Writing for children

E.B. White, on not writing down to children:

Anyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse-boy, and they accepted it without a quiver. In Charlotte’s Web, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.

Some writers for children deliberately avoid using words they think a child doesn’t know. This emasculates the prose and, I suspect, bores the reader. Children are game for anything. I throw them hard words, and they backhand them over the net. They love words that give them a hard time, provided they are in a context that absorbs their attention. I’m lucky again: my own vocabulary is small, compared to most writers, and I tend to use the short words. So it’s no problem for me to write for children. We have a lot in common.

Zoot Sims in Sweden

In 1984, someone invited Zoot Sims, the great tenor saxophonist, to Sweden, and filmed him. They brought him together with one of his old compatriots, the bassist Red Mitchell, and the Swedish guitarist, Rune Gustafsson. They met in a what looks more like a living room than a studio, talked over old times, and played music.

A few months after this was filmed, Zoot was dead from cancer. Whatever the ills he was suffering at this time so close to his death, here his playing is gorgeous, relaxed and beautiful. I would like to have been party to the entire conversation between him and Red Mitchell as well. The night when Zoot fell off the stage at the Onyx Club while playing Brew Moore's horn ... that's the kind of night I want to hear more about, mostly because I wish I had been there myself, but I was born too late, and in the wrong place.

At one point Zoot says, dragging on a cigarette, "Y'know, music keeps people sane, I think." I can't argue. When he said this I thought of the number of times that music -- making music, or simply listening to it -- has helped keep me on something close to an even keel when it could easily have been otherwise had there been no one to sing with, no records to listen to.

Zoot Sims' own music has played a small but meaningful part in my life, as has the music of Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkins, Duke Ellington ... so many others. I wonder if they know that now. I hope so.

What's Opera, Doc?

Nearly every Saturday morning of my childhood, from about age seven or eight on, I watched the Bugs Bunny-Roadrunner show. It was the best time of the weekend, I think, sitting on the couch eating cereal in front of the TV. You didn't know what the weekend held, but you didn't have to think about it too much. You had everything you wanted right there.

One of the many cartoons I watched, and loved, time and again, was this. Elmer Fudd sings Wagner. I knew it was from an opera, but I didn't really understand what opera was, and didn't care to learn much more. But the melody stuck with me, for some reason, and hearing Elmer sing "Bwoom Hilda, be my wove!" was funny. I was aware, dimly, that I was watching a parody of something that was meant to be tragic; "What did you expect in an opera, a happy ending?" Bugs says at the end.

Then, not long ago, I watched this. I had not even heard the prelude to Wagner's great opera in its entirety before. And, strangely, even as my appreciation for this music has unfolded as I never expected it to, the old Bugs Bunny cartoon seems funnier, better, more spot-on than ever, mostly because it seems to understand so well the greatness of the thing it is parodying.

Sometimes great art and popular culture collide, and both win. Take fifteen minutes and watch this. Beauty, sublimity, grandeur. Stunning. You won't be sorry, doc.