what kate reads

what to read in 2012

2011-12-31T10:21:00.001-06:00

The best books of 2011 of course! It's a great time of year to place hold requests, add things to to-read lists, and generally revel in the book awards spectacular. Of course, BCCB Blue Ribbons and Newbery/Caldcott/Printz/CorettaScottKing/Notables/etc. aren't out yet, but some of the big lists are already available:

Horn Book Fanfare

SLJ's Best Books of 2011

So far, from the above two lists, I've added these novels to my to-read list: Chime by Billingsley (who is an accomplished author), Dead End in Norvelt (I love Jack Gantos' work!), and new sci-fi Glow by Ryan. I'm also very excited to see picture books Heart and Soul, Spirals in Nature, and Press Here.

SLJ's list includes a section I'll be perusing heavily for my own reading, the Best Adult Books 4 Teens, and of these I'm especially interested in:

Ready Player One (sounds surreal),
The Language of Flowers (fiction about foster children),
The Magician King (fantasy),
The Night Circus (getting attention on other adult lists),
Swamplandia! (set in FL, humor),
and Robopocalypse (mostly for B).

Amazon's best and bestseller lists which I like to peruse for comparative purposes. Did the literature and youth services experts converge upon the same things as the customer stats from Amazon? Always fun to speculate why or why not, of course.

all the Tiffany Aching books

2011-12-28T15:30:00.001-06:00

I promised myself some real fantasy escape time this holiday season, and I got it with the help of Terry Pratchett and his 4-book series that starts with The Wee Free Men. Tiffany Aching is our heroine who becomes the witch of the chalk after a series of adventures that have her defeat enemies ranging from the fairy queen to winter himself. Her last battle is with with a long dead sorcerer whose hatred for witches seethes out in vile stench across the ages. Pratchett is at his best when he's most inventive, and pairing of the peculiarly verbally intelligent Tiffany Aching with her hilarious little blue defenders, the Nac Mac Feegle--whose curses are as blue as their tattoos--is highly inventive and leavened with humor throughout. Don't tell the Feegles they're hilarious, though, or they're liable to drink and fight you to death. Although they're easily defeated by the Pursing of the Lips and the Tapping of the Feet, at least if you're their kelda.

Personally, I find that Pratchett is less successful when he falls back on Discworld tropes, encouraging insider-y jokes rather than inventing anew. That's part of why my favorite book remains Nation, where he starts entirely from scratch. But these Tiffany Aching books are darn good too. Rather than give full-forced recaps, mustering up the energy for which would surely put a damper on my holiday relaxation, here are my favorite quotable moments from each title (in series order):

The Wee Free Men
--Tiffany Aching: "Yes, I'm me! I am careful and logical and I look up things I don't understand! When I hear people use the wrong words, I get edgy! I am good with cheese. I read books fast! I think! And I always have a piece of string! That's the kind of person I am!" (p. 217)
--Tiffany Aching, speaking to the Fairy Queen: "The secret is to wake up. Waking up is harder. I have woken up and I am real. I know where I come from and I know where I'm going. You cannot fool me anymore. Or touch me. Or anything that is mine." (p. 240)

A Hat Full of Sky
--The hiver: "What power! What wondrous power! You can take a billion trillion tons of flaming matters, a furnace of unimaginable strength, and turn it into a little song for children! You build little worlds, little stories, little shells around your minds, and that keeps infinity at bay and allows you to wake up in the morning without screaming!" (238)
--The teacher has been a little bit crazy, even for a teacher, but what he'd said had seemed to make absolute sense. One of the most amazing things about the universe, he had said, was that, sooner or later, everything is made of everything else, although it'll probably take millions and millions of years for this to happen. The other children had giggled or argued, but Tiffany knew that what had once been tiny living creatures was not the chalk of the hills. Everything went around, even stars. (243)

Wintersmith
--Nanny Ogg changed the way people thought, even if it was only fro a few minutes. Shel left people thinking they were slightly better people. They weren't, but as Nanny said, it gave them something to live up to. (p. 215)
--About jealousy, Lucy explaining Annagramma to Tiffany:
"You can do stuff she can't even attempt! Like that thing where you go invisible... you do it and you make it look easy! But you come along to the meetings and act like the rest of us and help clear up afterward, and that drives her mad!"
"Look, I don't understand what you're going on about."
Lucy picked up another towel. "She can't stand the ideal that someone's better than her but doesn't crow about it."
"Why should I do that?" said Tiffany, bewildered.
"Because that's what she'd do, if she was you," said Lucy carefully, pushing the knife and fork back into her piled-up hair. "She thinks you're laughing at her. And now, oh my word, she's got to depend on you. You might as well have pushed pins up her nose." (p. 224)
--There are times when everything that you can do has been done and there's nothing for it now but to curl up and wait for the thunder to die down. (p. 310)

I Shall Wear Midnight
--There's always something, she thought, and then there's another something on top of the something, and then there is no end to the somethings. (p. 93)
--About taking away grief: "I'm sorry," she replied quietly. "Everyone asks me. And I would no do so even if I knew how. It belongs to you. Only time and tears take away grief; that is what they are for." (p. 187)
--Granny Weatherwax on pride: "If you have let pride get the better of you, then you have already lost, but if you grab pride by the scruff of the neck and ride it like a stallion, then you may have already won." (p. 311)

race and fandoms

2011-12-07T14:56:00.001-06:00

http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/392/252

This is an editorial, and so of course hard to read out of context, but you get a good intro to article in this issue as well as a broad swath of a lot of cultural studies theory that is just now being productively mobilized to get at issues of race in fantasy media contexts. There are some gaps; you get a sense that "Racefail '09" involved a lot of people, but it's hard to tell exactly what motivated them or what they did; then again, cultural events that are an "imbroglio" is by definition tough to do. Still the cases of whitewashing are interesting specifics to visit, and the range from Avatar the Last Airbender to World of Warcraft makes this a fine touchstone piece.

JM, thanks for the heads up!

when I'm not reading, I notice that it's fall

2011-11-21T11:14:00.001-06:00

I started taking pictures on trips and of special events, as people do, but then awhile back noticed that I could create desktop art for myself from my walks and adventures. Here's some of what I found outside yesterday at my house, just me and my camera:

The one of pine needles shows where the squirrels are stashing stuff for winter. It takes a lot to get through winter, and it's certainly a perennial midwestern metaphor.

national book award

2011-11-20T11:01:00.001-06:00

Loving the diversity of this honored group of authors!

http://www.nationalbook.org/

I've just requested Inside Out and Back Again by Lai, the young people's winner, from the library. That plus a few recent YA novel to come.

a handful of young adult novels

2011-11-20T09:10:00.001-06:00

The Future of Us by Jay Asher and Carolyn Mackler

It's 1996, and when Emma gets a computer, something weird happens. Within her AOL account she finds a strange place called Facebook. In it, there's a page showing that she is fifteen years older and in trouble. So, along with her neighbor and lifelong friend Josh, she starts to change the future, to write a better ending for herself. And things really begin to change. She and Josh have been estranged ever since he tried to kiss her a few months back, and of course that changes dramatically. Josh is perfectly happy with his future, but when Emma changes hers it impacts his as well and causes renewed tensions in their relationship. Somehow, Asher and Mackler manage to stay on the relatively light side of how decisions today impact one's fate tomorrow, and it makes for a fun and engaging read.

Although marketed to young adults, this is a book best suited for my generation, for people who came of age in the 90s or so and and are in their 30s now-ish, who will get the AOL and scrunchie jokes. (I got this one as a galley, so it may not be released yet.)

Fire by Kristin Cashore

I thought Graceling was a feminist novel, but Fire takes it to the next level, engaging directly with the female experience of being looked at and insatiably hungered for without regard to one's inner being. Fire is the name of the only human monster known in a world where there are monsters of every species. Monsters are visibly different from others of their kind. Fire is marked by the radiantly bright colors of her hair, which she must keep covered to keep from being devoured by other monster creatures, who crave monster flesh like nothing else. As a human, however, other humans are quick to spot her even if her hair is covered, and since she's the only daughter of Cansrel who was notorious for debauchery and cruelty, she is exposed almost everywhere she goes. In addition to mesmerizing physical beauty, monsters also have the ability to control minds, and although Fire shies away from this ability after seeing her own father exploit others endlessly, she is treated with suspicion everywhere she goes. And she goes many places, after a mysterious archer attempts to kill her, and the attempt to solve this mystery sweeps her into kingdom-wide politics. Recommended without reservations, even if you don't get the feminist metaphors. It's a fantastic fantasy story and quite adult.

Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai

Lai just won the children's national book award with this free-verse novel about life in Vietnam, fleeing from the Vietnam civil war, and landing in Alabama where she is teased, ostracized, and feels "stupid." She's not, though, and she fights her way through learning English with all its absurdities. The most poignant part (spoiler) is when her family finally lets go of the hope that her father, missing these 9 years in war, will come back to them alive. This is a brief but beautiful book detailing the life of a Vietnamese family who is displaced suddenly through the eyes of sensitive protagonist Ha.

Life as We Knew It by Susan Beth Pfeffer

This starts as realistic fiction, but then becomes a dystopian novel. When as asteroid of unprecedented size hits the moon, the immediate effects are dramatic: part of the moon is knocked off, the moon is closer to earth, and the tides are out of whack. Miranda lives in rural Pennsylvania, so she is emotionally rather than physically affected by the loss of huge chunks of both the east and west coasts. Masses of people are dying, and Miranda is slow to understand how it impacts her. At first, summer goes on as usual. But then the infrastructure of power breaks down. As it gets colder, heat breaks down, although fortunately they have a woodstove. Miranda's mother thought to stock up on food, but even that becomes scarce. This is a well-told what-if story that would be eye-opening to young Americans who have never stopped to think about how fortunate, protected, and deeply vulnerable they really are.

explicit instruction in the culture of power

2011-11-11T14:18:00.001-06:00

Professor Emeritus Chip Bruce wrote/compilled the following graduate student survival guide awhile back, in 2008, but it's relevant again thanks to another engaging discussion at the Reading Around Race group today (Thanks to Sharon Irish for pointing Chip's blog post out to me!):

http://chipbruce.wordpress.com/teaching/graduate-student-survival/

The discussion centered around two articles that I selected as early works of two major scholars on race and education, Lisa Delpit and Beverly Daniels Tatum. Delpit in particular pointed out in her 1988 article in the Harvard Educational Review that there's a real need for direct instruction in how to engage with academic institutions as a student and attain the highest levels of success. As she put it: "If you are not already a participant in the culture of power, being told explicitly the rules of that culture makes acquiring power easier." When issues of race are at hand, it's worth remembering that students deserve direct instruction in how to gain power.

Delpit, Lisa.  "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children." Harvard Educational Review 53:3, August 1988.

The other article dealt explicitly with how to deal with varying levels of fluency with or development in talking about and/or dealing respectfully with race as a concept. Being able to speak respectfully came up as key for all of us who are instructors, for ourselves and perhaps even moreso for our students. Our students of color have been silenced over and over again. But just wanting one's classroom not to be a place where that happens again is simply not enough.

Tatum, Beverly Daniel.  "Talking About Race, Learning About Racism: The Application of Racial Identity Development Theory in the Classroom." Harvard Educational Review 62:1, Spring 1992.

My favorite Tatum quote was from the last paragraph:

"It has become painfully clear on many college campuses across the United States that we cannot have successfully multiracial campuses without talking about race and learning about racism. Providing a forum where this discussion can take place safely over a semester, a time period that allows personal and group development to unfold in ways that day-long or weekend programs do not, may be among the most proactive learning opportunities an institution can provide."

That was back in 1992. I was in college then, trying to figure out why my study of feminist theory had to be an independent study and why so few women of color were represented in any of our assigned readings. Looking back, I wondered at the time why, in my philosophy of science class, the one woman that we read--and whose critical work made immediate sense to me, unlike the rest of our readings--was the subject of critique by the professor. Now, here in 2011 (almost 2012!) it is perhaps as hard as ever, or maybe hard, to talk about race, gender, and class. As one of our reading group participants pointed out, the retreat from multiculturalism at the K-12 level in favor of standardized testing means that some of our students are coming up to graduate level education without having had any meaningful conversations about race.

So. We start where we are, and dig in.

The First R

2011-11-09T10:47:00.001-06:00

The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism by Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Feagin

Ausdale and Feagin together do a nuanced job of analyzing interactions among young children related to racial identity, showing that children as young as three years old see how racism operates in their worlds. They show how these children learn to avoid the topic of race around adults, just as adult avoid the topic around them. And yet young children are willing and able to engage in discussions of race among themselves, as long as they are outside of the earshot of adult authorities. They find that white children will be insistent about regulating how black children define themselves, looking at an example of an African-American girl who chose to represent her skin color with both brown and pink paint, which was met with vocal protest from several White girls. The African-American girl, however, was painting an image of both sides of her hands, and so defied the typical self-representation system of skin color by taking a more detailed approach to representing herself (pgs 58-62). That is just a snippet of this book that will be of great interest to anyone hoping to theorize preschool social behavior.

Two recent blog posts from Coloring Between the Lines related to this:

http://coloringbetween.blogspot.com/2011/10/they-didnt-get-that-from-me.html
and
http://coloringbetween.blogspot.com/2011/10/but-then-again-they-can-get-it-from-us.html

CCB Brownbag Recap: Fantasy and Race

2011-11-07T14:04:00.002-06:00

On Thursday 11/3, I gave a Brown Bag presentation on Fantasy and Race. This interest stems from at least two directions. One of those is the relative lack of authors of color writing fantasy literature for youth as well as character of color represented as more than tokens in fantasy and sci fi. A big shout-out is in order here to the ways that former students have called that syllabus out for these big gaps.

So I used the word "represented" above, and it the idea of "representation" that was key to my talk yesterday. I take it as a given that youth advocates, librarians among them, want youth to know that they belong in all things literature, literacy, and library-related. One way to assure this is to be sure that racially and ethnically diverse authors and characters are represented in library collections and if you're reading my blog at all you probably ascribe this notion as a fundamentally good idea in library services. Of course there are limits of the publishing world as well as of what authors write in the first place.

But, when we're talking about fantasy, the idea of representing race takes on two intersecting dimensions. The first is, as discussed above, representing real people in fantasy books, racial and ethnic groups that constitute lived identities, whether chosen or foisted upon us. Renowned authors writing this type of representation of African American people are Octavia Butler (for adults), Virginia Hamilton (for children and young adults) and some works by Julius Lester (mostly for children).

The other kind of representation of race is the representation of imagined races that may or may not correlate to any lived human identities. So good old J. R. Tolkein comes to mind, representing hobbits, dwarves, elves, and humans working together. Although orcs and trolls are another story. At any rate, in that kind of case, and there are many examples in children's literature of animal fantasies that work this way, race operates as an imagined aspect of a world. Part of the narrator's world-building work is to make it clear what is going on between and among groups of people defined by characteristics that, basically, add up to various fantasy versions of what operates in our society as "race." (Though that, too is a kind of fantasy, but one backed up by the U. S. Census, among other things).

At my talk yesterday, I tried to give some sense of the books I was presenting in terms of how they represent. The two categories are not entirely distinct, and in some cases they overlap in ways that trouble the distinction itself. That's okay with me, but just a heads up to readers that I know this isn't an iron clad binary. But I do think it gets at some of what is complex about thinking about fantasy and race in the first place. So now you enter the book-talk-like part of this blog entry, although I can't really recreate the face-to-face booktalking without making this waaaay too long. So I'm going to be brief, and just give the salient aspects of each title in relation to representations of real or imaginary racial identities.

Books Representing Real People in Imagined Situations

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
Skeleton Man by Joseph Bruchac
The House of Dies Drear by Virginia Hamilton
Time's Memory by Julius Lester
The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm by Nancy Farmer
Magic or Madness by Justine Larbalestier

That's the quick list. Now I'll do a little title-by-title description of who is represented and how...

Akata Witch: Perhaps the most inventive of the real people representations. Set in Nigeria, the four children who come together to learn magic and fight evil are, respectively: Orlu, an African boy; Chichi, an African girl; central protagonist Sunny, an Albino African girl who has lived in the United States until recently; and Sasha, an African-American boy who has been sent over to Nigeria to clean up his act. Sunny's emotional journey is central here, and part of that journey is her frustration over how she is treated because of her lack of pigmentation. She knows she is African, but she is constantly teased by other kids for being "white." This is probably the most complex representation of race as a lived experience and as a range of social constructs that I've yet seen in a book of fantasy or science fiction for young people.

Skeleton Man: The main character is a contemporary Native American girl, whose father comes from the Mohawk Reserve of Akwesasne, and the story of the "skeleton monster" features heavily in the themes of the book. Spooky events ensue.

The House of Dies Drear: The main character is a contemporary African-American boy whose family has just moved to Ohio to an old and mysterious house that was once a major stop on the Underground Railroad. Creepy events ensue, with both supernatural and everyday social conflicts.

Time's Memory: I keep describing this as Beloved for 5th Graders. It's really for high school and up. Lester starts from a disaffected slave ship captain's perspective, moves to an African woman that he rescues, and then follows the journeys of an African spirit who has come over to America in her belly to try to heal the wounds that slavery is creating. Beautifully written, if requiring suspension of disbelief at a higher level than most YA books.

The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm: Unlike the above authors who represent groups of which they are part, Farmer is white. She lived in Africa and did do solid research for this futuristic Zimbabwe depiction, complete with privileged children who move outside of their comfort zone and are almost trapped in a village that tries to recreate the past. At the talk, I described my complex sense of the importance of paying attention to who writes what by asking *how* they come to know what they write about. I can't champion only representative authors writing about whole imagined futuristic countries any more than I can defend anybody writing about just anything. Each situation deserves careful examination for how the author came by the cultural knowledge they represent in their fiction.

Magic or Madness: This one is possibly the most problematic of the bunch, but an interesting problem. Reason's father is characterized only by his absence and his Australian Aboriginal origins. Reason's biracial identity is not deeply developed, and the significance of her father's ancestry is, in great part, that it is from outside her mother's family's realm of magical control. Reason's "otherness" becomes vital when she learns that her mother's family is magic, but in a way that can lead to madness, and provides symbolic hope that she may escape the family curse. This race-as-other trope appears in lots of cheesy ways in fiction for young people, and while this is less cheesy than some I've seen, it's still worth thinking about critically.

Books Representing Imagined Races (that may function as metaphors for real people or the power relations they inhabit)

Watersmeet by Ellen Jensen Abbott
Black & White (previously published as Naughts and Crosses) by Malorie Blackman
City of Fire by Laurence Yep
Dust City by Robert Weston
Voices by Ursula Le Guin

Watersmeet: this has become my favorite of the imagined-race-society books, simply because it tackles both human skin-color-based racism *and* races of dwarves and centaurs too. Abisina's mother is a healer in a Vranian village, Vranians being obsessed with light skin and light eyes. Abisina herself is biracial, and has only survived to her teens because of her mother's local power and outsider nature as a healer. When racial violence comes to the village yet again, Abisina barely escapes. She is grudgingly rescued by a Dwarf, who hates humans generally but listens to his grandmother's more accepting views. They travel together to Watersmeet, where Abisina finds that her darker-skinned father is a leader of this place where the barriers between all the races have been overcome and led to a place of refuge and peace. However, Abisina, who was attacked by Centaurs on her journey, is utterly overcome by the idea that Centaurs roam free here, and has to overcome internalized racism. Especially when her father turns out to be a Centaur in disguise. This book may be overly simplistic in its good-versus-evil battle at the end, but the emotional world that Abisina inhabits is convincing.

Black and White: Imagine a world in which black-skinned people ruled over white-skinned slaves for hundreds of years, and the white-skinned people are only now beginning to achieve the right to schooling. This is the world in which wealthy black-skinned Sephy falls in love with white-skinned Callum, the son of her family's maid. This simple reversal does amazing things in making the reader have to rethink again and again the tropes of racism in our contemporary society. It's an effective reversal for disrupting the usual metaphors that operate around "black" and "white."

City of Fire: Main character Scirye comes from "an area where many cultures and people had mingled," and her ancestry is defined by a tradition of fierce women warriors, one of whom Scirye is in training to become. Yep sets this in a steam-punk-like imagined 1941, and dragons and other mythical creatures appear throughout the story, making references to Norse, Hawaiian, and other mythologies. Although he borrows from real people, Yep is creating a fusion fantasy that draws from too many different traditions to map into any one group of real people.

Dust City: The characters here are wolves, foxes, ravens, and hominids, and it hasn't escaped the notice of the animalia that the hominids always have all the good luck. Henry is a wolf, the son of the famous Big Bad Wolf, and his life in the Home for Wayward Wolves is really little better than being in prison. When he begins to investigate the real story behind his father's arrest, he stumbles across a murder victim, and flees rather than stay and explain that he didn't do it. When he does, he runs into the city's seamy underbelly of Dust dealers, and slowly uncovers the truth about fairydust. This is a lot darker than initial perusal might suggest, with plenty of gore and violence and even one tragic genocide at the frightening resolution of the many mysteries introduced here. Being a "wolf" operates as a loose but compelling metaphor for race, and in particular for the kinds of prejudices and judicial-and-prison system injustices faced by generations of African-American young men in the United States.

Voices: One culture has conquered another, and now the dark-skinned Alds rule over the city of Ansul. Memer is the product of both, as the child of a previous wave of conquering Alds and her own Ansul mother, making her visibly bi-racial in a world defined by tensions between these two imagined races.

The discussion afterwards was great and wide-ranging, as we talked further about the complexities of representation, including the fact that young people struggling with racism in their lives may not want to read about it in their fantasies. Then again, maybe they will. The way that fantasy represents real and imagined races to young readers is certainly an area and an issue that is ripe for more debate, and I can only hope that these descriptions of books are thought provoking and, perhaps, reading-provoking.

this sure looks interesting...

2011-11-07T13:04:00.000-06:00

http://youngstorytellers.com/

reading in the thick of race

2011-10-28T15:29:00.001-06:00

Our reading group, which I help to facilitative every other Friday, is called Reading Around Race. The "around" here means mobility as opposed to stasis. But, really, we don't go around any of it, we go through it all, as together as we can be given our different positions in society, life paths, and roles within the university that brings us together.

This week, we read Honma's article "Trippin' Over the Color Line," which is a resounding critique of LIS as a discipline that doesn't acknowledge its own whiteness. While I can pick at his conflation the academic side of LIS with the ALA (that demonstrate to me that his knowledge of the field is partial, though he is as well-informed critic as any field might hope to have), basically, his argument that silence around whiteness causes trouble in library and information science education and professional work is sound. I think of the hundreds of local projects that contradict the overall characterization made here, but the overall characterization is not totally off base.

So, if I take seriously that whiteness is the issue, and that I am constructed as a white subject in this society... then what have I missed in my research and teaching? I've worked on teaching quite a bit, but research has been slow to catch up. Here's what I see: while I do touch on race, class, and gender in all of my historical articles about children as readers in the U.S. from 1890-1930, I notice that my method, focusing on surveys or anecdotes collected by librarians or teachers, has some gaps. Namely, in none of the articles about "Negro" children (from the 1920s) contain *any* quotes from these young children, in striking contrast to the articles about children being "Americanized." Which really does suggest that the historical trend of creating "whiteness" was at work. Italian and Jewish children, who were being Americanized and would soon be considered white, are quoted. Negro children, who were not being Americanized (because they were already American, because of prejudices lingering from slavery, and more reasons no doubt) were not quoted. And that means I have to do some more reading...

"African American Children's Literature: The First One Hundred Years" by Violet Harris (who is right here at the U of I!) appeared in Journal of Negro Education in fall 1990. When I was just starting college. Harris writes about historical trends and shifts, creating some very useful categories, including the period from 1940-1978 which she calls "The Shift to Assimilation." (Since my previous study stopped in 1930, I have work to do on this era.) The valorization of prolific author Arne Bontemps makes me wonder: what was the reception of Bontemps' work in Horn Book or among established children's literature experts? Anyhow, the idea of "The Shift to Assimilation" itself raises questions related to the Americanization model that Honma critiques above.

I can raise a lot more questions than answers.... I have questions about why, when May Massee was editing Rebecca Caudill's writing in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she suggested that Caudill take out not only The N-Word, but all the references to people who were referred to by that word. This is another, smaller research project I'm developing. Which led me to read...

Randall L. Kennedy's article "Who Can Say 'N-----' And Other Considerations" tackles uses of The N-Word, the "nuclear bomb of racial ephithets," and answers by saying that the word itself is flexible in meaning and shouldn't be entirely censored. And that it should be generally frowned upon, but its speaker should be able to defend his or her use of the word, using example of commedians or African American people speaking among themselves and reclaiming the word (much like "queer" has been reclaimed). Still, it's a tricky topic, and you'll note I'm not using the word itself in this blog post, because, as a white woman, I don't want to participate even accidentally in the harm caused by racist name-calling.

An interesting blog post, by Emily Bernard (whose book I hope to read soon, about interracial friendships) gives some examples of when she, as an African American female professor, uses the N-word in a classroom situation, as a tool for teaching. Which, she admits, does sometimes cross from intellectual to emotional ramifications, however hard she strives to keep it entirely intellectual. She talks honestly about being defended and defensive in ways that are refreshing to read.

And finally, I read Willett's article on "Rifles for Waitie: Rollins, Riley, and Racism" which is the story of African American librarian Charlemae Rollins urging editor Elizabeth Riley to urge author Harold Keith to change insulting and stereotyped depictions of African Americans in his book Rifles for Waitie, right after it won the Newbery Medal. Keith changed some things, but kept other characterizations. Willett points out that Rollins surely had more objections than she raised, but doesn't speculate about the choices Rollins made to such a degree that it's a little unclear whether the reader should think of Rollins as making choices. Which she most certainly did. There's also an odd "declaration of no ill intent" (p. 489) that just reads as weird, maybe because Willett is trying to defend Rollins and Riley as "not censors." Later, Keith is also let off the hook ("should not be construed as overtly racist in intention" p. 493) in a way that, basically, predates the availability of Critical Race Theory as a tool for understanding that the idea of who is "racist" isn't an individual issue but is a social and structural one. At any rate, Willett's article deals with a similar publishing incident to the one I'm curious about, and so there are all kinds of parallels I'll want to make when I'm writing about Massee and Caudill.

When I raise issues of race with my colleagues, I sometimes watch the discussion stay just this side of contentious and defensive, only because we know and trust each other to have good intentions. So I need something about intentionality to be there, to assure that we talk at all and don't simply fragment into multiple segregated communities. But even abstracting it like this is difficult if not impossible. All I know for sure is: these topics of race, racism, and the role of whiteness as a hegemonic cover story for racism are very hard to talk about.

in the thick of fall

2011-10-23T21:18:00.001-06:00

Radway's article, read but not blogged. Readings on whiteness, including all of Jensen's book, read but not blogged. Ranma 1/2 and other texts for the fantasy class, read but not blogged. I'm tempted to say, YOU try being a children's librarian-untenured professor-researcher-faculty member-storyteller-reading group leader-spouse-mom to an ailing cat... But then I see this quote, and I realize: Why explain?

"Life is short, even for those who live a long time, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions, either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them. We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing; remain indifferent to a great deal, forgive often and never forget."
- Sarah Bernhardt

I'll be back to blogging when the maelstrom lets up...

cross-dressing in children's literature

2011-10-09T07:17:00.002-06:00

This is a case of, despite having drafted a really serviceable paper in about 2004-2005 and having gotten positive feedback from a major journal on the draft, I'm just wanting to set this project aside. And so I turn in two books related to it: The Queer Child by Stockton and Ways of Being Male ed. by Stephens (chapter by Flanagan). I already turned in (but xeroxed the last chapter of) Out of the Closet by Flanagan, which was the main text that the editors referred me to in considering my paper.

So, when I get back to this project (I won't say "if," but it's obviously implied by the relentless rigors of my schedule), here's what I want to do: a listing paper. Not English scholarship, but LIS. An analytic approach that nonetheless really scopes out what has happened in the field in the last however many years. I'm still very interested in the main premise of the paper: that children's cross-dressing in children's literature is often accompanied by a strong emphasis on heteronormativity. You could almost say "disciplined" by (good morning Foucault!), but however you say it, I want to look across multiple books to establish these patterns. Flanagan's whole book really only takes on a few texts, and The Queer Child looks to be about the same. It's tough to clear out the old to make space for the new, but the new must come. And the old must go.

The paper I am focusing on is "Editing Race: the case of May Massee, Rebecca Caudill, and the "N" word in children's publishing." With hopes of both ChLA and SHARP this year. Fingers crossed!

Just for the record, here are abbreviated chapter titles from The Queer Child: Or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Stockton (which, interestingly, cites very few texts from children's literature as sources, but a lot of sources from English canons):

Part 1: Sideways Relations
1. The Smart Child is the Masochistic Child
2. Why the (Lesbian) Child Requires an Interval of Animal
Part 2: Sideways Motions
3. What Drives the Sexual Child?
4. Feeling Like Killing?
Part 3: Sideways Futures
5. Oedipus Races, or the Child Queered by Color
Conclusion: Money is the Child's Queer Ride

the everyday life turn

2011-09-22T13:21:00.001-06:00

I remember talking in college about "The Linguistic Turn" in academic perspectives that had occurred some 30 years before we got to academia. These articles/chapters all make me think that perhaps there has since been an "Everyday Life Turn" of equal importance (as Sheringham, below, argues). From the everyday information behavior of children and tweens to the everyday significance of racial micro-aggressions (more coming soon, as I prep for the second Reading Around Race group), it seems to me that there's something to this argument that the everyday has become at least a major rhetorical part of the direction of research in many disparate fields.

First, here's an example of the kind of "everyday life" research that I often read, related to children and libraries:

"Leisure and Work in Library and Community Programs for Very Young Children" by Roz Stooke and Pamela J. McKenzie (Library Trends 57: 4, Spring 2009)

After observing children in multiple Canadian settings, Stooke and McKenzie come to some intriguing conclusions about the differences between programming approaches from library traditions vs. other traditions. They draw on feminist sociologist Dorothy Smith for a nuanced definition of "work" as the social order which is the product of coordinated (every day life!) activities. They spend pages 657-664 on their theoretical underpinnings, while, while all great citations, may belie some concern over the validity of purely observational data. (I myself have mixed feelings about this as a researcher, but I'm willing to go along with it for the sake of the article.) They did have fifty observations at eight sites to draw from, so not an insignificant pool of data.
The most salient findings, from my vantage point, were the differences between the value of language play in library activities (books especially) while only one community program leader that they observed used any books. Library program leaders also used physical artifacts (puppets, books, feltboards) while community programs used interactive toys at informal times but "only words and gestures" during formal programs.

This, of course, led me to wonder about what they didn't see from their observations, such as: what role does storytelling or narrative play in the "words and gestures" programs? What kinds of literacy are children learning in such environments?

They also discussed the importance of inclusivity and the need to avoid overly rigid approaches to programming, noting that "a rigid commitment to any mandated program, however research-based, can function as a barrier to inclusive and ethical practice." (p. 667) This may be part of why program leaders "presented themselves as friendly elders or peers rather than as experts." (p. 669) A strong sense of hierarchy in this kind of environment may inhibit the optimal combination of planning and flexibility that a really good program requires (and deserves). However, they also brought out some flaws, including that leaders worked to "diminish social gaps between themselves and participants, but tended to ignore social and cultural differences among participants." (p. 671) Differences like who does or does not have a romantic partner, which cultures people come from (no tofu was served--but meat was--as part of a "healthy foods" program despite the presence of Chinese participants). Overall, this is an intriguing and well-researched set of snapshots of what programming is today.

Here's the scholar who argues that there's an intellectual tradition hiding in all this...

Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, by Michael Sheringham (Oxford, 2006)
This introduction brought me the idea that, at least in French scholarship, investigations of the "quotidien" or everyday have taken on new prominence since the 1980s. Sheringham goes on to argue throughout the book that there is a "real tradition rooted in cultural and intellectual history, where the period between 1960 and 1980 is a phase of active, if often invisible, invention, and the period from 1980 to 2000 (and beyond) a phase of practice, variation, and dissemination." (p. 6) He notes that scholars like Lefebvre and Certeau are frequently cited in Cultural Studies venues, from the visual to the ethnographic. (p. 7) He goes on to argue for various associations in this tradition, from Certeau back to Lefebvre, and from Lefebvre back to humanist Marxism, to Barthes and Structuralism (to post-structuralism and postmodernism), to Perect and the Oulipo group of literary experimentalists... it's an interesting intellectual path to explore.
It won't surprise some of you that I wanted to check out the chapter on Barthes, which he introduces on p. 10 with a succinct but fairly accurate overview of Barthes' work, especially its last phase which he describes as "governed by a renewed vision of subjectivity rooted in affects and pleasures at large in the everyday." (p. 10) And it was worth it for me, as it would be for scholars of historical trends in scholarship, which is really what this book is about.
*Cited here and worth exploring: an article by Rita Felski (scholar of feminism and phenomenology) called "The Invention of Everyday Life" in New Formations, 39 (1999-2000), 15-31.

Here's a theoretical piece that connects some aspects of thought of two rarely juxtaposed "everyday" theorists:

"Theorizing White Consciousness for a Post-Empire World: Barthes, Fanon, and the Rhetoric of Love" by Chela Sandoval, in Displacing Whiteness, ed. by Ruth Frankenberg
Sandoval does this really interesting project of unpacking some of Barthes' views of "oppositional consciousness" in Mythologies about theorizing the limits of colonialism, from inside a country that was a major colonial power (France), and comparing those to Fanon's views, from a viewpoint within being colonized by an outside power. Both scholars, Sandoval argues, are involved in "decolonizing" projects, only Barthes' project is lost in loneliness and, ultimately, in a kind of dispersion of effort amidst the distractions (and pleasures) of the society built on colonizing power. Sandoval also argues that Fanon, on the other hand, escapes through his allegiance to revolutionary forces and his commitment to transforming the world around him.

For later: I have Certeau's book The Practice of Everyday Life with its chapter on "reading as poaching," first mentioned in the post about the Ross article a month of so ago. Need more time to read!

Article Amassment

2011-09-11T11:43:00.001-06:00

This post is the first of what I hope will be a regular feature, a quick look through my recent Article Amassment. Be they print journals or citations emailed me by colleagues, Article Amassment is all about fast skimming/reading a bunch of articles related to some aspect of youth services librarianship and blogging them here. I expect entries to be more like abstracts or even annotations than summaries, with my own slant, of course. So here goes, my first ever Article Amassment:

Large, Andrew, et al. "Developing a Visual Taxonomy: Children's Views on Aesthetics" JASIST 60(9): 2009, pp. 1808-1822.
Bring together visualization and usability testing/design, with seven 6th grade young people as collaborators. Includes children's prototype drawings of taxonomies, and uses them to suggest six aesthetic characteristics that should characterize such browsing interfaces for children, including "maplike metaphor." They come up with six aesthetic dimensions (from earlier work by Ngo et al. 2003) that are important to consider in children's taxonomies. It's a bit tough to see the connections from the children's drawings to the aesthetic measures, but it makes for a provocative piece.

"Dramatic Interpretations: Performative Responses of Young Children to Picturebook Read-Alouds." Full Text Available By: Adomat, Donna Sayers. Children's Literature in Education, Sep2010, Vol. 41 Issue 3, p207-221, 15p; DOI: 10.1007/s10583-010-9105-0
This is a qualitative study of young readers' responses to picturebooks. Uses five kinds of responses, a framework developed in a previous study:
     "Sipe (2008) developed ﬁve types of responses that are indicative of ﬁve facets of literary understanding. In summary: (1) Analytical responses include discussions of narrative elements, such as plot, setting, characters, theme, style, and use of illustrations; (2) Intertextual responses are the links children make to other books or texts, broadly deﬁned; (3) Personal responses involve connections children make to their own lives or the experiences of others; (4) Transparent responses indicate a deep involvement with the story world; and (5) Performative responses show that children are ‘‘manipulating the story for their own creative purposes’’ (p. 183)."
      The teacher read the story and encouraged participation throughout, and the article focuses on one child's responses, including vocalizations, physical responses, and responses that took on acting out the character's perspective. Recommended to anyone who wants to see an updated version of The Braid of Literature. Fun to read!

"Studying" and "Making Sense Of" Tweens
"Making Sense of An Information World: The Everyday-Life Information Behavior of Pre-Teens" by Eric Meyers et al. in Library Quarterly 79: 3, 301-341.
and
"Studying the everyday information behavior of tweens: Notes from the field" by the same team: Eric M. Meyers, Karen E. Fisher, Elizabeth Marcoux, in Library & Information Science Research 29 (2007) 310–33, doi:10.1016/j.lisr.2007.04.011.
       These two articles by Meyers et al. describe the same project, so I'm blogging them together. Perhaps the most interesting part in both, but especially in the L&ISR piece is the "play-date" format of the data collection time, a "five hour research 'play date' combining social interaction, creative play, and multiple data collection methods" with the hopes of doing research with youth, holding a central service philosophy. They blended focus groups with other activities to structure a fun and stimulating session, and it sounds like it worked. They used three locations: a university, a church, and a school (why not a public library?).   The bulk of the LQ paper, appropriately, is devoted to qualitative findings, written in accessible and descriptive form. Ending with a section on "Applicability of the Research to Practice: A Guiding Framework" is very smart, and while the general LQ audience may skim, I'm glad to see a focus on practitioners in this level of research. This is NSF funded research, and the lit review places it squarely in LIS, which makes this an inspiring set of articles that I'm sharing with doctoral students as I type.

Hughes-Hassell, Sandra et al. "Through Their Eyes: The Development of Self-Concept in Yount African American Children through Board Books" in Children and Libraries 9:2, p. 36
This is a call for real representation and cultural relevance in board books, with an exceedingly valuable list of good board books to promote and purchase (pp. 40-41). A few sample authors/titles: Asim Girl of Mine, Baicker I Can Do It Too!, Hudson Good Morning, Baby, Pinkney, Shake Shake Shake and many more.

Roman, Susan and Carole D. Fiore "Do Public Library Summer Reading Programs Close the Achievement Gap?" in Children and Libraries 8: 3, p. 27.
In short, yes, but there's more work to do. Study relies heavily on librarians and teachers, with just one survey for student input, but has the advantage of a timespan of over a year. But the findings are positive, and the ending call to action is about publicizing these findings and doing more outreach to populations not as well served by public libraries.

Prendergast, Tess, "Beyond Storytime: Children's Librarians Collaborating in Communities" Children and Libraries 9:1, p. 20
Describes a Vancouver based program in which librarians go to a variety of sites and serve children at those family service agencies, from specific language groups to addiction recovery and other service sites. Qualitative evidence of efficacy is given in parents' own words.

Rothbauer, Pauletter. "Exploring the Placelessness of Reading Among Older Teens in a Canadian Rural Municipality." Library Quarterly 79:4, p. 465
Explores "role of reading and libraries" in lives of older teens, with a focus on a particular rural geography. Based on interviews with 27 young people, and quotes are sprinkled throughout. Found libraries to be lacking for older teens, defined by what they offered them as younger children. Discovered large impact of spatial factors: proximity of reading selections, internet as default reading, public library as childhood space (not for them), lack of time for reading. "Nonactive teen readers" pose a host of challenges to rural public libraries, and only some of them are listed here.

delirium

2011-09-09T09:49:00.001-06:00

Lauren Oliver's Delirium follows the months before Lean is scheduled to be cured of deleria, the disease of love. Everyone goes through it, and society is seemingly peaceful and calm as a result. No falling in love means no insanity, no wars, no troublesome partner squabbles. At eighteen, everyone is surgically operated on to remove the part of their brain that can love and matched with a suitable heterosexual partner for life. And assigned a number of children to have.

But sometimes it goes wrong, as it did with Lena's mother, on whom the operation was not successful. Despite four tries, they never did cure her of love. As a result, Lena grew up first in a household full of love and games, and then, after her mother was said to have committed suicide, in her aunt's cold household, their whole family shamed by the blemish of her mother's failure.

Very slowly (sometimes a bit too slowly for the pace of the story) Lena begins to understand that the world of safety constructed around her is built on a backbone of violence and deception. She realizes it when she meets Alex, who has the scars of the cure behind his ear, but in fact grew up outside Portland as an Invalid in the Wilds. And he hasn't been cured at all, and they fall in love. And she realizes it when she sees her best friend Hana change, suddenly and dramatically, into someone who goes to secret music concerts.

Finally, it all breaks apart when (SPOILER!!) Alex shows her that her own mother was alive this whole time, kept in the endless prison of the Crypts, carving the word "love" over and over into her cell. And then Lena knows: she has to leave. All the safety of her society comes to seem like a cage, and she'll do anything to get out. Unfortunately, as she and Alex are planning their escape, things get very difficult and it's ultimately impossible to have a grand happy ending. But the ending is happy in smaller ways. Lena will survive, intact, and keep her ability to love.

Favorite quotes:

"You may think the past has something to tell you. You may think that you should listen, should strain to make out its whispers, should bend over backward, stoop down low to hear its voice breathed up from the ground, from the dead places. [...] But I know the truth: [...] I know the past will drag you backward and down, have you snatching at whispers of wind adn the gibberish of trees rubbing together, trying to decipher some code, trying to piece together what was broken. It's hopelss, The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone." (p. 176)

"One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world--your little carved-out sphere--is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you're an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you're lost in a wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it--life, the relentless mechanism of existing--isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead." (p. 303)

job hunting advice

2011-09-02T13:35:00.001-06:00

Personally, I like to read websites or blogs about a sequence of events. With a beginning, middle, and end. Oh, that sounds a bit like narrative, doesn't it! Funny how story creeps up as a defining element of all that I'm into even when I don't think it's the main point.

So this blog, http://modernhypatia.info/2011/08/job-hunt-index/, is all about a particular person's job hunt in librarianship, but written in ways that so many folks will recognize. I personally know several people, most of them recent former students, who are finding the same stories of successes and pitfalls. It's out of season for our semester cycle, but well worth reading if you'll be job hunting as a librarian or information professional of any sort in the next year.

just listen

2011-09-02T09:22:00.002-06:00

Sarah Dessen has a steady hand at writing emotionally involving YA books with female protagonists. Her stories are usually about coming of age in one way or another, and this story is about Annabel Greene, whose two sisters have been in so much trouble lately (one nearly dying from anorexia) that she has stuffed her own problems deep out of sight. Problems like the fact that she was raped by her best friend's boyfriend last summer, and her best friend Sophie dumped her over it because she blamed Annabel for being a "slut." Now school has started, but Annabel still hasn't told a soul what really happened, and endures Sophie's stream of verbal abuse in silence and alone. Until, one day, she starts to really talk to the guy who also sits alone at lunch. Their friendship blossoms into romance, but then screeches to a halt when Annabel goes into total shut-down mode and can't tell him why she's so upset. It's many things, but the main one is that Sophie's new best friend Emily was also attacked by her creepy boyfriend but has told the police and is pressing charges.

There's a history of friend-dumping behind this story... Sophie dumped Annabel, but back when Sophie first moved to town Annabel dumped her then life-long best friend Clarke for Sophie. But Clarke begins to reach out to Annabel, and Emily makes a shrewd guess about what happened and approaches her as well. Annabel stays silent for awhile, but she watches Clarke and Emily with their new friends. Emily especially, with her seemingly unshakable confidence, makes an impression on Annabel. So Annabel finally reaches out to Owen, and then to her family. They rally, the trial is a success (Sophie's ex is put behind bars), and Annabel really begins to move on. She even considers reaching out to Sophie, but all the time she has had to reflect makes her realize that this particular bridge isn't hers to mend. As Owen said, if people close to you can't get over being upset with you then "'...maybe you weren't as close with them as you thought.
     'Meaning what?'
   'Meaning that if someone is really close with you, your getting upset or them getting upset is okay, and they don't change because of it. It's just part of the relationship. It happens. You deal with it.'
   'You deal with it,' I said. 'I wouldn't even know how to do that.'
     'Well, that makes sense,' he said. 'Considering you never let it happen in the first place.'" (p. 151)

Dessen is a go-to author for me for good reads during busy times. I'd recommend her work generally, and while some of her books have won awards, I find them all to be similar enough in tone that, if you like one, you generally like them all.

*****

And speaking of reading in general, I came across this press release about a study by Shira Gabriel at SUNY Buffalo that shows that readers identify with characters like vampires and wizards. It suggests that readers feel such a sense of belonging when they are reading that the experience actually alters their self-image somewhat, making them feel like the characters they read about. I don't seem to have full-text access to the article itself (quick searching goes back to 2009 for recent articles in Psychological Science) so I'll have to wait to read that. But it's an interesting tidbit, and makes me think of some blog post this past year when I wrote about my own sense of belonging that comes from reading fiction or, in some cases, memoir.

Author Shel Silverstein and persona Uncle Shelby

2011-08-25T08:38:00.000-06:00

Joseph T. Thomas Jr. has finally written the article I've been curious to read for ages. Though it is certainly part celebrity gossip, Thomas' "A Speculative Account (with Notes) of the Development and Initial Deployment of Shel Silverstein's Persona, Uncle Shelby, with Special Care to Articulate the Relationship of Said Persona to the Question of Shel's Ambiguous Audience(s)" finally makes a coherent connection between Silverstein's work for Playboy magazine and his writing for children. Thomas focuses extensively on the satirical (and very funny) book Uncle Shelby's ABZs, which is a spoof on alphabet books, where the joke is on the absent gullible child who would follow instructions like, for instance, giving daddy a haircut while he sleeps on the couch or eating the paper in the book because it claims to be made of candy. But any present reader who would persist with the book and not simply abandon it in complete puzzlement would be a child sophisticated enough to laugh at the ways that adults routinely manipulate children.

And I bring this up because that sense of the savvy child reader is underemphasized in this article. That said, the adult Playboy reader has not been taken enough into account. Thomas makes a compelling argument that the persona of Uncle Shelby was a production in itself, and the deliberate obfuscation of Silverstein's own identity behind that person was part of the production not only of the author's celebrity, but of the books. In famously difficult interviews with Silverstein, he responded to questions about why he shaved his head with statements like "I don't talk about my head." Evasive, sly, humorous, the only thing that can be said for certain is that Uncle Shelby is subversive. And yet his parody of sincere language is not entirely insincere either, as we see from his later books.

This piece focuses almost exclusively on Playboy and Silverstein's early books, ABZs and Lafcadio the Lion Who Shot Back. I find it interesting to speculate about the persona of Silverstein/Uncle Shelby in or on the other books, jacket flap pictures and text, etc. This is possibly because I was alternately disturbed and fascinated by the pictures of Silverstein as a child, sitting glowering, barefoot, and with the neck of what appeared to be a guitar propped in his hands. He was as mysterious as one's childhood uncles often are, both affable and very remote.

I'd recommend the article, with the caveat that if you're a hardcore children's lit scholar, this falls somewhere between scholarship and an in-depth Playboy interview. But it's worth it, so I'd say put aside stylistic issues on the writing (which you can infer from the title) and dig into an interesting analysis of how the author isn't dead after all.

from Children's Literature Association Quarterly spring 2011, v36, n1, pp 25-46

collaboration, diversity, and metaphors of reading (in LIS)

2011-08-22T13:15:00.000-06:00

Just finished reading two articles from JELIS and one from Library Trends:

1) "Finding that Special Someone: Interdisciplinary Collaboration in an Academic Context" by Gunawardena, Weber, and (my wonderful colleague and ALISE Youth Services co-chair with me this year) Denise Agosto. This exploration and literature review of models of collaboration is a good thought piece, with real highlights in the two tables. The material here comes from several disciplines, and these authors synthesize it well. The first table compares three kinds of connections along a spectrum: coordination, cooperation, and collaboration, looking at how issues like authority and rewards vary along this spectrum. True collaboration requires deep sharing, of authority and rewards, in mutually beneficial actions. Table two lists types of research: multidisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, interdisciplinary, and trans-disciplinary, having to do with how the methods and perspectives of two or more disciplines come into play in a project. This article won't tell you whether or not to collaborate, but it will suggest issues to consider if you do. [Fall, October 2010, 51:4, 210]

2) "Diversity and LIS Education: Inclusion and the Age of Information" by Paul T. Jaeger (fellow New College alum) and Bertot is a call to action, with two specific exemplar program suggestions, for building diversity into the LIS curriculum. The most significant point I read here was on p. 169, where they point out that diversity approaches have typically focused on the *people* (students, faculty) rather than on the content of the *curriculum*. "...[E]ducational initiatives have focused on trying to increase the presence of underrepresented, disadvantaged, and underserved groups without changing the curriculum to better reflect the needs of these groups or to prepare all librarians to be culturally competent." (169) This is true, and this is exactly what our school is working on at this very moment. It's a strong and important call to arms, and one that I hope will be met. I wished slightly that the authors had brought out more of the pressing intellectual reasons for including diversity in the curriculum, and I also think about the ways that Critical Race Theory poses significant challenges to "business as usual" in any academic context. [summer, July 2011, v52 n3]

And the one from LT, by one of my all-time favorite LIS researchers and writers:

"Reader on Top: Public Libraries, Pleasure Reading, and Models of Reading" by Catherine Sheldrick Ross. What I love about Ross' work is that she's always seeing the underlying metaphors that guide the work of libraries and librarians. Here she calls them "competing metaphors" (633) used to describe the reading experience. From various fields, she identifies the following orientations to reading, each of which suggests a particular set of configurations of the "power of the text, the role of the reader, and the effect on the reader of what is read." They are:

"Reading with a Purpose" (the argument for public libraries as educational, popular from the 19th century to at least the 1930s, but still relevant today)
"Only the Best" (text-centered, related to children's reading in the 20th century, and eschewing series books)
"The Great Debate" (in education, between "code-emphasis" decoding skills and whole-language "meaning-emphasis" and implying competing research methodologies: experiments vs. ethnographic observation)
The Reader as Dupe (from cultural studies, "An odd feature of this model is the way it silences the class whose interests it claims to promote." (p. 647))
The Reader as Poacher (from Michael de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, emphasizing that "readers take back a degree of power from texts by finding nooks and crannies of resistance" (p. 648))
Blueprints for Living (from Oprah and many other who look to reading as personally transformative of the "mind and heart," "books as a source of models for living, examples to follow, or rules to live by" (p. 649))
The Reader as Game Player (from books like Johnson's recent Everything Bad is Good for You, which emphasizes that popular culture, from movies to games, is a "cognitive workout" involving complex codes that require practice to "play" effectively, and puts the reader entirely in charge)

With three citations and possibly a project idea emerging from this article, I feel both excited and mildly exhausted after reading it! Like the best academic writing, this utterly stimulated my researcher brain with nearly every paragraph. Oodles of notes to follow up on, and still one more article in this issue of Library Trends to read! [this one: Library Trends, issue title "Pleasurable Pursuits: Leisure and LIS Research, editors Crystal Fulton and Ruth Vondracek, 57: 4, Spring 2009]

[p. 635 also has a list of "trashy" romances that might be worth reading on vacation. hee hee.]

pomegranates and letting go

2011-08-20T14:02:00.002-06:00

Mother Sue Monk Kidd (author of The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and The Secret Life of Bees) and daughter Ann Kidd Taylor team up in Traveling with Pomegranates. It's odd to imagine a travel memoir about women's spirituality (and representations of women in spiritual traditions) being something that could come from two authors' viewpoints in alternating chapters, but it works beautifully. Though occasionally I was distracted by imagining the editing to make it so, most of the time I was immersed in their two complementary journeys. Sue is transitioning into an acceptance of old age as she turns 50, and Ann is transitioning into adulthood in her 20s.

As they travel to Greece and France and in their home lives as well, both are delving deep into what makes them who they are. After college and breaking up with her fiance, Ann is discovering the triadic symbolism of Athena, Joan of Arc, and Mary as the iconic women who inspire her to be true to herself. Sue is looking at images of Mary as not only the mother of Jesus, but also as the hag, the crone, the old woman who lived long past the famous manger scene and into old age. Her reading of Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror is astonishing, seeing "The aging mother reaching for her own grown daughter. The way she tries to make a lap for her younger self." (p. 151) She describes the "ricochet" of the feeling that deep knowledge of mortality brings (p. 163), and how "One day I will have to forgive life for ending." (p. 169) She describes the feeling of sending off part of a novel: "...I should lay down my ego and let happen what will happen. It is just life. It's time to settle more fully into my own condensed truth and find my strength and boldness in that." (p. 215) She feels "the curse of my own introspective nature, and its obstinate demands, how it wants to be allowed, wants my unhurried and undivided attention, how the moments of life insist on being metabolized and given expression." (p. 218)

Sue Monk Kidd has gift of making the long arc of life seem like a dance, but Ann Kidd Taylor is pretty good herself at capturing the raw honesty of a 20-something in search of meaning. Along the way, Sue further embraces her mother and the Hestia-like goddess of the hearth that she has always been, while coming to accept herself and her own ambitions as a writer. And Ann finds her vocation as a writer, at least for now, though impending motherhood and all of life could change anything. Here's hoping for more books from her. She pointed me to this beautiful quotation from the poem Sweet Darkness by David Whyte: "Give up all the other worlds/except the one to which you belong." The poem continues and concludes:

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

Mother-daughter relationships can be a fraught subject, and there are moments of tension. But it's a joy to read about Sue refraining from invading Ann's private world, even when she knows something is wrong, out of respect for the young woman that Ann is becoming and needs to become on her own terms (p 118). It's good to see Ann becoming herself while seeing her own mother more fully. It's a delight to image the three-generation trip of grandmother, mother, daughter that ensues.

Ultimately, this is a book about peace between the generations. One need not have experienced that joy in one's own family to appreciate it in written form. In fact, I think there should be a special word for taking joy in someone else having what you cannot or have not chosen. The opposite of jealousy. Jealousy-free joy for someone else's delightful path. That's what this book inspired, for me.

*****
I spend longer than I wish to on the simple task of letting go of expectations about how I thought "now" would be, back when "now" was still "then," in the future. It's hard to inhabit now when I'm doing this. Yet, of course, that also is what's now, whenever it's happening. So here I am, letting go of the true last of the summer memoirs...

Cherry by Mary Karr is a follow-up to The Liar's Club, and I know I want to read it sometime, because it's about her adolescence. The Liar's Club was amazing.

The Stations of Solitude by Alice Koller looks good except for its insistence on stripping oneself of all social contact in order to achieve "real" solitude. Her earlier memoir, An Unknown Woman, might be better, as it seems to be what brought her acclaim and is about post-phd uncertainty and wandering.

Too Late to Die Young by Harriet McBride Johnson is about a muscular dystrophy survivor who has, against the odds, lived to have a full adult life and become a renowned disabilities activist. Her voice and spirit shine in the first chapter.

last of the summer memoirs

2011-08-17T20:02:00.000-06:00

I'm sure these won't be the last memoirs I read, but they are for this summer, because school is starting! With a fresh year before me, I'm planning to be back at semi-weekly meetings for the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. It's the first time back in several years, and I'm looking forward to being once again immersed in rowdy and highly informed (and opinionated!) conversations with my colleagues in academia and children's librarianship. I first came to the Bulletin in 1997, so those review meetings at the big long tables are sort of like family dinners to me, with people who have become my dear friends as well as aunts I'm fond of and a new crop of cousins every year. So all this is to say that, after the last of the summer memoirs, I expect I'll be back to full-on children's and young adult lit for many months to come.

The memoir I'm Proud of You: My Friendship with Mr. Rogers by Tim Madigan, Mr. Rogers makes a point that sounds a lot like my previous post about Brene Brown's work: "anything mentionable is manageable." When life is moving at breakneck speed, during times of crisis or transition, it can seem like there will never be time enough to manage it all nor even to mention it all. Madigan shares a traditional Arabian proverb that Fred Rogers shared with him as their friendship developed in correspondence:

A friend is one to whom one may pour

Out all the contents of one's heart,

Chaff and grain together,

Knowing that the gentlest of hands

Will take and sift it,

Keep what is worth keeping and,

With a breath of kindness,

Blow the rest away. (p. 82)

That's what Madigan and Rogers create, as the real-life Mr. Rogers coaches and supports Madigan through a nearly devastating crisis in his marriage. This is a tender story of a grown man coming to be in touch with his feelings. It's also the story of the later years of Mr. Rogers, whose kindness was the real deal.

This next book is both silly and searingly honest. I'm the One That I Want by Margaret Cho is her memoir of coming to be a successful comic, forged in the fires of painful stand-up flops and a failed t.v. show. It's comedy, yes, but Cho's life has had its bleak moments. She finds ways to laugh, and so the reader does as well, but it's an intensely emotional ride. And I love this kind of raw honesty. She tells the story of failing out of high school twice. She talks about the joys of being a "fag hag" and the gay men she has loved, in addition to harrowing tales of dungeons, drag queens, and a whole lotta drugs. Cho also gets deep into struggles with Korean journalists whom she in equal parts expects to support her and despises when they don't, all through a lens of hard-won understanding that neither she nor they could be expected to "represent" an entire people to each other. Favorite quotes include...

When she finally ditches the boyfriend who was just no good to her:
"I had, for once, stood up for myself and stuck to what I knew was best for me, even though I wanted to please Bob and not be the bad guy. I did not stop laughing for a long time." (p. 62)

On trying to find love and acceptance outside of yourself first:
"I thought if I could get the job, get noticed, maybe even become a star, then I would stop hating myself, and adore me just like the rest of the world. Self-love doesn't work like that. Life doesn't work like that. [...] I think we all have our own messages, the tapes that play over and over in our minds, that weaken us, that desecrate the holines sof our lives, that come disguised as a way to motivate ourselves, when really they are all about self-sabotage. [...] Let's not hate ourselves. We are all we have. We cannot change anything until we accept that." (p. 90-91)

On people being stupid:
"People are stupid and will say what they say. It's not just [physical] weight [issues] either. It's everything. The challenge is learning not to give them the power to dictate how I will feel about myself. Learning how to love myself from within, to make my opinion count the most, knowing that no one and nothing is going to save me except myself--these are the lessons I have been forced to learn. That is what my life now is all about." (p. 207)

Those are my favorites, but believe me when I tell you that much of the joy is in the more raw moments that the ones I've quoted here. Strong women with fierce voices occupying the celebrity stage are still a rarity in our odd entertainment culture. I hope Cho takes the stage over and over again.

*****
The last couple of years I haven't posted as much as I before that stressful time. But these days the reading energy and creativity are back! Stay tuned for posts about recent articles related to gender issues in children's literature, the history of children as readers, great new resources for youth services librarians, and a smattering of general-interest LIS-related pieces. It's going to be a great year. Best wishes to all those who go back to school, as students or otherwise, in the next few weeks!

social work and authenticity

2011-08-16T17:15:00.000-06:00

I read pretty widely, and, unless I'm honed in on investigating a research project, my tastes are free range. Like the best chickens, my reading brain will at least peck at whatever looks tasty. So a PBS special on "The Gifts of Imperfection" led me to Brene Brown's work (her blog is called Ordinary Courage), interesting in part because she has a Ph.D. in social work. And, since I'm teaching a new class called Youth Services Community Engagement this fall and drawing on some social work research, it seemed right to pursue the threads a little further. So I found the textbook, Contemporary Human Behavior Theory (2nd ed) that holds a summary of Brown's research work. Which is based on interview after interview with women (though recently men have factored in as well) and is formalized as Shame Resilience Theory.

The theory goes a little something like this: depending on your place in life, your social support, and a host of other internal and external factors, you are more or less resilient to an episode of shame. This might be an internal overreaction or it might be a public humiliation, characterized by the burning sense of personal unworthiness, rejection, or lack of belonging. Same things apply in any case to come out of it: 1) "ability to recognize and accept personal vulnerability," 2) "level of critical awareness regarding social-cultural expectations," 3) "ability to develop mutually empathic connections with others, and 4) "ability to 'speak shame'" by which Brown means the emotional vocabulary to name what's happening to us (emphasis added). As another researcher notes, "women's sense of self and of worth is most often grounded in the ability to make and maintain relationships." (p. 230-232) There are exceptions to the rule, of course, and some women thrive on work or on one deep relationship. But many women--I'd guess many people, certainly many of the children we serve in libraries and other institutions--thrive when they can celebrate the network of long and short, deep and shallow, casual and serious relationships and their place in it as someone who, as Brown says, belongs.

This is a social work textbook, and I'd ultimately recommend skimming Brown's blog over the few pages in this text, but there are a few books and articles cited and recommended in the back that I list here for future perusal. Friere's Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a familiar title to me, but I'd like to re-read it in light of thinking about shame and the role it plays in adults and child lives. Articles of interest by L. M. Guitierrez include: "Empowerment and the Latino community: Does consciousness make a difference:" and "Working with women of color: An empowerment perspective" and finally "Understanding the empowerment process: Does consciousness make a difference?" I'm guessing these might explore the difference/relationship between thinking and acting, and I'm curious. I'm also curious about bell hooks' article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about "Learning in the shadow of race and class." And the book by J. B. Miller and I. P. Stiver from 1997, The healing connection: How women form relationships in therapy and life.

vacation reading

2011-08-07T13:38:00.000-06:00

I don't know why I actively avoided reading Bossypants by Tina Fey for so long. Maybe, like your average high-school-aged person, I shrank away because it just seemed too popular. But it's a memoir! And it's funny! And Mean Girls remains one of my favorite ever movies (for whatever that does or doesn't reveal about my twisted mind). So I read it, and it was worth it. It's not the best organized memoir ever, but Fey's musings on growing up weird in summer theater programs are totally worth it. (I've always wanted to do everything, usual at once, and so I read this wistfully wishing that I had been a summer theater program kid. It's like my periodic longing to have been born Joni Mitchell instead of, well, you know, me with moderate guitar-playing abilities.) And so are her feminist observations on the impossibilities of women's fashion, totally worth it. I laughed out loud at her impeccable use of the word "asshat" and, frankly, have still been laughing for days. I can't explain it, quotes won't do it justice, as comedy is never as funny the second time around. So just go read it already!

Also read by beautiful Lake Michigan in Chicago this past week: Radio Shangri-La: What I Learned in Bhutan, the Happiest Kingdom on Earth by Lisa Napoli. Interesting memoir about a woman who is a successful professional journalist for NPR, but is nonetheless harboring the usual mid-life doubts (did I take the right path? do enough? create the right family, or not?) and struggling to find what it means to her to be happy. When she is asked to be a radio consultant in the country of Bhutan. Bhutan is a tiny country of about 650,000 people right between India and China that has only recently modernized enough to embrace radio and other outside (read: Western) influences. It's famous mostly for being the only Buddhist kingdom on earth, and for having a commitment to "Gross National Happiness" rather than the usual GNP. So Napoli goes, almost on a whim, to help them "professionalize" the station, and her readers are taken on a tour of the country and culture from a slightly inside perspective. Napoli's story reads like the tale of a hard-headed realist and so is of an entirely different flavor from Gilbert's more famous and more fable-ish Eat Pray Love. Napoli deliberately eschews the happy romantic ending, but what she gives instead is lovely. I've been recommending this to my media activist friends already. My only hesitation was her rather knee-jerk negativity toward her young friend who wants to emigrate to the U.S.--why? yes, it's tough to do, but why not at least support her curiousity?--and said young friend runs off and tries it anyway, landing back in Bhutan and pregnant a little while later. Still. Very fun beach read, and one that touches on life's meaning in ways that make you feel solid, in the hands of an author with both feet on the ground.

reading plans for fall 2011

2011-07-30T10:08:00.000-06:00

Summer isn't over, but it's drawing to a close. School starts 8/22, in about 3 weeks. And I've knocked out articles and book chapters and focused my scholarly reading on primary and secondary historical sources for a long time now, related to each of those projects. Today I send off the last article for awhile (on evolution). Then there's one more article-in-progress (accepted!) that needs minor edits this fall (on the historical uses of evaluation in public library children's services). I have a next project in mind (on race and children's publishing in the mid 1940s) that's on the list for spring.

But for this coming fall, I'm planning to read articles on race, racism, and whiteness from a variety of perspectives. Some will be assigned for my new Youth Services Community Engagement class. Others will be from K.L.'s stack that she gave me in spring. Still more will come from the emerging reading/research group on Critical Race Theory/Critical Theory/research perspectives that I'm facilitating into existence in early fall. But I'd like it to be a bit more focused than Everything. So, in addition to that focus, here are a few other threads I'm thinking of:

--fantasy and other children's/YA fiction from the Bulletin meetings (probably starting with Return of the Dapper Men recommended by DR via fb) as well as fantasy-related scholarship in the journal Marvels and Tales
--Storytelling-related scholarship (article from CB in email which looks like one of the first sensibly skeptical pieces on digital storytelling I've seen yet)
--General youth-services-related articles (in paper form in my office) and catching up with listservs

So my goal for fall is to read and blog something, book or article, once a week-ish.

*****
And I'm out! Off for vacation. I may or may not blog for fun before school starts in fall, but whatever I'm doing the aim is to maximize the fun for the next couple of weeks. Back in the office starting 8/15!

visualizing evolution, done!

2011-07-22T09:35:00.005-06:00

Or at least done for now. At the SHARP conference in D.C. last week, I presented on a panel I created with two wonderful colleagues, Loretta Gaffney and Debra Mitts Smith (don't miss her book Picturing the Wolf in Children's' Literature from Routledge), about the "struggle for survival" of controversial books in children's literature. Loretta talked about sex, Debra talked about predators, and I presented on "The Art of Evolution: Images of Geological Time in Science Books for Children, 1921-1956. I'll most likely upload the powerpoint to my website soon.

The 1921 date is important because that's when the first Newbery medal was awarded to a rather hulking book (not as long as some of Rowling's, but still) called The Story of Mankind by Hendrick Van Loon. Here's how he visualized human evolution:

The text reads:

“The ascent of man. The world was millions of years old when a creature appeared which was to be our ancestor. The ascent of man was very slow. This wild creature struggled upwards for hundred of thousands of years. It survived hunger and cold and disease. At last it developed into a true man. The zigzag line indicates the duration of prehistoric times. The short heavy line indicates the duration of historic times.”

So that's one example, but not the prettiest one. My personal favorite is by Alex Novikoff (from Climbing Our Family Tree 1945), whose academic career and anti-eugenics stances are traced in the biography Stalking the Academic Communist by Holmes. Excerpts of his work also appear in Mickenberg and Nel's Tales for Little Rebels (a good follow-up to Julia Mickenberg's Learning from the Left which won multiple prizes).

But the most stunning one in terms of color is definitely Bertha Morris Parker's illustration from Golden Treasury of Natural History from 1952.

Here you see time on a left-to-right axis and the swaths of color represent predominant kinds of creatures during those times, such that the top right orange area represents "mammals."

My main analytic framework came from a new book (2010) called Cartographies of Time by Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, who argue for timelines as more than just the facts of chronology. Their timeline of timelines attempts to understand their historical development over the last 250 years, arguing specifically that “…traditional chronographic forms performed both rote historical work and heavy conceptual lifting.” (p. 11) I argued that these ways of visualizing evolution did the "heavy lifting" of both showing ways of visualizing geological time that were accessible to child readers and of indicating cultural beliefs about how humans are different from animals, an especially touchy topic when it comes to evolution. In the Novikoff, above, a zoom-in might show you that the man at the top right ("top" being a visual metaphor that signals "higher development" in many of these illustrations) is holding a gardening hoe, evincing the long-held belief that humans differed from animals in their tool use (which is now known to be not as extreme a difference as previously thought).

I got a great deal of useful background and range of scholarly approaches from the book Victorian Science in Context by Bernard Lightman (an organizer of the SHARP conference which I just attended and a really nice person), which now goes back to the library. As do a suitcase full of great primary source texts. I say goodbye to them to make space for class prep, writing the other promised article on evolution (with Caroline Nappo, in which we examined 244 books for their evolution content over the course of a year), and focusing on the upcoming article for Children and Libraries about the historical roots of evaluation in youth services librarianship.

Rapunzel, Rapunzel, Rapunzel

2011-07-02T14:37:00.001-06:00

Three Rapunzels. To be read and discussed during one day of the Fantasy class. Three interpretations of a tale that has changed in both oral and print form.

The most classic of these, from the story to the art, is Rapunzel by Paul O. Zelinsky. Zelinsky won the Caldecott medal for this Renaissance-painting-inspired version. He could easily have won another award for his excellent source note in the back, which details a lineage of written versions of the story as well as oral tradition inspirations. The various mini-versions of the story make for intriguing reading, but this book is really about the glowing illustrations. The tale is the most traditional of the three: Rapunzel is raised by a sorceress (taken from her mother who ate the rapunzel in the sorceress' garden), locked in a tower, meets her prince but their passion is thwarted by the sorceress, who blinds him and leaves him to wander in the woods. Meanwhile, she bears twins, also alone. When they meet again, her tears heal his eyes, and they are finally a family.

Straightforward enough. But Zel by Donna Jo Napoli offers an eerie psychological take on the story, using alternating perspectives to see things from Rapunzel's (Zel's) point of view, her "mother's" point of view, and also Count Konrad, who sees Zel at market one day. This novel-length retelling has room to elaborate on Zel's character and her near insanity when imprisoned in the tower. The witch's motivation is clearer as well; she has sold her soul for the powerful growing magic that allows her to manipulate and control nature in many ways, including growing Zel's hair to such unnatural lengths. She bemoans her barrenness, staying angry at all women who bear children, even her own Zel when she becomes pregnant by Konrad. Konrad meets Zel once and becomes obsessed, pursuing her for years. None of this make logical sense, as folktales often don't, but Napoli coaxes a kind of psychological sense that changes the way you see the story. The witch is both evil and pitiable. Konrad and Zel share an inexplicable bond after the one meeting, one that is more plausible from Zel's socially deprived perspective than from Konrad's, but it basically works. Told this way, it's a drawn-out love story. The way that Zel came to live with Mother is only explained later, when Mother admits to Zel what she did and hopes that Zel too will choose to sell her soul to the devil so that they can stay together forever. Electra complex fans would have a field day here... but the story of a mother who will do almost anything to keep her daughter from growing up and coming to power, especially sexual power, remains bewitchingly compelling.

Finally, Shannon and Dean Hale collaborated with artist Nathan Hale (no relation) to create Rapunzel's Revenge, a graphic novel set in a fairy tale wild west. Rapunzel here is not stuck in any tower, though she does have unusually long red hair and uses it to whip or lasso her enemies. This is pretty far flung from the original... the main motivation that Rapunzel has is to rescue her real mother, whom she meets the one day she escapes from the witch's villa. It's silly and goofy and fun, especially when her thieving sidekick Jack turns out to be a romantic interest as well as the guy with the magic beans.

It's going to be a great set to compare and contrast: picturebook, novel, and graphic novel. Three very different retellings of an old story. I'll need to watch the Disney movie Tangled before class starts, and I might also throw in an article by Marina Warner on her own Rapunzel retelling. Should be fun!

City of Fire

2011-07-02T08:28:00.001-06:00

City of Fire by Laurence Yep is a multi-mythological adventure that reminds me a little of Avatar: The Last Airbender in its cast of improbable heroes and East-meets-West philosophy. From Chinese dragons to the Hawaiian goddess Pele and even over to the Norse fire giants, Yep has clearly done a ton of research. But none of that would matter if there weren't a good story here, and there is. The story is told in alternating perspectives, but it's hard not to see it mostly from the young girl Scirye's point of view. When her mother and sister are guarding precious Kushan relics as the Pippal warriors they are, the San Ffancisco museum is attacked by a dragon who steals and ancient ring and leaves behind devastation, including the death of Scirye's warrior sister. This brings some unlikely allies together: the royally raised Scirye, the street kid Leech and his friend Koko, and the old woman Bayang, who is really a dragon in disguise. They band together slowly, as Bayang was initially hunting Leech for reasons that are revealed later in the book. But as prey becomes ally, they are each revealed to have some magical heritage and mysterious powers.

While Yep pulls all the threads together, the opening is a bit chaotic, and the perspective-based chapters occasionally wander a bit in perspective. So it does take some persistence to get past the first few chapters. The attack is dramatic, but the ensuing chapters bog down a bit before the adventure actually begins (about 87 pages in). And the dialogue is a bit slapstick at times, which keeps the characters fairly shallow (Koko is the jokey guy, Leech is a serious hero, Bayang is rethinking her dragon alliances... only Scirye is developed enough as a character to really follow emotionally). But that's not unlike what Lloyd Alexander did quite successfully in the Book of Three series, so it really depends on your taste. So. I'm recommending this one, and saying: just suspend your disbelief and trust Yep. He's good at what he does, he knows what he's doing, and whether the mythologies and cultures he weaves together are familiar old friends to you or inspiration for exploration (only a mythology scholar would know all the references, but they're contextually defined), it's a good yarn. Fans of Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series will want to know about this book as well, though it will appeal less to the reluctant readers and more to those who are as interested in psychological motivation and snappy comebacks as they are in action.

Akata Witch

2011-06-24T08:42:00.000-06:00

I wouldn't describe this as a relaxing summer, although I'm able to physically relax more than in the school year. It's a juggling summer of 4 papers (14 months to tenure dossier deadline!), 2 new classes, files to clean out in two offices, volunteer work for GSLIS, a bathroom remodel, and a small host of random Things that Must Be Done. Still. I'm enjoying the juggling.

And I'm not even counting as work the new reading I'm doing for the fantasy class. I love it, but I do feel like I'm holding auditions when I read these novels. Fortunately, they won't get their feelings hurt if I don't pick them. This year, I've changed the rules a little. I used to have a firm only-in-print-paperbacks rule to keep textbook costs down. But I'm bending that rule now, assigning about 5 books that are so new they are only out in hardback, with the expectation that, since it's a LEEP course, many folks will get them from libraries. That's a reasonable expectation for all my classes these days, I've found, as economics make it more expensive to go to school. So I'll ask my students to buy or borrow the 35 novels we'll read in fall, knowing that many of them will just want to buy them anyway. And pointing out the hardback-only books as good ones to try to borrow! This is one of those....

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor
This is a new twist on one of my favorite "genres:" children's group capers. I just love stories where a bunch of people crowd around together, each of them uniquely portrayed, but with a well-developed group dynamic too. (Diana Wynne Jones, Hillary McKay, Trenton Stewart, and many more authors write in this "genre.") Akata Witch is set in Africa, where protagonist Sunny is Nigerian-born, American-raised, and then has come back to Nigeria. She's also albino, and gets picked on a lot at school because of it. Her friend Orlu introduces her to Chichi, and things pick up when they initiate her into the Leopard people, revealing that she is even more different than she previously knew. Sunny's magical abilities make her a natural-born Leopard, a person with spiritual abilities that manifest in the physical world (as distinct from the Lambs, those born without special powers). The threesome becomes a fabulous evil-fighting foursome with the addition of Sasha, whose American family has sent him to live with his African relatives because of his rebelliousness. The balance of the group is key. They are two boys (Orlu and Sasha) and two girls (Sunny and Chichi), two Africans (Orlu and Chichi), one African-American (Sasha), and Sunny, who feels American having lived there for her first nine years of life, but is also Igbo and Nigerian. Sunny "walks between" different worlds, with her mixed background and fair albino skin. The diversity of the group gives a flavor for the Nigerian setting; each does magic in his or her native tongue, and that's Igbo for Orlu, Efik for Chichi, English for Sasha and Sunny. As they travel around, they also meet people who speak accented English from all over the world, a trope that Okorafor uses subtly to emphasize the diversity of people who come from Africa.

Okorafor strikes the right balance for readers in the late middle grades (generally 6th and up) between Sunny's introspection about her deceased grandmother's status as a Leopard and the group's adventures. They learn swiftly together, traveling to Leopard Knocks, the secret home of the Leopard people who are born with special abilities, visiting the teacher Anatov, buying books from the magic bookstore... there's a hint of Rowling's Diagon Alley here. Each of them finds a teacher who will continue their instruction as they grow. Well, each of them but Sunny, who has met the woman she hopes will become her teacher under bad circumstances. Sunny frightened her chronically bullying classmate by revealing her spirit face, thereby breaking one of the central codes of the Leopard people. She meets her teacher while under punishment for this violation.

But they have to grow fast, because bigger things are afoot than Sunny's misbehavior: the fab foursome is desperately needed because there is an evil man, a serial killer and maimer of children, on the loose in Nigeria, and he must be defeated. In fact, he is reading himself to summon world-devastating evil. Overall, I'd recommend this to anyone who enjoys a solid fantasy read. The characters are delightful, well-drawn while being action-oriented kids up for an adventure. There's a more ominous sense of danger here than in many fantasy books for young people: "More is at stake than your lives" (p. 310) comes up multiple times. Early on, Anatov chides: "It's as I taught you. The world is bigger and more important than you." While it's more fearsome, it's also a more humbling and humble perspective than most fantasy writers take. Yes, you are here to save the world, but the world would also go on without you. There's weightiness but also balance in that thought.

Ruins of Gorlan

2011-06-09T21:18:00.000-06:00

Ruins of Gorlan by John Flanagan is the first of the Ranger's Apprentice series. I came to this one by local library colleagues, who I asked for some of the best and most popular new-ish middle-grade fantasy. I can see why this one is a winner. Among the castle wards, it has come time to choose a path in life, and Will thinks he wants to go to Battleschool even though the bully Horace is going there as well. But, in fact, when the choosing comes, a letter arrives about Will but its contents are not revealed to him. Will climbs to the tower where the letter was last seen, and there he is surprised by Halt, one of the Rangers, and discovers that he has in fact been chosen to serve as one of the mysterious Rangers. Once he is used to the idea, Will thrives under Halt's exacting guidance. But a war is brewing, and the evil Morgarath has loosed two monstrous creatures on the land, killing some of the kingdom's most brilliant warriors in secrecy. Halt and the Rangers discover what is happening, and so they set out, with young Will, to kill the monsters. I'll not spoil it by saying how Will saves the day, but suffice it to say that there's a happy ending to this battle, with more books in the series to come.

Fans of the first Harry Potter book will love it for its relatively short length, action-packed adventure, special hero Will (whose mysterious identity is revealed by the end of this book), and general kids-growing-up-and-saving-the-world flavor. As compared to Harry Potter, this is simpler, with less humor and somewhat less character development. That's not to say there is none of either. In fact, the character of Halt the Ranger is nicely detailed with some wry witticisms, and Will's own emotional world is just evident enough to keep the reader engaged with his struggles. Side character Horace's story is flatter, and his transformation from bully to victim of bullying is a bit pat. Still, it's a good read, and I'd definitely recommend this to middle school readers looking for easier fantasy or a stepping stone to the longer Harry Potter books.

Much as I have waaaaay too many other things to read, I think I'm going to buy the sequel on Kindle for bedtime reading. So that's a pretty good endorsement! I hardly ever have or take the time to read further books in a series beyond the first these days, what with the demands of work in general and the fantasy class in specific. Students tend to get annoyed when I assign sequels, and I don't really blame them.

Half a Life, contrasted with the stridency of positive thinking

2011-06-09T13:50:00.000-06:00

"All the things get done and you regret them and then you accept them because there's nothing else to do. Regret doesn't budge things; it seems crazy that the force of all that human want can't amend a moment, can't even stir a pebble." (p. 194)
--Half a Life by Darin Strauss

Today I met a woman who believes. Angel cards, affirmations, being positive, visualizing the exact number of the weight/wealth/world you want and making it so by sticking it to something, anything, where you can see it. I was polite, but I mentioned that I'd seen those ideas used as weapons to blame others for their shortcomings. Privately, I was thinking my usual thoughts about religious dogmatism that pushes for stridency and obliterates nuance. Her response was a perfect example of what lies beneath "positive thinking," and that was to trash-talk her sister who has a chronic illness and "bad luck." "Do you wake up thinking something bad will happen today? Well, there you go." This healthy woman justified her faith in the positive by blaming her sister's health on her negative thinking, as though a bad thought were a toxic bomb just waiting to explode. It's both judgmental and simplistic, wiping out all need for nuance, ambivalence, or simple compassion for those who are in pain.

The interaction made me think of the memoir I just finished reading by highly acclaimed author Darin Strauss, called Half a Life. It is the opposite of this. It is a tour through the world of emotional nuance in the face of devastation, a personal and unvarnished look at confusion and pain. Darin describes a life of striving to be good enough in the face of a horrific accident in which, when he was 18, a girl swerved her bike in front of his car and died from the impact. He works his way to "I killed her" by the end of the book. But it's a perfect example of one of those horrible, negative, hurtful, difficult things that happens not because someone thinks the wrong thought in the morning, but instead because cars exist and bikes exist and sometimes, more often than we'd like, they collide unpredictably.

The memoir starts with a chronology of what happened, the accident, the numbness, the high-schooler's performance of grief, all written with a crisp self-consciousness that makes this accurate. It's unfakeable, this depth of clarity. "I've come to see our central nervous system as a kind of vintage switchboard, all thick foam wires and old-fashioned plugs. The circuitry isn't properly equipped; after a surplus of emotional information the system overloads, the circuit breaks, the board runs dark. That's what shock is." (p. 17) He writes his memories from within the shut-down of shock. Life goes on, he goes abroad to study, and the parents of the dead girl file a vengeful lawsuit, all the more pointless because it was declared a no-fault accident by multiple eyewitnesses. But Darin doesn't know this, because he's still blaming himself, an act of contrition and of the self-centeredness of the young. He hopes the trial will end it, declaring him innocent or guilty once and for all, but then the trial is canceled. He muddles along, as we all do.

If we're honest, if we look closely enough, we all have some cause for guilt and remorse. It may not be something as extreme as this accident, but there's something there. As Strauss writes: "I think we all build superstructures in our heads, catwalks and trestles that lead us from the acceptance of our own responsibility to the cool mechanics of the factory, where things are an interlocking mess, where everybody's pretty much unaccountable. To be alive is to find a way to blame someone else." (p. 110)

The worst moments come when he describes a date gone horribly wrong. At a movie, Darin's extreme stress kicks in at a depiction of an accidental death from car accident. His date is not compassionate, and instead blames him for being dramatic. "How can you even go on living?" she asks. He wonders: "Who was this person[...] did she kick puppies for fun?" (p. 140) To his credit, he backs away. She follows with a phone call, and he just says "all right." Good for him. That's no kind of date to have, no kind of person to have in one's life. That's the negative crazy worth running, not walking but running, away from. That's toxic, that blame. It's no way to spend a life, harboring those voices, internally or otherwise.

The memoir ends with the kind of happy ending that is possible to believe in, one built of a solid partner and their children together and a long stretch of therapy. But even in this, Strauss doesn't overplay the positive, seeing life for what it is. Books like this make me grateful for not only the realists but also for those who are unflinchingly willing to see nuance, contradiction, and complexity. This is a poetically written memoir, and so I have more quotes than usual. This book reminds me what it is to survive anything that is or feels life-threatening. The accidents that shape us.

A few more favorite quotes:

In the United States, some two thousand drivers a year survive "dart-outs." And these drivers are more likely to get laid out by post-traumatic stress syndrome than are those who are irrefutably to blame in fatal accidents. No one knows why. Probably the brain prefers a sturdy error to fixate on. It's hard to learn so viscerally that the questions of guilt and worth are managed with indifference, by nasty chance. (p. 127)

My ideas, my language, support me in the face of disastrous horror over and over. --Harold Brodkey (quoted on p. 143)

Ten year later, talking about it remained a crackling horror. Probably, just by acting weird, I'd shown myself stained by the blemish of it. Whatever private anxieties we endure are, of course, never really private. Our own dissembling behavior guarantees their eternal, public return. (p. 164)

In fiction classes [...] you find that epiphany has a pretty high rate of occurrence. It's a story, it's tidy. At the end, the hero finds himself standing under just the right tree, reaches up without quite meaning to, and plucks down just the right fruit. / But when you tell your own story honestly, that epiphany thing is rare: there is no walk, there is no fated grab. You try every fruit, or forget there even are trees and wander from forest to forest, losing sight of any destination. The only changes are emergencies or blessings: when you wake up, notice the surroundings, then fall back, and wander more. And if you're lucky you end up walking again through a life where you're never called on to do too much noticing. (p. 173)

(describing Complicated Grief Disorder:) And this decisive suffering--which lasts and lasts, and offers "no redemptive value"--has been given a name, to distinguish it from what used to be called sorrow: Complicated Grief Disorder. (p. 185)

That's the meter you come up with, as you approach forty. If your relationship fills you with a sense of luck, you've chosen well. (p. 188)

Things don't go away. They become you. There is no end [...]. But we keep making our way, as we have to. We're all pretty much able to deal even with the worst that life can fire at us, if we simply admit that it is very difficult. I think that's the whole of the answer. We make our way, and effort and time give us cushion and dignity. And as we age, we're riding higher in the saddle, seeing more terrain. (p. 203)

The accident has formed me. I can no more discard it than I can discard having grown into adulthood. But I am grown now. And because I am, I can say no. I can say no to the hectoring, blistery hurt. I can say to myself: It's all right to take in the winter beach and grass smells, and crackle back across the sand of the road, and smile at the faces you love. (p. 205)

City of Bones

2011-06-04T12:22:00.001-06:00

City of Bones by Cassandra Clare was first of interest to me because Clare's career started as a Harry Potter fan fic writer. See here for a brief list of the various scandals (proving that there is always someone staying up too late because someone is wrong, plagarizing, or being mean on the internet). I've had longstanding criticisms of the Harry Potter series, beginning with the extreme length of book four (Goblet of Fire) and the fact that 100 pages pass before we actually see Harry. I had similar problems with the rest of the series, and this is relevant here because Clare really is writing in a similar vein. Clare's City of Bones is plot-driven bestseller fantasy, which frankly is perfectly enjoyable as it is. But great works of children's and young adult fantasy, in my opinion, are those that received the extensive editing that both Rowling's later works and this book by Clare lack.

City of Bones follows the extraordinary revelations that follow with our heroine Clary's mother suddenly disappears, her mom's friend Luke apparently abandons her, and demons appear in her apartment. Fortunately, she has just met the Shadowhunters, teens like herself who live in NYC and fight demons in their spare time. Clary isn't one of them, but she's oddly able to understand and tolerate runes in ways that most "mundanes" are not. (Note the similarity between "mundane" and Rowling's "muggle"). Although the story bogs periodically bogs down in details of both cute outfits and unnecessarily complex architecture, the main plot is thrillingly suspenseful at times, and Clary is a sturdy and believably sympathetic protagonist. There's plenty of magically-aided violence, mysterious questions about Clary's identity, and other tropes that do make this a good counterpart to the Harry Potter series. There's something interesting about a fanfic writer turned novelist, and the fact that the novel is a fun read keeps on troubling those assumptions in ways that are good to think about.

However, I was cringing at racial slurs in the book (a generally insensitive character uses "chico" for a Latino vampire on p. 263, another more sensitive character makes a Jewish joke on p. 304 (though the character making the joke is revealed to be Jewish himself on p. 357 and possibly earlier), and "she's got nixie eyes" which admittedly is a fantastical "race" and so only loosely related). I later realized that Clare is not entirely unconscious of the first and third slur, and in fact they partially serve to set up a reversal when the looked-down-upon magical Downworlders (vampires, werewolves, etc.) turn out to be key to triumph in the end over the evil Valentine and his Circle. Still the Latino slur and Jewish joke are not addressed as part of the magical prejudices, and the idea of racism--magical or otherwise--as a personal attitude problem rather than a systemic cultural problem rests unexamined.

There's a fair amount of Star Wars here too, as when highly attracted teens turn out to be siblings, and the villain turns out to be father to them both. Still. Some folks will love the sprawling nearly-500-page world that Clare creates here precisely because it works from familiar tropes that they have thoroughly enjoyed elsewhere. If you like bestseller fiction generally and/or were a big fan of the later Harry Potter or Twilight books, this might be a great read for you (ignoring the ethnic slurs). Personally, I did very much like the poetry quotations throughout the novel (they set up various sections) and those led me to explore and re-explore a couple of poets, including William Carlos Williams and his poem The Descent which I'd recommend (p. 387, first page of Part Three). Clare may not achieve the grandeur she strives for, but she hits grand notes occasionally, and the result is a fun fantasy read (first in a trilogy).

Into the Closet, part 1

2011-06-03T16:51:00.000-06:00

Victoria Flanagan's book Into the Closet: Cross-Dressing and the Gendered Body in Children's Literature and Film has been on my to-read list for awhile. This post will only cover up to the end of chapter 2; I'll write about the rest of the book in a different post.

What I'm noticing, having read Flanagan's other work, is that she has solidified some interesting ideas here, especially in chapter two, about three models of cross-dressing. I'm currently only interested in two of them: female-to-male (FTM) cross dressing and transgendered cross dressing. The FTM model is specific to children's literature, which Flanagan points out has relatively little sexual content. Remarkably, these sorts of books show females cross dressing quite easily, "passing" as male immediately and without fanfare. "The majority of children's texts that feature a female cross-dressing theme spend little or no time describing the newly adopted attire of the cross-dressing character. Their central concern is whether the character can act like a boy." (p. 27) This, too, female characters accomplish both easily and heroically, and in fact she "incorporates both masculine and feminine behaviors into her gender performance" (30) such that: "The female cross-dresser's successful performance of masculinity disrupts the presumption that gender is biologically decreed by dissecting masuclinity into a series of behaviors and gestures that can be learned by a female subject just as easily." (p. 31)

The transgendered model is what Flanagan uses to talk about books that include sexuality, puberty, or anything about coming-of-age, basically anything that pushes beyond the (as she describes it) asexuality of childhood and gestuers toward adulthood "where the many dilemmas of contemporary adult transvestism and transsexualism begin to encroach on an otherwise simple and straightforward story of gender disguise." (p. 28) Alanna (the Tamora Pierce character) is the prime example here, with the story of her getting her period pushing her character toward adulthood.

These are my current thoughts: while Flanagan's model is an excellent starting point, I see problems inherent in separating childhood female cross-dressing and the resultant "liberatory and fluid conceptualization of gender"(xvi) from the next stages of life, those that involve puberty, young adult sexuality, and coming of age. I want to argue that gender and sexual orientation are inextricably linked. One way to do that would be to reveal that sexuality and sexual content are also present in children's books, albeit indirectly in many cases.

If I could re-read Alanna by Pierce and show that there is sideways sexual content, homophobia, or other evidence of biological sex, gender performance, and sexual orientation being tied together in inextricable ways, that might be something worth writing about in the article I'm editing.

More to come on chapters 3-8!

Quotes I'm mulling over:

"By disengaging itself from the sexually oriented world of adult transvestism, the construction of female cross-dressing favored by children's texts allows them to reclaim it as their own, refashioning female cross-dressing into a clever strategy for the interrogation of traditional gender categories." (p. 20)

"She [the FTM cross-dressing protagonist] has nothing to lose--in terms of socially constructed gender status--by deciding to discard her femininity temporarily in favor of masculinity. Her cross-dressing enables her to improve her gender status (becasue masculinity is traditionally regarded as superior to femininity), and therefore does not pose a threat to her femininity. She ultimately resumes her original gender position as a heroine, having redoubtably proved herself as a hero. Her final victory is her ability to bridge the distinctive literary traditions of masculine and feminine success, ingeniously weaving them together in order to deconstruct and interrogate their modes of operation." (p. 21)
   [I'm thinking of the sexual threats to both Charlotte and Mary/Bloody Jack... stepping out of gender identity is stepping into both power and vulnerability, specifically sexual vulnerability.]

"A person's gender, as these children's books and films demonstrate, is principally based on how that person behaves rather than who he or she is inside." (p. 30, cites Culler)
     [There's a "real person" problem here... mixing postmodernism and liberation doesn't necessarily work... Flanagan tackles that somewhat:]
"The concept of 'agency' is similarly problematic here because an ideological distinction must be drawn between the humanist definition of agency, wherein people are viewed as individuals who have the capacity to act reflectively and purposively, and Butler's postmodern concept of agency, which is specifically located in actions that disrupt and vary the normally reiterative nature of gender performance." (p. 42)
     [p. 48 also touches on "who they actually are" vs. prescribed gender... do we exist outside of prescriptive norms that we embrace or resist?]

time's memory and other books

2011-05-23T09:32:00.000-06:00

Time's Memory by Julius Lester

Lester is a fantastic author, and this book, with a blending of fantasy elements (based on African spiritual beliefs) and a setting in the late days of slavery in the south, was truly stunning. The book opens from the perspective of a slave ship master who doesn't have the heart for cruelty that his competitors do. A brutal storm is gathering outside the ship when the voice of his deceased wife tells him to promise to rescue one of the slave women when the voyage is done. As soon as he agrees, the winds die down. And Lester moves from there immediately to a next chapter written from the woman Amira's perspective. She is pregnant, carrying a spirit-child who was miraculously conceived from the breath of her dying father and the group's spirit leader. The spirit-child, Ekundayo (Joy out of Sorrow), goes through several transformations, but finally comes to be in the body of a young boy named Nat or Nathaniel, a slave on a plantation in Virginia, and he struggles with what the right way might be to eliminate the insanity of slavery: resistance or violence? Anything but acceptance. "Slavery was a kind of chaos, a confusion of mind which distorted everyone's vision by making skin color an object of worship." (p. 138)

Without giving it all away, it's worth mentioning another moving moment in the narrative, on p. 182, when the plantation owner Samuel tells his wretched story of betraying himself and his beloved to stay in power as a slave owner. After he tells the story to Nathaniel and his guardian Harriet (both slaves), the man says:

    "'You may think there is nothing worse than physical slavery, and maybe there isn't. But at this minute, I would swap places with you. The question is: would you swap places with me?'
     Neither Harriet nor I spoke, but we didn't have to. Samuel Chelsea saw the pity for him on Harriet's face and the contempt on mine.
       'I don't blame you,' Samuel said finally. 'I don't want to be me either.'
       The three of us sat in silence for a long while. What could we say to a life that had been lived poorly and without honesty? Samuel Chelsea had failed to be a decent human being, which was a failure of the most elemental kind."

The last we hear of Samuel, he is still scheming, still dishonest, imagining wealthy widows upon whom he could prey next. What Lester does is show the decency and indecency, the kindness and the cruelty, that human visit upon one another for the most flimsy of reasons, skin color. He also gives us glimpses of deep love that defy social strictures around skin color. Lester paints a picture of a kind of strength that considers but then rejects violence for the cycle it creates. Oh, and there's a central love story between Nathaniel and Ellen. It is profoundly touching; the characters come to be separated but, at long last, reunited in their spirits. The epilogue about Lester's dream of African/Dogon spiritual architecture is fascinating too.

Black & White (previously Naughts & Crosses) by Malorie Blackman

Blackman creates a pseudo-British imagined world in which the dark-skinned Crosses rule society, and light-skinned Naughts (meaning zero) or, in derogatory slang, "blankers," were historically slaves and are only beginning to make any civil rights progress. Sephy is the daughter of a wealthy Cross politician, but her best friend, Callum, is a Naught. Callum's mother works for Sephy's mother when the novel opens, and the two have grown up together. Even after Callum's mother is fired, they meet at the beach, and Sephy is thrilled when Callum is one of the few Naughts to pass the entrance exams to attend a Cross school. She's very excited to have him at her school, but in her naivete she fails to see all the forces aligned against them. It takes most of the novel for her to come to accept the cruelties that Callum cannot avoid. Sephy says: "I used to comfort myself with the belief that is was only certain individuals and their peculiar notions that spoiled things for the rest of us. But how many individuals does it take before it's not the individuals who are prejudiced but society itself?" (p. 367)

With a hanging, a kidnapping, alcoholism, and other drama, the latter half of the book has soap-opera potential, but the overall premise makes all of the 489 pages worth it.

imagined animalia

2011-05-19T08:16:00.001-06:00

Dust City by Robert Paul Weston

Henry lives in a world gone wrong. Where fairy dust once created daily miracles, now pharmaceutical companies pedal knock-off versions of "dust" for every ill. Henry should know, since one of their trucks killed his mother. And his own world has gone wrong in other ways too. He's stuck in St. Remus Home for Wayward Youth while his father is in prison for having killed Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. Though aspects of the premise sound humorous, this novel is anything but a fractured fairy tale. Henry hasn't heard from his dad since he was locked up, and although he has grown to be a pretty big wolf, like his dad, his friends all know that he's really a softie. Of course, he does occasionally have to defend himself from the more violent inmates. But when he walks in on the recently hanged body of his shrink, things change, and Henry breaks out of the "home" (really a juvenile detention facility) and into the real world. His quest to see his father turns into a quest to find out what really happened to the fairies.

The fairies once lived in Eden, high above Dust City, where no one but they could travel. And yet the world was not all right then, either, as Henry slowly realizes that the hominids had always cornered the market on happy endings, and the animalia--wolves like him, foxes, ravens, etc.--were hardly ever granted wishes, happy endings, or anything else. The animalia have always been bit players in the stories of the hominids. And this slow-dawning realization starts to make Henry mad, but what he finally uncovers sickens him and makes him sorry he started the quest in the first place (nope, no spoiler on this one--it's worth reading).

Fantasy is great for exploring complex sides of social worlds, metaphors allowing a kind of distance from reality that highlights the lines that we accept as part of our daily worlds. The various animalia-hominid-nixie-giant divides read as metaphors for race and class divisions in society today (albeit not easily mapped ones), and that's just part of what Weston has achieved. He's also infused this tough young wolf Henry with a sense of deep pathos and longing for a better world, and the ending holds some possibility for hope.

*****

I blog for many reasons, most of them to keep track of what I've read and what I thought when I did read. Reading has been a constant in my life. When everything else is in upheaval, I can read and, usually, learn or imagine something new. I may not ever be able to explain fully why I value exploring worlds that don't exist so much. It's a good day to celebrate a year of stamina through upheavals, and the steadiness of a good read.

race, whiteness, and anti-racism

2011-05-07T15:06:00.000-06:00

Once intensive discussions of race, racism, and the social structures that perpetuate racism break out in your school, it can be a bit meaningless to concentrate on anything else. I want to live and teach in a society, place, and community where people are striving for equality through explicitly anti-racist conversations, readings, and teaching. And I'm beginning to think that white folks who intend to be anti-racist have a kind of endless "coming out" to do, because it is not at all visibly obvious which white people want to strive to overcome racism (internally and socially) and which are unconscious of their privilege. On the one hand, coming out as gay or lesbian puts you in a state of vulnerability that "coming out" as anti-racist probably does not. On the other hand, in a group of white people who are struggling with some of these ideas, revealing one's own anti-racist intentions and proposed actions may result in quick, defensive critiques from others who have benefited unconsciously from white priviledge.

Things I've read lately related to this include:

--Christine Pawley "Unequal Legacies: Race and Multiculturalism in the LIS Curriculum" from Library Quarterly vol 76 no 2, pp. 149-168
Pawley's argument that the more comfortable topic of "diversity" is often used to obscure issues directly related to the less comfortable issue of "race" concludes with a call to arms for reexamining LIS curricula. That is the space in which I find myself currently, as an LIS professor who teaches predominately in the area of youth services.

--Marilyn Frye "White Woman Feminist" from Willful Virgin: Essays in Feminism (The Crossing Press, 1992)
Frye argues that "whiteliness" can be dismantled and avoided, much like "masculinity" as a privilege can be abandoned by men and "femininity" can be abandoned by women. While intriguing, I found this argument full of mental acrobatics that suggest that such abandonments are intensive activities that actually deconstruct our own ways of being. While I'm interested in this, I've seen too many women, people of color, and students in general subscribe to confidence-destroying self-examination activities that lack that quality of risk-taking and action that are so key to life-long learning.

--Gregory Jay, "Introduction to Whiteness Studies" https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/gjay/www/Whiteness/introwhite.htm
Like Pawley, Jay offers that the idea of "whiteness" stems from efforts to rethink "celebratory multiculturalism" in favor of "critical multiculturalism." Celebrating difference, again, is not enough. And yet Jay attempts to move the white reader beyond fear or defensiveness: "Whiteness Studies is not an attack on people, whatever their skin color." Jay goes on to talk about the historical appearance of the term "white" as a legal and social term that "determined who could vote, who could be enslaved, who could be a citizen, who could attend which schools and churches, who could marry whom, and who could drink from what water fountain."

--Debra Van Ausdale and Joe R. Fegan, The First R: How Children Learn Race and Racism
Much more to read in this book, but the gist is that, if children were "colorblind" and somehow nobly impervious to racism, racism itself would die out in a generation. The authors demonstrate that even very young children are not only aware of race but will actually use racial epithets. Adults look outside to see where this was learned *from,* and so fail to see the real causes. More reading TBA.

--Karen Coates "Blinded by the White: The Responsibilities of Race," chpt six in Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire, and Subjectivity in Children's Literature (Univ of Iowa Press, 2004)
Two folks I've been teaching lately have been using and referring to Coates, so I thought I'd refresh myself on this text. Coates looks at how "whiteness" functions as a "master signifier," but also at how naming and thinking about that signifier destabilizes its power: "When Whiteness itself is opened to interrogation and theorization, when it is revealed to be historically and culturally grounded in specific qualities, then it can be mobilized as one signifier among many rather than the unconscious support of a racist cultural system." (p. 126) I like the critical theory optimist of being able to get out of social binds via careful, thoughtful use of language, but I do remain a bit skeptical. Destabilizing signifiers has its limits!

Aside from reading, things I've done in response to the ideas circulating at GSLIS include:

--Talking about the topic of race (which came up in a town hall meeting) in the storytelling class with the students, and making some space to listen
--Offering to teach a new course on Local to Global Intersections in Library and Information Science, with the help of a syllabus that a group of master's students drafted as suggested by the GSLIS Curriculum Committee
--Reviewing my own syllabi and working toward changing about 5-7of the 35 books I'll require for my fall course in Fantasy Literature and Media for Youth
--Locating sources about race, anti-racism, and work with urban youth for the new course 490YS
--Participating in three sessions of the May 5 day-long meetings in response to the Town Hall

Previews of coming reading attractions:

Drylongso by John Langston Gwaltney
Black Power on Campus by Joy Ann Williamson, about the University of Illinois in the 60s and 70s, just loaned to me by friend and local-to-international media activist friend Danielle Chynoweth
Critical Theory in LIS by Leckie, Given, and Buschman (available via U of I library from http://www.library.uiuc.edu/proxy/go.php?url=http://site.ebrary.com/lib/uiuc/docDetail.action?docID=10400751)
more things by Rudine Sims Bishop

fantasy books lately

2011-05-07T13:16:00.002-06:00

Quick check-in on a few novels before I get to the meaty stuff I've been reading about race, whiteness, and racism:

Michael Buckley The Sisters Grimm
This is the first of a series of detective-style romps through the world of the Grimm family. Sabrina and Daphne are the newest members, and their family is responsible for all of the classic Grimm's Fairy Tale characters. This is clever and funny, and there are twists and turns as characters such as Puck and Jack the Giant Killer are neither the enemies nor the friends they first appear to be. Sabrina is slowly won over to her younger sister Daphne's optimistic perspective that Mrs. Grimm really is their grandmother. And the hunt for their missing parents will continue in the next books...

Jean Ferris Once Upon a Marigold
This won a big Horn Book thing as well as a bunch of ALA and NYPL accolades, so kudos for that.

(Warning: Snark Alert. You have been warned.)
And yet I found it to be sweet, twee, and trite. I mean, it's nice enough. This book is like a friend from middle school that I'd talk to on the bus politely, but who never guffaw or roll her eyes with me at the absurdity of the world. Christian runs away from home and adopts Edric the Troll as his new family. Obviously, he will turn out to be a prince. As he grows, he develops a correspondence (via pigeons or p-mail) with the princess across the river. Obviously, they will fall in love against the odds. The only interesting bits were the part where Princess Marigold's mother wants to kill her, but then that's tidied up as the girls turn out to be adopted. Mild drama, no surprises, and a rather large dose of overplayed proverb-based humor.

one fantasy and a couple of ok books

2011-04-24T11:02:00.003-06:00

The Lost Conspiracy by Francis Hardinge (this books is also published at Gullstruck Island for the kindle, which is darned confusing if you ask me)
This is the best of the three books I'm blogging today, although it's longer and slower paced than it needs to be. Hathin is a Lace girl, one of the tribe of people who once lived on the entire island of Gullstruck prior to colonization. The cultural differences between Hathin's culture and the colonizers are related to how they deal with their dead. The Lace scatter their ashes and let their names fade, with the idea that death is a kind of unnaming, while the colonizers collect theirs and let them take over the land in graveyards full of urns. Hathin is unusual mostly because of her sister Arilou, who is the only Lost among all the Lace tribes. The Lost are able to send their senses out without their bodies, having five or more minds in different places at once. Arilou, however, may or may not really be Lost. Hathin cannot understand her speech, but instead has been pretending to translate for Arilou for many years now. When all the other Lost in all the other parts of Gullstruck suddenly die, Arilou is the last Lost left alive, and she may not really be lost. Hathin is a solid and practical character, and the writing details a world of clashing cultures, beliefs, and power systems well. But the power struggles and political systems are not deeply emotionally engaging, and yet they seem to comprise the main emotional thrust of the novel, and the details build the world but don't always connect fully to the plot. However, if you know a young reader who really likes to memorize details and likes the kind of fantasy world predicated on strategy, this would be a fantastic book to recommend. Some Harry Potter fans are tailor made for this book and for Hardinge's other acclaimed fantasy novels.

favorite quotes:
--...we're broken. Broken so badly that we can't ever be fixed... and.... and all that's left to us is breaking something else. (loc 6825)
--I know you feel like you're carrying around this big heavy rock until you can talk to me about it... only if you do then you'll be giving me the rock. And it'll squash me flat. I have too much to carry in my head already, Therrot. So please, don't. (loc 5530)
--I'll be scarred. It doesn't matter. The important thing is, when I look in a mirror now at least I can recognize myself. (loc. 6766)
--Well, this is the way the world is. Let us make the best of things and set about surviving here, shall we? (loc 6766)

Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby
I like Hornby, generally, and this book was perfectly likeable while being a little flat. The main characters are either the couple Duncan and Annie who have been together 15 years and are on the verge of splitting up or the has-been rocker Tucker Crowe with whom Duncan has been obsessed with for more than the previous 15 years. When Annie listens to the new Crowe album without Duncan, it betrays their unspoken trust and truce. Duncan finds someone else, but he doesn't really like her. Annie realizes that she really wants a child, and she can't do anything about it. Annie surprisingly connects with Tucker Crowe online, and they have all kinds of sparks except that, Annie realizes, Tucker is really not such a great guy. The former rock-and-roll lifestyle left him with children from about four different women (he's not entirely sure) and the only one he cares for is 6 year old Jackson. Though I generally like Hornby, there's a soap opera quality about this one. The narrative follows the spirit of one of Tucker's musings: "The truth about life was that nothing ever ended until you died and even then you just left a whole bunch of unresolved narratives behind you." (loc. 4715) In the end, you're left back in the Tucker Crowe online fandom, feeling the emptiness of online connections as well as the fragility of real connections but without enough depth to make it poignant. Still. It really was an ok book and I enjoyed the read.

Everyone is Beautiful by Katherine Center
Lanie, Peter and their 3 kids (the third a recent surprise) have moved across the country to Cambridge so that Peter can go to grad school in music. Lanie hits a crisis point, realizing she's been doing everything for everyone else and desperately needs to do something for herself. So she goes to the gym and takes a photography class, squeezing this all in between extreme child care with three near-toddlers. The instructor of the photography class makes it clear that he's into her, and though he's a drunk and recently divorced and she's really not into him like that, she doesn't exactly stop it either. So that the night he decides to kiss her, Lanie's husband Peter sees it and assumes they've been having an affair all along. Which they haven't. But how would Peter know, having beeng swamped with grad school and three kids? Peter is not all likeable, but he's trying, and Lanie is sincere in her hope that he'll believe her instead of his own worst fears. Overall, the Lanie character was a little surfacey for my taste, and her trip to empowerment is a little unconvincing, somehow. But it was an ok book, and I enjoyed it while I was in it. A couple of quotes:
-I suddenly understood what it was, exactly, people longed for when they longed for their youth. And the bittersweet-ness of that longing. Sometimes it's worse to remember a thing than to forget it entirely. (loc. 3797)
--Everybody had marks on their bodies from years of living--a trail of life left on them, evidence of all the adventures and sleepless nights and practical jokes and heartbreaks that had made them who they were.

*****

another quote I saw recently:
Nobody sees a flower really; it is so small. We haven't time, and to see takes time - like to have a friend takes time. Georgia O'Keefe

revolution

2011-03-26T19:25:00.000-06:00

Revolution by Jennifer Donnelly is a tour de force YA novel. It's realistic fiction most of the way through, but with just enough historical fiction and fantasy to make it a somewhat genre-defying. At its heart, though, it's a problem novel about a girl, Andi, who loses her 10-year-old brother Truman to a freak accident, loses her father to an affair, and then loses her mother to mental instability following her brother's death. When her father institutionalizes her mother for treatment, he takes Andi with him to Paris where she is told to work on her senior thesis. She's just motivated enough to do that, because the thesis is about music, and guitar playing is the only thing that makes her want to live. She chugs anti-depressants at near suicidal levels, and yet this does not keep her from being suicidal. Go figure. Donnelly's descriptions of the raw grief at losing so much so irretrievably in a single year are all the more moving because they are understated, buried behind layers of Andi's defenses.

Paris brings new friends, one a particularly beautiful boy, Virgil, who loves music as much as she does. It also bring historical documents for her thesis and a chance discovery of the diary of a girl about her age who lived through the French Revolution. Andi has no idea how intellectual she is to keep all of these curiosities spinning at once, and Donnelly mostly handles the multiple plot developments well, though it takes all 472 pages to do so. The diary of the girl proves the most interesting document, and we read it along with Andi in its entirety. In it, the girl Alex strives to save the neglected and dying child Louis-Charles, who would be king had the monarchy not just been overthrown. Andi's loss of her brother Truman and Alex's ultimate inability to save the child king are parallel griefs. The gruesomeness of revolutionary Paris is, in fact, not dissimilar from Andi's witnessing of her own brother's death. And death, loss, the smell of sadness and desperation, all saturate the pages of this novel until very near the end, when the redemption is appropriately partial and imperfect. And honest and real because of it partialness and imperfection.

This is a book of grief, about all the unexpected shards and fragments that must be woven together to recover from an immense, enormous, life-shattering set of losses. This is the kind of healing that doesn't happen overnight, the kind that needs constant attention and falters readily, like a helpless creature fumbling to walk. A few steps at a time are the best you can hope for, and if falling is not accompanied by breaking, as long as you're well enough to take more steps tomorrow, that's healing.

Best quotes:
"It was nice. And weird. And tender. I'm not used to tender. It's a fossil, that word. Conditions changed and it died out. Like the woolly mammoth. It just couldn't live in the same world as dick box. Ho dog. Or wiener cousins." (p. 162)

"I'm tired, so tired. And weak. And everything's fading. But suddenly I'm laughing. I can't help it. Because I understand now. I know what Alex wanted to tell me. I know the answer. I know how her diary ends. Not with a smear of blood, not with death. [...] The world goes on, stupid and brutal, but I do not. Can't you see? I do not." (p. 456)

and boy are my arms tired!

2011-03-21T16:43:00.005-06:00

It's spring break, and I'm taking the opportunity to catch up on a zillion projects, from work to house to filing. In the filing area, I consolidated two folders today of conference information, dating back to 2006. And, just for kicks, I'm listing here all the conferences/places I have (mostly) flown to or (less often) driven to in the past 5 years. I feel very lucky to have travel be part of my work, and when I look at this list it confirms for me why I'm not typically keen on adding extra travel... Not listed here are little trips to Chicago to the Newberry library. So I just flew in from 3 countries and 14 confererences, and boy are my arms tired!

Association of Library and Information Science Educators (ALISE), San Antonio, TX, Jan 2006.
Center for the History of Print Culture in Modern America conference, Education and the Culture of Print, Madison, WI, Sept 2006. [I don't seem to have the flyer for this one, but I'm in the book that got produced, so I know I was there.]
Children's Literature Association (ChLA), Newport News, VA, June 2007. [This was part of a 2-week trek with Ben that involved living out of a tiny suitcase while tooling around the east coast, seeing some sites, visiting Elizabeth, and presenting my dissertation research at a wrap-up gathering for the Project Athena grant which funded my doctoral fellowship.]
Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), Minneapolis, MN, July 2007.
ALISE, Philadelphia, PA, January 2008. [This is the last one Ben went on with me before the onset of a long-term tailbone injury. No fun. :( ]
ChLA, Bloomington-Normal, IL, June 2008. [Close to home. Nice. I also went to Santa Fe, NM in May for fun.]
SHARP, Oxford, England, June 2008. [Yes, two conferences in one month. Yes, Oxford!! I felt exactly like Ratty and Mole, sitting on the bank of the Thames watching people punting by. Loved the solitude of walking out by the river and looking back at the spires. It was the ultimate college town.]
The Culture of Print in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine, Madison, WI, Sept 2008. [I skipped ALISE that year, unusually, though I can see a pattern: when there are biannual Print Culture conferences in Madison, I'm less likely to go to ALISE.]
A research trip to the Vassar Archives and the NYPL Archives, New York, funded by the Campus Research Board for my grant "Toward a History of Children as Readers" which became this paper, May 2009. I'm counting it, because it was a ton o' work.
SHARP, Toronto, Canada (Oh Canada!), June 2009. [Michael Jackson died while I was here, and watching the CBC reporting was just better. Loved the shoe museum!]
American Library Association (ALA), Chicago, IL, July 2009. [I won a spot on a juried Library History Round Table (LHRT) panel and that became a paper that was just published this month . I was also asked to present for an LRRT group on research in youth services. The presentations were fine, but overall I'd call this trip disastrous to my stress levels, and I took 6 months off from travel.]
ALISE, Boston, MA, Jan 2010. [First time Ben went with me since 2008. Hooray! Followed by a trip to MS in February that was scheduled too close and started a leg injury. Followed by a trip to KY in March, but still the nagging leg injury. Too much travel.]
On the Front Lines, Springfield, IL, March 2010. [Then took six months off to deal with the nagging leg injury. This no longer impedes my motion, but I have yet to regain full feeling in parts of my ankle and calf. Nerve injuries typically take a year, the doctors say. Still waiting...]
Library History Seminar XII, Madison, WI, Sep 2010. [I love Madison. Caught up with Andy and had dinner with Dipesh and his family, little knowing that it would lead to his giving the Gryphon award talk this year.]
ALISE, San Diego, CA, January 2010. [A fine poster thanks to Cope. Also included were the best burritos ever from El Zarape (Rick was right!), watching the gorgeous sunset and itty bitty surfers with Ben at Sunset Cliffs, amazing oysters at a beachside pho bar, and a salad in the Houston Airport that triggered food poisoning for about 2 weeks. But San Diego in January was such sweet relief from an unusually brutal Illinois winter. Totally worth it.]

There you go. Fifteen work-related trips, five years, and one tired but well-traveled tenure-track assistant professor. Now signing off to resume my regularly scheduled spring break, one file more organized than before. :)

what we don't know

2011-02-28T14:18:00.000-06:00

Teaching What You Don't Know by Therese Huston

Among the things I haven't had time to do lately, I haven't had time to go to the annual U of I Faculty Retreat, the big one that brings people across campus together. But I have been paging through this book by one of the keynote speakers. Huston argues that there are real structural aspects of how teaching is organized that lead to people teaching subjects they "don't know." But the bar for "know" is ridiculously high for most academics, which is again an artifact of the extreme narrowness of dissertations and Ph.D. specialization in general. In fact, most people teach things they are qualified to teach about (specialists in genetics can and should teach, for instance, biology), and her examples make this clear though the language around them is sometimes more dire, most likely reflecting the anxieties of her interviewees.

And the world changes. We can't graduate knowing it all. When I took storytelling, in 1998, no one had ever heard of "digital storytelling." Now the term is everywhere, though it's used in very different ways depending on the context. But a meaning has coalesced around audio-and-image recording technologies like iMovie and their use to record (predominately) personal stories. I could not have known this when I was in school, and yet what I "don't know" was worth both learning and teaching.

Huston argues that, based on her interview studies, there are three groups of faculty when it comes to teaching the unfamiliar: poised and confident, indifferent and undecided, and stressed and anxious. She gives tips for being more like the poised and confident group, but unlike your average self-help overseller, she cautions that some of this is just personality. The basics of who we are. Expectations and assumptions we really can't control. So I'd recommend this for folks who are struggling with teaching, in general, because most of the tips to be "poised and confident" are just good teaching tips anyhow. I like the things she suggests about thinking through pros and cons of hiding your learning process as well as being transparent about it. For my part, I think teaching should be a process of telescoping in to the fine details and also out to the biggest of big pictures. I like the balancing act this requires, and I think there would be something missing from the world if academic specialists never taught courses that required them to interact with students who have a general interest in a broad topic.

*****
Upcoming this week: Dipesh's Gryphon lecture (check out his styling bow tie!), and catching up with colleagues who teach LEEP this weekend, including some of my fellow 1999-ish GSLIS master's grads.

On a personal note: If life were just academic, it would be easier to get reading done and organize files and papers, but it would not be nearly as delicious. Over fifty people came to our house for the baby shower for my dear friend Danielle's baby boy, Ezra Shine. It was amazing. She's an important part of my chosen family. I am in favor of women having a splendid array of reproductive choices, including this one. She will truly be a mother by choice, and I can't wait to be part of his world.

funny times

2011-02-20T14:03:00.000-06:00

In honor of Terry Pratchett's Blue Ribbons Win for the last of the Tiffany Aching books (which I look forward to reading straight through):

"Some humans would do anything to see if it was possible to do it. If you put a large switch in some cave somewhere, with a sign on it saying "End-of-the-World Switch. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," the paint wouldn't even have time to dry."
--Terry Pratchett
quoted in the March 2011 Funny Times

storytelling, in both cases

2011-02-11T15:04:00.000-06:00

Two storytelling titles for various purposes....

Storytelling for Grantseekers by Cheryl A. Clarke
More than anything, this is an accurate and accessible book-length metaphor for what a grant can be: a gripping story of a need and a solution with a promise of another chapter to come. The chapter titles alone give a sense of how this metaphor works. A few examples are: "The Proposal Narrative: Introducing the Characters and the Place," "The Need or Problem: Building Tension and Conflict into Your Story," and "The Budget: Translating Your Story from Words to Numbers." This last chapter, chapter 8, is now in my email in .pdf form (thanks Alaine!) for future use in 506. The whole book might work, but I notice that the most frequent student mistake is to botch or, in rare cases, leave off the budget for their "facilitating change" projects. A whole reading on the how-to of the topic can't hurt.

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction by Brian Boyd
Were there world enough and time, I'd just sit and devour this book for about three days. Instead, I've had to try it out in chunks, thanks to my colleage Karen Coates who suggested it and is using it as a major text for her storytelling course. The text is comprised of two sections, and the first explores the idea that narrative has some basis on our makeup at an evolutionary level. The second delves into particular stories, "from Zeus to Seuss," analyzing both The Odyssey and Horton Hears a Who, a juxtaposition that I find charming, engaging, and again with the if-I-had-three-days comment. Boyd's arguments bring together narrative analysis and selected neuroscience in really interesting ways. Maybe in summer, maybe after that other book chapter is due in June...

roses, food, and imperfection

2011-02-05T17:16:00.002-06:00

Lots of reading, but very little blogging, so this is a catch-up posting. I suppose the guest lecture and keynote speech and the two classes I'm teaching and the writing do tend to get in the way. Today I gave a keynote speech for a little regional conference of teachers interested in history. It was my first time giving an hour plus talk with questions, and interestingly I found it really is about the amount that fits into any one of my 40-page-double-spaced history papers. I did talk for about an hour about "Creating a History of Children as Readers," but then left time for 30 min or so of questions, and I think it went well, though the evaluations that they'll send me will be useful. It was a pleasure to talk to such a great audience of intelligent history teachers with good questions.

In the meantime, I have been reading:

Rose Daughter by Robin McKinley

This retelling of Beauty and the Beast came to my attention years ago, when Betsy talked about it, and I vaguely remembering skimming through it. But this is not a book you can skim. To absorb it, you have to dive into its fantasy world and let it take over. The pacing is slow like dreams are slow, as Beauty discovers the castle, learns the Beast, and begins to decipher the magical complexities of history and identity that bring her to a crossroads and, ultimately, to a decision. In this version, the Beast stays a Beast, he does not transform back into the man he once was. I'm reading this in part because of B. who is doing an independent study with me, updating her thesis to be a publishable paper, and she tells me she absolutely hated this ending as a child. I can see why, and it reaffirms the sense that this is really an adult retelling. It's a satisfying tale on so many levels, interweaving reality and dreams in ways that feel more emotionally real than most realistic fiction. If I had a complaint, it would be that she still knows the Beast so little when they are married. But, really, knowing a person is so complicated, and both are characters of very few words. Beauty certainly chooses her own fate, and that is satisfying in and of itself.

About love:
"Roses are for love. Not forget-me-not , honeysuckle, silly sweethearts' love but the love that makes you and keeps you whole, love that gets you through the worst your life'll give you and that pours out of you when you're given the best instead." (p. 56)

About being unmade:
"But the worst borne is not necessarily past and over with thereby. The worst of fighting a dragon is being caught in its fire, but you do not survive dragon encounters by commanding your muscles to withstand dragon fire, because you and they cannot. You survive by avoiding being burnt. [...] Whatever--whoever--she was, it was beign transformed implacably into something else; she was being undone, unmade, annihilated...." (p. 92)

About one's old life dissolving:
"When we had to leave the city, I thought I'd die. Not for grief, or even anger, but more from a kind of... amazement that the world could be so unlike what I had thought. And then... fear. Fear for all those things I didn't know. I would get up in the morning and look at my petticoats, and my stockings, and my shoes, and my dress, and I didn't know which one to put on first, or whether my shoes went on my feet or my head. I would decide they went on my feet from the shape. How could I live when I know nothing?" (p. 265)

The Gastronomy of Marriage by Michelle Maisto

On the upside, this book is full of wonderful food descriptions, one of which inspired me to make a fig and olive tapenade that was excellent on crackers for a party appetizer and better still on pasta later. Maisto touches on so many simple but real truths about melding one's life with another, but "marriage" is overstating it, as this is really about food, eating, identity, and the process of being engaged and working toward a wedding. I think the landscape before that point is more similar than the landscape after, because every marriage, every partnership, has its own mysterious borders. I'd love to see a book like this from someone married for 15, 30, or 45 years, when the gastronomy is more than melding, but is also phases of separating, rejoining, agreeing, disagreeing, finding the foods that mean celebration or comfort at so many different parts of life. Still. The dinner party descriptions and the wonderful Manhattan food and tiny kitchen are evocative and well described. Maybe Maisto will follow up when her experience of marriage is, well, a little more extensive. I'd read that.

The Gifts of Imperfection by Brene Brown

I thought I'd sworn off self-help books (except Sark), but this one is by a researcher who does extensive qualitative research on topics like "shame resilience" and what she calls "Wholehearted Living." It's not a research book, and my only complaint is that it's really too lightweight for me. I'm less interested in solutions and more interested in process and evidence at this point in my life. So I'll be reading more of the evidence from her research studies. It's probably silly to complain about an explicitly self-help book being overly prescriptive, so I won't bother. But the bullet-point-style writing gives me enough to understand that I'd like to know more about this social work perspective on, for instance, surviving shame, differentiating guilt from shame, and living in ways that are authentic.

sex, fictional and factual

2011-01-23T11:04:00.000-06:00

First, a little context: I've been asked to guest lecture in a class on sex in the media, and at the same time I've been asked to write an article on how LIS should envision young adults. So I've chosen to focus on controversies and censorship of factual sexual health books for young adults, hopefully to bring the two together. I may even be able to write about talking to this class of freshman in the article. Some background on the central book I'll be looking at is here.

Though nonfiction is the focus, I also opted to delve into a little YA fiction on the topic, thanks to the help of the always wonderful CCB GAs, A. and L. Thanks you two! This is the first of that pile that I'm reading. Since the presentation and article are going to focus on books that support comprehensive sex education for young people, this may also be the last of the pile. We'll see.

The Making of Dr. Truelove by Derrick Barnes
I've read a lot of YA fiction, and this is by far the single most graphic sexual opening I've ever read, albeit an opening in which the characters completely fail to have sex. Main character Diego and his lovely girlfriend Roxy are in love and are trying to have sex for the first time, but Diego ejaculates prematurely. Twice. Roxy is totally understanding, completely nice, but Diego freaks out, can't handle it, and afterward he starts blowing her off. Meanwhile his boy J. comes up with a love advice website idea that he says will make Diego irresistible to the ladies. But J. really wants to dress up as Dr. Truelove and make media appearances while Diego does all the advice column work. And Diego is surprisingly really, really good at the advice column work. He's a compassionate guy with a sexy edge, and it intrigues readers.

Unfortunately, it also completely distracts him from the real issue, which is that he need to talk to Roxy. Roxy is kind about it, but she does let him know that she's thinking of seeing someone else, after Diego stands her up at least twice and stops returning her phone calls. Diego takes hit after hit to his pride, until finally a jazz historian contest gives him a chance to invite Roxy to something he knows he's good at doing. But what he learns is unexpected; there's another guy who needs to win the contest even more, an old dude, and Diego throws the competition even though he could have won, choosing to make friends rather than to win.

The context of Diego's world is humorously saturated with sex, from his own successful mother (a doctor) and father who are clearly enjoying themselves as he carries her off to the bedroom nightly to J's sister Tori who really wants Diego for herself. Though it was less believable that the older Jewish man at the jazz historian event would tell Diego he wants to win so he can get some tonight, most of the sexiness is pretty believable. It's sex-saturated, but it's also humorous and acknowledges that not everyone is into the same things. J., for instance, wants to be Dr. Truelove so he can get with numerous hotties, though he seems to achieve the same thing in his regular high school life. While Diego really wants to be with Roxy. And, in the end, he makes the speech he needs to make, all the apologies come out, and they're reunited. They momentarily rush toward sex, making up for what they missed before, but then both think better of it and decide to wait.

Kiss It by Erin Downing
The review said this was a book about a sexually assertive girl who "knows what she wants and goes after it with gusto and without apology," but I do not like the protagonist as I expected to and so I'm dropping this one like a hot potato. As of p. 30, we know that narrator Chaz (short for Chastity) ended her virginity with the unwitting Hunter at her parents' Christmas party. When he lasted for all of 4 seconds, she was abusively cold to him. He says "Oh" and she replies "Yeah, oh" and thinks to herself that she "certainly didn't want him to think this lame attempt at sex was going to count as something magnificent for me." He asks her out, she says "Never. Now get the fuck out, Hunter."

Turns out that I find nothing feminist in this kind of damaging assertiveness. I've seen firsthand what being sexually shamed and/or humiliated does to someone, and it's pretty horrible. Yes there are men with deflowering obsessions, yes there are people who use one another for sex, yes there have been eons of men wolfing around even vaguely available women. But it isn't sexy to be manipulative and then cruel to vulnerable people. Period.

Is it fair to judge a book by the first 30 pages? No, but I'm just another reader and not some exalted judge. And this reader doesn't want to read about women using unsuspecting men for sex any more than the other way around.

re-authorship

2011-01-20T13:04:00.001-06:00

What a great title for an article in this year's Book History about the extreme differences between British and U.S. versions of Charlotte Yonge's works in the late 19th century. The whole title is:

"Re-Authorship: Authoring, Editing, and Coauthoring the Transatlantic Publications of Charlotte M. Yonge's Aunt Charlotte's Stories of Bible History" by Leslee Thorne-Murphy, Book History 13 (2010)

The whole argument that Thorne-Murphy (T-M) makes is fascinating, showing that Yonge was produced as an author, to some degree constructed and re-written as a character in her own books.

Two particular aspects of this very well-written article fascinate me. First, T-M examines the British/U.S. publishing divide at a cultural level by examining the differences in how the author is figured in these very variant editions of the same work. That's interesting in and of itself, but it's especially useful to me as one of the comments on my book chapter on evolution in children's science books was that distinguishing these publishing contexts would be a good idea. And so it would! I know I'll refer back to T-M's brief lit review in this regard (note #9, Meredith McGill's American Literature... and S. and C. Moss's American Episodes Involving Charles Dickens). It seems likely that the work I'm doing on children's science books is new enough that I won't find specific publishing numbers before the chapter has to go to press, but I'll be attempting to do so.

The other angle that grabs me is the way that T-M goes about trying to decipher the editorial process that led to such different editions, pointing out practical tensions such as the publishers not paying Yonge as well as divergent narrative choices. In Britain, the narrator was an omniscient "Aunt Charlotte," already a character, but present only "in the title and on the title page." In the U. S., the narrator takes on a life of her own and becomes a person in the book. T-M does a lovely job of analyzing the complexities and contradictions inherent in and editor's rewriting of the author, hence the titular "re-authorship." I find this fascinating in relation to another project I have brewing that looks at an exchange between editor and author in the late 40s in regards to the depiction of race in children's books. That paper is still a glimmer in my eye, but it will emerge eventually, and T-M's citations on interactions between authors and editors (notes 17-19) will be a big help. This may in fact be the only article I've yet seen that addresses editing as part of the production dynamic of children's literature.

This is an excellent article, and while the above notes are really my reading it for my own purposes, I'd recommend it to anyone interested in authorship as a concept. The idea that an author's identity is "produced" seems more American Idol than 1880s, but T-M demonstrates that it was in fact in operation at that quaintly perceived period as well.

just jake

2011-01-15T10:11:00.001-06:00

I can blog about Jake because it's no longer up for award consideration for the Gryphon Award, though a fair smattering of my reading at the moment is geared toward the needs and ideas of that committee. Like reading for reviewing, reading for awards committees is an art in and of itself. I have to balance my critic with my reader. This means leaving room for the contradictions of both keeping an eagle eye out for flaws at narrative, cultural representation, or other levels while also trying to just drop into the absorption of a good narrative. It's like reading for class used to be, back before I finished all the degrees I'm doing.

Jake by Audrey Couloumbis

Jake is ten and it's almost Christmas when his mother slips on the ice in the grocery store parking lot. After that, a lot of things change quickly. His mom is unconscious and has a twisted leg fracture, so Jake has to stay with their neighbor. Even stranger, his grandfather comes to town, and Jake hasn't seen the man since he was a baby, since Jake's father died. His grandfather isn't that friendly at first; he brings a mean dog and the expectations of an ex-Marine, which Jake and his mom don't seem to live up to. And it's all up to Jake, since his mom is unconscious and then in surgery, and he doesn't get to talk to her for days.

Couloumbis tackles the big issues of family, identity, connections lost and reestablished, but never veers from the perspective of a 10-year-old kid, whose deep concern for his mother is peppered with concerns over what will happen for Christmas and whether he'll finally be allowed to have a bike. Since Jake's father died in an accident, Jake's mother has been extremely cautious, but he knows that 10 is old enough to start to take some risks.

And he does, first with his grandfather when he tries swimming, albeit with prior verbal assurance that the old man won't throw him into the deep end. Then he walks his grandfather's dog, and that paves the way to an easier truce between him and his grandfather. Couloumbis opens with Jake remembering the smell of cigarettes, which he associates with his father though his mother corrects him. Couloumbis never spells it out, but instead shows Jake realizing that this is a memory of his grandfather. At the end, in a rare playful moment, his grandfather is bouncing Jake on the bed and Jake says "I remember!"

88888

Had a great conversation with Les yesterday about narratives as information structures, or about a theory of narrative that would look at what is revealed and withheld among the network of characters. This got me thinking, Roland-Barthes-style, about what those "codes" would be of the kind of information that is revealed or withheld. First would be the exploding bomb or other dangerous or magical object. Second would be identities or roles of characters, and there ought to be a special case in which the protagonist's own identity is a central mystery (Harry Potter is just one example). I'd welcome input about other kinds of information, as what I've covered so far hits both ends of Louise Rosenblatt's efferent/aesthetic reading but sort of skips the middle. (What is the middle of that spectrum, anyway? It's called a spectrum, but it's always defined in terms of the dichotomy.)

All while putting together a list of narrative theories and theorists, going back to Aristotle, for my storytelling class this spring, which starts next Thursday.

poet/photographer and a dead librarian

2011-01-02T23:47:00.003-06:00

Christmas was good to me in terms of books. I got Patti Smith's memoir Just Kids about her long connection with Robert Mapplethorpe from Ben and a signed copy of Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck as a gift from my lovely student Genevieve along with a pile of other books that may soon be chronicled here.

Here Lies the Librarian by Richard Peck
He won the Newbery for A Year Down Yonder, and I am particularly partial to A Long Way from Chicago, so it's nice to see him follow up with more young adult historical fiction. This one begins with a wild Indiana tornado in a small town that disturbs a graveyard, uprooting, among others, the recently deceased librarian. Peewee sees the wreckage, and then gets back to doing what she does best, which is helping her brother fix cars at their little garage. When an Indianapolis paper slams their rural borough for closing the library when the librarian died, the town elders open up a search out of pure consternation. When four young women in the library training course of Butler University express interest in sharing the position, the whole town takes notice, and Peewee's older brother Jake takes notice of one young lady in particular, not least of all because her father is a car manufacturer. Peck has written another humorously understated tale of gentle life in a midwestern town of the past. The plucky Peewee saves the day at the big auto race, making this a satisfying short read.

Just Kids by Patti Smith
She's best known for her album Horses (which I have yet to hear), but Smith also lived an eventful life as the partner and later close friend of Robert Mapplethorpe in a late 60s/early 70s New York brimming with artistic life. Smith started out as a poet, and the care she takes in crafting the words describing her romantic and then platonic relationship with Robert makes this an incredibly satisfying book to read slowly. Part of the joy of this book is the diligence and honesty with which Smith recounts her journey in accepting Mapplethorpe's sexual orientation and then sexual explorations. They lived for a long time on a rarely described border between partnership and individuality, loving each other and promising to be together while allowing both and each of them to explore relationships with various lovers. At Smith says at one point, their children were their artistic projects together, and they thrived in various studio spaces and at the Chelsea Hotel as Mapplethorpe developed installations, collages, and finally photography that began to document the unabashed and yet hidden world of sex in New York City at this time. Smith, in the meantime, was developing a performance poetry that slowly became rock and roll, and she became a rare woman who used her appearance to further define her art rather than allowing her appearance to define her. It is fascinating to watch her intuitive glimmers of understanding as this path emerges for her. Even after Robert has cemented ties with his lover and patron Sam, when Patti leaves the city to marry, Robert's question is "what about us?" They created a kind of siblinghood out of their once sexual love. Smith richly describes her disappointment when Robert's path diverges from her own, but also exhibits a world of nuanced acceptance for the person Robert needed to become to follow his own sexual and artistic paths, which were sometimes one and the same.

There are too many quotes from this book to pick just a few. It already won the National Book Award, and it's by far the best memoir I've read in several years. Though the later chapters drag slightly with era-related names, Smith almost always manages to give a sense of the poetry of the interactions she had with this dazzling array of personas. It's an immensely satisfying read that affirms the wide expanses of life that committed love between friends who respect each other deeply can encompass.

This book got me thinking about long-term connections, both conventional and unconventional. I did a little research and here's a quick list of other memoirs about relationships that caught my eye as fodder for future reading:

Two Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage by Madeline L'engle
The Commitment by Dan Savage
In the Garden of Our Dreams: Memoirs of a Marriage by Shirlee Taylor Haizlip
The Gastronomy of Marriage: A Memoir of Food and Love by Michelle Maisto

partly read

2010-12-25T13:01:00.004-06:00

Isn't it wonderful to have the simple freedom of not finishing a book? Okay, I recognize that some non-librarians have never experienced this form of freedom. It's freedom from an odd guilt that, admittedly, only applies to the diligently bookish. Then again, if you've never been a paid book reviewer, then you don't know the special hell that is I-must-finish-this-book-so-I-can-judiciously-and-fairly-trash-it. On its own merits, of course, and without resorting to comparing it to other books you wish it had been. Books make it or don't on their own terms, at least if you're reviewing books fairly, and it can be a total bear of a task to finish a bad book because you have to.

So, geek that I am, I revel in the freedom to not finish. Happily, neither of the following books I didn't finish were books I had to review, just books I was interested in reading for pleasure. And they both remain part-read. Ah, freedom.

How Pleasure Works by Paul Bloom

Chapter 1, titled The Essence of Pleasure, was great. Bloom is a Yale psychologist, and he's making a complicated argument that pleasure is neither an entirely evolutionarily prescribed experience (though most of our pleasures attach somehow to pleasures that were, at some point, evolutionary: food, sex, etc.) nor predominately a cultural experience (though our tastebuds are dramatically influenced by the flavors we grow up tasting). Instead, it's a mix of both. And he totally had me until chpt 2, when he launches a discussion of foodies by presenting a graphic story of cannibalism. A few pages later he describes the visceral qualities of disgust, which, yes indeed, I had experienced earlier in the chapter. I thought Bloom had misinterpreted Darwin's quotation, but thanks to Bloom himself contacting me, I realized that I was flat wrong. Darwin was wondering at his own fellow Victorians for their physical sensitivities to verbal descriptions of eating strange foods. Though Darwin seems surprised, it doesn't seem strange to me that the Victorians would have been more likely to have experienced "retching or actual vomiting from the mere idea of having partaken of any unusual food" (Darwin, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animal, p. 258) than people today. Bloom quotes this slightly differently ("from having ingested") but the point is the same. Still, I've seen gross-out sessions amongst 5th graders, college students, and at cocktail parties full of academics, so perhaps we're all that different today. For instance, I was gagging reading his earlier cannibalism story, and I'm not a Victorian, nor am I the most sensitive person I've ever encountered (though I am sensitive). To Victorians whose God could organize the creation of misleading fossils as a test of faith in divine order, it seems reasonable that moments when their own actions challenged that perceived divine order would result in visceral disgust.

Great first chapter! I haven't actually returned this one to the library yet, and I feel that I owe Bloom a thorough read and fairer blog review, having made mistakes in my earlier post.

Moo by Jane Smiley

This is a book that I know for a fact to be good, because people I trust have said so, but the narrative has left me stranded. There's a host of characters in this book, such that one could argue that the real character is the imagined midwestern college campus and town that the characters all occupy. Kids from farm towns going to school at the University, professors, administrators cutting deals with big money guys... maybe it's a little too familiar, too close to home (Cope, one of those trusted readers, said it might be). I found that there was only one character I liked, until she randomly slept with an administrator in the library and then lied about who she was. I know I should be reading this as comedy, like the series Mad Men, where there are no saints and the point is that it's supposed to be amusing, but somehow I'm not amused. The narrative creates compelling characters, but then the snippet-like chapters give you only the briefest glimpses into their lives, and then you're on to the next one. Cecelia, my favorite character, looks like she's about to get into a relationship with Tim, but: "...that wasn't working out either. He was turning out to be one of those men whose interest diminished as they got to know you. You got into this pattern of trying to be interesting by revealing more and more of yourself, like a salesman unpacking his sample bag, but the man, though he looked like he was smiling and paying attention, was really shaking his head internally--not that, not that either, no I don't think so, not today. The temptation was to unpack everything, not exactly for that particular guy, but just to rise to the challenge, just to get the nod." (p. 117) See, Smiley is really good. Just quoting that passage makes me want to give the book another whirl.

Maybe I will. If the point of freedom is choosing what you will, then I might just choose to change my mind again.

another movie

2010-12-20T11:40:00.002-06:00

This movie is an old favorite, because the November paper has been submitted, the poster is done (I pick it up in an hour), and all but the one last student has their grades. It's snowing outside, again, adding another layer to this coldest December on record, and I am sleeping for record periods of time, myself, as appropriate to the weather.

High Fidelity
Was it the tail end of the John Cusak era or the start of the Jack Black era, or both? Nick Hornby's novels are great, and this movie adaptation is sweet and funny and set in a grungy part of Chicago. John Cusak plays the screwup boyfriend Rob who has just been dumped. He wallows in pity arranged as Top Five lists, mirroring his obsession with music. He owns a little record store, where he has two employees who he hired part-time years ago, but they show up every day. There's the timid guy Dick and the nonstop clown Barry (Jack Black, who is obviously improvising some of his own material into the script.) I don't really like those movies where Black plays the main character, but here he is brilliant, adding spice to Cusak's stew of self-pity. Rob has just been dumped by Laura, but over a course of several sets of Top Five lists, including Top Five Breakups, we learn that he, well, kind of completely deserved it for being a total asshole. Even Rob comes to understand this, amazingly enough, after he revisits the other women on his Top Five Breakups list. It does seem to help that he and Laura's friend Liz (played as only a sister could by Joan Cusak) comes by to scream at Rob ("you fucking asshole") very briefly, pointedly, and effectively. It's a story of immature self-absorption overcome, narcissism faced and wrestled to the ground, the search for the new and improved girlfriend put to rest for good when Rob nixes the mixed tape he was making for the petite redhead music critic. When Laura's father dies, Rob goes to the funeral, and begins with an apology. That's basically what Laura needed to hear. This is not typically romantic, not in any inspirational way, but oddly enough it is loving in a meaningful way, because it's a story of two people who decide to grow together when they could have grown apart.

Hornby's novels-made-movies have been parodied by British comedians Mitchell and Webb with the track "Nick Hornby Epiphany" from That Mitchell & Webb Sound (disc 2). And here's a list of great quotes from the movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0146882/quotes. And don't miss The Beta Band... the song Dry the Rain from the soundtrack is great.

movies lately

2010-12-12T07:43:00.001-06:00

When you're reading 143 applications for work, it's not blog material. Same goes for grading final papers. So here are some great moves and shows I've seen lately instead on these cold, dark winter nights.

The Lives of Others
Set in Communist East Berlin prior to the fall of the wall, the story follows an investigation by a high-ranking security officer who is looking to a group of artists to find communist traitors. He sets up 24-hour bugging and live monitoring of the apartment when a playwright and actress live together. At first, he is dedicated to finding and reporting anything traitorous. But then something unexpected gradually happens, and we see the man begin to feel compassion for the people he is spending most of his days monitoring. He gathers evidence, but does not turn it in. He begins to fake the transcripts of the monitored conversations, editing out the damning content. As we see more of his life, we begin to realize how lonely he is, having no other relationships besides paranoid ones at his workplace. It's disconcerting and heartrending at once, and when he realizes that his entire operation is the result of a government official's attempted affair with the actress, he loses all stomach for hurting his subjects. In the end, he saves them by hiding an incriminating typewriter, an act that reveals his existence to the playwright. A warm, sentimental ending where hidden camaraderies are revealed would dull the sharp edge of this tale. After the fall of the wall, the playwright eventually discovers the records of his monitoring, and dedicates his book to the security officer to who saved his life, but they never meet or speak.

Man on Wire
The young Frenchman who walked between the twin towers was a singularly gifted person, a person who was born with and cultivated an extraordinary gift for walking the high wire. But this documentary lays to rest any easy presumptions that such a gift for balance on the wire signifies a gift for internal steadiness or emotional balance. We see the preparations in detail, from multiple perspectives, and the filmmakers do a great job of splicing interviews so that even though you know from the start what happens, there's great suspense throughout. The charismatic figure who leads a group of young Europeans and Americans in pulling off this and several other feats of daring is a complicated figure, full of both inspiring joy and insipid self-absorption. The most poignant moment is the moment when it all falls apart, right after the great feat has been accomplished. Rather than celebrate with his girlfriend and their amazing team, he accepts the offer of a stranger to have sex immediately after coming down from the towers. While you see his passion for the pleasure, you also feel its hollowness in this moment. His friends simply describe the dissolution of the group. I was left with a sense of appreciation for wonderful, miraculous things that inevitably come to an end at the very moment of their culmination. This is deeply honest film making.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
I heard this was a wonderful mystery book, and though I can't compare the two I can say that the movie version was spectacularly suspenseful. Scenes of rape, torture, and images of ravaged bodies make this tough viewing for the sensitive (as in: me) but the characters are worth it. Set and made in Sweden, an investigative journalist convicted of libel has 6 months before serving his sentence, and during the interim he's hired by an old man to investigate the 40-year-old murder of his niece. He was framed, but this is not a simple story of redemption, though that comes in the end. The story is about the evil that can exist in families, passed on from generation to generation, and the old man's complex extended family is tough to track. But the girl who helps him, first by hacking his computer and cracking a code about a series of murders, is a fierce character in herself. She's out on parole and being sexually abused (and then tortured) by her parole officer, and though she can get even and does (another harrowing scene), it's not enough. She gets drawn into solving the puzzle of the 40-year-old case alongside the journalist. The two have a tender but distant relationship; you get the sense that she has sex with him because he is kind and because she needs to feel something other than pain. He, meanwhile, falls in love with her and is doomed to be disappointed. But they do solve the mystery, leading to one small, poignant family reunion amidst the larger dysfunction. And the bad guys all get their due, every last one of them. That's satisfying in its own right.

Battlestar Galactica
Maybe I should wait until I've seen the whole series, but we're 3 seasons into it, and I think this is one of the best imagined sci-fi shows or movies I've seen. There are creepy twists in the first few seasons, as some of the "humans" who escaped the cylon attack on the planet of Caprica turn out to be cylons themselves. For awhile, Ben noted that I was really excellent at the spot-the-cylon game; (spoiler) I pegged the weirdly clean-cut PR guy the minute he appeared onscreen. So while the plot is a crazy joy ride, it's the characters that get me (isnt' it always?). Kara/Starbuck is so tough and fragile, loyal and deeply dishonorable. Laura Roslin is a fabulous leader who has real imperfections and makes real errors. Characters like the Chief are forced to question their humanity as they wrestle with their emotions for specific cylons. And who wouldn't love to hate Baltar, betrayer of the human race and the ultimate self-serving narcissist? The puzzle of what his interactions with the blond cylon actually are has been solved at this point in the series, but for the first two seasons it was one of the more intriguing mysteries. With mysteries to solve (including the bigger quest for human survival) and plots to follow, there's so much to appreciate about this series. And I couldn't be happier that Ben and I are watching the whole thing together (hi Ben!) as he wraps up his first semester of art school of putting his own tech skills to aesthetic purposes, with a successful painting robot and reality-tv-related installation.

*****

Sometimes I write epiphanies here, simply because it's an easy place for me to access later. This is one of those.

In a great conversation with Heather, at lunch on Friday, I was finally able to articulate what I dislike about what Danielle calls "new age gangsters." I do value nurturing in myself and others, and I value knowing how to care for myself, and there are real things to be taken from resources that touch on those topics (such as, for me, Sark's fun and honest books). But I have serious problems with two particular aspects of what I see as "new age." First, people blame the victims. They use magical thinking to presume that, for instance, if a person is victimized, they must have brought it on themselves with their attitudes, as this website details related to rape and sexual abuse. I've actually heard a Hay-House-sponsored podcast that blamed the Iraq war on the mental/emotional attitudes of the Iraq people, as sick and twisted as that sounds. Second, this way of thinking encourages terrible emotional boundaries. It must become impossible to hear other's perspectives or accept the variety that life entails if you're constantly internally busy constructing a positive reality. New age gangsters turn this outward, feeling entitled to judge (and presume) others' emotional lives or mental states and prescribe affirmations if they don't seem "positive" enough. It's an inversion of the old 19th century "cult of true womanhood;"* now women learn (from new age books/cds) that they can and should use their intuition to police the emotional states of others. It's just about as neighborly as Foucault's panopticon.

Real healing doesn't come in a neat package. The raw and furious rant can be just as healing as the happy and polite affirmation. Coldness and distance make breathing room for inventing new ways of living that forced optimism can suffocate. Cultural norms already dictate that women control their bodies, weight, tempers, tongues... all to be "good." How deeply sad that women opt in to controlling their own thoughts and emotions rather than reaching for acceptance of all the wonder and horror and compassion for others.

*a nod to Barbara Welter

That Old Cape Magic

2010-11-24T09:49:00.000-06:00

Richard Russo hasn't been a regular for me like he is for some academics. I read Straight Man on the recommendation of a grad school friend, and it was enjoyable, funny enough and sad at times, but it didn't make me a Russo fan.

That Old Cape Magic is softer, less hard-edged and more forgiving. The story begins with a narrator who can't precisely explain why he's reflecting on his east-coast life as a professor and his 34-year marriage. We slowly learn that he's hauling his father's ashes around, and that his father's death was recent. This is not living the examined life, but it is the way tragedy works, sneaking in on the edges of consciousness in bite-sized shockwaves. There's so much that the narrator understands about his life, and yet so little that he really grasps, and the frequent phonecalls from his comically self-absorbed mother derail him over and over. It's as though we're peeking into his first emotional reflections, and there's something touching about how little he can fathom himself as he's sifting through the history of his family and his wife's family and the basic disconnects that exist there. Disconnects that are subtle, not epic, and yet the reader sees how far they have grown apart thanks to Russo's brilliantly indirect writing.

When he leaves his wife, at first he's just annoyed with her schedule, and then suddenly he realizes that something else is wrong. He asks her, and learns that she fell in love with a mutual friend years ago, though the emotional affair was not realized in physical terms. Rather than stay and deal with the aftermath, he just leaves, going back to their old life in L.A. for a year. Oddly, he goes to that very friend with whom she was infatuated for many years, his old screenwriting partner. For a year he stays there, but that year is left out of the narrative except in description. His mother died, so in fact the year in L.A. was in great part spent in a nursing home in Indiana. And now he's walking around with his mother's sarcastic voice in his head, all the time.

The climax of the story is tragic, farcical, and emotionally resonant. His daughter, Laura, is getting married, and so the families are back together again, he and his wife in the same place. Both have brought dates to the wedding, though they have not discussed divorce. Twin brothers-in-law throw punches, a wheelchair ramp collapses, his wife's family patriarch lands in a wheelchair upside down. Everyone is taken to the hospital for stitches, broken fingers, head injuries... It could be hilarious, but Russo holds anything slapstick back, and instead there's a genuinely mournful quality to even the silliest moments. In the end, he is able to leave his parents' ashes on Cape Cod, his mother on one side and his father on the other, as requested. He also reconciles with his wife, and the swiftness and incompleteness of her forgiveness are breathtaking. He asks if he killed it all, and she says "You only killed the parts that could be killed."

That's love.

(Thanks to Laura for the recommendation! And Happy Thanksgiving.)

will grayson, will grayson

2010-11-06T13:54:00.002-06:00

When John Green and David Levithan got together to make a novel, they took a seemingly silly premise and make it sing. Two boys both named Will Grayson from nearby suburbs of Chicago cross paths in a wildly unlikely way. We follow their alternating narration from chapter to chapter, these two Will Graysons. I can just hear the authors giggling at the set up.

Will Grayson #1 is the best friend of big, gay, soon-to-be high school musical director Tiny, and he has two rules: "1. Don't care too much. 2. Shut up. Everything unfortunate that has ever happened to me has stemmed from failure to follow one of the rules." (p. 5) As Tiny's amazing gay musical takes off, this Will Grayson feels left out, alone, but he does begin to cozy up to new friend and soon-to-be girlfriend Jane. Tiny set him up with Jane, but Will Grayson #1 is still feeling strange about how he and Tiny seem to be growing apart as the big day of the production approaches.

The other Will Grayson is himself gay, albeit deeply closeted at school, and, after a failed attempt to meet his online paramour "Isaac" in Chicago leads him to a porn store... well, to save the spoilers, he runs into the other Will Grayson, they meet and marvel, and Will Grayson #2 quickly becomes Tiny's boyfriend. So quickly that it's a bit too intense, of course, as these things are wont to be on the high school romance front. But WG#2 comes out to his mom in a scene that ranks pretty high in all-time teen-parent interactions:

"mom: how was chicago?

      me: look, mom, i'm totally gay, and i'd appreciate
      it if you could get the whole freakout over with
     now, because, yeah, we have the rest of our lives to deal

with it, but the sooner we through the agony part, the better.

mom: the agony part?

     me: you know, you praying for my soul and cursing
     me for not giving you grandbabies with a wifey and
     saying how incredibly disappointed you are.

mom: you really think i'd do that?

me: it's your right, i guess. but if you want to skip that
step, it's fine with me.

mom: i think i want to skip that step."

The thing is, the story is big and overdone and maybe there are too many details... maybe that's a given in this kind of collaboration. I'd like to say that Green's more measured outlook is wildly complemented by Levithan's bouncier prose (see Boy Meets Boy for the ultimate example), but I'm not sure they haven't reversed their usual world views here. The authors state that they did, in fact, write this in alternating chapters, but it's Levithan whose Will Grayson is clinically depressed, though he does pull off the most triumphant post-break-up appreciation of Tiny at the end. And Green's Will Grayson is a little (okay, a lot) insecure and self-absorbed, though he comes around in the end too.

So that's the review. All thumbs up. Read it, revel in it, enjoy it, and score one for a novel about gay teenagers that is populated by multi-dimensional characters at every turn.

A few of my favorite quotes:

About best friends: "I think about how much depends upon a best friend. When you wake up in the morning you swing your legs out of bed and you put your feet on the ground and you stand up. You don't scoot to the edge of the bed and look down to make sure the floor is there. The floor is always there. Until it's not." (193)

About sex and love: "How can our sentient fucking lives revolve around something slugs can do. I mean, who you want to screw and whether you screw them? Those are important questions, I guess. But they're not that important. You know what's important? Who would you die for? Who do you wake up at five forty-five in the morning for even though you don't know why he needs you? Whose drunken nose would you pick?" (259)

About friendship troubles: "When you date someone, you have the markers along the way, right: You kiss, you have The Talk, you say the Three Little Words, you sit on a swing set and break up. [...] But with friendship, there's nothing like that. Being in a relationship, that's something you choose. Being friends, that's just something you are." (260)

On breaking up: "this is why we call people exes, i guess--because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. it's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. it's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. the X is a diagram of two paths." (277)

On what is hot: "'Compassion is hot,' she says as we kiss."(292)

A concluding aside: That's the last book to be read as a full-on nonstop read until November draws to a close. I hereby declare for the world to hear (hi, world) that I will get this article written and submitted by Monday, November 29, and I'll do it the way I usually do when motivation is low: by starting a couple of really amazing books and making myself write so that I can read chapters as rewards. Doctorow's For the Win and Westerfield's Leviathan are on the agenda. If those get too bleak, I'll be back to YA romance/realistic fiction or whatever motivates the writing.

Feed as an audiobook

2010-10-31T08:52:00.003-06:00

Everybody told me. But, until now, I didn't listen.

Feed by M. T. Anderson is an incredible book, an utterly absorbing snarky sci-fi read about a future in which our brains are wired for digital communication from birth. The upside is messaging each other with minds alone. The downside is all the ads from the corporations who, collectively control the feed, and thereby also control our minds. When Titus meets Violet, whose feed was installed later than his own, he learns all kinds of things that he hardly has space to absorb in his product-saturated existence, things about socioeconomic differences and how expensive it really is to go to the moon. Which is where he met Violet, on spring break. This book has possibly the best first line ever: "We went to the moon to have fun, but the moon turned out to completely suck."

But now I'm listening, and I mean really listening, because I finally got (read: broke down and bought from audible.com) Feed as an audiobook. And it is beyond worth it. The feed is acoustically animated, if you will, bringing the sense of being inundated with ads, stories, images right into your earphones and into your head. I'm glad I read it first, back when it came out in 2002, rather than hearing it first, because this interpretation (and it really is an interpretation) is powerful. Even the voices of the characters suggest varying levels of sincerity and vapidity, differentiating them while also defining them in ways that print could not. And yet, never before have I had the experience of wishing that an audiobook wouldn't end, just so I could keep having the pleasure of listening to the inventive interpretation.

I find that my emotional read on the characters is a little different this time around at a level that goes beyond the voices. While before I felt sickened by Titus' callousness (and of course I overidentified with Violet. Duh.), this time I hear the cultural context differently. Violet argues that the feed keeps people from thinking, keeps them focused on desire and gratification, and on the next desire. This time, that makes more sense to me, and I blame Titus less for his inability to empathize at the most basic level. The feed is more real, perhaps, and therefore I see its distraction possibilities more vividly. Or maybe we're at a different point in history now than in 2002, and I'm susceptible to the lures of internet entertainment in ways I wasn't then.

Not all audiobooks are this impressive, of course, but I'm definitely going to pay more attention to the Horn Book audiobook reviews for my own future use. We change, and, for me, books that I re-read show me how I've changed. I'm positive the audio format and the extraordinary performance have something to do with this. But it's also true that I am on facebook regularly, blogging right now, and connected to email throughout my day. 2002 looks old fashioned from here.

"Keep Listening"

2010-10-26T18:57:00.001-06:00

From the book The Ethnography of Reading, edited by Jonathan Boyarin (Univ. of California Press, 1992) comes a chapter titled "Keep Listening: Ethnography and Reading" by Johannes Fabian. The opening is interesting, walking through arguments about literate vs. oral cultures that have, in short, set them apart and given literate cultures advantages. On p. 82, he makes an interesting argument. Writing, Fabian argues, has been dematerialized. We've paid for "theoretical progress" in our understanding of literacy and/in culture with "a dematerialization of the object of research." Though he doesn't explore it, I'm curious about the ways that literacy and writing can be thought of as material culture. If books/scrolls are cultural objects, then is the written page as well, not just its formalist properties, but also its content? It's simple to say yes, but then again content prompts immaterial interpretation faster than the blink of an eye.

Fabian then goes on to interrogate how the process of writing anthropology is endlessly complex, including the transcription process which we generally think of as fairly simple. He describes arguments with his informant-collaborator over how certain phrases should be written based on tapes. Some of this is now relatively old news in anthropology, but still interesting. My favorite part is when, on p. 92, Fabian insists that the "oral tradition" was a discovery made within a print culture, and amounts to no more than the absence of print. That's one way to put it, and though it's a familiar idea to look at how context informs what we think of as "discovery," this is still pretty interesting to consider. Walter Ong has other perspectives on this, and ones that lend themselves more readily to the digital age, but I like what Fabian is doing here, even the relatively simple assertion that "literacy is part of the phenomenon anthropology tries to comprehend." (p. 83)

It's not going to serve its original purpose, as a piece for the doctoral seminar 590HR--The History of Readers, the new class that Mak and I are teaching in spring--but it's still an interesting piece for future reference. The rest of the chapters in this volume are situated more in particular locations as ongoing anthropological and/or historical sites: ancient Israel, Anglo-Saxon England, Indonesia, Colombia, pre-modern Japan, etc. Elizabeth Long shows up too, with a piece on collective interpretation.

I promise, to readers and to myself, that young adult (fantasy) novels are coming back! I owe this blog (and myself) several long absorbing fantasy reads, coming soon. Thanksgiving week, if not before. It's October, which means Halloween stories next Saturday at Spurlock, and I'll be singing a spooky favorite that dates back to the 1500s in print and who knows how much earlier in the oral tradition. November is writing month, at least in my calendar... here's hoping for much article-related productivity!

what d&d character are you?

2010-10-14T12:50:00.002-06:00

In my fantasy literature and media for youth class (LIS590VV) this week, there's a student group presentation on role playing games. Did I mention lately that I love my job?

According to this site: http://easydamus.com/character.html

I Am A: Lawful Good Elf Ranger (6th Level)

Ability Scores:

Strength-12

Dexterity-12

Constitution-12

Intelligence-16

Wisdom-16

Charisma-17

Alignment:
Lawful Good A lawful good character acts as a good person is expected or required to act. He combines a commitment to oppose evil with the discipline to fight relentlessly. He tells the truth, keeps his word, helps those in need, and speaks out against injustice. A lawful good character hates to see the guilty go unpunished. Lawful good is the best alignment you can be because it combines honor and compassion. However, lawful good can be a dangerous alignment because it restricts freedom and criminalizes self-interest.

Race:
Elves are known for their poetry, song, and magical arts, but when danger threatens they show great skill with weapons and strategy. Elves can live to be over 700 years old and, by human standards, are slow to make friends and enemies, and even slower to forget them. Elves are slim and stand 4.5 to 5.5 feet tall. They have no facial or body hair, prefer comfortable clothes, and possess unearthly grace. Many others races find them hauntingly beautiful.

Class:
Rangers are skilled stalkers and hunters who make their home in the woods. Their martial skill is nearly the equal of the fighter, but they lack the latter's dedication to the craft of fighting. Instead, the ranger focuses his skills and training on a specific enemy a type of creature he bears a vengeful grudge against and hunts above all others. Rangers often accept the role of protector, aiding those who live in or travel through the woods. His skills allow him to move quietly and stick to the shadows, especially in natural settings, and he also has special knowledge of certain types of creatures. Finally, an experienced ranger has such a tie to nature that he can actually draw on natural power to cast divine spells, much as a druid does, and like a druid he is often accompanied by animal companions. A ranger's Wisdom score should be high, as this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus (e-mail)

contradictions: DiMaggio and Caudill

2010-10-13T12:01:00.001-06:00

Contradictions, but not paradoxes, at least not this time. The two things I need to blog this time are at opposite ends of several spectra... new and old, nonfiction and fiction, social theory and historical fiction... okay, those last two aren't even on a spectrum together, but you get the point.

"The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields" by Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell
My favorite theorist, from undergrad social theory class, was Max Weber whose talk about the Protestant Ethic and bureaucratization made sense, for me, out of hundreds of seemingly nonsensical bureaucratic experiences. DiMaggio and Powell take Weber one step further, to discuss why organizations tend toward "isomorphism," or all having the same shape. Or you could say, looking the same. Or at least using the same rationale, like when libraries call their people "customers" and borrow from business models. I like this kind of theory, in that it takes a big step back from the particular values of the day (such as "cost recovery" in the university) and instead think about why institutions do or don't look the same. They point out the inadequacy of the business-is-biology metaphor by pointing out that institutional forms homogenize around different central forms, and therefore it's less survival of the fittest and more metamorphosis (hi there Kafka). Coercive isomorphism, mimetic processes, and normative pressure are the mechanisms they name for the structural homogenization of institutions. For librarians, or maybe for LIS instructors, the last is the most relevant, in that professionalization tends to lead to homogenization. I saw this vividly in my research on early children's librarians uses of surveys. In 1882, Caroline Hewins did a national survey of libraries asking about children's services, using just one open-ended question. By 1898, the survey had morphed into a nearly 20-question rubric of "good services."

Of course, I'm always thinking about what use this might be... Dimaggio and Powell are building theoretical frameworks. It makes me think about the ways I continually strive to push my students to contextualize, to understand that, while professional standards are vital, the ways that standards are implemented can and should vary wildly in different locales, different social contexts. But the real use value for me of this article is simply that it explains why fewer librarians do real storytelling in story hours and tend to gravitate toward programming books. Institutional isomorphism. It's safer to tread the path that has been marked, and perhaps it's more efficient. It's also a recipe for reducing risk, and that's a creativity killer. We still need librarians who invent, create, and respond to their child audiences in libraries, especially in public libraries, however homogenous and isomorphic the institutional structures become.

And now for something completely different.

Barrie and Daughter by Rebecca Caudill
It's not a novel I would pick up otherwise, but Caudill's Barrie and Daughter turned out to be a relaxing and reasonably enjoyable read, if very slow by today's standards. Caudill is the namesake of the big reader's choice award in Illinois, but that's not why I'm reading her. I'm reading her because I want to see how race was depicted in her books. They are historical fiction, set in the mountains in Kentucky. This story is about a girl, Fern, who old-fashioned mother Blanche takes much convincing to allow her to take up shopkeeping when her father, Peter, decides to open a store to compete with the overpriced store nearby. It's also about Fern growing up, taking responsibility, and very gradually falling in love. There are guns and horses and really dramatic moments near the end, but for up to 200 pages the narrative meanders like a lazy river, nice to read but not especially gripping. And the answer appears to be that, in fact, race is completely ignored or edited out of this book. Fortunately, I have the correspondence between Caudill and her editor May Massee, so I'll know which soon enough. And that's the topic of the paper too, the editorial/publication process and race in children's literature. Two more to go by Caudill, Tree of Freedom and Susan Cornish, and then I'll be ready to reexamine the archival documents and get to writing.

Summer 2010 in review and Kook

2010-09-26T10:06:00.002-06:00

First the book, then the summer in review...

Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave by Peter Heller was an over-a-month page-at-a-time bedtime read for me. And for the most part it worked well that way. The one night when I reached for it during 4am sleeplessness and he was describing the slaughtering of whales, well, that didn't work so much. However. Mostly, it was great, in that it captures the adventurous spirit of a guy who has done a lot of running around alone, and now takes on both surfing and couplehood (SPOILER: marriage, in fact) at the same time. I appreciated the unconventional approach to life that this portrayed, and the author, while not a deeply introspective type, did manage to catch himself being a crappy partner more than once. But the real appeal was the landscape, the descriptions of waves and surfing, and the appreciation of our oceans. Heller has been an activist in defense of marine wildlife, and he sprinkles the adventure with healthy doses of reality about how seriously the oceans are in trouble. And this was before the BP oil flooding of the gulf. He describes coastlines in California and Mexico vividly, highlighting the differences between them. The fact that (SPOILER) his last reported surfing attempt nets him both a tubular wave and six stitches gives you something of the flavor of the whole book.

And now for something completely different. It occurred to me recently that, hey, I have a blog. I know, I know, this seems a little silly, but what I mean is that I could, occasionally, seasonally, capture some of my own adventures for the sake of posterity and celebration and all that. I'm not looking to transition this into being some kind of online journal. But, occasionally, I though I might post some pics. As fall is well underway, with the official season having started on Thursday and everything (with a full moon, no less), I thought I'd take a brief tour back through the highlights of summer 2010. If you're here for the books, then you'd probably want to skip this part.

Summer started with a big, mysterious back/leg injury for me in May, so our trip to Chicago had to be delayed for a month. So, in the meantime, I grew some peas in the garden. Carefully. In a raised bed, I'm glad to say.

It was a slow first month, but it picked up! First there was the marvelous play Aquatown and Andrea who directed it. Meeting her and hosting the cast party was a delightful experience, of which I wish I had pics. Then came a party at Richard's (for Boyd's visit) where Jerry found a cat who loved his beard and I enjoyed meeting Richard's partner for the first time. Plus a motley assortment of other folks.

i haz a beard

(I don't have pics of the Mikki/Ellen birthday shindig either, unfortunately, but that would go well with this.)

Then, finally, in late June instead of late May, I had healed enough to get to Chicago for our anniversary trip. Ben found us the most spectacular hotel ever, called The Wit.

Ben at The Wit

And the next day we went to the Art Institute and then to Millenium Park for the Bean and some live music...

Ben and a duck

Ben and Bean

Me and a lovely beer @ Karen's Cooked (great vegan restaurant)

And finally to good old MCA with its raucously painted steps. Ending with dinner at Frontera Grill. Best Mexican food since, well, Mexico last December.

Then we left Chicago proper and spent a fabulous day and night at Sof and Nadeem's house. So glad we did all that, even though it took some serious recovery time! Worth it. Totally worth it.

In July, Laura and Todd created an insane feast experience for a bunch of us as Golden Harbor, which does indeed harbor insanely good Chinese food! I had thousand year eggs and tried the duck feet dish (but couldn't really handle it). Was glad I tried, and gladder still to have the opportunity to try so close to home. I really wish I had a pic of Laura, but every time I got out the camera S. was nursing, so I'm going to keep those off the internets. Here are some of my other extraordinary peeps at that party.

Danielle is often a blur in my photos, but Marie and Beth are not.

But she's in focus here

Me and Meadow! She was post knee-surgery

Cope and Walter had an amazing party at the Crystal Lake boathouse and lakefront there. I didn't get pictures of the Volkswagen-sized bubbles that some of the fancy bubble folks created. Nor did I get me and little S. hanging out much, though we spent a lot of quality time there.

Carol!

I love Ben's expression. Classic.

I'm not sure when this happened, but at some point there was this incredible bonfire at Kord's house. We were safe about it, and extra careful with the babies (though it looks dangerous, there were 2 trenches, an adult sitting right behind that play structure, and several others to the left). That fire was big and hot and intense!

L., Lorien, and Kate

Kord at the grill. Crazy good italian sausages!

And we bought a water table for S. to have to play with at our house, and this was a night when Lorien joined us with L. too. But this next pic, at least with Laura, Todd, and S. on our screened porch, could have been so many terrific nights from this summer.

And Ben and I went to see Anna and Lorene's band, Duke of Uke, at one of the downtown Champaign festivals.

Then came Melanie's wedding, which was absolutely gorgeous. Though Ben couldn't go because his knee was hurt, which (he reminds me) was the side effect of the double-carpal-tunnel onset. Sheesh. Great summer, but what a bunch of injuries...

Melanie and Vince

My goofy friends Danielle, Mark, and Susan

And finally came my birthday bbq bash, which was a total blast. Wish I had more pics of the crowd, especially the Gengler bunch and all the kids playing together. But I was very grill focused, so the camera escaped me.

Me with my new birthday grill! Local organic meats only for this party.

Todd, Joe, Kord

And that's summer 2010, or at least all that's fit to print about it!

Enchanted Glass by Diana Wynne Jones

2010-09-15T11:56:00.001-06:00

I'm a Jones fan from well before the Harry Potter crazes, and this book, while not one of her absolute best, will not disappoint.

The adventure begins when Aidan's grandmother dies and he arrives on Dr. Andrew Hope's doorstep. Aidan is hoping to find Andrew's grandfather, whom his own grandmother had urged him to find should anything ever happen to her. Andrew has only recently inherited the place from his grandfather, and though he has long been part of a magical family, he seems to have forgotten much of the magic his grandfather taught him as a child. Aidan, on the other hand, seems to be brimming with magic and is overjoyed when he is able to show Andrew the trick of looking at things without glasses in order to see their magical elements. Together, and along with a colorful cast of friends, household servants, and local villagers, they set about restoring the old estate to its former glory. This includes cleaning the "enchanted glass" in the shed/abandoned chapel, which until recently has housed an old an rather ill-tempered lawnmower.

Jones' books are often crowded with colorful characters, and this time the identities of those in the crowd are part of the mystery. "Counterparts" from the realm of "those who don't use iron" (read: fairies) begin to appear, and Andrew in his good-natured and slightly clueless way takes them all in, just as he took in Aidan. What appears to be a property dispute with a cranky Mr. Brown turns out to be a magical feud between Andrew's recently inherited magical realm and the realm of the fairies; Mr. Brown is none other than Oberon himself. And he is angry that Andrew is gathering the counterparts from the human and fairy realms together.

Jones is great at providing plausibly happy endings that are nonetheless realistic. In this, she is perhaps a master of juxtaposing the humor of the mundane (from dirty boots and gardening sheds to an unrepentant dog) with classic battles of good versus evil. Though Andrew appears tame, the moment at the Fete when he exercises his true powers resonates through the village and stops the narrative in its tracks. Though he's bumbling and mild-mannered, it's impressive when he comes into his true inheritance as the guardian of this apparently mundane but actually highly magical village. Aidan too comes into his own too, though with a twist. He may be the son of Oberon, and therefore a threat to the fairy king's throne, or, well, he may be something entirely different. Again, Jones juxtaposes classic fantasy themes with the mundane realities of illegitimate offspring in the real world. I won't spoil it, but let's just say Jones demonstrates that there's just as much mystery in finding one's true origins, whether they lead to the realm of faerie or to the exploits of a rebellious teenage mother.

Highly recommended to Jones fans and to anyone who like complexity in both characters and plot twists to track as well as cozy British mysteries. Jones does it all with aplomb.

did I miss anything?

2010-09-15T08:06:00.002-06:00

This is something I read, and it is hilarious!
http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/013.html

Coming soon, Diana Wynne Jones' latest book...

Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins

2010-09-06T14:01:00.001-06:00

The long-awaited final book of the Hunger Games trilogy is out and being read by millions, I'm sure. I'm one of them. I read it a little over two weeks ago, and online discussions with facebook friends kept me thinking and mulling before posting. It is clearly a book that can be read several ways, depending on your feelings about the first two books.

So I'll briefly recap my take on the first two books in order to give context for my analysis of the third one. Hunger Games was brilliant, surprising, and in some ways now looks almost light compared to the books that followed. We see our heroine Katniss stand in for her sister Prim as their district's representative to the Hunger Games, a bloody spectacle in which young players are trapped in an arena until they kill each other off, all broadcast for the entertainment of the political leaders and populace of the all-controlling Capitol. Katniss emerges victorious and saves her friend Peeta too, and we get a very few pages of possible victory savoring in the second book, Catching Fire, until they announce a new game played among victors of the previous games. Though it was a little less engaging than the first book for me, it was nonetheless a riveting and page-turning read to see how Katniss once again saves herself and Peeta from almost certain death. The arena this time is itself a complex puzzle that the players have to understand to survive. At the same time, Katniss is pretending to be pregnant with Peeta's child, and they are pretending to be in love, except that Peeta made it clear long ago that he'd have her if she'd take him. Also occupying Katniss's torn heart is Gale, her childhood hunting friend whose strength she has relied on to keep her family alive while she was at the games. Of course, Gale wants her too.

Mockingjay is a breathtaking and well-written conclusion, in which these games and the protests over them (in part due to Katniss's unusual playing strategies, saving rather than killing a fellow player) fuel a civil war. We find Katniss and her entire home of District 12 either killed or displaced to the top secret District 13. And Peeta is a prisoner in the Capitol. And everyone she ever loved having been killed or displaced is basically the most optimistic part of this novel. Other reviews have noted the persistent obliteration of hope throughout this book. And what I'll say is that, while that is accurate to civil war and even to the larger political situation Collins has created, it doesn't follow the tone of the first two books. From a hopeful story of teen-girl-beats-machine, we're thrust into the dark world of political ambiguity and brutal violence on the streets. District 13 is bombed, the Capitol becomes a war zone, Katniss realizes that her allies in 13 are torturing her former makeup crew from the previous games... even Gale, stout-hearted to this point, is shown to be more violent than expected. And since Peeta has been tortured and has all but lost his mind, Katniss is very very alone. As one friend said, this really became a war story.

Rather than the amazing teen hero who is uncannily able to fight and survive hunger games, we see a girl broken, over and over, who nonetheless has to go on and make decisions as the symbolic leader of the revolution. This is the only logical reason I can offer for some of the more underdeveloped plot points at the hurricane-speed ending. The one that bugs me most is Katniss voting to continue the hunger games, the very institution she has been bent on destroying. In the end, she also choose to be with Peeta rather than Gale, a decision that would have been more satisfying if we had been given more substantive glimmers of her emotional or logical deliberations (or both).

So it's a successful conclusion that isn't entirely a success for this reader. But that's okay. I can admire Collins' brilliance at both character and plot while also being a bit dissatisfied with how she chose to develop those in her last book of this fine trilogy. I've been a fan since Gregor the Overlander, and I'll be eager to read whatever she writes next. Along with millions of others. :)

Sense and Sensibility

2010-08-11T07:38:00.001-06:00

Yep, as summer draws to a close (I'm back to work next Monday, still have my entire home-office half painted, and a crisis of mold at Ben's studio threatens everything... and I'm going tubing with Danielle et al. today anyway at Kickapoo, take that life, HA) I'm re-reading S&S by Jane Austen. Dear (blog) readers, may I remind you that "sensibility" is not a version of "sensible," but actually means "sensitivity." I also rewatched the Kate Winslet and Emma Thompson (oh and Hugh Grant too) movie version the other night. Kate is, as always, brilliant, proving once again why she is far and away my very favorite actress. There will be no plot synopses here...

The character of Elinor, the older sister, is almost more likable as Emma T. in the move than as the smart-assed projection of the author in the book. Though you have to admire the various turns of phrase with which she dazzles her fellow conversationalists, Elinor's parts of the dialog read so much like the great retorts we all think of after the fact. Such is the license of fiction.

In both movie and book, this time through, what I notice is the yin/yang pull of Elinor and Marianne. I see in myself the hyper-responsible older sister as well as the twinkling, mischevious, spirited Marianne. Marianne is more fun, but Elinor keeps everyone in food and clothing. We all need both. It's too easy, in a world where success and achievement are celebrated, to bury our Marianne side in Elinor seriousness. On the other hand, if you're prone to being as quicksilver changing as I can be, then a little Elinor at, say, breakfast time, is a very good idea. They are the twin poles around which the story revolves.

Watching the movie this time (directed by Ang Lee), when Marianne (Kate W.) is first asked by Willoughby whether he may examine her ankle, she nods wide-eyed. That is my favorite expression in the whole film, and a classic Winslet look. You can see it 23 seconds into this silly youtube thingy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6POkPYmdu1Q Most heartbreaking parts are when Marianne, who is so innocent and open, runs to Willoughby at the dance, unable to imagine that he might treat her coldly. And oh does he ever treat her coldly.

So that's how summer is ending this year, with Sense and Sensibility. I'll leave you with a quote about life's adventures, from an interview I heard on NPR's most emailed stories podcast. The author wrote Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave which may well be my next Kindle download (thanks to Laurel for a b-day amazon gift certificate!). Here's what author Peter Heller said:

“And every day, you have to totally commit to something that seems, kind of in your brain, seems insane, which is to throw yourself, you know, over the lip of something that looks, you know, like a wall, and you have to totally commit. You have to let go to a power that's greater than you. And I think, you know, those are really good things to practice, you know, if you want to live with someone else and have a good relationship."

Gotta love the surfer dudes.
"

Addicted to Her

2010-08-01T16:21:00.000-06:00

by Janet Nichols Lynch follows the short-lived but intense relationship between Rafa and the girl he has long fantasized about, Monique. Wrestling and helping his family were his passions before his brief hook-up with Monique, but all those other things fall by the wayside as he pursues her. She's totally hot, but usually goes out with guys who, well, have better cars. And she lets Rafa know that, while he lets her know that she has his heart. It doesn't take a very astute reader to see that Rafa is projecting a whole lotta good things onto Monique's hot body while disregarding her strikingly selfish side. When Rafa's stepdad is deported back to El Salvador, he is pulled back into the reality of his mom's struggle to provide for him and two other kids. As he steps up to be "el hombre de la casa," Rafa is finally struck by how manipulative and shallow Monique really is: "I take one last look at Monique. Creamy brown thighs. Beautiful breasts riding high in the blazing yellow halter dress. Full pillow-soft red lips. I avoid her eyes. Inside those eyes lives a horrible person."

This is solidly in line with the heritage of the YA problem novel, but more honest about sex and sexual attraction. A few posts back I was being cranky that no books ever did, well, this, showing that sexual attraction can be just that, sexual attraction, without any deeper substance. This probably won't sell paperbacks, probably will remain a hit among Mexican-American teens and librarians, but it's an excellent book for showing Rafa's love-blinded perspective in a sympathetic light.

What I almost read...

2010-07-22T14:09:00.001-06:00

Where did this summer go??? The truth is, this summer went to parties and lots of time healing from an injury, to worrying but also to relaxing and grilling, and of course to movies and books. Books. Thing is, as I gear up for vacation, I recognize how close we are to summer's end. I'm just not gonna finish all the books. Enormous frown. So here are several that look interesting, and for which the bits I've read have been tantatlizing:

The Maiden King: The Reunion of Masculine and Feminine by Robert Bly and Marion Woodman
This book opens with the long and winding Russian legend of The Maiden King, which reminds me to some degree of East of the Sun, West of the Moon, except weirder. It opens with stepmother incest, when a stepmother falls in love with and begins manipulating her beautiful stepson. He's young, he's weak, and he falls for all of it. Fortunately, he runs into the titular Maiden King, who rescues him in a series of highly symbolic and image-rich adventures. Bly and Woodman are both psychologists, Bly best known for his men's movement work and Woodman for her adaptation of Jung's theories to include bodily, not just mind, experience. Each of the authors, in turn, analyze the legend in their own styles. Bly goes blow-by-blow through the narrative, Woodman writes a more impressionistic analysis of the psychological themes. Both look to this as a legend for our times, when the old gender roles are radically shifted and new ways of being male or female are uncertain. I read enough to know that this is a perfect fireside winter read, so I hope I'll come back to it over winter break.

The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five by Doris Lessing

Didn't get as far into this one, but this fictional addition to Lessing's novel series, Canopus in Argos: Archives, is another tale of strife between two genders. I'd love to come back to this one when I have time to sink into the narrative rather than skim over its surface. The men and women doing the marrying are atypical in various ways, and from what I've read about the book, Lessing too was struggling with the gender issues of her contemporaries in this writing.

Love in the Western World by Denis de Rougemont
Ya gotta love the French for all things romantic, including the most geeky, least romantic analysis of romance I've ever read. Though I stalled out about a third of the way through, De Rougemont opens strong, arguing that the legend of star-crossed lovers Tristan and Iseult is the core of our Western understanding of romantic. This was written in the 40s, and although it has since become commonplace for every goth kid to equate love and death, de Rougemont did a handy job of showing how the two desires, to give over to romance and to surrender to death, are intertwined in this iconic tale. Of course, the lovers die in the end due to a misunderstanding. In fact, his main argument is that romance is a narrative drive that is fueled by obstacles. When the story runs out of obstacles, more emerge, such that the main cultural messages we receive about romance are about pursuit rather than, say, intimacy, deep connections, commitment, etc. No sustenance, just drive and pursuit and thwarted desire. After de Rougemont turned to analyzing the cultural context of the troubadours, particularly the religious context, I felt I had read enough for now. But I can see that this is one of those early, influential cultural history texts that has influenced a lot of rhetoric in that arena. And it all starts with a folktale...

a few more quotes from Goldberg

2010-07-14T09:33:00.002-06:00

On meeting more of yourself, which entails doing anything for more than the short time of the first love-affair with the new. Natalie describes her returning students:

"The love affair with writing was over. They were taking it more seriously. All their resistances had come up. That afternoon I explained to them: 'Last year, when you came it was all new. Writing practice was a joy. You discovered you could write, you recovered old memories. This year, you want writing more, you have expectations, you suffer. It's okay, just keep doing it. You're meeting more of yourself.'" (p. 147)

A lovely metaphor for how we are interconnected, interdependent:

"Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other's presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, 'Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place.' This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on." (p. 74)

Our teachers are not impervious. I've made mistakes like this (and I've suffered slights like this too, from students who project their own emotional characteristics onto me, just because we share some common intellectual characteristics):

"After one lecture, I visited him [Katagiri Roshi] in his study and said, 'Now that lecture was really boring! I had to do everything to keep awake.'
His face fell and I could see he was hurt.
I stopped. 'Roshi, you look hurt. How can that be? You're enlightened, you don't have feelings.'
But of course he had feelings. He was a human being. I saw that then. I had an erroneous conception of what an enlightened person was like." (p. 129)

Long Quiet Highway by Natalie Goldberg

2010-07-13T09:38:00.004-06:00

"'Meetings end in departures....' No matter how long the meeting or what the relationship, we depart from each other." (p. 179)

Goldberg is most famous for writing about writing in Writing Down the Bones, and her words are so poetic that, no doubt, this post will be full of quotes. Long Quiet Highway is the story of her life, a kind of Zen memoir, where you have to keep reading to see the sense in what she's writing, and even then not everything connects as it does in more conventional writing. Last time I picked this up, I read only to a section about a rainy Sunday feeling on a train, which floored me. What I saw then was the concept of surrendering to whatever is the case, whether it's noise or silence, bustle or isolation. Now I see more of what she was saying: "I was excited. I had physically experienced what the Tibetans talked about, the transformation from neurosis to wisdom. I sat in the train and watched my letting go, my opening into an old painful feeling, and I experienced it in a new way, felt another dimension of it--its largeness." (p. 29) I feel certain I didn't understand that the first time I read it, but after this past year, I understand it better.

Goldberg talks about "digesting my own voice," coining phrases for herself (p. 40). She speaks of this as a phase she went through once, though I've noticed I go through this periodically throughout my life. A thought becomes a phrase that turns into a poem or song, a tiny one, that I carry around for awhile. Sometimes they grow into actual poems or songs, other times they just stay little notecard-sized phrases that I carry around.

I appreciate her description of a feminism that didn't limit her into dismissals of male voices but freed her from sexist judgment:
"Before feminism I'd read books written by men and thought the women characters were the way I should be. I wasn't fooled this time, but wow! could he [Hemingway] write about walking through the Luxembourg gardens after working on a short story in a cafe about how it felt to write, about how his belly was hungry. This is what I took from him and thanked him for. I'm sure he suffered plenty for his attitudes about women, but I got what I wanted." (p. 41)
I still find myself wondering if Hemingway suffered enough, but Goldberg's approach is splendid in that it allows her to stay open-eyed, not defensive.

At one point she describes her father's misery that his brother didn't mention him in his will. "Nothing. All that love wasted," she quotes her father as saying. (p. 66) It's a painful passage to imagine. But this time I found myself adamant that no such thing is wasted. Not being loved back is just an experience among other experiences, it need not bind us into tit-for-tat even-steven loving.

I'm not being very literal in my writing about this book, and I'm veering away from being evaluative. Some will complain that it doesn't cohere enough, but I found the many passages that moved me to be worth it. She writes from the body in ways that defy articulation, and yet she captures a lot. I have a host of yellow sticky notes still begging for transcription, from the middle section of the book, and yet I think I'll stop here. Interestingly enough, I don't have many notes on the end of the book. I wonder, if I read it a third time in another ten years, if I'll understand that section in ways I don't know. The end is about her teacher dying, about letting go of even the sense of being valued by that teacher in order to honor his memory. She speaks of learning best from those who are "whole people," who live what they are in life in the classroom and vice versa. I haven't lost my teacher, and really, I don't want the experiences that would make me fully resonate with such a thing. But it seems likely that experiences may come anyway in the next decade or so. Perhaps I'll come back to this book when they do.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

2010-07-08T14:42:00.002-06:00

I was told. I was told to read this by folks in the last iteration of the fantasy class. It came up on multiple bibliographies. Ben said it too. Finally, I read it, and I sit here (having to go to a reception in 15 mins) in quiet awe. This is a great book, and though I can't add it to the reading list for this fall, I've just added it to the list for next year's iteration of Fantasy Literature and Media for Youth.

What can I say. A near-future version of San Francisco is hit by a terrorist attack, and Marcus and his 3 closest friends are in the wrong place at the wrong time. They are taken and held for questioning by the Department of National Security (DNS), and Marcus's friend Daryll disappears. It's a dizzying start, but it's only the beginning. Marcus gets out after being threatened that he's being watched. Everything, meaning everything, he does is being tracked. He hacks a free X-box machine, a promotional give-away, to run ParanoidLinux, a system designed to encrypt all activity. And from there, he starts the revolution, jamming the system, confusing the tracking devices, and eventually recruiting a host of other under-25-year-olds to the cause of resisting the police state.

In this near-future, the hackers are the heroes. Adults are tv-watching fools who, mostly, sanction the DNS restrictions to make them "safe." Doctorow does a fabulous job of including just enough history of real social movements, particularly the Yippies, to make this fictional, sci-fi story seem even more plausible. It will sound hackneyed, but Marcus also meets a geeky girl. That Doctorow carries off the creation of a believable and substantive romantic subplot along with the tech-geek speak and revolution plotlines... really, what more can you ask?

Did I mention I was in awe?

The only hole I noticed (and I can be damn picky) is that Doctorow doesn't specify, at one point, whether Marcus is using his school-and-DNS monitored laptops to write his papers or not. It seems to imply that he's using his X-box, which is potentially problematic in that the school might proactively monitor his assignment production. But those were extra credit, so nevermind.

See? It's that good. Just read it.

Zahrah the Windseeker

2010-07-06T14:32:00.002-06:00

Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu is the author of this fantasy novel about Zahrah, a girl who is born dada. Meaning she has plants growing in her dreadlocks, or at least that's what it appears to mean, at first. But strange things start happening to the shy Zahrah, among them that she begins to be able to fly by controlling the air around her, and it becomes clear that the real meaning of being dada has been lost. Okorafor-Mbachu creates an engaging fantasy world, where humans have shunned the Jungle in favor of their "culture," a culture that involves bending many kinds of plants to their own technological purposes. Zahrah only really comes out of her shell when her best friend Dari is bitten by a snake. Then she realizes that she has to go into the jungle, alone, and face down its most ferocious beast in order to save her friend's life.

It's a good read, and one that would work well alongside Farmer's The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm. The world it portrays is interesting, albeit mostly modeled on our technological world today, except with plants that function as technology. The scenes with the Dark Market hint toward layers of society that Zahrah and Dari don't understand yet, and as such beg for sequels. But not in an annoying way. I found myself, at the end, wanting to read more about this world.

*****

On another note, word is out about my winning an award from ALA/LHRT: http://ala.org/ala/newspresscenter. /news/pr.cfm?id=4171 After a tough year on many, many fronts, from a 3rd year tenure review to various family/friend troubles, a it's a joy to be able to celebrate this accomplishment. And relax and read novels for awhile. :)

Wintergirls

2010-07-05T10:05:00.002-06:00

Ever since Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson has garnered a well-deserved reputation for tackling traumatic emotional topics. Wintergirls follows in that vein of her writing (as opposed to her historical fiction). It starts as Lia learns that her former-best-friend of over nine years has died, alone, in a motel room. It's unclear exactly what has happened, and since Cassie dumped Lia nine months before, Lia is at first unsure what she wants to know. Lia has problems of her own, as an anorexic who is embattled with her own body, and it slowly becomes clear that part of what drew the girls together were their eating disorders. Cassie died of her bullemia, and Lia seems to be dying of her anorexia and the hallucinations that are either part of another mental illness or a result of her loss of brain tissue. When Lia realizes that Cassie called her 33 times the night that she died, the hauntings become much worse.

Uplifting stuff! Okay, not. The ending is hopeful, in that Lia begins to move beyond the hallucinations and her own family issues to begin to take a grip and flourish in her life. Anderson is a fabulous writer, which is how the ending keeps from seeming pat. Overall, I'd recommend it, but with a notation for the sensitive that it gets pretty dark and self-loathing in Lia's mind. I'd read it on a sunny day.

Alice in Wonderland

2010-07-04T19:52:00.002-06:00

but not the book. The movie. The Tim Burton production, to be exact. This is not a movie of the book at all, but an imagined extension of the book, if Alice had come back to Wonderland at 20 instead of only once at 7. As such, its main similarities are in the use of characters that resemble those in the original Tenniel illustrations. Johnny Depp features prominently, if almost unrecognizably in digitally-altered form, as the Mad Hatter. Aside from a rather long middle section where the Hatter gives a bit too much backstory on why the Red Queen is bad, the movie is an enjoyable romp-turned-quest. Though the words from Jabberwocky also feature prominently, gone is all of Carroll's logic games, puzzles, trickery. Alice instead takes on the hero's role; her quest foretold in a scroll and carried out when she dons armor and picks up the vorple sword. All in all, it's a fun DVD to watch.

But that's not really what I wanted to blog about. What strikes me is that, over time, the answer to the question of whether/when you can go back through the portal to the fantasy land has changed. I'd speculate that it has changed in ways that reflect the extension of youth in our society. If you think back to Carroll's Alice or to Wendy in Peter Pan, the answer used to be that the realms of fantasy were relegated to youth, childhood to be precise. Certainly to pre-adolescence. As Hollywood remakes (or makes) these tales, "youth" extends out of childhood and into the late teens and early twenties to provide vehicles for hot young actors of both genders. Jennifer Connelly in Labryinth comes to mind as a mid-range example, and the movie Labryinth also hits this mid point on the can-you-go-back question. Whereas Barrie's Wendy just had to move on and grow up, Sarah in Labryinth was able to revisit her trusty troop of Henson-created friends whenever she needed them. Whether this was real or imaginary was left to the viewer, but when Hoggle says "should you need us" at the end, it seems as if she'll have ongoing connections with the fantasy characters, if not the land of Labryinth. But we never really know the age of Connelly's character, though she appears to be (and probably was) a young teenager.

Now back to Burton's Alice in Wonderland, in which we see fantasy adventure taking place, explicitly, for a 20-year-old young woman who remembers only that she "dreamed" of Wonderland back when she was 7. As the movie begins, she is on the cusp of adulthood, about to consider a marriage proposal. Midway through, she remembers everything, and realizes that the recurring "nightmare" of her childhood was quite real. For the viewer, this frames the original tale as her childhood experience, and allows this new tale in the movie to diverge in a number of different directions. At the end, she eschews marriage and instead takes to the high seas, her rabbit-hole adventure having awakened a broader taste for adventure. It's an interesting shift to note, as we also see a cultural and even scientific extension of the concept of "youth," pushing "adulthood" ever later, into the mid-20s at least.

So the story used to be that you had to leave behind childish things. Now, it seems that childish things are just the transformative catalyst needed to, say, end a disastrous engagement and catapult our young heroine into a life of adventure on the high seas. And just to come back to reality one more time, I also wonder how this way of thinking about the ever expanding place of fantasy interacts with the financial crisis that is sending so many new graduates back to family homes.

Fantasy often says curious things about the culture that is intended as its audience.

teen and middle school realism

2010-07-01T20:36:00.003-06:00

Best Foot Forward by Joan Bauer
Bauer's serious-yet-bouncy writing has a style that suits summer. Most of the time. But this sequel to the acclaimed Rules of the Road
is just a sequel. Bauer sadly rewarms the plot from the last half of the earlier book, pitting Mrs. Gladstone and her honorable shoe sales team against the corporate mega-giant takeover, engineered by, again, her son. So the crime, criminal, and motive are all familiar. New aspects such as criminal-turned-salesman Tanner and Jenna's budding romance are underplayed, and Bauer's stalwart belief that anyone can be reformed is unconvincing. Sadly, though I've adored Bauer's work and hope to again, I'd say pass on this one. Just re-read Rules of the Road and you'll be happier.

The Kind of Friends We Used to Be by Frances O'Roark
This, however, is stunning. Gleaned from the BCCB Blue Ribbons list, O'Roark's novel deftly handles the aftermath of two seventh-grade former best friends who discover that they have grown apart. The alternating narration gives the reader the best of both worlds, showing the friends' fragmented social circles and demonstrating how their world views have come to be out of sync. With Kate's new guitar playing and Marilyn's new cheerleading, O'Roark could characterize the divide them in stereotypical terms, but she does anything but stereotype as she explores the nuances of Marilyn's wish to be liked amidst her parents' bickering and divorce and Kate's growing sense of music and poetry, tempered by her crush on a hot 8th grade guitar-playing boy. The ending is phenomenal in terms of structure; the narration suddenly encompasses more perspectives, each of them in staccato bursts, like the ending of a great fireworks show. It won't take long to read this one (I read it on my kindle so I can't give a page count), and it's very worth it.

Obernewtyn

2010-06-29T17:49:00.003-06:00

by Isabelle Carmody is a series book that, I can tell, really requires reading the whole series to "get." It was recommended highly, so I'm going to try book 2, Farseekers, as well. While Penguin published it in Australia, here it's under the auspices of the publisher Tor, which is usually home to more adult stuff in the states.

It's a post-nuclear-holocaust world, we think, although the forbidding of all things from before has made it difficult to tell exactly what happened. Some of the children born since the disaster known as The Great White have unusual mental powers. However, the religious sect that is the current law of the land has forbidden all such powers, condemning people who have them to death or banishment to Obernewtyn, a place rumored to do experiments on those banished. Our young heroine, Elspeth Gordie, is unsure about the powers she has, and her process of finding out what she can do also becomes the reader's process. This bogs down occasionally, as when a new power is required, and it's unclear whether Elspeth knows she has this power or is trying something for the first time.

However, her slow unraveling of the secrets of Obernewtyn is paced just right for young mystery readers. And that the book ends while we still don't really understand Elspeth's powers shows that Carmody is self-consciously mysterious, leading us to the next title in a subtle enough way that I avoid my usual next-title annoyance. (We all have little things that drive us nuts!) I've just put Farseekers, the next title in the series, on hold.

Bite Me

2010-06-13T10:06:00.002-06:00

...is not an instruction for any blog readers that may be out there. No, it's the title of Parker Blue's teen vampire novel. This is more Buffy than Twilight, and in fact heroine Val references Buffy in her own vampire-slaying adventures, as a fictional story (whereas hers is the real thing, of course). Val is a tough heroine who becomes sympathetic right away when, on her 18th birthday, her mother and stepfather kick her out of the house. This really isn't her fault, however. It has to do with the fact that her father was a part-incubus, and Val is part-succubus. Val's vampire-slaying has been, primarily, a way to slake her inner demon's lust. But Val's mother only sees the bad influence on her other, non-demon daughter Jen.

The drama here isn't her survival, which is assured relatively quickly and easily due to the interventions of other part-demons who have been watching out for her. And, luckily, she lands a job with the San Antonio police, who are far more aware than they let on about vampires. And, eventually, demons too. Watching Val and her very attractive partner Dan unravel the mysteries afoot amongst the vampires is fun, if not deeply complex. Val has to handle her lust for Dan very carefully, lest her demon side take over and drain his life force. That inner battle is more intriguing, and the combination of roiling internal emotions and kicking vampire ass makes this a well-balanced page turner. Definitely recommended to Buffy fans, and perhaps as an antidote to the passivity of Twilight's heroine.

There are, of course, repeated tropes in genres. Deborah Stevenson pointed out the oft-used teen novel trope of the description of self in the mirror. I've become intrigued by the trope of the truths and myths about vampires. Because every author/novel/series seems to have their own set. Here, Blue's truths are that vampires cannot be in the sun (no sparkly Edwards here) and that holy water, if blessed by a true believer, can be scalding. Silver is a problem too. But she eschews the turning-into-bats powers (those seem to be on the wane overall).

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In other news, Betsy Hearne won this insanely huge lifetime achievement award. Wish I could have been at the Children's Literature Association Conference to clap and cry.

Diana Wynne Jones

2010-06-09T14:14:00.003-06:00

Juliana just let me know that she's heard through the blog-grapevine some sad news about Diana Wynne Jones, which is that she has recently opted to cease chemotherapy (http://www.locusmag.com/News/2010/06/diana-wynne-jones-health-update/). Here's a blog post about sending fan mail, which now would indeed be a good time to do:
http://kate-nepveu.livejournal.com/488911.html

I sent my own little heartfelt note today. However, it seems to me that anytime is a good time to send fanmail to Diana Wynne Jones!

In my note, I pointed to The Lives of Christopher Chant and Dark Lord of Derkholm as my two personal favorites, the former because it details a situation in which a child has to learn to be skeptical of adult motives and the latter because it offers metal-level commentary on the tropes of fantasy while also being emotionally engaging and having a rousing good plot. I also love having almost-too-many characters to keep track of, as long as the author gives us good reason to care about the characters. Which Jones always does.

The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Perilous Journey

2010-06-07T21:35:00.002-06:00

I have always been a fan of wacky tales of bunches of kids together. I am also a long time fan of stories of kids with Special Powers, among them the original Witch Mountain books by Alexander Key (the movies were just ok). What I enjoy about this sequel to The Mysterious Benedict Society is that it combines both of these features. Four kids with extraordinary (and complementary) talents have to save the world, this time by saving Mr. Benedict himself from his evil twin. Author Trenton Lee Stewart writes in self-consciously unrealistic style, which always helps me with the suspension of disbelief (that I was complaining about in reading City of Ember). Because, if the author knows it's just a story, somehow I get very free and easy with belief/disbelief. And the kids are fun to read about.

The four stunningly gifted characters are back, again, and if the first book was Reynie's book, this one belongs to Sticky if it belongs to anyone. Reynie is still the central problem-solver of the four, whose gift for seeing through and around any apparent rules allows him to synthesize some of the best escapes from scrapes. However, Sticky's incredible memory features centrally in this book, though his accomplishments are now accompanied by a rather over-inflated sense of himself, which becomes annoying to his compatriots. Sticky wrestles with his pride throughout in a fine sub-plot to the larger adventures. Constance is only 3, with the vocabulary of a 10-year-old; her actions in this book are still amusingly (if not realistically) contrary, and we're given more insight into the "pattern recognition" that constitutes the core of her special abilities. Kate and her amazing bucket are back as well, and her feats of physical prowess save the day more than once. It's easy to see how gender and age expectations are shuffled about a bit, and that's refreshing.

While the previous book was set in a mysterious land where an "emergency" kept the entire society prisoner, this time the foursome treks to Europe via ship, to Portugal specifically, following the clues their benefactor Mr. Benedict has left for them along the way. Mr. B's evil twin, Mr. Curtain, has foiled Mr. B's plans, capturing him and secreting him away to an island purported to grow a rare and very valuable plant.

Nope, not a word of it is believable. And, yes, it's a great read for puzzle-solving inclined young readers. They have to be dedicated readers, as Stewart's books are written with a post-Harry-Potter reading audience in mind, at easily over 300p each.

Megan was right to recommend this one to me--thanks Megan!

The Boyfriend League

2010-06-01T16:48:00.002-06:00

Why is it that I find it so much harder to remember to blog stuff I read on my kindle? It's probably the way that physical objects, like library books that need returning, beg for my attention in a way that hidden bundles of digital text do not.

Speaking of attention, Rachel Hawthorne's bubblegum page-turner of a YA novel, The Boyfriend League, will not keep one's attention for long, but it's the perfect beach read for your fave preteen. Dani and her friend Bird are baseball fans, so they convince their families to host players from a college team for the summer. Hoping, of course, to find themselves boyfriends. Which (wait for it, big shocker coming) they do. Interestingly, it's Dani's apparently predictably shallow sister Tiffany who actually provides some of the more surprising content, not by becoming deep, but simply by refusing to over-dramatize the boy troubles that threaten to come between her sister and herself. Dani at first hooks up with Mac, who is all style and no substance. In fact, Mac turns out to be just about Tiffany's speed. Fortunately, Jason is waiting in the wings of Dani's own house to be her best boyfriend ever (obligatory squeee). While Dani's crush on the gorgeous player Jason is reiterated often enough, it's never clear what makes him appealing beyond physical attraction, though (of course) a deeper connection is implied. Hawthorne's writing is just far enough away from total stereotype to make this worth recommending, at least to the budding romance reader.

I do wish there were a few more preteen-aimed novels in which physical attraction turns out not to be the harbinger of something deeper. It would be fun to read about a romance in which the two attractants totally misjudged the situation and cannot, in the end, stand one another. But that wouldn't sell paperbacks.

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In other news, I'm volunteering to do a little stage-management planning for a production called Aquatown: A Future Hydro History. I feel honored to be included, despite my very limited time and energy, so thank you Andrea!

City of Ember

2010-05-21T16:54:00.003-06:00

What is it called when you try to suspend disbelief, but whatever you're suspending it with just isn't strong enough, and disbelief keeps crashing down on your head?

That was my feeling about Jeanne DuPrau's City of Ember, especially the premise that the citizens of the City of Ember have, over the centuries, forgotten the secrets of electricity. Electric lights make the place work, and they know how to fix plumbing (or "pipeworks"), but they can't figure out electricity. Maybe I've watched too many home improvement shows, or maybe I just married a spouse whose astounding technical competency causes electrically powered machines to, apparently, fix themselves in his presence... whatever the reason, I just couldn't buy this one. And the ending is just the setup for the sequel, which always bugs me.

Still, Lina and Doon are fine 12-year-old heroes. The best part is the opening, when Lina and Doon swap the jobs to which they are assigned, just after everyone in their class is assigned their first 3-year stint at various jobs in the city. I did enjoy watching them unravel the secret message which allows them to, ultimately, save their city, but the journey out of the city is somewhat anti-climatic, especially when the warning about the "rapids" (which the reader understands, but the characters do not) is dealt with by a mildly bumpy boat ride. Though I couldn't buy that electricity was used daily and yet forgotten (while plumbing was remembered), I did like the other lost concepts, like "heaven" and "boat" and other familiar-to-us words. And this is the sunniest post-apocalyptic story I've read in a long time, picking up just at the point where humans did survive and can now reinhabit the earth. So, if the electricity thing doesn't bother the heck out of you, this might be worth a read. I was glad I tried it, but I doubt I'll read the second one.

The Dud Avocado

2010-05-19T09:01:00.004-06:00

Way back in 1958, long before Sex in the City, Elaine Dundy crafted a novel of a 21 year old woman's year abroad that perfectly captures the disorientation inherent in that neverending task of discovering oneself. (Fair warning: there are spoilers all through this, and if you don't want to know the ending, skip the marked sections below). This is a young adult story, not in the sense of "teenaged," but in the sense of early 20s self-discovery, the post-college years when anything seems possible but odds against the great stuff seem insurmountable. The protagonist, Sally Jay Gorce, has been funded by her Uncle Roger to spend a full 2 years abroad. Sally Jay (henceforth S.J.) is by turns profound and flippant, with the flippant winning out more often than not because of the dizzying speed with which she changes her mind. But that's the fun of this book, the sense of life and adventure that she narrates, sometimes by incisive observation and other times by barely noticing something before her extremely short attention span is diverted to new things. Her flip observations can be hillarious, as when she falls in with "a rowdy bunch" at a left band cafe in Paris who were "so violently individual as to be practically interchangeable." (p. 31)

In fact, the only people who stand out in her narrative are her current or potential lovers. First comes Teddy a wealthy older diplomat who, in the end, wants her for money. When he reveals this, she laughs and thanks him for "restoring my cynicism. I was too young to lose it." (p. 54) Teddy does not give up so easily, and in fact sets up a humiliating dinner party for S.J. that sparks her to an unexpected (even to her) moral outrage: "The vehemence of my moral indignation surprised me. Was I beginning to have standards and principles and, oh dear, scruples? What were they, and what would I do with them, and how much were they going to get in the way?" (p. 80) In another surprising moment of self-reflection (surprising because, although she talks about herself constantly, she rarely seems to see herself), S.J. describes her moods as "midnight black, excited, and deeply dreading" or "beautiful midnight-blue ones, calm but deeply excited," and it's no accident that the common thread there is "excited."

[spoilers below]

Comparisons to Catcher in the Rye are apt, but there are real difference between S. J. and Holden, and I can't help but wonder if this has to do with gender. Holden's fears of being "phony" are paralleled by S.J.'s deepest fear: becoming a spinster librarian. (I know! Cracked me up to no end!)

"I'm so tired. What happens when your curiosity just suddenly gives out? When the will and the energy snap and it all seems so once-over-again? [...] Then, from outer space, that librarian who is going to be me, who is me, that dreaded librarian from outer space who is always waiting for me, always ready to pounce, is going to take over. And I'll be cooked. If I don't stop it." (p. 199)

(This makes me want t-shirts printed with "That Dreaded Librarian from Outer Space.")

While Holden Caufield's destiny remains ambiguous in the end, S. J. is trounced a bit for her adventures, and her attitudes become more sober. She overhears a conversation between two girls in a washroom, and her response reveals a whole new attitude toward the sexual revelry she earlier celebrated:

"'You gonna let him take you home? He's an awful wolf, you know.'
'Sure,' shrugged the other. 'I should say no to life?'
Yeh yeh, I thought. Great, oh great. Zop zop and all dot. De Village don't say no to life; jazz don't say no to life. But dis baby do. Right now. Cause it hurts too much. And I can't take it no more." (p. 249)

So, while Holden may be ever so slightly morally reformed or at least a bit less cynical, our heroine is more beaten into submission. Her friend Larry turns out to be a pimp who stole her passport, and possibly a murderer (though it's hard to tell if this last character flaw is real or a product of S.J.'s rather vivid imagination). Yet there is a happy, if awfully quick and convenient, ending. Famous photographer, Max, who had photographed S.J. in Paris, runs into her in New York, after she has beaten a hasty retreat from the Continent. He loves her, she lets him love her, and when she wakes up at his place, she finds that the bed is in the library, recasting her fears as premonitions. He proposes within days, and she accepts immediately. In the end, they are off to Japan together. Before leaving Paris, S.J. discovers that everyone in her former set has been getting married, taking out large swaths of the rowdy Left Bank crowd. A hasty marriage is not deeply sober behavior, and it would be the expected ending for a character of this time period (and there are numerous possible objections to that, of course). Nevertheless, as a reader I found it to be a satisfying ending for a heroine who was, if not actually likable, very entertaining to follow.

I wish this novel had received some of the same acclaim as Salinger's, and, again, find myself wondering about how much the then-shocking sexual behavior of a 21-year-old woman at loose ends in Paris has to do with its relatively obscure status.

An Education

2010-05-13T19:45:00.003-06:00

My mother is an Anglophile, and I grew up with a kind of baseline admiration for all things British as a result. English accents alone cause my ears to perk up expectantly, even when (as is so often the case) the content falls short of my expectations. Soldiers marching into soft boiled eggs, cucumber sandwiches, proper tea sets... these and other accoutrements were part of my childhood.

Ben picked up a Nick Hornby directed movie for me, set in Britain, and the movie led me to Lynn Barber's memoir An Education, on which the film was based. It is the story of Barber's life from schoolgirl to unwitting mistress to an older man, on to read English at Oxford, and then to work at Penthouse (as a writer, not as a "Pet"). Others have criticized her writing for being abrupt, and it is. Barber herself is sympathetic at times, not likeable at others. The movie focuses extensively on her teen years and her involvement with a much older man, who was later discovered to be already married. In the memoir, the story is, of course, a bit different. The older man, Simon, played his part in acculturating her to finer things, and the schoolgirl Barber played her part in being petulant and resistant to his plying. He deceived her, no doubt, but there's some question at to whether she ever liked him or just liked the status he conferred. She did see clues, of course, about his deception and she came away from the relationship with a sense of how "ultimately unknowable" other people are. She also makes a very apt description of the self-delusion that allows dishonest people to perpetrate deceptions: "I suspect this is always the way with conmen: they don't even have to construct a whole story, their victims fill in the gaps, reconcile the irreconcilables--their victims do most of the work. Simon hardly had to con me at all, because I was so busy conning myself." (p. 32)

I found the descriptions of working at Penthouse in the early days to be intriguing, as everyone there felt that they were on the cusp of something very new. And they were, in those early days of the sexual revolution. Barber never experienced sexual discrimination or harassment in that setting, but she did in later years in more traditional journalistic settings. Beyond the Penthouse chapters, the rest of her career is less intriguing to follow.

Overall, I would recommend the memoir to memoir fans only, in that Barber has an unusually unsentimental voice. This means that the final chapters, in which her husband is dying, are especially jarring to read, as sentiment and even at times compassion are far flung from the pragmatic sorts of redirection she does from the tender subject of death. It's a stark picture of love, but one has the sense that Barber is exactingly honest with herself. So, if you really like memoirs, this is one to read for its unflinching look at life by a woman who is, admittedly, self-centered, and doesn't hesitate to show that on the page.

*****

And now for something completely different... here's a brief but intriguing excerpt from a poem by Sarton, about the Hindu goddess of destruction, Kali:

It is time for the invocation, to atone
For what we fear most and have not dared to face:
Kali, the destroyer, cannot be overthrown;
We must stay, open-eyed, in the terrible place.

--May Sarton

teen humor

2010-05-10T07:47:00.003-06:00

I love silly YA fiction... I always need a series at this time of year, and so it's the last 3 books of the Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging series by Rennison. Substance? Not really. Amusing fluff? Yes, for days! Highly engaging and distracting as Georgia Nicholson pals around with the Ace Gang and tries to decide between Luuurve Gods Robbie and Masimo while constantly being distracted by Dave the Laugh. It's the last book in the series now, #10, and obviously we all hope she comes to her senses and picks Dave the Laugh. We shall see. She doesn't grow up so much as just change tack on a kind of ridiculousness that, as her parents' shenanigans demonstrate, it's not really necessary to grow out of, and may in fact be more fun to maintain. Series recommended only if you're ready and able to put all seriousness (possibly even part of your brain) aside for the duration of the reading experience.

Confessions of a Teenage Drama Quesn was a much better book than movie (Thanks Kat!), and I will admit that I do own the movie. Instead of the film's magical surrealism, the book actually creates a plausible interaction between bold teens and a rock star. Rock star was neither overly impressive nor impressed, and the teens did not reform his life but instead saw a glimpse of it, and that glimpse was ugly in all the ordinary ways. I much prefer the book, and I definitely recommend it.

one more quote from Ehrenreich

2010-05-08T13:00:00.002-06:00

before it has to go back to the library, from Bright-Sided, p. 56

"But in the world of positive thinking other people are not there to be nurtured or to provide unwelcome reality checks. They are there only to nourish, praise, and affirm. Harsh as this dictum sounds, many ordinary people adopt it as their creed, displaying wall plaques of bumper stickers showing the word "Whining" with a cancel sign through it. There seems to be a massive empathy deficit, which people respond to by withdrawing their own. No one has time or patience for anyone else's problems."

bright-sided

2010-05-01T13:21:00.004-06:00

Barbara Ehrenreich's latest book indicts recent American tendencies toward "positive thinking" for its Calvinist roots, its Stalinist applications, and its utter lack of grounding in empirical evidence. Though Ehrenreich acknowledges the social utility and even intelligence of trying to get along with others, she suggests that relentless positive thinking in fact encourages people *not* to think of others, especially on a social level. If we're always tinkering with our own minds, trying to "attract" the right things or purge the "negative" people from our lives, how would anyone have time to change the society around them?

Ehrenreich's thoughtful skepticism and suspicion of claims that seem too good to be true are a breath of fresh air in this post-subprime-mortgage collapse era. Ever since hearing the This American Life shows on the economy, I can't think of it as an "economic" collapse without thinking of the subprime mortgage connection. She shows the seriously delusional thinking in corporate America that led to the economic Ponzie scheme, the consequences of which are now everywhere, and connects it to positive thinking self-help gurus who made millions "motivating" top corporate executives.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of this book is that it finally gives fodder for resisting new age bullies and judgmental optimism pushers who would have us blame our own attitudes for everything from cancer to defaulting on a mortgage. Bad things happen. We don't have mind control over the world. My own tests of this at the age of about six were enough to prove to me that I couldn't, say, control thunder with my mind. But apparently most corporate executives and a whole lot of other people who believe they can control things like money with their minds didn't perform these same tests.

I hope they read Ehrenreich's book so they can catch up.

one from the vault

2010-04-21T09:50:00.002-06:00

There was a time when I was regularly writing poetry and taking part in a poetry group on a weekly basis. This was right before round 2 of grad school. I came across a draft of a poem that still now appears to me to have potential, though it's unfinished.

Poem from 2003:

There is a last time that something is done casually,
just before the great leaf drop of assumptions.
In a dazzling instance we are too informed,
know too much, and at such a moment we
treasure the knowledge, unaware of what
we’ve just lost by the knowing.
Clothes hit the floor with a thunk,
and we are bare and awkward,
and the last time we did that casually
recedes into an ever further distance. If
we are one of the lucky ones, lucky to grow,
trailing behind us, a lazy vine of time.

The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate

2010-02-17T19:23:00.002-06:00

by Jacqueline Kelly contains the following passage that accurately depicts adolescent disappointment upon receipt of a horrible gift:

"Great fatigue washed over me like a tidal wave, drowning my anger. I was too tired to fight anymore. I did the hardest thing I'd ever done in my life. I reached down into the depths of my being, and I dredged up the beginnings of a watery smile. I whispered, 'Thank you.' Just two words. Just two artificial words, coming from my own hypocritical mouth. Tears came to my eyes. I felt like I was disintegrating." (p. 305)

Calpurnia, or Callie Vee, is the plucky heroine of this Newbery honor book whose daily life and adventures with her scientifically minded Grandfather form the basis of this episodic narrative.

Callie is on the cusp of adolescence, 12 years old in 1899, watching a new century emerge. She (spoilers!) wants to be a scientist, but isn't sure women can do this, until her Grandfather introduces her to the likes of Marie Curie. Still, the book ends on a realistically ambiguous note... will Callie's mother succeed in converting her to domestic bliss, will Callie concede that she wants a family, i.e. children? Though the author is excellent at problematizing that word "family," as one of the girls asks "doesn't everyone have a family?" Will Callie go to the university? The book ends on a note of triumph: Callie and her Grandfather do succeed in discovering a new species, named after their family.

All in all, it's a satisfying read, and one that will promote the teaching of evolution and work well as a classroom read-aloud. But, basically, it's a solidly fun book to read.

Catching Fire

2010-01-23T13:38:00.003-06:00

the sequel to Hunger Games. Was amazing. Again, Collins rocks it. Katniss is back, having (SPOILER FOR FIRST BOOK) won the Hunger Games in the previous book. She and Peeta both make it home, which is unprecedented for these games, where there is supposed to be only one victor. At the same time, coming home means more danger, for Katniss and her family, because the Capitol is not pleased with how she won.

Now I have to wait for August 2010 until the last of the trilogy appears. The emotional twists and turns are only rivaled by the unexpected vertiginous meanderings of the plot. Nothing, and I mean nothing, is safe in this world. It's a great read.

In between the two by Collins, I stalled out yet again on a Tamora Pierce book, Wild Magic. It's good. It's really ok. Nothing bad about it. But once the Alanna character shows up, it gets kinda ceremonial in weird ways... Pierce is a little ham fisted in her writing, and makes the presumption that we care because, well, we must have read the other books. That tends to annoy me, because I need to be made to care about THIS book...

The Hunger Games

2009-12-31T19:25:00.002-06:00

Well, I heard Suzanne Collins' newest series was good, and the first book did not disappoint in the least. Katniss is a fierce heroine. When her father died, her mother emotionally abandoned the family to Katniss' care. As the eldest daughter, Katniss took it upon herself to feed the family by poaching in the woods with her friend Gale. All of this experience causes her to radically underestimate her ability to survive. When her younger sister, Primrose, is selected for the Hunger Games, Katniss doesn't hesitate to take her place. The Hunger Games are the ultimate in creepiness, a reality tv show created when "tributes" of children ages 12-18, one girl and one boy from each of the outlying areas, are forced into the wilderness and kill each other off one by one. All for the entertainment of the wealthy people in the Capitol. Katniss is ruthless in defense of her own survival, but she also becomes attached to the young girl Rue and to her fellow competitor Peeta in ways that defy her own understanding.

Personally, I'm just annoyed that the sequel doesn't appear to be available on my brand new Christmas Kindle (thank you Ben!). Because if it were, it's what I'd be reading

Oh, I also read most of The Lacuna by Kingsolver, but left it before the end. It was too obvious how it was going to end. I enjoyed the Mexican setting (having just traveled there for a week) and the international politics, but the long suffering closeted protagonist was more fun in his boyhood, less fun when he semi-retired to Ashville and developed xenophobia. Plus Kingsolver had more and more of the story told in articles and letters, resulting in less emotional involvement with the characters. I loved the lush poetry and aching loneliness of Prodigal Summer, so it's not that I don't love what Kingsolver can do. Certainly the coincidence of a young boy's life spanning encounters with oil magnates in the 20s, Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and Lev Trotsky in the 30s, and then HUAC in the 40s felt a bit contrived to my reading eye.

Echo, A Great and Terrible Beauty

2009-12-12T18:57:00.002-06:00

All my blogging energy was going to writing book reviews for awhile. That may happen again, as the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books periodically needs me to pitch in and write reviews, especially of new fantasy titles. The handful of fantasy titles that I reviewed AND that have stayed with me this year include: Roar by Clayton, The Forest of Hands and Teeth by Ryan, and Watersmeet by Abbott. Graceling by Cashore was not one I reviewed, but was splendid (thanks KQ!). I recommend them all.

A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libby Bray

Historical fiction and fantasy in one? Bray tackles this odd combination and makes it work in a plot that revolves around Gemma, whose mother's unexpected death in India sends her back to a London boarding school. But death is not the end, and Gemma sees her mother again in the "realms," spirit worlds where Gemma must learn to travel. I only read the first of the trilogy, but Bray wraps this installment up neatly while leaving plenty of room for future installments.

Echo by Francesca Lia Block
This seems fragmented at first, but the stories of Echo, Wendy, Eden, and Smoke do converge into yet another dreamlike Block narrative. The pacing is slow, but nobody reads Block for her page-turning prose. Oddly, this reminded me of an epic family narrative by Maeve Binchy, in that there are characters stacked on characters and Echo's family figures in dramatically and symbolically. By that standard, it's quite pithy!

Who does own the story?

2009-07-09T10:53:00.004-06:00

Welch, Wendy. "Who Owns the Story?" Storytelling, Self, Society, 5:1-22, 2009.

Welch asks the big question (above) systematically, using both legal and ethnographic arguments. But she doesn't answer it, and ultimately what she provides is a broad exploration of the facets of the question and ways of answering. This is a strong candidate as a text for the storytelling course precisely because it presents a range of answers. At the same time, I admit to a sense of disappointment as a scholar: she touches on individual/personal ownership, cultural ownership, authenticity (and claims to authenticity), the idea of "respect" and its limits, and even sacred stories, but she doesn't ultimately get beyond a postmodern issues of representation. She tackles them in concrete, not critical theory, terms, and that's a big plus, but her conclusion about "thoughtful people of integrity on all sides of this issue" is just shy of relativism. I wished for more serious consideration of power, a la Foucault, rather than a well-researched and well-defined paper that ultimately walks the reader through a smorgasbord of opinions.

The Letter-Box as intermediate space between child/adults/readers/writers

2009-07-01T09:52:00.006-06:00

Phillips, Michelle H. "Along the 'Paragraphic Wires': Child-Adult Mediation in St. Nicholas Magazine" in Children's Literature vol. 37, p. 84-109.
Great article for thinking about how a magazine positions child readers, in a top-down way, as active participants. Phillips argues that St. Nicholas readers had much free play in their interactions with the magazine through a series of close readings of the Letter-Box section. Brilliantly conceived and well argued, this is a piece that can substantiate the claim that child readers were granted some specific kinds of agency.
Of special note:
-Phillps argues that children themselves write "with amusement about other children" engaginging in "a process of disidentification with childhood." (p. 105)
-about Dodge.. "...unlike so many of the editors of other children's periodicals, for Dodge the role of an editor is not coincident with that of an author, parent, or other adult authority figure." (p. 90) Instead, "the editor's role is to mediate" in this "space of hybridized adult-child interchange." (p. 87)

my mothers' voices coming out of my mouth

2009-02-14T08:48:00.002-06:00

http://www.hbook.com/blog/2009/01/still-its-not-like-book-can-give-you.html

Roger posted about what Zena Sutherland used to quote Ursula Nordstrom as having said about kids loving to be read the phone book if it means they get attention. Which I now realize I learned from Betsy Hearne, who was Zena's protege, and which I know I have repeated. This idea has been handed down to me and, apparently, to Roger, who had the clarity to credit it back and back to its earlier attributions. I just heard it and repeated it, but now I see that my intellectual mothers' voices are emanating from my own lips.

It's odd to discover online evidence that you are actually living what you teach, participating in an oral tradition, part of a lineage of stories...

Toward an early history of teacher/librarian interactions, cooperation, and professional tensions

2009-01-14T20:46:00.002-06:00

When I'm ready to revise Chpt 3 of the dissertation, these sources will provide the educational history background for that lit review:

-History of Education in America by Pulliam
-The American School, 1642 to 1933 by Spring
-Education in a Free Society by Ripa
-Pillars of the Republic by Kaestle
-How Teachers Taught by Curan

I have a conundrum regarding this article-to-be: who is the audience? Is it vindicating or villifying to write about teacher-librarian conflict in the past? I do think it's a worthy antidote to histories that gloss over such professional tensions over jurisdiction, definition, identity, etc. L&CR seems wrong because it's not about cultural records, it's about professional culture. This makes me think Library History might be the venue, but that raises issues that Boyd raised and I haven't yet addressed: how do these early tensions connect to the broader story of the joint section of the NEA and ALA that emerged in 1896? My data is basically 1882-1898 and from the Reading of the Young reports. So this might require more primary source work as well.

It's certainly not going to be for an audience of children's librarians directly, but rather for folks interested in how reformist and, later, Progressive Era professionals defined their work in relation to children's reading. Who should guide the reading of children, teachers, librarians, parents, or others? That's a question that persists, and it suggests that this might be a worthy article if I can just figure out the appopriate scope and venue.

Histories that give context for understanding evolution in children's literature

2009-01-14T20:16:00.004-06:00

Here's a brief list of histories that are useful for possible lit review on this topic:

The Metaphysical Club by Menand
Talks about the influence of Agassiz in America

The Post-Darwinian Controversies by Moore
Details the various controversies, details being the key word. While the exploration of philosophical divergences could be useful, this focuses more on scholarly differences than on the kind of popular reception that would have influenced children's publishing.

Victorian Science in Contect, ed. by Lightman
Excellent collection of essays, among them the intro by Lightman and the chapter by Barbara Gates (who elsewhere wrote about Arabella Buckely's affiliations with Lyell and Darwin).

Wild Things ed by Dobrin and Kidd
On ecocriticism in children's lit. Most promising essay is "'He Made Us Very Much Like the Flowers': Human/Nature in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Children's Literature" by Maude Hines. Second most promising is "'Foundation-Stones': Natural History for Children in St. Nicholas Magazine" by Kaye Adkins

Charles Darwin and Darwin's Origin of Species, both by Janet Browne
I read the second in total, and appreciated what a smooth writer Browne is. She's also a formidable and respected Darwin scholar.

Before Scopes by Israel
Explores religion in Tennessee from 1870-1925, situating Scopes in historical context.

Disseminating Darwinism ed. by Numbers and Stenhouse
p. 129 Describes how the evolution controversy heated up only when the theory was applied to humankind.

Darwinism Comes to America by Numbers
Another respected Darwin scholar. Chpt 3 covers 1860s to 1920s.

Evolution: The History of an Idea by Peter J. Bowler
Whew, almost lost this one! I have copies of chpts 6 (reception of Darwin's theory) and 8 (evolution, society, and culture, 1875-1925) but somehow hadn't gotten the title page. All's well now, and time to put this into refworks...

Out with the old, in with the new

2009-01-05T16:23:00.002-06:00

Today on my NPR most emailed podcast, I heard of a guy who did all 121 possible merit badges in order to become an Eagle Scout. For comparison's sake, regular Eagle Scouts need 21 or so. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=7706158

Now that's overachievement. I think back with nausea on the fights in my home-of-origin around my brother's forced march to becoming an Eagle Scout, forced by my father the devout scoutmaster. All my brother wanted was a chance to be a garden variety underachiever, but no such luck in my house. But he had to get those 21 merit badges to satisfy the ego of the father who raised him. Such are fathers and sons around the globe. Not every father and not every son, but enough to create a spiderweb of displaced dreams. I think of the Liz Phair song about flying into Chicago at night. If I were able to look down from a plane on a globe lighted only by the fathers who have pressured their sons to achieve what they did not in their own youth, it would surely be awash with light.

So, out with the old, in with the new. I have blogged less than half of what I've read in the last six months. I have great personal reasons, but reasons can have the ring of excuses almost as soon as they are set into sentences. So out with the old, the overachieving blogger of 2007 and early 2008 who blogged nearly everything she read. In with the new, the blogger who blogs where, how, and if she feels like it. Dear readers, no merit badges will be issued for consistent blogging in 2009.

May you, may I, may all sons and fathers have a new year of ease.

Digital Storytelling

2008-12-09T13:29:00.004-06:00

I've been fortunate to have a great RA this semester. Recently she requested some sources on digital storytelling. The titles of the books appear related to the topic as I understand it, but the subjects are wide-ranging and not especially useful to the particular aspects of digital storytelling that interest me...

Technologies for Interactive Digital Storytelling and Entertainment, Gobel et al.
(conference proceedings)
This was the most promising of the bunch, with an article by Kibbat, Harald titled "Oral Tradition versus Digital Storytelling: On Educational Effects of Middle European Folk Tales and Their Value for Digital Storytelling," p. 292-296. But wait, that's a mighty tight page range for such an expansive title, and sure enough the piece is by a storyteller who offers his opinion that these digital tools might be good for retelling folk tales. No argument from me, but neither is there enough depth or substance here to warrant more than a cursory citation. Hey, at least he's making the connection to what has been traditionally known as "storytelling."

The next books don't really even do that....

Digital Storytelling by McClean,
subtitle: The Narrative Power of Visual Effects in Film. That's probably enough said... this is a book about movie making.

Storytelling Online by Shani Orgad,
but again, wait for the subtitle: Talking Breast Cancer on the Internet. It's about sharing stories, valuable and important stories, but it's not about storytelling as an art form.

Digital Storytelling: Creating an eStory by Howell
The lower-case "e" makes me a little nuts, but basically this is one of those rapidly-dated books on how to use software to do digital storytelling. It's the one of the four I'm hanging on to for the spring 409 (storytelling) courses, just in case it provides useful answers to questions that arise. It's also the kind of book that just begs this big question: why make a *book* out of this? Why not make a website??

letting books and even projects go

2008-09-29T10:07:00.002-06:00

If I had time to write that paper I wanted to write about the history of how food production is portrayed in children's literature, I'd go back to these sources:

Stoll, The Fruits of Natural Advantage: Making the Industrial Countryside in California
Recommended by L. B-K. who would know!

Iatridis, Teaching Science to Children (2nd ed., 1993)
Has a heavy focus on evaluative criteria and a very lightweight scope and intellectual depth. For example, "evolution" does not appear in the index.

Finishing the Ph.D., there seemed to be a scarcity of topics. Now I'm finding such abundance that I'm actually giving projects away to others. I recently handed off a whole folder of database search printouts to a deserving doctoral student. If I can't do it, then I hope somebody will tackle this project sometime.

I'm on two other tracks right now: children as readers from 1890-1930 and evolution in children's books from the same period.

Castle Blair by Flora L. Shaw

2008-08-13T20:32:00.002-06:00

Written at the urging of John Ruskin, recommended as exemplary fiction for children by Minerva Sanders in her 1890 Reading of the Young report because it depicted real children, Shaw's book is an interesting puzzle to me. It certainly fits the idea that approved children's fiction was written from any perspective but that of lower-class children. These children are the heirs and heiresses to an Irish estate.

They also have little inherent moral sense, especially the eldest boy, Murtagh, whose temper almost causes him to have the estate manager killed by one of his non-wealthy friends.

The poor children are there for the amusement of the rich children. They even tell Teresa at one point. Murtagh declares that they will "protect" her, and his sister Winnie agrees, saying: "Why, ye live on our land, don't you? So we're bound to protect you even if we didn't want to." (p. 55)

I'll be thinking about this one for awhile... there could be a paper in this, if I wanted to pursue it, following up on the book chapter about how adult approval of fiction for children correlated with the social class of the children depicted in the story.

?

2008-08-03T18:17:00.001-06:00

You Are a Question Mark

You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible. You love learning.

And while you know a lot, you don't act like a know it all. You're open to learning you're wrong.

You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more.

You're naturally curious and inquisitive. You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises.

Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought provoking.

(But they're not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!)

You excel in: Higher education

You get along best with: The Comma

What Punctuation Mark Are You?