If spring is the season when a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love, summer is the time when a former Midwesterner's heart fills with a different kind of affection – a romance with the land.Read the rest here.
For some of us, that romance is three-pronged. First, there is the love of the landscape itself: The way the horizon stretches endlessly, stitching together blue sky and black soil. The way silver silos glint in the sun. The way dairy cows graze in velvet pastures.
Then there is the romance with the bounty of that land, as reflected in the proverbial fruited plain and amber waves of grain. This is the month when the corn is supposed to be knee-high by the Fourth of July, and next month as high as an elephant's eye, at least in the view of Rodgers and Hammerstein.
Finally, there are the bedrock values that spring from this fertile land, beginning with the virtues of hard work and cooperation that are required to plant, cultivate, and harvest crops, fruits, and vegetables.
This summer two authors offer reminders of those virtues. In "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," Barbara Kingsolver describes her family's year-long experiment in self-sufficiency. Their locus is Appalachia, not the Midwest, but the values are the same. ...
For Mildred Armstrong Kalish, author of "Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression," rural life brought other lessons. ...
As Americans have moved from farms to cities, two profound changes have occurred. Younger generations have little knowledge of where food comes from. Many people have also lost an understanding of – and an appreciation for – hard physical labor. The poetic description of the Midwest as the nation's bread basket masks the intense labor and economic uncertainties farmers face. ...
Kingsolver knows that most families cannot replicate her family's experiment in self-reliance. Likewise, Kalish is not sentimental about the economic strains her family faced.
They understand that there is obviously no going back to a more rural way of life. But both books suggest an intriguing question: In a sophisticated urban and suburban culture, built on the premise of bigger, better, faster, and more expensive, is there value in encouraging a greater appreciation for simpler living, closer to families and the land when possible?
Kingsolver and Kalish both make eloquent, persuasive cases for answering in the affirmative. Sustenance, after all, comes in many forms.
July 11, 2007
Little Heathens and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle in The Christian Science Monitor
From today's Christian Science Monitor, from Marilyn Gardner's column, "A harvest of virtues as well as sustenance", with the subtitle, "Two new books remind readers how closely most Americans used to be connected to the land":
July 09, 2007
More from Millie Kalish
From "'Grandma, tell me a farm story'...and boy, did she ever" by Susan L. Rife for the Herald-Tribune in Sarasota, Florida, where Mildred Kalish, author of Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression -- now winging its way to me -- lived with her husband in retirement until 2005:
Kalish began compiling her memories into book form about 20 years ago, when she would walk her 4-year-old granddaughter, Meredith, to school and entertain her along the way with stories from her childhood.
"She would say, 'Grandma, tell me a farm story,' " said Kalish. "That's the title I did the first draft of the book with. I worked on it off and on until about 2002, then decided to really get to work on it."
Her friend, Marilyn Harwell, a neighbor for "years and years and years" at Pelican Cove, said the two would sit "for five years, talking about her book, drinking single-malt scotch." ...
Although Kalish wrote the book for her family, she thinks it has a broader appeal, thanks to nostalgia for simpler times, and, she said, "Part of it I honestly think has to do with the fact that the world is in such dreadful shape. We're having tainted food come in from China -- shrimp, toothpaste, beef, everything -- and we're having this awful war, the whole Mideast thing, and the political thing. I think that people feel they could not control their lives. In our day, we controlled almost everything about our lives. That gave us a sense of self-sufficiency and self-reliance that people don't have today."
[Mrs. Kalish's son Greg] described his mother as "the most unbelievable optimist," and said her greatest gift to him had been her love of the outdoors. When he and Doug, who now lives about 10 minutes away from Harry and Millie Kalish in Mountain View, were kids, their mother would awaken them at 2 a.m. to drive far away from city lights to watch meteor showers.
July 07, 2007
Semicolon's Saturday Review of Books
Or, turnabout is fair play.
Sherry at Semicolon was kind enough to submit a poem to yesterday's Poetry Friday, so since I find I have a reviewish post this week and some computer time this morning, I sent the post to Sherry's weekly roundup, the Saturday Review Books.
If you discount my initial goof, where my finger grazed "enter" before I finished typing, today's review is up 62 entries and counting (where the smilies came from, though, I don't know; I'm just relieved that Mr. Linky behaved himself all day yesterday). What a great deal of great weekend reading! Thank you, Sherry.
Sherry at Semicolon was kind enough to submit a poem to yesterday's Poetry Friday, so since I find I have a reviewish post this week and some computer time this morning, I sent the post to Sherry's weekly roundup, the Saturday Review Books.
If you discount my initial goof, where my finger grazed "enter" before I finished typing, today's review is up 62 entries and counting (where the smilies came from, though, I don't know; I'm just relieved that Mr. Linky behaved himself all day yesterday). What a great deal of great weekend reading! Thank you, Sherry.
July 06, 2007
Poetry Friday: Fireflies and a round-up
No, not a round-up of fireflies. I've already learned my lesson trying to herd cats.
Welcome to Farm School and to this week's round-up, which I'm happy (and probably long overdue) to host here at Farm School, starting off with a little Ogden Nash for a lazy summer day:
The Firefly
by Ogden Nash
The firefly's flame
Is something for which science has no name.
I can think of nothing eerier
Than flying around with an unidentified glow on a
person's posterior.
And so to the round-up -- with the help of Mr. Linky, while I'm off gathering eggs and watering flowers (today is the third day in a row of temps in the nineties and no rain).
Schelle at Brand New Ending gets an early start (from Australia) looking for Truth and Beauty, with Ralph Waldo Emerson's Each and All and an original Fib.
Alkelda at Saints and Spinners is first in the hemisphere, Putting the Good Things Away with Marge Piercy (by the way, Alkelda is hosting the next issue of the Carnival of Children's Literature, with submissions due July 20).
Michele at Scholar's Blog has some Shakespeare for a summer's day, Sonnet 55 for Poetry Friday 57, and WWI
Kelly at Big A little a, our fearless Poetry Friday leader, has an original Requiem for a Laptop, which I could have used last fall. "Black Screen of Death" indeed!
Sam Riddleburger has some haikus by writer and illustrator Cece Bell, including the first ever poem I've read about one of my favorite childhood meals, Toad in a Hole. Read his post to find out just how much he loves her, and her poetry. Sam also asks kidlitters to send in haikus for the showcase.
David at the excelsior file, who is "exploring the recovered memories of childhood while exploring my own second act through the world of kids books", joins the Poetry Friday fray for the first time with a bang -- and a bottle -- with the ripping pirate poem Derelict by Young Ewing Allison. A hearty pirate welcome, David, to the treasure chest that is Poetry Friday!
cloudscome at a wrung sponge has a poem by Rumi on one-handed basket weaving and craftsmen practicing their craft, with cloudscome's thoughts on the creative process and the questions, how and where do you write?
Laura at Wordy Girls offers a selection of poems, all 15 Words or Less, based on this week's photo, which is of a beatiful hydrangea growing three steps from Laura's front door. Add your own poem to the bouquet of comments in the previous link and Laura will add it to the blog post.
Kelly Fineman has perfect timing and patriotic poetry -- Emma Lazarus's "New Colossus".
Jules at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast has a Poetry Friday post chock full goodies -- lyrical song lyrics from one of her favorite bands, The Innocence Mission; and also Christopher Robin, and thoughts on the healing power of art, with a request to send along any art-as-healer stories. (Jules, I was this close to pulling Christopher Milne's The Enchanted Places off the shelf the other day. I think I'll have to go back and do it. Thanks.)
John Mutford at The Book Mine Set, up north in Iqaluit, Nunavut (can you see us waving from Alberta, John?!), has an original poem -- Slouching Toward Nirvana in Iqaluit, inspired by Charles Bukowski.
Christine M at The Simple and the Ordinary is also still in a patriotic mood this week, with some of Katherine Lee Bates's less familiar verses from America the Beautiful.
Energetic Elaine Magliaro, my old Cybils poetry panel pal, is already thinking about this year's Cybils, with a round-up post of of her own, revisiting the children’s poetry books she's read and reviewed to date at both of her blogs, Wild Rose Reader and Blue Rose Girls. Speaking of Blue Rose Girls, Elaine has a Poetry Friday post there with a poem by Linda Pastan on the joys of finding A New Poet.
Sherry at Semicolon has a riddle poem as well as a pictorial hint for the answer for Poetry and Fine Art Friday today.
Adrienne at What Adrienne Thinks About That takes a look at a picture book edition of Casey at the Bat, and finds that illustrator Christopher Bing hits it out of the park.
Gwenda at Shaken & Stirred tackles rejection in verse, with Philip Dacey's Form Rejection Letter, for a friend.
Nancy at Journey Woman has been thinking about CS Lewis and Joy Davidman. Nancy offers one of Joy Davidman's poems, and some book titles and links for more on their lives, and life together.
The delightfully named Becky at Becky's Book Reviews offers the lyrics to the Lennon and McCartney song In My Life, to celebrate both the first meeting of poets John and Paul on this date 50 years ago and Ringo Starr's birthday tomorrow. Becky also has a link to the nifty Blog, Blog Me Do.
Eva at Digital Changeling has A Little Lovecraft with some very scary cats. No, they're not responsible for the fish problem mentioned at the top of the post. At least I don't think so. And I hope you're feeling better soon, Eva.
MotherReader has a book in verse for young adults, and the good news is that it's "funny, realistic, and completely enjoyable."
Marcie at World of Words captures summer in 13 words, with her Blueberry Haiku, inspired by weekend berry picking. And there's more, in Marcie's Poetry Friday 2 post, with a look at Nikki Grimes's poetry collection (Marcie call it "a novel in verse"), What Is Goodbye?, about the death of a sibling.
Literacy Teacher at Mentor Texts & More offers thoughts on shelter and security with Leslie Bunder's My Homeland. LT is also hosting the Picture Book Carnival, which sounds very, very intriguing (and has a deadline of July 31st). And don't miss LT's links for Summer Reading for Teachers of Writing -- scroll all the way down the blogroll on the right to find them.
Little Willow goes over hill, over dale, with fairy queens and elves with an excerpt from her favorite Shakespearean comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream.
Sara Lewis Holmes at Read Write Believe enters the world of blogging, and Poetry Friday, with why she writes, and her poem (and its reply to Jules, above), The Bones of January. Welcome, Sara.
Karen E. offers one of her favorites (and mine), Emily Dickinson, listening to the murmur of a bee and seeing the red upon the hill.
TadMack at Finding Wonderland agrees, it is a firefly kind of week, with Lawrence Ferlinghetti's Are There Not Still Fireflies?, written shortly before September 11, 2001, about the flicker of possibilities.
Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect has been teaching a course on improving elementary math all week, and her mind is on numbers. She gives us a few poems about infinity. And don't miss her post from last week on Joyful Education, about the article "The Neuroscience of Joyful Education". We can usually add more joy to our studies around here by adding more poetry to our days. Or fireflies.
Jennie at Biblio File offers a stormy summer poem from Emily Dickinson. My favorite line -- "The lightning skipped like mice".
Rebecca at Ipsa Dixit, a terrific new-to-me blog I discovered just this week when Rebecca left a comment here, says goodbye to the long, long Spring with Mary Oliver's Such Singing in the Wild Branches.
Katie at Pixiepalace is celebrating Kissing Day today, with the help of Robert Burns and a merry tune.
Charlotte at Charlotte's Library spends Poetry Friday travelling the globe with A World of Wonders by J. Patrick Lewis.
Susan at Chicken Spaghetti, who I think is still enjoy lazy days on vacation, went looking for dragonflies and found ethereal Waterwings.
Suzanne at Adventures in Daily Living has a lovely July poem by Elsa Beskow -- and wouldn't you know, we just started making hay today. Thanks again for my lovely button, Suzanne. I'll wear it proudly!
Melissa Wiley at Here in the Bonny Glen offers an excerpt from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, and notes, "The older my children get, the more children I have, the more Whitman means to me. He understands about wonder."
Thank goodness for Google Alerts, which I just checked. Kimberley at lectitans leaves tomorrow for Florida, but not before posting her entry for Poetry Friday, the lyrics of the state song, Swanee River. Enjoy the magic and the Yoohoo, Kimberley.
Hornblower at HMS Indefatigable, in Beautiful British Columbia, slides in on the tail of timezones with two Leonard Cohen poems, including the timely Democracy.
July 05, 2007
Food, Family, Fellowship: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle
Barbara Kingsolver is as good a farmer as she is a writer. Or maybe that should be the other way around. And her nonfiction is a delight.
I finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life over the long weekend, and enjoyed it very much. It's warm, funny, and includes recipes, including one for mozzarella cheese in 30 minutes that seems ridiculously simple and inordinately tempting. What remains with me is not so much Ms. Kingsolver's passionate argument in favor of local and especially seasonal food -- she is, of course, preaching to the converted over here -- but her thoughtful discussions of food and family, and even food and homemaking. For more on the local food aspect, see JoVE's post on the book, with good links to places such as Liz's blog, Pocket Farm (and its new offshoot blog, One Local Summer); and also Mother Crone's review. My only quibble with the book -- the lists and references at the end are helpful, but even better would have been an index.
What makes this book different from some of the other current titles on the subject, especially those published on the heels of inconvenient truths, is that it's written by someone who obviously delights in and attaches importance to her roles as wife and mother. No coincidence that her co-authors are her husband Steven Hopp, who wrote the investigative, informative sidebars, and her 19-year-old daughter Camille, who wrote a nutrition and recipe sections at the end of each chapter. No doubt their year of food life was so successful simply because it was a family project. Ms. Kingsolver begins with an observation not overly common in North America:
Reading Barbara Kingsolver, I was reminded of the late Laurie Colwin, another writer in the kitchen. From the introduction to her second and last volume of essays and recipes, More Home Cooking (1990):
Updated to add: My other, early thoughts on Animal, Vegetable, Miracle posted here.
I finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life over the long weekend, and enjoyed it very much. It's warm, funny, and includes recipes, including one for mozzarella cheese in 30 minutes that seems ridiculously simple and inordinately tempting. What remains with me is not so much Ms. Kingsolver's passionate argument in favor of local and especially seasonal food -- she is, of course, preaching to the converted over here -- but her thoughtful discussions of food and family, and even food and homemaking. For more on the local food aspect, see JoVE's post on the book, with good links to places such as Liz's blog, Pocket Farm (and its new offshoot blog, One Local Summer); and also Mother Crone's review. My only quibble with the book -- the lists and references at the end are helpful, but even better would have been an index.
What makes this book different from some of the other current titles on the subject, especially those published on the heels of inconvenient truths, is that it's written by someone who obviously delights in and attaches importance to her roles as wife and mother. No coincidence that her co-authors are her husband Steven Hopp, who wrote the investigative, informative sidebars, and her 19-year-old daughter Camille, who wrote a nutrition and recipe sections at the end of each chapter. No doubt their year of food life was so successful simply because it was a family project. Ms. Kingsolver begins with an observation not overly common in North America:
Pushing a refrigerated green vegetable from one end of the earth to another is, let's face it, a bizarre use of fuel. But there's a simpler reason to pass up off-season asparagus: it's inferior. Respecting the dignity of a spectacular food means enjoying it at its best. Europeans celebrate the short season of abundant asparagus as a form of holiday. ...And there's more, much more:
The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint -- virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value. "Blah blah blah," hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires.
Waiting for the quality experience seems to be the constitutional article that has slipped from American food custom. If we mean to reclaim it, asparagus seems like a place to start. And if the object of our delayed gratification is a suspected aphrodisiac? That's the sublime paradox of a food culture: restraint equals indulgence.
I haven't mastered the serene mindset on all household chores ... but I might be getting there with cooking. ... Cooking is definitely one of the things we do for fun around here. When I'm in a blue mood I head for the kitchen. I turn the pages of my favorite cookbooks, summoning the prospective joyful noise of a shared meal. I stand over a bubbling soup, close my eyes, and inhale. From the ground up, everything about nourishment steadies my soul."Finally," Ms. Kingsolver writes,
Yes, I have other things to do. For nineteen years I've been nothing but a working mother, one of the legions who could justify a lot of packaged, precooked foods if I wanted to feed those to my family. I have no argument with convenience, on principle. I'm inordinately fond of my dishwasher, and I like the shiny tools that lie in my kitchen drawers, ready to make me a menace to any vegetable living or dead. ...
But if I were to define my style of feeding my family, on a permanent basis, by the dictum, 'Get it over with, quick," something cherished in our family life would collapse. And I'm not talking waistlines, though we'd miss those. I'm discussing dinnertime, the cornerstone of our family's mental health. If I had to quantify it, I'd say 75 percent of my crucial parenting effort has taken place during or surrounding the time our family convenes for our evening meal. I'm sure I'm not the only parent to think so. A survey of National Merit scholars -- exceptionally successful eighteen-year-olds crossing all lines of ethnicity, gender, geography, and class -- turned up a common thread in their lives: the habit of sitting down to a family dinner table. It's not just the food making them brilliant. It's probably the parents -- their care, priorities, and culture of support. The words: "I'll expect you home for dinner."
I understand that most U.S. citizens don't have room in their lives to grow food or even see it growing. But I have trouble accepting the next step in our journey toward obligate symbiosis with the packaged meal and takeout. Cooking is a dying art in our culture. Why is a good question, and an uneasy one, because I find myself politically and socioeconomically entangled in the answer. I belong to the generation of women who took as our youthful rallying cry: Allow us a good education so we won't have to slave in the kitchen. We recoiled from the proposition that keeping a husband presentable and fed should be our highest intellectual aspiration. We fought for entry as equal partners into every quarter of the labor force. We went to school, sweated those exams, earned our professional stripes, and we beg therefore to be excused from manual labor. Or else our full-time job is manual labor, we are carpenters or steelworkers, or we stand at a cash register all day. At the end of a shift we deserve to go home and put our feet up. Somehow, though, history came around and bit us in the backside: now most women have jobs and still find themselves largely in charge of the housework. Cooking at the end of a long day is a burden we could live without.
It's a reasonable position. But it got twisted into a pathological food culture. When my generation of women walked away from the kitchen we were escorted down that path by a profiteering industry that knew a tired, vulnerable marketing target when they saw it. "Hey ladies," it said to us, "go ahead, get liberated. We'll take care of dinner." They threw open the door and we walked into a nutritional crisis and genuinely toxic food supply. If you think toxic is an exaggeration, read the package directions for handling raw chicken from a CAFO [Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations, or feedlots/factory farms]. We came a long way, baby, into bad eating habits and collaterally impaired family dynamics. No matter what else we do or believe, food remains at the center of ever culture. Ours now runs on empty calories.
When we traded homemaking for careers, we were implicitly promised economic independence and worldly influence. But a devil of a bargain it has turned out to be in terms of daily life. We gave up the aroma of warm bread rising, the measured pace of nurturing routines, the creative task of molding our families' tastes and zest for life; we received in exchange the minivan and the Lunchable. (Or worse, convenience-mart hot dogs and latchkey kids.) I consider it the great hoodwink of my generation. ...
Eating preprocessed or fast foods can look like salvation in the short run, until we start losing what real mealtimes give to a family: civility, economy, and health. A lot of us are wishing for a way back home, to the place where care-and-feeding isn't zookeeper's duty but something happier and more creative.
"Cooking without remuneration" and "slaving over a hot stove" are activities separated mostly by a frame of mind. The distinction is crucial. Career women in many countries still routinely apply passion to their cooking, heading straight from work to the market to search out the freshest ingredients, feeding their loved ones with aplomb. ...
Full-time homemaking may not be an option for those of us delivered without trust funds into the modern era. But approaching mealtimes as a creative opportunity, rather than a chore, is an option. Required participation from spouse and kids is an element of the equation. An obsession with spotless collars, ironing, and kitchen floors you can eat off of -- not so much. We've earned the right to forget about stupefying household busywork. But kitchens where food is cooked and eaten, those were really a good idea. We threw that baby out with the bathwater. It may be advisable to grab her by the slippery foot and haul her back in here before it's too late.
cooking is about good citizenship. It's the only way to get serious about putting locally raised foods into your diet, which keeps farmlands healthy and grocery money in the neighborhood. Cooking and eating with children teaches them civility and practical skills they can use later on to save money and stay healthy, whatever may happen in their lifetimes to the gas-fueled food industry.She's sensible, practical, passionate, and I'd trust her to feed or look after my kids any day of the week. For our family, how we eat, and how the kids learn, not to mention how we make our family decisions, are all of a piece. We don't often defer to the corporate choices for society's status quo, and, from the time the kids were in (cloth) diapers, that has pegged us around here variously as nonconformists, free thinkers, and weirdos. On the subject of home educating our children, it's not uncommon to be quizzed about the reasons behind the choice: "Why bother," some folks ask, "when the local public/private/parochial school is good enough?" Much as many people now ask about those seeking more local, seasonal, home-grown, or organic foods, "Why bother when the supermarket is good enough?" The answer, of course, is that for many of us, "good enough" isn't good enough.
Reading Barbara Kingsolver, I was reminded of the late Laurie Colwin, another writer in the kitchen. From the introduction to her second and last volume of essays and recipes, More Home Cooking (1990):
These days family life (or private life) is a challenge, and we must all fight for it. We must turn off the television and the telephone, hunker down in front of our hearths, and leave our briefcases at the office, if for only one night. We must march into the kitchen, en famille or with a friend, and find some easy, heartwarming things to make from scratch, and even if it is but once a week, we must gather at the table, alone or with friends or with lots of friends or with one friend, and eat a meal together. We know that without food we would die. Without fellowship life is not worth living. ...Go ahead. Give a little.
The table is a meeting place, a gathering ground, the source of sustenance and nourishment, festivity, safety, and satisfaction. A person cooking is a person giving: Even the simplest food is a gift.
Updated to add: My other, early thoughts on Animal, Vegetable, Miracle posted here.
July 04, 2007
Words to remember, words to live by
A Creed for Americans (1942)
by Stephen Vincent Benét
We believe in the dignity of man and the worth and value of every living soul, no matter in what body housed, no matter whether born in comfort or born in poverty, no matter to what stock he belongs, what creed he professes, what job he holds.
We believe that every man should have a free and equal chance to develop his own best abilities under a free system of government, where the people themselves choose those who are to rule them and where no one man can set himself up as a tyrant or oppress the many for the benefit of the few.
We believe that free speech, free assembly, free elections, free practice of religion are the cornerstones of such a government. We believe that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America offer the best and most workable framework yet devised for such a government.
We believe in justice and law. We do not believe in curing an evil by substituting for it another and opposite evil. We are unalterably opposed to class hatred, race hatred, religious hatred, however manifested, by whomsoever instilled.
We believe that political freedom implies and acknowledges economic responsibility. We do not believe that any state is an admirable state that lets its people go hungry when they might be fed, ragged when they might be clothed, sick when they might be well, workless when they might have work. We believe that it is the duty of all of us, the whole people working through our democratic system, to see that such conditions are remedied, whenever and wherever they exist in our country.
We believe that political freedom implies and acknowledges personal responsibility. We believe that we have a great and priceless heritage as a nation -- not only a heritage of material resources but of liberties, dreams, ideals, ways of going forward. We believe it is our business, our right and our inescapable duty to maintain and expand that heritage. We believe that such a heritage cannot be maintained by the lacklustre, the selfish, the bitterly partisan or the amiably doubtful. We believe it is something bigger than party, bigger than our own small ambitions. We believe it is worth the sacrifice of ease, the long toil of years, the expense of our heart's blood.
We know that our democratic system is not perfect. We know that it permits injustices and wrongs. With our whole hearts we believe in its continuous power of self-remedy. That power is not a theory -- it has been proven. Through the years, democracy has given more people freedom, less persecution and a higher standard of living than any other system we know. Under it, evils have been abolished, injustices remedied, old wounds healed, not by terror and revolution but by the slow revolution of consent in the minds of all the people. While we maintain democracy, we must maintain the greatest power a people can possess -- the power of gradual, efficient, and lawful change.
Most of all, we believe in democracy itself -- in its past, its present and its future -- in democracy as a political system to live by -- in democracy as the great hope in the minds of the free. We believe it so deeply rooted in the earth of this country that neither assault from without nor dissension from within can ever wipe it entirely from that earth. But, because it was established for us by the free-minded and the daring, it is our duty now, in danger as in security, to uphold and sustain it with all that we have and are. We believe that its future shall and must be even greater than its past. And to the future -- as to the past of our forebears and the present of our hard-won freedom -- we pledge all we have to give.
from The Family Reading Book: Selections from the World's Great Writers and Thinkers Past and Present, edited by David G. Legerman, 1952, Doubleday & Company.
* * * * * *
Stephen Vincent Benét was born on July 22, 1898, in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, to a military family, which meant a great deal of travelling. Benét was raised around the United States, living in California, Illinois, North Carolina, and New York.
He published his first volume of poetry, Five Men and Pompey, in 1915 at the age of 17. His second volume, Young Adventure, followed two years later. A year after that, Benét graduated from Yale University. His writing career, centered around fantasy and American themes, began in earnest in the 1920s after his marriage to writer Rosemary Carr.
At the height of his all-too brief career, Benét was one of this country's most popular and critically acclaimed writers of fiction and poetry. His bestselling epic poem -- try that, nowadays -- of the Civil War, John Brown's Body, won the Pulitzer Prize for American verse in 1929. At the time, the poem was called "the Iliad of the Western world" and its author "the Homer of the Civil War"; Margaret Mitchell said she was inspired by the work when writing Gone with the Wind. I picked up a first edition not too long ago for all of $10.
In the early 1930s, Benét published two works infused by American history and legends. The first, Ballads and Poems, 1915-1930, appeared in 1933, and contained the poem American Names, whose last line,
"Bury my heart at Wounded Knee"
was taken by historian Dee Brown as the title for his classic 1970 work, subtitled "An Indian History of the American West".
The second, A Book of Americans (1933), called by Time Magazie "a lyric history in verse", was written with his wife Rosemary. Five of these -- about George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Nancy Hanks, and Negro spirituals -- were collected by Helen Ferris in her children's poetry anthology, Favorite Poems Old and New. One poem from the book, about Johnny Appleseed, was turned into a picture book about five years ago, with illustrations by S.D. Schindler.
Benét's classic short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, an American version of the Faust legend, was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1937 and won the O. Henry Award. Benét wrote the screenplay adaptation for the 1941 movie (also known as All Money Can Buy), starring Walter Huston (Anjelica's Canadian-born grandfather) as old Scratch. The story was later selected for Benét's short story collection, Thirteen O'Clock, which also included the classic early science fiction piece, By the Waters of Babylon.
Another of his short stories, The Sobbin' Women, was based on the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine women and later turned into the screenplay for the MGM musical, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Lyricist Johnny Mercer took Benét's story title and turned it into a musical number, Sobbin' Women ("Y'heard about them Sobbin' Women who lived in the Roman days; It seems that they all went swimmin' while their men was off to graze...")
In the 1940s, with the prospect of another world war looming on the horizon -- Benét was turned down for military service in World War I because of either poor eyesight or the effects of a childhood bout of scarlet fever (I couldn't be sure which in my Googling) -- Benét turned toward government service, writing radio broadcasts and other works, such as the creed above, to urge America's entry into the war. Other works included narration for the 1940 Rural Electrification Administration documentary Power and the Land (if you get only one DVD about the Great Depression to watch with your children, make it this one); the 1942 radio play They Burned the Books, about Nazi book burning in German; a short history of the United States, America, commissioned by the Office of War Information for translation and distribution in Europe; and, commissioned by poet Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, “The United Nations Prayer”, to be used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to close his radio address on Flag Day, June 14, 1942. Some of Benét's radio scripts, We Stand United, and Other Radio Scripts, 1940-1942, can be found online.
Stephen Vincent Benét died of a heart attack in New York City, on March 13, 1943, at the age of 44. He was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1944 for the unfinished poem Western Star, which was to be a multi-volume verse epic about the American frontier. Rosemary Carr Benet died in 1962, at age 64, of cancer.
Worth noting: Benét's brother, the poet and critic William Rose Benét (1886-1950), was the editor of a book I've mentioned before and find very, very useful: The Reader's Encyclopedia: An Encyclopedia of World Literature and the Arts, 1948, published by the Thomas Y. Crowell Company. I'll stick with my older edition, thank you, but you can find a new edition here. William Rose also won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1942 for The Dust Which Is God; his other works include Rip Tide (1932), a novel in verse, and A Book of Poems in Wartime (1944). He edited the works of his wife, poet Elinor Wylie, as well as The Oxford Anthology of American Literature (with Norman Pearson) and The Poetry of Freedom (with Norman Cousins). He was survived by his fourth wife, the children's writer Marjorie (Story of Ping) Flack.
by Stephen Vincent Benét
We believe in the dignity of man and the worth and value of every living soul, no matter in what body housed, no matter whether born in comfort or born in poverty, no matter to what stock he belongs, what creed he professes, what job he holds.
We believe that every man should have a free and equal chance to develop his own best abilities under a free system of government, where the people themselves choose those who are to rule them and where no one man can set himself up as a tyrant or oppress the many for the benefit of the few.
We believe that free speech, free assembly, free elections, free practice of religion are the cornerstones of such a government. We believe that the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States of America offer the best and most workable framework yet devised for such a government.
We believe in justice and law. We do not believe in curing an evil by substituting for it another and opposite evil. We are unalterably opposed to class hatred, race hatred, religious hatred, however manifested, by whomsoever instilled.
We believe that political freedom implies and acknowledges economic responsibility. We do not believe that any state is an admirable state that lets its people go hungry when they might be fed, ragged when they might be clothed, sick when they might be well, workless when they might have work. We believe that it is the duty of all of us, the whole people working through our democratic system, to see that such conditions are remedied, whenever and wherever they exist in our country.
We believe that political freedom implies and acknowledges personal responsibility. We believe that we have a great and priceless heritage as a nation -- not only a heritage of material resources but of liberties, dreams, ideals, ways of going forward. We believe it is our business, our right and our inescapable duty to maintain and expand that heritage. We believe that such a heritage cannot be maintained by the lacklustre, the selfish, the bitterly partisan or the amiably doubtful. We believe it is something bigger than party, bigger than our own small ambitions. We believe it is worth the sacrifice of ease, the long toil of years, the expense of our heart's blood.
We know that our democratic system is not perfect. We know that it permits injustices and wrongs. With our whole hearts we believe in its continuous power of self-remedy. That power is not a theory -- it has been proven. Through the years, democracy has given more people freedom, less persecution and a higher standard of living than any other system we know. Under it, evils have been abolished, injustices remedied, old wounds healed, not by terror and revolution but by the slow revolution of consent in the minds of all the people. While we maintain democracy, we must maintain the greatest power a people can possess -- the power of gradual, efficient, and lawful change.
Most of all, we believe in democracy itself -- in its past, its present and its future -- in democracy as a political system to live by -- in democracy as the great hope in the minds of the free. We believe it so deeply rooted in the earth of this country that neither assault from without nor dissension from within can ever wipe it entirely from that earth. But, because it was established for us by the free-minded and the daring, it is our duty now, in danger as in security, to uphold and sustain it with all that we have and are. We believe that its future shall and must be even greater than its past. And to the future -- as to the past of our forebears and the present of our hard-won freedom -- we pledge all we have to give.
from The Family Reading Book: Selections from the World's Great Writers and Thinkers Past and Present, edited by David G. Legerman, 1952, Doubleday & Company.
* * * * * *
Stephen Vincent Benét was born on July 22, 1898, in Fountain Hill, Pennsylvania, to a military family, which meant a great deal of travelling. Benét was raised around the United States, living in California, Illinois, North Carolina, and New York.
He published his first volume of poetry, Five Men and Pompey, in 1915 at the age of 17. His second volume, Young Adventure, followed two years later. A year after that, Benét graduated from Yale University. His writing career, centered around fantasy and American themes, began in earnest in the 1920s after his marriage to writer Rosemary Carr.
At the height of his all-too brief career, Benét was one of this country's most popular and critically acclaimed writers of fiction and poetry. His bestselling epic poem -- try that, nowadays -- of the Civil War, John Brown's Body, won the Pulitzer Prize for American verse in 1929. At the time, the poem was called "the Iliad of the Western world" and its author "the Homer of the Civil War"; Margaret Mitchell said she was inspired by the work when writing Gone with the Wind. I picked up a first edition not too long ago for all of $10.
In the early 1930s, Benét published two works infused by American history and legends. The first, Ballads and Poems, 1915-1930, appeared in 1933, and contained the poem American Names, whose last line,
"Bury my heart at Wounded Knee"
was taken by historian Dee Brown as the title for his classic 1970 work, subtitled "An Indian History of the American West".
The second, A Book of Americans (1933), called by Time Magazie "a lyric history in verse", was written with his wife Rosemary. Five of these -- about George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Nancy Hanks, and Negro spirituals -- were collected by Helen Ferris in her children's poetry anthology, Favorite Poems Old and New. One poem from the book, about Johnny Appleseed, was turned into a picture book about five years ago, with illustrations by S.D. Schindler.
Benét's classic short story The Devil and Daniel Webster, an American version of the Faust legend, was first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1937 and won the O. Henry Award. Benét wrote the screenplay adaptation for the 1941 movie (also known as All Money Can Buy), starring Walter Huston (Anjelica's Canadian-born grandfather) as old Scratch. The story was later selected for Benét's short story collection, Thirteen O'Clock, which also included the classic early science fiction piece, By the Waters of Babylon.
Another of his short stories, The Sobbin' Women, was based on the Roman myth of the rape of the Sabine women and later turned into the screenplay for the MGM musical, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers. Lyricist Johnny Mercer took Benét's story title and turned it into a musical number, Sobbin' Women ("Y'heard about them Sobbin' Women who lived in the Roman days; It seems that they all went swimmin' while their men was off to graze...")
In the 1940s, with the prospect of another world war looming on the horizon -- Benét was turned down for military service in World War I because of either poor eyesight or the effects of a childhood bout of scarlet fever (I couldn't be sure which in my Googling) -- Benét turned toward government service, writing radio broadcasts and other works, such as the creed above, to urge America's entry into the war. Other works included narration for the 1940 Rural Electrification Administration documentary Power and the Land (if you get only one DVD about the Great Depression to watch with your children, make it this one); the 1942 radio play They Burned the Books, about Nazi book burning in German; a short history of the United States, America, commissioned by the Office of War Information for translation and distribution in Europe; and, commissioned by poet Archibald MacLeish, then Librarian of Congress, “The United Nations Prayer”, to be used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to close his radio address on Flag Day, June 14, 1942. Some of Benét's radio scripts, We Stand United, and Other Radio Scripts, 1940-1942, can be found online.
Stephen Vincent Benét died of a heart attack in New York City, on March 13, 1943, at the age of 44. He was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1944 for the unfinished poem Western Star, which was to be a multi-volume verse epic about the American frontier. Rosemary Carr Benet died in 1962, at age 64, of cancer.
Worth noting: Benét's brother, the poet and critic William Rose Benét (1886-1950), was the editor of a book I've mentioned before and find very, very useful: The Reader's Encyclopedia: An Encyclopedia of World Literature and the Arts, 1948, published by the Thomas Y. Crowell Company. I'll stick with my older edition, thank you, but you can find a new edition here. William Rose also won the Pulitzer Prize, in 1942 for The Dust Which Is God; his other works include Rip Tide (1932), a novel in verse, and A Book of Poems in Wartime (1944). He edited the works of his wife, poet Elinor Wylie, as well as The Oxford Anthology of American Literature (with Norman Pearson) and The Poetry of Freedom (with Norman Cousins). He was survived by his fourth wife, the children's writer Marjorie (Story of Ping) Flack.
July 02, 2007
Gosh all hemlock!
I'm enough of a Luddite that I found it more than a bit disconcerting earlier today, when bringing up the Amazon website to look at a book, to find the main page welcoming me with "Science Picks for Becky". But disconcertedness turned to intrigue when the first cover's illustration, and then its title, caught my eye: Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression by Mildred Armstrong Kalish, just out in May and just thirteen dollars and twenty cents. And the cover is adorable. A glowing five star review from someone who didn't seem to be related to Mrs. Kalish. Hmmm...Then I went Google hunting and found Elizabeth Gilbert's glowing review in yesterday's New York Times Book Review. On the front page. From which:
Some of what follows is unsurprising. You’ll never guess it, but these kids were taught to work. They planted potatoes, tended livestock, hayed fields and were beaten for any lapses in judgment. They did without luxuries (electricity, leisure, heat) and were never coddled on account of their tender youth. (“Childhood was generally considered to be a disease,” Kalish recalls, “or, at the very least, a disability, to be ignored for the most part, and remedied as quickly as possible.”)Sounds delightful, and perfect for Summer. Sold. And great good luck to Mrs. Kalish.
For anyone from an old-school farming background, this is familiar territory. “We were taught that if you bought something it should last forever — or as close to forever as we could contrive,” Kalish reports predictably. Or: “When one of us kids received a scratch, cut or puncture, we didn’t run to the house to be taken care of.” If all that “Little Heathens” offered, then, were more such hard-times homilies, this would not be much of a book. But this memoir is richer than that, filled with fervency, urgency and one amazing twist, which surprised me to the point of a delighted, audible gasp: Mildred Armstrong Kalish absolutely loved her childhood.
It’s not merely that she appreciated the values instilled by the Great Depression, or that now, in her older years, she wants to preserve memories of a lost time (though all this is true). No — beyond that, she reports quite convincingly that she had a flat-out ball growing up (“It was quite a romp”) and her terrifically soaring love for those childhood memories saturates this book with pure charm, while coaxing the reader into the most unexpected series of sensations: joy, affection, wonder and even envy. ...
Later in life, Kalish became a professor, and while the foundation of her writing is still English-teacher English (orderly, with perfect posture) her old pagan rhythms seep through every disciplined paragraph. “This was our world,” she writes, but one gets the feeling that Garrison, Iowa, was really her world, which she experienced with the awe of a mystic. In the violet dusk of a cornfield, in the cool mornings on her way to chores, on the long, unsupervised walks to school, in the decadence of eating bacon drippings, heavy cream and ground-cherries, Kalish’s simple life routinely aroused her to an almost erotic extreme. (Then again, this was the only kind of eroticism available; the poor girl was never taught even the starkest fundamentals of human sexuality, regretting that “in those days, we were supposed to get such information from the gutter. Alas! I was deprived of the gutter, too!”) ...
Kalish is wise enough to know that the last link to the past is usually language, and rather than lament what’s been lost, she stays connected to her youthful world by using its gleeful, if outdated, lingo. (Tell me the last time you heard someone exclaim, “Not on your tintype!” or “Gosh all hemlock!”) She admits self-deprecatingly that there were certain expressions she heard spoken so often as a child that she grew up mistakenly thinking they were each a single word: “agoodwoman, hardearnedmoney, agoodhardworker, alittleheathen, adrunkenbum, demonrum and agoodwoolskirt.”
Memories too can run together like this, becoming mishmashed over time. Not with Mildred Armstrong Kalish, though. As a natural-born memoirist (by which I mean not only “one who writes an autobiography” but also “one who remembers everything”), Kalish has kept her memories tidily ordered for decades. Now she has unpacked and worked them into a story that is not only trustworthy and useful (have I mentioned the recipe for homemade marshmallows?) but is also polished by real, rare happiness.
It is a very good book, indeed.
In fact, it is averyveryverygoodbook.
Pssssst:
The book's website is here. Complete with farm recipes. Oh, and you can wet your whistle with a preview of Chapter One.
Also, this charming article, "Her stories of farm life could fill a bestseller: Hopes are high for debut by local grandmother", from The San Jose Mercury News.
June 29, 2007
More food for thought: connections and disconnections
I've been cogitating for the past week or so on the things I read in Natalie Angier's science book The Canon, partly in preparation for my regurgitation earlier today and partly in preparation for the kids' science studies next year (informal plans for which I hope to post before too long). So everything was rolling around in my head quite nicely when my I started to read one of the books from my father's recent parcel*, Barbara Kingsolver's latest, the nonfiction Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, just published in May and which I'm enjoying very much. It sounds very much of a piece with her 2002 book of essays Small Wonder, which JoVE has mentioned at least once to me in her comments here. (My request was down pretty low on the interlibrary loan list, but after opening the package, I canceled the hold and requested Small Wonder instead.)
So on page 11 of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I discovered this passage (emphasis mine),
Of course, The Canon goes off in one direction, toward science education, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, toward another. Here's a hint:
Which reminds me of this article, on farmers who write, from last week's New York Times (I think it's a pesky Times Select story, so if Bug Me Not doesn't work, email me and we'll sort things out). To even things out, here are some free recipes from the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle website.
Now off to the farmers' market with you!
* Also in the package -- thanks, Pop -- and on the go at the moment:
The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left by David Crystal, inspired, as you can no doubt tell, by Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are by Andrew Cohen
So on page 11 of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, I discovered this passage (emphasis mine),
Many bright people are really in the dark about vegetable life. Biology teachers face kids in classrooms who may not even believe in the metamorphosis of bud to flower to fruit and seed, but rather, some continuum of pansies becoming petunias becoming chrysanthemums; that's the only reality they witness as landscapers come to campuses and city parks and surreptitiously yank out one flower before it fades from its prime, replacing it with another. (My biology-professor brother pointed this out to me.) The same disconnection from natural processes may be at the heart of our country's shift away from believing in evolution. In the past, principles of natural selection and change over time made sense to kids who'd watched it all unfold. Whether or not they knew the terms, farm families understood the processes well enough to imitate them: culling, selecting, and improving their herds and crops. For modern kids who intuitively believe in the spontaneous generation of fruits and vegetables in the produce section, trying to get their minds around the slow speciation of the plant kingdom may be a stretch.What Kingsolver's husband, Steven Hopp, a biology professor, calls "agricultural agnostics" (he and their daughter Camille are co-authors of the book, by the way). Which of course handily echoes what I had read not too long before in The Canon (one of the bits I posted earlier today):
Farmers, too, were natural scientists. They understood the nuances of seasons, climate, plant growth, the do-si-do between parasite and host [and this is much more true of present-day farmers who farm in more traditional, less conventional methods without synthetic chemicals that kill the parasite and injure the host]. The scientific curiosity that entitled our nation's Founding Fathers to membership in Club Renaissance, Anyone? had agrarian roots. ...There's a reason this place is called Farm School and there's a reason we're not budging.
"The average adult American today knows less about biology than the average ten-year-old living in the Amazon, or than the average American of two hundred years ago," said Andrew Knoll, a professor of natural history at Harvard's Earth and Planetary Sciences Department.
Of course, The Canon goes off in one direction, toward science education, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, toward another. Here's a hint:
When we walked as a nation away from the land, our knowledge of food production fell away from us like dirt in a laundry-soap commercial. Now, it's fair to say, the majority of us don't want to be farmers, see farmers, pay farmers, or hear their complaints. Except as straw-chewing figures in children's books, we don't quite believe in them anymore. When we give it a thought, we mostly consider the food industry to be a thing rather than a person. We obligignly give 85 cents of our every food dollar to that thing, too -- the processors, marketers, and transporters. And we compalin about the high price of organic meats and vegetables that might send back more than three nickels per buck back to the farmers: those actual humans putting seeds in the ground, harvesting, attending livestock births, standing in the fields at dawn castin gtieir shadwos upon our sustenance. There seems to be some reason we don't want to compensate or think about these hardworking eople. In the grocery store checkout corral, we're more likely to learn which TV stars are secretly fornicating than to inquire as to the whereabouts of the people who grew the cucumbers and melons in our carts.Much as Michael Pollan did last year with his Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals, Kingsolver urges us to rememember that we are what we eat and reconsider what we put in our mouths. Kingsolver does it by eating locally and tending her own patch of earth as lyrically as she writes.
Which reminds me of this article, on farmers who write, from last week's New York Times (I think it's a pesky Times Select story, so if Bug Me Not doesn't work, email me and we'll sort things out). To even things out, here are some free recipes from the Animal, Vegetable, Miracle website.
Now off to the farmers' market with you!
* Also in the package -- thanks, Pop -- and on the go at the moment:
The Fight for English: How language pundits ate, shot, and left by David Crystal, inspired, as you can no doubt tell, by Lynne Truss's Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Unfinished Canadian: The People We Are by Andrew Cohen
Poetry Friday: Poems for the First and Fourth
A Happy Canada Day and Happy Independence Day to all, with some poems to mark the occasions.
Rivers of Canada
by Bliss Carman (1861-1929)
Rivers of Canada
by Bliss Carman (1861-1929)
O all the little rivers that run to Hudson's Bay,
They call me and call me to follow them away.
Missinaibi, Abitibi, Little Current--where they run
Dancing and sparkling I see them in the sun.
I hear the brawling rapid, the thunder of the fall,
And when I think upon them I cannot stay at all.
At the far end of the carry, where the wilderness begins,
Set me down with my canoe-load -- and forgiveness of my sins.
O all the mighty rivers beneath the Polar Star,
They call me and call me to follow them afar.
Peace and Athabasca and Coppermine and Slave,
And Yukon and Mackenzie--the highroads of the brave.
Saskatchewan, Assiniboine, the Bow and the Qu'Appelle,
And many a prairie river whose name is like a spell.
They rumor through the twilight at the edge of the unknown,
"There's a message waiting for you, and a kingdom all your own.
"The wilderness shall feed you, her gleam shall be your guide.
Come out from desolations, our path of hope is wide."
O all the headlong rivers that hurry to the West,
They call me and lure me with the joy of their unrest.
Columbia and Fraser and Bear and Kootenay,
I love their fearless reaches where winds untarnished play--
The rush of glacial water across the pebbly bar
To polished pools of azure where the hidden boulders are.
Just there, with heaven smiling, any morning I would be,
Where all the silver rivers go racing to the sea.
O well remembered rivers that sing of long ago,
Ajourneying through summer or dreaming under snow.
Among their meadow islands through placid days they glide,
And where the peaceful orchards are diked against the tide.
Tobique and Madawaska and shining Gaspereaux,
St. Croix and Nashwaak and St. John whose haunts I used to know.
And all the pleasant rivers that seek the Fundy foam,
They call me and call me to follow them home.
Carman, Canada's unofficial poet laureate and a cousin of Canadian poet Charles G.D. Roberts, wrote this c1925.
And, for the Fourth:
I Am an American
by Elias Lieberman
I am an American
father belongs to the Sons of the Revolution;
My mother, to the Colonial Dames.
One of my ancestors pitched tea overboard in Boston Harbor;
Another stood his ground with Warren;
Another hungered with Washington at Valley Forge.
My forefathers were America in the making:
They spoke in her council halls;
They died on her battlefields;
They commanded her ships;
They cleared her forests.
Dawns reddened and paled.
Staunch hearts of mine beat fast at each new star
In the nation's flag.
Keen eyes of mine foresaw her greater glory:
The sweep of her seas,
The plenty of her plains,
The man-hives in her billion-wired cities.
Every drop of blood in me holds a heritage of patriotism.
I am proud of my past.
I am an American.
Lieberman served as an editor of the American humor magazine Puck in 1916 and was literary editor of The American Hebrew journal from 1916 to 1932. "I Am an American" is perhaps his best known work.
The round-up is over at Shaken & Stirred today. Thank you, Gwenda. Grab a glass and a swizzle stick, and enjoy a weekend a poetry, fireworks, and freedom.
Oh, and just a reminder: I do believe in either a weak moment or a brief flicker of responsibility I offered to host Poetry Friday here at Farm School next week, July 6th. So if you sometimes read this blog but haven't participated in Poetry Friday yet, I hope you'll think about sharing a favorite poem -- yours or your family's -- or even a poem you'd like to learn more about or share with your kids. Put your thinking caps on.
And, for the Fourth:
I Am an American
by Elias Lieberman
I am an American
father belongs to the Sons of the Revolution;
My mother, to the Colonial Dames.
One of my ancestors pitched tea overboard in Boston Harbor;
Another stood his ground with Warren;
Another hungered with Washington at Valley Forge.
My forefathers were America in the making:
They spoke in her council halls;
They died on her battlefields;
They commanded her ships;
They cleared her forests.
Dawns reddened and paled.
Staunch hearts of mine beat fast at each new star
In the nation's flag.
Keen eyes of mine foresaw her greater glory:
The sweep of her seas,
The plenty of her plains,
The man-hives in her billion-wired cities.
Every drop of blood in me holds a heritage of patriotism.
I am proud of my past.
I am an American.
I am an American.
My father was an atom of dust,
My mother a straw in the wind,
To his serene majesty.
One of my ancestors died in the mines of Siberia;
Another was crippled for life by twenty blows of the knout;
Another was killed defending his home during the massacres.
The history of my ancestors is a trail of blood
To the palace gate of the Great White Czar.
But then the dream came
The dream of America.
In the light of the Liberty torch
The atom of dust became a man
And the straw in the wind became a woman
For the first time.
"See," said my father, pointing to the flag that fluttered near,
"That flag of stars and stripes is yours;
It is the emblem of the promised land,
It means, my son, the hope of humanity.
Live for it die for it!"
Under the open sky of my new country I swore to do so;
And every drop of blood in me will keep that vow.
I am proud of my future.
I am an American.
Lieberman served as an editor of the American humor magazine Puck in 1916 and was literary editor of The American Hebrew journal from 1916 to 1932. "I Am an American" is perhaps his best known work.
The round-up is over at Shaken & Stirred today. Thank you, Gwenda. Grab a glass and a swizzle stick, and enjoy a weekend a poetry, fireworks, and freedom.
Oh, and just a reminder: I do believe in either a weak moment or a brief flicker of responsibility I offered to host Poetry Friday here at Farm School next week, July 6th. So if you sometimes read this blog but haven't participated in Poetry Friday yet, I hope you'll think about sharing a favorite poem -- yours or your family's -- or even a poem you'd like to learn more about or share with your kids. Put your thinking caps on.
June 26, 2007
Latest edition of the Carnival of Children's Lliterature is up
Mary Lee and Franki have the June edition of the Carnival of Children's Literature ready at their blog, A Year of Reading. Good news, indeed!
June 22, 2007
Poetry Friday: A warning to children
This poem is wonderful to read aloud, to any children nearby or just to yourself.
Warning to Children
by Robert Graves (1895-1985)
Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and cut the rind off:
In the centre you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel --
Children, leave the string untied!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
But the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives - he then unties the string.
From our secondhand copy of the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, compiled by Edward Blishen with illustrations by Brian Wildsmith (OUP, 1963). Originally published in Graves's The Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children, 1960, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone.
* * *
Robert Graves was born at Wimbledon, England, in 1895. Though celebrated for his books, including his classic World War I autobiography and raw account of the war Good-Bye to All That (1929), and I, Claudius (1934), and work as a critic and classical scholar and translator, he considered himself foremost a poet. During the Battle of the Somme in 1916 he was badly wounded and left for dead. In 1929, he left England and eventually -- with brief stays in Cairo and, during the Spanish Civil War, the United States -- settled in Majorca, where lived until his death in 1985. For Michele at Scholar's Blog's thorough biography of Graves, go to her War Poets website, Counter-Attack.
The Robert Graves Archive is a marvelous online resource; it includes his poetry, audio files of Graves reading, multimedia resources, and various scholarly materials on the web.
* * *
A Wrung Sponge has today's round-up, and some Wallace Stevens. Thank you!
Warning to Children
by Robert Graves (1895-1985)
Children, if you dare to think
Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,
Fewness of this precious only
Endless world in which you say
You live, you think of things like this:
Blocks of slate enclosing dappled
Red and green, enclosing tawny
Yellow nets, enclosing white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where a neat brown paper parcel
Tempts you to untie the string.
In the parcel a small island,
On the island a large tree,
On the tree a husky fruit.
Strip the husk and cut the rind off:
In the centre you will see
Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled
Red and green, enclosed by tawny
Yellow nets, enclosed by white
And black acres of dominoes,
Where the same brown paper parcel --
Children, leave the string untied!
For who dares undo the parcel
Finds himself at once inside it,
On the island, in the fruit,
Blocks of slate about his head,
Finds himself enclosed by dappled
Green and red, enclosed by yellow
Tawny nets, enclosed by black
And white acres of dominoes,
But the same brown paper parcel
Still untied upon his knee.
And, if he then should dare to think
Of the fewness, muchness, rareness,
Greatness of this endless only
Precious world in which he says
He lives - he then unties the string.
From our secondhand copy of the Oxford Book of Poetry for Children, compiled by Edward Blishen with illustrations by Brian Wildsmith (OUP, 1963). Originally published in Graves's The Penny Fiddle: Poems for Children, 1960, illustrated by Edward Ardizzone.
* * *
Robert Graves was born at Wimbledon, England, in 1895. Though celebrated for his books, including his classic World War I autobiography and raw account of the war Good-Bye to All That (1929), and I, Claudius (1934), and work as a critic and classical scholar and translator, he considered himself foremost a poet. During the Battle of the Somme in 1916 he was badly wounded and left for dead. In 1929, he left England and eventually -- with brief stays in Cairo and, during the Spanish Civil War, the United States -- settled in Majorca, where lived until his death in 1985. For Michele at Scholar's Blog's thorough biography of Graves, go to her War Poets website, Counter-Attack.
The Robert Graves Archive is a marvelous online resource; it includes his poetry, audio files of Graves reading, multimedia resources, and various scholarly materials on the web.
* * *
A Wrung Sponge has today's round-up, and some Wallace Stevens. Thank you!
June 19, 2007
June 18, 2007
Jumping J, for JoVE, to see if it can be done...
Because I can't resist a challenge (there, another fact/habit about me...)
1. Famous singer/band: Jo Stafford, especially her album Jo + Jazz
2. Four letter word: jute
3. Street name: Jermyn Street, London
4. Color: jade green
5. Gifts/presents: jewels, or (more cheaply) jewel cases with favorite CDs and DVDs
6. Vehicle: jitney
7. Items on a menu: jicama with jerk chicken
8. Boy Name: James
9. Girl Name: Jane
10. Movie Title: The Journey (1959), Deborah Kerr, Yul Brynner; 1956 Budapest, and Ron Howard's movie debut. Sadly not on DVD yet, but I still have my homemade video.
11. Drink: juice
12. Occupation: jack-of-all-trades
13. Flower: Jacob's Ladder (I have taller ones with white flowers, and shorter ones with blue flowers, and both varieties smell heavenly)
15. Magazine: Jack & Jill, one of my favorite magazines as a child
16. US City: Jackson Hole, Wyoming
17. Pro Sports Team: Utah Jazz (NBA)
18. Reason for Being Late for Work: jail
19. Something You Throw Away: jetsam (and flotsam)
20. Things you shout: In a Viennese accent, "Jesus, Maria und Joseph!"
21. Cartoon character: Jerry, of Tom & Jerry
Eight things meme, and an extra
Camille at Book Moot tagged me some time ago for the Eight Habits/Things About Me meme. The taggee is supposed to list eight facts or habits about him- or herself, and, Camille explains,
1. I like lots of milk in my coffee (a friend in college used to ask me if I'd like a little coffee with my milk) and I drink it slowly. Which means it's almost always cold before I'm finished drinking. This is a trait I apparently inherited from my mother.
2. I sleep with socks on for most of the year.
3. Some items from my childhood scrapbook (before scrapbooking became a competitive sport): ticket stubs from the circus (Ringling Brothers, April 6, 1974) and a Mets game (vs. San Francisco, July 7, 1974); a pressed and dried edelweiss flower, a present from relatives after their trip to Europe; an autographed notes from Ezra Jack Keats ("It's been a pleasant sharing this afternoon with you") and Ben Lucien Burman ("with warmest good wishes from all us critters at Catfish Bend"), both of whom came to speak at my Puffin Books children's club meeting); and autographed photographs of Jimmy Cagney, Mae West, and Gene Kelly.
4. I can't fall asleep without reading a bit.
5. I don't have enough bookcases or bookshelves. I doubt that I ever will.
6. I miss Eugene T. Maleska.
7. For years until the kids were born, I had the same lunch every day -- a tuna sandwich and an apple. Then I decided it might be helpful to demonstrate that variety and moderation in all things are good.
8. I haven't used an ATM machine in the past twelve-and-a-half years.
I think most folks have been tagged, so I'll skip that part. But if you want to play along, go ahead, and leave the link in the comments, please.
Since I was so late with this one, I'll add an extra meme, Scattergories, that I haven't been tagged for, and that I've seen over at Frankie's Kitchen-Table Learners and at Karen's blog; the versions are a tad different (I opted for the one with flowers instead of celebrities, thereby avoiding bald Britney). Using the first letter of your (blog) name, come up with answers for the following categories:
Name: Becky
1. Famous singer/band: The Beatles.
2. 4 letter word: book
3. Street name: Broadway
4. Color: blue
5. Gifts/presents: books, to give and receive
6. Vehicle: boat
7. Items on a menu: Bananas Foster
8. Boy Name: Benjamin
9. Girl Name: Beth
10. Movie Title: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); starring Myrna Loy, Frederic March, Dana Andrews, Virginia Mayo, Harold Russell, Teresa Wright, and Hoagy Carmichael. Directed by William Wyler. A World War II homecoming.
11. Drink: beer (Big Rock Pale Ale, from Calgary)
12. Occupation: bean counter
13. Flower: buffalo beans, one of my favorite Alberta wildflowers. They're coming to the end of their season now. Other wildflowers coming into bloom now -- bastard toadflax, pincushion beardtongue, northern bedstraw, field bindweed, blue-eyed grass, viper's bugloss, bunchberry, and butter-and-eggs.
15. Magazine: The Beaver, the magazine about Canadian history
16. US City: Boulder (and here's a Canadian one -- Brampton, Ontario)
17. Pro Sports Team: Boston Bruins (NHL)
18. Reason for Being Late for Work: Bushed. Or bushwacked.
19. Something You Throw Away: broken bits
20. Things you shout: Blast!
21. Cartoon character: Bugs Bunny.
The rules of the game are posted at the beginning before those facts/habits are listed. At the end of the post, the player then tags 8 people and posts their names, then goes to their blogs and leaves them a comment, letting them know that they have been tagged and asking them to read your blog.Eight (not particularly interesting) habits/things about me, then:
1. I like lots of milk in my coffee (a friend in college used to ask me if I'd like a little coffee with my milk) and I drink it slowly. Which means it's almost always cold before I'm finished drinking. This is a trait I apparently inherited from my mother.
2. I sleep with socks on for most of the year.
3. Some items from my childhood scrapbook (before scrapbooking became a competitive sport): ticket stubs from the circus (Ringling Brothers, April 6, 1974) and a Mets game (vs. San Francisco, July 7, 1974); a pressed and dried edelweiss flower, a present from relatives after their trip to Europe; an autographed notes from Ezra Jack Keats ("It's been a pleasant sharing this afternoon with you") and Ben Lucien Burman ("with warmest good wishes from all us critters at Catfish Bend"), both of whom came to speak at my Puffin Books children's club meeting); and autographed photographs of Jimmy Cagney, Mae West, and Gene Kelly.
4. I can't fall asleep without reading a bit.
5. I don't have enough bookcases or bookshelves. I doubt that I ever will.
6. I miss Eugene T. Maleska.
7. For years until the kids were born, I had the same lunch every day -- a tuna sandwich and an apple. Then I decided it might be helpful to demonstrate that variety and moderation in all things are good.
8. I haven't used an ATM machine in the past twelve-and-a-half years.
I think most folks have been tagged, so I'll skip that part. But if you want to play along, go ahead, and leave the link in the comments, please.
Since I was so late with this one, I'll add an extra meme, Scattergories, that I haven't been tagged for, and that I've seen over at Frankie's Kitchen-Table Learners and at Karen's blog; the versions are a tad different (I opted for the one with flowers instead of celebrities, thereby avoiding bald Britney). Using the first letter of your (blog) name, come up with answers for the following categories:
Name: Becky
1. Famous singer/band: The Beatles.
2. 4 letter word: book
3. Street name: Broadway
4. Color: blue
5. Gifts/presents: books, to give and receive
6. Vehicle: boat
7. Items on a menu: Bananas Foster
8. Boy Name: Benjamin
9. Girl Name: Beth
10. Movie Title: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946); starring Myrna Loy, Frederic March, Dana Andrews, Virginia Mayo, Harold Russell, Teresa Wright, and Hoagy Carmichael. Directed by William Wyler. A World War II homecoming.
11. Drink: beer (Big Rock Pale Ale, from Calgary)
12. Occupation: bean counter
13. Flower: buffalo beans, one of my favorite Alberta wildflowers. They're coming to the end of their season now. Other wildflowers coming into bloom now -- bastard toadflax, pincushion beardtongue, northern bedstraw, field bindweed, blue-eyed grass, viper's bugloss, bunchberry, and butter-and-eggs.
15. Magazine: The Beaver, the magazine about Canadian history
16. US City: Boulder (and here's a Canadian one -- Brampton, Ontario)
17. Pro Sports Team: Boston Bruins (NHL)
18. Reason for Being Late for Work: Bushed. Or bushwacked.
19. Something You Throw Away: broken bits
20. Things you shout: Blast!
21. Cartoon character: Bugs Bunny.
Celebrate late Spring with a Country Fair!
The Country Fair of homeschooling is open again, so grab a lemonade or a cotton candy and meander through the barns or past the pie-eating contest...
Thanks, Doc, for taking the time to put it all together!
Thanks, Doc, for taking the time to put it all together!
June 17, 2007
For the birds
Late last spring, the kids asked if we could have "bird school" all summer. So, in addition to our various field guides, we pulled all of the bird books off the shelves and grouped them together in the living room on the coffee table. Indoors and out, the kids read the various books themselves, to each other, and asked for readalouds of others. I kept meaning to put all of the titles in a post, but never got around to something so linky and time-consuming.
But Susan at Chicken Spaghetti has, in a recent post on Bird Books for Children that she and her son have been enjoying. The list includes books, websites, and blogs, including a link to Kelly at Big A little a's bird book bibliography earlier this year.
And don't forget Chris Barton's bird book post from last fall, either.
But Susan at Chicken Spaghetti has, in a recent post on Bird Books for Children that she and her son have been enjoying. The list includes books, websites, and blogs, including a link to Kelly at Big A little a's bird book bibliography earlier this year.
And don't forget Chris Barton's bird book post from last fall, either.
A better late than never reminder for the (Late) Late Spring Edition of Dawn's Field Days
Dawn at By Sun and Candlelight has this season's installment, in words and plentiful pictures, of the latest Field Day, just in time for late Spring. Rainbows, skinks, flowers, birds and bird books -- something for everyone, especially on an early Spring morning or a quiet, rainy day. Thank you, Dawn, for the wonderful idea and for continuing, season after season.
Keys to my heart
A very happy Father's and Grandpapa's Day to my father, and a happy Father's Day to Tom, with whom I'm also celebrating 13 lucky years of wedded bliss. He and the kids -- who made us a fabulous breakfast of homemade pancakes and bacon with whipped cream and fresh pineapple -- went out this morning to see our new bull, bought from a neighbor on Friday, and later today there just may be some fishing.
For Tom, my joy and only dear, from his Becky Thatcher,
The Key of My Heart
(traditional, author unknown)
Madam, I will give you a new lace cap,
With embroidery on the bottom and insertion at the top,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will not accept of your new lace cap,
With embroidery on the bottom and insertion at the top,
I won't be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
Madam, I will give you a new silk gown,
With nineteen gold laces to lace it up and down,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will not accept of your new silk gown,
With nineteen gold laces to lace it up and down,
I won't be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
Madam, I will give you a little silver bell,
To call up your servants if you should not feel well,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will not accept of your little silver bell,
To call up my servants if I should not feel well,
I won't be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
Madam, I will give you a little greyhound,
Every hair upon its back worth a thousand pound,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will not accept of your little greyhound,
Every hair upon its back worth a thousand pound,
I won't be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
Madam, I will give you the key of my heart,
To lock it up for ever, that we may never part,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will accept of the key of your heart,
To lock it up for ever, that we may never part,
I will be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
From my copy of The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes, gathered by Iona and Peter Opie* with charming pen and ink drawings by Paline Baynes (Penguin Books, 1970); from the back cover:
* A very interesting Time Magazine article from 1959 (more than 40 years before The Dangerous Book for Boys), which begins: "Have children forgotten how to entertain themselves?"
For Tom, my joy and only dear, from his Becky Thatcher,
The Key of My Heart
(traditional, author unknown)
Madam, I will give you a new lace cap,
With embroidery on the bottom and insertion at the top,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will not accept of your new lace cap,
With embroidery on the bottom and insertion at the top,
I won't be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
Madam, I will give you a new silk gown,
With nineteen gold laces to lace it up and down,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will not accept of your new silk gown,
With nineteen gold laces to lace it up and down,
I won't be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
Madam, I will give you a little silver bell,
To call up your servants if you should not feel well,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will not accept of your little silver bell,
To call up my servants if I should not feel well,
I won't be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
Madam, I will give you a little greyhound,
Every hair upon its back worth a thousand pound,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will not accept of your little greyhound,
Every hair upon its back worth a thousand pound,
I won't be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
Madam, I will give you the key of my heart,
To lock it up for ever, that we may never part,
If you will be my bride, my joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with me everywhere.
Sir, I will accept of the key of your heart,
To lock it up for ever, that we may never part,
I will be your bride, your joy, and only dear,
To walk and talk with you everywhere.
From my copy of The Puffin Book of Nursery Rhymes, gathered by Iona and Peter Opie* with charming pen and ink drawings by Paline Baynes (Penguin Books, 1970); from the back cover:
The Opies [Peter died in 1982, and Iona continues to write] have three chidlren, and live in a Victorian family house in Hampshire, which, as a necessary milieu to their studies, is steadily being filled with old and rare children's books, toys, games, pictures, and the paraphernalia of bygone nurseries.I quite like the idea of "a necessary milieu" to our studies, but, as usual, I'm rambling off the subject...
* A very interesting Time Magazine article from 1959 (more than 40 years before The Dangerous Book for Boys), which begins: "Have children forgotten how to entertain themselves?"
June 15, 2007
The default setting
From A.O. Scott's review today of the new "Nancy Drew" flick (emphasis mine):
The movie turns Nancy, played with more pluck than brilliance by Emma Roberts, into an uptight goody-two-shoes, a prig who lectures her school principal on matters of policy and who won’t exceed the speed limit in the middle of a car chase. Worse, “Nancy Drew” corrupts the clean, functional, grown-up style of the books with the kind of cute, pseudo-smart self-consciousness that has sadly become the default setting for contemporary juvenile popular culture produced by insecure, immature adults.
Poetry Friday: Up by the bootstraps edition
I missed Poetry Friday last week in the thick of things -- Spring busy-ness on and off the farm -- but saw yesterday via Poetry Friday founder Kelly at Big A little a that our own Susan Thomsen at Chicken Spaghetti has a terrific article on the origins of Poetry Friday, "Thank Goodness It’s (Poetry) Friday", at the Poetry Foundation website. Included with the article is a sidebar of "A Few of the Many Poetry Friday Regulars", including Farm School. To which I offer great thanks, and a yikes. Though the kick in the pants is just what I needed. It's time to pull up my poetry socks, and my bootstraps, too.So here, in honor of Father's Day, and my father, who adores a good bowl of soup (or a bowl of good soup) is
Beautiful Soup, So Rich and Green
by Lewis Carroll
Beautiful Soup, so rich and green,
Waiting in a hot tureen!
Who for such dainties would not stoop?
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Soup of the evening, beautiful Soup!
Beau-ootiful Soo-oop!
Beau-ootiful Soo-oop!
Soo-oop of the e-e-evening,
Beautiful, beautiful Soup!
Beautiful Soup! Who cares for fish,
Game, or any other dish?
Who would not give all else for two p
ennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Pennyworth only of beautiful Soup?
Beau-ootiful Soo-oop!
Beau-ootiful Soo-oop!
Soo-oop of the e-e-evening,
Beautiful, beauti-FUL SOUP!
****
Today's round-up, with a bit of original Poetry Friday haiku, is at The Simple and the Ordinary. Thank you, Christine!
PS Speaking of beautiful and green, the Poetry Friday button above is lovely, but does anyone have a version that's a tad lighter? My 43-year-old eyes are having trouble with the black on dark olive green. And you know, after engaging in conversation this morning with another homeschooler about the merits of Andrew Lang's lovely color Fairy Books series, ably reprinted year after year by Dover, it occurs to me that a rainbow of Poetry Friday t-shirts and mug, say, from Café Press, would be a thing of beauty. Especially if the proceeds went toward providing poetry and other books for children.
June 07, 2007
You pick
the lesser of two weevils:
Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play, as reported by The New York Times yesterday (free registration or use Bug Me Not)
or
The Daring Book for Girls, the not very daring but very manufactured response to The Dangerous Book for Boys, pandering to those who say they are offended by a "boys only" tome and hoping, no doubt, to strike the same nerves and chords as has The Dangerous Book. Coming in time for Christmas 2007.
As I sit here tapping away, wearing my father's old blue dress shirt over my husband's t-shirt (it's a bit cool here this morning), while Laura slurps her cereal and reads her brother's copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys breezily ignoring the last two words in the title and thoroughly unaware of the Cartoon Doll Emporium, Club Penguin, Cyworld, Habbo Hotel, Webkinz, WeeWorld and Stardoll, I wish you a summer of uncomputerized, unmanufactured, unfettered fun.
Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play, as reported by The New York Times yesterday (free registration or use Bug Me Not)
or
The Daring Book for Girls, the not very daring but very manufactured response to The Dangerous Book for Boys, pandering to those who say they are offended by a "boys only" tome and hoping, no doubt, to strike the same nerves and chords as has The Dangerous Book. Coming in time for Christmas 2007.
As I sit here tapping away, wearing my father's old blue dress shirt over my husband's t-shirt (it's a bit cool here this morning), while Laura slurps her cereal and reads her brother's copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys breezily ignoring the last two words in the title and thoroughly unaware of the Cartoon Doll Emporium, Club Penguin, Cyworld, Habbo Hotel, Webkinz, WeeWorld and Stardoll, I wish you a summer of uncomputerized, unmanufactured, unfettered fun.
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