Uncommon women and others

Tenured Radical is calm, measured, incisive and smart as all hell.  She’d like to eat caribou steaks with Sarah Palin, but:

I think what is more important than whether the Palin nomination is good for women is that the Republican Party Platform, regardless of who is on the ticket, is not good for women. Women are more likely to be poor, homeless, uninsured, single parents, and caring for dependent relatives than men. As long as Republicans believe that they can campaign on “social issues” rather than “pocketbook issues” they can put the Virgin Mary on the ticket and “women” and “men” will vote Democrat in the fall.

Go ahead and read the whole post.

Another marvelous thing

(Click on any comic to enlarge.)

Lynn Johnston’s comic strip For Better or For Worse ends its 29-year storyline today, and I will miss it.  When I was an adolescent in the eighties, the strip didn’t resonate much with me, with its stories about Elizabeth’s babyhood, the devilment Michael got up to in school, Elly’s experience of motherhood, and John’s dental practice.  But I continued to read it, as one does if one reads the comic pages regularly, and as the kids grew up and ventured farther afield, the world of the strip kept expanding and the stories became more ambitious–and the characters became more and more complicated and compelling.  Lawrence came out to his friends and family, Grandma Marian and Farley the sheepdog died, Elizabeth moved to an Ojibwe village in northern Ontario…I could go on and list dozens of storylines.  One time, on a bet with my father-in-law, I listed over 100 recurring characters in the strip without looking at any of the books, and that was ten years ago–a lot of people have joined since then.

(As I got older, too, I found I appreciated the earlier strips more.  I remember finding a couple of the early collections next to my bed while staying in a friend’s parents’ house–on a trip to attend MLA, in fact–reading them and finding them not nearly as corny as I remembered.)

I know there’s been a lot of online snark about the strip, but any way you look at it, Johnston’s is an enormous achievement.  It’s very rarely laugh-out-loud funny, but it almost always hits the note of wry, resigned amusement that is part of life in families–and by “families” I mean communities as well, large, extended networks of relations and friends and people you have to deal with repeatedly even if you don’t like them: workplaces, schools, neighborhoods, as well as nuclear families.  And it created a persuasive alternate reality, as fiction does.  I loved it that at Elizabeth and Anthony’s wedding, Michael ushered to their seats people who had been important in Elizabeth’s life, like Gary and Vivian Crane, the teacher and nurse from Mtigwaki, but whom Michael had never met.  That’s what happens in life. 

I don’t know what the “newruns” will be like, in which Johnston returns to the beginning of her storyline and creates new comics.  I liked watching the development of her style over the years, and when I open the older collections (we have most of the strip in book form) I get the same frisson that you get when you look at old photographs of people you actually know–“Look how young Elly was!”  Even if they’re wonderful, the story is effectively over now.  I’m sure some papers will drop the strip to make space for something new.

And if they do, the strip they should pick up–and so should you–is Clear Blue Water, by Karen Montague-Reyes.  CBW is also a family strip, and the characters do age, as they did in FBOFW.  It’s about Eve and Manny, parents of five children: Owen, Ivy, Seth, and twins Iris and Maizy.  It is  laugh-out-loud funny a lot of the time, but it can also be tender (albeit spiked with wit) and serious.  Eve and Manny love each other and drive each other crazy; they love their children and are driven crazy by them as well.  It has elements of the fantastical, such as occasional visitations by random superheroes like “Politically Correct Guy,” “Easily Offended Man,” but it’s also down to earth and full of the ordinary, everyday complexity of people’s lives.  Check it out through this link to the strip on Yahoo! Comics.  And here are a few to get you started.

This is today’s strip.  Manny, who is Cuban-American (his Spanish-speaking mother, Caridad, and Eve don’t always get along), is politically more conservative than Eve, which can be a source of some tension in their home.  Eve, who is multiracial (African American, white, and Native American, if I remember correctly), is both more liberal and more religious.  See what I mean about the complexities of people’s lives?

Several years ago, Manny embarked on his lifelong dream of becoming a park ranger.  Eve worked at a series of stupid jobs to keep the family afloat while Manny was in training.  Now they seem to be doing better and she can spend more time on her art and writing–she seems to do a certain amount of freelance work, although it’s not always clear.

Their middle child, Seth, was diagnosed with autism while Eve was pregnant with the twins.

I was told there’d be cake

This week I had the first meeting of my New RU class.  It seems like a good group, and I enjoyed our work together.  It’s a small group, though–six students and me.  As anyone who’s ever taught one knows, very small classes can get a lot of work done, get to know one another quite well, and delve very deeply into the issues at hand.  They can also lose momentum frighteningly fast, especially in the middle of the term when there might be one or two people out sick and one or two others who are tired, coming down with something, or just underprepared.  Since this is a creative writing workshop, it will probably be as well for me to have a good writing exercise in my back pocket, so to speak, at all times, in case of low energy or–horrors!–not enough to talk about. 

It’s important for me to come in at high energy anyway, but with a small class it’s vital.  It’s also an evening class, so coming in with high energy takes some preparation.  Teaching high school means that I am awake no later than 6:30–and I’m usually up quite a bit earlier since I like those early morning hours for writing and grading.  So twelve hours later I’m not naturally champing at the bit to teach a three-hour class.  I have to eat a light but nourishing dinner; have a decent, if rough, plan for the class; and I pretty much have to have some coffee, too.  And I need to take a little time to sit and look over my notes and/or handouts and get myself psyched up. 

The class meets in a tall, narrow building on the NRU campus, in the smallest seminar room I have ever seen.  It’s got one of those blackboards with sliding panels filling up one wall, maybe about ten feet long; the opposite wall is solid brick, and the outside wall is maybe six feet wide, with three tall gun-slit windows.  The room is narrow, so instead of a seminar table we have four of those slender two-person tables pushed together.  (As I describe it, it sounds impossibly small.  Perhaps my rough guesses at measurements are way off.  I should take a tape measure next time.)

Which would all be fine except that the classroom next door is much larger and hosts a class during the same period of about forty boisterous evening students, and we’re pretty much jammed next to them right behind their blackboard.  They had quiet periods in which only one person was speaking at a time, but there were also bursts of chatter during group work and a huge amount of noise in the hallway at break time.  I went out during their break to ask them to tone it down, but groups kept leaving and arriving and I couldn’t both teach the class and stand at the door to hush people.  I can deal with the noise through the wall when they’re legitimately having class, but I will try to catch the other instructor before class next week and ask him to request consideration for the neighboring classes at break time.  I might also put a sign on our door.

(Did I mention that I think the boisterous class is high school teachers earning credits toward their master’s degrees?  I’m pretty sure, anyway.  The M.A.T. program is right down the hall.  And they sound as though they’re having way too good a time to be traditional graduate students.)