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Women’s Writing as Domestic Arts Assemblage

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crafted hat rack with painted book bindings and attached objects
Carlynn Crosby, Women’s Writing Hat Rack

Today I wrapped my graduate seminar Women’s Writing & Pedagogy with a reveal of students’ Domestic Arts Assemblage projects, crafted from discarded items at our community’s creative reuse center, The Repurpose Project. This is a debut DIY assignment I designed specifically for this course, which combines a seminar on 20th/21st century women’s literature with a practical workshop on assignment mock-ups students design for courses they might teach in future.

Over the past 3.5 months we’ve read women’s writing in various forms: novels, experimental prose, poems, and image-texts. Our writers/makers: Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Carter, Alison Bechdel, Rita Dove, Margaret Atwood, and Ange Mlinko. We also explored our library’s archive of Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Literature and Art. Keyed to this range of women’s literary writing in English, the series of assignment mock-ups focused on: City, Domesticity, Literary Magazine, Myth. Students also did other short assignments, including a conference paper proposal about teaching and a draft syllabus that featured women’s writing.

The Domestic Arts Assemblage is the outlier assignment. My rules were loose, resourceful, and communal:

plastic bottle with crinkled sheets green paper and pages of writing
Zuzu Tadeushuk, Writer’s Block 2024

(1) Make a Domestic Arts Assemblage with items from The Repurpose Project. MB will give you $8.00 to use for your project. At least one of our syllabus texts or a mock-up assignment should be a source of inspiration.
(2) Submit a photo of your Domestic Arts Assemblage + a 250-300 word Maker Statement.

By doing a creative-critical assignment, students could curate syllabus materials alongside everyday objects to reflect on our semester’s discussions and generate ideas for future work.

The resulting assemblages were stunning, as you can see from the writing-themed examples I’m sharing here (with students’ permission). Viewing the projects as a gallery and discussing them with their makers in today’s class, I was struck by how they reassembled our syllabus and discussions in analytical and inventive fashion. This teacher became the student, learning new pedagogies. Here are some of my takeaways:

  • Women’s writing can be laden with everyday objects, bringing texture and heft to the words.
  • Domestic Arts Assemblage makes us question why we label some work as domestic, and some work as art.
  • The domesticity in women’s writing covers some things while revealing others.
  • In women’s writing, the women characters can succumb to and liberate themselves from the cycles of time.
  • In women’s writing, domestic objects can signify burdens and rebirth, fragmentation and integration, restriction and possibility.
  • The household objects we donate or otherwise discard are inanimate narrators of our everyday lives. – MB
Wall clock surrounded by a collage of objects
Hyunjung Kim, Fragmented Writing in Domestic Time

 

Bell Jar Z.0

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Shot from the series ‘Master of None,’ 2015.

I’ve taught Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar many times in several courses: American literature, major authors, women’s literature, and the American 1950s. Most are brimming with English majors. During my class discussions in the late 1990s, a few students would identify with protagonist Esther Greenwood’s mental health struggles. By the time I was teaching the novel to older Millennials, a sizable group of students was finding Esther’s academic performance anxiety parallel to their own. Theirs was the first test-test-test generation: scores on an expanded array of standardized tests would affect public K-12 school funding. Esther sweated her grades to maintain her scholarship at an elite private college. My students fretted over feeling responsible if a teacher got terminated because of their school’s test scores. I sensed that Plath’s most famous character was becoming more mainstream.

Mentimeter graphic from my Spring 2024 GenEd class

This year I taught The Bell Jar to General Education students for the first time; most were freshmen and none were Humanities majors. A few had heard of Sylvia Plath, yet none seemed to have read her writing. The course was on the American 1950s and campus life, featuring literature by Plath, John Cheever, Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O’Connor, James Baldwin, and Sloan Wilson. We also watched  Fifties family sitcoms and Rebel Without a Cause. For parsing postwar campus life, we did a deep dive into student publications in our University Archives. The weeks on Plath were my first in which students didn’t bring up the writer’s life. They were more interested in Esther’s campus life–finding much of her story highly relevant to their own. For them The Bell Jar was primarily a coming-of-age story, as well as a story about 1950s gender roles for women. Very few students thought it centered on breakdown and recovery–a consensus view from their Millennial predecessors. Mental illness and mental healthcare are everyday things now, and Plath’s protagonist strikes them as more normative than outlier. People are marrying later, and more of my students come from two-career households.

Peyton Howey, Faux Fifties Ad inspired by ‘The Bell Jar.’ 2024.

In their final papers on how their lives would change if they attended college in the 1950s, several students wrote that they couldn’t help but see themselves in Esther Greenwood–whether or not their gender, race, or ethnicity matched hers. My hunch is that these factors have brought about Bell Jar Z.0:

Fear of Failure. Being over-tested surely highlighted the fear of failure my students see in Esther–and sometimes in themselves. When I was in high school in the 1970s, I didn’t have the pressures of getting top grades to qualify for a free state tuition deal. I did feel a responsibility to do well because of my parents’ investment in my college education. But a high GPA wouldn’t save them money. In The Bell Jar, Esther felt the pressures of a practically perfect opportunity: a private school scholarship + a top summer internship in New York. She also bore the burden of her mother’s palpable disappointment in her setbacks.

Isolation and Expectations. Like all my recent students, this year’s GenEd students were isolated during a formative period of their education, separated from their peers and support networks through remote pandemic learning. For GenZ this happened during middle and/or high school. Several students’ papers mentioned how Esther’s isolation as an aspiring young woman and a newcomer to city prompted them to consider how they would be isolated as 1950s college students–as the only members of their demographic in their classes or majors, as first-generation college students, as international students. They can relate to the suffocation of circumstances and social expectations. I was struck by one student’s response that The Bell Jar was fundamentally about loneliness.

Fig Trees, FOMO & Futures. Most of these students saw themselves in Esther’s fig tree analogy: picking the fruit from one branch meant foregoing the others. They could identify with the paralysis of indecision that could leave them with an empty tree and unfulfilled ambitions. While the term FOMO (fear of missing out) was coined a decade ago, it started spreading through social media in 2010–when GenZ was coming of age. Facing more migratory job markets and anticipating more career changes than their predecessors, this generation is moving beyond binary models of career paths as they embrace less binary models of gender roles. Instead of regretting roads not taken, they tend to envision more than one future for themselves.

Unmoored from the facts of (and fixations on) Plath’s life, more GenZ students are beginning to make her novel their own story. Sixty years after its publication, The Bell Jar may be finding the wider audience it has waited for all along. – MB

Student work used by permission.

Coffee/House (for Volta)

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Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. –Gaston Bachelard

In his meditative book The Poetics of Space, philosopher-poet-postmaster Gaston Bachelard situates the house within a series of concentric circles. Our houses radiate outward from the psyche to the sidewalk, from early memory to later recollection, from childhood daydreaming to future architectures. For Bachelard the space of the home holds an ultimate poetic depth that we can fathom only through dreams, memories, and poems. As we continually reconstruct our houses through images and words, our preoccupations with space become reoccupations of generative spaces.

(Once at Volta, I did a presentation with 20 images. I heard several poetry and fiction readings there.)

All really inhabited space bears the essence of the notion of home.
A coffeehouse is a community space where we can daydream, read, and write alone in company, or we might converse with persons already known or previously unknown. Each coffeehouse creates transient soundscapes of that moment’s music from the speakers, the varied rhythms of surrounding conversations and their languages, the intermittent keyboard clicks I’m making in this space at this moment.

Hanging from the ceiling across from me is a wooden sculpture that lets in the light between its sticklike components—as if someone pried open an architectural model. A house suspended in air. Cradled within an interstice lies a small mass of more densely assembled material; it resembles a bird’s nest. The surrounding coffeehouse nests its various assemblages of patrons with open spaces between the hard, smooth surfaces of its counters and shelves, tables and chairs.

For our house is our corner of the world.
My coffeehouse has two floor-to-ceiling windows on its outer wall; each has four panels. Through these windows the interior space is sculpted with natural light: the skyscape of bright or mottled clouds, the clarifying light of cloudless days. These windows also bring the downtown streetscape into an almost tactile proximity. Lines of mortar portion out the individual bricks, abrasions add texture to the asphalt, weathered concrete curbs divide them.

A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability.
A coffeehouse is the opposite of one’s workplace or home office, an altogether different kind of space than a reading nook at a school or library. It is an alternative home that is more open to the spaces around it. A poetic space that houses a transient togetherness, a transit house that posts its memories forward. A coffeehouse shelters rootlessness and fosters dreams. – MB

Volta closed its doors on May 27, 2024.

Sources:

  • Feature image by Anthony Rue, co-founder of Volta Coffee, Tea & Chocolate, 48 SW 2nd St, Gainesville, FL. January 2, 2013.
  • Auxiliary images by MB. May 26, 2024.
  • All italicized quotations are from Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Space (1958), selected as personal takeaways by a former community of students and by Charlie Hailey for his Architecture classes.

Teaching with Trash: American Poetry & Personal Trash Piles

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assembled trash items
Riley Fraunfelter, Personal Trash Pile

What impressions does a pile of discarded items reveal about your community? How might one or more of these items tell a story about a person (real or imagined)? How does arranging and photographing 5 items of trash highlight their aesthetic dimensions? 

These are the questions I gave my undergraduate students for my most outlier assignment yet: Personal Trash Pile Brainstorming. I was looking for something hands-on for this semester’s course Modern American Poetry: Cities. I wanted to get these Gen Z students out in our Gainesville community now that they’d left their Zoom squares and returned to campus spaces. I wanted to engage them through our mutual interest in sustainability–including sustainable Humanities. And I wanted to find a more tactile means of attuning students to the details and dynamics of poems. After all, Wallace Stevens wrote a poem called The Man on the Dump.

I had a hunch that thinking about trash would push students to think more about the language in poems, the diction. Just think of the word hoard: debris, detritus, dregs, garbage, litter, refuse, rubbish, scrap, waste, and yes, trash. The garbage can really pile up in American city poems. I also had a hunch that making and reflecting on Personal Trash Piles would give students a keener eye for the experimental city films we were watching. How might arranging garbage attune students to the art of assemblage on the page and screen?

5 items of trash
Sophia Medina, Personal Trash Pile
Adelyn Richgels, Personal Trash Pile

 

 

I brainstormed this assignment with Paige Glotzer at The Repurpose Project, Gainesville’s creative reuse center. An urban historian, Professor Glotzer was also putting the final touches on Spring classes. We like to talk about cities, we like to brainstorm, and turns out we like to talk trash. I’ve collaborated with Repurpose Project before, so I knew where the trashiest trash resided–in the Candy Shoppe where most items were plastic and would have gone to the landfill. I gave each student $2.00 to purchase 5 different items from this part of the building, and these instructions:

  1. Arrange your 5 items as a personal trash pile.
  2. Photograph your trash pile.
  3. Write 75-100 words each on the 3 brainstorming prompts at the beginning of this post.
  4. Submit your photo and brainstorming.

Parsing their adopted community through collective trash piles at Repurpose Project (and creating their own), the class perceived Gainesville as collegiate and sporty, as a synergy of work and play, as a home for artists and creative thinkers where imaginations run wild, as Madison Engler put it. The accumulated medical items in the city’s trash also reflected sustained illnesses, addiction, and other difficulties. In the thumbnails of stories the trash could tell, a mother bakes snacks for her kids’ sports teams. A child returns from school, proudly handing a parent the artwork they made in class. Someone cleans out a departed family member’s house and finds their childhood board games, discarding those with missing pieces. A graduating student sorts through memorabilia of their collegiate years, unable to take it all with them. Brainstorming with trash, students’ writing merged analytical, creative, and philosophical writing in varied and unpredictable ways.

trash items on the floor
Darwin Tortorella, Personal Trash Pile

As I’d hoped, the Personal Trash Pile Brainstorming Exercise also invigorated students’ writing for the Close Reading Paper on a contemporary poem that featured trash. In fact, we reinvented the close reading paper. And we’ve developed our own concept of the personal trash pile to complement perspectives on urban spaces and city walking that we’ve learned from Michel de Certeau, Gaston Bachelard, Anne Friedberg, Laura Elkin, and Louis Kahn. But I’ll write about that another time. -MB

SOURCES

All student images and quotations used by permission.

trash items on a windowsill
Madison Engler, Personal Trash Pile

Punk DIY as Sustainable Pedagogy

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Student DIY project: punk t-shirt
Caged Heart, by Roy Udeh-Ubaka.
materials: black t-shirt, nails, safety pins, corks, zippers, rainbow pin, glue

I’m wrapping my PostPunk Cultures courses on the British 1980s this week. And I’m wrapping my head around

student DIY project for punk earrings
Anti-Domesticated Earrings, by Chandler Mordecai.
materials: metal hoop earrings, bread clips, keys, dog tag, measuring cup, buttons, bulldog clip, thread spool, sewing thread, zipper, safety pin, hairpin, can tab

the amazing work my students did for their DIY craft projects. Our syllabus sampled fiction, poetry, film, TV, and popular music. We also read cultural analyses of subcultural style, song lyrics, historical revivalism, Black Britishness, and queerness. We watched The Slits smash a car in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, and we watched Vyvyan smash all manner of things in The Young Ones. We parsed the disconsolate punk in Michael Hofmann’s poem “Body Heat,” considered the object relations in Julian Barnes’s Metroland, plumbed the depths of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Bass Culture,” felt the frisson of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber stories. We also attended the 20th anniversary of The FEST, Gainesville’s punk and underground music weekend.

DIY punk shoulder pads with nails
Don’t Lean on Me Shoulder Pads, by Vix Gutierrez.
materials: vintage shoulder pads, nails, ribbons, glue.

To link the course directly to the music festival and to punk’s DIY aesthetic, I designed an assignment in which students made body art they could wear to FEST 20. I wanted the DIY project to tap the bricolage aspect of punk that Dick Hebdige discusses. He notes how “the appropriated objects reassembled” by punk and other subcultural bricoleurs could turn everyday items into symbolic warfare. Punks transformed the domestic diaper pin into edgy facial fashion. One of my students sutured a ripped t-shirt with safety pins, repairing identities torn asunder by mainstream culture.

A student-turned-bricoleur deconstructed domesticity by freighting earrings with tiny household items that reflected traditional “women’s work.” Turning women’s shoulder pads inside-out, another student punked an 80s symbol of hard, corporate femininity into spiked outer-wear that would repel shoulder sobbers. Punk frontwoman Poly Styrene made a plastic bag into a musical rebuke to consumer culture. In parallel fashion, a student assembled an outer “anti-bra” from corporate lanyard ribbons.

student DIY project for a punk outer bra
The Anti-Bra, by Kayla Conde.
materials: corporate lanyards, keychains, playing cards, pin, VIP pass.

Since the punk’s battle cry was “No future!”–and climate change has us worried about our planet’s future–I wanted to build sustainability into my DIY assignment. And so I partnered with The Repurpose Project, a creative reuse center that diverts trash from local landfills. After consulting with Repurpose staff about a price point that would give students a fairly wide choice of materials, I gave each student $7.00 to purchase items for their body art. (This was my creative way of donating to Repurpose this semester.)

Repurpose staff also suggested that I give students an additional constraint: requiring at least 2 items from the Candy Shoppe section, which displays “trash-treasure” items that usually end up in the landfill. Many of these items are plastic. My assignment allowed students the option of combining Repurpose items with materials they already had on hand. For example, they might ‘punkify’ a vest, or a glove, or pair of shoes. After assembling their body art, students submitted photos + a 250-350 word Maker Statement. Some students chose to wear their body art to FEST 20.

In our informal feedback session in class, students found my DIY Body Art assignment as much of an outlier as I did. This is not the kind of thing students expect to do in an English Department class. They enjoyed making something with their hands instead of on their screens for a change. My students agreed that doing punk gave them a fuller sense of the texts we were studying. The project also got them out into our community, and it got them thinking about repurposing as a way to reduce waste. Some found that the DIY project brought a material sense to their writing process that was proving useful. These projects helped me to see how punk can be a sustainable and resourceful practice that we can take into our classrooms–and into our future. – MB

Containers full of small discarded items at The Repurpose Project
Assorted items at the Repurpose Project’s Candy Shoppe section, which rescues “trash-treasures” that usually end up in landfills.

(Re)sources:
All student work published by permission.
Kayla Conde, The Anti-Bra. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Chandler Mordecai, Anti-Domesticated Earrings. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Vix Gutierrez. Don’t Lean on Me Shoulder Pads. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. (1979. Routledge, 1987).
Roy Udeh-Ubaka, Caged Heart. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.

Aisles Full of Annotations! Ginsberg’s Supermarket in Perusall

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shoppers in a 1950s supermarketStrolling through A Supermarket in California like a flâneur, Allen Ginsberg presents himself as a counterculture shopper in 1950s America. He sees the extraordinary in the new ordinary–garishly lit neon fruit, beaming wives in the avocados, and babies in the tomatoes. With a nod to William Blake wandering the ‘charter’d’ streets of London, Ginsberg wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans–moving against the grain of consumerist culture as he refuses to walk a straight line. The poet is shopping for images as he scans the cans and peruses the produce (what penumbras!). He doesn’t push a cart, and he doesn’t go through the checkout line. Ginsberg is a grab-and-go shopper.

If shopping with Ginsberg is like coloring outside the lines, annotating his poem with Perusall is like reading beside the lines. ‘A Supermarket in California’ was one of the first poems I assigned for digital annotation.Student's digital highlights of a poem This e-learning tool allows individual students to highlight and comment on portions of a literary text, ranging from a single word or phrase to a sentence or cluster of sentences. (Persuall also works for images.) I give my students considerable freedom in doing their digital annotations. I tell them I’m not looking for anything momentous–just 5 specific things they notice in the poem and why they drew attention. I don’t require students to distribute their annotations across the entire text. I’m not grading their reading comprehension, either. So I always override the software’s automatic scoring, my own refusal to walk the line in my teaching. I just want to know something about how my students are reading some of the poems I assign, and to give them their own digital space to interact with one another’s annotations.

When students use Perusall, they comment on what they highlight–seeing the text on the left and their annotations on the right. Students can also hover over highlights to see how other readers annotated that portion of the text (see pink highlight below). I sometimes join these digital conversations to share a reference, ask a question, or prompt further comments. My students use their Perusall annotations to:

  • Comment on a range of textual elements, from individual words and images to sentences and form;
  • Build larger interpretations by connecting a particular textual element to their sense of the whole;
  • Connect the text to other texts we’ve read and to our class discussions;
  • Connect the text to cultural contexts, including some we did not cover in class;
  • Agree or disagree with peer interpretations;
  • Locate parts of the text that confused them;
  • Ask each other questions;
  • Validate one another as readers (especially if they reveal something personal, or are not experienced in reading poems).

students' digital annotations of a poemStudents do their Perusall annotations individually, outside of class. Some highlight 5 things in a single session. Others do the assignment across several logins, contributing to multiple conversations about common highlights. They sometimes do more than the required number of annotations, knowing that there is no extra credit for this sustained engagement.

My students are kinfolk to Ginsberg’s alternative shopper, moving through and across the straight lines of text. As Ginsberg reaches back to generative poets he has read (Federico García Lorca, Walt Whitman, William Blake), my students reach across to literature they have read and to one another. ‘An annotation is part of a story,’ Amanda Golden writes in her recent study of midcentury poets’ annotations of modernist literature. My students’ Perusall annotations tell a story about their own adventures in close reading, and they contribute to a larger story about forming reading communities through digital platforms. In this sense, Perusall assignments blur a key distinction that Golden points out in midcentury print culture, one in which ‘annotations necessarily differ from one’s thoughts while reading.’ When my students do these assignments, I don’t know if the annotations capture their initial thoughts as they read, their perspective after finishing their initial reading, or retrospective insights. My sense is that the composite of annotations is a mixture of all three.

Many of my students tell me this was their favorite assignment. When I debuted my Perusall pedagogy during remote pandemic teaching, a student wrote on the course evaluations that they enjoyed the sense of not reading alone. And this is another reason that ‘A Supermarket in California’ tells us as much about Perusall as the digital annotations tell us about the poem.

The annotations you see above come from my remotely taught undergraduate course on the American 1950s. One extended conversation generated from the culminating phrase in Ginsberg’s third-to-last stanza about leaving the supermarket and walking the solitary streets with his surrogate father, Walt Whitman: we’ll both be lonely (pink highlight). A student’s annotation begins: ‘In a poem that speaks often of being solitary, this line invokes a strange sense of togetherness.’ If there’s a more apt distillation of the poem’s affect that also captures the strange togetherness of remote teaching and learning, I haven’t found it. ‘By idolizing Whitman,’ another student wrote, ‘Ginsberg is able to find a compatriot against the heteronormative system.’ Another annotation points out that because of their sexuality, Ginsberg and his alternative family of gay writers are lonely ‘even when they walk past houses full of stereotypical ’50s nuclear families’ because ‘they are not allowed to love who they want.’ Here the interface of Ginsberg’s supermarket and Gen Z’s digital annotations links the McCarthyite 1950s to our current moment, one in which LGBTQ Americans once again face surveillance.

In his poem’s culmination, Ginsberg hails Whitman as lonely old courage-teacher. Perusall’s window into my students’ reading–and their reading communities–gives me courage in my classrooms and in these times. When we are lonely in going outside the lines, we are lonely together.  –MB

Sources:
Amanda Golden, Annotating Modernism: Marginalia and Pedagogy from Virginia Woolf to the Confessional Poets (Routledge, 2020)
Student Annotations reproduced by permission
1950s Grocery Store: – https://clickamericana.com/topics/culture-and-lifestyle/scenes-from-grocery-stores-supermarkets-of-yesteryear

1950s Yearbook Highlights: Tapping Digital Archives for Student Projects

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1950s coed posing by a red convertibleDo you remember how it felt to begin another full semester of remote learning in January 2021? While my students were scattered and attending class through their laptops or phones, I was facing my first semester teaching on Zoom and Canvas. I wanted to find a way to do group projects for my undergraduate course on the American 1950s (Desperate Domesticity). And I wanted to find a way for my students to feel included in their campus culture.

Since we were all learning remotely in the pandemic, we connected to campus by exploring1950s college students in library digitized versions of 1950s yearbooks on the University Archives website. (UF’s yearbook was called The Seminole back then.) Time traveling through these yearbooks augmented students’ understanding of the time period they were studying. We considered the rise of suburbia and the nuclear family, gender roles and gender rebellion, consumerism and corporate culture, the civil rights movement and alternative domesticities. The time period seemed strangely relevant to our own as we were spending more time cooking, cleaning, and hunkering down at home. We were living our own modes of desperate domesticity.

stage actor applying makeupMy students curated 1950s UF yearbooks for their Highlights, which you can now find on the University Archives projects page. (Click here)

I invite you to explore their takes on their 1950s counterparts and postwar campus culture. If you click on the 1955 yearbook, you’ll find my DIY guide to teaching with yearbooks. We discussed the 1955 issue in class, thinking about what kinds of information and insights yearbooks can offer. For example:

Where might you fit into the UF campus culture this yearbook depicts?
Are there ways you think you would not fit in?
What aspects of student life do you find missing in this yearbook? Who is missing?
What are key ways your life would change if you attended UF in the 1950s?

We invite you to time travel with us through our 1950s Yearbook Highlights project.

My students and I are grateful to our University Archivist, Sarah Coates, for virtually visiting our Zoom squares and hosting our projects on the website. I also thank her predecessor Peggy McBride for showing 1950s yearbooks and other campus artifacts to my previous classes. – MB

1950s male college students outside a restaurant

Limericks for Oktoberfest

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Beer Steins on a tableI teach literature, and I am a literary beer reviewer. I write about literary-themed craft brews like the Leaves of Grass series from Bell’s (a tribute to poet Walt Whitman). And I often write about craft beer in a literary form: the limerick. My latest beer limericks for the Massachusetts Review pay tribute to Oktoberfest; some verses get tongue-twisty if you read them aloud. I parse Märzenbiers from Massachusetts, Michigan, and Colorado–plus a Festbier lager from St. Petersburg, Florida. Enjoy in moderation.

If you can’t fly to Munich, don’t worry –
American brewers have scurried
To release in due season
The beer lover’s reason
For drinking outdoors before flurries.

When it’s Autumn and weather behaves,
Tis the malts that the beer lover craves.
Don’t put pumpkin in beer!
(That’s for baked goods, my dear.)
Märzen madness tastes good, not depraved. . . .

You can read the rest of “Märzen Madness and Florida Festbier” right here.
-MB

My Pandemic Triptych

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toilet paper, The Iliad, Mr. Heater propane tank topperMarch 2021 is winding down, and we’ve been reading countless accountings of the pandemic’s one-year anniversary. I can distill my pandemic year in three images of entangled worlds and warped time.

PANEL 1 (Spring 2020): In the Lavatory of Late Capitalism. I was a latecomer to the Great U.S. Toilet Paper Panic of April 2020. By then the bathroom tissue shelves in grocery, pharmacy, and big box stores were as empty as the city streets. Social media chronicled the agony of no supply and the ecstasy of scoring rolls. Late night searches on Amazon were either fruitless or dubious. An emblem of late capitalism manifested briefly – tiny rolls of Chinese 3- or 4-ply Bath Tissue packaged with slogans such as Live a Happy Life with Good Quality Paper or The feeling of falling in love with you. The miraculous wood pulp product claimed to be Professional yet Silky Smooth, Strong yet Ultra Soft. While I hunkered down at home, it traveled from China to Finland to Florida. By the time my panic paper arrived nearly two months later, the product name had changed from Tianwei to Envision.

PANEL 2 (Summer/Fall 2020): Plague, Mullets, and Stasis on the Trojan Plains. By Summer many literary types were reading Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) and Albert Camus’s The Plague (1947), finding a timeliness in literary classics. Having lost track of time, I turned to the even slower time of Classical epic: The Iliad. The Achaean and Trojan armies have sweltered in place for ten years when the tale begins, and Apollo strikes the former with a deadly plague. The novel coronavirus surged through our population like Athena surged across the ancient battlefields, inducing Hate and Panic: Assault to freeze the blood. By day outbursts from angry men filled my daily news; by night outbursts from raging Greeks spilled from Homer’s lines as freely as blood. The sprinting Abantes and their fierce mullets put my DIY hair care to shame. Sometimes days or even weeks could pass before I returned to the book. I would pass seamlessly from my homebound stasis into the stately crawl of Homeric time.

PANEL 3 (Winter 2020/2021): I, Propane Robot, Will Invade Your Pandemic Porch. By Summer my husband and I had learned that our social life would be a socially-distanced one on the front deck. We launched our #CoronaCafe, prompted by friends who wanted to keep dining out together. By Summer’s end we’d rigged up outdoor fans and personal neckwear fans to keep our dinner parties going. We hung a string of lights when we Fell Back to Standard Time. But even Florida winters are not ideal for outdoor dining at night. Right on cue–when the tall patio heaters were out of stock–Mr. Heater materialized on Amazon. He was WALL-E perched atop a propane tank, a futuristic centaur. Mr. Heater’s glowing eyes stared unblinkingly into our own, transfixing us long after our guests had departed, after the Red Planet had risen above our cul-de-sac. Our propane robot transported us beyond this pandemic Earth, our own Perseverance landing us where we began at home.  -MB

The Milledgeville Quiz: Who Said It?

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woman sitting on steps outside her home
FOC outside her Milledgeville home


Born 96 years ago today in Savannah, American fiction writer Flannery O’Connor lived much of her life in the family farm house in Milledgeville, GA. I recently taught her short stories again in my courses on the American 1950s. O’Connor’s birthday and Flannery (this week’s American Masters program) have brought Milledgeville to the media again. The town’s other claim to fame is recently elected U.S. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, born there in 1974. O’Connor died in Milledgeville in 1964. Can you guess who said the following: a Flannery O’Connor character or Congresswoman Greene?

THE QUIZ:

  1. “You don’t want to cuss. You wanna talk in a very educated manner.”
  2. “In my time, children were more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else. People did right then.”
  3. “See that? Our library is full of that.”
  4. “Why, I think there aren’t enough good country people in the world! I think that’s what’s wrong with it!”
  5. “You’ll find out one of these days, you’ll find out what Reality is when it’s too late!”
  6. “I really, truly pray this is true. This really may be happening. The level of importance is good versus evil.”
  7. “It’s ridiculous. It’s simply not realistic. They should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence.”
  8. “I’m a very regular American.”
  9. “and then the militant, giant woman that’s bigger than my husband, bigger than most men, practically attacks me….”
  10. “She would of been a good woman, if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
street view of an intersection and buildings
Downtown Milledgeville today

-MB

SOURCES:
Flannery O’Connor Documentary Wins New Award from Library of Congress (New York Times)
Flannery O’Connor, The Complete Stories
‘Nobody Listened to Me’: The Quest to Be MTG (Politico)
Trip Advisor

Answers: MTG: 1, 3, 6, 8, 9   FOC 2, 4, 5, 7, 10

FOC characters: 2 (the grandmother in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”); 4 (Mrs. Hopewell in “Good Country People”), 5 (Mrs. May in “Greenleaf”),  7 (Julian’s mother in “Everything That Rises Must Converge”), 10 (The Misfit in “A Good Man Is Hard to Find”)