I am having a sinus headache due to weather system which is preventing me from being able to think how to explain Howard Pease (it is Pease like pease porridge hot, not Pearse) but I am hoping to come back and talk about it when I can. I credit him largely for why I kept my head during the rightward tsunami of opinion after 9/11/01 and through the years following, and I picked "Fog Horns" to represent his oeuvre partly because it's the one I think I was reading on 9/11 which materially shaped my initial reaction.
(I really do not know how he got onto the lists of approved YA authors for right-wing youth that guided my teenage reading. A marker of how drastically the Overton window has shifted from the '90s, maybe. He certainly had the 1930s boys' adventure thing down, and his contempt for the viewpoint of "tender-minded old women" -- to use his own words -- did fairly permanent things to the direction of the Newbery Medals through the midcentury, which puts him on my shortlist of Problematic Faves to consider when other people are grappling with having been formed by Harry Potter; but he was vehemently pro-union and heavily political, anti-isolationist as early as 1935, talking about the Holocaust in 1946 pretty much as soon as the news spread, even anti-gun in a tactful way. I suppose it might have been because we were much more anti-peer-pressure in those days? He's got a focus on "think for yourself and question propaganda" that... in retrospect, almost reminds me of DWJ, now I think of it. The sort of, oh wow have I ever been a young idiot, time to grow up and look unpleasant reality in the eye, take on the YA narrative of what becoming an adult means.)
Anyway I have put a lot of words here but I don't know if any of them make sense. Also none of them are about "Fog Horns" specifically. I'm going to try to nap. Hopefully I can be more coherent later.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2025-04-10 06:20 pm (UTC)(I really do not know how he got onto the lists of approved YA authors for right-wing youth that guided my teenage reading. A marker of how drastically the Overton window has shifted from the '90s, maybe. He certainly had the 1930s boys' adventure thing down, and his contempt for the viewpoint of "tender-minded old women" -- to use his own words -- did fairly permanent things to the direction of the Newbery Medals through the midcentury, which puts him on my shortlist of Problematic Faves to consider when other people are grappling with having been formed by Harry Potter; but he was vehemently pro-union and heavily political, anti-isolationist as early as 1935, talking about the Holocaust in 1946 pretty much as soon as the news spread, even anti-gun in a tactful way. I suppose it might have been because we were much more anti-peer-pressure in those days? He's got a focus on "think for yourself and question propaganda" that... in retrospect, almost reminds me of DWJ, now I think of it. The sort of, oh wow have I ever been a young idiot, time to grow up and look unpleasant reality in the eye, take on the YA narrative of what becoming an adult means.)
Anyway I have put a lot of words here but I don't know if any of them make sense. Also none of them are about "Fog Horns" specifically. I'm going to try to nap. Hopefully I can be more coherent later.