Vale E.L. Konigsburg

As if this week hasn't had enough bad news in it, word comes today that E.L. Konigsburg has died.

Konigsburg is one of the rare greats of children's literature who I actually read as a child (I don't know what I was reading then, but it was mostly nothing I read now). From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is probably THE iconic Konigsburg text, and of course it's a great one, but my personal favorite has always been - and still is - Up From Jericho Tel. I taught it once, in a children's lit class (maybe a summer course?), and I was so gratified that the students liked it. It was one of those books they responded to with "Why didn't I know about this book when I was a kid? I wish I had read this sooner."

Journey to an 800 Number is another one of her books I read when I was young, and it really stuck with me. The odd loneliness of the 800-number operator, the way people so easily become faceless and nameless - and the ways they (or people around them) create identities and spaces for themselves, the constant travel of the characters of the book - there's a streak of melancholy to that book that resonated and resonates still with me.

Konigsburg's books draw our attention to the unnoticed: to the people and things, large and small, that we ignore or never see in the first place. She's interested in the real, everyday things that are also completely magical: think of Claudia and the Angel statue, think of Amadeo in The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World. That title, in fact, seems to be precisely what each of Konigsburg's books is about - seeking, or stumbling upon, that mysterious edge of the heroic, magical, meaningful world.

The View From Saturday is perhaps Konigsburg's masterpiece, if we need to identify any one of her books as such. The multiple narrators, interspersed with the third-person narrated sections focalized by Mrs. Olinski, is an organizational and narrational thing of beauty. The way the stories of the four kids interlock and overlap, and the ways in which those convergences are revealed, is absolutely astonishingly brilliant and wonderfully skillful. It never feels gimmicky, and it never gets old, or becomes obvious. Each new revelation is revelatory, and each segment of the book adds up to an extraordinary whole story, a work of beauty and grace.

Konigsburg's protagonists are a big part of the greatness of her books, and it wasn't until I taught Up From Jericho Tel that I even realized that her characters all share one major thing in common: they are all very smart, slightly (or more-than-slightly) eccentric kids. Realizing this so long after first reading her books, it made me think that in all likelihood, one of the reasons my child-self liked her books so much was because her protagonists were like me: smart, and kind of weird. In children's literature, we get a lot of clever protagonists, and we get a lot of narrators or protagonists who have what seems like more wisdom/understanding than any kid that age should have, but it often goes unremarked in the text. Konigsburg - who herself must have been a smart, odd kid - so wonderfully captures both the challenges and delights of being an outsider because of your intelligence, because of your quirky interests. If the people around you don't recognize that you're a star - as Jeanmarie's classmates don't - you just keep wearing your appliqued Texas vest until you find someone who does recognize a Star when she sees one. The scene on the bus with Jeanmarie's vest is one I remember vividly identifying with as a younger reader: the feeling of being criticized or made fun of for something that you like a lot, or care about intensely, and really do not want to change, the uncertainty that engenders, the contempt for the bullies who don't understand, the desire to be like them even while loathing them - it's all so familiar.

Konigsburg's books make smart kids the main actors, the ones who can see and do and understand things around them in ways not everyone else can. Her kids aren't caricatured nerds, or strange performing monkeys - they are real, complex, intriguing people who live in a world where they are not the norm, and where not being the norm can make you invisible. The trajectory of the narratives are of making the invisible  visible, whether it's your own self or someone else, or some idea, some sense of understanding, some wider way of perceiving the world. The way invisibility works on a metaphoric level in Konigsburg's books makes me rethink the invisibility scenes from Jericho Tel - in some ways, her books function the way those episodes of invisibility work for Jeanmarie and Malcom. Her books let you see that which cannot be seen, uncover that which was previously hidden, understand yourself and the world in ways that make sense.

E.L. Konigsburg worked the best kind of magic with her books: the magic that lets you see the invisible in the world; the magic that lets you see the greatness of yourself, and helps you share that greatness with the world. So thank you, Elaine Konigsburg, for knowing how to see the invisible, and for knowing how to make us see it as well. Requiescat in Pace.

the helpers in Boston

Once again, terrible news of people being injured and killed for no apparent reason. As was the case just a few short months ago, when all those people were killed in Connecticut, I repeat what Mister Rogers has to tell us:

Look for the helpers.

This clip is from an (excellent) long interview done with Fred Rogers by the Archive for American Television. The quote about looking for the helpers has been doing the rounds online, but it doesn't include, usually, the final line in this excerpt, which is a line worth noting and repeating:

If you look for the helpers, you'll know that there's hope.

 I was thinking about this quote, because I think about this quote almost daily, and realized how multi-faceted it is, how helpful in so many ways. Looking for the helpers takes our gaze away from the blood and broken glass, away from the scary, anxious, confusing, nightmare we see on our screens (and our screens are everywhere, focused right on the blood and broken glass and crying people) - it directs us away from the horror onto the good. It shows in ways no statistics can that the good people who want to help us outnumber - by a LOT - the bad people who want to hurt us.
This photo (by John Tlumacki of the Boston Globe), which contains a bit of blood and broken glass, seems to me to be a perfect illustration of Looking for the Helpers as a way to see Hope.

 A lot of the photos from Boston today have featured brave, hardworking men and women in bright green vests: EMTs, doctors, nurses, police, other professional first responders. They are helpers, and they are so important.
But this photo - this one - shows two people helping a third. No one has a vest. No one is a professional helper - at least not that we can see. Neither of these people is on the clock. Possibly neither has any first-response training, or experience, or preparation.
What both people have is empathy and care and compassion and bravery. They're helping a third injured person. Maybe he's a friend, or parent, or family member. Maybe he's a total stranger. Who knows? It doesn't matter. What matter is these helpers, half an hour before this photo was taken, were just two random faces in a crowd.
The helpers are everywhere, all around us, ready to get to work and help at any moment. Anyone can be a helper. Everyone can be a helper. Lots of us already are, in big and small ways.
And there are so many more helpers than hurters. There always are; there always have been. Always. Even when it doesn't feel like there are, they are there. As Mister Rogers says, they might be just off-screen, or just at the edges. They aren't always the center of our attention - certainly not our newsmedia's attention - but they should be. There are thousands, probably millions of helpers in and around Boston today - and just one or two or a few bad guys.

Look to the helpers. Look for them. They are heroes, for sure. They are also us, you and me and everyone in the vast vast vast overwhelming majority of people who aren't bad guys. The people who got hurt? They're probably helpers too - maybe not today, but earlier, or maybe in years to come. Maybe even today.

*   *   *   *   *   *

The Fred Rogers Company - which is composed of some absolutely outstanding, compassionate, and smart people, many of whom worked with Mister Rogers on his program - has some advice for parents or other adults who work with kids on how to help children during tragedies. It's good advice. As I wrote before

Mister Rogers isn't going to lead you astray. He simply isn't. I have read hundreds of letters written to him, and dozens of responses from him and his staff of wonderful people who are very like him. The faith and trust people placed in him was not unfounded. The faith and trust and reassurance he gave them made a difference, in some cases a huge difference, to parents, grandparents, and children.

The link again to Fred Rogers Company's advice on speaking with kids about tragedy is here.

Mister Rogers is amazing, we know this, but his mother was also a very wise woman, and we should mention her, too, in our list of helpers. She helped little Fred Rogers become the great person he was; she is helping thousands, maybe millions, of people right now with her compassionate words of wisdom: Look for the helpers.

my dreadful mixed feelings over reasons my son is crying tumblr

 So there's this tumblr called 'reasons my son is crying.' It somehow exploded everywhere, apparently in the last 48 hours, because suddenly it's all over the place. Of course I went and read it, and was delighted and amused and followed it on my tumblr page. And then this morning:

reasonsmysoniscrying:

We mic’ed him up for Good Morning America.

And BAM just like that I suddenly feel less pleased with this tumblr. I felt/feel a little weird when people use their young children in such a public way - this kid is too young, really, to consent with full knowledge of what he’s consenting to, but at least on the internet there’s a (very thin) layer between the Kid and the Audience. The Kid’s “performance” (i.e., crying) happens ‘offstage,’ so to speak - there’s no microphone, no other people intervening or influencing, it’s just the not-so-much-privacy of his own family and their own camera. but when you add in things like a live studio audience, a crew, interviewers, a set - then you’ve created an artificial and highly manipulated and manipulative arena, and the Kid is On Stage and being used by multiple adults. It turns a mostly-private emotional reaction into a public performance, and performances aren't about the performer so much as they are about the audience, especially, I think, when the performer is a kid (cf. Shirley Temple, every child on 'Toddlers & Tiaras,' etc).

The premise of ‘reasons my son is crying’ is kind of interesting in addition to being funny - I don’t find it “cute” at all, but I do like the way it records the incredible frustrations of being small and quasi-helpless and inexperienced/untutored in the world. To us, maybe it’s funny that a kid would cry because he can’t run naked into Times Square, but the Kid presumably doesn’t know why he’s dreaming the impossible dream there.

I often tell my students that being a little kid is hard - the world isn’t sized for you, you have very little actual freedom and autonomy, you can’t pour your own juice or milk, there are monsters under the bed. You don’t know yet that your hand will get burned if you touch the stove when it’s on. You learn everything the hard way, or experience a world of what appear to be irrational restrictions. It’s this sense of difficulty that ‘reasons my son is crying’ captures that I like.
But I don’t like converting that into a sideshow - it’s already perilously close to being reproachably exploitative. I mean, would YOU want someone taking a photo every time you cried or felt frustrated, and posting it on tumblr for all the world to see? What if you couldn’t say no? what if you couldn’t say yes, either?
I am always, constantly suspicious of performing/trick children, and more suspicious of them in the age of “reality” media, where a kid might not even know or realize he’s being turned into a performer. And so this tumblr - and its transformation into a viral! media! sensation! meme! - makes me uncomfortable now.
[And that doesn’t even begin to address the fact that i suspect you’d see a VERRRRY different public reaction if the evidently continually crying child wasn’t white.]

I should say that I don't think this Kid's parent(s) are being neglectful or abusive or even truly exploitative. I think the original idea is actually quite clever, and I like that you (or I) can read the "reasons" in multiple registers. I'm not especially concerned that this Kid evidently cries constantly. I do think we as a culture are way too quick to embrace emotion-as-spectacle/entertainment, and I think we absolutely make a hash out of the way we treat child performers. I also think we use children, in our culture, in all kinds of ways that aren't really about the kid, or aren't in the kid's best interest. Even more than that, I think it's really easy to turn your kid into a vehicle for money and/or fame - again, the story of virtually every child star demonstrates this - and in this modern world, I can't think of a better example than the Gosselins, who originally appeared in a one-off TLC show about quintuplets and sextuplets. Easy to see how you could agree to doing this, a kind of documentary, and get paid a bit - with eight kids, who wouldn't need the extra cash? And then the reality show - you think, 'great, we can set up college funds for each of the kids,' and/or 'we'll give it a try,' and/or 'this could be fun.' And then you're on tabloids and having a very ugly very public divorce and running through money like water and oh hey, turns out reality-tv 'star' children aren't protected by the kinds of laws (like Jackie's law) whereby some portion of their earnings have to be banked in trust for them, untouched by their parents.

I'm not saying the Kid who is crying is going down that path. Probably he isn't. Probably he's just a kid, with average-affluent parent(s) who are kind of amused by the whole thing. Probably he'll grow up and be kind of mortified at these crying-kid photos, and not much more.

But in the meantime, the tumblr - and now the national tv appearances - raise some interesting and, I think, important questions/issues about how we view and use children in a variety of kinds of media. There's no Jackie's law for social media, there are no protections (and I am thinking primarily of economic/ financial protections) in place for child "stars" of tumblr or instagram or their parents' blogs or youtube.

There are also - and I do think this is very important - lots of reasons to cry when you're a very small child, and those reasons should be taken seriously by the wider culture when we think about children and childhood, even though in the moment, those reasons might be exasperating or just plain hilarious.

Kid Pickers: early lessons in capitalism

Evidently the American emphasis on teaching kids to be capitalists has moved well beyond the old standby lemonade stand; Macmillan Kids has published Kids Pickers: How to Turn Junk into Treasure "by" Mike Wolfe, star of the History Channel show "American Pickers."

I came across this via the Children Book Council's Pinterest, which is pretty terrific and very worth following.

I have many thoughts on "American Pickers," but in the interests of ever getting anything done I'll skip most of them except to say that it's a remarkably queer show putting up a 'brave' front of butch masculinity, and that I find both Mike and his co-star rather repellent; their open greed and capitalistic fervor disguised as genuine affection for and interest in history and material culture makes my stomach turn. At the Console-ing Passions conference in Boston last July (2012), I attended a panel that included a talk about "mantiquing," which didn't go as far as I wanted it to (i.e., dissecting the queerness/butchness of the show) but which did introduce the word "mantiquing" into my vocabulary.

And now mantiquing goes kid inclusive with this book. I can't think for the life of me how kids, who for the most part lack the essential picking resources (transportation, time, knowledge, and capital to buy 'junk') are supposed to launch their picking careers, but I guess that's why Mike Wolfe had to write a book. I hate the language of "turn junk to treasure," because it totally removes the value of any material object as anything but a money-maker; that is, the social, historical, cultural value of, say, an antique book is erased and replaced with nothing but its current market value. The things of history become metonyms for cash, and nothing more.

Because I get interested in about 18 different things each week, I don't have time for them all and I have to watch myself so I don't run after Shiny Objects and neglect things like teaching or dissertation. this is why I don't know what kind of critical work has been done on indoctrinating kids into commercial enterprise (that lemonade stand) - but I do remember talking about it in connection with (I think) The Great Brain when I took a children's lit class at Georgetown. Perhaps the most famous of Tom Sawyer's escapades also centers on moneymaking - the whitewashing of the fence. Kids in books are always trying to figure out how to get money, which is both totally reasonable, since kids in general are demographic without the power of the purse, and totally distasteful in its capitalism.
Making the leap from fictional moneymaking schemes to an actual how-to centered around this most peculiar of occupations - picking - is unsurprising but still deeply unpleasant. I'm curious about the gender implications of the book - the TV show really works hard to make picking a Man's Job, full of motorcycles and gasoline signs and jokes about wives. I also wonder how well this book will sell: what parents will support their child's new career as a picker? Or will it be a 'family who picks together...' kind of scenario?

tweens, adolescence, and sexgender

I've been thinking a lot about adolescence for the last few years, and one of the things I've thought about - but not had time to really pursue - is the way American adolescent culture plays to/engages with/creates sex/gender in different ways. [note: I have not yet come to any satisfactory conclusion about how to refer to sex or gender, because neither term quite gets at what I want to express, which is something to the effect of traditionally-understood, normative traits and qualities associated with males or females, regardless of how an individual is constructed biologically (sex) or psychologically (gender - and psychologically is a problem term here too). For the purposes of this post, I'm going old-school regressive and just saying "boy" or "girl" to mean those normative, traditional qualities and characteristics, with many apologies to trans-and-pan-and-queer-and-counteridentifying persons]

Recently - a week ago or so - I wondered on facebook if "tween" is just girls, or if it includes boys as well. I always think of tween as girls; when I first encountered the term "tween," it was in an article about Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, and I've rarely, if ever, seen it used in connection with boys. I was surprised that my friends - all of them academics of one sort or another - replied with certainty that of course, tween includes boys.

I was pleased, then, earlier this week to read Tyler Bickford's post of the text of his paper given at this year's SCMS conference, because he writes

the sphere of children’s entertainment that is emerging the most rapidly is directed to “tweens,” who a category that is presumptively (if not categorically) made up of girls. The term, which is a cutesy play on “teen” and “between,” emphasizes an age-based tension between grown-up autonomy and childhood domesticity that resembles nothing so much as the postfeminist tension between feminism and femininity. So talk about tweens is always already gendered. It’s also always already white, affluent, suburban, and consumerist, but then childhood also, as it’s hegemonically constructed, is itself presumptively feminine, white, affluent, suburban, and consumerist.

(emphasis mine)

I felt slightly vindicated in my conviction that tween is predominantly female, and that it at least is far from obviously a category that extends itself to include males in that Awkward Age (because really, that's what tween is: ages around 11-14).

So if, as Bickford claims (and as far as my exceedingly cursory sense of it goes) the most rapidly emerging sphere of children's entertainment is for tweens, where are the boys left?

It's a rare occasion when I say "but what about the boys?!" and mean it in anything but a sarcastic way. I say it when I think about Disney Princess culture, especially as it's enacted at Disney parks, where little girls (and big girls, and adults) are routinely addressed as "Princess." There's just no character set analogous to the princesses that is "for" boys. Of course, and obviously, plenty of little boys play princess quite delightedly, and plenty of little girls scorn princessing. But the culture emphasizes little girls in its focus on princesses, and that leaves the boys with...what?

I feel like this a bit about adolescence and boys. When I browse the teen section of my library (which is often, and it's a good teen section), I'm continually aware and reminded of how many of the books have pink covers, or purple covers, or sparkly covers. Many of them have images of girls on their covers. Many of them have girls as their protagonists, and many of them are written by women, or under female pseudonyms.

When I've asked my undergrads - and because I usually teach children's lit courses, I have a painful dearth of male students - what they read while they were themselves in high school or younger, the girls can usually rattle off lists: Sarah Dessen, Twilight, Hunger Games, Gossip Girl, Maggie Stiefvater, Libba Bray, and so on. The few boys, when I put them on the spot, usually say they didn't read much, then go on to mention James Patterson, Stephen King, maybe Neil Gaiman. Once, I had a boy student who was really into Neal Shusterman - possibly the only boy to name a young adult writer as someone whose books he read as, you know, a young adult.

Despite my general avoidance of Real-World studies and surveys and things that look like social science, I would be extremely interested in surveying a whole lot of teenage boys to see what books they read when they read voluntarily, or get to pick their material. I suspect it would be a whole lot of James Patterson-type stuff.

In class once, talking about something related to adolescence, I mentioned teen magazines - 17, YM (if that even still exists), Teen Cosmo, Teen People - then realized these were all girls' magazines. Then further realized I couldn't think of any teen magazines that weren't for girls. Once again, I put the few boys in my class on the spot and asked about magazine-reading (I supplied them with Maxim and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition just to get that awkwardness out of the way; some day I need to write and think deeply about how incredibly uncomfortable Kids These Days seem to be even acknowledging sex and erotics). The boys said: yeah, things like that, Rolling Stone, snowboarding or dirtbiking magazines, or other sport-specific ones. Those are adult publications - not in the brown-wrapper kept behind the counter sense, but just in that they are not produced with a teenage audience in mind.

so how come girls get to (or are forced to) have this distinct experience of teenager-ness, complete with rituals (prom, homecoming), periodicals, literature, movies, music, and so on?
OR/AND
why do we expect 14-year-old boys to be reading the same material as 34-year-old men? Is one group being "forced" to grow up too quickly? Or is one group being expected to act like teenagers their entire adult lives? Some combination of the two?


I'm concerned about the alienation of boys from YA fiction, in particular. There are some great YA books for and about boys, and plenty of the male students I teach end up really liking a lot of the "girl" books, too (Speak, for instance, always resonates with boys; they are very often the first to initiate class discussion and talk in very serious ways about how the book felt real and relatable). But the YA section as a whole looks extremely girly, and that turns boys off.
Women are attending college in markedly greater names than men now, and while I am not worried about men being oppressed and made into sad minorities, I do think that any kind of substantial gender imbalance - in schooling or in most other places - is not likely to turn out well in the end on a society-wide level. I can't help thinking that there is, or might be, or could be, a connection between the ways boys seem to be left out of this tween/teenage space of cultural production/consumption, and declining rates of college attendance. I could be totally wrong, and that's fine, but I do, for now, have the feeling that something is slightly askew here. Can't quite figure out precisely what it is, or how to correct it - is it a problem of how we're targeting girls? or a problem of how we're failing to target boys? is a creepy normative set of boy-oriented teen crap what I really want to see? (but then, how is that different from Maxim?)

I'm exceedingly interested in this, and I think it's important. I'm near the end of the list of the last people who would say that men in this country are sad, oppressed victims, but I do think that boys are being left out of an important cultural space. And that space also seems to be dedicated almost entirely to building and reinforcing traditional ideas about girl-ness and femininity in a way that is very hard for me to see as feminist or empowering or anything progressive and positive. This is a problem, and I think it's a big one - and it's one we need to be thinking about closely and carefully.

cuteness studies

I am teaching assistant for a lecture course this semester, and today's lecture dealt largely with questions of cuteness. I am not an expert in cuteness studies, which, if it is not yet a thing, will probably be one soon; I realized today, in thinking about it, that despite being intensely interested in most things child-related, I don't spend much time seriously thinking about children's stuff and cuteness. My cuteness-related contemplations are primarily reserved for baby pandas, and kittens, and miniature horses, and miniatures in general.

At the start of lecture, the professor put up a few cute-related questions on her powerpoint. This set caught my attention, and is now buzzing in my brain:

"Why might cuteness have been so attractive to people living in early 20^th century America or Europe? Why are we invested in children’s cuteness as a culture?"

I've been thinking about nostalgia a lot, and also about reception theory, and so this pair of questions set off all kinds of bells and whistles and whirling lights.

First of all: Cuteness is a thing that happens in the audience. There has to be someone looking (or listening, or reading) for a thing to be cute, because cute is in the eye of the beholder. Yes, there are all kinds of studies trying to science-ize why I enjoy looking at baby pandas, but - as with many psychology studies - I am skeptical. Cuteness is a construct that happens outside of the thing or creature "being" cute.

Which brings me to the second point, which was actually raised (sort of) by a student in the fall: cuteness HAS TO BE unintended. The second a child (or anyone) starts trying to be cute, trying to perform cuteness, it ceases to be cute. I think this is one of the reasons people find *Toddlers & Tiaras* so unsettling - it's an endless stream of very determined, conscious efforts to be cute.

Because...cuteness is "natural." It isn't, almost definitionally cannot be, something you do on purpose. It's un-self-conscious. It's "authentic." Perhaps most importantly, it's not manipulative. Cuteness, and the cute, can be manipulated, for sure - this is how advertising works - but it cannot originate in a place of intention. It has to be natural and authentic and unprompted, unscripted. Cute stops as soon as a script or intention can be detected.

Cuteness is non-functional, non-utilitarian. Those same kinds of studies which I regard skeptically occasionally suggest that we find babyness (big head, big eyes, roundness) cute so we don't just throw our offspring into a river when it starts shrieking, but even for me this seems hopelessly cynical. Biological imperative for survival keeps humans, like most animals, from eating their young (so to speak); I don't think panda mothers hang on to their absurdly small panda cubs because the mothers are ga-ga for big round eyes.

But because cuteness comes from a place of no intent, it is never selfish, always selfless, always a kind of gift or benevolence. The only thing cuteness does, in a functional way, is make the viewer feel good. Good can mean amused, or content, or pleased, or amusedly perplexed, or surprised, or satisfied - but it's not a productive response. Cuteness is not productive. It doesn't make or do anything until it's manipulated by a third party (and then it can do almost anything).

So in the 20th and 21st centuries, when we're as industrialized and mechanized and computerized as we've ever been, when humans feel increasingly isolated or alienated from themselves and other humans, when everyone with the wealth privilege to experience it is feeling the many pressures of modernity, a thing that is not manufacture, non mechanized, non technological has tremendous appeal. There's a lot of buzz about "the search for authenticity," blah blah, but that drive to locate something real in a world that feels chock-full of artifice is very strong. The fact that authenticity is as much a construct as anything else is beside the point (for the moment, anyway).

Cuteness isn't manufactured, and it doesn't ask anything of us except that we enjoy it. It's also got the weight of nostalgia, and all the unattainable longing that nostalgia carries with it. Since cuteness is unconscious of itself, we can never BE cute, or be the cute. We can, perhaps, recognize our past cuteness - look at a photo of yourself from when you were three or four or six, or listen to a parent or someone recount a charming story of something you said or did when you were a child; it's eminently possible to see cuteness there. But in the moment of the Cute-ing, the Cute cannot recognize itself as cute. And because it can't be intentional, we can't plan to be cute in the future (though we may be). So our own cuteness is always, forever, constantly retrospective; it is always something we cannot ever have or be. Cuteness, in a weird way, is always vicarious. Cuteness is a reaction, a response. In our nostalgia-saturated culture (see Svetlana Boym for some brilliant work on nostalgia), cuteness is another mode for our nostalgia to work in, or on; that intense, desperate longing for the thing which can never be again, maybe never wasto begin with, is at the core of nostalgia; it is identical to the way in which we are positioned in relationship to our own cuteness. We can never have it (again), we can never intentionally do it, we can only mourn its loss and furiously desire to have it. It has to be experienced vicariously, so we seek it out, and when we find it, we fawn over it.

I am not sure that I would argue - not yet, anyway - that cuteness is harmful to children or adults. I just don't know. I don't think cuteness has to be, or can only be, exploitative - it's how that cuteness is deployed and maneuvered that becomes the problem, but that, as I suggest, doesn't reside in the thing of cuteness itself. Still, it's an interesting and probably vexed (if not more disturbed) set of relationships and conditions that circulate around cuteness and The Cute and the viewer of that cuteness.

PSA: Lost Toys, found

I like toys. I like material culture. This year, because of my teaching assignment, I've been spending extra time thinking about material culture and childhood, and children, which most of the time seems to mean toys.

There's an artist, Jennifer Maher, in upstate New York who does gorgeous portraits of toys and dolls; tonight I was poking around her site and came across links to some Lost Toy Finding Services [which sounds like a charming mystery novel for younger readers, probably with an all-toy cast].

Because I've spent so much time thinking about how absolutely essential toys are to us when we are small (and often not-to-small; most of my students report bringing at least one stuffed animal with them to college), the search service struck me as particularly worth noting and linking to. They're a no-cost service - it's really just a hosting site, I think, with boards set up on Pinterest for easy access. basically: if you can identify or find a toy, you post that info, and hopefully the searcher can make the connection. I wasn't really struck by this, though, until I went to the pinboards - Disaster and High Priority.

You know you can never really replace a lost Toyfriend, but finding its twin can make a huge difference. Think about how that must be, to lose your toy(s) in fire, tornado, storm, hurricane, earthquake. Finding other random toy replacements is probably easy - I don't doubt a lot of donations are of new stuffies. But - when you've lost your best teddybear, you maybe don't want a stuffed dog as a replacement. You want THAT. BEAR.  There are also a good number of sick, or very particular, or developmentally-disabled folks who need a really specific toy - it has to be THAT. EXACT. ONE. or it isn't good enough.

So this service is actually filling a bigger need than the nostalgia/whimsy market, I think.
At home, we recently went through some of the bags of my sister's and my old stuffed animals and dolls; sorting through which to keep (preserve, or - to be pretentious - curate) and which to toss or donate. I wish I'd know about this Lost Toy search before, when we did that; I'd bet at least one or two of the Missing were amongst those my sister and I discarded.

Plush Memories finding service: go, overlook the excessive use of multicolor comic sans, use the pinboards, and keep an eye out for any of the Missing.