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- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E++T A L K Does a minivan signify the end of hipness? Discuss cars and image in the Mothers area of - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y The bento chronicles Great expectations That one ridiculous palm Second Thoughts: Earning credit in the straight world Time for One Thing: Marked-down memories BROWSE THE WILD THINGS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - Mamafesto - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
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----------------------[ W I L D T H I N G S ]  BY POLLY SHULMAN | Just as babies love to stare at other babies, books are fascinated bybooks -- children's books especially. After all, they have an educationalduty to foster a love of learning. The younger the audience, the truerthis is: Before books can open a child's mind to new experiences, theyhave to help her learn to negotiate their own pages. They have to teachthe language if they want to speak volumes. Perhaps that's why B is sooften for Book. ABCs usher children into the prestigious world of the written word.Remember your first one? Remember tracing the letters with your finger,as if its meaning would somehow flow in through your hands? Perhaps youwere an Eric Carle child, like me -- his colors seemed so vivid I thoughtI could feel them with my eyes closed. Like the old favorites, therecent crop of ABCs introduces aspiring readers to the uses of thosefunny squiggles adults set such store by, then elaborates on theirsubtleties. Because the alphabet book is a mature genre by now, most new ones usetricks to distinguish themselves. Kim Golding's "Alphababies," fortoddlers, draws in readers with photos of children their own age.Golding poses the tots in computer-generated backgrounds filled withletters and the objects they stand for -- "A is an apple, so shiny andred," and so on. The flat, shadowless landscapes contrast oddly with thephotographs; philosophical infants may find themselves inspired toponder the differences between representation and reality. "The Letters Are Lost!" an ABC for children a couple of years older -- oldenough to talk, if not to read -- adds a narrative to the traditionalalphabet text of A is for this, B is for that. It follows a box ofalphabet blocks through a diaspora, discovering H, for example, hidingunder a hat, and E in a carton of eggs. As in many ABCs, each pageshowcases several items whose names begin with the appropriate letter. Bshares a bathtub with a boat; the dog chewing on D has already made ahash of a rubber duck. Lisa Campbell Ernst, the author and illustrator,fills her pages with toys, putting the letters in a comfortinglyfamiliar context. The contents of a Noah's Ark supply characters in justthe right scale and give her a plausible reason to use zebra for Z. "Miss Spider's ABC," the latest in David Kirk's lush series of picturebooks about an elegant arachnid, also uses narrative to add structuralinterest. For each letter Kirk finds an insect, flower or other gardendweller, which he draws in deep, bright colors, supplying friendly facesand plenty of legs. Ants await, butterflies blow balloons, hummingbirdshide inside irises and so on, until Miss Spider arrives at last."Surprise!" everybody shouts. Then they all eat green cake. Kirk'spalette is sure to linger in his readers' dreams for decades. Illustrator Ian Penney sets his very British "ABC" in "houses, gardens,estates and other properties that he has visited throughout England,Ireland and Wales, specifically those that have been preserved by theNational Trust." It's a charming, if slightly twee, tour. B is forbook, naturally. Other unidentified B-words abound on the page. A boyin the background lies in a haycart reading the aforementioned book,while a bull looks over a fence. Few American children, unfortunately,are likely to associate the thatched building nearby with thehigh-roofed, red-painted barns familiar from picture books on this sideof the Atlantic. Similarly obscure, though delightful, are A's ruinedabbey, D's dairy and the undertaker directing two undergardeners movingan urn while, in an underground passage underneath, an underfootmancarries a pudding, the name of which I suspect must begin with U. You don't find many urns in other ABC books; alphabetarians tend to fall into clichés -- all those cats and castles. By restricting his book to insects, Kirk's "Miss Spider" avoids many of these -- his Q is for queen bee, which makes moresense than the quantities of queens and quilts found elsewhere. A quickglance at the Scrabble letters explains why so many alphabet books spenda page apiece on xylophone or X-ray, zebra or zoo. J is a rare letter aswell, worth eight points, which justifies the Jack-in-the-box jumping out ofboth Penney's and Ernst's pages. But why such an abundance of apples?Can't the authors think of another A word? Why such innumerable islandsand such devotion to ducks? Children who know their letters well enough to ponder such mysteries areready for Richard Wilbur's ingenious anti-ABC, "The DisappearingAlphabet." If the letters were to vanish, worries Wilbur, so would wordsand the world they represent. He moves through the alphabet, effacingeach letter and noting the carnage. "If [B] were absent, say, from BATand BALL," he observes, "there'd be no big or little leagues AT ALL."Perhaps Wilbur was inspired by James Thurber's "The Wonderful O," inwhich the round vowel vanishes and chaos ensues (Ophelia Oliver, forexample, finds her O-less name a horrible embarrassment). Or perhaps heread Georges Perec's quixotic French novel "La disparition," whichentirely avoids the letter E (as does the English translation, "AVoid," by Gilbert Adair, who also wrote a sequel to "Alice inWonderland"). Wilbur, two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner and sometime poet laureate, knowshow to make verses scan, which is more than can be said for mostchildren's poets. (Why, why, why? What's wrong with all the editors?)He's also a dab hand at a rhyme, pairing T with "shredded whea" andpointing out that without the letter W, "The WEREWOLF would no longertrouble you." The conceit of knocking out letters anywhere in a word frees Wilbur fromthe thrall of initial consonants. No zebra for him; he uses BUZZING andSNOOZE. Still, he finds a duck as irresistible as any ABC author: Likethe dodo, with which it shares his D page, "any self-respecting DUCK/Would rather be extinct than be an UCK." "The Disappearing Alphabet" is illustrated by David Diaz, who won theCaldecott Medal and creates typefaces -- who better to illustrate an ABCthan a type designer? Halfway between silhouettes and stencils, hispictures build objects out of empty space, cleverly echoing the vanishedletters. To supplement the ABCs, I recommend a double set of magnetic letters.Limiting the vowels to two apiece has a magic effect, like a kooky muse.For a couple of years, I kept two magnetic alphabets on the fridge forthe household and visitors to play with. Some lines came out soundinglike surrealist poems: "Sing heart -- hide my baby sun from Pluto"; "Apoor, thin guy busted all my princes"; "I fled huge, luckytransformations. Why?" Others were more down-to-earth: "Get your familyfried black donuts," suggested my cousin Peggy. "Go for my quilt,quacked Fred Blank," wrote my dad. Quilts, ducks -- maybe he should bewriting alphabet books.
Alphababies The Letters Are Lost! Miss Spider's ABC Ian Penney's ABC The Disappearing Alphabet |
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