slowlogging

oh goodness someone read my last year's blog today, and that would have been without much scrolling back because this is december and only my second time of 2019 blogging - or should it be slogging? slowlogging I think is the best compromise.

it's nice to be so slow - so slow that when I read back over my previous entry it's like something completed by another. time and poor memory the great recontextualisers.

perhaps i don't blog because i don't have anything to say, or perhaps because i don't think there is anyone there to say it to or perhaps because i like my fellows in 2019 tend towards more instant, more momentary, more immediate ways of making my public mark - photo - there! quick caption or comment done! speedy to do, speedy to take in.

and this year has been marked with a new or renewed interest in speed - a re-entry into climbing and a very slow immersion in the running world - slow in all senses of the word but nevertheless speeding up each time I go for it. i like this new sporty self, and the regular little landmarks in the week, little social landmarks, where i meet with others to push and sweat and challenge together - i am definitely not a lone long distance, or even short metred, runner.

have had an interesting discussion today, making connections, and also not yet making, between archaeology and poetry. Lots to think about here. In a way of course poets are archaeologists: to me archaeology means digging things up, excavating layers, and this of course is what poets do - intense sometimes forensic scrutiny of language, but the OED tells me that archaeology involves systematic description and scientific study of remains. Perhaps poets are more interested in what does not remain, reaching for it through what does - but of course this too could be what the archaeologist tries to do - you can only read the trace maker through the trace. i just think we approach that reading in really quite diverse ways

Female scientists astronauts leaders

I have had a fair bit of exposure in the last year or two to pushes within work and without to get women further up the 'hierarchy' of power. These were personal pushes, face-to-face conversations, both formal and informal, encouraging/pressurising me to take on the mantle of female role model and climb up to where I perhaps personally do not want to be. It has had an effect on me, although with no material action or result as yet. I have other priorities that do not have to do with career promotion, leadership, prestige. And I have other concerns, intensified by what I have observed in others who have pushed up. I'd like to work for avoidance/diminution of ego and the misery that brings with it, protection of health, happiness, time, space. All these move against the pressures to climb up the career ladder. However, being sick in the last two days and indulging in films, particularly the ficto-documentary Mars (National Geographic), I have really noticed a sense of cheer and wonder as I gradually, totting them up and watching the (male) characters diminish as fatal space accidents/acts occur, realise that at first half the astronauts in the film - engineers, scientists, explorers - are women, and then, as fatalities begin, three fifths, with the male leader replaced by a female, and later, as other astronauts arrive, reaching a two thirds female proportion. The last scene in the last episode of the first series was unforgettable in its credibility: three female astronauts, kitted up in their space suits and yet somehow (not crassly but clearly) still female figures, stand in acceptably heroic postures on a ridge in their new planet overlooking a Martian plain. It was thrilling, and would have been impossible 40 years ago.

I may not want to be that role model in my work, but its value and power is evident!

.... I have had to come back in and add to this a few days later, having just started to read a sci fi book which details the adventures of a female (maths whizz) protagonist, published in the 1980s (Greg Bear's EON (1985), which then reminded me of the James Cameron's second Alien film, Aliens 1986, in which the main normally macho characters were taken by women/girls. So all this was happening back then already. So my question is why is it still 'thrilling' now? Perhaps what is thrilling is that all the other characters, and film, accept this status quo??