Scary stuff!
Friends, it’s a never-ending round of seminars, walks through the garden, curator-led tours of both the Huntington and the Getty Museums, and lunch and dinner invitations that I have barely a moment to myself on this “sabbatical!” My apologies for the light posting these days, but sometimes a scholar just has to sit down once in a while and write something for peer-reviewed publications.
Here are a few interesting things I’ve found while haunting the interwebs over the past week:
- Should we bring back formal mourning clothes? This review of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s new exhibit, “Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire” by Hillary Kelly is nostalgic for the value of public mourning. Maybe this is on my mind, because I’m of the age now that my peers are coping with the deaths of their parents. I had a colleague whose father died a few years ago, and when I invited him out for dinner following a seminar several months later, I was a little surprised that he said, “no thanks, I’m just not up to socializing yet.” Of course it made perfect sense–but it struck me at the time that we make grief so invisible and so unknowable to others in modern U.S. culture. Recent widows and widowers complain that after a month or two, even close friends sometimes express exasperation with their grief! We expect people to “get over it” so we aren’t threatened by the memory of our own losses, or by fears of our impending losses.
- There’s a new book coming out with Yale University Press next year which I’m dying to read: Fashion Victims: Dress at the Court of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell. (Isn’t that a great title? Who wouldn’t want to read that book?) She was the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Curatorial Fellow in French Art at the Huntington from 2003 to 2007, and is an independent scholar.
- Speaking of mourning, what about graves, and specifically, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act? There’s an open position in the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts for a Repatriation Coordinator. Public historians or anyone else with NAGPRA knowledge and experience should apply. This position does not require a Ph.D., but rather just an M.A. in Anthropology, Native/Indigenous Studies/Museum Studies or related fields. This is a three-year lectureship.
- The bane of my existence is now the elaborate software systems through which we must all submit journal articles and letters of recommendation. Do I really need a unique I.D. and secure password for every. Freakin’. system? (If someone wants to write an article, revise it, and get it published under my name, I’d be happy to take credit for it!) Also: it seems unfair to ask an author to revise and resubmit an article, but still hold her to the first-round 10,000 word limit. Just sayin’. Now I’m off to eliminate 388 words from my polished, jewel-like, prose.
- Well, not yet. I forgot to say that tomorrow night is Halloween. Tips for candy thieves: only eat the candy out of your kids’ buckets until they can reliably count, or you’ll get busted.
I know I peed in many people’s gluten-free breakfast cereal of choice in my previous post, but I just can’t resist: is anyone else fed up with the adultification of Halloween? It all just seems like more evidence of the voluntary infantilization of adulthood–along with the rejection of grown-up clothing, food, and entertainment. I went to one of those pop-up Halloween stores yesterday, and was really creeped out by the fact that I had to hunt for the kids’ gear, and that the children’s costumes and accessories were probably only 25% of the total inventory.
From this kind of evidence, it seems like adulthood itself is scary enough for most of you!