[Previous entry: "news from the woesome Garrison"] [Main Index] [Next entry: "Triest"]

03/30/2004 Entry: "Literature for the young, old, and abridged."

Three is a magic number. Somewhere in that ancient mystic trinity you get three, 'cause it's a magic number. The past, present, the future. Faith, hope and charity. The heart, brain and body give you three. A man and a woman have a baby. There were three in the family, it's a magic number.
--Paraphrased from Bob Dorough, writer for Schoolhouse Rock!

I happened upon this very lengthy but very good article about the editing and rewriting of old children's classics. ( you have to sit through a lame ad to get the day pass to read the whole thing, but it's worth the wait )It is nothing new. In my youth I knowingly read editions of Frankenstein, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Red Pony, all which were edited or abridged. Looking back, it is as if I never read them at all. When I read Farenheit 451, Ray wrote an afterword condemning the act of condensing or editing literary works. His notion, it was not much different than what his "firemen" were up to.

Great children's books are never complicated, but have nuance and dispence wisdom. This wisdom is most often dispenced at a trickle. You can read a great children's book at age nine, then read it again at sixteen, twenty-five, or fifty-twelve, and still find it stimulating. There's the Little Prince, there's Michael Ende, Dr Seuss, Milne, Baum...

As a teacher, I do my best to give something to my kids that they can sink their teeth in an toss around for practice. But then I always try to throw in something that's maybe a little to hard for them to get. My students, of course, are college age and older. But it is still a sound principle for teaching. lt is not just about consuming and regurgitating; the learner must also have the desire to snap after the spoon, even grab it out of your hand and smack you in the noggin with it. That is still up to the learner, however.

There are many devices with which the learner may practice his skills, and enough popular books are dumbed down enough as it is. Let us leave the classic children's lit intact.

Replies: 1 Comment

Hey, I read those same kiddie 'abridged' books, and Frankenstein is definitly not the same in the abridged version, which may of well have been written by Universal Studios as Mary Shelly. Wretched Prometheus Rebound. It had neither gothic nor Goethe.
In fact, I remember reading that version of Frankenstein on the TEE through the alps, and don't remember much else. I was 7 or 8 years old, and unlike Kraftwerk, I didn't run into iggy pop or david bowie...at least not knowingly.

As for English children's books, I always recommend Roald Dahl. I liked them as a child, and I like them still. They're neither technically brilliant, nor especially inspired, but they are really effective at approaching story-telling from the perspective of a child.

Then of course, there are the great children's authors: Stephen King, Poe, Baudelaire, Kafka, Michael Moore, Larry Flynt, Rilke, Christopher Smart, H.P. Lovecraft, EE. Cummings, Pants Leon, Asimov, John Grisham, Douglas Adams. Anthony Burgess, Berkley Breathed, etc.

Posted by chris @ 03/31/2004 12:01 AM CST