Lillian Gish with guns

I’m sure you, too, have days when you need to see an excellent woman shoulder the gun and right some wrongs. Here’s how it’s gonna be, you’ll say, and that dude with “love” and “hate” written on his knuckles will just have to back off.

GOP shame game hits snag, still winning the long con

Richmond, VA: The Virginia personhood bill has been tabled by the state senate. Don’t worry, folks! It’s only been tabled until next year. Because the real con game here isn’t about personhood or abortion, it’s shaming women! (BTW: the unnecessary ultrasound bill is ready for the VA governor’s signature, even though it’s no longer a trans-vaginal probe ultrasound!)

Ever disliked a woman? A female boss, an ex-girlfriend, Nancy Pelosi, that mean girl in high school, that woman who got into a college that rejected you? Weeellll. This game shames all women, and that’s gotta be good for all of us!

This game is a lot like chess, except with blunt instruments. This is the long con, the game that stretches out for years. This game is not for the faint of heart.

Step #1 has already been accomplished: Making the abortion issue solely about women’s shame. When was the last time you saw a woman in one of those t-shirts that says, “I had an abortion”? Ha! All that screaming outside of women’s health clinics = success!

Step #2: Shift those glasses you’re wearing to black and white. Don’t be fooled by talk of “incest exceptions,” “women’s health,” “rape,” or “Republicans favor small government.” There is right and there is wrong, folks! Never the twain shall meet! And what is right is that men get to have patriarchal control over everything, and that women be shamed into silence and sexual submission.

Step #3: There is no hyperbole too outrageous. Propose a bill that requires all women seeking birth control to undergo religious counselling. A bill that requires female circumcision of all girls starting at the age of 10. Nothing is too extreme if you’re draped in the righteousness of Christianity!

Addendum to Step #3: Don’t worry if you lose these small battles — that’s not the point! The point is that we win the war, and the war is about shaming women and requiring female silence! In fact, the more hyperbolic the bill, the more we make all women think, “Hang on, am I supposed to be ashamed that I need birth control pills to manage my fibroid condition?”

Step #4: Shame all women in the public sphere who might offer up a counter-argument to female shame and silence. Let’s take the story of Quanitta “Queen” Underwood, the female boxer who’s likely to be the US’s best Olympic hope for the lightweight belt. Just recently she revealed something she had never told her closest friends: that between the ages of 10 and 13, Queen’s father raped her and her older sister on a regular basis. At first, he raped her older sister while Queen lay next to her in bed, pretending to be asleep. Eventually they told their (absent) mother, and he was imprisoned. This kind of coming-through-slaughter story is exactly what we need to squelch!

Solution: Propose that female boxers be forced to wear skirts when they compete. See how wearing a skirt reminds women athletes that the only important thing about their skill is their lady-business and/or how pretty they are? Get everyone distracted by the skirts question such that they ignore the Queen’s tale of survival — it doesn’t matter that you lose this campaign, because we’ll just propose skirts again for the next sport!

Our favorite part of this proposal: the perversion of the notion of choice. The outcome of this battle is that now, female boxers get to “choose” between shorts or a skirt.

And that leads to our last Step, #5: Rewrite the notion of choice. Bombard the airwaves with new definitions of the “right to choose” in a campaign so intense that everyone forgets that this terminology once had anything to do with abortion.

Example: Michelle Bachmann calls herself a feminist and speaks of the right to choose to raise 23 foster children. See how that muddies the water about choice, narrowing it down to the issue of how to be a mother?

Example: Sarah Palin calls herself a feminist and speaks of the right to choose between using a vacuum cleaner or crawling around the house on one’s hands and knees with a sponge and a bucket of water. You gotta leave room open for the fundamentalists who decry vacuum cleaners, after all.

Example: Lawmakers decide to end what some feminists call “rape culture” by urging Americans to “choose femininity, not rape.” This will mean nothing aside from shutting up those ugly women who want to break the silence. “Why do you choose rape?” we can ask in response. “Why talk about such nasty things as infections, diseases, humiliation, injury? Why not choose femininity?”

The shame game is one we will win, provided we all commit to it for the long haul. Down side: your daughters will grow up stupid, hunchbacked, and will cringe annoyingly whenever they’re spoken to. Up side: you won’t have to pay for college! and when you get bored with your alternately pregnant/breast-feeding wife, you can sleep with whomever you like, free of consequences.

Men = winners!

The quiet and “Secret World of Arrietty”

So I have this 5-yr-old niece who would love The Secret World of Arrietty (Kari-gurashi no Arietti). She’s got a twin brother and an older sister who take after their father — blonde, loud, socially charming, hyperactive. In contrast, this one is her mother’s child: dark-haired, quiet and imaginative, and prone to artistic focus for hours at a time. She would be entranced by the slow-moving beauty this film displays, because she’s very little, although not quite as small as Arrietty.I can’t help but watch Arrietty with a sense of regret. Hayao Miyazaki didn’t direct this film, but his hand is all over it as screenwriter, production planner, and having the whole thing done via his Ghibli Studios. Miyazaki refuses to make those computer-animated, jacked-up, and over-caffeinated films that fill theaters. In fact, our theater prefaced this film with at least ten previews for kids’ movies — Brave, Mirror Mirror, The Lorax, and The Pirates (a new claymation film by the Wallace and Gromit people) most notable among them — all supercharged and moving so quickly you feel like you’re missing half the action. In contrast, Arrietty takes its time, lets you pay savor every beautiful, hand-drawn and colored shot. The down side: it can get a little dull. Also: the dialogue can get pretty creaky for people over the age of 5. But mostly: it’s not weird, like Miyazaki’s best films, such as Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), Princess Mononoke (1997), and Spirited Away (2001).

Arrietty is based on Mary Norton’s The Borrowers (1952), a book I remember only loosely — but what a great idea for little kids. Arrietty and her parents are tiny people who live under the floorboards of a country house. They are borrowers — that is, they take little bits of things that the family will never notice, like a sugar cube, pins, tissues, a bit of string, and only things that allow them to survive. It’s a kind of big fish/ little fish symbiosis scenario premised on a couple of things: they must borrow without being seen, and if they cease to be secret, they must move away to a new house. What child wouldn’t want to think of a tiny family cobbling together a mirror house underneath your own, and stealing a postage stamp or a fish hook here & there to make life a little easier?

It’s a strange film to see as an adult, as it’s really more appropriate for small children. Arrietty’s parents are voiced recognizably by Amy Poehler and Will Arnett, two of the funniest people in show business, but they’re weirdly low-energy and unfunny. It’s as if they’ve received mild lobotomies, which distracted me from the story — even though I knew I wasn’t supposed to think so much about the voices behind the characters. There’s also a prevailing sense of sadness in the tale that works together with the film’s slowness and visual wonder. Sadness because the boy Shawn arrives at the house to prepare for his upcoming heart surgery while feeling neglected by his busy professional mother; and sadness because Shawn spots Arrietty, offers her the gift of a sugar cube, and gradually becomes friends with her, making it necessary that the borrowers leave their lovely house for parts unknown.

Sadness is a strange mood to prevail over such a lovely film. I love what the Ghibli filmmakers decided to do in creating this world: although the characters big and small are all obvious cartoons, the backdrops are beautifully realistic, if idealized. When Arrietty climbs the ivy up the side of the house, the ivy is portrayed in all its colorful, light-filled, twisted majesty. The camera occasionally scans a meadow full of flowers and bugs. Or it scans upward to watch light coming through the leaves of a tall tree. For tiny children, such scenes must be even more entrancing than for adults — a reminder to observe the world around you with even more attention in case you might catch a glimpse of a tiny girl in a red dress, slipping amongst the leaves.

But for the rest of us Miyazaki fans, it’s beautiful yet disappointing and oddly tame. What I love about his sometimes ponderous films is the way they take strange turns, display strange and dark motivations, and feature female characters who must address scary situations they’re not really prepared for, either emotionally or physically. At times, as in Spirited Away, the girl is not even very likeable for a while. Considering that Arrietty clocks in at a tidy 94 minutes (speedy by Ghibli standards), it’s kind of boring.

As much as I found myself disappointed by the film, I’ve got it on my list for the next time I see my little niece, who has all manner of weird things going on in her little mind. She’ll love it. It might even be one of those films that hits her quiet 5-yr-old mind in that way that means something beyond the shape of the actual film. Because really, how do we know how film works the way it does? How do we know what will stick in our minds as meaningful long after the fact?

Dear Rick Santorum

Do you know what the real problem is with women in this country? Shoes. Give a woman shoes, and she’ll think that God intended her to leave the house and/or get a job. Next thing ya know, she’ll be putting her children into government (aka “public”) schools rather than educatering them at home.

That’s right! It’s ladies’ shoes that lead to birth control and abortion, doing nasty things in the sexual realm that are counter to how things are supposed to be, and public education. Have you seen an episode of Sex and the City (aka “Demonesses Living in the Hellfire of Their Own Making”)? All those evil ladies do is expound their phony ideologies and buy shoes! And let various and motley men-folk explore their hoo-hah regions!

It might take a while for ladies to get used to being barefoot and pregnant all the time, but it’s God’s plan! I beg you to take my advice and hold forth on the evils of shoes for women. And I look forward to your being President Santorum!

yours in the everloving sanctity of patriarchal control over the vajay-jay,

Didion/ Feminéma

Richard Armitage fan fest coming March 12

I’ve had the banner on this blog’s sidebar for a couple of weeks now — just what is a FanstRAvaganza 3, you ask? It’s the combined efforts of 34 different bloggers to celebrate the talents of a British actor you may not know, but you should: Richard Armitage.

Perhaps you’re saying to yourself, now there’s a nice bit of eye candy. You’ll be forgiven by the bloggers participating in this blogfest, who know perfectly well that one of Armitage’s great gifts is looking good. Just don’t underestimate his acting skills. I know him best from North and South (stay tuned for more on that subject), but he also starred as Guy of Gisborne in the British TV series Robin Hood, Lucas North in Spooks (series 7 & 8), and John Porter in Strike Back; he’ll appear as Thorin Oakenshield in the forthcoming The Hobbit films.

Blogfest organizers have found a way to do something quite innovative (and organizationally complicated): each post will link to another post via what they’re calling a tag-team, allowing readers to move through shared ideas from blog to blog, almost as if they’re conversations about a theme or a performance. Because, of course, it’s intended to be a conversation: a way for 34 different writers and their many readers to chime in and think about these topics. What a terrific idea, and what a nicely democratic way to get everyone talking to everyone else.

Maybe the whole idea a fan-oriented blogfest makes you want to vomit: maybe you’ve never heard of Armitage, or you look down your nose at fan blogs. Again, let me suggest you pop in on this one anyway, because these writers run the gamut of great weblog philosophizing. They might admire his shoulders in one sentence and ponder the nature of objectification in the next; sing the praises of his sensitivity in a scene and then think about why the dynamics of that particular scene might speak so profoundly to a viewer dealing with the crap and trauma that life throws at us. Readers of this blog know that’s my own impulse as a writer: the personal is political, and the filmic is both personal and political.

Starting March 12, the following bloggers will start tag-teaming and conversing — join me in the chat, won’t you?

A is for Armitage
An Obsessed Fanatic
Avalon’s Realm
C.S. Winchester
Cerridwen Speaks
Crispin’s Eclipse
Do I Have a Blog?
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Country Life
Fly High!
Funky Blue Delphinium
I Want to be a Pinup!
Just Another Armitage Fan
La Loba
Me, My Thoughts & Richard Armitage
Melanie’s Musings
Mr John Thornton
Musings & Other Enigmas
Phylly’s Faves
Searching for MY Mr. Darcy
Something About Love (A)
Thearmitageeffect
White Rose: Sincere and Simple Thoughts
Y que iba yo a contar

And the whole thing with be anchored by the following:

Confessions of a Watcher
Bccmee’s Fanvids & Graphics
CDoart: Richard Armitage & History & Spooks
Distracted Musings of One ReAlity
Jonia’s Cut
Me + richard armitage
RA Frenzy
An RA Viewer’s Perspective from 33 0′ South of the Equator
Richard Armitage Fan Blog
The Squeee

Whitney Houston’s “Star Spangled Banner,” 1991

Is there any song more difficult to sing than the Star Spangled Banner?

Is there any song so familiar to us that has lyrics so convoluted, so martial? As national anthem tunes go I’d say it weighs in on the “more memorable” side of the coin, but I’m not sure I’d commit to anything more enthusiastic.

But watching Whitney Houston’s rendition, done at at the opening ceremony for the 1991 Super Bowl, is something else. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard something so spectacular: she takes a hoary old tune — and a big, quaint old orchestra with lots of brass behind her — out of its usual skin and plants it straight into the black church for a lesson in gospel. What she does with her voice here, and what she does to that difficult song, is by all measures evidence that she possessed a gift for channeling joy and glory — all the more summoned by her perfect pitch, that beautiful, beatific face, and her long, long arms, reached out to the sky:

She starts out deceptively, singing it straight up with the usual message and tenor; if anything, you’re impressed by the strength and volume of her voice. (That woman had breath.) But by the end of the second line — “the twilight’s last gleaming” — she drops into something more intimate, makes you lean a little closer. Those middle lyrics are sung with a low quietness, with only glimpses of the spectacular melisma she could perform with her voice. When she gets to the stunning joyousness of “And the rocket’s red glare” — she seems to leap across octaves as if she’s summoning angels, closing her eyes and belting out those words with a defiant volume, chin lifted to the sky. Ignore the words: Whitney’s singing something else.

By this time it feels like another song altogether, one you don’t know so well. Physically, her body moves not like that of a pop goddess or a diva but the soloist of a gospel choir in the midst of ecstatic communion, with her head moving freely, her arms and shoulders engaged. There’s nothing to make fun of here — nothing overwrought or over-exposed, the way we got tired of hearing “I Will Always Love You” from that awful film The Bodyguard (1992). No, this is something else, something commanding.

By the time she gets to that last impossible line and that high note, “O’er the land of the free,” it’s just otherworldly — just when you find yourself thinking, “how does she hit that note so right on?” she goes up an octave and seems to use her full body to extract every ounce of vocal energy. This is about coming through slaughter, about resilience, about breaking the chains. This is about exile and return, and this is about community and grace.

Finally she takes the last lyric home, on what I’ve always thought was a weirdly ambivalent final note in the song with ”and the home of the brave.” Rather than do what most singers do — pretend the ambivalence isn’t there and make that note resolve — Whitney draws out the ambivalence as long as she can, preferring to nail the resolution with sheer stamina in the way she holds the final note for what feels like minutes. She brings us home — shows us the promised land, gathers us together in love with her long, long last note, the power of her breath.

Que en paz descanse, Whitney.

Rick Santorum and vasectomies? and Viagra?

Does anyone know whether Santorum has paused in his misogynistic, anti-feminist diatribe against abortion, birth control, and public education to comment on vasectomies and the use of Viagra?

Because I’d be very interested in knowing that all this The Handmaid’s Tale-quality stuff out of his mouth ever deals with men. Please let me know.

“The Interrupters” (2011) and a model of female power

See this film right now — even if you have to sit in front of your computer and watch it streaming free from the PBS website. See it so you can gush with me over the role that Ameena Matthews plays in stopping violence in Chicago.

Made by the same documentary director as Hoop Dreams (1994), Steve James, The Interrupters shows us how you might go about dropping violence and homicide rates among young people who are largely untouchable by ordinary social institutions. The group CeaseFire hires members of local neighborhoods, often individuals like Matthews who used to be formidable members of gangs.

Watching Matthews talk people down is the most amazing thing I’ve seen, and she often does this at funerals and prayer vigils. Grieving and angered over the death of a friend, a group of young people might rouse themselves into an angry gang, eager for retribution. It’s at that point that she inserts herself to get people to calm down.

She does an amazing thing: she is simultaneously threatening and maternal. She gets right up in someone’s face to make sure he hears her. She bobs like a boxer. All the while she speaks of her own past as a gang enforcer (which many of the kids know about by reputation) and the mistakes she made. She tells them to stop. She looks meaningfully at the tallest and oldest of them — again, with a look that shows her vast, cynical knowledge of machismo and retribution — and says, “I’m looking to you.”

Sure, she’s beautiful and always wrapped in a headscarf. Sure, her father was a formidable gang leader, and some of the kids have heard about that. But what she does is an unholy mix of smart perception, distraction, offering perspective, berating. For us gender watchers, it’s a fascinating snapshot of what a powerful woman might do with her smarts, her gifts, her own troubled past. And when she has a series of interactions with a troubled teen girl coming back from prison and trying to get her life together, we see another level of Matthews’ maternalism.

Fantastic film — and not just because of Matthews. I’d heard people muttering complaints about the bizarre list of finalists for the Academy Awards for Best Documentary, and now I have to agree. I’ve seen two of the finalists and they’re deeply disappointing in contrast to some of my favorites this year, including Buck and Cave of Forgotten Dreams. Steve James also missed out on a nomination back in the ’90s for Hoop Dreams, which led to a revolution (supposedly) in how those finalists were chosen. So let’s all give The Interrupters some love to make up for its lack of recognition with the Oscars.

Returning to Little House in the Big Woods

Between the ages of 6 and 10 or so, I probably re-read the entire 9-book set of Little House on the Prairie books 60 or 70 times. My parents saw it as a sign of my budding eccentricity. “She finishes The First Four Years and starts over,” they’d tell their friends. These were also the years when I lobbied most vigorously for a horse for Christmas so I could enjoy at least a little bit of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life. (Never one to miss an opportunity, my sister started lobbying for a cheetah, thus putting the kibosh on both pets. Thanks for that, sis.)

Eventually I moved on to other reading obsessions and the re-reading stopped about age 10. Which means I haven’t read Little House in the Big Woods for roundabout 35 years.

Reading it again is an eerie experience for someone who once knew it more or less by heart, and not just because I’d forgotten the overall shape of the book. At the same time it makes me remember my childhood fantasies, the book itself is the collected memories of a woman looking back to the year she turned 5. Reading it again is, in other words, a strange experience of doubledness. As a child I imagined myself as Laura, that “little half-pint of sweet cider half drunk up!” Now — well, who am I as I read this book? A 6-year-old once again? Myself as a 40-something academic (who is, eccentrically, reading a children’s book)? The elderly Wilder, looking back? Or even her middle-aged daughter Rose Wilder Lane, who likely served as ghostwriter for the series?

Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs. The great, dark trees of the Big Woods stood all around the house, and beyond them were other trees and beyond them were more trees. As far as a man could go to the north in a day, or a week, or a whole month, there was nothing but woods.

I dare you to come up with opening lines as evocative as these. With three sentences, Wilder blows out of the water every single fairy tale I’ve ever read. And let’s not overlook the way the book was printed — these lines are framed by Garth Williams’ 1953 illustrations of Laura skipping toward us, with her family behind her. Opening the book to this page is like being greeted both by an old friend and by a family that might be your own.

Did I mention my father grew a beard about this time?

It’s easy to remember a few major elements, like the fact that it’s written much more plainly than the later volumes — this book is written for 4- or 5-yr-olds, or 6-yr-olds who can read on their own. Wilder opens with her family preparing for winter — smoking venison inside an upright log, stacking their attic with root vegetables and salted fish, butchering the pig. No one ever forgets the scene in which Laura and Mary play with a balloon made of the pig’s bladder, but I’d forgotten that their favorite specialty was chewing on the roasted pig’s tail.

Little House in the Big Woods is an episodic, anecdotal story of four seasons with this family, and it feels like a conversation with an exceptionally exacting granny — a woman who knows when to load you up with detail (how to prepare said pig’s tail for roasting; how to make bullets; what Aunt Ruby and Aunt Docia’s fine dresses looked like, and how they arranged their hair) and when to just spin a great tale, like when Pa tells them the story of when he was a child, and he and his brothers sneaked out on Sunday afternoon to go sledding against his strict father’s Christian rules, and how misadventure followed.

I’d forgotten — repressed, perhaps — that the sledding story ended with a royal whipping. I’d also forgotten that Pa tells her this story after Laura disobeys his own more lenient rules for Sunday behavior.

It’s unsurprising that I would have forgotten the whipping(s), because this is a book about familial love within a very tight nuclear family. All of Wilder’s memories have a hazy glow about them of love and pride and respect. Extended family members appear occasionally, but those scenes aren’t as significant as Laura’s love for her father, the relationship that dominates the book. Little House in the Big Woods is just about the most ideal situation one can imagine for a little girl.

Ideal especially because Laura isn’t perfect. She has “ugly brown” hair, and sometimes she breaks things, sulks, can’t sit still. She hates being a girl (I did too), and the book makes it clear that being a girl was worse than being a boy (I knew that, somehow, and was relieved to see it articulated). One time the sisters have a fight — a realistic one, I can assure you — and Mary says:

“I don’t care. Aunt Lotty likes my hair best, anyway. Golden hair is lots prettier than brown.”

Laura’s throat swelled tight, and she could not speak. She knew golden hair was prettier than brown. She couldn’t speak, so she reached out quickly and slapped Mary’s face. 

Then she heard Pa say, “Come here, Laura.”

 

What should we find most disturbing about this scene? The fact that even during the 1860s brown-haired girls felt inferior to their blonde sisters? That Laura should be the only one punished for this sisterly spat?

As a child reader I blew past both of those objections to the fact that Wilder is ridiculously generous to her sister, considering scenes like this in which Mary appears as a self-important prig. Wilder insists throughout that Mary was a good and well-behaved girl in contrast to Laura’s impetuosity and athleticism. Even knowing that Mary would eventually go blind (in By the Shores of Silver Lake, book #5) and therefore perhaps deserved special pleading, I always distrusted Wilder’s rosy account of her sister.

Reading it now, though, it appears in a different light. I care less about Mary than the way these scenes flesh out Laura’s character. Laura has an essential sweetness that I could imagine having (but didn’t). Even when she smacks her sister, I see how this fight helped shape her character. Scenes of Laura’s misbehavior can’t be seen outside of the other moments that illustrate her admirable qualities:

Mary was bigger than Laura, and she had a rag doll named Nettie. Laura had only a corncob wrapped in a handkerchief, but it was a good doll. It was named Susan. It wasn’t Susan’s fault that she was only a corncob. Sometimes Mary let Laura hold Nettie, but she did it only when Susan couldn’t see.

You see? Don’t you fall in love with a little girl who’s that considerate of a corncob doll?

The other trick Wilder pulls off is explaining in vivid detail the dangers that surround this Little House without terrifying little readers. The way an owl hooting in the dark woods can scare the bejeezus out of a child. The ominous presence of black panthers, who might chase a man riding a horse home at night. The time Laura and Ma go out to milk the cow on a black, dark night and run into a huge black bear — but it’s so dark that Ma mistakes it at first for Sukey, and she gives it a good smack on the bear’s rump. Somehow those tales never gave me nightmares, perhaps because of the reassuring presence of Ma and Pa throughout … and perhaps the regular appearance of exotic sweets like molasses candy, cooled in a pot of snow.

Some scenes had receded so far into my memory that it felt like read them de novo. Excuse me while I quote at length from the family’s maple sugar party and dance, at which Pa plays the fiddle as fast as possible. Until this moment, Grandma has remained in the kitchen, keeping an eye on the syrup boiling away on the stove. But then:

Suddenly Uncle George did a pigeon wing, and bowing low before Grandma he began to jig. Grandma tossed her spoon to somebody. She put her hands on her hips and faced Uncle George, and everybody shouted. Grandma was jigging.

Laura clapped her hands in time to the music, with all the other clapping hands. The fiddle sang as it had never sung before. Grandma’s eyes were snapping and her cheeks were red, and underneath her skirts her heels were clicking as fast as the thumping of Uncle George’s boots.

Everybody was excited. Uncle George kept on jigging and Grandma kept on facing him, jigging too. The fiddle did not stop. Uncle George began to breathe loudly, and he wiped sweat off his forehead. Grandma’s eyes twinkled.

“You can’t beat her, George!” somebody shouted.

Uncle George jigged faster. He jigged twice as fast as he had been jigging. So did Grandma. Everybody cheered again. All the women were laughing and clapping their hands, and all the men were teasing George. George did not care, but he did not have breath enough to laugh. He was jigging.

Pa’s blue eyes were snapping and sparkling. He was standing up, watching George and Grandma, and the bow danced over the fiddle strings. Laura jumped up and down and squealed and clapped her hands.

Grandma kept on jigging. Her hands were on her hips and her chin was up and she was smiling. George kept on jigging, but his boots did not thump as loudly as they had thumped at first. Grandma’s heels kept on clickety-clacking gaily. A drop of sweat dripped off George’s forehead and shone on his cheek. 

All at once he threw up both arms and gasped, “I’m beat!” He stopped jigging.

Everybody made a terrific noise, shouting and yelling and stamping, cheering Grandma. Grandma jigged just a little minute more, then she stopped. She laughed in gasps. Her eyes sparkled just like Pa’s when he laughed. George was laughing, too, and wiping his forehead on his sleeve. 

This scene is so delicious that I cried upon re-reading it. I should note here that my own granny wanted us to call her “Grandmother” and exemplified the lace-curtain Irish stereotype; she told stories of a comparatively exotic and cosmopolitan childhood roaming the 1910s and 1920s streets of Manhattan and, although she could demonstrate how to dance the Charleston, would have seen jigging competitions as gauche. Oh, how I wanted a granny who could jig, whose eyes “snapped,” and who lived in the Big Woods.

Despite the narrator’s heroic efforts to describe everything, there are hints of unknowability: the book is filled with song lyrics, some for tunes I still don’t know and which baffle even now — I was surprised to feel a familiar ache for lack of knowledge about those mystery tunes with strange lyrics. Who in my generation ever grew up knowing obscure lyrics for “Pop! Goes the Weasel” and “Yankee Doodle”? Who ever heard of a song about a “old darkey” named Uncle Ned or a poor husband whose wife only lets him drink whey with no cream in it?

I didn’t always revert back to emotions I’d felt as a 6-yr-old reader. I experienced odd moments realizing I can now reconstruct the book’s context. “Uncle George has come back from the Civil War!” I said to myself with odd realization during the scene when George takes his bugle outside and wails its song into the woods. Likewise, when Laura gets her first chance to see a real town — of Pepin, Wisconsin — I quickly raced to find Pepin on a map, something I’m quite sure I never did as a kid. I remember, too, being confused by that opening line, explaining that the book happened “sixty years ago” — not knowing that the book was originally published in the early 1930s. Considering that it never, ever snowed in my hometown, I can surely be excused for seeing the whole tale as so exotic that it must have existed out of time.

But nothing worked my confusion of identities (and my tear ducts) more than the book’s ending. Again, I’d forgotten this until I re-read it and the words washed over me with that familiarity like a long-forgotten ability to play a song on the piano — these words, I found, are practically bound up with my muscle memory, they run so deep. This ending captures a feeling I knew so well as a child; but at this point I can’t remember whether it was a feeling I already had, or whether I learned it from re-reading the book so many times:

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the fire-light gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the fire-light and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

I’m weeping a little bit now as I type. And I ask you, was there ever a more philosophical concluding page in the history of children’s literature?

Three things to read/ listen to/ watch

I don’t do this often enough: recommend things I’m reading, especially considering how much these three pieces have provoked my imagination during the past week. Don’t want to overwhelm you, so I’ve narrowed it down to three:

First: the wonderful playwright Tony Kushner (Angels in America, The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures) recently received the Puffin Prize, The Nation Institute’s prize for Creative Citizenship — a highly lucrative award. Watch his funny, self-deprecating, and thoughtful 20-minute speech here — he’s not the most natural orator, but what he says is lovely; or read his full speech at The Nation’s site. (Actually, do both, because you miss some things in the video version.) He talks jokingly at first about winning prizes and then eloquently about what it means to be a citizen, even a bad one. Also: how he intends to spend all that money:

Second, read this smart piece about Rick Santorum’s particular appeal to Christian women, written by Kathy Ferguson of the University of Hawaii. Whereas I’ve been inclined to make fun of him, full stop, she does a magnificent job of thinking about how he performs the role of a parent who has suffered grief (of a dead baby, a severely disabled child) and hence touches some women in deep ways. In “Making Sense of Rick Santorum,” Ferguson showed me that I need to come to grips with — well, if not Santorum, at least the women whose self-identification as mothers trumps everything, and even leads them to vote for such a man.

And third, finally, Terri Gross’s interview of Meryl Streep on Fresh Air was such a riveting and good-humored account of acting — acting as a form of singing (with special reference to Barbra Streisand); the similarities and differences between the voices of Julia Child and Margaret Thatcher; the way that coming of age as a girl eager to attract boys is a form of acting. I loved every minute and have added Streep to my list of Dream Dinner Party guests. (You can listen to it online or download it to your iTunes. I seem to listen to podcasts all the time now — at the gym, the grocery store, walking to work….)

Which reminds me: why don’t we have more female interviewers getting serious with other women artist/creator/politician interviewees on subjects that don’t devolve back to boys alone? Or weight loss? Can it be that women themselves don’t pass the Bechdel Test often enough?

Anyway. I do love seeing smart people being smart on the page/in person. Enjoy the pleasure of texts that sit above the usual.