Oached Pish

On their ongoing mission to reserve the entire national treasury to themselves and their suck-ups, the orange excresence and fellow scumbags have axed PBS.

But! For a few bucks a month (before they thieve those, too) you can view PBS's entire backlog, plus other goodies. And do some general good at preserving our culture while at it.

Okay, back to dismantling this entire house so we can replace the disgusting floors.

A friend forwarded this article about the grim antecedents of children's literature to me and asked what I thought.

Well, except for the slander of Chesterfield, which I think is taken way out of context, it's a pretty good representation of my (admittedly non-academic) reading. The first thing to mind was a passage in Anthony Trollope's engaging autobiography in which he quotes a formidable elderly relative of his saying, in effect, that the stuff she read and enjoyed in her day was pretty rough stuff that makes her blush to reflect on now.

There's something to that. Another anecdote, this one my own: my husband's grandmother (born in 1898), when my daughter was about four and had begun reading up a storm, handed off a battered kids' book her mother had given her. The print was tiny, and the vocab way ahead of my kid's reading level, which was pretty simple (she was, like me, an early reader but no prodigy) so I took it upstairs to read, thinking I'd add it to the bedtime reading rotation.

Well. In the very first chapter--no, the first ten pages--a little boy is torturing small animals to death, whereupon he dies in a barn fire.

Uh, no. I was not giving that to my tender-hearted kid, who sobbed if any animal in cartoons seemed to be in danger. She didn't need that heavy-hammer lesson about kindness to other critters. But that heavy hammer is something I saw repeatedly when I leafed through dusty old books in old bookstores during the days when such things could be bought for a quarter.

Children's literature was cautionary and cruel. Yes, I know life was cruel. The thing is, when people rail today about the violence creeping into YA and middle grade books, I think, I am totally sympathetic, but the truth is, it's creeping back into it. Those who think that Victorial kid lit was all about saintly children doing good are not completely wrong, though most of the time the really saintly ones died before the age of ten, after delivering five-page sermons.

Okay, enough people have given me a thumbs up on LOTR rereading, so I will start that this week--on Saturday, as I'm running so dry on topics for BVC blog links. I have the book waiting on the nightstand.

Meanwhile, yesterday's mail brought a gift from a friend--what looks like a first edition (there probably wasn't a second) of Mary Chase's play, sort of novelized and illustrated, Mrs. McThing. One of Mary Chase's books was a childhood fave, and once the internet gave me access to such data, I was astonished to discover that she'd been a well-known playwright.

So I took an hour last night to do some exploring.

In the process of looking up the playbill for Mrs. McThing, I found out that one of the child actors was Brandon De Wilde. I thought, wow, a Hollywoodish name for a kid, and looked him up. Turned out that his parents were from Dutch extraction, and that was his name, no Hollywoodizing here, and furthermore he'd been a phenomenally famous kid actor--who unfortunately died very young (age thirty). Examples of his acting exist on YouTube, most pretty hard on the eyes.

The clearest one was his appearance on What's My Line, a show that I always heard about as a kid, but as my dad didn't have any interest in it, I never actually saw an episode, as we watched whatever he wanted to watch. So I ended up watching bits of other episodes, like the appearance of "Eleanor Roosevelt. The show ran for well over a decade--yet when you look at the set, you'd think it was a high school production. Early television reminds me of early novels: raffish, experimental, doing its best to sell to the mainstream.

One of the episodes had Groucho Marx as a panelist, and he destroyed the format with his constant cracks. So that led me to the show he hosted, You Bet Your Life, which looks even lower budget. The episodes are fascinating glimpses of fifties culture, especially the outtakes. From the glimpses there that audience came there for the bits that would be cut out of the actual airing. Pretty tame by today's standards.

In 1971, sf and f scholar Thomas Clareson had some still-relevant insights into the sudden explosion of sf and f some five years previous. With a few quotes from his essay, I throw out a couple of ideas about why it happened. I'd love to discuss what you thing about why it happened. Here is the link.

So we're trading off holding down the fort between repair people showing up, eldercare-related medical visits, and voting, someone always having to be here for said repair people (you know that "Will arrive sometime between noon and six p.m." routine).

It occurred to me this morning as I walked the dog through the neighborhood that there are fewer signs than I remember in the past. That will probably change when we get closer to November (sigh) but I was thinking, why do people put those things up? Is anyone ever convinced by those bright colored signs? Or is it simply about tribalism, and marking your chosen group?

The only bumper sticker I ever put on a car was my ancient Rambler, after I got back from Europe and discovered that my sibs had been driving it all that year and had gotten into several accidents. In those days, nobody had insurance, or at least nobody in our neighborhood. So my car looked like a junk heap on wheels, making it totally irresistible to have a MY OTHER CAR IS A KLINGON BATTLE CRUISER on it.

Well, that was funny in 1972.

Reflections of immortality? Personal expression? Scam? Challenge? Looks at street art, rock art and possible meanings.

Reprise on bricolage, after a bunch of related discussions online and at cons. Plus mentions of a couple books, including Andrea K. Höst's new release.

Steve Popkes's take on the two shows. I thought his approach interesting, coming from a comics vector.

A look at how they were doing it a few centuries ago. Don't miss the nifty link to the Collier's Letter Rack book, which I wish I could afford.