Karate Parenting

My old friend Dr. John Duffy offers a funny and provocative post on his psychology and parenting blog in which he suggests that parents could borrow a trick or two from the martial arts and make like a sensei.

He writes of one client who describes her sensei as relentlessly demanding, but says she "does not feel discouraged or humiliated by these displays. . .Rather she sees each prodding statement as an indicator that the sensei believes in her and knows she can accomplish the task. . .Imagine if we could duplicate this dynamic in families."

If you're like me, you spend a lot of time feeling like you're walking a tightrope between a) encouraging your kid to do his best, and b) being a royal, nagging, helicoptering pain in the ass. So if there's a secret to being able to push without pushing too hard, I want to know it. Still, I have to wonder if the dynamic really can translate to families. I mean, I know even less about martial arts than I do about parenting, but is it possible that one of the factors that gives the sensei authority, one of the things that makes his students heed him, is precisely that he's not a parent, that he's something of a disinterested outsider?

And even more importantly, does this mean my kid and I have to bow to each other?

Trash Talk

According to the unwritten laws of American popular culture, fathers and sons are supposed to bond over baseball, or in some exceptional cases, cars. My boy A.J. and I have done more than our share of baseball bonding (and I think he is only now beginning to realize that it’s not entirely normal for a father to want to play as much backyard wiffle ball as I do). But lately we’ve been bonding over garbage.

Tuesday night is trash night at our house, which means that after dinner he and I haul our two big, wheeled barrels out to the street. A.J. takes the one with the recycling and I take the one with the general trash. He’s still a little kid, and it’s real work for him to lug the can up the slope of our long driveway--but for some reason he doesn’t complain about it, as he sometimes does about other, seemingly easier chores, like making his bed. Once we’ve put out the trash, he’ll challenge me to a race back to our front porch. If it’s a clear night, we’ll stop and look at the stars before we go back in, and A.J. will try to educate me about the constellations.

I’ve never really looked forward to taking the garbage out before, but this little routine has become one of the highlights of my week. You don’t hear so much about trash night as a vehicle for father-son bonding, but I suppose you take your Significant Life Moments where you can find them.

Flannery and Conan and Pauly

Joy Williams' admiring review of Brad Gooch's new Flannery O'Connor biography got the cover of yesterday's New York Times Book Review, but you have to go deep inside, to page 18, to find this gem from Jennifer Schuessler's TBR column: She writes that both Conan O'Brien and Tommy Lee Jones wrote Harvard undergrad theses on O'Connor's work. Here's O'Brien looking back on his brief career in literary scholarship: "I wrote a thesis: 'Literary Progeria in the Works of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner.' Let's just stay that, during my discussions with Pauly Shore, it doesn't come up much. For three years after graduation, I kept my thesis in the glove compartment of my car so I could show it to a policeman in case I was pulled over. License, registration, cultural exploration of the Man Child in 'The Sound and the Fury.'"

I figured this had to have been the first Pauly Shore mention ever in the pages of the Book Review. I was wrong.

Church Shopping

My new piece on church shopping is available at Slate. The practice is often dissed as an example of rampant spiritual consumerism, but I argue that there's a long history of fierce competition among churches for worshippers--and that the free market in faith is one of the good things about the way religion is practiced here. And right now even the president is looking for a new church.

The Moviegoer

I just finished another of my annual readings--my 21st? 22nd? I’m not sure--of Walker Percy’s 1961 novel The Moviegoer, probably the greatest novel ever written about a stockbroker’s search for meaning during Mardi Gras. It’s not a crowded field, I know.

In honor of the occasion, I have a post at Notre Dame Magazine’s new site that tries to explain why I’ve been reading the same novel over and over for a couple decades now.

It’s weird the way readers can sometimes feel so proprietary and protective of the novels they love. Ever had the experience of recommending your favorite book to a good friend and being disappointed when they don’t love it quite as wildly as you hoped? On the other hand, it’s also strange when every once in a while I meet another fan of The Moviegoer. Yes, it’s nice to connect with another like-mind, to know that there are other members of the club out there. But there’s also a little undercurrent of rivalry, too, as if we're in competition to see who has a firmer claim of ownership on the book.

Anyway, here's a little of The Moviegoer, including my all-time favorite literary description of a gas station:

I awake with a start at three o'clock, put on a raincoat and go outside for a breath of air. The squall line has passed over. Elysian Fields is dripping and still, but there is a commotion of winds high in the air where the cool heavy front has shouldered up the last of the fretful ocean air. The wind veers around to the north and blows away the storm until the moon swims high, moored like a kite and darting against the fleeting shreds and ragtags of cloud. . . Across the boulevard, at the catercorner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants, is a vacant lot chest high in last summer's weeds. Some weeks ago, the idea came to me of buying the lot and building a service station. It is for sale, I learned, for twenty thousand dollars. What with the windfall from Mr. Sartalamaccia, it becomes possible to think seriously of the notion. It is easy to visualize the little tile cube of a building with far flung porches, its apron of silky concrete and, revolving on high, the immaculate bivalve glowing in every inch of its pretty sytrene. (I have already approached the Shell distributor.)

On the Trail

Because I’m always on the lookout for new ways to avoid work, I decided to kill part of the day walking a trail I had never tried before. It turned out to be a beautiful way to procrastinate. The landscape was so gorgeous—a twisting stream, a few hills, snowy woods, a fox—that it was almost ridiculous. I mean, who needs that much beauty?

I’ve read that Thoreau tried to walk four hours each day. He wrote that as soon as he began to move his legs, his thoughts would start to flow. I guess I know that feeling, but I’m more skeptical about my walk-generated thoughts. As long as I’m walking it’s possible to believe that I’m having all kinds of brilliant brainstorms, but by the time I get back home and put them down on paper they’ve usually stopped looking so brilliant. Walking and self-delusion must be connected, somehow.

It's not always easy walking in my neighborhood, partly because my neighbors are too neighborly. They pull alongside me in their cars and ask me if I want a lift. I have to explain that I want to walk, but thanks anyway. The assumption, I guess, is that if you're walking something must be wrong--you must have forgotten to check your gas gauge or something.

But on the trail it was all quiet. I stopped once and could hear nothing but a few birds and some ice shifting in the stream. I had to clap a few times, loudly, just to break the silence. The echo of it scared off a bird or two, and I got on my way, just so I could feel I was getting somewhere.

Take Their Advice

My problem with advice is that I listen to too much of it. And if you spend enough time online you get hit with a lot of advice. Yesterday, for example, Karl Lagerfeld, who writes an advice column for Harper’s Bazaar, suggested that I never wear stilettos while drinking. Thanks, Karl. Noted.

And today, there was some marriage advice from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, who gave me a list of “ten cheap dates” that would see my marriage through tough economic times. My favorite: “Pick up the latest hot dance CD” and “plan your own party for later.” That’s probably excellent advice, but it does raise the question: Would a Catholic bishop really be the first person you would turn to for dating advice?

There are some good online sources for advice, like Kristen Hoggatt’s “Ask a Poet” column in the very fine journal The Smart Set. Sample question: “I’m pissed that I can’t play my Wii all day to make a living. I’m really good at it. Don’t you think my skills are valuable in the job market?”

I would love to offer some advice of my own on that question, but right now I have to run out and pick up the latest hot dance CD.