Goodbye, Fortress of Solitude

When I was growing up, one of my secret favorite books was Children of the Atom, a 1953 think-piece of a novel about a group of children born exceptionally intelligent after their parents are involved in a nuclear plant accident. The children must pass for normal as best they can until a caring psychiatrist intervenes and establishes a special, separate school where these boys and girls can be just as mad-brilliant as they want to be. As you might guess, it ends in tears, and though I don't remember the details, I'm pretty sure an angry torch-wielding mob is involved.

Looking back on it, my childish identifactory love of this book--"But that's me! I'm misunderstood and do better on tests than my peers too!"-- now prompts two uneasy realizations. One, I was vain as all hell as a preteen; participation in my elementary school Junior Great Books Club does not a mutant genius make. Two, I don't think I can love superheroes any more.

Of the many reasons that Alias crapped out in its final season, Sydney Bristow's pregnancy probably isn't the worst of it, nor can we really blame Angel's fall on the appearance of Connor, as much as we might like to. But there's no getting around the fact that, for the CIA super-spy and soulful vampire alike, progeny is a problem. If both shows depend on the conceit that the protagonist is singled out from millions by destiny, the Powers that Be, or Project Christmas, the question of how to handle the abilities of their genetic offspring starts to get creepy. Case in point: The Incredibles. Sure, it's Pixar and it's quippy, but it's also a logical first step on the path to eugenics and fascism. The "If everyone is special, then no one is" catchphrase, not to mention the entire plot of the movie, seems like Brad Bird's lengthy attack on the culture of child-affirmation via Barney singalong. And that's fine, I guess, if you enjoy pointing out to children how they're not really as great as they think they are, but where does that leave us?

If you're me, at a 8:30 Saturday showing of X-Men: The Last Stand (thanks, Peter!). X-3 concerns the transformation of various characters from one state to another--mutant to human, child to woman, regular psychic to psycho psychic--and in so doing tries to say things about the ways that people choose to conceal or reveal their true natures (or what they understand to be their true natures.) Thus, even more overtly than many other superhero narratives, X-Men works the race-passing metaphor until poor old Nella Larsen is limp as a noodle. Some of the mutants, by virtue of being blue or winged, can be visually identified as Other, while others just periodically pop in black contacts and move things with their minds but otherwise look "normal." (As an aside, I couldn't shake the feeling, perhaps enhanced by the San Francisco setting, that at least half of the "evil" mutants appeared to be former Berkeley grad students). In mentoring the flock of confused mutants that gravitate to either the ivied halls of Xavier's School for the Gifted or the redwood forest of Magneto's Tent City of the Pierced, the two surrogate fathers take different positions on how their "children" should integrate themselves into the world at large. But they both agree, and the movie does too, that their charges are superiorly special. That may be true--who wouldn't prefer self-healing skin--but the thing is, the real-world conditions that mutancy is a metaphor for are neither superior, nor special, nor necessarily genetically coded. Describing social difference in the science lab, as Children of the Atom also tried to do, tends to make a dangerous leap from constructivism to essentialism.

The movie's central conceit is the invention of a "cure" that polarizes the mutant community/race/species/what-have-you, with some characters defiantly reveling in their difference and others desperately eager to erase that genetic distinction. So the well-known philosopher Brett Ratner's question is: Is the ability to conjure mist at will, say, a way of expressing who you really are? Does your biology, or the way your biology is perceived, determine what you are for yourself inside of your own head? Or is there some essential part of your identity that transcends both societal category and DNA coding (as Something New would have it)?

But actually, my abandonment of superheroes has less to do with any possible answers to these questions than it does with the questions themselves. The notion that there is this kind of hidden best self, ready to be revealed only when greatly needed (unless you're Faith or something) isn't the way I want my children to understand identity. Do I want to tell them that any difference, real or imagined, between themselves and their peers is something to be gnawed over in private, pent up in a closet until they start classes at Metropolis University? Or do I want to make them start kindergarten with their capes and tights on?

This where I realize that being a parent changes things, lots of things, in ways I never would have understood before. Sure, my kids have the right to fantasize that they are disgruntled children of the atom, and probably will. But I don't get to think that way any more. I'm trying my damndest to raise citizens of the world, and step one of that endeavour as I understand it is to rewrite the narrative of exceptionalism that governs superhero fantasies and Bush foreign policy alike. That's why the argument that "parents are the real superheroes" is as flawed as "we don't condone torture, because we're Americans." The condition of being a parent, or of being an American, is terrifyingly important, powerful, weighty and more. And in that, it is utterly ordinary, because that is also the conditions of being human in general.

I'm really going to miss you, Buffy.

The original nerd

The original nerd
Originally uploaded by quietdomino.

Looking nervous and shifty-eyed, as usual.

That'll teach you to mention cats in the comments!

P.S. Can you believe that I took that picture with my camera-phone, then posted it to the blog via Flickr automatically? Zil McZillerson: Using amazing technology for remarkably trivial ends since 2006.

Meow.

FW: IMG_0532.JPG
Originally uploaded by quietdomino.

It has further occured to me that I have been a bit disparaging about our new cat. This is entirely (well, mostly) unwarranted. She is sweet as can be and polydactyl to boot. I had at one point planned a long blog post about the ins and outs of cat names, and how I wanted to name this cat "Willow" so that she would pair well with our other cat Milhouse in the category of "Lovable Television Nerds," but I was overruled, and instead she is named Annie Rose, after the little sister in the excellent series of "Alfie" picture books by Shirley Hughes, and then I was going to talk about how bibliophiles love to name cats after book characters and authors, and then I got busy and forgot about it and Annie Rose snuggled her way into everyone's hearts and also threw up a lot in the process because it turns out she can't handle dry food. So, consider this that post.

Apologia

It occurred to me, after I turned a simple email exchange with David into a scorched earth polemic on disciplinary boundaries, that my online persona has gotten a little belligerent. So I offer this return to basics, using the "nice words" I insist on for OlderKid. (Careful readers will note this is a straight copy of Asalad'sSisterGirl's blog, with different terms. I can only hope that my weak imitation encourages AsSG to start things back up again.)

Yes, Please

• Kiki's Delivery Service: Miyazaki, a 13-year-old witch, and a talking black cat for a sidekick. What's not to love?
• Threadless T-Shirts, especially the (sadly sold out) "Nothing Rhymes with Orange" design.
• Ask Metafilter, which has allowed me to spend countless minutes pondering the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge and the tragedy's sole fatality, a dog named Tubby.
• Jill Scott, and the Columbia Public Library for sharing her with me so kindly.
• The local Memorial Day Parade. Bring on the jingoism, as long as it involves marching bands and parachuters.
• The Man Who Wore All His Clothes. Though it's ridiculously long (who chooses an 11 chapter book for a three year old? Me, I guess), it's from the hilarious brain of Allan Ahlberg and involves a frequently confused car radio, a foiled bank robbery, a substitute teacher fond of impossible commands, and (no surprise here) a talking orange cat for a sidekick.
  

No, Thank You

• feverish babies and cats who don't talk but do puke in hidden spots.
  
• Sin City. Yes, I know I brought it on myself. But did I really deserve to have the image of Carla Gugino brandishing her just-cannibalized arm stump and screaming "He made me watch [him eat it]!" imprinted on my mind for the rest of my life?
• The A's 6 game losing streak.
• 90+ degree days in May and
• Raking leaves at noon on a 90+ degree day in May because some kind of fungal spores messed with our sycamore's head and made it drop all its leaves 5 months ahead of time.

Excuse Me?

• The Bus Uncle phenomenon.

Tune in Next Week

I can't explain why I stopped watching Lost. At first I was really excited about the show, happy that Daniel Dae Kim had graduated from lame parts on Angel and Voyager to a series regular, and glad to see Harold Perrineau out of the wheelchair. Then, as I recall, a baby appeared in my house and seemed to require a lot of attention, as did the toddler who was already there. And Lost somehow never made it back into my consciousness.

Which is why I was shocked to open the New York Times and discover that Our Mutual Friend was a plot point in last night's season finale. I was even more shocked to find out what kind of plot point: apparently one character is saving the book as the last one to read before he dies. To which I say, huh? That's the Dickens novel you're treasuring? But I guess that's another post.

The article goes on to quote Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carleton Cuse declaring their affinity for Dickens as someone else who knew the pressure of a deadline and the challenges of keeping up interest in a serialized narrative. (And poor Dickens ended up choosing to die rather than figure out who actually did kill Edwin Drood, or, you know, something like that.) Which gave another stir to the soup of ideas sloshing about in my brain-pot having to do with serial fiction, narrative, Victorian Futures, time, the universe and everything.

Tara Ariano, (along with others) the brains behind Television without Pity and Fametracker, wrote this article for the CBC about shows that "become too popular" and so go on too long, observing:

In some cases, producers prolong the natural run of a series by adding new plots or characters, without considering that a narrative structure can only support so much story before collapsing in on itself.

To which I say, tell that to Dickens. Or, for those of us not in a Doctor Who episode, I ask: is the problem the nature of narrative itself? Or is the problem the contemporary conversion of the art-form into a commodity? Put another way, is it that it's not possible to create a truly great piece of fiction that is both conceived of and distributed periodically? (Here I mean to exclude works that the author finishes beforehand and then just publishes in sections. I'm thinking about times when production, distribution, and reception are all mixed up together.) Or is that it's just not possible for such great serial fiction to be created in a period in which the creative product is for sale in so many forms? That is, given that we know that the installments of the story will be repeated on various channels, sold over the internet and in DVD sets, and otherwise kept in constant circulation, how can we maintain faith in the integrity of linear story progression? Even before one episode has even aired, don't we already know how it's going to fall apart, with hybridized bees, and immortal Italians, and men with blue hands, and demonic law agencies, and sons in the basement, and assasinated Presidents, and eye-gouging Preachers, and the list goes on?

A lot depends here, of course, on what I mean by "great piece of fiction," and I'm not sure I have the room or the audience inclination to get into that. If you poked me, I might say I'm interested in how serial fictions, in their production and reception, reflect a contemporary understanding of the passing of time, and, by the extension, the structure of personal and national history. And you might say "Shfngngrghs[drool on keyboard]djkl;sp." Then I might say, "Okay, let me rephrase. If circumstances--the internet, global empire, the iTunes music store--conspire to undermine the functions of linear narrative, does this mean that the question 'What happened next' no longer has meaning? And if it does, what meaning does it have?"

And then I'd also say, hey, look at the National Review's list of the top 50 conservative songs. Those guys sure are crazy!

Ravens are like Writing Desks

OlderKid has recently discovered the joy of titles. Until a few months ago, he regarded titles of books and songs as functional utterances to be pronounced phonetically until the desired object appeared. But now he's realized that oftentimes the words that are in the title also crop up in the text or lyrics, sometimes repeatedly, and figuring that out has made every piece of music a delightful treasure hunt. The conversation in our car on the way to daycare, multiplied by a million, goes something like this: OK: Mama, what's this song called? Me: Down by the Riverside. [Music continues...] OK: [with extreme delight] Mama, he said Down by the Riverside! He said it again!

All of this is just to say that the book I'm reading right now has a singularly unappealing title and one which by all right should not appear anywhere in the text. It's everyone's favorite work of rogue economics, Freakonomics. Let it be known that I am a ginormous fan of popularized science--I'm perfectly content to learn about linguistics from The Language Instinct, evolution from Darwin's Dangerous Idea, and quantum physics from The Elegant Universe. So I approached Freakonomics with great hopes. But, after making my way through the incredibly off-putting and self-congratulatory "Explanatory Note" which begins the book, I began to wonder. Shouldn't this book really be called "Patterns of Social Practice Which Should Be Obvious to Everyone Except You Guys Are Such Dumbasses You Need Me to Explain It"? Could we take a break from hearing about the Harvard Society of Fellows and how much cooler the author was than all of those coneheads and instead, you know, consider some of the social contexts? Take the chapter on "Why Drug Dealers Live with Their Mothers." I got the basic point, that rank and file gang members don't actually make much money; but couldn't stop thinking how much more interesting that point was in The Wire, or Random Family; big, hefty works that respect the huge, unwieldy complex of issues at hand. Freakonomics loves to pose the wowee-matchup--the Klan is like real-estate agents! Gangs are like fast-food franchises! Doodlebugs are like smarty-pants! (okay, I made that one up)--and then immediately walk away whistling, all "I'm just the freaky economist! All of life's contours are just number patterns to me, you guys take it from here--" I hate to be old-school humanist about it, but I just think that's kind of immoral.

The book smacked of the same things that bug me about Gladwell's writing, though I think this book was much worse; a tendency towards smugness and a willingness to play fast and loose with the reliability of the academic sources it draws on. It doesn't work to say, as I think Blink does, that standard research doesn't understand how to interpret these problems, while right at the same time drawing on standard research to support your conclusions. Maybe my problem is that I don't have any inherent interest in understanding cultural relations as data-sets, but isn't the bridge that the popularizer is supposed to build? I don't have any inherent interest in quantum physics either, but I like hearing arguments about how and why I should. All Freakonomics has really done for me is given me a lot of cocktail party anecdotes (which, given my current rate of cocktail party attendance, are going to last for a long time) and remind me that a lot of academics are blowhards.

On that note, and returning to the theme of problematic titles: I wonder why no one has wanted to be hired for this job?

21st Century Blake

Because "The Tyger" is one of my favorite Blake poems, trite as that might be, I especially appreciated this short film based on the poem (though not in any literal way) and also titled "Tyger." It's set in Sao Paulo and directed by Guilherme Marcondes and is the kind of combination of creepy and lyrical that I like best. Download and enjoy!

Thank you, Sam, for sending me the link.

Yeah, It Happened.

Barry's even with the Babe, and the A's are the ones that dealt it. (Yes, this is a baseball-related post. Hey, where are you going?) And apparently some people are kind of angry about it! Why? Well, go read this book. Are you back? Okay.

I have no pretensions that I'm going to be adding anything substantive to the discussion here, but I maybe want to make a case for why people of all kinds, even baseball-haters (you know who you are) should care about this. Sports are the most racially-integrated national institution we possess, but that integration doesn't come easy. Sars points out, in her essay on the Bonds kerfluffle, that the way people talk and feel about baseball is often related to how they talk and feel about America.

To me, that means race comes into it in a big way, even though everyone wants to pretend that it doesn't. That, they can, without cognitive dissonance, love the brothers Hernández, defectors who throw a ball really fast, but as for other, slower-throwing immigrants? Not so much with the love. And while everyone agrees Pierzynski needs anger management lessons, they also agree that Milton Bradley needs them more. (How dare he disrespect Jeff Kent?) And most of all, while everybody loves Ken Griffey Jr.--so respectful, so talented, so much potential to break records, yet so injury-prone and therefore so safely unlikely to ever play a full season--everybody feels just fine, gleefully fine, about hating Barry. But it's all about sportsmanship! Barry doesn't run out flies! Barry doesn't properly respect the past! Barry wears padding so a ball thrown at 90 miles an hour won't hit his elbow quite as hard! Barry has a weirdly high voice and a leather recliner in front of his locker!

Truth is, I don't like him either, and at this point I don't know if it's because he's really a jerk or because I've been conditioned into it. But I know that none of the things I mentioned above really gets at what the problem is for most people. Sure, the reluctance to "hustle" to first is annoying, when it's part of his million-dollar job description, but there's a little bit more cultural depth to the accusation that a black man is acting lazy. Barry, right now, is in a dangerous place: he is black, and he is getting something that we, the beer-guzzling sports fan public have decided that he doesn't "deserve." This gives people a chance to talk angrily about how America isn't like that--we earn our privilege and our place in the record books with our own bootstraps! Any similarity to barely suppressed white outrage about affirmative action, welfare reforms, or slavery reparations is, of course, surely just a coincidence.

Scenes from a Early Morning Car Ride

Me: Did you guys know we're going to be going on a big adventure in June?
OlderKid: Yes.
Me: We're going to Canada, and we're going to look for icebergs.
OK: Yes, and then I will chase them, and they will fly away up into the sky.
Me: Hmm. I think you might be thinking of pigeons. Icebergs are made out of ice and snow.
OK: Oh.
Me: And they are really big, bigger than our house.
OK: Oh, and we cannot play with them. Because that is against the rules.
Me: Ummm, yes. It is against the rules of gravity.
OK: Oh.
YoungerKid: Yaahhhhhh!

Not Amazing in the Least

Ray and Yolanda, why have you deserted me?

In a Nutshell

Lots of picture books have come home from the library in recent days, filled with lots of glossy illustrations, lots of photographs of cute young authors who live in Brooklyn, lots of squiggly line drawings of mischievous cats or lonely dodos or curious polar bears, and reading them OlderKid and I have felt...well, frankly, lots of boredom. The stories are all fine, and they urge pleasant, respectable behavior; sharing with siblings, eating food neatly, showing respect to Mother Earth. I wouldn't quarrel a bit with them, but I just might be asleep before the final page gets turned. Which is why, after trying the fourth such glossy innocuous yawner (at my insistence, I'm sorry to say, OlderKid recognized the way things were going long before), we rushed back with relief to Maurice Sendak's Nutshell Library.

If you haven't read these before, well, you're missing something, as I hope I'll make clear. The books are tiny and come in their own protective box; there are four of them; they are modeled on primers of the nineteenth-century and, in theory at least, review letters, numbers, the months of the year, and the importance of caring. But what makes them great (aside from the fact that Carole King set them to music perfectly for Really Rosie, her collaboration with Sendak), is their willingness, like every Sendak production, to delve into the terrifying and absurdist depths of a child's fears.

Picture books, like poetry, show their hand almost immediately: you can tell from the first few words usually if it's going to be "Tyger, tyger burning bright" or more "How doth the little busy bee..." And any good picture book, like any poem that's worth learning and remembering, leaves a mark. Sometimes the mark is funny, sometimes touching, but surprisingly (at least to me) most of of the time it's incredibly terrifying. Fear is probably the most powerful emotion that a 3 year old feels, and so he wants to feel it a lot, in a controlled environment where the turn of a page can bring back or banish the terrible feeling at will. If the book won't acknowledge this, or worse, passes off an adult's fear (that two siblings won't love each other instantly, say) as a child's, that book is worse than useless. (A fear that a sibling will replace a child, well, that's another matter.)

So this is what's great about Sendak. Pierre actually gets eaten by a lion because he is such a little snot. Johnny has to stand up to a robber, a tiger, and a nose-pecking blackbird, among many others. Alligators throw tantrums. These things are all scary, and fascinating, and worthy of constant repetition--and along the way there is also some talk of May follows April follows March, and so on. I think some modern parents are unsettled by this, and so reluctant to read Sendak to their children. Maybe they are afraid of the blood-thirsty enjoyment they see in their child's eyes. But the terror will inevitably out, if not via the Nutshell Library, than via Bionicles, or Power Rangers, or Batman, or what have you. And Carole King wrote no music for those.

Back to normal?

That is, we're back from a lovely graduation weekend in the Bay Area. The cat is back from the vet's, without her giant blue Elizabethan collar and 14 metal stomach staples and with a gargantuan appetite for anything YoungerKid drops on the floor. The car is back in the same city as us, after an elaborate practical joke (I can only assume, at least) played by the airline changed both the city of departure and of arrival for our flight home one hour before take-off; which meant I spent Monday taking the shuttle back across to the other side of the state to retrieve the car from the original airport parking lot. And the kids are back to all their familiar toys and books, of which they were apparently horribly deprived over the four days that we were gone.

Why the question mark in the title, then? The news that Cody's on Telegraph will be closing its doors on July 10. For those who love Berkeley and love books, this is undoubtedly shocking news, even if you admit, as you know you have to, that you probably did more buying at the 4th Street store or on Amazon of late anyway. Like every other graduate of Berkeley though, I have spent countless hours browsing the shelves (perhaps not every Cal grad shared my fondness for the pet care and mystery aisles in particular), enduring the strange sticky sweet smell of the floor, and carrying on feuds with various employees (actually, that one might also be just me.) Even now, when I pull out an old book and find that familiar black and white bookmark shoved inside, I remember settling myself down in some little corner of the store to read and eavesdrop on fellow shoppers intent on their own bizarre purchases, then tromping around Wheeler with my crinkly plastic sack full of fresh books, waiting for some professor to gaze distractedly at my burden and mutter tweedily: "Cody's, hmmmm? You'll make a fine academic some day." Academics and book-lovers have their status brands as surely as suburban teenagers and Park avenue matrons, and Cody's, the quirkiest, biggest bookstore serving the most chaotically brilliant U.S. public university--you bet them's fighting words--ranks right at the top. If people are now too frightened by the clumps of teenagers begging for beer money on the corner outside to make it in to the store, well, that's everybody's loss. I'm not sure I have time before the kids wake up to spin this out into a dissertation on how Barnes and Noble and poor urban planning are ruining American life, so I'll just say this. Maybe, as the Sunday New York Times Magazine reminds me, printed books don't matter anymore, even if the words inside matter more than ever. But, as a shopper, a reader, a collector, and a person increasingly nostalgic for her youth, I'm going to miss them when they go.

Last Night's Read-alouds: Lost and Found, Curious George, Blueberries for Sal ("I will be the Mama Bear, Mama"), Lottie's New Beach Towel, This Little Pirate, So What's it Like to be a Cat, Martha Blah Blah, and, for YoungerKid, Polar Bear Polar Bear What Do You Hear? one MILLION times.

Short Cuts

OK, now for a short, low-brow interlude. Lately I've been reading:

1. Carl Hiaasen's Skinny Dip: It's entertaining with cartoonish characters. Or else people are really like that in Florida.


2. Barry Eisler's spy thrillers, Hard Rain, Rain Fall, and Rain Storm: As you might guess from the style of the titles, all of these novels feature a brooding hero named John Rain, exotic foreign locations, gadgets, and much sex and violence. The interactions of the characters, male and female, usually occur in various judo holds. Nonetheless, entertaining, and I am both pleasantly and annoyingly addicted to them.


3. Robert Gibbons' Game Theory for Applied Economists: now I should add here that this has been relatively entertaining, at least for a economics book. All of the examples involve excitingly named concepts like 'sequential rationality' and 'the Revelation Principle', which you might think might promise some science-fiction mayhem, or spiritual epiphanies -- but unfortunately, then you'd be sadly mistaken. Economists apply these exciting names to boring things like insurance and looking for a job. I'm considering writing something in between game theory, a spy novel, and a romance novel, where all of the machinations of the various characters are set up, but then left as exercises for the reader. Only economists will be able to read the ending.

A particularly bad influence in my life lately has been.... the Seattle Public Library! It is a terrifically wired library, and so now I am able to check out junky books and jazz CDs to my heart's desire. Unfortunately, right now all my heart desires is fluff, in between schoolwork.

Random

A recent furniture rearrangement, a recent hard-drive failure, plus a recent email exchange with Asalad reminded me of several things. One, I am gosh darn easy to distract when I'm on a deadline. Two, I have a lot of mp3s of many kinds, and a lot of bookshelves stuffed in random corners. Three, I am a librarian's daughter.

Not making sense to you? Yeah, me neither. Let me try again. I had to move all the bookcases out of the guest room and into the hall because LittleCat had to go in the guest room after her stomach surgery and she wasn't allowed to have anything in there with her that she might jump on and pop her staples out. Now I'm thinking the bookcases look good in the hall, and I should keep them there permanently. But that raises the question, what kinds of books are appropriate for upstairs hallway bookcases? I mean, it's obvious I put my work books in my office. And my fanciest non-work books in the living room, where visitors can see them and be suitably impressed (Hello, James Joyce's Ulysses! My, your spine is looking mighty fresh and uncracked!) and my embarassing cat mysteries in the bedroom, where only my nearest and dearest can mock them (Oh, it's you, Rita Mae Brown. Put some damn soap in your cat's mouth, she curses like a sailor!) But what kind of book is a hallway book? Fiction? Biography? Foreign language?

In a related train of thought, while slowly re-copying all my lost music files back to the hard drive, and simultaneously reading this post on the Stephin Merrit controversy and the playlist meme more generally, I recognized myself with some sheepishness. Not that I'm always posting my random playlists from my iPod as proof of my musical taste,* but that the bookcase placement question which so concerned me is just a grand version of that, in which I try to stack the deck in favor of my self-image as an important intellectual. How much squirmier would I feel all the time if I had to meet with students and colleagues in an office filled with a truly random selection of the books that I own? But maybe it would be good for me. Then I'd have to face up to the fact, that despite having spent many years in pursuit of a doctoral degree in literature, I still like to read books in which animals can both talk and do detective work.

Moral? I need to check more books out of the library, and hope Homeland Security doesn't reveal library records for the purposes of petty humilation.

*To prove I am serious about not having musical taste, here is an unedited take from my iPod. Begin the mockery now:

Like The Weather 10,000 Maniacs MTV Unplugged
The Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34 (Variations and Fugue On a Theme of Purcell) Variation VI: Violas (Meno Mosso) Arthur Fiedler and The Boston Pops Classics for Children
King Harvest (Has Surely Come) The Band Greatest Hits
Dooinit Common Like Water For Chocolate
Tonight the Heartache's On Me Dixie Chicks Wide Open Spaces
I'm Left, You're Right, She's Gone Elvis Presley
Everyone's a Little Bit Racist Original Broadway Cast Avenue Q
New York, New York Ryan Adams
Kiss the Girl Samuel E. Wright The Little Mermaid Disney
Box Full of Letters Wilco A.M.

Adaptation

So the Guardian list of best 50 book-to-movie adaptations (as well as the subsequent blogosphere parsing of the list) has finally filtered through my brain, helped along by a viewing of The Chronicles of Narnia this weekend. Let me start by saying that I'm going to have to give the movie a thumbs-down, seeing how it's getting sourer and sourer in my memory as time goes on. It's not that it was bad, exactly, and I'm certainly not one to turn up my nose at CGI-heavy fantasy epics. Actually, for me (and is this blasphemy?) I think the problem lies in the source material. Y'all, those books just aren't that good! And it's not even having a problem with the whole Christian allegory thing, or the whole "always winter and never Christmas thing," which I had actually forgotten about. It's that those kids are such a bunch of boring prigs, except for Edmund, who experiences a brief period of de-prigification when betraying them to the White Witch and then quickly re-prigifies. (And they all forgive him so quickly--yet when Susan wants to wear pantyhose in a later volume, she's dead to them?) The movie doesn't help matters, certainly, by tightening up the progress of the plot; as a viewer, I simply did not care if Narnia was destroyed because nobody took the time to set up what was interesting or good or valuable about it. This supposed country is inside a wardrobe, and we're supposed to believe that within seconds the Pevensies would be all "We must give our lives to rescue the creepy talking animals that we've met five seconds ago with the help of an even creepier lion that talks like Liam Neeson?" Maybe it's because I coupled the Narnia movie with an episode of the Wire, but I'm inclined to believe even six-year-olds have more self-preservation instinct than that.
Obviously, I won't be including this movie on my list of great adaptations. In fact I started thinking about what my list would be like, and intially only came up with Howl's Moving Castle, which I partly think is great because it is nothing at all like the source material, and partly because it's Miyazaki, who currently can do no wrong for me. Then I got sidetracked thinking about a possible course on film adaptions that wildly diverged from their original nineteenth-century novel source. This yielded up the now-somewhat tired pairing of Emma and Clueless, and the possibly inappropriate for a Midwest campus duo of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Fight Club. (Yes, I know that Fight Club is really adapted from Fight Club.) Then I remembered the odd Western The Claim that I saw riding on a bus from Caracas to Barquisimeto, which I really didn't understand because it might have been dubbed in Spanish, I might have been hungover and the country might have been in the throes of a failed coup attempt at the time (I guess that's another story), but isn't that based on the Mayor of Casterbridge? And there my ideas ran out.

Which means, I guess all this post ends up saying is, I'm not very good at coming up with best-of lists. But I sure do love to watch movies. Also, I'd like to qualify my dislike of C.S. Lewis by saying that The Voyage of the Dawn Treader's creepiness still haunts my memory twenty years after my last reading of it, and I guess that's a good thing.

Collapsing

Last night I had a dream that a fish flew by outside my window. After I watched it perch on a tree, thought police came to my house and erased my brain because the flying fish was a sign of the imminent environmental apocalypse that the government was trying to cover up. I had to spend the rest of the dream trapped in an existence where my only thoughts could be childhood memories, half of which weren't even mine, accessed through a colorfully hand-drawn DVD menu.

I blame Jared Diamond. (Except for the DVD part. That is definitely related to the Dan Zanes video we checked out of the library.)

David has already expressed his surprise that I am still reading Collapse. And I'm a little surpised as well; I mean, I love me some apocalyptic fiction, but to read, in incredible detail, the ways that the Anasazi, the Easter Islanders, the Maya, the Vikings in Greenland, the Vikings in North America (you get the idea) all failed miserably in their environmental and societal policies and ended up starving to death? A little much, I think. I'm not even half-way through the book and I've already resigned myself to the eradication of all life as we know it within the next 10 years. Even though it goes against all my better instincts, I'm considering just stopping, because, I get it already, Diamond! They gluttonously consumed all available resources! They refused to consider the long-term consequences of their actions! There are some present-day parallels! Shelley got the same task done in fourteen lines, for goodness sakes.

But still, I'm reading. Where else would I learn about the dynamic field of packrat midden analysis?

New Media

All right, so maybe it's because I'm trying to finish up a book chapter about nineteenth-century photography, (or because I just discovered the amazing scariness of video-conferencing via iSight?), but I'm kind of consumed with thinking about photographic illustration these days. This has coincided nicely with OlderKid's and my discovery of Nina Crews' excellent (and brand new) picture book Below. It's easily compared with Traction Man is Here!, which I have previously praised, but they're actually pretty different (or as different as two books told from the point of view of a boy and his inanimate plaything could be).

I'm not automatically drawn to books that mix media like this; for example, Mo Willem's Knuffle Bunny seemed cute to me but not necessarily earth-shaking. Plus OlderKid showed no interest in it, for whatever reason. But he loves Below, and YoungerKid has also granted it the highly coveted drool-covered fingertip seal of approval. Part of it is surely that it's interesting to look at photographs of a boy about OlderKid's age doing exactly the same things that OlderKid likes to do: playing with trucks and little toy people and dropping them in various inaccesible places, such as, in this case, into a hole in the staircase. But Crews manages to make the book tap into the metaphorical terrors inherent in the space beneath the stairs, and without ever being heavy-handed about it, capture real fears of abandonment and loss more effectively than Willem's Trixie and her lost blanket. Plus, it's a biracial family! Not engaged in some kind of folkloric myth activity!

Photographs don't always make the best illustrations, but I've found that a lot of times their aura of realism and visual truth speaks especially to Older and YoungerKid, who is also a devotee of the DK board books. Ironically this is exactly what I'm railing against in the book chapter I'm writing, but maybe it's a little early to introduce Sontag into the mix.

Dear Authors

...of "multicultural" children's books. Is it possible that you could take a short break from writing up every single myth, tall tale, magical biography, fantasy, olde-timey story, and other folk tale that you can possibly find? Because, and I know this is going to be quite a shocker to you, apparently people of color still exist in the present day, like, right now, this minute, the second of May 2006! And these people do things--everyday things! Like going to the grocery store and whatnot! And books about those everyday things are actually kind of interesting to read aloud!
Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Unsettling

On Friday, I
1) gave an introduction to department faculty and graduate students to a talk on Middlesex, which I had no business doing since, as this blog reveals, American contemporary fiction remains my undiscovered country,
2) rushed my cat to the vet for emergency bowel surgery, and
3) finished Kazuo Ishiguro's When We Were Orphans.
Of these, I'd said the Ishiguro was the most unsettling. (Okay, of course that's a lie. The cat was the most unsettling, but such is my faith in and adoration for the vet school that I was/am probably less worried than I should have been.)
I gave this book to my father as a present when it first came out, based on the similarities between my dad's life and the plot synoposes I read. My father grew up in Shanghai around the time of the Chinese civil war, and left behind a close friend who he has always sought to reconnect with. When We Were Orphans is narrated by Christopher Banks, a British boy who grows up in Shanghai in the 20s and returns during the period of Japanese occupation to search for his "kidnapped" parents and his boyhood friend--a Japanese boy named Akira. My father read the book, I think, but never said anything to me about it. Later my mother told me that it "confused" him. Now I know why.
The book takes apart, slowly and with devastating effectivity, any faith in the reliability of memory or of narration. Christopher, though supposedly a renowed detective, blunders so badly and so horribly through the corrupt and brutal expatriate and Chinese communities, both as a child and as an adult, that even when the wrapping-up of the plot questions occurs, we have no way of recognizing whether or not the answers are correct. It's a meditation on the blindness of imperial Britain, surely, but also on the inability of humans in general to acknowledge painful truths. A fellow Victorianist recommended this book as one to teach in conjunction with Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, which I think I might do, but it would also pair well with James's What Maisie Knew, as a study in the devasting ignorance of childhood. Christopher, in the end, loses his parents both in reality and in memory--nothing that he has remembered about them ends up being true--and is left anchorless and alone at novel's end, in a way that is great to read about but less than wonderful to actually experience. I keep cringing now, wondering what questions and insecurities about my father's own boyhood the novel raised that made him describe it as confusing; if nothing else, let this be a warning to everyone not to give gifts of books that you yourself have not read. Especially when they concern traumatic personal histories.