seven lies multiplied by seven multiplied by seven again

[intertribal]

We're doing spring cleaning at my house (oh, spring cleaning... you always make me think of The Wind in the Willows), and my mom is culling books from the basement and garage.  She's also discovered things like her old high school yearbook, some essay she wrote about going to an underground American Legion party (she got a B!), every single note of correspondence she wrote to my father when they were in a long-distance relationship in 1983 and 1984 (including chili pepper cards that say "thinking about you makes me hot" - yeah), old TOEFL pamphlets, various essays they wrote in graduate school.  I get to go through the books and see if I want any.  Of course my dad was in political economy and my mom was in anthropology, so this is not exactly a ~riveting~ selection.  I say this as a political science major.  What I've been able to determine based on the titles is that my mom was into symbolic anthropology and my dad was into, uh, the political-economic empowerment of villages.  My mom's a bit iffy, though, because she apparently b.s.-ed her way into a fellowship so she could spend the summer in Indonesia with my dad, and she's also told me that she only used anthropology as an excuse to study Javanese dance.

But, I did pick some books, a lot of it political science/history/anthro stuff.  But some special ones:

• A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime, Francis A. J. Ianni.  Complete with single bullet and red rose on the cover!
• Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White.  Published 1957!!!
• Japanese for Busy People, Association for Japanese-Language Teaching.  Hey, you never know.
• Three Case Histories: The "Wolf Man," The "Rat Man," and The Psychotic Doctor Schreber, Freud.  I actually don't like Freud, but the names of those patients, goddamn!
• Gong Hee Fot Choy: A Fortune-Telling Game, Margarete Ward.  Copyright 1948!!!  It says "Do not use GONG HEE FOT CHOY in a light or a haphazard way and expect satisfying results.  This cannot be done."  So I'm kind of afraid to try it.

And goddamn, these books make my nose itch. 

We also found my really, really old Mother Goose book - a big yellow hard-cover with huge gorgeous olden-style illustrations that are, often, very creepy and disturbing.  I pointed out the ones that I found creepy and the common theme was: people falling down, and old people.  I tore a few pages out of this book as a kid, and I remember my mother berating me for it.  Some of the rhymes are familiar, but it's a big book, and there's a lot of obscure stuff that fell through the cracks:

Four-and-twenty tailors/ Went to kill a snail;
The best man among them/ Durst not touch her tail;
She put out her horns/ Like a little Kyloe cow.
Run, tailors, run, or/ She'll kill you all just now.

Three wise men of Gotham
Went to see in a bowl,
And if the bowl had been stronger
My song had been longer.

Robin and Richard/ Were two pretty men;
They stayed in bed/ Till the clock struck ten.
Then up starts Robin/ And looks at the sky:
"Oh, brother Richard,/ The sun's very high.
You go before/ With the bottle and bag,
And I will come after/ On little Jack nag."

My little old man and I fell out;
I'll tell you what 'twas all about:
I had money and he had none,
And that's the way the noise begun.

Bat, bat. / Come under my hat,
And I'll give you a slice of bacon:
And when I bake/ I'll give you a cake,
If I am not mistaken.

There was a man in our town,/ And he was wondrous wise,
He jumped into a bramble-bush,/ And scratched out both his eyes;
And when he saw his eyes were out,/ With all his might and main
He jumped into another bush/ And scratched them in again.

Plus some oldies but goodies that I'd forgotten:

"To bed, to bed," says Sleepy-Head;
"Let's stay awhile," says Slow;
"Put on the pot," says Greedy-Sot,
"We'll sup before we go."

There was a crooked man,/ And he went a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence/ Against a crooked stile;
He bought a crooked cat/ Which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together/ In a little crooked house.

The man in the wilderness/ Asked me
How many strawberries/ Grew in the sea.
I answered him/ As I thought good,
As many red herrings/ As grew in the wood.

Here am I, little jumping Joan,
when nobody's with me
I'm always alone.

Comments

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime, Francis A. J. Ianni.

I wanna borrow that when you're done with it ...

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Haha, cool. I've been on a gangster binge lately, so that book was attractive.

[timesygn.livejournal.com]

I grew up in an organized crime family so my "gangster binge" happened a bit earlier in life. I'd be curious to know what the book says about people who escape the culture and create lives beyond.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, damn. Sounds like you need the book more than I do!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Those last two nursery rhymes are ones I really love. We have a similar old book, huge, with beautiful old illustrations--I wonder if it's the same. There was one picture I liked so much that I wrote my name at the top of it.

Scratching in your eyes again is a great concept.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah, they're really lovely. I think that's how I learned what a red herring was. Mine is "The Original Volland Edition", illustrated by Frederick Richardson.

Especially after you've "seen" that you've scratched them out!

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

It's the exact same one!!

I just looked!

And wouldn't you know, the page I opened up to was the one with the strawberries that grow in the sea.

(The picture I wrote my name above was the one that went with As I was going up Primrose Hill. I liked the girl's dress, and wanted to look like her.)

The book belonged to my dad--he would have had it in his childhood in the 1930s and 1940s.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Oh, man, that's hilarious. Doubly so because Primrose Hill is one I pointed out to my mom yesterday as, "I really liked that one. She's pretty." Hahahaha.

Wow, that's crazy old! I think mine was an 80s edition - my mom bought it for me.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

too wild. I love things like that.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

You have a selection of symbolic anthro books, and that is what you pick?

.....

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Which one?

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

All of them? You and I just have vastly different ideas of what makes a good read, I guess.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Well, I picked like ten other books other than those, too, more "serious" stuff. The ones I listed here are just the ones I found funny. I don't think I picked any straight symbolic anthropology books, though, regardless.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

oh, i missed the 'special ones' comment. anyway, it's not lack of seriousness, it's just lack of actual, theoretical symbolic anth. (or empirical stuff of theoretical significance, or something)

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Yeah - well, the books were varied (both parents' graduate courses), and the ones I picked that were "of theoretical significance" I didn't mention. As I'm not into symbolic anthropology, though, I let the bulk of those books get put back into storage containers.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I'm not into symbolic anth either. I just mean that those books (not including almost all ethnographies) would probably be the only ones that would interest me, unless there's some political philosophy. A lot of the rest seems like noise.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

I took a bunch of political theory/ political anthropology. Don't know how good any of it is, of course. But I do read noise.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I know. But I also know that...I'm attracted to things that get at universal problems. It just never fails to amaze me how other people tend to find my interests so totally not fascinating.

On the subject of books for class, I recall you saying something about stopping buying books for (some of) your courses and just checking them out of the library because it was both expensive and not that interesting? I forget what exactly you said.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

Bad packaging?

Yeah, a lot of the books I had to read were either dry or unconvincing/poorly-written. And I was really into saving money in college.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

haha, i doubt it.

i think that's the general state of academic writing...but it probably affects some disciplines worse than others.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

I mean, I would find books like those listed (except maybe freud?) to be not 'un-serious' nor 'unsignificant' but just really, really dull and boring.