Speaking of Young Adult "problem novels"...

Laura Miller on Why Teachers Love Depressing Books (NYT; registration probably required).

Only a reader as attuned to realism as [Barbara] Feinberg [author of ''Welcome to Lizard Motel: Children, Stories, and the Mystery of Making Things Up''] could have puzzled out so nuanced a defense of imagination in children's lives. She sees the memoirlike problem novels as symptoms of ''the drastic fall from grace that the imagination has suffered in popular understanding'' and her generation's insistence on ''making our children wake from the dream of their childhoods.'' Adults, she suspects, secretly resent the sheltered, enchanted world children inhabit and under the pretext of preparing them for life's inevitable difficulties, want to rub their noses in traumas they may never actually experience and often aren't yet able to comprehend. All the better to turn them into miniature grown-ups, little troupers girded to face a world where they have no one to count on but themselves.

Miller mentions The Phantom Tollboth as an example of the other kind of book, the kind Feinberg's son actually wants to read. The thing that has always amazed me about The Phantom Tollboth specifically is that it manages to be so entertaining even though it's quite explicitly a didactic allegorical novel, a type that is usually a drag.

Dmitri Stostakovich and Danny Elfman

You know, listening to this right after some of Danny Elfman's movie themes made me think, "Hey, Shostakovich and Elfman really have a lot in common. Is there some actual influence there?" Yes.

"The composers I loved growing up were Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Ravel, and Bartok. My knowledge of classical music is very much limited to these composers."

I guess I'm getting OK at this music appreciation stuff.

And now, some baldfaced political advocacy

You say you don't have any good reasons to vote for John Kerry, as opposed to just voting against George W. Bush?

Well, for one, there's BCCI. At the time I remember thinking this was an incredibly murky and difficult-to-follow story, maybe vaguely connected to the Iran-contra scandal. The gist of it, though, is that there was a bank with an explicitly anti-Western agenda that was money-laundering for terrorists, drug runners and tyrants the world over; and, against heavy opposition, Kerry led the 1989-1991 investigation that busted it wide open. We're better at fighting terrorist organizations because of it, and they would have been incalculably better off had it not happened.

Actually, I find it odd that this isn't a centerpiece of Kerry's campaign. It's pretty much his greatest achievement as a senator, in my opinion, and especially relevant to today's world. His strategists may figure that the details of dismantling a criminal financial web don't make a good story, or sound wimpy when compared to fighting two wars. But, really, operations like the BCCI investigation are crucial to the sort of next-generation "netwar" that everyone was talking about in late 2001 as the right way to fight decentralized, often stateless terrorist organizations. You find their sources of money and shut them down.