" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

Today was a chal­lenge: this morn­ing, as part of a coor­di­nated national effort, New York’s base for the Occupy Move­ment was forcibly evicted from Zucotti Park. I con­sider myself a bystander at best, a wit­ness to what they do and their strate­gies for push­ing back against an over­whelm­ing goliath. But, I didn’t real­ize how much I needed them until they were kicked out of the park. When we heard the news, both my hus­band and I were dis­traught. We started lash­ing out at each other, over oat­meal of all things, sim­ply because we were so mad we needed to take it out on some­one, anyone.

Since I couldn’t do any­thing but watch Twit­ter, I went to the gym. A. needed some play­time with other kids and I needed to run my ass off for an hour. It didn’t help.

Sit­ting down to write this after­noon was a no-go. I received some kind advice from the inter­net (thanks @lizgloyn, @phd2published, and @ThomsonPat). I also reached out to a friend wherein we dis­cussed OWS in the con­text of try­ing to fin­ish our dis­ser­ta­tions and strug­gling with our his­tory of union activism. Today was an “all hands” kind of day and I’m sud­denly very thank­ful to all of the great peo­ple in my ana­log and dig­i­tal life. I’ve been in a funk for the past week or so about not get­ting the right kind of advise­ment or not being far enough along when, in the end, I’m not doing this to for my advi­sor nor is there any other mea­sure for how I should do this other than the way that I’m doing it. I write because I love what I do and I’m lucky enough to have allies who see its value as I do.

As for Occupy Wall Street, hang in there guys, I’ll see you Novem­ber 17.

Since start­ing AcBoW­riMo on Tues­day, I’ve made my best effort to write every­day and I’ve actu­ally learned a few things already.

One sig­nif­i­cant les­son learned: writ­ing tells you where the holes are. I got a lit­tle lost in my project last week when I tried to go to the library for Camp Dis­ser­ta­tion and I think this is because I was away from my writ­ing for a few days. By writ­ing every­day, I know my writ­ing and my project really well. I know what needs work and what I need to do to pol­ish it up. But if I don’t write, I don’t know what my next steps are. The holes exist, but as a night­mar­ish imag­i­nary space, haunt­ing the halls of my mind like those scary fuck­ing twins from The Shin­ing.

So I write every­day because no, I don’t want to go and play with them.

ETA: I changed the title from “Day 3″ to “3 Days” when I real­ized it made me sound superhuman.

So I’m on “vaca­tion” right now in D.C. That’s in quotes because so far I’ve spent most of my time in the hotel room with the kiddo, writ­ing like a mad­woman and jug­gling the atten­tion of a kinetic short per­son. She’s now telling me “All done the mommy com­puter!” and so this will be brief. The hard­est part of AcBoW­riMo? Not writ­ing “words words words” over and over again to meet my word count. Gen­er­at­ing new con­tent is exhaust­ing, even if I have a fairly clear idea of where this is going so my advice to you and to myself is: pace your­self and try to try to enjoy it. In this mad month of word count goals, some days you will go over, some will go under, the goal is to write every­day and reach your num­ber by Novem­ber 30. We’re now head­ing to the National Mall and although I have 500 words hang­ing over my head, I’m going to have some fun else­where and try to make up the words tonight or tomor­row. The last thing I want to do is burn out before the first 5,000 words.

The fam­ily unit went to Los Ange­les late last month and I spent a few days in the Hunt­ing­ton Research Library. For any of you British and Amer­i­can his­to­ri­ans out there who look at the past 1000 years of his­tory, you should check out the Hunt­ing­ton. Their man­u­script and rare books col­lec­tion is impres­sive, to say the least.

My work looks at eigh­teenth to nine­teenth cen­tury car­i­ca­ture and race. For my first chap­ter, I dis­cuss the link between phys­iog­nomy, race, and pol­i­tics and how polit­i­cal life was racial­ized as a result of ques­tions about con­tin­u­ing the slave trade, the influx of black poor into Lon­don, and the Hait­ian Rev­o­lu­tion. Diana Don­ald, author of the fan­tas­ti­cally com­pre­hen­sive 1996 mono­graph The Age of Car­i­ca­ture, dis­cusses the role of phys­iog­nomy, the clas­si­fi­ca­tion of a person’s bod­ily and facial fea­tures, ges­tures, and expres­sions as a means to mea­sure their per­son­al­ity traits and moral for­ti­tude, on early “how-to” guides to car­i­ca­ture. I wanted to see these guides for myself and much to my sur­prise, the first guide, *An His­tor­i­cal Sketch of the Art of Car­i­ca­tur­ing with Graphic Illus­tra­tions” (1813) by James Peller Mal­colm, opens with a dis­cus­sion of race, inher­i­tance, and the sub­lime beauty of Quakers.

For Mal­colm, graphic car­i­ca­ture was a truth-seeking exer­cise. That the most beau­ti­ful fea­tures demon­strate sup­pressed feel­ings and that women, in par­tic­u­lar, should “not mix in the usual amuse­ments of the world [so as not to be] liable to those acci­dents which would cause car­i­ca­tured lin­ea­ments in their off­spring.” (empha­sis added) This quote made me stop in my tracks. Malcolm’s car­i­ca­ture is about deco­rum and the dan­gers of a kind of moral mis­ce­gena­tion as a result of “mix­ing” emo­tion with deco­rum. He goes on to warn par­ents that “fre­quent and exces­sive laugh­ter must con­tribute to derange the fea­tures” so they should be wary of pro­duc­ing in their chil­dren an exag­ger­a­tion of their own worst, but sup­pressed attributes.

What led to this tweet exchange was Malcolm’s dis­cus­sion of the “sav­age car­i­ca­tur­ist.” He described “sav­age” peo­ples from the South Seas who can only cre­ate grotesque car­i­ca­ture art because they are, “car­i­ca­tures in nature.” Their art­work is a result of their own “dis­or­dered imag­i­na­tion” and the British car­i­ca­ture artist can learn from this innate sav­agery. He goes on to talk about the “despised and offen­sive hot­ten­tot” and how even if she had the “favoured pro­por­tions” of the Euro­pean, her com­plex­ion lends her to be a nat­u­rally occur­ring caricature.

I still haven’t gen­er­ated the link to the slave trade pre­cisely, but I feel so close to a break­through that it’s prob­a­bly star­ing me right in the face.