Marking Time

“He’s a great route runner,” said Greg Gabriel, the Bears’ director of college scouting. “He’s got excellent hands and he’s very good after the catch. On top of that, his character is impeccable.” 

The above was said of Bears’ third-round draft pick Earl Bennett, Vanderbilt wide receiver and the all-time SEC receptions leader –no small thing in a conference that produced the likes of the Packers’ Don Hutson (Alabama) in the 1930s and Sterling Sharpe (So Carolina) in the 1980s. 

But let’s look at the translation of the Bears’ statement: Bennett is not a burner. Like Mr. Gabriel says, he’s a “hands” guy, another route-runner who can work within the short-passing snoozefest that is Chicago Bear football. To put that SEC record in context: being a receptions leader is not the same as being a yardage leader. It just means you were in a system that did a lot of short passing, you were reliable, and you had quarterbacks for four years who knew what they were doing.

Still, it’s better than late-drafting another Mark Bradley or other such hopeful that turns out to be a bust. Bennett being taken early is a sign that the Bears know where they are weakest, and they’re looking to shore up in key areas. They did it with their first-rounder with Williams, an offensive tackle who looks to be a genuine stud (and was a teammate of Bennett’s… good to have a pair of high draftees coming in together, helping each other out early on). They even did it with their second-rounder, Matt Forte, a Tulane running back I know very little about. But what I do know is that their offenisve problems –running and passing– needed to be looked into.

And finally, they didn’t  take a stupid risk on a quarterback, in a class of QBs that was not sexy in the least. No new Rex Grossman (or Cade McNown… God forbid…). They’ll meet that need some other way, and I’m glad. They played it smart and safe, I think. I would have liked to see one of those other offensive linemen chosen higher  than they were, as Bear QBs are not known for their mobility or durability. But overall, this draft class looks promising. Not brilliant, but promising.

Below is the full list of the Bears’ picks, FYI.

And as for the receivers they still need, besides draftee Earl Bennett, I have just one thing to say:

Ocho Cinco!

Yes, I think Chad Johnson –on his way out of the Bengals situation– has the potential to be a colorful and talented Bears’ star, at least as popular and effective as Willie Gault or Fridge Perry (from their one and only Super Bowl team). Yeah, Chad’s a handful, P.R.-wise. But he hasn’t gotten in trouble with the law, just with the league, for his crazy on-field antics. Same was true of Jim McMahon, the Punky QB. As for Chad’s coachability and locker-room behavior, Randy Moss proved last year that even the brattiest of superstars can change his ways when he gets on the right team. And finally, consider a receiver corps that includes both the tall, fast Johnson and the ridiculously fast and shifty Devin Hester (who will have to learn the rest of his new receiver duties without  Moose Muhammad’s help this year, and could use a veteran to help him out, especially as a second threat or decoy, something Hester has not had thus far).

The one problem: the Bears are unlikely to spend the money on a guy like Chad Johnson. They seldom have in the past, anyway. But maybe the taste of victory in GM Jerry Angelo’s mouth two years ago, followed by the shame and disgrace of 2007, will lead them to change tactics and pick up more big-ticket free agents. So start a letter-writing campaign, people. Or just a chant: “We want Chad! We want Chad!”

Bears full 2008 draft class:

Round    
          Overall Draft Number     Name        Position    College 

 14 Chris Williams OT Vanderbilt

 44 Matt Forte RB Tulane

 70 Earl Bennett WR Vanderbilt

 90 Marcus Harrison DT Arkansas

 120 Craig Steltz S Louisiana State

142 Zack Bowman CB Nebraska

 158 Kellen Davis TE Michigan State

 208 Ervin Baldwin DE Michigan State

 222 Chester Adams OT Georgia

 243 Joey LaRocque ILB Oregon State

 247 Kirk Barton OT Ohio State

 248 Marcus Monk WR  

In the beginning, the landscape of books for children was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of Dickens hovered over the publishing landscape. And publisher E.P. Dutton said, “Let there be Winnie-the-Pooh,” and there was Pooh.

Welcome to Pooh Week at Marking Time! (And thank you, Spencer Foon, for sending me the above Mark Tatulli “Lio” comic strip, which inspired this Pooh-related series.)

We shall start with a bit of background on  author A.A. Milne (1882-1956), his works for children, and literary history in general. Then in the days that follow I will take a more personal and opinionated tone, during which I will alternately hug and slap around various cultural icons and sacred cows. So pull up a comfy arm-chair, fix some tea and a “little smackerel” of something, and settle in for a pleasant ride from London to visit our “friends and relations” out in the Hundred Acre Wood, then across the pond to America, and beyond.

As I’ve said, in the beginning, before there was Harry Potter and his gay headmaster, there was Pooh. Before there were graphic novels, there were the “decorations” of Ernest H. Shephard, who was already a renowned artist before he did the Pooh drawings. And before there was Disney (”Gosh, Daddy, was there ever such a time?”), there were books.

Until fairly recently, books were these hard-bound, venerable, comparatively expensive things that people bought for both education and entertainment, especially because they had so few other options for either endeavor. No movies. No tv. No radio or phonograph or iPod. No Guitar Hero, or Second Life, or even Myst. Think of it — for all those centuries, entertainment (when one even had leisure time for it, which was not often) consisted of just a few classic choices: board and card games, maybe a piano or other instrument (if one could afford it and could read music), a ball, maybe a few gadgets like the kaleidoscope (which I also know a few things about, but that’s a blog for another day), and books.

But people also bought books because they loved books, especially the way that a book lets us (as my man Garrison Keillor once put it), “live more than one life”. A work of fiction – and even some nonfiction– lets one imagine what life looks like through the eyes of another person. Thus, it helps us all to feel a little less lonely and strange. That’s probably the main reason families in England, and later in America and the rest of the world, immediately loved Winnie-the-Pooh (E.P. Dutton, 1926), and The House at Pooh Corner (1928). Because we all need friends, and the ones we find in books are the most faithful friends of all.

It may be a bit of a stretch to call the two main Pooh books novels, but I personally don’t think so. (I’ve been a high school English teacher, and I have a Masters degree, therefore what I say goes… nyah nyah nyahh!) For in the development of the novel as an art form, I have it on good authority that one of the first prose novels ever, if not the first, was a similarly episodic work featuring a child (and other comic characters), not unlike the two Winnie-the-Pooh books. Lazarillo de Tormes, published anonymously in 1554 Spain, was not meant to be fiction for children. However, it does feature a little street urchin of a boy who regularly gets into trouble and has semi-realistic dialogues with various stereotypical people commonly seen in 1554 Spain. It’s a funny little book, slightly satirical, and if you want to check it out online it would be a quick read. (Before there was Robinson Crusoe, or Don Quixote –the incorrectly labeled “first novels” in Western culture– there was little Lazarillo.)

Anyway, the episodic novel, featuring characters that have a slightly symbolic purpose, was a tradition well-established by the time Milne stumbled upon the forumula for our beloved Pooh. His ingenious idea was to give his son Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals a life of their own, out in the woods, which parallels the lives of adults and children here in our world. Talking animals had been tried before, of course — as early as Aesop’s fables, or the really weird story of Balaam’s talking donkey in the Bible’s Book of Numbers. But an inanimate object brought to life? This was a more modern invention, to be sure.

I’m actually an A.A. Milne scholar, in case anyone’s interested. Not in the sense of having a PhD in children’s literature. That would be stupid… not to mention an oxymoron. I’m only an expert in the sense of having read the two original Pooh books countless times –mostly before I had a child. I’ve also studied enough other adult and children’s literature – and non-fiction history – to be able to put the Pooh books in their proper contexts as masterpieces, no less important than Hamlet or Huckleberry Finn.

Plus I’ve read the collections of Milne’s children’s poetry When We Were Very Young (1924) and Now We Are Six (1927), both of which also feature decorations by Ernest H. Shepard.  It was in one of those earlier poems that Edward “Winnie-the-Pooh” Bear first appeared, within the pages of the British humor magazine Punch in 1923. That poem, “Teddy Bear”, can be found here. Note that When We Were Very Young, which collected Milne’s previous magazine-published poems, actually preceded the 1926 publication of Winnie-the-Pooh by two years… suggesting that Milne’s publishers definitely changed their original opinion of his writing-for-children as drivel, once they saw there was serious profit to be made on it.

As an amateur Pooh scholar, for example, I already knew that Christopher’s stuffed bear was named after Winnipeg, a Canadian black bear which had been the mascot of A.A. Milne’s WWI  British Army regiment. (Makes one wonder how the bear went from being black to being the utterly impossible and unnatural golden color that Winnie’s taken on nowadays.) I also knew that A.A. Milne was frustrated by the fact that his popular children’s books overshadowed any writing he ever did for adults (including plays, novels, nonfiction works and poetry). In this, he is somewhat comparable to playwright J.M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan and one of Milne’s idols.

I also know a wide range of odd little trivia about Milne and Pooh, such as a few details about the highly successful one-man-show that Patrick Stewart (a.k.a. Captain Picard) took on tour across the U.K. and U.S., performing interpretations of the original Pooh stories to packed houses of mostly grownups. I know there have been ongoing copyright issues, such as the strange California appellate court case in 2005, in which A.A. Milne’s granddaughter got all in a huff about how long her family’s copyright should remain in force (based upon the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998… go Sonny go! ). Or that A.A. Milne retired after a 1952 stroke to Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, which was where the Rolling Stones‘ lead guitarist Brian Jones would later live and be found drowned in 1969. Or that the 1982 nonfiction bestseller The Tao of Pooh is a load of crap – a thinly-veiled, opportunistic grab for cash that is neither Taoist nor Pooh-ist in spirit, and is not written very well either.

Speaking of people who have barstardized our pal Pooh: as you might expect, I barely tolerate the way DisneyCorp has prostituted those great A.A. Milne characters. While the first couple of feature-length movies were of good quality, even inventive in their own way, by now the new movies and tv show have taken those great characters well beyond the faithful portrayals in the original films. But I’m going to have to wait till tomorrow for this whole Disney debate, because today’s entry is already far too long and rambling…

kind of like one of Pooh’s patented hummy strolls through the woods! Nevertheless, we must move on. Therefore, until tomorrow, as the Disneyfied Tigger is fond of saying:

“TTFN — Ta Ta for Now!”

Sunday morning. 2:43am. Central Wisconsin.

The stars are utterly fabulous tonight. Maybe the earth moved to another neighborhood while I was sleeping. That would explain why I’m so completely disoriented, despite familiar surroundings.

My body clock is broken. Tonight I went to bed at 8:30. I *never* do that. Yet despite a fairly leisurely day, I was exhausted. To make matters worse, I went to bed in the middle of the Red Sox playoff game, which they were winning. I never do that, either. (Did they win? GO SAWX!)

I chalked my strange behavior up to several unsuccessful attempts to siphon gasoline from my car this afternoon, so we could run the mower. A few thousand dead brain cells later, I gave it up and drove the 8+ miles to the nearest filling station. (Nobody ever says that no more: fillin’ station. I must be regressing to some past life, where I was a Tennessee trucker.)

The other odd thing was how/why I woke up. I had a dream that my friend, the Right Reverend Thomas Willadsen, called me on the Haman/”Heyman” Phone to ask if I wanted an extra ticket to the Bears game today. While trying to wake up (it was 2am in my dream as well… the real Tom would have no reason to be up this late), I tried explaining that he’d called on the Heyman phone, which is somehow associated with the Jewish Purim tradition, and the notorious bad guy named Haman that they burn in effigy every year (or something like that).

When Tom was puzzled about the Heyman phone (”You’ve never heard of it?”), I said never mind, then asked what time the Bears played. He told me noon, which was why he was calling in the wee hours, in case I needed to set some plans in motion. So I rummaged around in my brain for a reason *not* to uproot my family this morning at 7am, and then I said yes, I wanted the ticket.

A few seconds later, back in the real world, my dog barked. Apparently he was listening in on my dream, and barked to tell me I’m an idiot. He’s a bad dog. Maybe he was Haman in a previous incarnation.