"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.

"Unfathomably, the programme notes for the Harry Potter author, who read from the opening of Peter Pan, declared her to be 'a great philanthropist, praised by the Government as a tax angel – one of the few who willingly pays her tax bill.'"

From the long, photo-filled Daily Mail article about last night's opening ceremony for the London Olympics.

Unfathomably? Oh, come on. It must be at least possible to fathom it!

The OED tells us that to fathom means "To encircle with extended arms." So: Can you get your arms around it? Can the government get its arms around you?

The opening ceremony also had a giant production number celebrating the National Health Service, replete with hundreds of dancing doctors and nurses in period costumes, and children in pjs bouncing on oversized hospital beds.

Socialized medicine will encircle you with its extended arms.

J.K. Rowling (the "Harry Potter" author) read from J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan" — video — and we were told that Barrie donated the royalties from "Peter Pan" to GOSH (the Great Ormand Street Hospital).  We saw "GOSH" in big lights along with "NHS" in that production number.

(Wikipedia: "When the copyright originally expired at the end of 1987, 50 years after Barrie's death, the UK government granted the hospital a perpetual right to collect royalties for public performances, commercial publication, or other communications to the public of the work.... GOSH has been in legal disputes in the United States, where the copyright term is based on date of publication, putting the 1911 novel in the public domain, although the Hospital asserts that the 1928 version of the play is still under copyright in the U.S.")

Rowling tied it all together. Like Barrie, she's an author of children's literature. (The production number more generally celebrated Britain's children's literature, e.g., "Mary Poppins.") Like Barrie, Rowling represents giving up one's money to the greater good. Barrie voluntarily donated a specific flow of money — "Peter Pan" royalties — to a specific cause — a children's hospital. Rowling is just a very rich person who — visibly and graciously — submits to taxation.

This year's Forbes magazine rich list showed that Rowling "has dropped out of the world's exclusive billionaires' club as a result of Britain's high tax regime."

So, fathom that: The government has gotten its arms around her fortune.  Unlike the charitable giving of yore — exemplified by Barrie — the modern-day secular saint need only sit still for taxation, and the government will decide exactly where it goes. It's the way things are done now, and it's massively celebrated as part of the Olympics spectacle about what makes Great Britain so great. The spectacle notably took us through the phrases of history, and those wonderful children's authors have been giving children reading material and vast donations of wealth, in their own way and in their own time. And in our time, the government has an immense role.

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"No man ought to graspe more then he can well fathome." Bp. J. Hall Horæ Vacivæ 71 (1646)(via OED).