reject the melancholy cabbage

Though, I mean, my current Caudwell obsession aside, I’m sure Sally Bowles wasn’t Jean Ross, but shut up about Sally Bowles, Alexander Cockburn. If you think “vulgar vamp” is an insult, you are missing the point.

So I’m reading Sarah Caudwell’s Hilary Tamar books, and doing a bit of research into her biography (long story short, everyone in her family is at least a little bit famous, but prizes go to her half-niece, Olivia Wilde, and her mother, Jean Ross, the inspiration for Sally Bowles in Isherwood’s Berlin Stories + Cabaret.)

Alexander Cockburn, her brother, wrote up a bit about Jean Ross’s actual life, and quotes Sarah Caudwell on the topic:

ubleproject:

Noted blues singer Alberta Hunter was a lesbian. I knew a little about her work, based on research on the Harlem Renaissance; she was always talked about in the same breath as Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters: black women-loving-women, singing and dancing and acting during the 1920s through 1940s. I read about them and wonder: Who did they love? 

Alberta Hunter loved Lottie Tyler.

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This is such good research.

“In other works, where he had no help from the past, as, for instance, in his theological writings, his style falls somewhat lower, but, even then, it is always nervous, simple and continuous. His chief writings deal with the Holy Eucharist, and their historical, as well as theological, interest is, therefore, great. His Defence of the true and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ (1550), to which he added while in prison and which was afterwards reprinted, shows his ample learning, and yet, even when dealing with intricate points, it is always simple in phrase and striking in its expressions.” — Reformation Literature in England

Anonymous asked: CONLANGING IS AWESOME CONLANGING IS GOOD AND HOW COME MY OLD-ENGLISH PROFESSOR NEVER MENTIONED ANYTHING ABOUT THE 4-WAY NEGATION/AFFIRMATION THING OMG

WELL IT’S CERTAINLY… IT’S A HOBBY. I was trying to come up with a naming language and picked up the Language Construction Kit book and now I’m sort of. Wandering in the wilderness of cases. Fuck the instrumental!!! I just wanted a locative!!! WHY MUST LANGUAGES HAVE REGULARLY INCREASING NUMBERS OF CASES?? HOW DOES PRONOUN???? WHY IS ADJECTIVE

Anyway, I think he might not have mentioned it because it may not have been a very prominent feature of Old English! It was followed much more enthusiastically in Middle and Early Modern English. (Chaucer follows it almost perfectly and so does Mallory, though Wycliffe less so.) It’s weird to me that I’ve never seen it before too. As far as I can tell, it’s because More is the only documented person to lay out the rule, in a book that was so massive it was partially lost and never widely reprinted in any form.

I see Marsh points out that Cranmer also used “No” instead of “Nay” in his translation of John, which is—well, I want to say hilarious, but also historically interesting! Stylistic overlap between Tyndale and Cranmer has shaped a lot of formal English style and idiom, between the KJV and the Book of Common Prayer, and I don’t really know much about it.