From sopping wet New York City here is your philosophical question of the day: If April showers bring May flowers, what the heck do May showers bring? Ponder that while I hand you a piping hot plate o’ Fusenews.
- My library branch is turning 100 next week (you may have noticed the pretty New Yorker cover that referenced this) but it’s acting pretty spry for a centennial. For one thing, NYPL is coming out left and right with fancy dancy apps! Here’s one for the researchers. Here’s another that’s a game. Here’s a third that lets you reserve books. Insanity!
- This week’s Best Post Ever: Travis Jonker is a genius. A full-blown, certified genius. He’s come up with a Middle Grade Title Generator that leaps on the current trend of titles that sound like “The (insert word ending in -ion) of (insert slightly off kilter first and last name for girls)”. He came up with a couple examples like “The Gentrification of Geraldine Frankenbloom” but his commenters really picked up the gist of the idea and ran with it. Rockinlibrarian’s “The Zombification of Apple McGillicutty” (which I would read in a red hot minute) may be my favorite but a close second was Lisa’s “The Excommunication of Willow Diddledeedee.” I got nothing so cool. The best I could come up with was “The Computerization of Sarasota McNerdly.” I doubt it would sell.
- Adam Rex recently penned a post that works as An Open Letter to Everyone Who Thinks It Must Be Easy, Writing Children’s Books. It’s in response to Paula Poundstone (whom I also like) and her recent faux pas on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me when she told Brenda Bowen that she thought it would be easy to write a picture book. Note, if you will, that Poundstone has not actually attempted to do so. In fact, the only stand-up comedian picture books that immediately come to mind are those by Whoopie Goldberg, Jay Leno, Jerry Seinfeld, and Jeff Foxworthy. And weren’t those memorable! Not in a good way, of course. Particularly the Leno. *shudder*
- She wrote it back in 2006 but it still applies today (particularly in conjunction with Adam Rex’s post). Meghan McCarthy asks the age old question What makes us qualified to write for children? I believe Anne Carroll Moore once asked Ursula Nordstrom the same question about editing for children (a cookie for everyone who remembers Nordstrom’s response). Yet another reason why we need to follow-up on Peter Sieruta’s suggestion to create an Anne Carroll Moore/Ursula Nordstrom crime solver series. I envision Moore as the Bert to Nordstrom’s Ernie, don’t you?
- Speaking of Peter (my co-writer on a book we’re creating with Jules from Seven Impossible Things), recently Collecting Children’s Books did a great round-up of great authors 9 Comments on Fusenews: Sifting the Nifty, last added: 5/19/2011
Ursula Nordstrom: (might not be exact) “I’m a former child and I haven’t forgotten a thing.” it is my mantra.
Love the bookmarker! And just yesterday I was telling someone how I long for a pair of red, sparkly shoes….
Reading French is one (fun) thing, but not long ago we spent the evening reading an Icelandic picture book (also available in French from the same great publishers as Tibois http://www.ricochet-jeunes.org/livres/livre/40870-non-dit-petit-monstre, but for some reason we had the Icelandic version) – neither of us have any Icelandic, but I have some Swedish, husband has Dutch and good German, and we both studied linguistics so we reconstructed some sort of proto Germanic and used that for the Icelandic. It was a lot more fun than it sounds! And the book was great – another one I hope gets picked up by an English language publisher.
I think a book in Arabic script, however, might be a step too far…. (although I’d loved to be able to read Farsi and enjoy Iranian picture books properly – I think they have an amazing illustration culture)
Ah, the Arabic was an old John Holt trick to put parents in the shoes of their child learning to read. To help them understand why their child might not recognize a word they had already read further up the page, Holt had a page of Arabic and asked the parent to to find the same word twice on the page.
The article about the LA librarians was beyond horrifying. Indeed, my hands are shaking as I type this. I hope those lawyers and district stooges end up in that special circle of hell where they spend eternity getting thwapped by wooden rulers wielded by every teacher ever.
And what KILLS me is that hearings like that are REALLY EXPENSIVE. The lawyer, I’m sure, bills the district at around twelve hundred an hour. Interrogating every librarian in the district would have been a ridiculous money waster, and would do nothing more than to humiliate the people who dedicate their lives to educating children.
But really, that’s the point, right? To humiliate.
Do you think that lawyer has to justify his job? Prolly not. We don’t do things like that to men in our society. Only to those “lady” jobs.
Being a teacher in L.A., I will just add that some 4,000 teachers are going through the same thing this spring. This is after getting a letter that says you can bring a lawyer and evidence to your hearing, and another letter that says you can file a “Denial of Accusation.” Apparently the accusation is that you work in a district that has no money, in a state that has no budget.
40,000 educators have been laid off statewide in the past 3 years, including librarians. This trend is scheduled to continue for the nest 3-4 years, till the kids will no doubt be taught in one giant classroom in the auditorium, like an endless school assembly–by the one remaining teacher.
So yeah, stick to New York and those excellent lions!
Thanks for telling everyone about the baby, Betsy! I was pleasantly startled to learn you have a similar birthmark to baby Ingrid. That’s delightful! Or perhaps ominous?–The mark of a kind of librarians’ Bene Gesserit?
*sigh* Yes, NYC I’ll stay for now. I am pleased that these library interrogations are getting as much news as they are, though. How much worse it would be if this passed unnoticed (or worse, uncared about) by the general public and press.
And yes, James. She bears “the mark”. All members of my occupation have already duly noted her name and placed it in The Big Book of Future Librarians. She will attempt to escape her fate for years, only to find herself filling out MLIS school application forms in her sleep. This future I foresee for your child.
For some reason your blog auto-corrected the word “weird” with “a genius”. Strange…
Beautiful baby, James! Hey, I’m not an anatomist or anything, but I wouldn’t say that birthmark is on Ingrid’s thigh. More like her waist. Are you sleep deprived or something? Congratulations!