Pajama Girl

Final paper for my eighteenth-century urban history class: finished.

Random probably grossly historically inaccurate and definitely depressing but it wouldn't leave me alone World War II story: finished. And good riddance. (No, really. YOU ARE GOING TO LEAVE ME ALONE NOW.)

Yuletide story: Yeah, I need to start that. How's everyone else doing?

***

There is a girl on my floor who wears polka dot pajamas. White, with little dark blue polka dots, the edges scalloped.

When I say she wears them, I mean I have never seen her in anything else - and I see her almost every day. I boil water for my breakfast tea, and she's in the kitchen chopping onions in her pajamas. I ransack the refrigerator for butter for my mid-afternoon toast, and she and her friend are stirring carrots in a skillet with a wooden spoon, murmuring in Japanese. I step out in the hallway...and she's walking to the shower. In her polka-dot pajamas.

She must own fifty pairs of these pajamas, because they're always crisp and clean.

Why? Are they hypoallergenic pajamas, and she can't wear anything else? Does she wear them to class? It must be cold; they're only cotton. Does she ever get tired of polka dots?

Maybe it's a dare. Wear the same outfit for a year, and you get a million dollars - a meeting with a unicorn (or a kirin, perhaps?) - a cure for a dying mother - I don't know; I'm only guessing.

Did she just get tired of fashion?

Maybe it's grown on her, like a second skin. Maybe I've met my first magical creature, and I didn't notice because I couldn't look past the polka dots.

Reading List

I've basically finished my eighteenth-century history class. We have one more seminar but we've already turned in the final paper, so basically things are done.

These are my favorite books from the reading list: the ones I thought were excellent, insightful, and well-written. It's mainly for my own reference, but if anyone has a sudden hankering to read about eighteenth-century social history than I highly recommend all of these.

1, John Brewer's The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century is an exhausting, yet entertaining look at high culture in the eighteenth century. He covers music, dancing, the theater, literature, the arts (both painting and sculpture) and finishes off with short biographies of cultural figures of the time who have since been somewhat forgotten.

I meant to read a chapter. Four hours later, nearly midnight, my eyes finally gave out and I had with great regret to put the book away. It's engrossing.

2. Amanda Vickery's The Gentleman's Daughter was probably my favorite book all term, and is incidentally one of the most popular books we read: it's available in a lot of public libraries. All sorts of interesting information about the lives of 18th century genteel women, drawn from scads of primary sources, with an interpretive framework that provides structure to the book without forcing the evidence into a preconceived pattern. (Writers of feminist history - or Marxist - or, indeed, anyone going into history with a sausage casing into which they wish to stuff their historical narrative - seem to be bothered when their subjects are happy, or exert some power over their lives. I suppose the historians think it weakens their argument.)

But Vickery is not just possessed of fascinating facts and a judiciously and sparingly applied interpretive framework. She's also a good writer, often quite dry and always entertaining. "We should not presume without evidence that women (or men) mindlessly absorbed a single didactic lesson like so many pieces of unresisting blotting paper"; no, we should look at as much evidence as possible from as many angles as are available, and see what it might teach us. Good history.

3. I've already written about Hitchcock and Shoemaker's Tales from the Hanging Court, which is, as it says on the tin, stories about trials at the Old Bailey. Lots of interesting insights, not just into the English justice system at the time, but into London life in general.

4. Brian Cowan's The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse. The title is misleading. I think Cowan called it that because everyone loves eighteenth-century coffeehouses and no one has even heard of his real topic, the eighteenth-century virtuosi. The virtuosi were nothing to do with what we would today call virtuosos; they were instead young men, who generally had done the Grand Tour, who were curious about pretty much everything and amassed huge collections of curiosities.

Cowan's got chapters about auctions, booksellers, zoos, freak shows (they were evidently a pretty high class entertainment at the time), the dangers of foppishness, and the eighteenth-century ethic of sociability generally. The ethic of sociability ties back to the whole coffeehouse thing, the coffeehouse being, and I quote, "a key site of masculine social discipline," and there's some interesting stuff about coffee too. But really that's just the window dressing. Come for the coffee, stay for the conversation.

5. And, finally, D. Cannadine's Class in England, which actually stretches from the eighteenth century to essentially the present (the book was published in 1998, which explains why he says so many nice things about Americans. Honest to God, I almost teared up. Someone loved us once!). It more or less diagrams the eighteenth-century class structure, and also talks about the essentially artificial nature of any diagram of a class structure: the lines are arbitrary, there are always people who don't fit, don't wed yourself to your system, etc.

I think that's enough to be getting on with.