tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-311060562024-03-05T17:15:21.444-08:00the moving castlechildren's and YA literature, film and culture (and a little bit more)kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.comBlogger225125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-85256211244068338682016-11-11T19:32:00.004-08:002016-11-11T19:32:39.719-08:00how to help: an idea<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Here is my idea for an app. If I had clue one how to
actually make it, it would be done by now. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Call it, for now, Safe With Me. It’s like a cross of Uber,
Grindr, that meme about asking for “Angela” in a bar, and that guy who walks
with people.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
How it works: If you are feeling unsafe, anxious to walk to
your bus, being harassed in a crowd you can’t leave, need to go into a bathroom
in North Carolina, being bothered by creepy guys and so on, pull up the app.
Put out a call for help – it will maybe have options to signal what your
particular instance calls for (ie, I’m a transwoman who wants an escort to the
ladies’ room, I’m a Muslim guy waiting for the bus). The app will show you the
nearest Safe Neighbors (or whatever they’ll be called). The people who have
signed up to be Neighbors/escorts/helpers get pinged, check your position, and
respond. Ideally, two will show up (to thwart terrible people using it as a way
to target vulnerable people). Once you make contact, you deactivate your call
for help, and the Neighbors/helpers walk you to your destination, wait with you
until your bus comes, tell those guys to stop harassing you, etc. Users must
post a photo, to assist in identifying each other, and will have some kind of
small insignia/logo/something that they can show as a Safe Person. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s like an electronic version of the safety pin, a way for
people who need help to get it, and for people who want to help to provide it. Anyone
registered/signed up can ask for help or provide it. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Possibly an adjunct feature would be “emotional help”
needed. If you’ve experienced abuse, harassment, received a threatening note,
otherwise feel shaken and would like some support, you can connect with a
nearby emotional helper. Maybe it’s just a hug, five minutes to listen to their
story, a few comforting words, a walk to the coffee shop. Maybe it’s sitting
for coffee with the person. Who knows? Not quite sure how this piece would
work, but it may be useful. But the primary thing is to connect people in scary
situations with people nearby ready to help. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I've been thinking about something like this for months, actually, after someone online somewhere posted about the feelings of fear after leaving a Pride celebration in a not-too-supportive city - the fear of walking from the bus or subway alone, an obvious queer person, and feeling like a target. And I felt furious, because - this is where allies can DO SOMETHING. Not just write thinkpieces about being white or straight or whatever, but actually get OUT THERE and put our bodies and ourselves out there on the line, in a small way, to protect the ones we are allegedly allied to.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I want to use my white privilege to help keep people safe. I want to help keep people safe because that is the right thing to do. It is the neighborly thing to do. It isn't fair that I can, if I want, simply duck my head and ignore it all. I have been increasingly feeling the wrongness of doing that, and now, in the wake of what feels like a horrible nightmare election, I REFUSE to just put my head down. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Someone make this app. Someone do SOMETHING. I will be doing whatever I can, whenever I can, for anyone who needs me.</div>
kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-38334652026285503282015-02-28T21:55:00.000-08:002015-02-28T22:50:53.250-08:00Mister Rogers' Neighborhood at the Heinz History CenterPart of the set of <i>Mister Rogers' Neighborhood</i> is now permanently housed at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh. There was a special event for its opening: a talk by Eliot Daley, then visiting the new display after regular museum hours. The History Center looks like a very amazing place, and I really ought to check it out. The new Mister Rogers exhibit is quite well done - well-staged and wonderfully lighted, and if the waxwork(?) Mr Rogers figure isn't quite lifelike, well.....it's easy to turn away from it to look at the case of props, or King Friday's castle.<br />
<br />
Photos from the event below!<br />
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<br />kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-63462202770424012872014-11-29T22:11:00.001-08:002014-11-29T22:11:42.035-08:00white privilege has got to goAn article reposting <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/11/27/in-one-classroom-a-teacher-makes-michael-brown-the-lesson-of-the-day/" target="_blank">a blog by a </a>local (Pittsburgh) teacher, about engaging with his students about Michael Brown, Ferguson, the grand jury's spectacular failure. Teacher is white, class is largely "minority."<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"One boy asked me, “Why does this keep happening, Mr. Singer?”</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It was the question of which I had been most afraid. As a teacher, it’s always uncomfortable to admit the limits of your knowledge. But I tried to be completely honest with him.</blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
“I really don’t know,” I said. “But let’s not forget that question. It’s a really good one.”"</blockquote>
THIS makes me really, really angry. It's nice that this teacher acknowledged michael brown, and ferguson, even if he did write a self-congratulatory post about it. But if you don't even try to answer the question of WHY this keeps happening, you haven't done anything except emote. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, and has its place. But emotion alone doesn't get shit done. It doesn't change anything. The answer to WHY - which is, in a nutshell, centuries of institutionalized racism! - is not comfortable, because it makes every white person complicit. And dodging the answer to "Why" is itself a kind of complicitness. At the very least, it's white privilege of a kind I <a href="http://themovingcastle.blogspot.com/2012/06/how-not-to-read-racist-books-to-your.html" target="_blank">discussed here</a>.<br />
<br />
Because we are. We benefit, every single day, from the oppressions of non-white people in this country. We have since before America was independent. We benefit from the historic oppression - slave labor contributed enormously to the economic development of the US, for starters. We benefit from years of Black people being denied the right to vote (because who gets elected? white people, who make laws and appoint people that serve white people's interests, because they are either outright racist, or are blind to the needs of Black/nonwhite people). All the weird-ass housing laws that kept Black people from owning homes in certain neighborhoods. All the jobs Black people weren't allowed to hold. All the underfunded, subpar schools Black children attended, segregated. It all adds up over time.<br />
<br />
Like I said a week ago, I'm really sick of the term "white privilege." I think it obscures what's really happening - because things like being able to walk through a store unaccosted by security guards, like buying a toy gun without being shot and killed, like seeing people who look, talk, and act like you on tv and in books - those things aren't really <i>privileges</i>. They are HOW EVERYONE SHOULD LIVE.<br />
Privilege means you have more than the norm. you are +1. Privilege is that guy with the gold-plated toilet seat or whatever it was.<br />
Privilege is having the manager greet you at the door, escort you through the store, jump you to the head of the line.<br />
<br />
One of the reasons stupid white people get all sniffy about "white privilege" (like this <a href="http://theprincetontory.com/main/checking-my-privilege-character-as-the-basis-of-privilege/" target="_blank">jackass from Princeton</a>) is because they don't see themselves as HAVING privileges. And many of them don't, to be honest. They have what all people should have, which is the ability to move through and in the world and be viewed as a fully human, fully normal, member of society. They don't have excessive riches, or important connections, or country club memberships, or summer homes on Martha's Vineyard, or whatever else marks the wealthy elite. A lot of white people <i>have</i> had to work hard, very hard, to get where and what they have. But the thing they - we - don't see or feel is that even in a life full of hardship, we are still benefiting from the color of our skins. And we are benefiting <b><i>at the expense</i></b> of very real, very human, non-white people. We always have been.<br />
<br />
Thinking of enjoying basic human rights as a form of privilege is a kind of red herring, I think. Rights, by definition, aren't privileges. And yes, when they are distributed or applied to only one segment, then that segment becomes "privileged" over others - but I still don't think privilege is the right word.<br />
<br />
White privilege makes it - of course it does - all about us, white people, again. It's about what we have. It's about <i>our</i> stories.<br />
<br />
What we need is a term that shows what effect our stories have on non-white people. We need a term that makes us not privileged, but <b><i>culpable</i>.<i> </i></b>We need terms that reveal the effects and stories of Black people without victimizing them all over again - so not calling them victims, or the oppressed, or disadvantaged (though those terms apply).<br />
<br />
I don't know what the word is. Or phrase. It isn't that we as white people are committing crimes - though some of us are, murdering police of this country I am looking right at you - against Black people. It isn't even that we need to be made to feel guilty (though we <i>should</i> feel some kind of guilt). We need to be made to see <b>and </b>feel that we are doing and benefiting from something very, very wrong, that was set in place before any of us were born, that we've grown up in, that we are a part of whether we think we are or not.<br />
<br />
The only word I can think of that describes the effect white privilege has on non-white people is <b>outrage</b>. I know "outrage" has other connotations, specifically rape, that is problematic. But "outraged" seems accurate, more or less, based on the blogs and posts and tweets and articles I've been reading. Weary, and outraged.<br />
<br />
I want a term that shows how our privilege comes at the expense of other people. I want a term that doesn't make it seem like we have something special, just by having basic human rights; I want a term that shows how those basic human rights are denied, again and again and again, to Black people. But I want that term to carry culpability. I want a term the makes really, really clear that the white world isn't the only world, and that it has been constructed, continues to be carried out, in ways that intentionally and otherwise hurt non-white people.<br />
<br />
I don't know how to articulate this properly, except to say I don't want the kind of privilege that means black kids can be shot dead for almost literally no reason at all. That I don't want to think of being able to walk across campus unharassed as a privilege - because it's a right. Civil <i>rights</i> movement, you know? But we need a word or phrase that makes explicit not what we're getting, as white people, but what we are <b><i>denying</i> </b>to nonwhite people. What our society has been denying to nonwhite people. <br />
<br />
Because what we've been doing, all these years, is NOT LISTENING. We have not been listening to the stories of Black people and Latino people and Asian people and Native people. We think we have been, but we've been doing that thing where you listen with half your attention, and cherry-pick words and ideas. And we're picking all the wrong words and ideas. We think we know what's up, and we don't. We really, really don't. In my last post, I mentioned a few examples of things I have learned, in the last 18 months or so, from some Black acquaintances and friends. Every new revelation was like a ton of bricks for me - I didn't <i>know!</i> and But that's insane/terrible! and - this is the big one!!! - I've never thought about that before.<br />
<br />
We need a word that takes our attention off our own enjoyment of basic rights, and focuses it on the things we've never thought about before. And the way - or <b>a</b> way - we do that is by getting out of our own, earnest, do-gooding way and let Black people speak for themselves. To themselves, and to us. Tell their stories, loudly, often, everywhere. If we're so dense as to need it spelled out, they can include an Aesop-like "and the moral of this story is" at the end of their anecdote about showing IDs, being stopped for driving while black, being followed around stores, being called names, being insulted, being the only one in the room who isn't white, and on and on.<br />
<br />
There are <i>lots</i> of stories. So many stories. We know some names right now - Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice - but for each of those boys (and they are boys, 'young men' is stretching it, a distinction I'm sure they would hate if they were alive to hear me make it) --- for each of those boys, there are dozens and hundreds and thousands of people, men, women, old, young, dead for centuries now, or only born since the millennium, who have story after story after story to tell. White people are not the heroes of any of those stories.<br />
<br />
But there are <b>so many</b> stories, and we've been allowed, we have allowed ourselves, to ignore them for far too long. We've been allowed to, have allowed ourselves, to make a mess, then close the door on the room the mess is in - because out of sight, out of mind.<br />
<br />
We need to mind. We need to be made to mind. I don't know what that will take, but I think it will have to be very loud and very big and very disruptive. It's the only way, I think, that white privilege will start to disappear as a thing of the present, and become a thing of the past, before we started listening -really listening - to other people's stories. Before we learned how we were hurting people, even when we didn't mean to, even when we didn't know we were doing it.<br />
<br />
Because we're hurting people. We're hurting a lot of people, and we're killing some of them. And that should not be anyone's privilege.kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-74991786266627336512014-11-26T11:11:00.000-08:002014-11-26T11:11:50.110-08:00it all depends on the skin you're living inThere's been a lot of chatter and anger and confusion and efforts at soothing in the children's lit world lately, after Daniel Handler's racist jokes at the National Book Awards, when he was introducing Jacqueline Woodson, who won for her <i>Brown Girl Dreaming</i>, a memoir, I think, though I have yet to read it (I am very, very far behind and out of the loop with children's & YA books this year). I haven't watched the video or read the complete text of Handler's remarks, because I don't need or want to know specifically what he said, because I can guess, from the dozens or hundreds or thousands of instances of casual racism I've heard over the years.<br />
<br />
Over on child_lit, this has been a hot topic of discussion, and I originally meant to stay quiet, to keep out of it, but then I kept seeing people - on list and elsewhere - use the word "mistake" to describe Handler's remarks, and I had to say something, and the something is pasted here.<br />
******* <br />
I've been thinking about this a lot because:<br />1)
I really, really like Lemony Snicket, and when Daniel Handler spoke in
Pittsburgh last year, he was phenomenally brilliant and insightful.<br />2)
I think a lot about race, and about all the things white people don't
know. The last year and a half, I've learned so many stupid, terrible,
hurtful, complicated things - many of them taking the form of what I
suppose would be called micro-aggressions - about specifically Black
experiences in the US that I am shocked at my ignorance and at the SO.
MANY????! ghastly ways white privilege (white power, white advantage -
privilege almost sounds too benign) makes itself felt against people who
are not white. <br />3) I'm fascinated by the ways we - and by we I
mean white people who study/read/love children's lit - are trying so hard
to reconcile those stupid-ass racist jokes with a writer and public
figure who, in so many other ways, is fantastically awesome. <br />
<div>
4)
I keep seeing Handler's remarks referred to as "mistakes." No, a
mistake is saying Jacqueline Woodward, instead of Woodson, or something
similar. It wasn't a mistake, but I also don't think it was intentional
-- I think it was a failure of consciousness that seems to me hugely
common and hugely worth thinking about.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
To ME
what seems most important - or at least most interesting - is that
actually the kinds of dumb casually racist jokes Handler made are made
ALL THE TIME, and very often by people who are really quite decent,
people who probably feel that they are anti-racist, or
liberal/progressive, or whatever you want to call it. But white
power/advantage/privilege *as a mode of thought* is so, so deeply
entrenched in so many small awful ways that, for most white people, it
really does not stick out the way more obvious racist *actions* or
statements do. <br />
<br />This isn't to let Handler off the hook, but to
say: we have A LOT to do. A LOT. It's not enough to be a white ally who
knows that "driving while black" is racist, or that just because we have
a mixed-race president, racism isn't over, etc. <br />We need - and
by "we" I mean white people who are, or want to be, allies - to sit
down and shut up and let the people who feel the effects of white
privilege explain to us *exactly* what they're feeling. Like:<br />
Don't
share all your good ideas in a meeting, because as the only Black person
in the group, you need to have a trick or two up your sleeve in
reserve, because you have to do twice as much to be considered just as
good as the white people.<br />Or: Black faculty wearing or
displaying prominently their faculty ID, so they don't get stopped by
cops and asked what they're doing walking around an Ivy League campus at
night.<br />Or: You have to wear your hair in just the right way,
that requires a lot of styling and work, because wearing it natural is
"threatening" -- and you might not get hired, or you might not get
promoted, if you look "too black." <br />Or: it's not really a great
discovery when a Black person discovers one of their ancestors was a
Famous White Man because, hey look, the Famous White Man owned slaves
and almost certainly ended up in the family tree via rape. <br /><br />Maybe
other white people think about this stuff all the time, but I kind of
doubt it. But Black people live this, experience this, all the time, and
we as white people are (mostly unconsciously) MAKING them experience
this. That needs to change. <br /><br />Which, I guess, is an incredibly verbose way of saying #WeNeedDiverseBooks.<br /><br />But
we also need to do more than crank out some Benetton-ad-style books. I
think we need to be shown all the things that white privilege has
caused, has created, all the things we, as white people, would never
think of (wearing my school ID visibly? NEVER ever ever crossed my mind
to do such a thing. Never crossed my mind that there could ever be a
reason why I'd need to do such a thing, why *anyone* would need to). The
diverse books - and films, and tv shows, need to do more than just
teach us all that Really, We're All Just People Living in This Crazy
World, or Black People: They're Just Like Us! or some gross heartwarming
cliche. <br /><br />Daniel Handler isn't exactly the problem; the
problem is the culture and ways of thinking that Daniel Handler is both a
product and producer of. And that means that WE are the problem.<br />
*********<br />
<br />
I'm tired of calling it white privilege. It's not a privilege, to me, to know that my friend has been stopped for driving while Black. it's not a privilege to be able to walk down the middle of a street at noon unaccosted, when a Black kid who does the same thing ends up with six bullets in his body, dead in a pool of blood on the road for no reason at all. It isn't a privilege to never have to ask myself "Did I get this job/bonus/gift/promotion/award just because I'm white?" While every day, non-white people are accused of "taking" jobs away from white people who were "more qualified" (because of their white skin, presumably), while non-white people have to worry in both directions: Did I get this because I'm black/brown/Asian/Indigenous? as well as: Did I <b>not</b> get this because I'm black/brown/Asian/Indigenous?<br />
<br />
One trick therapists use is removing the word "not" from patients' vocabulary. Because when you say "not," your brain - evidently - just erases the 'not' and focuses on the thing. So: I will not eat cake, in your brain, just becomes: I will eat cake. Or simply CAKE!!!!!!!!!! It's the "don't think about a purple hippopotamus" trick.<br />
And I think white privilege, as a phrase AND as a thing we live everyday, has been functioning as a "not."<br />
<br />
Calling it white privilege focuses on what we get. It doesn't focus on what non-white people lose, have taken, have <i><a href="http://stacialbrown.com/2014/11/24/for_tamir/" target="_blank">stolen</a>; </i>it doesn't focus on the fact that white privilege is actually <i><b>actively hurting and killing</b></i><b> </b>people, and that it is <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/grand-jury-reaches-decision-in-case-of-ferguson-officer/2014/11/24/de48e7e4-71d7-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html" target="_blank"><i>allowed</i> to do so. </a><br />
<br />
I don't want that kind of privilege. And I don't think that calling the ability to murder black children with impunity a "privilege" comes anywhere close to doing the work that needs to be done, the work of white Americans shutting the hell up, and listening, and feeling, and realizing that we've been benefiting from an almost-invisible (to us) rotten, nasty, system; and that, far more importantly than the benefits we barely see - FAR more important - we are <i><b>hurting people.</b></i> Hurting, and killing, real, actual, human beings.<br />
<br />
That's not privilege. That's abuse. And it doesn't matter if you are a white person who has never shot a black teenager, if you are a white person who grew up in poverty, a white person who never uses racist phrases or makes racist jokes, a white person who has A Black Friend - you, that is WE, are still causing harm.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
post title is a line from "Blink Your Eyes" by Sekou Sundiata. He performs it in this video; watch and listen.<br />
<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/6b6ydMA3tAM" width="420"></iframe><br />kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-4762209684305105132014-07-30T20:52:00.001-07:002014-07-30T20:52:37.191-07:00manic pixie dream boysSince I started really applying myself to reading YA, in spring/summer 2010, one of the tropes I find myself laughing/shaking my head at a lot is the New Boy whose hair falls into his (green) eyes, who is well-liked, popular even, but still enigmatic, who has Wisdom and Knowledge, probably from Sad Experience, who recognizes the flawed/broken heroine protagonist <i>as</i> flawed/broken, and still cares about her, and helps her recover from whatever her particular trauma is.<br />
This boy often has a name like Jake or Mason or Charlie or Connor. He is, as are the heroines, pretty much always white. He often has some kind of vaguely artistic or intellectual pursuit - perhaps he is always reading Russian literature, or taking photographs with an old manual SLR, or strumming a guitar. He is not a butch jock, but can often play impromptu games of basketball or baseball or soccer well, or maybe he goes for long solitary runs. His hair falls into his eyes. Possibly he has a dimple. Frequently, he loans a jacket or hoodie to the heroine, who then spends time smelling it and feeling comforted by it. Usually, he and the Heroine are at odds with each other, maybe put together by a science project or the school newspaper or an art assignment; they bristle at each other, they become reluctant friends, then of course realize they are In Love.<br />
<br />
He's a stereotype, a trope, and I think he is the male equivalent of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl - in other words, a function to change the course of the protagonist's life.<br />
Recently, the man who coined the term MPDG, Nathan Rabin, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2014/07/15/im_sorry_for_coining_the_phrase_manic_pixie_dream_girl/" target="_blank">apologized for it and wished t</a>o pull it from pop culture. I appreciated his reasons, but since I have <i>never</i> heard nor thought of MPDG in a positive way - it is always antifeminist, it always reduces the female to precisely a dream of the hetero male protagonist/viewer/gaze - I don't feel a need to pull it from circulation. I think it's a useful way of describing a specific trope that occurs very frequently.<br />
I don't know what the male equivalent of this should be called - he isn't manic, he's usually quite calm and collected; he isn't a pixie (but what is the 'masculine' equivalent of pixie?); he IS a dream; and of course, he's a boy, not a girl.<br />
He's not identical to the MPDG, either, because he plays a more serious role: he saves the heroine from self-sabotage. He doesn't bring sunshine and silliness into her life, he brings a life preserver and a solid rock to anchor it to. He is, ultimately, more important than the MPDG, because without him, the heroine would, perhaps, become suicidal, would die, would never identify the rapist/murderer who traumatized her, would never admit to, and seek professional help for, the psychological problems or mental illness from which she suffers. In other words, he saves her life - he rescues her, and he pushes her along to recovery, always standing by her side.<br />
In a lot of ways, he's actually quite like Prince Charming or any other knightly figure who swoops in to save the damsel in distress. He's just figured in a way that doesn't make him look quite so domineering. But he has the power/agency - without him, her story would not continue. Without the Dream Girl, the hero of the story will go on - perhaps boringly, perhaps with an unpleasant wife and children, but not suffering psychological torment or PTSD.<br />
<br />
I would like a term to identify this guy, so we can get him the hell out of there.<br />
I like a cute, intellectual boy with hair that falls into his green eyes as much as the next hetero girl, but he's a FICTION. Very few boys OR girls are as wise and sensitive as he is while they're in high school, or as willing to stick it out over the long haul while the girl is hospitalized with an eating disorder or whatever. But this is not the worst of the problem with him -<br />
<br />
The real problem is that <i>still</i>, even in books with smart, clever, interesting female protagonists, they need a Man to Save The Day. Why can't a heroine come to terms with her grief over accidentally killing her sister through a relationship with a good friend, or a mentor, or a cousin, or an aunt? Why don't any of her friends, or any of the women in her life, recognize her depression/trauma/helplessness? Why does it take the arrival of a mysterious, hot new boy for anyone to realize our Heroine is in trouble, unhappy, ill?<br />
<br />
Why do our female protagonists still need a man, even a teenage boy, to give them a sense of value, worth, purpose, place in life?kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-2174012416291970952014-06-24T21:04:00.000-07:002014-06-24T21:04:08.381-07:00AttributionHardly a new issue, but the abundance of quotes zooming around the internet that are not attributed, incorrectly attributed, inaccurately sourced or documented is immense, and infuriating. I hadn't seen this one before, though, and now I'm really annoyed.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTPIcdOpPijF-0K4IdV-V3y_lgN5BUOJP-BpQUdIoKyAV-QdH8s1Gd-A2S4XXHkjsGCAGGZ8RRwWLIa9OpNlFoh4Iu3oNSBG1CKYHnVOEq1RBDR08d2q-g6OC7I4Kmpy8dhBYM/s1600/have+i+gone+mad.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTPIcdOpPijF-0K4IdV-V3y_lgN5BUOJP-BpQUdIoKyAV-QdH8s1Gd-A2S4XXHkjsGCAGGZ8RRwWLIa9OpNlFoh4Iu3oNSBG1CKYHnVOEq1RBDR08d2q-g6OC7I4Kmpy8dhBYM/s1600/have+i+gone+mad.jpg" height="320" width="320" /></a></div>
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! In every place I've seen this where a source is mentioned, it is attributed to Lewis Carroll.<br />
NOPE.<br />
<br />
Those lines seem to be in Tim Burton's rather dreadful 2010 adaptation of <i>Alice</i>, spoke by the Mad Hatter and Alice, respectively.<br />
<br />
This particular image pairs the fake Carroll quote with one of John Tenniel's original illustrations for the 1865 publication of <i>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</i>. I also saw the quote with Tenniel's illustration of Alice talking with the Cheshire Cat, while he is perched in a tree. THAT illustration comes at the end of Chapter 6 "Pig & Pepper," and is when Alice and Cheshire Cat have their discussion about madness.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.<br />
"Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."<br />
"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.<br />
"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't be here."</blockquote>
<br />
Getting the attribution correct matters. Carroll didn't write the "Have I gone mad" quote. It's from a bad movie made four years ago. I knew it was wrong the moment I saw it, because I have read and/or taught *Alice* 300 million times (not an exaggeration). I know every line in that book absurdly well. And "bonkers"? come ON.<br />
It's quite easy to check the text, as well, if you don't trust me: the text is free on <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11" target="_blank">Project Gutenberg</a>, and you can do a find/search for the words from the quote. <br />
<br />
If you love the Tim Burton quote, fine! Just don't say it's from Lewis Carroll. If you want to quote the original Carroll text on the subject of madness, Alice's conversation with the Cat is perfect.<br />
<br />
Give credit where it's due. Care about accuracy. Words <i>matter</i>, and so do the people who write or say them.kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-13469544173295040822014-06-18T19:57:00.000-07:002014-06-18T20:05:27.481-07:00Grasshopper Jungle + No FutureI'm jumping happily onto the <i>Grasshopper Jungle</i> bandwagon; I read it over the weekend and loved it, of course. I love Austin and Robby as characters; I love Austin's histories; I love <i>Eden Five Needs You 4</i>; I love that this is a book that stars a bisexual teenager (bisexuals get short shrift everywhere); I love that sperm and balls are major plot points/motifs. I love that, very late in the book, there is a wonderful small clever joke referring to a whaling accident. I love that the book manages to be funny, anxious, deeply loving, dissatisfied, and completely horny all the time. I love that <b>everything</b> makes Austin horny. I am dying to teach this book already, though I anticipate students disliking the - what should I call it? omniscient isn't the right word - multidimensional? view and knowledge of history that Austin has, which is one of the things I loved most about the book. Austin is writing from a kind of 360 degree view of history - the only way I can describe how it felt to me as a reader is the way that certain video games and google street view and things allow you to rotate your view in every direction. Austin sees the past, the present, the future - they are both diachronic and synchronic. Everything is always happening, everything has always already happened, everything will always have happened. It's great and a bit dizzying. Andrew Smith has knocked everyone's socks (and Eden jumpsuits) right off with this novel, and all the praise he and the book have gotten are totally deserved. <br />
<br />
The thing I mainly want to say is that <i>Grasshopper Jungle</i> and Lee Edelman's <i>No Future</i> belong together. Late last night this occurred to me - the "no futureness" of the book, the dying Iowa town, all those lost balls and discarded sperm, the "unstoppable" everything, the fact that it is a record, as Austin tells us immediately, of the end of the world. There is a smidgen of reproductive futurity in the book, but not in a way that really makes the reader believe in that future. <i>Grasshopper Jungle</i>, with its gay hero Robby, and its bisexual narrator Austin, and the lurking megalomaniac Dr McKeon are all figures of non-futurity. What I find wonderful and curious is that Smith somehow makes this non-futurity seem, if not exciting or positive, then far from bleak. This is not an unhopeful book, though it is not a hopeful one, either. It is an exercise in synchronicity, in apophenia, in lines converging, crossing.<br />
But it is not for one moment a book where Our Hero takes the Romantic Interest by the hand, and steps out into the sunshine and into the bright new future. There is something Else in <i>Grasshopper Jungle</i>. I don't know what it is, exactly, other than queer, though queer doesn't seem totally accurate. It's been several years since I read Edelman carefully, and I don't have time to revisit him now, but I think if you put <i>No Future</i> and <i>Grasshopper Jungle</i> alone in a room together, some kind of exciting and intriguing critical reaction will take place.<br />
<br />
<br />kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-21344171475583401272014-06-10T23:25:00.001-07:002014-06-10T23:34:47.499-07:00If you liked The Fault in our Stars....A friend just asked my opinion on this list from <a href="http://mashable.com/2014/02/11/ya-books-the-fault-in-our-stars/?utm_cid=mash-com-fb-main-link" target="_blank">mashable of "9 YA Books To Read if You Loved The Fault in our Stars."</a> It's an okay list - <i>Eleanor & Park</i>; <i>Winger</i>; <i>Wintergirls</i>; <i>The Spectacular Now</i>; <i>An Abundance of Katherines</i>. I haven't read every title, but I've read a bunch, and read about a few others.<br />
<br />
But because I'm me, I made my own list of 13 YA Books To Read if You Loved The Fault in Our Stars, and it is:<br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0.$end:0:$0:0">*Jellicoe Road,* by Melina Marchetta</span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.0.$end:0:$0:0"> *Going
Bovine* by Libba Bray </span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">*Life As We Knew It* by Susan Beth Pfeffer (first in her Moon trilogy)</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0"> *Boy 21* and/or *Sorta Like a
Rock Star* by Matthew Quick *The Reluctant Journal of
Henry K Larsen* by Susin Nielsen. </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">*Where Things Come
Back* by John Corey Whalen</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">*Why We Broke Up* by Daniel Handler, with amazing illustrations by Maira Kalman. (Handler, of course, is
Lemony Snicket). </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0"> *This is not a
test* by Courtney Summers</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">*Last Night I Sang to the Monster* or *Sammy & Juliana in
Hollywood.* </span></span></span></span></span><span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">by Benjamin Alire
Saenz </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">*The Last Summer of the Death Warriors* by Francisco X. Stork </span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">*The First Part Last* by Angela Johnson</span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0"><br /></span></span></span></span></span>
<span data-ft="{"tn":"K"}" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body"><span class="UFICommentBody" data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0"><span data-reactid=".2.1:3:1:$comment10152170843671538_10152170890336538:0.0.$right.0.$left.0.0.1:$comment-body.0.3.0.$end:0:$0:0">And not technically YA, but about children and teenagers for much of the book - *Never Let Me Go* by Kazuo Ishiguro</span></span></span></span></span>kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-45936385044208062792014-06-05T20:22:00.000-07:002014-06-05T20:22:29.512-07:00choosing my battles<span style="font-size: small;">Slate.com posted <a href="http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/06/against_ya_adults_should_be_embarrassed_to_read_children_s_books.html" target="_blank">an awful short article</a> by Ruth Graham, titled "Against YA" which instructs adults to be "</span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><span style="font-size: small;">Embarrassed to Read Young Adult Books." Graham writes many tiresome things which mainly reveal her poor critical skills and her lack of knowledge of YA lit, but the one I'm choosing to reply to is this: </span></span></span><span style="font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br /></span></span><br />
<div class="text parbase text-10 section">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Most importantly, these books consistently indulge in the kind of
endings that teenagers want to see, but which adult readers ought to
reject as far too simple. YA endings are uniformly <em>satisfying</em>,
whether that satisfaction comes through weeping or cheering. These
endings are emblematic of the fact that the emotional and moral
ambiguity of adult fiction—of the real world—is nowhere in evidence in
YA fiction. These endings are for readers who prefer things to be
wrapped up neatly, our heroes married or dead or happily grasping hands,
looking to the future. But wanting endings like this is no more
ambitious than only wanting to read books with “<a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/05/would-you-want-to-be-friends-with-humbert-humbert-a-forum-on-likeability.html" target="_blank">likable</a>” protagonists. Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this.</blockquote>
A lot of YA and children's fiction end on an "up" note. There's at least a thread of hope, or hopefulness, injected into the conclusion of even the grimmer YA novels (Peter Cameron's fantastically good <i>Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You</i>) may be the best example. On the other hand, novels like <i>Mockingjay</i> inject <a href="http://themovingcastle.blogspot.com/2010/08/mockingjay-all-done-spoilers.html" target="_blank">a grim note </a>into an *apparently* hopeful ending. <br />
One could argue that, if you consider that most YA fiction is either narrated or focalized by an adolescent, the hopeful ending is the most realistic: at age 16 or 14 or 19, most of us do believe that things will get better, than upward progress is the really the only progress or trajectory our lives can take. Lack of experience is one thing that makes this perspective possible, and Graham's reaction to the "up" ending as unsophisticated and stupid makes the old mistake - one I am increasingly annoyed with - of confusing "lack of experience" with "stupidity."<br />
<br />
But the real point I want to make is this: a great deal of <i>adult</i> fiction has an up ending. Almost every piece of popular fiction - film, book, tv - ends on an up note. Even the classics, which Graham seems to regard positively, do this. Jane Austen? Courtship novels end with a wedding. They end with happy couples about to embark on their lives together. Shakespeare? Well, the tragedies and histories don't exactly leave us chortling with delight, but the comedies? End with weddings. Happiness. Looking forward to the future.<br />
How about Charles Dickens, my own beloved? Has Ruth Graham ever <i>read</i> any Dickens? <i>Our Mutual Friend</i>, or <i>Bleak House</i>, or <i>The Old Curiosity Shop</i>? <i>Nicholas Nickleby</i>? The impossible coincidences, inheritances, legacies, couplings, weddings - even when they recall sorrow (Little Nell's death) it's through a haze of happiness (Kit and Barbara's pairing, Dick Swiveller and his Marchioness).<br />
<i>Crime and Punishment</i> has an up ending, for heaven's sake. So does <i>Robinson Crusoe</i> and <i>Paradise Lost</i> and <i>The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn</i> and Wordsworth's Intimations Ode and <i>Jane Eyre. </i>I think you could make a case that <i>The Great Gatsby</i> has an up ending. Haruki Murakami's <i>The Wind-up Bird Chronicle</i>, undoubtedly a complex and sophisticated novel, has an up ending.<br />
<br />
Of course there are classics that don't end happily, with all loose ends tied up. Henry James is quite the purveyor of these - <i>Portrait of a Lady</i>, for example. <i>Wuthering Heights</i>, with all those miserable vile characters. <br />
<br />
But the stories that are popular - they don't end in wrack and ruin, for the most part. I know this because I actually really <i>like</i> stories that end bleakly. A friend once said "It's a good movie if, at the end, you kind of feel like you want to die." And yes! This is true! One of the greatest movies I know, and also one with the bleakest ending I can think of, is the Russian film <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thief_%281997_film%29" target="_blank"><i>The Thief</i></a>. It is a tremendous film, and ends terribly. It's great.<br />
But who has seen <i>The Thief</i>? Much more likely that you've seen <i>Love, Actually</i>, or <i>There's Something About Mary</i>, or <i>Star Wars</i>. And the books, the fiction, that people read: most of it has satisfying, unambiguous conclusions. The couple get together/get married/reaffirm their relationship. The criminal is caught. Justice is delivered. The world is saved. Even in stories where there's something sad/difficult/devastating - say, maybe, <i>Armageddon</i>, there's an up ending - because the Youth will Go Forward Into a Bright Future.<br />
<br />
Pretending that "adult" literature is sophisticated and complex and challenges triteness at every turn is absolutely dishonest in every sense of the word. The only way you could really believe this is to never have read any books at all. "Snobbish" doesn't come close to beginning to describe what's going on, if you're trying to stake a claim for the sophistication of the endings of adult fiction as opposed to that for younger readers. </div>
kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-56660740580039197552014-04-21T23:41:00.000-07:002014-04-21T23:41:29.766-07:00quiet/updateThings have been quiet here for awhile; I try not to get too personal here, so I'll only say my absence has been due mainly to the sudden and unexpected death of my mother in early February. The disruption in my life this has caused has been, to say the very least, considerable. I've also been quite busy with teaching this semester; both courses meet three days a week, which makes every day except Saturday into a teaching/prep day. I've chosen to teach books that, for the most part, I've never taught before, too, so that has required more prep than usual (I also misjudged and assigned several <u>very</u> long YA texts for my Representing Adolescence class). I did a week of picturebooks in my Childhood's Books class, the first time I've ever taught picturebooks in such a concentrated way. I often use <i>Where the Wild Things Are</i> as a way to teach/demonstrate close reading, but rarely as part of the canon of children's literature (I also did <i>Green Eggs and Ham</i> and David Wiesner's <i>The Three Pigs</i> - I had a fantastic week doing prep for picturebook week). I have also realized that I am terrible at teaching Diana Wynne Jones, for all that I passionately love her books; my critical faculties just wilt in the face of her brilliance. I tried teaching <i>Charmed Life</i>, and they were underwhelmed. The only Jones book I have had any luck with teaching is (of course) <i>Howl's Moving Castle</i>. I don't know what to call it if something is both your weak spot <i>and</i> your favorite thing, but Diana Wynne Jones is mine. I think I can live with this. <br />
<br />
I've been thinking a <i>lot</i> about adolescence and high school and YA and YA dystopian fiction; I had the incredible good fortune to have a fantastic group in my Representing Adolescence class, and our discussions were consistently thought-provoking and intriguing. I've been working on some of my ideas about dystopian YA, and hope to post that before too much longer. I also have my dissertation to work on, as well as converting some papers and draft chapters into articles for submission. A busy summer of work ahead, which is good.<br />
<br />
In the meantime, <a href="http://www.thescop.com/" target="_blank">Jonathan Auxier </a>has a new book coming out in May, and he is writing about becoming a writer - "After the book deal" - on blogs around the internet - <a href="http://www.thescop.com/2014/04/after-the-book-deal/" target="_blank">check out what he has to say</a> (he's quite smart). The book, <a href="http://www.abramsbooks.com/Books/The_Night_Gardener-9781419711442.html" target="_blank"><i>The Night Gardener</i></a>, has been getting very, very good advance buzz, and I'm keen to get my hands on a copy; I've already placed a hold on a library copy. <br />
<br />
Thus the quietness around here, and the plans, or hopes anyway, for making at least a little bit of noise in the near future. kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-89622982665596542572014-03-10T21:48:00.000-07:002014-03-10T21:48:23.724-07:00parentingI was surprised this morning to see anything at all about Sandy Hook in the news; when I saw that the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/17/140317fa_fact_solomon" target="_blank">father of the shooter had done an interview with Andrew Solomon</a>, I wanted to read it. Solomon is the author of <i>Far From the Tree</i>, which is an interesting if overlong look at children who are different from their parents in some substantial way. Solomon profiles autistic kids, down syndrome kids, deaf kids, severely disabled kids, transgender kids, kids who are the result of rape (possibly the most disturbing chapter, honestly), kids who commit crimes. I liked the book, and Solomon's writing and thinking, enough to want to read this interview with Peter Lanza.<br />
<br />
The article is semi-lengthy, and I was appalled by it. And sad. Really, really sad. Because from Peter's recountings, Adam had issues for a very, very long time. Being diagnosed with Asperger's seems to have allowed his parents to pigeonhole all of his behaviors under that classification, and to ignore things that were inconsistent with "just" Asperger's.<br />
Maybe I would have thought differently had I not read Solomon's book, but the thing that stood out the most for me in reading Peter's interview was how little he seemed to understand his son. Not even his son, post-mass murder/suicide. But his son as a kid and teenager who CLEARLY had problems beyond Asperger's or autism or any tidy diagnosis. For instance:<br />
"According to the state’s attorney’s report, when Adam was in fifth grade
he said that he “did not think highly of himself and believed that
everyone else in the world deserved more than he did.”"<br />
"He said that he hated birthdays and holidays, which he had previously
loved; special occasions unsettled his increasingly sclerotic
orderliness. He had “episodes,” panic attacks that necessitated his
mother’s coming to school"<br />
<br />
Peter says: "“It was crystal clear something was wrong,” Peter said. “The social
awkwardness, the uncomfortable anxiety, unable to sleep, stress, unable
to concentrate, having a hard time learning, the awkward walk, reduced
eye contact. You could see the changes occurring.”"<br />
"uncomfortable anxiety" seems like rather an understatement for panic attacks that sent him home from school.<br />
<br />
"“Adam was not open to therapy,” Peter told me. “He did not want to talk about problems and didn’t even admit he had Asperger’s.”"<br />
<br />
and this: "“If he had been a totally normal adolescent and he was well adjusted and
then all of a sudden went into isolation, alarms would go off,” Peter
told me. “But let’s keep in mind that you expect Adam to be weird." "<br />
<br />
He describes his son as "weird" repeatedly.<br />
<br />
When he was sixteen, his mother wrote: "“He had a horrible night. . . . He cried in the bathroom for 45 minutes
and missed his first class.” Two weeks later, she wrote, “I am hoping
that he pulls together in time for school this afternoon, but it is
doubtful. He has been sitting with his head to one side for over an hour
doing nothing.”"<br />
<br />
"“He was exhausted and lethargic all day, and said he was unable to
concentrate and his homework isn’t done,” she wrote. “He is on the verge
of tears over not having his journal entries ready to pass in. He said
he tried to concentrate and couldn’t and has been wondering why he is
‘such a loser’ and if there is anything he can do about it."<br />
<br />
The thing that most struck me in the relation of Adam's past was this snippet:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
when Nancy told Peter that Adam had been crying hysterically on the
bathroom floor, Peter responded with uncharacteristic vehemence: “Adam
needs to communicate the source of his sorrow. We have less than three
months to help him before he is 18. I am convinced that when he turns 18
he will either try to enlist or just leave the house to become
homeless.” Nancy replied, “I just spent 2 hours sitting outside his
door, talking to him about why he is so upset. He failed every single
test during that class, yet he thought he knew the material.”</blockquote>
And that....seems to be the end of the story. "communicate his sorrow"? What a peculiar and cold choice of words. A sixteen-year-old boy crying hysterically, talking about himself as a loser and pointless, locking himself into his room and refusing to eat -- and "communicate his sorrow" is what they looked for? The mom's reaction, too, is so strange: Failing a bunch of tests when you think you knew the material would definitely be upsetting. But hysterical crying? And the locking-out of his mother and not eating had been happening before this.<br />
There's just such a fundamental misunderstanding between Adam and his parents that it's excruciating to read. Solomon focuses mainly on this history's absence of warning signs of violence, and in fact a number of doctors and other professionals who saw Adam never worried about violence.<br />
<br />
Okay, fine. But - this is a distraught, disturbed kid. He had been prescribed anti-depressants and experienced side effects - after just a few days he stopped taking them and never would again.<br />
<br />
Right around here - the refusal to acknowledge the asperger's diagnosis, the refusal to take meds coupled with the hysterical crying, the apparent self-loathing, the intense intense isolation - it's right here where I think: This kid should have been taken to an inpatient facility. If he refused to accept treatment at home so vehemently, then he should have been checked in to a psychiatric center where he could be treated against his will. Normally, I don't feel good about things like "treated against his will" but he was so clearly suffering, and his parents and he were so clearly incapable of dealing with it effectively on their own. And he was still a kid, 16 years old.<br />
<br />
To me - and obviously I am not qualified to make any determinations - it sounds like Adam was having some pretty intense depression. That plus OCD plus the rather ominous phrase "his mother warned the school that he might not stop doing something because it hurt" -- that adds up to Something Is Very Wrong With Your Child.<br />
<br />
And his parents weirdly - didn't ignore his issues, but somehow totally misread them. It seems both parents couldn't really accept that their kid was something more than "weird" - he needed specialized help. That instruction for him to "communicate his sorrow" fails so totally to recognize anything like clinical depression, where the "sorrow" is not communicable - it is deep in your bones and not always identifiable with a cause or reason.<br />
<br />
The "shocker" of Solomon's interview, of course, is Peter's revelation that he wishes his son had never been born. Early in the article, Solomon notes that Peter has no photos of either of his sons in evidence in his house; Peter says "You can’t mourn for the little boy he once was."<br />
Peter describes his son - not his son's actions, but his son - as evil.<br />
<br />
<br />
And....I don't think you arrive at that point without years of maybe even subconscious priming for dislike or rejection. The rejection of "mourning the little boy he once was" is so cold. It is such a total rejection and denial and abnegation of Adam, and of Peter's relationship with his son. Pop psychoanalysis is tacky and bad practice, I know, but my guess is that Peter was uncomfortable with, disappointed in, frustrated by his "weird" kid in ways that were very legible to that weird kid all along.<br />
<br />
Look: it is not Peter's or Nancy's fault that adam murdered 27 people then killed himself. That was Adam. And it is profoundly horrible. I would not ever try to argue it isn't. But that isn't the issue here. It's the curious distaste and revulsion Peter expresses for his kid.<br />
After Jeffrey Dahmer was arrested and tried, his father wrote and spoke publicly about how difficult it was - because he loved his son but was horrified, naturally, by what he had done<br />
<br />
Timothy McVeigh's father said, publicly, right up to (and probably after) McVeigh's execution that no matter what McVeigh had done, he was still his son, and he loved him. Even though what he did was terrible, abhorrent, ghastly beyond belief, totally at odds with everything his dad thought and felt and believed. Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people, 19 of whom were children in a daycare, and injured hundreds more. He blew them up intentionally, purposely, with considerable planning beforehand. And yet his dad could still love him.<br />
<br />
Why can't adam lanza's?<br />
<br />
I'm not sentimental about children or parental love or any of that kind of thing. And in the end, it doesn't much matter to anyone except Peter how he feels about anything. And on the outside, even on the inner-outside as Solomon was, there's just no way of knowing what's really going on.<br />
<br />
But to wish your child had never been born? to feel convinced that he would have killed you as well? I don't know. I don't know how you get there; I don't know how you get there in less than 15 months. I think years of failure to properly recognize and understand the profound <i>difference </i>between himself and Adam had a lot to do with this post-murder/suicide attitude. And I would bet money that Adam intuited, at some point, his father's dislike? discomfort? rejection? of him - and that probably added to the kid's suffering, which seems to have been considerable.<br />
It's shocking, and depressing, how even in such a horrifyingly sad and upsetting story as the Sandy Hook murders, there's still room for one more sad story to get even sadder. kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-36758573419271982762014-01-03T22:51:00.000-08:002014-01-03T22:51:02.413-08:00Pinocchio and Peter Pan: Aubrey Hirsch writes smart wordsA lot of the people I know on facebook have small kids, some very small. They - the people I know, not the small kids - often post links to usually well-written but still tiresome essays and articles and blog posts about Being A Mom, or, less often, Being A Dad. I don't usually read all - or even any - of these pieces once I see the title and the source - websites with "babies" or "mommy" or "child" in the name.<br />
<br />
Tonight I clicked through a link posted by a fellow grad student (now graduated), to a short piece written by another alumna of our department, an MFA who I do not know other than by her name, Aubrey Hirsch. <br />
That piece is called "<a href="http://www.brainchildmag.com/2014/01/why-i-dont-think-my-son-is-growing-up-too-fast/" target="_blank">Why I Don't Think My Son Is Growing Up Too Fast,</a>" and it is <i>terrific</i>.<br />
I don't need to comment much on it; it's brief and efficient. It's a little more mushy than what I normally prefer in my everyday life, but on the whole it's very reasonable. But it is a brilliant rebuttal, response, refutation of the parental lament about their babies growing up too fast.<br />
Ever since I started seriously studying <i>Peter Pan</i>, in 1999, I have felt uneasy about perpetual children. Mrs Darling says it on the first page "Oh why can't you stay like this forever?" to toddler Wendy. But perpetual children are <i>failures</i>. If you never grow up, you never grow <i>out</i>, if that makes any sense. The sign of a parenting job well done is that your kid grows up and away and has its own life. It's why the narrator of <i>The Little White Bird</i> is so sorrowful over the "stealing" of David by Pilkington - once the child becomes enmeshed in its own life, away from guiding adults, it doesn't need or want those adults as much, even though the adults still need and want the child.<br />
As <i>Peter Pan</i> also taught me, the only permanent child is the dead child - hardly the outcome hoped for by any parent.<br />
What I admire about Hirsch's brief essay, aside from the blunt statement that she is content with her child growing up, is her statement that even if having a tiny kid is the ultimate, "then I’m not so selfish that I would keep him from having his own perfect moment with his own perfect child."<br />
It is uncommon for <i>me</i> to read, or see, genuine unselfishness from parents like this. I think most parents feel something like it, and want to feel it, but it doesn't always register with the kind of sincerity Hirsch conveys. Having a kid - being responsible, <i>creating</i>, an entire human person - is about that person, not about you, and lots of people don't seem totally clear on that. The enormity of the task is one reason I don't want kids of my own; I <i>am</i> selfish enough to realize I don't want to organize my entire life, forever, around another person. I enjoy putting myself first, when I can.<br />
<br />
After reading and delighting in this essay, I poked around a little for more info about Aubrey Hirsch and found a tantalizing reference to what she discovered lurking within the Pinocchio story. Which led me to this very short story, which has knocked my socks right off. <br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.bluestemmagazine.com/2011/02/pinocchio/" target="_blank">Pinocchio</a> as trans.<br />
<br />
Of <i>course</i>. Of <i>course</i> Pinocchio is trans. Of course Pinocchio is queer. Not just wooden puppet-to-human boy, but gender to gender.<br />
Transformation stories are often queer-ish (<i>The Velveteen Rabbit,</i> the wonderfully queer <i>Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse) </i>but for some reason Pinocchio and trans never occurred to me in the same sentence. Hirsch's short story is a beautiful little commentary, re-telling (or just telling, maybe?), re-framing of the story we all know well. It's a reminder than the stories of transpersons are stories we know well. We all know what it is to feel like something other than what you seem to be, whether you're a nerd who wants to be a hero or a wooden puppet who wants to be human or a boy who knows she's a girl.<br />
Hirsch's story makes Pinocchio and trans-ness both infinitely complex and elegantly simple. It's an "ah-ha!" and a thoughtful "ohhhhh." Exclamation and query. It is <i>lovely</i>. And brilliant.<br />
<br />
I admit: the wonderfulness of her Pinocchio story makes me a bit afraid to seek out her collection of short stories (<i>Why We Never Talk About Sugar)</i>, of which the publisher tells us: "Hirsch's compassion arrives on a knife blade. And you just may find your own heart cut open."<br />
<br />
Regardless of whether I ever read another word of her writing (I probably will), her 'Pinocchio' is enough to transform, forever, my thinking about that story. Go read it. kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-35359207195290496602013-12-10T21:21:00.001-08:002013-12-10T21:21:11.697-08:00Where are the pre-1960s nonwhite children's books?Last year, a lot of my thinking about all things related to children's literature culture revolved around money - class, wealth, etc. This year, it seems everything's about race. In fact, it's probably both (and a few other things as well), but the problem of racial underrepresentation is currently the most pressing, and shocking.<br />
<br />
I'm working on my syllabus for a children's lit class in the spring. I've decided to just go with a mix of classics and obscure texts that cover a broad range of time. I'm sticking with Anglophone, mainly British and American, texts because they are what I know best. I've been eagerly adding titles to my list of possibles, dreading the moment when I have to actually <i>make a decision</i> and choose which stay and which get cut.<br />
In reviewing my list, which has mainly concentrated on the 19th and early 20th century (since more recent texts that I want to teach I have in abundance), I realized: Gosh, all of my titles are by white authors, with white characters.<br />
Then I thought: Wait, WHICH books by nonwhite authors and/or with nonwhite characters can I even <i>think</i> of from the decades before the 1960s?<br />
Aside from some Langston Hughes and one or two other texts I've seen referenced in various people's scholarly work, I can't think of anything. The Hughes, and the references I remember, were mainly in the picture book genre, and I want novels or short stories. Not for or about teenagers, but legitimately children's literature.<br />
So I turned to the Collective Brain of the child_lit listserv, because they always know everything there, and asked for nonwhite children's books, NOT picture books or poetry, from before 1960.<br />
<br />
I have not gotten very many responses.<br />
Most of those responses have directed me to Arna Bontemps and Langston Hughes. There have also been a number of suggestions of collected folktales.<br />
Rudine Sims Bishop's
<i>Free within ourselves : the development of African American children’s literature</i> has been recommended, and I am heading to the library tomorrow to get it.<br />
<br />
But I feel discouraged that folktales and Langston Hughes are what we, as people who know children's literature very well, can come up with. Perhaps because I've recently been thinking about representations of American Indians (thanksgiving, of course), folktales and Langston Hughes, even, feel like they give the impression of a past, historical people. Like they don't deal with contemporary-to-their-time children. Hughes and Bontemps do, I think, though I'll have to do some more checking on that. But folktales?<br />
Don't mistake me: folktales, the oral tradition, are hugely important, especially in any culture that has been marginalized and/or oppressed (in the case of African/Americans, denied literacy as slaves, and kept from decent schooling by such terrible legal trickery as Plessy vs. Ferguson).<br />
But folktales also, as far as I've ever been able to tell, have their feet very firmly grounded in the past, in a historical or even mythic past. Those folktales have as much to do with the contemporary lives of kids reading then in 1930 as they do with kids reading them in 2013. Perhaps, in reading Rudine Sims Bishop, I will learn that African-American folktales have a very different existence than any of the Anglo/European folktale traditions I have some knowledge of. This could be true. But it's still a very specific tradition, a specific genre, that is distanced in several ways by its generic conventions from its audience.<br />
<br />
So why don't we know - and we should <i>know</i> at least one or two token titles! - nonwhite children's literature from before 1960 or so? W.E.B. DuBois's Brownies magazine made efforts at providing African-American children with African-American children's stories, but can anyone name any of those authors or stories? [Answer: yes, obviously someone, probably more than one someone, can - but they have a too-specialized knowledge].<br />
<br />
We learn/teach/are taught the Golden Age narrative of children's literature, which definitely is important and plays rather an important role in the development of the genre, and also in the dominant Anglo-American culture of the last 200+ years. Knowing <i>Alice's Adventures in Wonderland</i> and <i>Peter Pan</i> is still important. But I am really flabbergasted to realize that I don't know any African-American, or Native, or Latino, writers or texts for children from before the later 20th century. I do spend, and have spent, rather a lot of time trying to know everything about the field of children's literature, but I am happy to admit I don't know everything - so it would be easy for me to say "argh, a horrid oversight on my part!"<br />
<br />
But the fact that the Collective Genius and Knowledge of the listserv didn't have a couple of go-to authors or titles really does surprise me. Maybe it's because it's the end of the semester and folks are too busy to reply. And the responses I DID receive are definitely helpful - I don't want to dismiss them at all, because they knew more than I did. But the absence is noticeable, and notable. If you'd ask the list for, say, picture books with black child characters, you'd get heaps of replies right away saying "The Snowy Day" or "Amazing Grace" or Chris Raschka's books, or Faith Ringgold's, or any number of others.<br />
<br />
I don't know how - or rather, I am afraid I know too well how - to understand the depressing absence of nonwhite writers and characters from the children's literary tradition. I am hoping Rudine Sims Bishop can help me out (and Michelle Abate's and Kate Capshaw's work), because I am now <i>determined</i> to find and include an early nonwhite (probably African-American) work of children's prose on this syllabus.<br />
I had hoped for a nice easy-to-assemble syllabus, so I could attend to the sadly neglected dissertation, but this is too important to let go. So I'll give up a few dissertation hours to poking around the libraries and internet, and reading Sims Bishop, and seeing what kind of fiction I can find, written for and about and by the nonwhite population.<br />
<br />
When I find those texts, I will do my best to wallpaper my tiny corner of influence with their names. kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-81668487388734253992013-10-06T21:02:00.000-07:002013-10-06T21:02:23.708-07:00kids these days, with the sexting and the selfies and the changing modes of communicationI'm basically reposting this here (I wrote it on tumblr), but cleaning it up a little. It's a result of listening to a fairly recent episode of Roderick on the Line (podcast), and of showing "Blurred Lines" to my freshman comp class as an introduction to close reading 'text.'<br />
<div class="post_body">
I got Way Behind with my Roderick on the Line, because I
am a terrible person who doesn’t deserve nice things like RotL. Anyway,
washing dishes, listening to ep 78 <a href="http://www.merlinmann.com/roderick/ep-78-driving-lesson-costume.html">(“Driving Lesson Costume”)</a>, I was intrigued by two things pretty quickly.<br />
The discussion Merlin & John have about their respective
daughters, and those daughters growing up, and their unease about
certain aspects of that, was touching and adorable and hilarious.
Really, I think the best advice to give them (as a daughter who grew up
mostly successfully) is, to paraphrase Merlin, Just don’t be weird about
it. Don’t make it weird. Young Lady Roderick and Young Lady Mann will
be A-ok. they’ve got good parents.<br />
Next: selfies taken in the bathroom mirror and sexting and what’s the
point? Merlin says “If I was the kind of person who still read Roland
Barthes, I would write about that” (or something similar. Quote marks
here indicate speech, not accuracy in quotation).<br />
A moment of conversation ensues, then John decides to behave
precisely like a person who reads Roland Barthes and says something
like: those naked mirror-selfies are more a form of communication than
pornography. It’s about the real-time communication that a person is
getting naked *for you*. If you look back, out of context, at the photo
you’re like “eurgh, not the most flattering image.” But the context -
the communication of “I’m naked RIGHT NOW for YOU” - is the only thing
that really matters. That really has significance, in the “signs and
signifiers and signification” sense of the word.<br />
My mind, blown. Suddenly: all those out-of-context nakedy pictures
one hears/sees about are stripped of their sexual content. They’re like
reading a transcript of one side of a phone call, but not even the
complete call. It’s almost meaningless. <br />
So then I think about these naked selfies - the Kids These Days,
teenagers sending around Naked Selfies to their teenage boyfriends or
girlfriends or whatever - as not sexual. And….it kind of makes a really
fucked-up sense.<br />
One of the things I’ve noticed, teaching the Youth of America, is
that they’re really weird about sex, or at least talking about it in class in the context of a specific novel or film. Now, I spent my college years
being thoroughly repressed, except I went to a college that
was basically one giant hippie orgy. It wasn’t just that there were
groups of people who liked to walk around naked - outside, in public
areas - or that everyone seemed to be having sex constantly, with
someone, or that femynysts performed dance routines featuring smacking
their ovaries, or that there were actual orgies. nope: there was also
plenty of talk in classrooms, in academic, scholarly ways, about sex.
This only got worse in grad school (where “worse” = “more frequent”).
For a repressed person, I had to get unrepressed real fast, or be
chronically uncomfortable and silent.<br />
<br />
I’m used to everyone having a gutter mind. Everyone around me always did, it seems, from at least middle school on. *I* have a
gutter mind. But the Kids These Days, in my classes, they don’t seem to.
They are a weird mix of nonchalant “oh yes, pansexual multi-partner
orgies involving unusual fetishes are totally the norm in high school”
and red-faced, giggling, inability to say “have sex” in the context of a
discussion of a novel in which characters, in fact, have…. you know. <br />
As a kind of early practice in close reading, I had my freshmen watch the rather revolting video (unrated - topless girls) of <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwT6DZCQi9k">Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines</a>.”
And discussing it afterwards was shocking and revealing. Many of them
were confused - openly, raising-their-hands-to-ask-questions confused -
about various innuendo in the video. Like….what’s with him licking the
ice cream? what’s going on with the feet? that’s really random….what was
she doing with that stuffed animal? <br />
I was shocked. Like seriously, actually shocked. “Blurred Lines”
isn’t exactly a subtle video. And the sexual content just seemed to pass
many of them by, or flat-out confuse them. This class meets too early in the morning for them to be actively trying to fool me, either - I think those were their honest reactions. <br />
So: circling back to RotL: what if, somehow, the pornographic
signification of sexting and such is - if not totally absent, at least
really watered down, for Kids Today? I don’t get the sense that THAT
many of them are THAT much more sophisticated about sex and sex-adjacent
stuff than repressed-me was in college. Some are, sure, but it doesn’t
take much to exceed that low bar. <br />
I guest-lectured in a friend’s class once, ages ago, probably my
second year of teaching. And one of the boys in the class - one who was
simultaneously too cool for school and sincerely smart and engaged -
said something like “Nakedness doesn’t always mean sex.”<br />
He was and is right, of course, but I wonder if - somehow, in these
weird modern times of ours, with kids who grew up during the very
conservative reign of GW Bush (remember John Ashcroft having the exposed
bosoms of statues covered up in the Justice department building?) - I
wonder if somehow nudity and sex - like actual sexuality - have been
split apart in some odd way. So that they KNOW what is “sexy,” and that
is “naked bathroom selfies” but it doesn’t register for many of them in a
truly sexual way? That, again, it’s a way of communicating something -
for straight girls, I imagine, it’s something like “I love you boyfriend
so much i’m willing to do whatever will make you happy and sending you
this naked picture of me in my bathroom mirror will let you know that i
really care about you.” Or maybe "I'm cute and confident because I'm 16 and hot!" But it has about as much sexual content to it,
for them anyway, as would bringing the boyfriend chicken soup when he
was sick. <br />
If sexuality has become split in some way from nakedness, even from
the idea of “sexy,” which basically means nothing very different from
“pretty”, both of which just signify "attractive to the gender/sex i want to attract" that would explain an awful lot about the weird reticence of
my students, and their inability to lie in the gutter and think about Robin Thicke's
gross explicit video. <br />
</div>
kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-56472752944614526432013-09-11T23:06:00.002-07:002013-09-11T23:06:52.625-07:00ConsentA week or so ago, some acquaintance on facebook posted <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FDSu2tyxmKE" target="_blank">this video</a> from Parenting Gently. Despite the fact that I am not a parent and have no real interest in contemporary parenting (gentle or otherwise), the title of the video intrigued me enough to get me to click through: "4 Ways Parents Teach Kids That Consent Doesn't Matter." <br />
<br />
Because it's the start of the school year, and I have two classes full of college freshmen, I've been thinking about anti-rape education a lot lately. I did a brief reminder (with handouts from the internet!) about what Consent means - the most important reminder, I think, is that being asleep/being drunk/being passed out does not mean you are consenting. And that maybe if your person is really drunk, even if they are consenting, they might not really mean it. So use some intelligence.<br />
<br />
It struck me as rather awful that at age 18 or 19, these students might need some information about what consent actually means, but then i realized that we don't talk about it very much until then, and it's almost always in the context of rape. The Parenting Gently video makes it really clear that there are ways we, as adults, model consent/disregard of nonconsent - and that that carries over into all aspects of life, including sex and sexual coercion.<br />
<br />
Parenting Gently's 4 ways that adults teach kids that consent does matter are:<br />
*Tickling & Rough-house Play<br />
*Contradicting Their Feelings<br />
*Forced Affection<br />
*Respect For Elders<br />
<br />
You can watch her extremely concise and insightful discussion of each of these, but I was particularly struck by what she says about Tickling/Roughhouse Play: If you're tickling a kid and they say no (even if it seems like a playful no), stop immediately. That way, they learn that saying NO results in a behavior ending, but it ALSO shows them that the correct response when someone says No or Stop is to stop what you're doing. It works both ways. It models the effectiveness of saying NO, it gives power to the kid, and it also shows what you do when someone doesn't like what you're doing to them.<br />
<br />
A couple of days after watching this video, which I've been turning over in my mind since the initial viewing, I checked my much-neglected tumblr stream. For some obviously masochistic reason, I still follow "Reasons my son is crying," and<a href="http://www.reasonsmysoniscrying.com/post/60845926103/she-asked-daddy-not-to-look-at-her-he-didnt" target="_blank"> this</a> was near the top of my tumblr stream. <br />
And it made my blood boil, especially in the context of the Parenting Gently consent video.<br />
The tumblr is a photo of a little girl, maybe 3 years old?, sitting on the floor in a blue dress, crying. the caption: "She asked Daddy not to look at her. He didn’t listen."<br />
<br />
I think steam probably came out my ears I was so angry. Who knows why she asked daddy not to look at her? But when a girl asks a man not to look at her, "he didn't listen" is not the best response. And yes, it's her dad, and yes, she's only 2 or 3, and yes, it was probably all quite silly anyway. But who knows? Who knows what was going on in her mind when she asked her dad not to look at her? Maybe she had a really good reason for it. She's clearly in a safe, secure location - looks like she's sitting on a kitchen floor - so it's not like her dad needs to keep an eye on her for safety reasons. We don't know who took the picture, but if it was dad, I'm even angrier - imagine, not only ignoring your daughter's request not to look at her but PHOTOGRAPHING her in that moment!<br />
I do think my reaction is influenced by the gender dynamics there as well as the age dynamics. Girls are <i>so</i> looked-at, their whole lives, and sometimes you just don't want to be on stage. Laura Mulvey, fetishistic scopophilia, etc. Men are taught to look at women, their whole lives, and that they have every right to look at women when and how they want. And even if the woman is a three year old girl, and the man is her own father, it's still a problem. I won't even go into any of the stats about child sex abuse and likelihood of family perpetrators. I don't know anything at all about the situation being reported in the tumblr other than what I see and read. I don't do hysteria over child molestation, either, for a variety of reasons, but I also see no reason to pretend that no father has ever molested or been sexually inappropriate towards a daughter. It is a Thing. You can't say "but it's just her dad," as if that, in every single case, is an automatic exculpatory statement.<br />
<br />
Sometimes you just don't want to be looked at, and when there's no pragmatic reason that supervision is necessary, no one *should* look at you if you ask them not to.<br />
<br />
Taking Parenting Gently as a guide, fast-forward this moment by about 16 years. Girl, age 18 or 19, asks Boy not to look at her (for whatever reason; maybe she's changing, maybe she's taking off a layer of clothing and doesn't want her shirt to pull up in view of him, maybe she's feeling shy, maybe he's making her feel creepy, maybe he's looking at her in a disturbing way, who knows). Boy ignores request; in fact, Boy takes out his phone and takes a picture of Girl.<br />
<br />
And suddenly we're in a disturbing coercive situation where Girl's right to be not-looked-at is violated. Girl has been set up for this situation by parental disregard of consent/nonconsent. Maybe Boy has been similarly set up - say, by the "contradicting of feelings" item on Parenting Gently's list. Girl says "Don't look, I'm feeling shy," and Boy thinks "Oh, you're not really shy, you're just being silly/self-conscious/a tease."<br />
<br />
I know a lot of people would think this is a huge leap to make, and maybe it is. But I somehow don't think so. Ignoring children's actual feelings and desires - for instance, to not be looked at - tells them, as humans, that it's okay to ignore people's actual feelings, and that their own feelings and desires aren't legitimate. If we're lucky, we re-educate them at some point down the line to have self-respect and to know that their emotions are legitimate and should be respected, etc etc. But why not start that training from the very beginning? Why not say "Your feelings should be respected, and you should also respect other people's feelings"?<br />
That sounds very Mister Rogers-y, not surprisingly of course, but I think it's also true and important. Kids, as much as adults, are human beings with thoughts and feelings and wishes. We don't get to ignore them, make fun of them, trample over them, or contradict them just because we're older (see item 4 in the video: respecting your elders). Doing those things suggests that those behaviors are okay in adults, and they aren't. Doing those things suggests that your resistance/refusal is going to be ignored.<br />
These are not behaviors we want to encourage amongst people in our society - or they shouldn't be.<br />
Consent matters, and it matters from the very earliest imaginable moments. kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-33961759089217866092013-04-20T15:32:00.002-07:002013-04-20T15:32:43.134-07:00Vale E.L. KonigsburgAs if this week hasn't had enough bad news in it, word comes today that E.L. Konigsburg has died.<br />
<br />
Konigsburg is one of the rare greats of children's literature who I actually read as a child (I don't know what I was reading then, but it was mostly nothing I read now). <i>From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler</i> is probably THE iconic Konigsburg text, and of course it's a great one, but my personal favorite has always been - and still is - <i>Up From Jericho Tel</i>. I taught it once, in a children's lit class (maybe a summer course?), and I was so gratified that the students liked it. It was one of those books they responded to with "Why didn't I know about this book when I was a kid? I wish I had read this sooner."<br />
<br />
<i>Journey to an 800 Number</i> is another one of her books I read when I was young, and it really stuck with me. The odd loneliness of the 800-number operator, the way people so easily become faceless and nameless - and the ways they (or people around them) create identities and spaces for themselves, the constant travel of the characters of the book - there's a streak of melancholy to that book that resonated and resonates still with me.<br />
<br />
Konigsburg's books draw our attention to the unnoticed: to the people and things, large and small, that we ignore or never see in the first place. She's interested in the real, everyday things that are also completely magical: think of Claudia and the Angel statue, think of Amadeo in <i>The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World</i>. That title, in fact, seems to be precisely what each of Konigsburg's books is about - seeking, or stumbling upon, that mysterious edge of the heroic, magical, meaningful world.<br />
<br />
<i>The View From Saturday</i> is perhaps Konigsburg's masterpiece, if we need to identify any one of her books as such. The multiple narrators, interspersed with the third-person narrated sections focalized by Mrs. Olinski, is an organizational and narrational thing of beauty. The way the stories of the four kids interlock and overlap, and the ways in which those convergences are revealed, is absolutely astonishingly brilliant and wonderfully skillful. It never feels gimmicky, and it never gets old, or becomes obvious. Each new revelation <i>is</i> revelatory, and each segment of the book adds up to an extraordinary whole story, a work of beauty and grace.<br />
<br />
Konigsburg's protagonists are a big part of the greatness of her books, and it wasn't until I taught <i>Up From Jericho Tel</i> that I even realized that her characters all share one major thing in common: they are all very smart, slightly (or more-than-slightly) eccentric kids. Realizing this so long after first reading her books, it made me think that in all likelihood, one of the reasons my child-self liked her books so much was because her protagonists were like me: smart, and kind of weird. In children's literature, we get a lot of clever protagonists, and we get a lot of narrators or protagonists who have what seems like more wisdom/understanding than any kid that age should have, but it often goes unremarked in the text. Konigsburg - who herself must have been a smart, odd kid - so wonderfully captures both the challenges and delights of being an outsider because of your intelligence, because of your quirky interests. If the people around you don't recognize that you're a star - as Jeanmarie's classmates don't - you just keep wearing your appliqued Texas vest until you find someone who does recognize a Star when she sees one. The scene on the bus with Jeanmarie's vest is one I remember vividly identifying with as a younger reader: the feeling of being criticized or made fun of for something that you like a lot, or care about intensely, and really do not want to change, the uncertainty that engenders, the contempt for the bullies who don't understand, the desire to be like them even while loathing them - it's all so familiar.<br />
<br />
Konigsburg's books make smart kids the main actors, the ones who can see and do and understand things around them in ways not everyone else can. Her kids aren't caricatured nerds, or strange performing monkeys - they are real, complex, intriguing people who live in a world where they are not the norm, and where not being the norm can make you invisible. The trajectory of the narratives are of making the invisible visible, whether it's your own self or someone else, or some idea, some sense of understanding, some wider way of perceiving the world. The way invisibility works on a metaphoric level in Konigsburg's books makes me rethink the invisibility scenes from <i>Jericho Tel</i> <i>- </i>in some ways, her books function the way those episodes of invisibility work for Jeanmarie and Malcom. Her books let you see that which cannot be seen, uncover that which was previously hidden, understand yourself and the world in ways that make sense. <br />
<br />
E.L. Konigsburg worked the best kind of magic with her books: the magic that lets you see the invisible in the world; the magic that lets you see the greatness of yourself, and helps you share that greatness with the world. So thank you, Elaine Konigsburg, for knowing how to see the invisible, and for knowing how to make us see it as well. Requiescat in Pace.kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-36526038268603071162013-04-15T21:07:00.004-07:002013-04-15T21:14:00.369-07:00the helpers in BostonOnce again, terrible news of people being injured and killed for no apparent reason. As was the case just a few short months ago, when all those people were killed in Connecticut, <a href="http://themovingcastle.blogspot.com/2012/12/tragedy-children.html" target="_blank">I repeat</a> what Mister Rogers has to tell us:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Look for the helpers.</blockquote>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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This clip is from an (excellent) long interview done with Fred Rogers by the Archive for American Television. The quote about looking for the helpers has been doing the rounds online, but it doesn't include, usually, the final line in this excerpt, which is a line worth noting <i>and</i> repeating:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-size: large;">If you look for the helpers, you'll know that there's hope. </span></blockquote>
I was thinking about this quote, because I think about this quote almost daily, and realized how multi-faceted it is, how helpful in so many ways. Looking for the helpers takes our gaze away from the blood and broken glass, away from the scary, anxious, confusing, nightmare we see on our screens (and our screens are everywhere, focused right on the blood and broken glass and crying people) - it directs us away from the horror onto the good. It shows in ways no statistics can that the good people who want to help us outnumber - by a LOT - the bad people who want to hurt us.<br />
This photo (by John Tlumacki of the Boston Globe), which contains a bit of blood and broken glass, seems to me to be a perfect illustration of Looking for the Helpers as a way to see Hope.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_GqFgW-u-Qfl742YU8QWPXh0b1oiH30qaZrCIgTGxCHBd2lPM4udN1H27duEizFfUpDxR9mqUuXK3HTvOkYie7H7jJPqvfKFrJNct0yekVicssHQ2xNmzG3NQ3kQ0Yf5KkjyQ/s1600/boston+helpers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_GqFgW-u-Qfl742YU8QWPXh0b1oiH30qaZrCIgTGxCHBd2lPM4udN1H27duEizFfUpDxR9mqUuXK3HTvOkYie7H7jJPqvfKFrJNct0yekVicssHQ2xNmzG3NQ3kQ0Yf5KkjyQ/s320/boston+helpers.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
A lot of the photos from Boston today have featured brave, hardworking men and women in bright green vests: EMTs, doctors, nurses, police, other professional first responders. They are helpers, and they are so important.<br />
But this photo - this one - shows two people helping a third. No one has a vest. No one is a professional helper - at least not that we can see. Neither of these people is on the clock. Possibly neither has any first-response training, or experience, or preparation.<br />
What both people have is empathy and care and compassion and bravery. They're helping a third injured person. Maybe he's a friend, or parent, or family member. Maybe he's a total stranger. Who knows? It doesn't matter. What matter is these helpers, half an hour before this photo was taken, were just two random faces in a crowd.<br />
The helpers are everywhere, all around us, ready to get to work and <i>help</i> at any moment. Anyone can be a helper. Everyone can be a helper. Lots of us already are, in big and small ways.<br />
And there are <i>so many more</i> helpers than hurters. There always are; there always have been. <i>Always</i>. Even when it doesn't feel like there are, they are there. As Mister Rogers says, they might be just off-screen, or just at the edges. They aren't always the center of our attention - certainly not our newsmedia's attention - but they should be. There are thousands, probably <i>millions</i> of helpers in and around Boston today - and just one or two or a few bad guys.<br />
<br />
Look to the helpers. Look for them. They are heroes, for sure. They are also us, you and me and everyone in the vast vast vast overwhelming majority of people who aren't bad guys. The people who got hurt? They're probably helpers too - maybe not today, but earlier, or maybe in years to come. Maybe even today.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
* * * * * * </div>
<br />
The Fred Rogers Company - which is composed of some absolutely outstanding, compassionate, and smart people, many of whom worked with Mister Rogers on his program - has some advice for parents or other adults who work with kids on how to help children during tragedies. It's good advice. As I wrote before<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Mister Rogers isn't going to lead you astray. He simply isn't. I have
read hundreds of letters written to him, and dozens of responses from
him and his staff of wonderful people who are very like him. The faith
and trust people placed in him was not unfounded. The faith and trust
and <i>reassurance</i> he gave them made a difference, in some cases a huge difference, to parents, grandparents, and children. <br />
<br />
The link again to Fred Rogers Company's advice on speaking with kids about <a href="http://www.fci.org/new-site/par-tragic-events.html" target="_blank">tragedy is here</a>.</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
Mister Rogers is amazing, we know this, but his mother was also a very wise woman,
and we should mention her, too, in our list of helpers. She helped
little Fred Rogers become the great person he was; she is helping
thousands, maybe millions, of people right now with her compassionate
words of wisdom: Look for the helpers.kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-57040734364810564102013-04-09T16:05:00.002-07:002013-04-09T16:05:39.874-07:00my dreadful mixed feelings over reasons my son is crying tumblr<div class="caption">
So there's this tumblr called 'reasons my son is crying.' It somehow exploded everywhere, apparently in the last 48 hours, because suddenly it's all over the place. Of course I went and read it, and was delighted and amused and followed it on my tumblr page. And then this morning:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://reasonsmysoniscrying.tumblr.com/post/47534238666/we-miced-him-up-for-good-morning-america">reasonsmysoniscrying</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
We mic’ed him up for Good Morning America.<br />
</blockquote>
And BAM just like that I suddenly feel less pleased with this tumblr.
I felt/feel a little weird when people use their young children in such
a public way - this kid is too young, really, to consent with full
knowledge of what he’s consenting to, but at least on the internet
there’s a (very thin) layer between the Kid and the Audience. The Kid’s
“performance” (i.e., crying) happens ‘offstage,’ so to speak - there’s
no microphone, no other people intervening or influencing, it’s just the
not-so-much-privacy of his own family and their own camera. but when
you add in things like a live studio audience, a crew, interviewers, a
set - then you’ve created an artificial and highly manipulated and
manipulative arena, and the Kid is On Stage and being used by multiple
adults. It turns a mostly-private emotional reaction into a public performance, and performances aren't about the performer so much as they are about the audience, especially, I think, when the performer is a kid (cf. Shirley Temple, every child on 'Toddlers & Tiaras,' etc). <br />
<br />
The premise of ‘reasons my son is crying’ is kind of interesting in addition to being funny - I don’t find it “cute” <em>at all</em>,
but I do like the way it records the incredible frustrations of being
small and quasi-helpless and inexperienced/untutored in the world. To
us, maybe it’s funny that a kid would cry because he can’t run naked
into Times Square, but the Kid presumably doesn’t know why he’s dreaming
the impossible dream there.<br />
<br />
I often tell my students that being a little kid is <em>hard</em> -
the world isn’t sized for you, you have very little actual freedom and
autonomy, you can’t pour your own juice or milk, there are <strong><em>monsters under the bed</em></strong>.
You don’t know yet that your hand will get burned if you touch the
stove when it’s on. You learn everything the hard way, or experience a
world of what appear to be irrational restrictions. It’s this sense of
difficulty that ‘reasons my son is crying’ captures that I like.<br />
But I don’t like converting that into a sideshow - it’s already
perilously close to being reproachably exploitative. I mean, would YOU
want someone taking a photo every time you cried or felt frustrated, and
posting it on tumblr for all the world to see? What if you couldn’t say
no? what if you couldn’t say yes, either? <br />
I am always, constantly suspicious of performing/trick children, and
more suspicious of them in the age of “reality” media, where a kid might
not even know or realize he’s being turned into a performer. And so
this tumblr - and its transformation into a viral! media! sensation!
meme! - makes me uncomfortable now.<br />
[And that doesn’t even begin to
address the fact that i suspect you’d see a VERRRRY different public
reaction if the evidently continually crying child wasn’t white.]<br />
<br />
I should say that I don't think this Kid's parent(s) are being neglectful or abusive or even truly exploitative. I think the original idea is actually quite clever, and I like that you (or I) can read the "reasons" in multiple registers. I'm not especially concerned that this Kid evidently cries constantly. I do think we as a culture are way too quick to embrace emotion-as-spectacle/entertainment, and I think we absolutely make a hash out of the way we treat child performers. I also think we use children, in our culture, in all kinds of ways that aren't really about the kid, or aren't in the kid's best interest. Even more than that, I think it's really easy to turn your kid into a vehicle for money and/or fame - again, the story of virtually every child star demonstrates this - and in this modern world, I can't think of a better example than the Gosselins, who originally appeared in a one-off TLC show about quintuplets and sextuplets. Easy to see how you could agree to doing this, a kind of documentary, and get paid a bit - with eight kids, who wouldn't need the extra cash? And then the reality show - you think, 'great, we can set up college funds for each of the kids,' and/or 'we'll give it a try,' and/or 'this could be fun.' And then you're on tabloids and having a very ugly very public divorce and running through money like water and oh hey, turns out reality-tv 'star' children aren't protected by the kinds of laws (like Jackie's law) whereby some portion of their earnings have to be banked in trust for them, untouched by their parents.<br />
<br />
I'm not saying the Kid who is crying is going down that path. Probably he isn't. Probably he's just a kid, with average-affluent parent(s) who are kind of amused by the whole thing. Probably he'll grow up and be kind of mortified at these crying-kid photos, and not much more.<br />
<br />
But in the meantime, the tumblr - and now the national tv appearances - raise some interesting and, I think, important questions/issues about how we view and use children in a variety of kinds of media. There's no Jackie's law for social media, there are no protections (and I am thinking primarily of economic/ financial protections) in place for child "stars" of tumblr or instagram or their parents' blogs or youtube.<br />
<br />
There are also - and I do think this is very important - lots of reasons to cry when you're a very small child, and those reasons should be taken seriously by the wider culture when we think about children and childhood, even though in the moment, those reasons might be exasperating or just plain hilarious. <br />
</div>
kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-83105487867225939492013-03-25T12:08:00.004-07:002013-03-25T12:08:44.050-07:00Kid Pickers: early lessons in capitalismEvidently the American emphasis on teaching kids to be capitalists has moved well beyond the old standby lemonade stand; <a href="http://mackidsbooks.com/kid-pickers/" target="_blank">Macmillan Kids has published <i>Kids Pickers: How to Turn Junk into Treasure</i> </a>"by" Mike Wolfe, star of the History Channel show "American Pickers."<br />
<br />
I came across this via the <a href="http://pinterest.com/cbcbooks/" target="_blank">Children Book Council's Pinterest</a>, which is pretty terrific and very worth following.<br />
<br />
I have many thoughts on "American Pickers," but in the interests of ever getting anything done I'll skip most of them except to say that it's a remarkably queer show putting up a 'brave' front of butch masculinity, and that I find both Mike and his co-star rather repellent; their open greed and capitalistic fervor disguised as genuine affection for and interest in history and material culture makes my stomach turn. At the Console-ing Passions conference in Boston last July (2012), I attended a panel that included a talk about "mantiquing," which didn't go as far as I wanted it to (i.e., dissecting the queerness/butchness of the show) but which did introduce the word "mantiquing" into my vocabulary.<br />
<br />
And now mantiquing goes kid inclusive with this book. I can't think for the life of me how kids, who for the most part lack the essential picking resources (transportation, time, knowledge, and capital to buy 'junk') are supposed to launch their picking careers, but I guess that's why Mike Wolfe had to write a book. I hate the language of "turn junk to treasure," because it totally removes the value of any material object as anything but a money-maker; that is, the social, historical, cultural value of, say, an antique book is erased and replaced with nothing but its current market value. The things of history become metonyms for cash, and nothing more.<br />
<br />
Because I get interested in about 18 different things each week, I don't have time for them all and I have to watch myself so I don't run after Shiny Objects and neglect things like teaching or dissertation. this is why I don't know what kind of critical work has been done on indoctrinating kids into commercial enterprise (that lemonade stand) - but I do remember talking about it in connection with (I <i>think</i>) <i>The Great Brain</i> when I took a children's lit class at Georgetown. Perhaps the most famous of Tom Sawyer's escapades also centers on moneymaking - the whitewashing of the fence. Kids in books are always trying to figure out how to get money, which is both totally reasonable, since kids in general are demographic without the power of the purse, and totally distasteful in its capitalism.<br />
Making the leap from fictional moneymaking schemes to an actual how-to centered around this most peculiar of occupations - picking - is unsurprising but still deeply unpleasant. I'm curious about the gender implications of the book - the TV show really works hard to make picking a Man's Job, full of motorcycles and gasoline signs and jokes about wives. I also wonder how well this book will sell: what parents will support their child's new career as a picker? Or will it be a 'family who picks together...' kind of scenario?kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-15566676513429340122013-03-22T18:10:00.005-07:002013-03-22T18:10:59.659-07:00tweens, adolescence, and sexgenderI've been thinking a lot about adolescence for the last few years, and one of the things I've thought about - but not had time to really pursue - is the way American adolescent culture plays to/engages with/creates sex/gender in different ways. [note: I have not yet come to any satisfactory conclusion about how to refer to sex or gender, because neither term quite gets at what I want to express, which is something to the effect of traditionally-understood, normative traits and qualities associated with males or females, regardless of how an individual is constructed biologically (sex) or psychologically (gender - and psychologically is a problem term here too). For the purposes of this post, I'm going old-school regressive and just saying "boy" or "girl" to mean those normative, traditional qualities and characteristics, with many apologies to trans-and-pan-and-queer-and-counteridentifying persons]<br />
<br />
Recently - a week ago or so - I wondered on facebook if "tween" is just girls, or if it includes boys as well. I <i>always</i> think of tween as girls; when I first encountered the term "tween," it was in an article about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and I've rarely, if ever, seen it used in connection with boys. I was surprised that my friends - all of them academics of one sort or another - replied with certainty that of course, tween includes boys.<br />
<br />
I was pleased, then, earlier this week to read Tyler Bickford's <a href="http://blog.tylerbickford.com/2013/03/08/hannah-montana-and-tween-postfeminism-paper-for-scms13/" target="_blank">post of the text of his paper given at this year's SCMS conference, </a>because he writes <br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
the sphere of children’s entertainment that is emerging the most rapidly
is directed to “tweens,” who<b> a category that is presumptively (if not
categorically) made up of girls</b>. The term, which is a cutesy play on
“teen” and “between,” emphasizes an age-based tension between grown-up
autonomy and childhood domesticity that resembles nothing so much as the
postfeminist tension between feminism and femininity. So talk about
tweens is always already gendered. It’s also always already white,
affluent, suburban, and consumerist, but then childhood also, as it’s
hegemonically constructed, is itself presumptively feminine, white,
affluent, suburban, and consumerist.</blockquote>
(emphasis mine)<br />
<br />
I felt slightly vindicated in my conviction that tween is predominantly female, and that it at least is far from obviously a category that extends itself to include males in that Awkward Age (because really, that's what tween <i>is</i>: ages around 11-14). <br />
<br />
So if, as Bickford claims (and as far as my exceedingly cursory sense of it goes) the most rapidly emerging sphere of children's entertainment is for tweens, where are the boys left?<br />
<br />
It's a rare occasion when I say "but what about the boys?!" and mean it in anything but a sarcastic way. I say it when I think about Disney Princess culture, especially as it's enacted at Disney parks, where little girls (and big girls, and adults) are routinely addressed as "Princess." There's just no character set analogous to the princesses that is "for" boys. Of course, and obviously, plenty of little boys play princess quite delightedly, and plenty of little girls scorn princessing. But the culture emphasizes little girls in its focus on princesses, and that leaves the boys with...what?<br />
<br />
I feel like this a bit about adolescence and boys. When I browse the teen section of my library (which is often, and it's a good teen section), I'm continually aware and reminded of how many of the books have pink covers, or purple covers, or sparkly covers. Many of them have images of girls on their covers. Many of them have girls as their protagonists, and many of them are written by women, or under female pseudonyms.<br />
<br />
When I've asked my undergrads - and because I usually teach children's lit courses, I have a painful dearth of male students - what they read while they were themselves in high school or younger, the girls can usually rattle off lists: Sarah Dessen, Twilight, Hunger Games, Gossip Girl, Maggie Stiefvater, Libba Bray, and so on. The few boys, when I put them on the spot, usually say they didn't read much, then go on to mention James Patterson, Stephen King, maybe Neil Gaiman. Once, I had a boy student who was really into Neal Shusterman - possibly the only boy to name a young adult writer as someone whose books he read as, you know, a <i>young adult</i>.<br />
<br />
Despite my general avoidance of Real-World studies and surveys and things that look like social science, I would be extremely interested in surveying a whole lot of teenage boys to see what books they read when they read voluntarily, or get to pick their material. I suspect it would be a whole lot of James Patterson-type stuff.<br />
<br />
In class once, talking about something related to adolescence, I mentioned teen magazines - 17, YM (if that even still exists), Teen Cosmo, Teen People - then realized these were all <i>girls'</i> magazines. Then further realized I couldn't think of any teen magazines that <i>weren't</i> for girls. Once again, I put the few boys in my class on the spot and asked about magazine-reading (I supplied them with Maxim and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition just to get that awkwardness out of the way; some day I need to write and think deeply about how incredibly uncomfortable Kids These Days seem to be even acknowledging sex and erotics). The boys said: yeah, things like that, Rolling Stone, snowboarding or dirtbiking magazines, or other sport-specific ones. Those are <i>adult</i> publications - not in the brown-wrapper kept behind the counter sense, but just in that they are not produced with a teenage audience in mind.<br />
<br />
so how come girls get to (or are forced to) have this distinct experience of teenager-ness, complete with rituals (prom, homecoming), periodicals, literature, movies, music, and so on?<br />
OR/AND<br />
why do we expect 14-year-old boys to be reading the same material as 34-year-old men? Is one group being "forced" to grow up too quickly? Or is one group being expected to act like teenagers their entire adult lives? Some combination of the two?<br />
<br />
<br />
I'm concerned about the alienation of boys from YA fiction, in particular. There are some great YA books for and about boys, and plenty of the male students I teach end up really liking a lot of the "girl" books, too (<i>Speak, </i>for instance, always resonates with boys; they are very often the first to initiate class discussion and talk in very serious ways about how the book felt real and relatable). But the YA section as a whole <i>looks</i> extremely girly, and that turns boys off.<br />
Women are attending college in markedly greater names than men now, and while I am not worried about men being oppressed and made into sad minorities, I <i>do</i> think that any kind of substantial gender imbalance - in schooling or in most other places - is not likely to turn out well in the end on a society-wide level. I can't help thinking that there is, or might be, or could be, a connection between the ways boys seem to be left out of this tween/teenage space of cultural production/consumption, and declining rates of college attendance. I could be totally wrong, and that's fine, but I do, for now, have the feeling that something is slightly askew here. Can't quite figure out precisely what it is, or how to correct it - is it a problem of how we're targeting girls? or a problem of how we're failing to target boys? is a creepy normative set of boy-oriented teen crap what I really want to see? (but then, how is that different from <i>Maxim</i>?)<br />
<br />
I'm exceedingly interested in this, and I think it's important. I'm near
the end of the list of the last people who would say that men in this
country are sad, oppressed victims, but I <i>do</i> think that boys are being left out of an important cultural space. And that space <i>also</i>
seems to be dedicated almost entirely to building and reinforcing
traditional ideas about girl-ness and femininity in a way that is very
hard for me to see as feminist or empowering or anything progressive and
positive. This is a problem, and I think it's a big one - and it's one we need to be thinking about closely and carefully.kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-10357038531637417172013-03-05T21:53:00.002-08:002013-03-05T21:53:48.628-08:00cuteness studiesI am teaching assistant for a lecture course this semester, and today's lecture dealt largely with questions of cuteness. I am not an expert in cuteness studies, which, if it is not yet a thing, will probably be one soon; I realized today, in thinking about it, that despite being intensely interested in most things child-related, I don't spend much time seriously thinking about children's stuff and cuteness. My cuteness-related contemplations are primarily reserved for baby pandas, and kittens, and miniature horses, and miniatures in general.<br />
<br />
At the start of lecture, the professor put up a few cute-related questions on her powerpoint. This set caught my attention, and is now buzzing in my brain:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
"Why might cuteness have been so attractive to people living
in early 20<sup>th</sup> century America or Europe? Why are we invested in
children’s cuteness as a culture?"</div>
</blockquote>
<br />
I've been thinking about nostalgia a lot, and also about reception theory, and so this pair of questions set off all kinds of bells and whistles and whirling lights.<br />
<br />
First of all: Cuteness is a thing that happens in the audience. There has to be someone looking (or listening, or reading) for a thing to be cute, because cute is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, there are all kinds of studies trying to science-ize why I enjoy looking at baby pandas, but - as with many psychology studies - I am skeptical. Cuteness is a construct that happens outside of the thing or creature "being" cute.<br />
<br />
Which brings me to the second point, which was actually raised (sort of) by a student in the fall: cuteness HAS TO BE unintended. The second a child (or anyone) starts trying to be cute, trying to perform cuteness, it ceases to be cute. I think this is one of the reasons people find *Toddlers & Tiaras* so unsettling - it's an endless stream of very determined, conscious efforts to be cute.<br />
<br />
Because...cuteness is "natural." It <i>isn't,</i> almost definitionally <b>cannot be<i>, </i></b>something you do on purpose. It's un-self-conscious. It's "authentic." Perhaps most importantly, it's not manipulative. Cuteness, and the cute, can be manipulate<i>d</i>, for sure - this is how advertising works - but it cannot originate in a place of intention. It has to be natural and authentic and unprompted, unscripted. Cute stops as soon as a script or intention can be detected. <br />
<br />
Cuteness is non-functional, non-utilitarian. Those same kinds of studies which I regard skeptically occasionally suggest that we find babyness (big head, big eyes, roundness) cute so we don't just throw our offspring into a river when it starts shrieking, but even for me this seems hopelessly cynical. Biological imperative for survival keeps humans, like most animals, from eating their young (so to speak); I don't think panda mothers hang on to their absurdly small panda cubs because the mothers are ga-ga for big round eyes.<br />
<br />
But because cuteness comes from a place of no intent, it is never selfish, always selfless, always a kind of gift or benevolence. The only thing cuteness <i>does</i>, in a functional way, is make the viewer feel good. Good can mean amused, or content, or pleased, or amusedly perplexed, or surprised, or satisfied - but it's not a productive response. Cuteness is not productive. It doesn't make or do anything until it's manipulated by a third party (and then it can do almost anything).<br />
<br />
So in the 20th and 21st centuries, when we're as industrialized and mechanized and computerized as we've ever been, when humans feel increasingly isolated or alienated from themselves and other humans, when everyone with the wealth privilege to experience it is feeling the many pressures of modernity, a thing that is <i>not</i> manufacture, <i>non</i> mechanized, <i>non</i> technological has tremendous appeal. There's a lot of buzz about "the search for authenticity," blah blah, but that drive to locate something <i>real</i> in a world that feels chock-full of artifice is very strong. The fact that authenticity is as much a construct as anything else is beside the point (for the moment, anyway).<br />
<br />
Cuteness isn't manufactured, and it doesn't ask anything of us except that we enjoy it. It's also got the weight of nostalgia, and all the unattainable longing that nostalgia carries with it. Since cuteness is unconscious of itself, we can never BE cute, or be the cute. We can, perhaps, recognize our past cuteness - look at a photo of yourself from when you were three or four or six, or listen to a parent or someone recount a charming story of something you said or did when you were a child; it's eminently possible to see cuteness there. But in the moment of the Cute-ing, the Cute cannot recognize itself as cute. And because it can't be intentional, we can't plan to be cute in the future (though we may be). So <i>our own</i> cuteness is always, forever, constantly retrospective; it is always something we cannot ever have or be. Cuteness, in a weird way, is always vicarious. Cuteness is a reaction, a response. In our nostalgia-saturated culture (see Svetlana Boym for some brilliant work on nostalgia), cuteness is another mode for our nostalgia to work in, or on; that intense, desperate longing for the thing which can never be again, maybe never wasto begin with, is at the core of nostalgia; it is identical to the way in which we are positioned in relationship to our own cuteness. We can never have it (again), we can never intentionally do it, we can only mourn its loss and furiously desire to have it. It has to be experienced vicariously, so we seek it out, and when we find it, we fawn over it.<br />
<br />
I am not sure that I would argue - not yet, anyway - that cuteness is harmful to children or adults. I just don't know. I don't think cuteness <i>has</i> to be, or can only be, exploitative - it's how that cuteness is deployed and maneuvered that becomes the problem, but that, as I suggest, doesn't reside in the thing of cuteness itself. Still, it's an interesting and probably vexed (if not more disturbed) set of relationships and conditions that circulate around cuteness and The Cute and the viewer of that cuteness.<br />
<br />
<br />kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-87256470027597374362013-02-22T18:27:00.002-08:002013-02-22T18:27:14.683-08:00PSA: Lost Toys, foundI like toys. I like material culture. This year, because of my teaching assignment, I've been spending extra time thinking about material culture and childhood, and children, which most of the time seems to mean toys.<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://customtoyportrait.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/coralcatdog.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://customtoyportrait.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/coralcatdog.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<a href="http://www.yourtoyportrait.com/" target="_blank">There's an artist, Jennifer Maher,</a> in upstate New York who does gorgeous portraits of toys and dolls; tonight I was poking around her site and came across links to some <a href="http://plushmemories.com/" target="_blank">Lost Toy Finding Services</a> [which sounds like a charming mystery novel for younger readers, probably with an all-toy cast].<br />
<br />
Because I've spent so much time thinking about how absolutely essential toys are to us when we are small (and often not-to-small; most of my students report bringing at least one stuffed animal with them to college), the search service struck me as particularly worth noting and linking to. They're a no-cost service - it's really just a hosting site, I think, with boards set up on Pinterest for easy access. basically: if you can identify or find a toy, you post that info, and hopefully the searcher can make the connection. I wasn't <i>really</i> struck by this, though, until I went to the pinboards - <a href="http://pinterest.com/plushmemories/plush-memories-disaster-priority-searches/" target="_blank">Disaster</a> and <a href="http://pinterest.com/plushmemories/plush-memories-top-priority-searches/" target="_blank">High Priority</a>. <br />
<br />
You know you can never really replace a lost Toyfriend, but finding its twin can make a huge difference. Think about how that must be, to lose your toy(s) in fire, tornado, storm, hurricane, earthquake. Finding other random toy replacements is probably easy - I don't doubt a lot of donations are of new stuffies. But - when you've lost your best teddybear, you maybe don't want a stuffed dog as a replacement. You want THAT. BEAR. There are also a good number of sick, or very particular, or developmentally-disabled folks who <i>need</i> a really specific toy - it has to be THAT. EXACT. ONE. or it isn't good enough.<br />
<br />
So this service is actually filling a bigger need than the nostalgia/whimsy market, I think.<br />
At home, we recently went through some of the bags of my sister's and my old stuffed animals and dolls; sorting through which to keep (preserve, or - to be pretentious - curate) and which to toss or donate. I wish I'd know about this Lost Toy search before, when we did that; I'd bet at least one or two of the Missing were amongst those my sister and I discarded.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://plushmemories.com/" target="_blank">Plush Memories finding service</a>: go, overlook the excessive use of multicolor comic sans, use the pinboards, and keep an eye out for any of the Missing. kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-91235067835248193412012-12-14T22:26:00.001-08:002012-12-14T22:26:29.385-08:00Tragedy & childrenThere is nothing of any comfort one can say to the families, friends, neighbors of those who were killed in Connecticut today. It is horror and sadness and grief and loss of an order that is beyond language, beyond understanding. I hope that those people directly affected, especially the families of the deceased, have good, wise, compassionate people around to listen and help and support them.<br />
<br />
For the rest of us, who do not live in Newtown, Connecticut, (or even those who do, but were not directly involved in today's horrors), there is also not much that can be said to make <i>sense</i> of something so ultimately senseless. There may be explanations, most likely heartbreaking ones, but (as I think Dave Cullen's <i>Columbine</i> makes clear), even having an explanation does not make tragedy make sense.<br />
<br />
How to talk to kids about this, though? I was angered to see a <i>New Republic</i> post that cries,<a href="http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/111152/dont-tell-kids-damn-thing-about-newtown" target="_blank"> "Don't Tell the Kids a Damn Thing About Newtown." </a><br />
Written by a parent in a neighboring town (uninvolved, but of course not unaffected, by the shootings), it describes this particular father's dash to his child's school, to take aside her teacher, and ask her not to say a thing about what had happened. "“It’s just that you never know when a grown-up thinks they’re being helpful, and …” "<br />
He concludes with the closest thing to an explanation of <i>why</i> the kids shouldn't be told:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Here’s what we can control: as long as our children are alive, we can
refuse to terrorize them with worst-case scenarios. ... I understand that there are parents in
the world who have to teach their children about bomb shelters. But I
don’t, not yet. My daughter is just five years old, and her school is as
safe as we can make it without imprisoning ourselves in our own fear.
My heart breaks for what happened 25 miles away; I’ve cried twice
already today. But I’ve done it far from my children, who are still very
young and, yes, innocent. So please: Don’t tell them a goddamned thing.</blockquote>
I think this is the worst possible advice one can offer. I am not a child psychologist, or in any way expert on child-rearing. I am, however, human. I have also spent the last several years reading and watching and thinking about Mister Rogers, a man who <i>was</i> an expert on child-rearing and child psychology and the human condition. One of the songs that is regularly sung on the program is "I Like to Be Told." Kids <i>do</i> like to be told, because uncertainty is far more terrifying than even the scariest truth. Uncertainty - or deception - can be <i>anything</i>. A truth - well, you can process that. You can think about it, ask questions about it, find ways to live with it, hard as it may be.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.fci.org/new-site/par-tragic-events.html" target="_blank">The Fred Rogers Company (formerly FCI) has some advice </a>for talking with children about tragedy, and I think it's as eloquent and useful a response to the <i>New Republic</i>'s useless nostalgia and hand-wringing. <i>Everyone</i> wants children to live in a totally safe world, where nothing bad or scary or random or tragic ever happens. Everyone wants to live in that world <i>themselves</i>. But we <i>don't</i>, and because children live in the world that includes television and internet and smartphones and overhearing parents talking and playground chatter amongst children - because of that, trying to keep them hermetically sealed is impossible. Not only impossible, but quite possible harmful.<br />
<br />
From the Fred Rogers Company's website: " You may be really surprised at how much your child has heard from others." It also mentions, at the very beginning, that children know when their parents are upset, or worried, or scared. Kids are small, not stupid or oblivious, and even after you've turned off the tv or closed the internet, it's very, very hard to keep your affect unaltered by shock, anger, grief, fear, anxiety, etc. If you pretend otherwise, you're lying to your kid and confusing her, and making it clear that scary feelings are not a topic of conversation. Kids' imaginations are, usually, quite boundless, and though they are not stupid, they don't have the experience to have the kind of sophisticated critical reasoning many adults have (or should have). One of the most chilling things I remember from the days immediately following September 11 - and those days were full of chilling things - was from someone either with Fred Rogers or <i>Sesame Street</i>, saying that little kids were seeing repeated footage of the towers falling - and thinking it was happening <i>over and over</i> again. They didn't realize that they were seeing reruns - for them, that terrifying event <i>kept happening</i>.<br />
<br />
I do not think anyone wants their kid to feel like that for more than two seconds.<br />
I do not think anyone wants their kid to think she is unprotected, unsafe, likely to have disaster occur at an moment, for more than half a second.<br />
I do not think anyone wants their kid to worry that mom or dad or grandma can't/won't/doesn't want to protect or help them.<br />
I do not think anyone wants their kid to feel alone and scared in a world that appears to be full of terrible things happening over and over again.<br />
<br />
The reminder to look for the helpers is a good one. It isn't just moms and dads who want to take care of you; it's doctors and teachers and nurses and policepeople and firepeople and EMTs and pretty much 99.999% of the adult population.<a href="http://www.chbcnews.ca/video/teen+brother+rushed+to+sister+s+aid+at+connecticut+school+shooting/video.html?v=2316238493#web+exclusives" target="_blank"> Even teenagers</a>, even they want to help keep that pre-schooler from feeling sad and scared and worried, and even teenagers can and will help in an emergency.<br />
<br />
Mister Rogers isn't going to lead you astray. He simply isn't. I have read hundreds of letters written to him, and dozens of responses from him and his staff of wonderful people who are very like him. The faith and trust people placed in him was not unfounded. The faith and trust and <i>reassurance</i> he gave them made a difference, in some cases a huge difference, to parents, grandparents, and children. <br />
<br />
The link again to Fred Rogers Company's advice on speaking with kids about <a href="http://www.fci.org/new-site/par-tragic-events.html" target="_blank">tragedy is here</a>.<br />
<br />kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-89997086110482246912012-11-30T20:41:00.002-08:002012-11-30T20:41:22.942-08:00a wish: selfishly motivated and certain never to happenA few days ago, I read Newbery-committee member <a href="http://fairrosa.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">fairrosa's</a> post about Newbery Award criteria, which is a very smart and insightful post indeed. I scrolled down to the bottom of the post, of course, to read it in its entirety, and I could see the first few lines of the previous post, which begins with: "In the middle of book 112..."<br />
<br />
BOOK 112!!!!<br />
<br />
I suddenly remembered hearing about/seeing stacks of newbery contenders at committee members' homes. I thought about this same quantity of reading and books for the Printz.<br />
<br />
And I had my selfishly motivated, destined to go unfulfilled wish, oddly enough the first time I'd ever even thought about this:<br />
<br />
<i>I wish I was on the Newbery committee! Or whoever selects the Printz. Or, OMG, both!</i><br />
<br />
The thought of spending a year, or part of a year, reading dozens and dozens of children's/YA books with a certain goal, or set of criteria, as part of a small group of readers working with the same goals - this sounds like heaven to me.<br />
I have no doubt it becomes tiresome, and stressful, to do one's normal life AND read 112+ books. I have no doubt it's a very, very, very difficult task, whittling down that tremendous list to just a handful of exceptional titles, with one book to rule them all. <br />
But it sounds like a task I would excel at.<br />
<br />
I've been reading middle-grade fiction recently for a personal project, and I have zipped through quite a stack of books - which also includes <i>The Raven Boys</i>, because it's due back at the library - in a very short time. I'm already reading books in insane quantities. And I don't have a small group of similarly-reading comrades with whom to share opinions, lists, quibble and debate with over relative merits. This is the sad/bad part about no longer taking classes - you lose an automatic 'book club,' defined as a set of people reading the same work at the same time and meeting to discuss it.<br />
<br />
But I admit I get shivers of excitement at the prospect of having parcels of books delivered to my house, books I have a <i>duty</i> to read in certain careful, specific ways, and that I then have a duty to "grade," to make my case to others, to listen to/read their choices. Being able to have an opinion that actually turns out to be quite important and weighty is just a side bonus (I always have an opinion, and rarely are my opinions called for, or effectual). Newbery winners stay in print, and this is a <i>huge</i> big deal. Writers get a bump in sales, they become temporarily (or permanently!) famous, they get better contracts for future books (I hope). So it is an important task, but it isn't really the importance and opinion of it that gets me.<br />
<br />
It's being officially charged with reading <i>all those books</i> that makes me long for committee membership.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31106056.post-80045171909340849722012-11-12T19:16:00.000-08:002012-11-12T19:16:22.882-08:00how do you say it?A year or two ago, I discovered one of the best resources ever ever EVER: a directory of children's/YA authors pronouncing their own names (and occasionally explaining a bit about those names). Since I started teaching, I've been both paranoid and vigilant about making sure I know the correct pronunciations of <i>everything</i>, and there are an awful lot of names in the field - actually, just generally in the world - whose pronunciations are not immediately obvious. <a href="http://www.teachingbooks.net/pronounce.cgi?aid=2190" target="_blank">Scieszka</a>? <a href="http://www.teachingbooks.net/pronounce.cgi?aid=11591" target="_blank">Stiefvater</a>? <a href="http://www.teachingbooks.net/pronounce.cgi?aid=3277" target="_blank">Koertge?</a><br />
<br />
Quite a few authors add some tidbit of information about the name's origin, variant pronunciations, etc - and those are strangely delightful to listen to. But I love the site mainly for the totally boring utilitarian value of hearing the authors <i>themselves</i> speaking their names out loud. No messing with pronunciation keys or phonetic alphabets, no fretting over where to lay the stress when you say "<a href="http://www.teachingbooks.net/pronounce.cgi?aid=3752" target="_blank">Marjane Satrapi</a>."<br />
<br />
No excuses now for mispronouncing author names! kittens not kidshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01687718497473389899noreply@blogger.com1