why women are unhappy at work

Here's what I read this morning:

"Men usually bond when things are going well, whereas for women it's almost the opposite," said Aukland University of Technology psychologist Rachel Morrison, who works in organizational psychology at the business school. "Women actively go out and seek friendships when they're stressed and experiencing drama. They're probably more likely to tell others of their discontent, because they're motivated to get support by disclosing what's going on." So now we have scientific proof: Women are black clouds over the water cooler. Gosh honey, who funded your research grant -- Wal-Mart?

But actually, Morrison's research may indeed cast light on one of those invisible force fields that distinguish female and male workplace experiences. Women's inclination to bond over bad experiences may foment workplace negativity, but couldn't this be a classic case of blaming the messenger? Couldn't it be that women are sharing bad workplace experiences (and use commiseration as a survival strategy) because they have, well, a hell of a lot more of them to share?

(Carol Lloyd, in Salon's Broadsheet)

Kids in Danger

In case you didn't hear the lovely interview with Maurice Sendak this morning on NPR, you can listen to it here (click the "listen" button at upper left). And the audio slide show that accompanies the interview is glorious, too.

Banned Books Week

It's Banned Books Week again. Feels like it was just--well, last year, in fact. In honor of Banned Books Week our library hosts a read-out; last year I read In the Night Kitchen (nudity). This year I think I may read the Easter passage from Bridge to Terabithia (religious content, language). I am always astonished at the children's books that make the list, but it does stand to reason: we think children are more susceptible to influence, and thus more in need of protection, than adults. If you want to find the rationales for banning, you can--look for, for example, Parents Against Bad Books. (I'm not linking, because they don't really need the publicity.) They helpfully excerpt lots of the dirty bits from books they don't want your kids to read. Um, perhaps counter-productive? (But pretty amusing, nonetheless.)

I don't think I'm currently teaching or reading aloud anything off these lists, but they certainly appear on my syllabi.

It's always useful to remember, too, that books are challenged for a variety of reasons. I may feel that the challenges to BtoT and In the Night Kitchen are absurd, but the challenges to Huck Finn, Little Black Sambo, and Little House on the Prairie come from the "left." I don't agree with any of them--I've read Sambo, for example, and I would share it with a child, though not without some discussion. Some people don't agree: they don't want to have the Little House books on library shelves, as the attitudes towards Indians in them are certainly offensive and potentially damaging. I don't know how to answer that, except to say that the problem isn't in the book but in the attitude, and we can't change attitudes without studying them. That sounds a bit lame as I type it, but it will have to do--I have to go read a non-controversial book to my son now. Good night.

latest read

I just finished Terry Pratchett's Truckers, and I can't wait to find Diggers and whatever the third book in the Bromeliad Trilogy is. (Umm, Wings.) Pratchett, like Diana Wynne Jones, is ridiculously prolific, very funny, and English. Neither one is as well known in this country as either Philip Pullman or J.K. Rowling, and I'm a bit mystified by that fact--unless it's that they're too prolific? I certainly can't say, as I can of either of the latter two, that I've read all their books (or even all their books for kids...I think I've missed an early Pullman novel). But Pratchett is well worth the read. I think I tried to say so once before, but then got sidetracked.

The premise of the Bromeliad trilogy is that there are nomes (not gnomes)--four-inch-high humanoid creatures--living in spaces humans don't notice. In Truckers a small group of nomes leaves their home in a truckstop, where they are increasingly in danger from various predators, and moves into a department store where, to their surprise, they encounter an entire society of other nomes. These nomes have lived in the store--Arnold Bros (est. 1905)--for as long as they can remember. So long, in fact, that they don't really believe there's anything outside the store. So long that they have developed a religion based on this premise. Their sacred texts are signs and commentaries on signs in the store, thus:

III. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) said, Let there be Signs, so that All within shall know the Proper Running of the Store.
IV. On the Moving Stairs, let the Sign Be: Dogs and Strollers Must be Carried;
V. And Arnold Bros (est. 1905) waxed wroth, for many carried neither dog nor stroller...

XXI. But Arnold Bros (est. 1905) said, This is the Sign I give you:
XXII. If You Do Not See What You Require, Please Ask. (99, 111)


But it's not just a satire of fundamentalism. The store nomes are sympathetic (if flawed) characters, and they know a lot of things the outside nomes can use. It's a funny but also thought-provoking tale, in fact, in which science and faith come to be very similar, and which seems to me to expand our notions of what it means to be human. (Something similar also happens in The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents.)

I've been looking for something to read next to Nick--we're about to finish the Bartimaeus Trilogy, about which I'll write another time--and this may be it. (Dad, I'm working on him for Beyond Beowulf, but he insists that he has to hear Beowulf first, and he and Mark haven't gotten there yet.)

boy and girl books

One of the great pleasures of teaching children's literature is introducing "girl books" to male students. Invariably there is a surprised pleasure in their response to a book like, say, The Secret Garden, when they find out that it speaks to them just as much as, say, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

It's possible that The Secret Garden is a bad example here. After all there are plenty of significant male characters in it; in fact, a common complaint of feminist literary critics is that Burnett gives up Mary's story for Colin's halfway through. Although this is accurate--you can see it in the chapter headings, in fact, when Mary's pleading "Might I Have a Bit of Earth?" gives way to "I Am Colin"--it never felt that way to me as a child reading the novel. Indeed I continued to give Mary pride of place, even when the novel didn't, by recognizing that she engineers Colin's recovery, his new importance in the novel. She never goes away, she just has to share. It's not all about the protagonist, of course: plot lines (romance vs. adventure, "relationship" vs. "action") are usually trotted out as part of the explanation for how books get gendered as well. But if we read novels to "experience other minds," then at some level all novels are relationship novels, and we should just give up on giving them to boys.


I am of course unpersuaded that there really are "boy" and "girl" books. Marketing strategies that put floral covers on some books and monsters on others would suggest otherwise, but if you get beyond the covers, both books I just linked to have both male and female protagonists, and seem as if they could appeal equally to readers of both sexes. Let's not even get into the heterosexist assumptions behind some of this marketing...though I might for the record note that it's the book with the monster cover that seems to me to be suggesting a romance-plot-outcome (Nick and I haven't finished it yet, so I can't be certain).

The thing is, of course, a well-told story should appeal to any reader, and the canard that boys won't read girl books does the boys, above all, a disservice. Girls will read boy books (I could get into a long digression here about feminist standpoint theory, and may do so another day, but for the moment it's enough to say that, take my word for it, girls will read boy books--sometimes because they have to, sometimes because they can), but boys are often dissuaded from reading girl books, and it's too bad.

One year Mark claimed that Little Women and A Little Princess were the two best movies he'd seen all year (one in a second-run theatre; I know they didn't come out in the same year). Both stories were a complete revelation to him; both films told them well (again, we can debate their merits as adaptations another day--they worked for us); and I felt sorry that he'd gone so long without knowing them. But I have to acknowledge that Nick has so far evinced little interest in either, and I haven't yet pushed to read them to him. So what am I waiting for? He did give up on the Little House books (despite having heard one of them read aloud in class) with me, so maybe I just stopped trying at that point. And, while I'm at it, do parents of girls read "boy books" to them? There are very few books I've read to Nick that I didn't at some point read to Mariah (except the Bartimaeus trilogy and a few others that just weren't available when she was small), so for myself I think the answer is "yes," but I'm probably not the best example. I won't read what I think of as "trash" to either of them, so I gave up after one book in the Warrior series with Nick just as I never read a Babysitters' Club book to Mariah. And I think it's the "trash" books and series (oh, another topic for another day!) that are the most deeply gendered, so maybe a commitment to literary quality can (almost) obviate this problem. But not entirely.

Ah, too many digressions, not enough time! I'll have to come back to this one.

Off-Duty Disney Princesses, the play

This post is from last February, but Roger Sutton just linked to it now...here's a taste, but click the first link for the whole thing.

Snow White: Did you know Gaston was in rehab a few months ago? Sex addiction. But apparently he beat it.

Cinderella: What about the steroids?

Snow White: I hear he kicked those too. One of the busty blonde French serving wenches was in here the other day. She said he’s doing great—yoga, macrobiotic diet, a lot of charity work for Disney Characters Without Mothers. He’s a new man.

Cinderella: I admire that. I really do. (pause) Do you think they’re online? That organization you mentioned—

We missed the worst of the "Disney Princess" madness, thankfully--Mariah had to make do with the pretty little pony/centaurs from the original Fantasia, much of the time--but this still had me laughing out loud.

Library Thing

Attentive readers (hi, there!) will have noticed the new link over on the right to my library thing. Who has time for this? I am a complete library nerd; I worked in the interlibrary loan office of my college library for a couple of years, and then for a library automation company in the early 80s, so I come by this honestly. But I've never tried to catalog my books before, and to do so at this late date seems, well, crazy. Nonetheless compelling.

I've only added the books right next to me on my shelves to the library thing so far. And I'm not sure how many more I can, realistically, try to add in. Others seem to have done it, and I bow to their more organized minds, their more thorough natures. I am so far just playing with it, and I may not get very much further. But imagine the possibilities: actually to know which editions of various texts I own! Actually to have access to them! What a concept.