177: The Pushcart War

Are your school days out of sight? When you took English, art, and math. What's your favorite Fahrenheit? How sour are the grapes of wrath? Do you need a challenger? Poor disgusting Salinger. Do you love the written word? What happened to the mocking? Our show is just beginning So find a place to sit These questions will be on the test It's time for Sophomore League

Welcome back to Sophomore Lit, where we reread your 10th grade reading list. I'm your host, John McCoy, and with me is returning co-host Shannon Garrity. Hello. Shannon, you've been on before, but why don't you reintroduce yourself? Okay, I am Shannon Garrity. I'm a cartoonist and writer. I've done web comics going back to like the 2000s. I did a comic called Narbonic and then another called Skin Horse.

And I have two graphic novels out, both written by me and drawn by the great Chris Shadoian. They are The Dire Days of Willow Weep Manor and its sequel, The Nefarious Knights of Willow Weep Manor, which is actually just out. week we're recording this so please check those out. I will also have another a new book out Steam with art by Emily Holden in the spring and I've written a lot of like prose.

Science fiction as well. You can check out all my work at shenan.com. Well, I apologize for mispronouncing your first name again. I promise I promise to get it right the third time.

So this time we are returning to the well of books we read as children. And we're doing a book that I think I must have read maybe a dozen times as a child. The Pushcart War by Jean Merrill, published originally in 1964. What's your history with this book? This is one of those books that for me.

only existed in my elementary school library I think. Although I think I later tracked it down at the regular library but There's like this category of books that exist in like school libraries that you then may or may not ever see again and this is one that I got out of the school library over and over. for a while, and then I think I was separated from it for a while, but I was very hung up on this book. And also another book by the same author, The Toothpaste Millionaire.

which is a book that I see people looking for on like, what was that book? Reddit's a lot these days. I think that's another one that people frequently found at a library somewhere and then. I've remembered later on and had trouble finding again. As I said, I've read it like 12 times as a kid. I think my brother Rob read it first and he told he started to try to explain what this was in a very excited way. But he was.

eight and I was five or something like that, and nothing he was saying made any sense. I just remember reading it through and the first time being absolutely convinced that it was a true story.

because one of the things about this book is I think it's the first book a lot of kids will read that takes the form of a created history. You're ostensibly reading about the events of the book through papers and newspaper clippings and diary entries. And there's references to sayings that don't exist and references.

to events that the author assumes you know about that haven't happened. Yeah, the last time it was on, the book we discussed was The 21 Balloons, which is another book that claims to be a true story. And that was another early... fake history book that I read that had a big impact on me and I guess taught me that you could just lie to kids.

There's an interesting thing. The edition that I reread for this podcast is the 50th anniversary edition that New York Review Books put out. By the way, I just love New York Review Books. they're just a godsend for putting out putting out out of print books that need to come back into circulation but they did a reprint of the pushcart war and this made me realize that there's this There's a tradition with the Pushcart War where it is always set, I think, yes, a certain number of years after.

the book was written I think 10 years after 15 years it is always no 12 years it is always set 12 years after whenever it was published. It was originally published in 1964 and was ostensibly set in 1976. So all the references are It happening in 1976. And the edition I had, the 50th anniversary edition, everything ostensibly begins in 2026.

and is being written from the point of view of some people writing in 2036. So it just keeps being pushed farther and farther ahead in history, even though it's still about like. push carts and Mack trucks in New York City in a world that does appear to be the 1960s. Yeah, I recognize this as a device of the authors and I have to respect it. But the thing that's.

odd about this to me is this is obviously the New York of the mid 60s. This is what's being described here. This is a New York that was already fading. by the mid-70s and is long gone now. It's this sort of gentle New York of the post-war Mad Men era. And the concerns, you know, the kind of characters that keep showing up in this are a lot of European immigrants, a lot of. A lot of Latino immigrants as well. And all of the all of the.

bad guys in this book, which are the truck drivers, they all speak in Damon run-in lines, like they're coming out of guys and dolls. It bothers me because I understand that... This was the author's intent. And I again, I respect that. But there's a lot of there's a lot of books or adaptations of books that try to.

make a story that was set in the 1930s relevant to today or whatever. And I have no patience for that because as a reader, part of what I want is to be transported to a different time. Kids are... able to do that well yeah that's that's true what did it but did it bother you at all or did you oh not at all i don't care i know i don't care at all No, I love the, no, I have no, I mean, I don't think the intention is to have this be a realistic depiction of anything. It's very much an allegory.

Well, as it says, it's a story about the way wars start and also the way wars are carried out. And I mean, it's obviously it's a book that's the actual setting is something that I think Meryl knew was going to be dated. From the beginning, because it's about a world that's it's about how a world is going away. It's about how this these push carts are being literally pushed out of the streets by by trucks and by. Modernism. And I think even though it ends with the pushcarts being.

triumphing and being brought back because people love the push carts. You know, I think in reality, she knows that that's not something that's going to be going on forever, writing from the point of view of 1964, where, you know, push carts are already not. very much part of the New York scene. I guess supposedly she was inspired by living in Greenwich Village and just...

Hating trucks. I'll be saying that, you know, she should just write a book about that because probably lots of other people also hated trucks and could relate to it. So, I mean, on one hand, it's an allegory about war. But on another hand.

On the other hand, hating trucks is probably universal, and you could get with that. There's another book of hers that New York Review Books reprinted, which I did not read as a kid. It was probably out of print at the time I was growing up. And it's a picture book called The Elephant Who Liked to Smash Small Cars. And I read this to my kid because it was back in print by the time my kid was little.

And it is literally it is the title explains that it's about an elephant who likes to smash small cars. And that's the entire book. The elephant just goes around smashing small cars. And every time it smashes small cars, it sings a little song about it. And the song goes.

Smashing cars, smashing cars, how I love to smash small cars. So there's like, I don't know, there's an ongoing theme of like... antagonism toward motor vehicles in gene merrill's work but the i i really recommend the elephant who like to smash small cars if you have small children because they will love it um they love

They love kids, love vehicles and things being destroyed and animals misbehaving. And this book has everything. And then later they can get to the more sophisticated expression of these desires of the pushcart war. You're on to something there. There's plenty of clues that this is completely fabular. You know, the story begins with a florist, Morris the Florist, getting...

His pushcart crushed by a big truck and being thrown into a pickle barrel. And the only reason anyone knows that this was an... event that happened is because someone happened to be taking a picture of the pickle barrel and then when they didn't know what kind of a truck it was they they blew the picture up so so it was life-size and then measured the truck. That's how you would have to do it. There's no other way. I can't remember.

What reaction I had to the date of the dating of the book when I was a kid? I can't remember. I don't know what edition I read and what year the book was supposedly taking place when I read it as a kid in the 80s. I wish I did, but I don't.

Sadly, I can't go back in time to the Kleckner Elementary Library and find out what copy they had. As I mentioned, this is a story about a certain time in New York City. And it's interesting you point to... you'd point to Grinch Village because it feels very much of that era of of hipsters and beatniks.

And it is a book about kind of pushing back against modernity, but it's also a book about propaganda, about politics, about the ways in which people... try to shape narratives. And as all that, you know, reading it through right now, it seems bizarrely prescient of the modern time. That's right. And super sophisticated for kids. In some ways, it's a very radical book for kids. It's going to encourage them to be a bunch of skeptics.

I definitely, my politics are definitely influenced by the Pushcart War. I realized rereading it. And yeah, a lot of it, there's, you learn a lot about how politics works from this book. The very beginning is, well, the foreword is written by a character called Professor Lyman Cumbry, author of The Large Object Theory of History. And this is the character who comes up.

repeatedly throughout the book as a side character and he has created the theory of history um based on the idea that quote the only way to get where you wanted to go was to be so big that you didn't have to get out of the way for anybody And then the Pushcart war is a war against this world of people who are whose goal is to get so big that they don't have to get out of the way for anybody. And this is I mean, this feels very simple. This is a very simple sort of.

bullies against the little guys but yes we're now living in a time of people who are trying to become so big they don't have to follow any rules or get out of the way for anybody or acknowledge anyone else maybe that's the way the world always is but it feels extremely it feels extremely relevant

The book does have some characters who I would consider main characters, mostly the push heart king, Maxie Hammerman, who talks like. Jackie Mason, basically, through the whole thing. He's a he's, you know, very coded as first generation Jewish from some shtetl somewhere now in New York, plying his trade again. world that by this point is all by the time this book is written is already disappearing um but it's really a book that has dozens of characters some of whom are these

fantastic modern day, in quotes, characters looking back on and commenting on the war. There's... politicians who we get to see their their speeches there are captains of industry who are more like mob bosses who are trying to carve up the uh the the streets of new york into their own little oligarchy and um and then there's all the the push carts but um

But in the in the middle of everything, too, like at the end of the book, you know, when there's the letter writing campaign in that letter writing campaign, we also have the author of the book. And we have herself was involved in the pushcart war. We have the. The illustrator of the book talking about how nice it is to paint push carts and how trucks are ugly. That's right. So it's...

It's an ensemble book, too. You know, you don't follow a straight line through of the narrative so much as you take this sort of God's eye view of what's going on in New York in 1974. 2026, whenever you read the book? Yeah, it's a history. It's a history, but it's also... It's also very personal. It is definitely one of the books as a kid that made me want to live in New York City when I grew up. I was definitely a sucker for...

Books set in New York City set around this time period because it always looked, it always seemed so delightful. Like Harriet the Spy and from the mixed up files of Mrs. Baisley Frankweiler. Pretty much any book where you just like.

where you get to wander around this colorful, enormous city. It's almost like a Studs Terkel book. You just meet all of these colorful figures and they sort of... interacting, like getting to know them adds up to getting this larger picture of the city and also the conflict that they're up against.

It's a lot of, there's some, yeah, there's about a dozen different push cart vendors that you get to know. And most of them have some sort of, at least a significant role to play at some point in the story. And then there's... at least half a dozen major trucker characters. And then there are all these other figures in and out of the story. It's pretty great. I love them.

This book plays by Star Wars rules, which means that the good guys are all heterogeneous. People from all walks of life, all nations. The push card. uh, Push carts invite all comers, but the the truckers are kind of homogenous. They're kind of all presented as the same sort of brutish figure, except for one. There was there's one character who has a diary and he.

has the termidity to speak up in a meeting of the trucks saying, yeah, people have a point. Trucks are a pain and traffic is lousy. And then he gets fired. But he shows up again later in the book. That's part of what makes us feel so real to a kid when you read it. It feels like you've actually... followed these people and it ends with one of those chapters that talks about where everyone is now.

And that felt very real to me as a kid. One of the main characters is General Anna, this gentle motherly figure who runs a fruit. who becomes an important leader in the Pushcart War, who dies after the Pushcart War. And that's felt... Very real to me that there was, you know, I thought as a kid reading that I was very sad that General Anna had died. And but she gets a statue. So.

It's a very famous statue. No, General Anna is my favorite one, obviously. And she gets, yeah, she gets a statue with her motto on it. And it's obviously, it's a famous statue in New York City. Like, have you not seen the statue of General Anna? When you visited New York City or learned about in your history books. Yeah, no, it's the truckers are all all seem to be sort of tough talking white guys. And the.

While the. Push cart vendors are a. Yes, they're they're they're a diverse group in the ways of. mid-century fiction, which is to say that they're mostly different types of white ethnicities, although there are colorful white ethnicities. Although there is one like Hispanic pushcart guy, which is kind of... Actually, unusually progressive for the era. But yeah, there's like there's Jewish coded characters. There's Italian guys. Speaking of progressive, though.

This time I was reading it through. I was wondering, is Frank the flower supposed to be coded as gay, do you think? I wouldn't. I don't know if I'd go that far. But again, like she like again. Well, OK. I would not put it, I would not doubt it, partly because Gene Merrill was very progressive and partly because Gene Merrill was gay. Oh. Ronnie Salbert, the illustrator, was Gene Merrill's longtime partner.

And she illustrated a lot of books for her and they lived together for a long time. Wow. Well. I know. It's an amazing. It's the world of children's books is beautiful. But yeah, no, it's entirely possible. Again, they're living in Greenwich Village. She knows all sorts of types of people. Although she wasn't living in Greenwich Village at the time she broke this. She kind of moved all over the place.

I looked up a little bit about her when I was reading this because I was curious about it. She has a very eccentric writing history. She wrote some very interesting books. Her book, The Toothpaste Millionaire, is another book that's...

It's kind of interesting because it's sort of a pro-capitalist book, which is a little bit different from the Pushcart War, which is... a little which is kind of anti it's at least anti big business but the toothpaste millionaire is pro small business so it's got that going for but it's um it's progressive and then it's one of the few books from like

that period that has like a for kids that has like a black protagonist and it's not like really the central point of the book the kid just the main the protect the hero of the book just happens to be black and that was a book that my husband and i both read as kids and we like bonded over having read it when we were dating because it's about

It's about a kid who who starts a business selling homemade toothpaste. And that's that's pretty much it. He's a he's like this kid genius. And he hits on the idea of like making his own toothpaste, which is actually pretty easy. You can just make it from baking soda. But then it just goes. to all the details of how he starts his own business, testing out different flavors and making formulas. But it's a really good book, but it's also very different from The Pushcart War.

Except in his general interest and curiosity about how people make things and carry out jobs and dealing with colorful characters and their work, I suppose.

Anyway, Steve Merrill, interesting person. As I was flipping through my e-book version of here, I lit on the chapter, The Portlet Papers. Which I adored as a kid because this is this is one of these found. Pieces that the book is made up of. It was a woman who worked evenings as a custodian stopped to take shorthand outside the place where the.

Trucks are having their meeting and just happens to capture their nefarious plans for taking over the city, not by only pushing out the push carts, but then by pushing out the cars. And then he says, and the small trucks. And the small trucks, they could get that elephant. That made me gasp in a way because that felt extremely pertinent to the current political situation.

They're going to turn on everyone. Oh, yes. I mean, first of all, yes, that's a great section. I really like the detail that she gets some of the. details wrong in her transcription that makes it feel very realistic it's a very good piece of found documentation and yeah no that's a great section And it is also very accurate that they're eventually, the trucks are eventually going to turn on each other. The big trucks are already plotting against the small trucks.

There's a passage elsewhere in the book that I wrote down because it also felt relevant. Where the push carts are pointed. The push cart. People are having a meeting and they point out that, you know, scapegoating the push carts is pointless because like. It's not the push carts aren't actually causing traffic problems of the trucks of like.

caused, they fomented all this discontent against the pushcarts by claiming the pushcarts are causing traffic problems, when in fact, of course, the trucks themselves are causing most of the traffic problems. so it goes i don't understand says papa perez they could kill us all and the traffic would still be terrible so then they will have to find someone else to blame says maxi hammerman motorcycles maybe or grocery carts

And that's how they realized that, in fact, the yes, that's how scapegoating works. This is like teaching kids in a little, you know, very simply how scapegoating works and how people pick out, you know. How minority groups get picked out for blame and you don't want to join the chorus against them because you could be the next one and also because it's fundamentally wrong to do.

And also, eventually, the trucks are going to turn against the small trucks. I recently saw a video essay that was talking about the origins of the term jaywalking. They pointed out in the video that at the turn of the century, before there were cars, streets were... a public space where anything could go on. People were walking down streets. People were selling from their carts on streets. People were certainly.

pulling things on carts. But everything was so slow. If you were in New York, you never expected streets to be particularly easily passable, but it was easy enough to pass if you were walking or if you were drawing a small carriage. But when cars came along, the car manufacturers were upset about the fact that roads were so crowded because nobody would want to buy a car unless they could actually go faster. So it was car manufacturers that started.

campaign where they came up with this term jaywalking uh in the old days a jay was a uh like a country bumpkin was someone who was ignorant or stupid. It was called a J. And so they said, don't be a jaywalker. And that's where the phrase comes from. But it came from a concerted advertising campaign by. car manufacturers. Now, you know, this is an essay on the internet. I don't know if it's true or not, but in the spirit of this book, which is not true, but...

has two things to say. I thought it was an interesting anecdote. You know, I would believe that if it's true, because there is a long history of the... us being sort of reconfigured around mid-century around cars and becoming increasingly difficult to navigate by any other way and that's another thing going underneath the

surface of this book here. It's written around the time that that was happening and it deals with that sort of change from people walking around cities to people driving around cities. Although to this day, although actually to this day, you can't really drive around New York City very easily. So New York really did never did become a full.

Car and truck sort of city. Right. But even when like even when New York wants to have, you know, congestion pricing and stuff, people people get all bent out of shape about that. You know, I remember when I first moved to Boston, someone with. clipboard stopped me and asked me if I would sign a petition because they were going to be charging, I think it was a dollar to go over the bridge to the city.

And I said, I'm not going to sign that petition. I think people should go ahead and pay the dollar. And he goes, why? And I said, there's enough cars in Boston already. So anyway. And a lot of cities are trying now to find ways to reclaim space from cars, either by closing down places at certain times to have pedestrian thoroughfares or... reconfiguring the streets so that they take back some of them and make them into green spaces, you know.

It feels like everything's on hold right now with the world being as it is. But one hopes that in a few more years we can return to some of these approaches. Well, maybe the next edition of the push cart war, it will seem perfectly reasonable that, you know, there will be push carts around in the year 2046.

They will be food trucks. Other than that, it will be pretty much it is pretty much the same, though. It's not really that different at all. So it's just. But yeah, no, it's the book is set up as it's very carefully set up as a history of a war. And it's really.

It's very clever in the way it's arranged. The war seems very plausible, and it's also very carefully set up to teach the ideas about... about propaganda and war tactics and politics that Meryl wants to get across. It like starts out with... There's a traffic crisis that was caused by the trucks. So the trucks scapegoat the push carts and start blaming them. This leads to the secret campaign against the push carts and anti-push cart propaganda, which.

we've discussed and it turns out later that the trucks do not intend to stop with scapegoating the push carts. They're eventually going to scapegoat everyone, even leading to scapegoating the smaller trucks that eventually will be nothing but large trucks. Everywhere you see the city, which will obviously be a dystopian, a dystopian future in New York. This leads to the...

The push carts creating, they basically develop it. They sort of unionize. They develop solidarity. And they realize they need to work together. Again, this is all important lessons that we need to learn to fight against the man. They develop and they call up their first campaign, the P-Shooter campaign, which actually ends up being the main campaign against the trucks, which is that they all start shooting tacks into trucks' tires through P-Shooters.

I guess this is probably the main thing that anyone who reads this book remembers because it's sort of a beautiful image. I think it's sort of designed to appeal to children because children are... vicious little destructive people and would love to just bring down trucks by firing tacks at them. Initially, it's a push cart. The push cart vendors who are shooting tacks into the trucks and flattening the tires. And then people start getting wise. The cops arrest.

one of the vendors who takes the fall for them and claims he's the only one shooting tax, even though that's clearly impossible. And then children start shooting tax because, again, this is a very appealing thing to children. And then it just becomes impossible for the trucks to fight back. Which leads to.

The truck's next big pushback, which is to start attacking Maxi Hammer Man, the push cart king. Who builds all the push carts. We learn about the master plan to eliminate all the vehicles except big trucks. which is called Operation Crush Car.

There's a lot of good names for things. As you point out, there's like this whole vocabulary to this history that we learn about. There's all sorts of terminology. All the battles have names. There's slang that develops from the war that you're that you presumably know about because you live in this universe.

And you've heard it. There's a truce. It's not really a truce because the trucks are back to being in power. And this leads to a peace march in which all the. The push carts get together and take this take back the streets. And the trucks break the piece by rushing by running over push carts. It's this guy back. the meanest of the truck drivers who started the whole pushcart war by running over one of the pushcarts in the first place.

This is an important moment that is particularly relevant today and also particularly angering when you're reading this as a kid or even an adult because the mayor... is in the pocket of big truck this is an ongoing thing it's kind of an even thing because the mayor is in the pocket of big truck but the police commissioner is in with the push carts but which is in real life they would

both be working for the trucks i'm sorry to say but the um even though it was totally the trucks that were responsible for the violence and the peace march the may the the mayor And the truck propaganda demonized the trucks. And the mayor suspends the push cart licenses by saying the push carts were violent because a fire hydrant was destroyed. And how many times has this happened during one of the, when you've been out at a perfectly peaceful March and all of a sudden, you know,

Everybody gets rounded up and you get in trouble because like one window got broken or something. We've all been there. If we're like Antifa or something. Anyway, it's very upsetting. But. Unlike in real life where everybody just ends up in prison. There's a mass movement among the people to support the push carts. And then everybody writes letters to the newspaper about how much they love the push carts, including the actual author and artist of the book.

And this leads to a big battle where the people themselves rise up and throw fruit at the trucks. And after that, that forces a peace conference. Basically, it's a beautiful story about the socialism triumphing, when the people finally get tired of being oppressed by those in power and rising up to support the working man.

And that's, that's how I became, that's how I became an unreformed leftist because my elementary school had the pushcart war in its library. So what you're saying is Mothers for Liberty have a point here about these school books. Yeah, no, well, they didn't even, I'm sure my extremely... My extremely public school district had no idea what they were doing. They have no idea the danger in their midst. Bluffs. As I said last time, like.

The 21 balloons is all about how like if you get if everybody has like an infinite number of diamonds, they can set up like restaurant communism. So like it was nothing but different, different. Communist socialist models of government I was growing up on here. Well, if anything, this does show that. There's always been dissenters writing children's books, at least, and it's nothing new. There's a long and proud history of people writing.

these kinds of lefty books. Oh, there's tons of lefty books, especially this period. This is, I mean, there's a whole history going on here of like this being a period of publishers starting to take children's books seriously and seeking out like... more gifted writers and more intellectual writers and that does lead to like a lot of more politically lefty writers getting into the children's book field because there's a lot of intellectuals getting into the children's books around this time.

That's a whole other story. Yeah. Well, no, it's good to bring up because one of the things that one of the things that Gene Merrill. did was she was an editor for Scholastic Books, which was fairly new at the time. And as you mentioned, this was a time of... Great change in children's literature. I mentioned, I don't know, another... episode, maybe it was the one on Stuart Little. The post-war in New York publishing was largely led by this woman, Ursula Nordstrom, who was instrumental in...

in creating this sort of a new approach to children's books, which was no more moralizing, no more telling stories about English lords living gentrified lives. We were going to write books that were... that spoke to the interiority of childhood. And she had a great quote. She would say, she said, she advocated for good books for bad children. Yes. I mean, there were other really important editors at this time, but there's...

There's this category of thing where like, I think you could become beloved by being the only person who cares enough to be the best in a particular field. And Ursula Nordstrom is the best children's book editor. Nobody else cared enough to be the best children's book editor. Like everybody loves Jim Henson because nobody cared enough to be the very best puppeteer.

Like there's nobody else who even cares half that much. Everybody loves Weird Al Yankovic because nobody cared enough to be the best writer of parody pop songs. This is no competition. Nobody else cared enough. And he's the one. And that's Ursula Nordstrom is like the best children's book editor, but like a county mile. She's largely responsible for. Yeah, like where the wild things are existing and for Harriet the spy existing to the point that she essentially co-wrote them.

she did a lot of um yeah she's behind a lot of this stuff but yeah no it's an interesting period it's an interesting period of people like taking children's books seriously and wanting to make children's books that are art and that have something to say

I don't know. I don't know if kids are still reading this book. I mean, you bring up the fact that New York Review... books has just come out with a new edition of this book. I know it was briefly out of print because I had to track down a paperback copy of it when I was reading it to my kids, but that was... That was a while ago, maybe 20 years ago by now. But I don't know. You know, I hope kids are still reading this. This is this is one of those books that that.

People who know it adore it. And it comes from that same era of like... Cricket in Times Square type things. That's another book that made me want to live in New York City. Again, you know, I was I was in New York when I read that. My parents lived in New York from. 1969 to 1974. So, and I'll tell you, New York in 1974 was not what the Pushcart War was writing about either. That was already New York on the decline of the 70s.

It was a bit like Cricket and Times Square, though, in that there were lots of like vermin around. Yeah. Well, the other thing about all these books, like A Cricket in Tine Square or all the books by Don Freeman, who was best known for the Corduroy books, but he also wrote like The Mouse at the Met and things like that. and certainly Basil E. Frankweiler, is they...

They invite children into a heightened life, into a life of high culture that's accessible to kids. It's expected that you should be able to enjoy. art and enjoy fine dining and enjoy classical music. There's nothing on... expected about that. And in some ways that was, you know, I wish that we had more of that kind of democratic thinking towards these things today. Yeah. I was just reading an article in the New Yorker, which again is like about as.

snooty as you can be um in this discussion but like it was um we've been doing this 100th anniversary thing where they have different writers write about past articles and this was an article about um a book review of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, but the writer was pointing out that this was a very mid-century American attitude of...

that you could have intellectual and artistic things for the masses, like middlebrow and like the best possible sense. And Silent Spring was an example of this. It's like it's science, but. accessible to the masses and it's not written down to people, but it is accessible. And that's, that's all part of it. Yeah. So Ken, you know, John F. Kennedy like was inviting artists and scientists to have dinner at the White House. And I am.

Very sad thinking about how far that is from anyone who is being invited to the White House currently. I know I'm just going to cry now. But yeah, no, there's the children and this era of children's books ties into that, too. The Pushcart War is definitely not about like going to the Met or that end of. New York culture, but it is about a New York, another important part of New York culture. It's, you know, it's about, there's a great interest in craft culture in here.

There's a lot about how Maxi Hammerman is the push cart king because he builds the push carts for people. And he's he's the guy who knows how to build the push carts. And he has moved on to using he's advanced to using like. electric tools but he can still use hand tools for um general anna who likes hand tooled push carts there's another there's one push cart vendor who used to work for a circus painting

the circus sign. So he has a very elaborately painted push cart. And this is part of the culture that's being destroyed by the trucks taking over. The trucks are mass produced. push carts are crafted. And one of the things at the end of the book is among the letters to the editor is a little girl writing in that.

She heard that Maxie Hammerman is the pushcart king and wants to know why there isn't a pushcart queen. She wants to be the pushcart queen when she grows up. And then at the end, when it gets to the where are they now section, it mentions that this. This little girl actually did grow up to be the push cart queen and is now making push carts and learning the craft of push cart making. And there's this focus on.

Making things and craftsmanship and this craft tradition is another area of art and culture. the tie that this book ties into and it's not the high art it's not the high art of like going to the going to the met or the cricket in time square i suppose but um it's this other end of new york art and culture that is the writer's interested in preserving and showing off.

Well, I do like that. There is one highbrow thing in here, though, too, which is the Professor Lyman Cumberley and his his treaties are basically a parody of academic writing for kids. Reading it through as an adult, I'm struck by that because they're very funny. To me, as someone who works in a university, whose wife is a professor of philosophy, who's very familiar with academic publishing, that there's this.

Very dry send up of academic writing in this book. I don't know to what extent kids are going to get that or care about that. But, you know, I do think some of that like stuck in the back of my brain somewhere. Yeah, it's like a highbrow coverage of lowbrow material. It's an advanced history of this like street war, which I love it. This book is so genius. I'm sorry. This book is brilliant. But yeah, I know. I loved it as a kid, though. I was fascinated by all of the...

you know, found documentation, pseudo history elements of this. And I think I liked any book that had like the pseudo realism to it. So I mean, I liked it as a kid. I don't know. Why? I don't know why I was into this sort of thing, but I always am. I've always been interested in like fake reality. You know, that's the interesting thing about that. You know, and I'm going to hear I'm going to get all highbrow is that the novel started.

That way with like the the the earliest novels, things like Robinson Crusoe, Maul Flanders, Pamela, they all went out of their way to create this fake. framing story about how the manuscript for this novel was found or like, or that it's a series of letters between these people. It's like, it's, and, and that was really, um, That really continued on into sort of the middle of the 19th century. And then it sort of got dropped. And I think that in more recent times, a lot of, a lot of.

Postmodern writers are picking that up again, this idea of the book that you're holding your hand exists. in a magical, in another universe that goes beyond the book. You know, it's enclosed in the book. This reality is described in the book, but the conceit is that this book is only one artifact from this place.

Yes. Yeah, I imagine that early on novels did that to give some level of, or at least a lot of them did that to give some level of authenticity to the work since it was kind of a lowbrow, considered a lowbrow art form. You know, so you aren't just hearing some made up story. You're hearing about this thing that actually happened to Pamela that is very real. Serving maid really was kidnapped.

by her employer's asshole son and just locked up in a house for like once on end. And he'd show up about once a month and threatened to rape her and then not do it and then go away and then come back and do it again. And then eventually married her and they lived happily ever after. This is extremely real. And also the most romantic story anyone's ever heard. You know, Henry Fielding, who wrote Tom Jones, wrote a parody of Pamela. It was called Shyamala. Great parody title. It's anyway.

Yeah, I had to read Pamela in college. Right. Well, this is not a Augustan literature podcast. This is sophomore lit. So anything you want to do? It's not college. Yeah, it's not college. It's not senior lit. It's sophomore lit.

So any last thoughts you have about the Pushcart War? I just love this book. This book is great. I'm glad the New York Review Books has brought it back. Anytime a book that I'm familiar with comes back from New York, like comes out. from New York Review books, I wonder if like

how forgotten it's been. I always I'm always curious about how they find books. So I don't know if it was completely forgotten or if it just dropped out of print and they decided to pick it up. But I'm glad it's available and that people can read it. I hope they do. I think it's it's a great book for turning you into a radical leftist at an early age, which I always support. It's.

Very fun to read. It's very charming. It's very funny and clever. The illustrations are super cute. Ronnie Starbort draws great pictures of just impossibly large trucks. Also, great drawings are just push carts and all the things in the push carts. It's lots of like the kind of detail that that kids like to look at in books. It's a great book. I love this book. It makes me very happy to read it again. I was very happy to read it again. I was not at all disappointed coming back to it.

Thanks again to guest host Shannon Garrity. If you have an idea for a book, a story, a poem, or anything else to cover on a future episode, or if you have a suggestion for a guest host, Or if you'd just like to say hi, you can write me at sophomore.literature at gmail.com. You can also keep up with me at my blog, Pathetic Fallacy, at johnmccory.org.

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