Talk, Talk : A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups

  I cannot connect. My wiring is faulty. I cannot organize the world as it comes to me on MTV.

  I wonder if Amy Elizabeth, who is seven, can connect these images and these sounds and these words. Maybe she can. Maybe she can’t but doesn’t need to because she has connections that give her an order of consciousness that reading gave to me. Maybe.

  The child who by the age of seven has seen a lot of TV and a lot of MTV is bound to be wired differently from me.

  He may have wiring that I can only dream about. And that’s all right as long as he also has been given books.

  Suppose he has never been given a book.

  Suppose he has learned a lot but none of it has been from books.

  Suppose he has never been given a book and then he goes to school.

  He is given a book. It is full of pictures. The pictures don’t move. There is no beat. It is quiet. Very quiet. There is no sound at all. There are black horizontal lines on part of the page. They are broken lines. They have a name. They are called text. They look to him as Chinese looks to me. Abstract patterns.

  He is told that he is to learn from this book. Books require participation. He is supposed to look at the two-dimensional pictures and convert them into three dimensions inside his head. The movement has to happen inside his head. The sound has to happen inside his head. He has to make connections between no sound and the sounds inside his head. Later, he will be expected to translate those broken black rows into language—and convert them into sense inside his head.

  Well, all right. Where does he go?

  I’ll tell you where he goes.

  He goes to the back of the class.

  Way in back.

  Way, way in back. In back of all the other kids who have had books in their hands. I’m not talking head start here. I’m talking jump start. He starts way in back of them because they have already made the connections in the hardwiring of their heads. They are already plugged in. They’re already on the double-lane highway, ready to roll, and he will have to clear out the kudzu before he can even start his motor.

  And he better do it before he is an adolescent because I want to tell you, he’s going to read with a bad accent if he doesn’t.

  How can we expect any child who has been wired by TV to take to books unless we have helped him build in the circuitry? Won’t the child who has learned everything he has ever learned from moving pictures and loud sound be wired differently from the child who has linear books? A child who knows that he must get it in a flash has a different brain pattern from a child who knows that he controls something better than the remote; he controls the rate at which he turns the pages. He can study any picture for as long as he wants to. He can take his time and count the toes and see if they’re all there and if they’re all perfectly made.

  It will be very bad for us if we lose the ability to get into books. By becoming literate, we have lost a great deal of our preliterate patience, a great deal of our preliterate power to read continuity from pictures that don’t move. But having laid down the circuitry, we can reconnect the wires.

  There is no doubt that the TV kids entering first grade have their brains wired differently from mine when I started school. I think of those kids watching MTV, and I think that they do have a desktop radio telescope as well as an Aleph. They see it all, hear it all, unrelated, up front, close, in your face. The sounds they hear and the sights they see are perpetual, staccato, and unrelated.

  I see the results in the letters I get.

  Here’s a letter dated September 1992 from Rebecca in Kansas.

  Dear Mrs Kongsburg

  I think that From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs Bazil E Franklen thats a great book. I would like to another book of yours books are so adventuring well at least that. I think that your one of my favorit authers #1. My name is Rebecca and I in 5th Grade Well if you get this letter please write me back Hears my adress.

  And there’s my despair as a writer.

  Borges felt the same despair. Before he describes what he sees in the Aleph, he says:

  … here begins my despair as a writer. All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a shared past. How, then, can I translate into words the limitless Aleph? … What my eyes beheld was simultaneous, but what I shall now write down will be successive, because language is successive.

  Rebecca writes simultaneously and without verbs. Rebecca’s language is not successive. We do not share a past. Rebecca does not know that language could connect us across time. Rebecca does not know that language could connect us across space. Rebecca does not know that once she mails her letters, they are not in Kansas anymore.

  Maybe we pre-MTV people appreciate order too much. Maybe the brain patterns of Rebecca’s MTV generation will allow them to connect across time and space in ways that don’t involve reading. TV and MTV require a different kind of attention, don’t they? They certainly require less processing. Since processing itself not only stimulates but also strengthens nerve paths, I wonder how the learning circuits that lead to concentration, long attention spans, and conceptualization in the TV-taught generation will grow. And I wonder how they will ever mobilize the English language.

  I think it is a mistake for educators to disregard the nerve patterns that are being laid down by a “Sesame Street” generation, but it is even a worse mistake to lose the circuitry that books lay down. Or never to lay it down. Our present generation will lose touch with the collective past of our civilization as well as an alternate route to the future.

  And I will lose the connections that matter most to me as a writer. More than anything I want to connect. I write to connect. I want to connect with readers. I want to connect with readers of the current generation as well as the past. Books bond the reader and the writer, the reader and the read-to, the generation past and the generation future.

  In my picture book Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale’s, besides the text—which is linear—besides the full-color picture spread—which doesn’t move—I have drawn a strip of black-and-white pictures like a filmstrip. It is my hope that these will not only add to the feeling of Amy Elizabeth’s being a tourist but also add a dimension to the text. The film-strip tells what is going on inside Amy’s head, and I hope the nascent reader enjoys this early taste of that most important connection that books make: getting inside someone else’s head.

  Just as I want to connect the child to the page, I want to connect through time. I want to connect the generations through the book. I have not forgotten the teacher, the librarian, the primary caregiver who is reading that book. I put elements in my picture books that make the reading of them amusing to grandmothers. I know grandmothers. Grandmothers are friends of mine. I want to connect with them, through them, and through them to the book to the child.

  Someone wrote that in Amy Elizabeth Explores Bloomingdale’s Amy Elizabeth’s remark about “grandmothers and primary caregivers was … cynically amusing to adults.” I hope so. Sounds good to me. I am an adult. Adults are friends of mine. Then he went on to say, “but when you laugh, don’t be surprised if your listeners feel left out of an inside joke.”

  Beatrix Potter would never have said that.

  Beatrix Potter knew that the small-g gods who can count the unseen toes behind the wheels of the chariot can hear the amusement behind the spoken word. The listeners won’t feel left out. They may interrupt and ask what’s funny, and if you really want to connect, you can tell them. Anna helped me. I interrupted and asked what was funny, and she told me, remember?

  Don’t let the preschooler give up the two-dimensional, the ordered, the linear. It requires a lot, but it has a lot to offer. It has style.

  It has meaning.

  And it puts him in control.

  He controls the rate, the impact, the time.

  If I give up the way I am wired, I give up the world as I know it, and that’s an investment of a lot of years. I am not asking the MTV-wired kids to give up their hot-wiring or their remo
te controls, but I am asking them to plug in mine. They may someday sit in another cathedral—maybe even a library—and need to reattach those wires they once long ago allowed to dangle.

  That same Big Bang that produced the carbon in the diamonds we wear, in the graphite of our pencils, and in the carbohydrates of our cornflakes also produced the carbon in the proteins of which you and I are made. In our most particulate matter, we are—all of us—the stuff of stars. Doesn’t that tell us that we are all in this together? People who need people are not the luckiest people in the world. They are all the people in the world, all over the world standing “hand in hand, and one shock of recognition runs the whole circle round.”

  That is if we don’t blow a fuse or pull the plug.

  Talk Talk

  As I was growing up, I always had the feeling that I understood a lot more than I knew. When I listen to my grandchildren, I think that they know a lot more than they understand. The difference is exposure. Even before starting school, they see more and hear more than I had as a high-school graduate. Perhaps, saying overseen more and overheard more is a better expression because they have been exposed to a great panorama on a very small scale. Their big world is a small place—the size of a television screen. My small world was a big place—my neighborhood.

  In the first of these talks, my 1968 Newbery acceptance speech, I expressed gratitude for the recognition and acceptance of my books that made a “record of a place, suburban America, and a time, early autumn of the twentieth century.”

  It is now the tag end of the twentieth century, and experience appears to have moved out of the family home, off the streets of the suburbs as well as the big cities, out of the neighborhood altogether, and into television.

  Television cameras are everywhere: on the playing fields, in the courtroom, in Congress, in war zones, in hospital operating rooms. Between then and now the line between watching something happen and watching it happen on TV has become fuzzy.

  Television has blurred the line between real and make-believe.

  Consider three newspaper items:

  The New York Times, Friday, June 8, 1973:

  Students at the University of Michigan Medical School will have the choice of listening to a commencement speaker who is an actor in a doctor’s role, or one who is a doctor in an activist’s role. The medical school has chosen Robert Young as the official graduation speaker. Dissident students have chosen, as a “counter-commencement” speaker, Dr. Benjamin Spock.

  Robert Young spoke to the graduating class of the University of Michigan’s Medical School not as an actor portraying a real doctor—Banting, who isolated insulin, or Salk or Sabin—he was there as Marcus Welby, M.D. He was there as the fictional hero of a television series. But in 1973, there were apparently enough young doctors who wanted to hear from a real doctor at their very real graduation.

  The Florida Times-Union, Friday, April 24, 1987:

  Associated Press

  Howie Mandel, who plays Dr. Wayne Fiscus on TV’s St. Elsewhere, has been scheduled to address the graduating class next year at Tulane University Medical School.

  You were expecting, maybe, Robert Young?

  I have been unable to find a reference where the graduating class of the medical school of Tulane also had a “counter-commencement” speaker. I only hope that when he appeared “words [didn’t] escape Howie Mandel.” I only hope that he didn’t open “with a sequence of Howie howling.”

  In the wake of the first Rodney King verdict, after the riots in south-central Los Angeles, Vice-president Quayle addressed the Commonwealth Club of California.

  The New York Times, Wednesday, May 20, 1992:

  EXCERPTS FROM VICE PRESIDENT’S SPEECH ON CITIES AND POVERTY

  I believe the lawless social anarchy which we saw is directly related to the breakdown of family structure, personal responsibility and social order in too many areas of our society …

  We must be unequivocal about this. It doesn’t help matters when prime time TV has Murphy Brown—a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman—mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another life style choice.

  In November 1862, when President Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, he said, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.” Aside from the fact that we know that Lincoln was teasing about Mrs. Stowe starting the Civil War and Quayle was being unequivocal about Ms. Brown starting civil unrest, we know that Quayle could not have put the blame on an author. Murphy Brown doesn’t have one. Book characters are made up by authors. TV characters are made up by committees. Murphy Brown is a blend of writers, directors, producers, and the actress who plays her. Like a good bouillabaisse the blend is more identifiable than the ingredients that make it.

  Book characters can’t breach the line between politics and make-believe. Authors, not their characters, have always stayed the line. (Ask Salman Rushdie.)

  The single episode of “Murphy Brown” that upset Vice-president Quayle had 38 million viewers. Imagine! Thirty-eight million people doing exactly the same thing during a single half hour of a Monday night.

  A television show that has an audience of only one million viewers for its particular half hour is considered a flop. A book that has a million readers over a year or two years or five years is a hit.

  Television would seem to hold all the chips.

  But not if we regard as an advantage what is considered a serious limitation in television. No television show with 38 million viewers per half hour can offer what a single book can offer over a lifetime. Many lifetimes. In 1993 we celebrated the one hundredth birthday of Peter Rabbit. Peter Rabbit may have 38 million readers over a century of time. Think of it! Four generations sharing a single experience—not within a half hour—but within a century.

  As the number of years bearing down on the end of our millennium is in single digits, we are promised five hundred television channels before the digits run out. We are also promised that some of those channels will be interactive.

  Now, more than ever, television would seem to hold all the chips.

  But not if we consider what books mean.

  W. H. Auden said, “Rite is the link between the dead and the unborn.”

  Reading is a rite as well as a right. Reading is the slow-motion experience—the rocking-chair experience. And children’s books are the grandmothers’ laps we sit in. Books are meant to speak to us, one by one. They are one individual communicating with another. One generation connecting to another. They speak to the ages through the ages. Some of us have probably already forgotten who Drs. Welby or Fiscus were, but none of us has forgotten who Peter Rabbit is. He is. They were.

  I see children’s books as the primary vehicle for keeping alive the means of linear learning. They are the key to the accumulated wisdom, wit, gossip, truth, myth, history, philosophy, and recipes for salting potatoes during the past six thousand years of civilization. Children’s books are the Rosetta Stone to the hearts and minds of writers from Moses to Mao.

  And that is the last measure in the growth of children’s literature as I’ve witnessed it—a growing necessity. Permissions

  Permissions

  Excerpts from Johnny Tremain by Esther Forbes. Copyright © 1943 by Esther Forbes Hoskins, © renewed 1971 by Linwood M. Erskine, Jr., Executor of the Estate of Esther Forbes Hoskins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Co. All rights reserved. Excerpt from Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank. Copyright © 19S2 by Otto H. Frank. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Excerpt from “The Aleph,” from The Aleph and Other Stories by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Norman Thomas di Giovanni, translation copyright © 1968, 1969, 1970 by Emece Editores, S.A. and Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Used by permission of Dutton Signet, a division of Penguin Books USA Inc. Excerpt from Little House in the Big Wood
s by Laura Ingalls Wilder, text copyright © 1932 by Laura Ingalls Wilder; copyright renewed 1960 by Roger L. MacBride. Selection reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers. Excerpt from Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George, Text copyright © 1972 by Jean Craighead George. Selection reprinted by permission of Harper Collins Publishers. Excerpt from “The Rum Tug Tugger” in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats copyright © 1939 by T.S. Eliot and renewed 1967 by Esme Valerie Eliot; and excerpt from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” from The Complete Poems and Plays 1909—19S0 by T.S. Eliot are reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace & Company. Excerpts from “Renascence” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, from Collected Poems, Harper Collins. Copyright © 1912, 1940 by Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  Art Permissions

  Child’s drawing courtesy of E.L. Konigsburg. Henri Matisse, Visage. Circa 1948. Aquatint, private collection. © 1995 Succession H. Matisse, Paris/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Art Resource, NY. Fernand Leger, The Great Parade (definitive state). 1954. 117% x 15TA ins., oil on canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Photograph by David Heald © The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York [62.1619]. Wassily Kandinsky, Composition. 1915. ©ARS. Museum of Fine Arts of the Georgian S.S.R. Tbilisi, Georgia. Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY. Georges Braque, Fruit Dish and Cards. 1913. © 1995 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Musee National D’Art Moderne, Paris, France. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY. Juan Gris, The Book. 1913. Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY. Marcel Duchamp, Bride. 1912. 35% x 21% ins., oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. Marcel Duchamp, The Passage from Virgin to Bride. 1912. 23% x 2114 ins., oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Purchase. Photo ©The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Juan Gris, The Violin. Kunsthaus, Zurich, Switzerland, Scala/Art Resource, NY. Pablo Picasso, Violin and Guitar. Hermitage, St. Petersburg, Russia. © 1995 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SPADEM, Paris. Scala/Art Resource, NY. Georges Braque, Man with a Guitar. 1914. Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY. Georges Braque, Violin and Palette. 1909-1910. 36!^s x 1634 ins., oil on canvas. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Gift, Solomon R. Guggenheim, 1937, Photograph by David Heald ©The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, New York [FN 54.1412]. Pablo Picasso, The Violin. 1914. Musee National d’Art Moderne, Paris, France. © 1995 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SPADEM, Paris. Giraudon/Art Resource, NY. Pablo Picasso, Ma Jolie (Woman with a Zither or Guitar). 1911 — 1912. 3914 x 2514 ins., oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Acquired by Lillie P. Bliss Bequest. Photograph © 1995 The Museum of Modern Art, New