Here is a hand fan showing all the signatures from various men that signed during the dances. Some of the repeat names are interesting in that it shows a probably acquaintance or friendship with our mystery woman.

The hand fan seen above dates back to around 1901/1902, based on the dates inscribed in pen and pencil beside the names. It is made of wooden sticks stacked on top of each other and fastened with a metal rod, loose enough so that they can fan out and spread out the papery material attached to the wooden sticks—which look like longer, thinner popsicle sticks but are probably much more classy. On each “web” and stick of the fan are written names on the paper of various men who attended Village Hall dances in 1901 and 1902. Some names are written on the wooden sticks above the paper. On the rounded edge of the fan, it says: “Dances held at the Village Hall, given by the social club of New Paltz.”

While the fan originally came from New Paltz, it somehow found it’s way to Wooster, Ohio. It was then donated back to Historic Huguenot Street by Cecil Leslie in 2010, who found it in his possession (Graham). Unfortunately, we do not know the name of the woman who owned this fan, but the names that adorn it are more than ordinary. Some of the wealthiest, most famous names of historic New Paltz are written here; the last names Hasbrouck, Deyo, Lefevre, and Elting, among others, are a marker of this fan’s importance and its role in history.

When our unnamed woman entered the Village Hall of New Paltz in 1901, she would have brought with her this fan. The building into which she entered, now the Goodwill Church, formerly Barnaby’s Steakhouse, acted as a meeting place for New Paltz’s society in the early 1900’s.

The building itself is a physical manifestation of the history of New Paltz; one can see just by the various manifestations of its space all the evolution of New Paltz that has happened over the last 116 years. Yet what it interesting about this object is not the building that it is tied to, but the essences of the people who touched it that it preserves.

This hand fan was used by a nameless woman from 1901-1902. Over a hundred years old, we will probably never know the name of the woman that carried it. What we do know, however, is that this fan was used to mediate a courtship dancing ritual. To make sure every women who attended these dance parties at the Village Hall had a partner, they would use these fans. The woman would allow the man to inscribe his name on the fan, plus the type of dance, and sometimes the date they danced. When asked to dance, if she wanted to accept she touched the fan to her right cheek. One can imagine in these rituals (where just a simple “yes, thank you” would do) a kind of elaborately Pride-and-Prejudice-esque ball (the 2005 version).  

Unfortunately, our Elizabeth is lost to us forever. What we do have is our Darcys—though perhaps some of them were Mr. Collinses. Among the names on the fan are some of New Paltz’s famous gentlemen: Walter, Morris, and Bruyn Hasbrouck, A.P. Lefevre, Victor Deyo, Mr. Eltin, Phillip Dubois, and Pierre Deyo. These names populate the streets and buildings of New Paltz, our version here of royalty. Among these is Easton von Wagernen, who would not be quite old enough at this time to have served, but whose father by the same name served in the Civil War for the Union. Many of these names appear multiple times, indicating a close relationship with some of these men, a family connection, or perhaps even indicating that our woman had a stalker or two. The exact connections are hard—perhaps impossible—to parse out; the probability that the fan belongs to one of their wives is high.

It is ironic at best, indicative of women’s lives at worse, that the artifact of a woman survives, yet she continues on in memory nameless. What survives are the man that led her around the ballroom. She held this fan throughout 49 dances, but we know nothing about her except that she liked to dance.

We do know, however, that this is not an isolated object; this particular fan comes from a long tradition, dating back to Egypt, 4,000 years ago (“A Brief History”). Hand fans have been used for many different purposes, a sort of multi-use tool for women across ages and cultures. It seems to be one of the most ubiquitous female objects in the world, and yet I’m sure even the innate feminine quality of the fan could be questioned, made more complex.

The origin of the fan is Eastern, becoming a European trade good around the sixteenth century (“A Brief History”). Of course, because of the exotic nature of the object, the fan was considered a marker of class status, as well as monetary wealth. As many “exotic” objects were, the fan was appropriated into the European lifestyle. However, it became so common throughout history that there are only faint signs in today’s culture that point back to its origins, the movie Mulan being one of them. Dance fans in particular came with a hook that attached to the woman’s dress and also was able to hold a pencil, so that the man had everything he needed to sign and dance: the woman, the fan, and the pencil (“A Brief History”).

This particular fan is somewhat a mystery to us, and will always be that way. It is unlikely anyone will be able to figure out who which woman the fan belonged to without major detective work. But we do know some other, maybe just as important things. One, that New Paltz in the early 1900s was very fashionable. Given that fans were generally a sign of status and money. We know for sure that these dances were fashionable; the remnants of the families who attended still linger in New Paltz today on street signs and building names. This object, above us, is a reminder that even in 1901, people in New Paltz were still having fun and dancing. Perhaps it is a reminder to us that we should never stop dancing, or forget how to.

Works Cited

Graham, Katie. “Dancing Queen.” Object of the Week. Historic Huguenot Street, 6 Aug. 2014, https://hhscollections.wordpress.com/2014/08/06/dancing-queen/. Accessed 15 May 2017.

“Online History – A Brief History of the Hand Fan.” Purdue University, https://web.ics.purdue.edu/~salvo/@SEA/exhibit/history.asp#nogo. Accessed 15 May 2017.

When I workshopped my piece, I had very little actual material that I would copy here as a draft of a blog post. Below are the short, bulleted lists I had and a few pictures that Ashley sent me. After working with Carina, I have a few more ideas that are pulling me in different and new, and exciting!, directions. But below is what I had on the day that we workshopped:

I know already:

• 1900-1901 (1901-1902?) were when dances were performed
• “Dances held at the Village Hall, given by the social club of New Paltz”
• 49 signatures (damn, girl)
• Village Hall funded by the New Paltz Literary Association

New info:

• Names I could make out
  • Walter Hasbrouck
  • W. R. Ward
  • Frank R___
  • Bruyn Hasbrouck
  • Easton van Wagernen (Might have fought in the Civil War??)
  • A. P. Lefevre
  • Austin J. Pine
  • Mr. Fowler
  • Vanderlyn Pine
  • Victor Deyo
  • Mr. Elting?
  • Henry Freer
  • Mr. Tallman
  • Phillip DuBois
  • Morris Hasbrouck
  • Pierre (?) Deyo

For this analog assignment, I wrote a (very meta) reflection on using a typewriting to write about…writing the assignment. It was much more difficult than I thought it would be, at first. Typing this now seems so much easier than it usually does to type on a keyboard and while there are certainly some advantages I noticed about using a typewriter, I definitely missed having this ease, speed, and changeability in typing.

At first, I couldn’t even get the typewriter box open! There is a latch with a keyhole, so I was sure that the Circulation desk had forgotten to give me the key, but no. One must press the sides of the latch together to open it and it hurt a lot. I actually had to Google how to insert the paper and use the typewriter, which I find hilarious: using a digital technology to look up how to use an analog technology. Perhaps that just proves our point in class that digital and analog technologies go together and complement each other.

The other thing that wasn’t amazing about using the typewriter was that the ink is so light. Each time I tried to scan a good, readable copy, it looked completely white. Instead, I took a regular picture and have copied it out word for word (even including all my awful mistakes) below:

w

 

Brianna Best
Analog E xperiment
4/27/xx x 17

This is very strange and very hard, first of all. However, I am also no xxxxxx       *noticing that I am interact [sic] in  away that I havent bef – ore with writing. Of course with actual handwriting, one is aa also interacting with the page, butathis is quite different. I absolutely do not like having complete control over my spacing an d margins. Also I keep messing up and I do not llike that. I actually do enjoy theprocess, though. This page, as I;m writing it has that sort of aesthetiic vintage quality that reminds me of Paul Varjek in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or the idea of Modern- ist writers typing their novels v e r y slowly in Paris. X I am actually finding that the typewriter is slowing down my wr- iting process in anice way. I can’t imagine writing academic papers like this all the time, but I am actually enjoying the extra time the machine is giving me to compose my thoughts as I write. Usually I find that, when usingx a computer, after about one–or even a half–sentence, I have to stop to gath- er myx next thoughts. This process is so slow that I find it quite easy to keep writing continuously. This could also have to do with the nature of what I’m writing. I am not writing a theory-laden paper on a novel, so perhaps I would still need to gather my thoughts in that case, I still find this remarkably xxxx calming. While I don’t think I have the pat- ience or time to write rough drafts x of a thesis or dissert- ation on one of these, I actually like the idea of typing out first drafts of stories or papers on a typewriter. The process itself is such a nice break from the usually go-go-go pace of writing that I think this is actually encouragingxxxx more creativity. I am seriously considering seeing if I can get my ornamental typewriter at home in working condition so that I can use it to write shorter things. Which is strange because I’M not sure I have ever heard anyone who grew up with a typewriter say that they would like to go back. I am running out of the only sideof blank paper I xxxxxx hapenned to have with me. 😦

I wanted to take on the challenge of writing this blog post not about something that is a family heirloom, but rather something that I only recently acquired and is manufactured by the thousands. What I know about the history of this book before it ends up in my hands is that it was owned by Inquiring Minds. Since there is a penciled-in price on the inside, I also know that it is a used book. So it belonged to someone else before it ended up at Inquiring Minds. But when I bought it, it was almost in perfect condition. I thought it might be new until I saw the reduced price. It obviously came from a family—or single person—who knows how to keep their books in order. Either that, or it was never read. It might have been a gift, received by someone who had no desire to read Alexie’s work (which is a real shame, considering I devoured it in less than a day). Perhaps it was a textbook that someone read once for class and then sold back for whatever money they could get back. Before it came to the person who sold it to Inquiring Minds, in all likelihood it probably came from Amazon. It seems like most people buy their books from Amazon now because Amazon offers price cuts on almost every single product in order to boost sales. So, let’s say this was purchased on Amazon; War Dances probably endured a rough ride through the postal service from Amazon to the purchaser’s doorstep. Amazon offers two-day shipping, but I have learned not to trust Amazon’s shipping. I once had to purchase a novel for my German class and, while it was in German, it was coming from Book Depository in the US. Yet it took almost a month for it to arrive. I didn’t order with two-day shipping, but it still shouldn’t have taken an entire month to arrive. I would hazard a guess that War Dances also endured a long ride to its owner’s doorstep. Maybe it sat out in the cold on their doorstep before they brought it in. Before the ride through the postal service, it most certainly sat in a Amazon warehouse.

Even though War Dances is a book and its purpose is to be read, I want to offer an interpretation that is based off slight guesswork, and I want to say that the purpose actually has changed throughout its lifetime. Because of it’s perfect condition, it probably was only read once by its previous owner. Maybe they didn’t like it. Inquiring Minds usually sells a lot of textbooks and previously textbooks. But for me, who devoured the book within one day, this book will stand on my favorites shelf for a long time. I will probably re-read it soon, and the second time, I won’t mind cracking the spine at all. I am very particular with my books. I like to buy books that are in decent shape, but I like to rough them up myself throughout my time with them. I like seeing all the pages dogeared from where I forced myself to stop reading. I like cracking the spine so I can fold the cover back and read with one hand. I know that’s almost blasphemy to say as an English major, but I imagine that War Dances will probably gather a lot of wear during its time with me. It has changed it’s utility from a common book with someone else to a special one with me.

When first purchased, the book was uniform. It was a solid 5 x 8 x 0.5 inches around and weighed 7.2 ounces. The book is 209 pages long. Inside the front cover, on the right side at the top right of the page is written $6.50 in pencil. Relativity light for a book, the bright robin’s-eye blue of the cover is enough to catch anyone’s eye from a distance. The cover depicts a pair of what looks like red and white Puma sneakers on right side of the cover, in the bottom half. White outlines of footprints extend behind the shoes. At the top of the book, Sherman Alexie’s name is written in big, white letters. The name of the novel, War Dances, is written on the bottom. Both lines are in all-caps. Inside the front cover, Alexie’s name and the name of the novel are indented from where they were pressed in on the front. Across from the red shoes, on the left side of the cover, bottom half, is a golden circle, indicating that the book wonder a literary prize. Under Sherman Alexie’s name is a centered yellow text with a quote from The Seattle Times that says “Alexie mixes up comedy and tragedy, shoots it through with tenderness, then delivers with a provocateur’s don’t-give-a-damn flourish.” Because the book has been read, the bottom right corner of the book, including most of its pages, is turned upward. At the back of the book, the back cover actually turns outward. Unread, it would have been a perfect rectangular prism. The book would be a uniform width, but it widens further away from the spine because of its being read. Inside the book, some of pages fall open quicker than others, where I spent more time on them. The corners of the book are white where the top layer of the cover wore away from its paper backing.  The spine, from top to bottom, says Alexie’s name, the image of the shoes, then War Dances, then a yellow Grove Press logo. The back of the book says “National Bestseller” at the top in black all-caps. The words are centered. Underneath, in the same yellow that matches the Seattle Times quote on the front, it says: “From one of the most original and celebrated writers working in America today, War Dances is a highly charged collection of stories and poems that deftly captures the myriad aspects of modern relationships.” Underneath that are quotes from PEN/Faulkner judge Al Young, The Miami Herald, and O, the Oprah Magazine. The quotes are in black lettering, but the names of the sources are in yellow. Underneath that, on the left is Sherman Alexie’s picture. Next to the picture is a biography of the author in yellow words. The barcode is on the bottom right. Next to the barcode, the following information is written in small, white font: “Cover design by Charles Rue Woods. Author photograph by Cahse Jarvis. GROVE PRESS / an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. Distributed by Publishers Group West. http://www.groveatlantic.com Printed in the U.S.A. 0810.”

(I don’t know why all my blog posts end up being about pens.)

For the longest time, my favorite pen has been the Pilot G2 pen series. And I’m not saying that suddenly its position has been challenged, but there is another pen that’s come startling close. It’s a ridiculously cheap-in-price pen from the Dutch stationary company, HEMA. Unfortunately, on further investigation, it is impossible to get products from this company in the US because they don’t ship here. I received mine in a Christmas present from my friend who lives in the Netherlands, along with a few notebooks and some sticky notes. For the type of person I am, it was the best gift.

I have been using this pen steadily for about two weeks and the logo is almost completely worn from the surface. There are only a few black specks left that hint at there being something there. I can trace the life and homes of this pen very simply and easily. Moving back from my house, the pen then inhabited hers, and further back from there, it resided in a physical shop at _____, picked up in its package and touched by who knows how many people who decided not to buy it. Or perhaps it lay in the back, stored in boxes until it was needed to fill an order. Before it came to the store, it was probably packaged and shipped from the one distribution warehouse I could find online, in Utrecht, Netherlands.

My friend either picked the pen up at a store, or ordered it online. It is interesting to think about this online shopping space as something that isn’t physical but isn’t quite not-physical either. We talked in one class about “the cloud” and the physical storage farms that exist somewhere we can’t see them, and that these farms give us the illusion that the information we store online is intangible, invisible until we call it up. But there is something physical about the spaces we inhabit online. Online shopping is particular is a liminal space like this. Shopping is such a physical sport, except when one is able to do it all online. So maybe my friend bought these online and then had them shipped to her. Maybe she touched them, transferred her fingerprints onto the surfaces, and then packaged them up for me.

Many people touched the pens on their way to my hands. I have been using the black one almost exclusively since I got it and the ink has almost run out. To me, the pen has been a faithful companion while drafting  my Honors thesis, while outlining the many research projects that I have to do for classes, while comparing graduate programs and mapping out my future. To me, the pen has been much more to me than it was to anyone to had touched it before. It was handled by people who wanted to sell it, touched and packaged by my friend to make me feel good, and then it ended up in my hands, helping me craft ideas and plan out my future.

One of the objects that I brought with me to class on the first day was a picture that my sister drew. An eight-year-old girl with a hugely active imagination, my sister is constantly drawing. I have a million drawings that she’s given me, but when faced with the decision of what object to bring that really says something about my family, I snuck this one of my mother’s wall in her office. Part of the lure is that the picture contains all of our immediate family members, but even more than that, the picture contains an eerie sense of who we are as an entity. 

In the foreground, there’s the artist herself and our four (now three) cats–who, if you ask my mom, actually do run the house. Right behind the five of them are my mother and stepfather. These are the people that my sister sees every day, so she’s obviously made them the biggest. One of the cats, though the photograph I took doesn’t show it, is actually in the process of peeing, since that particular cat likes to pee on things when he’s mad at us. In the background, my grandmother, who’s identifiable by the wrinkles on her face that my sister kindly drew in, standing next to me. My grandmother and I are, I suppose, more further removed from my sister than the rest of our family members. My grandmother lives next door, and I live all the way in New Paltz.

What’s interesting to me in regards to this picture as it pertains to a “habitus,” however, is that this picture never leaves my person. I have fitted it into the back of my binder, opposite a schedule of all the assignments I have due that week. 

In the binder, I keep all my syllabi for classes and manila folders in which I store my readings for each class. I had first put the picture in there as a way to make the binder as a whole feel less daunting, but now I am more interested in this idea of the picture as a transient object in my habitus, just as I am a transient object in the unit of our family.

I didn’t frame the picture and put it on my wall, or skip the framing all together and take it up there like a lazy, broke college student. Instead I made sure that it would come with me wherever I went, that when I was in the library working, all I had to do was look over and be reminded of where I came from, and of whom I’m always trying to make proud. What does that say about me? I’m not sure, except that my whole habitus has become a habitus of convenience. Living in a dorm room, one is always aware that one’s living space isn’t permanent, isn’t even theirs. There are so many restrictions to what we can and can not put in our space that it often feels sterile and lifeless. The furniture is hard and uncomfortable, and we’re not allowed to bring any extra in (though I’ve cheated that rule and brought a folding wood bookcase for the past two years). I’m always aware that my area is one of transition. I’m never stopping for long there.

And even when I go home, I’m aware that it’s not really my home anymore. There’s my family, of course. And I have my own room. I’m lucky enough even to have my own office. But there’s always a sense that it’s a place I’ve left, and that in doing so I’ve also left an irrevocable chasm between my family’s space and mine. So perhaps the conclusion is that, without even knowing it, I’ve converted my entire habitus into something transient, that can be moved when I need it to. It follows, then, that the most important things follow me around, even in my micro-travels across campus from day to day. Maybe the object of the picture itself shapes the way I interact with this transience, letting me leave behind the anxious nature of never having anywhere permanent by allowing a physical representation of those I love come with me to all places. That picture is the thing that’s permanent, and maybe it makes every space a kind of home to me.

Pens galore. And this is after I did an exercise in tidying á la Marie Kondo in The Life-changing Magic of Tidying Up. I thought pens would be an easy category. They’re fairly cheap (unless you’re a pen snob like me) and they’re easy to come by. There’s no scarcity of pens in my little part of the world. But, for many reasons, I found this process surprisingly anxiety-producing.

I wouldn’t say that I necessarily have sentimental attachment to many of these pens. My reluctance to throw ones out that “didn’t bring me joy” stemmed from a few reasons, one of which was practicality. While pens are not expensive, they’re not cheap either—for someone who makes as little money as I do, anyway. I find that my writing process is incredibly different based on what pen I’m using and my weapon of choice is almost always the Pilot G2 pen series. It’s almost painful, when I need more, to pay almost ten dollars for four pens. Especially when, in my world, ten dollars is incredibly hard to come by. While not every Pilot G2 pen I have brings me joy—I dislike the 0.7 and 1.0 widths, while I used 0.5 and 0.38 depending on my mood/how fast I need to write/whether I care, at that moment about being neat, etc.—it would have been incredibly impractical for me to throw any of those away. They aren’t just going to sit there. They may not bring me joy, but eventually I will use them. And while Marie Kondo might say in her book to throw them away now and buy more later, I’m never sure if I’ll be able to buy more later. This was one of the largest reasons I disagreed with a lot of what she said. I took a lot out of it and there’s much of value in the excerpts we read, but she’s largely catering here to a certain class and I’m not part of that. Constantly being reminded that what she has to say in a large part doesn’t include me is incredibly off-putting as a reader. While my emotional response to this in particular is silly, I find it hard to get past.

I also found that because pens are in some way a temporal item, in the way that the ink runs out, and because I use them often—if sometimes not often enough to warrant keeping them by Kondo’s standards—it just seemed impractical to get rid of them. Because I often splurged for fancy pens, like fineliners from Staedtler or Stabilo, it seems incredibly dumb for me to throw them away. When I bought them, I knew it was a splurge. I knew that they weren’t practical on a day-to-day basis, but I bought them in spite of that. It seems silly to me to then get rid of them on the same grounds.

But at the same time, I do understand that a lot of what Marie Kondo has to say does have value. There are many things I took from the excerpts that I really want to continue putting into practice in my own life—such as, when applicable, doing the joy test to get rid of things that are really superfluous. But I do think that my standards of what is necessary and what is not are different than Marie Kondo’s, based on the fact that we clearly occupy different class structures and the fact that we come from different cultures. I do think she has a lot to teach me about being a more mindful consumer, or simply confronting what it means to be a consumer.