I'm about the same age as Douglas and Mark . Back in the day...I was allowed to go outside by myself without supervision. I was allowed to ride the subways into Manhattan from the Bronx at age 12--and it still does not strike me, even now, as an act of insanity unless I got off the downtown train in a well- demarcated DMZ like the South Bronx, which was full of Them. I don't know how I knew it was full of Them; I suppose someone warned me but I don't remember who that might have been.
They let me go outside by myself, at age 10, the day my father died. Outside, over there. Outside, by myself. And I almost killed another child. He looked at me, he spoke to me what I believe now were words of sympathy, but it didn't matter what he said, I tried to kill him. That is not figuative. I felt as though someone had stuffed my innards in a Cuisinart--all the substance was churned together. Today I wonder "What the hell was my family thinking when they let me go out ?"
I learned that my escape was via reading and later writing, the latter being far more a pose (as it remains today) than a practice. The point was I didn't have to interact with you . I was a Paul Simon character ("I am a rock") long before anyone gave a damn about Paul Simon. Grateful? Books probably kept me out of juvenile incarceration and mental institutions where I most likely belonged at that age. I sat in the bathroom for hours on end reading out of an old 19th century collection of children's stories someone had given me. I'd never heard of John Ruskin until then, but I read "King of the Golden River" when I was about 11. It was scary and dark and I adored it. What kind of children grew up in Victorian England, anyway? I know very little about children's lit nowadays but I loved and passed on to my own children a love of the dark imagination in writer/illustrators, chief among them Maurice Sendak.
I don't know where parents today are. I know where I was. Working, or trying. My former wife made a conscious choice, to stay home with our kids while they were young. As politically incorrect as this is, I think my kids would have grown up as crazy as me if it hadn't been for my wife's presence. Sadly, I don't know about two-job families. For years, even before the current calamity, two jobs were a form of insurance even if someone lost his or her job. Now? Who can tell?
Even when my kids were young, the absentee parental antiphon was "Not MY child!" The firestarter, the animal torturer, the school bully. "Not MY child!" Yes, tell me you child's name in under 3 seconds. Right now I'm observing with no glee whatsoever the charges and countercharges over that poor girl in Massachusetts who hanged herself because of school bullying. Another use for Facebook and MySpace. It will not stop because some school officials really don't like children very much, and the parents are too self-absorbed to notice until someone points the finger of blame at them.
Enough. I am saving part of this for the memoir. I'm serious. It's called "Barefoot in The Nettle Garden" and one chapter is already done. And yes, I have been inhaling Mary Karr's memoirs. We Faith types have to stick together.
Ken
----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark Weiss" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Thursday, April 1, 2010 1:11:54 PM GMT -05:00 US/Canada Eastern
Subject: Re: was: oxford prof of poetry? now state of the world
When in point of fact the cities in North America are now safer than
they ever were, except in poor neighborhoods, where the kids still
play in the streets. Certainly that quiet San Diego street of single
family houses in a quiet neighborhood of same presented few dangers
beyond the threat of earthquakes. Part of the disjunct, I assume, is
the constant barrage of the nightly news. But I'm guessing that it's
also because in the middle class now both parents work, rendering the
street a mysterious place to them.
It's sad to see so old a culture die. I don't know any better than
anyone else what impact that will have on future lives.
Best,
Mark
At 01:00 PM 4/1/2010, you wrote:
>People will make the argument today that it's so much more dangerous &
>therefore they cant allow their kids to play alone out there in the
>possible fields nearby, or an empty lot, or just on the street (see
>Lethem's The Fortress of Solitude, eg), but is it so? I remember, as
>you do Mark, the fun & the dangers, even for a kid with glasses who
>read too much like me. But we also didnt have all those temptations
>away from that world outside, where we could invest our imaginations,
>that surround the kids today.
>
>As to the dismantling of the social safety net, well, the
>multinational corporations, which apparently are simply ordinary
>'citizens' like you & me, have their own take on that. They the people?
>
>Doug
>On 31-Mar-10, at 4:51 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:
>
>>There was an article in the NY Times recently about the death of
>>child culture, at least among the middle class. When I was a kid we
>>played outside without adult supervision. Now parents make playdates
>>for their kids and send them to afterschool play groups, and endless
>>hours of solitary time is fed to the computer. It wasn't until I'd
>>been in the house I rented in San Diego for seven years, when I was
>>invited to a neighbor's barbecue, that I realized that children
>>actually lived on the block.
>
>Douglas Barbour
>[log in to unmask]
>
>http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
>Latest books:
>Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>Wednesdays'
>http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
> The secret
>
>which got lost neither hides
>nor reveals itself, it shows forth
>
>tokens.
>
> Charles Olson
Announcing The Whole Island: Six Decades of Cuban Poetry (University
of California Press).
http://go.ucpress.edu/WholeIsland
"Not since the 1982 publication of Paul Auster's Random House Book of
Twentieth Century French Poetry has a bilingual anthology so
effectively broadened the sense of poetic terrain outside the United
States and also created a superb collection of foreign poems in
English. There is nothing else like it." John Palattella in The
Nation
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