Radical Hobbyist

Certainly many of our most satisfying avocations today consist of making something by hand which machines can usually make more quickly and cheaply, and sometimes better. Nevertheless I must in fairness admit that in a different age the mere fashioning of a machine might have been an excellent hobby… Today the invention of a new machine, however noteworthy to industry, would, as a hobby, be trite stuff. Perhaps we have here the real inwardness of our own question: A hobby is a defiance of the contemporary.
Dresden, Militär Historisches MuseumIt is an assertion of those permanent values which the momentary eddies of social evolution have contravened or overlooked. If this is true, then we may also say that every hobbyist is inherently a radical, and that his tribe is inherently a minority.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Subversive Heroines

Malala Yousafzai with delegates at the Supporting Syria and the Region conference (24188172254)
She doesn’t do the things heroines are supposed to. Which is rather Jane Austen’s point – Fanny is her subversive heroine. She is gentle and self-doubting and utterly feminine; and given the right circumstances, she would defy an army.
Susanna Clarke