Un-Ready Teddy

At my age you'd rightly be expected to have encountered enough bouts of boredom to be able to stifle a yawn or two when another one comes along. You've been there , yawned that , got the T-shirt, come out this side of alive.

Children's books though are a whole other ballpark. When the wee beloved hauls across her latest favourite for you to read out while you're trying to take in a half decent show on TV you don't break out in spontaneous dance.

You notice the sheer bulk of it. I mean 80 pages ? So you try opening it at page 65.

Fat chance. Wee beloved wants it from the begining.

Which is Goosey Gander , Georgie Porgie , Rock-A-Bye Baby and Tom The Piper's Son. These followed by sustained endurance thereafter of Teddy's Birthday Party , Teddy's Favourites , Teddy's ABC and a seven-page epic entitled Teddy Goes Flying that has you feeling like you're on an especially turbulent flight you decide you've earned the right to skip a dozen or so pages.

Dream on Daddy.

And know that there's no missing Uncle Sailor Bill . Nor anything else in that book.

You have nothing against either reading or reading aloud. Quite the contrary. What pains is the sheer absence of traction, grip , hook.

I mean take Teddy's Favourites. Hardly the stuff you've been dying to know all your life. Or Teddy's ABC - edifying but don't bet on it creating an intellectual breakthough to solve the planet's problems (of which Kid Lit by the way is no small component). Granted Hey Diddle Diddle has a certain surreal appeal but only to a point. The delight of knowing the dish ran away with the spoon begins to wear thin by around the nineteenth reading.

While these pieces can be read away within a reasonable couple of minutes each , things like Teddy Goes Flying are a far tougher kettle of fish. They are long. They are meant to be stories.

Huh ?

Teddy sees a bird and thinks how nice it would be to fly. He tries all manner of ways and can't. His Uncle Bill then gives him a ride in a helicopter. Teddy decides that is exciting enough.

The end.

Roald Dahl it ain't.

Nor an Agatha Christie whodunnit. Nor anything that dwells on the human condition. Why , not even on the bear condition. As I recall it , Milan Kundera in his Art Of The Novel wrote of the five or six stages in which a character or plot progressively develops. You wouldn't find half of one in Uncle Sailor Bill. And one shudders to think what E.M. Forster - author of Aspects Of The Novel (of which sad to say I couldn't understand a word) - would make of The Three Bears.

So there you go. It's not easy.

One thing it has to be said that does link your wee beloved's fav. books to some well known works of high art - like , say , Joyce's Ulysses or William Burrough's Naked Lunch - is the effect it has of decimating any trace of wakefulness within an inch of your life. No doubt the competent author of Grumpy Bertie Bear is in the reckoning for a Nobel and good luck to her.

The difference though is that with Ulysses or Naked Lunch you have a choice not to partake.

With wee beloved's treasure trove of Kid Lit , it's Fat Chance.

Prosaic musings on poetry

The poet and I are strangers.

Where the poet plumbs the sunken depths of the human condition , I get a plumber to fix the condition of the sink. Where the poet soars to the loftiest heights of the human spirit , I take the nearest elevator to the bar. Where I struggle with common sense , the poet shines with uncommon sensitivity. Where I have mere myopia , the poet has vision. (Not that I could find any even with glasses on)

Any wonder , then , that I just didn’t get Shelly’s ‘Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought’ from To A Skylark ? I have somehow never quite managed to equate sad and sweet without recalling an article I had once read on binge eating apparently brought on by depression. Not when the accompanying visuals could have been a Damien Hirst installation or something out of Naked Lunch.

Or take the line before that “Our sincerest laughter / With some pain is fraught”. This idea is also mirrored in that fabulous Kaifi Azmi ghazal from Arth “Tum itna jo muskura rahe ho / Kya gam hain jisko chhupa rahe ho” . The poignant old Laughter- in-Pain motif.

Funnily enough , I can’t think of too many instances of people laughing in pain. Or of people - not least the superior sex - concealing their pain behind a gleeful smile or three. Quite the contrary. Shorter the joy longer the face about describes the average equation.The missus, for instance , was certainly not flashing me any smiles when I accidentally dropped that electric iron on her foot the other day. My instant and very foolish laughter though turned out to be with much pain fraught.

On a parting note :
How would you describe mystery- genre poems of early 19th century America?
- Edgar Allen Poetry !