Palimpsest

So listening to Jenna on Monday talk about palimpsests reminded me of an exhibit I saw this weekend, and reading her blog just now reminded me that duh, I had wanted to post about that.

Anyway, so I was in the middle of reading Haynes and stopped to go out for the afternoon. We decided to go to the Henry Ford Museum because we've got memberships and hadn't seen the new christmas exhibit yet (better yet, the usual upcharge exhibit is free this year--nifty).

It's a display on Tasha Tudor, who was famous for drawing christmas cards and writing children's books about Welsh Corgis. She apparently also was really obsessed with doll houses and dolls and played with them and told stories about them all her life. Yeah, so that last part is a little weird, but... whatever.

Her exhibit included a lot of early versions of cards with the final ones--which was really cool. It was interesting, not unlike the palimpsest that Jenna showed us, to see where changes were made and think of why that may be. Actually, I always find art palimpsests to be fascinating.

Then we walked around to the back wall and there displayed for the world to see was drafts of her writing with mark up included. My first reaction was to turn to the boy and go "Yeah, so if I ever manage to get famous--as unlikely is that is--and somebody hangs up my drafts in a museum after my death with my corrections all over them I will be back from the dead to haunt their ass faster than you can say 'mycoplasm'" which I had completely forgotten was from another reading and WASN'T the same thing as ectoplasm, but he's really deathly afraid of mushrooms so I guess in the end it got the same result.

Of course, I've been reading too much to not have to sit back and consider why that is. Why does the art palimpsest appeal but the written one, not so much? Why do I fear so greatly anybody seeing my early draft stuff?

Well, for one, I think my drafts suck--if they exist anymore at all. Second of all, if anybody dug up what I cared about as a child as museum quality work I'd want their head examined. To be honest, I did a lot of the things as a kid that were in this exhibit--I made tiny newspapers and books complete with tiny writing and illustrations for my My Little Ponies, I wrote elaborate stories based upon the characters that I thought they were (not the ones from the animated series), and so on. My mom proofread those stories for me... and then I'd correct them....

And really, the "palimpsests" that were given to us for this Tasha Tudor exhibit in the writing section really were just that--they were proofread. I don't think it's interesting that somebody at some point forgot to type a word before Microsoft could point that out to us. It would have been interesting to see that she had deleted a rather racially uh... "racy" ... section about "being the Nigerian" at Christmas, or maybe hadn't had it in at first, but nothing about these texts changed except spelling and missed words, so whatever thought process might have been in a more revised palimpsest just wasn't there.

So then, what makes proofread marked up text museum quality work anyway? If we can't learn anything about somebody's thought process that could paint really well but just might have been a little crazy, why hang it up at all? I kept thinking that "Tasha Tudor" must be some kind of author-function that I just hadn't been aware of before. After all, I'd be drooling to see original Shakespeare manuscripts (or even Derrida or Heidegger). So why not Tasha Tudor? Is it just because she isn't that popular or important of an author function for me? Or is it because palimpsests of minor superficial changes aren't really palimpsests at all unless there are major revisions to be seen?