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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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Sad, but true, to the point where I have a filter for discussing breastfeeding because I don't want my friends who didn't to think I'm sitting in judgement on them. When I want fandom to look sane, I go read parenting usenet groups and discussion boards. Now that I am no longer actively hunting down advice (I only did that for pregnancy, which was probably a mistake, as I just ended up annoyed when I was supposed to be watching my blood pressure), it's hours of entertainment for me.
I have no cable, and must make my own fun.
That introduction is... something. I'm boggled.
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As a new mother, I often wondered, rather vacuously, I'll admit, Oh, but can I really be friends with people who's parenting styles I don't agree with?
Nine years later, I've discovered that the answer is a resounding, rather desperate Yes!
Otherwise, it's a long, uphill slog. Through the mud. With leaky boots and wet socks.
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Interesting and very good insight. Just out of curiosity, did anything in particular lead to it?
But then again, isn't every "choice" that we make a judgment call, whether it's a choice about our personal actions or what our personal actions would be if we were in a certain position? When choosing between X and not-X, obviously we think X is preferable to not-X under most circumstances, for us or for anybody else.
And even if we are, in a sense, passing a judgment on people who choose not-X, that's hardly a bad thing. No doubt many people who choose not-X are doing the same to us. It's not something to be ashamed of, but rather difference of opinion.
[/philosophical mode]
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I can already tell that some parenting groups make fandom_wank look like a box of kittens. I'm trying to keep some perspective; after all, my parents did a pretty good job, I think, and the advice then was to put your baby to sleep on her stomach!
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I agree that many choices express some judgment about what people in general should do (though you're unlikely to feel judged by my chocolate preference, unless maybe I say "people who don't like chocolate reveal themselves thereby to be pleasure-hating lunatics" and even then you will probably chalk it up to low blood sugar on my part) -- but childrearing seems to be automatically understood as a judgment in many contexts. In general, I think people are much more willing to believe that my love of Buffy does not make me look down on people who just aren't that into the show. And they may be right to fear judgment -- on average, my preferences about childrearing are likely to cut closer to the core of my being than my love of chocolate (though it's a close thing at times) and so I am more likely to feel superior about doing it "right." At the same time, because it's such a fraught subject, I'm more likely to perceive the same judgment from them, so from what I can see tempers fray easily.
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"Attachment parenting?" Do explain--at risk of opening myself to being labelled either a silly schoolgirl or a "career woman" without a maternal bone in her body. I'm very curious.
The fact that "preferences" and "choices" with regard to childrearing tend to be "all-or-nothing" propositions may be the reason for that. With preference of a TV show like Buffy, even a die-hard fan does not necessarily view another person's dislike of the show as "wrong"--they may simply agree that it's different tastes (if less than good tastes) and be able to get along fine without any actual or perceived "judgment" being passed about either person's "social worth" or whatever you want to call it.
With childrearing, choices are more often "wrong" or "right" because the consequences for the child and the whole family can be so intense for even the smallest choice. Example: My mother never let me cry myself to sleep as a baby, although I didn't cry a whole lot to begin with. You might not think that's a big issue, but her mother and several of her sisters claimed she was spoiling me rotten and that I was going to have problems when I grew up. (We remain extremely close and attached, which some of those same family members no doubt find a bit odd.)
When you say, "I like Buffy", and someone else says, "I like Dawson's Creek," neither person is likely to feel that a judgment is being passed against their own preference because there are so many options out there.
But if you say, "I always pick up my six-week-old as soon as she starts screaming," and someone else says, "I just let her scream," the implication is different. Either pick the kid up or don't--but it's not a matter of "taste." Somebody must be "wrong."
Maybe we should view childrearing as more of a multi-option experience, depending highly on personal circumstances (or "tastes") of all the members of a family. After all, every kid is different, and so is every family.
Gads, and this coming from someone who's probably never going to have children--not that it's any judgment on people who do! Just my preference!
PS--However, speaking as one who was declared the Sweetest Tooth on the East Coast, I think we should have a license to label people who don't like chocolate as pleasure-hating lunatics. There is simply no other way to account for such a bizarre deviation for what ought to be a natural taste in all homo sapiens.
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That's not a question exclusive to fellow parents, though. I'm not even close to the time where I'd consider having children yet, but as someone still young enough to remember childhood--particularly the teenaged years--vividly, I often find myself gritting my teeth at the parenting decisions made by my aunts and uncles regarding my teenaged cousins.
It's harder still when they're your family and you're NOT a parent--thereby giving you even less of a "right" in the eyes of the rest of the world to have an opinion about childrearing.
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Oh, come on, the parenting groups can't be that bonkers! Worse than fandom_wank? Even the Harry Potter shipping wars?
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As for example:
When I was pregnant, a few people said to lay her on her stomach, and I pictured her smothering. A few more said on her back and I pictured her asperating on her own vomit. As a compromise, when she was born, I laid her on her side, and put one of those baby doorstops in front and behind her.
I had to resist the urge to explain or apologize for my choices a lot during her first six months, then I started shrugging and saying "it works for her."
Mary Ann
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Oh, yes they can. When they bring it, they make the HP fandom look like rank amateurs.
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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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For the newborn period, it's also the only thing that kept me sane. (Which is how I fell into it by accident. It just so happened that from the time she was born until she was about 8 or 9 weeks old, she wouldn't nap unless someone was holding her. So we did.)
What it boils down to, getting beyond slings and co-sleeping (which isn't the same thing as bedsharing--right now, she sleeps in our room, in an Amby baby hammock we borrowed from friends, and I'm given to understand that counts), is listening to/watching for the cues that your baby gives you. As I tend to sort of go with the situational flow and happen to have a clingy child, AP made sense for me and the baby in question. Your Baby May Vary.
(I tend to describe my parenting style as half-assed AP. While I exclusively breastfeed, plan to do so until she self-weans, and am keeping her in the room with us for at least a year*, she's always hated the sling, and despite her strong "hold me" urges, seems to prefer the stroller now to being confined in the pack--her dislike of getting too warm exceeding her desire to be right next to us--so we don't do a lot of baby wearing, and I have, on occasion, been known to :gasp: leave her ALONE in her Amby while I do things like, oh, take a shower.)
*In addition to liking having her close by at night, keeping her in our room delays the inevitable Huge Flooring and Painting project that her eventual room will require before we give it over for her exclusive use. Also, we haven't bothered to buy a crib yet. So when it comes right down to it, our reasons for co-sleeping are mainly that we are really quite lazy and live in a very small fixer of a place.
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That paragraph's so purple I swear it has overriddden my usual synesthesia.
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Tragic malformation of the tastebuds?
(Re: AP, see response further downthread.)
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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.)
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I think I speak for all of us when I say "huh?"
The worse kind of academic folderol. Saying very little, using twice as many syllables as necessary, with annoying ironic digressions into pop-culture reference (Hollywood, Here We Come!) in a vain attempt to sound hip. Just. . .bleah.
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Then again, you always have all of us :-)
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(and I can't link jocelyns, b/c it's locked, I wrote about it a while back, but my experiences are similar...I fell into it as a form of self-defense and had no difficulty working etc. even though I APed)...and personbally, I do love the Sears Baby Book, simply b/c it seems to empower parental instinct and knowledge of you own child and its indivual idiosyncrasies in a way many of the other parenting books don't (they often read to me as if my child were abnormal and I a bad mother for not doing X, Y, and Z)
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Somehow I still think there are clear conections between the competition that makes people turn their pre-schoolers into trained monkeys and the individualism, between the lack of a collective spirit in caring for our children and the oneupmansship you see in pre-school and school (though, in fact, it goes all te way down to babygroups and whose kid rolls, raises head, walks, talks, first...)
oh, and someone responded last night to this comment (http://www.livejournal.com/users/elke_tanzer/518565.html?thread=2879653#t2879653) i'd made a while back that addresses a lot of my misgivings (though I failed to connect them to political issues)
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If only I could believe he meant "Babe of Krypton" the way you or I would mean it.
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As it turned out, she's pretty mellow--just squirmy. Not what I was expecting at all. Watching her personality unfold is just plain neat.
If I hadn't said it, good luck with the baby!
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(deleted and re-submitted because that long link fucked up your page)
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FWIW, I thought some of the Sears stuff was nuts (who wants to be tethered to a baby 24/7) and so was Brazelton (Dads should have the final say on circumcision because they have penises after all. Uh huh). As I read all this different stuff, I decided in the end I'd go with my instincts and the child's personality. My son slept best in our bed so that's where he slept for almost all of his first year. My daughter, now 1, has never been as physically affectionate (or clingy, depending on how you look at it) as him and slept better in a crib.
One of the things I read that reinforced this for me was by an anthropologist named Meredith Small who writes about how cultures vary in raising children. What I found most interesting was how other cultures view Americans (by which she means white middle class Americans but she has enough on her plate without dissecting American culture into its parts). It didn't always change my opinion about what I wanted to do but it did make me more conscious of my choices.
And then there was my mother's advice: "I drank and smoked all the way through my pregnancy with you and you turned out fine. Relax." *g*
And congratulations again!
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we miss you
I ordered Dietrich's book a few years ago and found it... fun... but... not as good as it should be. I agree that the Lex stuff is some of the best.
I also think you're right about Parenting Decision Disapproval. Yikes.
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Re: we miss you
What did you enjoy/dislike about the Dietrich book? I approached it as a comics fan rather than a poetry reader, so I was only taking it on half its own terms.
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