Editing Out the Best Bits - Abridging Classic Children's Stories

Why do Children's Book Editors Talk Down to Modern Children?

I bought my grandson an illustrated edition of Ruyard Kipling's brilliant story, "The Elephant's Child," intending to record myself reading this exquisitely told tale from Kipling's "Just So Stories." As I read through the lovely illustrated book, something seemed off, as though something were missing from the story I enjoyed hearing as a child.

Off to the Internet I went and pulled up a copy of the story from a website that collected literature from the past, intact and without meddling by modern critics and editors who feel like Kipling just didn't understand modern sensibilities.  To my horror, I discovered that the wonderful rhythm of the story, which you may remember was almost a song in its use of rhythm and repetition was missing much of what I loved about the story. Not only were some of the best, most mysterious bits missing but the rhythm and repetition - two key crucial ingredients of excellent storytelling for children, as every great storyteller knows - were missing. 

My grandpa knew about rhythm and repetition. He used to tell us kids simple stories of his own childhood. They varied very little as he told them over and over. The words had been honed over the years to a fine edge, like music that held us enthralled. Then he would play an old tune on his harmonica and then magically plucked another story out of the air. Perhaps it would be "Old Bob and the Skunk" or "Old Bob and the Kittens" "Or Dixie the Horse Arrives on the Train."  Then a chorus of "Polly Wolly Doodle" or "We'll Be Jolly Friends." His stories were simple and lovely and would have made Mr. Rogers proud.

Kipling stories are like that. In the Elephant's child, Kipling does not talk down to children. He challenges them, periodically launching spectacular phrases like "the great grey green greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees." The editor of the book version I bought seems to have decided that children today are too stupid to understand about fever trees, thereby missing the point entirely.

Of course, the children hearing this story the first time won't know about fever trees. They are likely to interrupt the story to ask "What are fever trees." The wise story-teller, knowing that the whole point of this story is to show that children should ask questions even at some risk that more may happen than is expected, will answer. "Oh, best beloved, the fever tree is a kind of African tree which attracts mosquitoes which bite people and cause malaria which gives the people infected a fever. That's why people in Africa call them "fever" trees. Also best beloved, these trees like to grow along the banks of rivers."

The child learns not only from the story, but also the story-teller that asking questions is an acceptable thing, despite the relatives that tell them they should shut up and spank them for their "curtiosity."

Kipling also mangles words on purpose for fun. Some children, hearing the tale for the first time, may find the words funny, but they will soon come to recognize that the Elephant's Child, in using words like "'satiable curtiosity" is like them, trying out language and learning new words and that even if they mispronounce a word it is not the end of the world.

One wonders whether the Children's Book Editor at Frances Lincoln Children's Books who abridged "The Elephant's Child," does a great disservice to children by removing phrases like "all set about with fever trees" and "One fine morning in the middle of the Precession of the Equinoxes". Does the editor think children will not understand such things or is the editor like Aunt Hippopotamus and Uncle Baboon and could not understand such things himself. Or is he afraid the child might ask, "What is a Precession of the Equinoxes?"

Many grownups have a complete horror of being asked a question by a child that they cannot answer and therefore discourage any difficult questions from children and sometimes try to prohibit questions altogether because doing so might cause them to think and thinking has given them a headache ever since their days in college when they were taught not to think thoughts not approved of by their professors.

My solution to the problem is to obtain the original version of "The Elephant's Child" and read that into a microphone and render the digital audio onto a CD, thereby creating an audiobook of the unabridged story. My grandson Eli can follow along with the pictures (I'll put a bell in the recording to indicate time to turn the page). The words however, will be Kiplings own, intact and complete.

I am thinking that I will get Eli to provide me some recordings of his own voice saying cute things like "O' wisest of grandfathers. Can you tell me how the elephant got its trunk?"  I may interject questions like "What, o' wisest of grandfathers, is a fever tree?" That would be fun.

I would also include a preface of my own explaining that this is the unabridged story because Grandfather believes children are clever enough to figure out things for themselves, by asking wise grownups questions that satisfy their 'satiable curtiosity.

© 2021 by Tom King

 

 

Ginny Weasley – J.K. Rowlings’ Most Daring Character

 

Author’s Note: Many of my Christian friends find Rowlings’ Harry Potter series objectionable because it seems to glorify witchcraft. The use of magic in the series is at least the conjuring style with magic words and formulas rather than the summoning demons and dark forces style of magic. At least the rules of her magic world divide the use of magic by good and evil, right and wrong. Rowling, based on her own comments in various interviews, tries to cast her books as politically correct, but when she is honest about it, she gets in trouble with the cancel culture. Rowling says this book is not a Christian allegory and it is not set in the sort of magical fantasy allegorical worlds that openly Christian authors like JRR Tolkien, John Bunyan, George McDonald and CS Lewis built. But it’s hard to miss that Rowlings’ Harry turns out in the end to be a Messiah figure. Both he and Dumbledore willingly lay down their lives for others. Like John the Baptist, Dumbledore doesn’t come back. Like Jesus, however, Harry does. I think that in tackling the messiah theme, Rowlings could not help herself incorporating Christian themes. Even though not an exact allegory, the series definitely held ancient themes common to Christian literature. The messiah theme repeats itself in literature all down the ages from The Garden of Eden to Christ, to King Arthur to Aslan and Frodo. It echoes in our stories and songs down through the age, because, I believe, it is true. This article came from a discussion by disgruntled Harry Potter fans complaining because Harry didn’t wind up with Hermione. I think Rowlings was exactly right and revealed a great deal of wisdom. Her recent troubles with cancel culture have shown her to be made of sterner stuff than the left thought she was. I felt like I should defend her choice from wrong-headed critics.

J.K. Rowlings, author of the wildly successful Harry Potter series, drew her characters well. Her ability to draw distinct and likeable characters was responsible for most of the seven volume series’ success.  The character that is often cited as the least-liked of all the characters is Harry’s ultimate love interest, his best friend Ron Weasley’s kid sister, Ginny.  I utterly disagree.

Ginny was a wonderful girl. She had her mother's fierce devotion to family and her father's sense of wonder. She was devoted to Harry and wound up being pretty amazing in her own right. Fans of the series, especially female fans often criticize Rowlings for not getting Harry and Hermione together as a couple. Instead they had that rare and improbable male-female friendship that many less insightful readers believe is simply impossible.

Rowlings, however was smarter than that. She could clearly see that  Harry and Hermione would never have worked – they were too much like brother and sister. Heroes in stories need an ally like that, and a sister can be a powerful ally. But a sister is not a suitable mate. Harry and Hermione were both very powerful characters and they needed soul mates who were strong enough to be themselves, without needing to contend with them for dominance. Ginny adored Harry and had a very healthy ego of her own and had few doubts about herself or about Harry for that matter. The same was true with Ron toward Hermione. She always amazed him and he always trusted in her gifts even when she, herself, didn't.  I think Ron and Ginny got that from their father. Mrs. Weasley was always something of an overwhelming character and he was content to let her be so.

Remember that Ron ran away from Harry and Hermione for a time during their hunt for the horcruxes. He had to. It was in a way, too much having to live with the two of them running along at full power. As friends Harry and Hermione could work together and stand the heat, but as mates, I think the addition of a sexual component would have sent them both up in flames the way high-powered actor or politician couples tend to flame out and wind up divorced or worse.

Ginny and Ron got the best characteristics from their parents - stability, devotion and enough fire from their mother to hold their own in Harry and Hermione's considerable shadows. From their father they got that flexibility, good humor and common sense.  It allowed them to provide their more fiery mates a stable rock from which they could spring to even greater heights.

Look at all the people out there who achieve the kind of "greatness" Olivander predicted for Harry. The very best of them have friends like Ron and mates like Ginny.

Margaret Thatcher had Denis
Ronald Reagan had Nancy
Queen Elizabeth had Prince Philip
George W. Bush had Laura
George H.W. Bush had Barbara
JFK had Jackie
Dwight Eisenhower had Mamie
FDR had Eleanor
Harry had Bess
Abe Lincoln had Mary with all her flaws
George Washington had Martha

A recent example of a flawed pairing of two alpha personalities would be Bill and Hillary Clinton. Both were powerful in their own right and as such, they very publicly went up in flames during his administration. Bill still has trouble letting Hillary take center stage as she did when he was president. In her most recent political activities, Bill has hovered like a grim ghost in the background, his past history casting a poisonous cloud over her aspirations.

I think J.K. Rowlings got the pairings exactly right in the Harry Potter saga. Not many authors are brave enough to suggest that that type of relationships between a man and women may be idea! Harry was close friends with Hermione and mate to Ginny and the distinction between those relationships became ever more clear as the series went on. Many people want to believe that two powerful alpha type people can make it together, but the odds are always against them and their relationship will never be quite secure. Like it or not, Harry and Ginny were made for each other and Hermione and Ron were too. From the moment she told him he had dirt on his nose that first day they met on the train to Hogwarts, it was always inevitable they would wind up together. Ron was an amazing young man from the first and his character grew right along. But Hermione's confidence and self-assurance helped to bolster Ron's own confidence. Ron was always confident in Hermione and realized what a treasure she was. Like his father, Ron was devoted to her and quite content to live in the powerful presence of "the brightest witch of her day" without burning up or needing to challenge her position.

That's why J.K. Rowlings sold so many books. She wrote truth, however politically incorrect it might be. People are starved for truth. Some of the things J.K. says outside of the books might be suspect or an attempt to cull favor with the politically correct, but within the books, she got it dead to rights.

A lot of Potter fans complain that Ginny and Harry “suck” as a couple.

Balderdash! They only suck if you're looking for a soap opera and not a happy marriage. They only suck if well-adjusted, happy couples bore you to tears.

It's amazing to me how girls always get irate over the jock or the BMOC (big man on campus) who overlooks the shy, unassuming girl in favor of some tempestuous floozy who only makes his life miserable when the shy girl would have been a devoted supportive companion and helpmate. Then they turn around and complain if there aren't enough fireworks between the couple to pique their prurient interest.

I got news for you, tempestuous relationships tend to wind up in divorce a few years after the movie's happy ending. Having wild passionate sex, contrary to the romantic poets, doesn't fix all that’s wrong with a  bad relationship. It blows it up! Fiery relationships are all well and good for soap operas and movies of the week, but they suck as a foundation for a happy marriage.

JK gave us not one, but two wonderful relationships - Harry and the devoted Ginny and Hermione and the devoted Ron instead of some cliche'd romantic triangle (although we did get a bit of that with Ron on the horcrux hunt even if it was all in Ron's imagination.

Harry Potter was about good vs. evil. It was about making the right choice even if it didn't seem like it was in your best interests. It was about relying on your friends and family instead of trying to go it alone. It was about doing the right thing. Look at the quintessential romantic triangle - Arthur, Guinevere and Lancelot. Guinevere was too much of a power in her own right. Arthur was competition. Lancelot was powerful, but he never challenged her for right of place. It cost Arthur his kingdom and almost cost his legacy.

I think Harry came out far better than Arthur did in choosing Ginny. And the Ginny in the books was far more fleshed out than in the movie, although Bonnie Wright's subtle performance in the films revealed all you might want to know about Ginny's character - starting from that first contact in the train station. Bonnie really played Harry's mate to the hilt, even when Harry barely realized she was there.

I hate soap opera - stupid people who shouldn't be together torturing each other. Where is there anything to be gleaned from that besides the whole post-modernist "Life is meaningless and then you die" nonsense?

Why would you want to screw up a heroic tale like the Harry Potter series that way other than because you either have a perverse need to see people make themselves miserable so you don't feel so bad about your own misery or because you have a literary axe to grind and want to show how smart you are and "above all that schmaltzy happy ending stuff".

That's why so many English majors wind up bitter cranky old schoolmarms and never contribute anything meaningful in the way of literature. I'd rather learn from great authors than set myself up as their judge and jury. Those who can, do. Those who can't, teach. And those who can't even teach become critics.

As River Tam described such persons in Firefly, "Sad little king of a sad little hill."

Many Potter fans complain that Ginny is too “bland”.  I think her character is subtle and subtle is not bland. You want an exciting couple, there's always Voldemort and Bellatrix.

Again, it amazes me that people will complain a couple is bland and get royally furious when the "jock" spurns the "plain" girl for the more exciting one in real life. Maybe you have to be female to understand what these critics are talking about. For me, Ginny was a wonderful character, book and movie. She wasn't flashy or exotically beautiful, but for someone like Harry who was risking his life almost daily, fighting evil wizards and witches, giving up his very life to save others.......Ginny would have been a fresh, uncomplicated breath of fresh air and devoted companion.

You got a glimpse of the stuff Ginny was made of in the final battle, in the kiss she initiated in the room of requirement, in her steadfast devotion to Harry. Harry needed that. Hermione and Harry would have gone up in flames.

In the hero quest, the hero's mate gives him (or her) one of two things - a happily ever after or a tragic ending. Harry and Ginny were right together as were Hermione and Ron; that is, if you wanted them to have that happily ever after.

 

Rowlings was brilliant in putting them together the way she did. And with Harry and Hermione, she perfectly captured that fascinating and rare relationship, a male-female true friendship without sex. Nature provides us with pheremonal cues when two people are not genetically compatible. When you're together you feel like siblings. Anything else just seems wrong.

I've had relationships with women that were like that. My wife has a long-standing relationship with a guy from school that's like that. They even tried dating once and it just didn't feel right to either of them. They're great friends and all, but that's all.

I'm so glad J.K. placed that element in the Potter novels and didn't go for the whole "men and women can never be just friends" malarkey. Remember the scene in the tent where they danced together. It showed how their relationship worked and did so brilliantly. There weren't any sexual overtones in it. It looked like friends comforting one another.

Everything isn't about sex. Fully mature people understand that. Hormonally charged teenagers so seldom do. Both Hermione and Harry matured at a surprisingly young age. Remember how Hermione was always encouraging Harry in his relationships.

And did you catch the scene on the bridge where Hermione said, "At least you accomplished one thing tonight.......Cho couldn't keep her eyes off you." And if you keep your eyes on Ginny in that scene as she is walking along behind him, you'll see this tiny little flinch from Ginny when Hermione says it. She is already carrying a torch for Harry and Harry doesn't yet see it.

The romance between Harry and Ginny is one of my favorites in all of literature. It's not a bonfire, but the kindling of a warm hearth - the sort of fire that lasts a lifetime.

Hermione and Ron have a sparkier relationship, but mostly because Ron lacks the self-confidence to move forward with Hermione. Hermione is in love with Ron long before he has the courage to recognize that he is in love with her. Hermione was ready to close the deal with Ron early on. She loved Ron, not in spite of his flaws, but because of them. To me that's incredibly selfless and what love ought to be.

Ron was afraid to put himself forward with Hermione. It's not that Ron isn't brave; he just doesn't see how someone as brilliant as Hermione could possibly love someone as flawed as he sees himself being. After he becomes separated from Harry and Hermione and Dumbledore's light catcher leads him back, you see a new Ron, filled with a new sense of self-confidence - enough to push his way past Hermione's anger. From then on, they are pair-bonded for life and you can see it in everything they do. That time away was Ron's 40 days in the wilderness just as the time when Harry surrendered to Voldemort and was "killed" was Harry's. Once that job was done, Harry could allow Ginny fully into his life without fearing that being close to him would get her killed.

Rowlings did such a good job with those relationships. The books are very wise and the films captures that quite well. The Harry/Ginny naysayers inevitably make arguments for Harry and Hermione make arguments of the sort junior high school girls for putting together the big jock and the head cheerleader back in the hormone-fueled days of early adolescence. You don't hook up with your sister and Hermione was  always that to Harry. JK was dead on.

The fact that practically everyone wants more of Harry and the gang, is a testament to how brilliantly and truthfully Rowlings drew the characters. I may have to watch the movies again now. Rowlings has given us a wise and truly remarkable body of work that will likely stand the test of time and gets all the pineapples I have. An author that can hold the attention of children and adolescent through not just one thick volume, but seven knows her stuff, so y'all just shut up about Ginny being the wrong gal for Harry.

© 2021 by Tom King

The Detectorists - Poignant and Sweet

 

At first I thought this was another British comedy about unlovely people of the post-modernist "life sucks and then you die" genre. Toby Jones, after all, plays a lot of unsavory characters. But pretty quickly I came to really like the two main characters -Mackenzie Crook (from the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) as Andy and Toby Jones (from Sherlock) as Lance. Neither is a pretty person. They play oddball friends scouring the English countryside for treasure with metal detectors. Diana Rigg (Mrs. Peel from the Avengers) also appears as Veroinica in this quirky little series which is fun. 

A friend recommended this series to me and I respect her opinion on things like this. The series won a BAFTA Award. The show follows a group of "detectorists", amateur archaeologists searching for and finding military buttons, Roman coins and odd bits of old appliances. The six episodes I watched took us through their search for a buried Roman treasure that the Jones character is convinced is somewhere in the field.

There are rivals for the search grounds and all sorts of problems come up that you'd not expect would plague a bunch of guys who spend their weekends running metal detectors up and down an open field. The story, like all good stories, lures you in softly and holds you to the end. I found it on Amazon's Britbox which I get with my Amazon Prime subscription (which with the free shipping and all the free movies and TV shows is well worth the annual bill). If you're looking for a gentle diversion for a Sunday afternoon, I recommend this funny little series.

Stars:  Mackenzie Crook, Toby Jones, Pearce Quigley, Diana Rigg

And I Thought Plan 9 From Outer Space was a Bad Movie

 

 Aronofsky's Noah Is Bad Religion, Bad Politics, and Bad Writing

After avoiding watching this 160 million dollar turkey for 7 years, out of curiosity, I finally watched it. It is very very very loosely based on the Biblical story of Noah. Did I say VERY loosely enough times? Probably not. Man! In this unwieldy beast of a picture, After Adam and Eve sin, God doesn't talk to anyone for a couple of thousand years, having himself a right royal sulk over the whole pulsating magical fruit eating thing. Also noteworthy, evidently in Eden, Adam and Eve, looked thin, sexless and glowing, kind of like the aliens in Cocoon with their fake skins off. Mankind has messed up (or I probably should say "personkind" given the whole thing leaned to the left like the flipping Tower of Pisa). In this showy epic, it seems that Cain's extended family, with the help of fallen angels that God has turned into rock monsters, build an industrial civilization that has cut down all the trees, filled all the ponds and creeks with toxic waste and spilled lots of oil on the ground - that and, of course, the bad guys are all bullies and Noah is a misogynist of sorts. 

Noah comes off as a cross between a really angry, very focused Terminator and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. This is a shameless save-the-planet propaganda film that could have been written to support a propaganda campaign for the Green New Deal. It hits all the latest causes - killing the planet, depopulation, fallen angels ain't so bad, magical families, bullies, sex, war, male misogyny and implied incest. I was surprised that Noah wasn't black and Ham, at least, wasn't gay. Of course, Aronofsky did get some flack from the "woke" folk for those oversights.

The writers turned the Bible account on its ear. The fallen angels were "just trying to help" according to the narrator and God got mad at them, but they all got forgiven and went back to heaven when they started mass murdering people trying to get on the ark when the rain fell. The ark had a stowaway and there was a fight scene and someone was killed. In the battle outside the ark, it seemed that the faster the rock monster fallen angels squashed the maniacal human army, the sooner they were forgiven, freed of their rock casing and sucked back up into heaven.

Methuselah (Anthony Hopkins) came off as a crazy magical wizard with an obsession for berries who defended the rock angels from attacks by the Cain family while dispensing cryptic advice. There was even a magical talisman the family passed around that was the skin of the serpent that someone retrieved from Eden. This snakeskin gave Noah's family and anyone who stole the skin, magical powers. Noah came off as one of those environmental extremists that think we should kill all humans to preserve the planet in some kind of pristine state because people were messing the place up. Noah thinks that God, in this version of the story, is perfectly okay with wiping out the human race. 

To do God's will, Noah plans for his family not to reproduce, but to die out after the flood and leave the place to the bunny rabbits and birds. To that end, he leaves Ham's girlfriend behind in the woods to be trampled to death by a mob (leaving Ham single and unable to reproduce). Emma Thompson is safely barren till meddling Methuselah works his healing spell on her unbeknownst to Noah. When Thompson miraculously bears twin girls during the voyage, Noah nearly kills both of the babies and afterwards moans that he had thus failed to carry out God's plan to utterly destroy the human race while preserving the aforementioned fuzzy bunnies, along with an assortment of snakes and elephants. If that ain't a UN Depopulation Initiative wet dream, I don't know what is. 

Paramount seemed shocked that the film lost money in the states and was banned in a lot of non-communist countries where Muslims, Jews and Christians lived. Paramount tried to recut the film two different ways from Aronofsky's original and tested all 3 with religious audiences (without telling Aronofsky). They couldn't get Christians to like any version of this thing. When Aronofsky found out about the test, he got mad at the studio for even thinking about messing around with his "vision".

I, quite frankly, am a Christian. I sat through it for educational purposes, mostly to write this review, and to give the film a chance to get at least one or two things right. It never did. It felt like sitting through Leni Riefenstahl's 1935 Hitler propaganda documentary, "Triumph of the Will" (which I did sit through in college strictly for educational purposes).

The film attempted to win what should have been its primary audience. This film came 10 years after the stunning box office income from Mel Gibson's "Passion of the Christ". Christians should have lapped up a film about one of the more special-effects worthy stories in the Bible. As it was, the movie had to make up the earnings shortfall outside the States in countries where nobody reads the Bible apparently.

I'm giving this one the full three raspberries because I'm offended for Moses, who was the original author of the Noah story. Aronofsky had no respect for his source material and treated a work of literature like it was Sharknado, sailing through trying to hit all the right politically correct issues. Somehow the harder they try to make the perfect progressive remake of a good old story the worse it turns out.  I'm usually pretty forgiving for movies. It's hard to make a movie and particularly to adapt a story. Somehow Aronofsky must have thought, "Well, the author is dead and nobody reads the book anymore, so I can do anything I want with it. I know! How about rock monsters and an insane cult leader who wants everyone on the planet......TO DIE!!!!!

Nope!

© 2021 by Tom King