From My Bookshelves

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The Sociological Imagination is something that is relevant to all disciplines, indeed to all approaches to any subject. my guess is that the younger generation won't know about it at all, which is sad. We have one author on this website who specialises in power. If he/she is still around perhaps she will respond? Freudian Monkey is his name...

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Something I have for a long time been interested in is how England became a protestant country. This happened in the late fifteen hundreds when Elisabeth Tudor was Queen: See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_I_of_England. At the time the outlook was not good. Spain was a global power with colonies in North and Central America at the time of the Spanish Armada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada. I have several books covering this period, listed below.

Antonia Fraser Mary Queen of Scots Methuen Paperback, 1969
Alison Weir Mary BoleynVintage, 2012
Hilary Mantel Wolf Hall Fourth Estate, 2010
C. J. Sansom Heartstone Pan Macmillan, 2010.

Of these the best was by Antonia Fraser, followed by C. J. Sansom.

In this sequence of posts I will focus on the first of these, Mary Queen of Scots.

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I've come to understand that Joci was an important link person in our London life. She kept in touch with her sister Anci and visited her in Sheboygan, crossing the Atlantic on Cunard's Queen Mary. Anci did the same journey in reverse. Joci also introduced Maria to baking, as she*had a lot of recipes for continental cakes, like*sachertorte,*apple strudel,*rigo jancsi, Kugelhopf*- or kuglóf*(Hungarian) as I knew it - and*Linzer torte*(Linzer Torta) are all classic Dual Monarchy Habsburg era recipes.

Joci had a book of hand-written recipes in Hungarian and she and Maria made strudel with extremely thin pastry. Very difficult - I remember how they used to gently waft the pastry that had been stretched thin over the kitchen table by holding the flour-dusted cloth it was made on, to get air under it, so stretching it still further.

They baked for those who had come from Austria or other Habsburg countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and many of their customers were jewish (the northwest is one of the main jewish areas of London with Golders Green, Finchley, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Willesden Green). At busy times they worked though the night. Sometimes I helped by dropping some plum jam in each chocolate cup pastry form they made. Pouring the melted chocolate to fill the cups was much harder that I left well alone. Later I delivered cakes to customers by car.*I only took my licence when I was 19, and went to Leicester University soon after, though whenever I visited my parents I helped out by undertaking deliveries.

It was nerve-wracking work, and if things went badly they often had to scrap that particular bake and start again.

As their reputation grew and became better known this became their main work and major source of family income, especially after Zoli got too ill to work (making beaver lamb in the East End). Beaver lamb was made from sheepskins that were chemically treated to look like fur. The treatment process my father had to use involved formaldehyde, and working it in a small glassed-in area with a working table (I was not allowed in, of course). There is a description of working of lambskins n the early 1900s in this website:
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles09/furs.shtml. With travelling he had always had a very long day. He was very good at preparing beaver lamb, and the glassed in work area was jokingly called “my father's gas chamber”.

He left that job eventually and bought the goodwill of a sweet and tobacconist shop in Kilburn and worked there long hours, earning very little but always worrying about its economics. I cycled in to give him a hand as well as keep him company during this time.

For me, personally, there is a third reason. I benefited greatly from the many journeys Joci took me to Czechoslovakia and Hungary. That way, I also met many of my catholic relatives in Hungary, whom I otherwise would never have known. The last time was to Levoĉa, meeting Lajos and his wife Jolán, both were gentle and sweet, and had suffered so much during the war hiding in the forests. We also met another Zoli who joined the partisans, though I can't remember his surname.*The Slovak Resistance Movement including the Slovak Partisans had Jewish Brigades in it, though I have no idea whether my uncle and his wife, Cita, fought in a Jewish Brigade or not. They probably fought holding the Dukla Pass connecting Slovakia and Poland and through which the Red Army had to fight to reach Slovakia. See also The Battle of the Dukla Pass: I've come to understand that Joci was an important link person in our London life. She kept in touch with her sister Anci and visited her in Sheboygan, crossing the Atlantic on Cunard's Queen Mary. Anci did the same journey in reverse. Joci also introduced Maria to baking, as she*had a lot of recipes for continental cakes, like*sachertorte,*apple strudel,*rigo jancsi, Kugelhopf*- or kuglóf*(Hungarian) as I knew it - and*Linzer torte*(Linzer Torta) are all classic Dual Monarchy Habsburg era recipes.

Joci had a book of hand-written recipes in Hungarian and she and Maria made strudel with extremely thin pastry. Very difficult - I remember how they used to gently waft the pastry that had been stretched thin over the kitchen table by holding the flour-dusted cloth it was made on, to get air under it, so stretching it still further.

They baked for those who had come from Austria or other Habsburg countries like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and many of their customers were jewish (the northwest is one of the main jewish areas of London with Golders Green, Finchley, Hampstead Garden Suburb, Willesden Green). At busy times they worked though the night. Sometimes I helped by dropping some plum jam in each chocolate cup pastry form they made. Pouring the melted chocolate to fill the cups was much harder that I left well alone. Later I delivered cakes to customers by car.*I only took my licence when I was 19, and went to Leicester University soon after, though whenever I visited my parents I helped out by undertaking deliveries.

It was nerve-wracking work, and if things went badly they often had to scrap that particular bake and start again.

As their reputation grew and became better known this became their main work and major source of family income, especially after Zoli got too ill to work (making beaver lamb in the East End). Beaver lamb was made from sheepskins that were chemically treated to look like fur. The treatment process my father had to use involved formaldehyde, and working it in a small glassed-in area with a working table (I was not allowed in, of course). There is a description of working of lambskins n the early 1900s in this website:
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles09/furs.shtml. With travelling he had always had a very long day. He was very good at preparing beaver lamb, and the glassed in work area was jokingly called “Kemeny’s gas chamber”.

He left that job eventually and bought the goodwill of a sweet and tobacconist shop in Kilburn and worked there long hours, earning very little but always worrying about its economics. I cycled in to give him a hand as well as keep him company during this time.

For me, personally, there is a third reason. I benefited greatly from the many journeys Joci took me to Czechoslovakia and Hungary. That way, I also met many of my catholic relatives in Hungary, whom I otherwise would never have known. The last time was to Levoĉa, meeting Lajos and his wife Jolán, both were gentle and sweet, and had suffered so much during the war hiding in the forests. We also met another Zoli who joined the partisans, though I can't remember his surname.*The Slovak Resistance Movement including the Slovak Partisans had Jewish Brigades in it, though I have no idea whether my uncle and his wife, Cita, fought in a Jewish Brigade or not. They probably fought holding the Dukla Pass connecting Slovakia and Poland and through which the Red Army had to fight to reach Slovakia. See also The Battle of the Dukla Pass I've come to understand that Joci was an important link person in our London life. She kept in touch with her sister Anci and visited her in Sheboygan, crossing the Atlantic on Cunard's Queen Mary. Anci did the same journey in reverse. Joci also introduced Maria to baking, as she*had a lot of recipes for continental cakes,

[Dreamwoven]

Back to the correct thread. Mary Queen of Scots had a hard time of it in Elizabeth I's protestant England. Mary's father was James V of Scotland, who married Mary of Guises. So any child of hers would become Queen or King of Scotland, as, indeed happened. James VI of Scotland became the first of the Stuarts to unite the two kingdoms when he united the thrones of Scotland and England. But that was in the future.

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Mary Queen of Scots had a hard life, executed, beheaded, by Elizabeth's orders which she agonised over for two months before issuing it. But Mary founded the Stuart Dynasty, that united Scotland and England. She also had a very dignified end preserving her quiet calm throughout the execution. The Stuart Dynasty was in many ways a disaster, strengthening the London Parliament.

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Tia DeNora Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical politics in Vienna, 1792-1803University of California Press (1995). This is a fascinating study of the construction of Beethoven's genius.

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Erving Goffman The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Anchor Books, 1959.

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I have a standing interest in symbolic interaction. But since this perspective has never to my knowledge been mentioned on LitNet, I have not mentioned it either. The Journal Symbolic Interaction which started in 1977 is a good introduction. Erving Goffman (see preceding post) is a good introduction. I have several books on this. Some are listed below.

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Joseph Gusfield Symbolic Crusade: status politics and the American Temperance Movement (1963)
Craig MacAndrew and Robert Edgerton Drunken Comportment: a social experiment Aldine (1969)

The two below are classics in participant observation studies from the Chicago School of symbolic interaction:
William Foote Whyte Street Corner Society: the social structure of an Italian slum (University of Chicago Press (1943).
Paul Goalby Cressey The Taxi-Dance Hall(1932)

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There are also two books on the sociology of science - prior to the work by Mike Mulkay on this:

Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar Laboratory Life: the social construction of scientific facts 1979

Bruno Latour Science in Action 1987

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Finally, let us not forget theory in symbolic Interactionist research.

Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann The Social Construction of Reality: a treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge 1966

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An excellent book on ethnographic research is by Robert Prus Symbolic Interaction and Ethnographic Research: intersubjectivity and the study of Human Lived Experience 1996. Full of examples and from a background of interactionist studies and Chicago School sociology.

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Robert Prus is the only sociologist I know who has committed himself to teaching potential symbolic interactionists to undertake research in the study of human lived experience.

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Mary Lorenz Dietz, Robert Prus and William Shaffir (eds) Doing Everyday Life: ethnography as human lived experience (1994) is a rich and varied collection of studies of human lived experience ranging from being in a gang of bikies to being a ballet dancer.

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Eric Hobsbawm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Hobsbawm Primitive Rebels: studies in archaic forms of Social Movements in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1959). One of my favourite studies. Even Hungary had its equivelent of Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor, and a chocolate pastry was named after him - Rigo Jancsi, Rigo being his surname and so coming first as is traditional in Hungarian (Jancsi is the popular first name, referring to Janos.)