I just reread Shaun Tan‘s The Arrival. I can’t recommend this book too highly. It’s beautiful. You can read it in an hour or take days or do one then the other.

Late medieval erotic pilgrim badges, which I s’pose should also qualify as badges of common objects. (via Jane).

Cardboard clouds by Fantastic Norway.

Tadpole rain in Japan.

Advertising for love blog (via Maud Newton, I think, and even if it wasn’t you should read this conversation in Granta between her and Alexander Chee as they read Jean Rhys and Ford Maddox Ford.) This reminds me of the personals and want ads we found on disintegrating bits of prewar newspaper when we redid the roof of our building. One of them was a desperate sounding announcement by a husband stating that after X date he would no longer honor his wife’s debts. It concluded with an ominous line advising merchants to give credit at their own risk. There were also a number of families in the Bronx advertising for au pairs and nannies. Many of these ads included lines like: Poles ok, no Jews… I remember when I first realized that the ideas of eugenics that so pervaded that era would have been personal. I was perhaps ten and my history teacher was explaining that in Nazi Germany anyone with a single Jewish grandparent was required to wear a star. Up until that moment, I had never been conscious of my own privilege, or that it might not have existed in another time and place… I sometimes get a little queasy when I’ve read some of the contemporary language on nutrition in the last few years. There is a weird echo of the prewar language of eugenics that exists not very far enough away from good common sense. Michael Pollan, a fine skeptic, references the Weston A. Price Foundation in either The Omnivore’s Dilemma or In Defense of Food (I can’t recall which), whose work is about two thirds fascinating and provoking and about one third lurching in an disturbing direction, emphasizing the physical characteristics of “degeneration,” and by extension their opposite. (I just looked though their site and there seems to be less of that than there was  a couple of years ago.) That sketchy third overlaps with a horrid world of people whose language falls (not always) just this side of early twentieth century descriptions of fitness and creepy fetishistic primitivism. (All I wanted was a Pepsi—I mean, a stick of butter.) When Aure was a newborn I remember reading message boards where people were discussing certain physical qualities in terms of fitness and breeding. It was distressing, and not only because I was still wildly hormonal and willing to entertain the idea that I might have ruined my newborn by not eating liver while pregnant. I also, at that point, was embarrassed not to have a flat stomach four weeks after giving birth, lying awake at night worrying about what an awful person I was for not sending thank you cards to everyone who gave me baby things, and constantly imagining evil people might emerge from the sewers and snatch my baby away. (Who the hell was that poor wretch?) I managed to endure it by remembering the childbirth education teacher describing how a mother she knew was terrified to take her baby into the sunlight for fear it might die of skin cancer and how that was perfectly normal (hahaha, we all said) as long it didn’t prevent her from actually leaving the house. And she was right of course. In a month or so, it was fine… I almost didn’t read that article by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker on parenting crap because I am angry right now about how those moments of vulnerability are exploited and bored silly with the meta conversation about parenting (also gerunds unnerve me a little) and whether it is socially acceptable to discuss one’s spawn. But it turns out the author puts her finger precisely on why all the rib digging and ho-ho confessions are so annoying.

Paid parental leave? Better day care? Nah. More memoir is what we need.

Obviously. The more sensational the writer, the less she personally need worry about parental leave or paying the bills… Which reminds me of a recent confusing book review by Jessa Crispin. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, though I’m beginning to suspect her provocation is as calculated as is Waldman’s. I was right there with her until the end of the first half, which she left oddly hanging. Is she really trying to say she doesn’t understand the importance of marriage (not the importance of being married, mind you), isn’t interested in empathizing with a life not her own? Does she really not understand the cultural relevance of marriage right now, when so many Americans are passionately fighting for—what? A license to soggy crackers and lifetime of impotency? Come on. Given the stats on marriage, who could call that life playing it safe? The very hope that a long and passionate connection with the beloved can exist alongside the quotidian of curtains and bills and bodily functions is altruistic and excessive and heroic and romantic and utterly uncynical. Maybe that’s the problem. (I also love how she got in that tidy little misogynistic jibe about mommy bloggers too. Well done. Never forget, ladies, if you do anything between giving birth and dying, we passionate creatures don’t want to hear about it.) If I want to read Nehring’s book it’s because of What’s Wrong With The American Essay, in which she spanks American essayists not for “focusing on tiny fragments of their own lives,” but for refusing to extrapolate from their own stories to gesture at something larger in the form of theories, questions, and audacious aphorisms. For chrissake, she’s referencing Montaigne, who wrote about his own health at excruciating length (gravel!). It’s okay to write from the minutia of a life, it just has to go somewhere larger. The bigness or smallness of the starting topic’s not the problem. I always imagined Nehring was railing against the ladylike, the idea that too much passion, too much tooth and nail is somehow unseemly. She’s complaining about the compliant role of the American essay as one more mechanical prop to pat us all on the head and remind us to obey the rules. For example, the rules defining which subjects are palatable and which brand us hysterical.