From the NYTimes: In the Mideast, No Politics, but God's

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/weekinreview/24shadid.html

Interesting article and analysis as always in the New York Times: So the fall of Nasser was the start of rising fundamentalism in the Muslim world.

Gone are the dreams of an "Arab nation" who would include all Muslim sects and the Christians (for after all, there are/were a lot of Christians in the Middle East, Christianity predates Islam...) gone the possibility for the Arab World to unite and, under an "Oumma Arabiya" banner,  ensur economical and social progress in the Maghreb, the Machrek and the Arabian Peninsula.


Instead, theocracy prevails under the banner of an "Oumma Islamiya". It argues that being less "nationalistic/ethnic" as it includes every Muslim from South East Asia, Middle East, Central Asia, North and Sub-Saharan Africa and Europe now, it has more legitimacy.  Except that theocracy is the death of democracy...

Until secularism prevails, the MidEast, and by extension, all of the "Oumma Islamiya", poses a risk for minorities living among them, for women and for social, economic and political progress.

In hindsight, the only ones to blame are the Western "democracies" who brought down Nasser and allowed for fundamentalism to take over secular societies in the MidEast.

Mean Girls: It Starts Younger... Very Scary!

 This New York Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/fashion/10Cultural.html?pagewanted=1&ref=general&src=me
rightly claims that some Moms are responsible for their daughters' meanness, based on the fact that if their daughters are showing such signs, it is because they are "popular" and therefore feel invincible and protected by some kind of "popular immunity". Mean girls' mothers are fixated on their progeniture's "popularity" part and forgo any chance and opportunity to teach them kindness, ethics, compassion and empathy.

To illustrate yesterday's article in the New York Times about girls getting meaner at a younger age, the great feminist blog "Jezebel" has found 5 examples in classic children's literature and their TV adaptations for some of them:
http://jezebel.com/5661220/the-5-worst-mean-little-girls-of-all-time/gallery/

I still remember Nellie Olsen from the TV series adapted from Laura Ingalls' book, the world-wide famous "Little House on the Prairie." That is probably the best illustration for yesterday's NYTimes article: indeed, Nellie's Mom also fits the image of the Mean Girl's Mean Mother.

It is one thing... wanting our daughters to be Alpha Females ready to take up the world and be what they want to be (just like boys), and it is a totally different thing to assume -WRONGLY- that an Alpha Female is the one who, at 2 years old, can mimick Alicia Keys (as said in the NYTimes article) or is cute wearing sexualized grown-up attire... What are we doing to our daughters, for God's sake?

Bikers to the Rescue: an Act of Love & Respect

On Monday, I was driving back from a work trip to ... Costco in Arlington. At the Lincoln Memorial, cars were stopped to let a funeral drive by going towards Arlington Memorial Cemetery. I was very impressed: ahead of the funeral procession, bikers on their Harley were leading the hearse and all the cars. I thought the dead soldier was a Vietnam Vet. Then I read the paper on Tuesday and again this morning, and discovered that the fallen soldier was young, one more victim of the current wars, and that the reason Vietnam Vets bikers were there was to PROTECT their comrade in arms, to create a "noisy" barrier against the hateful, loud, disrespectful and tacky demonstration of Westboro Baptist Church... the very Church who blames soldiers 's death on the fact that "homosexuality is taking over America," saying that God is killing soldiers because of "America's sin."


BIKERS, YOU ARE THE BEST, and I say THANK GOD for bikers! As for the Westboro Baptist Church, I hope to God they lose their case at the Supreme Court. First Amendment should be amended when it becomes an intrusion on private life, especially at its most painful moments: the funeral of a loved one.
 
Read the article signed by Doug Gansler, Maryland's Attorney General:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/10/05/AR2010100503827.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

And here is a picture I took in 2009, on Rolling Thunder Day, when 500,000 bikers come to DC:

A New Voice In The Sphere of Child-Rearing Books: Reina Weiner's Book

Going against both sides of the mothering spectrum, Reina Weiner’s new book, Strong from the Start: Raising Confident and Resilient Kids, brings the rediscovered voice of reason and wisdom and a great sense of humor to the topic of raising children. Far from trying to antagonize one tribe (the working mothers) against another (the stay-at-home moms), she considers the child first and foremost, prodding us to “encourage [our] kids to think for themselves from the very beginning” as the under title states.


The book is very refreshing in the way that it stands clear from all the traditional literature on the subject. Away from hovering helicopter parents, which she dismisses with elegance and humor, Reina Weiner becomes the heroic standard-bearer of the silent parents, those who dare not assert that they have an identity other than being just Mom (or Dad), that they have a life other than the one revolving around their children. It takes courage nowadays for a young or even middle-aged parent to confess that they do not attend every single event in which their child participates. Try once and the choir of self-righteous mothers (the dads often seem to be able to preserve their identity more) will mark you with the scarlet letter “A” for Abomination (and not adultery, which would be much more fun since we do not live in the times of Nathaniel Hawthorne anymore). Indeed, Reina Weiner has a point and she tells it loud and clear. Too many parents seem to only be living through their children: living-rooms are so child-proofed that they look like the interior of a spatial shuttle when they are not littered with tacky giant plastic toys; time is spent driving the child from the "Mommy and Me" gym lesson to the Suzuki-method violin or piano lesson, to the Tiny Tots soccer game (and then the travel team which will take every single weekend away for 15 years)…. I could go on and on. Do we really want our children to remember us as their servants more than their parents? Do we really want to cater to their needs to the extent that they will not know how to wash their laundry or serve themselves cereals for breakfast?

I am not sure whether Reina Weiner interviewed stay-at-home or working mothers or a mix thereof. One of the reasons some of the mothers seem to be doing “everything” for their children is the apparent “lack of time” while another one confesses that it will be done by her standards if she does it herself! One wonders whether time is lacking because the child’s schedule is so loaded with activities to go to and travel time to consider, that allowing for him or her to get dressed by themselves, would disrupt the entire day. Or is it rather because nowadays mothers are pressured into perfection by the media, the parenting books, the parenting “empowerment” groups, the other mothers they meet? Judy Warner wrote a book a few years back that sums it all: “Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety” and Reina Weiner’s book adds to the theme. I particularly liked when she quoted Marsha who used to say to her kids “Unless there’s blood, don’t call me.” My own European parents had a similar attitude.

Reina Weiner also touches on the necessity for parents to share the same parenting style. This probably is one of the hardest tasks in a couple: oftentimes one of the parents will be the good cop and the other one the bad cop. I know I am the bad cop but I have to be since my husband is not so much the laid back dude (he is not!) as he is the “I did not see/hear it, so it did not happen” kind of guy. Saying yes when the other parent has said no, or even worse, saying yes when both parents originally agreed to say no is warranting mixed messages and hence limit testing sessions on a grand scale by a confused child or teenager.

Reina Weiner shares her “simple strategies” from experience and the reader can only be thankful for her down-to-earth approach to child-rearing, from letting them choose their own clothes, prepare their own breakfast, be responsible for their school bus, participate in family life (wood cutting). The reader also feels empowered by all the positive and humorous reinforcement one receives, especially in the chapter “You’re Still “Numero Uno”, which has become my new title until both my children leave the nest. Reina Weiner’s children, Laura and Daniel, seem to have swum through middle and high schools with just the occasional disappointments, such as Laura being disappointed for not having been invited to a birthday party, or Daniel not making it to a band performance for which he had worked. They handled these learning moments without any “fixing” from their parents, which is a rare occasion nowadays, as most parents tend to come to the rescue even when not asked to.

Of course, not all children grow at the same pace, and some of us face the daily challenge of a child with special needs for whom even Reina Weiner’s mom-tested strategies in trust-building may not work smoothly or right away. With a son who has Asperger Syndrome, I know for a fact that he will not leave the nest yet, and that he may need me for a much longer time than my daughter will. But that does not mean that he cannot learn, with positive reinforcement, trust and LOVE, some simple survival skills, even if it takes him longer.

I am not sure whether Reina Weiner interviewed any parents of pre-teens or teens for her book (as much as it obvious that she talked to mothers of younger children and to mothers of children who had left the nest). She does acknowledge that her own children, Laura and Daniel, grew up in the era before GPS and cell phones, although already with video games. This may be the only weakness in an otherwise extremely positive, trust-building (not only learning how to trust one’s kids but how to trust oneself raising them up) and optimistic book. In this 21th century, children can fall prey to the Internet, and I do not mean sexual predators or other horror stories. Children can fall prey to their peers through cyber bullying, “sexting”, the misuse of social networks, and a few other new things: from anonymous insulting phone calls to a photo being “photoshopped” and uploaded on the Internet , from graphic nude pictures being taken at age 12 and sent to friends “for fun”, from a mother creating a fake Face Book account to the suicide of the girl she “friended” and “de-friended” to the more recent suicide of a Middle School student in Connecticut due to intense cyber bullying, the book is missing one final chapter, on how to keep faith in and trust your kids in the face of greater and more powerful technological adversaries…

Mission Impossible? Not if we accept it and apply Reina Weiner’s mom-tested strategies from the start and relearn that common sense endures while best-selling child-rearing theories are just a fad…

©Sarah Diligenti, The Quill and The Brush, May 2010.

Winter Readings

What else to do when snow hits as hard as it did since December 19, but read even more? Cuddled under my many blankets and even with a flashlight when I lost power, I turned many pages during this long and never-ending winter. As I write this review, snow still muffles the sounds of bird chirping and the garden still looks more like the backyard of a Datcha than Suburban America.

However, from December to February, I traveled in time and space: from Scandinavia to India via France and Ireland, without leaving my house… Surprisingly, I have discovered a new taste for Northern European Literature. I still remember how I deeply disliked Karen Blixen’s prose when I was in my 20s, so it came as a real surprise for me to fall for the pristine clarity of such writers as Per Petterson or the infectious addictiveness of no other than the late Stieg Larrson. Of course, the subjects and styles are very different: the former writes about war, about the grey shadows of life – nothing is ever black or white with Petterson- and what consequences all this bears on its narrators, in Norway (Out Stealing Horses) and in Denmark (To Siberia). Solitude is the link between Petterson’s masterful pieces and the more addictive Millenium series. If Petterson’s heroes end up lonely, Lisbeth Salander is alone from the start of her tragic life and so is Super Blomkvist (although he is more sociable) when he investigates the world of finances, corruption, and violence done to women. If I ever travel to Sweden, I will definitely sign up for one of the Millenium-themed walking tours of Stockholm! It was supposed to be a Decalogue, but ended up being a trilogy due to Stieg Larrson’s untimely death. All of us fans of Millenium will have to try and imagine what other adventures Lisbeth could have gotten into and what other unknown aspects of Sweden Super Blomkvist would have brought out in the open. If you think of Sweden like I did until I read the book in terms of Ikea, meatballs, best social services and women’s rights, you are in for a shock!

For American readers, volume 3 of the trilogy will be released in May 2010. The American titles are: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (volume 1), The Girl Who Played With Fire (volume 2) and the last one will be called The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets' Nest. These books have been a phenomenal success in Europe since their release in 2004; translations in French and other European languages have been available since 2005...

From Scandinavia, I jumped to Ireland and hated Anne Enright’s The Gathering. I know it won the Man Booker Prize and in general this Prize is a notch higher than the Goncourt in its decisions, but this book did nothing for me. I am tired of Irish multigenerational books, always filled with alcoholism, religion and the odd domestic violence and now of course, revelations on pedophilia. What do you expect of families of twelve children in a country that only started to get out of poverty thanks to the EU subsidies? All families have their shares of secrets; the Irish simply have more because they breed more! Enough! The prose is so convoluted that one even wonders whether the author is not also an alcoholic. No Irish writer seems to be able to ever match James Joyce’s Ulysses…

Delphine de Vigan’s Les Heures Souterraines is not the most cheerful book; it is actually very depressing. But it should have gotten the Goncourt. To make do, a new literary award was created and given to the author for this book: "le prix du roman d’entreprise" (Corporate World Literary Award). Kafkaian to the very end, claustrophobic, extremely well written, with alternate chapters and alternate narrators, Les Heures Souterraines is the literary dissection of France’s corporate world and traditions. If they ever make a movie of that book, it will be the new “Modern Times” (Les Temps Modernes, Chaplin) but with a darker touch. Chilling!

A hop over the Atlantic took me to Canada and Iceland this time. As I was reading Christina Sunley’s masterful debut novel, The Tricking of Freya, I discovered the intricacies of Icelandic language (one of the most difficult to learn). The unraveling of words goes hand in hand with Freya’s family secrets finally out in the open. It also deals with mental illness with a sensibility rarely seen in literature. Freya, her mother, her aunt, her grandmother, are women living poetry, breathing poetry, even dying for it. This was probably the best book I read in 2009.

A Country Called Home, by Kim Barnes – just like Two Rivers, by T. Greenwood- is a twist on American Suburbia. Many novels in recent years have dealt with this theme: The Little Children, by Tom Perrotta, and the re-released Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates. I find it interesting that in Perrotta’s and Yates’s books, women are at the crux of rebellion against suburbia, while in Barnes’ and Greenwood’s, it is men who have to face life in the middle of nowhere. While the women often are characterized as hysterical (Yates) or newly-minted Bovarys (Perrotta), the men in Greenwood’s and Barnes’s books have to genuinely confront existence. Both men find themselves widowed with a child (a daughter in each case), and at a loss as to what to do. But where Thomas Deracotte becomes a junkie doctor, addicted to morphine, unable to take care of his daughter, Harper Montgomery is a little bit better, and suffers more from endless daydreaming or nostalgia for what could have been. Both men will rely heavily on loving caretakers: Manny and Maggie. The similarities between the two books are remarkable and it is worth a comparative reading. I still wonder though about the fact that Barnes and Greenwood, both female authors, treated their “fallen men” in a much more positive way than Perrotta and Yates did their “ fallen women.”

Far North, by Marcel Theroux, is a take on the future. The son of famous writer Paul Theroux, Marcel Theroux is not a newcomer on the literary scene. Far North takes place in Siberia, when a group of pacifist Quakers intent on saving their flock and trying to build a better world after global warming kills off the temperate hemispheres, buy land from the Russians and settle there. It is a rewriting of the Pioneer Movement, set in a very bleak future, slightly evocative of French writer Robert Merle’s Malevil (in which people tried to rebuild a life after a freak nuclear accident). Theroux’s strengths lie in a vivid imagination, a global culture and a research that may have included the best narrative accounts on the Goulag (in both tsarist and communist times, one thinks of Dostoievsky’s Notes from the Underground but also of Solzhenitsyn, of course!). His narrator’s name, Makepeace, is a probable literary homage to William Makepeace Thackeray. The narrator is in fact a woman, a fact one discovers only in the middle of the book. The writing style would not give this fact away, as it is clearly masculine writing. There is more than just one big surprise in the book so I will let you discover them. I am concerned though with the writing: at times, it is a bit shaky, almost grammatically incorrect.

Finally, to warm me up after all these snow-abundant books, I read Atlas of Unknowns, by Tania James, an Indian-American writer and Between Assassinations, by Indian writer Aravind Adinga (Booker Prize winner for The White Tiger). The first book is the beautiful story of two young Indian sisters living in the little-known Syriac Christian (Orthodox) Indian community: one is crippled by a firework accident but becomes a talented pictorial artist and the steady rock of a family still trying to recover from their mother’s “suicide” (it is not) and the other who is gifted and talented academically but who will have to steal her sister’s talent to get to America. The second book gathers chapters like a travel guide, and is in fact a very clever collection of stories between Indira Gandhi’s and Rajiv Gandhi’s assassinations, a real window on life in a Third World Country small city.

I read many more books than those mentioned here, but that is another story!

©Sarah Diligenti Pickup for The Quill and The Brush, February 2010.

No Need For New Architectural Monstrosities in the European Landscapes: Convert Old Buildings

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/05/world/europe/05france.html?ref=global-home
The one who must be laughing in his grave is none other than Josef Stalin. He destroyed churches by either erasing them totally, transforming them into swimming-pools, youth centers, museums, hay lofts, pigsties, etc. In Europe, chuch attendance has been decreasing steadily, without any Soviet input, since the 18th century, thanks to the "Enlightnment".
Now European (and French) churches are empty and there are not enough priests (here one priest serves many parishes). I could go on about the fact that the decrease in sacerdotal callings is due to the absurdity of the rule of celibacy for Catholic priests, but that is another subject altogether.On the other hand, other faiths are growing (Islam) and need their own buildings of worship.
Could the Europeans do like it is done here in the States, when sometimes a Church becomes a synagogue and the building changes parishioners and faith affiliation without a scandal?
After all, the meaning of the Latin word "ecclesia" does not mean a stone, cement and brick Church, just a gathering of the faithful... Church should be within one's heart and soul, not an architectural show. And since the steeple is already standing in the landscape, no need for additional minarets... My idea is not new, look at Hagia Sofia in Istambul...
Now of course, if the parishioners are truly opposed to any change (be it a peaceful revolution in the attribution of the building or the physical destruction of the church building as suggested in this article), why don't they show more fervor or faith for that matter? The hypocrisy of claiming their "Christian" or "Catholic" places of worship while not attending Mass is one more example of a decadent civilization. Practice what you say. Do not only lip-worship.
As for the government not helping, it is the rule of law: no government should be involved in spiritual issues. Temporal power and spiritual power are antinomic. And that is valid for all countries under the sun: old Europe, new Europe, the US, Saudi Arabia and Iran... Theocracies only bring out tyranny. Same with extreme secularism, alas!

Iranian Woman on Cruel Islam

This is a very moving interview of an Iranian woman who was jailed for 3 years for having refused to wear the head scarf. She was beaten, raped, her leg was broken, the other wounded and left to become infected.
In Europe, left-wingers are demonstrating alongside fundamentalist Muslims to demand that secular laws forbidding head to toe attire be abolished. They should watch this video and understand that it is a woman's right not to want to wear this demeaning and humiliating tool of male domination: the veil and any other potato-sack looking cloth.