Getting serious about genre

I don't think there's any question that kids aren't sent out to play with the same kind of freedom anymore, at least not where I live. I would say, "Bye, Mom," and I'd be gone all day long. It felt like such a porous boundary, between my physical world, in which I enacted my imaginary games, and the world I was reading about in the books I loved. They fed each other. What happens when you take out one huge part of that -- what happens to kids' imaginations?

And when you talk about crossing boundaries, seamlessly flipping from the imaginary to the real and back again, that's what I'm looking at with the writers I love.

In some ways the traditional highbrow argument can seem rather silly: "If we don't privilege and protect certain kind of work, it'll all be 'American Idol' all the time." That the forces of commercial culture will swamp all the good stuff.

Unquestionably -- it's not just futile, it's ultimately destructive to try to fence things in that way. Robert Frost said, "Something there is that does not love a wall."

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scott.timberg@latimes.com