ABCs

Tomorrow is the first substantive day of my course on literature and learning. Today it's back to the whole scramble-the-day before routine. This class broadly comes out of my dissertation--which is good--and it's giving me a chance to retrace my steps and rethink my project, or at least that's the hope. I'm realizing how much I didn't think about educational historiography, how what I was trying to do with learning outside the classroom (in literature and other imaginative forms) had been in vogue in history of education at least since the 1950s. Talk about coming too late to the party. I'm not sure how I missed this or even if I really did miss it (I may just be forgetting it now), but it helps explain why folks in history of education show relatively little interest in my project. What I'm doing just isn't news to them. It might not even be news to folks in literary studies, which is why the project needs so much more thinking and rethinking. But I won't bore you with those details here.

Instead, I'll tempt you with a puritanical treat. Tomorrow we're talking about The New England Primer, not a real crowd-pleaser, I fear. But it got me thinking about the ways in which children learn, or rather, consume letters in the process of becoming literate. In my own preliterate days, we learned letters through "alphabet people," colorful cartoon images printed on card-stock. I can't recall if they were tied to reading per se. I think, instead, their purpose was to acquaint us with the idea that letters were special kinds of signs with affiliated meanings. And we wanted to possess those signs, certainly more than we wanted to understand their meanings. We hung them from the chalkboard, from our desks, from the doorways, not unlike the way 17th-century children hung hornbooks from their waists. We developed, I guess you could say, a certain intimacy with letters.

Tomorrow I want to talk about this becoming familiar with the strangeness of letters. And so today I baked letters themselves. Chocolate letters, to be exact. I hope that it might help begin our first real conversation of the semester, one that's slated to be about alphabetization, the process of internalizing the alphabet and becoming literate in colonial america.

I used the smittenkitchen's recipe for brownie roll-out cookies. They have a rich chocolate taste from the generous 2/3 cup of cocoa. They're easy and quick. I'm just hoping that they have the power to get this class talking.

p.s. In true alphabetic dorkiness, I left out the "j" and the "u" because they, of course, weren't added until later.

Keeping on

There’s been too little handwork around these parts. It’s been days since I picked up the needles for more than ten minutes on the train. This Shalom has been waiting for its buttons all week, perfect buttons that I bought and then promptly lost. It’s not good to be slowing down before the holidays, but a weekend wedding in Cincinnati (that featured an amazingly spirited 45-minute hora, the likes of which have never been seen before) turned quickly into a week of book talks for my Bryn Mawr history. Today is the last one–thank god–and then I’m hoping to get my life back on track. Have I mentioned how much I loathe giving talks? Fortunately, this one was almost fun to write. Instead giving over to my clunky, tangled, tortured academic voice, I wrote it in what I think of as my nature writing voice, something closer to what I use in this space. The difference is astounding.

But who am I kidding? Life never really slows down. I need to write a paper for MLA, prepare for interviews, and figure out the coming semester (I've been starting to do just that here). And on top of all of it there’s Christmas and the 35 or so family activities we have planned.

Each night before I go to bed, though, I think about all the writing that I want to do in the coming months:

1. Write a panic narrative for a side project a friend and I are working on.

2. Write a book proposal for a biography of Elizabeth Zimmerman (I think this could be really cool). It would be sort of popular, but sort of scholarly and would tie into my desire to write about new domesticity. I’d also like it to have a web component.

3. Work on my essay “Prude: On Being a Prude” (you think that’s a joke, but it’s not)

4. Revise that god-forsaken essay on Alcott

5. Maybe, just maybe, look at my dissertation. But maybe not.

Note to self

I don't know why you keep forgetting this Anne, but when you can't bear to write a sentence, when there are no thoughts in your head, when you can't stand even the idea of arguing for anything, it's time to turn off the computer. Turn it off. Unplug it. Ignore it. Walk away. It's that damn white screen that's doing it to you.

Now go and find the stack of yellow legal pads. Even the kind with flimsy paper will do. Then dig for your favorite pen, or even choose two. Now it's simple. Just put pen to paper. Don't bother with complete sentences. Don't worry about structure or organization or weak verbs or tentative qualifications. Just scribble. Pretty soon those pretty yellow pages add up and before long, you might just have that talk written. But not if you keep babbling here. Go. Go back to it.

1200 square feet

I may have just 550 square feet in philadelphia, but if you add on "my" second home, my mountain retreat (which is really not that mountainous, but that makes it sound better), "I" have damn near 1800 sq ft in total. I hadn't been to my second home since October, but I fortunately evaded the third nasty storm in less than a month in Philly by jumping an early plane Thursday. J taught yesterday and I had a leisurely morning -- finally watching some olympics, knitting and then frogging a sleeve, wandering about his kentucky campus.

This is his department's building. It used to be a library. And it was this building we snuck into the December before he accepted the position. It was here that I found out about Berea's traveling library and Jane Addams's connection to the Kentucky college. Its president's wife corresponded with the pioneering Chicago social worker. In my dissertation, I explain:

Writing from a small college nestled in the mountains of Kentucky—one founded in 1855 in the middle of the slave-holding South on the simple idea that all Americans deserved access to education—Eleanor Frost could not help but feel connected to Addams when she turned the autobiography’s final page: “I am surprised that your conclusions and inner experiences should have been so similar to my own when your city world has been so different from my country one. But I suppose the matter of reading people living in a different world from our own is fundamentally the same everywhere.” Frost, it seems, read Jane Addams a hundred years ago the way I still do. She found something essential—perhaps almost primitive—in Addams’s own experiences, a resonance that defied geography but that had very much to do with gender. In her sympathetic connection with Addams, she came to realize the power of reading people and texts rightly. And yet Frost concluded her letter by reminding Addams of something they both knew well: that part of reading rightly was knowing when to close the book and face the person in need: "Over and over I have been convinced of the truth of your conviction—a mountain woman fifty miles from the railroad was telling me of their schoolteacher a college student from another state who was spending his vacation in teaching. ‘He seems to be a good man, an I reckon he knows a leap; but he stays to hisself an’ reads books. I reckon he got that habit in college. But hit takes talkin’ and ‘mixin to do folks good—leastways ignorant folks like us!” While Frost’s representation of mountain dialect reveals a now disconcerting assumption of cultural authority (she was, in fact, the college president’s wife), consider the national reach and the relevance of the “conviction” that Addams turned into action. She knew, and she convinced readers to believe, that “socialized” democracy—the talking and the mixing of disparate individuals that an uneducated woman in rural Kentucky easily explained—was the most pressing lesson that all Americans needed to learn.

Anyway....I like to think about J working away in this old library, a place in which Eleanor Frost may have penned her epistles to Jane Addams.

His office calls out to Lincoln, the emancipator, one of Jane Addams's heroes, and some might say the affective inspiration behind the college. I don't know what I'd do if my office was "The Lincoln Room." That's big pressure -- rhetorically and otherwise. You gotta think great things in Lincoln's Room. Fortunately, when he's not thinking great things or anything at all, he has a pretty stellar window.

This makes me very jealous. I have a windowless office and he has a seven foot window. He also has a lovely little coffee shop 400 yards or so anyway. And it's not even overrun by undergraduates:

I was thinking that if I can't get an academic job here, maybe I could become a barista. Or a busgirl. Or maybe I could work next door in one of three craft shops. Or maybe I could open a little community pottery studio. Apparently, there's a real need. Or maybe I could just make a nest, hatch some birdies, and forget all this academic nonsense. For now, though, I have to stay in the game, and so my saturday will look like this: