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MOM
AND POP
CULTURE:
Reinventing
the Neal
by Marrit
Ingman
When I heard that former Austinite Neal Pollack was publishing a book about fatherhood and popular culture, I figured I’d review it for my other favorite market and help a brother out. I’d recently seen him take a drubbing in “Up With Grups,” a blogged-about article heralding the ostensibly sudden appearance of parents who like iPods, coffeeshops, current events, and popular music. Because it’s New York Magazine, these parents are also assumed to push $800 strollers and wear $450 distressed jeans, and their existence is said to mark “a seismic shift in intergenerational relationships,” which has certainly never happened before. The article’s author makes Pollack sound like a jerk (“I do occasionally wake up before nine these days,” he’s quoted as saying) and I wanted him to have a fair shake.
I dug around and found an excerpt from Pollack’s book, Alternadad: The True Story of One Family’s Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America, which will be published by Random House’s Pantheon imprint. But before I could fire up my request for a review copy, I read the excerpt, called “Preschool of Rock,” which ran in the New York Times this January.
Two things struck me. One is that “Preschool of Rock” seemed awfully familiar, right down to the music- lessons motif and “Iron Man” references. Why, I’d written this article myself in 2004, when it was syndicated on AlterNet and noted across the Web. Stung, I blogged links to both pieces and asked readers for their impressions. A couple of people encouraged me to investigate the similarities.* Another reasoned that Pollack “probably just never considered any literature that deals with the parents’ perspective before he himself became a parent, and now he thinks he's inventing the wheel, or fire, so that we can all follow his light, admiring his insights.” In either case, Pollack’s piece seemed to confirm the bad rap he got in New York Magazine, and I was less inclined to defend him if what he wants is praise for serving beer and punk at playgroup.
The second point is the more obvious one: Pollack isn’t the first parent to struggle with the loss of self-identity. We all try to hold on to what we were doing before—personally, culturally, socially, politically, spiritually, professionally—because we recognize that raising a child isn’t the beginning and the end of us. It’s one very significant part of us, and while it is, at times, a sublime and uniquely transformative part, ideally we build on what we have already learned from our travels in life and share the fruits of our maturity with our curious and developing sidekicks: Taking turns is important, everything grows and dies, and the Strokes don’t actually rock despite appearances to the contrary. We teach our children how to find joy by modeling our appreciation of life, and that is critical.
(continued at right)
Ariel
Gore used to say children need interesting parents. At least from the
excerpt, Pollack seems to never have read her, although he seems awfully
attached to the zeitgeist she inaugurated with her writing. (Alternadad
looks quite logically like a male counterpart to hipMama).
There have always been punk and indie parents, but most of them don’t write
for the Times and Salon.com. They make zines and write for BUST,
like Ayun Halliday. They write
columns for Slug
& Lettuce and self-publish, like China
Martens. Maia Rossini and
Bee Lavender have been at this thing for
years, but their anthology on cultural-creative parenting, Mamaphonic:
Balancing Motherhood and Other Creative Acts, isn’t published by an
imprint of Random House but by Soft Skull, an indie which began under the
table at a Kinko’s in Manhattan. (Full disclosure: I published an essay in Mamaphonic.) All this stuff is already out there,
and a lot of it has an Austin connection. Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed for Pollack. Doesn’t he
realize? Did he never meet Spike Gillespie,
who could be the hardest-working freelancer in town? Has he never heard of
Allison Crews, whose essay “When
I Was Garbage” (featured in Breeder: Real-Life Stories from the New
Generation of Mothers) launched a teen-mom revolution? If Pollack ever
walked into Monkeywrench Books
he’d find a copy of PlacentaZine, Rosa-Maria
DiDonato’s excellent communiqué on vegan punk parenting. And just
yesterday I got an issue of Apron Strings, a great parenting zine by Robin
Dutton-Cookston and her husband Jeff, both of whom went to college with
me thirty miles north of here.
There are parents at the Austinist
and Metroblogging Austin,
and there’s even an Austin version of Rock-n-Romp
--
the backyard concert series for families -- taking off this summer. We’ve got a hell of a lot more than Music Together, but you have to
look for it outside your own navel. Perhaps Pollack preferred to
associate with parents he could make fun of for liking Darius Rucker, but
I’m surrounded by parents cooler than I am. Most of them aren’t big
players in the publishing world (perhaps Pollack and I have different
conceptions of “alternative,” as mine does not include the Old Gray Lady
and Nerve.com) Instead of corporate advertising dollars, most of them have
day jobs or student loans or some combination thereof. And yes, most of them
are women, which might explain how they’re so easily ignored. At any rate I
sure as hell don’t stir up shit with them by insinuating that they’re a
bunch of Raffi-led sheep and appointing myself their liberator from the
Disney corporation. And I don’t take potshots at Dan Zanes. If you founded
the Del Fuegos, run your own label, and sing with Sandra Bernhard about
thrift shopping, I respect you more than I do some crank-yanking author who
doesn’t know his neighbors. Hell, at least Dan Zanes is trying something
instead of sitting in the back row judging a credibility competition between
parents on parade. Therein lies the problem for me. I
simply don’t tolerate pitting parents against each other. Not mothers
against mothers, not fathers against fathers. When I meet other parents, I
don’t run down a list of how we’re different and I am better.
“Alternative parenting” isn’t about being the coolest kid in the room.
It’s about coalition-building and rejecting the ready-made, not about
bragging and slagging. I fear that, in addition to the
continuing existence of Caitlin Flanagan, we’re in store for more
mass-market books purporting to be firsthand accounts of this “new”
subcultural parenting, as if people haven’t been copying and stapling and
mailing for fifteen years, as if people haven’t been congregating on
message boards and blogs, meeting at alternative bookstores, and making
bootleg baby shirts. The lifestyle the New York Magazine claims is
“the convergence of downtown cool and easy, abundant money” has existed
for years in cheaper cities among poorer people whose jeans are distressed
naturally over time. Remember when grunge walked the runway? Maybe it’s
like that: a new retail sensation that is neither original nor meaningfully
alternative. Some people will make a lot of money from this. Perhaps Neal
Pollack will be one of them, and he doesn’t need my help.
Note from the author: After receiving
inquires about this column, I've changed a sentence to more clearly express
that I think the similarities between the two essays cited are not
intentional. They are, however, similar pieces, and the circumstances of
their publication (mine was originally published in Brain, Child, then
syndicated to Alternet.org and published in a small-market memoir) illustrate
my larger point: that writing by mothers is marginalized despite its quality.
I have sympathy for Pollack. When a
person becomes a parent for the first time, it feels like uncharted
territory. Parenthood is isolating. Of course that experience is fair game
for literature many times over. But when you sit down to write a book about
the experience—and you give yourself a superhero name like "Alternadad”— you should make sure you know your history. You should
reflect upon your experience and connect it to what other people are doing
and feeling instead of fellating yourself.
____________________
About the Author:
Marrit Ingman is a freelance writer, film critic,
occasional educator, and constant mother. She is a
frequent contributor to the Austin Chronicle, and her
writing on popular culture has also appeared in Brain, Child, Fertile
Ground, Alternet.org, Clamor, and Venus. Her first book,
Inconsolable: How I Threw My
Mental Health out with the Diapers, describes her
experience with postpartum depression and was
published in 2005 by Seal Press.
