Flies and Farms
There's a big, bumbling summer-fly noisily exploring the upstairs bathroom, which got me thinking about Grandma's farm in Minnesota. For some years in my late childhood and into my teens, I'd spend a week or so with grandma every summer, just me or just me and my brother, and most nights I'd be the last one awake, curled up in my father's former bed with four pillows behind me, a book in front of me, and the bare light bulb dangling from the ceiling over me the last light lit in the house, meaning I generally ended up with a fly or five circling the light there for some hours while I read. We get flies in the house here once in a while, but I always leave the downstairs bathroom light on and hubby hangs fly paper below it, so they don't generally last long. The light draws them in and the fly paper does them in.
I used to take a goodly stack of my own books to Grandma's, but I sometimes ran out of them before it was time to go home, meaning I'd raid Grandma's meager stash. Neither of my grandmothers were serious readers, although Grandma S. did introduce me to Grace Livingston Hill, who probably originated the "Christian romance" genre and wrote a slew of books with totally interchangeable heroes and heroines - but some lovely descriptive passages and many an interesting secondary character. But most of the books on her shelves were left over from when my dad went to college or were given to Grandma by a relative or friend.
Actually I avoided Grandma S's bookshelves for a long time because the first book I pulled off of there and read was George Orwell's Animal Farm, which I read because I was in the midst of the animal stories binge many girls go on when they're around nine or so. I wasn't expecting The Black Stallion, but I was expecting something along the lines of Beautiful Joe or Black Beauty, which of course is not at all what I got! I found Animal Farm interesting and well written, but it was the first book I read with such a downer ending, and it made me wary of Grandma's collection. Of course after a few years I ran out of books again and couldn't mooch any any where and was desperate enough to give something else from that bookcase a try.
My dad's cousin Jack, who was in general a great bastion of bad taste in the midst of the generally appropriately dressed and behaved Skinner clan, had at some time gifted Grandma with a number of Harold Kohn's small books, which drew me in with their delicate wood cuts and drawings of the natural world in the Charlevoix, Michigan area. Kohn's articles, like his art, are not brilliant or flashy, but rather quiet and peaceable and sometimes surprisingly beautiful or deep, and I have some of those books to this day.
I bet Jack's wife picked them out. :p
When I got around to reading my dad or my aunt's old copy of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, I was about the age of a lot of the girls she was interviewing and had a much better idea what I was getting into than I'd had with Animal Farm. I still found Samoa somewhat unbelievable, partly because a lot of the girls she interviewed sounded like girls I knew talking publicly - but I also knew what those girls said in private, and it wasn't the same story. Plus even Mead's account recognized that some girls were held to a ridiculous standard in terms of virginity, and I thought there was a really odd split between the mores these girls were supposedly held to and their attitudes. I've known girls who felt personally held to those standards who also believed it was okay that other women were not, and Mead's version just didn't ring true to me.
So when Derek Freeman's book came out, I'm not sure if I really got what he was saying or if I just read what I'd suspected since I read Mead's. :D I'm pretty sure that he agreed with me that Mead was hearing what she wanted to hear to some extent, though, and do think he pretty thoroughly disproved some of what Mead said. And according to a friend of Mead's, after Mead talked to Freeman she was quite shaken, and recognized that her work in Samoa was flawed. Although to be honest, I never thought Mead was as "deluded" by her findings as some of those claiming her work as their support seem to be.
For instance, Mead may have said that the Arapesh were all peaceable and the Tchambuli had sexual roles that in many ways reversed those of the US of the time, but she didn't argue that men and women were so alike as many of the people claiming her work as support do. In the early 1970's she said "that all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed... men everywhere have been in charge of running the show," so while the Tchambuli men may have been obsessed with make up and prettifying while the Tchambuli women worked, Mead didn't ultimately see that as evidence that men are only in charge due to social pressures, or that at one time those social pressures went the other way.
Despite disliking her book on Samoa, I love Mead, first because she points out that there's very little evidence that women as a whole suffer "penis envy," but great gouts of evidence that men suffer "womb envy." Her conclusion that most male initiatory cults exist because "women, by virtue of their ability to make children, hold the secrets of life. Men's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary" seems spot on to me. Second, I think her statement that "The central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for the men" was brilliant. I have never understood why so many guys (and some women) are so obsessed with defending mindless "girls are this, boys are that" kind of stuff that can so easily be disproved when you look at other cultures - Mead explained to me why the idea that men and women are not so neatly divided in reality is terrifying to some people.
Not to say I always agree with Mead, but I always find her worth reading. OTOH, I've read some of the guys who claim they've disproved Freeman, but they don't actually grapple with many of Freeman's points, instead obsessing on one detail and claiming that disproving that disproves the whole. While some defenders of Freeman seem to think he has discredited everything Mead ever wrote, some defenders of Mead seem to think disproving one of Freeman's source means he had no idea what he was talking about. I don't think either Mead or Freeman had the complete truth, but I think both Mead and Freeman understood how influenced we are by our own assumptions, and that they were both more charitable toward each other than some of the people defending them are.
Which is neither here nor there, and quite off the topic of the books on Grandma S's bookshelf. But the only other book I clearly remember reading from there was The Boyds of Black River, which I hated with a Deep Dark Hate fueled by the fires of a Thousand Burning Suns, so I think I won't go there.
Sometime I should review Grandpa G's books that I read, but aside from Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman (which he bought for Grandma), they were nearly all about cars and thus kind of blend in my mind. He did have one of the books on the Burma Shave signs, which actually had more prose than Burma Shave doggerel, which I liked muchly. Not surprising, that, since it combined his love of travel and love of cars, but looking back I'm surprised he didn't have more travel books. I know he had some, though, or at least one of the lots-of-pics Time/Life variety, because I remember reading it thinking I wanted to live in every one of the fifty states for one year of my life. Which goal lasted about ten minutes - I'd moved often enough to consider the logistics of that, which dissuaded me from giving the idea serious consideration. Still holds a lot of emotional appeal, though.
Sheryl
I used to take a goodly stack of my own books to Grandma's, but I sometimes ran out of them before it was time to go home, meaning I'd raid Grandma's meager stash. Neither of my grandmothers were serious readers, although Grandma S. did introduce me to Grace Livingston Hill, who probably originated the "Christian romance" genre and wrote a slew of books with totally interchangeable heroes and heroines - but some lovely descriptive passages and many an interesting secondary character. But most of the books on her shelves were left over from when my dad went to college or were given to Grandma by a relative or friend.
Actually I avoided Grandma S's bookshelves for a long time because the first book I pulled off of there and read was George Orwell's Animal Farm, which I read because I was in the midst of the animal stories binge many girls go on when they're around nine or so. I wasn't expecting The Black Stallion, but I was expecting something along the lines of Beautiful Joe or Black Beauty, which of course is not at all what I got! I found Animal Farm interesting and well written, but it was the first book I read with such a downer ending, and it made me wary of Grandma's collection. Of course after a few years I ran out of books again and couldn't mooch any any where and was desperate enough to give something else from that bookcase a try.
My dad's cousin Jack, who was in general a great bastion of bad taste in the midst of the generally appropriately dressed and behaved Skinner clan, had at some time gifted Grandma with a number of Harold Kohn's small books, which drew me in with their delicate wood cuts and drawings of the natural world in the Charlevoix, Michigan area. Kohn's articles, like his art, are not brilliant or flashy, but rather quiet and peaceable and sometimes surprisingly beautiful or deep, and I have some of those books to this day.
I bet Jack's wife picked them out. :p
When I got around to reading my dad or my aunt's old copy of Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa, I was about the age of a lot of the girls she was interviewing and had a much better idea what I was getting into than I'd had with Animal Farm. I still found Samoa somewhat unbelievable, partly because a lot of the girls she interviewed sounded like girls I knew talking publicly - but I also knew what those girls said in private, and it wasn't the same story. Plus even Mead's account recognized that some girls were held to a ridiculous standard in terms of virginity, and I thought there was a really odd split between the mores these girls were supposedly held to and their attitudes. I've known girls who felt personally held to those standards who also believed it was okay that other women were not, and Mead's version just didn't ring true to me.
So when Derek Freeman's book came out, I'm not sure if I really got what he was saying or if I just read what I'd suspected since I read Mead's. :D I'm pretty sure that he agreed with me that Mead was hearing what she wanted to hear to some extent, though, and do think he pretty thoroughly disproved some of what Mead said. And according to a friend of Mead's, after Mead talked to Freeman she was quite shaken, and recognized that her work in Samoa was flawed. Although to be honest, I never thought Mead was as "deluded" by her findings as some of those claiming her work as their support seem to be.
For instance, Mead may have said that the Arapesh were all peaceable and the Tchambuli had sexual roles that in many ways reversed those of the US of the time, but she didn't argue that men and women were so alike as many of the people claiming her work as support do. In the early 1970's she said "that all the claims so glibly made about societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that they ever existed... men everywhere have been in charge of running the show," so while the Tchambuli men may have been obsessed with make up and prettifying while the Tchambuli women worked, Mead didn't ultimately see that as evidence that men are only in charge due to social pressures, or that at one time those social pressures went the other way.
Despite disliking her book on Samoa, I love Mead, first because she points out that there's very little evidence that women as a whole suffer "penis envy," but great gouts of evidence that men suffer "womb envy." Her conclusion that most male initiatory cults exist because "women, by virtue of their ability to make children, hold the secrets of life. Men's role is uncertain, undefined, and perhaps unnecessary" seems spot on to me. Second, I think her statement that "The central problem of every society is to define appropriate roles for the men" was brilliant. I have never understood why so many guys (and some women) are so obsessed with defending mindless "girls are this, boys are that" kind of stuff that can so easily be disproved when you look at other cultures - Mead explained to me why the idea that men and women are not so neatly divided in reality is terrifying to some people.
Not to say I always agree with Mead, but I always find her worth reading. OTOH, I've read some of the guys who claim they've disproved Freeman, but they don't actually grapple with many of Freeman's points, instead obsessing on one detail and claiming that disproving that disproves the whole. While some defenders of Freeman seem to think he has discredited everything Mead ever wrote, some defenders of Mead seem to think disproving one of Freeman's source means he had no idea what he was talking about. I don't think either Mead or Freeman had the complete truth, but I think both Mead and Freeman understood how influenced we are by our own assumptions, and that they were both more charitable toward each other than some of the people defending them are.
Which is neither here nor there, and quite off the topic of the books on Grandma S's bookshelf. But the only other book I clearly remember reading from there was The Boyds of Black River, which I hated with a Deep Dark Hate fueled by the fires of a Thousand Burning Suns, so I think I won't go there.
Sometime I should review Grandpa G's books that I read, but aside from Marabel Morgan's The Total Woman (which he bought for Grandma), they were nearly all about cars and thus kind of blend in my mind. He did have one of the books on the Burma Shave signs, which actually had more prose than Burma Shave doggerel, which I liked muchly. Not surprising, that, since it combined his love of travel and love of cars, but looking back I'm surprised he didn't have more travel books. I know he had some, though, or at least one of the lots-of-pics Time/Life variety, because I remember reading it thinking I wanted to live in every one of the fifty states for one year of my life. Which goal lasted about ten minutes - I'd moved often enough to consider the logistics of that, which dissuaded me from giving the idea serious consideration. Still holds a lot of emotional appeal, though.
Sheryl