The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Karin:

Mary Frances @120: IIRC, you're right about the feminism angle as well. Basically, she was a pretty massive political radical by the standards of her day; according to her daughter, Abraham Lincoln greeted her with the words, "So you're the little lady who started this Great War."

Re the reinterpretation of Tom as the "kindly old darky" by the minstrel shows: I remember there being some surprise in class* when we read the book and discovered that the Tom of the novel, while not young, is actually a strapping fellow and physically imposing; that aspect of his character was definitely filed away by the plays based on the book. (In fact, Tom's physical presence was key to Stowe's characterization of him; physical power is nothing without spiritual grace and so on.)

But yeah, I agree: the history only loads the term up even more and makes it all the more unpleasant.

*(The class in question was a survey of melodramatic literature, and while we concentrated primarily on the tropes of melodrama in Uncle Tom's Cabin, you can't really avoid also talking about race history when you're dealing with it. The same class also included, by way of comparison, The Color Purple, both book and film. Wow, did the film ever get the class going...)

P.S. The relative merits of the concepts of Christian Humility, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom, as interpreted by Stowe and embodied in the character of Tom, are, I think, another debate for another day.

Also, Lighthill @106: you are exactly right about Frederick Douglass's autobiography.

John Mark Ockerbloom @102: It's been a good many years since I read Uncle Tom's Cabin, but I'll see what I can dredge up here...

IIRC, Harriet Beecher Stowe originally conceived of the character of Tom as a noble Christian ideal, enduring his sufferings with humility, etc., and eventually undergoing what amounts to martyrdom (at which event, incidentally, his sufferings cause the conversion of the two overseers who beat him to death on their masters' orders). In the context of the time, this was pretty radical stuff, in effect making a slave the hero of her novel.

There's a lot of interesting stuff to unpack about this book, and I'd have to go back to my old notes to dig it all out, but a few things are worth mentioning. There's a parallel plotline involving other slaves alongside whom Tom is bought and sold, and the happy ending for these characters is that they travel to Liberia, so yes, they gain their liberty, but they leave the country. Make of that what you will. Also, after Tom's death, we learn that the son of his original owner frees his slaves, more or less in honor of Tom's sacrifice and Christian goodness; from a certain point of view, one might be reminded of the "magical negro" character in current cinema whose stellar qualities and/or personal sacrifices enable the elevation of the white hero.

Anyway, my impression is that over time and through the dint of various adapations and spinoffs, the whole "Good Christian Humility" aspect of Tom's story got twisted around or misunderstood or misinterpreted, resulting in the derogatory meaning we have today, implying subservience or ingratiation.

Hmm. Wonder if I still have those old notes somewhere that I can get to them...

Early-voted last Thursday, no problems. So far, local news reports everything going smoothly.

There's also a story about campaign signs and sign-theft. I'm sort of in love with the person who put up a series of signs that reads, Burma-Shave style: "Stolen Signs / No Drama / Still Voting / Barack Obama".

Meanwhile: I've got a bottle of blue curacao left over from my Halloween party. Anyone got any good recipes using the stuff? I figure blue cocktails are probably in order tonight.

Get well soon, Teresa -- thinking of you and Patrick and hope all goes well.

My cousin's twin boys turn 10 today!

Also, I really liked this perfume ad by David Lynch, which makes great use of Blondie's "Heart of Glass".

I also recommend Maredsous, if you like that style of beer. Excellent stuff. Best if you can find a bar that serves it on tap, of course, but the bottled isn't half bad.

Serge @53 -- I did the same thing once, the fingertip-in-the-car-door. The main thing I remember is being so paralysed by the pain that I actually forgot how to open the door. The whole nail-regrowth process was kind of memorably foul, but oddly fascinating.

Other than a forehead would which resulted in stitches when I was four, I've had a relatively injury-free life. Even a fall off my scooter didn't do anything other than leave a few interesting scars on my right arm and bruise the living crap out of my right side.

One of my college buddies, though -- he ruptured both Achilles tendons. On completely separate occasions several months apart, but augh. The first one happened when he was rushing to make an entrance backstage and hit a step wrong -- all his bodyweight combined with a bad angle and snap. (He was a big guy, sometime rugby player.) Somehow he made his way through the rest of the performance, but rushed straight to the emergency room afterward. The circumstances of the second injury were less dramatic, but similar insofar as a step was involved.

Joel @11 and James @20: The Daily Show had some pretty amusing commentary on the "lure of the forbidden" angle here, vis-a-vis the Bob Allen incident.

"It makes the fruit forbidden, which is that much hotter. And we all know what they say about hot fruit."

Joann and TexAnne: I'm a Rice alumna, and I've heard the "whistles" story, although I have no eyewitness accounts.

However, I do for the Reveille story. According to my sources, it was something like this. (Anyone who knows better than me, please correct.) Apparently the latest Reveille had died quite recently, and the MOB decided to pay "tribute" -- e.g. the aforementioned fire hydrant formation, as well as the playing of "Oh Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone".

That went over poorly with the Corps. Very poorly. The MOB had to get carted away from the stadium by the Central Kitchen delivery trucks, the better to avoid the wrath of sabre-armed Corpsmen.

Twenty years later, while I was an undergrad there, the band did a "20th Anniversary of the Reveille Incident" halftime show, where a couple of bandmembers, dressed in old uniforms and fake white beards, were led out of the stadium tunnels where they had ostensibly been hiding all those years. This was, as I recall, a different game from the one where some bright folks on the Rice side decided to start doing the Nazi salute while the Corps was doing their halftime drill. That little gesture made no one happy. (No one who was sober, anyway.)

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