https://yalereview.org/article/chris-ware-richard-scarry
"As a boy, I knew I was supposed to like cars and trucks and things that go.
But as an unathletic and decidedly unboyish kid, I only got close to liking one
car—my mom’s blue Volkswagen Ghia, which she used to ferry me to and from
school (and, when she needed some time to herself, to her parents’—my
grandparents’—house for an overnight visit). In fact, I didn’t just like that
car, I loved it, so much so that the day it was towed away I secretly chipped a
piece of the sky-colored paint from the chassis and tearfully hid it in a
little box. I never had the chance to develop such a special relationship with
a truck or a bus or an airplane or anything else with a motor or wheels—in
fact, such things scared me, and to this day I have never changed a tire.
In my grandparents’ second-floor guest room, formerly my mother’s childhood
room, one bookcase had a row of children’s books slumped to the side, offering
a chronological core sample of my grandmother’s attempts to busy not only her
own kids, but all the grandkids who’d stayed there before me. There were the
original
Oz books, a copy of
Ferdinand the Bull, Monro Leaf’s inexplicably
compelling yet mildly fascistic
Manners Can Be Fun, some 1950s and 1960s
Little Golden Books purchased at the Hinky Dinky supermarket down the street,
and, among many others I’ve now long forgotten, the big blue, green, and red
shiny square of Richard Scarry’s
Best Word Book Ever. The largish (even just
plain large if you were smallish when holding it) book offered a visual index
of the everyday puzzle pieces of life in humble, colored-in line drawings. Each
page was a fresh, funny composition of some new angle on the world, making the
book a sort of quotidian picture-map containing everything imaginable and
unimaginable a kid might be curious about: where and how people lived, slept,
ate, played, and worked.
The thing is, “people” weren’t anywhere to be seen in
Best Word Book Ever.
Instead, the whole world was populated by animals: rabbits, bears, pigs, cats,
foxes, dogs, raccoons, lions, mice, and more. Somehow, though, that made the
book’s view of life feel more real and more welcoming. A dollhouse-like cutaway
view of a rabbit family in their house getting ready for their day didn’t seem
to just picture the things themselves—they were the things themselves, exuding
a grounded warmth that said, “Yes, everywhere we live in houses and cook
together and get dressed, just like you.”"
Via
Fix the News:
https://fixthenews.com/277-second-copernican-revolution/
Share and enjoy,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
