crooked house

Brand New Day

Luke, Steph, and Grampa have just finished watching the inauguration.

Luke: I wish I had brown skin.

Steph: Do you? You know, your skin is a very nice colour the way it is.

Luke [smiling bashfully]: Yeah. But I still wish I had brown skin.

That exchange made me feel happy -- I know it's not that unusual for a little kid to wish he was a different colour or that his hair was red and curly or even, say, that he had wings. Although I can remember freaking out a little bit back when I was teaching ESL to immigrant kids in Vancouver and one little Chinese girl -- she must have been in grade five or six -- drew herself as a blue-eyed blonde as part of an autobiography project. At the time I worried she felt she looked "wrong" somehow or that she was rejecting her ethnicity. But when Luke made this passing comment on Tuesday it felt like it meant something, something good. And all I could do was marvel at how it feels like the world really is different now, especially for kids Luke's age. I also realized that, aside from the hosts and characters on children's television shows, the only two famous people Luke recognizes on sight are Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey. Let's hope it's true -- that the world truly is becoming a brand-new place in which your skin colour means nothing more than the pretty shade you happen to come in.

The Toymaker's Marble Mouse

I think I've posted before about The Toymaker, a site featuring patterns for paper toys devised by Marilyn Scott-Waters and a companion to her book The Toymaker: Paper Toys That You Can Make Yourself . But there's enough terrific -- not to mention free -- stuff there to keep us coming back for more. I think Luke and I might try to make the marble mouse this afternoon. Thanks, Nela.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Last week Maud pointed to this article about the Virago reissue of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper, her famous novella about postpartum depression and an indictment of the "rest cure" -- really a kind of enforced and complete isolation --  that was prescribed for it in her time. The novella was not well-received by male critics. The Guardian has an excerpt of the introduction to the reissue.

Having been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder after Luke stopped breathing when he was about six weeks old -- after that I couldn't hold him or feed him without shaking, couldn't banish images of his funeral from my mind and, worst of all, couldn't let myself sleep for fear that as soon as I closed my eyes, he'd stop breathing again -- I've since become very interested in postpartum mental illnesses, especially now, since a second a baby is on the way. But when I looked for other work by Perkins Gilman on Amazon this morning, what caught my eye was Herland, her book about an utopia inhabited only by women. I can't believe I'd never come across it before. You can read an excerpt on the Amazon site. I just finished Ursula K. LeGuin's The Birthday of the World and, at first glance, Herland looks like it could hold its own.

Celebrate the Inauguration With Obama Paper Dolls

Whenever Luke sees a photo of the new president 0r hears his name mentioned on the television he cheerfully calls out, "Obama! That's the new president!" He has no idea who our leader, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, is.

(By the way, CBC radio was reporting that the plane crash yesterday in New York was caused by a flock of Canadian geese. I don't know if that's true or not. Either way, I'm so glad Bush has only got a few days left or we'd be bracing for an invasion up here.)

If your kids (or you) are into paper dolls, you might like to celebrate the inauguration with the ones that came in the Dover Pictorial free sample today. Or you might want to spring for the entire book, which contains the Obama girls, too: Obama Paper Dolls.

Listening to Waters of March in the Snows of January

Thanks CAAF. (And I vote for Jonathan Livingston Seagull.) I've always loved that melody but had no idea what the words meant. I can't say I know now, exactly, but still. I've been feeling very "stick, stone, end of the road" and "stuck car" lately not to mention the fact that I've been, much too often, "a body in bed." Or on the couch. Luke has taken to reminding me not to fall asleep when I go to the grocery store.

Matthew Carden's Photography

Matthew Carden's photographs featuring either very tiny people or very large items of food are for sale here. I wish he'd do one featuring a man and a woman and a giant red apple.

A. A. Milne's Parenting

Christopher Robin and Pooh in a hollow tree. Image from Enchanted Places.

Christopher Milne discusses his father's parenting in his memoir Enchanted Places:

But if my father could stand up to schoolmasters and if he inherited some of his own father's gifts as a teacher, he himself could never have become one. He could teach and loved teaching. He could radiate enthusiasm, but he could never impose discipline. He could never have taught a dull subject to a dull boy, never have said, "Do this because I say so." Enthusiasm spread knowledge sideways, among equals. Discipline forced it downwards from above. My father's relationships were always between equals,  however old or young, distinguished or undistinguished the other person. Once, when I was quite little, he came up to the nursery while I was having my lunch. And while he was talking I paused between mouthfuls, resting my hands on the table, knife and fork pointing upwards. "You oughtn't really to sit like that," he said, gently. "Why not?" I asked, surprised. "Well..." He hunted around for a reason he could give. Because it's considered bad manners? Because  you mustn't? Because... "Well," he said, looking in the direction that my fork was pointing, "suppose somebody suddenly fell through the ceiling. They might land on your fork and that would be very painful." "I see," I said, though I didn't really. It seemed such an unlikely thing to happen, such a funny reason for holding your knife and fork flat when not using them... But funny reason or not, it seems I have remembered it.

Milne goes on to tell the story of how his father corrected him when he mistook a blackbird's nest for a starling's. Christopher insisted that he was right about the nest, adding as proof that he'd just seen a blackbird fly into it. Instead of contradicting his son once again, A.A. simply said, "Perhaps it's a blackbird visiting a starling."

I have taken note of this technique. Like his father, Luke has very firm opinions on various matters and sometimes it's as if he asks me a question only in order to disagree with my answer. From now I resolve to dodge these differences of opinion -- or should I call them battles of will? -- with notions of people falling through ceilings and blackbirds visiting starlings.

Christopher Milne's memoir is quite readable -- he obviously inherited the talent for telling a whimsical anecdote from his father -- and I've got my eye out for the other two volumes he wrote. What's most striking about this first volume, to me at least,  is how little parenting either his mother or his father did for a the first ten years of his life -- he spent nearly every moment with his nanny, who even accompanied him into the hospital.  I'd like to get my hands on a copy of his father's autobiography,  It's Too Late Now, also known as Autobiography, and see what he has to say about it.

Vintage Illustrations from The Glorious Mother Goose

There was a crooked man, and he went a crooked mile,
He found a crooked sixpence against a crooked stile,
He bought a crooked cat, which caught a crooked mouse,
And they all lived together in a crooked little house.

From The Glorious Mother Goose, a library book Luke picked out yesterday. Published in the 80s, it's got lots of nice vintage illustrations including this 1922 one by prolific children's illustrator L. Leslie Brooke. You can view a lot of his work at Project Gutenberg. My favourite is this undated one by Jennie Harbour, accompanying "See, saw, Margery Daw":

I can't find much about Jennie Harbour online, except that, in addition to illustrating nursery rhymes and fairy tales, she did a lot of postcards in the Art Deco period and that they command a good price among collectors.

Two Quick Links: Vote for Maud and The Recently Deflowered Girl

First: My dear friend Maud has been nominated for a 2008 Weblog Award -- her category is Best Literature Blog. If you read Maud's site and enjoy it as much as I do, go vote for her now!

I haven't had time to peruse all the nominees in all the different categories but it looks like a great place to find new blogs. You know, if you have time to read new blogs. Seems like they could use more categories, though. For instance, the Best Literature Blog seems to contain anything and everything having to do with literature. They could easily break that down into Best Literary Blog, Best Author Blog, and Best Blog Devoted to a Single Work of Literature, for instance. At least.

And just for fun: The Recently Deflowered Girl, a kind of advice manual, apparently illustrated by Edward Gorey. Thanks, Den!

Reading Notes: Blood Matters, The Chrysalids, The Day of the Triffids, The Midwich Cuckoos, Blindness and More

What interests me most about current genetics research, I think, is the apparent discovery of genes for anxiety, say, or ones that allow or prevent you learning from your mistakes -- the science that indicates that  your personality is genetically determined. It's both frightening and fascinating stuff and I wonder if it's going to turn out to be accurate -- or as accurate as phrenology was, which is to say, not at all. Phrenology chart found here.

I highly recommend Masha Gessen's Blood Matters: From Inherited Illness to Designer Babies, How the World and I Found Ourselves in the Future of the Gene, which I devoured after reading this review.  The first part of the review focuses on Gessen's own struggle to decide what to do after she discovered she has the genetic mutation for breast cancer -- and that's very interesting stuff -- but the book really is much broader than that. It started as a series of articles for Slate -- get a taste of them here. I've always been fascinated by the field of genetics -- ever since performing one of those black and white mice-breeding experiments in high school -- but my interest has been piqued again, probably because of this pregnancy and the testing options now available. David and I have a letter my ob-gyn sent us while we were trying to conceive Luke -- it says, "Dear Mr. and Mrs. Aulenback: After receiving your test results, I am happy to inform you that you are entirely normal."  I plan on pulling it out as proof once the kids hit adolescence and start indicating that we're freaks. If you know of any good books -- or websites -- about genetics (for the general public not specialist stuff), please do email or leave a comment.

While I was reading Gessen's book, I also happened to be reading John Wyndham's terrific sci-fi novel The Chrysalids, which made for a mini genetics theme. Set a few centuries after a nuclear apocalypse -- at which point most of North America is a barren, burned-out wasteland -- it is about a tiny group of telepathic people who are born into a small farming community in Labrador that has made a religion out of stamping out the many abnormalities, genetic or otherwise, that have arisen in plants, animals, and humans since the disaster. I'm not sure that after a nuclear holocaust life in Newfoundland and Labrador  would fare as well as Wyndham thought it might -- we here in the Atlantic provinces, remote as we are socially, tend to get New York's weather systems only a day or two after that city does. But that quibble aside, I loved it. (Interesting how willing one is to quibble with sci-fi as opposed to magic realism -- I guess that's because what makes a work of science fiction really good is that eerily apt prophetic quality.)

As soon as I put that one down, I borrowed two other Wyndhams from the library: The Day of the Triffids and The Midwich Cuckoos. Cuckoos which I have not read yet, is, apparently, about murderously psychotic alien babies who are born to an entire village full of very surprised pregnant women. It is therefore perhaps not appropriate reading for a surprised pregnant lady with a nervous sensibility but I intend to read it nonetheless. I read Triffids yesterday and was astonished by the similarity of the premise -- one morning the inhabitants of the entire planet wake up blind with the exception only of a very lucky few -- to that of Saramago's Blindness, one of my very favourite books. Saramago turned the premise into an incredibly moving and masterful fable. Wyndham's sci-fi version is a little too convoluted -- hey, why not throw in some walking, talking, man-eating plants while we're at it?-- and a little too preachy, but it is still excellent. I'm willing to bet that Saramago had read Triffids before writing Blindness -- I wonder if anyone's ever asked him.

Now after all those hellishly apocalyptic scenarios -- I couldn't sleep last night after finishing Triffids -- I really need some nice, light, "middlebrow" reading that doesn't make me want to puke sugar cubes. For that, I am turning to Oxford scholar Simon Thomas, over at Stuck in a Book, who has compiled a list of everything he read in 2008 and has highlighted his favourites, including a few by A. A. Milne I'd never heard of. The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters and others, here I come.