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The dark side of Disney
There's no escaping the commodification of childhood.
By Samuel G. Freedman
[08/23/99]

Disney rocks!
Forget the long lines, the schlocky toys and the canned music. Disneyland will always be the Magic Kingdom for this lifelong Mouseketeer.
By Lisa Moskowitz
[08/22/99]

Wild Thing
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[08/20/99]

Wild Thing
Wake up, Sleeping Beauty!
Classic fairy tales get a feminist makeover for parents who don't like their princesses tricked out, locked up or comatose. But were the old ones really that bad?
By Margot Mifflin
[08/20/99]

There goes my baby
Once, I thought my daughter would win the Nobel Prize. Now that she's started college, I just hope she keeps her phone, her power, her housing -- and remembers to wake up for class.
By Stephen J. Lyons
[08/19/99]

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Another play, a version of the Orpheus myth, begs to be read in light of the poet's personal history. It contains this suggestive speech, from Pluto to Orpheus:

Nothing is free. Everything has to be paid for. For every profit in one thing, payment in some other thing. For every life, a death. Even your music, of which we have heard so much, that had to be paid for. Your wife was the payment for your music. Hell is now satisfied.

The Iron Giant: A Story in Five Nights By Ted Hughes Illustrated by Andrew Davidson Knopf, 1999 The Tiger's Bones and Other Plays for Children By Ted Hughes Illustrated by Alan E. Cober Viking, 1974 What Is the Truth? By Ted Hughes Drawings by R. J. Lloyd Harper & Row, 1984 Moon-Bells and Other Poems By Ted Hughes Illustrated by Felicity Roma Bowers The Bodley Head, 1986 The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit By Sylvia Plath Read by Andrew Sachs, Susan Jameson et al. Faber Penguin Audiobooks, 30 minutes

"The Iron Giant" and "The Tiger's Bones," for all their complex and gloomy messages, were clearly meant for kids. Not so Hughes' collections of children's poetry. "What Is the Truth?" -- which consists of 126 pages of animal poems strung together with a frail excuse for a narrative (God and his son come down to Earth, round up a bunch of people and make them describe animals) -- is full of lines like this:

There's nothing verminous, or pestilential, about swallows.
Swallows are the aristocrats,
The thoroughbreds of summer.
Still, there is something sinister about them.
I think it's their futuristic design.
And their bills seem tiny, almost retrousse cute
In fact the whole face opens
Like a jet engine.

Although adults may enjoy the poems' dark vision and their sensually vivid descriptions, kids will need a dictionary and tons of practice reading poetry to make head or tail of them. At 47 pages, though, Hughes' "Moon-Bells and Other Poems" has the advantage of being shorter. I liked a few of its poems, including "Amulet": "Inside the wolf's fang, the mountain of heather./ Inside the mountain of heather, the wolf's fur./ Inside the wolf's fur, the ragged forest," and so on. "Ted Hughes rightly makes no concessions to his young audience," boasts the jacket; perhaps that's why the book hasn't made it back into print.

Like her widower, Plath also tried her hand at children's books, but hers are far cozier. Several of my friends recommend "The Bed Book," an illustrated poem, but it's out of print, and I couldn't get my hands on it. So is "The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit," which can, however, be had on audiotape. Plummy-voiced British actors read about little Max Nix, the youngest of the seven Nix brothers in Alpine Winkelburg, who longs more than anything for a suit. One day a "woolly, whiskery, brand-new, mustard-yellow suit" arrives in the post, with a smudged address. Whose is it? One by one, the Nix men try it on, and Mama Nix alters it to fit them. One by one, they reject it as too new, too bright, too yellow, until at last Max gets his chance. Readers familiar with Plath's scorching, elliptical poetry will be surprised by this gentle, hopeful tale, full of folksy repetitions. Like "The Iron Giant," it deserves to reassemble itself in book form, hunting out its illustrations and pasting them back on.
salon.com | August 25, 1999

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