A Book I Like

The ol' webmaster has been on my case because I haven't updated my weblog recently. He's been complaining that I haven't given him all the material for the slides I need for next month's presentation, too. Yeah, he complains all the time, but he's very handy.

I recently finished a book I actually sort of liked. I'm not going to rave about it, but I think it's worthy of a recommendation. Melonhead by Michael de Guzman is the story of Sidney T. Mellon, Jr. a twelve year old with a head too big for his body. Evidently, he is really odd looking because people are always staring at him. A great many of them are rude and unkind so they call him Melonhead.

Now Sidney is a child of divorce and shuttling back and forth between his father in Los Angeles and his mother, her second husband, and stepson in Seattle. He gets fed up and takes off on a cross country trip by bus. He gets away with it for quite a while because each of his parents believes he is with the other one. Each chapter involves his interaction with a new person, often a person who could end up injuring him in some way. Sidney provides each person he meets with a new, ridiculous story about who he is and where he's going and escapes nearly unscathed.

There are two really interesting things about this story. One, of course, is the stories Sidney makes up. The other is that many, if not most, of the adults in this book are probably stereotypes. But de Guzman made them so real again that I didn't care. Sidney's father is the classic good looking ne'er do well who can barely support himself, let alone a child. His mother has made a bad second marriage to a nasty guy who isn't good to her child. His grandmother is estranged from her adult child. I think the reason I bought into these characters is that they really do exist in nature (Maybe they are archetypes instead of stereotypes? I'll have to look archetype up.) More importantly, they really do care about Sidney.

Here's the drawback, though. (I know, there's always a drawback when I'm reading something.) What's the point of having the kid look so odd? I mean, he's adults staring odd. Wasn't the divorce problem enough? The divorce thing is a real problem that real kids face. And, yes, looking odd is a real problem that real kids face, but I think in this particular case the head thing is a distraction.

But, really, for the most part it was a good book.

Literary Journals

Last week I went to Borders where I inspected literary journals. I need to scope some out because I'm finishing up a graduate course on creative nonfiction (as my legion of regular readers are well aware), so now I want to try to publish some and literary journals publish that sort of thing. It's important to study the markets. A journal devoted to, say, the fiction of Afghanistan is not going to be interested in my essay on the joys of studying Taekwondo so I should save everyone a lot of time (and, on my part, embarrassment) and not submit it there.

I found maybe six to eight different publications, which was way too many for me. I was overwhelmed. What to buy, what to buy? I finally gave up and purchased Riverbank Review , which really won't help me much as far as my essays are concerned because it's a review of books for young readers. But, read what you know, right?

I wish I could report on what I've read in Riverbank Review . But, of course, I've only read part of the first article. However, it's about nature writing, and, interestingly enough, I've just read two books of nature writing in my class. Well, actually, I read only one of them because I'm a really lousy student. Still, isn't it strange that nature writing keeps turning up in my life?

Perhaps someone is trying to tell me something.

But I Have Slides!

I am in the middle of at least four projects, not counting some correspondence I should be taking care of. One of these projects involves developing a new school presentation for two jobs I have lined up this winter.

This presentation is on the history behind Tess LeClerc's Ethan Allen report in The Hero of Ticonderoga. In addition to creating the text, I'm working on planning slides, which my webmaster (have I mentioned that he is a god?) will make in a PowerPoint program. I will then have to drive that program to a film developer about an hour from here where the PowerPoint slides will be made into traditional slides. (Because no matter what you've heard about the wonders of PowerPoint, most of the schools and libraries I deal with don't use it.) Then I'll have to drive back there the next day to pick everything up. Right now I'm just outlining the presentation so we can get the slides done before Christmas. My first presentation is in the middle of January, and I need lots of time to work on the text and practice because of this performance anxiety issue of mine.

Yeah, I know. You now know far more about me than you want to.

The point I'm getting to is that as fascinating as the history related to Ethan Allen is--I could just go on and on about it--I'm worried that kids won't find, say, the Puritans as interesting as I do. Even though I have a slide of Cotton Mather. I'm hopeful they'll like my material on smallpox in the Revolutionary era, though. Who wouldn't like smallpox? Why a professor named Elizabeth Fenn likes it so much she's written an entire book called Pox Americana on the subject of smallpox during the Revolutionary War. I haven't read that book and probably won't, but my point still stands--smallpox is interesting stuff. Ah, but the Enlightenment...My gut feeling is that without the Enlightenment those of us who are not descended from aristocrats would still be living in huts and turning in a percentage of what we make to the lord of the manor. Because of the Enlightenment, learning matters. (Unless I totally don't understand that period, which, of course, is possible.) But will kids, who are probably more than a little ticked off because they have to go to school and learn nearly every day of their lives going to see the value of that? Even though I have a color slide of John Locke to flash on a screen while I talk about his enlightened philosophy?

I'll keep you posted.

Lack of Appreciation for a Beloved Author

I'm not talking about these young whippersnappers who don't appreciate good literature. I'm talking about my lack of appreciation for same. And the author involved is E. B. White.

I know I should be talking about Charlotte's Web or one of White's other books for children. (Stuart Little, for instance). But I've never read any of them. The rumors I've heard about kids crying over Charlotte's death (which also may be only a rumor because, remember, I've never actually read the book) were a serious turnoff. But White was an essayist before he was a children's author, and we've been reading his essay collection One Man's Meat in my graduate class. Actually, we've finished with the thing. Though, I have to admit, I stopped around the halfway point.

One Man's Meat is about White's experiences after he left New York City to live on a farm in Maine. Think Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence except in Maine instead of the south of France. And instead of renovating a house White raised chickens. And instead of writing about great food White wrote about Nazis.

Usually I like personal essays, but White's are often just a little too much like random thoughts for my taste. In his defense, he was writing these for a column in Harper's magazine so the original readers of these essays got them in much smaller, easier to take, doses. Nonetheless, it's not unusual for White to be writing about, say, helping a neighbor drag a sheep home, use a few asterisks, and start writing about something else. This suggests to me that he had a certain number of column inches he had to fill each issue. The essays are interesting historically because they were written in the late 1930s and 1940s about topics people are still writing about today--big agriculture and big education, for instance. One essay on children's literature sounds as if it could be published in The Horn Book today and fit right in. But there's also an aspect to some of his writing that suggests that any thought he had was worth expanding and publishing. Since this is E. B. White we're talking about I'm sure there are many readers who will say that any thought he had was worth expanding and publishing. I, personally, don't know if western literature would be any the worse if he hadn't told us about the farm publications he happened to be reading the day he wrote his column or the state of his hen house.

Okay. I'm an awful person. I just bashed E. B. White.

What I Found on the Young Adult Shelf

I want to talk about the difference between a book for young people and a book with a young character. I believe I've done this before, but, well, I'm doing it again.

This line of thought was inspired by I Never Liked You by Chester Brown, which I found in the Young Adult section of my local library. I Never Liked You describes itself as a "Comic-Strip Narrative." It's very much a comic-strip memoir. (Does anyone else besides Chester Brown and myself remember that on the Daniel Boone television show Boone had a sidekick named Mingo?) I Never Liked You is a little disjointed and rambly, but the episodes it describes are very true to adolescent life.

Does that mean it's a book for adolescents? There are panels of full-frontal nudity as well as large sections involving very rough language. Both the nudity and the language are appropriate for the story line and true to life. Would I want to hand the book to my 12 to 15 year-old-child? Hmmm. Do I think it should be promoted as a YA book? Definitely not.

The adolescent experience is one that still interests many adult readers. It makes sense that books for them will be written with adolescent characters. I Never Liked You appears to be one of them. I can't find any information on Brown that suggests he thinks of himself as a Young Adult writer or that anyone knowledgeable about independent comics/graphic novels considers him to be one.

However, the adult comic is such a new genre in this country (actually, Brown is Canadian) that literary types are having trouble categorizing it. Yeah, I know, categorizing is bad, and I guess this is an example that illustrates why that's so. While I Never Liked You is sitting on the YA shelf where it may be picked up by a teenager whose parents may find it too mature for their offspring, adults who could really appreciate it don't know it exists.

It may not even be accurate to assume that graphic novels are a genre teens are particularly interested in. I Never Liked You has been in my town library for seven months. I was the first person to take it out.

I'm Ba-a-ack

Miss me? Did you even notice I've been gone--due to software problems?

I've been working on a new presentation to use in schools, writing essays for that graduate class I keep telling everyone about, and reading essay collections. I've managed to read two kids' books. I've also managed to write a second chapter on the new, new book--not to be confused with the new book, which is coming out in June. Two chapters all fall is nothing to brag about. Actually, it's only one chapter this fall. I think I did the first one in August.

So, anyway, I should have some things to write about.

I Guess You'd Call This Thought Provoking

I did not expect to like "Kids Lit Grows Up" an article by Charles Taylor that appears in Salon.com. Children's writers are not very fond of celebrities who decide "Hey, I can write a children's book." Taylor's article isn't about celebrities writing children's books but about writers of adult fiction writing them. Which is a similar situation. Or at least I thought so until Taylor convinced me otherwise.

According to Taylor, a number of writers have children's books coming out soon or already out. He discusses Neil Gaiman's Coraline, which I've already gone on record as saying I didn't like (see September 9 entry), as well as books by Carl Hiaasen, Isabel Allende, and Michael Chabon. (Chabon wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which I found too rambly and couldn't finish--This business of my never reading anything I like is really getting me down.) I assumed writers of adult fiction were moving in on kid turf because the Harry Potter thing suggested there was big money to be made by doing so. Taylor gives a more benign reason, and he makes a logical case.

Taylor's argument is that these authors are writing children's books because right now children's literature is an exciting field to be working in and who wouldn't want to be part of an exciting field? In addition, the impression that there's big money in kid lit (and, folks, it's only an impression--the people making big bucks are few and far between) is making it possible for these people to find publishers for their children's books. Under normal circumstances that might not happen.

It's a good article that's worth a look. Oh, my gosh! I think I just read something I liked!

More on Gail's Graduate Class

Charles Lamb is one of the more readable late eighteenth/early nineteenth century essayists we've had to read in the creative non-fiction class I'm taking this fall. To give you some idea of how decent a writer Lamb is, I studied him as an undergraduate and actually remember!

Why bring him up in a Weblog devoted to children's and YA literature? Well, Charles had a sister named Mary. During some sort of episode of mental illness, Mary killed their mother. To keep her out of prison, Charles offered to become her guardian. (Evidently you could do that back then.) She got off, but it was a life sentence for him. Needless to say, they ended up spending a lot of time together. And the way this connects with kidlit is that the two of them wrote a book for children called Tales From Shakespeare. The book is essentially prose versiions of some of Shakespeare's best known plays.

As luck would have it, my family happens to own a 1956 edition of the Lambs' book that evidently belonged to my husband and brother-in-law. It looks as if they barely touched the thing. My own sons avoided it as well. However, Tales From Shakespeare is available in a contemporary edition, in the event anyone would like to expose a young child to the playwright.

Here's a possible connection between Charles Lamb and myself--I can remember reading prose versions of Shakespeare's plays when I was a child. My mother had a book of them that I was reading somewhere around the time I was in second grade. If memory serves me, my mother didn't think it was appropriate reading for me and deepsixed the book. She was probably right.

Coraline

I looked forward to reading Coraline by Neil Gaiman because of some buzz it was generating early in the summer. This kids' book has been getting great reviews from both children's and adult sites. Even the mainstream Salon.com gave it a positive nod. Well, I'm uncomfortable saying this, but I found it a little over rated. Though it's a very creepy story full of atmosphere by an author who is evidently known for writing horror stories, its main character just doesn't work. So what I'm saying is the creepy part is just fine, the noncreepy part is the problem.

Coraline is too good to be true, not in the sense of being well-behaved, sweet, and icky but in the sense of always being able to confront every obstacle. And we never see how she works out these problems. She just does it. We never find out how she knows the things she knows. "'She has lied to you,'" a character tells Coraline. "The hairs on the back of Coraline's neck prickled, and Coraline knew that the girl's voice told the truth." Well, how did she know that?

She is also wise beyond her years, which I, personally, never particularly care for in a child perhaps because it makes me feel inadequate. But it's also not very realistic. "I don't want whatever I want. Nobody does. Not really. What kind of fun would it be if I just got everything I ever wanted? Just like that, and it didn't mean anything. What then?" I'm sorry. Not many kids feel that way, and that passage sounds just a little bit like a lesson--an odd thing coming in a horror story.

Another odd thing about this book is that there is something about the appearance of the scary characters that's similar to that of the family in The Mennyms by Sylvia Waugh. (A series of books I loved. I mention that to prove that I do like some things I read, though it doesn't seem to have happened much lately.) The similarity is so striking that I found it distracting. Perhaps Gaiman meant to pay a little homage to Waugh. Or perhaps as a primarily adult author he hasn't read much children's and YA fiction.

Which would go a long way toward explaining the failings in his child character.

Oh, Yeah. This is Going to be Great

I have finished the 100+ pages I had to read for next week's graduate class but not the book by the contemporary essayist.

Do you recall the poem The Swing by Robert Louis Stevenson? (Stevenson wrote essays but so far I've been spared having to read them.) Late eighteenth, early nineteenth century essays are very much like The Swing except they don't rhyme. "I love to go up in a swing. I love to look around while I'm up there. I love to come back down."

I feel very badly for those poor souls who lived before the time of the novel and had nothing to read but essays. On the other hand, it's terrific that you could write this kind of stuff and get paid for it.