Half Changed World

I saw this meme at Kaethe’s blog.  She decided not to play, but I was intrigued enough to pick it up (especially since I’m beat from N’s birthday celebrations).  It’s a little more complicated than your basic meme, but not as much work as writing a real post.

The Pharyngula Mutating Genre Meme 

A blogging and scientific experiment.

There are a set of questions below that are all of the form, "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is …".

Copy
the questions, and before answering them, you may modify them in a
limited way, carrying out no more than two of these operations:

• You can leave them exactly as is.
• You can delete any one question.
• You can mutate either the genre, medium, or subgenre of any one
  question. For instance, you could change "The best time travel novel in
  SF/Fantasy is…" to "The best time travel novel in Westerns is…", or
  "The best time travel movie in SF/Fantasy is…:, or "The best romance
  novel in SF/Fantasy is…".
• You can add a completely new
  question of your choice to the end of the list, as long as it is still
  in the form "The best [subgenre] [medium] in [genre] is…”.

You
must have at least one question in your set, or you’ve gone extinct,
and you must be able to answer it yourself, or you’re not viable.  Then
answer your possibly mutant set of questions. Please do include a link
back to the "parent" blog you got them from to
simplify tracing the ancestry, and include these instructions.

Finally, pass it along to any number of your fellow bloggers. Remember,
though, your success as a Darwinian replicator is going to be measured
by the propagation of your variants, which is going to be a function of
both the interest your well-honed questions generate and the number of
successful attempts at reproducing them.

My great-great-grandparent is Pharyngula.
My great-grandparent is Metamagician and the Hellfire Club.
My grandparent is The Flying Trilobite.
My parent is Pro-Science (by adoption).

The best time travel short story in SF/Fantasy is:
The Lincoln Train, by Maureen McHugh
 
The best feminist movie in scientific dystopias is:
 Aliens

The best sad song in rock is:
Hallelujah (as sung by Rufus Wainwright in the Shrek soundtrack)
 
The best cult novel in Canadian fiction is:
Not Wanted On the Voyage, by Timothy Findley
 
I’m not going to tag anyone, but anyone who wants to play is invited to do so.  Comment or trackback here if you do.

In the movie Pump Up The Volume, the Christian Slater character has a line where he says "At some point, I realized I was never going to be normal. And I said, f— it, so be it."  I saw this movie with a friend from high school, at a theater somewhere in the middle of Queens, and I laughed so hard at this line that I literally fell off my chair and the few other people in the theater all turned around to stare at me.

I was reminded of this line by Laura at 11d’s comment this weekend that "I think it helps that I have never placed a whole lot of stock in normality."  It made me realize that while I’ve long ago made my peace with being weird, I’m not quite there yet with respect to my kids.  I want them to be happy.  D’s already come home saying that kids have teased him, and I know that’s part of life, but I still want to strangle them.

D says they call him short. And you know what?  D is short, and he’s probably always going to be short.  Physically, he seems to take after me, and I’m short. Plus he’s on inhaled steroids for his asthma.  So what can he do?  He can ignore it, or try to turn it into a joke.  He can tell them they hurt his feelings, or find other kids to hang out with.  He can try to fight the kids who tease him, or tell a teacher.  Mostly I think he needs to get a little thicker skinned, but I don’t think that’s something you can learn by being told — you need to figure it out yourself.

He’s also said that kids laughed at him because he was licking the sweat off of himself after they were running.  I had to work hard not to laugh myself when he said that.  D can’t control that he’s short, but I don’t think it’s crazy to think that he could choose to save licking his own sweat for when he’s in private. I wouldn’t suggest that someone pretend not to be smart, or hide her sexual orientation in order to fit in, but this doesn’t seem like such a fundamental thing.

When we were talking about Madeline L’Engle after her death, one of my friends who does a lot of work with gifted kids commented that Meg clearly thinks it makes sense to pretend not to be as smart as she really is; she only gets in trouble because Charles Wallace is totally incapable of doing so, and Meg gets in fights defending him.  The problem with pretending is it’s hard work, and you miss out on friendships with the people who might actually like you the way you are, and if you’re good enough at pretending you sometimes forget who you really are.

The best fiction I’ve ever read about these issues is a comic called Zot! by Scott McCloud. Zot is a teenage superhero from a parallel dimension, but in the last 8 or 9 episodes that McCloud wrote, he gets stuck on our Earth and hangs out with his not-quite-girlfriend Jenny and her group of weirdo high school friends.  They’ve never been published as a trade paperback, because the press that put out the earlier volumes of Zot! went under.  I just found out that HarperCollins is going to publish all of the black and white Zot! episodes next year, as a single volume.  I’m really pleased.  (The Zot! book is now available for pre-order.)

Leslie Bennetts has been very harsh about people who criticize her book, The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?, without having read it.  So I’m here to report that I slogged through the whole thing, and now I feel perfectly entitled to criticize it.  Here are my major complaints:

1)  Bennetts says repeatedly that she’s not making a moral judgment about the value of stay-at-home parenting, only pointing out the economic risks of dependency.  But I just don’t believe her.  She refers to stay at home parents as "parasites," to singularly focused lives as "sterile and stultifying," and suggests that the children of such parents will be overly dependent.  As far as I can tell, she believes that devoting your full energies to parenting is waste of brains as much as Linda Hirshman does, but doesn’t have the courage to stand up and say so.

2) Bennetts is unbearably condescending towards Gen X (and Gen Y) women.  She’s fallen hook line and sinker for the story that Gen X women are looking at Boomer Women and rejecting their attempts to "have it all."  So she thinks that Gen Xers are lazy/wimps/expect to have perfection handed to them.  But there’s no evidence that’s true — mothers’ labor force participation has declined slightly from its peak, but is still higher than it was in the 1980s or earlier.

3) She doesn’t take the issues of lower-paid mothers seriously.  In the section on child care, she blithely writes that "the horror stories about negligent or malignant baby-sitters do not reflect the reality of quality child care as those with reasonable means typically experience it."  That’s probably true, if you define reasonable means as earning $60,000 or more a year.  But that’s not most families.  And she rhapsodizes on about the importance of having meaningful intellectually stimulating work, with hardly a nod to the possibility that not everyone has that kind of work.

4) The issue of economic vulnerability is a real one.  While I’ve said here before that I think Bennetts overstates the risk of divorce, she’s totally dead on about the long-term financial consequences of breaks in labor force participation.  But where Ann Crittenden talks about these same issues and asks why should a 5 year interruption in work reduce your earnings for the next 40 years, Bennetts just scolds women for making bad choices, even as she quotes people like Pamela Stone as saying that these were constrained choices.

Towards the end of the book, Bennetts quotes a working mother who reports on what her pediatrician said: "I have taken care of thousands of children from all kinds of backgrounds, and the one consistent thing in raising well-adjusted children was parents who were happy with their choices."   Pity that Bennetts didn’t seem to hear what she was saying.

The other morning I asked D to get dressed, and when I went into his room 10 minutes later to check on him, I found him sitting in his underwear reading.  I just had to laugh, because I can’t tell you the number of times my mom found me with one sock on, reading or just staring into space.  While it can be annoying to have to repeat myself 3 times before it registers on him that I’ve even said anything, I’m just pleased as punch that he’s becoming a real reader.

On the other hand, I’m sort of selfishly bummed by his choice of reading material, which is almost exclusively manga.  He’s read all the Naruto that the library carries, and is now working his way through the Yu-Gi-Oh books.  It’s not that I think that comics aren’t "real" reading –but it’s not the stories that I dreamed about sharing with my children.  D still wants to be read to, but he’s less and less willing to let me pick the stories, and has almost no patience for chapter books of any sort.

Added to clarify: I’m thrilled that he’s reading, regardless of the content.  But there are so many books that I was personally looking forward to reading with him that he’s not interested in….  He won’t watch baseball with me either.

This week’s book is A Class Apart: Prodigies, Pressure, and Passion Inside One of America’s Best High Schools, by Alec Klein.  Klein, a Washington Post journalist, spent a year at Stuyvesant High School, one of New York’s competitive math and science high schools.  He tells the stories of a handful of students and teachers as the school year progresses, occasionally cutting back for a bigger-picture look at the questions such as the value of gifted and talented education and the huge under-representation of black and Hispanic students.

In topic and approach, A Class Apart bears a striking resemblance to another recent book, The Overachievers, in which Alexandra Robbins reports on three semesters she spent with students at Walt Whitman High School in Montgomery County.  (Both authors attended the schools they wrote about.)  But I whipped through A Class Apart in a couple of days, while I gave up on The Overachievers after finishing less than 100 pages in the three weeks the library allowed me.  So what’s the difference?

• I also went to Stuy, so I had more of a personal interest in the book.  It was interesting to see what things had changed (more racial divisions in the student body, far more organized prepping for the entrance exams) and what hadn’t (Sing!, Ms. Lorenzo, the existence of an assistant principal who would approve schedule changes for the desperate).
• Klein included teachers’ experiences which made for a greater variety of stories.
• Klein clearly felt a great deal of affection for the students, the teachers, and for the school as an institution.  I didn’t get that from Robbins.
• I think Klein is just a better writer than Robbins.

Klein’s book doesn’t really have a thesis — it’s just descriptive.  To the extent that it has an argument, it’s a plea that there ought to be more schools like Stuyvesant.  By that he means schools that push bright kids to excel, but he also means schools where parents are involved (sometimes to a fault) and schools where students feel a sense of ownership (again, sometimes to a fault) and teachers and administrators are willing to bend the rules in the interest of learning.

This week’s book is William Gibson’s new book, Spook Country.  I requested it from the library mostly on the basis of the rave review in the Washington Post, which called it "a devastatingly precise reflection of the American zeitgeist" and compared it to Don DeLillo’s books.

I read it in about a day and a half, which puts it way ahead of most of DeLillo’s recent books.  (I’ve owned Underworld for several years and don’t think I’ve made it past page 50.)  But other than being quite readable, I didn’t think that Spook Country had a lot going for it.  (Well, it did offer the pleasure of hearing a Gibson character say "remember where we were all going to do virtual reality?")

I had two major complaints about it:

1)  The book has three main characters, whose stories wind up intersecting as the book proceeds.  But all three of them are fundamentally pawns, being moved around by other people.  None of them ever considers doing something independently.

2)  One of the major conceits of the books is about locational art, where virtual reality headsets are mashed-up with GPS receivers, so they send images that are specific to the exact spot where you stand.  But none of the locational art described in the book sounded in the least bit interesting.  I’ve experienced real directional art — Janet Cardiff’s audio piece, Words Drawn on Water — and it still lingers with me two years later.  Nothing in the book had that sort of resonance.

[This is a MotherTalk sponsored review.]

I signed up to review BOB Books: Set 1 mostly because I was curious to see how my kids would react to them.  D is 6 1/2 and a strong reader; N is almost 4, and knows his letters, but hasn’t really started putting them together into words. 

The set is a collection of 12 small paperback books, each about a dozen pages long, and with maybe 50 or so words.  N loves the size, and the way the set comes with its own storage box.  They’re designed so that the first book only uses a handful of letters, and then each book adds a few more.  As you can imagine, that doesn’t leave room for a particularly wide vocabulary — there are a lot of sentences like "Sam sat."

What redeems the books, and makes them not totally painful for the parent to read (and re-read, and re-read) is the illustrations, which are whimsical line drawings, with easy to read expressions.  N and D both think it’s absolutely hysterical that Sam sits on Mat and Mat sits on Sam.

Are these books helpful for teaching a child to read?  I don’t know.  Last night, N selected these books for his bedtime story.  (We’ve had the books for about 3 weeks now, and he’s still interested in them, although he’s no longer asking for them every night.)  I tried to get him to read some of the words in the first book, and he did, but when I asked him if he was reading them or remembering what the book said, he said "remembering."  I personally think my head will explode from the repetition of the books before N is ready to make the transition from identifying letters to putting them together.  But for a kid who is right on the verge of decoding, and who would enjoy the triumph of being able to read a whole book "all by myself," these books might be a real hit.

Tonight was the parent orientation at N’s new preschool, and kids weren’t invited, so a friend babysit for the boys.  She brought over a really cool book that I had never heard of, so I thought I’d share my enthusiasm.  It’s a book of birds, but it includes digital recording of the sounds that the birds make.  It’s like the noisy books that my kids love, but educational and not as annoying (and it has a volume control).

There’s a new one coming out of birds from around the world but I think I’d rather figure out what’s making the sounds in my own backyard.

This week’s book is Opting Out?  Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home, by Pamela Stone.  Stone is a sociologist, and the book reports on her study of the experiences of 54 white, highly educated professional married mothers who left their well-paid careers to stay home.  The book is framed as a response to Lisa Belkin’s famous Opt-Out Revolution article, although I think Stone had actually started her research before it was published.

Overall, Stone’s thesis is that these women did not stop working because of a call to full-time motherhood, but because of the lack of flexibility in their high-powered jobs that made it impossible to both work at the level that they were accustomed to and have any semblance of family lives, especially given the expectations for intensive parenting in upper and middle class families.  Most of their husbands worked even more crazy hours, and something had to give.  Many of the women had requested part-time or flexible work situations — and in several cases, had taken advantage of such situations for a while, but were denied to permission to continue them.  Stone concludes that for these women, it was easier to incorporate professional skills into at-home parenting (often through high level volunteering) than to be a parent while working in their intensive jobs.

While Stone’s findings generally seemed plausible to me, I found it frustrating that she only talked to the women who had "opted-out."  I wanted to know what was different about those who had faced similar pressures and continued to work — did they have husbands who were more involved in family life?  more supportive bosses?  a greater willingness to outsource family duties?  healthier kids?

Since I’ve read and thought a lot about this issue, I felt like a lot of the book was old news to me.  The only real new ideas were in some of the details, like the suggestion that corporate mergers and downsizing often led to less flexible work arrangements, because people suddenly found themselves working for new bosses who didn’t have a history with them.  I also was struck by the ways that, once there was a parent at home, families’ lives rearranged in ways that made it harder for the mothers to return to work — fathers worked longer hours, the children started participating in extra-curricular activities that required them to be ferried all over town.

Ultimately, I’m not sure that Stone’s understanding is as different from Belkin’s as she thinks it is.  Belkin too had argued that her subjects were pushed from the work side as much as pulled from the family side.  Belkin focuses more on on- and off-ramps, while Stone is more interested in part-time and flexible arrangements.  My guess is that’s more a difference between parents of younger versus older children than anything else.

This week’s book is one of the ones that Nick Hornby writes about in Housekeeping vs. The Dirt. Stuart, a life backwards, by Alexander Masters, is the biography of Stuart Shorter.  Who is Stuart Shorter, you may ask.  He’s a homeless man who lived in Cambridge, England.  A violent criminal.  A drug user.  Someone with borderline personality disorder.  The kind of person most people try hard not to make eye contact with, if they can’t avoid entirely.  So, in many ways, the simple idea of writing a biography about Stuart is a political statement, an argument that his life is as worthy of study as the politicians, scientists, or writers who are more traditional subjects of biography.

But the book is far more than just a political statement.  The edition I have is covered with blurbs from impressive reviews, with "extraordinary" and "funny" being the most common words used.  Masters does an impressive job of portraying Stuart sympathetically without  whitewashing his crimes or excusing his truly awful choices.  He includes Stuart’s comments on the draft manuscript (which he thought was boring) and credits him with the idea of telling his life backwards, unfolding from their first encounters (working together to protest the unjust arrest of two social workers for not preventing drug dealing at a homeless shelter) to his earliest childhood (when he was both physically and sexually abused).  When Masters calls Stuart his friend, I believe him.

In another blurb, Zadie Smith is quoted as saying "It’s been years since I’ve been so delighted by a book."  Either she’s off her rocker or she’s got a different definition of "delighted" than I do.  The book is many things, but delightful is not one of them.  It’s depressing as hell.  If Neil in 49-Up is a walking advertisement for the welfare state, Stuart’s story is a parable about the limits of the welfare state.  Unlike his American counterparts, Stuart is provided a place to live and a living stipend, but neither is enough to give stability to his "chaotic" life.

At one point, Alexander is flabbergasted when Stuart refers to "posh" people who live on council estates — what we’d call public housing.  He writes:

"The boy’s a freak, surely.
"No.  He’s not.  People like Stuart — the lowest of the low on the streets, outcasts even among outcasts, the uneducated chaotic homeless, the real fuck-ups — people who’ve had their school and social training lopped off at twelve: they simply don’t understand the way the big world works.  They are isolated from us normal, housed people as we are from them.  If Stuart is a freak, then it is for opposite reasons: it is because he has had the superhuman strength not to be defeated by this isolation.  It is because he has had the almost unbelievable social adroitness to be able to fit in smoothly with an educated, soft-skinned person like myself and not make me frightened half to death."