projects on the agenda

in no apparent order (though they should be in some apparent order):

1) article about the photography of greg s.

2) stories about people i know: D.G., P.S., L.W., R.M.D., R.R., etc.

3) Pan-American Institute research project and book distribution to rural Panamanian libraries

4) article about West Indian Panamanians hosting famous black performers and orators in Panama throughout the twentieth century

5) Research for oral history project based out of Vanderbilt U.

6) going to the National Archives and quilting myself in sheathes of paper

dreams - weird snippets of the hither and yon

so, lately i've been having dreams that feature things like parts of words, sounds, or movements. for the past week or two, i was hearing someone sing the words "LIVING ROOM" really loudly in my sleep. it was a male voice, i recall, with a bombastic air that i imagined might be accompanied by the twirling of waxen mustaches. which reminds me of the spanish word for mustache: bigote. what a great word (though not as great as remolacha).

finally i solved that puzzle - it was serge gainsbourg, of course, singing his song about the living room and "le smoking." i believe that that song is called "intoxicated man." great song that is. i should mention that in order to solve the puzzle i had to keep repeating the words to myself under my breath, as if that would help jog my memory. sincerest apologies to those who passed me by and were taken somewhat aback by the spectre of a lady muttering "living room!" to herself under her breath!

and then i started dreaming about a woman moving her neck gracefully like a swan's - sort of nodding and tucking it under herself. for some reason, i was associating this gesture with someone of the Continent. like the europe of the fin de siecle, before the trenches, you know.

Also, i did dream of a guttural phoneme, switched off mid-stream like a light -- but can't remember it. ah well.

and i've been dreaming about my ninety-year-old grandmother lately, but in these dreams she's lithe and vivacious despite her superannuated state.

military and civilian

okay, so here are some things that i got interested in while in DC:

1) military operation names, as referenced on wikipedia. these are so inventive, and the whole phenomenon of naming intrigues me. some of the best ones:

-Operation:
-Eager Glacier
-Lucky Alphonse
-Acid Gambit
-Bushmaster
-Mongoose
-Urgent Fury
-Overload
-Klipklop
-Alpha Tango Walrus
-Morris Dance
-Babylift

etc.


2) weird naval rites on equator-crossing, as referenced in wikipedia: this was something that i stumbled upon while searching for panama stuff in the national archives - apparently, the navy still has these rituals involving king neptune and pollywogs and the like. read on:

Line-crossing ceremony

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For other uses, see Crossing the Line.

U.S. Sailors and Marines participate in a crossing the line ceremony aboard USS Blue Ridge (LCC 19) as the ship passes the equator May 16, 2008. It has been a long naval tradition to initiate pollywogs, Sailors who have never crossed the Equator, into the Kingdom of Neptune, the legendary god of the seas, upon their first crossing of the Equator.

The ceremony of Crossing the Line is an initiation rite in the Royal Navy, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, and other navies which commemorates a sailor's first crossing of the equator. Originally the tradition was created as a test for seasoned sailors to ensure their new shipmates were capable of handling long rough times at sea. Sailors who have already crossed the equator are nicknamed (Trusty) Shellbacks, often referred to as Sons of Neptune; those who have not are nicknamed (Slimy) Pollywogs.

The two-day event (evening and day) is a ritual of reversal in which the older and experienced enlisted crew essentially takes over the ship from the officers. Physical assaults in keeping with the 'spirit' of the initiation are tolerated, and even the inexperienced crew is given the opportunity to 'take over'.^{[citation needed]} The transition flows from established order to the controlled 'chaos' of the Pollywog Revolt, the beginnings of re-order in the initiation rite as the fewer but experienced enlisted crew converts the 'Wogs' through physical tests, then back to, and thereby affirming, the pre-established order of officers and enlisted. Like the old physically- and emotionally-intensive boot camp, the "Crossing the Line" ritual deconstructs then reconstructs the initiates' experience from newbie outsider into the experienced military fraternity.

The eve of the equatorial crossing is called Wog Up-Rising and, as with many other night-before rituals, is a mild type of reversal of the day to come. 'Wogs' - all of the uninitiated - are allowed to capture and 'interrogate' any shellbacks they can find (eg, tying them up, cracking eggs or pouring aftershave lotion on their heads).^{[citation needed]}

Polish line crossing ceremony (Chrzest równikowy)

After crossing the line, Pollywogs receive subpoenas ^[1] to appear before King Neptune and his court (usually including his first assistant Davy Jones and her Highness Amphitrite and often various dignitaries, who are all represented by the highest ranking seamen), who officiate at the ceremony, which is often preceded by a Beauty Contest of men dressing up as women, each department of the ship being required to introduce one contestant in swimsuit drag. Afterwards, some wogs may be "interrogated" by King Nepture and his entourage, and the use of 'truth serum' (hot sauce + after shave + ?) and whole uncooked eggs put in the mouth. During the ceremony, the Pollywogs undergo a number of increasingly disgusting ordeals (wearing clothing inside out and backwards; crawling on hands and knees on nonskid-coated decks; being swatted with short lengths of firehose; being locked in stocks and pillories and pelted with mushy fruit; being locked in a water coffin of salt-water and bright green sea dye (fluorescent sodium salt); crawling through chutes or large tubs of rotting garbage; kissing the Royal Baby's belly coated with axle grease, hair chopping, etc), largely for the entertainment of the Shellbacks.^{[citation needed]}

Once the ceremony is complete, a Pollywog receives a certificate ^[2] declaring his new status. Another rare status is the Golden shellback, a person who has crossed the equator at the 180th meridian (international date line). When a ship must cross these lines, the ship's captain will usually intentionally plot a course across the Golden X so that the ship's crew can be initiated into the Golden Shellbacks.

The rarest Shellback status is that of the Emerald Shellback, or Royal Diamond Shellback, which is received after crossing the equator at the prime meridian.

A watered-down version of the ceremony, typically featuring King Neptune, is also sometimes carried out for passengers' entertainment on civilian ocean liners and cruise ships.

Contents [hide] 1 Controversy 2 Equatorial Baptism 3 Honors 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Controversy

In the 19th century and earlier, the line-crossing ceremony was quite a brutal event, often involving beating "pollywogs" with boards and wet ropes and sometimes throwing the victims over the side of the ship, dragging the pollywog in the surf from the stern. In more than one instance, sailors were reported to have been killed while participating in a crossing the line ceremony.^{[citation needed]}

As late as World War II, the line crossing ceremony was still rather rough and involved activities such as the "Devil's Tongue" which would be an electrified piece of metal poked into the sides of those deemed pollywogs. Beatings were often still common, usually with wet firehoses, and several World War II Navy deck logs speak of sailors visiting sickbay after crossing the line.^{[citation needed]}

Efforts to curtail the line crossing ceremony did not begin until the 1980s, when several reports of blatant hazing began to circulate regarding the line crossing ceremony and at least one death was attributed to abuse while crossing the line.

California Maritime Academy observed the line-crossing until 1989, after which the ceremony was deemed to be hazing, and was forbidden. The '89 crossing was fairly typical, as it was not realized to be the last one. Pollywogs participated voluntarily, though women midshipmen justifiably observed that they were under social pressure to do the ceremony but were targets of harder abuse.^{[citation needed]} Pollywogs (midshipmen and anyone else who had not crossed) ascended a ladder from the foredeck to the superstructure deck of the ship. There, they crawled down a gauntlet of shellbacks on both sides of a long, heavy canvas runner, about 10 - 12 meters. The shellbacks had prepared 1 meter lengths of canvas/rubber firehose, which they swung hard at the posterior of each pollywog. Pollywogs then ascended a ladder to the boatdeck to slide down a makeshift chute into the baptism of messdeck leavings in sea water in an inflated liferaft back on the superstructure deck. Pollywogs then returned to the foredeck where they were hosed off by firehose and then allowed to kiss, in turn, the belly of the sea-baby, the foot of the sea-hag, and the ring of King Neptune, each personified by shellbacks.

In 1995, a notorious line crossing ceremony took place on an Australian submarine HMAS Onslow. Sailors undergoing the ceremony were physically and verbally abused before being subjected to an act called "sump on the rump", where a dark liquid was daubed over each sailor's anus and genitalia. One sailor was then sexually assaulted with a long stick before all sailors undergoing the ceremony were forced to jump overboard until permitted to climb back aboard the submarine. A videotape of the ceremony was obtained by the Nine Network and aired on Australian television. The television coverage provoked widespread criticism, especially when the videotape showed some of the submarine's officers watching the entire proceedings from the conning tower.^[3][4]

Most navies have, since then, instituted regulations which prohibit physical attacks on sailors undergoing the crossing the line ceremony. In modern times, rather than a dreaded rite of initiation, the line crossing ceremony has become a popular tradition in the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard. In the PBS documentary Carrier filmed in 2005 (Episode 7 - "Rites of Passage"), a crossing-the-line ceremony on the USS Nimitz is extensively documented. The ceremony is carefully orchestrated by the ship's officers, with some enthusiastic sailors chafing at the degree to which "harassment" is disallowed.

Line crossing ceremonies are also carried out on many U.S. merchant ships. However, without the oversight of military justice, they can often get out of hand and lead to the abuse and assault which occurred in line crossing ceremonies of the past.

[edit] Equatorial Baptism

Baptism on the line, also called equatorial baptism, is an initiation ritual sometimes performed as a ship crosses the equator, involving water baptism of passengers or crew who have never crossed the equator before. The ceremony is sometimes explained as being an initiation into the court of King Neptune.

The ritual is the subject of a painting by Matthew Benedict named The Mariner's Baptism, and of a 1961 book by Henning Henningsen named Crossing the Equator: Sailor's Baptism and other Initiation Rites.^[5]

[edit] Honors

A popular patch has also been created for shellbacks, that depicts Neptune battling a sea serpent with his trident.

This is the text from a certificate issued on a Royal Navy ship during the Second World War:

A Proclamation

Whereas by our Royal Consension, Our Trusty, Well Beloved .................... has this day entered Our Domain. We do hereby declare to all whom it may concern that it is Our Royal Will and Pleasure to confer upon him the Freedom of the Seas without undue ceremony. Should he fall overboard, We do command that all Sharks, Dolphins, Whales, Mermaids and other dwellers in the Deep are to abstain from maltreating his person. And we further direct all Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen and others who have not crossed Our Royal Domain, to treat him with the respect due to One of Us. Given under Our Hand at Our Court on board H.M.S. .............. on the Equator in Longitude .....° on this ..... day of ..... in the year .....
(Signed)
Cancer — High Clerk
Neptune — Rex

This is the text from a certificate issued on a United States Navy ship during the 1960s:

Know ye, that .................... on the ..... day of ..... , aboard .............. appeared at the equator at Latitude .....° , Longitude .....° entering into Our Royal Domain, and having been inspected and found worthy by My Royal Staff and was initiated into the Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep. I command my subjects to Honor and Respect him as one of our Trusty Shellbacks.

(Signed)
Davey Jones — His Royal Scribe
Neptunus Rex — Ruler of the Raging Main

The USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVA-42), under way to Rio De Janeiro, crossed the line on 4 July 1966, and its crew became known as "Star Spangled Shellbacks;" however, no previous mention of such honor has to date been located.

Similar "fraternities" in the navy include:

• The Order of the Blue Nose for sailors who have crossed the Arctic Circle.
• The Order of the Polar Bear for U.S. sailors who have crossed the Arctic Circle.
• The Order of the Red Nose for sailors who have crossed the Antarctic Circle.
• The Order of the Golden Dragon for sailors who have crossed the International Date Line.
• The Order of the Ditch for sailors who have passed through the Panama Canal.
• The Order of the Rock for sailors who have transited the Strait of Gibraltar.
• The Safari to Suez for sailors who have passed through the Suez Canal.
• The Emerald Shellback or Royal Diamond Shellback for sailors who cross at 0 0 degrees off the coast of West Africa (where the equator crosses the Prime Meridian)
• The Realm of the Czars for sailors who crossed into the Black Sea.
• The Order of Magellan for sailors who circumnavigated the Earth.

[edit] See also

• Ducking and shaving

[edit] References

1. ^ Ceremonial Certificates - Neptune Subpoena
2. ^ Ceremonial Certificates - Golden Shellback Certificate - Personalized
3. ^ http://www.aamh.asn.au/news/0076.pdf
4. ^ Navy submarine hot bunking
5. ^ Matthew Benedict - Crossing the Line

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Chrzest równikowy

• Brief description of equatorial baptism
• Some accounts of baptism on the line:

• [1] - The Anti-Vacation
• [2] - Pust-Norden
• [3] - Greenpeace

• Line-crossing Ceremony: Homophobic or Homoerotic?
• Matthew Benedict's painting
• WW2DB: Line Crossing Ceremony
• Video of 1957 Coast Guard crossing ritual

so incredibly much to recount it ain't even funny

hey blog - once again, the negligent "Terrible Mother" returns to claim her own! so it's been forever, but i've been fairly busy and have actually produced quite a lot. yesterday i stayed in the LOC for hours focusing on this one very measured, finite task that i had to do, and while i couldn't find the event that i was looking for in miles of microfilm footage (eyes scrolling through it all until i became quite queasy and looked down and realized that i was exuding this sort of vegetable-soup smell, not a good thing for matin' - or maybe that was my vegetable-based pheromone cocktail at work, who knows), i churned out an essay that was, i think, pretty good at about 2 am today. everyhing sort of fell into place with it, because the topic was well-known, the essay had already been half-written in the first place, and the evidence was there. and i realized that working hard can be so satisfying when there are these finite, road-marker sort of goals lining the path. in the lack of the short-term agenda, academia seems like a lifetime of sisyphean sloughing through endless piles of paper as heavy as midwestern snow, which then proceed to pile up again, confounding the slough-er. so i think that in future i'm going to start sitting down, sorting, reflecting, and weighing more than consuming linear feet of information as if i was a tape recorder with a tapeworm.

now a word about the library. lately i've been walking there, as usual, and noticing the little metal cards attached to the foliage planted around it - heavy metal panicum and common box, not to mention a yellowwood that is apparently part of the legume family. then i enter the place, this time not the manuscript reading room, where the steel-cut bob lady rules all with her withering gaze and non-indelible sceptre, but the newspaper and periodical room, which is like the laid-back hippie counterpart to the manuscript room.

and well it should be, because for the most part these documents are preserved, so that you can touch them with greasy fingers and not worry about destroying irretrievable evidence. no, the newspaper room is not fastidious, and in fact the opposite: it's run by a cadre of eccentrics, including several who i initially thought were homeless people, and in fact they might be. it's an open secret that the newspaper room is a good place for homeless people to hang out during the day, to pee and check their email, and the aisles are full of limping, shapeless forms with dreadlocks and absent gazes. this, i feel, is right - clearly the library needs inhabitants, and they're enjoying it more than anyone else in This Great Nation.

then there are the researchers, another type of lost person, who stumble around with unkempt hair and baggy, ill-fitting clothes, but have the look of mania rather than defeat. they always request microfilm adamantly and scroll through it like housewives at a casino, sitting at the machines, pressing buttons, scribbling furiously in their rumpled notebooks as the lines squeal past. although the machines do produce a sort of screaming sound as the plastic whips through the reels, the screaming can be sort of soothing, if modulated correctly. or it can be maddening, as it was yesterday, when the man adjacent to me (a soft-spoken elderly person looking for kentucky newspapers, i heard him whisper to the librarian) kept jamming his finger on the button, jerking the film around, and producing the sorts of squeaks and belches that, i imagine, he also did. that was driving me crazy, i'll admit. but by then i'd been sitting at the machines too long and had become a raw nerve, the body equivalent of a lacerated eyeball, with red veins sticking out and the moisture stripped away, leaving a sort of dryness exacerbated by the friction of the quick-moving tape. nevertheless, this state seemed to be "good for business," as they say.

work ethic is important to me, as is control over the frames of microfilm as they slide past. modulating the speed of the thing is very satisfying, as is bringing the pages into focus by adjusting the gear above the lens. there's something very nice about turning on the machine, hearing it hum to life, stroking its innards and making printer adjustments, like a lowing beast. then the task of alignment, and the joy of flipping an image by turning a crank - who would've thought that the lateral motion, the flick of the wrist, could spin things that were upside-down into intelligibility? anyhow, sitting in front of one of those stereopticons is definitely comforting.

and i know that this is partly why the men with tousled long hair and untied, mud-caked boots and pants with holes in the crotch and a million bags come to this place. today i ran into one, with the usual accoutrements - thick glasses, messy blonde mane, rosaceous nose, military apparel - and he commented to me that he had come on a long bus ride, and he'd taken four bags with him - "one virtually empty," he kept repeating to me and to the ethiopian coatroom clerk, who looked at him with disdain - but four, nonetheless, because he needed those things but was not prepared to get on the bus with more than four. at this, the clerk perked up and mumbled something about how his back prevented him from carrying three. i smiled at them and made a short answer. everyone - including several of the middle-aged men standing in the reader registration line - was actually staring at this long, lithe, wide-eyed girl who spoke about her work like a burbling stream: "oh," she said, "i study feminism." the clerk said, "what?" and she said, loudly, "feminism," and then asked him where she should go for that. he said that he had no idea. she kept nodding her head like a horse (her long hair was extremely reminiscent of a horse's mane). anyhow, the whole thing was rather droll and convivial. a vignette, one might say.

other highlights of the library walk: one day, i saw a low-flying hawk. i had come from the police station, where all these people were cooking up a fish fry. i bought two fishes, i was enormously hungry, but then after eating one i was fully and gave the rest to a homeless man who sleeps in this granite corner and keeps his sweaters in the nearby newspaper box. i actually just put it down in his pile of pilly woolen blankets and ran off. anyhow, the fish was good, the macaroni and cheese even better. and then i saw the hawk (see photo): amazing, so close to me, speckled brown and cream-colored, with an unmistakably hawkish beak. definitely a pro-war sort of bird. and i noticed that a woman was also staring up at it, and i wondered why more people weren't (probably because they were, to quote that magnetic fields song, "Washington, DC," "doing something real"), and she and i exchanged a few words about the hawk, which she called "Lady-Hawk." she said that she recognized it from the native american museum, which was just adjacent to its perch. i noticed then that she was like a solid black wall in her down coat, one of those women who look like pillars, possibly like Lot's wife, just impenetrable forces of solid, continuous flesh. (Note: there are men who look like this too.) And she had a long dark streaked braid. something very friendly about her aspect.

One more note about a recent encounter: so, i went to thanksgiving in this out-of-the-way suburb of DC, invited there by my friend from Chicago, who is also a person who "[does] something real." first i took the train, and then i got on a bus, which was a very strange-looking 'short bus' with a sort of fake-vintage prow. very odd. there were practically no people on the bus, except for the driver and this lady of indefinite ethnicity, though i'd hazard a guess and say that she was filipina or latina. she was going to work (which i intuited to mean cleaning a house, since she got off the bus in the middle of rippling suburban berms and other landscaped formations that dipped and rose gently, covered with a receding grassline), and we chatted about the economy for a while. she said, "is obama going to fix this or what?" the driver observed that he was shocked that the wheaton mall hadn't even bothered to open on thanksgiving, owing to a low turnout. half of his day, he said, had been spent picking up and dropping off people who were trying to go to the mall and disappointed to find it closed. A half-day trucking frustrated would-be shoppers. Then he and i got into a long and rambling discussion about Obama, which became so interesting that we both forgot to look out for my stop, and i had to cycle back on the short bus as it went back the way it had come. this was very pleasant, though, and i sat in the closed-up bus and marinated in the warmth of the sun streaming in and the flowing juices of my horrible, horrible cold, which had made me into a florid and stinking virus-spewing disease carrier. the busdriver told me to drink robotussin and go to bed, and he even offered to give me some of his, but i said that i was fine. but i wasn't fine - my nose was like a snot-volcano, and my head felt hazy in that certain way that lets you know that yes, you are sick, in the way that the papers are telling us that yes, we're in a recession. i was self-diagnosing at that point, and it felt reassuring, in a way, to be able to do that, backed up with copious material evidence.

And okay, to segue into thanksgiving: it was really nice, despite the fact that i was sick. first of all, i spent time with my friend, who i adore. A great lady, as they said of Eleanor Roosevelt. then there was the other company - it was this humongous, multi-family event, with three different mashed potato concoctions, something that George Eliot could've devised. Half of the people present were politicos in high places (including one of the main authors of the 9/11 commission report and his wife, a member of the obama transition team up for a sexy post), and then there was a lawyer for the democrats, something with the housing and banking commission or some such, and then two lit professors, a radical leftist history prof (ohoho was he ever the best! loved that old crusty rabble-rouser), this lesbian of color who runs a famous blog about LGBT and social justice stuff, and then assorted others. halfway through dinner, a bevy of congresspeople arrived, with their pert, wifey wives, including extremely well-preserved old ladies with frosty coifs, pearls, and expensive leisurewear. clearly it would have been amazing to be healthy for these people, but i did manage to avoid touching them and, i'd like to think, spared them the grief of future infectious disease. also, there were children running around everywhere, a good sign. these children had golden curls and soft little kitten faces, everything you'd expect of children. there was a baby who looked, as i commented, like the "essence of a baby." there was nothing of the shriveled old man about him, that's for sure. and two of the children were named after famous black people's last names - ailey and ellison. no joke. one of those was purposeful, the other accidental.

also, there was this weird guy who was sort of unplaceable. i kept trying to figure out how he fit into the family. he and i actually ended up talking a lot, and he told me that he'd met famous musicians like john prine, steve gutenberg, and minnie riperton. he also told me that he'd met his wife when he stopped to pick her up as she hitchhiked across the USA. hm. he kept reciting john prine lyrics to me, because i told him about my incidental encounter with prine through a former lover, but it was making me sort of uncomfortable, so i changed the subject. i do remember, though, through my foggy haze, that this guy was taken by the fact that john prine had been able to truly understand love from a woman's perspective even before feminism really got going. i don't know if i bought that. anyhow, at some point i found myself semi-passed out on the sofa, full of food that i hadn't been able to taste because of my clogged passages, and he seemed to be in the same state, dorsal fin pointing up. another time, he saw me eating a piece of cheese and said "i see you," and i felt sort of creeped out.

hm.

one last point before i move on: i realize how important the olfactory is to life-processes and the enjoyment of life. food, sex, it's all better with the sense of smell. taking smell away is a really egregious thing to do. another egregious thing would be taping someone's mouth shut when his/her nose was clogged by a bad cold. that would, i think, amount to a mild form of torture.

here's what i'm gonna do

an open note to everyone who's ever known me in any way approaching intimacy:

if you want, i'll write a story about you. it will be loosely based on fact and memory, but also somewhat embroidered as a necessary consequence of said fact and memory. this can be a gift, but you also might not like it. but i think you will. okay, who's in? i think i'm just going to start writing them whether or not i get any responses. a-hem.