The Printed Word, in All its Forms

At any given time, Ian can be seen walking around the house with one of two equally valuable paperback texts in his hands - "Your Seven-Year-Old: Life in a Minor Key," and volume whatever of "The Adventures of Captain Underpants." I apologize if either of these titles offends anyone's sensibilities; I myself take exception to the scatological suggestiveness of "Life in a Minor Key," although of course I'm fine with the other title... But hereafter, let us refer to these works as simply "Your Seven-Year-Old" and "Captain."

"Captain" is a work which proves to me something I never would have believed prior to Ian's discovery of it - that it is possible for a parent to be deeply nostalgic for the Pokemon library of children's-fiction-excellence. Pokemon has a plot, of sorts, and some sense of a dynamic relationship between its postmodern human characters and their quasi-pets, and you can generally read more than five words of it at a stretch without cringing. And now I see that there are worse naming conventions for the dramatis personae than choppy, made-up little character-"names" that sound a bit like "Camry" and "Corolla" and "Prius" and "Yaris." The "pokemon" - yes, polemon is the plural of pokemon, just as in Japanese and another East Asian languages there is no distinct "plural"... Anyway, the pokemon have names along the lines of Barko the doglike-creature and Trunkeen the quasi-elephant and Striperbole the near-zebra. And now, after Captain, I see that these names are actually brilliant and beautiful. To be honest, I would not take exception - at least in the moral sense - to "Captain" if it had been written by a child, but the fact that this series is written by adults, of sorts, who are making material profit off their ability to reflect and expand children's toiletcentric inner-life-of-the-id, by selling it back - for real money - to that already-afflicted readership, seems extra-specially revolting. Needless to say, we haven't bought Ian any "Captain," volumes, except in our capacity as taxpayers, since he gets them from his school library. [And whatever happened to the Prude-Queen class of school librarians, who have always, until now, maintained the sacred duty of shaming children out of even thinking about reading this kind of substance?...]

So that's "Captain." "Your Seven-Year-Old," actually belongs to a rather different genre, however. It is a book that my mother - not a librarian, but an elementary school teacher - gave me and Amy, as a bit of insight into the troubled psyche of a class of people who, at the time of this writing, were born around 2003 or 2004. I have looked it at, Amy has read it, and now a third member of the family is working on it. It seems like an earnest little work, for parents (and apparently for seven-year-olds themselves...) providing insight into the inner workings of their children's lives. And of course, it was written for an adult readership. Yet, when Ian isn't touting "Captain," he'll be seen with this other volume in his hands, and in fact, he asked me to read a particular page, which I will probably do in the coming day, outlining some particular area of interest for seven-year-old's - probably as his way of showing me, in an irrefutable way - why he enjoys some p articular type of play or similar activity.

They say that when you have rats, your mouse problem goes away. Now that we have "Captain," our "Pokemon" problem has gone away - although, knowing Ian, he might well have simply exhausted the Pokemon collection and moved on to fresher, more fertile ground. However, if you do have a rat problem [which we don't, quite fortunately], I would think that eventually you get a cat, even though though cats are nasty, Nietschean creatures who have almost as much contempt for people as for the long-tailed rodents that they like to torture to death (but luckily, we're bigger than them). In any case, I'm hoping that "Your Seven-Year-Old" could be our proverbial feline solution to the "Captain" epidemic. But of course, in the interim, I"m not remotely surprised that Ian has managed to bridge the sublime and the ridiculous in his pursuit of reading, or that adult social sciences have already made inroads into this intellectual life, in spite of some of the other rich material competing for mastery in that sacred space.

(June, 2011)