My Tribes

This is an exercise I did for my Native American literature class. we had to rewrite an excerpt from Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian (which is an excellent, heart-breaking, hilarious book. I recommend it HIGHLY). This particular bit is about the various groups that make up your identity, and how you define yourself.

"I realized that sure, I was a divorced single mother. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of native Californians. And to the tribe of college students. And to the tribe of voracious readers.
And the tribe of fatherless daughters.
And the tribe of incurable theater nerds.
And the tribe of 80s babies.
And the tribe of coffee addicts.
And the tribe of procrastinators, the writers of last minute papers.
And the tribe of tattooed teenagers.
And the tribe of descendants of Mayflower pilgrims.
And the tribe of dancing in the rain.
And the tribe of beta readers.
And the tribe of recovering metalheads.
And the tribe of fandom artists.
And the tribe of pizza and beer gluttons.
And the tribe of perpetual clutter.
And the tribe of keep on moving. It was a huge realization. And that's when I knew I was going to be okay."

I promise, I'm going to stop this "lookit how smart I am!!" college work posting. I'm just trying to blog more often, and these are all things I've meant to post for a while, so I'm kind of clearing the queue so I can get to new content.

Myth and the Profane in "Kiss Me Kate"

(This post is a response to THIS prompt from my English professor, Robert Lopez. We were discussing "myth" and ideology in musicals.)

Cole Porter’s 1953 MGM musical “Kiss Me, Kate” is ostensibly a movie about a theater company putting on a play. The movie employs the classic play within a play conceit and features a cast of philandering, vengeful actors and a musical adaption of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew”. The show is also replete with bright, beautiful, and often quite funny, musical numbers, including one of Bob Fosse’s first efforts as choreographer. Superficially, this musical is about the theater, celebrating and satirizing its people and culture. However, the show is really about relationships, about our culture’s mythology of courtship, perfect love, and marriage.

The main characters of the musical are Lilli Vanessi and her ex husband Frederic Graham, who play Katherine and Petruchio in the play within the play. Graham presents the typical macho, womanizing alpha male, while Lilli is, like Katherine, a bit of a virago. Their characters play on classic tropes, and so their relationship, and its ultimate rekindling into love, is a performance of our cultural myth of passionate, hate-tinged lust/love and jealousy. The secondary romance, between Lois Lane (Bianca) and Bill Calhoun (Lucentio) plays on this same mythology, particularly the passion and jealousy. In both relationships, the respective partners are unfaithful to one another: Lilli is engaged to another man, Graham is courting Lois. Lois is a bit of a floozy, available to the highest bidder, and Bill has a gambling problem, which he tries to conceal from Lois. These relationships normalize jealousy and suspicion within romantic relationships, and are built upon our unquestioning acceptance of this interpersonal mythology. Clearly, in some ways, this musical espouses conventional mythology, but it is also interesting to note the ways in which those myths are challenged. Although the show does adhere, ultimately, to the standard monogamous, happily married myth of heterosexual intercourse, it also challenges this mythology. The musical plays with and picks at the myths of marriage vows and fidelity, in the cheerful, unchecked glee with which Lois, and to some extent, Graham, pursue their flirtations. In fact, two of the cheeriest, bounciest (literally) numbers in the show are “Why Can’t You Behave”, and “Always True to You”, both songs about Lois’ cheating and Bill’s gambling. The lovers lament their infidelities in the songs, but with a kind of winking good humor which renders the very idea of fidelity, and the expectation of that fidelity, ridiculous. In a way, the musical is poking fun at the very myths it ultimately espouses.

Another interesting element of this musical is its treatment of sacred space, the theater and its surrounding culture. This show gleefully violates the sanctity of the stage and dressing room. Lilli’s maid is constantly trying to defend Lilli’s dressing room from the violation of Graham’s presence and activity, trying to preserve the sacred pre-show routine Lilli usually performs in that space. The dressing room is an actor’s personal sacred site in this movie, and the way that sacred space is repeatedly violated, first by Graham, then by mobsters, and then a clueless Texan fiancé, ultimately defiles a space once sacred for Lilli. But the largest violation of theater’s sacred spaces occurs on stage. Conventionally, the theater is a space with much proscribed behavior, both for audience and actors. While silence, stillness, and attention is expected of the audience, in their regimented, dark seats, the actors themselves are no less constrained in their behavior in this space. Although actors are free to speak and move in this space, their every move is choreographed here, blocked and scripted. Their personal lives are expected to remain behind the curtain, only their characters and scripts to be performed on the sacred stage space. This space is violated repeatedly within the musical. Lilli ad-libs, throwing flowers at Graham while onstage, flowers she has mistaken as a love token from him to herself, which in reality were intended for Lois. Her personal rage is exorcised on stage, violating the illusion of the play. Later, mobsters are dragged onstage, disrupting the play yet again, and both Graham and Lilli ad-lib wildly as the play progresses. The stage becomes common, a performance space for personal grievances, rather than narrative. Interestingly, although the stage’s sacredness is violated, the audience is never breached in the movie, so while the performance space is violated, the spectator spaces are not. This seats a certain inviolable power in the audience, wresting power from the actors and the play and resettling it in the audience.

Another interesting violation present in this play is upon the sacredness of Shakespeare. There is a tendency, even today, to treat Shakespeare as sacrosanct, the highest of high drama and literature, a pinnacle of language. In the song “Brush Up Your Shakespeare”, the two mobsters sing of using Shakespeare’s words as pick-ups and put-downs, reducing the bard to something common, and accessible, through their sometimes vulgar use. Shakespeare is not sacred in this play, and there is much fun to be had in violating his cultural weight.

Ultimately, I think this musical could be reproduced today with little change (although it would be a shame to make this movie without Howard Keel’s voice and Fosse’s early choreography). The themes, and the glee with which the show violates conventions and myth, would fit nicely with our modern cynicism, with just a little more winking self-awareness to help us get past the need to suspend our disbelief. There is a certain expectation, in our modern musicals (Chicago, Moulin Rouge) that the musical will be always vaguely satirical, and a little sarcastic, especially in its silliest, most musical moments. We still want to watch the dancing, but we want to be able to sit back feeling smug and superior while we do it.

(seriously, this guy? Rawr)

The Invisible Bear: Parental Deceit and Creating the Other in The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear, and The Red Ripe Strawberry

One of the most popular and widely taught books in Don and Audrey Wood’s vast picture book oeuvre is The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear, and The Red Ripe Strawberry. The book is widely used to teach preschoolers about friendship and sharing, as well as early fraction concepts (half of a strawberry). Originally published in 1984 when I was only one year old, this book is also one of my own personal favorite early childhood reads. However, since I began reading the book as an adult to my own son, I have been struck by the absence of the Bear from any of the many beautiful illustrations of the story. Since the villain of the book, the Bear, is essentially invisible in the visual narrative, the Bear becomes a possible lie, an adult deception used to manipulate a child-like Mouse into sharing his meal with the Narrator. This omission of the Bear can be a catalyst to a deeper examination of some of the ideological paradigms of the book, particularly those ideologies which are shaped in the book by the Bear’s looming “presence”. In The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear, and The Red Ripe Strawberry, the Bear becomes a symbol of parental deceit, as well as a tool of social identity construction, the outsider Other to the Mouse and Narrator’s insider duo.

At the surface, The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear, and The Red Ripe Strawberry is a book about sharing and friendship. The Mouse is convinced, whether it be by trickery or truth, that the Big Hungry Bear is after the strawberry, and in order to save the berry from the Bear, the Mouse comes to trust the Narrator and shares the strawberry. However, it is interesting to note that the trust and friendship which develops between Narrator and Mouse is founded on what seems to be an untruth, or at least, an inflated sense of danger. The Bear is an invisible enemy, never physically appearing on the page in the illustrations. In fact, the only evidence of the Bear’s existence at any point in the book is derived from the Narrator’s own assertions that the Bear is coming, “tromp[ing] through the forest on his big, hungry feet, and [will] SNIFF! SNIFF! SNIFF! Find the strawberry…” Is there a Bear? And does he want the Strawberry? Possibly, but given the Bear’s significant physical absence from the book, it seems that the imminent threat he presents to both berry and Mouse is overstated, and that the actual threat may in fact be the Narrator.

This lie, or exaggeration, about the Bear presents an interesting ideological problem within the book. When viewed as an allegory for the adult/child relationship, the lie of the Bear in the Narrator’s interactions with the Mouse presents a kind of tacit approval of parental deceit. There are no consequences for the Narrator as a result of the “lie,” and in fact, the Narrator is rewarded for the lie, in that the Mouse happily shares the strawberry with them. This relationship represents an implicit ideological supposition that children (represented here by the Mouse) are intrinsically gullible, and further, that it is appropriate for the adults in positions of power over those children to lie to them “for their own good.” Additionally, since the lie in the story seems to be motivated by greed rather than a genuine protective urge, the book can be read even further as an approval of all parental deceit and even adult covetousness, regardless of the short and long term effects the lie may have on the child. In this way, the narrative of The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear, and The Red Ripe Strawberry can be read as a statement of the proprietary nature of the adult/child relationship, as well as an expression of adult superiority to children. The Mouse in the story is gullible and easily swayed, requiring no real evidence of the Bear’s existence before surrendering half of the strawberry to the Narrator, and the Narrator is clever and wise, all-knowing in the Mouse’s eyes, qualified to direct the Mouse’s actions, and well-deserving of a cut of the strawberry. Ultimately, the Narrator’s covetousness is not only allowed, it is rewarded in the book, as the Mouse is shown happily handing over half of his hard-won berry (which he has struggled to pick, hide, and guard throughout the narrative) while the Narrator proclaims “and we’ll both eat it all up. YUM!” Although this sharing on the Mouse’s part represents an explicit message about sharing and generosity, the implicit message is that the Narrator, or the adults the Narrator represents, has an inherent right to manage the dispersal of children’s property, as well as a right to deceive children for their own ends.

One of the other significant, implied ideological thrusts of The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear and The Red Ripe Strawberry is both the creation of, and the cultivation of fear for, the Other, the Bear. From the third opening on, the Narrator builds a case against the Bear, escalating the Mouse’s fear of the Bear until the Bear has been solidified for the Mouse as a shared enemy, and a threat worthy of thwarting by consuming the berry with the Narrator’s help. This creation of a shared enemy, an “Other,” against which to cast one’s self is a critical element of group identity building. In order to cement a unified social identity, a group singles out an out-group, a set of people which appears or behaves differently, or aggressively, toward the in-group, and comes to define the in-group in relation to the out-group. Essentially, by casting the Bear as aggressor, the Narrator is establishing a commonality between themself and the Mouse. The Narrator knows of and is separate from the Bear, and by telling the Mouse about the Bear, stoking the flame of the Mouse’s fear of the Bear until Mouse is literal sweating and panicked, the Narrator creates a social bond with the Mouse. This us-against-them paradigm bonds the Mouse and Narrator, and allows them not only to establish a friendship, but also enables the Narrator to achieve their ultimate goal, eating the strawberry. The berry becomes a kind of communal property, produce which the Mouse and Narrator have acted together to protect from external aggressors (the Bear), and as such it is shared between the members of the in-group, Mouse and Narrator.

This enacting of social identity building is largely implicit, in that there is no concrete statement of social unity or identity between the Mouse and Narrator, and even the more obvious general theme of friendship is never explicitly addressed in the book. However, if it can be argued that the Mouse and Narrator are friends by book’s end, then it is equally true that they have entered into a social union, as friends, against the Bear, the enemy. Indeed, this process of social identification and “Othering” is largely subconscious, operating on a large social scale and internalized, left unexamined by the lay person, so it is unsurprising that this social construction of the Other should appear as an implicit, unspoken, and possibly unconscious, ideological process in The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear, and the Red Ripe Strawberry.

The creation of the Other is a form of social control, establishing not only social bonds but also cultural norms, and presents a device for policing deviation from those norms, providing rich ground for pejorative slang and punitive threats; “if you’re not with us, you’re against us”, “Limey bastards”, etc. In the case of the book, this drama of the corrective potential of Othering is largely absent, although there is certainly an implied danger that, should the Mouse deviate from the Narrator’s direction, the Bear may get the berry and, by extension, the Mouse. In other words, if the Mouse fails his social group, he may well be left to the tender mercies of the Other, the Bear, which the Mouse’s social conditioning at the Narrator’s hand has given him every reason to fear and distrust. In this way, The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear, and The Red Ripe Strawberry becomes not only a sweet tale of friendship and sharing, but also an enactment of parental social conditioning and, possibly, the construction of prejudice. The Mouse’s fear of the Bear is, after all, unsupported by evidence in the book, built solely upon hearsay testimony from a trusted adult against an invisible and unknown enemy.

At its core, The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear, and The Red Ripe Strawberry is as much a book about friends and sharing as it is a book about lies, covetousness, social identity and child-rearing. The narrator creates an unseen enemy, an invisible Bear, to trick the Mouse into sharing his strawberry. This simple story reflects many unspoken ideological standards, both in a larger social context and within the more nuclear parent-child dynamic. It is a story of blind and unquestioned faith in a parental figure, and an unexamined fear of the Other. It is also, at its simplest, a funny story about a scared Mouse possibly getting tricked out of half of his lunch, a slapstick comedy of berries in be-schnozed spectacles, and a preschool thriller about looming unseen hungry Bears.

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Work Cited
Wood, Don and Audrey. The Little Mouse, The Big Hungry Bear, and The Red Ripe Strawberry. Swindon: Child’s Play Ltd., 2000. Print.

15 Books

Per The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes.

(This is by no means a list of favorite books. In fact, at least one of them I loathed. However, these are honestly the books that most stick in my mind. Some of them stick more because of the time in my life they represent for me, or because of the wonderful teachers/people who inspired or required me to read them.)

1.Curse of Chalion~ Lois McMaster Bujold
2. The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry, and the Big Hungry Bear~ Don and Audrey Wood
3. American Gods~ Neil Gaiman
4. Moby Dick~ Herman Melville (I will never forget the pain and frustration. That fucking albatross...thanks a ton Beerman/Chaplar! ;P I should probably read it again now, as an adult, in light of the fact that I rather liked The Confidence Man)
5. Gulliver's Travels/ "A Modest Proposal"~ Jonathan Swift (Thank you so very much, Chris Juzwiak. I love you.)
6. Anything and everything Shakespeare wrote (don't make me pick one. I won't do it. Although I should probably say R&J, despite the fact that it is by no means my favorite, simply because the damn Nurse is so inextricably tied to my life)
7. Guards! Guards!~ Terry Pratchett (really any book in the Guards set within the Discworld series, but Guards! Guards! stands out because it contains THE ABSOLUTE BEST character introduction EVER)
8. Pride & Prejudice~ Jane Austin
9. Watchmen~ Alan Moore
10. Agnes and the Hitman~ Jennifer Crusie (I never knew a mob hit could be hot, but this book proves it definitively can)
11. The Picture of Dorian Gray~ Oscar Wilde
12. Fables~ Bill Willingham
13. The Eyre Affair~ Jasper Fforde
14. No Exit~ Jean-Paul Sartre
15. "Sight Unseen"~ Donald Margulies ( And thank you, Ken. This was one of my favorite scenes to perform ever. You always pick such excellent material)

Profanity, Sing-Along Songs, and Raperation (Distant Cousin of Stabnation)

So, as I'm sure I have mentioned before, I swear. A lot. I swear like a dirty, foul-mouthed, scum-sucking whaler with a peg leg. Some days, I'm sure there are people in the world who think I should have a nice bar of soap for dinner. I'm okay with that. Mmmm, soap...

Anyway. I like to get creative with my cussin'... some of my favorites include douche nozzle, asshat, cum-monkey, fuckwit, fucktard, fuck-wit (really, hyphenate anything with fuck and it becomes grade A profane awesomesauce. It’s true. Try it. Fuck-butter. Fuck-bread, fuck-goat, fuck-bulb, fuck-knob, fuck-purple-monkey-dishwasher. See? All excellent and original profanities. Oh the possibilities... I *squee* a little for the varied and wondrous panoply of possible swear words that can be created in this way. But I digress...). Recently, I've been using "shit, balls, monkey mother-fucker." That exact phrase. I'm not sure what it means. But it sure is fun to say.

Now, all that being said, it is really, really, REALLY a bad idea to ask me not to cuss. Really. Don't misunderstand me. I'm fully capable of controlling my swearing. I can get through the day without any deliberate use or inadvertent slips. I know when it is inappropriate to swear, and I am completely able to control it. But in general, casual conversation? Yeah. Ask me not to swear, and I will hit the gas on the swear bus and run you over with fuck-puppets and shit-balls. And then I will back up and roll over your shattered spine with a couple of merdes for good measure (that’s totally French shit. Cuz I'm multi-culti like that.) Just don't do it.

Why, you may wonder, do I love swearing so much? Because it is fun. And one of the few areas of language in which you can be creative with the meanings of the words themselves, and still be clearly understood. Because flouting taboos and challenging social norms can be fun, and healthy. And because I think it is patently ridiculous to get your panties in a twist over the arbitrary labels we’ve assigned to biological functions. If I can talk about corpses and cancer, then I can talk about crap. (It is perhaps unsurprising that I also find it ridiculous to be embarrassed by discussing sex in public, friendly discourse).


And now for something completely different! One of the greatest pleasures in human existence is the ability to sing along, at top volume, in the privacy of your own car, to your favorite songs. I personally cannot help but sing along, loud, long, and without precision, when I drive. One of my absolute favorite sing-alongs is "Skullcrusher Mountain" by Jonathan Coulton. Good Lord, that song is fun.

I desperately long to perform the damn thing as a monologue, because this song, this song I not only sing, but perform. It is the frustrated actor child in me, I know. It’s been FOREVER since I got to perform anything, and “”Skullcrusher Mountain” speaks to the part of me which used to have to fish around performance material for student showcases and the like. I performed Tool’s “Cries of the Carrots” bonus track (I’ve no idea if that’s the proper, official name, but that’s bloody well what I call it in my own head) on two different occasions for such a showcase. Skullcrusher Mountain would be PERFECT FOR THIS. Alas, the downside: like most of my favorite monologues, the speaker in “Skullcrusher” is male. Boo. I can’t do Aaron from Titus Andronicus, or this, because I lack a penis. To which I say BALLS.


One final and completely unrelated third point: in my writing about literature class (which could be an entry on its own. It is surreal to be taking this kind of course at this stage of my college career. It’s like going back to freshman year of high school and relearning the elements of fiction ALL OVER AGAIN) the professor referenced Romance novels. Now, anyone who is even vaguely aware of the romance community knows to expect one of two things from this scenario. Support or venom, with venom heavily favored. Naturally, my prof takes the usual; romance is porn, stereotype the genre route. Of course. We were covering structuralism, and she gave the examples of the set formulas of books like The DaVinci Code and romance novels. And then she gives a brief sketch of her idea of the formula of romance novels: 1) Within 3 chapters, a kiss. 2) Within 10, a nice, healthy rape.

Wait what!?! Right. Rape. Because ALL romance novels, especially those written after 1987, contain rapes.

Now, I’m not going to lie. Rape is one of the old school conventions of romance novels. It is unfortunate, rape is never right or good, and it is problematic how it is often portrayed in old school romances (if the villain rapes the heroine, it’s bad. If the hero does it, it is because he is so in love, all unknowing, that he cannot control his cock around the heroine. Epic fail.) I could wax on and on about why this device came into the genre, the role it played, etc., but really, for my immediate purposes, suffice to say that the rape trope is MUCH reviled in the modern romance community, and that shit does not fly. Rape in romance is MUCH less common now, and its role is much more appropriate and realistic. And really, as a reader of the genre, and a fan of several of the writers, it really twists my tail when I hear this shit being smugly bandied about. I am annoyed by the smug superiority and condescension of these portrayals, and I’m annoyed to face it in my writing class. Shame. I was beginning to like this prof…

And now I am home and bone weary (text books weren't so heavy in MY day *shakes fist in impotent rage*) waiting for the ex to come pick up the Little.

On the plus side, my witch hat pants are pretty sweet.