Motherload

What an eclectic group of books to comment on, you may well say — and it is true that Shattered (Rebecca Asher), an indictment of how women have colluded in their own undoing, largely by obeying their biological drive to have something to cuddle, does not sit easily alongside One Day (David Nicholls), a thinly-veiled first draft of a Richard Curtis movie, and The Hare with Amber Eyes (Edmund de Waal), the story of 264 small carvings, travelling around anti-Semitic Europe from the 1870s to the present day. The only thing that brings them together is that I have been compelled by all three of them in very different ways, and read them with equal absorption for very different reasons. One Day is captivating because it tells the story of my generation: people who went to university in the dog days of the 1980s, after an upbringing under Thatcher, graduating into a recession. It is a great chronicle, in the tradition that only the English seem to do well, of wistful regret for fulfi...

This weekend, our children ran the house. Obviously, they do anyway, in a thinly-veiled exemplar of the master-slave dialectic. I went to see Frankenstein this weekend, hence the allusion to Hegel. But that aside, we thought, after a particularly fraught weekend, in which we were hugely embarrassed by their riotous behaviour, that they could have a taste of what it's like to be in charge. So we asked them if they would like to make the rules this weekend. Would they? They talked of nothing else all week in the lead-up. Apart from how bad the food was in our establishment, and why did they have to get up in the morning. V-e-r-y interesting. Saturday 1. Daughter played on computer all morning. 2. Son played with mother and father all morning. 3. Lunchtime saw Mummy and Daddy demanding to be fed, and daughter in floods of tears because the breakfast things needed clearing away before she could lay the table. 4. Afternoon saw much fighting, and then a hasty trip to the shops armed wit...

What a strange novel Saturday is. But the line I loved it for is an encapsulation of a facet of indifference I've been trying to characterise for a long time: 'benign dissociation'. The neurosurgeon Henry Perowne has just operated on his own assailant, Baxter. In carrying out the operation, Perowne overcomes his personal terror and shock at Baxter's appearance at his house, hours earlier, and attains a mental state of indifference that is tantamount to peace. I've long been searching for a way of understanding the idea of indifference, that takes it away from its connotations of sadism, depression, or stoicism. This is it: benign dissociation . Perowne decides that he does not have the power of life and death over Baxter, whom he could easily have killed during the operation. Perowne knows that Baxter suffers from Huntingdon's Chorea, and will face his own prison sentence in the future. Perowne does not have to act to avenge his family's honour; it is writt...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8264590/The-11-plus-has-taken-over-my-life.html I rest my case. The Chinese Mother may have featured on the Today programme yesterday, but England has Lucy Cavendish (whom I have already noted on this blog worriting away about competitive mothering), coaching her son through the iniquitous 11-plus as if her life depended on it . Which it doesn't. From Chinese Mother to Bexley Mother. On the one hand at least she's honest. Sort of. But on the other hand, it's the kind of guilt-assuaging honesty that enables her to carry on doing what she's doing: openly manipulating the education system, while pleading necessity. And by using the rhetoric of self-deprecation, and apparently offering herself up to the court of public approval, by writing about her experiences in the Daily Telegraph, she exercises one more level of manipulation: she can play the victim, so that critics like me look like the bad guys for naming what she's doing. What...

I'm in a terrible hurry, so only have a few minutes to digest a couple of things with you. This puts me squarely in the category "overfed information junkie" for a thinker like Alain de Botton, who's been delivering Point of View on Radio 4. I've heard a couple of these so far. In the first, he argued that humanities teaching in British universities is culturally bankrupt; in the second that everyone else is. I was kind of cross about the first perspective, given how much of my life I gave to trying to help students think clearly, simply and forcefully about works of difficult literature. But I agree with the second perspective, because I find myself swimming about in it these days, running between pointless meetings, unable to research ideas in any depth, and overwhelmed by the number of books I 'ought' to have read, or be reading (quite apart from the cultural events that I never now see). I agree with him on the notion that we are bulimics of culture: u...

The difficult question of what it is safe or appropriate to reveal about one's inner life maps directly onto what it is safe or appropriate to blurt out on a blog or Facebook, where an act of writing might carry you away, and your false sense of anonymity might fool you into thinking that there are no consequences to what you say. This leads to a striptease of revelations, in which it is ever possible to shift the position of the truth back behind one more veil of irony, lying, exaggeration, generalization or minimization. Truth is often only the truth if it hits its mark, which is why we spend so much time complaining to others about what we really ought to be saying to our loved ones or employers. The status of confession and truth-telling, the revelation of the self, in social media, is an extraordinarily fluid thing. Much of the time, the apparent greater disclosure we go in for by using the first person to tweet, blog, or post is in fact another kind of conformity: the Bri...

Why Love Matters (Susan Gerhardt, Routledge, 2004) was first published when my daughter was about one year old. I heard about it, but could not bring myself to read it. It sounded like the kind of argument I was already struggling so hard with that it could only cause pain -- it sounded as though it would tell me that my place was in the home with my baby, and that only mothers could provide the kind of affection and attention that their babies need to thrive. When I finally sat down with it, because of the reading list set by a School of Life course on the family, I could not put it down. Yes, it does in large part advocate a social organization in which it is possible for caregivers to stay at home with their babies, solely focused on their needs, delights, demands and neuro-cognitive development. And that's fine, because it's pretty much the conclusion I came to during my own early-years development experience. Gerhardt would love to live in a society without conflict, ...