Bits & Bobs

Blog

  • The Summer is For Reading

    I’m in a soupy reading mood. There are too many ideas, too many threads, to try to be linear. So I throw it all in the pot haphazardly and it tends to come out all right. It works for me in reading. Not in cooking. Don’t ask me to cook dinner. It’s going to be a dump in the crock pot kind of deal.

    What’s on the currently reading shelf right now?

    1. Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman. The social media is ocassionally right about things. My first litrpg. Good balance against the rest of this list.
    2. Faith Unraveled by the late, great Rachel Held Evans. A brush with brilliance. A spark of joy, a calm presence in a mad world.
    3. Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage by Rachel E. Gross. I’d like to generate a frequency table (without feeding it to a gluttonous AI) just to find out where the word “penis” rates in usage in a book about vaginas. That’s not a criticism. I think it’s a metaphor. Hats off to the people who study duck genitalia. Doing the Lord’s work there (I hope you’re still getting your grants right now).
    4. The Allure of the Archives by Arlette Farge. Thank you Introduction to Archives summer class. The back cover says this book is “a grand appreciation of the craft of discovery.” Yes please.

    Sam Wineburg says that historical thinking is an unnatural act, a taught worldview. It’s a skill predicated upon an ability to dive deeply into the primary sources, hold them in dialogue with each other, and say “I don’t know” repeatedly until a sort of sense can be made. It’s about brushing up against the strange and unfamiliar past without “presentism:” To hold separate the self and our own lived experiences and the complexities of a past worldview.

    Rachel Held Evans, author and blogger, writes, “I’m always afraid that if I remain silent or show signs of ambivalence, people will assume that I can’t think for myself, that I haven’t studied an issue or thought it through…I would rather people think I don’t bathe enough than think I don’t read enough.”

    There’s the tension. How to make space for the not knowing when knowing is what the people want? Why praise certainty when the question is just waiting to be unpacked?

    There’s an inherent humility to holding the space between knowing. The know/don’t know. The I don’t know what I don’t know. The scrap/push/pull/crawl to the next step before not knowing again.

    There’s an inherent humility, awestruck and solemn, in glimpsing Grand Canyon sized gaps in knowledge and choosing to just keep digging down level by level into that gap.

    If certainty is a feature and not a bug, of course no questions need to be asked. Of course, any little inconsistency or discrepancy or itchiness ought to be ignored if it threatens certainty.

    Kafka possibly said something along the lines of, “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Disruption. “You will not break me,” Carl mutters to himself in his powerlessness against a systemic machine. Resistance.

    There’s the tension.

    Also reading a bit of this: Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past by Sam Wineburg.

  • Ode to the Registry of Deeds

    I’ve been spending what might be an unhealthy amount of time in the county Registry of Deeds archive in the service of what could charitably be called a hobby. Less charitably, it’s unpaid and unprompted work and therefore slightly nutty given that gas prices are rocketing up and we should probably be seeing to the food storage and the garden and the fact that the chickens were taken out by a predator over the winter. Order of importance and yet, we do not live by bread alone.  

    Hence, the Registry of Deeds.  

    The Registry of Deeds is simply a government office and archive. The documents that captivate me enough to do this work voluntarily are records of real estate deals. Transactions between white men and for white men, the landowning ones. It’s a record of dominance and domination. The bureaucratic sweep of colonization by paper. And it’s absolutely fascinating. 

    It’s possible to map what once was, to a degree. It’s possible to connect, link by link, the who and the how of the land shaping to the usages and the proclivities and the economic forces of the times. It’s death and life and taxes. It’s prosperity and decline. It’s how people make their way through the world.  

    I’m fascinated by a father deeding over the homestead farm to a son, with the written caveat that the son must house, feed, and care for the father and mother. What does that contractual detail speak to in their relationship? Why use this particular form? Why not the process of a will instead?  

    In another case, a will does exist, but the real estate transaction is still the primary site of the outlined elder care required at end of life. 

    I am fascinated by the cases of elder care codified into real estate documents.  

    I’m fascinated that rules about gates and bars and public right of access can follow a document long after the characteristics of the road usage or even the persons involved fall to the wayside. 

    I don’t know what went down between William M. Jones and his neighbors, but I’m willing to bet no one, and I do mean no one, ever sold him that land he couldn’t have.   

    In that codified language of the real estate transaction, little moments slip through that speak to the life lived in those spaces.  The real and varied humans, most of whom go unnamed and unnoticed in the institutional record. Here there be stories.   

  • Baby’s First Archive Visit

    I’d like a gold star because I did the scary thing and went to an archive for the very first time to research. Yay me.  

    Archivists are very nice people and I certainly feel at home anywhere where the books and the information live, but there was a nuts and bolts intimidation factor in this case. A certainty that I would do everything the wrong way and, in fact, did not belong there. I’m just cosplaying researcher for funsies. They’d find out and eject me immediately.  

    Apparently imposter syndrome does follow one into their forties! But at least now I can wave it aside and tell it to go sit in the corner where it belongs.  

    The object of the day was to locate the wills of my people of interest and, in that, I was almost immediately stifled. Of the five people on my list, only one had probate documents, despite living and dying (as far as I can tell) in exactly the place I expected them to live and die.  

    Off hand, the archivist said that the lack of documents meant my people had died elsewhere. That’s something to turn over.   

    If I have a record of a person living in a specific location, like the census, and can find their headstone in the cemetery adjacent to the place they lived (census again), I have to wonder if there’s another reason they wouldn’t have left a will or probate records. Or maybe there’s more to uncover that would place them in other locations. Headstones don’t necessarily mean a life lived in that location and a check in every ten years leaves a lot of room for movement.  

    Then again, a family congregating on the homestead farm of 1800’s New Hampshire makes a certain amount of sense, especially when they show up on consecutive census records and their headstones are in the adjacent cemetery. 

    In any case, I only found one probate document. Just one. It was small and not very detailed, because my person died intestate after a theoretical 50-ish years on the homestead farm. 

    The descendants of my person, living on that same homestead farm, likewise didn’t produce probate documents or a will.   

    What stands out to me the most is how documents in the registry of deeds were possibly acting as de facto wills in the case  of another person in this family. He managed the transfer of property to his son and built in the condition that his son had to take care of himself and his wife in old age. That’s one way to do it.  

    As usual, I’m left with more questions and a tantalizing tidbit of the past nestled in my hands for a brief moment.   

  • The Ceiling is Falling Down

    At work, some ceiling tiles collapsed, a pipe burst, and there was surely a watery mess blocking off the front entrance. The ceiling is falling down and the pipes are bursting because deferred maintenance and depleted staff are de rigueur these days in higher education.  

    My first shiny new adult job at the start of my teaching career began in 2008. I was the second to last person in the hierarchy and escaped a pink slip by exactly that margin. Of course, the librarian at that high school was let go and we all had to tighten our belts and work harder with less resources. The ceiling, as it were, was falling then too.   

    I have never once in my adult life held a full time job at an educational institution that wasn’t in crisis mode. Sometimes I wonder what it must be like to work in a healthy, robust institution with things like money and resources. What must it be like to work in a system that isn’t slowly grinding down the human beings propping it up? 

    Between that first job and the one I have now, I was not officially in the workforce (even though I was).   

    For a period of about 10 years, I sacrificed future financial security (and future earnings potential!) to be the primary parent who provided care at home. I worked part-time and remotely, with an emphasis on the flexibility of my time.  

    I don’t regret it, but I didn’t love it unreservedly either.  

    I do wish that circumstances hadn’t forced my hand so fully. What else are you going to do when you are barely hanging on postpartum? The fact is, someone has to make an income or we would have also become homeless. If it happens to time out so that your husband’s career is actually taking off in interesting and important ways, what else are you going to do but support that run? 

    The fact is, I took a back seat and took care of the prosaic everyday things. I did the unglamourous day-in day-out breakfast and lunch and nap and play time and no-you-cannot-eat-a-cockroach (true story). The fact is, I packed away my own passions and ambitions for a time, and I will never be able to recoup that lost time.  

    I look back and wonder what I have to show for all that. Sure, there are three pretty terrific human beings I love in all their specificity. There was a lot of joy. There were trips to the zoo and morning snuggles and circuitous driving to prolong their naps.

    But me, myself, my self, was hibernating. On pause. Holding back until I figured out a few things. The ceiling that was falling down was my own sense of identity and well being.  

    The gift of all that time was that I had a lot of time to work on myself. I had time to grow and evolve.  

    I’m in my post child-care act now. It won’t look like what I had planned all those years ago.  

    And, in any case, the ceiling is always falling down.