My internet service goes off today. It will return on the 3rd or the 4th. In the meantime, I will be visiting libraries -- which is my idea of a nerdly good time. So keep checking for new posts...
By the way: If you are not completely tapped out, I happen to think that Liberal Rapture does good work, worthy of support...
An Additional Rant (and this has nothing to do with politics): I've decided to confess a horrible secret. One of the ways I've made ends meet in recent years is by illustrating children's books -- and I don't work under the name "Joseph Cannon." I won't say which name or which titles, for reasons which should be obvious by the time you finish reading this post.
But I will say this: Too often, the wrong people write books for kids. The best stories for young people are written by childless uncles and aunts -- not not not NOT parents.
Dr. Seuss never had kids. Beatrix Potter did not have kids. L. Frank Baum had not reproduced when he got into the trade of juvenile fiction. I believe that Stan Lee did not yet have kids when he co-created Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four. Seigel and Schuster pretty much were still kids when they invented Superman, as was Bob Kane at the time of Batman's creation. Maurice Sendak was gay. E. Nesbit (Edith Bland) did not have kids. I may be wrong, but I believe that Norton Juster did not have kids when he wrote The Phantom Tollbooth.
Okay, so A.A. Milne and J.K. Rowling were proven breeders when they took up the trade. Every worthwhile general rule has exceptions.
The problem with parents is that they're too damned responsible. Their first instinct is to create didactic literature, designed to teach Important Life Lessons: "Bullies are bad." "Be a good sport." "Brush your teeth every day."
Kids hate that crap. Think back to when you were young: Did not your every instinct rebel against all hint of the didactic? Nobody could fool you: You could always smell an Important Life Lesson from a mile away, and you did anything you could to avoid it.
Yet parents can't help themselves. They want to impose rules and limits. They want to teach right from wrong. They want to sermonize: Be Kind to the Handicapped and Show Respect For Your Elders and Practice Safety First and Eat Your Vegetables.
Kids live in a constricted world, a world of limits and regulations and curfews and censorship and punishments. Naturally, they yearn to break the rules. They long for the transgressive.
That's where Uncles and Aunts come in.
Your Uncle was the babysitter who said "Sure you can stay up past midnight!" You Uncle was the first person to let you discover what beer tastes like. Your Uncle told you really (really really) scary stories just before bedtime. Your Uncle taught you how to pitch pennies and play poker. Your Uncle let you see movies that contained more violence and salty language than did the ones that Mom and Dad let you see.
When an Uncle writes a story for kids, he doesn't want to teach any damned Important Lessons. He wants kids to say Wow! Cool! Maurice Sendak provides an excellent case in point: His most famous story is about a young man who perpetually stays up past his bedtime in order to keep dangerous company.
I have never bred, at least not to my knowledge, and I am sick of illustrating children's books which will never be popular because they were written by breeders.
I'm considering putting together a series called Jimmy and Timmy. These books will be about two brothers aged 8 and 9. Sample titles:
Jimmy and Timmy Drive Mom's Car
Jimmy and Timmy: Fun with Shattered Glass
Jimmy and Timmy Explore the Old Factory
Jimmy and Timmy Find Daddy's Gun
Jimmy and Timmy and the Mustard Gas Canister
The Secret Service Investigates Jimmy and Timmy
Jimmy and Timmy in Gitmo
Jimmy and Timmy Feed Mr. Bear
Jimmy and Timmy Have Fun With Knives
Jimmy and Timmy's Emergency Room Holiday
Jimmy and Timmy Meet Pablo Escobar
Jimmy and Timmy Hang With Hef
Jimmy and Timmy Summon Baal
Jimmy and Timmy Make Nooses
Jimmy and Timmy and the Donner Party
Jimmy and Timmy's Guide to First Aid
Jimmy and Timmy Teach Vampirella the True Meaning of Love
Jimmy and Timmy: When Mr. Turtle Met Mr. Fan
Jimmy and Timmy Hack the Air Traffic Control System
Jimmy and Timmy: Gang Symbols Made Easy
Jimmy and Timmy: Why Kitties and Razors Don't Mix
Jimmy and Timmy and the Big NORAD Oops!
Jimmy and Timmy and the Wonderful Icepick Lobotomy
Jimmy and Timmy Start a War on a False Pretext
Jimmy and Timmy Make Farting Noises During the Second Coming
Jimmy and Timmy Discover Antinomianism and the Freedom from Consequence
As you might guess, I'm supposed to be finishing up a children's book at this very moment. It was written by a very nice lady who is a wonderful parent. I cringe to think about it.
18 comments:
"Jimmy and Timmy Discover Mom and Dad's Secret Home Video Stash"
Jimmy and Timmy Go To Therapy"
From the Desk of Ms. Vandal...
"Jimmy and Timmy Find Mommy's Magic Vibrator"
"Jimmy and Timmy Meet Daddy's Special Friend"
Jimmy and Timmy Get Tried As Adults"
From "Jimmy and Timmy's Family Secrets":
What's this?
It's Sis!
See Sis in Bliss.
My brother-in-law (twice removed) - incidentally a talented albeit unemployed digital production artist whom I spent the evening moving into a homeless shelter - used to claim he had agreed to be godfather to our friends' son just so he could "take Patrick on his first mushroom trip" -thus setting the bar very high for any godparent needs I might one day have.
BTW, though, as someone who spent the Summer between my junior and senior years[1] of college as an intern with the Fabian Society, I should mention you've made the common[2] mistake of conflating Beatrice (Potter) Webb with Beatrix Potter. While the two were contemporaries, both dying in 1943, they were indeed two separate people - which is a shame, because I really like the idea of the author of The Tale of Peter Rabbit also being the Mother of
British Socialism.
__________
1. Although, to be precise, these were referred to by my nourishing mother only as one's 'third' and 'fourth' year.
2. Well, common enough among those who've actually heard of Beatrice Webb. Or at least a mistake I also made for a while.
A bit of a leap from my uncles to some of those titles, Joseph. But at 11, we had home-made (with a little help from unc modifying the auto leaf-springs) crossbows that would fire a shank through the L.A. phonebook with yellow pages. Way too scary; we reverted to aluminum bows on the crossbows.
Another "uncle" (much older brother-in-law of my buddy) showed us how to prime and start his bulldozer (about a D-4 or 5) and just walked off. We spent hours pushing dirt around.
Fired first rifle at about 10 years of age. May still have photo of skinny little twerp trying to hold up the "huge" single-shot .22 and sight it.
Times change.
Here's hoping better authors come to employ your talents. Really enjoyed your fresh observations.
Mazoola: I've corrected, and thanks.
I'm sorry to hear about your brother in law. I hope he gets to move out of the shelter soon...
Shel Silverstein was writing for Playboy when someone said to him, "dude, this is the wrong gig for you. You ought to be writing children's literature." And the rest is history. Lafcadio is one of my favorite books ever.
Hey Joseph! The key to writing any children's story is killing the parents off by chapter one. Anyone can do it, but it is tougher for "parental" authors to let the child characters careen off dangerously on their own. From Narnia to Bambi, take a look....no parents. At the most, say Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, you've got some clueless preoccupied eccentric adult, but no responsible parents. Mary Poppins leaves when the parents take responsibility for their family, and the kids' adventure is over.
As for AA Milne, as Dorothy Parker said, "This Tonstant Weader Fwowed Up."
Dr. Seuss filled his original drafts with swears and then substituted in the nonsense words.
I know a children's book illustrator, and he moved into writing his own books. Sadly, if the first one doesn't sell some magical number, the series is killed, but I saw he has a new stand-alone book out now...though I think the series they killed was extremely short-sighted of the publisher.
Meanwhile, if you're not into writing your own, don't fret...some of us collect old Golden Books, not for the stories (tho some became classics) but because of the amazing illustrations.
Some great observations, as usual. For further corroboration of your thesis, you might want to add my favorite childhood author, Walter R. Brooks, author of the the Freddy the Pig series.
As for your series, I'd add the possibly too obvious title: "Jimmy and Timmy Explore the Medicine Cabinet."
Inky
In addition to the "must be responsible" urge that most parents-turned-children's lit-authors succumb to, I think they suck at writing kid's books because for the most part they can't bear to tell kids the truth about the world. It's too painful. In addition to being able to ferret out a needle-seized Major Life Lesson from the proverbial haystack, kids have an excellent radar for condescension, dishonesty and/or total bullshit. They don't want that crap in their reading material.
Zee: Ah, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang! Nobody ever called Fleming, Ian Fleming, a paragon of conventional morality -- although he had a downright worshipful attitude toward his own father.
I don't think an author needs to kill the parents in a literal sense. He simply needs to keep the child-protagonist separated from parental authority, in order to meet challenges on his or her own. "Five Children and It" and "The Wizard of Oz" provide the models here.
Nibbles, I think a good example of your point is the film "Time Bandits." What parent would have dared to write such a story? Especially the bit at the very end...
Generally in children's stories any adults (with the possible exception of the villain) are dimwits who are unwilling or unable to see things that are obvious to the kids.
Common themes:
1. Kid detectives solving mysteries
2. Mystical events and/or portals into other worlds that only the kids can see or access.
3. The kids see something happen (like a murder or robbery) and are not believed (and sometimes punished for lying) by adults.
Yeah, I meant "kill off" or separate....or have the parent be eccentric and distant. In Wrinkle in Time, the mom is a busy scientist and the dad is off imprisoned in some distant time/planet.
Incidentally, Madeleine L'Engle had children, as did Joan Aiken, who wrote a children's series every bit as excellent and innovative as L'Engle's Wrinkle in Time series...the Wolves of Willoughby Chase chronicles follow an alternate history of England.
Aiken did come from a family of writers, but these two authors show it is possible for "breeders" to write compelling kids' lit.
In answer to Zee, I would say that no one is really suggesting that breeders can't make great children's authors. Maud Hart Lovelace, Frank Baum, and Charles Schulz came immediately to my mind in that category. But it truly is impressive, in a world where breeders dominate, how many of the truly great children's authors were childless. In fact, two great pioneers of the genre, Hans Christian Andersen and Lewis Carroll, also never had children. And HCA, in particular, corroborates some of the theories postulated here about why parents generally don't make the best children's authors. Can you imagine, for instance, a tale like "The Little Match Girl"--the story of a child's hallucinations as she lights matches and freezes to death--being written by a parent?
Inky
Timmy and Jimmy and the Cannibal Witch doctor would probably go over with the kids more than Timmy and Jimmy and Miss Emily's bible study so I agree.
If I trusted you enough to use pay pal by the way my picture would have been the following.
Draw an image of Hillary debating Obama in front of the news media. Set it up so the picture can be enlarged. Title the picture " The Objective Media "
Set up the picture so you can enlarge it and when you enlarge the picture you see that instead of lines the two candidates are made up of quotes from the news media and blogs, with Hillary being drawn from objective real quotes like fuck her with a pitch fork and Obama from quotes like he will win the nobel prize-anyway I thought it was clever...
Also - some of the best children's books are great adult reading as well. Not all of us grow out of the "wanting to break the rules" as a fantasy stage. Hmm . . I also happen to be childless, so maybe that explains my continued love of Sendak, Dr. Seuss, C.S. Lewis, etc. I also LOVE the Lemony Snicket books, which, true to form with the best children's books has the parents killed off even before the first book starts. Don't know if the author's childless, though.
Hmm....interesting observation, Joe. I do not have children (not yet, anyway) and ironically I've been told by many that I get along with kids very well.
But I wonder about Roald Dahl, who wrote CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY and JAMES AND THE GIANT PEACH...was he a parent when he wrote these, or not? And Berke Breathed--creator of BLOOM COUNTY--has written and illustrated a few children's books that are quite good.
Still, this is an interesting post!
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