Not at the MLA

I'm delighted not to be at the MLA convention this year. Though I love San Francisco, and the opportunity to catch up with old friends is one I'm sorry to miss, still I prefer spending Christmas and New Year's with my family, and without a convention in between them. Still, I'm glad Caroline is at the MLA and reporting on it for Inside Higher Ed--check out her insights here. (I'll be back blogging for IHE next week.)

Christmas in the country

We're headed south today, leaving my parents' rural retreat and heading back to the city. But my Christmas column is all about the joys of the country Christmas, and of The Wind in the Willows. Enjoy!

(cross-posted)

The Last Word (I hope!) on the Newbery "controversy"

Stop picking on the Newbery Medal, the premier award in children's literature. - By Erica S. Perl - Slate Magazine: "literary awards should do more than simply affirm books that are easy to love and would likely find fans regardless of a medal. They also serve as inspiration for authors to take creative risks, push boundaries, and even reinvent the form. In 2007, American Born Chinese became the first graphic novel to receive the ALA's Printz Award for Young Adult literature. The award recognized the author, Gene Leun Yang, for his funny and edgy trilogy of comic-style stories, but it also demonstrated new respect for the rapidly evolving field of illustrated narratives for teens."

Erica Perl says what I've been trying to say (and not me alone, by any means, but I'm too lazy to link right now) about the sorta fake Newbery controversy. A breath of fresh air.

Blog Carnival of Children's Literature

Jen Robinson has an amazing collection of posts up at her blog, Jen Robinson's Book Page. There is enough reading about children's literature here to get you through the rest of the month, and then some. The Carnival is a "best of" this time around: bloggers nominated their best posts on children's lit of the year, and they came up with some terrific ones. So go on and check it out!

Poetry Friday: Terza Rima

I never do Poetry Friday posts, and I never participate in Tricia's Monday Poetry Stretches, either. Well, never say never. Here's my attempt at a poem in terza rima, a little Advent piece.

The season tells me wait: for grace, for love.
I hope, and wait, and watch, but sometimes all
Seems lost, It is, I know, a season of

The worst of excesses. A heavy pall
Falls over me. I aim for joy, for gifts
That mean the most, that answer to a call.

But as the day approaches, lost in “ifs”
And “ands”, and “buts”, and “had I but the time”
I cave, surrendering my hope to bits

Of colored glass, and trinkets, for their shine.
The glitter cannot last, I know; it fails
To give the deep-down joy of love. I dine

On disappointment mingled with the tail-
End of my hope. And then--a child, a toy, a light!
We make a moment: briefly, whole and hale.

Literature Scholars Face Steepest Drop in Jobs in Decades - Chronicle.com

Literature Scholars Face Steepest Drop in Jobs in Decades - Chronicle.com: "Those looking to land a job as a faculty member in English language or literature will have 22.2-percent fewer openings to look at during the 2008-9 academic year, compared with last year, the MLA projects. The expected number—1,420 jobs this year versus 1,826 jobs last year—is still above a historic low of about 1,000 job offerings back in 1993-94."

This is why I discourage my students from pursuing Ph.D.s in English. Time to think of alternate careers for all these wonderful literature scholars!

Critics Say Newbery-Winning Books Are Too Challenging for Young Readers - washingtonpost.com

Critics Say Newbery-Winning Books Are Too Challenging for Young Readers - washingtonpost.com: "'I can't help but believe that thousands, even millions, more children would grow up reading if the Newbery committee aimed to spotlight books that are deep and beautiful and irresistible to kids,' said Lucy Calkins, founding director of the Reading and Writing Project at Columbia University's Teachers College and a professor of children's literature."*

OK, that's the money quote, and I think it's already (rightly) been ridiculed. As if one award is single-handedly preventing kids from becoming readers? In a culture where reading is not valued, where celebrity children's books and TV tie-ins dominate bookstore shelves (how many children have Madonna, Jenna Bush, and Jeff Foxworthy turned off reading?), how can the Newbery be keeping millions of children from becoming readers? It just doesn't make sense.

On the next page some actual teen readers get their say--briefly--and they note that one thing that dampens their enthusiasm for reading is having it assigned. While this annoys me, I think it may also have some truth, and of course there's an overlap between assigned reading and the Newbery, though it's by no means the only criterion teachers and curriculum developers use.

This semester some of my students spent a few hours working with middle school students at an innovative private middle school for girls. The girls they worked with have almost no specific assigned reading; rather, they are assigned a number of hours of reading a week. They write journal entries and book reviews, and they discuss the books with each other and with their teacher; they are thoughtful about their reading choices, and many of them challenge themselves with books like Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, and The Life of Pi (though, yes, others spent many hours last year working their way through the Twilight series). In a larger school the logistics of such a program might be daunting, but it clearly works: the girls read a lot, and they're articulate about their reading choices.

At the end of the semester I ask my (college) children's lit students to write a research paper. One option for that paper is for them to revisit a book they loved as a child. I haven't worked out the statistics (hey, I'm an English professor, remember?), but my sense from doing this for many years is that the students split their choices fairly evenly between books assigned for school (books like To Kill a Mockingbird, The Giver, Catcher in the Rye) and books they picked up for pleasure (this year, Redwall, The Phantom Tollbooth, and James and the Giant Peach, for example). I guess I'll have to start keeping records on the awards won by the books they choose. In the meantime, I'm really not going to worry about the Newbery award. Those librarians know their business.


*MotherReader takes the piece on here, with a hilarious list of fake controversies.

A little children's lit love

It's the season for appreciating children's books. Holidays connect us profoundly with our childhoods, with their traditions that call us back to our families of origin even as we forge them anew with our own children. Years ago in a graduate seminar I had a professor gloss the difference between diachronic (clock-time, linear time) and synchronic (recurrent, cyclical) time through holidays: they are synchronic in being always the same, even as the particulars change. And so here we are, moving forward into December but backwards into our childhoods at the same time, and for some people that means appreciating the books that link us to our past.

First up is Andrew Martino in the Chronicle, (re)discovering his love of children's books: "By spending several months reading children's and young-adult fiction, I rediscovered not only what made me a reader in the first place, but also something essential about myself: my imagination. Reading "for fun" should not be just for children, but required of us all if we want to hold onto what makes us essentially human — our imaginations." The essay feels very familiar to me--it actually describes the process I went through on my first sabbatical, when I effectively converted myself from a Victorianist to a children's literature specialist. I had always been a somewhat addictive reader, losing myself especially in genre fiction (I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on Dorothy Sayers). But I'd lost a good deal of the pleasure of reading through years of graduate school and the pressures of the tenure track. I hasten to add, I love analysis; I can find deep pleasure in unpacking a complex text. But the addictive pleasure of speed, of plot, and of the freshness of experience, still stays with me. (I'm still trying to figure out, though, what "second-person" texts he read--any help on this on?)

I also recently enjoyed this piece by Gary Kamiya in Salon.com (click past the ads) about The Wind in the Willows. I can't remember the first time I read this novel; it seems I've always known it. And I think Kamiya really gets at the twin pleasures of the novel: the madcap adventures of the irredeemable Toad and the nostalgia, even melancholy, of the reflective Rat and Mole. As a family we used to watch the wonderful stop-motion version of the novel* (yes, it skips the "Piper at the Gates of Dawn" sequence, but is really quite lovely nonetheless), and we used to try to sort out which of us was which character: was Mark really Badger, despite wishing he was the Rat? Am I Mole? And isn't every toddler Toad? Just thinking about it all makes me want to read it again, or at least to revisit the Christmas carol scene.




*there was also a series, and some of those episodes picked up episodes missed from the novel adaptation, while others were new. All good, really.

and again...

Which is worse, ripping the pages out of a book but still providing it to students, or removing it from the curriculum altogether?

(The latest is about Sherman Alexie's Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.)

Talk amongst yourselves

Posting has really fallen off here this week--and, if I'm honest, all semester. I've had a hard time keeping up with any outside reading and that leaves me less to talk about here. That said, I'm blogging elsewhere, and I realize I've forgotten to link to the discussion here. So if you want to read up on the shape of academic careers, and the difficulty of balancing work and family, here's a list of links for you. Discuss.

Tedra Osell gives advice to someone considering academe.

I follow up with some ideas about career ladders and lattices (original NYT article here).

Dana Campbell chimes in.

Laura McKenna at 11D joined the conversation about now; she also noted that ProfGrrrl, Professing Mama, and GeekyMom had more to say.

[edited to add] Wendy at Outside Providence has made her own luck, and talks about it here.

Tedra and I each blogged about it again the following week, and Aeron Haynie's next post also brings up a relevant point about including the dads.

Whew! After all that, do you think we've solved the problems of the universe yet?

Yeah, me neither. And now I need to grade some more papers.

Are we really talking about this again?

Here's the latest in the book censorship wars: a teacher in New Rochelle, NY (very near to my former hometown) has removed a section of Girl, Interrupted from students' copies of the book because the material was "of a sexual nature that we deemed inappropriate for teachers to present to their students."

Huh?

Listen, I haven't read the book. But these are twelfth-graders. I hate to break it to anyone, but these kids already know about sex. And someone thought they should read this book--not selections from it, but the book. And now they can't. Personally, I find underage marriage and suicide pacts offensive, but that doesn't mean high schoolers shouldn't read Romeo & Juliet. And so on.

Link from Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect.

Why Academics should blog

I think maybe this post should be required reading for academics and the administrators who don't know how to "count" blogging...

(link from Geeky Mom)

Why I do what I do

Sometimes my students ask me if authors really think about "that stuff" (symbolism, metaphor, allusion, intertextuality) when they write their books. Here is the unequivocal answer: yes.

John Green rocks.

YA books for adults

The line between YA and adult books is, for me, very blurry. And apparently for some publishers, too, which is why (for example) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is only one of many books published in both categories. Now the School Library Journal blog (link from Kids Lit) takes up the question, listing nine books for teens from the last year that would be equally at home in adult reading rooms. I've only read two (The Graveyard Book and Octavian Nothing, II) but I wholeheartedly agree about them. Then again, I'm an adult who routinely reads YA fiction, so I would, right? And Pratchett (another listee) and Gaiman already cross over all the time between children's, YA, and adult fiction, so they're no surprise. My husband thinks Octavian Nothing is categorically not for teens (we have these arguments periodically; they're fun); it is, certainly, a denser read than many books we typically think of as YA. But now I need to read the rest of the books on the list and figure out why they're there and not, say, Paper Towns, which was one of my favorite YA books of the year and far more engaging than, say, Prep, which also has a teenage protagonist but was published for adults.*

Categories are hard. Necessary, I guess, but hard.

*One (cynical) reason is marketing. It's also true that Paper Towns has few if any interesting and well-developed adult characters--they're just much less important to the story--while The Graveyard Book and Octavian Nothing each has several. For my money Prep** has no interesting characters of any age, but that's maybe just me.
**Yes, I'm aware that Prep didn't come out this year and the other books I'm talking about did. I couldn't think of a more recent "adult" fiction title with a teenaged protagonist.

Pre-reading Favorites

The Guardian Book Blog, one of my favorite reads on my feed reader, poses a fabulous question: What were your favorite books before you could read? I actually mentioned two of mine in my last post: Madeline, and Nomi and the Lovely Animals. I think that my dad began reading The Hobbit to me before I could read, too--I was just a week shy of my fifth birthday. I don't remember any others, but those are still lodged somewhere deep in my memory. When all is else gone, I expect those will still remain.

Favorite Childhood Reading

I mentioned in my last post that we've been discussing favorite childhood reading on the child_lit listserv, so I thought I'd repost here the message that I sent. (I've made some tiny edits.)

Like another reader, some of my favorite books (especially in fourth grade) were biographies. My earliest reading memories, though, are of my father reading me Madeline and, my very favorite, Nomi and the Lovely Animals, a book I haven't thought of in years though I can recite large parts of it by heart (and I had no idea, until just now, that it was by Louis Slobodkin). My father also read me the entire Lord of the Rings series, though I only really remember him reading The Hobbit; later I read them all myself and virtually inhabited that world for a while. The Chronicles of Narnia, the Little House books, the Streatfeild "shoes" books, and anything by Madeline L'Engle were also favorites that I read over and over again. There was also a collected Twain and a collection of similarly-bound Alcott novels in my grandparents' house, where we spent some summers, so I read those over and over as well. And does anyone else remember Thee, Hannah? That was another one from my grandparents' shelves...

There are more, of course, but I'll stop after mentioning the Moomin books, which I also remember reading over and over at around the same age (somewhere under 12).

Some of my old books are at my parents' house and I've enjoyed introducing them to my children as my mother must have enjoyed introducing her old books to me. What a pleasure to remember all of these!

Edited to add: here's a piece from the Times Online with some writers' favorite childhood reads.

'tis the season

As the holiday gift-giving season approaches, articles about children's books to give and receive are sure to start turning up. An early entry is this one by Joseph Bottum in First Things (I got the link from Neil Gaiman's blog), which I expect to see discussed in the kidlitosphere or on the child_lit listserv pretty soon.

I don't at all disagree that this is a golden age of sorts for children's literature, and I like his idea that we read some books (the Harry Potter series, for example) simply because others read them. Or as Bottum puts it: "their sharedness has become their most important quality." While I disagree with his judgements about certain books (Winnie the Pooh, Little Women, Summerland) I'm enjoying thinking about how living in a certain cultural moment can make good writers better. Is this what happened around the turn of the 18th-19th centuries with the Romantic poets, perhaps?

I'm also just delighted to see someone else sing the praises of My Family and Other Animals, a book I loved while growing up and should really read again. We've been talking on the child_lit listserv lately about our favorite childhood reading, and that's one I'd forgotten to mention. But I adored it at the time.

Winter Blog Blast Book Tour

It started today--and goes on all week, a series of interviews with children's and YA authors at all your favorite children's/YA lit blogs. Here's the list, borrowed shamelessly from Colleen Mondor of Chasing Ray*:

Monday

Lewis Buzbee at Chasing Ray: "The other part of the question: because I was so formed, in some way, by Steinbeck, I have always had an urge to write about him, but non-fiction never felt the right venue for me. His letters are so good, there are several fine biographies, not to mention Benson’s brilliant epic biography, and I know that I am no biographer. When I first started writing this book, I thought it was all about the libraries, but for me it was all about Steinbeck, in the end, trying to pay tribute to the power of his words. That part of it kind of snuck up on me."

Louis Sachar at Fuse Number 8: "When Stanley first sees some of the other boys, their race is part of their initial description, but after digging all day, they were all the color of dirt."

Laurel Snyder at Miss Erin

Courtney Summers at Bildungsroman: "Maintaining an online presence takes a certain level of time and commitment, true, but I'm down with it . . . and yes, I'm totally guilty of using them as a means to procrastinate sometimes. But if it wasn't them, it'd be something else. Not to brag, but I'm a FANTASTIC procrastinator."

Elizabeth Wein at Finding Wonderland: "The symbolism of bells are wonderful, though—they ward off thunder and the devil, they warn of fire and flood and invasion. They're always female (a bell is a "she," not an "it") and they all have individual names. Some of them are also very old. I used to thrill to ring a certain bell in Magdalen College, Oxford, because it predated Columbus's discovery of America. Most musical instruments that old are in museums, not in public use."

Susan Kuklin at The YA YA YAs

Tuesday

Ellen Datlow at Chasing Ray
Tony DiTerlizzi at Miss Erin
Melissa Walker at Hip Writer Mama
Luisa Plaja at Bildungsroman
DM Cornish at Finding Wonderland
LJ Smith at The YA YA YAs
Kathleen Duey at Bookshelves of Doom

Wednesday

Ellen Klages at Fuse Number 8
Emily Jenkins at Writing and Ruminating
Ally Carter at Miss Erin
Mark Peter Hughes at Hip Writer Mama
Sarah Darer Littman at Bildungsroman
MT Anderson at Finding Wonderland
Mitali Perkins at Mother Reader

Thursday

Martin Millar at Chasing Ray
John Green at Writing and Ruminating
Beth Kephart at Hip Writer Mama
Emily Ecton at Bildungsroman
John David Anderson at Finding Wonderland
Brandon Mull at The YA YA YAs
Lisa Papademetriou at Mother Reader

Friday

Mayra Lazara Dole at Chasing Ray
Francis O'Rourke Dowell at Fuse Number 8
J Patrick Lewis at Writing and Ruminating
Wendy Mass at Hip Writer Mama
Lisa Ann Sandell at Bildungsroman
Caroline Hickey/Sara Lewis Holmes at Mother Reader
A.S. King at Bookshelves of Doom
Emily Wing Smith at Interactive Reader

*note that there are links and excerpts for today's posts, since some are already up. Links for the rest of the week just take you to the blog in question, but you can always check out Colleen's post at Chasing Ray for the most up-to-the-minute details.

When did fairies get cute?

Many years ago my daughter dressed up for Hallowe'en as (her choice, her words) a "princess-fairy-angel-bride."* Friends teased me about "gender girl's" choice. But the part I remember best about it is the wings she insisted on having, that made the get-up a "fairy" or an "angel" rather than just a pretty girl. When did fairies get cute?

Today my students read and discussed several "stolen child" poems from the nineteenth century, including "The Pied Piper of Hamelin" (Browning), "The Fairies" (Allingham), and "The Stolen Child" (Yeats). It's not clear what, exactly, the Piper is, but he has fairy-like qualities: he dresses funny, he has magical powers, and he steals kids. In the other two it's even clearer: fairies are weird and dangerous, though not (perhaps) actually malevolent. They live in relationship to the human world, but they do not love it. And they can do things that hurt us, though their intentions are not entirely clear.

In some recent novels that I loved (Blackbringer, How to Ditch Your Fairy), it's really clear that fairies aren't particularly cute or even helpful; they do what they do, and there are consequences for us but that's not their primary concern. Tinkerbell (the original, in Peter and Wendy) is actively hostile to Wendy, if not to the other children. So are the cute fairies derived from fairy godmothers? (Though, as I recall, the one in Disney's Cinderella is dumpy, not cute at all.) Are they derived from the Disney Peter Pan? Or am I missing something here? Because, really, the cute fairy is as bad as the rainbow-colored unicorn--a perversion of the mythology. I know the YA authors may come after me for defending the unicorn* (a glorious and scary creature, really, much better than a zombie). But what about fairies?

*She hates for me to tell this story, but it's totally true.
**(Diane Peterfreund does that much better anyway)

More on YA

Yes, it's been talked to death. But I asked my students today what they thought characterized YA literature, and they pretty much agreed with Jen & MR in comments, below. Age of protagonist, teen--check. Subject matter, a little edgier, deeper, more emotionally intense than children's lit--check. They also think of YA literature as more realistic, longer, less illustrated, and more complex than children's literature, although we were able to think of many counter-examples for all of those qualities. Finally, they believed that YA literature was less clear-cut, more morally ambiguous, or less structurally "closed" than children's literature. They pointed to Weetzie Bat's rejection of "happily ever after" as a primary example. Again, though, I can think of some children's books--The Giver comes to mind--that are also a little less closed than, say, a fairy tale.

The issue then is, what's the difference between adult and YA literature? Does it really have to boil down to the age of the protagonist? My students were unwilling to call Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, or Dickens's Great Expectations, YA. But they agreed that they fit the criteria they had themselves outlined. They also talked me into listing The Lord of the Flies as YA, though I still resist the label. Again, why?

I love YA literature, and I think I know it when I see it. But at the moment I'm cribbing John Green's characterization of it from a recent blog post: "smart teenagers who talk fast and do stupid shit." That leaves a lot out, I'm sure, but it also brings a lot in, and for the moment it will have to do. (By the way, the whole post--about manic pixie dream girls--is fabulous.)

Back to your regularly scheduled blogging

Except I don't have a regular schedule. But I do feel as if it's been all election, all the time here and at my other blog for a while, and while I'm not sorry about it, it's time to get back to the business at hand, which is kids' books.

I'm in a quandary right now. Colleen Mondor over at Chasing Ray pointed out a recent piece that raised, yet again, the question of YA literature. She vowed not to get involved in that particular question again, but I do have to ask it. That is, what is it? I am currently teaching Introduction to Children's Literature, and I teach some YA literature in the course. But how is it different from children's lit? Or is it? I struggle with these questions.

This week I've asked my students to struggle with them as well. But what about you readers? Do you distinguish between YA and children's lit? Between YA and "adult" lit? (That always sounds vaguely obscene to me...) Note that I'm not asking if the category should exist, or if teens need different books, or if YA is somehow "lesser" literature. The category does exist, teens read all kinds of books and I think YA should be part of the mix, and, um, no. It's not lesser. But the definition in the piece cited above--"YA literature is distinguished by change, evolution, development, identity, and/or the search for self"--doesn't help me much, as there's all kinds of literature distinguished by those characteristics. I'm leaning towards a mix of thematic and structural elements for my own definition, but I'd love to hear yours as well.

And, if you comment, you can become part of Mother Reader's Comment Challenge, too! Check it out--and participate!

Kids Rock the Vote

Did you know that the Weekly Reader election poll has correctly predicted the winner of the national presidential vote 12 out of 13 times? This gives me hope this morning, as I get ready to go out and vote, and then volunteer, in the rain.

On running for office

While I'm deeply invested in the outcome of this election, I have to admit I'm tired of the campaign. Running for president seems to me almost nothing like being president, and I'm tired of the minute-by-minute scrutiny of folks doing a job that isn't the job we're electing one of them to do.

This month my column at Literary Mama takes up some books in which children learn a similar lesson. These are books that implicitly say: democracy is hard. You might not actually want to be a leader. Gone are the inspirational stories of my own childhood, in which children embrace leadership and optimistically look forward to making the world a better place. These stories are, in fact, a little depressing in their realism about presidential politics.

Read the rest here...

(cross-posted at the other blog)

Blog the Vote

(edited to add link & image)

Colleen Mondor over at Chasing Ray has a wonderful post up about teaching and voting; go read it.

Now.

OK, are you back? Doesn't that make you want to vote? And, for that matter, to teach history?

Her post is part of an effort she started called "Blog the Vote," in which bloggers are encouraged to blog about voting, in a non-partisan manner, over the next few days. It's a great effort.

It's hard for me to be non-partisan about voting. Frankly, at some level, if you don't agree with me I don't want you to vote. I've been heard to joke about telling people who don't agree with me that Election Day is the 5th.

Then I found out it wasn't a joke. In Virginia--and perhaps in other parts of the country as well--folks have been getting an official-looking email that tells them that people registered in one party will vote on the 4th, and the others on the 5th.

In Virginia we don't have registration by party, so this couldn't possibly be true--that's how absurd this is. And yet, I can easily imagine a first-time voter or an infrequent voter receiving this message and believing it. It looks pretty official; it seems to speak to a real problem (ie, turnouts may be high and lines may be long). But it's a lie--an effort, like so many others, to keep people away from the polls on election day. Just like voting, voter suppression has a history.

Since the experiment we call democracy got started, there have always been rules about who votes and who doesn't. I teach Victorian literature, and the Victorian period traditionally begins in 1832, which is not the year Victoria became queen (that was 1837), but the year the first Reform Bill passed. This legislation, the first extension of the franchise in England since the seventeenth century, extended the vote to one in five Englishmen. That's right, after the passage of this great reform, still only 20% of men could vote. (And no women, of course.) The bill is thought of as marking the beginning of the political ascendancy of the middle class--a group we've heard a lot about in this election, a group that now, I think, takes its political power somewhat for granted. Over the course of the century the franchise gradually expanded, until by the end of it there was (nearly) universal male suffrage. But it started very small.

I think often my students and I take our voting rights for granted, but most of them would not be voting if this were only forty years ago. The voting age wasn't lowered to 18 until 1971, after all. Poll taxes, literacy tests, and other restrictions persisted here in the south until well into the 1960s as well.

My daughter votes in her first national election this year. Her one still-living great-grandmother was born before women had the vote. Remarkably, democracy begets itself. That is, people who have the vote have repeatedly voted to extend that privilege to others. We don't only vote our self-interest; we vote for the common good, which we keep redefining and redefining as our boundaries expand.

There are always those who want to narrow the boundaries. Don't let them. Make your voice heard. Vote on November 4th.

Harold and Max, together (sort of) again...

This is too great: as Roger says, fun with intertextuality. Don't worry, you won't have to get annoyed: part II is right there after part I. No waiting.

Chains

I'm just a little bit annoyed with Laurie Halse Anderson. She's one of the most popular authors I teach in my children's/YA lit class; I teach Speak every year and every single time, someone tells me how important it is to her (usually it's a her). I've had students pass it along to their roommates, to younger kids they're mentoring, to groups they're involved with on campus. Students come to my office, close the door, and tell me how grateful they are for the book and our discussion of it.

So why am I annoyed with her? Annoyed might be too strong. Her new book, Chains, is a terrific read--a really engrossing tale of a young slave girl, Isabel, who gets caught up in the Revolutionary War in New York City. Promised her freedom by her mistress, she finds herself instead taken from her home in Rhode Island to a Loyalist stronghold in New York by her mistress's nephew, who won't honor his aunt's wishes. Isabel is a beautifully drawn character--at first relatively ignorant of the political situation, she is disgusted by the hypocrisy of both sides, who are willing to manipulate and even endanger her for their own purposes.

So, again, why am I annoyed? Because the book is the first of a two-volume series, and I didn't know it would leave me hanging. Sometimes a book leaves you hanging and you forget about it, thinking maybe you'll pick up the second one if and when you think of it--but I spent the weekend talking about this one, recommending it and then adding a brief warning. It's how I felt when I finished The Golden Compass--I turned the page and nearly cried out loud at the irresolution of it all.

But, really, I shouldn't be annoyed. I loved the book, and it really does stop in a logical place. And I think it's a terrific book for middle schoolers, especially ones who are interested in historical fiction. I'm passing it on to Nick next--he loved reading about the Revolution two years ago in his social studies class and is eager for more. But I also recommended it to adults I was talking to over the weekend--we had just seen a documentary, Traces of the Trade, about a New England family coming to grips with its own history of slave-trading, and this novel takes us through some of the same scenery, confronting some of the same issues, as the film. The film takes up the modern legacy of slavery; the novel gives us the contemporary reality of it. I recommend both, highly. And I retract my annoyance, though if the next one doesn't come out soon, I may start feeling it again.

More on The Graveyard Book

I've already said that I loved The Graveyard Book; now you can read (or listen to) a brief interview with Neil Gaiman, and check out another review and a brief excerpt. Go, now, what are you waiting for?

what I'm reading

I've actually managed to read two novels and a few picture books over the last couple of days--all of them non-required, almost-purely-for-pleasure books. (I say "almost" because when I read kids' and YA literature there's always a chance I'll teach it or write about it--but the initial reading is usually still for pleasure.) I've also bought a few more and am dying to get to them, although the treadmill starts up again tomorrow so I may not have time to get to them for a while.

First up was The Graveyard Book. What is there to say that hasn't already been said? I heard most of the first chapter of this read by the author himself almost a year ago, at the Fantasy Matters conference. It was so chilling, a large auditorium full of people just sat in silence, gasping occasionally, as he read. Since then he's read the entire novel, a chapter at a time, to different audiences on his book tour--and you, too, can listen and watch! I have heard about a chapter and a half so far, and it's absolutely spell-binding. But I can read to myself quicker than I can listen, and I can do it in bed, so I finished the book the old-fashioned way, page by page. I was at war with myself over whether to read faster so as to find out what happened, or more slowly so as to enjoy the experience longer. In the end faster won out, as it always does with me--but as soon as I can, I'll reread it so I can linger over the sentences again. I want to write about it more fully at some point, but for now--read it! (Oh, and apparently like everyone else, yes, I had trouble finding it in the bookstore. I checked YA, Fantasy/Sci Fi, and new YA--but it was in the children's section in a display all on its own.)

I also picked up Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist when I got The Graveyard Book, because I was planning to see the movie and wanted to read the novel first. But then I didn't. So. I enjoyed the movie, which has a great feel to it of one of those semi-aimless evenings where nothing happens but everything does. Then I read the book, which is really even better. Episodes get switched around in the movie, and heightened for dramatic effect--and I can't complain about that, as the drama is enjoyable--but the book, with its chapters alternating between Nick and Norah's voices, really is a compelling read all on its own. Again, others have already said much more than I, but I'm glad I read it (though I did stay up too late last night finishing it. Sigh).

The other books were all picture books dealing with elections, and I'll have more to say about them, I hope, in my next column. Stay tuned.

Got any suggestions for me?

One thing I get to do in my job is arrange for a big lecture by a children's or young adult author every other year. The first year of the lecture series, we were able to bring Lois Lowry to give a fabulous talk (March, 2005) to a large crowd. Last fall we had John Green while he was still in the middle of Brotherhood 2.0. Now I'm thinking about next fall. Whom would you ask? Leave me suggestions in the comments--we're looking for name recognition and a terrific speaker. (If you've heard them speak and can vouch for them that way, that's a plus...) We want someone who will speak about their work, the importance of children's literature, etc.--this is not a public reading, in other words, though we will set up a book signing and Q&A afterwards. Aim high--who's on your wish list?

Parenting and Pedagogy

Tedra Osell's recent post on her "Career Coach" blog at Inside Higher Ed's Mama PhD got me thinking: what is the relationship between parenting and pedagogy? How has my pedagogy changed since becoming a parent? It's hard for me to answer the latter question, as I had only been teaching as a grad student for a few years before I became a parent; the two have really always been intertwined for me. But I do know that I don't answer the question the way Tedra does; here's a stab at how I do answer it.

(cross-posted at the other blog...)

Don't forget!

Nominations for the Cybils open today. For those of you who missed them the last two years, the Cybils are the kidlitosphere's own children's book awards. (Cybils, as Little Willow helpfully explains, is a loose acronym for Children's and YA Bloggers's Literary Awards.) Cybils will be given in nine categories this year:

Poetry
Fiction Picture Books
Non-Fiction Picture Books
Easy Readers
Middle Grade/Young Adult Non-Fiction
Middle Grade Fiction
Young Adult Fiction
Graphic Novels
Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Last year I served as a Sci-Fi/Fantasy judge, and it was a blast. I didn't volunteer this year because, much as I loved it, I simply couldn't figure out how I'd have time. (I am already on the Children's Literature Assocation's Book Award committee, and I can't do two book awards in one year when I'm not on sabbatical.) This year's panelists and judges look fabulous, and I'm sure they'll have a great time sorting through the wonderful books that have been published this year.

Check out the FAQs for the Cybils here, and then go back to the Cybils blog to nominate books in your favorite categories. Remember, you can only nominate one per category, so choose wisely!

more on banned books

Here's a fun quiz, in The Guardian. (Linked all over the kidlitosphere already by folks who got to their Guardian feed before I did...)

(I scored 9 out of 13, which is only so-so. Two or three of them I could have looked up right here in the office and done better, but I didn't cheat...)

where I'm writing this week

I'm shifting back to my bimonthly schedule for the Children's Lit Book Group over at LiteraryMama. Though there are plenty of books to write about, my non-sabbatical year this year is keeping me hopping (or, more precisely, grading) in the moments when I might otherwise be writing a column. So look for that one next month.

In the meantime, I'm still writing every week, on Tuesdays, for the Mama, PhD blog at Inside Higher Ed. I'm enjoying the community of readers over there, so why not click over and join us?

[cross-posted at the other blog]

Read a (banned) book

It's banned book week again, the week when the American Library Association reminds us that "free people read freely." I'm proud to say I've read 2007's most challenged book, though there are several on last year's list that I haven't read yet. It turns out that this fall I'm only teaching one book* on the 100 most challenged books 2000-2007 list, but I'll try to make up for it by reminding my students of the issue--in fact, one of their research paper assignments asks them to look into a challenge and analyze it.

For more on book challenges and the like, check out Little Willow's great post over at Bildungsroman. And let me know your favorite banned/challenged book.**

*Speak, by Laurie Halse Anderson, #65.

**I think mine from the most recent list would be the His Dark Materials trilogy, though there are many great contenders.

Getting out

Can this be? I just added the first movie to my viewing list since we came back from France in July. There have been movies I wanted to see, certainly--and I have gotten out of the house every now and then--but the movies somehow just aren't happening.

Oh, I lied. Or, more likely, repressed. We did take a bunch of kids to see Star Wars: the Clone Wars for Nick's birthday, which I somehow forgot to list. (And, well, I slept through the middle of it, so maybe it doesn't count?) OK, so one movie since the third week of July. What have I been doing instead?

The reading list isn't much better. I did get a bunch of ARCs and read some of them at the end of the summer, but since school started in August it's been all re-reading, all the time. This weekend it's the Twilight series, since I have an idea for a talk--and an abstract due on Tuesday. But otherwise I'm re-reading for classes. And that's all fine--I don't teach things I don't like--but it still cuts into the time available for new books.

So, to recap: I don't get out much, and from August to May I don't take in much that's new, either. But it was fun to go out last night and laugh at the silliness of Get Smart.

Telling our Stories

One of my favorite feminist teachings is the oft-repeated mantra that the personal is the political. This doesn't, of course, mean that George W. Bush offers us advice for daily living (whew!) but that the power structures outside our homes don't necessarily stop at the doorway. We don't like to remember that, always--sometimes we want our decisions to feel free, open, disconnected from political realities. But they rarely are. This week in the Mama, PhD blog over at Inside Higher Ed I tell a little more of my story of balancing academe and family. Like all such stories, it's both idiosyncratic and representative, personal and --possibly-- political. Let me know what you think.

But don't stop there. In Capital-P politics, as you already know, there's a lot going on right now. Literary Mama columnists Ericka Lutz (Red Diaper Dharma) and Shari MacDonald Strong (The Maternal is Political) have terrific columns up now about the election, both telling different, but important, stories.

Two more columns at Literary Mama tell stories that don't feel political at all, stories of farewell. But Rebecca Kaminsky (Down Will Come Baby) and Vicki Forman (Special Needs Mama) know well how their stories of love and care are connected up with larger concerns--of how we treat women's particular health care needs, how we care for disabled children, how our families form part of a larger community of love and care.

The first time I ever wanted to take a political action was when, six months pregnant with my first child, I went to a meeting about doing clinic defense. Heavy with a chosen and deeply-loved child, I knew in my bones, my joints, my aching muscles, just how important it was for all mothers to have that same choice, to know their children were chosen as well. Organizers wiser than I dissuaded me, realizing that my condition would be a distraction, a potentially dangerous one. I've mostly stayed behind the scenes since then, hoping that my words and example in the classroom would be seen as the political statement I knew them to be.

This year I've been a little more mobilized--in July I walked a precinct with my newly-registered-to-vote daughter, and we signed up new voters together in the summer heat. She's spending part of her gap year doing more of that, registering voters and phonebanking and trying to be a part of something bigger than she is. Yesterday she finished working on a voter guide for a local progressive organization, and I saw the pride in her eyes as she told me of sending it off and getting it approved. "People will use my work to help them decide how to vote!" Seeing her and other young people get excited about this election is one of the things that gives me hope for the future--as does this new project, YA for Obama (check out Judy Blume! check out John Green!).

Listen to the stories around you--tell your own--you'll make a difference.

(cross-posted at the other blog)

Today's update

When I'm teaching, everything revolves around the books I'm immersed in, and the books start speaking to my present reality. Right now I'm moving on from Frankenstein to Wuthering Heights in one class, and from Alice in Wonderland to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in the other two. And somehow Frankenstein made it into my Mama, PhD blog entry over at Inside Higher Ed today.

In other news, I'm working at home today while I wait for the Verizon installers. The question of the day is, will I finish my grading before they arrive?

(cross-posted at the other blog)

Link Love

Not much time to post today, but lots of links:

• My new column is about growing up, and Peter Pan--who doesn't.
• I'm also blogging about Sarah Palin today at Inside Higher Ed's Mama, PhD blog.
• Even if you don't read my post on Palin, you must read the two excellent op eds over at Literary Mama, by Rebecca Steinitz and Nicole Stellon O'Donnell. Truly, these are must-reads: informative and opinionated in the best ways.
• I linked to this in my blog post, but in case you miss it: the best coverage I've seen on the Sarah Palin/book banning story is in last Friday's Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Thanks to Betsy at Fuse8 for the link.
  

I'm sure there's more, but that will have to do for now.

(cross-posted at the other blog...)

Book Review: Paper Towns

We don't really know each other very well. Even in an age of facebook, blogging, twitter, and text-messaging, our efforts to know and be known are still halting, partial, and frequently stymied by prejudice and preconception. And yet, the effort remains a fundamental human impulse--we keep trying, even as we fail again and again, to make connections that are lasting and meaningful.

Quentin Jacobsen (Q) is a teenager like many others, on the outskirts of high school popularity and relatively comfortable there. He doesn't have a girlfriend or a date for prom, much to his parents' consternation, but he has a group of friends--"band geeks," they call themselves (though Q himself is not in band)--and that's pretty much enough. He does, though, have one thing most band geeks don't have--a history with the most popular girl in school, Margo Roth Spiegelman. She and Q are next-door neighbors, and once in elementary school--before the demands of popularity became quite as pressing--they discovered a dead body in a park while out bike-riding. Although Margo Roth Spiegelman (almost always referred to by all three names) no longer rides bikes with Q--or seems, sometimes, even to know he exists--the incident somehow still defines both of them.

John Green has been publishing smart, funny, and poignant novels about teenagers for three years now, and fans of his previous two novels, Looking for Alaska (Printz award winner for 2006) and An Abundance of Katherines, will not be disappointed by Paper Towns. Margo Roth Spiegelman has a certain resemblance, for example, to Alaska Young, in that they are both young women who become objects of both adoration and speculation. Becoming an object, though, turns out to be a problem for both the girls who are adored and the boys who adore them or speculate about them: we are all more complicated, Green's novels remind us, than the stories others tell about us. Adoring someone from afar may give us a sense of purpose or meaning, but in the end it minimizes both the object and the adorer, who can lose sight of himself in his obsession. Margo Roth Spiegelman, unlike Alaska, both embraces and resists her objectification. She's known all over school for her adventures, most of which seem larger than life, and she delights--or so it seems--in her reputation. But when she enlists Q in one last big adventure, then disappears, she leaves in her wake a mystery that teaches Q and his friends as much about themselves as it does about her.

As in his previous novels, Green here centers his novel on a compelling group of quasi-misfit characters who nonetheless manage not to seem like outsiders or losers. They're folks who have decided--as so many of us do--that high school social hierarchies are not going to do them any favors, so they (mostly) opt out. Realistically, they are also delighted when, on rare occasion, they find themselves invited in: Q's friends' reactions to their sudden popularity late in the novel is as convincing as it is amusing. I love Q's friend Radar--whose nickname is hilariously inappropriate but sticks, as such things often do--who, despite his relative acceptability in the social hierarchy, fears that he can't quite live down his parents' record-setting collection of black Santas. And his friend Ben, obsessed with girls and videogames but childishly delighted by his own outrageous braggadocio. More than once reading the novel I found myself laughing out loud. But as often as it made me laugh, it made me think, and the persistence of Whitman's Leaves of Grass throughout the novel formed an important part of that thinking. Margo Roth Spiegelman uses Leaves of Grass as part of a clue to her mystery, but Green uses it as well to comment on the process Q goes through in finding Margo Roth Spiegelman:

'I think I will do nothing for a long time but listen,' Whitman writes. And then for two pages he's just hearing: hearing a steam whistle, hearing people's voices, hearing an opera. He sits on the grass and lets the sound pour through him. And this is what I was trying to do too, I guess: to listen to all the little sounds of her, because before any of it could make sense, it had to be heard. . . . I tried to hear, inside a song I'd never heard before, the voice I had trouble remembering after twelve days. (ARC, 196)

Like Whitman, like Q, Green tries to make us hear those voices: the voices of those whom we admire as well as those we avoid. In Paper Towns, he makes them come alive, in all their ridiculous adolescent angst as well as their honest and poignant earnestness, in their pleasures and their pains. Margo Roth Spiegelman may remain something of a cipher, but at least Q realizes that she is, and why--and that, in itself, is a big step for the boy who has called her his "miracle."

Reading over this review I find that I make it sound somewhat painfully earnest, which it is decidedly not. Or, at least, not only. I don't object to earnestness in fiction, and Q is an earnest type--as are his predecessors Miles and Colin. But he's also funny. Still, I'm afraid you're going to have to read it to find that out for yourself--what's funny in context often isn't, out of context, and all the quotes I pulled sound a little silly in the middle of my prose. Trust me, they work really well right where they belong.


(I read an ARC of Paper Towns which I received from the publisher after mentioning on the blog that I didn't have one yet. Thanks, Jillian!)

YA writers take on the issues

OK, I've been following the various Palin stories for a while now (and posting about them a little bit on the other blog), but today I read two great posts from YA writers that I just have to highlight. First, John Green talks about Sarah Palin's alleged history of attempting to ban books. Now, as you probably know, YA books get challenged an awful lot, and Green's Looking for Alaska is no exception. However, in his Alaska (a person, not a place, but anyway) no one gets pregnant. And the sex is so unsexy, I can't imagine anyone wanting to emulate it. Nonetheless folks get a bit queasy about it and try to ban it, which is --surprise!-- usually unconstitutional as well as counter-productive, since nothing says "Read Me" like a big "banned in your teen library" notice.

And then Maureen Johnson weighs in on Bristol Palin in the best possible way, by reminding us of the need for comprehensive sex education in schools. (She tells funny and sad stories while she's at it, so go read!) My daughter, who just graduated from high school, helped give a great presentation at her school last year about the same subject because they provided only the briefest sort of "Family Life Education"--uninformative at best, counter-productive at worst. So I'm with Johnson on this one.

OK, back to your regularly-scheduled programming. I think I have a couple of book reviews coming up, if I can just find my notes. And, um, the books. Getting on it, really.

ps to Sarah Beth Durst, who I hope will google her name and read this: I would really love you to take on The Black Bull of Norroway in your series on obscure fairy tales. I just taught it today and it is so mind-bogglingly weird, we barely skimmed the surface. A little bit Beauty & the Beast, a little bit East of the Sun and West of the Moon, and a whole lot of weird, with two burned-up women at the end. Ick.

Oh, too bad!

I'd been looking forward to the film adaptation of Ballet Shoes, a favorite novel from my childhood. (Unlike Jenny, though, my favorite Streatfeild novel was The Painted Garden, otherwise known as Movie Shoes, not this one.) Unfortunately the NYT reviewer doesn't think it's so great.

Picturing Politics

I spent most of last week rapt in front of one political speech or another--the Democratic convention offered all kinds of delights for the sometime political junkie. (I don't follow politics as closely as many, but election years do get me going.) As I watched the speeches and the reactions of the crowds, I kept thinking of two picture books I just finished--Big Plans, by Bob Shea (illustrated by Lane Smith), and Madam President, by Lane Smith (also illustrated by the incomparable Lane Smith). In both, we get a child-sized view of the political world.

Madam President offers us a girl moving through her presidential day, from kissing babies to state funerals (a pet frog), photo ops to negotiating treaties (she makes peace between a dog and cat). She selects an admirable cabinet--Mr. Potatohead as Secretary of Agriculture, a sock monkey as Secretary of Naps, and a piggybank as Secretary of the Treasury, for example--and still makes it through a fairly ordinary schoolday (mostly by exercising her veto power, over tuna casserole in the cafeteria and other indignities). Sly visual jokes permeate the pages, from the portrait of Susan B. Anthony on her wall to the books--about Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Teddy Roosevelt, among others--under her bed. And under the Frederick Douglass book is what appears to be a copy of Smith's other political contribution this season, Big Plans.

Big Plans leads with a somewhat scary cover image, at least to me in this political climate: a grinning youngster in what appears to be a skunkskin cap treading purposefully atop the globe. He's got big plans--even though, as the story opens, he's sitting in the corner of the classroom, staring at a map. (The visual jokes continue here: the bookshelf next to him includes a U.S. Atlas, a book about rocketry, a collection of tall tales, and a book about the presidency.) As the boy outlines his plans, he dreams bigger and bigger. Enlisting a mynah bird as his second-in-command (and eventually picking up the president as the mynah bird's assistant), he moves from business to politics, politics to space exploration. In my favorite line, he announces that he will "blast off into uncertainty"--and then returns, back to his corner, free to continue exploring his "Big Plans."

If there were an election pitting these two against each other, I'd vote for Madam President, whose heroine appears to me to have a slightly more realistic grasp of the position of president. The "Big Plans" types make me a bit nervous, frankly--but we've got enough of them around, this year, that we may need both books to keep us grounded throughout the coming months.


(I received both books as pre-publication unbound copies from the publisher. Both books are in bookstores now.)

Again with the literacy debates!

I'm linking to Tricia again, but this time it's just because she got to this article on high school English before me. When I read the article last week (titled: "We're teaching books that don't stack up") I found myself nodding in agreement with the article, but really frustrated by the title. As happens so often, the debate is framed as one about the canon: defenders of the canon are cast as woefully out of touch, forcing irrelevant works on their defenseless (and bored) students. And hip young teachers--or not-so-young ones--are cast as the proponents of relevance, teaching works to which their students can "relate" so as not to lose them to reading altogether.

I think it's a false dichotomy. The so-called canon is full of works that are thoroughly "relevant" to today's teens. Walden confronts them with a slacker environmentalist, Romeo and Juliet with love-struck teens, Catcher in the Rye with a teenager yearning for authenticity, and so on. The problem is not with the books but with how they are taught: as the article goes on to say (and here's where it's much smarter than its title), teens are turned off by "The reading quizzes that turn, say, "Hamlet" into a Q&A on facts, symbols and themes." Exactly.

I didn't know how true this was until I had a daughter in public high school. Her overworked teacher was covering material unfamiliar to her; she wasn't pedagogically innovative; her students had already "learned" that English was boring. So she resorted to quizzes and paper topics that merely skimmed the surface, in part because she had probably not gone much beyond that herself. When Mariah got excited about a text--Beowulf, say, or "The Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"--she found herself alone, without support from either teacher or peers. And yet these are texts that have inspired teenagers for generations--Wikipedia cites at least nine rock/pop songs that reference Prufrock, and without Beowulf we wouldn't have The Lord of the Rings or "Dungeons and Dragons." It's criminal--but, sadly, all too common--that these texts can be made boring by high school English. But it's not the texts' fault.

When I teach children's literature I use a fabulous textbook titled The Pleasures of Children's Literature, by Perry Nodelman and Mavis Reimer. Nodelman and Reimer have taught me how to focus on pleasure in the context of analysis--how to help students understand that "picking texts apart" can actually increase our pleasure when we do it thoughtfully and carefully, and--especially--when we are given the right tools. I don't have a secret decoder ring for poetry, but I do have some techniques that can help make it make more sense--and that, in turn, will make it more enjoyable. I try to remember these lessons, as well, when I'm teaching so-called "adult" or canonical literature--pleasure is, after all, why I do what I do, and if I can't convey that to my students I'm not doing my job. I'm only sorry that it often takes this long before they hear that message.

Back to School

Tricia over at the Miss Rumphius Effect posted a link to this funny Onion back-to-school story: Six-Year-Old Stares Down Bottomless Abyss of Formal Schooling. This one depicts the existential tragedy of hours spent in classrooms. But for those of us teaching college, there's another one that may elicit a rueful giggle: First Night of Freedom Spent Alone in Dorm Room. Read it and weep.

Literacy, Literature, and the like

Tricia called our attention this morning to yet another article in The Guardian on boys and reading, this one focusing on the difference between fostering literacy and fostering a love of literature. It raises a provocative question: "What good is the Bard to book-shunning boys?" But I think "the Bard" is something of a red herring here. The article suggests that trying to interest boys in Shakespeare through comics is a missed opportunity, since live performance is really a better way to promote an interest in Shakespeare (or any other playwright). Point taken.

But the larger question, as Tricia notes, is this: "Why do we still confuse the need for literacy with the experience of reading, and even more important to some, loving a canon?"

I think this goes back to something I've talked about before. It's actually not at all clear to me that all reading is good. Yes, everyone (in our culture) needs a certain level of baseline literacy, in order to fill out forms, read the fine print, use the computer, etc. But I think it's also pretty clear that certain kinds of reading--novel reading, for example--are associated with success in school. Is this because we haven't yet figured out how to test and/or reward other kinds of literacy, or because novel-reading actually makes you smarter? As an English professor, I'm inclined towards the latter view. It's certainly the case that novel-reading makes you a better writer (and the "better" the novel--the more complex, the more challenging the vocabulary, etc.--the better). I think it makes you a more thoughtful, empathic, creative, and subtle person as well, but I'm not sure I can prove that. I'm all for developing literacy, in other words, but I am not at all satisfied to stop there.

Now, that said, I don't think reading Shakespeare is necessarily the way to go, especially with teen readers. There are plenty of terrific, challenging, thoughtful novels for teen and younger readers that will both foster a love of reading and develop their intelligence. And, as Louise Tucker suggests, maybe they should also go see a play every now and then.

Terminus 2008, redux

Cheryl Klein, senior editor at Arthur Levine books and Harry Potter fangirl, has posted her talk from the Terminus 2008 conference. As you can imagine, she got a great response from the audience; now you can see why.

There's been an interesting discussion on the child_lit listserv about the conference and why more folks from the child_lit community weren't there. The call for papers was posted to the listserv, and several listserv participants were in fact there (Cheryl Klein is one; I'm another, but we weren't the only ones), but it's true that the conference was more fan-centered than centered on academe. That's fine with me--I think there's room for both. But it's also true that of the academics who were there, not all are children's lit scholars; they are literary scholars who happen to have written a bit about Harry Potter, or they are scholars in other fields entirely (philosophy, psychology, etc.).

Perhaps more than other fields, children's lit scholarship has a problem with boundaries. If you're not a physicist, you probably don't go to physics conferences. Random folks don't generally hold forth on chemistry. But everyone has an opinion about children's books. So if you write about Harry Potter, you might be a psychologist or a religion scholar or a mom or a book blogger or a fan--and some or all of those categories might overlap. Usually I think this is just fine, but some folks "out in the world" (i.e., not in academic literature departments) may not have the research skills or access to research materials that insiders have. This can create a situation where the "outsiders" are reinventing the wheel (not knowing it's already working quite well on the "inside") or repeating already-discredited theories, advancing analyses that have already been advanced, etc.

I didn't actually see that happening at Terminus, but I do see that anxiety come up on the listserv occasionally when someone from "outside" gets publicity for writing about something "insiders" have known about for a while. The resurgence of YA literature (or is it just a surge?) is one example; the Harry Potter phenomenon itself (especially in the earlier days) is another. Children's lit scholars are always annoyed by articles that begin "oh my goodness, there are some good books for kids out there, what a surprise!" or by ones that take as their premise the general badness of books for kids in order to demonstrate the virtue of one new book or series. Such articles demonstrate a general ignorance of the field, and may seem to diminish the value of the work we do.

In the end, though, I'm not so worried about boundaries. I like the exchange of ideas across boundaries, and I think there's room for all of us. And in the end, I like knowing that people in all different professions, businesses, fields are all taking children's literature seriously.

Literary Holidays

A post in the Guardian's Books Blog today asks, "If you were choosing a vacation destination on the basis of its bookish associations, where would you go?" You might not find the answers that surprising:

Travel website TripAdvisor has come up with a list of the world's top 10 literary spots, according to its editors. So, in order: London, Stratford-upon-Avon, Edinburgh, Dublin, New York, Concord in Massachusetts, Paris, San Francisco, Rome and St Petersburg.

I've been to 7 of these spots (not Paris, Rome, or Edinburgh), but I've only made a point of seeing the literary sites in Concord. (Well, I went to a play in Stratford-upon-Avon, but I didn't actually do a tour.) For sheer beauty and saturation of literary associations, I'd choose the Lake District in England, myself--in addition to Wordsworth and Coleridge you get Ruskin and Arthur Ransom, author of the Swallows and Amazons series, and some of the most glorious scenery in England. And then, as one commenter has already noted over on the Guardian blog, you could also choose Haworth and the Yorkshire moors for its Bronte resonances. How about Oxford, home of Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Philip Pullman, and setting of my favorite Dorothy L. Sayers novel, Gaudy Night?


Where would you go?

Watching Me, Watching You

I've got a new column up at Literary Mama; in it I talk about secrecy and surveillance and two books I really liked recently, Little Brother and The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks.

As usual, there's lots of great stuff at Literary Mama, so when you're done with my column, go on and check out the rest of the site.

And then go check out my latest little thing over at the Mama, PhD blog. I hope I'm not the only person who remembers Gilda Radner!

Hmm...

From The Guardian:

The story of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood is being made into a TV drama. Desperate Romantics will follow the vagabond group of English painters, poets and critics who rebelled against the art establishment of the time. The BBC2 "colourful and rude gang drama" will see the men strive to find fame, fortune, success, love and " quite a bit of sex along the way". The six-part series will be set among the alleys, galleries and brothels of 19th century industrial England.

I love the PRB; I teach them in my Victorian lit classes all the time, and one of the highlights of my recent trip to Chicago was seeing Beata Beatrix, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, at the Chicago Art Institute. (Though, truth be told, the Frank Lloyd Wright stuff was even more to my taste...) I'm not even above a little gossipy stuff when I teach them--how can you not talk about Ruskin's failed marriage to Effie Gray (who later was very happy with a younger member of the PRB, John Everett Millais) or, even more sensational, Dante Gabriel Rossetti's exhumation of his wife Lizzie Siddal when he decided that, actually, he did want the manuscript of his poems that he had thrown into her grave? But I fear a bit that this BBC production will emphasize these and other sensational points to the exclusion of the really quite remarkable art and literature they produced. Seeing Millais's "Mariana" in person at the National Gallery some years ago was a revelation to me: the things he could do with light and color! (The reproduction doesn't do it justice.) And Rossetti's poetry--and, even more, his sister Christina's poetry--is stunning. So if the BBC2 production makes it here, I'll no doubt watch it--but I'll be worried as I do.

Here's one of my favorite Christina Rossetti poems. (She also wrote, among many other things, "Goblin Market," and the Christmas carol "In the Bleak Midwinter.")

In an Artist's Studio
One face looks out from all his canvasses,
One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans;
We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
A nameless girl in freshest summer greens,
A saint, an angel; -- every canvass means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyfull as the light;
Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
Not as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.
1856/1861

Hmm...

More Breaking Dawn

OK, I should be firmly in the Potterverse right now, but instead I'm somehow all about Breaking Dawn. Check out "Edward Cullen helps me review Breaking Dawn"--a link I found in the Amazon discussions--and Alkelda's rewriting of it over at Saints and Spinners (link from What Adrienne Thinks About That). Adrienne also linked to John Green's comments on Team Edward and Team Jacob, which still seem appropriate. (It takes him a while to get to it, but you won't mind...)

My talk is tomorrow and then I need to head out of town fast, so that's all for now.

How I spent my Friday

So here I am at Terminus, and yesterday was a busy day. I took a long walk in the morning (waking up on Eastern Time when you're living in Central Time gives you these opportunities) then went to hear a talk on parenting in the Potterverse. I love when people don't think Mrs. Weasley is a model mom, I'm just saying.

Then lunch, where I heard the lovely and talented Cheryl Klein give a terrific talk about what we can learn (about writing) from the Harry Potter series. Turns out there's a lot, all about character development and plot and theme. Good stuff, and she's a great speaker.

I skipped out from the conference for a bit after lunch to see and hear John Green speaking at the Chicago Public Library, with his special guest, Hank Green! Nerdfighters galore! (There's a pretty large overlap between the Harry Potter fandom and Nerdfighteria.) John read from his forthcoming novel, Paper Towns (why has no one sent me an ARC of this yet?), and answered questions in his best "Question Tuesday" style. My favorite line from his answers: "having nerdy parents is a tremendous blessing." Are you listening, kids?

Then back to the conference for more talks, the best of which was a fascinating examination of Severus Snape as a character who is "coded feminine" -- that is, who occupies a position in the literature more typically occupied by a female character. Fun stuff.

quick update--and potential Breaking Dawn spoilers

So here I am in Chicago at Terminus, where the fans by far outnumber the academics (and, yes, most of the academics are fans, but we're not all dressed up in House robes...), the weather is lovely, and I've already caught up with a couple of friends.

[edited to fix insane punctuation...]
========possible spoilers below============
I spent the travel day reading Breaking Dawn. I wasn't thrilled about bringing a big book with me--I even left my copy of HP & the Deathly Hallows, the subject of my talk, behind--but I had to do it. I've been avoiding all discussion of it since last weekend, and I can't keep my head in the sand much longer. And, I have to say, I'm a little disappointed. I was really hoping that the literary allusions of the earlier novels (read the comments), especially to Wuthering Heights and Romeo & Juliet, meant that Meyer had a little more distance on the central couple than, in the end, I think she did. There's just an awful lot of deus ex machina (or, ok, hybrid ex machina) in the working out of the plot. I need to think about it some more, but that's my initial response.