crooked house

Twilight Delight

I've never been much interested in vampire genre fiction -- for instance, I've never read any of the Anne Rice books on the subject and I don't think I was able to sit through any of the movies (were there more than one?). But this past week, unable to pick my head up off my pillow for more than fifteen minutes and unable even to focus on the television, I developed a bizarre craving for the stuff. Chalk it up to pregnancy.

Spurred on by something I saw over at Light Reading, I picked up Living Dead in Dallas: A Sookie Stackhouse Novel at the library. I enjoyed it very much, the way I'd enjoy downing a giant bag of potato chips if, say, the potato chips came in a delicious and as-yet-uninvented Sex'n'Violence flavour. Unfortunately the rest of the Sookie Stackhouse books were out -- and since in my state, you don't really want your nether regions stimulated any more than they already are by the pressure of an enormous fetal cranium, varicose veins, an overactive bladder, and constipated bowels (is this too much information?) -- I decided to spring for the wildly popular Twilight book, which I'd read was a teenage abstinence allegory, typed out with one finger by a Mormon housewife while she cared for a baby and two other little boys under the age of five.

I have now made a private vow to write something similarly wildly successful and lucrative just as soon as I pop out this baby. Should be a piece of cake. And speaking of cake, although the abstinence allegory is certainly very obvious, the novel also works very nicely, perhaps even better, as an allegory of dieting. Edward feels about Bella the way I feel about certain kinds of chocolate and this thought kept me giggling through many of the otherwise romantic scenes. I was not the only one in my household to notice this, either. After I finished the first book and the second, New Moon, I sent David to the video store for the movie. Early on, he commented, "She's just like M&M Slow Cooked Pot Roast to him." This is a dish I've been serving my family ever since I was diagnosed with an iron deficiency -- quite a big deal around here since we normally don't eat much red meat at all. If I do manage to write my own wildly lucrative vampire allegory of something or other, perhaps I will invite M&M to invest in a product placement. Although I have a feeling my allegory might end up having something to do with babies being the vampires, and mothers being the bloody pot roast. Milk = blood, or something. That hasn't been done before, has it? I'm still working out the details.

As for Luke's impressions, well, he didn't take note of the dieting allegory as he was not watching the inappropriate movie but was instead playing an elaborate game with his collection of McDonald's toys on the floor. He did, however, stop for a minute to notice Edward's brightly lipsticked lips. "He's got a funny mouth," he said. He watched as Edward said a bunch of romantic things to Bella and was perplexed by her serious and quivering reaction. "His mouth is so funny! Why isn't she laughing?" Because your pot roast doesn't laugh at you while you're staring it down at the end of your fork, that's why. It just quivers and looks tempting.

Enormous and Boneless. With a Side of Head-Cold. In a Cup.

This morning we were watching the beginning of Wall-E -- although I think it's a terrific movie, for some reason Luke never makes it more than halfway -- and I realized that at this point in the pregnancy I feel exactly like one of the enormous boneless people who live on the shapeship. Early on, one called Josh falls out of his chair and squirms helplessly around on the floor until he can be rescued. That's me right about now. Also, everyone in the house has developed a head-cold. I'm hoping it's gone before my c-section, which is scheduled for three weeks from last Friday. And/or that I don't spontaneously go into labour before it's gone.

Speaking of c-sections, last night while reviewing The Nursing Mother's Companion (and trying not to hyperventilate as my first attempt at breastfeeding was a total nightmare), I laughed when I came across this brief note on the operation: "If you have had a cesarean birth, keep in mind you are recovering from major abdominal surgery. Most likely, you will have to take pain medication during the first week or so at home. You may perhaps be bothered by an uncomfortable feeling that your abdomen may fall out." I don't really remember being too bothered by the c-section the first time round -- I was much too busy trying to stay awake for the round-the-clock feedings. This time I've vowed to make myself take notes through everything, no matter how tired I get. I'll pay particular attention to any sensations that indicate my stomach is about to fall out and report back.

Travel Tip: Sometimes the Familiar Can Be More Exotic Than, Well, The Exotic

Image of a Thai Coke can, taken from here.

Acclaimed travel writer Pico Iyer has a short piece called 10 Things Every Traveler Should Do in the latest issue of Real Simple magazine. They're useful tips for getting the most out of every travel experience, whether you're visiting the next town over or the other side of the planet. With this baby's arrival imminent, we're not planning on going anywhere, not even the beach, any time soon. But a woman can dream.  I was particularly struck by this tip, for when you are visiting someplace far from home:

9. Go to McDonald’s. In Kyoto, you could see chicken tatsuta burgers, corn-potage soup, and, in autumn, moon-viewing burgers on the menu, and your fellow diners might be dressed in Vivienne Westwood or Dior. In Bolivia, the McDonald’s I visited was so exotic that society ladies sipped their McCoffees under the watchful eye of a security guard. Even in Manhattan, the Big Mac outlet I stumbled into one morning at 3 a.m. was home to an unexpected but very New Yawky kind of camaraderie. The food is cheap and semipredictable, of course, but it’s all the ways in which the place is surprising that you will take home with you. What else are we looking for in travel (and in love and in life) but a tasty mix of the strange and the familiar?

Ten years ago, when we were living in Singapore, for a little while we lived around the corner from a McDonald's tucked into a corner of the outdoor food court situated underneath a block of government flats (almost every block of HDB flats had these communal eating places). The restaurant used to give me a weird frisson every time I went in -- it was so familiar, of course, and yet, in its Singaporean incarnation, so strange. I thought at the time that someone should write a travel piece about visiting the various McDonald's restaurants around the world. It wouldn't have to be McDonald's, of course -- you could choose any Western restaurant or chain store that seems bound and determined to take over the world. They started opening up Starbucks in Singapore right around the time I arrived (I arrived the day after Princess Diana was killed) and a giant Ikea followed shortly. Both of those businesses tended to create the same surreal kind of tension.

In many ways, I find Nova Scotia, where we now live, much more remote from that world than Singapore was -- when we moved here in 2002, there were no Starbucks here yet and there are still only two or three in the entire province, I think. And there are no Ikeas.

Children in Fiction with Pasha Malla, Over At Maud's

Pasha Malla's terrific book of short stories, The Withdrawal Method -- a debut that got a lot of positive attention here in Canada, including a nomination for the Giller Prize, which is very fancy --is now available in the United States. To mark this occasion, we decided to have a little conversation about children in fiction. I was particularly interested in Pasha's fictional kids but Pasha, in typical Pasha fashion, was more interested in other people's. You can read the conversation over at Maud's, who was kind enough to post it for us. (By the way, it's Maud's birthday today! Send her some good wishes... I'd have the baby today, if I could be assured she wouldn't be undercooked, just so she'd share Maud's astrological profile.)

Almost There: Comfort Food and Sleep. And Pillows. Lots of Pillows.

Phew. Well, today marks the 35th week of this pregnancy, which means we've made it as far as we did last time -- Luke was born on this day of his gestation. And since this baby is a girl, I'm expecting her to be (at least) slightly more developed than he was at the same point. I feel like I could explode at any moment but there are still, potentially, four weeks until the scheduled c-section. Until then, as much as possible, my plans are to sleep and to eat. And then to sleep and eat some more. Maybe that's why these pillows caught my eye:

From the Etsy shop Diffraction Fiber. They also make these newborn footprints pillows, which are very nice, but would be even better if they could somehow use the infant's actual footprint:

Existences Chronicled in Public -- Or In A Vastly Crowded Void?

The following is such a good -- or maybe timely is a better word -- idea for a novel that I'm betting several people are already working on it. From Ann Hulbert's review on Slate of a bunch of parenting memoirs:

Now that my children are on the brink of adulthood, I have a fantasy of writing a 21^st-century bildungsroman about a daughter, or maybe a son, whose coming-of-age story is a variation on The Truman Show. As she's leaving for college, my character will suddenly discover that ever since gestation her existence has been chronicled in public, beginning with an in utero baby blog narrated by a rapt parent-to-be. Then follows an exhaustive new parent blog. By preschool, the mode has shifted to irreverently indiscreet columns—full of family chaos—written for a thriving online magazine with a big audience. Finally, the voluminous output gets shaped into one of the "bad parent" memoirs that have lately become so popular.

This portrait of family dynamics in the Internet era could skew toward the dark or the comic as the poor kid copes with the exposure—and above all with the figure who hogs the spotlight: her secret-spilling parent.

On reflection, though: there are so many parents now chronicling their children's lives in public via the internet -- actually, mostly they're really chronicling their own lives which happen to center on their children's -- that most such chronicles never get read by more than a handful of people. I think when our children are grown up, they're going to have different notions of "public" than we do now.

Is It Diner Lingo or The Name of a Sexual Position?

Photo taken from The Food Pornographer.

1. Foreign Entanglements
2. Bent Spoon
3. Shoot From the South
4. Eve With a Lid On
5. Folded Deck Chair
6. Adam and Eve On a Raft
7. Pie in the Sky
8. Maiden's Delight
9. Jellyfish
10. Bun Pup
11. Draw One in the Dark
12. Pirate's Bounty
13. Peel It Off the Wall
14. Drag It Through the Garden
15. Southern Exposure
16. Love Apples
17. Frenchman's Delight
18. Heart Attack on Rack
19. The Butler
20. Balloon Juice
21. Zeppelins in the Fog
22. Bloodhounds in the Hay
23. Rodeo
24. Put Out the Lights and Cry

One of the following links is not remotely work-or-child-safe:
1, 3, 4, 6, 8, 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, and 25 were all found here.
2, 5, 7, 9, 13, 16, 20, and 24 were all found here.
I happen to think the diner lingo sounds much sexier. Then again, I'm hungry. (I was trying to use this pre-baby time wisely, honest I was. I was reading Abigail Thomas's Thinking About Memoir and her reference to "Adam and Eve on a Raft" sent me off on a bit of a tangent.)

The Still Face Experiment and Loud Babies

This videotaped experiment, ostensibly part of an study on techniques babies use to capture their mothers' attention, demonstrates how subjective psychology experiments can be -- to me, that mother doesn't just look non-responsive, she looks mad. Isn't that the conclusion you'd make if someone you were holding a conversation with suddenly stopped engaging with you and stared sternly off into space? Either that or the woman's having some kind of petit mal seizure. Maybe I'm hormonal. (Via Paul Nyhan at Birth to Thrive Online.)

As I watched the video, we inadvertently conducted our own little psychology experiment into how Luke is going to respond to having a crying baby in the house. I wasn't much more than halfway through -- I think the baby had just shrieked loudly -- when Luke called from the other room, where he was playing a video game. "Mama? Could you turn that down please? It's awfully loud! Could you just stop playing that for a little while? Thank you!"

The volume on my laptop was at exactly the same level it had been last night when the child watched the promotional videos for Wipeout, over and over and over again.

Babies in Literature Series: Mary Wesley's A Part of the Furniture

 Sara O'Leary recently suggested the biography Wild Mary: The Life of Mary Wesley. Mary Wesley was a British novelist who, according to Wikipedia, didn't publish her first novel for adults -- she'd written two for children -- until she was 71. She went on to produce ten best-sellers. I'm still waiting on the library for Wild Mary but I've become increasingly curious about her real life after reading two of her novels, both set in and around the second world war, this weekend: A Sensible Life and Part of the Furniture. In email Sara said of Wesley's books "In some ways, it's the same novel over and over again but  I can't say I really mind that." That's very true of these two particular novels -- and I didn't mind it, either. Both feature almost identical young girls whose parents dislike and neglect them, girls who run away around the age of 17; and both plots feature romantic entanglements between the girl and two or more men. However, the two plots end very differently. I can't remark on her other novels yet but these two read as if Wesley was a bit obsessed with working out different but equally plausible consequences for the aforementioned scenario. They are surprisingly sexy books, considering the age of their author, and funny, too, but dark. If you google Mary Wesley you'll find her work constantly described as "arsenic without the old lace."

In Part of the Furniture, Juno, the seventeen-year-old girl in question, becomes pregnant after her first sexual encounter with not one but the two boys she has idolized since her childhood, on the eve of their departure for the war. Through a series of rather improbable circumstances, she finds herself working as a land girl on a farm in the West Country for Robert, a man forty years her senior. This passage features Juno, a few months after she has given birth to twins, Robert, and Bert, the extremely crabby old man who is in charge of the farm. Juno is calling in the sow, Eleanor, and her piglets:

   Suddenly, as if by magic the sow was brushing against Juno's legs; surrounded by piglets she was patting the sow. He heard her voice, 'All hams and sides of bacon present? Everybody there? One, two, three, four,' she counted, 'eleven, twelve? Right then, race you to your sty," and she turned to run down the hill with the sow and litter streaming behind her. 

   Still Robert watched. 

'You'll run all the fat off 'em.' Bert came to meet her. 'I've mixed their meal for you.'

   'Oh, thank you, Bert, thank you. You should not have bothered.' Their voices carried in the frozen air.

   'No bother.' (Robert raised his eyebrows. Well, well.) 'You need to get back to your own.'

   'They are safe with Ann. In you go, Eleanor.' She held the sty door open; the sow pushed in, followed by the piglets.

   'Maybe, but Ann can't feed 'em,' Bert nagged.

   'They will still be asleep, they are always sleeping when I get in. We have this exchange every night, Bert,' she teased.

   'Maybe so.' Bert watched her pour the pigswill into Eleanor's trough and shut the sty door.

   Juno said, 'Anything else?' She looked round the yard.

   'No, you get along upp.'

   'Goodnight then, Bert, thank you, goodnight.'

   ...

   'Bert.' Robert came up beside the man.

   'Sir? You're back? Didn't hear no car. No-one said you was coming. Made me jump.'

   'The taxi was busy. I walked, glad to stretch my legs. Did I give you a shock?'

   'Was just packing it in for the night, glad to see you. That Juno just called the pigs in from the wood; they are after the acorns.'

   'I was watching.'

   'Got a touch with the animals, that one. Didn't allow so at first, but she has.'

   'Good. Everything all right here?'

   'Yes, sir, seems so, ticking over.'

   'Good.'

   'Very glad to see you back, sir.'

   'Thank you, Bert. Eleanor's litter look fine.'

   'See a difference in them babies, too, sir. Quite plumping out, two fine little babbies.'

   'Oh yes, the babies, good.' Since when had Bert been interested in babies? 'You sound quite proprietorial,' Robert said.

   'I sound what?'

   'Interested, Bert, you were never a babies man.'

   'Well, I am now, we all take a turn,' Bert snapped. 'Tis nice for a change to care for something you ain't going to eat.'

   Robert said, 'I had not thought of it in that way. You have turned philosopher while I've been in London.'

   Bert snorted.

(Please excuse all the unnecessary line-breaks -- Typepad, irritatingly buggy today, insists on inserting them.)

To Focus Or Not To Focus

Thirty-three weeks and counting today. A few days ago I hired a student as a mother's helper for the summer. Before she comes I rush around -- okay, lumber around -- trying to put everything to rights so she doesn't discover how much help I really need. At my obs appointment yesterday I learned that I have gained so much weight that I won't need to eat anything at all for at least a year after this baby is born. I can see how this must have worked for my prehistoric ancestors -- they could hole up in a cave to nurse the newborn and not worry about hunting and gathering for some time. I'm not sure it's going to work out quite so well for me. I also found out the cause of that recurring, and very strange, sensation of tearing that occurs in a vertical line directly underneath my navel -- apparently my stomach muscles are separating. Nice. I think something similar is going on in my brain. I have lots of fleeting ideas and fragments of notions but nothing seems to come together anymore. I'm having a lot of trouble focusing. Which is why I took note of  two articles this week: the first was Laura Miller's Why Can't We Concentrate?, a review of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life, a book Miller leads me to believe is about how modern media, particularly the internet, is changing our brains for the worse, rendering us completely unable to focus on anything. And then I happened upon Inside the Baby Mind, an article that discusses current research on the minds of infants and remarks that they are able to learn so much so rapidly precisely because they are unable to focus:

Now, however, scientists have begun to dramatically revise their concept of a baby's mind. By using new research techniques and tools, they've revealed that the baby brain is abuzz with activity, capable of learning astonishing amounts of information in a relatively short time. Unlike the adult mind, which restricts itself to a narrow slice of reality, babies can take in a much wider spectrum of sensation - they are, in an important sense, more aware of the world than we are.

This hyperawareness comes with several benefits. For starters, it allows young children to figure out the world at an incredibly fast pace. Although babies are born utterly helpless, within a few years they've mastered everything from language - a toddler learns 10 new words every day - to complex motor skills such as walking. According to this new view of the baby brain, many of the mental traits that used to seem like developmental shortcomings, such as infants' inability to focus their attention, are actually crucial assets in the learning process.

In fact, in some situations it might actually be better for adults to regress into a newborn state of mind. While maturity has its perks, it can also inhibit creativity and lead people to fixate on the wrong facts. When we need to sort through a lot of seemingly irrelevant information or create something completely new, thinking like a baby is our best option.

"We've had this very misleading view of babies," says Alison Gopnik, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the forthcoming book, "The Philosophical Baby." "The baby brain is perfectly designed for what it needs to do, which is learn about the world. There are times when having a fully developed brain can almost seem like an impediment."

One of the most surprising implications of this new research concerns baby consciousness, or what babies actually experience as they interact with the outside world. While scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults - this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia - that view is being overturned. Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting. "For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time," Gopnik says. "Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You'll quickly realize that they're seeing things you don't even notice."

I can't wait for Gopnik's new book,  The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life.