Gimme an A! Gimme a B! Gimme a D!

My defense: awesome. No, wait: totally awesome. No, wait: so totally super mega fucking awesome. My committee said such nice things. They also found all my insecure-buttons and pushed them repeatedly. But on the whole I am a happy Ph.D. candidate. That's right, CANDIDATE.

It's all a blur, though. Ask me what happened when I've recovered a little bit.

We Are T Minus Five Days Until Launch

I defend my proposal Monday at 11:30. Now it can be revealed: I've had a defense date set for months but it was a secret because the Russians might find out! Now there is no way they can move their missiles to Cuba in time to stop my defense. I'm sorry to have kept this secret from all of you, but there are sacrifices you make when you work for the department. The history department, of course.

Keep watching the stars.

CQ's Political Scoop

Colin Powell endorsed Barack Obama today. There's been speculation about how he came to this decision—some, of course, contend it's because they're both black. But CheeseQuest was on the case first. And as we learned last month, it wasn't some kind of "tribal" (to use Chris Matthew's word) affiliation. It was because McCain stole the man's joke.

A Minor Setback, and Further Adventures in Archives

So it develops that Professor Famous cannot be my outside reader. But fear not, dear reader, for CheeseQuest is undaunted and will turn now to Professor Respectable, who may in fact be a better match.

In other excitement, I had another archive caper last week. Poring over fan letters written in 1984 to a fiction factory, I came across one from a girl who affixed two stickers to her epistle. Gracious, I whispered, I think I had that sticker! Then I realized it was a scratch-and-sniff—a round, yellow circle with a green smiley fact that read "Dino-MITE!" Furtively, I cast a glance about the dim reading room to make sure no one was watching, and rubbed the sticker slightly.

Reader, I sniffed it.

Ah, the sweet scent of lemon drops, made even sweeter by the knowledge that this sensory experience had transcended the mists of time. What I smelled, she had smelled. And the realization that I probably owned that sticker, and that the author of this document was approximately the same age as I, made me think that on some level I knew her—we breathed as one.


Desperate to give you a sense of my experience, I looked for this sticker online. Alas, no yellow "Dino-MITE!"s, but I did find this gumball machine, which I am positive was in the same family of stickers. Enjoy it to whatever extent you can.

Dr. Shock

Historians love us some case studies. They're snapshots of people's lives, albeit filtered through the pathologizing lenses of psychiatrists, physicians, social workers, and other professions.

It's pretty easy to find books with a ton of case studies in them. Maybe the most fascinating is Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis. Anticipating the work of Alfred Kinsey, Krafft-Ebing collected dozens of case studies of "abnormal" sexuality, many of them from people who sought his help, some of them from people who wrote to him describing themselves and asking to be cured. Jonathan Ned Katz gives a great account of Krafft-Ebing's contribution to the "invention of heterosexuality."

The case studies I'm looking for are a bit different, of course. Browsing around the website of the Kinsey Institute's Special Collections, I found the papers of a gynecologist and sex researcher named Robert Latou Dickinson, who did a lot of work during the period I'm studying. Since he seemed slightly relevant, I went to the massive (ha!) Cheeseville U. library to look up some of the work he did. I found A Thousand Marriages (1931). Case studies galore! But there was stuff in there I wish I hadn't read. In this passage he's talking about "Widows Over Sixty."

Pelvic examination indicates that memories or physical excitability give a strong reaction in the office of the gynecologist. Extreme distaste may appear or such vulvar congestion, marked mucous wetness and erotic behavior, even at seventy-five, that it is desirable to relieve the patient's embarrassment by hurting her, lest she have orgasm.

Dickinson died in 1950. You have to wonder whether really old gynecologists were trained by this guy, or people who studied his methods. Ugh.

Best Shot

Only a week past my self-imposed deadline, I handed in the final version of my prospectus today. It clocks in at 42 pages, including notes and bibliography! That's altogether ridiculous, but I didn't feel like doing the extra work to cut it down to 20. Besides, my adviser wanted "anecdotes and quotations," so I'm only following directions, right? I still need an outside reader, so I haven't scheduled a defense date. But here goes nothing!

Apparently, You Do Need a Weatherman

Is this the McCain campaign's October surprise? Bill Ayers? I thought we went through this during the primaries. Steve Schmidt, you can do better than that. How about "Obama would raise taxes on pet hamsters!" Or "Obama has an inter-species alien love child on the space station Mir!"

Meantime, Sarah Palin still can't complete a sentence. Try diagramming this passage:

We see America as the greatest force for good in this world. If we can be that beacon of light and hope for others who seek freedom and democracy and can live in a country that would allow intolerance in the equal rights that again our military men and women fight for and die for all of us.

(Thanks to Vgirl for the grammar article!)

Enough With the Classist Stereotypes!

An AP writer calls out Sarah Palin for her usage of the term "Joe Sixpack." I think this meme emerged right after the debate on Thursday, because I've seen it on a few blogs. However, no one (to my knowledge) has probed the origins of this term. I remember it vividly from my childhood in the 1970s.

According to one of the "On Language" columns Bill Safire used to do, the term first emerged in a 1970 story a Boston Globe reporter wrote about a local politician who ran against Louise Day Hicks for Congress. The reporter got lots of angry mail from readers, who accused him of perpetuating Irish stereotypes. Imagine that!

I also did a search on ProQuest (a distant relative of CheeseQuest, if you must know), and the first hit I got was "Freedom to Outrage," published April 17, 1972, in the NYT. It was an opinion piece by critic Herbert Mitgang, complaining that American TV was nothing like the BBC. "Nothing better illustrates the superiority of British television than the field of drama," he wrote. "Without it, American television would be confined to the routine homegrown series on doctors, boy detectives and Joe Sixpack families." Well, la di da!

The term has stayed in use since the 1970s. Among its perpetuators: Bill Clinton (see the Safire column above).

"Joe Sixpack" was condescending then, and it's condescending now. Enough, Sarah Palin!

PS: I feel the same way about the use of "Main Street," which the Dems also love to use.