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.