February 7, 2010 @ 8:32 pm | Filed under: Books
The home page of this website (the “My Website” tab above) seems to have gone temporarily bananas—instead of my usual welcome message, it’s channeling the text of the Carney’s House Party post I wrote a couple of weeks ago. Anyone happen to notice when this started? I can’t remember when I last clicked on the home page. Hmm.
I have no idea what the problem is, but I’ve written my Swank web genius and I am sure she’ll fix me up in no time. UPDATE: Yup, problem solved. Thanks, Emily!
Speaking of Carney, I’ve been perusing her yet again as I work on my foreword for the reissue, and I got curious about the novel everyone in this book seems to be reading: Queed. Isobel (Carney’s rich Eastern roomie at Vassar) reads it on the train en route to Deep Valley, and Carney is proud that her father has recently read the novel as well and is able to converse about it with Isobel. And then the day they all go to Sam Hutchinson’s house for swimming and lunch, one of Sam’s relatives is reading it. His mother, I think? Well, I looked it up and I find at Gutenberg a text by Henry Sydnor Harrison, published in 1911—the year during which Carney’s House Party takes place.
So Queed is the book everyone was reading in 1911. Have any of you read it? Wikipedia doesn’t have much to say about Harrison: Tennessee native, Columbia graduate, wrote articles for the Atlantic Monthly under the pen name of Henry Second. Queed was his first novel.
I must say the frontispiece of the Gutenberg text had me at hello:
MR. QUEED, YOU ARE AFFLICTED WITH A FATAL MALADY. YOUR COSMOS IS PURE EGO.
Anxious looking chap, isn’t he? The novel’s opening paragraph contains the word “behemothian.” Twice. No wonder everyone between New York and Minnesota is reading this thing. I’m going to have to read far enough to discern whether the tone is ironic or sincere. If it’s sincere, it’s unbearable. I’m betting on ironic, though, or at least wry. I mean:
“The dog was of the breed which are said to come trotting into Alpine monasteries of a winter’s night with fat American travelers in their mouths, frozen stiff. He was extremely large for his age, whatever that was. On the other hand, the girl was small for her age, which was twenty-four next month; not so much short, you understand, for she was of a reasonable height, as of a dainty slimness, a certain exquisite reticence of the flesh.”
A certain exquisite reticence of the flesh? Tennessee native or not, Harrison has a voice right out of Monty Python.
February 5, 2010 @ 8:06 am | Filed under: Family
• getting set up for Journey North (first batch of clues are out today, woohoo!)
• watching Beanie fall into Redwall
• wobbly steps growing more confident…suddenly this baby is EVERYWHERE
• LOST is back. I is happy.
• thinking and thinking about Carney and Winona
• George Mason and the Bill of Rights
• Big Bad Bunny until I know it by heart
• magical red blooms on the amaryllis
• lots of stuff to read online—Salinger, Apple, Macmillan, and Amazon kept me busy
• several kinds of waiting
• measuring cups scattered across the floor
• Rose’s blue ocean in a casserole dish
• Jane and Gulliver
• a phone call that made my week (I’m gonna be a godmother) 
• Wonderboy and Rilla on stools at the counter with eye droppers and food-colored water (thanks for keeping them busy, Rose!)
• Rilla in clompy heels (“clip clops,” she calls them)
• old photos unearthed by my dad…look, there’s Rilla in 1971! (And could my parents be any cuter?)
February 2, 2010 @ 3:26 pm | Filed under: iPad
Dear iPad,
I know you’re really busy right now, so I went ahead and took the Which Jane Austen Character Are You quiz for both of us. Hope you don’t mind.
It came out that you are Charlotte Lucas and I am Elizabeth Bennet. Which wasn’t at all what I was expecting, but if you think about it, it makes a ton of sense.
Lizzie: skirts six inches deep in mud
Me: clothes constantly smeared with peanut butter and masticated goldfish crackers
Lizzie: marries sarcastic, sensitive man who dislikes mingling
Me: DITTO
Lizzie: enjoys reading letters
Me: enjoys reading blogs
(See what I mean? It’s chilling, really.)
And then there’s you and Charlotte Lucas.
Charlotte: possesses wide array of talents ranging from the practical to the entertaining
iPad: ditto, though can only apply them one at a time
Charlotte: believes “it is better to know as little as possible of the defects of the person with whom you are to pass your life.”
iPad: might appreciate this point of view
Charlotte: makes decisions based on reason, not emotions
iPad: is a computer
Charlotte: not flashy
iPad: no Flash Player
And Lizzie and Charlotte are dear friends who, while vastly different in temperament, derive much satisfaction from their relationship—at least until Charlotte marries a man neither one of them can particularly stand to be around.
So I guess what I’m saying, dear iPad, is: I think we’ll get along just fine as long as you don’t go marrying Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s remote control.
But, you know, I was sort of hoping you’d be the Mr. Darcy of gadgets.
February 1, 2010 @ 8:14 pm | Filed under: Fun Learning Stuff
We have been participating in the Mystery Class hunt for five years now. I think it’s five. Could it be six? Five or six, it’s been a blast every time.
Here’s a post I wrote about it two years ago (full of nuts & bolts info).
Things don’t really get rolling until this Friday, when the first set of clues come out, so you’ve got plenty of time to sign up at the Journey North website. (It’s free.) It’s way fun.
February 1, 2010 @ 9:37 am | Filed under: Books, Picture Book Spotlight
Last week I shared pictures of Wonderboy’s favorite book. This week it’s Rilla’s turn for a books post. I’m going to try to get in the habit of doing this regularly, for our family records as much as anything else. These are the picture books she enjoyed most in the past week:
Big Bad Bunny by Franny Billingsley, illustrated by G. Brian Karas. This was one of the books I received for review as a Cybils panelist in 2008, and it was a hit with my family. Big Bad Bunny is on the loose, and Mama Mouse has just discovered her littlest mouse-baby is missing. She’ll brave any peril to find her baby—even Big Bad Bunny’s long sharp claws and fierce yellow teeth. Rilla loves the repetitive text and watches each page for the chance to shout “No!” when I ask if something will stop Mama Mouse. It’s very comforting, when you’re three, to know that Mama will face danger to find you and bring you safely home.
Alfonse, Where Are You? by Linda Wikler. Scott had the fun of reading this family favorite to Rilla at naptime yesterday. Lucky man. It’s out of print now, alas, but there are used copies floating around. Alfonse is a big old goose, and his fluffy yellow friend Little Bird wants to play hide-and-seek. Trouble is, Alfonse hides too well…all of our small fry have loved this sweet book. Rilla asks for it over and over.
Trubloff, the Mouse Who Wanted to Play the Balalaika by John Burningham. A strange little book with somber, gorgeous, heavy-toned illustrations, all reds, oranges, and blacks, with a vast expanse of snow. Trubloff lives with his mouse family inside the wall of a country pub. He befriends an elderly member of a band of traveling musicians, and the old gypsy makes him a tiny instrument of his own. Rather too text-heavy to hold my littles’ attention, so it requires a bit of impromptu editing, and yet they keep asking for it. Something about the mouse’s passion to learn how to play his instrument—so intense that he leaves his family to travel with the musicians—holds them rapt. And then when the mouse sister strikes out on skis to fetch Trubloff home to see his sick mother—Rilla does that quivering-in-her-seat thing that she does.
“Stand Back,” Said the Elephant, “I’m Going to Sneeze!” by Patricia Thomas, illustrated by Wallace Tripp. Good luck finding this one: it’s long out of print. Ours is Scott’s old Weekly Reader Book Club copy.
—OH!!!!!!!! JUST THOUGHT OF A MEME!!! Let’s do our favorite Weekly Reader books! I’ll move this to a separate post and do a Mr. Linky for it. Just the words “Weekly Reader” evoke such powerful memories for me. Dr. Boox, Sprout, Christina Katerina…OK, yes. Stay tuned.
Back to Stand Back, what a fun read. The elephant is going to sneeze, and all the animals are distressed; the last sneeze wreaked such havoc. The zebra lost his stripes, the alligator’s snout turned inside out, the giraffe folded in half…disaster all around, on this strange savannah where there are both alligators and crocodiles, and North American bears from the looks of it. Delightfully rhyming text. The whole book reminds me a bit of Johnny Crow’s Garden in tone and whimsy. Very glad Scott claimed it from his family’s bookcase.
Well, this only takes us back about two days, but it’s enough for now. I might come back later and add book cover illustrations if time permits.
January 30, 2010 @ 7:13 am | Filed under: Links
- Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over E-Book Price Disagreement – Bits Blog – NYTimes.com – Not cool.
- A Quick Note On eBook Pricing and Amazon Hijinx « Whatever – Author John Scalzi on Amazon’s eBooks: “I personally don’t buy ebooks with DRM on them, because I actually like to own the books I own. It’s a funny twitchy thing of mine. I’m not sure why other people are so willing to let that slide.” Ayup.
- Jenny’s Wonderland of Books: January 2010 Carnival of Children’s Literature – Woohoo! The Carnival of Children’s Literature is back! Many thanks to our excellent host, Jenny of Jenny’s Wonderland of Books, and to the Carnival’s new organizer, Anastasia Suen.
- Godsbody: The Eternal Smile by Gene Yang & Derek Kirk Kim – Matthew Lickona writes, “I think the book is kind of genius, and anything but modest, seeing as it takes careful aim at the unhealthy escape from reality that can be sought in both comics and religion, two things which are both hugely important to the writer. I’d call that pretty ambitious.”
Amazon, carnival, ebooks, kidlitosphere, publishing, TBR
January 29, 2010 @ 6:50 am | Filed under: iPad
I would totally climb the Empire State Building for you.
January 28, 2010 @ 2:02 pm | Filed under: iPad
Don’t worry, I’m not stalking you or anything. Well, okay, maybe a little. Maybe I’ve been scouring the interwebs for hints about you for months now. Maybe I had a little crush on you long before I ever saw your picture.
It’s just, you know, I think you and I would really hit it off. We’re so compatible.
I mean, your battery lets you run for ten hours without recharging? I have six kids—I can run for ten hours straight too!
And just look how fond I am of your little sister.
I know you’re busy basking in the spotlight right now, but I wanted to let you know that when the limelight gets old, I’m here for you.
Signed,
Your New BFF
January 28, 2010 @ 1:37 pm | Filed under: Writing
Monica Edinger has updated a post she wrote five years ago about technology in the classroom. I was particularly struck by this bit (emphasis mine):
Fortunately, as I described in my 1994 article, my students quickly proved the worth of this purchase. Given the choice between writing with a pencil and writing on a portable word processor, most soon preferred the latter. Initial frustrations due to minimal keyboarding skills and technical knowledge gave way to delight as the children discovered how much easier it was to plan, draft, revise, and proofread their work. Students became much more independent as they discovered that they could move around text, add and subtract information, and even correct spelling without adult help. The level of their writing soared now that the arduous nature of handwriting had been removed. More children began seeing themselves as serious writers, taking their portable word processors out during free time to write stories on their own. It was clear that the introduction of the word processors had been a great success.
This speaks to something I tell people all the time when they are expressing frustration over problems with getting kids to write. From the time I was tiny, I loved to think up stories (my mom saved my very first story ever, “The Big Ice Cream,” which contains such scintillating dialogue as “Hi! Hi! Hi! Mommy!”) but I have never really enjoyed writing by hand. And by “never really enjoyed,” I mean I kind of loathe it. My wrist begins aching after just a few sentences. So all through grade school and middle school, I started lots of stories but abandoned most of them unfinished because I didn’t like the physical act of handwriting. In high school my folks gave me an electric typewriter, which changed everything. And when I graduated from high school, they gave me my first computer, a kickin’ Commodore 128. (You know you’re jealous.) Finally my fingers could keep up with my thoughts—and my poor, feeble little wrist needn’t be overtaxed ever again.
And of course the cut-and-paste function is the best thing to happen to writing since the alphabet.
So my advice to parents who’d like to see their kids doing more writing is to give them access to a word-processing program and a fun typing tutorial. (Beanie has enjoyed this one.) Handwriting is still an important and useful skill, but there’s no reason it must be tied to the creative act of writing—and may in fact stymie the process. I’m quite sure I’d never have become a novelist if I’d been forced to rely on my cantankerous wrist.
January 28, 2010 @ 6:17 am | Filed under: Links
“The device was demoed with newspaper content from the New York Times and supports video and audio embedded in the content. Most importantly, the iPad will support the ePub e-book standard and Apple has developed its own e-reader software, iBooks, and will also launch an iBookstore. E-book pricing is reported to be in the $15 range.”
“In its haste to sort out the state’s social studies curriculum standards this month, the State Board of Education tossed children’s author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, R-Weatherford, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain “very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system.
“Trouble is, the Bill Martin Jr. who wrote the Brown Bear series never wrote anything political, unless you count a book that taught kids how to say the Pledge of Allegiance, his friends said. The book on Marxism was written by Bill Martin, a philosophy professor at DePaul University in Chicago. “
• Cybils: REVIEW Anything But Typical by Nora Raleigh Baskin
“This absorbing story told from the viewpoint of Jason, a boy with autism, would appeal to readers who enjoyed The London Eye Mystery or The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, says Abby.”
ebooks, education, iPad, TBR, Technology
