scoubidou's Open Salon Blog

The Venom at the Heart of Christopher Robin

Sun, 11 Mar 2012 13:03:26 -0400

When I was around eight years old, my mother found an exciting book club offer in the post. You could, for a sum of around seven dollars a month, receive a hardback "personalized picture book."

That is, Your Child was the subject of the story. It was a generic sort of kiddie lit, with Your Child's name filled in; the finished product looked a bit like a teletype.

Who went on the grand adventure with Your Child? —Your Child's five favorite friends, of course. First names only, please. There was more than a bit of other query attached to the application form, something of a crude marketing survey.

This was such a good little data snare I'm surprised the whole shebang wasn't being underwritten by In-Q-Tel. But then, we are talking 1973.

Eight weeks of pantering later, the first in a series arrived. A book about Me! A book also about Timmy and the others, as desultory support; but there was Me!

I was fascinated. I showed it to Timmy, but he wasn't so keen. Apparently there were licensing issues.

I couldn't tell you a thing about those books today. The story? Eh. Except—one thing. Yes, there was one playful mystery with a gag. The solution was Your Child's name spelled backwards.

This was the Cult of Personality at the height of navel-gazing delirium—that is, in the pre-Internet era. (It is now possible to be a model online—or just look like one. But that's another story.)

There is, however, a built- in problem with these sorts of books. Someone tried a revival of them a few years back, and I don't think it flew. I think you may be good for customers up to six months running, but the milk sours fast.

As A. A. Milne observed himself, some of what looked good three years ago now seems babyish. And as Christopher Robin observed, seeing a line of his classmates smearing him with Daddy's verse ("Christopher Robin's at his prayers!") being the subject of a book is something of being subjected to the book.

Nine was the killer. I was past the picture book (save as nostalgia). I was also past Timmy, who’d been neatly—and deservedly—86’d.

In fact, the Famous Five had been remodeled over. People Who Now Are Grateful to Get a Nod. Their participation in “my” adventures was passé, even—

...Embarrassing?

It was Oil Shock time and my parents sat me down. Always a bad sign. They wanted to talk about the $8.95 a month. (Yes, of course the price had climbed.)

I wouldn’t have come on as if I were asking for an extension on the rent. I would’ve silently cancelled the thing and said, “Well, they’ve stopped making them, you know.”

My father said we could save lots if we cancelled My Adventures. “You’re not really reading them anymore,” my father said, and sat three unboxed books before me.

No need to get into all that.

“Cancel them already,” I said, and moved on to pressing business.

I felt their surprise. They had expected the Works—waterworks, fireworks.

I’m sure if this were all moved thirty years on, they would have checked their workbooks to see if I was Asperger’s, or if I just need a new ritmo to my Ritalin.

The fact was, I had gone all Christopher Robin on them. Those books of My Adventures were not mine anymore. They were embarrassing.

Your Child was growing up.

If I wanted my name in any goddam book, I’d write one.

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The Mousequitters

Mon, 14 Mar 2011 13:03:38 -0400

No, I never got into Walt Disney. There has always been something horrific and swallowing at the Disney core, a black hole desire to claim and sign off on everybody else’s work, from the Bros Grimm to Ruddy Kipling.

Uncle Walt learned this game early, from the first days of signing his moniker over the work of the likes of Ub Iwerks and Floyd Gottfriedson. Was it too much thereafter to covet the world?

The 1950s belonged to Uncle Walt. Everything he floated caught fire—Davy Crockett, Disneyland, Zorro, and, of course, the Mickey Mouse Club.

Now if the 1950s were Uncle Walt’s to claim, the 1970s belonged to the 1950s. Perhaps for the first time, Americans were looking backward—the 360-degree view best associated with a broken neck. It all started, perhaps unsurprisingly, with George Lucas—Disney’s successor. American Graffiti pleased the oldsters and lured the kids in. Fifties nostalgia was in.

TV quickly cloned the notion, with much of the same cast showing up in the anthology Love American Style episode “Love and the Happy Day.” The interminable spin-off—Happy Days, which tortured us with a plasticene 1954 for nine years or something—was shot on nine-inch nails. Ron Howard was seventeen until he was forty-eight. Sick, man.

The unwelcome inferno of the clean-behind-the-ears fifties nostalgia—imagine a Ked in your face forever—was completed by the return to television of the elderly Mickey Mouse Club. Bleh.

A kid-centered variety show, MMC drummed up its opening with fascist fanfare reminiscent of Leni Riefenstahl doing a Stuka two-step on Termite Terrace. The Disney cartoon “family” arose to proclaim loyalty and to testify to the almighty suzerainty of Mickey Rat. Mickey, with a decorously lunatic grin, looked on, clapping. Only Donald Duck,that peacock-winged Iblis, refused to bow. Awesome, Donald.

Fred Mertz arrived in disguise as “Uncle Roy” (bad touch!) and speedily cartooned—Disney-assented images, no doubt off to the copyright office before the ink settled. Large-toothed Bobby danced, as he would continue forever after, from the Malebolge Loge of The Lawrence Welk Show. Annette Funicello, TV’s first ethnic, flashed her mousery mammaries like a teenaged Sharon Stone.

If I were a Baby Boomer, this piece would quickly derail into chuckleheaded doodles about Funicello’s role in American male puberty, or how the television screens crack’d when Bobby closed the barn doors and gave Funi her first dental close-up.

Whatever. Slacker, here. Represent.

It was all tedious black & white, and I smelled Orwell in the perfect Boy and Girl emblems over the opening curtain. I didn’t go for all that tippie-tippie-tin dance crap, those sterile little life’s lessons, the ancient asthmatic cartoon. Spin & Marty had a certain homoerotic appeal, but only in the most closeted Cohn & Schine circumlocution. It was, after all, the 1950s.

Almost everybody of my age was effing hypnotized by this crap. Hah, what this, with Zoom over on PBS? Sorry, you say Funicello, and I say Joey Schrand. But there they were, watching. Kolchak: The Night Stalker is on—Hey! The Rockford Files? Hello? Snap outta it!

The biggest fan I knew was Huan Phan, a kid whose aunt had been an interpreter for the US Army. Airlifted out of Saigon, he was trying to make do in Mound City. He loved Mickey Mouse Club. It was odd. I mean the way things worked out.

“Ah, I love dis—Goofy!”

“Goofy? Screw Goofy, Huan! Doncha wanna watch Speed Racer? That’s awesome! Mach Go-Go-Go!”

“No, put it back on Goofy! It’s my TV!”

“Awesome, look! Animal Treasure Island is on Sunday!”

When I heard they were pulling this mummy of a TV show in 1976, I was ecstatic. But guess what? The NEW Mickey Mouse Club would take its place!

Jaysus.

I remember it was especially awful. It was extra cheesy, and on video tape. Plus, it’s the PC era now, so we have to replace that perfect blond boy and girl curtain with a bulky UN cast. And all that kind of obliging unconscious racism where the Asian Kid always knows kung fu, the Spanish Kid gets the inevitable Latin riff (fortunately not played off with “Lowrider,” TV’s “Mexican Theme”). Amazingly, there was a single black boy and a single black girl (hope that they would breed?).

But the thing that was awful about NMMC? It had oodles of the girls who later showed up on The Facts of Life. Blair? Yeah. She was there. Giving orders. She was crazy, Man. Jesus. Do you know about Operation Mongoose?

The first episode of Zoom, quite innocently in 1971 or so, shows a blond boy building a raft. He christens it with a beer. He finishes the beer off himself. Things change a lot, here, in five years, in Televisionville. Fannee Doolee loves Pee Cee, but not The Language Rule. Jaysus.

(Word up, Schrand. You were da bomb as The Mad Catter. )

Not long ago—how this whole business occurs to me, the Lady Teri sends me a link to old New Mickey Mouse Club footage, over on YouTube. Everything gets mercy over time. You forgive what was old hat, even when new to you. So it sucks? --It was part of your childhood, you jerk.

There’s the NMMC Latin kid, Angel, the eldest at fourteen. “I love to sing and dance more than anything!” AIDS would keep him from seeing thirty.

Sigh. And I, so long immune to sentimentality. That too, comes with getting older.

The Wikipedia fact sheet changes everything for me as regards the New Mouseketeers. Their birthdays all fall between 1963 and 1967, mostly in 1965. Like me. Post-Kennedy, The Food Stamp Mulligans, The Baby Busters. 1965 was the first year of “Generation X.” The distance between me and the Skaters of Dogtown was a small one, but it’s been mythologized.

If you were in the Boom, you “changed the world.” If you followed after, lucky you remembered to change your shorts.

In 1976, The Bad News Bears kids were eleven—like me—and born in ’65. They represent the new Can’t-Do Attitude of America. Your loser kids, ladies and gents.

At that moment, though, we were The Children Who Are Tomorrow. We were the Hope. We were literally The Cool Kids, the Naturals, the Hands-On. Maybe we could change. We were lovable losers, right?

The world of Tomorrowland promised to look so different in ’76. I am a Depressive sort, but the MMC duds now make me sad. They were cancelled, kissed off in a few weeks, more of a pissing contest between Disney and ABC than over ratings. ABC was selfish with the show, which had the rights to air the title from wayback, and they pulled the rug on Disney, for the new show.

Emblematic of us all, really: The Generation That Never Arrived. That’s us in a mouseskin.

In the 80s, Disney relaunched MMC again, on its sterile Disney Channel. Disney later got ABC up the ass, too, thug style, prison sex.

So that’s what followed us: glitzy shallow Brittany Spears, Christina Aguiluera, Justin Timberlake. Y’know? Like, Y’know?

Sometimes there are worse things than merely being ineffectual.

Other than that, I have nothing more to say.

Oh, and Goodnight, Kids.

Uncle Roy? Ditch that bottle.

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Lost Souls, Bad Machines

Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:07:25 -0400

Lest anyone suppose I have been in chokey the past few months, or killed off in South America (a rumour which has dogged me the length of my life), I leave here upon the wall a bit of info, for the cognoscenti.

Strangely, but three days after my last post, my computer--less than vintage, less in fact than two years old--succumed to infant mortality. Yes, I do not know whyfore, but there it went, frozen at 4:59 AM forever, it went to sleep and never woke back up. I always thought that I would have been the one to go first.

Alas: not having the wherewithal to replace such an expensive machine, I have been silent (or silenced) lo these past four-five months. At this moment, I am racing against the slim margin at the public library, to give you this much of a leg up on the mystery of my newest hermitage, to open a window upon our shared grief. I am crush-surrounded by chatty skateboarders and gesticulating library marms, and this does not help my trance-formation, the zymurgy of that spooky liquor, of writing in that fairly high style.

Generally speaking, I have a backlog of about 100 untyped essays, a pent-up fury of supernova snowball, ready for your reading pleasure, if and when I ever get another horse.

Let me express my gratitude to you, thou faithful and fun, and my regrets that my return to the kingdom in March must yet be elided by the oldest of tech age griefs, the broken machine...

The Whiteness of the Welles

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:03:45 -0500

Orson Welles was the movie director every boy once dreamed of becoming—except for the beached whale part. Yeah, Welles was a genius. Even for Pauline Kael’s smear job—which divorces Welles creatively from Herman Mankiewicz’s screenplay for Citizen Kane—we will always have the textbook declarations that Welles “reinvented the visual grammar of filmmaking.”

And he did, whether it was coy misleading cutting, mockumentary mise-en-scene, or just putting visible ceilings on all the room sets. It’s funny that a Radio Guy would teach Hollywood how to see. But we shouldn’t forget his time in ghetto theater—he once depicted a mob of the French Revolution by mounting Halloween masks with light pouring out of them. If that ain’t genius-y enough for your taste, we can always bring up the Martian Panic thing.

Welles was the kind of guy to go looking for a sow’s ear, in order to show off the purse he’d make from it. He was good press from childhood, and when he told the world he was a boy genius, they believed it—long after he’d become his own skeptic.

But Welles was destined to form an American Tragedy. We like our Prometheans here to fall hard. Welles was the humble pie made good—lifted his bourgeois bootstraps into radio, theater, the cinema—the talk show circuit. But past these glories he soon becomes our archetypical Genius Who Only Made One Good Picture. “Great gifts and good luck rarely come together,” says a Scandinavian proverb. Welles became the perpetual Hollywood orphan—which he was also in real life—unable to get his mitts on the pearl of great price. Just when he was getting somewhere, they changed the rules, pulled the rug.

Welles lost control of every picture he made after Kane, as if Little Men were so envious that each became an Ahab pantering after the foil of the Great Whale. Or at least, I would suspect, Orson thought as much.

You can pick your villain. Citizen Kane was a spoof of the gray eminence of yellow journalism, William “Randy” Hearst. The movie tweaked his nose, left him to die with the name “Rosebud”—his pet word for his mistress’s genitals—on his lips. Hearst thereafter called out his minions to check Welles at every turn; Hearst vowed Welles would never rest in the kind of artiste-demimonde he so clearly coveted. And Hollywood, always up for a sneaky little blacklist, complied.

So Hearst. And Hollywood. And Those Philistines. Or perhaps Welles himself, whose tyro veered towards tyrant, whose gourmet tastes could not be stayed or sated. Own worst enemy—that sort of thing. He was uncompromising but also self-checking. Just when he introduced himself to a new generation as the man selling no wine before its time, he tells all in the talk show circuit that he’s lost a lot of weight by quitting drinking wine. He gets dropped faster as spokeswind than Dracula, another teetotaler.

So Welles becomes The Promethean Beast which is Forever Denied. They will look upon him and say, “What wonders he might have showed us, if his hand had not been stayed.” And best of all, “His movies would have all been perfect if only they had let him be!”

You can’t buy that kind of martyrdom. You also can never be held back by such concerns as making shitty movies, because the movie you made was not the movie you would have made, less the spies, swindlers, and saboteurs.

Welles became a cinematic beatnik, all through Europe on the bum. He was like a banned writer or a defrocked painter. In failure, he only stoked his cachet. Youngsters flocked to his side in search of anointment. In the end, those kids never did him any good, but to be fair, he never did them any good either.

Orson Welles dined with Gore Vidal, and how the wit—or was that venom—must have flown. They were kindred evil spirits. Then Welles would fly into the US on the cheap seats and do magic gestures for Carson or Merv or Mike Douglas. He pimped self-irony and self-conscious egoism as a persona long before Shatner caught on to the game.

Welles was consummate at getting attention while pretending that it wasn’t important to him. Just like the old Kane trailer—Orson snaps his fingers, “Microphone!” A microphone swings over, but Welles remains the Invisible Voice. His other players are introduced, but Welles never appears (recognizably) in the trailer. He’s calling attention to himself by his absence. On the talk shows, he’s distracting you from his whoring by pretending not to go along with the format, by pushing some stupid rope trick.

Citizen Kane used to be one of those American films so important you could never get to see it. It never turned up on the Late Show. I was eighteen and had to rent the VCR tape to finally catch it. What did I think? If I had to draw the line where modern cinema began, I would start right at Citizen Kane. Of course, the cinema is also not linear, so the line didn’t pick up again until Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly, some fifteen years later. Nobody ever made another Citizen Kane—but that’s okay: neither did Welles.

His secret was discarding everything and reinterpreting the process, ground up. This is what genius is all about. Excepting his hidebound players—half of whom thought they were in a Howard Hawks’ picture and the remainder off in George Cukor-Cloud Land—Kane was out there enough to be avant garde. A new kind of animal.

The kernel of Orson’s legend is to try and imagine what it would have been if they’d given him Kane-control thereafter, if he’d had the luxury of making a picture every year, like Hitchcock or Ford. There was a sort of intellectual pretentiousness to Welles’ taste, but he had a workman Ordinary Joe way of bringing it all to earth. In the Kane trailer, he almost presents himself with the workmen, directing that microphone around like a shop foreman. No surprise that the whiz kid co-authored a book—at age fourteen—called Everybody’s Shakespeare.

Welles thereafter made cheesy thrillers which only superficially looked like cheesy thrillers—or so the faithful tell us. Touch of Evil, like Lady from Shanghai, has a kind of AIP quickie look to it, and it’s hard to know if the cheesiness was added, like Tarantino, out of sheer cult brio. At the very least, Hitchcock was impressed. You can’t see Psycho and not realize the relationship to Touch of Evil—Master meets Maestro.

The cheap magic trick here is a long tracking crane shot in the opening of Touch that was damned spiffy and damnably complex. It’s something that is the result of a genius mind hamming up a pulp script and stuck with Charlton Heston as a Mexican drug enforcement agent. Like the microphone—also on a boom—Orson is flagrantly putting us on: it’s self-promoting and self-effacing at the same time.

The remainder of Orson’s oeuvre seems devilishly fractious in presentation. Films were shot hand to mouth, whenever funds and folks came to use—sometimes years passed between splices. That he pasted this stuff together into some sort of sense is a miracle all its own.

His characters are all mountebanks, from Mr. Arkadin to the “Self” of F for Fake. Even Harry Lime, a character he played in a British film shot after his style, but not by him, is a happy-go-lucky swindler crime-lord and murderer. If he’s not pushing himself as a figure of flummery, he’s aping newsreels or newscasts out of Martian battlefields.

The problem of this theme—and of his heavily made-up Shakespearean characters—is that people have conflated the Act with the Creator. Welles is often misread as himself a mountebank, a celebrated but perhaps overrated adventurer who used cinema to get around the way Cagliostro used astrology.

He may have been on the make, but it’s pretty pig-blind to call the auteur of Citizen Kane a phony. Frauds never hit all the right notes, not even once. They just hum a few bars, and fake it. To have gotten it right, even once, is to have gotten it all. Citizen Kane will forever tar Hollywood as Welles’ j’accuse.

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The Arrow Book Club and Its Missed-Contents

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:11:26 -0500

Sitting at work protecting the glass double doors from unknown terrors, I watch the pumpkin colored leaves catting after one another along the sidewalk, and I know, I say, This is autumn. And this makes me think, quite naturally of…well, Scholastic Book Services, specifically the Arrow Book Club.

I am atremble with nostalgia. Books bring me home. And Arrow, tailor-made and kid-tested (presumably) for grades 4-5-6, was once the gate of exquisite delight.

Remember the monthly slender cheap-paper catalogs with all those varieties of experience stacked inside? Inexpensive books, some as little as sixty-five cents, perfectly written, perfectly created.

All right, some were awful. The Shark in Charlie’s Window comes to mind, a hybrid of children’s exotic pet fantasy and Jaws—a little too cheesy. But for the most part, I was not disappointed with these worlds that SBS offered.

I know I read enough of them (and bought enough) to build myself a tomb, but only a few titles are yet clear in memory. The SBS dealt in three genres principally: kid detective thrillers, historical fiction, and the so-called Problem Novels.

Detective thrillers were represented by The Three Investigators series, in my mind far superior to the rather tepid shenanigans of the Hardy Boys. Even at nine I could recognize the added senses of humor and irony, and The Mysterious Three were each offbeat enough to add a dimension of empathy (the Hardys always struck me as mannequins, and not, frankly, very good detectives). The cases were formulaic (as is Agatha Christie), but there was a keep-rolling panache to the doings that primed us all for derring-do Doc Savage reprints. And at the end of each adventure, they reported in to…Alfred Hitchcock.

I betcha we read the same books: Silver for General Washington, My Side of the Mountain, Soup and Me, The Phantom of Walkaway Hill…

One of my all-time faves was Strangely Enough!, a compendium of eighty “hair-raisers” culled from C. B. Colby’s column Adventure Today! in The White Plains Post-Dispatch. Tales of ghosts and flying saucers, buried treasures on land and sea, hairbreadth’s escapes and Fortean mythos! Colby was a marvel of word economy and I often recall him to mind when I grow too loquacious. Strangely was a rare find captured in my mother’s cedar closet (perhaps reserved for when I was older) at age eight. I read it in a single sitting, all day, as the October failing sun lengthened the shadows of the trees along the woods. I have re-read the book almost every October since.

Arrow offered selected reprints of 1950s Mad Magazine material, such as The Greasy Mad and The Mad Frontier, thus allowing me to see the glories of the once independently-owned savagely satirical magazine—from the time when it ridiculed Madison Avenue ad merchants and finky politicians. I remember trying to watch Hollywood or Bust on Flippo’s Early Show and reading Greasy at the same time—and then later a huge-ass storm comes Dorothy Gale-ing out of nowhere and I ended up getting smackerooed in the kisser by a fistful of hailstones…You wouldn’t recognize Mad today (or even Arrow) and Flippo died a couple of years ago—not even the storms are quite the same.

Now I’m flashing back to those Scholastic Press hardbacks—the anthologies of ghost and mystery stories, the young athlete tales of struggling left-hand pitchers and gridiron smallfry dime-backs. And the soap box racers! And all those I bought at the block yard sale, from David Robinson’s stash…and how all his books had library proprietary markings, and I remembered how the school library had been broken into the year before…but if David (Blessed be the womb that bore him!) five-fingered books, he grabbed classics. He had a volume of Poe, goddammit!

The challenged-athlete books grew into the Problem Novel. I loved the Problem Novel, even though the best ones were for TAB, not Arrow members. They always had carnival titles: Then Again Maybe I Won’t, I’ll Get There It Better Be Worth the Trip, A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich—as if Maya Angelou was making ends meet by tossing out her unused material. The Problem Novel was supposed to be the turning point of a kid facing an ultimate moral dilemma. I saw a posted modern “concerned parent” reacting to “titles and subjects in Scholastic flyers that curl my toes.” She would have loved I’ll Get There It Better Be Worth the Trip from our long-gone 1970s, in which the thirteen-year-old principles wind up trying to back-burner their homosexual experiences and just try to “be friends.” (To think Gore Vidal had virtually been blacklisted for The City and the Pillar a few decades earlier!)

(Just so you know, I am writing a Problem Novel with a glorious title as séanced through Patty Highsmith. The title shall remain veiled at this point.)

Arrow offered other neat stuff, like posters and especially like Dynamite Magazine. Dynamite was edited by Jeanette Khan, who later went on to run DC Comics into the ground. Dynamite imitated Mad in some aspects (all these years later, Mad Kids imitated Dynamite). It was a skinny-assed wash of color trap-birded between cardboard covers, and we werewolfed down every issue. Dynamite defined fifth-grade cool. Ask me, however misguided Khan’s shipwreck at DC, she created ‘80s Nickelodeon Chic with Dynamite. Every slim page was printed on gold, I think. It was Esquire for brats. Wish I still had all those.

Arrow was on-target always in sniffing out trends and capturing the loose change of the popular kid-minded moment. There was a unity in their line and some sort of quality-assurance program that publishers in general have never mastered (which is very likely a good thing).

A friend with young girls sent me some recent flyers (thanks Teri), or as I prefer to call them, catalogs. *sigh* Yes, the grass is no longer as green as it was under Tom Sawyer’s toes.

Harry Potter is frighteningly ubiquitous. Way too overwhelming, too much of a publiswhorial piñata. I know J. K. Rowling wordfilters as Anne Rice for latter-day gridiron midgets, but Jaysus Rumble, break it up, willya? Reissue some Michael de Larrabeiti fer fook’s sake.

And, of course, every novel seems to have a “strong girl heroine”—not much room for boys to dream. If they do, they’ve been getting series trash like Animorphs for the past twenty years. Remember Scott O’Dell’s The Black Pearl? The Problem Novel boy of today is one whose Gundam Guyver is fresh out of ammo.

We never recovered our Arrow head’s lead. When TAB came around, most kids had decided print was beneath contempt, and the teachers at Kennedy Jr. High did not want to futz with it. We irregularly got TAB catalogs. SBS dropped out of my life, except in memories. And yeah, by eleven I was bleeding from the ears after reading David’s copped Poe, but I could sail through Wells. I was on my way to being an intellect vast cool and unsympathetic—or so I hoped.

Yet I sometimes wish there was an Arrow for the Really Big Kids—you know, us. I crave that careful selection, that unity of thought, that fearful symmetry.

In the interest of these precepts, I offer you a short list of adult tomes that give me that old SBS vibe.

Marvin Kaye’s anthologies for Doubleday, such as Ghosts and Masterpieces of Terror and the Supernatural, have the same tingle as SBS ghostly collections—which is not at all to say they are tame, although Kaye purposely excoriates the exact kind of horror that I write (i.e., “nauseatingly vivid”). His erudition on the weird tale is profound.

Mark A. Stein’s How the States Got Their Shape is the kind of you-never-knew-how-much-you-wanted-to-know-this-stuff trivial history that SBS would spin out as a 65-cent special. Painless page-turning little-knowners about the politics behind those odd juts and jagged lines on the map. Ever wonder why California didn’t include Baja, and yet has that weird angle that scarfs up Sandy Eggo before veering North? Well, it wasn’t a surveyor’s bungle.

Elsewhere mentioned, Earl Thompson’s dynamic duo of A Garden of Sand and Tattoo serve as a complex Problem Novel that will curl Concerned Parent’s toes. Will little Jack Anderson try to resolve his issues of poverty via incest? Will he fuck his way to the top of his lowlife? Then Again, Maybe He Will.

Stephen King’s Dark Tower stuff bristles with SBS fantasy inanities (what, a robot bear with a satellite dish on its head?) and is just as page-turning as any juvenile detective novel. It’s a western, it’s a medieval fantasy, it’s a mystery story—it’s good fun.

I’ve already invoked de Larrabeiti. With The Borribles, you cannot go wrong—imagine if Tolkien had accidentally written The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Remember how those historical fictions took you there? Gary Jennings’ Aztec leaves the same pleasurable boom in your belly. It is also the work of a man who accepted a dare to include every sexual perversion known to man. And I hafta pimp Scott O’Dell, the first pro writer to praise me. His “juveniles” function perfectly as historical adventures. He’s somewhere between Hemingway and Stevenson.

That’s a suggested short list. If you’ve got any of your own, I’d love to hear about them.

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