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Where do stories come from?: Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Salman Rushdie’s 1990 novel Haroun and the Sea of Stories is a joy, and an excellent book for both children and adults, though a fairly little-known one in the US. Its wordplay, play with lots of genres and literary traditions, and playful approach to characters and creatures and imagery are all just delightful. Its reflections on where stories come from and why they’re important are insightful and sometimes downright beautiful.

I love this part (spoken by a Water Genie, of course):

I am having my time wasted by a Disconnector Thief who will not trust in what he can’t see. How much have you seen, eh, Thieflet? Africa, have you seen it? No? Then is it truly there? And submarines? Huh? Also hailstones, baseballs, pagodas? Goldmines? Kangaroos, Mount Fujiyama, the North Pole? And the past, did it happen? And the future, will it come? Believe in your own eyes and you’ll get into a lot of trouble, hot water, a mess. (63)

Try it–you might like it!

[image credit: photo by G. Christopher Clark, made available under Creative Commons license]

Posted in children's books, reading/reviews | Leave a comment

chapter books for young children

You know when your child audience is ready to explore stories beyond picture books, ready to pay attention to and enjoy chapter books, but is still … a small child? What do you read then?

Noah’s four, and he’s been into chapter books for about six months now. Here’s the scoop:

  • We read A.A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh and House at Pooh Corner (of course), and that was awesome; they’re such great read-alouds, and so gentle. (Granted, in retrospect I don’t think it would have killed Milne to include a female character other than Kanga, or to give Kanga at least a characteristic or two beyond nurturing/maternal, but oh well.)
  • We read a couple of Arnold Lobel’s “Frog and Toad” books.
  • We read Emily Jenkins’s sweet little 2006 Toys Go Out, which has a sort of modernized Pooh-y-ness and is entirely very-young-child-friendly except for two inexplicable and unnecessary references to “axe murderers” (on pages 39 & 48, for those of you who wish to avoid troubling question immediately before bedtime).
  • We read the first “Magic Tree House” book, Dinosaurs before Dark, which fascinated Noah–he loved following the extended single narrative from chapter to chapter, rather than the more episodic short-story-ish structure of the others. We continued with The Knight at Dawn, which had some problems in terms of acting like it had educational content but not really delivering on that (the anachronistic ye olde language in the dialogue, and some other historical issues, bugged us) and including some rather dark asides with regard to torture and so forth. And then we checked out Mummies in the Morning, which is just weird and potentially disturbing and pointless. So we quit with that series.
  • After some online research, I discovered Bruce Coville’s “Moongobble & Me” books, and we requested The Dragon of Doom from our library. What a cool book! Noah’s head-over-heels for it, and it’s much better-written than the “Magic Tree House” books. I’ll write a proper review of this one soonish. In the meantime: I recommend it! As with the Pooh books, I wish there were any female characters other than a cooking-and-cleaning-and-otherwise-uncharacterized mother (and it’s surprising to me to find this stark absence in a book from 2003–like, why do even the toad and the dragon require masculine pronouns?). But still: awesome balance of adventure and a basically gentle outlook on the world, with nothing too scary.

What else is there? There are only a handful of “Moongobble & Me” books–we’re going to need a new series (or at least a new individual text) soon. Help!

Posted in children's books, parenting, reading/reviews | 3 Comments

Holy shit, I’m unemployed!

Well. Today was my last day at work (after a full year of a Visiting Assistant Professor of English gig with nonstop teaching, combined for the last three months with an internship in the library’s reference department). I’ll get one more paycheck … and then not; so that’s the scary part. I’ll have a chance to relax and get started on some of the other things I mentioned in a post in June; that’s the appealing part. Mostly it feels surreal, especially because no one’s around in the English department and no one’s really acknowledged that I’m leaving (well, no one except for the fabulous librarian who’s become a sort of mentor for me), and we’re packing to move next week, and we’re traveling to a wedding this weekend, and this transition is just getting buried. Weirdness.

Words of support? Fun free-or-cheap things to look forward to in St. Paul, where we’ll be living soon? Just plain delurking to say hi in a friendly fashion? All are very welcome!

Posted in money/class, other | 7 Comments

a bit of beauty: mother/child sculptures

Franta Belsky, Joyride (1958): photo by flickr user anemoneprojectors

Henry Moore, Draped Reclining Mother and Baby (1983): photo by flickr user Sebastian Crump

"Draped Reclining Mother and Baby" detail (same sculptor/photographer)

Mother and Daughter, Needham Market, Suffolk: photo by flickr user howzey

Toulouse Park statue: photo by flickr user Juraj Kubica

Posted in art | Leave a comment

favorite food blogs

My partner and I both love cooking and eating. Eric’s an amazing bread baker, in addition to an all-purpose good cook, and I’ve been cooking and baking (both bread and sweets) and fiddling with and/or making up recipes since I was little. Sometimes it’s the only thing I find soothing: the instant payoff of cooking helps balance out the extremely long-term and abstract projects I’m usually doing in my professional life.

Our child is therefore growing up in a family where–even though we don’t have time to clean or do all sorts of other things most people view as basic, required parts of daily life–we eat a series of wonderful homemade meals every day. Unsurprisingly, then, I like recipe blogs. Here are a few of my favorites (not all totally vegetarian, though Noah and I are):

Share yours (your favorite food blogs, or your very own food blog) in the comments if you’re so inclined …

[image credit: photo by flickr user Jessica Spengler, made available under Creative Commons license]

Posted in recipes/food (vegetarian) | 3 Comments

‘Once she’s a mom she shouldn’t try to be sexy–her kid should come first!’

The title of this post is a composite of quite a few deeply-felt statements that showed up in the data my writing students gathered in a recent semester. The class designed an interview-based project exploring fellow college students’ perceptions of pregnant women’s and mother’s bodies. (The course was on women’s bodies in our culture, and they chose the specific research topic themselves–much to my delight!) They came up with lots of interesting findings and analysis: for instance, on the idea of the MILF (Mom I’d Like to Fuck, for those of you who are too sweet to know already), perceptions of sex during pregnancy as unhealthy and/or just plain revolting, super-specific standards of ‘appropriateness’ for pregnant women’s and mothers’ clothing, and all sorts of related issues. But I want to reflect on just one general finding a bit in this post: essentially, that ‘Once she gets pregnant she shouldn’t try to be attractive ever again–her child(ren) should come first now (and forever! bwahahaha!)!‘ (Oh, crap, I missed the memo again. I so suck at this game.)

Several of my students wrote research reports focused on this one pattern in the data: over and over, students at our college insisted–as though of course everyone would agree, but why do these inappropriate mommies keep acting wrong???–that pregnant women and mothers shouldn’t try to be sexy or attractive because our priority ought to shift to taking care of our fetuses and then our children. And of course most parents put the wellbeing of our children pretty darned high on our lists. But, like, okay–three things:

  1. The claim is that a mother’s priorities should shift instantly and completely such that her child is the center of her universe. Putting aside how troublesome we may find that requirement, this claim begs the question shift from what? It sounds as though, before parenthood, a women’s top priority should be … being sexy/attractive. Great. Screw happiness, self-knowledge, emotional/spiritual/physical well-being, friends and family, intellectual growth, academic and/or career success, and all that–just make your body appealing to men until you manage to get knocked up. Then stop. What’s particularly intriguing about this logical conclusion is that virtually no students at this college would ever in a million years say that–I am surrounded here by intelligent and ambitious young women–and yet a widespread assumption about motherhood (so few years away for many of them) is based in precisely that narrative.
  2. Why are these goals in conflict, anyway? How are being sexually attractive and taking care of one’s children somehow at odds? When the logic behind this apparently-obvious assumption is articulated, it generally follows one or both of two routes: the ‘a mother should spend her time and energy on her kids, not selfishly on her appearance’ route and/or the ‘don’t set a bad example for your daughters!’ route. Which leads me to …
  3. As a couple of my students noticed and mentioned in their analyses, this stance doesn’t even make any sense in the larger context of our data (or of our culture). You’re neglectful if you spend time trying to look/be sexy: but you’re also neglectful if you look messy or frumpy or (heaven forbid) fat, because ‘if you can’t even take care of yourself and look put together, how can you possibly be responsible for a child?’ You’re setting a bad example for your preteen or teenage daughters … by ‘dressing like a teenager’ (aka wearing clothes that are considered appropriate for your daughters anyway). If you’re a partnered parent, you’re already ‘taken,’ so it’s inappropriate/wrongheaded/mean to be ‘too attractive’ to other men: but A) you are a disappointment and failure as a wife/partner/woman if you become any less conventionally attractive to and sexual toward your partner after you become parents and B) somehow the you’re-’taken’-so-stop-being-sexy rule only takes effect upon pregnancy, not upon marriage/partnering. Weird, huh? In other words, unsurprisingly, the ‘what about the children?’ thing (along with all these other explanations) appears to be rationalization rather than actual reasoning.

Perhaps instead we’re seeing the effects of all-too-familiar cultural ambivalences regarding women’s bodies, sexuality, pregnancy, and ‘the mother’? And young adults who either imagine themselves as unaffected by those ambivalences or feel they’re not supposed to admit to them–but carry out their troublesome logic anyway?

What do you make of these conflicting demands on mothers in our society?

[image credit: photo by flickr user PinoyParis, made available under Creative Commons license]

Posted in body size/shape, parenting, partners/fathers, pregnancy, sexuality/sex | 14 Comments
  • Welcome to First the Egg, a collection of practical information, links, and cultural criticism. This site is a feminist intervention in our rigidly-gendered culture of childbirth and parenting. Its aim is to provide a nonsexist space for people who want to learn, reflect, commiserate, or laugh about being pregnant, giving birth, and helping children grow up whole and happy.

    You can navigate the site a few ways:
    • The horizontal menu at the top of each page leads to information and further resources on women’s health, pregnancy, birth, and parenting.
    • The categories listed in this column (scroll down a bit) lead to blog posts relevant to each topic.
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