Inquiry into the nature of cute, # 1

Oh! She’s so cute!

Folks say, bending down to look at her in her stroller.

I smile proudly. When she toddles down the block with her candy basket swinging from her arm in her in her bat cow costume (yes, same as last year, but it actually fits now) . . . I snap away. Cute! Cute, like pornography, impossible to define; you know it when you see it . . .

But we Americans are only interested in one side of cute. Unlike the Japanese. They seem to inquire, as a culture, into the nature and being of cute.

At my old job, folks would gather around every so often and Ooh and Ah over something cute. A kitten (supercute.com). A baby panda (pandacam). At first I was resistant, but later, I came to appreciate the softening in the face, in stomach like any and a warmth behind the ears. I became a convert to the power of cute! And parenthood has given me many more moments of cute therapy: When she walks around with the towel on her head like Max in Where the Wild Things Are; when she gives that fake smile, with eyes shut in the middle of eating; when she purses her lips and pecks at the air; when she raises her shoulders emphatically and proclaims a string of nonsense from her perch on the broken scooter in our living room.

But there are the moments when I am too tired or stressed to fall for cute. Here’s when my feelings turn deviant. When my 15-month daughter toddling about the apartment with her pajamas trailing, or busily taking the dishrag off the refrigerator and wrapping her stuffed animals with it, well, then she looks bizarre to me. A stubby top-heavy creature that has bizarrely taken up residence in our home, a humunculus who nevertheless has crazily strong opinions on things she knows nothing about.

At nine months, I took her to the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum. As we wandered through the rooms plastered with cute-bunny wallpaper, and circled an enormous plastic smiling bunny, she grew more and more agitated. Then she began to cry. Howl. We had to leave.

This made me think. What lies outside the small window of cute—and why do we crave to reside in that small window of cute? What does it mean? What does is connote? It suggests the helpless, the eager, the absence of will, and the desire to please, as a pet has.

Well, of course, the Jungian side-show of cute is the grotesque, the creepy. The deformed. Super big cuteness replicated=grotesque.

The Japanese get it. Cute is the narrow zone that does not violate our will to agency. Cute it passive, pleasing. a violation. A narrow zone of cute on which either side of is creepy, grotesque.

The screaming child, the squalling child, the demanding child, is not cute. As she become more willful, as she discovers her own agency (and she is doing so with increasing frequency, every day), I will do well to disinvest myself in her cuteness for danger of it turning—in my own eyes—grotesque, distorted . . . of my becoming too attached to it . . .

And what lies beyond cute for the baby? The baby has moved beyond cute—into what?

Cute may be good therapy but it's not a good life-script for her—for any of us . . .

Inquiry Into the subject of play, part 1

I’ve been reading a lot about play. It’s is a big subject now. The theory seems to be that adult work is—or, at least, optimally, should be—a kind of play. The kind of work most of us need to know how to do, the kind that requires “soft skills.” Play at least as my generation knew it. That is, imaginative, creative, participatory. Playing house, playing doctor, playing store. As I mother, I am beginning to observe play and the striking thing about it, when it does happen—for it seems not easy, not predictable, the conditions have to be right—is that it is absorbing and difficult. She puts things into a basin and takes them out again, fitting them into holes that require her to identify matching shapes. Her head is tilted down, her eyes focused intently. When she fails, she looks up and cries out in frustration. This kind of play is not passive, not even fun in the sense we think of play as adults; it requires effort, but it leads to discovery.

So, okay, I buy the work analogy.

Now folks seem to be mourning this kind of play we knew as children’s play as it disappears amidst scheduling and demands of the modern entertainment juggernaut for kids. Or so the argument goes.

But I don’t know if I buy it. First off, play is, of course, a subjective term. Did it even exist in the, say, 1600s—before the modern concept of a childhood took root? In these agrarian, pre-democratic years, children had chores and began them as early as 5 or 6. They were not family mascots; they were necessary members of the economic unit.

So, maybe here’s the question: are adults really mourning the disappearance of play from kids' lives—or their own lost childhoods? Yes, this generation will have a different relationship to play—and we hope it is not one which confused play with entertainment (more about that later). . . So perhaps this generation will tell us what it was like to be consumers from a very young age. But they will tell us in their own way. It is an essential nature of humanity is to consume; but it is also essential to transform.

Smith mag's new Next Door Neighbor comic-essay

Back in the 90s, Josh and I collaborated on a few comics pieces, including the famous (or rather, infamous) “Gynecology on the Go”—an extended “travel tip” for ladies backpacking in the tropics—and the duet “Cave of Fear,” which I provided the journal entries for. Josh and I have teamed up again for the new Next Door Neighbor story. Next Door Neighbor, edited by Dean Haspiel, is the ongoing feature on Smith mag that features a rotating comics-essays, about, well, our next door neighbors, those we’d like to remember—and those we’d like to forget. Our story features a next door neighbor I had growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s. A beekeeper, in fact. Josh took a break from A.D. to render it. I think he did a fine job. It’s been my first time working in the comics form in awhile and it was interesting to think visually again. I’m pleased that the initial reviews have been positive. Take a look and let us know what you think.

I can only hope “The Beekeeper” has as long a life as “Gynecolgy on the Go,” which may still be doing the middle school health class circuit.

The Comics Revolution in the Classroom

I have a piece in the summer issue of Teachers and Writers on using comics in the classroom as a reading source and the, ahem, challenges of getting comics into textbooks. (One of my pet projects while I was at Holt.) T & W magazine is put out by the Teachers and Writers Collaborative.

This issue of T & W is devoted entirely to comics and education. It contains an article by Michael Bitz, founder of the groundbreaking Comic Book Project; an interview with Françoise Mouly about Toon Books; a very cool five-page comic by Youme Landowne; a piece on poetry comics by Dave "Mr. Alphabet" Morice; an interview with Ben Katchor; and my piece "The Comics Revolution in the Language Arts Classroom: An Editor's Perspective." The article is an inside--and humorous--look at how comics are infiltrating the educational publishing industry. The wonderful cover is by Josh Neufeld (yes, the one who is related to me). At the back of the issue, is an excellent resource list for parents and teachers interested in using comics as education tools.

This special issue of Teachers & Writers magazine is available at the T&W website for $5.

the mother wars

In the firmament, the mother wars are raging. Not the old son-father thing, or lovers spatting on Mount Olympus, that sound is of mothers waring.

A friend turned me on to the piece about Rebecca Walker in the British Mail. Based on an interview with Walker about her new book Choosing Motherhood After A Lifetime of Ambivalence (I will be reading this), Walker excoriates her mother Alice (of The Color Purple fame)--and all second generation feminists--for teaching her that motherhood was a form of servitude. Phyllis Chesler tried get them to kiss and make up on Salon.

I have to say that I am sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaint about the feminism she was reared on. It has been surprising to me how empowering many aspects of motherhood are—from delivering a child to caring successfully for her needs. It comes as a surprise because the feminism that politicized me in college (and to which I owe much) pretty much gave the message that motherhood could be great, sure, but it was essentially a defeat. It was something, that like all aspects of female biology one gave into.

Which goes back to the PC wars of the late 1980s. This was not girl-power feminism. Womyn. Herstory feminism. Take Back the Night marches. It was a puritanical kind of feminism. I remember talking to a friend who had been reading Andrea Dworkin crying over the realization that consensual sex with her boyfriend (which she previously enjoyed) now seemed like rape to her. I remember walking around assigning the “male gaze” to everything. Yes, no two ways about it--female biology decreed victimhood in a patriarchal society. We modern women were charged with gaining command over these primitive, biologically essentialist impulses. Motherhood? A desire for something like motherhood was weak, atavistic—it had to be squelched—it was a siren song from the past. (I’m thinking here of de Beauvoir especially.)


How screwed up this now seems. I know that many second generation feminists were themselves mothers—often too-young mothers—and that they struggled with the conflict between duty to family and to self. They wanted their daughters to be saved from that conflict. Understandable, yes. But at what cost?

So I find myself sympathetic to Rebecca Walker’s complaints as a later-life mother that it delayed her decision to become a mother. (I sometimes wonder whether it delayed mine.)

Does feminism matter still? With Gucci advertising its “hysteria collection” of handbags (what would Germaine Greer think?)? Yes, yes, yes! It matters even more than ever. But I agree with popfeminist that it needs to be more inclusive kind.

What do other mothers, women, feminists of my generation think? I really want to know. . .

Cures for Heartbreak

I just finished reading Margo Rabb’s novel Cures for Heartbreak. It is a novel about a girl named Mia whose mother dies of cancer when she is a fourteen. There are many things I love about this book. I love its sense of humor. I love that it is unapologetically a novel about a girl. I attended a reading of Margo’s recently and asked her about whether she wrote the book for an adult or a young adult audience. She said she wrote it for adults and when it sold as a young adult novel, she was surprised. I enjoyed it as much--if not more--than many other “adult” books. It has gotten me thinking about what makes a young adult versus and adult book.

Some of Alice Munro’s best short stories are about childhood. Why do we think that childhood or adolescence is not of interest to adults—or only if it is filtered through an adult frame or tone?

As some of you know, I am working on a novel. It is also about a girl—and as one friend who has read parts of it said, “girlhood.” A little while ago, I showed it to some agents, a number whom raised the adult versus the young adult question.

It seems to be, to a certain extent, a question of tone. A young adult editor I asked to take a look said she thought it was definitely adult. The theme and the prose level make it so. I have decided the same thing and am writing forward, thinking of it as an “adult” book.

Yet it is still a book about a girl—and about girlhood.

So, my question is: Must a book about girlhood necessarily marketed as young adult? After all, writing is about exploring human experience—all of it. The terms “childhood” and “adolescence” make us perceive those states as something other than adulthood but I wonder. I think it is more fluid than that. As Faulkner famously said, "The past is not dead. It is not even past.”

muttering #3

An illicit quality to the simplicity of this relationship. It is the illicitness of lovers—early lovers. Early lovers who can’t do anything but stare at each other amazed at each other’s presence. The rest of the world does not intrude. I’ve heard it called "being in a bubble with your baby." But the way women talk about it does not really tell the truth. Because if the truth were spoken, it might be taken from them. It might be shameful--misconstrued. An all-encompassing love. A jealous love. A myopic love. A competitive love. A love of that leaves you with a confusion of bodies—of whose is whose.

A woman whose mother was dying once said to me “Our mothers are our lovers.” I thought she was crazy.