Batgrl (Book Data Kept Elsewhere) > Recent Status Updates

Posted my feedback here: http://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/41...
I don't think this is the end of GR, I just hope that it doesn't go all Amazon branded. I don't need another Amazon with its overt review gaming/hiding. I never buy a book until I find a few 3 star reviews (with multiple paragraphs written about it) to check here.

S. Josephine Baker: "Three months later Father died of typhoid. In those days typhoid was the scourge of Poughkeepsie and no wonder, since the town water supply was drawn from the Hudson just below the outlet of the sewer from the large Asylum of the Insane above the town."

Margaret Floy Washburn, teaching at Wells College: "...I spent six years there that left not a single unpleasant memory. The salary, by the way, had by the last two years reached the maximum for women professors, seven hundred dollars and home; the men were paid fifteen hundred."

"The two greatest leaders of the cult in Jamaica are Mother Saul, who is the most regal woman since Sheba went to see Solomon, and Brother Levi, who is a scrontous-looking man himself." - as far as I can find (via google), scrontous is a word only found in Hurston.

Five pages of "Formulae of Hoodoo Doctors," like "Put an egg in a murdered man's hand and the murderer can't get away. He will wander right around the scene."

"Then fold the sock heel on the toe and roll it up together, tight. Pin the bundle by crossing two needles. Then wet it with whiskey and set it up over a door." - hoodoo ceremony/spell - um, this may just be me, but I think I'd have to ask why there's a bundled up sock hanging over a door...

"Then smoke the slip of paper with the four pins in it in incense smoke and bury it with the pins under your doorstep." - excerpt from a hoodoo ceremony/spell that makes me wonder what people who live in apartments higher than the first floor would do.

Margaret Floy Washburn: "Particularly delightful was quantitative analysis, with the excitement of adding up the percentages of different ingredients in the hope that their sum might approach one hundred; though the faint suspicion always remained that a particularly "ackerate" result was due to losing a trace of something here and getting in a grain or two of dust there."

Margaret Floy Washburn: "Our teacher performed some demonstration experiments...also Prince Rupert's drop falling into dust when its tip was pinched; why, we had not the slightest idea." - just today saw this video on Google Plus demonstrating Prince Rupert's Drop. Now that's a timely coincidence.

Maya Angelou: "...Few, if any, survive their teens. Most surrender to the vague but murderous pressure of adult conformity. It becomes easier to die and avoid conflicts than to maintain a constant battle with the superior forces of maturity..."

Maya Angelou: "She [Mrs. Flowers] said that I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy. That some people, unable to go to school, were more educated and even more intelligent than college professors. She encouraged me to listen carefully to what country people called mother wit. That in those homely sayings was couched the collective wisdom of generations..."

Yes, London, I see you, I will get around to you soon, really! It's just you're 832pgs - it's not your length that's an issue - it's a space thing. I'll be cleaning off my desk to make room to actually open you up. (Ebook next time, lesson learned! But paper was easier to pass on to my dad afterwards. Not that carrying it in my luggage will be fun.)

About the lumber company swamp-gang: "Not only do they chop rhythmically, but they do a beautiful double twirl above their heads with the ascending axe before it begins that accurate bird-like descent. They can hurl their axes great distances and behead moccasins or sink the blade into an alligator's skull."

Wanting to gather folklore but she's an outsider (very suspicious!), Hurston's solution: "I took occasion that night to impress the job with the fact that I was also a fugitive from justice, "bootlegging." They were hot behind me in Jacksonville and they wanted me in Miami. So I was hiding out. That sounded reasonable. Bootleggers always have cars. I was taken in."

"When we got there the party was young. The house was swept and garnished, the refreshments on display, several people sitting around; but the spot needed some social juices to mix the ingredients. In other words they had the carcass of a party lying around up until the minute Eatonville burst in on it. Then it woke up."

Marian Anderson: "We began with Handel's "Begrussung." ...I knew it was rarely sung in concert. It begins with a long, sustained tone that builds to a crescendo. To do it properly you must be a rather calm person. To start a program with it you must be sure of yourself. The first tone of your first number can make a decisive first impression."

Marian Anderson: "I felt very much at home in Copenhagen. ...People seemed happy to be with you; they sought you out. They accepted you as an individual in your own right, judging you for your qualities as a human being and artist and for nothing else. Even the first curiosity about my outward difference was in no way disturbing or offensive, and it seemed only a moment before that dropped away..."

Marian Anderson: "Listen, my child," Mother said. "Whatever you do in this world, no matter how good it is, you will never be able to please everybody. All you can strive for is to do the best it is humanly possible for you to do." (Now having a moment of remembering times my mom told me this, in almost the exact same words. This must be some sort of Shared Mom Wisdom.)

Zora Neale Hurston: "But his looks only drew my eyes in the beginning. I did not fall in love with him just for that. He had a fine mind and that intrigued me. When a man keeps beating me to the draw mentally, he begins to get glamorous."

Zora Neale Hurston: "The wish to be back in school had never left me. But alone by myself and feeling it over, I was scared. Before the job I had been lonely; I had been bare and bony of comfort and love. Working with these people I had been sitting by a warm fire for a year and a half and gotten used to the feel of peace. Now I was to take up my pilgrim's stick and go outside again."

So on pg 106 the author swears he's not going to look up the 1579 text about eating dead mice to avoid incontinence - and on this, the last page in the sources, he DOES. Because he could not help himself, as he admits. Then goes on to add what he's not going to look into further (superstitions about sprinkling urine on things and health), which seems totally reasonable.

I may end up buying a copy of this just for this Acknowledgements and Sources section, because there's so much in here to look up that sounds interesting.

Footnote: "It turns out that human horns, anomalous growths consisting entirely of concentric layers of keratinized epidermal cells...are "far more frequent than ordinarily supposed." - that last bit via Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine, 1956. Also they grow slowly and often have a tendency to curl.

Endnote: In a list of unusual museums - The Museum of Menstruation in New Carrollton, Maryland, which is apparently located in the basement of the collector's home - but now closed. Though here's its current online home. ...I'm both intrigued and disturbed.

Happily reading the endnotes - and hey, look - it's a Ricky Jay cite about a calculating dog act. Charles Dickens is involved. This is why one should always read foot/endnotes.

The museum has an exhibit "on loan from the Mutter Museum" - which I've always wanted to visit, and this reminds me of another book to add to my wish list (which means I must stop and check the price on it again and see how high it is). I'd be reading this so much faster if I didn't have to merrily go google something each page...

"The caption under the first read: "Mouse Pie, when eaten with regularity, serves as a remedy for children who stammer." The label under the burnt toast read: "Bed wetting or general incontinence of urine can be controlled by eating mice on toast, fur and all." - I'm pretty sure I saw this exhibit, yet somehow I managed to forget it until now.

Describing the Tradescant collection in 1638, list of items: "...a goose which has grown in Scotland on a tree"....the hand of a mermaid; the hand of a mummy..."a bat as large as a pigeon"..." - I have to admit immediately recognizing those geese, as that's one of my favorite myths.

1625, letter from John Tradescant the Elder to the Secretary of the Navy (England), listing things to be on the look out for since his patron is attempting to collect them, like "River horsses head of the Bigest kind that can be gotton" - concludes with: "Any thing that Is strang." Spelling and capitalization not mine, and instead due to this being the 1600s.