Somewhere out there in the universe

Some thing about readers' reports that I am thinking may in fact be the case--

They always take too long to come back. Your manuscript's reports are taking for ever, way longer than you thought or anyone said. Yeah. That always happens. Ask around.

Some thing about readers' reports that is weird--

Somewhere, out in the universe, my book ms. is sitting on someone's desk or something, stressing them out because they were supposed to read it months ago but they didn't. Maybe sometimes they put their coffee or tea cup on the cover page and now it has a few stray stains. But I don't even know who these people are, and there's no way to tell. Where is the desk upon which the ms. is sitting stressing someone out? In a warm place? In a rainy place?

Maybe the person is not even stressed out about it. Hmm. A few times I have said to senior people that my readers' reports are months overdue, and the people said, 'Oh, that reminds me, I am supposed to read this ms. and the report was due months ago. I really should try to get to that soon.' But they did not sound at all stressed about this.

Amazing fact about the Weimar Republic

Two Jewish women (that I know of) were elected to the German parliament under the Weimar Republic: Toni Sender and Adele Schreiber-Krieger.

People

The gay Nazi, people. It doesn't get much more sensational in an academic book.

I am just saying. It doesn't get much more like a major summer blockbuster. Why don't you want to publish it?

I mean, there was the time that a giant squid attacked the Puritans who were sailing around the Atlantic fomenting revolution with their pamphlets. But that was a one-time thing.

The gay Nazi changed gay history. The Puritan-attacking squid did not change squid history.

Evolution of a cover letter

(Cover letter to editor to be mailed along with book proposal.)

Four months ago: "This book makes three important scholarly interventions..."

Today: "This book has a chapter on the gay Nazi (enclosed)."

Failure to befriend sheep

At long last: victory over funding agency

CC found a run-on sentence in the instructions of a funder to whom you have probably applied for money more than once, and if you are like me, have been rejected multiple times, despite spending hours of your and your loved one's time ensuring that your proposal contains no run-on sentences.

Cretinism

In the mid nineteenth century, so I read yesterday, European psychiatrists rushed to cure the dread condition "cretinism" and its attendant intellectual disability, stunted growth, and remarkable facial abnormalities.

But what caused it? Some were like: "hereditary degeneration." Other guys said: living in swampy areas, or soil conditions. They found it spreading in remote villages in the Swiss Alps, with some hamlets entirely populated by "cretins."
(Appenzell--likely former home of many Swiss cretins.)

So, perhaps like you, I am trained to think about culture and imagination, and I am thinking: is this (yet again) elite Europeans gazing at impoverished Europeans and seeing biological degeneration rather than the actual economic and political inequalities producing poverty? But why is this happening in the Swiss Alps, not in urban slums?

So, of course, being a trained historian, I google image searched "cretinism."


OK! And people: that is not just the bourgeois imagination. Indeed, it's hyperthyroidism, caused by iodine deficiency, and it was common in Alpine villages prior to better food distribution systems because the soil in those valleys lacks iodine.

But then the imagination comes back in force, because the theory of "degeneration" so popular in nineteenth century Europe (Morel)--decadent culture, the decline of the race, the madness of the crowd, etc.--began with a study of these Swiss villagers with hyperthyroid. Degeneration won out as the explanation for what ailed them, but actually, the guys who were for the 'bad soil' explanation were correct.

Bibliography
Pick, Faces of Degeneration
Wikipedia