On Learning and Hair
Hello, Dames Nationals!
Here on the east coast, we are in the sweet spot of fall: the foliage is at its peak, the weather is crisp enough to demand a light jacket, and the clock has not yet fallen back. Therefore, it’s time for one of Dame Margaret’s greatest creations: her crowd-sourced sweatercore playlist on Spotify.
And now there’s a sequel in the works: 2 sweater 2 core. Listen and enjoy!
Never Stop Learning, Never Stop Language-ing
Last week, Holly suggested that we go see the editors of a new book, The Case of Lizzie Borden and Other Writings, that collects the writings of Elizabeth Garver Jordan do a reading at the Odyssey Bookshop in South Hadley. This is the sort of thing that I always think I am going to do but then end up eating a bunch of cheese and crackers on the couch as I scroll myself into a stupor. As always, once it was actually happening I felt very awake and interested and aghast at the number of interesting people/places/things that I know nothing about. There’s always something to learn! It’s so simple that my first impulse is to make fun of myself for thinking this at all, but here we are. [Side note: one of the most active volunteers at one of my many part-time jobs made me a loaf of delicious rye bread earlier this week to thank me for, well, doing my job, really, but I’ll take it. He’s probably about 80 and told me that he had to learn how to cook for the first time when his wife went into memory care five years ago and was delighted to discover that he loves to bake. “I never knew and I didn’t learn until I had to!” I’m often so just entirely sick of myself but there’s something[s] out there that I love and I don’t know it yet. I need to remember that.]
The editors, Jane Carr and Lori Harrison-Kahan, found each other due to a shared interest in Jordan, who was an incredibly prolific journalist, editor, suffragist and novelist whose stuff has been mostly out of print for quite some time until now. We’re apparently living through an Elizabeth Garver Jordan renaissance because Sharon M. Harris is currently writing the first biography of her, which I hope will go into details about her life as an unmarried woman who created a chosen family with two other women. The three of them went on to unofficially adopt a girl and raise her and Jordan had what the editors quote Harris as calling a “most romantically passionate partnership” with Frances Hodgson Burnett, who in their letters called Jordan “Beloved” and “Querida, the Spanish word for “dearest,” usually signifying a female romantic partner, which they had chosen as a special name” talk about a secret garden, amirite, sorry, sorry. To top it all off, Harris is burried right down the road from me in Florence, Massachusetts, where she spent summers!
Harris went to a convent school in Milwaukee and trained as a concert pianist before going to business college to learn shorthand. Through her father’s connections in Milwaukee she started out editing the women’s page of a local paper. She eventually made her way to New York in 1890 and litereally knocked on the managing editor’s door of Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and got a job in the newsroom. She broke through by getting an interview with the notoriously private then First Lady Caroline Scott Harrison and became famous for the twenty articles she wrote reporting from the 1893 trial of Lizzie Borden. Her trial writing is entirely engrossing, beginning with this paragraph that would be at home in any true crime podcast:
Lizzie D. Borden is a young woman thirty-one years of age who has heretofore led a respected life, who was identified with numerous religious movements, who according to the testimony of her friends, was kind of heart and thoughtful for the comfort and feelings of others. Did this young woman split open her aged father’s head with a hatchen as he lay sleeping on the sofa, and afterwards go back and batter his face and head with the same weapon that even the doctors who looked upon the hideous signt could hardly command their nerves? Did this same young woman just before or just after this deed, strike down her stepmother and chop and hack her head and face until it was beaten almost out of human resemblance? Did she do at least one of these horrible deeds within twenty minutes’ time, and was she able at the end of that interval able to appear before neighbors she had summoned without a sign of derangement or hasty adjustment of her dress, with the weapon concealed beyond discovery, and not even a scrap of direct evidence to connect her with the deed left undisposed of?
Good stuff! This article by Brooke Kroeger, who wrote the collection’s introduction, has a lot more pertinent information on Harris’s place in the history of “newspaper women,” if you’re interested.
Harris went on to write many, many short stories and novels, often about “newspaper women,” in which she was able to write about topics like sexual harrassment without naming any names since she was working under the cover of fiction. One story featured a reporter covering the murder trial of a young woman accused of murdering her father and stepmother. In the story, the accused woman confesses her guilt to the reporter, who decides to keep this a secret in the face of the woman’s acquittal!
Of course, this made Harris rather infamous and kept people talking about her and the case long after it was over.
Editors Carr and Harrison-Kahan also spoke of Jordan’s work as an editor — she edited Harper’s Bazaar and was a book editor as well, credited with discovering Sinclair Lewis, among other things. This came up when I asked why Harris’s work had been largely forgotten, and they noted that a lot of her influence at the time she was working came as an editor, which is often invisible work. In their book, they point to this amazing 2014 Avidly article by Sarah Blackwood: “Editing As Carework: The Gendered Labor of Public Intellectuals” which is more relevant than ever here in 2024 :
Excellent editing erases itself: it’s mending the dress so well that the fit is perfect, and the holes are invisible. Unless an author calls attention to it, a reader should never know it was there.
And forget being able to articulate the editorial labor I put into Avidly to my institution—what about articulating it to myself? Is it a, as banal as it might sound, “labor of love”? The past year has seen a number of sharp critiques of the alignment of labor and love, care and work. Miya Tokumitso has argued that the platitudinous directive to “do what you love” hurts workers and devalues work. My editorial and writing work for Avidly is entirely unpaid, a whole new exciting development in the history of capitalism that many writers have urged us to resist. I am sympathetic to these critiques, emanating as they do out of desperation with a world that has figured out how very possible it is to simply stop paying people for their work. And yet the solution: demand pay, stop editing and publishing work that you cannot pay for, basically: STOP LANGUAGE-ING seems to me far more desperate and dispiriting. As if attempting to cure a disease by ceasing to feed the body it ravages.
Keeping It Classy-fied!
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Drug Store Hair Care Dame Margaret Happily Endorses
It has been nearly 18 months since I last got my hair cut, so times are getting desperate. I am not deliberately growing it out or doing anything as intentional as that. I just kept being unable to decide before which event I would get it cut, and then ended up getting it cut before none of them, and here we are. Hair math— it defeats the best of us.
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As a result of this haircut impasse, my psychological need for better haircare is immense. But, thanks to my present state of partial employment, I cannot afford to go for the top-shelf stuff I usually swear by (Christophe Robin, this sampler pack is currently 50% off, it will lead to you stalking sales to buy the Prickly Pear Mask full-price). So, I’ve had to return to some drug store oldies and am thrilled to report: they’re still goodies!
First up: L’Oreal Elvive 8-Second Wonder Water, currently 2 for $10 at CVS, normally around $12 a bottle. I have no idea what is in this stuff or how it works. All I know is that I apply the recommended 20 ml of it to my hair between shampooing and conditioning, it creates a weird warming sensation on my hair, I rinse it out, and when my hair dries (especially if I blow dry it), it’s sleek and shiny and swishy to a degree never found in mere nature. The whole thing feels like alchemy and who doesn’t like alchemy they can pick up at the local CVS? I have used both the normal version and the new Hyalauronic Acid version and have yet to discern a difference between them.
Next up: Pantene Pro-V Miracle Rescue Intense Rescue Shots. In college, I used to dye my hair red using box dye from the drugstore. I believed I wasn’t pretty enough to be noteworthy as a brunette, but as a redhead I could TRICK people into perceiving me as hot— wild all the ways hot 20-year-olds convince themselves they’re unattractive. WHAT MATTERS ABOUT THIS, though, is that the box dye always came with a tube of, like, post-dye conditioning mask, and it was my TREASURE. I’d parcel it out into at least three applications, I’d save them for the times when I wanted to look REALLY nice. It made my hair feel soft and luxurious and luminous— honestly a high I’ve been chasing ever since. And finally. - couple weeks ago, I caught it: Pantene Pro-V’s Intense Rescue Shots.
I’d flown to D.C. for a friend’s wedding and forgotten my toiletries in Boston. I needed nice conditioner that I wouldn’t have to throw away before boarding a plane with only a carry all, and voila: these guys! Because these are sold as a set of four applications, each in their own 0.5 ounce tube, they are a perfect travel toiletry, but— unlike a normal travel size— you aren’t paying a premium to get almost nothing. And they feel JUST like the post-conditioner masks I so loved in my youth. And, also like those conditioner masks, each “application” can easily be stretched into two or three applications, and these come with a screw on cap that makes parceling them out even easier. They are ALSO on sale at CVS this week, so indulge— and pack one the next time you have to fly to a wedding.
So, if you’re looking for a nice indulgence at a real reasonable price-point, these have the Dame Margaret seal of approval.
That’s everything, folks! This week’s issue is brought to you by:
The Cate Blanchett leaf blower thing makes me feel SO VALIDATED, you have no idea