I didn't get a game together today, but he did.  It's a good one; I dare you to give it a shot .

Lolita......?

Right now I'm slowly devouring "Reading Lolita in Tehran." Penned by Professor Azar Nafisi, now at Johns Hopkins, it's a memoir of her early career in her native Iran, where as a young academic she suffered the cultural and religious oppression of the Iranian revolution, which transformed her from a vibrant female professional into a housebound non-person swathed in black and forbidden by formal edict from showing a strand of hair or wearing a pair of colored socks.  Nafisi's exploration, with a group of former students, of banned Western literature by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, Austen and other luminaries underlies her deep analysis of the nature of the human spirit, caged and at bay in a once-familiar culture purposely alienating its own.  Lolita is in part a metaphor for Nafisi's exploration:  an analysis of the many viewpoints of that infamous girl-child.  Was Lolita a sexually precocious prepubescent nymphet, as Nabokov's untrustworthy narrator paints it; or was she an absolute victim: an innocent child struggling to seize what life she might still have in the grip of her inescapable captor?

In the context of this difficult and fascinating journey into literature and culture and psychoanalysis, I was particularly stricken by yesterday's news.

Somewhere in this world today there is a young woman with a puckish grin under her tousled dark pixie-cut. Hers is a grin that just begs a twinkle-eyed return, if the context of its appearance were any less appalling.  The context, as anyone within the reach of the media could hardly escape from noticing, is its atrociously inapropos placement in photographs of the torture of naked Iraqi  prisoners, in whose pain and utter humiliation the owner of the grin, U.S. Pfc. Lynndie England, and her lover Specialist Charles Graner, are participating.

From the midst of the firestorm, one can choose from a wide variety of viewpoints.  Is Pfc. England a blameless peon engaged in a "silly prank," as her mother stated (oh what a preview to Mother's Day, to sit on your Appalachian trailer-stoop and see, for the first time, such images of your daughter in a reporter's hand, and grope for some response)?  Or the "grinning monster" excoriated in the press?  Or some aberrant psyche whom we would all prefer to cast, as Mr. Bush would have it, as "not representing the America that I know?"

I am significantly less sympathetic to the President than to the young commanders in the field, baldly crying to the Iraqi masses and the ravening reporters:  "This was not my Army.  This was not my Army!" but in any case the basis for the argument is the same.  Torture and humiliation does not lie readily to hand in the standard American tool kit (as, of course, every American knows it does for others in the world).

Yet seeking in the privacy of our inner soul, how other is this behavior, really?  Taking a cue from Mrs. England, when does "prank" become "atrocity"?  When does the thing the schoolyard bully is stopped from doing (too late to save a victim from shame, but soon enough to stop physical harm) become the thing that the fratboys do (that is exposed in the paper and badmouthed in the community as stupid and shameful and a waste of educational taxpayers dollars) become the thing that happens behind the American prison gates (where Specialist Graner was long employed and (perhaps) disciplined for inappropriate guardianship), become the thing that turns the self-proclaimed "liberator of Iraq" into a red-faced Goliath, stymied in his hubris by his own Achilles heel?

Does tough young Lynndie, thrown from one-horse rural West Virginia into the maelstrom of Iraq, into the arms of a partner with an abusive history, into the confusion of ill-defined orders to keep sensitive prisoners awake and uneasy, merit anything other than the repudiation of her President and her countrymen?  Is there more than one way to view her story?  Is there a nymphette/victim under that brash, gruesome playfulness seen so hideously victimizing others?

I'm going back to Nafisi's thoughtful world, to think.

Note:  these ruminations do NOT mean that what happened was in any way excusable, or that Pfc. England was in any way an "innocent."  It was not excusable, and she was not innocent..  My train of thought points to the questioning of the creation of, and the punishment of, the perpetrator of such acts, and to what cultural and global lessons might be drawn.

Uh.  Did I say "sense"??  But you know what?  I am, suddenly, laughing!

Give a shot at your own giggle?

eFairy, and....

You know, of course, about Pippi Longstocking, that bewitching (anti)heroine of Astrid Lindgren’s who lives all by herself in a ramshackle house with her horse and her monkey and makes the lives of the all-too-ordinary kids-next-door a joy and an astonishment from morning ‘til night.

Well, in case you haven’t yet realized it, Xanga has its own Pippi, right here.  eFairy defies description.  Let's just say:  you walk into a room and pick up a globe.  It's upside down.  You look at the two legs of Australia, waving in the air, and wonder to yourself:  "Why is  North "up"?"  That's sort of what eFairy does to the unsuspecting surfer.

The thing about eFairy is that her blogs can run from Tupperware sales (you're thinking:  okay, I get the score here) to a riveting and wrenching personal tale of astounding survival in the midst of abuse (you're holding back the tears) to a laugh-a-minute expose of her mother, "Captain Insano," and the latter's oblivious but eternal intent to off her dangerously allergic grandson by proffering peanuts (you're laughing and sobbing) to an invitation to participate in an art contest.  By the time you're done reading, you're ready to close down Xanga for the day, because, by gosh, you've already run the entire gamut of human emotion and have no more reading time left.

So check her out if you haven't yet.  She's not everyone's cup of tea, but boy, can she make tea! 

And since I promised her a laugh (how could I have had such hubris?) here's an eFairy-like offering of my own.  This is my own tale (true; happened last night) and as is seldom the case, it's actually bordering on eFairy-like NewsOfTheWeird-type humor, so without further ado:

....The Green Cheerio

My eldest, who's downed her spinach-and-potato soup with remarkable calm and is now proceeding slowly to the sweeter portions of dinner, pokes around on the kitchen counter.  "Mom - what's this?"

I'm at the sink scrubbing another sticky pot, up to my arms in suds, and grumpy.  I squint.  It looks like a green Cheerio.  "It looks like a green Cheerio," I say.  I go back to the pot, then look back up.  There are no multicolored Cheerios in my house.  "Don't eat it," I advise.  I'm still not making a move to actually inspect it, but further squinting reveals a somewhat rubbery appearance.  "Go ask Daddy," I suggest.  In a home on a farm, after all, the oddest things turn up on kitchen counters.  A washer, perhaps?

The eldest slides down from her stool and trots into the livingroom, green Cheerio in tow.  I hear her imperious little voice.  I hear my husband's hesitating return, in that well-known tone of the adult in an awkward moment.

"It's -- it's a band ," he says slowly, "to put around the scrotum of a little lamb or goat so -- so it can't make babies." 

I am laughing, and running water, and miss a few lines, but I think I hear Ms. Imperious asking, astounded:  "And his penis falls off ?!"

She returns.  "It's something to keep little boys from being Daddies," she announces matter-of-factly.  She plunks down the green castrator and picks up her spoon.  "Can I have more yoghurt, Mom?"

Go read eFairy.  She's way better than this!

START

“I showed ‘em…heh heh heh…yes’ir, I showed ‘em.”  The slow, regular rocking motion was not a nervous twitch for Howard, it just felt right.  He could move his stool, the one piece of furniture in his padded room besides his cot, to the center of the room, but the corner offered that safe, quietness that he longed for.  “They think they’re soooo smart, but they won’t forget the name Howard W. Longbottom… no, they won’t!”  His chart read like a laundry list of mental disturbances.  His “occupation” read, “Government Accountant” causing room for speculation as to the “chicken and egg” question.  Can one remain sane in a world of convoluted policy and incessant forms or does one have to already be nurturing the seeds of insanity in order to enter this cavernous world?  “They have me to thank for Form 1617.  That’ll keep ‘em stirred up, lonnnnnng after I’m gone…heh, heh, heh!” contributed by WaitingForEpiphany

More Quotes From Ms. Three 

• 
  
  “Mommy, always never put your socks in the toilet.”
  
  
• 
  
  “Mommy, there’s something in my dress that’s making funny noises and scratching my back.  Take it out!”
  
  
• 
  
  [after mistakenly hitting me during an arm-flailing episode] “It’s okay, Mommy.  I still love you.”
  
  
• 
  
  [after discovering mismatched socks during a hurry-up-and-go moment] "All right, all right.  I won’t fuss.”
  
  
• 
  
  “When I grow up, Mommy, I will have my own bed, but don’t worry, I’ll still live with you!”
  
  
• 
  
  [while snuggled, but ignored, in my arms during my conversation with another adult in which I'd just said ‘I feel like there’s a black cloud looming over me’] “Well Mommy, then it’s a very good thing I brought my umbrella!”

She brings more than that.  She brings tears of joy to my eyes.  Daily.

The Love/Hate Thing

My dear friend and thinker extraordinaire Quiltnmomi posted a lovely poem yesterday with particular reference to an excerpt indicating that it is easy to hate a general category of people, but equally easy to love any one specific example thereof (and when you read the poem, you'll immediately appreciate the amazing art of poets, who can say in five words what I just 'prosed' in five times that many). 

In a similar vein, another of my favorite Xangans, Thyrio, recently used his own not inconsiderable power of writ to excoriate the us/them construct in the political realm:  who, he argued, can possibly be suckered into believing the bile either party spews about the other; do we not all reach for the same common goals?

I admired the poem, and nodded my head over Thyrio's remarks.  But I find myself moved to argue, in part, the opposite case:  that it is easy, also, to generalize love and specify hate. 

The other day I dragged out my old Riverside Shakespeare for a reference, and found myself once more drawn into the power of the Bard's words, in this case those he placed in his young King's mouth as Henry V stood before his troops and told them how fortunate they were to be facing, few and weary, an inexorable enemy:

We would not die in that man's company,
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
He that outlives this day, and sees old age,
Shall stand a tiptoe when this day is named.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Shall yearly, on the vigil, feast his friends.
This story shall the good man tell his son,
And from this day, unto the general doom:
But we in it shall be remembred.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
Henry V Qu 4,3 [excerpted]

I read this aloud to my husband (aping, as I imagined, the vaunting tones of Branagh in my preferred rendition of the lines).  I am no proponent of armed conflict, but as I read I could hear the background music without effort.  Such words most assuredly stir my sinews:  Truth and Right, I think, love of one's country, the power of the David against the Goliath, the virtue of the chivalrous cause.

My spouse grinned sardonically.  "Yeah," quoth he, "sounds a little like Bush, huh?"

I staggered.  WHAT?  The immortal Bard, the most honorable of young monarchs, the best of Shakespearian actors -- and somehow all this can be compared to a man who, in the depths of my sneering knee-jerk liberal heart, I believe incapable of cracking a book, let alone discerning the meaning of Elizabethan English?

Well, of course.  The American President, like all leaders, frequently exhorts his people to greater glory by reference to their personal courage and their bond of citizenship.  And if I don't find much resonance in his speechwriter's words, it has little to do with their content or delivery.  It has to do with what I imagine I know of the man himself: his ancestry, his religion, his associates, the manner of his coming to power.

"Hate generalizes/love is particular"?  What of:  "Familiarity breeds contempt?"

Alas, "hero" in the particular is as mythic as "heroism" writ large.

As I had occasion to ask my eldest the other day:  "Do you think you're all good, like Gandalf?  Or all bad, like Sauron?  Or sometimes good and sometimes bad, like -- like me?"  Of course, she knew the only possible response.

Is the final answer to the human condition, in truth, neither love nor hate, but rather an understanding of the inseparable interconnection between the two?

Oooops

So this morning I was doing my usual maneuvering in our not-quite-regularly-arranged corporate 'parking lot' (unpaved area without any lane demarcation) when I noticed, out of my rearview mirror, that somebody had thoughtfully avoided my attempts to blindly sideswipe him, and was proceeding calmly on without giving me a chance to wave a thankful hand or show my red face.  Had anything occurred, at parking-lot speeds it would probably have been more embarrassing that life-threatening (Him to his spouse:  "Yeah, Faith smeared out our van this morning."  His spouse:  "That's a bummer.  How good is her insurance?"  Fully covered, I will hasten to say). 

I would hope this sort of idiocy is categorizable into the "minor lapses of judgment" folder rather than the "perennially bad driver" slot.  Either through blind luck and the care of others, like today, or through something less happenstance, my "driving oops" record to date is fairly short.  It includes one very nasty one-car icy-road smash-up (no passengers; myself only temporarily shaken) and one or two this-and-that's (wrong way on one-way road as a youngster; car apparently abandoned in the local park as a teen -- until the policeman's flashlight discovered me and, er, a friend, in some state of disarray, in the back seat........the latter, of course, not being a driving oops.  More-or-less).

Moments like this morning's give me pause, though.  I relate it in part to a recent conversation with my boss, in which he went on at great length about his own prowess and incredible insight during his recent difficult trip overseas for a multi-cultural negotiating session.  In my opinion, my boss is a very, very smart man.  I wonder, though, whether his opinion of his intellectual capacity isn't perhaps beginning to exceed reality.  But I don't want to call him on it.  Right now, flush with his victories, it would be rude; later on, it won't be the right moment.  In truth, it will never quite be the right moment. 

But should it be?  Wouldn't it be better if, every now and then, for purely selfless reasons, someone would tell us the truth about our own self-perceptions?  Not every day.  Just every now and then. 

Some people don't want to hear that, of course.  But me, I think maybe it would do me good.  Perhaps I should even advertise that I'm available for input:

Image and Reputation

Yesterday I receiving a purchase order from an institution I'd never heard of.  I checked it out on-line, to suss veracity, and was charmed enough to spend more than the requisite professional few moments looking at Rowan University, an eighty-one-year-old institution of higher learning in New Jersey, originally started as a women's teacher-training college, and an early leader in the special education movement.  I've never been to Rowan, never (as far as I know) known a graduate, and don't necessarily expect to have any affiliation with it in future.  But I liked the website.  I smiled at their historical pride and future plans.  I ended my brief virtual visit with a good feeling about them.

On an entirely unrelated note, I heard a disturbing rumor the other day. A friend with a summer home in the northeast mentioned that a children's camp where I once worked had experienced a scandal involving sex and a minor.  That was the extent of the remark: no indication of when, or who, or whether it was a truly gruesome event between a mature adult and a child, or perhaps one of the grey-area matters between, say, a 17-year-old camper and a 20-year-old counselor (still a matter of illegality, but in such instances -- sometimes -- less about the laws of man than the laws of nature).  The story might be untrue, or blown out of proportion, or rife with extenuating circumstances.  But somehow just the breath of such an evil thing tainted my otherwise pristine memory of a beautiful place with a beautiful tradition; a place where a part of my heart will always lie.

Thinking about these two institutions, one entirely unknown to me and the other once intimately familiar; about my unadulterated pleasure in the one, and my now disturbed concern about the other, left me wondering at the ease of image-making, and the incredible fragility of reputation.  The internet and our all-pervasive electronic media are accused of exacerbating this ease and that fragility, but that's not really the case, is it?  Today, images and reputation are made or broken by the snide off-remark on the newscast.  In Jane Austen's time it was the mere arch of a meaningful eyebrow.  When we all lived in caves it was a grunt and a turn of the shoulder.  But it's always been with us, that easiness and that fragility.

I'm returning to my purchase orders with a heavier heart, somehow.

Skating

Thankfully, it wasn't at all like the (personally) infamous roller-skating endeavor.  Although the kids were just as excited to be "going out at NIGHT!" (things that happen outside the home and end when it's dark are pretty special to my in-bed-at-eight girls).

Arriving at the skating rink in the midst of a tremendous spring thunder storm (crackling light show, falling branches, gusting rain that rocked the cars) was only the beginning of the excitement.  There was the whole interesting shuffle at the counter with skates, and getting the wrong-sized pair to begin, and feeling that too-tight-about-the-ankle sensation.  Then the interesting experience of balancing successfully on a razor-edge as you wobble across the matted floor toward the gate.  Then the ice, and the instant terror.  "Mommy!" screeched the youngest, falling flattly to her plump bottom and refusing to move from the crowded entryway.  The eldest clung in terror to her grandmother, bent double.

Hmmm.  Fortunately, however, it being a private-group rental of the facility, we persuaded the staff to bring out the little sliding chairs they use in the beginning skate lessons.  Instant smiles all around.  By the end of the evening, the eldest was proudly pushing the youngest (rather rapidly) across the ice, leaving me to swoooooop..........

Ever been forty-two and definitely no object of grace, but felt your body remembering when you were sixteen, and imagined you looked a little -- oh -- a fairy princess, flying, fluttering, smiling Mona-Lisa-like at some inner joy?

Yes.  Swooooop..............

(the bruise from the subsequent ice-cracking fall has only just begun to fade, but still.  The memory of the pre-fall moment won't). 

*painting by Alice Dannenberg