Books

So over on Unfogged it's a post up on whether all HS reading lists suck, and I'm thinking back to what I got made to read in HS, and, well, yes.

The Scarlet Letter, and Hawthorne's assorted short stories, I have no idea how many times. I don't believe I bothered to read any of them after the first time. Why would I? I hate Hawthorne. (That said, when I taught Am Lit I three semesters ago, I made my poor students read YGB. Suckers.)

Bartleby. Oh, did they adore to make us read Bartleby.

Faulkner's Rose for Emily. Every FUCKING semester. (Probably not. Probably I'm just remembering it that way.) We read nothing else by William F., but damn did we read the shit out of a Rose for Emily.

Great Expectations, three times.

Ransom of the Red Chief, I swear, every single English class I was in from fifth grade on. Eck.

To Kill a Mockingbird, once in Junior High, once in HIgh school.

Julius Caeser OR Romeo and Juliet. (Not both -- it depended on who you drew for English.

What's that you say? Modern fiction? Why, didn't you see To Kill A Mockingbird on that list? How modern do you want?

We did read the Great Gatsby when I was a senior, but I hated it as much as Hawthorne, frankly. I've never liked Fitzgerald and yes, I know I'm wrong, but there you are.

Lady of Shalit

Oh, look. Wendy Shalit's back.

You remember Shalit -- she's the one who discovered modesty back in 1999 and was amazed to realize that feminists had forced women to stop practicing it? And that this was why women were being raped and sexually harassed all the time? (Because, you know, previous to feminists, women, at least the good ones, who had practiced modesty, like Shalit, never got raped or harassed or called names on the street by those icky men, and if they did, well! Good brave men stepped in and dealt with it, like they were meant to, before feminism made them afraid to be men. Or something. The book where she explains it all is called A Return To Modesty and it was way too badly written for me to get entirely all the way through, but that was, apparently, its thesis. She has a website now with the same claim: http://www.modestyzone.net/)

Anyway, now she's written another book! Yay!

This one is called Girls Gone Mild, and it's all about how young feminists are rejecting the aged old cranky feminists and their way of life. You know: sex, and drugs, and crankiness.

Young feminists want to dress modestly

(Go here for a charming picture of how young feminists want to dress:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118254928882245220.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I must tell you I have never, in all my years of dealing with young feminists, seen a young feminist dressed this way, not ever, but then Shalit and I do not run with the same crews, as someone told another woman recently.)

and young feminists want to control their own lives; but they do not want casual sex, and they are not interesting in the hating on men, which is, apparently, what we older feminists spend our time doing, hating on the fellas and researching inventive ways to do the sex (young feminists? Not so much interested in doing the sex. Hmm.)

Tellingly, the National Organization for Women invited the Pittsburgh girls to one of their conferences, to honor them for "taking action," but the girls themselves were put off by what they saw there. As one of them put it: "I support equality and would never like to be controlled by a man, but the NOW conference was more like a brainwashing feminist summit than anything else. They had this artistic performance that was so much about sex and how much all men suck; it made me feel sick."

Ms. Shalit has little patience for the thinking of the older generation of mainstream feminists. They are, she says, "so committed to the idea of casual sex as liberation that they can't appreciate or even quite understand these younger feminists." To them, modesty is a step back, even a betrayal of the liberationist spirit. "They don't understand," Ms. Shalit says, "that pursuing crudeness is the problem, not the solution."

Ms. Shalit is in a good position to speak on such matters. As an undergraduate at Williams College, she caused an uproar by objecting to the school's coed bathrooms.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118254928882245220.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Ai, yi, the co-ed bathroom again. Will they ever shut up about that one? Like the pantsuit and the "but she GLARED at me when I held the door open for her!" -- can't these folk find a new trope? Seriously.

So. What do young feminists want to do, according to Shalit?

At the end of every chapter are "how to" boxes, obviously aimed at young readers, on such subjects as taking back your college dorm room when your roommate, planning a tryst, wants to send you into exile. Another -- "Confronting Your Baby Boomer Parent" -- tells you how to explain yourself to parents who think that you're "weird for being a virgin." A box called "A Recipe for Pleasing With Integrity" asks: "Is there a way for a young woman to impress others, without having to be mean or compromise her value system?" Why, yes: Bake an apple pie!

Pie.

Silly me. I thought we wanted justice, all this time.

Boys want liberty, justice, and equality.

Girls just want a pat on their pretty little heads.

Watching Movies

Spent this afternoon watching Grapes of Wrath, which I had never seen before, not the whole thing -- I'd seen bits of it.

And I've been reading my students' drafts on the movie True Grit vs. the text True Grit for the past three days.

Both of those novels are transgressive texts, the Steinbeck much more openly so than the Portis novel; but the Portis novel, also, works against narrative expectations.

In both cases, the movie does what it can to erase the transgression.

(I know, color you shocked.)

The ending of the movie True Grit is, for me, the worst offense -- John Wayne frozen on screen, in the act of leaping the fence, like the statue of a war hero, only, WOW! technicolor! As if to say, yippee-ay-yay! Shootin' bad guys is cool!

Which -- hey! -- that's what America believes, is it?

As opposed to what the text True Grit does with Rooster Cogburn's character -- and Mattie Ross's -- which is to make them both into doomed figures, as much banished Cain figures as Tom Chaney was, or Ned Pepper. Nothing goes right for Rooster; he ends up dying alone and lost. Mattie has a bank, sure, but everyone's against her, as she says, clearly, and she also is alone, and scarred by her vengeance quest, all of which the movie erases.

Grapes of Wrath, the movie, just scrubs the edges of Steinbeck's story -- makes it look like no one in particular is to blame for what is happening to the farmers; cuts a lot of the politics; cuts very nearly all the work (only one work scene is shown, I think, and none of the child labor scenes); and ends with Ma Joad claiming, optimistically, that they'll survive because they're "the people" and the people always do survive.

Um, yeah. So. No reason to fret then, I guess? We can relax? Good to know.

Semester Ends

Tomorrow is the last day of Summer I.

My students are all sledge-hammering away at their final portfolios. I've mentioned, haven't I, how good these students are? These are the TAA students. Returned to the University after having lost their jobs (forced quit, I think is the actual phrase Whirlpool is using), they are working to get some sort of degree or certificate that will let them earn money for the last ten or twelve years of their working lives -- most of them are fifty or fifty-five or (some of them) sixty years old. Anyway, they are not scholars; but they are working very hard, all of them.

For instance, I encourage students to give me multiple drafts of papers; these students have brought me not just one or two drafts of each paper, but three, four, five drafts of each paper. They fix what I tell them to fix, they go past that and try other things, they read one another's drafts (they have formed study groups, can you imagine? On their own! I didn't require this!) and give one another suggestions -- and, because of all this, their final portfolios have all been coming in early.

This makes me so happy. This is how education ought to work. Well, except for the whole having to get students back in school through economic collapse part, certainly.

I'm still worn out, though. Knowing that Summer II starts next Thursday, July 5, isn't helping.

Ah, Patriarchy

So you've remember all those conservative panic columns and reports about how women are taking over the universities? I first started reading about it in 2002, I think. Oh! Oh! Women outnumber men in the college classroom. Oh! If this goes on, by 2007, 80% of our university class will be women! (The horror!)

Didn't happen. Do you wonder why?

This might be it:

Many colleges are rejecting women at rates
drastically higher than those for men

These days, the student body is 49 percent male and 51 percent female-a ratio that the college insists is determined by the availability of on-campus housing. Maintaining that equilibrium, however, has in the past few years meant rejecting many more female applicants than male ones. In practical terms, in the past decade, female applicants have faced an admissions rate that is an average 13 percentage points lower than that of their male peers just for the sake of keeping that girl-boy balance.

(Snip)


Better students. The schools that are most competitive-Harvard, Duke, and Rice, for example-have so many applicants and so many high achievers that they naturally maintain balanced student bodies by skimming the cream of the crop. But in the tier of selective colleges just below them, maintaining gender equity on some campuses appears to require a thumb on the scale in favor of boys. It's at these schools, including Pomona, Boston College, Wesleyan University, Tufts, and the College of William and Mary, that the gap in admit rates is particularly acute.

The reason for these lower admissions rates for female students is simple, if bitterly ironic: From the early grades on up, girls tend to be better students. By the time college admissions come into the picture, many watchers of the "boy gap" agree, it's too late for the lads to catch up on their own. Indeed, beginning in those formative K-12 years, girls watch less television, spend less time playing sports, and are far less likely to find themselves in detention. They are more likely to participate in drama, art, and music classes-extracurriculars that are catnip for admissions officers. Across the board, girls study more, score better, and are less likely to be placed in special education classes.

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/articles/070617/25gender.htm

You won't hear the rich white males like Mr. Iggulden complaining about this one, I bet. No, in fact, as I recall, what we hear is the fellas suing the school districts, complaining that if their boys aren't doing as well as the girls in school (which they aren't, hmm, how odd) then it's not because the girls work harder, study more, watch less TV, nothing like that -- no, it's because the system is rigged and boys are being cheated.

And it surely can't be Mr. Iggulden's fault, can it? Because -- oh, maybe?-- because he taught his sons that group work was for girls and girls were losers? Because he taught his sons that only wimps and sissies did what girls did, so, you know, if the girls were studying, well, that must be a stupid thing to do? Because he taught his sons that competition was everything, so they couldn't ask for help?

Nah. Because that would mean the fault lay at Mr. Iggulden's door, and at the door of, well, men. Which that can't possibly be right. We all know it's the feminists and the girls to blame. They wrecked the world. Because back before them, (white) men had everything, which is how it's supposed to be, and Q.E.D.

Yeah.

Dangerous Games For Iraqis

But at least they won't be wimps!

Today, toy weapons are among the best-selling items in local markets, and kids play among armored vehicles on streets where pickup trucks filled with masked gunmen are a common sight. On a recent day, a group of children was playing near a camouflage-colored Iraqi Humvee parked in Baghdad's upscale Karrada neighborhood. One boy clutched a thick stick and placed it on his right shoulder, as if he were handling a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. He aimed it at cars passing by, pretending to blow them up. Two soldiers pointed at the children and laughed.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/25/AR2007062501952_pf.html

(Via Tbogg: http://tbogg.blogspot.com/)

Coolness

This is totally fun:

http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/journey/

And, if you read the information that comes with, intriguing as well. (You have to click on the flashy red bits and the tiny books. But it's very cool and worth the time!)

(Via Redneck Mother http://redneckmother.blogspot.com/)

Making Me Sad

I have an nine-year-old child.

She wants to be a wildlife biologist. Or perhaps an English professor. Some days, she wants to raise dragons off in the mountains -- a hankering I can certainly understand. When our friend the biology professor took her to his freshman biology lab and let her study single-celled pond scum, she was certain, for an entire month, that she would be a biologist, like him, and teach biology.

Why do I mention this? Because, at eight and nine, she has encountered the patriarchy. And where? At her Montessori school, of all places. The progressive nest of safety I thought to leave her in! Ha!

The boys in the first grade tell her she's a girl, and girls can't run fast, and girls are stupid, and girls don't know anything, and girls can't and girls don't. Mind you, she tells them they are patriarchy oppressed and they're wrong, but I know saying that and not hearing what they are saying, those are two different things.

Also, it's not just the students, I'm afraid.

What are we surrounded by, here in this world?

Why, people like this fellow: Mr. Iggulden, and his Dangerous Book For Boys.

You have heard of him by now, I am certain. You can hardly have escaped hearing of him. He is the darling of Rush Limbaugh and Rush's Dittos and their ilk. The Conservative Crowd is sucking up to him as fast as they can.

Let me say up front I have nothing against Mr. Iggulden's book. It looks like a fine book. It has nice pictures and there are plenty of fun things in it and as a ten year old I too would have liked to have known how to do those things, even though I must admit I did not, as a ten year old, or even now, have a penis.

What makes me sad is Mr. Iggulden's hatred for women. It is hatred, too. Read this paragraph from his essay in the Washington Post:

I thought I was the only one sick of non-competitive sports days and playgrounds where it's practically impossible to hurt yourself. It turned out that the pendulum is swinging back at last. Boys are different from girls. Teaching them as though they are girls who don't wash as much leads to their failure in school, causing trouble all the way. Boys don't like group work. They do better on exams than they do in coursework, and they don't like class discussion. In history lessons, they prefer stories of Rome and of courage to projects on the suffragettes.

Boys are different than girls: because, see, girls can't compete (the wimps!) and because girls only work well in groups when they can hide what losers they are, and because, as we all know, suffragettes were a bunch of cowards. (The fuck?) (And, of course, not true. Boys, some boys, might do better on standardized tests like the SAT; but girls as a whole do better on exams in the classroom, oddly enough. And not all boys do better on the SAT -- only boys from certain social classes: that would be, of course, Mr. Iggulden's class, the rich white guy class, which I imagine is the only class he thinks is real.)

And this:

When I was a teacher, I asked my head of department why every textbook seemed to have a girl achieving her dream of being a carpenter while the boys were morons. She replied that boys had had it their own way for too long, and now it was the girls' turn. Ouch. The problem with fighting adult gender battles in the classroom is that the children always lose.

(A) I have my doubts about the veracity of this here conversation, Mr. Iggulden (2) Show me these texts, will you please, where the boys are morons? Because I have read many a schoolbook and children's book to my child and that is a story I do not recall seeing and (3) do you think girls don't like to make things, too? Do you not know any girls? (4) the trouble with projecting your own gender battles into the world of children's books is you're not just fucking with your life, Mr. Iggulden, you're fucking with my child's life.

I expected a backlash. If you put the word "boys" on something, someone will always complain. One blog even promoted the idea of removing the words "For Boys" from the cover with an Exacto knife so that people's sons wouldn't be introduced to any unpleasantly masculine notions such as duty, honor, courage and competence.

Mr. Igg has missed the point -- intentionally, I reckon. It's not because we don't want people's sons to be introduced to those notions. It's because we don't believe that those notions are the purview solely of the masculine half of humanity. Why Mr. Iggulden does is a question he might raise with himself.

Here's the link to the rest of his essay. It's full of other little charming tidbits about how his father beat him and how he set fire to a crow and other manly pursuits which no doubt the Christian Right will swoon over:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/06/22/AR2007062201668_pf.html

Oh Look!

We are a Christian Nation!

And you doubted it!

After much discussion and prayer, Drew Heiss and I are announcing an event to honor Paul Hill on the 13th anniversary of his actions in defense of preborn babies in Pensacola. Memorial events will be held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to honor him as God’s man and our hero.

http://www.ezekielsystems.com/paulhillmemorial/

Paul Hill is the terrorist that murdered both a physician, John Britton, and his escort, James Barrett, and seriously wounded Britton's wife -- slaughtered two men and gunned down a woman, outside a woman's clinic, because Hill doesn't think women should be let to have abortions. Hill's anti-choice, so he kills people.

This, to this portion of the Christian Nation, is heroic.

Here's some other links you might be able to stomach. I can't:

http://www.armyofgod.com/PaulHillWhoIs.html

http://armyofgod.com/Paulhillindex.html

(Via PZ: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/)

Teaching Christians

I've got excellent students this summer, I do, and I'm not just saying that -- these are TAA students, and don't ask me what that stands for, because I don't know and they don't either. What it means is that Whirlpool shipped jobs to Mexico and so half of Pork Smith got laid off, and under some deal with the Federal Govt has come back to school on grant money. So long as they stay in school full-time every single semester, including both summer semesters, and don't fail more than one class -- they can only fail one class, their entire university career, and they have to maintain a C average -- then they get to keep getting the TAA grant.

But they can't lay out a semester, and that includes summers.

These are people who have worked the line since they were sixteen, seventeen years old -- many of them are now fifty, sixty years old. Few of them are stupid and all of them are working hard. They have formed study groups and they coach each other and they do all the work and they do not quit. I love these students.

But do they have a background in what they need to know to read novels and literature? Do they know zip about Western Culture?

Oh, my.

I'm using True Grit as the novel in my Freshman Comp class. (You'll recollect I gave up on Major Barbara, b/c no one would read it, and the ones who would read it couldn't read it.)

Well, they're reading True Grit. And they like True Grit. None of them had ever heard of it, mind you, which was a bit of a shock to me -- I almost didn't teach it because I figured everyone would have read it already. I mean, we're living in Fort Smith, and, hell, the movie plays every six minutes on TMC. How could they not have read it already?

But no. They had no idea the book or the movie existed.

Anyway, about half the class read it before we got to it, and the rest like it well enough, though one was surprised when I said it was fiction. "But these places are all real!" she exclaimed.

Apparently only books about places like Oz and Hogwarts are fiction? Don't ask me.

But they're liking the book, we're doing fine, I'm talking to them about why we read literature, what it's for, how it isn't escape, how their mamas lied to them, how it's important business, the most important business, how it's the work of culture, my usual lecture on that, then I start to talk about why we write about literature, and how we do it, and I start on the example I had picked out, which I picked out because I figured it would be easy.

"Consider the cluster of images in the opening sections of the book," I said. "When Mattie says that her father is his brother's keeper, and says that Tom Cheney has a mark on his face like banished Cain, and that no one knows why Cheney shot the Senator, or the birddog, for that matter, or why he shot her father. What is up with that?"

They gazed at me blankly.

"Any ideas?"

Not a one, apparently.

"What's the mark of Cain?" I asked. "Why's Cain got that mark?"

"Yeah," one student said. "I was wondering. What's that mean?"

I had meant it as a rhetorical question, but they were all gazing at me in frank puzzlement. I stared back, astounded. "Cain and Abel?" I said. "You know, the story of Cain and..."

They waited, interested.

"Who knows the story of Cain and Abel?" I asked. No one spoke. "Why did Cain kill Abel?" I asked. No one answered.

Then, in the third row, hesitantly, "Wasn't it because his father was going to sacrifice him? Or...send him away? Right?"

"No," I said. "No." I did not stomp up and down and yell Good Shit a Christian Nation My ASS!

Even though I wanted to.

No, I just told them the story of Cain and Abel.

About halfway through, one of them interrupted me: "I never heard this story before!" she marveled.

Another said, "This is a really good story!"

"Yeah," I said, wryly. "That Bible, it's got some cool stuff in it."

When I was done, I said, "Portis expects you to know this and pick up on it. It's an image cluster he--" (The poor schmuck, I did not add) "--expects his audience to have in their heads. So. What's this add to our text?"

And what's this mean, about teaching literature in this Christian Nation, when they do not, in fact, have the King James Bible -- or any Bible -- in their heads? When they have NEVER heard of Cain and Abel? At all?

Hell, most of them haven't even heard of Buffy anymore.

They're blank slates indeed, these folk.

Okay

Especially if you are a fan of this site

http://icanhascheezburger.com/



go read this

http://blog.3bulls.net/?p=1646

b/c liberals are really wicked, and have too much time on their hands.

Re-run

I was hunting something in my old blogposts and came across this.

http://delagar.blogspot.com/2004/10/those-damn-liberals.html

War Crimes

You must go here and read this:
A Report on Abu Ghraib at the New Yorker.

Some excerpts:

When Taguba urged one lieutenant general to look at the photographs, he rebuffed him, saying, “I don’t want to get involved by looking, because what do you do with that information, once you know what they show?”

***

Several of these images, including one of an Iraqi woman detainee baring her breasts, have since surfaced; others have not. (Taguba’s report noted that photographs and videos were being held by the C.I.D. because of ongoing criminal investigations and their “extremely sensitive nature.”) Taguba said that he saw “a video of a male American soldier in uniform sodomizing a female detainee.” The video was not made public in any of the subsequent court proceedings, nor has there been any public government mention of it

***

The team spent much of February, 2004, in Iraq. Taguba was overwhelmed by the scale of the wrongdoing. “These were people who were taken off the streets and put in jail—teen-agers and old men and women,” he said. “I kept on asking these questions of the officers I interviewed: ‘You knew what was going on. Why didn’t you do something to stop it?’ ”

***

If they had spoken, Taguba said, he would have reminded Miller that at Abu Ghraib, unlike at Guantánamo, very few prisoners were affiliated with any terrorist group. Taguba had seen classified documents revealing that there were only “one or two” suspected Al Qaeda prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Most of the detainees had nothing to do with the insurgency. A few of them were common criminals.

***

The official inquiries consistently provided the public with less information about abuses than outside studies conducted by human-rights groups. In one case, in November, 2004, an Army investigation, by Brigadier General Richard Formica, into the treatment of detainees at Camp Nama, a Special Forces detention center at Baghdad International Airport, concluded that detainees who reported being sodomized or beaten were seeking sympathy and better treatment, and thus were not credible.

***

(At the hearings)...And, as a result, somebody just sent a secret report to the press, and there they are,” Rumsfeld said.

Taguba, watching the hearings, was appalled. He believed that Rumsfeld’s testimony was simply not true. “The photographs were available to him—if he wanted to see them,” Taguba said. Rumsfeld’s lack of knowledge was hard to credit. Taguba later wondered if perhaps Cambone had the photographs and kept them from Rumsfeld because he was reluctant to give his notoriously difficult boss bad news. But Taguba also recalled thinking, “Rumsfeld is very perceptive and has a mind like a steel trap. There’s no way he’s suffering from C.R.S.—Can’t Remember Shit. He’s trying to acquit himself, and a lot of people are lying to protect themselves.” It distressed Taguba that Rumsfeld was accompanied in his Senate and House appearances by senior military officers who concurred with his denials.

“The whole idea that Rumsfeld projects—‘We’re here to protect the nation from terrorism’—is an oxymoron,” Taguba said. “He and his aides have abused their offices and have no idea of the values and high standards that are expected of them. And they’ve dragged a lot of officers with them.”


http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/06/25/070625fa_fact_hersh?printable=true

The whole thing is very long, but it's worth the trip. Sickening, but worth it.

Overheard

This "It Takes A Village" moment

Is brought to you by OverheardinNY:

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/


Mom to screaming child: Shut the fuck up!

Man: Yeah, keep telling your kid 'Shut the fuck up' so he can grow up and steal my car someday.

--6 train
Overheard by: ChickyWang

Marriage in the Patriarchy

Over here at Twisty's Place

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2007/06/13/the-post-on-marriage/#comments

And here at Feministe:

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2007/06/13/im-never-getting-married/

We're talking about marriage.

Marriage in the Patriarchy, which there isn't any other kind, is there?

I've been ruminating over this issue myself for, oh, what is it, nine years now? Might be more. Because mine didn't really get rough until the kid showed up. Before that I was married, sure, but mr. delagar was still working out of the marriage -- traveling a great deal, gone more than he was home -- and it was very like not being married at all.

Once the kid arrived, and he quit that job and became a stay-at-home-dad, that's when the actual marriage started.

And when we moved to Pork Smith, when the kid was three, and he stopped being a stay-at-home-dad, and started working at teaching and going to graduate school, hmm. Now we hit the patriarchy full-bore: because now we both work full-time.

See, mr. delagar, he's a good guy. A liberal guy (mostly). He loves me. Honest. I love him. But has he been raised in the patriarchy? Oh, has he indeed. Does he think he has a right to enter the kitchen and say to me, "Make me a sandwich"?

Do you need to ask?

And whose job do you think he thinks the laundry is? The vaccuuming? The cleaning of the bathroom? Childcare? Dishes? Fixing dinner? Arranging medical care and transportation to same?

He says he will "help" me with these, that all I have to do is ask, and he'll do what I say.

Notice the phrasing there.

Notice the position this puts me in.

Notice, also, that when I do ask, he (very often) ignores me, or says, "Not now, I'm working on (whatever it is -- his dissertation, his music, his writing)." Or he's watching some movie. Or something, you know, important. Not like me. My time is not of value.

This continues until, once every three or four months, we have a fight -- instigated by me -- in which I holler at him about how it isn't fair for him to force me to do all the work in the house, he admits it's not, swears he'll stop, and does stop -- for about two weeks -- and then slips back into his old habits.

So I have a choice: become a shrieking harpy, make our lives -- mine and the kid's, as well as his -- a fucking misery; do all the work myself, like a good oppressed member of the patriarchy; live in an utter sty(which, actually, I've tried that one); or continue this fucked pattern.

There's marriage with a good liberal man for you. Want to sign up?