_______________ WHY I MISS THOSE LOATHSOME "BARNEY" KIDS BY CAROL SNOW (02/10/98)
	Thank you, Carol Snow, for your article on the "Barney" kids. As the father of an 18-month-old who knew how to sing, "I love you, you love me," before he could say, "da-da," it hit home. Like you, we are not bothered by Barney himself -- he's just a big purple moron. Yet while we try to tell ourselves the show is no worse than the "Mickey Mouse Club" or "Captain Kangaroo," we can't help thinking there's something inherently sick about a cult of children who have mass hallucinations about a purple dinosaur and rely on his constant company for fulfillment. Don't they ever have homework? Must they follow a leader? Shouldn't they all be seeing shrinks? So yeah, it's the kids. My wife and I thought we were the only ones who sat around and wondered if Michael (they don't even use their real names!) was destined to become an Aryan skinhead or fodder for the North American Man/Boy Love Association, who Luci thought she was kidding with those bump-and-grind moves and why Sean was allowed on the show at all when he was obviously so stupid (maybe his dad's the producer).We too wanted to tell Kathy to stop pouting and get a life and advise Tina to lay off the burritos. We found ourselves suddenly bursting into "The noble Duke of York, he had 10,000 men," and suddenly stopping ourselves in horror. Yet we had a morbid fascination with the "Barney" kids. Like you, we wondered when they'd end up on a talk show as burned-out has-beens. But of course, the real reason we didn't mind turning to PBS every morning was because when Max woke up, the first thing he would say was "Bah." It didn't mean bottle, it meant you know who. As soon as the theme song came on, he'd run around giddily. He'd wag his finger in the air and hum along. He'd stand in front of the set and stare, transfixed, as his parents would roll their eyes and say, "Oh, no, not Baby Bop and her goddamn blankey again!" We quickly learned to videotape episodes so he'd have Barney on demand. Max already knows how the VCR works and has never forgiven us for those times when another tape happened to be in the machine. Then suddenly, a few weeks ago, it stopped. He didn't ask for "Bah." Instead, he started asking for "Booh." As in, book. Not coincidentally, we think, this occurred around the same time the new crop of kids came in. Did Max, like us, know that the new kids were bogus? Did he too share the joke? Whatever it is, we're not unhappy about this development. We still play his tapes for him, but his obsession is gone. Now, if my wife and I could only get those damn tunes out of our heads. -- Jeff Tamarkin Carol Snow is like every other parent who hates the "Barney" kids. Why do adults hate them, when their toddler-age children love them? The answer is simple: The "Barney" kids behave at the emotional level of toddlers. It's impossible to get 3 year olds to act on TV, so "Barney" has pre-teens who use their verbal and physical skills to portray characters at the emotional level of very small children. Toddlers find that the "Barney" kids are right on their level and respond enthusiastically. Adults and older children find the kids to be unbearably fakey -- and of course, they are, for the older audience. "Barney" -- unlike, say, "Sesame Street" -- makes no effort to appeal to older viewers. It doesn't have plot, or suspense, or slapstick, or verbal humor, or irony, or anything that would engage anyone over 3. It does have a familiar and unchanging set, simple songs, lots of repetition, bright colors, big smiles and strong and simply portrayed emotions on the toddler level. So, Carol, accept it. The "Barney" kids aren't talking to you, and they don't care if you don't like them. They're talking to your kid, who likes them just fine. -- J. Ruby
_______________ BITTER FAME BY JAY PARINI (02/06/98)
	Here's yet another quibble about Jay Parini's review of Ted Hughes' "The Birthday Letters." Parini writes, "But Janet Malcolm (in the New Yorker) and others attacked Stevenson mercilessly as a pawn of the Hughes camp." Actually Malcolm's piece is a sympathetic treatment of Anne Stevenson; Malcolm even writes, "As the reader knows, I, too, have taken a side -- that of the Hugheses and Anne Stevenson." While she does not paint the uncritically glowing portrait that both Parini and Kate Moses do, she points out that Hughes consistently allowed Plath's work and her journals to be published, even when he comes out looking quite bad. Her tribute to Hughes is one that any artist should be proud -- though perhaps painfully proud -- to receive: "Hughes has lived so long in the public imagination as Plath's enemy and censor that his actual role since her death has gone largely unnoticed (sometimes, it would seem, even by himself). But the more one examines Hughes' activities as Plath's literary executor, the more one is obliged to consider the possibility that he ... probably felt some ineluctable literary necessity for needlessly exposing himself to public scrutiny ... To this self, nothing is more important than literature, and no sacrifice in its service is too great. Hughes' plight as a man trying to serve two masters and knowing that it isn't ever going to come out right is, of course, the plight of every artist. His effort to disentangle his life from the Plath legend while tending its flame is a kind of grotesque allegory of the effort of every artist to salvage a piece of normal life for himself from the disaster of his calling." -- Ann Chih Lin SALON | Feb. 12, 1998

R E C E N T L Y+| THE LADY IS NOT A TRAMP BY JENN SHREVE

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