Conversations with Lucy

So I'm still here at the AAS, having a grand time.  I hope to post more of my fun finds, but for now, I thought you should have this Conversation with Lucy, as transcribed by Jake:

Lucy: You don't want me to get all fussy, do you?
Jake: What did you say?
Lucy: Well, when things aren't the way I want them to be, I get all fussy.
Jake: Yeah. I wish you wouldn't do that. (missed parenting opportunity, but honest)
Lucy: I can't help it. It's dramatic on my body.

Or something like that. Then much more about it being dramatic. I'm pretty sure she meant "automatic," but it's a funnily appropriate slip up.

So there you go.  So self-aware.  So manipulative.  What are we supposed to do?

I'll tell you what we need: some nineteenth-century children's literature to help Lucy understand how to behave!  How convenient that I'm here, in the nineteenth century, to collect some.  In fact, I was able to request the books that Lucy adopted a while back, both of which are pretty awesome little children's books. 

So here's the plate that tells everyone that she adopted this book:

So Lucy has adopted two books, including one from Letitia Barbauld called Little Marian; here's the awesome frontispiece from it:

It's an odd book, written in a sort of second-person weirdness, all very instructive, telling the child-reader what the moon and the stars are, with lines like "you will see it rise again above the trees."  And then it has a passage that asks: "Do you know where sugar comes from? Sugar comes from cane like a walking-stick that grows from the ground." Shortly thereafter: "And what is tea? Tea is a leaf that grows upon a shrub, and that is dried a good deal."  The weird thing is that what I am most reminded of here is the new collection of Winnie-the-Pooh stories we've been reading to Lucy lately.  But Milne is a lot funnier, and Barbauld is pretty dry and dull (at least in the book, though not elsewhere!).

The other book is Half a Dozen Girls, from sometime around 1874.  It has six stories featuring little girls getting themselves into trouble of the nineteenth-century sort, like not being able to sit still for photographs.  My favorite tale is "Nell -- The Little Pitcher," in which the title character is referred to as a "pitcher" because she overhears things and then says them out loud to the wrong people (little pitchers having big ears and all that).  Here's an illustration from one of Nell's humorous moments:

So, lesson learned: we have to watch ourselves around this girl (Nell and/or Lucy).

Havelocks and Housewives and Homespun, Oh My!

So we're back from Ralph's Rock Diner, which was awesome.  I should really be doing the reading for tomorrow, but I'm still so excited about all we learned today that I thought I'd write a bit about it before I forget any of the amazing details.  So I already wrote about the early photography session, but perhaps equally exciting was the session on Civil War era textiles, led by the curator of an upcoming exhibit Homefront & Battlefield: Quilts & Context in the Civil War.  Her presentation featured tons of images of quilts and some incredibly charming details about Civil War era textiles.  Here are some of my favorites:

Havelocks.  Do you know what a havelock is?  I didn't.  It's a headcovering used by the British military in India, named for its creator/proponent, Sir Henry Havelock.  If you have a hat that has a sort of kerchief that drapes down behind and covers your neck, that's basically a havelock.  Anyway, at the start of the Civil War, when various Ladies Societies were pitching in for the war effort, one of the things they supposedly made lots of were havelocks.  Many hundreds of havelocks.  But here's the thing: the soldiers hated them. There are accounts of the soldiers tearing them to bits. They were not helpful.  So the supposed "havelock fever" (of the women making them) was pretty much pointless. 

Housewives.  I know what you're thinking: you know what a housewife is.  But you don't know this kind.  During the Civil War, soldiers carried "housewives" -- by which they meant sewing kits -- so they could repair their uniforms or gear while on the road.  Here's a link to one from the Smithsonian.

Homespun: This word might not mean what you think it means.  I assumed it meant cloth made from threads spun at home.  Yes, that was sometimes true, and certainly prior to and even during the Civil War, lots of people were spinning and weaving at home.  But it turns out, lots of stuff called "homespun" was actually made in textile mills -- great big factories, not little tiny homes.  So "Homespun" was kind of like today's "Homemade" as a sort of aspirational marketing term.  Many Civil War-era manufacturer account books indicate "homespun" as one of their many product lines.  So much for there being no place like home.

Today (which is quickly becoming yesterday -- I mean Monday) I found out about the Civil-War- and textile-based- histories of a bunch of words I love, including:

Shoddy:  This was a kind of cloth re-made from other cloth -- so old cloth was re-processed back down to fibers that were then spun and woven again.  In and of itself, it's not a bad thing (recycling, after all!).  The term didn't have a particularly negative connotation until the Civil War, when uniforms made from shoddy proved to be....well....shoddy.  Here's a neat NYT article with a bit of info on military spending and the problems of shoddy military materials.

Sleazy: A fabric known as "Silesia" was in wide use as a lining for coats; it was thin and silky and, well, the sort of thing you'd have in the lining of a jacket.  It was commonly called "sleazy," and again, in and of itself it wasn't a bad thing for what it was used for, but obviously, if you started using lining material for something other than a lining, it would be a bad thing -- so material of inferior quality: sleazy!


Shebang (as in the whole shebang): The term first appeared in print in the Civil War, and referred to the tents soldiers set up in the fields.  We looked at lots of photos of such tents today.


And now, just one final, terribly gothic word explanation: Lint.  Look out, this one gets a bit gruesome.  You think you know lint.  You think it's in your dryer vent, or in your bellybutton. But during the Civil War, when the Ladies Societies weren't taken with "havelock fever" or knitting socks or making quilts, they were making lint.  Lint you ask?  Why lint?  And how?  Well, there are two hows: raveled or scraped.  "Raveled" lint meant that you unraveled cloth down to its threads.  "Scraped" lint meant you scraped the cloth with a sharp knife.  In either case, you were taking whatever old (hopefully clean) linens you had lying about, and making them into lint.  So that's the basic how.  But why?  Well, there were a lot of men wounded in the war.  Medicine being what it was (pretty barbaric) what they did was to pack the wounds with lint and then bandage them up.  So think about that the next time you clean your dryer filter.

That's all for tonight.  Sorry this post is so word-y.  I'll try to have more pictures tomorrow.

Early photography madness!

The first full day here at CHAVIC has been tremendous.

First of all, here's Cotton Mather's chair that I mentioned in the last post:

No, I did not sit in it.  But I did take this photo.  And photos are legit.  I just need to say that all the glory that you see here comes from the American Antiquarian Society.  It is a place of awesomeness. 

The morning's session was a hands-on activity where we learned about the differences between dageurrotypes, ambrotypes, and tintypes, each of which is a process used in early photography.  My favorite, I think, is the daguerreotype.  It's an amazing image.  Our curator told us that they caused all sorts of problems because people simply didn't recognize their own images.  The images have no color (except when it was added by hand after the image was done), and, more importantly, the image was reversed, so if you parted your hair on the left, your daguerreotype had a part on the right.  Downsides of daguerreotype: 2 minute long exposure times.  That's a lot of sitting still!

Here's my favorite dageurotype:

Yup, that date is 1860.  Sorry my photo quality is pretty bad -- my camera is not terrific, and in any case, the dag has a glass plate on the front, which makes it very difficult to photograph.

Then there was a fabulous family album; I'll include a few shots of pages here:

OK, did you SEE that facial hair setup there on the left!  Awesome!  But the kids on the right -- pretty cute, huh?  Well, one of the experts here happened to know a lot about the photographing of children in the early days, and here's what she told us: see that big sash on the middle of his/her dress?  That's not just a decorative silk ribbon -- it is there to HOLD THE CHILD IN PLACE, because the particular photographic method probably required about 40 seconds of standing still for a proper exposure (with some variation depending on light levels -- there's no flash at this point).  So the next time you see nineteenth century photos with lovely silk sashes on the kids -- know that they are being restrained.

A slightly later page of the same album featured this:

It's a dog! It's a dog!  (and yes, that's a soldier in his Civil War uniform on the left).

OK, so there is so much more to say, but now we are off to Ralph's Diner.  I'll try to report back more later.  My teaser for the review of the afternoon's activities: havelocks and housewives and homespun, Oh My!  Stay tuned.

Happy Anniversary!

As of tomorrow (June 18th), Jake and I will have been married for seven years!

Happy Anniversary!  I tried to upload the video from our wedding, but I've hit a tech stumbling block; I'll try to add it later if possible. 

For our (sort of) anniversary dinner, we went to Udupi Bhavan for fabulous Indian food, followed by a walk on the Vandenberg Esplanade, and then a quick trip to Target to pick up this:

Yup!  We finally have a little patio set, so as to enjoy the lovely outdoor weather we've been having.  Hooray!  This is what happens when you are married for seven years.

So the reason I'm writing this now is because I'm not even in Lowell.  I'm in fabulous Worcester, staying in a dorm at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) while I spend a week here at the American Antiquarian Society.  College dorm life has changed tremendously since I was an undergrad; I'm staying in East Hall, which is some sort of fancy all-suites living, with all kinds of green building and high-tech stuff.  It's really quite lovely.  I'm writing from the counter of the kitchen in the common space, which I'm sharing with two other women attending the seminar this week.

But let's get onto the more important part: I'm hanging out this week at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS), which you may recall I've mentioned in previous posts such as this and this.  I'm participating in the CHAViC seminar -- the Center for Historic American Visual Culture.  So far (which means, since 4pm today) it has been awesome.  We had a couple of hours at Antiquarian Hall, in the absolutely beautiful reading room, followed by a behind-the-scenes tour.  I got to go into all the RESTRICTED areas of the library, and it was amazing.  AAS, like most libraries of its sort, is closed-stacks: you request what you want, and the librarians bring it to you.  None of that mucking about in the shelves looking for what you want.  So it was thrilling to check out the incredible facility behind the scenes (movable stacks!!!  crazy glass floors!!!) with absolutely unbelievable holdings.

The AAS is mostly about print -- books, ephemera, lithographs, etc.  But they have a select few items in their holdings that are truly spectacular.  All of the furniture is all kinds of gorgeous, and the paintings and other images on the walls are phenomenal.  There's a room that is lined, floor to ceiling with glassed-in shelves that are stuffed full of Staffordshire pottery made in the early- and mid-nineteenth century, illustrating important buildings and locations.  But perhaps most awe-inducing was Cotton Mather's high chair.  As in, the wooden chair that a baby Cotton Mather sat in and slobbered all over.  It even featured a rattle/toy sort of thing on the top rung.  I'm probably not supposed to say this, but we were even told "go ahead and touch it!"  It was crazy amazing -- Baby Mather probably slobbered all over that thing!  Talk about wonders of the invisible world!

After the session, we had a lovely dinner at the Goddard-Daniels House, including drinks on the porch (beautiful!).  I'm so geekily excited about what the coming week holds -- sessions on print-making, visual culture, quilting, textiles, political cartoons....the list goes on, but all focused on the visual culture of the American Civil War.  Ken Burns, eat your heart out.

But right now, what I am supposed to be doing is reading.  There are, roughly, a million pages of reading that I should have done by now.  But now, I am staying in a dorm room.  And think perhaps the previous residents left a bit of their wishful thinking/procrastinating spirits behind, and I have no interest in doing my reading (even though I am excited about the prospect of a week of working on all of this).  Sigh.

So here I am, blogging. 

Happy Anniversary, Jake!

That's why it's called the Emergency Brake

So this afternoon, I was being a model of efficiency.  In an effort to decrease the errand-running and bridge-crossing, I picked up Lucy a bit early from school, then together we picked up Carter from the groomer's, then all together, we went to Shaw Farm, where we usually go once a week to get our milk and eggs.

Here's what happened next:

We left Carter in the car while Lucy and I went inside with our empty bottles.  It was a quick exchange of empties for fresh full ones; we paid and headed back to the car.  Carter had clearly attracted the attention of the young man in the car parked next to ours, and they appeared to be entertaining each other quite well.  I asked Lucy to stay on the sidewalk, while I opened the front door of the car and put the eggs and milk inside.  She squealed with glee, watching Carter bound about the car, very excited to see us (you'd think we'd been gone for hours).  Carter was very worked up, and bounded into the front seat just as I closed the door. 

I called Lucy, opened the back door, and popped her into her seat.  This is where things went crazy.  While I was working to get Lucy strapped into her seat, Carter was positively going crazy in the front seat, too excited to be still, just pacing and bounding and jumping.

Somehow, in all his chaos, he disengaged the emergency break, which sits in between the driver and passenger seat.  The car began to roll backwards, with the back passenger door open and me halfway inside, half on top of Lucy.

It was crazy.  The man in the car beside us jumped out of his car with a horrified look, but clearly wasn't going to be able to do anything.  Carter was jumping around, and Lucy was squealing with delight (she had no idea that rolling backwards, with no control, in a parking lot, was a problem).  I threw myself farther into the car, fumbled around a bit, and managed to grab the emergency break, pulling it with everything I had.  The car came to a stop, about a full car-length behind where it had started. 

No damage.  Thankfully, no other cars were pulling in at that instant.

The man in the car beside us was shaking his head, his eyes wide.  He kept saying "I can't believe that happened!"  I felt the same.  He told me I should go buy a lottery ticket.  Hilarious.  A bit shaky, we drove home, with Lucy delightedly talking about how Carter drove the car.

So, let's add that to his resume: Carter the dog, the famous movie star, once drove a car.

Release the doves already!

8:50 am Wednesday June 6th:

So the local and state papers are abuzz with the news today that the Board of Trustees are meeting today at 9am to discuss a big hike in tuition.

What's missing in these articles is another important thing they're discussing: my tenure.  Yup.  Today's the day.  I'm waiting for them to release the doves, or send up some white smoke from the state house or some such auspicious signal.  I'll keep you posted.

Update: 2:09 pm.

News from someone at the meeting, and from the Globe indicates that they voted for the 5% tuition increase.  No word, still on the tenure votes.  Will they table them til the next meeting?  Will I go stark raving mad?  Should I really be live-blogging my tenure decision?  Stay tuned!

Update: 4:19 pm

Received an e-mail with the subject line "Promotion and Tenure Materials."  OK, this must be it, right?

Nope.

It's an e-mail informing me that all my materials (tenure binders and evidence box) are now in the Dean's Office, and can I please come pick them up, pronto.  W. T. F.?  So I just got asked to pick up my stuff, like we've just had a bad breakup or something.

And still, no actual news.

Update: 6:23 pm

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an announcement:

I got it!

Cheers!

I am officially an Associate Professor, with tenure.

Or, if you prefer, Ass. Prof.

;)

thanks, all, for your support.

Transitive Venus*

Lucy announced this evening that she really likes space.  She had just finished making one of her signature rockets (a regular creation made with empty toilet paper tubes) which featured some fancy red rick-rack that I found.  She was also wearing her rocket PJs.  This evening's space excitement was inspired, in part, by the transit of Venus, which we learned about -- where else -- but on NPR.  We heard some details yesterday while we were in the car, and Lucy was insistent that I get more info.  This afternoon, as promised, I had some photos to show her (thank you, internets!) and we talked about the planets and whatnot.  A few questions ensued:

Are rockets real?

Are spacemen real?

I'm always delighted by these conversation about what's "real," because it's often the case that everything is possible in her mind -- both rockets and spacemen are equally plausible (or implausible) to her.

We watched some of Venus's transit live online, as the sun hasn't really been so agreeable today (and we don't have the right kind of viewing device to avoid ruining our eyes).  In fact, it doesn't feel much like June here -- our heat even kicked on last night!

Anyway, if you missed it, your next chance is in 2117.

You can watch an animation of photographs from the 1882 transit here.  Pretty cool stuff.

Also, it's called "Transit OF Venus" -- as in the transit of Venus across the sun.  I mis-heard it, and believed it to be "Transitive Venus."  It doesn't really make much sense, but I've decided that it's the name of my new band.