Girl Detective

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.

From Crime and Punishment

Fear was taking hold of him more and more, especially after this second, quite unexpected murder. He wanted to run away from there as quickly as possible. And if he had been able at that moment to see and reason more properly, if he had only been able to realize all the difficulties of his situation, all the despair, all the hideousness, all the absurdity of it, and to understand, besides, how many more difficulties and perhaps evildoings he still had to overcome or commit in order to get out of there and reach home, he might very well have dropped everything and gone at once to denounce himself, and not even out of fear for himself, but solely out of horror and loathing for what he had done. Loathing especially was rising and growing in him every moment.

Esquire doesn’t even pretend to objectivity in its “75 Books Every Man Should Read“:

An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published.

That’s a good thing. And many of the books are pretty good too. For men AND women–I’ve read 12 of them, and many more are on my TBR shelves. But I think I only counted one female author–Flannery O’Conner–on the entire list. Come on. Only men can write great books for men? That’s just silly.

Link from The Morning News.

Several years ago I read Should We Burn Babar? by Herbert Kohl, and was surprised to find books I remembered so fondly from my childhood contained such objectionable stuff. (The book’s analysis of the construction of the Rosa Parks myth is fascinating, too). I went back to the Babar books, and the criticisms weren’t exaggerated; naked, African Babar’s mother is shot, he quickly gets over his grief with a move to Paris, where he is taken in by a lady who dresses him and civilizes him, so that when he returns to the elephants, he is quickly chosen as King.

Adam Gopnik’s piece in the New Yorker, “Freeing the Elephants,” doesn’t dispute this, but he works rather too hard to portray Babar as a comedy of the bourgeoisie rather than as an apology for colonialism. I agree with him about the art, though:

The completed Babar drawings, by contrast, are beautiful small masterpieces of the faux-naïf: the elephant faces reduced to a language of points and angles, each figure cozily encased in its black-ink outline, a friezelike arrangement of figures against a background of pure color. De Brunhoff’s style is an illustrator’s version of Matisse, Dufy, and Derain, which by the nineteen-thirties had already been filtered and defanged and made part of the system of French design.

Link from The Morning News.

Marmeladov to Raskolnikov, from Crime and Punishment:

But if that’s a lie,” he suddenly exclaimed involuntarily, “if man in fact is not a scoundrel–in general, that is, the whole human race–then the rest is all mere prejudice, instilled fear, and there are no barriers, and that’s just how it should be!…

From Kate Beaton, “The Greatest Hamlet of Our Time.” Link from Blog of a Bookslut.

Also see Party Time with Richard III

Reviews were mixed last year when Danny Boyle’s (28 Days Later, Trainspotting) sci-fi pic Sunshine came out. A recent positive review in Entertainment Weekly spurred me to rent it.

The film starts strong. Fifty years in the future, a crew of eight scientists are traveling through space to the sun. They hope to reignite the dying star and save the Earth. Their ship, the Icarus II, is the second attempt, after the Icarus I went missing. The characters are well differentiated, and the shots of the ship are beautiful and interesting to look at. As the film unfolds, though, it fell more and more in step with sci-fi films of the past, specifically 2001, Alien, and Solaris. The movie makes deliberate nods to these, and other, films–it doesn’t hide its roots, and deserves to be regarded as an homage to them. I didn’t feel it creatively went much beyond any of those films, though. There were some cool bits, a nice, creepy surprise, good acting, and good visuals. By the end, though, it felt muddled, and more derivative than I think it was trying to be.

Trivia: the gold spacesuits had funnel-shaped helmets designed after Kenny of South Park’s hood.

Eddie Campbell’s Black Diamond Detective Agency is an engaging graphic novel, beautifully painted and in a lovely paperback edition typical of publisher First Second. A man with a past is framed in small town America on the verge of the 20th century. Though the story is sometimes hard to follow, mostly because of several characters who aren’t sufficiently visually distinct, the mystery is unraveled in entertaining, CSI-fashion. The ending is pleasingly awry, avoiding the cliches by not tying things up too neatly. DArk and violent, though with an edge of humor and redemption, it’s reminiscent of Clint Eastwood westerns, A History of Violence, Victorian mysteries, and Campbell’s other work like From Hell.

Lin Enger’s Undiscovered Country, which I received as a reader’s copy from the publisher, transposes Shakespeare’s Hamlet to modern-day Northern Minnesota, an icy analog for Denmark. The narrator, Jesse’s, father died in a supposed suicide, and after he sees what may be a ghost, he wonders what role his uncle and his mother might have played in the father’s death. This update follows Hamlet closely, but not exactly, and it’s in the departures and the nuances that this book shines. Here, Jesse and his 8-year-old brother Magnus, talk about the death of their father:

Did he do it, Jess?

What do you mean, I asked, knowing full well.

I mean, did he do it?

Of course not. It was an accident, like Mom said.

Mom never said that. Mom never said anything.

Well, that’s what it was.

How do you know? Did you see it happen? No.

Then you don’t know.

I know Dad, I said.

Are you sure?

I took his shoulders in my hands, looked as deeply into his eyes as he’d let me, and saw there, in large part, what my role in life was going to be for the next decade or so, until he grew up. I saw it with clarity–and I was not mistaken.

Yes, I said, I’m sure. I’m sure.

My brother stepped forward into my arms then, and his body felt breakable and small. I hung on to him for all I was worth.

Undiscovered Country is in the tradition of young-adult novels, told simply in first person by a teenager having difficulty with the adults in his life. This would work well as a companion novel for high schoolers reading Shakespeare’s play. There are opportunities to compare and contrast, discuss whether the story is universal, and how well it translates to a different time and place.

Was anyone else concerned by EW’s cover of Jennie Garth and Shannen Doherty?

Now:

About 14 years ago:

Doherty looks strangely the same, plus as if she needs a sandwich, or five. Garth’s face looks suspiciously tight. These women are only in their mid-thirties. Plastic surgery to make them look like their original-90210 selves is pretty extreme, and depressing.

One of my readers, SmallWorld Reads, commented about the movie Mamma Mia! that the movie characters, played by actors between 48 to 59, were significantly older than the characters’ ages in the play, which were supposed to be about 40ish.

I think 30-40 actors often won’t play parents because of the stigma of aging. Though her reps deny it, Rachel Weisz reportedly refused to reprise her Mummy role because she wouldn’t play the mother of the new 20yo character. (Weisz claims to have been born in 1971. A good friend of mine was in secondary school with her, and says she’s shaved a few years off.) Also, the age of parents goes up each year. I had my son Drake when I was 35, Guppy at 38. I’ll be 58 (about Meryl Streep’s age, now) when Guppy is 20. So 60 is the new 40, 40 is the new 30, and 30s are the new 90210.

Does that make 80 the new dead?

(Thanks, I think, to JV for the joke, which is ironic, since JV and his wife Rock Hack were the most fervent 90210-riginal fans I know.)

Stefan Kanfer, at the City Journal, on films in black and white (Link from Arts & Letters Daily):

Gregg Toland, the greatest cinematographer of his generation, never shot in color. He and his A-picture directors, including John Ford, Orson Welles, and William Wyler, preferred to give audiences the sense that they were watching a suite of etchings. Who needed color when the haunting landscapes of Wuthering Heights materialized on screen, as if photographed in Emily Brontë’s nineteenth century? Or when Citizen Kane’s deep-focus montages breathed life into the story of a fatally ambitious press lord?

Those of us in the Twin Cities are fortunate to have a good cinema culture that screens many of the black and white films Kanfer mentions. If you don’t have access to film revivals, though, TCM and Netflix do an outstanding job of making these films easily available.

From Boing Boing, Marlboros for Moms.

I’ve been a nonsmoker for eighteen years now, and am pretty happy with that choice.

Found by my husband G. Grod, the Hamlet weblog.