Peeking into the rock

Thanks to personhead del_c I can now write my rant about the evil little children's book The Artist by John Bianchi.  It arrived at the center in a pile of donated books and it never went to our shelves.  The immediate reason is that we can't have religious material in our center.  We can have books that include religion descriptively, but not prescriptively, if you know what I mean.  But even if I were at one of the church preschools like Calgary or Good Shepherd  I wouldn't be able to support this book.  It's a soul-crusher.

It starts out promisingly enough.  There's this talented puppy who wants to be a landscape painter and he gets ecouragement from various famous archly-named painting dogs. But poverty rears its head and he goes to work painting signs instead of concentrating on landscape painting.  Then he gets married at a young age and he has a lot of children and he always has to work hard doing every kind of commercial art in the world (except men's magazine illustration, of course).

Now would have been a good opportunity for the dog painter to either discover how fulfilling it can be to be a really good commercial artist, or for him to find a niche painting landscapes for magazines and ad agencies, or for him to quietly go on painting landscapes on the walls of his house or in miniature on birthday cards for his numerous children, but no.  This dog is a plugger and he never does anything that he really enjoys for himself.  He specifically only does work that brings in the dollar or advances someone else's agenda, and he does it in a resigned, amiable way, but never embraces it joyfully or really has very much fun.  Finally he's an old dog, and he retires and goes to the park to paint landscapes like he should have done on the weekends all along if he cares that much, but once he's there, he ends up painting his grandchildren's faces instead, at which point the astute reader goes aha! you never really wanted to be a landscape painter, did you? You just thought you ought to want to be a landscape painter.

But the book doesn't stop there.  The dog dies, and goes to heaven, and finally when he's offered some stupid painting job in heaven, I forget which, he meekly suggests that he's always wanted to be a landscape painter, and God gives him the sunsets to do.

You see what they did there?  This book didn't say "there is fulfillment to be found in everyday life and work."  This book didn't say "follow your dreams."  This book didn't say "work hard at life and you will find some kind of success."  It didn't say "family life is its own reward."  It didn't say anything that would encourage an artistic young puppy to get on with their life.  It said "give up on everything, and then God will reward you when you die." 

You'd think, since the book was written by an illustrator, that it would uphold the values of illustration and commercial art.  That it would tell about the satisfactions of craftsmanship and contributing to projects larger than oneself.  That it would give a glimpse into how a young dog can bring talent and skills to bear in any artistic arena.  But it doesn't.  The young dog takes on all these tasks because of necessity and just plugs along like a blinkered carthorse, and neither enjoys his work nor yearns for release.  That's a hell of a life to promise to a child. 

This dog gets handed a lemon and neither makes lemonade, nor invisible ink, nor throws it at a politician, nor draws a funny face on it.  He just carries it along with him till death.

I want my kids to want more than that.

on another front: for some reason my hands have developed a way of typing that means I now have to search every text for the numeral 8 mistyped in the center of words, sometimes not even next to a letter that is close to it on the keyboard.  I don't know what I'm doing, becasue when I watch my hands, it doesn't happen.