Little Utopians

We've begun to put the interior of the house back together as things get finished off one by one. On Saturday, as I was replacing some family photos on one of the shelves flanking the fireplace, I noticed a book I hadn't realized that I had.  During the living room paint job, the books remained on these shelves (I'm going to paint them later), so I hadn't had to move them--else I'd have noticed the book a couple of months ago.  I have a rather large collection of books for various ages of children, most of which have been passed down through generations of my family.*  But I still buy books I don't already have, by authors I have loved well, and especially if they're artfully illustrated.

Rather recently, I think (although with the current state of my memory, who knows), I happened on a Ten Speed Press reprint of Kenneth Grahame's Dream Days, illustrated by Maxfield Parrish.  It's a lovely facsimile edition, complete with the black and white plates of the original facing the first page of each story.  Most folks are only familiar with The Wind in the Willows (and probably because of the Disney film rather than the book itself), but Dream Days is the collection of short stories that contains the inspiration for another Disney film, "The Reluctant Dragon."

The astonishing thing about this little book, and its predecessor, The Golden Age (also "profusely" illustrated by Parrish), is the view of children as curious, inventive, literate, engaging people, bent on building their own little utopias within their own landscapes.  Grahame, who appears to have been just such a child, reminds me of J. M. Barrie, whose Peter and Wendy is just about the wittiest book I've ever read.  Both Barrie and Grahame seem to be writing both for the children themselves, and for the parents who would be reading the stories to them.  We see this same phenomenon today in clever animated features clearly meant to engage different audiences (Rango comes immediately to mind), but the "literature" I see on the shelves for kids today seems not to be nearly as well tuned.  Mind you, it's been quite a while since I actually bought a book for a child that wasn't a copy of an old childhood favorite, but their section of the bookshops is so over-stuffed with toys, games, movie tie-ins, and other trumpery that whenever I do want to buy a book-gift for a new baby, I have to search through the Times children's book reviews and order online to save myself the angst of wading through the mire to look for a new title.

But yesterday, I spent a little time in the kids' portion of Half Price Books, looking for a copy of The Golden Age, to no avail.  I did see a few copies of The Wind in the Willows (most had the Disney art on the cover), but nothing else, so I went to the Nostalgia section to see what might be there.  I yearned for two Tom Swift books, but had already latched onto a tenth-edition copy of  Tom Brown's School Days, and a My Book House collection of Tales Told in Holland--both for the quality of the illustrations and prose.  Once again, early twentieth-century children were clearly exposed to far more literate and instructive reading material than their early twenty-first-century counterparts are.

At some point I'll have to post a rant about this condition on The Owl of Athena, and talk about other of  Grahame's books on Owl's Cabinet. But for now, the fact that the children he writes about would undoubtedly fit in quite well with those who populate More News From Nowhere makes an account of this week's literary adventures fit best on The Farm.

*Owl's Cabinet of Wonders posts on some of these: The Peter Patter Book, October 2008, and Fiddling Away the Summer, August 2008.

Image credit: The Maxfield Parrish illustration for "Dies Irae," 1906, from Dream Days by Kenneth Graham (the edition I mentioned was published by Ten Speed Press in 1993. ISBN 0-89815-546-0); the image is from the New York Public Library Digital Gallery of Maxfield Parrish's work (Image ID: 1698241).

A Ride on the Cat Bus

The news is not good. Yesterday, tar balls showed up in Galveston, and today insult is added to injury on Lake Pontchartrain in New Orleans: oil from the BP spill has breached all barriers. I don't live anywhere near the Gulf, but the pain of the residents is leaking northward, and the sadness and sense of helplessness has penetrated deeply into the prairie. If I didn't have to go back to work on Friday, I'd be down drinking on Bourbon Street or hanging out on a pier in Galveston with old neighbors, just to show support.

Sometimes what one needs is a good dose of Hayao Miyazaki, and the evocation of childhood innocence that always shows up in his films. Tonight we watched My Neighbor Totoro again, just because we needed a fix of humor and sweetness in an otherwise dismal world.

One reason I've always found Miyazaki's films both entertaining and psychically energizing is that I can actually understand some of what goes on. I've never watched any of them in English, but baby Japanese is pretty hard to lose, and even without subtitles I can usually follow along. Although I only spent a couple of years in Japan (from ages 5 to 7 ish), the smidgen of the language I learned from living in a tiny shack in Kunitachi while my dad was stationed at Tachikawa Air Base not long after the end of WWII has stayed with me for more than a half a century. Both "towns" are now huge, thriving cities; but in the early '50s, they were villages with few amenities and a very traditional way of life.

Our "house" (before we moved to the military housing at "Green Park"--the link has some photos that look vaguely familiar) consisted of three rooms: a living room with a pot-bellied stove, a bedroom where my brother and I slept in bunk beds, and a kitchen. My parents slept in a bed in the corner of the living room, and that's also where we ate (on a table in another corner). The "bathroom" was out back somewhere, consisting (no doubt) of a "benjo" (toilet) and possibly a "furo" (bath)--but I seem to remember bathing at a public bath nearby. The scenes in the furo in Totoro always remind me of time spent in those baths as a family.

We lived next door to a dancing school, and my ever-enterprising mother talked the headmistress into exchanging dancing lessons (for me) for English lessons. So I was taught the ancient Kabuki dance, "Fuji Musume" (Wisteria Maiden), and came home to the States with a lovely kimono and all the accouterments: fan, geta, and a bow with cranes perched on it. I hope the dancing teacher got her money's worth in English. A few years ago I found some negatives from the period in question, and I think the photo at left is of my dancing teacher and her husband.

The Japanese I learned as a five year-old comes in handy when watching Miyazaki's films, because he understands kids better than anyone. The children in his films are just like those I learned to dance with: happy (giddy, almost), innocent, energetic, and open to almost anything. The children I knew then were the original "free range" kids, who played all over the place and didn't seem to be afraid of anything.

Watching Totoro tonight brought all of that back to me, and made me long for a cat bus to ride to get where folks could fix things. But because I don't have Totoro for a neighbor, I'll just have to rely on conversations with some of my anime-enchanted students to get a small sense of the delectable silliness that inevitably results from watching anything that comes out of Studio Ghibli.

I know it's not doing Louisiana or South Texas any good, but if more people understood the world the way Miyazaki does, I think there would be a whole lot fewer catastrophes occurring anywhere.

Image credit: I stole the poster from Wikipedia's page on Totoro.

The Mother 'Hood

Sunday I read an article in the Daily Poop by Judith Warner, who posted the original on her blog for the New York Times, "Domestic Disturbances." So, of course I went to the source to find the post, "The Choice Myth" in its original provenance, since the Poop can't be trusted to print anything in its entirety.

In the article, Warner explores evidence that while many women are staying home with their kids, this fact alone may not represent a choice on their part, and that the "myth" of women opting out of high-power jobs in droves to go home and raise little Chauncey is baloney.

Warner is actually responding to an article in the Washington Post from earlier in the month, ("Debunking the Mommy Myth," by Donna St. George and Pamela Stone) which presents statistics that indicate less choice-making than media attention implies. In fact, the number of mythologized drop-outs may be rather small and select.

My response to the whole thing is that I'm bothered by the need to choose at all. I'm beginning to think that my generation's demand for equal rights might well have led to equal opportunities to become harried cogs in the industrial machine. Mind you, I burned my bra with the rest of my cohort, but then stayed home to raise my kids.

I'm reminded of this choice (and for me it was a choice; in fact, I chose to stay home not only for my kids, but because I thought I might be taking a job away from someone who needed it more) whenever I get my Social Security statement in the mail. There, between 1976 and 1986, is a large gap: zero income for all ten years. Once I got my first TAship, the money started dribbling in until I got my first full-time teaching gig only fifteen years ago.

There are several problems with questions about who's staying home and why. One is the lingering notion/prejudice that stay-at-home moms aren't doing "real" work. I can't tell you how many times I had to respond snittily to remarks like "Oh; you stay home with your kids. So you don't work." Of course I worked. Just like the people who take care of working women's kids work. Only harder, because I did it 24 hours a day.

When my children entered school I started volunteering: Montessori school art teacher and materials designer, elementary school library and Junior Great Books, school district's library committee and outdoor learning center. This experience kept me in touch with my son and then my daughter even when they weren't home, and also helped prepare me for teaching once they'd fled the nest for high school pursuits and college. I went to grad school in the evenings when their father was home, and full time when they were in high school. My own family's rule had always been "18 and you're on your own" (because nobody could have afforded to send us to college), and even though my kids did get their college paid for, they were still pretty much independent from the moment they left the public school system.

I certainly didn't fall into the high-achieving power-job category (although I did "give up" a promising college administration career at Penn), nor was I married to a six-figure earner like one of the women in the Washington Post panel. There were some sacrifices, but I don't think any of us missed anything we did without. And even though it wasn't all peaches and flowers, I did like being with my kids and keeping house--and reading and writing and cooking and gardening--all the things I seem to have so little time for now that I have no kids at home and a "real" job.

The core question about the kind of work people do reminded me of similar questions posed by Wendell Berry, the agrarian philosopher I read more than almost anyone, who wrote an essay years ago about why he wasn't going to buy a computer, and then followed it up with one called Feminism, the Body, and the Machine (both were published in What Are People For, 1990).

Berry is a true essayist in the sense that his prose represents a journey from one idea to another, with connections made through stops along the way. So, what starts out as a response to comments made on his original essay ends up as a small treatise on craftsmanship--and because of this I'll probably put it on the reading list for my Winter course on the evolution of the Arts and Crafts movement. It's also a defense of choosing to stay home and practice home economics, the nobility of meaningful work, and everybody's stake in not succumbing to the power of industrial civilization to turn us all into robots.

This strikes me as being at the center of all of these "mommy wars" discussions about whether we should stay home, "work for a living," or somehow combine the two without driving ourselves nuts and bringing up spoiled brats or little monsters: meaningful work. Does it really benefit anyone (except perhaps manufacturers of stuff we may or may not need) if a woman goes to work on an assembly line, tightening the same set of screws every day of her working life? Do men find this kind of work worthwhile? What kinds of work are women choosing (if they do choose, that is) when they stay in the workforce after having kids? Is it more worthy, intellectually challenging, or rewarding than teaching youngsters how to bake bread or grow tomatoes?

I don't know the answers to any of this. But I do know that the so-called choices we are making are being framed by people who care far more about profits on Wall Street than about real lives of real people, and by people who care fare less about the environment and the world as a whole than they do about their bottom line.

Unlike Wendell Berry, I've adopted the computer precisely because I don't write for a living. If I want to write, I have to write fast, and the computer helps me do so. But if I had my druthers, and if I were flush enough to buy a cabin in the woods, grow my own food, and ditch the car, I'd happily go back to pen and pencil, or to my Olivetti portable, to get the writing done. Nobody would read it, of course, but I'm not sure that's why I do it. Not many people read this stuff as it is, computer or no, but there's some satisfaction involved in organizing ones thoughts and essaying through ideas when they come pressing in from the ever-present outside world. Thankfully, the children are grown and gone and working at jobs they seem to like. So I think I made the right choice.

By the way, it's raining again.

Image credit: Carl Larsson's idyllic domestic paintings came to mind immediately when I was thinking about the combination of Arts and Crafts movement, family, work, and living without much technology. This one, Kitchen (1898), seemed an appropriate illustration. Wikimedia Commons.