[quote=Hobie][quote=6packscaredy] then send kids home with hours of homework to cover up their own failure to get anything done in school.[/quote]
Huge amount of truth this statement. Nice.[/quote]
in the teacher’s defense, it can be very difficult to actually teach anything concrete to these little monkeys…by calling children “monkeys”, we are devaluing of course the type of intelligence shown by animals, and glorifying the type of intelligence that is uniquely human …
here’s a bit of an interview with franzen on cats and birds…
Q. Is Freedom an activist book? Do you hope that readers will come away with more of an appreciation for the natural world after reading it?
A. In general, I try not to do overt advocacy with my writing. If it’s a byproduct, and people become aware of an issue because it’s part of the story I’m telling, that’s great. But it’s not the primary motive.
The one small part of the book that had an actual activist motive was the very end, where we’re introduced to a predatory housecat that’s running outside and killing songbirds by the scores. When it occurred to me that I could end the book with the main character Walter’s problems with this cat, I realized that I could also perform an educational service. Most people aren’t aware of the degree to which free-roaming outdoor cats are a problem in this country. At least a million birds a day are killed by them, so we’re talking about a minimum of 365 million birds in America alone in the course of a year — perhaps as many as a billion. So there was an educational impulse there.
Q. I found your “My Bird Problem” essay in The New Yorker to be moving and persuasive. I finished it and thought, “Man, I need to go scout some birds!” Walter’s a birder, but his relationship to birds isn’t attractive in the way that your own birding stories are. Do your activist motives play out in your nonfiction more than in your fiction?
A. It’s a tricky thing. As a reader, as soon as I sense that I’m reading a piece of straight-up environmentalist advocacy, I put the piece of writing down. I feel like I’m already the converted, so don’t try to convert me. Tell me something interesting.
Even in nonfiction, I don’t want to take a purely advocating stance. I’m trying to complicate things. “My Bird Problem” is an essay about how I went from a general pissed-off concern about the environment to a very specific, positive passion for birds, which are part of the environment. Of course, it was also an opportunity to bring along readers who might not have thought about birds so much before. That’s a real and potentially useful secondary effect. But my primary responsibility to the reader is to say, “Look, this stuff is complicated — trust me, I’m not here to beat you over the head.”
