Sadie Lou

Dear Sarah Lawrence Community,

Welcome back! Happy October study days! We have been working so hard that we’ve only just begun to update the website now. We need YOU Bloggers, Poets, Fiction Writers, Columnists, Journalists, Essayists, Visual Artists, Copy Editors, Meteorologists, (more)-ogists. Come report for us! Did an art show happen on campus? Tell us how it went! Be supportive of your community. You read the newspaper online with your morning coffee? Turn to sadielou.net to find out what’s going on. The internet is the wave of the future. Be the water, the fish, the seacucmbers, the fly on the wall, the fireflies, the moon…you get the point…
Be published on the internet, and email the link to your future employer, parents, or flatmates. Or, do it for the love of communication and taking an active part in SLC’s evolution.

With thanks to the Free Public Domain Books from the Classic Literature Library Archive, I repost for you, some of Mark Twain’s letters, directly before the publication of Tom Sawyer and in dialogue with Bret Harte
(The expressions related herein are not that of Sadielou.net, we just think reading, even controversial works, can be a good thing.)
Be in a dialogue, with yourself, with everybody else and everything in between.
Have a great year and we look forward to working with you.
Best,
Nicole Feldman and Nicholas Moore

Mark Twain’s Letters 1876-1885
by Mark Twain
Free Public Domain Books from the
Classic Literature Library
ARRANGED WITH COMMENT BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE

LETTERS, 1876, CHIEFLY TO W. D. HOWELLS. LITERATURE AND POLITICS. PLANNING A PLAY WITH BRET HARTE

(The Monday Evening Club of Hartford was an association of most of the literary talent of that city, and it included a number of very distinguished members. The writers, the editors, the lawyers, and the ministers of the gospel who composed it were more often than not men of national or international distinction. There was but one paper at each meeting, and it was likely to be a paper that would later find its way into some magazine.
Naturally Mark Twain was one of its favorite members, and his contributions never failed to arouse interest and discussion. A “Mark Twain night” brought out every member. In the next letter we find the first mention of one of his most memorable contributions—a story of one of life’s moral aspects. The tale, now included in his collected works, is, for some reason, little read to-day; yet the curious allegory, so vivid in its seeming reality, is well worth consideration.)

To W. D. Howells, in Boston:

HARTFORD, Jan. 11, ’76. MY DEAR HOWELLS,—Indeed we haven’t forgotten the Howellses, nor scored up a grudge of any kind against them; but the fact is I was under the doctor’s hands for four weeks on a stretch and have been disabled from working for a week or so beside. I thought I was well, about ten days ago, so I sent for a short-hand writer and dictated answers to a bushel or so of letters that had been accumulating during my illness. Getting everything shipshape and cleared up, I went to work next day upon an Atlantic article, which ought to be worth $20 per page (which is the price they usually pay for my work, I believe) for although it is only 70 pages MS (less than two days work, counting by bulk,) I have spent 3 more days trimming, altering and working at it. I shall put in one more day’s polishing on it, and then read it before our Club, which is to meet at our house Monday evening, the 24th inst. I think it will bring out considerable discussion among the gentlemen of the Club—though the title of the article will not give them much notion of what is to follow,—this title being “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut”—which reminds me that today’s Tribune says there will be a startling article in the current Atlantic, in which a being which is tangible bud invisible will figure-exactly the case with the sketch of mine which I am talking about! However, mine can lie unpublished a year or two as well as not—though I wish that contributor of yours had not interfered with his coincidence of heroes.

But what I am coming at, is this: won’t you and Mrs. Howells come down Saturday the 22nd and remain to the Club on Monday night? We always have a rattling good time at the Club and we do want you to come, ever so much. Will you? Now say you will.
My volume of sketches is doing very well, considering the times; received my quarterly statement today from Bliss, by which I perceive that 20,000 copies have been sold—or rather, 20,000 had been sold 3 weeks ago; a lot more, by this time, no doubt.
I am on the sick list again—and was, day before yesterday—but on the whole I am getting along. Yrs ever MARK

(Howells wrote that he could not come down to the club meeting, adding that sickness was “quite out of character” for Mark Twain, and hardly fair on a man who had made so many other people feel well. He closed by urging that Bliss “hurry out” ‘Tom Sawyer.’)

Happy Summer Everyone!

We at sadielou.net are hard at work, scattered across the country and abroad for the summer. We’ve got a great year ahead of us and summer solstice is tonight, so we thought we’d give you an update. After the overwhelmingly positive response from our event this spring “I Can’t Believe I Wrote That” we aren’t sure how we’re going to outdo ourselves this fall. Please email Nick or Nic at nick.sadielou@gmail.com or nfeldman@gm.slc.edu with suggestions or events you’d like to see happen. Community is about collaboration, and no idea is too small or too big and we welcome all of yours. In the spirit of summer (even though it’s felt like fall so far this season) we offer you the copy from the “Wear Sunscreen” or “the Sunscreen Speech” which was originally an essay actually called “Advice, like youth, probably just wasted on the young” written by Mary Schmich and published in the Chicago Tribune as a column in 1997. The most popular and well-known form of the essay is the successful music single released in 1999, credited to Baz Luhrmann. The lyrics are below. You were expecting Pound? We’re on vacation!

“Ladies and Gentlemen of the class of ’99
If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen would be
it. The long term benefits of sunscreen have been proved by
scientists whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more reliable
than my own meandering experience…I will dispense this advice now. Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth; oh nevermind; you will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they have faded. But trust me, in 20 years you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. Don’t worry about the future; or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubblegum. Sing. Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts, don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours. Floss Don’t waste your time on jealousy; sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind…the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself. Remember the compliments you receive, forget the insults; if you succeed in doing this, tell me how. Keep your old love letters, throw away your old bank statements. Stretch Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life…the most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives, some of the most interesting 40 year olds I know still don’t. Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees, you’ll miss them when they’re gone. Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t, maybe you’ll divorce at 40, maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary…what ever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much or berate yourself either – your choices are half chance, so are everybody else’s. Dance…even if you have nowhere to do it but in your own living room. Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them. Do NOT read beauty magazines, they will only make you feel ugly. Get to know your parents, you never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings; they are the best link to your past and the
people most likely to stick with you in the future. Understand that friends come and go,but for the precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle because the older you get, the more you need the people you knew when you were young. Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard; live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel. Accept certain inalienable truths, prices will rise, politicians will philander, you too will get old, and when you do you’ll fantasize that when you were young prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders. Respect your elders. Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund, maybe you have a wealthy spouse; but you never know when either one might run out. Don’t mess too much with your hair, or by the time you’re 40, it will look 85. Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth. But trust me on the sunscreen…”

updates from our staffers abroad all summer and book lists soon. email in and join the team, we want to give you web writing experience, blogging credit, recommendation letters, and friendship.
As Ever,
Nicole and Nicholas

Friends In The Sarah Lawrence Community And Beyond, When the SadieLou team got together to try to figure out what our next issue would be, it was decided collectively we would explore the controversy surrounding Pluto as an outcast planet. Our annual SLC science lecture on campus was approaching and the speaker set to enlighten was Dr. Michael E. Brown aka “the guy who outed Pluto” We decided we would post from our own perspectives about the situation, as is part of our diverse, wonderful, Sarah Lawrence dialogue, we had differing opinions on the matter. I have chosen to file these posts under “history” because a shifting of an entire planet in our universe is truly an event in time to be noted. Below you will find three posts from members of the community sharing their take on Pluto and here is mine: As a young student in most school systems, no matter the country, we are taught about the planets. It is a unifying piece of information no matter the culture, language or location.

My
Very
Educated
Mother
Just
Served
Us
Nine
Pizzas

translates to

Mars
Venus
Earth
Mercury
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto

When Pluto was outed, our collective knowledge as learners shifted. Our collective body of knowledge will forever be a little different. No matter the opinion on whether the tiniest planet should have been told to go (and I type this standing at five foot one inch tall) it is almost a melancholy thing to ponder: How much of my knowledge as a conscious changes because Pluto is not a planet, but now, really a ball of ice? or Was it always a ball of ice, and was I dreaming?

Humbly Yours,
Nicole Feldman
(blog editor, SadieLou.net)

The relatively recent demotion of Pluto and discovery of Eris has a lot of people upset, for various reasons. I’ve heard people declare their emotional attachment to the poor dwarf planet, which I can understand, but I’ve also heard people scoff at the lack of precision in the entire field of astronomy.

They are absolutely right to. The field in astronomy is unique in many ways, but possibly one of the most important ones is that it is entirely possible that we will literally never see most of what we’re studying. Humanity as a whole will never touch a star, poke an exoplanet, or prod the cosmic background radiation; the vast majority of what we study about the universe is thirdhand inferences and cautious assumptions simply because everything is so inconcievably far away. To put it in perspective, if you take the distance between the Sun and the Earth to be an inch, Pluto would be three feet away. Alpha Centauri, the nearest star, would be four miles away, and the radius of the Milky Way would be ten times the radius of the Earth. The nearest galaxy would be ten times further away from the Earth than the Moon, and the universe, as far as we know, would span a diameter of roughly fifty times further away than – well – Pluto.

And this is on the scale of the distance between the Earth and the Sun being one inch.

So no, astronomers hadn’t defined the word “planet” until recently. Frankly, they had bigger things to worry about.
-Kristen Koopman, Sadielou.net, May ’09

The Pluto formerly known as a planet is not the only, or indeed the first Pluto to be given less than their due. Anyone remember Mickey Mouse’s pet dog? What about him? He’s a dog, just like Goofy, but he has to wear a collar and walk on all fours while Goofy has a snazzy turtleneck and vest ensemble. Not to mention the fact that Goofy had his own movie in 1995, while Pluto was the only major character not featured in Mickey’s Christmas Carol. What’s up with all the Pluto hate?
For more on the differences between Pluto and Goofy, read this Mental Floss article: The Difference? Pluto vs. Goofy
-Joanna Bettelheim, Sadielou.net, May ’09

When I was very little. Pluto was Mickey Mouse’s dog. He was yellow with a black, whip-like tail. He was a happy puppy with a curious streak. Pluto was nothing else.

When I was little. Pluto became the ninth planet. It was cold and distant. I always imagined it was a blue, cat’s eye marble floating in infinite black.

When I was a little older, I learned later that Pluto had a moon roughly the same size, Charon. I always pronounced Charon like Sharron, who was my baby sitter. I liked the idea of Pluto having a friend for eternity.

When I was older, Pluto was removed from our solar system. I felt the loss. Suddenly, Pluto had spun outside the close-knit family. It was lost in the net of stars. Pluto was unfamiliar. It was part of the other now. From this loss, I learned eternity was a lie. I was a quick learner.
-Poppy Little, Sadie Lou, May ’09