Animal Farm

My sister and I used to have a book called, Everything I Need to Know About Life, I Learned from my Cat.  Everything I need to know about Marxism, I learned from Animal Farm.  Life is full of little wee teachers, and the list could go on and on (Everything I Need to Know About Having an Inferiority Complex, I Learned from Summer Camp.  Everything I Need to Know About Eating, I Learned from Smokin’ Weed).  I once had a friend with a neurologist father and prodigious older sister, and she knew a lot early on, although it’s doubtful she grasped the significance of her absorbed knowledge.  When we were reading Orwell’s famous political commentary/satire in grade nine or so, she was the one who turned to me and said, in wise voice, “Snowball is supposed to be Trotsky.”  I think she might have also said, “Trotsky was cool.  Poor Trotsky.”

For several years after, I knew no more about the Russian Revolution than what she had told me about barnyard antics.  I still thought Rasputin was an evil sorcerer come back from the undead to nab Anastasia.  In reality, Rasputin was more like…well…let’s say…the unmentioned but most certainly over-involved pushy hairdresser of the wife of Mr. Jones, the farmer who exits at the beginning of Animal Farm.  You dig?  Forget that Rah-Rah-Rasputin nonsense – whispers and lies, whispers and lies.

Animal Farm is a book about a bunch of farm animals (surprise!) who take over the homestead.  The socialist leaders Lenin, Stalin and Cool Trotsky are represented by pigs named, respectively, Old Major, Napoleon, and Snowball.  A kindly old draft horse is the hardworking but dimwitted proletariat.  The mean ol’ farmer of neighbouring land is Hitler and the Nazis.  A gang of puppies are Stalin/Napoleon’s secret police.  As anyone who’s read 1984 could tell you, Orwell was highly critical of contemporary socialism and believed it to be basically flypaper for corruption.  Just like in real life, things down on the A.F. get messy.  Spoiler: Snowball kicks the bucket – one might even say he buys the farm (HAHAHA).  But you know the score – or do you?  Canadian History teachers masturbate to the idea of having a political history half as scandalous as Russia’s.  For example, I heard that one reason Stalin was ultimately able to oust Trotsky was that J.S. lied to L.T. about the date of Lenin’s funeral, telling him it was one day later than it actually was.  As a result, HAWTsky was absent at the proceedings, smearing his good commie name in the mud of apparent disrespect.  Total bummer, L.T.!

That, and Rasputin was never undead.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Not long ago, I was talking at my dear friend Ted about what is essentially the idea behind this blog – that is, the seeming ridiculousness of feeling one is entitled to critique works commonly acknowledged as “classics.”

“Like saying, ‘Oh, Of Mice and Men isn’t very good,’ for example.”

“Or criticising, like, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” added Ted.

I stared at him blankly.  “What is that?”

Ted gave me the eye of disbelief.  “Uh…it’s a really famous book…”

I am a university student and Ted did not finish high school.  Further proof that this means just about nothing at all when it gets right down to it.  So I hadn’t heard of Betty Smith’s “coming-of-age classic,” despite the fact that between the ages of ten and fourteen about 75% of the books I read could be described as YA coming-of-age novels.  Despite the argument that just about every book ever written about people under the age of thirty could be said to contain sprinklings of C.O.A., I am referring to the great preteen-targeted works of our time (Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging, or, uh, anything by Judy Blume).

My little sister is fifteen and reads exclusively Teen Vogue, Seventeen, and books about boys and shopping.  Her English teacher once asked her, “Sophie, when you go to the library, do you only look for books under the ‘bimbo’ section?”  Unfortunately for her, she has an older sister who doesn’t consider herself above open condescension.  As a result, I’ve totally forfeited the best part of being an older sibling - the ability to steer her in what I consider to be “the right direction.”  One word out of my mouth concerning her media intake triggers a prompt, “Shut up, Maddy!”  It becomes obvious that I have damaged this part of our relationship almost beyond repair.  It requires a superhuman measure of delicacy to convincingly explain to her that it’s not her fondness for bimbo media that concerns me, because I read the same things (albeit less openly).  It’s more that I don’t want her obvious intelligence to be drained, leaving her wading forever in the soulless pop culture mire.

Coming-of-age is a very inclusive label.  A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is about a saccharine preteen girl growing up in pre-hip Williamsburg at the turn of the century, back when it was a slummy neighbourhood inhabited by first and second generation white immigrants surviving on a diet of reconstituted stale bread, raw potatoes, and pork tongue.  Are You There, God?  It’s Me, Margaret is about a neurotic preteen girl growing up in the suburbs during the 1970s who, with her friends, chants “I must, I must, I must increase my bust” in hopes of, well, you know.  The friend who lent me her copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn says she loved it when she was a tween, and I might have liked it, too, but, ultimately, the C.O.A. novels that kept me coming back were closer to Gossip Girl – where, unlike in the former, any mention of consumption has nothing to do with the disease.

Don’t you hate when you read a magazine interview with some celebrity, and the interviewer asks the question, “What’s your guilty pleasure?” and the interviewee responds with something like, “chocolate ice cream?”  I have always resented the question because I feel it implies an expected puritanism, denial of pleasure, the idea that women should fear weight gain more than they should a world without ice cream (horrors!), etcetera.  However, I realise now that guilty pleasures have I, and theirs names are those old issues of NYLON I keep stashed for breakfast table reading.  But I haven’t bought a new issue in months.  I swear.  Because everyone knows that magazine’s gone down the tubes.  And I, for one, am a serious woman.