CSotD: Salute to Bad Literature
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Bug Martini either works on wicked-tight deadlines or stumbled into this topic just at the right moment: Keith Richards is now writing a children's book.
As mentioned recently, I read to my own kids and have read to my grandkids. And I know the feeling of having a small child come up with a book and being delighted at the chance for closeness and at the same time horrified because it's that damn book with the sing-songy rhyming text about a small animal walking around looking for home or a parent or whatever.
Gack. And, yes, I've used this Calvin and Hobbes before. I'll stop when they stop.
On the one hand, there's better stuff out there. On the other hand, it's probably hopeless.
Kids will gravitate towards what you give them, and if Mabel Syrup is what they are offered and what they see everywhere around them, that is what they will come to expect and want, which really doesn't make kids a whole lot different than anyone else.
Check out prime time TV, where comedies and cop shows are based not on creative vision but on the ability to replicate what people think comedies and cop shows are supposed to be like.
People take their cues from each other. I remember visiting a college roommate's home in 1969 and his folks had earth-tone shag carpeting, a giant wooden salad spoon on the wall and framed reproductions of Rembrandt's "Man in a Golden Helmet" and a big-eyed child (and there's a fascinating backstory). Admit it: If you are old enough to remember the era, you remember being in that house as well.
They may have gone the interior design equivalent of a Full Cleveland, but we all had some of that crap in our homes back then.
Laugh now, but take photos of your own place so your grandkids can enjoy a laugh later.
Anyway, it's good that kids read, it's good that parents read to their kids, it's good that the publishing industry pushes kids' books out and impresses people with the idea that kids need books.
And, after all, most of everything is crap. That's not just my opinion; it's the law.
Or a revelation, at any rate.
One of my revelations while reading great literature came in a fairly early chapter of "Ulysses," where Molly Bloom is lying in bed talking to Leopold about the latest Paul deKock novel, because it is obvious from Joyce's tone that, if the Blooms had lived in 1969, they'd have had the Rembrandt, the Keane and the giant spoon. Molly would have insisted and Leopold wouldn't have cared as long as she was happy.
Point being that Paul deKock was a real author who outsold all sorts of better writers whom you have heard of, which should be of some comfort, unless you are a writer more interested in paying the rent tomorrow than in having the last, posthumous laugh from a pauper's grave.
(I've been bitching about kidlit for a long time, by the way.
This little toddler is about to graduate. Click to embiggen.)
The Merry Month of March
There are all sorts of salutes to spring on the comics page and even the editorial page, now that March has arrived, but it's hard to top this vintage Richard's Poor Almanac that has popped up on GoComics.
It reminds me of when I was a little kid in school and they would hand out coloring sheets about March. We'd be sitting there at our desks coloring pictures of kids running across grassy lawns with kites flying up behind them and I'd look out the window and see three feet of snow.
And Richard Thompson is in DC, which is practically equatorial compared to the Adirondacks where I was growing up.
However, on March 22, he will be in Columbus, Ohio, for the opening of his show, along with a parallel show of the work of his cartooning pal, Bill Watterson, who will not be there. It will be fabulous and I'm really sorry I can't be there, but, if it's possible for you, you should go.
But don't take the snowtires off your car first.
I went down to Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, one March to do a teacher workshop. After the workshop, my hostess and I went out to dinner and we wore light jackets, walking on bare sidewalks.
She dropped me off at my motel, I went to bed and then woke up in the morning to more than two feet of snow. It had taken me about three and a half hours to drive down; it took nearly eight to drive home. Driving through the Delaware Gap was like if Yuri Zhivago had owned a car, only I think he made better time walking.
However, you should go to Columbus. It never snows there or anywhere between there and where you are right now. Not in March, and certainly not on the 22nd, because that will be two days into Spring, after all.
Bring your kite.
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