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Today on Slate I have a slideshow piece about Hollywood’s new repurposing of PG-13 action heros as early- reading educators. Enjoy it, share it with your friends, sound off to your heart’s content.
Where do you stand: “Who cares what the book is about as long as my kid wants to crack it open?” Or “C’mon, Iron Man, stick to the flying, wouldya?”
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I often run with Ira Glass. Not in person, though I’m guessing that would be fun. Rather, his The American Life podcast. Sometimes I run with Peter Sagal (of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me!) or Terry Gross (of Fresh Air… are you detecting a public radio theme?). But today, for the first time, I ran with… me.
Yes, I jogged along listening to a podcast interview I did with Sabrina Weissler, of the Children’s Book radio podcast. And so can you, if you’d like: you can get it here or go to childrensbookradio.com and click on “Episode Guide” (I’m Episode # 43).
I must confess that as I listened and ran, I cringed in anticipation, fearing that I said something completely stupid. I think the act of cringing while running gives a whole new dimension to the phrase “upper body workout.”
Ultimately, I didn’t discover that I had said anything truly cringe-worthy. I’ve enjoyed many of the other interviews Weissler has done, so I’m glad I didn’t totally botch it… or at least I don’t think I did. Feel free to strap on your running shoes, listen for yourself and weigh in on this point.
Cringing optional.
Do You Hate The Sound of Your Own Voice? What Do You Do That Makes You CRINGE? Ooo… Extra Points for What Does Your Spouse Do That Makes You Cringe? Or What Do You Do That Makes Your Spouse Cringe? I’m Not Picky.
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Well, another one bites the dust. I’m about six weeks into my six-month paid membership at Chemistry.com, and the stats are pretty grim. Only four gentlemen have joined me in Chemistry’s American Gladiator-style obstacle course of compatability ratings to get to the penultimate stage — e-mails within Chemistry’s internal messaging system — and only one of those has met me for the awkward and logistically difficult experience that in more romantic times was referred to as a “date.” The most recent correspondent, a promising individual from San Diego with enough quirks to keep me interested and afraid (hot!), seems to have withdrawn from the running after receiving my real-world email address, which comes with my real-world name.
I like to think I give good Google. He may disagree.
I’m divulging this to you, devoted Pajamazon readers, because what gets me through these dark and humiliating times is an essay in the Fall 2007 issue of Wilson Quarterly by Tyler Cowen. In “The New Invisible Competitors,” Cowen argues that it’s not the intensity of competition in modern life that dispirits us, it’s the bureaucratization of it.
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Writer Bob Morris never cared much about Father’s Day. A gay man living a hip life in NYC, he had little in common with his suburban Long Island Mets-fan dad, and didn’t like the pressure of this Hallmark-instigated holiday. But he managed unscheduled meaningful moments with his father, and wrote about them periodically in his cranky and affecting New York Times column “The Age of Dissonance.’ I loved that column, and when he ended it last November for other pursuits, I was gloomy.
While I’d first lumped Morris in with the rest of the confectionery, news-lite Sunday Style Section (the detailed, surreal, high-society wedding announcements are many a reader’s guilty pleasure), he soon meant much more. God help me, he resonated. Morris, like me, escaped Long Island, and occasionally, like me, he had to return to visit aging relatives. This is much easier—and funnier—to read about than actually take part in, especially when it involves him and his dad singing Allan Sherman songs at his mother’s tombstone unveiling in an effort to connect.
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This is pretty unfortunate. While I’m not a fan of Alice Walker — I always found her plotting to be far too serviceable to an obvious moral — there’s little denying her impact. That her daughter would use politics as the bullhorn to broadcast grievances over her upbringing threatens not only Walker’s credibility as a moralist, but feminism itself. We’re still getting 80 cents on the dollar, Rebecca. Thanks.
Worse, the criticisms of feminism appear almost as asides within an essay that can only be a referendum on Walker’s parenting. There’s no opportunity to spark a real discussion about whether “radical feminists” (a group that can include Camille Paglia and Suze Orman, depending on who you’re talking to) profess unsustainable or contradictory creeds. Without that conversation, all we have is a sideways assault dressed up like gossip.
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According to School Library Journal, several Newbery-winning books of old are getting face-lifts to make them more attractive to new generations of readers.
On one hand, it is ironic that books whose covers already contain the thing most likely to attract a reader’s attention (that shiny round award sticker) need help. But on the other hand, the book covers that worked in the 1930’s have a hard time competing with those of more recent books.
Take, for example, the old cover of Elizabeth Enright’s 1938 book, Thimble Summer (which won the Newbery in 1939):
Then check out the cover from the Holly-Hobbie-esque 1987 edition:
Now compare them with the new cover:
A lot more appealing for a kid in 2008, no?
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Is it just me, or has the Scripps National Spelling Bee become emblematic of something much larger, more rarefied, more mediated than a close-up of a nervous kid spelling “serrefine”?
It’s a perversely geeky competition, devoted, as it is, to our haughty and inscrutable mother tongue. Those of us with a good memory for the way words are shaped inevitably falter in the face of the completely unknown. In English, we have patterns in our phonetics, but not axioms. We have discernible roots that are easily switched with identical cousins migrated long ago from other mothers, other tongues. Our language is as combative as the Angles and the Saxons themselves. Face it, it’s a mess.
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As loyal readers will recall, I recently wrote a post about Playaway - the individual serving, smaller-than-a-juice-box digital book option… now available for free rental at your local library. I decided this would save my family car trip. By which I meant: I would actually get to talk to my spouse rather than listen to CD’s of the Katy Kazoo Switcheroo books broadcast throughout the car.
I think I’ve mentioned that my kids LOVE audiobooks. But for some reason, they often choose books - or readers - that drive me nuts.
Katy Kazoo is an excellent example. On paper, this is an O-K series. Katy is a regular girl, but in every book a “magic wind” turns her into someone else and she has to see the world through this person (or animal, occasionally)’s eyes and stop whatever problem is threatening him or her. However, the book’s dialog, especially as voiced by the books’ reader, Anne Bobby, is downright eye-rolling. One of the kids tells Borscht-belt era jokes and the other kids laugh and say things like “good one!” instead of telling him to put a sock in it, as real kids would. And the plots are as formulaic as you’d expect from most series books.
So I would prefer the kids didn’t subject me to this storytape.
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As we head into the holiday weekend, I have my usual To Do list. Get groceries, do laundry, go to the library, etc.
The library part is particularly key, because if we’re doing any driving - less appealing as the gas prices hit $4/gallon -we need to stock up on audiobooks (or as we call them, storytapes). My kids are addicted to audiobooks. There’s a CD player in their room, one in “the drawing room” (aka my office, which the kids use as their office, too), and of course, one in the car. On car trips, I try to choose new ones because I’m terrible at tuning them out and, unlike my kids, I get bored of even the best ones after a couple of times through. And the bad ones, well, let’s not even go there. I lose them quickly.
Our library system has a pretty fabulous collections of books on CD at this point, so I always go there to stock up when we need new material. I’ve heard that libraries are now offering on-line downloads to patrons (perfect for loading onto my iPod for backseat sharing via a splitter and two pairs of headphones) but I haven’t actually tried this yet.
However, a new option caught my eye: The Playaway.
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Ever wonder why the moms and dads in picture books never check their e-mail after tucking in the kids, even though you and pretty much every other parent you know does? Neither do picture book parents talk on their cell phones at the playground or pull out their laptops when the kids they’re strolling conk out. Why is that?
I have my theories and if you’d like to read them, here they are. Courtesy of Slate, which was kind enough to put them on the cover yesterday.
If you have YOUR theories, please share ‘em here!
A children's book writer chats about reading and writing children's books (try saying that ten times fast!).
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