Go Get Your Jacket

And always very curious

Having kids does weird things to your sense of perspective. Not only have I become more risk-averse and less able to enjoy the kinds of books or movies usually described as "harrowing" (because they so often rely on child-in-peril plots to engage the audience's emotions and those are no longer fun), I've also discovered a hearty dislike for kid things I used to think were dandy. We'll get to Babar later, but right now I'm looking at you, Curious George. 

I'm not a huge fan of monkeys, to be honest, but one tries not to prejudge. As monkeys go, George is OK, I guess. It's the books I don't like.

I honestly had no idea how dull they are, so dreadfully dull I can't imagine how I ever thought they were interesting.  I guess what you remember, looking back fondly on read-aloud sessions with a parent and a sibling or two and the monkey books, are the illustrations, which really are that good. I especially loved the one where George has transformed the horrid Margaret Dumontlike lady's living room into a jungle, complete with slipper-chair cheetahs and a broom-and-ladder giraffe. Reading that scene now, though, I'm less enchanted than irritated: if the lady wanted a normal paint job, why did she supply the painters with dozens of very small pots of varicolored paint?? Why not a gallon of eggshell? And why was George looking for work, anyway? Don't they feed him at the zoo?

OK, it's a kid's book. It doesn't have to make sense. but must it bore on multiple levels at once? Sentence to sentence, the Reys bring the dull by constantly de-emphasizing the interesting details in favor of the tedious ones. Do 3-year-olds care that the stuff you drink before an X-Ray is called barium? No, but if you said it tastes yucky you might at least get a laugh out of them. 

On the macro level the authors bore by writing the same book, already on the dull side, over and over and then dying and leaving it to their successors to keep writing it again. I can't do a better summation of the sameness than Alice at Finslippy, so why try?

I had a thing or too to say about how much worse the new ones are than the already-pretty-bad originals but I got scooped there too, by my invisible friend Mimi Smartypants, years back. Mimi sorta liked the original George  because he was a fuck-up, but "In these books CG's fuckups are presented quite differently":

In almost every case, the fuckup actually turns out to be a good thing. If CG hadn't wandered away during a camping trip, he never would have seen and been able to put out the forest fire. If CG hadn't let all the puppies out of their cages, the missing one would never have been found. The minor characters in these newer books always end up elaborately thanking CG and his yellow-hatted handler for obliquely saving the day through the magic of simian curiosity. I think this signifies some weird, Hollywood-ized narrative shift, where every thread has to have an overtly feel-good ending, and where child (or monkey) behaviors cannot be undesirable or even morally neutral. 

What she said. 

Blue period

I can't imagine these constitute infringement, since they are horrible underlit iPhone shots nobody could ever mistake for the real thing, so here is Olivia, star of page and (small) screen, experimenting with appropriation and homage  (here, referencing late-period Pollack) on her bedroom wall:

And here's her mother's reaction:

Now, I'm an Olivia fan. I think she's a great little girl/pig/girl: funny and resourceful and a friend to dirt, lizards, and interesting bugs, all while wearing a tiara and a tutu. It would never have occurred to me that she might be anything but an excellent role model for my own little girl. Olivia is a dancer; so is Lilah. Olivia is a painter, and check out the bold brushwork and strong graphic sense exhibited in these works from Lilah's recent Blue Period:

On paper

And in this site-specific work for kitchen door:

Note: Oh, look! There's a "splosh red and black paint all over the wall" GAME on the Olivia site. What do we think? Show it to her as soon as she gets home, or plunk down for some sort of net-nanny thing to insure that she never, ever sees it? 

Oh, of course I'll let her play with it, but I also get the feeling I'll be making that face a lot in upcoming years. 

I h8 Mother Goose

How did I manage to have a bookish, English-history obsessed childhood, with all its associated "Mother Goose" iterations, and miss the fact that the "see-saw" rhyme actually goes like this? 

Of course, Dorothy The Dinosaur's cruel giggle at the end there (she's enjoying Jacky's misery!) isn't helping, but the word-picture here of the nasty, brutish, and short life of the industrial revolution-era child laborer is rather too vivid to allow for any kind of literary or chronological distance. Don't you want to throw a wooden shoe into whatever machine that child is chained to?

I've never been too sold on the idea that every one of these rhymes is a veiled reference to some scandal of the day, the Minister's mistress's poxy decollatege or that embarrassing incident with the Knights of the Privy Chamber (although some, like Georgie Porgie, clearly are). I'm thinking this is not in fact an early version of the labor-movement protest song. I'm willing to go, in Margery's case, with the prevailing explanation that the "see-saw" rhymes are sawyer's work songs, But that little slice of soul-destroying, inescapable, class-bound poverty is just... not fun. And then I looked up "Margery Daw" and found this variant:

See Saw, Margery Daw,

Sold her bed and lay on straw;

Was not she a dirty slut

To sell her bed and lie in the dirt.

Even allowing for the fact that "slut" has changed meanings (from "slattern" to, well,

 "slut,") in the intervening years, this one is a bit raw, what? I can see why Jacky's plight, grim as it is to contemplate,has survived it in the popular children's editions. 

Scarytown

As long as we've been reading to the children, my husband has been promising to construct a taxonomy of the Scarryverse: which creatures are people and which just livestock, and which, disturbingly, function both as shopkeeper and charcuterie? Happily (and sadly too, since Kenton really does want to write one), but "Krepta,"  blogging here, has produced an excellent version of his or her own. I borrowed the image. Krepta  called it "horrormeat."

It isn't just  the pig-eat-pig Scarrdystopia that compels Kenton's attention, though. This week he walked into the room  with the book and a question:  ""What is wrong with this sentence?" 

''Mr. and Mrs Bunny and the baby bunnies are going to meet their friend Owl for breakfast." 

Don't go, Bunnies! Does the phase "To serve rabbit" not ring a bell with you? Resist! Hop away! Find a friendly, preferably herbivorous neighbor who will risk arrest by hiding those babies in the attic for you!

Maybe we think about this sort of thing too much at our house, but I can't help concluding that Mr. Scarry did not think about them anywhere near enough.

King Mongkut Lives

My daughter loves books and she loves the bathtub; these are not usually compatible. So you'd think we'd be happy about this waterproof book called Farm Fun. But then we got to this page:

   

"Moo, moo," says the cow while he munches on hay."

He?

I'm not sure if I should blame poor English or poor biology. It puts me in mind of the part in The King and I where the King wants "pairs of male elephants to be released into the forests of America. There it is hoped that they will grow in number and the people can tame them and use them as beasts of burden."

Gleeps!

Have you ever rediscovered something you loved from childhood and thrown yourself into it all over again?

The phenomenon is similar to the love that so many 30-something-men (coughmyhusbandcough) still have for Star Wars. As a kid, you fell in love with a character, or a story, or a series, despite any cheesiness that might have turned off a more discerning adult. And as an adult, you still love it because you remember loving it as a kid.

For me, it's Trixie Belden. Some of you are now guffawing, while the rest of you are saying, "Huh?" Trixie Belden was the girl detective and co-heroine of a series of mystery novels that I loved as a little girl. The first was originally published in the late 1940s, and the rest followed in the 1950s and early 1960s. My mom actually owned the first few installments in the original hardcover incarnations and passed them down to me. Later, she bought me the sequels in paperback.

Well, a few years ago, Random House decided to re-release the series, and guess who stumbled upon them?  I snapped up the first, er, nine books and proceeded to completely immerse myself in them, much to the amusement of my Luke Skywalker-fan husband, who can't quite believe I'm willing to suspend my usual dislike for the painfully earnest.

I don't even have daughters so I can't pass these books off as purchases for my future children to enjoy. I just bought them because I loved them once, and I still do. I love them despite, or perhaps because of, the cheesiness. And oh, they are so earnest! The books feature liberal use of such words as "gleeps!" and "Moms." One of the main characters is unironically named Honey. In one of the later books, one of the boys gave Trixie his ID bracelet as a sign that he wanted to go steady with her.

And I'm rereading them again now. And I'm still enjoying them. And to my delight, the books are exactly as I remembered them. No Nancy Drew-esque updates that miss the mark. I don't have to sneer at the way the editors thought (but were oh so wrong) that modern kids dress or talk and adjusted the characters accordingly. The books are still set in the Hudson River Valley in the era when phone calls cost a nickle and only rich households had television sets. The girls still wear "dungarees" (not jeans) to ride their horses but change into pleated skirts and loafers for school.

Oh, they are so comfortingly familiar, these Trixie Belden books. Nothing has changed. Except me, of course. And I'm okay with a little comfort.

Knuffle Bunny revisited

If you have any interest at all in gender roles and relations (and if you don't you may be reading the wrong blog) you will be familiar with the concept of the "Boob Dad." If you own or have ever watched a TV, you won't have missed him. He's the guy who can't do anything right, and nobody really expects him to, because men cannot be expected to behave reasonably or responsibly. If only he'd act more like a woman, he'd be fine, but he's too much of a boob to do anything so sensible.

While wearing various sex-educator hats (and believe me, they are fetching) I've gone on and on about this: in current popular culture, women, like men before them, are the default humans. Their world-view is normal, their perceptions are correct. In romance, they value commitment and communication, which are good, while men value getting over and getting laid, which are bad. They can take care of a baby or comfort an angsty tween. They can navigate a complicated work situation or a parent-teacher conference with good sense and a level head, while men flail and lie and pretend to be the janitor and forget the permission slip and leave the baby on the car roof. Men are, in other words, Homer Simpson.

For some reason the men of my acquaintance find this tiresome. I hate it, myself. I do, however, like Knuffle Bunny. And that's kind of a problem.

Knuffle Bunny, if you don't have little kids or don't pay much attention, is the hugely popular picture book by Mo Willems, and if you hate spoilers you can skip this part. Toddler Trixie and dad (Willems, basically), with Trixie's lovey in tow, go to the laundromat. They leave without the lovey (an ugly pop-eyed bunny called guess what). Dad does not notice. Trixie, who is preverbal, expresses dismay. Dad is clueless. They go home, mom sees the problem instantly, and they go back, where dad rolls up his sleeves and retrieves Bunny from the washing machine. Trixie rejoices.

So I brought this home from the library and presented to my non-Boob husband with slight trepidation. "He's not a Boob-Dad, see, because, um, it's really autobiographical and Willems is just using himself for self-deprecating comedy fodder and it could happen to anyone, right?
"Sure, sure," said my husband. "It's cute. It's fine."
"He really isn't a Boob-Dad," I repeated, to convince myself as much as anyone.

But you know what? I kind of think he is. His daughter has one thing she loves— she has one thing with her— and it never occurs to him to keep track of it. He doesn't ask the increasingly frantic toddler a single question: "Do you have an owie?" Did something scare you?" And back where people think clearly and know what's what, in Momland, Mom opens the door, assesses and instantly grasps the situation ("Where is Knuffle Bunny?") like a proper person ought to but a Boob-Dad is simply not equipped, by virtue of being a boob, to do.

I went through a phase of being very down on Willem's character for being so out of touch with his daughter's needs and, in fact, her very being (Knuffle Bunny is really really important! How could he forget about it? How could he??!!) and for the possibly even greater parental sin of failing to take inventory (OK, I have issues), but I have decided to forgive him. It's early days yet, in the book, and entirely likely that the outing portrayed is the first for dad and newly ambulatory daughter on their own and on foot.

Parenting, I tell myself, is a learning experience, or rather, a series of progressive learning experiences, each encompassing the last and proceeding along a sort of Fibonacci sequence as our children grow and we (we hope) grow with them. Next time, he'll check.

"Everyone makes mistakes," says my husband. But he'd never forget Knuffle Bunny.

The Sincerest Form of Fluttery

I'm pretty certain that the sonic and conceptual kinship of the words "butterfly" and "flutter" was recognized well before Reverend Spooner was born. Yet people keep coming up with it as if for the first time.

My daughter doesn't have all that many books (yet), but a weirdly large proportion of them drag this venerable lepidopteral trope out of its cocoon once again. Behold.

Amazing Baby, Feel and Learn:

Doring Kindersley, Baby Touch and Feel Animals:

Little Scholastic, Peek-a-Zoo:

(Notice anything familiar about the layout?)

Dorothy Kunhardt, Tickle the Pig:

YES, OKAY, WE GET IT. Each individual use is unobjectionable (I mean, hey, nothing's a cliché to a baby).

But… Coincidence? I say nay.

Kitten, Kitten, Burning Bright: Towards a Teleological Hermeneutics of Prosody in Curious Kitties

There's good news and bad news about being both a former English major and a new parent. On one hand, there is a lot of charming, high-quality children's literature out there. On the other hand, not much of it applies to the board-book set. So a word-nerd parent sometimes has to entertain him or herself with idle musing about, say, images of death and resurrection in Goodnight Moon or the theme of the epistemological quest in Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?

Take Curious Kitties, for example. It's got lively illustrations and is cleverly engineered. But the writing? Well. It has 94 words on its 14 pages. I know the muse can be fickle, but it can't have taken that much agonized soul-searching to write. Twenty minutes' work at most.

My main quarrel is this: why bother with rhyme and introduce meter if you're not going to carry it through? I have little choice but to quote it at length to illustrate my point.

Curious kitty playing on the floor.
Do you know what the yarn is for?

Tug-o-war is so much fun!
But what will the kitties' yarn become?

So far, so good. You need to be a little careful with the stresses in line 4, and fun/become is a slant rhyme, but it's forgivable. That is, it would be forgivable were it not for the next stanza:

Kitten in the sunny weather,
What happens when the yarn is all together?

I think this could be improved if it were rewritten: "Kitten, kitten, feeling fine / What happens when you try to fit way too many syllables into an ostensibly metric line?"

Ah well, maybe it was temporary madness; even Homer nods. At least it galumphs back toward approximately trochaic territory:

Little kitties, follow me!
What do you think the yarn could be?

Kitten bubbles pop and fizz.
I wonder what the yarn is.

The kittens like the yummy cake.
But what will the fuzzy yarn make?

Note that the fourth stanza, "yarn" carries the weight of one syllable. But the only way to make things scan is to ask it carry the weight of two syllables in the fifth and sixth ("I WONder WHAT the YAAarn IS"). Then the final stanza tosses the line length out like used kitty litter:

A blanket, of course! And in one quick snap…
The curious kitties are ready for their nice long nap.

Tetrameter? We don't need no steenkin' tetrameter.

De gustibus and all that, but it's clear that we're a long way from the confident martial march of

They're changing guard at Buckingham Palace.
Christopher Robin went down with Alice.

Or even the singsong flow of

Would you eat them in a box?
Would you eat them with a fox?

Sigh. Don't even get me started about Freudian subtext in Pat the Bunny.

We love it when Mimi hates things

Why is Mimi Smartypants not writing for GGYJ? We even kind of know her a little. Obviously we need to perfect our strong-arming techniques. Meanwhile, here are her most excellent reviews of two most terrible books.