The Year in Review

Or rather, not.

One year when I worked as a film reviewer for radio I took it upon myself to put together a year-in-review show that attempted to provide a summary of that year's films using soundbites from my fellow reviewers. I had nearly 60 hours of material to work with and in those analog days of rerecording and literally splicing quarter-inch tape I wound up living in the production studio for three straight days without sleep. I was very proud of the end result and vowed to edit together quarterly mini reviews as the coming year progressed to avoid a similar fate.

But something happened while I listened to the show being aired. It occurred to me that as entertainment was concerned it was fine but in the end no one really gave a damn. It was early evening, New Year's Eve, and those of us at the station listening to the final playback were half amused and half talking about our plans for later that evening. Talk turned to the previous year, where we were exactly a year before, and about how we couldn't remember our favorite movies from that year.

Our producer, a good friend of mine who was also a DJ, was obsessive about year-end lists. He would compile them for his favorite music released that year and would build a show around them. He would tally his best movie list -- including summaries of why he included them on his list -- and would email them to friends in those pre-blog days and invite the recipients to reply with same. While he might have appeared a tad obsessed I know we all had our own lists and were a bit jealous at his ability to have kept so close a track on the previous twelve months.

Even I managed a list, though in order to satisfy my curiosity in being able to definitively rank them in order of favorite I modified a method borrowed from Richard Bowles' What Color Is Your Parachute. When my lists was completed I was surprised at what would "objectively" come out on top, and secretly felt like the results were less accurate, less personal for the effort.

This time last year I'd only been at the blog for a few months and didn't feel I could put together a solid, representative list of titles. I studied other lists in the kidlit blogosphere and was sure I'd done the right thing because at best I was only familiar with one or two titles at best on each list.

But after having blogged for a full year I still don't feel I can put a list together. Presumably when one makes a "best of" or "in review" list it is with the understanding that the person making the list has covered the ground necessary in order to make that judgement. One year as a film reviewer I watched 317 movies in a theatre or screening room, and countless more on video. Given that the average American moviegoer sees fewer than four movies in theaters in a year and rents less than twenty videos released in those same twelve months it was clear that I had seen enough to speak with some authority.

But I couldn't put a list together because everything I could accept as being "best" for that year might not have made the list when compared to the years on either side of it. What on the surface looked like an excellent film one year wouldn't stand the test of time. Certainly I liked plenty of films, but to isolate them into a single list felt wrong or even misleading.

It's no different with books. One look at the New York Times Bestsellers list might suggest a buying trend of the moment, and over time continued sales could indicate that a particular book has resonance with a large section of the population - and don't misunderstand, I'd love to find myself on that list one day - but making that list only reinforces the fact that we are a list-driven society. Singling out or highlighting is what we do best, it's what we know, it's how we make our snap decisions in our accelerated world.

But every one of us has fallen victim to "list trust" somewhere along the way. We've seen in magazines or newspapers or on line some best-of list and felt intrigued enough to follow-through and seek out something from the list. There's a comfort in knowing that someone has taken the time to compile a list, someone has put the thought into it, and we trust that person and their criteria enough to allow ourselves to be swayed.

And how many times have we been burned by that trust?

What if, what if all lists had to be reduced to a single title? What if the real reason for a top ten or best-of comes from an inability to pick a single significant work for the year and stand behind it? What would it look like to see everyone -- blogger and professional critic alike -- stand up and say "Of all the items I encountered this year, this is the one I found most significant, and here's why"? Instead of being able to hedge a bet that several items might find favor with a wider audience each of us could get back to the point -- our opinions, as filtered through our personal experience, shared with the world at large.

A single title, culled from the rest for whatever reason, becomes a form of celebration. Without comparing it alongside a list of other disparate items the choice of a single title reveals something about the reviewer but also offers a chance for readers to filter out the static and focus their attention. If you read ten year-in-review lists with ten titles apiece how could you not find yourself swayed by the commonalities to the exclusion of the others? But, if ten people were to give you a single title for the year, the chance of duplication drops and the opportunity to focus on that spectrum becomes easier.

In order to put my money where my mouth is (or perhaps it's my foot) I'm going to have to say that the most important book for me this year ended up being something I never reviewed. Not here at least. It was a book I came across while traveling in Europe this summer and it started a chain reaction in my thinking about juvenile non-fiction, about how we teach history to children, it even became the basis of my first (eventually abandoned) critical essay for my grad school application. To make matters worse, the text of the book is 2400 years old.

It is Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants a collection of writings by Herodotus put out by Penguin as part of a new series called Great Journeys. I originally reviewed this back in September and while you might not sense the importance of this over all the other titles I have reviewed this year, trust me, this book has clung to me the most.

From this book I began spending more time looking at non-fiction and reading up on the reading habits of boys. In what has become typical of the way I develop ideas, I have been mulling and steeping myself in non-traditional narratives and questioning whether non-fiction requires linear writing. It causes me to look at the cinematic structures adopted by graphic novels (c.f. Laika) and the rock and roll "family trees" of Pete Frame, it even dredges up old arguments I made against standardized textbooks two decades ago when I was studying to become a teacher. Given the right conditions it only takes a small spark to set a forest ablaze, and for whatever reason Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants set me on fire.

The Year in Review?

In the end I suppose that 2007 can be remembered for many different things in the world of children's literature. One could argue it was The Year of the Graphic Novel -- or at least the first year it got its due among the wider kidlit audience -- and it was the year that gave us the end of the Harry Potter series. It was the year a debate over the word 'scrotum' overshadowed the questionable merits of the book that contained it, and the year we lost our octogenarian elders Lloyd Alexander and Madeline L'Engle. A year full of books and opinions and blog posts and comments and, yes, even lists.

So it goes.

Poetry Friday: Fifty-third Calypso - Nice, Nice, Very Nice

Kurt Vonnegut wasn't the first author who dabbled in an invented religion as a way of expounding his character's (and his own) operational beliefs. In Cat's Cradle Vonnegut laid out Bokononism, a mash-up of various Eastern philosophies as expounded by a double-speaking guru encamped in the Caribbean paradise of San Lorenzo whose hymnal was composed of calypsos. The second chapter in the book lays out calypso number fifty-three as follows:

Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen --
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, Nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice --
So many different people
In the same device.

The idea behind this has to do with what Bokonon/Vonnegut calls the karass.

"If you find your life tangled up with someone else's life for no very logical reason," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member of your karass."

Which is as concise a definition as is necessary. So many paths, so many lives we cross, and somewhere along the way we all intersect, intermingle, diverge.

"Man created the checkerboard; God created the karass."

There's more. A decade or so after Vonnegut wrote this calypso a band out of Los Angeles named Ambrosia turned it into a song for their first album. When they started out they were influenced by the harmonies of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and the prog rock experimentation of King Crimson. They were "discovered" by conductor Zubin Mehta and played with the LA Philharmonic, and were the back-up band for the first Alan Parson's project album before they were ever able to get a recording contract. Most don't remember their early songs like "Holding On To Yesterday" as much as they do their later soft-rock schlock "You're the Biggest Part of Me," "How Much I Feel," and "You're the Only Woman." So sad.

But when they still had their souls they managed to add a few more verses to round out Vonnegut's and had themselves a little classic FM hit.

Nice, Nice, Very Nice
(Vonnegut Jr. - Puerta - Pack - North - Drummond)

Oh a sleeping drunkard Up in Central Park
Or the lion hunter In the jungle dark

Or the Chinese dentist Or the British Queen
They all fit together In the same machine

Nice, nice, very nice
Nice, nice, very nice
So many people in the same device

Oh a whirling dervish And a dancing bear
Or a Ginger Rogers and a Fred Astaire

Or a teenage rocker Or the girls in France
Yes, we all are partners in this cosmic dance

Nice, nice, very nice
Nice, nice, very nice
So many people in the same device

I wanted all things to make sense
So we'd be happy instead of tense

Oh a sleeping drunkard Up in Central Park
Or the lion hunter In the jungle dark

Or the Chinese dentist Or the British Queen
They all fit together In the same machine

Nice, nice, very nice
Nice, nice, very nice
So many people in the same device
So many people in the same device

If I could make *%#@! Blogger accept my audio plug-in I'd have the song linked here. Instead, you'll have to visit someone else's blog to hear this opus.

Summer Reading, Part Four: Shorts

Warm weather, the dog days of summer, time to break out the shorts. Nothing more refreshing and cooler than lounging about, unencumbered, with plenty of free time to lounge and let the mind flicker an wander. The perfect time to snack on short stories and other collected short works.

I am opening this one to the floor because while I feel I could cover this topic myself I've found myself more and more wondering how others would answer the following question:

What collections of short stories, sudden fiction, or essay collections would you recommend to a summer reader as a nice, occasional pick-me-up?

I already feel that regular readers know that were it not for my discovery of Kurt Vonnegut's short story collection Welcome to the Monkey House when I was in my early teens I might not have been the reader I am today. But that wasn't my first brush with the single-author short story collection. No, that honor goes to Ray Bradbury's The Golden Apples of the Sun, a book I remember toting around with me in the fifth or sixth grade. I couldn't tell you where it came from or honestly say I remember the stories it contained (although many of the titles are deeply familiar in some way) and this book is among others on my NTR (Need to Re-read) list.

(Speaking of Mr. Bradbury, apparently we got it all wrong when we've read Fahrenheit 451 as an anti-censorship book; looks like it's an attack on television. Add another book to the NTR pile...)

There are, of course, collections aimed at middle grade and young readers that aren't half a century old that are widely available and enjoyed by kids. Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (and its sequels) is only a quarter century old! Schwartz is a collector of folklore and his tales represent those that are often told aloud and by necessity short enough to be memorized. I would consider these stories essential for campfires and slumber parties -- in fact I remember many of them from campfires when I was young, a testament to their lasting power. The stories themselves don't scare the reader as much as they might a listener as a large number include directions at the end for grabbing someone while screaming the last crucial line.

On the quieter side of things there's Cynthia Rylant's collection Every Living Thing gathers a dozen short stories where an animal plays an integral part in changing a person's life. I have to admit that the stories caught me a little off guard at first because they have an almost "adult" feel to them. "Planting Things" tells of an older retired couple, a man who likes to work the garden for the joy of it while his wife is housebound with illness. A jay makes a nest in one of his flower pots on the porch and while he delights in watching the fledglings grow and leave the nest his wife is content to stay in her bed and hear his second-hand tales. When the birds have flown off he collects the nest with the intention of setting it out the following spring to "grow" another family of birds.

And when I finished I couldn't help wondering "What would a kid make of that story?" Indeed, what do young readers make of stories that don't exists to push a happy ending or solve a particular riddle but instead celebrate small, changing moments in life. It's thoughts like this that lead me down a trail of optimism that the revival of the short story is immanent.

Another fine collection aimed at the middle grade reader is Richard Peck's Past Perfect, Present Tense, a brilliant title for a short story collection if ever there was one. Peck's collection begins with an introduction that briefly explains how short stories work. He then provides an introduction to his first-ever published short story including what his assignment was and how he approached it. Many young writers will appreciate the insight as much as they will the humorous story that came out of his thinking. Like many good teachers, Peck shows and tells giving his voice authority without scaring readers away. Each of the books sections contains an introduction that explains their grouping or origins. I wish there were more books like this.

Or are there?

This is where I wanted to open up the floor for discussion. What I like, what I am attracted to, are stories by a single author because I can see the breadth and variety of the author's thinking. If I like an author's style I'll want to read more, and while I understand the benefit of a story collection by many hands if a particular story doesn't catch me I might not search out that author to see if something else does.

Additionally, I am curious to know if anyone out there can recommend essay collections for children. I have seen in the past chain bookstore attempting to push David Sedaris' Me Talk Pretty One Day on their Teen Beach Reads table and scratched my head. In the beginning, Sedaris' essays were funny but they don't leave a lasting impression and I never said to myself "Teens would really love this!" Still, as I said, I am curious to know if anyone has encountered collections of essays that would be enjoyed by younger audiences.

I will add that as far as non-fiction goes I think there could be better coverage of collections on music, politics and general interest. The Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Non-required Reading, and the Da Capo Best Music Writing anthologies, among others, are totally acceptable for teens but what's out there for the younger reader, the pre-teen who might be interested in general non-fiction topics but wants something more substantial than a collection of factoids? Any ideas?

* * * * *

Our story thus far...
Episode One - Low Humor
Episode Two - Non-fiction?
Episode Three - Trash
Episode Four - Shorts
Stay tuned for the final episode in the series: Part Five - The Index to Periodical Literature

Feathers

Jacqueline Woodson
Putnam 2007

I've been floundering with this book for over a week now, trying to figure out what exactly it is I want to say. Twice now my attempts to review the book have quickly become examinations of the 1970's and why it feels like we're seeing more books set during that time and what, if any, relation all this has on our current political landscapes and whether younger readers really want to read about all this as "period" reading.

At it's simplest the story come from the wrong-side-of-the-tracks family. A boy with long hair transfers mid-year to the new school on the bad side of town, literally on the wrong side of the tracks. Being the new kid, the odd fish, makes him the easy target for the bullies and because he looks white and the other students are a rainbow of browns he is instantly viewed with suspicion. The Jesus Boy, nicknamed because of his hair and serenity in the face of his non-violent approach to life, causes unease because some of the kids begin to wonder if he isn't Jesus come back to test their faith. When finally pushed to the edge by Trevor, the class bully, JB finally lets lose a verbal assault that disarms Trevor but proves JB is like the rest of them, capable of cruelty and anger. JB's secret is that he was adopted by black parents who moved across the tracks because life wasn't any easier for them on the other side. Kids are egalitarian in their cruelty.

The story is told from the point of view of Frannie who, along with her deaf brother Sean, give us another perspective on being outsiders. Frannie doesn't feel she fits in with those around her who are more deeply connected to their church, and her brother Sean makes a connection between his deafness being a separate world that keeps disconnected. Frannie wants to believe as her friends do but she sees too many contradictions to settle her rational mind; Sean knows that no matter which side of the tracks he lives on he'll always be an outsider to the hearing world, a world he can never be a part of unlike his sister who can travel in his world through sign language.

The title comes from Frannie's book-long inquiry into a poem by Emily Dickinson which begins with the line "Hope is a thing with feathers." Indeed, it makes me wonder what Woodson herself hopes for both within the book and without.

Setting the story in the 1970's allows for a certain distancing from the idea of a segregated society, but the the ideas that lie beneath are as real today as they might have been 30 years ago. Somewhere between then and now American society has recreated new divisions and seems desperate to reclaim old one. Politics, religion and even music have moved to their respective sides of the track and don't take kindly to outsiders attempting to pass or blend in.

So why go there? Are we seeing an increase of writers who came of age during those times who feel the resonance so strongly with our current climate? The 70's are equally alive in Barbara Kerley's Greetings From Planet Earth so I'm wondering if this is a trend or a blip or just coincidence.

This perhaps moves outside the parameters of the review, but sometimes the universe sends a message and you have to puzzle it out the best you can. For a very long time now I've been wondering what to make of my particular generation, a shoulder generation who are alternately claimed as being either the tail end of the Boomers or the front end of Generation X. To my knowledge this generation is not formally recognized by marketers or the media and my experience has been that those born between 1958 and 1963 have a general sense of feeling left out. It was while I was at my wife's graduation ceremony this week that I had another old idea brought back to the surface. It was under the guise of referring to a graduating class as a karass, a term invented by Kurt Vonnegut, taken from Cat's Cradle (published in 1963 coincidentally), which is defined as "a team that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing."

I'm beginning to feel as if my karass is making itself known in children's literature.

Vonnegut's Vonnegut

Regular blogging will continue tomorrow.

My Vonnegut

It occurred to me at some point in the last year that I should be thinking about writing a personal obituary for Kurt Vonnegut. It wasn't that I thought his passing was inevitable, I merely wanted to be prepared because I knew the moment I heard the news I probably wouldn't be able to articulate my ideas and feelings. I kept putting it off, occasionally convincing myself that it was ghoulish to believe the man didn't have more years in him, that I still had plenty of time.

Looks like I missed the deadline.

It started in my garage. In my early teens the garage became one of those in-house sanctuaries for exploration and time alone. It was there that I discovered boxes of private things my dad owned. This didn't initially strike me as odd as my parents clearly held different personal and political views and to prevent discord they defaulted to abstinence. Politics were not discussed because they supported different parties. We owned more music than books but because they had different tastes (mom dug Motown, dad was a country-folkie) it was never played. Apparently there were books belonging to my dad that didn't belong with what few books we owned in the one bookcase in the living room.

It wasn't personal taste that caused the segregation of those books, but the dangerousness of their subject matter -- Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask) by Dr. David Reuben and Welcome To the Monkey House by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It might have seemed rational with my hormones raging that I would have gravitated to the book about sex but a quick glance at its contents scared me. The book made repeated references to the sexual practices and activities of men and women, and to my teenage mind that meant adults, which included my parents, and I didn't want any unsavory mental pictures. That left me the Vonnegut to puzzle out, which I did over the course of a month's worth of bathroom visits. The bathroom was my other sanctuary and allowed me to read the book in secret. My parents probably thought I was masturbating.

The advantage of a short story collection is that you get a sampling of an author's voice and talents. While there were stories that I appreciated -- "Harrison Bergeron", "D.P." and "Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow" -- I wasn't quite satisfied. I felt like there was something more, something I wasn't really getting. It was time to go to the library.

This Vonnegut person had a good smattering of books on the shelves, the most promising of which was Cat's Cradle. I pulled it down and found a nook at the edge of the adult reading room and began reading. The chapters were short, like an early chapter book, but the story was told in an almost glib voice, staccato phrasing and disjointed. I didn't get it, mostly because I was unfamiliar with the style. I put the book back and gave up on Vonnegut.

A month later in a casual conversation with a classmate named Po I found another person who'd heard of Vonnegut. No, she hadn't just heard of him, she was practically an apostle. Her older brother had hipped her to his books and she was fan enough to recount all their plots in great detail. What she told me not only rekindled my interest but was exactly the confirmation I needed to know going in: "He's a cynical bastard, Elz, you'll like him." I think that's what she said. She might have actually said "you're like him."

As luck would have it in these situations Vonnegut had a new book out called Breakfast of Champions. I had no idea what I was in for but I was determined to figure out what this Vonnegut person was all about. There were raised eyes from the ladies at the check-out counter of my library but nothing more. I had planned to wait until I got home to start reading but curiosity got the better of me. And there I was, standing in the middle of the sidewalk reading the words and looking at the pictures (pictures! juvenile scrawl in the author's own hand!) thinking: I can't believe they would publish this.

In his own way, Vonnegut casually begins his book on matters that seem tangential to the story, or offered up as background. What he's actually doing is setting up his leitmotifs and his riffs, a verbal overture if you will meant to fool you into thinking that the story's coming, soon, sooner, just wait. In Breakfast of Champions there is talk of stories being published in nudie magazines, wedged between beaver shots, and for those who might be confused he offers his own drawings of what those photos would look like followed by a drawing of the animal it is compared with. I might not have been ready to deal with the realities of sex, but this I could understand!

And then a funny thing happened: I started liking books again, started liking reading. Over the course of seven years of formal education I had slowly had the joy of reading drained and beaten out of me. The initial flush of excitement that comes from being able to read for yourself had slowly been choked by endless worksheets full of directions, SRA booklets and Ginn & Co. readers with serviceable, workman-like stories designed for comprehension questions. The encouragement to read was still there, the library talks and the individual recommendations from teachers, but the joy had been deadened. By seventh grade the materials we were being introduced to had importance and carried weight as classics (or at the very least culturally significant) but there was little fun to be extracted from the exercise of reading, much less from the subject matter.

Vonnegut gave me hope. There were adults in the world writing books that were as outrageous as the British comedy that was being exported to PBS, full of the absurdities of mankind told with a dry acerbic wit. I got it, enough to send me back to Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five. It sent me to the drama section for a script of a PBS television adaptation of his stories called Between Time and Timbuktu. I reread the short stories with a new eye. By the time I was in eighth grade and had to write a book report/personal narrative in long-form (over 12 pages) I not only wrote in my version of Vonnegut's style, I made him a character in the report. I used to say Vonnegut taught me how to write but that's not true; Vonnegut gave me permission to borrow his voice until I could find my own, and he gave me a few hints about where to find it as well.

Vonnegut's name attached to a review in either Newsweek or Time made mention of Joseph Heller and Philip Roth. I read Catch-22 and Portnoy's Complaint as a result. Comparisons to Twain were made, but as much as I appreciate Twain's wit I never cared for the style. Understanding this didn't make it easier for me to find the kinds of voices I was looking for in literature but it did lead me down some unusual paths. I was too impatient to actually learn the finer points of craft in my own writing -- I would race to tell a story but skimp on details, butchered spelling, sucked at editing for clarity -- but I didn't let piddling details stop me. Another friend once referred to some poetry I attempted as Ginsburg-esque, an insult at the time because I wanted to be forward-looking, not beatnik. When it came time to head off to college I brought along two treasured authors: Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski.

Perfect for art school.

I suppose the death watch on Vonnegut officially begins in the mid-1980's. In the same year he published his last great book (in my opinion) Galapagos and attempted suicide. There was, in the back of my mind, a hope that one day I might be able to meet the man, that I would be in a place where we would both have something to talk about to each other. More than fanboy idolatry and perhaps something close to peer. Or master and student. But if my onset of puberty happened on-time my creative maturity has taken somewhat longer and the thought of ever being even a fledgling desciple long past. A

t a certain point when my beloved creatives began to shuffle off this mortal coil I realized my time with each of them was precious and limited. In the ever-present question of whom I would invite to a fantasy dinner for conversation the list of possible names on the roster keeps getting shorter. Up until yesterday Vonnegut's name was at the head of the table. Robert Altman was at that table until last year. Something tells me J.D. Salinger is going to bow out before I can send the invitation.

In the end I figured Vonnegut would play the wise old cuss until the very end. For all his doom and gloom he held in his heart a place for the redemption of humanity, no matter how much he argued for the other side. That is until recently. The election and re-election of George Bush and the policies and actions of the Bush administration finally broke his resolve. Here is a man who, as a US Infantryman, survived the fire bombing of Dresden in World War II and witnessed all of human history for the second half of the 20th century and could still find glimmers of hope that we weren't headed for self-destruction as a species. But for the last six years he has had that hope whittled away until finally, in his essays for In These Times (later collected in Man Without a Country) he had concluded there was no longer any reason to hold out hope.

In short, George W. Bush killed Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut had anticipated dying from his addiction to cigarettes. He considered it an elegant form of suicide. Even twenty years after his official suicide attempt he was still going strong, still smoking, still unable to kill himself. Much like his faith in humans to not blow themselves into smithereens, that optimism that informed his cynicism kept him alive. Like many of us, we want to know how the movie is really going to turn out. The minute he began to feel all was lost was when he began to give up. I know he died from brain injuries suffered after a fall in his home, but somewhere in that brain the switch to fight for survival had been flipped to the off position.

In time, as with all writers, all that remains is the voice. For those who have left us many years ago the sting of that loss is dulled, if present at all. Those born today will not miss Vonnegut the person for lack of the intangible sense of having walked the Earth at the same time he did. Somehow, being alive at the time of a writer gives their voice a certain meaning, a sense of something shared. In the end the voice still carries on, in books, in recordings, in memories of speeches given. The voice is time-stamped, dated. He has said all he will ever say.

“If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph: The only proof he needed for the existence of God was music." —Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without a County

Good-bye, Blue Monday.

Rejected

I could just as easily titled this post Blue Monday, in honor of it being the most depressing day of the year. But it's such a day of mixed feelings that I thought Rejected better spoke to my mood.

It's never good to get that envelope back from a publisher, especially when it looks recycled and has the previous address covered with a sticker and other bits and pieces covered over with a fat felt-tipped marker. I'm no Kreskin, but the envelope had all the markings of a sloppy, harried intern. I won't say which publisher or which editor's name was attached, only that it was a little sad to get back the manuscript with nary a comment in sight.

I didn't even get a terse little form letter.

But all is not lost. Before the mail came I was able to toss out 13 lucky manuscript pages that, raw as they are, feel a whole lot better than the manuscript that came home with it's tail between it's legs. Granted, we're talking apples and oranges here -- picture book versus YA -- but it was still nice to be able to get something out ahead of the influence of otherwise bad news.

Oh yeah, and the ALA made some sort of announcements today about some kind of awards. All I really have to say is that as much as I like Flotsam I was pretty sure it would be passed over for something like Adele and Simon. Time will tell whether American Born Chinese really is the best that graphic novels have to offer. I have issues with graphic novels, and it's all about the disconnect between the history and tradition of the form and whether or not the librarians and booksellers really are up to speed with understanding what makes a truly good graphic novel. I'm still stewing over a post about this. Some day...

A parting shout out to Vonnegut, who first introduced me to the phrase Goodbye Blue Monday and saved me from myself back in 8th grade when I was a pubescent mess.