countries, how the infamous Protocols were spread, and the planned long-term nature of the Nazi machinery of propaganda. I would guess my father found this passage about the Arab world resonant, after he had been summoned home in 1941 by a pro-German regime in Iraq only to be torpedoed, shipwrecked and brought back to England.

“The Arab world…was selected for special care and attention. Prominent Nazi leaders took ‘holidays’ in Arab countries. Considerable numbers of Arab students were given scholarships to study in Germany, or at least free travel to visit Nazi conferences and meetings. While Mussolini poured out from his radio station at Bari anti-British ant-Jewish broadcasts, the Nazis, with great thoroughness, fished in the troubled waters of the Middle East, harping always on the two themes of the iniquity of the British and the iniquity of the Jews. There is nothing surprising in the Mufti finding a final home in Berlin, or in the rising in Iraq in 1941 [he’s referring here to the “farhud”, the attack on Jews in Baghdad after the pro-Nazi regime leaders fled, when hundreds were murdered and homes were looted]. Both were the result of years of careful German preparation.” (pp 62-63)

The other writers in my collection used the same kind of thematic structure as Parkes, going into the history of antisemitism, its manifestations, psychology and possible solutions. They agree that anti-Jewish sentiment (“ordinary dislike of Jews” in Maurice Samuel’s words) with its stereotyping and contempt should be distinguished from antisemitism with its crazed, fantastic imaginings about sinister Jewish power. Maurice Samuel even gives us as a list of cue words for anti-Jewishness and antisemitism to help us see the difference. What’s interesting now is that the first list of epithets – “kike” and so on – is obviously derisive racist abuse, but the second – “international plotter”, “enemy of civilisation” – you can well imagine being used by people even now who don’t see its racism.

Tony Kushner’s book The persistence of prejudice: Antisemitism in British society during the Second World War (1989) covers many more publications and analyses varieties of prejudice across a political spectrum, categorising them as left-wing, right-wing or liberal/centrist. Kushner examined how levels of antisemitism fluctuated during wartime, and his findings are not what you might think. Mass Observation terminated its survey on antisemitism in Britain during the war because Tom Harrisson assumed that the “present conflict points away” from such attitudes. But that wasn’t what happened. An observer in London in 1939 referred to an “almost universal antisemitic feeling”.  And at the end of the war, Hampstead residents got up a petition in 1945 aimed at removing “aliens” (i.e. Jews) from their area. (With so much recent interest in stories of the Kindertransport, it’s easy to overlook that the UK was not at all keen on taking in refugees but maintained tight restrictions.) Kushner describes how “Jewish financiers” were attacked from both left and right.  The fascist BUF linked “international Jewish power” to “Jewish communism”.  Amongst supporters of the Communist Party there was still antisemitism directed at “rich Jews”.

 Across the political spectrum although many were ambivalent, there were plenty saying outright that Jews deserved their treatment.  For the right, Jews were either too rich and powerful or dangerous agents of communism. For the left, they were rich oppressors. For the liberal centre, they were responsible for antisemitism for refusing to integrate fully and could solve the problem if they gave up being Jewish. These were already well-worn themes that some found useful guides for reacting to news and events.

“To many, Jews were not victims but oppressors and thus they could not suffer from Nazi attacks. At worst only working-class Jews would be victims. Thus some left-wing anti-war organs cast doubt on the accuracy of the atrocity reports…the reports were just propaganda justifying an imperialist war.”

Kushner’s conclusion from his survey of what he terms the “defence literature”, a good label for my inherited collection, was that much of it was apologetic in tone, tried to be fair to two sides and in effect boiled down to what he calls sugar-coated antisemitism. His one exception was Louis Golding’s book. Kushner is right that The Jewish Problem is a more bracing read.

For a start, the first chapter is called The Gentile Problem, and Golding writes that the whole book should really have had that title as it’s more accurate. He is the one author who states from the outset, simply and without reservations, that antisemitism is never the fault or responsibility of Jews themselves and there’s nothing they can do to solve what’s been called the “Jewish Problem”.

“There is no contribution the Jews can make which is not sooner or later pronounced an aggravation.”

Maurice Samuel made a similar point in The Great Hatred, that “the internal structure of contemporaneous Jewish life has no bearing on the function of anti-Semitism”. Samuel’s analysis was as much psychological as political, as he thought it was urgent for people to understand the psychic pull of totalitarian antisemitism and how deranged – and dangerous for everyone – it was. Like Golding, he argued that instead of trying to find rational causes which might have worked for older forms of anti-Jewish prejudice, we needed to develop explanations for why antisemites were drawn to the utterly irrational modern version with its unhinged paranoia and absurd conspiracies… “the inclination and need to believe hobgoblin stories cannot be treated by refuting the contents of the stories”. Samuel reckoned antisemites included people giving up the moral and intellectual effort of grappling with a complex world. It was easier to surrender to a system of belief in an evil controlling force, especially if you already disliked Jews or rather whoever you imagined Jews to be.

Remembering some of my own experiences of English antisemitism in its politer forms, I’m not sure I could apply the distinctions these authors mostly drew between (1) anti-Jewishness and (2) antisemitism. Things said directly to me by those of an older generation who lived through WW2 overlapped, for instance: “There are some good Jews” – (surely a 1) but also “Israel is the cause of all the trouble in the world” (surely a 2). “Hitler didn’t do a good enough job”, a kid in my sister’s class at our primary school told her, and some children now are still using and hearing the same line, so its transmission has apparently continued. While there’s vast evidence of the systematic spread of antisemitism online, much as these books described an organised, systematic spread of Nazi hate, there’s also somebody scribbling “kill Jews” graffiti in my neighbourhood, and that’s not an isolated recent example. And Kushner’s cutting point still applies, that a lot of so-called defensive argument shifts the blame for antisemitism from its perpetrators to its targets.  

I’m not too pessimistic. There’s far more awareness now and more people concerned to challenge all kinds of racism and beliefs in imaginary conspiracies. I hope there are enough of us.

And now, do you want to try an exam question from 80 years ago? It’s a good one for getting a sense of its original candidates.

Proficiency in English, January 1944. Question 2. Rewrite the following in good English, keeping as near to the sense as possible: –

“I am in England now since the fall of France, and in London already since one year and six months. I know full well that I even speak very badly English, what to say of writing. I have not learnt the English in my school, and because I am talking all the days with my fellow natives I was not improving here, and indeed I have been ashamed to have written to you in such bad English, but there is no helping it because I ought to ask you some things very important. I shall be hoping that I might be receiving a reply of you.”

Good luck with the question, and welcome, or welcome back to Elephantdentistry.

 An English Mystery

Not shutting up

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Jenny Lindsay has written a piece that goes from quiet to angry, from moderate and reasonable to fierce, retrospective to poetically prophetic. It pins down a particular time in a specific community and place – a section of the literary, arts and live performance establishment in Scotland with some further out ripples – that fell for a pernicious fashion of witchhunting. As ever, there are many who would rather join in with the witchfinders than run the risk of being suspected themselves.

She does not write as a victim although she was undoubtedly victimised. After being unfairly and thoroughly denounced herself she does not denounce named individuals but manages to rise far above her detractors. Jenny Lindsay warns that through their timid compliance and adherence to whatever the new rules might be today, those who either denounced or passively betrayed her will be left themselves with nothing much of interest to say to anyone. Is she being romantic in expecting more and better of people who want to be known as writers? There’s a history of official writers’ unions controlling access to publishing and being controlled in turn to make sure no unorthodox, non-approved ideas escaped into the public realm. But then looking back we tend to be more interested in what the writers they expelled or excluded had to say.

Her article, published in The Dark Horse Issue 2020 this autumn, reminded me of another time in Edinburgh a lifetime ago – the 1983 conference on feminist writing. It was not an academic conference but an event filled with writers and feminists. My paper later became an article in the 1987 anthology In Other Words: Writing as a feminist edited by Gail Chester and Sigrid Nielsen. Much of it resonates today. Here it is. The book was republished by Routledge in 2015. Like Jenny Lindsay’s article it is about the importance of not shutting up, especially when people are trying to shut you up.

I’m also struck that it was already relevant in 1987 to make points like

The idea of ‘correctness’ implies that there is some higher authority waiting to judge what we write…

…some women stay silent altogether rather than risk criticism for saying or writing something that others may interpret as racist, heterosexist, imperialist, class-biased, oppressive towards disabled women or mothers, and so on. I do not wish to trivialize the serious study of language, or to dispute how important it is for us to take care when we write not to use offensive words and phrases. But we need a more open way of confronting one another and of keeping debate going…

…when we pay obsessive attention to correct and incorrect vocabularies we are not necessarily changing what we think; we could just be learning a new set of rules.

Dena Attar, 1987.

Not shutting up

Sourdough survivalism and other bread stories

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This is for all you bakers, anyone who eats bread or makes it, anyone wondering how to keep your sourdough going in difficult times. It’s not a serious problem of survival and safety like looking after humans or other animals but you might still be wondering what will happen to your sourdough starter after months or years of careful nurturing if you can’t get hold of any flour. I care because I’ve finally learnt how to make a decent loaf like this, after going to some Bread Ahead classes along with friends and relatives. Wonderfully they are now doing live online baking via Instagram. Check it out!

Here’s what I’ll be doing after I failed to find any bread flour to buy, and can’t tell how long that situation will last. I started with a recce – how much flour do I have left of which types and how long will it last? I don’t have much rye flour, so won’t be making any more of the Borodinsky rye (of which more later) and will save it all for my rye sourdough starter which currently looks like this straight from the fridge:

I’m going to put half of it aside to freeze, and keep the other half to feed and use occasionally. It looks dark because I use wholemeal rye to feed it, and at the moment I can tell it’s still very healthy as it floats when added to water (a good tip from Bread Ahead).  I also had some white sourdough starter which I’d been feeding with strong bread flour. I decided to experiment and divide it in two, feeding one lot as usual. It now looks like this, also straight from the fridge:

I reckon that’s also fairly healthy. But the experimental half, fed with ordinary plain flour, now looks different:

So I’m thinking that’s not so great as the little yeast plants seem to consume their food at a faster rate, or something. I’ve added a little bit of rye flour to the mix and will then use it all up in an experimental bake with an added touch of dried yeast and a mix of white and wholemeal. It may end up as rolls, easy to freeze and eke out. Photo coming soon.

My flour audit means I can now calculate how many wholemeal loaves I can make with dried yeast, and how many half and half sourdough loaves, before my stock runs out. If that happens at least I’ll know there’s some frozen sourdough starter that might make it through. As for other types of flour, I’ve got some atta that’s for chapattis and though it’s apparently possible to use it for some strange breadlike concoction I reckon it’s best used as intended – all you need is water, rolling pin and wide heavy frying pan. Self-raising and plain plus baking soda equals soda bread which can be made with sour milk or thin yoghurt. 

The Borodinsky Rye sounds to me like it should be a dance so I’ve come up with a tune for it. Watch out for that in a future post.  And now for something far more interesting.

The Elephant Dentist is returning here as I’m currently stopped from doing so many other things, like everyone else. While I was away, as a postgrad at UCL I researched and completed a lengthy dissertation on the (now historic) Jewish community of Mosul. I came across this article. 

 How did they used to make bread in Mosul? [‘They’ here meaning the Jews of Mosul.] 

This question was posed directly by a Professor of Arabic, Otto Jastrow, to the late Ezra Laniado and his wife Ilana. He interviewed them in order to get them talking naturally and record their speech as he was interested in the Mosuli Jewish-Arabic dialect. I’ve inserted a few explanations in italics.

“ How does one bake bread in Iraq, in Mosul? First you go to the Feast of Tabernacles [Succot, festival occurring in early autumn]  to buy the bread wheat. You wash it and rise it until Winter. You store it in the cellar, or attic, or larder.  When you want to use it, you take it, in one or two sacks, to the Mill. The Miller grinds it, and lays it on to a donkey and brings it back to your home.

Once you return it home, you sieve it so as to remove the bran. Then, you sieve it a second time, and separate out the coarser flour, which is used to make wholemeal bread. Then you sieve out the pure/white flour out to make bread.

How does one make bread? First, the pastry (dough) cook(?) [female] [these precise job titles don’t seem to have an exact translation but it’s clear from the original language that they refer to women] comes in and places the flour into a level tub and stirs in the water. They add the yeast. When the dough has risen, they knead it with their hands until done. Once the dough has been kneaded once more, they take it to the baker’s [female] house. The baker separates the dough into pieces, each of which will make a loaf.

Here, there are sat more women. They roll out the dough with a rolling pin on a marble plate called fags with a rolling pin called Sobak.

After working with the rolling pin, she hands to the woman next to her to work, and again she passes it on, and again, working with the nassabe.

Ilana: one works with her hands, another with the rolling pin, a third with the nassabe. Yes the first flattens with her hands, the second rolls it further, the third rolls it flatter with the nassabe. The nassable is a round bit of wood but thinner than the sobak. Once the dough has been fully rolled, it looks as a circle with a diameter of about a metre. The dough is passed to the baker, who uses a (paddle?) and pops it into the oven. There are two types of oven; one is in the earth, and the baker places it deep inside. Beforehand, the baker takes wood, dung and whatever else and starts the fire. When the oven is hot she places it inside, and when the loaf is baked she pulls it from the (wall) of the oven and folds it together.

She folds each loaf twice, so that it looks like a triangle, and places into the bread basket. The baker takes a loaf as well as her payment, as does the dough mixer. Each family baked once a week, or once every ten days, or once a fortnight. Once the bread was done, you brought it into your house and stored it in a bread-storer. When you needed bread, you took from your store until the supplies were depleted. You sprinkled it with water first, to make it soft. You didn’t eat it dry. One bit of bread you would crumble off and eat with your soup under the lime trees.

So what of the wholemeal bread? You remember we have sieved the bran. The bran is often sold as animal feed. There is also the wheat from the second sieving, which you can bake and eat, but which is often gifted to the poor. Thus the bread of the Jews in Mosul was from the 3rd sieving.

The Jews of Mosul also baked small, fat loaves (qawas). This was baked in the same way. The fatter loaves were eaten in the morning, with (buffalo?) cream and taken with tea. The thinner bread was eaten at lunch and dinner. In the morning you might buy bread from the Muslims at the marketplace. That was warm bread, warm qawas which you ate in the morning. You’d buy it with (buffalo?) cream or whole milk, with honey or sesame oil, whatever you wanted. You’d bring it home, eat it with milk or tea. You’d eat it for breakfast. Of those who lived in difficult circumstances/relationships, you’d say they live off the market. They couldn’t afford to buy the wheat for themselves.

Bread for Pesach [Passover]: This was different that the standard bread as it had to be unleavened. You would have to mix it separately, so that it didn’t become leavened. For the first, you would clean the wheat carefully, and also with barley, as barley is not allowed at Pesach. At Pesach you would wash the wheat carefully and also the stone, so that it did not contaminate. This you would do one month before Pesach, and store it separately so that it did not get contaminated. This bread you would bake in exactly the same way, sieve it and remove the bran, however you would not wait for it to rise. This bread we called matzah. As our ancestors were expelled from Egypt, they didn’t wait for it to rise, and so it ate it unleavened. For this reason at Pesach each year we ate matzah. As well as this bread you would make thicker bread, called massa, and made like qawas. We say our prayers over the matzah. The massa we would eat for celebrations, weddings and such, and you’d eat it with lots of sesame seeds, or sugar perhaps. We would eat this at joyous occasions and sweeten it and share it with friends and other households. “

Shout out to Joel Attar who translated this from Jastrow’s article in German. Jastrow made the original translation into German. Reference here:

Brotbacken: Ein Text im arabischen Dialekt der Juden von Mossul in memoriam Ezra Laniado. Zeitschrift für Arabische Linguistik, No. 23 (1991), pp. 7-13. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43615773

Bookmark this site for your regular entertainment and some sharing of possibly obscure information. I’m going to be running a series on an extraordinary work from over a century ago and why it’s relevant now, Cassell’s Book of the Home, which has repelled and fascinated me for years.

Sourdough survivalism and other bread stories

Twisted tales of spinning and blogging

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Elephantdentistry’s main themes might seem a strange mix. They include (1) what’s going on with internet and social media industries, politics and practices,  (2) experts, (3) living metaphors and catching them in the wild (fun with language), (4) feminism, (5) music and (6) Mosul. Here I’m getting most of these twisted together so let’s see how that works.

I caught three new living metaphors in the wild when I was in Wales recently, visiting the National Wool Museum. I tried a hands-on exhibit, picking up a handful of wool and following the instructions to pull and twist simultaneously until eventually I’d spun a yarn. Nearby was a painting of wool gatherers, women who would follow the drovers taking sheep to market and dart from hedge to hedge to collect scraps of wool. They would then sell their bags of wool to eke out their desperately poor livings. You could see how the scattering of wool and movement of the gatherers made sense of the metaphor, as it’s not a task that involves following a straight line. You would need to keep constantly turning, moving and switching your focus of attention. Hard work, and once you realise the point of all that apparent distraction it’s obvious that wool gatherers have had a bad press. Raw wool is indeed very woolly: it’s fuzzy, breaks apart easily and has no fixed shape.

The name overstated what the museum really was and did. It’s in an old textile mill, formerly Cambrian Mills, near Newcastle Emlyn not far from the mid-west coast, and most of the exhibits were about the mill itself, its owners, the machinery and the weaving industry, so there was almost nothing on knitting. (I make up for that later.) The mill used to produce blankets, shawls and woven wool cloth used for miners’ shirts and soldiers’ uniforms. Most of the textile exhibits were of shawls and blankets. When they were taken off the looms, large pieces of cloth had to be washed and then stretched out on tenterhooks, on tenters, in tenter fields. There the cloth would be left hanging, waiting until it was ready. We saw a tenter, with hooks, in a park displaying information about the area’s traditional crafts.Tenterhooks2

Before  machinery and mills, spinning used the older technologies of spindles and wheels and was largely women’s work carried out at home as  ‘cottage industry’. It took tedious, long hours to earn much of a living and so telling stories was intricately associated with the work of busy hands that didn’t require much mental engagement. Weaving was another cottage industry.

Now being able to work virtually and from home, according to some optimistic commentators, has brought in satisfying new cottage industries, once again involving women fitting in somewhat creative, but low paid work (even if paid at all) alongside domestic and family commitments. It’s also handy when there’s no other work available.

That’s the positive story being spun. Some experts disagree and have a bleaker but more informed analysis.

When I started researching women’s online practices years ago I remember being struck by the growth of knitblogs – blogs about knitting. It happened long before blogs were as common as they are now, and back then few of those blogs seemed to be commercial. Now I would guess most of them are a means to try and make money, one way or another.

I’ll get on to what Stephanie Taylor has to say about creativity, home working and precarity, but first I’m not dissing woolly creativity although I do still wonder about knitted cupcakes. I know they can be used as pincushions or given away but that doesn’t explain their ubiquity. The museum had a three-tier knitted cake, which is fair enough as they are the Wool Museum, but the cafe also had knitted cupcakes and they apparently sold well. Their very pointlessness seems to be the point – you can neither eat them nor wear them, so knitters can express a creative impulse without anyone giving or taking offence because nobody wants to eat cakes or wear handknits. This, on the other hand, is extraordinary and needs no excuse. It is the giant cardigan on display in Cardigan Castle marking 900 years of the town’s history.  Cardigan4

The cardigan for Cardigan was created by around 200 knitters, including  schoolchildren and other volunteers alongside the two artists behind the project. It’s amazing. My photos can’t give you the sheer scale of it.

Even more impressive and with another woolly play  on words are the wool churches created as part of the Wolly Spires project. These are models of the beautiful Lincolnshire churches built out of the wealth of the medieval wool trade, intricately knitted to represent all the details of their stone decorations and graceful architecture. Community groups worked on these too. It took 8 years for the  teams to knit 6 churches.

They’re currently on display until mid January at the 20-21 Visual Arts Gallery in Scunthorpe so if you’ve ever wanted to visit Scunny, there’s a good reason.

These geographically-based communities of knitters are not anything like the virtual community I came across. I first found knitblogs around 15 years ago when I was researching  internet ‘beginners’ and specifically the various online literacy practices (what they read,  what they wrote and how) that women were developing for themselves. That was a time before the big social media corporations, so for most people there were websites, email and not much else . Internet access was still fairly limited and there was already a significant gender gap in the UK. But I was struck by the fact that a lot of web designers were women. There seemed to be a connection between that and a sudden flourishing of knitblogs, i.e. blogs about knitting. Pixels and stitches made up colour patterns on screen or in wool. Designers needed to understand and create sets of instructions written in a specialised language. Both web design and knitting could involve home-based creativity, whether for pleasure or money. Back then, knitblogs were more about personal creativity and sharing stories about life as well as creations or wips (works in progress). They needed more technical online skills than blogging requires now.  Those very personal blogs still exist, but knitblogs are now mostly about selling patterns or getting income through ads, which brings me back to Stephanie Taylor.

Taylor is one of the authors of an article on gender and creative labour, along with Bridget Conor and Rosalind Gill. Their research into the cultural and creative industries showed  there were vast inequalities and pretty terrible conditions of work, hidden behind myths about the wonders of creativity. Work was often informal and precarious. People, women especially, coped with a ‘bulimic’ pattern of alternatively long hours and super-intense periods of work  or nothing at all coming in. Stephanie Taylor has also analysed a more general phenomenon she calls the ‘new mystique’ of working for oneself, and how it traps women seeking to combine work and childcare into long hours and low pay. She discusses the language used to describe this type of home-based self-employment, including the term ‘cottage industry’ being revived by journalists, and picks up on the parallels between what’s going on in the fields of creative work and what’s happening with the growth of self-employment. They have precariousness, long hours and low pay in common as the price of apparent flexibility. Boundaries between work and home life disappear. We’re back in the world of the poor spinners.

Amidst a burgeoning social media economy, genres of self-enterprise have emerged that enable women to profit from creative activities located within the domestic sphere, including mommy blogging, lifestyle blogging, and craft micro-economies.

That link between working on websites such as blogs and creative crafts reappears in research by Brooke Erin Duffy & Urszula Pruchniewska. Catch Duffy (quoted above) being interviewed here. She has some sharp things to say about women working as social media editors. The title of her new book, out this year, nails the issue: (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love, subtitled Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work.

Drawing on interviews and fieldwork, Duffy offers fascinating insights into the work and lives of fashion bloggers, beauty vloggers, and designers. She connects the activities of these women to larger shifts in unpaid and gendered labor…

A tiny handful have lucrative careers but there’s a vast gap between them and the rest who make little or nothing.

Alongside these aspirational bloggers, there’s a secondary industry offering training and support. This blog makes nothing and luckily doesn’t have to try to earn anything, but I’ve participated in three training courses so far to get to know more about the blogging subculture. Most of the other participants were women, and even if they’d been sent by an employer in order to start up and run a company blog, they had ambitions to do with promoting their own creative outputs. The aspirations of some bloggers reminded me of a woman learning to use the internet for the first time in a class I ran in Peckham Library who told me hopefully back in about 2000  ‘You can make money out of this, you know’. I met some realistic and genuinely helpful trainers, but also one who suggested that any blog potentially had a substantial worldwide audience and could bring in regular income through adverts. Content, or a reason to blog apart from providing ad space, was irrelevant. Learn the techniques of the clickbaiters. Ten top tips for rescuing knitting disasters. The seven things you need to know about improving your blog.

Here’s some more from the hardworking knitters of Cardigan, Cardigan2and finally a link to Mosul. The Welsh weavers had their own traditional textile patterns and the mechanical looms in the mill could produce more complex patterns or more cheaply, cloth with a simple stripe. Wool used to be vital to Mosul’s economy, although cotton was more important to the textile industry. According to Sarah Shields, writing about the nineteenth century,

Mosul’s fabrics were mostly cottons woven in traditional patterns to appeal to the regional populations. The coarse cotton calicos (ham, cit) used for garments were bleached or dyed red or blue. One of the city’s specialties was alaca, a striped fabric used for zibun, the robes men wore. Weavers prepared women’s cloaks (izar) in assorted qualities, and special looms were employed for the wool and cotton blend abaya over garments. These textiles, as well as towels and headgear, were exported into the mountains, to Persia, Baghdad, Bitlis, Siirt, and as far away as Trabzon.

Did you know that the English word muslin for a lightly woven delicate cotton fabric derives from ‘Mosul linen’? It was thought to have been invented there first.

 

 

 

Twisted tales of spinning and blogging

The Devil’s Interval and Yair Dalal

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I heard that the blues musician Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in return for his guitar-playing genius, that Paganini was the devil’s violinist and the devil himself is a fiddle player. That was reported as fact to a folklore researcher and quoted in his article The Devil and the Fiddle in 1943. He was told:

I grew up in Chicago and Aurora. And one of the earliest things I can remember about my fiddle, that my old uncle told me ‘the Devil was in the fiddle’. He was my guardian and he wouldn’t let me take lessons.

I can play The Devil Among the Tailors on the violin, but I didn’t know about the Devil’s Interval until yesterday’s event with Yair Dalal performing Iraqi Jewish music on violin and oud. He explained that one of the pieces he was about to play featured the Devil’s Interval (Diabolus in Musica), or tritones. Traditionally it is shunned in Western classical music but it features in heavy metal, at least according to an article linking Black Sabbath, medieval theology and the tritone.  Yair told us that it’s used unflinchingly in Iraqi maqam, the traditional musical system which is about much more than Arabic musical scales and is also about form, melody and rhythm – but not harmony which doesn’t feature.

Yair Dalal

I’ve blogged previously about Iraqi Jewish music but yesterday I learned a lot more. Yair was in conversation with Sara Manasseh, who directs the Rivers of Babylon ensemble. I was their violinist for a few years in the band’s early days and it’s great to know they are still going and have recorded many more CDs since. Sara is an ethnomusicologist and her comprehensive book, Shbahoth – Songs of Praise in the Babylonian Jewish Tradition has the words and music for some of the songs Yair performed.

Shbahoth

It also has words and music for the song from the Mosul tradition that I introduced to the band. There’s even a credit to my late father Menashe.

Eliahu Eliahu (2)

Yair played some of his own compositions, traditional works by medieval poets such as Ibn-Gabirol, and twentieth century songs by Saleh Al-Kuwaity. Al-Kuwaity composed around 800 songs but after most of the Jewish community, including the musicians who made up the radio orchestra, left Iraq in the early 1950s their names were removed from their works. That’s now changing and knowledge of Iraq’s popular music history is being revived. Yair explained that most musicians in Iraq had been Jewish, so when the Jews left the musicians felt a heavy responsibility. They stayed in Baghdad until the last possible moment in order to record their music so it wouldn’t be lost.

I can remember going to a talk Sara gave many years ago where she played examples of traditional songs, and someone in the audience rudely asked if the performers had any training. I guess if you’re only used to a few simple genres of Western music and flinch at anything unfamiliar you might assume there was nothing complex, difficult or refined about these strange sounds and that they’re merely uncouth. Luckily audiences have mostly changed from those days. Yair’s training, he told us, when he was a young man living and working in the desert involved overnight five hour journeys each way, and then two solid days of study and rehearsal before going back to his home and work. He did that for years. He is from an Iraqi Jewish family although he was born in a transition camp in northern Israel, and grew up in an area where there were many Iraqi Jewish musicians who were constantly performing, at a time when their music was out of fashion in Isaeli society generally.

The Baghdad Bandstand clips on YouTube are a great way to see and hear some celebrated Iraqi musicians jamming, chatting and explaining what they’re playing – not in English but there are subtitles.  If you’re in London you may also be able to get to Yair Dalal’s masterclass on Monday 11th September at SOAS, or to East meets West A Concert for Peace, on September 27. Or you can listen to a younger generation of musicians reviving the old songs and putting them to new beats.

The rock musician Dudu Tassa is a grandson of the other al-Kuwaity (or al-Kuwaiti) brother. Dudu Tassa and the Kuwaitis have been touring and recording songs from his relatives’ back catalogue and it seems that through their versions this music, originally from Baghdad, is getting popular back in Iraq once again after a long interval.

 

The Devil’s Interval and Yair Dalal