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Check out these videos--two views of mothers and the work they do. The first one, The Mom's Overture, a compendium of the things mothers say in a day set to music, has been getting a reasonable amount of circulation, so you may have seen it already; the second is a totally funny parody of British police dramas--think Helen Mirren with a daycare crisis (thanks to my sister for this one):
What do you censor when you’re reading with children? I’m not talking here about banning books, but about those words and phrases that you find you cannot say, and the values they embody.
We’re reading E. Nesbit’s The Phoenix and the Carpet at home right now, the sequel to her Five Children and It, both of them huge favorites of my own in the fourth and fifth grades (as was the final book in the trilogy, The Story of the Amulet). She is so incredibly brilliant about magic, which though often exciting, is never particularly liberating in the ways that one hopes it will be. Instead, her protagonists are perpetually getting themselves into the most awkward situations—become so beautiful as to be unrecognizable to their baby brother, stranded on a rooftop when their wished-for wings have vanished, trapped at home with room full of cats and rats, and a cow and a burglar. In many ways, her books are about limits, and our efforts to transcend them—the limits and boundaries of childhood, and even more particularly, of girlhood and boyhood; of class and propriety; of magic in all its failed grandeur and of reality in all its drabness. And even all these years later, few authors seem to construct sibling squabbles as believable as those in these books, despite the Edwardian language and mores.
So it was with utter confidence that I opened The Phoenix and the Carpet. We’d already enjoyed its immediate predecessor, as well as The Railway Children. And it begins so well—with a bang, quite literally. But then there are servant problems—the cook threatens to leave the household because of the children’s bad behavior, and while Mother is able to placate her initially, the events of the ensuing week test her patience so much that she marches into the nursery to complain of the broken pudding basin, only to discover Anthea and Cyril and Jane and Robert dressing their baby brother for a trip on the magic carpet to a sunny southern shore to cure his whooping cough. In desperation, they include the cook rather than forgo the trip. And when they find themselves transported, they leave the cook at the beach to exploring: “…the children suddenly passed a corner and found themselves in a forest clearing, where there were a lot of pointed huts—the huts, as they knew at once, of savages.”
It wasn’t the savageness of the savages that brought me up short. It was the fact the very first one was dark and coppery colored—“just like the chrysanthemums that Father had brought home on Sunday”—and that “The whites of his eyes and the white of his teeth were the only light things about him.” I didn’t read that paragraph out loud. In fact, I selectively edited the entire chapter.
But was that the right thing to do? I worry less in this case about censorship qua censorship and more about the following. My editing was fundamentally dishonest, and allowed us to continue reading a book which was—and is—making me increasingly uncomfortable. And sure enough, things have gone from bad to worse, as displaced countrymen turned to thievery must be sorted out by the children, and dishonest servants must be kept in their place by threats of blackmail leading to the probable loss of their jobs. It is Nesbit’s refusal to critique the hierarchies of race and class that I find so surprising. I remembered from my own childhood her honesty about childhood, and so to be confronted as an adult with her dishonesty about the humanity of her other characters is unnerving. And now there’s nothing I can say to my children because I didn’t even reveal the truth.
I remember a conversation with a friend who didn’t want to read Little House on the Prairie with her daughter because of the racism that is recorded in the book—the fearful conversations about massacres, the repeated expression that “the only good Indian is a dead Indian.” But it seemed to me then as now that Laura Ingalls Wilder took the opportunity to expose the racism of that moment in an honest fashion without endorsing it, and in a way that allows her readers to talk openly about the true consequences and complexity of the homesteading movement. Nesbit is far more complicit in the power structure in this book than I expected, and by editing her to make her more palatable, I am as well. So should we not read her to children at all—relegate her to historical study—in other words, informally ban her? I wish I knew.
I've conquered the HTML dragon, and got LibraryThing on the page--just look to the left! LibraryThing is totally cool, a social networking site, in essence, for the book obsessed. It allows you to catalog your own book collection simply but correctly, and THEN to see which books you share with others on the site, thereby getting a look at their collections, and gaining recommendations. Not to mention being able to view the whole collection as a series of book covers... This will keep me busy for a while.
And that's not all. I'm at long last a Powell's affiliate, have posted some links to other kidlit blogs and to other local resources (more of both on their way), and have posted an essay on Reading with Babies--just look to the right.
On Friday, look for a post on censorship and children's literature.
Now if I can only master the RSS feed issue...
Being something of a Luddite, the tech side of blogging is an enormous challenge for me. You may have noticed that I'm starting some new lists in the sidebars. I'm now trying to figure out how to upload book cover images, and there are several widgets I want to add, not to mention figuring out how to get the RSS feed to work... Stick with me. It'll all get sorted out.
The other day a friend asked me if I knew of any good books about farm life in the 1950s. It's an interesting question because, I realized as I thought, there are many great books about farm life, but they tend to be clustered around specific historical moments--and the 1950s isn't one of them. The mid-nineteenth century, the turn on the twentieth century, and the Depression years all feature prominently in books that explore rural life--all moments of historical change, whether hinged on internal migration, technological innovation, or climate change and disaster. And there are great books that evoke the relative timelessness of farm life, the way that it is of necessity tied into the seasonal year.
One of my favorites for children in the early years of school is Georgia Graham's The Strongest Man This Side of Cremona, partly because she's writing about the prairies that I know. I've mentioned it before, but realy must do so again, I love it so. In it, Matthew is helping his dad fix a fence before the cows get loose when he notices a funnel cloud forming behind him. Hand in hand, the two of them run for a culvert, taking shelter in a drainpipe while the tornado rages around them. The family is safe, but faced with the sudden destruction of their careful labors--and with the quiet arrival of their neighbors from adjacent farms, who set to work to repair the damage and restore order. Graham's bold and detailed prints have the heightened clarity of the prairie, where every blade of grass, every stalk of wheat seems to register itself individually on the eye. "Nobody could stop a tornado, not even his dad"--but the dogged persistence of these farmers, their determination to prevail in the face of disaster, their dignity amidst near defeat is powerfully evoked here, and communicates something profoundly true about the strength of those who understand their vulnerability. This is a fantastic book for kids who are ready to go beyond the charm of the farmyard to the challenges of that life, and to understand the debt that urban dwellers owe those who live on the land.
Georgia Graham, The Strongest Man This Side of Cremona (Calgary: Northern Lights Books for Children, 1998).
