Half Changed World

D came home from school last week singing various songs about Martin Luther King.  Very cute.  The school also showed his class a movie that apparently involved time travel and how the world would be different if Dr. King hadn’t lived.  In particular, D was quite concerned that if it weren’t for Dr. King, black kids and white kids couldn’t go to school together and he wouldn’t have hardly any friends!

I didn’t want to spoil D’s enthusiasm, but two things about that claim disturb me:

First, I’m wondering if educators show the same film in inner-city classrooms that are 100% minority.  As Jonathan Kozol points out, if you visit any school in America that is named after Dr.  King or Rosa Parks, the chances are that it will be just as segregated as any school before Brown vs. Board of Education.

Second, with all due respect to Dr. King, I think it does a disservice to the civil rights movement to suggest that it all hung on one man.  The  path might well have been different — and quite possibly more violent — but I find it hard to imagine that we’d still have legal segregation in the US even if Dr. King had never lived.

I’m guessing I may have an annual series of posts for as long as I continue blogging, quibbling about how the schools talk about Dr. King.  Last year’s edition is here.

Last year, the Washington Post magazine had a long article about a children’s entertainer called The Great Zucchini.  We discussed it, and the general phenomenon of children’s birthday parties here and here.  Well, last week we learned that the Great Zucchini himself was performing at the Arlington Cinema and Drafthouse, so off we went this afternoon.

He’s funny.  The kids absolutely adored it.  D laughed until his juice went down the wrong way and he choked.  Although he’s billed as a magician, the act includes very little stage magic — it’s mostly slapstick.  He poured water on himself, got attacked by a slinky, threw diapers at the audience, told them NOT to dance in the aisles, made a child "disappear" by hiding behind the curtains, etc.  But it’s nothing terribly original, just a consistent willingness to be silly.  T’s main reaction was "I could do that."  And he could — at D’s party last year, he impressed the kids by juggling chocolate cake.

This year for D’s birthday, we’re just taking a few kids to Port Discovery.  It’s enough of a treat for him that he doesn’t mind not having a big party, and the logistics are far easier.  We need to check with his teacher, but we think we’re still allowed to bring cupcakes to school on his actual birthday to share with his whole class, as long as they’re consumed in the cafeteria and not the classroom.

Via Margy Waller at Inclusionist, I’ve been reading some reports about the "framing" of low-wage work in the media.

I have to say, I’m sort of dubious.  The media consultants (Douglas Gould and Co) are saying that it’s bad when newspaper articles or magazine reports start off with stories about individuals or families who are struggling to get by.  The argument is that even if the subjects are highly sympathetic, this pushes the reader into a frame of "sympathy for the poor" and they get stuck on the merits (or flaws) of the individual example, rather than looking at the social and economic system that leads to the problem.

Ok, they’re the experts, and this is based on research on the subject.  And I know that when newspapers run these stories about, for example, people who are about to lose their homes because of medical bills, they often get donations for that specific family.  But my question is how many people read the stories — my guess is it’s higher for the ones that start off with the compelling story.  As Gould and co acknowledge, reporters certainly think that it’s better journalism that way, and that more people will read the stories than if they lead with straight economic analysis.  And a story that no one reads doesn’t do you much good, right?

I was also a little dumbfounded by the statement that it’s "highly advantageous" that welfare has essentially disappeared from news stories "as welfare tends to call forth negative stereotypes about low-wage work and workers."  Wow.

I did think that it was interesting that they found that stories about family leave and low wage work were disproportionately likely to be framed as personal rather than as a question of workforce policy.  I’m not sure if this is a statement about the issue per se, or about the lack of specific legislative proposals that encourage the use of a systemic frame.

Jody at Raising WEG has a couple of great posts up about the decline of the independent bookstore and why this is still a golden age for readers.  She’s 100 percent right that it’s just sloppy reporting by the NY Times to treat the rise of the chain bookstores and Amazon.com as the same phenomenon.

Personally, I almost never go into a bricks and mortar bookstore to look for a specific book anymore.  (Well, except maybe the Harry Potter releases.)  If I know what I’m looking for, I generally start by looking online to see if I can get it from one of my local libraries.  If they don’t have it, I use fetchbook to see where I can get it most cheaply online.  I go to bookstores when I’m browsing to see what’s out there, to get ideas for presents, and to take the kids to story hours.  (And I make up for the sin of buying used books by often buying signed copies at full retail price to give as gifts.)

And I live in an urban area, with access to lots of bookstores.  If I lived in a remote area, internet bookstores would be even more transformative.  And there’s no doubt that the internet has saved the mid-list book, which is less and less likely to be stocked at a physical bookstore.  (And even less likely to be stocked at Walmart, Target or Costco, which account for an astonishingly high proportion of book sales these days.)

I’m not so sure it’s a good time to be an author.  I occasionally read MJ Rose’s blog about the book industry, Buzz, Balls and Hype, which is fascinating and utterly depressing.  The chains overwhelmingly order books based on the computer prediction of what is going to sell, and things that don’t sell fast get sent back to the publishers.  The publishers are desperate for the next big thing, so they’ll throw money at a new author who they think could break out, but god help the second-time author whose first book sold respectably but not spectacularly.  Rose tells stories of authors who invest pretty much their entire advances on hiring independent publicists, because getting a book published doesn’t mean that your publisher will do anything to help your book succeed.  (The combination of publishers providing less and less support to authors and the costs of printing dropping is pushing more authors into self-publishing, but that’s another story.)

One of the things that independent book stores do is sell books that aren’t best sellers, that aren’t getting hyped by the publishing company, but that someone on staff really believes in.  Authors are desperate to find a way to replace those disappearing independent book stores.  That’s why I have an inbox full of emails offering me free books, in the hope that I’ll write about them.

The other thing that good independent book stores do better than the chains is create what Ray Oldenberg calls "third places" — places that are neither fully public nor fully private, that invite conversation and community.  The best portrayal of this that I know of is the ongoing saga of Madwimmin books in Dykes to Watch Out For.   (And Madwimmin has closed; Bechdel says she didn’t want the strip to be frozen in time like the Family Circus.)  While Barnes and Noble is full of people reading, surfing the internet, and drinking coffee, they’re unlikely to talk to people other than the ones that they came with. 

As Jody points out, the internet also fulfills some of that role; I don’t need to hang out in a women’s book store to find people to discuss feminism with.  And again, that’s a lifesaver to those in remote areas, or those who would be too shy to join in the discussion.  But it’s also harder to make a real personal connection.

For my birthday, I asked for, and received, Barack Obama’s new book, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream.  I started reading it right away, but then got started on some other books that were due back to the library, and didn’t pick it up again until the last couple of weeks. 

The book did nothing to change my overall positive impression of Obama.  He comes across as thoughtful, compassionate, well-read, and funny.  He’s clearly been reading many of the same policy briefs that I have, and I can’t name a single policy recommendation that I seriously disagree with.  (I do think some of them are likely to fall well short of solving the problems that they’re aimed at; for example, tying teacher pay to performance is something that I’d be willing to experiment with, but is unlikely to solve all the problems of American schools.)  He’s got the politician’s knack of finding the telling anecdote to bring a problem to life.

But the book itself is a bit of a snoozer.  I found myself carrying it back and forth to work, but choosing to read the newspaper instead of cracking it open.  While the rhetoric soars at times, at other points it reads like a high school textbook, recapping America’s ambivalent relationship to international institutions dating back to the League of Nations.  I’m glad that Obama knows this history — I wish I were more confident that our current president did — but it doesn’t make for a page-turner.  Dreams from my Father is a far more interesting read.

Saturday afternoon, T mentioned to me that a man had rung the doorbell earlier wanting to talk about God, and that he had had a good conversation with him.  "We talked about the problem of evil," he explained, shrugging.  "I don’t get to have that sort of conversation very much anymore."

The problem of evil, is of course, how can a just God allow terrible things to happen to good people.  A few hours later, I read Phantom Scribbler’s post about the Belarussian beekeeper whose answer to the problem of evil was that God is weak, powerful enough to strike with lightning cows left to graze in the Jewish cemetery, but not powerful enough to prevent the Holocaust.  (Go read her post, then come back here.)

Baylor University released a study a few months back about Americans’ religious practices and attitudes toward God.  Among other things, they divided believers into four groups based on whether or not they believe that God is angry and will punish sinners and whether or not they believe God is active in their daily lives and the world in general.  Given those options, I fall into "type D" those who believe in a distant God — one who set the world in motion, but does not intervene and is not particularly judgmental. 

Looking at the crosstabs, I see that Jews are the religious group most likely to believe in a Distant god (41.7 percent).  I’d guess that is in part because of the problem of evil — it’s hard to explain how an involved and just God could have let the Holocaust happen.  But the survey also found that ZERO percent of Black Protestants believe in a Distant god, and I find it equally hard to explain how an involved and just God could have let slavery happen.

One obvious question if you believe in a Distant god is why pray?  The survey found that nearly two-fifths of those who believe in a Distant god don’t ever pray, the same fraction as atheists.  I pray because I believe that the act of prayer is healing, even if it doesn’t cause God to intervene in any way.

I’m not sure where I’m going with this, but T’s right, we don’t get to talk about these things enough.  And I’d rather talk about them with Phantom and with you than with the guy who rings our doorbell.

If I get up at 5.30 into order to exercise before taking D to school and heading into work, the odds of my being coherent enough to blog at 10 pm are very low.l

From Quev at Mobtown Blues:

A man was arrested and falsely charged with murder.  Despite his
protestations of innocence, he was condemned to be executed at dawn.
Resigned to his fate, he called for a Buddhist priest to give him
comfort him in his last hours.  The priest told him that if he recited
the prayer to the Bodhisattva of Compassion
12,000 times before dawn, he would be released.  The condemned man
stared at the priest in confusion and terror, since the night was
already half gone and there was no way that he would be able to get
through that many repetitions of the Enmei before the sun rose on the
day of his execution.  Nevertheless, he bowed to the priest and began
chanting.  He had only gotten to the 4,000th repitition when the cold
light of dawn broke into his cell and he heard the jailer’s key turning
in the iron door.  With one final prostration on the cold stone floor,
he rose and turned to meet his fate, only to find that the door was
open and he was free to go.

Or, as is said in Pirkei Avot, "Lo alecha ha-m’lacha ligmor, v’lo atah ben chorin l’hibateyl mimenah." (It is not up to you to complete the work, but neither are you free to refrain from doing it.)

In his 1975 introduction to Warm Worlds and Otherwise, by James Tiptree, Jr.  Robert Silverberg hypothesized about the reclusive author, who was the subject of widespread speculation in the sci-fi world.  In what has become the most famous passage, Silverberg wrote:

"It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing.  I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male."

The passage is famous, of course, because behind the name of James Tiptree, Jr., the author was indeed a woman, as became widely known a few years later. 

This week’s book is a biography of that woman: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, by Julie Phillips.  I’m usually not terribly interested in writers’ biographies, which are usually far less interesting than their writing, but this is an exception.  Sheldon’s life was every bit as fascinating as her writing — including a childhood that included safaris to Africa, an elopement with the man who sat next to her at her debut, a stint in the WACs and one in the CIA, a PhD in the psychology of perception — and Phillips does a fine job of taking the reader through it all.

Much to my surprise, I finished the book far more sympathetic to Silverberg’s mistake than I started it.  Phillips argues, convincingly, that Tiptree was far more than a pseudonym to Sheldon, but a full-fledged persona.  She quotes Sheldon as believing that there were two sexes — men and mothers — and she was neither.  As Tiptree she wrote with a confident voice that she couldn’t claim on her own, and she also engaged in long correspondences with other sci-fi writers and fans (including Ursula LeGuin and Joanna Russ).  When she was finally unmasked, she came somewhat unmoored, and struggled to find her writing voice again.

It is often hard to see clearly how gender roles and constraints affected individual women by reading their biographies.  Most women either lived within the expectations of their times, rarely bumping up against the limits, or were the extraordinary exceptions who don’t seem to have noticed that there were any limits.  What makes Sheldon fascinating is that she seems to have spent her life crossing the limits and then getting cold feet, trying to conform but bursting out.  In an early chapter on her boarding school experience, Phillips writes:

"Alice had the bad luck to be extremely pretty.  If she hadn’t been, she might have given up the popularity contest.  She might have studied harder, prepared for a career, and not cared what people thought.  She and the other awkward, bright girls might have been friends.  Instead she cared about appearances, practiced femininity and flirtation, and got addicted to the reward for being a pretty girl."

This pattern seems to have stayed with her for much of her life.  But forty years later, being Tiptree let her escape all that.

This was one of the Times notable books of the year.  It’s also one of my picks for the best books I read in 2006.

I’m usually into New Year’s resolutions, but somehow can’t come up with ones this year that I’m both excited about and can really commit to.  Last year was a year of many changes — new job, D starting kindergarten, N starting preschool — and I feel like this is sort of a consolidation year.

Susan at Crunchy Granola says that her family has a tradition of coming up with a hope, a fear, and a prediction for the new year.  That feels like more the right speed.  My hope is that I will really come into my own in the new job, my fear is about my mother’s health, and my prediction is that I will really enjoy watching my kids’ personalities develop.

I do have some exercise goals for the month of January — 10-50-500.  10 pushups a day (starting out with full ones, moving to my knees if I run out of steam), 50 crunches a day, and 500 minutes of aerobic exercise over the course of the month.  I’ve been working on editing the photos from the holidays, and I am NOT happy with how I look.