Author Archives: thewutheringmind

Plus ca change

June 22, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , Leave a comment

These days I feel as if all of the dystopian nightmares seeded in my teen years are coming true.

I’m not sure when I became politically aware of the world. At maybe three, our preschool was taken out to the nearby highway to wave at the president as his entourage passed by. Was it Johnson or Nixon? Probably Nixon. I remember a car and a helicopter overhead. I thought he was in the helicopter. I think I had some awareness of moon-shots, or at least astronauts, because that was mind-blowing, trying to reconcile “the Man on the Moon” with a man on the moon.

Then, there were the reports on television when I was in first grade. Images of Vietnam, the evacuation of Saigon, the Middle East, all back-to-back, making me think that they were all part of one big conflict. I think one report had mentioned “guerilla” attacks on airplanes, which my childish ears heard as “gorilla” attacks. Gorilla attacks? I looked at the beasts suspiciously at the zoo after that until the adults were watching a t.v. show on which a group of criminals did something criminal wearing gorilla masks. “Oh!” I thought. “That must be what they meant by the gorilla attacks.” Not until I was maybe 11 or 12 and came across the word “guerilla” in a National Geographic article about Napoleon did I realize my mistake.

All of those were flashes, bits that I picked up from the news, or “In the News” segments that ran with commercials in those days. Watergate registered a bit more, then the 1976 election. We were supposed to learn a bit about the Camp David accords in fifth grade, so I remember Sadat and Begin, but more than thinking that Sadat didn’t look like King Tut (also very much in the news at the time) and Begin’s name was spelled the same at the word “begin” slid right through my head.

There are huge chunks of my life in which that was true, as well as huge issues. I think that is probably true of most people: unless something directly affects them, they really don’t pay much attention. It’s all flashes on tv. Like feminists say, the personal is political.

Somewhere in middle school, however, those flashes became longer and brighter. Along the way my feminist consciousness, nascent though it was, grew (another story for another time). I became aware that there was a place called the Soviet Union, they were communist, which was as bad as the Nazis (and, thanks to my father’s fascination with World War II, I was the only first grader who knew about Nazis), and they wanted to take us over or bomb us or start World War III. Something along those lines. The message I seemed to pick up was that the world was on the brink of nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union (synonymous with Russia).

Then, the Iranian Hostage Crisis erupted and dominated the news through Reagan’s inauguration. I remember Iranian students being deported and felt badly for them, and the Shah passed through Houston Medical Center for treatment. During this time, we had a very long fire drill at our school on the day of an eclipse. Our teachers weren’t going to let us see the eclipse because it wasn’t total. Now, we were able to see it and, of course, get out of class for a long time. When they finally told us that the extra long fire drill was because of a bomb threat, they mentioned that the school was hypervigilant of the Iranian crisis.

I would think a bomb threat itself would call for hypervigilance, and the Iranian bit seemed so disconnected from the hostage displayed at the American embassy on the daily counts on the news or the crying college students embracing their friends as they were hauled away. What did our middle school in a Houston suburb of predominantly White, some Black, some Hispanic students, and about five Asian students have to do with that? My 11-year-old self had no idea. (I’m guessing a lot of 11-year-olds wonder at the reasons their whole lives are in upheaval right now over more than just a long fire drill.)

The 1980 election took place when I was in 8th grade, and our social studies class covered elections in the first unit of the year. I was pro-Reagan — the first and last time that I was ever Republican — because my parents were Republican, although my mother and I had huge caveats about his anti-choice stance. We were both very pro-choice. I have always been pro-choice ever since I can remember. For me, it was a question of bodily autonomy, as it should be.

By the way, my dad ended up hating Reagan, but continued to vote for him and Republicans all the way until 2016, in spite of his increasing disgust. Then, he wanted Bernie Sanders. I nearly fell out of my chair when he confessed that to me. My mom turned Democrat sometime between Bushes.

To give my little, white, 13-year-old, suburban self some agency, I probably responded to all of the attacks on Jimmy Carter as a weakling, Reagan presenting himself as a tough guy who could protect the country from the Big Bad Soviets and the new Big Bad Iranians, and what I can only identify as my naive libertarianism. Only in college and especially in grad school did I learn about how deeply offensive his platform was to the values that I had realized were mine. I was too young to know and the education system did not teach that Philadelphia, Mississippi, was the site where three Civil Rights activists were murdered.

The Iranian Hostage Crisis ended, or rather, fell out of the news, with the release of the hostages on Reagan’s inauguration. There were a lot of Middle Eastern Big Bads that followed, few of which I could name beyond Ghaddafi, whose name was spelled in about ten different ways depending on the news outlet. My school district became more diversified with immigration, and as we moved up into higher schools, we joined students from different parts of the larger school district. I had classmates from some of these vilified regions of the worlds and, as I joked with Dad, “they did not have horns or tails” as the popular cultural propaganda would have us believe. Dad was always counseling us to separate the government from the people. Totalitarian regimes are not always popular regimes.

Still, over these years, the same elements haunted me: the Soviet Union, nuclear war, and totalitarian government. I had nightmares that the totalitarian government came after a nuclear war during which the Soviet Union took over the U.S. I also created worlds, too, in which the religious right (which was neither) took over. They scared the shit out of me whenever they reared their head. Iran, again, became the Big Bad warning of the ways theocracy could end women’s rights. I was less afraid of Iran imposing their rule on the U.S. than I was about the American Moral Majority (which was neither) and their ilk. The Handmaid’s Tale was terrifying even in the late 1980s when it first came out. Yet, that didn’t seem to be as clear and present a danger as nuclear annihilation (or as it does now).

The movies of the day did not help either, and added into the mix the fears of another Vietnam-type of conflict, one that I think I suspected would likely Middle Eastern than Soviet Union, or perhaps Latin American. I can’t remember precisely where I thought it would happen, but I do remember fearing an on-going, un-winnable, pointless war that would sacrifice thousands of boys my own age like my brothers or my friends or my crushes.

In fact, when Desert Shield began, I worked at an oil industry magazine. All of the editors and salesmen there danced around the office, giddy with excitement. I sat shaking at my desk thinking of my brother, not in college, all the young men who I worked with at my night job, all of the movies about Vietnam, what I had learned about that war. “How could they be so joyful?” I fumed. “People will die. Do they not remember? Did they not learn?”

Perhaps the most ludicrous thing I remember is a — I hesitate to call it — documentary on Nostradamus that came on HBO or some such cable channel when I was in 9th grade. Orson Welles narrated. I looked it up during the 45th administration during one or another close call like now. What schlock! Still, it played right into my 14-year-old anxieties. By the time the madman in the blue turban in the east set off the bombs, I was in tears.

My parents had been out for the evening and came home to find me hysterical. Dad had to explain to me that this Nostradamus stuff was all extremely speculative, open to a million interpretations. Then, Mom convinced me to focus on the music of Paul Simon because One Trick Pony came on right after the Nostradamus show. (I will always think of those songs as soothing.) Gradually, I learned to deal with my anxieties through escape and through dark humor. Dr. Strangelove still makes such perfect sense (we had to get a VCR before I could watch that).

I have since learned that Nostradamus’s “predictions” had to do with the politics surrounding the French court at the time of Maria de Medici and Henry Navarre. All of the interpretations that he predicted modern or future events — future for even us — are laughable. Nevertheless, I still think about them. Not as truth or predictions, just as life imitating art — or schlock. After all, that “documentary” was of its time.

This post had a point, one beyond calming myself. I more than digress. I digress within my digressions, then digress further. This will go in the “does she have ADHD?” folder.

I needed to calm myself with words, with memories for perspective. I am nearly sixty years old. In these years, my old fears are still here. The Soviet Union is not gone anymore than the Russian Empire before it disappeared with the Soviet Union. It just reconfigured with a different czar under a different name. The current name is taking up the expansion, and instead of opposing it, our own czar wants to help. That’s not a satisfactory resolution to the Cold War. Rather, it seems more like my fears of a take over, just under a different guise — a Vichy version of the U.S.

Quagmire wars we saw again, and just as that was resolved in just as messy a way as the one before, here we are again. This one was preventable, but the person who is waging it didn’t want to prevent it. Just like the conflict in Vietnam, Congress will not or cannot use its authority to stop this slide into disaster. Deportations, attacks on women’s rights, the threat of nuclear attack, the potential suspension of Constitutional rights under war powers. This all comes out of every dystopian novel written in the past sixty years, including the ones that I wrote in pencil in spiral notebooks or imagined as I lay awake at night until sleep turned them into nightmares.

I don’t use this space for politics because I have nothing deep or original to say about politics. Mostly, my political thoughts are barbaric yawps that I put on Facebook in real time. This required more space, not so much to express an opinion, but to wonder at the way I have lived through this political history. Sometimes it feels like a kaleidoscope. The same bits and pieces just shuffle and tumble about in new configurations, but they are still the same bits and pieces. Perhaps also, it is like a spring, coiling back on itself, stretching and snapping back, folding itself into knots.

I’m sure I could come up with more metaphors; but it all leads to the realization that no one learns anything from the past. They follow what affects them and have flashes of the news of everything else. Then, they react.

Like at the end of Dr. Strangelove, “we’ll meet again.”

Coincidence

June 17, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

A funny coincidence happened yesterday. First, you were reading Little Women for a class you will be taking (that’s another story for another time) and reached the chapter “Camp Laurence” in which the little women go one a picnic with Laurie and some of his friends. The group plays a game in which one person begins a story, then each subsequent person adds to the story. They called the game “Rigmarole.”

By the way, this is probably the first time that you have read Little Women since you were in elementary school, although you may have tried it in the 1990s. You find several readers in yourself as you go along. One is the historian, noting the context of the various versions of femininity and tedious moralizing that crops up from time to time. One is the adult self understanding the reasons that you were more of a Little House girl, which leads to another who compares the two sets of girls. Another reader is the movie-watcher who notices that the movies all owe more to one another (and to the musical, which owes more to the films, too) than to the book. For example, the movies make Jo the main character, but all four sisters carry the story equally in the book.

Again, you digress. That’s all another story for another time.

That evening, you went to your Actors Studio, which you’ve been attending since its first meeting over a year ago. That meeting coincided with the close of Orlando. You were wondering what would replace Orlando, which itself was a lovely gift, if you would ever get to act again, and if you did, you should probably find children your own age to play with. Then, the notice of this Actors Studio popped up. All sorts of creative people gathered, working in plays, films, comedy, improv, and just wanting to get back in or in in the first place. Every month is a different topic, from auditioning, to scene study, to television acting, to film acting, to all sorts of things. Much of it has been making it up as it goes along.

Again, you digress.

Last night was improv, not your strong suit. Ever. Improv asks you to do the very thing that you have spent your entire life learning not to do: be utterly fearless in the face of failure. You have to be completely in the moment, not plan anything, trust the other person or people with you, shut off every editing mechanism in your brain, and kind of fall face first and eyes open. Yes, and… is just the technique. All of that fearlessness has to be there for it to work. So, just going was a leap because you have decided to accept Yes, and… into your life as a principle.

The evening’s leader runs an improve group called — and this should have been my tip off that I had made the right choice — Fubar. If you know you know, as the young folks say. If you don’t know, every day’s a school day: Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition. He had you all play some improvisation games. The thing is, you get scared, but as you watch and see what goes on, you want to jump in and do it.

Yes, and….

You digress.

One of the first games he had the whole group play was called “Yes, and…” We stood in a circle, all forty-some-odd of us. He fed a line to the first person. Then, that person would say, “yes, and” to begin adding a line to the story, all the way around the circle. This was Little Women‘s “Rigmarole”! Whereas the little women went on about knights and ladies, this group was way more interested in ballpark food, specifically pretzels and hot dogs. The story became sillier and sillier the further around it went. At one point, you thought, “this must have been the way the movie Everything, Everywhere, All At Once came about!”

So, that was the coincidence.

Yet, as you think about it, you realize that maybe you might want to go to the improv group, too. Not to perform, just for the exercise of doing it, of letting yourself fuck up or not. You remember the liberation of Anne Lamott’s “shitty first draft” and that one therapist so many years ago who told you to pick a hobby and do it badly (or, rather, do it for fun, not to be good or perfect). This would be a bit like that. A means of releasing something.

You are also going to be blasphemous and say, you aren’t too sure that you like Little Women, but you will take the “yes, and” approach and keep going for more than just the class.

World-building

June 11, 2025 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Someone recently asked you — and people are always asking this in the academic world — “what are you working on next?” It’s the grown-up variation of “what are you going to do with that major?” or “what are you going to do when you graduate?” or “how’s the thesis or dissertation going?” It’s also a small talk type of question like, “how are you?” You know there is a proper, shallow, unengaged answer, but more often than not you hear it as a sincere question demanding a sincere answer and it agitates you as you struggle for the right answer for the situation. In this particular instance, you didn’t bullshit. You just said, “I have an official answer, which is something having to do with nostalgia and Little House on the Prairie, and the real answer, which is I’m working on figuring out what I’m working on.” You were kind of joking — kidding on the square — but, then decided to embrace the idea. You are just going to work on figuring out what next. You are just going to bleed words until they start to flow in a direction. You are beholden to no one.

You keep thinking about being alienated from history and wondering about the reasons you followed history and came back to history. You wonder about how your different pieces fit together constructively, rather than as a narrative of survival and escape. You actually do blame Laura Ingalls Wilder. When you got into those books (and, yes, it was the 1970s and you were a Southern White Girl in first and second grade so had no clue about the problems inherent in the books), you became fascinated with that world so different from your own and fascinated with the fact that the person who wrote the books was also the character in the books. Identifying with the character led to identifying with the author, which led to asking yourself if you might not write books yourself. So, at the age of nine, you picked up a notebook and a pencil and began to write a story. Not an original one. You drew elements from everything you read. You illustrated them, too, just like in young people’s fiction.

Then you encountered Star Wars. It was just Star Wars then. One film, no sequels or prequels or expanded universes or anything else. There was a novelization, which consoled you when you were only allowed to see the film once, long after half the world had seen it at least twice. (You lucked out and were able to see it two more times because a co-worker of your dad had a nerdy son who pestered her as much as I pestered my parents to see it, so they decided to shut us both up. Maybe they had romantic ideas, too, for two ten-year-olds who had no interest in one another, just in seeing STAR WARS.) The whole world seemed enchanted by Star Wars, and only in recent years has the particular importance of Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia on little girls received due appreciation. A sassy, sarcastic princess with political power, a sense of right, AND brown hair and eyes in a world of passive blond-haired, blue-eyed, Disney princesses? Plus, her name resembled yours. She was your entire personality for fifth grade. So, you moved from writing what you suppose would be historical fiction into space fantasy by sixth and seventh grade.

One of the things that you loved about the Little House books was the meticulous detail with which they describe the clothes, the processes, the houses, the landscape, and everything about their world. When you started writing, the illustration part of your process served the same purpose, and you also tried to describe in similar detail the settings you created. As you moved into space fantasy, you no longer illustrated the stories, but you did create what you suppose would be appendices with drawing of clothes, spaceships, houses, maps of planets — they were like an encyclopedia of this world you created, including belief systems and a history of the conflict driving the story. The same happened when you moved into found worlds. Wow! You feel the thrill of doing that now, just remembering it, how it consumed those moments of boredom, when people thought you were daydreaming (and you were, about this), how everything became fodder to add to the world.

People classified you as a “genius” for doing this. You now wish they had not, because you also were very very bad at math. They didn’t know what dyscalculia was at the time, so this cause you so much pain, and being expected to be a genius while also failing, and therefore being berated and punished and mocked, and feeling like a fraud — all the fun things! — did nothing for your mental health over the years. At least, for a few years in middle school, there was a space where you had a class that allowed you to do this world building and storytelling. High school was just an intellectual beatdown. The stories dried up, for some reason.

Which was the reason you turned to history. You look back now and see that world-building urge was there all along. Your attraction to history was there in your attraction to Little House and its details; but it was also in the fun you had going to Colonial Williamsburg during those same years around the Bicentennial. The living history of it, the immersive experience, and seeing the old crafts like candle-making, paper-making, the way that they dyed the endpapers for books with the swirled colors, the glass blowing and pottery (that was actually at Jamestown), and everything else. You loved going to places where things happened. Where they did thing like “they” did in the “olden times.” You didn’t know, when you went to college or grad school, that this was a whole field called “public history.” In fact, where you went, “public history” seemed to be writing the history of businesses and this type of material history was mocked by — well, now you see that that person was a jackass in soooooo many ways.

Anyway, two years in, when you had to teach Killer Angels, to a discussion section, when both you and they had no idea how to envision the Battle of Gettysburg, so you had to do some old school military history to explain it, you became curious as to how the actual place looked. You got a wild idea to take a road trip from Houston to Gettysburg and to take the long way. The long way took you to Florida, Charleston, Williamsburg — well, long story less long, you learned that the physical place made all the difference in understanding the events that took place in that place.

When you took to writing your dissertation, you fortunately had a new advisor who believed that “you should always walk the ground that your subject walked.” (Imagine that in a Trinidadian accent.) He helped you go to South Carolina and Philadelphia to see where your subject was born, grew up, wrote, and enslaved people. You could read in the documents all day, then on the weekends and evening, walk to the places that they described. You aren’t certain if that affected your writing, but you kept the lesson.

When you wrote the third book, you realized that, to understand how some of the relationships worked or did not work, to gain perspective of people whose perspective had not previously been considered, you had to go to the sites. You gradually began to reconstruct the physical space with as much accuracy as you could. This allowed you to reconsider other historians’ interpretations and point out, in some cases, that they were either impossible or made your shared subject a monster.

By the fourth book, the physical space became integral to the interpretation since all you really had was the negative space around your subject. You had to create a virtual reality of her world. You were back to your childhood: world-building. That’s really your favorite part of the whole research endeavor, you realized. You love reconstructing their world. What were their houses like, what work did they do, how much energy did it take, how did they see at night, what did the world sound like, what did it look like?

Somewhere along the line you came across the late Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures. She wrote about becoming a novelist because she didn’t think that she was important or smart enough to become a historian. Yet, her discussions of rebuilding the world of Thomas Cromwell impressed and inspired you with their attention to detail both as a novelist and historian. “You don’t have your characters say things that they wouldn’t because you don’t have them think things that they wouldn’t,” (or something to that effect) she said, in response to ahistorical attitudes in Tudor-era and other historical fiction. The same applies to biography. Quotes mean nothing unless you place them in their context, which means building the world in which they were spoken.

You digress.

So, you don’t think you are alienated from that part of history. You didn’t have a political or social justice mission driving you in studying history. You wish you did because you might feel like you have a purpose when you teach, the part of your job that has been the bane of your existence (not as much a committee work, but on that count you have managed to quiet quit very effectively, which is another story for another time). At the same time, it wasn’t all survival and escape; or if it was, it had a creative element to surviving and escaping by building these worlds, simulacrums of a past in order to better understand these individuals and tell their story. Doing that was exciting!

Instead of being alienated from world-building, you just haven’t decided which new world to build yet.

Alienated

June 9, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , Leave a comment

Today I feel like a “you.” You feel like a “you.” So, second person in this post.

These past months you’ve joked that you’re not just burned out at work, you’re checked out. The problem is worse than that, you fear. You have become alienated from your craft, from history itself. You have no “project” to work on and, while you have ideas, no inspiration or drive or desire to do anything about those ideas lies behind them. You think of the whole academic endeavor, the whole process of doing this thing of history, and you feel pointless.

That’s not to say that doing history is pointless. You look at some of the people you know who have a passion for their work and envy them. They have burning questions about the past that they want to find out. Those questions go deeper than the particular story they tell in a book or article. For them, history is the means to another end. They have a mission, and history helps them tell the reason for the mission. Many of these people are from marginalized groups in the study of the past — people of color, LGBTQ+, women — people who have experience intersectional oppressions in their lives and want to know the source of that oppression, the reasons and ways that their persons, and people like them, were deemed “wrong” or “deviant” or silenced. Or, they are working class, wanting to know the reasons for the endurance of poverty and oligarchy. That’s all so fascinating. You wish you had that — whatever it is that pulls them forward.

You try to think what pulled you forward in the past. Two factors come to mind: survival and wanting to read a book that did not exist. Survival is a topic for another time — maybe several other times. It has been the driving principle for most of you adult life. Wanting to read a book that did not exist may be a cliche’, but it’s a good cliche’. You need neither to survive at the moment (at least you tell myself that so you can survive), nor do you know of any books that you have a burning desire to read that don’t yet exist. You don’t even want to read the ones that you’re supposed to read to review, in spite of them being good books.

What drove you to become a historian? You ask yourself, in the hopes that you will find that drive again. As the education sorts say, “remember your ‘why'” At — what was it? Twenty-something years old, still living with you parents, terrified of debt, terrified of making a wrong move, terrified of not being able to support yourself, terrified of being a woman (not in a trans way, but in a not-a-little-girl way, which is also another story), raised to be terrified of falling off of the narrow tightrope of a future that you were supposed to walk to some cubicle in some highrise in flourescent lights where your brain would rot into mush in between hour-long commutes in stop-and-go traffic — at that age, what was your why?

You’re getting shivers in your gut just remembering.

Escaping that terror was really your reason. Books had been your escape. Stories your escape. Majoring in English as an undergraduate was escape. You had no real career goal, just vague ideas that you gave to shut people up when they asked or to feel like you had a purpose while reading. (People should ask college students what they are learning, what they like about their education, not “what do you plan to do with that?”) You considered going to grad school for English in order to keep reading, but you already had some trepidation about the academic world, although you’re not sure from where except maybe stereotypes. You had wanted to write novels, really, but two creative writing classes and attempts on your own convinced me that you had no stories in you and hadn’t since you stopped filling notebooks with them in your early teens. History seemed to split the difference. History had the stories right there, you just had to tell them. You imagined a future in which you found yourself in some stupid academic argument over some trivial detail. At least the things had actually happened in history.

Oh, how naive I was!

Graduate school and the subsequent jobs became a series of episodes requiring survival and escape. Looking back now, survival and escape were two things so deeply entwined as to become inseparable. History, the craft and skills from it, and the lack of any other crafts or skills, became the vehicle for survival and escape. All other stories for other times. Now, no longer escaping, no longer surviving, what’s left? The vehicle. What purpose does the vehicle serve?

The purpose is the inspiration, the “why,” the mission driving it. You don’t have it right now. You feel alienated.

Maybe that’s not so bad. Maybe, like like molting, shedding an old, too tight skin, to become something else; or maybe it’s like losing your parents, both grief and liberation.

The Olden Times, Video Store Nostalgia

June 5, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I miss old video stores. You could just go in, browse around, pick out a film, and check it out for less than five dollars. The main drawbacks were that the new releases were always checked out, you were limited by the scope of your store’s library, and you could only check out something like three or four at a time. Still, that could get you through the night. Heck, just browsing was part of the fun! If you found a place that had been around a while, that had an extensive library, who knew what treats you might discover in their inventory. You also had people, movie nerds of all sorts, who you could discuss movies with at the counter.

Now, a movie is in the theater for three weeks. When will it stream? Maybe next week, maybe as part of a subscription to a streaming service, maybe you have to pay more — on top of the streaming service fee, which is on top of the fee to get wifi or whatever that gets the streaming part into your house. The worst part are the old films. “Old” meaning anything issued more than say three-five years ago that was not a blockbuster. “Old” meaning out of style, unpopular. Want to see a semi-niche film starring Tom Hardy as gangster twins? Only a handful of streaming services carry it and for a price. Want to see a film issued when your great-grandparents were still alive? Nope. Hell, want to see Nope?

A digression: There were many times that I could not afford cable, but I did have a VCR or CD-ROM on my computer so I could rent movies as I chose, so after the overhead of the device, it was just the film. My first VCR was on loan from a friend, Karl Bernard. For Christmas, Santa brought me a VCR, it may have been a hand-me-down, but it worked. I didn’t have cable until I had a roommate insist on it or unless it was part of the rental package. Those were olden times, too.

The closest I can get to that experience now is the actual library. The loan lots of films, sometimes even stream them. That’s how I saw the recent Interview with a Vampire. Otherwise, that was another channel subscription, another indefinite wait until one of my or my sorta-step-daughters’ subscriptions carried it.

This all sounds trivial. I read, escape read. I write. Another person in my writing group marvelled that I have four notebooks going. (That will go in my “Does she have ADHD?” file.) I do other things. Still, I love stories, and films are stories with multiple dimensions. They can be art, and even when they are not, they give shape to feelings, to ideas, to archetypes that speak to people. In the wake of my mother’s death, I became friends with the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I wasn’t particularly interested in them before, or even since, but at the time, they spoke to me. (Confession: Since it came out, I feel Agatha All Along, especially the Lilia storyline.)

Films are also a business, I know, but access to anything now seems to be a road with more and more toll booths and blocks. The road could be education, it could be information, it could be health care, it could be simply books or movies. We all need to make a living, but somehow, the harder, longer, more most people work — even running the toll booths — more and more booths pop up with no relief.

Maybe I should go watch Squid Game? Of course, wouldn’t it be ironic if I found out that I now had to pay extra to watch it?

Plus ca change and what not

June 4, 2025 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , Leave a comment

I look at the last post in 2020 and realize that the world is right back as if the intervening four years did not happen.

I am an I, now, I think. “You” reflected the dissociative state of loss, grief, new sobriety, pandemic. Those years, I lost another parent. I wrote another book. I stayed sober, even stopped counting the days, months, years (five, going on six) of sobriety. My hair became curly without even paying to sit with curling rods wound to my skull and ammonia-scented perm formula leaking down my face like in the 1980s. It also turned platinum blond, otherwise known as gray. I got old. I mean truly old. I look at my students, full grown adults, and feel like we are time travelers from the past and future, meeting in this place called a classroom.

That actually makes me more interested in them as historical actors, living in a different era, a different context, even as it overlaps with my own. What do they need from me, teaching a class that even I don’t think they need. Time folds back on itself and I identify with them more than I identify with my peers in this respect. I’m not sure if my peers allow themselves to confess that our way of doing things is not appropriate any longer and has not been for quite a while. That we are part of the problem. They have hope. I quite quit long ago in despair. This past semester, I joked that I’m no longer burned out, I’m checked out. It’s a bad feeling when you have ninety young people on your hands.

I was in — how many? — several plays. I had written off ever acting again. Twenty years ago now, I had been Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “Reclaiming Cunt” in Vagina Monologues (twice, actually), Violet Veneble in Suddenly, Last Summer, and both a nineteenth century guide and a ghost on living history tours. Great fun, but also of the time and place. I wasn’t a pro. I didn’t even rise to amateur. I took a few classes in Shakespeare in Washington, D.C., but that was — damn! time does fly — over fifteen years ago. But, then, I saw a call for everyone at my school to audition, and another faculty member did, and the parts were perfect for two older ladies, so we became two madwomen in an adaptation of Madwoman of Chaillot. Covid shut down the first production, but they brought it back in time for the freshmen in that version to be seniors in this one. The next year, I was cast as part of the chorus of Orlando and in a staged reading of a translation of Patenting Destiny. After that, I decided that I should find children my own age to play with.

I did. Now I’ve played Louella Parsons in Shakespeare in Hollywood, had a part in a staged reading of a one-act for a playwrite’s workshop, and will play Maria in Twelfth Night later this summer. The point of all this being that, I found in the whimsy some importance in this art. Embodying the joyful chaos of Madwoman and Shakespeare in Hollywood or the poignant beauty of life beyond gender in Orlando feels necessary — for the audience and for me. It challenges me to throw myself against this shell of fury that encases me, to go beyond Me.

I found a writing group. So the words flow toward something. I’m not sure what. I pick this blog up because it is something I know that led me to other books in the past. So, why not try again. I may never write another word here. It may peter out in a week or a month. Whatever. I’m not required.

Because, I have no project. Someone asked me, in a professional capacity, “what are you working on now?” My reply was that I had an official story but really I’m deeply uninspired and am working on figuring out what I will work on next. I’m figuring out the voice is I follow the official story. Mostly, I’m scraping away the parchment to leave a pamlpiset because I’m alienated from history, disgusted with the academic world, and resetting myself. Or maybe a better metaphor is that I’m like a bike or a machine that must be retored. I have to take the bits of myself apart, clean them off, replace and repair broken bits, and put it all back together to run smoothly.

Whatever the metaphor. Whatever the task, mostly I just want to be. To sit and be.

The Last Day

November 2, 2020 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Three years ago, standing in the ruins of the Roman Forum, centuries of sediment rising around you, each layer besting the one below, you wondered how such grandeur could now be rubble. You wondered where your own nation lay in its own timeline of rising and falling. Were the barbarians at the gates? Was Caesar crossing the Rubicon or Augustus proclaiming himself a god? In Greek plays, hubris brought down kings.

Will today be the Last Day, the Final Day, the Before before the After?

Tomorrow the transition will sort itself out. Tomorrow will be the unity of time in the Greek tragedy that could end with the divine justice brought on by the king’s hubris. Something will happen, and you wonder if this is what living in some crisis of the Roman Empire or the Weimar Republic felt like. You’ve wondered this for longer than the past four years.

You don’t so much worry about yourself, up here on your suburban hill in your lily white neighborhood where everyone holds on economically and puts Black Lives Matter and Democratic candidate signs out in their yards (with the exception of the one white family down the street, with their giant Trump flag and their Black child). You worry about your aunt down in Louisiana, one of the few people in her upscale neighborhood who puts out Biden/Harris signs. She has to take them in at night now because they have disappeared, stolen. Her Democratic friends warn her not to put them up anyway because they make her a target. You worry about the BIPOC-majority neighborhoods in this, one of the most segregated cities in the U.S. You have visions of Tulsa and Springfield and Rosewood and all the places that burned for being Black. You worry what will happen to a lot of people in the next month.

This nation has always struggled to actually be “of the people, by the people, for the people” and to realize “all men [and women and intersexed and non-binary and just plain human beings] are created equal.” That concept more than geography or ethnicity or religion or any other feature has defined the United States as a nation. The central conflict in our nation has been manifesting those ideals — and defining how they actually look in the world — since the reality began in slavery, misogyny, and genocidal dispossession.

You have wanted to be radical in your life, but ultimately your middle-class upbringing has always planted you squarely in some area of liberalism, pragmatic and progressive-leaning with questions about the means of accomplishing goals and cautious about radicalism eating its own. You wonder at the reasons that liberal has become a slur in some people’s minds, both right and left. Liberalism, one that embraces social liberalism and rejects the neo-liberalism of capitalism, wants a better life for everyone, and society cannot be better or safer or smarter or enduring or beautiful if everyone is not fed and educated and can earn a decent living and be well and not worry that the people who are supposed to protect them are actually preying on them. That means that people actually have to care about one another as classes of people, as part of the “us” of the United States and the world.

People show a shocking naivety when they expect the one candidate to solve everything. You advise your activist students on this when they attack potential or actual allies as if the allies are enemies. You have to look at the direction someone is facing or could be persuaded to face. In a presidential election, voters get two choices regardless of whatever third-party candidates appear on their ballots. Whatever way a person votes, they will have to live in a world with one or the other. The question comes down to the direction that candidate faces or could face.

Trump has always faced totalitarianism. He himself is an authoritarian, but the Republican Party has either actively or passively allowed him to set up a system (to be fair, pieces were already there, but they cranked all up to eleven) that creates totalitarianism. The Democrats may have extensive flaws — ask any BIPOC person — but they, right now, face in the correct direction. They still maintain that core belief — hope — vision — “of the people, by the people, for the people,” and “all [humans] are created equal.” They are the last wall against totalitarianism right now. You feel so naive yourself in thinking this. You teach U.S. history enough to know that the moral arc of the universe does not bend toward justice. That’s usually an optical illusion. Still…this year has taught you your limits, and this is one.

The totalitarians have the reins of government at this moment, and they have no intention of handing them over. As far as they are concerned, a Trump victory is a foregone conclusion and the election is merely a formality that they are fixing in order to maintain the façade of legitimacy. You thought that this would all happen two years ago. Here it is now.

What shall become of us all?

Will this be the Final Day of the Republic?

Hey, You’re Still Alive!

October 12, 2020 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Some time has passed and you realize that you have not asked yourself “why am I still alive?” Indeed, you have long stretches of time in which you feel not so bad in being alive. You chalk this up to your incredible skills of denial. The future, after all, remains unimaginable and without hope.

You allow yourself to research more than you ever have before during the semester. You let it become the productive procrastination. You let it occupy your thoughts as you jog. Indeed, jogging has shifted to the point at which you no longer feed the body dysmorphia so much as you feed your mood. You feel like you live in your own body again, rather than a blob. Now that you think about it, with these two parts together, researching makes you feel like you are in your own mind, too. In the evenings, falling into a serial t.v. show or doing a puzzle with the Eminent Historian or reading an absorbing novel makes you feel you are in your own mind, as well, just another part.

This is now, and you can jump from one to the other in seconds.

The program running in your background is teaching — online teaching, which is to say grading. Constant grading of the same answers to the same assignments, making the same comments, with no hope of making any dent in anything except this constant grading. It’s an assembly line, followed by constant e-mails from students who couldn’t upload this or (for this you are truly sympathetic) have horrible crises at home, or (for this you are not sympathetic) do not follow instructions. All of which ends up in assignments in three different places, and troubleshooting the online platform, and adjusting due dates and accommodations, and having to remember what for whom and where, and your emotions drain and drain and drain.

You do this with e-mails dropping into your in-box offering funds for “racial justice” initiative, just not for you or your classes or anything you do. They are only for the newly “woke,” those who just discovered racism exists and maybe they can address it in their classes. Fuck all of those who already do that, who aren’t noticed as doing that in the first place. This is where you wonder, “what am I for?” This is the type of thing that ruins what little time you feel you have left in the world.

So, when you can, you ignore that pile of grading. You research. Or work in the yard. Or research. Or go for a jog. Or research. You enjoy the time left.

Time is Damn Near Over, Conference Confidence, and Other Musings

September 29, 2020 By in Uncategorized Leave a comment

Seconds, not decades, has kept you from freaking out. Perhaps someone else might term it denial. Perhaps your therapist would. Then, again, one of your past therapists said that a little denial is good, necessary to get through life. You, right now, balance between the two interpretations.

The online conference went well. Your performance came in at just under the alotted 15 minutes, your pace calm but energetic, your ability to look into the camera enhanced by having the paper on the screen just below the camera’s eye. The Famed Ivy-League Historian also brought up your work repeatedly in his paper, reminding you how generous he is, but also making you feel intelligent, influential, as if your work had shifted someone else’s point of view on the topic.

You had a brief moment of embarrassment when, in lieu of Q&A, the chair of the panel asked your panel to comment generally. You ended up like a deer in the headlights and bumbled your way toward something beyond sounding like a fool. Then, almost no one but that Famed Ivy-League Historian, mentioned your paper again, all praising one another. Not until one of your co-panelists, himself an important scholar, wrote to you to say that you had changed his thinking with your paper did the thought occur to you that all of these guys (and, with one exception, they were guys) worked within the framework of the same ideas. They had similar conversations and debates and built upon one another’s work.

You, on the other hand, walked in as the token woman’s rights representative (bookending the conference panels with the other female participant who did not talk about woman’s rights), and discussed politics and political engagement in entirely different terms, challenging a given narrative that they all generally accepted as an add-on to the story, not an integral part. Your newness, meant that they would have to think awhile, integrated what you said (or ignore it, whatever). In any case, you felt more confident about what you do as the scrappy Cinderella-story from the off-brand degree program at the school no one has heard of. You felt buoyed.

So, you spent two days working on your book. No, you spent two days torn between avoidance of grading, which piled up, and desire to work on the book. You enjoy working on the book, so you feel guilty when you do work on it, especially during the school year when the grading and course preparation and e-mails pile up and you so desperately resent all of that, moreso when getting paid less for more work (as the college trumpets record enrollment!) and ignores the work that you have always done, privileging shiny new or job training, preferably both. Ultimately, you settled on the book because that would mean the weekend would not become a total loss.

This book is supposed to be a biography, but the nature of the subject means that it cannot follow the rules of a traditional biography. Whereas the last book started with your biographical subject, and built out from there, this one has an absence where the subject and many of the formative figures around her should be. Like you always said about the mother of your previous subject, “there is a her-shaped hole in the narrative,” you want to get a better sense of the shape of its shape and contents. You end up world building, which brings you back to your original study of history in grad school, or even back in the Bicentennial when you were a child visiting Williamsburg. Only now, the awfulness of that harassing and mean-spirited advisor, the sociopath liaisons, the insecurities of that period of time, have become gremlins, weak and chained and near-death but for the memory of them. The joy and curiosity of a world so different from now that captured you initially carries you forward, only now you understand and revel in the complexity and ambiguity.

What makes you sad, then? The news, for one — that’s a whole other, rage-filled series of posts that may require the pronoun “I.” For this, this semi-private, professional, personal milieu, you look at the time. When you turned 40 — no, earlier than that, around 37 or 38, but definitely 40 — you began to feel time getting shorter. Some people probably feel that for children, but you felt it for doing things that you wanted to do in life. Since then, you have done many of those things. Life improved since 40, markedly! Then, you had a shift again, you felt that shortening time, after your father died, and you now in your fifties. You did not want to waste energy or time on things that did not matter. You haven’t gotten over that feeling, nor been fully able to integrate it into your life. (No, be fair to yourself, you began.) Now this, the feeling that the world will end shortly, that the republic will end, that your job will end, that — as you heard put so succinctly — we are all in an extinction crisis has put you back in that place.

Time isn’t just short. It is damn near over.

You would rather spend it doing the things that make you feel good, and appreciated, and happy, and well right now. Writing a book seems like an act of hope, creating something for the future. That’s not the reason you find joy in it. You enjoy it because it is, essentially, an escape and creative. The puzzle of research is fun. Now. So, when you have to turn down other research projects — two, now — because you can barely manage the one contracted one because of the damn teaching. You feel sad. You damn the teaching because you get so little intrinsic joy out of it, what little joy there was has been all but eliminated, and it seems to have no purpose in the absence of any sense of future or appreciation from either students or administrators. Only the paycheck and the schedule that does allow for some time to research.

So, you shirk the grading and preparation to do the research because the rest seems not to matter except to keep other people — happy is not quite the word, — to meet other people’s unhappy requirements.

You just had a thought: you should invent one of those internet-social-media games: based on your behavior now, who would you be in the Great Plague? You would like to be one of the story-tellers in the Decameron.