Update 5/13: Tweep Sherman Dorn wrote a post in response to this more general compilation (link here), in which he makes specialized recommendations of books for first-time college teachers who need tools to get started ASAP (what he calls the “get-in-it-and-drive” list). Thanks, Sherman!

The Stack.

Last year around this time, I wrote a blog post that was a blatant copy of a post that Adam Golub, an alum of my graduate program and a faithful Tweep, had contributed to Forbes.com. This was the Holiday Bookbag, a simple rundown of the group of books that you decide will be your companions on the airplane, the parents’ living room rug, and the couch, in this season of sloth and minimal work obligations. Unbelievably, a year has passed, and I’m at the beginning of a week or so of blissful Chex Mix-eating and reading by the Christmas tree; the Bookbag post seems like it deserves to become a tradition.

This year I flew north for the holidays, so my bookbag is skimpier than last year’s; no Volvo bookmobile for me. In evaluating my choices, I have noted a sad lack of a traditional component of the holiday book array: the Completely Outside Of My Subject Area volume. There seem to be a few too many young-adult novels and histories of childhood in here for my Bookbag to qualify as fun. However, I’ve asked Santa for a few that could lighten the load (including the Library of America’s first volume of HL Mencken’s Prejudices), so here’s hoping. (Now that it’s too late, I totally wish I’d asked for D. Graham Burnett’s Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature; that’s the perfect holiday book, not least because it reminds me of the halcyon days of Christmas 2008, during which I got to read Moby-Dick for my oral exams. If anybody reading this needs an Xmas gift idea for me, there’s your freebie.)

The White Mountains.

The White Mountains, by John Christopher (NY: Scholastic, 1967). Just bought this for $2 at Athens Book Center, a combo used-new book shop in my husband’s hometown with a good science fiction section and troves of old magazines and comics. I grabbed this book when I saw the title on its spine, thinking it might be about my beloved White Mountains of New Hampshire; the cover got me for sure, as did the blurb on the back: “Will and Jack expect to be capped as soon as they are fourteen. They sometimes wonder, though, what it was like before the giant Tripods ruled the land—before people’s heads were ‘capped’ with small, metal discs.” The discs make people docile and stupid, saving the alien overlords the trouble of controlling them. This plot reminds me of Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies trilogy, in which teenage citizens are automatically given a series of surgeries that make them beautiful, but leave them with lesions on their brains that render them incapable of independent thought. It also seems like a classic example of 50s/60s fears about conformity. I have no idea whether the book itself will be any good.

Red Dawn-ish

Tomorrow, When the War Began, by John Marsden (New York: Scholastic, 1993). Although this book, the first in a trilogy, is now a movie (with a slick website), I’d never heard of it before seeing it at the Athens Book Center in the “Employee Picks” section (yay for flesh-and-blood bookstores!) The plot is similar to the movie “Red Dawn“—a group of teenagers hide in the wilderness and launch sneak attacks against the invading force that has taken over their hometown. Since this takes place in a small town in the middle of a cattle-ranching district in Australia, the kids—including the girls, of which one is the narrator—are really used to being in the outdoors, and wily and resourceful in the landscape. I read this one in a flash yesterday afternoon (yay, free time), and loved it. I’ll be getting my hands on the second one soon.

Might as well do all the young-adult ones in a row. Rot & Ruin, by Jonathan Maberry (Simon & Schuster, 2010) was a recommendation from another Tweep, Chris Tokuhama, who shares an interest in young-adult dystopias.  This zombie story, which I zapped through on the plane ride from Texas to Ohio, takes place fourteen years after the downfall of society; the young protagonists live in a walled-in small town with adults who are too scared to use electricity or travel. Like another good zombie book I read recently, Mira Grant’s Feed, this one is more about the way that survivors handle fear in the long term than about vivid scenes of zombie battle in the immediate aftermath of an outbreak. The bad guys here are the powerful bounty hunters who roam the abandoned, zombie-filled countryside, taking advantage of societal instability to do whatever they want. Arch-villain Charlie Pink-eye can’t scare me too much after encountering The Walking Dead’s terrible The Governor (he’s in the graphic novel—no TV spoilers, I hope), but there is something very moving about the way that protag Benny Imura begins to come to terms with his own humanity, while re-evaluating his assumptions about the world. Plus: Young Love. Of course!

Sarah Schwebel, Child-Sized History: Fictions of the Past in US Classrooms (Vanderbilt UP, brand-new!) I met Sarah Schwebel at the annual conference of the Children’s Literature Association this past year, and thought this project sounded maximum intriguing. It’s a history of the way that historical novels for kids, like Johnny Tremain, Island of the Blue Dolphins, and Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, have been incorporated into the classroom curriculum; an argument that these books constitute a sort of “people’s history,” a secondary location where kids learn and think about the past, outside of the formally recognized “social studies” curriculum. I believe that the approach incorporates textual analysis along with a history of the way that the education profession has recognized and assessed these books. Although this surely fits some definition of a “work book,” it’s also one that I might not get to in the course of my day-to-day life; thus, the Bookbag nod.

The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How it Changed America, by David Hajdu (New York: FSG, 2008). This one’s for my students, who, last semester, when assigned what I thought was a perfectly awesome reading about juvenile delinquency and comic books (from James Gilbert’s A Cycle of Outrage), told me in no uncertain terms that the chapter was BO-RING. Now, if there’s any moral panic that should not be boring, it’s the comic-book scare—people testified about severed heads and poked-out eyes in front of Congress, for the Lord’s sake—so I am trying to find a new reading for that day. I liked Hajdu’s Positively Fourth Street, about Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Mimi and Richard Fariña, so I have high hopes that this narrative history will solve my own comic-book problem.

Air: Or, Have Not Have by Geoff Ryman (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2004). This is a Highly Decorated and Recommended sf novel, about a woman who lives in an isolated village, and who is suddenly and radically connected to the rest of the world when a revolutionary technology called Air—which is something like the Internet in its implications, but operates through the air—is mistakenly tested on her village. A couple of times at Half Price Books I’ve snuck little tastes of this one, and finally concluded that I should commit for real. The premise sounds promising, and reviewers call Chung Mae (the protagonist) “one of the most fully rounded and complex female characters in fiction,” an entrepreneurial businesswoman who has little formal education but a ton of drive. Right now this is the only non-YA novel in my stack; much as I love the YA, I’m looking forward to delving into something a little more…complex.

Finally, Hyman Rickover’s Education and Freedom (1960), which is blatantly un-fun dissertation research. This book by the “father of the nuclear navy” was an impassioned screed calling for improvement in standards in math and science education. Guess what? I’m finishing my next (and final!!) dissertation chapter this spring, about the passion that people felt while calling for improvement in standards in math and science education during the 1950s and 1960s. This is the book that I included in the Bookbag to make myself feel better about taking time away from dissertation writing. Do I get any fun points for the fact that when I Google image-searched for this cover, I got results including a photo of a small dog pooping on a copy of the Learning Annex catalog, a photo of a coffee mug full of marijuana, and a photo of a hairy streaker on the field at a soccer game? Google Images works in mysterious ways.

That’s it! I wish everyone a holiday full of unconstructed reading time, punctuated only by trips to the kitchen for more cookies and rousing family games of Celebrity.

I wasn’t surprised to see that the categories of wallpaper offered for each gender reflected the same division between aesthetics and action that Orenstein noted when she visited a toy convention for her book. Boys’ wallpaper is movement-oriented: “Out of This World,” “Sea Breeze,” “Action Packed,” “Go Team Go,” and “Cars” (that’d be the Disney/Pixar Cars). Girls’ walls are all about pretty: “In Full Bloom” (flowers), “Dare to Have Flare,” “Everything Nice,” and the inevitable Disney Princesses. (I also found out from this expedition into kids’ wallpaper that Disney now sells Disney Fairies, bundled together in the same way as the Princesses. Here is the website. It’s happening.)

As somebody interested in the way that science and nature get represented to children, I lingered the longest on these two contrasting ocean offerings.

How can it be that each represents—in some tangential way—the same actual underwater world?

I would have been terrified to have the boys’ ocean on my wall as a child, but I don’t think that’s because I’m a girl. I found sharks amazing and awful; in an episode famous in family lore, my sister once chased me around the house with a National Geographic, opening it to a picture of a great white surfacing, as I shrieked and shrieked.

The boy-ocean, per allen + roth, is full of challenges, drama, and teeth. Although it looks more like the actual ocean than the girl-ocean—at least it’s brown and blue—it’s still Disney-fied, giving the impression that the undersea world is charismatic and bloody; the frame is literally full of characters. Sharks have never achieved exactly the same status as dinosaurs in kids’ culture, but they have many of the same attributes: powerful, scary, bizarre, living in a world very far from our own. This wallpaper seems almost to issue a challenge to a boy: can you swim with the sharks, day after day? Wouldn’t you be scared to wake up at night and see their teeth shining in the glow of your nightlight?

I much prefer the sky wallpaper included in the “space” section of the boys’ book; although an entire room papered in this might provoke feelings of existential angst, that might be better than the fight-or-flight instinct those sharks provoke.

The girl-ocean, on the other hand, looks like a jewel-box, filled with friendly pastel accessories. Again, there is no action, only decoration. This is unrealism of a different stripe. While the boy-ocean makes the false promise of endless startlement, this wallpaper gives the impression that all parts of nature can be reinterpreted through a pink lens, and can be pleasing insofar as they are pretty.

Perhaps the two oceans are simply an extension of an old division; surely 1910s girls were encouraged to study botany, while 1910s boys read Ernest Thompson Seton on wolves. My students and I have been trying hard to avoid the alarmist “kids’ culture these days is degraded” approach to analysis. But there’s something about the immersive nature of these two visions, and the pinkness of the girl-ocean, that seems new to me, and—I’ll say it—unwelcome.

Classic nasty "Ren and Stimpy." Panicked yet?

At last! The site I’ve been working on with my American Studies seminar (Popular Culture and American Childhood) is now live. The Archive of Childhood was born from the idea, dear to childhood studies scholars and historians of childhood, that the history of childhood should strive to feature more voices of children. Often in the archives these voices are an absent presence, and there’s nothing that can be done to recover them (damn you, estate of AC Gilbert, for failing to save the sheaf of letters from young Erector Set fans to the company!); this project was intended as a way for students to contribute their own experiences with popular culture to a web “archive” while these experiences are still relatively fresh in their minds, while simultaneously practicing the skills of analyzing a primary source and writing for a public beyond their instructor.

Students will contribute three entries to the archive over the course of the semester—one for each of the class’ themed units. During the first unit, Moral Panics, we talked about times during the twentieth century that parents and adults have reacted negatively to kids’ interactions with culture; I asked students to remember an encounter with pop culture that worried their parents, and to look at the cultural object again and talk about its meaning. Students contributed “objects” ranging from television shows (“Beavis & Butt-head,” “Jersey Shore,” “Sex and the City”) to musicians (Britney Spears, Eminem) to books (the RL Stine “Goosebumps” series, Harry Potter). The entries revealed the complex relationships that students have with their childhood culture. One student excavated the meaning of “gross” in children’s culture, and pointed to the independence she felt when her parents were disgusted by “Ren and Stimpy”; a student who is the daughter of a pastor returned to Harry Potter and tried to understand her mother’s objections to the series; a student remembered how the male members of her family were allowed to watch and enjoy “The Simpsons,” while her mother prohibited her from doing so, and speculated about that difference.

This project has been a huge learning experience for me, as an instructor of writing; the entries have provided great entry points for discussions about use of primary and secondary sources, textual analysis, embedding quotations and responding to them, and doing research in the library and the library databases. The next two units deal with gender and with the geography of childhood (both physical and virtual); I’ll be posting new entries next week and during the first week of December. You can follow along via this blog, or my Twitter feed, where I’ll be publicizing each new batch as I post it.

*Update 10.14: We’re on for sure. Pratt St. has yet to let me know which room we’ll be in, but we’ve got a spot reserved, so plan on it. I will update everyone with the specific room information when I hear.

Wouldn’t it be fun to try an American Studies Association tweetup? We’re fomenting one on Friday night of the conference (10/21), from 6-9, at the Pratt Street Alehouse, which appears to feature tasty food and craft-y beer and is within handy two-block walking distance from the conference hotel (map).

If we can promise the establishment twenty guests, we can reserve the Pratt. St “Lounge” for free. So, if you’re interested in attending, please @ me (@rebeccaonion) and let me know. Lounging is better than not lounging. It is known.

The Carbon Diaries 2015—the US cover

“Dear future generations: Please accept our apologies. We were rolling drunk on petroleum. – 2006″ – Kurt Vonnegut, from his Confetti project

Last month, Sara Reardon’s research, “Climate Change Sparks Battles in the Classroom,” based on interviews with 800 members of the National Earth Science Teachers Association, reported that “climate change was second only to evolution in triggering protests from parents and school administrators.” I read this finding while I was immersed in Saci Lloyd’s three YA books about climate change and energy troubles, The Carbon Diaries 2015, The Carbon Diaries 2017, and Momentum. As I’ve mentioned on this blog before, I’m in the very preliminary stages of research for a new project on the ways that American environmentalists have used “future generations” as an argument for acting to forestall environmental disaster; I’m also very interested in the ways that we tell these “future generations” about the problems we’ve caused, and whether, and when, these narratives amount to apologies. To me, Lloyd’s books feel like something sui generis: YA science fiction that addresses these issues of intergenerational environmental justice head-on.

Saci Lloyd is a high school teacher in London, as this great Guardian interview describes in length, and although media studies, not science, is her area of expertise, she’s written three novels that do much to bring home the day-to-day realities of a near future marked by energy scarcity and climate change. Lloyd’s books, which feature a scrappy heroine facing hardship in a harsh landscape, may seem at first glance to operate in the mode of other recent YA successes like The Hunger Games—and, indeed, they’ve provoked interest from filmmakers, just as Suzanne Collins’ more famous series did (the Carbon Diaries will be filmed by Company Pictures for the BBC, says the Guardian). But unlike the Hunger Games trilogy, the two Carbon Diaries books are of the “Soft Apocalypse” genre. Books that take this approach chronicle societies changing as a result of a series of rolling crises, rather than in the blink of an eye, as from a nuclear blast or a zombie outbreak. In the “soft apocalypse,” as Scott Timberg wrote on io9 recently, “the end has come but life goes on”: bad things may happen, but people still try to form communities and shape new ways of life. Examples would be Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, James Howard Kuntsler’s World Made By Hand (which I reviewed here), or Will McIntosh’s pithily-named Soft Apocalypse. Because they take this “soft” approach, Lloyd’s Carbon Diaries books are wonderful at showing the effects of climate change and scarcity on everyday life; they’re also completely terrifying.

The Carbon Diaries 2017—cover for UK sales

The first Carbon Diaries opens with our narrator, Laura Brown, a sixteen-year-old Londoner, describing the institution of carbon rationing in the UK. The system is harsh—each citizen gets a ration card, which they can use to activate appliances in their home, take the bus, or buy airplane tickets, though flying has become so “expensive” in terms of carbon that nobody does it. Although reviews of the Carbon Diaries note that Laura’s diary contains a fair dollop of “normal” teenage life—she’s in a band, she has a crush on a boy at school—the best parts of the book, so far as I’m concerned, have to do with the way that carbon rationing changes these human relationships. In Laura’s family, rationing upsets the precarious peace that formerly reigned in a household made up of two willful teenage girls and two slightly mismatched parents. Laura’s sister, the spoiled Kim, hides in her room, listening to music and taking scalding-hot showers, until the government realizes how much carbon she’s burning and enrolls her in a “carbon offenders” training program. Laura’s dad tries, in a fumbling way, to adjust to the new order, and plants a large backyard garden, even going so far as to buy a pig; her mother goes through a period of denial, and her parents’ marriage comes close to splitting up. Romantic relationships change,  too. Laura’s crush, Ravi, sees his dating stock shoot up at school, because he’s good at retrofitting appliances to use less electricity; the family’s next-door neighbor, Kieran, starts a company called Carbon Dating, which is meant to help single people readjust to a world in which conspicuous consumption can’t grease the wheels of human interaction. The books slide close to utopic dreaming occasionally, as when Laura’s block comes together to bust the black marketeers who are selling carbon points and driving around in gas-guzzling Hummers, but the book doesn’t try to convince you that a post-oil life will be kind of all right by arguing that community togetherness will replace all of the material comforts we previously knew and loved. That’s because Lloyd does a good job of showing how lack of oil, and scanty power, might coincide with rapid and scary climate shifts, which will put paid to citizens’ attempts to provide for themselves by planting gardens and huddling together to get through the winter. Laura’s dad’s garden, for example, shrivels up and dies when the government begins water rationing partway through The Carbon Diaries 2015, and the pig, symbol of the Browns’ new world as urban peasants, gets swept away by catastrophic flooding. (Vermont, I’m thinking of you.)

The Carbon Diaries series found a US publisher, Holiday House; I wonder whether it’s getting assigned in English classes here, or whether American teenagers are reading it. If we can’t talk about climate change in science class, maybe we can do it elsewhere.

So I thought I might instead show off my favorite find, which happens to have been published in 1921:  Henry Chase Hill’s wild encyclopedia The Wonder Book of Knowledge, ambitiously subtitled “The Marvels of Modern Industry and Invention, the Interesting Stories of Common Things, the Mysterious Processes of Nature Simply Explained,” and boasting 700 illustrations.

The preface to this volume was careful to note that the book could have appeal to audiences beyond children, citing “average workmen” as another potential readership. I find it fascinating to note how these two audiences often get mashed together by people writing popular scientific books during this time. The inscription in this copy seems to indicate a young owner.

That beautiful handwriting.

Books like these assumed the existence of a complicated modern world, full of processes that the ordinary citizen/child might find fascinating but alien. (“Most of us realize that we live in a world of wonders and we recognize progress in industries with which we come into personal contact, but the daily routine of our lives is ordinarily so restricted by circumstances that many of us fail to follow works which do not come within our own experience or see beyond the horizon of our own specific paths,” Hill writes.) But—rescue!—this complex world could also be explicable between the covers of a single volume. The table of contents of the Wonder Book of Knowledge promises answers to a wild ball of questions tangled together, interspersed with longer “Stories” of various objects and industries.

Two of the six pages of the Table of Contents.

In his Preface, Hill refers to “the constant avalanche of questions suggested by the growing mind”; echoing this metaphor, the questions and answers in the Wonder Book are presented devoid of any connection, as if rising up from a stream of consciousness: “What kind of dogs are prairie dogs?”; “What is spontaneous combustion?”; “How does an artesian well keep up its supply of water?”; “Where do dates come from?” One of the themes I’ll be addressing in my dissertation is the way that people in the first half of the 20th c started directing admiration and excitement toward childish curiosity—prizing it and seeking to develop it, rather than, as they might in another era, seeing it as intrusive or insolent. Lists of questions like these offer some indication as to the parameters of approved subjects for this curiosity.

This sequence of photo-illustrations, from “The Story in a Rifle,” displays the fascination with prehistoric man familiar to many of the “Story Of” books of this era. In this particular “Story,” weapons are discovered when a caveman lifts a rock to scare off a bear; his terrified friend, Craven Caveman, runs the other way:

Later in the evolution of the rifle, a Daniel Boone type desperately loads his weapon as a herd of ungulates approaches:

Hurry, hurry!

Photo-illustrations decorate many of these Stories (indeed, I found this book through Mus White’s wonderful bibliography of photographically illustrated children’s books), but the “Story of a Rifle” illustrations are notable for their unusual verve and vigor. More commonly, the photos were donated by the industries under examination, and are fairly unengaging. At my brown bag talk, we discussed the extreme basic-ness of many of these photos, all the more striking for its contrast with the excitement that the authors professed about them (examples would be William Clayton Pryor’s “Photographic Story-Books” of industry, with photos that were, in many cases, murky and uninteresting). We speculated that this was the equivalent of the present-day hype over anything “social media,” which seems to assume that the inherent fascination with the medium would trump any weakness of actual form or content.

Bo-ring.

The Wonder Book of Knowledge is unrelentingly positive about American industry, emphasizing a theme of abundance and possibility; thus, in “The Story of the Telephone,” the American telephone system is so superior that our hotels have better infrastructure than whole foreign cities.

Even in the “Story of Sausage,” the author discourses at length on the cleanliness of the packing houses, offering—perhaps self-consciously?—a picture quite at odds with the grisly scenes depicted in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle just fourteen years earlier: “The standard of cleanliness in the sausage kitchen has to be unusually high. Whenever white tile is not possible, white paint is used in profusion. The shining metal tables and trucks, on which the product is handled, give a new confidence in sausage.”

Free manicures for all Armour & Co. bacon-packers. (PS Bacon used to come in a jar!)

November 1930

Roland Marchand wrote in his Advertising the American Dream about the advertising trope that he called the “Parable of the Skinny Kid”: 1930s ads for foodstuffs often featured an undernourished child, who failed at school because his parents didn’t feed him a good enough breakfast. Marchand argued that these ads mingled Depression-era anxieties about money and food with the new-as-of-the-teens-and-twenties emphasis on “scientific” child guidance. These Cream of Wheat poster children, from so early in the 1930s, epitomize abundance of well-being, rather than lack: “Both children are always well,” Mrs. Drake says of her “brown-kneed” offspring, descended from Sir Francis himself. “Cream of Wheat is part of our program to keep them so.”

October 1930

Here, the pedigreed Six have “luck” not only because of their “names,” but because of the good sense their parents show in asking a “distinguished child specialist” what they should eat. This construction naturalizes the idea that rich people (especially rich mothers?) have access to expertise, and heed its counsel when possible; poorer people reading the advertisement can benefit from this second-hand knowledge.

According to this web page, Mary Pinchot, daughter of a wealthy lawyer who helped fund the radical magazine The Masses and a journalist who wrote for  The Nation and The New Republic, grew up to have quite a crazy life. Did she have an affair with JFK, and did she do LSD with him, and was she killed by a hitman who thought she knew too much? I’m not sure if this is a conspiracy theory or not, but it does make for good reading. John Aspinwall Roosevelt, on the other hand, was the only FDR son who never ran for political office (says Wikipedia); he also converted to Republicanism later on in life, thereby proving that you can feed your son Cream-o-Wheat, but you can’t control how he uses that lifelong health you gave him.

More tanned legs in this one, in which Alfred Olivier Hero, Jr, makes a playground out of an old plantation. Viewed through the attentive eyes of a child, this fraught landscape is rendered innocent; even “old slave quarters” are a jungle gym and a photo op. (The precocious Hero became a political scientist and studied the US-Quebec relationship; he died in 2006.)

September 1930

There are a lot of people worrying about the un-free nature of modern childhood these days; this ad shows that parents in 1930 received messages that they should exercise “careful surveillance” over their offspring at all times, while making sure that the kids don’t know that they’re watching. What careful labor must have been required to pull off this balancing act? And who was responsible for this labor? Mothers! (All grown up, sister Cynthia starred in a Ponds Make-up Remover ad in 1946; I wonder how many socialites had similar lifelong careers in advertising during this period.)

This is what I meant by this tweet – and sorry to be so cryptic.

I’m working on a chapter about sf writer Robert Heinlein, his books for young adults (published 1947-1959) and his conflicts with his (female) editor at Scribner’s. The gist of the argument has to do with Heinlein’s belief that “true” science teaching, and thus modernity, faces impediments in the form of older, tradition-bound, scared female and female-coded figures—typically mothers, children’s librarians, female teachers, and what he calls “spiritually-castrate” male teachers and school administrators. He loved Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers, and some of his older female characters in his YA books—mothers or aunts who object to characters leaving school to go on space voyages, for example—are very much like Wylie’s Moms.

What I’m trying to figure out is how to contextualize Heinlein’s attitude toward the “female” as “civilized,” and thus hidebound/scared/traditionalist/detrimental to progress, within the culture of the time. If he wrote during the early 20th c I’d have no problem getting secondary sources in on the game (see Bederman, for one), and there’s Marshall Berman, but for the postwar period in particular, I’m lost. Maybe I should be looking for people who write about Wylie, and then following that line of thought?

Thanks for the help, Tweeps.

Before I drank the digital Kool-Aid (committed to Zotero, bought a second, square-ish monitor for reading PDFs, and started taking pictures at archives instead of photocopying), I printed out a lot of stuff: reading materials for seminars, periodicals research for seminar papers, news articles that I thought I might someday use. What did I have to show for my pre-digital grad school life? A big trunk full of binders and notebooks, a file drawer stuffed with articles printed out from JStor, and four archival boxes filled with magazine and newspaper pieces I had clipped and marked “for future teaching.”

The Trunk, partway through excavation; unfortunately, a previous owner favored the use of mothballs, whose ghosts never fully die.

All of this stuff did me no good in its paper form. If I’m stuck for an idea or a reference—whether it be for my dissertation, for a friend or a Tweep, or for a syllabus in process—I never, ever go to the trunk, open it up, and start sifting through paper. It’s Zotero, every time. Digitizing would make that information visible to me, and it would also make any relocation in the next few post-doctoral years much easier. It was time to put everything in the same place.

Paper-sifting entertainment: "Spartacus," Starz-style.

I treated these faintly mothball-smelling pieces of paper the same way I would archival materials: I took digital pictures of the ones I thought I would want later on, and sorted those jpegs into folders inside a big folder on my desktop. I’ll turn all of these jpegs into PDFs (using Automator!), create Zotero records, and attach PDFs accordingly at a later date; this might take me a super-long time, but it’s a great zombie task: something I can do when I am absolutely unfit for any other effort. Like this paper-sifting itself, it’s also something I can do while watching TV. (I talked more about the jpeg-to-Zotero-record process in this post.)

Among all of the helpful-some-day book chapters, articles, and seminar handouts in these binders, I found two big treasure troves. The first was the archival material I collected from the University of Alaska/Anchorage for my masters’ thesis on celebrity sled dogs of the early 20th century. (Here’s a link [PDF] to a piece I wrote for The Crier on this same subject.) I don’t remember photocopying like a crazy person, but I guess I must have, because I found almost-complete copies of many of the key texts I looked at in the library and used in my thesis. I’d been thinking I might want to re-examine this material and see if it could be made into a book some day; the presence of all of this research right within my grasp makes the whole thing seem much more feasible.

From Polaris, the story of an Eskimo dog, by Ernest Harold Baynes, 1922

1926.

The second trove is a sheaf of 1920s-1950s-era photocopied articles from Library Journal, Publisher’s Weekly, and other library periodicals, that one of my advisors gave me from her own research files. This group contains copies of lists of science books recommended for library adoption, as well as some other articles about science reading and national policy. These will be a big help when I write a chapter this summer about the publication of non-fiction science books for children in the first half of the 20th c—and an even bigger help if I realize my dream of making a database to represent trends in science publishing for kids in that period (more about that here—and if you have ideas, I’d love to hear them).

Happily for my future self, a large percentage of the papers hiding in my binders were printouts of content that I could re-find online and input into Zotero. (I can’t believe I used to print out JStor articles and read them on paper, but engage in this irrational behavior I certainly did. Perhaps a Future Me that’s converted completely to e-books will regard my present cluttered bookshelves as equally prehistoric.)

Some of the JStor articles Past Me found interesting; Present Me concurs.

I was also able to find electronic versions of most of the pieces from Harper’s, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the NYRB that I clipped with future class assignments in mind. Because I’ll be going on the job market in the next couple of years, and I’m teaching my own class this coming year, I’m trying to expand my Zotero folder of ideas for teaching; this process took my collections a big leap ahead.

The idea of going through each and every page of hand-scrawled notes from seminars, lectures, and screenings was too time-sucky, even for me; besides, as I leafed through a few, I saw underlined titles of books I’d read in the intervening years and recorded in Zotero, which gave me a reassuring sense that I wouldn’t be missing anything if I spread my old notebooks out, took a picture, and prepared to throw them into the trash unread.

Pre-Z me loved to buy notebooks from Ex Libris Anonymous. And how about those pre-Google Calendar/smartphone day-planners?

A loose leaf fell out of one of them that saved all of their papery necks. These were my notes from the summer between my first and second year in grad school, when I went up to Alaska to visit my brother and to do that M.A. research. Turns out I wrote down some funny stuff. See bottom: “Strange Things To Eat: Fermented Blueberry Juice; Dead Man’s Thigh.” Or is it “Dead Mao’s Thigh”? Either way, the notebooks went back in the trunk. Maybe someday I’ll go through them all and digitize the pages that are important.

One folder in the file drawer contained only a few print-outs from microfiche, dating from the year that I went through the Saint Louis Post-Dispatch, looking for information about animals at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, in my capacity as research assistant. I couldn’t (then or now) pass over gems like these without grabbing them and stuffing them into my coat pocket; in the digital age, I do this via Twitter or Facebook. So here goes:

SLPD article on features of the fair mentions a “Map Made of Pickles—Exhibited by a Pennsylvania firm. Represents the United States, 18×24 feet, made entirely of pickles, vegetables, fruits, etc. The state lines are accurately shown and the lakes and rivers are represented by vinegar. The large cities are indicated by spices.” N.D.

Headline: “Ghoul Stole His Sweetheart’s Body: Horrible Discovery in Dissecting Room Drove Him to Expose Grave Looters. He Did Not Know That His Fiancee Was Dead. Terror Froze His Blood When He Lighted Gas and Recognized Face of Corpse He Had Carried From Cemetery.” SLPD Feb 5, 1903

Headline #2: “Octopus in Woman’s Stomach. Two years’ Suffering Explained By Removal of Reptile [SIC] She Swallowed With Water.” (SLPD Jan 29, 1903)

There. That’s out of my system.

End result of project: Two boxes of scrap paper; twenty-one empty binders; four empty archival boxes; two three-foot stacks of recycling; 10.21 GB of jpegs to Zoterify; and an ever-more-stuffed Zotero. Now’s the time, I think, to take the plunge and invest in a second backup system; Time Machine + Carbonite might not be overkill, if I can ensure that the stash I’m building remains mine.

Ms. Mollycat, with the beginning of Scrap Paper Box #2.