Charles Bronson got your tongue?

11:22am: So we're into the Championship series, and that's nice. I can analyze the little differences between the Angels and Red Sox, but really, they were close games. Two of the four were won in the ninth, and another won in extra innings. The blathering class appears to be fixated on mistakes the Angels made: errors, baserunning gaffes, the lack of hitting at key moments. But that seems overly deterministic to me, a retrofit. Things went our way, and we won. Some of that may have been psychology (11 game streak of the Angels losing to the Red Sox in playoff games); some of that managing (I really think Mike Scioscia was born for National League tactics); some of that talent, and all of it an unpredictable mix.

I'm pleased at Lester's ongoing performance; as he's hit his adult (post-cancer) body-size he's also settled and become more able to survive mistakes. I'm happy that Jed Lowrie has done so well, and that the AAA nerds who were talking him up two years ago weren't whistling Dixie. I heard an interview on the radio with Alex Cora, about how he's always kind of been second string and that's okay with him, about how you stay alert even when you know your pitcher (Matsuzaka) is a supremely boring fine-tuned strikeout artist, and I thought, it's only in the post-season that endurance becomes noticeable as a skill. It's a good team, young and old. They don't have a lot of flash, and some of the parts are creaky, but it's a good group and I'm glad they're my team. On to the unbedeviled Tampa Bay Rays, and the ALCS.

Now if only the games in my own goddamn time zone didn't start at 8:45, so I could watch them and not have to go to bed before the 9th inning. That would be nice. I went to bed with it tied, and woke up to word it had been won in a walkoff, and had to read over my neighbor's shoulder on the bus to discover that it wasn't a dramatic homerun, just a single with a man in scoring position. And an awkward, pants-down, higgledy-piggledy run it was, with nice, white Jason Bay admitting he almost tripped over his own feet while rounding third. (He was seen later in the clubhouse with the catcher's spike-marks on his arm, like a cluster of bee-stings as he avoided the whole hive.)

10:03am: Playoffs
The unfortunate part about there being a western division is that you have to play them, and they have their own primetime, so sometimes playoff games start at 10pm. I am an old lady who has to go to bed at 11 or else I am Sorry the next morning, so I saw only the first three innings of the first BOS/LAA ALDS game last night. It sounds like it was an agonizing game, considering that the score was 1-0 until the 6th, but I was pleased to discover we won, at about 1am my time. I'm sure they'll rerun a shortened version at some point (probably already have), which is always entertaining, because in the playoffs the shortened version is "every pitch, but cut out all the dithering." As you know, sports fans, baseball is a sport of dithering: on the mound, dancing around the batter's box, waving at flies in the outfield. So playoff-edited games all seem to be happening at warp speed!

I am also sorry to recall that every four years the playoffs coincide with the national election, which is about the most tiresome coincidence I can think of. So far -- so far! -- no sportsperson has come under the crazed delusion that having nice muscles induces great political wisdom. (Or anyway, possibly no sportsperson but Red Light Curt, who thanks to injury gets a microphone only in the vacuum of sports talk radio. For which I am ever so grateful; for all I know, he's probably planning to step in as Senator from Arizona, once his beloved Republican gets elected.) However, the coincidence does have its conveniences: if the VP debates tonight are as cringey as I expect them to be, I can switch over to sweet, sweet baseball, where verbal gaffes are par for the course and relatively harmless. Physical gaffes, NSM.

Truth be told, I wouldn't mind at all if the Rays won it this year. I always like for the Red Sox to win things, but the erstwhile Tampa Bay Triple-As have made it to the playoffs for the first time in their sucky history, and they are straining so eagerly after the prize that it seems churlish to deny it to them. Only a year ago, Tampa tickets were the easiest tickets to get at Fenway, because the games tended to be laughers and did not generate much excitement. Now, every game at Fenway generates excitement, and the in-division contender could come from anywhere.

Okay, anywhere except Baltimore.

5:02pm: Show of hands
How many of you, on seeing the NY Times website headline (as of 5:02 PM EST) "BAILOUT FAILS, STOCKS PLUNGE" flashed immediately to "Rocks fall, everybody dies"?

*raises hand*

10:34am: Oh, Paul Newman died. Now there's a man who managed to do a lot in his life, and by most accounts enjoy the daylights out of it. Also, I like his salad dressings. The question is whether, 40 years from now, my grand-niecephews will recognized the name for food or for Cool Hand Luke. On the whole, I guess I hope food, since Cool Hand Luke doesn't donate its profits to charity.

I had the car into the shop all week, fixing a belt (which I am sure took them 10 minutes, I know because they didn't even charge me a full hour of labor), and I got it home and it still makes strange whiny noises. But not the same strange whiny noises, and not belt noises. Just "your car is old" noises. Which I can continue to live with. The car guy told me the belt came apart in his hands as he was lifting it out, so, I apparently chose perfectly the balance between inconvenience and doom.

No, I didn't think to get the radio fixed, or replace the cracked rearview. One problem at a time.

Although it's not actually cold during this our latest ex-hurricane storm, it is dim and rainy, so all my clothes are on the living room floor, sorting themselves into seasonal categories so that the flimsy ones may be stored in bins and the sturdy ones be (ironed and) hung up ready to go. It is like having all new clothes! Except my all-new clothes need buttons sewn on and ripped hems repaired.

1:11pm: Finally, as though with great reluctance, the Red Sox finally won a game and qualified for the playoffs. Twice in September (once on my birthday) they were within a game of the AL East, playing Tampa, and twice blew it. And for some reason they cannot beat Cleveland, who are thoroughly beatable. But they pulled it off last night, and celebrated duly (if not dully), and that is now that. There's the theoretical possibility that they could still take the East, 3 games back with 5 to play, but unless Tampa turns into the Mets I don't think so.

The funny part is, the team is not in altogether great shape. Several people are ailing badly, and those who are not have not been consistent. Both Lester and Beckett have had shaky outings recently, or anyway 4 runs in the second inning type of outings. Lowell's hip is in agony; J. D. Drew is made of glass; everybody is tired and ragged.

On the upside, we have many nice rookies who are rookiesome and youthful. I still haven't wrapped my brain around that scattered Pocket Dustin for MVP talk that surfaced in August, but what the hell, if he can win Rookie of the Year he can win anything.

9:01pm: My allergies are so off the charts that I finally buckled just now and took my first ever Alavert. Why is it that the pills most likely to fix my problem are $1 a pop? If the Alavert doesn't work, I'm seriously considering cutting off my head.

In other news, you know it is fall because all my flannel is in piles on my bed I bought and roasted my first sugar pumpkin of the season. Not for pie or anything; just for eating.

3:17pm: You know, when people jump up and compliment me, for the fact that I say things like, "Well, we could meet on 10/9, although I should warn you that's Yom Kippur," I don't really know what to say. Doesn't everybody have this already marked in their calendars? And even if they didn't, wouldn't they be embarrassed to discover they were trying to schedule something on a major religious holiday without knowing for sure that none of the participants are Jewish?

(I'm terrible at keeping religious holidays clear one from the next, but even I know that Yom Kippur is the biggie, where people stay home for the day, presmably because they're fasting.)

It shouldn't be compliment-worthy when I do that. It should be ordinary; but apparently it's rare enough that I got complimented on it. Sheesh.

11:23am: History: why so fussy?
I was watching 3:10 to Yuma the other night, because, I don't know why. I liked the short story by Elmore Leonard, oh yes, not only has he written quite a lot of western short stories (the complete collection came out in paperback a year or so ago), it was his bread-and-butter until the western market dried up, and he moved on to urban crime; I say, I liked the short story by Elmore Leonard, but I've never seen a movie capture that particular Leonard dramatic untouchability. I mean, Leonard writes about the surfaces of characters, and implies things underneath, but not life-changing epiphanies and never in an explicit manner; and I've yet to see a movie that could resist an explicit life-changing epiphany. Even in the midst of stuff blowing up. It's kind of a Known Issue for movies in general, and that goes double when you're stretching a short story into a two-hour event.

So, I was watching 3:10 to Yuma, and it does that thing that movies do, which is get many, many details of true history exactingly right, and then completely blow it in one or two obvious ways. The director admits this, in an interview on the DVD: he equates westerns with science fiction, in the sense that the setting is an excuse for baldly treating in moral and social questions, and not necessarily meant for fact-checking. And, I can give him that, to some extent. It explains (away) the ugly history of racial problems in westerns simply as a reflection of the country's ugliness. (It is also the case that, since their heyday, westerns have tended to shift later in history, to the 1880s and 90s, neatly avoiding any racial questions by locating stories in territory overwhelmingly peopled by whites.) So this particular movie appears to have a thesis about how the train brings civilization (read: law and order) to the lawless West, and the low cruelty even of most of the good guys, and so forth into the moral discernment of the hero. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to fact-check an "historical" movie! ( Warning: pedantry ahead. )

1:28pm: So, it turns out to be a fine idea to roast a chicken with some bacon strips resting on its chest and some red wine poured over. However, roasting a very fatty chicken in a deep vessel, without pouring off some of the excess fat, means that the bottom 1/3 of the chicken was more of an accidental coq au vin, so that when I lifted the cooked chicken out of the pot the bottom part of it just sloughed off into pieces. Which are great! But very messy.

The top half of the chicken is sitting on a plate under tinfoil, looking like somebody burned its ass off in a vat of acid or something. The bottom half is still in the pot, which I will turn into realio trulio coq au vin at some point this week. Considering the lengthy part of that process is done already.

Yesterday and today are that achy-clear autumnal beauty for which the region is famous. (Also, unfortunately, very hard on my sinuses.) Down in the 50s at night, just below room temperature during the commuting hours, and at midday up into the low 80s and the sky like glass. I haven't seen any trees turning orange here in the urban parts, but the rural parts and the Cape have already begun to change.

12:16pm: I went to a used book sale yesterday and laughed and laughed (with affection) at the $0.25 romances, most of which had come from one person's stash, because they were marked on the spines in black permanent marker.

Some had dates of first read on them; most had genre or sub-genre tag (VAMPIRES or DRUIDS; most of them appeared to be paranormal in type). I picked out a trilogy, the first of which was wildly graffitoed with FAB FAB RE-READ because that kind of love means something has to be right! Sadly, I am 3/4 of the way through that beloved first volume, and not enjoying it nearly as much as the original reader, except inasmuch as a penis (under clothing) was at one point described as a "hero's mound." It's a animistic Dark Ages romance, with swan-women and wolf-men, where violent Viking masculinity is the irresistible/problematic topic. Also, it was copyedited by vervet monkeys.

The upshot of all these marked novels is my strong suspicion that the donation of same to the Newton Public Library was post-mortem, or post-something-disastrous. Too many of the books are labeled KEEPER for them to have been casual discards. So, apparently, some grand and devoted reader of romances has died, unnamed and probably unhonored as such. Except inasmuch as her labels report her devotion and her discernment (according to her own taste), and are helpful to rummage book-buyers now that she is gone.

Also acquired: two Walter Mosley titles in hardback (one Fearless Jones, the other a recent YA novel); Thoreau's Civil Disobedience; Mary Barton's North and South, of which I had previously read the first twenty pages in an airport; and Nancy Farmer's first, A Girl Named Disaster. All for $8.75!

And now, off to check on the roasting chicken.

9:20pm: In re colloquial expressions in the middle west, circa 1850 (and surely afterward):

The names for male animals -- boar, stallion, bull, cock -- were considered taboo words around women; a boar was known as a "male hog," a stallion as a "stable horse," bulls were "gentlemen cows," and cocks "roosters." [Ed. note: I have called those things roosters all my life.] By the taint of association no one referred to bull fiddles or bull rushes because of the sexual connotations. Similarly, to avoid the allusion, men stumbled through such contortions as I "pulled back both roosters" on the shotgun. In southern Illinois bags were always "sacks" because the former was a male word for the scrotum; flowers weer "blooms" or "pretties" because the female genitals were called by this name; and one never pricked but always "stuck" his finger.

Faragher, John Mack. Women and Men on the Overland Trail.New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.

This is almost as funny as discovering an 1846 diary (by a 19-year-old woman) that referred to insects as "bugs" and "musquitoes," and in other ways as appalling as reading a private 1864 letter from one US Army officer to another that referred to women's privates as "snatches." (In the latter case, a man's privates were just called "privates.") I did also read an historical work recently, that in describing the post-mortem desecration of a body, quoted the Army report which duly recorded the deceased had been "barbarously tortured with a stake inserted from below."

It's like a fast conversation in a foreign language, that stab of brilliance where you recognize a word or a phrase, and then the layers of confusion over that when you wonder what you're not recognizing that's right in front of you.

11:37am: Now that I'm Too Old for Entertainment Weekly -- seriously, there was a moment, about 5 years ago, when I suddenly realized I had aged out of the key demographic group, never to be catered to again! -- I never have any idea what the horizon of pop culture looks like. I have this vague idea that every TV show that was alive on 10/1/08 got automatically renewed, so they're all coming back; but really, the only other pop-culture objects that have swum into my awareness are Watchmen and Dollhouse, and that primarily for the fannish ambivalence around the projects. And they're both not to be expected till what, till next year anyway.

I'm aware some of my cluelessness is just cluelessness, and some of that intentional; anyway, I'm happier not knowing 95% of the gossippy claptrap of this earth. I wonder how much of my media blackout is related to the emergent problem of televisual culture, though. This year, the conventions are running late (thanks to the Olympics); TV has been in rerun more or less since Christmas; fall premiere schedules are all over the map, and no longer predictable; the non-casual TV watcher gets Tivo heads-up notices and is hooked into an array of media sources for advance notice, or has downloaded the pilot already anyway. (I consider myself a non-casual watcher, but one intentionally incompetent in the hype machine.) TV is becoming, for me, something to tune into at random, wondering what is on, or else it's something to watch as a marathon (DVD or televised marathon, which Bravo and Sci-Fi and AMC have mastered, but the networks never will I bet). There have been, as recently as a year ago, rare instances of appointment television, but, maybe only one appointment per week. What with Tivo, even the appointmentness of appointment television is mostly eroded.

If TV is to switch to the download-on-demand model, I wish they would do it sooner, and quit leaving me in this clueless haze. I hate being clueless, but not as much as I hate being required to learn all about So-and-so's drunken nose jobs in the process of incluing myself.

8:58am: I forgot to ask: now that baseball has instituted the instant replay, has the world ended yet? If it has, I failed to get the memo.

I don't approve of it generally; but the tensions of the game are such that it will be difficult to use extensively anyway. Every replay is a delay-of-game, moreso when it's a tense, important game -- oh say BOS/NYY in the playoffs, which always goes 4+ hours -- and the important games are the ones where it matters, theones that start late and fall out of primetime, and the ones that Bud Selig wrings his hands over their length. I'm also quite sure that the umpires don't like it, and while MLB doesn't care about the umpires' feelings, it will become a fighting matter when umpires lose control of their games, because their fiats are no longer the ultimate law on the field. So instant replay may come and it may stay, but there's not much chance it will dominate as it does in football.

It's baseball, for crying out loud! 99% of the time, attempts to deke the umpire already don't work. Having a camera there won't make that much of a difference.

9:16pm: Two weeks ago I had fine (PEI) mussels locally, and now I am down the Cape and had fine mussels again (still PEI). I don't know what it is about PEI mussels; I have been assured that Mass Bay mussels are perfectly cromulent and will not cause you to grow an extra head. But anyway in both cases they were mussels in broth with crostini (or really, just one crostino) on the side; but this second serving was in a broth made of ginger, shallots, saffron and some other stuff which is also aces.

Then something called "Pacific Rim Cioppino," which was multiple seafoods with tomatoes in a soup that was basically a green curry in soup format. Which is awesome. It's got a nice complex flavor, sometimes sweet and sometimes a little bit hot, garlicky and rich. I have leftovers. They will not be left over for long.

The Cape house is as ever, and the climate clammy; I peeled up linoleum tiles from the upstairs bathroom with my fingertips and they came like paper. (Probably, my grandfather put them in 35 or 40 years ago, carefully priming the plywood underfloor just as the instructions on our newly-bought tiles say to do.) My mother thinks we will also put on masks and fix the aged, black-fuzz insulation in the upstairs storage room, but I think that is not particularly going to happen until such time as we have (a) sheetrock to hand and (b) a plan and money for the upstairs renovation. There were shallow signs of rot in the bathroom underfloor, and I briefly fantasized that we would discover a problem so extensive that we would have to start immediately on a total overhaul. But no; it's serviceable; and anyway, the money isn't really there right now.

And if it were, it would go into the foundation and the de-leading first.

In the meantime, we are doing the intrafamilial furniture shuffle: my foldy couch to the Cape; the Cape's red sideboard to me; desks, tables, and chairs flying in all directions. Now if only my mother would stop buying rugs.

9:35pm: ...I think I just saw an interview on TV with a guy from Season 1 of The Real World. I think it said he is running for Congress. Holy crap..

I feel old.

Not as old as I would feel if it were that clueless muscle-bound moron who later hosted MTV dance shows. Thank goodness for small favors?

11:17am: Harvard Square means never having to say that you've never seen a man wandering around in street clothes with a perfect neon-green canvas sailor hat on his head. Just the hat, no other sailor paraphernalia.

9:15pm: From one spectacle to the next
You know what I would like to see at the Democratic National Convention?

Delegates required to do everything on bouncy stilts. Candidates roll up the aisle on glowy single-wheel bikes. With funny hats! All drummers required to wear bicycle helmets! Extra points if they show the TRON remake trailer on the big screen.

...What?

Also, I know there is a Hong Kong joke somewhere in the Olympics handoff from Beijing to London, I just know it. I'm sure any mayor would look faintly ridiculous swinging a gigantic flag in the middle of a stadium, but Boris Johnson looked particularly ridiculous. Possibly it is the shit-eating, vaguely-stoned grin.

It could be worse. I could be hearing Led Zep sung by a young woman wearing gigantic taffeta tentacles. Oh wait. And I am thinking... quite a few people haven't listened carefully to the lyrics of "Whole Lotta Love" in a very long time. I'm all for pornographic imagery, but I am to understand that diplomats frown on such things in public. Even when sung by women dressed like octopi.

6:09pm: Interesting headlines
You know how local news gives you an idea of the attitudes and assumptions of the local audience? Or anyway, what People In Charge think those attitudes and assumptions are. The 6 o'clock news tonight led off with:

Young child (who isn't white) goes missing -- Not covered nearly as breathlessly as the angelic blonde white girl whose father kidnapped her a couple of weeks ago, but this case doesn't have an injured witness to the kidnapping. (To say nothing of how the father is turning out to be a German con man and possibly a murderer.) This is a little smiling Hispanic kid, dropped off at his dad's house on Friday, no sign of him by Sunday. The mother got her 5 minutes on TV; her emotion was respected; the searchers are out in force in Lynn. The previous child-disappearance got an Amber Alert -- inappropriately; they're meant for stranger-kidnappings --, and she got CNN, and she got the FBI. But this most recent child-disappearance is at least getting face-time on the local news.

Boston firefighter under arrest after rape/kidnap of a prostitute -- This one doesn't have any juicy footage, but all the sources I'm reading do identify the victim's profession (not, in obeisance to custom, her name). The TV news had a prosecutor on to say, explicitly, that it doesn't matter what you wear or what you do with your time, rape is rape; and anyway, the circumstances of the crime (stalking, impersonating a police officer, threats) make the case just sensational enough that the outrage isn't "ambiguous" to the general viewing public. It might be nice if the crime, first reported in June, weren't only coming to attention in August.

And if not for the media attention so far, I'm sure that Channel 5 wouldn't have discovered -- as apparently the BFD did not know -- that the accused had been arrested in a prostitution sting in 1996, and the charges conveniently dropped. As the contours of the old-boys' network become visible, its power becomes less automatically accepted.

11:34pm: Last year, when I stopped carrying an umbrella it rained so rarely, my allergies were hardly noticeable. This year, uh. Mold is #1 with a bullet on the allergy list (dust is #2), although there are also some autumn spores that get me. I'd forgotten how exhausting a violent sneezing fit can be, and it's been a while since I've shopped for good allergy pills. Half what I used to take is now meth-lab material, so I think I'm starting over in the medication department.

It would be nicer if my sinuses would talk to each other and work out a parallel schedule for all this; I spent all of today with a screaming headache on the left side, and weeping out my left eye -- but totally fine on the right. It's not like I only breathe with one nostril, right? Sheesh.

11:45am: August has been so autumnal thus far -- rainy and cool, if not outright chilly -- that the bales of hay set along the sidewalk of Mount Auburn Avenue, where they are repaving sidewalk or street or both, are growing toadstools.

Tall, skinny toadstools. I thought they were stakes driven through the bales and into the ground (for some reason), but I got a closer look, and they're definitely fungi.

In other news, last night the Red Sox were winning, and then losing, and then finally won a laugher -- which shouldn't be possible. They scored 10 runs in the first inning: how do you end up losing after that?

Poor Charlie Zink, a knuckleballer and a decade younger than Wakefield, got his chance in the majors and had a classic knuckleball trajectory. He walked a couple, struck out a couple, but was pretty much holding it together till the 5th, at which point he collapsed and was pulled before he could even get credit for the win.

Which was just as well, because in the 7th the score was tied 14-14, and then the Rangers scored more. I don't even know how that happened, just that it did. Ortiz hits two 3-run home runs in the first inning, and we were losing by the end of the night...?

Let us merely say it was not a night for pitching. I went to bed halfway through the 8th, so I was not watching when Youkilis hit the home run that put the Red Sox up for good. They scored 19 runs, and won. ...They gave up 17 runs.

Not really a game to be proud of winning!

1:23pm: Via matociquala, the Hugos get old: TOR weighs in.

Now, the Hugo is a statue, made new every year, that looks like a rocket headed towards space. Or like a big chrome-colored erect penis. I'm not sure it's a statue I would want around MY house, although nobody says no to recognition and praise. I just, if in some imaginary universe I were to win it, it would go in the basement in a moldering box, to be brought out as an hilarious curiosity at parties.

People: it is a chrome-colored erect penis. Sometimes, it's a slightly different color, but it's always the same shape. This is the (arguably) highest honor the SFF community has to give. An exploring, conquering, colonizing rocketship-penis. Could there possibly be a theme here...?

I suspect that, coming to SFF from another culture (media fandom), I have way less respect and reverence for the cultural history of SFF than I probably should have. But it seems so obvious to me how mired in the past SFF can be, how hung up on counterculturalism and 1960s rebellion, how unwilling to cede control. The number of people I have talked to who really think that American SFF fans are smarter (and therefore more progressive) than ordinary Americans, I cannot tell you. The naive superiority of that attitude, the condescenscion with which it is laid on the newbie or the person who might possibly fit the profile of a newbie. The number of SFF people who can't look at the Hugo award and see that it's a giant penis, and wonder, Hm, what does that say about us?

It's hard to hear that you're old (ossified, unwilling to change). It's literally hard to hear -- half the time, I don't bother saying it; I just take my con-going dollars elsewhere -- and it's emotionally hard to hear, because it means you're no longer the center of the universe. Who wants to acknowledge that her experience is not central, typical, emblematic? Who wants to give up that semiotic control?

But if SFF can learn one thing from media fandom, it should be that fandom, like the internet, routes around choke points. You don't want new perspectives? Fine. Those perspectives go elsewhere, and hold their own con. Anime cons, big-ticket media cons, fanfic cons, cosplay cons -- they're all flourishing, while SFF cons decline.

One of the reasons I think Wiscon has done well recently is that it has media fandom penetration. It's more than just the overlap of strongly female audiences; the con itself is at least partially designed to be welcoming. Fanfic writers go to Wiscon and get put on panels right next to published authors; the experiences and texts of mediafans are not dismissed out of hand. (Which is not to say that every Wiscon participant is sunshine on daisies, but the structure of program planning, the encouragement of costumes, the free forms of discussion -- all create an environment where the new voice is encouraged or at least not actively discouraged.)

I think Wiscon could probably do better at advertising directly to media fandom, but they generally hit or approach their cap every year anyway, so that doesn't appear to be a problem. Arisia, this past spring, definitely looked well-populated, and with many faces I'd never seen before: young people; people who liked Dr. Who but not other SFF; people who were mostly there for the cosplay; people from off the street who thought Arisia might be cool.

Who goes to a con because it might be cool? To most of the cons I can think of, nobody. And if you don't think that's a problem, then... that's a symptom of the problem. How else is new blood going to join the fandom? Parthenogenesis?

9:53pm: ...So, all things considered, The Gate to Women's Country was the wrong book to pick up off the to-be-read pile this evening, wasn't it?

4:38pm: IBARW: Rape Stories on the American Frontier
After about ten books that mention the incident, I finally found a book that would tell me the name of the woman who, upon being captured from her wagon train in an Indian raid and raped, hanged herself from the lodge-pole of her captor in 1864 or 1865. Her name was Mrs. Snyder (no I still haven't found a first name), and every history book about the northern wagon trains I've run across mentions her eventually. And, on the one hand, she's mentionable because newspaper reports at the time went bananas over her and a number of other white rape victims on the Plains. And on the other hand, that's the story handed down through the ages: white women in need of defense from rapist dark men.( Read more... )

4:03pm: IBARW: Awesome People You Have Never Heard Of
There are a lot of ways to teach history, and there are good points to every method. One major downside to the Great Men method, where you basically hop and skip from one big name to another, is that you miss out on the everyday texture of life, you tend to privilege people who already had power (Great Men have a strange habit of being white), and you completely ignore the people who weren't famous (like, say, a whole bunch of Great Women). However, one of the upsides to the Great Man method is to showcase people who, thanks to their demographic category, are a minority of the everyday people, and might be elided out of a texture-style history lesson. So, a couple of stories, to give texture to the texture (so to speak).

( James P. Beckwourth: Yep, He's Black )

( Hiram Young, Businessman )

( Emily West, the Yellow Rose of Texas )

( Brit Johnson, The Man who Searched )

4:58pm: IBARW: My homework, let me show you it
So, here is the story: I started a research project last summer, which I'm still working on, about the American West. Among other things I was trying to do was track down black men and women who went west -- when, how, where they ended up, what they did. It seemed to me, suddenly on reading a detail, that I'd never wondered, and never particularly learned, about the immigrants to the West who weren't white, especially in the early periods, before most western movies take place. So I went looking.

In fact, there's a lot of history there, and I was unpleasantly surprised at how invisible it had been to my educated consciousness: it was there, in research journals and primary sources (only some of them still in print, but almost all available from my well-stocked library system), but it wasn't making it into popular history much, and it was almost totally invisible to pop culture. So I felt like an intrepid detective, searching through pages and pages of whiteness for the glimpses of black. In some ways, it's as close as I think I've come to a racial double-consciousness: the merest mention of "colored" or "negro" (and a vast number of unfortunate slurs, used blithely as descriptive terms)would get me excited, parsing every word. Even if it was just a sentence in a whole book; even if it raised more questions than it answered.( Read more... )