Mind Candy
Page 18
Naturally, there was an absurd amount of paperwork to be done, the required notices had to be posted and the fifty-year waiting period observed—if they had not followed the proper procedures, someone might have noticed what was going on—and in the event they cut it uncomfortably close, but at last they were able to remove Earth, England, and Paula Jennings from the galaxy.
And this brings us back to one of my earlier questions. Galactic civilization obviously has some objective, quantitative way of measuring the badness of truly bad poetry; we mere Earthlings do not.
Might it be that the actual measure used is something as simple as casualty rates? The effectiveness of various human weapons is measured by kill ratios; perhaps other species use something similar to judge just how bad bad poetry really is. Start with an audience of a hundred, then count the survivors and assess the physical and psychological damage, and you have a very good measure of just how bad a poem is. Vogon death rates would presumably be a respectable percentage, Azgothic somewhat higher, and Paula Jennings, as the absolute worst poet in the galaxy, might be expected to have exterminated entire audiences, had she ever had the opportunity.
The ruthlessness of such testing does not say good things about the nature of galactic civilization, of course, but then, what does? One might suppose they used computer modeling, rather than live testing, but I have my doubts.
Meanwhile, we here on Earth have never developed such methods for the simple reason that they don’t work on us. As the kin of Paula Jennings, we are all partially immune; no matter how dreadful a poem might be we hardly ever die from listening to it, and the nausea and nightmares generally fade within a reasonable time. Whether you attribute this to the stupidity and insensitivity of our Golgafrinchan forebears, or to the buffering effects of Earth’s computational matrix, it seems clear that the effect is real and significant. What else can account for Mr. Dent’s experiences, and our lack of any valid scale of poetical horror?
There. Now, doesn’t that explain just about everything there is to explain about Vogon poetry? Doesn’t it all fit together neatly? Haven’t I done a good job of telling you stuff I have no way of actually knowing?
You know, I really think I’d do a fine job as an omniscient narrator, if someone were to give me a chance. When you have an opening, do drop me a line.
Kid Stuff
Revised; originally published in a column in Comics Buyer’s Guide
Note: This essay taken from a 1985 column may seem out of date now, but I include it here anyway because I think it’s still worth reading—and because the prediction at the end looks pretty accurate to me.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” So said St. Paul (I Corinthians 13:11). You’ve all probably heard that quoted before, in all manner of applications. Paul was talking about “charity,” according to the King James Bible, a mistranslation of the Latin caritas, meaning “caring.” He was explaining how a man without it is nothing but a child.
A good many people, however, seem to live by those words without their context. They shun anything that’s “childish” and deride those who do not. Anything not fraught with social significance is “kid stuff” and obviously worthless.
Or for some it’s not social significance that matters, but intellectual content; a work that can be appreciated without careful study is “Mickey Mouse” and “infantile.”
Some have no set criteria, but simply divide the world’s pleasures into “grown-up” and “kid stuff” on an empirical basis—beer is grown up, dolls are kid stuff.
This is built into our society; from a very early age we learn to give up things we’ve outgrown. At any elementary school you can hear kids saying, “Aw, that’s baby stuff,” about games they enjoyed a month before.
Among comic book collectors, virtually everyone over the age of sixteen has encountered derision because of his/her collecting. “You read funny books? Hey, what’s Bugs Bunny doing these days? Gonna be Spider-Man when you grow up?”
However, take a look; are the people saying this so very mature? If they say comics are stupid, what are they reading? Most of the time they aren’t reading anything; they’re watching “The Dukes of Hazzard” on TV.
Gosh, how mature. “Dukes” happens to be a big hit with the four-year-olds I know. TV, however, has not been labelled kid stuff, while comic books have, even though a good many TV shows require considerably less intelligence and sophistication than most comics.
A great many other things have been labelled kid stuff. Amusement parks, for example; nowadays about the only time you’ll see anyone over the age of thirty in an amusement park he/she is there as an escort for his/her kids. Most of you probably assume that that’s always been the way of the world.
Not so. When amusement parks were first really popular, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, the clientele was almost entirely adults. Go look at any of the old photos of the crowds on Coney Island or at any of the old trolley parks from before the First World War—do you see any kids?
Now find a photo of Coney Island or Disneyland from any time after World War II—kids everywhere.
Bicycles—look at bicycles. When they became popular, late in the nineteenth century, they were ridden primarily by adults. Cycling was rather adventurous (and if you’ve ever ridden those poorly-balanced antiques you’ll know why), something that dashing young men and women did. Then look at any picture from 1950 through 1970 with bicycles in it, and the odds are that kids are riding them. Nowadays they’re becoming acceptable for adults again, thanks to the energy crises of the seventies, the revival of serious bicycle racing, and the advanced technology that’s spun off from racing and made top-of-the-line bikes too expensive for kids, but in the fifties they were strictly kid stuff, and an adult on a bicycle was something that elicited laughter.
Trading cards—ignoring the current collectibility of baseball cards and all the other variations, who buys trading cards these days? Kids, of course. However, were they originally intended for kids? Does the fact that baseball cards originally came in cigarette packages answer that for you?
Cartoons—nowadays anything animated is assumed to be for kids, which must frustrate Ralph Bakshi no end; it’s a major reason that films like his “American Pop,” or “Heavy Metal,” bombed at the box office. More than a decade after “Fritz the Cat” got an X rating, most Americans equate animation with kid stuff, but fifty years ago Disney’s Mickey Mouse (before he was watered down) was popular with all ages, and Betty Boop was racy enough that she had censorship problems.
Of course, nowadays having something labelled as “suitable for all ages” is the kiss of death, because that will be interpreted as meaning “kid stuff”. This is stupid, as it’s perfectly possible to produce something that really does appeal to all ages. Look at “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” for example.
Science fiction and fantasy are thought of as kid stuff by a lot of people; when I tell people what I do for a living, one of the questions I’ve learned to expect is, “What age group do you write for, kids or teenagers?”
Basically, anything that’s primarily for fun is considered kid stuff, except for sex, drugs, liquor, and TV. I’ve spoken with people who consider all fiction, or even all books, to be kid stuff! (Remember, I’ve lived in rural Kentucky; there are still people around who don’t hold with book learning.)
I don’t think that this is what St. Paul had in mind when he spoke of “childish things.”
(Of course, right there I’m sure I’m in disagreement with any number of hardcore fundamentalists who see Dungeons & Dragons as a Satanic ritual and comic books as kiddie porn.)
Why on Earth should fun be just for kids?
Well, hey, I wouldn’t ask the question if I didn’t have an answer. It’s a pet theory of mine. I have a lot of pet theories—I breed them.
First, let’s take a look at what’s considered kid stuff, an
d when it became kid stuff.
Comic books are considered kid stuff, and except for special cases, such as soldiers who couldn’t get anything better and collectors, they’ve apparently been considered kid stuff all along. Certainly Dr. Fredric Wertham thought of them as being aimed exclusively at children as far back as 1947, and the comic-book letter columns I’ve seen back to 1950 all assume a juvenile readership. The contents of comics from the thirties seems geared toward kids. Scribbly stories featuring the Red Tornado, “Comics” McCormick, and Supersnipe all treat comics as kid stuff. So let’s say that they were probably kid stuff in 1933, and definitely by 1945.
Amusement parks—in the twenties they were still frequented largely by adults, going by contemporary literature and old photos, though kids were present in large numbers, as they had not been at the turn of the century. However, by the fifties amusement parks were strictly kid stuff. I don’t have much evidence either way from the thirties or forties, though there are plenty of references to soldiers taking dates to amusement parks during World War II. Let’s say the transition period was sometime between 1930 and 1950.
Bicycles—well, they were supplanted as serious transportation in this country by the automobile, more specifically by the Model T, but you’ll find ads showing young women out for a Sunday jaunt on bicycle up through the 1920s. By 1955 bicycle ads—or any other ads—only showed kids.
Trading cards—well, they were pretty silly to begin with, and appear to have been strictly kid stuff by about 1925, if not sooner. I admit to not being up on the field.
Animated films—animators have never given up aiming at an adult audience, at least in increasingly-rare theatrical releases, but I know that by 1960, when I started paying attention, adults did not watch cartoons.
TV, which is usually just as juvenile as comic books or animated films, came along in 1949—that is, that’s when it began to catch on with the public, since it was around for a few years before that. The great boom in TV began in 1949 and gradually slowed down in the early sixties, and it’s never been considered strictly kid stuff—except on Saturday mornings.
So where does that leave us? Well, most of the transitions from adult-oriented to kids-only seem to have happened between 1930 and 1945. What happened over those fifteen years?
Hey, if you don’t know, you shouldn’t be reading this; we aim at an audience that knows at least the basics. The thirties were the worst economic depression in modern history, and the early forties were World War II. Rough times. The Depression put incredible numbers of people out of work, and even those who were still working were often living in an atmosphere of constant worry and tension for fear they would be the next to go. Money was tight—prices dropped steeply, hard as that may be to believe for those of us who have only lived during the past forty years of non-stop inflation. And until Roosevelt took office in 1933, there were no government handouts of the sort we have today—no unemployment benefits, no social security, no welfare payments. If you were retired on a pension and the company went bust, as many did, you had no income at all. It was entirely possible to starve to death.
This was not exactly conducive to fun. The birth-rate dropped sharply, and business at various entertainments did as well. Amusement parks that had thrived all through the twenties went bankrupt. Movie attendance leveled off (scholars disagree on whether it actually dropped or not), and patrons were lured in with gimmicks such as free dishes—people who speak of the thirties as the Golden Age of Hollywood are not talking about box office receipts; film quality went up in order to compete for the no-longer-growing market. Radio was very big—it was free, once you’d bought the set.
Survival was a struggle, and when you’re struggling to survive, you don’t go out and spend your money at Electric Park or at the Bijou. You don’t buy yourself a comic book—if you’ve just got to spend your dime on something to read you get a pulp, which will last you a lot longer.
However, kids were still kids, no matter what the economy did. A great many parents had the attitude that their lives might be miserable, but their kids would enjoy life. Just because Daddy’s out of work, why should Junior be miserable? Take the kid to Coney Island for the day—you can’t afford to play the games or ride the rides yourself, but you can enjoy it vicariously by watching the kids. Buy the kid a comic book—it’ll keep him out of the way while Mother takes in washing, a dime well spent. (Actually, some older people I’ve spoken to swear up and down that new comics cost a nickel during the Depression, not a dime; either all their memories are wrong, or I’ve fallen into the Twilight Zone, or they were sold at discount in some places.)
World War II had something of the same effect; men were in the army, women in the defense plants, but kids were still at home or on the streets, and comics or trading cards or whatever kept them busy. There seems to have been a great acceptance of the idea that the world was in really lousy shape, but could be improved so that the next generation would be able to enjoy themselves. When I was growing up, along with all the other Baby Boom kids, I remember hearing people of my parents’ generation talk about how we youngsters didn’t appreciate what they had done for us, how they had struggled through the Depression and fought the Nazis so that we could have TV and washing machines and comic books.
I had assumed at the time that this was just something every generation had to put up with—you can find complaints about the younger generation back to the first century BC, at the very least—but now I’m not so sure. I think perhaps the generation that came of age during the Depression and the war had this attitude far more strongly than most. I can’t imagine anyone born in 1960 telling his kids how he had to struggle to survive. The Depression generation really did have more worries and less time for fun than others—and for that reason came to think of fun as being something one outgrew.
There are things that one outgrows, certainly—but fun needn’t be one of them. Just because children enjoy something doesn’t mean adults can’t enjoy it as well. There’s a growing realization of this, I think; that’s why we’re seeing more respect given to the work of Carl Barks and John Stanley, why George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg are zillionaires. The people who still sneer at it all as “kid stuff” are the ones who can’t free themselves of their earlier training, or are unsure of their own maturity and therefore exaggerate it (like the swaggering macho males who flaunt their manhood because they aren’t really confident of their masculinity). As the Depression generation ages and fades in importance, I expect “kid stuff” to become ever more socially acceptable.
So the next time someone sneers at you for reading funny books or science fiction, just comfort yourself with the thought that you’re part of the wave of the future, free of the dead hand of the past, and with that charity St. Paul recommended, forgive the poor outdated slob.
Essays That Didn’t Happen
For one reason or another, over the years I started several essays that I never finished. Here are descriptions of some of those false starts, and why they weren’t completed:
All the way back in the 1970s, I was invited by a group of Sherlockians to write a piece for them. The invitation was withdrawn when they found out what I intended to write. “The Secret of Watson’s Second Wound” would have explained why Dr. Watson’s old wound was sometimes in his shoulder and sometimes in his leg, why he appears to have had four wives in the course of the Holmes canon, and why his reports are sometimes contradictory or impossible: He had contracted syphilis in Afghanistan, and the “wounds” he wrote about were actually chancre sores; his wives either died of the disease or left him when they realized he had it; and the eventual neurological damage affected his memory and his writing.
A little research now tells me I misunderstood or had been misinformed about the symptoms of syphilis, so the theory doesn’t really work, but the invitation was withdrawn, and the article never written, not because of inaccuracy, but because the people involved didn’t want to help me spread so scandalous a notion.
I never finished “Seven Reasons Why ‘Fringe’ is Better Than ‘The X-Files’ because Raina Kelley’s piece for Newsweek, “Ten Reasons Why ‘Fringe’ is Better Than ‘The X-Files’,” beat me to it and topped me at the same time. She had close approximations of all seven of my reasons, plus her #6-8, which I hadn’t thought of. (Hers is still on the web, in the archives at TheDailyBeast.com, if you want to check it out.)
“Empire State,” about King Kong, was abandoned when I discovered that a random sample of people I questioned did not immediately associate the Empire State Building with the big ape, and the first scene they remembered from the original movie was generally not Kong climbing the tower as fighter planes attacked him. That killed my still-vague-at-the-time thesis that the two were inextricably linked in the popular consciousness, and rendered moot my theorizing about why this was so.
“It Seemed Like A Good Idea At the Time,” intended for an anthology of essays about Batman, was going to list a bunch of forgotten additions to the Batman mythos and explain why they were stupid. Problem was, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that anyone still cared enough about Bat-Mite or Ace the Bat-Hound to justify writing an essay about them, and most of the other stuff was so stupid it only lasted an issue or two and needed no explanation.
Smart Pop asked me to write essays for several of their books where I declined to even try. Usually that was either because I didn’t know anything about the subject in question, or I didn’t think I had anything to say about it that hadn’t been said before. There were two cases, though, where I had other reasons. For their “Star Wars” volume I thought they had set up too rigid a framework, rather than their usual freewheeling approach, and for the “Battlestar: Galactica” book I realized I didn’t want to write about the series, I wanted to read about it.