Genre is in the Eye of the Beholder

I started writing this long post on genre and its utility (and harm) in contemporary publishing but all I was doing was complaining and not actually coming up with any solutions, even vague ones, so I think I need to ponder that topic some more before I commit to a whole ass post on it.

Instead, I am going to give a very clear example of why genre classifications are as much determined by the audience as they are by the creator.

As with many preschoolers in the late 70’s (yes, I am Gen X), I watched a lot of Sesame Street growing up. This was not only pre-streaming, but before it was common for households to even have a VCR. You watched the episode that happened to be on, and god forbid you leave the room for any reason, because then your mother would wander by, comment on the waste of electricity, and shut the TV off before you returned, meaning no more Sesame Street for you that day.

This is why I was regularly tortured by the Milk Video.

You may recall that back then, interspersed among the scenes of Big Bird once again failing to get anyone to believe Snuffalupagus was real or Ernie making Bert chocolate ice cream that was actually a mushed up banana with an ice cube and chocolate syrup, there were various animated and live action videos. There was the girl who walked to the store on her own to purchase “a loaf of bread, a container of milk, and a stick of butter.” There was the child who brought her llama to the dentist. There was the ladybug picnic.

And there was the Milk Video.

Please watch along at home.

It starts out as a bucolic winter scene on a dairy farm. A farmer calls his cows into the milking parlor, strips a teat in a shallow pan, and offers it to some happy barn cats. This is a Real Working Small Farm – the cows are dirty, the floors and walls are rough, there’s mud everywhere. It’s much like ones you see across New England, and that I used to visit when in vet school. The music is pleasant, an electric organ, I think, and an oboe. A woman’s voice soothingly sings. “Milk, milk, milk.” Some other woodwinds and a flute join in.

This is where Preschooler Katie would start to tense.

The farmer finishes the milking process. He hooks up the milking machine to a cow, fills a pail with what he collects, and pours it into a tank. Then, suddenly, we switch to a baby in a crib. She has an empty bottle with her.

The woman who once sang in a soothing tone now screeches, banshee-like:

“MILK!”

The baby starts to cry.

At this point, we cut to a man running out of his house into a milk truck. Adult Katie understands that this man is probably just late for work, and his pace has nothing to do with the baby in the crib.

Preschooler Katie was 100% convinced that the milk truck man was the baby’s father who has just realized he is completely out of milk, and has abandoned his child in his quest to get her nourishment.

The music now picks up in tempo. The oboe gets more urgent. We get the addition of an increasingly frantic piano. The milk truck man drives down the road in his milk truck at speed as the woman continues to scream “MILK!” over and over.

We get a brief reprieve when the milk truck man makes it to the farm and hooks up his tank to the farmer’s, collecting his lactose load accompanied by calmer music. He jumps back in the truck and pulls out of the farm in a hurry. We see him barreling down a snow-covered country road. The music is becoming frantic again. Is the milk truck man about to get t-boned? Drive into a tree? Who can say.

Cut back to the baby. She continues to cry, alone.

The milk truck man flies into the dairy processing plant. He is running again. He is always running. He hooks up his truck again, this time to the processing plant’s machinery. His mission is accomplished. He will not disappoint his child this day.

The music calms. We watch glass bottles fill.

We cut to a cabinet? These people keep their milk in a fucking cabinet? Anyway, a pair of hands (We never see who is attached to them. I assume now it is some unnamed, uncredited mother – typical! – but surely Preschooler Katie thought it was milk truck man.) fills a bottle and hands it to the child.

Her desperate hunger is finally sated.

She laughs and snots all over the bottle, because children are kinda gross.

Anyway, I’m sure some long ago Sesame Street producer thought this would be a fun way to teach kids how milk got from the cow to your house. I’m sure it did not occur to them that at least one small girl growing up in western Massachusetts would be terrorized by the thought of this child being hungry and uncomforted in her crib, with no adults in sight.

One person’s mini-documentary is another person’s horror story, is what I’m saying.

Something I’m reading:

I haven’t read any “books written before I was born” lately, and I found a copy of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth at our local library book sale, so I’m finally tackling it. It’s quite readable, actually, but rather dense. This is not a book to be blown through quickly but rather to be savored. I’ll probably continue to read it here and there, and intersperse with some less challenging contemporary reads, but wow did Wharton sure have a lot of disdain for her peers. There’s a passage where the protagonist, Lily Bart, just rips every one of her dinner companions to shreds, in the most emotionless way possible. A particular favorite: “Carry Fisher, with her shoulders, her eyes, her divorces, her general air of embodying a ‘spicy paragraph’” I don’t know what it means to embody a spicy paragraph, but I know it ain’t good.

My work in the wild:

Today I promote a podcast! One my friend and fellow writer Ash Huang decided to launch, Thanks But Not For Me is currently a limited series, but if people enjoy us going on in a sometimes unhinged way about writing and publishing, we are open to recording more seasons in the future! Give it a listen here, or on Apple Podcasts or , and probably other places but I’m not the tech person in this outfit.

Thank you for reading! You can always find links to my work here on my website. If you have any questions/thoughts on what I’m writing/reading/watching or there are topics you’d like to see me cover, leave a comment or drop me a line here!

💕 Katie