On Harold Bloom in Catalonia and Portugal (long, part 2 of 2)
christopher rollason
(Harold Bloom, 'El futur de la imaginació', Barcelona: Anagrama / Empúries,
May 2002, 206 pp., ISBN 84-7596-927-5)
A review article by Christopher Rollason, November 2002
Part 2 of 2
IV - THE PRESS PAYS TRIBUTE
Bloom's two 'new' lectures in this volume may be further illuminated by
reference to selected elements from the clutch of articles on and interviews
with him which appeared in the Iberian-language press and electronic media,
tying in with his visits, in 2001 and 2002. These texts, apart from
clarifying Bloom's positions on various subjects, chronicle a number of
significant events: in particular, on 27 May 2001 Harold Bloom was awarded
an honorary doctorate by the University of Coimbra, Portugal's oldest seat
of learning, in the presence of and with the sponsorship of José Saramago.
In the next section, I shall offer the anglophone reader a digest of the
salient points from the following press texts, translating all quotations
from Spanish or Portuguese into English (I have chosen seven texts - five in
Portuguese, two in Spanish; each full reference is preceded by a codeword
that will serve to identify it afterwards):
Almeida. Catarina Solano de Almeida, 'Ser um génio literário não implica ser
inteligente para outras coisas' ['Literary genius doesn't guarantee
intelligence in other fields'], website: SIC Online, 1 September 2002 -
http://www.sic.pt/article4540visual4.html (this article is a paraphrase of
statements made by Bloom in an interview with the Chilean newspaper 'El
Mercurio')
DN. 'Uma "lança" cultural nos EUA' ['A thorn in America's cultural flesh'],
'Diário de Notícias', 22 May 2001 - reproduced on Lusoplanet website,
http://lusoplanet.free.fr/noti0105.htm
Júnior: António Júnior, 'Harold Bloom - Um autor a que não podemos ficar
indiferentes' ['Harold Bloom, an author to whom no-one can be
indifferent'] - website: Blocos On Line (Brazil), 2001 -
http://www.blocosonline.com.br/entrev/entrev03.htm
Moret. Xavier Moret, 'Harold Bloom, crítico literario: "Los lectores están
en peligro de desaparición"', ['Harold Bloom, literary critic: "Readers are
an endangered species"'], 'El País', 22 June 2002, reproduced at website:
literaturas.com, http://www.literaturas.com/haroldbloom.htm
Najmías. Daniel Najmías, 'El boom Bloom: Harold Bloom en Barcelona' ['The
Bloom boom: Harold Bloom in Barcelona'], 'Barcelona Review', No 30, May-June
2002, http://www.barcelonareview.com/30/s_dn.htm
Queirós. Luís Miguel Queirós, 'Só Falta Começarem a Partir-me Os Vidros das
Janelas' ['Next thing they'll be smashing my windows'], 'Público', 26 de
Maio de 2001 - republished on terravista.pt site,
http://www.terravista.pt/Bilene/5099/bloom2.htm
Sobrado. Jorge Sobrado, 'O Futuro passa por ... Shakespeare' ['The future
is … Shakespeare'], site of Feira do Livro do Porto (Oporto Book Fair),
2001 -
http://feiradolivro.clix.pt/prt/g_img/programa/programa_eventos_02.html
V - THE CRITIC SPEAKS
The first point to be stressed from the reading of these press texts is the
way in which they underline Bloom's enthusiasm for the literatures of the
Iberian world. Thus, he tells Júnior: '"The [doctoral] ceremony in Coimbra
was extraordinary and eloquent - an incentive to me to go on learning more
deeply about the Portuguese literary tradition. I've already written pieces
on Camões and Eça [de Queiróz or Queirós]. I believe that [Eça's] 'The
Maias' is a work of sublime beauty, one of the finest European novels of the
nineteenth century"; and Júnior, in return, notes that Bloom's popularity in
Portugal may not be unrelated to his declared interest in that nation's
great writers: 'People in Portugal are delighted at your high opinion of
Fernando Pessoa and José Saramago'. Elsewhere, in the article by [Luís]
Queirós, we are told that Bloom considers Camões' neo-classical epic 'Os
Lusíadas' to be "a great poem - extraordinary powerful and disturbing,
better by far than all of Virgil"; and the DN article adds that 'Bloom has
written the introduction to a translation of Eça's "A Relíquia" ["The
Relic"], slated for publication in the US in the autumn [of 2001]'; and
Almeida adds that 'among those whom he believes to be the greatest literary
geniuses, the likes of Shakespeare, Balzac, Cervantes or Hemingway, the
critic [Bloom] has no hesitation in including the Portuguese writer José
Saramago', while Sobrado reports: 'A careful reader and confessed admirer of
the Portuguese writer, Harold Bloom declared him to be a "great writer",
even comparing him with Cervantes' (one may guess that Bloom was here
thinking of Saramago's picaresque, pan-Iberian and, indeed, quixotic
narrative 'A Jangada de Pedra'). For Spanish literature, we may, then, note
Bloom's recourse to Miguel de Cervantes as a point of reference; while for
Catalan literature, Moret quotes Bloom as declaring: "'The Nobel committee
is guilty of many errors, and one of those was not to have given the prize
to Salvador Espriu. I believe he deserved it'".
On the more specific details of the Bloom-Saramago connection, we learn from
Sobrado that, at the Oporto Book Fair in May 2001, 'Bloom was unstinting in
his praise for Portugal's literature Nobel, José Saramago, with whom he says
he regularly exchanges correspondence'. Still on his relationship with the
Portuguese writer, Bloom further tells Queirós: '"I regret the fact that I
don't speak Portuguese. On the few occasions when I've met Saramago, we had
considerable difficulty in communicating. I manage to read Portuguese, but I
find it difficult to pronounce, and his English is non-existent. And so we
ended up speaking in a crazy mixture of French, Italian and Spanish.
Saramago is a great writer and a most engaging person"'.
One might be forgiven for supposing that, defying the language barrier,
novelist and critic have indeed formed a Bloom-Saramago alliance in defence
of the literary tradition and its value for today's world. However, all is
not plain sailing when non-literary controversies raise their head. On the
vexed subject of Middle Eastern politics, Almeida quotes some sharp words
from Bloom on his Portuguese friend's anti-Israel line: "'Saramago was in
Ramallah [in March 2002] and said that what he'd seen was a latter-day
Auschwitz. Such a statement is absurd and unforgivable … when he talks
politics, the old Stalinist stereotype is always there'". It is clear that
Bloom the critic makes a clear distinction between Saramago the novelist and
Saramago the political animal - as, it might be recalled, an intelligent
Marxist critic such as Georg Lukács does in the converse direction, drawing
a sharp line between Balzac's monarchist politics and his novelist's genius.
This brings us to the question of Bloom's own wider political views, and it
emerges from these documents that, while he certainly has no time for
unreconstructed Stalinism or (unsurprisingly) for the pro-Palestinian
world-view, he is equally no admirer of the neo-conservative, hard-right
forces that now rule America. On Bloom's views on the present President of
the United States, Almeida comments: 'In the opinion of this US citizen,
George W. Bush "is a semi-illiterate fascist" who might as well be the
character Polonius from "Hamlet"'. Junior informs us that Bloom 'was invited
to receive an honorary distinction at Yale's 300th anniversary celebrations,
but decided not to go and to accept Coimbra's honorary doctorate in person
instead', and quotes Bloom's own explanation for his choice: '"His majesty
Bush was to be one of the recipients at Yale. I decided I would rather not
be there, and I have no regrets … George Bush II embodies the worst
imbecility that exists in the USA, something which is quite beyond my
comprehension"'.
On the Internet, Bloom's position as expressed in these texts is at best
lukewarm and at worst downright hostile. Sobrado's report on his address at
the Oporto Book Fair cites remarks that are quite as acerbic as those in
Bloom's Barcelona speech. The sea-of-chaos image recurs: 'Bloom declared
peremptorily that the Internet is an "ocean of chaos, an ocean of death",
which makes it impossible to read properly or to make any qualitative
distinction between the works "afloat" on it. He concluded that from the
literary viewpoint "the Web will not contribute anything of value"'. To
Moret, however, Bloom is a shade more conciliatory, declaring: '"For a
decently educated young person, the Internet may be a very useful tool. I'm
glad to know that there's valuable information of every kind there on the
Internet, but someone who uses it without the right educational background
runs the risk of drowning in an ocean of information. When I read about the
World Wide Web I can't help thinking of a huge spider's web trapping the
unwary'".
On another manifestation of the vicissitudes of text in the modern world,
namely Joanne K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, Bloom confesses to Moret:
"'I've read 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'. It's so badly
written! It's full of clichés and repetitions. Frankly, I was most
disappointed. If the Harry Potter books are now the most popular books in
the world, then we've got a terrible problem'"; and, in the same vein, he
tells Queirós: "'Of all my writings in recent years, the one that caused the
greatest furore was a small article in which I said, actually in a quite
kindly tone, that the Harry Potter books have no value whatever, neither
aesthetic, psychological or any other kind"'.
If we now move centre-stage to consider Bloom's main preoccupations, we find
that these articles, inevitably, touch on Bloom's defence of the Great
Books, his hostile relationship with the dominant orthodoxy in American
universities, the 'right-wing' label pinned on him by certain influential
lobbies, and the book of his that sparked off the entire conflict, 'The
Western Canon'. On the polemical issue of his own position inside the US
academy, Blooms tells Moret: '"In the circles I move in, they treat me as a
controversial critic. I don't feel that I am, but this must be a sign that
something is not right'"; and he declares to Queirós: '"If I'd been born in
1970, they'd never have given me a job. Even if I were ten times more gifted
than I am, no-one would take me on, because my opinions aren't acceptable"'.
Estranged from the academic establishment of which he is nominally part,
Bloom finds solace in what he finds to be the more open-minded company of
the common reader. He confides, again to Queirós: '"Around 1990 I came to
the conclusion that there was no point in writing for an academic public. I
went back looking for the general public - and I discovered that it existed.
There are readers out there - thousands of them, all over the world"'.
Meanwhile, Bloom's strictures against political correctness in literary
studies remain as harsh as those which he gave voice to in 'The Western
Canon'. He states to Moret: '"For years now, literature hasn't been taught
decently in my own country or in any English-speaking country. If things go
on like this, with the teaching of literature subordinated to gender, race,
sexual preferences or political opinions, in the end society will
self-destruct"'. Najmías, meanwhile, makes the salutary point (often
overlooked by commentators) that in reality Bloom's polemic in 'The Western
Canon' was directed as much against the right (read: the Christian
fundamentalists) as the left (read: the politically correct): '[that book]
raised the hackles of the members of the lobbies, on both the right and the
left, whom Bloom accused of politicising literary studies and criticism'.
Still on that book, Bloom makes an important clarification in the interview
with Queirós. Some, but not all, editions (among them the 1995 UK paperback)
include, apart from the twenty-six main author studies, a much more
extensive set of reading lists in (mostly) western literature, from Homer
and the Bible to the present day. Bloom explains why some editions lack
these lists: "'Those lists have nothing to do with me. I was obliged to
include them, but I repudiated them a good while back. I decided to remove
them from the book, and so they're not there in the Swedish or the Italian
translation, although you will, unfortunately, find them in the Portuguese
and Brazilian editions. My publisher and my agent banded together to
persuade me that the book could only be published with those lists - and so,
in protest, I wrote them off the top of my head, without looking up
anything'".
To both Queirós and Moret, Bloom relates an incident at Stanford campus,
California, home to one of his homeland's most prestigious higher education
institutions, which, he feels, encapsulates the antagonism between his
concept of literature and the world-view of his opponents. I cite the story
as Bloom tells it to Queirós: ''Three years ago, I gave some lectures at the
University of California, which is an extremely politically correct place
(…). In the middle of one of my lectures, suddenly the hall literally
exploded. They even wanted to lynch me, all because, in the end, I told the
truth. I turned to them and said: 'A lot of you in this room are teachers of
literature, but you don't really care about literature. If you commission a
table from a carpenter who happens to be Mexican-American, or Marxist, or
gay, and he hands you over a table that collapses on its legs, you'll return
it and ask for your money back. Yet you're more than happy to accept books
with no legs to stand on. You're totally hypocritical. There are quotas for
women, blacks, Mexicans and gays in law and arts faculties, but not for
medicine. You know why? Because if you politically correct folk were on a
hospital table for a brain operation, and the doctor who was about to
operate on you was a devastatingly attractive black lesbian - I'm trying to
be as offensive as possible - who you are told got her qualifications thanks
to her ethnic origin and her sexual orientation, all of you would run out at
once'. The whole room started shouting at me: 'Racist! Fascist!' And I
shouted back at them: 'All you are is a bunch of low-down nuisances. You
don't have a single rational argument to throw back at me. You're a crowd of
perfect swindlers. The whole lot of you would run out of the operating
theatre.' It was war. But is there any more socially repugnant idea than to
claim that it's more helpful for a young woman from Cape Verde who comes to
live in Portugal to read her fellow nationals' books, however bad they are,
than Eça or Almeida Garrett? Another day, I was speaking about five of my
favourite poets: Whitman, Pessoa, Lorca, Hart Crane and the wonderful Luis
Cernuda. All of them were gay, but why should I have to care whether they
preferred to go to bed with men or women?'"
VI - THE WORD IN THE MODERN WORLD
The above incident might suggest to some that the gulf between Harold Bloom
and the self-styled representatives of today's modernity may simply be
unbridgeable - that where two positions are irreconcilable to such a degree,
no dialogue can exist and nothing can be done. However, if we retrace our
steps and consider various of Bloom's positions, as expressed in the
material introduced in this essay, in a globally-oriented context, the
outlines of a more inclusive perspective may emerge.
Bloom defends the written word, but appears particularly resistant to its
present-day recasting via the new medium that is the Internet: while some of
his pronouncements on the network universe are more conciliatory than
others, his general position is clearly hostile. It is true that intelligent
use of the Internet for research purposes requires the capacity to select,
filter and assess the masses of material available on-line, but Bloom surely
underestimates the usefulness of the medium for literary study. The World
Wide Web allows readers to download, read, keep, annotate and study large
numbers of classic works of literature, and to track down quotations and
references with unrivalled speed and accuracy (the same is true for CD-Rom
versions). An electronic version of a novel is - unlike a stage, film or
television adaptation - not a transposition of the text into the language of
a different medium, with all the distortion that can entail; it is a
reproduction of the existing text, within another medium, certainly, but
with no distortion of the original message and with certain 'value-added'
elements such as search capacity. An electronic text of 'Don Quixote' is
still Cervantes' novel, in a way that a stage version like 'Man of La
Mancha' is not; it is more like Pierre Menard's 'rewritten Quixote' in
Borges' celebrated story: transcribed word for word for the readers of
another age, superficially different yet ultimately still the same. In
addition, with the rise of the Internet the cunning of history has brought
about an unexpected resurgence of, precisely, that common reader whose
intuitions Bloom says he now values well over those of the academy. Today,
any computer-literate reader of books can post a review on any of numerous
popular websites (Amazon and its imitators) or Usenet groups, so becoming
his or her own critic and bypassing the official critical establishment
altogether. The contours of a new reader-centred criticism are likely to
become visible as our new century progresses, and it seems somewhat
misplaced that a critic like Bloom should not be taking due note of this
immensely positive development. Large swathes of the Internet are and will
remain essentially text-based: the superficial difference between printed
page and screen is no greater than that between papyrus and parchment, or
vellum and paper. The new medium, in stark contrast to its audiovisual
predecessors, has all the potential, pace the still-voluble disciples of the
late Marshall McLuhan and his increasingly beleaguered world-view, to redeem
the power of the written word for the coming generations - to transform and
deepen it, while in no way abolishing it, thus repeating Gutenberg's quantum
leap on a new and more powerful plane.
At the risk of appearing to compare great things with small, I now beg leave
to move from the Internet to Harry Potter, and to question the usefulness of
Bloom's critical positions over another latter-day manifestation of the
written word. The analogy between Joanne Rowling's parallel world of
witchcraft and the virtual universe of cyberspace may in fact not be so
far-fetched as it might seem. The Potter books are, on one level, about the
hidden potential of alternative forms of networking, and, like the
electronic networks, they have given a remarkable and surprising boost
worldwide to the allegedly 'out-of-date' medium of text, breaking through
the barrier of anti-book prejudice and encouraging children to read as no
other contemporary fictions have. Indeed, Joanne Rowling and Tim Berners-Lee
may yet prove to be the two great anti-McLuhans of the new millennium. In
such a context, Bloom's dismissal of the Potter books could come across as
short-sighted and unfair. By denying their literary value, he aligns himself
with José Saramago, who is, as it happens, another of J.K. Rowling's
detractors (although, by contrast, such eminent figures from the world of
letters as the critic George Steiner and the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa
have praised her books). It may be added that the repetitive and formulaic
element which displeases Bloom in Rowling's style may be linked to the fact
that they are at least partly intended for oral delivery (as bedtime
stories), and thus stand at a particular intersection point of written and
spoken word which, a more sympathetic critic might argue, could suggest
comparison with the similarly formulaic works of Homer!
On the vexed question of the 'Western Canon versus political correctness'
debate, it needs pointing out that, despite the white heat that fires
Bloom's attacks on his adversaries (and theirs on him), the canonic gospel
according to Bloom is in fact much more inclusive than some might think.
This is very clear from the reading lists appended to some editions of 'The
Western Canon', which include large numbers of texts (not exclusively
western) and writers, both male and female, from an enormous range of times
and places, and it seems unfortunate that Bloom has chosen to suppress those
lists, thus generating unnecessary misunderstandings. His canon is
infinitely more generous than that of F.R. Leavis, who typically seemed bent
on whittling down the ranks of the great writers to the tiniest of elites.
Nor are there many Anglophone critics - above all from faculties of English
rather than modern languages - who have shown the openness towards
foreign-language literatures, including lesser-known ones, that Bloom has
manifested in embracing Spanish-, Portuguese- and Catalan-language writers.
His interest in Latin American literature even connects him to the wider
area of postcolonial studies (this aspect could be usefully strengthened
were Bloom to pay more attention to the parallel phenomenon of Indian and
'Anglo-Indian' writing, from R.K. Narayan to the likes of V.S. Naipaul,
Anita Desai or Salman Rushdie, which has, like Latin American writing before
it, achieved worldwide recognition not by quotas but by merit). Indeed, even
if Bloom would no doubt reject the concept of 'postcolonial studies' as
such, the global reach of his interests can objectively bear linking with
the concerns of that movement; and there are even curious similarities
between his technique, in 'The Western Canon', of revisiting and
reinterpreting classic texts, and the method operated by Edward Said in
certain passages of his book 'Culture and Imperialism', which is now
recognised as a basic text for postcolonial studies.
Meanwhile, there is no rational justification for the 'fascist' (!) label
pinned by the Stanford audience on someone who is an ardent promoter of a
card-carrying communist like José Saramago, and who, as we have seen, has
described Franco's regime as 'abominable' and Salazar's as a hell on earth.
Indeed, one might legitimately wonder how many of Bloom's Stanford opponents
knew more about General Francisco Franco than could be written on the back
of a postage stamp, and how many had so much as heard of António de Oliveira
Salazar.
It may nonetheless be argued that Bloom has by now said everything useful
that he could say on the issue of political correctness, and that it could
be time for him to move on. The whole PC question has, besides, now been
magnificently explored in fiction in 'The Human Stain', the remarkable
Clinton-era novel by Philip Roth (himself a Bloom favourite). Roth's novel
is centred on the academic world, and his character Delphine Roux, the
French ex-structuralist converted to PC, is a wickedly telling caricature of
Bloom's real-world opponents. The question remains whether there is much
more to say of interest on the subject, and whether it might not be a more
valuable exercise for all concerned to move away from confrontational
positions and start building bridges. The cosmopolitan slant of Bloom's
literary interests suggests that he and his adversaries may actually have
more in common than either would wish to admit. The biggest objective
stumbling-block is probably Bloom's insistence that works of literature
should be judged on merit rather than on the gender, colour, etc. of the
people who wrote them; his opponents would no doubt counter-argue that his
concept of merit is itself a white male construct, but given that many of
the modern writers whom he champions are not precisely from 'central' or
hegemonic cultures, it should surely be possible to evolve some more
inclusive definition of merit which might satisfy all parties.
Political correctness, despite its tangible excesses and rigidities as
pinpointed by Bloom and Roth, has at least had the not insubstantial merit
of keeping literary studies alive in universities. While the aesthetic has
to a large extent been displaced by the ideological, the world does still
have humanities departments populated by people who believe that at least
some creative writing is valuable enough for its study not to be pushed out
of the university curriculum altogether. One may wonder if Bloom is, today,
necessarily identifying the right enemy: political correctness may in fact
pose far less of a danger to literary studies than does the insidious
ideology of vocationalism.
By vocationalism, in the context of the humanities, I mean the subordination
of arts courses to labour-market criteria and crude, demagogic ideologies of
'relevance'. This can take the form of contaminating humanities courses by
injecting alien discourses such as behaviourist psychology, or, in the case
of modern languages courses, of downgrading and devaluating the literary
component as being 'irrelevant' or 'useless'. It may not be known at Yale,
but countries exist (I do not actually name any here) where higher education
in the humanities has in recent decades been systematically and officially
colonised by the occupying forces of vocationalism. This kind of wholesale
poisoning of educational systems may, in the long term, prove far more
inimical to the humanities than political correctness could ever be. Indeed,
the time may well be ripe for the creation of an International
Anti-Vocationalism Association: such a project would certainly not be
incompatible with a Bloomian reading of literature, for anti-vocationalism
is surely implicit, on one level or other, in every word that Harold Bloom
writes.
VII - PORTBOU: A HOLLYHOCK BLOOMS
Vocationalism is typically justified by reference to a simplistic notion of
linear 'progress'; and when one speaks of linearism and wishes to criticise
it, the example of Walter Benjamin inevitably springs to mind. It is curious
that Bloom, when he speaks of the affinity between the Jewish and Catalan
cultures, does not mention Benjamin, a Jew who died in tragic circumstances
on Catalan soil in 1940. Benjamin's non-linear model of history, as
unforgettably expounded, through the key image of the constellation, in the
last work he wrote, the 'Theses on the Philosophy of History', offers a
devastating critique of the false gods of 'progress'. His work in literary
and cultural studies, whose crowning glory, the vast, unfinished 'Arcades
Project', is now finally available in English, is grounded in a project of
building bridges - of rescuing lost fragments of popular culture from
oblivion and teasing out their latent significance, while at the same time
not destroying, Taliban-like, the great artefacts of high culture, but
re-reading and reappropriating them so that they can serve to liberate, and
not oppress, the men and women who make up today's ordinary humanity. The
kind of bridge-building exemplified by Benjamin's life's work could now mark
a valid direction for the future evolution of Harold Bloom's distinguished
critical career. Meanwhile, at the cemetery in Portbou, on the Catalan side
of the Franco-Spanish frontier, at the feet of the Pyrenees and overlooking
the blue Mediterranean - there where the sea ends and the earth begins,
right on the edge of Saramago's stone raft - there next to the marble plaque
raised in memory of Walter Benjamin, a bright pink hollyhock waves each
summer, symbolically in bloom.
**
Afterword:
Some of the biographical material in this article is taken from an article
recently published in the US: Larissa MacFarquhar, 'The Prophet of Decline:
Harold Bloom's Influential Anxieties', 'New Yorker', 30 September 2002, pp.
87-97.
Bloom's latest book, the physically and intellectually weighty (and
unfashionably titled) volume 'Genius', came out as I was finishing this
article (Harold Bloom, 'Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative
Minds', London: Fourth Estate, 2002, xviii + 814 pp., ISBN 1-84115-398-2).
It includes, among its one hundred writers, studies of ten from the
Iberian/Iberoamerican cultural area - three from Spain (Cervantes, Lorca,
Luis Cernuda), one from Mexico (Octavio Paz), one from Cuba (Alejo
Carpentier), one from Argentina (Borges), three from Portugal (Camões, Eça
de Queiróz, Pessoa) and one from Brazil (Machado de Assis). Saramago is not
there officially, since the book's rubric excludes living writers.
Nonetheless, in an introductory chapter Bloom names the Portuguese novelist
as a figure 'of palpable genius' (p. 11), and does not fail to express his
admiration for Saramago even when speaking of his compatriots: writing on
Pessoa, he goes so far as to declare: 'I am a literary critic trying to
reeducate myself, as I go on seventy-one, with the help of the master
Saramago' (p. 519). It is too early as yet for a full verdict on this new
book of Bloom's, but it may be noted already that it more than confirms its
author's interest in the literatures of the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking
world.
It should be further added that, while this article was being written, the
English translation of Saramago's 'A Caverna' ('The Cave') was published;
and soon after, coinciding with his eightieth birthday, Saramago launched a
new novel, 'O Homem duplicado' ('The Duplicate Man').
**
Christopher Rollason (M.A., Ph.D.) is the co-editor of 'Modern Criticism',
published in Delhi (2002) by Atlantic Publishers and Distributors
(www.atlanticbooks.com). He is also Language Editor of the Delhi-based
Atlantic Literary Review (www.geocities.com/atlanticliteraryreview).
Formerly a lecturer at the University of Coimbra (Portugal), he is
currently a guest collaborator with Kakatiya University (Warangal, India).
He is the author of an essay on Harold Bloom's 'The Western Canon' which
appeared on rec.arts.books (Usenet) in 1996 and, in Romanian translation, in
the magazine 'Noesis' (1998). He lives in Metz (France).
--
---
'Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments'
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)
Christopher Rollason, M.A., Ph.D., Metz, France
Language Editor, The Atlantic Literary Review (Delhi) -
www.geocities.com/atlanticliteraryreview
Editor and contributor, Atlantic Publishers (Delhi) - www.atlanticbooks.com
Co-editor, Bob Dylan Critical Corner site:
www.geocities.com/Athens/Oracle/6752/magazine.html
Stephen Hayes
christopher rollason wrote in a message to All:
cr> From: "christopher rollason" <roll...@9online.fr>
cr> On another manifestation of the vicissitudes of text in the modern
cr> world, namely Joanne K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, Bloom
cr> confesses to Moret: "'I've read 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's
cr> Stone'. It's so badly written! It's full of cliches and
cr> repetitions. Frankly, I was most disappointed. If the Harry Potter
cr> books are now the most popular books in the world, then we've got a
cr> terrible problem'"; and, in the same vein, he tells Queiros: "'Of
cr> all my writings in recent years, the one that caused the greatest
cr> furore was a small article in which I said, actually in a quite
cr> kindly tone, that the Harry Potter books have no value whatever,
cr> neither aesthetic, psychological or any other kind"'.
Does Harold Bloom include children's books in his Western Canon?
It would be interesting to know what children's books he *does* approve of.
What kind of books did he enjoy as a child - if he ever was one, and not just a
boring miniature adult?
Keep well
Steve Hayes
WWW: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/7734/steve.htm
E-mail: haye...@yahoo.com
FamilyNet <> Internet Gated Mail
http://www.fmlynet.org
Don Phillipson
news:0001...@fmlynet.org...
> . . . Joanne K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, Bloom
> cr> confesses to Moret: "'I've read 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's
> cr> Stone'. It's so badly written! It's full of cliches and
> cr> repetitions. Frankly, I was most disappointed. . . .
>
> Does Harold Bloom include children's books in his Western Canon?
>
> It would be interesting to know what children's books he *does* approve
of.
Bloom approves the classic five:
Lewis Carroll's Alice books
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
Swift, Gulliver's Travels
Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress
Twain, Huckleberry Finn.
Among these, only Alice was written for children
(and only partly so.) The others were written for
adults but Victorian taste reclassified them as
"suitable for children." The point is that this is not
because of their style, while later "children's authors"
(notably Enid Blyton, J.K. Rowling etc.) write in styles
which children enjoy and adults deplore. We now have
at least two classes of "children's literature" because
some authors (Dr. Seuss, E.B. White, Roald Dahl,
Arthur Ransome) preserve an adult style that is as
accessible to children as Bunyan's.
Probably no critic can deal with the transient
phenomenon of children's avidity in reading.
Fenimore Cooper was advertised by Victorians
as a "children's author" and therefore read by
millions of teenagers who, 10 or 30 years later,
might have been unable to turn a page.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada)
dphil...@trytel.com.com.com.less2
francis muir
dr2I9.13003$3J2.1...@news20.bellglobal.com, "Don Phillipson"
<dphil...@trytel.com> wrote:
I have previously mentioned R.D. Blackmore's *Lorna Doone*. In the Exmoor
that I knew most persons were not great book readers but they always had one
and sometimes another. The one they always had was *Lorna Doone* and the
sometimes another was *The Bible*.
Here is a Balliol scholar writing home to a fellow scholar:
To Neville Watts
July 18th, '16
B.E.F.
Circumsonor Armis
Abs te tam diu nihil literarum?
I did write to you once, but the rest is silence. However--
Nil mihi rescribas: attamen ipse veniam.
But if you will not write to me, you in Blighty to me out here,
"cæloque terrae non fueris memor", is it all in vain that I look
forward to some of the old walks to the old groves and high
places, and old ale at the Old Down Inn? Can a man cut adrift
from the past? Is it in vain thst for the first time I have read
"Lorna" in the trenches, your own Lynmouth copy of Lorna
Doone? But how can I hope in any case to see Exmoor or the
Mendips ever again: on the eve of . . . ! Exmoor and the
Mendips are fabulous, impossible, "lands undiscoverable in
the unheard of West".
No, when we meet again, we shall ask Mrs. Watts to let
me come with you to Wessex, shall climb the Beacon or
Rainbarrow, thinking of Lear and Wildeve and things older
and more solemn than the great advance. But do write.
Stephen Hewett
Stephen H. Hewett, 2nd Lieutenant in the Warwickshire
Regiment, was killed four days later in the Great Advance.
The war had two more years to run.
ObBook: *A Scholar's Letters from the Front*. Stephen H.
Hewett. Longmans Green, 1918. I obtained my copy from
Australia via ABEbooks and it is inscribed "H.U. from F.F.U.
Nov 15, 1918."
Steve Hayes
wrote:
As a child I used to enjoy Enid Blyton, well, at least some of her storites.
As a teenager I used to enjoy "Gulliver's Travels", especially the fourth
book, where the cynical misanthropism appealed to me.
I recently reread the first Enid Blyton books I read, which were also the ones
I enjoyed most - "The secret of Kilimooin" and "The mountain of adventure". I
was struck by the style, which was not nearly as good as Rowling, and the
extensive descriptions of food and eating. For all her deficiences, however,
Blyton managed to produce some quite good children's books.
But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
of good children's books. Just before Potter, the bookshelves were full of
drek like R.L. Stine and the Goosebumps series. Since Potter, they have
practically disappeared from the shelves.
And I recently saw reprints of Alan Garner's books from the 1960s.
>Probably no critic can deal with the transient
>phenomenon of children's avidity in reading.
>Fenimore Cooper was advertised by Victorians
>as a "children's author" and therefore read by
>millions of teenagers who, 10 or 30 years later,
>might have been unable to turn a page.
Will that happen to Potter readers too?
--
Steve Hayes
E-mail: haye...@yahoo.com
Web: http://www.geocities.com/hayesstw/stevesig.htm
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
>of good children's books.
Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
"Good" as in "pleasing adults" is another matter; Harry Potter has
crossover effects that haven't been around for a bit. But I think the
notion that a good book for children is really a good book for children
and adults is quite insulting, as if children weren't a worthy enough
audience in their own right despite being the genre's ostensible point.
You also sound like you're talking more specifically about fantasy, which
I know is one of the genres that most draws adults discussing children's
literature, but it's only one continent on the field's globe.
Just before Potter, the bookshelves were full of
>drek like R.L. Stine and the Goosebumps series. Since Potter, they have
>practically disappeared from the shelves.
You're talking the bookstore bookshelves here, from the sound of it.
Actually, Goosebumps were going fast well before Potter; Animorphs were
outselling them, and then Animorphs were losing their peak. Sweet Valley
was before Goosebumps, Babysitters' Club are in there, etc.
But you're mixing apples and oranges here, or to be more specific trade
books and mass market books. Harry Potter's had mass appeal in a way
trade books usually don't, so it's not entirely unfair, but it is
misleading to suggest that the mass market bookshelves prior to Harry were
all that children's literature was.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Steve Hayes
<stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>haye...@yahoo.com (Steve Hayes) writes:
>
>>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
>>of good children's books.
>
>Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
>children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
South Africa.
Perhaps other countries had a better selction before Harry Potter came along.
>"Good" as in "pleasing adults" is another matter; Harry Potter has
>crossover effects that haven't been around for a bit. But I think the
>notion that a good book for children is really a good book for children
>and adults is quite insulting, as if children weren't a worthy enough
>audience in their own right despite being the genre's ostensible point.
>
>You also sound like you're talking more specifically about fantasy, which
>I know is one of the genres that most draws adults discussing children's
>literature, but it's only one continent on the field's globe.
>
>Just before Potter, the bookshelves were full of
>>drek like R.L. Stine and the Goosebumps series. Since Potter, they have
>>practically disappeared from the shelves.
>
>You're talking the bookstore bookshelves here, from the sound of it.
>Actually, Goosebumps were going fast well before Potter; Animorphs were
>outselling them, and then Animorphs were losing their peak. Sweet Valley
>was before Goosebumps, Babysitters' Club are in there, etc.
Yes, I was talking about the bookstore bookshelves.
>But you're mixing apples and oranges here, or to be more specific trade
>books and mass market books. Harry Potter's had mass appeal in a way
>trade books usually don't, so it's not entirely unfair, but it is
>misleading to suggest that the mass market bookshelves prior to Harry were
>all that children's literature was.
Perhaps, but that was all that most of the bookshops carried, at least in my
town. Since Harry Potter hit the shelves about 3-4 years ago, the variety has
improved. Actually it was only after the second Harry Potter book hit the
shelves that it really took off.
Paul Ilechko
> haye...@yahoo.com (Steve Hayes) writes:
>
>
>>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
>>of good children's books.
>
>
> Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
> children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
Just as one example, E.L. Konigsburg is a much better writer than J.K.
Rowling. And that's just sticking with writers who don't like to use
their first names !
smw
Deborah wrote:
> haye...@yahoo.com (Steve Hayes) writes:
>
>
>>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
>>of good children's books.
>>
>
> Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
> children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
And those are the Astrid Lindgren decades; some of the best children's
books ever written.
Meg Worley
SteveH wrote:
>>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
>>of good children's books.
Deborah writes:
>Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
>children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
>
>"Good" as in "pleasing adults" is another matter[...]
My experience is quite the opposite. Even leaving out Goosebumps
and that genre of rapid-consumables, I must say that the quality
of children's literature has suffered quite a bit in the last 10
or 15 years. At the same time, it has gotten much more adult-erated.
The books of my childhood were generally full of youthful hijinks
performed without adult supervision. The Newbery-quality novels of
a contemporary childhood seem to be mostly about one of two things:
social ills (domestic violence, racism, bullying, blah blah blah)
resolved through appeal to the appropriate authorities, or historical
situations that only qualify as fiction because they insert a child
into the siege of Vicksburg/the Trail of Tears/the Donner Party.
I think the Harry Potter books made such a kersplash because the
engine that drives the plot is not telling adults -- scandalous
in the world of 21st-century children's lit.
Rage away,
meg
--
Meg Worley _._ m...@steam.stanford.edu _._ Comparatively Literate
Margot
> I think the Harry Potter books made such a kersplash because the
> engine that drives the plot is not telling adults -- scandalous
> in the world of 21st-century children's lit.
Hear! Hear!
And that is the same thing that really has the Christian Fundamentalists
up-in-arms about them too. It isn't magic that bothers them; it is the lack of
obedience and the children thinking for themselves (and quite often NOT doing
what they are told) in Rowling's books.
Margot
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>On Sun, 08 Dec 2002 05:17:41 GMT, Deborah Stevenson,,,
><stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>>haye...@yahoo.com (Steve Hayes) writes:
>>
>>>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
>>>of good children's books.
>>
>>Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
>>children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
>South Africa.
>Perhaps other countries had a better selction before Harry Potter came along.
I think that's true, and importation is quite variable as well (the US
produces a lot of good children's literature but is pretty slow at
importation, especially of translated stuff).
According to my _International Encyclopedia of Children's Literature_,
South Africa published 134 new books for children in 1987, a high that
hasn't been replicated since then (the Encyclopedia is itself dated 1996).
Between that number and your description of the bookshelves, it's then
relying mostly in imported material, and it sounds like the importation is
totally sales-based. So I think you're right that Harry Potter has had a
distinct effect there, if not quite the one you'd postulated--its success
is demonstrating to the bookstores that non-mass-market material can sell,
so they're starting to get stuff in that had been established in the rest
of the world.
I don't see a ton of South African authors, but we certainly get Niki
Daly, and we've seen some Lesley Beake; Hazel Rochman, a prominent figure
in children's literature and librarianship in the US, was originally from
South Africa, and she's an accomplished anthologist and critic who's
focused on a great deal of South African material.
So, ironically, we might not just see more good children's literature, we
might see more good South African children's literature than you do
because of your bookstores' habits.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>SteveH wrote:
>>>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
>>>of good children's books.
>Deborah writes:
>>Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
>>children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
>>
>>"Good" as in "pleasing adults" is another matter[...]
>My experience is quite the opposite. Even leaving out Goosebumps
>and that genre of rapid-consumables, I must say that the quality
>of children's literature has suffered quite a bit in the last 10
>or 15 years. At the same time, it has gotten much more adult-erated.
I can see some of the impulses you're talking about, but I don't think
overall this is an accurate summary, partially because we really are
talking an extremely large field: 5000 new books per year in the US.
>The books of my childhood were generally full of youthful
hijinks
>performed without adult supervision.
Can you name some of the ones you're thinking of so I have a more specific
idea of what you mean?
>The Newbery-quality novels of
>a contemporary childhood seem to be mostly about one of two things:
>social ills (domestic violence, racism, bullying, blah blah blah)
>resolved through appeal to the appropriate authorities, or historical
>situations that only qualify as fiction because they insert a child
>into the siege of Vicksburg/the Trail of Tears/the Donner Party.
Ooh, a bunch of things to address at once :-).
First, you're clearly talking about a subsection of children's books;
you're not talking about picture books, which have had some extraordinary
contributions, and you're not talking about nonfiction, which is one of
the most exciting genres in contemporary children's literature. So even
if we accept that notion of "worse" (which you're defining mainly
thematically), we're talking about a change in the intermediate-grades
novel rather than children's literature as a whole.
Second, the Newbery is always going to be a problematic representative,
and it's never going to be able to represent the genre totally any more
than one single title can represent that year's adult literature totally.
You think _The Exiles_ fits into your paragraph? _Feed_? _Captain
Underpants_? _Stinky Cheese Man_? _Wonder_? _Stones of Muncaster
Cathedral_? Etc.--I'm just randomly naming some of the books I've liked a
lot in the last decade or so that immediately came to mind as the kind of
book you're thinking doesn't exist.
It's not like I don't know the kind of book you're talking about. With
the historical fiction, I call it the Sherman and Mr. Peabody
approach--not only is the young person there, if the the young person
*weren't* there to hand George Washington the dollar/run back and fetch
Ben Franklin's key/drop Amelia Earhart's compass out the window History
Would Have Been Different. And the New Realism that brought out something
genuinely different, such as _Harriet the Spy_, did indeed normalize into
a problem-novel structure (though they're rather a different species now
than in 1970).
The adult-ification is a more complicated matter, because it's not simply
that. The lower-end genres in the field are underserved across the
board--good picture books for five year olds are easy to find, but there
are only a handful each year for two year olds (Harper's even got a series
specifically addressing this). Good books for fifth graders abound, but
decent original second and third grade chapter books trickle in (mainly
from Holiday House, bless 'em). That's a bit of a shift from 40 years
ago, exaggerated by the subsequent but disproportionate boom in children's
literature. And I don't know when your youth is, but the thematic stuff
you're talking about has been present for considerably longer than the
last twenty years, especially in historical fiction.
>I think the Harry Potter books made such a kersplash because the
>engine that drives the plot is not telling adults -- scandalous
>in the world of 21st-century children's lit.
I'm not quite parsing your first sentence--do you mean the book isn't
about adults telling kids stuff or the book isn't for telling adults stuff
about childhood?
I'm not meaning to suggest that I think children's literature is the heart
of all innovation and an arena bereft of preachiness--in the Lillian
Gerhardt/Ethel Heins argument I'm wielding a chair along with Lillian.
But I think that the sheer breadth of children's literature means that it
can be easy to mistake patterns of publicity and patterns of
recognization for actual patterns in children's literature, while that
literature is an infinitely more complex beast than those patterns would
suggest. The fact that Harry Potter *wasn't* greeted as a scandalous
departure by children's literature professionals would seem to support
that--it fit will into the concept of the field to those who were most
acquainted with its breadth.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>Meg wrote:
>Hear! Hear!
And the fact they know about Rowling's books.
I don't think there's been a book with an obedient child in it since 1964,
but since most of 'em aren't splashed across the headlines, they're easier
to ignore.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Marcy Thompson
>
>SteveH wrote:
>>>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
>>>of good children's books.
>
>Deborah writes:
>>Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
>>children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
>>
>>"Good" as in "pleasing adults" is another matter[...]
>
>My experience is quite the opposite. Even leaving out Goosebumps
>and that genre of rapid-consumables, I must say that the quality
>of children's literature has suffered quite a bit in the last 10
>or 15 years. At the same time, it has gotten much more adult-erated.
I agree. It is hard to find newish children's books that are
anyhing like as good as the Saturdays (and the sequels), the
Edward Eager books, or Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler et al; in all
of them, the kids just ran around and did stuff without
much adult supervision.
>
>The books of my childhood were generally full of youthful hijinks
>performed without adult supervision. The Newbery-quality novels of
>a contemporary childhood seem to be mostly about one of two things:
>social ills (domestic violence, racism, bullying, blah blah blah)
>resolved through appeal to the appropriate authorities, or historical
>situations that only qualify as fiction because they insert a child
>into the siege of Vicksburg/the Trail of Tears/the Donner Party.
In fact, not just without adult supervision, now that I think about
it. A major plot point was OFTEN to keep the youthful hijinks from
the parents -- so not just no adult supervison, but actually Not
Telling Adults. And can you ingaine a group of kids in most modern
children's books to buld a dam on the pond in the backyard to turn
it into a swimming hole? And having their dad, who finds out about
it afterwards, decide that this was a Good Thing, and letting them
swim in it without supervision, so long as they did not swim alone?
This is pretty rare these days, although Diane Duane's So You Want
To Be A Wizard books have that same feel. And while I can't comment
on the Hary Potter books, not having read them, I frequently read
children's books. Lloyd Alexander has a newish series about a teen-
age girl who is obviously patterned on Indiana Jones that is quite
enjoyable. And I'm a big fan of Tamora Pierce and Patricia Wrede's
Dragon books.
ObBook (in case you did not read the post itself): A Swiftly Tilting Planet
Marcy
--
Marcy Thompson
ma...@squirrel.com
Tim Smith
>The books of my childhood were generally full of youthful hijinks
>performed without adult supervision.
The actuality of my childhood was generally youthful hijinks performed
without adult supervision. I gather that the actualities are different
for children now.
Steve Hayes
<stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
That is quite possible, but none of it seems to impress Harold Bloom.
Does he include *any* South African literature in his "Western Canon" - it
probably doesn't count as Western.
Steve Hayes
wrote:
I noticed that in Bloom's selection most of the books did not have child
characters, and in those that did, their interactions were mainly with adults.
But since Harry Potter came on the scene, some of the children's books of the
1960s and earlier have been reprinted and are reappearing on the shelves. I
mentioned Alan Garner, but I've seen others as well.
Paul Ilechko
>>So, ironically, we might not just see more good children's literature, we
>>might see more good South African children's literature than you do
>>because of your bookstores' habits.
>
>
> That is quite possible, but none of it seems to impress Harold Bloom.
>
> Does he include *any* South African literature in his "Western Canon" - it
> probably doesn't count as Western.
>
>
If he doesn't include Andre Brink or J. M. Coetzee he has a problem ...
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>On Sun, 08 Dec 2002 18:05:33 GMT, Deborah Stevenson,,,
><stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>>So, ironically, we might not just see more good children's literature, we
>>might see more good South African children's literature than you do
>>because of your bookstores' habits.
>That is quite possible, but none of it seems to impress Harold Bloom.
None of it impresses a lot of people who haven't read it, but I don't
think that's cause to worry :-).
>Does he include *any* South African literature in his "Western Canon" - it
>probably doesn't count as Western.
Dunno--Nadine Gordimer, maybe?
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
r...@rosemarylake.com
wrote:
/snip/
>I agree. It is hard to find newish children's books that are
>anyhing like as good as the Saturdays (and the sequels), the
>Edward Eager books, or Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler et al; in all
>of them, the kids just ran around and did stuff without
>much adult supervision.
/snip/
>In fact, not just without adult supervision, now that I think about
>it. A major plot point was OFTEN to keep the youthful hijinks from
>the parents -- so not just no adult supervison, but actually Not
>Telling Adults.
Yes. I'm re-reading the Swallows and Amazon series (with an eye to Bickham
scenes :-). Much of the suspense is about concealing from the adults or
older children things that would worry them, and contriving to go off and
do their adventures in spite of the adults. That was especially strong in
my favorite, _The Picts and the Martyrs_.
Concealment from adults was a main theme in Eager and in Nesbit. In Nesbit
the children made a sort of global condition that whatever they wished for,
the servants wouldn't notice: which led to its own complications. It wasn't
just servants -- protecting parents showed up a lot (kind of like in E.T.)
/snip/
> And I'm a big fan of Tamora Pierce and Patricia Wrede's
>Dragon books.
Tamora Pierce's Alanna and her brother hoax all the adults by switching
identities. The heroine of _Page_ and her friends conceal the hazing
problems.
Rosemary --
http://www.rosemarylake.com Sources of Narnia.
Fairytales with smart heroines & lots of magic.
New story added 11/30/02.
Arindam Banerjee
> SteveH wrote:
> >>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
> >>of good children's books.
>
> Deborah writes:
> >Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
> >children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
> >
> >"Good" as in "pleasing adults" is another matter[...]
>
> My experience is quite the opposite. Even leaving out Goosebumps
> and that genre of rapid-consumables, I must say that the quality
> of children's literature has suffered quite a bit in the last 10
> or 15 years. At the same time, it has gotten much more adult-erated.
My better half researched Children's Literature for a few months at
Monash University, and we have two children who do not take too kindly
to be considered such, these days. Yes, you are perfectly correct, Ms
Worley. I was surprised to find the high degree of adult themes in
so-called childrens' literature. I suppose this reflects the sort of
lives most Western children now lead, where traditional family
structures do not exist. We did not have "mum's boyfriend" or "dad's
girlfriend" in children's literature, or children's lives, 40 years
ago.
> The books of my childhood were generally full of youthful hijinks
> performed without adult supervision.
Yes, adults were sort of distant entities remaining in their own
distant adult world. They mattered only in emergencies. Some were
bad, some you could rely upon, and for the most part they just did not
understand us, did they?
> The Newbery-quality novels of
> a contemporary childhood seem to be mostly about one of two things:
> social ills (domestic violence, racism, bullying, blah blah blah)
> resolved through appeal to the appropriate authorities, or historical
> situations that only qualify as fiction because they insert a child
> into the siege of Vicksburg/the Trail of Tears/the Donner Party.
Yes, really sad. Reflects the inability of the writers to relate to
children, and their way of thinking, does it not? My younger daughter
gives me a good book now and then. One was "Jake's Story"? about a
boy who made his way through the Amazon forest after he escaped from
his kidnappers. Now, that was the sort of book I used to love in my
childhood. Another good set is the "Penny Pollard" series. Then the
children can always go back to the good old books - on William, on
Bunter, Enid Blyton... They do not age. For the very young, there are
a lot of good illustrated books, though. Then with the computer age
they have access to stories via multi-media, and I personally think
that is not such a bad thing.
Strangely, my children are very fond of Shakespeare, but hard on
Dickens. Too long-winded. They also laughed at Faulkner (Absalom,
do) for his long and unwieldy sentences.
> I think the Harry Potter books made such a kersplash because the
> engine that drives the plot is not telling adults -- scandalous
> in the world of 21st-century children's lit.
Yes, I think that's it! No adult themes, just plain honest fun in
boarding school with a different, new, magical setting. This is the
way my wife sees it. It is just the old stuff back again, like
"Malory Towers". Lots of cliches, repetitions, and that's what
children, being children need. (Adults don't but childrens' books are
not for adults.) My children consider Ms Rowling a genius. However,
I could not get myself to complete even her first book, despite severe
exhortations. I guess, I am no longer a child, and that is sad.
However, I greatly enjoyed the latest Harry Potter movie. What I did
not like was the "mugblood" element, a deplorable adult theme which
crept in to remind us of the ways of the bad world. Reminded me of
the way the Anglo-Indians were treated by the British in the Raj.
Arindam Banerjee.
>
> Rage away,
>
> meg
francis muir
> For the very young, there are a lot of good illustrated books, though.
> Then with the computer age they have access to stories via multi-media,
> and I personally think that is not such a bad thing.
For the youngish like my great-nephew Lord Ford Middleton (twoish),
I am particularly fond of Edward Ardizzone's *Little Tim & the Sea
Captain* and its sequels where Little Tim is now plain Tim. EA was a
brilliant illustrator who turned to writing in his later years. He has also
illustrated for the Oxford World Classics where I have in mind *The
Warden*. Particularly appropriate for this time of the year and for
children and adults both would be his illos for Dylan Thomas' *A
Child's Christmas in Wales* with its memorable first paragraph. I
don't remember whether Ardizzone's edition is ragged right or not.
This is plain verse and justification makes no sense. Ellen Raskin's
wood-cuts for this work in the diminutive New Directions version
makes for a great stocking-stuffer.
For the tube I am enamored of the *Sagwa* 15-min daily offerings.
They grew out of Amy Tan's eponymous children's book and are a
delight. Yes, there's a moral attached to the end of each tale but
kids will know how to brush it aside and see it as the ObNanny bit.
Talking of morals, I am surprised that noon has brought up the
interesting moral stance of the Harry Potter tales.
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>m...@steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote in message news:<asvsk1$e3d$1...@news.Stanford.EDU>...
>> SteveH wrote:
>> >>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
>> >>of good children's books.
>>
>> Deborah writes:
>> >Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
>> >children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
>> >
>> >"Good" as in "pleasing adults" is another matter[...]
>>
>> My experience is quite the opposite. Even leaving out Goosebumps
>> and that genre of rapid-consumables, I must say that the quality
>> of children's literature has suffered quite a bit in the last 10
>> or 15 years. At the same time, it has gotten much more adult-erated.
>My better half researched Children's Literature for a few months at
>Monash University, and we have two children who do not take too kindly
>to be considered such, these days. Yes, you are perfectly correct, Ms
>Worley. I was surprised to find the high degree of adult themes in
>so-called childrens' literature. I suppose this reflects the sort of
>lives most Western children now lead, where traditional family
>structures do not exist. We did not have "mum's boyfriend" or "dad's
>girlfriend" in children's literature, or children's lives, 40 years
>ago.
And this is a bit of retrospective wishfulness. Of course children's
lives included parents' boyfriends and girlfriends forty years ago.
Children's lives included parents' divorces, and deaths, and remarriages,
and intervening states. One of the authors whose come up fondly in this
thread is Edward Eager--Edward Eager, who definitely depicted a mother
with a boyfriend, who dealt (albeit not very well) with racism and
deliquency, and whose fans are apparently forgetting those parts of his
books.
Children's literature has indeed undergone some changes in the last 40
years, but I think that a lot of people complaining about the comparison
to the books of their youth really don't see most of the contemporary
children's books, so their sample size is pretty nonrepresentative.
It's being further biased by the comparison of Newbery-type books, which
have always had a specific flavor, with non-Newbery books of yore.
_Johnny Tremain_ is the 1944 Newbery winner and seems to fit neatly into
the kind of historical fiction Meg is talking about, and that would seem a
bit early for this contemporary rot to have set in :-).
There are certainly problem novels (though fewer than 20 years ago), and
while some of them--and some of the hijinks without adults books--are
terrible, I don't think the New Realistic tendency is inherently
lamentable, any more than the Old Unrealism (ah, yes, the all-white world
where everybody's parents were solidly married) is.
And, as I've said, I think there *are* a lot of children's books these
days that fulfill the conditions so yearningly described here, but most
adults just don't know that many books in the genre. The result is a sort
of Harold Bloomian criticism, whereby condemnation is made of a field when
you don't really know what it comprises. I think there's a lot of
pleasure to ubi sunt, but I think it needs more than pleasure to be
supported as an argument.
I think a lot of adults who don't see that many new children's books would
be really surprised by what, overall, is in the literature.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
smw
Deborah wrote:
...
>
> And, as I've said, I think there *are* a lot of children's books these
> days that fulfill the conditions so yearningly described here, but most
> adults just don't know that many books in the genre. The result is a sort
> of Harold Bloomian criticism, whereby condemnation is made of a field when
> you don't really know what it comprises. I think there's a lot of
> pleasure to ubi sunt, but I think it needs more than pleasure to be
> supported as an argument.
Deborah, your expertise and your modifications are welcome, but perhaps
you'd like to give the parents around here a little bit more credit. I
doubt that many of them get their impressions from Harold Bloom. If they
are like me (Heaven forbid, but let's just assume it might be the case
in this single instance), they prowl the bookstores for hours and hours
at a time, in search for books that might appeal both to their kids and
themselves. It is, of course, possible that all these wonderful books
you appear to know about while closely guarding their titles are stocked
up in the warehouses somewhere and never see the neon light of the
Border's children's section. But that would prove exactly what?
francis muir
<sm...@ameritech.net> wrote:
Although for some reason Silke could look long and hard in Border's
and not necessarily find some of the Timeless Classics among which
I include Edward Lear's *A Book of Nonsense*, Hilaire Belloc's
*Cautionary Tales*, and Heinrich Hoffman's *Der Struwwelpeter*:
all of which are of a size and beautifully illustrated.
smw
francis muir wrote:
Man, I can find the classics on my own... half of my kids' books are
half.com or abebook purchases of nowadays out-of-prints.... we're
talking about the current state of affairs. I do like Lemony Snicket,
though.
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>On 12/10/02 10:25 AM, in article 3DF6241B...@ameritech.net, "smw"
><sm...@ameritech.net> wrote:
>> Deborah, your expertise and your modifications are welcome, but perhaps
>> you'd like to give the parents around here a little bit more credit. I
>> doubt that many of them get their impressions from Harold Bloom.
That's not actually what I said; I said I think it's a similar problem to
Harold Bloom's, wherein the genre is being judged in toto based on a
rather limited sampling.
If they
>> are like me (Heaven forbid, but let's just assume it might be the case
>> in this single instance), they prowl the bookstores for hours and hours
>> at a time, in search for books that might appeal both to their kids and
>> themselves. It is, of course, possible that all these wonderful books
>> you appear to know about while closely guarding their titles are stocked
>> up in the warehouses somewhere and never see the neon light of the
>> Border's children's section. But that would prove exactly what?
Well, look at what it proved for Stephen Hayes--that the bookstores are
carrying but a slice of stuff, and only what they think is going to sell.
If you're going to talk about changes in the last forty years, you've just
mentioned one of the biggest one so far--that's Borders (and other chain
stores, of course). Even the indy brick and mortar bookstores often can't
afford the breadth they used to, since the chains are what they have to
compete with. Sure, they'll all order books for you, but if you're
depending on what's on display for breadth, you're going to be
disappointed--and apparently you have been.
The change in what sells and where and to whom is also a fascinating
topic; while it definitely overlaps with the changes in literature,
however, it's not the same thing as the literature itself, and I think
it's often mistaken for it.
I don't discredit parents. They're one of the main reasons I read
r.a.b.c. But in lots of places parents, like their kids, are limited in
what they can easily access. I wish everybody had good children's
libraries so they could see the breadth that's out there rather than just
what Borders shoves at 'em. I don't recognize the literature Meg
describes as contemporary children's literature. I can certainly
understand that that might be what the chains in their infinite wisdom are
pushing, and that it sure looks like that to people standing in Borders.
(Though they did have _Feed_ prominently displayed last time I was in
ours, at least.)
There's also been an absence of specific books named in this discussion,
especially on the contemporary front. I've named some pretty
well-respected books that don't seem to fit into the syndrome that's being
discussed, and some older books that would seem to fit nicely into the
categories being considered to be problematic and contemporary (where is
the mourning for _Gayneck, the Story of a Pigeon_? I ask you :-)), so I
think the memories are being a bit selective as well. It seems a bit like
a books-I-loved-from-childhood vs. books-being-sold-in-chain-stores
contrast that's being misleadingly posed as a whole-genre-then vs.
whole-genre-now contrast.
Again, I should be clear that I'm not arguing there's been no change in
children's literature; I'm not even arguing that all the changes are good
(though I think some of them definitely have been). But I think that
there are other relevant factors here that are being discounted, and I
think the kind of books that are being talked about are alive and well, if
not alive and immediately purchaseable in the corner McBooks.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
smw
Deborah wrote:
\>
> I don't discredit parents. They're one of the main reasons I read
> r.a.b.c. But in lots of places parents, like their kids, are limited in
> what they can easily access.
What I was trying to suggest to you is that "the state of children's
literature" cannot be separated from "children's literature that can be
easily accessed." We all know of or presume the existence of fabulous
books we haven't seen and probably won't ever see.
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>Deborah wrote:
Thanks for clarifying. I want to clarify too, because I think I may have
been sounding like I don't think people were trying hard enough to find
stuff, and what I mean is that it sucks that anybody has to try hard just
to find good books they like.
You mentioned Lemony Snicket, who's a good example of the increased
tendency towards branding in children's books. Brand names are easier to
sell than individual materials, so obviously bookstores would rather stock
a bunch of Snickets and Dear Americas (a Christmas-list pairing I ran into
recently) and more self-selling picture books than expensive hardbacks by
unknown-quantity authors or less sexy sellers, especially to the group of
people (who existed in all our youths) who feel that children's literature
should educate as well as entertain, preferably on a book-by-book basis.
However, even in Borders, I think Meg's statement isn't quite true.
First off, it's not historically true--there are reasons why people are
pining for Ransome and Eager rather than other writers of their day, some
of which had as much and more rigid didacticism than the contemporary
writing being decried. Second, even yer average Borders is going to carry
a few of these original titles. (I believe ours just supplied a copy of
_Bloody Jack_, for instance.)
And I also think that there is a reasonable distinction there, just
as it was in Stephen's case, because lots of people *can* access that
children's literature you're talking about. It's not hidden in secret
warehouses, it's in public and school libraries, it's available for the
order, it's even, in bits, in some of the chain stores. Part of why I
like this newsgroup and similar resources is it can help people get what
they want despite the not-always-helpful foci of the local stores, and I'd
like to think that that kind of consumer effect is why Borders *does* have
_Feed_, _Bloody Jack_, (I bet Neil Gaiman's _Coraline_), etc., and even
though they don't have _The Exiles_ they may have _Saffy's Angel_, which
might even lead somebody to order _The Exiles_, which might lead them to
stock it.
So I'm not giving up the fight yet, and it sounds like you've got too much
dedication to give up too :-).
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Arindam Banerjee
> adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) writes:
>
> >m...@steam.Stanford.EDU (Meg Worley) wrote in message news:<asvsk1$e3d$1...@news.Stanford.EDU>...
> >> SteveH wrote:
> >> >>But from the 1960s until Harry Potter came along, there seemed to be a dearth
> >> >>of good children's books.
> >>
> >> Deborah writes:
> >> >Can you remind me of where you live? There's been a ton of good
> >> >children's literature in the US in the last 10 years, certainly.
> >> >
> >> >"Good" as in "pleasing adults" is another matter[...]
> >>
> >> My experience is quite the opposite. Even leaving out Goosebumps
> >> and that genre of rapid-consumables, I must say that the quality
> >> of children's literature has suffered quite a bit in the last 10
> >> or 15 years. At the same time, it has gotten much more adult-erated.
>
> >My better half researched Children's Literature for a few months at
> >Monash University, and we have two children who do not take too kindly
> >to be considered such, these days. Yes, you are perfectly correct, Ms
> >Worley. I was surprised to find the high degree of adult themes in
> >so-called childrens' literature. I suppose this reflects the sort of
> >lives most Western children now lead, where traditional family
> >structures do not exist. We did not have "mum's boyfriend" or "dad's
> >girlfriend" in children's literature, or children's lives, 40 years
> >ago.
>
> And this is a bit of retrospective wishfulness. Of course children's
> lives included parents' boyfriends and girlfriends forty years ago.
Did they indeed? I did not find any references in any Western
childrens' literature books I read in the 60s and 70s. I mean Enid
Blyton, Richmal Crompton, etc. The traditional nuclear family was
standard, with aunts and uncles also there. In contrast, Indian
childrens' literature of the time dealt with life in the joint family
situation, which was under assault. And what about the divorce rates
in the West - were they the same 40 years ago? The boyfriends and
girlfriends came with the USAn novels of adoloscence, meaning the
works of Mr James Hadley Chase, etc. But even the works of Mr
Alistair Maclean was reasonably free from boyfriends and girlfriends.
> Children's lives included parents' divorces, and deaths, and remarriages,
> and intervening states. One of the authors whose come up fondly in this
> thread is Edward Eager--Edward Eager, who definitely depicted a mother
> with a boyfriend, who dealt (albeit not very well) with racism and
> deliquency, and whose fans are apparently forgetting those parts of his
> books.
Edward Eager did not make it to India, to my knowledge. We have to
get a bit statistical to make sense. A single example is not enough.
> Children's literature has indeed undergone some changes in the last 40
> years, but I think that a lot of people complaining about the comparison
> to the books of their youth really don't see most of the contemporary
> children's books, so their sample size is pretty nonrepresentative.
Now you are talking statistics! I was only being interested in what
my children thought worth reading. I think they went through the
usual stages. What was missing in their lives was the comics we loved
(Superman, Batman, Phantom, Disney, Archie). In place they had
computer games. I think we were better off with the comics. But that
could just be nostalgia.
> It's being further biased by the comparison of Newbery-type books, which
> have always had a specific flavor, with non-Newbery books of yore.
> _Johnny Tremain_ is the 1944 Newbery winner and seems to fit neatly into
> the kind of historical fiction Meg is talking about, and that would seem a
> bit early for this contemporary rot to have set in :-).
>
> There are certainly problem novels (though fewer than 20 years ago), and
> while some of them--and some of the hijinks without adults books--are
> terrible, I don't think the New Realistic tendency is inherently
> lamentable, any more than the Old Unrealism (ah, yes, the all-white world
> where everybody's parents were solidly married) is.
The problem with New Realism is that it is hardly realistic, it only
seems so; it being based upon armchair-speculating too-much-assuming
Einsteinian thought-experimentation. To be really realistic, the
authors would have to work much harder, and spend much more time in
the field - analysing, balancing, judging, experimenting with live
subjects. In short, New Realism is a media-driven fraud. Harry
Potter is the great fightback to that. Harry's parents (solidly
married, happy couple) are dead. They exist as an inspiring memory to
Harry. Rowling fights "New Realism" lies with magic, and longing.
That, I believe, is the reason for her stupendous success.
> And, as I've said, I think there *are* a lot of children's books these
> days that fulfill the conditions so yearningly described here, but most
> adults just don't know that many books in the genre. The result is a sort
> of Harold Bloomian criticism, whereby condemnation is made of a field when
> you don't really know what it comprises. I think there's a lot of
> pleasure to ubi sunt, but I think it needs more than pleasure to be
> supported as an argument.
>
> I think a lot of adults who don't see that many new children's books would
> be really surprised by what, overall, is in the literature.
I am not really impressed, frankly, by all that I have seen and read
over the last 13 years of bringing up two kids in Australia. Here we
have very good libraries, both in schools and councils. The
illustrated books are excellent, I will allow. But the quality of
writing, characterisation, plots overall are poor and at best
unremarkable. Nothing really sticks in the mind, unlike the
unforgettable William, Bunter, Biggles, of the past. More to the
point, apart from Penny Pollard there is no such household name I can
think of. But now, we have quite a cast, along with Harry. Hermione,
Ron, Draco... I think good times may well be back!
Arindam Banerjee.
>
> Deborah Stevenson
> (stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Paul Ilechko
> ...and I'd
> like to think that that kind of consumer effect is why Borders *does* have
> _Feed_, _Bloody Jack_, (I bet Neil Gaiman's _Coraline_), etc.
Speaking of which, I bought _Coraline_ for my daughter (12) this
Christmas, along with Michael Chabon's _Summerland_, Carl Hiaasen's
_Hoot_ and Cornelia Funke's _The Thief Lord_ - all of which sound like
interesting books to me, at least - hopefully she will think so too. But
I didn't even bother trying to get them at a bookstore, I ordered them
all from Amazon.
Marcy Thompson
>>I suppose this reflects the sort of
>>lives most Western children now lead, where traditional family
>>structures do not exist. We did not have "mum's boyfriend" or "dad's
>>girlfriend" in children's literature, or children's lives, 40 years
>>ago.
>
>And this is a bit of retrospective wishfulness. Of course children's
>lives included parents' boyfriends and girlfriends forty years ago.
>Children's lives included parents' divorces, and deaths, and remarriages,
>and intervening states. One of the authors whose come up fondly in this
>thread is Edward Eager--Edward Eager, who definitely depicted a mother
>with a boyfriend, who dealt (albeit not very well) with racism and
>deliquency, and whose fans are apparently forgetting those parts of his
>books.
I agree that these themes were present. However, I also think that
there are very few books of the caliber of the Eager books being
written today. Of course, there were very few books of that caliber
being written then.
On the other hand, these books (and the Saturdays books, which deal
with a single-parent family in which the parent is away a lot for
work, as well as many others) still depict a world in which the
children run more or less free. I think that the loss of this kind
of book reflects the fact that children today spend very little time
running around free. I spent most of my childhood running around with
the kids in the neighborhood. We spent hours digging fossils in the
hills behind our houses. We would pack a sandwich on a summer morning
and as long as were back in time for dinner, we were essentially
unsupervised. There is not one family in my current neighborhood,
including mine, that would sit still for that.
So the kids in my life think that the Eager books, the Saturdays,
the Betsy-Tacy books are very interesting, and they will read them
avidly. On the other hand, they treat them as being as fantastical
as the Prydain books, the Allana books, the So You Want To Be A
Wizard books.
>Children's literature has indeed undergone some changes in the last 40
>years, but I think that a lot of people complaining about the comparison
>to the books of their youth really don't see most of the contemporary
>children's books, so their sample size is pretty nonrepresentative.
This is just unfair, and suggests that you have no idea who you are
talking to. I (and I suspect most people in this discussion) have
spent many hours sifting through what is on the shelves in every book
store I can find, to locate some good stuff for the children in my
life to read. I have a growing collection of children's books I have
bought for myself because I enjoy them.
In any event, yes, there are good books being written today. The thing
is, they are rare. (As they probably always were.) So it is much much
easier to drown in all the books of the types Meg was complaining about.
ObBook: The White Mountains
Marcy Thompson
>There's also been an absence of specific books named in this discussion,
>especially on the contemporary front. I've named some pretty
>well-respected books that don't seem to fit into the syndrome that's being
>discussed, and some older books that would seem to fit nicely into the
>categories being considered to be problematic and contemporary (where is
>the mourning for _Gayneck, the Story of a Pigeon_? I ask you :-)), so I
>think the memories are being a bit selective as well. It seems a bit like
>a books-I-loved-from-childhood vs. books-being-sold-in-chain-stores
>contrast that's being misleadingly posed as a whole-genre-then vs.
>whole-genre-now contrast.
There is something to be said for this point of view. And I will
also add, for the benefit of rabbistas (note the cross post) that
if you don't like the children's literature being sold at the mega
chains, you might get your hands on the Chinaberry catalog. Sure,
they are pushing a particular agenda, but they have an excellent
selection of books which have been quite successful in holding my
interest as well as the interests of a wide variety of children.
ObBook: Alexander and the Terrible Horrible No-good Very Bad Day
Don Tuite
books are nicely subversive.
Don
smw
Arindam Banerjee wrote:
> Deborah Stevenson,,, <stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote in message news:<f9pJ9.4630$Vf3....@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>...
>
>>adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) writes:
>>
...
>>>
>>And this is a bit of retrospective wishfulness. Of course children's
>>lives included parents' boyfriends and girlfriends forty years ago.
>>
>
> Did they indeed? I did not find any references in any Western
> childrens' literature books I read in the 60s and 70s.
But those might indeed be the exceptions. Older stories certainly crawl
with step-moms etc. For girlfriends, see "Phedre."
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>Deborah Stevenson,,, <stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote in message news:<f9pJ9.4630$Vf3....@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>...
>> adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) writes:
>>
>>>We did not have "mum's boyfriend" or "dad's
>> >girlfriend" in children's literature, or children's lives, 40 years
>> >ago.
>>
>> And this is a bit of retrospective wishfulness. Of course children's
>> lives included parents' boyfriends and girlfriends forty years ago.
>Did they indeed? I did not find any references in any Western
>childrens' literature books I read in the 60s and 70s. I mean Enid
>Blyton, Richmal Crompton, etc.
Those aren't actually books from the 60s and 70s (well, Crompton isn't--I
never remember Blyton's dates). However, I was referring to your comment
about children's lives, which I now think I misread. I thought you were
using the global "we," and instead you were discussing the specific "we"
in which you were reading. My "we" certainly had parental divorce and
dating, but that of course doesn't mean that everybody's did.
The traditional nuclear family was
>standard, with aunts and uncles also there. In contrast, Indian
>childrens' literature of the time dealt with life in the joint family
>situation, which was under assault.
Interesting. I'm not familiar with the "joint family" term--can you
explain?
>And what about the divorce rates
>in the West - were they the same 40 years ago?
No, not the same, but divorce was certainly extant. As, of course, were
widowhood and widowerhood (the former especially post-war), also
situations that may lead to parent dating.
The boyfriends and
>girlfriends came with the USAn novels of adoloscence, meaning the
>works of Mr James Hadley Chase, etc.
Now this is interesting, because he has virtually no impact in America.
AIUI, he never actually lived there, so it's sort of like Karl May and the
Indians.
>But even the works of Mr
>Alistair Maclean was reasonably free from boyfriends and girlfriends.
While Maclean was very popular with young people, I think he'd come
under the heading of "literature of adolescence" as a borrowing, like
Orson Scott Card, in the US>
>> Children's lives included parents' divorces, and deaths, and remarriages,
>> and intervening states. One of the authors whose come up fondly in this
>> thread is Edward Eager--Edward Eager, who definitely depicted a mother
>> with a boyfriend, who dealt (albeit not very well) with racism and
>> deliquency, and whose fans are apparently forgetting those parts of his
>> books.
>Edward Eager did not make it to India, to my knowledge.
I'm not entirely surprised; I'd rather doubt he was imported much of
anywhere.
From the sound of things, importation was a big factor in Anglophone
Indian children's literature--am I correctly understanding? It also
sounds like the Children's Book Trust was important in creating some solid
homegrown material, but that they concentrated a bit more on books for
younger children. Does that jibe with your experience?
>We have to
>get a bit statistical to make sense. A single example is not enough.
I'd love to hear more statistics, especially about other places; on the
other hand, I'm not sure we've got a specific theory we're trying to
quantify here, and I'm happy just to hear about what other people's
experiences are/were.
>my children thought worth reading. I think they went through the
>usual stages. What was missing in their lives was the comics we loved
>(Superman, Batman, Phantom, Disney, Archie). In place they had
>computer games. I think we were better off with the comics. But that
>could just be nostalgia.
Then again, it might not :-). Graphic narrative is a pretty interesting
phenomenon, and I also think it functions socially a lot differently than
computer games.
>The problem with New Realism is that it is hardly realistic, it only
>seems so;
I'd be inclined to agree with this, hence my tendency to use the term as a
proper noun rather than a descriptive term.
it being based upon armchair-speculating too-much-assuming
>Einsteinian thought-experimentation. To be really realistic, the
>authors would have to work much harder, and spend much more time in
>the field - analysing, balancing, judging, experimenting with live
>subjects. In short, New Realism is a media-driven fraud.
And I'm not inclined to agree with this. If its goal was to produce
documentation, then yes, it's a fraud. But its goal was to produce
literature, and often enough it did.
Harry
>Potter is the great fightback to that. Harry's parents (solidly
>married, happy couple) are dead. They exist as an inspiring memory to
>Harry. Rowling fights "New Realism" lies with magic, and longing.
>That, I believe, is the reason for her stupendous success.
Well, we may be meaning different things with New Realism here, as it's
kind of peaked and over in the US. However, if that's the reason for
Rowling's stupendous success with kids (and I know you didn't say "with
kids," but that's the part of the viewpoint I'm exploring at the moment),
what's the reason for the tremendous success of _The Outsiders_ (classic
USAn New Realism) or _Harriet the Spy_ (one of the early landmarks of the
genre)?
It may be that there's a bigger gap in Australia (though I wouldn't have
thought that Paul Jennings was grimly New Realistic :-)), but I don't
think the situation is quite as oppositional here as your theory seems to
postulate.
>I am not really impressed, frankly, by all that I have seen and read
>over the last 13 years of bringing up two kids in Australia. Here we
>have very good libraries, both in schools and councils. The
>illustrated books are excellent, I will allow. But the quality of
>writing, characterisation, plots overall are poor and at best
>unremarkable. Nothing really sticks in the mind, unlike the
>unforgettable William, Bunter, Biggles, of the past.
I'm not sure that Bunter and Biggles stick in the mind because of their
high quality writing and subtle characterization, frankly :-).
>think of. But now, we have quite a cast, along with Harry. Hermione,
>Ron, Draco... I think good times may well be back!
I'm in favor of just about anything that brings people good times :-).
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>On the other hand, these books (and the Saturdays books, which deal
>with a single-parent family in which the parent is away a lot for
>work, as well as many others) still depict a world in which the
>children run more or less free. I think that the loss of this kind
>of book reflects the fact that children today spend very little time
>running around free.
I would absolutely agree with this.
What's more, contemporary books where children run free are usually
I spent most of my childhood running around with
>the kids in the neighborhood. We spent hours digging fossils in the
>hills behind our houses. We would pack a sandwich on a summer morning
>and as long as were back in time for dinner, we were essentially
>unsupervised. There is not one family in my current neighborhood,
>including mine, that would sit still for that.
>So the kids in my life think that the Eager books, the Saturdays,
>the Betsy-Tacy books are very interesting, and they will read them
>avidly. On the other hand, they treat them as being as fantastical
>as the Prydain books, the Allana books, the So You Want To Be A
>Wizard books.
>>Children's literature has indeed undergone some changes in the last 40
>>years, but I think that a lot of people complaining about the comparison
>>to the books of their youth really don't see most of the contemporary
>>children's books, so their sample size is pretty nonrepresentative.
>This is just unfair, and suggests that you have no idea who you are
>talking to. I (and I suspect most people in this discussion) have
>spent many hours sifting through what is on the shelves in every book
>store I can find, to locate some good stuff for the children in my
>life to read.
And I definitely apologize, because I certainly wasn't intending to slam
people's dedications or labors. I'm here (on r.a.b.c, anyway) because I
respect contributors' dedication and labor and I learn from them
But, as conversations with Stephen and smw have helped elucidate, I think
that it *is* hard to make fair judgments about a genre when all you're
seeing in it is what the chain store displays. And I'd still like to hear
some specific examples of the books people are decrying, so I'd at least
know if I decried them too :-).
>In any event, yes, there are good books being written today. The thing
>is, they are rare. (As they probably always were.) So it is much much
>easier to drown in all the books of the types Meg was complaining about.
I can certainly agree with that. I wish book booms would
only boom upwards.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
r...@rosemarylake.com
<stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>smw <sm...@ameritech.net> writes:
>>Deborah wrote:
>>What I was trying to suggest to you is that "the state of children's
>>literature" cannot be separated from "children's literature that can be
>>easily accessed." We all know of or presume the existence of fabulous
>>books we haven't seen and probably won't ever see.
>
>Thanks for clarifying. I want to clarify too, because I think I may have
>been sounding like I don't think people were trying hard enough to find
>stuff, and what I mean is that it sucks that anybody has to try hard just
>to find good books they like.
Ok, how can it be made easier? If "good books they like" means things like
"books where kids have hi-jinks without telling their parents" or "books
where the parents have stable non-controversial lifestyles" etc etc -- is
there a web page that could keep a *cumulative* list by such factors?
Or is the information all spread out in different reviews and different
forum posts etc? It may be possible to begin with a book title and do some
searches and find such comments, and a few leads to a few similar books.
But....
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 19:49:25 GMT, Deborah Stevenson,,,
><stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>>smw <sm...@ameritech.net> writes:
>>>Deborah wrote:
>/snip/
>>>What I was trying to suggest to you is that "the state of children's
>>>literature" cannot be separated from "children's literature that can be
>>>easily accessed." We all know of or presume the existence of fabulous
>>>books we haven't seen and probably won't ever see.
>>
>>Thanks for clarifying. I want to clarify too, because I think I may have
>>been sounding like I don't think people were trying hard enough to find
>>stuff, and what I mean is that it sucks that anybody has to try hard just
>>to find good books they like.
>Ok, how can it be made easier? If "good books they like" means things like
>"books where kids have hi-jinks without telling their parents" or "books
>where the parents have stable non-controversial lifestyles" etc etc -- is
>there a web page that could keep a *cumulative* list by such factors?
That's a good question, especially as I think different people here (like
different people everywhere) are looking for different things.
I'd say using the books one does like might be a more useful
approach--rather than quantifying what you like *in* the book (not always
easy), start from the fact that this is the book you like. Booklist has
a Readalikes column, and I think that concept extends well beyond there
(witness the plethora of "If you liked Harry Potter..." material on
websites). I wonder if there are sites devoted specifically to
readalike stuff. Amazon and, I believe, other sites have the "People who
bought these books also bought..." sections, which I know a lot of people
find useful.
>Or is the information all spread out in different reviews and different
>forum posts etc?
I think it does depend on what you're looking for--if you are looking for
something quantifiable, like a bibliography of recent books featuring
nuclear families, that's the sort of thing that the web tends to excel at.
My impression is we're theorizing people with no decent library; obviously
if you've got a decent library, that's going to be one of your best
resources.
It may be possible to begin with a book title and do some
>searches and find such comments, and a few leads to a few similar books.
>But....
I don't think there's an easy way to find a bunch of books for any
specific taste that aren't linked by subject, but I think the methodology
you offer--starting with the title of the book you like--is the best way
to find those more atmospheric readalikes.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
r...@rosemarylake.com
<stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) writes:
/snip/
>> I was surprised to find the high degree of adult themes in
>>so-called childrens' literature. I suppose this reflects the sort of
>>lives most Western children now lead, where traditional family
>>structures do not exist. We did not have "mum's boyfriend" or "dad's
>>girlfriend" in children's literature, or children's lives, 40 years
>>ago.
>
>And this is a bit of retrospective wishfulness. Of course children's
>lives included parents' boyfriends and girlfriends forty years ago.
Forty years ago would be in the 1960s. Perhaps some of us in the US are
looking back to the fifties or earlier. There's also a sort of
skip-generation factor: Ransome wrote his Swallows and Amazons series in
the 1930s, but weren't they actually set in the time of his own childhood?
And weren't the Moffat books set many years before they were written? And
of course Wilder's. And for that matter, didn't Eager's cover two
generations? Of course some of those authors may have been applying
retrospective wishfulness....
>Children's lives included parents' divorces, and deaths, and remarriages,
>and intervening states. One of the authors whose come up fondly in this
>thread is Edward Eager--Edward Eager, who definitely depicted a mother
>with a boyfriend, who dealt (albeit not very well) with racism and
>deliquency, and whose fans are apparently forgetting those parts of his
>books.
I'm certainly forgetting any racism and delinquency; where were they?
Jane's reaction to the mother's suitor may have been realistic (she was
remembering her dead father, I think), but it was a short lead-in to a
fantastic, comical chapter and a cheerful *resolution*. Jane got over it.
She didn't learn to live with the problem, as I think would happen in some
modern books.... Also, the subplot of the suitor came from the magic plot;
it was the magic effects which introduced their mother to Huge, and which
made her hesitate to accept his proposal of honorable matrimony, which he
made after a very few very respectable dates. And the other children (who
didn't remember their father) weren't bothered at all. Jane's reaction only
showed up a few places, it was not a major theme. This wasn't a book for
girls who are troubled by etc. And I don't think it was put in to make the
story more realistic....
>Children's literature has indeed undergone some changes in the last 40
>years, but I think that a lot of people complaining about the comparison
>to the books of their youth really don't see most of the contemporary
>children's books, so their sample size is pretty nonrepresentative.
Nolo contendere. I'm not saying much about contemporary books. Pleasant and
stimulating as such generalizations are, I haven't contributed any yet,
iirc.
/snip/
>There are certainly problem novels (though fewer than 20 years ago), and
>while some of them--and some of the hijinks without adults books--are
>terrible, I don't think the New Realistic tendency is inherently
>lamentable, any more than the Old Unrealism (ah, yes, the all-white world
>where everybody's parents were solidly married) is.
Mm. I like that distinction between ... emotional atmospheres? Aim of
books?
I feel like there's an ... emotional stability ... in some old books, which
isn't quite defined by those facts. Call it Norman Rockwell, maybe? I'd
put Ransome, Estes, Carolyn Keene, etc quite in the Rockwell atmosphere --
tho the only current marriage seen onstage was the Walkers' at the
beginning and end of /Secret Water/, iirc; most of the time Mr. Walker was
overseas and Mary Walker effectively a single mom; Mrs. Blackett was a
widow, whose brother was gone much of the time also. But the atmosphere was
secure, stable.
I'd put Eager very nearly in that solidly Rockwell secure feeling.... The
reason he doesn't fit all the way in, for me, is the mother's job
insecurity. The Moffats' mother is poor, but her income is stable; she's
self-employed (seamstress iirc) with clients waiting, a solid role in the
community. And the mother in Eager gets married and much more secure by the
sequel.
>And, as I've said, I think there *are* a lot of children's books these
>days that fulfill the conditions so yearningly described here, but most
>adults just don't know that many books in the genre.
Where is the beginnings of a list of such contemporary yearnables?
smw
Deborah wrote:
...
> But, as conversations with Stephen and smw have helped elucidate, I think
> that it *is* hard to make fair judgments about a genre when all you're
> seeing in it is what the chain store displays. And I'd still like to hear
> some specific examples of the books people are decrying, so I'd at least
> know if I decried them too :-).
You're not listening very well. I buy books in chain stores, indie
stores, used book stores, on the web, and in Germany. What I did
"elucidate" is that it's unreasonable to pronounce on the _general_
state of children's books on the basis of stuff most people don't have
access to. And even access isn't everything, or even the main thing at
this point -- marketing etc. matters tremendously. The fact that some of
my students think that Oedipus the King is "a novel by Aristotle" has
nothing to do with access problems. Just as the fact that I don't catch
nine tenth of their TV allusions has nothing to do with the difficulties
of acquiring a television.
That said, I think there's always been a lot of dross. You look back and
see what you kept or remembered, and that's the good stuff. Hence, the
past looks good.
smw
Deborah wrote:
> Now this is interesting, because he has virtually no impact in America.
> AIUI, he never actually lived there, so it's sort of like Karl May and the
> Indians.
What's interesting about Karl May and the Indians in this context is
that he didn't write for children. The marketing of the books changed.
There's very good data on the shift.
HCN
<Deborah Stevenson>; <stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote in message
news:%WyJ9.5005$Vf3....@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu...
> r...@rosemarylake.com writes:
>
.....snip
> It may be possible to begin with a book title and do some
> >searches and find such comments, and a few leads to a few similar books.
> >But....
>
> I don't think there's an easy way to find a bunch of books for any
> specific taste that aren't linked by subject, but I think the methodology
> you offer--starting with the title of the book you like--is the best way
> to find those more atmospheric readalikes.
>
> Deborah Stevenson
> (stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
>
Since I have a pitiful memory of my own childhood reading and for what is
out I find myself relying on the expertise of the folks who are at my local
independent children's bookstore. They have seldom led me astray... and
have even pointed me to some nice grown-up books.
They do know the books, and much more so than their counterparts in the
Barnes and Noble just 3 short blocks away. This is probably why they are
still in business even after the BIG box of books took up residence a few
years ago.
Don Tuite
>On Tue, 10 Dec 2002 17:05:15 GMT, Deborah Stevenson,,,
><stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>. . .There's also a sort of
>skip-generation factor: Ransome wrote his Swallows and Amazons series in
>the 1930s, but weren't they actually set in the time of his own childhood?
No. Based on the stuff in that cairn on Kanchenjunga (or Coniston Old
Man), the Blackett kid's father must have died in France.
Don
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>You're not listening very well.
Always possible; thanks for persevering.
>I buy books in chain stores, indie
>stores, used book stores, on the web, and in Germany. What I did
>"elucidate" is that it's unreasonable to pronounce on the _general_
>state of children's books on the basis of stuff most people don't have
>access to.
Except I really don't think that's what I'm doing. I've mentioned
specific titles of books that are readily available in libraries and in or
through bookstores, from mainstream publishers. These books have won
prizes and gotten recognition. I'm not talking about obscure fly-by-night
stuff. I don't think it stops counting, when talking about what's
happening in the genre as a whole, because some people haven't seen
it--especially when we're talking a genre that still is largely driven by
its institutional market. Even if it never touches a retail store, it can
still be a significant children's literature phenomenon. And I
specifically mentioned titles that I knew *had* touched retail stores.
I may have the wrong idea about what people are looking for in them, of
course, and we may just disagree about what we're seeing (that's part of
why I'd really like to hear some specific contemporary titles mentioned).
I'm certainly agreeing that it's important that people haven't seen it.
But I don't think that can translate into its being dismissible,
and judgments were being made about the literature as a whole that didn't
jibe with the literature I'm seeing as a whole, not just a few weird books
tucked into corners.
>And even access isn't everything, or even the main thing at
>this point -- marketing etc. matters tremendously.
I agree, and I think, especially with the prevalence of chain stores and
megacorp publishers, that that's part of access.
The fact that some of
>my students think that Oedipus the King is "a novel by Aristotle" has
>nothing to do with access problems. Just as the fact that I don't catch
>nine tenth of their TV allusions has nothing to do with the difficulties
>of acquiring a television.
I'm not quite following your point (though I'm understanding the
situation :-)), or at least not how it works as a parallel. I'm imagining
that your unfamiliarity with their allusions is due to choice on your
part, is that right? Are you then extrapolating to a statement about that
television in general?
>That said, I think there's always been a lot of dross. You look back and
>see what you kept or remembered, and that's the good stuff. Hence, the
>past looks good.
Yes, memory is a great selection policy. But the weeding is hell :-).
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>Deborah wrote:
Isn't that another parallel with Chase, then? I didn't think he wrote
explicitly for kids either.
I'd love to hear more about the May stuff--is there somebody you
particularly recommend?
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Don Tuite
Something should be said about the ephemeral nature of library
collections. (There are only so many feet of shelf space.) Much of
what I read in the mid-'50s was long ago disposed of. Some of the
better-knows stuff (Heinlein, Kuttner, Clement) has been re-published;
some is available at considerable expense and effort from used-book
stores (my 40-year search for _Red Pete the Ruthless_), and some is
simply gone.
Don
Wendy E. Betts
<r...@rosemarylake.com> wrote:
>I'm certainly forgetting any racism and delinquency; where were they?
_The Well-Wishers_. Not one of Eagers's best.
--
"Notes from the Windowsill": http://www.armory.com/~web/notes.html
news and reviews for adults who love children's books.
"It must be my karma to have a son who eats books." - me
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>In article <8dadvu0b8bt0661jr...@4ax.com>,
> <r...@rosemarylake.com> wrote:
>>I'm certainly forgetting any racism and delinquency; where were they?
>_The Well-Wishers_. Not one of Eagers's best.
Yup. Which may rather support Rosemary's point.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
smw
Deborah wrote:
...
>
> Except I really don't think that's what I'm doing. I've mentioned
> specific titles of books that are readily available in libraries and in or
> through bookstores, from mainstream publishers. These books have won
> prizes and gotten recognition. I'm not talking about obscure fly-by-night
> stuff. I don't think it stops counting, when talking about what's
> happening in the genre as a whole, because some people haven't seen
> it
I don't think anybody claimed that there's not a single good book out
there. We were talking about trends as we perceive them. About what
dominates the market and what dominates the marketing.
Anyway -- be well, s
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>I don't think anybody claimed that there's not a single good book out
>there. We were talking about trends as we perceive them. About what
>dominates the market and what dominates the marketing.
Works for me.
>Anyway -- be well, s
And you, especially with winter weather and holiday complications :-).
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
r...@rosemarylake.com
wrote:
/snip/
>And I will
>also add, for the benefit of rabbistas (note the cross post) that
>if you don't like the children's literature being sold at the mega
>chains, you might get your hands on the Chinaberry catalog. Sure,
>they are pushing a particular agenda, but they have an excellent
>selection of books which have been quite successful in holding my
>interest as well as the interests of a wide variety of children.
>
>http://www.chinaberry.com/
It's a nice catalog. They seem to have their own warehouse, so they might
be limited. Are there similar operations who review and classify, but link
to Amazon and/or directly to small publishers to drop-ship the books?
Steve Hayes
>I don't think anybody claimed that there's not a single good book out
>there. We were talking about trends as we perceive them. About what
>dominates the market and what dominates the marketing.
Thanks for a good summary.
There may be good books out there, but in the early 1990s they weren't to be
seen in the book shops in my town. Or in the public libraries.
--
Steve Hayes
E-mail: haye...@yahoo.com
Web: http://www.geocities.com/hayesstw/stevesig.htm
Gloria Rolton
> Did they indeed? I did not find any references in any Western
> childrens' literature books I read in the 60s and 70s. I mean Enid
> Blyton, Richmal Crompton, etc.
I think you are thinking of several decades earlier for Richmal
Cromptom. You may not have read the William books until the 1960s but
I was reading them in 1946 and 1947.
> > snip.
>
> > I am not really impressed, frankly, by all that I have seen and read
> over the last 13 years of bringing up two kids in Australia.
But the quality of writing, characterisation, plots overall are poor
and at best unremarkable. Nothing really sticks in the mind, unlike
the
> unforgettable William, Bunter, Biggles, of the past.
I am not sure which 13 years you were/have been in Australia but
during the last ten or twelve years the following Australian authors
have produced some excellent work. Their plot structure,
characterisation and appeal to children ( for 'Book of the Year
Awards'in Australia children are definded as being readers up to 18)
have led to them winning awards.
Allan Baillie
Isobelle Carmody
Catherine Jinks
Victor Kelleher
David Luckett
John Marsden
Garth Nix
Gillian Rubinstein
and for younger readers Jackie French, Emily Rodda and Diana Kidd.
This list reflects my enjoyment of fantasy.
> More to the point, apart from Penny Pollard there is no such household name I can think of. But now, we have quite a cast, along with Harry. Hermione,
> Ron, Draco... I think good times may well be back!
I think that readers of Marsden's "Tomorrow when the war began" would
not agree with you. Granted Penny Pollard is a 'gutsy' kid and found a
strong following because she did what other kids would like to do but
then so did Ellie and Homer and their small group.
>
> Gloria Rolton
Author of 'What can I read now?
http://homepages.picknowl.com.au/grolton
Bruce McGuffin
> Arindam Banerjee wrote:
>
> > For the very young, there are a lot of good illustrated books, though.
> > Then with the computer age they have access to stories via multi-media,
> > and I personally think that is not such a bad thing.
>
> For the youngish like my great-nephew Lord Ford Middleton (twoish),
> I am particularly fond of Edward Ardizzone's *Little Tim & the Sea
> Captain* and its sequels where Little Tim is now plain Tim.
At about a year older, and for several years thereafter, I had great
success with books by Robert McCloskey, who was of course most famous
as an illustrator. My sons favorite for several years was Burt Dow,
Deep-Waterman. Tons better than his more popular Make Way for
Ducklings. His second best (in our humble opinion) would be One
Morning in Maine, then Blueberries for Sal.
Homer Price is also great, if you want Chapter Books for 2nd-3rd
grade readers.
Bruce
Bob Henderson
"Gloria Rolton" wrote..
> I think you are thinking of several decades earlier for Richmal
> Cromptom. You may not have read the William books until the 1960s but
> I was reading them in 1946 and 1947.
I still have some William books. "Just William" was published in 1925.
Arindam Banerjee
> adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) wrote in message news:<890e65ea.02121...@posting.google.com>...
>
> > Did they indeed? I did not find any references in any Western
> > childrens' literature books I read in the 60s and 70s. I mean Enid
> > Blyton, Richmal Crompton, etc.
>
> I think you are thinking of several decades earlier for Richmal
> Cromptom. You may not have read the William books until the 1960s but
> I was reading them in 1946 and 1947.
> > > snip.
>
> > > I am not really impressed, frankly, by all that I have seen and read
> > over the last 13 years of bringing up two kids in Australia.
> But the quality of writing, characterisation, plots overall are poor
> and at best unremarkable. Nothing really sticks in the mind, unlike
> the
> > unforgettable William, Bunter, Biggles, of the past.
>
> I am not sure which 13 years you were/have been in Australia but
> during the last ten or twelve years the following Australian authors
> have produced some excellent work. Their plot structure,
> characterisation and appeal to children ( for 'Book of the Year
> Awards'in Australia children are definded as being readers up to 18)
> have led to them winning awards.
Winning awards - from who, exactly? Adults, or children?
> Allan Baillie
> Isobelle Carmody
> Catherine Jinks
> Victor Kelleher
> David Luckett
> John Marsden
> Garth Nix
> Gillian Rubinstein
> and for younger readers Jackie French, Emily Rodda and Diana Kidd.
> This list reflects my enjoyment of fantasy.
I think my wife and children are much better people than I to talk
about contemporary Australian childrens' literature. My wife
contrasted the works of Ethel Turner and Linda Montgomery when she was
doing some research work several years ago. Neither of them appealed
to me. Of the list you have named, John Marsden is mentioned quite
often among them. I saw the movie "Looking for Alibrandi" and also
tried to read the novel, (which was a text book). By and large, I am
far happier to re-read the books of my own childhood, and also P G
Wodehouse, than try to finish reading modern literary works. I just
don't think they make, or can make, good writers these days. Both
readers and writers are far too pretentious, twisted and cynical -
natural products of robotswine capitalist culture.
> > More to the point, apart from Penny Pollard there is no such household name I can think of. But now, we have quite a cast, along with Harry. Hermione,
> > Ron, Draco... I think good times may well be back!
>
> I think that readers of Marsden's "Tomorrow when the war began" would
> not agree with you. Granted Penny Pollard is a 'gutsy' kid and found a
> strong following because she did what other kids would like to do but
> then so did Ellie and Homer and their small group.
Well, I'll have to ask the proper authorities for that! So far as I
am concerned, childrens' literature does not define children, it is
children who define childrens' literature. Which brings me to
thoughts of Little Alex, his troubles with Big Alex, Little Alex's
desire for immortality of a kind, ensuing wrathful neighbourly
comments, etc.
Arindam Banerjee.
PSmith9626
I had Lorna D as a birthday present on my ninth birthday. It wasn't as good as
the Arthur Clarke, Issac Asimov, John Hersey, George Orwell, etc., that I was
reading.
Children's literature is--generally-- for children who read poorly--a state
to get over as soon as possible.
best
penny
>Lewis Carroll's Alice books
>> Defoe, Robinson Crusoe
>> Swift, Gulliver's Travels
>> Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress
>> Twain, Huckleberry Finn.
> Among these, only Alice was written for children
>> (and only partly so.) T
Right.
I recommend "The Wizard of Earthsea" series by Le-Guin ( written for
children--a Newberry award winner) for those children who are wasting their
time with Potter.
It has a similar theme and is far, far better.
" He saw the birds, scarlet in the high dawn sky, and then he realized that the
light of the world was upon them before it was upon the world--thus, they were
not birds, but Dragons--flying high."
--Wizard
" Once he had felt himself to be a word spoken by the shining of the sunlight
and the splashing of the sacred spray, now he too had spoken--a word that could
not be unspoken"--Wizard
Harry Potter is GARBAGE.
Stephen Kane
Don Tuite wrote:
> Something should be said about the ephemeral nature of library collections.
> (There are only so many feet of shelf space.) Much of what I read in the
> mid-'50s was long ago disposed of. Some of the better-knows stuff (Heinlein,
> Kuttner, Clement) has been re-published; some is available at considerable
> expense and effort from used-book stores (my 40-year search for _Red Pete the
> Ruthless_), and some is simply gone.
There is a single, reasonably priced, copy of "Red Pete The Ruthless" on ABE
[http://dogbert.abebooks.com/] at present; if you are still looking that is.
Stephen.
John McCarthy
movies that have appeared. There is, however, a lot of criminality
among the non-muggles.
--
John McCarthy, Computer Science Department, Stanford, CA 94305
http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
John McCarthy
discussion seems to have enjoyed Harry Potter or any of the other
books whose quality they discuss. Snobs - the lot of you - except for
Meg.
smw
John McCarthy wrote:
> Neither Deborah Stevenson nor any of the other contributors to the
> discussion seems to have enjoyed Harry Potter or any of the other
> books whose quality they discuss. Snobs - the lot of you - except for
> Meg.
Huh?
Deborah Stevenson,,,
>Neither Deborah Stevenson nor any of the other contributors to the
>discussion seems to have enjoyed Harry Potter or any of the other
>books whose quality they discuss. Snobs - the lot of you - except for
>Meg.
But I think this is as much of a problem as the Harold Bloom approach. I
thought Harry Potter was okay, but it didn't ring my literary chimes,
absolutely true. I think it's problematic to consider different tastes
evidence of snobbery, just as I think it's problematic to consider
different tastes evidence of substandardness.
I enjoy a lot of books, and I've mentioned several titles; there are a ton
more I could mention, too.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
r...@rosemarylake.com
<don_...@REMOVETHIShotlink.com> wrote:
>Something should be said about the ephemeral nature of library
>collections. (There are only so many feet of shelf space.) Much of
>what I read in the mid-'50s was long ago disposed of. Some of the
>better-knows stuff (Heinlein, Kuttner, Clement) has been re-published;
>some is available at considerable expense and effort from used-book
>stores (my 40-year search for _Red Pete the Ruthless_), and some is
>simply gone.
Don't libraries have to contend with a Murphy's Law something like,
the more popular a children's book, the sooner it wears out or gets lost?
And, a dull book will stay in good condition on the shelves till someone
culls it? And if the dull book has an interesting title or cover or has won
awards, it may get checked out often enough not to get culled?
Stephen Kane
Don Tuite wrote:
> Stephen Kane wrote:
>> Don Tuite wrote:
> Thank you. You are a gentleman and a scholar. I was able to snare a copy
> several years ago.
>
> I'd read the thing in the third grade and remembered strange things about it.
> It turned out that my memories were very close to spot on.
>
> The books I've despaired of finding are a series for which I can recollect
> neither title nor author. They took place in post-Revolutionary War days, and
> involved Western-Pennsylvania backwoodsmen and tribes of Wyandotte indians.
> Simon Girty, an actual historical figure, was a recurring villain.
You're welcome.
Perhaps someone else here can help with the other ID.
Stephen.
Sea Wasp
>
> Meg wrote:
>
> > I think the Harry Potter books made such a kersplash because the
> > engine that drives the plot is not telling adults -- scandalous
> > in the world of 21st-century children's lit.
>
> Hear! Hear!
>
> And that is the same thing that really has the Christian Fundamentalists
> up-in-arms about them too.
Pfui.
The "not telling adults/adults don't understand" trope is THE trope of
kidstuff for the past 20+ years. If anything, HP does it LESS than most
stuff I've seen over the past several years. At least they TRY to
involve adults that they can contact and trust. (it's clear that
Dumbledore makes himself hard to access on purpose. What he's really up
to we still don't know.)
I give credit to the books for NOT depicting all adults as idiots or
The Enemy, which is the more common approach in the past several years.
It's not confined to kid's stuff, either. You see it most clearly in TV
shows, as those are visual and written. Shows written for adults almost
never show kids, except as occasional plot tokens. Shows written for
teens show adults (usually) as impediments, and kids likewise. Shows
written for kids show the kids as smart and everyone else as dumber than
posts.
The idea that different age groups might actually regularly interact as
people rarely shows up at all.
--
Sea Wasp
/^\
;;;
http://www.wizvax.net/seawasp/index.htm
r...@rosemarylake.com
>Margot wrote:
>>
>> Meg wrote:
>>
>> > I think the Harry Potter books made such a kersplash because the
>> > engine that drives the plot is not telling adults -- scandalous
>> > in the world of 21st-century children's lit.
>>
>> Hear! Hear!
/snip/
It sounds like Meg and Margot are reading or seeing one set of stories, and
Sea Wasp is reading or seeing another set.
I'd be interested in seeing some titles from both sides (in addition to
Potter, who seems to be in the middle).
> The "not telling adults/adults don't understand" trope is THE trope of
>kidstuff for the past 20+ years.
/snip/
> I give credit to the books for NOT depicting all adults as idiots or
>The Enemy, which is the more common approach in the past several years.
That got ET panned in some Scandanavian country, I heard. But which books
are you talking about?
Anita Wilhelm
that for the most part we engage in intelligent discussions and don't try
to judge or label one another, or use name-calling.
Anita (wil...@megsinet.net)
> But I think this is as much of a problem as the Harold Bloom approach. I
> thought Harry Potter was okay, but it didn't ring my literary chimes,
> absolutely true. I think it's problematic to consider different tastes
> evidence of snobbery, just as I think it's problematic to consider
> different tastes evidence of substandardness.
> Deborah Stevenson
> (stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Gloria Rolton
> gloria...@hotmail.com (Gloria Rolton) wrote in message news:<e31f4f9b.02121...@posting.google.com>...
> > adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) wrote in message news:<890e65ea.02121...@posting.google.com>...
> >
> > during the last ten or twelve years the following Australian authors
> > have produced some excellent work.
> > have led to them winning awards.
>
> Winning awards - from who, exactly? Adults, or children?
> Each of these authors (with perhaps the exception of Dave Luckett
I'm not sure about him) have appeared in Children's Book of the Year
short lists. And a number of them have won awards outside Australia.
The Chidren's Book Council judges are adults but not adults locked
away from kids. One of the criteria for selecting judges is that they
work with/ have contact with or have feed back from children.
In addition each state has an award, the names vary from state to
state, where the winners are selected by children voting for their
favourite book.
> snip
>
> I think my wife and children are much better people than I to talk
> about contemporary Australian childrens' literature. My wife
> contrasted the works of Ethel Turner and Linda Montgomery when she was
> doing some research work several years ago. Neither of them appealed
> to me.
You can hardly call these authors 'Contemporary" Ether Turner wrote
her 'seven Little Australians'in 1894!
Of the list you have named, John Marsden is mentioned quite
> often among them. I saw the movie "Looking for Alibrandi" and also
> tried to read the novel, (which was a text book).
'Looking for Alibrandi' may have been a text book in a literature
course or selected for reading in an English course but it was not
published as a text book. The pre-teens and teen age girls who had
read Penny Pollard several years earlier loved it. I had to keep
buying extra copies for the library!
snip > More to the point, apart from Penny Pollard there is no such
household name I can think of. But now, we have quite a cast, along
with Harry. Hermione, Ron, Draco... I think good times may well be
back!
> >
> > I think that readers of Marsden's "Tomorrow when the war began" would
> > not agree with you. Granted Penny Pollard is a 'gutsy' kid and found a
> > strong following because she did what other kids would like to do but
> > then so did Ellie and Homer and their small group.
>
> Well, I'll have to ask the proper authorities for that! So far as I
> am concerned, childrens' literature does not define children, it is
> children who define childrens' literature.
I worked with children for many years. I consider them to be
authorities on what kids like. Books by the listed Australian authors
along with books by
Brian Jacques
Anne Fine
Katerine Paterson
Lloyd Alexander
Betsy Byars
Monica Hughes
Gary Paulsen
Cynthia Voigt
always had waiting lists of kids wanting to read them. I think kids
know what they like and gradually come to see what is worthwhile. I
liken it to first drinking wine. We begin with sweet, sticky stuff and
after a while learn to appreciate the better drop.
Gloria Rolton
> > Author of 'Read to me'
> > http://homepages.picknowl.com.au/grolton
David E. Latane
On 14 Dec 2002, Anita Wilhelm wrote:
> Right on, Deborah! One thing I have always enjoyed about this newsgroup is
> that for the most part we engage in intelligent discussions and don't try
> to judge or label one another, or use name-calling.
But do you enjoy people referring to "this newsgroup" when they're
crossposting?
D. Latane
francis muir
> That got ET panned in some Scandanavian country,
> I heard. But which books are you talking about?
RAB is not a one-on-one chat room and it would be
useful if posters named previous posters; that way
we might know what the fuck they're talking about.
Deborah Stevenson,,,
rabbitistas please redirect if I've misread)
francis muir <francis....@balliol.org> writes:
>"r...@rosemarylake.com" <r...@rosemarylake.com> wrote:
Rosemary included attributions from Sea Wasp, Margot, and Meg; they must
have gotten snipped when you snipped the intervening material (the quote
from her you include followed several other paragraphs), as they're
available in her original post.
Deborah Stevenson
(stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu)
Sea Wasp
>
> On Sat, 14 Dec 2002 04:38:16 GMT, Sea Wasp <sea...@wizvax.net> wrote:
>
> >Margot wrote:
> >>
> >> Meg wrote:
> >>
> >> > I think the Harry Potter books made such a kersplash because the
> >> > engine that drives the plot is not telling adults -- scandalous
> >> > in the world of 21st-century children's lit.
> >>
> >> Hear! Hear!
>
> /snip/
>
> It sounds like Meg and Margot are reading or seeing one set of stories, and
> Sea Wasp is reading or seeing another set.
>
> I'd be interested in seeing some titles from both sides (in addition to
> Potter, who seems to be in the middle).
>
> > The "not telling adults/adults don't understand" trope is THE trope of
> >kidstuff for the past 20+ years.
> /snip/
> > I give credit to the books for NOT depicting all adults as idiots or
> >The Enemy, which is the more common approach in the past several years.
>
> That got ET panned in some Scandanavian country, I heard.
Got it panned here, too. Not by enough people, unfortunately. I detest
that movie -- I consider it the first strong indication of Spielberg's
decay.
But which books
> are you talking about?
I haven't read much of the recent kidlit, but my wife (a nanny for
several years) said that it was all following the general media trends,
and if you look at any of the media -- movies, TV, etc -- that's the
precise trend. Divide and conquer, so to speak.
I think Harry Potter became big because it had a very nice combination
of elements; it's not JUST a "kid with Special Powers" story, or a
"Boarding School" story, or a "Mystery", it's ALL THREE, and pretty well
done. It's well written -- startlingly so, for a previously unpublished
author -- with some inventive twists on the mystical world, yet using
some instantly recognizable tropes which the general public will grab
onto ("real" witches don't dress like that, wave wands all the time, or
ride broomsticks, but by using those images, Rowling gets a big oomph
from the collective impression).
In other words, I think it caught on in great part because it was GOOD,
as well as because of good timing, which is what determines the initial
success of most things.
r...@rosemarylake.com
wrote:
>adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) wrote in message news:<890e65ea.02121...@posting.google.com>...
>> gloria...@hotmail.com (Gloria Rolton) wrote in message news:<e31f4f9b.02121...@posting.google.com>...
>> > adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) wrote in message news:<890e65ea.02121...@posting.google.com>...
>> >
>> > I am not sure which 13 years you were/have been in Australia but
>> > during the last ten or twelve years the following Australian authors
>> > have produced some excellent work.
>snip
>> > have led to them winning awards.
>>
>> Winning awards - from who, exactly? Adults, or children?
>
>> Each of these authors (with perhaps the exception of Dave Luckett
>I'm not sure about him) have appeared in Children's Book of the Year
>short lists. And a number of them have won awards outside Australia.
>The Chidren's Book Council judges are adults but not adults locked
>away from kids. One of the criteria for selecting judges is that they
>work with/ have contact with or have feed back from children.
>In addition each state has an award, the names vary from state to
>state, where the winners are selected by children voting for their
>favourite book.
I'm beginning to wonder if I should start a web page pointing us ubi sunt
people to some good "old-fashioned" books written since the 1950s --
beginning with me. I only just discovered Margery Sharp, who wrote in the
1970s. (I was prejudiced because I didn't like Disney's art in THE
RESCUERS.) If there really are authors still putting out the good old
stuff, I want to find them and support them.
Rosemary
r...@rosemarylake.com
Perhaps you saw a glitched message. I not only kept all three attributions,
I addressed all three posters by name (Margot, Meg, Sea Wasp).
See Message-ID: <p6klvu8rekalifvgr...@4ax.com>
Rosemary
Arindam Banerjee
"Gloria Rolton" <gloria...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:e31f4f9b.02121...@posting.google.com...
> adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) wrote in message
news:<890e65ea.02121...@posting.google.com>...
> > gloria...@hotmail.com (Gloria Rolton) wrote in message
news:<e31f4f9b.02121...@posting.google.com>...
> > > adda...@bigpond.com (Arindam Banerjee) wrote in message
news:<890e65ea.02121...@posting.google.com>...
> > >
> > > I am not sure which 13 years you were/have been in Australia but
> > > during the last ten or twelve years the following Australian authors
> > > have produced some excellent work.
> snip
> > > have led to them winning awards.
> >
> > Winning awards - from who, exactly? Adults, or children?
>
> > Each of these authors (with perhaps the exception of Dave Luckett
> I'm not sure about him) have appeared in Children's Book of the Year
> short lists. And a number of them have won awards outside Australia.
> The Chidren's Book Council judges are adults but not adults locked
> away from kids. One of the criteria for selecting judges is that they
> work with/ have contact with or have feed back from children.
> In addition each state has an award, the names vary from state to
> state, where the winners are selected by children voting for their
> favourite book.
That's more like it! But how are the children selected? At random, or
what?
> > snip
> >
> > I think my wife and children are much better people than I to talk
> > about contemporary Australian childrens' literature. My wife
> > contrasted the works of Ethel Turner and Linda Montgomery when she was
> > doing some research work several years ago. Neither of them appealed
> > to me.
>
> You can hardly call these authors 'Contemporary" Ether Turner wrote
> her 'seven Little Australians'in 1894!
The authors are not contemporary, but they are still being read by
contemporary
Australians, both young and old. If you read what I wrote carefully, I did
not
say that I called them contemporary. Point is, they are old enough to be
objects
of serious research study.
spampot
Zane Grey wrote, besides his Wild West romances, several books with
exactly the background and characters you describe. My grandfather was
given those books as a boy and they've been scattered to various
cousins, but my mother still has "Betty Zane" (Grey used his own
ancestors, eventual founders of Zanesville, Ohio, and historical
incidents in those books). You might look for a Zane Grey web site for
a list of titles.
r...@rosemarylake.com
/snip/
Someone wrote:
>>>The books I've despaired of finding are a series for which I can recollect
>>>neither title nor author. They took place in post-Revolutionary War days, and
>>>involved Western-Pennsylvania backwoodsmen and tribes of Wyandotte indians.
>>>Simon Girty, an actual historical figure, was a recurring villain.
/snip/
>Zane Grey wrote, besides his Wild West romances, several books with
>exactly the background and characters you describe. My grandfather was
>given those books as a boy and they've been scattered to various
>cousins, but my mother still has "Betty Zane" (Grey used his own
>ancestors, eventual founders of Zanesville, Ohio, and historical
>incidents in those books). You might look for a Zane Grey web site for
>a list of titles.
_Betty Zane_ is at Project Gutenberg, as are many other Grey books.
Might the following relate? They're from
http://www.niulib.niu.edu/badndp/an-b.html
Edwin Emerson. The Phantom Hunter; or, Love after Death. July 11, 1871.
Found in: Starr's American Novels, no. 69; Pocket Novels, no. 93; Boy's
Library (octavo edition), no. 214; Pocket Library, no. 479.
A fortified blockhouse in Kentucky. Simon Girty takes part.
Charles Howard. The Girl Avenger; or, The Beautiful Terror of the Maumee. A
Romance of 1794. June 11, 1872.
Found in: Starr's American Novels, no. 93; Pocket Novels, no. 89; Boy's
Library (octavo edition), no. 231.
Banks of the Maumee, Henry county, Ohio, near where the present town of
Napoleon now stands. Joe and Simon Girty are characters in the story.
Good luck,
Rosemary --
SkidgeMarie
> In other words, I think it caught on in great part because it was GOOD,
>as well as because of good timing, which is what determines the initial
>success of most things.
>
>--
> Sea Wasp
The expert has spoken!
Cori
than a month old, I can't reply there, and as this thread is related,
here goes. Regarding the quality of Harry Potter, I'll admit to
having my doubts as to the popularity of the books being quite out of
proportion to their literary value. There is simply no way they are
THAT much better than all other books out there (old or new). The
poison pen posts and vehemence of the attacks, though, is taking it
too far and smacks a lot more of sour grapes than literary criticism.
They are not that bad, either. They're more like the Stephen King of
children's literature. When he is good, he is very, very good, and
when he is bad, well, Harry is still not as bad as Stephen King when
he is bad. As far as encouraging kids to read, at least many of them
go on to better stuff such as E. Nesbit and C. S. Lewis. There should
also be a resurgence of popularity of Elizabeth Goudge, as Rowling
named "The Little White Horse" as her most influential book.
Steve Hayes
I think you're quite right. Though they are not the best, they are not by any
means the worst.
One of the things that is good about them is that schoolkids can identify with
the characters. They are not really adults' ideas of what kids should be. They
are ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. The mixtrue of humour and
drama is a factor in their appeal to kids.
--
Steve Hayes
E-mail: haye...@yahoo.com
Web: http://www.geocities.com/hayesstw/stevesig.htm
Michael Uplawski
cmashiel...@hotmail.com (Cori) wrote:
> when he is bad, well, Harry is still not as bad as Stephen King when
> he is bad. As far as encouraging kids to read, at least many of them
> go on to better stuff such as E. Nesbit and C. S. Lewis. There should
This comparison with Stephen King is one, I did myself, recently. But
differently. Stephen King's books gain all their charm by \simply\
taking to the extreme the exploration and deploration of whatever
stimmulates a human being subconciously. This means cheap spectacles
most of the time.
I think I noticed a difference in the Harry Potter books and do (at least)
understand what the critics try to express. The essence of Stephen King's
big rumpuses is easily discovered, while whatever stirs some ... writer's
mind to produce ... subtlety (whatever - my English fails me, here),
is not always detected from her/his work.
You have to dig in the author's history and try to understand his mind in
the first place.
IMHO.
TKS for reading ;-)
Bye,
Michael.
Cori
also brought up in the derisive posts. It's wishful thinking on
anyone's part to suppose anything so popular will disappear in a few
generations (50-100 years), but I do wonder about readership. The Oz
books were wildly popular 75-100 years ago, and certainly the
characters are known to kids now--but ONLY through the movie and other
spinoff products such as toys and comic books. Given the length of
the Potter books and the shortness of the modern child's attention
span, it's kind of a wonder they're read at all. It's possible that
in 50-100 years Harry will survive only as some sort of archetypal
animated character, with the books being around and available but
hardly ever actually read by kids.
r...@rosemarylake.com
>The other thing I wondered about regarding the Harry Potter books was
>also brought up in the derisive posts. It's wishful thinking on
>anyone's part to suppose anything so popular will disappear in a few
>generations (50-100 years), but I do wonder about readership. The Oz
>books were wildly popular 75-100 years ago, and certainly the
>characters are known to kids now--but ONLY through the movie and other
>spinoff products such as toys and comic books.
Hm? Our public library has most of the full length Oz books, in recent
printings. Amazon shows several editions, many titles past the first book.
Check the sales rankings.
>Given the length of
>the Potter books and the shortness of the modern child's attention
>span, it's kind of a wonder they're read at all.
I don't know whether modern kids are used to books they can read at a
sitting, or whether they just read a chapter or so at a time anyway. Some
cheap modern books (Deltora Quest) are so episodic that I suspect they're
not for one sitting. There's also a read-aloud factor: parents and teachers
wanting something broken into readaloudable chunks.
Seems like I've heard of kids reading straight through the Potters, so I
wonder about your premise.
Steve Hayes
Part of their appeal to kids is that kids can identify with the characters.
The appeal might wear off a little as the slang gets dated. After all, who
reads Billy Bunter these days?
Yet I think the Harry Potter books are better-written than Billy Bunter, and
while they may seem dated in 10, 20 or 50 years time, I think they will still
appeal to kids, even though they may need annotated editions.
Arindam Banerjee
>
> The appeal might wear off a little as the slang gets dated. After all, who
> reads Billy Bunter these days?
>
> Yet I think the Harry Potter books are better-written than Billy Bunter, and
> while they may seem dated in 10, 20 or 50 years time, I think they will still
> appeal to kids, even though they may need annotated editions.
My father is a great fan of Billy Bunter. And so is my wife. I would
much rather re-read Billy Bunter than start on Harry Potter. Billy
Bunter books are correctly written, like William books, and of course,
Enid Blyton books. People fond of food, youth and adventure have to
like them.
Arindam Banerjee.
Daniel P. B. Smith
Deborah Stevenson,,, <stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> I don't think there's been a book with an obedient child in it since 1964,
> but since most of 'em aren't splashed across the headlines, they're easier
> to ignore.
None of the real children's classics have EVER featured obedient
children. Good-hearted, perhaps; but inquisitive, mischievous, and
disobedient, always.
The moralists of every day have written their instructive and uplifting
tales, but these are not the tales that become classics.
The slightly archaic language in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
should not obscure the fact that although Alice 'generally gave herself
very good advice ... she very seldom followed it." Alice is
consistently critical, disrespectful, and sometimes even rude to the
people she meets in Wonderland and the Looking-Glass world. And these
people are clearly exemplars of the adult Victorian world, although
Carroll blunts the impact and renders the tale acceptable by making them
fantastic inhabitants of an imaginary world.
Ethel Turner's "Seven Little Australians" (1894) begins:
Before you fairly start this story I should like to give you
just a word of warning.
If you imagine you are going to read of model children, with
perhaps. a naughtily inclined one to point a moral, you had
better lay down the book immediately and betake yourself to
'Sandford and Merton' or similar standard juvenile works.
Not one of the seven is really good, for the very excellent
reason that Australian children never are.
In England, and America, and Africa, and Asia, the little
folks may be paragons of virtue, I know little about them.
But in Australia a model child is--I say it not without
thankfulness--an unknown quantity.
It may be that the miasmas of naughtiness develop best in
the sunny brilliancy, of our atmosphere. It may be that the
land and the people are young-hearted together, and the
children's spirits not crushed and saddened by the shadow of
long years' sorrowful history.
There is a lurking sparkle of joyousness and rebellion and
mischief in nature here, and therefore in children.
And, of course, Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer":
He was not the Model Boy of the village. He
knew the model boy very well though -- and loathed
him.
Even Margaret Wise Brown's "Runaway Bunny" is disobedient.
r...@rosemarylake.com
wrote:
/snip/
>My father is a great fan of Billy Bunter. And so is my wife. I would
>much rather re-read Billy Bunter than start on Harry Potter. Billy
>Bunter books are correctly written, like William books, and of course,
>Enid Blyton books. People fond of food, youth and adventure have to
>like them.
I haven't read the Bunter books, but I have read Blyton's, and I rather
liked them. If you like their "food, youth, and adventure", you might also
like Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series. It was written in sound British
prose, in the 1930s, and based partly on the author's childhood memories.
Hm, I wonder if some modern children need annotations to read Ransome?
r...@rosemarylake.com
<dpbs...@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
>In article <giMI9.3588$Vf3....@vixen.cso.uiuc.edu>,
> Deborah Stevenson,,, <stev...@alexia.lis.uiuc.edu> wrote:
>
>> I don't think there's been a book with an obedient child in it since 1964,
>> but since most of 'em aren't splashed across the headlines, they're easier
>> to ignore.
>
>None of the real children's classics have EVER featured obedient
>children. Good-hearted, perhaps; but inquisitive, mischievous, and
>disobedient, always.
The only children I can think of off-hand that weren't disobedient, were in
the Narnia series. Maybe because their parents weren't in the books. The
Professor *encouraged* them about the other world just round the corner....
Ransome's Swallows and Amazons are always sneaking round doing things
they'd be forbidden to do if they asked, and trying to get round their
elders one way or another.
One of Blyton's early Famous Five books had them sneaking off, and stealing
a treasure box from the uncle's study.
>The moralists of every day have written their instructive and uplifting
>tales, but these are not the tales that become classics.
THE SECRET GARDEN was about doing a project in secret behind a forbidden
door.
Lots of miscellaneous disobedience of one kind or another in Montgomery's
Avonlea series. The author had the heroine liking the naughty Davy better
than the obedient Dora.
/snip re Alice/
>Ethel Turner's "Seven Little Australians" (1894) begins:
>
> Before you fairly start this story I should like to give you
> just a word of warning.
/snip/
> It may be that the
> land and the people are young-hearted together, and the
> children's spirits not crushed and saddened by the shadow of
> long years' sorrowful history.
>
> There is a lurking sparkle of joyousness and rebellion and
> mischief in nature here, and therefore in children.
This sounds rather like E. Nesbit, not long afterwards, who also made
comments about the model children sort of books. Hers did a lot of obeying
the letter but stretching the spirit....
>And, of course, Mark Twain's "Tom Sawyer":
>
> He was not the Model Boy of the village. He
> knew the model boy very well though -- and loathed
> him.
Very nice!
>Even Margaret Wise Brown's "Runaway Bunny" is disobedient.
So was Peter Rabbit, but he came to grief by it. Tho that was an exception,
in my reading.
Rosemary --
http://www.rosemarylake.com Sources of Narnia.
Fairytales with smart heroines & lots of magic.
New story added 11/30/02.
Steve Hayes
How about getting your father or wife to do a comparative review then - what
Bunter fans think of Potter.
That could be quite interesting.
In Potter, of cours, an owl is more likely to bring a postal order than to
expect one.
Youth and adventure are there in Potter, and food is not absent, though not
quite as prominent.
Arindam Banerjee
> Bunter fans think of Potter.
>
> That could be quite interesting.
Well, if you ask my wife a bit formally, she might oblige. I think
she would say that both writers have got some common characteristics:
use of cliche, repetitions, friendship, boarding school, exotic
elements, unpopular teachers, etc.
tejas
"Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:890e65ea.02122...@posting.google.com...
ObBook: THE BOBBSEY TWINS AT CAMP LEJEUNE.
"I can't hear you!"
--
Ted Samsel
tbsa...@infi.net
http://home.infi.net/~tbsamsel
Arindam Banerjee
> Bunter fans think of Potter.
My father is accessible by email these days, but he is a busy man. To
communicate why he loved Billy Bunter books, I will have to go by my
own memory.
It was in the mid 60s that we both came across Billy Bunter. The
first book I read was "Billy Bunter in Brazil". After that, Billy
Bunter became top reading for me, for pure enjoyment.
To my father, the primary thing about Billy Bunter was that he was a
basically harmless fat boy who loved to eat. He had had a deprived
childhood, losing his father to disease at the age of eight. While he
had never actually starved, he had known hardship. The prospect of
good eating was thus never unfavourable to him.
Billy Bunter did not know much, or care much, for the difference
between "meum" and "teum" in matters related to food. (Or most other
matters of interest to him, making him a sort of socialist so far as
irrelevance to the concept of private property defines socialism.)
Food was just food to Bunter, and it would serve its purpose when it
resided in his belly. The source of the food - whether from Horace
Coker's locker, or the tuckshop, or his classmates in the Remove, or
wherever - just did not matter. Also, quite sportingly, he was aware
of the risks involved, and took the resulting punishments as a way of
life.
In the 60s, life leant leftwards in India, and so, Billy Bunter could
not be unpopular with leftwing Indians. He projected an alternative,
human picture of former imperialists. It was welcome.
Importance of Latin, and schoolmasters who caned erring boys, also
should have sat well with my father. In his schooldays, he learnt
Sanskrit. Once he had to go out of the classroom, and cut a bamboo
cane for his teacher, so that he could beat him with it.
The Indian boy Hurree Jamset Ram Singh was quite improbable, but
always projected positively. That, too, was welcome.
A wealth of detail comes out from the Bunter books, and they do give a
lot of clear ideas about life in England. If Bunter had not been such
a popular character, these books would not have been read, and all
these details missed.
The books are clearly and cleanly written. Bunter paying for his sins
with loud howls never fails to interest, no matter how many times this
happens in all the books. Justifies the law of karma!
The total absence of adult woes inflicted upon kids is most
refreshing. No divorces, no dad's girlfriends/mom's boyfriends
business, very little gore... all this is realised without resorting
to any sort of fantasy.
Above all, there is Bunter, who lived to eat. Bunter was magnanimous
when it came to sharing stolen foodstuffs - he did not hoard anything!
A genuine socialist.
Well, that's that. I don't think my father has read Potter books.
Arindam Banerjee.
francis muir
890e65ea.02122...@posting.google.com, "Arindam Banerjee"
<adda...@bigpond.com> wrote:
No mention yet of Bessie Bunter, Billy's sister. Equally fat - at that time
the straight-forward epithet - so maybe Nature rather than Nurture.
David Matthews
"Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
news:890e65ea.02122...@posting.google.com...
I remember Billy Bunter well, from my childhood. The creation of Frank
Richards (real name Charles Hamilton) a prolific writer of stories for boys
who is credited with writing over 70 million words. There was also a TV
Billy Bunter series on British television that ran for ten years
(1952-1962).
There's much information about Billy Bunter on the web, just put his name in
any search engine.
Dave
Jean Clarke
modicum of sucess with this er...er...book, and it went the way so many
books do.....just away! But, NO ! It is just another contemporary
f...up of this generation.....it almost makes me wish the Dick and Jane
series would come back from the dusty archives......I miss seeing Spot
run!
Just a Jeanie
Arindam Banerjee
time
> the straight-forward epithet - so maybe Nature rather than Nurture.
I haven't come across any Bessie Bunter book, but my wife has. She says
they are good, but not as good as Billy Bunter books. Hilda Richards wrote
them, and she does not know whether she was Frank's wife or sister.
Somehow fat girls do not seem as interesting as fat boys. Fat boys have to
be very nice to others, for they cannot chase you after you have inflicted
some
injury upon them. We had a classmate who was fat and really had to be nice,
for his name was Sukomal (Very Soft) Baul. He had to smile a lot, to be
less
of a target.
francis muir
fido wrote:
>> No mention yet of Bessie Bunter, Billy's sister.
>> Equally fat - at that time the straight-forward
>> epithet - so maybe Nature rather than Nurture.
>
> I haven't come across any Bessie Bunter book,
> but my wife has. She says they are good, but
> not as good as Billy Bunter books. Hilda Richards wrote
> them, and she does not know whether she was Frank's
> wife or sister.
Frank & Hilda Richards were house pseudonyms of The
Magnet Library. The reality is that there were a variety
of authors including, perhaps most famously, Charles
Hamilton.
David J. Loftus
> "Arindam Banerjee" <adda...@bigpond.com> wrote in message
> news:890e65ea.02122...@posting.google.com...
> > > How about getting your father or wife to do a comparative review then -
> what
> > > Bunter fans think of Potter.
> > >
> > > That could be quite interesting.
> >
> > Well, if you ask my wife a bit formally, she might oblige. I think
> > she would say that both writers have got some common characteristics:
> > use of cliche, repetitions, friendship, boarding school, exotic
> > elements, unpopular teachers, etc.
>
> ObBook: THE BOBBSEY TWINS AT CAMP LEJEUNE.
>
> "I can't hear you!"
Yes, Miss Hannigan....