21 Sunday Jun 2009
Posted in our family
Dad has spent the weekend cleaning up his bookstore from the massive flooding they’ve had in West Michigan over the past couple of days. Hope he’ll be able to find some time during the weekend to get out and do some of that outdoorsy activity he enjoys so much. Meanwhile, here’s a picture from our 2004 father-daughter trek along the West Highland Way.
Happy Dad’s Day, Dad and thanks for all the memories!
13 Monday Oct 2008
Posted in a sense of place
Portland, Maine, that is (clearing up any confusion for you West Coasters). Hanna and I rented a Zipcar today and drove up to Portland (three states in two hours!) to meet her parents for the morning and early afternoon. We started at the local Starbucks — oxymoronic as that may sound — and rambled around through the bookstore, L.L. Bean outlet, and various shops before picnicking down by the ocean.
While eating lunch, we chanced to see a small steam train which ran on a narrow-gauge track along the harbor! And we also enjoyed a bit of casual leaf-spotting; Boston’s trees turn color but we’re often not outside in the middle of a sunny day to enjoy them!
16 Monday Jun 2008
Posted in my historian hat
Hi all! I flew in to Boston’s Logan airport at 12:10 this morning, after long delays in the Chicago O’Hare airport on my way home from the 14th Annual Berkshire Conference on the History of Women. The conference was at the University of Minnesota (U of M to the locals although to this Michigander that abbreviation only means one thing). It was a beautiful weekend and the campus–which spans the Mississippi River in the twin cities of Minneapolis/St. Paul–was a stunning location, particularly coming as many of us did from the first sweltering heat wave of the East Coast summer. The building on the left is the Weisman Art Museum, designed by (who would have guessed?) architect Frank Gehry, and perched on the high Eastern bank of the river.
I attended a number of awesome roundtable discussions and seminars, including one on the history of childhood and youth (“Childhood as a Useful Category of Historical Analysis”), one on 1970s popular culture and gender, and one on the history of lesbian and gay families in the 20th century. I also got a chance to catch up with my undergraduate adviser, and enjoyed dinner in Dinkytown with my current program adviser. I even managed to wedge in a visit to the campus bookstore!
The conference gave me some good ideas about possible directions in which to take my thesis research–whichever body of primary sources I end up using, I will certainly be focusing on ideas of experimental education and educational theory (pedagogy) in the mid-twentieth century (1960s and 70s). I am interested in the relationship between new educational practices and political movements such as feminism, environmentalism, peace activism, and radicalism on both the left and the right. Home education is, of course, one form of this experimental education. There are some others–including early women’s studies programs and the Oregon Extension program I attended as an undergraduate–that might also provide fruitful material to explore.
As much as I am resistant to formal academic environments, I can’t deny that it is encouraging and exciting to be around such incredible group of (largely women) scholars who are all researching thought-provoking topics in women’s and gender history. I was honored to have the opportunity to absorb their conversations and look forward to a time when I might more actively participate in the same.
13 Thursday Mar 2008
Posted in a sense of place
This being Spring Break, as previously mentioned, Hanna and I took one entire day off to frivol. We took the commuter train up to Salem and wandered around town, visiting the Peabody Essex Museum, admiring gravestones in the Old Burying Point Cemetery, and tarrying a while at a coffee shop with the most comfortable chairs ever invented (or at least they felt that way). We did not feel much of a need to visit the Witch Dungeon, the Witch History Museum, the Witches Cottage, although we did pass by the Witch Trials Memorial on our way down to the shore :).
Here are some pictures.
24 Thursday Jan 2008
Posted in life writing
Contrary to popular belief expressed in some circles, I do actually know how to enjoy myself outside of feminist politics. This weekend visiting friends in New York City, in addition to making a pilgrimage to Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party, dropping in at bluestockings radical bookstore, attending a lecture on women’s literary societies in the early republic, and seeing The Business of Being Born on the big screen, I took part in the following non-political activities:
You can check out the photos at picasa or watch a small version of the slide show below:
Now it’s back to the academic realm . . . my first history class convenes in 3 1/2 hours.
02 Wednesday Jan 2008
Posted in a sense of place
I returned to Boston on New Year’s Eve, just past ten in the evening, after the second 24-hour train ride in less than ten days. At the time, I was of the most emphatic opinion I will never travel again. Since I have plans to head down to New York City at the end of January, this will manifestly not be the case . . . but it was definitely the sentiment of the moment. The best New Year’s present ever was being able to crawl into bed and sleep horizontally between clean sheets!
This week, I am spending my daylight hours working at the MHS, and I thought I would share with you this childhood portrait of e.e. cummings which resides on our second-floor landing. Artist Charles Sydney Hopkinson painted little Edward in 1896, when the future poet was only two years old.
The MHS has an extensive portrait collection, since the donors of family papers tended to be the sort who also had the funds to commission paintings. My friend Jeremy says it sometimes makes him feel like we work at Hogwarts, and that the portraits might someday start talking back to us. That is a disquieting thought, since most of them are much more imposing than e. e.
22 Saturday Dec 2007
Posted in book reviews
This weekend, I’m heading home to Holland, Michigan (yep, it still feels like “home”) for Christmas . . . by train. It’s twenty hours from Boston to South Bend, Indiana, by Amtrak, and in order to pass the time I’m taking–what else?–a big stack of books. Here’s what’s in the Nina Totin’ Bag.
Spending: A Utopian Divertimento, by Mary Gordon. I’ve actually already started this novel, which is about a woman artist and her self-appointed muse, about art and work, relationships and sex, money and ethics, feminism, and a whole lot more.
Dragonhaven, by Robin McKinley. I’ve been saving this one for a couple of months. It’s always a treat when one of your favorite authors comes out with something new.It is entirely possible that between now and Saturday, noon, when the train pulls out of South Station, I will have added a volume or two to the collection. I have this 25% Barnes & Noble coupon burning a hole in my pocket and I think the Prudential Center has a copy of Julia Serano’s Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity, which I’ve been meaning to read since July, and which I know I will need to own since it will be read with pencil in hand to make notes in the margins. And Mom tells me I simply must read Lauren Child’s Clarice Bean Spells Trouble . . .
Then again, I have to fit those Christmas presents in somewhere too.
24 Saturday Nov 2007
Posted in a sense of place
Over Thanksgiving weekend, I decided to take a mini-vacation from Boston proper, and spent a night at the Friendly Crossways hostel outside Harvard, Massachusetts (the small town, not the University), and then drive to Middlesex Fells Reservation for a hike around the system of reservoirs which supply water for the town of Winchester. Yes! I said drive! I rented a car and was vehicularly mobile (a word I just made up) for the first time in three months. It was both extremely harrowing (in the dark) and giddily liberating (in the daytime).
The hostel was comfortably bare-bones and dark and quiet, in a way only rural areas can be. And Middlesex Fells was beautiful and abundantly populated with people and their dogs. I am not exaggerating when I say virtually every party of walkers had more or more four-legged companions. One woman even exclaimed when she passed me on the path, “You’re walking without a dog?!” as if it were an alien concept.
The photographs can be seen above or in larger format at picasa.
30 Tuesday Oct 2007
Posted in a sense of place
On Sunday, Bethany, Patrick and I went out for brunch at the Kitchenette and then made our way to the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art, when I almost got to live one of my childhood fantasies of being Claudia Kincaid in From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, who runs away from home with her brother Jamie. The two manage to hide themselves away in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and solve a mystery involving a statue possibly carved by Michaelangelo. It involves adventure, museums, and archival research–what’s not to like?
As incisive as the Guerrilla Girls may be in their critique of the fine art world’s lack of support for women artists, I still think one of the best things about visiting art museums is the women one finds on display. The variety of women’s bodies is absolutely stunning in comparison to the visual representations of women in our daily media. Their very multiplicity attests to the volatile nature of standards of beauty throughout history and across the world, from era to era and culture to culture.
For example, on this particular visit I was fascinated to see a 1661 Dutch painting, Visit to the Nursery, which shows a couple presenting their newborn to relatives. The mother holding the infant is dressed, but you can clearly see the gap in the front of her bodice, suggesting she is ready to nurse her child at any moment, despite the formality of the scene.
Another picture I was enchanted by (Mom, this one’s especially for you) was this portrait of a “mad” woman, Malle Babbe, which the museum describes as “in the style of Frans Hals.” She is posed with an owl on her shoulder, which apparently symbolized foolish or “vulgar” behavior in the seventeenth century. I like the fact that “wise old owls” were once thought to be exactly the opposite.
And finally, in a modern art gallery, I came across this painting (forgive me, but I forgot to note the painter and title; I will remedy that when I have the time) which I have always liked because of the juxtaposition of the very “feminine” colors and floral motifs with the girl’s confident pose and forthright stare. On the floor below the painting was a child or about eight, carefully drawing a copy of the portrait in her sketchbook. I hope she pays way more attention to what the art museums have to say about the beauty of the human form than she does to the monotonous version of “femininity” being pedaled by our consumer culture.
You can see all my pictures from the Met at Picasa.
30 Tuesday Oct 2007
Posted in life writing
For those of you who don’t know (and why should you?), a “Ceilidh”–pronounced “kay-lee”–is a Scottish dance party, usually featuring great music, food & alcoholic beverages, and traditional Scottish folk dances. This is not performance dance, but participatory dance, like a barn dance or square dance, where everyone can join in–and if they don’t volunteer, they are often pressed into service.
My friend Bethany’s husband Patrick is a graduate of the University of Glasgow, where he earned his MLitt in Philosophy, and the University was throwing an alumni dinner at the Harvard Hall of the Harvard Club in Manhattan. We went and gawked at the decor and enjoyed the food and wine, got in a few dances, sang “Auld Lang Syne” (obligatory at every ceilidh I’ve been to) and managed to stumble home not much later than midnight!
You can see all the pictures in my web album at Picasa.
the feminist librarian 