Just a follow-up. Neil Gaiman's daughter is writing his blog. She's on the set of the latest Hellboy being cosseted by Guillermo del Toro and Selma Blair. She's clearly quite precocious. On the one hand--how cool is that--I'm jealous. On the other, having been a precocious and cosseted child, I wish that people had been more honest with me. There comes a point when you will not be clever for your age--will not be the kid it's fun to humor, but just another adult. I think the whole self-esteem movement is actually making kid's self-esteem worse. I think I would have been better off if more people had said, "You aren't good at this--you have to work at it. This is good for a 12 year old but next year you'll have to do better." I got to rest on my laurels and I never learned to work hard or to fail. This probably won't happen to Gaiman's daughter, but I see it happening to other young people I know. Or I'm just blaming other people for my problems. I don't know how you go about doing both--keeping self-esteem, but teaching that there will always be people better than you. That's why I don't have kids.
I was completely blown away by the movie of The Prestige , and I thought then about reading the novel, but it seemed too soon. So I carried the author's name around with me for over a year (Christopher Priest) and then, finally remembered to buy it through an odd sequence of events. We watched The Painted Veil based on the novel by Maugham starring Edward Norton, and while I decided I didn't want to read The Painted Veil because of it's differences from the film (which was more romantic and tragic) it reminded me that I had wanted to read Fight Club (the movie version of which starred Edward Norton) and that reminded me that I had wanted to read The Prestige (which did not star Edward Norton, but was up against The Illusionist which did). Whew...so it's all Edward Norton's fault. The Prestige is a very good novel, and yet, the movie differs from it considerably. And I am still trying to figure out what exactly that means. The central premise is the same, AND HE
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