what is a bizzer sign, anyway?

Thing the First

The Bizzer Sign was introduced in BSC #5, Dawn and the Impossible Three, which features BOTH of my favorite BSC families, the Pikes and the Barretts, and so makes this book one of my top five favorites (another post about that later). The Pikes are a family of ten, with eight children between the ages of five and eleven. They are frequently hilarious and always lovable--but, of course, their house is chaos. The Barretts (at least in this book; later Mrs. Barrett marries Mr. DeWitt and their family gets bigger/more chaotic) are three off-the-wall kids and their harried, frazzled, busy, harrassed, poor mother. Dawn gets stuck babysitting the Barretts when they first move to Stoneybrook, and because Mrs. Barrett is SO busy and tired, she never does any of the housework, and the kids are completely undisciplined, so Dawn basically hates her life for a few weeks. (It resolves itself and the Barretts realize how much they love being helpful! and Mrs. Barrett finds time for her kids! and Dawn saves the planet some more! so it all ends up okay.) Anyway, so one day when Dawn is hating her life at the Barretts' place, the Pikes and their two baby-sitters--there are so many Pikes that at any time when more than, like, five kids are around, there have to be two BSC members present--come and hang out, and teach the Barretts the Bizzer Sign. It makes everyone upset and Dawn is about thisclose to moving back to California. (Or is she? Or isn't she? She never really makes up her mind until the California Diaries are published.) The Bizzer Sign is VERY VERY VERY OFFENSIVE (not really, this is the BSC, after all) and every time any of the Stoneybrook kids do it to each other they get upset/angry/annoyed. Claire Pike always cries and Nicky Pike always tattles. Two-year-old Marnie Barrett just giggles, which makes me think she's going to be fantastic when she grows up. Ann M. Martin never really explained what the Bizzer Sign looks like, but after I found out how people in Europe flip each other off (two fingers, not one), I always imagined one of the Pike triplets had seen that in some naughty British film and appropriated it for themselves, their parents never realizing that, effectively, all of their children were constantly telling each other "fuck you." The Bizzer Sign was already really funny; but now because of this I think it's hilarious. Thus the name of my blog was born.

Thing the Second

Smith and Watson write in Reading Autobiography, "Readers often conceive of autobiographical narrators as telling unified stories of their lives, as creating or discovering coherent selves. But both the unified story and the coherent self are myths of identity. For there is no coherent 'self' that predates stories about identity, about 'who' one is. Nor is there a unified, stable immutable self that can remember everything that has happened in the past. We are always fragmented in time, taking a particular or provisional perspective on the moving target of our pasts, addressing multiple and disparate audiences. Perhaps, then, it is more helpful to approach autobiographical telling as a performative act."

I definitely agree! It's impossible to remember everything you ever did, perfectly, chronologically, exactly as it happened, and it's even harder to make those memories into an interesting and coherent story/narrative/text. Coherency is overrated, and, for me, quite rare. The self is a construction; the self's identity/ies are constructions; the actions of conveying those constructions must, then, be different kinds of performance--the performance of coherency, chronology, memory, etc. (Not even the performances can mesh together into c

As for "We are always fragmented in time, taking a particular or provisional perspective on the moving target of our pasts, addressing multiple and disparate audiences"--well, this blog has a very particular theme. Specifically, I am reading the Baby-Sitter's Club series and getting all introspective and personal with them (though, of course, I will only be as personal as I choose to be, so I guess that's a performance of personablity and introspection?); broadly, I'm talking about children's media. My life is about a lot more than BSC and children's media, although I'm sure it seems quite the contrary to people who don't know me well. I could have made this blog about being at Bryn Mawr! I could have made it about t-shirts or cranberry juice or queerness or my friends or about a conglomeration of all of those which would have then made up a blog which was mostly a performative act which is supposed to represent a coherent picture of my life, which of course it wouldn't have, because there would be no way for me to write about every single experience and thought and theme that pops up in my life. I would have forgotten to note things about what it was like having braces for six years or that time I threw up on my third grade best friend, which I'm not sure actually happened. The very fact that I'm coming at this whole blog thing in a very specific way is only more evidence of how we are fragmented in time.