!Doing and being in books
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agk's diary
31 March 2023 @ 01:39 UTC
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written on GPD Win 1
while daughter's asleep and Evy at work
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In my town public library, they must discard older
books. They don't have many of my favorites. I want
children who explore, adventure, discover, imagine,
learn, misunderstand, and live actively in books.
King Shabazz & Tony Polito go to find spring in
Lucille Clifton's (1992) The Boy Who Didn't Believe
in Spring. They go too far, get busted. Peter &
Archie outwit big boys, sneak found motorcycle
goggles home from the hideout in Ezra Jack Keats'
(1969) Goggles! The kids in Donald Crews' (1992)
Shortcut go a dangerous way & easily could've got
killed. They never go that way again, never tell.
In Ruth Krauss's (1954) A Very Special House a kid
narrates the wild and amazing house he or she's
free to imagine. A kid imagines mama's dangerous
job juxtaposed with her safe home in George Ella
Lyon's (1994) Mama is a Miner.
I'm tender for the few library books still about
kids' doings. Eloise Greenfield (1978) evoked the
pure experience of a little girl's ordinary joys in
Honey, I Love. The 2016 illustrated book's even
better. Vallerie Bolling's (2022) Together We Ride
girl learns to bicycle with her dad's support.
The simplicity, stability, and danger of oldtime
childhood's soothing in Cynthia Rylant's (1982)
When I Was Young in the Mountains and Donald Crews'
(1991) Bigmama's. I could read 'em forever. Somehow
they're both closest to and furthest from the books
I don't like about children being instead of doing.
My library's book-children defy or revel in ideal
identities---Latina, Vietnamese, dress-wearing,
unicorn, frog---, creating themselves, individuals.
At work in the mental hospital I see kids the books
are for. Not individuals yet, irrationally inter-
dependent, their actions & self-understanding are
reactions to the moment's context.
You can't understand what books do just from who
they're for. Who are they by? Grownups producing
digitally in volume cartoons, games, and books for
a market shaped by other grownups who through edu-
cation, geographic mobility, and income left kin-
ship, collective experiences of time, & collectiv-
ized work; idealized what they left as identity.
Nobody's more southern than someone who left the
south, working class than someone who grew up on
wages but makes a salary, black than the only black
person in an otherwise all-white anything. Some
people produce identity from defense or repudiation
of others.
Identarians sacralize & idealize traces of lost
social worlds, their experience of themselves.
"Professionalized liberal protocols of self-impro-
vement [dictate] other people, other experiences,
only exist to the extent that they can expand our
capacity for empathy and feeling."[^1]
My kids reap anxiety: What am I? Am I bipolar? Am I
OCD? Am I a gamer? Am I a drug baby? Am I on the
spectrum? Am I gay? In sometimes tightening circles
they're commanded to look inside, be true to their
unformed self. To be without doing. Rilke in 1905
wrote identity's found through doing, active living
ever more perilously entangled in the world:
I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I will give myself to it.
I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I've been circling for thousands of years
and I still don't know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?
Dorothy Kunhardt's (1934) Now Open The Box was re-
issued in 2013 by The New York Review of Children's
books maybe because it's balm for the unsatisfiable
need of our time. Peewee the circus dog, loved be-
cause he's tiny, grows. He loses his job and place
in the world. But he keeps growing til he's freak-
ishly large and gets it all back.
Peewee does nothing, unlike his friends the trapeze
artists or the goat standing on a burning bed. He's
a sideshow, loved only for what he is. The harsh
reality is that, like the frog in the inferior book
I Don't Want to Be A Frog, he lacks total control
over what he is. His body changes unpermitted. He's
anxious no one'll like him anymore. They only liked
him because he was tiny.
Never fear, Kunhardt reassures young readers. Even
though what you are escapes your control, people'll
find something new to like you for. Peewee gets his
friends and job back because he grows freakishly
large. He can't be whatever he wants to be, but he
can be loved whatever he is.
Marlowe's 17th century Faust wanted to know every-
thing. Goethe's 19th c Faust wanted to do & experi-
ence everything. 20th c Fausts by Thomas Mann (1947
Doctor Faustus), Mikhail Bulgakov (1967 Master &
Margarita), and Istvan Szabo (1981 Mephisto) wanted
success and prestige.
21st c Faust wouldn't sell his soul for freedom to
know, experience, or be recognized. He'd want abso-
lute freedom of identity. Me, I don't want absolute
freedom. I want a good adventure; kids constrained
by reality living actively in it.
- - -
Note: If your library doesn't have these books and
you're in the United States, you can order
them Inter-Library Loan. If so inclined & you
have a computer that loads youtube, you can
find someone reading any notable picturebook.
[1]:Catherine Liu (2022), Virtue hoarders: the
case against the professional managerial
class. U of Minnesota Press, p.55.
