Please Don't Buy My Daughter This Toy

Every day one or more of my friends re-posts the link to this GoldieBlox video on Facebook. My friends tend to be highly intelligent and typically very highly educated folks, which is why this affinity for girly blocks with ribbons puzzles me. This toy really bugs me.

GoldieBlox appears to be a fancy building toy with polka-dot pink ribbons and small *clothed* animal figures atop yellow pylons. More about the pylons later. Apart from the girly colors (pastels: pink and purple, yellow and blue) and girly trappings (ribbons, tiny cute animals), what makes this girl-friendly? It comes with a book, because, as the designer informs us, girls like to read! Unsurprisingly, the heroine of the book is a slender white girl with long blonde hair. Little girls are supposed to read the book(s) to learn how to play with the toy. That would seem to delimit what the kids can actually do or "build" with the toy, wouldn't it? Building toys are about stimulating the imagination: "hey kid! I challenge you to make something you haven't even dreamt up yet!" I honestly think the designer had more fun creating the prototype than any child will have playing with the toy. And that leads me to the pylons.

Photo credit: Susan Burdick Photography

They were originally spools of thread. Look at this prototype! Doesn't it look like it was super-fun to put together? The designer got to make something out of wood, paper, markers, and other mundane  things found in most homes. I used to do stuff like this when I was little--make shit out of the shit that was just lying around. I made dolls out of rocks, and houses for them out of macaroni boxes. (Because even as a child I was interested in domesticity.) I'm pretty sure Mathilde will end up making stuff like that, too. When she's not inventing potions with the chemistry sets her father will inevitably give her.

I just don't believe that girls need special building toys any more than Ellen thinks women need special pens. If the point is to get little girls interested in the STEM fields, then give them regular building toys, more often, and play with them together. Girls of my generation were frequently told that we weren't good at math because we were girls. We need to change the messages that little girls hear (at school, at home, in the media), not change the toys.

One of my biggest beefs with this toy--and with the inane video being used to spread the good news about it--is that this commendable motive to introduce girls to engineering is obliterated by the stunningly pretty femme designer's heart-felt "more than just a princess" slogan. This clever marketing ploy is precisely why all my educated feministy friends are buying the message (if not the product). People, listen up: even though the toy's designer claims it's an anti-princess project (not her exact words, OK), it's still a very gendered gender-specific building toy. Pink! Ribbons! Pretty blonde girl heroine! Tiny animals wearing tiny clothes! I will buy Mathilde REGULAR Legos, blocks, Lincoln Logs, and K'Nex instead. My girl can read the awesome books she already has, and use her *imagination* to build things with non-gender-specific toys. She may choose to build dollhouses, or treat the smallest Lincoln Logs as babies. But she doesn't need a special girl-only product to do this. (And she is, by the way, up to a 4-block tower these days!)

Hurricane Sandy Apple Pie

Here on the east coast we've been bracing for Hurricane Sandy. I think we've got all the necessary supplies for bad weather: bottled water, cans of tuna, rolls of duct tape, flashlights and extra batteries, candles and matches, extra Cheerios, red wine, and, of course, homemade apple pie.

For the past month I've been imagining a blog post entitled "Suck it, CSA!" more often after I've been unusually successful at cooking and eating everything in the weekly CSA box. It's been a lot of collard greens, kale, green beans, butter beans, cabbage (geez, it's been a lot of cabbage), asian pears, and apples. Every week there are different apples in that box. They are generally very tasty--even the Red Delicious, a variety I'd never buy in the store because they are pretty fecking boring, as apples go. As I am the only raw apple eater in the house, the apples have piled up.

 So last night I put on my brave pants and made a pie. I used this recipe for both the pate brisee and filling.

I should admit that I have not made a pie crust from scratch in many MANY years. While I am not a bad baker, pie crusts were never my thing. Back in Seattle, I had three good friends who took care of all my homemade pie crust needs. Now that they're 3,500 miles away, I have to do it myself. Sniff. 

It was labor intensive. It was time consuming. It was fecking worth it. Oh FLAKEY flakeness. Oh complex, inviting, warm filling. Oh $7.89-a-carton Haagen Dazs vanilla ice cream on top.

Hurricane Tableau: Irony wine, apple pie, and pistols, just in case

Here, by the way, is my child in her cabbage leaf hat, which she thinks is hilarious. How I wish that kid would eat some of the things I cook from my weekly CSA, instead of just wearing it all.

Pure Gold

Preliminary results from tonight's rushed research session conducted at another local university's better-stocked library (God bless them for having nineteenth-century British newspaper databases!):

HARPOCRATES.—Young and pure love is as bashful as bashful can be. Its language is sighs, furtive glances, blushes, and strange, but warm heart-flutterings. It is intuitive, and needs no interpreter. Love on; you are bathed in sunshine, if you only knew it. When the mystic time comes, your tongue will be loosened, and gallop fast enough.

J. N. solicits our advice upon a delicate subject. She says, a widower, about sixty, has paid his addresses to her for some time. He has no incumbrance, but has some cash. Therefore she asks, whether it would be an imprudent match, as she is but six-and-twenty, and considered handsome. Has our fair correspondent any other lover nearer her own age? And if she has not, does she entertain a suitable affection for the old gentleman? If she can answer these two plain questions satisfactorily to herself, and her ancient bean is of good moral character, we don’t see any very dreadful objection to the match. In these economizing days, competence with an old husband is preferable to poverty with a young one. But we must warn her that old husbands are horridly jealous of young wives, and apt to play the tyrant on every trivial occasion. In matrimony all violent disparities are avenged some way or another. Still we do not pronounce against the match. Men are scarce, women plentiful; and no woman ought to refuse an offer at all decent and prudent.

I think the clear disparity of tone is what I love most about these entries in the Notices to Correspondents section of an 1852 issue of the London Journal. To the dude, the editor is like, "keep cool and dulcet locution will follow; the girl is destined to comply" To the gal, the editor is like, "take the old guy--your choices are slim as it is."

Breakthroughs

Courtesy of Wayne Booth's ideas about Tristram Shandy circa 1952, I just realized that matrimonial advertisements must be discussed as a comic genre with a recognizable set of literary devices. Because every time I present my research on "the mats" (as I call them), people find it quite funny. At VSAWC last spring, an audience member asked if I'd ever worked as a stand-up. Perhaps I should quit my day job. More on this later--my conference paper for Victorians Institute percolates.

Mat's many breakthroughs? In one short period of time she's learned how to say no, and to walk away from me. This coincides with a refusal to nurse--and we were down to once a day, first thing in the morning, combined with major family snuggle time. The last time I nursed her was about a week ago. I miss it. But I can be only a little sad about this: my girl has discovered independence. She is hell bent on being the boss of herself, and I can't blame her. In fact I'll help her. She's mini-me but she's Big-Her.

The usual view of the kid these days...

Good thing that fence was there, or we might have lost her!

the joblist

I giggle and groan every time I look at this tumblr.

Moved

Here we are in our new home, new office, new job, new city, new daycare, new used car! Evidently, we still have unpacking to do. Moving boxes really are some of the best toys.

I have a few preliminary notes.

1. There are not enough independently owned coffeehouses in this town.
2. There are NO espresso stands on my new campus.
3. The rain here puts Seattle's to shame.
4. I plan to buy stock in bug repellant.
5. I still have not completed my syllabi*, and school starts in 9 days.
6. I was dismayed at the size of the collection in the library at my new job (spoiled am I thanks to 12 years' access to major R-1 university stacks), but then the awesome librarian figured out how I can get access to the nineteenth-century newspapers I need for my current research project, and I felt better.
6a. When will I find time to write that Victorians Institute conference paper? This is not a rhetorical question.
7. My child took her first steps this week.

*For my composition course, I am planning a research paper unit involving The Lifespan of a Fact but I am bewildered about how to write the actual essay assignment (from which all scaffolding unfolds, so you see the problem, yes?). I am also planning a textual analysis assignment involving The Phantom Tollbooth. This unit offers no trouble at all. 

The Missing Frontispiece

No, this is not a post about Shel Silverstein's book.

Yesterday I went to Suzzalo Library where a librarian from the Maps collection helped me re-scan the over-sized woodcut images for my chapter to be published in a forthcoming collection about material life in the British Empire. To accomplish this task, I had the same bound copy of The Graphic 1869 (an illustrated weekly newspaper) brought out from the Auxiliary Stacks that I had used when I originally wrote the essay about four years ago.

I discovered that the frontispiece to the volume is gone. Where did it go? Was it stolen? Destroyed? Who would do such a thing? Here is what it looked like:



It's beautiful, isn't it? It's a woodcut reproduction of Edouard Richter's "Odalisque." Richter was a French painter of the Orientalist school of art. My essay discusses the figure of the Odalisque in relation to the Angel of the House (linked to one another through a breath mint, of all things--that's what my essay is really about, Victorian Altoids). Anyway, thank God for digital reproduction. A mysteriously missing frontispiece: that's what I get for dithering with ephemera.

Moving

We are moving. Mathilde is moving.

We, as in my family, are moving across the country to the East Coast, to a charming beachy-yet-metropolitan area where I accepted a tenure-track English Literature professor position at a SLAC. I was hired to teach my specializations: Victorian literature, post-colonial theory, women's studies. I have captured a unicorn.

Mathilde, as in the 13-month-old, is moving her body in all kinds of new ways. Here she is trying to sit back down after pulling herself to a stand using her toy bin as an anchor.

This morning, after a physical therapist came to find out why, at the ripe old age of ONE YEAR, our kid still isn't crawling, sitting up by herself, or pulling up to stand, Mathilde decided to start doing all of those things. Little Miss Contrary. Now we have to babyproof the house. The first thing she did after crawling back and forth across the living room floor was make her way over to my laptop cord and wrap it around her neck.

We have four weeks left of Seattle's crappy "summer" weather before we hit the heat. I am packing up my books for the third time in four years. Only this time? Most of them are going to go live in My New Office, on shelves where they'll stay more or less for years (unless I'm using them) to inspire students to read! question! analyze! write! learn! My books are verrrrrrry happy about this (unlike in July 2010).

ONE

Mathilde is one year old today. She wanted you to know.

Mid-March Miscellany

It's the middle of March. Must be time for an update.

The 9-month sleep regression? As bad as they say.

This kid? As cute as can be.

To Do List (not in order of priority):

1. Complete grades for ENG 200 by Sunday
2. Compose scientific article for DAT study guide (freelance writing gig) Deadline? weekly
3. Develop syllabus for ENG 2201, starting 3/28/12 (entails writing three scaffolded assignment sequences and course calendar, figuring out how to deliver course readings to students [goal: no book order]) Deadline? 3/28
4. Begin VSAWC conference paper (entails working through archive of matrimonial advertisements from London Journal and reading relevant chapter in Jennifer Phegley’s new book) Deadline? 4/25
5. Campus Interview Presentation: TBD (I’ve got nearly three weeks; I’m thinking Sensation Fiction, sensational fictions of marriage, a return to my book chapter on bigamy in England and polygamy in India) Deadline? 4/1
6. Spring Cleaning and baby-proofing of home (we’re going to have a crawler/cruiser any day now) Deadline? Mathilde's choice
7. Begin book review of Ian Ward’s Law and the Brontës (currently re-reading The Professor as preparation) Deadline? 5/1
8. Format article for NCGS, plus fine-tuning and tinkering because I can’t keep my hands off it (but hurrah! My Mr. Meeson’s Will article will be published this fall!) Deadline? 5/1
9. Work scheduled hours at other part-time job (for a little online shopping company you may have heard of called Amazon.com) Why? To support my teaching hobby.
   
10. I am pretty sure I am forgetting something. Like exercise, or healthy eating, or trip to CostCo, or dentist appointment. Oh!
11. Schedule dentist appointment—add to that eye doctor, haircut, and lobotomy.

Global Dickens?

One of the schools that I interviewed for at MLA this past January has a “Global Shakespeare” course in its catalog. This was promising, I thought, since my work conceives of Victorian Studies as something that should be global in scope, if only to acknowledge that what made the Victorians who they were was their vast-reaching empire. Maybe this school would like a “Global Victorianist?” I thought to myself. No, no they would not, it seems.

In other news, as the Dickens’s World online conference put on by Wiley-Blackwell this week (3/7/12 and 3/8/12, though in some other time zone) goes on, I am currently thrilling to the themes in John Jordan’s essay “Global Dickens.” My first reaction was to fantasize about the course I could teach by the same name. Or better suited, “Postcolonial Dickens!” But such gut reactions are best quelled in this job market. Instead, I buckle down to consider in what ways it would be possible to conceive of Dickens globally and what kind of horizon such a configuration must have.

The article praises Professor Ada Nisbet for conceiving of Dickens as an artist whose work has achieved global significance and circulation. Jordan’s essay describes Nesbit’s ambitious project to create an international bibliography of Dickens Studies. The project, essentially a global reception study heartily limited by language, seems to have had a positively Casaubonian scope to it. Nesbit never finished it. Jordan accuses the postal system of slowly stifling the project and understates the point: Nesbit lacked adequate technology to complete the project.

My own concern, given my scholarly background, is Dickens in India. For sure, recording the reception of Dickens in India alone would have driven any scholar mad: Jordan writes, "The essay on 'Dickens in India' was especially anomalous, since it would have contained references to some 14 different languages spoken within the Indian subcontinent, including English." Oh right, that national language problem (just imagine the voting ballots). Also listed as an obstacle to the completion of the project: “appropriate contributors were difficult to find. India proved especially challenging, and Professor Nisbet was obliged to locate new researchers there as one prospective contributor after another declined or withdrew from the project.” One wonders what is meant by an “appropriate” contributor? Literary criticism looks very different in India than in North America; in my reading experience, what passes for literary criticism in India is far more erudite and historical (literary historical and biographical in flavor), far less theoretical or formalist (formalism having always already been limited by its European contours). Jordan does give a proper shout out to Priya Joshi’s archival work, but then I wonder, when will we finally stop pointing to Joshi’s work as exemplary because it’s finally been extended by other scholars?

I think the moral of this story, though Jordan does not overtly call for it, is to digitize this project, “Global Dickens.” Something like RaVoN.

In conclusion, this line from Jordan’s essay made me chuckle: “A Dickens Fellowship supposedly exists in Poona, although little evidence of its presence can be found.” Maybe Poona is where my tenure-track job is, too.

With Regard to My Insomnia

I have a nice long teaching-reflectiony post percolating on my laptop, all about how rewarding it is to be teaching a literature course in my specialization this term, my successful Orientalism lecture, my thoughtful students dialoguing thought-provoking things on the online discussion board. But then some colleagues drew my attention to recent articles and blog posts on the topic of adjunct, contingent faculty. Michael Bérubé's "Among the Majority." Copy & Paste's Crowdsourcing Google doc. An infographic from Online PhD that makes things all too clear.

My kid wakes me up in the middle of the night to nurse. Yes, I'm still doing that. But after she nods back off to sleep, I'm usually awake for 2-4 hours considering the facts. I finished my PhD in 2007, and I've done MLA five years in a row now. 12 (or is it 16?) interviews, 3 campus visits, no tenure-track job. My scholarship has gotten to be an increasingly expensive hobby: I still attend conferences 2-3 times a year, each of which might cost me $500 to $1,000 in travel, hotel, registration, and meals. I spend uncompensated time writing articles, book reviews, and working on my book project when I could be working a paid job. (My family has been scratching their heads about this for years.) This is all fine--I love my research like I love my daughter. But now teaching, too, is beginning to seem like a very expensive hobby. Next term, I've got one contract for one 3-credit course for which I'll make about $2100 over three months. That might cover my half of daycare, but it certainly doesn't cover rent and other bills.

That's all. I just wanted a place to dump this information for the next late night session of not-sleeping.

CFP: Victorian Transnationalism

This is exciting. VISAWUS is doing a conference theme of Victorian Transnationalism this fall at SUNY Plattsburgh. What the advertisement on The Hoarding does not reveal is that Amanda Claybaugh, Professor of English at Harvard University, is to be the keynote speaker! (I confess that it was I who suggested to the Board when we met last fall that we invite Dr. Claybaugh. I really enjoyed her monograph The Novel of Purpose: Literature and Social Reform in the Anglo-American World. My only complaint is that her scope was limited to literary/reformist relations between Britain and America. I think some targets of social reform, such as marriage, were global concerns, not just shared across the Atlantic, and some day I will substantiate this claim with a shiny new book publication.)

*edit: I just found my very long review of The Novel of Purpose on Amazon.com. I'd forgotten I'd done that. How silly. I wonder if anyone has ever read it all the way through?

Fall Quarter 2010 Recap

In the Fall, I took a few risks with my course design. I think I was reacting to the fact that for the past two years I've been teaching writing courses that were linked to large lecture courses. I had no control over the materials that my students were encountering in their lecture courses; my role was to teach context-specific writing. Although that is also a pleasant and rewarding gig, I was itching to develop my own course again, so when the English Department at local R1 University hired me to teach both an Introductory and an Intermediate writing course, I went to town.

For the Introductory course, I had students analyze Matthew Arnold's essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time." I asked them to assess whether Arnold's standards for cultural critique still apply to cultural production today. Then I assigned them George Eliot's essay "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists." Students wrote rhetorical analyses to evaluate the success of Eliot's arguments. Collectively, student papers articulated the continuing relevancy of Victorian prose and ideas. Memorably, one student compared silly lady novelists to the women on Jersey Shore (as in, hopefully they are not representative of women's intellectual capacities today). Another student argued that Arnold's conceptualization of the elitist role of the cultural critic is no longer relevant in this world of mass/rapid digital communications when everyone is a cultural critic via Facebook and Twitter updates and artistic production itself seems wildly accessible.

I entitled the Intermediate writing course "WTF?" ("Why The Fangs" hee hee) The main line of inquiry for the course was, why have vampire tales enjoyed such sustained popularity? We read Polidori's "The Vampyre" (1819); Le Fanu's "Carmilla" (1872); Braddon's "Good Lady Ducayne" (1896); and Stoker's Dracula (1897). We watched Coppola's silly cinematic adaptation Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and various episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Limiting myself to these texts was difficult: I wished there was time for some of Meyer's bestselling Twilight books (or the blockbuster films), episodes of True Blood, and that amazing Swedish film from 2010 Let the Right One In (which I have already lovingly reviewed here). I think the most useful thing this course offered students was an intentional variety of writing assignments beginning with short analytical response papers—my opportunity to introduce them to some conventions of academic analysis including claim-evidence patterns and focused, coherent paragraphing. These were followed by a persuasive paper assignment that required students to read and summarize a challenging theoretical article about Dracula ("Textula" by Robert Ready) and then respond to it with an original thesis and bodies of evidence. Following this standard academic discursive practice, we dramatically shifted our approach to the course materials. The second half of the term was devoted to helping students develop and refine their writing voice. Students read what I thought were well-composed film reviews (from the New Yorker, NYT, and The Guardian) as representatives of the genre. We studied these for both their structural and stylistic lessons. (Basically I told students, "Given these examples, what seem to be the conventions of the film review genre?") Having deconstructed the examples, students then wrote film reviews of Coppola’s adaptation of Dracula. These were such fun to read! Lastly, I asked students to write expository essays engaging the central question of the course, Why the Fangs Still? I had them read Joan Acocella's New Yorker essay, and an article by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan in the NYT for sample archives and arguments. Students produced really thoughtful, risk-taking responses to this assignment, again.

I'm not sure how many regular readers of this blog are still with me, since this post lacks baby pictures! I would like to begin using this blog to create some kind of reflective record of my recent courses. This term I teach an Introduction to Reading Literature course that I've titled "Gender and Race in the Literature of the British Empire." First up: Flora Annie Steel’s historical novel On the Face of the Waters.