Roses Supposes

I spent the last two and a half weeks in California. The first few days I spent in San Diego going to the Western Association of Women Historians conference and staying with the pastor I grew up with and his wife (after I graduated from undergrad, the pastor moved from AZ to a suburb of San Diego). I was very impressed by the conference. Almost every paper was of very high quality, and though most all were read, the presentations were clear and nuanced (no monotone). I also enjoyed the great variety of subject matters. The keynote address was about masculinity and femininity in 1400-1600 Mexican convents and monasteries. I also met a woman from California who is working on American Intellectual History. One of her individuals in her dissertation is a black librarian active in Harlem from 1920-1970, who also became involved in UNESCO. We had a very nice conversation about our similar interests.

Sunday morning, I went to my pastor’s church. I was looking forward to hearing him again. In the evenings after the conference, I had caught up on their lives, and a little about their children. Their oldest son (3 years older than me) and his wife had started out in Campus Crusade but went through a crisis of faith that ended them up at the L’Abri Center. I feel a lot of kinship with them both. At any rate, the daughter-in-law ended up as a feminist, which has made my old pastor rather uncomfortable. It was quite a transition to go between the old-school and younger feminists at the conference to the rather conservative pastor’s home. He seemed so much more conservative than I had realized, particularly when I went to church on Sunday morning.

He was preaching through the Sermon on the Mount and had come to the passage about plucking out one’s eye or cutting off one’s hand when they cause one to sin. The sermon hit very hard against all visual forms of lusting; the pastor said rather explicitly that he believed he was preaching more to the men in the audience than the women. But what really bugged me was how much this orientation precluded any kind of realistic Christian engagement with the arts. I realized that was one thing I have rebelled against in this upbringing. How can I exist as an intelligent adult in the world of academics, particularly history and literature, and avoid all scenes of sex? I also believe there can be glorification of God in admiring his creation. As a wanna-be actress, I love to watch the physical and facial expressions of the individuals around me and on tv, etc. I can love their beauty without lusting after them. Could this kind of love for the physical as God’s creation be a way of having a Christian engagement with the arts that seems so precluded in my old pastor’s sermon? Is it even possible to suppose their can be appreciation of the beauty in the human form without lust? Would this go with the spirit that Christ preaches?

I spent the next two weeks traveling from my Grandma’s house in Alhambra to UCLA, on the other side of downtown LA. The 25 miles took anywhere from 1 hour to 2 in bumper to bumper traffic. It was really exhausting. The Ralph Bunche archives were quite rich in materials from my time period and in relation to my questions. I spent the first part of the time looking at correspondence and finding letters from a lot of individuals on my list of subjects that I didn’t know Bunche knew. This included some letters from Europe from others of my subjects that hadn’t been in their archives! Then I looked at his speeches from his early years. He certainly did consider the American racial situation in a global context. I just have to figure out how to write about that in a nuanced way that brings in this other network of individuals, an intellectual cohort.

The second week, my mom and dad came over from AZ. Mom went with me everyday to the archives and helped me research. She was amazing to put up with the concentrated schedule. She typed things in using my dying computer and marked things to be copied. I had her continue to work on materials in and around Bunche’s two international trips in the 1930s, while I transcribed his diaries from 1937 and 1938. I actually found travel diaries!! I ended up with 100+ pages of single spaced entries from these diaries. The type was tiny. I’m not sure yet how I will use the entries. Bunche had a significant group of African intellectuals he hung out with in London. Then he traveled to Africa and into the Pacific. In Africa, he also took very careful notes on all the customs for his anthropological/political project. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to these notes (about 20 journalism size notebooks). Maybe another time.

Mom and Dad wanted me to just concentrate on Bunche, but I really want to concentrate on a network of intellectuals, and not a biography. This will also free me from doing the normal sort of bio-things. I also don’t know that he needs another bio right now, as there are at least 2 scholarly ones and many popular ones.

We drove through Hollywood and Beverly Hills and LA a couple times. In all my travels to Southern California, I’d never been to these iconic places. My favorite was driving through LA on Melrose to the Farmer’s Market. There were all sorts of random stores. The two I remember were across the streets from each other–Delectable Men and Insanity Women.

At the Farmers Market, I went to the American Girl Place. I had loved to look at the catalog as a kid–all those wonderful historical connections! And yet so devastatingly romantic… Can’t we teach our children something other than Horatio Alger? That some slaves didn’t escape? That some little Victorian girls didn’t really care about the abuses of immigration? Or are these ‘good’ messages?

I am such a random collection of adultish and childish impulses.

Blogging may be very dangerous to my time…