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Talking to the son

At some point over the past couple of years, a reader might have written in to say, “hey Michael!  Every once in a while you tell stories about Jamie.  Don’t you have any stories about Nick?”

Why, yes I do!  Glad you might have asked, dear reader.  I mentioned the first part of this story deep in a comment thread about three months ago, but I’ll elaborate on it here, and then I’ll talk about poetry for a bit.

When I was a young father, hovering nervously over our firstborn, I wondered about many things.  Like when precisely Nick would acquire “object constancy,” the major philosophical leap in understanding whereby babies realize that the crackers you’ve hidden from them still exist in the cupboard.  And like how Nick would apprehend human diversity—to use a word much bandied about these days.  When he entered toddlerdom, would he classify humans by skin tone?  Eye color?  Hair?  Height?

None of the above, as it turned out.  When Nick began to group his fellow humans into grouplets, he wisely chose the only criterion that makes any real sense: the color of their shirts.  “Blue man!” two-year-old Nick would exclaim in the mall, pointing hither and yon.  “Orange woman!” One day I had an odd moment with him in the Food Lion in the south end of Charlottesville, as he pointed to a young black man wearing a black t-shirt and exclaimed, with toddler glee, “black man!” The black man in question gave Nick a quizzical look, since he was by no means the only black man within a five-mile radius, so I turned to him and said, “it’s your shirt.  I’m not kidding—” with a shrug of the shoulders—“he goes by people’s shirts.”

This was 1988, and back then, one of Janet’s many part-time jobs (in addition to that of graduate teaching assistant) involved running the study hall for Virginia’s football team.  Occasionally, she brought Nick to study hall for the evening.  Nick was a big hit among the players, particularly a talented freshman lineman named Ray Roberts, who always wore a red hoodie to study hall.  For this, Nick named him “red man” (surely you saw that one coming), greeting him with great enthusiasm every time he came in.  The other players did not fail to make a note of this, and ever after, Roberts was known to his fellow Cavaliers as Red Man.  Legend has it that the nickname (cough) followed him all the way to the NFL, when, in 1992, he was drafted in the first round by the Seattle Seahawks.

But over the next couple of years, Nick gradually learned more about race—and the history of race.  When he was four, I came upon him watching a bit of Ken Burns’ The Civil War, and he peppered me with questions about slavery.  (I started by explaining that it involved people working without pay, and we gradually made our way up to the “ownership” bit and all the beliefs that made it possible for humans to justify owning other humans.) He was intensely curious about Abraham Lincoln as well, whose name he knew but of whose fate he had been unaware.  And wouldn’t you know it, that was the year that Champaign, Illinois thrashed out the question of whether the city would finally cave in to “political correctness” and agree to honor Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday.  So not long after learning how Lincoln died, Nick learned how King died, and all without the help of that Richard Holler song.  In the space of a few days, then, Nick got the sense that there was something very, very wrong with the world he’d been born into, and he came to understand that some of the people who’d perceived its wrongness in the past got themselves shot and killed.

So one night I was putting him to bed, and decided to pull out of his bookcase a volume that my parents had given to him—the quite wonderful Talking to the Sun, edited by Kenneth Koch and Kate Farrell.  (The title itself has an interesting history, running from the quite wonderful Koch back to the quite wonderful Frank O’Hara.) Nick had a pretty high tolerance for poetry at the time, even (or especially) modern poetry, partly because he’d come across William Carlos Williams’s “The Great Figure” a year earlier—a poem that happily managed to combine the two things that completely obsessed little Nick and filled pages of his scrap paper and shadowed his every conscious moment: fire trucks and the number 5.  Yes, any form of human expression that addressed the critical issue of number 5s on fire trucks was more than OK by him.

We flipped through the book as I read Nick this poem and that, and suddenly we came upon the opening section of Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” “Check this out!” I said to Nick.  But Nick wasn’t interested, because, as he said, there were too many words.  It would take too long to read!  It would be boring!

“Oh, it won’t be boring at all,” I promised.  “On the contrary, my friend.  When this poem came out, people were so surprised they didn’t know what to do with it.  It’s full of all kinds of weird stuff, and look—the lines just run on forever, right?  Like really excited speech.”

Nick was not impressed.  Long lines, weird stuff, no rhymes, so what?

“So what?” I exclaimed.  “So what? Listen, pal, if Walt Whitman hadn’t written this stuff you wouldn’t have your number 5 in gold on that fire truck!  This stuff is where modern American poetry began!  Why, when this poem appeared, there were people who didn’t think it was poetry at all!  They wanted to ban it and keep people from reading it, it was so amazing!  That’s so what!”

Nick thought about this for a few moments, frowning.  He tried to imagine a poem causing that kind of uproar.  Then he seemed to hit upon something, and turned to me, nodding darkly as if to say, I know what comes next.

“So they shot him?” Nick said.

Posted by on 10/11 at 09:47 AM

  1. You hadn’t by chance taught Nick the “When I hear the word ‘culture’....” line before then, had you?  Or been reading him Plato’s Republic?

    If this doesn’t prove you are seriously devoted to the Great Books, I don’t know what would.  So the WAAGNFN Party has all along been the We Are All All About the Great Books Now Party.  Who knew?

    Must go rethink my complicity in almost-3-year-old onechan’s personal canon consisting of Dora, Powerpuff Girls, and now Pretty Cure (maybe we can get KO to pray this little anime franchise doesn’t get exported to the States).  But maybe her screaming “Buttercup’s home!  Buttercup’s home” whenever I get back from work (she’s Dora-Bubbles-’Pela Kela’; I’m Boots-Buttercup-monster) should have done the trick.

    Posted by The Constructivist  on  10/11  at  11:36 AM

  2. Powerpuff Girls

    Hmm, let’s see.  Male scientist tries to create the “right sort” of girls using sugar, spice, and everything nice.  Something “goes wrong,” however, and he ends up with superpowered girls who kick butt, take names, chew gum, etc.  And so the world is repeatedly saved from evil (though I’m betting a global nuclear fireball would take care of those meddling kids).  Think of it as a feminist message with really bad animation and atrocious voice talent (not unlike certain episodes at the Houston conference back in ‘77).

    It would seem dangerous to bring up great literature at such a crucial time in party evolution, Professor.  Resolve could be weakened by the schismatic temptations of Everyone Else Is Global Nuclear Fireball Now, So I’d Finally Have Time to Read All These Books If Only My Glasses Weren’t Broken.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  11:48 AM

  3. Well, this post learned me something.
    We had a print of Demuth’s The Figure 5 in Gold hanging on our son’s bedroom wall from a very early age - but procured merely for the visuals.
    We were all completely innocent of the poetry behind it.

    So my question is: What artist had to get shot? i.e: Whitman -> Williams as ?? -> Demuth. Would it be Picasso? - my grasp of influence and precedence in the Modern Art world is hazy at best.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  11:51 AM

  4. Michael, I had a similar experience at a tiny memorial in Albany NY where there is one of the few monuments to the Korean War.  While I wept over all the names of the capitalist liberation front who are now dead, my son asked me why I was crying. I said it was because the communists had killed all those people.  He then said dad what’s a communist?  A communist is someone who kills people who believe in independent economic opportunities, I said.  Why do they kill people who just want to own their own businesses, dad?  Because they want everything including poetry and the sales of toilet paper to be completely subordinate to the dictates of the state, my darling boy.  What are the dictates of the state?  Well, in this case it’s anything that Kim Jung Mentally Ill decides, I said.  Who’s that?  He laughed.  So then we opened the newspaper and I showed him a picture of the fat fool who’s been head of the party in North Korea for some time.  But dad, he looks like a nice man.  He’s smiling, my son said.  Can people who look nice be bad?  He asked.  Yes, it’s how they behave that matters.  Holding an entire people as slaves to communist ideology is bad, for instance, I said, even when you’re smiling and are sure you’re right. 

    At about this point I realized some kid from Oberlin college was watching as I indoctrinated my son into the anti-communist perspective, while smoking a cigarette with great agitation.  Finally he got up and walked toward me and actually spit at me, but the spit missed, and I thanked the heavens again for our universities.

    Posted by Kirby Olson  on  10/11  at  12:07 PM

  5. It would seem dangerous to bring up great literature at such a crucial time in party evolution, Professor.  Resolve could be weakened by the schismatic temptations of Everyone Else Is Global Nuclear Fireball Now, So I’d Finally Have Time to Read All These Books If Only My Glasses Weren’t Broken.

    The “Misanthropic / Myopic Burgess Meredith” wing of WAAGNFN, a/k/a EEIGNFSIFHTTRATBIOMGWB, will hold its weekly schismatic meeting in the bank vault promptly at 3 pm this afternoon.  Also, the orthodox WAAGNFN will be holding a fundraiser to send K.O. back to school until he learns enough about the history of the anticommunist left to be able to offer intelligible comments on blogs.  Sign up now to get your candy for door-to-door sales in your neighborhood!  The orthodox WAAGNFN thanks you.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  12:16 PM

  6. I was unaware that Luther had suspended the Eighth Commandment (Lutheran).

    Posted by Chris Clarke  on  10/11  at  12:19 PM

  7. Chris, what’s that commandment again? Don’t post painfully leaden and politically obtuse comments that completely clash with the wonderfully light-hearted and yet wistfully wise posts of a gifted writer and thinker?

    Posted by John Protevi  on  10/11  at  12:31 PM

  8. Kirby, may I suggest that from now on you just post the phrase from this shirt (which you should probably own) instead of posting more drivel.

    http://www.palmercash.com/product.asp?3=478

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  12:42 PM

  9. Wikipedia has a nifty chart laying out the differences between the Jewish/Protestant version of the Ten Commandments and the Catholic/Lutheran/New Church interpretation.

    #8 in the Lutheran version is, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor”.

    I’ll refrain from a rant against BushCo that’s just dying to come out right now.

    Posted by Oaktown Girl  on  10/11  at  12:53 PM

  10. Fascinated by the number five? Is Nick a member of the “John Dillinger died for you” society?

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  01:03 PM

  11. Out of the mouths of babes… I have a four-year old who has his own little diatribe which he throws out with little provocation, usually a time that maximizes the embarrassment of his parents. It goes something like this, “You know what they tell me at school (his one-day-a-week Baptist daycare) that’s a lie? They say that Jesus died and came back to life. Isn’t that silly? Once you die, you’re dead.” We’re not sure where he got this; maybe he’s been sneaking off and attending the local communist university.

    One of his buddy’s parents are so horrified, they’ve offered to take him to Sunday school with them on a regular basis. We let him go once with stern warnings against the using the diatribe, though we’re politely declining the continued offers to take him.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  01:07 PM

  12. Michael, sorry if I contributed to Kirby’s attempted hijack. This is a great post with lots to think about, and not just the Seattle Seahawks of 1992. There’s quite a bit of debate on how children construct social categories, and how race is learned. For instance, in this book I looked at this summer. But construction of racial categories doesn’t mean we have to have a racist society. For that, you’ve got to be carefully taught.

    Posted by John Protevi  on  10/11  at  01:11 PM

  13. Is there some other candy we can sell?? Maybe radiated chocolate from Sierra Leone???  I mean, gummy worms are so, i don’t know, ninja turtle like (pre-powderpuffed)???

    The Constructivist makes a subtle point however.  Reading GB authors to your little children (0-5) is the perfect pre-scholastic preparation exercise.  The kids’ agile and supple minds gleen only the cool parts and skip all those extra words that go on and on (did Euclid really need all that text translated, when you could just look at the cool diagrams).  Every bit of developmental research says read to your children from the earliest moments, tell stories, connect verbally and graphically.  Great books are great for that, although there is that Grimm stuff.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  01:31 PM

  14. My wife is Asian, and so we’ve had at least some of the requisite worries regarding how our daughters’ heritage will be viewed, by them and by others, and in turn how they will learn about race, and how that knowledge will manifest itself.  About the funniest thing that happened to us is when I was walking our oldest (then ~3 years old) around a local fabric store while my wife shopped; another customer stopped us and exclaimed, referring to my daughter, “How beautiful!” This would have been quite nice if she hadn’t then followed it up by asking, “Where did you _get_ her?”

    At the time, I honestly had no answer for her.  It had taken an entire one-period course in middle school to make it all clear to me, after all.

    Both my wife and I found it very strange, however, when our first daughter reached the stage at which she was making real friends.  At some point her “best” friends finally crystallized into three consistent names, all in her day care room - Caroline, Victoria and John.  These turned out to be the only two Asian children and the only other half-Asian child in the room.

    The second daughter, three years behind, recently passed through the same stage.  She came up with three names for her “best” friends.  Two of these were the only Asian children in the room.

    My daughters are only 3 and 6, and though I’ve been expecting it for years, I have yet to deal more than passingly with questions of race (other than that of their parents) from either of them.  We are still in the development phase of bringing our 6-year-old into awareness of a world that has evil, racism and murder in it.  Regardless, both girls have moved on from their original “best” friends, and their new pals are a more diverse lot in terms of racial heritage - they include Caucasians, for example.  A bit of a reversal of how these things are supposed to go.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  01:44 PM

  15. Hi, Jack.

    Yes, the holding in abeyance of the FIRST commandment is what presumably gives us all the license to invent comic vignettes within Lutheran circles (as opposed to the old Testament injunction against Graven Images) as long as we do so truthfully: that is, satire is a necessary act to create the laughter necessary to help us to see both worlds in contention, that is, to see the ideological construction of our competing realities, and to salute the skillful way in which the reality of the other has been constructed in the narrative we wish to show the yellow light of capital.

    Irony is not a felony, unless you’re Kim Well-Hung and I’m not.

    Bye, Jack.

    Posted by Kirby Olson  on  10/11  at  01:46 PM

  16. What a weird and wonderful coincidence—our guest faculty presenter in my “how to do graduate school” course was just talking about the New York School of poets and ekphrasis, and I was just thinking fondly of the late Kenneth Koch, whose poetry classes I was lucky enough to have taken.  No person killed him, but alas, leukemia did.

    Posted by Dr. Virago  on  10/11  at  02:16 PM

  17. Btw, Michael, your Jamie and Nick stories make me want to have kids, and that’s saying something, because I am *deeply* ambivalent about having kids. (Can one be deeply ambivalent?  Yes, I suppose so, if the conflicting desires themselves run deeply.)

    captcha word:  “stop”—as in stop going off on personal tangents on someone else’s blog!

    Posted by Dr. Virago  on  10/11  at  02:19 PM

  18. Thanks for the story Michael. It’s a hard lesson learned for all of us.

    (note to Kirby: satire targets its own subject.)

    Posted by Central Content Publisher  on  10/11  at  02:34 PM

  19. Is there some other candy we can sell?

    There is no other candy.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  02:52 PM

  20. But it was a true story (sniff) and yet it happened at the Vietnam Memorial just after visiting the Lincoln (sniff) and and I can’t finish this.

    But the citation of the 8th did bring me to heel.

    Hee hee.

    Posted by Kirby Olson  on  10/11  at  03:24 PM

  21. I think I posted a comment before about how my four year old also refers to people by their shirt colors.  But the other day, for the first time, he referred to the skin color of an african-american person—he pointed out that Luis Castillo and Torii Hunter both have brown skin but Joe Mauer doesn’t.  It seemed to me that the only thing to do was to agree in a noncomittal way with his factual observation. 

    Introducing kids to violent death—a tough concept, there.  The other day the front page of the NY Times had a picture of an Iraqi funeral procession (one of the 600,000, apparently).  I just didn’t have the heart to give the correct answer to the question, “Daddy, why are those guys carrying that box?” So I admire you for taking on slavery with young Nick.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  03:39 PM

  22. John Protevi, I immediately clicked your link to that book. One Amazon customer review, from Steve Sailer! And of course (as Chris Clarke and PZ Myers would attest), he’s full of caca. He says, “It seems obvious to me why little kids pay close attention to race. It’s crucial for them to understand who is related to whom, and racial traits provide a more reliable guide than even body shape.” Hogwash! My 6-year-old son pays almost no attention to race—kids have to be taught to do that (if they hear mom and dad describing people in racial terms, they’ll pick it up). He describes his “girlfriends"—four of ‘em!—as having black or brown hair and skin tones ranging from “black or tan” (one African girl, one unknown) to “light” (Filipino) to “tan” (Mexican/white), and he seems to have no awareness of labels like black/African(-American), Latino, Asian, or white. My kid’s Asian and white, and his classmates are roughly equally divided among the four main ethnic groups in this country.

    I’m just beginning to discuss issues of race with him—Columbus Day was a prime occasion, naturally.

    Posted by Orange  on  10/11  at  03:39 PM

  23. (Though maybe a kid raised in a single-race household or in a homogeneous community would be prone to notice things like skin color differences. My kid’s always been around folks with diverse backgrounds—your mileage may vary.)

    captcha: youre, sans apostrophe, avec horreur

    Posted by Orange  on  10/11  at  03:47 PM

  24. The Bolsheviks practiced slavery in the gulags.  If you’d just read Solzhenitsyn that would become apparent.

    The Khmer Rouge practiced slavery.

    The Chinese communists practiced slavery.

    And now, students all over America are building pyramids to race, gender, and class, in a form of communist slavery.

    Horowitz as Moses.

    Posted by Kirby Olson  on  10/11  at  04:02 PM

  25. About the funniest thing that happened to us is when I was walking our oldest (then ~3 years old) around a local fabric store while my wife shopped; another customer stopped us and exclaimed, referring to my daughter, “How beautiful!” This would have been quite nice if she hadn’t then followed it up by asking, “Where did you _get_ her?”

    Thanks for the report, M.  Of course, you could always adopt a patient, patronizing tone and reply, “well, you see, little children come from Heaven,” or the cabbage patch, or the baby store, or some shit like that.  That would rock.

    Glad to hear your kids are getting into the mix, though.  When it comes to dealing with intraspecies difference, Jamie, for his part, is exceptionally well attuned to the fact that some kids can’t walk and some kids are blind and some kids have Down syndrome.

    Dr. V., you took a course with Kenneth Koch?  C’est bizarre, c’est étrange, et quelle coincidence, for I too have taken a course with Kenneth Koch!  Wait a minute—it’s all becoming clear to me now—you’re Fafblog!

    And feel free to go off on personal tangents in these comments any old time.  About having kids:  just remember, they change everything.  Everything.  You lose control over half to two-thirds of your waking hours and many of your sleeping hours, but on the other hand, the acquisition of telepathy and extrasensory perception is kinda nice sometimes.

    Charles, it was indeed your comment, back in July, that induced me to tell Nick’s shirts story.  But your Castillo- Hunter- Mauer anecdote reminds me that the most important distinction in the book, as every manager (and your son) knows, is the difference between righties and lefties.

    Well, there’s also the difference between thinking people and Steve Sailer.  That one’s important too.

    Posted by Michael  on  10/11  at  04:12 PM

  26. Was the Williams poem incorporated into Nick’s obsession?  Or did he regard it as an independent validation?  ("Great minds and all that, Dad.")

    In outline, this story is remarkably similar to one from the first act of a This American Life episode called “Kid Logic.” It’s available for free streaming, but I can’t find a link directly to the episode.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  04:47 PM

  27. <object constancy,” the major philosophical leap in understanding whereby babies realize that the crackers you’ve hidden from them still exist in the cupboard. </i>

    When my son got that faraway, contemplative look in his eyes,that made me wonder such things, he was always pooping his pants.  Makes me wonder about the relationship between consciousness and particularly squishy bowel movements.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  04:49 PM

  28. And Michael, my son throws right but bats left—just like Joe Mauer and Justin Morneau (and Kent Hrbek, too!).  Sometimes he turns around, for fun, and says, “Now I’m Torii Hunter!”

    The “where did you get him/her” comment is tiresome.  My kids were born in South America and their skin is a very different color than the pasty white concoction I sport.  So I’ve heard that before.  Blah.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  05:23 PM

  29. Hi Orange, good books can receive three star Amazon reviews by crazy / stupid people, without the quality of the book being threatened by that fact. If you prefer, here’s the Barnes and Noble link to Hirschfeld’s book, untainted by the presence of the odious Sailer.

    Posted by John Protevi  on  10/11  at  05:23 PM

  30. Can i please be allowed to only(captcha) sell these bars to a certain religio-unrealist, oh please??? They are the perfect apéritif to the last dindin prior to a GNF rapture moment.

    The Prestigious (A refined evolution of historical recipes)

    THE ABSINTH CHOCOLATE
    To the tempting flavour of the well known 75% Cuor di Cacao Venchi’s skilful chocolate makers have added a drop of Artemisia Absinthium extract. Deriving from this tree the liquor was extracted by the much loved painters and poets of the late 800’s, such as Toulouse Lautrec and Charles Baudelaire, which caused a constant drift in and out of reality in which they found the inspiration for their enchanting artistic creations. The particular aromatic flavour of the essence is blended by Venchi to the intense and enticing flavour of pure cocoa: In exclusive from the 2004 Collection available in original gift boxes for tasting of four chocolate bars and a bottle of Artemisia Absinthium with a metal measuring cup.
    Must be tried: The mini bars of Italian biological Chilli pepper and mini bars with Cinnamon.

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  05:31 PM

  31. they change everything.  Everything.

    Hah.  They don’t change:

    1.  Their own diapers.
    2.  The catbox.
    3.  The sheets on the bed.

    You get the drift.

    However, they change most of the good stuff, yes.  And they change dinnertable conversation for the better, at least once you get to have one again. 

    captcha:  pattern, as in ‘the pattern of my life/and the puzzle that is me’.  Yes, I am so shallow as to find Paul Simon deep.

    Posted by Jonquil  on  10/11  at  06:53 PM

  32. I also thought of the “Kid Logic” episode of “This American Life”—a similarly shocking but sensible conclusion drawn by a curious child.  Makes me tear up every time I hear it on the radio.

    Here’s the link:
    http://www.thislife.org/pages/archives/archive01.html

    “...Includes a story set at Christmastime, where a father tells his daughter about the baby Jesus being born, and all the “good stuff.” Then the daughter notices a picture of Jesus on the cross, and asks why they killed him. The child later asks about Martin Luther King. (11 minutes)”

    Posted by  on  10/11  at  06:56 PM

  33. My son, now 13, used to do that with the shirts, too. When he was about three, there was briefly a collection of men named “Tim” in our lives (a contractor, a co-worker, a now ex-relative, a teacher). Two of them got shirt names: “Red Tim” and “Green Tim.”

    Not much later, every black man with a shaved head (be he 5’2” or 65 years old, it didn’t matter) was “Shaq.”

    Posted by KathyR  on  10/11  at  08:53 PM

  34. This is all very interesting, and brings to mind my own first conscious perception of race. I grew up in a de facto segregated suburb in the New York area. I have a vivid memory of a drive to my grandmother’s house in Long Island on which my father (in his constant quest to avoid tolls, or traffic, or something) took a wrong turn. There was a black man walking on the sidewalk. My immediate reaction was “Look, mommy, a chocolate man!” As I recall my thinking, some 50 (!) years later, it involved a syllogism that chocolate is wonderful; that was a chocolate man; therefore, that man was wonderful. But my mother’s reaction, telling me to sssshhhh, taught me that skin color was something Not To Be Discussed, or even Noticed. (Capcha “body")

    Posted by alice  on  10/11  at  09:45 PM

  35. When my daughter was in pre-school (she’ll be 7 in 3 weeks) she adored one of her teachers, especially her “beautiful, brown skin.” In fact, she still calls people brown (sometime dark, sometimes light) while others are white.  She is very musical and she’ll comment “Those are brown people.” or “Is that a white person?” when she’s listening to a song.  That really floored me the first time she said it, I think to “September” by Earth, Wind and Fire.  Occasionally she asks if singers are brown or white, and I usually make her guess.  I once asked how she knew, and her answer was only “Sometimes they sound different.”

    Last year she was one of only two white girls in her class, and she was so jealous of her (Asian) friends’ straight black hair.  Then last spring one of the girls browbeat her mother into getting highlights because she wanted to be blond like my daughter! 

    captcha: “son” who is almost 4 and hasn’t made any color comments (yet)

    PS Kids do change everything (why else am I posting at 1:10 am?) but they are so worth it.  Corny, I know, but I’m starting to doze here.

    PPS Chris C. can I submit a request for “Green Eggs and Ham”?

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  01:12 AM

  36. The butcher-boy puts off his killing-clothes...

    --Which is always a noteworthy event in this ongoing, benighted human saga.  Congrats!

    All right, I’ll have a quick look at yer Thomas Hardy.

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  03:44 AM

  37. Boy, you are a great dad.  And you and Nick (someday) should now I laughed outloud when I read the last line of this post.  Thanks, made the day so far, m.

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  11:09 AM

  38. mds, I’m an old school fan of the Powerpuff Girls, so thanks for the qualified defense.  My tongue was mostly in cheek when I bemoaned onechan’s ‘girl power’ personal canon (by implicit contrast with Chairman Michael’s all-male-fight-the-power canon).  But did you know there’s a Japanese version of PPG, where the cute little abstract kindergardners are now elementary school students drawn similarly to jr.-high/high-school-aged anime female superheroes?  It’s not quite into full-blown Sailor Moon/Lolita territory, yet neither overtly parodic nor funny (the early morning little kids’ TV shows are much more allusive and witty).  I still haven’t decided whether to stay appalled or give the show a third chance (it would help if they’d actually show new episodes!  OK, dammit, I’m hooked).

    Since we’ve only ever let onechan read/color the original PPG, and when we’re in the States strictly ration her TV watching to Dora, videos of Japanese kid TV, and golf tournaments (I was hoping she’d like Michelle Wie or Ai Miyazato, but she actually likes Karrie Webb the best--a no-lose situation, really) yet since we’ve been in Japan have totally relaxed the TV-watching rules, this means that she’s watched the Japanese anime before ever seeing the American cartoon.

    This hasn’t stopped her from inventing Powerpuff Babies and creating elaborate scenarios where they interact with both the American and Japanese Powerpuff Girls.  And since there was a big typhoon our first weekend here, it always comes around to fighting typhoons.  Heh.

    Where I’m going with this is gender construction rather than racialization (but if you want to see my responses to the Sailerites and the GNXPers on that whole race v. racialization thang, go to the archives of the blog I’m on leave from and wade through the many comments).  Having spent a month with her Japanese cousins--all boys--and hence seeing a lot of boys’ TV (Ultraman and Power Rangers are still going strong here, and have evolved in very weird and wonderful ways), onechan is quite aware of gendering in Japan, to the extent that she’ll insist that I can’t like her (girls’wink shows and that her older cousins’ shows are not for her (even though she watched them happily with them two months ago).  For a while, she was insisting that while I could pretend to be Buttercup, I had to be ‘big boy Buttercup,’ b/c I couldn’t pretend to be a girl.  She’s lately relaxed that rule, but has moved on to pretending to be ‘Pela Kela’ and making me play the monster (who in the Pretty Cure episodes we’ve been seeing is a muscle-bound, handle-bar-moustachioued, gold-skinned tall guy--wonderful), once again enforcing what I find to be strange and troubling gender rules.

    So as you can imagine I’m quite curious about how being in Japan affects her role playing, fantasy spinning, and narrative building (and sense of identity--she’s a dual citizen, at least until she hits taxable age, but since she’s been here sometimes refers to herself as Japanese and sometimes insists she’s not).  Not to mention how she influences her imoto, who’s not yet 6 months old but already is very entertained by her onechan.  Or what happens if/when we put her in day care here and goes back to interacting with live kids her age (as she did 3x/wk. in the States [mostly with boys] and weekly in the Chiba playgrounds when we were there [mosly with girls]).

    So, to try to justify the length of all this by ending with a question or three, do you all have any neat anecdotes about gendering, performativity, etc., at very young ages (say, pre-K)?  Where are kids getting their ideas about gender roles and rules from at those ages these days, in your experience?  What kind of media filtering and literature pushing do/did you practice, with what effects (especially the unintended ones!)?

    Posted by The Constructivist  on  10/12  at  02:20 PM

  39. A dozen years ago or so, my youngest son (then two) began to attend Burning Man.  He acquired the nickname buckethead (in honor of buckethead and the bucketheads) by dancing around in front of DJ with a yellow Duplo bucket over his head.  For several reasons that name stuck, and he became well known among the BM greater community. 

    A couple of years later at BM, he was riding along in his offroad pimped radioflyer wagon when we were passed by a group of people riding extreme tricycles.  These were members of a group of older SanFran performance artists/ exotic dancer types.  My son had seen them before but had never talked to them.  This time one of them stopped, and said hello to buckethead.  My boy looks up at this naked person, smiles, and said “What are you?” Oh the Alice in Wonderland moment.

    You see, this group on their tricycles were well endowed (upper and lower) shemales.  As my son had been surrounded by literally hundreds of naked human beings, he had observed that this Sister was not a familiar example of the species.  The Sister guffawed, chortled, immediately called the others over, and we got a great impromptu performance of their song and dance act.  It may not have explained it fully to buckethead, but he got the gist.

    Posted by  on  10/12  at  03:52 PM

  40. Wait a minute—it’s all becoming clear to me now—you’re Fafblog!

    Te-hee!  This obscure, meta-blogular running joke will *never* get old with me.  Clearly I am easily amused.

    And feel free to go off on personal tangents in these comments any old time.

    Uh-oh, can open, worms all over the place...I’ll refrain for now, however.

    About having kids:  just remember, they change everything.  Everything.

    Yes.  Hence the ambivalence.  Plus the whole “this world sucks and my potential children would have no future” issue.

    Posted by Dr. Virago  on  10/13  at  11:59 AM

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