Where the wild things are on tv

In case you missed it, Maurice Sendak did a hilarious, curmudgeonly interview with Stephen Colbert this week. I'll embed it here because I think he made some valid points about children's books and the book industry.

Part 1

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 1
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

Here's Part 2

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Grim Colberty Tales with Maurice Sendak Pt. 2
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video Archive

In which I suddenly express a small amount of desire for an e-reader

I admit that I've been pretty disdainful of eBooks in most past posts on this blog. But last weekend, I felt a glimmer of desire for one of the dang things.

I was trying to squeeze all the new books that E-girl received for Christmas and her birthday into already packed shelves. They...wouldn't...fit.

She is very sentimental. Suggestions that we give away some of the books she doesn't read anymore have been met with tears. She won't get rid of even the books that don't deserve a second reading like those from the Dear Dumb Diary series. Being surrounded by books is a comfort to her, even the stack of Dr. Suesses on the top shelf that she hasn't read in seven years.

"What if," a little voice in my head whispered, "all those throw-away tween novels had been on an e-reader? She could still have access to them, but they wouldn't be crowding all these shelves."

(In the past, we could get such books from the library. But our public library is struggling and its book budget has been slashed. If they buy new books at all it's sometimes one copy for 19+ branches. When we went to look for books on planning children's parties last week, we found the same books that were there 10 years ago. So if we want something new, we now have to buy it ourselves. Or, possibly, wait a long time in an online queue.)

And when she struggles to put on her backpack in the morning, filled with books, I sometimes wish I could load up textbooks and novels on a small e-Reader for her.

Of course, there's still the problem of misplacing or losing such an expensive tool. If not lost out of a backpack, I imagine it could be easily buried under a pile of books in her room.

So I won't be ordering a Kindle anytime soon. But it's starting to appear, sometimes, on a Wish List in my mind.

Spa party (or, Martha Stewart for a week)

Most of my time and intention last week went into organizing a spa party for E-girl. Like a production assistant, I went around to various stores and web sites looking for just the right props/tools/party favors: small spray bottles, candies, tiny nail polishes, bath sponges, emery boards, a red heart tray... etc.

I am not a Martha Stewart-type—and I normally loathe shopping—so this was not done without some inner struggle on my part. But it was her fervent birthday wish and I tried to do a good job of it. (I suppose some of that intention came from guilt, to make up for any past, pitiful party favor bags I'd filled with Dollar Store items such as non-bouncy balls, flimsy hair barrettes, and soon-headless dolls.)

As I continued on with it, I became more intent on doing it as perfectly as possible, even if all that planning and acquiring and cleaning kept me from writing. Sure I could think while driving from one store to the other, but those thoughts were unrecorded, unexplored. Much of it felt like lost time, though ultimately for a good cause.

I realize that some people would have found the whole event a creative outlet—acquiring, decorating, planning, as art forms in themselves. My Aunt Sadie was one of those people. She used to throw parties for my brother and me that involved the entire neighborhood. In one, the local doctor, bandana across his face, held up the station wagon/stage coach, while kids defended it with toy guns. The sets she made for those parties lingered in my grandmother's attic after she married at middle age and left for England.

The spa party was on a much smaller scale. I hired a local teenager to give foot massages. We set up foot spas in the kitchen and a card table topped with make-your-own foot soaks, sugar scrubs and scented water. I polished toenails, sprayed faces with rosewater and put sliced cucumbers on eyelids. Four hours later, it was over, all that work transformed into happiness.

Though not my usual format, it was a successful bit of performance art.

Try doing this with an e-book

Fun, whimsical video of what goes on in a bookstore in the after-hours.

The Flaubert option

I am in the midst of my third bad cold/respiratory virus in less than 12 months. Is it karma? (I bragged "I never get colds anymore!" a year ago). Whatever the cause, this is my particular immune weakness right now and no matter how many vegetables I eat or how much zinc, vitamin C, or Chinese herbs I take, the colds stick around for several days. And make me tired—after I typed this first paragraph, I wanted to lie down again.

There are only two good things about being sick: it increases empathy for the sick, and offers time to daydream. Of course I can daydream in good health, but not without some degree of guilt. Trapped in bed, the mind can wander.

I thought of Gustave Flaubert this morning when I went back to bed after breakfast. Flaubert's family wanted him to be a lawyer but he wanted to write. After what was described as a bout of nervous fits (perhaps undiagnosed epilepsy?) he declared he was too ill for the law. And he wrote. Of course, this is an oversimplification of his life—he traveled, had liaisons with prostitutes and engaged in love affairs in places beyond his own bedroom. But I have this image of him retreating from the world and giving himself completely to words.

Last night, I went to bed early and, cozy under blankets, read 50 pages of The Night Circus, which I received for Christmas. I did not think about dirty floors, laundry or dishes—I didn't have the energy to do anything else.  The only other time these days that I can "read" books so guiltlessly is when I am driving in the car, listening to books on tape. I always have to be doing something, going somewhere.

In my regular, healthier life, the reading of a book is no longer a goal or worthy activity in and of itself. How have I gotten so far away from one of the things that is most important to me?

Another woman's work rescued from the trash

The December issue of Smithsonian Magazine includes a short article on Vivian Maier, whom it calls a "photographer of consequence." Never heard of her? That's because Maier, who worked as a nanny, didn't sell a print in her lifetime and rarely shared her photos with friends and neighbors. Her photos came out in the open only because she could no longer pay rent on the storage unit where they had been kept. A stranger, John Maloof, bought a box of 30,000 negatives for $400 in 2007.

By the time Maloof began sifting through the negatives, Maier was dead. Fortunately, Maloof liked what he saw and started posting her photos on a blog. He also has issued a book of her work (which, probably due to the magazine piece, is out of stock at Amazon right now).

You have to wonder how many other female artists haven't been so lucky—lacking any kind of postmortem discovery or champion.

How much work by women has simply been thrown away? Perhaps this is true also for good and even excellent work by male artists and writers who have had the misfortune to remain unknown. But from all of antiquity we have one complete poem from Sappho (and a few other line fragments), and a handful of lines from other female writers—compared to the multiple volumes by men that are arranged in the Loeb Classical Library.  There is little or no female perspective remaining from those centuries—the voice of all those women is eerily silent.

The above photo is from a direct link to a page on Maloof's blog.

Once upon a time—The End

I actually got excited when I first read about the new ABC show, "Once Upon a Time." Critics lauded it as a return to the family hour, comparing it to the old Sunday night standard, "The Wonderful World of Disney."

That's because there is nothing on TV currently that our family watches together. We usually don't even channel surf in front of our kid in the evenings, since we don't know when a simulated murder, rape, or assault might appear. Of course there is "children's TV," but it's a parallel world/ghetto of silly Disney Channel shows or oft-repeated Sponge Bob episodes—the type of shows that my tween-aged kid despises or is tired of (she outgrew PBS a few years ago). When we occasionally sit down in front of the TV together, it's mostly to old TV shows and movies.

"Once Upon a Time" promised to bring fairy tales to life, with storybook characters exiled to modern-day Maine. I imagined it was going to be a TV version of "Enchanted," which we all found charming and funny (though just a tad scary at the end).

But E-girl watched most of Sunday night's episode behind a blanket raised over her face. She couldn't stand seeing the hunter kill the deer, or the queen tear out his heart, or the mayor/queen crushing the heart of his modern-day sheriff counterpart.

And then there were the nightmares afterwards... I dreamed of deer being slaughtered, of hearts ripped out and dripping blood, of people chased by an evil presence—the type of dreams I rarely have and certainly never relish. E-girl is still upset about seeing the queen murder her own father a few weeks ago. It has affected her dreams, though not as a nightly occurrence.

Of course, we'll get over it. Neither of us will become serial killers as the result of watching this show—the argument that always seems to be trotted out whenever a parent or anyone else tries to explain why they are bothered by screen violence that (they or) their kids are exposed to: "TV violence doesn't correlate with real-life aggression..." And real-life is full of violence, blah, blah, blah.

But why should I want my tenderhearted child to become callous now (or ever)? Or why would I want her to watch something before bedtime that will give her insomnia?

With a title like "Once Upon a Time" you keep hoping for a happy ending at the end of each show [and not at the end of a five-season series—although, given that its producers also did "Lost," there may be no real resolution]. But each episode has seemed increasingly grim (pardon the pun).

So we'll go back to our DVD player and our Netflix Instant queue. As E-girl put it at the end of it, "I think I'd rather watch 'Rocky and Bullwinkle'."

A mission of salvation in a dark basement room

Yesterday I scavenged through a dead woman's bookshelves. Although I don't know her name, or anything about her except that she was a former school teacher and a survivor of the Holocaust, I came to admire and like her in the couple of hours that I was there in her dark, empty house.

The books we found there gave evidence of an intelligent person with eclectic tastes: hardcover, first-edition novels (from Lolita to Star Trek), a collection of Samuel Beckett's work (in English and French), travel books, cookbooks and issues of Bon Appetit, humor, biography, and trendy psychology—written in English, French, German, Spanish and even Russian. She had been a voracious reader—there were stacks of books in other rooms of the house,  and they obviously had been read because almost every one contained scribbled comments on the inside front page that summed up her reactions, e.g., "...highly amusing" and "...a suspenseful read."

My companion and I were there to take out what we could for the local high school's annual book sale because no one else wanted her books. She had been single, childless and elderly, and after she died in that house, no one came to claim her books. In fact, the realtor who bought it was just going to throw them away. We were there on a mission of salvation.

Looking through her collection, I was reminded of the autistic knitter. This woman's book collection also represented a kind of art form or life's work. And all of it, including her tiny commentaries, had been destined for a garbage can. Perhaps there was other evidence remaining of her life beyond that quiet house—art works or crafts or letters she had written, still preserved by companions or the sons and daughters of her companions—but I doubted it. With a sinking feeling, I felt like I was deciding what part of her would go on, even if only to strangers that won't know her name.

But what struck me more was the sudden realization that if everything she had read had been on an e-reader, my friend and I wouldn't have been there in her house in the first place, and I never would have spent those few moments in her lingering presence. All those titles, the odd juxtapositions of Art Buchwald and Ferlingetti and science fiction paperbacks, gone in a blip.

Create something in 30 days (more or less)

NaNoWriMo didn't work for me this year. But that doesn't mean you or I have to wait until next November to work under an artificial, Internet-based deadline to complete some type of creative work.  Below I've compiled a list of web sites that encourage "high-velocity prose" (as NaNoWriMo bloggers call it) of any type within certain time frames:

February: Picture Book Marathon - Write a picture book every day of the month in February

March:  NaNoEdMo - 50 hours of editing one novel

April: Script Frenzy Write 100 pages of original scripted material in 30 days (includes TV scripts, screenplays, stage plays and graphic novels)

May (1-7):  NaPiBoWriWee - Write 7 picture books in a week

November:
• WNFIN (Write NonFiction in November) - Write 50,000 words of nonfiction
• NaPlWriMo (National Playwrighting Month)
• PiBoIdMo (Picture Book Idea Month) - Create 30 picture book ideas in 30 days
• and, of course, NaNoWriMo

For a list of additional contests [I didn't list them here because some seem less official] see:
  NaNoWriMo-Style Events

The most comforting sound I know

What is keeping a journal but a need to talk with myself and make sense of things? As I sit here trying to figure out what to do with myself, what else to write, I am comforted by the scratching sound of the felt-tip pen as it moves across the page and back again. Perhaps it is the most comforting sound I know. It is the sound of my silent voice, the one that isn't heard in usual conversations.

Spoken words vanish, unless remembered, and then memory often fades. Things said/written here have the potential for some kind of permanence (even if only for this audience of one).

Maybe writing like this, without a title or format or specific intention, shares a kinship with dance—the brain choreographs and five fingers move in rapid obeisance.

(from journal entry dated June 11, 2011)