Behind the Scenes Minis: Carry-on Bags

Summary

Stuff You Missed in History Class – Behind the Scenes Minis: Carry-on Bags

Hosts: Holly Frey & Tracy V. Wilson
Date: March 13, 2026
Episode Theme:
A warm, companionable behind-the-scenes mini-episode in which Holly and Tracy reflect on their recent coverage of Elizabeth Bisland’s globe-circling journey, her complicated legacy, the trials of historic (and modern) travel, and a discussion of Gustave Flaubert and the universality of literary discoveries. The episode moves from thoughtful critique to entertaining anecdotes about travel mishaps and personal pet peeves, all with the show’s signature blend of scholarly insight and good humor.

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Main Topics Overview

• Reflections on the episode about Elizabeth Bisland and why Tracy chose certain naming conventions.
• Nuanced discussion about Bisland’s character, her legacy, and the challenge of judging historical figures with limited context.
• Empathetic rumination about the challenges of last-minute historic (and modern) travel.
• Entertaining, personal travel disaster stories and the practicalities of luggage.
• A short segment about covering Gustave Flaubert and literary pet peeves.
• Broader musings about how people encounter knowledge, both universal and obscure.
• An affectionate plug for classic novels and the joy of literature.

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Section 1: Discussing Elizabeth Bisland and Naming Choices

[03:17]–[04:09]

• Tracy explains why she continued to refer to Elizabeth Bisland as “Bisland” after marriage, maintaining consistency with Bisland’s professional name.
• Tracy chose to consistently refer to Lafcadio Hearn as “Hearn,” given his brief mention, to avoid confusion with his wife’s shared surname.
• If Hearn becomes the subject of a future episode, the approach may differ.

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Section 2: The Messiness of Historical Figures

[04:09]–[06:49]

• Tracy: Finds both Bisland and Hearn to be “fascinating messes”: “A fascinating mess. Yeah. Similarly, in some ways, kind of a mess or a mixed bag. Maybe Elizabeth Bisland.” [05:07]
• Addresses Bisland’s mix of admirable and problematic qualities: “That's really lovely. And other things…yikes. That was, girl. What? Really offensive.” [05:09]
• Holly reflects on how people in history—especially in the 19th and early 20th centuries—had far less information at their disposal:
  • “How easy it is to forget that any of these people we talk about historically…had a dicey mix of some of your concepts and your worldview is great, and some of it is not cool at all, is how much less information they had at their fingertips at any given time.” [05:41]
• Both hosts acknowledge judgment must be tempered by the context of the time.

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Section 3: Empathy for Elizabeth Bisland the Reluctant Traveler

[07:10]–[08:58]

• Tracy and Holly express empathy for Bisland being pressed into an arduous around-the-world trip on short notice.
  • Holly: “If you told me right now you have to leave on an around the world trip that's gonna take you more than two months and you gotta leave in six hours, I would shout an expletive at you.” [07:37]
  • Tracy: “Yeah, I read a couple of things…who characterized her almost as ungracious about it. And I’m like, she was being told to drop everything and go on a trip that was gonna be uncomfortable at best and exhausting.” [08:08]
• Both articulate that Bisland’s grumpiness was entirely reasonable.

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Section 4: Luggage, Packing, and Travel Mishaps

[09:12]–[16:49]

Historic Luggage Innovations

• Tracy delights in Bisland’s advice for lady travelers, especially the “bureau trunk” and shawl straps:
  • “I was just so delighted by the descriptions of what she thought would be good luggage and this, like, newly developed bureau trunk. …I had to look up what a shawl strap was.” [10:50]–[11:32]
• Practical parallels are drawn to modern packing strategies (carry-on essentials in case of lost luggage).

Personal Lost Luggage Anecdotes

• Holly recounts a chaotic luggage debacle in Paris involving Star Wars droid-themed bags:
  • “One of my bags had come out at that point...and she started calling departments around the airport asking if they had seen R2D2 or C3PO. Cause those were the two that were missing.” [13:34]
  • “And we got back to…our room, and there was our 2D2, like, with light shining off of it like it was a holy relic. And Brian hugged that luggage for so long.” [14:48]
• Tracy shares about backing up her checked bag with a rollerboard containing enough essentials to dodge disaster on a multi-stop trip to Morocco.
• Both share tactics: Tracy distributes essentials between bags, Holly packs only carry-ons outbound, then checks bags for the return trip.

Memorable Quote

• Tracy on planning for travel disaster: “If a piece of luggage did not come on our arrival to Morocco, odds of it catching up to us were slim to none.” [15:46]

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Section 5: Gustave Flaubert, Social Media, and Literary “Aha!” Moments

[20:17]–[33:23]

Flaubert and Literary Connections

• Holly confesses a longstanding admiration for Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” and relates being invited back to guest-lecture on it.
• She discusses Flaubert’s notorious disdain for clichés and relates it to a personal pet peeve:
  • “One of my pet peeves…when people say or do mundane things but act as though they are novel…[Flaubert’s] like, let's write down all the stupid things that people say, thinking they are clever. I'm like, yes, write them all down.” [21:35]
• Tracy references XKCD’s “The Lucky 10,000” as a positive model for encountering old things with fresh wonder.

Knowledge We Assume Everyone Shares

• Both hosts reminisce about believing everyone knew certain authors, clowns, or historical facts, only to realize these were niche experiences.
  • Holly: “I thought everybody read Jim Carroll growing up.”
  • Holly: “I thought everybody knew clowns. …[In] Florida, where there is clown school…if you're in theater or the arts at all, you know, people who are clowns.”
  • Tracy: “I know clowns because…of the theater stuff more broadly.” [25:31]–[27:19]

Flaubert and Madame Bovary Trivia

• Discussion on Flaubert’s trial and comparison with Charles Baudelaire, who was penalized for “obscene” poems when Flaubert escaped censure.
• Holly recites the first part of Baudelaire’s “Recueillement,” which she memorized in French as a student.

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Section 6: Madame Bovary, Daisy Buchanan, and Literary Revelations

[28:36]–[32:12]

• Holly shares a revelation about the parallels between Emma Bovary and Daisy Buchanan from “The Great Gatsby”—ambitious women seeking meaning and excitement.
  • “Was she part of the inspiration for Daisy and Gatsby? …Because Daisy is very wealthy and can afford all these things, but she is empty and kind of pursuing things that will give her a thrill.” [29:17]
• Tracy ponders why people throw “Great Gatsby”–themed weddings, noting that the novel’s message is hardly romantic.
• Holly argues: “I'll make the case that that great party is worth recreating. …I think that's probably what people are doing. Not like, hey, let's use people and run them over with our cars.” [30:31]
• Both laugh about the now-overused 1920s party motif and reminisce about Tracy’s wedding, for which Holly made the beaded dress.

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Section 7: Literary Recommendations & Sign Off

[32:12]–[33:25]

• Holly extols “Madame Bovary” (and film adaptations):
  • “If anybody has not read Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, I highly recommend it…It's a good examination of the way people can be intoxicated by the promise of something else giving their life meaning.” [33:12]
• Warm weekend wishes:
  • “If this is your weekend coming up, I hope you don't accidentally open up any Pandora’s boxes you don't want. If you get to read some books…great. I'm never gonna judge whatever is gonna make you happy.” [34:23]

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Notable Quotes

• Tracy: “Boy, do I love how crabby she was about going on this trip.” [07:10]
• Holly: “If you told me right now you have to leave on an around the world trip…in six hours, I would shout an expletive at you.” [07:37]
• Holly: “I just realized…I just want to design clothes for me and, like, the style I want. I don't want to create other people's visions.” [32:06]
• Holly: "I think [Flaubert] would hate social media. Probably because it is so full of people having revelatory experiences that aren't really that revelatory." [24:56]
• Tracy (on lost luggage): "If a piece of luggage did not come on our arrival to Morocco, odds of it catching up to us were slim to none." [15:46]

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Key Timestamps

• [03:17] Episode begins; discussion of Bisland, Hearn, and naming conventions
• [05:07] “Fascinating mess”–type reflections on Bisland and Hearn
• [07:37] Empathetic rants about sudden travel assignments
• [09:12] Luggage innovations and travel hacks
• [13:34] Holly’s Parisian lost-luggage adventure
• [20:17] Gustave Flaubert segment starts
• [21:35] Holly’s “mundane ideas as novel” pet peeve
• [25:31] “I thought everybody knew clowns.”
• [29:17] Daisy Buchanan as possibly inspired by Emma Bovary
• [32:12] Holly’s Madame Bovary recommendations and weekend wishes

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Episode Tone

Conversational, empathetic, a little nerdy, full of laughter and candid reflections. Tracy and Holly combine historical rigor with warm, relatable storytelling, always inviting listeners into their delightful friendship.

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Summary Takeaway

This behind-the-scenes episode blends sharp observations about the difficulties and contradictions of historical figures with down-to-earth stories about travel woes, packing strategies, and the unpredictable roads to learning. The hosts gently invite listeners to consider both the challenges of the past and our own assumptions, all while sharing their own laughter, frustrations, and literary passions.

Transcript

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Holly Fry]

Welcome to stuff youf missed in history class, a production of I heart radio.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This week we talked about Elizabeth Bisland and her trip around the world and her whole career as a journalist outside of that trip. I didn't spell it out in the episode, but I kept calling her Bisland after she got married because that was the professional name that she continued to use for the whole rest of her life. And it seemed kind of weird to jump back and forth. I also called Lafcadio Hearn Hearn the whole time, even though his name changed. Cause he only made that brief appearance at the beginning and the end. Because since he only made a very brief appearance at the beginning and the end, it seemed potentially confusing to change what name I was using for him and then also talk about his wife who was using the same family name.

[Holly Fry]

Right.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

If we do an episode on him at some point, that may proceed differently in that full length episode.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, of course. Yeah. He's a wild one.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

He's like one that's been on my list for a while and I look at it and I go, later for you. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, we'll see.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Trying to narrow down how much of him to talk about in this was a little tricky because it's clear that they were important to one another and that they were in touch with each other for their whole. His whole life after they met. But I didn't want the episode to become too focused on him because the episode was not really about him.

[Holly Fry]

Right.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

And then every time I learned a new thing about him, I was like, man, he's so fascinating. Also kind of a mess and fascinating. A fascinating mess. Yeah. Similarly, in some ways, kind of a mess or a mixed bag. Maybe Elizabeth Bisland.

[Holly Fry]

Oh, yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I would read some things from her and Go, wow, that's really lovely. And other things. And go, wow, yikes. That was, girl. What? Really offensive. And then some stuff where it's like, I wish I could figure out more of your specific opinions on things just because of, you know, when and where you lived and what your upbringing was like. You know, the people of history have all kinds of different feelings, but it is just. It's nice to know when you're talking about people.

[Holly Fry]

Do you know what I've been thinking about lately in regard to that?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

What?

[Holly Fry]

Is how easy it is to forget. This is gonna sound so stupid. And to me, it seems so profound in the moment I thought it. How easy it is to forget that any of these people we talk about historically, particularly in the 20th century, that have a dicey mix of some of your concepts and your worldview is great, and some of it is not cool at all, is how much less information they had at their fingertips at any given given time.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Oh, yeah.

[Holly Fry]

To what we have. So their experiential learning would have left huge gaps that they just couldn't quickly fill in the way we can with, like, a rapid Internet search.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

And so it's made me feel a little more graceful for figures like her that maybe just don't know. I know she went around the world, but in many ways she wasn't worldly. You know what I mean?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Mm. Mm. Still sucks.

[Holly Fry]

Her position still sucks on a variety of things, but, like, I'm not as much, like, monster as I am. Like, you just didn't have the knowledge. You just didn't have it.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, I sometimes think about things that I didn't have the knowledge about for sure. Same for. Yeah. Having grown up in the 1970s and 80s, you know, and started college in 1993. What a different understanding of so many things in the world between then and now.

[Holly Fry]

Oh, yes.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Radically different access to information now versus then. Yeah. So, yeah, I do find her to be a mixed bag, but, boy, do I love how crabby she was about going on this trip.

[Holly Fry]

I had.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I had so much empathy for her. Being called into her boss's office to do a thing she didn't want to do and to start right now. And, like.

[Holly Fry]

Well, and a pretty heavy hitting aside, you know what I mean? Like, I love to travel. I live in the modern age when I always have kind of like a go bag ready in case I have to travel last minute. But if you told me right now you have to leave on an around the world trip that's gonna take you more than two months and you gotta leave in six hours. I would shout an expletive at you.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I would lose it. Yeah, Yeah. I lose it about smaller things than that.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah. It's a big ask.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I. Yeah, I read a couple of things that, you know, things written by modern people and written in recent years who characterized her almost as ungracious about it. And I'm like, she was being told to drop everything and go on a trip that was gonna be uncomfortable at best and exhausting.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

With no notice whatsoever like that. Yeah. Reasonable to be cranky.

[Holly Fry]

It's not like winning a luxury trip around the world. It's hustling. You're not getting to enjoy any of those cultures very much.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

You're not really exploring. You're just going from, like, train to train to train to boat to train to boat to train.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

No, thank you.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Right. Yeah. Yeah. As a person prone to seasickness, I also would have an added layer of how frustrating I would find such an assignment, even with no notice. Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

I really liked her early life experience of trying to keep secret that she was writing poetry and they thought she was an old dude from England.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

Which made me think a little bit of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Because she was not using a fake name, but because Vincent was part of her name, people initially thought she must be a mature man. And it just tickles me in each case.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The number of times that apparently people by her writing thought that she was a man amused me a little bit. And the idea of suffering through something that it turned out that you hated while churning the butter.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Because George Eliot said that it was the best thing.

[Holly Fry]

Listen, I 100% understand all of that. That is exactly the kind of thing I would do where I'd be like, well, these are two things that I feel like I need to do. I'm gonna combine them.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

That makes all the sense on earth to me. Is that weird?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I agree. I agree. There were a lot of moments in her story that I was like, yep. I completely have empathy with that. Not all of them, obviously. We already talked about that. Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

I love the idea of. Aside from the fact that she thinks all men will be chivalrous, I love the idea of early sort of like, packing lists, practical advice for lady travelers.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

I do like that a lot.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. I was just so delighted by the descriptions of what she thought would be good luggage and this, like, newly developed bureau trunk. I was like, yeah, that would be really handy if what you are traveling with is a big old steamer trunk being Able to open the top lid and have that be drawers organized with all your small items instead of having to have like a lot of little interior boxes that you had to wrangle around for your small items. Yeah, Seems like it would be a lot more convenient. Or just throwing your things into a trunk and then having to pull them out and figure out where everything was later on. Yeah. I had to look up what a shawl strap was.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

How exactly does that work? Yeah, it could just be. You could just have your shawl and it would be the strap that your shawl was wrapped up in so that you could sling it over your shoulder. Not have it to wear it with you, but have it accessible when you got on the train. All of those things. I do something similar sometimes. If I am taking a long trip and checking luggage, I will often have in, like my. My purse or backpack that I'm taking onto the airplane. I will have a change of clothes, toothbrush, the deodorant, like basic things so that just in case the checked luggage goes awry, I. I can manage on what I put under the seat in front of me.

[Holly Fry]

Do you remember on our first deaf you missed in history class trip, which was to Paris, the checked luggage going awry for me and my beloved? No. Because the first two and a half days we were in Paris, Brian had nothing.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I forgot this completely.

[Holly Fry]

Oh, yeah. It was like a little bit of a wild ride because we had gotten to Charles de Gaulle. Everyone from our flight got to baggage claim. About half of them got bags and rolled out. And the rest of us just stood there for a long time. And then someone from Air France came over and was like, what are you doing? We were like waiting on our bags and they're like, nuh. And it became this whole wacky rigmarole where we were. One of my bags had come out at that point. I had two checked bags, he had one. And my, you know, mediocre French and this very kind Air France woman. Like, we were trying to work out what was going on. The funniest part was when all of our luggage that we usually travel with is the American tourister line that came out years ago. That looks like droids from Star Wars.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

So once I showed her a picture, she was like, ooh. Like, this changed things significantly. And she started calling departments around the airport asking if they had seen R2D2 or C3PO. Cause those were the two that were missing. And at one point she talks to someone and she makes a very excited face, hangs up the phone Takes my hand and says, let's go. And we go running to a different. Completely different terminal. And shoved behind a potted plant in a corner is my C3PO bag.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Wow.

[Holly Fry]

But Brian's R2D2 never shows up. And I really think, like, some poor junior staff member overturned one of their chain, their little train of luggage trucks and didn't know what to do and just hid things around the airplane, but his was not there. And we got back to the. We got to our hotel because she was like, we're not gonna find it today. Go to your hotel. Poor Brian had not packed anything in his carry on, like, for overnight. And so, like, those first couple of days, we would get back to the room and be like, did luggage show up? And they had called our room at one point and said, we found your luggage. We're bringing it. But the number they gave was the ticket that was on my C3PO bag we already had.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Oh.

[Holly Fry]

And then we went out one day, and we did our tour, and we got home, and it was that day, and we asked at the front desk, and they were like, no. But then we got to our room, and there was our 2D2, like, with light shining off of it like it was a holy relic. And Brian hugged that luggage for so long. So that's our story of international not having your luggage. Yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

On our. On our trip to Morocco last year, I had a checked bag, but I also had, like, a rollerboard to go in the bin above, and that contained enough clothing that was all stuff that could be, like, washed out in the sink and dry really quickly. It had enough that I would be washing stuff in the sink every day. But if the big checked bag got lost, you'd be okay. I would be able to make it through the trip. Because that trip, we were in a. In a different place almost every day. Like, there were a couple places that we spent two nights. Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

If you're. If a piece of luggage did not come on our arrival to Morocco, odds of it catching up to us were slim to none.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. Yeah. So I had planned for the worst outcome of that, and it was unnecessary. Everything was fine. Did not need it at all.

[Holly Fry]

I do a different thing in that scenario, which is that I put everything I possibly can into carry on. I do no checked bag going out, but coming home. I'll check everything.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, I checked everything coming back because

[Holly Fry]

I don't want to carry that. Bizarre. And I did accumulate a piece of luggage while we were there, because on our last day, we got additional treats that we weren't expecting, like, pieces of pottery. And I was like, I've maxed out my luggage. Now we have to.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I imagine Elizabeth Bisland would have a lot to say about all of these things. With our travel.

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You know Roald Dahl, the writer who thought up Willy Wonka, Matilda and the bfg. But did you know he was also a spy?

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

It must have been.

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And he was really good at it. You probably won't believe it either.

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[Holly Fry]

We talked about Gustave Flaubert this week.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

We did. I could swear that this came up briefly at some point in another episode, but my searching of the old outlines yielded nothing. And I'm like, did I dream it?

[Holly Fry]

I don't know. I like Flaubert a lot. The nice thing about this one is that I had so many books already on my shelf for reference that I was good.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

Like I said, I was very fascinated by Madame Bovary when I read it in high school. So much so that when I was in college, my high school English teacher asked me to come back and do a guest lecture on it to her then seniors.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Okay.

[Holly Fry]

Which was super fun because I just like talking about it. I like the the questions you can raise about it, et cetera. One of the things we didn't talk about in this episode is how many other literary figures Gustave Flaubert knew, right? Like he and George sand were good friends, for example, and there were many others. And I just didn't bring all of them up because talking about other stuff, sometimes you got to edit. Let me tell you how much I love his disdain for cliches. Yeah, this will reveal a less than noble part of my personality, of which there are many.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Okay.

[Holly Fry]

But one of my pet peeves. Oh, just even thinking about it makes me like, physically and it's mean. So know that this is mean on my part I have no grace or tolerance. And again, I wanna say, as I'm saying all of these things, I'm the jerk. I have no grace or tolerance for when people say or do mundane things but act as though they are novel. I mean, like capital offense. It makes me so irrationally angry when people are like, blah, blah, blah, and it's something everybody knows and they've just realized it. And I should not be that way. I should be like, that's so co. That you've just had this realization. Welcome. But instead I'm just like, ugh. I hide it because I know that's monstrous behavior, but it makes me understand when he and his friend are like, let's write down all the stupid things that people say, thinking they are clever. I'm like, yes, write them all down. That's a good way to get it out.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This reminds me of the XKCD comic. I think it's called the lucky 10,000. And the basic idea is that there are things that you think that everyone knows, but like maybe 1 in 10,000 people don't. I'm recapping this from memory. Like I could be saying this totally wrong. Randall Monroe, please don't be upset with me if I'm recapping your work badly. But how when somebody, for example, has never heard of the whole Mentos and Diet Coke thing and they see the Mentos and Diet Coke video for the first time thing can be like, oh, you're the lucky 10,000. Like you, you were the lucky person who is seeing this for the first time today.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Can be a. A way to think of that. Besides being like, you know what, what

[Holly Fry]

I get, I try to. What do you get?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I have a. A childish kind of mean fixation on the people who say I was today years old when I figured out. And then the thing that they figured out isn't a real thing. It's like I was today years old when I figured out you're supposed to unroll the little paper ketchup cups at the fast food restaurant. Because then it holds way more ketchup. And it's like, no, you're not supposed to unroll the lip of the thing. You can do that, but that's not what it's made for. That's the thing I get real frustrated by.

[Holly Fry]

Oh, yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I've also started just blocking anyone on any, you know, any kind of social media who puts up obvious rage bait.

[Holly Fry]

Oh, yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Like I saw somebody one time that was doing a video in which they were using a can opener to open the can of biscuits that you're supposed to open by, like, pressing into the seam.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Or maybe smacking it against your cabinets. And they were like. And I was like, I think you're just doing this so people will engage with your video, that you're doing it wrong. So I'm just blocking you so I never have to see this again.

[Holly Fry]

Speaking of which, I think Flaubert would hate social media.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

Probably because it is so full of people having revelatory experiences that aren't really that revelatory.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

Which I understand there is a flip, though. Not related to Flaubert at all. But after you talking about the lucky 10,000, have you had that opposite experience where something that you thought was a universal experience, people are like, or. No, Tracy, not everybody had that.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yes.

[Holly Fry]

Mine are so odd and goofy and so stupid that I would ever have thought everybody had that experience.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. Do you have an example off the top of your head?

[Holly Fry]

I thought everybody read Jim Carroll growing up.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Oh, no.

[Holly Fry]

So when I would casually reference the Book of Nods, like I was, you know, hipster extraordinaire in the 1990s, they would be like, what are you talking about? And I'm like, jim Carroll, what's wrong with you? Jim Carroll. He wrote the Basketball Diaries. Come on, Jim Carroll. And they would be like, holly, we did not read all of the heroin journals that you read, apparently, growing up. But to me, I was like, of course you did. Everybody I knew read them. My, like, seven friends all knew about them.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm hard pressed to think of, like, an actual good example right now, but I have had this experience at work on the show. Not in a while, but, like, in the past, we have gotten emails from people that are like, hey, I just found this thing out for the first time. You should do an episode on it. Because, like, I don't think anybody knows about this. And it's something that was like, a part of my fifth grade history class or something, where I'm like, obviously, everyone knows that. And it's like, oh, no, Tracy, you just. You learned that because you lived in North Carolina, and that's where whatever the thing was happened.

[Holly Fry]

Right.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

My other was that I thought everybody knew clowns.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I love that, though. That's funny to me because I grew

[Holly Fry]

up in, you know, like, Florida, where there is clown school.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

And you can't throw a rock without hitting a clown. Like, you know, if you're in theater or the arts at all, you know, people who are clowns.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

And so I just Thought everybody knew clowns. It turns out they don't.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

No, I know clowns.

[Holly Fry]

So when I would say things casually like, the clowns taught me that.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Right.

[Holly Fry]

People would be like, je me excuse.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I know clowns because. But it's because of the theater stuff more broadly.

[Holly Fry]

Right, Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One thing we didn't talk about was contextualizing Flaubert's trial in relation to other writers that did not get the same good fortune. Right. Charles Baudelaire, poet that I love, was put on trial, like, essentially the same thing, six months after Gustave Flaubert, and he was found guilty. I think he was put on trial for 13 poems.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

And six of them were found to be. But he didn't suffer a lot because of this. He was fined and his publisher was fined.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

Incidentally, one of the first poems I ever memorized was the first part of Recolllement by Charles Baudelaire. And to this day, I still know it. Soissage pluton quier tout reclaim le soir il de song le voisi an atmosphere obscure envelope la ville forever I will be on my deathbed and I will still be able to say that poem. It's a good one. Read it in English. It's also good.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

Be still my pain. I also had a revelation that I have never had before.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Okay.

[Holly Fry]

While trying to, like, summarize Madame Bovary this round.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This is going to be so funny to me if your revelation is something that everyone already knows.

[Holly Fry]

Probably it is, but I don't know. In trying to write the summary of the novel and trying to point out that Emma Bovary is ultimately revealed to be quite selfish, you know, even when she's up against it and people are like, no, no, no, no, no. She's like, yeah, of course. Let's buy more curtains. I was like, oh, my gosh. Was she part of the inspiration for Daisy and Gatsby?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Oh.

[Holly Fry]

But like, from a different point of view, because Daisy is very wealthy and can afford all these things, but she is empty and kind of pursuing things that will give her a thrill. And I was like, oh, my goodness, is this a. Could I. If I travel back in time, could I go to graduate school and write an entire thesis on this? Maybe, maybe, maybe. But also, that also falls under that same idea that everybody understands.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

What?

[Holly Fry]

Wanting more than you have or different than you have, and wanting to find something that excites you.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

My Gatsby memory, aside from having read that also for school, maybe in college, is that when I was getting married and we were planning our wedding, and I decided that we were gonna have a 20s theme wedding. I realized that there were a lot of other people who were writing about their wedding inspirations who were describing their, like, roaring 20s kind of flapper wedding as. As that. And I'm like, that's not a Great Gatsby wedding. You shouldn't have a Great Gatsby wedding. Great. The Great Gatsby is not a good theme for a wedding.

[Holly Fry]

Well, I'll make the case that that great party is worth recreating that.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I can see that argument.

[Holly Fry]

I think that's probably what people are doing. Not like, hey, let's use people and run them over with our cars.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Right, right. And that's sort of why I think it's weird to say that your wedding is a Great Gatsby wedding. So that when I. When then I was like, you know, having meetings about wedding planning, I was like, it's a 20s wedding, not great Gatsby. It's not a Great Gatsby wedding. It's just.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, that doesn't bother me as much because I presume they're borrowing the style of it and not the mentality of the characters. And that is a good shorthand for a lot of people that maybe are having trouble, like, which One is the 1920s.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Holly Fry]

Although now, like, you timed it right, because I feel like now the 1920s is so played out.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Sure.

[Holly Fry]

As a party theme, maybe.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. Was super fun, though. Had a good time.

[Holly Fry]

You made my dress.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Thank you.

[Holly Fry]

I did. I did make your dress. There's a lot of beads on their dress.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

I've only made a couple of wedding dresses since then. I used to do them all the time, and I have slowed down in my old age. You have to be very, very much a person that I really, really adore before. I'll make you a wedding dress at this point because I used to do a lot of bridal, like, as a side hustle, and that was not fun because one, like, there's just too much. There's too much stress on what people think a garment can do for them. That made it not very fun for me. And also, I just realized pretty quickly, I just want to design clothes for me and, like, the style I want. I don't want to create other people's visions. Yeah, go for it.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Go for it.

[Holly Fry]

I do all the time. All the time, all day, every day. Stitching away over here. If anybody has not read Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, I highly recommend it. There are Also some good movie adaptations. They all take license. The one From Is It 2014 with Mia Wasikowska is pretty good. It leaves out some stuff like in the novel Madame Bovary and Charles have a child. She does not appear in it. The coda where the apothecary kind of gets great recognition, even though he's kind of a social climber. Weasel is not in none of that's in there. It ends with just the end of Emma Bovary, but it's still pretty good. There's an actor in it who has some very questionable stuff in his life that, mm, you gotta overlook if you're gonna do it. But it is quite good. There are many others, too. French language and English language if people just wanna watch movies. But I really like this book because I think it is a good examination of the way people can be very intoxicated by the promise of something else giving their life meaning.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Oh, sure, sure.

[Holly Fry]

Like I said, I will talk about Bovary all day, every day. I just love it. There you go. It was very funny. I was talking with one of my very best friends the other day and I was telling her I was working on this. She's like, have you read Madame Bovary? And I'm like, have I read Madame Bovary? She bit off more than she was ready for in that moment. I was like, I'm sorry. I've nerded up this conversation. I'm just like, and then this happens, and this is important. And it was like, yeah, don't do it. Don't open Pandora's box if you're not ready. If this is your weekend coming up, I hope you don't accidentally open up any Pandora's boxes you don't want. If you get to read some books, whether that's classic literature, new trashy fiction, great. I'm never gonna judge whatever is gonna make you happy and feel enriched. If you don't have time off and you have to do, you know, work or have other responsibilities, you don't get to sit on your badonk on your couch. Like is my favorite activity on the weekend. I hope that your days go smoothly, everyone is kind to one another, that we all remember to take care of each other. These are the important things. We sure are grateful that you are here listening. We will be back on Monday with something brand new, and tomorrow we will have a classic.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Stuff youf Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.