Girl Detective

I’m one of the few people who don’t seem to like the Minx line of graphic novels from DC Comics (see positive reviews here, here, and here, for example.) But I read New York Four because my friend the Big Brain assured me it was good. I read it; when I told him I didn’t agree, he said I must hate everything. Not true, but I clearly am not the target audience for the Minx books, though I appreciate well-done YA books.

Riley is a first year student at NYU who is overly attached to her Blackberry. In spite of her antisocial ways, she manages to make friends with three girls: a non-brilliant beauty from a wealthy family, a socially inept jock, and a tightly wound academic. (They didn’t dig very deep into the YA cliched character closet.) She has an older sister who she hasn’t seen for years, who was kicked out by their parents for an unknown reason. The four girls all get jobs that require psyche interviews, which are used to convey the girls’ thoughts and feelings.

Will she find out her sister’s secret? Will she regret her attachment to virtual friends instead of real ones? In spite of one part of the ending that was unexpected, most other plot points were by the book. Ryan Kelly’s art is great, though, and elevates NY4 beyond its mostly pedestrian story.

The Minx line may be better for fans of manga than for fans of YA fiction. It seems that DC is going for an older reader with stories like NY4 about 18 year olds, and Plain Janes, about older high-school girls. Yet the mostly chaste romances, and the unsurprising stories, make them feel as if they’re more appropriate for much younger girls, say 9 to 12 instead of 12 to 16. Here’s an interesting post on the audience for Minx.

And so is his geek initiation. Last night was a pretty typical night in our house. We put the boys in bed by 8:30pm, then my husband G. Grod and I repaired to the basement to watch television, which is about all we feel up to after wrangling the boys (2 and 4) into bed. Earlier this week, SciFi reran a few Doctor Who episodes from Season 1 that introduced Captain Jack Harkness (not yet of Torchwood), as well as references to the phrase that ended last Friday’s US airing of “Turn Left.”

It is not unusual while we’re watching to hear the pitter patter of little feet overhead on our creaky hardwood floors. G. Grod and I take turns to go up and tell 4yo Drake to go back to bed. He’s usually grabbing some toy cars to take upstairs. He calls them his “contestants,” a la PBS’ Fetch with Ruff Ruffman. I’ve learned to search his bed after he’s asleep to remove the cars. More times than I care to count, G. Grod and I have been startled awake in the wee small hours by the sound of a Matchbox car falling out of Drake’s bed onto the hardwood floor.

Last night, though, all was quiet. We watched the two-episodes that ended Season 1 of Dr. Who, and that had some pretty dramatic events. G. and I were discussing them afterwards, when Drake appeared in the hallway of our basement, with a please-don’t-yell-at-me-for-being-awake-because-look-how-cute-I-am! smile on his face. We admonished him for still being awake, when he got a grumpy look on his face, crossed his arms in front and moved them up and down, as if he were in a hip-hop video.

“What,” he enunciated slowly, “was that city flying across the sky?”

G. Grod and I exchanged a look. Drake clarified.

“That building, I mean.”

“How long have you been watching, there?” G. Grod asked with some concern.

A quick interrogation proved he’d watched the entirety of the last, pretty scary episode, and he had many questions.

“What were those things? With bumps?”

“Daleks, Drake.”

“And that thing with one eye, it said it couldn’t die. Hey, I made a rhyme! But, what did it mean?”

“Um, that it thought it would live forever.”

We shooed him up to bed. He fell asleep quickly, I removed the cars from his bed.

I think we’re going to have to get a motion detector in our basement. Dr. Who is one thing, but I’m thinking of renting Apocalypse Now sometime soon. Yikes.

2yo Guppy, screaming. I stumble in, give him water, which usually appeases him. He continues to moan. I return to bed, hoping he’ll settle. He doesn’t, and his cries increase in volume. I return, pat his back, and ask what’s wrong. I ask if he wants a hug. He nods and stands up, then quiets down.

I tell him to lay back down with his friends Snake and Baby Elmo. Guppy suddenly is in a rage.

“I DON’T _WANT_ BABY ELMO!” he yells, picking up the toy and flinging it across the room, and beginning to cry again. I am at a loss.

“More water?” I ask, and am surprised when he agrees. He finishes the cup, and asks for more. I get some from the bathroom, then return, and his screams rise in pitch.

“BUT _I_ WANTED TO GET WATER!”

It is too dark for him to see me roll my eyes. “OK, Guppy, I’ll take you out of the crib, we’ll go into the bathroom, dump out this water, and you can fill the glass again.” My sarcastic tone and sigh were to make me feel better; I knew he wouldn’t get it.

“O-TAY,” he says, petulantly. But we do exactly that, and I return him to the crib. He has quieted, and I ask him if it’s all right if I go. He says yes, and I beat a hasty retreat before he changes his mind.

Sad news for fans of Ebert, Roeper, and fans of good film reviews. They are officially leaving At the Movies, the show that introduced Ebert, Siskel and the Thumbs Up and Down ratings.

Richard Roeper joined Roger Ebert on the show after Gene Siskel’s death. Ebert has long been absent from the show for health reasons. Several guest critics have filled in, but only a few have even come close to Ebert’s high standards of review, in my opinion: New York Times’ A.O. Scott, Village Voice’s Robert Wilonsky, and Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips.

Ebert and Roeper will continue to review movies in different media formats, such as Ebert’s site.

The return of Project Runway, and was it me, or did Bravo run it an hour earlier (9pm Eastern, 8pm Central) to further confound fans?

A few observations. Suede has a silly name, freaked out at a challenge that had been done before, and refers to himself in the third person. Two contestants from my city of origin, Columbus, Ohio? Will someone tell Blayne that tanning is a bad idea that he’s going to regret in a very few years, and ask him if he has allergies or a coke habit. The two runners up last night did not look like gracious winners. I thought the mop top, the paper-towel dress and the pasta skirt should have gotten more love. I love how Austin Scarlett celebrates his femme-y self. All three of the losing dresses deserved their drubbing. Last night I questioned the judges’ decision and thought the goth trashbag was the loser. Looking more closely this morning, I am still horrified by Blayne’s whatever-it-was. Reviewing the serial killer/nurse outfit this morning, I applaud the judges’ decision.

For more dissing and dishing, visit Project Rungay and Blogging Project Runway.

Day before yesterday, 4yo Drake woke at 2:30 am crying.

“I dreamed bugs were all over my feet, Mom!” he wailed.

I checked the bed, and assured him that they were in his dream, not in real life. “And Daisy and Duckie are ducks (referring to some of his loveys), and they eat bugs, so they’ll protect you.”

“BUT THEY’RE NOT REAL, MOM!”

I pause, think. “But neither are the bugs in your dream, honey.”

He pauses, thinks. “Oh, OK.” Turns over and shuts his eyes.

This morning, 3am, 2yo Guppy started to yell. I stumbled into his room.

“Drake’s being really mean to me, Mom!”

I, figuring this need not be dignified with an answer, placated him with a drink of water, and returned to my bed. What, it’s not enough that I have to endure their fights all day, but I have to deal with bad-dream versions, too? Oy. And poor Guppy doesn’t even get a break from his younger-sibling torment in his dreams.

Triptychs showing a packaged food from Germany, a closeup of the product on the packaging, and what the food looks like in real life.

Not for the weak of stomach. Or probably for the vegetarians out there. For example, “Fleischsalat” is what it sounds like. *shudder*

Link from The Morning News.

My friend The Big Brain lent me an advance copy of Burnout, the newest graphic novel from the DC Minx line, for young adults. The Minx books have gotten a lot of praise, and I’m in the minority (for example, praise at Boing Boing); I hate them. I think they’re full of young-adult novel cliches that were tired at least a decade ago. I could do a plot summary, but I think a cliche summary will function just as well:

Teenage protagonist was abandoned by father
Mother is in relationship with abusive, alcoholic jerk
Jerk has a hottie son whom protagonist has crush on
Hottie has a secret, which protagonist learns
Minimum of other characters (dog, best friend, and best friend’s uncle)
Hottie comes to bad end; protagonist and mother escape to new life

Perhaps the only difference between this story and the typical teenage problem novels of the 80s and 90s (which I quoted Michael Cart about, here) is that there is an ambiguous, not-happy ending. To me, this was a by the numbers YA book with OK art.

Better choices? Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Yes, they’re more serious. But they’re also really good. Gray Horses by Hope Larson, and Runaways by Brian K. Vaughan have good, believable female protagonists. And for good YA novels, check out the Printz award winners.

Joshua Gans at Game Theorist (”Musings on economics and child rearing”) blogging about disciplining his youngest child:

When it comes down to it, this blog is a censored version of my parenting life. It is not and I do not claim it to be a full record. And when it comes to Child No.3, who is soon to turn 4, the terrible twos have seemed to lasted well beyond what one would have hoped.

Same here at Girl Detective. I try not to gripe about the daily grind; if I do I try to make it humorous. But my husband G. Grod and I have struggled with discipline issues, too. Gans’ post is long, but I found it worthwhile itself, and for the Slate article it linked to on timeouts. Both are matter-of-fact about dealing with kids. Gans candidly calls his struggles “the war” and the Slate piece mentioned, more than once, the desire of a parent to hit a child when things escalate.

Before I had kids, I didn’t believe I ever would, or even would want to, hit a child. (All you parents of multiple kids may now take a break to laugh your heads off.) As with most (all?) of my pre-parenting “I nevers,” this got proved wrong pretty quickly. Parenting books say things like “model the behavior you want” and “don’t lose your temper.” Good ideas in theory, but much harder in practice. And frequently not effective, even if done “correctly.”

Both the Gans entry and the Slate piece are refreshing in their realism. The Slate piece points out that most people misunderstand the purpose of timeouts, and offers these useful guidelines:

1. brief
2. immediate
3. done in isolation from others,
4. administered calmly…and without repeated warnings

Facebook, that is. Apparently not.

A friend from high school recently emailed that she’d joined Facebook. She’s an international athlete, and found it was a good way to stay connected to friends around the world.

I decided to test the waters, and have since found many, many friends who were already there, from all different parts of my life: family, former co-workers, neighbors, Philly friends, high-school classmates, and more. (Interestingly, no college classmates yet.)

I’m a bit overwhelmed by the scope of it, and the time-consuming possibilities. Remember back when google became a verb, because people looked up old friends? Facebook is like a school yearbook for the world. I’ve even gotten a friend request from someone I don’t know or can’t remember. What’s the etiquette for that? I may have bitten off more than I can chew, here.

I was vacuuming the basement yesterday when 4yo Drake and 2yo Guppy lost interest and ran off. I heard them laughing. Then I smelled something, and went running.

They had gone into my husband G. Grod’s office; Drake had been spraying Guppy and the floor with Endust for electronics. Drake’s shirt and Guppy’s hair were wet with cleaner. I yelled about poison. I mopped. They cried. I tried to get them out of the office; they refused. G. Grod yelled, and I hustled the boys upstairs for an unplanned bath with shampoo.

While Guppy was in the bath, Drake played with the cord on the window blinds, putting it around his neck. While Drake was in the bath, Guppy grabbed, opened and spilled the bottle of baby shampoo. They’d really learned their lesson, no?

I sometimes think it’s largely luck if children survive to adulthood. There are things we can do to help them along (like putting toxic cleaners up high, or not having them in house; sigh), but the world is dangerous and kids are curious, a dangerous conjunction.

2yo Guppy woke screaming the other day at 4am, angrily yelling, “But _I_ wanted to take off my sandals, Mama! Not YOU!” I gave him some water and a pat, and we went back to sleep.

Next day, 4am. This time, Guppy hollering, “I wanted my milk, but YOU poured it out, Mama!” Water, pat, sleep.

This morning he woke at 5:45am, but not screaming. I told him it wasn’t time to get up. Water, pat, sleep.

I fear for our future relationship, if Guppy is going to clutch each day’s little injustices till they induce nightmares.

I like Johnny Depp. I’ve liked Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas and Edward Scissorhands. So I thought I would like Sweeney Todd. I thought the quality of the production and acting (Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, Sacha Baron Cohen and Alan Rickman) would outweigh the dark and gory aspects of the film.

I was wrong.

The film is so dark, and so relentlessly gory, that I spent much of it gazing at the ceiling, waiting for scenes to be done. It’s embarrassing to admit I didn’t like the film because it was too dark and gory. What did I expect? Perhaps a little more humanity, a lot less blood and violence. But the acting, the look of the film, and the singing were all top notch. And it was interesting to see the pregnant Bonham Carter’s bust and belly change size, sometimes even within a scene, depending on when the scenes were filmed.

Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath is my book group’s next selection. It is the Nobel- and Pulitzer-Prize winning epic novel of the Joads, a sharecropping family from Oklahoma. They’re evicted from their farm during the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. Like hundreds of thousands of others, they pack their belongings into an undependable vehicle, and set out for the promised land of California. As with the biblical story of the Israelites exodus from Egypt, the journey is far more difficult than the Joads hoped it would be.

Every strong novel redefines our conception of the genre’s dimensions and reorders our awareness of its possibilities. Like other products of rough-hewn American genius–Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (three other “flawed” novels that also humanize America’s downtrodden by exposing social ills)–The Grapes of Wrath has a home-grown quality: part naturalistic epic, part jeremiad, part captivity narrative, part road novel, part transcendental gospel. –from the Introduction by Robert DeMott

Criticism of the novel tends to extremes. Some hail it as a masterpiece. Others called it didactic, sentimental and overblown. Critics complained of its flat characterizations.

I found it a powerful, moving novel that had a strong historic effect on injustice in its time. I agree with all the above criticisms, though. The novel alternates between “telling” chapters of analysis, and “showing” chapters of the Joad’s journey. This interrupts the main narrative, and I found obvious and repetitive. The Joads are sympathetic, but reductive characters. They are “noble savages“, and barely flawed or complex in any way. Tom, the son who returns at the start of the novel, meets a former preacher named Casy who joins the Joads. Tom and Casy can be seen respectively as analogs to Jesus and John the Baptist, or to Jesus and Doubting Thomas. In his effort to detail the hardships of the Joads, Steinbeck painfully detailed many of the degrading details of their new life. This leads to a greater understanding of the difficulties of the time, but was difficult to slog through over 619 pages. Chapter 16 is forty-three pages long, and concerned mainly with a broken rod in the car, and how a replacement is located and replaced. The novel ends with a deliberately provocative scene in which Rose of Sharon, who recently delivered a stillborn baby, offers her breast to a starving stranger. This heavy-handed scene conveys Steinbeck’s idealization of the poor’s willingness to share to survive, as well as his romanticization of mothers that pervaded through the book. (I believe there is a Biblical or saint myth about a woman nursing a man in prison, but I am still searching for the reference.)

A recent article by Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post questioned whether the “earnest but artless” Steinbeck’s works are ones that speak more to younger readers than to older ones, and wonders at their enduring popularity. Had I read Grapes of Wrath when I was younger, I might have been less attuned to matters of craft, and perhaps not as sensitive to being preached to on matters of social and political justice. As a more experienced reader, I appreciated the well-meaning passion of the work, and the effect it had on society at the time. I can’t, however, recommend it as a masterpiece.

Added later: I still can’t find a religious reference for a woman breastfeeding a man in jail, though I remember seeing an old painting of this in an Italian chuch. But just a little research turned up many, many similarities between the gospel of Luke and Grapes of Wrath.

Well, our little family is either on our third virus in 5 weeks, or on the third version and second iteration of the virus we got at the beginning of May. Either way, we’ve been sick since then, and can’t seem to get enough rest to kick it. I’ll spare you the unpleasant details. Supplements and vitamins haven’t done doodly squat. I feel like we’re the Schleprock family, with a little raincloud following us about. I’m bitter, cranky (even more so than I usually am!) and hope this is the final round till virus season begins again in October.

Joseph Epstein, at the Weekly Standard, is concerned about what he sees as a shift to a child-centered society (link from Art and Letters Daily):

Children have gone from background to foreground figures in domestic life, with more and more attention centered on them, their upbringing, their small accomplishments, their right relationship with parents and grandparents. For the past 30 years at least, we have been lavishing vast expense and anxiety on our children in ways that are unprecedented in American and in perhaps any other national life. Such has been the weight of all this concern about children that it has exercised a subtle but pervasive tyranny of its own. This is what I call Kindergarchy

Epstein argues that the centrality of children in a family does no favors to the parents, who become “indentured servants”, or the children, who become sheltered and need constant entertainment and gratification.

While there’s something of the “I walked to school ten miles in the driving snow when I was a kid,” about Epstein’s argument, I’ve been thinking a lot about this, since I stay home with my 2 and 4 year old sons. My house is dirty, my laundry piles up, and my yard is a weed mecca. This is because the boys are not only not helpful to the housekeeping, but actively detrimental. And out of guilt, or fatigue, I don’t always press my point. Yet why shouldn’t children facilitate and participate in the housekeeping? Cleaning, cooking, laundry and yardwork are good, honest work. And making a neat, orderly, presentable home is a fine ideal. They may seem less intellectual than a museum visit or a music class, but they provide ample opportunities for learning and exercise.

Added later: Mental Multivitamin wrote about the Kindergarchy piece, too.

One element of the Three Bears story always bothered me–why were the bowls of porridge three different temperatures? Last week, during my umpteenth reading of some version, a few possibilities occurred to me.

Mother Bear’s porridge could be cold because she served herself first, and sat down to eat last. I find this the likeliest explanation, having experienced this scenario many times. Additionally, she could have been on a diet, and given herself a small portion compared to that of Papa Bear, whose large size would demand a large portion, which would take longer to cool. Perhaps the bears were very poor, and Mama Bear was sacrificing her own portion to feed her child and husband. In both the latter examples, Baby Bear would probably get the medium amount of porridge, which would then be cooler than Papa’s, and warmer than Mama’s.

I do wonder how my reading changes when this type of musing takes up part of my brain. Do the boys notice the difference between Mom being fully present reading a story, and Mom struggling to suss out the subtexts while still reading aloud?

In the US, PBS’s Masterpiece recently ended its season with the 3-part Cranford, based on three novels by Elizabeth Gaskell; she’s best known as a friend and biographer of Charlotte Bronte. Mo Ryan recommended Cranford, but I found it disappointing. It featured some great performances, especially from Dame Judi Dench and Imelda Staunton, but this tale of a matriarchal town too often used its female denizens as butts of jokes, many of them cruel. The treatment of men was quite negative. Many were thoughtless or bad: a man who discouraged his daughter from marrying, a drunken poacher, a prank-playing friend, a prodigal son who broke his mother’s heart, a brother who deserted his sisters without explanation, and was welcomed back without it. Two especially kind, honorable men were killed off abruptly. One man took a self-imposed exile to India. In all, the tone shifts were extreme, and there seemed to be an underlying misanthropy about it that put me off. Only the removed observer, Mary, seemed immune to trouble.

Was anyone else aloof to the charm of Cranford, or am I a curmudgeon? I’ve recorded two other Masterpiece movies from earlier in the season, My Boy Jack and A Room with a View. Did anyone watch these, and what did you think? I’m hesitant to spend time on them after investing five hours in Cranford.

How is it that it took most of my life to learn that window washing is difficult? Perhaps because I was doing a crappy job of it and never noticed. But now that I’m a homeowner with two small boys, dirty windows are a fact of life.

It’s cloudy today, so I tried to clean the interior windows. I used a squeegee. I used vinegar and water. And I wound up with windows both still dirty in areas, and streaky in others. And that’s not even taking into account that the outsides of the windows are so dirty that it’s hard to tell whether I’ve cleaned the insides or not.

There are lots of websites with lots of recipes for nontoxic, home cleaning recipes that include vinegar, cornstarch, dishwashing liquid and more. I am not without resources.

Now I understand that commercial from my childhood, “I don’t do windows.” I understand why cleaning services don’t do windows. THEY’RE IMPOSSIBLE.

Minnesota Governor Pawlenty vetoed the Safe Baby Products & Deca Flame retardant bills yesterday.

I try not to think what they coat those flame-retardent kid pajamas with. I mostly buy the snug fitting ones for Drake and Guppy. My mom and sister call them “sausage suits”; they are, indeed, snug.

Seriously, how can he veto something called Safe Baby Products and sleep at night?