Savannah Lee

I still have my original copy of the Choose Your Own Adventure Series #4, "Space and Beyond."

I should probably google it and post links, but I don't want to. This book belonged to the pre-internet world for me, and I want to preserve that. I want it to be mine now in the same way it was mine back in sixth grade. No invisible threads connected it to anything but my own sense of possibilities.

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I'm assuming everyone knows what a Choose Your Own Adventure book is. Written in a Jay McInerney-style second person, it pulls the postmodern maneuver of giving "you" an active role in the book. Choices crop up every few pages. What "you" choose determines where the story goes and how it comes out.

In my opinion, this should have revolutionized a significant chunk of our literature. Besides being fun, it's potentially deep. Our postmodern novelists should have been right on it. Don DeLillo, Rick Moody, DAVID FOSTER WALLACE!! ferchrissakes, where are you guys with this? Where are your playful yet serious explorations of this form? Daniel Handler, where is your masterful parody and inversion of it?

Maybe there's a flaw inherent in the design that I haven't seen; maybe all these guys tried, but it didn't work. I do know that none of the other Choose Your Owns I read were as good as "Space and Beyond."

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"Space and Beyond" itself, though, is a lot of fun (although I'm sure I'm reading it through nostalgia-colored glasses). In it, "you were born on a spaceship traveling between galaxies." Your parents were from different planets in different galaxies, so, when you reach eighteen "in...three days and two hours" due to time compression, "you may choose which galaxy and planet you wish to belong to and have citizenship in."

Your choices are: Phonon, in the "PINEUM" galaxy, and Zermacroyd in the "OOPHOSS" galaxy.

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There is, I believe, one ending where you are at least heading towards Phonon. (I quote: "On you go towards Phonon. THE END.")

But in no case do you ever get meaningfully underway to Zermacroyd. Zermacroyd is just a disaster. The Zermacroyd adventures are far crazier and more sinister than the ones that get you if you try to head to Phonon.

What's interesting about all this is two facts:

1) The story is all in the detours. Here you are, thinking your story is to head towards whichever one of your ancestral planets that you chose. This is what you were told the frame was, so the thought of Phonon and Zermacroyd provides a kind of unspoken reference point for how incredibly off-course you keep going and going and going.

Question: does this match up with the course of my own life because that's how life is? Or does this match up with my life because I read this book, and absorbed the idea that life really is what happens while you're trying to get to Phonon? I'm not sure, but I do know that any self-help guru or therapist who is trying to convince people that they control their own destinies--or at least that they'll be better off if they act like they do--should steer well away from "Space and Beyond." It's a completely absurdist, fatalistic little thing. Your choices do not actually empower you; they just unleash different forms of arbitrary fate upon you.

2) And I do mean very different forms of fate. If you decide to go to Zermacroyd, for example, you get two initial choices: to stay behind and get some extra training, or launch right ahead. If you get extra training, you find yourself with a companion named Mermah and the choice of entering the Space Academy or "exploring the knowledge within yourself." If you choose the Space Academy, you're asked to choose a research program or the command program. In both cases, you immediately forget about Phonon and Zermacroyd and just immerse yourself in these other lives.

The branching of the other ones are equally divergent--you end up a circus performer, a diplomat for aliens, a curiosity on earth, and, in many scenarios, a visitor to the extreme ends of time.

Which can get surprisingly evocative: "There is no sound, no light. But no darkness either. ...You are and you have been a part of everything, always. The beginning is the end." "Stars appear, planets burst forth, blackness is turned aside by the light from millions of stars. You wander in a mist of light...It is beautiful."

Most of the endings are inconclusive and haunting: "Well done? You aren't really sure." "Maybe you will quit." "To survive now, you will have to hunt for food and support each other." "You are all on your own now." (I really do find myself thinking of the classic last line of "Bright Lights, Big City"...what was it, "You will have to learn everything all over again." Something like that. A similar irresolution. Is there something about the second person that invites this sort of thing?)

But anyhow: the impression you get is that any of us could have ended up a nun, a hit woman, a mother of six, an Army captain, or a dust-covered student of the catacombs, just depending on which corners we turned at what times. All things are possible and anything can happen. It's America on steroids. But it's not even deliberate, as in "I will go to California and start a new life;" it just happens. Like the Dust Bowl. So it's...America on passive steroids.

And of course...there's one thing that can't happen.

You can end up a king or a caveman, a captain or a pirate, a zoo exhibit or a prisoner, and everything in between...

But you just can't get to Zermacroyd.

I wonder if the author intended that to mean something.

Probably better if he didn't.

And we're back! To our series.

Here's Part 1, where we scream and yell at the idea that childcare is "menial." A baby is not a dish or a tire. What you do for it has a significance that goes way beyond the action itself.

Here's Part 2, where we concede that, however significant and therefore intellectual childcare may be, it is indeed repetitive...and then make the point: "So is professional cooking (currently seen as a glamorous job). Hello?"

Today, we're going to question the negative "repetition" meme some more.

In my opinion as a SAHM, the repetitive tasks are actually the best part of doing childcare.

When my daughter was very little, my days were a blur. What I mostly remember was the almost physical pain of not being able to run away inside my head. Always before, I had gotten through life by sitting down, tuning out and drawing or "taking notes" (writing). But you cannot operate that way when a little being is counting on you to discover the world with her.

Maybe for some moms, that's the fun part. For me, it wasn't; it took me out of my head, which, for me, was like being locked out of my house. Everything I needed and wanted was in there, and I couldn't get at it.

You know what saved me?

Exactly what so many disdain: the "menial"/repetitive stuff.

Feedings. Diaper changes. Stroller rides. Bathtime. Naptime, with the rocking chair and the lullaby. Reading my daughter's favorite book to her. Driving her places. Thank god for these things!

While I did them, even if only for a few moments, I could escape; I could get into my house. Was this the 40,000th time that I had read "Freight Train"? All the better! I had my delivery down ("Freight train. Moving. Moving through tunnels. Moving through cities"), and I could just slip away inside. I could actively nurture her but still be in my own space.

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This reminds me of something my mother always said: she loved the drills in her elementary school. It was her favorite part of the day. She could sit there droning grammar facts or timestables and go far away inside, to her own country.

"Menial" labor is only boring to people who don't see the opportunity in it.

In fact, I'll go one step further. Repetition isn't the enemy of creativity. It's the heart of it.

How do dancers learn to dance? By doing the same moves over and over again. How do yogis get to that moment where the kundalini (the creative energy at the base of the spine) uncoils and rises up through them? By doing the same asanas over and over again. How do writers write? Welcome to rewriting. How do perfumiers work? With the same elements over and over again. How do rock stars stay rock stars? By playing their five or six top hits for forty years. Chefs? We've discussed that.

Once you're over the learning curve and can do it without thinking, a repetitive task isn't a bar to creativity. It's the stuff of it. This is where the "Chop wood, carry water" school of enlightenment is coming from.

More tomorrow, or the next day or whatever...

Let's make up a world today.

I haven't done any worldbuilding in a while, and I miss it. I've been thinking about it since reading Satoshi Kanazawa's "There Is Only One Human Culture" a few weeks ago.

His argument is that, at the "abstract level," "all human cultures are the same." He argues that the differences between them are largely cosmetic.

On the one hand, I see his point. Every society has some form of marriage, hierarchy, religion, music, dance, and the incest taboo.

On the other hand, this does not mean that I could go waltzing off to live in Ulan Bator without another thought. The differences may be details, but that's where the devil is too. Customs that seem irrelevant at the "abstract level" become extremely relevant when (as happened to Susie Bright recently, grownups only please and scroll to the ninth paragraph) you're in a restaurant in Paris and cannot understand why everyone is staring at you like that.

The universals, in other words, can become so heavily overlaid with often-unspoken customs that they become unrecognizable. Eating in a restaurant--that should be a comforting universal, right? If you can do it comfortably in New York, you can do it comfortably in Paris, right?

Ask Susie Bright.

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So our task today is: how are we going to overlay the universals?

How are we going to freak Satoshi Kanazawa right the heck out? (In a theoretical way, of course.) How are we going to come up with a culture that fully meets all his abstract criteria, yet blows his mind?

This is somewhat complicated by the fact that, as an evolutionary psychologist, Kanazawa carries the full load of male-dominance-and-promiscuity,-female-"coyness"-and-pickiness stereotypes. We'll need to accommodate that, or get around it by making our culture intensely urban. Urban living tends to wear a lot of those edges down; so does money. Shall we have a decadent urban aristocracy rubbing shoulders with a liberated bourgeoisie eager to sell them silver buckles? And a professional servant class, outwardly deferent but holding all the cards behind the scenes? That's all universal too--not just Kanazawa's evo-psych rules, but the constant breaking of them.

But those sorts of interactions and arrangements happen in between the lines, and we haven't figured out what the lines are yet.

So: on a continuum from Brazil (constant celebration) to Japan (circumspection and self-control), where is our culture going to lie? To what will it be devoted--beauty? Survival? Authority? The cracks in the mirror with which it studies itself? Or is it, on closer inspection, braided with factions each dedicated to one of these qualities, and seethingly (or openly) at war?

The people of this culture, how do they feel about happiness? Do they like it? Mistrust it? Where does it lie for them, anyhow--in possessions? Autonomy? Power? Safety? Predictability? Getting enough food? Love? What is love to them? Has it always been that way?

Maybe their music will give us the answers. What's their music like? Layered? Simple? Loud? Soft? Lush? Spare? Emotional? Austere? How do they dance to it?

Their musicians...are they servants? Gods? Both? Mistrusted? Admired? Seen as libertines? Is that true? Or a sign that this culture might be a bit repressed? Are all cultures repressed? Why do some appear more so (physically, in dress, in custom)? Might they actually be less repressed or controlled than some that seem more relaxed?

What do they do with their bodies? Why did France invent ballet and India yoga? Both systems get you really flexible and turned out, with cores of iron, but to say they do so in different ways is to parody the understatement.

What ways will our world discover?

Happy Fourth of July, everybody!

(ED.: Here is the wonderful Juan Cole on today's holiday and patriotism.)

Here's Part 1.

Here's Part 2.

Here's Part 3.

Okay, so: Childcare is stigmatized.

--We yell at professional women who choose to do it, accusing them of "wasting their education."

--We also penalize those women when they return to the workplace, making it very hard for them to attain anything like the career they could have had if they'd put their kid in full-time daycare and soldiered on.

--Then we blame them for the sacrifice they made. We ridicule them as vague, toothless losers who "don't necessarily have a passion, or even something they're so good at." Oh yes, we hate these women. (The bitter irony is that a big chunk of us ARE these women.)

--The only women we hate more are the ones we hire to take care of "working" women's children, at least to judge by the rate at which we pay them.

Here's my question. Why do we hate women who take care of children? Because of them, or because of the small children they care for?

In other words, what's driving our contempt? Is it our unresolved collective rage at our own mothers? Or is it our simple disdain of human beings who drool and say "Ga!"?

You know, I think it's Unresolved Mom Anger. Because the fact is, we hate "working" mothers too. Yeah, the women who do NOT "waste their education"? They get accused of not loving their kids. In the eyes of vicious can't-win cultural stereotype, they're the heartless, materialistic bitches who outsource their mommying instead of becoming a toothless suburban loser like they're supposed to. (There are entire magazines to help them manage the guilt the culture throws at them.)

So here are my parting thoughts on this subject.

America, my dear: get over it. Your mother is YOUR mother, not a stand-in for the whole tribe. Whatever your issues with her may be, kindly keep them between you and her, not you and all the women at the park.

And kindly also consider the possibility that if we treated mothers like they were important--really important--they might become better mothers. People who feel proud of who they are often become nicer and just plain better.

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Instead, we get stuff like this--a blog I actually enjoy, but which also serves as a really good example of the problem.

The blogger urges a mother not to "give up on herself as a woman." We all know what that means--living in stained sweats and ponytails.

Here's my question: why the hell does looking like what you are mean "giving up on yourself as a woman"? Shouldn't it be exactly the opposite?

The crab fishermen on Deadliest Catch--get ready for a real shocker. They look like crab fishermen.

And we honor that. We would not want them to look like models or actors or tycoons. We like them precisely because they are NOT those things.

So when a woman who gets up five times a night, performs messy care functions all day, and cleans and nurtures in the meantime, LOOKS like it, why do we say she's "given up" on herself? When we see her stooped posture, dirty utilitarian clothes, plain hair, pallor, and grim expression...why don't we see the captain of the Cornelia Marie?

We accept that Phil Harris (I think that's him to the right) looks the way he does FOR A REASON. It makes him authentic. It makes him real. It shows his kick-ass competence at a tough, tough job.

Yet with moms, it's "Oooh, don't give up on yourself! Fix yourself up, you'll feel better! Lose ten pounds, put on red heels, get nice clothes! You'll feel so much better!"

Sheez.

(Actually, there's a lot to be said about the link between appearance and mental/emotional health for women. But the rules are a little different for moms, I would argue...and it's a separate topic anyhow. Later...)

Hmmm.

Says here, with brutal directness (after all, they're just pictures on a screen, right?), that Angelina Jolie has been Replaced As Face of Shiseido.

My question is...and I mean this as a compliment to the tattooed, killing-fields-literate actress...what was she ever doing as the 'face of Shiseido' in the first place? Or any other cosmetics firm?

The idea probably was that her image would give them edge, danger, darkness, substance, a sense of being different from business as usual.

But the thing is...there is a REASON that cosmetics companies and fashion houses hire "faces" that seem safe (or at least discreet).

I'm talking about the Apollo-Dionysus split.

I'm talking about arrows versus shotguns. (In extreme cases, sawed-offs.) Chambered nautiluses versus porcupines. Ice versus fire. Marathoners versus sprinters. Hidden courtyards versus open plans. Whispers versus screams.

I'm talking about where you take your wounds.

Some artists are made to bleed only in secret.

Some are made to bleed where it shows.

They get to the same place in the end, but by different roads.

Some have an art of boundaries and silence. You know that you will never reach the sanctum. There will always be another doorway. You've got 'em, but you don't. Their limits are part of their mystery. They are the stillpoint of their own chaos.

And then some are the chaos. Their lack of limits are their mystery. They howl, cry, flail, fight, fling themselves in the street, practice recreational oven-diving. Until they either literally or metaphorically die. Usually before their time. But spectacularly, with a force of tragedy that amounts to an act of war.

Angelina Jolie, as an artist, appears to be a mixture of both kinds of qualities--the steely professional and the child of midnight. She walks both roads. That's probably what made her attractive to these big firms...until, I guess, they maybe realized that any midnight is too much midnight for certain kinds of jobs.

Or maybe they're just shallow, and they churn through people on a two-to-three-year basis all the time.

Maybe both.

There are two kinds of responsibility.

(A) Getting it done.

(B) Getting it done right.

When you set yourself the goal of daily blogging, you are signing up to watch a perpetual dogfight in your head between (A) and (B).

"Just get something up there!" says A.

"No!" wheedles idealistic B. "I want every post to be heartfelt!" (I'm afraid I'm not kidding; I really said this in my head.)

"Can't you be heartfelt in five minutes?" yells A.

"Well...no, actually, not always," apologizes B, cowering like a bad dog.

"Why not? What's wrong with you?" snaps A.

"I...I..." fumbles B, feeling horribly inadequate.

"If you want every freaking post to be heartfelt, then you better learn to crank it out! I don't have all day. I'm in the middle of five loads of laundry, three long-term projects, running errands, and taking care of a kid who's home for the summer. So let's hear it! What've you got for me?"

"Well, I know I'm going to blog about 'House Hunters,' but that one isn't ready yet. I could complain bitterly about the episode of 'Design Star' that I watched last night, but I try not to come from a negative place."

"You 'try not to come from a negative place'? 'TRY NOT TO COME FROM A NEGATIVE PLACE'? What are you talking about? Were you there for that four-part childcare rant?"

B shows an uncharacteristic flash of fire. "Hey! Were you there for that? You know how it originally looked in my head. I toned it way down!"

A turns her head. "There's the kid asking for help with her project. Come on, I gotta hit 'published.' Give me something. GIVE ME SOMETHING!"

"Okay! Here!"

"Good."

"But is it good enough?"

"Shut up."

"Well, one thing's for sure. I really mean it."

With the distinctively strict moves of the eloquent conservative, Daniel Larison gets out the verbal fillet knife:

"Those who engage in fearmongering about Iran usually save contradicting themselves for separate sentences, but not Robert Kaplan."

BWAH!

...Yeah, I read enough political blogs that that's funny to me. Extremely.

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If I blur my eyes and refuse to see the intimations that he's a social conservative, I am fairly happy in Daniel Larison Land. With these posts, at least.

Dude! Blue up! Seriously. Friends don't let friends stay conservative.

"America has become Versailles," says Chris Hedges with exactly the brutality the point deserves.

"I did not participate in rituals designed to hide from ourselves who we have become." (Second page, last paragraph.)

The second essay slides from a discussion of marginalization to a discussion of failure, which seems to me like a bit of a detour; I think men tend to be somewhat more obsessed with success and the external pecking order than women, whose usual burden is to freak out over visible signs of aging.

But otherwise. Yeah. Chris Hedges.

I wrote a post about one of his anti-war articles for Salon. I ended up not publishing it, mostly because I didn't see the point. I was too filled with despair. You'll understand.

But these columns, these tight, eloquent things that turn like keys, springing something inside...yes.

"[Classic books] remind me that there were other ages of collapse and despotism...[and] that through it all, men and women of conscience endured and communicated, at least with each other..."

Which means something. Maybe everything. "The poet W.H. Auden wrote that 'ironic points of light flash out wherever the Just exchange their messages.'"

You can't imagine how beautiful that sounds to me now. To me, that's what real hope looks like.

I wish and I hope that I could become one of Auden's messages of the Just, a spark for one of his flashes. I wish, I hope, that I could be the light one time for Chris Hedges as he and so many others are and have been for me.

I wish, I hope, that I could be the light one time for you, as you are and have been for me.

Flash out. Flash out.

Either on the official website or in the beautiful book, WALL-E director Andrew Stanton explains the lovable cleanup robot Wall-E. Wall-E, Stanton announces, is "timid," while his futuristic love-interest EVE is kick-ass.

I disagree.

...If you haven't seen this delightful movie yet, you might not want to read on. Otherwise, follow me!

I was reading a book about hair at the library. Since I don't feel it has much to recommend it, I won't say the title. But there was one passage that leaped out at me.

More openly than most people, the author came right out and talked about the sexuality of hair--that our hair carries the essence of our sexual selves in a mysterious, profound way that cannot be underestimated or denied. So our feelings for our hair are not about "appearance" or "self-esteem" or any of that mealy-mouthed crap...our hair expresses something deep and scary in us, something we need almost more than life itself.

I put the book down and thought about that.

He's totally right: In the past, I have felt desexed by bad haircuts.

But, he's totally wrong. If I went bald today, it's not like I would jump for joy, but I would pretty much slap on a hat and go my merry way without much more than fond regret.

Not just because I, like everyone else who has seen "Star Trek: The Motion Picture," swiftly got the idea that lack of hair could do a mighty fine job of expressing sexuality too.

And not just because I truly believe that our little status games about looks should go acquaint themselves with the business end of a combine in ways which even Larry Flynt would find unprintable.

But because now I have earrings. Long, swingy earrings that stir when I move. Earrings that please me to no end. Far more, in fact, than my hair ever has or ever will.

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Having come from a rigidly anti-ear-piercing family, I was rather late to the earring party.

I'd spent my life admiring them--the only kind of jewelry I really like--and wishing I could have pierced ears. Then sternly telling myself that such a trivial little issue did not matter.

A couple of years ago, though, I decided that an act of self-ownership would do me good. There being no tattoo parlor in the mall, I went in to Claire's and got the gun.

And I am here to tell you that I was totally wrong. It did matter. The delight of having these tiny weights at my ears, swinging as I walk, is not something I should have denied myself.

And once I'd experienced it, whatever sense of self I might have unconsciously invested in my hair was gone.

Over.

So. Hair. Sometimes all that. But, you know...sometimes not.

I took The House Test on Blogthings. (I love those 'descriptor' tests--imagining a house, a room, a landscape.) Here is its august pronouncement:

What the House Test Says About You

You are happy with who you are, and you don't have an inflated sense of self importance. You do your own thing quietly. You don't take up a lot of space. You aren't against being community oriented, but it's not really your thing. You tend to prefer to focus on your family and not the neighborhood around you. You are a playful, charming, and seductive person. People feel instantly close to you. You look attractive, but mostly because your rely on your natural good looks to get by. You find it hard to be enthusiastic about much. You are a picky person.

I got that obviously ridiculous crap about being "playful, charming and seductive" because I answered "bedroom" for which room I liked best in the house.

It was between that or "library," which would have gotten me a more sensible, or at least more comfortable, graf about being intellectual and liking ideas. (Der, as the snarklets of my generation would say.)

As for the "unenthusiastic and picky" thing, I don't disagree, but I find it weird that that's what you get for (iirc) saying you don't have a garden.

--Canadian writer Robert Sibley takes on the role of narrative in American politics. I'm always interested to read non-American perspectives on our three-ring circus.

--For a homegrown perspective, free registration is required but SO WORTH IT to be able to witness the massive awesomeness of Frank Rich go by, word by word, on the same topic--through the lens of Wall-E.

--I just found out that you need to eat your whole grains whole, not ground up in flour. Whoops.

--Self-help-with-attitude author Karen Salmansohn fascinates me because she writes post-book books--highly image-driven productions with relatively few words per page. I actually find them difficult to read, which makes me a dinosaur. (I hope I'm a pterodactyl. Always loved those things.)

But her book "How To Change Your Entire Life By Doing Absolutely Nothing"--a really long title for a book considering how few words are actually in it, and I haven't even gotten to the sixteen-word subtitle; it's like the cosmic reverse of "Moby-dick"--does feature more-or-less traditional page design. So I was able to Jurassic my way through it. And here's the thing: her meditation exercises (because that's what those "do-nothing relaxation exercises" are) are the most practical, graspable, doable ones I've ever come across.

I especially like Exercise #10.

--I do believe that would be all for now.

A Bit of Fry and Laurie, that is, the original fount of the genius that is, separately and together, Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie.

(I've also been reading Stephen Fry's blog. The man writes longer than God. Here, read the first six and final two paragraphs of his speech to the BBC. His evocation of his family's old television--the ball-bearings and clicks, the smell of "baked" dust--is remarkable, as are his sketches of a childhood tuned to radio. His final plea for the Beeb brought tears to my eyes, and I don't even have the right to them. Well, yes, I do, because he universalized; with one single, surprising metaphor, he lifted the meaning of the BBC beyond Britain and made it belong to all of us.)

So anyhow: I have been watching "A Bit of Fry and Laurie."

And here's the thing.

They're terrible. They're TERRIBLE, and I love them.

Anyone who has seen Fry and Laurie in "Jeeves and Wooster," or Laurie in "Blackadder," would have to agree (I think) that they are comparatively AWFUL in this comparatively very weak show.

To me, they break the fourth wall as a tacit admission that whatever sketch they're in can't be redeemed. To me, the deliberately "stilted, amateurish and inappropriate performance style" of the Control and Tony sketches is deliberately stilted, amateurish and inappropriate in a bad way. They're doing it wrong WRONG. To me, the John and Peter sketches are just loud. The only think that really works for me are the Alan sketches, which are much more actorly.

But: I can't stop watching it! Because even though they're awful, they're brilliant. Brilliant!

That. Is true genius.

When I was a little girl I had a coloring book of famous ballerinas. The most haunting image was that of Olga Spessivtseva.

Spessivtseva did in fact go mad in her long and shadowed life, but that is not the madness I want to walk with today.

No...I am talking about the madness of the ballet-company artistic director.

In searching for pictures of Spessivtseva, I stumbled on this two-year-old thread from Ballet Talk which is about today's physical standards for ballerinas.

If you scroll down to comment #6, the commenter gives a brief visual history of the ballerina--from the "extremely compact" Mathilde Kschessinska and Pierina Legnani ("I don't think a dancer like Legnani...would get into a ballet company today," understates the commenter) through the dancers who began the long and horrible march towards the walking skeletons we're stuck with now.

The commenter names the transitional figures as Tamara Karsavina, Anna Pavlova, and Olga Spessivtseva.

The thing is...if you look at the pictures, especially the pictures of Karsavina...Karsavina would be considered a cow today. She couldn't get into a ballet company today either.

You know what that means, folks? That means were are officially collectively insane. And the people who hire ballerinas are even insaner.

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There's another thing. If you read that Wikipedia entry on Pavlova, you will see that she:

"paid little heed to academic rules: she frequently performed with bent knees, poor turnout, misplaced port de bras and incorrectly placed tours. Such a style in many ways harkened back to the time of the romantic ballet and the great ballerinas of old."

And not only that! But!

"Ballet technique did not come easily to the young Pavlova. Her extremely arched feet, thin ankles, and long limbs clashed with the small, compact body which was at that time in favor for the ballerina. Her fellow students taunted her with such nicknames as The broom and La petite sauvage."

In other words...both Pavlova's technique AND her body were "wrong" for ballet at the time.

Yet she soared in her career.

Why would this be?

The artistic directors and critics of her time recognized that despite her thin body, despite her poor turnout, despite her bent knees, despite her haphazard technique and archaic style, HERE WAS AN ARTIST.

Why can't we do that anymore?

In that same Wikipedia entry, it quotes Pavlova's teacher Pavel Gerdt as telling her: "I beg you to never again try to imitate those who are physically stronger than you. You must realize that your daintiness and fragility are your greatest assets. You should always do the kind of dancing which brings out your own rare qualities..."

Who would ever say that to a ballerina today? Today, if a pre-professional girl is not strong...or has a BMI over 12...she would not be told to love herself, embrace her shape or constitution, and "always do the kind of dancing" that brings it out. She'd be told "The door is that way."

Who are the Anna Pavlovas of today? The women with the "wrong" body and even the "wrong" technique, but the right soul?

This is what haunts me: we're never going to know.

P.S. Here is an essay about Pavlova which I have loved for years, written by the great ballerina Allegra Kent, who is one of my heroes. Enjoy.

I was going through the archives of British journalist Johann Hari's columns. (Regular readers will know that he's a favorite of mine.) And he thinks American high schools are more vicious than British ones! Wow.

It's not that I didn't think American high schools were bad. Please. I went to one. It's just that I always thought they must be cakewalks compared to British schools, which are world-famous for their bullying. But no! Apparently, ours are even worse!

"In American schools," reveals Alice James, a British woman who attended high school in America, "it's like the bloody Indian caste system. Jocks simply rule the school and everyone knows it."

So it's...not like that in Britain?

Apparently not: "In British schools, you get different groups who all sneer at each other, but there's no obvious ranking system. The kids into hip-hop might hate the kids who are into pop, but neither of them is universally regarded to be `better' or higher up the social tree."

So our ridiculous hierarchy is our own special national delusion. How embarrassing.

Worse, continues James, "the hierarchy the teenagers create for themselves is reinforced by parents and the school authorities. ...American parents take it incredibly seriously. It's given a kind of official imprimatur, because they build their kids up to be cheerleaders or jocks and they're openly disappointed if they don't make it. For `freaks', it's not just like they've failed in the eyes of their schoolmates - it's like they've failed for life."

Again...we all know this. (High School Musical treats it as an ordinary fact of life.) The amazing thing to me is that it's apparently not like this everywhere else. And especially Britain--I assumed that any school culture which has so much bullying must be hierarchical too. I always thought the two went hand-in-hand.

#

I wonder what it must have felt like to go to my school.

Don't ask me, I don't know. I was not available for the whole Pretty In Pink sort of thing. I was too much of an outsider to even meaningfully be one, because in order to meaningfully be an outsider you need to steer by what's "inside," and I couldn't have told you.

With a few individual exceptions, I didn't want anyone to like me or interact with me.

With no exceptions whatsoever, I didn't want to be a part of the life of my school. Or my world.

I was therefore not able to be disappointed in high school. Pissed off, resentful, yes. But not disappointed. I was not able to feel like I'd failed, because in order to fail, you have to believe in success. I didn't. The world was flat to me. I saw fate as totally arbitrary, all values as equal (except for kindness, which was special) and hell as what was all around me. Good thing I was studying French! It would have been terrible if, with that mindset, I couldn't read de Musset or Sartre or Rimbaud.

#

Generally, the United States has only one answer to an offbeat story: bring it in line. Angry teenage girl? Fix her. Clueless one? Give her a makeover. Reactively indifferent? Make her care. You know she wants to.

Girls aren't supposed to ride off alone at the end. Or the middle, or the beginning. They don't "ride" at all, metaphorically speaking; they stay where they are and 'attract' the world, bring what they need (love, work, mentors) into their orbit.

A loner trapped in a female body therefore has no way to express it and so becomes entombed in that body.

In story terms, she can only fail--fail to gather the world, end up alone in her house.

Or as Harrison Ford so brilliantly yet so wrongly said of Han Solo, "He's got no story." Memo to Mr. Ford: of course he has no story. He is a story. His story is his gun. His story is his boots. His story is his ship.

But a girl Han Solo, a girl loner--all her flights are inward, therefore unseen, therefore nonexistent. They melt into nothingness within her as she fails to live out the story that was made for her. A girl loner really doesn't have a story.

How do you tell the story of no story?

Each of us faced with that task has to find their own way.

I'm going to figure it out, because it's not just in me. It's all around us. It's everywhere. I am going to figure it out.

I especially love comedy crossovers of otherwise serious characters. Why? Because it's usually a pleasant break, because the incongruity is heightened and because it's often handled by trying to act as if everything is normal, thereby upping the in-joke quotient.

And that is why I have been watching a BBC video of David Tennant and Catherine Tate on Comic Relief more times than is probably legal.

Umm...yeah, you're saying (especially if you're American). David Tennant and Catherine Tate. Yeah, wow, that's a...that's a crossover for the ages, there.

But it is! It really is! Just let me bring you up to speed. Get you in on the joke.

Now, first, you'll want to watch this introduction to Tate's famous sketch character, Lauren Cooper. Yes, Lauren...and her guiding philosophy, her epistemology, her teleology if you will, "I ain't bov'ered [bothered]."

(Note to whichever of my fellow Americans might be feeling as clueless as I felt the first time I watched this: I think what they're saying at the beginning is "well." "She is well fit." "That's a well nice song." And, of course, the immortal "She is well bing-bing.")

Lauren and a host of other characters got a full workout on Catherine Tate's popular comedy show. Then, turning serious, Tate joined the cast of Doctor Who. She played Donna Noble, the latest companion of the Doctor. Specifically, the Tenth Doctor. (I want you to appreciate the full gravity of this.)

Donna is distinct in that she (unlike seemingly everyone else--there are uncountable fan videos of David Tennant, each lovingly spliced to whatever music the maker feels is best, from the [imho] saccharine "Kiss Me" to the that's-more-like-it "Oh My God" by Pink) does NOT want to sleep with the Doctor. Or as Tate put it in an interview with Jonathan Ross, "She gets that he's an alien. She knows he has two hearts; she's not interested in finding out what else he might be doubled up on."

Tate seemingly does not understand that this is exactly what any scifi fangirl WOULD be interested in finding out--but of course Tate's not talking about them, she's talking about Donna.

Now what you have to understand here is that Donna Noble is a serious role. Believe me, ain't nothin' funny about it.

See? Look. Are THEY bov'ered? They are WELL bov'ered.

Yes, together, these two are as desperate as a...well, as a shadow.

And THAT, my friends, is how we ended up here, with the ultimate serio-comic crossover: Lauren Cooper and, well, someone who looks awfully familiar, in a Comic Relief sketch courtesy of the BBC itself.

Enjoy.

Here's Meghan O'Rourke's assessment of Anne of Green Gables at 100.

O'Rourke is inspired by Anne...yet has to concede, even as she tries not to, that Anne fails the great test for women of the 20th century. She does not take her place in the world.

Ordinarily, I would say "And?" But in this case, it really is a problem.

First of all, some context: this is a Bildungsroman for girls. All the larger issues are funneled through the unfolding of Anne's destiny, rather than her destiny being subordinated to and reflecting larger issues (as would happen if she were, for example, a secondary character in a Zola novel). No: she is the center of the universe rather than a cog in the machine. And her job is purely to become herself.

With all that in mind, let's look at Anne as an individual. Let's look at the person she is.

She has native vision. She has extraordinary imagination. She has rare intellectual gifts. She lives in a time when education and possibilities for women are opening up.

She has no particular inclination towards domesticity.

Yet Anne gives up the world.

She marries and has six kids, which would otherwise not be a problem, except for the fact that, in doing so, she quietly retires her dreams.

This would be like if Huck decided not to go to hell after all.

In fact, it would be like if Huck never even considered the possibility. If he somehow didn't quite grasp or articulate the issue. If he somehow thought the issue was solved just by the fact that he himself loved Jim and was kind to him.

Which is essentially what O'Rourke argues: "[Anne's] power is hardly diminished by the fact that she trains it on her children and the world rather than the blank page."

Yeah but. In this case.

I mean, ordinarily, I would agree. God knows that if having kids is not a (literal) creative act, I don't know what is.

But if it's going to take the place of other acts of artistic creation in a woman's life (and female artists have had it as easy, I think, as any group can in that regard; you can paint, write, sculpt, do fiber arts, in your house if you have to, pausing to yell "Put down those matches!!" as necessary), then it had better be because it's your first, best destiny.

And Anne's story suggests anything but.

Anne is what Jean Shinoda Bolen would call a "virgin goddess," utterly one-in-self: "Anne...is nobody's object but her own," says O'Rourke. "Her inner spiritual life exists utterly apart from the domains of domesticity and romance." She is "organically indifferent" to the handsome Gilbert Blythe, and when she finally marries him, it is "only after he almost dies, and out of abiding friendship, not fear of loneliness."

Or love, apparently.

Besides making her sound closeted, this description of her motives does make it look an awful lot like Anne betrays herself by not becoming a writer.

It's entirely possible that this is the author's fault. The author may have misunderstood her own creation. She was always trying to clip Anne's wings. At the end of the first book, remember, she has Anne give up her chance at university. That ended up feeling wrong even to her, so she let Anne go after all, but when it came time for career, the iron door shut for good.

Maybe this is because she actually thought and believed that she was writing about someone other than Anne--someone who resembled her, but had a different destiny and different needs.

The problem is that people are always mistaking Annes for that other girl. It's so much more convenient that way.

So much more convenient, in fact, that entire societies make that mistake. Don't look now, but there's folks that think they just might make it on purpose.

So "Anne of Green Gables" ends up, very sadly, on the wrong side of the moral ledger of our century. It does not come out all right.

#

I have the same beef, actually, with the later Earthsea novels, "Tehanu," "Tales from Earthsea" and "The Other Wind." In this case, it is not even a self-development, moral-ledger issue. It's a continuity error. I felt gutshot when I picked up Tehanu and found that Tenar, the dark priestess of "The Tombs of Atuan," had become...a housewife!?

No. Just...no. READ "The Tombs of Atuan." It is impossible to reconcile the ferocity, the isolation, the unquestioned sense of singularity, the scars of darkness, of this fifteen-year-old girl with the middle-aged housewife she suddenly is in "Tehanu." It's just wrong, just...not possible.

No doubt Ursula K. LeGuin would look at me and say "Yes, exactly."

But...no. Really. Tenar was The Eaten One, she was Arha (the name by which she knows herself for something like 70% of "Tombs"). She was, in fact, the dark, dark Anne, "starved for human love" (O'Rourke) but with a very different, though equally powerful, object to fixate on instead. Anne gets trees and rivers; Arha gets the secret mazes of the Nameless Ones.

Which is worth remarking on, because in both cases, their object is nature. Yet Anne gets the bright, beautiful side of nature, the grass, the stars, while double-doomed Arha gets the "terrible, dark and cruel" side, the underground, the irrationality, the negation. The concentrated powers of death. Torn away from them at last, she can see only what she has lost to them, "the waste of all her years spent in bondage to a useless evil." And the struggle ahead of her: "The road leads upward to the light, but the weary traveler may never see the end of it...She wept in pain, because she was free."

And you're telling me she grows up to marry a townie!?

Yeah, no. Only as a psychotic act of self-abandonment, or a hiding place from which to secretly serve her Masters after all.

Otherwise, she's got three choices: silent servant of the hermit mage; dangerous-eyed beggar on the edge of town (if something goes horribly wrong); or mage in her own right.

In which capacity she might, in fact, marry. And maybe even marry a goatherd.

But everything would be different underneath.

Isn't that what we're aiming for? Or should be?

Dear "House Hunters"...and "Spice Up My Deserving Space With Color Splash Correction To Sell."

1) Stop with all these dark browns and earth tones. What is WRONG with you people!? Were you not alive during the 70s? Didn't we learn our lesson back then? On show after show, I see designers take a perfectly good space and close it down by using brick reds, dark browns, rough stones, big accent pillows and other objets, fussy accent stripes and added chair rails...STOP!!!

The culprit here is that all these poor professionals are under enormous pressure to look like they really did something with the space. So they pile on with color and objects and design instead of pruning and nipping and tucking and standing back to let the room breathe. It's entirely the fault of the medium (TV), but it is ruining the tastes of a generation. And we have enough problems in America right now. Please! Everybody! Simple, basic interiors. White walls, hardwood floors or plain carpets, as little furniture as you can get away with. Okay? No, it's not sexy. No, it will not give you something to do over the weekend. Here's what it will give you: something you'll feel comfortable in when you have the flu. Something you won't regret in ten years.

Let's move on.

2) Persons on "House Hunters" who are looking at million-dollar properties in a highly-desirable area of the country where real estate is at a premium...please stop complaining about how small the bedrooms are. Please do not act like you are in a near-ghost-town in North Dakota where the few remaining pensioners rattle around in ginormous draft-traps built a hundred years ago for dynasties that would never come. Which you can now buy for $30K. There, a small bedroom would be an affront. Not where you are.

3) Persons on "House Hunters" in general, when you stand there and make a face and say "But it doesn't have a view" or "Well, the balcony is pretty small" or "There's no guest house" or anything like that, please consider how this will make you look in the eyes of the nation. On TV, everything is magnified. You're never just saying "There's no guest house." You're giving subtext. Whether you mean to or not. So if you don't want people to get what I am sure is the wrong idea about you, please do not complain about Marie Antoinette-style problems. (Note: complaining that there is no closet in a bedroom is okay. That is a legitimate gripe.)

4) Consider that these surface complaints might just be symbols anyhow. I put my realtor through total hell (yet we became friends) because I was wandering through house after house after house after house and not buying, because I was waiting. I was waiting for that irrational-yet-truer-than-true moment when you know you're home. With every house that didn't make me feel that way, I'm sure I said specific things, but what I meant by each and every one of them was just "The moment ain't happening."

5) And then it did.

6) I am still going to go blue-and-white on this house. It's just going to take me a while.

7) All the HGTV design professionals will, I am sure, hate what I'm going to do.

8) That is okay with me.

Look what I just found!

Probably about six days ago (I've actually been on vacation and just got home), Arts and Letters Daily linked to this sprawling article about the mommy wars by Sandra Tsing Loh. Tsing Loh takes a detour in the middle to point out, via the work of one Neil Gilbert, exactly what I posted in late June/early July:

A) If childcare is repetitious, well, so the hell are most other jobs

and

B) If repetition is therefore your fate, you could do a lot worse than being repetitious in service of your family than in service of some faceless corporate monolith.

Gilbert also makes the very Cheryl Mendelson point that family tasks such as meal planning are actually more interesting than most out-of-home jobs. (Or as he put it, shopping in the grocery store is a lot more interesting than working in it.) (Well--actually, I've worked in a grocery store, and it's kind of fascinating, if you pay attention to all the remarkable combinations of things people buy, and how some orders bag easily and others don't, and so on. But that's another story.)

One thing that interests me is that Tsing Loh and Gilbert compare motherhood to negative, devalued jobs like being a cubicle farmer and said "It's no worse and often lots better," whereas I compared motherhood to currently-glamorous toilpits like cooking and crab-fishing and said "It's EVERY BIT AS BAD, so where's its props?"

I went even further, in fact, and said that, far from being negative, repetition is actually the secret soul of creativity. Gilbert and Tsing Loh are not quite that crazy. But the point is, we're all more or less on the same track here. I have found my tribe. (Tsing Loh even cops to a messy house. My sister!!)

Which is important, because the disdain for childcare has to end. It's one of those unfortunate areas in which the feminist left collects the unthinking snob and the two of them ride so far that they bang into the reactionary right. All camps have the same analysis--women who stay home are losers--but they value it differently. Snob: "Women who stay home and merely take care of little children are unsexy suburban losers." Left: "Women who stay home and merely take care of little children are servant losers who have been duped by the patriarchy." Right: "Women who stay home and merely take care of little children are living out their exalted, natural, ironclad, proper, God/biology-given destiny of being servants." But underneath, it's the same analysis. And this analysis is, um, let's just say deeply flawed.

Of course, one problem is that we're all ignoring one of the much-reviled Linda Hirshman's central points, which is: What's the alternative? It's easy to criticize Hirshman, but she's looking at something real: women who stay home do put themselves at economic risk if they get divorced and suddenly have to support themselves. But, imho, the answer is not to make them work if they don't want to, and still less to make everyone aim at the kind of elite jobs that Hirshman props, as if everyone could or should become their state's attorney general. The answer is to fix it so that women taking care of their children GET taken care of, with money, the same way that women arranging corporate arbitrage deals do. It really offends me that the choice to raise your children is somehow something you're supposed to do on your own time, or if you're lucky enough to have a partner to "support" you (as if you were a dead weight).

The whole article is worth checking out. Especially Tsing Loh's witty and very apt concluding sentence.

My essay "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" will be delayed because I was too busy playing Rock Band with my husband to write it. Or unpack. Or clean up the bedroom like I promised God I was going to. (Speaking of God, did you ever read that book by Nancy Friday? My mind will not release the title, but it was her seminal--or, as a former grad school classmate of mine put it, ovarian--sexual autobiography. At one point, she was talking about screwing around in college. After blessedly getting a period she had absolutely no right to expect, she reports that "I had a moment with my God." [Yes, that line has stayed with me for over 20 years. Not much in itself, it was so perfectly placed in the narrative that it became immortal to me.] This moment involved promising not to have unprotected sex while twenty years old and screamingly fertile anymore. Well, before we left for our trip, I looked around at the piles of clothes and newspapers in my bedroom and I had a moment with my God. "Please, God," I said, "do not let any of this crap spontaneously combust, and I promise I will...um, at least TRY to clean it up when we get back." I have kept my promise precisely as well as Friday kept hers.)

So anyhow, Dear Cosmic Teacher, since I was too busy playing Rock Band and plus now I'm late for something, I am going to have to hand in my vacation essay just a tiny bit late. I know you're sorry about that. Here are some slides...I've got slides...they have lots of educational value, especially the one with my 6'3" husband bending comically under the stern ceiling of the historical house. ("We don't tolerate proud, sinful HEIGHT around here. Don't tell me it gets you closer to God! How dare you try to get closer to God, worm!?")

I'll stop now.

You know how people say "I need a vacation from my vacation?" I'm there.

It means falling behind.

It means falling middle-school-mononucleosis behind. IMF-loan behind. It means spending days rushing around to pick things up, bring things back, deliver other things, ferry people, and then buy frozen chicken breasts from Target just so you don't have to go to one more place afterwards. All while feeling hungry. Terribly...terribly hungry. And thirsty. God.

Or maybe that's all just my bad luck, and if I went away more often, I would have more happy returns.

Then again maybe it's some weird psychological thing. Most people get nervous before they travel. I apparently get nervous after I travel.

#

But going away on vacation REALLY means...

...discovering new TV shows.

Follow me far, far, far back to the decade of the 90s, where if you had told me that a mere ten years later we'd be in hock to China, stuck in a war of choice, paying positively giddy amounts of money for gas, losing the polar ice caps at a rate beyond the nightmares of our worst alarmists, losing our houses even faster, and so on, I would have...well, you know, I probably would have just said "So the wingnuts finished the job, huh?" and gone back to sleep.

But anyhow!

Follow me back to those days before the wingnuts finished the job. My husband and I were on our honeymoon. Naturally I got bronchitis. Naturally all the coughing led me to have muscle spasms in my ribs, which was painful in ways I can only describe as truly original and moving. Well-conceived and an excellent effort on the part of my body.

Naturally we sat in our hotel room watching TV...and we discovered Red Green.

It was the one where Red cheerily destroys a car he's trying to fix. That doesn't sound like much, but believe me, it was. We had never seen anything quite like it. As soon as I had recovered enough to laugh without crying, we started watching it all the time. We got years of television happiness from that one chance moment, a moment we never would have had without the dislocations and disasters of our trip. (And after all, isn't that why we travel?)

#

Many years and one child later, we found ourselves in another hotel room, and this time we discovered Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Wow.

Besides just being a good show and all that crap, this thing was SO VISUAL. Did you SEE "Sozin's Comet" (the two-hour finale)? Did you SEE that final battle between Zuko and Azula? If I were an actor, I'd slit my wrists. Those two cartoons achieved a level of fluidity in motion that no living being could hope to match, all while 'acting' perfectly for the camera in their close-ups--registering deep emotion while still fundamentally remaining blank canvases onto which the audience could project themselves. As soon as Hollywood executives figure out how to simulate the human voice convincingly, actors are done. (I hope not. But I fear something like that may really happen. WALL-E would scare the motherboard out of me on that score too, if I was an actor. Yes it would.)

The dire fate of human acting aside, however..."Avatar" was fantastic, and we never would have watched it if not for that annoying, three-second-blink-between-channels, color-distorted hotel television. And the sheer exhaustion of trailing around various historical attractions in the hot sun for four hours.

And after all, isn't that why we travel?

I am very busy playing with the Paint Color Picker over at House Beautiful, where you can select images from their online gallery and "repaint" them according to a vast color database.

It's exactly like playing with paper dolls, only the doll is a picture of a room, and instead of cutting out outfits for it, you click on colors.

I shouldn't waste time playing like this. There's work to be done and errands to be run and...and...and...nothing I can't catch up on a little later...yes, later...just a little later...

You know, that store we never went to before or since. You remember, right? It had those funny pink and green prepared foods set right out in the middle of the produce. They had their ice for sale over there on the left by the checkout. We stopped there that one time on the way to see the person who lived behind the trees. You know--her. Her name is on the tip of my tongue. She's the one who lived just a few of those odd, one-house-deep, oblong blocks away from that other person, the one we visited more often. Back there in that time period which I can't quite pin down. Don't you remember? Don't you remember how the road used to split around that funny store with the red roof? And we went in there once? It was a pancake house that served whiskey. But was it dark out? I can't remember if it was day or night. Shut UP! I am NOT DREAMING! I'm...I'm...

I've been poaching on a book about dreams. ("Poaching" on a text is when you read it disobediently. My preferred manner of reading books is to open at random, see if it grabs me, then start skipping all around. Eventually I will cover all the territory. It makes things much more exciting that way. Drives my husband nuts.)

I've never been that interested in dreams per se. Most of my dreams are so vague, ornate and "other" that I know, while I'm having them, that it's no use at all to try to remember what's happening. Most of the time, in dreams, I can't even clearly describe what I'm seeing. My suicide dream, which moved the wonderful David to actually comment on its weirdness, was atypical of my dreams for its, well, for lack of a better word, normalcy--there was enough specificity of place, sequence and perspective for me to be able to recount the main thread of it.

I've been fascinated to discover that this author I'm reading has a totally opposite experience of dreams. She dreams of actual people and places. Sometimes she has not seen these people or places yet, but experience has taught her that, soon enough, she will.

I wonder why we're so different; why her dreams form a closed loop with her waking life but mine seem like a doorway or umbilical cord to other realms of perception. It's not a scary place at all, though neither is it comforting. It just is.

I wonder.

"I don't have anything."

"How about that post you've been neurotically working for the past three weeks?"

"It's still not ready yet."

"HOW CAN IT NOT BE READY!! You have written entire SEMINAR papers in less time!"

"It just doesn't feel right."

"And did any of your seminar papers feel right?"

"No, but that was just grad school."

"I see your point. Okay, well how about that old movie you were going to complain about?"

"I forgot which one it was. And what I was going to say about it."

"Oh come on."

"I can't help it! I thought of it in my sleep!"

"You'll hear from me about this later. Meanwhile, what are we going to do right now?"

"I don't know. It's time to go to the bookstore."

"But it bothers me."

"You know it shouldn't. It's not right to worry about stuff like that. It's not the point."

"But that watch contained his entire essence as a Time Lord. And she LEFT IT ON THE DESK!? Where anyone, for example a telepathic boy, could just pick it up and make off with it? Which happened entirely too soon, by the way. It put the audience too far ahead of the story."

(The merry voices in my head are discussing "Human Nature" and "Family of Blood," the blistering, sad two-parter from the third "series" of the reborn "Doctor Who.")

"Regardless, she did leave the watch on the desk. And you're going to shut up about it, because you know perfectly well that it's not right to ask those kinds of questions. Suspend your disbelief."

"That would be easier if she hadn't kept the key to the TARDIS on a string around her neck. If she's going to keep the key on her person, why wouldn't she keep the every-bit-as-important watch on her person too? I could have accepted the watch lying on the desk if she'd left the key lying around too."

"Maybe she did, and you just didn't notice it. Maybe we saw her pick the key up from beside the watch on the desk, and you forgot or weren't paying attention in the first place. Then when she took the key out of her jacket in the next scene, you thought it had always been there. You ignorant, half-asleep little creature."

"Yeah, I should go watch it all again before I say anything."

"Good idea. That could fix the watch issue too. For all you know, there might have been a line in there where he told her to keep watch on the desk! And you just don't remember."

"True."

"Besides, this might have been discussed elsewhere. You should google it. 'Watch On Desk In Human Nature' or something."

"Oh god, no. I'm starting to hate google. Upside: you can google everything. Downside: you can google everything. Sometimes you just want to think and talk about something without googling it. When I left grad school, I thought I was leaving wonky, anal research behind. For good."

"Uh, not that you'd ever been accused of embracing it in the first place, Ms. I'd Rather Do Theory Thank You."

"That's another story."

"Yes, and this one is this one, a moving, sad, subversive thing where [SPOILER ALERT] you spend the whole episode hating the 'rubbish' human the Doctor has become--stiff, patronizing, clueless, and seemingly incredibly self-centered, as he spends what feels like twenty minutes of airtime weeping over the imminent loss of his precious self--only to find that, once he's gone, you want him back more than anything. You realize he wasn't crying about himself, he was crying about something much bigger. This episode is not about the loss of a temporary identity that the Doctor took on, it's about the loss of a world, an entire way of being that was destroyed by the century to come. At the time, all you can think is 'good riddance' to its hierarchical, patriarchal, patronizing-at-best, cruel-at-worst bullshit, and then...well. Then you look at the returned Doctor, who represents the triumph of the future, and to your own utter astonishment, you think 'Who is this glib asshole?' You certainly don't start agreeing with the bad parts of the Edwardian world, but you realize, sadly, that there was a baby in the bathwater. And it's gone. All this, they told us in microcosm through the transformation and then return of the Doctor."

"Yes, and isn't that what you should be focusing on, rather than a less-than-elegant strategy to set up for the plot?"

"Absolutely. I agree with you. But...but somehow it just bothered me. The watch lying out there like that, when she kept the key inside her clothes."

"Don't let it."

"You're right. I won't."

"Good."

"Instead, I'll complain about Martha falling in love with the Doctor. Does every-damn-body have to fall in love with the Doctor? Jesus Christ."

"Donna Noble doesn't."

"Martha Jones shouldn't have either. The Doctor should not be Captain Kirk."

"Isn't he, though? In a way? All those edgy, laughing itinerant heroes, all those knight-errants, aren't they all the same guy underneath?"

"Heh. Yeah. I suppose they are."

"Or maybe the same mask on the surface."

"Ah. And then the question is, what is underneath."

"Maybe that's why we keep watching."

It's around 1933 in America. Your job, your house, your dignity, and your sense of self are distant memories. You can't see any way out of this mess.

A hundred years before, folks in your situation emigrated to the Americas and the Caribbean for a better life. You decide that emigration might be a smart idea for you too. But where should you go?

About fifteen thousand Americans went to the Soviet Union.

I kid you not. Hit the link. There's even a picture of an American-emigrant baseball team.

Here's the thing: those poor souls, most of whom ended up in the gulag as Stalin's sanity marched ever southward, were the very model of the creative, out-of-the-box thinkers and bold risk-takers who are supposed to always land on their feet.

Here's what they did right:

--They questioned the orthodoxies of their day and listened to alternative voices. Not crazy alternative voices, but respectable ones, such as George Bernard Shaw, who had gone to the USSR themselves.

--They thought ahead. Sure, they could have gone to other sort-of-relatively-untouched-by-the-depression areas like Latin America or a colony like Rhodesia or British Somaliland. But wouldn't it be better to emigrate someplace with industry and technology? They bet on the future, ladies and gentlemen, yes they did.

And:

--They were brave.

Look where it got them.

Books, movies and TV shows can reward the bold adventurers all they want. But in the end they're just gamblers. Gamblers going up against psychos on a tip from a fool. How do you like those odds?

(Of course, arguably, that's everyone's story. That's why those of us with any sense are white-knuckling the edges of the boat, heads down and shivering.)

#

I wonder if any of those people had a gut moment. With all the voices that they listened to, did they ever listen to their own? Did anything in them say "no" at a point when they still could have backed out? If so, why didn't they?

And what if their instincts weren't saying no? What if their instincts said yes? What if their instincts said "Hell yeah! Borscht and zakuski, here we come!"?

What if their instincts said nothing at all. What if it was bigger than that. What if there really was nothing anyone could have done. No way to see enough of the puzzle in order to act. But you don't know that. You can't. You have to act anyhow.

It was a bad century, my friends. A very bad century. It ate a lot of souls.

Was that its revenge upon itself for also being such a good one?

"Time lord opens the Tardis to a new generation of Prom-goers," announced the headline in the UK Times Online.

"So this is the hottest ticket in town," writes Caitlin Moran, "--the Doctor Who Prom."

Oh wow, I didn't know they had proms in Britain!

Did they get it from us? Because the whole concept of a prom doesn't really seem very British.

Neither does the idea of a Doctor Who prom seem very prom-like. I try to wrap my mind around the idea of a thousand hard-eyed high-school seniors adjusting the bustiers of their crimson gowns on their way to dance with Daleks.

Which school was doing this? Was their prom committee really heavily into irony or something?

But wait. What's this now? "Families with backpacks"?

"In yesterday's early sun," no less?

At a prom?

Um...

...oh! This is a concert, a music concert. Not a pointless exercise in bitchiness and conspicuous consumption romantic evening of dreams.

Well then. I'm glad we got that cleared up.

#

Read the review. Personally, I'm not at all sure I'd let four and six year olds watch Doctor Who; were those "weeping" kids really upset about the concert ending, as the reviewer claims, or were they just wishing the Judoon and Ood would go away? But assuming they were crying at the beauty of the music, I'm all for it.

And the message at the end ("You've got music in your head, too...Everyone can write a song") was lovely.

In fact, upon reflection, I'll have to take back my earlier complaint about the Doctor's companions falling in love with him. Since those wacky Brits persist in the mad delusion that this horrifying show, with its images of pain, suffering, terror, and Toclafane turning out to contain severed and noseless human heads which talk, is for children, let us pause to consider the love of Martha and Rose for the Doctor in a new light.

When they fall in love with him (so predictable from an adult standpoint), look what they don't do. They don't start putting on lipstick, miniskirts and heels and acting coyly stupid. Instead, they become heroes. They battle tyrants, cross space and time (sometimes through magic, other times on foot), rescue people from despair, outthink assholes, surmount obstacles, nobly refuse to compete with women who've had better luck in the Doctor department, and slowly realize that, like the Doctor himself has told them, they are ever so much more than they thought they were. So much more, in fact, that one of them, at least, outgrows her crush and walks right out on the Doc. Wow.

Boys and girls who watch Doctor Who, whether they consciously perceive it or not, are both being trained in this: when a girl falls in love, she will get serious. She will metaphorically strap on black fatigues and walk the earth to save the world. She will become more. Dresses and bitchiness will not be involved.

Not bad.

It's 12:45 where I am! PM, even! How did that happen?

I haven't eaten yet today. Which is something I should really rectify.

Yep, it's one of those days.