March 9, 2008
Underlining my point
Check out this photo (I assume it to be stock) from the front page of yesterday’s Globe & Mail. Yesterday at the Descant blog I wrote about the resonance of 1970s YA fiction, and the effect of writers like Norma Klein on our formative years. More of an effect than I imagined, however, if this photograph is anything to go by. But then Girls Can Be Anything was published in 1973! I wonder, are we holding onto these books out of nostalgia, or has nothing as good or better come along since then? I’ve not actually been paying attention, and hope indeed something else has come along. These are things that can’t get lost. Liberal propaganda it might have been, but then my own indoctrination into Free to Be… You and Me, for example, only ever had the effect of teaching me how to be happy.
Oh, in terms of YA there are still come great books out there, but Gossip Girls and the like outsell them a billion to one. It makes me really sad.
But really I just commented to say OMG NORMA KLEIN. Most people have no idea about her. I still weep when I think I gave away those books before I moved cross-country. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
I still have some of my Norma Klein books, and I was just re-reading some of my Paula Danziger this week!
I will be rereading Norma soon– all this nostalgia has made me curious…