The Best Laid Plans; Or, Waiting for Earl

We were going to go to the beach for Labor Day weekend but have decided not to drive into the hurricane zone after all. Although Shoreline will get the edge of the system, meriting Tropical Storm status unless something changes, our Back To School destination was (is) about twenty five miles to the west of where Earl is destined to pass tomorrow afternoon. Everyone is talking about Bob, a Category 2 hurricane which, 19 years ago, took out power lines and trees from Long Island to Hartford, killed eighteen people and caused almost $3 billion in damage. At last report, although very wide, Earl had been downgraded to a Category 1 hurricane. It's nothing to fool around with, and it will hammer eastern Massachusetts -- but, although we are battening down the lawn furniture, we should have less trouble here.

That same 19 years ago, the Radicals were in the last two weeks of a summer-long rental on the North Fork of Long Island, and I was getting ready to start my job at Zenith. Bob passed pretty much over our house, which thrummed as the winds shrieked around it. We would not have made that choice voluntarily, but were living without TV or radio, so it was not until the semi-finals of the softball league were postponed that we understood that there was a whopper coming in. By then it was too late: the highway was bumper to bumper, and it was doubtful we would get off in time anyway. Except for a brief period right before the hurricane struck, when I was crawling around under the house capturing our fluffy gray cat who believed that you should leave the house in dangerous weather, we spent the storm in bed, wrapped up in blankets, mostly believing that we were safe but half expecting the house to levitate.

The sound of the wind, as the storm accelerated towards us, was unforgettable.

The truth is, however, that I loved it, and I half regret getting the B-version of this one. I have few guilty pleasures that I enjoy more than being battened down in a house in a seriously dangerous storm: ice, hail, wind, snow, thunder, lightening -- bring it on! I discovered this was when I was sixteen, on Tangier Island, off the coast of Virginia, on a family vacation, and I was hooked for life. The trick is, of course, that you have to be "caught" in it for it to count -- you can't drive right into it, because that would be just dumb.

Hence the canceled trip. If all goes as it is supposed to, we will be waiting on the sidelines for this one, working on our syllabi, blogging and greeting the School New Year.

Summer Reading List

Please note that I finished Debby Applegate's, The Most Famous Man in America, and it is a Great Read. It is now out in paper, and I recommend you take it on vacation.

Remember I said in the previous post that gay and lesbian books sell like little hotcakes? Well, the Radical's new featured book (which I am taking on my weekend retreat to the country house of another historian) is a good example. If you are, just now, choosing a dissertation topic, read this book, because it demonstrates how you can make choices (even as a graduate student, the time where it seems all choices have been made for you!) that make your life more pleasant and possibly more lucrative. Karen Krahulik's Provincetown represents the following good choices:

1. Choosing a fun summer resort as the place to do your research. Can't beat that with a stick. It's almost like being a Europeanist, but without having to read bad handwriting in your second language.

2. A queer book topic that queers will buy and read in large numbers. If you can find any of the remaining queer bookstores, you will see a lot of academic stuff on the shelves that will be purchased by non-academics, often by people with no college or high school degree at all who are voracious readers. Speculation on why this is so may appear in another post, but it has something to do with a long period of time when knowing anything about any kind of homosex required research on the part of those coming out, since all information about perverse sexuality was withheld by the state, and by those agents of the state, schools and parents. And don't forget that bookstores, even post-Stonewall, were one place where queers of any age could meet each other and have actual sex. Then maybe read about it too.

3. A book about a summer resort which anyone who lives in, summers in or visits will want to buy and/or give as a house present and/or take home as a souvenir. You could probably extend that to all of Cape Cod, Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard. And when you think of the number of academics who summer in those places, what a way to get a book into the hands of people who might learn to appreciate you. I mean, wow.

4. A book about a place that most cultural and literary historians know is important, but that no one had yet devoted the time to write a community study of.

5. A short book. Thank you, Karen. Would that other people were more like you.

If you like Karen's book and want to get email from her regularly, go to the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History website (CLGH) and join this affiliate of the American Historical Association. Karen is the chair and corresponding secretary. A lifetime membership is only $150: you can buy a yearly membership for a piddling amount that, annoyingly, you will have to renew every year for another, less-piddling amount. But $150 is a steal, when you consider that a lifetime membership to the Organization of American Historians costs ten times that sum.

Or less of a steal, when you consider that last year the lifetime membership cost $100, but how could you have known? Stop berating yourself and write the check, for God's Sake. And *do not* compare this sum to the fact that in 1885 a lifetime membership to the AHA cost $25, and an annual membership cost $5. One imagines that the Founding Fathers weren't sure the AHA would last. Imagine how clever people like Frederick Jackson Turner felt by 1900! Well, you can feel the same way by joining CLGH now.