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At least in my socioeconomic class, one's own decisions are inevitably read as judgments about what other people are doing with/to their kids. It doesn't matter what your subjective intentions are; sometimes you are indeed judging and sometimes you aren't, but the social meaning of your choice X is that you think that not-X is a mistake, possibly a mistake so grevious that the kids subjected to it will grow up to be crack whores -- and low-paid ones at that.
Bryan D. Dietrich, Krypton Nights: Z. gave me this book of poetry for our anniversary, showing his usual brilliance. It won the 2001 Paris Review Prize in poetry, if that means anything to you, and is cursed with the worst introduction I've read in a long time. The intro by Richard Howard is pretentious (to the extent it is intelligible) and full of congratulations to Dietrich for seeing something meritorious in such a ridiculous topic as Superman; though I tried not to hold it against Dietrich, I may not have succeeded, and I must quote some Howard so you get the flavor:
I'm not sure that's bad writing so much as simply bewildering. Anyway, the poetry itself is divided into sonnets from Kal-El's POV, "The Jor-El Tapes," "The Secret Diaries of Lois Lane," and "Lex Luthor's Complaint." The meditations on ultimate power and ultimate loss are occasionally affecting, but Dietrich was in the end mining Superman as a source of signification – along with Jesus and Abraham – rather than taking him on his own terms, for example when he has Lois opine on how different Superman is because he has no knowledge, expectation or fear of death – as if the instincts and sympathies were absent because he grew up under a yellow sun. Predictably, I liked Lex's section best, Lucifer's lament about how hard it is to speak truth to power, and harder still to stand up to it.
Bryan D. Dietrich, Krypton Nights: Z. gave me this book of poetry for our anniversary, showing his usual brilliance. It won the 2001 Paris Review Prize in poetry, if that means anything to you, and is cursed with the worst introduction I've read in a long time. The intro by Richard Howard is pretentious (to the extent it is intelligible) and full of congratulations to Dietrich for seeing something meritorious in such a ridiculous topic as Superman; though I tried not to hold it against Dietrich, I may not have succeeded, and I must quote some Howard so you get the flavor:
Superman and Co. [are] a popular religious phantasmagoria which Dietrich has mined so deeply that it is only his garrulous deftness which keeps him from being the exhaustive Aquinas of the affair. No, there is no antecedent High Versification in our theology of Comic Books, though we can immediately recognize the subject in its place and wonder why not? Perhaps because the stern stipulation for the Tinsel City of God is not only a proud and interplanetary imagination (Hollywood, Here We Come!) but a metaphysical sympathy I should expect to find only among the most loosely lapsed of Catholic readers – readers of Superman Comics as an epyllion to Dante's divine version. When you're working with elements as "elementary" as the Lost Babe of Krypton, as crude, not to put too fine a point on it, as the Doomed Planet which has given its All, or its Best, to an analogously doomed Earth (do we not all feel?) it is order that is the one thing needful ...
I'm not sure that's bad writing so much as simply bewildering. Anyway, the poetry itself is divided into sonnets from Kal-El's POV, "The Jor-El Tapes," "The Secret Diaries of Lois Lane," and "Lex Luthor's Complaint." The meditations on ultimate power and ultimate loss are occasionally affecting, but Dietrich was in the end mining Superman as a source of signification – along with Jesus and Abraham – rather than taking him on his own terms, for example when he has Lois opine on how different Superman is because he has no knowledge, expectation or fear of death – as if the instincts and sympathies were absent because he grew up under a yellow sun. Predictably, I liked Lex's section best, Lucifer's lament about how hard it is to speak truth to power, and harder still to stand up to it.
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Okay, NOW I am certain: I am NEVER having children. Ever. [Disclaimer: this is not a judgment against persons who choose to have children, but rather a statement of my own lack of courage to face true lunacy.] I am going to go hide under my bed now. ;-)
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Personally, I think they all should get out more. Smell some roses, eat some chocolate, and chill. While I have a lot of strong opinions in the abstract, I keep it there. In my experience, most parents of any parenting style have good reasons for why they're doing X, Y, or Z, and it's not my place to try to change their mind.
(It may be easier for me to keep to the abstract because most of my strong opinions are about societal support for new parents and the lack of it, and how that affects parenting decisions in various groups.)