Peter Rabbit breaks the social contract by eating his neighbor’s vegetables. As Peter is hounded for his crimes, he rapidly loses the trappings of socPeter Rabbit breaks the social contract by eating his neighbor’s vegetables. As Peter is hounded for his crimes, he rapidly loses the trappings of society - his shoes and his clothes - until he’s returned to his primal animal state, naked, shivering, driven out, an anthropomorphized JG Ballard. He can’t find the gate that will lead him from the garden of sin back to his safe home. After he finally escapes, he’s ostracized by his family and hung in effigy in the garden as a warning.
Beatrix Potter’s characters stray from social norms and are punished for it. She is essentially a coercive agent of the bourgeois. Have fun explaining “rabbit pie� to your three-year-old....more
is what I originally was going to post for this review bu[image]
is what I originally was going to post for this review but then I was like you know who likes ridiculous things with extremely long titles is McSweeney's, I should see if they want this, and they did. Here are the Duckling things I didn't cover:
a) my kid thinks all cops are named Michael now b) here is a funny tweet
c) this book is very famous amongst Bostonians and all babies born in Boston automatically get like five copies of it from various cousins. This is for good reasons: c.1) there are not many famous things from Boston, it's pretty much this and Aerosmith, western Mass tries to too but it doesn't always work c.2) Make Way For Ducklings is oddly specific in its Boston geography. It's practically a tour guide.
Anyway the result is that there's a statue of the ducklings on Boston Common and here's my kid with them, following my general rule of Always Post A Picture Of Your Cute-Ass Kid, People Seem To Like That.
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My friend Joanne below reminds me that there's even an annual Duckling Parade in Boston - May 12 for 2019 - at which, I assume, toddlers run into traffic....more
Corduroy, the world's sweetest felon, is the star of two books about breaking and entering. In his debut here, he rambles Mixed-Up Filesianly through Corduroy, the world's sweetest felon, is the star of two books about breaking and entering. In his debut here, he rambles Mixed-Up Filesianly through a department store at night, breaking shit.
[image] dude let's trash this place
In the sequel, Cor2roy, he hides out in a laundromat after a confusing encounter with a beret-wearing artist who talks like a hillbilly. Once again he leaves the place trashed.
[image] something something watch the world burn
He's caught both times - the first time by a cop, the second time because he traps himself in a laundry basket and falls asleep, nice work Cheech. And why doesn't he end up in jail? Because look at him, all innocent-looking with one strap undone:
[image] Who Wore It Better?
He gets away with all of it.
Anyway this was my kid's favorite book when he was two, and we read it many times. He's over it now; he's moved on to Paddington, so we might be sensing a theme here.
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The theme is bears who can't get their shit together, do you realize that the entire plot of every Paddington story is he loses a sandwich? But who am I to judge. I once tried that thing from Breakfast Club where they climb through the space above a drop ceiling. It's much harder than it looks and I got in more trouble than Corduroy did. Maybe I should have tried the one-strap overalls look....more
"We saw a shadow on your son's lungs," is what they told us. He was ten months old. We were frozen. What could the shadow be? It could be anything. Th"We saw a shadow on your son's lungs," is what they told us. He was ten months old. We were frozen. What could the shadow be? It could be anything. There's a universe of possibilities about that shadow. It could be bad or it could be the end of the world.
It was his stomach, it turns out. He had a hiatal hernia: the hole for his esophagus was too big. His stomach, and most of his intestines, had slipped up around his lungs. All things considered, this is a fixable problem. Over the next year, he had two operations to pull everything back down and tighten that hole. The second one went badly.
What followed was a month-long nightmare. Nathan's stomach stopped working altogether. It's called gastroparesis, and it was just bad luck. He couldn't process food at all. He grew weak and pale, surviving on an IV drip. Again and again I walked him into the operating room, clutching his teddy bear, so the surgeons could try procedure after procedure. Each time, I thought: this could be the time when things go wrong. (Well. Wronger.) They put a central line into his artery so they could feed him TPN, which is fancy Gatorade. They cut his pyloric valve to help his stomach empty. They inserted a G-J tube so we could pump sustenance directly into his intestines. Hole after hole appeared in my child's body. He had six operations in all.
We lived in the children's ward at Cornell in New York City. My wife and I took leaves from our jobs. We were with him all the time. We cleaned adhesive off his body. We ran after him through the halls, pushing his IV pole.
Because through all of this, he was still running. Nathan wasn't old enough yet to feel that this was unfair. He wanted to run. He got a toy medical cart and he ran to nurses and checked their vital signs. He careened through the halls on a motorcycle, racing the other children.
[image] This is Steve, one of many wonderful nurses.
Nights were hard, though. There were a few - we couldn't even give him water, because there was nowhere for it to go. There were times when he was up all night long, crying for water, and we couldn't help him. Those were the hardest nights of our lives. It felt like only Dante could have invented a hell like this.
There were a very few things that could give Nathan a little relief during those endless nights. A nurse's boyfriend was a garbageman and he took videos of his route for us, and Nathan would watch them over and over. I would carry him up and down the dark halls sometimes, Nathan in one arm and his IV pole in the other.
And there was this book, Miss Rumphius, which became his favorite. We would read it to him when the nurses woke him up trying to change his TPN bag, after he'd finally gotten to sleep. We would sit next to him, reading it over and over, while they tried desperately to fix yet another IV line that had failed.
"There is a third thing you must do," says Miss Rumphius to her grandniece. "You must do something to make the world more beautiful." We read those words during the darkest of nights, and they would create just a very small pocket of something beautiful. It was just, just big enough for us to fit inside.
[image] These are goats.
Nathan is fine now. We learned a lot during that month. We were reminded many times how lucky we were: Nathan's problems were dire but temporary. Many of the friends he made in the hospital weren't that lucky. We learned about how strong we are, my wife and I. I remember day two of the crisis, when we still thought the surgery had gone well and we were about to go home, thinking that I was completely drained - good thing it's over, because my well is dry. There would be 24 more days ahead. People talk about finding hidden depths - that the well is deeper than they knew. I don't think it's like that. It's not deeper; it's bottomless. You will never run out of strength.
But I'm not sure I'll ever read this book again. When I tried, I found that it brought me back too vividly to those nights. It hurts. Hospitals freak me out now, too. My wife and I have trauma from that time.
Nathan doesn't. His big takeaway from the whole ordeal is that he got to ride in an ambulance. He wants to dress up as a doctor for Halloween. Maybe that's what he'll become someday. I feel sure that whatever he does, he'll find a way to make the world more beautiful. He's certainly heard that advice enough times....more
Here are green eggs and ham in real life. They're made of danger.
[image] courtesy of who is undoubtedly super nice
If your ham and eggs are gHere are green eggs and ham in real life. They're made of danger.
[image] courtesy of who is undoubtedly super nice
If your ham and eggs are green, they are rancid. Of course they are! That's what green means! They're poison now. You're going to be sick. Tautological nightmare Sam I Am is trying to convince our protagonist - unnamed, like the children in Cat in the Hat and others in Seuss's Kafkaesque universe - to eat rancid food. Understandably, our hero is reluctant. But Sam I Am won't quit. He uses increasingly brutal tactics to break our hero down. Here he is hitting him with a car.
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Soon Sam I Am will drive the car off a cliff into the ocean - a goat will be involved too, because why not - and here, near drowning, our hero is finally defeated.
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If this all sounds a little familiar, it's because it's exactly the ending of 1984.
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Seuss, one of our darkest and most anguished writers, has a fascination with psychological torture. His nihilistic masterpiece Fox in Socks presents a darker end to a similar journey: Fox brainwashes his prey with relentless reality-bending tongue twisters until Knox breaks and destroys him with his own weapons. It's A Clockwork Orange with rhyming: "I was cured alright."
The tactic here is an infinite doubling down until you lose all sense of reality. If you repeat something enough times, even if it's gibberish, it starts to sound like there must be a reasonable argument for it, or people wouldn't keep bringing it up. You use simple words, short sentences. Dr. Seuss's publisher bet him that he couldn't write a book using only 50 words. Green Eggs & Ham uses exactly 50 words. They form a lunatic vortex.
Say! In the dark? Here, in the dark? Would you, could you, in the dark?
Well, no, says our hero. That...that sounds crazy, right? I would not, could not eat green eggs and ham in the dark! Not in the rain! Not on a train! But - but maybe if we could just slow down for a moment, I could - I could have a taste. Would that be a good compromise? Is that the new normal? If you say "Fake news" enough times, some people will believe that too. It's hard to remember what normal used to be. Were there rules? Did anyone follow them? You have to step back, again and again, and re-center yourself. You do know what a sane world looks like. That food is green. It's made of poison. Don't let them break you....more
A dump truck gets stuck in the mud; plucky little blue truck can only get him out with the help of all his friends. Kids learn about kindness and teamA dump truck gets stuck in the mud; plucky little blue truck can only get him out with the help of all his friends. Kids learn about kindness and teamwork.
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Or...do they?
In the end it's the addition of the little green frog who pushes them over the edge; that last little bit is enough to help the dump truck.
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Or...is it?
Let's tell this story another way. A mighty machine can only be moved by the combined strength of every citizen. Whatever their individual strengths, all must join in the struggle to move the enormous truck. Even if, like the frog, they are not best suited for pushing, they must join equally in the fight. If all pull together, even the largest tasks can be accomplished.
Sound familiar? That's because it is COMMUNISM!
[image] "Everybody is fully occupied in production"
You know what Little Blue Truck sounds like to me? It sounds like Little Red Book, and this story is an allegory for Mao's Great Leap Forward, during which everyone, regardless of their innate ability or training, was set to melting metal down into steel. The real-life result was a lot of bad steel and no one had any pots left. But is any of that acknowledged in this insidious communist propaganda? Of course not!
[image] "With great labor we will fulfill the plan"
Real talk: a frog can't move a dump truck. That's stupid. The American Way is you best call a tow truck, and if you can't afford a tow truck then you have a truck problem. And if you allow your child to be indoctrinated into the Red Army, before you know it she's going to run off thinking she can farm or smelt or push dump trucks or whatever, and let me be straight with you, friend: she can't. She can't do any of those things. You've been reading her cute little rhyming books. She's suited to go to college and become a software engineer. Here's some real propaganda:
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Indoctrinate your child at the altar of Atari, friend, or she's gonna learn the hard way what really happens when frogs meet trucks....more
Look, I like a book about trucks as much as the next guy who will claw his fucking eyes out if his kid drags one more book about anthropomorphizedtruLook, I like a book about trucks as much as the next guy who will claw his fucking eyes out if his kid drags one more book about anthropomorphizedtrucks home from the library, what is your deal with trucks, kid?The problem with trucks is that they're not interesting in any way. And I know, your kid is like "but FIRETR - " Nope. It's not interesting. Shiny! But boring.
[image] I'm not above trolling for likes by posting pictures of my cute-ass kid. Here he is playing with two of a staggering number of trucks that have somehow ended up in our house .
How did I end up with a kid like this? I didn't like trucks when I was young. My wife didn't like trucks. We're not truck people. We're animal people. Both of us were the kind of kid who would come shuffling up to aunts all, "Did you know that whales have baleen?" My wife had a subscription to I'm not kidding. (And is that the best magazine title ever? Yes. It just..it says so much.) And now here's this spawn, toddlersplaining the different kinds of backhoes to me. Where did this come from? And before you make any paternity cracks, let me just tell you that he makes dumb jokes and is then enormously entertained by himself, so he's definitely mine.
But this is my cross to bear. Well, mine and the hundreds of other parents I've had bemused conversations with at playgrounds while we watch our toddlers practice their conflict resolution skills on dump truck toys. In the meantime, here's another fuckin' book about anthropomorphized trucks. This one's about an idiot cement mixer that keeps fucking up the cement: he's told "Get a load of white powder!" and he keeps bringing back the wrong white powder. And if you thought now was a good time to make a joke about cocaine, here's the thing:
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I'm pretty sure the author beat you to it. This can't possibly be an innocent coincidence, can it? Those are literal lines of white powder laid out for the tired trucks.
Cocaine is a drug that makes you energetic and annoying. It was big in the 80s. I don't know if it's big now; I'm 44, I don't have to know things like this anymore. It's addictive and also it destroys the tissue in your nose and you end up with a nosebleed at the club and now you're yelling and bleeding and people are backing away from you like you were a horned lizard, which is an animal that to ward off predators. See, now that's interesting! Not like this truck bullshit....more
Poor Knox cringes and begs for mercy. "Please, sir. I don't like this trick, sir." But Fox refuses to relent. "Here's an easy game to play," he whispePoor Knox cringes and begs for mercy. "Please, sir. I don't like this trick, sir." But Fox refuses to relent. "Here's an easy game to play," he whispers - but his wordplay is more than games. It's an assault on Knox's very sanity, and as the book progresses he slowly, cruelly tears the fabric of reality away from the defenseless Knox. An unending series of nightmare images parade by, reminiscent of brainwashing scenes in dystopias like 1984 and Clockwork Orange.
[image] a giant crow sews Knox into a box
[image] on the next page Fox tries to get him to chew the blue goo
Fox in Socks has been called Seuss's greatest tragedy. Its ending is irredeemably bleak. Fox succeeds in driving Knox mad - but in a final twist, the now-lunatic Knox turns against his tormenter and viciously murders him.
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"Thank you," gibbers the raving Knox, "For a lot of fun, sir!" as the battling tweetle beetles advance on the trapped fox.
Make mad the guilty, and appall the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. - Hamlet II.ii...more
Seuss's most cynical political work describes the cycle of every generation: first you hate the machine, then you rage against the machine, then you fSeuss's most cynical political work describes the cycle of every generation: first you hate the machine, then you rage against the machine, then you forgive the machine, then you become the machine.
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Sally and her brother, who, like Dostoevsky's sick man and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, will remain unnamed, join with the force of revolution, embodied by the Cat in the Hat. Together they recruit agents of change and chaos - the furious Things One and Two - to dismantle the oppressive world built by their parents.
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The ensuing freedom proves too much for them, though. They turn against the Cat, and finally they capture and cage Things One and Two. Meanwhile the Cat in the Hat literally becomes the machine:
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His promise of anarchic freedom is a facade. In fact he is an agent of stasis, and everything is put neatly back just as it was. The revolution will be reset. Sally and her brother have become what they rebelled against. The idealism of another generation is crushed under the weight of convention. And what will you do, when your mother asks you?
It's Alice in Wonderland for Americans! No seriously, that's literally what Frank Baum was out for, which is...fine I guess? I mean raise your hand ifIt's Alice in Wonderland for Americans! No seriously, that's literally what Frank Baum was out for, which is...fine I guess? I mean raise your hand if you were like every time I read Alice in Wonderland I'm like, this is so fucking unAmerican, there hasn't even been one scene set in Kansas.
Which by the way is not at all presented sympathetically, and of course how would you even do that, we all know what the deal is with Kansas, but here's Dorothy:
No matter how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather live there than in any other country
So, I mean, that's some pretty shady patriotism, is all. The scarecrow is all,
If your heads were stuffed with straw, like mine, you would probably all live in the beautiful places, and then Kansas would have no people at all.
lol. The thing that's always pissed me off about the scarecrow, the tin man and the cowardly lion is that the first two are missing a brain and a heart and therefore by the laws of parallel metaphor the lion should also be missing an organ. Guts? What's a spleen for again? Anyway it feels like Baum sortof punted there, and in fact the thing with this whole book is that it's not that great, honestly. Like, the images are great. The metaphors. The thing with Oz himself is so wonderful, right? This great and terrible Oz, and then Toto the meat dog (that's what she calls him!) knocks over a screen and there he is, just a pathetic old man. That's such a resonant image, and it's useful for every authority figure currently in existence who isn't Angela Merkel.
But Alice has good images too, and Baum has nowhere near Lewis Carroll's delirious feel for writing. You could probably track the quality of children's literature by the number of tattoos grown-ups have of them, right?
That's an exactly accurate ranking of the quality of these stories.
So the story is great but the book isn't. A lot of perfunctory tasks are perfunctorily performed. Packs of wolves and giant spiders are dispatched without any real sense of urgency. A great deal of attention is paid to dinner. And y'know the illustrations are bullshit too, if we're being real here.
[image] That's only an okay picture. Ooh, you wanna see something cool though? Here's some dude named Graham Rawle with the Emerald City:
See if you can figure out I know!
So it's Alice in Wonderland without very much of the wonder, is the upshot here. Baum has great ideas but he hasn't made great literature. You can go ahead and just watch that fucking musical again and not read this....more
The plot of this one is, some kid tries to grow a carrot and everyone shits on him. "That'll never work," say his parents. "What a terrible plan," sayThe plot of this one is, some kid tries to grow a carrot and everyone shits on him. "That'll never work," say his parents. "What a terrible plan," says his brother. But the kid waters it and - wait for it - it grows! Of course it grows, it's a fucking carrot. Do you know how easy it is to grow a carrot? It's like one step up from crab grass. So the lesson here isn't so much "Believe in yourself" as "You're surrounded by assholes," which is true but I don't know that my kid needs a book to rub it in for him. He hangs around with me a lot; he probably already knows....more
Those of us who grew up with an affinity for Victorian books, it might have started here, in Joan Aiken's 1962 classic Gothic / Dickensian love note, Those of us who grew up with an affinity for Victorian books, it might have started here, in Joan Aiken's 1962 classic Gothic / Dickensian love note, with its pitch perfect wicked governesses and wretched orphanages and aptronyms and moors and girls who are described as hoydens, and secret passages, and real dungeons, and all these wolves. When we hit our teens and started reading stuff like Dickens and Wuthering Heights, it felt familiar to us; we'd already been indoctrinated into the rules of Victoria.
It's set in an alternate history of England, where wolves are rampant and something about a King James III, who cares, how am I supposed to know whether a given King James is fictional or not, you can tell it's not the real world because this is a place where geese can be trusted. Geese cannot be trusted irl. They are wicked and they mean you harm.
Here's from the School Library Journal's Top 100 Children's Book List, which is a terrific resource. Its popularity spawned a series, but I don't remember how good the rest are.
I read this a ton of times as a kid, and re-reading it now, scenes absolutely exploded in my memory as I got to them. Aunt Julia's pathetic poverty, Simon's hidden cave, Mrs. Brisket's nasty daughter finding and breaking an egg in Bonnie's pocket...This is one of the first books in which I felt real danger. When Bonnie and Sylvia are in jeopardy, they're really in jeopardy.
I wasn't wrong when I was young; this is legitimately wonderful. Now that I fully recognize all the tropes Aiken is playing with, it might be even better. It has brave heroines and narrow escapes, and it's about as perfect as children's literature has ever been....more
While I love everything Kate Beaton does ever and ever, if you're only going to get one children's book by her it should be The Princess and the Pony.While I love everything Kate Beaton does ever and ever, if you're only going to get one children's book by her it should be The Princess and the Pony. King Baby is cute and funny but the...plot doesn't really go anywhere? The beginning is funnier than the end....more
I didn't realize this was The Odyssey for so long. It seems so obvious now! It's the Cyclops part. Polyphemus.
[image] [image]
Which makes Max's mom a stI didn't realize this was The Odyssey for so long. It seems so obvious now! It's the Cyclops part. Polyphemus.
[image] [image]
Which makes Max's mom a stand-in for Penelope, keeping his dinner hot for him as he sails "in and out of weeks and almost over a year," and that's a little weird but there's always something a little weird about Maurice Sendak, isn't there? Have you read In the Night Kitchen? It's fuckin' weird, man. None of this knocks Where the Wild Things Are any lower on the list of Great Children's Literature, where it is #1.
It's everything, right? The way Sendak writes - everything is a little effortlessly different. He starts in media res, "The night Max wore his wolf suit..." I like to evolve the way I say wild things - in the beginning I put the emphasis like "wild Things," and then I switch it up to the Hendrixian "Wild things" as we build to this:
“And now,� cried Max, “let the wild rumpus start!�
Which honestly, can you think of a better sentence in all of literature? I'm being serious! I can't. This is my favorite one.
You ever notice how the pictures get bigger? Max making mischief of one kind and another is just a little picture on the page, but by the time the wild rumpus gets going it's full page spreads, there's not even room for any words. And those creatures! You've probably heard how Sendak modeled them on his family. Look how awesome they are.
[image] Which one is your favorite? I like the hippie in the back.
And of course it's great because, like the best children's books, it takes children seriously. Max is being an asshole. Dude chased the dog with a fork, what the fuck. His mother punishes him and he learns zero lessons, he just plays in his room until she gives in. That's a plot a kid can dig! Children can tell when a book is written for them and when it's written at them. This is for children. It has magic in it, and so do they....more
A parent friend wondered about children's books with badass girl role models and I was like "PRINCESS AND PONY OMG" and she was like *cock an eyebrow*A parent friend wondered about children's books with badass girl role models and I was like "PRINCESS AND PONY OMG" and she was like *cock an eyebrow* maybe something without princesses? and I was like IT'S NOT THAT KIND OF PRINCESS
One of our favorites. Written entirely in sixteenth-note alliterative tongue twisters, it's not for bed time - not at all a relaxing experience - but One of our favorites. Written entirely in sixteenth-note alliterative tongue twisters, it's not for bed time - not at all a relaxing experience - but tons of fun to trade stanzas with your partner, and will probably be even more fun to watch the kid fail at reading it if he ever stops failing to read at all....more
A metafictional analysis of the crushing dichotomy between who we want to be and who we really are, this book contains the entire agony of a disillusioned life in its chained pages. Stone's avatar is, cleverly, an idol of our youth, the inexplicable Grover. We find him in his youthful idealism, vowing to keep the monster he feels lurking in the world around him at bay. We track him through his heroic efforts to beat fate itself. We feel the inevitability of his defeat - the ending is writ in the title. But this is our childhood champion, our Super Grover! How can he lose? We expect a twist ending. Surely, he cannot fail.
And then: the twist comes, but it's the twist of a dagger, as our protagonist realizes that he himself has always been the very thing he most fears.
He is the monster. You are the monster. We...we are all the monster....more
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