Day 113. My class project website

I'm still stuck working on the book proposal, but at least there is some good rabbit energy going on: I set up the website for my Myth-Folklore class project about Brer Rabbit and the Witch-Rabbit. I missing getting to work on Brer Rabbit every day like during the summer, but this is something anyway. I'm excited about getting Taily-Po ready for Halloween!

Tales of Brer Rabbit

and the Witch-Rabbit

Day 112. Book dilemma

I was already scrambling when the school year started, and now I've got another dilemma; I've been asked to write a book proposal about teaching online. I debated about whether to submit the proposal or not, but I decided it was important to give it a try. So, I'm working on the book proposal right now, and if it goes through, Brer Rabbit will be on a back burner not just during the school year but next summer too.

But it's good either way: I will be happy if the book proposal is accepted... but if not, it means I'll be able to get back to Brer Rabbit and maybe even write a Brer Rabbit book next summer. :-)

Day 111. Cherokee Rabbits

I didn't get to do any real work on the project today at all (and that's going to be a perpetual problem while school is going on I'm afraid), but I did do a wonderful aetiological story starring the rabbit in Cherokee legend: Why There Is Flint Everywhere.

A Sioux story makes it clear that this flint creature is a bear: The Rabbit and the Bear with the Flint Body.

With stories like this, it is clear why there would be so much good synergy between the rabbits of Native American storytelling traditions and the trickster rabbits of the African American traditions. It's not about proving origins as in some folklore studies, but instead about the great new stories and new versions of old stories that resulted from all this storytelling energy. I really want to find a way to make my Brer Rabbit anthology reflect all that rabbit energy at work!

Day 110. Jerry Pinkney

I was flipping through my copy of Julius Lester's version of the Brer Rabbit tales, with all those gorgeous illustrations by Jerry Pinkney. His depictions of the animals are wonderful, but what's really remarkable is the way he draws Miss Meadows and the gals, along with Mr. Man and the other human characters, as African American. Every time I see a white Miss Meadows, it just feels so wrong. I wish so much that Pinkney's illustrations were in the public domain. Maybe someday I can afford to hire an artist to draw some illustrations for the stories like these, where the human characters do not get "defaulted" to being white...

Brer Rabbit Falls in Love

So much better than the usual 19th-century illustrations for white audiences:

(illustration by Church)

Day 109. Rabbit and ribbons

I did some research this morning for the version of Tortoise and Hare I want to write for my Week 3 story in Myth-Folklore, and I had one of those great folklore moments: in Harris's version, there is reference to Rabbit wearing ribbons (not so tortoise), and the illustrators pick up on that, but it's not motivated in the story at all. But if you look at Native American versions of the story, there are references to the contestants wearing ribbons or feathers (and so Turtle has to supply his substitutes with those markers also). I don't know if that is Native American innovation (which then passed on to Harris's informant), or if that is also in the African stories; I didn't have time to read through the African stories yet to look, but they are definitely in some Native American versions, so I will include that in mine too for sure. Here's Rabbit with ribbons:

Day 108. Brer Rabbit units ready to go

I finally got some time to work on Brer Rabbit, and I fixed up both the Brer Rabbit Units, One and Two, at the UnTextbook. I'm really glad to have those new versions of the stories and all the illustrations ready for people to read. Each time I copied in the story without the eye-dialect (I had already removed the Uncle Remus frame), I felt so sure people would really enjoy the stories more. I ended up ditching two of the poems, but that worked out fine given that there were three poems I replaced with prose that was longer. I took reading notes also, finding favorite stories in all four parts: 1-A, 1-B, 2-A, and 2-B.

I've also got a plan for the Brer Rabbit stories I will write for class; I did the one about wolf-under-the-rock; next I will do the tortoise and the hare (Aesop and Brer Rabbit combination), and then the tortoise-in-the-pond (inspired by the Indian jataka), and then there are two weeks I can use Brer Rabbit sources, so I'll pick two Rabbit stories then (not sure which ones), and then in Week 11 I'll be able to do a Cherokee story (or some other Native American analogue story), and finally meeting-man in Week 13... if I'm not done with the class already.

So, that's six or seven stories here at the blog, plus I'll do the Mammy-Bammy-Big-Money stories I think for the Storybook, so that's another three or four... the odds are looking good for ten stories this semester. :-)

I'm even thinking I might have that magical little bird in the story of the little rabbits be one of Mammy-Bammy-Big-Money's magical agents...

Day 107. Planning for tomorrow

So, this week was just hard... I'm glad it's Friday! And what I thought I might do with this blog post is use it as a "tomorrow-agenda" approach, having in mind at the end of the day today what I want to do tomorrow. And since tomorrow is Saturday (glory hallelujah!), that means I can work on Myth-Folklore reading, which will I think needs to be fixing up the Brer Rabbit units in the UnTextbook, so that will be my goal for tomorrow. I am going to swap out the eye-dialect versions (I had stripped the frame, but not the eye-dialect) with my new versions, plus improving the notes:
Brer Rabbit
More Brer Rabbit

Those units are from five years ago and, at that time, I didn't have a good handle on the Harris bibliography at all, so I worked with the stories at Gutenberg with the most abundant illustrations. So, I might also swap out some of those stories for other ones, and to do that, I will need to follow this procedure:

1. Get the time-date stamp from the story being retired.

2. Create a new post using that time-date stamp and same labels.

3. Change time-date stamp on the old post to backdate it.

4. Update the table of contents.

5. Update the forward-backward navigation.

That's a pretty tedious process, so I'll try to keep that to a minimum, but I know for sure I want to swap out the whippoorwill story; Chase did not include that, and I'm still trying to figure out what its source might be (it's a good story, and it's even aetiological... I hope I will come up with a source or analogue eventually!). And I'm also going to put a story in place of the proverbs. 

So, that will be a good project to start tomorrow! I think I can make it my goal to get through both units, which I'll count for Week 3 Reading A-B and Week 4 Reading A-B... and maybe I can do some of the Nigerian stories too; I'll count that as Week 3 and 4 extra if I can get to them; I really enjoyed working on those and adding the notes last time I got to sit down and work on the course.

The past two weeks have been so hectic that seems like a long time ago!

Fox and Terrapin

Day 106. A fun invitation from OPB

This is relevant to the project I think! This morning I got a really fun email invitation to write a guest blog post for a new blog project at OpenPress Books, one of my favorite OA publisher. The idea is write something about OA, and for me that means the intersection of OA and OER, how accessible monographs means that I can recommend books to my students that, in the traditional publishing model, would not be accessible: at best we would have the book in the library, in which case one student could access it. But with OA online, that means an unlimited number of students can access the book title.

So, for example, here's the OPB page for Ruth Finnegan's Oral Literature in Africa: wonderful!

Day 105. Emily Zobel Marshall's Brer Rabbit book!

I've been on a trip to Texas, and one of the best things was reading Emily Zobel Marshall's Brer Rabbit book on the plane: wow!

American Trickster:

Trauma, Tradition and Brer Rabbit

I learned so much that will be really useful going forward. One of the most exciting things is the Beatrix Potter connection: the invention of Peter Rabbit is indebted to the African American folktales published by Harris. Harris did a poor job of crediting his sources, and Beatrix Potter certainly did not indicate her debt to Harris, much less to the African storytellers at the heart of it all. I am really looking forward to exploring Beatrix Potter's rabbit stories based on what I have learned from Emily Zobel Marshall's book!

(from The Tale of Mr. Tod)

Day 104. Another historical visualization

I didn't have time to do any project work today, but I did see this great visualization tool from USAToday of all places:

Day 103. Agendas

So, it looks like I might be taking on a book project; I've got a few weeks to put the proposal together, and it sounds like I would get a go-ahead before the end of the semester. I hesitated at first because it would set this project behind by a year, with my next summer working on a teaching-related project instead of Brer Rabbit. But the more I think about it, the more that seems like a good idea. I see myself shifting from teaching to OER, so taking an opportunity to sum up what I've learned about teaching in these past 20 years.

And I can keep on collecting and indexing stories all the while...!

I did the wonderful Nigerian tortoise story today about why the elephant's eyes are so small: The Elephant and the Tortoise.

Day 102. Educational Malpractice...

I didn't have time to work on the project directly today (although I did share a Brer Rabbit story as Story of the Day!), but I keep seeing great stuff from the 1619Project, including this item that really got my attention:

Why slavery is mistaught — and worse — in American schools

by Nikita Stewart

Day 101. Emily Zobel Marshall on Brer Rabbit

Finally! Emily Zobel Marshall's book finally showed up as a Kindle; it had been listed as pre-order even though I knew the book was out, and something made me pop over and take a look, and there it was. It's ridiculously expensive ($35 for the Kindle, argh!), but I thought her Anansi book was wonderful, so of course I knew I had to read this one. Maybe I can manage to read this on my trip to Austin this weekend; I'm pretty tense about this visit, so having this book will be a great way to distract myself!

Day 100. Made it so far!

It seems very appropriate to have Day 100 of the project coming exactly the day before classes start! So, I don't have a lot to write today, except to say: YAY, I made it!

And, thanks to a Nigerian folktale I was working on this morning, I did manage to stump Google Socratic by asking about bush cats! Details: Zuboff, Chapter 4: How Google Got Away With It.

And the story was such a great find, too; I recognized it right away as being parallel to the Anansi story about a chain of victims that I was working on a year ago and, kudos to Martha Beckwith: she had the Nigerian citation in her notes to the Anansi story: Brer Anansi Borrows Money.

And here's a bush cat:

(photo by Danny Idelevich)

Day 99. My first Brer Rabbit story

I'm working on the Week 2 assignments for Myth-Folklore, so I wrote my first Brer Rabbit story! Here it is:

Brer Wolf Under the Rock

I also did the brainstorming assignment, thinking about four possible Storybook topics (and of course there were so many more I could think of!). I'm strongly leaning towards Mammy-Bammy Big-Money, but we'll see. I don't have to decide until I get back from Austin.

Day 98. Wikipedia

So, I've decided to start doing a "Wikipedia good deed of the day," adding references and external links to Wikipedia articles.

Today I added a list of Joel Chandler Harris books to the Brer Rabbit article, along with a Florence Baer citation.

That article is such a mess, and I'm not even sure how to clean it up really, but at least I made some kind of useful contribution.

I'm pasting in here the Baer citation so that I can use it again in other articles!

{{cite book
 |last=Baer
 |first=Florence
 |date=1980
 |title=Sources and Analogues of the Uncle Remus Tales
 |publisher=Folklore Fellows Communications
 |isbn= 9514103742
}}

And for the Harris books, I linked to Gutenberg when available; if not, then to Hathi:
[URL ''title'']

This is the first major edit I've made on a Wikipedia article in a long time, so I'm wondering if I will run afoul of the editing guidelines; that's something I will learn about as I go!

Here's the Brer Rabbit article, and a screenshot of the list I added; I was able to use Diigo to get a quick count of actual Brer Rabbit stories for each book!

Day 97. Pinterest Board finished

I finished the Pinterest Board with all the Joel Chandler Harris stories that have illustrations; 139 stories out of the 183 stories total. :-)

Day 96. Pinterest Board

I was emailing with a student today talking about Tumblr and Pinterest, and that gave me the idea to make a Board with all the Joel Chandler Harris stories that have illustrations; I got about half-way through so far; I'll finish tomorrow.

Day 95. Getting ready to launch Nights site

The Story-of-the-Day project is going really well (I'll be using that for my class announcements starting next week)... and now I think I am ready to try my reuse strategy, creating a Google Sites website for Nights with Uncle Remus. I've been using some Nights stories already as Story-of-the-Day... and if I have time tomorrow, I'm going to create a Nights site where I will use those texts plus the other stories from the Nights that I have turned into Google Docs.

Part of me thinks I am not quite ready for this experiment... but part of me says I've just got to do it; otherwise, school is going to start officially on Monday, which means for several weeks I will be feeling completely discombobulated.

So, we'll see how it goes; I may or may not have a new site to share here tomorrow. Today's Story of the Day is one of the ones from Nights:

Day 94. #1619Project

I am glad I saw this hashtag at Twitter today: #1619Project. This is a project I will definitely want to follow to learn how it resonates with the work I am doing on the folktales.