So last Wednesday I posted, in a flurry of enthusiasm, that I was working on an essay about the ways in which "mummyblogging" was being described / attacked / dismissed / minimised, and how this was eerily reminiscent of attacks on other women who speak over time. I was all fired up, and I have indeed been working on it, but:
- it's turning into a long and complicated research project, and I need more time and space to do it justice;
- school holidays;
- work busyness; and
- I have been seriously side-tracked by a new story I've started writing, the main protagonist of which arrived in my head one morning and has refused to be dislodged thus far.
The essay is still coming, but I think it'll be a couple of weeks before it's ready. I'm OK with that, and I hope it will be OK by you too.
Tuesday, July 10, 2012
Sunday, July 8, 2012
Working Music #3: Fuel to the process
Another busy week with work and school holidays, and another set of tunes :-) As of 5pm yesterday, when I sent another bunch of documents off, I am on a break from the project until the kids go back to school on Monday 16th, which will be *so welcome*.
This week, thinking about friends and tweeps who are off to BlogHer in New York, I played my favourite ever song about that amazing city:
I was also chilling out a little with this one:
A little bit of an anthem, this one:
What a debut single this one was:
The Good Son, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' early album, has been on rotation, including this beautiful, beautiful song. My husband, who has a great voice, sung this song to me on our third date, at which point I was hooked :-)
So that's a wrap from me for a bit. I've got a book review post almost ready which will go up later in the week, but other than that, I'll be light-on for blogging until school and work resume. I'm trying to be as switched-off as possible so I can be switched on with the kids. Have a great one, all!
This week, thinking about friends and tweeps who are off to BlogHer in New York, I played my favourite ever song about that amazing city:
I was also chilling out a little with this one:
A little bit of an anthem, this one:
What a debut single this one was:
The Good Son, Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds' early album, has been on rotation, including this beautiful, beautiful song. My husband, who has a great voice, sung this song to me on our third date, at which point I was hooked :-)
So that's a wrap from me for a bit. I've got a book review post almost ready which will go up later in the week, but other than that, I'll be light-on for blogging until school and work resume. I'm trying to be as switched-off as possible so I can be switched on with the kids. Have a great one, all!
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
"All this has happened before and will happen again"*: Backlash, personal blogging and keeping women in their place, Part 1
So both the blogosphere and old media have been a bit preoccupied lately with the "phenomenon" rather cringeworthily labelled "The Rise of the Mummybloggers". Aside from sounding vaguely like a C-grade zombie movie, this phrase has all sorts of problematic notions embedded in it, and here's the thing:
None of them, not one of them, is new.
I am an historian by education, and, watching this conversation unfold, I was struck by how very familiar it all sounded. It may not come as a big surprise to anyone (or maybe it will, I don't know), but the deploying of loaded language to shame, silence and reduce the impact of female voices is a common and continuously repeated trick throughout much of recorded history. When women speak in ways that are uncomfortable, or just unfamiliar or unfathomable, to those in positions of inherent or explicit authority, they are shut down. Or, at least, that's what is attempted, although usually without complete success, because not everyone will be silenced, no matter what tactics are deployed. As the Indigo Girls put it, "You can't keep a spirit down that wants to get up again..."
Lots of people have written directly responsive blog posts on this topic, making fun of the debate (often hilariously), unpicking specific complaints about personal blogging and its growth, and defending the right to write. I thought I'd do something a little bit different here; I'm going to look at some of the language that's been used to describe and attack "mummyblogging", and some of the criticisms levelled at it, and compare it to the tactics, language and criticisms levelled at other "women who speak and are not silenced" over time. I also want to look at the nexus between language belittling maternal voices and the kinds of imagery at play in the new-again reproductive rights debates currently raging in the US, of which only whispers have yet reached the Australian political landscape.
What's the point of all this, you might say? After all, no one is actually *preventing* women who are mothers from blogging, or speaking, right? People can have negative opinions without it infringing on the right to speech, yes?
Yes - but I think there is a real value in understanding the ubiquity of a particular kind of criticism that is levelled at women who speak and are heard, and, worse yet, are perceived as having some influence or power. It's a dragging down because of femaleness, a devaluing because of maternity (or its absence, it works both ways), a tapping into a set of unspoken but powerful cultural assumptions about the worth and value of women's words. It hurts debate and its hurts women, because its fangs bite deep into the cultural bedrock we're all brought up on, knowing or not.
This is going to be an essay, in 4 parts. It's been researched, and it will be - quel horreur - footnoted. It's not everyone's cup of tea, I will not blame any of you who tag it TOO LONG DID NOT READ right out of the box. But if you have the patience to stick with me, I hope that these comparisons might really highlight how not-new this kind of denigration really is, and, in doing so, help to shake this dust off our feet.
Because, after all, if personal blogging by women is being catcalled so predictably, there must be something frightening in it after all, some sly potential, some underground power, in these words we write about food and books and play and children and the world and ourselves and our hearts and our bodies and places and tragedies and laughter and souls.
Part 2: Calling out mummybloggers: The maternity card will be posted on Saturday.
(*title quote from Battlestar Galatica: Razor. Cos I am all about the pop culture while interrogating tropes of cultural silencing, yo.)
None of them, not one of them, is new.
I am an historian by education, and, watching this conversation unfold, I was struck by how very familiar it all sounded. It may not come as a big surprise to anyone (or maybe it will, I don't know), but the deploying of loaded language to shame, silence and reduce the impact of female voices is a common and continuously repeated trick throughout much of recorded history. When women speak in ways that are uncomfortable, or just unfamiliar or unfathomable, to those in positions of inherent or explicit authority, they are shut down. Or, at least, that's what is attempted, although usually without complete success, because not everyone will be silenced, no matter what tactics are deployed. As the Indigo Girls put it, "You can't keep a spirit down that wants to get up again..."
Lots of people have written directly responsive blog posts on this topic, making fun of the debate (often hilariously), unpicking specific complaints about personal blogging and its growth, and defending the right to write. I thought I'd do something a little bit different here; I'm going to look at some of the language that's been used to describe and attack "mummyblogging", and some of the criticisms levelled at it, and compare it to the tactics, language and criticisms levelled at other "women who speak and are not silenced" over time. I also want to look at the nexus between language belittling maternal voices and the kinds of imagery at play in the new-again reproductive rights debates currently raging in the US, of which only whispers have yet reached the Australian political landscape.
What's the point of all this, you might say? After all, no one is actually *preventing* women who are mothers from blogging, or speaking, right? People can have negative opinions without it infringing on the right to speech, yes?
Yes - but I think there is a real value in understanding the ubiquity of a particular kind of criticism that is levelled at women who speak and are heard, and, worse yet, are perceived as having some influence or power. It's a dragging down because of femaleness, a devaluing because of maternity (or its absence, it works both ways), a tapping into a set of unspoken but powerful cultural assumptions about the worth and value of women's words. It hurts debate and its hurts women, because its fangs bite deep into the cultural bedrock we're all brought up on, knowing or not.
This is going to be an essay, in 4 parts. It's been researched, and it will be - quel horreur - footnoted. It's not everyone's cup of tea, I will not blame any of you who tag it TOO LONG DID NOT READ right out of the box. But if you have the patience to stick with me, I hope that these comparisons might really highlight how not-new this kind of denigration really is, and, in doing so, help to shake this dust off our feet.
Because, after all, if personal blogging by women is being catcalled so predictably, there must be something frightening in it after all, some sly potential, some underground power, in these words we write about food and books and play and children and the world and ourselves and our hearts and our bodies and places and tragedies and laughter and souls.
Part 2: Calling out mummybloggers: The maternity card will be posted on Saturday.
(*title quote from Battlestar Galatica: Razor. Cos I am all about the pop culture while interrogating tropes of cultural silencing, yo.)
Tuesday, July 3, 2012
Modernising classics: Is it ever a good idea?
I saw a link to this article on Twitter just a few days after posting my Once a Month Book Club review / panegyric of Anne of Green Gables. It's an announcement that a Toronto media company is planning an Anne of Green Gables reboot, a modernisation for television that will aim to appeal to the YA market as much as to existing fans.
My reaction was instant suspicion, and a sinking feeling in my gut. Phrases about putting the Anne stories "in a broader, more international context" and talk about "writing in more modern points of view" worry me a bit. Even more, I get twitchy when the producers airily talk about emulating the sensibility of YA runaway successes like the Twilight and Hunger Games books (both of which are utterly dissimilar to Anne, and, I'd venture to say, to each other, in theme, aesthetic, voice and moral universe).
It's not the notion of adaptation for film or TV per se that bothers me. There are good book-to-film and book-to-TV efforts and there are bad ones; there are some notable examples of the visual version of the story being more compelling and better crafted than the original text (as a not-huge-fan of EM Forster, I'd have to put the film version of A Room With a View in this category, for instance; and I liked the film of The English Patient even more than the book, despite the book's highly literary and award-winning status). The existing TV series of the Anne books themselves, made in the 1980s and starring Megan Follows as Anne, are lovely, and my girls and I enjoy them as a complement to the texts.
No, what makes my teeth itch is the idea of modernisation of the story. I can think of one - possibly two - examples of truly successful modernisations of classic stories for film or TV (Sherlock is a cracking example of Doin' It Rite here). Offhand, I can also think of a dozen absolute shockers, dismal efforts that appealed neither to fans of the originals nor the expected cashed-up new generation. This seems especially true of children's classics, actually. Three of the more egregious examples illustrate the point:
Exhibit A: The Dark Is Rising movie
Exhibit B: The Famous Five reboot
Exhibit C: My Friends Tigger and Pooh (Winnie the Pooh reboot)
I think my main issue with modernisations is that unless the writers, producers and actors are extremely clever in the way they address the stories, the core elements that made the stories appealing are lost in the process. Place, values, and voice are not extrinsic elements to stories like the Anne books; the whole savour, the whole beauty of those texts is their infusion with the late-19th century worldview of their author and her powerful evocation of place-in-time. Prince Edward Island is a character (or more than one, actually) in these stories, and Anne's particular moral-ethical lens, indelibly coloured with 19th century values, is the filter through which the stories come alive. "Modernise" that - "internationalise" it - and what's left? Some escapades of overly imaginative children, which, while entertaining enough, lacks the integrated, magical integrity of the books as they stand.
Besides all that, I just think modernising classic stories - which usually means contemporary costumes, dialogue, settings, props, values / assumptions, and maybe inserting gender / diversity balanced characters - is based on a false and rather insulting premise: that people (in this case, kids / young adults) only connect with characters, situations and places that are familiar. Somehow the assumption seems to be that, if the fiction intersects with or purports to offer any view of an actual real-world situation or circumstance (not magical, not fantastic, not cartoonish), then the real-world elements must be rendered comfortable by making them replicas of the world around them. The argument that this means children can relate better to the story or the characters is, I think, entirely and irretrievably misguided.
Sure, children do like stories about people and circumstances they recognise, and such stories, when fresh, novel and well-developed, are great. BUT children are much smarter, more flexible, more capable and more creative than adults give them credit for. They can also deal with LOTS of different reality-scenarios - past eras, different social or cultural contexts, different types of language, different sets of assumptions, different ways of writing (or telling) stories. All that they can deal with - in fact they eat it up. I believe that it begins the process of learning that the world is, and always will be, a multifaceted place, and that the way you live your life is, in fact, not immutable, but changeable over time, place and circumstance.
Taking a classic story and attempting to modernise it usually strips it of the elements that made it great in the first place - elements that were embedded in the language, values, characters and style of the stories. I pretty much believe that redoing a classic is like dissecting a frog (or a joke) - at the end of it you may understand what made it tick, but it's stone cold dead.
My reaction was instant suspicion, and a sinking feeling in my gut. Phrases about putting the Anne stories "in a broader, more international context" and talk about "writing in more modern points of view" worry me a bit. Even more, I get twitchy when the producers airily talk about emulating the sensibility of YA runaway successes like the Twilight and Hunger Games books (both of which are utterly dissimilar to Anne, and, I'd venture to say, to each other, in theme, aesthetic, voice and moral universe).
It's not the notion of adaptation for film or TV per se that bothers me. There are good book-to-film and book-to-TV efforts and there are bad ones; there are some notable examples of the visual version of the story being more compelling and better crafted than the original text (as a not-huge-fan of EM Forster, I'd have to put the film version of A Room With a View in this category, for instance; and I liked the film of The English Patient even more than the book, despite the book's highly literary and award-winning status). The existing TV series of the Anne books themselves, made in the 1980s and starring Megan Follows as Anne, are lovely, and my girls and I enjoy them as a complement to the texts.
No, what makes my teeth itch is the idea of modernisation of the story. I can think of one - possibly two - examples of truly successful modernisations of classic stories for film or TV (Sherlock is a cracking example of Doin' It Rite here). Offhand, I can also think of a dozen absolute shockers, dismal efforts that appealed neither to fans of the originals nor the expected cashed-up new generation. This seems especially true of children's classics, actually. Three of the more egregious examples illustrate the point:
Exhibit A: The Dark Is Rising movie
Exhibit B: The Famous Five reboot
Exhibit C: My Friends Tigger and Pooh (Winnie the Pooh reboot)
I think my main issue with modernisations is that unless the writers, producers and actors are extremely clever in the way they address the stories, the core elements that made the stories appealing are lost in the process. Place, values, and voice are not extrinsic elements to stories like the Anne books; the whole savour, the whole beauty of those texts is their infusion with the late-19th century worldview of their author and her powerful evocation of place-in-time. Prince Edward Island is a character (or more than one, actually) in these stories, and Anne's particular moral-ethical lens, indelibly coloured with 19th century values, is the filter through which the stories come alive. "Modernise" that - "internationalise" it - and what's left? Some escapades of overly imaginative children, which, while entertaining enough, lacks the integrated, magical integrity of the books as they stand.
Besides all that, I just think modernising classic stories - which usually means contemporary costumes, dialogue, settings, props, values / assumptions, and maybe inserting gender / diversity balanced characters - is based on a false and rather insulting premise: that people (in this case, kids / young adults) only connect with characters, situations and places that are familiar. Somehow the assumption seems to be that, if the fiction intersects with or purports to offer any view of an actual real-world situation or circumstance (not magical, not fantastic, not cartoonish), then the real-world elements must be rendered comfortable by making them replicas of the world around them. The argument that this means children can relate better to the story or the characters is, I think, entirely and irretrievably misguided.
Sure, children do like stories about people and circumstances they recognise, and such stories, when fresh, novel and well-developed, are great. BUT children are much smarter, more flexible, more capable and more creative than adults give them credit for. They can also deal with LOTS of different reality-scenarios - past eras, different social or cultural contexts, different types of language, different sets of assumptions, different ways of writing (or telling) stories. All that they can deal with - in fact they eat it up. I believe that it begins the process of learning that the world is, and always will be, a multifaceted place, and that the way you live your life is, in fact, not immutable, but changeable over time, place and circumstance.
Taking a classic story and attempting to modernise it usually strips it of the elements that made it great in the first place - elements that were embedded in the language, values, characters and style of the stories. I pretty much believe that redoing a classic is like dissecting a frog (or a joke) - at the end of it you may understand what made it tick, but it's stone cold dead.
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Working music #2: This week's tunes
I've done a little better carving out blog time this week - 3 posts, woot! - but Sunday finds me out of time again, so I thought, why not put up a few more working songs. If nothing else, I'm building an on-blog playlist for myself :-)
So this week, I've been listening to this:
I actually didn't like this song so much when it first came out, but man has it grown on me.
Also have been revisiting my teens and giving this one a whirl:
The whole album from which this one is drawn has been hammered. It's helped me clarify my thoughts around some of the issues I've had to write on. (Not for the fainthearted, though).
As has the album from which this - my wedding dance song - came:
And for some world music, it's hard to beat Dead Can Dance:
Soundtrack to my week!
So this week, I've been listening to this:
I actually didn't like this song so much when it first came out, but man has it grown on me.
Also have been revisiting my teens and giving this one a whirl:
The whole album from which this one is drawn has been hammered. It's helped me clarify my thoughts around some of the issues I've had to write on. (Not for the fainthearted, though).
As has the album from which this - my wedding dance song - came:
And for some world music, it's hard to beat Dead Can Dance:
Soundtrack to my week!
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