Charlie White’s beautiful Teen and Transgender Comparative Study.

Melville’s limited correspondence to Hawthorne. I’m still trying to construct a satisfactory picture of Melville, for some reason.

Quimby the Mouse.

Iraqi intelligence in suing The Guardian and (at least some from) the interior ministry are suing The Times. Hmm. (via Salam Pax, though the hmm is mine.)

Food fonts at Typophile. Love the baked beans. It strikes me that these would nicely double as captcha fonts in the current Man vs Machine battle. The human user could devour the font when he’s done with it… Although that’s not to say that machines can’t metabolize food. (The best part about Cloaca is that the poo emerges in a nice vacuum sealed package.)

~

I remember thinking I needed to research Silas Weir Mitchell and his sinister rest cure long ago, but I only got around to it when Jane mentioned his work with amputees and malingerers during the Civil war. He apparently pioneered the use of anesthesia to diagnose malingering in the Union army (Science!), though he appears to have understood (male) pain in a way unusual for his time. According to Edwin A. Weinstein in a fascinating work on War Psychiatry (see chapter 15),  women still had a monopoly on the diagnosis of hysteria at the time (with the exception of “men weakened by sex, alcohol, or tobacco” and, I would be willing to bet, foreigners), so the male psychological casualties of the first modern war were diagnosed instead with a variety of maladies including nostalgia, soldier’s heart, and garden variety insanity… Despite The Yellow Wallpaper (Mitchell was actually Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s doctor!), I used to be fascinated with the idea of the rest cure. I imagined a sort of Victorian spa where everyone was wheeled about in bath chairs, drinking milk under shade trees, free of cares, probably looking thin, pale and interesting. In Fat and Blood Mitchell describes women who “fail in flesh” and are “cases desirable to fatten and redden.” I would not have qualified as I am positively puffy when depressed. Even if I lose my appetite entirely, no romantic wasting takes place. Sometimes I get an itchy rash, but no one could call that romantic. However, in my imagination, all of us taking the rest cure were excessively slender with haunted eyes beneath masses of chestnut, flaxen, raven, or auburn hair (see those large untidy nests on the heads of Edwardian ladies fortunate enough not to be roosted on by a bunch of flowers and avian taxidermy by way of a hat) that may or may not eventually need to be cut off for incomprehensible reasons probably associated with consumption or being dosed with Calomel—no, that was earlier and for teething or something. Maybe. Regardless, recovering from a nervous breakdown in a peaceful place sounded like an unassailable excuse to stay in bed. I think this was the late teenage, early adulthood corollary of my childhood fantasy of the Apocalypse on the days book reports were due. Obviously I didn’t think it through very well because, like the Apocalypse, there probably wouldn’t have been anything to read when I got there.