Teaching the Comic Book

Let me start off by saying the while I generally do for living what I trained in graduate school to do (I am, in fact, a college professor and a literary critic), there are many aspects of my job I never imagined in grad school. I never imagined that I'd be director of an African American Studies program (that was never really on my list of career goals), yet here I am. I fancy myself a scholar of the African American novel, yet I've yet to publish on the African American novel--a book of Octavia Butler's interviews, a book on the critical reception of Baldwin, an article on an intellectual crisis during the Harlem Renaissance, another on a comic book, but nothing on the African American novel.

And this semester I find myself, for the second time, teaching a course on the graphic novel. Today was the first day of class and I woke up in a panic feeling wildly unqualified to teach a course about comic books. Sure, I'm on the comics sholars listserv and have been absorbing comics theory and criticism for the last three or so years. Yes, I've been reading all the articles on comics I can find in journals and books. Yes, I read tons and tons of comic books. But still...I'm a scholar of the African American novel! To top it all off, because the course is big (40+ people), I'm teaching in one of our lecture rooms. There's a stage! I taught on a stage today, which totally exacerbated my anxieties about people looking at me while I'm teaching. (Yes, I know people are looking at me. I like to pretend they aren't though, which is rather difficult when you're standing on a stage.) So I'm standing on a stage, using Powerpoint (which, as a general rule, I detest), and feeling sick to my stomach because I feel like a big geeky fraud, when this exchange happens:

Very intense female student, clearly a lover of comics: Is there any reason why we aren't reading Maus?

Me, thinking, oh no I've been found out: Well, since even people who don't read comics, and I assume that most of the people in this class don't read comics, have been introduced to Maus in high school or some other arena, I thought we'd read other things together. I think it would be a better use of our time to look at things people haven't read before.

Girl: And people haven't read Dark Knight Returns?

Me, thinking I hear a hostile tone, but actually that's probably just in my head: Well, in my experience, even big fans of Batman and Superman haven't actually read a Batman or Superman comic. Of the many times I've taught DKR in various courses, I've run into very few students who have actually read it.

Girl: Well okay.

At this point the interrogation is over, though there were other questions about why there are no Marvel books on the syllabus and why I've never been to Comic-Con and whether their friend can draw their mini-comic. It was a very stressful 75 minutes.

Tomorrow I'm teaching comp and Intro to African American lit, both courses I could teach in my sleep at this point. But all I can think about is how not to make a fool of myself the next time I'm in the graphic novel course.

Breastfeeding Revisited

At the risk of courting the ire that accompanied my last breastfeeding post (if you want to get a whole bunch of hateful, angry comments on your blog, just suggest that breastfeeding may not be all it's cracked up to be), I'm linking to this *great* piece by Hannah Rosin in the April 2009 issue of The Atlantic. I found the piece through a discussion on She Writes about taboo subjects in writing about motherhood and someone suggested that we aren't allowed to talk about how the notion that breastfeeding is the cure-all for whatever ails you is kind of bullshit.

Here's the intro to the piece. Go read it.

In certain overachieving circles, breast-feeding is no longer a choice—it’s a no-exceptions requirement, the ultimate badge of responsible parenting. Yet the actual health benefits of breast-feeding are surprisingly thin, far thinner than most popular literature indicates. Is breast-feeding right for every family? Or is it this generation’s vacuum cleaner—an instrument of misery that mostly just keeps women down?

Black Writers Rock

Two noteworthy posts in the world of black publishing today.

First, Carleen Brice over at White Readers Meet Black Writers has a new store open at Cafe Press with really cool t-shirts, mugs, and bags. Claudia calls Brice a latter-day Georgia Douglas Johnson, and I tend to agree.

Also, Verb Noire, an independent publisher dedicated to, among other things, publishing stories by and about people of color, has a new call for submissions. They're looking for retellings of fairy tales and folk stories that feature people of color or that come from non-Eurocentric traditions. Check them out.

Questions Plaguing Me This Morning

1. Where does one buy a boy's tie for a 9 year old girl that is both fashionable and school appropriate?

2. Does being vegan really mean giving up butter and cheese? That seems like torture. (Especially after seeing Julie and Julia last night with Alison and watching people having near orgasmic reactions to butter.*)

3. Why isn't erotica aimed at black female audiences better written? I applaud Zane for trying to fulfill each and every erotic literature wish black women seem to have, but man, does she need a good editor.

*As in our last trip to our local arty movie theater, Alison and I scanned the crowd to see if I were indeed, again, as usual, the only black person in the room. In fact, we spotted one other black woman, someone Alison knew. Which, I think, says, something about Alison.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

Those who know me know that our battles with Cate, our youngest, over drawing on the walls are numerous and frequent. No trick or reward or punishment or lecture or tears works. She draws on the walls (I say "draws"--she actually draws, colors, scribbles, stamps, places stickers, glues paper...) every chance she gets. (Here I am reminded of something she said in the doctor's office after drawing picture of herself and making sure to include a knot in her hair: "I knot my hair. Anywhere. Anytime." With a devilish grin she said this.) So Brian and I have given in (despite our strongly held parenting belief that given clear boundaries and ample opportunity for self-expression, children will not draw on the walls--clearly Cate was sent to us to poke holes in all of our strongly helf parenting beliefs) and lined her room with drawing paper. The picture above is Cate just after Brian finished the first part of her wall. She immediately grabbed a marker, jumped on her bed and started scribbling. "I'm making crazy art," she said. "When I'm done, it will make you smile." The hat came later because artists where hats. If you look to the left, you can see evidence of the wall art the paper is now covering up.

And here is a picture of the finished project. Cate is just out of frame, knotting her hair. We found her in bed that night looking at all she drew (pictures of all us, superheroes taking the bus home, a turtle, a meat bug, among other things) and trying to cover up the fact that, in addition to drawing on her new wall, she had also drawn all over legs, ears, and scalp. "I wanted to be fancy," she said. And so, having, hopefully, conquered one problem, we embark on another.

Fun with Zane at My Local Library

I think I've blogged here before about my new research project. I'm writing about contemporary black popular/market fiction--those books that are in face out displays at the bookstore during AA history month. The ones about baby mama drama and urban angst and freaky threesomes. I've been reading a ton of this stuff all summer and have finally come to Zane's work.

In typical academic fashion, when I decided it was time to read Zane's work, I decided it was time to read *all* of Zane's work. As her particular brand of erotica isn't exactly the kind of thing carried by my university library, I turned to the public library. I requested all the Zane books in the system and had them delievered to my local branch. Last Friday, I go the library and check out Twent-Six Princesses for Cate and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing for Frances. At the desk, the librarian says I have four books on hold and brings me the ones pictured above. There was awkward silence as the librarian looked at me, then my children, then back at the smutty books I was checking out. I tried to be adult and rise above the embarassment I was feeling, but wound up just scooping up the books and rushing out the library.

We are in that library all the time. All the librarians there know my children by name. There are three more Zane books (with equally provocative covers, I'm sure) waiting for me to pick up. Can I say to them, "This is research. Really." I think I'll have to send Brian.

I Want My !@#$% Fruit Roll-Up

This morning, Cate woke us up at 7am to request a fruit-roll up. We told her she couldn't have one and should have some real breakfast instead. She insisted, we resisted, until finally she banged her little fists on the bed and yelled, "I want a fucking fruit roll-up." We immediately sent her to her room for a time out and to think about why you shouldn't use bad language; and when she was gone, Brian gave me the "You know, this is all your fault" look.

It's probably true. Frances is a bit of a puritan when it comes to cursing and other bad habits, so she never repeats the myriad curses that come out of my mouth. but Cate--cate loves to curse, almost as much as I do. And I do love it. Actually "love" doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of how much I enjoy saying "fuck" in any and all situations. It's one of the most satisfying things I do, actually.

But clearly, we can't have Cate telling her pre-school teacher, "I want my fucking fingerpaints," so something needs to be done. But as I've given up sleeping in, buying new shoes whenever I want, vacations alone with my husband, Saturday mornings spent reading (instead of watching soccer games and playing ponies), it seems really wrong that I should give up the pleasures of a good curse word.

Michael Jackson

Here are some random reactions to MJ's death from Casa Afrogeek:

--Frances asking, in quick succession while watching the news footage, "Isn't Michael Jackson supposed to be black?" "What's wrong with his nose?" "How can he spin on his toes like that?"

--Brian and I felt incredibly old when (1) upon hearing he was only fifty when he died, Brian, fast approaching fifty himself, said sadly, "He was so young" and (2) when the video for "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough" came on and I got up in the middle of the floor and forced my children to dance with me, just like the old folks used to do to me whenever Al Green was on the radio.

--My mother and sister and I spent all night on the phone singing MJ tunes to each other ("Heal the world, make it a better place, for you and for me and the enitire human race...") because we apparently are characters on a sitcom

--Cate has discovered a new favorite song to shake her butt to, "Smooth Criminal"

Michael Jackson - Smooth Criminal
by Tina007

A Poem for Mothers

Ode
by Elizabeth Alexander

I love all the mom bodies at this beach,
the tummies, the one-piece bathing suits,
the bosoms that slope, the wide nice bottoms,
thigh flesh shirred as gentle wind shirrs a pond.

So many sensible haircuts and ponytails!
These bodies show they have grown babies, then
nourished them, woken to their cries, fretted
at their fevers. Biceps have lifted and toted

the babies now printed on their mothers.
“If you lined up a hundred vaginas,
I could tell you which ones have borne children,”
the midwife says. In the secret place or

in sunlight at the beach, our bodies say
This is who we are, no, This is what
we have done and continue to do.
We labor in love. We do it. We mother.

Katrina Tourism

Here at Afrogeek Mom and Dad, we don't talk about Hurricane Katrina much, despite the facts that Brian is from the 9th Ward, that his mother and sister lost their 9th Ward homes in the storm and have been unable to return to New Orleans, that Brian's is a typical New Orleans family in that they all lived in New Orleans for generations (some never leaving the city limits) and now that is all gone forever, with family scattered around the country. We don't talk about it much here because it hurts, really really hurts, still, after almost four years, despite the fact that we weren't in New Orleans when the storm hit. It hurts because of the devastation the storm caused in Brian's family, but also because the city that we know and love will never be the same again. Corporate greed, national apathy, and morbid curiousity are conspiring to turn New Orleans into a Disney-version of itself. It's heartbreaking. Over at The Bottom of Heaven, Frieda links to a video made by N.O. natives about the tourism industry that's grown up around the storm. Check it out.

No One Calls Han Solo A Bitch

I am buried under a mountain of deadlines (one of them for a reader of this blog--I promise I'm working on it) and preparing to go out of town with the children and teaching. Busy doesn't even begin to describe these last few weeks. Yet, I have managed to watch Fanboys. As if George Lucas sensed my growing obsession with the new Trek universe (I bought an Uhura action figure yesterday--she's going to live on my desk at work), Fanboys is released on DVD to remind me of my first love. For all of you who are obsessed with all things Lucas, who can recite entire scenes of the original trilogy from memory, who camped out or stood in line for hours or drove to the next town over (like Brian and I did) because you had to see Phantom Menace first thing in the morning, then Fanboys is for you. Go rent it right now. For the rest of you, if the idea of a cancer-stricken guy and his pals driving across country to break into Skywalker Ranch to see a rough cut of Phantom Menace before it's released sounds like good a time, then you'll enjoy this movie too. But probably not as much.

My book has an ISBN #!

Look what I just saw: HEE!

That is so so cool.

Random Thoughts From Boston

1. Darius Rucker was on my flight from Charleston to Atlanta. He is foxier in person than you expect.

2. Elizabeth Alexander, who gave an amazing reading that was both a celebration of poetry and a an assertion of the importance of academics to poetry, wore the most unexpected, sexiest 4-inch stiletto heels. They were incongruous with her cute, baby doll face.

3. The intellectual earnestness of graduate students is unparalleled.

4. I am no longer a junior scholar. Not only that, but on more than one occasion, when people saw my name on my name tag, they said, "Oh! I know you from [Afrogeek Mom and Dad or the Comics-Scholars list, or my school website]." I found that a little disconcerting.

5. There was an anime convention in town, so it was not uncommon to see Sailor Moon and Captain Jack sitting at Au Bon Pain enjoying muffin together.

6. Hotels are the very best invention ever.

7. The Starbucks banana bread recipe is not the same all over the country. In Boston, banana bread comes with some kind of weird icing and is light anf fluffy. That's just wrong. Someone should write a letter.

8. The best meal I had was in a restuarant in the airport. I had a heavenly dish with crab cakes and grilled scallops and shrimp. I may have dreams about that meal.

I'm home now, with a ton of work to catch up om. All in all, it was a lovely trip.

Drive-by Post

Hey All!

I have been woefully absent from ths space. (I know, same old song...)I started back teaching last week at the exact same moment as I caught some creeping crawling death from the three year old. I have been alternating between grading and lying on my sofa, curled up waiting to die. And now, I'm off to Boston for the American Literature Association conference where I will present on race and American superhero comics for a bunch of people who have probably not seen an actual comic book in ages. (Though, to be fair, I read tons of comic books and am also a college prof--maybe all the academic geek-y types will come out of the woodwork for my presentation). Plus, Elizabeth Alexander will be there!

Here are some updates:

Work--The page proofs for my Octavia Butler book came yesterday. Woohoo! One step closer to being an actual book on in an actual store.

Books--I finished the Pride and Prejudice zombie book. It was an enjoyable read, but really had only one joke to tell. I'm dying to read Colson Whitehead's latest. I may finish the Twilight series.

Movies and TV--I've been mainlining episodes of Supernatural on DVD. I know what you're thinking--"Conseula, aren't you terrified of zombies and ghosts and demons?" Yes, I am, and watch a lot of the show through my fingers. As creepy as it is, though, it is also really funny and heartbreaking and I love it. I also saw Star Trek again. Spock and Uhura are my current happy place.

I'm off to teach now. See you when I get back from Boston.

Star Trek is Made of Win!

In rare instance of the universe arranging itself so that Brian and I could see not one, but *two* movies in one week without having to pay a babysitter, we managed to see both Wolverine and Star Trek. And while I enjoyed Wolverine a great deal (Hugh Jackman is amazing, and sexy as hell, as Wolverine and that guy whol played Gambit wasn't bad either), Star Trek rocked my socks. Brian and I are both Trek fans (though I've never seen an episode of the original series) and were super-excited to see this. (side note: Brian proposed to me after we saw the first Next Generation movie, so Trek has a special place in our hearts.) It was satisfying both for people who know Trek and got all the inside jokes (don't listen to the haters who are saying the film monkeys with canon; the movie does fool with canon, but in crazy delightful ways that make my fangirl heart really happy) and for people who've never seen anything Trek related before now.

I don't want to give anything away (so, if like me, you hate any kind of spoilers, stop reading now), but my very favorite part of the movie is the fact, despite the marketing campaign's suggestion otherwise, Uhura is not, in fact, the ultimate prize for the alpha white male. Kirk doesn't win her as a reward for his aggression and general disregard for the rules. Something much better than that happens. But you'll just have to see it to find out what that is.

Were-lions Make Me Blush*

Brian and I were in Barnes & Noble yesterday doing a little pseudo-research for a project I'm just beginning. As Brian often helps black women find the kinds of contemporary commercial fiction they are most interested in, I asked him to point out some of the titles that seemed the most popular. This resulted in me standing in B&N, reading the back cover summaries of books, giggling and blushing. Why didn't anyone tell me how *dirty* contemporary romance fiction is? The *summaries* had me blushing like a schoolgirl. I can hardly imagine what's actually in these books.

*There was one book in the romance section, not featuring black characters, about a romance novelist who tries to overcome her fear of cats by making the male protagonist in her latest book a were-lion. Without warning the character comes off the page as an actual flesh and blood being and she becomes involved with him. I opened the book to a random page and was greeted by the dirtiest, kinkiest sex scene. I squealed and dropped the book because I'm, apparently, 12.

Kick, Push...and Coast

Our new car has a great new sound system and the girls are getting their money's worth from it. Their latest favorite song is "Kick, Push" by Lupe Fiasco (check him out in the video). When I say favorite, I mean we listen to it incessantly in the car. In the morning, when we are in the car for approximately 10 minutes on the way to school, that means we listen to it about 2.5 times. But on Saturdays, when soccer games and birthday parties and grocery shopping and library trips and play dates keep us in the car off and on all day, I hear this song about 12,693 times. Brian and I are conspiring to get them to like something new (though the sound of the three year old singing the chorus in the backseat is kind of cute).

C.O.R.A. Diversity Roll Call Week #4--Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine

This week's roll call asks us to write about a Asian, South Asian, or Asian American writer we like. I'd like to recommend a comic book (or graphic novel, if you like) called Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine. I'd read some good reviews of it here and there and saw it on the shelf at my local comic book shop (where I had gone to purchase the latest issues of Tiny Titans and New Avengers), so I picked it up. It was amazing.

The basic story revolves around Ben, his girlfriend and his lesbian best friend. Ben (and his girlfriend and his best friend) is Asian American and may or may not have a serious white girl fetish. The story follows a typical narrative arc of self-deluded protagonist finding some clarity by the story's end, but what I really enjoyed about this book was Tomine's ability, through the art, to get me to *feel* Ben's cluelessness, his desperate need to keep himself in the dark. Tomine has a wonderful ability to convey awkward silence in this book. And as I am endlessly fascinated by works of fiction that portray the way race is actually lived in America (it matters when it matters, it doesn't when it doesn't, as I tell my students) while also being about something completely unrelated to race (in this case, how soul-sucking New York City can be, how soul-sucking self-delusion can be), this book rocked my socks.

Afrogeek Bookshelf

I thought my sabbatical would be full of lazy days spent reading whatever my heart desired. Instead, I've mostly been writing (which should not at all be read as a complaint) and reading things related to that writing. All that said, here's an update on what I have been reading:

I love Pride and Prejudice. Love it love it in a crazily cliche girly way. I am also terrified of zombies. Don't give me your logical "zombies aren't realy" arguments. Zombies are scary. Imagine my surprise, then, when I started Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and found myself utterly charmed by it. It's exactly what it sounds like: zombies in the P&P universe. Elizabeth and her sisters are Shaolin trained fighters of the "unmentionables" and Darcy is pretty handy with a blade and rifle himself. The plot and setting of the story is exactly the same as the original, only with more zombie goodness. I haven't finished it yet, but I'm enjoying it so far.

I am endlessly fascinated by discussions of black intellectuals not only because of the work that I do, but also because I am a black intellectual. Houston Baker's provocative title, Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era, immediately caught my eye when it was first published, but I'm only now getting a chance to read it. He posits MLK as the quintessential black public intellectual and measures the likes of Michael ERic Dyson, John McWhorter, Cornel West, and Shelby Steele against that standard. You can imagine how they fare. Baker is a great combination of agile thinker, engaging, playful writer, and snarktastic wit. His book, aside from being both painfully smart and delightfully catty, is also a great resource for those interested in the concept of race man/woman. This book is changing the way I'll teach King/Dubois/Baldwin in the future.

And finally, I am re-reading Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin. I'm writing about this book for a project completely unrelated to my book on Baldwin. I haven't re-read it since graduate school. The Baldwin book (or the Bal-damn book, as my husband as taken to calling it) has made it really hard to remember what I love about Baldwin, his work has been such a huge weight on my shoulders for so long. But this novel is a good reminder. If you haven't read it--the story of 14 year old John Grimes' religious conversion as well as the story of the adults who in his life (and that is such a inadequate description of this book about religion and blackness and racism and urbanity and the difficulty of becoming a whole human being capable of love)--you should rush right out and get it.

If You're Gonna Suck, Suck Out Loud*

I am, by nature, a shy person and creature of habit. I am happiest when left to read a book in a corner by myself (or with my husband or children). This fact comes as a surprise to people who have met me recently, since I've become a full-time working adult. I tend to hold my own in conversation and do well in new situations and in front of groups (though secretly I am a great big ball of anxiety because I suck at small talk and hate the knowledge that people are actually looking at me). My transition from a shy person to someone who pretends not to be shy happened after I got married and had children. Brian is a naturally gregarious person who loves to be the center of attention and is genuinely interested in other people. Traveling through life with Brian means having to get used to talking to all sorts of people. When we had Frances it became immediately apparent that she, like her father, loved being in the world and loved being with other people. Not wanting to inhibit her natural curiousity and fearlessness, I found myself pretending to be perfectly comfortable with engaging in conversation with parents and kids we didn't know, venturing down paths we'd never going down before, and generally doing things just because they were new. I tried to model the behavior I wanted to see in Frances, despite how much I would have rathered just go home and read a book.

Which brings us to last Saturday when Frances and a friend and I went to the Avery Research Center for a demonstration of blues harmonica and African drumming. All of the participants were given a harmonica and taught a few basic notes. And then we were all supposed to jam together. Renard Harris, the harmonica instructor, would point to each of us in turn and we would play or sing or drum or do whatever. This is exactly the sort of thing I spend my entire existence avoiding. But there I was with Frances and her friend, both of them looking terrified at the thought of being called on, and there was only one thing to do. Whenever Renard pointed at me, which he did several times, I blew on my harmonica or sang with enthusiasm, as if my stomach wasn't a big knot of anxiety.

In the end I think both girls had a really good time. Frances has been playing her harmonica almost non-stop since Saturday (she's writing blues songs in her notebook and listening to old Chess blues--every once in a while we hear her from her room saying, "Amen brother, Amen" while listening to Muddy Waters or Bo Diddley). I kind of hope, though, that I don't have to play harmonica or sing again any time soon.

*When Renard tried singing in a band for the first time and gave a really timid, lame performance, his friend gave him this piece of sage advice.

Poetry is the human voice

I blame Claudia and Rich for getting me hooked on this blog meme. For this week’s C.O.R.A. Diversity Roll Call, participants are asked to post and discuss a poem by a woman of color.

1)Post a poem by a woman of color. Your choice must be a poet who has written in the last forty years. Do your best to avoid the most anthologized, popular poets unless poetry is new territory for you. In that case, check out why the popular poets are well loved.

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry
is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said
“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats
for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.
Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,
overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way
to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)
is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.
Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,
and are we not of interest to each other?

This is a poem called "Ars Poetica 100: I Believe" by Elizabeth Alexander. Yeah, she's famous now because of Obama's inauguration, but a few months ago she was merely a successful, if a bit obscure, academic poet.

2)Tell us why you like the poem you chose. Don’t worry about the technical aspects of writing poetry, devices or forms. Give us your reader’s response. How does it make you feel or what does it make you think about? What questions does it raise for you?

I generally like "Ars Poetica" poems (even when they're not called "Ars Poetica," like Amiri Baraka's "Black Art"--"Poems are bullshit unless they are/ teeth or trees lemons piled/ on a step.") and this one resonated with me immediately. I love the urgency and the passion of it, as the speaker desperately tries to communicate something fundamental to her students. I love that there is a sense that, despite her best efforts, she's hasn't quite gotten her point across. She knows that they haven't heard her, but she's going to keep trying ("here I hear myself loudest"). I feel like that a lot in class.

3)If you are a poetry reader and you can recommend a contemporary woman poet of color, who do you recommend and why? I would really love to hear about emerging or lesser known poets. Introduce us to poets from around the world.

Ai is a poet who is grungy and bluesy and kind of depressing actually, but always a really provocative read.

Of Splash Awards and Podcasts

I have been enjoying an incredibly lazy spring break with my daughter. She's 8 and teeters wildly between needing to be in my constant presence, pratically attached to my side and wanting nothing at all to do with me. So this week was just a lot of hanging out and riding out the pre-hormonal storm. And while that was going on, two lovely things happened:

First, Claudia over at The Bottom of Heaven "splashed" us with an award for our "bewitching" blog. This is especially nice since TBoH is an addictive blog full of the kind of cleverness, intelligence and consistency (!) I aspire to.

An second, Djuanna at divafictionbytes interviewed me for her podcast series. We talked about what it means to be a black female college prof in a place like Charleston, about what books I want my girls to read, and what gadgets I can't live without (hint: I'm a horrible Luddite), among other things. It's posted here. Check it out, but don't tell me if you think I sound too dorky.

Afrogeek Mom Goes to the Spa

There has been a lot of silence around these parts lately. My only excuse is that life sometimes really just sucks. The latest suckiness in our lives resulted in us having to buy a new car. Now, while riding around in a car in which everything works as it should when it should doesn't suck, having to pay for it kind of does. Alas.

Today, though, I ventured out in to the truly awful weather to a local day spa to get a facial. Here is what happens when you get a facial: you are led into a room where the aesthetician instructs you to put a drape-y garment around the top part of your body; she asks about your skin problems and skin care regiment (my response: "uh, I wash my face with soap and use suncreen in the summer"--this was not the right answer) and then shines a very bright light in your face to check things out. Upon looking at my face under this very bright light, the aesthetician says, "Ill have to do some extractions today. Don't worry. Everyone has them."

My immediate reaction is, "oh, you've seen the blackheads on my nose. You'll get rid of them. Yay! You probably have some special spa scrub or mask or strip or something. More yay!" Fifteen minutes into the facial, though, I hear her say, "Tell me if you feel too much pressure." I think she means she will be pressing hard on my face as she applies the magical spa blackhead-removing potion. Oh no. The pressure comes from her literally *squeezing*, with her *fingers*, the blackheads out of my nose. Isn't that crazy?

The whole time this is going on, I'm thinking, "Wow. Brian would do this for free at home." On the other hand, that it needed doing suggests that we aren't actually going to do it at home. And my face is lovely now (I even have on lip gloss, which feels really foreign on my mouth but looks kinda foxy), so I guess it was money well spent.

Literary Obama

I'm guest-blogging over at Literary Obama. I reviewed Amazing Spider-Man #583 (also known as the Obama comic). Check out the review and check out the blog, which chronicles literary works by and about our 44th president.

New Independent Publisher: Verb Noire

I came across this today, a new start-up hoping to make a difference in sf/fantasy. There mission:

To celebrate the works of talented, underrepresented authors and deliver them to a readership that demands more.

What does that mean? That if you're a talented writer with an awesome, original story about a POC girl/guy/transgendered character, there is a place for you. And that if you're a sci-fi/fantasy fan who has grown tired of the constant whitewashing of these genres, there is a place for you, too.

Now that isn't to say that we will accept ANY ol' manuscript as long as it features a POC protagonist, because we will NOT. What we're looking for is quality, soul and PASSION, something that will resonate with readers for years to come.

"Everyone has a story." These words are the driving force behind this project, because we believe that EVERYONE has at least one good story in them, and that story demands to be shared with the world.

Today they made an addition to their call for submissions:

In other Verb Noire news we've decided that we need your best young adult and independent reader submissions. This decision is in no way motivated by the complaints of my 9 year old son about Harry Potter and Lord of The Rings knockoffs or my teenage nieces griping about Gossip Girl knockoffs. Well it is, but don't tell them that or I'll never hear the end of it. Don't be afraid to be different. It doesn't have to be vampires, werewolves, witches, wizards, or about rich spoiled teens. In fact I'd prefer it if you avoid those tropes unless you're doing something totally new with them. Don't be afraid to create new tropes or utilize ones that have no European connections. We're doing something totally new here, so don't be afraid to branch out and do something totally new in your writing.

As Brian and I complain all the time about the lack of books with little brown girls as protagonists (books that are *not* about slavery or Harriet Tubman or jazz), we are excited about the possibility of Verb Noire.

Film Review: I'm Through With White Girls

Conseula: I first read about this film about a year ago. It's an independent film directed by a black woman, produced by another black woman, about an afrogeek guy who dates white women. I figured there was no way I'd ever get to see this film, living as I do in Charleston. Imagine my surprise then when I happened upon the DVD in the video store the other day. I knew immediately Brian and I would be watching this on date night.

Brief plot synopsis: Jay Brooks decides that the problems in his relationships stem from the fact that he only dates white girls. He embarks on Operation Brown Sugar to find his black soul mate. And then he meets Catherine.

Brian: I have to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the movie. The afrogeek part of me identified with the character of Jay -- his being a comic book, er, graphic novel artist, and his quirkiness, but I wasn't exactly a fan of his fear of commitment, and his lack of concern for the women that he dumped. Like most male characters in romantic comedies, he had to go through the fire in order to become the self-actualized person who could commit to a relationship with a woman who could truly be his soulmate.

As for Catherine, I immediately fell in love with her. Like my wife, she was pretty, smart, artistic and quirky. What was there not to like?

Conseula: Aside from the fact that some of the black supporting characters played like caricatures (to me at least) and the special features behind-the-scenes footage suggested the filmmakers took themselves a little too seriously (this film won't really make you re-think anything about race), this movie was still adorably sweet and funny and honest. Check it out.

Octavia Butler Graphic Novel

When Brian and I heard Watchmen would be made into a movie (a movie we haevn't seen yet and won't see until Tuesday, so keep your spoilers to yourself, people), we were an equal mix of giddy joy and dread. I'm having the same reaction to this news (courtesy of Rich over at Glyphs) that Beacon is planning to adapt Octavia Butler's novel Kindred as a graphic novel. My first reaction is "woohoo!" Any new Octavia Butler material is always a good thing and the news that the executor of her estate wants to adapt all her work means their could be new work for years to come. My second thought, though, is that of all her work, Kindred is the least likely to yield an interesting graphic novel. Maybe I'm biased because it's my least favorite of her books. But an adaptation needs to be more than a simple transcription and that means the story needs some depth and complexity. There needs to be more story to tell. I'm not sure that's the case with Kindred. The Parable series and the Xenogenesis series seem to me better candidates for this kind of adaptation.

More Happiest Toddler on the Block

I realize that I didn't fully explain the fast-food rule. I don't have the book sitting in front of me, but I'll give it try anyway.

Basically Karp argues that you talk to an upset toddler (or any upset person, of whatever age) as if it were a fast-food exchange. When you are the the drive-thru and order a #3 with extra pickles, the guy inside repeats your order back to make sure he's got it right before telling you what the total is. He doesn't speak until he's sure you're done speaking and that he's heard you correctly.

So, in the case of your toddler (or mine), when the kid is upset, instead of saying "It's okay, it's okay" while they are hysterical, repeat back to them what they are saying (in toddler-ese). They get to speak first because they are upset. You should also hit their "sweet spot," mirroring back their emotions, maybe ratcheted down a notch or two. So be sad when your little one is sad, be angry or scared when they are. Your little one, if this works right, recognizes that you hear them and empathize and then they calm down enough to hear what you have to say. When it's your turn to speak, you can remind them of the rule they just broke or distract or give them an alternative or whatever else you need to do diffuse the situtation. In Cate's case, sometimes just calming down is enough to diffuse the situation. Karp reminds us that these are the kind of interactions we have with our toddlers when they are excited. He gives the example of a kid who climbs to the top of the slide by herself for the first time. We let her express her enthusiasm first and we mirror that enthusiasm, in toddler-ese ("You climbed up! All the way! Yay!") before we then take our turn ("I'm so proud of you.")

A typical exchange here goes something like this:

Cate (hysterically crying because Frances won't let her stand in front of the sink to brush her teeth): I want to brush my teeth! I want to brush my teeth! Frances is breaking my feelings!

Me (getting down to her level): What's wrong Cate?

Cate: I was brushing and Frances won't let me. I want to brush my teeth. Frances is mean. She broke my feelings.

Me (with a sad voice): You want to brush your teeth?

Cate: Yes.

Me: Catie sad? Sad sad Catie?

Cate: Hmm hmm.

Me: Why don't we wait to for Frances to finish and then we can take our turn.

Cate: Okay.

On other mornings, there would be hysterical tears and yelling the whole time we're getting ready as I try to explain to Cate that she can just wait her turn or get her to brush her teeth in the other bathroom. Now, it's brief exchange in which I get her to calm down and we move on.

We're about a week into our campaign to get Cate to act like human child and not wild animal and it's going well. We are now adding in some of Karp's time-in suggestions and those are going well to.

Again, in my pre-Cate life I the very idea of reading a book to figure out how to raise your kid was just plain silly and wrong-headed. And, again, I'm not sure these tricks would have worked with Frances (Frances *hated* baby talk and responded, still does, best when you talked to her reasonably and truthfully), but this book is really helping with Cate.

Afrogeek Mom Recommends: Happiest Toddler on the Block

Our three year old has the nickname "Barbarian." She is like some rare exotic forest creature come to live with us, one who has some curiosity about our human customs, but really no intention at all of adopting our ways. We are at a complete loss about what to do to civilize this creature, which is how we wound up spending our last date night in a bookstore looking through advice books about child-rearing.

Let me back up a bit and tell you a little something about kid #1. She certainly had her share barbarian tendencies. (I remember distinctly deciding when she was three and in the seemingly constant throes of temper tantrums that I was never having another kid.) But, all things considered, she was infinitely easier. We did a modified version of attachment parenting with her: we fed on demand, we had a family bed for three years, we held her has much as possible, we gave her as much skin-to-skin contact as possible. All of that seemed really natural to us and, frankly, worked brilliantly. When she started to walk and crawl we removed all breakable and dangerous objects from the low shelves and replaced them with her toys and books. She had (mostly) free reign of our apartment because we felt that it was her space as much as ours. We believed very strongly that little people, like big people, want to be treated with respect and dignity. So we explained rules to her instead of just handing down edicts. We set reasonable boundaries with reasonable consequences for stepping outside of them. Again, this all worked brilliantly. Our first kid is naturally a thinker and a rule follower--she likes things explained to her, in detail; she needs to know the whole plan before you execute it; she hates baby talk. We think she's turned out great. We felt we were great parents.

Then the universe sent us kid #2. None of our parenting tricks worked. As an infant, she was most content when left alone. She didn't want to be held or cuddled. She didn't want us to sing or coo. She wanted us to meet her needs and go away. When she learned how to walk she started trying to meet her needs herself, often going to the refrigerator or pantry to try to get her own juice or snack. She doesn't seem to care at all about rules. She is a big drama queen (one of her first phrases was "That's so tragic.") and an even bigger bully (she, at 3, thinks nothing of kicking or throwing something at her 8 year old sister). In short, we have a kid we don't know how to parent. So we went looking to a book.

Harvey Karp's assertion that toddlers (1-4 year olds) are like cavemen is exactly the kind of thing that would have had me rolling my eyes with my first kid. But, wow, is it an accurate description of kid #2.

We've been trying two of his techniques, the Fast-Food Rule and Toddler-ese. Again, if I had read this book 5 years ago, I would have scoffed. The idea of talking in "toddler-ese" and hitting my kid's emotional "sweet spot" when she's having tantrum would have read to me like complete pseudo-psychological nonsense. (We always refused to participate in the first kid's tantrums. We waited for her to return to a state of reasonable calm.) Truthfully, it read kind of like that now. Until I tried it.

Cate, since she's been potty-trained, wakes up once or twice a night to go to the bathroom. Only, she's so sleepy she doesn't quite realize she needs to go and gets really angry when you try to make her go. It's been a nightly fight for about a month now. Out of frustration I tried the fast-food rule and toddler-ese. Instead of saying, "Cate, you need to go to the bathroom. Let's go to the bathroom so you can go back to bed," in a sleepy voice that imitated her sleepy state, I said, "Sleepy? Sleepy? Catie sleepy?" She gave her little eyes a rub and shook her head. I said, again, in a sleepy voice, "So tired. I know. Let's potty and snuggle back in bed." Another nod. She went to the bathroom with no problem and went right back to sleep. No tears. No tantrums. No yelling. Amazing.

I was really skeptical of this book (And self-help books generally) and I'm not convinced it would have worked for the first kid, but I have to say, it seems to be doing the trick. She isn't civilized yet, but there seems to be hope.

Saturday Night Random-ness

Random #1
The new television ads for Slumdog Millionaire are touting it as the most moving love story of the season. There a great shots of kisses and long, soulful looks against a soundtrack of almost riotous Bollywood music. Now, I have no problem with the characterization of this movie as a love story because it certainly is that. But it's also, in many ways, for large stretches of the movie, a deeply disturbing movie. It's about a guy's love for a girl and about his run on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire; but it is also about orphan brothers from the slums of Mumbai and the things they need to do and are forced to do to survive. I'm not saying I didn't enjoy the movie (I actually loved it). I'm just saying these new commercials are a bit dishonest.

Random #2
What kind sick, twisted universe do we live in that gives your child a 102 degree fever at 3am that then drops to 100 by 7am and 98 by the time you get to the pediatrician's drop-in hours at 8am? What the hell is that?

Speaking of hell--is there any more hellish place that drop-in hours on a Friday morning? Exhausted parents (because we've been up all night) with grumpy, germy kids all trying to get seen by the doctor before the weekend. We love our pediatrician and have no complaints at all about the care we get. But the 90 minutes we sat before we got to see the doctor (all to find out Frances *doesn't* have strep throat, just some random virus) even had me a little testy.

Random #3
I'm reading Order of the Phoenix with Frances. This is her first time through it (when we tried to read it aloud to her when it first came out, she told us it was too scary and, therefore, inappropriate for poppets; she said the same thing about Revenge of the Sith and still refuses to see it; this is heartbreaking to her father and I, but I digress) and my third time. Two things strike this time around. First, there is no way I would let my kid go to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. It is a crazily scary and dangerous place. I suppose parents don't really know what's going on because Umbridge is monitoring all lines of communication and isn't letting out any bad news, but still. How many times does Voldemort have to attack Harry in or around Hogwarts before parents say enough?

Second, if Frances wrote fan fiction, she'd write great Mary Sue stories about her adventures with Fred and George Weasley and Lee Jordan. I used to, along with my best friend from middle school, write Mary Sue fic about our adventures with Bon Jovi and Whitesnake.

Happy Mardi Gras!

I started to list Mardi Gras as a black thing that I love, but since it's actually a Catholic thing and not a black thing, it doesn't really qualify.

[This is Brian. She's not from New Orleans, so she doesn' t know about the foul debauchery that takes place at Congo Square (the corner of Rampart and Claiborne). There's nothing remotely Catholic about that!]

True, I have never been to Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Nice Catholic girls from Southwest Louisiana were not allowed to go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras (or any reason really) for fear that we would be turned into drunken sluts as soon as we crossed the city limits. (Though, to be fair, it is considered conventional wisdom at home that only tourists flash their tits for beads. Native girls know someone might see you and tell your mother, and you can't have that.) No, all of my Mardi Gras celebrations were spent in Lafayette, LA. You could take your kids and your grandmother and eat and drink and be merry for five days straight before you fasted and contemplated the sacrifice of Jesus for 40 days.

We are really missing Mardi Gras today.

Book Rec: Jump at the Sun by Kim McLarin

Okay, I clearly suck at writing every day. But I'm here today, so let's get going.





I've just finished reading Jump at the Sun by Kim McLarin. It's hard to describe what this book is about because it's about so many things really, but at its root it's about maternal ambivalence. The protagonist, Grace, is a black women who has recently located to the suburbs of Boston with her husband and two daugthers. She is a sociologist who did not earn tenure at Duke and who is presently staying at home with her children. The book opens with her desperate realization that the unprotected sex she had with her husband could very well lead to baby #3 and that's the last thing she wants. The story then becomes her own articulation of her ambivalence and desperation, interwoven with the stories of her mother and grandmother, two women who made very different choices about the way they mothered.



This book was riveting and disturbing. At one point Grace is having a day that is very familiar to me--her children are unexpectedly out of school and are demanding to be entertained every minute of the day. She is at her wit's end, tired of their bickering, bored out of her mind with Candyland, and desperately needing a break. I've been there. I daresay there isn't a mother who hasn't been there. Grace's response to this though, contemplating leaving them (even going so far as to send them into the house and stand on the front porch rationalizing just walking away), freaked me out. I had to put the book away for a few days before I could continue.



What I ultimately loved about this book is how human and flawed Grace is. There is seemingly nothing at all wrong with her life (big house, bills paid, healthy beautiful kids, loving husband), yet still she is unhappy. That made her unhappiness more believable to me because it was real. Sometimes you just don't know what the problem is. McLarin isn't trying to tell me that suburbia is evil or that motherhood is soul-sucking or that black women are the mules of the world (though all those things might be true). She gives me a brief window into the mind of a woman who has tons of questions but very few answers and that, for me, made the book a worthwhile read.

Black Things I Love #8: The Cosby Show

When I was in college (1991-1996, the heyday of neo-black nationalism), it was de rigeur to be deeply suspicious of The Cosby Show. The family was too unrealistic, the argument, trying too hard to prove to white America that black folks were just like everybody else, too eager to ignore the realities of black life. I wasn't a nationalist, but I sympathized with others' frustrations with the show. The life of the Cosbys certainly looked nothing like my black life.

Watching the show now, with my own black family, is a very different experience. My life still doesn't look like the Cosbys', though it is significantly closer than when I was in college, but I can appreciate what Bill Cosby was trying to do. It's nice to be able to turn on a black show that isn't about blackness. I like that the Cosbys were matter-of-factly black, without apology or explanation. I like that it's show that, while not representing my life experiences, nevertheless represents my experience of my blackness.

And here's what else I like: the completely angst-free portrayal of a two-income household. I love that Claire Huxtable being a mother and wife and lawyer was treated as no big thing--just another part of being a grown up. Does the show completely gloss over the fact that having a successful career and five (!) kids is significantly harder than they make it look? Sure. But again, without apology or explanation, they gave us a woman who mothered her children well, had a career she loved and was good at it, and who had a husband who clearly adored her. Claire Huxtable was too busy living her fabulous life to navel-gaze about having it all. Where can we find that on television now?

Black Things I Love #7: The Electric Slide

I know I 've missed a couple of days. I've had some tooth trauma and a field trip with Frances's school, but I'm back.

First a Frances story: Her class took a field trip to Drayton Hall to learn about the Civil War. At one point, a guide was telling them about the 54th Massachusetts and how the men in that regiment said they would refuse their pay until they were paid equal to white soldiers. My daughter, sitting in the front row of course, says loud enough for everyone to hear, "I guess they never got paid then."
**********
Today's black thing I love is the electric slide. Every wedding reception, graduation party, Saturday BBQ in the park, etc. will, at some point, see a large group of people doing the electric slide. I even remember doing the electric slide on the sidewalk during Mardi Gras as a marching band marched past playing Cameo's "Word Up." It's a fun dance, easy to do, and incredibly egalitarian--young and old, men and women, tragically hip and profoundly uncool, everybody can do it.

Black Things I Love #6: Al Green

I've often thought I'd like to write a book about my grandmothers.

My father's mother, Dorothy Mae, aka Dot, was a loud, funny, crude woman who loved Atlanta Braves baseball, fishing, and cold beer. She lived in a big house with a man I only ever knew as Mr. Happy. (I also thought he was a white man until I was in graduate school. I probably would have thought my grandmother was a white woman had I not known she was my grandmother.) She used chamber pots because she didn't trust indoor plumbing and kept a compost heap so she could use the worms for fishing. She bought my sister and I an Atari game system when they first came out and she fed us pineapple juice and toast whenever we slept at her house. We used to love going there.

My mother's mother, Tina, is not loud or crude. She very much believes one needs to behave with a certain amount of decorum in the world. Yet, she is also a woman who wants to be cremated and have her ashes scattered beneath the floorboards of a nightclub she frequented until it burned down. I was thinking about her last night as I watched Justin Timberlake (who comes pretty close to being a black thing I love) sing "Let's Stay Together" with Al Green at last night's Grammys. My earliest memory of Al Green is living in my grandmother's house, before my parents were married, and of spending weekends there after they were married, and hearing my grandmother play Al Green records on Sunday morning. This was a woman who grew up in a traditionally black "holy ghost" church (as we called when I was little) and who married a devout Catholic. There was an awful lot of church in her life. She responded to it by listening to Al Green sing "Love and Happiness" on Sunday morning. My mother says she always played a James Cleveland record first, but I only remember the Al Green.

Here, for your viewing pleasure, is Al Green at the Grammys.

Black Things I Love #5: Black Panther

Today's edition of Black Things I Love is brought to you byBrian, aka Afrogeek Dad.

The Black Panther. Marvel Comics. King of the fictional African nation of Wakanda. And super kick-ass, bad-ass, super-confident 1960s hero with no need to stick-it-to-the-man. No blaxploitation here. Just a good, well-rounded image of blackness in comics that young readers could read and not feel ashamed of. He wasn't the first black character in comics, but he was the first never to be drawn as a caricature, never to be written speaking false ghetto-ese. He was never a sidekick to or a spin-off of a white character. He didn't get his powers by being someone else's lab assistant. He didn't get his powers in prison. [Note from Conseula: Brian here is bad-mouthing Luke Cage, which I really don't appreciate.] His multiple levels of super-asskickery come only from years of intense training and discipline backed by the science and religion of his own culture. I *heart* the Black fucking Panther.

Black Things I Love #4: Neil deGrasse Tyson

Tonight the whole family went to the College of Charleston's Observatory open house. Five telescopes were set got to see the Moon, Venus, the Orion Nebula and lots of other cool stars I'm not going to remember. This outing inspires today's black thing I love: astrophysicist extraordinaire Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Every time I see him on television, he makes me start all over again as a physicist (despite my appalling lack of any real mathematical ability). After his last appearance of the Daily Show, for about a week, I harbored great fantasies about inviting him for a guest lecture at the College. I had the dinner all planned out in my head. Then I found out how much his speaking fee is and realized that dinner will remain a fantasy. He's still pretty awesome, though.

Black Things I Love #3: Lucille Clifton's Homage to My Hips

To say that I weigh more now than I did when I was in college is a laughable understatement. That's me in the picture above. I'm probably 20 or 21 there (though I look 12; how much bigger could my head have gotten?) Since then I've had two kids and embarked on a fairly sedentary career. I used to run. Throughout grad school I was almost always enrolled in a dance class. Brian and I used to hike when we lived in Washington. (We went hiking for our honeymoon on the lovely Whidbey Island.) But life takes its toll and it seems to have taken its greatest toll on my hips.

Now many is the day when I'm perfectly fine with the body I travel the world in. But on those days that I'm not, I pull out this poem and I feel a little better.

homage to my hips
these hips are big hips.
they need space to
move around in.
they don't fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don't like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top

Somewhere Pecola Breedlove is Crying

I feel inspired by Black Snob's post this morning, On Black Girls, Beauty, and Barbie Dolls. Go read it. You'll be moved, I promise. It was prompted by recent news that advertisers, in response to the popularity and adorable-ness of Sasha and Malia Obama, or the WeeMichelles as they are called over at Michelle Obama Watch, want cute little brown girls for their campaigns and that modeling agencies are scrambling to meet the demand. One agency rep offered this explanation for their lack of diversity:

Marlene Wallach, president of Wilhelmina Kids & Teens, says the First Daughters are tough subjects to match. “It’s a very specific age and a very specific ethnicity, so there aren’t that many girls that would necessarily fit the bill.”

WTF? One doesn't even know where to begin with is. Should we first point out there really isn't anything exotic at all about the "specific ethnicity" of Sasha and Malia? Are there any black people whose family has been here for more than a generation who aren't some crazy mixture of African and European blood? Should we point out that beautiful black girlhood looks like Malia and Sasha but also like Kyla Pratt and Keke Palmer and Willow Smith? Or do we simply point out that this woman clearly has never actually seen little black girls?

In the age of the Obama, when so many things seem possible, this is the kind of thing that keeps me awake at night. That people won't see my beautiful black girls, or that people will see them but will read their existence as some sort of aberration. I don't want my girls to be invisible or rare birds. I just want them to be.

Black Things I Love #2: Gumbo

"On a cold winter's day, gumbo is communion for the body."--Brian

I'm sure some food historian out there my take issue with defining gumbo as "black," but as I'm from Louisiana and have never actually eaten gumbo (and I've eaten a lot of gumbo) prepared by someone other than a black woman, I'm going to call it black.

At home there are three questions that matter when meeting someone new: Who's your mama? Are you Catholic? And can you make a roux? While the first two are self-explantory, the third is nonetheless crucial. Roux (pronounced "roo") is the basis of any good gumbo (or etouffee for that matter) and getting it just right--cooking up butter and flour so that it turns a delicious caramel brown, without burning it, is considered an art.

In New Orleans, Brian's home, you can have okra gumbo or seafood gumbo or chicken and sausage gumbo. In Lafayette, where I'm from, we put all of that in the same pot (clearly the superior way to eat gumbo, though Brian doesn't let me cook it this way). If you meet anyone who is putting tomatoes or any other vegetable that isn't celery, onions, or bell pepper (the holy trinity of Cajun/Creole cooking), you know that person is making their gumbo all wrong.

Here's a last quote from Brian: "Make sure you put a little bit of cayenne pepper on top of your serving so that the gumbo lingers with you throughout the day, like any good sensual experience." (Actually what Brian said was quite a bit dirtier than that, but I've cleaned it up for you.)

Black Things I Love #1: Our Afrogeek-y President

I'm trying to institute a little writing discipline into my life, so I'm participating in Nablopomo's writing challenge. Instead of writing about this month's theme ("want"), though, I will instead observe Black History Month and Valentine's day by writing about black things I love. First up, Barack Obama: Fanboy.

Tales of Obama's comic booking collecting are almost certainly exaggerated, but I find this Onion piece, about Obama's cabinet complete cluelessness when it comes to Marvel comics, hysterical and comforting nevertheless. Here's a snippet:

While Obama has not scheduled another meeting with his cabinet this week—a respite the president hopes they will use to brush up on the 235-issue Savage Sword series—he is expected to meet with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates on Friday to discuss Afghanistan. A holdover from the Bush administration, Gates told reporters he may have gotten off on the wrong foot with the new president, citing an occasion when Obama asked him what he knew about 1984's Secret Wars, a 12-issue limited Marvel release. Gates then handed a visibly confused Obama 1,400 classified pages on covert CIA operations in El Salvador.

Is he really pacing up and down on the sidewalk outside his favorite comic shop every Wednesday (new comic day) hoping for the latest issue of New Avengers (my new favorite as of late)? Probably not. But the sheer geeky joy he seems to get from digging deep into the mind-numbing minutiae of political bureacracy or Keynesian economics or Medicare spending tells me he is fellow afrogeek.

Good Hair

I've written before about my own hair drama, but not about the how the drama plays out in my relationship with my daughters' hair. It's conventional wisdom (at least where I am from) that the kind of angst white girls have about their weight, black girls have about their hair. One of the parenting things I think about almost constantly is my girls' hair and whether or not their sense of worth or their own beauty will be diminished because it's not run-your-fingers-through-it straight and bouncy like their friends or women in shamppo commercials. One of the most trying moments I've recently with my older daughter is the morning she had a fit in the kitchen because I would let her wear her hair loose to school for "messy hair day." She insisted that her teacher was going to brush everybody's hair after the class took a picture. How do you explain to an 8-year old, without making her feel like the odd girl out, that brush her white firend's hair back into a ponytail is not really the same as brushing her hair?

Chris Rock apparently had the same concerns about his own daughters and made a documentary about it. Check it out.

Inappropriate Silliness on a Friday Afternoon

I had a whole post planned about my complete inability to parent the three year old who lives at my house (don't worry--that post is still coming). Instead of feeling sorry for myself, though, I'll post these instead.

First, in the tradition of Twisted Toyfare Theater, here is Barack Obama taking on Dick Cheney in costume Darth Vader, complete with light sabers.

And here is a lady talking about the Obamas' relationship. Watch and listen carefully. I think she has no idea she's being inappropriate.

Rev. Lowery Rocks My Socks; Praisesong for the Day

I was a weepy mess during the inauguration, and applauded several times during Obama's speech. But I have to say my favorite moments of the day didn't come from Obama, but rather from Joseph Lowery and Elizabeth Alexander.

While I continue to understand and support (mostly) Obama's pragmatic downplaying of the racial significance of his victory, it was incredibly satisfying to have Lowery, in his benediction, remind us of the racial context of the day.

Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get in back, when brown can stick around... when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right. That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen. Say Amen'...

And I also absolutely loved Alexander's poem. Here's my favorite bit

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by “Love thy neighbor as thy self.”

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp — praise song for walking forward in that light.

Mommy Notes

I have long held that part of what makes motherhood so difficult is the unreasonable expectations women are encouraged to live up to. (Brian could write a whole book on the pitifully low expectations of fathers, but that's another post). The idea that having a womb means that I will unequivocally, at every moment, enjoy my children and love the day-to-day task of taking care of them, for me at least, has been something I struggled with. Because, honestly, sometimes parenting is nothing more than a pain in the butt, no matter how cute my girls might be in their self-fashioned superhero costumes or playing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star on the guitar and moroccas.

A Chronicle of Higher Education article offers us some good news and bad news about parenting, particularly the nature/nurture debate. It's a great article about what the latest in sociology and psychology tell us about parenting, but this was my favorite bit:

According to a study by a team of scholars led by the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, mothers enjoy child care just a little more than housework, and a lot less than watching television. As an economist, I have to suspect that a major reason for parents' lack of enthusiasm for their role is simply diminishing marginal utility: Average enjoyment of parenting is low because parents are overdoing it.

Notes from Sabbatical, Part 2

(Hello Moxie Readers!)

The Good: I spent a guilt-free evening with Brian (it's a lot easier to enjoy date night when there aren't set of papers to be graded or class prep waiting for you at home). We saw Slumdog Millionaire, which was both heartwarming and incredibly disturbing, in part because the little kid who played the young Jamal looks a lot like my youngest kid--something about the big ears and the mischievious glint in his eyes.

The Unexpected: Everyone has an opinion about how I should spend my sabbatical and many people to seem to take it as a personal offense if they see me on or near campus. I am usually greeted by my colleagues with, "Hey. How's it going?" This week, almost everyone who's seen me on campus says, "What are you doing here?" I find that disconcerting.

The Not-So-Unexpected: I really don't want to be a stay at home mother. I am reminded again, as I am periodically, when the nature of my work allows me to spend an extended amount of time away from the office, that the care and feeding of children and the maintenance of a household alone cannot sustain me. I fully recognize that parenting is a lot easier when I haven't been at work all day. I'm not as exhausted, I have more patience, I get to go on school field trips. But I'm also fully aware that this arrangement is only temporary (my sabbatical is only a semester long), and since I'm writing and researching, I'm still working a great deal. That sustains me. This is not my life. And I'm happy about that.

Notes from Sabbatical, part 1

I wish I had something profound to say about being on sabbatical, but sadly I don't. The only insights I've gleaned from my first three days is that I don't quite know what to do with unstructured time. My days stretch endlessly before me and that freaks me out a bit. Today was better than Monday (I did actual work today), but I can tell this will take some getting used to.

All that said, sabbatical does give me some time to indulge in distractions, like this:

Clearly everybody in American has already seen this video, but I'm just now seeing it from beginning to end. And while I find the politics of the song horribly bourgeois and kind of antifeminist, I can avert eyes. I love it.

I've also been thinking about this article from Bitch: Aint I a Mommy. One of the reasons I started this blog is because I was in constant search of moomy narratives that mirrored my experience. In all the talk about "mommy wars" you rest assured that the voices of women of color (not to mention single women or working class women or lesbian women) are few and far between. I wanted to hear from women like me: nerdy black women who loved their kids and their job and were happily, mostly, doing the mommy dance. I couldn't find those voices, so here we are. Now that I'm on sabbatical, I'll have some more time to reflect on the mommy dance.

Kwanzaa with the Afrogeeks

I had a long post planned defending Kwanzaa, chastising those who mocked the "made up" nature of Kwanzaa (as if all holidays weren't man-made social constructs), correcting the myth that Kwanzaa is a black separatist, socialist holiday, but instead I will share how I came to celebrate Kwanzaa.

My oldest daughter learned about Kwanzaa last year at her public school. She learned that it was an African American holiday and wanted to know why we, a family of African Americans, didn't celebrate it. In my head I had a whole list of reasons, similar to the ones found in this article and the comments on this post, but I didn't tell her any of this. Instead I set about the task of reading all I could about Kwanzaa and figuring out how our family would observe the holiday. Last year it was important to celebrate Kwanzaa not because it was a black holiday but because my daughter, who often expresses anxiety about being the only black kid in her social circle, wanted to do something "black." However contrived the whole thing might be, easing some of her anxiety would be worth it.

The funny thing is, though, the family loved it. We bought a kinara and candles, but spent money on little else. We checked out some books on Kwanzaa from the library and read about Africa. We researched black scientists on the internet. We made a bunch of African flags from construction paper and made a black, red, and green streamer for the Christmas tree. And for seven days we enjoyed being together as a black family.

This year, as we got out the Christmas decorations, my daughter reminded me that we need to get out the Kwanzaa decorations as well. She had her wish list for Santa, but she was also looking forward to the handmade/useful/culturally relevant Kwanzaa gift she would get on the sixth night of Kwanzaa. She had hopes for a necklace made with African beads to match the bracelet she already owns. She was over the moon about the quilt made from her old t-shirts that she actually received. Our observance this year consisted of talking about the way we could practice the Kwanzaa principles all year (my favorite: the girls deciding on their own they could practice unity by not fighting all the time over toys), correcting my oldest daughter's impression that African American history consists solely of slavery and emancipation, reading about famous African princesses and fierce African American women, and listening to a lot of music (the baby has developed quite the passion for Motown and Miles Davis). We also made Kwanzza pal refrigerator magnets.

All in all, it has been a pleasant way to spend seven days