Thoughts and Words Ill-Sorted

On a lighter note, Sydney and baby and I have made it 30 weeks into the pregnancy.  We’re on the home stretch!  So far, all is going well: all tests are clear, I’m still feeling pretty good and mobile, and we’re able to focus on our work.  I have pushed all remaining baby-related mania back to March (when I’ll do taxes, scour the house, wash baby things, etc.).  I have found that all the baby pressure in my stomach seems to demand that I walk regularly, so I’ve been making regular pilgrimages down our road and into the surrounding country.  If I don’t walk, I feel like a tire that someone is inflating a bit too vigorously.  It makes me laugh to think that some of our neighbors may catch sight of me on occasion and wonder, “Good grief.  She’s out here walking regularly in the cold, but she’s still expanding around the middle.  What’s she eating?”

On a related note, the university librarian was chatting with me after a meeting recently and asked why she wasn’t seeing me at the gym this semester.  I told her I was working from home more and had taken up walking outside instead; I thought I’d leave the gym to those undergrads who seem desperate to get ready for spring-break bikinis.  She laughed and said something very complimentary about my not having to worry about wearing one, either–which made me think she hadn’t looked too hard at me recently.  Or my scarves are bigger than I think.

Erin

The closer we come to having a child of our own the more a single question recurs in my reading and conversation with others: “Can you provide for a child?”  Next in line, of course, is the implicit, “For how many children can you provide?”  And underpinning it all is the question: “Do you meet my standards for provision?”

If this is, usually, a matter of private concern (for parents and extended families), it has perhaps never been more publicly or more coarsely treated than recently, with the birth of the octuplets in California.  Hearing responses from different groups of people gives one a sense of their value systems.  Some see these kids as a mark of life’s abundance, praising God or nature for the creation of so many lives and/or the medical world for meeting the needs of such premature children.  Some, however, see this as a failure of the medical community to reduce the number of foetuses and thereby raise the odds of success for the remaining children.  Many, when hearing of the number, immediately jump to the conclusion that this woman and her children will need public assistance and thus add to the weight around our country’s neck (and I’ll admit that 8 premies makes for one heck of an albatross, if you think about it that way).  I’m sure those last, in particular, nearly flipped a lid when they heard that the woman has six older children.  And I’m sure the medical question will get more interesting now that we know (after much media invasion of the family’s privacy) that the woman did have embryo implantation, and thus the multiples aren’t merely the result of fertility drugs (this is where doctors get nervous).  News is still coming in, so I can’t vouch for the reliability of all of this information, but it seems pretty clear that the few facts we do know have thrown the public into a tizzy.

How many is “too” many?  And why do we assume that there is, at some particular number, a “too” that gives us the right to step in?  I find this woman’s case interesting because it puts the ethics of the fertility industry to a point in a way I haven’t seen before.  Yes, I find bioethics really, really interesting, and I did long before having kids on my horizon.  Some of our assumptions about what’s “appropriate” use of technology have to do with our visions of a prototype fertility case.  Usually it’s a childless couple that has been attempting to have children for many, many years.  Why, many ask, would we not do everything possible to give them a child?  It’s always “a” child.  But why, I’m wondering, is the question different if the case is that of a woman (no mention of a father just yet) who seeks to have a child after she’s already had children?  And what if she chooses, despite a doctor’s advice, to reject embryo reduction?  We talk a lot in this society about the value of the individual.  We teach our kids to feel special and we ourselves strive to be distinct from each other.  But then why, when it comes to a couple’s decision to have two children instead of one (or seven instead of six) does the existence of another child in the family change the “value” of the child under consideration?  Continue reading →

Forget chairs. This anecdote is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while (from here):

My college chemistry professor, of national renown in organic chemistry, told the following story on himself. One summer, the professors’ wives left on an extended vacation together. In their absence, the stay-behind husbands would share cooking duties at one house. After dinner the first night, no one wanted to wash the dishes. The microbiologist came up with a solution. He said that if they just piled the dirty dishes in the sink, filled it with water, and left them for a week or two, the bacteria would clean the dishes for them. When the bacteria were done, they would die. The men could then drain the sink and use the dishes again. The men could go to another house the next night, and so forth. My professor said they did that the whole summer and no one got sick.

That’s even better than using the farm pressure washer.

Sydney

Sydney and I have spent quite a lot of time at home recently.  He’s got a paper due shortly, I’ve got one due shortly after that, and we’re both feeling the need to make progress before the baby gets here.  And, oh yes, we got more than half a foot of snow and lots of freezing rain today–a very good reason to sit tight.

On Tuesday our home office got quite a boost with the addition of a handsome glider.  It was the one piece of “baby” furniture I wanted, having spent many, many late-night hours rocking other people’s children to sleep.  By the way, we didn’t have to entice Arwyn into the photo; she’s taken quite a liking to the chair and claims it anytime we get up.

Last night as I was reading in my department building I heard a woman crying.  Not loudly, but the waves of unhappiness easily made their way down the hall.

Imagine my sense of relief when I realized that the crying was that of a woman in a movie and not a real, live, suffering person in my hall.

I like to hide out in library cafes and comfortably-chaired nooks around campus to do work when waiting to meet up with Sydney.  I’ll admit I’ve gotten soft: those hard-backed study chairs are just not for me for the next few months.  But in the course of my holing up I’ve caught snatches of conversations of all sorts.  Some are quite entertaining.  Some are amusing for me because they’re between two professors in my department, only one of whom realizes he and the other guy are talking shop in front of a department grad student.

Some, however, give off waves of unhappiness or bitterness.  With the campus a sea of young people, there’s a lot of drama.  And I can’t help being pulled away from my book.  It’s not that I can’t read without distraction; it’s that I can’t or won’t turn off the part of my brain that insists on paying attention to see when and where I might try to jump in and protect or comfort.

So I catch my breath when I hear a slightly hysterical outburst that does, eventually, settle into gigles rather than sobs.  Or I wait for the strain to go out of a guy’s mumbled sentences to his friend or girlfriend.

But often, because such incidences are so frequent and so troublesome, I work at home.

Erin

Stanley Fish and I don’t agree about everything (or, really, much at all), but I think he makes some nice points about Obama’s speaking style in his recent article.  Parataxis is something I love about poetry and even about some of my favorite experimental novels.  Beautiful beads are set out, one by one, and there’s a lot of flexibility in the way the reader or listener strings them together, the connections he sees among them.  It’s not, however, how I like my arguments to run.  Political speech seems always on the verge between the two: much “arguing” goes on between politicians that seems more like a reading of poetry by each than actual back-and-forth about issues.  Fish uses “parataxis” where I have always described political speech as the “wait for the applause after each clause” rhetorical style.  I suppose his term is actually in the dictionary, but it’s one that would make my students yawn.

Erin

I thought that, after 8 years of education in rhetoric and textual analysis, I might know something about analyzing a written or spoken work.  Good to know, however, that I was wrong.  Apparently I am the only American out there who doesn’t see anything special in what Obama said today.  I excitedly sat down to read the transcript, having listened to selections on NPR in the car.  And I failed to see substance.  Sorry, but bluntness seems appropriate here.  Granted, I realize that this is supposed to be a “rally the people” speech.  I have given such things myself.  Heavy on rhetoric and light on program.  Fine.  Tell stories, paint pictures, allude to past moments of American greatness, make us feel together.  Obama’s speech did that, and, insofar as it completed that mission, it was fine.  Not out-of-this-world, but fine.

Except.

Every major newspaper I have read seems to carry articles in which highly educated and experienced politicians and writers speak of the inaugural speech as “unsparing” in its critique of the Bush presidency.  Excuse me, but did I miss something?  Saying that we’re not doing so well and haven’t done what we need to do to keep above water is not the same thing as saying “It’s all Bush’s fault.”  It’s not, for example, Bush’s fault that I carry a credit card and use it, frequently, and with little concern for my savings account.  It’s not, in other words, Bush’s fault that the American people in general have been making terrible decisions–on the individual and corporate levels.  I’m no huge Bush fan, but I am simply blown away by analysts’ audacity in making strong criticisms of Bush based on what I have to say was a bland speech.  If my students tried such a reading, I would give them a C and tell them they had much to learn about making plausible arguments.  And, frankly, having been told that I am waaaaay too inclined to over-read anything put in front of me, I’m disinclined to think that I just wasn’t sensitive enough to the nuances to see the embedded criticism.  No wonder politicians never say anything; even without saying anything they appear to be open to far-fetched readings.

Erin

So I’d gotten a little tired of people of people talking about supposed ‘inimitable Bushisms’ like misunderestimate. I’ve also gotten tired of hearing talk of Bush’s ‘Manichean worldview’, as, for example, in this article by Yale graduate and Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michiko Kakutani. I’m afraid some of his oh-so-enlightened critics don’t know their history too well.

What did the Manichees believe? According to some dictionary definitions, their basic doctrine was that there is a conflict between good and bad in the world. They certainly believed that, but that hardly seems terribly distinctive. Who doesn’t think that there is a conflict between good and bad? It’s perhaps worth noting that the Manichees are not talking about a conflict between good people and bad people; rather, they’re talking about two cosmological forces or natures. What exactly they mean is often a bit mysterious, since their cosmology gets pretty exotic pretty quickly. At any rate, I’m pretty sure that people who complain about Bush’s Manicheanism have something more in mind than merely that he thinks there is good and bad and that good and bad are opposed.

So what is the distinctive part of Manicheanism? It might be easiest to see by reviewing an alternative view first. Christians say that there is an omnipotent God who is perfectly good and who created everything else. It’s not too hard to see where the first challenge is to the Christian view is going to come from: if God is all-powerful and perfectly good, then where did the all too-apparent evil in the world come from? The Manichees don’t face this challenge, since they deny that an all-powerful, all-good God stands at the origin of everything. Rather, there are two forces, one good, one evil, that account for everything. Since neither is omnipotent, i.e., neither has been able to eliminate the other one, we have a ready explanation for why there is both good and evil in the world. The good is the result of the good god and the bad of the bad. That’s the theoretical advantage of Manicheanism. Of course, there are also some disadvantages to the Manichean picture (Augustine had a good bit to say about those) and Christians generally weren’t keen on giving up on the idea of an all-powerful, all-good God.

Okay, so that’s the best-known doctrine of the Manichees. Now what has that got to do with President Bush again? In fact, I thought he was supposed to be some kind of conservative evangelical (all those dire warnings a few years ago about the rise of right-wing Christian theocracy …), but I’m quite confident that it is impossible to be both a good conservative evangelical and a Manichee. Of course, Bush might be not be a good conservative evangelical; in fact, he doesn’t look like that either to me. Still, are those who complain about Bush’s Manicheanism really complaining about his lack of belief in an all-powerful, all-good God? About his advocacy of an ancient rival to Christianity? Something tells me that’s not quite what Kakutani and friends have in mind …

No more venting about these sorts of things for a while, I promise. With any luck, I won’t even feel quite as strong an urge to vent from now on. Maybe, just maybe, political discourse in this country will improve at least a little bit with Obama’s inauguration. I’ll admit to some scepticism about any such prospects, but maybe there is some reason for hope.

Sydney

Arwyn has taken up the habit of sleeping under blankets. She’s improved a great deal in her ability to quickly get under them.

‘Annoying photographers.’

A couple of months ago:

“I couldn’t go to a conference at the beginning of April, could I?”

“Nope.  How about me one in late March, far from home?”

“Probably better not.  We’re going to be joined at the hip starting the first of April.”

More recently:

“So, if all goes well, could I apply to a conference at the end of May, leaving you with full-time baby for a couple of days?”

“If all goes well, you could probably do that.  How about you then tagging along with me to play full-time Dad at a conference in early June?”

“I’d be up for that.  It’s a deal.”

Let the baby bargaining begin . . .

Erin