The Vintage Reader

...Lois Lenski and Beatrix Potter (as well as others you might not have heard of--but you've probably seen their work; my personal favorite is Clara M. Burd, whose occasionally creepy images of cheerful children adorn my favorite Louisa May Alcott editions). Women Children's Book Illustrators has a TON of information about the women who drew or painted some of the best-loved characters in children's literature.

(Thanks to Kids Lit for the link!)

Okay, so I don't keep up with these things the way I should.

Blogger has added word verification to its comments sometime (fairly recently, I think, but I wouldn't swear to it), so I've added comments back. See, I hate comment spam. Really, really hate it. And I wasn't able to keep up with it, so I just took comments away entirely. But now they're back. We'll see how it goes.

It's not very often that I read a book review that actually makes me decide to read a book I had already decided not to read.

This one did.

When I heard about Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her I thought, "Oh no, not another fawning Baby Boomer writing about how Nancy made her what she is today." But this excellent review by Sandra Tsing Loh made me change my mind: if someone who writes this well liked the book, how can I go wrong? She had me at the phrase "tap-tap-tapping for swag." (You'll just have to go read the review to find the context for that.)

I have to admit that despite my love for American pulp fiction, I didn't really know there ever was a substantial Canadian pulp industry (unless you count Harlequin). But then thanks to metafilter I found Tales from the Vault!

I'm listening to "Somewhere," from West Side Story, on CineStar80 on Live365.com, and it just occurred to me that this is truly timeless music: written in the 50s, but it reminds me of the 80s, and it doesn't sound dated yet. Wonderful.

The "shall we play a game?" clip, however, is rooted forever firmly in the 80s. :-)

NYT discusses What to Expect When You're Expecting, which I actually have a nickname for that nobody else has mentioned: Don't Expect to Find an Existing OCLC Record, because I remember trying to copy-catalog the monster and finding that it had so many different printings and assorted oddities that finding an accurate record for whichever copy you were holding in your hand was always next to impossible.

But that's not what I wanted to talk about. The Times article talks about how people don't like the book because it paints such a dire picture of pregnancy, and tells you everything that could possibly go wrong, even if there's only a 2% chance or something. Well, it's true that it goes into great detail about things that most women will never experience. And it's true that the diet probably seems restrictive to some (it didn't to me, but then, I'd been on Weight Watchers for a couple of years when I got pregnant, so it just seemed like a normal, healthy diet--and I think eating a basically healthy diet in the first place has helped me not get a lot of cravings and things, but maybe I'm just lucky).

This is where critical reading comes in. There are a lot of books, particularly pregnancy and parenting books, that I don't agree with or that I find hard to believe; anything by James Dobson, for one. And a lot of the natural childbirth books are scarier than anything in the What to Expect series; I remember one that had graphic photos of the birth process that freaked me out so much I thought about calling my doctor right then to schedule a c-section. But I'm not going to complain to the authors, the publishers, and the New York Times about them; I'm just not going to pay as much attention to them as I do to the ones I think are better suited to my information needs.

The thing about What to Expect (or any other book) is that you can take what you want and leave the rest. I haven't read anything that indicates that it's actually giving inaccurate information; just that people think it gives them too MUCH information. So does reality TV. Deal with it.

Now on DVD: Eighty years of The New Yorker. Search every page from 1925 until this year. It's got a companion book, too. Wow.

I knew it would happen someday: I'm down from my all-time high of four Bloglines subscribers to just one--myself, and I only subscribe to see how many subscribers I have. I know that people use other aggregators, of course, and since I disabled comments instead of just updating my template so that Blogger's delete feature would work (so I could delete comment spam, which I was getting hit with at the time) there's no real incentive for participation or anything.

On a somewhat related note, have you ever tried to explain RSS to people? My co-workers would LOVE RSS if they would ever actually try it out. They're all highly technical people in highly technical jobs, and yet their eyes glaze over when you try to explain even something as simple as Bloglines. They see "blog" in the title and think it's some kind of thing where people post anecdotes about their dogs (which some of my Bloglines subscriptions are, as a matter of fact). I think Bloglines needs a new name, and I think we need a new model for RSS aggregators. Thunderbird's built-in RSS capabilities are a good start--if reading RSS feeds was actually as easy as reading e-mail, I think more people would do it. Unfortunately, it's difficult to use the aggregator in Thunderbird because every feed seems to display differently, probably due to the differences in feed-generation standards (RSS, XML, Atom, etc.).

I don't really care that I don't have a lot of subscribers, but it does make me wonder sometimes about the compulsion to blog. Why do we do it? I used to do a blog that was about work-related issues, but when I lost all interest in the issues and was only blogging about my job, I took it down. I mainly use this one for myself--to remember that neat knitting pattern I found or the cool site about Lustron houses. I tried del.icio.us for a while, but as an odd form of morning sickness, I started getting dizzy and nauseated just looking at del.icio.us during my first trimester and had to stop using it.

I have to give a talk on blogs in a few weeks. Perhaps this is a question I will ask the participants: why do you think people keep blogs? What are some reasons you keep a blog (or would like to)? Conversely, why do people stop blogging?

1. Entertainment Weekly's EW.com | TV Preview: The scoop on ''Gilmore Girls'': "'A year like last year doesn't come around very often,'' says Sherman-Palladino. ''And to not have that acknowledged? It makes you wonder who you have to...'' We'll stop her here because, as she's fond of reminding people, this is a family show." [after EW speculates about an Emmy for this year]

Were they watching the same show I was? I haven't even been able to bring myself to watch the reruns. It's not quite as bad as the 3rd and 4th seasons of Felicity--I mean, it is still Gilmores, and it's been neat to watch Rory develop into a person of her own (albeit a whiny, selfish, not-very-interesting one)--but there were no moments that matched Lorelai and Luke's "Reflecting Light" dance of the previous season (the best Gilmore moments always feature Sam Phillips), or the incredibly well-written stuff of the first two seasons.

[UPDATE, 9/27: The season premiere wasn't great, but last week's episode shows a lot of promise. There were a couple of times that we had to back up and listen to something again because we missed it by laughing so hard. So I'm looking forward to tonight's episode to see if it's a trend.]

2. Insomnia strikes again. It's 2:44 a.m. and sleep is nowhere in sight, which means that I'll spend yet another day wandering around in a fog, trying to get stuff done but really being too tired to do much of anything. And it will be worse, because at least yesterday I had slept for about four hours before I woke up in the middle of the night.

3. I can't believe I missed the series premiere of Reunion. But honestly, who premieres a show on September 8? And why is it that the pics make it look like 1984, not 1986? I realize that most people have one big lump of fashion that they think of as "the 80s," and they don't distinguish between the '81-'84 preppy years and the post-'85 new wave years (and of course, there are regional differences; the fashions in Valley Girl and Fast Times didn't make it to my region for another two or three years, for example), and I'll have to actually watch the show to figure out whether it's just the publicity photos. You can get away with a lot of exaggeration in a show that is reminiscent of a time period; not so much in one that's representative of it (the costumes and sets in Oliver Beene as opposed to those in Wonder Years, for example). Or of course, you can follow the example of That 70s Show and never really specify a particular year, which leaves you free to do whatever you want to with the costumes.

(On a side note, Freaks and Geeks totally nailed '80s fashions, btw. I swear the costume designer must have gone to my high school. Hmmm... I always wondered what that one girl with the sketch pad was doodling all during algebra I... )

[UPDATE: Reunion appears to have continued its two-years-behind fashion, as it launched into 1987 with clothes more appropriate for 1985--and it turns out that these people are supposed to be in New York. But more than that, it's just a dreadful, dreadful show. Horrible dialogue, predictable storyline, and they keep reminding us what year it is: "Come on, man, it's 1987!" or "Can you believe it's 1987 already?" Needless to say, it did not make it into the permanent queue in my ReplayTV.]

...the reason I ask is that anyone over that age who calls himself an entertainment writer would surely remember that Chris Carter always said his inspiration for The X-Files was The Night Stalker.

Entertainment Weekly's EW.com | TV Preview: The scoop on ''Night Stalker'': "While it's based on the 1974-75 cult TV series, Stalker is equally reminiscent of The X-Files — no coincidence, since that's the show from which exec producer Frank Spotnitz hails."

Well, the jeans operation was a success. They aren't as well-done as I would have liked, but hey, nobody will see that part anyway.

I do think that the time has probably come when I am going to have to give in and buy a sewing machine that's at least younger than me. My 50s-era machine, as great as it is, does not seem to be particularly well-suited to tasks like pounding through four layers of denim or attaching elastic to stretch knit.

I've been a light sleeper, subject to insomnia, since I was in high school. Usually it's a 4 a.m. thing: I'm fine until 4, but then I wake up suddenly and can't go back to sleep.

It's interesting how active my neighborhood really is at night, and most of us sleep through it. For example: twice already tonight I've heard sirens go by and fade out, and then police helicopters (a fairly common thing in my area of town, so that in itself isn't too alarming). A lot of the time when I'm up I hear people walking down the street talking or arguing; we used to get a lot of people pulling up outside and stuff like that, but it doesn't seem to happen anymore, so I have a feeling it was actually the young woman whose father used to rent the lower half of the double across the street (which is actually a historic property: it was a barn on the property of one of the first houses built in our neighborhood in the late 1800s). They moved out about six months ago, and even though I've been up a lot in the middle of the night during that time, I haven't noticed nearly as many young people pulling up and fighting in front of my house. None, actually. So maybe she just had a number of volatile friends.

***

My dear old cat Simon used to join me in the middle of the night. I'd come in to my office and sit down with the laptop, and before too long I'd hear him in the hall: pad, pad, pad, pad... hesitate... BONK (as he pushed the door open with his head)... and then his face would appear at the edge of the futon, and I'd sort of help him launch himself up onto the seat. He'd lean his head on the wireless card, and I'd arrange my hand in an uncomfortable scrunch, and we'd surf the Internet together. Since Simon died, I've sat here alone in the middle of the night, but tonight Alexander decided to join me. He's younger and a lot more restless than Simon, and not content to just sit there and rest his head; he keeps pushing up against me and shoving my hand off the keyboard. Cute, but annoying. And now he wants out. I might just let him go; at least it will shut him up.

***

When I went down to let him out, heard more sirens. Then another helicopter. I might actually read the news tomorrow to see what happened, anyway.

***

I've noticed recently with my Bloglines subscriptions that it's kind of jarring to go from reading about Katrina survivors and the latest political outrage to somebody's post about a neat childhood memory or something. I haven't posted much here about anything current, although I've been posting to my other blog frequently; it doesn't seem right to me to mix the topics of my blogs. I've been quite disappointed with a certain longtime web presence (who used to be in my blogroll) whose excellent, hilarious retro work has been overshadowed in the last couple of years by his insistence on trying to write about politics--which he just isn't good at. It's not the direction of his views that I object so much to (although they're mostly completely opposite of mine); it's that his political writing really sucks. I just realized when I went to look that he's actually still producing a lot of really good retro stuff, but I didn't know it, having abandoned him after one too many barely coherent, ill-informed political rants.

I don't want to do that here.

***

Now the smell of something burning; maybe those sirens were fire engines.

***

Well, I'm finally feeling kind of tired, and I have an early morning hair appointment, so I'm going to sign off now and go back to bed.

Vintage Projects offers some excellent projects and plans from old magazines. Most of them are fairly ambitious for the modern woodworker; for example, I don't know very many people these days who would take the time to build their own collapsible pop up trailer, electric-powered backyard merry-go-round, or submarine (Chris Elliott might be an exception to that one).

But who wouldn't want to remember a particularly good vacation with a fish head ashtray?

(via metafilter)

One of the top search terms for my site is "Brownie uniform pinup girl" (go ahead, try it and see). If that's what you came here looking for, I think you'll have better luck here and here.

The Outsiders is re-released, with deleted scenes added back in and a new score. S.E. Hinton, author of the book, is interviewed here, with more personal information than she typically gives out. It's an interesting interview, and a neat photo of Ms. Hinton at the Admiral Twin, which was there when she wrote the book when she was in high school... and when the movie was made, when I was in high school (it also recently won $20,000 for renovations in Hampton Inn's Save a Landmark contest).

This was one of my favorite books in junior high, although I still think some editor should have made sure that "socs" was spelled phonetically. Even those of us who had the word as part of our normal vocabulary (...and I've never met anyone who didn't grow up in Tulsa who DID have it in their vocabulary) had a hard time with the spelling--it's pronounced so-shes, short for "socials."

I've never cared much for the movie, but I'm curious about the remake. I think the new rock-n-roll soundtrack could completely change my mind about the movie, because the main thing I didn't like was the slow pacing, which the orchestral score just dragged out even more.

I really want to blog this, but it doesn't fit on my other blog, and my next blog, which will be devoted to this kind of thing, isn't ready yet. (One of the pitfalls of being an ex-library cataloger is the compulsion to categorize everything, including my opinions, to a fairly ridiculous extent, which is why I need a lot of blogs) But I guess I can loosely group this in with all of my recent posts on rationing, making and mending, and other conservation efforts of the past.

Earlier this week I was distressed to find out that Lands' End has discontinued their maternity line, just as I'm heading into the home stretch and cooler weather. As far as I can tell, nobody else makes any maternity jeans that don't have some kind of strange wash, or that won't require me to buy new, trendy shoes instead of the good sturdy ones I prefer--which only really look good with straight-leg jeans. But Kwik Sew, long a favorite pattern company of mine, has come to my rescue with this: Kwik & Easy™ Maternity Pattern #3324. I can now convert my old Eddie Bauer and Lands' End jeans--which I would be replacing in a few months anyway, in the regular order of things--into maternity jeans, for a few dollars' worth of knit ribbing and some elastic. I actually made a special trip to Hancock's last night to pick this up, and found that the knit ribbing was on sale too, so that's my project for today.

Until I read The History of Kwik Sew I had completely forgotten that there was a time that stretch knits were not generally available in fabric stores. My mother took a class at Stretch & Sew, a chain store that had special patterns for stretch knits, sold special Stretch & Sew fabric, and had lots and lots of classes. They were around until at least the early 80s--I tried making my own polo shirts (you could buy pre-cut polo collars there too) and using little embroidered patches where the alligator would have been on the OTHER shirts that were popular at the time. This was mostly a dismal failure, as my mother's Singer Touch & Sew has always hated me and has a tendency to pitch bobbins spontaneously whenever it sees me coming, but I did make one striped shirt that I actually wore to school a few times before I realized just how dorky I looked wearing a fake Izod I had made myself. I don't remember what the patch was; I do remember spending an inordinate amount of time looking through an awesome display of patches, trying to decide which one to buy (Mr. Vintage Reader just read that and smirked, I'm sure, as my shopping habits haven't changed much).

I've been sorry to see apparel sewing mostly going away over the last couple of decades, but I think younger women are starting to pick it up again. Kind of like knitting, which has become HUGE after nearly dying out completely in the 90s. I'm hopeful that interest in sewing will "serge" (sound of geeky guffaws) again soon as well.

Washington Station is one woman's story of living in Washington, DC during World War II. Wonderfully written, and a nice tribute from her daughter. Of course, I'm finding it interesting to read this in parallel with The Winds of War, which describes Washington in the buildup to WWII from a military man's perspective.

Of course, I'm sure it was the question about children that did it. I was picturing Virginia Weidler in toe shoes when I answered it. Always nice to know I score higher than 9% on class, too. That's good, right?

(This one is also via Thrilling Days of Yesteryear)