Frog and Toad and Dog and Bear and Bink and Gollie

I have started to notice a solid genre in children's picture books. I'll call it "the quirky loyal friendship" book, and it usually consists of three or more stories in a single volume, all of which involve two unrelated friends that have no parental figures, siblings, or other friends. One friend is usually taller, more responsible, and completely amused by and adoring of his other, shorter, more whimsical, spontaneous friend. Arthur Lobel's Frog and Toad series is probably the origin of this genre, and its apex. The appeal of Frog and Toad is in their absolute loyalty to one another despite their rather different personalities, and Toad's ridiculousness is never ridiculed but rather cherished by Frog, which then clues in the reader to feel the same affection for Toad. The Frog and Toad series is really an ingenious creation in so many ways, particularly for its insulated world in which Frog and Toad seem to be the only conscious beings. There is danger in their world (like snakes or dreams), but there is safety in their friendship. Besides, Toad is really funny--and the image of him yelling at his new seeds to grow, which never does not make my kids laugh quickly turns into beauty when he stays out all night with them so that they won't be afraid of the dark. It is this affection that compels us, and the books are, justly, masterpieces.

There were probably many imitations of Frog and Toad in the 60s and 70s of which I know nothing about, but I have noticed this formula working to wonderful effect in two recent books, Dog and Bear and the 2010 Geisel Award winner, Bink and Gollie. I am not going to discuss Dog and Bear, by Laura Vaccaro Seeger, too much other than to say it is for a younger child than Frog and Toad is but it is equally clever: Bear, a stuffed bear, is the Frog character: bookish, thoughtful, responsible, but also a little timid and introverted. Dog is more like Toad: impulsive, demanding, silly, adventurous, and sensitive. The two live in some sort of home without owners or other children. Their universe is so small that the reader can't possibly imagine anything happening outside of the facts of their friendship. Bink and Gollie, by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee, is the latest iteration of this effective genre, and it is fantastic. I came across it when I was looking for the "Mercy Watson" books by Kate DiCamillo at the library and I quickly read it to determine whether it would make a good gift for one of the kids. I was so taken with it that I just checked it out and read it with the family at home. I eventually returned it, keeping it in my memory bank for later purchase.

But my mom got it for us for Valentine's Day, so that is nice. I do not wish to make more of the book than I need to, but, much like Dog and Bear and Frog and Toad before it, it contains three stories that center around a tall, bookish, particular girl named Gollie and her friendship with a short, wild, impulsive, affectionate girl named Bink. Their adventures usually contain a small disagreement and an imaginative reconciliation. Bink is very funny, and Gollie's reactions are protective and admiring, as all good friends should be. Their universe is insular, again, where no parents or other friends can be seen. The materials of their mythology are skates, pancakes, peanut butter, and socks, a little like the materials of Dog and Bear's mythology are books, a monkey doll, a blanket, a bone, and strawberry-flavored desserts. Bink appears to be about 9, and presumably lives alone, as does Gollie, who might be 10.

The book is charming to a fault, and Kate DeCamillo is keeping up her streak of really good children's books. But I'll finish by thinking about the genre itself. Why does the whimsy of imaginative loyal friends so appeal to us? I'll try to answer this question by answering three more questions: Why are these books illustrating an insular world? Why must there be three (or more) different, if interrelated, stories? Why must the friends be so different? To answer the first subdivision question: Perhaps in the idea of childhood friendship there is a feeling of protection, where parents don't matter, the outside world does not exist, and the only thing with any power is the loyalty of one friend to another. Certainly when a friendship is working, it exists only within itself, and if it is concerned with all the outside stuff it is not really a friendship but an acquaintance of convenience. The form of each book, vignettes, makes sense with the friendship theme as well, primarily because friendships happen in episodes rather than linear plot narratives. A friendship noticed over time veers into the epic story of love, which might not work for whimsy. These friends are not brothers, and their friendship is totally dependent on moments rather than time--their loyalty has much more to do with the compatibility of the moment rather than the endurance over years. With each story, a moment of friendship is illuminated, and those moments matter more than the whole. The final question, why the friends need to be so different, only has to do with affect, I think; two friends thinking alike just becomes smug after a while, while two opposites who are fiercely loyal moves us, I would say. Don't know why--just happens that way. That is why I am always moved by my own friendship with my spouse, I guess. Maybe that is the reason this genre is so appealing to me: my own marriage has a similar amount of whimsical insularity--I like it that way.

Manifest Approval

For some reason, my mom gave us three books for Valentine's Day. I am very grateful, and maybe she just wanted an excuse to give us books, but getting a present on Valentine's Day from my mom is weird, and Valentine's Day makes no sense as a holiday anyway, so the whole thing seemed gratuitous. Ah, but the benefits we reaped. My mom gave us three children's books--all award winners--and I thought each of them deserved a review, the first of which I'll post now.

Moon Over Manifest, Clare Vanderpool. I guess I have read the last three Newberry Award-winning books, and they have all been excellent, so I need to applaud the committee first of all for a string of wonderful choices. I should also applaud them for rewarding a very midwestern book this year in Moon Over Manifest, which takes place in southeast Kansas in a small town during 1936 and 1918, both important dates for the American Girl series, what with them being Depression-era and World War 1 era, but also being a very different, more comprehensive in the details, approach than those American Girl books (which are usually pretty good, by the way, if read as morality tales rather than novelistic fictions). Moon Over Manifest, by taking place in separate moments only 18 years apart, and removed from contemporaneity, has a structure that might emulate two trains, one leaving at 7:10 from 1918 and the other leaving at 10:30 from 1936, moving towards each other, a mathematical problem that has philosophical and moral resonance in the novel (and this kind of problem actually appears more than once). It opens with a 12-year-old girl jumping off a train just before the town of Manifest, which is echoed 30 pages later when a 16-year-old boy jumps off a train just before Manifest, and the novel ends the same way. The trains of time are all moving different directions but to the same centerpoint, and the effect is indeed like one of those fifth-grade math problems. Solving the puzzle requires not only skills that come with organizing times, places, and speeds in the brain, but also requires the ability to piece together contexts, relationships, and stories.

This isn't just a strained analogy: Abilene, the 12-year-old protagonist, is given a homework assignment over the summer to tell a story, and this homework assignment becomes the problem of the novel: the ability to present not just an answer to a homework problem but rather a process, the story, by which she gets there. The construction of that story, as is often the case in juvenile fiction, becomes the means by which salvation occurs--whether the story is invented on the spot, a con in which the ideas are more truthful than the facts, or a historical truth that can unlock, with a skeleton key, the significance of identity, place, material objects, and genealogy. I realize I am being especially vague in my description of its structure, but that is only because this blog entry wants you to have the pleasure of solving the homework problem in real time without the interference of a nosy neighbor or an intruding parent figure.

In fact, the process of uncovery matters so much more in this novel than the answers. Abilene, if she just asked the right questions, might find all of the facts of her, and the town's, situation, but it would lose all of its emotional power if the story weren't slowly "manifest" in the way it is. Abilene does not ask questions but rather allows things to be revealed, a process that can test her patience but that allows the full range of significances to come forward. The town's name is also its primary storytelling method, and there is no meaning in the immediate facts without the context of the story in which they are told. This is the same principle I often discuss with my students when we wonder why we can't boil a poem or novel's method down to its basic truism, down to its moral, cliche, central point. The "heresy of paraphrase" as some critics have put it: the sense that truth moves beyond the story in which it is told is false: truth is relative--a controversial stance, I suppose, let me change it--truth is meaningful only within its story, its picture, its voices. For Abilene, the truth of her existence and the truth of the town's history, are contained within the teller's voice, and the storyteller will only allow the truth to be told if there is a payment, perhaps of herbs, attention, work, or sympathy. On the other hand, Abilene must supplement the story with her own research, reading, and acts of generosity so that a more complete version reveals itself. It is all part of the process of having thing manifested. The fact that the train started moving in 7:10 is ultimately less interesting than who was on the train, how they got there, where they want to go, and perhaps greatest of all, who they are sitting by.

The novel has its own network of stories on which it draws: one of the particularly scary characters is named Finn, and evokes Huckleberry Finn's frightening father. Mark Twain's novel seems to be stamped all over this book, especially in the way moral and historical truth looks to a child that is developing his or her moral identity, as Huck and Abilene are. The major way in which the books are different is that Moon Over Manifest is about place, township, and community whereas Huckleberry Finn has a permanent suspicion about towns and place, where inhabitants are constantly deceiving, backstabbing, and stagnant, which is one of the reasons Huck lights out for the territories at the end of that book. In Moon Over Manifest, the 1918 story begins with Jinx, nephew and surrogate son to the frightening Finn, lighting out for the territories but getting sidetracked and essentially adopted by Manifest, an irony bearing on the doctrine of "manifest destiny," which keeps its inhabitants moving west. Here the destiny is Manifest, only nobody, including the reader, yet understands that destiny in Manifest is not the grand, and unethical, appropriation of Manifest Destiny but rather the acceptance of community on a smaller and more intimate level, the level in which truth becomes satisfying. Jinx, the clear successor to Huck, lights out but stops in Kansas, in a town whose population is overwhelmingly first-generation poor immigrants without the genteel tradition that Huck had to combat.

This is all to say that the novel operates on a structural level that is not as much layered as it is darkly illuminated in different shades: the sun over Manifest brightens the day but also bleaches the town in drought and poverty; the moon over Manifest allows the ghostly shadows to reveal themselves. The moon over Manifest allows nighttime meetings to take place, clandestine deals to be made, kindnesses to be administered without the burden of the work day, the drought, the pallid bleach of sun. The night does not darken Manifest, it allows the truth, the light, to finally manifest itself. It is no wonder the saint of the book is named Shady, and the benevolent "spy" is dressed in black, or even that a principal character is named Hadley, the pregenitor to Boo Radley, that nighttime wanderer and savior. Another principal character claims Gideon as his moniker, and the Gideon of the Bible was instructed by God during nighttime (and, interestingly, refuses to be king). In this book, the Spirit doesn't go to bed at night, it wakes up, called out by the moon.

Let me end by wondering: what is it about 12-year-old girls that make them such wonderful protagonists? It seems that lately I have taken to watching Maria, half that age, go about her business with a mixture of awe and wonder. It is as if I can see her brain moving at lightning speed, concentrating on words, behaviors, and relationships, allowing the complications of the world slowly manfest themselves in bits and pieces. What happens between now and when she is a preteen is perhaps beyond my understanding, but the mystery of her development is certainly powerful to me: a potent mixture of fierce intelligence and whimsy, bravery and vulnerability, loyalty and rebelliousness. I don't know--could be that I am too sentimental, but there is something about girls growing up that makes me exhilarated that there is always so much potential, and sad that our world, we, most often don't let them realize their powerful selves. It seems that the 12-year-old, at least in adolescent novels, has achieved enough womanhood to be incredibly interesting but not enough to be struck down by roles, values, and images that we give her for her own ruin. I don't mean to end this review on a sad note, so let me revert to awe again: the perfect protagonist is the one who is willing to let things manifest themselves in all their newness and glory, and treat those things--stories, identities, people--with the reverence they deserve. To capture those moments is to write a good story.

Grimm's Fairy Tales and other Expertises

I just finished Rebecca Stead's Newberry-winning When You Reach Me this morning while Iwas in the basement of the plasma place, and I figured it would be cause for some taste-making updating on the blag.

Books:

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? by James Shapiro. People like to ask me about Shakespeare authorship. I don't like to answer Shakespeare authorship questions. I don't take the high road with the typical academic response of "Why should it matter? Authorship is a construct anyway" because that response is just as stupid as the question. I usually respond with "What makes you think that a guy named Shakespeare from Stratford didn't write the plays?" and I then am caught in the conspiratorial tractor beam. Conspiracy theories satisfy our need to believe that there are always trickier people than us, and somehow those people were smart enough to secretly and ingeniously operate. I rarely buy it. But I do buy books about the people who make up the conspiracies. I bought this book because I admire Shapiro's excellent scholarship and I knew he would take a fresh approach, which he does by chronicalling the beginnings of the Shakespeare authorship controversy and tracing its historical manifestations. To be sure, Shapiro believes Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare, but any sane person would believe that anyway, no offense to Mark Twain and Sigmund Freud. What Shapiro uncovers in this book is much more interesting than who authored Shakespeare. Rather, he uncovers the ways in which Shakespeare has become a secular deity whose authorship question is akin to the parascientists claim that God is not author of the world. The methods of argument are surprisingly similar, if not the details. How dare a man with little education and a quotidian, local lifestyle write the greatest works of the English language!!! How dare he!!! How dare Joseph Smith do anything! Look at the records--this guy was mean to his wife, was a social climber with no refinement, and was possibly sexually deviant!! How is it possible! Right.

When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. Imagine what happened if smart time-travel novels crossed ectoplasm with concise storytelling about real people, and you wouldn't end up with The Time Traveler's Wife. Instead, you might end up with When You Reach Me, a book that isn't really about time travel and isn't really about real people either, but it has elements of both. Perhaps I should call it the greatest tribute A Wrinkle in Time has ever received, but I am sure that Madeline L'Engle's book has been the subject of so many tributes that I am wrong. This book surprises, though, and although I was pretty good at

predicting plot outcomes, the story was a lot of fun with at least one chapter, the one about looking beyond the "veil," that is as insightful as a good youth book should be. I dread the inevitable film rights on this book, but I welcome the increased exposure.

Grimm's Fairy Tales by the Grimm Brothers and peasants/commoners in the European countryside. I read the fairy tales because I am teaching them this summer, and they are fascinating. But so help me, they are not deep. And that is their major charm. They are stories, and they rejoice in the sense that they are stories, pure and clean, simple and powerful. They have no moral to proclaim, no mind to explain, no philosophy to frame. Why can't we recognize that their importance lies in the fact of their "storiness" and little else. Do we need more justification than that? Sure, like all good stories, they express cultural anxiety and concerns and often threaten social stability, but all in the name of the story's suspense and intrigue. Needless to say, I taught them not through interpretation but through retelling. The class and I retold them in various mediums and contexts, and each time we retold one, it became more useful, not in the moral sense but in the structural sense of narrative consciousness. We read stories because we are enchanted by them--isn't that enough? By the way, the story "The Golden Bird" is phenomenal, as is "The Dog and the Sparrow."

Movies:

I should start by saying that I have recently gained "expert" status when it comes to romantic comedies because I have watched so many in the last year. As an expert, I can proclaim with the heralding trumpet of authority that: they all suck.

But sucking is only half the battle. For a romantic comedy to be distinctive, it has to be repulsive in the way that the two Sex and the City movies are repulsive (I gave the first Sex and the City the same review that Sex and the City 2 got from professional critics, so I am ahead of the game and can continue to exploit my "expert" status). Example #1: Valentine's Day, possibly the worst film I have seen since Miss Congeniality the Second. I am going to try and imagine the pitch meeting:

"Did you see Crash and Babel and 21 Grams? I feel like we need a romantic comedy that uses the same techniques."

"Isn't that what Love Actually did?"

"Yes, but it was British and therefore snobby and exploitive towards 9/11. And it was only shallow, not vapid. I was thinking we could made an LA version about Valentine's Day with lots of hot new celebs and so vapid that we have to reset the vapid scales, which is good for business."

"Huh, now you're going somewhere. What else?"

"Well, who has the most followers on the tweeter thing?"

"Ashton Kutcher?"

"Right. He can be the centerpiece, the connector of all the disparate stories. And isn't there a show where the guys are doctors and hot?"

"Grey's Anatomy?"

"That one. We'll get the hot doctors in this movie."

"Got it, but what's the plot?"

"Hold on, that comes later. The movie that did the best last year was the Twilight movie, and there is a guy who looks like Adam Bluth, circa 1996, who takes off his shirt. We're gonna have him in it, and we'll pair him up with the girl who sings about Romeo and Juliet, but she'll be a cheerleader who smacks her gum and likes boys."

"This sounds like a powerhouse so far."

"Wait a second, we'll also get the guy from The Hangover and pair him with Julia Roberts."

"How're you going to land Julia?"

"Already thought of that--we'll get Gary Marshall to direct, and Julia owes him for jumpstarting her career in Pretty Woman, and she'll play a soldier coming back from Iraq to see her kids, so she can show her range and we can get Red Staters in the seats."

"Perfect."

"But we can't alienate the Blue Staters, so we'll make a gay couple be prominent, and perhaps nobody will suspect they are gay because they are masculine doctors from Grey's Anatomy."

"Beautiful. So let's hear the story."

"The story is how real people with low incomes and middle class lifestyles act in America and what they think about love."

"Ok, but I am not sure how the middle class acts nor do I have any idea what they think about love."

"Neither do I. Neither will the actors. Neither will the director. But I am pretty sure they own flower shops and drive around their kids and watch local news and think that love is the answer . . . it doesn't matter, actually. We can't fall for that trap. They'll act like the actors think they act. Besides, the movies define what love is anyway these days so why would we need to figure out what the commoners think about it? We'll even have a scene in which an aging movie star remembers her love because she sees herself loving in a movie. It'll clue in the audience that love is what we tell them it is."

"Fair enough. How will we afford all the stars?"

"Thought of that, too. I asked the writers to write the script as the movie is being filmed and Gary to direct it in two weeks or less. Since it is an ensemble, each actor will only have to work for one day, never requiring them to actually get into character and taking home a one-day paycheck. As long as the stars' faces are in the movie, the audiences won't care if they are actually acting or not."

"What else will require budget besides the stars?"

"Nothing. Not the camera, the lighting, the scenes. We'll film it two blocks away from here so the stars don't need to travel either."

"I think you have found the perfect formula, my friend. How much do you need?"

"Nothing. I'll ask each actor's agent to talk to you directly about one-day salaries. I am not going to need any money besides that."

"Who'll get top billing?"

"The faces of the stars."

"Is Justin Bieber going to be in it?"

"He would be if we were to make it two months from now when he is a bigger name, but we begin filming tomorrow and looking for a wide release in three weeks."

"Andele."

I don't know what possessed me to write that much, but a movie as bad as Valentine's Day deserved it. Are there other movie to review? When in Rome? More like Dumb in Rome. I can't remember the other movies I've watched, which means they were unmemorable, of course. I guess I liked Shutter Island. I hated it too. In fact, that movie bears recognition because I loathed it and enjoyed it at the same time. And the soundtrack is the best of the year, no irony involved.

Places to eat:

I did the regular stint at Cafe Rio while I was in Utah, which was as good as I remember it--in

both ways. I remembered that the food is good even though I don't want to like it, and the primary reason I don't want to like it is because I remembered the people that patronize it, particularly the Cafe Rio in Provo. It is strange that no matter what happens, the people that go to Cafe Rio never change--guys in caps, scruffy, tight shirts and board shorts, just back from the lake. Girls in tight clothes with pristine hair, tanned and vacant. My recent trip was even better because one of the females in the Cafe Rio had apparently just got back from the lake or from a Daisy Dukes convention and her bottom was forcefully protruding out from the end of her shorts, or bathing suit, or whatever it was. I hear that you enjoy Cafe Rio salads that much more if your bare glutes actually touch the southwestern chairs. I am going to try it next time, and don't think I won't. I have to get back into Provo mode when I am in Provo, so if that means wearing the Cafe Rio uniform when I go to Cafe Rio, that's what it means.

We also ate In And Out Hamburger in Sandy, UT. It tasted the same as the In And Out Hamburger in California, which tastes the same as the In And Out Hamburger in Scottsdale adn Las Vegas. It is like the Church because it is everywhere the same, but the cult which is irrational about it is mainly located in one centralized state.

Where the Big Shaggies Are

I showed Where the Wild Things Are to my class on Thursday night, and I am hesitant to write very much about it because the movie requires a pretty thorough analysis that I don't have the energy nor inclination to write in this hallowed format. My course is an investigation about children and literature, not children's literature, but children and the way they receive canonical literature. I am bookending the course with two films from 2009, both of which were "contested sites" of children's reception, Where the Wild Things Are and Coraline. I should admit up front that both are wonderfully provocative movies that take children seriously. I should also say that Fantastic Mr. Fox falls in this category. My own kids have not seen the former two, but they did watch Fantastic Mr. Fox, and they thought it fantastic, which relieved me to some degree. Seems like our culture, me included, is in the business of underestimating our children. I should explain that: many of my friends overestimate their children in some ways, insisting they read by the time they enter preschool or kindergarten for example, but underestimate their child's ability to absorb complicated human relationships and problematic ideas. They underestimate a child's ability to experience, essentially. So let me explain what Where the Wild Things Are is like so I can use it to make this argument.

On the first day of the course (Tuesday), students and I read the David Brooks column in the NY Times from that morning. It is about the necessity of learning the humanities, and it refers to something he calls "The Big Shaggy," which acts like a code word for what has traditionally been called the "soul." He discusses how looking into the big shaggy, which consistently defies comprehension, allows us to deal with it a little more honestly. I liked his basic argument, even though he tends to confirm outsiders' feelings about what the humanities is good for, and I happen to think there is a lot more to it. The article actually came up in a recent church interview with a member of the Stake Presidency. How about that?

The article naturally led into the film, which involves many Big Shaggies that occupy the moral consciousness of Max. What those Big Shaggies do is both within Max's child-like worldview (they destroy, they have fun, they hug, they create, they bicker, they tell stories, they believe stories) and beyond it (they have deep-seated anxieties, they don't understand things, they willingly hurt eachother, they consider eating him). But this introduction into the unkown world of the soul confounds and fascinates Max, exhilarating him and frightening him simultaneously, an effect that certainly moves through into the audience. The Big Shaggies defy conventional wisdom, common sense, and structurally coded behavior, yet they exist in a very real way, and their existence has major consequences.

My students observed several profound moments in the film, including moments in which levity turns to anger, joy to despair, as well as variations: anger to sorrow, sorrow to joy, rage to love. Towards the end of the film, Max hides in one of the Wild Things's belly, finds a raccoon inside, and sits with the dual sense of security and dread. The scene ends with Max, a slimy mess, being pulled out of the Wild Thing's mouth in a kind of rebirth. My students wanted to claim this as the turning point in the film, but I argued with them that the turning points are simply at every moment in which Max confronts the unknowns of his world. He is a child, after all, and turning points, epiphanies, new creations are the raw materials of his minute-to-minute existence. My own sense is that the movie captured that in ways that are insightful, powerful, often disturbing, and finally moving.

I honestly don't know what kids make of the film. I guess it depends on the age and so much more, but I get the sense that it is one of those films that doesn't allow itself to be just watched. Perhaps this is why so many of my friends have objected to it for their children. I am not going to quibble with them--the movie might be more intense than a child is prepared for--but that is also its strength.

The final scene of the movie has been noted for its subtle power, and my own response to that final scene is reassuring to me, a guy who often wonders if his own love is fit for fatherhood. Yet the final scene is a nod towards parents, a gesture on the part of the filmmakers that Where the Wild Things Are is relaying its concerns to them as well, and I am not sure the rest of the film functions that way, thankfully. The whole film, it seems to me, is an emotional topography of anxious adolescence, not the kind that looks outward and sees the sometimes disappointing world we have created for children but rather the kind that looks inward and sees the confounding meanings of having a human self. This, to me, is the right way to start a humanities class.

Magic Treehouse and Corduroy

After an onslaught of lovely visitors, our family has returned to the chaos of routine domestic living, which means I get access to the computer in the evenings after the kids are asleep. I much prefer the nightly conversation that occurs when the visitors are around, but writing something on the blog has its own charms.

Maria and Henry and I have been reading the Magic Tree House series together, and it excites the kids in equal proportion to boring me. We have made it through three books (there are something like 35 in the series), and I can’t help but wonder if some of my fifth grade story manuscripts were stolen in order to write these things.

It is my understanding that these books are very popular in the elementary school curriculum, which is great, because any time “books” and “popular” are pitted together, it probably means something good is happening. In the case of the Magical Treehouse books, the good is found in the way the sentences allow young readers to quickly understand them (which is also the bad). They are also good because they are short and swift. Nevertheless, I have two major misgivings about the series that I try to will quickly describe:

1. “Books are Magical!!!”: The premise is that a brother and sister find an abandoned treehouse full of books, and they discover that if you open one of the books and wish that you could go to the place the book is describing, you will actually go there and have some sort of adventure. I suppose the lesson is that books are full of adventures if a child decides to just open them up and read. I agree with the statement but I don’t quite like the application: the way the magical books in the treehouse work is more like the way a videogame functions, interactive in a “choose-your-own-adventure” way. The virtue of books is not that they “take” you places but that you “go” somewhere (you meet halfway, if that makes sense). Books ask you to leave your senses behind because they will often limit the way your mind creates the sensory reality of the words arranged on the page. Books are not videogames, nor are they movies. A good children’s book allows you to mentally enter a world of a writer’s and reader’s dual creation, and the appeal is less from the dinosaurs that you see or the intricacies of the moat around the castle, but rather the emotional and moral situations that those created worlds allow you to experience.
2. “Don’t worry, it won’t affect your ‘outside’ life”: Another premise in these books is that after the brother and sister travel to their foreign land and have an adventure, they return to their Pennsylvania town, where everything is the same as when they left it, and no time is elapsed. I hate this gimmick, and I also think it is dishonest. If you want to make a point about books and adventures and reading, then why would the world you inhabit never change? One of the primary experiences of reading a book is the time lapse—time does not stand still but it takes on a strange new movement that can only be gauged by the engrossing power of the book. Books take time, and a reader has to negotiate that in important ways. Not only do books take time, but they take and give life. After having read your book, if the world you return to is not altered in some way, either by your own perception or by the regular progress of time, you read a crappy book. Isn’t the worst insult for a book to be that you read it and then when about the rest of your day or life as if it never happened? The progress of time and the movement of space is the absolute of any narrative, and when it is ignored, nothing is at stake, and the book rings hollow.

Last night, after having finished Magic Treehouse #3, “Mummies in the Morning,” the three of us returned to the greener pastures of our older stories, and we ended up reading the two Corduroy books. The Corduroy books are odd among children books: they both involve being locked in a commercial space overnight, a thing of childhood daydreams or nightmares, and they both involve a multicultural cast that emphasizes the books’ urban setting. The tension and isolation of the city remain the central concerns of Corduroy, who often finds himself alone among a myriad of urban creations, whether it is in a mall or Laundromat. Corduroy gets into his overnight predicaments by searching for something fairly innocuous, like a button or a pocket, and in his search, he imagines each new item as a natural entity from beyond the urban experience (“I’ve always wanted to climb a mountain” for an escalator, or “I’ve always wanted to enter a cave” for a bag of laundry). The result is an amazingly acute representation of urban isolation and fragmented living (Ezra Pound said the city is like a collection of nouns without verbal relations, which is most perfect statement about the city that I have ever come across).

I should stop ruining Corduroy with my points about its political concerns, but let me just emphasize how charming the Corduroy books are. The kids and I were more enchanted by the two adventures of Corduroy procuring small accessories for his green overalls then we were by the three adventures of visiting dinosaurs, castles, and mummies in a spinning treehouse. I could write a term paper about Corduroy, which I might try to do sometime, but in the meantime, let me just use it as the perfect example of two points: 1. books are magical, and 2. they allow you to re-envision the world in which you live.

Jam on Prose (The Frances books)

This is an excerpt from Russell Hoban’s Bread and Jam for Frances, a wonderful children’s book in its own right but an especially important picture book from my childhood.

Albert took two napkins from his lunch box.

He spread the other one on his desk like a tablecloth.

He arranged his lunch neatly on the napkin.

With his spoon he cracked the shell of the hard-boiled egg.

He peeled away the shell and bit off the end of the egg.

He sprinkled salt on the yolk and set the egg down again.

He unscrewed his thermos-bottle cup and filled it with milk.

Then he was ready to eat his lunch.

He took a bit of sandwich, a bite of pickle,

a bite of hard-boiled egg, and a drink of milk.

Then he sprinkled more salt on the egg and went around again.

Albert made the sandwich, the pickle,

the egg, and the milk come out even.

The passage goes on for several more lines in this vein. I am not sure if Russell Hoban meant for it to read like poetry, but it is written with those end-lines how I have transcribed them, and the effect is much like a sestina, what with the deliberate meter and the repetition of “egg,” “milk,” and “pickle” to end different lines. The prose is hypnotizing in its incantatory sound and in each sentence’s parallel construction, like a liturgical utterance or something. Indeed, the words that make up each sentence “come out even.” But what is really striking is its sonority: you could read this passage in a poetry reading and I guarantee the audience will be rapt with attention.

Now consider this excerpt from Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses:

He hung the hat on a peg by the door among slickers and blanketcoats and odd pieces of tack and came to the stove and got his coffee and took it to the table. She opened the oven and drew out a pan of sweetrolls she’d made and put one on a plate and brought it over and set it in front of him together with a knife for the butter and she touched the back of his head with her hand before she returned to the stove.

McCarthy’s prose is like Hoban’s with the punctuation removed, and the difference in effect is that the McCarthy has a ghost-like quality to it in which things are done in detail but without end stops: each activity blurs into the next, and the small gestures seem to have strange depth beyond their simple performance. The signficance of each activity is never retained, though, because it is too quickly transformed into the next act.

My point in pitting these two passages together is to show both their similarities and subtle distinctions. Both include prose that enchants with its evocation of details in a kind of cosmic ordering of everyday acts, but that order has a completely different meaning despite the stylistic parallels. The significance of the prose describing Albert eating his lunch is that an incredible enjoyment can come from meticulousness, whereas the significance of the prose in All the Pretty Horses suggests that meticulousness is often a marker of great sorrow. Both have the emphasis on sequence and chronology but differ in the way that chronology is lived.

Hoban’s prose is good in all of his Frances books, and his deliberate style makes for great bedtime reading, as my brothers and sisters will attest. Several years ago, my mom and dad made an audio recording of two of the Frances books, and my dad reads the bulk of each book slowly and clearly, much like how Albert eats his lunch. The result is bittersweet: he reads with the joy of systematic thinking that Albert has with systematic eating, but his voice evokes such sorrow in me because since he has been gone, my life has been much more like the McCarthy passage, with one activity blurring into the next in an attempt to grip an unknown grief, than the Hoban passage, of which Dad’s life was a great model. I strive to make it all “come out even,” but I end up needing too many “ands” and neglecting the periods.

At the end of Bread and Jam for Frances, Albert makes another appearance, this time as the observer of Frances’s new diverse lunch. He responds to her description of her lunch with what I consider immortal words:

“That’s a good lunch,” said Albert.

“I think it’s nice that there are all different kinds of lunches and breakfasts and dinners and snacks. I think eating is nice.”

I often have that sentiment, as simple as it is, but what I really find lovely about it is that when my dad says it on the audio recording, it sounds like he really means it. I have the feeling that Albert and my dad are kindred spirits when it comes to the simple enjoyment of the diversity of lunches. I think that is nice.

Up

I won't deny that I am a contrarian when it comes to popular tastes, depending on the local context of popular. There was a time that I tried to dislike Pixar films because I was so swamped with adoration for the films that I thought were mediocre, like Monsters, Inc and Finding Nemo. They are both great movies but not quite as good as the voices close by made them out to be, yet upon entering graduate school in Arizona, I noticed that ideological criticism reigned supreme, and Pixar (especially from its association with Disney) became a target of knuckleheads ready to point out the absence of women heroes, racial diversity, and conservativism. From that spirit, I began to defend Pixar, especially as The Incredibles first entered the scene, with its Ayn Rand-ish message (albeit more subtle) and traditional family values, favorite targets of the unenlightened. I am not totally opposed to ideological criticism, and I love to pull it out when in discussions about The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, both of which are kind of lame anyway so I don't feel too bad about it. I also have ideological criticisms of Beauty and the Beast in my contrarian bank, but the movie is so damn good that I prefer to leave them there.

Since the Incredibles, it seems that Pixar has been on a roll of rolling out movies that are so far superior to other films that I have considered making them course requirements. My personal feeling is that Pixar reached its peak with Ratatouille, which is a downright masterpiece, but the latest two films have been as close to a plateau as Mesa Verde. I am going to leave Wall E for another post because my friend Bryan (with a y not an i) needs to lay down his own critical apparatus to deflate it, but I saw Up last Saturday, so I can quickly comment on that. 

Having spent 20 dollars to take both kids to Up, I was either going to love it or hate it with an ardency that only comes when I spend more than 10 dollars on something. But because I got my 20 dollars worth in the first 20 minutes of the film, I could happily enjoy the rest of the movie without further reservations. In fact, the first 20 minutes were so moving that it took me the rest of the movie just to come down and shore up the tears of aesthetic joy. If Wall E is about romance, the kind that is so true that only robots could depict it (see my earlier comments on allegory), Up is about marriage, the kind that is so real that only a montage could depict it. This thematic movement is a nice trend--the next Pixar film, if all goes according to my plan, should be about childrearing. Up tried to approach that topic but was not as successful, principally because the film knew it was all about marriage and other topics weren't going to be dealt with as well. 

The film as a whole is good enough--it is funny and nice to look at, full of little moments that provide the vagus nerve with enough juice to get through the less-appealing action sequences. Here are two observations though: the kid in the movie, who has all the makings of one of those really annoying characters in animation that says crazy things and mugs endlessly, has a personality that reveals the charms beneath the annoyance. Not once did I really want him off the screen, which was an unexpected reaction for me. The other observation is that each character seems to have weight. One of the problems with computer animation is that it creates a kind of weightlessness that removes the stakes from the action, but the characters and objects in this movie, with the exception of the exotic bird Kevin, feel like gravity actually pulls them. After all, this movie is all about weight and weightlessness, which is why the child needed to be overweight: the metonymic relationship between actual weight and "weight" as in burdens are always collapsing to make the action and images more poignant. The story constantly turns on how much weight both the balloons and Carl Frederickson can carry, and the only way to move the house was to balance human weight and the upward force of the balloons. The symbolism is at times a bit heavy-handed, but that is necessary, in my opinion, for an adolescent's understanding of the literary weight of the film, so to speak. The movie's title not only refers to the possibilities of weightlessness but also nicely puts two letters together that look an awful lot like the characters: Carl and Elie in "U" form (two lines joined at the bottom), and Russell as a small "p." This might look silly, but the textual appearance of the word frequently appeared in the visuals, whether intentionally or not, and I kept thinking about it while watching. The movie is that good. 

I don't want to make the movie sound like a chore though--it's not. In fact, Pixar's latest films have understood the enchanting power of narrative as well as most children's books, and it makes them much better for it. A good children's book tells a story with just enough words to move the pictures along, and it doesn't waste time with self-conscious jokes and metanarrative winks."Where the Wild Things Are" is a good example of this: the book's white space (where the words are to go) is gradually overtaken by the imaginative illustrations to the point where the words disappear completely. Only when Max feels like exiting his own imagination do the words start to reappear and the white space returns. I have never heard anybody adequately explain why that book is so powerful, but I would suggest that it is precisely because it is about imagination itself, while it allows the reader to cognitively do what Max is doing, with few words to muddle it up. This, it seems to me, is part of the Pixar formula, or at least it has been for the latest three films. Now if only Dreamworks could start rethinking their brand of cool self-consciousness and allow their characters to shut up for a while, we might have more than one worthy computer-animated movie a year.  

The Graveyard Book

Upon finishing The Voyages of Doctor Doolittle when I was just a llad (sic), I decided I was going to read every book that ever won the Newberry Medal. I don’t exactly remember why I decided this. Maybe it was because I was so impressed with Voyages that I thought it represented the quality of those awards—if Voyages of Doctor Doolittle won it, the award had to mean something. The Newberry Award seems to be the only major literary award (or artistic award) that I still trust: Johnny Tremain, The Westing Game, The View from Saturday, Lincoln: A Photobiography, The Giver, Julie of the Wolves—the list really is pretty amazing. My goal to read all of them was never completed, but I did read a lot of them, and I only stopped after the “donkey” (a secret book-giver on Christmas Eve) gave me Maniac Magee, and my brother made such relentless fun of the book’s title and cover that I decided to give up my quest and not read for a while. This is why Mark, as a brother, has always been overrated: for each special hiking trip he took Paul on, he destroyed at least one artistic and intellectual dream of mine. I should at least give him credit, though, for abusing me away from Broadway shows and teddy bears. So maybe he is not overrated.

Earlier this year, when I heard about the newest Newberry Award winner The Graveyard Book, by Neil Gaiman, my childhood interest in the Newberry inexplicably returned. When a fantasy/scifi book wins the Newberry, it usually means that there is going to be a lot of thoughtful prose to accompany the mythologies and narrative intrigue that usually characterize the genre. The Newberry people, like most award givers, like to have their literary pretensions satisfied, and if a fantasy novel can do that, all the better. At any rate, I decided to read The Graveyard Book as soon as I had the chance.

If my regular readers have not noticed already, I refuse summary as resolutely as I refuse raisins, so I will not summarize the book’s plot other than to say it is about a kid who is raised by ghosts that inhabit a local graveyard. As narratively magical as they come, the novel begins with a deep menace that quickly dissolves to wonder, and then to delight. Gaiman, whose imagination seems to be inherited from Roald Dahl, has the gift of enchantment, which is no small feat: rare are the books that can whip up a world that seems to be familiar in terms of its affective possibilities, observations, and emotions but foreign in its history, geography, mythology.

I suspect the Harry Potter series achieves something similar, although I have not read the series other than the first book (I am waiting for Maria to be about the right age for us to read them together). I am told that the Twilight series also does this, but those who have told me that are wrong because I read the first 30 pages of the first book and it was utterly foreign in all the things that should be familiar, like emotions, observations, relationships, compassion, and quality. The reason, though, that I bring up these two series is because they popped in my mind while I was reading The Graveyard Book as comparisons. Thinking about them, and their popularity, brought into relief the excellence of Gaiman’s story in a genre that is already oversaturated by vampires, ghosts, and schoolyard legends. But what is really great is Gaiman’s prose—precise, fun, and light.

For example, in a fantastic chapter called “Danse Macabre,” Bod, the protagonist, stumbles upon an ancient tradition in which the dead dance with the living in a public square during a late autumn blossoming. As he approaches the scene, he sees a young mother holding a baby “swaying her head to the music”:

“How long does the music go on for?” Bod asked her, but she said nothing, just swayed and smiled. Bod did not think she smiled much normally. And only when he was certain that she had not heard him, that he had Faded, or was simply not someone she cared enough about to listen to she said, “Blimmin ‘eck. It’s like Christmases.” She said it like a woman in a dream, as if she was seeing herself from the outside. In the same not-really-there tone of voice, she said, “Puts me in mind of me Gran’s sister, Aunt Clara. The night before Christmas we’d go to her, after me Gran passed away, and she’d play music on her old piano, and she’d sing, sometimes, and we’d eat chocolates and nuts and I can’t remember any of the songs she sung. But that music, it’s like all of them songs playing at once.”

The passage is emblematic for some of the larger effects that the book has on the reader. The woman with the baby is clearly in a dreamwalk of some sort, where things utterly strange take on a familiarity in which past experiences and emotions are remembered, only as if they have been amplified (“like all of them songs playing at once”). Freud would probably call this the uncanny, but the response isn’t abject fear but rather a dreamy nostalgia. The book has the same effect: The reader knows as little as Bod does about every given situation, and as layers are uncovered, there is still a sheen of mystery that is never quite stripped away. The enchanting nature of prose narrative comes from the sense of not-really-knowing, where one almost has the answer but cannot quite connect everything. This is why the big reveal at the end of some narratives is never quite as satisfying as its anticipation: the slightly unknown is much more a part of our lived existence (especially in childhood) and hence has a more powerful effect on us. As readers, we “sway” to the music of Gaiman’s prose, wondering what to make of the things we are witnessing, only to remind ourselves of the things that great art can conjure, whether it is singing Christmas songs at Aunt Clara’s in memory or a wholly new experience tweaked with familiarity: “like all of them songs playing at once.”

The greatest of children’s books can create this sense, and I wouldn’t hesitate to put The Graveyard Book in that category. I advise all those within hearing distance to read it with their eight-year-old (or above) as soon as possible.

P.S. Don’t think the book is not scary—it is. But it is scary in the way things should be scary, to heighten the senses instead of to dull them. Let it scare you—you will be better for it. I condone a good scare, especially for children.

I should add that you know a story is subpar when it all hinges on whether every moment is “connected” at the end: the movies often make use of this cheap device, and the result is a forgettable movie. The Graveyard Book leaves much of its mystery intact, which is the way I prefer things.

Voyages of Dr. Doolittle

I have started this blog in anticipation of keeping my occasional writings on adolescent literature, as the title suggests. I url'd the blog "DoolittleVoyages" because that book, the second book in the Doolittle book if my memory serves me correctly, did more for developing my early love for imaginative literature than any other book. I will be starting by posting most of the reviews I have already written on my other blog to this one. I'll try to indicate dates of writing in the title heading. Let us begin.