Ted, Ted, Ted

…was a blast as expected. Laura was annoyed at the liberties taken with the plot, but I was too busy soaking up the Terry Gilliam silliness to notice. Evil minions in funny hats, fisheye lenses, the whole thing — it reminded my suddenly how long it’s been since Brazil, and what an impact that movie had on the way I watch movies. The bears, which loom large in the physical world of the book, are even more impressive on screen. They are an animation slam-dunk. The animators let a little fuzzy-and-cute slip into the bear characters and if anything it adds to the overall towering monsters effect. The screenwriters mostly dropped the author’s anti-church broadsides, but the usual suspects are getting upset about it, which is all to the good.

Look for us in that long, roped-off line for the opening night of Philip Pullman’s Golden Compass movie. We never do that, but I have a good feeling about this one.

Now that we’ve moved closer to my work, I don’t get much time to listen to audio in the car. But I still like to strap on the pod whenever I have a long wait in a line or something. I’m bookmarking this site here for the next time I need something to listen to.

Usually when I see a site I like I subscribe to its RSS feed and it shows up in the left column here, but this site out of Kerala, India has no feed, so I’m putting it here to remind me to go back and read it sometime.

The more you think about it, the less crazy it sounds.

I’m importing a bunch of old entries, and there’s a fair amount of manual work involved, so things will be kind of out of sequence around here for a little while. Bear with me.

Update: Done with 2001. Intervening years to follow as time allows.

Let us now praise really, really bad books for children. Has anyone seen anything worse than Robert Munsch’s monumental Love You Forever? Forget about books that don’t quite live up their potential (see below). This one has none to live up to. This unbelievable dog, which regularly shows up on the checkout stand racks at Borders-type stores, manages to combine in a single thin book all the simpering sentimentality, reinforcement of conservative cultural norms, bad writing and horrible art work that made children’s literature the publishing backwater it was for so many years. I think it’s the worst children’s book now on the shelves. Tell me I’m wrong. Your homework for the holidays is to come up with the most horrendous children’s book that you know to be currently in print. Painful as the exercise may be. Do it for the community. Do it for closure, or whatever. (The “in print” part is designed to eliminate Struwelpeter, my German grandmother’s favorite cautionary book for kids, because I just don’t like to think about that one. I’m pretty sure it’s out of print.) Note: Munsch’s labor of schlock has been hashed over pretty thoroughly over the years. There may not be much more to say about it. But I don’t know of any actual collections of bad kids’ books. So let’s get started.

From the Children Now site’s new report on kids and computer games:”The video game industry explains that girls are not interested in gaming and that it would not be economically wise for them to invest in producing games for a female market. The truth, however, is that girls do enjoy playing video games. According to PC Data, 45% of computer and video game players in 2000 were female.”

Lemony Snicket is flying off the shelves. Now here’s something I can get behind. Says the Post: “Child psychiatrists say that these books, and other works that deal with kids’ deepest and often unspoken fears - of separation, abandonment, loneliness and death - can be therapeutic, far more so than tales that are relentlessly optimistic. Some children’s mental health experts say that darker fiction can help children master the inexplicable and terrifying events they witness in real life.” Has the Attorney General heard about this stuff?

our first lady agrees with me on the virtues of bilingualism.

The Women’s Sports Foundation put up these handy reminders about helping girls with sports.

Reader Service Dept:If you have ever fallen asleep while reading a Potter tome, here is where the Guardian lets you know how much you’ve missed. I didn’t do so great, but I feel very well rested, thank you.

From Cathy:

J.K. Rowling may not be a literary giant, but like many children around the world, Elena is engaged in a way I hadn�t expected, and eagerly anticipates her nightly dose. So what if it�s �skim-milky?� I wasn�t expecting E.B. White, Milne or Lewis Carroll. Most readers aren�t primarily drawn to Rowling because they think her themes �fresh and intriguing,� either; they are attracted to themes that resonate most deeply. Go figure. Though Rowling is no Dickens, she�s no fool either. What I am relishing, though, is Elena�s rapt attention, incessant questions about unfamiliar vocabulary and accurate recall of the many characters and their devious or noble intent. While I read and she listens, I can almost see how her mind�s eye brings to life the words on the page, weaving pictures that dance and sparkle or, even, frighten. Sometimes, she�s asked me to stop reading when she can�t bear to hear the terrifying conclusion (Harry’s foray into the Forbidden Forest - Book 1) or when a character is suffering too much (house elf being interrogated - Book 4). There is an electric power in this act of the imagination that will serve her well as she begins to decode and then read �good� books fluently on her own. What matters isn’t so much that I am willing to suspend my critical eye for the literary merit of the series, but that Elena and I have done what all of us do when fully engaged; we�ve surrendered to the pure pleasure of the storyteller�s tale, counting on her to lead us where she wishes, spellbound, thrilled and appalled by turns. Having said this, the best of the four books so far is The Prisoner of Azkaban, which develops the theme of the duality of human nature and tests Harry�s and Hermione�s mettle in surprising ways. Hermione, who so far has been Harry�s stereotypical sidekick, really comes into her own in this book, taking risks and the initiative in ways that overshadow Harry�s sometimes dubious accomplishments. Like my real-life friend Harriett, I was repelled by Harry�s self-serving lies in Prisoner and I�m getting a little tired of Rowling�s heavy reliance on deus ex machina, as well. Besides resonant themes, however, Rowling has captured the mystery of a world where children have access to and can exercise magical powers. Until Elena says stop, I will continue to let her imagination take flight and be thrilled at the wonder of it.

Stephy Says: That tired old saw about “just get them reading,” to which you refer, my dear Ted, is no small thing. Reading is the cornerstone of all learning, and as such, of all revolution. Not to sound too much like my grandmotherly old self, here, but look: once they learn to read, they can choose to read whatever they like. (Which may include religious tracts, but one can’t stop all the evils in the world, now, can one?)One more thing: I am Not a geek! (Am I? What is your evidence?)

I suppose to someone not as hopelessly geeky as me (or you, Stephy), the themes Rowling works in Harry Potter might seem fresh and intriguing. Now that I think about it, Ursula LeGuin’s Wizard of Earthsea stories, aimed at a similar audience, struck me that way 30 years ago, and you could shoot some of the same arrows at them: a little 60s neo-mysticism plus warmed-over Arthurian mythology. Which was itself lifted from somewhere, and so on.

What’s more interesting is how Rowling (and LeGuin and Lewis and so on) have figured out how to talk past us, directly to the kids, even when we are the ones reading the stories to them. I try hard to keep the laughter out of my voice when I read Harriet to Laura, but I know it’s there; I can hear it. She doesn’t, as far as I can tell. From where she sits, I am nothing but a conduit, like one of those talking e-Book reader gadgets. I guess I’m OK with that. In other contexts I like it a lot. You will remember the Robert Louis Stevenson poem about the horseperson going by in the night, with that great repetitive line, something like “back at the gallop again,” which when you read it out loud turns you into a percussion instrument in the writer’s hands. That’s pretty cool.

Meanwhile, Harry the Movie opens this weekend, as if anyone needed to be reminded. Slate has a pretty decent review, but the best part of their coverage is a link to the delightful Voice of the Turtle. The New York Times ran a think piece today that revisits parts of that old “Just get them reading” battle cry. Most librarians, who should know, seem to agree. I just wish this were the kind of world where they didn’t all have to get started on the exact same mass-produced mush.

Stephy was just explaining why she doesn’t mind having an ad at the top of her website, and I scrolled up to see if there was an ad there, because I had not noticed. There was, and it was an ad for this nifty all-around book site, which I wish I’d known about ages ago. Which goes to show you something or other.

I’ve been reading Harry Potter to Laura a little bit — only when she brings it to me; I don’t bring it up myself. It’s not that I mind it so much, but I wonder if other people who have read Douglas Adams or Fay Weldon or C.S. Lewis find this Potter stuff as skim-milky as I have. It feels like someone carefully analyzed all the little verbal tricks and tics in the Hitchhiker’s Guide books, sorted out the ones that work the most reliably, and then tinker-toyed a bunch of them together, with some plot points for connectors, hoping for a similar effect. It doesn’t work, of course. At some points it sits on the page like the lab-spawned text in those Disney picture books, refusing to move. At its best it manages to be a little bit coy where Adams was maddening, and comfortably eccentric in the spots where Adams achieved full wacko-hood. But we slog through it, sporadically. The only thing that keeps me on the ball through some of the muddier pages is Laura’s insistence that the hero be called Harriet, which forces a certain alertness. She catches me every time I forget.

Why do I always assume this guy is going to be obscure? Some clarity from Humberto Eco in La Repubblica last week:

“What is confusing is that often we don’t understand the difference between identifying with our own roots… and distinguishing good from evil.”

My aunt Judy does serious genealogical research, which frees up the rest of us for the spurious kind. The most glamorous thing I’ve dug up so far involves an L.A. lawyer named Ted Kuster (no relation, I’m pretty sure), whose fame derives from his wife Una leaving him for the poet Robinson Jeffers (now remembered mostly for his bricklaying skills, I loyally note) around 1910. If there is a point to this, it escapes me.

Bobby: A New Life

Another of the many good Dad journals out there.