Dept of, PSA: I was very positive some months ago about Matt Cook's Queer Domesticities (2014), formerly only available as hideously expensive academic press hardback: this is now out in paperback and Kindle/ebooks editions at more eligible price (though over the book launch attended, will draw a veil, because it might be something to do with my ( Read more... )

Article about the value of boredom for children during school holidays
Am of the opinion that, if not actual boredom, a certain amount of days that are quiet and routine and even monotonous can be a very good thing for the grown person, as well.
And on the matter of over-scheduling stuff, I was pretty much aaaaargh at this:
Want to Be Happier? ( Read more... )

Article about, essentially, Beyond the Palaeo Diet to the full-on Palaeo lifestyle -
I'm over here, fair lying on the ground and holding my stomach almost retching with laughter at the following: she used to be the sort of beauty obsessive who would slap on makeup to take out the trash, in part because of her sheepishness over her acne. But when ( Read more... )

Boy o boy, the Hughes literary estate just keeps on giving, doesn't it? We note that they have sold off the Hughes papers in two lots, to Emory University and the residue to the British Library, for not insignificant sums, but still retain a fierce grip on the actual copyright.

Having authorised someone to write a 'literary life', copyright per has ( Read more... )

And muttering furiously about 'Young people today' -

NB while the child's behaviour was atrocious, I think we can blame the parents, who are all about their offsprings' speshul snoflakiness, and relative to me, they are young people.

When I first saw that report, yesterday, about child climbing on a sculpture in the Tate Modern, while parents stood ( Read more... )

In article on teeny infants and iPads, somebody actually points out a historical parallel:
But I try to be mindful that it is an open question whether it is unsettling because there is something wrong with it, or because it wasn't a feature of my own childhood. Not that long ago parents were bothered by seeing their children reading all the time. ( Read more... )

Working today, yet again on a weekend when relevant bits of the Northern Line NO.CAN.HAZ, so rather than faff around with replacement buses I ordered a minicab. I'd allowed ample time (on the grounds that if I cut it a bit finer, no doubt there would be heavy traffic &/or roadworks) and it turned up early, so I got into work v early indeed, even ( Read more... )

Another thing I've been brooding over about the 'let the children run wild and explore nature' question is thinking about that in the context of my post about visiting the Museum of Childhood and this
image:

( Read more... )

I am getting mightily irked at keeping coming across reviews of, or extracts from, that book bewailing the fact that children no longer have contact with NAYCHUR, that healing nurse...

And I'm, like, how many of them, outside your carefully cherry-picked hunter-gatherer cultures (which are not, you know, outside time and historical processes, srsly ( Read more... )

What strikes me about this is that there is a false dichotomy going on between 'nature' and 'sitting stodging in their rooms living life online': what about the many, many children (the majority, probably, since the Industrial Revolution) living in urban environments and whose experience of 'nature', if any, would have been in municipal parks? I'd ( Read more... )