Love as an Act of Inference

My bedtime reading these days is a novel by Emily Listfield, Waiting to Surface. I'm only a few chapters into it so far, but it's making me wonder how well we can ever really know the people we love. The book's premise is that the husband of the protagonist, Sarah, disappears without a trace at a moment when they are estranged from each other and on a fast track to divorce.

While she's trying to digest the initial, nauseating news of her husband Todd's disappearance, Sarah reflects on something that resonated with me even though I'm pretty confident I'll never go through a comparable experience. (Listfield apparently based the book on her own real-life experience - a fact I'm trying hard to repress because it so horrifies me.)

People offer up fragments of themselves to friends, spouses, lovers, leaving each person to create the remaining whole according to what they have in hand, forensic scientists all. But no two pieces are precisely alike, some barely have any resemblance at all. Love, it seems, and understanding, are largely acts of inference.

(Emily Listfield, Waiting to Surface, p. 37)

Since I don't watch CSI but I did spend enough time in archives to warp my personality, the only metaphor that doesn't work for me in this passage is the "forensic scientist" bit. I'm picturing instead the archaeologist, holding shards of a life. Or even more pertinently, the historian, skimming through reams of documents that time's ravages have rendered fragile and frustratingly incomplete. The history of emotions is especially hard to reconstruct; in my dissertation research, for instance, I typically had to rely on doctors' accounts of how women reacted to giving birth, sometimes reading the doctors' descriptions against the grain.

We assume that the people we know are a whole lot transparent than that. Yes, people lie. But that's not what Sarah/Listfield is saying. She's insisting that it's in the very nature of relationships that we cannot fathom the other in his or her fullness.

In this novel, this unknowability and ambiguity lays the ground for (apparent) tragedy. Even in the absence of high drama, however, I think that our fragmentary understanding helps explain how a partner can demand a divorce, or have an affair, or suddenly declare themselves unhappy with the couple's division of labor - or maybe all of the above - and their partner may be blindsided.

Yet I suspect that recognizing love as an act of inference explains more than just the death of love. It may also hold the promise of greater happiness? Might it also be a call for humility toward our partners, which could liberate us (by, for instance, erasing the expectation that we'll always automatically be on the same page)? Might it open the possibility of continually discovering new and wonderful aspects in them? Might it suggest that terminal boredom in a marriage or other long-term relationship just means we've closed our eyes to how our partners are fundamentally unknowable?

I don't know the answer to those questions, but they remind me of Esther Perel's prescriptions for keeping a marriage erotically alive in her book, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence. Much of her message is to cultivate a healthy distance and mystery. What Listfield suggests is that this mystery is always there, always present. Our task is to recognize it and celebrate it.

Perfect crocuses (which have withered since I took this picture behind my house). Relate this to the post as you will.

Books: Name the Anti-Aphrodisiacs

Oh oh. Picking up on a post on Pandagon on the worst books to read while having sex, figleaf is turning this into a meme. Books? Sex? How could I resist? (Excuse me while I fan myself.)

Note: The question is "what are the worst books to read during sex?" If you decide to pick up on this meme, you are not allowed to say "why would anyone in their right mind read during sex?" Auguste at Pandagon already put the kibosh on that. So no cheating!

Now, figleaf put Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes on his no-fly list, and while I wouldn't personally recommend Hegel - he makes your blood drain into your brain and then freeze, never to flow southward again - I can vouch for the eroticism of reading German out loud in bed. I know that goes against the grain of every stereotype about erotic languages, but hey, my Italian stops at "una camera con doccia." (Which, come to think of it, could also lead to rather nice things.) There's something intimate and vulnerable about reading to your partner in their language, especially/even if you're not terribly adept at it. I wouldn't necessarily recommend halting the proceedings to do this, I'm just saying it can be a surprisingly good warm-up. High-quality German chick lit works rather well, believe it or not. (Oh, why do I have the feeling no one is going to believe me?!? And if you do, that you're going to think I'm much kinkier than you ever suspected?)

German history, on the other hand, is right out. I've had a copy of my doctoral advisor's book, Absolute Destruction, next to my nightstand for awhile. It's a very smart history of Germany militarism during its Imperial period. If you get off on that, you've got a paraphilia way beyond the bounds of what I personally would consider healthy.

Ditto for Ian McEwan's The Innocent, a spy story set in Cold War Berlin which culminates in scenes of such horror and gore that no other author could have kept me on board. I won't detail them here, because you might not want the spoilers. Except: Shortly before things come apart (all too literally), there's a scene where the clueless young British title character is doggedly losing his innocence with his German girlfriend. He goes down on her with such concentration and wonder that - even though I only read it silently to myself - it, um, led shortly thereafter to certain non-fictional inspirations. 'Nuff said.

More surprisingly, Sungold the Lust Kitten was totally disappointed in Jane Smiley's Ten Days in the Hills. It was billed this exhilaratingly transgressive erotic romp. I love Smiley, but darn it, this book was chock-a-block with chatter about Hollywood. Every once in a while there would be a sex scene featuring the word "cunt." I guess was the transgressive part. (Ooooh! Naughty words!) But the temperature just never rose above tepid for me, even though I was shamelessly looking for the steamy bits.

And apropos Hollywood: Just about anything I read for work is a guaranteed lust-killer, but the last thing I read tonight for tomorrow's class on psychoanalytis feminisms was Laura Mulvey's classic essay in feminist film theory, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." In discussing the phallocentric structures of classic Hollywood films, Mulvey writes:

It is said that analzying pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article.

Granted, this article is no doubt (as Amy Poehler said in her alter ego as Hillary Clinton) a "boner shrinker." (And not because it's a feminist manifesto, but because it assumes you understand Lacan, which - god help me - I don't.)

But. I'm not so sure Mulvey's entirely right about pleasure and analysis. Sure, there's a point of no return beyond which analysis is disruptive - and frankly and wondrously impossible. But as a form of flirtation? There's a level between analysis and appreciation where describing a partner's charms ... and how I might want to enjoy them ... can be all about pleasure.

Illogical but Irresistible Book Meme

Cliché-lit cat from I Can Has Cheezburger?

I first saw this meme at Sugar Mag's but can't link her because her blog has disappeared! (Where are you, Sugar Mag?!) I bumped into it again via Brandy at Moue Magazine.

Supposedly the average American has read just six of these books. Could be; plenty of people don't read at all, which would tend to drag down the average. But I'm guessing nearly everyone I know has read a lot more than just six.

No one seems know who originally picked the books or why. The list is partly just plain nonsensical. Why list Hamlet separately and then also include the complete works of Shakespeare? Why pull a similar trick with C.S. Lewis?

It's a curious list in terms of its selections and omissions, too. Why all the Austen and Dickens? Where are the post-war big boys like Norman Mailer and Philip Roth and Saul Bellows and John Updike? Where are some of the more recent literary luminaries like Don DeLillo (I've read a fair amount of him even though I'm not a huge fan) or Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections or Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible (to name two novels that totally derailed work on my dissertation at the time)? And The DaVinci Code just makes everyone go WTF.

It's fun anyway. It tickles my inner nerd. Plus, editorializing is just irresistible. Please feel free to editorialize right back at me.

And if you do the meme, I'd love it you link back to it in comments, okey dokey?

The rules are:

1) Bold what you have read
2) Put in italics what you have started to read
3) Put an asterisk next to what you intend to read

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (I love Austin and so does this list.)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (See The Hobbit, below.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (Might this be the origin of my weakness for enigmatic, dark-haired men?)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I'm probably the only person in America who hasn't read a single page of it - or seen the movies.)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (When I was about in fifth grade, there was a Bible in our bathroom and I tried reading it start to finish. I got bogged down in Leviticus. Purity rules, anyone? Also around that time, I read Revelations under the covers at night by flashlight. Not recommended.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (My high school never assigned this, so I read it on my own steam shortly thereafter - in the summer 1984, in fact. I don't know if that made it more or less chilling.)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (I read this multiple times as a kid and wept harder every time when Beth died.)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read a bunch of the more famous play but nowhere near all. I started with Romeo and Juliet when I was 13 and had the chicken pox.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (I really tried to get into this. All my friends liked it. There were certain cute nerdy boys who were completely fixated on Tolkien. And I just couldn't get involved in the storyline. I bailed after about 150 pages.)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (I read this for "diversion" when my husband had just survived multiple close brushes with death, and - even though I also kept accidentally picking up novels with a cancer theme around that time - this one disturbed me more than anything else. The central male character's trajectory - the time traveler edging ever closer to calamity - captures the dynamics of catastrophic illness and the ICU with terrible, perfect clarity. Even though nary a hospital appears in the story, it's a poetic and horrible depiction of what actually awaits most of us time-bound mortals. *Shudder.*)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (Oh, this was one of my biggest bail-out moments ever. It was assigned for a class my last year of college. I got within 100 pages of the end. And then I got busy with final projects and never finished. Isn't that awful?)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (All the cute nerdy guys liked this, too, but since I actually enjoyed it, I read the whole set.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (I'd like to re-read this one, as well as East of Eden)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
*37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (This one's in my to-read pile.)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (I read the whole thing out loud to my son, the Bear - who resembles Pooh not in the least)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (I think I was in sixth grade the first time, but I re-read it a few years later when I was old enough to grasp the political allegory)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Everyone who does this meme wonders why this book is on the list. Maybe because it became part of the cultural fabric for a while?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I read this over 20 years ago but still think of the plague of sleeplessness sometimes when I've got insomnia - oh, and during my first pregnancy, I thought of the babies born with the tail of a pig more often than was smart.)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (This book is forever tangled up with the end of my first, preliminary research trip to Germany during grad school. I started reading it while I was breaking up with my then-boyfriend, and I finished it on a Pakistani Air plane from Amsterdam to New York. Under other circumstances, I might have sneered at the ending as emotionally manipulative. As it was, I wept loudly for about a half hour, right in the middle of that airplane, obviously mourning a lot more than poor Owen Meany.)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (I love everything Atwood has written. This isn't my very favorite - I think Cat's Eye or The Robber Bride top my list - I re-read it last fall in order to teach it and was amazed at how presciently Atwood described a mix between the Taliban and the Religious Right today.)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (I think McEwan just keeps getting better, and he already ranks with Atwood in my literary cosmos. So, while I really enjoyed Atonement, I was totally captivated by Saturday and On Chesil Beach.)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (Here's another one from the cute, nerdy boy collection that I couldn't really get into.)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (This is such a fascinating book, funny and touching and suspenseful. I'm sure I'll read it again.)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (Her second book, The Little Friend, was wonderful too - another compulsive page turner. It cured me of ever wanting to try meth - ever. Not that I was planning to.)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (I thought this was haunting and wonderful, not overhyped in the least)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (But don't ask me to reproduce the plot line; by now it's pretty, um, obscure to me.)
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (And y'know, I loved it. Sometimes silly comedy is just the best.)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Uh-oh. I was supposed to read this late in my college career but hated it and just got bogged down. The shame!)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (But I have a friend who read it; does that count?)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (I read this when I was maybe 12, and I wish I knew why the adults around me allowed it. I was way to young for it. But I was also totally fascinated - and still am - by Plath's talent and her trainwreck life.)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt (Another favorite author of mine - but I liked Babel Tower best.)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (This is de rigeuer for women's/gender studies scholars. I love it anyway.)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (I read this for a history seminar in the college where we read oodles of nineteenth-century European novels - that's where I read Germinal and Great Expectations, too - but this was my fave of the bunch. What I most remember from the discussion: my professor discussing what Flaubert meant when he referred to cold feet in bed. I think I should re-read this now that I'm a putative adult.)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (Um, this is in the Moby Dick category for me.)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (This goes back to junior high for me; I loved it at the time.)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (I read this with bronchitis and a high fever; light delirium meshes well with it.)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (I've never heard of this one and have to wonder: where is On the Beach?)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (My older son discovered this book about a year ago, too; it's so fun to see him adore it.)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Obama's Inner Bookworm

Photo by Flickr user chotda, used under a Creative Commons license.

Do books matter? Does it matter what books our leaders care about? I think the answer to both these questions is a resounding yes, but then, I’m an incurable bookworm who's spent half her life inhabiting fictional worlds.

So I was fascinated by Laura Miller’s profile in today’s Salon of Barack Obama’s reading tastes. She cites Nietzsche as a major influence on him – which frankly I don’t see – and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, whom she portrays as a political chameleon. I'm not convinced that this sheds much light on Obama’s politics and character. I'm also not sure how she selected his non-fiction "favorites" nor whether they're really representative of his reading habits.

What intrigued me, though, was Obama’s relationship to fiction. Miller writes:

If Obama is elected, he'll be one of the most literary presidents in recent memory. Although his boyhood and youth in Hawaii and Indonesia were not especially bookish, Obama the reader blossomed as an undergraduate at Occidental College in California and, especially, during the two monkish years he spent finishing up his degree at Columbia University in New York. "I had tons of books," he told his biographer, David Mendell ("Obama: From Promise to Power"), about this time in his life. "I read everything. I think that was the period when I grew as much as I have ever grown intellectually. But it was a very internal growth." Even after he left New York to work as a community organizer in Chicago, Mendell reports, Obama lived so much like a retiring writer -- spending many hours holed up in a spartan apartment with volumes of "philosophy and literature" -- that some of his colleagues assumed he was gathering material for a novel.

A taste for serious fiction is rare in the American male these days, but Obama has it. According to several friends, he even tried his hand at writing short stories during those early years in Chicago, and he recalls priggishly scolding his half sister, Maya, while she was visiting him in New York, because she chose to watch TV instead of reading some novels he'd given her. Among the authors he favored during his years of intensive reading were Herman Melville, Toni Morrison and E.L. Doctorow (cited as his favorite before he switched to Shakespeare). He has also mentioned Philip Roth, whose struggles to shrug off the strictures of Jewish American community leaders must have resonated with the young activist.

Okay, I'm no huge fan of Philip Roth, and I'll confess I never finished Moby Dick. Weak, I know. But that's beside the point. I think the fact that he cares about serious fiction matters. Here's why.

Some months ago, back before the presidential herd had been thinned, USA Today asked the candidates a bunch of questions intended to reveal them as actual human beings. When asked what work of fiction they'd last read, most of the candidates either named something escapist (both Chris Dodd and Joe Biden mentioned John Grisham potboilers) or flip (Bill Richardson cited the administration's energy plan). Hillary Clinton inexplicably named a non-fiction book by Doris Kearns Goodwin.

Barack Obama? He'd just read Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. This practically clinched my vote. I'd just finished it, myself, by a funny coincidence. But mostly, I loved Obama's response because it pandered to no one except maybe my personal demographic (surely less than 1% of the population!). Gilead is the story of a retired minister looking back on his life. It's a pleasurable read because the prose is so graceful. It's just a beautiful book that lovingly portrays ordinary events, shades of gray, tensions between faith and desires, family dynamics, and the often-cruel passage of time. While all of this adds up to a surprisingly compelling story, you couldn't rightly call it escapist. It's not flashy, it hasn't been made into a Hollywood movie, and it's not a household word that most voters will instantly relate to.

I'm not a snob. I've read a few Grishams in my time, too, along with an embarrassing number of romances - but as part of a varied literary diet. At the risk of sounding like the schoolmarm that I actually am, I think literary variety isn't just good for the brain; it nurtures the soul, too.

Obama's embrace of serious fiction - of books like Gilead - signals something far more important than the actual list of his favorite titles. It means he's not just tolerant of ambiguity, he actually enjoys it and appreciates it. His voracious reading habits matter, too, because they express an insatiable and wide-ranging curiosity.

These are both unlikely qualities in a politician. Lately, our leaders have insisted the world ought to be black and white. Obama refutes this not just through his very identity and family tree but also through his choice of books. And the fact that he chooses to read in the first place, rather than, say, clearing brush? Well, curiosity has been sorely lacking in the Oval Office over the past eight years. If curiosity and the life of the mind are elitist, then the world needs a lot more elitism.

I'm still deeply, deeply uneasy about Obama's tack to the center. But I hope that Obama's inner bookworm will protect him - and us - from the worst of what Adrianna Huffington rightly calls not realpolitik - but "realstupidpolitik."

The Face in the Mirror and the Origami of Time

From I Can Has Cheezburger?

I don’t think I’m an exceptionally vain person, but I’m also not immune to wanting to look younger than I actually am. Every once in a while I catch a glimpse of time leaving its tracks on my face. This happened most memorably a couple years ago when I was rushing between classes and was ambushed by the view in a bathroom mirror. Looking sidelong, I thought: oh my goodness, it’s my grandma!

Now, matters could be worse. Yes, it’s true that my dad’s mother got rather jowly late in life, not quite Nixon-esque but still quite noticable, and I see the contours of that future in my own chin. Yes, her eyelids sagged by the time she was in her eighties, and instead of getting them fixed, she held them in place with tape. (Why she never pursued surgery remains a mystery.)

But Grandma also remained vibrant and attractive well into her middle years. She adored being the queen bee of Republican politics in North Dakota. Virtually the only woman on the scene, she basked in the admiration of all those men. Incipient jowls apparently didn’t deter them. And conversely, she appreciated an attractive man well into her nineties, pretty much up to the point when she lost her marbles.

So yes, things could be a whole lot worse. And yet, when I read this passage in a Stephen McCauley novel a few days ago, I thought, whoa, he got it exactly right:

I was barely awake when the doorbell rang at eleven the next morning. I glanced in my bureau mirror on my way to the stairs, amazed at how increasingly unkind sleep was as I got older, as if someone came in every night to practice origami on my face while I slept.
(Stephen McCauley, The Man of the House, 140.)

McCauley is recounting the very particular woes of a gay man around 40 who’s single but would prefer to be paired. But even if you’re not hunting for a mate, that morning tracery can be merciless. My one really noticeable wrinkle is a line near my jaw where I know my chin gets squished against the pillow. I suppose I could sleep on my back, but then I’d never sleep, and that wouldn’t exactly enhance my looks, either.

This isn't just vanity. It's also not merely a slavish response to the beauty ideal, as a unidimensional feminist analysis might suggest. It's partly a fear of mortality. It's also anxiety - as McCauley's anti-hero displays - that no one will want to have sex with you beyond a certain point of decrepitude.

Most interestingly, it's a sense of alienation from oneself, as philosopher Diana Tietjens Meyers has argued. In her book Gender in the Mirror, Meyers says when we look at our aging selves in the mirror, we no longer see our familiar, long-known selves. Our face appears as "not-self." It's no longer the image that is invested with and in our relationships. In this interpretation, the desire to look younger, be it through surgery, cosmetics, or merely the approving eyes of another, is an effort to recover what we perceive as our true selves.

Meyers presents this as a gendered phenomenon. It's true that women's social worth is still bound up with our appearance more than men's. I think Meyers may also be right that women's aging faces become a sort of proxy for everyone's horror of mortality. This was likely one strike against Hillary Clinton during the primary campaign.

But that loss of the familiar self is not necessarily gendered. The face with origami folds - and the resulting sense of unfamiliarity - can be male just as easily as female.

In some ways, recognizing myself as my grandma was a moment of pure alienation and unfamiliarity. I literally saw someone other than myself in the mirror. But if I have to morph into someone else, I could do worse. When Grandma died, she was just a few days short of 103. So if I get her jowls, I’ll hope to inherit her robustness, too. Certainly I got my ornery streak partly from her. But I promise: If my eyelids start to sag, I will get them fixed.

Where the Tiger and Bear Got Their Names

I call my sons the Bear and the Tiger on this blog mostly because I don't want any weirdos invading their privacy. In fact, I try to write mostly about my own reflections on parenting, without a whole lot of identifying detail or anything that would embarrass them later. But those are also their nicknames in real life. They're named after characters in German kids' books by a guy named Janosch. (Just Janosch. That's his whole name.)

The Little Tiger and the Little Bear live in a house on the bank of a river near the woods. The Little Bear is a would-be gourmet who mostly knows how to make bouillon. The Little Tiger is, like any good cat, a bit lazy, but he does like to watch the Bear work. Occasionally the Tiger gathers mushrooms for dinner. They have two constant companions, a tiger-duck and a little green frog called Gunther Kastenfrosch. They both believe in soft, comfy couches.

And they take care of each other, even though the Tiger can't read yet. (He does learn eventually; you can see an online version, in German but with pictures, here.) The Bear has some rudimentary literacy, just enough to get him in trouble. When one day he finds a banana carton labeled "Panama," he gets it in his head that Panama must smell like bananas from top to bottom. That sets them off on a quest for the land of their dreams, but when they ask for directions to Panama, they keep getting told to take the next left turn. After several lefts, they end up - you guessed it - back at their little house between the river and the woods. It's sort of a mild-mannered version of "There's no place like home," minus the witches and tornadoes but with repeated black humor featuring a fox who's "romancing" a goose.

The Bear takes care of the Tiger when he takes sick one day while picking mushrooms. He carries the Tiger home and plies him with his favorite food (well, bouillon), tea, and visitors. He bandages the Tiger from neck to foot, though the Tiger implores him to "leave my back unwrapped" because "I might have to cough." (The picture shows how well that worked.) Finally, the Tiger is carried to the Hospital for Animals by a grand procession of motley woods-dwellers, including an elephant and a vain, flirtatious donkey named Majorca. There, an x-ray reveals the diagnosis: a slipped stripe! The Tiger has an operation ("a little blue dream") and the same caravan of animals schleps him triumphantly home again.

None of this has a whole lot to do with my kids, really. They got the names even before they were born because their dad and I loved the Janosch books. My Bear is a pretty good reader; my Tiger is actually more apt than my Bear to help around the house, though the right verb is more often "help." But like the Little Tiger and the Little Bear, my sons are both intense - both bent on seizing all they can from their young lives. Both are resourceful and quirky. And while they get ferociously on each other's nerves (a topic that deserves a whole 'nother post), like the storybook Bear and Tiger they do adore each other when the day's done and we're all snuggled together on the comfy couch.
All images come from posters at the Little Tiger online shop, which sadly only ships to German addresses.

Not Lost in Translation

One of the things I do when I'm not chasing kids or teaching women's studies is German-to-English translation work. I have a few hard limits – I don't do literary or legal stuff – but otherwise I'm pretty shameless about what I'll try. I've done technical and marketing projects as well as more scholarly material. And years ago I helped with the Porsche customer magazine, with lots of spousal help on the hardcore automotive concepts.

Usually the translator is invisible if not downright inglorious. I mean inglorious in the sense of "obscure," not "disgraceful," though we've all seen translations that are downright embarrassing. User instructions are another hard limit of mine, so that trainwreck of a manual that came with your DVD player? I'm innocent.

I think some authors prefer to give the impression that their work is wholly their own. But I just got a copy of a book I worked on last summer, and my name is actually in it! Okay, it's on the last page, and since I'm listed as being in "Athens" I could be mistaken as being Greek. (A very, very pale Greek.) But my name is spelled right, thanks to my awesome friend who did a beautiful job on the copyediting. And I'm included even though I got sucked into the project at the last minute after some unspecified glitch with another translator. I'm tickled pink!

The book - Asia: Changing the World - also has a sexy cover. You can't tell from the picture, but it's got a translucent gray-green jacket that gives you a flirtatious peek at the underlying Asian symbols and characters. Plus, the book was free, and I'm still enough of a grad student at heart to be happy about free books.

Regrets Only?

So I'm still reading The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta. The protagonist I mentioned a few days ago – Ruth, the sex ed teacher – gets sent to a remedial class on abstinence because she's failed to toe the district's hard line on demonizing sex. She and her three fellow miscreants are given the assignment of writing a short in-class essay entitled "A Sexual Encounter I Regret."

At first I was afraid Perrotta was going to let Ruth subject herself to slut-shaming:

It wasn't that she was stumped for something to write about. Like anyone else her age, Ruth had committed her share of youthful and not-so-youthful indiscretions. There were a couple of tipsy one-nighters in college she would have taken back if she could, as well as an ill-considered fling with a married, much older grad-school professor that had fizzled after a lackluster session on his office couch.

While Ruth is still trying to decide what to say, her classmates begin reading their essays aloud. The lesbian names heterosexual sex on her prom night as truly regrettable because she said yes only in hopes of proving herself "normal." Another woman describes seducing her best friend's fiancé. The only man in the group, a gym teacher slouching toward retirement, starts to rhapsodize about "fourteen-year-olds who look like they're twenty" but is cut off by their teacher, a thirtyish professional virgin who favors a seductive Barbie-doll look.

When it's finally Ruth's turn, she doesn't recount any of her ancient "mistakes," nor does she divulge that her biggest regret is the sex she had with her ex-husband. Instead she calls out the instructor for trying to shame her students:

"It would be all too easy to pick one of these errors and tell you what I should have done differently, and how much better my life would be if I'd been mature and responsible enough not to have made it. But I'm not sure I believe that. I think it would be more accurate to say that we are our mistakes, or at least that they're an essential part of our identities. When we disavow our mistakes, aren't we also disavowing ourselves, saying that we wish we were someone else?

"I'm halfway through my life, and as far as I can tell, the real lesson of the past isn't that I made some mistakes, it's that I didn't make nearly enough of them."

This resonated with me because I've never felt any real regrets about my occasionally checkered past. (Then again, I never slept with any of my grad school professors.) I've sometimes thought I might be a little bit shallow on this count. It's not as if I never hurt anyone, or never got hurt myself. But it always seemed like my misadventures in mating made me slightly wiser each time; at least I didn't repeat the same mistakes over and over and over. I've tried to reflect on them and learn from them. I didn't set out to deliberately hurt my partners. Like Ruth, I think all of my experiences have made me who I am today. And also like her, the few real regrets I have about past love affairs are all about words unspoken, chances not taken.

Ruth set me wondering, though, what would I consider my biggest sexual mistake, even if I'd stop short of calling it regrettable. (TMI alert! Stop reading now if you don't want to hear a PG-13 story about me that includes one unsavory medical detail. Hmm, I bet I just ensured that you'll read this post in its entirety. Well, you've been warned.)

I'd have to say it was a guy I briefly dated my senior year of college while my boyfriend was studying abroad and we'd agreed to see other people. I met this man while we were both playing French horn in an orchestra for a formal ball. We were mostly performing Strauss waltzes, so musically it was pretty dull for the horn players, leaving plenty of time for minds and bodies to wander off topic. In between sets, he asked me to dance to the jazz band that was switching off with the orchestra. He wasn't a bad dancer, and what with the heady music, a couple glasses of wine, and the elegant atmosphere, I gladly said yes when he offered to walk me home.

I tend to think that a man who can dance will have some satisfying moves in other realms, as well. (The reverse is by no means true – a great mercy, considering how many men are lousy or reluctant dancers.) This guy turned out to be the exception that proved the rule. The sex was just plain awful. Awkward, clumsy, no chemistry. This in itself was not the mistake. Young though I was, I knew better than to expect instant ecstasy with a new partner. Which may be one reason that I said yes to the next date, and to the one after, hoping we might click after all. Also, I was mildly dazzled by the fact that he was several years older than I and very, very smart, a Ph.D. student in particle physics. (I'd just gotten my one and only C – in first-quarter college physics – so this impressed me unduly.)

No, the mistake came when I saw him a couple more times even after I'd visited the student health center with some painful blisters. I didn't have an STI, which was just dumb luck because like most young heterosexuals in the mid-1980s, I was in full denial of the new risks that were emerging. What I had, the doctor said, was friction blisters. This gives you some idea exactly how clueless this guy was in bed. But I bore some responsibility, too, because I let it happen without speaking up, even though in the heat of the moment it was evident to me that there wasn't, well, quite enough heat. Despite all the friction. Or maybe because of it.

Soon thereafter, I slammed on the brakes when he called me on the phone and accused me of snubbing him. He claimed he'd said hi to me while I was playing Frisbee near the student union, but I'd ignored him. I retorted that I didn't play Frisbee, which is true to this very day; I'm way too much of a klutz. Besides, I'd been in class. He insisted loudly that it had to have been me, that this mythical woman even walked like me. I concluded he was just as clueless outside of bed, not to mention borderline mentally unbalanced, and so I bade him adieu.

But that wasn't quite the end. Three years later I left for grad school on the other coast – and guess who I promptly run into, now working on a post-doc. I guess I should've screened out history grad programs at colleges with particle accelerators. Anyway, I was floored when he called to ask me out. What part of "no" had he not understood? He was starting to strike me as slightly stalker-ish, or at least what my students fondly call a creeper. I was uncharacteristically blunt in turning him down. He didn't call more than twice, but I had an uneasy feeling for weeks.

In retrospect, I don't think he posed any danger to me. I think he was just deeply self-absorbed. It's not just that he was utterly insensitive in bed; worse, he seemed to have an idealized image of me that only tangentially and coincidentally overlapped with the actual me. So if I hurt him – and I know I did – it was inevitable. I could never have been everything that he projected onto me. Stringing him along would've been cowardly and cruel.

Why no regrets? Well, at a minimum I learned to speak up for myself, to be as assertive in sex as I already was in the rest of my life. I learned to protect my boundaries and not stay in a situation that felt unsafe. And I'm happy to say that the only blisters I've had since 1985 were on my hands – the result of digging in the garden.

What about you? How would you respond to the assignment Ruth was given? And do you think people are ethically impaired if they reach mid-life and still sing "je ne regret rien"?

Photo by Flickr user jeco, used under a Creative Commons agreement.