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The Song Arrives Before the Truck

Before you saw anything, you heard it. Three streets over, thinned by distance and bent around the corners of houses, a music box the size of a paperback was broadcasting through a horn speaker bolted to a roof, and every child on the block lifted like a field of prairie dogs. The ice cream truck is the only store in American life that hunts its customers, and its weapon is a song. I grew up inside that ambush on a grid of flat streets in Lincoln, Nebraska, where sound carried forever, and I live now beside another version of it on the sidewalks of New York, where the song obeys different laws, sells a different menu, and means something different to the children chasing it. One machine, two rituals, and the split between them is the story.

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Your Three-Year-Old Already Knows the Brand Name

Watch a three-year-old in a grocery store. Watch her eyes when you turn into the cereal aisle. Her gaze is not scanning the shelves the way you scan them, evaluating prices and nutritional labels and unit costs. A search is underway. The child already knows what she wants, and she knows it by name, and she knows the name because a screen taught it to her before she could read the word printed on the box. The box appears in her sightline. A finger goes up. The name comes out of her mouth. You have just witnessed the end product of a commercial pedagogy that has been operating in American media for more than fifty years, and the child has no idea it happened to her.

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I Wrote the Book I Was Born to Write

Fifty years is a long time to prepare for a single sentence. I did not know I was preparing. I thought I was living, which I was, and writing, which I was, and teaching, which I was, and publishing, which I was. I thought the Fractional Fiction novels and the EleMenTs trilogy and the Prairie Voice reporting and the Human Meme episodes and the dramatic literature and the ASL linguistics and the cultural criticism were separate projects, separate impulses, separate rooms in the interior country I have been building since I was old enough to read. They were not separate. They were all rehearsals for this.

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Never as Sweet as the Memory

As I get older, I notice that things I once loved, and remembered with a philosophic passion, no longer measure up to the memory in reality. With the resurrection of old TV shows in expanded reruns on new cable channels like MeTV, old childhood favorites like “Wonder Woman” and “The Carol Burnett Show” and “The Incredible Hulk” are bitter comparisons to what they used to be in memory.

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Precious or Precocious and an Eerily Dissimilar Disambiguation

I’m always fascinated by labels and meaning and the attributes we actively choose to apply to people and thoughts and concepts. Disambiguation is important — words have previously defined meanings — and to purposefully change the common use of a word to fit a narrow political stream, or a personal agenda, is both dangerous and daunting. There are two words I’ve lately been pondering: Precious and Precocious!

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Little Miss Bossy Pants and the Incongruity of Expectation

Sheryl Sandberg sure knows how to make a headline. First, she wanted young women to “LEAN IN” and now she wants us to all stop using the word “Bossy” to describe the behavior of some young women because that word somehow destroys their inner need to tell people what to do.

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Superman, Batman and Spider-Man: How Murdering Loss Creates Comic Book Character

Over the holiday break, I decided to watch the newest Superman movie and I was certainly disappointed in the silly story, the rebooting of the franchise, and the awful acting of the lead character.  Superman should be wily, and funny, and tough.  He never preens.

It’s always boring when movie production houses feel they have to re-start a story that’s been never-endingly told for generations.  We pretty much know the backstory of Superman and we don’t need to re-live, over and over again, every 10 years or so, just how the star child becomes the Superman on earth.

In my short life, I think I’ve lived through at least a dozen iterations of Superman in film and on television and I would be perfectly fine to have a new Superman just appear in media res.  We get it he’s special and Superhuman, so just drop him in and let the story start with no explanation necessary!

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