Detestable Drumsnabs

             
            While sitting in the lecture hall just before the start of class on Thursday, I turned around and did an approximate headcount. There had to have been just fewer than thirty-five students.

            When professor Baker started up the slide apparatus, a slide from the previous class was displayed: “Medieval Empires, Lecture 2: from the Ottonians to the Hohenstaufens” There was also the image of a very heavy looking golden and bejeweled crown with a cross on it that threw off its aesthetic balance. But it was hard not to associate it with some of the stories of fairy tale kingdoms we’ve been covering in Children’s Literature.

            The lecture, with a lot of audience feedback invited and received, was on Janet and Allan Ahlberg’s “The Jolly Postman or Other People’s Letters”. We returned again to the book as material object that invites physical engagement and interactivity. The child is invited to pretend to break the law and to read other people’s mail.

            The intertextuality of the book assumes that the reader is already familiar with many fairy tales and nursery rhymes that are referenced in casual ways. For example, a letter from Goldilocks to the Three Bears is postmarked Banbury Cross, thus referencing without quoting the nursery rhyme: “Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross, to see a fine lady upon a white horse; rings on her fingers and bells on her toes, and she shall have music wherever she goes.”

            The book places the world of fairy tales into the middle class English countryside of the 1980s and gives that world an efficient postal service to connect it. A lot of the magic referred to is made practical to the modern age, which is part of the same charm that made Harry Potter so popular.

            I thought it was particularly hilarious that the Wicked Witch’s garage was also made of gingerbread and had a car with the licence plate “Hag1”.

            I really don’t need to own “The Jolly Postman”, so after class I went up to the OISE library to get their copy of the book. I went up to the juvenile section, on the third floor, which is really the fourth or fifth floor by my count while climbing the stairs. I found the book fairly quickly, but discovered that it was sealed in a transparent plastic string and button envelope. It seemed so extremely protected that I wondered if I’d be allowed to take it out, but the friendly young librarian in that section told me that the container meant there were things in the book that could fall out in transport. When I brought it downstairs, the front desk librarian, who always looks both a little bored and a little reserved, looked puzzled. She said, “I wonder why they have it in that container!” Her curiosity then brought her to life and she said to me, “I’m sorry! I HAVE to see what’s inside to find out why they put it in this envelope!” Then she unravelled the string and saw that some the book’s pages had open envelopes with letters inside that could be pulled out and read. Then she understood. Her curiosity had an interesting coincidence with the nature of the book.

            I rode along Bloor to Castlefrank and then north. There’s only one street running east off of Castlefrank and it’s a dead end with some big fancy houses called “Drumsnab”. It sounds like an insult that musicians would bestow on a particularly despicable fellow musician, as in, “You fucking drumsnab!” Apparently it’s the name of the estate that the street is named after and the estate was named after a word in a northern English dialect that means “sugar-loaf”. Sugar was stored in phallus shaped loaves in old post-colonial England.

            I watched an episode of Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe called “Destroyers of the Sun”. The Universal Ruler was shooting a ray that blocked out the sun and plunged the world in darkness. It only seemed dark in some areas though and other places like dusk. I guess they needed to show us what was going on. They found out the signal was coming from Planet M-27, which is apparently in the solar system “just west of ours”, whatever that means. They went there and bombed their base, causing the signal to be shut off and our sun to shine again.