I was getting breakfast for the kids this morning, as I’ve been doing since Mary was born, and had this conversation with my seven-year-old.

Dave: I want some chocolate milk.

(Note: he didn’t say please.)

Me: And what makes you think you deserve chocolate milk?

Dave (surprised): What?

Me: And what makes you think you deserve chocolate milk?

Dave (in disgust, as though I’d misheard him): REGular milk.

Me: No, you said you wanted chocolate milk.

Dave (with an air of resignation): OK, I’ll have chocolate milk.

It was a genuine Bugs Bunny/Daffy Duck moment. I laughed loud and long, and got Dave his chocolate milk.

Gosh I’m glad I don’t live in Dave Sim’s head.

I was extremely tempted to let that first line stand as the entire
review, but I suppose I should elaborate.

Jaka’s Story is the next installment of Sim’s epic comic book
series, Cerebus the Aardvark; I’ve previously reviewed
Cerebus, High Society, and Church and State.

The first thing to know is that this isn’t a story about Cerebus at all.
It’s primarily about a dancer named Jaka who appears as part of a gag in
one of the early episodes. Cerebus has been slipped a love potion by
some bad guys; things don’t go quite as expected, and he becomes besotted
with the dancing girl at a tavern. She returns his love, or so she says,
but by the end of the episode the potion has worn off, and Cerebus is
gone. Being, after all, an aardvark, he’s not likely to fall in love
with a human no matter how lovely she is.

Jaka makes a number of short appearances in High Society and
Church and State, during which time Cerebus has gotten over his
disdain for human women, and they have a number of bittersweet passages.
This, however, is the first volume in which she plays a major role. And
in fact, she’s center stage–Cerebus isn’t even present for most of it.

The first two-thirds are quite interesting, despite Sim’s penchant for
filling whole pages with four or six or eight panes of nearly the same
image (I suppose it’s supposed to be cinematic, and sometimes it works;
there are a number of pages on which one character is having writer’s
block, where it’s quite effective; but mostly it just seems like he’s
trying to get through an issue with as little writing as possible.)

But as I say, the first two-thirds are quite interesting. The volume
contains two narratives side by side. The first tells of Jaka’s childhood in
the Tavers Family Residence in Palnu from when she was five years old
until she left Palnu and began earning a living as a dancer. The second
follows on from Church and State, and features Cerebus
(briefly) visiting with Jaka and her shiftless husband Richard. The two
stories are converging into what’s looking to be a really dramatic climax
when — BANG in steps the Cirinist Inquisition. The Cirinists are
a matriarchal sect of the Church of Tarim; it seems that dancing has been
outlawed. All and sundry (except Cerebus, who stepped out in boredom
sometime earlier) are shipped off to the Cirinist dungeons, which is
where the last third of the book takes place.

I really don’t know what Sim was trying to achieve, but what ever it was,
he completely blew it with that last third, in both narratives. I won’t
say how the story of young Jaka ends–but the horrible, traumatic event
that is supposed to send her fleeing her patrician birth to become a
dancer in low dives all over Estarcion is too absurd for words. As for
the present day narrative, the ending is truly horrific…but the only
thing I gather from it is that Sim doesn’t much like women and doesn’t
much like religion. I also gather from his introduction that he has no
concept whatsoever what a healthy marriage looks like.

Anyway, I’m disappointed, just as I was with
Church and State–the book’s got an excellent build-up, and
some truly beautiful story-telling, and then the ending fizzles. It’s
really rather pathetic.

I don’t have much to add to Will’s review of this book. When I was reading
the Vlad Taltos series in January, this was the only one I couldn’t put my
hands on at the time and so, moved on without it. I wish I had waited. The
following books would have made more sense and been better for knowing what
was in this book, I think. If you haven’t read Brust’s Taltos series, start at
the beginning and work your way thru them. They’re a gas.

One of the truly surreal parts of having a newborn in the house is that they grow. They never do it while you’re watching–you come down for breakfast, and you look at them, and….they’re bigger than when you last noticed.

That’s what happened this morning. I looked at Mary, all comfy and relaxed in her carrier (she’s on the table next to me as I write) and suddenly realized that her head was just a little bigger and more rounded than it was yesterday.

“Jane,” I said, “Her head’s bigger.”

“It could be,” she said. “She wanted to eat all night long.”

The kicker was her hair. She was born with a lot of dark hair, but it looks thinner this morning. Analysis: the follicles are farther apart.

I was expecting this–Mary is our fourth, after all–but I wasn’t expecting it quite so quickly.

The very day after I write a review of C.S. Lewis’ The Abolition of Man, a book in which Lewis argues for the notion of “objective value” or “natural law”, I read this post on Banana Oil. The post is a hodgepodge of linkage; the second entry down deals with Leon Kass and the president’s Council on Bioethics.

I don’t really want to talk about cloning here, as I’ve not thought much about it. What I find fascinating are some comments made on both sides. Ian quotes a post which says, in part,

[Leon] Kass [Chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics] has written in the past about how we should base our moral judgments in part on what he calls “the wisdom of repugnance.” In other words, the feeling you get in your bones that something is wrong is a reliable guide to what really is wrong.

Ian’s response:

It is genuinely sad that both left and right in the US now believe that feelings trump facts and reason. There can be no productive argument in such a situation. One side feels one way, the other side another, both say so, and then the name-calling begins.

I don’t know to what extent the quoted post is an accurate description of Kass’s belief….but if it is, it seems to me that what Kass is saying is that some things are objectively wrong–wrong on the face of it. His mistake is in using the language of emotion, rather than the language of natural law.

In my experience, I might add, the feeling in my bones that something is wrong is always worth listening to. In technical matters, it’s called the voice of experience; in moral matters, it’s called the voice of conscience. Please note, I don’t say that this voice is invariably correct–sometimes the problem is in my understanding, and sometimes I’m simply confused. But it’s always worth listening to.

If you’re like me, you’ve participated in dozens if not hundreds of
bull-sessions, electronic or otherwise, on the topic of “What constitutes
good literature?” The presence of the book in the “Literary Fiction”
section is no clear guide; the “Literary Fiction” section is mostly
filled with pretentious tripe. The popularity of the book is no clear
guide; people will read the most appalling trash in large quantities.
And the book I revere might well revulse you. It can be tempting to cut the
Gordian knot of aesthetics by claiming that aesthetic values are merely
subjective. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” you might cry.

And yet, that’s not a particularly satisfying answer. It’s clear to me–in
fact, it’s clear to everyone–that some books are better than others. I
might not be able to say precisely why in every case, and yet the fact
remains. Some books are better than others.

Part of the problem, of course, is that there is no single measure of
literary value–there are dozens of axes on which a work can be said to
succeed or fail. Literary value is complicated–as complicated as people
are complicated–and to say that literary value is merely subjective
isn’t a solution, it’s an abdication.

A similar muddle exists in the realm of moral value. The modern relativist
says, “Act A is forbidden in culture B, but compulsory in culture C;
therefore the immorality of act A is culturally-defined rather than
absolute.” Reduced to simplest form, this statement generally turns out
to mean “It’s not wrong when the So-and-so’s do it, and therefore it’s not
wrong if I do it, no matter what Mrs. Grundy says.”

And indeed, faced with the varied customs and ethos of the cultures of
the world, it’s easy to cut the Gordian knot of moral value by taking up
a relativist position–especially if we’re looking for reasons why it
isn’t sinful to sin.

And that brings me to Lewis’ book The Abolition of Man, which
is outstanding and which I highly recommend. Lewis begins with a
discussion of a schoolbook whose authors appear to espouse the notion
that aesthetic and moral values are subjective. He points out that such
people don’t usually hold that all value is subjective–just the ones
they want to belittle. Their own values, of course, are objectively
good, as they will hasten to prove from first principles.

Except that they can’t. You can’t prove that a value is objectively good
except in terms of another value. Consider the following dialog:

A: We must feed the poor!

B: Why?

A: Because if we don’t do something, many of the poor will starve.

B: Oh. That’s bad, is it?

A: Of course it’s bad. If they starve, they will die.

B: Oh. But won’t that leave more food for the rest of the poor?

A: You don’t get it. If we don’t do something, people will die. Some of
them will be children!

B: And it’s bad for children to starve?

A: Well, naturally!

B: Why?

Speaker A has a number of options here. He might conclude that B is
yanking his chain and tell B to go to hell; he might (if he’s unwise) try
to argue the point further–for no matter what value A invokes, B can
simply say, “Oh, that’s good, is it? Why?”

A’s best answer is simply that it’s wrong to allow children to die of
starvation if we can prevent it. Allowing them to starve is objectively,
self-evidently, axiomatically wrong.

According to Lewis (and I have no reason to doubt him), the word “reason”
has been redefined in the last hundred or hundred-and-fifty years. For
the ancients and medievals alike, “reason” included not only logical
thinking but also what we call common sense–and that, in turn, included
the recognition that the value of bravery, charity, and other virtues are
self-evident. Some things simply don’t need to be proved.

This, of course, gets us back to our moral muddle. If moral values are
self-evident, then why don’t all cultures agree on them?

The astonishing fact is that for the most part they do, as Lewis amply
illustrates in the Appendix to his book. Every culture in the world
shares in what Lewis calls, for lack of a better word, the Tao. Taken
as a whole, the agreement is remarkable. And taken as as a whole
it becomes clear that the exceptions, so far from proving that value is
relative, are simply culture-specific kinks, the besetting sins of each
nation.

Moreover, although the Tao is the common heritage of all mankind it still
needs to be taught; even Aristotle recognized that if virtue is not
taught to a child, the child will never recognize virtue as an adult.

Thus, it’s more true to say that there’s no accounting for taste than
that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. For what is bad taste but
attributing value to objects which don’t deserve it? And what is virtue
but attributing value to actions which do deserve it (and acting
accordingly)?

I generally buy my daughter the trade books she reads for school so she can
write in them. It’s easier for her if she underlines the vocabulary words
she has to define or scenes she has to discuss as she’s reading them. It’s a
simple enough adjustment for her learning difficulties and since schools
really don’t teach more than one or two non-text books a semester, it’s not
a huge budget issue either. This book is taught in, I think, 7th grade.
Maybe 6th. I do remember trying to help her decipher the idiomatic
vocabulary and probing her for a little more depth on her critical thinking
questions. It’s too bad I hadn’t read it at the time. Our chats about it
would have been much more productive because it’s really a very good book.
Amazingly so.

As a coming of age story, the plot is fairly simple. Rob Peck is a young boy
skipping school one day and wandering the woods brooding when he happens
upon a neighbor’s cow calving and in distress. He’s small, the cow is huge
and it’s a fierce struggle to help the calf out but he does it and he goes
on to save her from choking to death on ruptured goiter by reaching in and
ripping it out of her throat. He’s bitten and unconscious when he’s found by
the neighbor and carried home to be stitched up on the kitchen table by his
mother. And in payment for saving his prize cow and her twin matched bull
calves, the neighbor gives Rob a young piglet of his very own to raise.

That’s the first couple of chapters. After that it’s the story of Rob
raising his pig, living during the Depression on a farm that is barely
making it, watching his parents struggle and finally accepting some of the
harsher realities of adulthood. It’s not a happy story, though there are
light hearted moments in it, particularly when a prissy friend of his mother
learns he is nearly failing English in school and decides it’s due to not
learning to diagram a sentence. His description of his diagramming lesson
was so funny I had tears in my eyes reading it. And if you are not of a
farm background or don’t understand the earthy way that farmers approach the
breeding of animals, some of the scenes in it may be a little surprising. It
adds rather than detracts from the book.

His parents are deeply proud, plain people and Shakers, although what that
means is unclear to me since Shakers were a sect that believed in communal
living and a celibate lifestyle. His parents seemed more along the lines of
devout Quakers. No matter. The point is that he does not fit in. His clothes
are different, he doesn’t own a bike etc. And they are poor. His father must
work off farm as a pig killer at a slaughter house to pay the mortgage. They
have next to nothing and the only real thing he has of his own is the little
pig he has been given. He plans on breeding her and making money from
selling the stock.

The real joy of reading this book is the language. Peck plays with idiom in
a way that enchanted me. It’s almost poetic. I had to read slowly and listen
to the words to hear it. The descriptions at the end had me in tears. The
story was sad and the telling was sad. I am so glad my daughter had the
opportunity to read this one. It’s a jewel.

In which Will feels heroic for doing the things Jane usually does every day.

It’s common to lampoon a husband’s feelings of achievement in the area of childcare at a time like this (in the movies, at least, and on TV), and I think that’s wrong. I’ve gotten the kids up, fed, dressed, and in David’s case off to school; I’ve washed the dishes; I’ve gotten the carseat ready to bring Mary home from the hospital; and I don’t usually do these things.

What’s not to be proud of?

But then, I’ve always found it remarkably unperceptive to say that “so-and-so is just a housewife….” Keeping a household running smoothly is a lot of work, and a valuable skill.

…unto us a daughter is given!

Mary Suzanne Duquette was born today (8.5 lbs, 20″), and Jane and I are exceedingly grateful.

As you can read on her blog.