Story Time

In Japan, onechan never really needed or wanted bed-time stories. Sure, she'd have her mom read her books from the library as often as she could get her to, she'd ask me to read her the few books in English we brought from home, and when she was really desperate would get me to read to her in Japanese. But now that we're back in the States, she's really wanted to get back into the bed-time rituals we had established before we left. With some changes.

For one thing, she definitely likes certain stories for their nostalgia value now. Big Sister Dora is a big hit with her, probably because it takes her back to the winter and spring before imoto was born when we were frankly trying to indoctrinate train prepare her for her changing role in the family. Some stories take her even further back in time, like Goodnight Moon and Pat the Bunny (bed time edition). In Japanese, she's gotten even more into this series of stories about two little bear friends, Guri to Gura, which we originally received as a gift from the wife of one of my colleagues and which we now have access to thanks to the library at onechan's UB yochien. Since it's going to take her awhile to figure out how to invent that time machine she's been implicitly asking for lately, narrative will have to do for the time being.

For another, she's into me making up stories at bed time for the first time. These characters I invented several trips ago in Japan based on her and her oldest Japanese cousin, whom I'll call Iki and Ika here, are now doing double duty here. In the past, I told mostly action-adventure or silly stories about Iki and Ika's interactions with her favorite cartoon characters like Dora and the various Pretty Cure superheroes. Now, taking a page from Bill Benzon's Sparkychan and Gojochan, I'm having Iki and Ika go through versions of the problems onechan is going through. So one story has had them discussing how to make new friends in a new place. Another has had them figuring out what to do when a kid at hoikuen is being mean to them.

All this has gotten me thinking about imoto. It's clear that onechan is motivated to develop her English through listening to these stories. But in part because imoto is too young to really understand the shift from a Japanese-saturated environment to an English-saturated one and in part because she's been on this physical rather than verbal kick ever since she figured out how to roll over, I'm not at all confident that she's going to get the idea of using (more) words any time soon. So figuring out how to change her bed-time ritual to get some story time into it is going to be a big deal in the next several months. The problem is that she's so used to going to sleep with her mom in one bed and onechan is so used to going to sleep a little later with me in a different bed (after staggered baths most of the time) that it's going to be difficult to change things around so that I'm reading imoto a story in English before she goes to sleep with her mom. I can see adding a post-bath step, where the tsuma reads to onechan in Japanese while I read to imoto in English and then reversing it to end up with the familiar pre-sleep situation. Shouldn't be too big of a change, given that the current pattern fell into place only in the last two weeks, when it became clear to onechan that imoto is such a bed-hog that it's really difficult for all four of us to sleep together comfortably. But it does mean adding another 10-20 minutes to the process of putting the girls (and, usually, ourselves) down for the night (or in our case, a few hours before heading downstairs to talk and work for a while and then back upstairs to sneak a few hours of sleep together with imoto). Still, imoto's getting close to the age when we started building in regular bed-time storytelling to onechan's good night ritual, so it's going to have to happen sooner or later....

[Update (9/16/07): Thanks to Uncle Bill Benzon, I can point you toward this new University of Waterloo psychology study on very young children and stories!]

Abe Out

Back in the day, I did a number of political posts at Mostly Harmless that looked critically at the ties between right wingers in the U.S. and Japan. (Yes, March feels like "back in the day.")

I never came out with a prediction that Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe would resign, like I did for then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (ok, so I was off by a few months there--sue me!), and now I'm wishing I did, because he just did!

Now I'm wondering which party is in more trouble, Japan's LDP or the U.S.'s Republican Party? Given that the Republicans have already lost both legislative houses and neither Cheney nor Bush has offered to step down, I'd have to say it's the LDP. But there's still time for the Republicans to catch up with the LDP. Go for it, y'all!

Early Semester Rush Over?

So far this semester, the chair and I have hired two new TAs after a pair of returning ones got job offers elsewhere the week before classes started, run our first department meeting, gotten the wording on our two upcoming tenure-track searches approved and sent out to MLA, gotten all the department committees set up, gotten the Spring 2008 schedule out for administrative approval, hired a Visiting Assistant Professor for the spring, and begun mentoring our three new tenure-track hires. And that's just the stuff I remember. Next week: getting together a committee to evaluate everyone's cases for a discretionary salary increase (it has to be made up of people not going for this "extra" raise). Bright side: we checked with the dean and reread the department handbook and it appears I'll be eligible to apply this year, despite being away on leave last year. Other good news: next semester I get to teach two courses I've been waiting my entire time here to get a shot at: Black Women Writers and Non-Western Literature. OK, time to finally finish the minutes from that department meeting!

Fantasy Bleg

So I'm doing one of my favorite things this year, which is mentoring an honors thesis on a topic I'd be focusing on if I were starting over as an undergrad doing an honors thesis right about now. No, it's not science fiction, comics, or video games, but fantasy. The student is interested in the ranges of the rules and functions of magic in fantasy, figuring that it may not be that dissimilar to the rules and functions of (new) technology in science fiction. The larger project is to make a case for the scholarly study of fantasy.

Not only does this give me a chance to introduce her to some of my favorite writers--Steven Brust, Neil Gaiman, Guy Gavriel Kay, Charles de Lint, and Sherri Tepper--as well as others I respect but don't like as much yet should be crucial to her project--Piers Anthony, Lloyd Alexander, Ursula Le Guin, L.E. Modesitt, Jr., and of course J.R.R. Tolkien. But, most important, I get to read some George R.R. Martin and Irene Radford--not to mention finally finish the last three books of the Harry Potter series! What's more, this is work, or should I say guilt-free pleasure?

So, keeping the former part of the last sentence in mind, is anyone out there aware of good scholarly studies of fantasy? Lucie Armitt's Fantasy Fiction: An Introduction is our entry point, but she's a bit too hung up on the fantastic and the possibilities of Lit-ah-rary fantasy, for my taste at least.

Saturday School Then and Now

Just like my little brother and I did, my two daughters go to Saturday school. Just as my parents drove us to New Hartford for Hebrew school, the tsuma and I drive onechan and imoto to Buffalo for yochien. I wonder if the resemblances will end there.

My parents both grew up in heavily Jewish communities in post-W.W.-II era Brooklyn and, later, Long Island. My brother and I grew up as two of the four Jewish kids in Clinton, NY. So we went, rather unwillingly, to Hebrew school, until we had our Bar Mitzvahs--and then stopped. We were only taught enough Hebrew to make it through our Torah readings--and that's about as much as we learned. We identified as upstate New Yorkers, not as Jewish Americans.

Onechan and imoto have dual Japanese and U.S. citizenship. The tsuma and I hope their year in Japan came at just the right time, linguistically speaking, and that Saturday yochien in Buffalo can tide them over until we get back for our next extended stay. From what I've seen of the teachers and the set-up, they have decent odds at keeping connected with Japanese language and culture. Onechan is already loving to learn the hiragana and katakana writing systems that I struggled over last fall. She was "drawing words," as she put it to me later, for an hour straight last week. She seems to really like her sensei, too. But as good as they are, what's really going to keep her Japanese developing is her peer group there--and so far, only she and a 6-year-old girl whose Japanese is far behind her are the only ones in the class. We've heard two more kids might join up this week, so we'll see tomorrow. Her Fukuoka yochien friends and her cousins in Okinawa are mostly too young right now to enjoy talking on the phone with her (that is, over Skype), so she's going to have to rely on her Buffalo yochien friends until imoto gets old enough to start having conversations in Japanese with her.

So both girls are light years ahead of where my brother and I were at their ages. Perhaps if my grandparents had tried to pass down Yiddish, we could have become bilingual at a young age, too. But it's clear that they wanted their children to be monolingual in English. When my dad's mom was in late stages of Alzheimer's, a long time ago now, there was a period when she was mostly living in her memories of the Depression era. She would often correct our English when we visited her and our grandfather in Long Island, particularly irritated by my brother's and my upstate accents and bad pronunciation/enunciation according to her standards of correct English (which were quite correct). Although she spoke Yiddish with her sister and her husband her whole life, she didn't try to teach more than a word here or there to her grandchildren.

That's history for you. Our grandparents came to America just before anti-immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment peaked with the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act--a time when the KKK was reviving, when nativism and 100%-Americanism set the standards of inclusion and exclusion, when immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were of ambiguous and uncertain racial status (not-quite-white, at best). Our parents were born at a time when the U.S. racial order was undergoing a historic shift, one that has proven to be more deeply-rooted and extensive than the unfinished revolution of the later civil rights movement: the opening-up of whiteness to the previously racialized immigrants of the late 19th and early 20th century, first on a kind of conditional "white ethnic" status and later simply white. Perhaps if we had grown up downstate, my brother and I would have taken part in the "ethnic revivals" of the 1970s, but most likely not. Between our grandfather's Holocaust-induced disbelief and our father's profession of philosophy (not to mention our childhoods in the college towns of Clinton, Chapel Hill, and Palo Alto), it's difficult to imagine us being seriously attracted to Judaism or Jewish culture.

So do our stories fulfill the classic melting pot script? With my brother marrying into a big Polish Catholic family and their four kids growing up in the classic suburban mode, perhaps so. Or maybe the ethnic similarities (we're part Polish and part Hungarian) outweigh the religious differences there, so that onechan's and imoto's cousins' childhoods will echo their grandparents' somewhat. In any case, it's pretty clear that onechan's and imoto's childhoods will be something different. In what ways and with what effects remains to be seen.

Deer in the Headlights

That's what I've felt like during my many hours in the office the past week and a half. There are a lot of benefits to being associate chair--a course release each semester, a small stipend (even smaller for me since I'm only doing it for the fall), a get-out-of-other-departmental-committee-work-free card), and let's not forget the soul-corrupting power (bwaa ha ha!)--but parking your computer and a few books in one of the rooms in the departmental office complex is most definitely not one of them.

Back in Fukuoka, my office time was my own. Even though I invited students to visit me every class, I didn't have to post any office hours, most of my students were loath to visit another campus (or university), and my 21st Century Program students were hesitant to intrude on me. Not so in Fredonia. Even though I've kept my office hours to a minimum for me (an hour and a half a day for the first four days of the week), I'm actually spending closer to 12-16 hours a week in that room, for the first month of the semester at least. There's just too much that needs to get done--new faculty need mentoring, advisees need advice, internship seekers need coordinating, students appealing various things need to be heard out and referred to the appropriate people, the spring 2008 schedule needs to be compiled, job ad language needs to be approved, committees need to be formed, minutes for the first department meeting need to be typed up, a colleague's teaching evaluations from last semester need to be summarized, a new dean needs to be consulted, and e-correspondence needs to be maintained. And that's just for starters. Between the departmental secretary and the chair, very little of this is my responsibility alone, but I have my hand in to a greater or lesser degree on just about all of it. The upshot is, very little time is left over for, say, getting my course web pages in shape, learning my students' names, tweaking my lesson plans, getting some reading for my courses in, or surfing the MLA bibliography. You know, the kinds of things I use my time in the office for when I'm not associate chair. It's gotten so bad at times the past two weeks I've found myself bouncing from task to task without finishing any of them. And when I actually get a chance to focus on, say, my own teaching, well, my focus is shot.

I know this, too, will pass, and I'll someday figure out how to be more efficient in the office at Fredonia--just as I eventually adjusted to my commute in Fukuoka and became a champion subway reader. But I'll tell you: a year away from service of any kind sure leaves you rusty. And wondering how you did so much more of it before your leave....

Third Try's the Charm?

I'm teaching my Postcolonial Hawthorne course for the third time this semester--first was at Kyushu University in Fall 2006, next at Seinan Gakuin University in Spring 2007, and now here. Those already interested in the intricacies of course design may find the differences between the first two and the last less boring than the vast majority of those whose lives will never be brightened by this post.

Apparently I was the last in my department to get the memo that postcolonial theory is dead. But that PMLA forum I missed in May will actually be perfect for the course, the basic goal of which remains to ask whether Hawthorne ought to be considered a postcolonial writer or not and why, with a particular focus on the implications and stakes of the answers to these questions.