« | Main | Notes on Badiou, D&G, and the new antiliberation movement »
December 15, 2004
Cousin [R]ick Comes to Stay, or The Land of the Topsy Turvy
In the Children's Section of the Bookshop. Illustration & Sexual Politics in 21st Century Britain.
YES:
NO:
First Book: New edition of Enid Blyton's "The Magic Faraway Tree" (children climb tree, meet magical people who live in it, climb up through the clouds with them to have adventures in the different lands, some nice, some frightening, that pass by the top of the tree [make sure you don't get trapped up there when the land moves on, though]). With the increasingly familiar sickening feeling that my childhood is being systematically pulverized by an imbecile marketing army, I note that the charming illustrations (Gerry Embleton's detailed, appropriately twisty, foresty drawings) been replaced by awful characterless crap tossed off in a third-rate illustrator's lunchbreak ("I'll just slap some white airbrush around the title to make it look magical-like, then I'm off daan the pub"). Trying to be liberal, saying to myself that this is probably utterly unjustified nostalgia, each generation has their own images (but truly, will anyone ever look back fondly on technicist CGI monstrosities like Shrek?), I then notice also that 'Cousin Dick' has been renamed throughout as 'Cousin Rick', presumably because a"modern" publisher would be ashamed to let a child read the word 'Dick' for fear that they'd undergo a paroxysm of giggling from which they'd never recover, or perhaps of not appearing sufficiently 'street' for da kids? Senseless, pointless meddling. Lamentable pre-emptive cowardice. Total lack of respect for an author who has served the publishing industry well for almost a century; and insulting condescension to her audience (would they do this to an author whose books were purchased by any other section of the reading public? "Moby Rick", perhaps? I don't think so).
Second Book: 'The Guide to Snogging and Shagging' offers advice to kids on oral and anal sex using a friendly and accessible vocabulary.
Thank Dust for Philip Pullman, who offers more sophistication in character and concept than 90% of 'adult' fiction, showing that childhood has not yet been totally eclipsed by its multitude of political templates.
Posted by undercurrent at December 15, 2004 09:57 PM