Distant Father Research Articles

The Deepest Breath by Meg Grehan

Reviewed by: The Deepest Breath by Meg Grehan Kiri Palm Grehan, Meg The Deepest Breath. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021 [192p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780358354758 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780358355458 $9.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 4–6 Eleven-year-old Stevie doesn’t understand why her classmate Chloe’s smile sets butterflies dancing in Stevie’s tummy. She also keeps track of Chloe’s weekly nail polish colors, admires her magic tricks, and notices her eyes when she’s never thought about anyone’s eyes before. When it begins to dawn on Stevie that she has her first crush, she worries that there’s something wrong with her. Irish author Grehan offers an encouragingly smooth coming-out story; though Stevie is uncertain of how others will feel about her revelation, her mother, friends, and even other adults in her community support and encourage her on her journey of self-discovery. First-person free verse opens readers to Stevie’s strategy of researching her feelings the way she researches the ocean and other things that frighten her. While other aspects of Stevie’s life, such as her distant father, are alluded to, Grehan keeps the plot focused on Stevie’s first crush and eventual acceptance of her attraction to girls. Filling a needed niche for younger queer and questioning kids, this is a gentle, hopeful read with a kid-friendly romance and a protagonist whom readers will want to befriend. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Ars Romantica

Ars Romantica Erin H. Davis (bio) Like Love Michele Morano Mad Creek Books https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814255988.html 232 Pages; Print, $17.56 The human experience, although sometimes limited by language, has a myriad of definitions for love. In English, speakers are at a lexical disadvantage. The word “love” is too simple, as it is an all-encompassing definition of affection or romance or mythological infatuation. And so, it takes pages upon pages to pick apart each separate facet of what society calls — and limits as — love. Michele Morano’s essay collection Like Love begins this journey into what love, in its expanded definition, includes. In fourteen essays — an auspicious number, perhaps for St. Valentine’s Day? — expresses language with fluidity, moving the reader from beyond love’s colloquialisms to that which, depending on the reader, is almost taboo. Morano writes from personal experience, much of which could be compared to the soapiness of domestic dramas. Yet in their truth, carefully defined and presented to the reader through a veil of historical fact and the lively play of words (notice the simile in the title), we see beyond the tropes which Morano writes in. For example, in “How to Tell a True Love Story,” a play on Tim O’Brien’s “How to Tell a True War Story,” Morano writes that much of love is embellished over time. When we tell of our journeys, we trip over our own facts and must differentiate between reality and fiction. Sometimes, however, the two blend so beautifully that we are loath to separate them. Yet, in the end, all true love stories come to the same conclusion: “There is nothing new to say. Only the ending remains, and even that isn’t original, it’s the ending you were headed toward all along, the ending of every true love story ever told.” This essay collection approaches subjects that, upon first read, readers may question. Take, for example, the crush of a thirty-year-old teacher on a twelve-year-old boy. Morano, however, doesn’t tread in dangerous waters, as the essay first suggests. Instead, she focuses on the idea of a “crush” as something simultaneously childish and mature. The narrator’s crush is, we realize, on the underlying spirit of the boy, on his budding talents and wise soul that surpasses his years. It is a crush on a relationship that fosters intellectual stimulation. Love, then, is not always purely sexual, not even openly apparent or understood to those who, despite their knowledge, fall victim. Morano’s essay, “Ars Romantica (or a Dozen Ways of Looking at Love)” expounds upon platonic love, a desire that manifests through fascination and personal development — art and creativity as catalysts. Morano expertly weaves philosophers, writers, and psychologists through her essay collection to not only aid her many layers of definition, but also to grant artistic authority on the matter: Plato, in his Symposium on platonic love, Robert Sternberg’s theory of love triangles, and biological anthropologist Helen Fisher note aspects of love’s universality. But perhaps Morano’s most interesting exploration is into the language of love. She writes, In Spanish, love is more nuanced than it is in English. You don’t love a person (te quiero) with the same verb you love, say, a pineapple (te encanta). In both Spanish and English, we can fall in love, echoing lost paradise and a lot of work ahead, but in Spanish the more common phrase carries a reflective twist: me enamoré de. It’s the grammatical equivalent of “Now I lay me down to sleep,” with a subtle implication of agency, of choice. I became in love. For another, perhaps more widely studied, example, the Greek language has no less than seven words for love. Morano, impressively, has fourteen — with examples. And of course, at the root of all understanding of affection is that of familial love. Morano’s childhood was, even by today’s standards, non-traditional. Growing up in the ever-changing tides of the 1970s, Morano shuffled between her divorced parents. Sometimes living with a distant father who worked the night shift, sometimes immersed in a patchwork family of...

Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship

Seamus Heaney and Robert Lowell: A Turbulent Friendship1 Jeffrey Meyers I In Stepping Stones (2008), Dennis O’Driscoll’s excellent book of interviews, Seamus Heaney recalled that he first met Robert Lowell in 1972 at Sonia Orwell’s party to celebrate Lowell’s wedding to Caroline Blackwood. Heaney was young enough to be Lowell’s son and from a rural Irish background, remote from Lowell’s patrician pedigree. He had not been invited to that grand occasion, but was staying with Karl Miller, editor of The Listener, who was on the guest list and brought him along. He was shy of meeting Lowell ‘because of that nimbus of authority that ringed his writings and his actions’,2 but ‘actually got into a corner with him for about half an hour and did the laundry list, as [Joseph] Brodsky used to say – checking out what was to be said about which poets … It was a genuine enough meeting, and he was immensely charming and even more immensely intelligent’.3 Later, on several manic and memorable occasions, the two developed a close friendship that influenced and inspired Heaney’s poetry. At the party Heaney was not only introduced to distinguished poets, but also gained insight into the politics of poetry: the prestige and power that controlled lucrative teaching jobs and lecture tours, fellowships and honours, of which he would later reap the full harvest. After Lowell’s untimely death in September 1977, Heaney wrote two essays, a memorial address and two poems about him. Lowell had social and political, as well as poetical, influence. Heaney remarked that ‘Lowell was the last American to be a dual citizen of the university and the world beyond it, at home in Harvard, but also at home among the metropolitan set, a figure to be photographed at cocktail parties and on marches to the Pentagon’ (SS, p.273). He used Keats’s description of Wordsworth to describe Lowell’s distinctive genius, and also explained why Lowell’s reputation, though not his poetry, fell after his death when fashions changed and standards declined: ‘Lowell is taking the punishment Studies • volume 109 • number 436 448 that’s always handed out to the big guy eventually; so no, I’m not surprised. Lowell was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male, a Eurocentric, egotistical sublime, writing as if he intended to be heard in a high wind. He was on the winning side from the start: Boston Brahmin, friend of Eliot, part of the literary establishment on both sides of the Atlantic’ (SS, p.280). When Heaney’s reputation later soared, he too took his share of low blows. Caroline Blackwood, a witty and talented writer, was also a considerable figure. Her wealthy and aristocratic family came (like Heaney’s) from Northern Ireland, but her father, killed in Burma in the Second World War, was the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava. An heir to the Guinness brewery fortune, she was also a great beauty. Her first husband, Lucian Freud, had painted her portrait that was as stunning and sensuous as Botticelli’s Venus. In August 1975 Heaney invited Lowell to a poetry festival in Kilkenny, Ireland. As Lowell feared from past experience, the event became a week of drunken and quarrelsome reelings and writhings. Heaney expected Lowell to arrive for his midweek performance, but he came on the previous Sunday and stayed with him through the next weekend. Heaney’s nine-year-old son Michael, with unusually formal diction, told Lowell that he preferred soccer to sonnets: ‘I know you are a famous poet, but it’s my ambition to meet a famous footballer’ (SS, p.216). During that prolonged visit Lowell, a wayward and distant father to his own daughter and son, envied Heaney’s close family life and sadly remarked, ‘You see a lot of your children’ (SS, p.216) – as if that were a rare event. Heaney said that Lowell ‘had a wonderful way of coming close, personally and critically’ (SS, p. 216) and he valued both aspects of that intimacy. In a letter of 11 September 1975, a month after the Kilkenny chaos, Lowell advised Heaney to follow his own practice of salvaging the best...

Kurt Vonnegut Remembered

Kurt Vonnegut Remembered

Harrow Lake by Kat Ellis

Reviewed by: Harrow Lake by Kat Ellis Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Ellis, Kat Harrow Lake. Dial, 2020 [304p] Trade ed. ISBN 9781984814531 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781984814548 $10.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 7-10 When her father ends up in the hospital, Lola is sent to Harrow Lake, the hometown of her estranged mother and the backdrop for her director father's most infamous horror movie, Nightjar. No one in Harrow Lake is particularly welcoming, and they're all obsessed with the same things: Nightjar, Lola's mom (the star of the movie), and the legend of Mister Jitters, a creature who stalks the town's abandoned mines. There's more here than just some folksy story meant to scare outsiders, though, and Lola's connection to the town might mean a connection to the monster. The book starts as a familiar horror setup, with a fair amount of contrivance landing seventeen-year-old Lola in Harrow Lake, but it soon happily goes off the rails as the town amps up for the annual festival celebrating Nightjar (which culminates with people feasting upon a life-size cake version of Lola's mother), Lola's childhood imaginary friend shows up to warn her about Mister Jitters, and her grandmother becomes increasingly agitated, accusing Lola of being just like her mother, "a rotten, lying little bitch." Ellis deftly keeps the pace moving, leaving little time for questions and sweeping readers along on a thrilling mindbender; the scare factors are executed with just the right amount of flair, indulging in a bit of campiness only to pull back for some true terror. Lola is intriguing as a distrustful, prickly girl who both hates and yearns for her distant father, and she's easy to root for even as her narration becomes unreliable. Some loose plot threads leave the supernatural element a bit muddled, but the ending points towards monsters of the more human type, and their fate is clear and particularly satisfying. Copyright © 2020 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

PARENTING FOR LEFT-BEHIND CHILDREN IN MIGRANT WORKER FAMILIES: A STUDY IN WEST JAVA

Women’s decision to be a migrant worker may cause problems in their domestic functions and roles, including childcare. Children may only be taken care of by a father, not both parents as it should be, or even a member of extended family. The negative impact of labor migration on family, particularly left-behind children, has not been a concern of the authorities of the country. This study sought to describe the parenting system for left-behind children in West Java. It used the Case Study method with Karawang and Bandung Barat Regencies were purposively selected as the population. Data were collected by interviewing and observing 20 key-informants, i.e. the householders of the migrant families. The result showed that parenting in migrant worker families was held by husbands/fathers by providing the best care and education for their children. Still, it is different from how a mother may apply it. In some aspects, the mother’s role is irreplaceable, particularly at the early development stage. Occasionally, grandmothers and aunts help the fathers to look after the children in order to reduce the fathers’ burden. The study found five types of a father in the father-and-left-behind-children relationship: (1) an intimate father; (2) a plain, distant father; (3) a strict, authoritative father; (4) a spoiling father; and (5) an indifferent father.

Resignifying the Japanese father: Mediatization, commodification, and dialect

A new style of Japanese masculinity targeting the new middle class, specifically stereotypical salarymen, is highlighted in the 2013 Cannes Jury Prize Award winning movie, Soshite Chichi ni Naru (Like Father, Like Son). Belabored by the ongoing economic slump and ever-decreasing birthrates, masculinity is (re)presented both visually and audibly as a hands-on caregiving father who speaks a regional dialect.Through mediatization and language commodification, Osaka dialect is resignified and linked to an affective, hands-on fatherhood. The juxtapositioning of Standard language and dialect serves to underscore a distinction between a cold, distant father and a warm, affective one. The film provides valuable insight into the emergence of a new ideal of fatherhood that is indexed through language.

Infinite Sky by C. J. Flood (review)

Reviewed by: Infinite Sky by C. J. Flood Kate Quealy-Gainer, Assistant Editor Flood, C. J.. Infinite Sky. Atheneum, 2014. 244p Trade ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-0658-1 $17.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-1-4814-0660-4 $10.99 R Gr. 6-9. When her mother takes off from their small English town, thirteen-year-old Iris is left with her gruff, distant father and Sam, her once adoring but now angry and rebelling older brother. Summer offers a reprieve from the prying questions and unwanted pity of her school friends, and Iris finds herself particularly fascinated by a group of Irish Travelers who have illegally settled on her family’s property. Despite her father’s warnings to stay away from the “parasites,” Iris befriends Trick, meeting the fourteen-year-old Traveler boy daily to roam the countryside, swim in the [End Page 572] nearby river, and share her secrets. Meanwhile, Sam becomes increasingly involved with a gang of skinheads, drinking and fighting, and Iris’ magical summer comes to an abrupt end when a drunk Sam meets with an angry Trick. An opening scene at a funeral sets the stage for tragedy immediately and creates an underlying tension to the idyll that Iris finds with Trick, tingeing each romantic moment between the two with a deep sense of melancholy. Flood’s prose is wisely restrained, with an elegant simplicity that captures both the beauty of Iris’ rural surroundings and her inner turmoil. The ending avoids any neat resolution, offering only the idea that unbearable tragedies must nonetheless be borne. American readers may be unfamiliar with the Traveler culture, but they’ll recognize prejudice when they see it and feel for the impossible situation in which Iris finds herself. Copyright © 2014 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Giovanni’s Room in the LGBT* Movement

No one ever ran a gay bookstore to get rich. Giovanni’s Room certainly never provided more than a modest income for its owners and paid staff. So why do people open and operate gay bookstores? In my case, for personal as well as political reasons. The personal becomes political. I was born in 1940 and so the first thirty years of my life were a time when homosexuality was, as Oscar Wilde said, “the love that dare not speak its name.” The only comments about it were expressions of fear and contempt, fear of contamination of self and society, and contempt for weak, unnatural perverts. Homosexuals were seen as threats to the family and the continuation of the species. Yes, homosexuals were known to have contributed to high culture—Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Michelangelo (maybe), the ancient Greeks, and in our own time Jean Genet, Radclyffe Hall, Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monet, Gertrude and Alice. They were known among the educated classes, but their like were not familiar to the overwhelming majority of Americans. Homosexuals were an alien, unknown species. Both my parents held master’s degrees, so books were a constant presence in my life and I was a reader, finishing off three encyclopedias by the time I was 14. My father taught at Rice University in Houston, so I had access to its library until I left for college. At Rice I found a few titles through the card catalog’s listings on homosexuality, but those books were about close-binding mothers and distant fathers and recommended therapy. I certainly knew that it was dangerous to let anyone find out that I was strongly attracted to males in the way it seemed to me that males were supposed to be attracted to females.

Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M. Talbot (review)

Reviewed by: Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M. Talbot Julie McCormick Weng (bio) Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes by Mary M. Talbot, illustrations by Bryan Talbot. Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2012, 96 pp., $10.19 hardcover. The terms James Joyce and graphic novel may seem like an unlikely pairing of phrases, but this combination is stylized through the composition of the husband and wife team Mary M. and Bryan Talbot in their 2012 Costa Award–winning publication Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes. While Mary composed the novel’s written narrative, Bryan provided the illustrations. As Mary’s first graphic novel, it marks a departure from her previous scholarship, which addresses questions of gender and representation in such publications as Language and Gender: An Introduction and Media Discourse: Representation and Interaction. Bryan is bestknown for his graphic novel The Adventures of Luther Arkwright and its sequel Heart of Empire. The Talbot team’s latest work weaves Mary’s autobiography with the biography of Lucia Joyce, daughter of the renowned writer of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, James Joyce. Although different in nationality and language, the narrative depicts Mary’s and Lucia’s common struggles to come of age within the shadows of their eminent fathers. For Mary, she yearns for positive attention from her distracted father, Joycean scholar and author of The Books at the Wake, James S. Atherton. Lucia, on the other hand, desires her parents’ approval as she develops her career as a dancer. Drawing from such sources as Carol Loeb Shloss’s Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, the Talbots blend the lives of these two women, who are generations apart, yet comparative in their paternal histories, through the popular medium of the graphic novel. The narrative opens in true Joycean fashion: “Once upon a time / and long ago / a king and a queen / had a daughter. / Her name was / Marushka / or Lucia / or Lucy Maria / or Mary” (1). Listing versions of Mary’s and Lucia’s names knits the women together as one identity, yet two identities inside of one tale, yet two tales of young daughters with famous, “royal” lineage. This jumble of identities recalls Joyce’s complex configurations of characters in his convoluted masterpiece Finnegans Wake. By adopting Joyce’s technique, Mary suggests that these daughters’ histories and the gender politics affecting their lives take place across geographies, languages, and generations. Mary, as the youngest and only daughter of five children, craves attention from her distant father. Even though Atherton addresses her affectionately as his “baby tuckoo” (23), his “foul temper” often coincides with angry outbursts [End Page 182] that inspire fear in Mary (9). With his tendency toward violence and criticism, Mary feels that she cannot win her father’s attention or approval. Rather than dote on his daughter, Atherton delights in his academic research and in “muttering Joycean phrases to himself,” thus creating a linguistic separation between himself and his daughter. He speaks in a language that her child’s ears interpret as “nonsense” (20). Overall, his treatment of Mary emphasizes his disinterest in fostering a close relationship with her. While Mary’s story initially dominates the narrative, the majority of the latter half of the book belongs to Lucia. To begin, Mary opens Lucia’s story with a misquote from Joyce’s poem “A Flower Given to My Daughter,” wherein the speaker uses the possessive “my” to claim “my blueveined child” (Joyce 1991, 53). In Mary’s narrative, however, “my” disappears and is replaced with the diminutive “frail” as Joyce refers to his “frail blueveined child” (27). This fascinating misquote distances Lucia from Joyce and bolsters the text’s overarching thesis that, along with his wife Nora, Joyce became increasingly disengaged from Lucia’s artistic life and discouraged her professional accomplishments. Not “frail,” but rather robust and physically strong, Lucia excelled at modern dance and studied with such icons as Raymond Duncan, Margaret Morris, Jean Börlin, and Lubov Egorova. Alongside her studies with famous dancers, Lucia’s brief though notable career included participating in Jean Renoir’s short film A Little Match Girl and dancing on the stage of the Théâtre des Champs-Élys...

Distant Fathers: Disjointed World of George Eliot

The article discusses distant fathers in the novels of George Eliot within the context of the nineteenth century. In the nineteenth-century Britain, the father’s role is best defined by Nelson, “authority, guidance and financial support”. (Natalie 2011, p.155) The article is devoted to explore the distant or absent fathers, which means no guidance, protection, and financial support to the children. The absence might be the consequences of many aspects relating to fathers. The father could be absent either physically or emotionally. The article argues that Eliot seeks and yearns for a perfect fatherhood by showing some shortcomings of the father and its effects on the lives of their children.

First Family: Abigail and John Adams. By Joseph J.Ellis. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. 299 pp.

First Family: Abigail and Adams. By Joseph J. Ellis. New York: Vintage Books, 2010. 299 pp. Joseph Ellis's latest book on one of the most famous marriages in American history shares much in common with his previous work. It is well written and engagingly told, the historical context is well established, and the personalities are sharply drawn. Adams needed equilibrium: Ballast is what I want... I totter with every breeze, he once wrote (p. 12). Ellis argues that Abigail's chief role as John's wife was to become his ballast. She needed to create secure domestic environment in which he felt completely comfortable, calm place where his harangues and mood swings were treated as lovable eccentricities (p. 12). She did precisely that, running the household; raising and educating the children; and supporting her proud, sensitive husband. But all this came at cost. John's driving ambition meant that he consistently chose to spend his time in the service of his country--in Philadelphia and then in Europe--and not with his family. He was devoted but largely absent and emotionally distant father whose children vied for his attention and approval, often receiving neither. And for Abigail, John's repeated selection of public service over family life meant that she became single parent, her husband faithful and loving yet chronically absent. For much of their marriage, their relationship consisted solely of letters. When John, distracted by his work obligations, failed to write or wrote back infrequently, it hurt Abigail deeply. John's achievements were no longer.., adequate compensation for her abiding loneliness. From her perspective, he was simply gone; thus, damage had been done to their previously impregnable bond (pp. 91, 107). Eventually, she joined in Paris and then, London, and they rebuilt their fraying emotional connection. Ellis also portrays the couple as demanding parents, by turns, harsh or withholding of praise and frequently distant. Greatness was the goal for their boys; indeed, Ellis observes, John Quincy spent his entire childhood hearing that anything less than the highest office would be regarded as failure (pp. 92-93). Although Quincy was always their favorite son, he was treated as a project almost as much as person (p. 129). While he flourished under such unrelenting expectations, his siblings did not, meeting with unhappiness, disaster, and tragedy instead. Ellis argues that Abigail deserves some of the blame for John's support for the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798. …

Shoeless Joe, the Bambino, the Big Bankroll, and the Jazz Age

Shoeless Joe, the Bambino, the Big Bankroll, and the Jazz Age John Thorn (bio) Most of you have read Shoeless Joe, a novel of magical realism by Bill Kinsella, whom I knew a little bit thirty years ago, before he finished that book and before I became a historian of the game we both so clearly love. Shoeless Joe is a novel about fathers and sons, the baseball of now and then, and guilt, and hope. It is about the transformative power of fable and dream. Bernard Malamud is another fellow whose baseball novel about sin and redemption, The Natural, is, like Kinsella’s, more widely known through the film adapted from it. It was Malamud who once observed, “The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.” Yes indeed. This creates a problem no less for the novelist than for the historian. We crave realism not only from game accounts but also from imaginative renderings of an activity that itself is not real. Play, like play acting, is metaphoric action. Like a novelist who ventures to write about theater or film, the writer tackling baseball always starts off at one remove from reality, and is always playing catch-up. Baseball is not about baseball, at least not entirely, even if you’re playing it. For those watching it or thinking about it or reading about it, this great game is about past glories, power transference, surrogated combat, and unconscious contests of generation and gender. Yet another author, one who with The Great Gatsby may have written the best of all American novels, used baseball as a symbol of all that was good about our nation, so that he could depict how even an icon could be stained. My own book, too, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, deals with the game’s history and legend and good and evil—the title gives that away rather blatantly—but it is a work of history, not fiction. All the same, it raises issues that one may confront with Shoeless Joe and in one’s observations of what we uncertainly call “real life.” What is real, and what is made up? Can we shape or even alter the facts of history to make for a better story? Can our imaginations create a desired reality? If we do so, are we artists of our own lives, architects of legend, or mere liars, no matter how lofty our intentions might be? [End Page 118] Shoeless Joe’s ballpark in the cornfield speaks to us as a symbol of paradise lost, when rural innocents played ball for the love of the game, when distant fathers could toss a ball with sons perplexed by real life. But baseball’s idyllic past, like America’s and like our own, for each of us, is not history; it is a pretty story agreed upon. Not a lie, exactly, but a sustaining myth. What might possibly join The Great Gatsby, Shoeless Joe, and my little book? Let’s look to the Jazz Age, the Black Sox scandal, and the religion of baseball—complete with a creation myth, a fall from grace, an expulsion from paradise, and an eternal longing for a dimly recalled golden age. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald—an all-American boy from St. Paul, Minnesota—drifted east with his family’s shifting fortunes and in 1913 entered Princeton University. Graduating with the class of 1917, he went to New York, determined to become a writer. Two years later, after a despairing, impoverished return to bunk in his parents’ home, he linked up with Scribners, a prestigious house, to publish This Side of Paradise, his first novel. Appearing in 1920, it portrayed a generation that, drained of all illusion by the horrific casualties, was heedless in its pursuit of pleasure. The novel was a great success and launched his magazine career, where the real money was back then. Short fiction in Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and other story papers often fetched five thousand dollars—a handsome annual salary for a white-collar worker and four times that of the common working man. In 1922, Fitzgerald published a collection of stories titled Tales of the Jazz Age...

Hysteria, Hypnotism, the Spirits, and Pornography: Fin-de-Siecle Cultural Discourses in the Decadent Rachilde

Michael R. Finn’s exploration into the dominant cultural discourses of nineteenth-century France relates these doxa to the life and fiction of Rachilde, the decadent female writer. Born Marguerite Eymery (1860–1953) in the Périgord region of France, Rachilde grew up, according to Finn, with a mentally unstable mother, a distant father, an influential grandfather and with one leg shorter than the other. She is described variously as a ‘juggler of perversion’, ‘the perfect hysteric’ and ‘the immaculate deviant’ and thus she resists any simplistic form of categorisation. The book aims to situate Rachilde’s fiction within the societal expectations, medical terminology and scientific pronouncements of late nineteenth-century France. It offers a comprehensive discussion on the convergence of medical doctrines with moral censure and utilises many of Rachilde’s lesser-known works and examples from her actual life in order to do so. The reductive nature of biographical readings of fictional texts is always a delicate or unfruitful enterprise for any scholar and Finn provides a caveat to this effect in the introduction to the text. However, throughout the text there is still the persistent conflation of Rachilde with her unorthodox female protagonists which tends to offer only a simplistic analysis of her work. The middle chapters comprise of examinations into the four main discourses of the title, namely Hysteria, Hypnotism, Spiritualism and Pornography, which are then bracketed by a biographical essay (chapter one) and a final chapter on the female fin-de-siècle writer. These explorations are often presented in a diachronic form, switching between significant instances in Rachilde’s life and fiction. This should prove confusing and disconcerting for the reader, however, Finn signposts each change of topic or theme with helpful subheadings within each chapter.

Deadweather and Sunrise (review)

Reviewed by: Deadweather and Sunrise Kate Quealy-Gainer Rodkey, Geoff . Deadweather and Sunrise. Putnam, 2012. [304p]. (The Chronicles of Egg) ISBN 978-0-399-25785-8 $16.99 Reviewed from galleys R* Gr. 5-8. Island life has been anything but idyllic for thirteen-year-old Eggbert: besides being subject to Deadweather's terrible climate and its many drunken, and often abusive, pirates, the poor kid must also regularly dodge blows from his violent older brother, while garnering little to no sympathy from his emotionally distant father. So when a hot-air balloon accident seemingly kills his entire family and leaves Egg in the care of a wealthy merchant (and the merchant's beautiful and fearless daughter), he's not entirely distraught—until he realizes that his new guardian is most likely responsible for the death of his family and is looking to bump Egg off as well. What follows is a high-seas adventure in the grandest tradition, featuring epic maritime battles, elusive hidden treasures, tender romance, and of course, pirates—lots and lots of pirates. The fast-paced swashbuckling will surely satisfy fans of adventure, but it's really Egg's narration that makes this pirate story rise above its counterparts. Wittily observant and self-deprecating, Egg relays the series of absurd events that precede his escape from Deadweather with a fair amount of humor, while his decision to avenge the deaths of his family—despite their mistreatment of him—lends the tale a certain nobility, casting Egg as an accidental hero whose efforts to do the right thing are both admirable and somewhat haphazard. Colorful dialogue (including plenty of piratespeak) and a fully realized setting that will have readers wiping the sea spray from their brows round out this delightful nautical yarn that promises a sequel. Copyright © 2012 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

Stone Arabia, and: A Servant's Prayer, and: Sand Shark, and: Opening the Hive, and: Prayer for a Journey by Sea, and: Cat Lying in the Grass

Stone Arabia, and: A Servant's Prayer, and: Sand Shark, and: Opening the Hive, and: Prayer for a Journey by Sea, and: Cat Lying in the Grass Mark Wunderlich (bio) Stone Arabia Mark Wunderlich (bio) The horses bisect the fieldpull the cutting plow, guided burden, churning a soil-fold, wave of earth turned up for the gulls to pick; theyfollow the farmer, cut the April air with hollow-boned wings scurrying beetles, grubs and red worms the wages for following the plow's wake.The field turns from tan and green-flecked to uniform brown, lowliest color on the wheel offset by a fencerowwhere the wren's syrinx bursts with the air-blast of a tiny lung—wind thimble muscle-trill—warbling with the sexual urge to build. Black cows punctuatethe green page of pasture, move in cued diagrams, knee-deep in spring-flush mouths bent to grass, growing the soft bones of fetal calves on alfalfa, white clover [End Page 167] which they pullfrom the fallow field while the whiff of their sweet-smelling shit is wound in the spool of this sentence. [End Page 168] Mark Wunderlich "Two of the poems here are in the form of prayers. A couple of years ago, while visiting my family in Wisconsin, I came across an old Lutheran prayer book, written in German and published in St. Louis in 1876. The book was small, meant to be carried in a pocket or reticule and consulted during times of need. The prayers are notably specific: prayer to be said before setting off on a journey by sea, prayer to be said in the first hour of a deathbed watch, prayer for a birthday, prayer to be said during a time of drought. I found these pleas addressing mostly harrowing circumstances to be psychologically compelling. By begging for the attention of an all-knowing, distant father, they seemed to me an interesting model for poems, but quickly my own versions took on new and contemporary contexts. "I began writing these poems some time ago and resisted showing them to anyone or sending them out to journals. I felt embarrassed to be writing poems with religious underpinnings, and, as a queer agnostic, I felt exposed. Of all the poems I have written, these—mostly devoid of autobiographical detail—are the most personal. The other poems here have animals as their subjects. Having grown up on a farm and having been around various domestic and wild animals my whole life, I developed a particular aversion to the sentimentalization of animal life and the morally specious mistake of equating animal deaths with those of humans. The relationship between domestic animal species and humans is long, complex, intertwined. They are, quite literally, a part of our biological makeup, and we owe our survival as a species to them—and they owe theirs to us. The poems are my way of thinking about some of these complexities." Mark Wunderlich is the author of The Anchorage (University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), which received the Lambda Literary Award; Voluntary Servitude (Graywolf Press, 2004); and The Earth Avails, forthcoming from Graywolf in 2013. He has received fellowships from the NEA, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and the Amy Lowell Trust. His work has appeared in numerous journals, and his poems have been widely anthologized. He is a member of the Literature and Writing Seminars Faculty at Bennington College in Vermont and lives in the Hudson River Valley. Photo by Nicholas Kahn A Servant's Prayer Mark Wunderlich (bio) Oh Tenderhearted, O Kindhearted,you who have spared us from eternal servitude, by torturing and killing your only child,we know what you can do. Only you can spare usfrom a world in which the Creature presses his stinking hoof to our neck,the tyrant who supervises a petty bureaucracy rich with oil and other filth, covers his sow-bride'sfat Bahama-tanned paw with a crust of diamonds. You have chosen to keep me in a stateof service, beholden to a mustachioed czarina isolated and confused and grandiose,which is, I confess, a...

'Where he lies, I lie': Tagore meets Kabir

What drew Rabindranath to Kabir? Although a poet’s purpose is never entirely transparent, the enquiry here is necessary to understand the ‘myriad-minded’ reach of Rabindranath’s art. In India’s cultural history as well, it is worth asking the question because One Hundred Poems of Kabir represents the merger of two of India’s foremost cultural institutions, Kabir and Rabindranath, within the global institution of English. From his early teens, Rabindranath had displayed the spiritual power of his poetic imagination, which progressed from awe at the distant father figure of the upaniṣads to an intense relationship with the personal godhead of vaiṣṇava poetry, especially as in Jayadeva’s Gitagovinda. But it was when he came upon Kabir’s poems that he found an answering echo to his growing attraction for a philosophically more sophisticated idea of an abstract, nirguṇa deity who could nonetheless be a viably and personally realised presence. His English versions of Kabir’s poems are necessarily, then, approximations of that resonance, which explains their closeness in form to Rabindranath‘s own expression of spirituality, most notably in his Gitanjali. My aim here is to understand the Kabir–Rabindranath unity by viewing Rabindranath’s translations in the light of his own poetry of spiritual self-affirmation.

Stories We Tell Our Clients: Alleviating Suffering and Understanding Classic and Innovative Therapeutic Approaches

VERED SLONIM-NEVO, ITZHAK LANDER: Stories We Tell Our Clients: Alleviating Suffering and Understanding Classic and Innovative Therapeutic Approaches. Russell House Publishing, Dorset, UK, 2008, 175 pp, $37.95, ISBN 978-1-905541-19-5. Vered SIonim-Nevo, who specializes in family therapy and is a peace activist, is an associate professor of social work at Ben Gurion University in Israel. Itzhak Lander is a lecturer in social work at Sapir Academic College, also in Israel. He specializes in child therapy and is a long distance runner. Together, they present here a book intended for social workers, psychologists, family therapists and counselors. There are ten chapters in the book and each story deals with a different problematic theme we may encounter in the quest of helping our clients. Crisis, trauma, traumatic bereavement, intergenerational transmission of conflict, loss, death, social rejection, self destructive sexual behavior, eating disorders, loneliness, isolation and suicidality, amongst others, are presented and the dynamics that lead to pathology are researched meticulously and explained extensively by Slomin-Nevo and Lander. Each chapter of the book is divided into three parts: a unique story of a clinical interaction, followed by an analysis of the client's situation using theory and research, and finally an explanation of the specific intervention used in each case with a focus on rationale, theory and empirical basis for the intervention chosen. The highlights of this short book are the stories of the patients themselves. These stories are unique to the clients and to the land of Israel, but the themes are universal for those who work in the mental health field. Each chapter has an intriguing name such as "The Young Man in a Room," which is about a 24-year-old man who, prior to his compulsory army service in the Israeli army, has barricaded himself in his room for two years. The therapist decides to reframe his situation by admiring the young man's integrity and his change strategy is to lecture the patient on psychological development, almost like taking an introductory course at the university. The stories presented here are certainly evocative and the interventions nonconventional. "The Man Who Went Bankrupt" tells the story of a formerly successful businessman who went bankrupt, was divorced by his wife, and is now seriously depressed and considering suicide. The intervention is to bring him to a hospital to hear the stories of patients in a cancer ward to demonstrate that his situation, in contrast to a person with cancer, is not that bad. "I Forfit My Life for Mommy" tells the story of a thirteen year old who refuses to go to school. She lives "in an ok house with ok furniture and ok food and a seemingly ok mother but . . . nothing at all was ok." Her father and mother are divorced and she lives in an unhealthy dyadic relationship. The therapist responds to this patient by telling a story about himself and his difficult family situation. When he finds out that the patient's father was a tennis champion, he embarks on years of "tennis therapy" and eventually pays for the patient's father to travel over and play tennis with the patient. "Heavenly Father I am Sinking" tells the story of a devout Christian "girlish woman, naive and pure . . . tall and skinny, blonde wispy hair in pigtails" who, as a child, discovered her depressed mother hanging from a beam in her bedroom a suicide. Her father, while superficially caring about the family, becomes more distant and remarries, only to have his second wife die in a car accident. The patient decompensates after revealing this to the therapist "she was transformed almost overnight from nice little daddy's girl to a vixen, getting deep into alcohol and sex," plagued by depression and suicidality. …

Mr. EF, Who Throws Things at Staff in Anger

Mr. EF, Who Throws Things at Staff in Anger

Becoming a father, missing a wife: Chinese transnational families and the male experience of lone parenting in Canada

AbstractThis paper explores men's embodied experiences of transnational families. Recent research has stressed the gendered nature of transnationalism, exposing the patriarchal structures and unequal power relations that exist within contemporary migrant households. While there is a greater awareness of the female experience of transnational migration (both as the migrant and the person ‘left behind’), we still have little parallel knowledge of men. When the male experience has been studied, it is commonly in the context of their mobility (and in the absence of their wife and children), and ‘disembodied’ images of power dominate these accounts. This paper examines immigrant households from Hong Kong and Taiwan in Canada, where the male has been left behind to take care of the home and children, and his wife has returned to East Asia to pursue her career. In the process, men's lives have been completely transformed – from successful businessman to ‘homemaker’ and from distant father to lone parent, giving moral, emotional, and practical guidance to their children in the absence of the mother and extended family. The paper highlights the diverse nature of gendered experiences of transnational families and the varied forms that these arrangements can take. It also makes an important conceptual point about common understandings of transnationalism as something that ‘privileged’ migrants enact strategically at certain stages in the life course. I argue that the experience of transnationalism can also, in fact, change migrants – their objectives and their sense of self. Transnationalism can be transformative in the lives of ostensibly strategic immigrant families. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.