New York Stories

The New York Public Library, along with other library systems in the New York City area, released a brochure that lists books for children set in the Big Apple. New York City natives are just bursting with pride about their city, and their making certain that they pass on this attitude to their children. I wonder if Manileños celebrate Manila. I never did, even though I was born and bred in the metro. I took the place for granted, and I was never much of an activist, never lifting a finger against the threats of pollution, overcrowding, crime.

(Guilty sigh.)

May this abbreviated list of “I Heart New York” books inspire Manileños to write about Manila (“…hinahanap-hanap kita, Manila...”), though I can already sense publishers hesitating (“But it won’t sell in the provinces!”). Heard from Ani Almario once that Barumbadong Bus was difficult to market in rural public schools.

Anyway, the list:

Eloise: A Book for Precocious Grown-ups by Kay Thompson
Black Cat by Christopher Myers
The Adventures of Taxi Dog by Debra Barracca
Scooter by Vera B. Williams
Down in the Subway by Miriam Cohen
The Gingerbread Boy by Richard Egielski
I Hate English by Ellen Levine
The Old Pirate of Central Park by Robert Priest
Madlenka by Peter Sis
Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge by Hildegarde Hoyt Swift
The House on East 88th Street by Bernard Waber
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by EL Konigsburg
Stuart Little by EB White
The Cricket in Times Square by George Selden
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
Brothers of the Knight by Debbie Allen
Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing by Judy Blume
Sector 7 by David Wiesner
Abuela by Arthur Dorros

Happy reading!

Because I Have Nothing to Say Today

I have no idea at all what to write about today. For the past week and a half that I’ve been keeping this blog, I always have something to write about. Now, I’ll probably be just blabbing nonsense.

Or maybe I can use this time to focus on my assignment. Believe it or not, I finally am reading Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (yeah, yeah, I’m that dreadful English major who breezed through college without reading “important” texts). The first few pages of the novel kept collapsing on me, and the only thing that propelled me to read further was imagining Apocalypse Now playing in my head. I had to visualize Brando as Kurtz (the horror, the horror, indeed). But I’m still trying to figure out on which character Robert Duvall’s crazy napalm-sniffing soldier was based.

But now that I’m in the middle of Conrad’s text, I find myself devouring it, loathing it, hypnotized by it. It shocks me the same way many conquest stories appall me, but the text’s flavor captivates me, too. I imagine it to be similar to Wells’s Time Machine, Burrough’s Tarzan, or Stevenson’s Treasure Island. There’s a pulp fiction quality to it, though Heart of Darkness somehow is (or wants to be) a more serious, sophisticated adventure book, analyses and monologue-as-criticisms eclipsing the action. Marlow is an odd character. A man dies by his feet, the victim’s blood soaks his shoes. Yet he stares at the dead man with an amazing detachment. He observes the world, functioning beyond fear and anger, as if he is a perfect being tut-tut-ing the failures and foibles of other men.

But he is also a storyteller, relating an event that has taken place in the past. Maybe it is time, having passed, that allows him his coolness, his detachment. The story is in the past, the adventurer tells it to us; despite the quality of excitement that Conrad delivers, we breathe easy, knowing Marlow is alive, sitting on a boat floating on the River Thames. We know then he has survived the harrowing journey.

Physically, at least. His cranium still needs measuring.

Stew on This:

There is only one rule in this house: no growing up.

Grandma Wendy
Hook (dir. Steven Spielberg)

Anak ng Third World!

Whenever I tell people that the Philippines is considered a “developing nation,” most of them start a sort of squirm, as if they were subtly putting on some dress that would make them P.C. in my presence. They want to deal with me “properly.”

The truth is, I’ve developed a taste for seeing them grow uncomfortable. In some social situations, I wear my Third World-ness like a neon-yellow badge, an open dare for people to come ogle at me, the yellow-brown freak who can speak English with an American twang. I want them to say something rude, so I can spit back at them. But even when all are steadily polite, I am rudely capable of reminding them of their imperialist tendencies.

Most days, though, I choose to blend in. Race is surprisingly easy to forget here. Sometimes I forget my Filipino self, and see myself only as this person wanting and building this chance at a new life in a new city. Just another person riding the subway home. When my brownness disappears like that, I take it as a good sign. There is so much comfort in traveling without thinking about my color, or the color of the man sitting across me. Many people still imagine New York to be a jungle of crime, graffiti and African-American/Hispanic gangs who rule the subway systems. But NYC has just been named the fifth safest city in the U.S. – it’s not without crazies and beasts, but the city

Speaking of the “Third World,” I’ve been thinking lately – when psychologists, critics, educators of developed nations speak of “children,” do they include in their definitions the youth of developing nations? Wonder, innocence, escape, the Oedipal complexes: do Filipino children experience these? What does “play” mean to a Filipino child? What is “work”?

I admit now that I have no idea what Filipino children want to read…or if they want to read at all. Children born into classes A and B are raised according to Western ideals, and so the often are raised to read. But children of classes C, D and E experience labor, violence (which upper class children also experience, true, but the lower classes probably have no concept of being guilty about the violence, because to many of them, it’s a way of life – I know, this is a stretch in logic) and, god, poverty!

How do we write for children who live poor? It’s not an issue of language – although Filipino may be less daunting for Filipino children to read, it’s not just the language that alienates them. It’s the themes, and the way that literature is made to appear a luxury that only the rich and/or the intelligent can enjoy. These children watch a lot of movies and TV, so it means they enjoy stories.

Damn. My brain hit a dead-end, as if it were fearful of finding out that there is NO solution. Damn. Damn. What to do?

Chew on This:

He who hesitates is lost!
Daniel Handler
from Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Grim Grotto

The Shit

(*“The shit” is an expression I recently learned. I was madly gushing about Gaiman and The Sandman to Jovan when this guy sitting on the couch next to us said, “Gaiman’s the shit.”
I smiled at the guy and asked “What?” as politely as I could, even though I was so flustered my question came out as “Whatwhatwhat?”
“The shit. Gaiman is the shit.”
Still smiling, but barely. “How could – what do – but he’s –“
Jovan hurriedly explained. “’The shit,’ ‘the shit,’ that means Gaiman’s cool.”
“Oh.” I said, blinking. “Oh!”
I let it sink.
“Yeah, yeah! The shit! Gaiman is the shit!”)

I finally met Darcey Steinke, our literature seminar instructor. The concept of her course is a comparative study of two novels at a time: one a “classic,” the other a contemporary novel that has been influenced by, or is a response to the classic. My verdict: Darcey rocks (quite literally, too: she had that rock star look that immediately endeared her to me) and her syllabus is the shit. Some of my friends in the class though are not as thrilled as I am. I was whooping it out to Siobhan and she shrugged and said, “I’m just sort of excited.”
“But isn’t this cool! We’re gonna be so busy! Weekly prose exercises! Lengthy and deep discussions! This is so high standard!”
Siobhan started pummeling me with her fists, squealing, “Oh, you nerd!”
Ye-bah! I like being nerdy – or rather, I like being given challenges that force me to become nerdy. It’s hard for people who have full-time jobs, though I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed, too. I’m already supposed to submit a couple of things to Tor next week, and I have to read Heart of Darkness, write a discussion question about it, and write my one page imitation. Plus, I have to add a few more pages to my thesis, and attend a poetry class tomorrow. Yikes!

All this pressure is what I’ve been wishing for. Got my wish – now it’s all up to me. Oh crap. (Deep breath) Discipline and belief. That’s what I need to survive the next four months. It’s all going to be about happy accidents, I guess. Amazingly, everything has been working for me these past few months. I don’t always get what I want, but I have been getting what I need. There have been disappointments, but some force, I feel, is allowing me to survive and love New York and the New School. Money – my big issue – is thankfully always available. Not plentiful – I just have enough to get by. But I am never in dire need. When the well starts running dry, some generous accident fills it up again.

So, this semester will be brutal but healthy. It will be the first time in a long time that writing will become my priority again. And this time, I will have to learn to balance it with “real life.”

One fear that I will have difficulty in overcoming is the feeling of being so under-read. I have always considered myself well-read, but because I have been shifting concentrations so madly that there are books I keep on missing. I miss reading fiction. I’m glad that last semester’s Saturday classes kept me in the loop…but the titles that my fiction classmates were reciting from an endless list in their heads. Patay. I feel so illiterate.

At least I know there’s never a day I don’t read.

Darcey’s point though: how should a writer read? I understood the language of film quite easily, but I have underestimated the formula, the mechanism of literature. I hope that’s what I finally manage to learn, after all these years.

Chew on This (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is my favorite book, and virtually every line is quotable)

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh you ca’n’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad, you’re mad.”
“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

Lewis Carroll
From Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland

Mighty Tor

(How honest can one be in a blog? I, for one, am unwilling to tell the truth, because I am afraid of being condemned. Here at The Night Kitchen, I avoid lying. But I hedge at sharing some ideas, trying to play the intellectual instead of talking about my day’s details and my personal, primal experiences. There’s a lot of vanity, greed, loneliness, self-pity, anger, and jealousy swirling inside me. I’m trying to bleed them out of my system. I’m worried though, because someone once told me that writers are necessarily monsters.)

We had our first session with Tor Seidler today. Awesome! We spent two hours with the man, and my brain is on fire. My hand and mind are one: I am roaring to write. Tor swept away the thickening cobwebs in my brain. Story and poem ideas came leaping out, and I had to jot them down in the middle of taking down class notes, so as to not let them dissipate into the world of irretrievable dreams.

Only, he praised his previous class so much that I am suddenly eager to please, to impress him. I am censoring myself at the get-go: my ideas seem to easy, not great enough for Tor. What if I am unable to write anything because I can’t produce anything that I thing will astound him? Or what if I manage to write something I deem pure genius and he deems mediocre and unsalvageable? Aaaaaaaah!

(Slap-slap-slap.)

Alright. So. Tor didn’t exactly share anything new, but he blew the dust off ideas I’ve shelved and forgotten. When he mentioned them, I felt rejuvenated. I felt exclamation points popping in my chest:

Children like stories about the lowly, the ostracized, the small, the meek, the weak, because children themselves are underdogs. Many tales for children deal with a child’s low/small physical perspective, such as stories about going underground and being in tight places, or, conversely, being in a land of giants. Many of children’s anxieties are expressed in fairy tales (Hansel and Gretel: lack of food, separation from parents, and eventual separation of brother and sister).

Fairy tales are worth a second look, definitely. I’ve been devouring a lot of fairy tales lately, but unfortunately, my blind, lazy self has not bothered asking why many of them are treasured by children. Tor’s interpretation of fairy tales were highly Bettelheim-ish, and I recall Zipes argument that the flaw of psychoanalytical studies of fairy tales is that it ignores the socio-historical setting that created the tales. Whatever – I’m madly in love with Zipes’s ideas, but I thought Tor’s thoughts plumbed the mysterious appeal of children’s literature, via a look at fairy tales. The man definitely made a lot of sense.

Chew on This:

Writers are liars.
Neil Gaiman
From Calliope

Democratic Publishing!

I have faith in very few things, but last night, I suddenly became a believer in synchronicity. A few minutes, s after posting a whirlwind of questions on my blog, I rolled into bed with Breton’s Nadja, and I was pretty certain the book was going to put me to sleep. I admit, I was on autopilot for much of the half-hour I spent reading the book, that is, till I hit this section:

…I am forced to accept the notion of work as a material necessity…I admit that life’s grim obligations make it a necessity, but never that I should believe in its value, revere my own or that of other men. I prefer, once again, walking by night to believing myself a man who walks y daylight. There is no use to being alive if one must work. The event from which each of us is entitled to expect the revelation of his own life’s meaning…is not earned by work.

It was not exactly Breton’s ideas that amazed me. It was when the response came – I asked a question, and ten minutes later, I got an answer. Loose pieces of my universe click into place: Nadja is coincidentally a book about coincidences.

I thank Monsieur Breton for his response – it crossed a continent and several decades to reach me (thanks to Richard Howard, too, for translating it). It’s difficult to imagine, though, how an artist can survive the 21st century without working. Even if an artist is excessively moneyed, s/he often has to “sell” his art: a curator, an editor, a producer must deem the work acceptable (or, more likely, profitable – horrors!) before the work is made available to the public.

I have never been a fan of self-publishing, but now I realize that it’s one of the few ways that makes publishing more democratic. It’s easy for company-published writers to raise their eyebrows at authors who have self-financed the publication of their books. But writing is increasingly becoming a business, an industry. It has become the system of selling, rather than sharing ideas.

Here’s my portrait of a Great 21st century writer: one who shares his or her creations by democratic means: blogging, self-publishing, public performances. One who does not need approval from self-appointed higher beings.

(Note my hypocrisy here: I am, after all, enrolled in an MFA program, which teaches one how to write acceptable, profitable manuscripts. Yarg – the irony that I am arriving at these anti-MFA thoughts because I am made to think about writing in this program)

Chew on This (a bit of a spoiler if you haven’t read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time):

And I know I can do this because I went to London on my own, and because I solved the mystery of Who Killed Wellington? and I found my mother and I was brave and I wrote a book and that means I can do anything.
Mark Haddon
from A Curious Incident of a Dog in the Night-Time

Questions

Do writers go shopping? Do they worry about fashion? Do they count calories? Do they worry about root canals and dandruff and ingrown nails?

The answer I’m hearing: Great writers are beyond petty matters.

At least that’s the answer I get from biographies and anecdotes and biopics of writers. True, these are fictionalized, and therefore they offer the big picture, as good fiction must. Who wants to sit through a movie of an unedited life? Who wants to see the hero preoccupied with laundry and tooth-brushing and napping when his or her huge passions are infinitely more interesting? Censorship, adultery, disease, suicide, insanity, unsympathetic editors, ungrateful lovers, hateful children – these are the things we want to see.

So, do writers transcend housework and the daily commute? Or in their minds they transform these minute concerns into feminist, Marxist, surrealist, postcolonial arguments. It seems like they always talk big, God-like: every line that spouts from their mouths is quotable (meanwhile I am stuck on talking tiny, like, you know).

The impression left by fabled writers is that a writer’s life is made up of leisurely walks, long conversations with fellow writers in a darkly lit café, hours of self-imposed imprisonment in a study bursting with books and leaves of paper and inspiration. A life that revolves around writing.

Does a writer become great when s/he perfects the skill of ignoring distractions? Is writing about observing the world then shutting it off? Are writers ever exhausted that they say, “Time for a break! Let me take off my writing hat, let me put on my traveler’s cap! I’m taking a hike! I’m off on a cruise!”

I have an incredible guilt. I feel I am supposed to live writing as if it were my religion. But I’ve always been bad with religion. I have no discipline, no patience. I am a failure at faith. I mistrust things that require time to become whole. Every time an idea is born, I love it, in its fetal state. But the next minute, I want it to be all grown-up. I refuse to empty my mind so one idea can occupy my life. I realize that I actually chose to be distracted – by chores, hobbies, and other ideas. Other ideas that go nowhere, of course.

Chew on This:

Children set off each day without a worry in the world.

Andre Breton
from Manifesto of Surrealism

Rediscovering Terry Pratchett

[The Luggage is the most terrifying literary creature ever invented.]

I couldn’t resist borrowing a copy of The Color of Magic from the library earlier today, even though I promised myself that I would only borrow books required for my literature seminar so I can concentrate fully on my studies. While sniffing out a copy of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for class, I bumped into a bookcase full of Discworld paperbacks. Hala!

Rewind to early 90s, high school days: I discover Pratchett by accident. I’m checking out the fantasy titles at Goodwill Bookstore, hoping to connect with a good book to relieve me from my boring high school existence. Bam – my fingers land on The Light Fantastic, its cover all fantasy, with a hint of irreverence. I am laughing by the time I turn the second page. The months go by and I devour the next few titles: Equal Rites, Mort, and Sourcery. I feel my life is imbalanced because no bookstore in the Philippines seems to carry The Color of Magic.

But by Wyrd Sisters, I become tired of Pratchett’s humor (“same old, same old”) and feeling I have outgrown him, I cast him aside (my attention then turns to Spielberg films).

Fast forward to college: My roommate gets me hooked on The Sandman. I obsess about everything that Neil Gaiman has touched. When I find Good Omens at National Bookstore, I am floored. Gaiman and Pratchett, collaborating? They know each other? I am suddenly in love with Pratchett again, as if seeing Gaiman’s stamp of approval on the man made me regret ever abandoning him (Good Omens is more Pratchett’s than Gaiman’s book, I feel).

Still, I have been unable to rekindle the fierce loyalty I offered to Pratchett back in high school. I continued to enjoy his work, but quite sporadically. I read Strata and The Dark Side of the Sun (neither of which I fully enjoyed because of the non-Discworld setting) in the late 90s, and recently finished Truckers (Prices Slashed? Ho-ho-ho!) and The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Strangely marketed as a children’s book. Because the book’s lead characters are cutesy-wutsey animals?). But maybe because I live two blocks away from a library that has a bookcase bursting with Discworld adventures…maybe it’s time to fire up old loves.

[Sharing-Pratchett moments are always precious:
1) Peter Hunt cheerleading the literary merits of the Light Fantastic in last year’s ICFA
2) Striking a conversation with a guy in a Chinese restaurant who was reading Discworld book. The surprise there is that he was American! (Americans usually get blank expressions when I mention Tintin, Asterix, and Voltes V).
3) At the 2003 Edinburgh Fringe Festival, I didn’t miss the chance to see stagings of Mort and Guards! Guards! They were horribly clumsy productions (maybe in honor of the Rincewind, Patron Wizard of the Inept?), but the scripts, directly quoting from Pratchett’s text, still had me laughing out loud.]

Challenge:

Readers read. Writers converse with what they read. Review all the books you’ve read within the past month and brainstorm on ideas that each book inspires you to write about (three per book).

[The Lovely Bones, Tintin Vol 3, 4, 5, and 7, Rape: A Love Story, The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents, Redwall, The Oxford Book of Poetry]

And please finish your first assignment.

Chew on This:

Goodnight nobody.

Margaret Wise Brown
From Goodnight Moon

Mr. Bunny Goes to Washington

I spent much of last night flip-flopping on whether to attend the Anti-Inaugural Ball. But any anti-Bush racket is worth participating in, and so I ventured out solo in the cold and ended up at Judson Memorial Church. Witnessed red-state vs blue-state wrestling, drag versions of nuns dancing on the altar, and a lesbian version of Tammy Wynette singing “She put the cunt back in country…” Yep, in a church. That’s how blue NYC can get.

Shocker! A children’s book writer getting political! Shouldn’t I have spent the night cuddling with my teddy bear?

It seems an unspoken rule that writing for children be apolitical, and so many assume that we who write these stories are apolitical as well, to the point that we are living in Whimsy-land. In the Hunt-edited Children’s Literature: An Illustrated History, the point is made that children’s literature of the post-World War I era was quite escapist, and this provided a stark contrast to the Modernist movement that was sweeping “adult” literature. Case in point: Winnie-the-Pooh came out the same year as The Great Gatsby.

But as Leonard Marcus’s Ways of Telling reveals, writers for children (specifically here picture book artists) are aware of the world, and have very complicated thought-processes. Marcus’s interview questions steered the responses away from clichés, and so we get quite unexpected stories. I loved the Sendak interview, of course, but I was most surprised by the voices of James Marshall and William Steig – they struck me as beautifully tragic, though humor masks most of their troubles.

Many of the writers Marcus interviewed lived through personal and historical turbulences, and true, very few of these troubles surface in their work for children. But to hear them speak doubts about the world, to express criticisms of themselves and others gives their work another dimension. Perhaps we readers choose to see their works as one-dimensional, whimsical, when in fact, something tumultuous is hidden underneath? Or could it be that the bigger machinery that produces children’s literature demands books for the young to be kept shallow, uncritical? Or critical only to a certain extent, because we assume children can handle oh-so-little, being such innocent lambs?

Okay – I’m guilty of such short-sightedness. Only lately have I seen that children’s literature is not always about play…or rather, I’ve come to realize that play can be political, an expression of childhood’s power. This past year, I’ve been relearning respect for children and children’s literature, and it’s frightening how much I have to unlearn…Michael Rosen’s poetry is the primary agent of my liberation. Ack! It will take another blog entry to explain this. I’m exhausted…these blue-state balls can get pretty wild.

(True story: I was at the subway on the way to class when I saw Leonard Marcus waiting for the train. I was too embarrassed to introduce myself, but I stuffed myself in the same boxcar that he got into, in the hopes that either I would muster up the courage to strike a conversation with him, or he would recognize me from CLNE 2004 and he would strike up a conversation with me. But then I had to get off. When the doors were closing, we kinda caught one another’s eyes and I just assumed he recognized me. I shouted, “Are you Leonard Marcus?” He nodded, and tried to keep the doors from closing with one hand. But the doors slid shut anyway, and I just waved and shouted, “I love your work!” I’m pretty sure I made his day, teehee.)

(Another true story: I saw Art Spiegelman walking down E 8th St. one afternoon. His hair was shorter than I remembered, but I confirmed it was him because I saw a sketchbook stuck at his back pocket. Awesome! But of course, me too shy to say hello. What if he bit my head off? My heart would have been broken.)

Last Word:

I’ve just let them out!
Pick up your pen, and start,
Think of the things you know – then
Let the words dance from your pen.

Leslie Norris
From The Thin Prison

Bzzzzt!...and some Sendak stories

I love New York…because of free movies! My schoolmate May (a triple F-ing friend: Fellow Fantasy Freak) invited me to watch a free screening of The Fifth Element at Loews 34th. I said yes in a second! Awww! I saw the movie when it first came out in the 90s, and the characters that had me laughing are the ones played by Chris Tucker and Gary Oldman (his best scene: when he opens the Diva’s case). I completely forgot that Bruce Willis is in it, too.
Awooooo! The Fifth Element is a trip!
May and I are bonding over fantasy flicks – we caught the screening of Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal at BAM during Muppet Mania week, and saw A Series of Unfortunate Events before the holiday break. We enjoyed all the screenings, but Jim Henson’s movies unfortunately showed their age. The two-decade old puppetry, amazingly, is still flawless (and we got a free demonstration from an ex-Mystic puppeteer to boot), but the script of both movies (especially Labyrinth) made me wince. And Henson always seemed to botch up climatic battle scenes – in Labyrinth, he went overboard with the slapstick. In Dark Crystal, the climax was so stretched out, slowed down, that by movie’s end I felt something was still unresolved.
Ack – and I call myself a Henson loyalist.
Apparently there’s a Maurice Sendak-Labyrinth connection. I didn’t notice it till this last viewing: Ludo, the rock-summoning Minoutaurish creature, stepped out of the pages of Where the Wild Things Are(the book itself enjoys not-so-subtle product placement, the first time we see Sarah’s bedroom). Of course, the idea of goblins stealing the baby sibling was pure Outside Over There.
The idea of kidnapping was Sendak’s childhood nightmare: he was a young child when the Lindbergh kidnapping occurred, and the event seemed to have haunted him for life. But I feel that the idea of a baby being stolen in the night (by goblins, by men) is a deep, universal nightmare that many people experience. Sendak relates how Outside Over There almost destroyed him:
(The book) was the most painful experience of my creative life. It brought on a catastrophe. It was so hard it caused me to have a breakdown. I left the business. I didn’t think I could finish it. At that point of my still-young life, I felt I had to solve this book, I had to plummet as far down deep into myself as I could: excavation work. Wild Things was excavation work, but I got up and out in time, like a miner getting out just before the blast occurs. Night Kitchen was a deeper run, and that was troublesome. But I did not anticipate the horror of Outside Over There, and so I fell down. I lost my belief in it, I didn’t know what I was doing, and so I quit; I stopped the book right in the middle and I stopped work.

Obviously, Sendak finally managed to overcome the terror, and finished the book. Imagine, the man suffered to make a picture book – a picture book! It makes me feel small, amateurish. I feel like I have to feed my liver to an eagle in order to write anything of worth.

Another Sendak story (one he may have made public for the first time in CLNE 2004!) For the 10th (or 15th?) anniversary of The Hobbit, the publishers thought of printing an edition with Sendak’s illustrations (who was then the children’s book industry sweetheart, having been awarded the Caldecott Medal for Wild Things). Tolkien, who drew the original illustrations for The Hobbit, wanted to approve any new drawings, and so asked for a sample of Sendak’s work. Sendak, though slightly offended, yielded to the request and sent two sketches: one scene of Bilbo peeking out of his hobbit hole, another of Bilbo and the dwarves celebrating their victory. A bumbling editor mislabeled the illustrations, swapping the description of one scene for the other. Tolkien then sent word that Sendak obviously didn’t know how to interpret his text. Sendak was so incensed and thought, what fool wouldn’t be able to see that a mistake had been made?
Editors quickly tried to appease both Tolkien and Sendak, arranging a meeting so things could be smoothed out between the two. Sendak, who was off to England to promote Wild Things, grudgingly agreed. But the day before he was to meet Tolkien, Sendak suffered his first major coronary. He and his editor immediately sent word to Tolkien to tell him of the situation. Tolkien’s responded with a telegram. It read: “I don’t like having appointments broken.”
Sendak’s response? “I sent out such a huge wave of hate, I could have killed him.” As a footnote, he added, "Then again, I send out huge waves of hate towards Bush all the time, and they don't seem to work."


Last Word:
We will rise to the occasion
which is life.

Virginia Euwer Wolff
True Believer

Marking the Twain, Indeed

I used to think that Mark Twain was an old fogey – some dead white male whose writing survived the decades only because those of us living in the 21st century needed some punishing texts now and then. I avoided reading him, even as a Creative Writing major in college, mostly because I was arrogant – I thought reading any literature older than 50 years (with the exception of Shakespeare’s plays) was a waste of time.
I knew of Twain mostly through a series called Children’s Illustrated Classics, a set of very cheap palm-sized books printed on newsprint, which retold books such as The Mutiny in the Bounty and The Count of Monte Cristo through illustrations and simplified, though quite emotional, texts. I thought them thoroughly enjoyably: reading Monte Cristo, I could taste Edmund’s need for vengeance in my mouth (tasted like a mix of rust and blood). Academics would probably condemn the series for murdering the original text, but I felt these kid-friendly books were better because 1) they were readable, and 2) they were pared down to the essentials of action and base emotion.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was part of this series, and it was one of my favorites in the collection. Non-stop action and intrigue, murder being hinted at…thrills galore! And so when I picked up the original Huck Finn years later (dying again to read about Huck dragging around a pig with its throat cut), ayayay! I went dizzy with the dialect. Gave up by the third page because I didn’t feel like anything was happening.
In graduate school, I was forced to become seriously acquainted with Mr. Clemens – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was one of our required readings. I dreaded opening the book, imagining it to be a colorless, impenetrable account of life by the Mississippi River. But then the first page started with:
“Tom!”
No answer.
“TOM!”
No answer.
“What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!”
No answer.
I was immediately hooked. I was plopped in the middle of a war (fuck, I know how awful that sounds…) of children vs. adults, and clearly, the book was on the side of children. Twain suddenly became my hero.
In high school, I learned that Twain was one of the outspoken critics of America’s colonization of the Philippines. I never really took any of my history classes seriously, so that information hardly made a dent on my skull. But last year, reading a book called Sitting in Darkness, I was reintroduced to Twain’s intense criticism of late 1800-America and its burgeoning imperialist tendencies. Reading “To the Person Sitting In Darkness” post 9/11, and on the eve of the Iraq elections, I am appalled by how little America has changed:
“There is something curious about this – curious and unaccountable. There must be two Americas: one that sets the captive free, and one that takes a once-captive’s freedom away from him, and picks a quarrel with him with nothing to found it on; then kills him to get his land.”
Twain may not have necessarily argued for the colonized (children and Persons-Sitting-in-Darkness), but definitely argued against the colonizers (adults and the rapacious American government)
He once lived in an apartment on West 10th St., two blocks up from where I currently lived, roaming these very streets in his trademark white suit. I should honor the man, maybe by leaving a bunch of flowers on the steps of his old apartment.
Or maybe a more proper way would be for me to start reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Last Word:
If you’ve been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you – you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness. You feel as if nothing was ever going to happen again.

CS Lewis
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe

Here's to Bad-Ass Kids (In Children's Books)

I know: a careless toast. I don’t have kids of my own, and so I have the luxury to say that children, in life and literature, deserve to be given the freedom to be mischievous and wayward, and have to be steered away from the adult pretensions of propriety and morality. Honestly, though, I go ballistic when kids turn wild on my watch, and I often abuse my authority as an adult to get them to, ahem, behave.
But naughty kids in children’s books – ah, it’s a pleasure if one is just reading about them. Many of these mischief-makers get away with their tricks because they are made to be funny, while other characters are sympathetic because they remind us that badness is human.
Some naughty-licious kids worth noting:
1. Max, Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
It’s all in the wolf suit.
2. George and Harold, Captain Underpants series by Dav Pilkey
Bart Simpson’s spirit lives (pop quiz: who has the flat top, and who has the bad haircut?).
3. Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
Not strictly children’s literature material, but I had to make him count because he reminds me so much of my brothers.
4. Alexander, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day by Judith Viorst
Alexander’s nugget of truth: when nothing is going right, the best way to deal with it is to make things worse.
5. Harriet, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh
When Harriet’s life has turned into one huge shit-storm, she trips up a classmate in an attempt to regain some balance in her world. The cruelty that suddenly explodes in her frightened me because I recognized it.
6. Bradley Chalkers, There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom by Louis Sachar
Guide to understanding bullies.
7. Anne Shirley, Anne of the Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
Too bad she grows up.
8. Junie B. Jones, Junie B. Jones series by Barbara Park
Ang kulit!
9. Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
This bad boy refuses to show his age.
10. Pippi Longstocking, Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Another spirited redhead, though I thought she rocked the boat more effectively without superpowers.

I do find some bad kids to be unpleasant: Edmund (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis) broke my heart, and even when he repented, I could never fully trust him again. And despite their transformations, Colin and Mary (The Secret Garden by FH Burnett) were too uglified in the book's beginning that I don’t think I can ever embrace them.
And as for Artemis Fowl, I would rather hang out with his butler.

Last Word:
If you don't turn your life into a story, you just become part of someone's else's story.
Terry Pratchett
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents

Graduating

One of my resolutions for the New Year was to stop considering myself a student of writing, and to start calling myself a writer. I forced myself to write the sentence “I am a writer, not a graduate student” one hundred times. Did it work? Well…results won’t manifest themselves within a day. The exercise was like getting thumped at the back of the head one hundred times. There was a flicker of some larger epiphany, but I didn’t catch it in time. Maybe it will come bursting out in my dreams…
A friend of mine wrote to me a few months ago, sighing about how envious she was that I was here in vibrant New York City, earning an MFA in Creative Writing and specializing in children’s books to boot. I certainly am proud that I am in an MFA program, and yeah, in New York Fucking City, but I’ve come to realize that an MFA has more use for teaching rather than writing. The degree will help you secure a teaching job, but will not necessarily get you published, or become a better writer (shocking!).
Of course I came to this realization the expensive way.
The New School Writing Program is also a hellish disappointment. Well, let me take that back. I exaggerate. Last semester I was bowled over by the Incredibles: Frederic Tuten (who split my world open by introducing texts like Markson’s This is not a novel and Sorrentino’s Gold Fools), Susan Bell (who gracefully shared a more respectful and effective manner of offering workshop critiques), and Susan Van Metre (who taught us how mischievous, wicked characters are essential in children’s books. Oh villainy!).
The thing is, the NS Writing Program is daftly designed, and one has to instigate a nuclear war-sized protest before any improvement is made to the writing for children concentration. I’m pretty certain we place far behind other MFA programs (at Simmons, Hollins, Lesley, Union Institute, and Spalding; all programs except Simmons and the New School are low-residency) that specialize in writing for children because these other programs do not see children’s books as some lesser form of literature. These other institutions recognize the scope and complexity of children’s literature, so much so that they have isolated the study of texts for children from other genres. Their programs allow their students to dive deep into the history and criticism of children’s literature, and therefore they surface with a keener familiarity with the genre.
Here at the New School, we’re lumped in with folks majoring in the “higher arts” of fiction, poetry, and non-fiction, many of whom treat us with disdain. And why should they respect us? We’re purportedly writing easy, unimportant stuff. We’re all about cute bunnies and sunshine. We’re not at all encourage to create ties with the traditions of children’s literature – at most, we can take one seminar on children’s literature (because that’s all the program can “afford” to offer) called “Children’s Literature.” As if one course can explain it all (for context: prose and poetry literature seminars have titles such as “Nonlinearity and Structural Play in the Novel,” “Master Thieves of Poetry,” and “The Writer’s Presence”).
I agree that understanding different literary genres can only help strengthen a writer. But I feel like this strategy of taking courses outside our concentration does not work because our vision is not respected. We are made to see the world through the eyes of adults, and hardly allowed to share what we imagine children to see. The priority lies with the people who write for adults.
Not that getting an MA or MFA from schools other than the New School will afford one more respect. Amanda Cockrell, director of the Hollins program, likes to relate that the one question children’s book authors are always asked is, “So, when are you going to write a real book?” It’s heartbreaking, because the value of children’s literature cannot be rivaled by any other literature in the world. This is the literature that has the capacity to reveal the flaws of adult institutions in a most truthful manner, because it is spoken in childhood’s voice. Childhood is adulthood’s truest opposite, truest critic, truest enemy (the sad truth is, childhood can never win. It always transforms into adulthood. Either that, or it meets death. Perhaps it can fly away, like Peter Pan?).
The adults in the New School program refuse to hold our hands – but I can turn that into a good thing. In the world outside of graduate school, there is hardly any hand-holding. Fictionist Susan Choi offered this truth: an MFA program is not a factory that transforms would-be writers into full-fledged authors in two years. An MFA program is more of a long-term residency, giving a student of writing both the intense freedom and responsibility to write. So it’s all up to the student to turn an MFA program into a true learning experience…
Oh fuck. Being churned out by a factory is so much easier.


(Aside: Tuten was a friend of Hergé, yes, the Hergé who created Tintin comic book series. Tuten wrote a book called Tintin in the New World (the cover was illustrated by Roy Lichtenstein! Can you believe I came within one foot of a guy who has such social circles?), but he claims the only way he managed to write it was by getting permission from Hergé to use the comic book characters. Tuten and I went crazy one class discussing episodes from Tintin, and I was stunned to see my classmates’ blank expressions. They don’t even know who Tintin is! Why so? 1) Because they are Americans and 2) because they are into “serious” literature.)

Assignment:
Retrieve childhood memories of mischief or wickedness. Focus on three, and develop one into a story or poem.

Last Word:
And what is the use of a book without pictures or conversation?
Lewis Carroll
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland