Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts

Monday, March 4, 2024

Kid-Free in New York City: Day 3 is When We Go to the Library!

This whirlwind trip was, indeed, a whirlwind! Still reeling with excitement from Hadestown, the Rangers game, doughnuts, bagels, Van Gogh, karaoke-singing waitresses, and the view from the High Line, we got up early, checked out of the Republican stronghold, and set out for just a few more precious hours in New York City.

Even on a random Wednesday morning in February, all the other tourists in the city had the same idea, and so we all met up at Rockefeller Center:



Then all the tourists in New York City all headed over to FAO Schwartz together. My partner basically had to run a deprogramming campaign on me to convince me not to buy these SHOCKINGLY expensive and TINY stuffies for the kids, but I doubt it's going to stick since now I have the store's web address. Yes, this keychain-sized stuffed dragon IS LITERALLY THIRTY DOLLARS, but it's so freaking soft. This croissant purse is forty dollars, but it is a Croissant Purse. I don't even know what to tell you if you don't think that is worth dipping into your retirement savings for.

Ah, well. Stymied for the short-term, I let myself be dragged bodily from FAO Schwartz, and instead we, along with all the other tourists in New York City, headed for someplace that was actually free:


In its smartest move yet, the New York Public Library just went ahead and made an entire permanent exhibition out of its coolest stuff. As soon as we stepped inside, my partner and I essentially abandoned everything else on our to-do list for the morning (Sorry, Hamilton! I'll go check out your grave another time!) and stayed here until we absolutely had to leave for the airport. 

Beethoven's sheet music in his own handwriting


Manuscript page of The Secret Garden in Francis Hodgson Burnett's own handwriting


The real Winnie-the-Pooh and friends



I love their sweet little faces! I am devastated to tell you, though, that Roo was lost in an apple orchard...


Please pay special attention to my precious Eeyore. I took a lot of notice, when I was a kid, of how he wasn't afraid to show that he was sad, and how the creatures around him never seemed annoyed by that:


I love how well-loved they all look. I just wish that every now and then, maybe once a year or so, they'd get to come outside their box and play with some real kids again. 

Noah Webster's spelling book



manuscript copy of Ptolemy's Geographica

On this map of Greece there's a label for Hades, so apparently they knew where that was!


Hunt-Lenox globe

This globe's claim to fame is that it's one of only two from the Medieval OR Renaissance eras to include the label "Hic sunt dracones!" 


marketing materials for the Montgomery Bus Boycott

I'm so excited that I got to see this--this is the first time that I've ever seen real-life primary source materials from the Montgomery Bus Boycott in person! The handwritten ride-share flyer, in particular, is such a precious artifact.


typewritten poem "Malcolm X" by Gwendolyn Brooks

I've never seen this wealth of primary source material before. So many manuscript pages and works in progress! I'd be very interested to know if this was Gwendolyn Brooks' own typewriter, or if she had an assistant who did her typing. Either way, I'm fascinated by the noticeable wear on some of the letters--the "g", especially--showing their frequency of use.


Shakespeare First Folio

I used to work in a Special Collections library, so there were a few items here--the double elephant folio of Audobon's Birds of America, for instance, and this Shakespeare first folio--that I'm already acquainted with. But that just means that I could greet them with not the excitement of novelty, but the happiness of again spotting a well-loved old friend.


cuneiform

Here's another old friend--y'all KNOW how much I love cuneiform!


manuscript copy of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

This makes me wish that I HAD made time to bring my now-collegiate environmental scientist here the last time we were in New York City, because she would have freaked out with excitement to see this. But I did get immediately onto my public library's website and put a copy of Silent Spring on hold to read when I got back.


first edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

I didn't catch why, but the NYPL has an AMAZING Mary Shelley collection, including materials about/by her famous mother, Mary Wollstonecraft.


portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft

This painting, a copy of one that hung in baby Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's family parlor, was commissioned by AARON BURR(!!!) for his daughter, Theodosia.


Gutenberg Bible

Another old friend! The Special Collections library where I once worked also had a life-sized model of a Gutenberg printing press that my kids could probably draw with their eyes closed, I've made them look at it so many times over the years.


handwritten manuscript of "Transformation," by Mary Shelley

I've never read this Mary Shelley work! I was so interested to see her handwriting and all of her in-text edits.


Frankenstein first edition

This was one of only 500! Not shown here but also on display: literal fragments of Percy Bysshe Shelley's skull(?!?).


the Green Book

Another primary source first for me! My teenager has been so interested in African-American history during her AP US History study this year that I wish she could have seen some of these materials in person, too.


SO MANY COOL THINGS!!!! In the end, only my horror of not showing up at the airport far too early for my flight got me out of that library. 

After dragging myself, weeping, out of the NYPL, my partner and I bought some bagels to take home (once again, we did not check our order before we left the store, and once again WE GOT SHORTED BY A BAGEL?!?!), rode the subway to the train and the train to the airport, got screamed at and patted down only a little at security, and then made our way back home to chickens, cats, dog, and one teenager who in our absence had kept up with her schoolwork and ballet, maintained the house and pets in excellent condition, and tbh did not seem super excited to have her quiet haven wrecked by our noisy excitement and cluttery luggage.

She was happy to see the New York bagels, though!

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Friday, January 26, 2024

I Read Twelve Years a Slave, and Now I'm Going to Go Spit on Edwin Epps' Grave

I read a bunch of these one-star Goodreads reviews to the family, and we were simultaneously horrified and howling with laughter. People are so hilariously awful!


Twelve Years a SlaveTwelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

My teenager and I have been listening to this book together as part of her AP US History study, usually listening for an hour or so at a time... but this last time, we listened to two and a half hours together, all the way to the end, in the audiobook equivalent of not being able to put it down because it was so exciting!

The teenager chose this book over both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other possible slave narratives because, frankly, it was the shortest. I'd never read it before, and neither of us have seen the film, so we both came to it fresh. I was interested to see what each of us thought about it, she who's read several children's fictional accounts (shout-out to Addy Walker!) and YA histories about US slavery but nothing this graphic or wrenching, and me who's read fairly widely on the subject, but almost entirely in college classes. We've taken a lot of road trips to Civil War sites, but shamefully few to sites where we could learn about the enslaved



Spoiler Alert: OMG this book is EPIC. It is INCREDIBLE. It is distressing, and action-heavy, and suspenseful, and sad. It has vivid characters who I can't get out of my head, villains whose graves should be spat upon, heroes who should have statues made and scholarships founded in their honor, and victims who bring to life the vile nature of enslavement.

Like, seriously. I was shocked at how good this book is! Because it's for my teenager's history course I was prepared to read it even if it was dry or boring or we just didn't enjoy it--I mean, it's school, that's kind of what it's known for! So I was shocked and thrilled that this book is genuinely good, genuinely exciting, genuinely interesting. I saw some people in other reviews griping about having to learn all about how to pick cotton in the book and they didn't like learning about it and thought it was boring. I mean, though... it's high-key NOT?!? If you don't pick cotton right, or don't pick enough of it, you get your ass kicked! And then get your ass kicked more the next day when you can't pick even that much on account of you're injured from getting your ass kicked! And if you're female, you're also getting raped on the regular, and then when the enslaver's wife finds out that her husband is serially raping you, you get your ass kicked for that, too. That... doesn't feel boring to me. It feels uncomfortable, which I'm guessing is what the negative reviewers are actually not liking about Northup's memoir.



Everyone should read this book, and I'd say that ideally they should read it in high school. It's pretty graphic, but the graphic scenes are terrible in the way that graphic scenes ought to be, in that they're in service of telling a very important story. It's not boring, unless you're just completely uninterested in learning about any type of life different from your own. And it's a living testament to the value of human life and the importance of those who give service to help others.

Under the theme of Some People are Incredible but Other People are Terrible, here is a gross bit of backlash to Northup's memoir: 163 years after the publication of Twelve Years a Slave, a person unaffiliated with any academics at all wrote and published a book (through the small press that she owns and serves as the editor, designer, and proofreader for) entitled 200 Years a Fraud, in which she claims that Northup lied about the events of the book? That does make some of the other one-star reviews that were a lot more racist, revisionist, and conspiracy theory-forward make more sense. Here's an excellent series of rebuttals to that very weird book, including some primary source evidence of its veracity.

I was so invested in this book that after the teenager and I finished it, I went on a deep-dive to learn more about Northup's life afterwards. Unfortunately, by all accounts, Northup did not cope well with his trauma upon his return to freedom. His mother had died during his incarceration, and the seven-year-old daughter he'd left greeted him as a 19-year-old woman who introduced him to the newborn son she'd named "Solomon." Northup spent time as a speaker on the abolitionist circuit, and, of course, helping author his book, and became famous enough that during the Civil War, Union soldiers who traveled through that Louisiana area sometimes sought the plantations were Northup had been held. They sent back news of this in their letters, so happily we know that Patsey, the woman who'd been repeatedly raped, and at least once beaten almost to death, by Epps, had left earlier in the war and so had at least survived long enough to achieve freedom. 

I wish we also knew what happened to the small child Emily, daughter of Eliza, who had also been held with Northup in Washington, DC. She wasn't sold onward to Louisiana but was instead retained to be forced into sex work. 

Census records tell that Northup and his wife often separated, and eventually official record loses track of him entirely. It was rumored that he suffered from alcoholism, and was likely often unhoused, as Anne Northup's obituary refers to him as a "worthless vagabond." I am so sad that this was not a happy ending!

This is a better ending: The Hollywood Reporter collected portraits of 46 of Solomon Northup's direct descendants. I LOVE this!

There are two more happy stories: that of Dr. Sue Eakin, the historian responsible for publishing a new edition of Northup's memoir and bringing his biography into prominent academic light, and that of Samuel Bass, the Canadian who successfully got actionable information to Northup's family and lawyer and was directly responsible for Northup's rescue. When my teenager and I listened to this book together, one of our favorite parts is when Bass is discussing why he'd put himself in so much danger to help Northup. He says that he wants to do this good deed so that later in life he can think about what he did and feel good about it. I mean... FAIR! 

We don't know what happened to Northup at the end of his life, but we know the entire biographies and final resting places of his enslavers (because of COURSE we do, sigh...). You can actually still visit the house that Northup was forced to help build for Edwin Epps--it's currently on the LSUA campus! I high-key love how people are using the memorial page for Epps' Find a Grave entry to roast him, and I'm definitely not NOT going to make a point of looking him up and spitting on his grave if I ever happen to be in the area, although I will probably gag myself trying and then end up barfing all over his grave because spitting is so nasty.

I guess barfing would be better anyway?

My teenager and I listened to this book together as inter-disciplinary work for her AP US History and AP English Literature and Composition studies. For a high school student, there are some excellent extension activities to add more meat and rigor for these studies, in particular. For students who need more practice writing about literature, or in using close reading as evidence for implications, I really like the reading/writing prompts at Edsitement

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries (where I promise I NEVER spit on graves!), handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Homeschool High School English: Gothic Literature, The Haunting of Hill House, and Why Teenagers Should Watch Rocky Horror Picture Show


Our 2023 pumpkin army is a vision of Gothic decrepitude!

If you know me AT ALL, you will be so surprised to learn that I think that you should watch The Haunting of Hill House Netflix series with your teenagers before you read the book!

It's really good, first of all, and it stars one of the guys from Leverage, which is another teenager favorite around here, and it's so genuinely scary that my one chicken teenager actually noped out of the experience, and it's a terrific set-up to the Gothic literature genre, especially the idea of the decrepit old house as a representation of the darkness inside ourselves... AND it's completely different from The Haunting of Hill House book in every important way, BUT has enough nods to the book that when you read it with the teenagers afterwards, they can discover all the little connections for themselves as an aid to interest and an encouragement for close reading.

The only thing to be wary of is that my teenager loved the Netflix series so much that she was Big Mad that the book was completely different, and therefore decided that she Did Not Like the Book, which is a shame because it is so good, just... different. So if your teenager, like mine, is spiteful and loves herself a grudge, maybe rethink this order.

For all the other teenagers, it's 1) the TV series, then 2) the book!

https://www.tumblr.com/brutaliakhoa/722303965399859200/what-if-the-house-was-haunted-what-if-the-house

Genre studies are very good for high schoolers, because a genre study gives them a lot of practice picking out themes from different artifacts and doing a lot of comparison/contrast, all supported with lots of evidence and that good flow of logic that connects evidence to conclusion. 

Gothic literature makes an excellent high school genre study for a few reasons:

1. It's not exactly horror, so it shouldn't actually scare off the scaredy-cats, but it IS horror-adjacent, and has a kind of aesthetic that really appeals to a lot of teens. Even kids who aren't super emo tend to appreciate Gothic vibes!

2. It's a genre that's covered a lot of ground, historically, so it gives teenagers more practice reading and analyzing older works than they're often used to. A lot of the teenagers that I've worked with get so fussy when asked to read anything with challenging language/syntax, including just about anything that's not completely contemporary. But they'll work harder for something that they find genuinely interesting, and I have a lot more luck making Frankenstein interesting than I do Romeo and Juliet!

3. Speaking of Frankenstein... there are so many excellent female authors within the Gothic literature genre, and this study is a great chance to focus on Mary Shelley, Shirley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Anne Rice, and other important female authors within the canon. Gothic literature is, as far as I know, entirely Eurocentric, but there are plenty of Black voices to add, especially if you delve into one of my favorite sub-genres, Southern Gothic. Researching to find works by other POC or authors across the sex/gender spectrum or other continents (now I'm thinking that some Japanese horror could also work?) would make an excellent final project for a teenager!

https://www.tumblr.com/angrylittleburd/730460890258980864/spatial-horror-isnt-i-am-in-a-scary-place-so

For our The Haunting of Hill House study, I got my teenager's buy-in because that Netflix series was so good. After we finished, I asked if she would want to read and study the book version next.

Reader, she did!

After that, I'd planned to go on a whole Shirley Jackson deep-dive with her, doing some short stories (including "The Lottery" of course!) and then my own personal favorite Jackson book, We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Alas that she didn't love the book version, because it caused me to scrap those plans, but to be honest, broadening the study out to cover other authors over a larger time period was more academically sound, anyway. 

For a semester-long, in-depth study that you could put on your kid's transcript as its own English course, I suggest reading several entire novels together. A lot of very early Gothic is super messed up, though (*cough, cough* The Monk *cough*), sooo... pre-read! But even without the most messed-up stuff, though, you've got Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, etc. I don't usually like to get too invested in authorial intentionalism, but author studies of Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde would make good rabbit trails if your teenager seems especially interested in their works. Or utilize those author studies in their history course to add more inter-disciplinary work. 

More modern Gothic choices could include Shirley Jackson, Ira Levin (Rosemary's Baby is the more obvious choice, but The Stepford Wives plays with the theme of place in the Gothic genre in some interesting ways that your high schooler can use for their compare/contrast paper), Anne Rice, and Toni Morrison. If you do Interview with the Vampire, consider contrasting it with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is just as schlocky as it sounds, but actually has some interesting things to say about enslavement. 

Here's a New York Public Library list with even more Gothic literature books.

If you don't have an entire high school semester-long course to dedicate to Gothic literature, I also like the idea of covering the same ground via short stories. This list of Gothic short stories has Shirley Jackson, Edgar Allen Poe, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner on it, and also includes "The Yellow Wallpaper," mandatory reading, in my opinion, for any Liberal Arts major in the making.

Here's a list of Black authors of Gothic fiction that I've put on my own must-read list. I read Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl back in undergrad as a slave narrative only and I've only read Octavia Butler's post-apocalyptic Parable of the Sower, so I'm very interested in reading/re-reading the works from this list through a Gothic lit lens! 

https://www.tumblr.com/string-star-lights/691764710603980800/rocky-horror-picture-show-asks-what-would-happen

I'm trying very hard not to raise a bunch of hopelessly unemployable Lit majors like myself, so even with high school English, and EVEN with high school AP English Literature and Composition, which is the teenager's current study, I like to extend the analyses beyond just written text to a wide variety of other cultural artifacts, and the work beyond just reading and writing to a wide variety of other intellectual explorations. 

Fortunately, movies, music, and theatre are all very easy to incorporate into a literature study, because you can use many of the same analytical processes with them. They tend, especially movies and theatre performances, to hit the same plot and thematic beats in much the same way as literature does, so it doesn't feel like a big stretch for a teenager to write about them while writing about literature. But you can then help your student notice the parts that ARE different, like costume and setting and acting choices and audience, and adding those analyses helps them deepen their thinking on their topic. 

As part of this study, we watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show, both at a family-friendly live show and (because the teenager fell asleep during it, lol) at home. Especially if your student has already studied Frankenstein, The Rocky Horror Picture Show is semiotically rich with its overtly mad scientist and self-aware Frankenstein's monster and heroine who is required to choose between man and monster. If you watch a live show, you also get to add in the audience as further cultural artifact; the concept of a self-aware, non-consensually modified character has a lot of appeal to a lot of people, and witnessing an audience seeing the experience as a celebration instead of a taboo is enriching. 

I also recommend The Hunger and Pan's Labyrinth as semiotically rich Gothic horror films, although Pan's Labyrinth scares the snot out of me! 

For a more in-person folklore/social history/anthropology element, and depending on how scaredy your own teenagers may be, it can be very fun and intellectually rewarding to visit a haunted house (in October), or attend one of those paranormal/ghost hunting excursions that a lot of cities have. Even my own corn-fed Indiana locale hosts several such events. Place semiotics is easy to see during these activities, and although analysis of a first-person event can be extremely challenging for this age range, it's a useful skill that teenagers should start developing.

Other hands-on activities for this study include creating one's own Gothic art (take a rabbit trail down the path of Gothic art for a day or two first, because that's another whole entire fascinating exploration!); DIYing a model haunted house that fits into some of the themes you've explored (if you do this, add in some extra STEM skills by incorporating this Pepper's Ghost element); or, of course, writing one's own Gothic short story or poem. If you've got a bit of a reluctant writer, or just one who gets writer's block, it's fun and low-stress to first have them write themes, elements, characters, etc. on notecards to pick at random to be included in the work, or even to write a circular story, in which every five minutes you pass your stories back and forth and collaborate on all of them.

And in my family, we end essentially every study with a themed family dinner and movie night. Is the most Gothic dinner food bloody finger breadsticks, or is it mummy head meatloaf? 

You're all wrong. It's mashed potatoes carefully unmolded from my skull pan, with pats of butter melting in the eye sockets.

P.S. Want even more high school lit studies? My kids really love the Gothic vibe, and we've done full studies on both Frankenstein and Dracula!

P.P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, handmade homeschool high school studies, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!

Thursday, January 4, 2024

I Read The Cold Vanish and It Really Bummed Me Out

Cleaned Christmas off the coffee table, and now it's time to eat Domino's and watch Trolls!

Because why would I want to read something lighthearted and fun over my Winter Break staycation, when I could instead read something seriously depressing?

The Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's WildlandsThe Cold Vanish: Seeking the Missing in North America's Wildlands by Jon Billman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book is tied with When You Find My Body as a compelling, first-person story of what it’s like to love someone who’s gone missing in the wild. The author, Jon Billman, spends the most time with Randy, the father of Jacob Gray, a bicyclist missing from Olympic National Park. Billman writes vividly about Randy’s obsession with searching for his son, and it really moved me… although not, I don’t think, in the way that Billman intended. Unless he wanted me to spend New Year’s Eve super sad about the meaningless and futility of life?

In between writing about Jacob and Randy, Billman writes about the cold cases and search efforts for other people mysteriously missing in the wild. Cases like Amy Bechtel’s and Marty Leger’s highlight how mysterious and frustrating it is when a person simply disappears, and how often it’s not even in what we would think of as “the wild”--both of those cases happened on marked trails. Bechtel’s case, especially, illustrates how easily a missing person’s loved ones can turn on each other or behave unpredictably; if Bechtel’s husband had submitted to a lie detector test, something that seems like a sticking point for her blood relatives, would it have put their minds at rest, or would the test’s notoriously faulty results have caused him to be unfairly targeted?

However, my biggest takeaway from this book is Coast to Coast AM, a radio show Billman mentions a few times in the book. I found its podcast version on Spotify, and while it’s not going in my regular rotation, it did keep my family entertained for a few hours off and on while putting together puzzles over winter break. 

I’ve since been told that in 2020-2021 the show was all about the anti-mask COVID conspiracies, which is gross, but I found that at least in the recent episodes the dynamic of the host nodding thoughtfully and asking engaged questions while his guests ramble on in pseudoscience nonsense-speak is actually kind of charming? Like, did you know that you should be writing down your dreams because they’re all precognitive? Also, aliens!

Anyway, Billman’s point in mentioning Coast to Coast AM was to bring up Sasquatches, and the people who believe in Sasquatches, and to kind of, in a wavy-hands sort of way, connect them to the search for Jacob Gray, in particular. I feel like the point he originally wanted to make was how kind, helpful, and generous the Olympic Project, in particular, had been regarding the search, including allowing Jacob’s father, Randy, to stay in their headquarters. The larger, better point was possibly meant to be how, due to lack of government oversight/interest in the plight of the missing on public lands, the absence of a definitive clearinghouse of data, and disorganization and petty disputes over authority, it fell to a group of goodhearted crackpots to fill in the gaps as best they could. However, what Billman ends up writing about is how he sat there and watched as Randy grew more and more desperate, and more and more willing to entertain all the crackpot ideas that came his way, whether it was aliens or Sasquatch or wild goose chases caused by every psychic with a cell phone and/or access to his Facebook page. It was abject--you could tell Billman also found it abject--and it ultimately felt unkind and voyeuristic, the way that he notes every time Randy brought up Sasquatches, or followed a lead that was about Sasquatches, or, in a scene that jarred and upset me, cried out to Sasquatches who might be watching invisibly to ask them to help him find his son. It felt wrong to vicariously stare at this man in the most broken moments of his life, a bridge too far while attempting to illustrate what it’s like to be a person whose loved one is missing in the wild, and it made me question Billman’s capacity for compassion.

I was also really uncomfortable with Billman’s anecdote about accompanying Alan Duffy and a couple of his bloodhounds on a completely unnecessary walk through the former neighborhood of the late JonBenet Ramsey just so Duffy could show Billman that even after all these years, his bloodhound still smelled cadaver at her house. The current homeowner--and her young child!--were apparently in their yard at the time, and these guys were enough of a disturbance that the homeowner threatened to call the police. I know Duffy and his bloodhounds do a lot of good, but this particular display was crass and unethical, it distressed innocent people, and Billman should have declined to participate.

Overall, though, this book is better than those few isolated lurches into looky-loo-ism. I did come away feeling like I could see the experience of loving someone who’s gone missing in the wild. That experience, though, is desperately sad, and this is, therefore, a sad book to read. The culmination of all of Billman’s first-person work is the phone call he receives near the end of the book from Randy, telling him that Jacob’s body has been found by some biologists working in the park. It is a terrible result, not the least of which because all of Randy’s efforts of the prior 16 months had been towards finding Jacob. He followed every lead, however unlikely, he dove into swollen rivers to search underneath logjams, he hiked over impossibly rugged terrain, he drove as far as Canada simply to see if Jacob might have gone there. And nothing that he did helped find his son. Those biologists were always going to be in that place at that time. He could have sat his butt at home that entire time and the result would have been the same. That’s the saddest thing, to me. If it was at all possible for a parent to find their child by force of will, by effort or determination, Randy would have found Jacob. But he didn’t, so it’s not possible.

I suppose my main takeaway from this book is that in these years-long searches for missing people, of course there are going to be people behaving poorly, but fortunately Billman also includes plenty of stories of people behaving admirably, as well. Duffy does admirable things with his bloodhounds. Elite cross-country runners volunteer their time to search backcountry areas that typical searches couldn’t touch. Randy Gray benefits from the kindness of strangers over and over again in his search, and is, in turn, kind and generous to everyone around him. Jacob sounds like he was an awesome guy, and I hope that Randy is able to feel some peace now that he knows where Jacob is.

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Tuesday, December 26, 2023

I Finished the Wool Felt Moveable Alphabet (and the Dolch Sight Word Cards!)

 

Once upon a time, waaaay back in January 2023, Past Julie thought, "Ooh, I have the perfect idea for a cute Christmas gift for my niece! I'll hand-sew her a moveable alphabet out of the rest of my stash of wool felt. I'll just sew, like, one letter a week and she'll have SO many letters by Christmas!"

June 2023 rolled around, and Past Julie thought, "Hmm, no big deal. I'll just start stitching a couple of letters a week."

During the October meeting of my mending group, I happily cut out letters and burbled to my fellow menders that "I just need to sew one a day and they'll be done in plenty of time before Christmas!"

During the November meeting, I said, a little more grimly, "Just two a day and I can squeak them into the mail just in time for Christmas."

Those last couple of days in December, it was more like six a day while binge-watching Chicago Med DVDs, but look at the glorious result!


I am SO pleased with them! 

Here's a rooster for size comparison, because the entire flock could not get it out of their heads that these colorful nuggets were perhaps made of delicious chicken food:


My favorite part of this project is that even though yes, it took a lot of me-hours to accomplish, the materials are ENTIRELY stash!


The felt is a really nice merino wool felt that I bought long ago for projects with my own kids (it's this exact set, but I bought 8"x10" cuts instead of the 4"x6" cuts shown here). I blanket stitched the letters with basic-grade Amazon embroidery floss and I stuffed each letter with snips of that same felt, and won my own personal game of wool felt chicken because after the very last letter was stuffed, I had less than a handful of little wool felt snippies left. 

I even had all the colors left! I managed a complete rainbow to start the set--


--and also had enough grey, brown, black, and white to make a nice variety and multiples of every letter (except for X and Q, ahem):


My partner handled creating all the Dolch sight words in the same font and size, and I backed each one in pretty paper and laminated it so my niece can use them as templates to make words with the wool felt letters:


Wool felt has such a lovely feel, though, and the colors are so pretty, that I'm hoping that the letters alone are a fun sensory experience. Sensory experiences build intrinsic knowledge and increase one's love for a topic.

It's clear that the chickens, at least, appreciate the sensory appeal!


Even though this project took a loooong time, it was not hard at all, and I actually would recommend it as a beginner-level hand-sewing project for absolutely anyone. Over Thanksgiving break my college kid sewed a perfectly acceptable "I" after about five seconds of instruction, and it's now mixed in there somewhere with the rest of the letters, completely indistinguishable from the lot (well, *I* can distinguish it, but definitely nobody else could)...


Best. Christmas. Yet. Now, to figure out something even more unwieldy to make for next year!

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Wednesday, December 20, 2023

I Read The Pornography Wars and Now It's My Least Crowd-Friendly Special Interest


The Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Obscene ObsessionThe Pornography Wars: The Past, Present, and Future of America's Obscene Obsession by Kelsy Burke
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What a world we live in! The other day, I sincerely told my teenager that if I’d known, at her age, that one day I’d live in a future in which Spotify Premium* exists--nearly all the world’s music at my fingertips for just eleven bucks a month!--it would have literally been my own personal “It gets better” moment. Seriously, all. That. Music! And every day I find something new! I’m still low-key in my deep dive of comparing different versions of “The Nutcracker” as played by different professional orchestras, and yesterday, I found a cover of “Life on Mars” sung by Sophia Anne Caruso. What a world!

*This is not an ad for Spotify Premium.

Simultaneously, the fact that you can also now find nearly all the world’s porn at one’s fingertips has gone mostly unnoticed by me, but I love myself a social history, so I was interested enough to dip into this book… and now I might possibly have found myself obsessed with the history of pornography?

But to be fair, Burke drew me in right from the start with a history/analysis of the Venus of Hohle Fels, the earliest figurative depiction of a human yet discovered, and y’all KNOW how I feel about the art and artifacts of early peoples!

Just by looking at it, the Venus of Hohle Fels is pretty porny… and off we go into the history of porn!

There wasn’t as much history of bygone eras as I’d wanted--I wanted to read about Victorian porn!--but I was very interested in Burke’s analysis of a few more contemporary key historical moments that changed how we make and consume pornography. There’s the internet, of course, which made commercial porn shoots less viable because nobody really needs to rent backroom DVDs anymore, and the Pornhub monopoly, which made those shoots now nearly worthless, because why buy a website subscription when you can get raunchy clips for free? It was enlightening to see interviews in which sex workers who said that they could once upon a time earn a living filming porn on contract now have to operate more like gig workers, with porn shoots, camming, public appearances, and escorting. Apparently not even OnlyFans is a one-stop solution for most sex workers, especially when it can’t ever seem to decide if it will take major credit cards or not.

There is actually less history overall in this book than I’d been anticipating. I guess I’d expected a timeline/analysis of seminal works (lol!) and their various historical impacts, and we do get some of that, from the Venus of Hohls Fe to Deep Throat (you should read Roger Ebert’s review of that film!) to the Girls Gone Wild franchise that I remember from my own misspent 20s… but also with a lot of present-day first-person narrative of what it’s like to attend an ethical feminist porn shoot or an anti-porn convention or a sex workers conference, etc. I never could quite nail down (lol!) the author’s thesis, I guess, or even really how she wanted her analysis to flow, which often left me confused about the purpose of what I was reading and/or weirdly displaced in time--there was a very long passage about commercial shoots, for instance, that I was very interested in, but I could not for the life of me figure out if this was a contemporary shoot or something from, say, the early 00s? Based on Burke’s later discussion of the ways that MindGeek/Pornhub has made commercial shoots obsolete, I’m guessing it was the early 00s.

I was also less interested in the lengthy discussions of the various contemporary anti-porn movements. Historical anti-porn movements, sure--the California Measure B legislation in 2012-2017ish is super interesting, and to my mind has a lot of connections with ongoing legislation across the country to limit/determine what public school teachers can do--but the discussions of the contemporary stances against porn just went round and round: feminists are against porn for these reasons, religious conservatives are against porn for these reasons, etc. The feminists who are opposed to porn have a point, at least, but so do the feminists who are okay with porn, as do the sex workers involved in creating it, as do the free speech laws. I did have a fun time looking up an author’s reading of Good Pictures Bad Pictures Jr.: A Simple Plan to Protect Young Minds and snickering over it, though--my teenager, who was also watching this reading with me, kept shortening Jenson’s call to arms of “Turn, Run, and Tell” to “Turnt,” which… snicker! But what I really wanted, and didn’t get, was Burke’s final conclusion and stance; after all, she’s the one who just wrote a book about it! She must have opinions!

Instead, you are not going to BELIEVE what she does in the final paragraph of her book: she spoils the series finale of The Good Place?!?!? I mean, yes, fine, the show has been out for a few years, but still: it was a big twist! And she didn’t even give a spoiler warning first!

Although I got frustrated with the various philosophical stances since they were portrayed as, and seem to remain, unrectifiable (lol!), I was very interested in Burke’s references to a few cultural artifacts that seem like they could be more revealing, notably Rashida Jones’ documentary, Hot Girls Wanted, that seems to portray porn’s incessant acquisition of 18-year-old talent as VERY close to human trafficking, and the Twitter controversy involving August Ames, which seems to have as much to say about mental health as it does homophobia. As well, there’s a short mention of Dan Savage’s amateur porn film festival, Hump, and of a few performers who’ve done some compelling advocacy (including TEDTalks!) that I would have loved to have seen entire chapters on; this feels like the closest society has come (lol!) so far to true feminist, ethical porn.

I left the book with a lot of topics in mind that I’m still curious about: IS feminist ethical porn possible? Is there an ethical way to legitimize sex work? What do popular trends in porn say about the society that creates/consumes it? How has the takeover of “indie”/”pro-am” porn affected the marked sizeism, colorism, and racism clearly evident in most commercial porn? Burke did a little bit of semiotic analysis of a couple of commercial films that have historical resonance, primarily in her discussion of racism and pornography, but I’d love to read more about that. I mean, she barely touched (lol!) 50 Shades of Grey!!!

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Tuesday, December 12, 2023

I Read Our War and I'm Pretty Sure It's Non-Fiction


Our WarOur War by Craig DiLouie
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I am so unnerved by how plausible this book seems. A second American Civil War caused by Trumpers (in this universe they probably refer to themselves as “Marsh-ans” or something, but we all know they’re Trumpers), a post-apocalyptic future in which big cities exist more like third-world countries, and a world in which the most unrealistic aspect is the fact that apparently nobody’s dropped a nuclear bomb yet? Yeah, DiLouie is basically just saying the quiet part of my constant feeling of impending doom out loud.

If you didn’t feel the same level of, like, deja vu for the future I won’t be surprised, because for me, the most unnervingly plausible part of this book is DiLouie’s street-level knowledge of Google Maps. A couple of chapters in, I actually Googled him to see if, like John Green with his Funky Bones reference that first tipped me off to his own locality, DiLouie is also a Hoosier… and he’s actually from New Jersey? Well, his Google Earth skills are marvelous, because I could mentally follow one of the main characters, Hannah, from the refugee camp to the Free Women headquarters to the Brickyard Crossing golf course--the only thing missing was a Children’s Museum of Indianapolis sighting. Imagine the pathos DiLouie could have packed into an image of the life-sized dinosaur statues bombed and broken!

But even without the reality boost of a setting that is my closest big city (and a name-drop of my own hometown… we tried, but alas, the rebels got us), I think this book would have been unsettlingly real. I mean, deep down aren’t we all surprised that January 6 didn’t end up in a full-on Civil War? Deep down, don’t we all think that Civil War was just postponed, not completely staved off?

With that realistic setting, DiLouie’s main premise--the use of child soldiers by all sides of the war, at all levels of the conflict--was vivid and disturbing. Here's the UNICEF definition of children recruited by armed groups, and one of the main characters in Our War is a UNICEF official who's come to evaluate the needs of America's children during this war. In Our War, the rebels had the more predictable, stereotypical uses for their child soldiers, terrible but nothing I’ve not read about before, but what really got me was how the “good guys” also used children. It was devious and compelling, manipulative and awful, and yeah, I totally buy how it went down. One day, you’re telling an orphaned child that everyone in the militia is her mother now and you’re feeding her and praising her and giving her a home, and the next day, you’re putting a suicide bomb in her backpack and sending her over the wall to the enemy encampment.

The only part of the book that didn’t really ring true to me was Hannah’s final chapter. DiLouie doesn’t usually pull his punches, so I kind of think that he just bummed himself out too much and was all, “Dang, I’ve got to give this kid a redemption arc or I’ll never have another good night’s sleep!” I know kids are resilient, and this kid got a LOT of therapy, but I just don’t think she’s pulling out of that level of trauma.

Speaking of deja vu for the future… if The Handmaid’s Tale didn’t already have you planning out your overland, on-foot route to Canada, this book will get you motivated to figure that out. Remember: stay off the main roads and highways!

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