Applying to college while black (ATCWB)

Congratulations, you just got into UCLA! You're smart and awesome! Oh, wait a minute, you're black? Well, despite the fact that you make up only 5 percent of the incoming freshman class, we think you might not really belong here. One of  your professors has resigned from the admissions committee because it seems that some of you (how many we can't say) wrote about being black in those moronic personal essays that you must write in order to get into college. How dare you? This means that UC admissions committee members, who are prohibited by state law from taking race into account when admitting students, could tell your race from what you wrote and sneakily let you in, according to this guy, who may just be grading some of your papers very soon. This subterfuge must be stopped! From now on, UC admissions officers will shred applications that mention race and use them to line their birdcages. And as for you students, no more self-expression—you must write about how you spent your summer vacation cleaning toilets at a soup kitchen in India like your white peers. (Dude, it so totally changed my life!) Only once we all censor ourselves and conform to the same idiotic life story will true diversity be achieved. 

Sad news

Del Martin died yesterday.

A decent proposal

I'm close to finishing the first draft of my proposal. And a drafty draft it is! I'm not quite sure the methodology matches up with the research questions. I don't know whether I got a lot of stuff in the lit review right. Heck, I don't really know what's in some of the archives I'm going to list. I think this is OK, because the all the good stuff I've found in archives so far has been in random collections. I almost wrote off the diaries of the girl with soldiers when I first read them because she wasn't like, "I am a tomboy, this is what I think about being a tomboy," etc. So I figure it's OK to fudge some of the sources part. It's not a brilliant proposal; it's a decent proposal. I'm sure I'll have to rewrite it anyway to please my eclectic committee. That's why it's called a draft: you can feel the air whooshing through all the holes in it. Here's hoping it's done by Friday so my committee can spend all Labor Day weekend reading it!

Castling

OK, last post on Budapest.

I have always loved castles. But when you grow up in the United States, they're kind of hard to come by. Actually, on the outskirts of Cleveland there is this thing called Squire's Castle where we used to have picnics. It was built by a Standard Oil tycoon who just really wanted to live in a castle. I know the feeling! But, of course, castles are different in Europe. They come with a lot of baggage attached—you don't just up and build yourself one because you suddenly come into a lot of money. No, the true measure of castle entitlement is not to do a damn thing to get it, which is one of the reasons they're so cool.

The Budapest Castle is actually a complex of buildings packed high on top of a hill in Buda overlooking the Danube. It is more of a palace-type operation than a big stone fortress, although some kind of castle has been there since the Dark Ages, I think. Unfortunately, there are no royals to be found there these days. But walking around, you still feel a kind of awe and a sense of being very, very unimportant. For instance, all the doors are tremendously high and you have to reach up to about shoulder height to turn the handles that open them. My host AK pointed out that if you were anybody who counted, you had doors opened for you, and if you were the person opening the door, reaching up would have reinforced your lowly status. I'm not sure many Americans would think to imagine life in a castle from that perspective.

We visited the castle district at dusk, which made for some stunning views of the Parliament building over on the Pest side, across the Danube. The picture above is part of the castle; the one below is the view of Parliament.

Bath-stravaganza!

The medieval guys who thought it would be a good idea to settle Pest probably were drawn to this lovely site on the Danube for a few reasons: the view of Buda, the palinka, and the hot springs. Today Budapest has several amazing baths, at least one of which goes back to the  Ottoman days. My friends and I chose to visit the Széchenyi Baths, which are in this large park in the middle of Pest. They are (I believe) the largest baths in Europe, with a whole complex of indoor baths, a couple sauna rooms, three outdoor swimming pools, and masseurs. And did I mention they're gorgeous? The indoor baths have these very cool vaulted ceilings, and the bath temperatures range from 20 C. to hot hot hot. We spent hours there. You feel like you're floating in this dream palace. Hey, was that a Habsburg drifting by?

Hungry in Hungary

I've just returned from a vacation in beautiful Budapest. The weather was great, the hospitality delightful, the palinka potent, and the cheese plentiful. I had cheese practically every day, mostly soft white cheeses with things like dill in them. This is a picture of a cheese stall in a small market set up during the communist days as a small-scale free-market experiment. The market survives to this day. Despite our inability to speak Hungarian, BG did an excellent job ordering the cheese by the point-and-gesture method. The cheese lady was extremely nice. We got there when the market was closing, and she had to get rid of her cheese before it spoiled, so she gave us tons of free samples. The market also has fresh fruit, vegetables, nuts, pastries, and an array of Hungarian cleaning products.

Of course, most of my time was not spent eating cheese. I had a rather history-themed vacation. At the Hungarian National Museum I saw the coronation robe, Magyar stirrups, portraits of random Habsburgs and their buddies, a sarcophagus, and an exhibit on ladies' fashion. It's interesting the way they do the Communist period. The whole museum is pretty much silent, as museums tend to be. But when you turn the corner into the Communist display, all of a sudden you're overwhelmed by the strains of the second movement of Beethoven's Seventh (that's the sorrowful one, not the angry one). Wonder what the official line on Communism is now! And here I was looking for the shiny happy people of socialist realist propaganda to cheer me up. In the gift store I bought a small poster of three young people looking confidently into the future. But I forgot it in Budapest! Is that a sign?

I also went to the House of Terror on Andrassy ut, a tree-lined boulevard with lots of lovely buildings. It sounds like it might be a wax museum with Jack the Ripper recreations, but the House of Terror is actually where political prisoners during Hungary's fascist and communist periods were detained, interrogated, and tortured. The whole thing has been turned into an aesthetically sleek conceptual art piece that shows how Hungarians were victimized by the Arrowcross and Communist regimes. Now, this is an important part of history. But it was really heavy-handed on the victimization by outsiders. At one point the ripoff of an audiotour said that Hungarians were humble, religious people who would never do anything to hurt anyone and rejected all kinds of fascism. This despite the mind-blowing history of the country's participation in the Holocaust. In fact, there is almost nothing on the Holocaust, period, except as something Hitler wanted Hungarians to do. Also, did you know that no Hungarians were interested in Marxism till the Soviet occupation? Just humble kulaks. What's really interesting is the gallery of perpetrators as you leave the place. Some of these people are still alive. And according to my host, people have "informed" on some of these people, so some pictures are up there based on hearsay. My host thinks the whole thing is a piece of right-wing propaganda.

We did make it to the Holocaust museum, which had a much different tone and seemed geared more toward Hungarians than the House of Terror. It was also almost completely empty (House o' Terror had a line around the block when I left). I was a little confused by some of the chronology, so I imagine that you'd have to have a passing familiarity with Hungarian history before you go. Also, there was a kind of weird video about anti-Semitism that was probably directed at anti-Semites. At one point it was like "OK, the Jews did kill Christ, but that was just a few of them, so can you really hold it against an entire group of people?" Wha....? There were lots of visual touch-screens that presented actual type-written documents that I imagine ordered deportation and the final solution. They are all in Hungarian with no translation, so I guess they are mostly for Hungarians to read. I think actually the most affecting part for me was this part at the beginning where you have to walk down a long, dark hall. You notice footsteps behind you. They get louder and louder until it's impossible not to look behind you. I thought that was a good use of technology in a museum—so often these days the "interactive" stuff seems pointless. After the whole thing, you emerge in a restored synagogue, which at first seems like an up note until you realize that it, too, is completely empty (of course, this is a function of there being no one at the museum at the time). There are glass benches with the names and occupations of some of the victims there. 

Well, there's much more, but I'll save it for another time. 

Lost Lesbian Literary Masterpiece!

Just kidding. About the masterpiece. The lost lesbian part is true.

Many years ago, my friend KL gave me a book: Freshmen at Arden, by Bertha Goes. KL said she was convinced it was a lost lesbian novel. I said thanks, put it on my shelf, meaning to read it, and forgot about it. 

I came across it again the other day. Remembering what KL said, I opened it again and read a few pages. Seemed like a 1930s school story. Not that great. But THEN I turned to the inside front cover. It was signed "To Hildegarde, with many thanks and deep appreciation, Bertha Goes, 1936." But not only that: there were two obituaries pasted there: one for Bertha Goes and one for Madge Anderson, her "dearest friend," according to the obituary. Bertha and Madge died within six weeks of each other in 1980.

Then I noticed there were seven little photos pasted inside the back cover. They showed what I assume is Bertha and Madge on vacation: frolicking in a lake, holding hands in a hammock, sitting at a picnic table...I was stunned. Here's a picture for you. Bertha is on the right. 

Oh, snap! dissertations

I've been reading a few books that started as dissertations related to my topic, and I think I have figured out some winning strategies for writing them and getting them published. You just have to give it that "Oh, snap!" element. Here are two ideas.

1. Make a minor theoretical distinction that will save the planet. This is an especially useful strategy when a single book has defined your field and no one will admit to hating it because the author is something of a rock star now. Changing this book's theoretical wording may allow you to assert that while it is useful (which no one believes), it is ever so slightly (i.e. extremely) reductionist, essentialist, etc.

2. Pull off the presto-changeo trick. This is kind of related to no. 1. What you do is take something that everyone thinks is progressive and prove (i.e. assert) that it is (presto-changeo!) actually conservative, imperialist, racist, sexist, or in service of the white middle class. Your argument will distract everyone from the fact that it makes no sense and is based on nonexistent evidence and a knowledge of history culled from books that came out in 1989. Because so many things that seem progressive in real life really are conservative, imperialist, racist, sexist, and in service of the white middle class, people will take you seriously.

If you can think of any other "oh, snap" strategies, let me know.