“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.”
—Walt Disney, American cartoonist, born December 5, 1901
As well he might. Mickey was very good to Walt Disney.
Disney the corporation is perhaps the greatest example of what I call “cultural cancer.” I mean the endless mixing and mutation of literary and visual arts so that the end product is an undifferentiated, timeless mass of “entertainment,” without any possibility of making fine cultural distinctions or understanding the history of ideas. Please do not get me started on the strange effect any approach to the end of the Mickey Mouse copyright has on the United States Congress.
Example: Disney sells both “Pooh Classic,” a lightly bastardized version of the original AND “Pooh Disney,” which is an execrable perversion of A.A. Milne’s and Ernest Shepard’s art. The reason for the update is to appeal to a modern audience the perpetrators know would find the 1920s world of the original bafflingly alien.(The real Winnie the Pooh has had its detractors: Dorothy Parker reviewed it in the New Yorker like this: “And it is that word ‘hummy,’ my darlings, that marks the first place in The House at Pooh Corner at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.”)
But the Mickey Mouse cartoons from the late 1920s and early 1930s are fabulous. I always had a hipsterish disdain for Disney (mostly in favor of the Fleisher brothers’ Betty Boop cartoons, which are pure homegrown American surrealism) until I actually sat down and watched them again. They’re fresh, inventive, anarchic, and colorful. Like everything Disney touches, Mickey Mouse is now encrusted with layers of crap. The original was pure gold.
Great piece about how life in high school, at least in modern America, influences the future course of the majority of people’s lives. Income, careers, physical and psychological health are highly correlated throughout life with social status in high school. Amazingly, four years of American high school is not universally experienced as a season in hell. Figures. Bastards.
The best thing about the Chinese going to the Moon while the U.S. has abandoned its lunar ambitions is that I’d a hell of a lot rather eat dim sum in Luna City than McNuggets. The Chinese lunar rover is rather charmingly named the Jade Rabbit. In Chinese folklore, the Jade Rabbit is the companion of the Moon Goddess, who pounds the elixir of life for her in a mortar and pestle.
Today and Tomorrow in #westernma
| THURSDAY | DECEMBER | 5 |
| 11:45AM–1:15PM | Springfield | Young Professionals Society Greater Springfield CEO Luncheon |
| 12:00–2:00PM | Easthampton | Don’t Eat Lunch Alone |
| 12:00PM | Springfield | Exchange Club of Springfield |
| 4:30–6:30PM | Chicopee | Chicopee Chamber Holiday Party |
| 6:00PM | Longmeadow | Bay Path College Young Women’s Leadership Conference |
| FRIDAY | DECEMBER | 6 |
| 12:00-2:00PM | Greenfield | Don’t Eat Lunch Alone |
| SATURDAY | DECEMBER | 7 |
| 9:00AM | Enfield, CT | Hartford Springfield Speakers Network |
Reading
Sending Kids Into the “Roman Amphitheater”
“In fact, one of the reasons that high schools may produce such peculiar value systems is precisely 
because the people there have little in common, except their ages. ‘These are people in a large box without any clear, predetermined way of sorting out status,’ says Robert Faris, a sociologist at UC Davis who’s spent a lot of time studying high-school aggression. ‘There’s no natural connection between them.’ Such a situation, in his view, is likely to reward aggression. Absent established hierarchies and power structures (apart from the privileges that naturally accrue from being an upperclassman), kids create them on their own, and what determines those hierarchies is often the crudest common-denominator stuff—looks, nice clothes, prowess in sports—rather than the subtleties of personality….”
Why You Never Truly Leave High School
Mandarin Moon
The Last Word
“The problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms. But we cannot speak about atoms in ordinary language.”
—Werner Heisenberg, German physicist, born December 5, 1901