What shall we read to the kids?

Don’t Tell the Grown-ups: Subversive Children’s Literature by Alison Lurie

Lurie’s book is a collection of essays on classic children’s authors and their works, with some excursions into fairy tales and folklore. Her featured authors – primarily Victorian and early modern writers based in England – are nonetheless a diverse group, among them Beatrix Potter, Kate Greenaway, E. Nesbitt, James Barrie, A.A. Milne, T.H. White and J.R.R. Tolkien. Having read her essays, I am seriously moved to hunt down and read a goodly number of the books I didn’t read as a child or adolescent, and re-read several of those that I did read. Lurie’s sketches of the authors’ lives and discussions of their key works were tantalizing in the extreme.

What I found interesting about the topic as a whole is her thesis (not necessarily a new one, but a well argued and illustrated one), based on her own memories of children’s books as well as her research, that there are two broad categories of children’s books:

1. The conventional books that “told me what grown-ups had decided I ought to know or believe about the world,” that encourage deference for and dependence on authority and try to teach children how to become “responsible adults,” and

2. Books that speak from the perspective of the child, that celebrate daydreaming, questioning, disobeying, running away from home, having adventures, rebelling, stretching wings and pushing boundaries.

Lurie argues that the great works of children’s literature, the ones that survive and pass on from generation to generation, are mostly the latter sort, the subversive sort, and that they are a necessary part of a child’s learning experience – and an adult’s interior life.

I think we should… take children’s literature seriously because it is sometimes subversive: because its values are not always those of the conventional adult world. Of course, in a sense much great literature is subversive, since its very existence implies that what matters is art, imagination and truth. In what we call the real world, on the other hand, what usually counts is money, power and public success.

The great subversive works of children’s literature suggest that there are other views of human life besides those of the shopping mall and the corporation. They mock current assumptions and express the imaginative, unconventional, noncommercial view of the world in its simplest and purest form. They appeal to the imaginative, questioning, rebellious child within all of us, renew our instinctive energy and act as a force for change, This is why such literature is worthy of our attention and will endure long after more conventional tales have been forgotten.

Everyone needs a little subversion - ot a lot - in their lives.

The Voice of Nancy Mairs

Plaintext
Remembering the Bone House
Carnal Acts
Ordinary Time
Voice Lessons
Waist-High in the World
A Troubled Guest

Nancy Mairs is a skilled practitioner of the art of the personal essay that explores a universal truth. I’ve read seven volumes of her essays – most recently Carnal Acts – and have continued to be profoundly moved, both emotionally and intellectually, by her work.

Her themes are often universal – memory, the body, sexuality, love, the creative impulse, the relationship of live and death, the spirit. She addresses these through the material of her life and that of her friends and family, through her experiences as a child, a woman, a mother, a writer, a person of faith, a person who questions, a lover, a person living with multiple sclerosis, an teacher, an antiwar and social justice activist.

Carnal Acts is a collection of essays, speeches and one short story, most of which foreground the issues of disability and the body – specifically the female body – but also address many of Mairs’ other key themes. In two introductory essays, in this volume, Mairs does not deal as directly with disability issues as she does in the rest of the volume, but rather takes as her theme writing about the body, its physicality – as a woman, her voice issuing out of a woman’s physical, carnal body. A key passage in understanding the focus of Mairs’ work, from a selection on columns written for the New York Times (“The ‘Hers’ Columns):

By ridiculing or trivializing women’s utterance, men seek to control what is and is not considered important. Weighty, worthwhile in the world.

I, for one, was an awfully well-bred girl who grew up into a Yankee lady. From infancy, the language slipped into my mouth was scrubbed as clean as my rattles and teething rings; and to this day, I wince at the possibility that I might be thought rude. A man’s sneer shrivels me. But I guess that’s just what I’m going to have to be: rude. Because if women are ever going to be really heard, people (including women themselves) are going to have to get used to the sound of their voices and the subjects they believe worth discussing. So I, for one, intend to keep telling the truth about myself as a woman: what I see, who I love, where I hurt, why I laugh.

In doing so, Mairs talks frankly and carnally about being a person with a major, visible and degenerative disability. Many of the “carnal acts” Mairs discusses are acts of the body – and increasingly dis-abled body; they are also acts of everyday courage in the face of fears that she also talks about, frankly and carnally.

Especially moving for me is one essay, “Faith and Loving in Las Vegas,” where Mairs talks about her experiences at an antiwar protest. She chooses to commit, with other protesters, an act of civil disobedience that will result in an arrest, knowing that as a pwd (person with a disability) and a wheelchair user she faces concerns that an able-bodied protester would not, but also facing the fact that, under some circumstances, her disability status will separate her and possibly shield her from the experiences her fellow protesters will face.

In the end, the most carnal act Mairs commits, and commits again and again, is the act of speech about an embodied life – for Mairs, this embodiment is both as a woman and as a pwd, and intersectionality fraught with many meanings, many pains and many joys.

More Jack Whyte

I have now just about caught up with Jack Whyte and his Camulod series.
I've finshed:

The Sorcerer: The Fort at River's Bend
The Sorcerer: Metamorphosis

These volumes take the main line of the story right up to the coronation of Arthur, and the eve of his first major battle against the Saxons. Whyte is still managing to follow the essence of the myths but make them appear historically possible.

I've also read the two "companion" volumes:

Uther
Clothair the Frank

The first volume parallels the main line of the story, which is told by Merlin. It begins with the childhood and youth of both Merlin and Uther, cousins, one of them destined to inherit the command of the romano-British community of Camulod and the other to inherit the kingship of the Welsh nation of Pendragon, and ends with the death of Uther, hard on the heels of the birth of his illegitimate son Arthur to Igraine, daughter of Irish kings and wife to Gulrys Lot of cornwall.

The second volume is the early story of Lancelot - again, it attempts to be historically plausible while keeping to the essence of the story of Lancelot. Here, Lancelot's name is Clothair, and he is of Frankish descent. He gains his nickname, the Lancer, from a young girl who, all unknown to both of them, will grow up to be Arthur's queen. Clothair's story ends with his first meeting with Arthur, shortly after the battle that, in the main line of the story, has yet to unfold.

Now all the pieces are in place for the tale of King Arthur. I can hardly wait to see how Whyte is going to handle what is still to come.

A slow apocalypse

The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham

I've been rereading old sf classics as I find used copies here and there (or my partner does, which is essentially the same thing). I've managed to find a few volumes to restart my collection of John Wyndham novels. Wyndham is probably best known for The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids, both of which were made into movies, but I've always preferred The Kraken Wakes.

There are some strong similarities between the three books - an alien lifeform arrives on Earth, and changes life as everyone knows it - but what makes The Kraken Wakes that little bit more interesting to me is the slow progress of the invasion, as it were, and the detailed examination of how political and scientific communities around the world ignore the problem until it's just too late to do anything. There is some of this subtheme in the other works I've mentioned, but it is exploited to its fullest here.

Like many other sf writers, a lot of Wyndham's work deals with comunication - or the lack of it, or indeed the impossibility of it - whether between humans or with alien species. Those issues are foregrounded in the book, in part because the protagonists, a husband and wife research and writing team for a British television network, communicate for a living. They want to understand, to put the pieces together, to communicate.

Something else that I enjoy about Wyndham's work is that he sees women as people who contribute actively to the development of the plot. Wyndham's women are not the women of much standard sf written in the 1950s and early 1960s. They are often present in the novel becasue of their relationship with a man - Wyndham was a man of his times - but once in the novel, they think, they act, they offer valuable contributions to the development of the story.

I enjoyed reading this again. I must find more of his works to re-read (bearing always in mind that the man had more pen names than most sf writers of the era: John Beynon, John Beynon Harris, Johnson Harris, Lucas Parkes, and Wyndham Parkes.

Lackey does dragons

Joust
Alta

Just for fun. Mercedes Lackey has a new series, based loosely on ancient Egypt before the union of the Two Kingdoms, with dragons.

Lackey's dragons aren't very intelligent compared to, say, McCaffrey's dragons, but they are used as winged mounts for what are, in essence, knights of the air. Their riders are the elite warriors in the long conflict between the Two Kingdoms, and they do indeed joust.

Of course, there's conspiracy and evil magic and lots of other cool stuff behind the war, and there are at least two more volumes in the series, but this is nice mind cady and I'm looking forward to reading more.