And it’s 1-2-3, the kids love the monkey
And it’s 4-5-6, the monkey’s got a hockey stick
7-8-9, havin’ a good time, yeahhhh. . .

I sure hope those children save the monkey from medical experiments.

Thou Shalt Not Rape

No, I haven’t renounced my longstanding ressentiment and mistrust of football at any level of play, from Pop Warner through the NFL.  It’s an appalling waste of money that pretty much sums up nearly everything that’s wrong with our culture, in universities and in the nation at large:  profligacy, the wage gap, male supremacy, obsession with inconsequential trivia, anti-intellectualism, and the abuse of women.  But, I’ve go no problem whatsoever with Tim Tebow.  I don’t care about his public religiosity (although it’s not really my style).  I’m impressed that a nice-looking, successful, and wealthy young man has taken a vow of chastity before marriage, not because I value chastity in particular, but because this is also effectively a vow not to abuse women sexually and not to rape them.

Even by comparison to most other professional or college athletes, football players have particularly poor records of abusing women, raping them, or even as we learned last year about Tebow’s teammate Perrish Cox, raping an unconscious woman, and denying it even after a DNA test of her fetus indicated that he was its father.  Seriously–this happened!  Last weekend, I was just fine with the fact Tebow and his team defeated the Pittsburgh Steelers, whose quarterback Ben Roethlisberger has been three times charged with rape.

Conservative columnist Michael Medved–whose work usually makes me throw up a little in my mouth–wrote a perceptive column recently about the mysterious hatred that Tebow inspires.  In it, he suggested that Tebow’s squeaky-clean gee-whiz perfection is what rankles other men:  “In the same sense, most males look at Mr. Tebow and see a virtuous rebuke to our own limitations and imperfections. If we were 24, single, supremely athletic, enormously wealthy and adored by millions of young women, how many could still wear Tim Tebow’s ‘purity ring?’”  It occured to me after reading Medved that Tebow offers a radically different yet clearly authentic masculinity that’s not built around “scoring” with women and treating women like consumer goods.  This is a very different notion of masculinity than most American men inhabit, including Tebow’s opponent this afternoon, Tom Brady of the New England Patriots.  (Brady isn’t a rapist, but he seems to be a serial impregnator.  Eeeww.)

So long as Tebow’s religious and moral commitments prevent him from raping or otherwise abusing women, it’s all good from my perspective.  I might even change my mind about football if substantial numbers of other players followed his example and “tebowing” also became a synonym for treating women like human beings.  Maybe Tim Tebow could make that cool.

Thanks for the memories!

Book weight, that is, not body weight.  Our recent discussion of clutter, inspired by the super-detailed and super-creepy installation “Barbie Trashes her Dream House“, has inspired me to donate the shelves full of books I no longer read or use.  I’ve just removed four boxes and large bags of books off of my shelves, and I’m just getting started.  Whichever organization calls me first to ask if I have any good, re-useable household goods, books, or clothing, and offers to pick my donation up from my front door, will be the beneficiary.

I’ve lived in this house for ten years–by far, the longest place I’ve ever lived in my adult life.  And I’ve bought or been given a lot of books over the past thirty years.  I was wondering, aside from the household clutter angle, why now?  Why get rid of the excess books now, instead of sometime during the 1990s, when I moved ten times in as many years and was always packing and moving and unpacking those damn boxes of books.  It’s perverse, no? 

But my theory is that it’s precisely because I have a stable home now and I’m no longer moving once or twice a year, I don’t need the old books any more. It’s like I carted around those books as though I were building walls with them, Three Little Pigs-style, in the hopes that they’d make me feel secure and keep the wolf from the door.  But after ten years of not regularly culling the heard, some shelves in my living room and office were starting to look like the shelves of a crazy hoarder–you know, shelves with double-rows of books, and shelves with books files horizonally as well as vertically.

(And please–no lectures on e-readers.  For most of my life as a biliophile, e-books were entirely unavailable, so I’d still be stuck with 95% of this pile of unwanted dead-tree codex even if I had a Kindle or an i-Pad now.)

Fifteen year-old travel books?  Who needs ‘em!  Trendy books purchased on impulse in an airport two or five or ten years ago?  Buh-bye.  That whole shelf of anti-George W. Bush books I bought ca. 2001-2008?  You’re outta here, too.  Cultural studies books that mystified me 20 years ago?  Gone.  Fiction I bought but never read because it bored me?  Guiltlessly gone!  I’m keeping only books that relate to my work, and great literary fiction.  If I give away something and find I need it again (unlikely), I can get it at a library.  After all, I can get nearly any book in the world delivered to my university library, after all, and then return it when I’m done.  (And even non-academics can do this too–most local library systems participate in interlibrary loan services.)

A shande! Sin verguenza!

So the big clean-out is part I of my resolution.  Part II is a promise not to buy a single book for myself in 2012.  (And it’s a leap year! )  Instead, so as to support the work of my fellow historians and other useful authors, I will agressively pepper my subject-area librarian with requests for the Baa Ram U. library shelves.  Amazon and brick-and-mortar bookstores with new books aren’t my weakness.  It’s the used bookstores that always yield the greatest treasures, as I’ve written here before, and will be the most difficult test of my resolve.  (Maybe I’ll make exceptions for rare finds, if they’re directly germane to my work.)

Now, if only I could shovel off my desk, I might get some real work done this semester. . .any advice for me on this?  In the past, my experience is that if I wait long enough for the documents and papers on the desk to become irrelevant or useless, it’s a pretty easy cleanup.  (But it’s hardly efficient.)

(From White Christmas (1954), with Rosemary Clooney, Vera-Ellen, Danny Kaye, and Bing Crosby.)

Actually, there’s no snow on the ground here in our New England holiday enclave, but that’s OK–in northern Colorado we’ve had snow on the ground since the week before Halloween, so it’s a nice respite.  Those of you who are traveling, travel safely. Those of you who are staying put, enjoy!

[Ruth] Marcus states that “I may sound alarmingly crotchety here, but something is upside down in the modern world, which has transformed [Kansas teenager Emma] Sullivan into an unlikely Internet celebrity and heroine of the liberal blogosphere[.]” You don’t sound crotchety Marcus, you sound insane. Sullivan was too mean in her tweet about a politician? And you claim to cover these people?

Something is upside down in this world when a so called journalist can get this up in arms over a tweet that is disrespectful to a pol while being just fine with the past decade in Washington, DC.

Ruth Marcus, a supremely silly woman, is nevertheless only reflecting the reality of the world for people under age 30 or so.  Teenagers and young people aren’t permitted to talk back to nasty pols, even passively through Twitter.  Only nasty pols are allowed to talk smack about American youth, lecturing them about taking baths, getting jobs, and remaining quiescent while their lockers are randomly searched for drugs (or whatever might offer a pretext for turning them over to local police.)  Never mind that nasty pols are particularly nasty about the sex lives of teenaged girls.  For the record, I don’t think Sullivan is a “hero.”  She sounds like a typical teenager, bragging about a confrontation that never happened.  Although foolish, her tweets are her own business.

But even nasty pol Sam Brownback knows that his staff was overzealous, and he apologized to Sullivan for the overreach.  (He’s nasty, but he’s not an idiot.)

I wish I could watch Parks and Recreation more often, but out here in the Mountain Time Zone it’s on at 7 p.m., and I’m ususally still feeding watering the horses.  I could start taping it, but my mother lives in Michigan and she’s the only person who knows how to program the VCR.  (And yes, I realize that it’s nearly 2012 and no longer 1988, and that it’s also funny that my mother is more technologically adept than I am.  But I have a perfectly good VCR, whereas a DVR and a better cable package would cost me money.  And the teevee just isn’t that important to me.)

See you tomorrow.

Glitter on the highway! Hope your weekend travels are safe, fun, and loving!

We want YOUR article!

Mary Berkery, the Managing Editor of the JWH e-mailed me last month to help spread the word about a new graduate student article prize.  Here are the details:

On Friday, September 28th, participants will gather at the A.D. White House for a series of sessions inspired by distinct aspects of Professor Norton’s scholarship and teaching. That evening, attendees will continue the celebration at a catered reception at the Johnson Art Museum. The conference will conclude with a morning roundtable and brunch on Saturday, September 29th. If you are interested in contributing a brief paper to one of the sessions, please email Molly at mwarsh@tamu.edu or Susanah at ssromney AT gmail DOT com.

The conference is being organized by two of Professor Norton’s former students (and now historians), Susanah Shaw Romney, PhD ’00, and Molly Warsh, BA’99. The event has received generous support from Cornell’s History Department; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; Society for the Humanities; and numerous other on-campus and off-campus entities.

You can go to the conference blog and sign up for updates by entering your e-mail address.  I hope that Mary Beth will get a good audience for this event–she has always been among the most enthusiastic of women’s historians, and a very generous mentor and colleague to junior scholars like me.  I remember that she answered a snailmail letter I had written her as a newly dissertating graduate student, back in the early 1990s when we wrote letters on paper and sent them through the U.S. Postal Service.  She didn’t have anything to gain from helping me out–but that’s the kind of thing she has done for the community of early American women’s historians.  I also remember running into her at the Maine Historical Society in the late 1990s when we were both researching the Northern New England frontier, and being struck by her enthusiasm for archival research (an enthusiasm I share, of course!) 

Spread the word!  Thanks to Susanah and Molly for organizing this.  It should be quite the party.

*UDATE, 1:17 MDT:  MBN e-mailed me to report that “Rumors of my retirement are greatly exaggerated! I have made no decision about when to retire.”  But, I think it’s a fine idea to celebrate her career now in any case.