Clean Filth

Bridge to Terabithia wasn't one of my huge childhood favorites - I think I must have been born too much city-mouse to connect characters who purport to be real country people (as opposed to idealized country people from another century). Opening a book with a phrase like, "hot as popping grease" is not the way to this Bibliophile's heart. So I have no concrete plans one way or the other to see the lately released film. But it looks like all the copies of the book (including the audio versions) are checked out of the Suburban Selfimportantville Regional Library System, which I take to be a good thing.

I recently spoke to my mother, who works as the head children's librarian at the Rustingham Public Library. Apparently, a woman came into their children's room in dismay over Bridge to Terabithia - the book - which, recall, was published thirty years ago. "I can't believe a book like that won an award! I mean, someone dies in it!"

Alright...

So no awards for Dickens. Steinbeck. Hemingway. Conrad. Dumas. Hugo. Ibsen. Shakespeare, for heaven's sake.

Christianity Today published an interview with Katherine Paterson last month for the movie release, which included the following exchange:

CT: There's a trend lately to provide books and films for Christian
audiences that are "safe for the whole family." Perhaps your books have been
challenged because they're not necessarily "safe" for children.

KP: Well, don't give them the Bible, because it's certainly
not a safe book. Safety and faith are different things. If you want everything
to be safe, then you can do without imagination. If you're so afraid of your
imagination that you stifle it, how are you going to know God? How can you
imagine heaven?

Indeed.

There's always been a constant stream of meaningless drivel of all descriptions from the media, but traffic has increased lately in the subgenre I've come to think of as Clean Filth. Clean Filth comprises all those entertainments created with no mind to anything but inoffensiveness - ignoring reality, taste, culture, and depth alike. Fun for the whole family. Wholesome. Advocated by those religious media barons who make their fortunes capitalizing on other people's (preferably uninformed) moral indignation.

Not that there isn't plenty to outrage and grieve in the moral baseness of so much of the media today. I do believe that some day world society will have no choice but to acknowledge that such things matter. But other things matter too. In having an eye only to morality - and a limited understanding of morality, at that - leaves portals for so many more forms of damage. There's never a thought to the intellectual danger presented by culture devoid of ideas or meaning, "clean" or otherwise.

Observing Snow

For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms and did my duty faithfully.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

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The northeast's tardy winter is coming fully into its own today, with the first "real" snowstorm of the season. February 14, eh? This is when the locals are generally looking for winter to start winding down. The skiers resigned themselves to a disappointing season months ago, and everyone else is enjoying the reprieve from heavy-duty shoveling for the year. So far, at least. And even now, though conditions are treacherous, we won't be getting the foot-of-snow-topped-off-by-ice-storm that was forecast.

I didn't grow up around all that much snow. My first experience living in real winter began my freshman year at East Hill University* in Oddtown*, New York. Plenty of snow there, as well as a mountainous one-mile trek between dorms and classes. (You know those stories about walking to school uphill both ways in the snow? Ahem.) Fortunately, I discovered the winter to be far more tolerable than summer ever had been in all those tropical and sub-tropical places where I'd spent my childhood, so for now, I'm stuck on the north country. Well, the semi-north, at least. Those places in the upper midwest where you can't go outside with any skin exposed or turn off your car's engine for months at a time don't really appeal. And to think there's a whole country north of there...

My parents weren't snow-initiated either, until they moved to Rustingham*, New York, while I was in college. Rustingham enjoys copious amounts of lake-effect snow, a largely misunderstood phenomenon which is to the lakeshore regions of the US what rain is to Seattle. Rustingham, however, doesn't get quite as much snow as, say, Buffalo (94 inches per year, average), Rochester, (93 inches, all of which fell last week), or Syracuse (116 inches). Oddtown averages around 70 inches per year, and Selfimportantville, being a seaport, runs only around 40 inches, though out here in the inland suburbs we see rather more.

Of course, some places are totally different. According to the National Snow and Ice Data Center:

The greatest snowfall officially reported at the Phoenix, Arizona National
Weather Service Office was one inch. That occurred twice. The first time was January 20, 1933. It happened again four years later on the same date.

Perhaps next year I'll have to write on international snow.

Oh, and by the way, Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. Hope you can actually dig out in time to make your dinner reservations.
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*Place names changed protect my obsession of superficial anonymity, as usual.