caitlin shanley // blog

I have been procrastinating for a long time on this blog entry because I was just introduced to postcardsfromyomomma.com, which had me entranced for the better part of an hour. The site owners ask people to contribute emails and other (typically online) correspondence from their mothers, and then post them to a tumblr blog. Highlights include pretty much all of the instant messenger conversations. Another current distraction (and incidentally, another tumblr blog) is garfield minus garfield, a blog of garfield cartoons with the cat himself removed. Somehow, when it's just Jon, everything is so very dark and sad.

Speaking of comics, library school got me re-excited about graphic novels this week. We read the Best American Comics 2007 for my Popular Materials class, and while the anthology itself is questionable (would the "Best American Comics" really exclude superheroes?), seeing new stuff got me back in the mood to read. it was also nice to get to re-read some of Fun Home, as my copy has been borrowed indefinitely. The anthology selection included one of my favorite parts: the section where Bechdel recounts her childhood journaling. She has a quote in there - "Again, the troubling gap between word and meaning. My feeble language skills could not bear the weight of such a laden experience" - which I think is a supersmart way of stating what many of the "hip" autobiographical comics artists in the anthology were going for. I must admit, though, I sometimes found myself siding more with a line from Sophie Crumb's piece - "It just annoys me that these douches dare to think a whole comic about that shit is interesting...entertaining...can't they see that their lives are SHIT and not worth writing about??" Admittedly, for occasional selections, it was sometimes a struggle.

The past week also saw a glimpse of warm, spring weather, which was very exciting. I am looking forward to more of that by the end of this week, in addition to:

• ncaa tournament!! although things are getting stressful, especially with potential roy williams-related drama...
  
• spending more time studying in davis, a library I really like even though it looks a little bit like a train station
  
• the annual unity conference this weekend - sessions on the L Word! slash fiction! queers in the south! very exciting.

And I have a new digital camera to document everything for the internet world, even though so far I have used it solely to take pictures while lying in bed...

Well. I have been concerned about writing a post that details my spring break roadtrip to the Midwest without being excessively long. The trip ended up taking some unexpected turns, but was totally worth it.
A brief timeline of events:

• 13 hour drive from NC to Chicago (or so we thought) - my little car braved the "worst storm in history" (according to an Ohio weather website) and only spun off the road and left us in a snowbank once. The only advice we could get from AAA was "good luck," but luckily enough Lindsay drives amazingly well in 14 inches of snow. We ended up at a Microtel in Dayton, Ohio that night, where we watched Carolina beat Duke and ate chicken wings. It actually turned out to be glorious.


• Chicago - I finally got to meet some of Lindsay's lovely friends that I have heard so much about. We drank some beers and ate some hot dogs and watched Flight of the Conchords in a beautiful apartment near Lincoln Square. Also glorious, even the part where we went down to Lake Michigan to see it totally frozen, which scared the living hell out of me.


• Galesburg - I had a lot of fun in this tiny town where trains seem to go by every minute. More lovely friends and beautiful apartments, more chicken wings, lots of delicious iced coffee and dressing up with wigs.


• St. Louis - I really liked this city. Granted, I was only there for a short time, and I was in a "hip" place with a nice coffee shop full of attractive people, but there was something about the city that attracted me. Maybe it was the Catholicism everywhere, or some sort of magnetic pull from the river. Whatever it was, I am seriously considering adding St. Louis to my list of potential future places to live.


• Asheville/long drive home - After driving a million hours, we stopped in Asheville for dinner, and I got really nostalgic and cried a few tears into my spicy tuna roll. I still get a feeling of homelessness when I think about that place; it seems like home in my mind, but the actuality is that it is a very different place now, and I don't really feel like I belong there. I guess Thomas Wolfe was right, as much as I hate to admit it. (The rest of the drive, which was postponed a day due to "severe thunderstorms," was thankfully uneventful.)

One of the reasons I was excited to go on this trip was because I feel like I (and many fellow Southerners) have some pretty deep-seated misconceptions about the Midwest. I think a lot of where that comes from has to do with the notion of the Midwest as "landlocked." Although Lindsay has pointed these things out to me at length, when I was actually there, I was really struck by how much WATER there is everywhere. I think that many Southerners (and specifically North Carolinians) do not understand lakes and rivers the ways that Midwesterners do. North Carolina's history is so linked to the ocean, and in many ways our culture still is. For instance, as frivolous as it seems, "vacation" in North Carolina usually means the beach. Many of our distinctive foods come from the eastern part of the State (and we love our hushpuppies). Our identity as a state is closely linked to the Lost Colony and Kitty Hawk and, I don't know, lighthouses. Standing next to Lake Michigan, Lindsay and her fellow Midwesterners laughed in the face of accusations of being "landlocked." Looking out at the Mississippi, I realized what an intense feeling it is to be in a place that is connected to so many other places in such a very physical way. Rivers, y'all. I don't think that North Carolina really understands.

I must admit, though, at some point driving through Illinois I did feel a little bit like the Earth was going to swallow me. There was just so much sky!

But for now I am back in the pleasantly hilly Triangle, procrastinating on a huge Archival Appraisal paper. I fear it's going to be a difficult week.

(For a photo essay of these same events, as well as a million pictures of me wearing a blond wig, check out Lindsay's flickr.)

Last night while watching two (in a row!) of those terrifying shows on the Discovery Channel about quintuplets and sextuplets, I was reminded of my fascination with the Dionne quintuplets. Born in 1934, the Dionne quints were some of the first quintuplets to survive infancy. I first learned about them in one of my favorite books of all time, the 1940 volume Multiple Human Births by Horatio Hackett Newman, which includes really bizarre illustrations of armadillos in the womb, among other oddities. The previous owner of my copy even penciled in some pretty creepy notes about eugenics.

A quick Google search for the Dionne quintuplets reveals that there is a Dionne Quints Museum (!!!) in North Bay, Ontario, which has embarked on a digitization project and virtual museum. It was there that I ran across the following photo:



of (from left to right) Marie, Yvonne, and Cecile Dionne.

First of all, I think that this is just a really great picture. The smirks! The glasses! The nun! In particular, though, check out Yvonne, the one in the blazer with the short hair? Some further research pointed out that one of the Dionne sisters died young, three got married, and Yvonne "was never interested in male company."

I mean....I'm just saying.

I am still trying to get to the point where I think about my life in blog-able segments, but for now, I just got really excited about that photo and thought it needed to be shared.