Ghia Pet

This is an orange Karmann Ghia convertible. A '68, I think. This is the kind of car my parents drove when they had me. I don't know if you can tell, but it's a two-seater. What did they do with the baby, you ask? Family legend has it that they mounted a small chair between the two front seats. This meant that baby's head was pressed against the windshield as the little Ghia sped through traffic. I was a little Ghia pet, ha ha.

I can't vouch for this legend, for I don't remember much about the Ghia. I only mention it because the baby-with-head-on-windshield metaphor fits my current situation pretty well. Events are hurtling along, and I feel like I'm watching everything come straight at me from a very uncomfortable vantage point. Right now I ought to be (1) finishing a seminar application, (2) finishing a comment on a faculty member's paper that's going to be presented Tuesday, (3) reading three articles by a hotshot postcolonial scholar whom I'm meeting tomorrow, (4) reading another prof's paper to give them feedback.

Run-of-the-mill stuff, I know. But I haven't worked this hard since I started writing my dissertation. Here's hoping that the little Ghia doesn't run out of gas and baby's head doesn't go through the windshield.

To All of My Friends Struggling With Grant Applications

As the deadlines approach, I send you my heartiest, cheeriest, best wishes as well as this blast from the past, YSA's personal statement to end all personal statements.

May you take heart, and be inspired.

Wrap Me Up and Take Me Home

I have time for one last post before I leave to get on the train. I'd call this trip a qualified success. It was disappointing in that I used my grant money to find stuff I already knew was there. But I also ventured into another library on the same campus where they have tons of relevant documents collected by the woman I am studying. I still have some grant money left, and I want to come back to use it at the second library. But that doesn't seem right.

My brown bag talk went well. I'd worried so much about what I could possibly say and figured I'd have to do an air-guitar solo in order to distract them from my failure to find much at their library. But I spent most of my time reading from some of the documents I did find, which they thought were really interesting. They asked a few questions and that was it.

My one big extracurricular activity was a trip to the Marimekko store, where I splurged on a jacket. When I say "splurged" I mean "spent more money on one garment than I ever have before." I was in doubt about the fit. It's a size 38, which nowadays is usually too small for me, but it was a little roomy in the shoulders. I asked if it was possible to get it tailored and sadly because of the way it's lined it would be impossible. Also, it's a cotton jacket, meaning it's totally out of season, and I won't be able to wear it until May, maybe. But it was so, so cute! I mean overwhelmingly cute. Hopefully they will get its Finnish style back in Cheeseville.

OK, it's time to go. Hopefully the train won't take an extra three hours this time.

Wishful Thinking

When I wrote my awesome dissertation proposal, I started in with a juicy anecdote. This, as most students of history know, is a tried (tired?) and true method of drawing readers in and making them think that what they're about to read will be just as interesting. Yes, it's the old academic bait and switch routine. We all love narrative, but we don't trust it because it's not analytical enough.

I digress. I discovered something important yesterday as I retraced my research steps from two summers ago. That symphonic anecdote that anchored my dissertation prospectus was, dare I say, completely false. What happened was that I wasn't allowed to write down anyone's name or correct initials in this protected set of documents. I looked at one institutional report on a girl—let's call her Mildred. Now, pretty much no one today would name their kid Mildred. So it must have been true of the 1920s too, right? Wrong! Oh, so wrong. The Social Security people say Mildred was the ninth most popular name of the 1920s! But as I was reading along last year, I saw "Mildred" on the report. Then, several boxes later, I saw "Mildred" on two letters. I thought they must be the same person. If I had been allowed to write down people's names or make photocopies of these documents, it's likely that I wouldn't have made such a boneheaded mistake.

So far, so excusable (maybe). But how to explain the composition I thought was also written by "Mildred" when it had another person's name written on it? And, OK, the love letter I was sure "Mildred" had written? It was signed with a man's name. A man's name! Last time around, I was totally sure it was the boy name "Mildred" adopted for herself. Wishful motherfucking thinking.

And now I succumb to the throes of panic about what else I might have messed up in my peripatetic research gambols. Remember, I haven't been able to photocopy or photograph most of my evidence. On the bright side, no one on my committee's seen this stuff, so if I am completely wrong, they won't be able to tell.

Thirty Minutes of Funk

Here I am on another research jaunt. I got a grant to come here. But the fact of the matter is that I've already been here. Yes, in the academy you get grants to go to places you've already been. And it's turning out that I maybe didn't even need all that extra money—I thought I'd just scratched the surface of these collections, but I picked through five or so pretty effectively the last time I was here.

I can hear you saying: Well, good on you, CheeseQuest! Take that money and go spend it on the fair-trade yoga clothes on offer at every other store on Main Street here. And have a $4 cup of coffee (also fair trade) while you're at it. Put that grant on your CV and ride into the sunset.

Of course, it's not that easy. I have to give a brown-bag talk on Friday. At first I thought it was no big deal, since I've done enough in-class presentations in grad school. Then I heard it should be thirty minutes long. Did you hear that? Thirty minutes long. I have no idea what I'm going to say. "Thanks for the opportunity to come here. I love your library, especially how each table is equipped with outlets for laptops. It's pretty here. Your call slips are easy to fill out. You get me my boxes real fast-like. I wish I had gotten into your graduate school." That will take up one minute...and then what?

I know, a twenty-nine-minute funk breakdown!

I'm Flying! Flying! Flying! Flying!

Recently, I had a conversation with someone on my committee about how to organize my dissertation so I could get unstuck. This person—we'll call them Professor Brilliance—had an idea: organize the dissertation by type of evidence. This puzzled me, for it would have meant one chapter based on five letters, one chapter based on twenty-five pages of a child study group's meeting minutes, one chapter based on memoirs I haven't read yet, and two chapters based on a phone-book–size stack of psychosexual case histories. Professor B. gave me an "assignment": write up some questions I could answer based on the evidence I have. Now, you may wonder, as I did, if it would be possible to write one fifty-page chapter based on, say, five letters. If you do so wonder, perhaps you can comprehend the despair I felt upon leaving Professor B.'s office.

Frustrated, I complained to the Facebook masses. And the masses responded! Or, at any rate, CBAM and AD did. When in doubt, go with chronology, advised CBAM. But I have no chronological development! I wailed. AD then suggested using one case history to lead into each chapter—a "collective biography," as he put it. CBAM concurred. And just like that, the clouds parted and tongues of fire descended. Dissertation Pentecost! I'm babbling away, and I'm coming to preach the truth: accept Facebook as your personal savior now! Make no decisions without consulting Facebook!

I'll finish my "assignment," all right, but won't Professor B. be surprised.

Conference Call

Instead of making arrangements to get coffee, brownies, and chopped honeydew for a meeting I'm supposedly organizing in a week, I spent the whole day at a conference kinda sorta related to my dissertation topic. "Kinda sorta," because although scholars in this field have pioneered new approaches to some of the issues I'm writing about, pretty much no one working on traditional twentieth-century U.S. history cares what these people have to say. I hasten to add that I had heard of two of the four presenters, one of them mind-scramblingly famous, but I am apparently unusual. So I went. And I learned a thing or two: new books I should read, pictures I would never have seen otherwise, and who used to sleep with a famous lesbian novelist.

Sometimes I think being a grad student going to a conference with famous people is like being in an X Men comic book or movie, meaning a bunch of mutants (like me) with weird powers they can't really control gathering to hear a possibly crackpot professor guy talk. Then we're supposed to go out and save the planet, slay the dragon, get tenure, whatever.

Well-attended panels can get really weird. During the Q&A at the end of one today, some guy asked a question and three famous professors all of a sudden started crabbing about the question among themselves. Seriously, they started talking to each other, and a big roomful of people were left to listen to this troika of fame hash out the finer points of one particular school of demography. This was my cue that shit was getting irrelevant for me. I doodled in a notebook for a while. When I looked up again, the celebrity trio was still going at it. I glanced around the room and saw someone who taught one of my grad seminars gesturing wildly to the moderator to please, for the love of god, take another question! This finally happened, but by now I was in orbit in some mental galaxy far, far away. Finally, the session ended. We all clapped, then rushed out to the reception area for some coffee, brownies, and chopped honeydew.

I was going to call it a day before the last session, but I decided to stick around. On the way back in, Professor Wink-a-Lot (who seriously winks, like, a lot) winked at me and said, "When are you going to ask your question, CheeseQuest?" I can never think of witty rejoinders to Professor W.a.L., so I mumbled something about how all my questions were answered at least halfway. "I'm kidding!" Professor W.a.L. said. I should have known from all the winking going on.

The last presenter was interesting, but by the time he finished I was packed up and ready to go. No more Q&A's for me. I thought of hanging around until they unveiled the food at the big reception afterward, but the thought of trying to make sparkling conversation while standing up with a plate in my hand and a bunch of food in my mouth just didn't appeal. So I hoofed it back home and ordered in. The end.

Stuck in the Mud (and Other Metaphors That Will Never Make It Into My Dissertation [So Why Am I Writing Them {Waaa!}?])

Getting bogged down in the Land of Dissertationia: everyone tells me this is normal. (Oh, sorry, normative.) I've resisted hand-wringing and whining on this blog for a long time, if only to keep myself buoyed and somewhat confident, as if I were in one of those cults that told you that if you think you can breathe underwater, you can breathe underwater. In fact, if the whole breathing-underwater thing doesn't work out for you, you're not believing in yourself hard enough. So...where is this metaphor going? I forget.

You see my problem.

I've been having fun, free-ranging discussions with a faculty member who's not really in my field but with whom I share a number of intellectual interests. We're trying to untie the same epistemological knots. (Mom, that basically means that we know we know something but we don't know exactly what it is. [Insert George W. Bush joke here.]) During one particularly free-ranging discussion of writing, I mentioned that I'd been "experimenting with aphorisms on Facebook." With that remark, this professor's face fell like a bowling ball chucked off a skyscraper. "My official advice to you," he said, "is to write your dissertation."

Friends, it was the voice of G-d telling me to sacrifice my favorite child. (Sorry for all the metaphors in this post.) I went home and opened up all the rambling Word documents I've created over the past year or so. There were about nineteen, most of them over four single-spaced pages. I couldn't find a definitive thesis in any of them. I opened up my proposal, which my committee had praised to no end last year. No thesis there either! How did they ever pass me? I am an impostor. I have been imposting for more than a year now. Toujours j'imposte. Etc.

I keep pinching myself: I am normal—sorry, normative. Today I will write like the dickens. I will. If I believe hard enough, I can breathe underwater. Where's the pool?

A, B, C, D, E, F, Google

You know how if you start typing something into Google, it'll predict what you're searching for? I wondered what would come up if I typed only a single letter in that oblong box. Here are the ABC's according to Google.

Amazon
Best Buy
Craigslist
Dictionary
Ebay
Facebook
Gmail
Hotmail
Imdb
Jet Blue
Kohls
Lowes
Mapquest
Netflix
Old Navy
Pandora
Quote
Realtor.com
Southwest Airlines
Target
USPS
Verizon Wireless
Walmart
XM Radio
YouTube
Zillow

What does this tell us about the Internets?

Fame and Charisma: Not the Same

This afternoon I went to a lecture given by an extremely famous professor. We're talking someone who has shaped the field. Whose writing is dynamic. Who has ideas that at first blush seem simply curious but upon closer inspection open up new worlds of inquiry. It was strongly suggested that we "familiarize ourselves" with this professor's recent book of essays in order to prepare for the lecture. I suppose the people who organized Professor Famous's visit were worried lest Cheeseville U.'s faculty and students come off looking stupid during the Q&A.

Well, those people needn't have worried.

Professor Famous gave a Powerpoint and basically talked into his computer. He almost never looked up. He talked in a low voice and stopped and started a lot. And it took him ten minutes to make a single point.

There were also two smart people who were "discussants" for Professor Famous's lecture. What this is supposed to mean is raising questions and generating critical issues that the lecturer didn't address. But in practice this often turns out to be "listen to me talk" (as do Q&A's).

So here's the total picture. Imagine it's 4:30 p.m. You're in between meals—really in between meals. You're in a room that's a little bit warm. Professor 1 introduces Professor Famous and his Powerpoint. Professor Famous mumbles into his computer. He starts to go overtime. No one cuts him off, because he's, well, famous! He talks until he feels like stopping, having shown a number of interesting slides and talked about some intriguing sources. But basically you're famished and exhausted. Time to go, right? No! There are two more smart people who have to talk. And this they do. Then Professor Famous responds. Then Professor 1 says the dreaded words: "I think we have a few minutes for discussion." And you're like, please, please, just let us get to the reception and the cheese cubes (we are always on a CheeseQuest, remember) and we can make a getaway. Not one but two people ask questions, and Professor Famous responds to what he feels like responding to, delivering an embarrassing and unprovoked smackdown in the process. At this point you're not sure if you're going to get home in time to watch Project Runway on Lifetime TV for Women, which comes on at 10.

But escape I did, gentle reader, with time enough to spare for Project Runway. I have resolved that when I'm running shit, I will vet the people whom I invite to my university for a certain level of charisma and some discipline in sticking to a schedule.

Also, if there's any way to pre-screen people for whether they can talk to anyone but a laptop, that would work too. My computer is my right arm, but it is not my best friend.

Two Scoops

I just saw a review on H-Net (which, for those who don't know, is an academic email discussion list/news clearinghouse) of a book by a senior scholar in my field. This person's new book is about the topic I wanted to write about when I applied to grad school! If I'd been writing my dissertation about that same topic right now, I'd be feeling pretty darn bad—not only because I'd have been totally scooped, but also because the ever-so-politely-worded review made it sound like this person didn't do a massive amount of research. I would have kept writing my dissertation, only I might have had to pitch it completely differently. And when I went in for job interviews (presuming I got interviews), I'd have to explain how my work differs completely from Professor Senior Scholar's, without making it sound like I think Professor S.S. is a moron. (Those of you who know me know that I have put my foot in it more than once.) Actually, I will have to do this anyway. You always have to describe your "intervention into the literature" but be respectful about it. But I think I will feel less defensive.

Right now I feel fortunate to have been blessed with the gifts of ambivalence and indecision. I got to grad school convinced I would write about this topic, but an offhand remark by a beloved faculty member made me change my mind. Then I came up with topic B, which would have kicked a lot of ass on the job market but which I would have hated writing. If I'd chosen topic B, I would have been mired in misery, making it less likely I'd ever finish grad school. Topic C is a better fit, although there is another historian working on the same topic and a literary study was published on it a year ago. But I feel much more confident about it, mainly because I have a network of spies who have told me what this person's interpretation is, and we have completely different takes on the topic, different sources, and different writing abilities. OK, the latter is an assumption based on my reading of this person's first book. But I think this might be a counterscoop! This person probably has a network of spies too, and these spies might be reporting that a grad student is working on a similar project. I doubt this person will feel threatened by me, but in my dreams this person contacts me about doing a panel or some such collaborative activity in order to preempt me. What I am wondering is if I should present any conference papers or try to publish an article based on my dissertation research. That way I might get counter-counterscooped. Ah, academic politics.

Am I fooling myself?

I Am Spartacus!

Vgirl and I had a conversation recently.

Vgirl: If my job is like being on a pirate ship, what's yours like?

CheeseQuest: Remember the gladiator school in Spartacus?

This is by way of apology for being so quiet lately. Three things have gotten in the way of my blog postings. One is that I am still learning to fend off deadly triton attacks at my new job. The second is that I've been reading the sources I've found instead of trying to find them, so the rare-books-room adventures have dried up. (But look for a new adventure in early November.) Third, I've gotten sucked into Facebook, which (along with Twitter) is going to kill the blogs, I think. As I face the prospect of writing my dissertation I haven't been sure of what to post, since most grad student blogs get somewhat duller and a lot more angsty once the research is done.

I should say that I haven't been hit by the angst yet, but I think it's a-creeping up on me. I've been trying to block out my schedule a week ahead of time and have found that this is somewhere east of pointless because I have no idea how long something will take before I start doing it—erp, make that before it's done.

So here's to Labor Day: I'm thinking of it as the last day I get to ponder what's ahead without doing anything about it. I dedicate this blog post to Kirk Douglas in Spartacus, by all means the guy I would follow into battle against our imperialist, slave-owning Roman oppressors. To my fellow graduate students: keep telling yourself "I am Spartacus!" Stand together, and avoid the flaming logs.

The Girl in the Street

"Mary is an arrogant, aggressive child who makes her way by force. She plays with anyone who happens to be on the street."

"Mary" was born about 1930, "in an eastern city with a population of about a quarter million." She was four years old when Virginia Boggess, a student at the Smith College School of Social Work, studied her and her family for a 1935 thesis titled "Some Factors Accounting for the Variation in the Social Adjustment of Children Living in a Tenement Area." (In those days you didn't have to come up with a belabored pun or some variation of "Transgressing the Boundaries" for your thesis title.) "Mary's" Portuguese-American, Catholic family lived in a "first-floor flat, unattractive and untidy." The family was on the dole; the mother (age 25) had had at least two abortions. (And kids, don't believe the hype that abortions were rare before Roe, or accessible only to rich women. Social-work and medical literature are full of women who had them.) The mother "feels imposed upon because she has to care for her sister's children, and she does not like children."

Virginia Boggess judged "Mary" and her family harshly, and this tells us a lot about her perspective. But the sole sentence she could devote to the girl raises a ton of questions that I wish I could answer. What constituted arrogance and aggression in a four-year-old girl? What were the desires "Mary" was trying to fulfill by "mak[ing] her way by force"? Who did she play with on the street, what were their games, and what kind of social relations did they act out in playing them?

I think we all think we know children like "Mary," but we have to consider what kind of expectations adults had for little girls in the 1930s. To another observer in another time—perhaps even today—"Mary" might simply be a high-spirited youngster, even a tomboy.

Some of the Greatest Geniuses Went to Slumber Parties

In the 1910s-'30s they had what were known as child study groups. Basically, a group of mothers (and sometimes fathers) would gather to hear about the latest research into child development and discuss some assigned reading. I've found some minutes from a New York City group dating from 1931. The discussion topic: homosexuality. One member of the group worried, "Young people today say, 'We don't think anything [negative] about these people. They are just as good as anybody else and some of the greatest geniuses have been homosexuals.' " The task was disabusing the kids of that notion. "The whole idea can be gotten across to the growing child that if there is someone in difficulty it is not our business to stone them but to understand what the difficulties are and to see whether we can help them," explained the leader. "In that way you take away any feeling of exaltation in regard to these people[.]" Hey, no more stoning! Yay!

And "exaltation," yes indeedy. Throughout the minutes of these meetings, the members repeatedly refer to the "glamor" [sic] of homosexuality (sometimes called inversion). In Gay New York, George Chauncey discusses "mainstream" fascination with "the fairy" in the first half of the twentieth century. It's still an amazing read, nearly fifteen years after it was first published. But naturally, he doesn't write about lesbians, because lesbians are "invisible," damn it! I'm sure he tried really hard to find them. Nonetheless, it was very surprising to me that life for gay men in New York was ever anything but life in the closet. It wasn't true. There were African American drag balls discussed in "straight" newspapers and so forth. "Fairies" were visible all over the urban landscape. So what I've found is that in the 1930s the kids also knew about the gays and were cool with it. Adults couldn't shield their eyes from it. (Was it Walter Pater or John Addington Symonds who came up with the line about genius? No matter.)

OK, long quotation time! The members of the child study meetings I am talking about discussed many things about homosexuality, but they were especially concerned about warning signs. And lo and behold, they talked more about girls than boys. Take that, gay male historians! Invisible, my ass. Here's how the leader of the group explained "crushes."

A mother in one of our study groups was very much concerned because her daughter wanted to go to a friend's house to stay all night where the two girls would have to sleep together. The daughter was fifteen and a half and had plenty of boy friends and was perfectly normal but the mother was afraid to let her sleep with her friend. Girls have always slept together but they didn't necessarily become homosexuals.

But suppose we have a girl who by and large does not find much companionship and she likes to sit by herself and do things by herself. She doesn't see boys and they don't see her, but she begins to find pleasure in girls and gets so she worships some girl or woman. I know of one girl who stopped biting her nails because she dedicated one hand to one loved girl friend and the other hand to another. Don't you see what a different picture this is than the two normal girls who just wanted to spend the night in each other's homes? With one picture we should be concerned and not with the other.

Wow, the fingernails! That's the kind of detail historians kill for. It raises so many questions about the nature of affection between teenage girls at that time in history and provides so many clues about things like parent-child relationships and girls' culture. Like, how did this woman's daughter come to tell her mom about her new fingernail habits? I'm guessing that she was a compulsive nail-biter and one day suddenly stopped, and her mom noticed and asked her why. I wonder if the cessation of nail biting was just the girl's idea, or whether all her friends were doing it too—doesn't it sound like one of those school fads? It also might speak to the nature of how people understood "compulsions" in relation to homosexuality. The women in this group were definitely up to date with the latest in psychoanalytic theories, one of which was that nail biting was an oral fixation that betokened an arrest of sexual development. So in the popular understanding, maybe nail biting could lead to homosexuality. Modern parenting: it's always been one big hairball of anxiety.

I don't want to speculate about the answers to all of these questions—that's not my job. I've read enough to know that in some cases girls were just sleeping in the same bed and in others they were "sleeping" in the same bed, if you get my drift. But do girls now sleep in the same bed when they sleep over? If not, that also represents historical change. It could be that parents got the homosexual-panic bug at some point and came to forbid it. It also occurs to me that as people moved to the suburbs, houses just got bigger, and there might have been room for more beds. That's the kind of thing that will take more research.

People always want to know for sure what girls were doing in those beds. A generalization, I think, is impossible, and also pretty pointless. Although I've been tempted to do otherwise, I prefer to let it go unsaid.

The Poetry of Pathology

I come across a lot of personality inventories, IQ tests, and the like in my work, but today I found something called the Chicago Sustained Application Profile in a book of a social worker's case histories from 1933.

A study of the sustained-application profile in history showed constant interruption of her own thoughts, as if she did not quite understand what she was doing. It was to be noted especially that she was working most of the time, but it was not purposeful study. She spent a few minutes on the notes, another few minutes reading the book, and then a few minutes writing, then back to the notes.

This case might as well be labeled "Case No. 123: CheeseQuest," because as readers of this blog no doubt know, this pretty much describes my intellectual method. What struck me about the case study in this book were the diagrams of this girl's attention patterns. They're sort of like vertical frequency-wave graphs: they show two columns, "Distraction" and "Application," with a line that weaves back and forth between the two. When the subject crosses the line into Distraction, the graph notes her action. The names of these actions struck me as unintentional poetry (kind of like the "poetry" of Donald Rumsfeld back in the day). So I give you four poems of the Chicago Sustained Application Profile.

"History Class, Dec. 2"
Turns around
Erases
Looks at notes
Looks at notes
Erases
Looks at notes
Turns sheets of notes
Turns leaves of book
Picks up pocketbook
Puts head on her hands

"History Class, Dec. 8"
Looks on paper
Scratches head
Turns back her notes
Looks at clock
Looks up
Scratches head
Looks ahead
Fills the pen
Looks at guide sheet
Handles several books
Picks up another book

"Study Period, Dec. 1"
Smooths hair
Restless
Restless
Restless

"Study Period, Dec. 2"
Dreams
Rests
Idle

Better to Marry Than to Burn

I'm trying to piece together a theory about psychiatry in the mid-1930s. The idea is that experts (and many lay people) thought there was a reserve of sexual energy in each one of us and we have to find some way to let it out. These "outlets" could render you well adjusted (i.e., if you were engaged in married heterosexual coitus) or maladjusted (i.e., anything else). But everyone needed an outlet of some sort, and if an individual found this outlet in, for example, solitary masturbation or homosexuality, well, it wasn't very healthy, but it was often understandable. It all depended on how your desires were channeled during early childhood. Just your basic Freudian vitalism, I guess.

The one thing that really threatened these experts, I think, was celibacy. It was one of the most important causes (and effects!) of neurosis. Celibacy wasn't so much a choice as the result of negative psychosexual growth. The people whose work I'm studying regarded it as "immaturity."

With this realization, I naturally went on one of my research digressions. There is a relatively new history of celibacy out there. But the idea of celibacy brought to mind the Catholic clergy, so I decided to go to the source: I Corinthians 7. (I have the King James Version, which the Catholic clergy wouldn't use, but whatever. The link above will take you to a site where you can get more translations of the Bible than you can imagine.) This chapter is the kind of Paul everyone demonizes: virginity, virginity, virginity; don't leave your husband, etc. But it also deals with the idea behind priestly celibacy that I learned in CCD (what the Protestants call Sunday school): "He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife" (32-33).

Paul also goes on about celibacy among the laity: "...I would that all men were even as I myself [celibate]. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that. I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, It is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn."

That passage has stuck with me for the last week or so. The 1930s psychiatrists always struck me as trying so hard to be forward-thinking, but in some ways it looks like they were drawing on much older sources and traditions. I have no idea what biblical criticism was like in the 1930s, but I wonder.

Fortune Smiles

Direct from Missouri, the first impression of the 1953 edition of the Girl Scout Handbook arrived on my doorstep this morning. Pressed between its leaves were not one, not two, but three four-leaf clovers. I'm beside myself.

First Impressions

One of my professors told me that one of his students bought all of his sources on Abe Books for like $1. I now believe it. I just ordered the first impression of the Girl Scout Handbook, 1953 edition, for $1 plus $4.99 shipping.

Yes, ILL is free, but ILL sucks.

History of the Book/Cookie Pushers Redux

I was hoping to avoid another archive trip to finish this article, but it looks like I'm going to have to go. Part of this project is to compare two editions of a book. Or rather, two printings of a book—specifically, the Girl Scout Handbook; more specifically, the fourth and sixth impressions. (I'd also like to see the fifth, of course, but I'm pretty sure the most significant changes happened between the fourth and the sixth.) So it would seem that a trip to the Girl Scouts archive is in order. I feel tired just thinking about it.

Interlibrary loan: my savior, and the bane of my existence. I requested "the 1953 edition" of the Girl Scout Handbook. Little did I know that it had gone through so many impressions. The one ILL got me was from late 1955. But it's the right "edition," so I guess I can't be mad.

Ever wonder about those Girl Scouts? Where did they get their marching orders from? Let's peruse the 1953 handbook (eighth impression, November 1955) and see if we can find out.

According to a report submitted to Congress, the most popular Girl Scout badge in 1953 was Cook. (What, not Truck Gardener?!) To earn this badge, a Girl Scout had to "Prepare a breakfast, lunch, or supper for your family or patrol." Now, lots of scholars have jumped all over the Girl Scouts for trying to mold girls into compliant homemakers. But my subversive reading of this badge requirement is that the handbook offers "patrol" as a legitimate alternative to "family": a chosen community of girl peers gets equal billing with a bio family. Let's see, what else. "Cook eggs in three different ways." Hmmm, an activity that undercuts ovobinarisms. Moving on: "Make cocoa with three kinds of milk and decide which kind you prefer." While the signifying Other (the dark "cocoa") here is singular, and outnumbered and thus dominated by the plural, decidedly Eurocentric subject (the light "milk"), the passage also suggests a post-racial hybridity in which the Other can be both "pure" ("unmixed" cocoa powder) and "mongrel" (milkified cocoa for drinking); moreover, one's hybridity may be chosen.

Just for fun, let's open the book at random and see what badge we get. OK, how about Wood? You'll be interested to know the badge pictures a totem pole. Oh, this is great! One of the three absolute requirements to earn this badge: "Make some article of wood for the comfort of your animal friends." I don't know why, but "litter box" comes to mind. Mine would for sure have a totem pole on it.

Here's one called Minstrel—ulp! It's 1955, I don't know what we're in for. Ah, phew, nothing to do with minstrel shows (thank you, Girl Scouts, thank you). "Write a story about the meistersingers in Germany, troubadours in France and Spain, or minstrels of England. Learn several of their songs." Do I have to sing them too?

Finally, Clerk. Oh dear. Absolute requirements: "Dramatize the courteous way to approach salespeople, to wait on people, and to receive visitors in an office"; "Learn how to use and care for the following: typewriter, hand-stapling machine, fountain pen, and automatic pencil. Be able to read a postal scale"; "In a skit show how to apply for a job." According to eBay, this is a rare badge. I guess I'm happy for that. I wonder if the seller can read a postal scale to know how much to charge for shipping!

I'd write more, but I have to go learn to care for my automatic pencil.

Too Many Broths Spoil the Cook

One of the promises I make as CheeseQuest is never to bore you with whining and complaining about my work. I know I've broken this rule on occasion, but the Quest is all about bringing you enough fun facts to make you wish you were writing my dissertation. I hope you'll also cheer me on when it comes to this crazy article I'm writing. Seriously, I thought it would take me two weeks to bang out a first draft. But production is a bit slow. I feel like Nestor Almendros waiting for "the golden hour" to shoot Days of Heaven, by which I mean I can only write the equivalent of Almendros shooting twenty-five minutes of film for an entire day. The Paramount Studios breathing down my back, freaking out about the budget overruns, my narcissistic perfectionism, and the long delays, is my dissertation.

Let me get back on track before I run too far with this analogy and turn into Terrence Malick, the brilliant but underproductive director of Days of Heaven. (CheeseQuest! Step away from the analogy!) What I meant to write about was the state of knowing too much, which one of the Cheeseville U. faculty members always says can torpedo a work. As I'm finding out now, knowing too much causes you to write in too much detail. Each detail leads to more qualification, which, if you're not careful, can lead you to make razor-thin changes in your interpretation. If you're writing from a particular theoretical standpoint, it can cause you to do backflips in order to get your evidence to fit your thesis, which you should never do. And because you've got tons of evidence, your thesis becomes ever more complicated; you may lose track of it completely. I have the additional problem of finding each detail endlessly fascinating. Ultimately, as I am finding, knowing too much makes your work very late, and you're often unhappy with the result.

I spent all of yesterday trying to figure out my protagonist's views on race. This was actually one of my priorities as I was gathering my evidence, because the minor political dustup I am writing about happened in 1954, pretty much to the day of the Brown decision, and my protagonist was an adopted southerner. He personally benefited from segregation and opposed Brown as inimical to southern tradition. The problem that has stumped me is that he had an opportunity to spread a rumor smearing an African American man as a communist, and to the best of my knowledge, he didn't.

Why? I tried to answer this question by looking at his autobiography, but I give that masterpiece almost no credence because the letters he wrote at the time directly contradict it. I looked at his libertarian magnum opus, and while it gave me a good idea of his philosophy in 1960, it was quite unlike what he was writing in 1954. What caused him to shift his views so radically? I tried to figure out his political lineage: which conservatives influenced him? This also stumped me, most likely because he cut his teeth on anti-FDR politics during the Depression, and I've read absolutely nothing in graduate school on contemporary opposition to the New Deal—only the anti-ND conservative movement that culminates (maybe) in Reagan's presidency. I looked at the liberals he seemed to be attacking, but this only led to more confusion because they didn't say what I thought they'd say.

You can see where I'm going with this. Despite all these lacunae, I know too much. I wouldn't even have been asking these questions had I not known this rumor was spreading. It does figure in how the scandal played out, but it's kind of a sideshow. It has to do with race, however, and I'm pretty stubborn about figuring out racial politics. It's political that this guy apparently chose not to spread this rumor. But is it important? I can no longer tell.

Dear Julia Kristeva

What ejects the abject?

Your friend,

CheeseQuest

P.S. Do you like my new umbrella?

I Love Me

In the 1920s, Eddie Cantor had this great song called "I Love Me."

I love me, I love me, I love to squeeze my hand
I love me, I love me, It always feels so grand
With me I get right in my tub
I let myself give me a rub
Oh how I love to feel me scrub
I'm wild about myself.

Ooh, Eddie, so perverted. Actually, I think it's pretty cute. Maybe Eddie Cantor was the last person who could have gotten away with singing a song like "I Love Me."

Anyway, I love me too, in so many ways. As this is a family blog, I'm not going to detail all of those ways, except to note that I do not take baths.

What was the point of this post? Oh, yeah, I got a new umbrella. It's Marimekko, pink and orange. Go Finns! This is one of the ways I say "I love me." Buying shit.

(I have been trying to upload a picture of my beautiful Finnish umbrella for fifteen minutes, but the signal in this cafe is really weak. So here's the link.)

CheeseQuest Totally Loses It at the Stop 'n' Shop

Yesterday it took me about five hours to forgive the local Stop 'n' Shop for not stocking fresh mint. Now I am all in a stew because it did not have scallions. Freaking scallions! And the gourmet (HA!) cheese section is now half kosher. To think I moved to this town pretty much for the supermarket.

Bathroom Anticommunists Take On Collectivist Cookie Pushers

Cheeseville has two major employers: Cheeseville U. and a giant conglomerate known for making products that you probably have in your bathroom. We'll try to give this company a name that sounds like it could be one of those products: Cheesemoxynol Inc. Today I found a letter from the man who was president of Cheesemoxynol Inc. in the 1950s among the small mountain of photocopies I had made in Eugene. There are tons of buildings and institutions in Cheeseville named for this man. And here I am with his confident signature sitting in my lap! The historians out there can, I'm sure, relate to this moment of frisson. I'll rehearse a portion of this letter here:

Aware as I am of the infiltration tactics of the collectivists I should like to aid in ridding the country of this dangerous influence. For some time it has seemed to me that the best way to do this is to take up the cudgels of freedom in specific circumstances. This is such a circumstance.

What was the circumstance he was referring to? What was the "dangerous influence"? Why, the systematic brainwashing of little girls known best for selling awesome (though expensive) cookies door-to-door. Those communist wolves in liberal internationalists' clothing would stop at nothing, nothing, I tell you!

With this letter from the Cheesemoxynol president, I can't help feeling that this article is going to make the pages of Us Weekly. What a scoop!

CheeseQuest's First Grant

Good news—the nice people at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe saw fit to give me a goodly-sized chunk o' change (more than I asked for, in fact) to do more work in the papers of Miriam Van Waters, a Progressive penologist and superintendent of a girls' reformatory in the early twentieth century. I wrote about one of her articles a couple months ago.

I'm excited, because I went to the Schlesinger a year ago, and let me tell you, it totally spoiled me. Lovely people, gorgeous reading room, and possibly the best luxury of all: quick box-retrieval time (I think they keep a lot of their collections on site). It was one of the first archives I went to, and most of the other ones have failed to measure up. (The exception might be the Social Welfare History Archives at the University of Minnesota, which, like the Schlesinger, has fascinating material, a dedicated staff, and a reading room that was quite comfortable.) Important fact: Schlesinger is pronounced "shlay-sing-er," not "shlessinjer."

Anyway, one of my missions will be to figure out how Miriam Van Waters and her Progressive colleagues managed to square their optimism about girl delinquents' potential to "go right" with how some (many?) of these girls actually behaved—running away, setting fires, and worse. Van Waters believed maternal love could reform girls. So how did she feel when these girls essentially rejected her love?

And another thing: many of the girls' reformatories she approved of in the 1920s were hellholes by the 1930s. Some of them performed forced sterilizations. Did she know this? What did she think?

Fingers crossed that stuff turns up.

Case 89

I recently had a true "duh" moment (not unlike the one I had a few months ago). Did you know that if you're using a book that has a bunch of case histories chopped up and strewn over ten chapters, there's this amazing technique called "taking notes" that can allow you to reassemble these histories? I must admit, I prefer to see them all chopped up. I guess it's an aesthetic thing; like, a sculpture is more interesting to me than a hunk of marble, and part of the pleasure of a study in psychology or social work is to see how the author chops up and arranges the traces of the human beings who form her data.

But hey, you don't have to do it that way all the time! The other day I was reading a book called Varieties of Adolescent Experience (1926), by E. Leigh Mudge. (Could you ask for a better name if you were a psychiatric social worker? No, you could not.) I had great hopes that it would resemble William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, a beloved of my adviser's, if not mine, but it would give me something to talk about with him. In any case, E. Leigh's method was to give a survey to 100 female college students and have them write their life history. So these are examples of relatively rare case studies from the 1920s that use first-person narratives.

I'm not sure why, but I thought, gee, maybe I should write down the cases that seem like tomboys and keep track of them throughout the book. And holy mackerel, I'm glad I did. I've pieced together one so far: Case 89. I'll let her speak for herself.

I was always tomboyish; I am yet at times.... Before I entered my teens, I loved to take part in the wildly exciting boy-amusements. Indian games gave my childish soul thrills of delight, even though at night I did dream of horrible redskins who were lying in the corners of our haymow to grab me. I even flew kites and performed marvelous "stunts" on the trapeze in the vacant lot back of our barn.

One day, however, I discovered that I did n't want to play with "horrid little boys" who were interested in guns and dogs and Indians and dirt.... But I was restless and uneasy if I tried to be still. I did n't know why—but some funny feeling inside of me just would n't let me keep quiet. So...I played fairies—not quiet, beautiful, passive fairies, but more in the category of imps. For hours at a time two "dearest girls in the world" and I floated gracefully around the yard to the strains of weirdly enchanting music.

My thirteenth year saw a peculiar individual.... I was filled with the idea that I wanted to be a deaconess. I suppose this came as a result of the visit of Miss Susie ----. I admired her so much that I felt hers to be the very highest calling in the world.... Not content to wait until I was old enough, I persuaded my two boon companions to play deaconess.

I felt that I was called to help make humanity happy, and for a time I exulted in lecturing big, loppy trees who were drunkards with big families to support, and in comforting brown-eyed susans, who were frail wives, spending their lives in sweat-shops or over the wash-tub, and the dirty little children whom I could please with just a smile or a word.

Tomboy I was for a time, then religious, moody, violently happy. Through it all, however, my mother moved as the great, true heart who believed in me. To her I told everything. To her I went to cry in her arms when petty griefs arose.... I believe that it is to this chum, Mother o' Mine, that I owe all the comfort and content that I got out of that trying period; and when to others I appeared uncivil, grouchy, or hysterically happy, to her I was only a little girl who was growing up.

The Newsprint Closet?

Last month I got taken to task for being tempted to interpret some of my subjects as "gay." Well, I'm tempted again. Do you see the sketch above? Can you read the caption? This ran in the New York Times in June 1927.

I have a friend who has a theory about the Times. It goes like this: the New York Times editors are not liberal, but the photo editors are. How else to explain the rather frequently encountered photos of Cheney snarling, Rumsfeld looking diabolical, and Bush looking clueless? (He had this theory in the early days of the Iraq War.)

There's another theory out there, from a guy named Vito Russo, author of the great book The Celluoid Closet. Russo argued that homo Hollywoodians managed to sneak the gay into mainstream films via effeminate and butch characters, cross-dressing scenes, throwaway jokes, and so forth. It's pretty convincing—see the awesome documentary (some clips here) based on the book, which has all the footage that Russo talks about.

Combining the two theories, I'm thinking it might be possible that the Times had photo editors/illustrators who were "that way" in the 1920s. Seriously, I'm not looking for this stuff. It just has a way of finding me.

When You're a Jet, You're a Jet All the Way

This is the cockpit of the Airbus A320. It is the jet I flew on from PDX to MSP. And guess what, I happened to be sitting next to a flight attendant! She was mostly concerned with chatting with her fellow flight attendants, but for the last half hour or so she talked to me and the guy next to me about flying, jets, airports, and turbulence. Guys, I got the poop! Here are some interesting facts.

• Flight attendants aren't assigned to specific routes. They look at flight plans themselves, consider things like which planes fly on those routes, and then bid on the routes they want. I'm not too clear on what this involves, but it's way more complicated than I thought. The flight attendant I was talking to likes DC9s and 757s the best. She called the 757 the '57, so I did too. I complained about the hard landing (complete with bounce onto the runway) the last time I rode a 757. She gave me a blank look, and I realized it probably wasn't the plane, it was the pilot, or wind patterns, or something else.

• When the pilot lands one wheel at a time (back wheel, back wheel, front wheel), this is not a mistake. It is because of wind shear. The wind is blowing the plane from the side, and when you land a plane in wind shear, this is how you adapt your landing.

• Also not a mistake: the figure eight pattern around an airport. I said that I felt like the pilot had missed his exit off the freeway, especially when descending from low-lying clouds. No, this is a holding pattern. I told her about the time my Q400 (the turboprop) was about to land in Newark and we pulled up and flew around for twenty minutes. The pilot said it was to maintain even spacing between the planes. She said that she'd once been on a 747 (a massive plane) that was about to land in Detroit, only a DC9 was taking off on the same runway. If the 747 had landed, it would have caught the back of the DC9 as it took off. So the tower made them pull up. "They don't usually do that to a 747," she said. No doubt!

• The binging noises all mean something different, and they really bug flight attendants. "We're always getting binged," she said. "On the '57 the bings go bing, bing, but on these planes they go bing bing bing bing bing. I hate it!" She pointed to an exit sign. "In a few seconds you'll see the exit sign light up and hear another bing. That means we have about two minutes till we absolutely have to be in our jump seats. But I don't need the bing, I can tell by the way the plane's flying."

• The amount of turbulence on every flight varies, but you can count on it in some places. I noticed the flight attendant was turning green whenever we hit some bumps. Was this a bad sign? Shouldn't she be used to this? I asked her if she was OK, and she said, "Yes, I'm just pregnant." Oh! She leaned over to look out the window. "I'm just trying to see what approach we're taking," she said. "If we fly over the lake, we should be OK, but if we go over the valley, we're gonna get thumped. It looks like we're coming in over the lake." We talked some more about wind tunnels and the like, then we started turning. She looked out the window. The ground was visible below. "Oh, I shouldn't have looked," she said, and turned green again. "I wonder if we're coming in over the valley. Oh, looks like it. We're gonna get thumped. Sorry, guys."

For all the shaking, the landing was amazingly smooth. "Wow, nice landing!" she said. I agreed. I took out my boarding pass to see where my connecting flight would be. "Where are you going?" she asked. Newark. "Ugh, well, have fun." I am trying to take her words to heart my first morning back in Cheeseville. Trying.

Oh, Give Me a Home Where the Boxy Cars Roam

It's about 3 p.m. on the West Coast and I've already counted 20 Volvos, including the Holy Grail: the 240 Series station wagon in creamy white. One creative driver painted his Volvo in pink racing flames (like Greased Lightning in the movie Grease only on a boxy Swedish car). Another had a seashore scene on the hood. Who says social democracy has to be boring? I think the one pictured above has it all: Obama sticker, bike rack, and patriotic Swedish flag sticker.

I realized the other day that this is how I go on vacation: find some work-related excuse to travel to exotic, Volvo-suffused places. Don't get me wrong, the research has been fruitful. Yesterday I was going through clipping files that had letters to the editor of papers like the Park Ridge Shopper written by right-wing ladies decrying the creeping influence of communism and one-worldism. Today it was radio commentary scripts about similar topics. Although I was disappointed not to find anything about water fluoridation, I did learn that public housing leads to overcrowding. Hey, why didn't I realize that before? In any case, it has been an altogether relaxing trip compared to the hectic pace of research in Indiana, where I really did feel under the gun at all times to get my case histories transcribed. Here are some of the extracurricular things I've done.

Solo martini night! Richard at Bar 201 was kind enough to mix me a proper Ketel One martini (stirred, not shaken) and serve me a cheese plate. He was a little shaky on the service with the latter ("This is cheddar, no wait, it's blue, this is Chèvre, and this...I don't know what this is"), but he was cute. Drink and cheese plate together cost $12, and you know on the East Coast it could have easily cost $25. This meant a second drink was an option. But I'd skipped lunch and I was edging toward loopy. I decided against another martini, bid goodbye to Richard, and started a FoodQuest. I found a resto promising "Northwest Cuisine." I don't know what I was expecting. It turned out to be a steak and salad kind of place. I walked in and the host asked me if I had tickets for Spamalot, which was playing across the street in about 45 minutes. "Me, Spamalot?" I asked. He laughed and showed me inexplicably to a six top. My server came and asked me if I wanted anything to drink. I didn't realize there was a drink menu. I asked her if they had an IPA, and it turned out they had two local brews. Of course, how could I not want to help local breweries? I also ordered a burger with some very aggressive toppings. I think it was two kinds of cheese, bacon, avocado, L&T, sauteed onions, and rich, creamery butter. Ha ha, there was no butter. Even though I was chowing down on this big burger, the IPA was getting to me. I ended up leaving about an inch of beer because I was getting drunk and feeling embarrassed about it. I got on the bus to go home. Now, the streets in West Eugene go in the order of the presidents (although they skip John Adams for some reason). The closest president street to where I am staying is Polk. I pulled the cord at Madison Street, because I thought Polk was a few presidents away. I'll leave it to you and Wikipedia to tell me how many blocks I walked that night to get home, because somehow I was nearly gone after less than two drinks, and I can't remember.

I also went to the movies at this converted church. That was interesting. Unfortunately I was in the dark most of the time, so I could not see the theater too much. Also, I watched The Watchmen. Have you watched The Watchmen? If not, spare yourself. I feel like I spent about two and a half hours learning about glowing blue penises but not much else. If you have seen it, you know what I mean.

More later. It's a lovely day here.

Lunch

For lunch today I had a delicious grilled tempeh over quinoa with peanut sauce, topped with cilantro, for $6.50.

Guess where I was eating.

The UO student center.

We Can Walk on the Moon. Why Can't We Walk on a Cloud?

I file this report from the wilds of Portland, Oregon, the first stop on my jumbled trip to Eugene to do research on a right-wing nutjob at the University of Oregon. I wanted to take a break from my dissertation research, so I'm doing...research on a different topic. Chuckle all you want. Even more amusing were my efforts to put this trip together, the details of which I won't bore you with. But I arrived in PDX last night and made it to the hostel. I got a private room for $63, about the same rate as an airport hotel, but indescribably comfy after ten hours of traveling. I flopped at about 9:30 PDT and woke at about 6:30. I think that's good enough to adjust me to Pacific time.

I love and hate air travel. I hate almost everything about airports—security screenings, overpriced food, the CNN monitors that I am pretty sure are Orwellian telescreens that Big Brother watches us from. But there are random things that fascinate me and flicker in my imagination. One is airplanes and their relative merits. I am starting to notice how they are built and have even gone to the company web sites to see how much it would cost to buy one. I wonder about random things, such as how working conditions at Embraer (the Brazilian company that makes regional jets) compare to Bombardier (the Canadian company that makes those commuter turboprops), and whether Boeing's 787 "Dreamliner" has any future.

I flew from Newark to Minneapolis in an Embraer 175, which I don't think I've ever been on. It rolled up to the gate at EWR (how I love that ritual, with the little guys with red sticks guiding those big planes to their parking spaces), and I noticed how massive the engines were compared to the plane. Imagine tying exercise balls to your shoulders and sticking out your arms. Then sit down. I couldn't imagine how this plane got off the ground. The flight was pretty empty. I was sitting at the back of the plane, and a flight attendant asked me and a couple other people to move to the front. I'm guessing this was to adjust the ballast of the jet. Anything to get us off the ground, I thought. So I moved without hesitation. It was a good flight on the whole. The 175 turned out to be pretty roomy. You could get your roller bags in the overhead compartments (which you can't do on the tiny Embraer 145), and there was plenty of legroom. The pilot did one of those weird flight plans where they overshoot the airport and do a figure eight and go back. I hate that. I feel like they're making a mistake.

My flight to Portland was on a 757, which I haven't been on in a while. I forgot how freaking uncomfortable they are. There are rows of three seats across, and I was stuck in a middle seat. In the back. Behind a family with two kids. One of whom screamed the entire time. On my left was a nice grandmotherly type. But to my right was Madame La Crazy. She got into her seat juggling a large purse, a smaller bag, a Starbucks coffee, and a Ben and Jerry's milkshake. She managed to get everything stowed for takeoff (meaning the drinks went between her legs), but once we reached 10,000 feet she deployed her tray table, got out the small bag and the big bag, rummaged around the latter, and pulled out five copies of Time and the Wall Street Journal, in that order. When the beverage service came around, she bought a red wine and drank it with ice. She also took a bottled water when the flight attendant offered that toward the end of the flight. By then Madame La Crazy had the following balanced on the tray table: magazines, cup of wine, bottle of wine, Starbuck's coffee cup, Ben and Jerry's cup, cup of water, and at least seven crumpled tissues. At one point the plane started to bank to the left and I was positive that at least three of these would come crashing into my lap. But she was a good citizen and held her arm around them so they wouldn't slide off the tray table. Then, as we started our descent, I saw what looked like a giant mountain. Then I realized it was a giant mountain! I couldn't believe it. Mount Hood, totally gorgeous as it peeked through the clouds. The flight attendants came around for the last time, and this very no-nonsense one pretty near yelled at Madame La Crazy for not getting rid of all that stuff before. Finally we touched down, if you can call it that, a few minutes early—we hit the runway and bounced up and hit the ground again. At the gate we deplaned from an exit in the coach cabin, and the fight attendants made us let the first class passengers off first! What crap.

I enjoyed the light rail trip to central Portland, although it took about an hour. From the PGE Park stop it was a short walk to the hostel. I totally remembered the order of the streets from when I lived here for a summer in 1992: Burnside, Couch, Davis, Everett, Flanders, Glisan. Northwest Portland streets go alphabetically like that; easy to remember. I'm about two hours away from checkout time, then it's over to the train station, where I'll catch the Cascades Regional to Eugene. I am not stopping at Powell's Books, because I just can't spend any more money on this trip than I already am.

More on research to come.

Image: interior of TWA Terminal at JFK Airport, designed by Eero Saarinen.

Random Cuteness

What better way to enjoy 75 and sunny?

Gay or Not?

Ordinarily, I don't care about sniffing out gay men and lesbians in the archive by relying on circumstantial evidence. Documents are only fragments of people's lives, and what's left to the historical record seems in some way to belong to the person whose life is described. This is especially pertinent to my work, since I am using lots of case histories, and I find it difficult to correct for contemporary language, values, and diagnostic categories. If people aren't described in the sourced as homosexuals or "perverts," I'm reluctant to take that leap myself. It's not that I'm an empiricist who insists on finding sources like diaries that say "I had sex with so-and-so"—far from it. I just prefer a sense of mystery, which I suppose is a form of postmodernism. Why pin someone down when it's impossible to say who they really were?

Which is a long way to set up today's report. This is an excerpt of one of the questionnaires I've been looking at. I think I'm going to have to make an exception to my rule.

This is a woman describing her husband.

[Q] 1. Describe your husband’s appearance.
[A] Blonde, very effeminate, tall, broad shouldered, very careful of his weight.

[Q] 2. What sort of a personality does he have?
[A] Nerves high-pitched, good natured, in love with life to the nth degree. Loves his wife but loves other women too. Good mixer. Some would think he’s ideal if they like that mode of living—night clubs and fast living—prevalent among musicians and theatrical people—to my trouble.

[Q] 3. Do you have the feeling your husband is more highly sexed (i.e., wants more frequent intercourse) than you?
[A] He is.

[Q] 4. How did you feel about your first intercourse with your husband?
[A] I menstruating at marriage. Gave me opportunity to lie in bed 4 nights with a man without intercourse. ...

***

[Q] 7. How much preliminary show of affection, caressing and embracing, talk of his love and admiration for you, does your husband display before actual intercourse is attempted?
[A] None. Come home at irregular hours—comes home late—often has to wake me up and I’m in no mood. Times early in the morning when I feel like it, then he has to sleep.

***

[Q] 14. How frequently do you and your husband have intercourse?

[Q] a. During the first year of your marriage?
[A] Every night
[Q] b. During the past month?
[A] Much sickness in the house—not typical
[Q] c. Is this typical?
[A] Typically twice a week.
[Q] d. When is your desire likely to be strongest?
[A] In the mornings, after a good nights rest.

[Q] 15. Do you and your husband frequently display affection for one another, embrace and kiss each other without culminating in intercourse?
[A] No—at least I’m not affectionate. He was more so up till 4 years ago. Then his work put him into burlesque contact[.] Has worried me. He often says, "You go your way, I go mine". (crying). Don’t feel we're ready for either of us to give the children up. He's having his good times—Yet there's a fragment for appearance’s sake between us[.] ... He's artistic, I'm too stout and matronly—I've tried to discuss it, he's cowardly.

***

[Q] a. Are there any special phases of sex play, exposure or intercourse which are repulsive to you?
[A] Yes
[Q] What are they?
[A] When I go to burlesque houses, see these girls play with themselves on the stage—once I got so disgusted I had to leave and take a cab home.

I put it to you, dear reader: gay or not?

How Green Was My Archive

You know you've been doing too much work when you start to get possessive of the archive you're doing research in. Today there happened to be a lot of other people in the reading room. And by "a lot of other people" I mean four. On one hand I think this archive is so great and the people there are so nice and helpful that I want them to be really famous, get more money, move to a bigger building, and sell a ton of T-shirts. On the other hand, I don't like being crowded (i.e. have two other people sitting at the same eight-by-ten-foot table as me) or waiting over ten minutes for the staff to fetch my sources (I guess I could be waiting 48 hours like at a lot of the big places). And when you share space with people, the likelihood that you will end up next to a chronic nose-picker goes way up. Not that it happened today. But it could have!

Slowly progress is coming to my lush valley in the hills of the Midwest. Plentiful outlets for laptops, more desks, unshuttered windows, and prettier carpeting may come, but so may crabby additional staffers and extremely anal policies about leaving your stuff in lockers (they do require it, but the lockers are in the reading room, and I bring my bag to the table to pack up my computer and notebook). And like the character Huw in the movie (and book) this post refers to, I will end up an old Welsh man reminiscing about life before the coal mines.

The Kingdom of Evils Is Within You

Guys, check out this book immediately. I was reading about it in Elizabeth Lunbeck's awesome book The Psychiatric Persuasion. She uses tons of case studies from the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, founded by psychiatrists and social workers in 1912 as a modern institution that they hoped would replace the nineteenth-century asylum, with its physical restraints and other treatments they considered barbaric.

The Kingdom of Evils was written by the head psychiatrist dude and the chief social worker of the BPH. It's amazing—100 case studies ranging from no. 1, "Agnes Jackson, pathetic nuisance," to no. 100, "Henry Allen, draughtsman who had to work alone." Don't miss no. 23, "Julia Brown, who lived as a man." I think my own favorite is no. 2, "Richard Sully, morbid altruist." Richard kept founding clubs for boys. He brought refreshments to the meetings, and resorted to eating them himself when no one showed up.

Just check out the table of contents and tell me which diagnosis fits you best. I think I'm "enraged by the vindictive ticking of the clock" (no. 69)—why must time pass so quickly during my fellowship year?! I am enraged!

I vowed to stay off the nerd crack, but it's a monster.

P.S. I'm back in Indiana for two weeks to look at more sexual case histories.

"Welfare, Adjustment, and Education"

Miriam Van Waters, 1922:

"If one were asked to sum up in a phrase the background idea of correctional institutions for girls in this country, it would be, not punishment, nor discipline, but 'welfare, adjustment, and education.' The strictly modern institution is a composite of school, home, workshop, hospital and laboratory, and its plant and entire atmosphere express its goal as re-education and the adjustment to normal life of the girl whose parents and whose community have failed her.

...

"Helen, aged fifteen, had run away from three institutions, had bobbed her hair, wore boys' clothes, smoked, drank and beat her way on freight cars. She had an irresistible sense of the comic and she had gifted hands. In the Kansas State School she was set to making original dolls. She made them of cloth, of wood, and of paper. Their faces resembled those of the people she had met: porters, policemen, waiters, tramps, Japs, jugglers and matrons. She made rabbit dolls with human faces. Gradually as she sat day after day in her discipline room, for her language made segregation necessary, her dolls began to have a commercial value. She 'found herself' and later when she was put in charge of the kitchen department her only gesture of independence was to hang a sign, which I am glad to state remained unmolested:

"NO SLANG HERE: BY HECK."

Paging Michel Foucault...

Crushed

I'm a big one for parallel reading, also known as following tangents. While going through an advice book, I saw a reference to a 1929 novel called Schoolgirl by a sixteen-year-old writer, which "gave a graphic description of the development of homosexual tendencies in a group of girls more or less segregated from contacts with the opposite sex." Google Books had only a snippet view, so I was forced to order the thing from ILL. And for once, ILL came through for me! Schoolgirl arrived from the Hartford library system last week. And wow, did this book deliver.

While it doesn't portray boyish girls, Schoolgirl is a really good document about the "environmental causes" theory of homosexuality, which gained currency when the vogue for psychoanalysis took hold in the early twentieth century. One of the big fears parents had was that single-sex environments would turn their children into sex perverts. (I don't know whether it's because I'm reading so much about girls, but this fear seems to have applied more to girls than boys, with the exception of men's prison environments.) By the 1920s, middle-class adults knew that adolescent girls had sexual desires; the problem was in finding a wholesome outlet for these desires so that they could effect a satisfactory heterosexual "adjustment." You can see the dilemma. You didn't want girls to pet or, heaven forbid, "go the limit," but you wanted them to date, go to mixers, kiss a little, that kind of thing. If, however, there weren't any boys around, the girl's "sex urges" would go for the only available outlet, other girls.

This is the position that Schoolgirl endorses. Being written by a sixteen-year-old girls' school student lent it an air of authenticity. Despite the controversy it provoked, its message was au courant and intellectually sound enough to appear in a 1930 advice book.

So you didn't think I'd take you this far without a juicy quotation, did you? Here's a sample:

A house full of girls and all apparently contented! Naomi watched them silently, and wondered if it would be disconcerting to the vanity of a male to walk in upon this satisfied séance of femininity. She turned to Olive.

"Why do girls have crushes, Olive—on each other?"

In the half-dark, Olive's brown face was troubled.

"...I don't guess you've been with girls a lot; neither had I before I came up here. But I asked Dad—about—about crushes and—"

"You asked your Dad?" Naomi was shocked and incredulous....

"...My Dad's different. I tell him everything I get messed up over, and he can do wonders figuring things out. About crushes he said—that being with boys a lot and then being suddenly transferred to a girls' school with only a lot of females—well, you just sort of transfer your affections. No, not affections, but emotions or something. Do you get what I mean?"

Naomi nodded her head. "You sort of crave—uh—well—uh—"

"Exactly. Sex excitement, or something, whatever you want to call it. Rotten, but I suppose some of us weak little nimpcompoops can't be blamed. No backbone or sense either."

This is only the psychological theory the book presents. It is not the reason the book was so controversial. To find that out, you'll have to go through ILL.