Na! Blo! Po! Mo!

Now, with even more backdating! :-)

How behind am I? Well, the lovely Bon sent me some questions--questions that I asked her to send, mind you--more than three weeks ago, and I haven't answered them yet.

Whoops. They're great questions, too. So I'm going to answer them now.

1. what is your favourite book/work/text (choose whatever word is appropriate) to teach these days, and why?

Hmmmm. I'm teaching a literature class this semester, a graduate course in 'literary dystopias'.' I'm really enjoying it, because my students are just so bright and engaged. But, you know, the books are depressing and scary: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Brave New World, Player Piano, Stepford Wives, The Handmaid's Tale. I don't really enjoy the books all that much.

You know my honestly favorite book to teach? Really? Cheaper by the Dozen. As you likely know, it was recently-ish made into a terrible movie starring Steve Martin that related to the original text only by sharing its title. Shudder. The original details the true story of Frank and Lillian Gilbreth, and the home they shared with their eleven children (a twelfth died of typhoid fever before the action of the book begins). I teach the book in a graduate class on 'narratives of technology in the twentieth century,' because, in addition to being wonderful, funny people, with loads and loads of adventures in parenting to recount, Frank Gilbreth was a pioneer of motion studies, a science he and Lillian developed in order to increase the number 'happiness minutes' that people could fit into their lives. They figured that by making spaces and processes more ergonomic, people could do more work more easily and more quickly, as this work was measured in 'therbligs' ('Gilbreth', backwards-ish). Frank died tragically early, and with 11 kids to support, Lillian became a 'domestic engineer' and wrote books on how to design kitchens to reduce strain on homemakers, and made diagrams of the most efficient, least-difficult ways to make beds, for example. The three-station kitcher? Lillian Gilbreth.

I like the contrast between these kind, hilarious, loving, child-friendly people, and, say, Fred Taylor, the time-studies guy whose idea of efficiency was to take a stopwatch to the biggest strongest guy who shoveled coal, and then holding everyone else to that standard or threatened to fire them.

And the book is sweet, and funny, and humane. Did I mention funny? It's not a story my students think of as being about technology, but it kinda is.

2. you've posted pics from your hardcore days, though your aesthetics are more mainstream now...what will Munchkin find in you to rebel against when she hits teendom?

Oh geez. You've overheard us all the way from Atlantic Canada, talking about this? If she wants to hit me where it hurts, she will become boy-crazy and conformist. She will stop reading and pretend she is dumb. I honestly don't care what she looks like--I'd prefer more youthful piercings to tattoos*, because the nose rings come out when you change your mind. I would be heartbroken, though, if she plucked and dieted and mall-ed her way into super-conformity and looked like one of those interchangeable longhaired blond Ugg-wearing undergrads I can't tell apart from one another.

3. if you could apply a theme song, in hindsight, to your twenty-year old self and who she was and how she wanted to live, what would it have been?

Oh yeah baby! I had a lot of angst. It was a lot of Smiths, with a dash of Ministry. That is to say I was both lonely and looking for love, and defiant and aggressively defensive.





4. what makes you angry?

Incompetence and apathy. I nearly FREAKED OUT at Quizno's yesterday. Pynchon and I went for lunch, and it took us twenty minutes to get our sandwiches, and the order got fouled up. At one point, I actually stepped into the conversation between the hapless, whispering, probably new, definitely not a good English speaker girl at the cash, and the irate customer about to lose it. Finally having extracted from her the Caesar salad he had paid for, he had to come back again to get dressing. She was trying to explain to him that a Caesar has cheese on it. He asked for dressing. She talked about bacon bits. Pynchon sent me away to sit at our table. Two other employees lounged in the background, rolling their eyes.

Stuff like that: so simple, so really WRONG to get angry about, really, and yet? I lose it. Not a one of my better qualities.

5. if Munchkin had been a boy, did you have a name chosen? what would it have been, and why?

Ooooooh. We always joke about how it was lucky she turned out to be a girl, because the day she was born, we still hadn't settled on a name. And she was overdue, so really ....

We always wanted 'Jasper', but it rhymes with Pynchon's last name, and euphony is important to me. I liked Henry and Charles but Pynchon totally vetoed those as old-fashioned dork names. Our compromise name, actually, was Finnegan. So my heart leapt, Bon, when you asked: your first born was Finn, and every time I read about him my heart leaps because it's a name that was already in my heart, my if-it-was-a-boy, instead of my Miss Baby. Finnegan was our compromise name because it was stodgy enough for me but current enough for Pynchon.

So. That's that. There's 30 days in November, right?