Category Archives: Poetry

For the Friends of Flaco: A Picture Book About Owls

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Bübchen’s Traum. Potsdam: Gropiusschen Hofbuchhandlung, [ca. 1914]. (Cotsen 65862)

Today I discovered a rather surprising book, Buebchens Traum  [Little Boy’s Dream], with a lovely snowy owl on the cover, by a Dagmar von Natzmer published around 1909 in Potsdam, by a firm in Potsdam, Germany.  No entry for her or the book in the usual sources, so she may not have written or illustrated another picture book.  Or maybe “von Natzmer” was her maiden name and she published under her married one later in her career.

The story is quite simple. A little boy falls asleep in the woods and has a marvelous dream about owls.  Not ominous birds of prey, like Mr. Brown in Beatrix Potter’s The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin or a whimsically befuddled creature like A. A. Milne’s Owl, who doesn’t quite manage to live up to his species’ reputation for wisdom.  Von Natzmer’s well-dressed owls look as if they belong in a parlor instead of the deep forest.

A mighty hunter looks with pride at his game sack filled with mice.

This handsome couple prepares to celebrate their nuptials in the woodland.

The band plays for waltzing birds in evening dress

and little girl owls twirling around in frilly pink dresses.

The boy wakes up at dawn and his dream of the elegantly anthropomorphized raptors vanishes.

How should we react to pictures of owls that diverge so far from the actual creatures?  A picture book this eccentric has its own peculiar charm, but it is also a bittersweet reminder of the differences between the projections of the imagination and undomesticated nature.

We can recognize Flaco in the hunter in green, having taught himself how to catch vermin after twelve years in captivity.  Of course the ones he ate were probably full of rodenticide.   The people who worried about how long he could survive in the wilds of New York City also were concerned that the Eurasian eagle owl would never find a mate.   He did hoot a lot from the heights of tall buildings–was he calling for a female?  Characterized as a very curious bird, we wanted to believe that his ability to explore and survive this strange new environment compensated for the lack of the companionship of his kind, at least for a while.  If he had settled down, surely he would not have chosen a female pretty in pink…

Von Natzmer’s owls reconfirm Beatrix Potter’s opinion that dressing birds posed a stiff challenge to the artist.  Jemima Puddleduck in her bonnet and shawl is a small masterpiece because of the way the fabric is draped around the contours of her meticulously realistic body.   But an owl in a military uniform?  Its legs are so long that the observant reader notices that the figure looks like an owl’s head stuck a little clumsily on top of a man’s body.   Those of us who never saw Flaco during the last twelve months will leave a deeper impression of “owlness” from the many photographs of him that captured the black eyes intent, yet expressionless stare, the beak’s cruel curve, the illusion of weight the splendid feathers lent to a four and a half pound body with a six-foot wingspan than the color illustrations of these fantastical owls.  Still, von Natzmer’s wonderful endpaper design of an owl in flight would make a beautiful card to leave under Flaco’s favorite tree in Central Park.

Pirate Stew: Neil Gaiman Updates The Cat in the Hat

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Pirate Stew, written by Neil Gaiman and exuberantly illustrated by Chris Riddell, is a new addition to the corpus of quirky stories about adventures in babysitting.  One of the funniest is  Alan and Janet Ahlberg’s Burglar Bill (1977), the tale of a housebreaker who accidentally pinches a baby.  Melinda Long and David Shannon may have been the first to cast a bold buccaneer as the antihero of Pirates Don’t Change Diapers (2007).

Pirate Stew. New York: Quill Tree Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2020. (Cotsen)

Gaiman gleefully exploits the idea that pirates have to be among the most unsuitable of all possible childminders.  Those running away from home to lead a life of crime on the high seas make dubious role models with their wild hair, bad teeth, huge hoop earrings, and ill-concealed sharp weapons.  No one expects much in the way of nurture from pirates, mayhem being their stock in trade.    Even if they stayed in one place for long, what would move them to register on care.com? Which raises the unanswered question in Pirate Stew:  how did the parents hire Long John McRon, a pirate ship’s cook to take care of the children for an evening?   He has the requisite peg leg and crutch plus a hook for one hand, but is too roly-poly to pull off the feats of strength Stevenson’s Long John Silver was capable of.  This Long John comes prepared to fix the children dinner, with  a map rolled around a wooden spoon stowed in his enormous hat and apron pockets bulging with what look like bottles of spirits. Doomed indeed.  Their parents might have well as picked the Cat in the Hat out of the lineup on Babysitters Registry.  Shortly after they leave for an evening out,  someone knocks at the door.  Thing One and Thing Two?

Worse.  A crew of blithe buccaneers, among them a granny with blue-rinsed hair, a comely queen with a diverse court of fair maidens, a fiddler, and two that look like Smee and Captain Hook.  There’s also a chap got up in makeshift deerslayer’s cap looking for a Sherlock Holmes story.Dinner preparations founder when the crew decides that beans on toast, spaghetti, or scrambled eggs are beyond them.  Long John quickly takes charge and declares that they will all feast on pirate stew, guaranteed to chase away the blues.   Simmered in a large container like  stone soup, it calls for indigestible things made of wood or metal  like figure heads and doubloons, thickened with parrot seeds, and seasoned with limes and mermaid’s tears.

Although no magic was used in the test kitchen, the uproarious song that accompanies the addition of ingredients to the pot sounds suspiciously like something a coven of witches would chant brewing up a potion.  The last line, “You’ll become a pirate too” makes little sister, who is no fool, put two and two together.   They prudently go without dinner.

Now fortified with bowls of steaming green goo, the crew commandeers the house, magically transformed into a flying ship, for a trip into town, where they swagger into the local donut shop prepared to steal the makings for a party.  Tattooed Sally the proprietor proposes to let them have the day-old ones for free instead of throwing them out.  The pirates graciously pay for dessert and the famished children fill up on the junk food which is their right any night a babysitter takes charge.

Long John drops the crew off at the Saucy Treasure Chest for a nightcap and steers the vessel back home with a few minutes to spare.The parents are so delighted with Long John’s report that the kids were good as gold that they overlook the state of the kitchen.   Still hungry after an unsatisfactory meal out, the mother spots their children’s untouched bowls of pirate stew and she and her husband dive in, deaf to their children’s pleas to find another midnight snack.

  And that is how those two old heads on young shoulders come to be pressed on board the pirate ship…

Chris Riddell’s exotic but adorable crew of age, gender and race inclusive misfits  give the story its swagger as well as a counter narrative provided by the children’s refusal to be play along, from when Long John McRon hands them his card, to when their father, now captain of the ship, gives the command to set sail.   Gaiman’s serviceable verse just enough “mateys,” “aaar,” and  “me hearties” to qualify this picture book as obligatory reading for International Talk Like a Pirate Day.   Pirate Stew would have been a better yarn if it had stirred up any sense of urgency or danger, like that nail-biter The Cat in the Hat where it seems all too possible that the mischief-maker will not be able to turn the house right side up before the children’s mother walks through the door.