Jdanehey

Arika Okrent, a longtime LH favorite (see this post), has a mental_floss post called "4 Changes to English So Subtle We Hardly Notice They're Happening," and it's just the kind of language reporting I like to see, focused on something other than the usual funny-word or dubious-press-release material. She starts off:

Everyone knows that language changes. It's easy to pick out words that have only been recently introduced (bromance, YOLO, derp) or sentence constructions that have gone out of style (How do you do? Have you a moment?), but we are constantly in the middle of language change that may not be noticeable for decades or even centuries. Some of the biggest and most lasting changes to language happen slowly and imperceptibly. The Great Vowel Shift, for example, was a series of pronunciation changes occurring over 350 years, and not really noticed for over 100 years after that. It resulted in an intelligibility gap between Modern and Middle English and created the annoying misalignment between English pronunciation and spelling. But it was impossible to see while it was going on.

These days, however, it is possible to spot subtle linguistic changes by analyzing large digital collections of text or transcribed speech, some of which cover long periods of time. Linguists can run the numbers on these large corpora to determine the direction of language use trends and whether they are statistically significant. Here are 4 rather subtle changes happening in English, as determined by looking at the numbers.

It has been years since I’ve traveled the great expanse of North America by car.  Normally, we fly from Los Angeles to Chicago and then drive around the Midwest.  But this year we are driving, and it’s great fun to see the local sights, billboards, bumper stickers, diners, and all the confusing Americana that we normally miss.

Here’s something we saw in the historic Haymarket district of Lincoln, Nebraska.

At one end of a public space in an area of old factories and warehouses turned into restaurants, condos and (a really good) bookstore is this brick mural. It’s both interesting as intricate brick work, and extremely ideological. It put me in mind of the Currier and Ives lithograph “Across the Continent.” But instead of looking out into a suggested, but incomplete future, this one looks back on a sanitized past. Perfect history for a contemporary commercial zone. The old Haymarket and train station were places in which real distribution took place. It was a market both in the sense of money exchange and in the sense of stuff and people moving about. Now, like every other rehabbed urban nightlife district, the only exchange is money for things immediately consumed on the spot (food and beer, mostly). So the mural has just the faintest suggestion that the train is going to displace the buffalo–no suggestion that the people on the train are coming to shoot the buffalo. And of course, no Native Americans at all. The 19th century was more honest about its imperialism.

In June and July we’ll celebrate the beginning of a new fiscal year by highlighting new acquisitions from the past year.  All of these amazing resources will be available for today’s scholars, and for future generations of researchers in the Rubenstein Library! Today’s post features additions to the collection of artists’ books by women in the Library’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.  Check out additional posts in the series here.

Image courtesy of Nava Atlas.

Dear Literary Ladies by Nava Atlas. New Paltz, New York: Amberwood Press, Inc., 2010. Edition of 15. Gift of the author.

According to Atlas, “this artist’s book fancifully poses questions on writing and the writing life, with the replies derived from classic authors’ letters, journals, and autobiographies. Reaching back to answer contemporary questions with voices from literary history reveals the timeless concerns and challenges of writers, with a particular emphasis on these issues from a female perspective.” The book was also produced in a trade edition.

Skirt Book: Made in the USA by Julie Mader-Meersman. 2010.

This unique artists’ book is made in the form of a skirt with custom fabric printed with scans of country of origin tags from clothing. Booklets made from fabric remnants and original textile tags are sewn on around the garment.

Image courtesy of Carolyn Prescott and Maddy Rosenberg.

School Rules/First Grade by Carolyn Prescott. Berlin, Germany, 2012. Edition of 20.

This book features 10 vignettes of the author’s memories of first grade during the Cold War, with lessons focused as much on socialization and patriotism as reading and arithmetic. The ten images of children and teachers on the reverse are painted on dark backgrounds evoking chalkboards.

32 Big Pictures: A bound series of hand cut collages about Barbie by Dana F. Smith. San Francisco, California, 2011.

The images in this book were originally created from magazine collages overlayed on the pages of an over-sized Barbie coloring book. According to the artist, “it was created as a painstaking labor of love and reveals untold ways that Barbie is interlaced with modern American culture.”

“Barbie’s Makeover.” Image courtesy of Dana F. Smith.

Post contributed by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian, Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture.  

I’ve just wasted a perfectly good morning scrolling through my own pronunciative history. Joshua Katz, a Ph.D. student in statistics at North Carolina State University, has produced a series of visualizations of the Cambridge linguist Bert Vaux’s online survey of English dialects, as applied to the continental United States. There are various pretty patterns of blue, red, green, yellow, and the blends in between, and you can check 122 maps showing regional differences in pronunciation, word choice, and syntax according to the questions posed by the survey.

Now, clicking on the maps—and trying to guess, ahead of time, at the four most popular answers to each question—is fun all by itself. I couldn’t guess, for instance, at No. 83, “what do you call an easy course?” but I was all over  No. 36, “how do you pronounce the c in grocery?” But more interesting, for me, was tracing my own evolving dialect. Having grown up in the Midwest and having spent a fair amount of time on the West Coast before settling (with a slight detour to the South) in the Northeast, I had been aware of shifts in my own use of language, without ever really stopping to consider what lay behind those shifts.

For my personal dialect history, I chose the city of my birth, St. Louis; the city where I attended college and lived for a time, Los Angeles; and the city I’ve called home since 2000, Hartford. Some of the results were expected. Although I knew the term for a “sweetened carbonated beverage” was pop in Michigan, where we often vacationed, it was soda for me from the start and remains so. Other terms, though, rang a bell or touched a raw nerve. I grew up with several aunts, all of them pronounced like ant. My aunt on the West Coast, who hosted me often during college breaks, was also ant. My mother-in-law, when I moved East, was horrified. My female relatives were not insects, she pointed out; and in her presence, if I used the word, it was to rhyme with font. Sure enough, more than 93 percent of St. Louisans pronounce ant, compared with 30 percent of Hartfordians, more than half of whom prefer the au pronounced as ah.

Some results brought a jolt of memory. At the question, “What do you call the insect that flies around in the summer and has a rear end that glows in the dark?” I thought, “Firefly, duh.” Then, when I clicked on the regional variations, there it was—lightning bug (preferred by St. Louisans 9-1 over firefly), along with all those memories of chasing lightning bugs through hot July nights.

In jotting down regional responses and considering my own evolution in pronunciation and usage through the years, I came to a rough conclusion about openness and resistance to change. I left St. Louis for the West Coast at 17, and left the West Coast for the Northeast at 26. Where there was a considerable difference between St. Louis and Los Angeles, and Angelenos’ usage mirrored Northeastern usage, I shifted—e.g., from a three-syllable to a two-syllable mayonnaise; from icing to frosting—and, when I transitioned to Connecticut, kept the word or pronunciation I had apparently begun to use in California. Where there was similar usage in St. Louis and Hartford—e.g., highway for the big road on which you drive fast­­—I could recall having traded the term in for a West Coast term (freeway) and then changing back when I moved East.

But most interesting to me is that, where St. Louis and Los Angeles have similar results and usage in Hartford differs, I have tended to stick to my former habits. Examples from the survey include No. 26, syrup, which I still pronounce, like most St. Louisans and Angelenos, as sir-rup, even though a plurality of my neighbors pronounce it as sear-up. Here, they mostly call the rubber-soled shoes worn for athletic activities sneakers, but I’ve clung to my combined California-Missouri roots and say tennis shoes. I still call No. 103 a drinking fountain and not a water fountain. If I’m asked for an example of a pastry, I’m more likely to name No. 87, bear claw, even though the locals go for No. 86, cruller.

A broad conclusion from this entirely personal and unscientific survey might be that we (the royal we) are relatively fluid in our language choices at 17 but fairly fixed by 26. But various outliers tell a quirkier story. My family of origin tended to put on airs, for instance, so that we pronounced pajamas and pecan with ah in the second syllable even though that’s less typical for St. Louis than for Los Angeles or Hartford. I heard my father, a Yale graduate, say New HAven even though others said NEW Haven, so when I arrived in Connecticut I felt more at home.

The visualizations fail to account for differences of age, which the larger Cambridge Online Survey takes into account. But I’m fairly sure that the difference between calling Dibs! and calling Shotgun! for the front seat has emerged over decades as much as regions. And it seems a bit unfair to ask St. Louisans and Californians about No. 84, “a traffic situation in which several roads meet in a circle,” since these rarely exist in those parts and so the distinction between rotary and traffic circle seems almost silly.

So have at it. Reconstruct your own lexical journey. You may even find, as I did, an answer to a nagging question. One of many temporary homes I excluded from my personal survey was New York, where I spent four years trying in vain to say “Wait on line” rather than “Wait in line.” That’s No. 93, where—joy of joys—it turns out Manhattan and its environs stand out from the rest of the country. Theirs was the provincial pronunciation, not mine. Take that, you folks in (No. 95) the City.

by SB Sarah

In 2003, Mattel released Jude Deveraux, The Raider - Barbie® and Ken® Doll Giftset. I don't know why the earth didn't move and alert me to this amazing opportunity, but it is only ten years later that I have been able to see this amazing majesty for myself. 

You guys, I seriously think this doll set answers SO MANY QUESTIONS that I've had about classic romance novel poses. Let's examine each element close up, shall we? Vision impaired readers, I've done my best to describe each image, and I swear I am not making any of this up. 

First, behold the majesty of the official Mattel portrait of these two:

They don't look a thing like that in the box. It even says on the page, "Doll cannot stand alone as shown." I'm not sure which one they mean, but I assume KenAlexander, because he's not letting go of BarbieJessica.

Lest you doubt this is currently in my possession, the box! On my counter!

I was never into Barbies as a kid, but this made both my inner awkward adolescent and my external adult self absolutely giddy. IT IS CRAZY YOU GUYS.

And it has a lot to live up to, because the original cover for The Raider, it is absolute grade A crazysauce: 

I can just picture that cover art meeting:

Dude: "No, her hair needs to be bigger. NO, BIGGER. No, MORE BIGGER." 
Artist, grumbling: "I'll show you bigger..."
Dude: "PERFECT!" 

I love the horse, too. He's appalled at their lack of knowledge on basic horsemanship: "I am not carrying you weirdos on my neck. Go away."

Seriously, what's with her hair? Is she underwater? How do you get your hair to even do that? I need to try it. It's like an Elizabethan neck ruff for hair. 

So does the Barbie collector set live up? OH HELL YES.

First: have you ever wondered how the cover model posing as the heroine can maintain these half-fainted, half-boneless positions of swoony submission? 

Get a look at her face: 

The answer is, apparently, quaaludes.

She's heavy lidded, but I don't think it's passion. I think she's high as a kite. A kite on some seriously good drugs, yo. Her pupils are like dinner plates. 

"Hey, KenAlexander. I wanna tell you....tell you...somethzzzzzzzzzzzz." So romantic!

The other details are just as amazing. 

I don't even know how one does that with eye makeup. Though, I don't know if he'd remember either, given that he looks like he's on the same stuff as Barbie. 

Then there's the other other makeup:

I scratched at it with my fingernail. I tried wiping it with a towel. That is not schmutz or dirt. That is... I don't actually know what that is. I think it's meant to suggest stubble, only romance stubble, which is apparently as smooth as chinchilla bum fur.

In romance, stubble doesn't scratch, it soothes.

I'm telling you, the mysteries of the romance universe are hidden in this box. 

For example, you know that curling tendril of hair that so often tempts the romance hero as he looks at the heroine? How many historical romances have you read that in? Me, probably hundreds. She puts her hair up, except for one curl that rests on her neck, beckoning the hero to gaze upon her décolletage. 

How does one maintain that tempting curl with its tempting, curly perfection?

By stitching it into her armpit, of course! That sucker ain't moving, either, let me assure you. 

And how do you know this is a legit romance novel Barbie set? The certificate of authenticity? Heck no.

SHIRT UNDONE BUT STILL TUCKED IN!

Hell to the Yes! 

Pay no attention to Barbie's opportunistic hand, there. 

So let's get a look at what's under the shirt that's undone but still tucked in because accuracy:

HOLD UP. Is that.... is - YES it IS! 

DOUBLE STICK TAPE! 
 

So THAT is the secret of the shirt-undone-but-still-tucked-in look! Wardrobe tape! Amazing. 

And speaking of amazing, GET A LOAD OF THOSE ABS. Somewhere there are professional body builders with .02% bodyfat who don't have that level of definition. KenAlexander, he is negative body fat. 

I can't get this particular close up of my own KenAlexander without removing him from the box, so don't miss this picture of his nipples! 

Also: I love that I just told you not to miss a picture of someone's nipples. Oh romance novel Barbie, don't ever leave me. 

Let's keep exploring the magic, shall we? 

What? Those flowers are not the LEAST bit suggestive. Nuh uh. 

We don't need any euphemisms that KenAlexander is well-equipped in every way. As the box description assures us,

He is wearing a sheer white cotton shirt and tight black pants accented with a black belt. Black knee high cuffed and buckled boots complete his ruggedly handsome look.

But KenAlexander, being a Ken doll and all, has no actual equipment, per se. But no worries. We have manly hand assurance, too. The size difference between KenAlexander and BarbieJessica's hands is... illuminating. 

Everything about this guy is big. And windswept.

Did I mention it comes with bling, this gift set? IT DOES. BLING IS INCLUDED. 

HOT DAMN. What could it be? My own personal Raider minifigure? With windswept hair and abs like cobblestones?

A charm bracelet! With... charms that I'm not sure of. Like this one:

Is that a candelholder or the business end of a waistband snap? No matter, really. It's Raider Bling! 

I was nearly ready to put the box aside and go out and raid the grocery store with my bling when I noticed how amazing the back of the box is. I might have bought this JUST for the back of the box. Because it's so incredible.

First, Mattel has a very strange idea of what age "adulthood" happens: 

Adult! Now 14 and over! 

Uh, ok. 

Dear LORD, is that from the book?! 

YES IT IS.

Perhaps that is the secret of KenAlexander's beard fuzz: he wears stubble like a man with superior knowledge. 

But wait, there's MORE.

In case you're too lazy to turn the box over and, you know, look, or you like to have all your surprises spoiled, there's a description of what's inside: "Ken is swashbuckling in a sheer white cotton shirt paired with black pants."

KEN IS SWASHBUCKLING. It's a VERB. 

Ken is swashbuckling like a man with superior knowledge.

Aw, yeah. 

But the best part is the illustration of the dolls inside the box. I wish I could frame it.

WHAT THE WHAT? Her face is most likely meant to look like a Barbie doll, except it's the creepy version thereof. Egads.

And KenAlexander... oh, dear.

According to the official description, KenAlexander has "long brown windswept hair." 

That's not windswept. That's "A windy hedgehog exploded on his head." 

And I'm not sure what that facial expression is meant to convey, but I'm going with "too many beans at the Raider Barbie launch party last night."

The greatest disappointment, though, is my discovery on the front of the box: 

That says, "Limited Edition, Romance NOVELS Collection."

NOVELS. 

Romance NOVELS.

That means PLURAL. MORE THAN ONE. 

Were there more Barbie and Ken romance novel editions planned? Did they not ever make it to market? Are the obscure collectibles in Japan somewhere? WHERE ARE THE OTHER NOVELS?! 

Seriously, I would buy the hell out of them. I bought this one on eBay and it was the best ridiculous eBay purchase I've ever made. I bid on this box so hard, my eBay-addicted father in law probably flinched without knowing why.

SO WHERE ARE THE OTHERS?! Where are the other novels?! 

How can Mattel break my heart this way? Seriously, shouldn't there be more? I think so! 

What novels do you think should receive the Barbie collector's edition treatment? Anita Blake? That'd be a ten-doll collection right there. oh - Derek Craven from Dreaming of You! That would be an amazing Ken doll. He'd have to substitue badassery for the swashbuckling. 

So, which book should be done as a doll set next? Let's pester Mattel until they either run screaming or give us our way.

Categories: Fun And Games, General Bitching

Following the honor earlier this year of being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, legendary rap group Public Enemy received a key to Durham on Father’s Day.

Thoor Ballylee, Co. Galway. Once owned by W.B. Yeats

“Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” —W. B. Yeats

A reception is held at the Missouri Botanical Gardens in St. Louis, August 1990.Photograph by James P. Blair, National Geographic

Photo: Frank Hunter

I am a pitching chauvinist. The mechanics of it are so complex, so cerebral, so deliberate—so difficult—that in the past, I’ve compared pitchers to authors and hitters to readers. Hitting a baseball is essentially reactive and instinctive; it seems like the sort of thing almost any big lug could do with enough practice, as long as he has wrists strong and quick enough to swing a bat, and decent hand-eye coordination.

This year, the Durham Bulls have a prized young slugger, twenty-two-year-old Wil Myers. Myers hit thirty-seven home runs in the minor leagues in 2012. He was so good that the Bulls’ parent club, the Tampa Bay Rays, traded one of their best major-league pitchers for him. Myers was assigned to Triple-A Durham for a final polish, but for the first third of the season he appeared to need much more than that: on May 23, he was batting just .244, had hit only four home runs, and had struck out in 28 percent of his at-bats—among the league’s highest rates.

Then Myers went on a tear, hitting five home runs in just six days, including one of the longest Durham Bulls Athletic Park has ever seen: a moonshot off the highest balcony of an office building that towers over left field. Read More »

That headline could signal only one thing: the return of Toddlers & Tiaras. Well, it could signal the apocalypse too, I suppose. Really, the clip reel above from last night's season premiere is all about the first 9 seconds, which made me laugh harder than anything I can remember. Alexa says, "Wheeee!" and I feel her.

The rest is background: Two-year-old Alexa has been drinking coffee every morning since she was 9-months old (don't worry, her doctors say it's fine) and rabidly fiends for an unholy combination of soda, sweet tea and Pixy Stix that her charming mother Tori calls "Tinker tea." That's standard T&T stuff, but Alexa is a remarkable child. By the end of the episode, when she was throwing gibberish at the producers, I like to think that she was just fucking with everyone.

Also, she looks like Jessica Lange.

Reviving obsolete meanings of words is largely a futile business, but with the verb fizzle, it just might be worth the effort. At least it’s worth a chuckle.

My own discovery of this word’s history happened two years ago with an innocent question. A friend called me up and asked me about the etymology of the word sizzle. (Yes, my friends really do call me up with these kinds of questions.) The answer to my friend’s question is not all that interesting: according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb sizzle is probably imitative (of a hissing sound). But the OED’s etymology of sizzle cross-references the verbs sizz and fizzle—and I figured as long as I was in the OED, I might as well look up fizzle.

An etymological jackpot. When I saw the earliest meaning of fizzle in English, I thought, “How did I not know this before? Why isn’t this gem in every history of English textbook?”

The verb fizzle is first cited in 1601, in Philemon Holland’s translation of Pliny’s Natural History. It meant, in the wonderfully prim, Victorian wording of the OED (the entry was published in 1896), “to break wind without noise.” The quotation: “ … they say if Asses eat thereof, they will fall a fizling and farting.” The noun fizzle could be used to describe the action of breaking wind without noise, and a fizzler is one who partakes in said action.

How wonderful that we had a verb for that! And why in the world did we let that meaning become obsolete? (We now have the noun SBD—”silent but deadly”—but not a verb that I know of.)

By 1859, the OED has records of the verb fizzle meaning “to make a hissing sound,” with reference to oil and “unambitious rockets.”

It is 19^th-century U.S. college slang that gives us the meaning we have today, where fizzle means “to come to a weak conclusion, to fail.” It shows up first in a record of slang words at Yale University (1847) in reference to failing exams: “My dignity is outraged at beholding those who fizzle and flunk in my presence tower above me.” Slang thrives on play with the taboo, and if you’re now thinking about the slangy phrasal verb fart around (“waste time”), I was too.

Not only has the verb fizzle lost its taboo meaning, it’s not even all that slangy anymore. It remains more colloquial than formal, but according to the Corpus of Contemporary American English it shows up describing politics as well as sports in newspapers and even appears sometimes in academic prose.

I sincerely doubt that, in everyday language, fizzle is going to regain its ability to pair with fart in the memorably alliterative and slangy “fizzle and fart.” But you can now join me in using the word fizzle with secret irreverence.

Herewith, Charles Dickens crossed with Morrissey, for kids. Look, just watch it.

Women use compact mirrors in packed crowd to catch sight of the queen in London, June 1966.
Photograph by James P. Blair, National Geographic

by Elyse

Grade: F+
Title: Captive Splendors
Author: Fern Michaels
Publication Info: Ballantine Books 1980
ISBN: 0-345-31648-7
Genre: Historical: American

I picked up a copy of Fern Michaels’ Captive Splendors from a used bookstore, and boy was I in for a surprise. I vaguely remember reading her Texas series back when I was a teen, but I didn’t remember anything about it. This one had a benign cover and some vague references to desire on the high seas, and I love a good pirate story, so I grabbed it.

I had girded my loins in preparation for an Old Skool historical, but nothing could have prepared me for the sheer level of WTFery this novel contains. I can only guess that Michaels dropped acid while she was writing it.

On one hand, I kind of want to give this book an A for the sheer level of batshit insanity it manages to encompass. It takes all those offensive Old Skool tropes and then feeds them PCP and lets them loose on the reader. On the other hand, it was so jaw-droppingly bad, I had to give it an F.

I broke this bad boy up into three parts to really make sure I was getting everything that happened in the book. If you really want to read this book, then skip the last portion of the review because I’m going to lay it all out for you. To quote my favorite sorority sister, tie yourself down because this is going to be a rough fucking ride.

Part I: Everyone In This Family Is Insane

So first thing Michaels does is introduce us to the hero, Caleb van der Rhys, and show us what an Old Skool hero is. Caleb the captain of the Sea Siren and an agent of the Dutch East India Company. The book opens with him in port, having his wicked way with a whore. The whore is all like “OMG Caleb, you’re the most manly man ever and the best lay I’ve ever had. Take me away from this bad place and make your mistress so I can worship your love-tool.” And Caleb is like “Woman, quit smothering me! To punish you for the smothering I shall make sweet love to you one more time and then never again!” And the whore cries. Because Caleb is a man, baby, and you can’t tie a man down.

Then we move on to the heroine, Wren van der Rhys. If you just picked up on the fact that she and Caleb have the same last name, it’s because they are adoptive step siblings. Yup. SIBLINGS.  But is okay because 1. they weren’t raised together and 2. they aren’t biologically related in anyway. The words “Well, he’s not your real brother,” actually appear in this book.

So anyway, Wren and her friend, Sara, are living in London and going to finishing school or whatever the fuck ladies did circa 1630. Wren is gorgeous and spunky; she has black hair, eyes the color of flame, and she says “damnation” a lot. We know she’s the heroine because she has unusual hair/eye coloring and an odd name.

We learn through massive info-dump that Wren was adopted by Regan van der Rhys and his 3rd wife, Sirena. Sirena used to be bad-ass lady pirate called the Sea Siren. Regan and Sirena live in Java and are picking Wren up from London. Did I mention Wren and Sara are living with Regan’s (2nd) ex-wife, Camilla? Cuz they are. I guess the divorce was amicable. Oh, and by the way, Caleb admits to sleeping with Camilla when she was married to his father. In fact Caleb and Regan share a nostalgic chuckle about all of this. If you're thinking WTF is wrong with all these people, join the club, because I was convinced they were all deranged.

Anyway, Wren is in love with Malcolm, who is a douchebag. Malcolm is a ladies man, but he’s broke. So he seduced Wren’s friend Sara, then when he found out that her family fell out of favor with the king, ditched her for Wren. He’s pretty sure Wren is an heiress and the solution to all his financial troubles. Why Wren and Sara don’t sit down and compare notes regarding Malcolm’s d-bagness are beyond me, but they don’t.

When Regan and Sirena find out about Malcolm, they freak, because they can tell immediately he’s a dbag. They figure Wren is just in love with him because he’s the first man to court her, so they suggest to Caleb—HER STEPBROTHER—that he flirt with her to show she’s desirable. You see, Sirena believes Caleb is Wren’s destiny, DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEY ARE SIBLINGS.  And Caleb is all like, sure, whatever.

But Wren just kicks him the balls and leaves him rolling around the garden, so that doesn’t work.

It’s okay though, Sirena has a whole slew of bad fucking plans up her sleeves. She arranges for Malcolm to meet her in the garden, and since she’s a fox, she coaxes him into rubbing his face in her boobies.

Wren sees the boob-rubbing and throws a fit, accusing Sirena of being a giant whore and yells “you’re not my real mom anyway!” When Malcolm hears the “not my real mom” part he realizes that Wren isn’t an heiress, and now he’s all pissed. He tells Wren, “it’s not you, it’s me.” Wren thinks he's being noble because he’s poor and can’t support her.

Meanwhile Sara, who is still in love with Malcolm, finds him and they have a roll in the hay. Since she’s poor, Malcolm blows her off, too.

Wren isn’t giving up on Malcolm, though. Oh, no, she’s a feisty one. She runs away and finds him. Malcolm brutally rapes her, then gets drunk and loses her in a game of cards to three sailors who also rape her.

So if you’re keeping score, within the first third of the book we have 1. Adoptive step-sibling lovin’ 2. A mom who is a former pirate 3. Gang rape.

Part II. Also, Puritans.

Caleb is still smarting from the ball kicking, so he goes back to being a badass sea captain. He finds out his partner, Farrington, has arranged for them to smuggle a bunch of Puritans out of England and to the New World.

Guess what? Sara’s family is part of that Puritan group! Yup, Sara’s brother, Bascom, is some kind of religious zealot who has visions from God and everyone is following him to America. Also, Bascom repeatedly emotionally abuses and rapes his wife, Lydia, because we can’t have more than five chapters without rape or mention of rape.

Meanwhile, Wren escapes from Malcolm and the sailors by waiting till they’re wasted, then strangling one of the sailors with her stocking. As Malcolm starts to come to, she whacks him the face with a hot poker, disfiguring him and blinding him in one eye.

Wren doesn’t want to go home because she’s ashamed of how she treated Sirena and Regan. She knows Caleb will look out for her, but for some reason she can’t just go to him and ask for help. Instead a friend gets her a Puritan-looking dress, and she sneaks aboard the Sea Siren with the Puritans. Then she’s all like, HEY SARA!

Sara is like “WTF. What happened to Malcolm?”

Again, no one actually discusses what a d-bag Malcolm is, so Wren says:

“Malcolm is…was…actually, Malcolm is dead… He developed some sort of…of pox and just…he just died. In my arms.” (Michaels 168).

Even Sara doesn’t buy this load of BS. Once Wren realizes hanging out with the Puritans is no fun (can’t say “damnation”) she asks to be brought to Caleb. Caleb decides she needs to be punished for running away and leaves her there.

Caleb is an ass-hat throughout the entire book. At one point Michaels decides he might actually need to have a feeling other than gas, so she has him reflect on what he’s looking for in a lady:

“Somewhere, someplace, someday, he would find a woman full of wonder and excitement, a woman who would love him the way he would love her. They would make love the first time to his satisfaction and the second time to the satisfaction of both; each time they would be tantalizing and incomprehensibly cruel with each other, yet gentle, so very gentle, as if their lovemaking were an assault and a confession at the same time…” (Michaels 144).

Call me old fashioned, but the words “incomprehensibly cruel” and “assault” probably don’t belong in dreams of love. Also glad to know he's gonna take care of her sexual needs in the second round. Class act, Caleb is.

Anyway, to add to the mass of confusion, Malcolm also sneaks aboard the ship. Seems he and Farrington are partners in some jewel heist or some shit like that. Farrington is smuggling him to the Americas also. So Malcolm is hiding in the locker box and Wren is hiding with the Puritans. Then Bascom, the zealot, sees her and decides she needs to be purified or some shit. There’s a bad storm up top and Bascom drags Wren to the deck to be cleansed by the fury of God. Caleb meanwhile is lashed to the wheel, trying to steer them safely through the storm.

Wren realizes she’s going to be washed overboard so she manages to wedge herself in-between some barrels or something. Caleb can’t go help her without killing them all, so he watches her between the waves, afraid she’ll be washed over:

“He couldn’t see her, didn’t know if she alive or dead. She could have been washed overboard…The thought of Wren’s body being hurled about beneath the relentless tides was more than he could bear. A single, lone tear formed in his eye and clung to the lash. Only once before could he ever remember a tear coming to his eye, and that had been when Sirena had told him Regan was his father.” (Michaels 181).

That’s right. Caleb knows he’s in love because he cries a single fucking tear for her, the second tear he’s ever cried in his entire badass life. He makes Chuck Norris look like a whining little puke. THAT is an Old Skool hero.

Wren and Caleb survive the storm, but they’re all battered and feverish. The crew tucks them into bed together “for warmth,” and they start to develop tender feelings for each other. Wren feels safe with Caleb, and in the fits of her fever, tells him about how she was raped. When she wakes up, she is horrified, but Caleb is kind to her.

Once everyone is healed you’d think we’re on to the sexy loving times, but no. For reasons that boggle the mind, Caleb decides now would be a great time to sleep with Sara.

Sara is pregnant by Malcolm, and freaking out about it, so she seduces Caleb with the hope of passing the baby off as his. And by “seduce” I mean she basically says “Wanna fuck?” and Caleb is all like “Sure, but don’t think this is a relationship, because I’m not that kind of man, baby.”

Wren is upset and there’s catfigthting and general sniping, and Caleb spends a lot of time thinking “Argh! Women!”

He then ditches Sara and begins to pursue Wren sexually, which pisses Sara off. By now Sara is completely batshit insane. She’s found Malcolm hiding in the locker box by following Farrington one day. So to get back at Wren she locks her in the locker box with Malcolm. She also kills Farrington to cover her tracks, and tells everyone that Wren was washed overboard.

If you can’t keep track of all of this, don’t worry. I had to jot notes on a napkin while I read this shit on my flight home from a business trip. If you actually want to read this book, stop now, because I’m going lay out the shit-tastic ending in part three.

Part III: Meanwhile, Wren is Still Tied to a Tree

Okay, so Wren is now trapped with Malcolm who rapes her again (of course). Caleb thinks she was washed overboard and is dead. Sara is pregnant and insane. Bascom is not pregnant and insane.

They get to America and Malcolm sneaks Wren off the ship in the middle of the night. He decides he’s going to ransom her back to Caleb. He ties her to a tree in the woods and leaves her there.

Meanwhile Caleb goes ashore and learns that the local governor, Kiefft, has been abusing the local Native American tribe, driving them nearly to starvation and using them for slave labor. Caleb is friends with the Pequot Chief, Sassacus, who tells him the Pequot will go to war with the Dutch if the situation doesn’t improve. Caleb thinks he can broker peace between the two parties (because he's a man, baby).

Meanwhile, Wren is still tied to a tree.

Malcolm finds Caleb and tells him he wants a bunch of jewels for Wren’s safe return. Caleb wants to kill him, but can’t because then he won’t know where Wren is. He nearly passes out because the stress of not being able to act on his manly urge to kill Malcolm is too much to bear. Also he loves Wren, and the affects of his love are described in the same painful terms I would use to describe a kidney stone. I swear, he's body is so violently allergic to love that it's causing his vision to "go gray."

Back at the tree, Wren freaks out because there are red ants attacking her. I think they might have been biting her lady parts, but I'm not sure. She screams and passes out. Some Pequot girls hear the scream and find her. They untie her and take her back to their village, where she is cared for.

Caleb pays Malcolm and then goes to the place where he was told Wren was. He sees that she is missing, but intuitively senses she’s safe with the Pequot or some bullshit like that. He finds Sassacus who tells him war is imminent, and also, hey, we have your stepsister/girlfriend.

At this point there was some tearful reunion and sexytimes in a waterfall or some shit like that. I don’t know. My brain had melted.

Caleb and Wren go back to New Amsterdam. They find that Bascom has shunned his pregnant sister and she’s basically stark-raving mad, so they come up with the solution of selling Sara to the Pequots. I mean, what else are you going to do with a  pregnant murderess, but sell her off to the locals? Also Wren thinks this is a brilliant idea because:

“A hut is a lot easier to build than a house. All we really need is some shelter that will protect her from the elements. Surely there must be some kind soul who would take pity on her and let her live within the confines of the settlement.” (Michaels 362).

Right. Let the crazy bitch live with the Indians because she’ll manage better in their squalid conditions than with the white folks. Good plan.

Then Lydia talks about making pies, and Bascom rapes another girl (I think this was rape number five). Bascom gets murdered and Malcolm drowns. Both epic bad guys were killed uneventfully in an almost oh-by-the-way scene of the book. Just...fucking...argh!

Meanwhile Kiefft convinces a bunch of settlers that Caleb and his crew are partisans with the warring Pequot and they attack the Sea Siren. Caleb and Wren and the crew defend her in a two page battle scene where Wren somehow becomes a female pirate and fierce warrior, and Caleb is all "Daaaamnnnn, girl!"

Then the Pequot come to their rescue and it’s all good.

By this time I felt like my gray-matter was running out of my ears, but I still had the energy to be shocked by the last words of the book. Michaels closes out this shitshow with Caleb crying his third tear ever:

“Caleb ran the back of his hand over both his eyes…Only Wren was close enough to Caleb to hear him say, ‘Look for me in that other world one day, Sassacus, and we will hunt and fish together, good friend’.”(Michaels 393). 

So yeah, the big emotional send off was Caleb and Sassacus's bromance, not the true love between Caleb and Wren.

I tried to find one thing I liked about this book, and I decided the font they printed it in was okay. The slew of rapes, the crazy fucking characters, disjointed plot, and lurid purple prose were enough to make me want to beg for mercy, but also nod my head in respect to Michaels. I wouldn't have thought you could put some much awful into 400 pages, but she did. Captive Splendors is just epically, gloriously bad.

 This book is available from Goodreads | Amazon | BN | Kobo | iBooks.

Categories: General Bitching, I Read This Sh*t So You Don't Have To, Reviews, Reviews by Author, Authors, L-P, Reviews by Grade, Grade F

Tourists atop the Chicago Tribune building look down on the Chicago River, the site of Old Fort Dearborn.
Photograph by B. Anthony Stewart, National Geographic

Image: Vampire by Edvard Munch

Here is how I know that all of the writers of the world have run out of ideas: Vampires in High School. In this marvelously fucked up age that we live in, we've apparently all collectively decided that the story we want to tell each other, and the story we want to hear, is how if we were granted eternal life in the body of a hot 16 year old, we would probably spend that eternal life in high school. Listening to inadequate and confusing versions of what World War I was all about. Showering with other 16 year olds after gym class or football practice. Facing lunchroom seating dilemmas. That is what we have decided we would spend hundreds of years doing.

Right after I read a horrible short story about a vampire in high school, I went and saw the new Neil Jordan film, about a vampire who goes to high school. I kind of yelled at my film-going companion for a while, about how we all, excitingly and terrifyingly enough, get to decide, the first generation ever, with some limitations of course, what we want to do, where we want to do it, and for how long. And our writers are responding to that by putting supernatural creatures, always the exciting deviants and margin-dwellers, into that symbol of neverending conformity, fucking high school.

Jesus Christ, people.

Speaking of non-conformity, Patton Oswalt has supplied the best blurb for crazy deviant Mary MacLane's memoir I Await the Devil's Coming. It:

"is a mind-cracker. It's basically the diary of a bisexual, rebellious, punk-rock aesthetic teenage girl -- written in Butte, Montana in 1902. Truly, a time-displaced rarity in a cold, cruel landscape. Required reading."

Fifty-two stories high, city noises fade and vistas expand. Chicago, June 1967.
Photograph by James L. Stanfield, National Geographic

Word came—via Twitter, Tumblr, I don’t remember, something that starts with a t—that The New Yorker has been featuring on its Web site the five best sentences of the week. That was good to hear, as I collect great sentences, the way some people collect beach glass, small statues of turtles, or perceived insults.

I was disappointed to find, however, that “Backblogged: Our Five Favorite Sentences of the Week” consists of sentences from a rather small subset of published work, The New Yorker itself. No one admires The New Yorker more than I do. However, I judge a magazine, even The New Yorker, to be too small a sample to yield each week five sentences worthy of collecting: that is to say, sentences which you cannot think of a way to improve and which might have a chance of living on when the immediate circumstances of their publication are long forgotten. Here, for example, is Backblogged’s latest crop:

1. “Henry Miller was one of those rare writers who actively and energetically hated New York, calling it late in life ‘that old shithole, New York, where I was born.’ ” From “Henry Miller, Brooklyn Hater,” by Alexander Nazaryan.
2. “It used to be the case that L.A. seemed utterly different from Eastern cities in one crucial way: It was already hauntingly apocalyptic, a place of steep hills, deep predator-filled canyons, terrible earthquakes, and winds bearing plutonium from Japan.” From “Leaving Los Angeles,” by Meghan O’Rourke.
3. “Cicadas have no natural predators, in the sense of an animal that depends on them as a primary food source—it would be problematic to wait nearly two decades between meals.” From “The Song of the Cicada,” by Michael Lemonick.
4. “For Berry and the others to be rescued, in other words, two things had to happen: she had to never forget who she was, and that who she was mattered; and Ramsey needed to not care who she might be at all—to think that all that mattered was that a woman was trapped behind a door that wouldn’t open, and to walk onto the porch.” From “What Charles Ramsey and Amanda Berry Knew,” by Amy Davidson.
5. “I never told anyone—not the people I worked with every day, or the victims I convinced to go on camera to share their stories—how my own life was changed by a gun.” From “Guns and My Mother,” by Arkadi Gerney.

They’re all fine sentences, don’t get me wrong. But collectable? One and 5 are gimmicky at the core, their impact dependent on a single surprising word. In 4, a cascade of prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, and abstract verbs pile on top of an interesting thought and pretty much bury it. Three is witty and nicely uses litotes in the essential word problematic; but the phrase in the sense of was clearly chosen for rhythm rather than meaning. (A species’ natural predator is an animal dependent on it as a primary food source, right?) O’Rourke’s sentence is the closest thing to a keeper; the list after the colon is vivid and beautifully paced. But the initial clause is marred by the overstated utterly and crucial and the wordy “It used to be the case that … ”

Of course, there are lots of other places where you can find personally curated sentence collections. A good one is a Tumblr called The Beautiful Sentence, which has been in business for exactly one year, as of today, and whose “About” reads: “Sentences with sound and sense. Emily Gordon, lepidopterist.” Gordon ranges widely, like a good shortstop: she’s got old and new, print and Web, demotic and mandarin. A few of her recent selections:

• “The dad was too irritated to see how his outburst made the child a thousand times less likely to stop complaining, bizarrely laying responsibility for how fun the entire vacation was, possibly the vast Grand Canyon itself, on the kid’s grouchy little blond head.”—Amy Shearn, Huffington Post
• “To condemn a woman simply for mentioning what she’s wearing is to miss the point that she has no choice but to wear something, and that the world we live in is such that people will derive meaning from her clothes in a way they do not from the spaghetti-sauce stains and baggy khakis of the male-poet set.”—Michelle Dean, Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.”—Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom
• “Ashley Tisdale parades her slim pins in animal print jeans as she picks up a calorific meal at In-N-Out Burger with pup Maui”—Daily Mail  headline

From these and other examples, I take it that some of the elements of a great sentence are shapeliness, pacing, conviction, surprise in both diction and idea, precision, wit, the evidence of the intelligence and personality behind it, and a strong sense that, having come up with it, the writer celebrated by utilizing some whiskey he or she had been saving at the back of the cabinet.

My own collection is a hodgepodge. One particular sentence from The New Yorker, by Ian Frazier, made me do a virtual spit-take when I first read it the week of April 19, 1982, and has been a favorite ever since. You actually need to read the previous sentence (which is also a good one) to get the full effect. Frazier is talking about a fishing-store owner. “Garen has a style of garment which he loves and which he wears almost every single day of his life. This garment is the jumpsuit.”

Another New Yorker one-two punch was penned in 1937 by A.J. Liebling, in a profile of the boxing cornerman Whitey Bimstein. Liebling says Bimstein’s assistant is “a Mr. Emmet.” Then: “Mr. Emmet, a Bostonian, is so called because, as he explains, ‘I always hanged in Emmet Street.’ He forgets his former name, which was polysyllabic.”

Here are a few more selections on my current playlist:

• “He do the police in different voices.”—Dickens
• “I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have bad dreams.”—Shakespeare
• “Raid Kills Bugs Dead”—Lew Welch
• “Without supposing that the man in the street has any penetrating instincts denied the expert, or is immune from demagoguery, we may nevertheless think it reassuring that political power is shared between experts and nonexperts rather than being a monopoly of the former.”—Richard Posner
• “‘Shut up,’ he explained.”—Ring Lardner
• “If you feel like loving me—if you’ve got the notion—I second that emotion.”—William (Smokey) Robinson

The collection is always changing. A recent addition is from a Washington Post article by Michael S. Rosenwald about gun shows. Rosenwald encounters a man at the show who says his name is Tom. Rosenwald writes:

“Asked his last name, Tom said, ‘Why?’”

Currently my favorite sentence is from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Horace de Vere Cole, a “practical joker” (that is the DNB‘s summary phrase) who died in 1936. My friend Wes Davis alerted me to the sentence several years ago, and I return to it whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth. Actually, there are several contenders in the Cole entry, which was written by Richard Davenport-Hynes. The final line is a classic of over-the-top understatement: “His widow married Mortimer Wheeler (1939) and shot Lord Vivian (1954).” Still, nothing can top the one Wes told me about, which describes the aging practical joker in the winter of his years:

“His advanced deafness prevented him from realizing that his carefully timed coughing was inadequate to cover his explosive breaking of wind.”

I would be delighted to hear of the favorite sentences of Lingua Franca readers.

Many days I just delete whatever does not look vaguely personal in my inbox. I don't read press releases, because I am sure that is the secret to a long and healthy life. Today I don't know why I stopped on this:

"I thought you would be interested to learn about a new study that finds a link between what a woman is reading while she is traveling and her willingness to indulge in a casual hookup."

Amazing! And scientific, I'm sure. I am sure they didn't just ask five women in an airport what they were reading and whether they put out, until they were escorted away by security/laid low with pepper spray in the face.

It is best not to linger on the fact that someone wrote this email. They typed it up and they pressed send and they did not immediately suffer a psychotic break from the experience. Nor the fact that there is an entire website devoted to churning out content like this. I would tell you what the website is, but then I would die.

Related: I am currently traveling in the west of Ireland, and occasionally reading The Golden Fleece by Robert Graves at the bar. There is no survey that will tell you the odds of your chances with me right now. So just try to pick me up. I fucking dare you.

The ladies of Middletown

Fell down a rabbit hole today, reading Rollo May's The Meaning of Anxiety. May is one of my favorites, his Man's Search for Himself is essential, particularly for those who want to puke when they try to read psychological writing today and it all sounds like fucking self-help.

Anyway, in the beginning chapters of The Meaning of Anxiety he talks about the Middletown anxiety studies. These originally took place in the '20s and '30s, but they seem particularly relevant today. May writes:

The citizens of Middletown, [the Lyndals] write, "is caught in a chaos of conflicting patterns, none of them wholly condemned, but no one of them clearly approved and free from confusion; or, where the group sanctions are clear in demanding a certain role of a man or a woman, the individual encounters cultural requirements with no immediate means of meeting them."

This "chaos of conflicting patterns" in Middletown was one expression of the pervasive social changes occurring in our culture... The Lynds observed that, since "most people are incapable of tolerating change and uncertainty in all sectors of life at once," the tendency in Middletown was toward a retrenchment into more rigid and conservative economic and social ideologies.

For me, it seems like this could be the basis of the weirdo "retrenchment" of gender roles in our contemporary society -- the pressure on marriage, the inflexibility of monogamy, the beatification (and simultaneous policing) of mothers... Right now with all of the news reports about how powerful men used the sexual revolution to become predators, raping young girls and women in the name of freedom, and how they're just now being held accountable (in a process that is looking more and more like a witchhunt, but we'll see how that progresses). It's like we all agree that the sexual revolution went all topsy turvy, and maybe we were best off in nuclear families after all.

Of course this comes out in other behavior as well -- gun culture, political inflexibility, etc, but the Middletown studies focus a lot on gender, so I'm thinking aloud about the gender aspect.

So the May reference led me to start reading whatever I could find online of Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture and Middletown in Transition: A Study in Cultural Conflicts, but I might have to buy a copy.

While we're on the subject, let's watch this video of Rollo May explaining what existential psychotherapy is, and why we need to think about anxiety outside of a medical model:

“A day without an argument is like an egg without salt.” —Angela Carter

image via https://twitter.com/mattdpearce/status/331096177393160193

I’m fascinated by the cover of yesterday’s Sunday New York Times. Fixated on the image of Boston Marathon suspected bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I was momentarily unable to notice the words surrounding it. I was a little stunned, then angry, then captivated. The image, not just the Instagrammed selfie of Dzhokhar, but this photo within the culturally significant New York Times front page, is endlessly sociologically fascinating.

For some, this cover provokes anger:

Wonder what Boston marathon victims think of the huge, swoony photo of Dzhokhar on the front of today's NYT.

2013/05/05 13:10:46 via TweetDeck

Matt Pearce

mattdpearce

This cover and the anger around it should be understood alongside the noteworthy #FreeJahar movement (Dzhokhar’s friends called him Jahar). Many people have expressed very positive feelings over Dzhokhar—including through the #freejahar tag on Twitter as well as fan-Tumblrs and so on—and what is brought up quite often is his disarming good looks. It might appear that the New York Times is playing to the #FreeJahar crowd here with such an enchanting shot. Further, within photojournalism, it is quite controversial to use photos that go out of their way to obscure reality with dramatic editing such as a faux-vintage filter, something I discussed when the paper ran award-winning faux-vintage war photos from Afghanistan. While the New York Times had previously used more “objective” photos of Dzhokhar, for yesterday’s cover, the paper opted for a glamour shot. Why?

What the New York Times was very likely trying to do is play on the juxtaposition between Dzhokhar-the-bomber and Dzhokhar-the-kid, the inherent tension of a swoon-worthy-murderer will sell lots of papers. In all of this, one must wonder, like the tweet above, if those affected by the Boston Marathon bombing find this treatment disrespectful?

Beyond just right or wrong, the fact that the paper chose an Instagrammed selfie is novel and interesting in and of itself. The image does capture well the story it accompanies. The article is, in my opinion, a well-told and intriguing story about Dzhokhar’s efforts to cover a disturbing set of motivations with a likeable exterior. The faux-vintage Instagram glow on an attractive selfie might very-well be a paradigmatic modern example of the sort of identity “face work” we all engage in. The selfie is, of course, face work in the literal sense that it is a photo of one’s face, but also in the way Erving Goffman famously discusses “face work”: as the demonstration and maintenance of positive social value and attributes in an effort for acceptance and approval. Goffman notes that this is a “’working’ acceptance, not a ‘real’ one”, which is precisely what the New York Times story describes Dzhokhar attempting to pull off in this front-page selfie.

Granting, of course, that Dzhokhar’s face work was certainly of a radically larger scale, selfie face work is a sort of fiction that is a common fact. The filtered selfie isn’t the most objectively accurate photo, but it might have been the most honest. It’s how he presented himself, down to the name-brand shirt, and it’s how many people his age understand and perform for increasingly ubiquitous photographic documentation. It’s a sort-of unreality that’s carries a sort-of truth. The selfie isn’t just any photo of you, it is, of course, one taken of yourself, by yourself, and there is something simultaneously fitting and upsetting in the young bomber taking his own mugshot.

The Page One bomber selfie also challenges what many of us thought the bomber would look like on the day the tragedy occurred. This image doesn’t conform to what “we”, as a culture, wanted, perhaps even needed, the bomber to look like. Instead of the stereotypical guy-in-a-cave or guy-in-a-shack, Dzhokhar here looks like someone we might know. More than that, given that this is an Instagrammed selfie, he even acts like someone we know, someone we recognize as “normal”. It breaks from the script: The bomber was never supposed to be so familiar.

The bomber selfie forces us to confront that violence doesn’t always come from an other. It is even cropped square; I can almost picture the now-customary “like” or “<3″ Facebook and Instagram buttons with this photo. As such, this front page acts a bit like a mirror: the Instagram filter forces us not to just see Dzhokhar, but ourselves, our own, modern, culture, too.

What other angles here have I not yet considered? Or perhaps it is still too soon to engage in this sort of meta-conversation around this tragedy, apologies if so, but this cover struck me as culturally significant for the reasons I’ve tried to articulate this morning, saying something important about what it means to be alive in 2013, .

Nathan is on Twitter [@nathanjurgenson] and Tumblr [nathanjurgenson.com].

June "Mama" Shannon and Mike "Sugar Bear" Thompson, the parental units on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, were maybe married this weekend in their hometown of McIntyre, Georgia. "Mama June isn't saying whether or not they're married, but they did renew their vows," said Carlos Greer of People. "She's still in love with Sugar Bear and she wanted to show their love to her girls."

They definitely wore matching camo prints (the kind with leaves and all) and the ceremony or whatever was definitely filmed for the next season of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, which is set to premiere on TLC in July.

They probably wanted to show the world how culturally offbeat they can be. They are really good at doing redneck drag without even really seeming like it.

Alana aka Honey Boo Boo wore a pageant gown because she is about as real of a pageant queen as this event was a wedding.

[Photos via Splash]