Thing-Finder

This caught my eye in an otherwise also interesting article, Marriage in America, in the The Economist magazine from the May 31st issue.

Research also suggests that middle- and working-class parents approach child-rearing in different ways. Professional parents shuttle their kids from choir practice to baseball camp and check that they are doing their homework. They also talk to them more. One study found that a college professor's kids hear an average of 2,150 words per hour in the first years of life. Working-class children hear 1,250 and those in welfare families only 620.

Years ago, at Georgetown's Lauinger Library, while avoiding some study assignment or another by trawling the stacks, I stumbled across Charles Addams, a cartoonist from the thirties and fourties. His dark humor was definitely creepy and kooky and led to the famous Addams Family TV series in the sixties plus a couple of spin off movies. Some of his work has recently been re-released including even The Charles Addams Mother Goose, a rendition unlike most others to which a child will be exposed. The humor is really more off-beat rather than gruesome, somewhat in the vein of Edward Gorey. It will appeal to most children but especially to twelve year olds of the Y chromosome persuasion.

There is a good article on Herge, the author/illustrator of the long running Tintin stories. Unfortunately available only in abstract on-line, it can be found in full in the May 28, 2007 edition in an article titled A Boy's World. It is written by Anthony Lane. Among the other tid-bits he explains the origins of the nome-de-plume, Herge.

Reading Novels Linked with Increased Empathy

from King Solomon's Mines by H. Rider Haggard

Having just survived crossing a desert, then climbing and descending a mountain range into new country cut off from the rest of the world, Alan Quartermain and his companions encounter a group of threatening inhabitants of this new world, whose custom it is to put to death all intruders. They speak an archaic form of Zulu and Quartermain is able to communicate with them in that tongue.

. . . "Nay, ye shall know the truth. We come from another world, though we are men such as ye; we come," I went on, "from the biggest star that shines at night."

"Oh! oh!" groaned the chorus of astonished aborigines.

"Yes," I went on, "we do, indeed"; and again I smiled benignly, as I uttered that amazing lie. "We come to stay with you a little while, and to bless you by our sojourn. Ye will see, O friends, that I have prepared myself for this visit by the learning of your language."

"It is so, it is so," said the chorus.

"Only, my lord," put in the old gentleman, "thou hast learnt it very badly."

As he describes his site "At the moment, the contraption, built in a garden shed and first tested off the tops of small hills, is more like a free university having a love affair with a space station. Another useful analogy might be with a clearing in the jungle. The web is certainly a jungle, and without a few clearings it is hard to see how the innocent can stay sane in there, and it might soon be hard to see anything at all. There have to be at least a few areas that unashamedly represent civilized achievement, if only because there are so many that represent the exact opposite, all fangs bared."

He can be a little much to take sometimes but is almost always worth reading.

The Big Knockover

". . . no more warmth in him than a hangman's rope."

"The room was as black as an honest politician's prospects."

"She didn't seem to know what it was all about, but she couldn't help knowing that it was about something."

Having read the C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia as a child and enjoyed them immensely (one of those stories that take you away from your present reality and then has the courtesy to repeat the favor over several books), I anticipated the release of the movie version in 2005 with some trepidation. Your interaction with a book is often so unique that any movie version has to be a disappointment. Occasionally there are real successes where the new movie carves out its own distinct character but somehow, and often unaccountably, remains true to the source. It is then that you end up with two separate enjoyments, the movie and the book, separate but related.

Evaline Ness was the illustrator of Sam, Bangs, and Moonshine for which she won the 1967 Caldecott Medal. It was a popular story with our children when they were younger and I read it many times to them over the years.

What I did not know was that the Ness part of her name was from her marriage to Eliot Ness, of Treasury Department/Al Capone/Untouchables fame. I don't know quite what to make of that, but it is oddly fascinating to me.

Minh Le has a blog Bottom Shelf Books giving an alternative view of many of the classics of children's literature. I suspect he will be frequently quoted here.

Frog and Toad are friends who (judging by their clothing) both teach in the Philosophy Department at the University of Vermont.