Author: Liz Henry

Judith and Jane – a girls’ book from the 1920s

Posted on by Liz Henry

Another of the books in the pile from my mom – Judith and Jane – from 1925 – was completely separated from the spine with the pages detached, so I read it carefully on the dining room table yesterday. It was somewhat similar to Plain Jane and Pretty Betty as the story has a poor girl who is happy and a rich girl who is miserable, and they eventually become besties.

It also made me cry, as these books tend to do nowadays. Not sure what happened, since I was a heartless wretch as a child and would just laugh at any hint of sentiment, mocking it relentlessly, while now in my 50s I can feel myself winding up to weep into my hoodie as soon as one of the girls contemplates her sorrows or there is any sort of heart to heart talk!

So here is the plot synopsis with some commentary. Jane is the poor but happy girl, in a boarding house in 1920s New York City, living with her mother who works as a magazine editor. Her father died recently – within the last few months to a year – And her mother got an invitation for Jane to be a scholarship student at Mrs Something’s School for Girls.

Meanwhile, in the 6th grade at Mrs Whatever’s School for Snooty-Ass Bitches, vivacious, rich Judy is extremely popular, but secretly unhappy, as her mother is dead and her beloved father doesn’t really pay attention to her. He is an important banker or something. Her governness and all the servants in their mansion barely even remember how old she is on her birthday, her presents suck because they are like, dollies and frills and she is TWELVE and her party is boring because it’s the same overblown children’s entertainers as ever. She is not allowed to have her mother’s miniature in her room to weep over because it was painted by some famous artist. Awkward times at the old mansion! Judy compensates by acting out in school so she can always be the center of attention. So when Jane shows up, Judy is a huge snob and the other girls follow suit. Plus they are just puzzled at the thought of someone having no father and their mother isn’t even in Who’s Who! OMG!

The teachers are overwhelmed by the terrible behavior of the 6th grade class and especially Judy, except for Eleanore Myers Jewett’s self-insert character, the history and English teacher, Miss Kelly.

Jane’s mother points out that Judy must have something good in her, because her rizz dominates the classroom so hard. Jane kind of sees it and wishes they could be friends BUT NO.

Quick fast forward: Interspersed with scenes of Judy’s secret misery, we see Jane being treated unjustly. Not invited to Judy’s stupid party – Jane gets the best part in the class play (Puck in Midsummer Night’s Dream) Judy is Jealous but secretly delivers flowers to Jane (!!!) – Accused of being a goody two shoes – Dared by the class to do something that the principal had just completely forbidden on pain of expulsion – Jane finds out she only got the scholarship because the other students suck and they needed to get someone smart in – Same for Miss Kelly, the only competent teacher – Jane suspected unjustly of stealing a beautifully illustrated book from a classmate AND EXPELLED on the very day that her mother is in a horrible subway accident and in the hospital, unconscious!

Jane moves in with her minister and minister’s wife who conveniently live in the same boarding house in the slums. Shit happens fast. The minister goes to the principal – Miss Kelly also intervenes – Judy has an enormous realization that she sucks, is sad, actually likes and admires Judy, wishes she could hang out with Judy’s beautiful and smiling motherly mother, etc. TURN ON THE WATERWORKS because they have a gorgeous talk and agree to be BFFs. They both secretly dream of becoming AUTHORESSES! They write poetry and stories! Jane then gets the riding lessons of her dreams including a full riding outfit and little ivory-handled riding crop, gets comfy in the mansion, and impresses Mr. Judy the Banker with her happy childlike laughter and ability to touch-type.

Back in the classroom, Miss Kelly assigns the 6th grade to think of a high old brick wall. If they could climb over it for the first time, what would they see? It turns out Judy at her summer mansion actually has an old stone wall she used to stare at but didn’t want to look over, exactly because she liked to imagine something amazing was there. Looking would ruin the fantasy. Someone mentions the Land of Happy Dreams (or something)

The girls then produce a zine!!! I’m not joking! They write all the stories and poems for their magazine, Jane types it all, and they produce two issues, one for Judy’s dad and one for Jane’s mom who is still in the hospital months later at Christmas, unable to walk!

Turns out Mr. Judy is on the Board of that very hospital and visits with Jane and Judy and gets Mrs. Jane a private room so she can have more frequent visits!

Mr. Judy becomes much much nicer, and has learned to be a real Father in a real homelike, cozy, listening to his daughter, way!

A famous surgeon found by Mr. Judy then repairs Mrs. Jane’s spine!

Jane meanwhile sent off one of her mother’s stories to an editor and it wins $300 in a contest, which I believe may have been enough to pay the surgeon (!?) But also Jane is invited to Judy’s summer mansion and is working very short mornings as Mr. Judy’s typist so that she doesn’t feel beholden!

Jane and Judy (led by Judy’s still naughty spirit) ride off without their groom early one morning, Judy is thrown from a horse, and then they are KIDNAPPED BY ROUGH MEN in a CAR and taken to the slums of NYC somewhere! The rough men’s … wife or mother or something … is roughly kind to them and won’t let them be hurt! But also won’t let them escape. Jane escapes, wanders around the slummiest slum, then into a diner full of rough and dirty men who do not help her but then the smallest dirtiest man gives her his LAST NICKEL and is kind – Police come – everyone rescues – Jane worries aboout rewarding the one kind and poor man and is informed the slum is only a slum because people were poor and that maybe unions will help them and the kind man is an anarchist organizer!

I had not predicted either a kidnapping, or that the girls would be RESCUED BY ANARCHISTS!

You can see the ending I hope! It lies just over the stone garden wall ! In the LAND OF HAPPY DREAMS AND ANARCHY.

Everyone is really truly sisters and lives happily ever after, with the note that even though their hopes and dreams change as they grow up, they have learned they should always work steadily towards them!

Of course I had to look up Eleanore Myers Jewett. She had the barest stub of a Wikipedia page, so I added a little to improve it, from a few decent looking sources. I would have to go lookking in histories of children’s books, or maybe newspapers or something with contemporary book reviews, to find out more to add.

Surprise (not) she had a PhD in medieval English and comparative literature, and worked for a while as a middle school English and history teacher! I love her now.

This book easily could have become a series. Judith and Jane at the Rodeo! Judith and Jane go Deep Sea Fishing! Judith and Jane March for Women’s Suffrage! I feel a pang that these books don’t exist.

black and white yearbook photo from 1912 of a serious looking white lady

Next up, Plain Jane and Pretty Betty.

I also plan to (re-)read some classics of Russian literature to offset the silly Inspector Rostinov detective series.

Reading good bad books

Posted on by Liz Henry

My mom gave me a small stack of old children’s books from my grandmother’s collection. I am fairly sure they were my grandmother’s to begin with. I grew up reading this stuff. The top of the pile was Helen’s Babies, which I vaguely remembered as somehow not one of my favorites – not a book that I read over and over again. After I ripped through it this morning I got some insight as to why. It has a sort of condescending “little kids lisping and saying adorable things while being idiotically naughty” flavor to it (like the much later “Penrod”) that I didn’t like then and that still rubs me the wrong way. I enjoyed it more now than I did when I was a kid and found it funnier. What I didn’t realize is that it was written in 1876! (Contemporary with Five Little Peppers btw.) That is quite early for this kind of book and makes it more interesting to me.

I had a look at the front of the book and realized that this isn’t my grandma’s copy of Helen’s Babies, which was in terrible condition, falling apart. My mom must have bought this one or maybe I bought it years ago to give to her, knowing she loved it. The book is inscribed, “Presented to Dan Halstand, April 5th, 1925 on his 7th Birthday from Grand Mother Halstand”. I wonder if 7 year old Dan liked it for the naughtiness of the little boys, ages 5 and 3? In a sort of Joel Pepper Gee-whockety way that an older kid (like I was when I read it) would find nauseating? And did Grand Mother Halstand present it to him because she read it to her children? It could even have been a book from her own childhood!

The book’s point of view character, Uncle Harry, arrives in the country somewhere just north of New York City, as his married sister sent him a letter telling him he should go take care of her two boys for his vacation. “Just the thing!” he muses, considering his brother in law’s fine horses, cigars, books, and cellar of claret. There is a maid or children’s nurse (aka a nanny), a cook, and an Irish handyman/driver/horse caretaker running the household. Anyway, Uncle Harry quickly realized that the children he thought of as perfect angels from earlier visits, were filthy, ruin everything, cry and howl, wake him up at all hours, love to climb up on the roof and hang over cliffs, and so on. Hijinks ensue.

The “plot” is that he has a certain Regard for a lady in that town, Alice Mayton, whose mother lives there – it seems like Alice is visiting from NYC too but staying in a boarding house full of other single ladies. So there is a romantic plot that is also comical as the children ruin every social occasion or embarrassing Uncle Harry in some cringey way by revealing way too much of his Certain Regard for Alice in mixed company. He falls into the mud and is seen by a carriage of tittering boarding house ladies; the littler boy falls and get hurt and demand that he sing a particular embarrassing song while rocking him and kissing him (also in front of the boarding house ladies.)

This is pretty cool in a way because it’s about this slightly pompous young man who does much of the normal work of caring for young children. He doesn’t realize how attractive and steady and loving it makes him look to not only all the ladies but his particular crush, Alice.

I went to have a look to see what reviews or discussion I could find of the book. Unexpectedly, right at the top of the results — George Orwell mentioned it a couple of times in his essays on literature; briefly mentioned in Good Bad Books (a term he says that GK Chesterton came up with), and then explored a bit more in Riding down to Bangor. He is thinking about how as children we gather some vague idea, the most stereotypical, about other places in the world – for him, from things like boys’ adventure tales.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

You can think of how they map out gender and class in a similar way.

Orwell’s description of his boyhood concept of “America” is very funny!

He also mention so many good favorites of the genre! Rebecca of Sunnnybrook Farm and the What Katy Did books! I wish I could go back in time and get him to read Understood Betsy as well. Anyway, when he analyzes Helen’s Babies it’s really him trying to understand how social class works in the U.S. of the 1870s, in New York, post Civil War. And the morality of the book which manages to work in a pious Christian air in a less dull way than the usual books of that time – the tracts where a small child is either naughty and dies, or is super religious and pure and dies – accompanied by the most boring sermonizing ever. Instead our naughty toddlers are seen as cute and healthy and normal – their naughtiness is innocent and pure – They like the more adventurous Bible stories and insist on praying adorably before bed, not forgetting their dead baby brother.

Orwell analyzes it as compelling, readable schlock. I ended up reading through a fair number of his essays of criticism – some I had read before, like the one on PG Wodehouse, but most were new to me.

I had a look a the author of Helen’s Babies, John Habberton. He wrote the book on the advice of his wife (maybe with her input?) to tell stories of their own children and how cute they were. I saw he published more books that look like sentimental tales of parenting – for example, “The Annals of a Baby, by one of its slaves”. I’m curious to read that one!

That title makes me think of The Biography of a Baby, a more serious work of developmental psychology from 1881 by Milicent Washburn Shinn, in which she analyzes the behavior and development of her niece, Ruth, for the baby’s first two years. Very refreshing and non religious, not sentimental in the way you might expect from 1881 – contemporaneous with books like Helen’s Babies or Elsie Dinsmore. Milicent was the first woman to get a PhD from UC Berkeley. It’s a great book that I often buy for people when they are having their first baby!

Next up, I will re-read Plain Jane and Pretty Betty which I remember as one of my favorites. There is a very decrepit copy of Judith and Jane – to read it I will have to treat it like an archival copy and more or less turn the pages with tweezers and white gloves since I don’t see it online as an ebook anywhere and also don’t see any other copies for sale!

Talking with people in the eternal hallway

Posted on by Liz Henry

I went to a sort of unconference, though I’m not sure what its formal categorization is if any. Back in the day when there were like 6 unconferences a week, open spaces, BarCamps, and so on in the Bay Area alone, it was semi hilarious to me to see the internecine battles over exactly what could and couldn’t be called “open” space. You can probably still find it somewhere, if you are a historian of such things, or enjoy reading stuff like MeatballWiki or C2. The debates raged! (imho partly because people wanted to define the specifics so they could own them; certificiation, professionalizing, consulting, etc. to be a licensed WhateverTechSummit operator.) At DevSummit I was noticing a refrain from the old guard of that commmunity, of missing those times & the fashion in small flexible self organizing conference spaces.

DevSummit, which is for “tech nonprofits”, gave a fairly loose framework that allowed for a lot of spontaneity in subject matter. There were frequent pauses to do “go-rounds” where everyone in the 100 person circle would say something: how they were feeling; what they are looking forward to; something they want to talk about today; something they learned today, and so on. Discussion groups were formed quickly with minimal preparation – you might have indicated the day before, or 5 minutes ago, that you had a topic and were wiling to facilitate a discussion. This worked well, and we had several rounds something like 15 groups, with 2-10ish people per group.

If you are a veteran of conferences you know the best bit is often the hallway track – ie the part of the conference between organized talks or panels, where you are standing around in the hall having informal conversations. DevSummit managed to maximize that feeling while providing useful structure. This is usually my experience of events that derive from the unconference or open space world.

I am trying to look for, or make, things that happen HERE so that I don’t have to subject myself to the physical difficulties of travel.

Anyway, I had a good time, met dozens of new people, connected with others I already knew, had a lovely dinner out one night and a happy hour the other, and had lovely conversations. Rosa gave me a tiny lego wheelchair kit, free nature journaling zines, and a gorgeous book from the Venice Biennial, “The Pleasures We Choose” which went deep in art and disability justice and culture and which is also beautifully designed and bound. (I am so admiring and jealous of its gorgeous design! The exposed signatures in the spine, the images and handwriting on the inside dust jacket, the nice rough texture of the cover and end papers/ front matter inside the jacket, the eggplant colored accent text throughout, the art, the poetry, the bibliography!!) I will read it through and I hope to report back on it with a real review.

I talked a bunch to people about my nonprofit, Grassroots Open Assistive Tech, and while I didn’t exactly get any immediate answers to my questions I now have a wider circle of people to invite to deeper conversations about what we are trying to do, and the nitty gritty of how to do it and with what tools.

One of the more top-down sessions I went to where mainly the facilitator talked, I got a lot out of because it was a somewhat alien perspective to me, about fundraising, which I need to do more of and learn more about. One side of the message was about approaching “funders” as peers who you are potentially engaged with as co-conspirators with a shared goal. I agree hard with that as it is in my nature, but I also always feel a bit sad seeing people approach “authorities” for their validation. Validation is nice but I don’t like the deferential / condescending attitude people can sometimes bring to it. My heart is with grassroots or small scale stuff most of the time. I also utterly don’t care if someone has some measure of fame or power. They are just a person. Maybe this is my early identification with punk, or stoicism, or both. But also as I am sometimes now in the funder position it sucks to deal with people who are outright trying to kiss my ass, or the flip side of people who don’t want to look like they are kissing my ass so they can barely speak to me. OMG. Well, anyway.

The other main point of the talk was something that made me more uneasy but that was very interesting. It was about sales vs. marketing, something I know zero about. In fact someone approached me at this conf to gossip about a long gone tech company I worked at 20+ years ago and I was like… I don’t know any of those people. The sales side of things was like another planet and I never talked to those people who also did not know what to make of anyone like me. I associated them with a falsely hearty slap on the back that leads suddenly to being inside the horribly traumatizing (to me) movie Glengarry Glen Ross. Anyway apparently marketing is one to many, but sales is one to one. Many slogans were said like, when you know a funder you know something about exactly one funder. It was kind of about “be yourself” advice, but kind of shading into manipulativeness which I guess is the uncomfortable part. Is it manipulative to “pitch” the part of “yourself” to an individual in this way? Dude looked right at me and was like “Well I could guess from my knowing you for like 2 minutes that pitching a narrative to you about Capitalist Bootstraps would not be right, and that instead it would be more of a Class War story.” I mean, Dude was correct. But also, yikes?

I can maybe best internally translate all this filthy orc-talk into something about storytelling or narratives, tropes, and registers of communication. But I also have to get over it to some extent since my nonprofit has to have some financial support in order to accomplish anything and it will not fall into my lap, so I have to learn to ask for it.

And a final note: apparently – a thing I have never heard mentioned – the origin of “Open Space Technology” (really??? technology? must we? get that bag i suppose) was from a minister who noticed it being used in small West African villages where he was working and them created his version of it and immediately formed a consulting company and an entire conference, the Organization Transformation Symposium, so, a new age consultant to Western big business. And that’s the Grifters Ripping Off Indigenous Cultures (GROIC – tm) update for today!!!

Software Freemasons

Posted on by Liz Henry

From years of working from home in a tiny house I mostly tune out Oblomovka’s work meetings, but today a particular cadence caught my ear. He was asking someone a list of pointed questions about a software project and the staccato back and forth – I could only hear his end of it mind you – sounded oddly mystical. Who maintains it? When was the last commit? What are the dependencies? I realized that it reminded me of The Musgrave Ritual.

‘Whose was it?’
‘His who is gone.’
‘Who shall have it?’
‘He who will come.’
 

I then stopped listening.

“Did you have a list of questions you were going down? Or were you just riffing?” I asked after he was done with the meeting.

“Making it up.”

I then had to show him the Musgrave Ritual.

It would be funny to have a software engineer / open source project Ritual, maybe a bit like freemasonry.

Who shall maintain it?
They who will come.

At least – that is what we usually hope for.

Let us toast every Brother,

From the East to the West,

Who updates his packages,

And adds lots of tests.

More Inspector Rostinov novels; farm report; wheels n legs

Posted on by Liz Henry

I am now on book 10 or 11 of the Inspector Rostinov series. The Russian detective lifts his weights and considers his painful leg; his assistant Karpo is monastic and humorless with glimmers of feeling; the other assistants have their subplots and relationships so it is all very engaging. Right at this point in the book the collapse of the USSR happens and of course along with the current political situation (here and globally) it makes me think about “democracy” in a glum way where I wonder if it ever “worked” or the thing propping it up is mostly imperialism. And that’s all I want to say about that!

I love a good long series but also always have in mind that the author must be sick to death of their characters by around book 3 or 4, like Agatha Christie finally writing Mrs. Oliver into her series, a detective novel writer who talks constantly about how much she hates her detective and keeps trying to kill him off.

Of course I also think about the concept of “copaganda” which I wish I had recognized as a young person. While I love a detective novel I can also be at least aware that they are making the police to be sympathetic in a way that at least usually, or systemically, not deserved.

With all those caveats – This series is super relaxing and reading it is rejuvenating. I am also playing a lot of Stardew Valley on the Switch since the 1.6.X release has been out (Nov 5th). Voyager Farm is in mid winter, I have reached level 25 of the Skull Caverns and am slowly building up a small store of jade and iridium. My Meadowlands industrialization has progressed to the point where I will likely start buying iridium sprinklers from Krobus, as I continue my campaign to get him for my roommate. Usually, I build the community center in year 1 but this time didn’t really have that as a goal, so I have a pufferfish and a truffle still to go before it is complete.

Oblomovka is back from Thailand and it is so good to have him back after his way too long trip. He brought delicious Pracha Tai (tea from our friends at Prachatai) and made me a pot of it yesterday which I drank while playing Stardew.

Last Monday I also started a weight lifting class at a local gym that is aimed at women and in particular older or menopausal people who need to build up strength and bone density. My bone density is good despite my years of on and off oral prednisone; I am super flexible, have great balance, but my cardio is not great and my strength also not great. Though, I can swim a decent number of laps (for me)  where decent is like, 10 at best and then I can do more after a pause if my ankles and knee permit, but I usually don’t. So, weight lifting!  The gym is aggressively pink and has flowers everywhere on the wall and big fake flowers  on top of the weight racks and machines.  I do not need flowers to go to a gym, but I think they are useful here to filter out really sexist or anyone infused with a lot of toxic masculinity. Indeed, there was no grunting and sweating and judgey macho BS going on. Hurrah!

I got a very pragmatic instructor, M,  who I felt really comfortable with. No weird gender stuff. I wrote down all the sets that we tried together and made them into a weekly spreadsheet so I can check off doing all the things. For some exercises, M was maybe a bit too ambitious for me so I notched it down a bit or just failed to get all the way through the sets or the groups of reps. My little hand weights are 1, 2, and 3 lbs and I can combine them in one hand since they are soft with little straps. (So I am bicep curling 5lbs, and upwards pressing 6.) And, day 3 I only did the stretches because I was hella sore and could not cope. I had to switch from desk pushups to wall pushups as well. I think if I do even part of the checklist every day next week, I will catch up to where she thinks I might have been on day one!  We’ll see! For now, it feels good. The one thing I am “good” at is a rowing motion that uses my manual wheeling and kayaking / swimming muscles so I am able to unexpectedly “do” 25 pounds.

One of my little pretend goals, which I don’t take too seriously, has been to walk to the corner, buy something or sit somewhere, and walk back. 3 years ago at our old house — on the same steep hill we are on now — That was something of a dream and I would get kind of close and then not be able to do it. But now, I can do that half block walk and back on a good day. This has been a really long arc from my 2011 ankle blowout where I spent a year not being able to stand up without CAM boots. And let’s not forget the hideous pain like snakes squeezing 24/7 around my ankles and legs and feet.

Anyway, without having any REAL goal, I realize I have greatly improved my walking ability in the last few years. It is very slow and not linear. I spend weeks or months being able to walk inside the house now, with interludes or weeks or a month or so in the manual chair in the house.  (The house is now easier for my chair, too!!! With the bathroom floor level with the rest of the house instead of having an inch drop. Try wheelie-ing over that in the middle of the night half asleep when you need to pee. Ugh!)

I now try to just IMAGINE walking just a bit further than the half block hill to sit in the cafe, or buy something at the drugstore. (Standing up to wait in line part is intimidating.)  I try to imagine walking to the bus stop, getting on the bus, going somewhere that is right next to another bus stop, then crossing the street to the opposite stop to bus home. Can I do it? Could I do this limited “go one place where I know the number of steps I will have to take” trek, in a cab? I am only just starting to imagine it. Can I do it without setting my ankles back a year, or putting myself back into the Snakes Squeezing Walking Boot territory? That is my real fear I guess. But it also feels inherently scary, like I am about to leave the house defenseless and naked. Keep in mind I dream myself in my wheelchair or powerchair, and in dreams, when I realize it isn’t there, it is a nightmare that usually wakes me up. The thought of trying it brings up huge, weird, inchoate FEELINGS. They are not unfamiliar because I have done this before (in 1997, then in 2009 or so), had some amazing bipedal times, then WHAM, in a world of hurt.

a cartoonish outline drawing of a quadruped with the caption "defenseless animal"

 

Progesterone daze

Posted on by Liz Henry

Not a lot to report here – but that won’t stop me from over blogging about it.  I did want to mention I had a nice dinner out and a gossip with “Criplishus” and then over the weekend had the “Sunday Loaf” with radgendervibes where we hung out and did little projects – I mended some things, conditioned some boots and  a jacket, and tried stripping the dye from my boot toes and re-dying them to see if I could get them brighter red while she sewed something that was going to be a pincushion but turned out to be a tiny jewelry bag with a ribbon instead. We had tea and cookies and gossip and then tried some ways to modify the skirt of her dress. I am going to her dance performance soon so I heard all about that and what “heels dancing” is.

Anyway, I love mending and maintaining things. and i love my crafting stuff and sewing box(es) and tool bags and my little carton of leather maintaining stuff and the supplementary box of leather dye and deglazer etc. It is like having this quiet superpower. Danny and I are thinking to make the Sunday Loaf a regular and low key event.

I am still working out how to organize and store my wheelchair fixing and modding tools and materials, right now in 4 different toolbags, a shoebox, and a giant bag full of weird clamps and camera tripod parts, and then some PVC pipe of different widths and lengths.

I am reading through the entire series of Inspector Rostinov detective novels which are set in the USSR in the 80s. They are grossly sexist but still readable (somehow). I also started having a look at a giant doorstop of a book I got at the SFPL main library bookstore, called A Treasury of African Folklore, figuring I will at least look at the rabbit trickster stories in honor of Uncle Wiggly but it’s likely I’ll just read through it too!

I am not feeling 100% right now as some hormonal weirdness kicked off. Because of extremely heinous hot flashes I started taking estrogen a couple of years ago, which works amazingly well, except you have to take progesterone pills for the first 12 days of the month along with that in order to decrease your risk of uterine cancer and if you screw up the timing of the progesterone, or just think bad thoughts, or look funny at the sky, then you suddenly get either “breakthrough bleeding” or just a regular old period depending on if you think you are actually in menopause or not, which is NOT really well defined.

Either way, it makes me feel quite blah, with moments where it takes a huge effort of will just to get up and Do a Thing, and I am suddenly bleeding all over after months of Not Bleeding (I had to go search the basement for tampons) and also am having regular old painful cramps. I also have some fairly gnarly fibroids including some fibroids inside the uterine wall and adenomyosis which, if you have heard people complain about endometriosis I have that too but ALSO have it INSIDE THE UTERINE WALL. I am not knocking my uterus,  which did its job as well as it could. But i wish that it would be done doing things, growing things, leaking, being lumpy in strange new ways, feeling heavy, sloshing around in there like a, I don’t even know what. Like a heavy sloshing crampy thing.

Have  you seen those videos where guys wear a period simulator and some giggling women slowly turn up the knob from 1 to 10? It is best when it’s more than one dude at a time so they try to out macho each other but fail. I would love to try one of those machines and see if it really approximates the pain!  It does appear to from the stunned look on the dudes faces and the way they bend over and then when the dial turns up higher, the pain goes skittering down their leg and they freak out. Truly accurate. I think the period pain simulator is nothing without pouring about a quarter cup of blood into their pants though.

I spent an hour on a video call with my nephew looking at bits of his college essays and offering light editing analysis. He is always a bit mysterious, has exhibited a sort of strategic flare, or genius, from a young age as well as being able to inhale vast amounts of detail and analyze things at a high level.He is a very interesting thinker and has mastered a certain kind of rhetoric that made me think he will make a quite interesting career doing policy or political work.

My ex mom in law died this weekend and I am thinking about her a lot. I am so glad I got to see her and sit with her earlier this year at my ex’s wedding (which was so lovely!) And feel that we still had a connection. She was a really amazing and very intense person. M. came over and we hugged a lot and looked at old photo albums and talked about her for hours last night. I found an old letter she had sent from her trip to Tanzania where she not only climbed to hut 2 of Mt. Kilmanjaro but also visited some hospitals and small clinics for kids with cerebral palsy and developmental delays or disorders. So most of the letter was about that and I know she worked on those connections for years getting them equipment and other resources.

It seemed so wild at the time (~20 years ago) that you could email some random hospitals in Tanzania and introduce yourself, then show up, inspect everything, give some lectures, actually work a lot, and create a lasting connection. Never mind “going on vacation” – far too dull. They stayed in hostels a lot and would cook for everyone and then just go around meeting random Korean businesspeople who lived in town. You could also count on her and her husband both to do things people told them not to that were dangerous or forbidden or generally unwise. If there was a sign saying caution stay back, they would take it as a sign to investigate…. Sometimes maddening but also endearing. She also set money aside for all 5 of her grandchildren to help them through university. But, my memories of her are more about how hilarious she was and how she was a sort of shrieker and blurter and witchy cackler, and a generator of chaos, in a way that made us kindred spirits in a certain chaos goblin way. She only retired a couple of years ago at age 86. I am sad she has died but a little comforted to know she had been doing things like, reportedly, declaring it was fine now on her way out to have THREE DESSERTS if she felt like it. Correct!!!!

As I told various stories to my kid I had more of those stereotypical Gen X moments where i was just casually telling about something and the young person’s eyes go wide with concern and shock as they go “I’m so sorry that happened to you!” and they make you stop and get a hug. I cannot remember what the things were, because they don’t even register for me as particularly bad, but sometimes I can take the hug, step back, and think, Huh. OK. I’ll take a kind of care that I didn’t think was needed. Maybe it is!  I can learn things!!!! I thought a little bit about older relatives and how curious I was or would have been about their war experiences but how reticent they were to share.

We looked at several photo albums of their babyhood and toddler years and both sets of grandparents holding them and playing with them and I think that was a good grounding thing to do that made some space for emotions around loss but that were also making space for love.

 

And if the gaiome doesn’t hop down the lane to the badger’s library, I’ll tell you another story

Posted on by Liz Henry

Reading the last few days:

Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble, which slides down easily and makes me feel like I can take deeper breaths than usual (physically and mentally) – Should you read this?  YES!!! Read it!!!! It explains some of the underpinnings of my feelings about why we should not be “going to Mars”. (Sorry.) I always tell Danny he can go to the Moon when we are very old if he really insists but I will be here making healthy soil from compost and a lovely ecosystem for bugs, grubs, and fungus.

Women Who Make a Fuss: The Unfaithful Daughters of Virginia Woolf – Isabelle Stengers and Vinciane Despret – To go with the Haraway book. Useful background.

Fourth Grade Rats – a very annoying short children’s book I got on spec from a little free library and am putting right back out – It is about toxic masculinity I suppose where one boy persuades another, more kind and innocent boy that to really grow up, he must be a bully, and misbehave, and throw away all the toys he loves and his cartoon lunchbox and stuffed bear, etc. This doesn’t go well and our soft boi is miserable. Their moms discuss the situation and meet them with a mixture of sternness and laughing at them. Soft boi gets a hug and his stuffed bear is returned to him. That sounds nice but something about it annoyed the hell out of me. I think the part where the moms fix it.  Figure yourself out! Jeez. So it is both putting the burden onto women, and also, condescending somehow. Also, sure fine maybe this would KIND OF happen at age 9 but try it in 5 years and see how it goes down.

Uncle Wiggly’s Fortune, by Howard R. Garis, in a splotchy pale green hardback from 1950, much like the ones I remember reading at my paternal grandparents’ beach house in the 70s as they were strangely short of books and yet had a large run, a whole shelf, of this Uncle Wiggly nonsense, which bored me even when I was small but I was desperate. I remember once starting to list out all the goofy chapter endings, where the author says something extra cornball and fake-down home, in a particular formula, like, “My! And if the butterfly don’t decide to take the grasshopper and use it for scissors to cut out a quilt pattern out of the tigerlillies to give to the post wagon man, then I’ll tell you the story of Uncle Wiggly and how he met the Littlest Hedgehog.”  I made that one up, but let me find a real one. “If the parlor lamp doesn’t go out to a moving picture show and melt all the ice in the gas stove, the story will be about Uncle Wiggily and also some more about the horseshoe crab.”  You may be able to imagine my childhood fascination (mingled with something a bit like horror, or snobbery) at these tag lines. They were foul, and boring, but I had to read them, and the only thing left to me was to overthink about the (horrible) style.

Looking it up now gives me a clue to where these books came from. Garis wrote a daily (!!!!) Uncle Wiggly story in the Newark News for over 50 years starting in 1910. My grandfather John A. Henry was born and raised in New Jersey (born in 1919) so he would have grown up reading this stuff maybe in the paper. It seems like a good theory – either he had some of these books as a kid, or he got them or was given them by his parents, to read to his children. I will have to ask my dad if he remembers them.

I guess we have to acknowledge Uncle Wiggly as a disabled protagonist – he walks, or hops, with a crutch.

Is he a manifestation of the African trickster rabbit? Even . . . a whitewashed one? Maybe! He is not very tricksy. But I could sort of see it.

I had also not realized Garis was a hugely prolific author not just for Uncle Wiggly but for a lot of the Stratemeyer syndicate books including early Bobbsey twins books. Probably the more boring of them.

As usual I spend more time writing about this nonsense than about the actually good soul-feeding book that I loved (Staying with the Trouble). Partly because i would have to think harder about what I’m saying.

I also read through a little new looking translation of Sallust (“How to Stop a Conspiracy”) which as I remember from some other reading/translation, is extremely confusing. To really understand what the hell is going on I would need to make a lot of little index cards for the cast of characters or generate an entire cheat sheet. Who said what, and who said who did what, and who said who said someone did something else, and for everything (this is the good part!) there is at least one other theory of what happened or some other group or different factions making different claims. Holy shit! Anyway, it also made me think again about Megalopolis which uses some of the names but none of the actual information or “plot” or anything you might think of as history, somehow. Like how you go from Sallust’s “everyone said something different and the situation kept changing very rapidly” utter chaos, to  a grossly boring plot about a genius great man inventing something with the love of a good woman buoying him up, but also somehow it feels like the Fountainhead, I do not fucking know. WTF again, Francis Ford C?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Legion of Honor 100th anniversary festival

Posted on by Liz Henry

There was so much cake! A marching band! Sketching in the galleries! Ballerinas and an organ player! Printmaking and free art stuff and activities in a sort of swirling all day chaos. I spent all day at the Legion of Honor and had a great time.

a ballerina in mid step in a marble hall art gallery with marble rodin statues

It was heartening to show off this gorgeous corner of San Francisco and a day of amazing culture to my parents, who have moved here from Texas! My sister and I hauled them around the museum  – we went through the Mary Cassatt special exhibit and both gift shops – and to the lawn where we had our sandwiches and cookies we brought from home & then attacked the aftermath of the Cake Picnic.

I hadn’t realized that to get into the Cake Picnic proper, you had to bring an entire cake! Per person! (or maybe a small group?) I have to share photos of the before and after. There were hundreds of different cakes. After the main crew of cake-bringers were done, they unleashed the rest of us onto the remains strewn across the labyrinth of long tables covered in white tablecloths. The mess of plundered cake plates looked almost as beautiful and colorful as the “before” tables. dozens of differentcakes on tables on a lawn

My favorite thing about this was watching people wander through the devastation and the emotions playing across their faces. First, being overwhelmed and confused  – then desire, even greed and lust, warring with a sense of the forbidden – and the moment of decision where people just said Oh fuck it and dove right into the smeary cake stands to get a glob of icing and crumbs. It was so beautiful.  That is how you know the cake picnic was art. It made people FEEL very intensely! The absurd abundance, the variety, the love and intent behind making something so delicious, unnecessary, and flamboyant – and the collectiveness of everyone bringing cakes!

a long table covered in the remains of many many different cakes. a man leans over and puts a finger into one in the distance

(There were forks over by the statue of El Cid, but by the time I realized that it was far too late for me, personally.)

We all laid on the lawn on my picnic blanket and my dad commented after a while that he hadn’t sat on grass for probably 20 years. “No fire ants here!”  Maybe he will warm to California!!!

I made prints from someone’s lovely art  – a poster of Alma Spreckels and another of a scene from the movie Vertigo – And got a free embroidered patch of the  statue of the Thinker – And then somehow a free magnet of the museum building which is now on my fridge.

a screen print of the legion of honor building with its many columns and an old fashioned car

The Mary Cassatt exhibit was great especially for seeing the parts showing her drypoint and aquatint process and experiments. I will be back to see that entire exhibit a few times!

Have a pic of my sister and I sticking our tongues out in excitement at our feelings of identifying with the lady reading a book:

liz and sister grinning, sticking out tongues cheerfully while liz points at famous Cassat painting of a lady with a book

It is always thrilling to see the real paintings of art that I have only seen in books or online before. You can get right up and see the brush strokes and the tiny lines of the canvas showing through which makes it seem so, almost holy, and real, and created, and I feel a shivery feeling of connection with people long dead!

(Though honestly when I think about it, which i often do, i also feel that way about every object i’m looking at, like, a random brick or whatever. Or – riding the bus past SF’s cute little houses – I look at the ornamental moldings or features of the houses, like the plaster shield things, and think about the decisions and aesthetic sense of the builders, carpenters, or house owners who might have wanted them.)

I had a good time trying to sketch in the upper gallery. It was set up so you could get a card to sketch on, printed with a border like a gold picture frame. You then could choose 5 pencils from their boxes sorted by color, and there were stools you could also borrow to sit on for sketching. Here is the painting I tried to copy,

rough sketch of lady in neck ruffle dressoil painting of a lady in a low cut dress with a huge neck ruffle

While I have never been able to really do faces and also never had any art classes I do love to draw and manage to do it expressively – there were some years where I drew comics and loved it but I was so slow at it that it was sometimes frustrating. Someday I’d like to take art classes and do a live drawing, contour drawing, all that kind of thing!   But words come more naturally to me and are my first love.

I tried to get one of the free wheelchair van Waymos, but none were around. My sister drove our parents back to the East Bay.  I ended up barrelling to Geary down the huge hill, which I love anyway — it is not like I go faster downhill in a powerchair, which limits my speed, but it feels extra joyous anyway on that particular hill and it’s a gorgeous landscape. I recall thinking, Huh a guy in a flat cap , looks a little like Horehound – but I raced past without even looking somehow and then we realized at the bus stop on Geary that we knew each other. It was nice riding the bus and chatting with Horehound (one of my favorite poets in the bay area – along with Steve Artnsen, Juba Kalamka, and Daphne Gottlieb, and Diamond Dave –  and some person named maybe “King” of indeterminate gender who read a brilliant poem about pouring milk into their cereal, while crouched on a stump in Holly Park earlier this year – and i’d like to meet more poets!!! I hope next year I will go to more open mics! )   A good end to a glorious day of connection with other people, strangers, my own family, and a fabulous poet acquaintance who I should go email right now so we can exchange information about various readings coming up.

Two kinds of soup

Posted on by Liz Henry

Did some blogging for my nonprofit, GOAT, to talk about the DIY lights and safety workshop we ran with ILRCSF, and a small conference I gave a talk at, Common Tools. I also did some extra work on my 2 consulting jobs, co-working on video chat with Sumana for companionship.

Before lunch I had a walk to bring soup to yatima since I made a giant pot of chicken posole yesterday. I actually looked up whether it might be possible to rent a miniature pony to bring to her in the garret where she is isolating, because i would like for her to have all the ponies, but maybe isolation and a visiting pony and several flights of stairs don’t QUITE mix.

At lunch (which was escarole soup my mom brought me yesterday!)  I read a kids’ book, Summer of the Swans, that I picked up from a little free library along the Bernal Cut. It’s a Newbery Medal winner from 1970 that I remember looking at and rejecting when I was a kid, basically for gender reasons as the main character bugged me so much I didn’t want to read the rest. I didn’t mind super old fashioned girls’ books when I was younger, like reading Heidi, or Pollyanna, or whatever, but a vaguely modern tween girl freaking the hell out that her feet were too big and hates her nose or whatever, was a big fat no.   However, I read it while eating my soup today.

In Summer of the Swans there are two POV characters, Sara who is about to be 14, and her little brother Charlie, who is non neurotypical in some way because of a severe fever he had when he was a toddler. Their older sister is 19 but acts maybe 15 by my standards even for 1970, maybe especially for 1970. Anyway, the younger brother has mutism and some kind of developmental delay, and his sister Sara has a fairly strong bond with him and defends him against people who bully or tease him. He then wanders off in the night and the extremely thin plot of the book is basically that Sara realizes how much she loves him and finds him in the woods along with the Yukkiest Boy she totally hated who turns out to be quite nice and asks her on a date for that very evening. The end!  Yawn. Did this deserve the Newbery? It is probably notable for having Charlie be a sympathetic character and including his point of view and how he thinks and experiences the world and what he considers important, and the fact that his family respects him maybe is radical for 1970 or even today.

The book goes right back out onto a free shelf though. I pick up a lot of free kids’ books like this, read and release them, and only a few make it to the bookshelf of honor and preservation in my house!

I am also well into, maybe nearly done with, Can’t Spell Treason without Tea, which is as fluffy or flufflier than Legends and Lattes, and is basically a knockoff of it where a tough palace guard and the land’s most powerful mage run off together to a small border town where they open a combination tea shop and bookstore/lending library while solving all the local political and magical problems and being adorable lesbians mildly processing their various insecurities and anxieties. Does our city guard “deserve” love or still feel she has to “earn” it? Does our mage take reasonable care of herself or run herself into the ground? Will they get married (duh yes but maybe in book 2). What will happen about the sucky, evil-ish Queen what’s her name? There are also mildly bad “puns” which I have to put in quotes because they hardly even deserve the name.

Obviously, I enjoy this comfort read and will read as many as appear before me magically on my Kindle.

Our contractors started painting today, or maybe just taping in preparation for painting the bathroom. Luis and his son also covered the back of the house in tyvek and started getting ready to do the exterior siding in the corridor alongside the new ramp, and also on the outside of the bathroom which was water damaged and a total teardown and rebuild. They are really great, but I am so ready for this project to be done with!!

Stardew and Voyager Farm await me – I am in mid summer and pushing hard on getting those 5 gold star melons for the Community Center bundle. I will also make myself amazing tacos with the remnants of the chicken posole. The broth is now gone, so it is just shredded chicken, peppers, tomatillos etc and the maiz blanco; I have white corn street taco sized tortillas which I will fry up lightly, maybe some refried beans from a can since didn’t think to cook actual dried beans, celantro, raw red pepper. I can’t remember if I have any salsa or cheese but am not feeling motivated to go out. Plain tacos are fine!

This weekend I am planning to hang out at the Legion of Honor museum festival with my sister and our parents and maybe my friend Mikayla. I will miss Lisa’s podcast for  Aaron Swartz Day this weekend (Saturday from 2-5pm) but planning to be on her podcast early next year to talk more about GOAT.

Books and Stardrops

Posted on by Liz Henry

Well, I read Metal from Heaven and am about to start Can’t Spell Treason without Tea. And I’ve played the new Stardew Valley update on my Switch for the last two days, so much that I’m well into Summer Year 1.

Last night had dinner in Annalee and Jesse’s garden with a bunch of really lovely people. Loudly shrieked with people about Metal from Heaven (psychically damaged hallucinating fantasy motorcycle bandit lesbian train robber revolutionaries! unions! strikes! with a side of  decadent aristocrat prep school girl graduates!).  Other fun messing about with Meshtastic with Jesse and Emma H. and then Jesse told us about AREDN. I still need to go get my ham license!!   Megan told me about being a Master Birder and then Rick and I just kind of gloriously explained to each other all the facts we know about different kinds of rocks, which is like one of my favorite kinds of conversations, and then about family history things.

Today I had lunch with my parents and later had a video chat with yatima, who has covid and has to isolate – I will bring her soup tomorrow, having just made chicken posole after going to the newly opened (today!) El Chavo supermarket, which is great & I highly recommend it.  I went to Stamper and ordered new glasses, the cheapest possible progressives, because I sat on my wonderful glasses that I love. (I did find the same frames used and ordered them from Canada, fingers crossed that works.) Lunch was at the old St. Jorge cafe, which has re-opened with new owners as Tea Rex, and I can report they have a very good quinoa-beet-apple-balsamic salad and excellent coffee. That is it. I am giving myself some space and down time to feel a wide range of things.

Last weekend I had a great time with new friend Tiffany as we wandered around Valencia, had ice cream, dumplings, shopped around in Silver Sprocket, exchanged stickers, and showed each other our tattoos.  Danny is still reading me chapters out loud from book 2 of Dance to the Music of Time, from Bangkok, when our schedules overlap.

Everyone is just so shell shocked.

I try to keep my historical perspective and I do know that I am lucky to be alive in a time where I have any rights at all to anything, and I never expected even so to see queer/trans rights and all the legal changes there and the shift in acceptance that we have seen. We hoped that was a done deal – with a little backlash – But no. We then saw our rights to our bodies taken away and people die from pregnancies, miscarriages, infections, women driven into poverty or in the control of abusers.  The dynamic here I think is less backlash and more the economic precarity that goes with climate change and rampaging billionaires or whatever, that leads so many people into hate, fear, right down the path to fascism. We are not unique in the world, and other countries are struggling with the same stuff. What to do? I don’t know, probably same as ever but twice as hard and with more determination. I did not get to blow my ridiculous celebratory bugle that i blew in 2020 but I will blow it again soon enough.

I recommend reading (and subscribing to) Erin in the Morning – I found her post This was always going to be a generational fight for transgender people to be heartening today.