It was last May. I was on my way back from a pop culture conference in Calgary. Prior to and throughout that trip, I had been casting around for some kind of writing target. I’ve written before about how, when I first undertook writing for its own sake, I found I had nothing to write about except my big stupid feelings, either my sorrow over the death of my cat Peanut or my shame and rage about failing on the academic job market. And whatever I produced on either of those topics was usually all choked up, either with sentimental garbage about how one special cat taught me how to love or a bunch of melodramatic whining about how stupid I’d been. I needed to open things up, I needed to think about something else. I read books about the writing life. I read Stephen King’s On Writing and Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I felt better. I could look around me and see things to write. I could look up and feel inspired by airport architecture. But I lacked direction. Nothing was adding up.
At the pop culture conference in Calgary, I went to a panel about graffiti. I can’t remember much about any of the projects presented, but I do remember being struck, hard, by the idea that people often use graffiti as a way to inhabit a space, if only for the time it takes to tag a stop sign. It made me think about what can happen when we’re mindful about being where we are (with or without spray paint.)
It’s funny, because I have no interest in graffiti-ing anything, and though I’ll occasionally stop and take notice of a particularly vivid or weird piece of graffiti, more often than not it just joins the mass of visual city noise. But this panel on graffiti helped me to articulate something that I’d only been intuiting since I started casting around for a writing target: as I walk across the Smoot Bridge, or past the S-Curved steps on my way to Davis, or along the Mystic to the library, as I look up and across the many rooftops that jump out in sharp relief against the bright blue sky, I dig into where I am and I find sources for things I might say. Where I live can be a writing target…but how to begin?
Instagram. Really. Graffiti led me to Instagram, a platform I had avoided and scoffed at ever since I learned of its existence. Just eat your food, people! Come on! But, sitting in that Sheraton conference room, taking in the array of graffiti images captured in cities, small towns, and on railway cars, I realized that with Instagram I could capture images of my own. I could accumulate a stylized portfolio of visuals that hit me somehow, and then maybe I could figure out how to write about them. I could even use the captions to take notes for later.
The colors and layers of this Meow Mile pic really grabbed me, and it turned out to be a useful way to introduce the characters in my life: Tim, Iris, Lateegra, and the idea of Peanut (whose love taught me how to….yuck, you get it.) My Meow Mile was my first post, written before I really knew what this blog was going to be. What it lacks in coherence I think it makes up for in cuteness…a cheap trick, to be sure.
The point of all this: In a nutshell, winter kills the muse. My Instagram has been running on fumes for months. We’ve got a few pictures of the inside of my house, or a selfie of me in a unicorn horn (because, one must!) but otherwise, just nothing. Nothing I see makes me want to write. And the longer I go without writing, the harder it is to write. In desperation, I went back and read my earlier posts — cringed a bit, copy-edited some — and generally embarked upon a labyrinthine meta adventure, thinking about thinking about writing this blog.
They are no longer shoulder height, and in many places the city has come and carried them away, but most sidewalks in Medford are still narrowed by massive snow embankments. Now that March is here, the temperatures rise and fall so that the snow melts and unmelts over and over. The topmost layer of these embankments has accumulated a month of filth, so that the lacy crystalline fingers that have formed through repeated melting and unmelting glisten brown, blackish, and gray.
Oh, and of course, yellow.
Occasionally, we get to sidestep other gifts left behind by neighborhood dogs and their weary walkers. The embankments have stolen the strip of grass between the street and the sidewalk — the canine’s usual rest area. Apparently the humans tasked with ushering our neighborhood dogs out to go on the snow-choked sidewalk can’t handle their usual bend-and-scoop. They are undone by the miserable, ever-present walls of refrozen snow and filth.
Yes, this is disgusting. This is what walking in Medford has become. (But poor Medford. It isn’t just Medford. It’s the entire greater Boston area. Dis-Gusting.)
I love to walk in and around Medford. I walk as much as I possibly can, especially since the buses are as choked with irritable commuters as the sidewalks are choked with filthy snow. I am always wearing my bean boots these days. I’ve had to plan my work apparel around them. This resulted in the unintentional February uniform of bean boots, slim-cut corduroys, button-downs under sweaters, and a maybe a blazer to dress it up a bit. I have four pairs of corduroys, each in a different playful color, but if I never see my corduroys again, it will be too soon.
Despite wardrobe weariness, despite filthy snow, despite the penguin’s gait I must adopt on stretches of sidewalk that have become solid ice, I walk. Every day I skip the bus and head from my place, past Tufts, up Winthrop, down Curtis, through Teele Square to the Davis T stop, and then off to work. On the weekends, I walk either from my house down to the Mystic River and the library near Medford Square, or around Tufts campus, over to Ball Square in Somerville, then down Willow to the bike path, through Davis Square and back.
Last April, on my usual walk to the T, I got the idea to start making notes and taking pictures on my walks to try to document what it’s like for me to inhabit my town this way. All year long, this is what I do. When the sky is blue and the sun is shining, the houses, trees, and flowers all electrify with color. The world jumps out at me. I remember well stopping on my way up the hill on Winthrop Street and just staring at the S-curved steps carved into the hillside that leads up to Carmichael Hall. I love those steps. Walking here is a comfort and an inspiration. But not so much among the dank glistening of sidewalk embankments.
Last Sunday when, for the fifth time in twenty minutes, I realized shovelers had skipped the corners and I was trapped in a snow maze that would likely circle ever inward upon itself, I realized that though I never quit walking, I’d been doing it out of defiance, no longer out of love. The only joy to be had in my walks these days comes from my sense of pride at not giving up. My eyes rarely unlock from the slippery sidewalk in front of me, but I’m no quitter. This is a thin kind of joy.
But today we lost an hour, the sky is blue, and the sun will be up until well after six. When spring finally comes, we’ll see a parade of perennials: crocuses, grape hyacinths, daffodils, tulips, irises, roses, lilacs, peonies, rhododendrons, hostas, hydrangeas, echinachea, black-eyed susans, and others whose names I’ve never learned, and some surprise guests, like the totally unexpected color explosion I stumbled upon in my neighborhood last September. Not five minutes before I’d been complaining that we’d run out of flowers for the flower parade. Then I almost ran into this bank of bright pink.
Moments after I cheerily posted My Snow Panic two weeks ago, I received an email I’d been kind of dreading.
Back in July, I submitted the third iteration of My Middlemarch Article to a third scholarly journal of Victorian literary and cultural studies. After seven months, I got my rejection.
Feelings were mixed: I was not surprised; I was tremendously disappointed; I understood where the reviewers were coming from; I was certain they hadn’t actually paid attention to what I was trying to do, which pissed me off…or they didn’t care…which in the end, is on me. Woe. Is. Me.
If I were submitting a different kind of writing to a different kind of journal — say, a short story to a literary journal — a reviewer’s inability to “get it” wouldn’t feel so bad. To a certain extent, it would still be “on me” if a reviewer didn’t get it, but the culture surrounding that kind of literary submission puts more responsibility on the reviewer. The piece just didn’t connect with that reader, but it might be just what the next editor is looking for. And guess what? In the world of literary journals, you can submit the same piece to multiple journals simultaneously. Not So in Scholarland.
Still, plenty of people who write scholarly articles adopt a similar view. They immediately send the manuscript off to the next journal on their list. I’ve heard beautiful stories. One place hated it, the next place accepted it with minor revisions. Dreams do come true!
Now, you know you can’t throw a dead skunk at the internet these days without hitting an article about the dying academic job market or the plight of the adjunct. Your dead skunk might even hit my rendition of “quit lit.” Less prolific are the articles about the sado-masochistic world of scholarly peer-review. Less prolific, but still plentiful. Here, in a piece for Vitae, Kirsten Bell pulls the curtain back on the world of scholarly journal publication. She also links to other articles she’s written in which she gently takes us all by the hand and shows us just how we’ve been effing everything up. (I kind of like her.) And in this piece for Slate, in her trademark over-the-top satirical style (which I love), Rebecca Schuman shows us just how messed up the peer-review process has become and proposes her modest, pragmatic solution.
So, I’m not alone in getting my guts wrenched by this process, nor am I alone in my understanding that I don’t have to let it wrench my guts. I can really just shoot this manuscript at the next scholarly journal of Victorian literary and cultural studies, provided I tweak some things to suit the new venue. And I’ve toyed with this option. But my reviewer called the coherence of my argument into serious question. Back to the drawing board, they said. Or strip it and sell it for parts.
I’m a planner. Even curled in the fetal position, I plan my next move. But things are different this time.
On the one hand, given that I’ve chosen a non-traditional sort-of academic path, I knew that I could just cut my losses and move on. I know about the “sunk-cost fallacy.” More misery doesn’t add value. I don’t need to publish like an assistant professor, because at this point it really doesn’t look like I’m gonna be one.
On the other hand, though I know that “publish or perish” doesn’t apply to me, I want to see My Middlemarch Article have some kind of life out there in the world, where people can read it. Truly, the only way to get your scholarship published is by not cutting losses and moving on. I’ve been working on Middlemarch for about a decade — from seminar paper, to conference presentations, to dissertation chapter, to first rejected article, to second rejected article, and now third rejected article. That’s a lot of time, and it feels like a lot of rejection, but compared to the wide field of scholarly publishing, it’s totally commonplace. We must take comfort in that, right? An article that is good can be rejected many, many times. And I’m no quitter.
As I sat there on my old IKEA loveseat, chromebook in my lap, reading and re-reading the reviewer’s report, crumpling and uncrumpling both facially and internally, I felt my personal sunk-costs. I’ve invested a lot of time and scholarly toil, but it’s more than that. Working on My Middlemarch Article, I’ve changed. I’ve gotten better. While Peanut the cat and I negotiated bites of tuna and nausea medication, I was also working hard on this article’s second iteration. As the new version came together, so much stronger than the first, I seemed to be coming together and getting stronger, too. I don’t know, the two things feel really knotted together. Even though they probably aren’t.
The journal I sent the second version to rejected it, but in the second paragraph of the letter they asked me to write a review essay about Victorian realism. I accepted, did the research, wrote it, and was told to expect it in the March issue. As I crumpled and uncrumpled on the loveseat the other day, I took a peak to see if it had come out yet. It had.
That helped. Then, the following Friday I got an email from a journal accepting a conference paper I’d given for publication. This one is on another gigantic George Eliot novel called Daniel Deronda. The ideas in this paper owe a lot to the work I’ve one on Middlemarch; it’s been in development for almost as long, too. The Deronda Paper will appear in this journal’s online, free, readable-by-anyone section in May. That makes two publications out of the ashes of My Middlemarch Article.
So, I’ve decided that I don’t have to decide what to do about My poor old rejected Middlemarch Article. I’ve decided that it can live in a drawer for a while. The article itself might not be out there in the world — it might never get out there in the world — but some of the stuff it helped create is out there now. For years, I’ve felt like some inmate of Tartarus, working and working to make something that seemed to crumble apart in my hands. But some things did actually come together. My stuff doesn’t look like I was told it ought to, but it is my stuff, and it isn’t too shabby.
It’s ok, I know it looked like you didn’t have any ideas that were going to cohere today, but you’ve got it now.
No, you’re right, I know, it totally isn’t your fault that you’ve been buried under a five-foot tall pile of snow. And right, the MBTA! The MBTA keeps shutting things down. And when it’s running, nobody wants to go anywhere because all buses and trains, when they turn up, are packed. And broken.
And, once you swallow your terror and get on board, there will be no sitting down. There will only be upright spooning with strangers, and then swaying together — human spoons, nested, swaying, pretending to be elsewhere. Thank god we’re all wearing big puffy coats to help us maintain the illusion of personal space.
Yesterday was nice, though, right? WBUR Meteorologist David Epstein said the weather wouldn’t get bad till late, so we could all keep our Valentine’s day plans. After gleefully trudging a mile and a half to Davis Square, grabbing, on impulse, 2 chocolate chip cookies for $2.49 at the Davis Au Bon Pain, you and Tim didn’t bat an eye at the mob of people waiting for the train. Delays due to a severe and mysterious medical emergency at the Park Street Station…Who Cares?! Love! Cookies! And the massive angry crowd of Valentines people was thinner at the back of the train! No stranger spooning! Score!
In spite of the falling snow, icy temperatures, wind, slush, and sidewalks-turned-giant snow caverns, you still got to the Russell House Tavern in Harvard Square for the raw bar, lobster sliders, and a lovely glass of bubbly. And then pen shopping at Bob Slate Stationers, followed by comics at The Million Year Picnic and a new pair of whale socks at Newbury Comics (which sells more socks now than it does comics…or music, but no matter. One must find one’s cool-ass socks somewhere.)
Over night, though. Wow. Here’s the neighborhood:
The beautiful, frozen MysticTim wanted to see the beautiful, frozen Mystic, so we walked over there. It usually takes us about five minutes to get to this bridge. This time, maybe twenty minutes? Twenty five?I could not see over the bridge’s snowbank to see the beautiful, frozen Mystic. But that’s ok!I can barely see over the top of this snow cavern, but that’s ok!My home is totally buried in snow, but that’s ok!And around the home, we have beautiful, terrifying Ice Dams that could fall and kill us, but that’s ok!Because under what other circumstances can I get away with rocking these cool-ass socks?
Yes, those socks are cool-ass, indeed. And it’s ok that the only thing you really have to blog about is the same thing that everyone in eastern Mass, parts of Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine has been talking about for the past month? I mean, it is a crazy huge amount of snow. Seriously.
Once, there was a silver seashell. It lived on a sun-porch in Jamaica Plain. Often, three women would visit the silver seashell. One by one, in pairs, or all together, the women would sit. Sometimes they would talk, but not always. But they would always smoke, and then they would stab the silver seashell with burning cigarettes.
Over and over and over.
The illustrator, who loved to draw the human anatomy (especially teeth), would stab the silver seashell with American Spirits. The graphic designer and the literary critic, apparently more colonial in their tastes, stabbed it with Parliaments. The literary critic was really a graduate student learning to be a literary critic. She was home in the day quite often and terribly nervous. She stabbed the silver seashell most of all.
The seashell was large and its silvery shimmer was spray-painted. The women sat, filling it and filling it with burning cigarettes, all the year round. Even in winter, when noreasters would fill the sun-porch up to the windows with snow.
The illustrator and the graphic designer were natives of Massachusetts and had been friends since college. The literary critic was new. She’d answered their advertisement. In their initial interview, the graphic designer showed the literary critic the sun-porch and said,
“We like to come out here, smoke some butts…”
The literary critic smiled knowingly, though she thought the designer had said “buds,” and she quickly began to calculate the extent to which she cared about living with habitual drug users. In two bats of the eye she decided she didn’t. It was a huge apartment on a lovely, tree-lined cul-du-sac in a hip neighborhood. And there was this sun-porch for smoking things with people who didn’t mind if you did. Later the three women laughed together about quirky regionalisms, like “butts,” “bubbler,” and “packy,” and the zany misunderstandings they often caused.
The literary critic had been smoking cigarettes for over ten years, ever since she was fourteen years old. Back then, it was anything she could get two fingers around, but when she found a gas-station attendant willing to play dumb and take her buck-eighty, she always ordered Marlboro Lights.
“Hard pack.”
In those days, she’d walk her block, find a hiding place, smoke and feel like James Dean. Later, she’d drive around town, smoking and singing. Her favorite song to sing was the Toadies “Possum Kingdom,” and she would always belt along: “Do You Wanna Die?”
The critic, then, was seventeen. The dark humor of this scene did not strike her. At the time.
The car she had at twenty-two was old, and one day its power windows stopped rolling down. So she popped the sun roof and filled her ashtray to overflowing. All future cars, she resolved, would have the manual windows you cranked down yourself.
But that was not Boston in cigarettes. She smoked a lot in those days, but in Boston it seemed she smoked constantly.
It may have happened anyway, but two dramatic events prompted the critic to inhabit the sun porch alongside the silver seashell. She had lived in Jamaica Plain for less than a week when her grandfather passed away. She returned from whence she came. She arrived at her boyfriend’s house.
“I just said goodbye to you,” he said, failing to conceal his irritation.
Back in JP after the funeral, the boyfriend broke up with her over the phone. Both cruel and cliche. There she sat: cell phone, sun porch, cigarettes, seashell. And there she stayed, for hours and hours, smoking and crying. And once school started, on the sun porch she could study while she smoked without ceasing. Away from the sun porch, she entered into the “every fifteen minutes” phase of life.
Once she met the man who would become her husband, she tried to cool it. Fortunately for her, he was a devotee of rock clubs, and he was understanding–a lot of people he knew and liked were smokers. She almost never smoked around him. But once apart, she would return to the sun porch–six in a row for the silver seashell.
As the relationship grew more serious, she tried to cut back. Once engaged, she quit. But her arms and legs grew great rashy flames in protest. (Nicotine tricks the body. It makes the body think that without nicotine, the body can’t survive.)
Once married, the critic’s attention returned to graduate school, comprehensive exams, confusion, frustration. She began to fantasize about fancy clove cigarettes, long, sleek cigarette holders, and abalone-encrusted cigarette cases. She would peruse these fanciful products online. And then one day she bought some clove cigarettes. She started smoking again.
She lived in Somerville near Harvard now. The seashell and sun porch were long gone. She sat on the stoop and just blatantly littered the sidewalk with cigarette ends. She got to know each of her neighbors this way. A near constant presence on the stoop. Or so it must have seemed to them.
But the every-fifteen-minutes phase was long past. From the first clove cigarette, for a period of five years she tried to keep herself to under six cigarettes a day. She took up collage. She played scrabble with herself. She did a lot of online shopping. She learned that Parliaments burn too quick, leaving her wanting more. She learned that American Spirits burn far longer, and she could have just one.
In October, 2011, two days after her husband was laid off and six months before she would defend her dissertation, the critic lit a cigarette as she waited for the bus. And then she made a ludicrous decision.
“Yeah. That’s gonna be the last one.”
And, more or less, it was.
A few years back, a student had complained on a course evaluation that they’d seen her smoking before class. The critic decided to find places to smoke out of sight. Shortly before this particular October day, she’d spent about fifteen minutes looking for a solitary smoking spot. No one’s got time for that.
And then, there was the breathing. Breathing felt gray. She felt gray before, she felt grayer after, and she felt gray during, which really obviated the whole enterprise. It was like she could feel the shit killing her.
I am sitting on the floor in my kitchen, leaning on one forearm with the other outstretched, trying to coax my cat Peanut to eat bits of tunafish from my finger tips.
We just got home from one of his chemo treatments about an hour ago. The vet tech told me that if he won’t eat within a couple of hours, then I have to call. If he won’t eat, he’ll have to go back. He hates leaving the house. Leaving the house is, for him, the worst part of having cancer.
There was a time when Peanut would walk right into his carrier, but since the vet appointments have grown closer together and more invasive we have to force him. I have mastered this by now, but the first time he fought me turned into a half an hour of struggling. It was summer in our third-floor apartment. I was sweating and growing sweatier as I chased him, grabbed him, tried and failed to get him in the carrier. Peanut is a huge orange tomcat, like Maurice the Cat or Garfield, and I am not skilled in cat-grappling. Every time I tried to thrust him in he’d somehow manage to straight-arm the entryway and knock the carrier back. After perhaps ten attempts, including a couple in which I stood the carrier on end and tried to lower him in, I gave up.
Shit.
Then I remembered that I am stronger than him. I just had to anchor the damned thing so he couldn’t push it away.
I grabbed him, forced him in, and then paced the apartment. I was out of breath, kind of weeping, soaked with sweat, and coated in cat hair. It was in my eyes, up my nose, and in my mouth. I removed as much as I could, and took Peanut to the damned vet.
In May, after Peanut’s regular checkup, there were concerns about his liver. Friday before Memorial Day, we took him in for an ultrasound. The anesthesia from that procedure almost killed him. A vet hospital in Woburn saved his life, and after the holiday weekend, both our vet and the hospital told us that Peanut had lymphoma.
I was not the primary cat parent. That was Tim. He took care of all the near-death drama while I waited at home. But cat oncology appointments can only be made on weekdays during regular work hours. Because it was summer, and as an adjunct academic I was “off work,” that left me to do the primary cat parenting. (In truth, I was unemployed in the summer, or rather ungainfully self-employed. I was embroiled in the process of patching significant research holes in my recently-rejected article on intimacy in Middlemarch — a novel that is very well covered by scholars already — and along with that imbroglio, I was fiercely battling the return of my depression.)
Though Tim found Peanut as a kitten in Evanston, Illinois five years before I’d met them, and though Peanut was there for Tim through years of upheaval, and though Tim took care of Peanut day after day while I explored the various depths of my woe and self-involvement, it was I who went with Peanut to find out how much time he had left, and how he was supposed to spend it.
Peanut’s lymphoma is particularly aggressive, the cat oncologist told me. His life expectancy is very short, with or without chemotherapy. I listened as well as I could, trying to make sense of our three complex treatment options so that I could confer with Tim over the phone.
Option number one: chemo at the veterinary hospital every single week for the rest of Peanut’s life. Option number two: chemo at the veterinary hospital every three weeks, plus meds, for the rest of Peanut’s life. Option number three: no chemo, some meds, and occasional checkups at the vet hospital for the rest of Peanut’s life. Testing on dogs has indicated that option number one prolongs life longer than option number two, and option number two longer than option number three. But no matter what we do, this cancer is going to kill Peanut in nine months or less.
We chose the second option because the third didn’t seem enough like trying.
The name of the game is Quality of Life. As we side-stepped the omnipresent anxiety, pain, and nausea of weekly car rides to invasive chemo, our task was to maintain Peanut’s quality of life through a combination of vet visits, feeding, medication, and observation. And most of the time, it was just me. He needs his medication about an hour after we get home from the vet, and he needs to take it with food. But the vet, the car ride, and the medicine make him too stressed and nauseous to eat. And a cat’s failure to eat can become life-threatening very quickly. Hence, if Peanut doesn’t eat within a couple of hours, back to the vet he must go.
So Peanut and I enter into a precarious dance. We come home. He is very stressed, so I let him calm down. He hides under the bed. I learn to gently call his name to coax him out of hiding. I learn that tuna is his comfort food.
Down here on the kitchen floor, I have bits of tuna on every finger. There are bits of tuna scattered on the floor between us.
“Please, Peanut. Eat some tuna.”
He sniffs it. He licks a few bits from my fingers. I pull the dish forward and he sniffs it. He recoils a little, nauseous. Then he inches his nose toward the bowl again. He licks a bit of tuna juice. He has a bite. Another. He’s eating.
At last, I wipe away the tears and snot that have been running down my face and I collapse onto the floor. He’s eating. He will not have to go back to the vet today. Lying snotty and sobbing on the kitchen floor, I know I have become a cat person.
Back in 2006, right after Tim and I got married, we realized that Peanut had put on quite a bit of weight. In the nine-month period before our wedding, Tim and Peanut had been living with roommates, one of whom was another cat. Peanut tried to befriend this cat, but she demurred. So, he availed himself of her ready supply of food. He was in danger of cat-adult-onset diabetes, so we put him on a diet.
For six years, we measured out his food, he lost a couple pounds, and begged to be fed all the time. He liked to nibble on my bare legs and scratch at my dissertation desk while I tried, often in vain, to wrestle the Diaries of Virginia Woolf to the ground.
Yeah, I screamed at him a few times. A few times a day.
I remember quipping to my friends at a party, “I’m pretty much over Peanut.” I should have said, “I’m pretty much over Virginia Woolf,” because it wasn’t Peanut who was killing me, it was her. But he was easier to blame. As I cared for him throughout summer 2013, I apologized a lot.
Over time we decided to stop the chemo treatments. All they did was make him nauseous. He started eating more, and we rejoiced.
As I patched my research holes on intimacy in Middlemarch, the ever-shrinking Peanut curled up in my lap to keep warm, even in the summer heat. As summer turned to autumn, he ate less and less.
The week before Thanksgiving, we had to let him go. Carrying Peanut, I approached the vet hospital receptionist and said, “I have come to euthanize my cat.”
January 2014
There’s been no cat here for me to care for or talk to. One day, I caught myself petting my own pony-tail. A few days later, I decided to name it Harrison. I miss the Harrison phase. Anything I did, I announced to Tim that Harrison and I were doing it. While we enjoyed this source of hilarity, we also knew it was time to find our new cats. At the Gifford House Cat Shelter, Iris and Lateegra were quartered in the basement–Iris lived in the shower stall and Lateegra lived about ten feet away, in one of those cages we all call “crates.”
I am a cat person and a primary cat parent. I clean the litter box. (Well, we take turns.) Here is what I know about quality of life:
Sitting in the sun means the cat is happy. Sitting in the window means the cat is happy. And if you’re working at your dissertation desk, or your adjunct-academic desk, or your freelance-math-book-editor desk, hacking through the current learning curve, and you look down and find a cat sitting on the rug next to you, all four feet curled underneath, kind of resembling a loaf of bread, it means this:
“I kind of like you.”
Which makes me happy.
— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Peanut in our Somerville apartment, on my dissertation desk.
I am not in the habit of cataloging my movements as they happen, but I have become enamored of editing Wikipedia, enamored of writing women into it–and I got to make an infobox for Mary Almy, of Cambridge, Massachusetts architecture firm Howe, Manning & Almy, Inc.
This morning I went to a mini-editathon (only 2 hours) at the MIT library archives. We used archival materials to enhance the presence of some women in architecture and some other fields. We were about ten women, in the lovely archives room at Hayden library at MIT, typing away in silence. Very intense, concentrated, productive, and super fun silence. At an editathon, this kind of silence exists.
The reading room of the Institute Archives and Special Collections in building 14 at MIT. (public domain)
By the way, infoboxes are those things on the right side of a Wikipedia entry. They look like this:
a screenshot of the infobox I made (which no longer belongs to me, but to wikipedia and the world. CC-BY-SA.)
Better ones have pictures. But to post an image to Wikipedia, it either needs to be in the public domain or have Creative Commons licensing BY-NC-SA.
BY means “Attribution” (you have to give credit to source.)
NC means you can only use it for Non-Commercial purposes.
SA means “share alike,” which is more cryptic than the other pieces of the license. To “share alike” under Creative Commons means once you use the thing in question for your purposes, you have to apply the same CC license to it. (I am increasingly enamored of internet citation, it would seem. Nobody said I wasn’t a nerd.)
Anyway, images that meet those criteria are hard to find. The next time you do a google image search, try clicking the “Search Tools” button, and select “Usage rights” and then “non-commercial reuse.” A lot of the pretty pictures you just found will go away. Including all the ones you wanted. (Unless you image search kittens. A lot of kittens will stay. *there are kittens behind the “google image search” link.*)
I headed over to the MIT campus along my usual route, but this time in the dark. Spring semester won’t start for a few more weeks, and MIT people are in the middle of IAP, or “Inter-Activities Period,” a month-long session full of lectures, how-to classes, dance classes, tours, you name it. The only thing I had to do out in the world this day didn’t start until 7 pm. It was raining a little, but I walked the 30 minutes to the Davis T Stop anyway. I wore my duck boots. My umbrella just covered both my backpack and my head. I had to bring my laptop so that I could learn how to edit Wikipedia.
I know, it’s not really all that difficult to edit Wikipedia. Way back in 2008, I demonstrated to my Advanced Writing students that Wikipedia was not a viable source for their research by defacing Wikipedia myself.
“See, class? Any asshole can go in and make changes.”
I am not proud of this, though I’m pretty sure I only did it once.
One of the students in that class — a junior architecture major — politely raised his hand and informed me that what I did was not in the spirit of Wikipedia, that people work hard to get rid of this kind of vandalism, and that sooner or later, Wikipedia would be a viable reference for research. I was surprised to hear that what I’d done was vandalism, and I decided I probably wouldn’t do it again. As for the usefulness and viability of Wikipedia, I saw his point. I conceded that by the time he and his peers were making decisions about what constituted reliable sources, Wikipedia just might be on the list. But in 2008, it was not on that list, and they weren’t allowed to cite it.
But they were allowed — encouraged, even — to use it. Because the wikimedians creating and editing entries are held to the same standards as my students. They must cite reliable sources — sources that pass through some kind of editorial or peer review — if they want their work to stay on the site. Today, in addition to teaching students how to navigate the library and Google in order to yield strong sources, we also teach students to follow the trail of research that wikimedians leave behind, and then use those sources to dig deeper into the existing research and scholarship on their topics.
And that’s great! And generally, in life, if we encounter something we want to know more about — in my case, who succeeded whom in the British monarchy and how that whole thing works, or the defining characteristics of the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune— we probably go check out Wikipedia. And that’s great, too.
But there’s a problem: if you work hard, contribute to a field, and open doors for people like you who come after, but Wikipedia doesn’t know about you, do you make a sound? Well, yes. But if more and more people turn to Wikipedia to learn about the world around them and its history, then we want to have as much of that work represented as possible. And People of color, lesbian, gay, transgender, and queer people, and women in general, it turns out, are really underrepresented on Wikipedia.
I’d known about these representational issues for a while, though the gender gap has had the highest profile. Amanda Filipacchi’s April, 2013 New York Times Op-Ed, “Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists,” first drew my attention to the gaps of Wikipedia. The recategorization of American novelists who happen to be female, from “American novelists” to “American women novelists,” has since been named “categorygate.” Sue Gardner’s response, “What’s missing from the media discussions of Wikipedia categories and sexism,” (posted to the WikiMedia blog in May of 2013) openly acknowledges the problem, and then clearly conveys how a better understanding of Wikipedia’s core principles can help us better address its gender gap. In “Wikipedia’s gender gap and the complicated reality of systemic gender bias,” Adrianne Wadewitz unpacks and comments on some problematic assumptions that go along with recent efforts to address this gap.
I just happened upon “Writing Women into Wikipedia” by chance, as I scrolled through the IAP listings. This editathon was unlike typical editathons that last only a few hours. This one took place over four nights. We wiki-newbies got solid introductions to the gender gap, Wikipedia’s Five Pillars, and different ways to contribute. And then we worked.
Some things about Wikipedia are easy. It was certainly easy for me to vandalize, back in the day. And Wikipedia encourages newcomers to start with simpler tasks, like fixing typos, and then working their way up to more substantive corrections. But “Writing Women into Wikipedia” is a little different. So many lists of writers, artists, innovators, and scientists (and so on, and so on) lack entries for women who belong there. Copyediting is great, but at this workshop we were encouraged to start new entries. And that was hard.
My “expert” topics are very well covered already. None of the authors featured in my dissertation are missing from Wikipedia. I wanted to help where help was needed, and I didn’t think fixing grammar on George Eliot‘s page was going to do that.
I’ve been very interested in comics, and frequently saddened by the dearth of female comics creators on my reading lists. I decided to start there. Then, I decided to go with British women comics creators, because 1) that keeps all my literary expertise in the same nation, and 2) though there were few American women comics creators listed, there were even fewer from Britain. It didn’t take me long to find my candidate, but it took a very long time to gather enough information from reliable sources to create an article for her.
But, at long last, I did. You know you want to see. Go ahead, click the link. Here she is: Suzy Varty
She’s just a little “stub” right now (that’s “an article containing only one or a few sentences of text that, although providing some useful information, is too short to provide encyclopedic coverage of a subject, and that is capable of expansion.”) Not much, but something to build on. This little stub isn’t mine any more, though I will continue to tend her and help her grow. She belongs to Wikipedia and the world. Hopefully other wikimedians will add and edit her, and help her become a real article. Hopefully the wikimedians will let her stay.
— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
PS
If you’re interested in becoming a wikimedian, check out New England wikimedians for information about Wikipedia meetups, or just Google wikimedians in your area.
If you’re interested in addressing the gender gap on Wikipedia, here’s an overview of how to get involved, from FemTechNet. And here are some other WikiProjects:
African diaspora, a wikiproject that “aims to improve all articles related to the cultural contributions of people of African descent all over the world.”
Another date at a coffee shop. Tim on the left, Rebecca on the right.
CAMBRIDGE
April, 2005
1369 Coffee
The cafe was full, but I’d arrived early and gotten a small table, just across from the entrance. The door was open to let in the spring air.
I’d been frequenting 1369 Coffee since I first moved to Boston from Ohio, eight months prior. In 2005, the punk-rock aesthetic that most of the baristas sported seemed like the epitome of cool to me. And is that Radiohead’s The Bends I hear playing in the background? And are all these stern looking people reading and writing at their little tables probably intellectuals, poet/writers, or revolutionaries? Yes. After eight months living in Boston, 1369 Coffee in Cambridge was probably the coolest place I’d ever been. It made me cooler, just by walking through the door. Why hadn’t I arranged to meet my other blind dates here?
In his Friendster pictures, he was either peaking out from behind a fluffy cat or posed in quiet contemplation. In one picture, he was gazing out a large window, leaning forward, palms together, hands pressed against his lips. He looked like he was praying, which I found odd, but the cat pictures intrigued me.
He walked in and I set down the copy of The Journals of Lewis and ClarkI’d been studying. From my seat, he seemed impossibly tall. The late-afternoon sun blazed behind him through the cafe’s vast storefront window, lighting him up, golden.
We said hi. He smiled. I smiled. He’s way out of my league.
I’d seen pictures of Tim on Friendster, but that was only after I found him on Craigslist. This was a few years before the Craigslist killer, and before the “dating” sections became indistinguishable from the “casual encounters” section. I went with Craigslist, first of all, because the only other method of online dating that I knew was match.com, and the only people I knew who used it were my mom’s friends and my forty-something ex-boyfriend.
All of those people were divorced professionals. In 2005, I was 26 years old with a dial-up connection, and if I hadn’t just moved so far away from everyone I knew, I’d just keep relying on the age-old matchmaking network of friends’ friends congregating at parties and bars. But I didn’t know anyone in Boston. I’d spent the entirety of the fall semester either in class or in my bedroom. By January, I thought, that’s enough of that.
I first heard of Craigslist in May, 2004, when I first visited the Northeastern campus. I’d never had to find roommates from a distance before and was growing increasingly worried that I would wind up in a hugely over-priced utility closet in someone’s basement. The PhD student* who was showing us around told me I could find roommates on Craigslist.
“Regs List?”
“No, Cuh-raig’s List.”
I found the site. Its mass of tiny blue links dazzled me. You can find roommates here! And jobs, and bicycles, and clubs to join! And also, maybe, boyfriends.
These days, getting your pictures online is child’s play, but when I was reaching out through my dial-up connection I had to use my roommate’s scanner to upload my school ID picture. And I didn’t know how to change iPhoto’s HUGE auto-setting for attachments. After one or two gigantic picture exchanges that went nowhere, I established a rule of no pictures in either direction — a rule that would immediately sink any on-line dating endeavor today. I would respond only to well-written and intriguing Craigslist personals.
Between January and April 2005, while also keeping up with my grad school coursework, I went on about four blind dates a week, sometimes two dates in one day. Most of those were one and done, but I did manage to court a few guys for a while.
There was the research librarian who was very nice and smart, who was taken with the way I wrote Library of Congress call numbers on the back of my hand, but who reminded me too much of my uncle. There was the pony-tailed radical who seemed to know everyone, everywhere we went, and who lost interest in me because I asked too many questions. And finally, there was the Spanish graduate student — this was the most romantic courtship by far. On our second date, as I was telling a story about something, he abruptly leaned across the restaurant table and kissed me on the mouth. “I could wait no more,” he said. I liked him most of all…but alas, when I admitted that I was still dating around, he broke it off. Damned honesty.
But it doesn’t matter. I thought I liked the Spanish guy, but that was before I met Tim at 1369. I told him on our third date — after we’d decided to go steady — that until I met him, I thought I was doomed to never really like anybody ever again. Everyone I’d dated between January and April was cute, nice, smart, interesting — the test of writing style had worked! And yet…meh.
After things ended with the radical and the Spanish guy, I took matters into my own hands. I posted my first and last ever personal ad on Craigslist.
“I was just on my way to the sink to wash my hands of dating,” the ad read, “but maybe someone can change my mind.”
Turns out, someone could.
“Is that Lewis and Clark?!”
Was he genuinely interested in this book? It seemed so. We talked for a while about Lewis’s brooding intensity and Clark’s abysmal spelling. Apparently there had just been a story about the Lewis and Clark Journals in Smithsonian, so the extreme differences in their writing were fresh in his mind. I was impressed. I tried to impress him back with a story about how Clark doted on Sacagawea’s son. Clark nicknamed him “Pomp,” or sometimes, “Little Pompy.”**
This prompted some giggling on both sides, and then an awkward silence. We decided to go for a walk, down Mass Ave. to the Middle East Rock Club, then across the street and back up towards the cafe. We stopped at Rodney’s bookstore. We meandered through the stacks. When I found the “Cat” section, I stopped and started pulling out books. I wasn’t really into cats, but, for reasons then mysterious to me, I loved that he was.
Suddenly, he thrust a book toward me. On the page, a line-drawing of two cats mating.
“REEOW!!!”
He meowed and broke the quiet of the sleepy bookstore. He meowed, and I dissolved into uncontrollable laughter.
In his pictures, at the cafe, and all along Mass. Ave., he radiated an intriguing combination of calm reserve and something else. Something very silly and mischievous kept peaking out from behind his shy smile. And here it was. “REEOW!!!” indeed.
— Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze
Met at 1369 Coffee. Walked down Mass Ave., then back up, then into Rodneys where the deal was basically sealed.
*The PhD student who introduced me to Craigslist became a life-long friend. She even played the piano at the wedding.
Inhabit Your Town 
