22
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
any father who's a writer, as we say in Yiddish,
""C/l.
Uut right next
to
Ulysses
was a comic book called
COllall tile Barbariall
and he was reading
both. In college he took a course on
Ulysses
and he loved it, but I'm not
quite certain that he, or anyone in his generation, distinguishes on some
level between
Ulysses
and
COllall tile Barbariall.
I mean, they distinguish in
the sense that they know that
Ulysses
is "great literature" and
COllall tile
Barbariall
is a comic book but there are no levels. It seems to me that
what we had when we were younger was the idea that there were levels
of culture. I was totally ignorant in music; I don't think I ever had a
course. I didn't go to school between Illy eleventh and thirteenth years,
but I went from listening to Gershwin to listening to Ueethoven and
Bach. I knew that there were levels and that you went from
A
level to
13
level to
C
leveL I think that has really disappeared and that all sensation,
all ideas are equaL I think that also accounts in part for what we see as a
kind of breakdown of the idea that sensation has consequences, that if
you stick a knife in someone, it's not blood that Stephen Spielberg is
filming, but it's real blood and it's a real body on a real floor and there's
a real death. I think that has gotten lost somewhere along the line.
Joanna Rose:
I
want to take issue with those who say reading doesn't
make you virtuous. I think reading does Illake you virtuous and I think
virtuous people tend to read. My husband and I arc deeply involved with
central Harlem, with children who have no futurc except if they learn to
read. This is what we try
to
tell them all the tilllC, whcn you can read
you have fi'eedolll, you have an open future. I really think it does Illake
you virtuous.
Doris Lessing:
As
do I.
Igor Webb:
I have three children under the agc of six. My experience is
more complicated than the one you present. I have seen many of the
things you have noted, but I am very startled by children's television, not
in the sense that it zips by too quickly, but that what you see on
Nickelodeon, in my view, is actually terrific. Most of the shows are
inventive, witty, very subtly moraL In fact, I'm astonished that they're on.
I don't know who makes them, but I'm struck by the shows for kids up
to about age seven. Once you get beyond that you suddenly get a very
strange shift and something different goes on. Uefore that point I'm
struck by how deeply literary these visually inventive shows are. Some of
them are also fairly offensive, so it's not a single picture, but I think it's
far more complicated than the way you have presented it.
