Context, Context, Context!

I was wading through a bunch of articles about the exceptional life and appalling death of Denice Denton (thanks, Martha) when I came across this headline:
"The tragic death of Denice Denton (pictured), the openly lesbian chancellor of University of California, Santa Cruz..."
and i stopped reading and started to bristle until I noticed that it had been published in The Advocate, the award-winning LGBT magazine, and realized that far from reaping scandal-power, Denton's lesbianism was being used as a mantra for empowerment. I guess the three most important factors in reading are context, context, and context.

A quick moment to acknowledge Denice Denton who when she wasn’t racking up academic accomplishments or helping the cause of women in science, took on everyone from Larry Summers to the Department of Defense.

I wish I’d heard about her while she was still alive.

Trying to Catch Them Riding Dirty

Here’s Himalayan Project (thanks Abhi) rapping about being brown with real verbal dexterity and rare political adroitness.

Zeeb and Chee Malabar’s track about being pulled over by an NYC cop, Oblique Brown, is on their myspace page here--it's got an old-timey feel to it while being totally current. Postcards from Paradise (with Rainman) is also a captivating track, idealistic and beautiful and more importantly, more my speed :P .

These Brooklyn boys are playing in New York all this month. Very worth going to see.

Jul 14 2006 10:00P	Columbia University/Lerner Hall	New York, NY
Jul 21 2006 8:00P	QMA/Queens Musuem of Art	Queens, NY
Jul 21 2006 10:00P	Maya Lounge	New York
Aug 17 2006 8:00P	SOB's	New York

Despatches from the Mommy Wars

Katha Pollit's enduring contribution to the so-called mommy wars--the debate regarding the suitability of women returning to work after they've had a child--may well be this inspired comparison of Linda Hirshman and Caitlin Flanagan in The Nation. While Hirshman (for) and Flanagan (against) are on either side of the mommy battlelines both of them are highly opinionated and believe that feminism gives women too many choices.

Pollit also has problems with what she terms "choice-feminism," which she defines as "the philosophically absurd position of smiling politely at everything women do, from naked mud wrestling to home schooling." She'd like to ask: " But what happens when the choice is a bad idea, for yourself, for other women, for society?" "But what if the "choice" is the forced, or at any rate predictable, result of a lot of previous choices you didn't realize you were making?"

Her later sentence gave me a-ha moment goosebumps: "But really, isn't the stay-home vogue at bottom a response to the fact that society has failed to adapt to working mothers?"

I'm reading Daphne de Marneffe's Maternal Desire right now, of which more later.

Ahilya Bai sat on a Wall...

English nursery rhymes have been declared too Western for children in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh and have hence been banned from government (public) schools. The state’s education minister Narrotam Mishra has gone on record in an English daily as wanting “value education in local colour” i.e. more about the likes of Ahilya Bai who was a stalwart Hindu and a tireless temple builder to boot. I’m sure it’s practically tautological to disclose here that the Madhya Pradesh government is composed of the increasingly fundamentalist BJP.

Mr. Mishra, however, may not be kookier than the other kookaburras out there--nursery rhymes are notoriously scandalous and other hot-headed nursery-rhyme bans have been in the news pretty recently .

Parents and teachers in Madhya Pradesh seem quite taken aback by the ban, protesting that their children like both Indian as well as non Indian nursery rhymes. But the case for multiculturalism can be made convincingly only if we were teaching those tots Russian and Spanish and Chinese and Finnish nursery rhymes as well.

Until then it's ok to admit that we learn English nursery rhymes in Indian schools because we have a weird colonial hangover. Hey, i said it's ok :). Words have a seductive power even when we don't precisely know what they mean--like in sanskrit slokas, Dylan Thomas, terms of affection invented on the spur of the moment, etc.

So we'll keep learning those nursery rhymes or Shakespeare or Wordsworth...

My mother was, at the least, the third generation in her family to encounter William Wordsworth's Daffodils although the first one to ever see the flower itself--more than four decades after she first memorized the poem in middle school. The "sighting" occurred when she visited me early one April in England "That was what all the fuss was about?" was her underwhelmed exclamation to me re. the flower, but i guess that as a question it could well be directed to the assiduous industry of English pedagogy in India as well.

(Thanks to Kenn O'Reilly for link and title.)

AFTERNOONS LAST YEAR

I always refer to them
As the little girls in 11-C
But I always think of them
As the little Chinese girls


With princesses’ names--
Caroline. Stephanie.
Dainty as paper dolls,
Their glossy hair
A single laughing creature,
One simple slick of tumbling wood.


They’re in China now
The little Chinese girls
Still in the afternoons
I see them sometimes


Stephanie, kindergarten fresher--
Rambunctious, opinionated,
scolding her grandmother
In a rolling waterfall of language
and then smiling at me
with identical delight


And Caroline, then 12,
picking through her words
As though
they were a handful


of M&M colored beads
Her eyes like pebbles
her fists like rocks
curious about my hair, my bracelets
And unlike other 12-year-olds
still so small that I can’t offer to share


In the afternoons waiting
For the school bus
to bring my son back to me
I’d converse with their grandmother


Who only spoke Mandarin.
Or rather
we bowed, we smiled, we signed
With pithy opinions
About the weather, food, my schoolwork
They’re all in China now


Last year, their mom used to work
in the Lipstick Building
On Third Avenue (near 55th St.)
Two buildings away from K’s


I always expected
to bump into her
All those now long ago
lunchtimes with him
I miss them
all.

On Being a Snuggle Slut (in my dreams)

Dreamt that Big A changed the house around--that he brought the dining room into the conservatory end of the living room and moved the chaise to the dining room and that he said that from now on that would be my study.

I was alright about it--not thrilled, not upset, not sad. Then one night after work when I’m turning out the lights, the cityscape springs up all lit up outside the windows and I can see Big A's silhouette moving from building to building bringing darkness and screams with him--he’s committing some sort of crime but in a Scarlet Pimpernel kinda way, for a good cause. It's a cause that i strongly believe in also, but I'm worried about his safety and I walk into the bedroom all mopey aaaaaaaaand...

Jon Stewart is in bed (this is the only time I remember ever having dreamt about a celebrity). He asks me if I can’t fall asleep---I shake my head and look at him ruefully, and he says--well, what shall we do about that?

At that point I realize that in the dream I’m awfully preggers--

And JS smiles that sweet, shy smile and puts out his arms and makes me comfortable and snuggles me to sleep in an extremely matter-of-fact way, much as if he were offering me a seat on the subway.

He's a very kind guy, apparently :).