Brown Bear Banned

The below tidbit came my way from a college friend on Facebook, who'd seen my post on Joy's "Brown Bear" moment.  The "banned" image came with the accompanying text below:

In 2010, a member of the Texas State Board of Education called for the removal of "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?" by Bill Martin, Jr. from the state curriculum. Why? The board member said that Martin's works for adults contain “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system." Fortunately, someone pointed out to this mistaken board member that Bill Martin, Jr. was not Bill Martin, a philosophy professor and author of "Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation." Oops.

JoyDad's response was swift:

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, what do you see?

I see a struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie!

JoyTeachers, take note.  We depend on you to convey to our daughter, in suitable terms, the enduring significance of the RED bird!

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

One additional delight that came of my visit to AuntLO and UncleDO earlier this month was that they were culling their book collection, and invited me to carry off any of the discards that I wanted. Among the novels I took from the pile was Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister, by Gregory Maguire. I had read his Wicked and felt rather take-it-or-leave-it (I haven't seen the musical, how culturally out-of-touch I am sometimes!), but was willing to give him another chance.

Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was ever-so-much-more compelling!

First off, I was a sucker for Tracy Chevalier's Girl With a Pearl Earring when I read it a couple years ago, set in the city and household of the painter Vermeer in 17th-century Holland. Confessions places its retelling of the Cinderella story in that milieu and time-frame (well, not Vermeer's house, but definitely the Holland of Vermeer and Rembrandt), such that the household details felt familiar. So too did the exploration of women as artistic subjects, and as apprentice artists themselves.

Maguire goes in deep on the themes of ugliness and beauty and art; on perception and reality and the places where perception fails. His retelling of the Cinderella story is full of surprises and yet makes perfect sense as to how HIS version might have been twisted into the fairy tale we know today (as if he weren't the one doing the twisting!)

So why does this rate an Elvis Sighting?

Well, it's the older (ugly) stepsister Ruth. Most of the book is told from the perspective of the younger (ugly) stepsister Iris, who is clever and thoughtful but pinched and plain in physical appearance. The older stepsister, when first described, is "a solid thing, already more than adult size, but simple. A pendulum of spit swings out and makes a tassel. Iris reaches and wipes Ruth's mouth."

Ruth doesn't talk. Ruth perseverates on a little toy given her by the ethereally-lovely girl who will one day be her (beautiful) stepsister. "Is she a changeling?" the exquisite Clara/Cinderella asks.

The word "autism" would have been a complete anachronism to 17th-century Holland, and Maguire doesn't make any such diagnosis. But I heard spectrum echoes. (Is that perception on my part, or a place where perception fails?)

Ruth is essential to the plot.

And I must confess...

that I can't say any more, because I simply cannot spoiler this book. GAH!

A Discouraging Word

The official song of the state where I was born has a refrain that goes like this:

Home, home on the range
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day!

A cowboy's earthly paradise! It'd be enough to make ya want to move back, if it weren't for the fact that really Kansas has about as many discouraging words as anywhere else. And, alas, the movie Tropic Thunder is playing in Kansas as well.

There's been a lot of editorial page ink and blogospheric bytes spilled over the protests from the special-needs community about the movie's use of the "R-word": retard. As I understand it, the context is an actor (played by Ben Stiller) playing a character with cognitive disabilities, and overplaying the "simple" factor of his "Simple Jack" for Oscar-pursuit purposes. The word "retard" is bandied about indiscriminately, leading to real-world concerns -- shared by me -- that one of the movie's ugly taglines may be heard on a lot of playgrounds this fall. I won't repeat it, but you can read about it if you care to.

I won't be seeing this movie, and wouldn't anyway because a) I see something like one theatre-movie per year if I'm lucky, and b) I don't "do" trash-mouth movies that pull their big laugh-lines out of the gutter, and I'm not just talking about the "R"-word anymore.

Instead, over the past several months I've been reading my way through a clever and highly entertaining science fiction series by Lois McMaster Bujold, featuring lead character Miles Vorkosigan. Miles is a nobleman on his home planet, in the line of succession to the emperorship. He is blindingly intelligent, a man of conscience, full of manic energy, apparently arrogant but battling inner bogeymen. He commands a fleet of space mercenaries, and has adventures, romantic and otherwise, all around the galaxy.

He's also just over four feet tall, with startlingly brittle bones and other physical frailties, the in-utero victim of a chemical attack on his mother before he was born. His home planet has a low tolerance for physical difference, to put it mildly. The "R-word" that gets used against Miles is "mutie," short for mutant.

Joy and I have not yet heard our own planet's discouraging epithets used against her. With any luck, we'll avoid it for some years longer. I'm not so naive, though, as to think that it isn't going to happen at some point.

Meanwhile, I shield myself against the day, rejoicing in Joy's accomplishments and entertaining myself with the successes of Miles Vorkosigan. Who needs the movies, anyway?