Timeless August 8, 2009
Posted by dolorosa12 in books, reviews.Tags: books, children's books, conversations with little people, michael ende, momo, reviews
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This morning, I tucked myself away in a corner of the University Library’s West Room, and read Michael Ende’s glorious, gem of a fable, Momo (spoilers in the link and in my review). You might think it odd that I had not read this book as a child, but my youthful reading list, A Little Princess aside, was remarkably Australian, now that I think about it. The edition I read was translated by J. Maxwell Brownjohn.
Ende is the author of The Neverending Story, which is certainly next on my reading list!
The eponymous heroine of Momo is a wise little girl who, in the tradition of fairytale heroines everywhere, knows how to see the heart of things. She lives in a ruined amphitheatre on the outskirts of a city never named, but which is probably Rome. Momo has a remarkable talent for listening and hearing the stories that everyone, even the most mundane, boring people, have inside them. She has a startling imagination and always makes the games of other children more entrancing. In short, she gulps life down with relish.
That’s a threat to the grey, sinister members of the ‘Timesaving Bank’, who are out to convince people to live life at a rushed, manic pace. In their opinion, the small joys of life – chatting to customers, singing with friends, lingering over a meal, and even dreaming – are time-wasting distractions. They convince most of the members of Momo’s neighbourhood to sign over their ‘free’ time. When Momo objects to this, they target her friends in an attempt to frighten her.
But Momo has an ally in Professor Secundus Minutus Hora, a benevolent, disinterested god (in the ‘clockmaker’ model; why is it that gods and imagery of time seem so perfectly wedded?), who helps Momo see time for what it is – life in all its wonder. With this knowledge, Momo is able to save her friends from a miserable existence of fast food, regimented activities and toys that sap creativity and imagination (in one scene, Ende parodies Barbie dolls with broad brushstrokes – Momo comes upon a doll with which she cannot play, that only asks for more and more consumer products).
It’s hard to tell if Ende’s story, which was written in 1973, is anti-communist (Karl Marx is all but named as the ‘architect’ of the world in which Momo and her friends live), anti-capitalist (the aforementioned diatribe against toys which encourage consumerism supports this reading) or simply anti-twentieth-century values. In the end, Ende’s ideological position is irrelevant. He’s for the storytellers, the stories, and the small moments needed to listen to them, and that is all that matters.
Dream, work, play… June 11, 2008
Posted by dolorosa12 in childhood, fangirl, memories, work.Tags: buffy, conversations with little people, dream, fangirl, joss whedon, work
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Sometimes I simply adore the kids at the school. Today, not only did I have the most amusingly trippy conversation ever with one of them, but a bunch of the others watched the Buffy film. I shall give further details about both occurences further, but first, let me relate a truly bizarre dream I had last night.
The dream took the form of a home-video memory, and, at the time, seemed totally plausible as something of which I’d have a video record. I was six, and, with two-year-old Mimi, cycling around Lake Burley Griffin. Nothing unusual about this, except that I didn’t learn to cycle without training wheels until I was seven, and Mimi certainly couldn’t ride a bike at two.
It was a hot summer Canberra day, and Commonwealth Park was full of people out enjoying the sunshine, dressed in a fetching array of early ’90s clothes: men in stubbies, kids in leggings and big, fluoro T. shirts and women with crazy, permed hairstyles. Some people were running through the sprinklers, a throw-back to a less water-conscious time.
All of a sudden we met up with E., an old family friend who is my age and whom I’ve known since the first day I moved to Canberra (when I was three). She was dressed in her school uniform, riding a small bike through the water of the Lake, to school. This wouldn’t work for many reasons. Firstly, she was dressed in the Red Hill Primary uniform – but at six, she still attended Griffith Primary, which only closed down when we were eight. Secondly, she lived on the same side of the Lake to her school. Dream logic ftw, huh?
Finally, Mimi and I arrived back at our old house in Forrest, which, inexplicably had a bush shower in the kitchen. Umm, no it didn’t. All the time, I was an observer of this dream, rather than a participant, as if I were watching it on TV. It was a very strange experience.
Part II
My trippy conversation with one of the kids at the school was as follows:
Me: Be more careful when you run around with hula hoops, please.
Kid: I am careful, but my master makes me bad.
Me: Your master?
Kid (climbing up on to the equipment): Yeah, I have a master. He’s invisible and sits on my back and tells me to be evil. You can’t see him.
Me: Can I speak to him?
Kid: No. He only speaks to me.
Me: So, what’s his name? If I speak to him, can you tell him what I say?
Kid: His name is Aslan, but he’s not the Aslan from Narnia.
Me: Hi Aslan. It would be very helpful if you could tell (kid) to be good, not evil.
Kid (thinking): He says that if you want to speak to him you need to fight a big battle and face a challenge. And then, the reward would be DEATH.
I gave up, bemused and amused.
I am further amused at the older kids’ obsession with my own favourite TV series (and the seminal show of my teenage years), Buffy The Vampire Slayer. They’d been nagging for ages to bring in a DVD and watch it on a rainy day, but we always said that because the series is rated M, they’d not be allowed to watch it at school. But they somehow figured out that the 1992 movie was rated PG, and today they brought it in to watch. Unfortunately, I was not in charge of this activity, and so am still a Buffy movie virgin, alas. Since Joss (AKA God) himself has described the film as an imperfect rendering of his perfect Buffy vision, however, I suppose it’s not too much of a loss to me to have missed out yet again.
It did, however, remind me of when the film came out. In Australia, it came out when I was nine, in 1994. I was not allowed to watch it (and, indeed, wasn’t all that interested), but several of my friends (whom I’ll assign random initials) were. My best friend at the time, S., and two boys in my year, E. and K., were utterly obsessed, and spent their days playing Buffy, carrying around smelly garlic and sticks stuck together to form crosses. S. also persuaded her mother to let her raid the herb cabinet, and packed our shared desk with packets of ostensibly vampire-repelling herbs. Good times.
