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.

There's No Business Like No Business

Hey, kids, let's put on a show! We'll call it "Gold Diggers of 2009," and it'll be all about trying to get people to give you money now that Cheeseville U. has announced that for 2009-2010 it will no longer fund grad students past their eighth year. Nope, not even tuition remission. Not that we're starting our ninth years, but in 2010-2011 Cheeseville U. will no longer fund grad students past their seventh year. Now we're getting into Slightly Scary Land, huh? You better hope there's no family emergency or serious illness in your near future. Or that you don't have to change your topic at the last minute because your committee members can't get their acts together for a year to approve your prospectus. Or that your archive doesn't burn down. Or that that foundation you were counting on to give you a grant didn't get sucked into the Bernie Madoff vortex.

Oh, wait, I've got it! Let's get the New York Times to write a blistering exposé about the academic job market. Impossible? Well, how about a quizzical piece about how jobs for humanities Ph.D.'s are drying up? Start it off with a guy who applied for two dozen (two dozen!) jobs (can you hear the sound of my hands wringing?) and try to keep from wondering why he only found two dozen institutions worthy of receiving his cover letters and teaching portfolios. Raise your hand if you know people who sent out more than forty within the past several years, way before the Times discovered this "downturn in jobs for Ph.D.'s in the humanities." It's true that lots of searches were cancelled this year because of hiring freezes and the AHA reported a 15 percent decline in the number of schools doing interviews at the annual conference. But what exactly is new here? Did the Times send Jimmy Olsen, Boy Reporter, to write this? Anyone who even applied to grad school within the past fifteen years knew this (and if you didn't, you should have your undergrad adviser assassinated). Academe is kind of like show business, except in show business you will probably land in New York at some point and take a turn as a clueless witness on Law and Order, the residuals from which will likely be higher than the royalties you'd get from publishing a book with an academic press. You will also come away with professional headshots instead of five hundred books that weigh a ton. Times, wake up.

This post was brought to you today by the letters C, R, A, and B.

Stomping the Blues

My research is massively hung up by grading midterms. I was either really naive or really ambitious to think I could grade 95 bluebooks in less than a week (although I didn't know when I agreed to do this that the prof wanted "extensive comments"). I am thus missing an important conference I've been dying to go to for a couple of months. My IRB application is languishing somewhere on my hard drive. And I've forgotten where I was in my research. (Thank god I have my blog to remind me!)

Unlike most grad students, I don't care all that much about student spelling mistakes and grammatical infelicities on in-class exams (take-home essays are another story). I was a copy editor for eight years; once you've been around that long, you know that even hugely famous writers can't spell. But I still insist on historical accuracy and I can't be bothered to argue about what students "meant" to write. I grade the words on the page, period.

So far, I've only had to write one "?!" in the margin. "?!" is a nice way of saying "WTF." Here it is:

"The Birth of a Nation: This film is important to so much for its historical accuracy but for showing the prevalence of rasicm in America. The film is based around a group of African American slaves that rise up and hold their white masters prisoners only until the KKK arrives to save them.... The heros are white supremes.... The movie...in no way accurately represents the people of its time accept its racism."

Did this kid even watch the movie? If so, where were the white supremes? Somewhere Flo Ballard is smacking her forehead.