A very brief update with a highlight of my recent online reading: the excellent Susannah Clapp on pocket poverty in the LRB.
In Pockets: An Intimate History of How We Keep Things Close (Algonquin, £25), [Hannah] Carlson shows the ways in which pouches confer power: routinely sewn into male but not into female clothing, they have helped men make their way through the world, fully equipped, as if they were armoured vehicles or portable garden sheds.
Overstatement?—Not according to the paper of record:
In 1899 an article in the New York Times declared that, since the invention of pockets, ‘no pocketless person has ever been great.’
Armoured vehicles? Really? What do you keep in your pockets, Kieran (just asking)? Historically, I wonder what men have kept in them (J. Berger says peasants may have kept a spoon or a fork). Pocket watches and notebooks for the affluent?
Wallets. Okay. I wonder if that's so different from women's purses, though? And their handbags? Now, let's not even go there...the black hole of Calcutta!