Most Hated Toy in Burtonia: Gone!

At the height of the Chinese Great Leap Forward, even small towns and villages had steel quotas. Since it was impossible for them to comply with the insane demands of the communist planners, the hapless peasants would melt down their agriculture implements and submit the resulting "product." Another example of how socialism is most adept at subtracting value from industrial inputs.

Until yesterday, we had just such an endeavour in our home, thanks to the Crayola Crayon Maker. It made crayons in the same way the Chinese peasants made steel in the 1950's. You take a perfectly good existing crayons, heat them to about 200 degrees, and pour the burning hot liquid into a mold. The end result is crayon slag that comes in colors like "dark mucous" or "abyssal mud." Below is a picture of a couple of these excreta.




The whole idea is so preposterous that one might expect to find it on the store shelf next to the Lil' Woodsman Junior Chainsaw or Baby's First Soldering Iron. For me it sums up everything wrong with America: cheap plastic landfill fodder, pointless and wasteful "activities," and indulgence of children. But since my boys absolutely love everything that has to do with wanton destruction, it was one of their favorite toys. So how did this state of affairs come about?



Mom was up late scraping crayon wax off the floor. Now to figure out what is the second-most hated toy in Burtonia.

Volume Control for Your Ears

Trying to work/read/sleep in a house with five noisy children? Let me introduce you to active noise cancellation technology. Ahhhhhh.

Snicket the High Brow

I admire what Lemony Snicket has done in his "Series of Unfortunate Events". He developed a unique style and format for Kid Lit that incorporated humorous pessimism and an intrusive narrative voice into the standard serial cliffhanger genre. When I first encountered it, my reaction was, "Why didn't I think of that?" What I most like about his writing, though, is his evident love for words, and a determination to teach kids vocabulary through reading.

There is however, something not quite right in "Events." I've listened to the first book on tape, and browsed through a number of the others (one of my children is a fan). What I noticed is the tendancy to insert references to serious literature in the stories (Tolstoy, Melville, etc.). There's nothing wrong with that, many of them are so offhand, kids won't have any idea to what he is talking about. I can't be sure without reading all 2000 pages of the series, but I think this technique becomes more explicit and even troubling as the series progresses.

For instance, I stumbled on this in Book 12, "The Penultimate Peril":

Richard Wright, an American novelist of the realist school, asks a famous unfathomable question in his best-known novel, Native Son. "Who knows when some slight shock," he asks, "disturbing the delicate balance between social order and thirsty aspiration, shall send the skyscrapers of our cities toppling?"

He then goes on for an entire page to explicate this "unfathomable" quotation. These books, I have to remind you, are intended for readers age 9-12. Nine years old to twelve years old. Native Son deals with racism, murder, institutional injustice, sexual violence (allusions to), and is informed by the communist world view of its author. The quote is famous, but not as impenetrable as Snicket implies - it's simple Marxist apocalyptic wishful thinking.

Once again, Snicket is writing for children, ages nine through twelve.

Lest you think this an isolated example, I offer this bizarre passage from the Slippery Slope:

The writer who can most accurately and elegantly describe the path of the three orphans was an associate of mine who, like the man who wrote "The Road Less Traveled," is now dead. Before he died, however, he was widely regarded as a very good poet, although some people think his writings about religion were a little too mean-spirited. His name was Algernon Charles Swinburne.*

Many of you may not be familiar with the 19th century poet Swinburne who celebrated sadomasochism, lesbianism, and atheism in his work. Now my second born at least knows his name (or would if he were paying attention, which I know he wasn't).

I guess this is what happens when one becomes a best-selling children's author. Your editors no longer have any hold over you. In Snicket's case, you can see this when you glance at a shelf of the "Series", arranged in order - they grow more corpulent with each volume.

I think what is on display here is a person who really wants to be a college English professor, but wound up a writer of juvenile fiction. Or maybe he is a professor (that would explain the pen name and the funny sub rosa biographical bits).

* Those who have been reading my blog for a while might recognize a certain similarity between his style of writing and my own. Another reason I have can't condemn the man in toto. Also I must get in this dig - Because M. Scott Peck had not died yet when the Slippery Slope was written, he must be referring to Frost's The Road Not Taken. More evidence for substandard editing.