muttering

The Sexual De-evolution

2011-12-14T14:49:00.010-05:00

Erica Jong recently wrote in the NYT about how this generation of women has given up on sex. She quoted her 30-something daughter Molly Jong-Fast's essay "Your Generation Had Sex So Mine Didn't Have To" in nerve.

I was surprised not to be surprised. At issue is not the sex itself, but the wildness, the unpredictability sexual desire requires--or unleashes. How it can subsume the tightly monitored managerial impulse. I get it. We are a generation consumed with management--of families, careers--yes, men.

Sex requires an avenue for the libidinous to overflow. Its essentially anarchic nature was so attractive--represented freedom?--to the the 2nd-wave of feminists.

I don't hear much talk of freedom now--only of choice--mostly measured and responsible. With the dam that kept us out of the workplace largely burst, it feels like we're striving to harness our creative potential for productive purposes (career, family management). And sex is not productive from this standpoint (umm,or is it?).

Does choice turn out to be as much a burden, and a prudish one at that, as it is exhilarating?

Playmate & Me: Feminist at Playboy

2011-08-29T13:11:00.005-04:00

Josh and I recently finished our collaboration for The Big Feminist BUT, an anthology of comics exploring feminism in our backlashy era. Editor Shannon O’Leary put out questions like these to the contributors.

Specifically, why is there so much discomfort with the idea of feminism?

Does feminism have an image problem, or are we living in a post-feminist era? And if we’re not living in a post-feminist era, what are the aims of a third-wave feminist movement?

What do women really want for themselves, each other, and the men in their lives nowadays? Can feminism provide it for them?

And what kind of effect has the women’s movement had on men?

All good questions. In response, I wrote a meditation in the form of a short comic memoir on my experience as a young feminist working for Playboy magazine in the 1990s. In the many iterations of the piece, my gratitude to editor Joan Reilly, what emerged through the many iterations of the piece was my own ambiguous feelings about the omnipresent Playmate (and by extension sex, sexuality, body image, feminity) who literally (since images of various Playmates through the ages hung in the office corridors) filled my days in the office. Here’s a sample page from the forthcoming anthology.

Operation Les Subsistences

2011-06-26T16:31:00.007-04:00

I wrote this post several days ago, but due to technical difficulties am just posting now, the final day of the festival.

Until three days ago I hadn’t known that Lyon, France has zucchini the size of footballs and golf ball-sized peaches like that taste of candy. The air is crisp and burns with high-desert heat after three o’clock. The city has not one but two rivers—the Soane and the Rhone—that Phoebe calls the “Run” and the “Sun.

Phoebe and I are lucky enough to be tagging along with Josh on his artist gig as a resident at Les Subsistences, an “international artistic lab.” It’s a bizarre place for an American—a well-funded, avante guarde cultural compound outside of Lyon, housed in a very old monastery. They do love their artists in France.” For this week, Les Substistences has invited seven writers and performance artists (and one cartoonist—Josh) to create performances in response to the day’s news. (The festival is sponsored by Agence Press France). On Thursday, Friday, and Saturdays eves, Josh will be performing some aspect of the day’s news.

Just how—and wearing what—was the subject of our conversation as we hike up in the blazing afternoon sun up through the Jardin du Rosaire to the immense and elaborate cathedral Notre Dame de Fourviere.

Comics in Collaboration

2011-03-11T17:04:00.004-05:00

I was happy to see that The Oxford American is featuring our collaboration--mine and Josh's--on its website. We chose to explore the future by crafting a Deepwater origin myth of sorts. (This issue has a great fiction piece by Victor LaValle in it--did I mention that already?) I love collaborating with Josh and getting to put on the hat of comics writer. Working in the comics form helps me clarify and experiment with narrative strategies because visual narratives have to be so much more distilled. Because this piece was so imagistic, this one did not feel like as much of a stretch as some more action-driven collaborations...

Notes on Black Swan

2011-01-20T13:05:00.004-05:00

What lies between the Apollonian and Dionysian? The reality of the Bunhead, captured in the modern fairytale Black Swan.

Shocking to find ballet a metaphor that men relate to.

So read! Read more. A great new book about ballet—not an oxymoron it turns out: Jennifer Homan’s astonishing, lucid Apollo’s Angels.

From Apollo’s Angels: “At the origins of ballet lay two ideas: the formal mathematical precision of the human body and the universality of human gesture.”

So? So. But, then:

“Most people’s idea of ballet is that it’s a big puffy pink glittery nightmare,” --Christopher Wheeldon, The New York Times

What I’ve learned so far:
1. Maria Taglioni, great Romantic era ballerina, was considered in her youth ill-shapen, ugly. She created new paradigm around her "defects." So there, Twiggy, Madonna!
2. Ballet steps are codified court dances: a blueprint of the "gestures" performed by the aristocratic and royal courts as far back as 1500s.

When we watch a ballet today, what do we see? Why are we interested? We are watching a moving diaorama, the archictecture of a vanish(ing?) society: aristocracy. Is our interest, our fascination, atavistic?

Writer=Translator?

2010-10-29T17:52:00.007-04:00

I’m involved in an innovative project called Poetry Inside Out. It’s a joint project of the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco and Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York and funded by the NEA.

While the Poetry Inside Out pedagogy revolves around translating poetry, it is also more broadly about interpreting another's vision while making it your own.

When I write graphic novel scripts, they are for someone else to interpret—to translate—into visual reality. When I am working on my novel, I am laboring to translate a vision of a book—or of my character—effectively into words, into scenes.

In fact, the more I think about it, the better the metaphor of translation is for the work of a writer.

Funny how life works. Mulling this over, I came across this beautiful NY Times essay by Michael Cunningham on the broader meanings of translation.

Notes from a colony stay

2010-10-04T11:24:00.004-04:00

Here, at the colony, I have a composer’s studio on the bottom floor of one of the cottages. It faces a line of trees that borders a sunlit field—squirrels scamper about, chipmunks chase each other, and once, I surprised a hedgehog coming out of my studio. It leapt into the path, landed on its back, and scrambled about for a while recovering itself. My room has curtains and a piano, which I opened only once. The piano is big, black; its solidity in the room gives me courage.

It a fall-feeling day, but I can see on the bare branches outside my window some kind of growth, new buds forming. What I will take with me, in addition to a heftier manuscript are these indelible images: a black and white wall against which I read, a turn-of-the last century tycoon’s crumbling playa entrance, the faces of new friends, a woodchuck sitting proprietarily on a pile of wood surveying a field…

2010-06-23T16:21:00.003-04:00

Heading to D.C. this weekend for the American Library Association’s annual convention. I’ll be on a panel with Scholastic author Peter Gutierrez, professor and reading expert Katie Monnin, and librarian David Serchay. Reading and Teaching with the Graphic Novel: Navigating the Resources will be at the new PopTop stage on Monday, June 28 from 1:30-2:30. Our panel will be dealing mostly with resources available for this growing form of literature: What is out there? Where to find it? The panel will be one of several that day. The whole thing is part of Graphic Novel Monday, sponsored by Diamond Book Distributors.

A quick trip through the day’s events highlights that graphic novels are growing in popularity and acceptance as a form of literature in this country. Other panels include Great Graphic Novels for Teens: Ground Zero for a Cultural Shift in American Publishing and Graphic Novel Editors: The Masters of Design with Abram's Sheila Keenan and Scholastic's David Saylor, among others.

I am excited to be part of this groundswell of interest from the academic community and librarians (who are the form’s early adapters!)

This will also be a great time to share the news about upcoming plans for the new Drawing Words and Writing Pictures website, which I have been helping to develop as an educational resource.

Lady Gaga and the Toddler Princess

2010-05-26T16:02:00.004-04:00

When asked, she says, proudly, “I’m two and a half!” She is interested in distinct and indistinct. She is interested in the parsing of the world—letters, symbols, and time. Clocks. What day is it? What time is it? Where are we going?

She’s also interested in gender. She corrects herself. I am a big boy—I mean, a big girl. Her interest is so simple, so guileless that it pulls me in. How interesting bows are, and ribbons—the many ways we fasten our clothing!

“I am a princess! I am a princess!” is now often the first thing she says in the morning.

I’m thinking of all of this as I read Rachel Rosenfelt’s great piece on Lady Gaga in Pop Matters. Rachel writes: "With the rest of the would-be mass culture riding the greased slide of Web 2.0’s “long tail” into relative obscurity, Lady Gaga’s massive popularity suggests that the disappearance of the mainstream has been a deeply felt loss for culture at large. Gagaism has all the intensity of backlash, because that is precisely what it is: pop culture’s response to the disorientation of normlessness, the outburst of a complaint simmering in our collective unconscious."

Of course, the desire to be a princess is, at this point, primal, primary, atavistic. It infects the 2-year-old girl and must leave a lingering strain that can be triggered later in life by the reality shows we watch, Sex and the City, sparkles, high heels.

I YouTube Gaga videos; I watch. Madonna circa 1984 seems innocent in her challenging of female archetypes. There is something more cynical and desperate in these videos.

From Princess to Gaga, girls today have such a distance to cover.

This blog has moved

2010-04-21T13:06:00.001-04:00

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The Graphic Novel Institute at Northwestern

2010-04-21T11:39:00.003-04:00

Josh and I will be in Evanston, IL this coming weekend to take part in a comics and education conference called The Graphic Novel Institute. The G.N.I. will be held all day Sunday, April 25, at Northwestern University from 10am - 4pm, with a catered meet-and-greet following from 4-6.

The G.N.I. was originally affiliated with the International Reading Association annual conference, but has since broken off on its own as a pre-IRA event. It is being co-sponsored by Northwestern, Diamond Book Distributors, Reading with Pictures, and Baker & Taylor.

I will be moderating a panel with Michael Bitz, William Ayers, and David Rapp called “Why and How to Teach with Graphic Novels.” In the afternoon, I’ll be co-leading a breakout session with Peter Gutierrez and Alan Holtz called “Developing Graphic Novel Resources for the Classroom.”

Josh will be co-leading a breakout session with Alex Rodrick on the topic of creating graphic novels with a secondary reader focus.

We’re looking forward to being part of this effort to bring the comics and educational communities together.

2010-03-26T12:28:00.003-04:00

I've been editing some graphic stories for a new educational comics anthology to be published by Reading With Pictures, a cool new nonprofit aimed at increasing use of comics in schools. Most interesting and startling to me is the range--a funny piece built around a field guide that features a Little Big Foot (yup, they exist) by Scott Cunningham and Philip Pittz, a thoughtful meditation on ex-pat life in South Korea by David Precht, and a powerful portrait of a young professor's journey to become a teacher by Mike LaRiccia. The anthology features a cover by Jill Thompson (The Sandman) and original stories by over 50 all-ages creators including. You can check 'em out online at www.readingwithpictures.org.

RWP has recently launched a pledge drive on kickstarter.com to finance the publication of this new educational comics anthology; pass along the news to any and all interested in comics and education.

Response to J.D. Salinger's Death, Belated

2010-02-23T12:25:00.004-05:00

So Mr. Salinger has died. An author known for his absence makes news with the finality of his final absence. What is left to contemplate of this--his--narrative is finality, and the society he left behind?

Jonathan Foer on the radio talking about adolescent alienation, that 20th century right of passage. Will it still exist in a hyper-connected world?

At the cafe, people sit in rows and stare into their screens. They seek out this place where, together, apart, they can stare into their screens. A group of young people--late adolescence, early adulthood--the prime of it--anchored to their screens; here is today's weigh station. What did Mr. Salinger say of this? He said nothing. Is there no gap, still, in which anomie, like a weed, can grow?

Inquiry into the acquisition of language, part 2: point of view

2009-12-02T10:40:00.004-05:00

Now she is learning the language of subject, of a subject acting in the world. I go to school. I like vanilla. Sophie [a doll] feel sad. She is still not so good with the difference between subject and object. Her is sleeping, she will say. Also gender is a vague—inconsequential?--concept. She uses him and her indiscriminately, he and she.

Listening to her reminds me of my own struggles in novelistic storytelling. A novel offers endless choices in point of view and, along with tone, it’s one of the greatest challenges to try to find a point of view that fits with the story’s throughline and author’s intent. (Wow, sorry, that was a dry sentence!) Each offers its own take on the sense we try to make of our essentially random lives.

First person has the power of memory; third person the power of distance, of the space to act more visibly as storyteller. This morning, I am contemplating which one works better for a particular scene, and I’ve sketched out two options—one in first and one in third:

Rachel let me sleep in her bed. She took the couch. I wasn’t going to school anymore. I was too embarrassed to be seen, even by the Mexican girls. I woke up one night with vice-like pains squeezing my sides. I felt like my belly was a cement mixer. Pain ran up and down my back. The sheets beneath me were soaking wet.
Mom, I called. Mom! Rachel came in. She was pale. She was already dressed.
Okay, Isabelle, she said. We’re going to get through this.

That's the first person. Or:

Isabelle slept in Rachel’s bed and Rachel took the couch. She didn’t going to school anymore. She was too embarrassed to be seen, even by the Mexican girls. She woke up one night with vice-like pains squeezing at her sides. Her belly was a cement mixer. Pain ran up and down her back. The sheets beneath her were soaking wet.
Mom, she called. Mom! Rachel came in. She was pale. She was already dressed.
We’re going to get through this, Rachel said.

Her is sleeping...
She is sleeping?
I am sleeping?

Story in memory?

Or memory in story?

The Novel Project (Resurrected)

2009-11-03T13:32:00.002-05:00

I ‘m writing a novel again. I’ve tried to write it before. I know. For some of us this is like saying I’ve joined Weight Watchers again. What is different now? I no longer care how I lose the weight, what my smaller body actually looks like. I no longer care if it is bad. I just want it to exist. It feels hard, not romantic, not fun, not like “Oh I’m writing a novel” which really means looking at the tops of trees and pondering life.

It feels like moving bags of concrete from one place to another. Swimming, Stairmaster, Caloriecounter. My arms hurt at the end of the day. And my neck. And my head—the inside, the outside—my whole head. It is still one of the hardest things I have ever tried to do.

Inquiry into the Power of Signifying Objects

2009-09-03T15:31:00.004-04:00

Here’s a question: What is the worth of that horse-and-rider necktie your grandma gave you when you were four? That mix tape that doesn’t work anymore that your first boyfriend made for you (he drew on the plastic tape case with glitter markers)? The Sanka ashtray that you took from your dad’s home office after he left you and your mom?

Who can say? In the zany world where economics, human sentimentality and hunger for meaning meet, there is no such thing as objective. But there is Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn’s fascinating Significant Objects project, which has been written up in The New Yorker’s books blog and BoingBoing. A Doug Dorst story attached to a bedraggled tsotchke figurine recently sold for $193.00!

Which brings me to the penguin creamer.

My assignment turned out to be not a Slavic totem or a Sanka ashtray or a Chili cat. Yes, I too have tried my hand at Inventing an Object’s Significance. I was a bit daunted by the other storytellers involved in this project—Lydia Millet, Luc Sante, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Doug Dorst, and Curtis Sittenfeld to name a few—but I mediated on my humble object and a story emerged for me. You can read it here. I hope you find it of interest; perhaps even of significance?

You can read more about the Significant Objects project here and follow it on Twitter.

Inquiry into the acquisition of language, part 1

2009-08-13T22:13:00.004-04:00

Most of her sentences these days begin with I want or I need. This follows I like and I love, which were her first two sentence constructions.

A friend whose mother taught two-year-olds says, “Two is all about language development.” It’s amazing to watch this, this language development.

So we come to language full of desires, wants, passions. We learn through language to distinguish them.

In Michael Pollen’s fascinating recent New York Times magazine cover story on Julia Child, I was reminded of this tension in the mothering/work paradox: What do we need? What do we want? What are we allowed? How do we choose?

A recent conversation with new mother who feels feminism did not prepare her for the joy she would feel as a mother—that it let her down—because its message focused more on the triumphs and challenges of proving oneself in the work world. The phrase “the burden of choice” surfaced. This silenced us. Cut through our joy (she held a two-week old baby in her arms), brought us back to the earliest questions.

What do I want? What do I need? What do I like? What do I love?

Notes for a Feminist Comic

2009-05-30T12:41:00.003-04:00

Image ideas:
• Simone de Beauvoir sitting in an armchair with a long cigarette holder saying, "Women are oppressed by their biology";
• Sari, 19,1980s, putting on jacket w/shoulder pads and going off to summer job as a clerk in a law firm...;
• me, bags under eyes, saying to my homemaker mother (mother of 4 kids) "you didn't tell me how HARD it was"

Possible title: Snapshots from a New Mother's Life in Which Age-Old Feminist Conflicts are Acted Out

Overview: A patchwork quilt of the last year of my life in which I have had to confront some basic issues of feminism in a more bread-and-butter way than ever before (such as economic self-sufficiency, gender roles, and childbearing).

Script ideas:
Have baby.
Lose job.
Discover that baby needs lots of care.
Lose health insurance.
Start blog!
Baby wakes in middle of the night.
Journalism collapses!
Join coop. Shop for food.
Freelance for less than you were getting in-house. Can afford some daycare!
Publishing collapses!
Baby wakes in the middle of the night.
Shop for food.
Widespread layoffs!
Baby wakes in middle of night.
Baby wakes in middle of night.
Too tired to blog.
Against all reason, wish to have another baby.

Point is not to ridicule feminist thinkers but juxtapose theoretical pronouncements and mass messages women receive with the hard-knock realities of women's lives through the centuries.

Shine some (hopefully humorous) light on the gulf between theory and inevitable realities of life.

passover reading

2009-04-08T13:29:00.003-04:00

I’m going to be doing a reading tonight at a bar. A bar on Passover. I said yes, because it’s a great chance to read with other Slice writers, and to further the mission of this really great, ambitious publication. It’s funny; the question of whether or not to read on Passover never would have entered my mind ten years ago when we were living in Wicker Park (okay, technically, East Village) and driving the Gusmobile to Cub Foods through the often-still snowy March streets.

I remember when, one day, Josh said to me: Hey, it’s Passover tomorrow! So what? I said and then we stood there looking at each other waiting for something else to be said.

We'd never cared if it were Passover before (that was the day my parents, back in New York, went to the Bridge Club with my cousins). But the next day, I found myself going to Waterstone’s after work and buying two Haggadah’s. We thumbed through them as we ate the pad thai we ordered. We made a half-hearted attempt to conjure up a seder plate: a carrot for the haroset, a bean sprout for the pascal lamb, a piece of parsley for the bitter herbs. We did all this reluctantly, with a kind of shyness, as if someone were watching. Every year since then, we’ve found a way to have some form of a Passover seder.

Not this year. I’ll be reading at Pacific Standard, a bar on 4th Ave. I’m excited and nervous. I’ve never read this story aloud and reading aloud is always a different experience. The work enters the world in a new way. I hope I do it justice.

Reading on Passover has made the think of the story of exodus in a new way; the risks of leaving bondage; and how the decision to leave one life can give a renewed strength but also many years of living in the wilderness before one can find a new home.

slice of slice

2009-03-19T22:36:00.003-04:00

There’s a new lit journal called Slice. I’ve been reading issue 3, In Translation. It’s a pleasure. Their format is visually engaging and the writing is smart and thoughtful. The interview with Kathryn Harrison is stellar, as is a memoir by William Giraldi of Agni. There's a powerful piece by the Diazesque Patricia Engel.

Slice releases their fourth issue next week. The theme is Home. It includes interviews with Aleksandar Hemon, Paul Auster, and Lisa See, among others. And: a short story of mine called Patriotic Dead. Pick it up at a newsstand or your independent bookstore. (If they don’t have it, request it!); and let me know what you think.

inquiry into the naming of the world, part 1

2009-03-06T20:13:00.004-05:00

Mine, Mine, she says, clutching a box of tissues. She grabs the remote control. Mine! Her voice: part entreaty, part demand.

I pause, in the grip of this newscycle. Who does the TV remote does belong to. My husband, who uses it most? Phoebe, who holds it at the moment? Our neighbors, who gave us this TV (along with the remote) when they upgraded to a flat-screen? Listening to the news these days, one wonders at concepts that appears so elementary getting day by day fuzzier and fuzzier.

That is—we “own” our apartment. This means we pay a mortgage to a bank. Thus, the bank owns it. But shareholders own the bank—right (and who are shareholders but the royal “we”)? Or maybe the government now owns it?

She points to Naomi Klein’s giant book of Disaster Capitalism (right now lying beside my bed being used as a coaster; no reading time). She points to a dictionary. An umbrella stand. Mine.

I'm reminded of the story of the wise people of Chelm who capture the moon in a water-filled barrel. They gather around night after night to admire it. One night, when it is cloudy, they stand looking at the barrel and wonder how the moon had escaped.

Yours, I tell her. For today. Enjoy it.

A week as a single Stay-At-Home Parent

2009-01-07T20:59:00.007-05:00

Over break, I had a week as a single Stay-At-Home Parent. Josh was back in Brooklyn working hard on making the deadline for A.D. Phoebe and I went upstate to my parents’ place. It is a big house full of people who sleep until at least 10:00 or so. Phoebe got up before it got light, usually at 6:30. We slept in the same room. I fed her, read to her, dressed her, played with her. It was cold and snowed a great deal. Going out took a long time to prepare for. (It was actually our main activity—not going out but getting ready to go out.) While I did have some help, it was pretty much me caretaking for her all the time.

At first, I felt a mighty resistance. I thought of all the better things I could be doing with my time—writing and sleeping came to mind most—but after a couple of days, I gave into the restrictions of that life. And then a strange thing happened: I began to enjoy it. The simplicity of it. The single-minded purpose of it. We woke up, I changed her diaper, I made her a bottle. I looked out the window and in the early dawn you could see the snow falling steadily. It was very white. It was covering everything. In the cold kitchen, she sat on my lap in a chair and we watched the snow fall. At that moment, the seemingly small world of the Stay-At-Home Parent seemed a portal to something rich and wonderful.

Inquiry into the nature of cute, # 1

2008-11-25T13:10:00.008-05:00

Oh! She’s so cute!

Folks say, bending down to look at her in her stroller.

I smile proudly. When she toddles down the block with her candy basket swinging from her arm in her in her bat cow costume (yes, same as last year, but it actually fits now, I snap away. Cute! Cute, like pornography, impossible to define; you know it when you see it.

But we Americans are only interested in one side of cute. Unlike the Japanese. They seem to inquire, as a culture, into the nature and being of cute.

At my old job folks would gather around every so often and ooh and ah over something cute. A kitten (supercute.com). A baby panda (pandacam). At first I was resistant, but I came to appreciate the softening in the face and in stomach, the warmth behind the ears. I became a convert to the power of cute! And parenthood has given me many more moments of cute therapy: When she walks around with the towel on her head like Max in Where the Wild Things Are; when she gives that fake smile, with eyes shut, in the middle of eating; when she purses her lips and pecks at the air; when she raises her shoulders emphatically and proclaims a string of nonsense from her perch on the broken scooter in our living room.

But there are the moments when I am too tired or stressed to fall for cute. Here’s when my feelings turn deviant. When my fifteen-month-old daughter toddles about the apartment with her pajamas trailing, or yet again takes the dishrag off the refrigerator and wraps her stuffed animals with it, well, then she looks bizarre to me. A stubby top-heavy creature that has taken up residence in our home, a homunculus who has crazily strong opinions on things she knows nothing about.

At nine months, I took her to the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum. As we wandered through the rooms plastered with smiling bunny wallpaper, as we circled the enormous totemic super-cute bunny, she grew more and more agitated. Then she began to cry. Howl. We had to leave.

This made me think. What lies outside the small window of cute? Why do we crave to reside in this small window? This window is where we find the helpless, the eager, the absence of will, and the desire to please--the qualities we look for in a pet.

Well, of course, the Jungian side-show of cute is the grotesque, the creepy. The deformed. The Japanese get it. Cute is the narrow zone that does not violate our will to agency. On either side of that zone is the screaming child, the squalling child, the demanding child, who is categorically not cute. As she becomes more willful, as she discovers her own agency (and she is doing so with increasing frequency), I will do well to disinvest myself in her cuteness for danger of it turning—in my own eyes—grotesque.

And what lies beyond cute for the baby? She'll tell me, no doubt.

Cute may be good therapy but it's not a good life-script for her. Or for any of us.

Inquiry Into the subject of play, part 1

2008-09-02T11:29:00.004-04:00

I’ve been reading a lot about play. It’s is a big subject now. The theory seems to be that adult work is—or, at least, optimally, should be—a kind of play. The kind of work most of us need to know how to do, the kind that requires “soft skills.” Play at least as my generation knew it. That is, imaginative, creative, participatory. Playing house, playing doctor, playing store. As I mother, I am beginning to observe play and the striking thing about it, when it does happen—for it seems not easy, not predictable, the conditions have to be right—is that it is absorbing and difficult. She puts things into a basin and takes them out again, fitting them into holes that require her to identify matching shapes. Her head is tilted down, her eyes focused intently. When she fails, she looks up and cries out in frustration. This kind of play is not passive, not even fun in the sense we think of play as adults; it requires effort, but it leads to discovery.

So, okay, I buy the work analogy.

Now folks seem to be mourning this kind of play we knew as children’s play as it disappears amidst scheduling and demands of the modern entertainment juggernaut for kids. Or so the argument goes.

But I don’t know if I buy it. First off, play is, of course, a subjective term. Did it even exist in the, say, 1600s—before the modern concept of a childhood took root? In these agrarian, pre-democratic years, children had chores and began them as early as 5 or 6. They were not family mascots; they were necessary members of the economic unit.

So, maybe here’s the question: are adults really mourning the disappearance of play from kids' lives—or their own lost childhoods? Yes, this generation will have a different relationship to play—and we hope it is not one which confused play with entertainment (more about that later). . . So perhaps this generation will tell us what it was like to be consumers from a very young age. But they will tell us in their own way. It is an essential nature of humanity is to consume; but it is also essential to transform.

Smith mag's new Next Door Neighbor comic-essay

2008-08-06T17:32:00.002-04:00

Back in the 90s, Josh and I collaborated on a few comics pieces, including the famous (or rather, infamous) “Gynecology on the Go”—an extended “travel tip” for ladies backpacking in the tropics—and the duet “Cave of Fear,” which I provided the journal entries for. Josh and I have teamed up again for the new Next Door Neighbor story. Next Door Neighbor, edited by Dean Haspiel, is the ongoing feature on Smith mag that features a rotating comics-essays, about, well, our next door neighbors, those we’d like to remember—and those we’d like to forget. Our story features a next door neighbor I had growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. A beekeeper, in fact. Josh took a break from A.D. to render it. I think he did a fine job. It’s been my first time working in the comics form in awhile and it was interesting to think visually again. I’m pleased that the initial reviews have been positive. Take a look and let us know what you think.

I can only hope “The Beekeeper” has as long a life as “Gynecolgy on the Go,” which may still be doing the middle school health class circuit.

The Comics Revolution in the Classroom

2008-07-30T15:09:00.003-04:00

I have a piece in the summer issue of Teachers and Writers on using comics in the classroom as a reading source and the, ahem, challenges of getting comics into textbooks. (One of my pet projects while I was at Holt.) T & W magazine is put out by the Teachers and Writers Collaborative.

This issue of T & W is devoted entirely to comics and education. It contains an article by Michael Bitz, founder of the groundbreaking Comic Book Project; an interview with Françoise Mouly about Toon Books; a very cool five-page comic by Youme Landowne; a piece on poetry comics by Dave "Mr. Alphabet" Morice; an interview with Ben Katchor; and my piece "The Comics Revolution in the Language Arts Classroom: An Editor's Perspective." The article is an inside--and humorous--look at how comics are infiltrating the educational publishing industry. The wonderful cover is by Josh Neufeld (yes, the one who is related to me). At the back of the issue, is an excellent resource list for parents and teachers interested in using comics as education tools.

This special issue of Teachers & Writers magazine is available at the T&W website for $5.

the mother wars

2008-07-09T11:13:00.007-04:00

In the firmament, the mother wars are raging. Not the old son-father thing, or lovers spatting on Mount Olympus, that sound is of mothers waring.

A friend turned me on to the piece about Rebecca Walker in the British Mail. Based on an interview with Walker about her new book Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence (I will be reading this), Walker excoriates her mother Alice (of The Color Purple fame)--and all second generation feminists--for teaching her that motherhood was a form of servitude. Phyllis Chesler tried get them to kiss and make up on Salon.

I have to say that I am sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaint about the feminism she was reared on. It has been surprising to me how empowering many aspects of motherhood are—from delivering a child to caring successfully for her needs. It comes as a surprise because the feminism that politicized me in college (and to which I owe much) pretty much gave the message that motherhood could be great, sure, but it was essentially a defeat. It was something, that like all aspects of female biology one gave into.

Which goes back to the PC wars of the late 1980s. This was not girl-power feminism. Womyn. Herstory feminism. Take Back the Night marches. It was a puritanical kind of feminism. I remember talking to a friend who had been reading Andrea Dworkin crying over the realization that consensual sex with her boyfriend (which she previously enjoyed) now seemed like rape to her. I remember walking around assigning the “male gaze” to everything. Yes, no two ways about it--female biology decreed victimhood in a patriarchal society. We modern women were charged with gaining command over these primitive, biologically essentialist impulses. Motherhood? A desire for something like motherhood was weak, atavistic—it had to be squelched—it was a siren song from the past. (I’m thinking here of de Beauvoir especially.)

How screwed up this now seems. I know that many second generation feminists were themselves mothers—often too-young mothers—and that they struggled with the conflict between duty to family and to self. They wanted their daughters to be saved from that conflict. Understandable, yes. But at what cost?

So I find myself sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaints as a later-life mother that it delayed her decision to become a mother. (I sometimes wonder whether it delayed mine.)

Does feminism matter still? With Gucci advertising its “hysteria collection” of handbags (what would Germaine Greer think?)? Yes, yes, yes! It matters even more than ever. But I agree with popfeminist that it needs to be more inclusive kind.

What do other mothers, women, feminists of my generation think? I really want to know. . .

Cures for Heartbreak

2008-06-09T18:07:00.005-04:00

I just finished reading Margo Rabb’s novel Cures for Heartbreak. It is a novel about a girl named Mia whose mother dies of cancer when she is a fourteen. There are many things I love about this book. I love its sense of humor. I love that it is unapologetically a novel about a girl. I attended a reading of Margo’s recently and asked her about whether she wrote the book for an adult or a young adult audience. She said she wrote it for adults and when it sold as a young adult novel, she was surprised. I enjoyed it as much--if not more--than many other “adult” books. It has gotten me thinking about what makes a young adult versus and adult book.

Some of Alice Munro’s best short stories are about childhood. Why do we think that childhood or adolescence is not of interest to adults—or only if it is filtered through an adult frame or tone?

As some of you know, I am working on a novel. It is also about a girl—and as one friend who has read parts of it said, “girlhood.” A little while ago, I showed it to some agents, a number whom raised the adult versus the young adult question.

It seems to be, to a certain extent, a question of tone. A young adult editor I asked to take a look said she thought it was definitely adult. The theme and the prose level make it so. I have decided the same thing and am writing forward, thinking of it as an “adult” book.

Yet it is still a book about a girl—and about girlhood.

So, my question is: Must a book about girlhood necessarily marketed as young adult? After all, writing is about exploring human experience—all of it. The terms “childhood” and “adolescence” make us perceive those states as something other than adulthood but I wonder. I think it is more fluid than that. As Faulkner famously said, "The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

muttering #3

2008-05-20T13:45:00.006-04:00

An illicit quality to the simplicity of this relationship. It is the illicitness of lovers—early lovers. Early lovers who can’t do anything but stare at each other amazed at each other’s presence. The rest of the world does not intrude. I’ve heard it called "being in a bubble with your baby." But the way women talk about it does not really tell the truth. Because if the truth were spoken, it might be taken from them. It might be shameful--misconstrued. An all-encompassing love. A jealous love. A myopic love. A competitive love. A love of that leaves you with a confusion of bodies—of whose is whose.

A woman whose mother was dying once said to me “Our mothers are our lovers.” I thought she was crazy.

to bear

2008-05-13T10:17:00.004-04:00

She hugs a stuffed bear. She opens her mouth and a word—or something sounding like a word—comes out. Bear. . . It comes out like a half world. “Ba.” The B is solid, but the vowel sounds strange. Not quite an e—nor an a, nor an o. A floating vowel. She hides her face. Without the final consonant it is strangely naked, a half formed word.

This is the astonishing thing: she grows shy.

Yes. That’s it. I say, bear, and she avoids my eyes.

The whole world of meaning and symbol.

It is difficult to bear. The transition from—what?—to differentiation.

She pulls an object out of the undifferentiated mass of objects and she shrinks as if from the implications of this.

It is difficult to bear.

To hear language in formation.

For a few more days, she does not try to speak.

A part of me mourns the loss of the unnamed world,

In the beginning was the word. To name things. Then the symbol of the thing. The beginning of “as if” time—a time of metaphor.

object permanence

2008-04-16T14:35:00.004-04:00

That’s what they call it. They. In this case, the smiling man on the cover of the well-thumbed tome in our bathroom. A good book, it is. Though large, doesn’t pretend to be all-inclusive. Though opinionated, doesn’t pretend omnipotence. Arranged according to “touchpoints,” the developmental milestones in baby’s life (no article needed, now I see why).

This is the stage when she learns that an object, when not visible, is still there. Peek-a-boo. Where’s Phoebe? There she is. She gives her rabbit-toothed grin. Where’s Phoebe? There she is! She gives her hiccup-laugh. Where’s Phoebe? There she is. She reaches out her hand and screws up her face.

So we have to learn this. A stage. We are not born knowing of object permanence.

But how real is object permanence? How much should we be taught to expect—to anticipate—the reliability of “objects”? How misleading is it? In the era of string theory, dark matter, spooky particles, who can say that an object is permanent? What does permanent even really mean? As I understand it, these theories say that what is invisible to us in the universe is as binding as what is visible. There also seems to be some question, at the subatomic level, of the permanence of particles: they appear, waver, disappear. This is Schrodinger's Cat territory.

My father worked for a good company for thirty-eight years. This company put us through high school, college. I watched as father/object left in the morning (peppermint smelling, with briefcase) and returned that night (hungry, piqued smile, tie loosened) return. Objects roll out of sight. Then they reappear. A good job. A good family. I learned the lesson well: The universe is dependable.

It often seems to me that I have spent my adulthood since unlearning this lesson.

So what? Jobs come and go. People come and go. Technology comes and goes. Even our various selves come and go. (I am cleaning out my desk and find old photos, old letters; is that me? Did I say that?)

We must learn again and again that we essentially groundless beings: all that seems permanent, will indeed change, will pass.

So: If an object goes in one end of the tube, does it always come out the other end?

Really?

What can I tell her?

mutterings #23, 2

2008-04-02T18:54:00.000-04:00

Muttering #23 (on subway): In a big house, many people and their needs. Giant. A dog panting. Hopeful. Hopeless.

This is America. Astonishing.

Dark wood, moist, confusing.

Lydia Davis's committment to words.

Two kids sleeping after prom night.

Muttering #2 (waiting for elevator;posted belatedly): I assume someone pressed the button.

(Pause.) No one pressed the button.

the pincer grasp

2008-03-10T11:08:00.000-04:00

Oh, said one person we recently ran into, the flapping stage. Yes, especially when she was excited, she would beat her hands--her entire arms, really--against her sides like a chicken flapping its wings. The effect is comic. But this morning I watched her in her high chair as she tried to pick up a slippery piece of tofu between her thumb and forefinger. The pincer grasp! The same dexterity we admired in a nine-month old baby playing with a piece of lint on the floor, at her six-month doctor’s visit. So, here I am, glued to the spot, riveted really, in front of her high chair, NPR blaring the recession news around us, the kettle on the stove whistling, as she carefully maneuvers a piece of slimy tofu, between her thumb and forefinger, turns her wrists and brings the whole operation, now the BBC announcing itself with its cascading electronic muezzin call, toward her mouth. My goodness! Such work we are born into!

My Six-Word Memoir

2008-02-27T20:01:00.000-05:00

Hey, I have a six-word memoir in Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous & Obscure the new book from SMITH Magazine (yes, the same SMITH that publishes my husband Josh's A.D.)

Not Quite What I Was Planning originated from a contest SMITH held with Twitter last year, inspired by a possibly apocryphal tale of Ernest Hemingway's six-word short story: "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." The pieces ultimately chosen for the book are a good mix of the silly, absurd, straightforward, sentimental, and ironic (lots of those). Mine is "Suburban Girl Tries to Make Bad" (p.152). Okay, so I fictionalized the setting somewhat, but my purpose was noble: to reveal, as any good memoir does, the deeper emotional truth. (That's what they all say, no?) Josh is in there too: "When she proposed, I said yes." No fiction in that. Other contributors include Sebastian Junger, Aimee Mann, Dave Eggers, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Flynn, Stephen Colbert, Jonathan Lethem, Amy Sedaris.

The book's been getting tons of press, including an excellent interview with co-editors Larry Smith and Rachel Fershleiser on NPR's "Talk of The Nation."

The New Yorker even wrote a Talk of the Town about it--composed all in six-word sentences.

Forgive my bias when I say the book isn't just a novelty piece. It feels trenchant. There is something haunting in the brevity of these mini-memoirs and in the inevitable self-interrogation they inspire--after reading it for awhile, you will start to naturally compose six-word sentences about yourself.

Oh, and go ahead and submit your pithy memoir to sixwordmemoir.com — a sequel is already in the works.

Our Saturday Nights with Carmela and Tony

2008-02-23T22:44:00.000-05:00

Now that are home so often, we watch The Sopranos (better late than never, no?). At the center of it is the power stuggle between Carmela and Tony. The struggle has the name of marriage. An institution in crisis. Still, it does not interrogate the power of the mother. Here is Carmela, standing in the kitchen with her sponge, as if at the helm of a battleship, wiping the decks down, getting ready to hoist the flags. No, true, not a financial power, a kind of moral power. The power of disapproval.

back to the office

2008-02-08T09:51:00.000-05:00

On the 4 train into Manhattan. Already, there are things I forget: the breast pads, bottlecaps for pumping bottles, the slim freezer packs that make the bottles fit. I tried to prepare Phoebe for me being gone all day. It has rarely, if ever, been so long. One or two times before, I guess. But that was an aberration. This is the new normal. How will I do without the naps I have become so accustomed to? Will I need to start drinking caffeine again? How will Phoebe adjust? How will Josh adjust? (He will now be with her in the mornings.) At 3 months, it seemed hard; at 5 months, now it seems possible. In Josh’s arms this morning, she looked down coyly and bounced her leg, gave me an uncertain smile.

I’ll call you, I said. I’ll call you.

The office. The cube. My company has been bought by another company. The Technical Help Desk has moved to Orlando. The guy I talk to reset my computer password has a lower voice than the guy I used to talk to in Austin. It is cold there—30 degrees. A cold front. I moved here, he says bitterly, for the weather . . .

Inquiry into the celebration of Firsts, part 3

2008-01-29T22:19:00.000-05:00

It's capitalism, says Grandma R. Firsts can be easily commodified. How does one make spectacle of 100 days? Unwieldy, too specific and too general at once. But Firsts are ongoing, ripe for stirring memories--cards, keepsakes.

Is nostalgia a byproduct of capitalism? Is that a ridiculous question?

inquiry into celebration of Firsts, part 2

2008-01-08T11:07:00.001-05:00

It comes back to me: being in the poster and t-shirt store on 8th street. 1984. That poster everywhere of the baby with the spaghetti bowl on its head. Remember that? It was everywhere when I was a teenager--why? Why? I hated that poster. But then I have trouble with the awkward, the imperfect, the struggle. . . That ballet training, the yearning toward perfection and fear of failure overriding natural curiosity. The First? So. Then. I think maybe there is something to celebrating firsts. A need to celebrate the awkward, the misshapen, the mistake. Something in that, in the don’t watch me do this thing I don’t know how to do . . . Like all things about babies, they are both Present and Future. Everything they do contains a nugget of the future, all the other times this task or motion will be done without thought, just a part of life, part of the routine of life.
So, yes, one day she will eat. By herself.
Snap. Click. . . .

an inquiry into the celebration of firsts

2008-01-04T20:15:00.000-05:00

We get out the camera, the new blue one with the Lyca lens that my folks gave us cause they weren’t getting enough, or the right kind, of pics of their granddaughter. I stand around, positioning her face in the viewfinder, as our babysitter (whose idea it was to begin with) begins to feed her some soupy rice cereal. Snap and click. Snap and click. Here she is chewing on the spoon. Blowing out when the spoon touches her mouth, the pasty substance smeared all over her face. We will say this was her first meal. Her first meal, her first bike ride, her first xmas. . . and why do e celebrate these firsts? The man who cut my hair tells me that in Korea they celebrate the hundredth day of a baby’s life. The first, after all, is usually awkward, confusing, ill-conceived or at best ungraceful . . . Why not celebrate the second the fourth, the seventh? Is it just the American love of the Superlative?

reach

2007-12-15T21:03:00.000-05:00

Now she has begun to reach. It is not a gentle massage of the air or a tentative flexing of her muscles. No, she cranes her neck and thrusts her arm out. She reaches with her entire being. With intention, as the Mindfulness folks would say. She stabs at a textured block. She bats a plastic JCC rattle. Why do I study her? What I am looking for? Some secret. Here it is then: we want. As soon as we can, we do.

"awareness is not power"

2007-12-03T17:41:00.001-05:00

In the current issue of the excellent journal Agni, Sven Bierkarts writes six pages about the process of going for his morning walk. It is a tour de force of mindfulness and writerly skill. What seems, as you read it, “of course” becomes remarkable. I am left with a sense of wonder and excitement about the power of consciousness. Surely it is something—something—to be able to thrum the so often invisible strings that move us through our lives? Virgina Woolf, too, one of the greatest writers I have read, found power in the quality of awareness. Her books are testaments to the power of careful observation of the process of unfolding consciousness.

Woody Allen is quoted as saying “awareness is not power.” I have been doing a lot of stream-of-consciousness writing as I go through my day. Allen’s quote, then, sticks. Is there no value in “catching” some—charting—some of the mind’s maneuvers?I have been practicing yoga now for seven years. Meditation, on and off, for longer. Solid helpings of psychotherapy too. I have learned the skills of awareness. They are not easy but they are, like all things, get easier with practice.

I think it is wrong that there is not power with awareness. It is perhaps, a first step to power.

Maybe it depends on what we mean by power. Is power the ability to influence others? If so, then perhaps awareness if a detriment to power, since the drive toward power is so often blind and comes at the expense of so much else. However, if by power we mean that we have better control over our own destinies, the way we act in the world, and the influence we bring to bear in the world, well then awareness is the first prerequisite to power.

The Terror Dream

2007-11-14T15:59:00.000-05:00

I am reading The Terror Dream by Susan Faludi. It is an amazing, necessary book. She posits our response to 9/11 as a reenactment of the fantasy of the male protection and the domesticated, vulnerable female. This sends my thoughts on the Baby Boom in another direction.

She says: “In the aftermath of the attacks, the cultural troika of media, entertainment, and advertising declared the post-9/11 age an era of neofifties nuclear family 'togetherness,' redomesticated femininity, and reconsititued Cold Warrior manhood. 'Security moms' were said to be salving their fears of terrorists by sticking close to the heath and stocking their pantries with canned good and anthrax antitdotes, while suburban dads were stockpiling guns in their families’ linen closets. Scared single women, the media held, were reassessing their independence nad heading for the alter; working mothers were ‘opting out’ for the protected suburbs.”

So, to what extent is the Baby Boom I am observing (and am participating in) a reenactment of a fantasy of domestic security of the nuclear family? (Shades of the hallowed, reviled 1950s—the distant shadow-memory of my generation, the time before the Time that Decided Everything: the 1960s.) The protective father, the vulnerable mother, the imperiled little girl? I see the track marks in my own psychology clearly enough. Maybe the question becomes: What is the power of the thing—family—in our culture? How much of it is build on collective illusion, a fantasy? (Certain things said to us come back to me—things that Josh and I puzzled over. “Now you don’t have to worry about the world or anything else. All you’ll care about is her.” Or, on a Congrats greeting card, “Now you are a complete family.”)

baby boom

2007-11-01T23:19:00.000-04:00

I grew up with it The Baby Boom of the 1950s as a fact of life. The Boom following the War. Now here we are six years after 9/11 and all around there are babies. Another baby boom? At least in our little locale. In our building (of eighty some odd units) there are seven or so babies that I know of under a year old. Interesting that a tragedy is--can be--followed by such an urge toward procreation. So? So. We are not logical beings. What could be a greater act of faith in humanity (for our children are born into the hands of others, receive care from others) and the future than deciding to have a child? The more evidence of cruelty, misery, and horror perpetrated by humans onto other humans, the more energetically we procreate?

Is our survival as a species is predicated on a kind of amnesia?

Still, it is hard to sit in a room of babies and not feel hopeful.

something big

2007-10-23T23:15:00.000-04:00

The rejection comes in the mail from Tin House. I only am knocked down for a few hours, not a day. Or two. Or three.

I say to myself: You are a mother. I feel a new confidence. Why? I am keeping a being alive. She is thriving and happy. This is something. Something big.

my birthday

2007-10-19T23:15:00.000-04:00

Working on the novel again, a struggle between the whole of a story and its parts. I thought I saw how it could work as music but then it grew quiet and I heard only a few notes.

My birthday. Now it has a meaning. Out to dinner. Nouvelle Mexican. Happy and anxious, equally. A few gifts. Earrings. A book. A glass of champagne. Thank you everyone! Thank your babysitters, too! I had forgotten that anxiety of my other self, the non-birthing self. The narrow-self. The one not big enough to fit another life. The prevaricating, lip-biting, staring-out-the-window-with-brow-furrowed self. The sweating, hemming-and-hawing self. It is been a long time. Hello.

I didn’t miss you.

What are you made of? This small, anxious, smiling self? Opinions. Smiles. Oh really? Wow.

Now I know. Plato was right. We are all selves bereft of other selves, split off. Wandering. In Search Of. This is why pregnancy is A Big Deal. For a few months, we are whole—two selves, one accommodating the other—in one.

A dream I had last night. Involving houses, a narrowing, a closing up of the birth canal. And a boy. The baby I thought I would have. To narrow, then to open out. The eternal process. How to keep opening up what tries to close to fit into the narrow passages of this one life? How to keep all the possibilities?

another limb

2007-10-17T23:14:00.000-04:00

This is how it feels to have a baby strapped to you all day long. Another limb moving on it own. How fascinating to look down and see another arm moving you didn’t know you had.

right foot, left foot

2007-10-14T23:13:00.000-04:00

right foot, left foot, right foot
breathe

left foot,
right foot,
left foot,

breathe

tug-of-war

2007-10-11T23:13:00.000-04:00

Crazy-making. Our babysitter just came. This tug-of-war. Tug: her eyes flirting with me as she nurses, this new coy smile, the knowledge (macho, really) that I am the only one who really takes care of her. The ego-boost that goes with the job: only one. The hardships for such a tangible result: flesh and blood. Now I understand that primal phrase, its import—the confusion of one’s own flesh with that of one’s child. Tug: the imaginary world of the novel. Isabelle, her mother, Maurice. They all begin clamoring to speak with me. Hello, hello, hello. Hello, I say.

Twenty hours a week of babysitting. How many hours do I care for her? It is nothing, but each time I leave her it hurts, pulls. Like a muscle or tendon ripping. Ouch.

anyone else

2007-09-29T23:10:00.000-04:00

Forehead healing. But now caught a cold. Had to go to doc’s. Asthmatic bronchitis. Doped up on drugs. Forehead in Band-Aids. You sound like a wounded rhino, says a friend. A rhino with a splintered tusk.

Hard to leave the little one with someone else. Anyone else. Why was it easier with Jackie? It was so early on, I just handed her over. I had done my job getting her out. Someone else take over now. But now it is different. Why?

echocardiogram

2007-09-27T23:09:00.000-04:00

Took her to get an echocardiogram the yesterday for a heart murmur the doc heard. They hooked her up to wires, did an EKG. Then they did an echo. They pointed and mumbled at the pulsing colors on the screen. They took notes. Then the doc came in and checked their notes and made more of his own. They conferred some more. Various dire scenarios went through my head.

Back in doc’s office, Phoebe dressed again. Josh holding her. Doctor facing us with his notes, looks up and says, “Well, she is totally normal. It is a functional heart murmur. A normal heart.”

I nod. I am so relieved I feel numb.

I proceed to walk into an open file cabinet and cut my forehead open.

a trial run

2007-09-25T23:09:00.000-04:00

Our part-time babysitter starts work. This is a trial-run for going in to the office. Just my own work. Just my own work. Not just. How to keep the self-denigrating adjectives from creeping in. Not the example I want to set for my girl.

The big question: how to merge—or at least balance—the two rhythms? The dreamy state of infant awareness: amorphous. Time fluid. Dictated by internal needs. And the other: a state controlled by external forces. Trains, buses, opening hours. Travel logistics. And deadlines. Product shipping dates. Drop-dead book dates. The chronicle of education. The upcoming merger. The exigencies of capitalism.

What could be more foreign to her?

Why do we arrived at this place in our lives—of encroaching cynicism—to start all over again? The new child is just that new. New life. Possibility for a better world. We look at her sweaty ears and see a different self—a different world. We feel, it is trite perhaps, a special kind of hope.

We witness it all over again. Now from the outside. This is how it looks. How can I travel back and forth like this?

on the subway

2007-09-20T23:08:00.000-04:00

a child pushing a child

yellow shirt wet hair plastic stroller rubber wheels

what my mother-in-law tells me

2007-09-19T23:07:00.000-04:00

First comes “What is it?”

Then comes “No!”

Then comes “Why?”

9/11

2007-09-11T23:07:00.000-04:00

A preternaturally beautiful day that was. The butterflies on the 14th floor terrace as we looked south at the column of smoke. But today is rainy, humid, with a weird breeze that reminds us fall is coming.

Nurse, burp. Sleep. Poop. Pee. Change diaper. Nurse again. How can if be the same city? The same life? She knows nothing of that day. She is new. She has no history. That is why people come to see her.

No concern for efficiency here. A different rhythm. But lack implies less. This is not less but more. More fills up all the moments so they are seamless—not pages, but one long yarn of fabric.

hello

2007-09-07T23:04:00.000-04:00

What dreams, what images, gallop through an infant’s mind that cause these sudden shifts: grimace to grin? What do they dream of? She has never seen a boat, a horse, a dog, a pack of chewing gum, a blueberry bush, a city bus. What forms do her dreams take?

A smile! With her eyes open. She looks at me looking at her. This is not a dream smile, from unfathomable infant land. Not mysterious. Mischievous. Hello.

I see you.

gooseberry toes

2007-08-27T23:03:00.000-04:00

Enough has been written about mothering, but each adventure is new. Each is our own. What surprises me: everything and nothing. It all overrides my surprise function and goes deep into some other part of me, where all this is somehow known. Atavistic. The shape of her ear, like complicated fruit, against her skull. Her hunger. Her gooseberry toes. A flesh that came from me. I know her because she is me. (My mother once said this to me and I thought how egotistical and wrong she was. Now I see.)

nursing

2007-08-10T23:02:00.000-04:00

she flings herself from the breast
arms raised in surprise—or triumph—she struggles to found her mouth
arms jerking

second life

2007-08-09T23:01:00.000-04:00

once translucent, candy-stripped
funnel of nourishment made more declarative than I’d thought possible

now—only ten days since—
blackened and fossilized
turned a million years old
a remnant of a previous age
Pleistocene era, man-apes
The first human foliage blooms on her vine, then shrivels and falls

Now she is one of us—Second Life, tin cans, plastic bottles,
her hunger soon will turn to horoscope-gazing

where is the nursery?

2007-08-03T23:01:00.000-04:00

The room down the hall where you take the crying one and they return her two hours later wrapped up like a burrito slit-eyed and dreaming in a little longshoreman’s cap

No nursery here.
Only jumble-tiled bathroom
Stiff-necked
The cool green room chugging air
And a blank page changing table
Burning chartreuse walls

desert

2007-08-02T23:00:00.000-04:00

A tiny thing crawling through the desert, parched, glimpsing an oasis. The force of her mouth on the breast like a vacuum hose on those shrink wrap storage containers that pull all the air out of your winter sweaters until they are balls of tired fleece. Breasts of tired fleece. Inflatable, though. Every few hours rising above the horizon, and her tired, despairing gaze, lifted from the hot sand fixates on them and she calls her brazen, curdling life-and-death wail.

I pull her to the breast and she begins to drink. Everything else fades. It is okay, I tell her. And it is.

invisible system

2007-08-01T22:58:00.000-04:00

an invisible system
the climber and the peak
forager and the land
freezing homeless and a warm subway grate
starving man in the mythical desert

birth

2007-07-31T22:57:00.000-04:00

Born in one giant swallow
Swallow
Swaddle