!Doing and being in books --- agk's diary 31 March 2023 @ 01:39 UTC --- written on GPD Win 1 while daughter's asleep and Evy at work --- In my town public library, they must discard older books. They don't have many of my favorites. I want children who explore, adventure, discover, imagine, learn, misunderstand, and live actively in books. King Shabazz & Tony Polito go to find spring in Lucille Clifton's (1992) The Boy Who Didn't Believe in Spring. They go too far, get busted. Peter & Archie outwit big boys, sneak found motorcycle goggles home from the hideout in Ezra Jack Keats' (1969) Goggles! The kids in Donald Crews' (1992) Shortcut go a dangerous way & easily could've got killed. They never go that way again, never tell. In Ruth Krauss's (1954) A Very Special House a kid narrates the wild and amazing house he or she's free to imagine. A kid imagines mama's dangerous job juxtaposed with her safe home in George Ella Lyon's (1994) Mama is a Miner. I'm tender for the few library books still about kids' doings. Eloise Greenfield (1978) evoked the pure experience of a little girl's ordinary joys in Honey, I Love. The 2016 illustrated book's even better. Vallerie Bolling's (2022) Together We Ride girl learns to bicycle with her dad's support. The simplicity, stability, and danger of oldtime childhood's soothing in Cynthia Rylant's (1982) When I Was Young in the Mountains and Donald Crews' (1991) Bigmama's. I could read 'em forever. Somehow they're both closest to and furthest from the books I don't like about children being instead of doing. My library's book-children defy or revel in ideal identities---Latina, Vietnamese, dress-wearing, unicorn, frog---, creating themselves, individuals. At work in the mental hospital I see kids the books are for. Not individuals yet, irrationally inter- dependent, their actions & self-understanding are reactions to the moment's context. You can't understand what books do just from who they're for. Who are they by? Grownups producing digitally in volume cartoons, games, and books for a market shaped by other grownups who through edu- cation, geographic mobility, and income left kin- ship, collective experiences of time, & collectiv- ized work; idealized what they left as identity. Nobody's more southern than someone who left the south, working class than someone who grew up on wages but makes a salary, black than the only black person in an otherwise all-white anything. Some people produce identity from defense or repudiation of others. Identarians sacralize & idealize traces of lost social worlds, their experience of themselves. "Professionalized liberal protocols of self-impro- vement [dictate] other people, other experiences, only exist to the extent that they can expand our capacity for empathy and feeling."[^1] My kids reap anxiety: What am I? Am I bipolar? Am I OCD? Am I a gamer? Am I a drug baby? Am I on the spectrum? Am I gay? In sometimes tightening circles they're commanded to look inside, be true to their unformed self. To be without doing. Rilke in 1905 wrote identity's found through doing, active living ever more perilously entangled in the world: I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I will give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I've been circling for thousands of years and I still don't know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song? Dorothy Kunhardt's (1934) Now Open The Box was re- issued in 2013 by The New York Review of Children's books maybe because it's balm for the unsatisfiable need of our time. Peewee the circus dog, loved be- cause he's tiny, grows. He loses his job and place in the world. But he keeps growing til he's freak- ishly large and gets it all back. Peewee does nothing, unlike his friends the trapeze artists or the goat standing on a burning bed. He's a sideshow, loved only for what he is. The harsh reality is that, like the frog in the inferior book I Don't Want to Be A Frog, he lacks total control over what he is. His body changes unpermitted. He's anxious no one'll like him anymore. They only liked him because he was tiny. Never fear, Kunhardt reassures young readers. Even though what you are escapes your control, people'll find something new to like you for. Peewee gets his friends and job back because he grows freakishly large. He can't be whatever he wants to be, but he can be loved whatever he is. Marlowe's 17th century Faust wanted to know every- thing. Goethe's 19th c Faust wanted to do & experi- ence everything. 20th c Fausts by Thomas Mann (1947 Doctor Faustus), Mikhail Bulgakov (1967 Master & Margarita), and Istvan Szabo (1981 Mephisto) wanted success and prestige. 21st c Faust wouldn't sell his soul for freedom to know, experience, or be recognized. He'd want abso- lute freedom of identity. Me, I don't want absolute freedom. I want a good adventure; kids constrained by reality living actively in it. - - - Note: If your library doesn't have these books and you're in the United States, you can order them Inter-Library Loan. If so inclined & you have a computer that loads youtube, you can find someone reading any notable picturebook. [1]:Catherine Liu (2022), Virtue hoarders: the case against the professional managerial class. U of Minnesota Press, p.55.