educating alice

I’m sitting in my suite (almost as big as my NYC apartment) at the Inn at Essex enjoying a little quiet time before heading over for breakfast, visiting, and then off to listen to the sure-to-be-profound words of wisdom from the brilliant M. T. Anderson.

The Opening Page is a new yet familiar Children’s Literature New England institute. For twenty years, ending in 2006, these summer institutes were like no other. At the urging of some child_lit friends I began attending in 1999, was a speaker in 2005, a discussion leader 2006, and a fan for life. This one is new because it is at a different time of year, shorter, in a very different venue (previously these were always in educational institutes), less intensive (no huge reading list or formal discussion groups), and smaller. It is familiar in structure (packed with wonderful speakers), singing, and most of all — faces.

I accompanied Rita Auerbach on the drive from NYC to Essex. While her car’s GPS was very unhappy with our route and kept trying to make us do a U-turn and take her way we stuck to Rita’s husband’s route and arrived as the wine and cheese reception began. Before long directors Barbara Harrison and Gregory Maguire welcomed us with prose and song and so we began.

After dinner we heard the one and only Katherine Paterson. I stupidly did not take notes, but it was (as always) a magnificent and profound talk. I was sitting next to Brian Selznick who did sensibly pull out a notebook and jot down a few notes for himself. I do remember that she began by reading the first few pages of Alan Bennett’s charming The Uncommon Reader, a book she had recommended for the reading list.

More anon.

Huh? Why Newbery, you asked? After all, I’m done. We made our decision and now it is the 2009 Committee’s turn. Well, because I’m now thinking about possible books for this year’s award and my current favorite is absolutely neck-deep in atmosphere.

Now I may be using completely the wrong word, but by atmosphere I’m thinking about books in which the setting is alive and a vibrant part of the story, books in which you just smell, feel, and taste the heat or the wind or something else. Books like Richard Mosher’s Zazoo. It has been years since I read it, but I remember being drawn in by the atmosphere of that life, that home where Zazoo and her grandfather lived. Books like Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast series where the place is so weird, so unique, so part of the story.

What brought the term to mind is Kathi Appelt’s The Underneath, a book that I like more and more as I think about it. And the more I think about it and read other reviews, it strikes me that it is the atmospheric writing that elevates it to award contender for me. The story is engrossing, but it is the sense of place the author gives to us, that bayou, ancient and current, that is absolutely central to the book. Swirling, twisting, moving in and out and about, Appelt’s mastery in creating atmosphere is what makes this book to my mind a serious contender.

Are there others you’ve read, old and new, that are similarly vividly atmospheric?

MIDTOWN, OCTOBER 1996 Wallace and Gromit, the British clay puppets who are stars of the silver screen, spent a day locked in a taxi trunk when a porter at the Rihga Royal hotel, at 54th Street between Avenue of the Americas and Seventh Avenue, overlooked the black box they live in as he unloaded luggage belonging to their creator, Nick Park. Mr. Park gave chase but could not catch the cab or its license plate number. The driver returned the box, with puppets, to the hotel the next day.

Lost and Found in New York Taxicabs - New York Times

…While Amazon.com and other online booksellers boast lists of best sellers and a local librarian can advise on which books are in frequent circulation,
neither can tell you if any of these books were ever opened, much less
if they were read cover to cover. Renaissance Learning has unique
insight into the books kids are reading, and we are pleased to share this
information with you for the first time….

The above is from Renaissance Learning’s self-proclaimed “Groundbreaking Report” [sic]: What Books Are Students Reading in Grades 1–12?

Please. All this reports tells us is what books kids are reading for their school’s Accelerated Reader program. Cover to cover? Well, some kids may really be losing themselves in the books, but I suspect (based on my own years as a teacher and earlier ones as a kid doing SRA which was also quiz-based) that they are far more concerned with collecting book credits than in properly reading them. To my mind this report has way less crede than the above disparaged stats from booksellers and librarians. For those unfamiliar with AR, this is how it works (according to their own website):

It’s as Easy as 1-2-3

1. Student Reads a Book. Students choose books at their appropriate reading levels and read them at their own pace. Visit AR BookFinder to search for available titles.
2. Student Takes a Quiz. Accelerated Reader Enterprise offers more than 120,000 quizzes to help you motivate and monitor students’ reading and vocabulary growth.
3. You Get Information. You get immediate feedback on the reading and vocabulary progress of each student.

Seems benign, right? Well, not exactly. Well, hold on. See that “Visit AR BookFinder to search for available titles.”? Means, just that — not all books are part of this program. Besides, since when did a simplistic “quiz” indicated that a kid really read a book thoroughly? Hate to tell you, guys. It doesn’t.

About as groundbreaking as …. I don’t know…sliced bread?

The Golden Compass tops Entertainment Weekly’s “Read the Book! 23 Disappointing Movie Adaptations.” It is a very eclectic list, but of those on it I think The Cat in the Hat (#10) was a whole lot worse.

And of course there have been MANY absolutely horrid film adaptations of wonderful children’s books. One of the worst of late was The Seeker, supposedly based on Susan Cooper’s wonderful book, The Dark is Rising.

“Once you get the snippets you need,” Wozniak says, “your books disappear. They gradually evaporate. They have been translated into knowledge.”

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

It had to happen sometime — and, lo, an era has ended. After a 10-year run, and less than a year after the seventh and final book in J. K. Rowling’s series was published, the Harry Potter books have fallen — as of the May 11 issue of the Book Review, which went to press last night — off The Times’s best-seller list.

Ten Years Later, Harry Potter Vanishes From the Best-Seller List - Paper Cuts - Books - New York Times Blog

Chris Riddell is doing illustrations for the British children’s edition of Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book while Dave McKean is doing an adult version. And now Neil has posted a few of Riddell’s illustration on his blog here and I must say, they creep me out. But then I also find Dave McKean’s illustrations for Coraline too scary for my students and don’t show them when I read the book aloud.

For that matter, the forthcoming graphic novel of Coraline with illustrations by P. Craig Russell is also problematic for me because Coraline looks way too old in it for me. I guess I had always imagined Coraline to be around the same age as Alice — eight or nine, close to the age of my students. But the graphic novel makes her look several years older. Closer to the girl in Mirrormask than my imagined image of Coraline.

What strikes me about this is that kids eight to ten are getting a bit squeezed out here. I mean, there are the more sophisticated picture books that they love such as Gaiman and Grimley’s Dangerous Alphabet, but then there is a BIG leap upward to Coraline and The Graveyard Book in terms of illustration. Sure, some of my students will go for both, but many will not. And I think that is too bad because I think Coraline is very much for them. I’ve read it aloud many times with great success. But those illustrations are scary, scary, scary!

World Premiere
May 6-June 20, 2009
Coraline
Music and Lyrics by Book by
Stephin Merritt David Greenspan
Based on the Novel by
Neil Gaiman
Directed by Leigh Silverman

Poor bored Coraline. She’s left to rattle round her perpetually distracted parents’ house all by her lonesome. Then one day, her dreams of a better reality are answered as she steps through an old oak doorway and passes into a perfected replica of her own world. Greeted there by a vastly loving Other Mother and kindly Other Father, she’s thrilled! But, as the saying goes: Be careful what you wish for…

A musical like no other, Coraline sprang from the minds of three of the most wildly popular cult heroes of our time. Adapted from the truly terrifying children’s book by Neil Gaiman (author of the international sensation Sandman), this tale of menace and mayhem is set to music and lyrics by smart-rock iconoclast Stephin Merritt (of The Magnetic Fields), and boasts a book by celebrated downtown actor-cum-auteur, David Greenspan, who serves double-duty as the villain, Coraline’s suspiciously nurturing Other Mother.

At the MCC Theater at The Lucille Lortel Theatre :: New York City

From Neil Gaiman, natch.

Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot, she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: `Dear, dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I? Ah, THAT’S the great puzzle!’

So Jack read to little Aaron as Kate watched fondly at the start of last night’s LOST episode (or an abridged version thereof — I didn’t recognize the edition of the book). Hmm…maybe Aaron IS Alice? (And isn’t Jack’s dad something Carrollian too?)