Recommended 6: News Sources

The Washington Post makes COVID19 related articles freely available, here.

The New York Times makes COVID19 related articles freely available, here.  

Quality coverage for Virginia includes
Central Virginia COVID dashboard.
Virginia Mercury
Richmond Times-Dispatch

Recommended 5

My folks aren't interested in FaceTiming me. They're retired and not trying to #wfh. They live in rural Virginia and have terrible internet speed. They're not talking about zoom or new podcasts or what restaurant has pick up now. Mom's pretty tech savvy; Dad, not so much. Thus I am surprised to tell you that today's recommendation for something to do while isolating comes to you from Dad. He recommends the "takeout" art talks from the Barnes Collection, available here on YouTube. More online offerings from that museum are here.

Red Headed Girl in Evening Dress by Modigliani

Also recommending the storytimes my library system is presenting online (those videos won't stay live for very long). Loving the new-to-me song that Jodi sings, "Knife Fork Spoon Spatula."

Recommended 4

Break out of your claustrophobia with the Lumberjanes! Sure you should start at the beginning, but Indoor Recess is my quick pick today.

Recommendations 3

The Librarian is In, a podcast from the New York Public Library, made me want to be better at readers' advisory (the practice of recommending books to all kinds of readers). General interest listeners will come away with additions to their To Read list. This year's first discussion of a book on the NYPL 125 list prodded me to read Giovanni's Room, a title always lurking on my "should have read" list.



I always describe my GoodReads reviews as "notes to myself" rather than proper reviews. Here's what I jotted down:

Passion and the futility of love in Paris in the 1950s. While David's girlfriend tours Spain without him, he gets evicted from his Paris hotel. He turns to an older man he knows, someone who often helps "boys" like him. They go to Guillaume's bar and both immediately become enamored of Giovanni, the bartender. The larks and liaisons of this (gay) crowd roll along at a leisurely, drunken pace until girlfriend Hella returns. Only, the book tells the story out of order: sooner than we see those scenes we know that something terrible happened and that David and Hella definitely aren't getting married. (Lots of undergrad paper / book club themes to mine: "room[s]" and being trapped; the way the characters -- Baldwin? -- view women; the caricatures of the older men.)

Recommendations in the Time of COVID19, part 2

Graphic Novels and the Like

Many public libraries buy into the digital hoopla collection for their patrons -- this service offers music, steaming video, and books including comics and graphic novels. Henrico's collection includes Joe Hill's Locke & Key which you may have gotten sucked into via Netflix (surely that wasn't just me?)








Some things I've read recently that I recommend are below. If you're here in Richmond, local booksellers are delivering. I know Chop Suey will order books for you.

Chop Suey Books

Fountain Bookstore

Small Friend Records & Books



Sara Berman's Closet

A great example of the art -- photos and paintings -- being as much of the point as the biographical story of a Greenwich Village personality.















Spill Zone

When Scott Westerfeld brings his A game, it's an A+. He captures young people's voices well and brings us amazing post-apocalyptic visions. This cover doesn't do the art justice: Puvilland uses vivid color to convey the spill zone itself.



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Jumberjanes



I approach things that are Girl Scout or summer camp-adjacent with trepidation. I fear lack of the proper reverence, knowledge, or simply not getting it. The creators of Lumberjanes get it and have nothing but love for girls' camps. In this series, our heroines take on magical monsters, champion friendship and teamwork, earn badges -- and try to make curfew.

Recommendations in the Time of COVID19

Tuesday

Listen to Bill Nye and Alan Alda chat over tea about science and communication.

Read a romance in which a NYC epidemiology student keeps ignoring the emails from "an African prince" -- so he shows up at her door. Princess in Theory, by Alyssa Cole.



Monday 3/16/20

Read the Lager Queen of Minnesota and spend time with generations of a midwestern family as they shift form farmers to service workers; able-bodied to creaky; highschoolers to grandparents. Also: beer-making and family drama.



Listen to a light-hearted romp through copyright, intectual property, and dance hits with 99PI's episode, Whomst Among Us Has Let the Dogs Out.

Last Week

"Dad Ward" put together a super-informative Virology podcast for us. Link to that Ologies episode.

All Aboard

Fastrack acquired and assembled; transformer got a check up. We're rolling!

Note for future:
White wire to top terminal.
Don't put freshly-greased engines on carpet.

To Clean or Not

I assumed cleaning the trains would be the right move: years of nicotine, cat litter dust, and of course remnants of the driveway gravel we'd fill the hopper cars with. Then I found a whole chapter in a train book about how to dirty up the cars to make them more authentic. So I guess this is permission to do a bad job cleaning?

A Think Piece

For the most part, I gave up my habit of jotting down apparently wise or humorous things people say. One tidbit I held onto for a long time I wrote on an official Valentine Museum notepad. I captured museum director Frank Jewell's observation "race, class, gender: difficult stuff." That was the gist, anyway, and at 22 or so, I found it to be a profound observation that I knew should guide my look at life as well as my work in history. 

Raised in Chesterfield County by parents from the north, I did not think of myself as southern. When reflecting on my sense of identity now, I often recall the brief fad some of the alpha kids (boys?) in 4th grade pursued of asking all the kids questions to classify themselves: teams we rooted for; religion; north or south. I said "north" -- because I wanted to be different? Because I was born in Philadelphia, even though I don't remember those first nine months of living there? In high school, I had first a black teacher for world history who urged us into discussion of racial stereotyping, then a white one for US history who used terms like "War of Northern Aggression," and positioned states' rights as a leading cause of the Civil War. My chemistry teacher also taught driver's ed; he told us girls could neither do science nor drive. This was the early 1980s. And so I went to college in New England with a lot of private-school-educated women and felt very different. To emphasize that otherness, I'd layer on fake Southern -- by shouting to people being loud in the dorm hallway too late at night "y'all hush." I also bought a Confederate flag, because I thought it was merely a southern symbol, or a silly symbol of the losing side. It took taking  an actual southern history class at Mount Holyoke -- was it a whole class on the Civil Rights Movement? -- to learn about its use as a symbol of hate and hastily throw it in the trash. I don't think it was up long, but my stomach sours thinking about it. The focus of my history degree eventually became "gender and race in the modern south."

In the 90s, after those few years of work at the museum, I followed my love to Mississippi so he could get a master's degree in Southern Studies. As Virginians, we seemed Northern to most people. With public lectures and casual conversations with his classmates, we immersed ourselves in discussions of race and class. When the theme of a costume party was "come as your favorite dead Southerner," I made an "Indian" dress from cheap fake suede and went as Pocahontas. I wore it later in the 90s to portray the woman my camp is named for. I would never do it now; I feel embarrassed. I do hear myself rationalizing, "well, they were real people -- and it's not like I wore any kind of makeup." Rationalizing away privilege? Other experiences of living in Oxford in the 1990s included taking part in demonstrations against the playing of "Dixie" by the school band, seeing burly black young male athletes wearing ballcaps with that little Rebel logo on them, and watching white students sit on the grassy knoll outside the baseball diamond so they could wave the giant Rebel flags that weren't allowed in the park. I had to drive all the way to Jackson with other members of the NOW chapter for clinic defense and Roe day observances. 

By this point you are not surprised that this self-evaluation comes about thanks to contemporary leaders of Virginia's government. It's what makes me believe that people who build careers helping ALL others could have started in a different place. 

Additional reading:

"Yes Politicians Wore Blackface," Washington Post

Early Post item on the governor

Trains

I have the family train set and really thought that I just needed to hook up some wires and hit go. I didn't realize how much wiring Pop-Pop, my uncles and/or Dad must have done for the board layout. Well. Maybe because the first thing I read was more ambitious than I am right now.

Dumping some links here and fretting a bit about joining some kind of train club.

Lionel's website re current version of ZW Transformer

Pretty useful forum discussion of what connects where for simple running.

Classic Toy Trains magazine site (joined) has wiring piece.

Virginia Train Collectors seem to meet on Thursdays.

Found everything but wire.