Mama Laputa's Open Salon Blog

Consumed by Consumption

Fri, 27 Feb 2009 15:02:33 -0500

I have just realized that I have proposed no less than three different courses that deal in one way or another with the history and theory of consumption at the college at which I teach! With a little luck, next year I will be busy teaching and writing (and learning!) about consumption in the 18th, 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries. In the meantime, I wanted to share a couple of links with readers (if I have any--hey, everybody, check this out!)--

First is Lee Eisenberg's article at the Daily Beast on haggling. A must for those who like to think about cultures of shopping. I love his wife's reports on her expedition.

Interestingly, I was at my local Goodwill store this noontime, absolutely cleaning up for a total of less than $50. This haul: new navy blue jersey knit pants from LLBean--perfect for my days when I work from home; new J Crew navy soft-as-can-be crew neck sweatshirt; practically new blue and green stripe Lands End cotton crew neck sweater; 2 pair used and in great soft-as-can-be condition Lee khakis--hidden stretchy waist--thank heaven; and a pink fake Kate Spade wicker handbag--but who cares because it's for my six year old niece anyway! But the related point here was this: the woman checking me out seemed to want to head off at the pass any haggling I might do, apologizing for charging me $9.99 for the new items as she rang them in one by one. I wanted to say: are you kidding me???!!!!! First of all, let's recall how cheap these are at $9.99. Second, I never haggle at Goodwill, or the Salvation Army, or the VNA Thriftique, or the St. David's Thrift Shop...or anywhere I buy second hand clothes, because all of them are charities, and I consider these worthy causes in and of themselves, apart from the great buys I find. Nevertheless, the fact that she brought up that the price was firm suggests to me that people are trying to haggle with them on a regular basis--so what Eisenberg points to on the high end is also going on (more than I realized) on the low end.

Eisenberg also has a blog called Shoptimism that I wanted to highlight as well. I noticed one of his posts uses the following quote from Dorothy Canfield Fisher: “Buying is not a creative occupation; nor is caring for superfluous possessions productive effort.” — Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The American Family in a World at War.

As much as I love Fisher (Understood Betsy, anyone?) I really hope he contests Fisher's statement in his book. Fisher had a hand in the creation of the Book of the Month Club (read about it here in Janice Radway's A Feeling For Books), and she had a bit of an upper-middle-class didactic meddling thing going. Scholars of the 60s and 70s looked upon advertising and consumption as the masses being manipulated by the elites (think Marx's religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-masses-type dynamic), but that attitude has been contested by a new generation of scholars who explore the creativity and pleasure of consumption, especially in relation to forming identity and community--and who would deny us as humans some pleasure in life...?

Looks like Eisenberg's book will be interesting. I enjoyed Judith Levine's Not Buying It: My Year Without Shopping, and will have to add this one to the list as well.

Love Thrift, Baby!

Sun, 22 Feb 2009 23:02:04 -0500

Of all the puzzles about my own habits of consumption, one that has been nagging at me lately is the question of how I got so deep into the habit of going to thrift shops and buying things second hand. I've been thinking about this, and my best theory is, oddly enough, for the sake of vanity.

Growing up, I was the oldest of four siblings and twenty grandchildren--if anything, I was most often on the giving and not the receiving end of hand-me-downs. (I remember The Year It Didn't Snow, when all the families went into their closets and pulled out their skates. Everyone tried them on, and handed down the ones that didn't fit. Of course this left me with no skates at all, and I can still picture standing in the aisle at the local Ames store picking out a brand new pair with my dad.) My family wasn't wealthy--not by a long shot--but we usually bought things new, though on sale if possible. Bargain hunting was the big thing with my mom and my aunts. It was never considered rude to talk openly about the great deals you got, even on someone's gift. This was a sign of resourcefulness and luck, like an extra blessing upon the item at hand. Only once do I recall getting hand-me-downs, from our older, wiser, more hip, and also oddly enough more religious second cousins who lived in the magically distant big city and its suburbs. It was a pretty exciting bunch of stuff, I think--being a reader I mainly cherished the big pile of books, though, and paid little attention to the rest.

In high school I had a job at a local department store, a regional chain with national brands that I started to follow through catalogs and magazines. This allowed me money to spend on clothes, an employee discount, and notice of when things were to be marked down, and by the time I left for college, I was pretty well hooked.

Shock of shocks then when the relative poverty of college set in, and I found I could no longer afford my clothing habit. But rather than suck it up and stop buying so much, instead I drifted toward frequenting the thrift shops in my college town. For the most part I think the first few trips were made out of curiosity more than anything. This gave me somewhere to walk to on a rainy Saturday afternoon, somewhere to go besides the gym or the local used book shop. Soon, I was thinking about bargain hunting in terms of scaring up interesting finds in church basements and spare storefronts.

One of those early finds sealed the thrift shop deal for me, I now believe. It was a 1960s minidress--kelly green with dark turquoise polka dots, falling about 2 inches above the knee but definitely below my substantial bottom, and with a large green tulle (maybe?) collar all the way around it, not unlike a clown's collar. One of the polka dots had begun to wear off, leaving a white smudge; I fixed it with a magic marker. I remember the first time I wore that dress: to a dorm room party with a group of friends that I desperately wanted to impress. I was from a small town, and had grown up in the bubble of a close knit family. Everyone I met at school seemed to have grown up in interesting places very far away, and many had traveled extensively abroad--they seemed extremely cool and cosmopolitan. I was delighted and immensely relieved when I arrived to find that they LOVED, and I mean, LOVED the dress. And that's all it took. Thrift appeared to be my ticket to carving a little niche out for myself, and so I threw myself into rummaging for unusual items, spending just as much as I might have at department stores, and too often considerably more than I really had, because I dreamed of being received every day with the enthusiasm that my clothes had elicited that night.

Years later, I wore that dress again. Right before I outgrew it forever it got an especially great showing at a B52s concert at Jones Beach, NY. And as it had the first time, and every time in between, the dress functioned as what I thought of as a near-perfect combination of shield and sword. Armed in thrift, I thought, no one could touch me. And so I made thrift the focus of my spendthrift ways.

Hat Solidarity

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 23:01:58 -0500

Well, there's always an excuse not to write, isn't there?

On or about December 1, 2008, I finally decided what the organizing principle of this blog would be, but it has taken me almost two months to get over my fear of actually being read. But here it is. Done. A handful of words on the page. No more blog title changes, no more fiddling with the artwork. Out, out, out into the webby world it goes....

For personal and professional reasons, I am interested in things. Objects. Artifacts. Junk. Stuff. Material Culture. Getting the goods, too. Shopping. Consumption. Exchange. Creating, making, inventing. All this is of interest to me. So, the organizing principle of this blog will be along those lines.

I've been thinking about two posts in particular that I want to make soon, but I thought it would be fun to start off with a simple observation: My hat--It's not too far removed from Aretha's hat. I mean, it is not anywhere near as wonderful as Aretha's, but it does say (as hers does): I'm not afraid of giant adornments affixed near my temple. Deal with it.

I adored Aretha's hat. It was absolutely marvelous. Wouldn't you know that the very first thing my son said to me when I picked him up from school and asked him about his day, and whether he saw the inauguration (I knew they were showing it to the kids), and what he thought--the very first words out of his mouth were:

"Did you see that woman singing the President's song? She had on THE MOST RIDICULOUS HAT!!!"

[Sigh.]

He loves me so much now that sometimes he just has to scream (according to him, those are his words, almost verbatim)--but the clock is ticking, and soon he's going to realize that, even though he loves me, he doesn't want to be seen with me.

Anyhow, the title of the blog comes from Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard, who is quoting Father Abraham, who is in turn quoting Poor Richard. In the almanac of 1758 ("Poor Richard Improved") Franklin imagines that Richard overheard Father Abraham tell some other colonists:

"Handle your Tools without Mittens; remember that the Cat in Gloves catches no Mice, as Poor Richard says. ’Tis true there is much to be done, and perhaps you are weak handed, but stick to it steadily, and you will see great Effects, for constant Dropping wears away Stones, and by Diligence and Patience the Mouse ate in two the Cable; and little Strokes fell great Oaks,as Poor Richard says in his Almanack, the Year I cannot just now remember."

The above almanac and Franklin's papers can be viewed and searched online at franklinpapers.org, and I encourage everyone to play around in that site: it's a bit clunky to navigate, but it is really quite fun to read Franklin's own words.

[Trivial note: one day I wanted to see what Franklin said about spending, so I keyword searched for "spent" or "spend" or some such thing, and to my surprise--although, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised--I pulled up lots and lots and lots of hits of him referring to spending time, but not money. Ah well, yes. "Remember that Time is Money." as Franklin wrote in his "Advice to Young Tradesmen." (1748) That, too, it a particularly relevant one these days, with its advice re: money, credit, salaries, spending, and its harping on INDUSTRY AND FRUGALITY. Yipes!]