No new shinies!

Advice to myself.

All this spring I have struggled to juggle multiple projects: the book I want to finish, the conference paper that had to get written, the project I’m supposed to be working on. There was a lot of thrashing (see also previous posts on the topic). A chapter revision did not go well; it was a struggle to write paragraphs for a short section of it, the outline kept shifting around, progress was frustratingly slow. The conference paper proceeded in fits and starts, and I finished it the day before the conference began. Intermittently I tried to think about planning classes for next year, and did well enough at listing possible things to read, not so well at cutting the possibilities down to a manageable number for one 15-week term. The other research project . . . I’ve already confessed to enough trouble, so let us draw a veil.

I know perfectly well that I work better when I can concentrate on one main project. It’s not as if I have an ADHD brain that thrives on switching from one task to another. Certainly the new shiny thing always looks wildly attractive when the old one is troublesome, but pursuing the shiny object just leads to bogging down in a swamp of unfinished projects and losing the thread in all of them (apologies for mixed metaphor, but you see the sort of effect this situation has on my brain).

I got home and thought about things I need to do. In addition to the still-in-progress chapter, the Other Project, the class planning, and the possibility of developing the conference paper for publication, I was supposed to write another conference paper, related to a different chapter of the book.

Reader, I pulled the plug. I withdrew from that conference. The relief was huge. I then sat down and planned to focus for two weeks on the chapter revision which I will send out to a friend to look over, two weeks on class planning, one month on the Other Project, then get back to the book via the chapter a portion of which would have been the second conference paper. Following this plan, I worked on the chapter revision every day for three days, and while not finished, it is behaving itself and I expect I will be able to finish it in the allotted time, because I’m not thrashing and worrying about the other things that I’m not doing, nor am I putting it down in order to work on something else with a deadline.

Yay!

Only then I looked at the CFP for next year’s Medieval Academy meeting, and thought about the last conference paper (the one I just finished a few weeks ago), how little I was able to convey in 20 minutes, how well that material would fit at least two of the themes, and how I know a couple of people who might be interested in contributing to a session. Plus I could visit my friend who lives outside of Boston. It would be such a great opportunity! It’s nearly a year off; surely in that time I could . . .

No. No, no, no.

Or rather, let’s think of it this way: Yes to working calmly and peacefully on one thing at a time, to self-imposed rather than external deadlines. Yes to finishing my book. Yes to having next year’s classes planned and assignments written before the semester’s maelstrom drags me down, so that I can (yes!) teach and write and grade and do committee work and read and write in an organized way instead of constantly robbing Peter to pay Paul as the term rushes on and I realize I have not posted an assignment. Yes to putting in one solid month on Other Project in between book chapters, as a sort of palate cleanser. Yes to going back, eventually, to the April-conference-paper material and doing something with it when I can give it my full attention, when I’m not juggling a whole batch of other at-best-distantly-related things. Yes to visiting my friend near Boston sometime when I’m not distracted by a conference. Perhaps, eventually, yes to giving a paper at the MAA, when it really fits my priorities.

No new shinies, but yes to finishing the old well-burnished objects.

Before the month is out

I’m back to staring out my study window at the wide expanse of green grass (in my neighbor’s yard) dotted with dandelions (in mine), appreciating the chance to observe a sparrow pecking at dandelion seeds (please, eat them all!) and a squirrel popping down the game trail from the peonies by the fence to the deck. I’ve particularly enjoyed the restfulness of this scene over the last week, when I’ve been nursing a cold. I regret having missed the period of a few days when my view would have been pink, thanks to the magnolia tree outside my window. However, the lilac on the other side of the house is doing its best to make up.

Before the cold, I was away for a couple of weeks, in two lovely French cities one of which was Paris. I’ve never before visited Paris in April, and it was pretty much all it’s cracked up to be. Although there was often rain in the afternoons, the temperatures were decent, and Sir John and I were lucky and managed to arrive at museums just before the rain started. We didn’t see as much as we would have liked, thanks in part to the onset of aforesaid illness, but staring out at a classically Hausmannian building was certainly a change from my green fields. I was a little surprised at how little I could make out of the interiors and their inhabitants, even when the lights were on and curtains open: the angle, the trees, the wrought-iron railings on the balconies, all conspired against a really clear view. I also thought that differences in layout and furniture might make it harder to “read” a Parisian interior, for an American used to American lifestyles and ideas of what is or ought to be on display.

Life is so different in a place where you can go downstairs and find shops, restaurants, banks, a post office, a drugstore, all without crossing a street. (OK, there are the four flights of stairs to take into account!) Sir John said he did not at all miss driving while we were away. My car was in the shop while we were gone, and I was glad to get it back, and also to have the green vista again; nonetheless, I know what he means, and I definitely enjoyed the convenience of truly dense city life. In some ways, our last house was the worst of all possible worlds: in a town dense enough for neighbors to be a nuisance (not dense enough for them to rely on city-style pretence that neighbors don’t exist), yet sprawly enough to make a car necessary (but slow, so slow, with all the stoplights and stop signs). Although we have to drive a lot where we are now, it’s easier driving, with big multi-lane streets and well-timed stoplights.

It does make me think. Where do I really want to be? Maybe what I have is perfect, a country-ish life with vacations in cities, the other way around from how Parisians live.

See’s house, again

This time from Mothers, Daughters (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1977 [and what an amazing name for a publishing company]).

“A patio slanting and slanting, off to the edge of a jagged sandstone cliff. . . . The sun, every morning, coming up at a slightly different point on the ridge across the canyon from her living room. The sun, every evening, going down against an infinitesimally different wedge of green . . . . Ruth went into the kitchen, put water on for coffee, bent over the oven to light it, slammed the broiler door, shivered, ran for her robe and slippers, put on a record. The kids were asleep in the living room, where she usually slept; they had colds and the nights in their basement rooms were freezing” (1-2).

I don’t know why Ruth gets involved with the horrible Marc Mandell. She knows about him from high school, from friends of hers who went out with him. He’s handsome, and has nice clothes: “His immense, tall, shambling, rangy form was covered as it always had been by the very best. And much the same best as they had in Marshall High: soft blue shirt, soft, thick gray cashmere sweater, soft gray slacks.” (39)

But Eve Babitz clued me in about Marshall High. That place is bad news for real California girls:

Gabrielle is chewing

(Slow Days, Fast Company [New York: Knopf, 1977], 155-7).

It’s only in putting this post together that I realize the two books came out the same year. I’m pretty sure I read Babitz first, by several years (probably I first read both between 1985 and 1995). In many ways, Mothers, Daughters is the kind of “literary fiction” I categorize as “people ruining their lives by making stupid decisions” (just as much a genre as mystery or romance, if you ask me), and I don’t like it nearly as much as Golden Days. But if you focus on setting, the contrast between LA and British Columbia (where Ruth goes with Marc) is brilliantly done. The landscape, Ruth’s house, Marc’s hotel, other buildings and views, support the characters and plot. And by the end of the book, Ruth is back in the Topanga Canyon house. Her life isn’t ruined, it just took a detour for awhile.

If you belong in Topanga, beware of people who went to Marshall. As for standing in for a Midwestern high school, I’m sorry, but movie people have no clue about the midwest.

Dodie Smith, meet Mary Quant

Actually, to provide a bit of continuity with my last post, first here’s a quotation about considering what one might still do with the remainder of one’s life:

Dodie Smith, The Town in Bloom (Little, Brown, 1965), 270. Moira at Clothes in Books had a great post on this book (linked from this more recent one) and it’s available on archive.org, so I read it. Loved!

The main action of the book takes place in the 1920s, but there’s a 40-years-on frame, which gets us to the 1960s, and here’s where Mary Quant comes in, though I also like the sound of the Edwardian-style grey chiffon on the even-more-elderly lady at the start of the passage. The narrator does not describe the details of her outfit:

Dodie Smith, The Town in Bloom (Little, Brown, 1965), 270. It’s hard now to imagine black woollen tights as a “vice,” but expectations about women’s clothing were so much stricter in the past.

Still brooding on retirement

LRU is undergoing this decade’s budget crisis (see here and here for the last time I got worked up enough to blog about it, though really, we’ve been having budget problems since the late 90s; I think by now it’s more chronic than crisis). So, once again, it’s a comfort to think that I can retire if this means a lot of nonsense gets dumped on my plate. But then we have again the problem of what I’d do (besides research and reading fiction). The Grumpies just had a post that relates to this, and Delagar’s response to it also resonates with me, though we currently live somewhere I like a lot and I’m not enthusiastic about the idea of moving again, which would be necessary in order to get any sort of degree in Classics (because it’s not a degree offered very many places anymore, sadly for my inner nineteenth-century schoolboy). I read through all the answers to an AAM “Ask the Readers” about things to do in retirement, which mainly clarified for me the things I don’t want to do.

I do not want to do volunteer work. If I work, I want to be paid for it. Better women than I am worked hard for the right to be paid for their labor, and while I respect the achievements of volunteers, the idea of joining them does not sit well with me. In the first place, having spent my career teaching, I feel no need to “give back”: I gave at the office. In the second, I respect money. Even a part-time job that didn’t pay much would make me feel that I needed to show up for it, because they paid me. If I were volunteering and had to deal with someone annoying or incompetent, I’d just say, “You know what, you do not pay me enough to deal with this! In fact, you don’t pay me at all, so screw you guys, I’m going home.” I think I should save us all the trouble and not even start. I liked Doodlebug’s comment: “I have volunteered but being a type A personality and being involved with no power to change anything, improve inefficiencies, etc., was hard. I do not volunteer anymore.”

Oh, and I don’t want to serve on the board of an organization: that is committee work, which is one of the things I will gladly leave behind when I retire.

Further, or maybe this is back to “in the first place,” I don’t care about helping people. I like teaching, but it supports a research habit. I like to teach the topics that interest me. I don’t want to teach for the love of the process, and certainly not because I want to influence young minds. If anything, I want the young minds to influence me, to keep me from succumbing to “kids-these-days”-itis. I’d be happy to do something that put me around young people, but I don’t want the young people to be the focus. Regarder ensemble dans la même direction.

When I read comments like CM’s (“This is also a great opportunity to make connections within a specific local community — so if you’d like to meet local politicians, or artists, or activists, or families with young children, you can choose an organization that serves and/or is run by those people”), I just say nope! I do not want to meet any of those people. I don’t want to hold babies or work with children. If I worked at an animal shelter I’d just want to take all the cats home. Cleaning up parks . . . worthwhile and within my capabilities, but see above about wanting to be paid for my time; I’d rather work on my own garden, and I don’t think I’d have the energy to do both.

The suggestions to study something had me looking at various tolerably-local “lifelong learner” programs. Some of them have attractive topics, and some of these options are led by respected scholars. But they make a point of no exams, no papers, no degree, just the “fun parts” of learning. Well, call me weird (I’ll embrace it), but I like exams and papers. I want to be able to show that I have attained a certain level of mastery. So, like Delagar, I’d want to get the degree, not just dabble in “fun courses.” I do not want to be a dilettante.

I can see that the people who have lots of crafty hobbies (not me!), and/or are a lot more extroverted than I am, probably are much better off when it comes to retirement. I’m a bit of a misanthrope. I recognize that I need some interaction with other people to keep from getting weird. But I really don’t want to do all the extroverted do-stuff-with-people group things. If I lived in Santa Cruz or somewhere similar (looking at you) hiking would be a great activity for me, but my mostly-flat section of the Midwest just isn’t that interesting for outdoor activities, not to mention being too hot or too cold for about 2/3 of the year.

So I may have to just deal with whatever nonsense is coming down the pike this time, so that I can keep on keeping on at LRU.

Paper and Kindle

I frequently have two fun books going at the same time*, one electronic for reading at the gym, or during the day, one paper, for bath** or bedtime reading.***

Lately I’ve been getting curious overlaps between the two, such as shared character names or family constellations. One example: Lucy Pym of Tey’s Miss Pym Disposes shuffling around my brain alongside Lucy Eversley Kahn of Jo Walton’s Farthing. They are both involved in murder mysteries, after all, and there is a certain similarity of tone between Tey’s narration of her Lucy’s adventures and the first-person narration of Walton’s Lucy.****

Then we have the families of the hero of A Civil Contract (Heyer) and Brat Farrar (Tey again).***** They’re not precisely similar, but I kept thinking, “Wait, wasn’t there another brother who died while he was at Oxford?” during Brat, and “Wait, where’s the identical twin?” when reading the Heyer.

I suppose this is one route to fan fiction.

*Don’t hate me because I’m a reading addict.+

**I have been known to put the i-pad mini in a ziplock bag when I can’t put down the electronic book and want to continue reading in the tub.

***Not that avoiding blue light in the evening does nearly as much to prevent insomnia as it is popularly supposed to, but if I do so I can at least tell people who want to give me the standard advice about sleep hygiene that yes, I am already doing all those things and the root of the problem lies elsewhere.

****One of the things that drew me to Farthing was precisely the tone of Lucy’s opening chapter, in which I thought Walton did an excellent job of imitating the Mitfordian upper-crust airhead who isn’t nearly as silly as she appears.++

*****I seem to be on a Tey kick lately, partly because Jo Walton seems to have found her inspirational, and also because some of her books are available cheaply for Kindle.

+ It’s true that I used to read research-related material at the gym. I’m not sure what happened to that. It’s partly that the machines I use for cardio no longer have stands suitable for resting physical books on (my i-pad mini is hard enough to situate), but is it that I coax myself to the gym with the bribe of fun reading, or that it’s difficult to get PDFs and electronic books as they appear from LRU’s library to display at a reasonable size for reading on the previously-mentioned device while also exercising?

++ I did notice occasional failures of idiom, as for example “knocked up” to mean “pregnant” rather than “tired out” or “put together roughly and hurriedly.” I imagine traveled Britons were aware of the American meaning, but in a world in which the US never entered WWII, it seems even less likely that an English aristocrat’s daughter would use the term in that sense, than it does in our world where American troops did, er, knock up British women from time to time.

Quant and McCardell

Or, capsule wardrobes in the 1950s and 1960s, according to Mary and Claire.

Quant writes, “I came back to London bewitched by the American co-ordinates . . . . I would suggest a wardrobe in miniature like this. Take a pinafore dress, a jacket, skirt, sweater, pants and shirt that all go happily together and you have umpteen outfits. You have a sleeveless dress, a dress and jacket, a suit, separate skirt and sweater or skirt and shirt or shirt worn over the sweater with the skirt and trouser suit. A girl would need only a topcoat to complete a host of different-looking all-occasion clothes. And there need be positively no colour problems. Everything should be checked or plain or spotted in colours that go together.” Quant by Quant (New York: Putman’s Sons, 1965), 109.

One of her inspirations for this American notion of coordinating clothing was no doubt Claire McCardell, a generation older than Quant, who designed for American suburban and city women, mainly wives to professional men, the sort of women who could afford to shop at high-end department stores, but who didn’t aspire to couture. Wikipedia says her five-piece separates wardrobe debuted in 1941. In 1956 she described it as follows: “The ideal piece-wardrobe for travel must have a short skirt, a long skirt, a bare top, a covered top, and a matching coat. . . . With this as a start, begin to add—a stole or a dressed-up cashmere sweater or a scarf. A packable hat—the twist of jersey or satin for instance. Extra blouses. But remember, the five-piece wardrobe sets your color scheme. Anything you add, whether shoes or gloves or jewelry, must blend with this basic color scheme.” What Shall I Wear? The What, Where, When and How Much of Fashion (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1956), 134.

I can see that in some ways, McCardell represents exactly what Quant’s fashion rebelled against, but for her time and place, McCardell was practical and helpful in her recommendations to her target audience. “Put a large X beside that part of your schedule that puts you on view. Consider what role you play and your audience. . . . Let’s think specifically in terms of: THE TIME, THE PLACE, THE CLOTHES” (92-94). And she starts with the Suburban Morning, dropping husband at the train and then doing “the marketing.” There are three basic “good-looking early morning outfits.” First is pants or shorts; second is “one wonderful dress (per season)”; third is “separates, for all weather, all year long.” Interestingly, she describes the first two types of outfit in detail, whereas the separates are just “skirts or pants to go with vests, shirts, jackets, varied day after day, to go to the station five days in a row, never looking the same.”

But she’s very prescriptive about the pants. “Succes of this outfit depends upon the cut of the pants, the length of the shorts, and the kind of top you choose, the shoes you wear, and what you do about your head. If slacks: real ones; not toreador, not too tight, not above ankle-length unless you are young, slim, and contemporary looking. Slacks are sensible, down-to-earth; toreador is cocktail hour. Not red, green, etc. Stick to monotones, or a conservative clan plaid. Both navy and black will show lint. [Wait, are we down to khaki or grey, if you’re not willing to wear plaid pants? I already want a pair of red toreador pants; damn the neighbors’ gossip.] Wear a tucked-in shirt or cashmere that blends, a leather or wool jacket if the weather calls for it. Shoes with no heel or low heel, but not ballet slipppers. . . . . No hat and well-groomed hair preferable. Be careful about gypsy scarf arrangements to cover curlers or confusion. I can’t honestly imagine any kind of hat for this sort of spotlight so you’d better have done your hair.” (94-95)

I think a beret or newsboy cap would be great with this kind of outfit, actually.

As to the dress, she says, “One that doesn’t remotely resemble either a Mother Hubbard [oh, this is good, coming from the woman who designed the “Monastic Dress”] or a dress that isn’t good enough for town any more. For warm weather: Classic shirtwaist, belted or sashed. A scoop-necked sheath, not too scooped. Not a sunback unless your town is very country-store casual. Fabrics: cool ones—cotton or linen. Colors: bright as you please. Shoes: little heels, pump or sandal. Head-coverings: small-brimmed hat, straw or piqué, if you like hats. For cooler weather: Suit; flannel or tweed or corduroy. Easy coat in wool or leather for really cold days. But please don’t be all matching: tweed hat, coat, bag too. Too many suburbanites are.” (95)

I wonder if there was a difference in style between the suburban suit and the city suit, particularly when the material was flannel. Having read the vast quantity of early and mid-twentieth century British novels that I have, I relegate tweed to the country and corduroy to gardening clothes.

Under “City Living,” McCardell notes that this woman “will need far more round-the-clock clothes, especially if she has a job to go to. And here the piece wardrobe serves her most strategically. A jacket covers a bare-top during the day, comes off when she goes on to a dinner date. Jewelry is switched to show that it is after five. A short skirt is exchanged for a long one” (103). The working woman appears to be single. “This year’s beau may account for changes in your wardrobe. Does he take you to lunch at the Club or at the Museum of Modern Art? The first date calls for city restaurant clothes, the smart touch of eight-button length gloves, beautiful shoes, a handsome bag, the gleam of jewelry. The second date will find you surrounded by art students, art lovers. Their clothes will be casual, often bohemian. You will feel overdressed if you look like a page from a glossy Fashion magazine” (105).

Huh. Did society ladies never visit the Museum of Modern Art? Or did they dress in their version of bohemian, when they did? Now that I would like to have pictures of!

Clara and Penelope

This morning, I was Clara Mayhem-Doome, putting in a solid morning’s work, shifting from project to project at regular intervals. In the afternoon, following a swim and late lunch, I poured a glass of wine and became Penelope (or does Penelope stick to herb tea? Maybe the wine is still Clara), pulling dried sage leaves off their stems and putting them in glass bottles, then chopping ginger to preserve in vodka. We had fun.

Quant, age, boyfriends

I remembered that Mary Quant and Alexander Plunkett got together pretty early in their lives, and I remembered some descriptions of his clothes (of course I did!). “He wore his mother’s pyjama tops as shirts, generally in that colour known as ‘old gold’ . . . in shantung. His trousers also came out of his mother’s wardrobe. Beautifully cut and very sleek fitting, the zip was at the side and they were in weird and wonderful variations of purple, prune, crimson and putty. The trouble was that they came to a stop half-way down the calf of the leg so there was always a wide gap of white flesh between the tops of the Chelsea-type boots he wore and the end of the trouser legs.” (2)

Because in the next paragraph, Quant refers to Plunkett growing six inches at ages 15-16, I had the impression that they met in high school (or UK equivalent). She also says in this area that her “old boy friends . . . . became obsolete” (3). Also, “At sixteen, both Alexander and I thought of ourselves as pretty advanced” (4). OK. And then I got to a bit I didn’t remember at all, about a pre-Alexander time when Quant was “in the middle of a mad love affair with a man at least twice my age who seemed to me then to be absolutely super and marvellous and extremely elegant and worldly. . . . I really hero-worshipped him. The trouble was that I knew he was having an affair with a woman of his own age” (20-21). Hmm. Mad love affair for her, indulgent flirtation for him? I thought maybe this was a teenage crush. But a couple of pages on, “He used to come to my home and my parents encouraged him like mad. They thought he was old enough to have a steadying influence on me” (22).

Well, that rather brought me up short. True that in the post-WWII era, girls tended to marry quite young, and true also that in the UK there is a long tradition of women marrying men substantially older than themselves (Marianne Dashwood and Colonel Brandon, for instance, and other real-life examples in the 20th century). And I’m not shocked by age differences between adult couples. But parents encouraging, what, a 15-year-old and a 30-year-old? Twenty and 40 is not much better.

But then I went to Wikipedia, which told me that Mary Quant was born in 1930. Suddenly the loops and ellipses of her timeline made a lot more sense. She was not a small child during the war, or a teenager loopily attempting to get into the fashion business in 1960. Her degree from Goldsmiths’ College (where she met Plunkett) was awarded in 1953, so she was probably around 20 when they met, not 16. In her memoir, she represents herself as younger than her real age so as to appeal to the target audience for her clothes. I began to doubt that her crush, affair, whatever, was really on a man double her age: maybe double the age she pretended to be.

The clothes are the real point. “Little high-waisted flannel dresses with white stockings, or alternatively, flannel tunics over red sweaters with red stockings to match” (83). “Knee-high cowboy boots worn with fantastically short skirts; high-waisted tweed tunic suits with tweed knickerbockers” (95). “A shiny mock-crocodile batwing top over black tights” (127). “One day I pulled on an eight-year-old boy’s sweater for fun. . . . And, in six months, all the birds were wearing the skinny-ribs that resulted” (153).

The best pictures are in the book. They’re great. But I’m not sure I wouldn’t like even better to get my hands on Plunkett’s mother’s trousers and pyjamas.

All quotations from Mary Quant, Quant by Quant (New York: Putnam’s, 1966).

Mary Quant

Sometime last semester in the university library, when I was minding my own business on the way to the Z’s*, I wandered through the T’s and my eye fell on Quant by Quant, which I last read in my mid-teens, probably in the stacks of the local public library**, though I might have checked it out and taken it home.

Well, of course I had to take the book out and get reacquainted with it. The part I remembered most vividly was about a holiday gone wrong, on which she hated Malta, traded in her return ticket for a “leapfrog ticket,” and hopped around Europe only to find that it was raining everywhere she went.*** “I cried all the time quite shamelessly.” In Rome, she checked into a hotel where she got a private bath (in the 1950s or early 1960s, whichever this was, that would have been a big deal), and “When I was not actually sleeping, I spent the next four days lying in the bath [reading]. . . . I managed to fix the taps so that I could have a trickle of hot water running all the time and adjusted the plug so that just the right amount of water ran away. I never left my room. All I had to eat was the breakfast the waiter brought in the mornings. Obviously the hot baths were a terribly good idea. I was told afterwards that even lunatics respond to this sort of treatment. one morning I woke up and I knew I was cured. Suddenly I felt on top of the world again. I was able to cope with anything. Every bit of the depression was gone.”****

I wonder if this vignette had anything to do with my love of baths, and reading in them, or if it just confirmed for me that I was on the right track.

Other parts of Quant’s memoir were much less familiar*****, or struck me very differently now than I expect they did when I was 14 or so. More on those in another post.

*In the Library of Congress system of call numbers, Z is for books about books.
**My high school had an open campus, in those days, and the public library was barely two blocks away. I spent a lot of time in its stacks, usually in the biography section.
***I had a European trip like that once.
****Mary Quant, Quant by Quant (New York: Putnam’s, 1966), 102.
*****One reason why I wonder if I just browsed the book in the stacks rather than reading it properly.