kidchamp dot net

05.03.10

THUNDERTOME: ROUND 13

SURVIVOR: let the great world spin (colum mccann)*
CHALLENGER: manhood for amateurs (michael chabon)

childless readers of so-called parenting blogs and lit, particularly childless readers who intend to stay that way, are a strange bunch. on the web side of things, for some of us, the mommy and daddy blogs are species-specific versions of cute overload; for others, they're reassurance that we've chosen the right adventure (oh man, if i'd turned to page 25 after college we'd be mopping up vomit instead of jumping around at a concert right now!). me, i'm just a design and storytelling groupie; i discovered sweet juniper ("just two more yuppies raising their kids" - ha!), for example, when jim and wood's beautiful detroit home popped up at design*sponge a few years ago, and i kept reading because their writing and projects are amazing (and, okay, their son and daughter are goddamn adorable). i have a professional interest, in turn, in the lit, given that i work with parenting content; i've also read and liked a number of michael chabon's novels (the mysteries of pittsburgh, the amazing adventures of kavalier & clay, the final solution, and the yiddish policemen's union), and i'll at least audition almost any book on my desk as a personal read if it happens to land there when i'm at the wrong end of a long subway ride.

so here we are, me and chabon's manhood for amateurs: the pleasures and regrets of a husband, father, and son. it's thirty-nine short essays, most of which were originally published in details (a handful appeared in other magazines; "the wilderness of childhood," of which many reviewers are especially fond, debuts in the book). i've read a hell of a lot of first-person parenting and relationship essays, and i'm a fairly tough audience; most of the parenting pieces feel like especially deft versions of old saws. "the wilderness of childhood" does include a few eloquent observations about overprotected children and the future of imagination (that link above will take you to the whole essay, and it's worth a read); many of its fellows, on watching a daughter come of age, talking to your children about pot, losing one's soul to hermetic pixar movies - are kind of forgettable.

on relationships, now: there's that fresh feeling. it could be that ayelet waldman's notorious "modern love" essay on how she loves chabon more than she loves her children** has made his love life much more interesting to me than it would naturally be, but i quite liked how he spoke of his first wife:

She had an eye for furniture and flowers, a rich history of weird sex, weird jobs, and weird scenes, an ear for quirky pop tunes. I found that you could make her intensely happy for a little while with a handful of sweet peas or by putting her in a dinghy and handing her a pair of good binoculars and sending her out very early to row softly among the coots and the buffleheads. Most important for me, she had expectations of how a man ought to act and speak and shoulder his obligations, and in the three years of our marriage, I learned how to be a husband.

what a surprisingly pleasant way to be remembered. chabon also makes me feel better about having had a facial piercing in my wedding photos:

If we are conducting our lives in the usual fashion, each of us serves as a constant source of embarrassment to his or her future self, and by the same formula, all "eras" can be made to look ridiculous in retrospect. But the seventies have always been more prone to more ridicule than their twentieth century cousin-decades, without anyone giving sufficient notice to the fact that it was the seventies themselves that originated the teasing (Annie Hall, Nashville, "You're So Vain").

what i like best, though, is how he speaks of eternity (and growing out of being "a little shit").

We are accustomed to repeating the cliché, and to believing, that "our most precious resource is our children." But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared. You bring your little story to the workshop, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't; and then you're gone, and it's time for somebody else to have the floor.

and he learned these things from wiser older women in his graduate work at UCI! who doesn't love a guy who tips his hat to women who return to writing?

i am not a fan of nuggets of writing - even while using public transportation, i prefer to lug great, ponderous stories about with me - but i liked many of these nuggets. borrow this book with gusto, internets.

VICTOR: let the great world spin, for it never asks me to think about chabon, waldman, and cunnilingus.

imaginary reading group discussion questions

01 do you read parenting blogs and/or literature? why or why not?

02 would your romantic background yield an interesting "modern love" column? would you be willing to have it fact checked with your current or former loved ones?

03 does it weird you out that chabon and waldman's children will one day read that mom loves dad more than she loves them?

*previous battle here.

**we know it's true, for "modern love" pieces are fact checked rather rigorously. a woman i know wrote one a few years ago, and the verification process involved contacting an ex-lover she'd deceived, which changed the post-script of the narrative itself in a rather interesting way.