Recording Surface

Unlike some, I’ve never thought of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are as escapist fare. In fact, it’s always produced quite a bit of anxiety for me: parents who punish for things as harmless as chasing the cat and saying “I’ll eat you up” to your mother; visiting a place where the creatures do exactly what they’re told to do; even the wild rumpus was kind of ambiguous in that its joy was completely confined to the moment of the rumpus and didn’t carry over into the rest of the story. I’ve also never really thought of it as a book about escape, since when Max gets back to his room, everything is the same as when he left, and his food’s still warm — despite his epic journey he has escaped his existence for just a few minutes. The emotional timbre of the story is as muted and melancholic as its accompanying art.

The movie provides a contemporary back story but retains the book’s affective register: the compassionate, cool, hip, hot single mother who is too tolerant to actually send Max to his room without supper, and the monsters, who aren’t scary ogres but gloomy characters who openly express their depression and dissatisfaction and who aren’t as quick to capitulate to Max’s commands. While Sendak’s book was written when expressions and feelings were more strictly controlled and authority was rigid, the movie is about a time when everyone talks about their feelings and hierarchies aren’t as sharp. But despite these advances, melancholy pervades. Neither cool moms nor leveled hierarchies nor emotional honesty have been enough to overcome the sadness.

S0metim3s has tagged me with the passion-quilt meme, the instructions of which are as follows: Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about. Give your picture a short title. Title your blog post “Meme: Passion Quilt.” Link back to the blog entry which tagged you. Include links to 5 (or more) educators. (more…)

“Justice is no more than the immanent process of desire.” I’m sometimes thick, but this line from Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka book, and Deleuze’s usage of the term justice generally, has always confused me. (more…)

Nate has tagged me with an eight-things-about-yourself meme. I’ve been tagged in the past, but a combination of laziness and antisocialism (heh) have prevented me from responding before, and almost certainly will again. Here goes: (more…)

My son is starting to, um, “notice” things. And yes, even though I mock it, the hesitation is there for me–the currents of Catholicism and other modes of sexual repression run strong and the habit of believing that children should not think of such things, that they are asexual and need to be denied certain realities, dies hard. (more…)

Things I’ve read recently:

The Commoner’s new(ish) Editor’s Blog has a report on Mario Tronti’s talk at the Historical Materialism conference, though it’s really more of a critique of the messianism in some theories of the multitude. And speaking of an “emphasis on processes rather than mainly on goals,” Zapagringo notes the one-year anniversary of the forming of Regeneracion, a “revolutionary childcare” organization in New York City. And speaking of commons, Anne Nimus has a fine article about copyrights and how the Creative Commons repeats Romanticism: “In an uncanny repetition of the copyright struggles that first emerged during the period of Romanticism, the excesses of the capitalist form of intellectual property are opposed, but using its own language and presuppositions. Creative Commons preserves Romanticism’s ideas of originality, creativity and property rights, and similarly considers “free culture” to be a separate sphere existing in splendid isolation from the world of material production. Ever since the 18th century, the ideas of “creativity” and “originality” have been inextricably linked to an anti-commons of knowledge. Creative Commons is no exception.” (via nettime)

Meanwhile, Blair and Howard have had it with migrants and their ways (via here and here, respectively).

The thoroughly irritating first two-thirds of Monster House, produced by archboomers Spielberg and Zemeckis, is, like the last animated move I saw, Pixar’s Cars, a giant playground for baby-boomer solipsism. (more…)

The school walkouts that have followed the big marches over the past few weeks are rippling across the U.S.–even in Texas–as more kids in more places are joining in, despite veiled threats from school administrators, who worry about the effect the absences will have on the federal money they recieve. Predictably, the state’s response is becoming increasingly militarized and repressive.

Meantime: Compared to Congress, the president gets to seem like a principled antiracist, while making it clear that the needs of capital dictate immigration policy. Progressives worry that Democrats are being unfairly lumped together with the president (when of course they are mostly worse). Media makes sure we know that the protests are an illegal-immigrant-only affair. And labor unions expres solidarity with immigrants, while letting it be known they should be kept out at all cost.

We attended the MLK Day celebration in our little burg on Monday. The town we live in is one of the poorest in Texas; not coincidentally, it’s also darker than most of Texas. As in all good Southern towns, local politics has always been dominated by whites, black and Hispanic civic life has been limited to filling service-sector jobs and starting positions on the high school football team, and the physical racial lines are drawn by the major road that passes through it. (more…)

Antipopper makes this parent feel better about what his sometimes-too-permissive child-rearing.

I’m always impressed when children calmly decide when stuff might be “too much” for them.

Over the holidays, I made a little horror film with some young kids. We were just getting ready for the bit where the monster rises from the depths when Thomas, the youngest (who’s three), stopped everyone and announced that “this is too scary for me.” He then affably left the room so the rest of us could continue.

[…]

Children who are patronised don’t stand a chance.

At a party a few months ago, our hosts put on Shaun of the Dead. I was a little skittish about having the kids watch it because I wasn’t sure of how violent/scary it was, but I really wanted to see it, so we stayed. About fifteen minutes in, after the first head was pulled off, my almost-three-year-old, who was sitting on my lap, turned to me and said calmly but with a hint of panic, “Papa, I don’t want to watch this.” We of course left immediately, and everyone at the party was impressed with her lack of fear expressing what she wanted, as were my partner and I. We also felt pride in ourselves for not preemptively deciding what she could handle and for having allowed her the space to feel comfortable expressing her desires.

Patronizing parents don’t stand a chance either.