As I did last year, I will be blogging the food and drink of Mad Men. (In a departure from last year, I do not plan to be so overwhelmed by all the themed cooking and cocktails that I completely miss the last post of the season.)

This Week:

Today, there will be no pictures, because my TiVo and its associated server are being weird. No worries! We will survive this.

Update: Pictures added.

The first scene sets the tone for the entire episode. A reporter, writing a feature designed to showcase Don Draper’s sudden celebrity — he’s produced an attention-getting TV ad about floor polish — is interviewing Don in a restaurant, or, at least, trying to. Don ducks all the man’s questions, especially the pointed “Who is Don Draper?”

Who IS Don Draper?

It’s a hilarious question if you’ve been watching the series from the beginning; Don Draper is either a dead man or a cipher Dick Whitman invented in Korea. Don Draper has never been a real person. It’s always fascinating when Jon Hamm allows the man who calls himself Don Draper to actually relax; usually when he is all alone, he stops projecting an aura of invulnerable suavity and just makes himself some corned beef hash or something.

These days, Don has relaxed that persona to such a degree that he’s picking up shades of his father, maintaining a standing date with a prostitute and bordering on abusive in his dealings with Peggy.

Don, himself, in the middle of a tanking client presentation, voices the question that drives the episode: “You need to decide what kind of company you want to be.” Sterling Cooper Draper Price is struggling, as their old clients fall away; Don realizes, in the midst of the presentation, that they can only compete by being perceived as flashy, daring, and edgy. That begins with kicking the clients out of the office — and with spinning a dazzling new SCDP origin myth for what will certainly be a successful Wall Street Journal profile.

Don also needs to decide what man he wants to be. Traditionally, he’s done best when he creates a new persona from scratch; one can assume Don is making himself into a new, flashy, confident Don Draper for the new ad marketplace. For the first time in at least a year, Don is remembering how to sell his most important product — himself.

Edibles:

In other news, what a juicy episode for food! First off, everyone is dealing with Thanksgiving, in particular the very modern problem of blended families vs. holiday arrangements. Betty’s Thanksgiving, chez new husband Henry’s mother, was tense at best. No one wants to eat: Henry’s daughter shows up, having already eaten elsewhere, and Sally actually throws up at the table after being force-fed sweet potatoes by her mother. Not subtle, that; Betty, in power for once, is shoving her new, perfect life down everyone else’s throat, and Sally, alone, refuses to toe the party line. Given that Kiernan Shipka has been bumped up to series regular, I’m guessing this power struggle is going to be a major story this season.

Peggy fesses up to Don.

Peggy’s storyline was, in all seriousness, about ham. Creating an artificial demand for ham; selling ham; getting ham mentioned in the newspaper; who did and who did not receive a ham, and, I might even add, making fun of a hammy comedy routine. Ham ham ham. (I almost feel like this was some oblique reference to John Hamm’s Hamm & Buble SNL sketch.) Peggy gives Don the office’s sole canned ham because he will, presumably, be all alone on Thanksgiving (canned ham is for sad, lonely people), then interrupts his day with a prostitute (!!!) to get her ham actors bailed out of jail. Then Peggy rejoices because, this time, the delighted client has sent enough canned hams for everybody. Yay ham!

What does the sad canned ham represent? The cold sterility of “modern” industrially-produced food? The subjugation of a traditionally lovingly handmade food — the Virginia Ham — into a jellied product? I am sure Matthew Weiner has thought about this, but I am, frankly, drawing a blank. Ham.

On his date with Betty 2.0 (played by Anna Camp, the actress who portrayed Jason Stackhouse’s love interest to hilarious effect on True Blood last season), Don, on both his date’s and Roger’s advice, orders the Chicken Kiev. Roger, who always gets all the best lines, describes it thusly: “Get Chicken Kiev. Butter squirts everywhere.” Leave it to Roger to turn melted butter into sexual innuendo. (Depending on how you feel about butter, that may not be much of a challenge. See: this.)

Next week:

Next week, I think we will be having either ham (ham) or Chicken Kiev or Ham Kiev, and some sweet potatoes? (Poor Sally.) I will photograph it. Photographs will be placed ham.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/revger/

It was unseasonably hot.

That must have been the reason my grandmother walked down the aging basement stairs and out of the open garage door and traveled a block to the corner store, holding my three-year-old hand in hers. The giddy excitement of the moment still stays with me; the black night sky, like a stage backdrop, the garage brightly lit and curiously empty, and — most amazing — my grandmother walking, out of doors, all alone, with me.

My grandmother was an inside person. Rare it was, on the sunniest of days, to find her anywhere other than the square footage of her Cole Valley four-bedroom; my sister and I were in her care, so we stayed inside with her, all summer break, other than the rare occasions when she permitted us to explore the overgrown backyard. We played fervently, imagining we were orphans running our own farm. We harvested sour grass and thought mosquito larvae were tadpoles. At the very best moment in any game, she would call us indoors and we would not go out again for weeks.

The house was hers; the house was her. She could protect us, inside, so we rollerskated down the hall, bumping on the tattered green carpet and stopping with our hands against the heavy oak front door, climbing from coffee table to velvet couch when the green carpet was hot lava, sliding down the fifteen stairs from the upstairs hall, each rug-burned drop, from step to step, a tooth-jarring earthquake. The house was our world; she was our world, and she knew it, warm, and soft, her pillowy lap a place to lay a drowsy head, her soft heavy arms carrying a pot of spaghetti and dumping it, steaming, into a green plastic colander.

I remember, dimly, being awakened in the night to take a dose of bitter-sweet cough syrup. Her bedroom was next to mine. She must have heard me coughing in my sleep, and walked downstairs in the middle of the night to fetch the medicine from the kitchen. The little light over the stove stayed on all night against the dark. Each room in that house holds the ghosts of a hundred loving gestures, performed as naturally as breathing.

Outdoors was my grandfather’s world, a world of hard men and backbreaking work, spat insults and bitter choices, where money was grasped and held by the man with the strongest fist. Even the backyard was his, the kettledrum barbeque dominating the concrete deck under the hopelessly overburdened yellow plum tree. They would barbeque, on the 4th and on Labor Day, and our big uncles and little cousins and the smell of roasting meat filled the house. My grandparents marinated the meat in beer and lemon juice and soy sauce in a huge enameled washpan; she would hand the raw meat to him through the basement door, both slippered feet firmly in the house, as if the doorframe was the border of a friendly but alien country.

The house, it bears repeating, was hers, and my grandfather knew it, deferring to her when he deferred to no one else.

Why, then, would she walk outside, when she never did? And at night? Why would she leave her sanctuary on a whim, when walking was so hard for her? Did I fantasize that we went for an improbable jaunt in the heat of Indian summer? Why wouldn’t I imagine her, then, at my school’s yearly Grandparents’ Day, or on a field trip to the museum — places where my gregarious grandfather always represented them both – instead of a five-minute walk uphill and around the corner?

I believe it happened. It is clearly an early childhood memory, more light and sound than action, the astonishing feeling of traveling into the outside world with its endless black sky while still being surrounded by my grandmother’s protection. I am far from home, now – home being the place where my grandmother washed dishes at the sink or sat on the couch watching her stories – and I can never go back again. Even if the situation was strange, even if the whole thing was a dream, who would not treasure the memory of exactly what it felt like to be loved?

These Malabrigo mittens will save the world.

Over the last two decades, an entire industry has sprung up around the notion of packaging the products of Third World craft collectives to sell to the First World. Let’s examine the ways in which First World advertising both misrepresents and romanticizes the work and lives of these collectives to encourage First World consumers to buy their products.

Advertising encourages consumers to bolster their sense of identity by purchasing certain products. An increasing number of Americans are being swayed towards buying handicrafts in particular. “Labeled cultural creatives [emphasis in the original], these individuals are college educated, in their early 40s, and with average household incomes of $52,200. Six out of 10 are women. Values of community building, ecological sustainability, abhorrence of violence, and attraction to the foreign and exotic guide their lives” (Litrell and Dickson 1999, 52). Authenticity, uniqueness, and the hope that the item’s value will increase over time are important factors in the cultural creative’s decision to buy a handcrafted product. This kind of consumer purchases items with a story she can relate later. She is the prime target for an industry that produces handmade items.

This typical American consumer feels that, in purchasing a handmade item, whether imported or through tourism, she is in some way participating in the culture that produced it. In her social circle, the handmade item awards her cultural capital. She is like a representative for the culture the item represents, along with the exotic knowledge that position suggests. She also likes the idea that buying the item does good in the world; buying from a craft collective is appealing to her. Therefore, advertising intentionally builds a narrative around the collective and its products. The general storyline involves a population in crisis, who, usually thanks to the intervention of kindly Americans or Europeans, develops a small industry, producing handicrafts imbued with exoticism.

The Mirasol Yarn Project is one such example. The Peruvian collective, which produces yarn for export, manages every aspect of production, from alpaca herding to marketing. Perhaps to make consumers feel at home, the website emphasizes the actions and perceptions of American and European visitors to the project site over the experiences of the Peruvians who make the yarn. Profits from every sale of yarn fund childhood education in rural Peru. The website makes sure to mention that the idea for the school “came from a visit made to the ranch by Kari Hestnes and Per Svendsen who run Du Store Alpakka in Norway.” The product line itself “was initialized by Peter Mulley from Diamond Yarn in Canada, and he then set about contacting other distributors to make sure the Mirasol Project was supported worldwide with contributing companies in the United States, Europe and the UK.”

There is little mention of the agency of individual Peruvians in the collective itself, other than a biography page for Mirasol herself, the little girl who is the company’s namesake. The biography page, despite being called “Meet Marisol,” contains no biographical information about Mirasol, only photographs and a first-person description of her from Kari Hestnes: “Mirasol is beautiful, but she is marked by the life she lives, the skin is darkly tanned and cracked, her clothes are trashed, but she still radiates something beautiful and very feminine that touches my heart deeply […] I get a strong need to give something to these children, but the only thing I have in my pockets is lip gloss with sun block” (The Mirasol Project). This narrative emphasizes the cultural creative’s need to “do something” when faced with the crushing poverty of this region of Peru. The unspoken answer to the yearning is, of course, to buy Mirasol Yarn.

Marketing photographs of Third World collectives frequently show small groups of workers – usually women – working in a bucolic, often outdoor, setting. The workers smile, projecting satisfaction in their work. Purchasing the products, it is strongly implied, will keep these workers happy. Manos Del Uruguay, another collective producing garments and handmade yarn, offers up several such photographs. Unlike the Mirasol Project, Manos was founded by an Uruguayan woman, Olga Artagaveyta, in 1968. (Durbin 2005) Manos’ website emphasizes the empowerment of individual women through collective action (Manos Del Uruguay). The site even provides photographs of some of the 17 collectives the group boasts. The American influence is not mentioned, although Durbin’s article refers to the grants from NGOs that make the collective possible. They are beautiful photographs of Uruguayan locations, although they do not offer any information about actual working conditions or wages.

In general, the producers who belong to craft collectives are assisted by government agencies, NGOs and outside nonprofits who try to organize the artisans to make products that can be successfully exported. The typical artisan working for such an organization is also female, but, there, her similarity to the American consumer ends. She is usually part of a household, making handicrafts while tending to household tasks. Her goal is to make money to maintain and ultimately raise her family’s status in the community. So it is that, for example, the money made by small artisans who borrow from the Grameen Foundation goes almost invariably to educate the borrowers’ children. (One of the “Sixteen Decisions” chanted by members is “We shall educate our children and ensure that they can earn to pay for their education.”) Ironically, while the artisan’s handcrafted item appeals to the “cultural creative,” such items do not have the same cachet in the artisan’s community. Frequently, artisans use the money they make to buy items imported from America and elsewhere, such as appliances, electronics, and, in one example, Stallone T-shirts.

When these projects are successful, women’s lives improve dramatically. As the Grameen Bank publicizes, women overwhelmingly educate children of both sexes, which, in turn, uplifts an entire family. Women also delay marriage and childbirth when they have financial independence, and their families support them when they see the clear economic benefits. This can have tragic results when the community sees this empowerment as a threat to the male status quo. In one Chiapas village, the female organizer of a pottery collective, Petrona Lopez, was murdered. “Petrona was clearly a threat to a patriarchal order of households wherein women’s production was controlled by their fathers or husbands. All men in the community were threatened by the autonomy women gained in the cooperative and condoned the act that released them from the threat” (Nash 1993). Marketing certainly does not emphasize the risks female workers accept when they band together to form collectives.

There are many other pitfalls on the way to becoming a success story like Mirasol or Manos Del Uruguay. First and foremost, producers of handicrafts are dependent on the global market. They do not produce a “necessary” product, and in an economic downturn, demand for their products will by necessity decrease. When a market is developed for a product, that market can become suddenly flooded with inexpensive, mass-produced knockoffs from, generally, Asia. As well, tastes change quickly; if there is suddenly no demand for an item, a collective is left with equipment and raw goods but nowhere to unload them. There is constant, ruthless competition in the global market from East Asian countries. Chinese yarns and other textiles are produced much cheaper than the handicrafts, which is, of course, why advertising must be used to explain or justify the higher cost.

When men in a community realize the craft collective has a potential for success, they often become involved in the management of the collective. Because they are not artisans and are primarily concerned with increasing the collective’s bottom line, they frequently reorganize in ways that increase profits but are detrimental to workers. One common tactic is to divide artisans in to “pieceworkers” so that each worker specializes in a tiny portion of production. No one woman gains the knowledge to assemble an entire item, so each woman is dependent on the collective. If the collective disbands, the women may not have transferable skills.

A side effect of pieceworking is to reduce the pride of craftsmanship that brings enjoyment to artisans. Further reductions to this enjoyment can occur when artisans find themselves producing to North American tastes, at the expense of their own, culturally dictated aesthetics. In one situation, Guatemalan weavers were upset when told that North American consumers did not like the “hot pinks, limes, and oranges” they traditionally wove into their hangings (Lynd 2000). Some even continued to weave with traditional colors, despite being paid a discounted price for items that “did not meet quality standards.” Clearly, it was a difficult situation, as expressed by the American who was overseeing the collective: “On the one hand, we want to help the women succeed in the international market. On the other hand…we do not want producers to lose the integrity of their weavings” (Lynd 2000).

Worst, wages may be disproportionately low. In the production of Peruvian sweaters in one male-run collective, “in a classic example of middlemen reaping disproportionate profits, knitters earn between US$5 and US$20 for a sweater, while the garments may sell in the U.S. for as much as US$200 or US$300” (Page-Reeves 1998). One USAID program not only underpaid workers, but actually left participants worse off than before. They encouraged a collective to take out loans, then used information gleaned from the collective to actually develop factories to undercut the market (Page-Reeves 1993).

In an increasingly crowded marketplace, advertising often must project an additional cachet to get the consumer’s attention. So it is, for example, that Campbell Soup produced special pink “breast cancer” cans of soup for a limited time; by purchasing a can of soup that contributed a tiny fraction of sales to breast cancer research, consumers could sate their guilt over not financially supporting the race to the cure. Ben and Jerry’s ill-fated Rainforest Crunch convinced shoppers that a purchase would help save the Amazonian rainforests. Consumers like to buy products that make them feel good about themselves. Buying “breast cancer” chicken soup implies that the consumer is a good person who cares about breast cancer.

Although the goal of helping individuals parlay often ancient skills into modern financial success is laudable, it may minimize help for more widespread solutions. This makes the consumer force complacent. My buying a skein of organic yarn spun by a Tibetan refugee is very nice, but it does not lead me to lobby Congress to put pressure on China. Nor does it encourage me to seek information on how my purchase really affects the man or woman who spun the yarn. We have the power, as consumers, to ensure that “voting with our pocketbooks” makes the lives of individuals throughout the world better. Looking beyond advertising to the realities of production can be the first step.

Works Cited
Durbin, Paula. “Manos Del Uruguay: The Bottom Line.” Grassroots Development: Journal of the Inter-American Foundation 26, no. 1 (2005).
Ghista, Garda. “Towards Economic and Women’s Liberation Via Grameen Bank.” ProutWorld.org. (Retrieved May 9, 2010.)
Litrell, Mary Ann, and Marsha Ann Dickson. Social Responsibility in the Global Market: Fair Trade of Cultural Products. Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, Inc., 1999.
Lynd, Martha. “The International Craft Market: A Double-Edged Sword for Guatemalan Women.” In Artisans and Cooperatives: Developing Alternative Trade for the Global Economy, edited by Kimberly M. Grimes and B. Lynne Milgram, 65-84. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 2000.
Manos Del Uruguay. (accessed August 13, 2008).
Nash, June. “Maya Household Production in the World Market: The Potters of Armantenango del Valle, Chiapas, Mexico.” In Crafts in the World Market: The Impact of Global Exchange on Middle American Artisans, edited by June Nash, 127-154. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993.
Page-Reeves, Janet. “Alpaca Sweater Design and Marketing: Problems and Prospects for Cooperative Knitting Organizations in Bolivia.” Human Organization 57, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 83-93.
Page-Reeves, Janet. “Sweater-Knitting and Project Aid in Bolivia: A Critique.” Anthropology of Work Review 14, no. 2 (Winter-Spring 1993): 34-36.
The Mirasol Project. (accessed August 13, 2008).

http://www.flickr.com/photos/kesta/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

For the first time since 2001 or thereabouts, I did not host a Passover Seder. (I attended two seders, both of which were lovely.) I did not cook an unforgivably unpalatable kosher-for-passover dessert, nor did I set a glass of water beside Elijah’s cup for Miriam, nor did I explain the significance of an orange on the Seder plate. Thanks to the kindness of others, I have eaten brisket and matzo ball soup and charosets both Ashkenazi and Sephardic.

(I did make chopped liver and matzo balls with gribenes. I’m not dead yet.)

It is six days into Passover. This is always the point at which I begin to complain in an unseemly manner about the absence of bread in my life. I miss bread. I miss pizza. I miss sushi.

And, yet. There have been beautiful things this Passover. I watched my daughter chant the Four Questions in perfect Hebrew (with perfect pitch) for three generations of her family. I learned the Modeh Ani morning prayer by heart. I ran five miles and stood among the ruins of a millionaire’s estate looking over the Pacific Ocean. I ate at Contigo, and, though I could not spread the briny-sweet cured anchovies on bread, I consumed every morsel of fresh Dirty Girl strawberries with sweetened crème fraîche and rhubarb gelée.

In short, I have had the best Passover of my life.

I thought, when I began my Jewish journey a decade ago, that Passover was Jewish Lent, a mortifying of the flesh, a kind of fast to achieve holiness. Passover, this year, has been, instead, a crystallization of Jewish time. Things moved more slowly. I ate less. I ate more carefully. I ran along the ocean in San Pedro to an old lighthouse and just missed seeing dolphins. I lit Shabbat candles. I sat in warm sand with new friends. I said a prayer of thanks for my first morning breath.

Tomorrow night, when I taste my first bread in seven days, I will not be sorry. But I will, I think, be grateful.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sweetbeetandgreenbean/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

This is how to make collard greens. First, my grandfather drives his truck to the Alemany Farmer’s Market. My grandfather chooses a bunch of taut, bitter leaves, and he puts money in the dirt-caked, stubby-fingered hand of the farmer who planted the seeds, and he brings home the collards to my grandmother to cook.

But where does my grandfather get the money to buy the collards? Well, first, my grandfather buys a ticket on a slow bus from outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He sits in the back because it’s 1943, and he’s leaving Arkansas because he has to sit in the back of the bus there. The bus takes him to San Francisco, and he gets a job mixing concrete, and then another, better job, and a foreman’s job, and one day it is 1985 and he is a senior supervisor for the Department of Public Works who makes more money than he has ever made, and he has a wife who has never had to work, who makes the very best collard greens.

But, then, where does his wife come from? It starts with a man named Newman Ingram, whose face I have never seen, who is born in South Carolina of two slaves born in Africa. Newman begets a son whose name I do not know with another slave named Chaney, and that son begets another son named Terrell, whose face I have never seen, with a woman named Charlotte, and they have a son, Neely, the first one of these born a free man. (I have seen Neely’s weary, broad face in his sole surviving photograph.) And Neely and his wife, the haughty creole Amanda Duncan, have a son, Augusta, who will break his mother’s heart and his wife’s heart and his daughter’s heart.

Augusta Ingram

Augusta and his several brothers are high-yellow men, some of whom can get by riding the front of the bus in cities where no one knows about their dark-skinned father, some of whom disappear forever and are presumed to be passing. That magic high-yellow skin supposedly makes Augusta better than his dark-skinned wife Mary and his pretty little brown daughters, but when his liver fails and he turns a deep golden yellow from the bile it just makes him dead. And that is how you get my grandmother, who takes the train to San Francisco with her aunts after every last one of those people dies before she is sixteen.

Maybe Martha’s aunt Irene, who will one day own a restaurant, will teach her to make good collards. That will be later, after Irene and her sisters abandon their teenaged niece in San Francisco, after sixteen-year-old Martha changes her name to Barbara and marries her hard-working boyfriend, who had been a concrete mixer operator and will one day buy her a big house at the base of Twin Peaks with a kitchen just right for making collards.

The kitchen has a big window over the double sink, framed with frilly curtains. My grandmother will soak the collards well in the left-hand sink. My grandfather is peeling and cutting up potatoes with a huge sharp butcher knife, so he’ll just go over and drain the collards and cut the rubbery leaves from their thick stems while my grandmother blanches the ham hocks for the greens.

My grandmother will put the collards in one of the bigger pots, and they will cook down slow with the ham hocks. When the collards are tender and limp, my grandmother will make cornbread and an iceberg salad with apples and carrots, and my grandfather will have turned the potatoes into thick, soft home fries in the same skillet where he has just fried some pieces of chicken. And I will sit down at the kitchen table, my melamine plate piled high with food, and tear at a chicken drumstick and home fries and cornbread with margarine and grape jelly, and pause at the collards only to carefully pick out and devour all the little shreds of ham hock and completely ignore the bitter, wilted, silky greens, luminous with pork fat.

And when I am done there will be a sad lonely pile of collard greens on the plate, but my grandparents won’t make me eat them.

I tried to explain how to make collard greens but it may be impossible. My grandmother is gone forever and my grandfather doesn’t eat pork anymore. And, worst of all, I rarely ate collards when given the opportunity, being in it for the ham hocks. Still, I am going to blanch some ham hocks and pile some wilted greens in a pot and try my best. I will serve them on a melamine plate to my son and daughter, who have never seen my grandmother in the flesh, who have never been to Pine Bluff but are of Pine Bluff, not Ingrams but of Ingrams, have washed their hands in my grandparents’ double sink, and meet their hard-working great-grandfather in his truck all over San Francisco. They will probably not like collards yet but that is probably beside the point.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wheatland/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I was raised to believe I could keep bad things from happening to me, as a woman, if I just followed certain rules.

The women in my life, trying, no doubt, to protect me, taught me these rules. When a woman was abducted and killed while leaving a nighttime party in a miniskirt, I was taught not to leave parties alone and not to wear miniskirts. When a woman was raped while jogging in the park at dusk, they told me not to jog in the park at dusk.

As I grew up, I learned to be nervous in the outside world. If something happened to me, out there, it would be because I had let down my guard, because I had broken a rule, because I had not had my keys out quickly enough or hadn’t crossed the street when a suspicious man started walking behind me. It would be my fault.

The funny (or not-so-funny?) thing is that the worst things usually happened to me at home. No one gave me rules to handle those eventualities, as a child or as an adult. The outside world was supposed to be the place where it was the most dangerous for me to be a woman, alone, and, yet, it is invariably at home where I have felt the most alone and the least safe.

I have been a runner, off and on, for almost ten years. One of the major obstacles to my developing a consistent running practice has been that, in my mind, there were only certain hours of the day that were safe for me to run, outside, alone. Very early morning, evening, and nighttime were too dangerous. I could prevent violence against my person by avoiding running during those times. If I ran during those times and I was accosted or raped, it would not be because a criminal attacked me, but because I had been a woman, outside, alone.

Staying inside at dawn and dusk did not prevent me from being sexually harassed by a group of men in broad daylight in the middle of a farmer’s market while pushing a baby in a stroller, or being loudly threatened by a big angry guy over a parking space on my way to an early dinner in Hayes Valley. The rules did prevent me from running during the moments I actually had time to run — early morning and late evening, when the streets were deserted and the sky was dark.

Yesterday, I set my alarm for 5:30 AM and went for my very first predawn run. I came over the stairs at Great Highway when it was still completely dark and the street was so hushed that I could hear everything: a Safeway big rig idling, lonely, almost a mile down the road, the shushing of ocean waves, my new running shoes scraping on sandy asphalt.

I had never seen the ocean, at night, alone. The water was black and pale gray, melancholy. The predawn sky was overcast. Bonfires dotted the bleak sand. Yellow streetlamps made circles of greasy light. Some people slept in their cars. No one hurt me.

Six months ago, I couldn’t walk without pain. Yesterday morning, I ran four miles in the dark. It was safe. It was good.

Sure, these are noble pursuits that I would, in theory, eventually like to see to fruition. But, honestly, at 5:40 PM — a soul-chilling time when I must remind myself that The Darkest Hour Is Just Before Bedtime — it is impossible to view my life from such a distance. It is easy to answer questions like “Why am I here?” and “What is the meaning of all this?” when I am sitting in a lovely teahouse, sipping Lapsang Souchong and languidly jotting down notes. You would not wish to hear my answers to these questions when it is 5:40 PM and I have suddenly noticed, midway through a one-pot dinner that has used all the pots in the kitchen, that the little white grains of sand in my child’s hair can’t  really be sand because they are moving of their own accord.

It has been 5:40 PM several times a day for about six weeks now, a day or three of peace followed by just a string of horrid little surprises and unpleasant personal epiphanies. Unnecessary arguments have been had. Bills have shown up out of nowhere. It has rained every time I let down my guard. I’m certainly not an optimist on the sunniest of days, and so, when everything is sucking,  I tend to throw in the towel immediately. The problem is that, in real life, there are not really many ways to throw in the towel. You  can say “I give up,” but that’s not a permanent solution. There is a permanent solution, but it is not permitted.

Sometimes, one needs to be reminded of that.

I won’t bother saying something so trite as “knitting gets me through.” But, when the outlook is very bleak, there is something to be said for bright green yarn on a gray day, tiny needles clicking through a sullen silence, soft when life is hard, warm when everything is cold.

You can even put it on your foot.

Sometimes, you don’t have to make it the rest of your life. The next row will do.

(Pattern: Cat Bordhi’s appropriately named Discovery Sock, from Personal Footprints for Insouciant Sock Knitters. Yarn is Madelinetosh Tosh Sock, in Oak. Knitting socks on two circular needles thanks to Bordhi’s Socks Soar on Two Circular Needles. Let’s worship her.)

One source suggested we begin the Sabbath meal by reading each other biblical praises. This is an excerpt from Proverbs 31 that a husband is supposed to read (or sing) to his wife every week:

Who can find a virtuous woman? for her price is far above rubies.
The heart of her husband doth safely trust in her, so that he shall have no need of spoil.
She will do him good and not evil all the days of her life.
She seeketh wool, and flax, and worketh willingly with her hands.
She is like the merchants’ ships; she bringeth her food from afar.
She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.
(Proverbs 31:10-15, King James Version)

It made us feel squicky, somehow. We didn’t bother to examine our feelings much; by tacit mutual agreement, we just never did it again.

Having had at least one child  (or one adult incapacitated enough to count as a tall child) home sick every day last week reminded me of that odd Shabbat episode. When I am not writing fiction or crafting or running or blogging or (shudder) part-time bookkeeping, all that remains is “housewife.”

If my husband were a nineteenth-century subsistence farmer, I don’t think I would mind so much. (That is, I would not mind the title “housewife.” I would definitely mind if my husband were a nineteenth-century subsistence farmer. Or at least be very confused.) In such a situation, the “housewife” has a huge and important duty. Without her, the farm can’t run. In the Little House on the Prairie series, for example, the author’s father never minimizes her mother’s work. And there is a lot of it: canning, butchering, making cheese, sewing everyone’s clothes and bed linens from scratch, knitting socks and other clothes, cleaning, washing clothes by hand, growing most of the family’s food, cooking, bearing, nursing, and teaching children, and that list is by no means exhaustive. Because the entire family lives and works together, the housewife’s work is very visible.

(And, yes, I am obsessed with Little House on the Prairie this week for some reason.)

The “woman of valor” verse reminds the reader of this kind of hard work. After the excerpt above, it continues to praise her for buying and tending land, spinning, giving good advice, and making her family’s clothes, in short the work of the farmwife.

I’m not a farm wife. We have exactly 0 cows. Everyone in my household leaves in the morning at around the time I am a third of the way through my first coffee. (I could not tell you what all three of those people are wearing today if you paid me, though you are welcome to try.) They return, in the best of all possible worlds, to a beautifully-appointed, immaculately-cleaned flat filled with handcrafts and organic foods, or, barring that, to a house that is clean enough to not give them hookworm or sleeping sickness and something to eat that is definitely edible and untainted by malevolent bacteria. I am a machine that turns chaos into clean socks. I am our household’s last bulwark against entropy. I am Wall-E.

My work, like Wall-E’s, is largely invisible, though not for lack of complaining loudly. I don’t think it usually occurs to my family that I do this work, in the same way it does not usually occur to me that the sidewalk is largely free of refuse or that the train is driven by a human and arrives reasonably on time. Just as I only think about the train driver when the train is late, they only think about housecleaning when it’s not done. By default, most of my feedback is, thus, negative: “I don’t have any clean pants/there’s no turkey for my sandwich/Mommy, I can’t find the floor.”

I am, by default, a kind-of-housewife. I do my work (and, mostly, my trying-to-get-work) from home, so I’m obviously well-situated to popping a load of laundry in the washing machine between sentences and then forgetting it for two days. I pick up children between paragraphs and pop them in the bathtub and forget about them for forty-five minutes. I have a husband who expects to have deodorant when he needs it, and this benefits us both. But I’m very resistant to describing my primary role as “housewife.” I don’t think the word accurately describes what a 21st century woman with an Internet, a credit card, a master’s degree, a DVR, and a craft supply addiction does with her day.

I mean, I can do some of the things on the “woman of valor” checklist. I have been specifically asked to stop seeking wool and flax. I don’t do evil, mostly. I buy food, if Trader Joe’s counts as “afar” (I prefer the one in Daly City). I get up when it’s dark (in the winter). But the “woman of valor” in the verse is a farm wife, and, I’m afraid, I’m not a very good farm wife: despite my best, caffeinated efforts, I am a miserable wreck when housewifery is my full-time job. And, when I’m forced to be in full-time housewife mode, I feel that failure acutely.

So, next Shabbat, instead of Proverbs 31, I’m going to have my husband read to me from the Book of Cake:

I want a girl who gets up early
I want a girl who stays up late
I want a girl with uninterrupted prosperity
Who used a machete to cut through red tape
With fingernails that shine like justice
And a voice that is dark like tinted glass

She is fast and thorough
And sharp as a tack
She’s touring the facility
And picking up slack

I want a girl with a short skirt and a long, long jacket

Cake, “Short Skirt Long Jacket“

Short Skirt, Long Jacket from Anna Gustafson on Vimeo.

“Gangsta rap” came along when I was a young teen. Everything changed! There were cusses everywhere, especially this word “ho” that I repeated blithely until it occurred to me that it had nothing to do with Santa’s merriment. At first, I mocked the people who criticized this new, very popular, very open misogyny. Sometime around college, however, I realized that I was both enchanted by the music and deeply troubled by a lot of its content.

At that point, I realized rap music at large wasn’t talking to me: I was not the target audience. The self-aggrandizing lyrics, swagger and casual violence towards women were meant to invite the (male) listener to join a fellowship of powerful, desirable male peers — and to exclude me.

So why was I still listening? Why do I still listen to rap music, even now? Well, I’m not unaccustomed to being “othered” by the media I love.

Even the earliest books I read contained hints that I was not their target audience. Several Oz books contain references to Hottentots (renamed “Tottenhots” because that is clever), complete with unflattering illustrations:

Tottenhot! Get it?

In case we were confused about Baum’s feelings concerning the “Tottenhot,” this particular image illustrates a storyline in which Glinda the Witch has to put an animal through a succession of transformations, each time bringing him closer to humanity. “Tottenhot” is two transformations removed from a human being.

I definitely remember having seen these images, decades later; they have since been expurgated from more recent editions, causing something of a controversy in the “Oz community.” (You can see the other scanned pages at the link.)

Meanwhile, the author who continued the Oz series after Baum’s death, Ruth Plumly Thompson, added a popular character, Jinnicky, the Red Jinn, to the stories. Jinnicky  is served by a cast of chubby black slaves. At one point, a rebellion among the Red Jinn’s slaves is actually suppressed by Princess Ozma.

And then there was the first time of many I read through Little Town on the Prairie and fetched up against the charcoal drawing of Pa Ingalls and three friends in blackface (Wilder refers to them as “darkies”). Again, I remember this cognitive dissonance. I didn’t ask an adult what was going on; I didn’t even know what blackface was. I only knew that there was something creepy about Pa dusting his face with soot and speaking in a fake black vernacular.
Once I moved on to my ten-year Sherlock Holmes obsession, I learned pretty quickly to avoid the latter-day mystery  “The Three Gables”:

The door had flown open and a huge negro had burst into the room. He would have been a comic figure if he had not been terrific, for he was dressed in a very loud gray check suit with a flowing salmon-coloured tie. His broad face and flattened nose were thrust forward, as his sullen dark eyes, with a smouldering gleam of malice in them, turned from one of us to the other.

“Which of you gen’l'men is Masser Holmes?” he asked.

Holmes raised his pipe with a languid smile.

“Oh! it’s you, is it?” said our visitor, coming with an unpleasant, stealthy step round the angle of the table. “See here, Masser Holmes, you keep your hands out of other folks’ business. Leave folks to manage their own affairs. Got that, Masser Holmes?”

“Keep on talking,” said Holmes. “It’s fine.”

“Oh! it’s fine, is it?” growled the savage. “It won’t be so damn fine if I have to trim you up a bit. I’ve handled your kind before now, and they didn’t look fine when I was through with them. Look at that, Masser Holmes!”

He swung a huge knotted lump of a fist under my friend’s nose. Holmes examined it closely with an air of great interest.

“Were you born so?” he asked. “Or did it come by degrees?”

It’s actually really hard for me to read this quote, given how many of my junior high school daydreams took part in the Victorian London Holmes inhabited. Now, let’s be honest: that world was not racially inclusive. There are plenty of other racist assumptions in the Holmes canon — the Welsh are dark and emotional, the Southern Europeans border on hysteria both comic and murderous, Indians are invariably shady and the poor are either noble or felonious.

I suppose it’s that the black buffoon Doyle serves up is alarmingly similar to the sort of Stepin Fetchery that’s still on offer today — and still just as offensive. I knew, by the age of eleven or twelve, that I was supposed to be offended by that. Instead, I remember feeling ashamed. I wonder if the shame stemmed from this proof I was unworthy of participating in my Victorian fantasy?

I can’t answer that honestly from an adult perspective. All I know is that, despite knowing most Holmes stories practically by heart, I could not tell you what happens in The Three Gables if you put a gun to my head; one of my favorite Holmes stories was “The Yellow Face,” in which the truth about an interracial marriage comes out, without negative consequences; and that for some reason I have spent the last thirteen months building a Victorian alternate universe in which people of all hues mix pretty freely. Hmm!

The point of all these sad little vignettes, I suppose, is to prove that I’m well accustomed to the point at which an author waves me aside, saying, in effect, “I’m not talking to you.” I rail against it, but I can’t say it never happens, even today. However, I can’t just stop reading books, or only reading the books that make me feel great about myself. Some of the best and most important books were and are written by people with really backwards notions of race and gender. That doesn’t discount the fact that these books are good or important.

In the same vein, when rap is good, it’s very good. For every time Kanye West rails against gold-digging baby mamas

18 years, 18 years/ and on the 18th birthday he found out it wasn’t his

he also produces something like the last verse of “Gone,” perhaps my favorite set of Kanye rhymes –

What the summer of the Chi got to offer a 18-year-old/sell drugs or get a job, you gotta play your role/my dog worked at Taco Bell, hooked us up plural/fired a week later, the manager countin’ churros/sometimes I can’t believe it when I look up in the mirro’/how we out in Europe, spendin’ Euros

Kanye rapping ridiculous pop culture things (churros) with real-world things (Euros) never fails to make me smile.

Of course I’m against misogyny in music, of course I constantly question the relationship between the misogyny of rap music and the culture of violent sexism among young people. (I also am against the use of the word “Hottentot” outside a critical discussion of the media’s obsession with Black women’s bodies!) But I’m not going to stop listening to all rap music, any more than I’m going to torch my Oz books.

I avoid music that is actively vile, just as I avoid books that are consciously attempting to be racist. I try to find mainstream rappers who are doing something a little different from the norm, whether musically or lyrically. (Yes, Mos Def, I know, thanks. :) I get excited when a new female MC appears, then get disappointed when, almost inevitably, everyone loses interest in the “novelty.”

I wince, when an otherwise fantastic rapper describes his coterie of willing groupies in the same verse in which he enumerates his other possessions, because I know he’s talking over my head to the men in the room. But I keep listening.

I had lots of baby dolls. Orange Blossom I received the Christmas my little sister turned one; when you squeezed her stomach she “blew” orange-scented kisses. And Martha Jean (renamed after my grandmother), my first treasured Cabbage Patch Kid.

Eventually, these dolls were lost to history, so to speak. I don’t have any of my old dolls. I’m an adult woman with two children. Kids play with dolls to prepare for parenthood, after all.

Or do they? Is something infinitely weirder going on?

Dare Wright’s The Lonely Doll series (recently reissued) followed the richly photographed adventures of the author’s own childhood doll, Edith (named after the author’s mother). Dare Wright, herself, sometimes coddled but mostly smothered by her mother, never stopped playing with Edith; the books were born of her already obsessive hobby of photographing herself and her doll in various handmade costumes.

Jean Nathan’s meticulously researched Dare Wright biography, “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright,” argues conclusively that Dare Wright explored her sad childhood and stifling adulthood in her photographs and stories. According to Nathan, “Edith became a lonely doll, as Dare once had been a lonely little girl, wishing for a brother, however naughty, to play with, and a father who might be enlisted as a reliable parent to care for them both. In this rendition of the story, Edith’s wish comes true” (163).

Outside her home, Dare was a successful author, a sophisticated and beautiful sometimes model, pursued (hopelessly) by wealthy men; inside, Dare reenacted her traumatic childhood events with a cast of two teddy bears and a doll.  Dare never married or had children — she was too damaged for that kind of emotional intimacy — but I don’t think having a child would necessarily have changed her relationship with Edith. Dare didn’t see Edith as a baby, but as her own mirror image. With Edith, Dare could forever relive childhood, always closing with a happy ending.

I was left unsettled by the end of the biography, not thinking of Dare, but of myself. It had never occurred to me that, as a child, I might have thought of the baby dolls as versions of myself, not merely babies to play with. It makes a lot of sense though — children stop playing with dolls around the age they are beginning to craft what will ultimately be their adult identities.

I stopped playing with dolls around fifth grade, when I started being aggressively bullied. At about the same time, I developed a rich and detailed fantasy life, inventing stories where isolated young people found companionship, bullies were vanquished, and everyone lived happily ever after. Twenty-plus years later, I’m still writing stories about loners making good.

Dare Wright played with dolls well into her sixties. I don’t play with dolls — I write stories with characters.

That’s very different, right?