South Dakota

I went there once. We visited the family farm where my dad, although he was born in CA, spent the first dozen years of his life. The land was still being farmed, but all the structures were collapsing. The barn was an old swaybacked thing.

Anyhoo, after years of watching the antics of our older cousins and their children and grandchildren (yep, we were lapped generationally twice), a more level-headed cousin shook his head and declared the lot of us South Dakota descendants as being from "the no-diving end of the gene pool."

I won't go into details, but let's say he may have a point. With the news of the latest legislation in South Dakota, however, it appears any relatives seeking to find better lives for themselves and their families by controlling family size through terminating pregnancies are SOL. They'll just have to carry on the proud family tradition of losing their children to quasi-Darwinian and carceral processes.

Many of us are angry today. Fortunately, Phantom Scribbler is willing to hold our hands while we read "The Women's Health and Human Life Protection Act." (Which, by the way, appears to have very little to do with protecting women's health. Bastards.) Be sure to read the discussion in the comments thread.

Today was good

1. Wrote like a madwoman until about 11:30 a.m., and printed out 52 pages of TCTRTBC. I hope to write another 15 or so by the end of the weekend. I handed the first 52 pages to Fantastic Adviser at lunch.

2. At lunch we talked briefly about blogging. I told her I had a blog in which I referred to her as Fantastic Adviser. She laughed. (phew)

Lunch was terrific, mostly because we didn't talk too much about the diss, a process that usually makes me feel really inarticulate because, well, I get really inarticulate. Instead we chatted about teaching, her current research, writing books, and a panoply of other professional issues. She told me the department wants to hire me as a lecturer next year to cover a couple of sabbatical leaves if nothing else comes through and assured me I'd find a teaching position someplace once I'm on the market with a Ph.D. in hand because I have lots of experience and my student evals are stellar. It's nice to hear such assurances (even if I don't really believe them) and even better to have a back-up plan for next year.

3. Had an awkward moment pre-lunch. Fantastic Adviser was talking to Really Great Program Director before I showed up at the café. As FA walked away from RGPD, I told RGPD I was nominating FA for a mentoring award, and asked if RGPD would be willing to write a letter in support of FA, since FA mentors many students in RGPD's program. Unfortunately, the restaurant was loud and RGPD thought I was saying I was nominating RGPD. I corrected her (gently, I hope), but awkward conversation followed. I'm still a bit anxious about that, even though I'm sure I made myself clear.

4. Taught two sections of pretty lethargic students. It's that time of the quarter for all of us.

5. Got a revise and resubmit from the first journal to which I've ever submitted an article. First reader didn't seem to have too many problems with the article and gave me some really helpful comments. Second reader wasn't quite so fond of the piece. Oh well. I think I will revise it in a few weeks once I've had another prof look over the chapter from which the article sprung.

6. Came home to happy family, with boy occasionally shrieking from painful poop. Within 20 minutes of my coming home, boy was asleep in my arms.

It's a glamorous life.

But I'm happy.

Dead air! Dead air!

Please excuse my silence. I'm working on the dissertation. In fact, I've already written several pages this evening (yay me!). I've promised myself I'll have a complete draft of The Chapter That Refuses to Be Completed finished by noon tomorrow, even if it means cutting sections from it.

I will finish, dammit!

More soon. . .

UPDATE: Well, I blew the noon deadline, and I'm meeting with my adviser in an hour so I have a bus to catch in a few minutes. I've printed out 52 pages of TCTRTBC. I think it may hit 70 pages, at which point Fantastic Adviser will certainly tell me to divide it into two chapters, each of which will need to be further fleshed out and made to stand on their own. Grrrrr.

(S)crapbooking

If I'm going to accurately chronicle Lucas's first sixth months of life in a scrapbook, there must be a page about poop.

Why haven't I seen poop pages in other parents' scrapbooks? I mean, it's on Mr. Trillwing's and my minds almost all the time: Has our little Man in Black pooped this week? When did he last poop? What was the consistency of said poop? We even have a "Dump Chart" tacked to the kitchen wall. The dump chart is definitely going into the (s)crapbook, maybe with the labels from the suppository jar and the prunes.

Tonight Lucas screamed as he tried to have a BM. He fell asleep mid-poop. Can you imagine falling asleep mid-poop?

Anyway, I'll be sure to share the Poop Page with you when I'm finished, but first, I have some other crap to take care of: midterms to grade.

Best movie review I've read in a long time

It's up at Dean Dad's.

The man is brilliant.

Inspiration for trillwing

All right--I can't remember (and my searches won't turn up) which wonderful academic blogger mentioned she had created a flyer to motivate herself to work, but I loved the idea. So I decided to steal an image (from the California Academy of Sciences website) of my favorite scientist and dissertation subject, Alice Eastwood, to create this:
Many thanks to the blogger from whom I'm stealing this idea (anyone remember who it is so that I can give credit?) and to Ms. Eastwood herself. She was a dear.

First Thoughts: Scrapbooking and Feminism

I'm supposed to be a scholar, so I thought I'd behave like one from time to time in my role as chief curator of The Clutter Museum. Accordingly, I'm starting a new series here called "First Thoughts." In it, I'll share my first, largely unedited ramblings thoughts and very preliminary research on topics of interest to me. These pieces will likely raise more questions than they answer.

Today's First Thoughts piece was inspired by my recent run-in with scrapbooking.

Stumbling into scrapbooking
Last weekend, through almost no fault of my own, I acquired a Creative Memories consultant. A friend invited me to a scrapbooking party she was having at her home. Since she's a new mom and hangs out with a lot of new moms, and because Lucas and Mr. Trillwing were included on the invitation, I assumed it would be a kind of mommy-n-me deal, light on the scrapbooking. How wrong I was! Aside from the hostess, I was the only one of the all-mommy party who had a child in tow, and I may have been the only one there who had not previously been exposed to scrapbooking.

The afternoon began with a presentation by a Creative Memories consultant, a young mother who was very enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the company's product line and a savvy marketer who made recommendations at the party and later followed up on my order with more recommendations and event announcements by phone and e-mail. Each of the participants selected a couple of photos and our consultant led us through the creation of complimentary "Short Story" cards, folded pieces of cardstock that came packaged with a few stickers and a couple scraps of decorative paper. Steps 1-4: crop, mount, journal, and enhance. According to the dominant Creative Memories aesthetic, it's clear my "Hands Off, Mommy! It's Great-Grandma's Turn" card pushed the boundaries of the acceptable. I didn't use the appropriate tools, so my cuts were crooked, and my lettering was not in Happy Schoolteacher Print. Oh well. . . Maybe I'm not cut out for this stuff.

We then moved on to the sales/"workshop" portion of the presentation, where the consultant educated us about Creative Memories products and provided us with catalogs and order forms. She had some supplies with her so we could purchase the essentials (blank album pages, adhesives, decorative paper, etc.) and complete a page or two on the spot. As luck would have it, the usually mild-mannered Lucas used this event to demonstrate his Fussy Boy repertoire, so I didn't get much done, but the consultant was kind enough to check on my progress periodically anyway. We all took breaks to look over one another's shoulders and watch as the pages came together. When people glanced at the page I was sweating over, however, their reactions, I think, were considerably less enthusiastic than their reactions to other folks' scrapbooking. Again, I wasn't buying into, er, didn't grasp the Creative Memories aesthetic. Shall we illustrate?

Here's the Creative Memories ideal, as illustrated on their website:


With my mind on the kind of scrapbook Mr. Trillwing and a future Lucas might enjoy, and motivated by a desire to go at this scrapbooking thing freehand instead of using all the templates and cutting tools, I created this:



A detail:

Yeah, it's not pretty.

Anyway, I like to be liked, especially by people I'm meeting for the first time, and particularly by new moms who might want to invite Lucas and me into their playgroups, so I was then, and remain now, conflicted: Should I have shown that I could adopt the aesthetic and use the tools (literal, metaphorical, and symbolic) of the other scrapbooking moms? Would it have been more polite and acceptable to use (and then purchase) the tools created for and used by the other scrapbookers? Or was it better for me to forge ahead with my own vision, Creative Memories ideals be damned? If I were experimenting with scrapbooking in my own home, these questions never would have occurred to me, as I'd see the whole project as a creative, quasi-artistic outlet. Out would come the acrylic paints, the cartoonists' inks, the watercolors, pastels and fixatives, scissors and X-acto knives, and whatever else felt appropriate at the moment. But if I wanted to be accepted into this particular group of women (and as a new mom seeking emotional support and potential childcare swaps, I very much desired acceptance), I needed to prove myself a member of the club and validate their visions of what their albums should contain.

In which I get all intellectual on scrapbooking's ass
Some time ago, Fantastic Adviser taught a course on corporate cultures, and she had a Creative Memories consultant come to her class as an illustration of how direct selling organizations work. In planning for this event, Adviser shared with me her desire to at some point write up her thoughts on scrapbooking, and as I sat at the scrapbooking party, Fantastic Adviser's brainstormings came rushing back: that because scrapbooking calls on women to crop, place, and embellish family photos, the whole exercise is really about giving women a sense of control over their families. Through this process of photo mounting and journaling, they can frame their families in any way they wish, and highlight--or even fabricate--those roles they feel they themselves should be playing as mother, sister, daughter, or aunt.

My questions, then, are these: In what ways does scrapbooking empower women as members of their families and of a larger community of women who scrapbook? And in what ways does it reinforce traditional women's roles or circumscribe opportunities for more creative expression? What is the role of the consultant? Is her influence a limiting or liberating one? And what does being a consultant for Creative Memories mean to the women who sign up? (Of course, as an academic, I'm tempted to sign on to get a sense of the experience, but the dissertation must come first.)

Scrapbooking has a long history for women and girls. Drawing on Rodris Roth's chapter on scrapbook houses in The American Home: Material Culture, Domestic Space, and Family Life (ed. Eleanor McD. Thompson, Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum; Hanover: UP of New England, 1998), Mary Flanagan writes,

Playing house in miniature was a popular American pastime in the late Nineteenth century and was featured in home magazines of the 1890s to early 20th century. Children used old ledgers or albums to create a paste-up graphic room per leger page set. These early visual miniature representations of upper middle class houses provide a specific idea of house as imagined by a particular class at a particular time and geography. Rodris Roth notes in "Scrapbook Houses" that such scrapbook houses "were an ideal medium to introduce girls to their future roles as wives, mothers, and homemakers" and that the "house in a scrapbook, just as much as an actual one, had to be run and maintained properly" (308). The house was implicitly known to be a gendered space. That female children were being trained to imitate their parent's tastes and shop for desirable goods from mail order catalogs and samples suggests the intertwining of play, gender, and consumption over a century ago.

Modern day instructions for making a scrapbook house, as well as a photo of a scrapbook house from 1879, may be found here. Another example is here.

The Creative Memories literature proclaims a more liberating motive for scrapbooking today:

Every moment you capture in a photo, every time you ask, “Guess what happened?” … you are telling your story as only you can. We’d like to help you take the next step by preserving your story in a safe and meaningful keepsake scrapbook album.

It’s so simple:

• Live life
• Take pictures
• Call your Consultant
• Tell your stories in albums

In other words, instead of serving as a training ground for a future life as manager of a household, today's scrapbooks are a way to preserve the past, to celebrate achievements as a wife, mother, etc. Or so say the Creative Memories PR mavens.

But when we scrapbook, we're not just "telling stories" as a journalist, or even a photojournalist, might. Instead, we're imposing narratives, and therefore fairly explicit meanings, onto our lives. We omit many details and bring others into sharp relief. Most of us put the best possible face we can on our family life. And isn't that our job as wives and mothers? (Single women certainly have some of the same impulses, which may be centered more on self-presentation, forging a sense of extended family, or the role of daughter.)

We pose and then crop photos. We frame them in paper of particular patterns. We stencil. We write brief journal entries. We apply stickers with pre-printed words And the results are, well. . . here, here, and all over here. (In this sense, perhaps scrapbooking is kin to blogging, where most of us use templates created by others but fill them with our own photos and journal entries, but do so often by basing our posts on what we've seen on others' blogs (through memes, responses to posts, etc.).

In light of these first thoughts, could scrapbooking be considered feminist? Could a self-described feminist participate in scrapbooking without feeling too much angst? If the prescribed, cookie-cutter Creative Memories brand of scrapbooking makes us uncomfortable, how far from it do we need to go before we're back in emancipatory territory? What does a feminist scrapbook look like? Does it use new or recycled materials? What does it chronicle? Does it attempt a linear, chronological narrative?

Oy. I think I need to do some freewriting and a lot of further research. In addition to interviews with scrapbooking women and further participant observation, I'm thinking of revisiting Janice Radway's books on romance readers and the Book-of-the-Month Club, as well as maybe Levine's book Highbrow/Lowbrow. (Wheee! That will let me revisit some good American Studies stuff.)

Postscript: While writing this post over a couple of days, I put together another few pages in the hopes of better understanding the process of scrapbooking. And I'm still struggling with what it all means (or might come to mean) to me and to others. I think having a full album of varied pages would give me a very different perspective from having completed just a page or two. That said, I'll close with my latest pages. (They're too big for our scanner, so please excuse the indoor-digital-photo nature of these images.) The print, which may be too small to read, includes passages from poets Emily Dickinson, Sarah Lindsay, and W.B. Yeats.







And one inspired by the cover of Goodnight Moon:


Further resources (which I have yet to read but discovered in my preliminary web search):
Gordon, Beverly. "Scrapbook Houses for Paper Dolls: Creative Expression, Aesthetic Elaboration and Bonding in the Female World," in Susan Tucker and Patricia Buckler, eds., Layered History: Essays on the Commonplace Book, the Scrapbook, and the Album (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003).

Free shoes

Well, my little shopping expedition last Monday has paid off in spades. . . I entered a raffle at the Aerosoles store, and today I learned I won three free pairs of shoes.

Maybe my luck will continue and my big pile of exams will grade itself? The university should have a weekly raffle offering a free pass from grading. . .

Linky goodness

I've come across some great stuff in the past few days, so I thought I'd share it here.

The endangered Pacific Northwest Tree Octopus needs our attention. (h/t to kermitthefrog)

My favorite Chronicle of Higher Education columnist, the pseudonymous Thomas Benton, writes that "there is more than one way to skin a dissertation."

Flower-shaped urinals. Nuff said. (h/t to she falters to rise)

P.S. Does anyone else obsess about whether punctuation belongs inside or outside HTML link tags? Yep, I thought it was just me.

Friday Poetry Blogging

Another one by trillwing. . .


Crossing

Usually the row of Gothic brick buildings
amplified the train’s horn as rock valleys do,
but that night we didn’t hear the horn, only the clacking
of grain cars with their giant funnels, the tanks
of corn syrup and ethanol. There was no sign
of the kernel-yellow engines, and no hint of an end—
only bells at the intersection, the rhythmic thuds and screeches
of wheels and track compromising,
the track sinking into earth, the train passing on
but not passing us. In the spaces between cars
we saw the figures of people waiting,
like us, to cross. Their silhouettes were unfinished,
framed by distant lights of varying brilliance.
We could almost see through them.

We knew the track ended at the southern edge of town,
behind Wal-Mart, by the grain elevators.
There had been times when a long train
sliced the town in two. I’d walked
more than a mile around it to visit friends.
But that evening, not knowing its ends, we waited
for the long corn train, the sidewalk rumbling
hungrily beneath our shifting weight.
Above us, the bare cottonwoods
rationed the sky into graspable pieces.

The crowd grew with the minutes until one woman,
hoarse-voiced, her hundred braids and two active hands
swaddled in the first scarf and gloves of the season,
spoke above the train. She said, What if your double
were on the other side and was dying, crumpling there,
and no medics could come—you could only watch?
From there the tale grew among us: the Town
of the Perpetual Train, the families never meeting,
half the citizens without fire trucks, half without mail.
People might dig tunnels, build bridges, learn not to hear
the trains, just as, caught up in our own stories,
we don’t hear the roaring stars and the winds of hurtling Earth,
even on clear nights, when—because we have places to be—
we’re forced to consider our crossing.