If you thought I was immune...

to praise and compliments, you were wrong. Number 13 on this list just tickled me. Thank you, Red.

From the archives: Hobgoblin

In "Self-Reliance," Ralph Waldo Emerson included the oft-(mis)quoted epigram, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."

As an editor, I have heard paraphrases of the above too many times to recount, usually when a writer or (in a larger house or firm) copyeditor (one who is (a) inexperienced, (b) wishing to move out of proofreading/copyediting and into the more glamorous (as if!) substantive editing, or (c) both) is reviewing my notes for changes. "Be consistent," I advise, pointing to one or another (or several!) item(s) on the house style sheet. "Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds," they mutter. I don't suffer these misquoting fools gladly, but I usually let them pass without challenge.

One afternoon about eight years ago, though, a (very) junior claims attorney grew weary of my patient commentary on his submission to the firm's annual report, and loudly sighed, "You know, [insert my name here], consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds."

His secretary smirked at me.

"You know what, [insert real fool's name here]? The complete quote is, 'A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.' And here's what I'm thinking: I'm thinking that Mr. [insert surname of firm president] would share my view that closely adhering to the company style guide he helped me pen would represent an, oh, I don't know, wise consistency. What do you think? Shall we go ask him?"

Muttering junior attorney bustles off with secretary.

Editor vindicated.

Emerson fails to advise readers of the differences between a foolish consistency and a wise consistency, of course, but one could always read "Self-Reliance" and determine it for himself.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
...

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — "Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood." — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.

Folks, Emerson wasn't talking about grammar or punctuation conventions, house style guides or publishing formats. No, he was talking about something grander. Isn't it sad that his profound idea has been reduced to so little a thing?

This entry was first posted on 4.29.2004.

Note: Over the last few months, So Many Books has been reading and writing about Emerson. And we have a few related entries, here, here, and here.

More work

And now HMS Indefatigable has offered thoughtful commentary on Hirshman and work. Thanks to HMS and to all who have participated in the virtual discussion.

You know, the misreading of my initial Hirshman post provoked me to more thought on this subject. In fact, the misreading actually engendered more reflection than articles about Hirshman's manifesto itself (which was penned by a wife and a mother of three daughters, folks -- along the way, some may have missed that key bit of biographical data about the much maligned philosopher).

Here's what I came up with:

I work because I like it. No, that's not true. I love it. And I like the money my work yields. Frankly, off and on, we've needed the money my work yields. (And spare me smug nods about satellite dishes and luxury vehicles. We drive a six-year-old van and had bunny years for ten of the last twelve years. Stereotyping only goes so far, gentle (and not so) readers. Be wary. Think.) And for the record: I don't subscribe to the idea that parenting, directing the family-centered learning project, and homemaking -- no matter how wonderful (and they are), fulfilling (ayup), and demanding (you betcha) -- should supplant my desire, need, even, to work as a writer. That reasoning is flawed. It would be akin to saying that because I grow oranges, I have no need or desire for apples.

Since at least sixth grade, my sense of my future self involved work as a writer. (Aside from a period there during which I envisioned myself enjoying a career as an interpreter for the United Nations.) How many folks can say, with joy, that they have the work they always thought they wanted -- and that, even now that they have it, they still want it?

I'm lucky that way. In other ways, perhaps, not so lucky. But in this? Lucky.

More thoughts:

Why is it that some folks assume that a woman who seeks to define herself beyond the daily, beyond the playdates and baths and curriculum choices and meal planning and all of the chores that mark a mother's day (all of which have inherent pleasures and, be honest, some attendant pains in the posterior) is a less committed mother and wife, is ignoring her primitive and instinctual calling, is somehow less than they are? Conversely, why is that some folks assume that a woman who seeks to define herself within the daily, within the playdates and baths and curriculum choices and meal planning and all of the chores that mark a mother's day is less of a person, is ignoring her potential, is somehow less than they are?

These are, I believe, the questions that define the camps in the so-called "Mommy Wars" -- a subject about which I thought, until recently, I had opined sufficiently.

Was it Caitlan Flanagan (as maligned, if for different reasons, as Hirshman, as I remember it) who opined that good and bad mothers can be found on both sides? I think it was she. If not, someone will hasten to correct me.

I haven't hopped aboard Flanagan's wagon, either, by the way, but I agree with her (or with the speaker to whom the observation about mothers can be attributed): There are good mothers on both sides of the Wars.

Still more thoughts:

What many folks missed in Hirshman's philosophical manifesto is that, for the most part, she's not talking to us. No, really. She's not. She is talking to and about what La Mai calls "Upper East Side mamas" -- the excellently educated and unfathomably wealthy (read: politically influential) women who opt out of their tony offices and powerful appointments to become "professional parents." (See a related entry on the professionalization of motherhood here.) Hirshman is not talking to librarians and nurses and pharmacists and teachers and police officers and answering service operators and bank clerks and by-the-word writers and freelance editors (even if we are educated and/or smart). No, Hirshman is aiming her arrows right over our heads at lawyers-on-the-cusp-of-partnership, financial officers, deans-in-the-making, movers, shakers... the women she perceives have the best chance of becoming political, marketplace, and academic leaders.

It would be self-delusional to think that the pieces I pen (or edit) are reshaping the world, as Hirshman maintains women in positions of power can and should do. I am not in a position of power (well, I head a benevolent dictatorship of three subjects, but that's not exactly wielding a ring of power, now, is it?), although my influence as a parent, a teacher, and, yes, even as a writer remains to be seen. Sure, in my most recent assignment, I have improved the product's quality and, by extension, pleased the boss and the firm's clients. That's a great feeling -- it's a feeling that, for me, far outstrips the satisfaction I experience after finishing, say, the kitchen chores. But I'm not exactly reworking the political landscape, if you know what I mean.

And, let's be honest, neither are you.

What I am doing, and you may be, too, is reshaping my corner of the world. It's a small corner, peopled by only a few, but I'm doing all I can to make it a clean, well-lighted place, a place in which we can learn and laugh and love and live. And when all of them have gone to bed and sometimes before they awaken, I do the work I've wanted to do since long before I shopped with my own mother for my first bra -- I write. For pay. For recognition. For me.

Some parting thoughts:

Among a handful of ongoing correspondences that have grown from M-mv is my correspondence with Girl Detective, who opted out of the debates surrounding the "Mommy Wars" a long time ago. It was partly by her example that I, too, ceased to give the issue (much) virtual ink. As I polish this post and prepare to publish, I wonder why I was attracted -- again -- to the issue last week, why, beyond HMS Indefatigable's recent email message, I felt compelled to explore it further today.

All I can come up with is this: The struggle to live well -- to learn, to think, yes, to work, to grow -- requires regular and rigorous self-scrutiny. Something about the Hirshman hijinks reminded me to observe the delicate dance between this self and that, between the girl that was and the woman that is, between hopes and realities, minds and hearts because those performances interest me, and I thought it might interest others.

Hey! I was right.

Postscript: I may be more influential than I realize -- the tiny library has ordered Hirshman's slim volume on my say-so. Heh, heh, heh. A revolution of one, that's what I am. Home education. Book requests. Work. What next? A coup?

Nah. I'm on my way to the beach. Right around now, folks clear out of there. The lifeguards put away the plastic distractions, lower the umbrellas, and rake up the sandcastles. The girls and I will encourage the barn swallow fledgings, chatter with the nervous kildeer, pitch rocks over the tiny pier, and run along the abandoned shore.

The coup can wait.

From the archives...

"This above all: to thine own self be true."

The advice Polonius gives Laertes in Act I, Scene iii (see below) is nothing more than a laundry list of sparkling platitudes garbed in a threadbare cloak of (alleged) senior wisdom. It's no wonder that folks who return to Hamlet (again and again) are certain that Ophelia's father is among the lowest of Shakespeare's creations.

He is.

Hamlet's inadvertent murder of the skulking old man elicits gasps only on the maiden reading (or viewing). Subsequent readings engender murmurs of relief. "Thou wretched, rash, intruding fool, farewell!"

I am reminded of the platitudes of Polonius today because "to thine own self be true" has become the crutch of lazy self-discoverers, a cliche for those too weary or foolish to press past the average and mediocre. "I give up! This is who I am," they confess. "'To thine own self be true.' This is me, warts and all, and I embrace it."

This maladaption of the phrase is self-deceit. Yes, by all means, let us be true to ourselves, to our best selves: to the selves who rise early (or stay up late) to improve mind and body; to the selves who make mountains out of modest snow-covered hills in the local park, not out of chores and errands; to the selves who challenge the conventional wisdom; to the selves too smart to denigrate those who insist on a high standard, even if that standard is difficult to attain.

Let us not be true to the selves who urge us to settle for the status quo or, worse, make excuses for it. Let us not be true to the selves who enjoin us to make excuses or blame others for our lapses, difficulties, and failures. The lapses, difficulties, and failures are part of who we are. We must own them... and then move on.

To thine own best self be true.

No, of course, I would not presume to rewrite the secular scripture of Shakespeare, but like any other disciple, I have been prompted to spin it a little, to assign to it contemporary analogies.

Read. Think. Learn.
__________________________

Look thou character. Give thy thoughts no tongue,
Nor any unproportion'd thought his act.
Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar.
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;
But do not dull thy palm with entertainment
Of each new-hatch'd, unfledg'd comrade. Beware
Of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in,
Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice:
Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment.
Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,
But not express'd in fancy; rich, not gaudy:
For the apparel oft proclaims the man;
And they in France of the best rank and station
Are most select and generous chief in that.
Neither a borrower nor a lender be:
For loan oft loses both itself and friend;
And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
This above all,—to thine own self be true;
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell: my blessing season this in thee!

This entry first appeared on 2.15.2004.

The recommended daily allowance

As studies and writing permitted last Friday, I read Alice Steinbach's collection of essays, The Miss Dennis School of Writing. The Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist (Feature Writing, 1985; Baltimore Sun) devoted the title essay to her ninth-grade creative writing teacher, Miss Dennis:

"I can't teach you how to write, but I can tell you how to look at things, how to pay attention," she would bark at us....

[...]

"What lies at the heart of good writing," she told us over and over again, "is the writer's ability to find his own unique voice. And then to use it to tell an interesting story." Somehow she made it clear that we were interesting people with interesting stories to tell.

Yes, set aside the cumbersome writing "programs" and simply invite, no, urge your students to pay attention. Model how to do so. Encourage them to find their writerly voices. You don't need to be a professor or a professional writer to do this, by the way. You need only trust that your students are interesting people who do indeed have such voices. Let them use those voices to tell their interesting stories.

Teachers -- not "programs" -- shape us and open the world's windows.

Heh, heh, heh. Yeah, Steinbach hooked me with the opening essay.

More from Steinbach:

Writing in "One of Us" --

We all go through it: the struggle to deal with childhood ghosts, the search for a place to rest, the need to find out why we do what we do. And for each of us -- man, woman and child -- there are inner realities as well as outer realities. It's almost laughable to think it would be any different for a feminist.

In fact, you could make a case, as Gloria Steinem does, that she has finally located the missing half of the feminist equation: The political equals the personal.

Emphasis added.

In "In the Garden" --

As I said, small -- but wonderful -- pleasures. At least to me. I guess I'm partial to small pleasures because they seem less perishable -- more dependable, if you will -- than the blockbuster pleasures: family, love, success, Pulitzer Prizes, and so on.

Yes, it's the little things, isn't it?

In "Rejection" --

As best I can remember, the rejection slip -- which arrived almost by return mail -- said something like this: "Your manuscript does not fit our needs at this time."

Of course, I immediately fixated on the words "at this time." Writers do that -- search for, and find, positive messages in even the most blatant rejection.

Ayup.

In "Still Betty after All These Years" --

Friedan revisits the issue in the Playboy interview, saying: "I never believed that feminism was opposed to family. Feminism implied an evolution of family. Feminism was not opposed to marriage and motherhood. It wanted women to be able to define themselves as people and not just as servants to the family. You want a feminism that includes women who have children and want children, because that's the majority of women."

[...]

It's an interesting observation -- that many of the women who started the movement were mothers. And it may account, in part, for some of the tension between older feminists and younger feminists. Among those younger women who want but have not yet had children, some of the toughest decisions -- or choices, if you prefer -- lie in their futures.

And I'm willing to bet that no matter what track these young mothers choose -- the stay-at-home trach, the Mommy Track, the fast track -- they will feel some guilt. Which is why it's important for women to support and respect one another's decisions. Whatever they may be.

Something to chew on a bit, no?

In "News of the World" --

Someone once described the material that emerges from a consistent correspondent as an "unself-conscious autobiography," one in which the writer expresses his hopes and dreams, his fears and disappointments. Unlike the telephone call in which the physical voice is present, the inner voice is often what one hears in a thoughtful letter.

Read. Think. Learn.

Enjoy.

"What will you do with your children today... on this summer day?" asked the gentle spirit-gardener.

I replied:

We will dance and sing. I will tell them how much I love the spray of freckles on their sun-kissed noses and how glad I am that they are my family.

We will read and think and learn.

We'll laugh.

We'll cry a little, too, when we bury the vole that Jenny Linsky, the stray with the white boots, killed.

We'll talk.

We will recite poems, cook a meal or two, sneak cookies, and walk to the library before the skies break apart in thunder and rain.

We'll write letters to Grandmom to thank her for the recent care package. We will play Blokus, Othello, and Continuo. We will study and write.

And nap.

We'll eat the fresh berries we just bought at Jewel, and, yes, I'll paint their tiny toenails red while we watch the thirty-minute show that shall not be named.

We already kissed Boy-boy's bandaged hand. Soon, we'll take him to work and call out, "I love you!" as he lopes away from us, grinning.

We'll talk and learn and take care of the one of us suffering from a summer cold while taking care to avoid catching it ourselves.

Before dinner, we will go to the beach and watch the swallows swoop and dive and the kildeer fret and the robin fledglings flip, flop, flee; we'll leave footprints in the damp sand on the edge of the gently lapping lake; and we'll lob rocks over the pier.

We'll return home with sandy feet, and sooner than can be possible, we'll watch the day fade to dusk and hear the birds' appreciative song as they dart from our feeders home.

That's what we'll do, the children and I, on this summer day.


Adapted from my 6.23.2006 entry.

Semicolon...

... is up and running again. Bookmark the new address.

Footwear

for Randi's "Get real" feature.

Sandhill cranes

We spotted these two beauties (Can you make them out? I didn't have a telephoto lens with me--alas!) on our (roundabout) way to afternoon mass at Our Lady of IKEA. (Yes, it was time for more bookcases.)

Friendship: An Exposé

Who knew Joseph Epstein had penned another book? What a delight to see it there, on the table at the bookstore which must not be named, as if it were ordered and displayed just for me. (Because, really, is there another person in this cultural wasteland we now, with affection and no small dose of chagrin, call "our town" who would seek Epstein out? If so, please, please -- send me an email message. I will set aside all of my legendary personal space issues and have you to dinner -- tonight! Hell, I'll even cook. Heh, heh, heh.) More on Epstein here, here, here, and here.

I wonder how much it would take to buy a soap bubble,
if there were only one in the world.
-- Mark Twain

We danced among the bubbles, barefooted on a freshly cut lawn. Like the bubbles, our laughter cascaded down our street and into the neighbors' yards.

What did you do today?

Did you dance? Did you sing? Did you tell them how much you love the spray of freckles on their sun-kissed noses? Did you read? Did you laugh? Or cry? Did you see the blue skies burst then fade to dusk and hear the birds' appreciative song as they darted from your feeders home? Did you open the door before he inserted his key and kiss him like you did on the eve of your engagement? Did you dream? Or nap?

Did you recite a poem? Inhale the damp-clean smell of laundry tumbling in the dryer? Did you cook a meal? Sneak a cookie? Walk it off? Did you write a letter longhand? Send a friend a book? Wear silly socks? Play Othello? Share a treasure? Did you count your change?

Did you eat fresh strawberries? Did you taste them? Did you wash your hair? Kiss a bandaged cut? Did you remember when? Did you call an elderly friend or relative? Send flowers to your sister? Did you paint a picture? Color in one of their books? Clean your closet? Empty your junk drawer? Balance your checkbook? Reflect?

Did you learn anything?

Did you love someone?

Did you live?

"Get to work!" redux

Ah, this is the sort of cogent and thoughtful reply I sought to my 6.20.2006 entry. Thank you for the link and the insight, Queen of Carrots.

(Added 6.24.2006: Here is yet another cogent and thoughtful reply --- from the daughter of a woman who chose family and home. She concludes, "The important thing is not which way you have chosen - not which "camp" you've joined - but whether or not you have chosen the path that will most benefit your family." Bookmark The Autumn Rain.)

If I may jump aboard the Queen's wagon (in a way in which, as I said--quite clearly--in my earlier entry, I would not Hirshman's), I, too, chose home--not for connectedness, about which the Queen writes in her entry:

I am the hub of the wheel. I am the wall on which the paintings hang. I am the station where the trains come in. I say this with all modesty, not to brag about how well I do this job, but simply to point out that it is my job, as it is the job of everyone who keeps the home.

although connection, rich and deep, followed; but for a sense that, well, I could do this--raise and teach the children, make a home to which my favorite people in all the world would want to return daily--better than anyone to whom I could delegate these daily dances.

I think I was right. No one could love these people and work in their interests with as much love and conviction as I bring to the everyday rituals, the commonplace tasks, and all of the celebrations of the ordinary the family life comprises.

But what sort of luck have I that the work in which I find such joy--the work apart from the quotidian (about which I first began posting in December 2004 *)--can be completed (well and for pay, no less) in the interstices parenting and homemaking permit? I have, no question, the best of both the worlds I had hoped to inhabit.

A few have attempted to "fisk" my entry, which makes me wonder if they read these lines:

As I shared in yesterday's conversation, I don't plan to hop aboard Hirshman's wagon, but I will admit that my definition of self is inextricably bound to my work--that is, work (paid, well and on time) apart from the work (important, yes; wonderful, of course; meaningful, well, I think so; paid, um, not!) I do as parent, teacher, and homemaker.

I am a paid, professional writer and editor. I am also a wife, a parent, the director of the family-centered learning project, and keeper of a clean, comfortable, uncluttered home (to name a few other key definitions of self). Where in my entry, where anywhere in any of my writing, ever, have I suggested that the choice to turn homeward was not my glad fortune, let alone my unequivocal choice?

Did the "fiskers" miss this line, too?

The fundamental difference between Hirshman and me is that I'm not about to posit that everyone needs it (paid work), nor will I maintain that women who choose not to put their brains and skills in service for pay are somehow wrong.

I entreated readers to refrain from dismissing Hirshman's polemic as so much feminist blathering and to consider, as the Queen has, what our choice means, personally and politically. Perhaps I should have entreated readers to refrain from misreading my entry for alignment with Hirshman's philosophy, too.

Ah, well.

I look forward to other insightful musings on the topic.
______________________________

* From The Quotidian Mysteries: Laundry, Liturgy and "Women's Work" (Kathleen Norris), first recommended in this entry:

Our culture's ideal self, especially the accomplished, professional self, rises above necessity, the humble, everyday, ordinary tasks that are best left to unskilled labor. The comfortable lies we tell ourselves regarding these "little things" -- that they don't matter, and that daily personal and household chores are of no significance to us spiritually -- are exposed as falsehoods when we consider that reluctance to care for the body is one of the first symptoms of melancholia. Shampooing the hair, washing the body, brushing the teeth, drinking enough water, taking a daily vitamin, going for a walk, as simple as they seem, are acts of self-respect. They enhance one's ability to take pleasure in oneself and in the world.

Thoughts on education and parenting

Tentatively planning for a long weekend here, but I wanted to leave something out for the guests. I originally assembled the following list to append to a Carnival of Homeschooling entry.

Happy weekending. Hey, and read, think, learn, folks, okay?

Added later: Well, our plans for a long weekend were undone. It's a good thing we enjoy our weekdays, too, eh? I'll leave this up, in any event. It may interest those who are new to M-mv. Again, happy weekending.

One hundred words a high school student (and his parents!) should know (10.02.2003)

About college (11.16.2003)

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming... (2.25.2004)

Reading, thinking, learning (5.09.2004)

The monastic preservation of our culture (9.30.2004)

(Behind the scenes) at the museum (3.20.2004)

Parenting as performance art revisited (1.31.2005)

Feed a cold; starve a (spring) fever? (4.22.2005)

Be a sun. (5.05.2005)

Paying for college: A rant of modest proportions (5.20.2005)

Morning meditation: What I live for (8.11.2005)

Life is short. (8.26.2005)

Many folks think... (9.15.2005)

Parent-teacher (9.17.2005)

I think... (10.07.2005)

A typical night and day here (10.11.2005)

Simple ways to inject fun into your children's learning days (11.01.2005)

Advice to a new homeschooling mother (11.02.2005)

"Good teaching isn't about being the old bore at the front of the class with a textbook." (11.14.2005)

On writing... and thinking (12.03.2005)

Let's go. (12.28.2005)

It all begins with me. (3.18.2006)

Guard (6.13.2006)

The recommended daily allowance

Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age (A.C. Grayling)

Religious apologists speak much about beauty and goodness, personhood, and subjective experience. These are indeed the things that matter most. But apologists make the standard mistake--of conflating these high and good matters of human experience with anything supernatural. Humanity's sense of beauty, and decency, our power to love, our creativity--all of the best things about us--belong to us, to human experience in the real world. They neither need, nor benefit from, some alleged connection with supernatural agencies of one kind or another. They are ours, just as much as the evil, stupidity, greed and cruelty which they oppose. Indeed: why do not religious apologists say that these bad things come from the gods, the better things from man, rather than--as they always claim--the other way around?

Meditations was originally published as The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life in the UK. For more about Grayling, visit his website and/or read his interview for Amazon.

And, yes, I've recommended Grayling twice before--here and here.

From the archives: I think...

that almost everyone arrives at a point in his or her life at which he or she realizes, "I am woefully ignorant."

It doesn't matter how many As we received, how many honors were bestowed upon us, how many diplomas hang in our offices. All of us who aspire to the so-called examined life will, sooner or later, be challenged by our own lack of knowledge, insight, synthesis, etc. At some point, yes, each of us will wonder, "Was I ever smart? What do I really know? What have I actually learned?"

What will separate some from others (dare I contend, some from most?) is that rather than accepting the status quo (and rather than losing too much more time railing against our own inadequacies and apportioning blame to that school, those teachers, and this program for said inadequacies), some of us will work... late into the evening. Some of us will rise... early in the morning. Some of us will turn off the television... and read, write, think, grow, learn. Some of us will stop being apologists for the cozy comforts of pop culture... and actually seek out the difficult books, the thought-provoking plays, the masterpieces of literature, music, dance, and art, as well as the marginalized works. Some of us will cease maintaining that we were never into math, never needed chemistry, were just awful at statistics... and learn to appreciate numbers, reason with science, and discover new territories of the imagination to map. Some of us will set aside the to-do lists, the schedules for self-improvement, the public announcements (virtual and otherwise) of this or that plan for personal growth... and Just. Do. It.

To be sure, some will toss their arms in the air. Say, "I am who I am. Deal with it." Scoff at those of us who fret about the twilight of culture. Scold us for caring too much about books and ideas. Deride us for valuing wordsmithery, discovery, history.

And that's okay.

Isn't it?

No, not really.

_______________________

The cadences of language and literature have changed such that most forty-year-olds with decent schooling and one or two degrees are easily frustrated with any sentence that wanders, folds in upon itself, and floats, swirls, glides like water down the drain. Even those with Advanced Placement credits, medals in English lit, advanced degrees... even they, quite possibly, arrive at this point without ever having had to the hard work of decoding difficult works of literature, of really learning a second (or third language), or of mastering basic math and science principles. So Faulkner bores them. Don Quixote leaves them cold. They don't get Moby Dick. Middlemarch makes them tired. Plato's Republic? The Prince? Shakespeare? Homer? Logic? Math? Who cares? What for?

The "Let's Go! Let's Go! Hurry UP! Go, Go, Go!" mentality that pervades our business transactions and the Power Point school of presentation and the five-paragraph view of the world that governs our post-baccalaureate "education" have slowly stripped us of the ability to savor language. To read. To think. To learn. To hold a Great Conversation. And to synthesize all that we're learning. To reconcile it with the life we lead.

And the life we want to lead.

Steve Almond (Candyfreak) describes this well: "The unexamined life, it might be said, offers an extraordinary profit margin."

Ayup.

What's a frustrated former A student supposed to do?

_______________________

So you're not as smart as you thought you were. You are, though, far from stupid or dumb or a lost cause. Why? Because more than one-half of any problem is recognizing that there is one. If you're reading this with even the faintest nod of recognition, I'm guessing you've arrived at that point, the point at which one realizes, "I am woefully ignorant."

And I'm guessing that you're just not the sort to throw your arms up in the air and let the next three or four decades slide easily past, right?

_______________________

What a great gift parents give themselves when they acknowledge the gaps in their own learning and seek to fill them, joyfully, beside the people they love most in the world--their children; when they redress the educational "wrongs" done them and in doing so, model the wonders of learning.

Yes, we may have been gifted in our youth, but we are most truly gifted now, don't you agree?

Forty years from now, you may still say, "Oh, how ignorant I am!" But it will be with the sort of hard-won wisdom that being a lifelong student yields, not with the sort of middle-aged despair that can beset one early on the trail of autodidacticism.

This entry first appeared on 10.07.2005.

Read. Think. Learn.

Live.

Get to work!

Elsewhere, in a virtual conversation related to my recent chapbook entry, the bit about Holland on Woolf and my observations about Hirshman's manifesto were quoted:

Virginia Woolf, speaking from a different world, said what we needed, what women needed, was "a room of one's own" and a modest allowance so we wouldn't be distracted by money worries. But under what guarantee? What happens when our benefactor whimsically cancels the lease on our room and cuts off our funds? No, Mrs. Woolf. A job, Mrs. Woolf.
(p. 303 of Barbara Holland's memoir When All the World Was Young)

Following that passage, I mused:

Do you agree? I do, but, then, for all of my adult life, I have had work, most of it good work, work that makes me think, work that helps shape my definition of self. In the recent issue of Newsweek, Linda Hirshman discusses her book Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. In response to a question about leaving a career to raise a family, she opines, "Well, if you have two or three children, you're out of the work force for 13 years. And you should have work that brings you influence, honor, compensation, a way of being political and a hand in shaping the world around you." In other words, a job, Mrs. Woolf.

As I shared in yesterday's conversation, I don't plan to hop aboard Hirshman's wagon, but I will admit that my definition of self is inextricably bound to my work--that is, work (paid, well and on time) apart from the work (important, yes; wonderful, of course; meaningful, well, I think so; paid, um, not!) I do as parent, teacher, and homemaker.

Holland's point about it being a job of her own not a room that a woman needs resonates with me. It may not with others, but it does with me. I can create a space-time in which to read, think, learn, write, work anywhere--even in food court at a mall on the day before Christmas. (Yes, I've done it.) I don't need a room of my own. But paid work? Work that I'm unafraid, in fact, delighted to say defines me to a certain extent, work to which I look forward, work that feels meaningful and right, work that asserts its value in a competitive marketplace, work that makes. me. think.--oh, I most certainly need that.

The fundamental difference between Hirshman and me is that I'm not about to posit that everyone needs it (paid work), nor will I maintain that women who choose not to put their brains and skills in service for pay are somehow wrong.

I can only posit and maintain personal truths.

Since I have been, as yet, unable to put my hands on Hirshman's slim but controversial volume, I cannot offer a chapbook entry on it, but I did locate a site that includes a long excerpt. Here's a passage:

Deafened by choice, here's the moral analysis these women never heard: The family—with its repetitious, socially invisible, physical tasks—is a necessary part of life and has obvious emotional and immediate rewards, but it allows fewer opportunities for full human flourishing than public spheres like the market or the government. This less flourishing sphere is not the natural or moral responsibility only of women. Therefore, assigning it to women is unjust. Women assigning it to themselves is equally unjust.

The complete excerpt can be found here.

Having read it, I see that Hirshman thinks educated and privileged women, in particular, squander their talents, degrees, and skills by "choosing" to stay at home and/or reduce their career ambitions. She writes:

Whether they leave the workplace altogether or just cut back their commitment, their talent and education are lost from the public world to the private world of laundry and kissing boo-boos. The abandonment of the public world by women at the top means the ruling class is overwhelmingly male. If the rulers are male, they will make mistakes that benefit males. Picture an all-male Supreme Court. We may well go back there. What will that mean for the women of America?

Be wary of dismissing Hirshman's polemic as so much feminist blathering. Instead, ask yourself, What are the implications, personal and political, of the choice many highly educated women make to bend their (advanced) education to the primarily quotidian pursuits of child care and housekeeping? Can you respond without resorting to clichés and Hallmark sentimentality?

If you're going to participate in this philosophical exercise (and that's all it is; please--don't grow needlessly indignant), read the entire excerpt. Hirshman cites the choice to homeschool as a symptom of the problem.

Read. Think. Learn.

Analyze.

Added later: Linda Hirshman's November 2005 article "Homeward Bound," first published in The American Prospect, is available online.

Toynbee

TOYNBEE IDEAS
IN KUBRICK'S 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER

The plaques have now been found in intersections in Chicago, reports the Sun-Times today. The official web site of the plaques can be found here. The Bradbury story... 'couldn't find it online. Here is the book in which it's collected. And here is a link to information about English historian Arnold J. Toynbee.

Read. Think. Learn.

Wonder.

On the nightstand

Books. On the nightstand. Under the pillow. In the knapsack or, more recently, the messenger bag. And so on. This is the thirty-second "On the nightstand" entry.

Snow (Orhan Pamuk)

Ovid: Metamorphoses (translated by Charles Martin)

Literature Unbound: A Guide for the Common Reader (Sam Tanenhaus)

Small Island (Andrea Levy)

Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee (Charles J. Shields)

Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast (Bill Richards)

The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (Sam Harris)

Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (Anne Fadiman)

Greek Gods, Human Lives: What We Can Learn from Myths (Mary Lefkowitz)

Remember:

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested: that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention.

~ Francis Bacon

:: Visit the "On the nightstand" archive. ::

Chapbook entry

From Barbara Holland's When All the World Was Young.

p. 26
She never played cards with other women. She knew no other women, except the neighbors to nod hello to over the hedge she was clipping. She used the telephone only in emergencies and she never drank coffee in other people's kitchens, as Mothers were said to do, but what would she have talked about with them? What did they talk about in their kitchens: husbands, children, recipes, new clothes? The small change of women's friendships, complaints and anecdotes and confessions, weddings and funerals, housework? Mother would have frozen with outrage and boredom. She had no talent for the vernacular. Forced into a setting that called for generic women's chat, she slid out of focus and took on what I thought of as her blind-baby look, with a small fixed smile and bemused blink.

At some point I wondered, Is she describing me or her mother? Heh, heh, heh.

p. 47
I could slip through a hundred doors and out to anywhere, free and safe, free to worry or weep about somebody else's danger or grief.

Yes, books are life vests for those trapped in unhappy childhoods.

p. 143
What happened to eccentrics? I suppose for a while we locked up the impecunious ones, and then we just medicated them all, and after that it was no fun anymore and they faded away.

Does your family have an eccentric?

p. 148
What does remembrance look like? I'm told it's all, all those years, crammed into the left frontal lobe, in a cerebral groove called the fold of Broca. Will they ever discover a way to unwrap it—painlessly, of course—and let us look down into its contents in all their rich, untidy, embarrassing, roiling stew; perhaps poke a long-handled spoon in and stir and watch the stuff churn up and sink again, old phone numbers, a pool table in somebody's basement, a page in a geometry textbook, faces without names, names without faces, a row of rickety houses seen from a train window, Claire de Lune picked out on a piano, and smells of pine trees, low tide, shaving lotion? The name of a town we drove through twenty years ago? Flowers of Sulphur?

What do you think remembrance looks like? I don't think I could describe it any better than Holland. A rich, untidy stew.

p. 151
Somehow the safety of children, a subject of obsessive, passionate national concern today, simply didn't bother anyone I knew. Maybe this was good for us. Maybe it made us brave and carefree. Or maybe reckless and foolhardy. Or all of the above.

Do you approach the subject of child safety with "obsessive, passionate" concern?

p. 163
Junior high schools have been renamed "middle schools" because the word junior was an affront to self-esteem, but the idea remains the same. Mother, who went through school under the old eight-and-four structure, thought it was a terrible idea, segregating children during their three most disastrous years so they could exercise the worst possible influence on each other.

Are the middle school years the worst possible years of a young person's development?

p. 164
Nobody writes about these years. Psychologists descend on the elementary schools and analyze growth and learning; everyone has a theory on high schools, test-makers and politicians obsess on them, and their graduates write novels about them. The three years between are the missing tooth, the blank. Everyone's trying to forget.

What are your three clearest memories of middle school?

p. 168
Boredom possessed me like a rage. The world out there was bursting with things to be learned and books to be read, and the hours of school were deliberately, purposefully, spitefully keeping me from learning anything at all.

I remember boredom that felt like rage. I felt it most often—and great and towering and terrible, it was—during the summer months. Yes, the classrooms of my childhood had flaws and inanity and terrible textbooks and a few ignorant teachers and handfuls of peers who would never be friends, but at school, there was a good chance I'd get my hands on books I hadn't already read dozens of times. What was your school experience like?

p. 173
I found myself in line next to a girl named Amanda that I knew slightly; she lived on the margin of my neighborhood. "You know," she said cheerfully, "there's someone in my class who's just as weird as you are. You ought to know each other. There she is over there. Come on."

Who was the friend who finished your sentences? Made you want to be more than—or other than—you were?

p. 184
How many ordinary suburban thirteen-year-olds do I know who read each other Browning, listen to the Brandenburg Concertos, know where Medina is, and prefer Manet to Monet, all on their own, for the fun of it?

How many... and where do they live? I know a couple of young people who would like to meet them, ordinary or extraordinary.

p. 210
It's fallen into disuse now, and students no longer wear long-sleeved shirts on test days to hide the verb endings inked inside their wrists, but at the time it was still the ancient dividing line between the aspiring intellectuals and the future lowbrows.

Do you know to what she's referring? Some argue that it continues to be the dividing line between the aspiring intellectuals and the future lowbrows (albeit, not in so many measured words). It is a delicious absurdity that many of those making the argument these days are, by default, lowbrows, in that they themselves were not trained thus.

p. 230
Envy is the only one of the seven deadly sins that's never any fun at all, even briefly....

Ayup.

p. 239
Growing up is the process of learning how many things you can't do and how many people you can't be. When you've winnowed them out, what's left is you.

Have you grown up yet?

p. 303
Virginia Woolf, speaking from a different world, said what we needed, what women needed, was "a room of one's own" and a modest allowance so we wouldn't be distracted by money worries. But under what guarantee? What happens when our benefactor whimsically cancels the lease on our room and cuts off our funds? No, Mrs. Woolf. A job, Mrs. Woolf.

Do you agree? I do, but, then, for all of my adult life, I have had work, most of it good work, work that makes me think, work that helps shape my definition of self. In the recent issue of Newsweek, Linda Hirshman discusses her book Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World. In response to a question about leaving a career to raise a family, she opines, "Well, if you have two or three children, you're out of the work force for 13 years. And you should have work that brings you influence, honor, compensation, a way of being political and a hand in shaping the world around you." In other words, a job, Mrs. Woolf.

Previous chapbook entries:

Why Do I Love These People?
Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading

The recommended daily allowance

American Bee (James Maguire)

As I've mentioned elsewhere, the writing is spotty, but Maguire tells a story I wanted to hear, so I have forgiven him for not being a Pulitzer Prize contender.

If you believe that the scholarly pursuits of young people are as gripping, if not, moreso, than their athletic achievements, if you love words and language and study, if you have an even passing interest in the National Spelling Bee, pick up American Bee. Stay for gems like 1999 champion Nupur Lala's observation:

"Other kids are distrustful of kids that age who'd rather be sitting inside reading [...] than hanging out at the mall," she says. "I think every kid deep down wants to do something different, but to actually have the courage to do something is something else."

Spoiler: This year's winner, Kerry Close, is one of the five top spellers Maguire profiles during his coverage of the 2005 bee.

Hearing the misspell bell [on Laetrile], she tilts her head back with the disappointment of it, as the crowd's applause acknowledges the end of her fourth year here. In a moment of great graciousness, she thanks the pronouncer before walking to get a big hug from her parents. With one more year of eligibility, it's probable she'll be back with her parents onstage next year.

And she was.

Bloomsday

Same entry, different Bloomsday.

From "The Fading World of Leopold Bloom":

[Today] is the 100th [actually, the 102nd; as I said, same entry, different Bloomsday] anniversary of the day in 1904 on which Dublin's best-known fictional Jew (and cuckold), 38-year-old Leopold Bloom, wandered the city as a modern-day Odysseus and, after numerous adventures located more in his mind than on the street, circumnavigated his way home. It also commemorates the first day that James Joyce, Bloom's creator, "walked out" with his wife-to-be, Nora Barnacle. On Bloomsday, as it has been known for more than 50 years, Joyce diehards will have a chance to celebrate his great novel "Ulysses" in costume, recital and booze. They can retrace Bloom's footsteps to Davy Byrnes's "moral pub" or indulge in Bloom trivia by buying cakes of lemon soap, as Bloom did for his secret epistolary lover, Martha.

My tour through Ulysses was led by a deft literary guide, a full professor who preferred his students to his study, a rare, rare breed, indeed. He took us by the hand (and some us by the nose) as we sometimes walked, often plodded, occasionally skipped through his favorite book in all the world. And those who could afford the annual pilgrimmage to Dublin, he happily ushered through the streets and narrows that his beloved Bloom paced.

As I have done each June 16 since taking Marty N.'s seminar on James Joyce, today I pulled down my tattered copy of the tome and reread a paragraph here, a margin note there, assorted slips of paper quoting Marty, and Chapter 18 in its entirety. Our discussion of "the 'Yes' chapter," all those years ago, was prefaced by a screening of Irish actress Fionnuala Flanagan's performance of Molly Bloom's monologue. The stunned silence that followed the film's end was recalled to me today when I read this bit in the Times Literary Supplement:

This is particularly true of Molly Bloom’s closing soliloquy, which may end on a “Yes” but is tragic in its implications. Here is a wakeful woman, beside her sleeping husband, left with nobody to talk to but herself. After an afternoon assignation with her lover, she feels compelled to m-st-rb-te repeatedly in the bed, because her visitor took all the pleasure for himself. The blank pieces of paper which she posts to herself seem like emblems of her lonely condition, just as her “yes” seems a desperate tactic to convince herself that life is better than it is. When the Irish actress Fionnuala Flanagan performed the monologue in this way on an American campus in the 1980s, some elderly professors handed back their membership cards to the Joyce Association in disgust at her alleged blasphemy against a sacred text.

Not Marty. Like us, he was staggered by Flanagan's interpretation. Oh, what a discussion followed.

Yes, it's Bloomsday again. The thirteenth [fifteenth, now] that I've marked. I grow old.*

You know, reading Joyce, heck, reading any of the "heavier" books, requires a time-space that few of us willingly make. Oh, the children, we chide. Ah, work, we moan. Oh, dear, the chores, the errands, the lawn, the home-improvement projects. We toss the books aside in dismay because they are no easier now than they were when well meaning English teachers and professors pressed them on us in our teens and early twenties.

Bulletin! They were never meant to be "easy."

Happy Bloomsday.
___________________

* From "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" by T.S. Eliot:

I grow old . . . I grow old . . .
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

Do you want me "to bring it all home"? Okay. Modernists Eliot and Joyce (and Ezra Pound) influenced, nay, arguably shaped twentieth-century literature. In a 1922 review, Eliot described Joyce's Ulysses as "the most important expression which the present age has found." It's no small coincindence that Eliot identified the "mythical method" in Joyce's work: "The Waste Land" was meant to be read as a mythic quest, too.

Hence, it is not remarkable that a discussion of Joyce might remind me that "I grow old... I grow old..." and that growing old in that meter might call to mind Eliot.

The reading life is rife with leaps and connections, links and consolations.

And lest someone think me a literary snob, I offer this from Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye:

"'I grow old... I grow old... I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.' What does that mean, Mr. Marlowe?"

"Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good."

He smiled. "That is from the 'Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.' Here's another one. 'In the room women come and go/Talking of Michael Angelo.' Does that suggest anything to you, sir?"

Yeah -- it suggests to me that the guy didn't know very much about women."

"My sentiments exactly, sir. Nonetheless I admire T. S. Eliot very much."

"Did you say, 'nonetheless'?"

Also from The Long Goodbye:

I'm a licensed private investigator and have been for quite a while. I'm a lone wolf, unmarried, getting middle-aged, and not rich. I've been in jail more than once and I don't do divorce business. I like liquor and women and chess and a few other things. The cops don't like me too well, but I know a couple I get along with. I'm a native son, born in Santa Rosa, both parents dead, no brothers or sisters, and when I get knocked off in a dark alley sometime, if it happens, as it could to anyone in my business, and to plenty of people in any business or no business at all these days, nobody will feel that the bottom has dropped out of his or her life.

The company of books is unimaginably rich.

(This entry originally ran 6.16.2004.)

Flip, flop, flee!

Butterflies are free!

The Misses M-mv released ten more painted ladies and gentlemen on Monday.

Our first home in Chicago was a spacious second-floor flat in a two-story greystone: hardwood floors throughout; an older kitchen and bathroom. What they call "a charmer."

Charmingly enough, it had no air conditioning.

That first summer passed without too much discomfort, I guess, but during the killer heat wave of summer 1995, when I was great with Miss M-mv(i), we decided that perhaps it was time to install a cooling system. In an attempt to abridge this story to an entry of even passing interest to anyone but me, I will simply say that the charmer would have required prohibitively expensive electrical work to support our let's-make-ice-cubes-in-this-joint air conditioning plan. (No need for chiding emails: The electrical system was safe. It simply had its limitations.)

Undeterred, we decided to install a (safely supportable) large unit in the master bedroom, which was (fellow Chicagoans may understand this best) located near our large eat-in kitchen. The unit cooled both rooms when the door was open.

During the killer heat wave, though, temperatures crested 105 degrees F several days in row. We lived on the top floor. The unit was performing a Herculean task simply by cooling our quaintly — our charmingly small bedroom. For a couple of days that summer of 1995, then, and during the worst days of each summer through 2002, we took refuge in the master bedroom, closing the door on heat and humidity.

We passed the time with books and games and conversation and, yes, with television. We put a small television on the dresser for those few days, storing it in the basement when the temperatures returned to passable. The larger set in the living room served us — when we needed or wanted it — the rest of the year.

Longtime M-mv readers know about the bunny ears atop our television. It wasn't "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)" for us. Oh, no. It was, perhaps, nine tuneable channels... and, too often, nothing on.

He watched "Baywatch."

Okay, dear readers? That's where this pointle-, erm, rambling entry is headed. He watched "Baywatch."

It was hot.

Really hot.

We bought an air conditioning unit.

Cloistered in a small cool room, we made ample, some might argue promiscuous, use of the limited programming available.

And from the age of six until the age of twelve, our now 16.75-year-old son saw, what, six, eight, no more than a dozen partial episodes of "Baywatch."

This experience, I learned yesterday, was life-changing.

Yes, it seems that when he pressed me for diving, water polo, and junior guard programs at the city college, when he leapt at the chance to teach in the community swim program out here on the prairie, when he dove into competitive swimming, and when he turned fifteen and earned all of the certificates required to lifeguard for the community program and now the town's parks, pools, and beaches, he wasn't responding to the kind teachers who shepherded him through the Y's swim program in Chicago (where, for a couple of sessions there I thought I might end up as mother to the world's oldest guppy). Oh, no. He wasn't motivated by tales of Olympians or even his father's short stories of swimming long distances while away at Boy Scout camp a lifetime ago.

Nope.

Not Master M-mv.

It was "Baywatch."

Yup.

Baywatch.

Master M-mv is 6'7" and change and nearly two hundred pounds of broad back and seeded-first-in-his-division-in-two-events-for-the-season's-opening-meet muscle. He's a black belt in taekwondo. And he's a scholar who reads Shakespeare and quantum physics texts while on break at the pool.

(Yes, to silence the voices in my head — "How could you? How could you?" — I am indulging in some less than artful boasting. He's handsome. He's smart. He's a blend of the very best Mr. M-mv and I could possibly offer. And I let him watch "Baywatch." Please. Take my parenting license. Raid my library. Strip me of my teaching credentials. I have squandered my son's mental fortunes, and I deserve your scornful email messages. Heh, heh, heh.)

That mountain of mind and matter donned his lifeguard uniform on Monday, stood in front of the mirror, and had the nerve to say to me — to me!? —, "It's the total 'Baywatch' package, huh, Mom?"

Say what?

(I'm seeing a chiropractor for the whiplash his remark caused.)

"What did you just say to me?"

"The. Total. 'Baywatch.' Package," he said slowly, without a trace of irony. Or shame. "Isn't it great?"

"Isn't what great?"

"I'm a lifeguard! I've wanted to be a lifeguard since I was little, Mom! Remember when...."

Oh. My. God.

"... and you let me watch 'Baywatch' in the summer? I loved that show. I thought...."

He said more. His lips were moving, but I couldn't hear him over the roar in my ears and head.

I have spent the last decade leading you to great literature, great music, great films, great art, and other great teachers (I said I was indulging in some boasting) for the rest, and you credit your interest in saving lives to a man who will do this for money?

I am silently screaming.

Screaming silently.

Screaming and screaming and screaming....

The mind reels.

It's an August day in 1997. Miss M-mv(i) has fussily but finally succumbed to mid-afternoon slumber. I nestle her on cool sheets in my charmingly small bedroom. Large with Miss M-mv(ii), I, too, am in need of some mid-afternoon slumber. It is hot. Hotter than it's been all season.

"Want to look at a little television?"

"Sure, Mom."

"I'll just rest right here."

I see red swimsuits, beautiful women, muscled men, Los Angeles beaches, and then, for twenty minutes, nothing.

"Mom? Mom? Are you okay? Did you hear me? We'd better get going, or I'll be late."

He swings a large bag bulging with towels and books and snacks and water bottles over his shoulder and lopes over to the door.

The roaring scream. The screaming roar. In my head.

Baywatch.

I gather enough of my wits to counsel him. "If I were you, I would never. Ever. Ever. Tell another soul about that."

He is silent for a moment, a heartbeat or two. A childhood — his childhood — passes before my eyes. He is six. No, he is sixteen. He's a baby. No, he's a man.

Then his laughter, deep and loud, rolls over me and his waiting sisters, around the little house in the tiny woods on the prairie, down the driveway, and into the sleepy sort-of-suburban silence of the still, still morning. It rolls and merrily it rolls.

Until I am laughing.

And crying a little, too.

I'm not really upset about "Baywatch." No, really. I'm not. If I could rewind ten years and do it all over, I would still let him watch those lifeguards frolic in the chilly California sand.

I'm crying a little because that day when he was two or six or eight, even ten, or older, and I hugged him and said, "You're growing into such a kind, smart, handsome man," I never really understood that he would.

He would grow into a kind, smart, handsome man whose laughter, deep and loud, would make me cry for baby boy starfish hands, the world's oldest guppy, and hot summer days when he dreamed of becoming a lifeguard because his mom let him watch "Baywatch."

The recommended daily allowance

"It is about a reader
who goes in search of other readers,
and it is a love poem to reading."

A walk in the woods

Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature.
It will never fail you.
~ Frank Lloyd Wright ~

Attracting birds

UPDATED: My backyard list is now kept separately, here.

My life list (beginning June 2006)

American Crow
American Goldfinch
American Redstart
American Robin
American Tree Sparrow
Baltimore Oriole
Barn Swallow
Belted Kingfisher
Black-capped Chickadee
Black-and-White Warbler
Blue Jay
Brown Creeper
Brown-headed Cowbird
Brown Creeper
Brown Thrasher
Canada Goose
Cedar Waxwing
Chipping Sparrow
Common Grackle
Common Tern
Common Yellowthroat
Cooper's Hawk
Dark-eyed Junco
Dark-eyed Junco (Oregon)
Double-Crested Cormorant
Downy Woodpecker
Eastern Bluebird
Eastern Kingbird
Eastern Phoebe
Eastern Screech Owl
Eastern Wood-Peewee
European Starling
Fox Sparrow
Golden-crowned Kinglet
Gray Catbird
Great Egret
Great Blue Heron
Great Horned Owl
Green Heron
Hairy Woodpecker
Hermit Thrush
Herring Gull
Horned Lark
House Finch
House Sparrow
House Wren
Indigo Bunting
Kildeer
Mallard
Mourning Dove
Mute Swan
Northern Cardinal
Northern Flicker
Northern Mockingbird
Osprey
Pine Siskin
Purple Finch
Red-winged Blackbird
Red-tailed Hawk
Red-winged Blackbird
Red-bellied Woodpecker
Red-breasted Nuthatch
Ring-billed Gull
Rock Dove
Rose-breasted Grosbeak
Ruby-Crowned Kinglet
Ruby-Throated Hummingbird
Sandhill Crane
Tree Swallow
Turkey Vulture
Veery
White-breasted Nuthatch
White-crowned Sparrow
White-throated Sparrow
Wood Duck
Wood Thrush
Yellow Warbler
Yellow-Bellied Sapsucker

Stuff we bring when we bird away from home

Field Guide to the Birds of North America (National Geographic)
The Sibley Guide to Birds (David Allen Sibley (National Audubon Society))
Common Birds and Their Songs (Lang Elliott)
Birds of Chicago (Chris C. Fischer)
Birds of Illinois Field Guide (Stan Tekiela)
Bushnell Falcon 10x50 Wide Angle Binoculars
Audubon Bird Call Whistle
Moleskine Reporter, Large Plain
Repel Lemon Eucalyptus

From the archives: An open letter

To the two young mothers who lunched at [insert restaurant name here] today:

Your children disturbed every diner in the room.

You may have chosen stay-at-home-parenthood, but you must now choose to parent your offspring. Yes, we could explore the whole "I need time for me" angle of today's adventure, but it's been done. To death. You will find time for you in the interstices that family life offers. Rise earlier. Turn off the television. Step away from the computer. Put down the phone. Ah, the elusive me-time freed from its shackles.

And now to your parenting.

Put your children in situations in which they can succeed. At their ages, they most certainly cannot succeed in a sit-down restaurant during lunch hour on a business day while their mothers pretend that said children are not (a) bored senseless and (b) too sick to be out in public. You see, you can dress a child up in Nordstrom togs, ladies, but if his or her nose still drips, you should probably choose drive-through. Or. Just. Stay. Home.

Teach the kids to cough, sneeze, and burp into their sleeves, please. My chicken, the pasta salad of the gal in the table behind me, and the entire platter served to the folks at the table next to yours were contaminated when not one, not two, but three of the five small diners in your party spewed their germs and partially chewed hot dogs as they sped past our tables, chasing each other and squealing.

Do not persist in your banal conversation while your children bound out of their seats to "visit" with other patrons. We were not amused when they wiped their noses on the sleeves of their pricey-boutique sweaters, smeared their grimy hands across our tables, knocked into our chairs, and whined (and whined and whined) in a desperate bid to win your attention. Attend to your children, ladies. That's your job. Not ours.

Threats and bribes amount to lazy parenting. If you put the children in situations in which they can succeed, and if you remain focused on the moment that they're in, you need never resort to such flawed and short-sighted techniques. By the way, you thought that your hissed threat to your four-year-old son was discreet, but we all heard it. And in that moment, your coiffed hair, manicured nails, beautiful make-up, and exquisite jewelrey lost any appeal that remained after your children's performance. You were exposed as the woman you really are. And it wasn't attractive.

Give the children some extra Vitamin C tonight and ensure that they get the rest and fluids they need. And once they are well again, take those kids to the park. Or the pool. Or a children's discovery center. Some place in which children can be children. Fit conversation into the spaces between swinging and sliding, running and jumping, singing and laughing. They will only be little for a little while. Don't squander their childhood on your selfish mommy luncheons.

Oh, and you owe me $9.96 for lunch.

Sincerely,

Mental multivitamin

This entry was first published 9.01.2004.

Where I live...

... when a gift from Omaha Steaks arrives for the birthday celebrant, everyone expresses mild interest in the Coconut Shrimp with Apricot Mango Wasabi Sauce and Chick-n-Bacon-Cheddar Appetizers and great delight in the large block of dry ice.

"Google some experiments, Mom!"


Folks, it's just. not. that. hard. Find the joy. The love. The reason to celebrate and sing, rather than scream and complain. Yes, find it even in the quotidian. It's there.

Really.

Sh--, if this curmudgeonly autodidact can find it, you can.

Coconut shrimp, anyone?

Why indulge them?

Because every once in a while I can.

Because they never really asked or hinted. They expressed great interest, acknowledged the stiff price tag, and let it go.

Because they asked for Kaya and Felicity. Had they asked for more (for lack of a better word) conventional characters or dolls that the manufacturer purported would look just like their owners, I might have remained disinclined. But there was something about native Chicagoan daughters asking for a colonial girl and Nez Perce girl and describing how the dolls would be good friends who taught each other their customs and languages that moved this autodidact to rub her thumb along the edge of her MasterCard contemplatively, a gesture akin to stroking one's chin thoughtfully.

Because I wanted to.

Because even curmudgeons change their minds... albeit, begrudgingly.

Why indulge them?

Just because.

Morning coffee out back

Interested? Get the book here, the mug here (or here, if you prefer), and the flip-flops just about anywhere that carries cheap footwear that reminds you of your youth.

From The Squashed Philosophers:

There is no taking part in the Great Debate of Western civilization, the debate about who we are, how we should be governed, how we think and how we out to behave, without some familiarity with the remarkably few thinkers in whose language and idiom the talk is conducted.

Hey, and many thanks for the inquiries about my work. It's going well. Met the first wave of (self-imposed deadlines) with aplomb. See you as time permits. Until then...

Read. Think. Learn.

Live.

From the archives: Brain research ...

... shows that diet and exercise are keys to living well.

As brain research advances, experts are finding that some of the physical and mental changes normally associated with aging may not actually be normal at all, but instead, the result of treatable and preventable health conditions. In fact, by some estimates, only 30 percent of physical aging can be traced to our genes. The rest is up to each individual.

More here [link may have expired], but the fact is, you already know what it says.

It bears repeating, though: To ensure our physical and mental health, we need to eat well, rest, and move our bodies. Sometimes we forget that. We think we can keep the hours we kept at university, even though university is buried two decades (or more!) in our past. We think we can bear the effects of our coffee-and-more-coffee-only breakfasts and whatever-is-available lunches because our dinners include a limp green salad. We think soft drinks slake thirst as well as water. We think walking to collect the day's post counts as exercise.

No. No. No. No.

All of the great books and crossword puzzles in all of the libraries of the world cannot save us once our bodies (and, by extension, our brains) begin to wear out from misuse.

This [week], make one change that will, if it becomes habit, improve your health. Eight glasses of water. Early to bed. Even something as simple as ten sit-ups before or after each meal. One change. One improvement.

Because we only get one brain.

This entry first appeared 1.17.2004.

From the archives: Defining creativity

"Be creative."

How many times did a teacher exhort you to "Be creative!" Never mind that classrooms and school (and their adult kin, cubicles and meetings) are often if not the death then the terminal illness of creativity. (Classrooms. Ah, the great equalizers. Talent and gifts are muted, mediocrity is celebrated, and no one is left behind. We are all above-average. Shhh. Don't tell anyone that today's above-average is yesterday's unacceptable.)

"Be creative."

When genuine creativity, which by its nature challenges the conventional wisdom, draws derison from classmates, bemusement from teachers? Indeed. One might as well say, "Become the scorn of the playground."

"Be creative."

What the teacher likely means is, "Add some color. Some pizazz. Use construction paper. Add some illustrations. Do something so that all of the projects (essays, etc.) don't look exactly the same."

"Be creative."

"But don't be different. Because how would I grade that?"

"Be creative."

Yeah. Whatever. Who wants to watch t.v. at my house?

(*sigh*)

Today the word "creative" is ascribed with enthusiasm to scrapbooking, stenciling, and salads, as in "What a creative hobby!" "What a creative way to decorate!" and "What a creative use of bacon bits and grated cheese!"

Egads.

If being creative is that, I don't want to be creative.

If, on the other hand, creativity is the "difference between proficiency and imagination," "the ability to identify connections between things or ideas — meaningful connections, useful connections — that others do not perceive," oh, then let me at it. Please!

This past Monday, the Capital Times ran an article [link has expired] about the public discussion series, "Conversations on Creativity." Dr. Richard Burgess, oncologist and founder of the UW Biotechnology Center, was one of the featured speakers.

"In my profession, you have to have passion," [Burgess] says. "If you're easily discouraged, you'll pack it up and go home. Researchers are driven by the desire to understand what is not yet understood, to understand something that is new. "

Perseverance has a role [in creativity]. So does a rebellious nature. It is about challenging dogmas and sometimes ignoring the skepticism of peers.

Later in the article:

In both the arts and sciences, he [Burgess] makes a distinction between excellent technicians and the creative genius. A virtuoso performer may not be particularly creative, Burgess observes, but he is great performer who "can get all the notes and timing right."

Similarly, in science, there is a difference between proficiency and imagination.

There is a difference between proficiency and imagination.

And the difference is as obvious to me as the difference between, say, scrapbooking and, oh, sculpting.

Creativity, imagination, needs a space — a mental and emotional freedom from chores, rote assignments, media, and the common. It requires a patch of clear air or lush green that few of us find in the city of concrete that is school, work, and our over-scheduled, micromanaged lives.

It may be difficult, but find it, readers, thinkers, and autodidacts. Find the clear land. Daydream. Sit idle. Breathe. Think. Be passionate. Persevere. Rebel. Ignore skepticism.

Be creative.

This entry first appeared on 12.11.2003.

Precognition?

Or self-fulfilling prophecy?

Who knows? Does it matter? Either way, I was right.

Yesterday, I finally welcomed my new work station into my writing life, inwardly noting that, really, the only thing that could go wrong is that the image host to which I had downloaded all of the photos from my old station could go down (or out of business), and even then, this would only affect Mental multivitamin. No worries, right?

Riiight.

Yeah, it seems that Walagata is experiencing some technical issues, which explains the alarming lack of a blog banner and sidebar images.

Carry on, though.

Coffee to brew, books to read, songbirds to identify. You know the drill: Read. Think. Learn.

Live.