The Mystery of Mitzi

Found this in a New York City newspaper from 1920. I can't figure out who Mitzi was. (It's not Mitzi Gaynor—she wasn't born till the 1930s.) There's a script for Lady Billy at the New York Public Library, so I may check that out. You've heard the plot a million times before: countess disguised as boy comes to America. According to the New York Times, "there are alarms and excursions, escape and discovery, and final haven in the arms of the stalwart lover." Sidney Greenstreet was also in the cast. There's some sheet music from Lady Billy offered on eBay. The Times called Mitzi an "accomplished young person," which makes me think she might have been a juvenile actress. I'm not sure whether it's worth it to try to look for interviews or articles in the papers that are blurbed in the ad. Girls-dressed-as-boys roles were pretty common and could be the subject of a dissertation in themselves (actually, I'm sure they are). So for now, Mitzi will remain a mystery girl.

Sensitive Cowpokes Need Not Apply

Illustration from "The Feeling of Inferiority" in the magazine Hygeia, March 1926. I know you need to squint to read the caption—I'm still working out how to get the exposure right.

The Camera Craze

OK, second crabby post in a day, forgive me.

I know a lot of you out there love you some digital cameras for archival work. Snap, snap, snap, and you can copy an entire book if you feel like it. For free! (Not that you'd ever break copyright restrictions.)

Me, I feel frustrated and overwhelmed by digital photography in archives. There are practical difficulties, like the books that won't lie flat (which can cut off inside margins), and trying to hold your hand steady, even when you have a camera that has that steady-hand correction thing (which mine does). I've also been trying to work with extra-large magazine formats, and when you manage to fit those big pages in your viewfinder you wind up with a resolution that's not all that readable.

But more to the point, are you downloading, saving, naming, and printing all your files? This is what mystifies me about taking pictures. What's the purpose in taking all those photos if you don't have a good system of organizing them? How can you organize them without going through and naming all of them? Do you really read them on your computer screen, or do you have to print them out (like I do)? That costs lots in ink cartridges, and when you print them out they look like crap. And why can't I figure out how to make a sweet multi-page PDF that I only have to name once?

Oh, and if you've managed to solve these issues or they don't make a difference to you, I have one thing to say: don't do a project where you're working with documents on kids. Lots of archives will not let you make photocopies, much less do the ol' snap-snap with your Canon PowerShot.

So, digital photography: OK, not great. I hope that I can be proved wrong.

What Is Wrong With You, Library?!

I have reached the boiling point. It seems the library system is moving all these bound periodicals that I really, really need from the main library to the storage facility. Plus, they haven't got around to updating their catalog system, so the catalog says they have a periodical, but when you go to the bound periodicals room it's gone! I understand not everyone may need to have the complete run of Playground or Survey at their fingertips. But these things are not online, they're not on microfilm, and they're too recent to be on Google Books. I have no alternative but to troupe out to the storage annex, where they do have a reading room, but it's in a remote corner of campus, and it's getting cold out! Wa wa wa, I know.

Oh, and another thing. I need to see a few volumes of Ladies' Home Journal from the 1920s and '30s, which are on microfilm reels at another branch of the university. But my request keeps getting cancelled automatically because we have two years of LHJ online—those two years being something like 1888 and 1889. Library, those are not what I'm looking for. Please don't be stupid and tell me these are online, because they're not. Duh.

Library, I'm going to find out where you live, and I'm going to get you.

Warriors and Priests

It's funny how you can find precedents for contemporary theoretical concepts in documents created a long time ago. I was looking for magazine articles on the "boy problem." I'm still not sure what the "boy problem" was (I think it has something to do with eugenics and the supposed declining "generative impulse" among white people), but it's all over the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature for the years 1919-1921. So I looked up some of these articles, and I found this, from the Atlantic Monthly of March 1920. I know it's long, but try to get through it.

I think that we all know enough of human nature to know that in ... primitive society, if any individual boy had not these [masculine] virtues, he must assume them; he must believe he had them and make others believe it.

Here arose a source of confusion. Internally, for himself and to himself, a boy was, first of all, a conglomerate human creature, compact of innumerable capacities and perceptions, incapacities and obtusities. He could not by any amount of determination or self-deception be other than that particular bundle of individual traits which he happened to possess. He could not by any effort really conform to a type. The most he could do, of course, toward that imperative community demand was to assume an outward aspect of invincibility; while the best he could do for the race as well as for himself was to develop his own traits, each to its best use, irrespective of whether he resembled in consequence any other boy or any accepted type. The early community demanded many more enthusiastic physical fighters than it naturally produced, so the rest of the boys must pretend to these warrior virtues if they could. If they positively could not, the monastery became at last open to them. What these non-fighters did in the earlier ancient days, when opportunities to be priests were comparatively few, it is hard to guess. (Perhaps fewer dreamers were born, since the need for them can have been so little felt.) ... And so, from time immemorial, boys have pretended to be what they are not, as all persons do upon whom an unattainable expectation is laid. The pretence has not been conscious most of the time. They have fooled themselves, as we all do in the process of submitting to others' expectations. So boys, personally self-wrapped and uncomprehending of others and of themselves, laugh at each other, traditionally and tribally, for showing personal feeling, special interest, or individual taste.

Get rid of the essentialism, the "from time immemorial" ahistoricity, the bizarre picture of "primitive" society, and the "duty to the race" garbage, and don't you have something close to the idea of gender as performance? What this passage captures for me, in a way I think we downplay or can't see today, is the depressing nature of performativity. We just don't have a choice; we're on the performativity treadmill from the day we're born. Similarly, the options this piece presents are bleak. If you simply can't "pretend" that you're a warrior, "the monastery became at last open" to you. But the author seems to know that this isn't a choice. Perhaps fewer dreamers were born, indeed.



On the other hand, I do appreciate the author's awareness that more than one kind of masculinity is available. This is something I don't think a lot of scholars of U.S. gender history realize yet. Most of us seem kind of locked in to what we think of as hegemonic masculinity, which changed to this he-man thing around the turn of the 20th century and which we believe still rules today. I have long doubted this and (gladly) have been finding evidence that complicates or contradicts this picture.

What it means for girls, however, is still a mystery. More later.

I Don't Think I'm Ready for This Jelly

Am I the last one to see this awesome Beyoncé video for "If I Were a Boy"? I'm not crazy about the song, but I keep wondering if this is Beyoncé's message that she is actually a gay man. How else to explain her appearance in a police suit just as she sings, "If I were a boy..." as she sits down to breakfast with her hot hot hot boyfriend?

Sorry for the wishful thinking—you can tell grad school has gotten to you when you can't stop reading against the grain.

P.S. to Beyoncé: Thanks for your correct use of the subjunctive in the title of your song. Oh, and plus you are hot in this video!

Yes We Can!

I've totally drunk the Kool-Aid.

Lure of the Xtabay

A drag queen once told me that Yma Sumac was the Peruvian equivalent of Carmen Miranda. If that makes any sense to you, you probably already know about Carmen Miranda and Yma Sumac, who died recently. According to the New York Times, which I take for my bible in all things camp, her name was really Imma Sumack (not Amy Camus, as the rumor had it), and she was born in Peru (not Brooklyn). And she really was an Incan princess, according to the Peruvian government.

I'd listen to Yma Sumac, along with Eartha Kitt and Barbra Streisand, while I was working one of my late-night data entry jobs after I first moved to New York. I remember vividly how I'd code data for an evil corporate law firm that was working on an asbestos case. Yma, Eartha, and Barbra hinted that there was a world beyond all this.

I'm bad at describing music, so I hope you'll seek out Yma Sumac for yourself. She was known for her high notes, but as you can see here, she could also growl. Unfortunately, some of her best songs—"Mambo" and "Xtabay" in particular—only show up as tributes on YouTube.

I think of Yma Sumac as one of Julie Taymor's birds, with a 1950s nightclub act. You'll either love her or you'll hate her. It's camp all the way.