Film Club interview

from The Canadian Press. Here's an excerpt (emphases mine):

What [the book] details is a father's struggle to connect with a beloved son who is totally disinterested in homework and who, at six-foot-four, is a man-sized adolescent frequently skipping out of high school to wander about the big city at will.

"All we ever talked about was his poor performance at school," the Toronto author and winner of a Governor General's award for A Perfect Night to Go to China explains in an interview.

"And it really was turning him into a liar. And it was creating antagonism between the two of us. And finally I just said 'I can't do this, I've already done Grade 10. I can't do your homework for you. I can't do this. You're going to have to make a choice.' And to my horror, he said 'I don't want to go to school anymore."'

Gilmour makes a deal with Jesse, telling him he can quit school as long as he watches three movies a week with his dad and absolutely stays away from drugs.

"I was trying to salvage my relationship with him because I thought not only am I going to lose the school battle but I'm going to lose him over it."

Jesse Gilmour, now 21, is doing a few interviews alongside his well-known father as the book about his sometimes tumultuous adolescence is launched, and he concurs that dropping out was the correct -- and probably the only -- course of action for him.

"I hated high school, I hated it. I was completely happy to get out of there. And even now, I'm going to university now, which I like, but even if I could go back, I probably would do the same thing again," he says emphatically.

"For some people high school just doesn't work for them. It's just terribly straining and boring in a way that it becomes unhealthy to you."

But if high school was a strain for Jesse, the decision to let him opt out was nothing short of terrifying for his dad.

"I spent about a year waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning with my heart thumping thinking, my God, he's going to end up in a cardboard box in Los Angeles ... where can you go in this world with a Grade 9 education?" Gilmour says.

People of his own generation went to school out of fear because they were terrified of what would happen if they didn't have an education, he notes.

"Most of us got a B.A. because we were frightened of the consequences," Gilmour says. "His generation isn't frightened of that stuff at all. I don't know why they're not. But they're really not."

Gilmour, who has worked as a film critic and cautiously served up erudite observations about plot, direction and acting techniques to his son, doesn't even attempt to describe the three films per week as a substitute for an education.

"He really didn't get anything out of it except he got to spend time with his father, and what teenage boys really need is to spend time with their fathers," he says.

"We could've gone skydiving, or we could've gone scuba-diving. It wouldn't have made a difference. It wasn't really the films. It was an opportunity for the two of us to spend time together before he was gone for good."

As it turns out, the films worked as a kind of conversation-starter, and father and son would go outside on the porch, smoke cigarettes and "talk about everything under the sun" - including Jesse's attempts to sort out matters of the heart when he falls hard for one girl, and later, for another. There are troubled times, too, when Jesse breaks his vow to stay away from drugs.

But Jesse's opinion diverges somewhat from that of his father when he talks about the "nourishment" he got from seeing a range of movies, including some he describes as "great art."

"On The Waterfront," "Notorious" and "A Streetcar Named Desire" were among the many films the pair watched together.

"The more you learn about it the more you can appreciate it. So it's true the movies were more just kind of a jumping off point that me and my dad could spend time together, and have a real relationship during that time. But yeah, I think I got a lot out of the movies."

A few years after the film club began, Jesse decided to go back to school and signed up for a crash course in the required subjects, with tutoring by his mother. Last month, he began studying Italian cinema, classical mythology and world religions at the University of Toronto. ...

Gilmour, 57, says that during those "film club" years, his professional life was "a catastrophe." Now, he calls it an unbelievable stroke of luck because it gave him time at home with his son at a time when teens are "gradually shutting the door on their parents and they're keeping their private lives to themselves."

"It was like winning the lottery, and not recognizing it until about halfway through that this was actually a victory, not a life catastrophe."

You can read the rest here.

An alternative education

First up on this morning's CBC Radio "Sunday Edition" show, my favorite weekend listening, was host Michael Enright's interview with film critic and writer David Gilmour, author of the just-published The Film Club: A True Story of a Father and a Son. Film Club is Mr. Gilmour's account of his decision, several years ago, to let his son drop out of high school. What he kept coming back to during the radio interview was his son's need for time.

I found a very good review by Ian McGillis in yesterday's Montreal Gazette, entitled "Learning from film: A father, a son and an unusual education". From which,

It's the kind of thing a movie producer would label "high concept." A father, at his wits' end over his teenage son's extreme aversion to anything classroom-related, suggests that the son drop out of high school on the condition that the two of them watch three films per week, together, for two years. [The other condition was no drugs.]

But this is no movie. The father is David Gilmour, award-winning novelist and former CBC film critic, the son is [16]-year-old Jesse. And their experiment, for which the term "hare-brained" might seemingly have been coined, has turned out against all reasonable expectations to make for a book that's insightful, surprising and, yes, moving.

It's a handy hook, of course, that the mere idea of what Gilmour has his son do is sure to cause the taking of mass umbrage by good parents everywhere. It's not as though Gilmour isn't aware of this. Even at an advanced stage in the program, when it's too late to undo, he's attacked by doubts: "What if I'd allowed him to f--k up his entire life under some misinformed theory that might just be laziness with a smart-ass spin on it?" What if, indeed.

On the surface, Jesse does provide plenty of cause for concern. He has very little sense of geography. ("The United States are right across the lake?" asks the lifelong Torontonian.) He takes his loves and his lost loves extremely seriously and -- surprise, surprise -- he wants to be a rapper.

But this young man, we come to see, has hidden reserves. The child may never quite become father to the man, but at many times, the dynamic is much more big brother-little brother than Pop and Junior.

The films they watch, handpicked by the father, range from undisputed classics (Citizen Kane) to French New Wave standbys (The 400 Blows) to outright kitsch (Showgirls). It's a commendably catholic list, though Gilmour père proves utterly unable to predict which films might set his enigmatic son alight. Jesse's blank response to A Hard Day's Night, starring Dad's beloved Beatles, is priceless. But then, the author surprises himself no less on revisiting some old touchstones. "Some films let you down; you must have been in love or heartbroken, you must have been wound up about something when you saw them because now, viewed from a different trajectory, there's no magic left."

An index at the end lists nearly 150 films mentioned, but the book somehow never feels weighted down with the references. In fact, in what may or may not be a coincidence, at about the time the reader begins to tire of the device, so do the participants. But that's fine, because by then, it's the relationship we really care about. ...

In fact, after three years, Jesse rose off the couch and decided that he was indeed interested in further education. He is now 21 and attending university in Toronto.

And an excerpt from yesterday's Globe & Mail review by Charles Wilkins:

...Gilmour's intimate and free-wheeling book is, in large part, the story of the role he played in his son Jesse's life (and vice-versa) when the teenager crashed out of high school at 16 and seemed headed for what Gilmour refers to as "a bad life."

In a stroke of strategic educational genius (and of optimal deployment of his own fascinations and resources), the writer offered his son freedom from school and employment on the condition that the boy join him in watching and discussing a minimum of three feature films a week.

The deal was made, and over a period of three years, the films became a curriculum unto themselves, a varied and fascinating syllabus rich in ideas, social values, character study, history, geography, family, ethics, music -- and, of course, in the import of filmmaking and art, of dramatic writing and acting and directing.

As Jesse learns, we learn -- about Hitchcock and Kubrick and Truffaut; and Brando and Bogart and Hepburn; Annie Hall, On the Waterfront, The Godfather. Gilmour was once a film commentator for CBC Television, and his knowledge of the art and industry is both rangy and deep -- and is happily charged with anecdotal vigour and gossip.

"I knew I wasn't giving Jesse a systematic education," he writes. "We could as easily have gone skin diving or collected stamps. The films simply served as an occasion to spend time together, hundreds of hours, as well as a door-opener for all manner of conversational topics -- Rebecca, Zoloft, dental floss, Vietnam, impotence, cigarettes."

The book is also the story of the travails of a middle-aged writer who, at the time the action takes place, was, by his own admission, down on his luck, and is painfully honest about it. At one point, when other options have been exhausted, he seeks work as a bicycle courier, and is turned down - too old. (It bears mentioning that Gilmour's luck changed dramatically in 2005 when he won the Governor-General's Award for Fiction for his novel A Perfect Night to Go to China.)

And a helpful caution from The Globe & Mail,

...there were points at which I felt as if I were reading through a keyhole and that, given the context, there was simply too much grovelling over "relationships," over "the game," over "chicks," which unfortunately detracts from the book's erstwhile innocence and integrity. ...

In the end, a majority of the pages in the book might more appropriately have appeared under the title The Dating Club or The Mating Club than The Film Club.

And yet the book is meaningful, is insightful, is valuable. On a social level alone, it challenges our notions of education, of productivity, of high schools that have fallen catastrophically behind in their capability to inspire young men. It is, what's more, a compelling, often tender account of a parent's deep concern for his child.

Poetry Friday: A bit of Browning and a huge delight

A poem for back-to-school season for all parents who teach, guide, educate, explain, discuss, and develop.

Most of the great English poet Robert Browning's education took place at home, centering around his father's library of some 6,000 volumes in English, as well as French, ancient Greek, and Latin. He began composing rhymes even before he learned to read and write by the age of five. Browning wrote the following poem, toward the end of his life, a loving thank you to his first and best teacher. I can easily picture father and young son, gallumphing around the library floor, sofa cushions stacked nearby, surrounded by books and surprised family pets.

Development
by Robert Browning (1812-1889)

My Father was a scholar and knew Greek.
When I was five years old, I asked him once
"What do you read about?"
"The siege of Troy."
"What is a siege and what is Troy?"
Whereat
He piled up chairs and tables for a town,
Set me a-top for Priam, called our cat
-- Helen, enticed away from home (he said)
By wicked Paris, who couched somewhere close
Under the footstool, being cowardly,
But whom -- since she was worth the pains, poor puss --
Towzer and Tray, -- our dogs, the Atreidai, -- sought
By taking Troy to get possession of
-- Always when great Achilles ceased to sulk,
(My pony in the stable) -- forth would prance
And put to flight Hector -- our page-boy's self.
This taught me who was who and what was what:
So far I rightly understood the case
At five years old: a huge delight it proved
And still proves -- thanks to that instructor sage
My Father, who knew better than turn straight
Learning's full flare on weak-eyed ignorance,
Or, worse yet, leave weak eyes to grow sand-blind,
Content with darkness and vacuity.

* * *

Make your way to Semicolon for today's Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Sherry!

Further thoughts on self-esteem and self-confidence

In one of my own comments to my post the other week on children, responsibility, and hard work, I mentioned "the whole self-esteem vs. self-confidence business (I consider the former nonsense, the latter vital)", and my good friend hornblower at HMS Indefatigable replied,

One other thing though - in your comments Becky, where you talk about self confidence coming from doing things well. Yes, I agree with that. But I'm actually a big fan of self-esteem & quite like the term. IMO, it comes from something so basic, so simple, and yet something many parents fail at: kids need to be loved, cherished, accepted for being themselves. Not because they did something well, know something, contribute something, look good or make the family look good. But just because they are. That is the primary gift of a great parent & from there comes an unshakeable core of self.

Not implying you disagree (though feel free to!) but I sometimes get a little overwhelmed by the emphasis on doing, as opposed to being.....

Since I threw out my comments very briefly and parenthetically, I think I owe it especially to hornblower to expand on my thoughts.

I see self-esteem and self-confidence as two sides of the same coin. Or rather, self-esteem as self-confidence's evil twin, especially as self-esteem has been co-opted by North American school systems to consist of a great deal of the curriculum.

Esteem I understand as (blame my high school Latin teacher...) as value, regard, worth, standing, and rank, and I think that inner core of a person, especially a child, should be more virtue (in the classical sense) than value, if that makes any sense, especially the virtue of belief in oneself regardless, as hornblower says, of looks or abilities. Self-esteem, particularly as it's promoted in North American schools, I understand as a little more than an obsession with feeling good about oneself, and it tends to be a concept imposed from without, rarely a successful method of effecting change.

My main experience with self-esteem and its promotion as an educational tool has come from the local school system, especially Laura's early years, first with play school, then kindergarten (part of the year here and the remainder in the West Indies, with two very different results, in part because the former promoted self-esteem and the latter self-confidence), and then several months of first grade, before we began home schooling. And yes, there was a shameful big-deal graduation from play school and one from kindergarten -- the latter of which, darn it all, we missed by leaving partway through the year. All of her Canadian schools, but interestingly not the West Indian one, saw, in the words of Charles J. Sykes in his Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, or Add, their "ultimate product as the well-adjusted teamworker with a healthy sense of self-esteem". Sykes goes on to say that such schools are "unlikely to adopt the same means as a school whose goal is individualists", which is part of the reason we abandoned public school for home school when we discovered Laura to be a year ahead of her classmates and the school interested only in "age appropriate" curriculum, most of it centered around boosting self-esteem and patting little backs for no good reason. But that's another story and another post...

Because self-esteem tends to be a top-down affair, it's hard to pass along just the right dose. It either doesn't stick, because it gets stuck in the trickling down, from adult to child; and kids in general are smart enough to know when something is hollow or has been trowelled on thickly. Or, kids get an overdose, veering dangerously from self-esteem into self-absorption and self-gratification. This is one of the reasons I like The Well-Trained Mind's approach to teaching and learning history. When I first read the chapter on teaching history to young children, Laura was in first grade at the local public school, where the social studies curriculum that year was the ungrammatical and self-centered "Me, My Family, and Other Families". The provincial education ministry in all its certificated wisdom sees fit to arrange the the world around first graders, whereas the authors of WTM see things rather differently:

A common assumption found in history curricula seems to be that children can't comprehend (or be interested in) people and events distant from their own experience. So the first-grade history is renamed Social Studies and begins with what the child knows: first, himself and his family, followed by his community, his state, his country, and only then the rest of the world.

This intensely self-focused pattern of study encourages the student of history to relate everything he studies to himself, to measure the cultures and customs of other peoples against his own experience. And that's exactly what the classical education fights against -- a self-absorbed, self-referential approach to knowledge. History learned this way makes our needs and wants the center of the human endeavor. This attitude is destructive at any time, but it is especially destructive in the present global civilization.

The goal of the classical curriculum is multicultural in the best sense of the word: the student learns the proper place of his community, his state [or province], and his country by seeing the broad sweep of history from its beginning and then fitting his own time and place into that great landscape.

Or as Miss Manners says in her Guide to Rearing Perfect Children,

Schools first started doing parental tasks because they thought parents were neglecting them; and now there are parents desperately trying to make up for the neglect of academic subjects on the part of teachers. The neglect, on both parts, is rarely mere callousness. On the contrary, it is often connected with the idealistic belief that the object of anyone entrusted with a child is to make that child happy, and that the happiest child is one free of constraint. Miss Manners loathes that theory, and doesn't notice that it has much of a record of success. It is her belief that happiness is a by-product, and that the happy child is one who has been carefully trained to use his abilities to take on challenges and overcome them.

The happiness theory is full of self-defeating characteristics. It directs the child's attention back into himself, instead of taking the natural self-absorption with which we were all born, and which we are in no danger of losing, and turning it outward, so that the ability to take delight in a varied and curious world may be developed. It also coddles our natural laziness, so that energies that could be put into growth are put into finding excuses and examining reasons for the lack of it.

I'd hazard a guess that an overdeveloped sense of self-esteem, not to mention "a self-absorbed, self-referential approach to knowledge" may well play a part in the infantilization of young adults.

Self-confidence, on the other hand, develops from within a child and as it takes root within becomes increasingly difficult to dislodge. It's the result of good, thoughtful parenting as well as of a child's efforts and achievements, though these needn't amount to much at all in the early years. Self-confidence can easily apply to the idea that, as hornblower wrote, "kids need to be loved, cherished, accepted for being themselves. Not because they did something well, know something, contribute something, look good or make the family look good. But just because they are. That is the primary gift of a great parent & from there comes an unshakeable core of self." But I don't know how much time a great, or even good, parent really needs to devote to establishing, or later maintaining, a confident core of self in a child, as long as you let your children know, well and often -- and that doesn't mean with workbooks, activities, programs, and curricula -- that you love them as they are.

I do think that even more important than just "being", or being a wonderful you, is the vital necessity to a child of belonging to a family (however it is comprised) and being needed. I'm no psychologist, and maybe Robert Epstein would disagree, but it seems that some of the general footlooseness I see in the teenagers I know is the result of their realization, however unconscious, that they aren't particularly needed in the family, that they can go about their daily activities with friends or alone and not be missed outside of school hours, even under the same roof, with everyone microwaving his or her separate meal at different hours, sitting in front of the computer or television in private bedrooms, everyone in the backyard but plugged into an individual iPod, or taking separate vacations (sometimes even at the same destination or resort). The very youngest children can help the family with needed tasks such as folding towels, feeding the cat, making a card for a sibling's birthday, holding the map in the car, and they soon learn the importance not just of being loved just because, but of being trusted, being able, and being needed.

I'll leave the last words to Charles Sykes, from Dumbing Down Our Kids [links and aside added by me]:

Whether the programs of self-esteem are motivated by a romantic view of childhood, by adult guilt, or simply by a desire to spare children pain, it is increasingly obvious that these eminently well-intentioned efforts often have unintended consequences. Members of the generation that braved the Depression and World War II were so anxious to spare their own children the deprivations of their youth that they created the pampered generation of the baby boomers. The boomers (and Generation X), in turn, seem determined to spare their children the emotional and psychological privations they imagined that they might have suffered in their own youth. While the Depression generation hastened to make sure the boomers would never lack material possessions, today's parents seem anxious to spare their children the stress, anxiety, and pressures of their youth. Neither of the elder generations seem to have foreseen what such indulgence might mean for the younger generations which not only have been deprived of the adversity of the previous generation, but also of the opportunities to test themselves against those challenges. [My own theory is that Mildred Armstrong Kalish's very contrary opinion, in Little Heathens, is what has made the book sparkle so and touch such a nerve in so many readers.]

Trying to understand the courage and character of the English miners of the 1930s, whose lives he had been observing, George Orwell speculated about the source of their strength and dignity in the face of adversity. "The truth is," he wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, "that many of the qualities we admire in human beings can only function in opposition to some kind of disaster, pain or difficulty; but the tendency of mechanical progress is to eliminate disaster, pain and difficulty." While no one would argue that every effort should not be made to reduce disasters and pain, Orwell's point about the moral consequences of dealing with difficulties is a crucial insight into the way the human soul develops and grows.

Just as I was finishing this post, I came across Poppins' recent post, Shine On,

"Born to Shine" by Joshua Kadison. It has an uplifting message that boils down to: you were born to shine; everything is fine. Baldly stated it loses all of its poetry. Do yourself a favour and listen to the song or I'll get hate mail from Kadison for misrepresenting his artistry. ...

..."Aha!" came the thought, "I should play this for [daughter] Sandra." And then the visceral realization slammed into me: she doesn't need it. No one is squashing her. No one is making her feel wrong. She is shining. It's her own light that I see in her eyes and hear in her laugh and marvel at in her conversation. She isn't wounded.

It occurs to me that another reason that much of the self-esteem business in schools doesn't stick is because rather than fostering high self-esteem in children, it can introduce instead a nasty, niggling kernel of self-doubt. Which is probably as good a way as any of undermining any self-esteem or self-confidence a child already has.

All roads lead to home and hard work

"Too many parents make life hard for their children by trying, too zealously, to make it easy for them."
German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), quoted in "The Case Against Adolescence" by Robert Epstein

I started Farm School two years ago in part because I blathered on for much too long on the subject of children and independence at L's blog Schola. Independence, self-reliance, and responsibility are among the values Tom and I talked about teaching children when we thought about getting married. And these values are a good part of the reason I decided that it would probably be better to raise children on the Canadian prairie than Manhattan's Upper West Side; I'm not saying it's impossible (I think my parents did a fabulous job), but 40 years on it seems rather easier in this neck of the woods.

While we didn't start homeschooling with the idea that it would be a good way of further inculcating those values, it didn't take Tom and me long to realize that this educational experiment is as ideal for our child-rearing purposes as it is for our academic ones. And I'm always keen to read anything that supports our rather old-fashioned notions when it comes to raising kids.

So I was more than interested to learn a couple of months ago, at Susan's blog Corn & Oil, about the new book, The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen (Quill Driver Books, 2007) by Robert Epstein, a psychologist and former editor-in-chief of Pyschology Today magazine. The idea behind the book is that (from the front flap)

teen turmoil is caused by outmoded systems put in place a century ago which destroyed the continuum between childhood and adulthood.

Where this continuum still exists in other countries, there is no adolescence. Isolated from adults, American teens learn everything they know from their media-dominated peers -- "the last people on earth they should be learning from," says Epstein.

Which, in my case at least, means the good doctor is preaching to the converted. While I tend to think that part of the problem with the way kids are being raised is that they are being raised by advice from books rather than from parents' hearts or instincts or the way they themselves were raised by their own parents (somehow that all seems too easy...), at least there seem to be some better parenting books to choose from nowadays, including Dr. Epstein's. And as you can see from the bit above, The Case Against Adolescence contains echoes of Hold On to Your Kids by Dr. Gordon Neufeld and Dr. Gabor Mate, another book I like, though I don't find mention of the title or authors in the index.

But I've already found, just partway through chapter three, mention of the two home education gurus, former New York public school teacher John Taylor Gatto and the late John Holt; a peek at the index shows three mentions of "Home Schooling" toward the end of the book. Dr. Epstein notes that Gatto addresses "quite explicitly, ... the artificial extension of childhood" in his latest book, The Underground History of American Education (an excerpt of which was published in Harper's Magazine in September 2003, and which I saw the very week I hit upon the alternative of home schooling for Laura. Yes, I took it as a good omen).

The Case Against Adolescence owes a considerable debt to Jean Liedloff's 1977 classic, The Continuum Concept: In Search of Lost Happiness, which I read while pregnant with Laura, after coming across a secondhand copy at a library book sale. Indeed, the CC website's main page features glowing quotes about the book from both Dr. Epstein ("This book is the work of a genius" in Psychology Today) and John Holt ("I don't know whether the world can be saved by a book, but if it could be, this might just be the book.")

Just last night, I read Dr. Epstein's handy summary of Liedloff's two years with the Yequana Indians of Venezuela:

There is no distinct separation between childhood and adulthood in the tribe; instead, there is a continuum of activities, behaviors, and expectations. Expectations are modest when children are young and increase gradually and smoothly over the years, but the goals are always clear: the development of self-reliance and the full integration of the child into the world of responsible adulthood. Responsibility and authority are never forced on anyone, but they're given freely as soon as a child shows an interest in taking them on. Independent decision making is encouraged, because "leaving the choice to the child from the earliest age keeps his judgment at peak efficiency," and the child's "self protecting ability" is trusted to keep him or her from serious harm.

In contrast, she says, we weaken and damage our children by overprotecting them; we even impair their ability to make reasonable decisions and to protect themselves.

And then, still mulling over the development of this "self-protecting ability" this morning, I happened upon today's New York Times article on claims of possible child abuse in connection with Kid Nation, a new show to air in September:

The ads promoting “Kid Nation,” a new reality show coming to CBS next month, extol the incredible experience of a group of 40 children, ages 8 to 15, who built a sort of idealistic society in a New Mexico ghost town, free of adults. For 40 days the children cooked their own meals, cleaned their own outhouses, formed a government and ran their own businesses, all without adult intervention or participation.

To at least one parent of a participant, who wrote a letter of complaint to New Mexico state officials after the show had completed production, the experience bordered on abuse and neglect. Several children required medical attention after drinking bleach that had been left in an unmarked soda bottle, according to both the parent and CBS. One 11-year-old girl burned her face with splattered grease while cooking.

The children were made to haul wagons loaded with supplies for more than a mile through the New Mexico countryside, and they worked long hours — “from the crack of dawn when the rooster started crowing” until at least 9:30 p.m., according to Taylor, a 10-year-old from Sylvester, Ga., who was made available by CBS to respond to questions about conditions on the set.

I also came across a Los Angeles Times article from last week, "Kid Nation" parents: What were they thinking?, where three women were interviewed to "respond to the critics condemning them for allowing their children to participate in the CBS show". Said one mother, about her 10-year-old, an only child,

He does live in what I call a sheltered environment. He goes to a small school. Most of the schoolmates and friends that he knows he's known almost his entire life. I thought that this was a good opportunity for Zachary to experience some independence and learn some self-reliance. And if he was able to do this, I thought that was a very good way for him to build confidence in himself.

I worry that in today's world kids don't realize things they might have to face in life that might be difficult because, I think, as baby boomers we tend to be very protective of them. And I want him to know that he has the capability to be out in the world and be independent and self-reliant.

All this of course after I've spent the past few weeks on and off delightedly wallowing in Mildred Armstrong Kalish's charming memoir, Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression. Unvarnished and homespun, these are the stories, words, and advice of a real grandmother eager to share her own part of a disappearing world, and to let later generations know the lasting value of pulling up your socks and putting your nose to the grindstone. As I read through each of the chapters, from her earliest reminiscences to the recipes to her later life as detailed in Epilogue, I realized that Mrs. Kalish has written about a happiness and freedom in childhood, and a contentment in adulthood, that today are sadly rare. From Little Heathens,

The summer after I graduated from eighth grade I ... was delighted to go to work as a hired girl on a large farm south of [the town of] Garrison. The family consisted of Cecil, Anna, and their two girls and four boys, ranging in age from one and a half to eleven. Cecil hired one or two extra men in the summer. That meant that Ann and I cooked, set the table, and did the dishes for at least ten people, three times a day.

Anna paid me four dollars a week for my work on the farm, and I was especially proud of that for my closest girlfriends and all of my other friends were being paid only three and a half dollars. Of course, we all received room and board, too.

Here I should report that we were also accepted as full-fledged members of the family, for hired girls were not treated as maids. In fact, I was the only one in this family who had a private room. Located at the top of the crooked stairs, it was about five feet wide by ten feet long, and it had a window overlooking the huge vegetable garden. To me it was a palace.

During those summer months we rose at five-thirty A.M., unless it was haying or threshing time on the farm; then we got up at four-thirty. Anna and I timed it so that we got up just after the men, who immediately disappeared to the barns to do the morning chores. Anna built a fire in the iron kitchen range, while I put the copper teakettle on along with the gray, graniteware coffee boiler and got the bacon started. As the kitchen filled with the delicious fragrance of the bacon crisping and browning, I carried jam, a whole pound of butter, sliced bread, a large pitcher of milk, and a smaller pitcher of heavy cream to the table, which was already set for ten people. Then I carefully broke twenty eggs into a mixing bowl and waited for one of the boys to report that the men were ready for breakfast. At that point I poured the blow of eggs into the gigantic iron skillet and fried them to perfection in bacon fat, sunny-side up.

If there was a delay, or if the men had an especially busy day before them, I might make an applesauce cake -- the very one I described in an earlier chapter. Here again, the family training in thinking ahead and always doing more than was required stood me in good stead. I could whip up that cake in just a few minutes since I kept a ready supply of homemade applesauce in the pantry; it would bake while we were eating breakfast and would be ready to eat with our second cups of coffee.

I could handle almost every task in Anna's household; I could even make gravy without lumps, for heaven's sake. There was always something to do on that farm: cakes, cookies, and pies to bake; potatoes, radishes, beets, carrots, peas, lettuce, tomatoes, and beans to pick, wash, clean, and peel; chickens to kill, scald, pluck, singe, draw, and disjoint; dishes to wash and dry; clothing to wash; laundry to be hung on the line, then taken down from the line, folded, and ironed. And every day, we made beds for ten people. Everything I had learned in my early years [up until eighth grade] I put to use as a hired girl for this family.

The children all helped in as many ways as they could. They would make their own beds, wash vegetables, carry wood and water, set the table, dry dishes, and gather eggs and apples. Like the children I grew up with, they understood that hey played a part in making the family work.

We had fun with one another. There was a lot of joking, laughing, and good-natured teasing. And often in the evening, on those occasions when we had somehow managed to finish our chores as well as our supper before dark, the kids would hep me with the dishes if I would agree to come outside afterward and play with them. We played hide-and-go-seek, touched-you-last, and may-I. Some evenings we would have water fights, tossing pails of water on one another. Or we might just sit out on the front porch and sing.

Or, as The New York Times article on alleged child abuse concluded,

“Everyone usually had a job,” said Mike, an 11-year-old from Bellevue, Wash., who participated in the show. Among them were cooking, cleaning, hauling water and running the stores, where, he said: “It was hard work, but it was really good. It taught us all that life is not all play and no work.”

Taylor, from Georgia, agreed. “I learned I have to work for what I want,” she said.

I'm sure both Mrs. Kalish and Dr. Epstein would approve. Pass the applesauce cake, please.



(Very likely more thoughts to come on The Case Against Adolescence, and Little Heathens, in upcoming posts.)

Hot to trot tots and their pole-dancing mamas

A couple of months ago, after seeing the Macleans magazine cover story about "dressing our daughters like skanks", I wrote,

What continues to surprise me is how many mothers around here, and remember, I'm far away from liberal east coast urban types, so your experience may be wide of my mark, are the ones who choose to pimp put their daughters in (often matching) stripper chic not because it's the path of least resistance but because it's the path to popularity, to approval, and -- hey, a bonus -- makes the mothers themselves look or at least seem hip and trendy and young. Well, younger at least. When Laura was in kindergarten and first grade at the local public school, one of her classmates was often dressed by her mother (who in the past few years decided to return to the classroom and now teaches first grade) in fashion-conscious "mini me" style -- feather boa trim on sweaters and matching short skirts and dressy suede boots. Not good for the playground at recess or those messy arts and crafts projects, but certainly eye-catching. And this classmate was in good company.

So I was interested to discover, lurking behind today's Times Select firewall (email me at farmschool at telus dot net if you'd like to see the article), the latest blog installment from Judith Warner,"Hot Tots, and Moms Hot to Trot"; here's a Select selection:

Bling-Bling Barbies and pouty-lipped Bratz. Thongs for tweens, and makeover parties for 5-year-olds. The past couple of shopping seasons have brought a constant stream of media stories — and books and school lectures and anguished mom conversations — all decrying the increasingly tarted-up world of young girls and preteens. Now the American Psychological Association has weighed in as well, with a 67-page report on the dangers of the “sexualization” of girls.

The report takes aim at the music lyrics, Internet content, video games and clothing that are now being marketed to younger and younger kids, and correlates their smutty content with a number of risks to girls’ well-being. It finds that sexualization — turning someone into “eye candy” — is linked to eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression in girls and women. Adopting an early identity as a “Hot Tot” also has, the researchers wrote, “negative consequences on girls’ ability to develop healthy sexuality.”

This isn’t surprising, or even new. But what did surprise me, reading through the A.P.A.’s many pages of recommendations for fighting back (like beefed-up athletics, extracurriculars, religion, spirituality, “media literacy” and meditation), was the degree to which the experts — who in an earlier section of the report acknowledge the toxicity of mother-daughter “fat talk” — let moms themselves off the hook as agents of destruction requiring change.

I know that sounds pretty nasty. We’re not supposed to be judgmental these days. We’re not supposed to blame parents — especially mothers. I also know that what mothers do or don’t do (short of out-and-out abuse) doesn’t, single-handedly, “cause” much of anything. But I think it’s fair, even necessary, to wonder: how can we expect our daughters to navigate the cultural rapids of becoming sexual beings when we ourselves are flying blind? How can we teach them to inhabit their bodies with grace and pleasure if we spend our own lives locked in hateful battles of control, mastery and self-improvement?

We all tend to talk a good game now on things like body image and sexual empowerment. We buy the American Girl body book, “The Care and Keeping of You,” promote a “healthy” diet and exercise, and wax rhapsodic about team sports. But do we practice what we preach?

Not when we walk around the house sucking in our stomachs in front of the mirrors. Not when we obsessively regulate the contents of our refrigerators in the name of “purity.” (Did you know that there’s a clinical word for the “fixation on righteous eating”? It’s called “orthorexia.”) Our girls see right through all our righteousness. And they hear the hypocrisy, too, when we dish out all kinds of pabulum about a “positive body image,” then go on to trash our own thighs. ...

Maybe it’s time to take a break from bashing the media and start to take a long, hard look instead at the issue of mothers’ sexuality, which is, apparently, after a long and well-documented dormancy, enjoying a kind of rebirth — thanks, it is said, to things like pole dancing classes and sports club stripteases. These new evening antics of the erstwhile book club set are supposed to be fabulous because they give sexless moms a new kind of erotic identity. But what a disaster they really are: an admission that we’ve failed utterly, as adult women, to figure out what it means to look and feel sexy with dignity. We’ve created an aesthetic void. Should we be surprised that stores like Limited Too are rushing in to fill it? (Now on sale: a T-shirt with two luscious cherries and the slogan “Double trouble.”)...

"Smart Is Sexy" likely wouldn't sell as many t-shirts, though I suppose you could try a "Double trouble" version with Ben Franklin and Tom Jefferson, or Plato and Aristotle, especially if you decide to trade in that pole dancing class for a Great Books discussion group. I don't always agree with Warner, or with Rosalind Wiseman, author of Queen Bees and Wannabees, whom Warner quotes at length in her post, but there are some good thoughts in Warner's post today.

As an aside, last summer I read both Queen Bees and Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher and much preferred the latter. I read them on the recommendation of a good friend, who happens to be the mother of three daughters, ages six to almost 15; as she put it succinctly in a letter about a year ago,

it's Mary Pipher's "Fence at the Top of the Hill" metaphor that differentiates the aim of the books. QB&W is the ambulance at the bottom of the precipice. RO is the fence on the hilltop. QB&W's focus on cliques is just one manifestation of a much larger problem, instructing parents how to deal with the situation at hand, not how to avoid it.

Good fences make good families as well as good neighbors. And you can start building that fence with the pole that used to be in the living room.

Made you look

Stocking up on reading material for the weekend at the library, I was rather startled to find the January 1st edition of Maclean's Magazine (at left) looking out from the shelves at me with the cover headline "Why do we dress our daughters like skanks?" over a girl about Laura's age dressed like a hooker. In case you can't read the sparkly writing, it says Made You Look.

I was startled not because of the question or the girl's attire but because Tom and I had just been discussing the very subject, after yet another extended family holiday gathering with a gaggle of underdressed young relations. The conversation regularly pops up here during holiday get-togethers, children's clothing shopping expeditions, and the obligatory cousins' dance recital, where students and teachers writhe around in suggestive clothes to suggestive music performing suggestive choreography; all that's missing, Tom has said more than once, is a pole. This time the conversation took place with the school photo variation, as in, why on earth were some of the girls allowed to pose for their school photos, invariably included in the Christmas cards, wearing tops that drew such startling attention to cleavage? Or what is supposed to be cleavage.

The Maclean's cover story was inspired, I learned, by the publication this fall of Southern humorist and syndicated columnist's Celia Rivenbark's book, Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank, and indeed the same issue of Maclean's features an interview with Ms. Rivenbark along with the cover story, "Why are we dressing our daughters like this?". But on this particular subject, and in this interview, Ms. Rivenbark leaves the humor behind: "I don't think it's harmless to wear a glittery shirt hanging off the shoulder when you're seven years old. I think that's just ridiculous, and borders on obscene. I'm a humour columnist by trade and this is probably the most strident thing I've ever written. I don't normally get so agitated over things, but this one, I'm just shocked about it." The newspaper column was inspired by a trip to the mall:

Well, I went shopping with my daughter, and I saw all these tween skank clothes, and one thing led to another. I just went off on the notion that these clothes are inappropriate, these hoochie-mama Las Vegas showgirl clothes marketed to kids who are as young as seven. There were all these sequined, sparkling midriff tops, lots of fishnet, shirts saying things like Jailbait, Made Ya Look or Juicy on the bottoms of the pants. Pretty disgusting. ...

Obviously the stuff sells because the stores are full of it. Parents buy it. They feel a lot of pressure -- particularly parents who work all the time -- to appease the kids by giving them what they want, so I think that's why so many parents just finally give in. They feel like this is a battle they don't want to fight. ...

I think sometimes, as parents, we get so conditioned to what we see in the stores it's almost like you get numb to it, and so this was for some parents, they said, a bit of a wake-up call, you know? If you're used to seeing ripped jeans and some questionable phrases on kid clothes, you roll with it. Especially when you see it in really nice department stores. You think, this is what they're selling and you almost get used to it and conditioned to accept it. I'm not a prude, by any means, but I just don't think there's any way you could possibly say that these kinds of clothes are suitable for anybody under, I'd say, 24. ...

Amen. Other things not meeting Ms. Rivenbark's parental approval for her nine-year-old daughter include the latest sex-sound stylings of Justin Timberlake and the loose and promiscuous not to mention Canadian Nelly Furtado. And once again I'm reminded that one of the things I appreciate so much about home education is that the conditioning about society's values and expectations just isn't a factor for our family, for the children or the adults.

More of Ms. Rivenbark's thoughts from the interview on modern, ahem, parenting:

... generally speaking, for whatever reason, kids tend to run over their parents a lot more than they used to. The whole child-centered thing is really big now. I see it over and over again just among the friends I have: the child makes the decisions on, for example, what kind of entertainment they watch, what they do on Friday night. Sometimes they need to realize that. But I think that when the kids are running the show it's not really a good thing. These are little kids, and if you give them that much power they're not ready for it. ...

We've lost the notion, as parents, that it's really okay to be the grown-up and say no. My daughter hears no all the time -- occasionally she hears yes, but a lot of no. There was a dress she wanted a couple of months ago, and she had a real meltdown wanting it, and I thought the dress was inappropriate, and we all survived it. Parents almost think that it's in their contract that they have to negotiate. Well, no, they really don't. Some things, maybe, but not everything. If your kid is trying to go out of the house looking like a mattress-back, then you just send the kid right back in there and try again.

But we're not talking about a "whole child-centered thing". The correct term is "wholesale absence of parental responsibility". Yes, it's easier to give in and say yes most of the time, and not to hang around the house long enough to monitor your child's attire and even, heaven forfend, send him or her back to changed into something appropriate when you could be picking up your daily coffee at Starbucks or slouching about the water cooler exchanging the latest adult conversation with your colleagues. But don't sugarcoat terms for "slacker parents" -- and I understand that Ms. Rivenbark has referred to herself as such at times -- who want to take the easy way out, to the detriment of their children and their futures.

Asked by the interviewer, "Do you think the kids are conscious of the meanings of what they're wearing? Does the fashion come with attitudes and behaviours?", Ms. Rivenbark replies,

That's a real good question. I haven't seen a correlation there. I think they just think it all looks cute. I don't see that it particularly changes their personalities. They think, "This is hip, I saw it on TV, this is kind of cool." It doesn't turn them into monsters. I'm more concerned about the perv who sees them at the mall. A little girl, if her parent is idiot enough to buy something that says Jailbait on it, goes to the mall -- it's the perv who sees that that bothers me.

I do see a correlation, and it's been there at least since I was in fifth grade about 30 years ago. Kids are indeed conscious of the meanings of what they're wearing, and they're conscious -- and more cavalier -- at ever younger ages. And while the threat from child molesters is not to be discounted, what of the threat of the warped attitudes and paucity of the imagination with which so many boys and girls are growing up? What sort of lives will they have, with friends (or, I suppose, "hook ups"), colleagues, spouses, and their own children? Do I really want my daughter, her cousins, and their friends to think that their bodies for a few drinks and some airtime on Girls Gone Wild is a fair trade? Sex even far from its best isn't a toy, a tool, or a joke, but the greatest expression of love between two people.

The Maclean's interview and article both mention Bob Herbert's October New York Times column (reprinted here since the original is behind the Times Select firewall), "Why Aren't We Shocked?", written after the Amish school shooting and inspired in part by an Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt reading Who needs a brain when I have these?:

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?” ...

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

What continues to surprise me is how many mothers around here, and remember, I'm far away from liberal east coast urban types, so your experience may be wide of my mark, are the ones who choose to pimp put their daughters in (often matching) stripper chic not because it's the path of least resistance but because it's the path to popularity, to approval, and -- hey, a bonus -- makes the mothers themselves look or at least seem hip and trendy and young. Well, younger at least. When Laura was in kindergarten and first grade at the local public school, one of her classmates was often dressed by her mother (who in the past few years decided to return to the classroom and now teaches first grade) in fashion-conscious "mini me" style -- feather boa trim on sweaters and matching short skirts and dressy suede boots. Not good for the playground at recess or those messy arts and crafts projects, but certainly eye-catching. And this classmate was in good company. As the Maclean's article notes,

We tell girls that, in wearing these things, they are somehow expressing themselves in an essential way. "If [T-shirts] expressed who a girl is," write [Lyn Mikel] Brown and Sharon Lamb [authors of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes], "you'd think she'd be wearing the T she got at the summer camp she went to, the music festival she attended or the Humane Society where she volunteers to walk the dogs. But instead they express 'attitude' rather than interests, skills, concerns, and hobbies." Worse still, in their very construction, these clothes prescribe behaviours that are hard to describe as empowering. A micro-mini, for instance, is a great disincentive to playing on the monkey bars. A halter top and tight, low-rise jeans make it rather more challenging to run and jump. "Every message to a preteen girl," write Brown and Lamb, "says that it's preferable to pose on the beach rather than surf, to shop rather than play, to decorate rather than invent."

Now there's a challenge for the daughters of North America and their parents for the new year: step away from the fishnets and those size 2 stilleto heels and run, jump, play, and invent. Who needs a brain, indeed.

Poetry Friday: The golden August edition

August
by Celia Thaxter (1835-1894)

Buttercup nodded and said good-by,
Clover and daisy went off together,
But the fragrant water lilies lie
Yet moored in the golden August weather.

The swallows chatter about their flight,
The cricket chirps like a rare good fellow,
The asters twinkle in clusters bright,
While the corn grows ripe and the apples mellow.

Read more about and see Celia Thaxter's garden in An Island Garden, written by Celia Thaxter and illustrated with paintings by (Frederick) Childe Hassam (1859-1935)

****

Updated to add that both Liz B. at A Chair, a Fireplace and a Tea Cozy (here) and Jen at Jen Robinson's Book Page (here) have compiled the day's round-ups. Thank you!

P.S. What are the chances of two selections by Celia Thaxter in one week? Go to MotherReader for hers.

And Karen at lightingthefires has, if not an official offering for Poetry Friday, a lovely offering for poor benighted Pluto by Walter de la Mare.

Poetry Friday

Inspired by the recent birthday candles, new (well, new to us) tea sets, and a summer full of vases of garden flowers on the kitchen table, I offer

Setting the Table
by Dorothy Aldis (1896-1966)

Evenings
When the house is quiet
I delight
To spread the white
Smooth cloth and put the flowers on the table.

I place the knives and forks around
Without a sound.
I light the candles.

I love to see
Their small reflected torches shine
Against the greenness of the vine
And garden.

Is that the mignonette, I wonder,
Smells so sweet?

And then I call them in to eat.

********

Many thanks to MotherReader, who stepped into the Poetry Friday breach with the weekly roundup -- one might even say she kept it from going to the dogs -- and a review of a cute new kids' book in verse. And a special thank you to Karen, ever a kindred spirit, for finding the above so delightful and linking to this post. Now if we could just get her to join the Friday fun!

Poetry Friday: Look up

When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer
by Walt Whitman

When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.



For the day's roundup, check later today or this weekend with Kelly at Big A little a and Liz B at A Chair, A Fireplace and A Tea Cozy.

Poetry Friday: The rain in Spain edition

Very thoughtful Grandpapa (aka Old Curmudgeon) sent us a parcel the other day. It's always a wonderful surprise albeit a bit confusing to get a box from Amazon I haven't ordered. But before we even left the post office Laura suggested, "I think it's probably from Grandpapa." And it was, too: two rhyming dictionaries -- "For Poetry Friday and the rest of the week, too," he wrote. No doubt to help Laura and the boys compose some Ruthless Rhymes of their own.

The first is the Oxford Junior Rhyming Dictionary by John Foster, illustrated by Melanie Williamson and Rupert Van Wyk. Not to be confused with the Oxford First Rhyming Dictionary, for budding poets (and readers) of about 4 or 5. The junior edition is more geared for established poets from about, oh, age 7 or 8. The "How to use this dictionary" section runs several pages and is a lovely and almost invisible reinforcement of early phonics lessons, reminding children that "hole" rhymes not only with words in the same "rhyme family" ("words that end with the same rhyming sound and have the same spelling pattern") but also with those in other rhyme families (reminding them that "-ole rhymes with -oal" and "-ole also rhymes with -oll"). Most of the entry words in the dictionary are fairly simple, one or two syllables at most, but the rhyming words offered are quite comprehensive and not at all as simplistic as you might expect in a dictionary for kids; "us", for example, rhymes with pus, plus, thus, as well as circus, genius, hippopotamus, glorious, raucous, and dubious.

The back of the book includes a 13-page section of activities for playing with rhyme by writing poetry, complete with prompts, from limericks, nonsense nursery rhymes, and counting rhymes to rhyming riddles, epitaphs (handy for pets and aged relatives), rapping, rhyming couplets, chants, homophones, and a brief discussion of rhyme patterns.

The second book in our box was the Oxford Rhyming Dictionary by Clive Upton and Eben Upton. Aside from the actual entries and the usual "how to use this book" business, the book has three other charming though not necessarily G-rated bits at the front, "Introducing rhymes", "...and a bit of theory", and "Who needs rhymes?". The first two sections explain that the rhymes in the book are organized phonetically and are based on their pronunciations, with no regard to spelling or alphabetical considerations. Which means that "moustachio is as good a rhyme as peepshow for the word quizshow", not to mention "clayey" for "Pompeii". Though it also means you have to bear in mind that the book was put together by two authors who pronounce, and write, the Queen's English. Another reason that the very comprehensive index of 85,000 entries is so handy, including everything from Oberösterreich, "off and on", and cetaceous to Nintendo and both "raison d'être" and "raisons d'être".

As for who needs rhymes, the Uptons write,

...almost everybody needs information about rhymes at some time in their lives; perhaps to compose a little ditty as a joke for family or friends, when constructing a quiz, or to settle an argument such as whether there's an exact rhyme for orange (there is, incidentally, though there isn't for butcher). So this dictionary is for everyone. Anyone, who enjoys the sounds of the language, whether or not they have a professional purpose or a pressing personal need for a rhyme, could find themselves browsing far beyond the immediate confines of any target word they look up.

And so I leave you with one of John Foster's epitaph examples from the Junior Rhyming Dictionary:

In memory of Charlotte Cul-de-sac,
A loyal and trusted friend
Who finally lived up to her name
And came to a dead end.

*****

As usual, Kelly at Big A little a and Liz B at A Chair, A Fireplace and A Tea Cozy should each have a round-up of the day's poetic offerings from around the blogosphere.

Poetry Friday

For my footsore boys and girl enjoying long summer evenings...

No Bed
by Walter de la Mare

No bed! No bed! we shouted,
And wheeled our eyes from home
To where the green and golden woods
Cried, Come!

Wild sang the evening birds,
The sun-clouds shone in our eyes,
A silver snippet of moon hung low
In the skies.

We ran, we leapt, we sang,
We yodelled loud and shrill,
Chased Nobody through the valley and
Up the hill.

We laughed, we quarrelled, we drank
The cool sweet of the dew,
Beading on bud and leaf the dim
Woods through.

We stayed, we listened, we looked --
Now dark was on the prowl!
Too-whit-a-woo, from its hollow called
An owl...

O Sleep, at last to slide
Into eyes made drunk with light;
Call in thy footsore boys to harmless
Night!

Poetry Friday: Bastille Day edition

Be Like the Bird
by Victor Hugo

Be like the bird, who
Halting in his flight
On limb too slight
Feels it give way beneath him,
Yet sings,
Knowing he hath wings.


Links a la francaise, poesie plus:

French page of the Poetry International Web

Bibliomania's collected French verse online

And two handy blogs if you're planning a Paris vacation (or wish you were): Secrets of Paris and David Lebovitz.

Poetry Friday: Egg edition

Look at Six Eggs
by Carl Sandburg

Look at six eggs
In a mockingbird's nest.

Listen to six mockingbirds
Flinging follies of O-be-joyful
Over the marshes and uplands.

Look at songs
Hidden in eggs.

Poetry Friday + one, for Canada Day

Canada (Acrostic)
by E. Pauline Johnson

Crown of her, young Vancouver; crest of her, old Quebec;
Atlantic and far Pacific sweeping her, keel to deck.
North of her, ice and arctics; southward a rival’s stealth;
Aloft, her Empire’s pennant; below, her nation’s wealth.
Daughter of men and markets, bearing within her hold,
Appraised at highest value, cargoes of grain and gold.


Sorry I missed the Poetry Friday festivities yesterday. Better late than never!

Poetry Friday: The long, the lovely day

Somehow my E. Nesbit poem disappeared. Blame Blogger. Will repost as soon as I get a chance (probably sometime after our 17 hours of daily sunshine disappear).

Poetry Friday: Laureates, late and latest

In honor of the new Poet Laureate, and a past Laureate, some links and a poem:

A selection of poetry by Donald Hall; and by his late wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, from the very nice University of New Hampshire Library website;

Poet laureate poetry for children: Hall's Ox-Cart Man, illustrated by Barbara Cooney; and,

The Academy of American Poets page for Stanley Kunitz, who died last month at the age of 100, with a biography and links to several poems and interviews.

Peonies at Dusk
by Jane Kenyon

White peonies blooming along the porch
send out light
while the rest of the yard grows dim.

Outrageous flowers as big as human
heads! They're staggered
by their own luxuriance: I had
to prop them up with stakes and twine.

The moist air intensifies their scent,
and the moon moves around the barn
to find out what it's coming from.

In the darkening June evening
I draw a blossom near, and bending close
search it as a woman searches
a loved one's face.

Poetry Friday: Flint & Feather

Prairie Greyhounds
by E. Pauline Johnson

C.P.R. "No. 1," Westbound

I swing to the sunset land --
The world of prairie, the world of plain,
The world of promise and hope and gain,
The world of gold, and the world of grain,
And the world of the willing hand.

I carry the brave and bold--
The one who works for the nation's bread,
The one whose past is a thing that's dead,
The one who battles and beats ahead,
And the one who goes for gold.

I swing to the "Land to Be,"
I am the power that laid its floors,
I am the guide to its western stores,
I am the key to its golden doors,
That open alone to me.

C.P.R. "No. 2," Eastbound

I swing to the land of morn;
The grey old east with its grey old seas,
The land of leisure, the land of ease,
The land of flowers and fruits and trees,
And the place where we were born.

Freighted with wealth I come;
For he who many a moon has spent
Far out west on adventure bent,
With well-worn pick and a folded tent,
Is bringing his bullion home.

I never will be renowned,
As my twin that swings to the western marts,
For I am she of the humbler parts,
But I am joy of the waiting hearts;
For I am the Homeward-bound.


from "Flint and Feather: The Complete Poems of E. Pauline Johnson", first published in 1912.

E. Pauline Johnson, also known as Tekahionwake, was born on the Mohawk Reserve near Brantford, Ontario, in 1861. Her father was George Henry Martin Johnson, also known as Onwanonsyshon, Head Chief of the Six Nations, and her mother was Emily Susanna Howells, an Englishwoman and cousin of the American novelist William Dean Howells (who didn't think much of his relative's writing, it should be noted). In her lifetime, Johnson became quite well known in Canada, the U.S., and Britain for her writing and public recitations.

For more on Johnson's life, find Charlotte Gray's thorough biography, "Flint and Feather: The Life and Times of E. Pauline Johnson Tekahionwake".

Poetry Friday II: Because we all need a little more Ogden Nash in our lives

No, You Be a Lone Eagle
by Ogden Nash (1902-1971)

I find it very hard to be fair-minded
About people who go around being air-minded.
I just can't see any fun
In soaring up up up into the sun
When the chances are still a fresh cool orchid to a paper geranium
That you'll unsoar down down down onto your (to you) invaluable
cranium.
I know the constant refrain
About how safer up in God's trafficless heaven than in an automobile
or a train
But...
My God, have you ever taken a good look at a strut?
Then that one about how you're in Boston before you can say antidis-
establishmentarianism
So that preferring to take five hours by rail is a pernicious example of
antiquarianism.
At least when I get on the Boston train I have a good chance of landing
in the South Station
And not in that part of the daily press which is reserved for victims of
aviation.
Then, despite the assurance that aeroplanes are terribly comfortable I
notice that when you are railroading or automobiling
You don't have to take a paper bag along just in case of a funny feeling.
It seems to me that no kind of depravity
Brings such speedy retribution as ignoring the law of gravity.
Therefore nobody could possibly indict me for perjury
When I swear that I wish the Wright brothers had gone in for silver
fox farming or tree surgery.

-----------------------

More from the man who suggested that "Candy is dandy/But liquor is quicker":

Ogden Nash's biography and bibliography

A Tribute to Ogden Nash and a selection of his poems online

Candy Is Dandy: The Best of Ogden Nash

The Life and Rhymes of Ogden Nash by David Stuart

For the Kiddies:

The Tale of Custard the Dragon by Ogden Nash

The adventures continue in Custard the Dragon and the Wicked Knight by Ogden Nash

Ogden Nash's Zoo

The Adventures of Isabel by Ogden Nash

And for your classical homeschooling types:

Ave Ogden!: Nash in Latin by Ogden Nash; you can read his "The Hippo" in Latin here

Horse Sense in American Humor: From Benjamin Franklin to Ogden Nash by Blair Walter

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Check back later today at Kelly at Big A little a and Liz B at A Chair, A Fireplace and A Tea Cozy for a complete round-up of the day's offerings for Poetry Friday.

Poetry Friday I: The Griffin Prize for Excellence in Poetry

It's not often I get to report poetry news, and glamorous poetry news at that. Yesterday it was announced that,

"Kamau Brathwaite and Sylvia Legris are the International and Canadian winners of the sixth annual Griffin Poetry Prize. [Legris won for Nerve Squall and Brathwaite for Born to Slow Horses.] The C$100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, the richest prize in the world for a single volume of poetry, is divided between the two winners. The prize is for first edition books of poetry, including translations, published in English in 2005, and submitted from anywhere in the world. ...

"More than 400 guests celebrated the awards, including former Governor-General, the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson, acclaimed Canadian actors Albert Schultz and Sarah Polley, Senator Jerry Grafstein and his wife Carol, among others. In addition, poets, publishers and other literary luminaries attended the celebration.

The evening's theme was Shangri-La and featured a silk route marketplace replete with banners of fuschia, purple and gold. Hundreds of pigmy orchids and butterflies in a dizzying array of colours adorned the room. The event, which took place at The Stone Distillery in Toronto, offered up a menu of decidedly Asian fusion cuisine. Appetizers included mango and Thai basil sushi rolls, deep-fried plantain, sweet corn tamales, crab cakes on a bed of remoulade, and a sweet potato and jicama salad. The main course featured seared strip loin of beef with a mini risotto wild rice pancake and for dessert, a chocolate fountain with assorted sweets."

And a tidbit even more interesting than the mango and Thai basil sushi rolls: "As in past years, copies of the submitted poetry books are being donated to Corrections Canada."

Griffin Poetry Prize Trustees include Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje, and the Griffin Trust was created to serve and encourage excellence in poetry written in English anywhere in the world.

Believe it or not, tickets for the Griffin Poetry Prize short-list readings this past Wednesday were sold out. The Griffin website has a number of nice features, including "See and Hear Poetry" from Griffin shortlists and winners; a selection of poets' blogs; and a long list of related links.