cookies

Did anyone else feel that Amanda Hesser threw down a gauntlet with her cookie recipes in last week's magazine? (Edited to include permalink; thanks, Jody!)

I made the "flat and chewy" ones, and I'm going to try "thick and gooey" today. [Edited to add: "thick and gooey" are tasty but not thick. Maybe because I didn't chill the dough long enough. Life's too short.] But I have a couple of complaints already. The "flat and chewy" were too salty: 1 tbs. kosher salt AND baking soda instead of powder. I liked the kosher salt, actually, but in future I might double the amount for baking soda and use powder instead, which is way less salty-tasting. And I think one could easily scant that TBS of salt. I have spent most of my adult life leaving the salt out of recipes entirely, actually. Mark has a condition that requires a low-sodium diet, and when I started cutting salt out of things I got fewer headaches. But lately I've been inching it back into things grain by grain. It does make things taste better, no question.

But, sifting the flour with the kosher salt? Is just dumb. The kosher salt just lies at the bottom of the sifter mocking you.

She also wants you to use a mixer fitted with a paddle. Well, I don't have one. The recipe worked with my ancient Hamilton Beach stand mixer, but I just wondered if I missed something.

Finally, it's really annoying to be told to preheat the oven in step one and then told to chill the cookie dough once it's put together. I'm just saying.

What to read to your kids

Claudia asked for read-aloud recommendations on the very day I found this article in The Guardian: Guardian Unlimited Books | Special Reports | What the top writers say every child should read:

While most of what's here is way too ambitious to read aloud to a five-year-old, I'm intrigued by Philip Pullman's choices. "He did nclude The Rime of the Ancient Mariner among his choices - recalling that it had been a 'mesmerising' experience when a 'wise and far-seeing teacher had, without explaining anything about it, read it aloud to my class when I was about seven'.

Pullman's list has at its heart fairytales, myths and legends as the great stimuli to children's imaginations. Another recommendation, which does not appear on his list, is Kipling's Just So Stories 'for the wonderful rhythms and rhymes and the muscular strength of the language. You don't understand everything as a child but you love the sound of it. Children respond very immediately to the musical rhythmic effects of language.'"

I have never really read poetry to my kids, other than Edward Lear and James Marshall's nonsense stuff. But why not? I'm also intrigued by the Kipling suggestion: I loved the Just-So Stories as a kid, and they seem entirely appropriate for a precocious five-year-old, but you may want to pre-read to check for occasional offensive stereotypes. Or just read them and then talk, which is something we've done a lot as well.

Read the whole piece, or just scroll to the bottom for the lists. Oh, and Rowling is right: Roald Dahl! (Though, again, some very questionable ideology here and there, like those happily-enslaved Oompah-Loompahs. Sigh.)

changes

Bored with the dots. Dots gone. Recipes in the sidebar.

Literary Mama blog book tour, coming Wednesday! Watch this space...

I think I'm in

Or maybe insane. I think I'm going to sign up for Stephanie's knitting olympics. I'm not quite sure what I'm going to knit, however. I have a bunch of lovely recycled silk yarn that I got for Christmas--maybe something with that? I've already got one project cast on, though, so I can't use that. And the other thing I'm thinking of making with that yarn is placemats, and I hate to think that they would be a challenge. Though they might, if finishing in 16 days is the goal. I certainly have enough yarn, which is key.

I also don't want to buy new yarn. I've got four or five skeins of this (in "Grand Canyon," which is a variegated red) in my stash, and two skeins each of this in blue and purple. And some of this in teal. I think I must have planned yet another funky scarf out of that, and then gotten bored with the whole funky scarf thing.

None of this is very exciting, though that cotton blend is probably enough for...something interesting, right? But what? Oh! I did just buy some really lovely wool/silk/cashmere (in "emporio," which is a rich purply brown) that I intended for a scarf. (I could only afford enough for a scarf.) But then again, a scarf is hardly a challenge. And I deliberately bought yarn that would look good knit up in stockinette (ie, it's variegated) because I wasn't planning to do anything complex with it.

So I'll have to think some more about this. But I definitely want to join Team Wales. I don't know if I have any Welsh ancestry, but Wales was our favorite place during our travels last summer. And the music is fabulous. So that's settled. First things first, right?

Friday Food #3: chicken/edamame stir-fry

This is really just edamame and rice, dressed up. It's basically an epicurious recipe (sigh. I'm so predictable) but I left out the scallions because my kids won't eat them so they just go limp and icky in the vegetable drawer. If you like them, scatter sliced ones on at the end.

4 tbl soy sauce (I use "lite" soy sauce in hopes that the lower sodium makes a difference)
1 tsp honey
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped coarsely
2 boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite-sized chunks or slices or whatever shape you like
2 cups frozen edamame (no pods)
4 tsp dark sesame oil
3-4 tsp minced fresh ginger
3 cloves garlic, minced

as much rice as you need to feed 4 people; I make 1-1/2 to 2 cups. Brown rice is great, but I make sticky white rice in my rice cooker more often--it's quicker, and this is one of those last-minute dinners. It helps to buy jars of minced ginger and garlic, too, and to have an Asian market nearby selling dark sesame oil for a reasonable price. I'm just saying.

Stir the honey and 2 tbl soy sauce together and pour over the cut-up chicken. Let it sit while you start the rice and toast the walnuts.

Toast the walnuts in a small frying pan on medium heat for about three minutes, shaking the pan or stirring frequently. Drizzle 2 tbl of soy sauce over them, stir until the walnuts are coated, and remove from the heat.

When you're almost ready to eat, heat the oil in a wok or large saute pan. Cook the chicken for about three minutes, stirring constantly. When it is done or almost so, add the garlic and ginger and cook until fragrant. Then add the edamame and stir to mix well. When the edamame are thawed, toss the walnuts in and stir again.

If you were really on the ball and cooked the rice earlier, you could stir that into the chicken/edamame mess now and call it fried rice. Or you can just serve the chicken/edamame mess on top of the rice (or next to it, if your kids are segregationists) and that's good, too.

My kids pick the walnuts out. But I still think they're worth putting in. Oh, and if we were vegetarians, I think this would be a place we'd use tempeh, which has a nice chewiness to it and would hold up well with the other flavors. But of course we're not, which is why Nick has to worry about who his guardians will be. Sigh.

Random

Stephanie does random Wednesdays, sometimes, but I'm (as so often) a day late, apparently.

There are many reasons I'm glad I'm not toilet training anyone right now. This is one.

My mother can't load my blog on her computer any more. Some kind of weird internet filters. I even changed a few of my links in the blogroll (sorry, Dr. B.!) to see if that was it, but it wasn't. So why doesn't her computer want her to read the blog? (My dad's computer allows her to, so she can still check in.)

I'm actually enjoying my upgrade. I like the little entourage notification in the bottom right corner that gives me a preview of incoming email. I'll probably get annoyed with it before long, though.

But I really like the new enhanced search. Google for my hard drive, how cool is that? Maybe I'll be able to find all those lost recipes now. Somehow TVG and I have a habit of exchanging recipes without putting the recipe name or the primary ingredient in the subject line. Sadly, however, spotlight appears not to want to search my entourage files, where many of these recipes reside. Hmm.

If 8:15 is too early in the morning for me and my students now, in the second week of classes, what will it be like in mid-February when we don't even have the excitement of the new term to keep us going?

Speaking of mid-February, I'm turning 45 then. I want to do something, take on some new activity, learn something, make a resolution...something to mark it. But what? Take up running? (Ha!) Learn to knit things with shape, or changing colors? Begin a book? (Oh, yeah, I've done that...maybe finish a book?) That said, I don't want to put too much pressure on. Maybe I'll just bake a cake.

Nick's thinking about things

Nick calls to me from his bedroom at about 9:45. He's been in bed for forty-five minutes. I go to talk to him.

"I'm thinking about my own mortality*," he says. "I think about what would happen if I went to sleep and didn't wake up."

"That's hard to think about," I say.

"Hard not to, you mean."


Doesn't miss a beat, this kid. So we chat for a while about what might make him feel better. We agree that I'll check on him in a few minutes and see how he's doing. When I come back he has new worries. What will happen if Mark and I die? Who will take care of him? Where will he go to school?

I'm a little worried about this one--should I let him know we've tried to take care of this for him? He's literally imagining waking up in the morning and needing new parents, pronto. He's thought about a few options.

"First I thought about the H---. But then I couldn't go to my same school. So then I thought about my other friends from school, but I couldn't go to the same church."

This surprises me. He's been asking not to go to church lately, after all. But I let it continue. Finally I suggest his actual guardians (well, theoretical, since the wills are...I know! I know!).

"Really?" he says. "Why not M--- or L---?" They're out, I answer, because they don't have kids.

"But...then I couldn't taste meat until I grew up and left! I'm afraid I wouldn't like their food! And, they'd really have their hands full with two other kids!"

(Ah, the food thing. Is it better to be worrying about that than the death of your parents? Are vegetarian guardians the worst thing he can imagine?)

We run through various other permutations: grandparents, friends, other relatives.

"The thing is, Mommy, if you left, SOMETHING would change. Maybe two or three or four things."

I don't point out that if I "left" (his euphemism for death, at this point) everything would change. I remind him instead that we're doing our best to stay. I give him another hug, tell him I love him, promise to check back in ten minutes. In less time than that, he's asleep.

So obviously there's still a lot to process. These are interesting conversations, ones that don't resolve easily. Heaven is not much comfort to the eight-year-old, who has pressing concerns in the here and now. Maybe not much to older folks, either.

We both slept well, though, and are greeting the morning with renewed energy.

I'm off to get this computer upgraded to OX 10.4.something. Wish me luck

*Yes, he really did say he was thinking about his mortality. In the midst of this conversation, I'm noting his excellent vocabulary with maternal pride.

new stuff

Here's my latest column:
Children's Lit Book Group: Why Not Cinderella?

Friday Food #2: creamy chicken soup

My kids don't like soup. I may have mentioned it before; I can't quite remember. I don't quite know what it is, but I suspect it has something to do with the promiscuous mingling of ingredients. My kids are strict segregationists when it comes to food, despite the best efforts of their progressive parents.

Still, they like this soup. Of course they do: it's rich and creamy! And yet I can kid myself that it's healthy, as I throw lots of vegetables into it. And you get a lot of bang for the small amount of cream in it, really you do. And with some nice bread or a salad you have a meal.

4 tablespoons butter
1 cup sliced celery
1 cup shredded carrots (about 2 medium) (I minced the carrots and celery in the food processor; could have done the onion with them...In fact, should have, since complaints about onions in food are in direct proportion to the size of the bits)
1 medium onion, chopped
3 tablespoons all purpose flour
6 cups chicken stock or canned low-salt chicken broth
1 1/2 cups half and half (I used half 1% milk and 1/2 cream, as that's what I had in the house)
Dried thyme

2 boneless skinless chicken thighs
2 tbl sherry

1-1/2 cups penne pasta
1 cup frozen green beans, broken if they are whole (I buy these fancy frozen haricots verts but any green beans would do for this, I think. The original calls for sugar snap peas, which would also be delicious, I'm sure.)
1 cup frozen corn
3 tablespoons fresh lemon juice


Melt 3 tbl butter in heavy large pot over medium heat. Add celery, carrots and onion. Cook until celery and onion are tender, about 5 minutes. Add flour and cook 3 minutes, stirring frequently. Gradually mix in chicken stock. Bring soup to simmer, stirring frequently. Add the pasta and cook until tender. Add half and half and a sprinkling of thyme and simmer 5 minutes.

While the soup simmers, brown the chicken thighs in the last tablespoon of butter. When the chicken is cooked through, remove it from the pan and deglaze the pan with the sherry. Shred or chop the cooked chicken and add it, the pan juices, and the frozen vegetables to the soup. Simmer until the vegetables are no longer frozen. Mix in lemon juice; season to taste with salt and pepper.

This feeds all four of us with some left over, even when Nick has two servings.

I adapted this from an epicurious recipe, by the way. Here's the original in case you want to compare.

why this is not a knitting blog

Because I keep knitting the same things over and over. I've made the clapotis three times, as I'm pretty sure I've mentioned before. And I've made a version of this spiral scarf at least three times, maybe four. I've lost count. (I've also lost the original pattern link; mine said to cast on 90 stitches.) I also made a clapotis-look-alike this fall.

Because I can only knit things that don't change color, or have any particular shape, or require complicated counting or holding stitches.

Because I am currently trying to finish my third (or fourth) version of said spiral scarf, and I have been casting it off for at least three days. Three days! I worked on it for over two hours yesterday and it's still not done! Granted, I'm doing it in a very fine mohair (oh, it's so lovely!) and I think I may possibly have increased it beyond 1440 stitches up to 2880. Is that possible? I'm not going to count...)

So, it's not a knitting blog. But sometimes I just have to share about my ridiculous knitting nonetheless.

And I must say, this yarn is so lovely, I might be tempted to do it again. Knitting this scarf is a little like those sudoku puzzles--predictable, even boring, but weirdly addictive.

why we love the books we love

I just finished Charmed Life, by Diana Wynne Jones, and I'm trying to figure out why I found it so, well, charming. It's been around a while, so I'm apparently getting on the bandwagon late. But I think Jones has been rediscovered by kids (and adults) who have gone through the Potter books, and maybe the Narnia ones as well, and want something else. Jones has in common with Rowling the combination of fantasy and humor, which is key, I think, to the success of both. The thing is, I think Jones may really be more original: her book is, like Rowling's, about the education of a wizard who doesn't know he is one, but it came out in 1977. Now, there's no boarding school setting or parallel world (well, there is, but it's different) or unique wizard sports and sweets (as far as I know yet), so I'm not saying Rowling just lifted her story wholesale. Indeed, her genius is to have lifted from a variety of sources and genres and blended them into something greater than the whole. [edited to say, um, that's "greater than the parts," of course. Sigh.]

Charmed Life is short, though it's the first of a long series (6 books, as far as I can tell). It gets the parents out of the way quickly, as such books often do, and focuses on a pair of siblings right from the start. In fact there are two pairs of siblings and part of the pleasure of the book is figuring out why some get along and some don't, what the differences in their relationships are. (I like sibling stories...) The beginning of it reminded me of the Lemony Snicket books (which, of course, came much later) in the casual way in which serious topics are broached and then discarded. Also like Roald Dahl in that--the parents are killed off right at the start, there's a brief recognition that this is sad, and then that's pretty much over with. Though I think the parents will continue to be important in this series, actually.

So what I'm trying to figure out now is: why do I like this book so much? And, why did the Rowling books become such a phenomenon, when this book and others like it (and just as "good" in some purely literary sense, if there is such a thing) did not?

I'll come back to this.

a theology of sleep!

Read the whole thing here:Sleep Therapy - Books & Culture.

"The unarguable demands that our bodies make for sleep are a good reminder that we are mere creatures, not the Creator. For it is God and God alone who 'neither slumbers nor sleeps.' Of course, the Creator has slept, another startling reminder of the radical humility he embraced in becoming incarnate. He took on a body that, like ours, was finite and contingent and needed sleep. To push ourselves to go without sleep is, in some sense, to deny our embodiment, to deny our fragile incarnations—and perhaps to deny the magnanimous poverty and self-emptying that went into his Incarnation."

thanks to Sam for the link

back to work

the first day of the semester, and I am still wondering how this whole 8:15 class thing is going to work out. Oh, your heart bleeds, I know, if you have a real job with real hours. So I'll stop whining.

This morning was fine because I didn't have to take Mariah to her bus--she's off for MLK day, of course, but we are--not. Some of my students seem to have decided to take the day off anyway; it'll be the end of the week before I really know who's in what class, etc. But we'll get there.

In the meantime I am reading the first of the Chrestomanci books by Diana Wynne Jones, and wondering what took me so long? The more pre-Harry Potter fantasy I read, the less groundbreaking it seems. Sigh.

I should have a new column up soon. I'll link it here when it's up.

Friday Food: Tuna Casserole

OK, there wasn't a groundswell of interest in recipes, but here's one anyway. This is not Kelly's healthy tuna casserole, but neither is it the old can-of-soup variety. My kids would eat this every night if I would make it. Especially Nick.

Ingredients:
1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter
1/4 cup flour
2 cups milk (skim is fine)
1 tsp mustard, optional

1 lb. pasta; shells or fusili seem to work best

1-2 cans tuna, packed in water (or, I suppose, oil, but I never buy that kind. Actually I buy the kind that has no salt added, too.)

1-2 cups frozen tiny baby peas. Or not so tiny ones, if you don't mind them. They seem kind of icky to me, but I like the little tiny ones. You don't need to thaw these.

2-3 cups shredded cheese of your choice. I usually use 2 cups of colby-jack and a cup or so of parmesan or romano, but it depends what I have in the house. Something that melts well is what you're going for, and since you're probably feeding kids, don't bother with really good cheese. I buy bags of shredded stuff and throw them in the freezer, then pull out whatever I have and use it. "Italian" blends work fine, as do "Mexican." Real cheese that you shred yourself is probably better.

breadcrumbs, optional


OK. So you have your ingredients. Turn your oven on to 350 or so (400 if you're in a hurry) and make sure you have a casserole dish that holds a pound of cooked pasta.

Put up a pan of water for the pasta. While you wait for it to boil, melt the butter in a medium sauce pan. Medium heat. When the butter's melted (don't let it burn!), whisk in the flour. When it collects into a sort of pasty mess at the bottom of your pan, add the milk and whisk madly to break up the clumps. (If you heated the milk beforehand this might go more smoothly, but if you just keep whisking it will work with cold milk out of the fridge.)

Keep whisking while you heat the milk to just below boiling. Turn the heat down a bit if you need to. The sauce will thicken up quite a bit. Whisk the mustard, if you're using it, in as it thickens. (I find it makes a big difference.)

If you already knew how to make a bechamel (aka white sauce, aka cream sauce) you could have skipped those last two paragraphs.

When the sauce has thickened take it off the heat. When the pasta water boils, duh, add the pasta and boil it until tender but not mushy. Drain the pasta and run cold water over it to stop it cooking.

Dump the pasta back in the pasta pan. Pour the sauce over it and mix it together. Then add the tuna (breaking it up in the can a bit before you dump it in) and the peas. Mix it all together so that the tuna and peas are evenly distributed.

Put half the pasta/sauce/tuna/peas mixture in the bottom of the casserole. Scatter half the cheese over it. Then the rest of the pasta, and the rest of the cheese. If you like, blanket the top with bread crumbs. Crushed up Ritz crackers or potato chips would be decadent and tasty. Pop the whole thing in the oven and bake until the top is golden and crusty. This will take 15-20 minutes at 400, up to half an hour at lower heat. Since everything was already cooked before it went in, all you really need to do is melt the cheese and brown the top, but if you have to go take a shower or something and need it to be in the oven longer, you might cover the casserole when you put it in, then take the top off and blast the heat up to 425 or so for the last few minutes.

This is, obviously, not haute cuisine. It's comfort food. You could probably leave the tuna out and add more cheese and call it mac-n-cheese, though there are contrary opinions on this one. (That article's from the NYTimes so you may not be able to read it all; the operative phrase is "vexatious infatuation with white sauce, a noxious paste of flour-thickened milk." So, you've been warned about the sauce. My kids like it. I do, too.) The white Moosewood cookbook, Moosewood Restaurant Cooks At Home, has a fancy version with cauliflower, onions, and tomatoes, but my kids won't eat that so why bother? This, they will eat.

[Edited to add: Masha, I don't cook in the mornings; it's all I can do to feed myself before leaving the house at 7 am, and this is just the kind of mindless thing I can do at 5 or 6 pm. But, if you wanted, you could certainly make this ahead and then put it in the fridge. It would just take about forty-five minutes, I think, to heat it up when you were ready to eat. But, really, I assume you know how to make something like this already...]

Delurking Day

I always feel as if I know all my readers, but maybe I don't! If you feel like it, de-lurk to tell me if you want recipes or if that would just be boring. I'm still not sure about it myself.

what we eat

Becca is tired of making food her kids won't eat. I'm with her on that. My kids are older, and my daughter, at least, has learned to keep her opinions to herself (and, apparently, to swallow food without tasting it), but my son, my son! Even if he likes the meal he finds something he doesn't like to complain about. Last night it was the lettuce. I made this weird, but weirdly delicious, pasta dish--that both kids have happily eaten before, I might add!--and he complained about the lettuce. "Could I just have a plain piece of lettuce and then the pasta and sausage?" Well, no. Because I'm putting it all together in one bowl so that the rest of us can eat it. And I'm mean like that. (BTW, if you make the dish, I use romaine, which is crunchy and doesn't get quite so wilt-y, and turkey italian sausage, so I can kid myself that it's healthy.)

He ate it, in the end, though he picked through his bowlful to eat as little lettuce as possible.

This happens, it seems, every day. And, though I love to cook, I do get tired of it. Especially when I remember that I will have to do it again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. (Yes, Mark does cook, but I do more of it--mostly because I like to, so don't worry about my traditional housewifeliness or anything, please!)

I am thinking about posting one recipe a week here, things that we have liked, that are easy, that are (reasonably) healthy. And to see if I like writing up recipes, as it's something I've thought a lot about. We'll see if I actually do it. (I don't think the epicurious link actually counts.)

Tonight we are going to try Nigella's chicken nugget recipe, both because I'm still obsessed with Feast, and because--why not?

heresy

Mark and I went to see Narnia yesterday. We didn't have high expectations. Mark doesn't like fantasy at all, and I've really burned out on the book after teaching it so often. I used to love the Narnia books as a kid, but of late I've come around to Philip Pullman's way of thinking about them. (Note that his opinions are much more nuanced in this New Yorker article than in the more frequently cited Guardian piece from some years ago...) I was always sorry that Susan didn't get to go to heaven in The Last Battle (my sympathy for her probably has to something to do with the fact that I'm the Susan in my family, the second child and oldest daughter). I didn't catch on to the racism in The Horse and his Boy when I was a kid, but reading it to Mariah several years ago I began to want to edit it on the fly. And lately I'd been especially annoyed by the avuncular tone in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; for example, when Aslan announces that they have to hurry in order to defeat the witch before tea-time. Yeah, right.

Well, there's none of that in the film. When Father Christmas gives Lucy a dagger, he does indeed say that battles are ugly, but he doesn't add "when women fight," as he does in the novel. Susan gets to shoot an arrow in the battle, in fact. The opening of the film is terrific, and demonstrates one of the ways movies can and should depart from books, by showing us what can only be hinted at in print. Where Lewis gives us a sentence in which he notes that the children "were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids," the film shows us an air-raid, and then the children's mother crying as she puts them on the train. It also shows us what bombing looks like, something that gets echoed later in the battle scene.

As others have said, Lucy's entrance into Narnia is especially well done. She looks like a real kid, for one thing--snaggle-toothed and a little dough-faced. And when she and Tumnus first meet they scare each other in a way that feels completely believable. (Again, as others have said, Tumnus is one of the triumphs of the film. He's fabulous.) Tilda Swinton is terrifyingly beautiful and freakish all at once. The landscape is golden. (Why is New Zealand the location of choice for fantasy epics?)

I was sucked in throughout. While I can not help suspending disbelief when I read the novel--mostly because Lewis keeps reminding me that I'm reading a novel--I had no such problem with the film. In fact, I was weeping off and on throughout. (OK, I'm a little overwrought anyway, and I often weep at bad films, but this was different. Take my word.) I could quibble with a few things that I do like in the novel that the film left out--especially the food! (My favorite subject, of course!) But overall, I liked the film a lot, better (in fact) than I like the book.

Yes, that's the heresy: I think the film is better than the book.

Some other time I may want to talk about Christian allegory in general, and my opinions of Lewis's version of Christianity. I'm not crazy about it, to put it mildly--onward, Christian soliders, and all that. The film, contrary to my expectations, seems to me to downplay that angle, frankly. I may come up with some criticisms later. But it was exactly what I needed yesterday afternoon.

weird

I'm a little weirded out to be linked here (Jan. 6--I can't figure out how to link to a specific post). Folks, I'm going to try not to write about the Harvey killings any more. It's not my story, and, while I'm still overwhelmed by it, I have nothing to add. If you came here from bluecricket and were upset to find me nattering on about Nigella, sorry.

I'm going back to the kitchen now.

Feasting

I should really put Nigella's Feast over in the sidebar under books read [edited to add: done!], because it was the best book I got for Christmas, and the only one I've read cover to cover. She's such a fun writer.

I've also been cooking up a storm out of it. The New Year's day pork roast, which I made before New Year's, then the lentils, the breakfast banana ring and the banana pancakes, a big pasta, the biscotti...there may even be more, but that's enough, isn't it? Six recipes out of a new cookbook? (I made the banana ring twice already, too.)

I have been thinking about why it's so much fun to make these recipes. (Even when, as with the big pasta, they really aren't much to write home about.) There's something very inviting about the way Nigella presents herself and her cooking--nothing too elaborate or fussy, just home cooking.

The recipes are well presented, at least for people who already cook. I'm not sure how it works for truly novice cooks, as she tends to assume a lot. She assumes, for example, that you'll be comfortable substituting ingredients. Often she'll tell you about alternatives right there in a sidebar. With the banana breakfast ring, she reminds you that a half teaspooon of vinegar in a cup of milk makes an acceptable substitute for buttermilk--which was helpful to me as I had less buttermilk than I thought in the fridge! In a big encyclopedic cookbook like the Joy of Cooking or Fanny Farmer, there's a table of substitutions, but you need to check the index to find it and then see if the particular ingredient you don't have is actually listed. I like Nigella's way better, though of course if she didn't happen to think of an alternative you won't find it at all.

Becca's already talked about problems with some of the recipes, and I'm sure there are more, but I've still been finding the book out on the countertop more often than in the bookshelf over the last two weeks, and with mostly gratifying results. My winter cooking binge will have to slow down next week when classes start up again, so I'm taking advantage now.

too creepy

They've arrested two men in the killings, and now they're tying another victim to them as well. It's horrible, and yet something of a relief. I hope this is over.here's today's story

Nick is having a hard time with this. He was fine in school last week, but seemed kind of fragile yesterday (nothing too out of the ordinary, but shy and a little weepy when called on it). Today he just plain didn't want to go to school. I told him the killers had been arrested, and that helped a little, but when we got in the car he was weepy again, and so I sat with him for a little and comforted him. We tried to go to school but he so obviously didn't want to be there that I just picked up his homework and brought him home.

He keeps saying he doesn't know why he's crying, and we just keep hugging him. I told him I thought he must be sad about Stella and her family, and he said, yes, but he didn't know why that would make him not want to go to school. I reminded him that he first heard about it there, and he (quite reasonably) responded that then the kids who first heard about it at home might be afraid of their houses. And anyway, the family was killed in their house--but he's not afraid at home.

I know these things aren't rational, and he so desperately wants them to be.

Thanks, all you lovely readers who've sent me your good thoughts and the various links, by the way. I didn't link to the story last week--I just couldn't bear to. I didn't want the story in my cache, really. I've been hitting "clear history" every time I read more about it. But I am hoping that the arrest sticks, that the police are right, and that we pick up the pieces and move on. Slowly.

We do what we can

Mostly I just don't want yesterday's post sitting on top. While I know the family can't move on, and there are others feeling more grief than I, I need to return to a routine, to fake it for a while. I wondered as I went to pick Nick up at school today, "will I ever feel normal again?" I know I will.

Went to see Syriana today. Neither uplifting nor escapist, but complex and engaging enough to make me focus on something else for a while. It helped. It's a mess of a movie in a lot of ways, and besides being about the intertwining corruption of government and industry it's about how fathers fail their sons, I think. There are a lot of fathers in the film, some who try and some who don't, but all of them fail their sons, as far as I can tell, without exception. Mothers, with only one exception, are strikingly absent from this film's world.

sick to my stomach

I took Nick into school this morning and noticed, on our way in, clutches of parents talking, a few folks in suits I didn't know, and an air of anxiety. I took Nick to his classroom and retraced my steps. Passing a couple I know, I stopped. "What's going on? People seem...stricken," I said. I didn't know I thought that until the word came out.

They looked at me oddly. I wasn't sure what I saw in their eyes.

"Did you just get back into town?"

"No, but I don't read the paper, I don't watch the news."

A murder. A young family. Two kids, one in Nick's grade. The parents. All dead in their house on New Year's Day.

A group of parents stood in the auditorium. A detective spoke. A school board member (who has a child at the school). Several ministers, one the pastor at the church where the younger child went to day care. Another, a dear friend, husband of a teacher at Nick's school. A couple of counselors. After morning announcements, the principal joined us.

Nick didn't know. He heard it this morning from his teacher. He is spending the day in school as usual--they're "trying to keep the routine for the kids." But the third graders, who knew the older daughter, are being watched carefully this morning. "Grief counselors will circulate through the classrooms, pulling kids out in small groups to talk if they need to." They are doing a writing project, writing about, or to, the girl they knew, drawing pictures, remembering. He knew her, a little, knew the toystore the mom operated. What will he think? What will we say when he comes home? What will we tell Mariah, who already has trouble sleeping, imagining dangers we have never discussed? She will hear, I'm sure--this is not that big a town, and the kids at her school will have heard already. We lived in ignorance for two days, and I want to go back to that ignorance. I want not to know this. I want it not to be true.

a really, really bad mother

I've been blogging since the middle of 2003 and I have never once blogged about a child on a birthday before. For the record, we do celebrate their birthdays--perhaps so well that there's no time to write about it. Or maybe I'm just lazy. Anyway, I was glad to see this year wasn't an anomaly!

Happy Birthday

I am a terrible mother. No birthday post for Mariah, although she turned sixteen (gasp!) almost a week ago. Last Wednesday, to be precise. In my defense, we had six girls over to spend the night, and the following day in-laws arrived. So we had stuff to do.

Anyway, here's to Mariah, age sixteen. Smart, funny, talented, beautiful. We like her friends, we talk about books with her over dinner (tonight: "Should I read The Fountainhead?"), we like a lot of the same movies. She wears my clothes and doesn't return them. She advises me on what to wear (often, things she'd like to borrow...)

I was going to do Becca's five weird things about her, but after booby-trapping the doors every night (she keeps us safe) I couldn't come up with four more. She claims she and her friends are all weird kids who couldn't make it in "regular" high school, but they go to an art school and they all seem fine to me.

I called her "sweetie" the moment she was born, and endearments have come easily to me ever since, though never before. So, though it's belated, happy birthday, sweetie!

Happy New Year

I don't make new year's resolutions; they just make me feel inadequate. I can give something up for Lent--forty days is doable--but wholesale changes in behavior have never, for me, been tied to the calendar. So no resolutions here.

But here's what I want:

less time in doctor's offices for all of us, but especially Mark

more time with family and friends

progress on writing projects

a beach vacation

one week when we can look around and say, "there's no work to do on the house" (really I want more than a week, but I'm trying to be realistic)

more exercise

What was good about 2005? Not a whole lot in the world, I'm afraid. But here are a few things I enjoyed:

summer abroad

Mariah's friends

our friends

reconnecting with family

knitting

cooking and baking

my $5 espresso machine from the church yard sale

caring less about the things that give me stress. (I know this sounds like fatalism, or obscurantism, but right now it's working, so I'm saying it.)

I've got fresh bread out of the oven and I'm cooking some lentils because Nigella says they're good luck on New Year's. Right now, life is good.

I don't know how she does it...

That phrase came and went, I had thought...the novel really killed it so that, at least among women I know, we stopped saying anything like it to or about each other. Even if we didn't, quite, know how we were doing "it," we just shut up and did it rather than get into a long conversation about "it." And of course "it" changes all the time anyway, so however you were doing "it" ceases to work...

But I've been having that thought anyway when I read the frequently-updated blogs on my blogroll. How do they do it? How do they manage to blog when the kids are home from school, relatives are visiting, food needs to be cooked, new toys are being broken, and so on?

All of which is to say that I have in-laws visiting and lots to do. Time alone with a laptop is at a premium. So go check the updated blogs in the blogroll and enjoy.

PS--My mother-in-law, bless her, says "I don't know how you do it" to me at least twice a day. And currently, of course, the answer is, by skipping out on the blog. (I also don't do much house-cleaning, but we'll talk about that another time.)

Nick and Santa

Nick is eight. Do eight-year-olds believe in Santa any more? Nick does, or he wants to, anyway. He writes a letter to Santa every year and I hide it, forwarding the contents to folks in my family who might want to play Santa. And we manage to put gifts in stockings and wrap something from Santa every year. Nick puts out cookies and milk for Santa (and this year oats for the reindeer) and leaves notes, which he expects to be answered. (He does this to the Tooth Fairy, too...) This year he asked Santa to name the reindeer, which Santa did--in handwriting that Nick thought looked like Mark's (despite an attempt to disguise it). He didn't press the similarity for long, though.

Last night as he went to bed after a long happy day, Nick was unaccountably sad. "Unaccountably," to me anyway, because he pretty much raked it in yesterday. No clothes (OK, except a shirt from Grandma that he doesn't love and a punch-buggy t-shirt from Mark that he does), various cool things to do, and even the requested Star Wars lego set from Santa. Wrapped in paper that didn't match any other paper under the tree, except the gift for Mariah from Santa. (Mariah plays along beautifully, by the way.)

I asked him why he was sad and he said it was because last year he had three presents from Santa and this year there was only one. (Last year we had Christmas twice, once here and once at my folks, and Santa made his way to both trees...)

And why couldn't Santa bring more Star Wars lego sets anyway, when he has elves to make them? Why did Santa end up buying stuff? Did he just give money to the elves and send them out shopping?

These are unanswerable questions, and Nick was tired, so I just hugged him and read him a chapter of his book and put him to bed. And he didn't ask again.

Christmas Eve

I like the anticipation of Christmas almost as much as the actual event. Yesterday Mark and I wrapped gifts while the kids were both out with friends, and we had a great time choosing wrapping, imagining them opening them, and anticipating the day. It will all be over, probably, by about this time tomorrow.

I still have a couple more things to get, and some baking to do, but today's mostly about cleaning. We bought a new vacuum cleaner yesterday (oh, the excitement of my life!) and I want to test it out. Oh, yeah, and it would be nice to have a clean house for Christmas.

Mariah and I will be singing at the midnight service tonight, but Nick is in the pageant at 5, so that means church twice. Worse things have happened.

slowing down

I know I haven't been the most faithful of bloggers--some weeks I'm all here, others not so much. This is one of the not so much, and it's going to stay that way for a while. Unlike Dr. B., I'm not done grading yet--and our deadline was extended, setting up the dangerous possibility that I will not finish by Christmas. That would be very, very bad.

On the other hand the freedom that the extended deadline has given me has produced several batches of cookies (OK, Mariah made two, but I made one by myself and Nick helped with one), some spiced nuts, a draft of a column, a finished clapotis (my third, and favorite), and some nice social time with friends. So it's not all bad.

I know I wanted to say more about keeping Christ in Christmas, and ANWAR (yay!), and Ian McEwan's Atonement, which I just finished, but instead I'll just say welcome to Miriam's new baby, born last week. Her name is Amelia, and it sounds as if labor was really really rough, but Miriam and Amelia are both well. So there's some happy holiday news!

I'll try to drop in again before Christmas if the grades are done. (Now, there's some incentive!)

Advent

I love Advent. In normal life I hate to wait. I mean, I really hate to wait: I got married at 10 in the morning so I wouldn't have to wait around all day. But a whole season, four weeks, devoted to waiting, I actually like. I think it's good for me to slow down, to wait, to prepare.

This year Advent has been...not so much. I bought candles and a wreath-form, but the candles didn't fit in it and I never did get it put together. I was busier than usual at work, in meetings almost all the time when I wasn't teaching, and I didn't feel as if I were preparing for anything except the next minute, for days on end. I had a couple of days where I left the house before sunrise and didn't get home until well after sunset, and I was worthless when I got home.

But today felt like Advent. Somehow I actually did manage to do a bunch of shopping over the last few weeks (bit by bit--I really hardly even felt it) and today we wrapped up gifts (Nick helped, and it shows) and put them in boxes and put them in the mail. Whew! And then we went out and bought a gorgeous tree, put it up, and the kids decorated it. There are decorations I've had since I was a kid (including one I made in 1974), decorations the kids have made, things people have brought us from various places (Russia, New Zealand, Japan, England...)--decorations that mean something, in other words. To us, anyway, though to anyone else I'm sure they just look random.

Then Nick and I baked cookies, and we all sat down to dinner together--something we hadn't done too often this week. I still don't have the Advent wreath together, and at this point I don't think I will, but it's a time of preparation, and waiting, nonetheless.

Public School

Thanks to Becca for this link to the National Council of Churches statement on No Child Left Behind. I live in a place where public schooling is a vexed issue. The city here had its boundaries fixed artificially many years ago to prevent it from annexing portions of the wealthier, whiter suburbs (a result themselves of white flight). Thus as the city had grown the tax base has not, and the schools find themselves in trouble.

My kids go to public school. My son attends the elementary school my daughter attended, one of two high achieving schools in the district, the only one that is truly racially integrated (or so anecdotal evidence suggests...I could be wrong). This year he's in a "testing" year. Virginia uses their aptly-acronymed SOL tests (it stands for Standards of Learning, really it does!) to measure progress on NCLB. This year it seems he's taking a test every week, maybe more. There are computerized tests known as Edu-Tests (the kids pronounce it "Edgy Test," which I love). There are reading tests, math tests, spelling tests, social studies tests, practice tests, and tests.

Nick is actually fine with this, though I bridle at each new test, each new announcement that some part of the curriculum will be skipped this week so the kids can take another test. And yet his school has far less anxiety over this--far less riding on it--than most local schools. His school is fully accredited and meets all standards.

But now they have the kindergartners taking "practice tests." There are SOLs for every grade, and they're starting to test them even in the "off" years.

We always said we'd stay in the public system until they drove us out. I fear, of course, that the purpose of NCLB and SOLs is precisely to drive parents with options out, abandon the schools to kids without options, and then declare them failing.

What I don't understand is why anyone thinks closing schools is a good idea. Even if your kids aren't in school, or aren't in public school, aren't you glad that other kids are? That we as a society take seriously the next generation, which--if we leave it under- or un-educated--might make bad decisions about how to govern us? Don't we, at the very least, want these kids safe and off the streets? I don't get it.

It's a Boy...still

The last four babies to enter my world have been boys. Make that five or six. Most of the kids on our block are boys. My two nephews. The last three kids born into my choir. So even though Andi's blog book tour is over I thought I'd say a few more words about It's a Boy, which I just finished reading the other night.

The essays that really struck me have to do with boys growing older, perhaps because we're well out of the toddler years here, perhaps because I'm interested in watching the boys at Mariah's school grow up. Gayle Brandeis has a lovely one about her son and weaponry, for example. There are a couple about the strangeness of living with a teenage boy--something I'm not quite ready for. I thought about it the other day: Nick hugged me and I flashed forward onto his hairy teenage self and I realized how unready I am for that day, and that person. I've got some time, though.

Kate Staples has a lovely piece called "Reading to my Son" that I want to think about more. I have found myself, as I think I've written here, choosing different stories for Nick than for Mariah, and I'm never quite sure if I'm responding to or shaping him as I do so. Staples' piece takes up some of the same issues and resolves them gracefully.

And I was really taken with pieces by both Susan O'Doherty and Catherine Newman about their sons' love of "girlish" things. Again, it's something I've thought about with Nick. When he was in pre-school, he used to insist on spraying some of my perfume on himself and putting on some of my lipstick every morning before I left him at the pre-school. Not only did none of the kids there every tease him about it, several of them used to crowd around me and ask for their own lipstick as well--both boys and girls. It always seemed to me that Nick was trying to keep a piece of me with him when I left, and I never denied him (though I did draw the line at painting other kids' lips chocolate or berry-colored).

What I love about It's a Boy is the diversity of the stories--some of these boys remind me of my own, others not. All the mothers remind me of me, though, in their love for their sons and their ongoing reflections on what it means to raise them. It's a nice kind of reminder.

words fail me

Nick has read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe at least twice. Once I may have read it to him, actually--the other time it was his school's "one book" reading project, where all the kids read the same book, and I'm pretty sure he read it to himself that time. He may have read it one other time, now that I think about it. He was working his way through the series not too long ago.

Which is why I was surprised when he came home from seeing the movie today (he went with a friend's birthday party group) and asked me this:

"Mom, in the book, does Aslan get killed?"

this is not why I haven't blogged, I promise!

Choosing to do one task while temporarily putting another on hold is simply setting priorities, which allows people to cross things off their to-do lists one at a time. Procrastination is when one keeps reorganizing that list so that little or nothing on it gets done.

Check out the whole piece on procrastination (which is, I repeat, not my problem!) here.

I'll try to have something more to say soon. But it may take me a few days to dig out from under my end-of-semester obligations, which are multiplying even as I type.

snow day, take one

Yes, we're having a snow day with less than six inches of snow on the ground, and temps in the 40s predicted for later in the day. When I first moved here I, too, scoffed at the ineptitude of these southerners who couldn't handle snow. I don't scoff anymore; I just welcome the occasional break in routine that winter offers us. Yes, it snows here, and yes, we have snow days every year after relatively light snowfalls, certainly not enough to slow things down in New England or the Midwest. But, because we really don't get much snow, we can't really justify the expense of investing in the plows, personnel, and other equipment that would make it easy to remove the snow and keep going. I think we as a community have chosen, consciously or not, to accept the inconvenience of a few snow days over the expense of investments that would take a long time to pay off. If it's a choice between air-conditioning the schools and paying for snow removal (and I'm not sure it is), I choose air conditioning, which affect many more days out of the year.

So Nick is outside in snowgear, playing with the neighbor kids who are also at home, and Mariah is upstairs strumming her guitar. I stayed home from the office this morning because I don't teach today anyway, and I've been catching up on work from home. I've actually been more productive than I am many Tuesdays, perhaps because things are a little up in the air and my routine's been disrupted. I'll go in later today to keep some appointments and do some prep for tomorrow, but I'll also probably bake something (well, in addition to the muffins I made for breakfast) and try to get a pot of soup going. Tomorrow we'll all be back at work, rested from our unusual mid-week break.

I do recognize that my flexible schedule makes it possible for me to welcome these breaks with pleasure rather than annoyance or--worse--a fear for my job. I don't need the schools to provide child care for me, in other words, while many parents do. I don't know what those parents do on days like today--take a sick day, find a relative to stay with the kids, bring the kids to work? It all comes back to feminism for me, then: feminism needs to create a society in which men and women share these burdens equally, and in which children's and families' needs are central to the design of society. This would mean emergency childcare centers, paid emergency leaves, and, in general, the generous recognition that all lives matter.

These things seem possible when I look outside and see trees glittering in the sun, cars driving by more slowly, and children playing all along the block. Later today when the snow has turned to slush and the kids are tired and crabby, I'll no doubt return to my more cynical self.

Let it snow...

Big fluffy flakes are falling outside my window. I feel as if I'm looking into a snow globe. It's coming down pretty hard and fast now, actually--a snow globe just shaken by a toddler, perhaps? Anyway, this kind of weather makes me nostalgic for New England, where it would mean hot chocolate and cookies after a snowball fight. Or maybe not, maybe it would just mean a little inconvenience on the way home. Here in Virginia it means checking the school closing list every fifteen minutes; both kids went to school today but the district governing Mariah's school just announced it will close an hour early--what does this mean for her bus ride? And will Nick's school close early, too? Will his tae kwon do class meet?

Mind you, the prediction is for about an inch of snow. We're not talking blizzard conditions here. Just regular old snowfall, the kind that happens every year here and that we are, every year, unprepared for.

I love it.

edited to add:
as I pressed "publish" on this the power went out. Luckily my laptop went straight to battery and our campus internet connection didn't go down. But I think school may be letting out early for me today as well...

one more, then I'm done

Here's a follow-up on Jen's great post about Hirshman. In a weird turn of events, Linda Hirshman commented on Jen's post, but mostly to attack Miriam Peskowitz. Read it all here:Literary Mama Blog: The "Elite" Talk Back: Linda Hirshman and Miriam Peskowitz Respond

but wait, there's more

I can hardly keep up with the various responses to the American Prospect piece I talked about below. Here are a few really worth your while; read the comments, too:

Mrs Coulter of Republic of Heaven collected one good bunch of links.

Mamazine picked up a couple more (yes, including me!).

And Jen has some more to say over at the Literary Mama blog, which you should be checking out regularly anyway.

Dr. B. gets her own link, even though she's linked in Mrs. Coulter's post, too, because she takes the by-now-contrarian position of mostly agreeing with Hirshman. Dr. B. doesn't mind dishing out advice or making rules, which is what some folks find particularly annoying about the piece. I might give different advice, and would certainly make different rules, but it is worth noting that agreeing with Hirshman doesn't necessarily mean you're antifeminist.

I actually think Beauvoir would agree with much of what Hirshman says. If, as Beauvoir and her existentialist colleagues believe, you are what you do, AND IF (here's the big if, for me) only public, money-making "doing" matters, then LH is right.

The problem is, public money-making "doing" isn't the only game in town. It is, however, a game that I'd actually like to see more women in if only because they might change it. I vote for women politicians, try to patronize women-owned businesses, even read novels by women BECAUSE they are engaged in a kind of public "doing" that is different from the mainstream while still, somehow, part of it. I like that women need to be reckoned with in these ways.

And, as I've said before (in comments on some of those posts linked above, I think), choices can be constrained. Many women "choose" to stay home not because they really and truly want to but because the other options (full-time child care, low wage labor, part-time work with no benefits, whatever) are less appealing. I never chose to stay home, so I will not be so arrogant as to claim that no one else "really" does, either--but I do know many women who would have chosen differently if they had real options.

This is, again, getting too long. And I'm feeling like maybe it's time for something really frivolous. Too bad Becca's not blogging about "All My Children," because I could really get behind that...

edited to add...
There's another data-rich post here and another bunch of links, some new, some old, here (both on Alas, A Blog).

memory and story, part two

Nick told me the other day that he was re-reading the Harry Potter books because "when you read, the words are printed in your mind." He claims to forget movies more quickly than books for this reason, and since he wants to remember the stories, he's reading them again. I love this notion, though I'm not sure I believe it. (I have a terrible memory for what I read, actually, which means that I have read Jane Eyre at least two dozen times, preparing to teach it...but I digress.)

childhood memories

Early in November I read this great question on Raising WEG: "So here's the philosophical question: what is our childhood?� If you're prepared to accept, as I am, that memory plays a role in shaping our selves, that childhood is valuable not just for the subconcious effects it has on our inborn temperments but also for its storehouse of tales re-told in adulthood, what difference does it make that we forget most of our childhoods?� How much does it matter for us as parents, parents trying to create 'good childhoods' for our children, trying to lay down strong foundations, when what we remember of our childhood often diverges pretty radically from what our own parents remember.�"

At the time, I thought I had something profound to say about it, but no time to do so. Now that I have the time, I'm suddenly struck by how little I have to say about the question, after all.

But I'm not going to let that stop me. I want to talk about stories and memories, whether we remember them or not.

I've just ordered the books for my children's literature course next spring, and I am struck by how many of them are about storytelling. I don't think this is just selection bias on my account. Yes, I'm an English professor who specializes in fiction, in narrative, in storytelling, so I am drawn to those stories. But I think writers for kids are, too. So in Alice in Wonderland, Alice repeatedly tries to remember stories, tells some, fails to tell others, and thinks about what she will remember of her adventures when she is no longer having them. In Coraline, the title character recognizes the way her story is a story, is like other stories she's read. In The Neverending Story, Bastien learns that by telling a story he can create reality. Peter Pan brings Wendy to Neverland in order to hear stories, including the end of Cinderella. In Walter Dean Myers' Monster, the title character makes a movie of his experiences, controlling and shaping them with the camera and the storyboard. And so on.

What does this have to do with Jody's question? Much of what we remember in adulthood is story. In fact, we actually move experience from short to long term memory by telling it, turning it into narrative. (I have a friend who's a memory expert and confirms this for me.) So if your family tells stories about you, those silly/cute/annoying stories about what you did when you were too little to know better, for example, then those stories become your memories. The stories about stories seem to intuit this fact, and give us new ways to organize our memories, to think about our own lives in terms of other people's lives. I've never, for example, felt that I created a reality by imagining it, but Bastien's experience--which I first read about as a child or teenager myself--reminds me of the stories I did invent in childhood, and those I heard. While my memories of my childhood do, as Jody suggests, diverge pretty radically from my parents' memories, we come together on certain stories, both true and fictional, and those are a shared source of history and delight. Their stories of my childhood will necessarily differ from my own, but as we continue to tell them we create new memories, too.

out from under

Thanksgiving began early for us this year with a surprise birthday party for my mother the weekend before. We had the best houseguests ever (again!) for a week, and others for shorter periods of time. (The best houseguests ever now include a new nephew who got his introduction to solid food during this trip--bonus!) Lots of cooking, lots of cleaning, the dishwasher and washing machine running non-stop. Thanksgiving itself was an amazing feast, with so much food I felt briefly guilty (then gave it up--and a good thing, too, as it's almost all gone already). I think I bought butter every single day for a week and we are out again. And no, I don't plan to step on the scale any time soon.

It was a lot of fun, but I'm glad significant birthdays only come about once every ten years. I'll need a while to recover.

More on the whole opt-out thing

Salon's cool new (ish) blog, Broadsheet, tipped me off to this one. It's an article in American Prospect Online that takes all those "opt out" articles seriously. The author, Linda R. Hirshman, a feminist professor, is working on a book about "marriage after feminism." She interviewed 30 some-odd women whose weddings were announced in the Sunday NY Times over three Sundays in 1996. Most of them, she says, were staying home with their kids 7 or 8 years later. (Actually, 50% were no longer working for pay, and a third were working part time.) : Conservatives contend that the dropouts prove that feminism "failed" because it was too radical, because women didn't want what feminism had to offer. In fact, if half or more of feminism's heirs (85 percent of the women in my Times sample), are not working seriously, it's because feminism wasn't radical enough: It changed the workplace but it didn't change men, and, more importantly, it didn't fundamentally change how women related to men.

I think she's right, that it's not just the workplace but male-female relationships (and, maybe, men themselves) that are at issue. This came up again and again in my class discussions on Beauvoir. With little apology, the young women in my class spoke of wanting mates who would "take care of" them. Or attributed such feelings to "most women." The men were fairly quiet in our discussions, but when they did speak, they acknowledged the heavy expectations on men: to earn, to provide, to "take care of" a partner, a family. It's hard to be equal when you're claiming a position of dependency. It's also hard to be the "superior," the bread-winner. But my students seemed to have a hard time imagining another future for themselves outside of that paradigm. So I think Hirshman's right that feminism has failed in that regard, at least for a lot of folks, both male and female.

I disagree with several of Hirshman's conclusions, though, most strikingly her fairly uncritical acceptance of capitalist standards of value. After arguing that it's relationships that need to change, she focuses primarily on workplace issues, and on women's need not to sell themselves short in the marketplace. This begins in college for Hirshman: The first pitfall is the liberal-arts curriculum, which women are good at, graduating in higher numbers than men. Although many really successful people start out studying liberal arts, the purpose of a liberal education is not, with the exception of a miniscule number of academic positions, job preparation.

I'd respectfully disagree with that claim on two counts. First, liberal arts degrees still do prepare folks for the workplace if they make them good researchers, clear writers, and/or experts at group work. Second, they may also, as my dad has always said, "teach you to despise the wealth they prevent you from acquiring." Or you might want to say "critique" or "re-value" instead of "despise." Is it possible that the women Hirshman interviewed who didn't care all that much about money (many turned down part-time or flexible work that their possibly enlightened employers offered) actually learned something, in college or elsewhere, about the dangers of making money their standard of value? At one time we used to say feminism would change the way we think about work, teaching us all to value care and cooperation over aggression and competition. That obviously hasn't happened yet, but is it worth throwing in the towel on it already?

Yet (sigh) I fear she's right that one way to change relationships is for women to increase their earning power. (She also suggests they could be changed if women would "marry down" in age or status, or if they married liberals. She reports this with--seemingly--no irony.) And her advice on what to do about the house does make me laugh:

The home-economics trap involves superior female knowledge and superior female sanitation. The solutions are ignorance and dust. Never figure out where the butter is. “Where’s the butter?” Nora Ephron’s legendary riff on marriage begins. In it, a man asks the question when looking directly at the butter container in the refrigerator. “Where’s the butter?” actually means butter my toast, buy the butter, remember when we’re out of butter. Next thing you know you’re quitting your job at the law firm because you’re so busy managing the butter. If women never start playing the household-manager role, the house will be dirty, but the realities of the physical world will trump the pull of gender ideology. Either the other adult in the family will take a hand or the children will grow up with robust immune systems.

Learned incompetence, it's called. It works for men, why not for women?

Again, there's more to say about all this. Read the article and let me know what you think.

Spice Cookies

Those of you who came over from the Carnival of the Feminists may not be expecting a cookie recipe, but I think Pauline (from comments) can't be the only person who could use this. Honestly, they are the best spice cookies: easy, fun for kids to make, and oh-so-tasty. Oh, and quick.

They come from one of the funniest cookbooks ever, one I've mentioned here before: The I Hate to Cook Book, by Peg Bracken (illustrations by the fabulous Hilary Knight, of Eloise fame). As most of you know I don't hate to cook, but I love a cookbook that assumes one has better things to do. In fact, there's a little seventies feminism going on a decade early in Bracken--she assumes the women (yes, she does assume it's women) who buy her book may in fact be changing the world, and thus too busy to cook much. One of the original work-life balance writers, then. (OK, she also suggests they may be lying in bed eating bon-bons on occasion, but who doesn't fantasize about that, some days?)

Enough! Here's the recipe:

Mix together:
3/4 cup shortening (I use a stick of butter and a 1/4 cup of non-hydrogenated vegetable shortening)
1 cup sugar
1 egg, unbeaten
1/4 cup molasses

Then sift together and stir in
2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking soda
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon cinnamon
3/4 teaspoon powdered cloves
3/4 teaspoon powdered ginger

Now mix it all together and form it into walnut-sized balls. Put them two inches apart on a greased cooky sheet and bake at 375 for ten to twelve minutes.

It makes a lot; they'll puff up a bit and then settle and crinkle on the top, just like spice cookies should.

Does Motherhood Make You Crazy?

Here's my review of Inconsolable and Down Came the Rain. Mostly, reading these books made me glad I'm past the PPD stage entirely...

Sour Duck: The Carnival of Feminists, Issue 3

A big "thank you" today to Sour Duck for including my post on Beauvoir in this terrific round-up of feminist blogging: Sour Duck: The Carnival of Feminists, Issue 3

(Thanks, too, to the indispensable Dr. B. for alerting me to the carnival.)

I have barely scratched the surface of the fabulous links Sour Duck pulled together; I'm sure I'll have more to say when I spend a little more time. Welcome to anyone who clicks over here from there; stay a while and let me know what you think!

And a reminder: Issue 4 of The Carnival of Feminists will be published on December 7th at The Happy Feminist. Send submissions to veryhappyfeminist AT yahoo DOT com with feminist carnival in the subject line.

Second Wave Feminism, Beauvoir, and me

Simone de Beauvoir is often credited as the foremother of second wave feminism. The Second Sex, which came out in 1949 in French, and 1953 in English, long predates what we think of as second wave feminism, all that 1970's style agitation over equal pay for equal work, etc. But Beauvoir gets it, 20 years earlier.

I'm teaching it in a class for first year students right now, and as we were walking to class yesterday I heard one of my students (a young woman) say to another (also a young woman): "She really makes me hate being a woman. I never hated it before, but she really makes me see how it sucks."

I told Mark this last night and he wondered what planet she'd been on. But I've actually never really met an 18-year-old feminist. Not in this country. American girls may indeed face discrimination (indeed, I'd argue that they do) but they often don't see it. Especially the high-achieving ones I teach. They have, after all, succeeded at the thing that matters most in one's youth: school. They have faced little or no discrimination there, at least not overtly. They have been offered the same courses as the boys in their schools, the same (or, usually, at least equivalent) opportunities for athletic competition, the same extra-curricular activities. They have not been told that their brains are too small for them to study science, or that they're too emotional to understand math. They have not been told, in other words, that their biology is their destiny. All of this is, in fact, the result of seventies feminism, of Title IX and heightened awareness of gender discrimination in schools and consciousness-raising among teachers. So when Beauvoir hits them with this right up front, they are taken back to a place they thought was long gone, and they don't like it. And she spends a good bit of time on biology, and some of it is hard to take: "woman is the victim of the species," for example. That's an interesting way to think about your mom in the minivan, isn't it? And not a pleasant one.

So. Because they have been offered these equal opportunities, if they have failed to make use of them they take it personally. That is, if they have stopped being interested in math they have not blamed the teacher or the way math is taught; they have simply stopped being interested in math. (Like Barbie, maybe?) In America we prefer to think of ourselves as autonomous individuals, after all, which means we prefer not to engage in analysis of systems: when someone stays home raising children we frame it as a choice, not a result of systematic decisions and social constraints (see yesterday's post and comments for a little more on this). I, too, want to think in terms of autonomy (so does Beauvoir, ultimately), but a little systematic analysis allows for a more fruitful discussion of it. Only when we see how our choices are constrained can we finally analyze the ones we can and do make.

So I put the text of the equal rights amendment up on the board. Not one student recognized it. That, to me, is a failure of seventies feminism, and every feminism since then.

If we have time, I want to come back to it and discuss Phyllis Schlafly as well. As many others before me have pointed out, Schlafly took advantage of any number of "second wave" advances for women, to deny them to other women. She argued for keeping our "privileges" as women over advancing our rights. But those "privileges" cease to operate as privilege in a time of economic scarcity, as we all know. And so as long as those second-wave battles are not yet won, I don't really know how we can call ourselves any sort of a "third wave."

MMO Essays: Why can't men be more like women? By Nandini Pandya

MMO Essays: Why can't men be more like women? By Nandini Pandya. This is a terrific piece ruminating on the costs and benefits of care-giving, talking especially about the ways women are differentially paying the costs. She comes up with some suggestions for change, among them this one:

"Many women would gladly settle for 75 percent pay if they could work 75 percent of the 40 hour week. Creative flextime, and job sharing arrangements can make this a viable option. In fact, I know this can work, because I have been fortunate enough to work with managers (yes, most of them men) who have seen the benefit of having a committed, passionate, dedicated and oh-so-grateful employee even though she is available only 75 percent of the time."

As always there's great stuff at Mother's Movement Online. This essay by Nandini Pandya (which I found through a link from Miriam Peskowitz's blog) is smart and helpful.

And yet. Why does even smart, committed feminist Pandya assume that it's women who will want the flextime? Why not men working 75% time for 75% pay?

Right now I'm working 100% (or more) of 40 hours a week for 100% of the salary in our house. Mark would love part-time work, but if you think it's hard for women to negotiate that, try doing it as a man. And yet creative types like Mark are among the most likely to want part-time work in some ways: pay some bills, make some art, run some errands--it's the way his life really should be organized.

There's so much more over at MMO that I need to spend some time there myself now. I may be back with more about it later.

New(ish) YA Lit

I don't read as much YA (Young Adult) literature as I should, given that 1) my daughter is a young adult and 2) I teach children's (which includes YA) literature. So yesterday I went on a little rampage and read three books, and they are all remarkable.

They are also all what might be termed "edgy." In a book that got a lot of press about a year ago, Welcome to Lizard Motel, Barbara Feinberg complains that kids' books are too sad, too taken up with "problems." (She cites Bridge to Terabithia, a book I find sad but also uplifting, as an example...) Well, that may be. But then again, life is rather too taken up with "problems" for my taste, and problem novels have the advantage, usually, of being able to solve their problems.

But I digress. These are all, arguably, "problem novels." Weetzie Bat has a baby her partner isn't ready for, her gay friends deal with HIV/AIDS, and her father kills himself. Daisy, in How I Live Now, leaves the States to go live in England with some cousins because her father's new bride is a contender in the wicked stepmother sweepstakes, but she gets caught up in a war. And Michael, in Skellig, moves to a new house and has to face the possibility that his premature baby sister will die.

And yet. They are all fabulous books, lyrical and imaginative and thought-provoking. While I liked all three of them, it's Skellig that I keep thinking about today. I gave it to Mariah right away; it is the most brilliant example of magical realism outside of Latin America that I've ever encountered. At some level it takes up the Darwin vs. Intelligent Design debates, but not so you'd be put off by it from either position. And the writing is just spectacular in a quiet way.

I still don't have a book order list for next semester; I'm not quite sure what books I'll teach in what way. But somehow I've got to get Skellig on the list.

Nick and Niobe

Nick had to do a project on Greek mythology over the month of October. The kids were allowed to choose any myth, retell it, and illustrate it with a diorama. Now, I hate projects, but Nick is a crafty guy and he was happy about this. We started chatting about various myths--Perseus and the gorgon? Hercules? the birth of Athene? These were all pronounced "boring" because he knew about them already.

So we handed him Bulfinch's Mythology.

And he chose the story of Niobe.

Now, I don't know about you, but the story of a proud mother whose children are killed to teach her a lesson doesn't seem an obvious crowd-pleaser to me. But Nick was firm. He made a mountain of construction paper, placed a (construction paper) rock (Niobe) on top of it, and scattered (construction paper) dead daughters around the shoe box. He got to make arrows to stick into one or two sons who also littered the scene. He made a (construction paper) trickling stream of tears to flow from Niobe-the-rock.

I would prefer not to draw any conclusions about my son's character from this story.

Flexible Time

I have several friends who've left academe recently, some for secondary school teaching, some for other kinds of positions. People leave academe for all sorts of reasons, and though I'd note that all the people I know who are doing so seem to be women with children, I'm not sure it's because the academy is family-unfriendly in its essence. But I do know that the promise of flexibility which so many of us believe in often fails us. That is, we expect to be able to choose our schedules, to work at home in our pajamas on the days when we don't teach, to be available to our children for school drop-off and pick-up--and then, the department chair needs us to teach an 8:30 or a 4:15 class and there we are, just as tied to a schedule as anyone else.

But this is not, today, a lament. Because today my flexible schedule paid off. While I am inflexible in the afternoons, unable to pick Nick up from school more than once a week, if that, my mornings are often quite open. I teach late in the day but come in early, and thus get lots of unscheduled but necessary things done during normal people's actual working hours. This is a good thing.

The thing is, I don't have to be in at any particular time (well, until my office hours begin at ten, or my class at 12:30). So today, when for the first time Mariah and I missed her bus, I could take her in to school thirty miles away and not worry about missing my own class. We saw the bus driving away at 7:10, as we were still a block from her stop. (I won't go into my frustration about the bus driver's seemingly flexible schedule--some days he doesn't arrive until 7:15, other days he leaves at 7:05.) We went to the stop anyway, just in case it was another bus, but it wasn't...so we just got on the highway and I drove her in to school. Round trip: one hour, thirty minutes; $1.25 in tolls; and don't even think about the price of gas (less than it would have been last month, anyway).

Next semester I have an 8:15 class so all my flexibility will be at the end of the day, and if she misses the bus I don't quite know what we'll do. But this is the first time it's happened in a year and a half, so maybe we'll dodge that particular bullet for another long while.

Ten Commandments a Terrorist Threat

Ten Commandments a Terrorist Threat: "Commandment 10 prohibiting covetousness violates interstate commerce regulations as well as the first amendment protecting the free speech of all commercial advertisers. The freedom to covet is vital to the economic and political interests of the United States. Covetousness has always been a strong indicator that freedom is on the march, both here and around the world. "

there's more if you click the link...

Blog Book Tour

My colleague over at Literary Mama, Andi Buchanan, has a new edited collection out, It's a Boy. So I'm joining in her blog-book tour this week.

Here's a taste of what's in store:

The Introduction to "It's a Boy"

An interview with Andi about "It's a Boy"

The writers contributing to the book are:
Stephany Aulenback, Karen Bender, Kathryn Black, Robin Bradford, Gayle Brandeis, Faulkner Fox, Katie Allison Granju, Ona Gritz, Gwendolen Gross, Melanie Lynn Hauser, Marrit Ingman, Susan Ito, Suzanne Kamata, Katie Kaput, Jennifer Lauck, Caroline Leavitt, Jody Mace, Jennifer Margulis, Jacquelyn Mitchard, Catherine Newman, Sue O'Doherty, Marjorie Osterhout, Jamie Pearson, Lisa Peet, Jodi Picoult, Maura Rhodes, Rochelle Shapiro, Kate Staples, and Marion Winik.

Some questions and answers:

From Rebecca Steinitz, contributor to the "It's a Girl" book:
Q: As you read through piles of manuscripts from mothers of boys, did you find any consistent threads? Anything surprising?
A: I was surprised by the sheer volume of pieces I got on wanting to have a daughter instead of a son. Of course, I had felt that way myself when I was pregnant and had been so attached to the idea of having two girls, but I hadn't encountered too many people in my real life who felt the same. So I surprised to get so many essays on being the reluctant mother of a son.

From Sandra of the blog Dance As If Nobody's Watching
Q: What seems to be the biggest thematic difference between boy-centric concerns and girl-centric concerns?
A: For both the Boy book and the Girl book, I received many essay submissions from writers who were conflicted about the sex of their baby, something I came to call "prenatal gender apprehension." But the concerns of writers in It's a Boy were about the otherness of the male gender: What the heck do you do with a boy? Some of the writers in It's a Girl ask a similar question about raising their daughters, but what prompts that question is not the fear of an unknown gender, but of knowing it all too well. Also, in Boy, writers talked about the act of separation -- letting go of teenagers and a mother's changing role as her child becomes an adult. This separation, though, was mainly about adolescents. But in It's a Girl, writers wrestled with letting go of daughters who were five, eight, nine, teenagers, grown women. Clearly – in these collections, at least -- identification and separation between mothers and daughters is a different terrain from that of mothers and sons.

From Shannon at Peter's Cross Station
Q: When I first heard about the project, it sounded like yet another opportunity to make stereotyped claims about gender in children. How have you been able to avoid falling into that old rut? How did you manage to do something new in this book (these books)?
A: Well, as I said in my original call for submissions, my whole idea with this book was to refute the gender stereotypes about boys and girls, and to explore whether or not those stereotypes really exist in actual boys and girls through essays by thoughtful writers. For the BOY book, I was specifically looking for pieces that questioned the cultural assumptions we have about boys -- whether the essayists ultimately embraced the stereotypes or rejected them was not as important to me as whether or not the writers wrestled with them in the first place. So the BOY book has pieces about a mother being surprised by a son's love, since what she experienced with her son ran counter to her expectations of what a boy would be like; about a transsexual mother grappling with how to raise her son in the face of everyone's attitude that her mere presence tips the scale in the direction of him being gay; about a woman nurturing her son's desire for soft, pretty things, even though a part of her wants to protect him from the harsh, messy world that will surely not be so kind; about boys who defy stereotypes, boys who fit them, and the way mothers adjust their expectations to fit the reality of who their sons are.

From Marjorie at MomBrain
A: You have a son and a daughter. How have these projects changed your feelings about mothering a son and mothering a daughter?
Q: I think the experience of having a boy and girl has probably changed my feelings more than working on these projects has. Pre-kid I was a big nurture versus nature proponent, but now having two kids and seeing how different they are, I am more prepared to believe that children pretty much come as they are – both of mine were born with their temperaments, and I feel like my work with them is to help them either cope with that temperament or embrace it. (And that's how I think of the differences between them, by the way, as differences due to temperament, not necessarily gender.) But working on the books did give me a wonderful chance to read so many people's stories about their lives as mothers of boys or mothers of girls, and I found these tales of varied experience quite absorbing. I did come away from these projects with the distinct impression that mothering a girl can be somewhat more . . . intense or personal than mothering a boy. There's something about raising a girl that makes a mother have to confront her own girlness, and brings up her relationship with her own mother. That kind of intergenerational fraughtness just doesn't seem to be there with mothers of boys – at least in the stories in my book.


I'm not all the way through my copy yet, but so far I keep finding myself here and there--like Andi says, I am surprised at how many of us were a little disappointed/surprised when we found out we were carrying sons. And relieved to find that we are all managing, one way and another, to learn from our sons how best to parent them.

So far the most poignant, lovely essay I've read is my friend Susan's on the son she lost, Samuelito. This essay will break your heart.

Time to clean house...

Dr. B..wants to know what's in your pockets/purse. I do have a cough drop in my pocket, but the purse...well, the purse.

1. My palm pilot/wallet: a leather case full of palm pilot, cash, credit cards, receipts, random slips of paper, business cards (mine), and a picture of Mariah (Nick's picture day was Wednesday; I'll get it in here soon.)

2. Monster key ring with 12 keys (some of which I can't identify), 1 mini credit card, 4 store discount cards, and a bottle opener.

3. Cell phone.

4. Various rumpled kleenex.

5. A small pack of kleenex.

6. Reading glasses.

7. Car keys for both cars.

8. A flyer from the bank, to remind me to check on a deposit.

9. Face powder.

10. Perfume oil in a little spray vial.

11. Mini-size marble composition book (blue).

12. Name tag. (Hey, I might forget!)

13. Two business cards picked up at a writing conference last fall.

14. Directions to doctor's office, with scribbled note about a song Mariah and I liked.

15. Ticket stub from Ethos Percussion Group (last year).

16. Ticket stub from Chesterfield Berry Farm (June).

17. Eye drops.

18. Sample size purell hand sanitizer.

19. Expired coupon from J. Jill.

20. Post-it with four book titles/call numbers. (I did actually check these books out, so I can probably get rid of this.)

21. Listerine breath-strip thingies.

22. Loose change: 77 cents.

23. Folded note from Mark asking me to get some books from the library (call numbers included; books already obtained).

24. Old grocery list.

25. Slips of paper with mildly inspirational sayings or ideas I wanted to remember (three).

26. Extra (black) button in small plastic bag.

27. Extra leather lacing for the sandals I wore all summer, also in a small plastic bag.

28. 1 lip balm, 1 lipstick, 3 lipglosses.

29. 4 coughdrops.

30. Expired Target film developing coupon.

31. 3 black pens, 4 blue pens.

32. 1 bobby pin.

OK, so now numbers 4, 13, 15, 16, 19, 20, 23, 24, and 30 have been thrown away. And I am actually proud to discover I have more pens than lipstick/lipgloss in my purse. That's not always the case. And don't even ask about my desk, or my computer/book-bag. Yes, they are just as bad, if not worse.

How about you?

I heart The Onion

'Scooter' Libby Wishes He'd Ditched Nickname Before Media Coverage | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

Of course, I'm not crazy about Scooter's last name being all over the news, either, but I'm living with it.

NPR : 'Elements of Style' Goes Beyond Words

I heard this story on the radio this morning, about Maira Kalman's illustrations for The Elements of Style. I want it, I want it! The (verbal) illlustrations of principles of clear writing (and, often, unclear writing) are such a joy in this book; it's brilliant of Kalman to have thought of illustrating it visually as well.

Interestingly, amazon.com recommends Joan Didion's latest, The Year of Magical Thinking to purchasers of the Kalman book. I want that, too, but I'm still trying to think of why customers who bought one bought the other.

(P.S. There's also an opera! We missed the concert performance, though...)

Random thoughts on Hallowe'en

Nick was not, after all, Darth Vader for Hallowe'en. Instead, he was a Cyborg Alien. I'm not quite sure why, but he has decided that one must be "evil" (not just "scary") for Hallowe'en. This lets out all the cute funny costumes of years past (most memorably, Mark once made him a swan costume so he could be Louis from The Trumpet of the Swan). He went out with four other boys from the neighborhood and the mom of two of the boys, and came back in an hour (maybe less) with a load of candy. Which, unprompted, he offered to share with Mariah (though he did put limits on what she could take). So despite his really ghoulish appearance, he remains a (mostly) sweet kid.

Hallowe'en was otherwise fairly unmemorable. We bought pumpkins on Sunday (after striking out Saturday when Nick couldn't choose one that fell within my price-and-size guidelines--he's not always sweet!). Nick carved his later that afternoon, with help from a neighbor and supervision from Mark. Mariah carved hers in the twenty minutes between dinner and the first onslaught of trick-or-treaters. She then sat on the couch trying to do homework as kids streamed up to the door. "I hate kids," I heard her say. So I took over handout duty.

Every year, it seems, there are more bought costumes, fewer homemade ones. This was the first year we ever bought a costume solely for Hallowe'en. (Mariah had two costumes that were purchased on sale after Hallowe'en that lived in her dressup box. One of them, a fabulous furry bear costume, did actually appear on her and, later, on Nick on the actual day.) But this year we were just like everyone else, it seemed. I saw a few little kid costumes that might have been homemade, but they were really rare. And the kids without costumes just make me sad. I always think the dressing up is the point, the candy the side-benefit, but apparently not everyone agrees.

It was warm this year but we didn't have a big crowd. We always get enough takers to clear out four or five bags of candy (this year it was four, supplemented by a couple of handfuls from our neighbor, who got home too late to hand out everything he'd bought). I recognized about a third of the kids/families; the rest were strangers, but that doesn't mean they don't live in the neighborhood. Still, I felt as if we really didn't get into things this year--as if it were just a chore. I'm not quite sure why.