Girl Detective

There are several promising plays here, or coming soon to, the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Distracted closes soon, and Twelfth Night tickets are going fast, so don’t dawdle.

Distracted, a play about ADHD, at the Mixed Blood Theatre through October 19, 2008.

A View from the Bridge, by Arthur Miller, at the Guthrie through November 8, 2008.

MacBeth, at the Torch Theater, starring Stacia Rice and Sean Haberle, whose chemistry in the Guthrie’s Jane Eyre earlier this year made it worth watching.

Twelfth Night, an all-female production from Ten Thousand Things, with performances at Open Book.

Frost/Nixon, Spring Awakening and other Broadway hits, playing in the Hennepin Theatre District
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At the Times Online, A.N. Wilson reviews the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams’, DOSTOEVSKY: Language, Faith and Fiction, a combination of literary criticism and historical theology.

Link from Arts & Letters Daily.

Pevear and Volokhonsky’s Crime and Punishment is an accessible translation of the original criminal psychology novel, as well as an homage to Hamlet and a social commentary. It has a troubled hero, his kind friend, a hooker with a heart of gold, a savvy detective, a suitably creepy villain and so much more. Loved it; read this book!

About the translation: I read this for book group. Those of us who read the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation really enjoyed the book and found it relatively easy to read. The readers of the Norton and Signet editions found the book dense and difficult.

My reading list has of late been lacking in mirth. Time for a comedy or romance, methinks.

Bring your plastics to the Eastside Food Coop for recycling on Saturdays (today!) from 10am to 2pm, and on Thursday afternoon and evenings, 3:30pmto 7:30pm.

Rain Taxi’s Book Fest is today. I may head out to see Jess Winfield at 3:30 p.m., author of My Name is Will: A Novel of Sex, Drugs, and Shakespeare

2.5yo Guppy and I are off to the doctor’s office to get a strep culture. Never had to do it with 5yo Drake. It helps much that Guppy clearly is in pain as he swallows, and says his mouth hurts. Whenever Drake was sick as a toddler, he would just scream and scream and refuse to let anyone get near him.

One of my favorite memories of childhood is the time my dad decided to do the strep cultures for my sisters and me at home. He did the swabs, touched them to the red stuff in the plastic dishes, then my mother put them in a low oven to develop.

And forgot them. Till the house smelled bad, and she had three melted strep cultures all over her oven.

I’m sure my mom didn’t think it was funny, but I did.

Normally autumn, with its launch of the television season here in the US, is one of my favorite times of the year. I devour the Entertainment Weekly guide to fall TV, reading it to tatters, then carefully plot out what I’m going to watch, and how, since our Tivo can “only” record two shows at a time. This year, however, was different. Perhaps the quality of shows took too big of a hit with the writers strike earlier this year. Perhaps I’ve simply reached my allowable tolerance for only-OK television. In any case, my interest is failing fast.

I canceled the season pass for Dirty Sexy Money before the season even began. I’ve dropped Heroes and Sarah Connor: Terminator. I’m waiting to hear how the Mentalist is; the premiere was good, Simon Baker is very good, but I’m tired of watching shows that are only OK except for one thing: Life for Damian Lewis, Bones for the witty banter, the overcrowded House for what Hugh Laurie is going to do or say next. When I look at my Tivo to-do list, I find only a few shows that I consider A-list: Mad Men, Project Runway, the Office, and 30 Rock. I’d add How I Met Your Mother, only it’s wildly uneven, and last night’s was really lame.

I’m highly dependent on, and grateful for, the tv critiques of Alan Sepinwall. He likes the good stuff, and is intolerant of the mediocre and bad stuff. He’s about to give up on Heroes:

Like Peter, I think you really have to be able to turn your brain off to enjoy “Heroes” these days, and unfortunately, I don’t have that ability… er, power. (Gah!)

And he goggles that one of the two reasons he still watches Terminator is because of former 90210er Brian Austin Green:

He’s gone from squeaky-voiced “Beverly Hills 90210″ fifth wheel (did anyone at any point watch that show for David Silver?) to convincing bad-ass, and, along with Summer Glau, the reason I remain engaged by a show that’s otherwise just slightly better than mediocre.

Sepinwall is a reliable indicator to me of what to watch, and what to avoid. I’ve got about 110 pages of Crime and Punishment to go for my book group this week, and I’m giving the B shows the boot so I can finish it. Will I watch them again? Who knows. But I’m rather looking forward to the increase in free time. I’ve let TV become a chore, and that’s just wrong.

This morning, 5yo Drake woke up complaining of stomach pain. He skipped dinner last night, so I knew what to expect. I gave him only a little water, and he threw up for the next few hours. I think he’s got mild ketotic hypoglycemia, which recurs because he’s such a picky, stubborn eater who skips meals.

Then 2.5yo Guppy whipped off his diaper, flinging poop on the floor. When I cleaned it, and him, up, he threw a 20-minute tantrum while I tried to deal with barfy Drake.

Finally, when I wasn’t looking, Guppy started throwing puzzle pieces in Drake’s barf bucket.

Am I on a sitcom? Insult to injury doesn’t even come close.

In anticipation of November’s cumbersomely titled Quantum of Solace, my husband G. Grod and I revisited the James Bond reboot, Casino Royale. Like the Bourne movies and The Dark Knight, Casino is both well done and entertaining, with a dark, complex, brooding main character. At over two hours, it’s too long; the poker scenes go on. And on. But it’s that rare action movie that has brains to back up its brawn.

The opening credits for Casino Royale and AMC’s Mad Men are strikingly similar, with their heroes in silhouette. They were not done by the same people. Casino Royale’s was done by Daniel Kleinman, for UK-based Framestore CFC. Mad Men’s opening sequence was designed by Mark Gardner and Steve Fuller of design firm, Imaginary Forces.

The triumph of self-preservation, the rescue from overwhelming danger–that was what filled his entire being at the moment, with no foresight, no analysis, no future riddling and unriddling, no doubts or questions. It was a moment of complete, spontaneous, purely animal joy.

Raskolnikov, from Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment

G. Grod and I married one another ten years ago on Friday, on the fifty-somethingth floor of a building in downtown Philadelphia named after a bank that no longer exists. Our family and friends helped us marry one another, and it was a lovely evening.

To celebrate, my sister Sydney is working overtime, and flew my parents out to watch 5yo Drake and 2.5yo Guppy so G. and I could drive up to Grand Marais, on the north shore of MN on Lake Superior. G and I have walked, shopped, napped, eaten very well, read a lot, and enjoyed each others’ company. We watched the sun rise over the lake this morning. I feel very happy, and grateful, this morning.

(I’m reading Dostoevsky for my book group. It is not an ironic commentary on marriage. At least, not intentionally. Heh. G. is reading Infinite Jest. Interpret as you will.)

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Christopher Shea looks into the rise of Experimental Philosophy:

At the heart of experimental philosophy lies a suspicion of so-called “intuitions.” An intuition in philosophy is something far more potent than it is in ordinary discourse….The trustworthiness of intuitions (whose roots can be traced back to Plato and Socrates, who thought they represented glimpses of the true, ideal world usually hidden from us) hardly goes undebated by traditional philosophers – quite the opposite – but the experimental philosophers apply a new kind of pressure. They think that by studying human minds, using empirical techniques, and drawing on the insights of modern psychological science, they can get a better sense of where intuitions come from, and whether or when they should be granted credence.

Link from Arts & Letters Daily.

I’ve been a stay-at-home parent since 2004. A good friend called recently about a job opportunity that sounded like a great fit, though, so I just finished updating my resume. I wrote my first resume about twenty years ago, and have learned some useful techniques over the years to polish it. Here are my top ten; do you agree, disagree? What are some of yours?

Tailor the resume to the position you’re applying for. Put the most relevant information first.
Check, double check, then check again. Errors on resumes are often deal breakers.
Use active, powerful verbs to describe experience. Eliminate passive constructions.
Edit for brevity.
White or ivory paper only.
Prepare a Word document and a text-only version. Use the latter to avoid sending an attachment.
Times New Roman, 12 point, at least 1-inch margins all around.
Use bold and italic sparingly, but consistently.
Use double spacing when possible for ease of reading.
Early in your career: one-page resume. Later, you can go longer, but keep it short and sweet.

At The American, Charles Murray asks, “Are Too Many People Going to College?”:

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a few people. Most students at today’s colleges choose not to take the courses that go into a liberal education because the capabilities they want to develop lie elsewhere. These students are not lazy, any more than students who don’t want to spend hours learning how to chop carrots into a perfect eighth-inch dice are lazy. A liberal education just doesn’t make sense for them.

(Link from Arts & Letters Daily) I worked for an educational services company for many years. I worked with high school students and their parents who were focused only on getting into college. I worked with college students who planned to go to graduate school simply because they didn’t know what else to do. My children are only 5 and 2, so the question of college is still a long way off. But I hope I’ll be able to encourage my kids to consider all the options, and choose a university education if that’s the best thing for them, not just because everyone else does it.

Christina Hoff Sommers reconsiders Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique:

But in building her case, Friedan made a fatal mistake that undermined her book’s appeal at the time and permanently weakened the movement it helped create. She not only attacked a postwar culture that aggressively consigned women to the domestic sphere, but she attacked the sphere itself – along with all the women who chose to live there.

(Link from Arts & Letters Daily) The debate continues, forty-five years later, with the media darling Mommy Wars, a supposed conflict between stay-at-home and on-the-job mothers. I think the flaw in Friedan’s argument continues–all women are not the same. But they’re not all different, either. The best analyses find the balance point in this seeming contradiction.

Joanna Weiss on the problems of sanitized fairy tales, a la Disney:

Rich in allegory, endlessly adaptable, fairy tales emerged as a framework for talking about social issues. When we remove the difficult parts - and effectively do away with the stories themselves - we’re losing a surprisingly useful common language.

(Link from Blog of a Bookslut) I recently found Angela Carter’s collection for children, Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales, at our library. I’m not sure 5yo Drake and 2yo Guppy have the attention span, but I know these won’t be toothless tales.

Minx, a line of graphic novels from DC for teen girls, has been canceled. (Link from Blog of a Bookslut) I wasn’t a fan, and am not surprised. There are many better YA graphic novels. Check out Hope Larson, Hopeless Savages, Scott Pilgrim, Craig Thompson and Persepolis.

Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing, on John Holt’s How Children Learn:

Holt’s basic thesis is that kids want to learn, are natural learners, and will learn more if we recognize that and let them explore their worlds, acting as respectful co-learners instead of bosses. Practically speaking, that means letting them play and playing with them, but resisting the temptation to quiz them on their knowledge or to patronize them.

A friend of mine, observing me with my son Drake, gently admonished me, “Not everything has to be a teaching moment.” It helps to have these reminders, since it’s easy for me to get mired in the “shoulds.”

The Sorted Books Project takes a group of books from a library and groups them so their titles tell a story. (Link from Boing Boing)

Doesn’t this make you want to sift through the spines on your shelves?

My husband G. Grod, my friend Blogenheimer, our friend EJ, and I attended Neal Stephenson’s reading at the Barnes and Noble Galleria on Friday night. NS read from his new novel, Anathem, and signed books after.

NS seemed game to be there–not his favorite thing, but he was polite and funny. The question session went well; no one asked where he got his ideas, or told him how cool Snow Crash or Cryptonomicon were. He has no plans to write again about Enoch Root. He didn’t want to go back to the Baroque Cycle world because it would be like falling into “an event horizon.” And he chose to set Anathem on a fictional world, rather than Earth, because historical fiction is like “darning a sock” and making things up requires much less interpolation. He was stumped when a woman asked what the first bedtime book he remembered was. He said he couldn’t, but that he had great affection for D’Aulaire’s book of Greek myths, and found it funny how Zeus was always “marrying” other women.

For his signing, in addition to Anathem, I brought a copy of Quicksilver, the first novel in his Baroque Cycle trilogy. I handed him the trade paperback of Quicksilver, and explained that my husband had advised me to bring the hardcover copy, but I’d chosen the trade paperback instead. That was the copy I’ll read, and I want the inscription in the one I’m reading, not the one on the shelf.

“You must have interesting conversations in your house,” he responded, with only the slightest emphasis on “interesting.” Was it a compliment, or a polite way of saying he thought I was crazy? G. Grod and I both think the latter. And G. remains adamant that the hardcover was the way to go.