resolved

excelsior blogiversary

Today is officially the first anniversary of the excelsior file. I like that the word giver is embedded in the word blogiversary.

A lot has happened in the last year. It isn't like me to toot my own horn but I'm feeling like maybe this once I need to get over the awkwardness of the whole thing and just do it.

A year ago today I jumped into the kidlit blogosphere with the idea of using this blog as a place for exploring my continued personal education in children's literature. I had just started reviewing for The Horn Book Guide but knew I wanted to say more about books than could fit into 60 word summaries.

I can get wordy. I'll try to keep this brief.

As months went on I wasn't sure if the blog was anything more than the proverbial tree falling in the forest: did anyone hear me as I felled those trees? Comments were scarce, other bloggerss out there were covering the same territory (better in many cases, I thought), and I was on the verge of giving up and refocusing my energies elsewhere. But all along there was a stream of comments from kidlit bloggers -- a trickle grew to a brook, then into a stream, not quite a river -- and there was no doubt of my continuing; I felt compelled, I couldn't stop.

Today I find myself at a different juncture. I'm still blogging, still reviewing, but I feel a need to go beyond reviewing books. I've occasionally dabbled in opinions and rants but they always felt out of place on this blog.

Then there was this little matter this past August, when I applied for grad school and then managed to get myself accepted. Starting in January (unless something staggeringly unusual or unfortunate happens) I'll begin work on my MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults at the Vermont College of Fine Arts.

As part of the process I decided I wanted to set up a place for documenting the journey from kidlit blogger to kidlit author. Or at least potential kidlit author. So for the past month behind the scenes I've been working out the rough edges of a new space, a new blog, one that will run parallel with this one. It's called fomagrams.

the excelsior file will continue as a home for reviews of children's literature, as it almost always has, and I'm hoping to maintain the steady flow of reviews. fomagrams will cover more personal issues, it will document my student life, my home life, and the various and sundry things that I feel the sudden urge to share with the world. Those who want only the reviews can keep visiting me here (and I hope you do) while those who want to watch the slow-motion train wreck that is my mid-life academic career can visit me at fomagrams.

To all who have joined me this far -- both in the post and with the blog -- thanks. Sorry it wasn't as short as I'd hoped. I'll work on keeping it shorter next year.

We're gonna break out the hats and hooters, it's party time...

News & Notes

The past couple of weeks have been hectic, what with getting the girls into a new school routine, the wife starting a new high-power job, getting accepted to grad school, writing reviews for The Horn Book Guide, building a new blog, blah, blah, blah.

Here's the deal. I am backlogged with dozens of reviews I just haven't found the time to get down and one of these days, pretty soon, the floodgates are going to open. This blog has it's one year anniversary coming very soon and I'll be dropping a more full news announcement then about some changes (all for the good) coming from the knowledge lair at the excelsior file.

In the meantime, the Second Annual Cybils are coming up and after spending the past year kicking myself for not participating in the inaugural run I find myself on this year's graphic novel committee. Yeee! You can click on the link above for general info, but here's the line-up for the graphic novel group.

Category Organizer: Sarah Stevenson (Reading YA: Readers' Rants)

Nominating Panel:

Mary Lee Hahn (A Year of Reading)
Alyssa Feller (The Shady Glade)
Katie Zenke (Pixie Palace)
Elizabeth Jones
Gina Ruiz (AmoXicalli)

Judging Panel:

David Elzey (The Excelsior File)
J.L. Bell (Oz and Ends)
Anna (TangognaT)
Snow Wildsmith (My Reading Project)
Angie Thompson (Angieville)

Wow. This is going to be a wild ride. I better keep my hands and arms inside the blog at all times! In the meantime I have to go run some errands. Hopefully I'll be up to speed within the next couple of days. So much to talk about!

Is it time we revisit the Grimmoire?

Vote! Vote! For Octogoat!

I cannot help it, my suggestion for the Adam Rex Contest over at Ironic Sans is the first choice listed. I'm sure most of you have a horse in this race as well, but if you don't and you like to see what Adam Rex can do with my recycler extraordinaire then, please, go vote!

Seriously, my sad little Octogoat is only at 1% of all votes so far, trailing well behind the leader AMBIGUGUS, The Remarkably Unmemorable Man with 27%.

Voting ends tomorrow at midnight EST.

I thank you for your kind indulgence.

Off Holiday

Officially I won't be back up and running with regular blog posts until Monday. I should have decompressed and acclimatized enough by then to talk about books again. But one can't take a trip abroad and not come back and make a few comments.











First, IcelandAir: Worst. Airline. Ever. No matter how many times their "convenient" mid-way layovers in Reykjavik come up as the cheapest way to European destinations, resist the urge at all costs. What's not to like? After being told of a two-hour weather-related flight delay we were promised our connecting flight would wait for us at the other end.

It did not.

In fact, it was leaving the ground as ours was taxiing to the gate. Other joys: clueless guest services (they didn't even know about their own customer's rights policy, despite a posted sign), uncomfortable planes (no, really, worse than normal), weird Icelandic food in flight (meatballs made of fish? salmon carrot salad?), disorganized boarding procedures (herded into holding areas, no controlled board procedures), and the only flight (of 5) that departed and landed on time was our re-routed flight from Sweden (!) on a different airline.

That said, Paris was as beautiful as always, despite my shaky nighttime-without-a-tripod photography.


















For some odd reason my first shot was of a scooter.



















My last shot was also, though it was in Amsterdam.












Versailles is opulent.











This was the summer home away from the palace? No wonder the people revolted. I wonder what would happen if the excesses of our government were as visibly tangible. Oh yes, the traditional garden shot from Versailles.












And the Louvre, where you can take pictures of people taking pictures of artwork they can buy postcards of in the museum store.












Including strange self portraits in a room full of ancient Assyrian carved-stone gates reflected in a giant arced mirror.









Trust me, despite my pictures the Louvre was as crowded as the evacuation of Beijing.



And there were doorways




















And doorways



















And then a train to Amsterdam where arty nighttime shots were attempted (lack of focus deliberate)












And it was a big gay pride weekend, with parade flotillas along the canals












The commuter parking lots looked like this, explaining why European cities are so quiet. And require less road work.












Of course, with such quaint small streets...












They need smaller vehicles.












You can't ignore the flower market









(yes, 40 roses for about $10.25 USD)

But these are what the tulips look like right now












Unless you want fake wooden ones.











Naturally there was much that can't be properly photographed. The food, the cafe sits, the sudden insights while drifting off to sleep about the organic differences between American and European literature and how much those writers we consider literary follow that European model, browsing bookstores, coffeeshops, red light districts, art in museums where you cannot take pictures. Things like that.

Though I had hoped to make some kidlit discoveries abroad I was thwarted by such things as sightseeing and otherwise relaxing. I did manage to pick up a few books, with a couple of things noteworthy for future blog posts. But the most prominent picture book I saw in every bookstore in Paris and Amsterdam?




















I guess they haven't gotten around to translating Flotsom yet. Library Lion was a close second for availability. And the two most available YA titles: Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series and John Green's An Abundance of Katherines.

All in all, a much-deserved and very relaxing time bridging a very intense time and a pending hectic time. I'm going to get some more sleep and work on my flickr account, get a littler more reading done and be back next week with some real content.

On Holiday

And a proper one at that. Call it a belated honeymoon (when did we get married?), a little adult time, or a celebration of someone taking (and passing we trust!) the Bar Exam, my sweetie and I are headed off on a major two-city tour of Europe.

Which means that I'll be dark here until sometime around August 12th. I'm hoping to just chill for a couple weeks and come back refreshed and ready to hunker down with some writing. I'm also hoping to come back with one or two discoveries of my own. Okay, maybe a picture book or two, and the Dutch equivalent of Dick and Jane.

And speaking of Jane, I hope to finally get to my review of The Plain Janes when I'm back home. Short version: I think I like it. But there's another book in queue I most decidedly did not like and I just can't decide whether it's worth the time to even think about. Maybe something by Garth Nix? We'll see.

Catch up with y'all in the dog days!

I thought I'd at least rate a PG-13...

Very interesting. Based on a very low sampling of words scanned from my blog I apparently warrant a PG rating. Here's the deal:

This rating was determined based on the presence of the following words:

• steal (3x)
• pain (2x)
• dangerous (1x)
  

I wonder how the rest of the kidlit blogosphere checks out. Click on the rating and check yourself out.

Blogger Laureate

Roger said so. I'm speechless.

No, actually, I'm not. I'm going to go make a tiara out of a pipe cleaners, pop beads and macaroni and wear it during my tenure as Blogger Laureate.

For all of 30 seconds. I now name Fuse #8 Blogger Laureate.

Way. Too. Much.

Welcome to all and sundry who may have tripped over here via Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast or, as we like to say in our culture of abbreviation, 7Imp.

When I agreed to the interview I thought "well, it'll be small and quick and a fast read" because, honestly, it's not like I'm M.T. Anderson or Grace Lin or someone like that. I didn't realize I had so much of myself... out there, for all to see. It feels like way. too. much.

The interview is there, the blog is here. Thanks for stopping by. Now, back to the business at hand.

dot dot dot

I don't generally traffic in kidlit news as I find others out there do it much better and more frequently, but this story from The Walrus hit my radar while checking out information on Grimm tales. The Grimm reference is almost tangential, the story is about the disappearance of childhood and the audience for books to go with. In particular I chortled at this particular quote:

If picture books are on the wane, Young Adult fiction is thriving. “You should write YA,” a publisher told me. “That’s where the money is.”

What kind of money are we talking about, exactly?

Actually, there's a nice little breakdown on how the children's book market has changed under the weight of big bookstores (perhaps nothing new, but good to remember) and I'm always a sucker for an article that references Neil Postman's work. I am, admittedly, a product of his Soft Revolution.

How Doth Chaucer Blog?

It was only a matter of time before the dead started blogging. Go on, follow the link to Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog and see what the man is up to these days.

Personally, if someone can point me in the direction of Jules Verne's blog I'd greatly appreciate it. He seemed ahead of his time, perhaps he's been hosting a blog for the last 130 years or so. Though knowing him he's probably running it on a Babbage platform.

Tagged, Double-Tagged Even!

I suppose I should have seen it coming when an author I reviewed called my rambling stream-of-consciousness take on his book "brainy". Now I get hit by the tag-team (pun intended) of Eisha and Jules over at 7Imp as both a "Thinking Blog" and for another meme concerning the non-lit blogs I frequent.

Yikes.

The Thinking Blog thing has me a bit stumped as I've been watching all my thinking blogs get tagged before my very eyes. And since I don't believe "tag backs" are fair I'm going to have to give that post a little more thought than my non-lit post.

My five non-lit blogs, in no particular order...

• ModMom is my secret doorway into the world Mid-Century Modern art and design. Well, it's not so secret, just my secret. Maybe secret isn't the word. ModMom celebrates the art and style of an era that taps directly into the innocence and nostalgia of my elementary school days. It showcases the boldness in design that briefly promised us a future of unique furnishings in 1970's colors that weren't only avocado and burnt orange. It also rounds up contemporary artists, designers, businesses and retailers who are capturing and reviving that spirit today and bringing it back for retro hipsters.

• Keri Smith's The Wish Jar may get a double-hit here because I think of this as both a creative artist's on-line journal and a Thinking Blog. Keri calls herself "Author, Illustrator, Guerrilla Artist" but so much of what she posts are also meditations on the creative act. In February she participated in "A Thing A Day" month by creating something and posting it without fail. Many of the "things" could be viewed as the kind of creative exercises an artist might do when feeling stumped in their regular work, but with Keri each is carefully considered, grouped each week by theme, and presented almost like silent lessons in jump-starting your brain. Or my brain at least.

• This one's a bit off the rails. It's Seth Godin's Blog and perhaps one of the oldest blogs I've kept tabs with. Seth is a marketer, but he's also an innovator. He writes about the ideas surrounding marketing from a point of view that takes common sense and turns it on it's head. Seth's books looked like someone misplaced some fiction titles in the business section, the art was fresh and fun and the titles themselves were not like most business titles: The Big Red Fez, Free Prize Inside, The Purple Cow, All Marketers Are Liars. What's not to like? At that point I actually had to rethink my position on books in the business section and began to read both his blog and the places he takes me for views on how people think and act in the marketplace. If you read this post on brands and mythology with an eye toward Harry Potter you'll know why I keep checking him out.

• Time for the out-of-the-blue segment. When I was in fifth grade I wanted to be an animator. Lacking the actual ability to draw, and not having the foresight at that time to see that digital cartoons were on the horizon in a dozen years, I gave up the dream but never the interest. To that end I like to check in on the blogs of animators, artists who work in animation, and a handful of animation student who seem promising to me. Lorelay Bove is a character animation student at Cal Arts, a college founded by Disney that focuses primarily on animation. Her works reminds me of Mary Blair, going back to that Mid-Century thing again. She works both traditionally (with paint) and digitally but prefers the hand-drawn and when viewed side-by-side you can see the warmth that always seems to be lacking in digital work by artists. She's not a frequent poster -- she is a student after all -- but when she does the illustrations she posts are like little tea time pauses in a text-bound day.

• Finally, I cook. Five nights a week. I'm not great, but I can hold my own. I have any number of places that I like to visit for recipes and general info but Coconut & Lime is the place I go to when I want a good kick in the rut. Rachel Rappaport has been featured on NPR and was the winner of "best original recipes" category in the 2006 Food Blog Awards. You know, I didn't even know that until just this moment when I was double-checking her info for this post. Unlike other food blogs where people post their variations on established recipes, Rachel always seems to be exploring the possibilities and her recipes stand out as a result. Well-illustrated, nicely designed, it's a good blog all around. And it tastes good, too.

So that's my five. Passing it forward, I have the same problems as with the Thinking Blogger tag: everyone I know appears to have been hit already. The problem of being low man on the totem pole. If you're reading this, and you haven't been tagged, and you want to participate please (a) feel free to do so and (b) give me a hard time in the comments for not tagging you properly.

The Akond of Swat

Oh, man! Proof that the Internets are a deadly place!

So I was toolin' around and found this post by Brooke over at The Brookeshelf. Some guy animates an Edward Lear poem. I'm totally digging it, remembering how Lear opened up the whole world of poetry to me when I was in fourth grade.

And then it hits me: Could these wonderful Internets also contain even more Edward Lear? Not just, but more: They contain an Edward Lear poem recited by Ken Nordine. To wit.

Ken Nordine was a 50's jazz poet, a voiceover artist, a man whose voice you hear and never forget. The first time I heard it was when I was young and he was doing ads for Levi's. He's done stuff with Jerry Garcia and put out a number of Word Jazz disks in his time. In the annals of spoken word, he's a great.

Then I'm checking out the comments on his video on YouTube and there's all this stuff about people not digging his politics. Ken defends himself by saying they're Lear's politics but what I'm seeing is people object to Nordine suggesting that Lear's poem did not apply equally to the political leaders shown in the video.

Reading the poem straight it is difficult to make out if Lear is just riffing on the possibilities of what a charismatic and war-like leader the Akhund was (according to one citation I found) or if he was merely using the unique sound of the title as a way of taking charge against the behavior of despotic leaders in general. I'm no Lear scholar, it's difficult to say, but I'm guessing the latter.

I also find it curious is that this poem, "The Akond of Swat," is included in the Edward Lear volume of Poetry for Young People series put out by Sterling, edited by Edward Mendelson. Here's their introduction:

"The poem never tells us who the Akond of Swat might be, but there really was a person with that title; he was a religious leader in what is now Pakistan, and Lear read about him while planning a trip to India."

All very well and good, but I suspect there's more to this story.

As for Mr. Nordine's politics, all I can say is if the images offend then close your eyes and listen. The man has a great voice.

Fewer Books, More Video Games in Schools

Right.

The answer isn't literacy, it's functional illiteracy. Perfect for military service, which is about all we expect from our public school these days anyway.

Urg! Don't get me started!

Hamas More Easily Swayed Than Librarians?

Okay, that was a bit of a cheap shot.

A while back Roger Sutton drew our attention to a news item in which the Hamas-run Palestinian government was banning a book because it had, as originally reported here, vague sexual inuendos. After some protesting we now get news that the Hamas government has revoked that decision.

Originally I had suspected that the reason the government didn't approve might have to do with a large number of the stories coming from female narrators. But out of this article from an Israeli news agency we get this nice little bit:

Parts of the book that some find objectionable include lines like "Allah will curse your friends' father!" and "I will piss on you," according to a manifesto a young bearded Hamas member distributed at the rally.

Nice. That beats the heck out of a scrotum any day. Figuratively speaking.

Hours of My Life I May Never Retrieve

It has been a long time since I've seen a movie that made me yearn, nay ached, to to have those precious lost minutes returned to me.

I watched The Devil Wears Prada two nights ago and I'm still feeling the loss.

Years ago when I was reviewing movies for fun and non-profit there were whole seasons filled with dread as Hollywood found ways to fill the calendar year with movies they could not justify throwing into the trash. The early months of January through March are a sort of wasteland while the industry readies itself for the annual gift of collective log rolling which is the Academy Awards. As spring comes into view movies tumble out of the festival circuits and into the movie houses where some writer-director's self-indulgent wanking gets confused with art. And foreign films, mustn't forget those, as they poke their heads up from behind the hedges hoping not to get slaughtered in the pre-summer movie blockbuster assault.

And when you're watching three to five new movies a week your bound to come across things committed to celluloid that could make you weep for those precious lost minutes. Much the same way you can occasionally pick up a book and weep for the tree that gave up its life for results that insult its memory.

Under most circumstances I would never have chosen to see The Devil Wears Prada. I did so with a reluctance that I cannot touch or name except to call it The Sixth Sense. The way a child sees dead people I can see a dead movie. I don't actually have to see the movie in question, in fact I can see as little as 30 seconds of a preview on television, or read the testimonials in a newspaper ad, and I know there's a little brown shark in the bath water.

I suppose, if pressed, I could say that I remember seeing the book in stores when it was first released and, after a glance at the cover art, could have predicted the premise if not the entire plot. So, yes, that could have prejudiced me against the movie. But the curiosity factor was still there, a clever device created by studios and casting directors whereby they lure actors into these movies specifically to fool people like me who should know better.

Why would Meryl Streep be in this movie if there wasn't something to it? And Stanley Tucci, he's never really done something strictly for the paycheck as far as I can remember...

Ah, but see how cleverly they have worked their Hollywood pixie dust! By cloaking Ms. Streep in fine Italian sheepskin they have created a situation where, indeed, she does seem Oscar worthy.

But only compared with the rest of that movie. She isn't even a candle's wisp against the raging gale force wind that is Helen Mirren or the class five hurricane that is Dame Judi Dench. A good actress, yes, but an Oscar nod for a one-note smolder? Please. My best guess is that the Academy felt a little funny not putting up at least one token American, but that goes into politics and would further take me off my already diversionary course.

Afterward there wasn't even the regret that I might have better used the time reading or cleaning my shower but an actual loss, an emotional depression.

And the next night I realized that after all these years it was time to finally give up on 24. Jack Bauer and the CTU gang have lost any pull they once had and I can no longer justify giving them the space of an hour a week. I had hopes that Aaron Sorkin's Studio 60 might serve as a soothing balm after 24, a nightcap as it were, but like that mislaid glass of champagne you find several hours after the party has started the show has quickly grown flat, tepid and leaves an aftertaste like Old Spice.

I never used to watch this much TV, in fact I went through most of the 1990's without using my television as anything more than a monitor for movie watching. Strangely, I didn't seem to miss much. I found I could keep in touch with popular culture through Entertainment Weekly and sound intelligent around the water cooler and at parties and no one was the wiser.

And I got a lot more reading done.

Perhaps, if I'm very lucky, over time I can recoup my losses through a strenuous regimen of reading. A minute here, another there, and slowly the essence of those missing minutes will be reconstituted into a rough approximation of time regathered. A leap day, as it were, as compensation for my industry and dedication.

Until the next ARC of a middling young adult novel crosses the transom, then it starts all over.