A Bright Side if You Look for One

Years ago, someone posted a prompt/challenge at a writing site, beginning with a photo of a neglected, abandoned house and asking writers for a short "flash" story using five of a list of words that seemed chosen to suggest a depressing story. A horror story, even, like this rather clever one:

https://writinginnorthnorfolk.com/2017/01/07/tearing-down-the-house/

Looking at the picture, though, I think of all the little towns in "flyover country" that have been abandoned because a factory closed. A determined couple could see this as the start of a cheerful story. I, having some good memories of remodelling homes as half of a couple, see this picture as positively erotic.

[Photo is in the public domain, so far as I know.]

Five words from the list: abandon, abundance, axe, disappear, love

"What luck to get these two fixer-uppers together for such a price," Jill said, squeezing Jack's hand. "I love it, I love it, I love it!" 

"Whoever abandoned it wasn't thinking of abundance," Jack agreed. "The smaller house is a wreck inside, but it should be ready for us to move into by the time Junior gets married."

"Eww ick! No kissing!" Junior yipped from the back seat. "Those yellow walls are just begging for an axe. Can I make them disappear? Please?"

Memes That Remind You of a Favorite Show or Movie?

Say what? I don't have a "meme garden." But let's see what Google can do today...a movie and a dash of snark...

 

And a happy, brain-restful Thanksgiving weekend to all...for those going offline for the weekend today, a tip from this web site: Try to find out one brand-new thing about each relative that you didn't know before. "That she's even fatter this year" and "That he's a stubborn wingnut" do not count. Make a list: name of relative, new fun fact--their favorite song, funniest childhood memory story, all-time favorite car model, anything you can think of them to ask them about that maintains a festive mood. 

If you liked these memes, check out everyone else's at http://www.longandshortreviews.com/miscellaneous-musings/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-for-november-22-2023/ . I laughed. 

Book Review: King of the Wind

Title: King of the Wind

Author: Marguerite Henry

Date: 1948

Publisher: Rand McNally

ISBN: 0-590-45316-5 (Scholastic paperback)

Length: 192 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Wesley Dennis

Quote: “[S]elect six of the most perfect steeds in the royal stables. They will be a gift to His Majesty, Louis XV, the boy King of France.”

There’s just one problem with using the history of the horse known as Godolphin Arabian, or Godolphin Barb, as an inspirational animal story for children: It’s an adult story. To make a novel for children out of it Marguerite Henry had not only to invent a little boy who not only lives with a disability but never seems to grow up or change his clothes, but also to alter the pivotal moment in the horse’s own life in such a way that the inspirational consequences have to be narrated thirdhand.

The broad outline of the story needed no changing, just a little fictional embroidery. History records that in the eighteenth century Sultan Mulai Ismael of Morocco sent six fine Arabian race horses to France for racing and crossbreeding. At the time Europeans were trying to breed fast race horses, but the fashion was for breeding big, heavy, thickset animals (of all species, actually). The preferred types of horses were the ancestors of today's Clydesdales and Percherons. Beside them even healthy, well fed Arabian horses looked small and thin. And these horses, apparently, weren’t well fed when they got to France. Apparently a greedy ship’s captain had supplied scant and poor food for the six horses and the six stable boys who travelled with them. When they got to France the boy king’s many aristocrat advisers sent five horses and boys directly back to Morocco. The palace cook being between horses, one of the bony Arabian stallions was harnessed to the cook’s shopping wagon.

Unaltered male horses aren’t the easiest to handle. Why the cook sold the Arabian horse to a vendor of firewood rather than having him neutered is one of the unanswered questions of history. Anyway, during the tough little horse’s first winter in France, an English visitor found him fallen down on the ice, being beaten by the vendor. The Englishman bought the horse, brought him back to England, and sold him. To the Earl of Godolphin, who wanted to breed race horses. The Earl did not, however, want to breed fine-boned, long-necked Arabian horses. He bought this horse as what horse breeders call a “teaser.”

Horses mate only once a year, and their preferences about exactly when and with whom they will share this moment often conflict with those of humans. The Earl, it seems, had particular problems getting visiting mares interested in his big fat male horse, and had noticed that they seemed to find the Arabian stallion more interesting. So the job of the stable boy, who history records was still travelling with the horse, was to lead the Arabian horse out to greet visiting mares before the mares were led in to mate with the Earl’s stallions.

“Stud farms” are not as idyllic as non-horsey men fantasize that they would be. Unaltered male horses do not have a natural instinct to graze peaceably in herds like cows. Nor do horses pair off and live in human-type families. Male horses fight, sometimes to the death, to select one leader who is then allowed to mate with all the females who form his herd. Young horses follow their mothers about until they reach adolescence, when the males start fighting. Most males will try to go their own way and perhaps start their own herds, if they can. But on stud farms there’s no place for them to go, so all these male horses spend their days indoors. Their instincts give them a tendency to be hostile and dangerous at best. Since their situations are not the best, from their point of view, the expectation is that they’ll become vicious, and can be handled only by teams of professionals using various restraining devices, sometimes including drugs. Nobody expects a male horse who is kept specifically for breeding purposes to be pleasant to have around. A male horse who is free to roam a pasture with a mini-herd of female and/or neutered horses and other animals is nearly always easier for everyone, including himself, to live with, and may even make himself useful, if only to one particular human friend.

The Godolphin Arabian had such a friend in the stable boy who came with him from Morocco. Who this man was, where he came from, whether he was completely unable to speak or just never learned to speak English, have been lost to history. The Earl called him Agba. Both horse and man were young when they came to England; they grew up, and the horse grew old, on the Godolphin farm.

The adolescent horse was led out to meet several females who were then bred with the Earl’s male horses before, as young male horses used as “teasers” will, he realized he was old enough to mate, too. Probably with the connivance of his human friend, he “broke loose” from the team of men who were supposed to control the male horses. He whipped the bigger, lazier, older horse in a fair fight and, as male horses do after winning a fight, mated with the female “before his handler could stop him.” The Earl was not pleased.

But he kept the mare and her colt, along with the other colts his horses had produced, and he soon saw that the lean and wiry Arabian-British crossbreed colt was faster than any of his purebred British colts. Or, it turned out, than anybody else’s. The Godolphin Arabian’s first two colts were called Lath, meaning a thin bit of wood shaved off on a lathe, and Cade, meaning the smallest young animal in a litter—and they won races under those names. The Godolphin Arabian’s third colt was called Regulus, because he was expected to win races regularly, and he did. These and the Godolphin Arabian’s other crossbreed offspring became the founders of the Thoroughbred breed. Two other male Arabian horses were imported to England. Before long, one-mile races were restricted to Thoroughbreds—descendants of these three stallions, whose offspring were then bred with one another. On one side or another the Godolphin Arabian was an ancestor to almost every horse whose name you’ve seen in the newspapers: Man o’ War, Black Gold, Native Dancer, Secretariat, Seattle Slew, Seabiscuit, Barbaro, Smarty Jones...

Horsey adults have long enjoyed the ironic history of the first Thoroughbred horses, but it’s hardly an edifying story for middle school readers. Making it one remained for Marguerite Henry to do. She did this by telling the story from the point of view of Agba, about whom the real world knows nothing, which left Henry free to invent an inspirational little story based on what really happened to children whose parents had died young and poor in the eighteenth century. Agba is taught nothing but how to groom horses. We learn with him about the body proportions required for show-quality Arabians, but mostly we see him being loyal to his horse.

In the children’s story version, the horse just eats, rests, or runs about, often carrying Agba and their pet cat, in between intervals of starvation, until he falls in love with the Earl’s youngest mare. The urge to inject an “affectional” quality to animal sexuality rings about as false as Agba’s reaction when he and the horse and the cat are banished from the stables to an isolated property down in the Fens, then brought back when the Earl sees how Lath can run. At Wicken Fen he sees only one other human being, a poacher; free to farm or fish, he doesn’t learn how to do either, but subsists on barley cooked in brackish polluted water. We can believe he might have been shy enoough to feel not much more isolated during this time than he is by his muteness all the time, but I suspect a real man would think of better rations at the Earl’s farm, new clothes, and presumably a little pocket money, before thinking about the horse’s reputation. Well, read the book. Maybe, if you’re as goodhearted as Agba, and a horse is what you have to love, you might think of the horse’s reputation first. I’ve never been sure.

Henry also gave the horse an Arabic name: one of the simplest sords in the language, Sham, “sun,” although the horse’s coat was usually described as the shade of brown called “bay.” Though, if the stable boy really couldn’t speak at all, the horse would never have answered to that name either, many Thoroughbreds don’t know their official registered names. Stable staff often give them simpler, more descriptive nicknames, often things like “Horse” or “Big Boy.” Man o’ War, the newspapers reported, actually answered to “Big Red.” The Godolphin Arabian might have had a grandiose official name like "King of the Wind," and "daughters of the wind" is a traditional name for Arabian mares, but whether the horse had a name will never be known. To the Earl his being an "Arabian" or "Barb" was distinctive enough.

In any case, most children who like horse stories like Marguerite Henry’s. Though what I currently have for resale is a reprint with only a few of the original illustrations, I recommend looking for the original if you can find it. Most of the illustrations in children’s books are badly done, included just to distract the eye, but Wesley Dennis’s horse and dog drawings are lifelike. Children who consciously study how to draw and paint animal pictures, with or without humans and landscapes in them, will want to study all of his. If you grew up with a copy of King of the Wind that had the full-page color pictures in it, a reprint with only the little black-and-white pictures above the chapter headings seems unsatisfactory somehow.

Book Review: Dixie Dobie

Title: Dixie Dobie

Author: Margaret S. Johnson and Helen Lossing Johnson

Date: 1945

Publisher: Harcourt Brace & Company

ISBN: none, but click here to view it on Amazon

Length: 90 pages

Illustrations: several pencil drawings

Quote: “The most important animals on Sable Island are wild ponies.”

On Sable Island off Nova Scotia, as on Chincoteague, harsh conditions have caused an abandoned herd of horses to evolve into a breed of sturdy “ponies.” These ponies were sometimes rounded up and sold to people on the mainland. Dixie Dobie is the story of a Sable Island pony.

Written for grades two through four, this is a simple be-kind-to-animals story that will appeal to even younger children if they are precocious readers or if the story is read aloud to them. Sophisticated fourth grade readers might pronounce it dull. There’s no suspense, no surprise.

The pony’s first purchasers, a family called Dobie, expect “Dixie” to behave like a well trained farm horse and are predictably disappointed. Her next human family, the Bradfords, add “Dobie” to her name, take the time to make friends with Dixie Dobie, and are able to benefit from her toughness and good sense.

If it’s not the straight facts, Dixie Dobie is certainly true in essence, and predictable as it can be. There are no distracting subplots or characterizations. Like the drawings of horses, people, and landscapes that break up the text, this story is meant to communicate information clearly, not to entertain anyone with flights of imagination.

As a first book about How to Care for Your Pony, Dixie Dobie might disappoint children who imagine that the bonding process will be as quick in real life as it sounds in the story. Adults reading this story to children who are going to be living with any kind of animal may want to emphasize that, although Johnson didn’t expect anyone to sit around and read about each day, the Bradfords would have spent months making friends with their feral, independent pet.

People who seriously intend to adopt a feral horse will need more informative books than Dixie Dobie. In fact, they’ll probably need a support group. Nevertheless, Dixie Dobie is a nice first book for those people to give to young children as a pre-introduction to their new friend.

Wild pony photo from Thelesleyshow at www.morguefile.com/archive/display/977192:

Posted on October 8, 2015 Categories Book, Horse Tags feral animal, Nova Scotia, wild pony

Book Review: 102 Favorite Audubon Birds of America

Title: 102 Favorite Audubon Birds of America

Author: Roger Tory Peterson

Date: (?) 1978

Publisher: Crown

ISBN: 0-517-53545-9

Length: 160

Illustrations: color prints of John James Audubon’s paintings

Quote: “Audubon...was the first to take birds out of the glass case and give them the simulation of life.”

Before photographs were invented, wildlife artists worked from dead specimens. John James Audubon (born 1785), like Alexander Wilson, Mark Catesby, and John Bachman, shot the birds they “studied.” They were fascinated by how easy it was to kill birds without making a noticeable dent in local populations. “Besotted” might be a better word. Though Audubon was amused by the behavior of birds he was able to catch alive, he didn’t mind eating birds he;d shot or selling them for meat, either, and might kill three dozen birds while preparing to paint two.

In Audubon’s time the Carolina Parakeet, which is now extinct, was a noisy, messy pest, and Audubon wrote that while the birds were “plucking off the fruits or tearing the grain,” a farmer could “commit great slaughter...All the survivors rise, shriek, fly round about for a few minutes, and again alight on the very place of most imminent danger. The gun is kept at work; eight or ten, or even twenty, are killed at every discharge. The living birds...return to be shot at until few remain alive. I have seen hundreds destroyed in...a few hours.” Passenger pigeons and prairie chickens were also slaughtered whether or not anyone could eat them. In pigeon season the poorest had fresh pigeon pie.

Egrets, whose “breeding plume” feathers were especially popular as hat trimmings, were slaughtered in their breeding season, so the orphaned baby egrets died shortly after their parents. Peterson’s comment on “the stench...heavy over every colony” socks it to the imaginations of readers who can remember all too easily that a healthy colony of any kind of herons always has a sufficiently strong odor.

Audubon observed closely the positions in which the birds he shot for his own use had flown, perched, sung, scolded, or threatened him. While painting he nailed and wired his specimens into similar positions. Big birds, like pelicans, great herons, and Canada geese, were posed with their heads down so they could be painted at life size, or close to it, on a 26x39” page. Some of his specimens seem to have stiffened into grotesque positions. Birds’ necks naturally form curves and angles that look uncomfortable to humans; a living heron is as good an argument as a giraffe is for the claim that the Creator must have a sense of humor, but some of Audubon’s herons were hard to believe. I have never seen mockingbirds try to fly in the position one of Audubon’s mockingbirds seems to be flying in, either.

Audubon's language could be flowery, and his article on Bachman's Warblers raises the question whether these birds ever were a true, distinct species. Marylanders who wanted to believe they had a rare, endangered, vanishing, and finally agreed to be extinct, species have paid dearly to protect the habitat of what may have been merely a variety, all along. In the name of preserving Bachman's Warblers cats have been forbidden to hunt in otherwise pleasant parts of Maryland, allowing rats to reach the top of the food chain. 

Even Audubon's observations were imperfect. Mostly they are reliable even today, but we've learned more about typical bird behavior, especially the number of eggs laid in the average nest. Recent editions of Birds of America have footnotes correcting Audubon's average-brood-size counts. Audubon also through herons were solitary; they are of course solitary when fishing, which means most of the day, but they roost in great loud messy flocks. When fish are abundant, as when ponds have been stocked, I have seen a half-dozen herons fishing side by side on one sandbar, and when the shadow of a passing human did not disturb the fish it did not noticeably disturb the herons either. Most conspicuously of all, of course, Audubon mistook the young bald eagle for a separate species he called The Bird of Freedom.

Nevertheless, Audubon's paintings were magnificent, his stories about the birds he studied were often entertaining, his descriptions were precise, and with just a few explanatory footnotes his Birds of America is still a valuable reference work. More recent birdwatchers have dreamed of writing something like Birds of America for themselves, using their own observations and stories. 

Today a claim might be made that David Sibley's Guide to Bird Life and Behavior, taken together with his Field Guides, have reached that goal. Meanwhile, in the 1970s, no one was better qualified to emulate Birds of America than Roger Tory Peterson, already famous as the author and illustrator of Peterson's Field Guides to the Eastern and Western North American birds and founder of the series. He probably knew most of Bird of America by heart, with its few necessary corrections, and he had stories to tell of his and his friends' observations of these birds, "hunting" with cameras rather than guns, worthy to set beside Audubon's. So he was asked to write 102 Favorite Audubon Birds of America, and he wrote it. It is of course shorter than Audubon's masterpiece, and was printed in a much smaller size, as if to say "Of course this book is only a successor,--no one would try to compete with Birds of America!" 

Here, anyhow, are 102 updated "biographies" to accompany smaller prints of Audubon's paintings--a modest, affordable, coffee-table book that explains, accurately, how young bald eagles have dark coats all over, and white feathers grow in on their heads after the first few molts, when the birds are four or five years old. And many other fun facts, many quoted directly from Audubon and some of Peterson's very own.

If you like watching the birds around your house and garden, or even at the local park, and you live in an Eastern State, this book will probably meet your reference needs for several years. The birds most people most often see are here. This book does not go into the details of how experts identify the other warblers of which Bachman's might have been a mutant or crossbred form, but does provide fun facts about palmated and piping plovers, herring gulls and sooty terns, red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks, sparrows and wrens and all the other favorites. 

Peterson was a cautious scientific observer. Over time, the works of cautious scientific observers seldom need to be changed--only added to.

Book Review: The Golden Book All Paris

Title: The Golden Book All Paris

Author: Giovanna Magi

Publisher: Casa Editrice Bonechi

Date: 1998

ISBN: 88-7009-191-0

Length: 128 pages

Illustrations: full-color photographs

Quote: “Writing a brief historical outline of Paris is no easy task: few cities have been so involved in great events which have changed the course of history.”

So, although there’s a sketch of the city’s history, no fear, this is mostly a photo album of Paris. Of course choosing what to include in the photo album is never an easy task either. Everyone agrees on the Eiffel Tower, the Arch of Triumph, and the Mona Lisa painting reprinted on the back cover. Beyond that, much depends on which of the pictures the visitor snaps come out best. (One way real progress has been made: with a good digital camera you can snap all the pictures you need to save only the ones that come out well.)

People who’ve been to Paris will start listing things that ought to be in the photo album and aren’t in this one, no doubt, but almost every one of these 128 pages contains premium-grade eye candy. Magi hardly needed to bother translating the text into English but she wrote nice, clear notes in English, too, if you can pull your eyes away from the pictures long enough to read them. If she’d chosen the title she would probably have chosen a better one. The Golden Book is a series of travel picture books printed by the publishers. Each book is “all” pictures of one popular destination or another.

If you’re a fan of “Wordless Wednesday” photo blogs, you might want to collect the whole series…though these Italian Golden Books are in no way connected to Whitman’s cheap, popular “Little Golden Books” for children.

Book Review: Tales of Whimsy Verses of Woe

Title: Tales of Whimsy Verses of Woe 

Author: Tim DeRoche

Date: 2023

Publisher: Redtail

ISBN: 978-0-9992776-1-4

Length: 99 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Daniel Gonzalez

Quote: "If your moral character is flimsy / Or your wit be rather slow, / Oh dare not read these tales of whimsy / For often do they end in woe."

This book would have you know that it received a "Baldersquash Medal"! Also awarded to the works of Edward Lear, Dr. Seuss, Edward Gorey, Shel Silverstein, and Lemony Snicket! (And others.)

These poems, and the drawings that accompany them, remind one of all five of those geniuses. 

It's unfortunate that the first and last poems, which people picking up a book in a store, would be likely to read first, are likely to put people off, because what's in between them is good clean hilarity. Here be mudpie shakes with hollandaise, a gallant prince who decides not to kill the wild beast that he's heard killed his father, a young couple who set out to paint all the green things on Earth red or blue, a fish who wants to be eaten by the king, a Jabberwock that doesn't need slaying, and more. 

The first poem, in which a girl's head explodes from studying too much, advises the child reader Silverstein-fashion to tell this story to parents who tell them to do their homework. If they do, the kids certainly ought to get a little extra reading about how that kind of thing was used in the past to discourage little girls from letting themselves do better than little boys at school. The last poem, in a boy claims God told him that God looks forward to seeing him "up here" when he dies, leaves me wondering whether to say "You shouldn't make up stories like that about serious things!" or to feel sorry for the parents who might be about to lose their son. So they're not quite up to the Lear, Seuss, Gorey, Silverstein, Snicket level of quality. 

But then you'll want to know what happened when:

"The King of the Land

Had a band.

They practiced their punk.

But they stunk."

Or: 

"...my bathroom faucet cannot make me clean,

Since it brings only lukewarm gasoline."

These poems won't disappoint you. Neither will the pictures, which are too detailed to be cartoons and too goofy to be baroque, and delight the parts of my brain that like both of those genres. Somewhere in my mind Silverstein, Carolyn Wells, and Gelett Burgess laughed out loud and agreed, "The trouble with this book is that it's too short."

Book Review: Rachel Ashwell's Shabby Chic

Title: Rachel Ashwell’s Shabby Chic

Author: Rachel Ashwell

Date: 1998

Publisher: Harper Collins

ISBN: 0-06-039208-8

Length: 210 pages

Illustrations: color photos and line drawings

Quote: “I learned to appreciate vintage and history...I honed an ability to know what to restore and, more important, what to leave alone.”

Rachel Ashwell financed her move from Britain to Southern California by decorating other people’s houses, not with whatever some department store was trying to sell (as an older generation of home decorators did), but with her own flea-market finds.

This daring move calls for criticism on social-political-economic grounds. That Ashwell did it was laudable. Whether the rest of us should try to copy it is debatable, and calls for mindfulness. Making something fashionable can be an easy way to destroy what made it valuable. Flea markets are, primarily, FUN. They’re also a way for small businesses to start without going into debt, and a way for the recently unemployed or disabled or bereaved to meet a few of the sudden expenses life has dumped upon them. This gives them a valuable place in society that depends on their being kept accessible, cheap, and, well, fun. The idea of “an upscale flea market” is not obviously or intentionally contrary to the idea of a good flea market—but in effect it is. Raise the booth fees, edge out the cheap junk that might appeal to jammy-fingered kids rather than the selfconsciously trendy and arty crowd, and you’ve replaced a good flea market with a horrid, pretentious source of overpriced...well...cheap junk. Because real gold will be real gold no matter how much brass and plastic surround it, but when people who don’t have real gold start charging the same prices for brass and plastic that they would for gold, then people who recognize real gold have a reason to sneer at the pretentious flea market.

There’s also a tendency for slick types to finance “really interesting” flea market businesses with illegitimate operations...one way to recognize this happening is when the genuinely casual vendors or the resolutely wholesome and small ones start feeling dissed or patronized. Women tend to enter flea markets, either casually or amateurishly, to sell off things that no longer need space in our homes: baby supplies after menopause, things a departed friend or relative won’t be using again, things that cost more than we ought to have spent on them in the first place and might have enough resale value to allow us to keep the house. When we are new both to an individual market and to flea-marketing, it’s easy and natural to assume that a guy who’s obviously buying and selling the more coveted items, for profit, might overtly fail to listen to us, address us as “Baby” or “Grandma” or some similar bogus endearment as a show of lack of respect, even try to discourage us or push us to go home before he does, because he is a sexist jerk. Guys who act that way are, of course, sexist jerks but if we pay attention we find that that’s not the full extent of what’s wrong with their operations. It’s always worthwhile to find out what kind of illegitimate business they’re up to—drugs, illegal gambling, stolen goods, etc.

Even a wholesome, low-budget market tempts vendors (they’re numerous these days) who are in fact old, ill, and in pain, whether they look it or not, and do in fact receive prescriptions and discounts for medications they find it possible not only to get by without, but to resell at a profit. They may be enabling the self-destruction of idiots who aren’t likely to be missed, but by keeping themselves active  they are replacing those idiots with smarter, more experienced, active citizens.

Any movement toward oh-not-just-raising-prices-for-profit-but-making-the-market-more-“upscale”-and-“professional”, which market managers will try if they think some vendors and customers will tolerate it, creates the financial pressure that makes pill resellers start buying as well as selling, handling more and “harder” drugs than their own surplus. That’s when they start trying to clear the “sweetie pie” vendors out of the way so “the big boys” can “do business,” and when their business needs to be shut down by the police. As these markets lose the respect of people looking for fabulous deals on “shabby chic” china dishes, they also attract vice and crime.

Toward the end of Shabby Chic Ashwell lists her favorite (big, pricey) markets, sources of the faded colors and antique styles that fitted into her decorating look (which, for those who don’t recognize it, might remind them of Laura Ashley). That’s the part of the book that could most usefully have been left out. If those were good, legitimate markets in 1998, chances are that they’d been ruined by 1999. Ashwell really should not have given the kiss of death to those markets. Fortunately they weren’t even in the same States where I’ve either shopped or sold. The focus is of course on California.

That’s a short appendix, squeezed in at the back of the book between a discussion of cleaning and refinishing techniques and an early-twentieth-century style “inspirational poem” at “The End.” The main 200 pages of this book are all about decorative looks. What Ashwell had to tell people probably can be communicated better through photos than through words; certainly her book consists more of photos than of words. We see lots of furniture, dishes in china cupboards, books on shelves, plus some clothes modelled by young women and children.

And, of course, colors...

I think the essential challenge for anyone writing about colors, designing (anything) with colors, mixing colors, shopping for colors, etc., is to acknowledge that, while you might like a particular “palette” of colors better than others, not everyone else needs to share your taste.

Women tend to sound judgmental about colors when we lack training in working with different styles and palettes.

I think Carole Jackson’s biggest contribution to the world was that her “Color Me Beautiful” system required everyone to learn to see four general categories of colors (with or without advanced practice in identifying “palettes” that blur the edges between two of the big four categories). Human faces usually fit into one category more than the others, although some people are hard to classify. In theory all colorists would agree that a face fits into one color category. In practice some people really do look good in colors from two or even three categories, and trained colorists can disagree on whether to count an individual as Spring or Autumn.

Printed color photographs can complicate matters by nudging color tones closer together than they might have been in real life, but it looks on the front cover as if Rachel Ashwell is one of those people. “Her” color palette appears to be a compromise for her face. She looks like a natural Autumn, or maybe even Spring, who likes colors that are in the Summer palette and has built her whole look, at least when these pictures were taken, around mixing colors that blur on the edges between the Summer, Spring, and Autumn categories. Things are off-white, or they are pastel-colored. Most of the pastel colors are very pale pastels. They’re pink and mauve, but very pale shades of pink and mauve, with brown rather than blue undertones. Or they’re yellow, but very soft shades of yellow that blur toward cream, ivory, and pine wood rather than lemon or orange. Or they’re green—pale greens with visible blue overtones and quite strong yellow undertones. Occasionally they’re true blue, but faded...like indigo-dyed denim, which is bright blue when new but always shows its white warp threads even before the blue starts fading, or like blue-on-white china, where some parts retain a bright true blue color but the white always predominates.

Enough people like this cross-“seasons” group of colors, at least in decor, that there’s an alternative school of colorists that regard it as a primary color group in its own right. In the 1980s Leatrice Eiseman worked with a color classification system of cool-toned “Sunrise,” warm-toned “Sunset,” and this mix of pale colors with cream and ivory as “Sunlight.” The “Sunlight” palette definitely lends itself to secondhand furniture, which is often faded. It’s probably a compromise palette for almost anybody to wear. Sunbleached furniture material is often good for several more years of service; genuinely sunbleached clothing may not be.

Shabby Chic is a visual guide to using Sunlight colors. They make soft, pretty combinations. They clash with the Winter colors the majority of people wear well.  Since the effect of mixing Winter colors with softer, more “natural” (non-aniline-dyed) colors tends to be making the other colors look faded...

Women can sound downright bigoted about the colors that aren’t their own (or, in some cases, their mothers’, or those of some other fashion mentor). In the past, when everybody did not have equal access to every color that caught their eye, various cultures evolved judgmental ways to describe colors. The intense Winter and Spring colors were dissed as “garish” or “childish”; soft Summer colors were “faded” or “washed-out,” and warm Autumn browns were “pre-soiled” or “dirt-colored” to those they didn’t suit. 

Since my hand-knitting brand is “clothing, not ‘fashions’,” I’ve not retreated back, as most retailers of mass-produced garments have, to the bad old Waste Age custom of marketing “this season’s colors” and purging colors that may be what someone wants from my display. Sometimes someone twits me about this: “Don’t you have some more contemporary colors than all those 1980s [they mean Winter] colors?” I do, but since the person has used a hostile rather than professional tone I’m apt to hit back, “Y’mean that pre-soiled, urban grunge look?” Actually it’s only on Winters that browns and brownish grays look “dirt-colored.” On Autumns, of which the speaker is probably one, brown is a vibrant color that brings out the person’s unusual good looks.

Colors speak directly to the emotional, even reptilian, layers of our brains but it’s worth the effort of learning to see colors with a detached professional eye. You are, for example, more likely to get the designs of your dreams from artisans or decorators to whom you describe your colors without making harsh judgments on theirs. Better yet, as Ashwell fortunately does in this book, show pictures. If someone has a clear, true picture of the couch and the rug and the picture on the wall and says "I want a blanket to put on this couch," we are communicating.

Ashwell betrays a habit of thinking of books on shelves as décor items, to be judged by their covers, rather than words to be judged by their meaning. She knows someone who finds the freshly printed colors on book jackets too bright, so she loses the jackets and displays the beautifully fading colors of older books’ hard covers. Isn’t that special! Ick! Actually, it depends on the community. I both buy and sell secondhand books without paper jackets, but some booksellers say they can’t sell them.

If a person wanted to display books as décor items, it’s not hard to do. In fact it could be fun to do as a family project with children. You can’t have too many book covers and it’s so easy to cut paper to wrap around a book. You could color-code book covers to make it easier to see which shelf a book belongs on. You could decorate them with scenes from the book. You could play with visual effects on your computer, printing off book jackets with colors, shading effects, or decorative fonts. But the backs of books on a shelf are such small areas of color that books can’t really be said to affect the color balance in a room, unless you put a lot of color-matched covers side by side. 

Actually, since most houses benefit from having light-colored interiors that maximize the efficiency of lighting, Ashwell’s pale color palette could inspire tweaks in any direction. Ashwell suggests re-dyeing yellowed white fabric to a “flattering sepia.” Spoken like an Autumn...to the majority of humankind, who are Winters, there is no such thing as a flattering sepia. If yellowed white fabric doesn’t bleach back to white, most of us would dye it a bright color, or maybe black. If you take design or decorating seriously, you do this kind of “translation” automatically, and you can use and enjoy Shabby Chic. If not, you probably wouldn’t be interested anyway.

So, in summary: If you are the kind of person who can get the most use out of Rachel Ashwell’s Shabby Chic, you probably don’t need it, but you’ll probably enjoy it. I don’t think it’s an ideal first book for someone who’s new to The Applied Visual Arts, unless that person happens to be in Ashwell’s peculiar color niche, as described above. It is, in any case, a gorgeous book. It’s the sort of book I like having on a display just to show that, bristling and value judgments aside, I do understand how those minority-appeal color palettes work...and actually I enjoy using them, now and then, on commissions from people who look different from me. You might like it for that purpose too, or you might like it as a guide to putting together your home and/or wardrobe.

  

More Petfinder Links, Anyone?

A few years ago, this web site was featuring daily Petfinder links.

It all started when I took the Laptop of Then home and looked at "cached" web pages while the Queen Cat of Then, Heather, was being encouraged to curl up and purr beside me. Heather would look at the laptop, and though she didn't mistake pictures for real things in the room or try to swat the cursor, she did seem to recognize cat pictures as images of other cats. She'd look at cat pictures and usually point her ears slightly toward them, showing mild interest, not alarm or hostility. I thought it was cute to make a post that suggested that a cat an e-friend's local shelter was finding hard to place might become an "e-friend for Heather." Publicity got that cat (a crotchety senior cat) a home, and Heather and I then started picking the cutest cat photos near the zipcodes 10101, 20202, and 30303--New York, Washington, and Atlanta.

The rule was that we, or more often just I, would look for photos of the type of animal first mentioned by an e-friend or Tweep during each online session. If the first animal content I found online came from Mudpie's Human (the blogger who started it all), I'd pick the cutest three-colored cat pictures. If it came from LB Johnson, I'd pick the most photogenic black dogs or retriever-type dogs. And so on.

The cool part was that Twitter would automatically display one of the pet photos, people would retweet the cute animal picture, and the next time I'd look at pictures of that type of animal, that one would no longer be in the shelter. (Usually. There was one beautiful cat, who looked a lot like Heather, who the shelter staff said just wasn't friendly; people who saw her picture would decide to adopt some other three-colored cat instead.) We were actually helping animals find homes! Heather really was pleased...because other people were adopting those cats, so they weren't moving in with us. Heather was a gracious Queen of a Cat Sanctuary but she had a way of looking at other cats, just to let them know who was Queen, that caused several prospective temporary residents to sprint half a mile. Even some human readers, seeing Heather's "Excuse me, I happen to be the Queen Cat here" expression, thought she looked "mean."

Nah. Miffed is the word. I never saw Heather looking seriously angry, or wanted to. She was a gentle, goodhearted cat who once lost her own kittens by trying to adopt some orphaned kittens too completely, too quickly. She was extremely social, and failed to develop some of the standard adult cat survival skills by relying on her friends to do things like supplying enough milk for all the kittens or even cleaning the fur on Heather's head. The one time she encountered a cat who really was hostile, her attitude seemed to be "Is this even possible? What can you do in such an unnatural situation--an antisocial cat!" But when she reached her full size she was a serious predator--the hunter for the family. Most other cats didn't want to mess with her. She always seemed to wish other cats well, and to understand that their well-being included plenty of space.

Heather grew older and dozier, spent more time indoors but still wanted to spend most of her time outdoors, and was eventually caught in extreme weather. She was survived by a foster kitten, Samantha Scaredycat, and a nephew, Burr, who produced our current Queen Serena. Serena really can be a tough disciplinarian, though not mean. And she's shown subzero potential for ever actually participating in any cute little rituals of helping pick out cute pictures to show on this web site. Serena disapproves of electronic screens; that's why there aren't more pictures of her, though she knows she has a pretty face and likes to be admired.

In that picture, taken before she was even half grown, Serena was asserting ownership of Samantha's Safe Place. She's usually nice about it but she is the most dominant social cat I've ever known. (Often social cats don't seem to have a hierarchy.) She loves other cats as long as they're completely submissive, subordinate followers who don't get any ideas about e.g. snuggling up to her human. Possibly that's why, on seeing a glimpse of her own reflection in a screen, Serena either moves away from a full-sized image, growling and hissing, or wants to play roughly with a miniature image such as a digital camera phone. She probably sees herself as either a hostile intruder, or a very bratty kitten who needs a lot of slapping around. No other living cat has ever replied to Serena's normal body language with equal assertiveness, and if one did, fur would probably fly.

 But with humans, at least, the Petfinder links were extremely popular, and seemed to be doing some good, so I continued doing them without Heather's input until Petfinder redesigned their web site and added some cookies that the cookie-cleaning software on the Laptop of Then was not able to clean away. This made using them a violation of our Google Contract of Then: This web site's contract forbids us to use links that might adversely affect people's computers' performance, i.e. links to sites that use messy cookies.

But guess what's happened? I have a new laptop with newer cookie-cleaning software. Google has changed their coding to include newer cookie-cleaning software. I can now visit Petfinder without picking up messy cookie crumbs. That does not necessarily guarantee that everyone can, so the following Petfinder link is only a test. If it opens slowly or strangely, or the link works slowly or strangely, for any readers Out There, please let me know, and I won't do more Petfinder links.

Here, in any case, is Claudia from Blountville, Tennessee, nonverbally saying "Please give me a decent home, away from this lunatic who wants to drape beads around me."



Can you resist that eyeroll? If not, click here. That shelter near the Tri-Cities Airport in Tennessee is a long drive from anywhere but it's where I found Dusty, the legendary Queen of the Yuma Cat Sanctuary, and it's where shelter staff found and documented a pair of social cat cousins whose bonding was remarkable enough to be written up in the newspapers. Claudia is a full-grown cat, which means she'll take longer to become a real part of your family than a kitten would, but also means she's already received the routine veterinary care, including spaying, necessary before you can take her home.

If I don't receive complaints from readers, the Petfinder links will return.

(For those who don't know, that straw-gray tabby coloring with patches of yellow makes Claudia what some people now call a "Torbie"--a combination of tabby and tortoiseshell. I don't know that there is a stereotype of what's considered a typical Torbie personality yet. I know our Mackerel was a big, tough, independent, sweet, super-social Torbie tom who lived in the woods and spent quality time with all the different families who loved him, and Suzie, the Queen of the Jackson Street Cat Sanctuary for many years, was a long, lean, mean-faced but sweet-natured Torbie who spent lots of time warming a sick patient's feet. So the common characteristic for both of the Torbies I've known was that they were unusually kind cats, but I don't know that that's really typical.)

Tortie Tuesday: Cats Thank E-Friend

"A reader who may or may not want to be identified has sent you cats some treats," I said.

"Treats? Gimmee!" said Samantha. (She said this by leaping straight up into the air and grabbing at the top of the bag. It must be remembered that Samantha spent part of her kittenhood among middle school boys who encouraged this sort of doggy manners--until she got big enough for the playful nips and scratches to hurt people.)

"Treats?" said Serena. (She said this by sitting up and giving me a junior-queen-cat look.)

"Treats? I love you I love you I love you where've you been you left us indoors far too long, don't go away any more, oh, you smell like hamburgers, did you bring me one?" said Traveller. (He said this by leaping up into my arms, rubbing against me, purring loudly, drooling, licking, and wriggling to spread as much fur as possible over my clothes. He always love-bombs me after work, but he seemed especially ecstatic yesterday because I'd gone online from McDonald's.)

"So, while the sun is shining behind the trees, can we get some recognizable snapshots of you cats showing treat appreciation, please?" I said.

"Right," said Serena. (She said this by perching on top of the carrying cage and posing as if she'd ever been taught how to pose, or seen the cheap-cell-phone camera in use, before. She has not. She is not a normal cat. At four months old, she already seems like the Ruling Queen.)

"Me too," said Traveller, bouncing onto the carrying cage. Through the cell phone camera his face showed up well against the aluminum roof of the cage. Then he realized that I was sitting down on the ground to get that nice clear picture... "A lap! A lap! Snuggle me on it! I always was a lap cat! No, don't put me back on that old cold roof, hold me on your lap! Hey, your skirt smells like hamburgers too! No, I've not finished rolling and purring and rubbing and cuddling!" He refused to pose properly. I finally got one face image that I recognized, although it's distorted. He does not have patches of white fur above his eyes. He has patches of thin black fur through which, at certain angles, in certain lights, a really shabby cell-phone camera...well...

"What was that in the shed? Oh never mind, only a cricket. You can take my picture now," said Samantha.

Compared with the other trios of cats by whom I've been owned lately--Heather, Irene, and Ivy, or Mogwai, Grayzel, and Bisquit, or Mac, Polly, and wossname their brother--these three cats are a handful of misbehavior.

Black and dark tortie cats tend to have a lot of energy. Traveller and Samantha seem to be bonding by encouraging each other to jump at things they shouldn't grab, dart into places they're not supposed to go, pull things down, and play in traffic.

Serena has a cool personality and a passion for wrestling that most people would probably read as a mean nature. She's actually a sweetheart if you understand that gentle nipping and scratching are her way of cuddling, and remembering rules and cooperating with instructions are her other way of showing affection. Still, if you define a pet as something that snuggles on your lap I don't think Serena will ever be one. 

None of these cats can prove they understand words by reliably obeying commands. They're as much fun as the proverbial barrel of monkeys, and in much the same way. During this whole ten-minute photo shoot the neighbor who'd brought me home was sitting in his truck laughing. (I will admit I was also laughing.) The cats were bouncing about, racing, chasing, tagging each other, trying to grab the phone...a merry heart, and specifically the diaphragm exercise of laughing out loud (for humans), do good like a medicine, so I'm sure the photo shoot was very good for all of us.

Serena is Irene's granddaughter and has a fascinating mix of Irene's graciousness and Samantha's sass. (And Irene's mother Candice's preference for romping over cuddling.) Samantha does respond to words, in her way; she's not an obedient animal but she usually seems to know exactly what I'm talking about. Traveller at least wants to please and responds to tones of voice, if not specific words. I still miss the older generations of Serena's family...but I enjoy these cats too.

For those readers who've had to lay a beloved senior cat to rest...Heather was going on eight years old, which is old for the barn cat she theoretically was, moving in the direction of having to be the sort of mostly indoor animal my mother never wanted in the house...consider adopting a couple of bouncy-pouncy kittens. I want to emphasize "couple," even if they were born in different litters the same year. Serena's incessant chomping on my hands when I was trying to type was quite a nuisance, and apparently Trav was a similar nuisance in his original home. When they met they were obviously fascinated by each other. When Samantha and I allowed them to play together, after a period of quarantine and flea treatment, they became inseparable. As far as they're concerned, they are brother and sister. As far as I'm concerned, they're completely different from Heather, so they don't stir up memories or seem to be competing with her in my heart or anything like that. Even as a kitten Heather never acted like these three. So they're a separate experience, and great fun.

And of course, like all healthy cats, they enjoyed their treats. Thank you, Gentle Reader.

Book Review: The Gift Is Small the Love Is Great

Title: The Gift Is Small the Love Is Great

Author: Frederick S. Weiser

Date: 1994

Publisher: York

ISBN: none

Length: 120 pages

Illustrations: full-color photos on almost every page

Quote: “This limited edition...is privately published...for the enjoyment of our clients, friends, and employees...the 23^rd in a series of Keepsake books.”

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in Pennsylvania, across the various German religious communities that formed various towns, simple colored-ink drawings called Fraktur were used to decorate books and documents, sheet music, and sometimes furniture (a particularly pleasing drawing would be pasted onto the wood for everyone to look at, though drawings that have survived were pasted to the insides of wooden chests). These drawings were one-off, private souvenirs of occasions, often given to a new church member at baptism or to a student at the end of a course. The most elaborate might use two shades of light and dark green, blue, or red; simpler Fraktur were done in black or sepia, with shading effects produced by drawing more or fewer lines. Most of the drawings were the kind of simple, stylized, often symmetrical motifs students learn to make in drawing classes; leaves, roses, tulips, finch, and Valentine “heart” shapes predominate.

Fraktur were usually done on unbleached white paper, occasionally framed by wood or cardboard. Warm red, warm yellow, moss green, and the shade of brown produced by mixing those colors, are the most common colors used. Blue is less often found, partly because the bird, leaf, and flower motifs favored were not blue in real life, but a few specimens show blue ink that has not completely oxidized to black or green.

This short book consists mostly of photos of especially well preserved and colorful Fraktur.

While some Fraktur adorned the backs or separate sections of written documents or stood on their own as pictures, many incorporated calligraphy. The writing was usually in German, often in dialects that differ from the regulation German foreigners may have studied. Occasionally documents decorated with Fraktur were simple documentations of names and dates. Often they incorporated verses, Scriptures, or beautiful thoughts. A few were meant to be funny; one pair of pictures depict an argument between two chickens shown squawking at each other from mounds of compost.

As visual art Fraktur showed a close relationship with embroidered pictures from the same period. Simplicity and symmetry are selling points. Although the specimens reprinted in this book are masterpieces, in fact Fraktur were, like the embroideries, often done by children, and new pieces could be done by children today. Who knows what Magic Marker drawings done today, stored inside a drawer, will look like in two hundred years?

Where the original calligraphy was legible to Weiser’s practiced eye, in most cases he typed and translated it. In a few cases, like a thirteen-verse poem based on Hosea 11 (each verse enclosed in a heart above a tulip), he settled for a summary. Christian-phobics beware: Although the focus of this collection is on pretty pictures, many wordless and some with calligraphies that merely give names and dates, when a long text is included it was usually Christian. Weiser, a minister, didn't mind.

This book will probably appeal to anyone interested in any visual art, from simple drawing/coloring to computer graphics. A wooden frame included in one photo, described as “much later,” shows that although Fraktur was not especially congenial with “art in the round,” it is possible for carvings, sculptures, knitting, etc., to take inspiration from Fraktur.

The Gift Is Small was a limited-edition book meant to be a collector's item, so it surprises me that, perhaps because it's small and soft-covered, the heavy glossy paper and glorious color haven't gained value faster than they have. Amazon lists secondhand copies selling for probably no more than Weiser's friends were asked to pay for production costs when the book was new. If you like early American folk art, this amount of it is a bargain at $20 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 if you pay online. About a half-dozen more books of comparable size will fit into a $5 package. Regrettably, Weiser has no remaining use for the $2.50 he'd get if this were a Fair Trade Book, but you're encouraged to add Fair Trade Books to the package.

Book Review: Lazy Liza Lizard's Tricks

Title: Lazy Liza Lizard’s Tricks

Author: Marie Curtis Rains

Date: 1953

Publisher: Winston

ISBN: none

Length: 119 pages

Illustrations: drawings by Vera Neville

Quote: "‘Don’t be hanging’round here,’ said Mr. Snake. Liza got up. ‘You say Liza’s hanging around here, Mr. Snake? Is she on your bushes?’”

Before this book, Rains had written a book called Lazy Liza Lizard containing animal fables. (You know, the kind where the smarter animals, though described as adults, are characterized like ten-year-old children, and the animals whose mistakes are supposed to furnish a lesson are more like four-year-olds.) At the end of that book Liza had reformed and stopped playing tricks like stealing the other animals’ food right out of their cooking pots. Children wanted more stories about Liza’s tricks. Rains knew more stories of that kind, so, as the publisher explained, Lazy Liza Lizard’s Tricks was a prequel about some of the other things Liza had done before she reformed.

Sample: While arrogant Snake and complacent Frog are waiting for their six new potatoes to boil, Lizard takes the whole pot home and sets it over her fire. Frog sees a feather bolster hung out on a bush to air, drops it down the chimney, and steals the pot back as Lizard’s house fills with smoke. Strangely enough the pot now contains only four potatoes. Possibly, Frog observes, “that’s the way it should be.”

Who ever heard of a snake, a frog, or a lizard wanting to eat a potato? Liza is fairly hard to miss as a fictional stand-in for the child audience’s even younger siblings—a nuisance to whom the other animals have to be kind—in these stories. The stories themselves are part of the transition from oral-tradition folk tales to animated cartoons. Nobody behaves well enough to be a good role model for human children. Nobody gets badly hurt. The stories draw on earlier forms in European and African folklore, and have been transplanted to the Southern States in the 1910s or 1920s. The sunbonnets and mufflers and steam trains, in both drawings and narrative, are delightfully nostalgic.

Lazy Liza Lizard’s adventures never were on my top ten list of favorite books, as a child, but they were on my top hundred list. They’re not p.c. but they’re free from the cloying attempt to write different dialects that ruined some similar storybooks for baby-boomers. Adults who are interested in folklore, or children who want an easy, funny read with appealing pictures, might want to keep the stories of Liza Lizard alive.

But the price...would you look at those prices on Amazon? As public libraries rushed to discard their copies of these books, whether the books were badly worn or not, non-library-discards leaped into the collector price range. What I have is a library copy--by me, the wallpaper sample lovingly cut to shape to protect the cover adds nostalgia value, thank you very much--and discarded because of mold; I've cleaned it, but there will never be any guarantee that mold won't grow back in damp weather. In real life that copy won't cost $350, but good-as-new copies ordered online may cost that much, or more if prices keep rising.

Currently, to purchase these books here, you'll need to send $350 for Lazy Liza Lizard's Tricks, $200 for Lazy Liza Lizard, plus $5 for the package, to Boxholder at P.O. Box 322, or add $6 to the Paypal payment to the account you get by e-mailing salolianigodagewi at Yahoo. Both books will fit into one package, along with probably two more of similar size. 

Book Review: Lion

If the book reviewed is not about Torties ("tortoiseshell," black and orange mottled cats), at least it's about felines...

Title: Lion 

Cartoon felines.

Author: William Pene du Bois

Date: 1956

Publisher: Viking

ISBN: none

Length: 36 pages

Illustrations: by the author

Quote: "[O]ne hundred and four artists...made up new animals, which they drew in clear colors. It was in this way that animals were first invented."

And this story is about how an artists' committee designed the lion. Need we say more? Yes: if you're collecting books illustrated by William Pene du Bois, you'll want this one for the collection.

Do even six-year-olds really like that kind and amount of nonsense? The copy I have for sale occupied space in a library for more than thirty years. Generally the wear and tear on a discarded picture book tells how popular the book has been with the read-aloud crowd. This one, apart from the plastic cover and library stamp, seems to be in mint condition. So if you're looking for a picture book to give to a first grade student or read to a kindergarten class, I'd recommend a different one.

Nevertheless, the full-color drawings on every page (sometimes excluding words) are delightful. Probably mostly adults, with a sense of humor and playfulness and with some interest in the artistic process, will enjoy Lion.

It's a collector's item, Gentle Readers. If you want Lion, please send $10 per book, $5 per package, plus $1 per online payment, to the appropriate address at the bottom of the screen. (Salolianigodagewi is not a Paypal address; it's the e-mail address from which you get the appropriate Paypal address.) At least five more books of this size will fit into one $5 package. 

Book Review: Faith Trust and Pixie Dust

A Fair Trade Book

Title: Faith Trust and Pixie Dust

Author: Mark I. Pinsky

Author's web site: http://markpinsky.com/

Date: 2004

Publisher: Westminster John Knox

ISBN: 0-664-22591-8

Length: 267 pages plus acknowledgments, bibliography, and index

Quote: "These film essays vary in approach. Some are primarily critical readings of the narratives, highlighting elements of faith and values,and may provide a helpful guide for children's caretakers. Others probe deeper or take off in a different direction...I have chosen not to dwell unduly on the differences between the Disney features and the source materials from which they have been adapted...it would be difficult to argue that...the printed word could in any way compete with images on the screen for impact."

Well, right there in the introductory "Methodology" chapter, in a nutshell, is what I like least about this book.

My parents didn't go to theatres, and videos weren't sold for home viewing when I was a child, but my parents did approve of the bland, sappy, but generally wholesome Disney cartoon movies for children. I learned to read by reading Disney movie stories: Snow White, Pinocchio, Mickey Mouse as Sorcerer's Apprentice, Dumbo, Bambi, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, the Lady and the Tramp, Sleeping Beauty, 101 Dalmatians, the Sword in the Stone. (Those are the topics of chapters 3 through 14 in this book.) Also (minimally discussed because they were short, or not discussed because they weren't cartoons) Brer Rabbit, Johnny Appleseed, Peter and the Wolf, Robin Hood, the much criticized MACOS tours of countries like Scotland and Morocco, Niki and Neewa (the Nomads of the North), the Swiss Family Robinson, Old Yeller, the Odyssey of the Otter...I loved those stories, and in his turn my brother did too.

Then we grew up, found the original books in the library, and realized how vastly superior they were, how Disney had desecrated good stories and cheated people out of the fun of reading stories that were more interesting and complicated than Disney's stale babyfood. Pinocchio originally had lots more adventures. Cinderella in The Glass Slipper (by Eleanor Farjeon) did a lot more than sit around feeling sorry for herself. Alice in Wonderland wandered through all sorts of delightful wordplay the cartoon version missed. Perdita wasn't even Pongo's original mate in the real 101 Dalmatians story. The Sword in the Stone was a serious story, good enough to be worth rereading even as an adult. Even Peter Pan and Wendy, a dreary sentimental book, full of tired muddled metaphors for sex and death, that Brigid Brophy skewered as "teasing children who want to know where babies come from" and that Dave Barry has profoundly improved by discarding James Barrie's what-was-he-thinking original and working directly from the movie, at least had more to it than the Disney version, even if what Disney lost was pretty "stoopid."

For me as an adult, a study of the art of Walt Disney would begin with C.S. Lewis's reaction to "the simpering dolls intended for our admiration" as more horrific than the demonic figure (and in Sleeping Beauty Maleficent gets pretty demonic; I wouldn't share the original movie, where she invokes "all the powers of Hell," obviously not referring to the tourist town in Michigan, and turns into a monstrous dragon, with a nervous child). From there it would go on to detail how much was lost when classic short stories were expanded, or classic novels cut down, into movies. It would assert that, for those children who happen to be ear thinkers, images on a screen can't compete with printed words, and go on to trace how Disney's neverending quest for perfectly inoffensive pictures had, in fact, offended a lot of people, including but not limited to the people who had appreciated the books.

And it would mention, as Pinsky does mention toward the end of this book, the "evil subliminal imbedding" in the cartoons. As Pinsky confirmed by asking the animators themselves, animators get bored redrawing scenes so that they seem to move; sometimes they'd draw something offensive or merely silly into a picture and see whether someone else would notice and remove it. Was the word "sex" spelled out in clouds? Actually, the animator admitted, it was "sfx," "special effects," but yes, it's there. The good news is that such occasional subliminal imbedding has not been shown to affect human behavior; deliberately imbedding "popcorn" into movies turned out not to increase the sales of popcorn.

Pinsky's primary approach, highlighting the values in the plots of Disney movies, may be useful in its own way. If you want to watch movies with children rather than reading books to them, here is your guide to some classic movies many children enjoy.

I think it's also helpful that Pinsky is Jewish. Two reasons:

(1) Judaism is not evangelical; its emphasis has tended to be on teaching the young "what we do" and supposing that a just and merciful God probably relates to all those People Different From Us in other ways.. This gives Pinsky an edge on writing objectively about how much Christianity, Paganism, or Islam there is in one movie or another, and whether it reaches levels that offend a reasonable Jewish viewer. (This is something many Christians want to know. We are Christians and we're not going to stop talking or writing about that, but we don't intend, primarily, to offend people.)

(2) Although Walt Disney specifically purged his movies of overt references to Christianity, or even to God, to avoid offending Jewish viewers, and although he worked with Jewish colleagues, he's been accused of anti-Jewish bigotry. Pinsky considers the evidence and finds Disney not guilty. On the evidence Disney seems to have known enough Jewish people, without prejudice, to have liked some and disliked others as individuals. (The wolf acting out the stereotype of a Jewish peddler, in the original Three Little Pigs, was apparently based on what the Disney brothers had watched "well-known Jewish comedians portray" and written in as, according to a later critic, "a positive reference to the trust most Americans of the time had in Jewish peddlers." Nevertheless, Disney reworked the movie.)

What may be less helpful is that, when Pinsky "probes deeper and takes off in a direction," he seems to get stuck in a rut that leads in only one direction: Is the movie politically correct? Does it, shudder, quake, stereotype anybody?

It's enough to trigger a backlash in readers: How bad is it if a fictional character does resemble a stereotype? Stereotypes don't come to exist without some base in reality. Stereotypes bore readers because they have nothing new to tell us. Stereotypes are the native language of movies; where a memoir would tell you "I felt these emotions because what was said stirred up these memories," and a novel would have given you an image that stirs up or builds memories for readers too, and a journalistic or historical version would tell you the consequences of what was said, a movie gives you a stereotype, usually a face that is presumed to look the way the character's face would look in reaction to an emotion. (Facial expressions are sometimes assumed to be a universal language of emotions. They are not. At communicating whether the feeling has anything to do with the conversation or is strictly a physical feeling about something going on in the person's body, much less communicating the degree of emotion or the mix of emotions or what the person is going to do about it, one word can be worth a thousand pictures.) Movies work, to the extent that they do, by manipulating stereotypes. What flashes around the screen is not a living person, but a set of stereotypes that attempt to evoke something about a living person.

Ooohhh, but some stereotypes, the ones about currently active pressure groups, are hurtful...

Nothing brings out my sadistic side like this whole concept of "hurtful." People who have actually been hurt don't whine about what is merely, intangibly "hurtful" in some stereotyped way that's usually being invoked as a camouflage to describe something that's more effective than some more recent effort they, or some "creative" friend of theirs, has wrought. The Taming of the Shrew works if it's played strictly for laughs, as a little-bully-quietens-down-when-exposed-to-bigger-bully story; it does not work if you try to take it seriously as a statement about women or marriage or the hope for peace...but, because the whole point of the story is that the mean girl is not beaten or raped but simply beaten at her own game, it's not subject to criticism as being "hurtful to women." Spare me. Women are tougher than that, and also more individual.

Stereotypes of whole demographic groups of people in the arts have hurt people whenever they've become normative. It never hurt anybody to recognize that there are passive, wimpy girls like Disney's Cinderella and that some of them do occasionally "luck out" and get what they've been whining for.. (Whether they like it when they get it is another matter; as Gregory Maguire reminded us in Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, in historical fact the prince who invited all the single women in the realm to the ball was free to marry a commoner because he was dying.) What has, in the past, hurt women writers and women audiences has been that publishers and movie-makers have refused to recognize that more interesting girls, like Farjeon's Ella, or like Maguire's, or like Amelia Earhart or Helen Keller or Hedy Lamarr, also exist; for too many years the high-paying publishers, and all the Hollywood movie-makers, wanted to define every female character as Disney's Cinderella. That hurt a generation of women's sales figures, and the next generation's ability to enjoy contemporary fiction, rather badly.

But, now that it's over, spare us the whines about how older fiction with passive "heroines" needs to be buried--regardless of whatever other merits it has or doesn't have--because any portrayal of a passive "heroine" is sooo "hurtful." Bah, humbug, and also pooh. That's "pooh" as in Winnie the..., a charming storybook that might have been better if Kanga had had more lines, but that works just fine as a story about a little boy's imagination of all his toys as little boys if they're not designed to look unavoidably like mommies, and that does absolutely no harm to little girls who can now read it along with other stories where different kinds of lively, active female characters have plenty of lines.

Or, more to the point: Disney Studios' Aladdin, produced long after the Disney brothers' death, is true to the Disney tradition of being vapid and shallow and silly. Eisner didn't want the Disney movie list to discriminate; Disney always meant it to present "simpering dolls" of every ethnic type from around the world, to desecrate every available artistic tradition impartially. And yes, the grandfather in Peter and the Wolf, of whom my brother once said, pointing to the picture in our book, "Is that the grandfather or the wolf?", gave some of us a certain image of what Russian people look like that lasted until we started to see them venturing into warm climates and peeling off the dead animals' skins, and wotta surprise that they look just like other humans underneath. And Pinocchio is ineffably Italian, too. Why didn't Pinocchio and Geppetto shape my generation's unspoken expectation of what Italian people look like? Because we saw real Italian people, both Italian-American immigrants, and images of Italians doing their own thing in Italy. Many of us didn't know any Russian-American immigrants, and the images we saw of people in the bad old Soviet Union seem in retrospect to have been chosen to support the idea that they all dressed up in bearskins because they intermarried with bears. War propaganda, even during a "cold" war, is harmful--by design. But the cure for the image of the grandfather in Peter and the Wolf was not to suppress Peter and the Wolf, which is actually a rather delightful introduction to classical music for children; it was more images of good-looking Russian athletes.

Eisner, I suspect, wanted Muslim or Arab-Americans to celebrate Aladdin as a step toward interfaith dialogue, and was disappointed that they didn't like it. Because they hadn't been conditioned by two generations of mass-market stupidity, that's why! Aladdin is a set of caricatures of stereotypes of the Arab countries, just as Sleeping Beauty is a set of caricatures of stereotypes of the European countries. Nufsed. I don't blame Muslims for being disgusted by Aladdin in the same way Lewis was disgusted by Sleeping Beauty, and for the same reasons, but the remedy is not to suppress Aladdin and wail about how the main characters (deeply tanned, with black hair and huge dark eyes and Arab-style clothes) don't look "Arab" enough, so "all the Arab characters" (meaning the minor characters caricatured as mean or foolish people, not counting the Genie, who's not human) "are violent or very nasty," and that makes Aladdin "hurtful." I think, historically, part of the problem is that the Arabian Nights stories were collected from all over the world and Aladdin was originally Asian not Arab--which might be what the cartoonist was trying to say by drawing him from what I suspect was an Indian model--but then, too, it's a long step from "Badroulbadour" to "Jasmine" or from Aladdin's Arabian Nights adventure to the Disney plot, so who cares. I watched the movie and I recall plenty of uncharacterized animated images of vendors and buskers and beggar children who were neither violent nor nasty; maybe the whiner seriously thinks that all real Arabs' faces look like the way Americans draw facial expressions that stereotype violent or nasty intentions, but that's still not the real problem, nor is it a solution. The solution is for Muslims to get busy writing children's stories, and making videos of them for those who prefer videos, that Muslims can actually like, in the same way Lewis liked The Wind in the Willows and Animal Farm. American children badly need stories about Arab people that are neither fantasy fiction nor cartoon movies...so Arab people need to stop whining and start writing, translating, and filming.

For me Pinsky's obsession with stereotypes is not as useful as his focus on the moral values portrayed in the stories.

That said, if you like cartoon movies and want to share them with children, Pinsky has given you a wonderful guide to choosing from the classics of the genre. Should Pocahontas, who left not a word about her spirituality beyond the fact that she eventually joined the Church of England, have been shown practicing a very twentieth century New Age impression of a Native American religion that, like cartoon Pocahontas herself, belongs to the Plains not the Coast? Is Robin Hood a hero you want to discuss with your children? Does it matter that the Deep South accent grotesquely assigned to the monkey chief in Mowgli belonged to a White actor, that "King Louis" was named after that actor rather than Louis Armstrong? (Oh, please...the voice was so obviously not Louis Armstrong's.) Pinsky notes the details and leaves you to decide.

And, if you don't like cartoons, don't want to watch any, and would prefer a Cliff's Notes approach to this aspect of twentieth century U.S. pop culture, Faith Trust and Pixie Dust can hardly be recommended enough. Here are well written, accurate, terse, and enjoyable summaries of thirty major Disney cartoon movies. I can testify that they bring back memories of the movies I've watched and stories I've read; I'd trust Pinsky's summaries as a guide to which, if any, of the newer movies I would or would not be willing to sit through.

Pinsky's web site indicates that he's sold enough of his books about the spiritual values reflected in pop culture to have dropped that thread and changed his focus to historical studies. So, his earlier books, about the values or "gospels" of Disney movies and "The Simpsons" cartoons, are now Fair Trade Books; they're more widely available secondhand than new, and you can get them for lower prices, but when you send this web site $5 per book + $5 per package + $1 per online payment, we'll send $1 to Pinsky or a charity of his choice. (If you want both Faith Trust and Pixie Dust (The Gospel According to Disney) and The Gospel According to the Simpsons, you'd mail a postal order for $15 to Boxholder, P.O. Box 322, or e-mail salolianigodagewi for the correct current Paypal address to send $16, and Pinsky or his charity would get $2. Contact information is at the bottom of the screen, below the Amazon widget.)

For Pinsky's recent contribution to North Carolina history, Met Her on the Mountain, go here.