Beyond the Fields We Know

My brain is feeling alternately empty and overly full. We’re going on a vacation to California this weekend, so I’m full of lists and plans and things to do. Which has made my brain seemingly empty of much else.

I had a post cooking in there about education based on an interesting thread on an editing discussion board. I have several drafts I could finish. I could go outside and take pictures of the beautiful flowers and plants growing madly all around and tell you all about them. Heck, I could take a couple shots of my cats and write the most boring post ever:

Eat. Drink. Poop. Scratch. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Repeat.

I’ll spare you that one.

Image via Wikipedia

Instead, I think I’ll use one of those lurking drafts to fill the empty blog void in my brain. I’ll share some gems from one of my all-time favorite books, Little, Big by John Crowley.

Our heroine is taking her morning bath, in my ideal bathroom*:

The Gothic bathroom had filled with steam. Its sort of Gothic was really more woodland than church; the vaulting of it arched above Daily Alice’s head and interlaced like meeting branches, and everywhere carven ivy, leaves, tendrils and vines were in restless biomorphic motion. On the surface of the narrow stained-glass windows, dew formed in drops on cartoon-bright trees, and on the distant hunters and vague fields which the trees framed; and when the sun on its lazy way had lit up all twelve of these, bejewelling the fog that rose from her bath, Daily Alice lay in a pool in a medieval forest. Her great-grandfather had designed the room, but another had made the glass. His middle name was Comfort, and that’s what Daily Alice felt. She even sang.

Our heroine’s mother is cooking, experiencing something similar to what happens to me when I wash dishes:

Mother was powdered to the elbows in the process of pie-making, not a mindless task though she liked to call it that, in fact she found that at it her thoughts were often clearest, notions sharpest; she could do things when her body was busy that she could at no other time, things like assemble her worries into ranks, each rank commanded by a hope. She remembered verses sometimes cooking that she had forgotten she knew, or spoke in tongues, her husband’s or her children’s or her dead father’s or her unborn, clearly-seen grandchildren’s, three graduated girls and a lean unhappy boy.

Our hero meets our heroine for the first time:

The more he looked at her the stronger [the feeling] grew, the more she looked at him the more he felt . . . what? In a moment of silence they simply looked at each other, and understanding hummed, thundered within Smoky as he realized what had happened: not only had he fallen in love with her, and at first sight, but she at first sight had fallen in love with him, and the two circumstances had this effect: his anonymity was being cured. Not disguised, as [his friend] George Mouse had tried to do, but cured, from the inside out. That was the feeling. It was as though she stirred him with cornstarch. He had begun to thicken.

*Ideal only if I can hire someone to clean it, especially all the little nooks and crannies of all that lead came.

Happy Anthromama Day!

Dear Loyal Readers,

Let me interrupt the normal stream of posts by the illustrious Anthromama for a short Mother’s day tribute.

Sincerely,

Anthropapa

Thank you Anthromama for all that you do, all that you are and all that you will be. Thank you for your smile, your laugh and the twinkle in your eye.

Thank you for your patience, your preschooler negotiation skills, and your tolerance of spousal grumpiness. Thank you for always seeing the beauty of nature, of children and of life in general when I seem to be unable.

Thank you for being the mother to those that are most precious to me.

Happy Mother’s Day!!

Anthropapa

Friday Silliness

I’ve been trying to finish an editing project (an analysis of Plato’s implicit criticism of the mimetic poetry and its relation to Athenian education!), plan our trip to California, and a thousand other things. Hence, no substantive blogging this week. But I did just come across this from The Scholarly Kitchen, which I present especially for Papa Bradstein, my favorite editor/cyclist/videographer friend:

The Girl is Four

We wish you a happy birthday,

A joyous and celebrated birthday,

To our dear Napoleona,

May you live a long, long life!

My dear girl is four years old today. She has celebrated in style, at a little party over the weekend

with friends and a new balance bike.

A balloon monster suddenly appeared

and left chaos in its wake.

This morning we had our customary birthday bagels and lox

and lots of hugs and kisses.

Was it only four years ago that you appeared in the world? We are so very glad you chose to join us.

You’ve been a princess from the start

and we’ll love you forever!

Busy Weekend Equals Short Post on Something Random

Napoleona’s birthday is tomorrow, so I’ll post pictures of her party from this weekend then. Did I mention a party? We also went to a going-away party for some work colleagues on Sunday. Ergo, no blogging over the last few days.

Image via Wikipedia

But I do want to quickly share this article from the Guardian online about Dylan Thomas’s daughter Aeronwy and his play Under Milk Wood. I went through a phase of loving his poetry when I was a girl–I even wrote a poem dedicated to him, which I am 90% glad/10% sad that I no longer have, because I’m sure it was mortifyingly bad.

I’m always fascinated by learning about people’s lives, their biographies, and how their life situations affected their work. And I’m also willing to laugh at my younger self for not noticing the joke in the name of the town in the play! (see photo)

This is so me…

How embarrassing is it: my kids will gladly inform you that “Mama is the Bacon Queen! She also loves butter!”

Need….more…vegetables…..gasp!

More Reasons to Love BookMooch

Image via Wikipedia

WARNING: This post is liberally peppered with links. Sorry if it’s annoying, but I’m really excited by this topic and just want to share the coolness.

I just came across this article on the Guardian’s website about book-swapping websites. As one of the largest such sites, BookMooch was featured prominently.

I’ve been a BookMooch member since…oh, heck, I have to go check my member page…la la bum tee bum…here we go, January 2007. I’ve mooched 40 books and given 37 (bad Mama: you’re really supposed to always give away more than you get, but thanks to a points donation by Helen, I’m still in the black!)

Aside from clearing out books I don’t want anymore and finding books I either can’t find elsewhere or that I’m willing to read but not buy, I also love the open-source, Free Culture, Creative Commonsy aspect. The Guardian article touches on some of BM founder John Buckman’s thoughts about how book swapping doesn’t really take any profits away from authors and publishers

And recently a few new interesting things have popped up in the Moochosphere: swapping shipping materials, which is a brilliant use of the BM network to reuse and share exactly what BM members need, and actual cooperation between a free book-swapping service and publishers. Added to the existing cool stuff like the ability to donate your BM points to charities, the ability to download every bit of information in the BM database (except user email and snail mail addresses) for free, and the constant tinkering with what it means to collaborate between reader/swappers, authors, and publishers, these innovations make me love BM even more.

Now I just need to find some more books to give away….

* * * * *

Interested? Read more about BookMooch here or here.

Education and Hierarchies

I’ve been enjoying reading a lot of homeschooling blogs lately, both Waldorf inspired and others. I’ve always tried to hold the possibility of homeschooling my children, at the same time that I have major doubts. I believe these thoughts started a few years ago when a close friend and Waldorf-inspired daycare provider chose to take her son out of Waldorf school. She felt that he was being pressured to read in an unhealthy way–which is not really indicative of the Waldorf curriculum in general, but more likely of his particular teacher.

She chose to unschool him, meaning they did not use any particular curriculum. They had ample opportunities for informal learning: for example, they had farm animals, Dad was an engineer and loved to build things and tinker, Mom was an accomplished singer, and the boy was old enough to go fishing on the river by himself.

Around that same time, Anthropapa became intrigued by the work of John Taylor Gatto, an award-winning teacher from New York City who had come to believe that American public schools were unhealthy in their methods and in fact did not teach children what they need. He’s quite adamant that most modern educational methods and compulsory education work against the goal of educating children to be healthy and well-rounded human beings. But the part that was astonishing to read was what he said about the roots of compulsory public education in the US:

From the beginning, there was purpose behind forced schooling, purpose which had nothing to do with what parents, kids, or communities wanted. Instead, this grand purpose was forged out of what a highly centralized corporate economy and system of finance bent on internationalizing itself was thought to need; that, and what a strong, centralized political state needed, too. School was looked upon from the first decade of the twentieth century as a branch of industry and a tool of governance. For a considerable time, probably provoked by a climate of official anger and contempt directed against immigrants in the greatest displacement of people in history, social managers of schooling were remarkably candid about what they were doing. In a speech he gave before businessmen prior to the First World War, [US President] Woodrow Wilson made this unabashed disclosure:

“We want one class to have a liberal education. We want another class, a very much larger class of necessity, to forgo the privilege of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks.

I just finished editing a book about how the private and public education hierarchies in Istanbul interrelate with social hierarchies and economic class transformation. Many of the authors’ assertions about Turkish schools echo what Gatto says out about the US system:

A hierarchical system of attained levels of education is conducive not only to the reproduction of a social hierarchy but also attuned to economic hierarchies related to expertise and manpower needs for a developing division of labor in an emerging industrial economy. Together these features function to satisfy the role that the education system plays in socializing individuals to become loyal citizens and disciplined workers in modern nation-states. Just as the state legitimizes the education hierarchy, the education hierarchy lends legitimacy to the state and other hierarchies—political, economic, social, and cultural. (emphasis mine)

This also reminds me of what ElsieDeluxe has written about how she homeschools her sons:

[In schools] they’re just learning that somebody out there has a notion about what they should be doing all day, and they must sit still for it.

I’ll never forget how one day after reading some of Gatto’s writing, Anthropapa mentioned to me how he realized that despite the wonderful qualities of Waldorf school, it still involves a lot of sitting at a desk with the teacher as the authority figure at the front — the Prussian model of school as socialization.Now, I’m not completely knocking socialization here. I’d like my kids to be honest, and generous, and kind to others. I’d also like them to learn the rules of the road, how to be polite to strangers, and to learn compassion for other living things. All of this is part of socialization in my view.

But I’m not sure that learning to sit quietly for many hours at a desk is what some or even most kids really need. Certainly it fit my temperament as a child; I loved school, loved to sit still and read, and even played school at home. But I’d like my kids to be a little more involved with the world at large, to be physically active, to be artistic and musical, and to love not only book learning but life learning.

With at least of bit of the old “Question Authority” mentality mixed in, if only to free up their mental patterns (at this point I’m not quite ready for them to question my authority yet, thanks!)

The First Annual Fairy Ball

Do you know anyone who is half fairy?

I do!

My old neighbor seemed like a normal human mom. Heather had twin boys, worked as a doula and herbalist as well as a homeschool teacher. She drove her station wagon around town, and hooked me up with a wonderful biweekly food co-op. She loved to garden and be in nature whenever possible.

But then, sometimes her other side would come out. A few sparkles of fairy dust would appear on her cheek. Were those gossamer wings sprouting from her back?

Yes, Heather would magically transform into her other half, Fairy Una Wildwood, to the delight of all the children in town. In the spring and summer she hosts delightful Enchantment Camps: weeks of crafts, songs, and play all about fairies, mermaids, pirates, and other imaginative worlds in nature and beyond. Sometimes she invites the children for weekly explorations of fairy realms for an hour or two at the Enchanted Cottage, or she might even appear at the local library to tell magical tales and sing fairy songs. Una even flutters off to birthday parties to enchant all the children with stories and gifts from the fairy kingdoms.

But this last weekend, something amazing happened! Una decided that the children needed to meet some of her friends from fairyland. And so, the Children’s Fairy Ball came to be.

I arrived to help Una decorate the hall in true fairy fashion: garlands of flowers, flocks of butterflies, twinkling fairy lights, and even a giant mushroom bedecked the scene. Tempting food was prepared, and places set for all the children to enjoy with their families.

Suddenly, I was transported to Una’s fairy realm, and became one of her companions — the Fairy Dust Fairy! I found myself dressed in a blue dress with trailing ribbons and sparkling wings, and crowned with a silvery blue fairy crown. At my side I discovered a trove of fairy dust in tiny bottles, and each child felt my gentle touch as I shared some fairy dust with them as they arrived.

Soon the other fairies appeared to greet the children: the Green Man/Earth King, the Earth Fairy Queen, the Fire Fairy Queen, the Winter Fairy Queen, the Ocean Fairy, the Moss Maid, and more came to share songs, dances, and treasures with everyone. The children, of course, had arrived in their own magical attire, with wings, wands, tiaras aplenty. There were even a few wizards and dragon-tamers there!

I’m not sure I can describe all the delights that we shared, as now I find myself back in the human world again and the fairy world seems so far away. But I know that truly, the Una’s fairyland is always near.

Food Meme

Gypsy at DomesticallyBlissed tagged me for the Food Porn Meme. I guess I’m more of an uptight suburban mom than I thought, because typing that word into my blog was very, very troublesome. Or maybe I’m just imagining the weirdo Google hits. Or that my mom reads this.

1. What food do you consider the best “date” food? In other words, what meal or food item do you think is sexiest to eat in the company of someone you would like to look sexy around?

Well, my first date with Anthropapa was Chinese food, which isn’t particularly sexy really. Too much slurping of noodles and dripping of sauce and fumbling with chopsticks. I think the sexiest thing to eat is something that you really, really like. Then you are enjoying yourself and relaxed and happy.

2. What well-known person would you like to share a meal with—with or without clothing. (saying whether or not clothes are involved is optional).

Hmmm…I think I’ll plead the fifth on the clothing part. My first instinct is to yell out “Colin Firth!!” (and if you’re a fan, do check out the photo in that link) but then he’s married, and he’s not really Mr. Darcy. Or Jamie Bennett. But I’m sure he would be interesting to, erm, talk to about acting and world travel and stuff. If she weren’t dead, I’d love to talk food with Julia Child over a good meal.

3. What does your perfect breakfast-in-bed look like? (Food AND the details, please. Candles? Music? Flowers? Hot tub? Dancing girls?

First of all, the food would not be made by me, nor cleaned up by me! My favorite breakfast is a lightly toasted sesame bagel with a bit too much cream cheese and smoked salmon, and good coffee with sugar and cream. Perhaps a token strawberry or two to represent the food groups I would be missing. This would all be served to me on a commodious and untippy tray with a cloth napkin, possibly some nice fresh flowers somewhere that I could gaze upon them, nothing too exotic — some sunset-colored tulips sound about right. There would be mounds of perfectly clean, cool white sheets and pillows, lots of sunshine (but not too bright), the whole day free before me. Anthropapa would be there, of course, lolling in the cool white bed and only arising to get the door for room service to deliver the bagels and coffee. The children would be firmly ensconced at Nana’s house for the duration.

Hookay, back from dreamland now.

4. What do you consider the best application of whipped cream to be?

On top of something chocolate, of course. Or possibly simply in a large bowl, with a spoon. No need for anything complex here!

5. Oh-God-No, Biff, the yacht is sinking! You are sent to the galley to retrieve the food. What luxury food items do you snatch first? The champagne? The caviar? Smoked Salmon? Truffles? Chocolate? Or something else?

Again, the smoked salmon would be calling my name. Probably the high-end chocolate as well. But then there’s all that fresh sushi the galley chef just finished making for us…decisions, decisions.

Well, I hate tagging people. Do it if you like!