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🦋 Elephants
"Let's work hard and cheerfully and we'll continue to be happy," the Old Lady tells the elephants, and, though we know that the hunter is still in the woods, it is hard to know what more to add. Adam Gopnik has a good article in the current New Yorker about de Brunhoff's Babar books -- "Freeing the Elephants" addresses complaints about the colonialist worldview in Babar by calling the books "a self-conscious comedy about the French colonial imagination and its close relation to the French domestic imagination." I'm not totally convinced that this describes the spirit in which the books were written -- Gopnik doesn't really make an argument, just an assertion -- but it does seem like an excellent spirit in which to read the books.Next week we're going to see the exhibit at the Morgan Library. The library's website features a digital reproduction of de Brunhoff's first, hand-printed copy of Histoire de Babar.
posted morning of Saturday, December 20th, 2008
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