Harry Potter Film Wizardry

2010, HarperCollins first edition
Harry Potter Film Wizardry: From the Creative Team Behind the Celebrated Movie Series
Written (mostly) by Brian Sibley
Designed by Minalima Design
Bought new for $39.99
Hardcover in good condition
B+

Like the pop-up books, this is a lot of eye candy, even more so of course, since it runs to 160 pages.  There are no pop-ups, but there are lots of "paper ephemera," such as Harry's Hogwarts letter, booklets like Advanced Potion-Making, Honeydukes packages, and best of all, the Marauder's Map!  The book is arranged roughly in chronological order, although there will be focus on a person, place, or thing if particularly prominent in one film.  Understandably, given the timing of the release, there are only fourteen pages on DH1, and only two on DH2.  Still, it's a great way to relive the movie series.  If I have any quibble, it's that the writing by Sibley could've been stronger, but it doesn't get in the way too much, and I especially liked the pages by production designer Stuart Craig and producer David Heyman.  I also like that, while it's mostly about the film series, the book series is discussed where pertinent. 

Highly recommended for moderate to obsessive fans.  Appropriate for, say, ten years old and up, although Helena Bonham Carter does get a bit naughty at times.

The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America

2007, first edition, from Henry Holt and Company
Susan Faludi
The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America
Bought new for $26.00
Good condition hardcover
B+


Albert: That's too bad 'bout some folks not wantin' to be rescued from trouble by the Loan Arranger.
Noah: Some is even more fierce.
Albert: More fierce?
Noah: Some won't get in trouble for him in the first place.  Not very obliging.

--Prehysterical Pogo (1967)


I kept asking myself why, as I read this.  Why did a tragedy whose victims were mostly male get recast as a need for men to protect women?  Why were the same men who failed to protect the 9/11 victims recast as heroic studs?  (As if Donald Rumsfeld's "sexiness" or George W. Bush's ability to cut brush, or for that matter John Kerry's huntin', would've stopped the attacks, or even upgraded the firefighters' communications system.)  And why was it, as it always seems to be in the mainstream media, feminism's fault?

Faludi points out the lack of logic, but she also shows why the particular myths took hold at that time.  She draws parallels not only to, of course, the 1950s but also to the second half of the 1800s, with a look at the very different attitudes of the 1600s and 1700s.  (In that earlier time, white Christians saw themselves as weak and vulnerable compared to God, and they were fine with this.) 

When Americans of the last two centuries feel vulnerable, they often hope for cowboys and other heroes to ride to the rescue.  (And, yes, she quotes Rogin on The Birth of a Nation.)  But for some men, perhaps most especially the men who are most scared and least able to admit it, there's a corresponding need to believe that women are, or should be, damsels in distress.  If women are strong, including Daniel Boone's "skilled markswoman" wife Rebecca, then it makes the men seem weak, and thus vulnerable to Injuns, Commies, and terrorists.  If a woman is actually a victim, like Jessica Lynch, her victimhood is magnified so her rescue can be enlarged.

As the discussion of America's early days shows, it wasn't always like this, and Faludi sees it as a pattern that can be broken.  Her book obviously has a sad, frightening base, but I was surprised how much I laughed.  As always, her speaking truth and cutting through the crap delighted me.

The title comes from the novel The Searchers.  She discusses that book, its movie, and other media, although as usual not much about music, other than Neil Young's "Let's Roll."

1973 Nervous Breakdown

2006, first edition, from Bloomsbury
Andreas Killen
1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America
Original price $24.95, purchase price $1.00
Hardcover in good condition
B-

This is only the second time I've read this book, and I'm still not sure if I like it, or even if it's a book that can be "liked."  Killen focuses on the pivotal year 1973, with some looks forward and back, but not only is this far from my favorite year of the 1970s, I don't think of most of the topics that he focuses on, Watergate aside.  POWs, skyjackers, and religious cults are not terribly interesting to me.  Even when Killen focuses on pop culture besides Warhol, it's things that I've never seen or heard, like the New York Dolls, Fear of Flying, Badlands, and An American Family (the reality-TV pioneer about the Loud family), or ones that aren't very meaningful to me, like American Graffiti.  (Even so, I felt like like I knew that movie better than Killen, since he thinks Wolfman Jack is "a person of color.")  Also, it seems wrong that Ronald Reagan is repeatedly mentioned, sometimes as being elected "at the end of the decade," while Carter merits only one mention, for pardoning Patty Hearst.  True, few outside Georgia knew who Carter was in 1973, while Reagan was a nationally known Governor of California, but couldn't Killen have connected Carter's election with the breakdown of three years earlier?

Still, I found the book well written and sometimes insightful.  I'll give Killen kudos for presenting 1973 as it seemed to him and making it more interesting than I expected.  And if it was true seven (almost eight) years ago that we were still experiencing the aftershocks of that earthquake of a year, it's still true now.

Bachelor Girl: ...A Social History of Living Single

2002, 2003 Perennial edition
Betsy Israel
Bachelor Girl: 100 Years of Breaking the Rules-- A Social History of Living Single
Original price unknown, purchase price $7.50
Slightly worn paperback
B-

I found this about equal to Blumberg's The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls (1997), with which it somewhat overlaps.  Despite the subtitle, we're actually looking at more like 150 years of single "girls."  And some of these singles are young, under 21, although she does discuss older "spinsters," of 30 or 40 or even 50.  She goes roughly chronologically, but sometimes with a few decades in one chapter.  The book didn't quite jell for me, although there was some interesting material.  And, yes, both Sheila Levine and Bridget Jones make appearances, as do some TV characters like Mary Richards and Ally McBeal.  Israel was single and 27 when the "marry a terrorist" study came out, although she wed soon after.  I wish she'd gone into more about the binary assumption of married and single-- as a divorced childless woman I identify as neither-- but I do appreciate that she includes lesbians to some degree.

All About "All About Eve"

2001 update from 2000, this edition from St. Martin's Griffin
Sam Staggs
All About "All About Eve":  The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made
Bought new for $15.95
Worn paperback
B

This is similar to Aljean Harmetz's 1977 Wizard of Oz book, focusing as it does on one classic movie that was the highlight of many careers.  I didn't grow up watching All About Eve of course, in fact I think I was in my 30s before I saw it.  But the first time I did, I thought it was one of the wittiest movies ever.  I don't know about bitchiest, but Staggs definitely writes from a middle-aged gay man's perspective.  There's certainly queer content in the film, although obviously there's a lot of straight content, too, with Bette Davis and Gary Merrill blurring with their characters, and Marilyn Monroe making a very memorable appearance.  The book is basically a long, sometimes repetitive, but almost always fascinating love letter to not just this movie, but Old Hollywood.  I'm also using the "literary criticism" tag because Staggs has quite a bit about the short story that inspired the film.

I'm going with the 2001 update rather than the original copyright, because it includes, among other things, Celeste Holm's reaction to Staggs's opinions.  She was the only surviving cast member (she died last year) and refused to be interviewed for the book, and yes, she and Staggs are pretty bitchy about each other.

Subject to Debate

2001, possibly first paperback edition, from Modern Library
Katha Pollitt
Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture
Bought new for $13.95
Worn paperback
B+

Instead of the longer essays of Reasonable Creatures, this is more of a "best of" from Pollitt's column in The Nation called, yes, "Subject to Debate."  As such, I didn't feel it sustained the heights of its predecessor, although she's still probably my all-time favorite columnist.  I had a Nation subscription into at least '95, and I remember seeing some of these pieces for the first time almost twenty years ago.  And yet, I found myself laughing hard early on, when she zaps Clinton, and Nixon.  There's a definite New-York-centricity to her writing, and so we get a slightly different take on Giuliani vs. Ofili's "elephant-dung Virgin Mary" artwork than in Lechner's book.

Pollitt's daughter Sophie was growing up, seemingly untraumatized by her mother's divorce and subsequent live-in with "The Last Marxist," and it's the then ten-year-old who makes the best comments on Titanic.  But understandably the elder Pollitt has great insights into The First Wives Club, which I recently saw for the second time.  Ironically, she comments on her future publisher Modern Library's choice for the 100 best books of the 20th century.*  Pollitt mostly writes of politics of course, local, national, and international.  I agreed with her for the most part, especially in why "we were wrong" to vote for Clinton in '92, and again when she reacts to how Clinton tried to cover up the fuss over the Lewinsky scandal by "carpet-bombing Iraq without so much as a phone-call to Congress, much less the U.N."

This book goes up to October 2000, the outer edge of the Clinton years.  We'll see what she says about the first half of George Bush II's administration in Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time in 2006.... 


*No "television criticism" tag though because, as Pollitt admits in an endnote, she lacked "television savvy."  I've never watched NYPD Blue either, so I identified with her there, too.

The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family

2001, 2002 Norton edition
Mary S. Lovell
The Sisters: The Saga of the Mitford Family
Original and purchase price both unknown
Hardcover in good condition
B

I was wrong that Jessica's The American Way of Birth (1992) would be the end on my blog for this colorful family, because after that I got a used copy of this group-biography.  I thought Lovell did a fairly good job of balancing the different sides, although she's admittedly harder on Communist Jessica than Fascist Diana or Nazi Unity, perhaps because Diana and Debo were then still alive.  (Diana died in '03.)  She even pays some attention to Pam, who's sort of the Gummo Marx of the family.  Father David and in particular Mother Sydney come off as much nicer, if not as colorful, than in Jessica and Nancy's books.  Yes, there's some repetition from other books (including the Collier & Horowitz book on the Kennedys), but there was enough new material to be interesting, and sometimes amusing.

Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis

2000, 2002 Da Capo Press edition
Eric Myers
Uncle Mame: The Life of Patrick Dennis
Original price $16.95, purchase price unknown
Slightly worn paperback
B

I found this biography to be about equal to Dennis's fiction, not so much because of Myer's writing style, since that's a little flat and overly redundant (he tells us several times that one of Dennis's nieces became a nun), but because Dennis was even more of a colorful personality than any of his characters.  Whether he was a 10-year-old dressing up as Margaret Dumont, or a fiftysomething working incognito as Ray Kroc's butler, he was the life of the party.  Even his letters to friends, family, and his editor are priceless.

Myers never quite finds the right tone to address the darker side of Dennis's real life as Edward "Pat" Tanner, the depression, suicide attempts, and struggle to deal with his sexuality.  Tanner was campy before camp was recognized (including as a Boy Scout), and yet he was never involved with men until he was in his 40s, leading to a very long separation, but never divorce, from his wife.  (They reunited not long before his death, still in love.)  I consider him to be bisexual, but of course for most of his life-- he died in 1976-- that wasn't an accepted orientation.

As in Dennis's best fiction, there's a vibrant cast to back up the "lead," and Myers does a good job of digging below the stereotypes, so that Louise Tanner isn't just the long-suffering wife, or Corry Salley the Hattie-McDanielesque maid.  And we learn more about the folks behind Little Me, which sounds like it was even more fun to make than to read.

Note, I'm using the "film criticism" tag as well as the "literary criticism," because Myers does talk about the movie versions of Auntie Mame.  Dennis thought Rosalind Russell was great but found Lucille Ball "a little too c-mm-n for the role."

Holding My Own in No Man's Land

1997, possibly first edition, from Oxford University Press
Molly Haskell
Holding My Own in No Man's Land: Women and Men and Film and Feminism
Original price $25.00, purchase price $12.50
Hardcover in good condition
B-

Although there were times when I didn't feel like Haskell was being very clear, this does overall feel less confusing than her From Reverence to Rape (1974), ironically considering it's deliberately less focused.  It includes essays and columns from roughly 1972 to the-then present.  Much of it is interviews with Hollywood legends, from John Wayne and Doris Day to Meryl Streep and Liv Ullman.  But she also discusses television (quite a bit on The Carol Burnett Show, with quotes from Burnett's autobiography), literature (including Jane Austen's Emma), and some not directly media-related concerns, like make-up.  I thought the most interesting essay was "Rape: The 2,000-Year-Old Misunderstanding."  Since Haskell parts company with many feminists on some topics, I was intrigued by her belief (as always of course, not terribly well expressed) that when some women say "rape fantasy," they mean something more like a seduction, in which the man's/men's desire is what matters, while some men's "rape fantasies" more often emphasize the violence and domination.

It's telling that the glowing reviews on the back cover are from such definitely not-feminist men as Richard Schickel and Lionel Tiger.  But Haskell would likely say, as she does in her introduction, that this is because feminists don't understand her.  If you can get past the martyrdom of that attitude (as suggested by the title, which she admits swiping from Gilbert and Gubar although for a different purpose), she does provide food for thought.

The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society

1995, possibly first edition, from Routledge
David Van Leer
The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society
Possibly bought newish for $12.99
Worn paperback
B

Van Leer looks at the ways that "gay culture" impacts "straight society," and vice versa.  His examples go from the low culture of Hollywood Squares, to middlebrow culture like Damn Yankees, to academic approaches to the topic of AIDS.  I'm not sure how well the book hangs together, or if Van Leer proves a thesis as such, but it's always an interesting read, looking at language and appearance in particular.  I think this is a good example of a nonfiction book that gets a B rather than a B+.  B+s make me go "Wow!", while B's make me go, "Hm."

It's a very '90s book in the way it looks back at the "post-war" era (roughly 1945 to '69), as well as the "liberated 1970s" and the "reactionary 1980s" (my terminology, he might disagree).  There's distance, but not as much as now of course.  For instance, he talks about the generational differences for middle-aged gay men who'd lost many friends to AIDS, as opposed to younger gay men who grew up with the threat of the disease as an aspect of their sexuality.  He doesn't ignore lesbians, and one of the most interesting sections is on Larsen's Passing.  He's very good at finding layers of meaning, even in something like a Paul Lynde quip, or the works of Patrick Dennis.  I of course enjoyed the pop-culture stuff most, but I could see how the "higher" culture relates to it.

Media-Tions: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars

1994, undated later edition, from South End Press
Elayne Rapping
Media-Tions: Forays into the Culture and Gender Wars
Original price $15.00, purchase price $11.99
Worn paperback
B

I liked this book more than I recalled, even though Rapping does criticize Faludi's Backlash.  (I agree with her criticisms of Wolf's Beauty Myth.)  It's ironic that one of her criticisms is that some of Backlash was then "old news," considering that Rapping includes '70s pieces on soap operas and Tupperware.  And some of what she writes about has already been covered by other books I've read, such as Woody Allen's involvement with Soon-Yi (Goodman's Value Judgments collection from '93).  

Still, it was fun and thought-provoking to get Rapping's views on Amy Fisher, Thelma and Louise, Beverly Hills 90210, and, yes, rapping with a small R.  The other feminist media critics I've looked at mostly haven't addressed (then) modern music, and I like that pre-Baby-Boomer Rapping (born in 1938) found positive things to say about not just Madonna but other aspects of Music TV (little and big Ms, Ts, and Vs).  In fact, this book is sort of the inverse of Smith's Misogynies, in that it's a little too upbeat and positive.  Still, it was a nice change.  And, although a straight mother of two, she addresses gay representation more than her peers.  (One element missing in Douglas's otherwise wonderful Where the Girls Are, an issue I'll be returning to when I get up to Enlightened Sexism in 2010.)

I think Rapping is the first to get the quadruple crown of all my "criticism" tags, since she also discusses romance novels.

Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice

1993, revised from 1989 edition, from Faber and Faber
Joan Smith
Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice
Original price $12.99CAN, purchase price $3.60
Very worn paperback with split spine
B-

The original edition of this book actually predates Faludi's Backlash, but Smith updated to include a review of Milan Kundera's fiction (The Unbearable Lightness of Being etc.) and her thoughts on the Clarence Thomas hearings.  Her book is less focused and deliberately less inclusive than Faludi's.  She's discussing just some of the different forms that misogyny can take in European and American culture.  She's British, and this book was inspired by her experience as a female local journalist covering the Yorkshire Ripper case.  As with Faludi, music is only mentioned in passing, but she offers literary criticism of not only Kundera but William Styron (Sophie's Choice), Scott Turow (Presumed Innocent), the Bible, and historians of Greco-Roman society.  She analyzes not only Fatal Attraction, but Glenn Close's Jagged Edge and some Brian De Palma movies.  She looks at how the media treated Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher.  And she examines misogyny in court cases.

With a tighter structure and/or a more uplifting ending (the book is very bleak compared to Faludi or Wolf), I probably would've gone B or higher.

Possession: A Romance

1990, 1991 Vintage International edition
A. S. Byatt
Possession: A Romance
Bought newish for $12.00
Worn paperback
B+

Like Fowle's The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), this contrasts moderns with Victorians, but the approach and results are different.  Roland and Maud, two literary scholars, each devoted to a Victorian poet, in 1986 and '87 trace the connection-- intellectual and romantic-- between their poets, themselves connecting intellectually and then romantically.  Although this is definitely a novel ("romance" in Hawthorne's sense), I'm using the "epistolary," "literary criticism," and "poetry" tags because Byatt creates not just poems but all sorts of texts (and subtexts) that are convincingly real.  (As you know, I generally don't like poetry but I do like it when Christabel LaMotte writes like Emily Dickinson.)  The book is a celebration of not just writing but reading, and reading into, which means it's often joyful but can get bogged down.  At times, especially early on, I was tempted to give this an A-, but while it's an impressive and frequently fun book, it just doesn't quite make it to the top tier.  (By now, I'm pretty much convinced I'll never give out an A, certainly no A+.)

For the most part, Byatt presents her Victorians just through their writing, although there are times when she shows them directly.  However, she doesn't get as close as Fowle did.  When we see characters riding the train, Byatt isn't curled up into a corner of the compartment, as he was.  Like many of her characters, she's more aloof.  The book is about both passion (possession in many senses, including spiritual) and its avoidance, and times when celibacy is the more "romantic" choice.  (Even whether or not to read something is a very important choice, more important than sexual choices sometimes.)  One reason I loathed the 2002 movie is that Roland, who appeals to Maud partly because he's not "forceful," was changed into a brash American.  It's better to have an ice queen's melting be more paradoxical.  Also, in the book it's much clearer why Maud seems like an ice queen, because we see the nature of her recent involvements with a man and a woman, both of whom overwhelmed her.

When I first read the book, the ending surprised me but it fit.  I'm generally writing these reviews as if you don't mind spoilers, but I really do need to say don't read further if you haven't read the book but plan to. 

SPOILERS AND SPECULATION....

LaMotte and Randolph Henry Ash go away together for a week in Yorkshire, in early to mid-June 1859.  As near as we can tell, it's the only time they have sex.  (He's married, she has a live-in girlfriend.)  Cleaning up after their first time (possibly her first time with a man), he finds blood on his thighs.  He doesn't talk to her about it.  Has he deflowered her?  Does she have her period?  Some other reason?  We never find out.

She has a baby sometime between mid-April and early May.  The baby, who's raised by LaMotte's sister, is named Maia, implying the later month.  But wait a minute, even mid-April is at least ten months after she had sex with RHA.  The big reveal at the end of the novel is that Maud is the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of both poets.  But is she?  What if LaMotte had an affair with another man?  (My money's on Crabb, the only other male friend she has.)  It's like there's a whole other subtext to the book, one that Byatt isn't aware of, or sneakily pretends isn't there!

No Man's Land, Volume 2: Sexchanges

1989, undated later edition, from Yale University Press
Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges
Original price unknown, purchase price $2.00
Very worn paperback with broken spine
B-

I read a library copy of Gilbert & Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic (1979) twenty years after its initial publication and loved it.  But then it did focus on 19th-century women's writing, not just their title character, from Jane Eyre (and Miss Eyre herself), but the subjects of Austen, Eliot, and Dickinson.  Here, the co-authors look at the "modernists," covering roughly 1885 to 1940, with World War I central in more than one sense.  They examine the works of male as well as female writers, to discuss the ways that changing sex roles were feared and desired, sometimes simultaneously by the same author.  As the subtitle of this volume suggests, sexual orientation, as well as "transvestism" and "transsexuality," are part of this.

While there are some interesting insights-- I was intrigued by the idea that Alice B. Toklas actually wrote or at least cowrote her "autobiography"-- I was generally less interested in both the time period and the novelists and poets that G & G chose to represent it, compared to the subjects of Madwoman.  I'd much rather have seen their take on Sinclair Lewis's conflicted attitude towards women than Ezra Pound's or (yet again) D. H. Lawrence's.  (I got enough of him with Millett's Sexual Politics). 

Oddly enough, as with Fritz's Path, the now most thought-provoking aspect here is actually their references to the 1980s, including the androgyny of Yentl and Boy George.

Now, Where Were We?

1989, undated possibly first paperback edition, from Villard Books
Roy Blount, Jr.
Now, Where Were We?: Getting Back to Basic Truths That We Have Lost Sight of Through No Fault of My Own
Original price $4.95, purchase price $3.95
Worn paperback
C+

This is another slip in quality for Blount, though it still has its moments, mostly in the last 70 pages.  (Yes, right around the time he starts making fun of Reagan.)  One oddity to this copy is that pages 115 to 146 are missing, and are replaced by duplicates of pages 147 to 178.  So one minute he's talking about power-walking and the next he's talking about cola.

I did like seeing his take on health spas, compared to Jessica Mitford's a decade or two earlier.  (The pieces are from '78 onwards.)  The cover illustration riffs off of a piece imagining himself at the Constitutional Convention, which has a great last line.  His next book, the novel First Hubby, will offer a very different look at politics, which I'll discuss in 1990....

Oscar Wilde

1987, 1988 Knopf edition
Richard Ellman
Oscar Wilde
Original price $24.95, purchase price unknown
Hardcover in average condition
B-

This book most reminded me of Sinclair Lewis: An American Life, in that the biographer spent many years (about twenty in this case) researching a controversial writer, wrote a long book that at times includes day-by-day itineraries, but never quite succeeded in making me like the subject as well as the writer's own works.  To his credit, Ellman seems to have liked Wilde much more than Schorer liked Lewis, but then Wilde seems to have been a nicer, more charming person, despite the heartbreak he caused his wife and children.  On the other hand, Schorer's book was much funnier, which hardly seems fair considering the relative wit of Lewis and Wilde.  I do appreciate that Ellman recognises that Wilde's main "crime" wasn't that he was gay but that he didn't hide it (much) compared to most of his contemporaries.

Merlin Holland (now 67), Wilde's only grandchild, and Merlin's son Lucian (now 34) are proud to be Oscar's descendants, although I found out more about them from Wikipedia than in the brief mention Ellman makes of them towards the end.

Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

1985, 1986 Penguin edition
Roy Blount, Jr.
Not Exactly What I Had in Mind
Original price $6.95, purchase price $4.95
Worn paperback
B-

The title feels apt for a not bad but definitely weaker follow-up to Fell Soup.  There just aren't as many laugh-out-loud spots, although I did chortle rudely at a few of the swipes against Reagan.  The copyright page this time goes back to 1977, but it's mostly an '80s book.  I found the first section, "Talking Wrenches," to be the best, but his rambling style does wear thin after awhile, especially when I don't care about some of what he's rambling about.  (The sports writing is duller, although I was mildly interested in his take on whether Carl Lewis is gay.)  It seems like there's less poetry, and what there is less memorable.

But his piece on Erma Bombeck reminded me of why I once loved Erma, and why I'm not so crazy about her now.  The Bill Murray profile also captures a lot of Murray's appeal, and flaws.  And for that matter, he's good on Mark Twain, bringing the perspective of a Northern-dwelling Southerner.  Blount is a good observer, most of the time.

Children's Novels and the Movies

1983, undated (but probably that year) Frederick Ungar Publishing edition
Edited by Douglas Street
Children's Novels and the Movies
Original price $8.95, purchase price unknown
Paperback where about half the pages detached from the binding
B-

While reading this, I kept thinking of how much has changed.  Not just the nature of children's movies (from Harry Potter to the trend of the last decade of making full-length movies out of picture books), but even the methods of film distribution.  That there's a list of "Rental Sources for Films Listed in Filmography" reminds me that while cable TV and home video were becoming increasingly common in 1983, most families did not yet have them.  (I was middle-class and had neither.  A few friends had cable.  I don't remember knowing anyone who owned a VCR, or Betamax, although a few rich people had laser discs.)  Organizations, such as schools, still used film projectors, and rarely for entertainment rather than education.  (A year or two later, I did watch Romeo and Juliet [1968] on a classroom VCR, of course blushing at the topless Juliet and hoping no one noticed.)  As I've noted elsewhere, you can now watch an entire movie, sometimes for free, online.

So when I read about the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit, it wasn't just odd because of the current live-action version.  And yes, The Hobbit isn't a children's movie per se, but Street feels that any book with appeal to children is a children's book, so such classics as Treasure Island and Kim, not to mention more modern books that arguably have more appeal to adults, such as The Little Prince and Watership Down, are included.  There are even a few definitely YA examples, such as A Hero Ain't Nothing But a Sandwich (1978).  (It's a sign of the tendency of Hollywood to employ a small group of actors and actresses, especially those of color and at that time, but I was amused that both that contemporary story and Sounder [1972] of the Depression era star Paul Winfield and Cicely Tyson as the parents.)

Contributors do their best to steer clear of Disney (at that time still seen as the predominant maker of children's films, which I think is less true in the era of Pixar et al.), although there's an interesting examination of Pinocchio (1940).  While in some cases the "book is better" syndrome prevails, some writers do find films that they think work equally well, albeit in a different way, such as Wizard of Oz (1939).  Admittedly, some of the movies that they (and other critics) trash as not just bad adaptations but bad films, I have a soft spot for from watching them on TV in the 1970s, like Pippi Longstocking (1969, but I think the American dub, which adds to the campiness, is from '73).  In some cases, they'll compare different versions, like the 1933 and 1949 films of Little Women, to each other as well as to the book.

I obviously found the contributions where I'd neither read the book nor seen the movie, like Tom Brown's Schooldays, less interesting, but overall I'd recommend this book, both as a product of its time (and the 15 or 20 previous years), and as a good starting point for the topic.

Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction

1983, 1986 Methuen edition
Margaret Kirkham
Jane Austen, Feminism and Fiction
Original price unknown, purchase price $5.95
Worn paperback
B

I almost rated this a B- for three reasons.  One, I've read it too often; two, Kirkham's thesis that Austen was a feminist with views similar to Mary Wollstonecraft is no longer as revolutionary as it was two or three decades ago; and the discussion of Austen's novels is severely lop-sided.  These first two are not Kirkham's fault, and it's because her argument is so convincing that she's shaped the way that I and others see Austen.  The book probably isn't meant to hold up to the perhaps dozen readings that I've given it over the years.  (Well, physically it's doing all right.)  I do, however, find fault in the way Kirkham concentrates on the three later novels, with only a few pages to the first three, one page in the case of Sense and Sensibility!  The book would've been strengthened by doubling in size, since at 187 pages (counting notes and index) it's rather slim. 

That said, this is the best work of literary criticism so far, intelligent without being overly academic.  She also has a good dose of wit, including about literary criticism and biography, the two portraits of Jane, one by Cassandra and the other a Victorian "improvement," symbolising how badly Austen has been represented at times.

One Fell Soup

1982, 1984 Penguin edition
Roy Blount, Jr.
One Fell Soup, or, I'm Just a Bug on the Windshield of Life
Original price $5.95, purchase price $2.50
Worn paperback
B

I can't remember if I first encountered Blount as a writer, likely of this eye-catchingly titled collection, or as a "news" correspondent on Comedy Central.  (Or it could've been his introduction to one of my Nancy collections, more on that later.)  Both his spoken and his written voice are unique, both goofy and wry.  In the introduction here, one of the funniest I've read, he tries to explain what this book is a collection of.  With copyright dates going back to 1967, there's poetry and sports writing and "spoofery" and various unclassifiable things that he sees as "juice-swapping" like Huck Finn's food in a barrel.  I've tried to select enough tags to cover the bases.

It's hard to pick out a favorite.  Usually, there's at least one line in everything, even the sports articles, that catches my fancy, makes me chuckle.  His poetry is a bit Ogden-Nash-like, and even when a poem is called a song, it looks impossible to sing, which is OK, because he claims to be singing-impaired.  I'm finding it hard not to slip into a Blountesque style, so I'll just conclude with this here quote:

"I once heard Blaze Starr ask an audience whether they would like her to uncover her (larger than life) breasts.  When the audience cried out yes, yes, ma'am, they certainly would, she froze; rolled her eyes; replied, with great, pungent reserve, 'I reckon you would like some friiiied chicken."