"All I wanted was to grow up in peace, deal with my bodily changes and these pesky new zits without it being recorded. But my mother was omnipresent, her phone an extension of her arm … every little moment was mined for content."

Writes Shari Franke, "The House of My Mother," quoted in "Is It Abusive to Make Art About Your Children? It’s not quite #MeToo, but a spate of new memoirs is forcing a reckoning on what consent means when your parent is the artist" (NYT).

Shari Franke is the daughter of "mommy vlogger" Ruby Franke, who was ultimately convicted of child abuse. The article also discusses Sally Mann, the photographer we talked about a couple days ago, here.

Mann has her own memoir, in which she concedes, “I wanted attention for the work and the easiest way to get it was obviously to put forward the most attention-grabbing imagery.... To be an artist means you must declare a loyalty to your art form and your vision that runs deeper than almost any other, even sometimes deeper than blood kinship.... When I stepped behind the camera, and they stepped in front of it, I was a photographer, and they were actors and we were making a photograph."

There's this quote from Molly Jong-Fast: "In [my mother's] view, she did spend time with me — in her head, in her writing, in the world she inhabited. I was there. I may have felt that she was slightly allergic to me, but to her, she was spending time with the most important version of me."

By the way, did you know "Christopher Robin Milne resented his father’s use of his likeness in the Winnie the Pooh stories, and Peter Llewelyn Davies, the inspiration for 'Peter Pan,' seemed to live in a permanent state of rage at being associated with the character."

The article is by Parul Sehgal, who writes: "If the child’s perspective goes unacknowledged, and their compliance confused for collaboration, it might be because our focus has so often been elsewhere — on the needs and rights of the artist-parent, on the struggle to have domestic life and, specifically, motherhood, accepted as a subject worthy of study."

That feminist issue has overshadowed the childist perspective. Is "childist" even a word? Actually, yes, but this is the first time I'm thinking of it, and I had to check to see that I wasn't coining it.

How I came to read "They shut me up in prose" (and talk about it with ChatGPT).

1. The Supreme Court, in a new opinion, used the word "who" to refer to Twitter (as if Twitter were a person (Elon Musk?)).

2. I studied the OED entry for "who" to see if there might be some justification for using "who" like that. Couldn't find any.

3. I became entranced by the "archaic or literary" use of "who" without an antecedent as in Shakespeare's "Who steales my purse, steals trash" and A.A. Milne's "Hush! Hush! whisper who dares, Christopher Robin is saying his prayers." We'd normally say "whoever" in that situation, but why is that? However did "ever" come to clutter our speech?

At the House-at-Pooh-Corner Café...

... maybe you'll write something utterly charming.

I took the photograph this morning at sunrise, as I was entering my running trail. It looks as though a child lost the book somewhere on the trail and whoever found it put it on that rock in the hope that it would find its way if not to the home of the child who lost it to some other child's home.

At first I thought Christopher Robin was humiliating Pooh, but I think he's knighting him.

"Hong Kong activists wear Joker and Winnie-the-Pooh masks as they form human chains in defiance of ban on face coverings."

The Daily Mail reports.

Chinese internet users have joked that Chinese president Xi Jinping resembles AA Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh - leading the country's censors to scrub online references to it. Many protesters have been seen wearing masks of the character in an apparent effort to mock the leader....

The photo at the link doesn't show a Winnie-the-Pooh mask, but an image that combines Winnie-the-Pooh and Xi:



It's hard for me to absorb the mockery, if that is what is intended. I feel nothing but affection toward Winnie-the-Pooh. In fact, I was just listening to this lovely song...



... so resembling Winnie-the-Pooh feels totally positive.

Things to do with cigarettes.

I found this old ad...



... in the March 14, 1931 issue of The New Yorker... which I'm reading because I did the new New Yorker crossword puzzle and it made me want to read the bad review given to "The House on Pooh Corner" by (spoiler alert) Dorothy Parker.

Oh, those old boss-and-secretary cartoons! And who remembers Murad cigarettes? I know Murad as a brand of eyedrops — no, that's Murine — but Murad was a cigarette brand. And they had some fantastic color ads. Look here. Just one example pulled out at random:

Why the Chinese banned Winnie-the-Pooh.

They didn't want people to see this:



(That's Chinese President Xi Jinping as the Pooh to Obama's Tigger.)

"In the old days we had these communal fireplaces. And then we had cathedrals, and so the arena is kind of the communal fireplace of the 21st century. It’s the new cathedral."

Oh, I think in the old days, we had arenas...



The quote is from Vivek Ranadivé, the majority owner of the Sacramento Kings, who have a enormous new arena with a newly unveiled Jeff Koons sculpture. The sculpture is 18 feet tall and looks not like a king, but sort of like a teddy bear. It's brightly and messily (but very expensively) colored and is called "Coloring Book." The Kings only paid $8 million for the large object, even though Ranadivé proclaims Koons "the 21st-century Michelangelo."

Here's how the NYT article follows though with  Ranadivé's cathedral theme:

Mr. Koons offered a slightly homier take on civic religion. He recalled visiting the top of City Hall in Philadelphia as a child, and being inspired both by the sweeping view and Alexander Milne Calder’s 37-foot-tall statue of William Penn.

“It made me feel tied to history, tied to my community,” he said. “I think it changed my life. Now, ‘Coloring Book’ is not that William Penn sculpture,” he said, “but if in some way you can touch the life of somebody, and add just a little bit of curiosity, a little bit of wonder — you can’t ask for more.”

Koons also concedes: “I’ve never followed sports.”

After reading the whole NYT article and writing everything you see above, I had to Google "what animal is koons' 'coloring book' supposed to be." I found this in the Sacramento Bee:

“Coloring Book,” Jeff Koons’ artwork chosen for outside the new downtown arena, is based on Piglet, a cute animal appropriated from A. A. Milne via Walt Disney. And he’s covered with bright colors as if a child had colored outside the lines in a coloring book. How sweet. Or is it an ironic put-on?

Not according to Koons, who once said, “A viewer might at first see irony in my work ... but I see none at all. Irony causes too much critical contemplation.”

Ha ha. But of course the remark is ironic... right? And therefore the sculpture is ironic... or... whatever. It doesn't really matter. It's art looking like the art of a child, which is the sort of thing that's been around for a long time. I associate it with Jean Dubuffet, who made my #1 favorite piece of public art, "Group of 4 Trees" at the Chase Manhattan Building in NYC.

It's funny that the New York Times didn't mention that the sculpture represented a character created by A.A. Milne when it referred to Alexander Milne Calder. Alexander Milne Calder should not be confused with his grandson, the 20th century sculptor Alexander Calder, who, unlike Alexander Milne Calder, was another one of those sculptors who indulge in playful childishness.

What's with all the sculptors wanting to be like little children? Is it not discordant with the rich man's burbling that his arena is like a cathedral and his artist is like Michelangelo? Michelangelo and cathedrals are quite the opposite of anything childlike.

But Jesus said: "Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven."