Pic spam link and mini rant

kathyh put up a lovely Bamberg pic spam, which those of you I managed to interest in my lovely hometown might want to check out:

Beautiful Bamberg here!

Also, it appears this year I actually managed to read a Booker winner before it won - Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. (Reviewed in these ramblings some weeks back, dear reader.) And lo and behold, there is snobbery in the press reaction, to wit, this article, which complaints that "novelists should be engaging with the issues of the day – like Balzac, Dickens and George Eliot did – not indulging in high-class escapism. Does anyone actually read Sir Walter Scott any more?"

Excuse me while I roll my eyes. (And admit to a certain bias, but still.) Firstly, you know what, Dickens and George Eliot wrote historical novels, too. (A Tale of Two Cities and Romola. Maybe not their best novels, respectively, but they undeniably wrote them.) Secondly, Walter Scott may not have that many readers, but you know who still does and still gets imitated to this day? Alexandre Dumas, that's who. Thirdly, don't make me brush up my George Lukács. If one of the most brilliant Marxist critics of his day was able to see how historical novels can always contain fascinating social commentary not just about the period they're set in but the period they're written in (see also: The Historical Novel from 1937, which is inflicted on every literature student over here, so it bloody better be inflicted on Anglosaxon students as well), so can you. Fourthly, how anyone can define a depiction of Henry Tudor's England in its back-stabbing, paranoid, religious strife torn darkness which starts with the depiction if a child getting beaten within an inch of his life in graphic detail as "escapism" is beyond me, but hey, that journalist proudly states he doesn't have the time to read historical fiction anyway.

The irony is that Wolf Hall, while brilliant, did cause me some problems, and I like Mantel's A place of greater safety better as far as her historical fiction is concerned. But right now I'm all ready to wave banners saying "Long live the historical novel". Bah, humbug.

Public attention: a comparison

This seems to be my day for short outbursts. This one is, sadly, isn't about a literary issue.

For the last two weeks, both online and print media reported at length about the Roman Polanski case, and there was much justified indignation about how the initial response by over a hundred of his fellow film makers, actors and by some politicians utterly ignored or belittled the crime he was (not) on trial for 31 years ago, which was rape of a thirteen-years-old girl. Much analysis of how even today, rape can be called a "moral lapse" or similar euphemisms and about privilege of gender, wealth, even a tragic backstory which has nothing whatsoever to do with the crime and can't be used to excuse it ensued. So far, so good. (Or bad, but you know what I mean. Good that it's analyzed, bad that it has to be.)

But today an article about the crisis in Guinea -"crisis" - another awful euphemism - has reminded me of something. Mass killings and mass rapes, specifically gendered violence against female protesters took place in Guinea last week. In August, when Hillary Clinton travelled to East Congo, she made sexual violence, the systematic rapes that are used as a tool of warfare against civilians not just East Congo but in many other states a specific focus of her speeches. But do you remember what the focus of what little media coverage there was about her trip to Africa was? One sentence that had nothing to do with the issues she addressed. Her irritated "my husband isn't the secretary of state, I am" response when a student asked her "what does your husband think of this?". Who cares about campaigns against mass rapes when there's speculation about the state of the Cinton marriage to be had, right?

There are reports, every now and then, about the way rapes - against women, against girls, against children - are used as one more tool to terrorize, like this one, but they don't get much attention or publicity. Not if you compare them to, well, the Polanski case. Don't get me wrong: rape is rape, whether it's a thirteen years old girl in Los Angeles in 1978 or a thirteen years old girl in Guinea in 2009. There is no competition in victimhood. But I can't help but notice: in the last two weeks, there was so much talk about celebrity, celebrities, the term "celebrity" used with quotation marks and without, so much scorn poured on people who value the famous director over his unknown victim, who only want to listen to said victim when she's 45 and wishes for the case to be dropped, not when she's 13 and only just reporting it. Yet the double standards in terms of who gets the public attention are there as well. Because I'm pretty sure the Guinea article won't be read by nearly as many people in the US and world wide or discussed as yesterday's news Polanski won't get bail in Switzerland has been. If it's noticed at all. Perhaps it comes down to the cliché that one single case captures the public imagination in a way statistics about thousands and thousands of cases can not, I don't know. And it's not that I wish a decades old crime would be less noticed. But I do wish contemporary ones would be more noticed than they are. Much, much more. If they would get the same amount of public attention and indignation, if there weren't just petitions but actual attempts to help these women, girls and children right now, that would be really something.