Jdanehey

Jane Eyre is far and away my favorite creep in literature. She’s a tiny monster who roams the countryside, flinging herself on people’s doorsteps, demanding that they love her or she’ll drown herself in some dark elfin sea. She threatens suicide at the drop of a hat. If I can’t get a new job, I will kill myself, you bastard, she tells God. I wish you would just hit me. If you won’t be my friend I hope a horse kicks me in the face and I explode. I wish we were both dead so you would respect my ghost. Don’t believe me?

“No; I know I should think well of myself; but that is not enough: if others don’t love me I would rather die than live—I cannot bear to be solitary and hated, Helen.  Look here; to gain some real affection from you, or Miss Temple, or any other whom I truly love, I would willingly submit to have the bone of my arm broken, or to let a bull toss me, or to stand behind a kicking horse, and let it dash its hoof at my chest—”

“I am not talking to you now through the medium of custom, conventionalities, nor even of mortal flesh;—it is my spirit that addresses your spirit; just as if both had passed through the grave, and we stood at God’s feet, equal,—as we are!”

“If I could go out of life now, without too sharp a pang, it would be well for me,” I thought.”

“A weakness, beginning inwardly, extending to the limbs, seized me, and I fell: I lay on the ground some minutes, pressing my face to the wet turf.  I had some fear—or hope—that here I should die: but I was soon up; crawling forwards on my hands and knees, and then again raised to my feet—as eager and as determined as ever to reach the road.”

“And with that answer he left me.  I would much rather he had knocked me down.”

“Hopeless of the future, I wished but this—that my Maker had that night thought good to require my soul of me while I slept; and that this weary frame, absolved by death from further conflict with fate, had now but to decay quietly, and mingle in peace with the soil of this wilderness.”

I love this nut. She almost starves to death because she’s too embarrassed to talk to strangers, and that resonates with me deeply, as they say. She falls in love with everyone who shows her a bit of kindness like it’s her job, starting with Miss Temple and ending with her hot cousins Mary and Diana.

And Mr. Rochester! I’m not going to take away Mr. Rochester from you. This is a slightly unusual Femslash Friday inasmuch as there’s no One True Pairing I’m trying to argue you ’round into supporting; I don’t disagree that Jane and Rochester make for a pleasantly unhinged couple. I like the way they terrify one another with slightly different methods — he threatens to mail her to Ireland but doesn’t follow through; she pretends to run back to her room to grab her handkerchief and abandons him. He’s all bark and she’s all bite; together they make a horrifying, adorable dog. No, my only hope here is that you will come to see Jane Eyre as a book that is suffused with a marvelously gay atmosphere, all tender looks and proclamations of devotion and boarding-school girlfriends. Jane Eyre falls in love too much to be confined to but one gender.

I’m not entirely sure on this, but I think that Jane Eyre is just about the first English novel to devote a significant amount of time to a girl’s experience at an all-female boarding school, which means that without it we might not have lesbian classics like Mädchen in Uniform and Chocolates for Breakfast and Regiment of Women and Olivia and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and our lives would be the poorer for it indeed. Given how large the Rochester-and-Thornfield storyline loom in most reader’s memories (and in most movie adaptations), it’s crazy to reread the book and realize how much of it is dedicated to her life before and after meeting him.

It’s at Lowell, Jane’s first boarding school, that we run into the first really classic set of lesbianish characters, Helen and Miss Temple, who sets Jane’s organ of veneration aflame:

I suppose I have a considerable organ of veneration, for I retain yet the sense of admiring awe with which my eyes traced her steps.  Seen now, in broad daylight, she looked tall, fair, and shapely; brown eyes with a benignant light in their irids, and a fine pencilling of long lashes round, relieved the whiteness of her large front; on each of her temples her hair, of a very dark brown, was clustered in round curls, according to the fashion of those times, when neither smooth bands nor long ringlets were in vogue; her dress, also in the mode of the day, was of purple cloth, relieved by a sort of Spanish trimming of black velvet; a gold watch (watches were not so common then as now) shone at her girdle.  Let the reader add, to complete the picture, refined features; a complexion, if pale, clear; and a stately air and carriage, and he will have, at least, as clearly as words can give it, a correct idea of the exterior of Miss Temple—Maria Temple, as I afterwards saw the name written in a prayer-book intrusted to me to carry to church.

Miss Temple. And Helen. Oh God, does Helen love Miss Temple.

“Is Miss Temple as severe to you as Miss Scatcherd?”

At the utterance of Miss Temple’s name, a soft smile flitted over her grave face.

“Miss Temple is full of goodness; it pains her to be severe to any one, even the worst in the school: she sees my errors, and tells me of them gently; and, if I do anything worthy of praise, she gives me my meed liberally.  One strong proof of my wretchedly defective nature is, that even her expostulations, so mild, so rational, have not influence to cure me of my faults; and even her praise, though I value it most highly, cannot stimulate me to continued care and foresight.”

I don’t know what Helen’s game is, exactly. She’s an absolute saint who derives great and unspeakable joy from explaining just how depraved and awful she “really” is, then sitting at Miss Temple’s feet in mute adoration and radiating goodness at her, which is presumably how angels have sex. She spends the rest of her time restraining Jane’s rough passions, convincing her not to let horses kick her in the chest, and cuddling in bed with her. It’s a wonderful, tender partnership. They kiss and embrace and tend to one another’s needs; Jane adores Helen like Dante adored Beatrice and the both of them worship at Miss Temple’s refined feet.

Miss Temple had always something of serenity in her air, of state in her mien, of refined propriety in her language, which precluded deviation into the ardent, the excited, the eager: something which chastened the pleasure of those who looked on her and listened to her, by a controlling sense of awe; and such was my feeling now: but as to Helen Burns, I was struck with wonder.

The refreshing meal, the brilliant fire, the presence and kindness of her beloved instructress, or, perhaps, more than all these, something in her own unique mind, had roused her powers within her. They woke, they kindled: first, they glowed in the bright tint of her cheek, which till this hour I had never seen but pale and bloodless; then they shone in the liquid lustre of her eyes, which had suddenly acquired a beauty more singular than that of Miss Temple’s—a beauty neither of fine colour nor long eyelash, nor pencilled brow, but of meaning, of movement, of radiance. Then her soul sat on her lips, and language flowed, from what source I cannot tell..

They conversed of things I had never heard of; of nations and times past; of countries far away; of secrets of nature discovered or guessed at: they spoke of books: how many they had read! What stores of knowledge they possessed! Then they seemed so familiar with French names and French authors: but my amazement reached its climax when Miss Temple asked Helen if she sometimes snatched a moment to recall the Latin her father had taught her, and taking a book from a shelf, bade her read and construe a page of Virgil; and Helen obeyed, my organ of veneration expanding at every sounding line. She had scarcely finished ere the bell announced bedtime! no delay could be admitted; Miss Temple embraced us both, saying, as she drew us to her heart—

“God bless you, my children!”

Helen she held a little longer than me: she let her go more reluctantly; it was Helen her eye followed to the door; it was for her she a second time breathed a sad sigh; for her she wiped a tear from her cheek.

Picture, if you will, a school full of brilliant women dressed in simple linens, strolling about rustic gardens murmuring softly in Latin to one another, sculpting naked in the afternoons and taking tea by the fire every evening before the Poetry and Caressing festival. Mutual admiration and intellectual romance is the byword of the day; it’s nerdy and it’s terrible and it’s beautiful and there are teeny tiny sandwiches every day for lunch. In such a place does Jane Eyre find her heart begin to grow three sizes.

(My favorite place on the Internet is this particular Wiki Answer: ”Question: Does Jane Eyre and Helen burns have a lesbian relationship? Answer: Of course they did.”)

Oh, the wonderful and the marvelous gayness of the Brontë sisters’ novels! Women in them are either stone-eyed rock doves who delight in torment and saying “No” and stonewalling the happiness of others, or else solemn-mouthed angels who read German, or lace-bedecked coquettes with flashing eyes and merry, laughing lips, and they all frustrate and tease and instruct and tenderly nurse one another in turn. Occasionally men turn up riding horses or flinging gold purses about, and then they go away again, and the women go back to their tiny dream of opening a schoolhouse together, as equals and companions of the heart as well as of the mind.

Miss Temple, when she finally marries, is described as being “lost to [Jane] forever.” It’s not until after Helen dies and Miss Temple moves away that it even occurs to Jane that she might be unhappy at Lowell. Then it’s off to Thornfield and a great deal of psychosexual mind games that to this day make me more than a little uncomfortable. (Remember when she decides Blanche Ingram must be Mr. Rochester’s fiancé and forces herself to draw Blanche’s beautiful face over and over again as a reminder of what a sad scrap of junk metal she is? That’s messed up, and you know she got off on the degradation more than just a little bit.)

But then. But then. Jane escapes the Thornfield mindfuck and wanders into an all-lady bluestocking’s paradise.

I could see clearly a room with a sanded floor, clean scoured; a dresser of walnut, with pewter plates ranged in rows, reflecting the redness and radiance of a glowing peat-fire.  I could see a clock, a white deal table, some chairs.  The candle, whose ray had been my beacon, burnt on the table; and by its light an elderly woman, somewhat rough-looking, but scrupulously clean, like all about her, was knitting a stocking.

I noticed these objects cursorily only—in them there was nothing extraordinary.  A group of more interest appeared near the hearth, sitting still amidst the rosy peace and warmth suffusing it.  Two young, graceful women—ladies in every point—sat, one in a low rocking-chair, the other on a lower stool; both wore deep mourning of crape and bombazeen, which sombre garb singularly set off very fair necks and faces: a large old pointer dog rested its massive head on the knee of one girl—in the lap of the other was cushioned a black cat.

A strange place was this humble kitchen for such occupants!  Who were they?  They could not be the daughters of the elderly person at the table; for she looked like a rustic, and they were all delicacy and cultivation.  I had nowhere seen such faces as theirs: and yet, as I gazed on them, I seemed intimate with every lineament.  I cannot call them handsome—they were too pale and grave for the word: as they each bent over a book, they looked thoughtful almost to severity.  A stand between them supported a second candle and two great volumes, to which they frequently referred, comparing them, seemingly, with the smaller books they held in their hands, like people consulting a dictionary to aid them in the task of translation.  This scene was as silent as if all the figures had been shadows and the firelit apartment a picture: so hushed was it, I could hear the cinders fall from the grate, the clock tick in its obscure corner; and I even fancied I could distinguish the click-click of the woman’s knitting-needles.  When, therefore, a voice broke the strange stillness at last, it was audible enough to me.

This is actual porn to a certain type of person. A clean, quiet house with good china. Two lovely, severe-looking chicks learning German, surrounded by cats and dogs. No men. A fire crackling on the hearth. Someone’s knitting. Goddamn. Goddamn.

So Jane passes out on their front door and forces them to take her in, which is just classic Jane (“I know you wouldn’t turn out a dog on a night like this, so perhaps you will have pity on me, miserable worm that I am”). She overhears them talking about how pretty they think she is while she’s passed out, the sick fuck, and the three of them take to each other like ducks to lesbian threesomes:

“Indeed you shall stay here,” said Diana, putting her white hand on my head.  “You shall,” repeated Mary, in the tone of undemonstrative sincerity which seemed natural to her.

The petting! The cossetting! The mutual improvement!

I liked to read what they liked to read: what they enjoyed, delighted me; what they approved, I reverenced…

Indoors we agreed equally well. They were both more accomplished and better read than I was; but with eagerness I followed in the path of knowledge they had trodden before me. I devoured the books they lent me: then it was full satisfaction to discuss with them in the evening what I had perused during the day. Thought fitted thought; opinion met opinion: we coincided, in short, perfectly.

If in our trio there was a superior and a leader, it was Diana. Physically, she far excelled me: she was handsome; she was vigorous. In her animal spirits there was an affluence of life and certainty of flow, such as excited my wonder, while it baffled my comprehension. I could talk a while when the evening commenced, but the first gush of vivacity and fluency gone, I was fain to sit on a stool at Diana’s feet, to rest my head on her knee, and listen alternately to her and Mary, while they sounded thoroughly the topic on which I had but touched. Diana offered to teach me German. I liked to learn of her: I saw the part of instructress pleased and suited her; that of scholar pleased and suited me no less. Our natures dovetailed: mutual affection—of the strongest kind—was the result. They discovered I could draw: their pencils and colour-boxes were immediately at my service. My skill, greater in this one point than theirs, surprised and charmed them. Mary would sit and watch me by the hour together: then she would take lessons; and a docile, intelligent, assiduous pupil she made.  Thus occupied, and mutually entertained, days passed like hours, and weeks like days.

Indoors we agreed equally well. If it weren’t for St. John (how old were you, by the way, when you found out how St. John is pronounced? How badly did it shake you?), things might have continued in this vein indefinitely, but of course he has to ruin things by proposing marriage to Jane.

While I looked, I thought myself happy, and was surprised to find myself ere long weeping—and why?  For the doom which had reft me from adhesion to my master: for him I was no more to see; for the desperate grief and fatal fury—consequences of my departure—which might now, perhaps, be dragging him from the path of right, too far to leave hope of ultimate restoration thither.

Fine. Fine. Jane, we release you to go to Rochester, but never forget the two lesbian paradises you dwelt in before and after you learned his name. Perhaps you will find one again, after he is gone.

Another time, perhaps, we will have a little chat about Villette and Agnes Grey, both of which are easily thrice as saturated with lesbian sensibility. Ginevra Fanshawe, that swaying, teasing, insouciant minx! — If you want to read a book about a coquetteish high femme who strikes up a dizzying, mocking relationship with a stone butch (who cross-dresses and makes ardent love to her in public during a school play), pick up a copy of Villette immediately.

But that is a conversation for another Femslash Friday.

Read more Femslash Friday: Jane Eyre at The Toast.

You may have heard the news: a working draft of one of the iconic songs in American music, Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run,” will be displayed in Perkins Library on May 8-11, and then here in the Rubenstein Library from May 12-June 27.  While at the Rubenstein, Springsteen’s draft, owned by Floyd Bradley, will be in the very good company of one of the largest collections of manuscripts by another favorite son of New Jersey, Walt Whitman, in the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana.

Walt Whitman, 1869, from the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana, box III-6C (Saunders 29), by M. P. Rice; Bruce Springsteen, on the cover of the album Born to Run, 1975, by Eric Meola.

Both Whitman and Springsteen felt and expressed a deep connection with working-class Americans.  After a transient childhood, Whitman worked as a journeyman printer before becoming the “Good Gray Poet”; Springsteen’s mother famously took out a loan to buy him a guitar when he turned sixteen, and years of honing his musical craft at small venues for low pay preceded the breakthrough of “The Boss.”

The working draft of “Born to Run” includes many passages that were changed or excised from the final lyrics, but the chorus “tramps like us, baby we were born to run” is already in place.

The chorus of “Born to Run” in the working draft. Image courtesy of Sotheby’s.

“Tramps,” or homeless itinerants looking for steady work and a place to live, became a particular concern in the United States (and for Whitman) during and after the “long depression” of the 1870s.  Whitman wrote about this phenomenon in many different contexts, perhaps most memorably in a fragment entitled “The Tramp and Strike Questions.”  In a sentence that gets to the core of an element of “Born to Run” and other Springsteen songs, Whitman writes there: “Curious as it may seem, it is in what are call’d the poorest, lowest characters you will sometimes, nay generally, find glints of the most sublime virtues, eligibilities, heroisms.” A volume in the Trent Collection, given by Whitman the title “Excerpts &c Strike & Tramp Question,” contains manuscripts and newspaper stories annotated by Whitman in preparation for a lecture on the topic, which was never delivered.

Two prose fragments from “Excerpts &c Strike & Tramp Question,” Trent Collection of Whitmaniana Box II-7B.

We’re excited to host the “Born to Run” draft, and please contact us if you’d like to take the chance to see this treasure of American culture alongside items in the Trent Collection of Whitmaniana.

Post contributed by Will Hansen, Assistant Curator of Collections.

“Mr. Stevenson”

Some stray thoughts:

1. I would like a businessman for a pet, but I would not like to take very good care of him.

2. It does not seem quite fair to show 15-second ads before a 2-minute video. I cheerfully endure proportionately justifiable commercials while watching a full-length episode of television, but upon my Sam, it seems a little hard to have to sit through ads nearly 1/4 of the length of the clip itself, particularly when I wish to watch a succession of clips rather than just clicking over to Netflix and watching an actual KITH episode. Oh, I seem to have solved my own problem. I shall click over to Netflix, and diminish, and remain Galadriel.

3. Aging is a natural process that comes for us all, and it is deeply uncharitable to remark upon the face of men who have lived well into their fifties as if they were spoiled lunch meat, but it makes me sad to see modern-day Mark McKinney and Bruce McCullough introducing clips of themselves, back when their faces were still possessed of a lithe and distant beauty that has since been stolen by the hands of Time.

4. I think this is a very good Kids in the Hall sketch.

5. Bruce and Scott made the perfect mother-son team, better even than Kevin and Dave.

6. I myself have never been possessed of a lithe and distant beauty, although once in high school my grandmother told me I looked a little bit like “that girl from The Princess Diaries.”

7. Every time I hear the first few notes of the Kids in the Hall theme song I feel inexplicably sad in the same way I feel inexplicably sad when I hear the first few notes from the Adventures of Pete & Pete theme song.

8. The “Business Time” episode of Adventure Time owes more than a great deal to this sketch, I think.

Read more Kids In The Hall Monday: Pet Businessman at The Toast.

"Spinster, referring to an unmarried woman, is a whole lot more negative-sounding than bachelor, unmarried male. A bachelor connotes an idea of a fun, handsome, available male with the power to choose his mate. A spinster sounds like a woman who has been unchosen, left to the side. It really reflects the way society portrays these two populations, especially in 19th century literature."

Over at Ohio Edit, my new Reading the Tarot column is up, and this one is about the Nine of Cups. I refer to it as the spinster card. Only, spinster Coco Chanel, not spinster Miss Havisham. Certainly not spinster Jane Austen, whose novels always seemed to have that angle, about how dreadful it must be to be outside of a man's sphere of protection. No self-hating spinsters. Spinster as in Henry James.

Men can be spinsters, too. Bachelor always seemed like the pejorative word to me. It suggests prolonged adolescence, a man constantly needing to take his willy out to receive outside confirmation that yes, it is so very impressive, yes it works, let’s just get on with it already. But spinster, that has a dignity to it.

There are very few writers who bothered to think that maybe one could be single and not go crazy from the despair. Henry James did it a few times. W Somerset Maugham had wonderful spinsters. (But then with his marriage, abusive and suffocating as it was, he must have thought not being married would be the most amazing thing in the whole wide world.) Barbara Pym. But for the most part, writers have spinsters being loony or dullwitted, twisted up emotionally, or forever searching for The One. Fuck that. All hail the great spinsters of literature.

Read the whole thing here.

Go Ask Alice is a 1971 novel by Beatrice Sparks that bills itself the “real-life diary” of an anonymous teenage girl. It has sold over four million copies, was adapted as a TV movie with William Shatner, and is still in print over 40 years later. I read it when I was in the seventh grade and was absolutely terrified by the searingly honest portrayal of what (I assumed) it felt like to do drugs.

On rereading it as a slightly less credulous adult, I am amazed that even at twelve I was ever fooled by the least credible imitation of a teenage girl ever to stain a page. The entire book reads like the literary equivalent of this tweet:

HELLO FELLOW HUMAN TEENS I HEARD THE COOLEST PLACE FOR US TEENS TO HANG OUT IS Ｔｈｅ Ｃｏｌｏｓｓａｌ Ｐｉｌｌａｒ ｏｆ Ｗａｓｐ Ｅｇｇｓ LETS GO DO NOT BRING WEAPONS

— Glempner (@pisscop) May 9, 2011

“Wonderful news, Diary! We’re moving. Daddy has been invited to become the Dean of Political Science at——————. Isn’t that exciting! Maybe it will be like it was when I was younger. Maybe again he’ll teach in Europe every summer and we’ll go with him like we used to. Oh those were the fun, fun times! I’m going to start on a diet this very day. I will be a positively different person by the time we get to our new home. Not one more bite of chocolate or nary a french fried potato will pass my lips till I’ve lost ten globby pounds of lumpy lard. And I’m going to make a completely new wardrobe. Who cares about Ridiculous Roger? Confidentially, Diary, I still care.”

No teenage girl has ever referred to her ex-boyfriend as “Ridiculous Roger,” nor immediately answered her own rhetorical question.

“The movie was fun with Scott. We went out after and I ate six wonderful, delicious, mouth-watering, delectable, heavenly french fries. That was really living in itself! I don’t feel about Scott like I used to about Roger. I guess that was my one and only true love, but I’m glad it’s over.”

Do you know who talks about french fries like that? Old ladies wearing sunglasses in birthday cards they sell at car wash gift stores, and Mormon therapists who write fake diaries by imaginary fifteen-year-olds.

“I keep thinking about our teacher in gym teaching us modern dance and always saying that it will make our bodies strong and healthy for childbearing, then she harps and harps that everything must be graceful, graceful, graceful.”

No one has ever suggested that modern dance is helpful practice for childbearing; if anyone did, exactly zero adolescent girls would listen to her.

“Dear precious Diary, I am baptizing you with my tears. I know we have to leave and that one day I will even have to leave my father and mother’s home and go into a home of my own. But ever I will take you with me.”

“And go into a home of my own.” “And diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.”

“I wonder if I could go stick my finger down my throat and throw up after every meal?”

Teenagers don’t independently invent the concept of eating disorders in their journals. She would just call it bulimia.

“Lucy Martin is having a Christmas party, and I’m supposed to bring a gelatin salad.”

No.

“I met another girl walking home from school. She lives just three blocks from us and her name is Beth Baum. She’s really awfully nice. She’s kind of shy too and prefers books to people just as I do. Her father is a doctor and away from home most of the time just like Dad, and her mother nags a lot but then I guess all mothers do. If they didn’t I’d hate to see what homes and yards and even the world would look like. Oh, I do hope I won’t have to be a nagging mother, but I guess I’ll have to be, else I don’t see how anything will ever be accomplished.”

“I say, aren’t you fellow school-teen Anonymous?”

“I am! And your full name is?”

“Beth Baum. Which do you prefer, books or people?”

“Books, much as you do. To what degree does your mother nag?”

“As much as we all will, till the world burns.”

“Even so, co-human. Even so.”

“Boy, Mom would be proud of my thinking and attitude today. It’s just too bad we can’t communicate anymore. I remember being able to talk to her when I was little but it’s as though we speak a different language now and the meanings just don’t come across the right way. She means something and I take it another way or she says something and I think she’s trying to correct me or “uplift” me or preach at me and I really suspect she isn’t doing that at all, just groping and being as lost with words as am I. That’s life, I guess.”

No teenager has ever thought this fairly and objectively about her own mother. Their brains just aren’t ready for it.

“We even talk a lot about religion. The Jewish Hebrew faith is a lot different than ours. They have their meetings on Saturday and they are still looking for Christ or the Messiah to come. Beth loves her grandparents a lot and she wants me to meet them. She says they are Orthodox and eat meat off one set of plates and milk things off another set of plates. I wish I knew more about my own religion so I could tell Beth.”

“As a Jewish Hebrew, I look forward to the day when Christ or the Messiah comes, either one, both are great. Pass the milk things, please.”

“I’m going to wear my new white pants suit, and I have to go now and wash my hair and put it up.”

Not just her white pantsuit, nor even her white pant suit — her white pants suit.

“I had found the perfect and true and original language, used by Adam and Eve, but when I tried to explain, the words I used had little to do with my thinking. I was losing it, it was slipping out of my grasp, this wonderful and priceless and true thing which must be saved for posterity. I felt terrible, and finally I couldn’t talk at all and slumped back onto the floor, closed my eyes and the music began to absorb me physically. I could smell it and touch it and feel it as well as hear it. Never had anything ever been so beautiful. I was a part of every single instrument, literally a part. Each note had a character, shape and color all its very own and seemed to be entirely separate from the rest of the score so that I could consider its relationship to the whole composition, before the next note sounded. My mind possessed the wisdoms of the ages, and there were no words adequate to describe them.”

…This is barely how drugs feel. It’s a little bit like Nation of Islam, though.

“It’s been like, wow—the greatest thing that has ever happened. Remember I told you I had a date with Bill? Well he introduced me to torpedos on Friday and Speed on Sunday. They are both like riding shooting stars through the Milky Way, only a million, trillion times better. The Speed was a little scary at first because Bill had to inject it right into my arm.”

She has snorted speed maybe twice and she’s already graduated to needles. Because they’re so inexpensive and readily available.

“I’m so, so, so, so, so curious, I simply can’t wait to try pot, only once, I promise! I simply have to see if it’s everything that it’s cracked up not to be! All the things I’ve heard about LSD were obviously written by uninformed, ignorant people like my parents who obviously don’t know what they’re talking about; maybe pot is the same.”

At this point, we are expected to believe that even a single human being has tried the following drugs, in the following order:

1. LSD
2. Speed
3. Benzos
4. Various “uppers and downers”
5. Injected speed
6. Acid
7. Tranquilizers
8. Marijuana

Marijuana is a gateway drug, not the last drug you try after you’ve done everything else.

“All my life I’ve thought that the first time I had sex with someone it would be something special, and maybe even painful, but it turned out to be just part of the brilliant, freaky, way-out, forever pattern. I hadn’t thought about being pregnant before. Can it happen the first time? Will Bill marry me if I am or will he just think I’m an easy little dum-dum who makes it with everyone? Of course he won’t marry me, he’s only fifteen years old. I guess I’ll just have to have an abortion or something.”

“Or something.”

“I must talk to someone. I must find someone who understands about drugs and talk to them.”

No.

“We never get tired and she and I are two of the most popular girls at school, I know I look great, I’m still down at 103 pounds, and every time I get hungry or tired I just pop a Benny. We’ve got energy and vitality to spare, and clothes, like man. My hair is the greatest. I wash it in mayonnaise and it’s shining and soft enough to make anyone turn on.”

I realize we live in an anti-shampoo society, and that women nowadays love nothing more than throwing away perfectly good shampoo in favor of pushing baking powder and various kitchen solvents into their scalp, but I refuse to believe that any woman has ever washed her entire hair in pure and unadulterated mayonnaise.

“School kids are one thing and even the junior high, but today I sold ten stamps of LSD to a little kid at the grade school who was not even nine years old, I’m sure. I know that he in turn must be pushing and these kids are just too young! The thought of nine and ten year olds getting wasted is so repulsive that I’m not going over there any more! I know if they want it they’ll get it somewhere but they won’t get it from me!”

Call me old-fashioned — call me naïve — but I cannot bring myself to believe that even in the 1970s the price of LSD was so low that nine-year-olds could afford to buy it during recess.

“But just before I was too out of it to notice what was going on, I saw Sheila and that cocksucker she goes with lighting up and setting out Speed. I remember wondering why were they getting high when they had just set us out on this wonderful low, and it wasn’t until later I realized that the dirty sonsofbitches had taken turns raping us and treating us sadistically and brutally. That had been their planned strategy all along, the low-class shit eaters.”

All implausible, but the phrase “low-class shit eaters” is perhaps the least plausible of all.

“Adolescents have a very rocky insecure time. Grown-ups treat them like children and yet expect them to act like adults. They give them orders like little animals, then expect them to react like mature, and always rational, self-assured persons of legal stature. It is a difficult, lost, vacillating time.”

This is a line from a Deborah Tannen book, I am sure of it.

“I don’t know what or when or where or who it is! I only know that I am now a priestess of Satan trying to maintain after a freak-out to test how free everybody was and to take our vows.”

Right-ho.

“Another day, another blow job. The fuzz has clamped down till the town is mother dry.”

…Right-ho.

“The kids have really started hassling me. Twice today Jan banged into me in the hall and called me Nancy Nice and Mary Pure. I was walking home from the store and a carload of kids pulled up beside me and began shouting things like:

‘Well, if it isn’t easy lay, Mary Pure.’

‘No, it’s Miss Fink Mouth.’

‘Miss Super Fink Mouth. Miss Double Triple Fink Mouth.’

Surely they wouldn’t pick on me so unmercifully if it weren’t for drugs. Would they?”

Heroin dealers. Vicious, deranged, LSD-addled, homicidal heroin dealers, and the worst insults they can think of are “Mary Pure” and “Miss Double Triple Fink Mouth.”

“Anyway last spring, he and three of his buddies heard about sniffing glue and thought it sounded exciting so they bought a couple of tubes and tried it.”

No one in this book just drinks beer. Didn’t you mostly just drink beer in high school?

“I used to think I would get another diary after you are filled, or even that I would keep a diary or journal through my whole life. But now I don’t really think I will. Diaries are great when you’re young. In fact, you saved my sanity a hundred, thousand, million times. But I think when a person gets older she should be able to discuss her problems and thoughts with other people, instead of just with another part of herself as you have been to me. Don’t you agree? I hope so, for you are my dearest friend and I shall thank you always for sharing my tears and heartaches and my struggles and strifes, and my joys and happinesses. It’s all been good in its own special way, I guess. See ya.

The subject of this book died three weeks after her decision not to keep another diary.

Her parents came home from a movie and found her dead. They called the police and the hospital but there was nothing anyone could do.

Was it an accidental overdose? A premeditated overdose? No one knows, and in some ways that question isn’t important. What must be of concern is that she died, and that she was only one of thousands of drug deaths that year.”

I feel like that question is important, but let us leave that aside for now. I will not contest the fact that thousands of people die as a result of drug use every year, only that no human person ever fell into drug addiction by way of gelatin salad and secret LSD and the Satanic priesthood.

Read more Lines From Go Ask Alice That, In Hindsight, Should Have Tipped Me Off That This Was Not A True Story at The Toast.

In a stunning, sublime act of teen dirtbaggery, after an argument with his parents (which we can only pray was about fine ham) this weekend, a San Jose teenager ran away from home by hopping the fence and stowing away in the wheel well of a plane bound for Hawaii.

The FBI is calling it a “miracle” and the airline says a teen who hopped the fence at a San Jose airport is “lucky to have survived” a 5-hour flight to Maui — in the wheel well of a Boeing 767.

The 16-year-old stowaway survived temperatures as low as 80 degrees below zero and the thin air available at 38,000 feet, FBI spokesman Tom Simon said.

“He was unconscious for the lion’s share of the flight,” said Simon. “Kid’s lucky to be alive.”

Security video indicated the teen was able to breach San Jose’s Mineta International Airport security on Sunday and climb undetected into the wheel well of Hawaiian Airlines Flight 45.

“Yeah, I fucking knew it was Easter,” the teen presumably added during his interview. “I don’t care. I’ll run away on Easter. They’re a bunch of fucking fascists.”

“I passed out pretty fast, though, so the ride wasn’t even that big of a deal. People made such a big deal out of it, but whatever,” he almost certainly continued, looking tough as shit. “Wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t lost my Luckies somewhere over Catalina.”

Officials confirmed that the teen reportedly planned to return home by skateboarding across the Pacific.

[Image almost certainly not of the actual teen dirtbag in question]

Read more Dirtbag Teen Runs Away In Style at The Toast.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I find Pharrell’s massive hit “Happy” really, really irritating. And, for that reason, I love it. In the same way that The Sex Pistols were Malcolm McLaren’s massive joke on us, this song is, I think, Pharrell’s attempt to pull a fast one on the economy of viral “upworthiness”–an economy that, as David has shown, is really racist.

So, before I get into “Happy,” let me first explain what I mean by the “viral economy of upworthiness.” To be really simplistic, what I mean by the term is this: the rhizomatic, exponential spread of positive affect (“upworthiness”) across social media, which uses fan labor (ie., the labor of sharing and spreading) to generate profits for media corporations (both the social media corporations, like YouTube, and the record companies, who profit from each play/click.) In a way, the viral economy of upworthiness is a lot like finance capital–instead of algorithmically intensifying money, this economy algorithmically intensifies positive feelings and/or affects. For example, as David argues, Upworthy videos “zoom in on heroic moments that are emotionally powerful”; Upworthy banks on the viral spread of these good feelings. The viral economy of upworthiness spreads positive affect like a disease, because the business model only works when happiness spreads like cancer. Social media business models require users to share things (that’s how we make ‘connections’ that generate the oh-so-valuable “data” sold to third parties), and apparently positive affects like happiness are more shareable than negative ones (there’s still no “dislike” button on Facebook, right?). What David’s article brilliantly points out is that this organization of the means of production is also a racialized and imperialist one, one in which non-white, non-Western people do the groundwork for this economy of viral upworthiness. Capitalism says there can be no majority for the pity (Kein Mehrheit Für Die Mitleid--who knew KMFDM basically predicted social media capitalism?), so to speak, so it outsources the work of transforming tragedy or bad feeling into happiness or upworthiness onto the same groups of people who have historically done the white/Western world’s un/undercompensated dirty work.

OK, cheeky music jokes aside, let’s talk about “Happy.”

For a number of reasons, the song sounds manic and anxious. First, there’s the tempo. It’s about 160 BPM. For some reference, Motley Crue’s “Kickstart My Heart” (whose first line is “When I get high, get high on speed”) clocks in at 180 BPM, Rihanna’s “We Found Love,” a proper dance banger, is 128 BPM, Kesha & Pitbull’s “Timber” is 130 BPM, as is Fatboy Slim’s “Eat Sleep Rave Repeat.” So, “Happy” is a full 30 BPM faster than most contemporary EDM-pop songs, songs designed for crowds of twentysomethings hopped up on MDMA. In this light, “Happy” seems a bit like a super-sized dose of sonic Adderall, a properly legal and bourgeois dose of speed that helps propel us through our hyperemployed days and perform the upworthy affective labor so many of our jobs demand. We’d need Adderall to make it all the way through the song’s marathon 24-hour video. Perhaps this video is commenting on hyperempolyment and real subsumption, capitalism’s increasing ability to realize its dream of the 24-hour work day? (And seriously, don’t those drawn out “eeeeeee”s in the chorus suggest the clenched-jaws of a speed freak?)

Another reason this song sounds manic and anxious is because, as Kariann Goldschmitt (@kgoldschmitt) pointed out in a conversation we had on Twitter, the song never releases any tension. The song is basically one long plateau with two breaks that build a little bit of tension without releasing it in a hit or a climax (like the soar in “We Found Love,” or the drop in something like “Tsunami” or “Bangarang”). The break from 1:49-2:13 builds sonic tension: the clapping intensifies the rhythmic texture, and the addition of the choir and the resonance of the church sanctuary intensifies the timbre, but the downbeat of the new verse doesn’t release that tension. There’s a condensed version of that intensification at 3:02-3:13, and yet again we are denied a proper climax point. Being “Happy” seems like a lot of affective labor with no payoff–the surplus value of our happiness labor goes to somebody else.

And I think that’s what Pharrell is trying to point out. As I read his performance, he’s slyly critiquing the affective labor “upworthy” white supremacist pop culture requires of black performers.

First, what role to black culture workers play in white supremacist upworthiness? As I have argued before, black culture workers are often like sous-chefs who prep the affective/emotional mise en place for “our” performance of upworthiness (they do the work of “organizing” whites’ ignorance of ongoing racism). That is, they’re supposed to perform positive affects and emotions–like heroic overcoming, as in the example David discusses in his post–that audiences then transform into a higher-order upworthiness. “We” perceive “our” appreciation of “their” performance as evidence of “our” commitment to multiculturalism. However, if black people were manifestly unhappy, that would shatter the myth of post-racial multiculturalism. So, post-racial white supremacy demands blacks play happy. [1]. And that’s just what Pharrell does. He plays happy.(Perhaps this is one reason “Happy” was the song that broke the recent 14-week absence of lead black artists from the top of the Billboard Hot 100? It provided precisely the kind of surplus value people expect from black artists?)

But, there are (at least) two ways that his performance works against the literal interpretation of it as the expression of happiness. First, his vocal performance adopts some strategies used by Billie Holiday to transform banal, racist and sexist Tin Pan Alley rejects into nuanced art songs. Angela Davis discusses Holiday’s “working with and against the platitudinous content” of pop songs (Blues Legacies & Black Feminism, 163) at length. Here, I want to focus on one specific type of vocal embellishment that Holiday uses all the time, and that Pharrell also uses throughout “Happy”: they both mimic, in their vocal melodies, the pitch shifts that people use in spoken language to indicate sarcasm. Holiday does it here in “When a Woman Loves a Man,” which, when taken literally, is a really sexist song. Listen to how she dips down and back up in the first verse (e.g., “just another ma-an,” “she’ll just string al-ong”):

Click here to view the embedded video.

Sure, these are super sexist lyrics. But by mimicking the pitch patterns that Americans use when being sarcastic, Holiday ironizes these lyrics. She’s not endorsing them, she’s making fun of them. This is reinforced by the song’s last line, which doesn’t go down in pitch, but up. In spoken language, that indicates a question: “That’s how it goes, when a woman loves a man?” By phrasing this as a question rather than a declamation, Holiday sarcastically critiques the song’s sexism. Pharrell echoes Holiday’s vocal sarcasm in “Happy”’s verses–for example, listen to how he moves the pitch around on “balloon” at 0:26 in the first verse. There’s also “news” in the beginning of the second verse. The choruses use another type of sarcasm: deadpan. The choruses are sung almost entirely on the same pitch. This mimics the flat deadpan one uses to indicate that you don’t fully believe what you’re saying or reiterating, often because you’re expected/forced to say it.

So, I think there’s a good bit of musical evidence that Pharrell is critiquing the white supremacist expectation that he perform upworthiness for white audiences. But his visual performance also gives us some evidence that he’s pulling a fast one on us: his hat.

He wears the hat throughout the video, but it’s central to his overall ‘brand’ at the moment. It even has its own Twitter account. So, this hat is important.

The hat is a vintage Vivienne Westwood hat. As Alison Davis notes over at The Cut, this is the same style hat that Malcolm McLaren wore in his hip hop video, “Buffalo Gals.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is the same Malcolm McLaren who formed and managed The Sex Pistols–mainly as a huge art prank. McLaren was the master of “The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle”. The “swindle” here is that the joke is on us–the Pistols are basically a prank, a massive troll designed to rile up the general public. The Pistols aren’t authentic working-class rebellion–they’re manufactured for some too-clever art-school condescension at bourgeois moralism.

And that’s precisely what “Happy” is–it’s trolling bourgeois upworthiness. That’s what the hat is supposed to tell us: in the same way that McLaren was trolling Thatcherites, Pharrell is trolling Obama/upworthy liberals.

Most (white) people seem to take the song literally. They don’t get the sarcasm, or the troll. Perhaps the question this song begs most is: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?

Click here to view the embedded video.

[1]This accords with what Sara Ahmed says in her famous “Feminist Killjoys” essay: “Marilyn Frye argues that oppression involves the requirement that you show signs of being happy with the situation in which you find yourself. As she puts it, “it is often a requirement upon oppressed people that we smile and be cheerful. If we comply, we signify our docility and our acquiescence in our situation.” To be oppressed requires that you show signs of happiness, as signs of being or having been adjusted. For Frye “anything but the sunniest countenance exposes us to being perceived as mean, bitter, angry or dangerous”.”

Robin is on Twitter as @doctaj.

This will also be my last post for a few weeks–I’m traveling three weeks in a row for speaking gigs: 4/17 at Stony Brook, 4/23 at Colby College, and May 2-5 at Penn State. If you’re near any of those places, I’d love it if you came to my talks! Hit me up on twitter for details.

When you are asked why you want to go to library school, do not say “I like books.” That’s the reason you’re going to library school, but it’s everyone’s reason, so come up with something a bit more creative (like you want to be the Veronica Mars of answering reference questions, you want to ingrain your love of books in the youth of America, or maybe you just really love the Dewey Decimal system.) Everyone knows you came to library school because you like books anyway.

This is the one place in the world where you actually fit in. Sometimes you literally blend in with the crowd, because everyone looks alike. You are constantly getting mistaken for the other million busty, slightly awkward looking brunettes who walk around this area of campus. That doesn’t mean there aren’t cliques, even library school has those. But eventually everyone under 50 who knows how to shower becomes part of the “cool kids” group.

You’re probably wondering at this point how you’re going to fit in. Simple! Have you seen Doctor Who? You should probably have a favorite Doctor (NINE FOREVER.) You’ve read Harry Potter and maybe dabbled in fandom? And you love Tina Fey. You must love Tina Fey. To really stand out you should probably have at least one “thing.” It’ll have to be really weird to stand out in library school though. Maybe cyborg hockey player RPS? Oh wait, that’s taken. Maybe just think on it for a while. Whatever you do, don’t talk about the rock wall at your gym constantly. Nobody likes that guy.

Librarians have to do something with their hands while they’re bingeing on pop culture, so you should probably develop a craft. Knitting and crochet are acceptable, but cross-stitch works too. But what do you eat while you’re watching all that tv? Hopefully you’ve baked some Sorting Hat cupcakes for your Harry Potter marathon. Baking is preferable, but home-brewing is an acceptable substitute. At the very least you should love to eat.

The absolute best thing about library school is your peers. You will all have a Leslie Knope-ian intensity about something. It may be Star Wars, hockey, astrophysics, or that damn rock wall, but everyone brings some kind of obsession to the table. There is sure to be someone who will be a little too into board games. People will regularly discuss Weasleycest and Tami Taylor’s hair at parties, because if there’s one thing librarians get, it’s an enthusiast. We are all punk-ass book jockeys, and we want you to read our favorite book. And then maybe we’ll break down the Library of Congress Subject Headings afterwards.

If you’re thinking you will meet a future love interest in library school, don’t hold your breath. The pickin’s are slim. If you do meet your significant other in library school, be warned: they will ask you to consolidate your Harry Potter collections once you move in together and you will look at them aghast. You will never have any space in your apartment because you need so much bookshelf room. Also, you will probably have cats. So try not to be allergic to them.

Sorry, did you want to actually come to library school to learn, not just to play Settlers of Cataan all night? Well, none of your professors have ever actually been librarians. Maybe one or two tried it in the 70s, but they’re all library directors now. Everyone else has a PhD in Library Science. Nobody has any idea why. PhDs don’t know jack about being an actual librarian.

Oh wait, I lied, you’ll have one awesome professor who had a storied career at a local public library and teaches Young Adult Literature. You take Young Adult Literature even though at this point in the program you know you’d hate being a public librarian, and you still can’t stand teenagers. You thought you’d outgrow that once you stopped being a teenager, but you still can’t relate to youths.

The classes? Oh, they’re great. If you like being treated like a middle-schooler. You will do approximately 10 group projects every semester. Don’t be the person that refuses to adopt the one technological tool that makes doing group projects slightly less monstrous. Google Docs is one of the easiest ways of working on group projects while being a grown-up. If you refuse to use it because you can’t be bothered to sign up for a fucking Gmail account, you are what’s wrong with this country. But group projects are a cleansing fire. If you survive them, you can deal with any library patron with ease. Group projects will teach you how easy it is to get into library school, even a supposedly “well-ranked” one. You will quickly identify the dream-team group member potential for every class and dread pre-assigned groups, despite the ideals of democracy and diversity that library school should have ingrained in you.

Most of what you learn will be in acronyms. ALA. FRBR. RDA. MARC. AACR. ILS. ILL. ERM. IMLS. LCSH. OCLC. OPAC. MDMA…that one may not actually be relevant. But FAFLRT? That one is all real! You are probably going to be forced to take some basic classes before you get into the “advanced” stuff. The basic classes make your brains melt out of your ears, because you spend your time learning a combination of basic html, intricate information seeking-behavior theories, and MATH. You probably came to library school to avoid math, but they don’t care.

Maybe you’re not going to Library School, but to an iSchool? A fancy way of saying, “We know how to use computers too!” And maybe your MLS (Masters of Library Science) is now an MLIS (Masters of Library and Information Science.) Will it make a difference in what you learn? Not really. None of this is helping to make librarians seem more relevant, and that is what worries all the talking heads in every corner of librarianship. They go on as if librarians are going through some kind of extinction event, but our arms are normal sized, so I think we’ll be fine.

So what actually changes after library school? Suddenly that weirdo book-worm vibe you’ve been rocking your whole life is actually kind of cool. People seem to respect you. They may have no idea what you do, and think you wear Tina Fey glasses and lots of sexy pencil skirts with plunging v-necked sweaters (you do, but that is neither here nor there), but they respect you. Maybe it’s all the acronyms?

On the professional side, you’ve now worked and volunteered and interned your way through school, and you’re still not qualified for the entry-level jobs. This may make you bitter about all the time and money you spent on a master’s degree that taught you a little bit of theory and a whole lot of nothing. An apprenticeship probably would have served you better, but then you couldn’t put MLS after your name. And you need that MLS to become a professional…who gets paid $30k a year.

As much as you may complain, library school is like your little brother. You can talk shit about it, but you won’t let anyone else do it. People will enjoy mocking your chosen profession for being a degree in “Googling.” This is why most of your friends are librarians. They will understand the joy of a well constructed Boolean search as the masses cannot. Some of your classmates will eventually get the job they wanted, but within a year they are back at school, starting the PhD program. And they were probably the ones that most complained about the program when they were in it.

Finally, don’t count your cardigans. It’s…let’s just not go there.

Read more So You’ve Decided to Go to Library School at The Toast.

If you enjoy this, perhaps you will also like Marcus Aurelius, Sports Broadcaster.

On the San Francisco Earthquake, 1906:

Concerning the great earthquake, I was not able to gain any information from philosophers or scientists, nor could I gain any satisfactory explanation from the inhabitants of the city, who could explain neither why the great city had toppled nor why it had burned.

Some academicians, wishing to seem clever, have attempted to explain the motions of the earth in this place in the following way. They posit that all the earth is comprised of great plates of rock, like the ridges on a turtle’s back, and these float together on a sea of molten earth, and sometimes bump into one another like boats at anchor in the harbor, and that these jolts produce great perturbations of the earth. This is of course is absurd, for if the earth were so composed, then what is the turtle eating?

I will therefore proceed to explain what I think is the reason for the periodic quaking of the earth in these parts. The city of San Francisco is on the Pacific Ocean, and this ocean is cold in every part of the year, and the sun is unknown there. Now, when the waters of the ocean are cold it is necessary that the great fish that inhabit these waters would remain slumbering because of the action of the cold water on their blood. But should the sun pass too close to the water due to an unusual wind, it stands to reason that the great fish would wake up from their long slumbers, become enraged and thrash their tails, disturbing the natural course of the tides in this place. These tidal waves, in turn, would thrust themselves against the unprotected shores, resulting in exactly the type of earthquake that so devastated this unfortunate city.

On the Death of Rasputin, 1916:

In the old days, the people of Russia declared that they would overthrow the Romanovs, whom they called despots, and install a government of the people. The Romanovs in those days were greatly influenced by a priest and scholar called Grigori Rasputin and so during the February Revolution the Russian people conspired to murder him by means of poison. When poison failed to kill him, they attempted first to shoot him, then to beat him to death. At last he was wrapped in a curtain, still alive, and thrown off a bridge into the Malaya Nevka River, where he at last ceased to breathe. But there are others who say Rasputin survived these tortures by secretly drinking a mixture of ginger ale and pigeon’s blood, and that he roused himself from the river bottom and fled Russia together with his son, who was a lion.

On the Stock Market Crash 1929:

As things are at present, the leaders of nations would do well to remember the story of the great market crash and the misfortune that followed, for the wise will declare that immoderate greed is the cause of all evil things.

On the Assassination of Trotsky, 1940:

Trotsky and Stalin were also in conflict over their position on the Republic of China which had been established that year in the east. Stalin hoped that Chinese Communist Party would unite with the Kuomintang to bring about a class revolution, but Trotsky was critical of Soviet support for the right-wing Kuomintang. Stalin and Trotsky also disagreed over the pace of industrialization and economic reform. In the winter of that year, Trotsky rode a dolphin to Mexico.

On the Moon Landing, 1969:

For on the moon the sand is made up of very large diamonds, which are polished by the actions of the atmosphere, and are naturally made smooth and perfect. And among these diamonds live a type of dogs, which are similar in size to a baby elephant, and which are very ferocious. And these dogs have the head of a cat, and the body of a boar, and the tail of a peacock, with hooves like a goat, and a moose’s antlers, and a zebra’s stripes, and a call like a chimpanzee, and no part of them in any way resembles a dog at all. And these dogs, as I have chosen to call them, fill their cheek pouches with smooth moon diamonds and hold them in their mouths to quench their thirst and in place of drinking water, for the water on the moon is noxious. And the astro-men who conquered the moon were wary of them, for these moon dogs are the most territorial and aggressive of all the animals on the moon.

On the Watergate Scandal, 1972:

Following the release of the audio tapes, Nixon immediately committed suicide by sitting cross-legged on a river bank, which everyone knows to be fatal.

On the Fall of the Berlin Wall, 1989:

It is the custom of the Germans to build massive concrete walls to commemorate important feast days, and to decorate these walls with pictures and inscriptions in brightly colored paint, and to set guards and towers and barbed wire and trenches along the walls to decorate them. The Berlin Wall was the greatest of these feast walls. The wall was four hundred feet tall and eighteen feet wide, and at the base was a moat twenty feet wide and filled with water and oil that was kept perpetually boiling by means of a sieve. I know this for a fact, I have seen it with my own eyes when I traveled to Berlin, which I did, personally, and on more than one occasion.

On the Establishment of the World Wide Web, 1990:

In 1990, Tim Berners-Lee constructed a giant net of woven fibers and cast it over the earth, from which the “web” gets its name.

Read more Herodotus Writes a History of the 20th Century at The Toast.

It has recently come to my attention that there is a film featuring Katharine Hepburn as an aviatrix who commits an abortion/suicide by flying into the sun, and I am simply furious with each and every one of you for keeping this from me.

“That…that can’t possibly be right,” I hear you stammer weakly. OHO, CAN’T IT. I present to you the plot summary of Christopher Strong:

Kate plays Lady Cynthia Darrington, an aviatrix who meets and falls in love with Sir Christopher Strong played by Colin Clive. Sir Strong is married and rather then tell him that she is going to have a baby and since she knows their relationship is doomed she decides to take a challenge to attempt the world speed record. Her plane climbs to 30,000 feet where she takes off her oxygen mask, loses control and dies in the crashing airship.

Can you imagine. I cherish the thought that the original script called not for Cynthia to be an aviatrix but a society woman who dies from a regular, run-of-the-mill botched abortion, and Hepburn herself decided to make things a little more interesting.

“Say, fellas. Love the script. It’s terrific stuff, the real Tabasco. But what if the girl’s a pilot?”

“A…pilot? But she’s a socialite.”

“Sure, that’s a great gag. But catch this angle: she does the abortion herself by flying into the sun.”

“I don’t follow.”

“‘Course you don’t, boys, keep up. She wants to beat the world altitude record, see? And to also have an abortion and die.”

“You…you really think that’s a good idea, Kate?”

[pounds table] “Boys, we’d be crazy not to make her a lady daredevil pilot. I wouldn’t do the picture otherwise.”

“Well, if you think so…but most girls have abortions on the ground, don’t you think, Kate?”

“I think my character would prefer to have one by flying into the sun. If she’s going to have an abortion, she might as well break the sound barrier while she’s at it.”

“You’re the boss, Kate.”

“Damn right, lads. And one more thing. Find a way to make my character wear a moth costume in this picture.”

“A moth costume?”

“That’s right. Here, have a cigar.”

The 1930s were a wonderful time. Women were constantly breaking the sound barrier to have abortions and giving cigars to henpecked studio heads. You couldn’t turn around without kissing a lady reporter who worked like a man and played like one too, and the streets of New York City were crawling with female stenographers who’d kill you as soon as look at you. And Katharine Hepburn made at least one movie with a trailer like this:

Which was a promotion for, you might remember, a film where she played a lady pilot who has an abortion by flying towards the sun (Tagline: “Higher and higher! Faster and faster! She gave herself to the great god Speed, and tried to run away from the fires within her!”).

Let us consider the following posters for Christopher Strong. Would you say that this effectively communicates “lady daredevil has illicit affair, then flies to a lonely death”?

You would not? Nor I; we are of one mind on the subject. Let us try again. Perhaps we will get closer with the next one.

Oh, that’s better, that’s a great deal better. Her thousand-yard-stare is part Jack Torrance and part Hannibal Lecter. “Who is this man sitting next to me,” her face seems to say. “Why aren’t I flying ’round the world right now?” But we can do better.

There we are. That’s the one. The only abortionist a woman needs is the sky itself.

Chris: “What do other women do who don’t risk their lives flying?”
Cynthia: “I don’t know. I only know I want to go up again. I want to break records. I want to train hard and not eat and drink all the time. I want to get up at dawn. I want to smell the fields and the morning air, and not mind getting oil in my hair and hands. And I want to talk with the boys I’ve flown with again.”

And have abortions by flying into the sun. And have, lest we forget, abortions by flying into the sun.

Read more Let’s Talk About The Movie Where Katharine Hepburn Has An Abortion By Flying Into The Sun at The Toast.

It took me a long time before I was able to love Grease. It’s so confusingly gay — even for a musical — that it was difficult for me to understand as a child why it was supposed to be a good thing that Danny and Sandy eventually started touching one another. It took reaching adulthood before I was finally able to appreciate it on its own merits.

Grease is the movie you would get if you had three hours to explain the concept of camp and 30 seconds to explain the concept of heterosexuality to a race of aliens that can only reproduce homosexually. So there’s some mixed messages in it. The women are all roughed-up looking toughs in their 40s, all eyeliner and cigarettes and sun-damaged and wobbling in their wedges, ready to punch a guy in the face if he looks at them cock-eyed; the men are all greased-up dandies who don’t know what sex is. You could very easily recast Grease with drag queens as the Pink Ladies and drag kings as the T-birds (I’m thinking Ivan and the butch mechanics from season 1 of The L Word) without sacrificing anything. Gender Studies majors could keep the academy going for another twenty years on the strength of the Greased Lightning scene alone, which makes the “Playing With The Boys” volleyball sequence from Top Gun look like heterosexual pornography.

But it’s Frenchy and Rizzo that make up Grease‘s true, gay heart that lies beating somewhere under a few inches of pomade and leather. It doesn’t hurt that the design for Rizzo’s character was apparently “Remember the Beebo Brinker Chronicles? That.”

Rizzo is the platonic ideal of the 1950s butch — she’s mouthy and she’s a rebel but somewhere underneath it she’s all marshmallow. Give her the chance to be a gentleman, and she’ll take it. Her big number is basically The Ballad of The Stone Butch:

I don’t steal and I don’t lie / But I can feel and I can cry / A fact I bet you never knew / But to cry in front of you / That’s the worst thing I could do.

I mean, sure, she’s singing the song because she thinks she’s pregnant from a big old dollop of male sperm, but *waves hands about vaguely* it’s still stone cold stone butch. This is not a woman who sits around mooning over some wet-haired idiot who looks like Bobby from The Brady Bunch a few years out of puberty. Rizzo is a dyke, and I mean that in the absolutely most complimentary sense imaginable. The other girls carry purses. Rizzo tucks a pocketbook under her arm. The other girls ride on the side. Rizzo drives her own car. She doesn’t walk, she struts. She doesn’t chew gum, she pops it. She doesn’t sit down, she sprawls along the bench. She takes up space and she doesn’t apologize for it. You tell me it’s an accident her character has the same name as Dustin Hoffman’s male hustler in Midnight Cowboy. Go ahead. Tell me it’s a coincidence. I’ll wait.

While everyone else is in tweed and and cardigans and pink jackets, Rizzo’s the only girl who wears all black. She’s Pink Lady on the outside, T-bird on the inside. She’s at least 47 years old and I love her.

You look at this mise-en-scene and tell me I’m supposed to buy Rizzo and Kiniecke together.

Kiniecke’s leather jacket is off. Rizzo’s leather jacket is on. The two of them practically have the same haircut. Frenchy sits patiently in the corner, a pop of color waiting to come out from hiding under that scarf. That is not a picture of a girl with her boyfriend and a good pal sitting around at the end of dinner. That is the picture of a butch waiting for her beard to get the hint and scram so the real date can get underway.

May I take a moment to write a brief aside to studs and butches everywhere? Butches, I love you. Studs, never change. Your forearms are perfect and I love watching you walk. End aside.

And Frenchy! Loveable, dim, loyal Frenchy. She’s everything that is lovely about the femme, who on first blush looks cousin to the straight girl but is in fact her own coy, wonderful species. (“Femme is perpetually misunderstood and remains cloaked in silence and invisibility. Femme is a glitter-filled explosion of the gender binary.”) Lest we forget one of her first lines to Sandy:

Men are rats, listen to me, they’re fleas on rats, worse than that, they’re amoebas on fleas on rats. I mean, they’re too low for even the dogs to bite. The only man a girl can depend on is her daddy.

I MEAN. Oh, and the fights simmering just below the surface between the two of them — is there a more classic setup than the baby butch who feels initially confused and resentful by her femme’s relationship to straight girls? Frenchy takes a shine to Sandy right away and Rizzo can’t stand it. She even experiments with femme drag at the emotionally-fraught slumber party during “Look At Me”, as if to ask Frenchy You really like this? You really like girls like this? Fine. I can do it too.

It’s both a clumsy attempt to connect and a bit of a warning: Don’t go looking for someone else too far afield. I’ll follow you. 

Also, Principal McGee and her assistant Blanche are totally doing it. This isn’t really related to the Rizzo-Frenchy relationship, but it’s important for me to point out that they are totally doing it. Principal McGee went to Smith, and they share an apartment together, and they are totally doing it.

Once Rizzo realizes that Frenchy’s not looking for a femme-on-femme escapade, she relaxes around Sandy considerably, content to mostly shake her head at her weird Australian antics. And her scenes with Frenchy are the most vibrant, touching, sweet, realistically sexually charged scenes in the entire movie, everyone else’s leather-clad hip-flinging notwithstanding. Riz is tender with Frenchy, even though she’s a little slow. She’s considerate, she’s relaxed, she laughs. There’s some hasty, messy making out with Kiniecke at the end of the movie once she reveals she’s not actually pregnant, but we all saw who she got on the Ferris wheel with, and it wasn’t a boy. She took the ride with Frenchy.

Read more Femslash Friday: Rizzo From Grease Is A Butch For The Ages at The Toast.

In the March issue of Bookslut, Coco Papy leads an illuminating roundtable discussion on making a living as an artist. Sharon Louden, editor of Living and Sustaining a Creative Life: Essays by 40 Working Artists, and artists Beth Lipman, Peter Drake, and Julie Heffernan join Papy in a conversation about the challenges artists face when entering “the real world,” the conflation of fame and success, the risks of including one’s personal life in one’s work, as well as other topics relevant to visual artists today. From Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own to James Baldwin’s “The Creative Process” to Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be?, the question of how one can live as an artist is continually asked as the world of art is constantly changing.

For further reading on the difficulties of living as an artist in the digital age, here are a few articles:

“At one point I thought I would find another full-time job after finishing the book, but then I must have convinced myself that teaching yoga part time would better enable my writing. I also thought that I would immediately start another book, which I would sell, like the first, before I’d written half of it. In order to believe this I had to cut myself off from all kinds of practical realities; considering these realities seemed like planning for failure.”
-- Emily Gould, “How Much My Novel Cost Me” | Medium

Emily Gould’s essay chronicles the financial missteps she made while writing her novel and living as a blogger in New York, where diversions from writing are plentiful and costly.

“Just as the atom bomb was the weapon that was supposed to render war obsolete, the Internet seems like capitalism’s ultimate feat of self-destructive genius, an economic doomsday device rendering it impossible for anyone to ever make a profit off anything again.”
-- Tim Kreider, “Slaves of the Internet, Unite!” | The New York Times

Writer and illustrator Tim Kreider’s op-ed warns artists against providing free labor in exchange for exposure in an age where people are increasingly unwilling to pay for content.

“Kickstarting a project demands that we transform ourselves from artists into marketers. Are these two selves compatible? We are forced to streamline our heterogeneous senses of self, the complicated pushes and pulls that make up our personalities, for the sake of attracting investors.”
-- Josh Macphee, “Who’s the Shop Steward on Your Kickstarter?” | The Baffler

Josh MacPhee at The Baffler looks into the downsides of crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, but his essay is also an examination of what’s at stake when artists are forced to be their own promoters.

At the same time, Racialicious has a blog post about how Kickstarter is relevant to artists of color in ways that the NEA has failed to be.

by SB Sarah

Susan P. found a cover that was so fantastic, she took a picture of it and emailed it to me. YOU GUYS. This cover was so complete in every aspect of its WTFery that I had to buy a copy for my very own....so I could scan the cover into a huge, mondo-big epic-sized JPG of wonderment. 

When it arrived, and I performed the embiggening scanning actions to my satisfaction, I called upon the posse to ask the crucial (and trick question):  Front or Back? Which is Worse?

Let's start with the back: 

Amanda: My immediate instinct is to go with the back since I read the entire thing with the hero's name being Cheese.

Elyse: Also I thought his name was Cheese.

RedHeadedGirl: ...Cleese.  His name is Cleese. 

I also read Cheese.  Women are fish?  What is happening. 

(I'm on a LOT of Sudafed right now)

Susan: "extra rod!" Hee hee.

Amanda: But then I saw the front...and those pants.

He's got the red, shiny face of a cartoon drunkard. Or maybe he's sunburned. BUT THOSE PANTS!! He better be packing something to make up for the unnecessary length in that denim crotch region.

Nice touch with the gold watch by the way. He's got enough money to wear a Rolex while doing yard work, but not enough to find pants that fit him apparently.

Elyse: I realize I'm going to hell for this, but when I saw his face I immediately thought of one of those "bad touch" PSAs we had to see in grade school.

Carrie: Which is worse? The front.  The fishing metaphors on the back are dreadful, but they pass in comparison to the smarm on the front.  Why is there cowboy gear and no fishing gear if it's all about fishing?  Why do his arms look glued on?  Why is his hair glued on like one of those Lego hair pieces?  Why is he looking at me like that?  Can I hit him?  Is "He looked at me in a smarmy and patronizing way" legal grounds for assault?

Sarah: Y'all have missed the best part! Check out the white text on the cover! 

Carrie: Still wasters?  What?  I thought I had a copyright on those kinds of typos.  It is a typo, right?  Or am I just not intellectual enough to comprehend this?

Amanda: I'll be honest, I have no clue what that meant. I assumed it had something to do with the uncomfortable fishing analogy on the back.

Susan: I'm guessing that because the cover painting dealt solely with the cattleman aspect of his life,  the front cover blurb was supposed to handle the fisherman part.

Elyse: What if "still wasters" is some kind of code? Like how in movies spies communicated through personal ads?

Carrie: Shhh you're not supposed to tell everyone!  It's a secret code!  I mean it was, until you TOLD EVERYONE.

RedHeadedGirl: That's like, the slowest, most inefficient code ever. 

Which is why I totally believe it.

Sarah: I have the cover of this book sitting upright on my desk so he's looking at me. I keep thinking his right arm is attached incorrectly. LIke one of those He-Man dolls where you could rip their arms off and reattach them?

Or wait. Maybe he IS MADE OF CHEESE.

RedHeadedGirl: I have a really good chiropractor that can fix that.  (his arm, I mean, not the made of cheese part.)

Carrie: No, I think he's plastic.  Like a Barbie, but one of those where sadistic children keep removing the limbs and sticking them back on until the limbs don't attach right.

Sarah: I feel like "still wasters" should be a useful phrase (aside from spy coded messages of course). Like, there should be some sort of regular internet event that could be described as "Still Wasters." 

So, what's your best idea for the true meaning of Still Wasters? Does it involve cheese? (We hope so.) 

Categories: Covers Gone Wild! (Non-Snoop Dogg Edition), General Bitching

MATTHEW: Well now, I don’t mean to seem uncharitable-like, but you see as how Marilla and me was expecting a boy.
ANNE: yeah well
i expected to have an alabaster brow and raven tresses down to my tits by the time i turned fifteen
but we don’t always get what we want, do we
old man

[MARILLA's neighbor RACHEL LYNDE comes to call]
RACHEL: Well, Marilla
I can’t say I think she looks like much, but you always did know your own mind
ANNE [lights a cigarette]: funny
i don’t recall asking you what you thought about a fucking thing

[ANNE meets DIANA BARRY for the first time. The ADULTS leave the parlor to gossip in the kitchen.]
DIANA: It’s awfully nice to meet you
ANNE: wanna get drunk
i know where Marilla keeps the good stuff

GILBERT: psst
psst
[Anne does not turn]
Hey. Hey, Carrots. Carrots.
[ANNE smashes her slate against the edge of the desk and holds a jagged edge to GILBERT's neck]
ANNE: say carrots again
go on
say carrots again
[GILBERT shakes his head ferociously, wide-eyed and silent]
ANNE [presses the tip of the shard into his throat]: no, come on
do it
GILBERT [whispered]: I don’t want to
ANNE: My hair’s red. You notice that?
[Gilbert nods carefully]
ANNE: ‘Course you did. You’re a smart guy. You know what else is red, smart guy?
[GILBERT is silent. ANNE twirls the tip of her slate until a single drop of blood appears at the pressure point]
you wanna tell me what else is red

DIANA: oh Anne you’ve got to come right away
Minnie May is sick and I think it might be the croup and Mother and Father are in Charlottetown and I don’t know what to do
ANNE: get me some cough syrup
DIANA: all right
ANNE [takes a swig]: all right let’s do this

[MARILLA stands outside the bathroom door and knocks nervously]
MARILLA: Anne, are you all right? You’ve been in there for an hour. What are you doing in there?
ANNE [o/s]: i told you
don’t ask questions you don’t want the answer to

[MATTHEW collapses in the field]
MATTHEW: Anne, you’ve got to call for a doctor — it’s my heart — call for Dr. Meadowes –
[ANNE lights a cigarette and leans against the fence post]
ANNE: sorry what was that
MATTHEW: [gurgling]
ANNE: you’re gonna have to speak up
MATTHEW: please
ANNE: i want the dress
MATTHEW: what
ANNE: you know what dress i mean
the big sleeves
MATTHEW: Anything — anything –
ANNE: I want two.
MATTHEW: All of them, you can have all of them.
ANNE [runs towards the house]: Oh, Dr. Meadowes!
MATTHEW: Christ.

[The schoolhouse burns in the distance. Anne stands on the porch, face flushed and streaked with ash]
ANNE: IT’S ANNE WITH A GODDAMN “E”
A GODDAMN “E”

[The CUTHBERT's kitchen. Anne sits at the table with a pair of oversized headphones covering her ears, eating a raw carrot, and carving a circle-A into her forearm.]
MARILLA: Anne?
ANNE [yanks off her headphones]: what
MARILLA: Anne, Ms. Perkins just ‘rang — that schoolmate of yours, the Blythe boy? Gilbert? He’s gone missing since the picnic last Saturday.
[ANNE does not respond]
They were just wondering if anyone had seen him since then.
[ANNE takes a slow bite out of her carrot without breaking eye contact]
MARILLA: I’ll…tell them you haven’t seen anything.
ANNE: you do that

Read more Dirtbag Anne of Green Gables at The Toast.

BURNING THE GROUND EXCLUSIVE 1987

REQUEST

At the end of 1987 Falco announced his return with the single “Body Next To Body.” It was produced by Giorgio Moroder and featured a duet with the Danish actress Brigitte Nielsen.

“Body Next to Body” failed to chart in the UK but went to #22 in Germany, #6 in Austria and #1 in Japan.

SIDE A:
Body Next To Body (Dance Mix) 6:18

SIDE B:
Body Next To Body (Rock Version) 6:30
Body Next To Body (The Other Version) 6:22

VINYL GRADE:
Vinyl: Near Mint
Sleeve: Near Mint

RELEASE INFORMATION:
Label: TELDEC ‎– 6.20835
Format: Vinyl, 12″, Maxi-Single, 45 RPM
Country: Germany
Released: 1987
Genre: Electronic, Rock
Style: Pop Rock, Synth-pop
Credits: Mixed By – Brian Reeves, Steve Bates
Other [Brigitte Nielsen Management] – Music Machine GMBH
Other [Falco Management] – Horst Bork
Photography By – Oliver Herrmann
Producer – Giorgio Moroder
Written-By – Falco, Moroder*, Whitlock*

NOTES:
BPM 102
Made In Germany

Find The 12″ On DISCOGS

EQUIPMENT USED:
Turntable: Pro-Ject Debut III
Cartridge: Ortofon Super
Stylus: Ortofon OM Stylus 30
Platter: Pro-Ject Acryl-It platter
Speed Control: Pro-Ject Speed Box S
Phono Pre-amp: Bellari VP130 Tube Phono Preamp
Tube: Tung-Sol 12AX7ECC803-S Gold Electron Tube
Soundcard: ESI Juli@
Record Cleaning: VPI HW 16.5 Record Cleaning Machine
Artwork Scans: Brother MFC-6490CW Professional Series Scanner

SOFTWARE USED:
Recording/Editing: Adobe Audition 3.0 (Recording)
Down Sampling: iZotope RX Advanced 2
Artwork Editor: Adobe Photoshop CS5
Click Removeal: ClickRepair (DeClick Level 3)
FLAC/MP3 Conversion: dBpoweramp
M3U Playlist: Playlist Creator

RESTORATION NOTES:
All vinyl rips are recorded @ 32bit/float
FLAC (Level Eight)
MP3 (320kbps)
Artwork scanned at 600dpi

Username: btg
Password: burningtheground

You can help show your support for this blog by making a donation using PayPal. Thank you for your help.

Ethan – Did you see Bill Murray recently said the only reason he did that Garfield movie was that he thought I wrote it instead of some schlemiel named Joel Cohen? Not sure why he didn’t just pick up the phone. But it got me thinking — why shouldn’t we do a Garfield pic? Gritty reboot. I sketched out a few scenes. Let’s talk tomorrow.

-Joel

–

INT – UNKNOWN

We begin on pitch black. A crackling sound steadily grows louder. The camera pulls slowly back to reveal some texture to the blackness. Further back and we see the smooth lip of an unknown object. Further back. We see the surface of what looks like the moon Io, or horrifically burned skin. It bubbles ominously. As we slowly pull back, the object is revealed: a lasagna in a glass dish, cooking in an oven. The camera does not leave the oven, lingering on the dish as we watch the cheese brown and bubble dangerously. A quick, low tone accompanies text centered on the screen.

SUPERIMPOSE: “MONDAY”

CUT TO:

The lasagna, still steaming, is set down on a cheap linoleum floor by two hands encased in floral-print potholders.

CUT TO:

A CAT’s head, shown from behind, as it eats the lasagna

CUT TO:

A bare patch of floor, just as a CAT (off screen) vomits onto it.

CUT TO:

A flash of orange fur as the CAT is shoved into a crate.

CUT TO:

A car door closing as we see the crate inside.

CUT TO:

A bell rings as we see a door opening, and a MAN walking through, carrying the crate. As it closes, we see the word “VETERINARIAN” printed in curved letters on the outside.

———–

INT. VET’S EXAMINATION ROOM – DAY

JON, A nondescript man — mid-40s, brow furrowed with anxiety, neither especially attractive or unattractive — stands next to the waist-high examination table. He taps his fingers incessantly. We hear a low moan, human in sound. The camera swings around to the opening of the crate where GARFIELD, a fat orange cat, lies motionless, eyes closed.

GARFIELD (V.O.)

It happened again, Jon.

JON stops tapping his fingers. He looks up, resigned.

JON

I know.

GARFIELD (V.O.)

It’s the third time this month.

JON

(yelling)

I know!

GARFIELD (V.O.)

This can’t keep happen–

GARFIELD is interrupted by the door opening. Enter LIZ, 40s, her face lined but attractive. She’s wearing a lab coat and stethoscope, her slim legs visible. She speaks with a thick Midwestern accident.

LIZ

Well now you guys are back again, huh? That’s quite a bit in just a short little while isn’t it?

LIZ pulls GARFIELD out of the crate.

LIZ

What’s going on with you there, big guy? You get into something you shouldn’t again?

GARFIELD (V.O.)

What is she talking about, Jon? What the hell is she talking about?

JON

(nervous)

Yeah, I’m sorry I don’t know what it is, he just keeps getting places he shouldn’t. Hey, by the way, I saw this –

LIZ

(cutting him off)

Well let’s just take a look here and see what we can do for you.

LIZ examines GARFIELD. She listens to him breathe with the stethoscope, she presses her fingers into his fur. She makes small “hmm” noises as she looks him over.

JON

So, like I was saying I saw that there’s this theater in town that plays these old movies and I was wonder–

LIZ

(interrupting)

Jon.

JON

Yes?

LIZ

I’m concerned about Garfield. He’s sick. Very sick.

GARFIELD (V.O.)
Why does this keep happening to me, Jon?

———–

INT: JON’S HOUSE – NIGHT

We follow a small, sleek gray kitten through the halls of JON’s house until it reaches the kitchen, where it slowly slides its body alongside GARFIELD, who is tucking into a plate of lasagna.

NERMAL (V.O.)

(effete, yet sexy)

I saw him making it. I saw him pour it in.

GARFIELD (V.O.)

(over the sound of chewing)

I know it. I know what he did, I know what he’s doing.

NERMAL (V.0.)

So why are you eating it?

GARFIELD (V.O.)

(choking back a sob as he continues to eat)

Because I have to, Nermal, all right? Because this is what I do. This is who I am. The sun comes up in the morning. Birds fly. Fish swim. I eat the lasagna he puts on the floor. You think I don’t know that I’m dying, that it’s killing me, that he’s killing me? You think I don’t wish every damn time he took this pan out of the oven that I could stay away?

Sometimes there are forces, Nermal. Sometimes there are cosmic forces that are bigger than us, that mold us into who we are. Sometimes our future is already drawn. And you can spend your whole life pushing back. But I don’t push back. That’s not who I am. I’m Garfield. I eat the damn lasagna.

———–

INT. RESTAURANT – DAY

LIZ and JON are sitting across from each other in a deep booth at a cheap-looking chain restaurant. LIZ is wearing a heavy sweater and looks deeply uncomfortable. JON is wearing a bowtie, jacket, and shirt that all clash violently with each other. He is eager, with a strong undercurrent of sadness plain on his face. We find them in the middle of a long, awkward pause, and linger there before they speak.

JON

Some weather we’re having though.

LIZ

(sighing)

Jon, I only agreed to come here because you promised you’d talk to me about what’s going on with Garfield.

JON

Probably gonna snow. Those clouds look dangerous.

LIZ

You’re hurting him, Jon. Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a pet? To depend on a human being for everything? He loves you, Jon. He loves you, and you’re hurting him. I know what you’re doing, and it can’t go on.

JON

Yep. Dangerous.

Read more The Coen Brothers’ Garfield Movie at The Toast.

The son of Mississippi sharecroppers, Southern soul paterfamilias RUFUS THOMAS (1917–2001) had already worked as a comedian and dancer on the black tent-show circuit and cut a few unremarkable R&B 78s before resettling in Memphis, where Sun Records’ Sam Phillips tapped him to growl “Bear Cat” – an answer song to Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog” – in 1953, well before Elvis’ involvement with the label, or the song. Thomas’s own tenure with Sun was brief, but he remained a popular Memphis DJ and talent-show host (while keeping his job at a uniform factory), and resurfaced in 1960 with the self-penned “Cause I Love You,” a duet with eighteen-year-old daughter Carla that became the first record released by the nascent Stax Records (then called Satellite) to achieve more than local renown. Other “Rufus and Carla” sides followed, as did the solo dance novelties for which Thomas is best remembered: “The Dog,” “Walking the Dog,” “Can Your Monkey Do the Dog,” and, once the canine theme was exhausted, “Do the Funky Chicken.” While Thomas’s ingratiating persona and light-hearted material could have become as an embarrassment in the late 1960s and 1970s, as the music came to reflect changes in black political consciousness, he seems instead to have been embraced as an important link between the old and new. It’s hard to imagine anyone else, no matter how tight the Stax house bands’ backing, getting away with reviving minstrel-era material like “The Preacher and the Bear” (first recorded in 1905) in the age of “Say It Loud — I’m Black and I’m Proud.” While Thomas’s music may not have had the gravity of Otis Redding’s or the explosive passion of Sam and Dave’s, it has the dignity and vitality of honest entertainment: Stax, and soul, wouldn’t have been quite the same without it.

***

On his or her birthday, HiLobrow irregularly pays tribute to one of our high-, low-, no-, or hilobrow heroes. Also born this date: J.L. Austin, Diana Ross, Gregory Corso, Leonard Nimoy.

READ MORE about members of the New Gods Generation (1914-23).

King Akrisios had a daughter of surpassing beauty, Danaë, but no son. Eventually he sent a messenger to the Oracle at Delphi to ask what hope he had for an heir. He received a grim prophecy in answer: he would have no son, but his grandson would kill him.

Then Akrisios locked his daughter in a bronze chamber and refused to let her out. But Zeus, smitten by her beauty, slipped through a high window in a shower of golden coins and seduced her. Danaë gave birth to the hero Perseus nine months later.

The Prayers of Danaë: An Illustrated Dialogue

hey
hello
at church huh
yes
praying huh
yes
who are you praying to
no one in particular
see the statue of the guy out in front
yes
the statue of the guy whose temple that is i mean
yes
that’s me
i know who it is
okay just checking
just checking to make sure you know this temple is for me
i do
for praying to me
i’m sorry i can’t really do this
i’m praying to Hera right now
oh my god
are you serious
oh my god don’t do that
please don’t do that
i’m so serious please don’t do that
I’m not
you’re not?
no I was just
I was just joking
oh my god
ahhhh
for a second i was like
oh my god I’m totally going to have to turn Danaë into a bear or a swan or a bear eating a swan while turning into a stone tree or something
ahahahaha

Danaë
Danaë remember that time
remember that time we did it
when I turned into a bunch of gold coins and we did it
in your dad’s basement
please
it’s very uncomfortable when I try to pray and you bring that up when I’m in the middle of the temple
sorry
no of course
I just
remember it though
yes
awesome
that’s awesome

i just want you to know
that out of everybody else praying to me in this temple right now
you are far and away the hottest
thank you
i’m serious
it’s not even close
there’s a Thracian woman out in the semi-holy antechamber who has arguably a better ass
but overall she’s not really a threat
like her face is a mess
compared to yours
thank you
a total mess
shouldn’t you be listening
to what
to everyone else praying to you in this temple right now
oh my god no

danaë what are you doing after
doing after what
after praying
i’m going to the well
do you want to have sex
i could turn into money again

would you like to meet him
meet who
Perseus
our son
our son Perseus
sorry new temple who is this
Zeus you can’t do this to me
you have reached the temple of Odin
Sorry I’m not in right now
please direct your prayer to the nearest one-eyed crow
and she’ll make sure I get your supplication as soon as possible

Read more Zeus’ Girlfriend Goes To Church at The Toast.

Previously: Nicole’s list of demands.

1. A re-edited version of the original Footloose where the townspeople are not simply forbidden to dance but magically cursed such that they are unable to do so until a spell is lifted.

2. For all Alec Baldwin-narrated documentaries about the Arctic to end on a cheerful note with absolutely no mention of the catastrophic effects of global warming or enormous graphics depicting the scale of current polar melt.

3. A cop/detective procedural that takes place only after office hours at the protagonists’ homes.

4. For Christopher Hitchens to rise from the grave and apologize to me because I have made him finally realize that women are funny. He also apologizes for never buttoning the top two buttons on his shirt in life.

5. As a society, we mutually agree to start caring about pets again at about the level we did in the 1980s — we won’t keep animals out in the backyard all night, but we don’t refer to buying a dog as an “adoption” and the phrase “it’s just an animal” won’t get you killed in certain parts of San Francisco. Declawing a cat will be seen as normal as spaying or neutering it, rather than the moral equivalent of sawing off a toddler’s hands without anesthesia.

6. A re-edited version of It Could Happen To You where Rosie Perez gets to keep all her money and her jewels and her fur and becomes Queen of New York and Bridget Fonda and Nic Cage move to Peoria and open a coffee shop for mealy-mouthed invertebrates.

7. For the phrase “So I wrote a thing/Here’s a thing I wrote” to disappear silently and painlessly from all human languages overnight.

8. To grow so strong in wisdom that a white stripe develops in my hair overnight, just like Bonnie Raitt’s.

9. To have every male writer for Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show pay me formal tribute in the form of a tenth of their income every year.

10. A cave to live in that is half hobbit-hole and half witch-palace.

11. For the treehouse part of Disneyland to stop being Tarzan-themed and go back to being Swiss Family Robinson-themed; the return of the Skybuckets.

12. Absolute certainty that no one on my Gchat list is purposely ignoring my messages.

13. That one book I had when I was eleven, with the cover of the scary-eyed man on the front clutching the side of a cliff. I don’t remember the name or what it was about.

14. To have biological grandchildren without ever having children.

15. For hitchhiking to become socially acceptable again, but it’s only legal for women to do it (trans- and gender-queer inclusive).

16. The ability to tuck pants or leggings into tall boots effortlessly and without lines or bumps the way that rich women do.

17. An all-lesbian remake of Love & Basketball where Brittney Griner plays Omar Epps’ character and I get a job as a production assistant on set and we slowly fall in love.

18. For Bellamy Young and Kerry Washington to have breakfast and do the crossword with me while wearing linen robes every morning.

19. To get a full scholarship dedicated to helping sedentary women nearing 30 to get combined Master’s degrees in ancient Roman/American Civil War/World War I (but just the Western Front parts) military history.

20. A version of Brokeback Mountain where Jack lives and Ennis agrees to move to Denver and get an apartment together in a quiet part of town.

21. For Kristen Stewart to come out tomorrow morning.

22. To never have read The Mists of Avalon.

23. To not have that gene that makes cilantro taste like soap, because it is in all of the best kinds of food.

24. To know exactly what will happen to me when I die and to have it be the thing I hope it is.

25. For more critical analyses of the works of C.S. Lewis besides just pointing out the Susan Problem.

26. For texting while driving to be completely safe and also muscle-building somehow.

27. To be able to do wall sits for two minutes. Also to be able to touch my toes without bending my knees.

28. For even my greatest enemies to concede that I am this generation’s non-musical Noel Coward.

29. For my impression of Sidney Greenstreet to be improved by 40%.

30. For the one time I tried to fly by taping construction-paper wings to my arms and jumping off a very low branch on the tree in my front yard to have actually worked, just the one time, and for no one else to know about it but me.

31. For every Subway that offers avocado to have actual avocados instead of those little plastic packs of vacuum-sealed unflavored guacamole they scoop onto your sandwich with a paddle.

32. To have gone to a real college.

33. To have a working understanding of the geography of the East Coast, or at least remember whether Boston is north or south of New York City without having to draw a map.

34. To finally see the original ending of Pretty in Pink where Andie and Duckie get together and stick it to Blaine, who majorly sucks.

35. For definitive, unarguable proof that 90% of the actresses in Hollywood in the 1930s were majorly gay and all dating each other so that no one could ever again say “she just liked to wear pants!”

36. For liking The Big Bang Theory to be socially acceptable among my cohort.

37. For all trains to have sleeper-car tickets that cost less than 1/3rd the price of a plane ticket.

38. To get back my original tape of The Land Before Time with the commercial for Pizza Hut on it, and for the little girl who voiced Ducky to not have been murdered immediately after making it. Failing that, to not remember that the little girl who voiced Ducky was murdered after making The Land Before Time.

39. For barn dances to become a regular feature of society again.

40. For Toby Keith to be my best friend.

Read more My List of Demands at The Toast.

“Two by two by two [cocks gun]…by .22.”

“Looks like somebody’s…all washed up.”

“A storm is coming that will drown the world.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’re going to build a boat.”

“The Lord said we needed two of every type of animal on the ark, but we’ve already got a jackass.”

“Forget about it. It’s water under the bridge.”
“Not anymore. It’s water over the bridge now.”

“You act like he walks on water.”
“Not walks. Floats.”

“Listen, God might have promised never to destroy the world again [cocks gun]…but I didn’t.”

“Looks like you’re up Shit Creek, and I just sold my last paddle.”

“Whatever [pushes Tubal-Cain over the side into a raging torrent]…floats your boat.”

“I’m with you, come hell or high water.”
“There’s no or about it, friend. They’re [cocks gun]…both coming.”

“We’re going to have to throw out an awful lot of babies with this bathwater.”

“Rainbow? Not on my watch. [cocks gun]“

Read more Dialogue I Desperately Pray Will Be Featured in Darren Aronofsky’s Noah at The Toast.

Last month, Michael Dunn was convicted of attempted murder, after firing several rounds into an SUV of young black men. Jordan Davis, a 17-year-old, was killed in the incident. Dunn is 47, and he is white. Dunn invoked the "Stand Your Ground Law" to defend his actions, and the jury was deadlocked on whether to charge him for Davis's murder. He'll face a retrial this summer.

Kate Joyce, Pressbox, April 2013.

On view as part of the New York Public Library’s recent exhibition “Play Things”—on prints and photographs that deal in some way with games and recreation—was a series of nine baseball cards made in 1975 by artist Mike Mandel. Originally packaged with sticks of Topps gum, the cards feature some heavy hitters at bat, pitching, and fielding: Joel Meyerowitz (2), who prefers Kodachrome film; Aaron Siskind (66), whose favorite developer is Mircodol-X; and Betty Hahn (54), who likes to shoot with a Nikon. Oh, didn’t I mention—they’re photographer trading cards.

Mandel made them (there are 134 in all) in order to satirize, and frustrate, the commercial art market: the only way to collect all the cards is by making trades. Mandel’s link between photography and baseball is apt for another reason: baseball, a famously uneventful sport, is a game in which players and fans spend a lot of time observing—each other, the stands, the field, the sky—and what is photography if not the art of observing?

My appreciation of this visual aspect of baseball is fairly new. It was exactly a year ago that Sam Stephenson wrote to ask whether we might collaborate on a series of blog posts documenting the 2013 season at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park. Initially, I demurred. I’ve never had much interest in baseball, unless you count a short-lived crush on Chuck Knoblauch in the early aughts. But Sam also promised images by a roster of photographers, and I was won over.

Bull City Summer ran on this site for six months and reported not only on the team’s players and manager but, more significantly, on the field, the fans, and the idiosyncratic atmosphere of minor-league baseball. When Adam Sobsey introduced the series last April, he wrote that “to the unpracticed eye, the mostly static conditions on the field can seem slack or desultory, but in fact the opposite is true: the game conceals in its apparent inactivity (even woolgathering) maximum tension, precision, aspiration, tactics, worry, and grudge.” The action is in the details, and Sobsey and other writers from the series—Sam, Michael Croley, David Henry, and Howard Craft—spent the summer digging into the rote boredom and finding life within the long stretches of empty innings.

But what of the photographs? What do pictures of minor-league woolgathering look like? In many ways, they don’t look much like baseball—or at least not the baseball we’re using to seeing in still images. There are no shots of players running bases, of pitches just as the ball has left the mound, or of the crack of bats. The moments captured here are small and transitory but nonetheless make up a season at the Durham Bulls ballpark.

Alex Soth looked to the green wilds of the stadium, where solitary outfielders hold their positions and wait; Frank Hunter looked to the skies over the field, where the stadium lights met gathering thunderheads. Leah Sobsey studied individuals by composing formal tintype portraits of Bulls staff. For Kate Joyce, the details of a game were often literal: the wrung torsos of players in batting practice, a pitcher’s fingers lightly positioned on the ball, the myriad bubblegum-wrapper darts tossed by players into the grass. But in the minors, the accounting of a game doesn’t only take place in the space of the field but also among the social community in the stands: the fans and workers who provide a different kind of theater during the slow procession of innings. So we have Hunter’s shot of fans shielding their eyes from the late afternoon sun, Alex Harris’s portraits of attendees as they enter the stadium and Sobsey’s as they mill on the concourse, Soth’s enigmatic concessions workers, and Joyce’s playful typology of cups containing melted slushies and watered-down cokes.

Kate Joyce’s typologies are some of my favorite photographs. She took some ninety thousand pictures over roughly a thousand hours in preparing for and realizing the BCS project. But these grouped photographs—the lawn darts, the abandoned concessions, the white smudges made by balls hitting the Blue Monster in left field—are the clearest indication that she, like me, was trying to make sense of a game that is as much about ritual as it is about rules. These accumulations make up a pattern, a vocabulary, through which Joyce can begin to understand the larger language. 

On view this spring and summer, in Raleigh, North Carolina, are two exhibitions of photography and video work from the Bull City Summer project, by ten artists—Kate Joyce, Alec Soth, Frank Hunter, Leah Sobsey, Hank Willis Thomas, Hiroshi Watanabe, Alex Harris, Elizabeth Matheson, Ivan Weiss, and Jeff Whetstone. You can work on your own art of observation with the slide show of selected images below. And remember that baseball, to quote Leonard Zelig, “doesn’t have to mean anything, it’s just beautiful to watch.”

“Bull City Summer” is on view at the North Carolina Museum of Art, in Raleigh, through August 31. Another exhibition, at the Contemporary Art Museum–Raleigh, opens May 15. The book Bull City Summer: A Season at the Ballpark will be published by Daylight Books in April.

Kate Joyce, Impact of a Ball and the Outfield Wall, Part 2, 2013.

Leah Sobsey/Tim Telkamp, Groundskeepers (L–R: Scott Strickland, head groundskeeper; Connor Moser, Bill James), tintype.

Alex Harris, Outside the Ballpark #4, Durham, North Carolina, May 2013.

Leah Sobsey.

Alec Soth, Center Field #3, 2013.

Frank Hunter, Light in a Summer Night #4, 2013.

Leah Sobsey.

Frank Hunter, Man with a hotdog.

Kate Joyce, Lawn Darts Made from Bubblegum Wrappers and the Field of Play, 2013

Leah Sobsey/Tim Telkamp, Vince Belnome, tintype.

Leah Sobsey.

Frank Hunter, Light in a Summer Night #8, 2013.

Alex Harris, Outside the Ballpark #3, Durham, North Carolina, May 2013.

Alex Soth, Jamal, 2013.

Hiroshi Watanabe, Zero, 2013.

Hey you! Do you like movies? Have a couple you love? Great, have a seat. I’ve got some news. Movies are trapped here on Earth and made by us awful humans, and they’re all bad. Yeah. Even the good ones.

1. GHOSTBUSTERS (1984): DAN AKROYD HAS A SEXUAL ENCOUNTER WITH A GHOST FOR SOME REASON

INT. Ghostbusters Writer’s Room

RICK MORANIS: Okay, so what do we have here?

HAROLD RAMIS: Well, my idea here is a montage, where we show the Ghostbusters’ business picking up after they capture the ghost in the hotel.

RICK: Alright, standard stuff. Casey Kasem mentions them on the countdown or whatever, you see their commercial on the tv-

DAN AKROYD: alright what if i’m asleep and a ghost sucks my dick

HAROLD: Wait, wh-

DAN: no no, stay with me here. Like, i’m snoozing, yeah? Fast asleep. And then WHAMMO, a ghost just undoes my belt, whoopsie-daisy, and goes to town and I make a “WAZOOO!!!” face or whatever, right at the camera

*

2. THE DEPARTED (2006): EVERYONE IS A RAT

Yeah, yeah. So the point of the movie is everyone is a big rat, right? Rats everywhere. They say the word “rat” 40 times a minute in this movie. So what if, after the final scene, a RAT just walked right in front of the camera! To stand in front of the Massachusetts state house? GET IT?! Great. I was going to put a photoshopped image of Marty Scorcese with hams for fists here, but I think that might be too subtle.

Oh, is that not your favorite Scorcese? Fine, it’s a little late in the game and it’s not his strongest. How about:

*

3. GOODFELLAS (1990): JOE PESCI SHOOTS YOU WITH METAPHORS

Henry Hill made it out alive right, but he’s really dead, you know? BLAMMO! Does Marty know how to end a movie? I’m worried.

And screw Sid Vicious and all, but that cover of “My Way” rules.

*

4. LORD OF THE RINGS: THE TWO TOWERS (2002): LEGOLAS INVENTS SKATEBOARDING

This is fine when Marty McFly does it because he is FROM SKATEBOARD TIMES. I’m not comfortable with the idea of such radical elves.

*

5. PULP FICTION (1994): QUENTIN TARANTINO GETS AN ENTIRE 120 SECONDS OF SCREEN-TIME

This actually might have been a merely outdated scene with a better actor? It’s got that soft ‘n comfortable dialogue cadence that makes Tarantino movies special. But it’s beautiful QT, begging for us to love him.

Every morning, Quentin cradles in his arms and kisses a little trophy he made himself that says “I SCREAMED THE N-WORD AT SAM JACKSON”

*

6. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980): VADER’S DINNER PARTY

how was he eating

*

7. THEY LIVE (1988): THE WHOLE DARN THING

They Live is a really extraordinary movie, in which it’s the greatest movie of all time and yet is composed of the worst scenes ever put on film. I love it .

Let’s go on a journey together, sheeple.

Either put on these glasses, or start eating that trash can.

*

Read more Awful Scenes in Otherwise Great Movies at The Toast.

Gretchen McCulloch last explained exactly how the Benedict Cumberbatch name generator works and why dogespeak is so doge. This piece was brought to you by a reader.

You might think that Shakespeare spoke with a British accent. And technically, you wouldn’t be wrong, because since Shakespeare was a full-time Brit, he must, by definition, have had a British accent.

But a lot of people, including many Shakespeare aficionados, take that to mean that a modern-day British accent (usually Received Pronunciation aka RP) is the best accent to pronounce Shakespeare with. Is this actually true?

Partly as a demonstration, partly because I just want an excuse to make everyone watch this truly excellent sketch, here’s Catherine Tate performing Sonnet 130 (the snarky one) for Comic Relief, in a British accent that is definitely not RP. You can start at 4:37 if you only want to watch her perform the sonnet, although the whole sketch is well worth the watch.

Or what about the accent of Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow? (For the uninitiated, this is a TV series involving Ichabod, a British soldier who has been magically asleep since 1781, newly awoken from his enchantment and adjusting to the modern world, while also trying to break an ancient curse and figure out whether he has better chemistry with his cop partner Abbie or his former wife Katrina.) Here’s the series trailer for reference: you can stop after about 30 seconds if you’re pressed for time.

There’s a lot of buddy-cop plus magic stuff in Sleepy Hollow which is actually quite entertaining, but what I want to focus on is the fact that Ichabod speaks with a fairly standard-issue British accent, RP or close to it. Ignoring the realism of Headless Horsemen, is Ichabod’s accent any more reasonable than the affected British accents of Shakespearean actors?

As a matter of fact, there are actually very good reasons to think that neither Shakespeare nor Ichabod should be speaking with what we currently think of as a “British” accent at all. What? Yes, really. Let me explain.

First, we need to talk about how it came to be that British and American accents are different in the first place. Most people assume that the British have always basically talked like that, and at some point after Shakespeare had died and while Ichabod Crane was asleep, the American colonists started speaking differently. That’s certainly what Sleepy Hollow assumes.

But it’s actually the opposite: at the time shortly post-Shakespeare and pre-Ichabod when the majority of British settlers arrived in North America, they actually spoke much more like current Americans than current Brits. One example is in the pronunciation of R after a vowel: at this time, everyone on both sides of the Atlantic was saying things like “paRk youR caR in HaRvaRd YaRd” (well, if cars had existed at the time, which they didn’t. Harvard Yard actually did exist, which, just…whatever, Harvard Yard).

We can tell that the rhotic pronunciation was the original one for a couple of reasons. For one thing, there has to be some reason why we write an R in those words in the first place, and basically everything that seems illogical about English spelling is actually totally reasonable if you go far enough back into the etymology. Another way we can show that people pronounced things in a particular way before we had recording devices to prove it is spelling variation, especially from less-standardized text like private notes and letters or from respelling schemes in early dictionaries. For example, if someone is writing “should” as “shud”, we can be fairly sure that the /l/ is silent for that person; conversely, if people don’t start writing “park” as “pak” until 1775, we can suppose that they didn’t start pronouncing it that way until around the same time.

So anyway, some Brits sailed across the Atlantic, speaking rhotically, and then they rebelled against the mother country, speaking rhotically, and then they founded America, speaking rhotically, and then they decided to make a time-travel action/supernatural TV series featuring some excellent characters of colour, still speaking rhotically. I may have skipped some steps, but speaking rhotically is in every single one of them. (Well, unless you speak one of the American dialects that isn’t rhotic, like Boston English or Southern English, but let’s not complicate things here.)

Meanwhile, back in Ye Olde England, everyone had also been speaking rhotically for quite a long time, but people started getting tired of it in the period just after the American Revolution. (Although we’re not quite sure why: perhaps this was just the 18th century equivalent of memespeak.) The first evidence we have of non-rhotic pronunciation is from a dictionary by John Walker in 1775, and pretty soon thereafter everyone was “pahking theih cahs in Hahvahd Yahd”. Metaphorically speaking. (Well, except for the people who speak a British dialect that is rhotic, like Northern English or Scots, but again let’s not complicate things.)

Is it surprising that the British were the ones who changed their way of speaking? Actually, not really. Language change generally happens faster in urban environments than in rural ones, so there’s a tendency for colonies (rural) to maintain the older forms of a language while colonizers (urban, at least in the capital where the most prestigious dialect is spoken) keep on innovating. So the same pattern happens in other languages: for example, Acadian and Quebec French preserve some older features that are now archaic in European French. (This is true at least until the colonies develop cities for themselves: other changes have happened in North America since then, such as the loss of the Transatlantic accent.)

Incidentally, the Great British De-Rhoticization (a term I just made up) also explains why Australian, New Zealand, and South African English are all non-rhotic, because these areas were settled after the British switched off their Rs, while Canada and the USA were first settled while everyone was still R-full. (More about British colonization if you want numbers.)

So let’s go back to Shakespeare: his dates are 1564 to 1616, which is far before the American Revolution in the 1700s and therefore long before anyone in Britain got it into their head to speak non-rhotically.

Read more A Linguist Explains What Old-School British Accents Sounded Like at The Toast.

Images via Amusing Planet

There is no time that is not hard and complicated. Disaster is never far away. But in the immortal words of Fred Rogers, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’” This can be hard for grown-ups to remember when buildings explode or planes vanish out of the sky.

One of the true helpers, if you ask me, was Akira Yoshizawa, whose work stopped me in my tracks when someone shared it with me earlier today. “The grandfather of origami” was born on March 14, 1911, in Kaminokawa, Japan. Until his forties, he lived in poverty, choosing to devote himself wholly to the art of paper-folding. He was frequently inspired by nature.

With the publication of his first monograph, New Origami Art, in 1954, he gained substantial recognition, and shortly thereafter opened Tokyo’s International Origami Centre. By the time of his death, at ninety-four, his origami had been exhibited at the Louvre, he had been named to the prestigious Order of the Rising Sun, and his Yoshizawa–Randlett folding system, composed of the now-familiar arrows and diagrams, had become the worldwide standard.

While his craftsmanship and commitment were far beyond the reach of most people, Yoshizawa had an endearingly democratic streak; he often proselytized the meditative pleasures of origami. In his famous words, “Overall, I want you to discover the joy of creation by your own hand. … The possibility of creation from paper is infinite.”

Previously on Femslash Friday, we’ve cut abusive tools loose and given fictional women the keys to direct their own lives. Today I want to talk about a board game character and a pretend lady from a game show for kids that prominently featured a capella music who stole stuff like “the history of medicine” and the leaning tower of Pisa, because it’s important to me that Miss Scarlet from Clue and Carmen Sandiego from Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego (oh, here’s a link to the damn song, go listen to it; I know you won’t be able to pay attention until you do) steal some diamonds and run off together into the sunset. A sexy board game piece and the evil female Indiana Jones? Yeah, I’m on board. It’s like two Catwomans (Catwomen?) getting married: awesome.

This is definitely the purest “Because I run this website” entry in the Femslash series. They’re not literary or even cinematic characters. Carmen Sandiego barely talks; Miss Scarlet is from a children’s board game. I can’t even claim the 1985 movie as part of this because I played the game all the time when I was a kid before I saw it so I never picture White Miss Scarlet when I think of her, just Regular Asian Miss Scarlet. I just feel like putting the two of them together, even though they don’t exist in the same game continuity, and I still own 1/3rd of this website so there’s nothing you can do about it; sorry.

There was a Clue-themed series of children’s mystery books, and they were terrible, and I loved them. The premise was always the same: for some reason Mr. Boddy was this very cheerful, fabulously wealthy naïf who was only best friends with murderous jewel thieves. He was like the Bertie Wooster of getting murdered. And I can’t find any quotes from the series online, but the setup would always be something like…oh, they’re all over watching a movie in Mr. Boddy’s screening room and everyone gets popcorn, but Miss Scarlet has popcorn with no butter and no salt and Mrs. Peacock has popcorn with salt and no butter and Mr. Green has popcorn with salt and butter (and so on), which becomes important later in identifying the killer, somehow, in a way I can’t quite remember. And then Mr. Boddy would show them all his latest treasure, and they’d all make punning asides to themselves about killing him and stealing it. So, say he had a new ruby-encrusted peacock statue, he’d show it to them and they’d all go into their killer inner monologues:

Birds of a feather flock together, thought Miss Scarlet, and I’ll have the finest feathers of them all once I’ve got that bird.

Mr. Boddy’s as dead as a dodo, thought Mr. Green.

Getting that peacock from Mr. Boddy will be as easy as duck soup, thought Mrs. White, and afterwards I’ll be free as a bird. 

I’ll be mad as a wet hen if I don’t get my hands on that statue, thought Colonel Mustard.

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, thought Professor Plum, and Mr. Boddy’s a real bird-brain if he thinks he’s going to keep it away from me. 

I shouldn’t count my chickens before they’re hatched, thought Mrs. Peacock. Better keep an eagle eye on that statue the rest of the night.

That sort of thing. I just ate that shit up, I don’t know why. Oh, but by the end of every book you’d find out that Mr. Boddy wasn’t really dead, and you’d find out who tried to steal the artifact, and they’d begrudgingly give it back, and then for some horrible reason he’d invite them back to his mansion the next week. If Bruce Wayne wasn’t also Batman and suffered from weekly amnesia, he’d be Mr. Boddy, and Miss Scarlet would be his Catwoman.

Anyhow, Miss Scarlet was clearly the best of all of them because she was the only young hottie in a group of withered old chefs and ex-army dudes and non-tenured professors. She should have had a flock of Young Hottie friends. Look, if you’re a certain type of girl who grows up preferring a particular set of activities your only role models/avatars are Princess Peach and Miss Scarlet. You don’t want to be Princess Peach, necessarily, but you owe it to yourself and to women in general to select her instead of the toadstool guy when you’re playing Mario Kart, you know? Anyhow, Miss Scarlet meant a lot to me as a kid.

You know what else meant a lot to me as a kid? Youth-oriented game shows that required an appreciation for a capella vocal work and a hell of a lot of geography knowledge. You see where I’m going with this, obviously. Carmen Sandiego is, luckily, of the same exact moral alignment as Miss Scarlet — she loves to steal and she loves to blow shit up, but nobody ever gets hurt and she never gets in any real trouble. She’s as stern as Batman but not even 1/25th as serious, which is an important distinction. She just wears giant hats and gets to live wherever she wants and never has to, like, walk home and then pay a bill and then fall asleep watching The Simpsons on her laptop. Her life’s aces. And what’s more aces than two brilliant, talented jewel thieves of color falling in love and taking on the world together? Nothing, that’s what.

Do you need more convincing? Let me present you with a meet-cute for the damn ages:

“You’re never going to get the diamond out that way.”

“Excuse me? I’ve been stealing diamonds since — oh. I’m sorry. I didn’t realize who it was. Were you…?”

“I was, but you seem to have beat me to it.” Pause for rich and disarming laughter. A puzzling drink over an inquisitive table. Questions in both of their eyes. Then the two of them make a getaway — together. They’re both used to taking off alone.

It takes a little getting used to, going somewhere with someone when you’re used to going it alone, but once you make a few adjustments, you find that two can travel just as easily as one.

Roxanne Palmer (alias Roxy Drew) is a cartoonist and science journalist. You can see her stuff at roxydrew.com and roxydrew.tumblr.com.

Read more Femslash Friday: Carmen Sandiego and Miss Scarlet at The Toast.

We’ve visited messenger dogs on the front lines, and met charity dogs doing their bit to raise funds, but now this blog takes a look at the dachshund, and the prejudice this German breed encountered during World War One. As a dog lover, Mary Evans herself amassed an enormous and varied collection of canine-related material in her lifetime, giving rise to this unusual pictorial perspective on how dachshunds were portrayed, and occasionally persecuted, in the Great War.

As late as April 1914, The Illustrated London News ran a rosy feature as part of their on-going series “The Women’s Cult of the Dog”, No. X111 of which reported on The Dachshund. The page featured photographs by the eminent dog photographer, Thomas Fall (whose collection is now represented exclusively by Mary Evans), with text that praised the breed as being “loved as a merry, amusing, quaint, clever little companion, affectionate and faithful”, though also acknowledged it to be “wilful”. The article called for a greater appreciation of the sporting potential of the breed, which was originally bred to work below ground, hunting badger and fox.

However, with the outbreak of war, this appreciation of the dachshund was soon to change. With its German name and origins, the dachshund was used by cartoonists as a short hand for the German threat.

Though often employed in humorous illustrations, the Teutonic associations of the dachshund resulted in a decline in its popularity as a breed, as patriotic dog lovers of the allied nations choose to express their allegiance through their choice of pet. 

Echoing the anti-German sentiments expressed through the use of dachshunds in political cartoons, advertisements and postcards, it was reported that some dachshunds on the home front were actually the victims of violence themselves. Author Graham Greene was a schoolboy in Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire at the outbreak of World War One, and recorded much later in his autobiography,(‘A Sort of Life’, published in 1971), the anti-German hysteria experienced in his home town, during which a dachshund was reputedly stoned in the high street. Though reports of this kind have been repeated, and have somewhat entered into World War One folklore, actual documented cases of dachshund-stoning in Britain seem to be rare.

Attempts were made to rebrand the breed, with the American Kennel Club officially renaming it the ‘badger dog’(a literal translation from the German), with others giving it the moniker ‘liberty pup’. German shepherd dogs received a similar treatment, and are still known today by some as ‘Alsatians’, a label given in an attempt to emphasise the French origins of the breed from Alsace, rather than Germany.

Adding to the dachshund's wartime woes, the Kaiser’s love of dachshunds was well documented, reinforcing for some their negative Germanic associations.    Two particularly bad-tempered dachshunds belonging to the German Emperor, named Wadl and Hexl, almost caused an international incident, when they set upon the heir-presumptive Archduke Franz Ferdinand's priceless golden pheasant on a semi-official visit to his country seat, château Konopiště. Though this was no doubt a distressing episode (not least for the pheasant), the Archduke would soon have bigger problems to face than the Kaiser’s belligerent dachshunds. 

Even in exile at Huis Doorn in the Netherlands after World War One, the Kaiser was accompanied by his faithful dachshunds, five of which were buried in the surrounding parklands. One German postcard in the archive depicts a pensive Kaiser in exile, with an equally pensive-looking dachshund seated next to him on a bench.  Though the Kaiser’s reign was truly over, that of the dachshund was not: despite its continued Germanic associations, this much-loved breed endured another world war with Germany, and remains a very popular pet to this day.

http://www.maryevans.com/lb.php?ref=26235

Lucinda Moore

For the early ’90s Nebraska preteen one of the most exciting events was the school skate, a quarterly event which offered your only chance to hold hands with a boy during the equally anticipated and dreaded couples skate.

All of a sudden, Holiday Skate World would fill with the melodic tunes of Bryan Adams or Mariah Carey and you’d frantically look around to see if Dan was skating with someone else (he usually was).

At this particular school skate, there seemed to be a lot of miscommunication which undoubtedly led to all sorts of friendship drama with Angela. It’s rather convoluted. I recommend making a flowchart.