Tradle: learning things by wasting time

There was a Moment, a couple years ago, where I, along with everyone else, was playing Wordle. But I had already gotten permanently angry at NYT, so for me, that ended, altho many of my friends carried on. When I saw friends posting things from other, somewhat similar games, I sometimes tried them. But none of them stuck long at all — a week at the most. Tradle, however, I learned about from mention on the Odd Lots podcast and it has stuck. I am legit terrible at it, and I love it so much.

You know, if you have NOT done today’s Tradle, go do it and then come back, or I might spoil today’s answer for you.

Today, I learned about the New Zealand Mint.

I did not successfully figure out the answer in my guesses, altho I did get to within a few hundred miles. I am not sure I’d ever _heard_ of Niue, altho if you were to tell me, walkitout! How could you forget!!! And then told me that I referred to Niue when rereading Thor Heyerdahl or something along those lines, maybe doing some rabbit hole reading after Moana came out, sure I’d believe you and also conclude that my sieve-like brain is even more sieve-like than I had imagined.

Niue is a very small island nation, and its exports similarly tiny. The ship thing makes sense, but the coin thing was a bit mysterious. I was thinking, well, I can imagine that numismatists might be completionists and so coins from small countries like Niue might be desirable on that basis and there might globally be enough coin collectors to generate some significant trade in … yeah, that’s gotta be bullshit, right? And indeed, it is bullshit. Niue is sort of like New Zealand’s Puerto Rico. And there’s a private mint — think, Franklin mint; they don’t make “real” coins. They make collectibles — called The New Zealand Mint. And apparently, the Niue coin made by the New Zealand mint with Czechian theming is really popular, popular enough to constitute a meaningful fraction of Niue’s export trade. If you are wondering, but why would New Zealand collectible coins be valuable? Well, gold, silver, pretty, Great Recession kinda put it in front of people. Probably the expensive bunkers for tech bros in New Zealand industry helped that along. And honestly, I increasingly think of the Peter Jackson movies as ads for the entire area as a bright and shiny bugout ideal.

I don’t think that learning about Niue has materially improved my life. I’m blogging about it because it’s such a weird and useless but fun bit of information that I probably would not have become aware of if I had no been playing Tradle and asking questions like, But Why Coin? What I _actually_ get from Tradle is a sense of trade flows around more ordinary things like textiles and electronics and grains. But once in a while, there’s something odd like this and it adds zest to my life.

9th Grade English Curricula

My daughter’s English class has been reading short fiction/non-fiction about kids their age. They read “Eraser Tattoo” by Jason Reynolds. We read _Long Way Down_ by Jason Reynolds in book group a while back, and that book was amazing. It was emotionally powerful, sensitive and beautiful, and also very sad. Apparently, Reynolds has also written some Miles Morales novels that look really great. “Eraser Tattoo” is a poignant story of Shay and Dante, who have grown up together, but now Shay’s family is moving because the brownstone she grew up in has been sold to a white couple and now Shay’s family is moving to Wilmington, NC. In the short story, they are being edged more and more to the side of the stoop until they have to get off it completely (synecdoche!), as they talk over the years they have known each other, what they plan for the future individually and their tentative thoughts about the future of Maybe-Us, and Shay gives Dante an “Eraser Tatttoo” (scarification). Love that story.

Amy Tan’s “Fish Cheeks” perfectly depicts the absolutely intense mortification that one can feel more at 14 than maybe any other age ever. Her family has the minister’s family over for a holiday dinner, and mom is making all of her favorite dishes: whole steamed fish, squid, prawns. But she is now seeing the holiday dinner and her favorite dishes through the eyes of white Americans — the minister’s son who she has a crush on in particular — and the difference in simple but important things like how a group of people shares food (reaching vs. passing platters) and expresses delight in a good meal. It’s a beautifully told, extremely brief tale.

Unfortunately, for all that “Eraser Tattoo” and “Fish Cheeks” are wonderful stories, “The Bass, the River and Sheila Mant” by Walter David Wetherell is kinda gross. Another 14 year old, another crush, this one at the summer place on the Connecticut River in or near Hanover. I’m not sure if the one town mentioned — Dixford — is real but I think probably not. The 14 year old invites the crushee, a 17 year old, to go to a fair / listen to some music in Dixford, and offers to bring her there in his aluminum canoe, which he normally fishes in. Surprisingly, she accepts and shows up dressed up really nice, and while the 14YO surreptitiously fishes in paragraphs full of masturbation related double entendre, Sheila talks about how she thinks fishing is boring, says she’s thinking of having her hair done to be more like Ann-Margret, her uncertainty about tanning given that Jackie Kennedy seems not to tan at all, her possible college choices, which include Bennington and UVM, and her interest in Eric Caswell, who strokes 4 for Dartmouth. The narrator has already noted that Sheila looks at the Dartmouth crew (20 YOs) in much the way that he looks at her. The narrator eventually cuts the fish loose and is nauseated at having done so, loses track of Sheila at the show, and she comes to tell him she’ll be leaving the fair with Eric, who drives a Corvette, and that the narrator is kinda strange. The last paragraph, without explanation, refers to her as “Poor Sheila!”, leaving the reader to wonder _why_ is Sheila pitiable? She just left the fair with a 20 YO who thinks she has a figure for modeling, in his ‘61 (ish) Corvette, ditching the 14YO she left her family’s place with. They didn’t think she’d be getting into any trouble with the 14YO, he’s just a kid, amirite? So why is the middle-aged author of this thing getting such a nasty chuckle out of how he’s never made a similar mistake again, picking the Sheila over the fish? And why “Poor Sheila!”? I feel like there are three explanations, none of them great and one of them really, really bad. The least toxic is that Sheila was grounded for the rest of the summer after her safe return home in Eric’s ‘61 Corvette. The next up is that the author legit thinks that Sheila missed out on her opportunity to date someone who would grow to be heavily anthologized and a part of 9th grade English curricula around the country. Call that, Team Narcissist. But the third is that Everyone Knew later one that Something Happened to Sheila that night at the fair, and thus, “Poor Sheila!” Which is gross. I think the text points pretty unambiguously towards this interpretation. Meanwhile, I can’t find anyone who else who unprompted noticed the “Poor Sheila!” And a reader I trust quite a lot is Team Narcissist. Whatever. Just on the basis of all the masturbation double-entendres, this is a yucky story.

But you know. At least the kids got to read Fish Cheeks and Eraser Tattoo.

I am sort of curious tho, about just how autobiographical Wetherell’s story is. I re-upped over at e-yearbooks to get a look at the crew team in the relevant years. That got me last names which I’m trying to connect to full names elsewhere in the book and failing. And I don’t really know what to make of that, because I don’t really understand genre conventions of college yearbooks in the early 1960s. Also, wow, Dartmouth really dragged their feet on going co-ed.

I _had_ thought reading the story that it really oozed Oh Look at How wtf We Are, with named fishing gear that at the time would have been high-quality gear (still is good value for money gear), and Sheila talking about skiing which would have been a niche, not particularly cheap hobby back then. That Sheila has no concerns about whether she can get into college, and a good, elite college, speaks to her social status as well. But Wetherell’s publicly available information says he was born in Mineola and went to Hofstra, so it is tough to see the narrator as running in quite the same circles (for that matter, while I _can_ find him in his high school year book ‘66, and I can find The Mast for the obvious year — ‘70 — and surrounding years, I cannot find him in it, so I don’t really know what to think _because I don’t know genre conventions for college yearbooks_. Altho I’m getting really good at navigating them online.). The narrator's mother turns her nose up at the loudness of Sheila's family, which initially struck me as possible Not Our Kind Dear, I'm now thinking the narrator's longing for the glamour of Sheila's family as more telling. I'm not sure if we're told what the narrator's hair color is, but he's a red-head, like Sheila is described, if this thing is truly autobiographical.

I will say this, tho. Hofstra looks like a pretty good school.

This is interesting: https://www.hofstra.edu/pdf/community/bdc/css/css_conf_0301b.pdf

There was a dramatic reading from one of Wetherell’s books at Hofstra for an academic conference about suburbia (it’s the levittown book, obviously). The person who _did_ the reading his named and his degrees are described, one of which is from Hofstra. But Wetherell is not named as ever having attended Hofstra, much less graduated, and while Wetherell’s older online information says he went to Hofstra and/or has a degree from there, the more recent entries do not. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but in this case, questions arise.

Possible link-fu in support of my negative appraisal of Darthmouth in the early 1960s

So far, I am 0 for 2 in terms of convincing friends who read _The Bass, the River and Sheila Mant_ that the “Poor Sheila!” remark in the final paragraph is a nasty little authorial chuckle at the expense of the real-life woman who was raped by Eric Caswell, who strokes 4 for Dartmouth. I have, unfortunately, read in the past about exploits of Dartmouth men of this era and earlier, so I assume the worst. My friends are much more prepared to just assume the author is narcissistically thinking “Poor Sheila! I lost interest in her so quickly! She’s just not a very interesting person! Poor her!”

I tracked down photos (in The Aegis) of both crew teams for 1962, and the men sitting 4 do not appear in subsequent year book crew or in subsequent yearbooks seniors. That doesn’t mean much — absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t angle in on scandal at Dartmouth in that time frame.

https://1962.dartmouth.org/s/1353/images/gid315/editor_documents/articles_by_d-62_authorsr/bob_marrow_rye_magazine.pdf

The author describes his academic path and is insecurity leading him to emulate the worst of his local environment which got him suspended from Dartmouth, quoting “an unauthorized but popular version of the Dartmouth Football Fight Song”

“Dartmouth’s in town again, run girls run
Dartmouth’s in town again, fun girls fun
Our pants are steaming hot, we’ll give ‘em all we’ve got
Virgins are just our meat; Rape, Rape, Rape!
Down from the hills we come, surge on surge,
F**king like Dartmouth men,
We’ve got a biologic urge
Dartmouth’s in Town again.”

I don’t even know _what_ to say.

https://archive.dartmouthalumnimagazine.com/article/1980/9/1/the-dartmouth-animal-and-the-hypermasculine-myth

This is an amazingly thoughtful if somewhat dated piece about hypermasculinity in the context of early 1960s Dartmouth and the impact at mid-life on relationships, for the alumni magazine.

Wetherell’s story was first published in 1983, for timeline purposes.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/library/rauner/archives/oral_history/community/transcripts/Sjogren_Interview_Edits.pdf

An amazing interview in 2013 with someone who was at Dartmouth in the relevant years. Sjogren refers to “When Better Women are Made, Dartmouth Men Will Make Them” as something that made him uncomfortable at the time he was there. It was _not_ just Dartmouth that used that phrase, which apparently represented the anti-coeducational perspective. You can find this for at least Harvard and Yale (the only other ones I have searched on) on auction house websites and at Etsy (vintage), and Princeton you can find an alumni weekly online from 1955 with their version. I’m 3 for 3 so far.

Cornell has a box in their library: https://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMA03439.html

I can’t find Columbia or Brown doing this (but that means nothing, given the trend!).

Williams college having its own reckoning with the sentence: https://williamsrecord.com/92897/features/yearbooks-give-insight-into-the-colleges-complicated-past/

Lehigh’s entry in the genre:

https://www.lehigh.edu/lts/lib/speccoll/memorabilia.html