And after a 6 week hiatus, it's a BOOK REVIEW.

Y'all must be so excited.

Bad Things by Michael Marshall.

Michael Marshall has written one great books (The Straw Men) though possibly (In my opinion), two (The Lonely Dead).  Everything else has been the kind of hit/miss smorgasbord that means I'll never actually seek out one of his novels but if I'm hard up for something to read, will check out his newest.

He's really great at starting books; throwing interesting characters at you, setting up horrific dilemmas, creating bizarre and engrossing mysteries that hook you, draw you in and then during the second act reveal the novel to be science fiction.  Or fantasy.  Or supernatural horror.  His recent reliance on this kind of deus ex machina has let me down as it gives him an easy way out from having to follow through with his really amazing set ups and by the third act, his last two books have used this to essentially cop out of something really great.

It was with this expectation that I went into Bad Things and, while it certainly was better at incorporating the sci-fi/supernatural stuff and engaging with the real world, it also felt kind of boring.  The second act just seemed to drag and I think that if 100 pages were shaved off, the book would tell a nasty little story of a man haunted by the sudden death of his son who returns to the quiet village where it happened and discovers the secrets of it's dark past.

The thing is, Michael Marshall has it in him to write really great thrillers I hope that soon he'll find his stride.  Overall, the entire book played like a humourless season of The League of Gentlemen.

Counterpoint: Carle

Previously in this Blog That Never Gets Updated In Anyway That Makes Any Sense Whatsoever, I went on a bit of a tyrade that Elisabeth suggested may have scared some people off.   Originally, this was going to be a semblance of an apologia but, since those people are now aparantly scared off, I shall continue my rant:

Eric Carle is inexorably tied to Ms. Boynton in my mind, not just because their books are so often mass gifted but because he's the anti-Boynton.  Were I to ever complete my opus on Beatrix Potter, I would say that, in the world of Ms. Potter, he is the pictures, she is the words.

As I cannot remember all my points against Sandra Boynton and am too lazy to revisit them, I am going to use Eric Carle as a point-by-point refutation of Boynton in three acts, using only my dodgy memory and those books I've read as proof.

Act 1: The Very's:

The Very Hungry Caterpillar was the first book I read to Henry.  It's great because it's got one great big picture for little eyes to focus on with few enough words per page so those eyes don't get bored.  There's a payoff at the end with a Very Colourful Butterfly to gaze upon.  As Henry has gotten older, he's found the holes in the pages interesting to focus on.

There is an aural, visual, tactile sense going on with the three books in this trilogy.  The Very Busy Spider has a web that the child can feel and encouraging Henry to touch the pages and literally feel the web getting built (As well as seeing it) adds to the story.  The story itself is fairly repetitive but, unlike a certain author whose name rhymes with Sandra Boynton (oops), there is room to play around.  For example, giving each animals who speaks to the spider a different voice.  It helps that the pictures are big and bold and definite.  They are obvious enough so that a young child knows what hey are, yet intricate enough to make you want to keep looking.  They are a far cry from Boynton's stories which are basically made to amuse adults while reading to their child.

Finally, The Very Lonely Firefly works at an age stage higher than the first two.  Here, the pictures are dimmer (in keeping with the story) and have a more complex breakdown as there are speech bubbles added.  Also, the pictures are, in my opinion, scarier.  This all makes sense in the context of a tale about a firefly lost in the night looking for his friends.  I'm particularly partial to the ending and the Christmas light twinkling once (Spoiler!) the Very Lonely Firefly finds his friends.  This last page baffled Henry for a while until one night he finally noticed the firefly's were twinkling and he looked at me, did a triple-take and literally said, I kid you not, "My God, It's full of stars."

What I am poorly articulating is that in these three books, there is a story, art and a moral (Eat right; work hard; don't worry you'll fit in) that is good for kids, re-readable (Hundreds of times) for adults and, above all, interesting.  The story never gets in the way of the art and there is a parental freedom to interpret how you will.

Act 2: The What Do you Sees?

Technically these are not by Eric Carle, he just provided the art.  That said, I believe that somewhere I addressed how Ms. Boynton could have been better served by better writing.  Here, Eric Carle lends his art to an excellent series of books.  The story is straight-forward & repetitive for the kid, the pictures are big & bold, there's a sense that something's going on but you're not quite sure what that something is.

Henry genuinely seems to like these as I'm sure in his world he's hearing & seeing mumble, mumble, PICTURE!  And as the series progresses and the pictures become increasingly detailed, there is more for him to look at.  Honestly, this is what Sandra Boynton should have done a long time, focusing her art on someone else's stories.

(Of course she would then have to do things like draw in detail, make things bold & appealing to children, not the weird adultopods she imagines that the all are, but I digress...)

Act 3: The My Very Firsts:

Henry's not gotten into these yet and, while I have the Very First Book of Words, Shapes, Food & Animal Homes, I also appear to be missing several others including, numbers, colours, motion, animal sounds and bowel movements.  The four I have i got on sale and, while Henry's not old enough to be able to figure them out, they serve two great purposes.

The first is that they're split down the middle which mean that if you're a baby like Henry, there's double the pages to turn!  Carle's bold colours and artwork continue to draw his attention offer him something to do with the book as well as some enjoyment.

The second is that the  bold colours and artwork continue to draw his attention offer him something to do with the book as well as some enjoyment.  Crap.  That's the first one.  I'll come up with points two and maybe even a third once Henry's at the stage where he is able to figure out that a doggie live in a doghouse (The animal homes book is hard.  I've not been able to figure them all out)

The point is that Eric Carle, as opposed to other writers, seems to 'get' kids.  And parents.  When I finish reading Henry one of his books I don't feel like I've made him a target for bullying.

Sandra Boynton Makes Me Hate Babies

Or, as Elisabeth would have me write, Sandra Boynton Makes Me Hate Parents.

Caveat 1: I admit that sometimes I have no taste.  Case in point, I hate The Big Lebowski.  I find it stupid, unfunny and basically pointless.  I hear other people think it's great.  They're wrong, of course, but that's their opinion.

Caveat 2: I'm about to criticize a bunch of gifts.  No offence is meant to the gift-givers, I know that this was done in good faith.  I want you to know that your gift was a) appreciated for the gesture and b) appreciated for the rant it provided me.  To be honest, I don't much remember who has given us what.

So, with that in mind, I come to Sandra Boynton.  An author I'd never heard of a few months ago and whose name I now curse.  And not just me, Henry recoils like an adder when he sees a cover of one of her books.  I've brought his reaction up with the owner of the local book store for kids who has told me he's too young to get it and will grow into them, but I feel that the way the aging process works, where a person becomes smarter over time (Until thirty and then you become your parents), this runs counter intuitive to logic and if indeed these books are for older kids, then why are they so stupidly, utterly dumb and offensive?

In all fairness, I'm sure there are stupider things.  Like toy poodles, Juggalo's and de-alcoholized beer.  But these aren't marketed to sensitive, developing brains.  People who buy toy poodles are already functionally retarded.  This is the kind of banal humour for people who thought Family Matters was piss-your-pants funny and who can help but go "Aww," whenever a toddler vomits out its catch phrase in Steve Guttenberg's latest attempt at prime-time relevance.

I thank you all who gave us these books as gifts but they are atrocious and poor old Henry hates them.  The literally make him cry.  They are also horribly morally suspect.  Case in point:

Blue Hat, Green Hat.  In which a retarded turkey in unable to dress itself properly.  It puts on clothes in inappropriate ways and is last seen dressed in too many layers, diving into a swimming pool to presumably drown while all the other better dressed animals who know how to put their clothes on properly, watch on in empty stoned silence.

Throughout this book, the animals gaze into nothingness, do not attempt to help the unfortunate who has crossed their paths and through their passivity let him die.

The Turkey is portrayed as a species (As opposed to the elephant, moose or small cute furry whatever) to be imbecilic, lemming-like and disposable.

But Not The Hippopotamus is another exercise in exclusion as it tells the tale of animals having fun with each other while either ignoring or being blatantly racist to the titular hippopotamus.  Page after page it stares at animals doing fun things until finally they invite him to join them.

The punchline is that as soon as the hippopotamus is allowed into the circle, an armadillo it excluded from it.  Any opportunity to turn this book into a message of inclusivity or to contextualize why it's not okay to ostracize someone is lost for a cheap joke that actually makes light of shyness/exclusion/ favouritism/ racism.  I don't want to go so far as to say the book actually encourages racism but Ms. Boynton has, according to Wikipedia, written more than forty book and four thousand fucking greeting cards.  It's not like she's new at this or learning the ropes or this is her difficult second novel, she's literally produced thousands of works.  She either thinks racism is funny or she is the stupidest children's writer since Chuck VonNasty wrote It's Okay to Poke Your Eye Out, It'll Grow Back in Time For Supper Now Smile and Eat Your Plate of Broken Glass.

But I digress...

Horns To Toes And In Between is about three inbred uncles who are also monsters.  They sing about the parts of their bodies, tickle each other and then dance around, celebrating their morbid obesity.

This is a lazy book with a lazy story and lazy pictures.  It commits the cardinal sin of children's books in being utterly forgettable.  I honestly didn't know we had it for at least a month.

It also features Ms. Boynton's most irritating flourish: The weird circular belly button.  I don't know if it's meant to be cute but it draws unnecessary attention to her creatures nether-regions as well as looks like a sadistic cork lodged in the bellies of all her cute kiddy animals; ready to pop at any moment and spill out their guts until the inbred uncles of Horns to Toes are little more that carpets of a middle-class couples basement.

Belly Button Book! (Yes, that's the title.  No "the" and the exclamation point is thrust in there, forcing you to think this is a fun and/or exciting literary trip you're about to embark upon) feels like an aggressive attempt to make your kid cute by calling it's belly button "bee bo."  This is the kind of humour for stunted adults who think that Saturday's Hi and Lois strip is Bill Hicks level cutting-edge satire.

This is a book geared for older kids (You know this because it's slightly larger than all her other books) to force them to act like younger kids.

Here, the hippopotamus (No longer an ostracized freak) acts like a freak that I'd like to ostracize by devoting its time to loving their so-called bee bo's and going to bee bo positive beaches where they sing songs about their bee bo.  There is a level of forced saccharine jokey wholesomeness that is thrust down your throat throughout this book that I'm left feeling hostile towards Ms. Boynton.  The book itself is pointless.  It's just an attempt to push a catch-phrase that is neither witty or clever or makes any sense at all.

Opposites was one of the, if not the, first books that Henry received and I had high hopes for it.  Just page after page of opposite stuff.  You know, hot/ cold.  On/ off.  Anterior/ posterior.  With corresponding pictures.  The thing that makes this book go from good idea to bad (See what I did there?) is that the words and pictures are such a jumble that it's hard for a kid to know what is going on.

It's here that I might think that the lady in the bookstore had a point.  Maybe Ms. Boynton's books are indeed for kids a mite older then Henry.  But if this is so then why is she writing about such simple notions?  Why is she making dumbed down books for dumbed down kids (Who's parents see nothing wrong with a quaint touch of racism)?  It literally baffles me.

The final book I need to address is The Going To Bed Book.  Just to show I'm not a spiteful jerk, I will admit when I enjoy something.  Even The Big Lebowski made me laugh.  Twice.

This book worked for a while.  Henry enjoyed it and we enjoyed reading it to him.  The thing is, unlike Sandra Boynton's other books, this book is a poem with pictures and the thing that he clues in on is the cadence and rhythm of the voice reading to him.  He's too young to grasp the pictures (Hell, he's too young to grasp anything) but he's able to bounce along with the voice saying stuff.  This is absent in all Susan Boynton's other books (That we own) and were they there, then perhaps Henry would like them as well.

Personally, I don't care for her artistic style (Though literally millions would disagree) but it's irritating that she doesn't ever vary it to reflect the age range that she's writing for.  If the words, pictures and layouts changed for a child's capacity to understand, I might feel very differently.  But they're not.  They're too complicated for young kids and too simple for older ones.  They feel like they've been written by someone who's never had, raised or met children but has a kind of vague understanding of what children are and has geared a career towards that misunderstanding.

In Summary

I'm coming off a fairly successful weekend where I was able to take Henry to his first petting zoo and where we all went on a long trip to the beach yesterday which for the first time, he seems to have really engaged with, playing on swings and waving at pretty much anybody, so I figure that I should re-engage with the blog a little bit.  It also helps that the work on my office is finally finished and the most expensive room in the house is devoted to video games and aurally offensive music.

My analysis of the works or Beatrix Potter is still on hold.  Reading her books to him as he falls asleep continues to be a challenge due to a combination of the sparseness of her writing as well as a lack of rhythm while reading out loud.  Henry has had several colds and flus so I decided that since he was spending so much time in bed, I should start reading him something with a little more substance which lead me to The Thief of Always by Clive Barker.

I got this book during my Stephen King/ Clive Barker phase and remember being disappointed that it was a book for children.  I'd been hoping for the standard scary/ freaky/ violent fare I was gobbling up at the time.  I also devoured the book very quickly and loved it.

Reading this with new eyes, I was surprised to find so much going on in it.  The entire first act serves as a warning to children about how easy it is to fall into the hand of a stranger and be seduced my false promises away from your parents.

The second act traces the shift from the fantasy of how life would be without rules to the horror of discovering you've been kidnapped and cannot escape to return to your old life.  It ends quite darkly where the young protagonist gets to experience the horror his family has has to go through in losing a child.

Of course, this is a kids book so it is in the third act that the young man decides to regain control of his life and make amends, you get the sense that things are going to turn out alright however, as Mr. Barker has already gone down a rather dark route earlier, there is the niggling question as to just how happy the ending is going to be.

This is definitely a book for ten year olds (This point is reenforced several times throughout the story as well as on the flap) and can be quite scary if you're so inclined. The illustrations by Clive Barker add to the overall creepiness (e.g., fat naked lady melting with her eyeballs dangling from their stalks obscuring her breasts).  But with the books theme of illusions and the constant reminder that much of what is happening is not real, it should be a good kind of scary.  The final act is also dedicated to the concept of overcoming you fears so there is a nice little catharsis there as well.

Hollywood has been dithering about making this a movie for years and I find it a pity this has not come to pass.  It's also made me curious about Clive Barker's Abarat series of children's books and, should Henry have any interest in The Thief of Always when he's older, will certainly consider picking these up for him as well.

Next up, I read Henry The Little Prince.  To this day I'm still frustrated that the book really has nothing to do with this:

Which is a shame because then I would like the it.  This was my first time reading it to the  end, nt in spite of doing at least two book reports on it in my school days.  Both times I reached the same point and never finished reading the book (Granted, i was reading it in French) and wrote the book report based on my knowledge of the first thirty or so pages and the cartoon.  It's an interesting reflection of the school system that on both reports I got a fairly good grade, considering that I was a million miles off with regard to what happens in the rest of the book.  Namely that at the end, The little Prince does not go off into space and have further adventures; he gets bitten by a snake and dies.

I suppose a case could be made using the Life of Pi Defence that the book is open ended and you can decide that The Little Prince flies through space through the power of death but I find this is a stretch of the imagination even for a book that gets away with the idea that there is a 20' diameter plant upon which lives a drunk with a never-ending supply of alcohol.  Really, M. de Saint-Exupery, you paint such a wonderful picture of Heaven.

Any cynicism I have for the book is primarily due to an awareness that there is something going on, some kind of message in all The Little Princes adventures, that is entirely lost on me.  Other that the religious ones.  Those hit you over the head like you're in a whack-a-mole.

With that done, I have now moved on to reading Henry Treasure Island.  We're only three chapters in and I doubt we'll get much farther.  He's reached a stage where we need to retrain him to fall asleep on his own and if we're not doing that, he's so zonked out by the time we put him to bed that there's no point reading to him.  Which is unfortunate because I was pleasantly surprised by the first three chapters.  It was not the dry, dated kind of story I was expecting and trucked along nicely with lots of pirate-speak.  I'll keep at it for now for my own entertainment and should Henry go through a pirate phase, I imagine this will sate his interest nicely.

As for me, I've just wrapped up ShadowMarch by Tad Williams.  I don't want to turn this into a Game of Thrones rant but in relation to my thoughts on this book, but it feels inevitable.

This is the third novel of a four part series originally conceived to be a television series.  It was, however, never picked up.  This is unfortunate because George R. R. Martin wrote A Song of Fire and Ice after reading tad William's first fantasy series, Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and realizing that you can write epic fantasy while exploring adult themes in mature ways.

It frustrates me that HBO has picked up a still unfinished fantasy series  in which the author take five-plus years to finish a novel, while Tad Williams is a known quantity who, at the very least, has established that he can finish an epic and tie together all the lose ends.

As it stands, the Shadowmarch series is on track to better Memory, Sorrow and Thorn.  This being the third book in what is essentially one very long novel, he continues to pick up immediately where the last one ended and entirely lack an ending or resolution of any single plot point.  It's infuriating yet I love that the book just stops and you have to wait for the next one but, if you're going to write a single massive story, i think this is the way to do it, rather than to shoehorn in needless plot developments which do not serve the plot just to give your readers some satisfaction.  I can think of no greater cliffhanger that to have the story simply stop and have to wait a year to pick up where you left off.

Next time: A gratuitous attempt to post more than one entry in the month of June.

The Tale of Three Bad Parents

Part 8: The Tale of Tom Kitten:

True confession time: I always thought that the story of Tom Kitten was that he over ate and bursts out of his clothes.  (In all fairness, Tom Kitten is described as very fat but he's never portrayed as gluttonous or lazy.)

What its lazy is his mother who is more concerned about putting on a good tea when company comes 'round.  In preparation for said company, she gets her kids ready in their good clothes and leaves them to play outside unsupervised so she can get something to eat.

Kids being kids, they play and Tom Kitten, being dressed inappropriately by his mother, loses his clothes.

Then along comes the frankly, rather creepy, adult Puddle-Ducks who, instead of being helpful, tease the kittens, dress up in and then steal Tom Kitten's clothes, leaving him naked.  Weird.

So the kids go home and, naturally, their mother takes no responsibility in her poor choices (A common trait of abusive parenting) and punishes her kids instead of losing face in front of her friends and be able to keep up the appearance that they are a healthy, functioning family.  The kids act up again and the story ends in an unsatisfying way with the promise of more books about the antics of the kittens.

The interesting thing about this book is the coda at the end where the creepy Puddle-Ducks lose the stolen clothes in the pond and Beatrix Potter attempts a little mythology creation, explaining that the Puddle-Ducks are still looking for them and that's why ducks bob their head under water.

Part 9: The Tale of Jemima Puddle-Duck

Jemima Puddle-Duck is quite possible the most clueless and unlikeable 'hero' that I've ever encountered in a book.  Her outright stupidity is jaw dropping when you consider her dedication to bring and presumably raise a bunch of children all on her own.

So basically, Jemima really wants to have kids but she's got nowhere to lay her eggs.  One day she comes across fox who is a moustache-twirling caricature of a villain.  Jemima not only fails to grasp that this is a villain she is interacting with, she fails to grasp the he's not just a fox but an animal, assuming instead that he's a friendly gentleman.

With the 'gentleman's' help, Jemima is shown a great place to build her nest: In a shed filled with feathers.  This would be like being pregnant and invited over to someones house for a meal and discovering that their dining room is decorated with human hair and skin.  Jemima thinks it's a great place to lay her eggs.

So she lays them and the 'gentleman' suggests that she should bring some ingredients to make a large feast before the dull process of incubating the eggs begins.  He suggests he will make her a tasty omelet if she gathers the correct ingredients for it.  So just to contextualize this: You're pregnant and sitting in the strangers dining room which is decorated with hair and skin and he tells you he's going to serve up fetus stew.  If you were Jemima Puddle-Duck you'd say "Yum yum!  I'll help you cook it."

(In all fairness page thirty-nine contains what must be one of literature's most understated sentences: "Jemima Puddle-Duck was a simpleton.")

During the process of gathering the ingredients, she mentions to a dog what's going on and he, possessing the keen intelligence of a dog, realizes something's up and gathers some buddies.

As the action comes to a head, the fox gets nasty and impatient towards Jemima and, while she checks in on her eggs, the dog posse shows up, chases off the fox and, in an orgy of bloodlust, eats all of Jemima's eggs.

Jemima's escorted back to the farm where she has learned nothing, lays more and only four of the chicks survive.  And they all live happily ever after.

Part 10: The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies


Benjamin Bunny is all grown up, married his cousin and has had so many children that they are devoid of individual personalities and the couple has to sponge off the work and generosity of their family members in order to get by.

When they're not able to mooch off Peter Rabbit (Who appears to have gotten over his PTSD, become a farmer and married a fat little thing in a pink frock), Benjamin bunny takes his family out to the dump to eat garbage.  Specifically, fermented cabbage which, apparently, has 'soporific' effects.

So after he takes his family out and they all get high after eating garbage, they all pass out and/or laze about in a drugged out stupor.  Benjamin puts a paper bag on his head and has a chat with a mouse, not noticing that the farmer has come along, found his children and popped them in a burlap sack with the intention of skinning them and cutting off their heads and turning them into food and clothes.

Luckily his cousin-wife has not taken part in the orgy of drug-taking and comes along, realizes something is wrong and with the help of the mouse, saves her children, replacing them in the sack with vegetables.

They follow the farmer, who seems rather inbred himself,  to his home where they hear about what his intentions were with the bunnies and their skins.  Then for no reason the youngest bunny is badly hurt by a flying gourd and they go home without learning any lessons.

The helpful mouse is rewarded that Christmas with some rabbit fur outfits.  So I suppose the littlest bunny ended up expiring from his injuries and his parents were thoughtful enough to turn their dead baby into clothes.  The end.

Book Review

Imperial Bedrooms by Bret Easton Ellis

Imperial Bedroom, aka Less Than Zero 2, will likely have two stand out moments for most readers: The first ten pages and the last ten.

In the first ten, The whole narrative of Bret Easton Ellis' universe is given a clever metatextual shake up which acknowledges the veracity and fiction of both Less Than Zero the novel and Less Than Zero the movie and then creates a third (Or fourth, depending on how many fictional Bret Easton Ellis' you think are out there.) 'real' universe in which Imperial Bedrooms takes place.  It's a bit of a stroke of genius where he is able to create both a stand alone novel and a sequel to a book and a movie based on a book that deviated from the plot and main themes of the novel it's based on, wildly.

In the final ten pages there is a sudden return to the kind of sadism and violence that Ellis is well known for and which had been otherwise absent from the rest of the novel.  It's jarring and horrible and proof that, as far as I'm concerned, Bret Easton Ellis should be considered one of the world's leading writers of horror, not just contemporary fiction.

In between these bookends is a nasty little tale of societal paranoia that made me feel like like I was reading a posthumous J.G. Ballard novel.  Clay returns to L.A. to cast a movie he's written and almost immediately strange things start happening: Anonymous texts, threatening cars following his every move, someone breaking into his condo and the sudden appearance of a mysterious would-be actress who really wants a part in his movie.  As Clay tries to hold it together, all the while descending deeper and deeper into alcoholism, cracks start to appear that hint at a much darker past that he has let on

Imperial Bedrooms doesn't quite skewer society as his past novels have done but it follows Lunar Park's lead in telling a nasty little tale of psychological horror while drawing attention to the darkest recesses of Hollywood, the backbone of our culture and what kind of people inhabit it.

Click here for a taste of the mood of the book and assess how much of the devil lives in you.  (I'm 100% evil and already dead inside, according to it.  But then, I didn't need a website to tell me that!)

Freedom

The other night Elisabeth and I had a conversation we've had a few time before, centring on how it seems that new parents seem to be under the impression that raising children is something no ones ever done before.  While I think I'm a bit more forgiving than Elisabeth on the subject, I do think that it's interesting that a lot of attention seems to be given to the idea that this is the first generation of kids growing up with unprecedented access to technology and information; less attention is paid to the fact that this is also the first generation of parents raising kids with this kind of access too.

If you compound this with the dichotomous fact - I feel fairly certain I can use the word 'fact' here - that our generation will be the first to have a lower standard of living than our parents (And that more than likely the following generations are going to have, if not increasingly lower standards, radically different realities.), it seems that all this weird arrogance that new parents have may be related to a darker zeitgeist that has yet to be acknowledged.

This sort of ties into my thoughts about finishing Jonathan Franzen's newest novel, Freedom.  In all honesty, I don't mind if he only publishes one novel a decade if those novels are able to weave together such insightful and venomous deconstructions of the spirit of the age (I refuse to use 'zeitgeist' again out of fear of appearing too pretentious) into family dramas which explore the damage that history does to a person.

I'm embarrassed that I let the book sit on my shelf as long as I did before finally giving it a shot.  I'm also not too sure what the sales are like (I suppose we'll have to wait for the paperback to come out to find out) but am fairly sure that they would be tripled had the setting taken place somewhere exotic like India.  People would be able to talk about the culture, how barbaric things are, how his descriptions make you wish you were there, and how foreign yet relatable the characters were.  Instead he writes about the American mid-west with the kind of you-are-there exactitude of Rohinton Mystery that I think would make a lot of readers uncomfortable at how close to home (and below the belt) Franzen comes.  I'm going to totally rip off CBC radio and say "If you're only going to read two books this year, this should be one of them."

The Clothes Make the Manimal

Part 7: The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher

It has taken me long enough but I've just realized what an important role clothing plays in these books.  There's a lot of attention paid to exactly what each animal is wearing to the point of numerous redundancies and non-sequitors.  It has been established thus far that clothes equal personhood and should one of the animals lose their clothes (As seems to happen quite a lot.), they become animal and prey to the dangers of the world.

The animalistic predators are aware of this in Ms. Potters world and seem determined to first disrobe their prey and then eat them.  I now invite all sorts of perverse interpretations of this, considering especially that the victims are young innocents.

Luckily, however, we don't have to go there today as Mr. Jeremy Fisher is your eccentric uncle who lives in the countryside and smells of damp potatoes, has a tendency to drink too much whisky and fires his shotgun at things that irritate him like Mrs. Hiffle's Pomeranian.

Mr. Jeremy Fisher decides to catch some fish as he's having some friends over for dinner, including Sir Isaac Newton (Who just happens to be... a newt!  Comedy thy name in Beatrix.).  As always, things don't go according to plan as Mr. Jeremy Fisher deals with increasingly dangerous situations.

Luckily for him, he's wearing clothes.  Early on a fish tried to nibble a hole in one of his rubbers, a clear indication that the predators lurking behind every bullrush want this old coot naked for their sinister machinations.  When he manages to evade all the attempts to disrobe him, a pike gets fed up and swallows him whole.  Well, not quite.  Thanks to the bad taste of Mr. Jeremy Fisher's mackintosh, he gets spit out and is able to make it home in one pice (Though his clothes slightly less so) to meet his guests for an unsatisfactory dinner.

Like Peter Rabbit before him, clothing has saved Mr. Jeremy Fisher's life from what would have otherwise been a blip in the ecological web that we call life and he is able to go home and be a bad host.

I Dream of Tiggy-Winkle

Part 6: The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle.

Say it ain't so, are the Tales winning me over?  Yes and no.  This one was fairly straight forward.  A little girl loses her  handkerchiefs and embarks on a magical quest to find them.  A little bland by today's standards.  Bland by early twentieth century standards too, I imagine.  Throughout the story Lucie is fairly non-plussed about losing them.  After embarking upon a non-journey to find them, she discovers Mammy I mean Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle living in the side of a hill making her living as a maid to all the other animals.

I've noticed that the books are steadily becoming easier to read.  I'm not sure if it's because I've learned the voice to read them in or that Ms. Potter is becoming a more adept writer.  I suspect the latter because there is much less chaff attached to the stories.  The Tale of Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle does have quite a bit of chaff - do we really need page after page of various animals dirty laundry?  But it works - Yes we do need it because it continues the tales of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny (Shrunken jacket; oniony handkerchief) and makes mention of various other named animals whose names I've noticed have tales attached to them.  It's here I can see Ms. Potter's mythology is starting to take root.

The end however, leaves something to be desired.  As a twist ending (Spoiler: It was all a dream!) it's kind of played out.  It would have been much more interesting if, in fact there really was a four foot tall hedgehog dry cleaner in the side of a hill which, ironically (Double spoiler: It wasn't a dream!) there is.  See?  There's just something not working there.  Why does Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle get to be a giant animal who wears clothes and talks to humans when all the other animals are fairly straight forward and animal-like.  Granted they're anthropomorphized, but when they come into contact with humans all of a sudden they're just animals.  It doesn't make any sense that Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle exists outside that rule.

Otherwise this was a light and fairly harmless tale.  Except for the racism.

More Beatrix Potting

Part 5: The Tale of Two Bad Mice.

I really liked this tale.  I liked that Beatrix Potter created a story about a real child's dollhouse and her own pet mice.  I liked how they interacted, I liked the imagination.  I loved reading aloud the name Hunca Munca to little Henry.

But what I liked best was the murder at least one of the children of the mice.  The murders are subtle but they're there.  After the mice have vandalized the doll house and taken as much as they could back to their home, the little girl who owns it wanted her parents to buy a policemen doll to protect it.  Instead the parents buy a mouse trap.  And there, bright as day, the accompanying image shows Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca with their four children staring ominously and the wooden box.

Immediately the story switches to the mice engaging in indentured servitude to the doll house and the dolls therein.  The question is, what has caused the sudden shift?  Just the threat of death or something more sinister?  Were this to have been the first and only book written by Beatrix Potter, I would have assumed the threat of death alone would have cowed the little rodents into subservience.  However, based on her established record of placing young animal children in harms way, it's not unlikely that at least one of Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca's children would have paid the Ultimate Price (Which is not $19.99 in four easy payments) for the crimes of their parents.

Bad mice, indeed.

(For those who care, there a big ol' Wikipedia entry about the book.  Naturally, in order to keep by beautiful brain free from the influence of so called web scholars, I've not bothered to read it.)

Next Time: Something that's not Beatrix Potter-related.  I don't like committing so strongly to a theme.

Peter Rabbit 2: Electric Boogaloo

Part 4: The Tale of Benjamin Bunny.

The Tale of Benjamin Bunny picks up right after The Tale of Peter Rabbit.  In it, Peter Rabbit's cousin, the titular Benjamin Bunny, arrives at the Rabbit's sandy hole and we discover something very unpleasant about Ms. Rabbit, Peter's mom: She's a dealer in contraband.

You see, it was established in Peter Rabbit that the father was long dead - caught by the farmer and turned into food - and as such, Ms. Rabbit has had to find different ways to earn money, selling hats and little parcels of rabbit tobacco which Ms. Potter immediately back peddles on, saying that at rabbit tobacco is really lavender.  Ri-i-i-i-ght.

One is led to wonder just how potent this 'lavender' really is, since life seems to be quite normal at the Rabbit's, however Peter is still a gibbering mess: naked, wrapped in a pink handkerchief, and cowering out back while life goes on all tickety-boo for Flopsy, Mopsy and Cotton-tail those bitches.

So Benjamin, it turns out, is quite brave (And not just because he wears clogs!) and takes pity on Peter and recommending they get his clothes back, thus restoring his dignity and, one would hope, a place in his home.  As luck would have it, the farmer had gone out for the day and the two rabbits get Peter's  clothes and Benjamin builds his cousin's confidence back up by encouraging him to eat as he now timidly wanders around, a shell of a living creature.

And, since this is Beatrix Potter, we need something to happen to scar the protagonists so up pops the farmers cat (Once again, cat = evil) and chases them.  They hide under a basket which the cat then sits on for five hours causing the rabbits such emotional turmoil that Ms. Potter states explicitly in the text that she can't draw what went on in the darkness of that basket.

As luck would have it, Benjamin Bunny's father (Also named Benjamin Bunny.  The imagination on display when it comes to names is just earth shattering.) shows up - and this, I think, is key - smoking rabbit tobacco and in a bizarre display of violence that would make Charlie Sheen proud, attacks the cat, beats up the cat and then beats his son and nephew and sends them home where Peter is reintegrated back into the family thanks to getting his clothes back and will no longer have to starve to death in the Rabbit family's back yard.

Also, I think there should be a rule that all children's stories should end with a drug crazed family member coming out of nowhere and beating the shit out of everybody.  It would make Goodbye Moon so much more interesting.

The Tail. Or, of Gloucester

Part 3: The Tailor of Gloucester.

While reading this, the third book in Ms. Potter's magnum opus, I couldn't help but be reminded of its shocking similarity two two other great works of art:  Halloween 3: Season of the Witch and A Clockwork Orange.

Like Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, The Tailor of Gloucester takes a series of precedents established in the first two stories and then goes in a completely different direction for the third outing.  In this case, it is a sudden shift from child-like animals living in the woods being traumatized by the realities of the world to the story of a tailor in Gloucester (You've got to hand it to Ms. Potter how she cleverly links the titles of her books to their content) who is tormented to the point of poverty, illness and insanity by the pettiness of his cat because he ruined its meal (Quite a realistic plot, if you ask me.  No sarcasm intended.  Everyone knows cats are evil.).  Whereas in the Halloween series it is a shift from an indestructible William Shatner mask wearing serial killer hunting babysitters to androids harnessing the power of Stonehenge into Halloween masks that will kill children (Also a surprisingly plausible plot, if you ask me.)

Like A Clockwork Orange, Ms. Potter for some reason decided to write The Tailor of Gloucester in a fictional language, not too dissimilar to Nadsat with odd words and terms like 'paduasoy,' 'green worsted chenille,' 'ribbons for mobs' and frequent references to 'tippets.'

So the moral of this story - After freeing a bunch of mice his cat had trapped, the tailor's cat tortures him which means that the tailor won't be able to sew a coat for the soon to be wed mayor of Gloucester.  As such, the freed rodents work together to sew the coat while the tailor is being tortured.  The cat only stops when he realizes that he's not going to get fed.  The tailor is happy to discover that a bunch of house mice are as good or better tailors than he is, puts on the finishing touches on the coat and becomes rich and famous.  His cat doesn't learn any lesson and the tailor employs the mice in his shop in a weird sort of indentured servitude to sew the finishing touches on his coats - is, ah...  That the moral of the story is, um... that cats are evil?

I suspect the true moral, much like the true moral of Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, is to go back to what works in part four.  Which she did.

Beatrix Potting

Part 2: The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin.

In essence, the is a respect-your-elders-or-face-the-consequences morality story.  In a nutshell (Get it?  Nudge, nudge.), while all the other squirrels are working hard collecting nuts and paying respect to the old owl who guards said nuts, Squirrel Nutkin is acting childish, avoiding work, telling nonsensical rhymes, playing games and generally disrespecting the owl.  This goes on until the owl has enough and decides to eat him instead of one of the offerings.

But, the tale does not end there, Beatrix Potter interjects.  It has a happy ending:  Squirrel Nutkin escapes from the owl by snapping his tale in half and being scarred for life, no longer able to speak, instead talking in broken, stuttering sounds.

Like Peter Rabbit, this is a story about an anthropomorphized animal child coming face to face with the reality of the world and embracing the natural timidity of their species.  But whereas Peter Rabbit involved nudity to achieve this end, Squirrel Nutkin ups the ante by incorporating dismemberment and post-traumatic stress.  Thus far it appears that in the world of Beatrix Potter, children are stupid, irritating things constantly on the verge of annihilation and adults are scarred husks, beaten (practically literally!) into conformity.

Pooh Thoughts

While Elisabeth was pregnant, I read Winnie The Pooh to her stomach.  I'm fairly well versed in Winnie the Pooh and didn't feel the need to comment on it.  Also, I was lazy.

With Henry's bedtime routine fairly set in stone now, I've been reading to him every night.  We plowed through Beedle the Bard fairly quickly as I wasn't very good at picking up on his I Want To Go To Bed Right Now signals and read to him for far too long.  The House on Pooh Corner has been a bit of a long slog but last night we finally got through it.  what really stood out for me was how different it was to the first book, especially as I realized while reading it that I'd never read it before.  These are my random and poorly developed thoughts on it:

1) Walt Disney ruined Pooh.  A.A. Milne's characters are so strongly realized (And linked to the original illustrations) that when reading Pooh, there's a weird dichotomy where it's easy to confuse the two interpretations.  I'm happy that I never watched the cartoons beyond the original adaptations because it would mess with my brain too much.  Like Harry Potter, this is something I'd like Henry to experience before he watches the movie (fat chance!)

2) A.A. Milne got the 'Pooh' double entendre and used it to excellent effect, never milking it.

3) While the first book is filled with the whimsy of childhood, Pooh Corner focuses on the confusion of growing up.  The animals bicker about who is smarter; Christopher Robin is absent and becoming Educated while the animals feel threatened, not just by Tigger's sudden arrival but by Pooh and Piglet's perceived stupidity.  All the while those who claim to have something other than fluff for brains come across as curmudgeonly, dull, petty and, in the end, dumb.

This is a central conceit with Pooh Corner:  There is an awareness through Christopher Robin becoming Educated that the magic is coming to an end.  The animals are petty, bicker more, have an awareness of the dangers of the world and are jealous towards each other.  These are all externalizations of the fear an adult (A.A. Milne) would project on a child growing up and seeing less and less magic in the wonders of his toys and imagination.

Pooh Corner ends on an especially depressing note with Christopher Robin trying to articulate his fears and the reality of his leaving of the forest, accompanied by Pooh's vain attempts to understand what he's not able to articulate.  In the end, Christopher Robin gives up as neither of them are able to communicate any more.  There is a final promise that Pooh will wait for him for 100 years (Which I take to mean his death - at which time he might be able to re-cnnect with his childish ways) and a coda, almost as badly tacked on as the final chapter to The Deathly Hallows which promises, almost too desperately, that things will be all right.

At least that's how I read it.

Book Review

Elisabeth picked up the complete hard cover collection of Beatrix Potter (minus two books) from our local charity shop for a grand total of thirteen bucks.  The missing volumes are winging their way over to us via Amazon.  What follows is part 1 of a 23 part series in which I review in order (And, I imagine, become increasingly dismissive of) her works.

I don't know if I've even read any of the books in their entirety before.  Mom says that I didn't like them but concedes that she was the one who didn't like them and most likely never bothered reading them to me.

Part 1: The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

It probably does the book a disservice by reading it at 4:30 in the morning after only three hours of sleep to a five month old whom you desperately want to go back to sleep but has the Let's Play look in his eyes after you've spent ten minutes changing his diaper because you're half asleep and somehow the diaper keeps getting put on backwards no matter how you turn it around.  As such, the book felt quite long.

This is a vague memory I have of Beatrix Potter's books and I'm interested to see how this stacks up to reality.

What I liked the most about this book was how Peter Rabbit's arc is from anthropomorphized young boy/ rabbit to, literally, a real rabbit.  As he loses his shoes, he goes from biped to quadruped and once he has lost his coat, he is no longer a little boy looking for adventure but a nervous rabbit facing the very real and deadly dangers of the world (As exemplified by Peter's father being caught, killed and baked into a pie earlier in the story).

So I suppose then, The Tale of Peter Rabbit is about the loss of innocence.  While his siblings are good kids and do as their told, they keep their clothes and humanity while Peter ends up sick, scared and a grown up rabbit scared of the world, aware of its dangers and to possibility of being turned into someone else's dinner.

It's also interesting to note that, according to this story, having camomile tea before bed is a bad thing yet I do this several night a week and find it quite pleasant.  Oh dear, it looks like I've lost my innocence.

Mea Culpa

Or, stupid baby books, the rant continues.

For whatever reason, Elisabeth & I have been have more child development/ parenting conversations than usual.  The usual things get covered; what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, what could be done better, too much, too little andcasting broad accusations and unfair judgements on others.  Fairly standard stuff.

The interesting thing is that it seems that in every conversation two of the following three terms come up: "The Baby Whisperer," "Penelope Leach," "What to Expect in the First Year."  Yes, the bloody baby books rear their ugly heads and control our lives once more with their infantilizing advice, digitally altered too cute to be real babies and idyllic white upper class Ikea backgrounds.  (There is something soul destroying about seeing the exact same furniture or toys in these books that we have bought for Henry.)

Caveat: Elisabeth is the one reading the books.  She continues to read them and absorb their  "knowledge."  I make fun of them and rely on her to tell me the stuff I need to know.

Aside: Infant Potty Basics by Laurie Boucke is possibly the worst thing I have ever looked at with regard to child rearing.  It encompasses all that I hate about hippies.  From it's grainy black and white photos of humourless women with bodies shaped like nylons stuffed with cotton and personalities like yogurt, holding inbred babies destined to grow up to be stock brokers or mormons, to it's Everyone can do it! attitude without concrete guidelines as to actually do it, to what amounts to the praising of poverty, the encouragement to raise as first world child as though you were living in the third world and the attempt to normalize the wearing of assless chaps by toddlers, this is something I just can't get behind.  In a nutshell, it's a book more interested in spreading a washed up ideology by conservative people confused into thinking their liberal because instead of using diapers, they take their 4 month old to the park, whip off its pants and let it have a pee off the park bench.  Practical stuff when it's -20 with a windchill.  If you want to order the book, click here.  Laurie Boucke also publishes a diverse selection of books which include... Beating up Daddy... Killer Pics... and Limericks of the Heart (And Lungs).  This one is my favourite:

Did you know that the first time you smoke

In addition to making you choke

It burns your lung hairs?

And there aren't any spares -

Healthy cilia make those germs croak.

But I digress...

There has to be something said for accumulated knowledge.  In one on Our favourite programmes, G.B.H., there's a scene near the end where Michael Palin addresses a room full of very misguided revolutionary socialists and brings up the core problem with ideology.  To paraphrase: "You've only read one book.  You need to read a variety of books, and then decide."

This, in essence is my issues the, yes I can't leave her alone, The Baby Whisperer.  Out of all the other books we've (Elisabeth) has read, this is the only one to actually tell you not to read other books.  Not to become well rounded.  Not to dare consider anything other than her highly structured routine schedule whatever.

Loath as I am to admit it, The Baby Whisperer has given us good advice.  Tips on things to look out for, what to be aware of, as well as some pretty good strategies at how to train Henry.  But so has Penelope Leach.  And so has Heidi Murkoff and her think tank of What to Expecters.  I'm open to advice and looking for information.  But when one person tells you to listen to them and only to them, it's clear that they're no longer offering you advice but an agenda.

Book Review

MEDIUM RAW by Anthony Bourdain

A funny thought occurred to me about half way through Medium Raw: 'What's the point?'  As a memoir Bourdain is all over the place.  As a meditation on foodie culture, Bourdain is so involved in it, he doesn't feel the need to to explain exactly who Emeril, Otto, Sandra or Ms. Kitty are.  There's an assumption that you've read Kitchen Confidential, followed his shows and read his articles that borderlines on utter arrogance.

And then there's the question as to who his target audience is.  Readers of his previous book?  Yes.  Obsessives about his TV show?  Yes.  Someone interested in food?  Well, not really.  His book is like that joke:

Q: How many hipsters does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: It's an obscure number you probably haven't heard of.

Much like Christopher Hitchen's God is Not Great, Medium Raw is written by a fascinating person: Engaging, intelligent, someone whose presence exudes gravitas and who is able to argue his point home with a tenacity that cannot help but to polarize.  But, like God is Not Great, I was left wondering what exactly the point was, other than to provide a few crates of ammunition for the converted.  Anyone questioning, curious or, God forbid, out of the loop is not invited to the dinner party.

That said, I really enjoyed the book.  It was engaging, interesting and rife with unrealized potential.  If, perhaps, the goal was to convert others through tantalizing hors d'oeuvres, then perhaps he's succeeded.  I for one will be filling in the Bourdain shaped hole in my life.

They also made a movie about the book but, based on the trailer, looks like they took some liberties:

The moral of the story: If you're a vegetarian you're probably a racist who hates humanity.

Book Review

MATTER by Iain M. Banks

So I caved and read another Culture novel. Mr. Banks continues to write the most convoluted science fiction that I've read in a long time. At least this time around he kept things linear. Matter follows a post-post-9/11 mindset where the analysis is no longer about the clash between fundamentalism & secularism but with the notions of stewardship of less advanced civilizations.

To keep things complicated, Banks has four layers of stewardship (Plus another peripheral one) in order to explore the different possibilities of the dynamics, and sources of abuse that can (and inevitably will) arrive when you remove freedom from a society and impose laws that don't evolve through the natural course of a civilizations development.

Plot-wise, it's your typical sword & sorcery dilemma: The king's been murdered and the princes are on the run from the baddie who seized the throne and are looking for justice. This conflict is juxtaposed with crises of an intergalactic scale, balancing out the human emotions with practical issues of a much grander scale while destroying every stereotype of a science fiction/ fantasy novel.

The book meanders and is a lot better in concept than in execution (Which is kind of the point), however the final act is so amazing it's well worth the schlep. Banks officially says a big Fuck you to the expectations of the reader and comes up with one on the biggest downers of an ending that I've read in a while. While it's not a particularly big downer, he deliberately denies the reader catharsis through the final journeys of the main characters, maybe provides a twist that (possibly) forces you to re-think the motivations of main characters and convolutes things so much that you'd better have paid a hell of a lot attention to the whole book to be able to grasp the repercussions of everything that happens.

The moral of the story: You are even less meaningless that you suspect.

Oh yeah, the blog

I guess life got in the way a little. Mind you, for the last month, things have been fairly quiet as we wrap up our pre-Henchel lives so I've got no excuse whatsoever.

As for the prenatal classes, things only got worse. The 200$ they cost would have been better spent on tacks and bubblegum.

We went to one more class; the 'fun' one where we did massage and partner-supported poses for the labouring woman. Things went to hell early on when pretty much every suggested massage involved applying tremendous direct pressure to the woman's lower back. On top of the general idiocy involved in doing such a thing, E also has lower back pain with made doing such doctor recommended activities even more dangerous.

We skipped out on the baby bath class, assuming that the half dozen or so parenting books we own, combined with the power of the Internets at our finger-tips would provide us with guidance enough. Besides, the way things were going at the TEGH, they would likely have recommended bathing your newborn in turpentine and drying them with 80-grit sandpaper.

In other blog-related news, I read Jonathan Coe's The House of Sleep. If I was doing a review I'd probably write something trite like "Jonathan Coe is the best author you've never read." But I'm not writing a review. I am, however going to write that it is really, really good. Funny, dark, witty, serious, sad, all the things you want. It also avoids getting into his politics (Which all the other novels of his that I've read seem to do.) for good or ill. Since I agree with his politics, I kind of missed them. The most clever thing about the book is how at once it is your irritating well-plotted X connects to Y which in turn is why Z did this with the kind of poetic justice that does not exist in the real world but also has numerous (Generally hilarious) asides which do nothing to move the plot forward (Pointing out the randomness of life) which balances out the Look-at-me-I'm-so-cleverness of the novel.

I haven't watched any new movies because Blockbuster is about to go bankrupt and gouging its customers. I'm too uppity to rent movies from the library. This will change once Henchel is born and E & I are poor (again).

As this is likely to be my last week as a not-father, I will endeavour to post one entry a day until Henchel flops out. Unlikely, I know but it'll be good practise.
For something.
I guess.

Book Reviews

DOWN IN THE WOODS by Nicola Smee

I hate these kinds of children's books. So do children, perhaps because this was the only image for Down in the Woods that I could find on the Internets. I even went as far as the third 'o' in Gooooooooogle Images.

But why do I hate this book, you ask. Well, I answer. It's because there's not an iota of conflict in it. Just a bunch of stuff that happens and everyone gets along and then it's over. The art is as bland as the synopsis. I was reduced to reading in in my creepiest Mark Heap voice to keep things interesting.

The moral of the story: Don't stress about anything because everything will be great and there will be a picnic.

HOP ON POP by Dr. Seuss

I like Hop on Pop. It starts out as gibberish and slowly builds its own logic so that by the end, you're reading a book. It's like a sped up version of a child discovering language, starting with nonsensical rhyming couplets and building towards simple sentences, it slowly primes a toddlers brain to understand the more complicated bits at the end. I'm sure someone smarter than me figured this out a long time ago and said it better.

The drawings are pretty good too.

The moral of the story: Your parents are smarter than you.