Getting to What with eBay

My day of plenty hath runneth over: 
I just got an official email from eBay that is so funny, it's almost as if they intended it that way.
The email is to inform users that eBay is setting up a "new payments experience by intermediating payments on our Marketplace platform".

I think this means eBay is going to start handling payments themselves, rather than farming them out to PayPal--their current "primary payments processing partner". 
This changeover is going to be a "multi-year journey".

The language reminds me of the British comedy W1A, a sendup of the BBC. It's full of wonderful gibberish, such as their invention, The Department of Better.

The email from eBay ends with this beautiful line:

"We’re looking forward to what’s next, and to getting there with you."

My New Fridge Magnet

Truly, it has been a day of plenty. Not only did I find at the thrift store The Report on the Impeachment of Richard M. Nixon, 
but later in the afternoon the mail carrier delivered the Starsky & Hutch magnet I'd bought on eBay ($5, including shipping).
And then I went out for veggie burgers with L&M.  

Now--not happy, but very good--I'm going to finish reading A Rumor of War, Philip Caputo's memoir of being a Marine in the early days of US intervention in Vietnam.  

Caputo conveys better than anyone I've read the boredom and depression of the war--partly because he writes in a rather flat tone, which is a little enervating in itself. He also conveys without sentimentality how much soldiers love one another. 

Besides going into the field, he was in charge of filling out forms describing in detail how soldiers had died, using military euphemisms such as "traumatic amputation".
He says in his introduction that the book is not  a protest because he doesn't think it will change anything, which is the intent of protest. The four decades since have proven him right.

Hm... this started out a happy post. Oh well. It's both.

What a find! If only my dad were alive!

When I was in college--my first, no, second time, in my early twenties--I worked for Interlibrary Loan at the U-MN Library. 

I was one of the student go-fers who, in those pre-Internet days, took a library truck into the stacks of this huge library and retrieved hard copy of books and magazines in order to Xerox requested chapters or articles by hand. 
(I can still smell the ink and ozone and feel the heat of the overworked copiers.)

The copies were then mailed (in the mail) to the people who'd requested them, as the happy expense of we taxpayers.

In my eyes, the worst task was hunting down material in Government Docs---that mess of printed papers put out by the US Congress, bound in distinctive brown paper.

Today at the thrift store, however, I was soooo excited to see this House Report bound in that brown paper:

Zowee! Ninety-nine cents for the actual House Report No. 93-1305: Impeachment of Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States, August 20, 1974.

The first thing I thought was, 
Damn! I wish I could send this to my father! 

My father, once a professor of political science and now dead these past 6+ months, always said that Nixon was the only politician he hated, personally.

When I looked at the introductory matter, then I really wished he (my father) were alive so I could call him and ask, 
What does it meant that on the list of Impeachment Inquiry Staff is Hillary D. Rodham, Counsel? What was she doing?

I know I can (and will) google the answer, but since my father and I never had a lot of easy meeting points, I always loved finding a good question for him, on which I could hang a conversation.

Gollee, and there's John Conyers on the Committee on the Judiciary list, now sadly disgraced, and Barbara Jordan, r.i.p. 
And Trent Lott!
And, and, and:

I rarely pay close attention to politics, but these names rang through my childhood, on TV and at the dinner table.

But look---this is the most amazing thing to read, on Page One:

The Committee on the Judiciary... recommends that the House exercise its constitutional power to impeach Ricard M. Nixon, President of the United States.... 

RESOLUTION

Resolved, That Richard M. Nixon President of the United States, is impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors.

Hey... we got rid of a rotten president before, we could do it again, eh?

Since my dad is not here to enjoy this, I'll keep it for a while, then list it on eBay. 

Slightly Carbonated

I. Bubblier 

The days are getting longer, and I'm feeling bubblier. I've been going out and about more, including to my new gym a few times. 
I'm even ready to start looking for a personal trainer––necessary if I'm going to start lifting weights, even "sissy weights"––because I'm weak and ignorant of proper form, so I'm especially vulnerable to injuries.

I was inspired, too, by our old blog friend Annika (hi, Annika!) reminding me of Robert Mapplethorpe's photos of bodybuilder Lisa Lyon:

When I look at Lyon, I miss having a strong body. 
It was only seven years ago I walked across Spain, but turning fifty that year was a watershed. Since then, I'm no longer able to coast by on my ever-present strength. It's  diminishing. 

I've had a hard time believing, really accepting that I now have to DO something if I want to stay strong. And I haven't, so I haven't. But... try, try again. 

II. We're standing on a big clay marble

First, however, there's a trip to the Grand Canyon next week!
It's a one-day excursion from Las Vegas where bink and I are taking her mother for her 83rd birthday. I don't care about casinos, but I'm eager to check out the thrift shops.

bink and I are staying an extra day to go to the canyon, and I'm excited. I want to see this opening down into Earth---it's like the inverse of seeing Earthrise from space. You know? They show us that we are standing on a planet. We are explorers, if we want to be.

We're taking a bus tour and will have only four hours at the canyon, but that includes a short hike up to a ridge on the West Rim:

Maybe one day I'll get back for a longer stay, but––post-fifty––I'm thinking, work with what you've got, and take what you can get.
If I wait for some ideal trip, maybe I'll never get around to going at all. This way, at least I'll be there.

III. Toy Making

Last night was the first meeting of the free community ed class "Sewing Dolls and Bears for Children in Need". Except we're not sewing bears, because the group leader has a request from a school in western Kenya, near Uganda, for 200 dolls. 

So, it's dolls, which is OK.
I guess.

No, it really is. It's fun. All the material is donated, and it's like choosing candy, going through the many different fabrics. The doll pattern is simple, but you can jazz it up any way you want.

Below are some of the dolls, and some Kenyan schoolkids with their new dolls a couple years ago. 
I'd felt a little iffy about this kind of charity, but when I saw the kids with their dolls, I thought, what the hell, set aside your sociopolitical reservations here––when I was a kid, I'd have wanted one of those dolls.

 

IV. eBay Video Game

I recently read an article by an eBayer who compared his experience selling on eBay to playing multi-player video games. 

That feels right to me too. It's like the kind of role-playing games where you have to do a lot of prep, getting together your gear and developing your avatar, then heading out to engage with other players of the game, many of them unknown.

Some remain unknown. Most buyers treat the transaction entirely impersonally, as if you were just a supplier. Others get quite personal. Last week three people who'd bought from me sent me pictures of how my things fit in their life.

A quilter in England who'd bought two patterned sugar sacks from 1936 sent me the link to her Instagram of works made from old feed sacks--including this one, in process:

Another, who'd bought a lot of six "vintage" squeaky toys [vintage on eBay is anything older than twenty years old, which this year means older than 1998...], sent me her Flickr where she documents her rooms-ful of squeaky toys. 

They take on a surreal quality...  

Wouldn't this make a wonderful Easter card?

And a third showed me one of the Valentine's Day corsages she made with all-vintage stuff, including ribbon she'd got from me. 

I'd bought the spool to resell, thinking the packaging was cool. (Also I've developed a small interest in local stuff, and this was made by 3M and has their MN address on the package.) I didn't realize what she told me: "people fight over vintage crafting material to use".

After a week when I sold eight things (a lot, for me), this past week I've only sold one. Which is a nice break, actually--it's a lot of work, packaging things and schlepping them to the post office every day. 

I have made a little money ($215 profit in two months), and while some items have made a tidy profit, the overall return on investment, especially investment of time, is small. 

Part of that is the nature of the game, part is that I'm still learning. 

I don't always estimate the shipping charges right, for instance--and last week I hadn't realized the p.o.  raised its prices. The day they went up, I'd underestimated so badly on two inexpensive items, I made a total profit of 80 cents.

It's not worth it, financially, to sell stuff with a tiny profit margin, like squeaky toys, but in the Game version, it's all fake gold anyway---the pleasure is in the hunt––for things, and for the knowledge that comes with them––and in the transaction. 

Yesterday I got this 1970s ceramic owl macrame hanging at GW for $3. Common wisdom says you should photograph your objects against a plain background, but I had to get my photo of Soul & Glaser on the set of Starsky & Hutch in there.

They look so good together, I almost hope the owl doesn't sell and I have to keep it.

[God Emperor Avatar of eBay, if you're listening, don't grant that half-hope. I do not need more stuff around. Send a buyer! ]

Fix-It Fabric

I liked and learned a lot in Quilting Fundamentals class yesterday,
making a quilt piece out of the Land o' Lakes alfalfa seed sack that I'd felt iffy about (with its sanitized Indian servant "butter maiden"), 
even though in the end I didn't like the piece itself.

I started to pull it apart to remake it...

 But decided I'm never going to like such a blocky square format.

Instead, I'm working on re-making this black velvet painting, below. 
Matadors in their suits of light are surely some of the most beautiful humans ever. So when I saw a matador in gold and pink at the Thrift Store for $2.99, I snatched it up. 

Then got home and thought [again], WHAT am I going to do with this? 

I'm not sure bullfighting's worse than other sports.
(American football? Barbaric, in all directions.
My city is hosting the Superbowl next month, for instance,
 and social services here are working to provide safe places for the tide of sex-trafficked children who they know will to be brought in to service the players and fans...)

But that's beside the point.
My stuffed animals were scowling! They did not like having a wounded bull around.
So... this afternoon I am working on fixing that up.

In which I accidentally buy a statue of General Lee.

I'll be damned if yesterday I didn't go and buy a copy of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee--much like the very one I'd fumed about melting down into playground equipment, a few months back here.

I didn't see it, is the thing, because standing there in the St V deP thrift store, I was marveling at the glory of a pin-up girl next to an Andrew Jackson-wearing-lipstick on a souvenir ashtray--
part of the glory being that it's an ASHTRAY, which you hardly see anymore round here. 

It made me feel nostalgic, like the Pyrex coffee pot my mother percolated Folger's coffee in.
My mother also smoked––Marlboro's––often while she drank Coke out of glass bottles, and ate sleeves of Saltines.
(And we brushed our teeth with Crest, shampooed with Breck, lathered up with Dial, lotioned up with Jergen's, washed our clothes in Tide and our dishes with Joy.)

She had clear glass ashtrays around, the ones that were so heavy you could bludgeon someone with one--seems I've seen a movie where someone is being strangled and reaches for one in self-defense? Or am I imaging that?

Anyway, I got home, unwrapped the newspaper from my finds, and ...by gum, there's my boy, top center:

 Damn. It was only three dollars, but what am I going to DO with it?

I won't sell it, which had been my intention. 
I'd had to make a decision about what I'll sell really quickly after I started on eBay, because a whole lot of "passive racist" things show up at thrift stores.

I say passive because they aren't blatantly hateful. If you didn't know the context in which they exist, you might not even spot them.

This "Our Pals" needle book, for instance:

I bought it quite a while ago because it came with two Rocket needle books I love.
It made me uncomfortable, but I couldn't quite say why. 

After public artworks celebrating the Confederacy came up [violently] for review last year, 
I looked into it more.

Looking at images from the Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia, 
I saw that the image on the needle book quite clearly fits in with many other images of good-natured, 
happy-to-be-poor and subservient African Americans--

such as the black man who cooks Cream of Wheat (for white people's children). 

What's his name?

Whoops--looked it up, he's Rastus.

Aunt Jemima, who is soooo happy to cook pancakes (for white people's children), and Uncle Ben, not Spiderman's uncle, who made rice. The New York Times reported in 2007 that a re-make of this "racially charged character" comes with a "very high cringe factor":

 "Uncle Ben [stood] prominently in stark contrast to the way other human characters like Orville Redenbacher and Colonel Sanders personify their products. That reticence can be traced to the contentious history of Uncle Ben as the black face of a white company, wearing a bow tie evocative of servants and Pullman porters and bearing a title reflecting how white Southerners once used “uncle” and “aunt” as honorifics for older blacks because they refused to say “Mr.” and “Mrs.”"

White men rarely appear on needle books, and when they do, they are leaders of industry with a family on the side:

And this is the norm for white women on needle books (I've seen no black people yet, and I've been looking). Pearl necklaces!

In contrast, "Our Pals" (they're not us, I guess, just pals, like my stuffed animals) are a pair of anthropomorphic black animals with pink hands, feet, and lips--exaggerated on the female cat, who also has simple-minded "Lawdy, Miss Scarlett, I don't know nothin' bout birthin' babies" googly eyes.

They appear shiftless, with just enough industry to sew patches on their tattered clothes, though they have to work a little at threading that needle...  

And it's significant that the male dog has nothing better to do than help at woman's work---which would have been emasculating in that era (and in our ours too--men who do needlework are slightly suspect). (Related: some African Americans object to how often black men are dressed as women in mass media, for comic effect.)

Well, so what? some might say. 
But once you look at the less "benign" images of Jim Crow--some are literally nauseating--you can see---I could see---that this seemingly friendly image is one puzzle piece in a picture of humiliation, degradation, and even outright terror, torture, and murder. 
E.g., postcards of a real lynching in Duluth, MN, in 1920, that Bob Dylan sings about his song, "Desolation Row":
"They’re selling postcards of the hanging".

So I don't buy or sell any things that set my Spidey senses tingling.
But I have accumulated a few, one way and another.
For instance, a very cool, mid-century alfalfa feed sack, printed with the pretty Indian maiden who has long been the logo of Land O' Lakes. 
Recently I sold a couple sugar sacks printed in 1936 with doll patterns, and the buyer said she is always on the look out to buy more feed sacks. I thought of this one, but got that "oh-oh" shiver.

I talked to my friend Julia, a sewer who, as a POC, has thought a lot about these things, and she said,
"Why don't you cut it up and sew it into something else?"

A good idea.
I am taking a Beginning Quilting class this afternoon, (I don't want to learn to quilt, I just want to learn some of the associated sewing tricks.) 
I am taking the feed sack to cut up. 
Maybe I'll break the ashtray and make a mosaic.

Popular This Week: Things with Ears

These three items with ears sold in the past three days, one-two-three, just like that, on my eBay:

L to R: 
-Ironstone sugar bowl from Yorkshire, 1840s
-Fluffy dog "Baba-ra", by Kamar, 1967
-1970s fondue pot, the sort I imagine Mary Richards would've used if Starsky & Hutch had come to dinner [good prompt for a fic!]

Oh. No, I have to take that back about Mary Richards--per the Mary Tyler Moore Show's fondue scene on youtube, she used one of those stinky sterno pots. (Really, these electric ones are much better--no smell.)

I must have absorbed a lot of 70's design from the MTM Show, which my family watched every week when I was a kid, because it wasn't from my parents, who weren't at all into the era's style, and neither was I---all that orange, all that polyester...
I appreciate it now, but I still wouldn't want to live with it 
. . . she says, sitting on her orange couch--(but it's more of a 50s orange).

I didn't like the MTM show much--it was my sister's favorite--but remember when you just watched whatever halfway decent was on TV, cause that's all there was? 

I'm enjoying eBay a lot. 
Mostly I like the scrounging and researching, but I like the selling too: 
after almost two months, I've made a profit of $175. 
That makes it a hobby that pays for itself, essentially. 

The Shape of Boiling Eggs

I've spent the profits on stuffed animals, but I've got a backlog to work on now, so I haven't bought any in a while.
My most recent purchase is a glass Pyrex stove-top coffee pot.

I'd almost bought such a pot at Goodwill for $6 but decided it would be a nostalgia buy––memories of my mother making Folger's coffee in one––and not something I'd really use. And I didn't want to try to sell it because it's heavy and breakable, which I don't like dealing with.

But then I went to see the movie The Shape of Water, and director Guillermo del Toro must have been in love with these coffee pots because he over-lingers, more than once, on eggs boiling in one.

The hero (Sally Hawkins), offers one of her boiled eggs:

AND THEN I HAD TO HAVE ONE! A coffee pot. (Also, some hard-boiled eggs. . . . If I hadn't just not bought such a pot, would I have felt the same?)

So, instead of spending $6, I spent $29 w/shipping (the shipping is what kicks you on eBay).

The sets and props, like the pot, are what I liked best in The Shape of Water. Otherwise, it's a nice but rather flat story.

In what is basically a fix-it fanwork of The Creature of the Black Lagoon (fix-it: where a fan retells a story to get it to come out the way they want), del Toro weirdly left out the crucial ingredient that makes monster movies work: 
arousing the audience's pathos for the monster.

Del Toro's monster is human––played by the wonderful Michael Shannon––but he's only ever bad. 
You feel not one ounce of sympathy for him. 

That makes him a one-note character, and, overall, I found the movie boring. 
Lovely and sweet, but too psychologically simplistic.

But the eggs boiling in the Pyrex pot!!! 
That was not boring.
That was even worth it. 

This is mine. >

It's Snowing

bink & Maura's terrier Astro loves the snow.
We're in the middle of our first big snowstorm of this winter, and he was out "helping" bink shovel snow by leaping at her and tearing around like a mad thing.

Lake Ice, by Julia

We're having a very cold and very dry winter:
unusually, the lake ice is not much obscured by snow. 

Julia dresses in a million layers >
 to spend time on the lake (about 1 mile from me)
and photograph the ice. Sort of amazing her iPhone works when she lays it right on the ice surface, but it does.

She has the place pretty much to herself, usually.

I went with her one day when it was above zero F, but she goes when it's below too.
_______________________________________
This is my favorite of her many photos of lake ice--it looks like a photo the Hubble Space Telescope would take, or one of our own brain neurons:

"I have enofugh dresses"

Three weeks after my seventh birthday, I wrote this letter [transcribed at end] to my grandparents, inquiring after my birthday present.

It cracks me up: I have always been just like me. 
I don't want clothes, but may I have a stuffed toy or a puppy? (Also kind of pushy and yet so thoughtful--don't mail a puppy, that would hurt it!)

My mother kept the letter (to her parents) because, I strongly suspect, she had kept the present they'd sent, if it was a check, or she'd given it to me as if it were from her, if it was something I'd like. (I know she regularly did this because years later she told me she did.)

My grandparents continued to send presents like clockwork. They often were dresses, which my mother passed along under their names.

                                                 
                                                 1968 March (27th)
Dear Grandmother and Grandfather    I wrote a story called,
The Dirty Pig   it was two pages long. Why I realy wrote this
lettr is so I can ask wen you'r going to send my pacage I'm curieus 
what it is, wht I realy realy want is asmall little puppy that dosn't grow to big 
with spots and the reast of him is white but don't send one Please. how is 
little Miss [their dog]. Hope she is fine. Hope you are to. I have enofugh dresses
but I would like a ragdy Ann I don't care just so if you give me a
puppy you bring it here. We are fine.

Among the Weight Lifters, and Other People & Places

Could I Drag a Big Tire Across a Floor?

I joined a new (to me) gym yesterday, only one block away.

I was frightened even to go in the door, as it caters to weight lifters---serious, competitive weight lifters. Humans whose muscles have the consistency of boards.

But I'd heard through the grapevine that this independent gym welcomes people with regular bodies from the neighborhood. 
And also that you can always get space on the lightweight machines because most every body is busy doing things like dragging tractor tires by metal chains across the AstroTurf floor in the basement to bother with what Arnold Schwarzenegger called "sissy workouts".

So I pumped up my bravery and went it to sign up for sissy workouts.
And the place really was welcoming. To begin with, the manager is a buff and affable woman who happily showed me around.

I told her––because the words formed in my mind so I said them––that I'd like to work up to dragging a tire across the floor, 
and she brightly said, 
"That's a great goal!"

It was clear she really thought it was a great goal, and entirely possible that I might hold it and even reach it.  
Isn't it funny how people are different?

But then, after all, me working up to dragging a Very Large Tire across a floor is possible, technically.
I mean, I'm older and fatter and outer of shape than I've ever been, but there's nothing fundamentally physically wrong with me.

So... watch this space.

It was fun to be there today. 
While the YW never played music, except for classes, here they  assume everyone likes Joan Jett's "I Love Rock and Roll" and other thumping songs, and they play them. 
I do like that sort of music when I'm exercising, so that's all right.

Duck and Cover

"Reality" is a movable feast, eh?

Yesterday I went to Walgreens to buy hydrogen peroxide to soak for 48 hours a white ironstone sugar bowl I'm going to list on eBay.
I'd read that that removes the brown age-stains under the glaze, which this lovely piece has a lot of. (Twenty-four hours later, I can report it's working.)

While I was back in the pharmacy area, I hear a fight break out up by the cash register. Some guy was bellowing ugly accusations at some woman who'd accused him of shoplifting.

My first thought was, if he starts shooting, where should I go?
The floor?
Was there an emergency exit? (Not that I could see.)
I stayed far away until the guy left.

When I checked out, I said to the cashier, "Well, that was scary--I was wondering if I should hit the floor."

"Yeah," she said. "I don't think he had a gun, but we thought he was going to start swinging."

There you have Life in America these days--being relieved that you're going to get hit instead of shot...

I didn't even think much about it, except to think how adaptable we humans are to shifting realities. 

Bears to Come

I am going to make bears from scratch!!!
I signed up for a free community ed class---more like a weekly gathering--to "make bears and dolls for children in need."

The toys are given to the local Crisis Nursery---the place where the police or social workers take you if you're a little kid whose parents just got shot (or shot somebody) at Walgreens or something else that leaves you hiding behind the couch.
I believe you get this toy to keep, which...
Jeez. 
Can you even imagine? 
Maybe you can.

Materials are free too, but they said bring wool sweaters for felting, if you have them. I actually do have a couple brown sweaters, and also some leftover brown flannel from that baby toy I made for my friend's grandchild. Bears are brown, and lots of kids are too.

Anyway, doesn't that class seem tailor made for me?
The first meeting is at the end of January.

The Southwest Thrift Store Tour

And then. . . I'm going to Las Vegas!

The back story is, bink's mother is losing her short-term memory and also some of her decision making faculties. 
Recently she fell for some "You won a free cruise!" scam--a legal one that explains all the associated costs, but still a scam designed to snare exactly people like her, who don't track all that well.
Her mom had even sent in money to "reserve your place".

bink looked it up, and it sounds like if you actually show up at the dock, you spend 48 hours on a floating Motel 6 that hasn't been cleaned between sailings, eating (and paying for) Denny's–style food, and it can end up costing you more than if you bought and paid for a regular, non-"free" cruise.

I've known bink's mother for more than 30 years. While she's annoyed me as often as not, I was really angry that people would consciously DESIGN rip-offs to take advantage of her in her old age.

Also, I always remember an act of kindness on her part. The Easter after my mother killed herself, bink & her mom were going to meet me for lunch after my shift at my Catholic church job.

Ridiculously, I'd timed our get-together as if it were a normal Sunday. Of course everything at church goes way longer on Easter, and I assumed bink and her mom would've gone home by the time I got there, two hours late. (None of us had cell phones at this point, in 2003. (I still don't.))
But no, bink's mother had insisted they stay and wait for me, because of my mother.

That one kindness is like a perpetual carte blanche.
(That's the economy of kindness for you.)

So I said to bink, let's give your mom a REAL free trip. She loves Las Vegas, so we're taking her there for her 83rd birthday in February.

I've only been to LV once, for the 2008 Star Trek Convention, and I didn't see much of the place then. This time I want to leave the hotel and go find thrift stores.

Thrift stores are where the detritus of a culture washes up.
I'm curious what that will be in LV. I bet there are all the usual things that I find here---Happy Meal toys and Corning Ware casseroles without lids---but what else there might be?

Of course I especially hope there might be some local stuffed animals, but I suppose they'll mostly be the sane Beanie Baby crap as here.  But maybe at the Antique Malls there will be Mormon ones, whatever those might be.

Alongside deciding to take this trip, I decided not to go to London. 
To begin with, no one except bink could commit to joining me there for my birthday tea, for a lot of reasons, including that I don't have as big a pool of friends, family, and acquaintances as I had 17 years ago. Because they died, some of them, and because I worked freelance since 2001 and don't meet many new people, 
but also I am happier being solitary than I've ever been.
[See, Bears]

Then, I also started to feel nervous about that trip being right on the heels of the Texas Librarians Convention in Dallas, where I am going to be on a panel about nonfiction writing.
I've never done much public speaking--and none in a dozen years. The idea of coming in jet-lagged from London to talk [intelligently] to strangers started to appear like a bad one.

I could have cancelled the panel--they aren't paying me or anything. But while I've been to London more than a dozen times, I've never been to Dallas. I'm curious to see it--and they must have thrift stores.
This will be my springtime southwest thrift store tour! 

And somewhere in here I will start looking for a job.
I will be physically strong again, unless a tire falls on me, godforbid.

Where's this, then?

A box of new old toys has arrived. I look at them and wonder where they've been in their lives.

They seem to be wondering, Where are we now? 

These two ^ came as part of a lot of seven toys on eBay. The seller didn't photograph each animal, but I took a chance because I could see I wanted at least two of the lot--including this dirty white terrier with ocher ears. (And they were cheap--only $11 for the lot, though shipping more than doubled that.)

When I opened the box, I got the sort of surprise you hope for. 
The animals were all much cooler than I'd expected––especially this black dog (above, right), which had just looked like a blob in the photos.  

You can see, can't you? this dog's got personality. 
He's a mohair Scottish terrier, from the 1930s or 1940s. Stuffed stiff with wood shavings (and a non-working squeaker), he stands up,  and he has glass eyes and a jointed, movable head.

Scotty cost $4 (w/ shipping). I could add a zero and resell him. I wasn't even expecting him. But he's here now, and he's staying.

Material Girl: Show & Tell

These past weeks I've been obsessed with material things, specifically with researching, photographing, and writing up things to list for sale on eBay--both some of my own old things, and also vintage stuff I find at thrift stores.

When I was younger, say until my forties, I was mostly taken up with metaphysical things--what are and what do I think about god, relativity, psychology?

Now I wonder about things like, Who invented polyester?
How do you clean aluminum?

Doing eBay has been a mash-up of three things I loved when I was a kid: 
scavenger hunts, show and tell, and thrift stores.

It satisfies some hunting-and-gathering instincts too: 
I feel atavistic.
(Can you feel atavistic? Perhaps I am atavisticizing?)

I've made almost $100 profit in 6 weeks (hm... about what I made writing nonfiction for young readers). I've spent it on other things I want from eBay, including the Czech spaceman I already posted, and a Pyrex glass stove-top coffee pot, which is on its way.

Here are photo collages of some of the stuff I've listed:

I researched all these things and am confident in my identifications--the dates, for instance, are often from original ads I found online, not just what other eBayers say (not a reliable source).

They are, listed in order from Left to Right in each row:

• Wear-Ever Aluminum Pan, 1956, anodized lid, curly-loop handles

• Canadian Mountie RCMP figure, on birch disc (1970s?)

• Items from The Golden Rule Lutterloh Pattern-Making Set, 1966

• Boontonware Melmamine 9"/4Qt Mixing Bowl, Raspberry-Pink Splatter, 1960s 

• Tag from sheer yellow apron, handmade by Mae Bennett, New Prague, MN

• Card of 2 LaMode-brand black plastic "basket-weave" buttons 

• Buttonhole attachment for Singer Sewing Machine, © 1940

• White ironstone 7" tall sugar jar & lid, Meakin, 1870s

• 4 Fire-King Peach Lustre Cereal Bowls, 1950s

• Repoussé tulip spray on hammered aluminum, casserole holder by Rodney Kent, 1955

• Nesting brushed-aluminum canisters, anodized lids, mid-century modern

• Sterling Silver Salt Shaker, Lunt 1100, 1920-40s

• Nicholson Brand 13" File

• Star Trek fabric, 1970s (not a reproduction) 

• Unbranded Cathy Doll, drinks, wets, blinks, waves, 1960-70s

"Fandom is a personal book. . ."

The publisher asked me to write a post for their blog about my book on fandom. They posted it this morning, but, as is their prerogative, they'd cut it by half. 
.

That's OK--the original post is long and chatty--but they sanitized it too. Fandom ends up sounding too much like a social crusade. There is that side of it, and it's a big one, but the publisher took out my paragraph about characters hooking up---and "shipping" (creating relationships among characters) is even a bigger side of fandom.
.

Ah well, that blog is for publishing professionals. Pleasegod no one much else will see it. I'm posting here what I originally wrote. I've said all this before, but it was fun to sit down and write it out, now the book is behind me.

My original, unedited post:

Fandom is a personal book for me, and the first book I've written for this publisher that is entirely my own. Always before, I've written on someone else's choice of topic, from Algeria to Zimbabwe. 

I began researching this book back in the 1970s, when, every day after school, I watched Star Trek reruns in syndication on my family's black and white TV. (Syndication--I had to define that in the book.) Of course I mean  Star Trek: TOS––The Original Series. There are seven Trek series now with the latest, Star Trek:Discovery airing.

The show was incredibly important to me––I felt weird and ugly in a new school, my family was falling apart, the president of the United States was clearly unfit to serve, the country was in a seemingly unending and unwinnable war (just the one, though)––and here was this crew, this all-species [not just human] crew of both genders [only two throughout the universe, according to the show] that said another world, another way, is possible. Get on board.
.

Star Trek implied that things on Earth would get worse before we got to their, the 23rd, century. In some arenas, that seems to be the case so far. In fandom, however, things have gotten better. While I had almost no one to share my fan love, art, and ideas with, teens now can share online their passion for the stories they love. 

Of course there are problems  with online fandom …because humans. The 1970s had problems too. For me, isolation was the big one. Entering the fray can be scary, and possibly dangerous, but so is silence.

A couple years ago, in 2016, I noticed that while fans are all over the internet, there were few printed books on the phenomenon of fandom. I pitched the idea of a book that would take a look at some of the many ways fans actively participate in the media they love.  I took on fan-made writing (fic), videos (vids), games, visual arts, and cosplay. Trying to fit all that into 100 pages ended up feeling, as Bilbo says in Lord of the Rings, "sort of stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread." 

I decided to focus on a couple main ingredients. One was history. Fan writing comes in for a lot of derision. It's true, a lot of it is painfully bad. So is a lot of printed work. (Dan Brown, I'm looking at you.) I wanted to show that fan writing is not some anomaly: humans have always, always riffed on one another's stories.

If you look at the history of literature, it's a bunch of magpies borrowing shiny bits for their own use. Virgil lifted his hero Aeneas from Homer's Illiad. Jane Austen got her start as a teenager writing parodies of the romance novels of her day--like our Harlequins. As the British Library says, virtually none of Shakespeare's plots were original. (Of course, lifting a good idea is just the beginning--you have to be able to run with it.) Fifty Shades of Grey, which started online as adult erotic fic based on the teen vampire Twilight romances, is nothing new.

The other ingredient was fans' passion for things to be better. We don't always agree on what better would look like (ha! not at all), but, mostly, we want it.

Sometimes it's a personal vision of better.

Let's see...

*takes a quick look at Archive of Our Own*

[AO3, the fan-run site for fanworks; for recent fic: https://archiveofourown.org/works].

OK--today, fans want Wonder Woman and Captain Kirk to hook up (that's a new one on me). * We (still) want Captain Kirk and Spock to, too. (Star Trek is the mother ship of a kind of fic called slash, that romantically pairs same-sex characters.) And so forth, and so on.

Fandom envisions a better social world too, one with less barriers of every kind. I start the book with the fan-love for the musical play Hamilton as an example of a virtuous cycle: fans love that the actors are people of color and women play a prominent role. But it was fandom's ongoing call for and support of work like this that helped bring about a world where creator Lin-Manuel Miranda's work can make it to Broadway, and beyond. And where Black Panther and is not just a background character, and Wonder Woman isn't just "the other one" in the DC pantheon. 

In many ways, these mass media stories are inheritors of Star Trek (and other) fandom's vision of, as fans say, a sandbox where everybody gets to play.

To wrap up, an example of how I participated in one tiny way in that vision.

For some fans, Fandom Is a Way of Life. I am not one of those fans. By 2008, it'd been a couple decades since I'd even thought about Star Trek. Life was rough that winter though--specifically, I was reeling from my mother's suicide.

I idly googled "Star Trek." My word, the fandom...!

I entered the fray. I made an autobiographical vid: screenshots from Star Trek  subtitled with my story of being a sad teenager, and then a (at that time) sad adult, and how the example of Kirk and Spock––a sort of yin/yang pair of personalities––had and did inspire and comfort me.
 
(YouTube took it down after a few years. Copyright law and Fair Use--it's a thorny thicket the book just brushes lightly.) 

YouTube comments are famous for calling forth the sludge of humanity, but my vid got nothing but love. A lot of people let me know they felt the same. "It's true, Star Trek saves lives," one wrote.

That summer, I got a message on youTube from a fan in Moscow, Captain J. L. of the Russian Star Trek Club. She wrote, "It's wonderful that people on the other side of the planet feel the same way." Would I be willing to re-subtitle the vid in Russian, to be shown at the 2009 RusCON, the Russian Star Trek convention?

We worked together to translate it. There were some funny glitches. What did I mean, "Spock seemed like a pill"? And, did you know, "Bluetooth" in Russian is "Bluetooth"? I'd put that in as a reference to Star Trek's prescient wireless technology.

The captain also asked me to write a letter she would translate ad read at Ruscon. The letter I wrote concludes, "Star Trek has been right in its predictions about technology and a lot of other things. But I hope it will be wrong about one: I hope we won't half-destroy ourselves before we finally get our act together. Thanks to Capt. J. L. for translating the video. Our work together gives me hope that Star Trek was right about humanity's peaceful future."

Russia, presidential politics, social justice, personal sorrow, lust, and love, and plain old fun!---fandom has enough butter for all the bread. Writing this book allowed me to spend a lot of time with young fans, online and in personal interviews. They and their creativity and love for stories, for romance, justice, community have given me hope. I hope they (and we) take that hope and, as Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation says, make it so. 

________________________

* After I wrote this, I realized that in the 2017 movie Wonder Woman, Chris Pine plays the love interest, Steve Trevor. Pine also plays Capt. Kirk in the reboot Trek movies (2009– ). That didn't immediately occur to me because, in my eyes, Captain Kirk has and always shall be William Shatner.

"BOOKS ARE WEAPONS" (WW2)

On the publication-information page of a Dell pulp fiction paperback published during World War II:

"In a free democracy everyone may read what he likes."

Spaceman Revealed

This is the Soviet rubber cosmonaut toy I blogged about a while ago---designed in 1962 Czechoslovakia by Libuse Niklova. This toy [later named Kelvin the Cosmonaut (Kelvin from the movie Solaris)] and I are basically the same age.

He arrived from eBay yesterday, wearing his nonremovable scratched and clouded helmet. This morning he is seeing the clear light of day for the first time in... who knows how long?

The eBayer told me:

"We got it in Czechoslovakia either on our honeymoon in 1962 or in 1964 when we again visited relatives in Kosice, this time with our 11-month old son. I suspect the relatives gave the toy to the baby."

(I'm wearing my 1961 Vostok pin too, which arrived the day before.) 

Epiphany

(Know Your Meme)

Excerpt from "An open Tumblr letter to younger fans..."

I got all choked up when I read "Open Tumblr letter to younger fans, from a 77-year-old TOS fangirl" from Fandom Grandma 
[via Flamingo Slim's Tumblr, mostly Starsky/Hutch],
especially this part:

"The friendships you make in fandom will be with you for life. Like all friendships, they will wax and wane as the focus of your life shifts over time, but you will always be able to pick up the thread.

"You will — to give you a hypothetical example — be 77 years old and discover Tumblr and get a rush of Spirk [Spock/Kirk] feels after a decade of not giving TOS a thought, and contact your 83-year-old fangirl friend in the nursing home, to whom you haven’t spoken in several years.

"You will open the conversation with, 'So, Jim and Spock love each other and that just makes me so happy.'

"And your friend in the nursing home will sigh and say, 'Yes. They do love each other. It’s such a comfort.'"

Please contact me in 25 years and remind me of this too.

This moved me because not only do I expect to BEcome one of these old ladies who still finds comfort in TOS ("the original series" of Star Trek), but because it shores up my decision to emphasize the positive side of fandom in my book---a decision I've sometimes doubted as I also see, of course, the downside of the internet. 

But there's a downside to everything we do, because humans.*
It's hardly a secret that the internet is problematic, and so can be fandom. I stand by my choice to emphasize the positive, in this case.

This open letter has 11,550 notes [likes and shares] on Tumblr, so I guess other people see it that way too. 

Thanks to Mortmere for sending this letter to me! 

A random example of Spirk fan art, "love beams" from 2009 moiramurphy.deviantart.com/art/TOSART-Spirk-63596479
(She manipulated actual screenshots from the show of Kirk and Spock looking at each other.)

_____________
* “because x” was a Word of the Year in 2013, but this is the first time I've used it, because it fit so well.