Guest Blogger: David Levy and Skyward 2018; A Change of Pace

This is a blog by another type of collector, one who discovers comets and creates observation logs of the heavens and astronomical objects.  His passion is equal to our, that's for sure.

It is an honor and a pleasure for us to feature guest blogger, Dr. David Levy, noted author, astronomer, Shakespeare scholar, champion of the planet Pluto, and discoverer of  22 comets, either alone or with Gene and Carolyn Shoemaker
 

Dr. Levy was a co-discoverer of Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 in 1993, which collided with the planet Jupiter in 1994.


Among his many awards, Dr. Levy won a 1998 News & Documentary Emmy Award in the "Individual Achievement in a Craft, Writer" category for the script of the documentary 3 Minutes to Impact produced by York Films .

Skyward—

 

October 2018

 

If you build it…

 

 

“If you build it,” said the voice, “he will come.” In eastern Iowa near the town of Dyersville, near a well-kept farmhouse, lies a regulation baseball diamond in the midst of a cornfield.  This is the field of dreams from the 1989 movie.  On the beautiful Sunday afternoon of September 9, Jeff Struve and I drove down to visit the site as part of the Eastern Iowa Star Party he had so well organized.  With impact crater specialist Jennifer Anderson and her husband David, we saw where one of my favorite movies was filmed.  Dr. Anderson had just delivered a stunning and lively lecture about her impact crater research at Winona State University’s geosciences department.

The theme of Field of Dreams revolves around baseball.  But even though I am a baseball fan, the movie’s influence on me was not about the sport but about the dreams.  It is about a dream I began to have in the fall of 1965 just as my interest in the night sky was advancing by leaps and bounds.  That fall, two Japanese comet hunters, Ikeya and Seki, discovered what would become the brightest comet of the 20^th century.  I first saw Comet Ikeya-Seki’s lovely tail rising out of the St. Lawrence River late that October, and I have never forgotten it.

Two months later, I began my own program of searching for comets.  It had three goals, to search for comets and exploding stars (officially referred to as novae, to discover a comet or a nova, and to conduct a research project on comets and novae.  Over the course of my life I have now discovered 23 comets, and when I co-discovered the comet that collided with Jupiter, I really felt as if I dipped myself in magic waters. And the research part, which connects to poetry and the sky, became my 1979 master’s from Queen’s and my 2010 doctorate from the Hebrew University.  Along the way, I have also made two independent discoveries of novae.

When I visited in September, the house and field looked exactly as they were in the movie.  The picket fence in front now has a sign that says “if you build it.”  The second part is left off.  I interpret its absence as indicating that not all dreams come true.  Maybe yours will, maybe it won’t.  But it is about the dream, whether it is baseball, the night sky, or anything else.  At the close of the film Ray Kinsella asks,  “Is there a heaven?”

“Oh yeah,” his Dad replies. “It’s the place dreams come true.”

          And if somehow your dream does come true, you could add the words of Ray’s skeptical brother-in-law:

“When did these ball players get here?”

House at Field of Dreams, photo by David Levy

Field of Dreams, photo by David Levy

We are officially Non Profit and can Accept Contributions!

We are officially Non Profit and can Accept Contributions!

 

Dr. E’s Doll Museum is now incorporated as a 501© charity as American Doll & Toy Museum.  We can now accept monetary ad other contributions which are tax deductible. Our collection has taken a lifetime to assemble; we are in the last stages of completion, and hope to have a building by the end of next year.  Thank you to everyone who has helped us on this journey.  Anyone who would like to contribute to this teaching museum which will feature dolls, toys, and objects to tell human history from the dawn of time, please contact me at ellentsagaris@gmail.com.  We will continue our blogs and social media, and will have a print library of materials in our museum to help everyone learn more about dolls, perhaps the oldest cultural artifact, still relevant after all these years!  Happy Collecting!

 

Paper Airplanes

Paper Airplanes

 

Greetings, everyone!  Many of us who collect dolls also love toys, dolls, and other ephemera. I am currently in charge of selling the lifelong collection of one of my professors from my alma mater.  Currently, he records Rock Island Lines on WVIK and co-hosts Scribble and Saturday Morning Life; check it out at WVIK.org.  He has collected paper airplanes, starships, kites, books on the topic, paper models and related items for most of his life.  These are all vintage, roughly twenty years and older.  There are cereal box premiums, White Wings, books on flying airplanes, some signed, models, gliders and much more. The collection contains 2000+ items.  All are priced to sell. Some are on Etsy under Vintage Rose Antiques and Jewelry.  Others are pictures on my instagram account under ellen_tsagaris.  Any one interested, please pm me, and thank you for reading this blog. You can find my email on this blog as well.

Inside Huguette Clark's Estate: Bellosguardo

Inside Huguette Clark's Estate: Bellosguardo

Barbie and Friends Fun Facts

Addressing Dolls as Objects of Study in Material Culture

Addressing Dolls as Objects of Study in Material Culture

 

According to Australianmuseum.net, a “cultural object is an object made by humans for a practical and/or spiritual purpose.”  Certainly dolls qualify as cultural objects by this definition; when created for play or retail merchandise, they serve a practical purpose.  As Max Von Boehn, Carl Fox, Janet Pagter Johl, Emily Jackson, Laura Starr and others have documented, the doll began as a religious figure or idol, meant to serve spiritual purposes.

 

The Study of Material culture studies cultural objects and culture in general. Antiques in particular are important, and my alma mater, Augustana College, has created a new major in this area, closely related to art history.

 

Material culture studies analyze how we interact with objects, and how they are used or traded, curated or thrown away.  We, as humans, have treasured and collected certain objects since The Stone Age, and even animals like chimps and orangutans have exhibited human like behaviors involving collecting objects and tool use.  In fact, other animals also tend to collect or save certain types of things.

 

My observations indicate that this is a course of study related to archaeology, anthropology, sociology, historiography, and art history.  A study of dolls is right at home in such an academic canon. One student at a local college has focused on the study of antiques, and uses her grandmother’s antiques business as a research source.

 

By its very definition, doll collecting involves  scholarship of a serious nature.  More and more serious research is being done on dolls and their history.  The question might become, why have dolls been ignored by Academe for so long?  According to Elizabeth V. Sweet whose book “Dolls” is a partial bibliography of doll study, “. . . the marginalized status of children and the taken for granted nature of material culture have contributed to the underrepresentation of toys in academic scholarship.” Kenneth Gross’s books On Dolls and On Puppets are excellent sources for how dolls are important as cultural objects.

 

 

 

Sweet also agrees that the diverse work on dolls emerges from a variety of fields of study including history, psychology, sociology, communications, media studies, human development,, cultural studies, folklore studies and more. 

 

As Sweet writes, many different types of researchers are interested in dolls because doll play helps children with socialization and because dolls allow kids to “interpret cultural messages, create social meaning, and actively carve out spaces of resistance to adult culture.  Books included in her bibliography are Manfred Bachmann’s “Dolls the wide World Over” and G. Stanley Hall’s, “A Study of Dolls.”  I would like to humbly submit two of my books, “With Love from Tin Lizzie:  a History of Metal Dolls” and “A Bibliography of Doll and Toy Sources”, simply because they reflect my own interest in dolls as historical and cultural objects.

 

Susan Pearce address dolls and collecting objects in general in her well written and documented four part series, The Collector’s Voice.  The series of four books examines collecting behavior from ancient to contemporary times.

Doll collectors also collect, and even create dolls, to preserve cultural heritage, another focus of Material Culture studies.  Cornhusk dolls, handkerchief dolls, apple head dolls, and other folk dolls are collected and made to preserve the cultural heritage of early American colonists and pioneers.  Poets are not immune to dolls, either; American Poet Dave Etter wrote a poem called “Cornhusk Dolls”, while William Butler Yeats and Sylvia Plath have included poems about dolls and mannikins in their work.  Tom Whalen wrote a book of poems called “Dolls”, and your humble guide is about to publish her book of poems about dolls called “Creepy A** Humans:  the Dolls Reply.”  My late cousin Panos Panoyoutounis who was a renowned poet in Europe declared in his poem, “What is Poesy?” that his little girl’s doll, and her dress, were both “poetry.”  Native American dolls are collected and made for similar reasons, especially Kachinas and the Pueblo storytellers.  The Smithsonian Institution has an excellent booklet on Native American dolls that is fee to download for anyone interested.  Ethnic doll collections also are collect to preserve other cultures as collections in Shankar’s International Doll Museum, The Indianapolis Children’s Museum, The British Museum, and The Yokohama Doll Museum show.

 

Didn’t we all know dolls were important?  I have a male friend who is a retired detective who collects dolls because he is a history buff, and he considers dolls to be historical objects.   Doll artist and author R. Lane Herron stresses in his many books that dolls are indeed historical and art objects, too.

 

Celebrity Dolls from My Collection

Many of you know that a few years ago, Atlas Obscura interviewed me about Celebrity Dolls. Below is a snapshot of some of my celebrity dolls before I had to pack them away and move them.  Soon, they will be displayed again in our museum.