mary poppins's bag

Last night, my potential new boyfriend (to quote Dolly), came back from a week away at work with a large duffle bag. Placing it upon my couch, he unzipped it, and pulled out 12 cans of Coca-Cola. We put them in the fridge. Then came several packets of chocolate chip cookies and small drinkable yogurt containers. We settled down to watch a movie, but he decided he wanted to see if he could get the cable to work, so out came his pocketknife/ beer&wine-opener/utensils. Today, when fishing around for his glasses, he pulled out a protective painter’s suit. Later he handed me a copy of my questionnaire he offered to conduct with some co-workers. And then, when we needed to strain the water from rice he pulled out some mesh cloth to do the trick.

“You’re like Mary Poppins,” I said with a twinge of jealousy, remember that day in college when I just happened to have sunscreen, a bottle of water, granola bars, and toothpicks in my purse, all of which came in quite handy. There’s something so fulfilling about being prepared. 

In those days in college I was often the lone female in my band of merry men. And though mother was never high on my priority list, I took pride in being the caretaker somehow. I was the studious one. I was the prepared one. I was the one who tried to help a too-drunk-Peter write a paper for his music theory class the next day (and if you know me, you know that a too-drunk-Peter is probably better off writing a music theory paper on his own). I enjoyed a kind of care work. And I suppose in a way I knew this had something to do with gender. But at the time I didn’t quite understand how. 

I suppose I never considered my purse a particularly gendered aspect of my life, because I’ve never had a particularly girly purse. It is an unwritten rule of my life that any bag I carry, aside from an occasional backpack while traveling, must be cross-body (not over the shoulder). I am at times a person obsessed with aesthetics, but this is clearly a practical concern. I should be able to run with the thing on without having to worry about my arm movements affecting my stride. I should be able to reach in while holding things in my other hand. I should be able to win a game of pingpong with it still draped over my shoulder and under my other arm. 

But despite the unobtrusiveness of my plain black zippered purse (of which several versions have existed), the purse is still a gendered space. As Tristan Bridges explains in his Sociological Images blog, Doing Gender with Wallets and Purses, “certain objects are simply more likely to be carried in purses… Indeed, many of us are able to travel without these objects because we can ‘count on’ purse-carriers as having them.”  That water bottle and granola bar were not necessarily a burden (emotionally or on my shoulder), but do represent a form of care work by which I cared for the male friends that accompanied me. I remember Verde thanking me profusely for the water, and I wonder if her assertion that this caring goes virtually unacknowledged is true. 

But more importantly, I want to return to my potential new boyfriend and his big work bag. From it he pulled food and beverage (not unlike water and granola bars), protective covering (a bit like sunscreen), and tools (maybe toothpicks are almost tools for tooth picking?). Ok, the toothpick/tool thing might be a bit of a stretch, but my point is, what he pulled out of his bag was not so different than what I had provided to my friends several years ago. Yet my items, at least in Bridges’s assessment are involved in care-work, while a common immediate reaction to my potential new boyfriend might be that they are items of “providing.” It is masculine to “provide” food for the “family” (not that I am in any way considering us a family at this point) or fix things. To protect male friends from the sun, to feed them, to sate their thirst, however, gets categorized as “motherly” care-work. 

I do not think that Bridges is wrong. Women do end up performing an inordinate amount of carework for their families, work colleagues, friends, and strangers, as Robin James alleges in Femininity as a Technology. But my point is, we still categorize it differently: Mary Poppins pulls bedtime medicine and mirror out of her bag and it is carework. Burt the chimneysweep provides magic brooms and a few tuppence. The process is more complex because not only are women expected to carry certain things for others’ use, but we then categorize the manner in which they do so as particularly feminine. When men do the same thing, we categorize their behavior not as carework, but as providing. In essence we expect similar things of both, and the consequences of not doing them are similar—failed notions of femininity or masculinity—but we use these different valuations to further instantiate our reified notions of gender difference. 

In sum, I still have fantasies about being Mary Poppins (even though being a nanny is about the worst job I could imagine). I still like pulling the perfect thing out of my bag to please a thirsty, bored, injured, or otherwise lacking friend. Whether this is a feeling I have been socialized into because I have a vagina I am unsure. I think we all like the pleasant surprise that lights up the face of someone we care about when we unexpectedly have what they need. 

But it is precisely the acknowledgement of this carework that makes it enjoyable. Perhaps as a friend, and not a mother, I have been lucky in this respect. I will continue to carry a bag that always has water, granola bars, Kleenex, pencils, and paper. But on the nights when I don’t feel like hauling my bag, I’ll ask my potential new boyfriend to carry my wallet and phone in his “banano” (known stateside as a fanny pack).

an auto-ethnographic memoir of the ways social media has changed (almost) absolutely nothing

In 2003, I graduated from college and moved to New York. Well, Jersey City, New Jersey to be exact. But I worked in Chelsea. For this small town girl, it was the illusion of “living the dream,” but I was too poor and too depressed that my top-10 University degree was not helping me do anything worthwhile with my life.

Yes, 2003, as you will recall, was pre-Facebook. When I moved from the Midwest to the East Coast that October, I had already begun to migrate away from Friendster and towards Myspace. It would not be until late 2005 when I would, under pressure from co-workers, open a Facebook account.

In 2003, I was employed as a librarian at a boutique architecture firm on 22^nd Street, right around the corner from a Barnes and Noble where people like Betty White and David Sedaris regularly did public readings. The only thing I liked about my job was that it sounded fancy and I once ran into Austin Scarlet (from Project Runway season 1) in the building’s elevator. But really being the “librarian” meant that I opened mail, filed catalogues, and eventually learned to master the art of using Excel as a payroll system. The “boutique” firm did not usually design cool restaurants or private homes. Most of our business came from the hospital sector.

I quickly found that the actual amount of work I needed to do in an eight hour day probably amounted to about 90 minutes. But I had the internet. I read the New York Times website cover to cover (or whatever the appropriate term would be), back in the days when there was no pay structure. I wrote on the billboard site for all of the Discovery Channel shows I watched with my roommate at night. I wrote emails back and forth to said roommate who worked downtown for a large credit card company. We usually averaged about 70 emails a day. Then we started using gchat instead and we lost count. I was obsessed with this website called Flavor Pill which essentially posted free and low-cost arts related events around the city. Every week they had a short 200 word essay contest to win tickets to some sort of film premiere or art opening. I won about every other month, which is a testament to the time I spent crafting these essays, rather than any innate writing talent. And by 3:00 when it seemed I had exhausted all other alternatives, I resigned myself to Myspace. I searched for new music there. I commented on friend’s latest picture uploads. Of course back in those days, people uploaded pictures at the tune of 5 a month. I even met new people. I don’t remember how exactly. Probably through groups one could join. I met a professor of anthropology from Florida who ended up guiding me through the graduate school admissions process a few years later. I also remember essentially planning a lunch date with a woman who worked a few blocks away, but I canceled at the last minute and just went to the Whole Foods salad bar 3 blocks away. I even started this here blog while working there.

Today, I read an NPR article that reminded me of those days. The days when my nokia phone worked just fine. When the internet was a waste of time, but I needed a way to waste time. When I lived a twelve hour car trip from my family and my best friend had just taken off to backpack in Australia for a year. I had no land line, so I called my mother using my cell phone, usually on Sunday afternoons. My roommate and I had internet at home, with Ethernet cables running between our bedrooms (Who needed wifi? Who needed internet in the living room or kitchen? I had my fill of internet at work). My boyfriend did not have internet at home, but he did have a giant television with 200 channels. The article laments, like so many, that “We Are Just Not HereAnymore.”

I offer my story here as an example of what the article gets wrong. In 2003, I spent at least 6½ hours of my eight hour work day, mentally not there. And social networking at it’s early stage was my last resort for ways to waste time at work. I’d then ride the train home, listening to my new mp3 player, reading a book, and barely making eye contact with anyone. Once home I would make dinner and watch tv with my roommate. We were physically in the same room, but our interaction was minimal. We found it so funny that this was our usual mode of existence that we hung a painting of us sitting on the futon staring at the TV (pictured above). On nights that I spent with my then boyfriend, I was often driven crazy by his obsession with television. He often spoke exclusively in quotes from whatever Bravo TV show was hip at the moment. In the morning, if we took the train to work together I was often deeply offended because rather than talk to me while we rode, he preferred to wear his headphones and listen to the news on his pocket radio (maybe I should have known it wouldn’t last). In those days, I paid rent on an apartment in Jersey City, and received paychecks from an architecture firm in Manhattan, but I didn’t live there. I lived through the phone calls to my mom and sister. I lived through the monthly emails sent by my best friend in Australia. And occasionally, when we’d all get together for a backyard barbeque, Sparks, and a rousing game of paper telephone, I lived with my friends. But we did not have rousing, meaningful conversation. We’d watch tv and comment, and generally drunkenly make fun of each other. The adventures would end up retold in my roommate’s livejournal. Photos would be shared via Photobucket or Snapfish. The stories might end up condensed into inside jokes about a hairy rock in the bathtub or what happens after bazooka, but they were not worthy of literary inscription.

The point is, maybe we’re not “here.” But if we are not now, we never were. People have been interacting with people in other places since the beginnings of modern humans’ existence. They have been preoccupied with what’s going on “over there” with “those people” for 200,000 years.  To think that new forms of technology are creating supposes there is some prior, “more authentic” form of communication we’ve left behind. But that simply did not exist. We are still human. We still communicate with other humans in the mode of our time…from cave painting to Snapchat, these modes help us share information with people close and far, for now or later. So let’s stop lamenting the social ills that everyone seems to want to find to be emerging from social media and get on with the usual business of being social with those in our immediate vicinity and those far outside of it.

Mr. Banks vs. Mary Poppins

As one may have discovered by reading this here blog on occasion, I sometimes go by the nickname Mary Poppins. I like to think this is because I am “practically perfect in every way,” but really it was just that some friends thought I looked like her one day while wearing my glasses. “But Mary Poppins doesn’t wear glasses!” you might say. And you would be correct. But that’s not the point of the story.

The point of the story is this: while I was in the US in December I was able to see the movie Saving Mr. Banks (SMB)—the story of the transformation of PL Travers’s book Mary Poppins (MPB) into Disney’s classic film Marry Poppins (MPF). 

I have written before about MPF, so this blog began as a simple review of SMB. Had it ended that way it probably would have been much like this review from Jerry Griswold.

“The odd thing about Saving Mr. Banks is that in this contest between the creative side and the corporate side, we’re supposed to sympathize with corporate. We’re supposed to join in patronizing the writer. Over all, someone seeing the film would reasonably conclude that Travers was an extraordinarily difficult person and Disney a nice guy. And alas, given their reach, it may be the Disney folks who get the last word.”

But what seeing the movie really inspired in me was a desire to go back to the original. And so, I read the book.

What really struck me was that the things that I truly loved about the movie were absent. To me, the character of Mary Poppins in the film represents a critique of capitalism. She is creative without relying on money. She fraternizes with and is part of the working class. Yet she is the one who holds the power over Mr. Banks. And in the end, she teaches both the children and Mr. Banks that money, capitalism, banks, and hierarchy are not what lead to happiness.

Given that the SMB takes as one of its main themes the fact that Travers’s father taught her that money was not the most important thing in life, I expected the book to reflect this more. And yet, the book barely takes issue with money. Mr. Banks indeed works in a bank. But there is no ugly scene in MPB in which he tries to force his children to open an account. He is not fired from his job. He does not disrupt the ____ of the bank. “Saving Mr. Banks” could easily be read as the act of saving him from his deep entrenchment in material wealth. And yet the book clearly states that the family is of modest means, and does not portray Mr. Banks at all as being obsessed with or really interested in money outside of his job.

So then, I’m left to feel as if, given all this information, perhaps it was the Disney writers who were the ones who spun MPB into the magic tale that I love so much. They are the ones who wrote “Fidelity Fiduciary Bank” in which Mr. Banks pressures his son to invest his tuppence with lines like:

If you invest your tuppence

Wisely in the bank

Safe and sound

Soon that tuppence, 

Safely invested in the bank,

Will compound

And you'll achieve that sense of conquest

As your affluence expands

In the hands of the directors

Who invest as propriety demands

and

Now, Michael, 

When you deposit tuppence in a bank account

Soon you'll see

That it blooms into credit of a generous amount

Semiannually

And you'll achieve that sense of stature

As your influence expands

To the high financial strata

That established credit now commands

The song is both haunting and parodic, giving the viewer (at least a viewer like me) a sense that capitalism is ridiculous and scary. Michael’s refusal sends bank customers into a panic resulting in a run on the bank, and to me this indicates the very delicate construction, indeed the simulacrum, which is currency itself.

Shortly after, when he is fired for the run on the bank, Mr. Banks seems to recognize the ridiculousness, and is overcome by a fit of laugher, only managing to say “Supercalifragilisticexpedalidoucous” when Mr. Dawes, bank owner declares that the word doesn’t exist, Mr. Banks replies to he, Mr. Dawes, does not in fact exist. The man, the institution, the currency is a spectre, he declares, by my interpretation.

And then there is what I think is the subtlest, yet most critically nuanced piece of the film—suffragette Mrs. Banks’s song, Sister Suffragette. She insists that her domestic workers join in, when clearly the lyrics reflect the experience of white women of means (not to mention other forms of privilege).

No more the meek and mild subservients we!

We're fighting for our rights, militantly!

Never you fear!

So, cast off the shackles of yesterday!

Shoulder to shoulder into the fray!

Our daughters' daughters will adore us

And they'll sign in grateful chorus

"Well done! Well done! 

Well done Sister Suffragette!"

As SMB tells the story, Travers was opposed to the idea of Mrs. Banks as a suffragette. Thus, this critical aspect I attribute to Disney employees as well.

So then, we are left with this: Travers told tales of a magical nanny. Yet it was Disney and his employees, those who were on the “corporate” side that made the film into what I read as an imaginative and savvy critique of capitalism and class stratification. This goes far beyond a reading of “Travers as an extraordinarily difficult person and Disney a nice guy.” It is confounding given what I know of the Disney corporation today. So, in sum, what I must say about that film is that I am disappointed. I hoped it would shed light on how such a company would promote these ideals in film, but I walked away (from the film and the book) feeling even more utterly confused as to how this film took the form it did.

And even after reading the book, I still just don't get what's up with Admiral Boom.