Scattered thoughts on children's cultural education

My daughters' preferred method of selecting library books is to sweep an armful off a shelf into a basket and stagger over to a table to peruse them. I peruse too -- I certainly don't intend to check out tomes such as The Happy Halloween Adventure or The Easter Bunny's Day Off (titles invented just now but based on books I've vetoed in the past). The other day one of the books in the pile was a retelling of Rumpelstiltskin. Now I'm all for children hearing fairy tales, and the artwork wasn't bad, so I gave it more than the cursory scan. And to my great irritation, it was a revisionist telling in which the miller's daughter ends up marrying Rumpelstiltskin and their daughter is carried off by the king, whom she manages to outwit before passing up the role of queen in favor of being appointed Prime Minister.

I'm not particularly in favor of parody for children, because childhood is the best time to absorb the basic cultural and literary building blocks of a society. Parody works when the original source has already been assimilated to such an extent that subverting expectations becomes amusing. (Spaceballs: is it funny even if you haven't seen Star Wars a million times? Discuss.) If children aren't being sufficiently exposed -- and often -- to fairy tales, myth, Bible stories, famous events from history, and great works of literature (even in simplified retellings), how can parody even survive as a genre?

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It wearies me how books and movies targeted at children involve shallow plots and characters smeared with a thin veneer of cleverness. Can we just forgo the snappy banter and the mouthy sidekick? And must sincerity only be reserved for speeches in which characters are exhorted to transcend their differences or be true to themselves?

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I've been looking over the Mass books that Darwin has been researching, and I'm appalled by the amateur and/or saccharine quality of what's considered acceptable children's illustrations. The garish, childish pictures in the modern books are certainly different from the anemic blond pansy Christ depicted in children's devotional works of decades past, but it's hard to argue that they're an improvement. There's always a place for the amateur looking to improve his craft, but the job of teaching a child to appreciate the beauty of the Mass ought not to be compromised by the aggressive childishness in teaching aids.

On a positive note, I've been delighted by the illustrations in Inos Biffi's Illustrated Catechism, which seem to take seriously a child's ability to appreciate what is beautiful. Also, Caryl Houselander's illustrations in My Path to Heaven are intricate, detailed line drawings that inspire admiration as well as meditation. And the gentle style of Ben Hatke's artwork in Regina Doman's Angel in the Waters are elegant in their simplicity.

Certainly, there's no shortage of ugly artwork in secular books. But Christians seem particularly disposed to excuse mediocrity on the grounds of devotional sincerity.

Taking back the sexy

The marketing geniuses at Victoria's Secret have recently had a revelation: maybe you can overdo sexy.

Victoria's Secret likes to ask in its marketing, "What is sexy?" Now the lingerie chain is trying to figure out, "What's too sexy?"

The chief executive of the brand known for its provocative televised fashion shows and alluring stores made an admission yesterday. In her mind, the brand has become "too sexy" -- or at least the wrong kind of sexy.

"We have so much gotten off our heritage," CEO Sharen Jester Turney said in a conference call with analysts. Responding to the past year's weak sales and focus-group feedback, she said, "We will return to an ultra-feminine lingerie brand to meet [customer] needs and expectations."

Now, I'm going to come out and say it: frankly my dear, I don't want to go around all the time feeling sexy. Thank God that those hormonal days of youth, in which one spent most of the time either thinking or trying not to think about sex, are past!

Perhaps it has become financially obvious (and what other kind of obvious is there, marketing-wise?) that a relentless emphasis on defining your brand as "sexy, sexy, SEXY" may start to grind on the core customer base, most of whom a) do not have the body they did at nineteen, and b) do not desire to be classified as skanks, and therefore want to look good with their clothes on.

I like the idea of "ultra-feminine". It implies a foundational garment with superior support that is pretty. "Sexy" implies scanty and flimsy, and does no practical good if the concept can't translate into actually looking fine on a real female body. Is underwear that makes you look fat really sexy? I don't think so, Victoria's Secret, and so I applaud your move into "ultra-feminine" territory. Everyone wins when real aesthetics trump fake aesthetics.

Now, if you'd do something about your sleazy posters in the mall window, I'd really be grateful.

I gave to the diocese, and all I got was this lousy video

The diocese of Austin just held its annual Catholic Services Appeal. Every diocese has something like this -- a pledge-based appeal that covers seminary costs, pensions for retired priests, and general diocesan ministries that aren't funded by regular collections. This is a worthy cause, of course, and we support it every year because it's the right thing to do.

You'd almost think, however, that the diocese thought that the Catholic Services Appeal was, well, stupid. Otherwise, why would they subject 125 parishes to the blandest, most inane publicity videos year after year? The bishop gives a good pitch, but it's hard to drum up enthusiasm when the P.R. engine is undermining your message. For instance: apparently the production team was unaware that there is any music extant that specifically conveys the idea "Catholic". Even secular filmmakers know that there is "religious" music that can inspire feelings of piety or awe. Chant, anyone? Organ music? A hymn? No, the whole video is underscored with new-agey guitar tracks -- music that means nothing except "I'm stuck in this damn elevator". And one does not feel inspired to donate to an elevator; no, one marks the seconds until one is released from the purgatorial onslaught of muzak.

Aesthetics are not the issue in considering how much to give, but surely a quality video isn't that much to ask for, especially as the diocese assigns each parish a not-insignificant goal.

(Digression: Recall the baptism scene at the end of The Godfather, which is juxtaposed with the brutal murders of the enemies of the Corleone family. The aesthetic quality of the Catholic church -- the dim, stain-lit interior, the richness of the decor and of the vestments, the ancient ritual of a soul being cleansed from original sin -- made Michael Corleone's corruption all the more evident. Remove those elements of beauty and antiquity and, while the moral implications of the murders remain, the visceral impact would be effectively slashed.)

I searched the website of the Diocese of Austin to post this piece of shill for you, our readers, but apparently the powers-that-be are ashamed enough of it that it's nowhere to be found. But at least we can breathe a sigh of relief until the elevator doors start to close on us next year.

Music You Can Sink Your Teeth Into

One of my favorite CDs for some time was a recording of Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante, with soloists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, playing with the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. It's a great recording of a great piece. The problem is, that my CD now has tooth marks in it -- little bites that go all the way through the media surface and make it unplayable in any CD player except (for some reason) our Sony DVD player, which somehow manages to oversample enough not to even skip. But I can't get the CD into iTunes or play it on any of my work computers or the stereo.

Thus I found myself looking for a new copy the other night. Amazon sells it for $17 (a bit less used or through resellers) and iTunes sells it for $10.

Now, these days, we pretty much exclusively end up listening to music via iTunes. The stereo is hooked up to the computer, and if we're not listening to things outloud, I'm listening to them over headphones while at work. Yet my first reaction was, "I guess I better shell out the extra money so I can get a real copy."

However, as I thought about it, a CD is just another digital format. It's not as if the CD is somehow more a product of the musician's craft than a digital file. There's nothing "crafted" about a CD, it's just a piece of write once/read many digital media. And with the baby (whoever fills that niche in our ecosystem at the moment) having a tendency to go through the CDs -- they have a pretty limited life around here lately. (Which is unduly annoying to me, as I always priced myself on keeping CDs in pristine condition.)

For all that people have often talked about digital books taking over from their hard copy forebears, I've never been able to imagine collecting electronic copies of books instead of the real thing. There's something about the book form that has far too much history to be abandoned at this point. Call me old fashioned -- even call me a "crunchy con" but I'll remain a book collector as long as my days last.

Now I think about it, though, all collections of recorded music are collections of a secondary source anway. We have CDs or cassettes or 8-tracks or LPs because we can't actually be present and hear the artists perform a piece of music every time we feel like hearing it. But does the recorded medium itself have any particular value? Is there any reason to cling to CDs rather than switching to digital files? (I already keep backups of our recorded music, of course -- but that can much more easily be done via USB hard drive.)

iTunes still seems like a rather transient means to be your only way of owning a piece of music. But I'm not sure that there's any reason behind that, or if it's just my reflexive conservative suspicion of "the new".