applying an elephant gun

[calimac]

The Mythopoeic Award nominees have been announced. I'm on the scholarship committee, and two or three of my choices in each category made the finalists. Reading through the preliminary list (not publicly announced) for the myth and fantasy category was particularly depressing this year, as it contained several anthologies, particularly on recent authors, filled with the most deadly dull, plodding, and straining routine academic essays. Most of them, of course, were from McFarland, though the worst one of all wasn't. I read enough of these that I began to worry if the problem was myself, but then I turned to the Inklings material and cheered up immediately. A lot of good stuff in that category. Fortunately, the other committee members seemed to agree, and none of the awful anthologies made the ballot.

But the experience did influence my proposal for a paper of my own for Mythcon this year. The conference theme is "the land and its inhabitants in fantasy," and B. had suggested I depart from Tolkien and give a paper on ecology in Dr. Seuss. The prospect of reading all of his children's books - I never have, not all of them - and combing them for environmental considerations (is the Cat in the Hat wasteful? Is Sam-I-Am? what about a tweetle beetle battle?) had potential, but the fact is that most of Dr. Seuss's explicit lessons in that realm - Horton, Yertle, the Lorax - are pretty heavy-handed, and well-known enough that they need no help from me. And I don't think I'd have time for that much research.

But I've noted that both scholars studying children's lit, and readers reminiscing about their favorite childhood authors, tend to ignore picture books, and I want to correct that, so my thoughts then turned to my earliest favorite author, one of Dr. Seuss's Beginner Books colleagues, P.D. Eastman. I picked his first three books, all of which were brand-new in my childhood and very dear to me, and one of which provided a catchphrase I still use today. Eastman practiced an equally zany but far more disciplined form of nonsense than Dr. Seuss, and he had some particular recurring themes in teaching children about the world that I find interesting.

And, I thought as I leafed through the books with this in mind, I can do this with the same determined and strained air of all those boring academic essays and thus, like Asimov with thiotimoline, exorcise the demon.

So here, just accepted, are the deliberately pompous title and abstract of my paper topic for Mythcon:

"Ecology, Environment, and Resources in Three Novels by P.D. Eastman"

Abstract:
P.D. Eastman is an important fantasy author too long neglected by scholarship. His first three titles for Random House's classic "Beginner Books" series - Sam and the Firefly, Are You My Mother?, and Go, Dog, Go - skillfully combine fantastic imagination and humor with a restrained pedagogical motive, inculcating in readers an appreciation of the place in their lives of the environment around them, both natural and artificial, with particular attention to identification with animals, understanding of traffic rules, and a knowledge of the uses and limitations of machinery. Comparison will be made to works by parallel authors including T.S. Geisel and William Pene du Bois. Eastman deserves the same degree of scholarly scrutiny and attention often given to authors for slightly older children, like Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman, and in this hour he's going to get it. N.B.: As this presentation will include the actual reading aloud of picture books, attendees are encouraged to dress for naptime and bring their own cups of water.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Are You my Mother? is just about the first book I remember reading - it sounds an interesting talk. (And you don't even have to invoke Oedipus!)

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Is it possible that Are You My Mother? was the inspiration for Is This My Cow?, the book Sam Vimes reads aloud to Sam Jr. in Terry Pratchett's Thud?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Heh!

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I have read Go, Dog, Go! more times than any other book in the world. We generally refer to it by its nickname, Go, Dog. It can profitably be read backward, upside-down, sideways, at random, and while the book is being opened and slammed shut. Go, Dog stands up to repetitve use much better than The Little Engine That Could or Fox in Socks or that appalling book about the twee baby dragon that I ended up tearing to bits once I knew I could do so without repercussions.

I applaud this undertaking.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I am delighted to learn that this hoary classic is still popular among children today. Its generally non-linear flow, which is what makes it so amenable to irregular reading order, strikingly resembles that of my favorite Dr. Seuss, One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, to which learned comparison, or at least passing reference, will be made.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

The only Dr. Seuss I really loved as a kid was On beyond Zebra. I was obviously a prime target for Tolkien's invented language. . . .

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I read that one at some point, but it never really did it for me for some reason. I collected alphabets, but only real ones. And when I read LotR, the complexity of the system for the tengwar defeated me, and I contented myself with learning the cirth.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

Funny you mention waste. When I was at the movies today, I was struck, watching the trailers for upcoming films, by how wasteful the movie industry seems to be. Okay, I was there to see Iron Man 3 so the trailers were mostly of shoot-'em-ups with lots of car crashes and explosions. It made me wonder about our society, though, in how we choose to be entertained. It was obvious that some of the things on screen were CGI, but I wondered how many other real things were there just to be destroyed.

In books, the author can blow up as many things as s/he chooses and it does not translate to waste in the real world. When such things are transferred to film, it does.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised that tengwar would have struck you as hard. They seemed cleanly logical to me, whereas the cirth have enough arbitrariness to demand brute memorization. And you seem to have a systematic mind.