Memory: A Decent Reason to Blog, or...at least...re-read "Pipers at the Gates of Dawn"

Whyfore blog? Maybe because it's just another memory file. Which brings one more chance for me to tout Jonathan Cott's seminal "Pipers at the Gates of Dawn: The Wisdom of Children's Literature." Oh yeah. Love this book. (For movie love, click here. Later.) So, Iona and Peter Opie are sitting at the table, and J. Cott is transcribing:

Jonathan: In 'Lore and Language,' you have a section devoted to how children mishear things. Could you give me an example?

Peter:  Iona had on the other day.

Iona:  There are hundreds of examples, that's the trouble.

Peter:  I'm afraid we can't remember.

Iona:  We have no memories, we only have filing systems. Because the traffic is going through at such a rate, all we remember is from our own childhoods, and then only the ordinary things that any one lifetime has acquired in the way of memories. But everybody else's childhood is coming at us, so we can't remember all the things we hear.

Peter:  That's true, we just write them down. But I also have a thing even against memory as such. If you have a memory, you tend not to be very good at creating. Pope has a line on this, which I'll give you....I always keep it on me because I can't even remember what the quotations are that say that it's a disadvantage to have a good memory. If there were no writing, I'd be lost...

Like I said, love this book. 

"Pipers at the Gates of Dawn."

If Peter Opie is right about memory, I'm getting more creative every day. Goodie.

photo, above, from the doll museum in rothenburg

Bob Dylan and Jonathan Cott and Peter Sis and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Let's just start the Insight Hall of Fame, shall we? I'll nominate these masters. They're connected, too, in marvelous ways. Brilliants often are, aren't they? In ways you might least expect, which makes it all the more delightful to find out how...

To the left, a photo taken while wandering toward the Met earlier this summer. It was quiet and sweetly prosiac, that little part of the path in Central Park that meanders past this spot. It was elegiac yet beautiful. Just the thought of it, and the green and gray and black of the picture, puts me at peace...the same peace that was to be found by that lovely still bit of water on that lovely still day.

So, I ask...how remarkable is it that these four have crossed paths, sometimes often? And do I dare begin to try to map the territory? Perhaps...

Jonathan Cott and Bob Dylan and Peter Sis and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis...maybe, if I click my ruby slippers...Toto?  (And, somewhere, not far from here, John Lennon rightly joins them.)

on the sea of memory

By Jonathan Cott.  

I can't put this book down, and keep re-reading certain chapters.

I think this is a very, very important book. There is so much that is informative and illustrative and poetic about our memory and it's capabilities and...this was going to be a short post.  Here is where you can find out for yourself and get it.

{Quite sure there will be more on this later, here.}

Photo by Julia Cameron.

Jonathan Cott's "Pipers at the Gates of Dawn"

Love this quote from Iona and Peter Opie that Jonathan Cott has included in "Pipers at the Gates of Dawn"

"...It seems to us that something is lacking in our understanding of the child community, that we have forgotten Cowper's dictum that 'Great schools suit best the sturdy and the rough,' and that in our continual search for efficient units of educational administration we have overlooked that the most precious gift we can give the young is social space: the necessary space--or privacy--in which to become human beings."

The Marvelous Mr. Cott

If you were to only ever read one book about books that most people call "children's books," (disclaimer:  I believe that the best children's books stand amongst the world's greatest literature, in every sense of the word--and then some--and, to quote the back cover of the book I'm going to mention at some point in this paragraph after this too-long sentence, these best children's books "are not meant only for children but are significant sources of delight and wisdom for grown-ups as well").  Alrighty.   The book?  "Pipers at the Gates of Dawn," by the amazing Jonathan Cott.  

If I were to write a dissertation, it would somehow have this book holding the center (is that how you say it? I will have to ask the brilliant Dr. Bev Hock how to say this, at a later date).  Mr. Cott has conversed and/or presented the work-behind-the-work of Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, William Stieg, Astrid Lindgren, Chinua Achebe, P. L. Travers, and the ICONIC Opies.  All in 301 pages.  Amahhhhzing, as Seth Rudetsky is wont to say.

I purchased the book in the summer of 1989, at Chanticleer, in Los Gatos. It was a few short weeks before a substantial earthquake shook the little bookstore in Los Gatos loose from it's foundations...and my life changed, with this book and that little shaken store and the riding that rootin' tootin' earthquake out in a fourth-grade catechism class I was teaching in Saratoga.  {But that is for later, that story...I suppose...and for now, I simply must say unto you that Jonathan Cott's masterful interpretation of 'the Wisdom of Children's Literature' is simply not to be missed, if you care about these things.}

And, while you are at it, check out "The Roses Race Around Her Name:  Poems from Fathers to Daughters"...but not from the West Springfield High School library (I still have their copy, unfortunately).  

It was years...sometime well into the '90s, surely...before I realized that Mr. Cott was responsible for two of the most seminal books in my life: one purchased at the soon-to-be-epicenter of an earthquake, another softly swiped in 1976 from my high school library, because I could simply not bear to part with it. 

Cheers to the marvelous Mr. Cott: long may he write.