What I Will Remember

I'm taking off for whirlwind week on the Continent that will include several days in France. Then, back for a day or two and off on a whirlwind trip through parts of England and Scotland for anther week. After that, we pack to head back.

I confess, that I"m still powerfully ambivalent about this past year; but, whatever frustrations I've had, be they the appalling garbage service, the woefully inadequate appliances, the daily encounters with piles of dog poo, my own financial setbacks, the frustration of not writing as quickly as I had hoped -- I could go on ---  but, whatever the problems, if I could go back to last year, I would do this. I would pack more workout clothes, more jammies, all of the turtlenecks, my trench coat, more books and notes, a better backpack, and fewer nice, work clothes

That's it. Except for those trifles, I would do all of this again. And again, and again. I've been very lucky in this year, and very lucky in my partner.  That will be what I remember.

A Quiz

Question: Who said this?:

I didn’t know, for instance, that when the Pilgrims set up their little community – first of all, they were required to be communist. That was in their charter. Communism is that old. It was mandatory. And as a result of that half the people died in the first year. They opened up the Bible, and said “Oh, if you don’t work, you don’t eat.” They turned it into a free market system and they took off and flourished from there.

A) One of those students who does not show up often for class, doesn't take notes, doesn't read the textbook, then, on the exam, pieced together this answer from half-remembered information from who knows where.
B) Your stoner brother in the smoky haze of a particularly bad bag of weed.
C) A character in a bad episode of "Drunk History."
D) A "perennial student" who is running for the Texas Board of Education and whose "activism" includes a long list of organizations with "Tea Party" in their names.

Answer:



Yes, a woman who says "there are not enough educated people out there" goes on to show her own spectacular ignorance. I want to believe this is a prank because it is just too funny to be true. I mean, really!: dollars in the 1600s? Did they have Washington's picture on them? "Communism" was a requirement of the Pilgrims? WTF?

Sadly, I know the Texas Board of Education is the worst joke ever played on the minds of the people of Texas and -- through its command of the textbook market -- the rest of the country.

This almost makes me want to move back to Texas, run for office, and try to put some sense into that state. Someone should. If the big wigs in the history profession really want to effect change, maybe they should put that in their grand design addresses and include running for office on Boards of Education as acceptable professional activity.

National Poetry Month: From the Land of the Bard

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players:

They have their exits and their entrances;

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth....

...And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

--Jaques in William Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, scene IV

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Illustrations are from my last visit to London:

1 & 2: Globe Theater, a bit of a pilgrimage.  I left with a desperate longing to jump onto the stage and call for "a muse of fire!"

3: Paddington, in Paddington Station. We took the train from Heathrow to Paddington. I wasn't so familiar with the bear, but I did just read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. At one point, Smiley disembarks at Paddington and goes to a hotel to study pilfered documents. As I thought of that, I notice a man slightly older than myself, with his hair brushed straight back, checking his phone for texts. "Hey," I thought, "he could BE Smiley." Then, he looked up. After noticing that he wore those fabulous Clark Kent glasses that I cannot wait to get for myself, and that, for his casual fashion, he seeme espensivly dressed, I thought, "wait, he IS Smiley." No, not Smiley, not Gary Oldman, but familiar, famous...Bill Nighy! True story.

4: A condom wrapper found in Canterbury Castle, because some people can fuck anywhere.

5: Statue of Bodicca and daughters -- the one that I only saw at night before -- along the Thames with the Eye in the background. I still did not get drunk enough to think going up in the Eye was a good idea. Normally, yeah, but these attacks of vertigo have become a nuisance.

6: Memorial to the soldiers who fought at Dunkirk in World War II, at Dover Beach. First, don't go to Dover in the off-season. Everything is closed. Second, next to the poppy wreath you will see a pile of stones, a tradition Jewish display of mourning and memory. I wonder if the people who placed them there did so to connect the war to the end of the Holocaust.

7: A marker for the historic site of Scotland Yard.

8: Big Ben, marking the passing of time.

9: A stray group of graves by a small church in Canterbury. We had been looking for "Jewry Lane" and came across a graveyard next to a church, very haunting in the dusk. Some indigents had set up camp behind the church, and these decaying graves next to the graffitti, with a parking garage in the background captured the mood.

Mother-work as Wage Labor

ETA (4/19/2012): "A group of politicians led by Rep. Pete Stark of California are taking Mitt Romney at his word—that “all moms are working moms”—and plan to introduce an act that would allow mothers receiving welfare support to count their childrearing duties as the required “work activity” until the child turns 4." from Slate.com. THAT'S more like what I'm talking about (not that it has a chance in hell since certain powerful people still think that poor mothers are automatically evil and only the wealthy are entitled to parenthood.)
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It was a lousy statement that produced a painfully shallow and moth-eaten debate revealing a cultural presumption that "real" work is work outside of the home. Even working mothers who make that sort of a statement -- my own was among them -- know that is not true. I'm not defending that statement, nor anyone who makes it. Instead, I'm interested in the reasons that such a statement exists in the first place.

You see, I think that the idea that "real work" exists outside of the home comes from our capitalist society in which "work" means "wage labor," or labor that has a market value. Most people who go on and on about the nobility of motherhood will never think of motherhood those types of terms. They cannot understand the work that mothers do as labor that has a market value. They assume mother-work is just something that women (and a few men) do, and all of its rewards are --- well, I'm not a mother and I suppose the added value varies with each woman and each child. Still, those rewards are much like enjoying your waged or salaried job, or having great colleagues at your salaried job, or having good benefits, and so forth. Here, we are talking about the hard, cold cash-value of the work women do in sustaining families. That work has a market value, and in our capitalist world, market value has become the way that our society demonstrates real respect for the work that people do.

We know that a mother's work has a market value because people pay other people to do it. Cooking, cleaning, childcare, accounting, time-management, even grocery shopping -- heck, go back far enough and you see that the household production done by housewives in the preindustrial era, such as sewing, spinning, weaving, gardening, are now done outside of the home and by people who are paid for the work. You can even see welfare as part of this continuum (and I might be mistaken, but wasn't that a vestige of Progressivism that found its way into the New Deal?). The government pays women to be mothers.

Mother-work also has a value in the wages or salary, retirement benefits, and earning potential lost by women who leave the waged workforce to stay at home. They might never recover those losses, either. Yet, the same people who go on and on about motherhood being the most noble and important work in the world use the hit that women take to their earning power when they leave the workforce to do that work as an excuse to oppose laws for equal pay.

When I taught women's studies and when I sat in on a women's studies class, even the most ardent feminists in the class had a very difficult time making the leap from seeing motherhood as an emotional relationship done as part of the fulfillment of nature. Sure, they admitted it was work, but they didn't see it as having any more monetary value than what the wage earner of the family (or the welfare office) could afford to provide for the family. One student said, "well, my mom stayed at home and her pay was that my father put a roof over our heads." Perhaps, but then again, if you see the roof as pay, then you have assigned a financial value to your mother's work.

Underneath this hollow rhetoric (and privilege) of the "mommy wars" lies a vicious and literal devaluing of mother-work. This devaluing isn't done so much by the people who cannot make a better argument than "not working at a real job" or "not worked a day in her life," as by the people who would rather grant verbal gold stars than actually recognize mother-work as work. This is a damn society and we are all in it together whether we like it or not -- no "love it or leave it" bullshit because, ultimately, we live on the same choking planet -- and the work that people do to sustain that society should be valued. Value comes not through hollow rhetoric but through action. Action comes through better compensation, equal compensation, mere compensation, through better welfare programs, better access to reproductive choices, better parental leave programs, better any program that support working parents in caring for families -- even if they must all be supported by higher taxes (especially on the wealthiest people or entities).

Furthermore, since the Menz sometimes can't see women's issues as human issues unless they are directly hurt by malicious policies or benefit by supportive ones, men can do much of this mother-work, too. (When they do, some often want a trophy and a cookie, despite the fact that the woman doing the same work don't get trophies and cookies.) If mother-work became not-gender-specific-work, then perhaps it might receive more actual respect and be accorded actual importance beyond a pissing match between two political parties who, when pushed to actually do something real, tell us yet again to wait.

Also, I am not a mother, but this affects me because I live in this society, because I teach, but mostly because I am a woman. As a woman, I am affected by the presumption that my work, whatever work that may be, is compromised by my alleged bioglogical clock. I am affected by the presumption that, even without children, I should somehow be motherly and not tap into any mommy-issues. I am affected by this devaluation because it lies at the bottom of all presumptions about women at work -- whatever work that we do, whether it involve raising children or not -- in which their labor is voluntary, ancillary, and supportive rather than necessary, central and supported.

This Enters the Territory of TMI

Remember the days when Bill Clinton smoked but didn't inhale? I used to joke that, after having gone to so many concerts at which people turned the entire venue into one big bong, I had inhaled but hadn't smoked. Really! Thus, I could become president without question (except for the whole having a vagina thing. Oh, and the feminist thing).

Now, my vagina and its associated lady parts have entered the same twisted world of semantics. You see, for the past ten years I have had sex. In fact, I have had sex out of wedlock, sometimes kinky, and in sometimes unconventional arrangements. Yet, by the most recent definition of the word, I am not a slut. I am not a slut because I have not taken birth control in the past decade.

Before you gasp and chastise me for irresponsibility, let me assure you that I consider condoms to be disease rather than birth control, and I have had some more permanent measures in place that ensure no babies. Ever.

Yet, despite those permanent measures and despite having just received my monthly bill, I seem to be pregnant. Can you beleive it? A few years ago I had learned that, as a woman, I should always consider myself to be in a state of pre-pregnancy, but now, according to the state of Arizona, I actually am pregnant. I didn't even have to conceive! This is going to come as a HUGE surprise to my empty uterus.

Is there no end to the dumbassery?

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For the humor and satire challenged, please note that I am NOT actually pregnant. Before the permanent measures, I always took birth control pills AND used a condom; and, I think the term "slut"is narrow, regressive, gynophobic and misogynist and utterly without meaning in the real world in which actual women live.

Proposal Writing

I rather suck at one of the most important tasks of being an academic: writing proposals for papers or panels. My fortune thus far had lain in the popularity of my subject. Still, even then the Big Guy cannot sell the paper on his own. Famous subject also carry with them the assumption that anything interesting or original has all been said. My proposal must convince the program committee that, yes, yes, there is more to say and I am saying it!

One of my problems, I just realized, it that I think of my proposal as a movie or t.v. episode preview. I want to tantalize, suggesting all sorts of mysterious and curious plot points without actually saying anything. I suppose that would work if, say, I suggested that I had "new and unknown documents" -- which actually did happen once -- but reassessments of the same ole same ole have to bring something more to the table than a suggestion that this will be the most awesome, groundbreaking, amazing revision of the subject. Or something similar.

You need more than the promise, too, if you, yourself, have become so embedded in your story that you sort of forget the ways that you are, in fact, original. I recently had the embarrassment of an eminent historian telling me that she had never heard of or thought of my interpretation before, and I was surprised. I hardly ever think of myself as original; while I KNEW that my point was original, I had been thinking on it for so long that the gleam of originality had worn off. Hence, my surprise, which put me in mind of an English professor saying of a famous writer she had once met that the writer was a creative and brilliant novelist, but not very bright.

I digress.

Now I'm just giving it all away in the proposal. The proposal, especially if I already have the paper written or outlined in some shape or form, becomes the plot summary of the paper. I can underscore the originality, but the committee can see my work as interesting -- or not -- from the summary. Tell and show, not tell and tease. With any luck, and if they accept me, the title will entice the conference attendees to show up at my panel. The audience should be tantalized, but the program committee needs the goods up front.

Incidentally, if you are wondering the reason that I just figured this out just now since everyone seems to learn this at grad school or early in their career, my earliest advisers told me that conferences were not for students (that was the least of the bad advice), my earliest supervisors thought a proposal should just state greatness without offering even the tease (one of the myriad reasons our project repeatedly lost funding and sent me on the road less travelled), followed by years going it alone.  Now, I have lots of good advice and feedback from ethical and successful people. Still, sometimes I'm slow. Hence, I am Queen of Late Bloomers.

Another for National Poetry Month: When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd

In the door-yard fronting an old farm-house, near the white-wash’d palings,

Stands the lilac bush, tall-growing, with heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

With many a pointed blossom, rising, delicate, with the perfume strong I love,

With every leaf a miracle......and from this bush in the door-yard,

With delicate-color’d blossoms, and heart-shaped leaves of rich green,

A sprig, with its flower, I break.

--Walt Whitman, "When Lilac Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

I confess that I don't really get poetry. That is, I can't tell you what is good or what is bad or anything like that, although I do know what I like. Isn't that the cry of the untutored? I also have no education about poetry beyond my senior year as an undergraduate, when we read this. After having it crammed at me several times since my junior year of high school, I finally got it. I didn't care if it rhymed or any of the usual complaints.  I just liked the rhythm and the way the lines moved like waves across the page. They felt like wind or the ocean -- or what I imagined the ocean feeling like since I had never seen the ocean and my entire experience with beaches extended as far as Galveston. Galveston will disgust you from beaches.

I also had never seen lilacs, and thought the idea of a "dooryard" quaint. In fact, the concept of flowers blooming at all, much less in April, was an azalea and a magnolia away from alien. So, when, at a museum in Connecticut, I first saw a lilac bush blooming in a dooryard, you would have thought I had won the lottery. "Look!" I giggled. "Like Whitman!"

Then, I had to explain Whitman to everyone around me. They were not impressed. Alas, losers.

Researchintowriting

Generally, I think of research and writing as two distinct activities. Research, the collection and assembly of evidence, leads to writing, the arrangement of that evidence in narrative form.

Of late, I've felt that writing actually extends research. The overlap of assembly into outline into letting the argument of the narrative take over have made all of one piece. The writing part exposes the holes in the research, and the research drives the narrative, which turns the whole process into a loop.

The days of greatest fun come when I flip back and forth between the two, sometimes ranging wide and sometimes training microscopic attention on some puzzling detail that does not quite fit like it should. Those days may not end with a higher word or page count, but they give the words on the page greater depth. Even if they do not accomplish that, at least not obviously as of yet, they ensure that I cover every line of inquiry, they eliminate blind spots from which stupid mistakes or obvious oversights surprise me.

This has been one of those fun days, and I don't yet want it to end.

Envy of the Novelist

The chapter on which I am working right now has a lot of holes dealing, as it does, with the lives of enslaved women. As I write around the holes, offering educated suggestions for what might fill them, I feel the tug of fiction. Imagining these options, their lives, I want to flesh out scenes for which I do have documentation, enter into a voice for the women, allow them to express some emotion or opinion on the circumstances of the scene.Those are places that, as a historian, I have no right to venture. As a novelist, I could.

Alas, that is not this book; and perhaps this book will inspire someone to write that novel (as long as they write it well).

Still, I see a woman adjust her headwrap and call to a small boy to take a long walk. I see her lift him on the road, angry that he asks, angry that she must take him on this walk, angry that she must make this walk over and over and over. I see her lift that boy because this is the last time she will hold him, the last kindness she can give him, the last time he may ever know a touch that assumes he is human. I see her hide what she knows as she pushes him toward the other children. I hear her lie to him that she will be right back. I see her peek through a window to make sure he is distracted, then slip back along the road, steeled between memory and forgetting.

This Facebook Stuff is Disconcerting

I have a Facebook account; or, rather, not-Clio does. I don't like Facebook. In fact, I started an account about three years ago when the summer seminar I attended had hoped to use it for communicating group messages, then I deleted it. I think Clio might have had an account then, too, but it also went into the bin.

The whole thing feels creepy on a level just below the surface of conscious. Sometimes, not below, either, as when I see postings from other people that say "[Friend] just read an article on Snooki in the New York Times" or some such type of notice, and you know that the [Friend] did not necessarily want the world to know about their Jersey Shore addiction. Then, people pass all these "quizzes" along for fun, and I'm certain that quizzes just plug you into advertisers or Homeland Security or who knows what else. I've learned to deal with the ads for all sorts of shit, and I wonder what on earth I posted or said or stumbled on that would make the advertising algorithm think that I want to meet "Lonely, Married, Christian MILFs" or some other such nonsense. I laugh out loud at the limits of their cyberpsychic formulas when they offer up the professor who sexually harassed me (and that was the least of his ethical sins) as someone I might want as my "friend." That guy is NO ONE's friend.

Yet, I started a new account for not-Clio to publicize her blog, to maintain professional connections at a comfort level suited to may abysmal social skills, and to keep my parents off of my back (if they see I've passed along a history news story, or posted in not-Clio's blog, or posted pictures of my visits to places, they don't pester me with "why don't you write? Why don't you call?"). I'm also learning that a lot of people out there have no idea about the line between personal and professional (of course, they are all at a stage in their careers when they have tenure and endowed chairs and such so they can do whatever the hell they want), and I myself am learning how to balance the two. Clio Bluestocking Tales is for the personal, and I am more myself as Clio than as not-Clio. Not-Clio, as I have said before, has the professional claim. I had a weird moment when I realized that the divide worked on the internet, but not when the internet intersected with real life. People who knew not-Clio in person but who were not part of her professional network wanted to be "Friends" with not-Clio, and directing them to Clio was too tedious, so I had to devise a way of negotiating the two.

I'm constantly reminded of the need to negotiate the overlapping persona on Facebook because Facebook can show you some sides of your "Friends" or their "Friends" that you wish you didn't know about in order to maintain a polite discourse and pursue your purpose in starting an account in the first place. People from your past show up, and you become Facebook friends out of curiosity, to catch up, and you realize that a lifetime of different experiences has led you to entirely different value systems. That, or you remember the reasons that they are in your past and not your present.

For instance, two friends of a friend, both whom I used to know, consistently make comments that are so smug, self-important and narrow that I wonder why I ever knew them in the first place. In another case, I knew that Komen foundation was under pressure from the anti-choice groups a few months before they yanked funding from Planned Parenthood because a childhood friend, whom I haven't seen since 1980, posted a petition asking Komen to do just that. A colleague from my last job seems to be a far right Republican -- not raving Tea Partier, but definitely caught in the Republican tropes of "Obama is a socialist" to the point that you see there really is a logical continuum between the old school conservatives and these extremists. Plus, you would think a person with advanced degrees in history and political science might know the definition of "socialism" and see that Obama ain't it. This was not something that I knew about at work, but I want to maintain those contacts at those schools.

The thing that I hate the most, however -- the kind of posts that make my blood boil -- are the college sports ones. People, some of whom I thought better of, use their college logos for their avatars, post updates on the games as they proceed, and actually follow the high school recruiting going on and on and on about the luck of their school getting this kid who can kick a ball a mile without any reference to this kid's ability to pass a class or actually get the return on the education that is allegedly his pay for the use of his talents. Right now, one school has just changed their logo, and some of these ostensible friends are heavily invested in critiquing it, saying it looks too much like Penn State's logo. The resemblance isn't what bothers them so much as the association with the abuses there.

I suppose this is their tribute to four of five wonderful years of their youths, but it seems somehow unbalanced, unthinking, or juvenile to me. What I want to do is reply to them. I want to say, "how much money went into this logo change and how much went into the library? Or cost-of-living salary increases for employees?" I want to say, "you may have condemned the abuses at Penn State, but your worship of a team at a school that you have not attended in two decades, creates the same sort of atmosphere that allows such abuses to occur."

But, I don't. Something about maintaining a professional tone, a non-confrontational position, dispassion for all but my research, restrains me. That's something I never really learned: how to disagree politely and dispassionately but firmly. I suppose in most of these cases, there is no point, no reason to be political about the anti-choice or mindless invocation of talking points, no tangible goal in telling the footballers that their relationship to their alma maters is out of sync with the school's actual mission -- which ain't, as Historiann always says, running a farm team for the NFL. I didn't consent to hand over all of my deepest personal information to the FB gods to be combative.

I went on it to let others know about my research, so I try to stick to that and other things related to history and writing. That part has worked. I would like a bigger audience for the blog, but I suppose that will come and of course I should post more regularly than once a month for that to happen. I've also maintained and built contact with other people who research in the same area that I do, and we are putting together panels for conferences. So, in that respect, this has been a mild success.

Still, I wonder what historians in 100 years will make of all of this, and I especially wonder how they will study this weird interplay of public and private, what people share and what they don't, how they share and how they don't, and the consequences of having all of this information fogging up the internet.

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Anyway, I've been slacking on my progress in the chapter this week after last week having been so effective. My meds are kicking back in, thank goodness! Today, I'm going to keep track of the amount of time I spend goofing off because I think I do way more of that than I allow myself to admit. I suppose I should shut off the wireless switch on my computer, too. I have to write a proposal for a conference paper, on top of that, which means that I have to figure out what new I'm bringing to the conversation. I'm very poor at articulating that because I become so immersed in my own writing that I sometimes forget that this idea, the one I had, is new and kind of original, so I have a difficult time explaining the reasons that it is new and kind of original. I'm very myopic that way.

Bust Enhancement Diet

I have discovered an inexpensive, pain-free, and fun alternative to cosmetic breast enhancement surgery (not recommended for women requiring surgery after a mastectomy):

The Bust Enhancement Diet (aka The Ireland Diet).

The diet includes these ingredients:

1. Alcohol. I, myself, prefer hard cider or wine; but your best results may come from heavy beer.
2. Carbohydrates, specifically in the form of bread -- lots of yummy bread
3. Dairy, cheese and chocolate -- mmmmmmm, cheese and chocolate!

Enjoy as much as you like of all three, and within six week you will go up a full cup size. A VERY full cup size.

You may also enhance the enhancing with push-ups. These will help build the muscle, thereby adding to your success, and counteract the forces of gravity.

Bonus:
May also cause increase of hips, butt and thighs, giving you an hour glass figure. My own current measurements have not yet reached those of Jayne Mansfield, but they are certainly within Sophia Loren territory, or Ava Gardner, just with a thicker waist (of course, all of those women most certainly cheated and wore corsets to measure their waists -- also, middle age does tend to take up more space). My goal is Helen Mirren because she is full of awesome.

Warnings:
Do not see a doctor before embarking upon this diet for she will surely discourage you from it. It's far too tasty to be healthy!

Who Is This "We"?

I don't usually write about these things because I usually don't feel important or original enough to add anything new to the conversation; but I've seen this piece by William Cronon on the American Historical Association website in various places and can't stop thinking about the reasons that it bothers me. Perhaps the piece was the final straw of reading one too many things by academics whom I generally respect but who seem to be in a different class of historian than I am -- and by "class" I mean the academic equivalent of socioeconomic class. In any case, in his rush to admonish academic historians for being too academic -- is such hand-wringing common in other fields? -- I think Cronon seems to miss a few key points.

First, writing specialized articles or monographs for an academic audience is not in and of itself a bad thing. As a whole, all historians generate research and ideas that are used by other historians or people writing about history, including those who write for popular audiences. "Boring" work appear and enhances, synthesized, into other historians' work who may write for a wider audience in a more lively manner.

Also, define "boring." As we know from our students, "boring" can mean "I don't want to put out the effort to learn." "Boring" can mean "I have no interest in this subject at all." "Boring" can mean "I'd rather be doing something else right now." "Boring" can mean "good idea but -- oh, my god, I have to translate it into English;" and "boring" can mean "the prose is ghastly!" Boring seems a rather subjective adjective. In Cronon's case, I think that "boring" means "highly specialized language conveying complicated ideas with linguistic shortcuts for people already familiar with the subject." That's not always boring for everyone, but it might be difficult for a newcomer to the subject to comprehend with an appropriate level of ease.

Second, anyone who has had to teach in an open-admissions school knows that attempting to teach to people who barely graduated from high school at the same time as you are attempting to teach to people who could have gone to a more selective school but for other reasons, knows the perils of losing either end of the spectrum in an attempt to accommodate the needs of the other -- even when you attempt to teach to the middle. The same goes for writing. There is nothing wrong with choosing an audience and learning to write for that audience, be they other academics or the lay reader or people picking up a book-shaped souvenir with lots of images in a gift shop. Everyone cannot write for all readers, nor should they, because each audience requires something different from a writer.

Third, not all historians write for a specialized audience. Many of "us" actually do write for an audience that includes non-historians by synthesizing that "boring" work and breaking down those ideas into language that the newcomer can understand. That is both a skill and a talent that not everyone has, nor cares to develop because their focus and talents lie elsewhere. Lots of good, academic historians can and do write easily accessible articles and monographs; but just because we write does not mean that the work gets to that audience -- we build it but they don't necessarily come.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, Cronon leaves the publishing business entirely out of the equation. The nature of their work and their budget constraints limits their ability or desire to publicize books. Historians, with rare exceptions, do not have the enormous built-in audience that journalists or politicians bring to a publisher, so the publishers go with the journalists and politicians, not with the historian. (I refuse to consider journalists or politicians as "historians" when they write history -- they are writing history, but they don't approach the subject with the craft of the historian. They approach it as journalists reporting historians' work or as politicians manipulating information. That's not the work of historians.) Publishers who do reach big audiences also want tried and true topics like the Civil War or World War II or the Founding Fathers.

Those publishers also don't like the sort of things like footnotes and bibliographies and discursive footnotes in which we explain how we arrived at conclusions and who wrote about this subject before us and so on -- the things that demonstrate the craft of history and in which we "show our work." They also don't necessarily have a vetting process so some serious historical sins are committed in some of those books, sins that make people dedicated to good history doubt books that come from those publishers (or  maybe that's just me) and not review them in scholarly publications in order to point out those sins.

At the same time, there are many good, accessible historians who write well-researched and grounded history for a wider audience and about a diverse range of topics, including those same subjects near and dear to publishers' hearts; but their work does not appear in museum bookstores, nor is it carried by bookstore chains, and you have to look for it specifically in online bookstores because it does not necessarily show up on the first page of a search for the subject. The publishers who put out these books do not have the marketing department budget to push these books to Oprah Winfrey, or the New York Times, or whatever they have to do to invest the time and money to get these books onto the reading public's radar. A historian might need their own publicist to ensure this, and who of us can really afford that publicist?

Now, don't get me wrong. I respect his work, but when I read things like this, I often feel as if the "we" invoked does not include me. Cronon and those like him were educated and work in a more rarefied environment than the ones in which I was educated and have worked. So I sometimes cringe when people in such a position use "we" because I'm not sure if they are trying to implicate me in these admonitions or if they don't include me in the "we," and I'm not sure how I feel about that. I do know that I want to say such things as "YOU -- a famous and important historian -- JUST figured this out?" Or, "maybe in YOUR world, but that's not the world I have worked in."

After all, what Cronon writes in this piece -- minus the bits about public historians -- was exactly what I heard in1986 when I entered college. I've also heard it since, all the way through grad school, among public historians, and out in the public. Throughout my education, I was a diligent if mediocre student at less than laudatory institutions, so I dealt with professors who were frustrated with where they were in their own careers and what their students were up against in the job market. The worst of those professors just wrung their hands and told us "you will never get a job, why do you bother?" Then, criticized us for wanting to know how to make ourselves competitive because non-academic jobs at specific types of schools were somehow beneath us. The best of those professors embraced conversations about writing, publishing, teaching, and alternate career paths.

Since then, I've worked on editing projects, in museums, in libraries. I've written for an academic audience and for lay readers, and dealt with publishers at both levels. I'm now writing for something in between. I've also taught at community and urban colleges. The "we" amongst whom I have worked, know that the reality is and has been more complicated than historians being too "boring," that to survive we have had to mix a bit of the "boring" with a bit of the "exciting," and that "real" historians live in a lot of different nooks and crannies of the professional world because "we" have been and are there right now.

Peeps!

It's been a while, since I forewent the contest last year because I had to focus on other things. The year before wasn't my best effort, but it was fun:

By the way, I still don't know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall:

Oh, and until about five year ago, I thought Lennon was singing "I'd like to tell you all." That made sense because I thought he wanted to tell us all about what was in the news today and such. His actual lines makes more sense.

Anyway, reaching way back to 2009, when I became obsessed, rather like Richard Dreyfus in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but with Peeps, I submitted this to the Washington Post contest. The National MVSEVM of American Peeps:

I'm still very proud of it!

Here are this year's winners.

Happy High Holy Day of the Candy Season!

Did You Know that Easter is This Sunday?

Did you know this is Holy Week for Christians? I managed to be oblivious to that fact, despite living in an overwhelmingly Catholic country where they take their holidays seriously. For instance, at Christmas, everything was closed for nearly a week, and god forbid you forgot something and had to run to the grocery store on Christmas day or the day after!

I have been aware that Easter is coming. They also take their chocolate seriously here. With good reason, too. They know their dairy and the chocolate -- ahhhh! There is something about the texture and the taste that takes the yummy, milkiness that Americans know of chocolate and cranks it up to eleven. It's like solid pudding, meltier than American chocolate, and coats the inside of your mouth with sweet silk. And every store has been stacked to the roof with Cadbury since January. No Peeps, no jelly beans, no candy-coated marshmallow eggs. Just Cadbury.  Wall-to-wall Cadbury. Yummmmmm!

So, yes, I knew that Easter was coming, eventually, sometime in the future.

We plan to go to the West Country this weekend, because one must. In booking our hotels and trains and such -- trains because we are still keeping the roads of Ireland safe by not driving on them -- we had a difficult time finding a room on Saturday night. "Must be some kind of trad music or arts festival," I said, searching for "Galway festivals" on Google, because there is always something traditional or artsy going on in Galway. I found nothing that would explain the problem. Then, a few days later, filling in upcoming events on the calendar, I noticed "Easter." There was our explanation.

Later, we went down to the liquor store, as one does. They had a sign posted saying that they would be closed on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. A liquor store? In Ireland? Closed? Not to indulge in stereotypes, but this is not exactly a dry country. Every crossroads has at least one pub, and mathematicians have proved that you really cannot walk across Dublin without passing a pub. Seriously, I've gained back the 20 pounds that I lost solely through alcohol consumption (and cheese, I should include cheese; and bread, the bread is phenomenal, too). Apparently, there is a national law here that requires off-licenses from selling liquor on these days.

That strikes me as funny not just because of the predominance of alcohol but also because Easter is one of the Christian holidays that specifically involves the consumption of alcohol. Didn't Jesus turn wine into his blood at the Last Supper? Perhaps they want to ensure that everyone goes to church by making church the only place that you can get a  drink? We will be stocking up.

Meanwhile, I'm hoping for good weather. There is nothing like Ireland in the sun. The light glows a little differently here, and the particular bright green color of the grass seems to cast light upward, too. Plus, stormy weather in the west is, so I've heard, quite a hair-raising adventure.

Brain Ruts

Oh, Happy Snoopy Dance of Joy! The post office did its job and finally delivered my happy pills!

A good thing, too, because I was sitting here, with the happy pills slowly leaking out of my system, and feeling all of the symptoms of depression creep over me. The hopelessness, the fatalism, the inherent self-loathing, the desire to curl in on myself like a doodle-bug, and shut out the rest of the world, the fear that I will be unable to distinguish between my own self and the rest of the world while at the same time feeling profoundly alienated. Good times.

As I wrote about the last time this happened, I can observe this knowing that it is not permanent and remember a time when I thought that it was. This makes me wonder about the way that those years -- decades -- affected my own perception of myself and the world to the extent that, even medicated, I fall into the same patterns of thought.

Say you spend the first half of your life, from birth until into your twenties, unmedicated. Leaving aside the variable of your environment, you live in a state in your own head in which you are too tired on some existential level to do anything. You think that you are too lazy or too stupid to get up and do anything, to try anything  or to succeed at anything. You think that, even if you could work up the energy to get up and maybe make an attempt to do something, just because you have to if nothing else, that you are too stupid or lazy or untalented or disliked or flawed in some inherent way to succeed at it. If, by some odd chance, you do succeed, you know the success will be a disappointment anyway, because isn't everything a disappointment? You wouldn't deserve the success, besides, more so because you would find it a disappointment. So why bother trying. And then you think you are too lazy or stupid and definitely too tired to try in the first place and on and on and on.

That's the depression. Then, one day, someone gives you a pill. You take the pill every day and pretty soon, you feel as if someone took off your glasses, cleaned them off, and put them back on you. You can see clearly! You have energy! You can muster up some hope! What excitement! What  joy!

Except your story isn't over. You spent so long in your existential funk that the thinking has gone beyond a symptom of the depression and is now a belief system. Belief systems are sometimes so deeply embedded into you behavior and your cosmology that you have no idea how they operate. You have to meticulously unlearn them, if you can at all. You at least have to figure out how to work with them.

I don't think that I'm two different people on and off of the medication. I'm the same person, one can just deal while the other cannot. Me on medication, however, can figure out the belief system and decided that some of those beliefs are just  really bad ideas. Me on medication can figure out what to do with that information. Me off of medication cannot. Me off of medication is a victim of that belief system and thinks that I can never escape it.

I'm sure there is some research into the way your brain chemistry permanently affects your thoughts, even after the chemistry is under adjustment. I think of the depression as rivulets of acid burning ruts into my brain for my thoughts to follow so that, even when the acid stops, the ruts are still there.

Observations on Season 5 Commentary

1) I confess, I haven't seen any of the episodes of this season's Mad Men. Our landlord's cable plan doesn't have the channel on which it airs in Ireland and the U.K. My computer has freaked through my other methods of seeing it, and I am too cheap to get it on iTunes. Thus, all my information comes from reviewers and recappers. These have deteriorated over the years, especially the comments section where you get a real sense of just how Dr. Philed and Oprafied people have become in understanding even fictional relationships. "The right person," "become a better person," blahblahblah. Do these people not watch the same show that I have watched for four seasons? Do they not see the same characters? Are they overwhelmed by how pretty these characters are, especially Don? Do they understand nothing about characterization or continuity? Do they understand nothing about the concept that change does not always mean for the better and can sometimes mean that the characters manipulate external change to their own end rather than to become "a better person"? What does "a better person" mean, anyway?

2) Wasn't there an African American Barbie named Dawn back in the 1970s? I had a paperdoll Barbie set, and I seem to recall a black Barbie named Dawn, with a big Afro, go-go boots (god! I loved my own white go-go boots!), and an A-line dress of swirly bright colors.

3) Why do all of the Mad Men reviewers/recappers seem to miss that the Peggy story line, in which she has to hire a young, male copywriter, is slightly different than all of the men's story lines? (See: Slate, Alan Sepinwall, A.V. Club, Tom & Lorenzo, Deborah and Roberta Lipp, Salon, Washington Post, Maureen Ryan )The older men may be threatened by the younger men, fearing replacement; but Peggy is of a generation in which the perfectly capable, talented and extremely experienced woman must train subordinate men to prepare them for promotion above her. The best the can do is suggest -- as it appears another character in the episode did -- that he will be promoted because he might be good and all of that meritocratic shit, not because of the "glass ceiling." Jeez! Did these reviewers/recappers never see 9-to-5?

4) Why does Betty have some of the more intriguing, subtle stories, yet the writers or the actress or something always make her seem loathsome? Do the writers have some serious Mommy issues? Because, damn! Maureen Ryan has a nice breakdown of the problems with the way the character is depicted. Ryan's is sympathetic to some degree, without liking the character, and I particularly like that she zeroes in on the fact that the writers have not created a life for Betty outside of the scenes with her. What does she do all day? What interests her? Her horseback riding was the last time they showed her as having anything like a hobby. I also remember that great episode in the first season that ended with Betty, cigarette perched in her mouth, shooting pigeons in her housedress. A little more of that, please! Betty is a character that helps me understand my mother a bit more, although my mother was closer to Peggy's or Megan's ages at the time -- or the groupie's. She had the same issues of frustration, the Feminine Mystique, not really liking her children, and feeling downright old at 35. Being her kid was not so easy, but looking back and understanding her as a woman, I can see why she was so miserable. I wish the Mad Men writers could be so just with Betty.

5) Would a wife in 1966 really taunt her husband with the information that her paycheck was her own to do with as she chose? It seems those conversations did not take place until a decade or more later? Would that have even been legally true? Would she even be able to have her own bank account in 1966?

6) Also, not to defend the husband because he is genuinely loathsome, but isn't it more appropriate for him to be embarrassed and angry that said wife, who is also an employee, would do something short of a striptease at what was essentially a business function? To the other employees, especially in the context of her having been promoted not for any discernible talent (or active ambition) but for marrying the boss, she must have seemed like she was saying, "I may be an underling, beneath all of you in the office hierarchy, but I have power over the boss because I am fucking him." That's a bad mix in any situation at any time. That whole story is off in a lot of way, anyway.

Commenting

Apparently Blogger hates everyone who does not have a Google or Blogger account. So, I've altered my settings to allow anonymous commenting. My apologies to non-Googlers and non-Bloggers -- I hope you can comment now!

I Have a Good Partner.

I have a good partner. How do I know this? The other night we were channel surfing and, at the bottom of the screen, a notice for a show called "Donkeypunch" popped up. "Donkeypunch?" I said. "They did not name a show Donkeypunch."

I have brothers. Disgusting brothers. Brothers who find such things funny. They were the ones who told me about this term (worse yet, their wives thought it was funny, too, and they tell their sons about such things and encourage such humor. Their sons are in first grade.)

Meanwhile, the Gentleman Caller was perplexed by my reaction. "What's a Donkeypunch?" he asked.

"Look it up on Urban Dictionary," I said. "It's just too disgusting to say."*

"Why don't you save me a step?"

So I did, and I told him.

"Why would you do something like that?" he asked. "That seems unnecessary."

That is the proper response to such things.

For National Poetry Month: Canterbury

Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour;

Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hat in every holt and heeth

The tendred croppes, and the younge sonne

Hath inthe Ram his half cours yronne,

And smale foweles maken melodye,

That slepen al the nyght with open ye

(So priketh hem nature in hir corages),

Thann longen folk to goon on pilgrimages...

My 12th grade teacher made us memorize that for our English class. I can still recite the first four lines by heart. They ran on a loop in my head while I was in Canterbury making my own nerdy pilgrimage.

One presumes that Chaucer's pilgrims did not stop at Subway on their way toward the gate:

At least, they didn't in the final draft of the poem.

The Cathedral:

This is so impressive as a work of art today. What splendor and awe it must have invoked to peasant eyes unfamiliar with tall structures and spectacles that our 21st century eyes consider so mundane.

Indoors:

The passage under the altar to accommodate pilgrims visiting the Martyrdom:

The Martyrdom visited by modern-day pilgrims, schoolchildren:

I'm a vile atheist myself, but my grandmother was not, nor my other three grandparents. She had died a week earlier, so I lit a candle for her and them.

One of the places where Thomas Becket's bones lay:

The other was in the crypt below, but pictures were forbidden there. Henry VIII, magnificent jackass that he was, destroyed them -- or the monks removed them before he arrived -- in the dissolution of the monasteries. This was a surprisingly gruesome site for a church, if you think about it. After all, the account of Becket's actual murder involved cutting his head open and kicking his brains about, right where those schoolboys stood. Then, the disinterment and crushing of already long dead bodies. Very nasty all about.

Then, the monks sold vials of Becket's blood as medicine; or so the Museum of London told us in this exhibit of pilgrims' souvenirs:

I must admit, I loved the idea of medieval tchotchkes!

Before you leave:

World War II haunts the southern coast of England. Fucking Nazis.

The West Gate to the city:

This pilgrim stayed just outside of it, at an inn called the Falstaff. Shakespeare did not come from Canterbury, but his comrade-in-theater, Philip Marlowe did.:

Alas, his namesake theater was not playing Shakespeare's Henry V until the following week. The fare for this week? Grease. "It's quite popular," said the infant manning the box office. Poetic arts do not pay for themselves, I suppose, so Grease must.

Complaining and complaining and complaining

Have I mentioned how much I hate having depression, how much I hate having to deal with doctors to get pills to treat my depression, how I hate having insurance companies control the amount and type of pills for treating the depression, and how I hate having to deal with pharmacies, especially in busy areas, in getting those prescriptions filled?

After the fiasco of getting the damn prescription filled back in December, when I was essentially drug free for nearly a month and weeping through every minute of it, I am back in nearly the same position. The December fill was for three months. As the three months neared their end, I went on line and ordered them to be refilled.  I did this in a timely manner so as to account for the time required to get the prescription filled and sent overseas while also allowing them to be covered by insurance. Insurance companies will not cover the prescription if you fill it too early.

Since, the pharmacy will not ship overseas, I arranged for one of the Gentleman Caller's kids -- the ones who served as my mules back in December -- to pick up the prescriptions and mail them to us. Seemed like a simple plan: I order online, she picks up in her city, she mails from her city, I pick up here. Shouldn't take much more than a week to a week an a half. I ordered on a Sunday evening here for a Monday noon pickup there. If she mailed on Tuesday, then the pills would reach me by the end of the week or early the next week. I had enough left to last me about a little over a week, longer if I stretched. By "stretched," I mean that, of the two pills that I take every day, I alternate them to last longer. (I used to do this because I couldn't afford to pay for the pills every month, even with insurance, because I was so poor. Turns out the quack prescribing them over-prescribed, so I was probably doing myself a favor at the time.) In any case, I figured that all would be well.

Aren't I cute and naive?

You see, despite also having an allegedly convenient online ordering service, the pharmacy chain in question doesn't always get the orders.  So, it should not have been a surprise when my connection got to the location in her city and they, of course, did not have my prescription ready. They didn't even have the order. She got on Skype to the Gentleman Caller, and we got her the order number. Nope, no record on their end. Understand, this was 24 hours after I had said that someone would be picking up the prescription. Do you think they said, "oh, we are so sorry. These things happen, let's fill these two very very common prescriptions right now"? If you did, you gave them more credit for competence than they actually had. Instead, they told her to come back in two days and they would have the prescription ready.

This is not the first time I've dealt with this sort of online reservation snafu. You order something online, then arrive at the scheduled location for pick up, and the location does not have what you ordered or even a record that you ordered, and stare at your printed confirmation as if you hold a rare miniature unicorn in your hand. Oh, and could you please wait a moment while they deal with these other customers?

In fact, that once happened in the middle of a full-blown, please-shoot-me-right-here-in-the-head, throwing up migraine. I sat curled up on the floor, and people in line kept asking what was wrong. "I'm waiting for my prescriptions," I said. The pharmacists kept casting concerned glances in my direction. I'm not sure if it was because they were worried about my health -- in which case, fill my fucking prescription! -- or because they were worried that I was giving them bad publicity.

It also happened regularly in That Place, where, on one occasion, I had to return to the pharmacy (the same chain in question here) four times because they first did not have the very common prescription in stock, and the second two times had not unpacked it from the shipment. The last time, I refused to leave until they filled it. I waited for three hours, to no avail, then I went home and wrote a letter of complaint. They were ready on the fourth visit.

But, I digress.

"Fuck," I thought. "Now I have to stretch." Throw in some perimenopausal PMS and you have yourself a big chemical party in my body!

Two days later, my connection returned to the pharmacy and the prescriptions were actually ready. Next stop, the post office.

You know that didn't go well.

Understanding that time was of the essence, my connection attempted to send them the fastest way possible. Guess what? You can't send pharmaceuticals that way. Contrary to what our students would have us believe, you can get send books within 24 hours. DVDs you can get quickly, too. Medication? Yeah, that will take a week, at least. I had ordered the pills online on a Sunday, my connection couldn't get them until Thursday, and now they would take up to 14 days to get to me.

As of Friday, they were still not here in the Emerald Isle. Two weeks after I ordered the prescriptions, I'm still without them, and with one pill left. At least the PMS has passed.

Damn good thing I just have the garden variety, low serotonin depression. Can you imagine if I needed anti-psychotics?

This so annoys me because I always have this crisis whenever I am not in the same place from month to month. That is, when I go away for the summer or, now, for nine months, getting my prescriptions filled becomes a logistical frustration. If I stay in the same place all year long, or don't leave for longer than a month, no problem. Need to get my prescription filled in a place different from where I live? Then we encounter difficulties -- even using the same damn pharmacy chain. If I was willing to pay full price, I could probably get all the refills that I need at one time, but the insurance company won't let me get more than three months at a time. That can work for the summer, but for a longer duration. Well, this is what happens.

I know I'm lucky. I have both insurance (and am paying dearly for it without official employment) and the medical care to get the prescriptions. I can also afford the co-pay. Oh, and you can throw in the whole getting to spend the year overseas and work on my book. There have been times when none of that was true. So, really, I should just shut up. Just, sometimes, you gotta bitch to get it off your chest.

Let's just hope that the mail doesn't lose the package. That has happened, too. If it does again, then I'll have an exciting post about a temporary ex-patriate who swore she would not use the national health system going to the clinic to leach off of the Irish tax dollars.