Today and yesterday

[phyloxena]

1. My daughter got to an age, or a stage, when she asks her very few friends for book recommendations.  Her last acquisition (is it a right word?) was something called "101 ways to bug your parents".  I read it, not because I censor her reading, which I'm not entirely adverse  (is it a right word?) to do, but do not do yet, since she doesn't read enough yet for the said censorship to be needed, but because the book was lying around.   The book starts with grotesquely cliche, but still funny, description of the middle-school class dynamics (the topic and the setting I hate profoundly, if this is a word): a vain and gossiping girl, a cool guy, a pretentious boy, a girl with a sad back-story, and a couple of nerds nobody likes.  Nerd#1, the narrator, needs money to get to an inventor's convent.  He also needs means of transportation and some parental attention.  Silly boy, he could have had so much fun with his sympathetic, permissive and overburdened parents while and as long as they were not paying attention.  But this is a standard school-library fare.  Anyway.  Nerd#2, the sidekick, gets kicked aside in the course of the story, but bounces back vigorously and shows his waivering friend the true meaning of friendship.  Nerd#1 writes a book about bugging parents to sell it, because he needs money.  He gets in trouble.  He gets out of trouble.  In a true heroic moment he forces his way in the room with the the PTO meeting there his book and possible firing (for permitting this topic for an assignment) of his teacher is discussed, and, in a dissociated moment, hears himself speaking in a microphone that firing the teacher would be wrong.  Fanfare.  He doesn't get to the convention, but he discovers...  Oh, my.  How the same hand that which could type "Burp with your mouth open"could type "Because the inventing is who I am [...] Doing something because you believe in it, because it's right -- that' what counts".  I mean.  It's almost as bad as a book about a girl who was so nice and good all little cuddly animals believed she was beautiful, even if she, actually, was just as plain as you are, my gentle reader.  Now go blow your nose and be good.  Now, the question.  What are the normal, staple, classical English books for a seven-year-old to read?  I don't mind reasonable amount of violence and disturbance, and I have very lax notion of what is appropriate, but I don't want her to read something good too early, not get most of it and ruin her perception of the book.   Currently she reads this bugs, the Church Mice series and "the Jungle Book".

2. While visiting friends happened to watch last fifteen minutes of a generic TV movie.  School bus of hostages, a maniac who turned mad with his problems with IRS (my heart goes out for the men), frantic parents abusing very David Wellham -like (but shorter and handsomier) boyfriend of the hostage driver, yelling at him how hard it was to persuade  their children that the school bus was safe (my heart goes out for the moronic parents: of course the school bus is not safe!), a sweating pony-tailed blond female police lieutenant with the sexiest sing-song voice, a cool to pieces police sniper.   No idea how they got there.  The madman was shot, the children were safe, the brunette driver kissed her boyfriend, my kids crawled out from under the furniture and asked why didn't they shot at tires?  I do not know. 

Comments

Re: twice self-conscious

[phyloxena.livejournal.com]

Well... It is no worse than some LotR fanfiction I have read. A sure method to make a perfect hero: just kill little boy's daddy before the boy develops any Oedipal tensions. Kill the mom before she interferes with the dating, too.

There is a horrible orphaned goody-goody girl in Russian classics, Netochka Nezvanova, by Dostoevsky. Very similar middle-class imagery, tears and trembles. Plus revolting tender female friendship moments as written by an old man, dirty and perverse for all I know. He probably didn't mean it to be sexual, that was just the fashion of the girl's friendship of that period, but all this crying one's heart out on another's shoulder, both in nightshirts, is a bit sick.


Aragorn, btw, is not like that. First, he blunders and tarries enough to bring dire consequences upon himself and others, and, second, LotR is more of an action than of a character study. Aragorn acts in a way that moves the plot, and there is very little introspection. Faramir gives in (am I saying what I mean? The right idiom escapes me) to Denethor, and Aragorn gives in to Elrond in very similar way. He had better luck with an authority, but it's not his fault. And there is nothing lesbian about him...

Re: twice self-conscious

[nestashouse.livejournal.com]

In Victorian fiction it was very common to kill off parents. I suppose it reflected reality, in that there were so many things that you could die of: childbirth to start with, in the case of many mothers. It's the same further back: Shakespeare, for example, is obviously very interested in parent-child relationships, but it's very unusual for both parents to still be in the picture. Leontes and Hermione are one exception, but they're not exactly a happy couple, and Hermione is believed to be dead, by Leontes and by their daughter, for many years. Nowadays, the death of one parent is not assumed to be likely, but the absence of one parent through divorce is taken almost for granted in many novels for children. It often makes a good story, of course.

I don't know what Freud have to say about kids that don't grow up with their mothers/fathers. Do they fail to develop an oedipus/electra complex, or do they just project it onto the nearest male/female adult? It's all bunk anyway, in my opinion.

Passionate, but not (homo)sexual, friendships between people of the same sex seem to be taboo just now. Isn't it funny how, the more we are exhorted to see homosexuality as 'normal', the more horrified 'straight' people are if they're accused of it? In past times (take Shakespeare again!), expressions of passionate affection for a same-sex friend were taken entirely for granted. Personally, I can't see anything wrong with that, even in nighties, though what goes on in the murky depths of Dostoevsky's imagination may be another thing altogether.

You're absolutely right to say that JRRT leaves little if any room for introspection in LoTR, except occasionally among the hobbits. The only Aragorn introspection I can remember is when he's wondering what to do at the very beginning of TT. You have to deduce what's going on in the minds of most of the LoTR characters, including Faramir of course, from what they say or do. The fascinating thing is how easy this seems to be - even if we don't all agree on the interpretation. It was the same in medieval fiction, which was where JRRT got most of his inspiration of course. Medieval writers didn't have our sophisticated psychological vocabulary, but they understood people well enough. They just applied that understanding in a different way.

Re: twice self-conscious

[phyloxena.livejournal.com]

My remark about the absence of parents had more to do with ficwriters (whom it's unfair to blame because Tolkien killed off the parents) than with the constants of the Victorian fiction. Freud offers pretty absurd scaffolding for the character study, which is sometimes better than none, and sometimes worse. Anyway, his nonsense is common place now, contaminating the speech and hard to ignore. I used to be very enthusiastic about psychoanalysis when I discovered it in my teens. It seemed to explain and so remove from my active thought process so many irritating things; now Freud seems to me as creepy as other influential philosophers of that period, like Marx and Pavlov.

Passionate, but not (homo)sexual, friendships between people of the same sex seem to be taboo just now...expressions of passionate affection for a same-sex friend were taken entirely for granted

Have you read "The Warrior in Tiger's Skin" by Rustaveli? I have no idea what is it worth on the world's literature scale. It's Georgian poem based on a Persian legend, about adventures of the three princes who are recovering their stolen and bewitched brides. They fight demons, lions and armies, and passionately cry/comfort each other with immodest praise in between. Shakespeare, or said Rustavely, is one thing, but murky depths of Dostoevsky (very nice way to put it!) is entirely another. These girls in nighties are certainly sick in some way. Neurotic, or hysterical, or deprived of vitamins D and B16, I don't care. In my unfavorable onion he begs for psychoanalysis to appear and set things right. And I don't imply that same-sex sexuality is sick, it's none of my business.

Also, it appears that people in modern (Western) world keep larger physical distance than they used to. From the expressed ban on any physical contact in some school to larger houses, people don't seem to touch one another naturally, innocently or unintentionally.

Touching

[nestashouse.livejournal.com]

In Britain, at least, touching another person has become a dangerous act. If it's another adult of the opposite sex, it'll probably be assumed that you're in a sexual relationship, or want to be. If it's another adult of the same sex, you'll probably be assumed to be homosexual. And if it's a child, God help you, because nobody nowadays dare lay even a fingertip on a child that isn't their own, for fear of being set down as a paedophile and lynched by a hysterical mob. It's got to the point where a teacher in a nursery school daren't pick up and comfort a howling infant who's just fallen over in the playground. In fact, most schools have explicit rules forbidding them to do so.

Honestly, I think I'd rather have Lord Fauntleroy, or even Little-by-Little.

Re: Touching

[phyloxena.livejournal.com]

I have no way to know if you are exaggerating! It sounds like caricature of Boston or Berkeley.

Re: Touching

[nestashouse.livejournal.com]

I always exaggerate.

The above statement is, of course, exaggerated.

of course

[phyloxena.livejournal.com]

But only a little bit.
Probably makes no sense to try to quantify the exaggeration.