100 Days

I didn’t go to the demonstration today for the students. Today I went for myself. I don’t even like demonstrations. I was reading Patrick deWitt’s novel Ablutions and he has this line about a group of drunks “singing in the single voice of a runaway giant.” That’s how I generally feel about crowds. I can’t bring myself to chant–I choke right up. But do you know what I like less? Government bullies who think fundamental democratic freedoms are disposable.

Two enterprising young men were selling socialist classics at a little card table for five dollars apiece. The rain held off and so did the police.

Some people wore face paint to get around the mask laws.

This woman is waving to her minions.

Some people wore masks, but on the back of their heads.

And some people wore very little at all.

This woman wants to dance with you.

And these two, obviously, prefer to dance with each other.

49 Ways to Reject Bill 78

I’ve been making the mistake of reading the comments sections on the articles about Bill 78. Don’t ever do that; you will despair of humanity. The combination of poor logic, plain viciousness and bad spelling are a nauseating accompaniment to my Sunday morning coffee. But it’s good to get a sense of why so many people are so angry at the students and are willing to compromise their own rights in order to get back at them–that punctures the filter bubble a little bit and gives me a sense of public opinion outside of my small world. Large sections of the Anglo public are like a Bond martini on these protests: shaken, not stirred. If I was a student leader I’d look at those comments and instead of responding with self-righteous ire I’d try to gain back some sympathy and to pull back on some of the more disruptive actors. More street theater, fewer broken windows, that kind of thing.

But as a citizen, I’m shocked at Bill 78. It’s never going to survive a Charter challenge and is not designed to do so; the bill will likely expire before it gets struck down. Charest’s cynicism in passing a Bill that contravenes fundamental freedoms (two or maybe three) during an election year is just stunning and is a much bigger issue than the tuition hike. 50 people is a class trip or a big family picnic or a kid’s soccer game. The fact that it isn’t meant to be applied to any of these groups only underlines that this is a discriminatory bill, meant to be used only against opponents of the Charest government. And once a law is passed, there’s no guarantee it won’t be used, even in situations that nobody ever thought would be applicable. Once a further precedent is set for passing emergency measures for non-emergency situations there’s also no guarantee that further measures won’t follow.  This is a bill written in haste and spite that sets a vanishing margin of legality for public assembly, association and protest.

There’s more to be upset about: the back to work legislation that makes me feel a tiny bit of sympathy for Air Canada employees for perhaps the very first time in my life; the transparent attempt to cripple student organizations;
and of course, article 29 which says that “anyone who, by an act or omission, helps or, by encouragement, advice, help, authorization or command, induces a person to commit an offense under this act is guilty of the same offense.” Under this article, police are already monitoring Twitter and Facebook for liability. This blog post might even qualify. The Education Minister says she trusts the police to administer the new law responsibly, and I’m sure that in relation to her, they will. As Anatole France said, “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor, to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets and to steal bread” (thanks, J).

In response to the new bill, student groups have started posting disclaimers alongside protest announcements, so let me say that I do not “recommend” you go to the big march this Tuesday. But I have another idea, one within the bounds of this new law. What if there were micro-protests all over the city of exactly 49 people, in phalanxes of seven by seven? 49 Professors. 49 mothers. 49 women with tattoos of manga characters. 49 man-children who should rethink their facial hair. 49 little dogs named Francis. 49 readers who think The Marriage Plot was overrated. 49 hacked Little Miss and Little Mister characters. 49 groups of 49, all over the city, marching peacefully in support of civil liberties. Who’s with me?

Mother’s Day Dandelions

So Mother’s Day was lovely and lucky. There were daffodils and tulips that my boys bought with their own allowance and homemade cards and early morning yoga and a trip to the Botanical Gardens with all of the other mothers, moving together like a zombie horde, muttering flooooowers and bruuuuunch. I love it that they don’t charge admission for the outdoor gardens until after Mother’s Day; it seems such a civilized gesture.

But because I’m a curmudgeon, I also did some reading. The chapter “Mother’s Day Bouquet” in Leigh Eric Schmidt’s book Consumer Rites does a good job of summarizing the history of the holiday. It turns out that Mother’s Day in America has a couple of different origin stories. Abolitionist and activist Julia Ward Howe wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Around the World” in 1870, later known as “The Mother’s Day Proclamation.” In 1872, she asked for the establishment of a “Mother’s Day for Peace” on June 2nd. She never succeeded, but she celebrated the day on and off for thirty years with like-minded groups of early feminists and pacifists. I was struck by this line: “Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn/ All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country/ To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.” So at the breakfast table I mentioned Howe to my boys, and stupidly, spontaneously blurted out, “So that’s what I’d like for Mother’s Day! Don’t ever be soldiers!” They looked at me as if to say, forget it, we already bought you tulips.

Fifteen years earlier, Ann Jarvis began something called “Mother’s Day Work Clubs” –church based groups of women who fought for better hygiene in order to reduce infant mortality in West Virginia. When the Civil War began, the groups nursed soldiers fighting on both sides during the Civil War, and when the war ended they held “Friendship Day Picnics” to try to reconcile the divided South and North. When Ann Jarvis died, her daughter Anna began a memorial service to honour her legacy. A few years later Anna Jarvis managed to turn the memorial for her mother into a day for all mothers, and Mother’s Day was made a national holiday in 1914. As the story goes, Jarvis was disgusted by the rapid commercialization of the day that she had called sacred. She sounds so crabby and contemporary, “A printed card means nothing except that you are too lazy to write to the woman who has done more for you than anyone in the world. And candy! You take a box to Mother—and then eat most of it yourself. A pretty sentiment.” The holiday was a boon for florists, and is still their biggest week of the year. Each year the celebration grew larger, and each year there were renewed attempts to criticize its debasement. In 1921 a minister suggested that all the bouquets be replaced by a single hand-picked dandelion.

So my boys picked a dandelion. Or twenty.

Oh mighty and august congress of mothers, what would life look like if we spent a little more time talking about Anna Jarvis and Julia Ward Howe and a little less time talking about this?

The Art of Fielding (and other novels that didn’t win a Pulitzer)

I’ve been thinking about the failure of the Pulitzer board to award a prize for fiction this year. This morning the NYT  has an article on the books that shoulda-coulda won, and I feel a little scooped because I was also going to argue that David Foster Wallace should have taken it for The Pale King–not, as Sam Anderson argued, because it was the best novel of the year but to make up for not recognizing Infinite Jest back in 1997. I have a superstitious belief in retroactive literary justice, and a little bit of guilt about the amount of time it took me to recognize the greatness of Infinite Jest (it might have taken me less time if the DFW fans had been a little less rabid about it, but I’m ready to admit that they were right).

A couple of weeks ago Ann Patchett argued that the Pulitzer board had a responsibility to award the prize in order to celebrate and support the craft of fiction. Awarding a prize is a little bit like assigning a book on a syllabus, but on a much larger scale. It’s a vote of confidence and a wink to readers. The prize is going to be subjective and is going to be a little biased and that’s fine; that’s how culture gets disseminated. But sniffing at all of the books that came out this year and stepping away from them with a disappointed huff; that’s just disrespectful. It implies an absolute taste test which every single work of fiction published in America last year failed. The board is like a grade school teacher looking at a classroom of eager students and informing them that none of their essays was worth the prize. Junot Díaz was the single fiction writer on the board so yeah, Díaz, I’m looking at you.

And no love at all from the Pulitzer committee for John Jeremiah Sullivan. I think this was the best American book I read this year.

I’m not going to say much right now about The Art of Fielding–I’m saving that for a post on campus novels this year. That was just an excuse for the baseball picture at the head of the post. But I am going to vote early and vote often for the Pulitzer prize for fiction 2013, which until further notice should go to Lauren Groff’s gorgeous second novel Arcadia. Although George Saunders has a new collection coming out this year, so I’ll wait to make my final decision.

Failed Attempts at Aesthetic Indoctrination #1

Who knew there were Mies van der Rohe buildings in Montreal? Everyone but me, it seems. A friend mentioned she’d looked at an apartment for sale in a van der Rohe building. Where? I asked. It turns out I’ve been passing it on my walk or bike to work. Almost very week. For fourteen years. Ahem.

It’s like a joke. How do you find a Mies van der Rohe building?

OPEN YOUR EYES.

It turns out that van der Rohe not only built the complex at Westmount Square–those elegant, dark glass monoliths I’ve managed to ignore all this time–he also built a gas station on Nun’s Island. Now that’s a trophy building. Anyone can live in a van der Rohe apartment but how many people own a modernist gas station?

There was recently an article in the New York Times about “The New Dinner Table.” It turns out that at the new dinner table, people have conversations with their children. Amy Chua, aka the tiger mother, said she brought talking points to the table for discussion. Here’s how the conversation at my dinner table went down that night.

Me: “Did you know that Mies van der Rohe built that complex at Westmount Square?”

B (age 9): “Who’s Mies van der Rohe?”

Me: “A modernist architect. He, umm, believed in building minimalist buildings. Lots of elemental shapes–squares, rectangle. Glass. Not too much ornament.”

L (age 6): Why are we talking about this?

À qui la rue?

I’m intrigued by the “Manifestation ludique: En sous-vêtements pour un gouvernement transparent” going on at Parc Emilie-Gamelin this evening. It’s a cloudy day to protest in your underwear. March 22nd, the day of the first big protest, was much sunnier. But that was a false summer in so many ways. Since then, the weather has gotten colder, and the protests have gotten smaller and more polarized.

I still feel as I did when the protests started: sympathetic with the students, though my sympathy wanes the moment their methods turn violent. When my students were on strike I moved my class off campus, but I told the pro-strike students I’d move it back to the campus if they used tactics of intimidation or treated their fellow students like scabs. That may seem inconsistent but it still makes sense to me: I believe in the principle of accessible education, but less than I believe in the principles of non-violence.

The police say the protestors have escalated and that their actions are necessary to maintain the peace. The protestors say that the police are baiting and bullying them. It would be cynical to say that it’s in the interests of the police to inflame the protestors in order to further discredit them in the eyes of the public. But I like silly, playful demonstration ideas like the one happening tonight. If the students are consistent and creative, the government looks humorless and intransigent. If the student protests turn violent, the government seems justified in its immobility.

The reception of the protests reminds me of the story of the blind man and the elephant: people seem to be experiencing it so differently, and the difference often divides along language lines. Are the students principled or entitled? Idealistic or deluded? Thugs or victims? The protests as they unfold in the little bits of French media I’ve seen seem much wittier, more stylish, more sensible. In the English media they’re deluded, selfish, brutal. Perhaps one of the more disturbing things about this past couple of months has been the ways it has reinforced the feeling that Quebec is still two solitudes, and they don’t like each other very much.

The cherry blossoms are out in Montreal and so are the riot police, each night, every night.

Motherhood vs. Feminism: A False Choice (Obviously)

It’s so nice of The New York Times to stage a catfight. And just in time for mother’s day!

All this is occasioned by the new translation of Elisabeth Badinter’s book “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women,” the latest entry in the French-women-do-it-better bookshelf (see Paul Rudnick’s article “Vive La France”). I haven’t read Badinter’s book yet, but according to reviews it’s a screed against attachment parenting, with a particular attack on breastfeeding. Badinter targets the “ayatollahs of breastfeeding”–breast feeding advocacy groups like La Leche. Her primary objection to natural mothering seems to be that she finds it gross. Badinter on cloth diapers: “can you imagine how disgusting it is?” Badinter on breastfeeding: “It gives them the feeling they’re becoming a cow.” It makes me think of that line from the second episode of Girls: “But what if I want to feel like I have udders?”

Badinter claims to be protecting women and mothers from the judgement of their peers, but she sounds awfully judgmental. I can’t say that the responses in the New York Times today are much better. I’m not sure why Mayim Bialik is dragging hormonal birth control into an argument about parenting. I’m irritated by Heather McDonald’s brag disguised as a confession (I confess–I didn’t breastfeed my children! But I’m still having sex! Are you?). I’m just appalled by LaShaun Williams’ suggestion that we “blame feminism” for everything and that women leave their children and go to work because they want to “live in ritzy neighborhoods.” And I am deeply disturbed by Erica Jong’s description of herself as a “zipless gran.” Has she forgotten what that term meant when she introduced it in 1973? Erica, you are not babysitting for me anymore.

At least Annie Urban mentions that fathers should be part of this conversation. And she and a few of the other respondents back away from the false choice the debate provides for them. Why does it have to be either/or?

Badinter describes herself as the spiritual heir of De Beauvoir, who has often and rightly been criticized for portraying pregnancy and childbirth as a parasitic attack on female subjectivity. But Badinter is also a physical heir–as daughter of the founder of Publicis, the advertising firm that represents Nestle’s infant formula. The real conflict here is a conflict of interest. It’s unfortunate that a long advertisement for formula feeding is being taken as a serious intervention in contemporary feminism.