Written Pyramids

This makes me happy. Did you know that the book is more popular than The Cat in the Hat or Goodnight Moon?

Also, Newsweek has a great write up of Eric Carle's life. It's chilling in many ways and certainly worth a read:

He developed a special bond at school with his art teacher, Herr Krauss, who secretly showed him the works of Picasso, Matisse and Braque, all banned by Hitler. He remembers wading in the Rhine when a warplane flew by and shot at him. The bullets missed him by a few feet. He also remembers an unexpected knock at his family's house, days before the Germans surrendered. "Some Nazi official came to the door and said to my mother, 'Your son tomorrow morning has to report to the railroad station, we'll give him a bazooka.' I thought it would be exciting to get a bazooka. But she didn't let me go."

I have been negligent about this blog. There are a lot of things I'd like to say: musings about how I've yet to read a John Updike novel, but I relished his short stories in the New Yorker, photo essays about election and inauguration in the nation's capital, and the shocking realization that my editors disapprove of my drinking coffee on the metro (which is, yes, illegal).

But for right now, I'd just like to say that the illustrator of Tiki Tiki Tembo died today.

I had forgotten how much I loved this book until I saw news of his death, but now I can remember the exact intonation that my father used (and that I imitated later) when reading the name " Tikki tikki tembo-no sa rembo-chari bari ruchi-pip peri pembo."

Further, it is amazing to me that this story, about the younger sibling saving the day and the overly-revered older child who is stupid enough to fall into a well in the first place, charmed my oldest-child heart. But it did. And Blair Lent, whose name meant nothing to me before today (but who I now know is a Boston native!), deserves to be properly remembered.

As an added bonus, the other books that Amazon suggests based on customer's purchasing history is a delightful trip back to hours of childhood story time:

Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day
Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs
The Story about Ping
Caps for Sale

Those books, particularly the last two, were some of my favorite books, and I'm glad that people seem to still be buying them.

Since I last wrote a "death of newspapers" post, the world of print seems to have thrown up its hands and taken a plunge into the depths of who-knows what.

• The Chicago Tribune declared bankruptcy, throwing the fates of America's most respected newspapers into question.
• The New York Times used its own brand new building as collateral on a loan.
• The Detroit newspapers decide home delivery is a thrice a week option
• Small town newspapers close their doors.
• Washington bureaus from papers all over the country continue to shrink or disappear
  

A year ago on this blog, I defended the future of newspapers. They still seemed viable. The rumors of their demise seemed greatly exaggerated. But, when the dust settled from the election and the recession hit papers, rumors of the demise of print seem realistic at best.

I could fill this blog with sob stories, or with worries that storied newspapers will tell their last.

But, despite the obvious snark in the Onion article, which declared "Dying Newspaper Trend Buys Nation's Newspapers Three More Weeks," there is a legitimate truth. Newspapers cover the death of newspapers, and while I might look on with horror and desperately try to suppress the panic that comes from watching my plans grow vague and hazy, I have to admit, it's a great story.

I get to watch--and be part of-- the evolution of something that, I believe, will be, ultimately, fascinating.

There is a real need for news. Whether it be to revel in victory (photo essay of people waiting in line for the Nov. 5 papers to follow) to follow, or mourn a tragedy, or to understand the intricacies of scandal and failure, there is a need for reporters, writers, and editors.

Despite our low job approval ratings, I'm not sure readers are ready to give up on journalist-driven news and opinion all together.

The question is, how to make sure people see that, and how to profit off of the way readers consume their news.

There is an answer. There has to be. And this evolution is something that I will tell my children about. Not only so they can laugh at their old-fashioned mother, but also so that they understand the evolution of industry that will be shaping, exposing, and probing their world.

Watching my industry -- or any industry for that matter -- struggle is painful. But I can't help thinking about the Phoenix and how the bird, who combusts and then is born from ashes enchanted me when I first discovered it in E. Nesbit's books.

In reading parts of the book, this line seems particularly apropos:

"It was felt that Robert, as the pet of the Phoenix, ought to have the last melancholy pleasure of choosing the materials of its funeral pyre."

It seems to me that the reporters, the ones who are still proud to call themselves ink stained wretches, should be the ones who figure out how to let this incarnation of news die, and how to facilitate the next one rising from the ashes. Or, to keep the analogy withing this particular phoenix mythology, they should be the ones to build the pyre, but then to throw the golden egg back into the flames.

The death and rebirth of news might be one of the biggest story of my time. And I'm glad that it's one in which I can participate.

Any young Washington Post reporter or intern or copy editor--or really almost anyone who was in elementary shool after 1972, when the book was published--should have caught the blatant mistake in this article. :

"Blume, not surprisingly, won over fourth-graders with her "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing," the first of several books about Peter Warren Hatcher, who prefers to be called "Fudge."

They could have even read the back cover of the book: (Available on Amazon.)

"Two is a crowd when Peter and his little brother, Fudge, are in the same room."

You see? One sentence and you know that Peter and Fudge are different people. Peter would have been so mad at the Washington Post. (As I imagine legions of Judy Blume fans are).

UPDATE 05/08: The Post published a correction, which indicated that the writer has not read Tales of A Fourth Grade Nothing OR The Outsiders (though to his credit, I would not have been able to tell you where The Outsiders takes place. Actually, no. He could have looked that up too).

CORRECTION TO THIS ARTICLE
Earlier versions of this article incorrectly described the setting of S.E. Hinton's book "The Outsiders." It was set in Tulsa, not in Tucson. The article also incorrectly reported the character Peter Warren Hatcher in Judy Blume's "Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing" preferred to be called "Fudge." His younger brother, Farley, used the nickname. This version has been corrected.

Theodor Seuss Geisel was not apolitical.

“I am the Lorax and I speak for the trees”? Guess what the political message is there.

And, while on first glance some of his black and white drawings look like they could have come out of Hop on Pop, on second glance, they contain swastikas and calls for American patriotism. Not the type of thing you want to read with your four year old before bed.

When he was not charming young children, or taking up bets that lead to Green Eggs and Ham, Seuss drew a lot of cartoons that could look a lot like American propaganda during WWII; I find his caricatures of the Germans and Japanese disconcerting.

But it’s one thing to talk about authorial intention, and recognize that some children’s books are chock full of political messages (gold standard vs. silver standard anyone?) It’s an entirely different thing to usurp the iconic lines for new political purposes. (I never thought I’d use the words “authorial intention” to write about Seuss, let alone post-structuralism, but here I go).

Try this on for size: The story “Gertude’s One Feathered Tail,” about a bird who takes a pill to grow a bigger tail only to realize that with a bigger tail she can no longer fly, is a warning about the dangers of athletes taking steroids.

Or How the Grinch Stole Christmas is about the triumph of Capitalism against communists who want to take your hard-earned presents.

Thought Gertude was about loving yourself and your body? Yeah. Me too. And thank goodness I have yet to see the steroid interpretation. Thought Grinch was a sweet Christmas story? Uh huh.

But what about this? Horton’s famous mantra “a person’s a person no matter how small,” made a great Seussical the Musical song, and probably has made millions of small children feel vindicated. But, according to some, Horton’s quest to save Who is an anti-abortion message. Never mind that all of the Whos seem to already have been born, “small” now extends to the fetus, much to the distress of Geisel’s widow.

Interestingly enough, though I totally made up the capitalist interpretation of Grinch, Geisel’s estate spends a fair amount of time pursuing politicians who call their opponents grinches. (Side note, he also coined the term nerd, but it was a lot more innocuous in his book then it is when a kid with glasses is harassed).

There’s a whole school of literary thought that supports this kind of interpretation. Ever been in a class where every book is about class struggle? Phallic symbols? Gender equity? Any political cause can be applied to any book, something that drove me mad when I first read the theories, prompting me to rant in a response paper: “Freudian Criticism and the schools of thought that stemmed from it make me want to tear my hair out.”

It’s bad enough that a recent press release about global warming included a stanza from Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night,” even though it is so clearly about a dying father, not the planet, but why corrupt children’s books?

Why make kids trying to watch the new movie of Horton Hears A Who walk past protesters holding photos of bloody fetuses? Regardless of my own view on the abortion debate (I try to keep my politics out of this blog), the stories of those protests drive me nuts.

For Seuss’ sake, find your own slogan.

Image from the Web site Dr. Seuss Went To War.

The books for bigger kids. Bear with me. It's long but worth it.

• The Anne of Green Gables Books and The Emily of New Moon Books (if I wanted Anne to be real, I wanted to be Emily) by L.M. Montgomery
• Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Caroll (I was SHOCKED at how many of my friends had not read these.)
• A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. (She just died, which made me very sad. Newspapers paid tribute to her in long, prominently placed, obituaries.)
  
• Matilda, The BFG, George's Marvelous Medicine, The Witches, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and James and The Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl ( Other ones are good too. These are just the ones that stand out in my memory).
• The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle by Avi
• Blue Willow by Doris Gates (One of mine and my mom's favorite books. I looked for blue willow plates wherever I went).
• Where the Red Fern Grows by Wilson Rawls
• After The Dancing Days by Margaret Rostkowski (I read this for school and still remember large parts of it more than ten years later).
• Homecoming by Cynthia Voigt (and the following books, though in my fifth grade class, only the girls were allowed to read Dicey's Song which deals with, among other things, female puberty. There is a bra shopping scene, which might not be the most revealing, but as a prepubescent girl is what stuck in my head.)
  
• The Search For Delicious by Natalie Babbitt
• Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbitt (I didn't know these were by the same author until today).
  
• Twenty-One Balloons by William Pene du Bois (I think my fourth grade teacher read this out loud to us. I was able to return the favor by reading most of it to my sister. It's another wonder of whimsy and crazy inventions).
• The Mushroom Planet series by Eleanor Camero (These books about two boys who build a kid size spaceship to get to a new planet, were some of my favorites. I was delighted to fund, after finishing The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet that there were more of them. Reading them now when I know more about space exploration, they seem quaint, but I think the thrill is still there, though I fear some of them are out of print now.
• From The Mixed Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler by by E.L. Konigsburg (Man, I wanted to sleep in the Met. When I went as a college student to a party after hours at the museum, all I could think of was this book. I've read some of her other books, which are also good, but I am not including them because I read them much later, when my youngest sister wanted help on her book projects).
  
• The Cricket in Times Square (a family on the New York Subway made my day when the father turned to his two young kids and said, "we get off at Times Square, that's where the cricket lived," and his daughter enthusiastically exclaimed, "maybe we'll find a newsstand" (that's where said cricket lived)).
  
• Black Beauty by Anna Sewell (Oh my goodness. I have NO idea what I will do if I have boys.)
• The Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell. (I liked a lot of his books, but this was the first I read and most memorable).
  
• My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George (on second thought, about 50% of these are genderless, though when I was in fifth grade I wrote a story that sounded a bit like a rewrite of this with a female heroine.)
• The Indian in the Cupboard books by Lynne Reid Banks. ( I have linked to a trilogy of them, but there are more than three. As I have heard it, she was going to keep writing these, but the publisher asked her to tone down the stereotypes embodied in the book--even though the cowboy is decidedly uncowboyish in his tendency to cry, and the Indian, though his English is sometimes broken, firmly instructs others about the difference between Indian tribes-- and so she decided to stop writing them rather than change her characters. Interestingly, she has also written some thought provoking novels about Israel, which I read in middle school.
• The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (I found a tiny gold key soon after I read this, and I made it into a bookmark and was delighted. This too, my dad read with fabulous accents. He has Cockney down pat).
• A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett (I don't think this was my favorite at the time. That was probably the one just below, but it is one that I have read a million times since and that I brought to college with me as a familiar and wonderful read. In the movie, which is faithful for much of the time, the ending is made happier, which I think is an insult to the emotional capacity of young movie watchers and readers everywhere).
• The Wolves of Willoughby Chase by Joan Aiken (This was my all-time favorite for a while. It was so vivid that I confused the images I imagined with a movie, which, of course, did not exist and I had never seen. It's a great adventure story and the heroines are both girls).
  
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (Duh. I wanted to re-read this last weekend, but couldn't find my copy. Time to get a new one).
  
• Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (My dad read this out loud to me around third grade. He did it with voices, and it was thrilling. This past year, he found some new kids to delight with his reading of this book).
  
• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain. (This was my first foray into Twain, which was much less of a struggle than The Prince and the Pauper which I liked once I got into. But who doesn't love Tom? And, I have a confession to make. I've never read all of Huck Finn.)
  
• The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster (amazing word play and a deep respect for words comes out here. This is great at any age, as many of these are. This book, in particular though comes across as very smart).
  
• Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter (Like a slightly more preachy version of Anne of Green Gables but wonderful in its own right. I have no idea why all the covers to this book are so ugly now).
• Hey World, Here I Am by Jean Little(see earlier entry -- one of my favorite books ever)
• To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (another given, and this one, like The Giver, can be read at a million different levels. It makes me so sad that my sister, for some reason, refuses to read it).
  
• The Giver by Lois Lowry (fun games: have kids debate the values of this fictional world before they get to the end. Have college students wake up in a college political theory and realize that they read a novelization of Plato's ideal world as outlined in The Republic when they were in fifth grade).
  
• Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson (This and Where the Red Fern Grows are two of the earliest books that caused me to cry for hours. I think books are a good way to introduce kids to tragedy. Also, there is a great interview with Paterson in which she expressed her utter surprise that the book was banned from some libraries for promoting new age religion. She wrote the book, she said, before she had ever heard of anything called new age religion. She was writing about imagination).
• Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (Admit it. How many of you kept your own spy journals? I certainly bought some composition books after reading this. I don't think I learned her lesson).
• The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
  
• Charlotte's Web by E.B. White

I'm ending with a classic that every person should read. I'm sure I missed some of the books that I treasured. After all, my favorite must have changed week to week and I never put down a book in the middle until high school when I couldn't always keep up with assigned reading. This already overly long list will have to do. Feel free to put more in the comments.

UPDATE 09/18/2007 11:15: edited and shortened.

There has been a lot of talk about Harry Potter in the newspapers but the piece I liked the best was this Times Select piece (again, free for .edu emails, which made me laugh and almost made me cry It was one of the best defenses of children's literature I've seen in a while. Not that it often needs defending.

"Though Harry Potter's birth preceded our 9/11-conditioned era by a number of years, Julia discovered him at precisely the time that she learned of the downing of the twin towers. She learned of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and (despite my best efforts) Adolf Hitler at just the time when she was deepening her understanding of the dark Lord Voldemort. Just as I took refuge in Pa Ingalls's house precisely at the time, in the mid-1970's, when the anxieties of being a "tween" overwhelmed me, Julia found solace behind the thick walls of Hogwarts when she most needed protection.

Nine can be a tough age under any circumstances. But in our age, with the family room TV beaming in not just Britney but news of falling bodies and beheadings, a series of books in which small-bodied Good defeats disembodied Evil can be just what the doctor ordered.

Whatever terror Harry experiences is controlled terror; it has no life outside the page. Villains, too, are not immortal once you break beyond the bindings of J. K. Rowling's realm. What greater comfort today — what greater source of power — for a child who has lived through airplanes becoming missiles, the Washington-area sniper, and now, daily storms that she takes as a sign of deadly global warming, than to have the ability to shut the book and walk away?"

The article got me thinking about the books I would want on my children's bookshelf. It's a fun game. Here are the ones I thought of so far. As I search on Amazon for these books, I see more and more that I loved. I consumed books so quickly, that it's impossible to write down all the books I loved. The list is inevitably truncated.

• Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, Brave Irene, Amos and Boris, and Dr. DeSotto and more by William Steig (but Brave Irene is my favorite)
• Where The Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak
• Make Way for Ducklings by Robert Mcloskey (you can't be from Boston and NOT want this book around.)
• The Story About Ping by Marjorie Flack
• Tiki Tiki Tembo by Arlene Mosel
• Madeline by Ludwig Bemelmans
• Miss Nelson is Missing by Harry Allard
• A New Coat For Anna by Harriet Ziefert ( I remember this book so fondly)
• Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
• Good Night Moon by Clement Hurd (fun fact: the publishers photo-shopped Hurd's ciggarette out of his hand on the author profile.)
• The Key to Winter by Janet S. Anderson (Author), and illustrated by David Soman. (This book, sadly, seems to be out of print. It is a book I won in a writing contest when I was probably too old for picture books. Still, I loved the amazing illustrations and the seasons myth plot line and read it again and again).
  

Ok, I am posting a new post for chapter books, because the list got too long.

Happy Reading.

When I was in fourth grade, my favorite book was a skinny paperback of poetry and prose written by a fictional girl named Kate Bloomfield. I thought that I was her and that Jean Little, the real author, somehow stole my fourth grade genius and captured it on paper. My copy of Hey World Here I am was bent in the corners and at the spine so many times that it fell open to my favorite parts and the cover was criss-crossed with white lines. One of my favorite entries (I can't figure out what else to call them) was Kate's musings on journals.

"Real writers keep journals. I've had four. When Mother told my sister Marilyn that I loved to write, she sent me a journal for my birthday. It was squarish and fat, with small organized pages.... A flimsy padlock, which would break if you looked at it, was supposed to keep it secret. Every page had two skimpy sections with a date at the top of each. There was space enough for maybe three sentences if your handwriting was small. My handwriting scrawls. Besides my life is too big to fit into those squinched-up pages. I gave it to my friend Lindsay Ross. She loves it. She has a smaller life. And tidy writing....
Then our teacher handed out "journals" which we had to write in every day for one month. She said she wouldn't mark them but she would read them over....But of course, you could only put down stuff that you wouldn't mind her knowing. My private life is not her affair. When I got it back, though, and saw she had written Excellent! on it, I felt like a fraud.
Then Dad gave me a journal. It is elegant. The pages are creamy and feel like the best art paper when you stroke them. .... I love it. Maybe , someday, my life will be elegant enough to match it. I hope so. I am saving it carefully just in case.
My fourth journal I bought for myself it is a hardcover book meant for writing lecture notes in. It has lots of room on every page. Some days I write six or seven full pages about what I am feeling and thinking....Other days I don't pick it up or, if I do, I just write something like "Another day lived through!"...
Getting a journal is like buying shoes. You have to find the one that fits. And you are the only one who can tell if it pinches."

Sorry that was so long. It turns out I still love that essay, and it hurt to cut too much of it. I guess this is my roundabout way of saying that I am not sure what the point of an online journal is. I can't think of anything less personal or personalized than the Internet, no matter how much time you spend changing the colors on the template of your blog.

So why am I doing this? For one, I just restricted access so that right now only I can see it. It's an experiment to see if it gets me to write more. But I'm a newsprint kinda gal. Which means I like to hold my newspapers in my hands, read books while turning real live pages and write on paper with a pen or a pencil.

One of my friends laughed at me because she says that whenever I want to treat myself to something I buy a journal. It's true. But I am not alone. Mary Gordon, who swears by writing first drafts out by hand, and who is one of my mentors, teachers, and heroes says that she buys a journal every time she goes to another country. I know that sometimes she buys souvenirs as well, but often the journals are her souvenirs.

Makes sense. There is a journal that sits in my bookshelf unopened and blank despite it being perfect, because of the memories I associate with it. It was a present from a boy who had a crush on me for five years. This was at about year four of the crush -- before I evidently broke his heart by telling him I was not attracted to him-- and he inscribed the journal with something silly, something about always planning at the last minute (I had forgotten to invite him to my birthday party until 20 minutes before it started, and he still showed up with a gift). I can't bring myself to write in a journal that someone I never liked very much chose just for me. It seems wrong. And, as a friend asked "who inscribes a journal?" Who buys a journal for someone else?" Lots of people buy them apparently. It is THE gift for girls who like to write. I had the ones that locked (at my prime diary writing time I even had an entry that read "Dear Diary, I am reading a book about a girl who lived in an annex and kept a diary. She was famous because of her diary. Maybe one day we will be famous too." I couldn't finish the Diary of Anne Frank then, I was too young and had recurring nightmares of being chased by Nazis. Seems I was a bit of a morbid kid) I had a slew of travel journals bought both by me and others (Those were the more successful presents. At the same birthday party mentioned above, a girl I was not very close with gave me a cream journal of hand made paper. That was the only journal I almost filled to the end. I kept it blank for almost a year before bringing it with me to Poland where I recorded experiencing brand new Holocaust horrors and reflections and tried to force myself to not go to sleep until I wrote it all out.) My favorites when I was little included one that had a picture of Mary opening the garden door and said "Secret Garden Journal" on the cover, one that was blue with gold cat's eyes and ears on it, and a Lisa Frank notebook that I choose myself. I never get to the end of journals. I give up halfway through sometimes a few pages in. When I got older, I insisted on buying them for myself (with the travel journal exceptions) and they were inevitably plain. Often spiral bound. I kept one through most of high school. It had a cardboard cover that I wrote quotes on with metallic pens. I am pretty sure Jean Little featured on it along with the likes of Steinbeck and Thoreau. But still, I can't get through them. Now I am the owner of at least four moleskin notebooks, only one of which -- a reporters notebook that I treasure as a gift but will most likely leave blank or keep in my purse for emergencies--- was a gift. The rest I buy myself. Moleskins make me think of snobby artsy writers, but the truth is they are perfect. Slim with hard backs and elastic bands to keep them closed. They come in pocket size, though my newest one is a bit bigger -- a size I found is better for writing fiction because turning the pages that often makes me forget a narrative-- and in black they are unobtrusive and let me decide what's important about them and don't look too tempting for prying eyes. Maybe I will be able to fill the newest one all the way to the end.