May 08, 2005

Happy Mothers' Day

(link from Life in the Present).

May 05, 2005

Kennebecasis River 2005

The river hasn't been so high, apparently, since 1973 (when it was the highest since the flood of 1936). This photo shows were Sandy Point usually is: a substantial little peninsula that juts into the river, a perfect site for bathing, kayak launching, and rock throwing. Joe and I find all this pretty exciting, pretty interesting, but the Jinker Boy seems to be impressed on some primal level. Here is a drawing he did at preschool yesterday of the river washing out the road to his babysitter's house:

(not to scale)

May 04, 2005

Across the finish line!

Just entered the final grades for my last course. Hasn't really sunk in yet. Huge load fallen etc. etc. Though I have a pile of other pressing things, all due yesterday. Still, hope to get back to my usual level of posting pronto. Just after I go and have a nice nap. Just for a little while.

Meanwhile, for your perusal: Idioms illustrated by fourth graders (via BoingBoing) and heroes of atheism mugs and tea-towels (via things magazine). Major sellers, it would seem.

And, Mark Woods reminds us that it is the thirty-fifth anniversary of Kent State.

April 25, 2005

Parent/child

I went to bed with a migraine yesterday in the early evening. This means that I took some meds then ensconced myself in a complicated apparatus of pillows, ice packs, eye shades, and ear plugs. The Jinker Boy hovered, solicitous. When I woke up a few hours later, after he had gone to bed, I found myself surrounded by a number of very small toys tucked into the crook of my shoulder and leaning up against my head. There was one in my hand.

And my headache was gone.

Coincidence?

April 16, 2005

More things you don't want to hear

when you are sitting reading blogs:

"Mummy! Daddy peed on my head!"

April 15, 2005

Size does matter

Joe, the JinkerBoy and I all in the bathroom, elbowing each other out of the way in an effort to get ready this morning:

Joe: Does he have any pants that don't fall down?
Me: Not really. JB, you have a small butt.
JB: No! I have a big butt!
Joe: No, Mummy has a big butt; you have a tiny butt.
JB: I have a big butt!!
Me: Daddy has a small butt.
JB (triumphantly): Daddy, you have a small butt. I have a big butt!

April 11, 2005

Slept

a few hours earlier, which I why I'm up now (I had a migraine). Woke up to see the Jinker Boy and Joe beside the bed, trying to tempt me to get up and eat some supper.

Me: What have you been doing all evening?
Joe: He's been watching videos but he got tired of them.
JB (solemnly): They made me go crazy.
Me (look at Joe)
Joe (nods).

I contemplate not getting up, but my bladder is full. I go upstairs to the kitchen, and he is, indeed, crazy.

March 29, 2005

Perhaps it is the right-wingnuts

and their appropriation of the term, but it has become increasingly clear that I don't think of Joe, the Jinker Boy and I so much as a "family," as a "pack." When Sally first came to live with us, Joe and I read various books about dogs, and what started as a joke seems to have stuck. Our pack includes Sally, of course, and Furio. (Which begs another question: why a pack and not a pride? Because, I think, human social organization has more in common with that of canines than felines. Any biologists out there, feel free to correct me.) Anyway, we are a pack, and Joe is not my husband or my spouse as much as he is my mate. Less loaded with millennia of baggage, less legalistic, nice and functional yet not prescriptive.

I suppose this means that the Jinker Boy is our pup. Though sometimes, like this morning, he seems more like spawn.

And, browsing through books when writing this post, I discovered that there may be some potential pitfalls to living in a pack.

March 20, 2005

First day of Spring

Today we went to a sugarbush, the same one we visited last year in mid-April at the end of the season, rather than at the beginning, as today. A beautiful day. Blissful to be outdoors for so long.

Jinker Boy and friend

March 12, 2005

Cake and ice cream

Exhausted but contented. Today we had a birthday party for the Jinker Boy (4) and my father (90), and it went really nicely. But now I can't string two words together. So. Posting will resume shortly.

March 03, 2005

Our winter break

is next week; it is later than most universities', designed to coincide with March Break in the public schools. Convenient for those with children, but such a late break makes for a very long winter term and a rather abrupt finish to classes. I am counting the minutes; my back is still bad and I just want to sleep. Oh, and mark papers, of course (in case any of my students are reading). Had a massage yesterday, which felt lovely while it was going on. But it loosened up all those clenched muscles that were holding me together and now I am a real mess.

Off to bed. Reading Geoff Ryman's Air — wonderful! — but think I will fall asleep. Tylonel 3s, eh?

(Air is up for a Philip K. Dick Award. Here's an interview with Ryman by Kit Reed.)

(The JinkerBoy thinks the solution to back problems is cushions and more cushions. He was tossing them at me all morning until his father finally got him out the door. I heard him howling from the garage: "I wanna stay and help Mummy!" I had better go and sleep so that I am ready for his help when he gets home.)

February 26, 2005

I have

already mentioned sorryeverybody.com, apologiesaccepted.com, and PostSecret. Now here is i used to believe: the childhood beliefs site (link from Pratie Place). Here is one:

When I was about five, and didn't understand the whole how and where babies came from, I used to think as we (children) aged our parents would do the opposite and become younger. And once we reached adulthood, we would become the parents and our parents were our children. Death and giving birth did not exist in my mind.

The Jinker Boy and I were watching television this morning and an ad for Pound Puppies came on. JB turned to me:

JB: When you are a little gel, I will buy that for you.
Me. Would you like one of those?
JB. No, that's for gels. When you are a little gel, I will buy it for you.

These online collaborative projects are fascinating. They channel the overwhelming number of competing voices on the web into something purposeful and understandable, something that builds community. But they are also a product or installation rather than a meandering conversation, so in that they differ from other forms of online community. They are limited; one sends in an entry (or two or three) and moves on. To use some of the common metaphors for online communities, these projects are like giant multi-artist murals on urban walls, rather than coffeehourses or townhalls.

February 10, 2005

THIS kid

has the JinkerBoy beat.

February 02, 2005

Discussing Elizabeth Barrett Browning's

use of morphine in my intro. class today (maybe I'm sleazy to pander but they really seem to brighten up when I mention the various addictions of the writers we're discussing) and was wishing, earlier this evening, that I had some myself. Had a meeting with the other members of my dept. at which I was presenting a somewhat contentious proposal about reorganization, and not only have I come down with a cold, but I developed a migraine. Usually I would have just left and gone home to bed, but didn't feel I could this time, it being my initiative and all. To add some piquancy to the evening, begged a ride home from the person at the table least enamoured with my proposal, and had to fight hard not to throw up in her new car as we made chitchat for twenty minutes.

Came home and decided to go right to bed, but was worried that the Jinker Boy, having been without me for some hours, would object:

Me: Sweetie, I'm very sorry, but Mummy has a headache and has to go to bed now.
JB: (not moving eyes from Blue's Clues DVD) Well go to bed then.
Joe: (snorts, then looks abashed and pats my shoulder).

So, doped up and clutching my ice packs, I crashed out and had vivid dreams about programme requirements.

January 30, 2005

Things you don't want to hear

when you are sitting reading blogs:

"Mummy! Dogs don't like marshmallows."

January 22, 2005

So we're driving home

this afternoon, from my parents, and the Jinker Boy falls asleep. In the front Joe and I are chatting about this and that.

Me: (after a pause) So, you heard that SpongeBob is gay, eh?
JB: (from the back seat, at the top of his lungs) What? Whats dat?

I nearly drive off the road and Joe starts laughing so hard he can't talk.

JB: (still yelling) Stop dat! Stop laughing! What dat bout SpongeBob?
(more laughter)
JB. Stop dat! SpongeBob skates?
Me: (finally) That's right. SpongeBob skates.
JB: Me too. I skate. Like SpongeBob.

The writing is on the wall. He likes Tinky Winky, too.

Update (23/1/05): Annie at Maud Newton posts on the yellow fellow, and quotes at length from The New York Times.

January 18, 2005

I got a haircut today.

I knew it was time when one of my students told me last week that my hair looked good. So I toodled over to my stylist clutching a DVD of Breathless so that I could show him the photograph on the cover. Two hours later I bounced out into the bitterly cold weather, an older, heavier, brunette version of Jean Seward.

Back home, I sit at the table reading blogs and in bounces the Jinker Boy.

JB: (gleefully) Mummy!
Me: (looking up) Yes?
JB. (laughing) Your hair!
Me: (with dignity) What about my hair?
JB. You look like a boy!
Me. I look like Jean Seward.
JB. Like a boy!

I liked it better before, I think.

January 13, 2005

It's a baby if she says it is

Lauren at feministe posts a slew of links under the title "Thursday Feminist Reading Material." Was particularly moved by Ayelet Waldman's post about her own second-trimester abortion and the necessity of developing more nuance in pro-choice rhetoric. It ends, "Listen to the pregnant woman. Value her. She values the life growing inside her. Listen to the pregnant woman, and you cannot help but defend her right to abortion." I spent a decade as an activist in the pro-choice movement and have never wavered, but having fertility problems and then finally a healthy pregnancy of my own certainly broadened, and deepened, my beliefs. Though I suppose all those years doing posters, media bites and op-eds has paid off because I still seem to have managed to come up with a slogan. Not a very wise slogan, perhaps ...

January 01, 2005

New Year's haiku

Sharon asks for "positive haiku" with which to start the year, offers hers, and links to two others'. Here's mine:

Voice flutes from below,
shutting out the wind. I think:
He'll be four this year.

December 20, 2004

Dec. 19

Newsflash: I have just cut two horrible chunks out of Joe's hair with the new clippers he bought. He is too cheap to go to a hairstylist scared to go to the local stylists' because they are called "Gigolo and Gigolette,' and so insisted that I cut his hair, in his mother's cramped bathroom, with Sally the dog dodging the flying hair and Alex wriggling around underneath the chair and offering me advice:

JB: Da lady squirts wader.
Me: The lady who cuts your hair squirts water?
JB: Yiss! Like diss [makes squirting motions from down near Joe's ankles]. An da lady chair go up 'n down.
Me: Uh huh. Oh shit! Joe! You have to go to a barber!
Joe: What? No, it's fine.
JB: Mummy dat's a bad word.
Me: Yes I know honey, I'm sorry; Joe, you look like someone attacked you with hedge-clippers, you have to go to a barber.
Joe: No, just even it up.
Me: I don't think I … Oh shit!
JB: Mummy!
Me: Sorry, honey. Joe, your mother's going to kill me. We have that dinner to go to. Oh shit!
JB: MUMMY!

Dec. 17

On the way into the city, Joe and I were getting tetchy with each other, as more often than not we seem to take a wrong turn, just when we least want to, here at the end of a long trip. We had pulled over and were poring over the map, each convinced that we knew the best route. Then from the back seat, the Jinker Boy issued a command:

"You guys share!"

So we did.

November 27, 2004

Well I'm back

An interesting evening: a reading and the ballet. I generally have to work hard to convince myself to go out again once I am home, and after a long week it was difficult to go back into the cold and leave a warm house, a pre-schooler getting ready for his bath, and a soft bed. But I did, and am glad.

Beth Powning reads well. I haven't read The Hatbox Letters but from the two excerpts I heard, it is, at least in part, an intensely nuanced exploration of loss and loneliness. In other words, although I recognize the artistry, I doubt I will read it any time soon.

There is an interesting congruence between Powning's novel —

When Kate Harding, recently widowed, receives nine antique hatboxes — family letters, diaries, and memorabilia — from Hartford, Connecticut, she finds herself drawn back to the childhood summers she spent in Shepton, her grandparents’ Connecticut house.

and the ballet, Les Portes Tournantes, in which there are also documents from the past in the form of "a mysterious black book."

It appears that this evening was my time for dabbling: first a reading from a book I likely won't read, and then the first ballet I've seen in well over a decade. The first Act failed to draw me in, though the second did, despite my reservations about the narrative as some sort of wish-fulfilment story for children of divorced parents, and my discomfort with the theme of two mothers who leave their children. Boy children. (Wonder what my little sprout is doing? Is he upset that I went out? Why am I here watching a narrative about abandonment since to do so required me to temporarily abandon my son? And of course, when I got home I found that he had had a fine evening with his father, played for ages, and went easily to sleep. So.)

One thing I found interesting about the performance was the consistent focus on other forms of artistic production: one character is a painter, and paintings are a significant part of the set. Another is a musician; a "string quartet" dances their performance with their instruments. The artist's mother, danced by the magnificent Evelina Sushko, was a pianist who accompanied silent films in Cambellton, N.B. Textual documents — the mother's unmailed letters — are central. And of course the ballet itself is based upon Jacques Savoie's 1985 novel.

But much of this is still dabbling. The fact of the matter is that I could not bring myself to care very much for any of these characters, Powning's or the dancers' (with the exception of Sushko's solo in which she gives up her infant son. Yeah, there's a theme here). I was irritated with Powning's widowed Kate; she seemed so solipsistic, so bogged down — or even luxuriating in — in the minutia of her existence. (Big caveat: yes I know I only heard two small sections.) Jaded? Cold? Tired? Insensitive? Overwhelmed? In denial??? You be the judge.

Turned on the ignition in the car afterward and was blasted with some screaming metal on the campus radio, flipped to the "Golden Oldies" station but it was even more maudlin than usual, so settled on the CBC. And caught the tail end of the last in this year's Massey Lecture series, A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright:

Each time history repeats itself, so it's said, the price goes up. The twentieth century was a time of runaway growth in human population, consumption, and technology, placing a colossal load on all natural systems, especially earth, air, and water — the very elements of life.

The most urgent questions of the twenty-first century are: where will this growth lead? can it be consolidated or sustained? and what kind of world is our present bequeathing to our future?

In A Short History of Progress Ronald Wright argues that our modern predicament is as old as civilization, a 10,000-year experiment we have participated in but seldom controlled. Only by understanding the patterns of triumph and disaster that humanity has repeated around the world since the Stone Age can we recognize the experiment's inherent dangers, and, with luck and wisdom, shape its outcome.

Finally, some perspective. There will be no readings, no ballet, after the apocalypse. But on the plus side: no critics, either.

Globe and Mail review of the ballet.
Part one of the Massey Lectures is available on audio.
A Short History of Progress available from Anansi Press.
Interview with Ronald Wright. And another.
Wright's novels, A Scientific Romance and Henderson's Spear.
Civilization is a Pyramid Scheme: The Maya's ruined temples reveal a frightening message for us all, says archaeologist Ronald Wright (originally published in the Globe & Mail 08/05/2000).

November 25, 2004

Joe flew to Halifax

last night, for a conference. The Jinker Boy and I drove him to the airport.

JB (from the back seat): Where we go?
Me: The Airport, honey. Daddy has got to catch a plane.
JB: Daddy go on da pwane?
J: That's right.
JB: Go on pwane?
Me: Yep.
JB: Pwane gonna crash?
J/Me: No!
Me: It goes up in the air.
JB: Den gonna crash? Crash down?
J/Me (with desperation, singing): "Fly through the sky, through the sky, through the sky!"
JB (with relish): BOOM!

November 12, 2004

With me, it's Wiggles songs

web zen does earworm zen.

Oh yeah.

November 09, 2004

Jinker Boy redux

Me: Come here and get your jacket on, mon petit chou-chou.¹
JB: I not your shoe. I boy. I a boy.

¹ Fr. little cabbage, darling

November 03, 2004

On to more important things

I just repeated to a colleague the following conversation that I had with the Jinker Boy this morning:

JB: My froat is sick.
Me: Your throat hurts?
JB: Yis.
Me: Shall I kiss it better?
JB: (looking very alarmed) No! You can’t go in dere!
Me: (trying not to laugh) No, I’d just kiss the outside.
JB: (not appeased) You too big! Liddle froat (moves away casting nervous glances back at me).

The colleague to whom I repeated this had just been listening to a recording of Portnoy’s Complaint, unabridged, on his way to work (which would have caused me to drive into a ditch, but that’s beside the point), and still thinking of it, made an offhand comment about the overbearing physicality of the mother in that novel.

My cute story, ruined!

I have always thought that Portnoy’s mother got a bad rap.

October 27, 2004

Talking

to Joe on the phone, the Jinker Boy in the background:

Me: [natter, natter] Signal Hill [natter natter] conference [natter natter].
Joe: Uh huh, uh huh.
JB [top of his lungs]: Wanna talk to Mummy! Wanna talk to Mummy!
Joe: I guess he wants to talk to you. [various phone noises]
JB: Hi Mummy! I went to da dentist today. Bye! [hangs up]

Retelling story in a taxi on the way to a restaurant to colleagues with teenaged children: "Well at least he still wants to talk to you."

October 25, 2004

Inexplicable connection problems

over the weekend that I can't blame on the university server. So, no posts, reading, email, or anything. I actually had to read things on paper and talk to people.

Actually, had a very good day yesterday: took my little fish for his swimming lesson, and then to visit his grandparents. Who are not-so-secretly horrified that he still uses pull-ups, though they have the good sense not to say so outright.

Leaving in a few hours for a conference in St. John's, Newfoundland. A wonderful city; hope I have a little time to walk around. How can you not love a city with a clothing store called "Wenches & Rogues"? Back on Thursday, though I hope to find access while away.

October 07, 2004

Lost and found day

Yesterday was not a stellar day. Last minute fussing and administrative confusion with my grant application, two classes that were less than inspirational, and the inability to get online all yesterday evening (our server was down. Again.)

On the plus side: had a good conversation with two students after Gender Studies (they must have found the material compelling, even if I wasn't). The Jinker Boy's Scholastic book order came in, so there was fun reading in the evening¹. And I watched the second half of The Godfather. It really is one of those films that have become so iconic that we don't even look at it anymore. I had forgotten how out of step Pacino looks in his dark wool, there in swinging Las Vegas or with his bright young wife, like a Hasidim who's wandered into the Kentucky Derby.

¹ Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are came with a wonderful DVD — part of a really nice Scholastic series that I can't find on their difficult-to-search-site — that also includes In the Night Kitchen and The Nutshell Library. Watching the DVD I realised that Sendak finds children's feet as endearing as I do.

(Does that sound wierd?)

And can you believe that In the Night Kitchen was banned? Oh, yes:

In the Night Kitchen (1970) proved controversial on its release, as several well-meaning librarians and teachers reacted to Mickey's nudity by removing the book from the shelves and/or covering the child's offending genitalia with marker, tape, or other method of obscuring it.  The book continues to appear on lists of banned or challenged books, somewhat to the consternation of those who can find nothing disturbing or "sexual" in the nudity of such a young child as Mickey appears to be.
Sendak himself has said that he did not intend to be controversial with this book; his concern was more aesthetic, to avoid the "mess" that would result from Mickey's falling into the batter with his clothes on. (source)

Very practical, too.

<< Is anyone disturbed?

Bonus links:
Nice, visual Sendak page
Another nice page
Sendak exhibit in Pittsburgh
Wally Hastings' children's literature page.

September 25, 2004

Pink and blue

Alex has discovered that I am a girl; yesterday when I asked him for one of his Skittles — purely in an effort to reduce his sugar intake, you understand — he said, "Dese 'r boys!"

(He has a lot to learn about girls.)

September 19, 2004

So we're at Phyllis and Peter's

for dinner, and Phyllis and I are in the kitchen while the menfolk are doing something or other in the garage and the three children, B¹ (5 yr. old girl), B² (2 yr. old girl), and the Jinker Boy, are in the next room. These three march in, led by B¹ in a tutu and nothing else, who proclaims that she helped the other two to dress up and that they are all going to dance. B² is wearing a hot-pink net confection with only a few rips, and the JB has on a pink leotard with attached tiny tutu, very tasteful and discrete.

"How wonderful you all look!" Phyllis and I enthuse. "Have fun dancing!"

Ten minutes later, they're back, again led by B¹, still topless.

B¹ (to me): Is it okay that [JB] is wearing a girl's costume?
Me: Sure, if he wants to.
B¹: So it's okay that he's wearing it?
Me: Sure. He can wear whatever he likes.

JB, hearing this exchange, dashes back into the living room, rips off the tutu, and rushes back into the kitchen wearing only his Spiderman pull-up and one sock.

Me: Aren't you dancing any more?
JB: Where's Daddy?
Me: He's outside with Peter.
JB: Wanna go wit Daddy and Peeder!
Me: Sweetie, you're not dressed and it's cold out.
JB: [louder] Wanna go wit Daddy and Peeder!!

I just know I am going to report this to my gender studies class.

September 13, 2004

Well, yeah.

You're an agitator! Your kids have grown up on the front lines of rallies and pickets, and chances are that you boycott at least one company for its bad business practices. Your kids are learning what matters to you and how they can change what matters to them.

What kind of a freaky mother are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

(via KateSpot).

September 06, 2004

Since the Jinker Boy

had a meltdown last night and I felt clumsy and useless, some links about things maternal and child-like:

The Ideals of Motherhood - Aesthetics of Form and Function in Hindu art (from Plep).

Philobiblon on older mothers in the 19thc, and women-friendly gnosticism.

Magic Pencil: contemporary children's book illustration at the British Library (from Plep).

And, another Alice link: The Background and History of Alice in Wonderland (also from Plep, who is going on holiday so go over and read your fill now).

August 26, 2004

Pink and blue

The Jinker Boy has discovered the categories of "boy" and "girl," though he uses them with his own inflections:

Me: Is Phyllis a boy or a girl?
Jinker Boy: Gel.
Me: Is Lauren a boy or a girl?
JB: Barbie gel.
Me: What's a Barbie girl?
JB: Liddal gel.
Me: Is Daddy a boy or a girl?
JB: Boy.
Me: Is Mummy a boy or a girl?
JB: Boy.
Me: Mummy's a boy? Why?
JB: Because I love it.
Me: Because you love Mummy?
JB: Yis.
Me: But you love Phyllis and she's a girl.
JB: [pause] Yis.
Me: Is Mummy a boy or a girl?
JB: Boy.

August 23, 2004

Like I need more blogs to read

Just stumbled across an appealing webzine, Literary Mama (run on MT). Mothers of sons might want to have a look at Having A Boy? Better Luck Next Time: Mothers, Sons and Stereotypes by Alison Streit:

Then there are the perfect strangers who see fit to tell me things like "He'll eat you out of house and home." "You'll need a harness on him till he's ten." "Sometimes he'll just ram his head into the wall for no apparent reason, but he'll be fine. That's just how they are."

I look forward to that stage.¹

Those working outside the house could read Amy Hudock's Mothering in the Ivory Tower. Here is an excerpt:

I must do this work, but I have to call it as I see it in my own life. I won't pretend that Sarah is not suffering. I won't pretend that her pain doesn't matter. I won't try to justify it in terms of her well being, as in claiming that "she is learning to be more independent" or "a happy mother makes a happy home." I won't be pacified by the nanny's comment that "she stops crying the minute you are out of sight." Does my pain at a loss hurt any less because I can reconcile myself to it? No, of course not. Then, should I disregard her pain because she is learning to deal with it? Because it is short-lived? Is my child's pain less important than mine? Even though she won't consciously remember this later, if therapy has taught me anything, it's that the unconscious forgets nothing.

I won't deny the obvious truth: I am rebuilding my career on the back of her grief.

This is hard to admit. When working mothers are on the defensive, we can't publicly admit the grief of our children. When we are fighting with each other and against those who demean us, we can't be fully honest about our own grief.

Since this morning with the Jinker Boy was particularly ... how shall I say? fraught, this got under my skin.

Perusing the about us section, discovered that a good proportion of the editorial staff blog, too (though the contributors are more inclined to have websites rather than blogs. Hmmm. See the quote from Nietzsche on the main page). A couple of these blogs I had already come across, but some were new to me, including Hudock's Mothering in the Ivory Tower and Libby Gruner's midlife mama, both of which appeal for obvious reasons. Maybe I should rename this blog. Or at least change the description. Something like, "Fat, forty, and huffing up the steps of the ivory tower. With a diaper bag."

¹ The Journal of The Association for Research on Mothering published an excellent issue on Mothers and Sons in 2000, and I believe that back issues are available. Also excellent: Andrea O'Reilly's edited book, Mothers and Sons: Feminism, Masculinity and the Struggle to Raise our Sons (Routledge, 2001).

August 21, 2004

Japanese children's art

Boing Boing links to Japanese children's books from 1920s: beautiful, modern paintings, stylish and haunting. Xeni Jardin comments thoughtfully about the experience of looking at this site, aware of the historical events through which the children who originally read these books lived. Yes. And more generally, looking at someone's else nostalgia is an odd, poignant thing in itself.

August 19, 2004

So this morning

as we are finally all ready to leave the house, the Jinker Boy for his sitter and Joe and I for campus, the JB looks at me and asks, "Are you wearing your jammies, Mummy?"

Bring on September and its sartorial discipline.

August 14, 2004

At the movies

Got a babysitter and went out for dinner and a movie (woo hoo!). Left too late to catch The Manchurian Candidate, which Joe wanted to see — he often screens the original in his popular culture class — so we saw The Bourne Supremacy although neither of us had seen The Bourne Identity (first, or second. Though we remedied that by renting both at Blockbuster on the way home, as much to extend our night out as anything else, I think).

Kept thinking, all the way through the film as the narrative swept from one exciting location to the next — Goa, Naples, Berlin, NYC, Moscow — that this is really the way to travel. Painless, cheap, no fatigue or troublesome dislocation. I am ready and waiting for the virtual future, man. Bring it on!

After dinner we went to a new Thai restaurant, which might not seem noteworthy to many, but is for us. When we moved to Saint John almost eight years ago there were few interesting restaurants: a good sea-food place, an inconsistent little-bit-of-everything place with a horrendous, punning name, a couple of stultifyingly timid upscale places, a Chinese restaurant where everything is covered in sticky red sauce, an excellent Guatemalan restaurant — okay, granted, that was unexpected — and lots of fast food, diners, and steakhouses. Since that time there have opened two or three other Chinese restaurants, all good, two Thai restaurants, a wonderful Indian restaurant, and a few others (another of which also has a punning name). It has become, in short, a town where you actually have to decide where to go for dinner based on something other than your pocketbook.

That being said, the meal tonight was not wonderful. Both Joe's and my soup tasted vinegary, and my tamarind shrimps, and dessert, were both too sweet. Sigh. I tease my cousin that he and some of his friends are food Nazis. You know, people who send dishes back even if they're not burnt. But then, that is in London where one can routinely pay more for a good restaurent meal than, in other places, a good restaurant, so perhaps they have some justification. During dinner this evening I kept having to grab my evil arm, like some cranky love-child of Peter Sellers and the late, lamented Julia Childs. Or Martha Stewart, more like. Quite inconsistent given the amount of Kraft dinner I have eaten in my life.

Perhaps it's just as well that we aren't able to eat too many meals out these days without the levelling influence of the Jinker Boy.

[We have this book and the Jinker Boy likes it, although he does not seem to recognize the pointedness of my choice in having bought it for him.]

This blog entry mirrors the pattern of Joe's and my conversations whenever we do have a chance to go out alone: it always comes back to the Jinker Boy.

August 08, 2004

That was not the amusing post

This is.

So we went to Rainbow Valley, an amusement park in Cavendish, P.E.I. You need to scrutinize the web site to understand the true vibe of the place. That 70s Show should shoot an episode there. Here is one of the two souvenir shops (the other is a castle); maybe Jackie could get a job there:

Here is a close-up of the window (it contains a garden gnome holding a Canadian flag, in case it's not clear):

And the rest of the park is equally wonderful. With the bonus that since it was built way back when, the trees are mature and so the whole place is lovely and shaded.

But I was worried, when we first got there, that it might be overwhelming for the Jinker Boy. After all, he probably could have happily played with any one of the things he saw for half an hour, and here were a couple of acres. It took quite awhile to coax him away from the yellow ducky boat, and then he found a shoe house, presumably of the Old Woman who had so many children she didn't know what to do (and how she managed in one room I can't imagine), and he wouldn't come out:

(Here is a close-up of his face:)

It wasn't as though it was particularly interesting there, either: the shoe was beside a half-filled pond with what looked to be part of a plastic crocodile who had seen better days.

And straight ahead was a band of weird birds who would break into song ("Rocking Robin") at irregular intervals, through no discernible mechanism.

Then there were the various passersby, determined to see every nook and cranny, who stomped up the steps to the shoe house then jumped when they noticed the little boy half hidden behind the stove. I thought we had reached a stalemate when Joe appeared and took matters into his paternal hands:

But don't cry for the Jinker Boy; after this inauspicious beginning he decided that he loved Rainbow Valley. Particularly the water slide.

[Click on image for larger view]

He has been periodically asking when we will go back, ever since.

August 07, 2004

Message from the Jinker Boy,

who would like to thank all his fans and well-wishers (freely translated by the editor):

Please, Gentlepeople, rescue me from my crazed parents who dragged me off to the wilds of P.E.I. where my little tush got a rash because we were roughing it and the rest of me became food for mosquitos, and who then had the unmitigated gall to drag me away from the giant slide after only fifty-eight turns, sling me over their shoulders, and carry me off to the parking lot where I was imprisoned in my car seat for, they say, my "own safety."

Just twelve and a half years and then I can drive.

August 06, 2004

We're baaack!

I sat down to write an amusing post about taking the Jinker Boy to a theme park in P.E.I. but had five hundred (that is not a typo) spam comments, most of them offering various calming medications. Some of which I could have used this past week. But still.

July 28, 2004

Stateside

Arrived back in Newark Sunday, and spent a couple of days in Queen's at the Jinker Boy's Nonna's (or "Noona," as he calls her. Which is apparently charmingly archaic dialect and not mispronunciation. Who knew?)

Driving away from the airport I was reminded of the episode of The Soprano's in which Tony, Christopher and Paulie go to Italy. In Naples, Paulie is sentimental, full of enthusiasm, but the Italians he meets are uncomprehending. In one scene a prostitute remains unimpressed that his family was from her village; in another, a man on the street starts to rant about Nato when Paulie tells him he is from America. Near the end of the episode there is a wonderful, understated shot of Paulie sitting in the car, smiling out the window as he is driven home from the airport past various scrap-yards and dumps.

In keeping with one of the themes of my recent trip, of my reunion with the menfolk, I refer you to a passage from Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë which alludes to the period just after Brontë's wedding to Arthur Nicholls:

Henceforward the sacred doors of home are closed upon her married life. We, her loving friends, standing outside, caught occasional glimpses of brightness, and pleasant peaceful murmurs of sound, telling of the gladness within; and we looked at each other, and gently said, "After a hard and long struggle — after many cares and many bitter sorrows — she is tasting happiness now!" We thought of the slight astringencies of her character, and how they would turn to full ripe sweetness in that calm sunshine of domestic peace. We remembered her trials, and were glad in the idea that God had seen fit to wipe away the tears from her eyes. Those who saw her, saw an outward change in her look, telling of inward things. And we thought, and we hoped, and we prophesied, in our great love and reverence.

And that is all I will say about that, except to add that the Jinker Boy, Joe and I (and Sally, but don't tell the management) are in a motel in Maine, on the way home. Joe is lying spread-eagled on the bed watching the Democratic Convention and JB has a black eye from slipping on the deck of the motel pool. "Ripe sweetness" indeed.

July 19, 2004

Six more days

until I am home with the Jinker Boy and his dad.

July 17, 2004

Catching up

Written in Leeds, 14 July 2004

On jet lag

William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, despite my complaints, was a good read and had some interesting things to say, in particular, about jet lag. Cayce, the main character (who gets to travel first class and to sleep in one of those little pods that I can only drool over in high-end magazines), says that when you travel by plane you are going at such speeds that you leave your soul behind, stretched out behind you by the thinnest of umbilical cords.¹. Evocative, but not quite how I feel; if I had a soul, and if I thought it was somewhere over the mid-Atlantic, at least I could take comfort that it was on its way, like a wayward suitcase. I have the hollowed-out feeling of having lost something without the confidence that it will return. Or that it will return in the same shape without burst zippers or having been plundered in some lost luggage room.

Gibson also helpfully informs the reader that "Jacques Cousteau said that jet lag was his favorite drug" (12). I have been trying to adopt this cheery perspective but when I repeated it to a fellow conference attendee she responded that Cousteau must have been into downers.

If only jetlag were that simple. And consistent.

I hasten to add here that I am not complaining and that I realize how infuriating it would be if I were. I'm just trying to describe an experience.

A cacophony of voices all around, scraps of which stay with me and roll through my head. Naomi, a Japanese woman I met in London, and her precisely inflected English. Half a dozen Scottish voices, friends of my cousin, and here at this conference: David, Al, Stuart, Charles, Stephen. A PhD student here at Leeds whom I had tentatively identified as Canadian but then who moved south, and west, with each word she spoke. Karin, a German woman I spoke with for a long time yesterday. And the quiet relief of Elspeth's voice, Elspeth from Saskatoon. Who would have thought it was such work to speak and listen to one's own language? Especially when the rest of the world so thoughtfully learns it in order to save us the trouble of really having to make an effort?

There have also been moments of excitement, of consciousness of stretching, of disappearing boundaries, and strange impulses to transparency. And moments of happy recognition: the skies; the hedgerows; hell, the paving stones. I never feel so North American as when I am here, but I know this place, from my own visits but also refracted through my parents' stories of the 1930s, the 1940s, the 1950s. I suppose in some ways I know it better than they, as they don't — can't, or won't — understand it now.

But back to the original subject: perhaps Cayce is right, after all: the cord which attaches me to the Jinker Boy is stretched painfully (for me if not for him: his dad reports he is happy and busy; his nonna reports he is eating and sleeping well, is quiet and good. But quiet isn't good!). Me, I am noticing all strollers, all babies, all toys and children's clothes in store windows, all playgrounds. And I won't be going home for another ten days. What was I thinking?

¹ Adam Roberts notes that this conceit is not original to Gibson.

Excerpt from a telephone conversation with the Jinker Boy, 13/7/04:

JB [in background]: I talka Mummy! I talka Mummy! [thumping noise]
Me: Hi, baby!
JB: Mummy! Ottopus!
Me: Did you go to the Aquarium?
JB: No! Piderman!
Me: [beat] Oh! You played Spiderman with Daddy?
JB: An Beaderbarka!
Me: [beat] Peter Parker?
JB: Beaderbarka an Piderman!
Me: [beat] You saw the movie Spiderman?
JB: Yiss! Daw Piderman Daddy!
Me: Daddy took you to see Spiderman?²
JB: Yiss! Ottopus!
Me: [beat] Wasn't it scary? Weren't there bad guys?
JB: No! Good guys!
Me: Can I talk to Daddy, honey?
JB: No!

² You, the little sweetie who was frightened at Shrek 2?

On going to Haworth on July 14, 2004:

The conference organizers arranged a trip to the village of Haworth, which is about an hour from Leeds. A busload set off, many of us making snide, self-conscious comments to each other about the silliness of such literary pilgrimages. And Haworth is very commercial, with a Villette Coffee House where I had a rather hard bun and a cup of tea (just like the food at Lowood!), and the Ye Olde Brontë Tea Rooms. And there were some howlers at the Brontë Parsonage Museum itself, like the careful preservation of some doodles on the nursery wall even though the adjacent plaque admits that none of the Brontës had done them. But I was brought up short when I came to the kitchen, saw papers and a tiny book on the narrow table, and read that Emily Brontë had worked at learning German while baking the bread. And again: upstairs in a display case there is a tiny, white embroidered bonnet, made by a friend in anticipation of Charlotte's baby, a baby that was never born because Charlotte, the last of the Brontë siblings, died while only three months pregnant at the age of thirty-nine. Downstairs there is a temporary exhibit of artifacts from Emily and Charlotte's time in Brussels, with letters from Charlotte to M. Héger that were too painful to dwell on. And though some of us were decrying the mild weather and the lushness of the countryside, if one squints away from the souvenir shops and the flower boxes, one can almost imagine what it might have been like in that small stone village in the 1850s. Then, to make the day perfect, as we walked back to the bus the clouds gathered and lowered, and the wind picked up.

Okay, but I didn't kiss the ground.

Haworth webcam: enjoy literary history while in your underwear.

Leeds webcam: no muss, no fuss!

July 11, 2004

Day 2

Didn't get my ass -- sorry, arse -- in gear in time to get to the shops to buy an adapter and so am typing this on my cousin's &*#&ç!! French keyboard. Off to a Portuguese restaurant for dinner; had Chinese last night. This isn't the London in which my father grew up, that's for sure.

Talked to Joe and the Jinker Boy on the phone earlier:

JB: Hi Mummy!
Me: Hi baby!
JB: Bwok pardee!
Me: You went to a block party?
JB: Fiwah twuck!
Me: There was a fire truck there?
JB: Yiss! All da kids!
Me: There were lots of kids there?
JB: Yiss! Sweep alone!
Me: You slept alone last night?
JB: Daddy sweep alone!
Me: Daddy slept alone?
JB: Yiss! Mummy go werk!
Me: Mummy's gone to work?
JB: Yiss! Bye-bye! See you lader!
Me: Bye-bye, baby; miss you!
Joe: Huh?

June 28, 2004

We went to the beach today

Finally, a lovely day. We set out for New River Beach to meet some friends. The ride was smooth until a couple of kilometres before the turnoff to the park, when traffic came to a standstill. We finally arrived at the entrance only to find traffic cops directing people to park along the highway and walk in; the annual sand sculpting contest was today. Under other circumstances that would have sounded like fun, but between us we have three children aged one to four, not to mention one bouncing Schnauzer, and we feared for the sculptures. So, we turned around and headed back to Saint John and one of the beaches at the Irving Nature Park, the kids dug a hole to China and tried to pull the dog into it, and a good time was had by most.

What we missed:

[Click for larger image]

Photos from 2002 and 2003 by J. Gordon Anderson.

Elsewhere:

Moss Beach Sandcastles, September 13, 2003.
Sandcastle Festivals.
Sand Castle Central: from the basics to the spectacular.
The Queen of Sandcastles.
Sultans Of Sand.
Sandcastle Basics.
Sandcastle Insanity.
The Physics of Sandcastles. From NASA!

June 15, 2004

Some bookish stuff

wood s lot has some links about the passing of Canadian publishing legend Jack McClelland (here's the CBC story).

More on comics, something practical this time: From James Sime: "Listen up, Mr. and Mrs. Comic Industry Professional, your comic book covers are killing your books" (via Bookslut).

Making rejection public: Everyone Who's Anyone, Gerard Jones' site, and Deb Central, a new site from Deb Schwarz, both chock full of rejection letters and cheeky responses (via MoorishGirl). These two are clearly on a roll.

The Official Eric Carle Web Site (via Plep).

The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.

4000 Years of Miniature Books (also via Plep).

AbeCedarium: An Exhibit of Alphabet Books (via Plep).

OneZeroZero: A Virtual Library of English Canadian Small Press and Atlantic-Poetry Pages (via wood s lot).

June 14, 2004

Spare the rod

Years ago I visited the Osborne Collection, when it was still on University Ave., with my 18thc women writers graduate seminar. I won't soon forget the story of the little girl who wanted the pretty coloured vase instead of sensible shoes: her mother bought her the vase, which turned out to be plain glass filled with coloured water, and she wore her too-small shoes, full of holes, all through that winter. Bet she learnt her lesson. Surprised Gorey missed it.

moleskinerie links to a wonderful website, Victorian Children's Activities: a digital collection of pieces from the Osborne Collection that showcases pop-ups, theatres, and other movable books.

June 07, 2004

Say it ain't so

Sally ate a chipmunk this morning (she was chasing the cat, who apparently dropped it. Bonus!) We were all outside and Joe tried to get the thing away from her while I tried to distract the Jinker Boy.

JB: "What's wrong with the chipmunk Mummy?"
Me: "It's sleeping."
JB: "What's wrong with the chipmunk Mummy?"
Me: "It's not feeling well."
Joe, from across the garden: "My god, she bit its head off!"

May 28, 2004

The author/the work

Jessa Crispin posts the following:

Acclaimed children's writer William Mayne has admitted to sexually abusing children forty years ago after accusations started to build. Now parents and bookshops are trying to decide what to do about the books.

According to Catherine Bennett in The Guardian, there is already a growing reaction (booksellers deciding not to stock; publishers "postponing" planned editions).

Will anyone, having read [the] details, want to read stories by Mayne again? Or want their children to read them? Even if they are innocent as can be, his stories for younger readers, about a bobbed, big-eyed seven-year-old called Netta, can hardly escape being contaminated by the interest we now understand he took in eight-year-olds. Then again, a book cannot be judged by its author. Lewis Carroll's pictures of naked girls do not stop us reading Alice. Eric Gill's carvings weren't shrouded after the revelations of incest and bestiality. Michael Jackson's albums are still on sale. Mayne's achievement of 60 or so titles, written over half a century, remains what it was when Philip Pullman admired "the rare and intense quality" of his work; when a panel led by Anne Fine awarded him the 1993 Guardian Children's Fiction Award, and when the TLS described him as "the most original good writer for young people in our time."

Though Michael Jackson's may not have been the best name to invoke, Bennett gamely continues,

If his crimes did justify the purging of every Mayne title from public display, this would be a precedent, surely, for reconsidering the position of all sorts of authors, from William Burroughs, (killed his wife) and Jeffrey Archer, (sentenced for perjury) and Malory (rape) not to mention a reassessment of the claims of numerous misfits and demi-creeps ...

then adds provocatively,

Arguably, if the best children's writing emerges from a special, unusually powerful connection with childhood — sometimes through a personal inability to leave it behind — then the best children's authors are always likely to include the significantly messed up. It almost amounts to a qualification.

She goes on to argue that his books are a "good" result of his interest in children, but qualifies her defence by noting a tendency in the books to "echo, for an adult reader, Mayne's real efforts to establish private complicities and relations with children behind the backs of their families."

This discussion resonates with a discussion some weeks back about Orson Scott Card (here, here, and here), and the possibility of separating a writer's work from their other actions. In Mayne's case, I suspect, fewer will defend that divide quite so vehemently.

Me? I haven't seen a Woody Allen film since his thing with Soon-Yi went public.

Update (1:11am): Coincidentally, The Rake's Progress affirms that yes, a "bad man" can be a good poet, in a post called "Find me a well-adjusted poet and I'll show you a Hallmark employee." In reference to Philip Larkin, though, who just seems to have been cranky.

May 09, 2004

Sunday in the garden

Notice the two daffodils? (Look closely). We're very proud of them...

May 01, 2004

Happy Mayday

The Kingston Peninsula Farmers' Market opened for the season today, so we drove out, met some friends, and had a huge fried breakfast. Then we all went back to one of our houses, relaxed on the porch, and ate cheese and bread from the market with a cheeky little cheap zinfandel. Or pink lemonade, depending. An idyllic day.

April 29, 2004

Children's books

A couple of days ago, E. at Reading to my Kid posted a list of children's books with the same instructions as the last book meme: bold the ones you have read. Below the fold I replicate her list, followed by additional titles that we like:

Update (30/4/04): Perhaps we're barking up the wrong tree with all these beautiful books; CNN reports, "'Poop fiction' big hit with kids." Inelegant link from Mark Sarvas.

Another update (6/5/04): milk factory joins the conversation. Be sure to read the comments for other book suggestions.

Millions of Cats, by Wanda Gag
Angus and the Ducks, by Marjorie Flack
Caps for Sale, by Esphyr Slobodkina
The Man Who Didn't Wash His Dishes, by Phyllis Krasilovsky
Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel, by Virginia Lee Burton
Babar, by Jean de Brunhoff
Madeline, by Ludwig Bemelmans
The Runaway Bunny, by Margaret Wise Brown
Green Eggs and Ham, by Dr. Seuss
Bread and Jam for Frances, by Russell Hoban, illus. Lillian Hoban
Harold and the Purple Crayon, by Crockett Johnson
A Hole is to Dig, by Ruth Krauss, illus. Maurice Sendak
In the Night Kitchen, by Maurice Sendak [amazing]
George and Martha, by James Marshall
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, by William Steig
Harry the Dirty Dog, by Gene Zion, illus. Margaret Bloy Graham [check out the other Harry books, too]
Blueberries for Sal, by Robert McCloskey
Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, by Charlotte Zolotow, illus. Maurice Sendak
Ira Sleeps Over, by Bernard Waber
A Color of His Own, by Leo Lionni [a rainbow message for those who pay attention to pronouns]
A Whistle for Willie, by Ezra Jack Keats
The Beast of Monsieur Racine, by Tomi Ungerer
Strega Nona, by Tomi De Paola [one of our favourites]
Eloise, by Kay Thompson, illus. Hilary Knight
Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What do You See? Bill Martin Jr., illus Eric Carle [Jinker boy also likes Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What do You Hear?]
Freight Train, by Donald Crews
Frog and Toad are Friends, by Arnold Lobel
Jamberry, by Bruce Degan
First Tomato, by Rosemary Wells
Hondo & Fabian, by Peter McCarty [Lovely soft pencil drawings]
My Friend Rabbit, by Eric Rohmann
Tuesday, by David Wiesner
Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin, by Lloyd Moss, illus. Marjorie Priceman
Charlie Parker Played Be Bop, by Chris Rashka

And here are some titles that I would add:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Counting, colours, food, holes in the page: what's not to like? [View image]
Everyone Poops by Taro Gomi. Hilarious, earthy, matter-of-fact, and part of an excellent series about the body. [View image]. [This was on the list before I saw the CNN story.]
The Mole Sisters and the Moonlit Night by Roslyn Schwartz. And all the other Mole Sisters books; they're magic. [View image]
Doggies by Sandra Boynton. All of Boynton, in fact, though the following is also particularly good. [View image]
The Going-To-Bed Book by Sandra Boynton. "They rock, and rock, and rock, to sleep." [View image]
Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann. Be sure to look at the expressions on the faces of the animals. [View image]
The Mitten: A Ukrainian Folktale by Jan Brett. A beautiful artist; amazingly detailed images. [View image]
The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear. Another intricately painted Jan Brett book. [View image]
The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats. One of Keats' colourful urban tales. [View image]
Madlenka by Peter Sis. Wistful, evocative, fantastic story; intricate and beautiful art. See also Madlenka's Dog. [View image]
Beegu by Alexis Deacon. Baby's first sf. Wonderful story; wonderful art. [View image]
The Subway Mouse by Barbara Reid. Amazing plastercine art. [View image]
McDuff Moves in by Rosemary Wells & Susan Jeffers. First of this nostalgic series. [View image]
Gaspard and Lisa at the Museum by Anne Gutman & Georg Hallensleben. Part of a series. Witty; thick and colourful oil (?) paintings. [View image]
Cat and Canary by Michael Foreman. Magic tale of bird-friendly cat who flies over NYC.
Where's That Cat? by Stephane Poulin. Wonderful scenes of Montreal. See also Catch That Cat! [View image]

April 27, 2004

In the air

Rooting around in my backpack, avoiding marking, and found this little bear. Awhile back the Jinker boy got it from McDonald$. As far as I know he hasn't ever seen the Di$ney movie, but he took one look and said, "A Mummy bear!" I was taken aback, having nothing like this dressing gown in my closet at home (I assure you!), and chagrined, too, that the dress code is already so firmly entrenched: he's only three. But he was holding it and smiling, and then he brought it to his face and gave it a big kiss. So my "click" moment turned into an "aww shucks" moment.

(Maybe I could find some tiny little rollers for it.)

April 26, 2004

Some links

Poetry in your pocket (via Culture Cat).

Tracking kids with Lego writstbands (via slashdot).

Zombies are the new Republicans (via the chutry experiment).

A woman who says her iPod is better than her boyfriend (via Cult of Mac).

Screensaver mimics airplane window (via Cult of Mac).

Eats, Shoots & Leaves: a punctuation game (via forty.something. And no, you may not know my score.)

La Gringa asks, "What would Joan Jett do?" (W.W.J.J.D.?)

April 25, 2004

More on "breeders"

The Little Professor links to the Chronicle's live colloquy, "Single Professors, Isolated in the Coupled World of Academe," in which Bella M. DePaulo, the guest, answered most comments with some variation of "Thank you soo much for that important question! I really hope someone does some research on that!" Timothy Burkes says it best in his post, "cry me a river": he makes a clear and valuable distinction between a culture that may make some people feel like outsiders—"always worth discussing empathetically, as a human concern"—and bona fide inequality or injustice.

And sorry about the title of this post. Does the word "breeder" make your blood boil, too? It was used in the Colloquy by "Ms. (read Miss) Nettle, small liberal arts college" when she asked, "What is it about academe that makes it such a hotbed for breeders?" This is stunning news for most of the (young, untenured) parents I know who are reluctant even to talk much about their families for fear of seeming unprofessional. As someone who is up for tenure next year and who has also, since having a child three years ago, completely lost all those evenings and weekends she used to devote to work, I have been reading this whole debate slack-jawed.

But I don't for a minute think that DePaulo and Miss Nettled speak for more than a minority of single faculty. Most, I am confident, do not share this Thatcherite view of the atomized individual in competition with all others; most surely take the view that raising the next generation is something in which we all have an interest. If for no other reason than because, as the old joke goes, they'll be choosing our nursing homes.

Update (26/4/04): Apt. 11D has some new links.

April 22, 2004

Children and the academy

There have been a series of posts lately on the singles/parents divide between academics and related issues. Don't have time now to do more than list them as I am getting my kid ready for his first dentist appointment in about an hour. (Sorry, gotta go; continue without me.)

A little while ago Netwoman noted the difficulties of being a woman with children on the job search in her post about "The Mommy Candidate" in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Today, The Little Professor notes two other articles in The Chronicle: "Unmarried professors are outsiders in the Ozzie and Harriet world of academe" (huh?), and "Singing the Grad-School Baby Blues."

Laura at Apt. 11 D cites those same articles in a long and thoughtful post on the subject (with good links to the ongoing discussion in other blogs).

And, see this earlier post.

Update (5:16pm): Back from the dentist. The Jinker boy was a little prince. Chuck has an excellent post on the question of singles vs. marrieds in which he makes the crucial point that it is the competitive job market that is really at issue here, and is in effect turning us against ourselves. I heartily agree. There are some practically feudal aspects to the ways in which our profession is organized that affect all of us, no matter what our family status.

Update (23/4/04): the conversation continues at Apt. 11 D and Moment, Linger On.

Update (23/4/04): Brayden King adds his two cents, and concludes, "all workplaces need to do a better job of making room for the family." Samantha Blackmon is shut down when she takes issue with the idea of single people as "the last underrepresented minority on campus." And Liliputian Lilith reminds us of the impermanence of categories.

April 15, 2004

Just one more PEEEEZZ!!

Just found two blogs by literary mums: Magnificent Octopus, which led me to Reading to my Kid. I immediately blogrolled both. (Now if either of you ladies had a comments feature, I could have complimented you on your own turf... )

April 14, 2004

We're teaching him to share

Our exam period started yesterday, and my students have their first exam in less than an hour. Rather them than me; if I had to write anything more than my name this morning I would be in deep trouble. All three of us have the cold from hell — brought into the house by Typhoid Alex and passed around — and the worst of it is that he is feeling so rotten that none of us can get the solid night's sleep we all so desperately need. And he won't give up that damn soother, even with his little nose so plugged up!

Anyway, I'll go in there and try to keep my eyes from crossing, and hope no-one asks any hard questions.

April 12, 2004

We are Canadian, part 347

We went to a sugar camp today with some friends of ours, took a tour, and then had a breakfast of sausages and pancakes. The guide poured hot maple syrup on snow spread over a split log, and gave out popsicle sticks so that we could twirl it up and eat it. Delicious! The children, as you see, fell on it like locusts.

These are not the first New Brunswickers we have met who have found innovative ways — all of which seem to involve tourism — to continue leading some semblance of a traditional life.

April 10, 2004

Pre-school locker-rooms, Jesus on roids, and why Barbie really left Ken

Three posts from ms.musings:

A story pointing to Jill Storey's meditation on sensitive sons, "Act like a man" at Salon.com (sorry, subscription required, but the Ms. piece gives a good overview), and another on the hyper-masculinization of Jesus.

And, a young woman is awarded damages after being suspended from school for wearing a tee-shirt that read, "Barbie is a lesbian."

Update (14/4/04): Alas, a Blog has a thoughtful post on the Salon story.

April 09, 2004

Happy Easter to all, and to all, a good night

La Gringa has a scrumptious selection of links to strange and hilarious sites about marshmallow peeps. Go! Read!

My favourite peep, though, is still the one in

Addendum (11/4/04): Go to Boing Boing for a picture of "The Passion of the Peeps."

April 08, 2004

"Domestic blogs"

Laura at Apt. 11D writes about to Brayden King's recent post in praise of what he calls "domestic blogs" (less cutesy and more inclusive than "mommy blogs," I'll admit).

King links to a recent Times article, "The New Family Album: More parents are using online blogs to share photos, memories, gripes and advice with friends — and strangers." The article, while generally upbeat, has some exceptionable language:¹

Mommy blogs often take navel gazing to new and uninhibited depths, recording every aspect of parenthood, from the pregnancy blood test through the umbilical-cord clipping to the latest triumph in toilet training — complete with photographs, video clips and message boards.

"Navel gazing"??!!? Well, perhaps, but not at one's own navel. The article goes on,

Nobody tracks the number of family-oriented blogs, and estimates of the blogging universe range from 300,000 to 3 million sites, but by all indications, baby blogs are becoming more common. According to an October 2002 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, parents are more likely to be online than nonparents, and 53% of online parents say the Internet has improved the way they connect with family; 61% say it has boosted relations with friends. At Lycos, which is host to two blog sites, moms are regarded as the future. "The new blogging world skews female," explains Michael Sikillian, marketing manager for Lycos Web Publishing. "One day," he predicts, "every family will have a blog. Instead of putting drawings up on the refrigerator, you'll scan them into your computer and upload."

I like the idea of the blogging world "skewing female," though I would question the absolute correlation implied here between "female" and "domestic/family/baby." There are certainly lots of men who blog blog blog about their children, and many, many more women who blog about something else entirely. I would hope that the blogging world "skews" female—though skewing implies going off-course, when any right-thinking person can see that what is meant is moving on-course—because more and more women feel blogging holds something for them.

All of which brings me to the question of the categorization of this blog. I think scribblingwoman is pretty mixed. It's written by an academic with wide interests and a pre-schooler. It's not a "domestic blog," or a book blog, or an sf blog, and it's not always an academic blog. Every now and then I think of putting divisions in my blogroll, but just as I can't categorize this blog, I don't want to diminish others. Certainly some blogs are extremely focused, but many are not. King writes,

I prefer to think that although blogs may offer distinct kinds of content, domestic blogs can be just as intelligently-written and analytically precise as any other kind of blog. For a good example see Laura at Apt. 11D.

I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, I started to read Apt. 11D when I found it listed somewhere as an academic blog, and I know that many others position it in that way.

I think I will stick to my alphabetized blogroll.

Why do we have to keep reinventing the wheel, anyway? Has everyone forgotten Doris Lessing's The Golden Notebook, in which the protagonist kept differently coloured notebooks about the various aspects of her life? Disintegration ensued, until she realized what was happening and reintegrated her life, symbolized by her decision to use one notebook. (It's a very long novel so I'm sure I'm leaving something out. But you see my point. And without the trouble and expense of analysis.)

Anyway, the very name of this blog evokes the dismissal of early women writers as dilettantes, ignorant of learned and literary culture, dragging down the noble profession of "author" by their inclusion of the personal, the domestic, and the trivial. So you see, I have a mission.

¹ Dawn Friedman, who blogs at This Woman's Work and who was interviewed for the Times article, offers a quick correction to the way her remarks are reported.

Update (8/2/05): Well, I knucked under and introduced categories into my blogroll. But I agonized over it, I really did.

April 07, 2004

Gabriela Mistral

(1889-1957)

This via the always-interesting wood s lot: Ursula LeGuin translated a selection of the poetry of Gabriela Mistral, the only Latin American woman to have won the Nobel Prize for literature (in 1945). Mark Woods posts the following poem, one of several of which LeGuin includes both versions on her site, and I have reproduced it here because, well, it's been my reality too, for the last three years:

Song of Death

Old Woman Census-taker,
Death the Trickster,
when you’re going along,
don’t you meet my baby.

Sniffing at newborns,
smelling for the milk,
find salt, find cornmeal,
don’t find my milk.

Anti-Mother of the world,
People-Collector --
on the beaches and byways,
don’t meet that child.

The name he was baptized,
that flower he grows with,
forget it, Rememberer.
Lose it, Death.

Let wind and salt and sand
drive you crazy, mix you up
so you can’t tell
East from West,

or mother from child,
like fish in the sea.
And on the day, at the hour,
find only me.

from Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral, Trans. Ursula LeGuin (2003)

March 29, 2004

Kids on the internet

Liz Lawley at mamamusings writes about negotiating between trust and safety when one's children use the internet. Tracy Kennedy at Netwoman and Fiona Romeo pick up the discussion. Romeo writes about

facilitating a type of parental involvement that leaves space for children's privacy. Much of our recent work has been directed towards learning where the boundaries lie: when does parental monitoring cross the line from being something that makes children feel looked-after and safe, to something that feels like having their pockets searched? This is a very difficult balance to strike, and I think we need to learn from some of the ways parents mediate their children’s contacts and communications in everyday – mostly offline – life.

This sounds commonsensical. Of course, many parents don't manage very well off-line, either. But is the internet substantially different from the rest of life? Do we need to invent new modes of parenting for new technologies? Is our job as parents qualitatively different from that of previous generations? I am inclined to think that it is, but not just because of something as relatively clear-cut as the internet, or more specifically, danger on the internet. Sure, that's part of it, along with globalization, global warming, advanced monopoly capitalism ... the twenty-first century, in fact. We have to find new ways of parenting in so many ways.

Addendum (1:44pm):

Here is a barely-there image of a drawing Harry G. Peter did for Wonder Woman comics: it depicts a little boy shaking his fist at a retreating man and saying, "Scared o'me, huh?" while Wonder Woman twirls her lasso in the background. It is meant to indicate my idealized protective relationship with my child. The question is, I suppose, what does the lasso represent? More than software.

March 22, 2004

Motherhood

There was a thread at Crooked Timber a couple of days ago that picked up on a post from Laura at Apt. 11D about The Mommy Myth, by Susan Douglas and Meredith Michaels, in which she wrote, "

One of the pressures (there are others) on the work of the previous generation of feminists comes from child experts, not Dr. Laura. Attachment parenting and Baby Mozart are pressuring women to leave the work force and forcing feminists to think up new solutions.

She doesn't have comments on her blog, but there were a number of interesting comments at Crooked Timber, most of them rejecting child experts and their books. As I said there, I would make a clear distinction between the attachment parenting advocated by the Sears, and Penelope Leach.

This is the second on-line conversation about child-rearing that I have backed away from. Defensiveness, in part, probably. But also, this is one of the few subjects that ... well, it's not academic.

Anyway, Jessa Crispin at Bookslut has a succinctly worded link to a Salon article about Maternal Desire: On Children, Love, and the Inner Life by Daphne de Marneffe, apparently about, in part at least, the joys of staying at home and parenting. I haven't read it and likely won't, though I am intrigued by the title and would be more than interested in a meditation on maternal desire; perhaps I will have to write my own. But the shouldas, the oughtas, explicit or merely implied ...

It's a conspiracy.

Addendum (24/3/04): Jessa Crispin links to another article on Daphne de Marneffe, and then appeals to someone to "write a decent book about childlessness."

Owlet vocabulary

It's been so long since I've done any linguistics, and even if I could remember the notations I doubt I could reproduce them on this keyboard. But I can say that I am in awe of his Nibs' ability to introduce the most amazingly drawn-out diphthongs whenever he encounters a vowel. He loves vowels; he chews them and rolls them over his tongue; consonants are trickier, but he is game to try.

"a-mah-no" = "tomorrow"
"meeeew-zik kwaass" = "music class"
"Saad-yi" = "Sally"
"paaar-di" = "party"
"So fuuuuddy" = "That's funny"
"happy bird-ay" = "happy birthday" (also "candle"; "flame")
"Oowl-lix" = "Alex"

Addendum (23/3/04): How could I forget "Boom-ba" for "Grandpa"? And upon reflection, "happy bird-ay" is more "appy dird-day."

March 10, 2004

Last of the reading week posts

5/3/04/9:44pm

Playgrounds of NYC

In partial fulfillment of my promise:

Here is the Jinker boy in Union Square playground while Mummy and Daddy are spelling each other off to make book-buying runs to nearby Barnes and Noble:

Here he is in Juniper Park in Queens:

Here he is in one of those oversized hamster runs, where he was taken as a birthday treat by his aunt and uncle. He loved it, of course; we could only extract him with the promise of cake and presents waiting at home and even then he howled like a monkey:

And here is a shot on the promenade at Brooklyn Heights,

(me, Jinker boy, our friends Jeremy and Danielle) on the way to the playground,

just before a downpour.

6/3/04/12:10am

This going without web access, cold turkey, is rough! I could make more of an effort to get some access, I suppose, but time is tight. We'll be out tomorrow; perhaps I can finagle an hour at an internet cafe from Joe, in exchange for ... what? Being so wonderful to all his family? Yeah, that's it! For being so wonderful!

[Never did, of course. But then, wasn't all that wonderful.]

March 09, 2004

Non-posts for the past ten days

Thurs. Mar.4/2:36pm

Report: The PowerBook G4

I love the way the keyboard feels: crisp and light, cool to the touch. Metallic keyboards are the way to go. I also love that it is an expanded keyboard. And the backlighting is a sleek, high tech version of glow-in-the-dark bugs stuck to the ceiling: I love it.

Nice big screen. Speakers better than last PowerBook. And it's so fast: none of those horrible straining sounds.

One quibble: when I first went to open it I was confused; the apple on the lid is upsidedown. Then I realised: the logo is no longer for me; it is a public message. On some level this disconcerts. It seems so ... so ... self-promoting.

My Mac, c'est moi.

Haiku for NYC

Fetal buds amidst
grey leaves, organic exhaust,
debris. Breathe deeply.

5:44pm

Sleeping

I used to be a particular sleeper. Needed my own Obusforme pillow. Couldn't sleep if any lights were on, and never travelled without my sleep mask (a friend called them my "Reuben Kincaid goggles"). Even light from outside coming in a window or under a door. I had to cover up the light from clock radios with a sock or towel. Also, I never travelled without ear-plugs, and even wore them at home when there was too much snoring. And, I had to be on my own side of the bed, no matter where the bed. If I ended up on the other side, I could not sleep until I poked and prodded my way back to where I belonged.

All that has changed. I now often go to sleep with two people snoring; I go to sleep with lights on, and sometimes even on the wrong side of the bed. I'm not sure whether to congratulate myself on this newfound flexibility, or see it as a symptom of ongoing exhaustion.

5/3/04/9:47pm

For someone who spills his drinks and foods with stunning regularity, the Jinker Boy is very fastidious about not wearing damp or stained clothing.

And, are three year olds capable of sarcasm? I reprimanded his nibs for making a mess and he ran about saying, "Big mess! Make a big mess!" in a tone that I can only describe as mocking.

February 24, 2004

U.S. Postal Service champions gay rights

Re. the Dr. Seuss commemorative stamp:

First Ernie and Bert, then Tinky Winky. But surely the world of Dr. Seuss is uncontroversial? Wrong.

February 22, 2004

Noted

Two from the Bookslut:

1. Japanese manga for girls and young women.

2. A commemorative stamp has been issued for the late Dr. Seuss.

February 20, 2004

Children on line

I have a dilemma about my progeny: specifically, about how, or even if, to refer to him in this blog.

Since he is the centre of the universe it would be somehow stilted and artificial to skirt around his existence. On the other hand, he may not appreciate his buddies being able, in a few years, to google a post about how cute his little toesies are. And there is the darker side of the web to worry about. This is not an anonymous blog.

I used to post photos of him to my home page long before I ever blogged, and I'm almost certain that the only people who ever saw them were my students, but even that started to seem risky.

I could use a pet name for him, one of those cutesy or witty names that many bloggers favour (and if any parents of Knat, the Little Man, or Smaller Baby are reading this, I mean to include you among the witty). Most of the nicknames I actually use are just plain silly, though — Monkey-butt, Booboo, Monkey-boy, Stinky-pants — so I'd have to think up something a little more distinguished. And original. Imagine! I found another Monkey-boy out there.

Addendum (5:04pm): I posted this somewhat abruptly, before a meeting. The second paragraph is not meant to imply that my students offer the risk. And the final paragraph somehow lacks closure. But then, so do my thoughts on the matter.

February 13, 2004

Valentines and cherubs

Two more from Maud Newton:

1. An on-line test of romantic literary knowledge, from The Guardian. No doubt because I am a dix–huitièmiste (the Age of Enlightenment and Reason, don't you know), my score sucked (6/10). Oh well.

2. A link to some eerie photographs by Loretta Lux. Be sure to scroll down and view the portfolio. Beautiful in themselves (and why are all these children so pensive?), and interesting because of the way they have been structured, with a somewhat classical, slightly surreal, painterliness. And for the ways in which, as Stephany Aulenback suggests in her post, they play with conventions of idealized childhood. It is this aspect of the photographs that makes them eerie, and at times uncomfortable. The boy with the ruff (Trolls 1, 2, and 3 on this page): just the barest of allusions to things unsavoury, but enough to unsettle.

And no doubt this is the parent in me speaking. I had a more jaundiced eye, once.

February 12, 2004

A couple of things...

My new

arrived today and I'm too excited mucking around with it to think straight, but here are a couple of things:

Brian Weatherson at Crooked Timber writes about gender neutral language and why it's okay to use "they" for the singular.

The Books Every Educated Person Should Read post is up to 216 comments and 8 follow-ups. People cannot resist lists. (Or offering advice.)

Maud Newton links to Based on the Book, a "compilation of over 950 book titles, short stories, and plays that have been made into motion pictures" using IMDB.

feministe has a lyrical post on, among other things, putting young children to bed.

February 06, 2004

A couple of book links

Two links via Maud Newton:

Pop-up and Movable Books from the University of North Texas: A collection of fabulous old books.

(Do you like pop-up books? I do, and Little Bump loves them. And he is finally at an age when he can restrain himself from ripping them to shreds. He particularly loves Jan Pieñkowski's Monster Pops. Last summer I bought him a copy of L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz illustrated by Robert Sabuda, but that's still on the high shelf.

Second link: Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe is out, both on paper and electronically. This is the second novel Doctorow has released both ways; his first, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (2003) is also available on-line and from fine bookstores everywhere. Doctorow writes,

[H]ere is the book as a non-physical artifact. A file. A bunch of text, slithery bits that can cross the world in an instant, using the Internet, a tool designed to copy things very quickly from one place to another; and using personal computers, tools designed to slice, dice and rearrange collections of bits. These tools demand that their users copy and slice and dice — rip, mix and burn! — and that's what I'm hoping you will do with this.

What does this mean, though, alongside the safety of the fixed book version? Though I suppose one could slice and dice that as well.

January 28, 2004

Cats and rats and elephants

Kathleen Fitzpatrick at Planned Obsolescence mentions that poem by Shel Silverstein (yes, Matt, it is by him; here's a link to the text and the Irish Rovers' recording) about the feckless unicorns who get left behind when Noah closes up the ark.

Some friends and I, all parents, particularly love Jan Brett's children's books; she does these exquisite paintings. I told these friends that she had done a book of the Noah's ark story but they were not about to run out and buy it. They said they thought it was a cruel story and I suppose, from a child's perspective, that it is. What happens to all the other animals, the ones not chosen? I've always thought that the unicorn song was sad, but really, the whole story is. All those other cats and rats and elephants, the ones who didn't make the cut.

I still may buy the book. But it might sit on the shelf with the little row of white Beatrix Potter books that I love but am reluctant to read at bed-time.

January 23, 2004

One day, in Teletubby land...

Everyone knows that Jerry Falwell claims that Tinky Winky is "promoting the gay lifestyle," right?

Though why he would think so, is anyone's guess.

(Here is the scoop from theory.org.uk.) And here, via The Foo Blog, is someone so far out, Falwell looks almost reasonable in comparison: "TELETUBBIES: Nazi Hybrid Greys in Disguise" (you've been warned). No, wait; Teletubbies are part of a secularizing, goddess-worshipping conspiracy. Then there is the Teletubbies conspiracy site, which has to be a satire. Has to be. Almost certainly satiric is this site about the species Teletubby (Tubbis tele).

I have been meaning to post on the Teletubbies for awhile now. The Pinocchio Theory offered some incisive Tubbie analysis awhile back. And then I was pushed over the edge when my mother, watching with Alex, suddenly noticed that Dipsy has darker skin than the other three, and said, "That's odd; I thought they were all one family." I, on the other hand, have always assumed that they are some sort of anarcho-syndicalist commune (this reading of the show as a hotbed of progressive ideology is backed up by the interpolated vignettes of multi-racial groups of children—real children, whose socks fall down, not the polished automatons on Barney—and the episode in which the mummy of the little girl with the puppies is casually revealed to have a tattoo). The Pinocchio Theory post is worth quoting in full:

I watch Teletubbies now and again with Adah (who is now 15 months old), but I have to admit I love it more than she does. I think it’s the most brilliant kids’ TV show that I have ever seen (or at least, that I have ever seen as an adult).
Teletubbies is pure bliss.The show has a formal elegance rare for TV: a minimalism as rigorous as those of early Philip Glass or late Samuel Beckett. The beginning and end of the show are always the same: the baby-sun rising, and then setting, with the Teletubbies saying hello and goodbye respectively. Once the sun has risen, the Teletubbies run away over the hills; and a voice emanating from one of those tubes that rise out of the ground asks: “Where have the Teletubbies gone?” This enigmatic question is never answered: it is always followed by a series of abstract scenes, with multiple Teletubbies against monochromatic backdrops. There are only four Teletubbies, but they can be “everywhere,” thanks to their multiple instantiations in these abstract scenes. Other elements are repeated from show to show as well, like the mini-films of children around the world, broadcast through one or another of the Teletubbies’ tubbies; and my favorite, the twice-repeated (sometimes more) “Big Hug” that follows the offscreen narrator’s assurance that “Teletubbies love each other very much.”
I also love the puzzling non-narratives that sometimes happen in the latter part of the show: a piece of Tubby Toast is too big for Tinky Winky, Dipsy, or LaaLaa to eat, but Poe (the smallest) manages to eat it just fine. Or, the meadow is mysteriously turned into a big lake, then just as mysteriously back to a meadow again. Or, LaaLaa plays with her (?) ball inside because it has started to rain; but when the rain ends, she goes outside again. Even when these little stories seem like they are going to turn moralistic or didactic, they don’t, but stop short of having a point (I imagine this to be some Western child’s version of a Zen koan, but I don’t really know anything about Zen). Of course, other times there are no such pseudo-narratives at all; the Teletubbies just dance, or march around, or something.
The Teletubbies themselves intrigue me endlessly: it’s so hard to figure out whether their brightly-colored surfaces are skin/fur, or just costumes they are wearing (the seam on their backs suggests it is just a costume, but somehow it makes sense to me that this would be the form of their actual, pre-genital bodies). LaaLaa and Poe seem to be female, because they are smaller and their voices higher; Tinky Winky seems to be male (and gay, as Jerry Falwell claimed); Dipsy remains mysterious to me in this regard. But infantile or pre-genital gender is a strange sort of concept anyway; one thing that is good about the show is that this strangeness is retained intact (instead of being “normalized” by the absurd tyranny of boys-in-blue and girls-in-pink from the moment of birth).
I’m usually not a fan of minimalist art; but here the infantile content perfectly matches the form.

Further to the aesthetics of Teletubbies, via an old post on Law Blog: "Teletubbies inspire new style of jazz."

But are they good for you? Here, just as some have feared, is a photo of someone's baby being hypnotized. But despite what some people say, Teletubbies are educational. Pedro Vera describes how his little one has developed a sense of order and hierarchy from the Teletubbies:

Pedro has an incredible collection of Teletubbies. He has them in all sizes, both plushies and plastic. That is on top of the other zillion toys in the house.

Except for one thing: Regardless of where I find them in the house, I always find them arranged in the proper order that they are presented in the TV show:

1. Tinky Winky (Boy, Purple)
2. Dipsy (Boy, Green)
3. Laa Laa (Girl, Yellow)
4. Po (Girl, Red)

It is not that they are always in a perfect line (they never are) but that Pedro always sorts them by color. From where I am sitting right now I can see two sets setup that way, and I just saw in my own bedroom there is another set (huge plushies, 2/3rds of Pedro's height) arranged on the foot of our bed.

Surely this can only be a good thing.

And millions of viewers can't be wrong. There is quite a fan base out there. Here are links to 8 Track Diva's knitting patterns for Teletubbies projects (I love the hats). And paper crafts ("All projects require a toilet paper roll to complete"). And cupcakes.
Electronic tubby postcards from the Netherlands.
A webring.

Of course, not everyone likes them. This picture from the frisky Alive and Blogging is frankly disturbing, though I am not entirely sure why since I have worked out my own Tubbie taxonomy which includes a few of these elements (Dipsy=dipsomanic is a no-brainer). Must be the R. Crumb-does-the-playground idea. Mike Rogers would appear to have some serious Tubbies issues. Along with a nightmarish picture that is NOTHING like Teletubby Land, he offers a shoot-'em-up called "Teletubbies mercy killing." And here is another shooting game, though I couldn't figure out how it worked. But my heart wasn't in it.

Then there is the Teletubbies virus hoax and the Teletubbies quiz:

Uh-oh!

And finally (be still, my heart), one can buy one's own Noo Noo.

Tubby successors: Boobahs. On this side of the pond, watch for them Jan. 19 on PBS.

December 31, 2003

New Year's Eve

I sit at the computer, Joe is making pasta forno for our levee tomorrow, and Alex is (finally!) asleep in the car, in the garage, beside the baby monitor. We don't dare move him; long gone are the days when he would sleep anywhere, anytime. We spent the day ingeniously using up our last little pockets of credit to buy supplies for tomorrow, and tonight we are driving out Hampton way to spend New Year's Eve with some friends with kids, and the other people with kids they have invited. No doubt this message will horrify any of my students who happen to read it, but I have to say, I feel contented. My parents always got us a babysitter and went out to some organized dance with long tables covered in paper tableclothes, and we rushed down to the kitchen the next morning to find their party hats and favours (sadly anticlimactic so soon after Xmas). But if this night marks a passage, if it is a time to reflect and to hope, then who else to spend it with than Alex, our little life–changing event? And with other people who have crossed that great divide with us.

And we must enjoy his company while we have it; in several years the idea of spending New Year’s Eve with us, will horrify him.

Happy New Year.

December 29, 2003

I AM Canadian

Here is the little jinker boy (his grandpa's phrase) determined to go sledding despite the very mild weather here in Saint John. Lucky for him there is a decent patch of snow left in the back garden:

December 17, 2003

Out of the mouths

Two and a half years old Alex just said, of the cat, "Ow! Bites with the toes!"

August 30, 2003

Back in the saddle

Back from our various travels and madly scrabbling now so that I don't feel so—well, madly scrabbling—the first couple of weeks of classes. Spent the week putting course materials on WebCT, choosing better icons than the boring ones on offer, and finishing the move to the new, improved office.

New York is a different place with children along. Not only did we have Alex, 2 1/2, but some friends of ours joined us after the first week: two adults and their daughters, 4 and 1 (give or take). So we visited a lot of parks and playgrounds,

checked out the mummies at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,

and had a blast at the

(Long Island Children's Museum), where sometimes the kids have to drag the parents away from the music room, or the blocks.

Also did some book shopping, of course, and bought Alex some cute European outfits at Century 21—the kind of cute outfits that would get him beaten up in a few years so I had better indulge myself now.

Didn't get any work done while down there, though I dragged it along with me as usual. Did, however, read most of the previously mentioned Dozois anthology, which I enjoyed very much. Bought China Miéville's Scar, which I look forward to diving into perhaps at Xmas, as I doubt I will have much time for non–teaching related reading for the next three months. Have read two by him—King Rat and Perdido Street Station, both of which are excellent: well–written, original, compelling. The monsters in PSS are fascinating, and strangely sympathetic at points. In both novels the beings allied with the protagonists are often almost as dangerous as the bad guys; propbably not a coincidence that Miéville is political. PSS is ultimately quite bleak, for which it has been criticised by some, but hey, life can be bleak. It is good for us as readers to have our knee–jerk desire for a completely happy ending frustrated every now and then. And it's a real pleasure to find novels that I can unreservedly share with my 88 years old dad; he really likes Miéville for his evocations of London and his creation of fantastical, London–like, New Crobuzon (Dad is originally from London. After reading the two novels, he finally saw an author photo of the shaved–headed, earringed, twenty–something Mieville, and said, "That's more or less what I expected.")

Click photo for an interview from 2001 with Cheryl Morgan for Strange Horizons.

July 14, 2003

Birth: A Literary Companion

I am half way through a wonderful collection: Birth: A Literary Companion, edited by Kristin Kovacic and Lynne Barrett (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 2002). I am reviewing it for the Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering so I won't go on at length here, except to say

that it is intensely engaging, and it has reawakened the dormant desire I have had since Alex was in utero to create art: to write, to paint: I came up with hundreds of plans, and even began to sketch out one of the writing pieces. I would like to finish it, and to write down everything I remember while I still can. That of course is the paradox, as now I have less time than ever. There is a piece by Margaret Atwood in the collection, and (I am going to misquote here) she writes that the reason that women forget is not the pain, but because the whole experience is outside language. No doubt it is true that we must be able to articulate something in order to remember it. What the editors write, in the introduction, that they wanted to do—and I think they have succeeded admirably—was to collect some articulations of the birthing and parenting experiences, as a sort of public service to expectant parents. Though I'm not sure that I would have appreciated it while I was still pregnant or in those early days when I felt like I'd fallen off a cliff; or, at least, I am appreciating it differently now that I can reflect back from a quiet distance. Though perhaps "quiet" is the wrong word...

July 11, 2003

two down...

Just sent off the second of four reviews that I have due, of Science Fiction, Canonization, Marginalization, and the Academy, edited by Gary Westfahl and George Slusser (Greenwood Press). I'll put it up on my web page after it's been out for awhile (if they still accept it, that is; it's pretty late.)

The summer is slipping through my fingers. I had hoped to clear up the small projects I had pending by the end of May, or mid-June at the latest. And here I am, still plugging away. And it's not as though I havn't been busy, because I have. The difference is Alex (my 28 months old son). It is almost impossible to do any work when I'm not actually in my office; having him has certainly brought home to me—and to Joe (Alex's father; my partner)—just how many hours a week we actually used to work B.A. (before Alex). That's the thing about academic work: to a large extent it consists of things you would likely be doing anyway, in one form or another, and so you tend to lose track. Certainly reading and writing, though I suppose, in a perfect world, there would be fewer committees and less marking.

I can work myself up into a state of anxiety about all the tasks I need to do, but the fact is that having Alex has changed my centre of gravity. Other things tend to shrink into the distance. Today he had a late nap and when he got up he was crying, inconsolable. He insisted that I hold him, but he wouldn't let me sit down; I had to stand and rock him. We offered him different foods and drinks, but he rejected them. We finally realised that he was so hungry that he couldn't eat; he had a very small lunch, and then played, and then had a long nap. Once we got some banana bread into him—his favourite—he calmed down and was able to snack on some different foods. I didn't think about my "To Do" list from the time he woke from his nap, to fifteen minutes ago, when he went to bed.

Then, of course, there are the times when I am dying to get away to my laptop. But then once I am here, I am often too tired to be productive.

My mother always said to have them young so you have more energy (she was 35 when she had me), but I think that the trade-off is patience. Joe and I are very patient with Alex. Some might call it "lax," but that's just semantics.