Not this time, I guess

A month or so ago, when I last drove through Point Marion, PA (just a few miles up the road from us here in Morgantown), I was surprised to see an all-white deer scamper across the road and up the hillside with a normal, brown-colored deer beside it. Presumably, it may have been an albino, but as the relevant threads at the "Buck Manager" website indicate, it may have only been a "piebald deer," if it had some brown spots I didn't notice. I didn't have a camera, and while I thought I saw someone else pull off the road to snap some pictures, I don't seem to have been able to Google them.

In Marie de France's Guigemar, the poem that leads off her twelfth-century collection of Lais, the eponymic main character encounters a white deer and shoots it. His arrow bounces off the deer's hoof (believe it or not) and strikes him, causing an injury. Guigemar then goes on a great journey, has a variety of adventures, etc, etc. The white deer, though, plays the role often played by a dwarf or giant in medieval romances: the magical or mystical creature that serves as kind of gatekeeper or prompter who motivates the hero's rite de passage, sending him off on the adventure or at least ensuring that he has one.

So, anyway, for the last month or so, I've been looking over my shoulder, somewhat hopefully and anxiously holding my breath and waiting for some transition that will change my life, or at least for the start of some new adventure. But a month seems to have passed, and now I guess I've had to conclude that it's not going to happen. Maybe next time I drive through there, though, I'll get another crack at the white deer. But in the romances, you only get one shot at something like that.

Fifty years of Barbie stories

Is it a coincidence that West Virginia lawmaker Jeff Eldridge decided to submit a bill to ban Barbie sales in the state right before the iconic doll's 50th birthday? Poor Barbie can't cut a break; isn't turning 50 rough enough without some well-meaning dope trying to cut you off at the knees? Oh, wait: Barbie is already cut off at the knees, more or less.

Historiann has said about everything smart there is to say about fashion dolls, so I won't duplicate her efforts here.

But for awhile now, I've been meaning to blog about my vintage "Miss America" Barbie doll. In 1972, Laurel Lea Schaefer, a native of my hometown in Ohio, was crowned Miss America. My father and her mother worked together, so in many ways, it was my first (and to date about my only) brush with celebrity. Needless to say, I was smitten.

I'm pretty sure these dolls were a premium for sending in cereal boxtops--I could be mistaken--but at any rate, my parents got two: one that I was allowed to play with, and one that they kept in the box and stashed away in their bedroom closet. The one I played with has long since disappeared, and I think all the clothes got totally worn out.

Just a few years ago, my parents finally decided I was responsible enough to take the mint one home with me. As you can see, I've tried to take good care of it. In fact, I wanted to take the scepter, roses, and white shoes out of their original bag so you could get the full effect, but my collector husband advised me not to. It seems a shame, but I suppose he's right; any value it has is completely linked to the unbroken seal on that little package.

Alas, Laurie Lea never went on to any great fame, though the doll is still worth something, not only as a collectible, but as a relic of my childhood and of the 1970s more generally. As some of you know, I managed to break Laurie Lea's Miss Ohio crown several years later when some other kids and I were playing with it during a party at Mrs. Schaefer's house.

This page on the Miss America website suggests that 1972 may have been the last uncynical year for the pageant. While Laurie Lea's predecessor, Phyllis George, toured Vietnam with the USO, the woman who followed Laurie Lea won the crown while wearing a POW bracelet, and later admitted to entering just for the scholarship money and being pro-choice. In 1974 the National Organization for Women held its annual convention in Atlantic City during pageant week in protest, even as the crown went to a doctoral candidate, Shirley Cothran.

In the meantime, a classmate's mom who volunteered in our second-grade classroom had asked me if I was a "women's libber," and encouraged me to be one. My dad, upon finding out that I'd decided I was a women's libber, told me I could open the car door for myself. My mom smoked Virginia Slims. We've come a long way, baby.

NOW's protest of the pageant was deeply symbolic and completely ineffectual in much the same way Delegate Eldridge's bill is.

What's always interested me about people's "Barbie stories" is how subversive they all are. I've never encountered a woman (or a little girl, for that matter) who's had a simple, uncritical relationship with Barbie. She is, instead, always a canvas for working out all kinds of issues, very few of which ever seem to be related to body image in any straightforward or unproblematic way.

A former colleague reluctantly gave her daughter a Barbie years ago, only to discover that she had popped Barbie's head off, since that made it easier to change her clothes.

My friend Karla and her sisters begged for a Ken doll, but their mother--fearing some kind of sex play--unequivocally said no. Ever resourceful, the sisters chose one of the old Barbies they didn't like, cut off its hair, and took it outside where they scraped its breasts off on the sidewalk, thus performing the first Barbie sex-change operation.

I'm sure you know similar stories. The reality of children's play is always vastly more complex and interesting than adults generally see or are willing to see. I probably went home and played with my Barbies the very day I told my classmate's mom that I was a women's libber.

So, Mr. Eldridge, may I respectfully request that you go out and observe some real, thinking girls playing with their Barbies? And if you really want to create some legislation that makes girls feel better about their bodies, do something about gym.

For other interesting Barbie stories, look here and here...

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy

Regular readers may know that I am a notorious scourer of used bookstores, always looking for the elusive treasures that can only be found in dusty shelves, unrecognized and unloved.

For years, I've been keeping my eyes out for a copy of Hawthorne Abendson's notorious and incredibly difficult-to-find 1962 novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. Written by an obscure Cheyenne, Wyoming, writer, this novel was banned almost everywhere on its publication, but it was quickly pirated and reprinted by a variety of fly-by-night outfits. Sold under the counter, used copies turn up occasionally, but I've never had a chance to read it--until now. The accompanying picture shows what looks to me like a late sixties edition (which I was lucky enough to spot today, prompting this post) printed and sold by "Rocky Mountain States Books," with a cover price of 95 cents.

Supposedly, the novel is a classic of science fiction, in which the outcome of World War II was pretty much the opposite of what happened in the real world, and the main characters make their way through that world in a kind of spookily revealing travelogue/narrative. The author, Abendson, always claimed that the book was actually written by the I Ching, in that every major occurrence in the book was the result of the author's consultation of that oracular text.

I'm looking forward to finally reading this book; hopefully, I will post a review here at some later date. Check in regularly.

My opportunism is a function of my pessimism

...so a neighbor and colleague told me this morning, when I ran into him and his wife coming back from a walk just as I was heading out for one.

It's a gorgeous day here--after single-digit temperatures last weekend, it's now 72 and sunny. So, I skipped the gym, put on my hiking boots, and headed for White Park, a huge woodsy space criss-crossed with trails that's about a ten-minute walk from our house.

En route I ran into a couple who live around the corner from us coming back from the park. I mentioned that I wanted to get out and walk before it rained.

"Is it going to rain today?" they asked.

"Well, there's like a thirty percent chance of rain," I offered sheepishly.

"So," Michael said, "your opportunism is a function of your pessimism."

Wow! Yeah, I guess it is.

After years of living in Colorado, where the forecast sometimes called for rain but where, in fact, it almost never did rain, back here in wetter climes I fully expect that if the weather guy says it's gonna rain, it will. Even if he says it isn't, I figure it could still happen. I've re-learned the necessity of having umbrellas in the car and my desk drawer, just in case.

But is it true, in a larger sense, that my opportunism is a function of my pessimism?

Am I that much of a glass-half-empty kind of gal?

A knotty situation

Well, I tried.

For the last two years, I've been trying to teach myself to knit, with little success: I've made a bunch of scarves, some better-looking than others, but can't seem to get any further than that.

In the fall of 2007, I bought two skeins of gorgeous hand-spun, hand-dyed wool at the Mountaineer Week craft show, with the hope that it would inspire me to work toward the next level. The skeins were dyed in beautiful shades of green and lavender--one smooth and the other an amazing loopy light mohair. I decided I'd combine the two strands and knit them together to have both weight and texture.

I started with a scarf, which turned out pretty well; Tom's actually adopted it as his go-to scarf this winter, so at least it's getting some good use.

With the rest, I decided I'd try to make a hat. Bought myself some circular needles, found an "easy" pattern online (Oh, how I have learned to distrust such descriptors), and went to town.

First attempt: made a woolly Mobius strip. Seriously--the thing got twisted around the circular needles in a perfect, infinite loop. So, I ripped it all out and started again.

Second attempt: made what a friend referred to as a woolen tube top. Pretty accurate. My attempts to decrease worked poorly, if at all, and then I ran out of the regular yarn and only had the fine, loopy mohair left, which was hard to work with on its own.

But damned if I was going to rip it all out again. So, I pulled it all off the needles, folded the top together in quarters, and sewed it up. Here's the result.

Tom's first reaction: "It's probably a little more granola than I think you had in mind."

Second reaction: "I think you need to spend about a month knitting with Don."

At which point I offered that I might just give up knitting entirely, since I seemed to have no facility for it, and found the more intermediate stuff frustrating and discouraging rather than relaxing in a Zen-like way, which is why I picked it up in the first place.

Oh well. At least the cat might like this. Our calico kitten has recently shown a proclivity to be a rug muncher, literally: she's been obsessively chewing up the wool rug in my office, to the point where she's pretty much unraveled a whole corner of it.

Who knew that cats could develop a form of OCD that focuses on wool-chewing? Let's hope that it's just a phase that she outgrows. Tom and I have been trying in vain to find a chewing substitute that she might go for: tiny dog chew toys rubbed with fish oil and catnip (a pungent combo), rubber balls, straws...but apparently, this is really a very specific fetish for wool.

So, the hat might soon be Pip's. At least I know she'll love it.

This is my letter to the world that wrote volumes to me*

Regular readers of this blog know about our love of ephemera, and may recall my describing the wonder of re-reading myself through the letters I wrote to my friend Christina in college, which she returned to me a year or so ago.

Christina, Kristin, and I have our annual meetup scheduled for this coming weekend, and I decided I wanted the two of them to have the letters they'd written to me during during college. So, I dragged out the boxes full of old cards and letters that I've now moved across the country twice, and started sorting through them to find the ones from Christina and Kyer.

There are hundreds of letters in these boxes, as you can see, going all the way back to my high-school days. It amazes me how much time we all seemed to have 25 years or so ago to write, longhand, such lengthy and detailed letters, and so regularly! And in fact, it's the ones from exactly 25 years ago (or a little more) that particularly struck me as I sorted through the stacks.

My freshman year was not a good one. My mother was recovering from cancer that she had the spring that I graduated from high school, my sister had just had a baby and was having trouble with her (now ex) husband, and I'd never lived anywhere other than Columbus, Ohio when I went off to Wellesley College in the fall of 1983. But it was my "dream school," so I figured that once I got there, all the magic fairy dust that I perceived floating around the place would make any difficulties disappear.

No such luck: I slipped into my first profound depression that fall, which reached its nadir when I went back after Thanksgiving and just fell apart. Over the holiday break, I decided not to go back, and felt immediately relieved...though also guilty, ashamed, weak, and pathetic. Needless to say, the depression continued, on a different plane, and didn't really lift until early in 1985, when I really got settled in at Ohio State, which had become my "not-so-dreamy" but comfortable school of choice.

In hindsight, it all worked out fine. But still, it's often felt like the "lost year" of my life.

Until now. I couldn't believe the sheer quantity of mail I discovered that had been sent to me that fall at Wellesley--as well as the many letters the friends I'd made there sent to me throughout the following spring. Nor could I believe the amount of love and support and empathy that poured out of those envelopes--from my parents, friends, friends-of-parents, siblings, neighbors, teachers...seriously, I think there's at least one letter in there from everyone I knew at that point in my young life. I was blown away to see and feel, literally, the amount of concern people felt for me--concern I don't recall registering or remarking on at the time.

Here are a few examples. A card from my sardonic high-school biology teacher, Mr. Logsdon, in which he asks, "Is the food edible? Bring a sample back for analysis if you have questions," and advises me to "stay away from the men and the bars--school comes first."



A postcard from my friend Jay, announcing that he's coming to visit (which was truly a high point of the semester).



A postcard my mother sent, explaining that "Mary Baxter [a colleague of my mother's] sends you this. She has had it in her office window and thinks it should be yours now."


A note (not pictured) that my favorite professor from that first semester, Kathryn Lynch, sent after she wrote a recommendation letter for me. The 1983-84 academic year had been her first year teaching at Wellesley. Toward the end of the note, she writes about her own difficulties transitioning to Boston from California, writing that "Freshman years are difficult in general, even when you're as old as I am." Only now, having survived two first semesters in new academic jobs, can I appreciate the feeling and empathy behind those words.

And finally, a letter from one of my hallmates, Susan D., who was a loyal correspondent right through college. Honestly, I'd forgotten that until I discovered many letters from her from December of 1983 through the the spring of 1987, when she graduated from Wellesley. At the beginning of that year, she sent the following, asking questions that seem particularly poignant to me now:


Dream and nightmare both, at that time. Bittersweet and undoubtedly distorted memory now.

I was so moved to see just how many letters I got from my former Beebe Hall dorm-mates in the first months of 1984. To me it seemed that the Wellesley door was hermetically sealed when I packed my stuff and drove away from the empty campus before spring semester 1984 started. But apparently it was part of my life--and vice-versa--for some time afterward. Looking back at those letters now feels a bit George-Bailey-esque: here's what this world looked like without you.

Last summer, via Facebook, I reconnected with one of those remarkable women (Jane over at Leaf - Stitch - Word), and through her, learned of the whereabouts of several others. It felt as if my life had come full circle: my present self meeting my past self and both knowing her and feeling as if she lived on a different planet than the one I now occupy. That experience, combined with these letters, go a long way toward patching the pothole that seemed to open up in my life in the fall of 1983 and the winter of 1984.

My life was, and is, contiguous, assembled haphazardly from scraps of paper layered over time until the compiler finally thinks to step back, and sees the form that's emerged, unbidden. I feel blessed to have received and to still have these remarkable scraps, and--after the better part of three decades--to finally be able to read their messages.

[*with apologies to Emily Dickinson]

Ephemera: The Valentine's Day edition

Our ephemera collection began with old Valentines, which I have always found irresistible. There's something kind of sweet and forlorn about finding a stack of them at a antique shop or flea market. The original recipients must've cared enough to keep them, and once those folks were gone, someone else couldn't bear to throw them away.

We'll skip over the step when someone else, aka a dealer, sweeps them up and sells them for cold, hard cash. It's never much cold, hard cash, though--I don't think we've ever paid more than ten bucks for a single card--and as our collection has grown, it's been fascinating to see how the motifs and sentiments have changed over the years.

As the photo at the top suggests, we have a lot of these things, so I'm only posting a selection here. First, this group of "insult" valentines from, I imagine, the 1920s:


Here's a card from the 1930s that I always find a little sad, since the message seems to imply that a shy gentleman might use it as the prelude to a proposal, if not as a proposal itself...and yet, there's no signature inside, and it appears never to have been used:






Planes (and Zeppelins, apparently) were popular greeting-card motifs in the early 20th century:



And finally--WAY better than any Spongebob Squarepants Valentine-making kit you might buy at CVS, this adorable Art-Deco one:


We have lots more...enough for Valentine's Day ephemera blogs for years to come! Have a happy one, dear readers.

The aesthetics of "random"

A friend (or should I say "friend") posted a link to this video on Facebook the other day. I have to admit, I found it pretty damn amusing, if a little disturbing--I'm not sure I buy the dad's claim that he shot it because his son was scared about going to the dentist, and he wanted to have a "before" and "after" tape to convince the kid that everything was fine.

Anyway, the ethical discussion is for another day. What interested me is that the very next day, a blog I occasionally read posted the video below, which synchs some of the audio from the "original" to...a 1970s picture book about kittens.



Some of the juxtapositions are funny, others not so much. When I saw this, though, the word that sprung to mind immediately was "random." Is this what them crazy kids are talkin' about these days when they describe something, positively, even joyfully, as "random"? And will I sound tiresomely middle-aged if I say that random just isn't enough for me, aesthetically?

I get the whole postmodern pastiche thing--playing with copies of copies of trivial but somehow iconic stuff, like Duchamp's 1917 "Fountain," pictured at left. But when my students describe something as "random," the pleasure seems to be in the utter meaninglessness of whatever they're talking about, its lack of a reference point.

"Random" seems to have become the aesthetic for a certain generation. But what does random mean? Is random the aesthetic that fills the vacuum when "camp," "kitsch," and all the other self-referential, post-ironic modes are exhausted? Thoughts, please!

The Venerable, Honorable Tradition of Cheating in Baseball

Well, Alex Rodriguez has admitted to using some sort of banned substance while playing for the Texas Rangers, and I can't help but feel like it's time to chronicle just a few of the ways in which cheating in sports, and in baseball in particular, has a long and highly respectable history.

Now, I'm not a baseball historian, or anything like that, but I'll never forget the time that Rick Junkins had me scuff up the seams of some new baseballs before a high-school game, so he'd have a better curveball. And who hasn't heard of spitballs, Vaseline balls, and foreign-substance balls of varying descriptions?

George Brett famously used pine tar on his bat in a fashion contrary to the rules; but what most people seemed upset about is that Billy Martin waited until Brett had hit a homer before he asked that the bat be disqualified. Few people blamed Brett for using illegally-doctored equipment.

Sammy Sosa (and a handful of others) have used corked bats, and these are only the ones who were caught.  And trickery is enshrined in the game in all sorts of ways: pretending to throw the ball, then tagging someone out; trying to get a home run called a ground-rule double; letting the ump call the runner out even when you know you missed the tag.

True baseball purists, I have always believed, ought to believe in the value, even the necessity, of cheating as part of the game.  Players should take their punishment if they get caught--because it is cheating, after all--but until they're caught, it's part of the game.  A scrupulously honest game would probably be unwatchable, and hardly worth talking about.

But, supposedly, the banned substances A-Rod admits to using involve a whole other kind of cheating that cannot be tolerated, understood, and accepted like the other kinds are.  How about that.  

Calling all "snappy comeback kids"

After I changed the name of the photo embedded in this post, I find we're getting a lot less traffic from people (especially, and curiously, from Europe) looking for images of Bob Seger.

What's notable, though, is how many people seem to be trolling the internets looking for snappy retorts. Here's a sampling of some of the search phrases that have led people to our blog recently:

what do you come back with when you have a bad witty moment
my best witty comeback
witty comebacks against sexist comments
witty sexist comebacks
snappy comebacks teacher comments
snappy comeback kids

Now that the "Bob Seger bump" has been eliminated, this post about witty comebacks is the second most visited post on our blog, after Tom's post about "Jim Dandy". Apparently, bad 70s rock is a popular topic, Bob Seger aside.

I find it reassuring to know that so many people feel completely impotent in the face of an unexpected insult. Because when it happens to you, you always imagine that anyone else would have had the sense to defend themselves, and to do so instantly and elegantly. Apparently, though, the vast majority of us stand there slack-jawed, and then berate ourselves later for not having the wherewithal to say something clever in our defense.

So no wonder people turn to the web for help. If I could invent an instant retort generator that folks could carry around with them, or maybe even an implant that would feed the perfect comeback directly into one's brain when needed, I'd be a rich woman.

Barring those unlikely developments, readers, I'm turning to you for help. What advice or quick-draw options can you provide for your fellow sufferers? Are there some multipurpose comebacks that work in a variety of situations that one can keep on hand for emergencies? Or maybe you can just offer some balm to ease the wounds inflicted by unexpected insults--is there something comforting you say to yourself afterwards that neutralizes the pain?

But here's the option that interests me: are there some of you out there willing to admit to inflicting the kind of zingers that most deserve a zippy comeback? And if so, are you insightful enough, and brave enough, to tell us what your victims might say in response that would put you in your place?

Somehow, though, I suspect that those who do the insulting are too clueless to know what they've done, much less reflect on it. Which, I suppose, gives the rest of us a perverse sense of victory...

Nah.

[If only the "Ass air freshners (sic)" pictured above would work to clear the air of asinine comments. Thanks to failblog.org for the thought, though!|