Girl Detective

Alas! poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy;

Writer David Foster Wallace killed himself this weekend past. The books and essays of his that I’ve read have challenged, surprised and entertained me. Reading them, it wasn’t hard to “hear” the author’s depression. I imagine that his head, with the morass of thoughts, learning, and tangents that he wrote about, was an often difficult, painful place to be.

Good-night, sweet prince;
And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.

ETA: Harper’s has gathered links to Foster’s essays for that magazine. (From the NBCC blog.)

A fall U of MN English event:

October 29: Junot Diaz, “We Are the New America: A Reading,” 7:30 pm

Diaz published his debut novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao eleven years after his acclaimed short story collection Drown–and ended up winning the Pulitzer Prize, the Sargent First Novel Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel of 2007. New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani characterized Diaz’s writing in the novel as: “a sort of streetwise brand of Spanglish that even the most monolingual reader can easily inhale: lots of flash words and razzle-dazzle talk, lots of body language on the sentences, lots of David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes and asides. And he conjures with seemingly effortless aplomb the two worlds his characters inhabit: the Dominican Republic, the ghost-haunted motherland that shapes their nightmares and their dreams; and America (a.k.a. New Jersey), the land of freedom and hope and not-so-shiny possibilities that they’ve fled to as part of the great Dominican diaspora.” Esther Freier Endowed Lecturer. Coffman Theater, 300 Washington Avenue SE, Mpls. 612-625-3363

Thanks to my friend The Big Brain for the heads up.

I often vow to read more books off my shelf and not buy new ones. Feel free to mock me.

From Big Brain Comics:

Zot! 1987-1991 by Scott McCloud,
The Black Diamond Detective Agency by Eddie Campbell
The Amazing Remarkable Monsieur Leotard by E. Campbell & D. Best
Superpowers by David J. Schwartz (a friend of a friend)

From Half-Price Books Roseville:

The Book of Jhereg by Steven Brust
The Book of Athyra by Steven Brust
Tales from Shakespeare by Charles, Mary Lamb, ill. by A. Rackham
Hamlet (Chamberlain Bros. edition with BBC production dvd)
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Far Side of the World by Patrick O’Brien
Hamlet: The Poem by Harold Bloom

From Dreamhaven:

The Book of Taltos by Steven Brust
Making Book by Teresa Nielsen Hayden
The Paths of the Dead by Steven Brust
The Lord of Castle Black by Steven Brust
Sethra Lavode by Steven Brust

From Half-Price Books St. Louis Park:

The Eensy Weensy Spider by M. Hoberman, ill. by N. Westcott
Skip to My Lou by Nadine Bernard Westcott
Miss Mary Mack by M. Hoberman, ill. by N. Westcott
Romeo and Juliet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead by Tom Stoppard
Hamlet dvd (with Ethan Hawke)
Heat dvd
Spartan dvd
Shakespeare by Peter Ackroyd
Crime and Punishment transl. by Pevear, Volokhonsky
The Early Bird by Richard Scarry
The Mouse and His Child by Russell Hoban, ill. by David Small
Stone Age Boy by Satoshi Kitamura
The Birthday Box by Leslie Patricelli

As if all these weren’t enough, and as if we didn’t have enough to read, we bought this at Big Brain Comics last night. It does double duty: it’s a novel and a bludgeoning weapon!

Let me know if the photos are legible; this is my first big photo foray.

Last month, Anne Trubek’s article at Good Magazine questioned Catcher in the Rye’s place in the canon, and wondered whether other, more recent fare might suit students as well or better. (Link from ALoTT5MA, among others.) Most commenters were outraged that she even suggest such a thing, and further ridiculed several of her choices. My question is why not complement, not replace, Catcher with something else, so as to compare and contrast? I commented at the article to this effect, and more.

I reread Catcher within the last few years, and found it a mixed bag. I did not empathize with Holden. MFS, who blogs at Mental Multivitamin, one of my favorite learning blogs, is an unabashed defender of Holden. I think he’s worthy of questioning. I also enjoyed Frank Portman’s irreverant homage/critique of Catcher, King Dork.

There was much crying and screaming at bedtime last night. I wonder, is the “price” of a good day a difficult bedtime? We met friends at the pool, then met them again later for burgers, hot dogs and great french fries at the Bulldog NE, picked by Minnesota Monthly as having the best burger in the state. After that, bedtime was challenging. But once Drake and Guppy were _in_ bed, they stayed there and fell asleep quickly, so G. Grod could watch a bit more of Branagh’s Hamlet. I’m not sure how I made it through all four hours in the theater when it came out. I can’t make it through an entire hour without nodding off. Then again, I was unmarried, without kids and twelve years younger in ‘96.

Half-Price Books (a US used book, movie and music store) is having a sale over Labor Day Weekend with an extra 20% off everything in the store, which is almost all at least half price already. Our little family brought home quite a stack of books and dvds last night; a pic to come, I hope.

At the Atlantic, “Two–Make that Three–Cheers for the Chain Bookstores.” Link from the NBCC blog, Critical Mass.

Although there is some reality in the image of the chains as predators (ours is a capitalist economy, after all), it is not the whole truth or even, perhaps, the most important part. The emotional drive behind the anti-chain crusade is an understandable mistrust of big corporations allied with the knee-jerk snobbery that is never far from the surface in American cultural life. “I am a reader,” the interior litany goes, “therefore I belong to a privileged minority; I patronize exclusive bookstores known only to me and my intellectual peers.” With the chains, which target a wider public and make the process of book buying unthreatening to the relatively less educated, the exclusivity factor disappears.

I enjoyed the article, because I’ve always enjoyed Barnes and Noble and Borders. (Not so much Books a Million.) On a trip to London, I can’t tell you how many happy hours I whiled away browsing in Waterstone’s, and admiring their floor by floor displays. I also shop at amazon.com. And my independent book and comic stores. I love books; I love shopping. Therefore I love bookshops.

I love the films of Baz Luhrmann. When I saw the trailer for his upcoming Australia, and heard the accompanying music, from one of my favorite films, Branagh’s Henry V, I got pretty excited. I know the music won’t necessarily be in the film, but the trailer + the music was quite stirring.

Sad news for fans of Ebert, Roeper, and fans of good film reviews. They are officially leaving At the Movies, the show that introduced Ebert, Siskel and the Thumbs Up and Down ratings.

Richard Roeper joined Roger Ebert on the show after Gene Siskel’s death. Ebert has long been absent from the show for health reasons. Several guest critics have filled in, but only a few have even come close to Ebert’s high standards of review, in my opinion: New York Times’ A.O. Scott, Village Voice’s Robert Wilonsky, and Chicago Tribune’s Michael Phillips.

Ebert and Roeper will continue to review movies in different media formats, such as Ebert’s site.

I was aware of Helen Oxenbury’s work before I had children, because I oversaw the kids’ section at a large used-book store. But I didn’t own any of her books till after I had my own child. The first thing that raised my interest was an article I can no longer find*, I think from the Guardian or Times, about best books for children that included at least one of Oxenbury’s quartet, Say Goodnight, All Fall Down, Clap Hands and Tickle, Tickle. The second was a post by kidlit/librarian blogger Book Moot about Farmer Duck, whose author is Martin Waddell. We owned, and both Drake and I loved, Owl Babies, by the same author. It had humor, and a wonderful almost-rhyming text that was a joy to read. Farmer Duck, a Parent’s Choice award winner about a lazy farmer who takes advantage of his hard-working duck, delighted us as well. Finally, a comment from a reader (was that you, Loretta?) about the Tom and Pippo series made me seek those out. After Guppy was born, we bought all four of Oxenbury’s baby books that were recommended in that first article, Michael Rosen’s We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, and the four “I” books: See, Hear, Can, and Touch. He adored all of them, and they were his favorites for a long time. Now that Drake is nearly 5, I’ve added the Helen Oxenbury Nursery Collection and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and both these are often off the shelf.

Many of Oxenbury’s books, such as the Tom and Pippo series, and the charming It’s My Birthday, are out of print. But they’re still in circulation at many libraries, and on the shelves at used bookstores. I highly recommend Oxenbury’s illustration. She captures something that clearly speaks to my children, and draws them into the books. Her style is distinctive and accessible, yet not saccharine.

I highly recommend the books I mention above. Seek out those in print so that they stay in print. Perhaps we’ll be fortunate to see others come back.

(For anyone who wants to have a go at finding it, here’s what I recall. It was an English best-of list, probably from 2005. It included work by Oxenbury, Shirley Hughes (Alfie’s 1 2 3 or A B C) Julia Donaldson’s The Gruffalo, and Baby Brains. But I may be conflating two lists. I think it was a part of a series of many best-ofs, like novels, or non-fiction, and not just confined to the previous year.)

At Pages Turned, SPF writes about books read and un-, the latter of which includes Lin Enger’s (brother of Leif) Undiscovered Country, and Daniel Wrobleski’s Story of Edgar Sawtelle, both inspired by Hamlet. The former is set in Minnesota, the latter in MN’s next-door state WI.

And while I was searching for possible productions of Love’s Labor’s Lost, I came across this information on this upcoming, far-away production of Hamlet. (Be sure to read down to see who plays Claudius.) Shall we all go, if only in our dreams?

I Watch Stuff has the trailer for the movie adaptation of Kate DiCamillo’s Newbery-award winning book, The Tale of Despereaux: Being the Story of a Mouse, a Princess, Some Soup and a Spool of Thread.

I was surprised how cutesy this preview looked. The book is quite dark, even violent at times. DiCamillo is an advocate of not writing down to kids; she trusts her readers with stories that include life’s difficulties and injustices, as well as hope and redemption. I hope that this adaptation is more true to the book than the preview indicates.

Correction added later: The animation for the Despereaux movie is not done by the same team who did the bizarrely beautiful Triplets of Belleville. (Thanks to Camille of Book Moot for giving me the heads up that this had changed.) The directors previously worked on Flushed Away, Seabiscuit and Pleasantville. Check out the cast of voice talent, though. It’s impressive.

The days of overdue books, hefty library fines and interminable waits for best-sellers are over in Chicago.

The city of Chicago just got a big tech upgrade to its library system. Patrons can now reserve and renew books online, resulting in fewer overdue books. (Link from Blog of a Bookslut)

Not, to gloat, but we’ve had that at the Minneapolis Public Library for ages. (Suck it, Chicago! Heh, heh. Just kidding.) It’s a great system. I hate to burst the bubble, though, but there are still interminable waits for bestsellers. For example, I’m 116 (of 163) on the request list for the Into the Wild dvd, and I placed the request in January.

Have you visited your local library lately?

I feel as if I’m caught in a reading zeitgeist, with many online articles touching on similar themes.

At The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz details what he sees as “The Disadvantages of an Elite Education“:

[I]t makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you …[and] inculcates a false sense of self-worth.

An education from an elite US university, like Yale, will reinforce the class system, and prepare students for the security of an upper-class job, not introspection and independent thought.

In “The New Learning That Failed” at The Criterion (link from Arts & Letters Daily), Victor David Hanson argues that modern universities have lost two important lessons from a classic, Western education: the value of self-criticism and introspection, and theories of exploitation based in the real world. The result, according to Hanson, is pedagogy focused on what to think, not how to think.

Hanson also notes the loss of three things that used to distinguish between what once was studied in a traditional liberal arts education, and pop culture:

an appreciation that a few seminal works of art and literature had weathered fad and cant and, by general agreement, due to their aesthetics or insight, or both, spoke universally to the human condition.

[an] old assumption that professors, through long training, were necessary to guide students through such classic texts [like] Dante’s Inferno

an appreciation of a manner of formal thought and beauty that separated some high art and literature from more popular and accessible counterparts.

Historian David McCullough echoed this idea of established classics in a recent commencement speech, “The Love of Learning” (link from Mental Multivitamin):

Read for pleasure, to be sure… But take seriously–read closely–books that have stood the test of time. Study a masterpiece, take it apart, study its architecture, its vocabulary, its intent. Underline, make notes in the margins, and after a few years, go back and read it again.

At The Times, Rod Liddle writes about books that don’t survive their age (link from Bookslut):

[T]hey seem to be books that fitted in far too comfortably with the sensibilities of a certain chattering-class elite when they were published. Remove a work of fiction from the milieu in which it was written and you remove some of its purpose and point, of course; however, with Hesse, Powell and Fowles, as with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, you seem to lose all the purpose and point. Everything simply evaporates.

Liddle’s, though a rant, is similar in subject to Jonathan Yardley at the Washington Post on Cannery Row and other Steinbeck works (link from Arts & Letters Daily):

Not many books of our youth survive unscathed into what passes for our maturity, and many other books await that maturity before we are ready to appreciate and understand them.

For more on Steinbeck’s books as classics, see “The Rescuing of Steinbeck” at The New York Review of Books. (link from Arts & Letters Daily)

All of the preceding articles provide an interesting context for Entertainment Weekly’s lists of new classics–the top 100 since 1983 in books, movies, tv, music, and more. In the blogosphere, at least, EW’s lists seems to have quickly eclipsed the AFI’s 10 top 10, released the same week. As with any list, there’s a great deal of righteous protest: This should have been higher, that lower, this one’s missing, I can’t believe that one is on there.

EW qualifies their lists up front. They’re not only based on quality, but on influence. They include recent works, because that’s what EW does–it’s a weekly magazine for entertainment, focusing on what’s new.

A few things struck me about the lists, and the commentary on it. First, I think there’s great value in a waiting period to see if a work endures. Second, lists are only ever a starting point for discussion. Nearly every list that’s published acknowledges this, but that gets lost in the ensuing outrage. Third, I think there was a great deal of justice done in the lists for works that were critically acclaimed but not blockbusters, or for things like comics that still aren’t considered by many to be real books. Finally, my own numbers told an interesting story: 37 books, 87 movies, 67 television shows, and 46 albums. I don’t agree with all of EW’s choices, and I think they put too much emphasis on recent works, but it affirmed why I am a fan of the magazine–I like much of what the writers like, so EW is a good index of things I might like.

AFI has a special, 10 Top 10, on US tv next Tuesday, June 17, 2008, naming their top ten films in ten categories. Take a movie quiz (I’m a MOVIE MASTER, with 34 out of 40 correct) or try to pick the 10 winners in a contest. There are some tough questions, but some good ideas for stuff to see, though there were some headscratchers in there, too. Clash of the Titans for Best Fantasy? Really?

As part of a spy-themed night, Turner Classic Movies is showing Our Man in Havana tonight in the US at 10pm EST. It’s based on the novel by Graham Greene (the author of The Quiet American). It’s not available on DVD in the US, so this is a rare opportunity to see it. (Link from Laurel’s TV Picks.)

NPR talks to independent booksellers and gets their picks for summer reading (link from Morning News). I haven’t even _heard_ of many of the books, though I’ve read one of them, Vendela Vida’s Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name, which I recommend.

Here are last year’s picks.

To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Booker Prize, now the “Man Booker”, six books were shortlisted earlier this month for a Best of the Booker special prize. A similar prize, The Booker of Bookers, was given for the 25th anniversary in 1993, and awarded to Salman Rushdie for his first novel, Midnight’s Children. That book is the odds on favorite for Best of the Booker as well.

You can vote here. The six shortlisted books, chosen from the list of 41 Booker Prize and Man Booker Prize winners, are:

Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road (1995)

Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda (1988)

JM Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999)

JG Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur (1973)

Nadine Gordimer’s The Conservationist (1974)

Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981)

My sister Ruthie sent me a card with this message for Mothers Day, and it’s so true. Today I’ve cleaned up vomit, diarrhea, and snot, none of which was mine. This is not a glamour gig.

But there are compensations, however brief, like the snuggling of a small, warm head against my shoulder while we read three new finds from the used bookstore:

The Guest by James Marshall
Fox, Outfoxed by James Marshall
Minnie and Moo: Night of the Living Bed by Denys Cazet

For myself, I was delighted to find a slipcased set of Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights by the Misses Charlotte and Emily Bronte, with engravings by Fritz Eichenberg. From 1945, they’re fragile, but lovely to look at. They’ll display nicely on my recently created Bronte/Austen shelf, and bring me much bookish geekjoy.

Here’s what the crowd picked during previews before Iron Man on opening night:

Applause for Indiana Jone and the Crystal Skull and Batman, no reaction for Incredible Hulk, and laughter (not the good kind) for M Night Shymalan’s “The Happening” either for the trailer, or the silly title.