By: Ellis Nadler,
on 9/17/2012
By: Ellis Nadler,
on 9/15/2012
What a wonderful little puzzle of a book is The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. It reminded me a little bit of Lydia Davis’s book, The End of the Story. Both books are slim, both deal with relationships, and both play with the truth with the narrator rearranging it to suit her/ his preferences.
Barnes’s book is told by Tony Webster, a man in his late middle-age. When he was at school he had two good friends that eventually became three when Adrian joined the school. Adrian was a bright and philosophically minded boy while the other three were typical smart teenage boys. After graduation they went their various ways to different colleges but kept in touch through letters and the occasional meeting. Gradually the letters and the meetings became less and less frequent. During college Tony has a relationship with a woman named Veronica who then becomes his friend Adrian’s girlfriend after she and Tony break up. And then Tony learns that Adrian has committed suicide. All of this is pretty much forgotten and Tony goes on with his life until in his late middle-age he learns he is the beneficiary in Veronica’s mother’s will of 500£ and Adrian’s diary. Veronica is in possession of the diary and will not give it to him which leads Tony into all kinds of maneuvers to try and get the diary and piece together the puzzle of Adrian’s life.
We are warned throughout the book by Tony himself that his story is not reliable. On the very first page of the book he says:
what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed
And towards the end of the book:
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.
As Tony tries to puzzle out Adrian’s life and his role in it, Veronica keeps telling him he is wrong and asserting that he just doesn’t “get it.” And it is true, Tony doesn’t get it. Even in his middle-age, or perhaps because he is in middle-age and life has not turned out to be extraordinary, he finds himself in the grip of a boyhood fear:
that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature.
And so Tony spins his tales about Adrian and why he might have killed himself and how it might have been – probably was – his fault because of a cruel letter he wrote Adrian after he let Tony know he was seeing Veronica. He comes up with various reasons why Veronica’s mother left him money in her will and, makes up various stories about what kind of relationship Veronica and Adrian had and who the mentally disabled man Veronica visits regularly really is.
Because we only know what Tony tells us, we don’t know what parts of the story are true tellings of events and which ones are edited in some way. We don’t know anything more about Adrian or Veronica than Tony does. No doubt there are kernels of truth in what he says and some things might be completely true, but we can’t know what they are.
As I am writing this I find myself wondering why Tony, who comes off as self-centered and completely clueless, didn’t inspire any kind of anger or dislike in me. To be sure, he made me exasperated, but I never once hated him. Perhaps it is because he is honest about how memory and time work together to change the past, how
when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
One wants to be the hero of one’s own life and we create our story accordingly. At the same
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By: Melissa Wiley,
on 6/29/2012
When the big ones were little, we got the Child’s Garden of Songs CD (like every other Charlotte Masonish homeschooler in the country), and oh how those small girls of mine adored it. For years it was their most frequently requested music, especially at bedtime–especially in summer. 
We got the beloved Tasha Tudor-illustrated picture-book-sized edition of Child’s Garden of Verses, too, of course: another CM requisite. My girls liked the book well enough, but it was the CD they cherished, and it’s the CD they still recall with affection, and hum around the house from time to time. Those lovely Celtic-flavored melodies got into my blood, too; that’s the kind of music I love best; it stirs my heart, gives me the shivers.
Now and then I’ll realize suddenly that there are these books and songs that meant the world to us ten, twelve years ago (Amazon informs me I purchased the Tasha Tudor book on April 14, 2000—six years to the day before Rilla was born; gosh, even before Beanie was born; and now I’m a little whelmed by the thought that in some respects, Amazon has a better record of my family history than I do)—important to us years ago, I was saying, but my younger trio don’t know them at all. It happened with Miss Rumphius (heresy!) and it happened with Child’s Garden of Songs.
I realized this a week or two ago and tracked down the CD, and we’ve listened to it every couple of days since. Rilla and Wonderboy are as enchanted by its melodies as their big sisters were. Huck remains somewhat indifferent, but then there aren’t any songs about trucks, are there?
The large book with the Tasha Tudor illustrations has failed to jump out from any of the shelves on which I’d expect it to be residing. All I found was the little Dover paperback edition, print only, no pictures; but Rilla doesn’t care. She sprawled on my bed today, frantically hunting each of the poems during the opening measures of its corresponding song on the CD—pause, Mommy, I can’t find it! oh here it is—and then calmly, almost serenely, singing along, kicking her feet, looking up to identify various instruments in the musical arrangement. Guitar, piano, violin, a fluty thing, those little round things you wear on your fingers, more violin, maracas. It was supposed to be my quiet reading time but I gave up on my book and watched her instead. It was a fancy dress day; she likes her sash tied in a fastidious bow, but she scorns anything that binds or tames her hair. The ragged locks fell over her face as she peered down at the book. Amazon says I purchased the Garden of Songs CD on July 19, 2002. Jane was seven that June. You know, last week.
The other book Rilla wanted today—wanted fiercely, rejecting my offer of the next Brambly Hedge story—was hist whist, the li
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By: Zoe,
on 11/29/2011
What Goes On in My Head? by Robert Winston is a tremendously entertaining children’s book about neuroscience and psychology and is the final book shortlisted for the Royal Society’s Young People’s Book Prize.
Read this book and you’ll find answers to questions such as “Are brains actually necessary?”, “Why do we rub sore bits of our body better?”, “What is more dangerous – sleep deprivation or food deprivation?” and “Is it always better to concentrate when you’ve got to make an important decision?”.
Mike, the headless chicken
What Goes On in My Head? is a fascinating, exciting read, packed with curious facts. And as you’d expect with a Dorling Kindersley book, it’s a lovingly produced physical object, rich in images.
If I were to find fault with this beautifully produced book it would the use of Robert Winston as the “celebrity” author. Yes, he’s a household name (at least here in the UK), but he’s not a neuroscientist nor a psychologist (human fertility is is area of expertise). It seems a shame that if you’re going to use a scientist presumably with the idea of giving weight to the content of a book, why not use a scientist who is an expert in the field. Of course the book was written in consultation with a neuroscientist, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, and this leaves me wondering what Robert Winston actually wrote for the book. Additionally, Robert Winston was used as a figure head to promote the sale of a health supplement, the adverts for which were subsequently banned for breaching the ASA guidelines on “substantiation and truthfulness”, so for me personally, the use of his name to add “credibility” to this book backfires a little.
By: Neil Gaiman,
on 9/11/2011
Tuesday, September 11, 2001
Now got BBC America on. Many e-mails from friends to say they are alive... Many more I'm waiting to hear from.
Was meant to be going to the UK in a couple of days for Douglas Adams' memorial service, and then to Trieste in Italy for a festival. Right now we'll see whether or not planes are going to be flying...
posted by Neil Gaiman 10:24 AM
This is what I did today.
I picked up lots of fallen sunflowers and propped them against the side of the house for no real reason other than they looked nice like that. I did some baking. I wrote some of a movie. I phoned friends I hadn't talked to in a while, just to say hello. I failed completely to get hold of anyone in New York by phone. I answered the phone a lot, because there were people calling in from New York. I decided not to fly to London on Sa
By: Lauren,
on 7/28/2011
By Dennis Baron A a research report in the journal Science suggests that smartphones, along with computers, tablets, and the internet, are weakening our memories. This has implications not just for the future of quiz shows--most of us can't compete against computers on Jeopardy--but also for the way we deal with information: instead of remembering something, we remember how to look it up. Good luck with that when the internet is down.
By: scriberess,
on 11/3/2010
By: DGLM,
on 9/23/2010
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By: linda sarah,
on 7/15/2010
By: Heidi Mordhorst,
on 5/28/2010
The biting cold wind of middle age has swept in, and there is no doubt that my middle-aged brain can't do what it used to. I used to walk into a classroom each year and learn 25 names in 30 seconds; now I need nametags and at least 30 minutes, and the names I do know tend to hover tantalizingly just above my tongue at the moment I need them most. However, I've been noticing a different memory phenomenon that puzzles me a little.
I spent time this week in my daughter's fifth grade classroom talking about poetry as memoir. To mirror the young writers' process, I wrote a fresh new memoir poem for their critique. (I'm sharing below the draft I took in yesterday before their questions, comments and suggestions showed me many ways to improve it.) Once I got going on this poem, I had no trouble at all accessing strong physical and emotional memories of the way my friend and I played. I have deep wells of detailed memory from the years between 5 and 14--not comprehensive by any means, and only sort of chronological--which have fed my writing over the last ten years. But I just allowed my 25th college reunion to pass without me, partly because of a kind of embarrassment about what I don't remember (and what classmates I know seem to remember quite clearly and easily).
Is there really a difference between the way I experienced things at 10 and at 20 and then again at 30? Some difference in intensity, some difference in the quality or mode of recording memories at different ages? Or does it have something to do with writing itself? At 10 I was a writer, but by 15, even, I was recording my life in journals and poems and term papers and letters, and by 25 practically everything in my life went on paper somehow: lesson plans, travel packing lists, favorite songs, budgets....
Maybe it has always been, since 15, the way it is now: I write it down so that I don't have to actively remember it. I decided long ago that, after the kids themselves, our family diaries are what I'd take if the house were burning down. It's a good trick, but it makes me sad to think that in committing these experiences to paper I am perhaps erasing them from my mind.
Indians
We leap like deer
over the rushing sidewalks
of the Eastern Woodlands
"paying no heed to the biting cold wind,"
our oatmeal box quivers full of arrows,
our hair in brave braids.
5 Comments on "paying no heed to the biting cold wind", last added: 5/29/2010
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By: Steve Novak,
on 5/27/2010
That's right, as of this morning there are not one, not two, not three or even four, but forty-two pages of "Forts: Fathers and Sons" available for you to read online!
Get this...
It's totally free!
Don't say I never gave you anything.
Why not click the link below and take a look? What have you got to lose? Nothing.
Or did you already forget that I said it was free?
Damn you and your short memory.
Steve
Do you remember a time when you cracked open a fortune cookie and read a fortune that would soon come true for you?
By: Martha Alderson, M.A.,
on 1/28/2010
A problem I often find in the plot consultations I provide is the misuse of flashbacks.
During a plot consultation, a writer outlines her historical novel to me. Before long, the story takes a u-turn into flashback. My immediate reaction is to refocus myself. I quickly scan the Plot Planner I am creating for her for what I know of the story so far ~ the time frame, the place, and the characters ~ in order to keep in perspective the time and place change.
If you've read Blockbuster Plots Pure & Simple, you know I am not a fan of flashback. Mostly, I dislike the whiplash effect, but also because I have seen too many writers, especially writers just starting out, overuse and abuse flashback. It is more difficult and takes more thought and creativity to integrate the pertinent backstory seamlessly into the front-story than it is to create a flashback. Flashback is a depiction of a past, literal experience. Full integration of back-story into front-story involves more nuance and skill.
Three plot tips when it comes to flashbacks:
1) If you feel you just have to have a flashback, wait to use it in the Middle of the story. By then, the reader has had time to ground themselves in the front-story and is better able to transition back and forth in time
2) A flashback is portrayed moment-by-moment in scene. Consider instead using a memory (summary)
3) If flashbacks are integral to the overall plot and structure, do like Audrey Niffenegger in The Time Traveler's Wife, make the story line non-linear and create the very structure of your story based on time jumps.
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By: Cynthia Reeg,
on 1/21/2010
Let's have some fun today. Do you like to play memory games?
By: jeff,
on 10/2/2009
Growing up, I had a lot of girl friends (or, more accurately, friends who were girls). As a consequence, I became quite good at hula hoop, hopscotch, jump rope and various hand clapping games.
When I saw a certain cell phone hawking robot on TV playing jump rope with some children and singing, “My cousin Sally, sittin’ on…” I asked my wife if she knew that rhyme and she said, “No, I always did, ‘Cinderella, dressed in yella…’” to which I responded…
Went downstairs to kiss a fella’
Made a mistake,
Kissed a snake,
How many doctors will it take?
1, 2, 3, 4…
I realized these rhymes are not the kind you find in books, but they endure in an oral tradition that many people think is extinct. Here are some of my faves that I have never read, but remember anyhow because the rhyme and rhythm is burned deep in my brain. The first was a great elimination hand slap game similar to hot potato, the last person in the circle when the rhyme gets to “Ker-plop” is out.
Down by the banks of the Hanky Panky,
Where the bullfrog jumps from bank to banky,
Eep, Op, over the top,
East side, West side, KER-plop!
This next hand clap song is a little racy and always caused a little tittering when it was sung.
Miss Suzy had a steamboat, the steamboat had a bell, (Ding! Ding!)
Miss Suzy went to heaven, the steamboat went to…
Hello, operator, please give me number nine,
And if you disconnect me,
I’ll kick your old…
Behind the ‘frigerator, there was a piece of glass,
Miss Suzy slipped upon it, and broke her little…
Ask me no more questions, I’ll tell you no more lies,
The boys are in the bathroom, zipping up their…
Flies are in the meadow, the bees are in the park,
Miss Suzy and her boyfriend are kissing in the Dark!
One reason our custom kids books are written in rhyme is that it is more fun to read aloud. Another benefit of rhyme is that it is easier to remember and to guess which words come next as your little one attempts to read the book “all by themselves”. Maybe, like me with ‘Miss Suzy’, they’ll even remember the texts for years to come!
…
Two books I read recently in my ongoing LGBT reading challenge — Nancy Garden’s ANNIE ON MY MIND and Julie Anne Peters’s LUNA — employ the same interesting technique: the narrator-protagonist is really telling you the story, as evidenced by their struggling to remember particular details.
It’s more pronounced in ANNIE ON MY MIND, where the narration repeatedly includes passages like,
I remember we were both watching the sun slowly go down over one end of the beach, making the sky to the west pink and yellow. I remember the water lapping gently against the pilings and the shore, and a candy wrapper — Three Musketeers, I think — blowing along the beach. Annie shivered.
Sometimes — I can’t find a good example — Garden has the narrator Liza trying, and failing, to remember details that are important to her (who put their hand on the other’s arm first), even while she remembers other things that don’t matter. You get a strong sense that the story is her actively constructing her memories for you.
And you get a sense that she’s really explaining things to herself, as much as to you, when she adds narrative commentary like, “But maybe — and I think this is true — maybe we also just needed more time.”
When Garden isn’t highlighting the imperfections of Liza’s memory, or her struggle to make sense of it, she’s sometimes drawing attention to the fact that she does remember, as in this passage:
I nodded, trying to smile at her as if everything was all right — there’s no reason, I remember thinking, why it shouldn’t be — and I sat down on the edge of Annie’s bed and opened the letter.
Which, for me, pulls up that recognizable feeling of knowing something is wrong but pretending to yourself that it isn’t, far more than if Garden had simply told us that that’s how Liza felt. For some reason, the fact that she remembers feeling that way matters.
It actually reminded me of nothing so much as a moment toward the very end of the pilot episode of MY SO-CALLED LIFE. Angela and her mother reconcile after their fight over her hair (which she has dyed “crimson glow,” and which her mother says looks like it “had died — of natural causes”). The scene ends with Angela’s voiceover narration, “I fell asleep right there — I must have been really tired.”
MSCL does not, in general, have WONDER YEARS-style narration, where older Kevin Arnold is looking back; most of the narration is real-time. And partly, this was the pilot and they were probably still figuring out the limits of their template, but it always stands out to me as, I think, the only example of Older Angela thinking back. And it’s funny because it’s such an utterly banal thing to remember!
I think that’s what I liked about the technique in both of these books… it’s a convention of fiction that the narrator has this obscenely good memory, and you accept it for the sake of getting the story. Garden, and to a lesser extent Peters, break that convention and make their narrators into …people narrating, instead.
Posted in Annie On My Mind, Garden, Nancy, LGBT reads, Luna, On Genre, Peters, Julie Anne, Shades of My So-Called Life
By: jeff,
on 8/25/2009
If you wanted to get all philosophical about it, you could say that each of us is a collection of our own memories and that, therefore, our very first memory is the moment we first become “ourselves”. You could think of your first memory as the exact moment that the person you know as yourself was born. I’ve invited everyone at MJM Books to tell us about their birthdays: I wonder how much these birthdays reveal about the people we turned out to be…
Erin first remembers her dad pushing her around the house in a cardboard box and making car sounds as he pushed the box along. She also has early memories of my mom tucking her in at night.
Visual Approximation
I share Erin’s automotive origins. My first memory is of Mike and Matt constructing a sports car for me out of one of my old diaper boxes. They made more than one, apparently, as there is a picture of me in a cardboard Busch nascar racer, but the one I remember was a Ferrari? My only clue is that it had pop up headlights, a feature that my brothers delighted in and I pretended to know why it was exciting.
Not a Ferrari... discrediting my hypothesis
Mike’s first memory features a subject a little more… natural. I’ll let him explain…
“When I was very young (maybe 3 or 4 years old) our family dog was a Great Dane. As you can imagine Great Dane’s are pretty big; and one thing that goes along with big dogs is big… er… umm… well poop.”
“During the day I would usually play out in the back yard but this could often be difficult as I’d have to dodge the many ‘land mines’ scattered about.”
“Being the bright young lad I was, I decided that I would mark each pile in the backyard with a small stick to flag its location. That way, when my dad came home from work all I had to do was show him the ‘flags’ in the yard so he could clean up.”
Problem Solved.
“In retrospect I suppose I could have probably picked up the ‘waste’ myself but then again what young boy can resist the urge to make a game out of something as cool as giant piles of dog poop?!”
Sara’s first memory also features some family pets, but it seems to be quite a bit more idyllic…
“I remember sloshing around under a shady tree in a tiny, blue plastic kiddie pool with my younger sister in my grandparent’s backyard. I smelled the charred, spicy aroma of hot dogs while my grandpa grilled and listened to my grandma laugh while her and my parents talked. My grandparents’ two lhasa apsos, Toby and Muffin, sniffed around the yard, occasionally poking their wet noses into the pool to say ‘hello’.”
Matt also remembers water… too much water. Matt’s traumatic “birthday” memory involves learning how to swim.
“I was so frustrated at Mom and Dad, they would stand three feet apart in the pool and one would let me go and the other would call out, ‘Swim to me Matt, come on,’ all the while backing away. So, by the time you reach them, you’ve learned how to swim, but you’re crying from the intense fear of drowning, and a deep sense of betrayal.”
Re-enactment
Good times. Good times.
…
In the first lesson we covered how to say “Hello, how are you?” and “What is your name?” in German. In this lesson we will look at possible answers to general questions. Phrases in brackets are the pronunciation of the adjacent word. NOTE: In German you may come across an awkward character (ß) it may look like the letter B but actually represents a double s. But this character is now only used in special circumstances. For the sake of this lesson we will use ss instead of ß so you don’t get confused.
The most simple of answers are “Yes” and “No”. Which in German are “Ja” (Ya) and “Nein” (nine).
Out loud or in your head say “Yes” and then “Ja”. Repeat this three times. Do the same with “No” and “Nein”.
If your not sure how to answer something I suggest three phrases. “Maybe” - “Vielleicht” (vee-liked), “I don’t know.” - “Ich weiss nicht.” (Ick vise nickt) or “I don’t understand.” - “Ich vestehe nicht.” (Ick ver-shter-hir nickt). Now these are slightly harder phrases to learn if you are not yet familiar with German. Start by revising “Maybe” and “Vielleicht” over in your head.
It should become clear by looking at the other two phrases that “Ich” means “I”. Also you might have been able to tell that “nicht” is “not”. We have “I do not know.” and “I do not understand”. In German, however, they literally say “I know not.” or “I understand not.”. Once you know “Ich” and “nicht” these phrases should become easier to learn.
All you have to learn now is “weiss” and “vestehe”. “Weiss” meaning “know” and “vestehe” meaning “understand”. Write these words down if this is hard to memorise and use this to revise at various points during the day.
Remember to try and practice these phrases with a partner for more practical learning. Thank-you for reading my article and hopefully you can catch the next lesson.
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By: Megan,
on 5/13/2009
What’s the very earliest thing you can remember? That sandwich you had for lunch today? Your last day of high school? How about your first day of kindergarten? Can you remember anything before that? In Karl Sabbagh’s new book, Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us, he challenges the idea of “recovered memories,” an idea that has been at the center of several recent court cases. In Remembering Our Childhood, Sabbagh uses scientific experiments to show how fragile our earliest memories are and how easily they can be reshaped during early childhood. In this post, I’ve tried to copy something Sabbagh does in the book and collect early-childhood memories from some of the OUP staff. Some responses were funny, some were sad, some seemed like they couldn’t be true. Whether you have faith in the accuracy of early-childhood memories or not, the employees at OUP definitely have some interesting ones. After you read, feel free to comment with your own recollections from early (or not so early) childhood.
Paige, Marketing Manager, Online & Scholarly Reference: My earliest memory is a mosaic of images from my family’s house in Omaha, where I was born and lived until I was nearly four. I remember the bright pink only-in-the-70s shag carpeting in my bedroom, the view out the backdoor to the park, the house flooded with sunlight, and the brown, green, and beige color scheme.
Rebecca, OUPBlog Editor: When I was about two and a half my Nana Sara passed away. I don’t really remember Nana but I do remember that day. I remember being terrified at seeing my father upset and my brothers, (who never paid attention to me) took me into the study to distract me and keep me away from all the friends and relatives who had come to sit Shiva. They helped me draw a picture of Nana and then let me hide it anywhere I wanted in the house. I hid it behind a picture frame in the hallway and no one found it there until we moved eight years later. I distinctly remember being both scared of what was happening to my father and excited that my brothers were giving me their complete attention – and I was so proud that I kept the secret of the hidden picture for so many years.
Susan, Senior Publicist: My earliest memory is from before I could speak or sit up on my own. I was lying down on my belly in my crib and I distinctly remember trying to lift my head because I wanted to take a look around. I tried and tried but realized quickly that I was unable to get my head up and that I would just have to be patient and wait. This is all before language but I remember thinking this precise thing. I simply put my head down, closed my eyes and decided to wait.
Betsy, Publicity Manager: My parents took me on vacation was when I was three. I remember packing all my dolls into the backseat of the car, and I remember being in the hotel room and being so happy that I could still watch “The Muppet Show” with my dad even though we weren’t at home. The TV was mounted up on the wall, and I had to look up to watch, but I was so happy to see Miss Piggy.
Cassie, Publicity Assistant: Can my answer be that I hardly remember anything? Most of my childhood “memories” have been extrapolated from one of the many, many, many pictures documenting it. So, for example, I think I remember falling asleep with a giant picture book/encyclopedia type thing about wolves when I was about six, but it may just be because I have a picture of me, dead to the world in my little pink room, with a giant book open across my chest.
Lauren, Publicity Assistant: My first memory is my mother standing in the kitchen holding my just-born brother and pushing a drawer shut with her left hip. She was wearing a blue terrycloth shirt and it was sunset, so the kitchen was very orange.
Shannon, Editor, Humanities: Well my first memory is of the moon landing in July, 1969. My mother stopped vacuuming to point at the fuzzy black and white television screen and explain the impossible goings on going on there. I mean, the TV itself was mind-boggling enough for a small fresh brain.
Purdy, Publicity Director: I was the youngest of three boys, still in diapers, growing up in a small house, in a small town during the dawn of the 1970s. I remember we had a dog named Stacy whose white coat was only interrupted by a brown black triangle near her throat. She had ghostly eyes that could be blue or gray, or white depending on the light. She was extraordinarily beautiful and had a wolfen look to her. Each morning I’d climb out of my crib, wake my brother Richie (whom I called Neighbie, short for neighbor, because I didn’t quite understand our fraternal relationship), then we descend the stairs to watch Popeye or Captain Kangaroo cartoons on the television before Neighbie went off to school. Often we’d discover by a big goopy pile of dog poop downstairs and Neighbie would step right into it and wiggle his toes about. He claimed this was “fun,” he claimed to “like the way it feels.” When he grew bored, however, he knew better than to walk about the house and sent me back upstairs to seek help from my sleeping parents. My reports were met with groans and more often than not, “Not again! What is wrong with that boy?”
Sarah, Associate Director of Publicity & Communications: My earliest memory is being tucked into my parent’s bed with my brother and my two cousins. I’m not sure why we were all bundled into bed together if our parents were having a date night together or what. But at this time we all lived together in a two family house in a working class area of New Jersey.
Megan, Intern: When I was really little, probably around 2 or 3, I had some kind of eye condition that meant monthly appointments at a huge children’s hospital downtown. I don’t remember what went on at the appointments, but I do remember the waiting room. I loved going downtown each month and getting to play with the bright red, perfectly detailed, miniature kitchen, complete with metal taps!
By: Rebecca,
on 1/28/2009
Sarah Russo, Associate Director, Publicity, [email protected], http://twitter.com/sarahrusso
Years ago, I started my career in publicity as an assistant at Alfred A. Knopf. It was the ultimate place to learn about books, authors, the publishing industry, the “right” way to do things in the publicity world, the civilized way.
Every day started for me at 7:30am, cup of coffee in hand, the other assistant and I divided the morning papers and got to reading: The New York Times, Washington Post, Daily News, New York Post, Christian Science Monitor, Wall Street Journal, and several other big dailies. We read them all, devoured them is more like it, searching for mentions of Knopf books—clipping, pasting, photocopying; putting together the “clips packet,” arts & crafts for the publicity set—to circulate to sales, marketing, editorial, and the rest of the publicity department. Yes, there were that many mentions of Knopf books each day. The packet was huge, thirty, forty pages on most days, far more on Mondays when we received the Sunday papers from around the country.
The office was a rotating cast of celebrity authors and poets. Michael Crichton, V.S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison, Eli Wiesel, and celebrity editors: Ash Green, Gary Fisketjon, Deb Garrison, Judith Jones. If you don’t know Judith Jones’s name it’s only because she is the personification of a true editor: the person behind the scenes, never flashy, never usurping the true performers—the writers—she just made the books better. But you do know her work. She discovered Julia Child, and there is a story that’s told at Knopf that she is the person who discovered The Diary of Anne Frank in the slush pile as an assistant at HarperCollins Paris. She was, of course, John Updike’s editor. And their friendship was palpable.
One afternoon, I had the chance to spend the day in Judith’s office, overlooking the East River (as Knopf was then at 201 East 50th Street) with John Updike. As a publicity assistant part of my job was to help authors sign their books when they came in to the office. When they are being asked to sign 300 copies for the sales force having someone un-boxing books, opening them to the title page and packing them back up is a necessity. My job for the afternoon was to help and make polite conversation.
Learning to talk to famous people as a terribly shy, 22 year old was a painful process for me but Mr. Updike was a kind, generous person and full of conversation. And we had one thing in common: we’re both Dutch (or I am at least partly so). So we had the Netherlands to chat about. And as we were talking about Holland, Sijthoffs and Updikes, plugging through 300 copies of Gertrude & Claudius, a rainbow appeared over the East River. Truly, a rainbow. Utterly bucolic over the dingy buildings on the waterfront of Queens. And we just stood there, staring out the window, silent, surprised and smiling.
John Updike was a good man: an incredible writer, kind to the least important of publicity personnel, and a lover of words and the world. He will be missed.
By: Kirsty,
on 1/28/2009
Karl Sabbagh is a writer and television producer with 25 years of experience describing complex events and subjects for a nonspecialist audience. His latest book is Remembering Our Childhood: How Memory Betrays Us, which explores what science tells us about the nature of memory, and in particular, memories of childhood. In it, he argues strongly for the critical role of scientific evidence in cases involving the memory of witnesses. In the piece below, he talks about the earliest memories of people he interviewed for his book.
When I was researching my new book I asked a number of people on my e-mail list, and a few people I interviewed, for their earliest memories, with a rough estimate of the age they were when the remembered event occurred. The reminiscences I received, about sixty of them, showed a wide range of ages and content. Some memories were said to date back to when the subject was one year old; others claimed to remember nothing before the age of seven or so. Both the content and the dating were suspect. Very few scientists believe there is any evidence for memories retained from before the age of about two and a half, because of a period of infantile amnesia which some connect with the development of language, and yet my sample had about twenty or so that were said to go that far back.
Several of my ‘rememberers’ told me what they believed their earliest memories were and then told me why they could not be correct. One had a vivid memory of his father at the time when his father was serving abroad in the army and never returned; another remembered the happiest day of her life as being when she saw a film which, she later discovered, had not even been released until several years after the date.
And the range of content was bewilderingly wide. When you think how many events, perceptions and insights a child experiences in his or her first five years, why would one woman remember “Being in my bedroom dressed only in a pair of knickers which I had filled with plastic Noddy/Big Ears figures and my mum being really angry with me.” Was this the only time her mother was angry with her? Unlikely. Or “Trying to scoop up the water from a birdbath with a metal jug.” This is such an ordinary event to be retained in memory over someone’s entire adult life. Some earliest memories showed a startlingly philosophical approach to life. One subject, a psychologist interviewed for my book, remembered at the age of two lying in his crib and crying with frustration because he couldn’t communicate with his mother. He described it as thinking “She just didn’t get it.” I suggested that it was as if he was wishing for someone to invent language, and he agreed.
What I discovered when writing the book was that there is a lot of carefully designed research to answer questions to which there were only anecdotal answers before. Controlled experiments in which scientists tried to corroborate alleged earliest memories by going back to parents or siblings confirmed the period of infantile amnesia and fixed its end at about two and a half, where psychologists had previously thought it stretched to three or four.
Other research showed the importance of conversations between parent and child as a factor in determining the content of early memories. Parents consciously or unconsciously reinforce or suppress their children’s memories by the way they react to them. After a trip to the zoo, if the child wants to talk about a bright pebble on the ground and the mother thinks the giraffe is more interesting, the child may soon forget the pebble and remember the giraffe.
I begin the book with one of my own earliest memories, a short poem my mother used to say to me about five ducks on a pond, and then tell how, much later, I discovered that the words I had remembered were different from the original poem. But was it my memory that was at fault or my mother’s, or even the poet’s – perhaps he saw four ducks or six? After describing in the book all the ways in which memory is fallible, I return to the poem at the end and suggest that something true was remembered – that I sat on my mother’s knee while she recited a poem to me. That was too important to forget.
By: Julia,
on 1/19/2009
Why What We Pore Over At 12 May Be The Most Important Reading We Ever Do.
By Tim Kreider
A GIRL I ONCE CAUGHT READING Fahrenheit 451 over my shoulder on the subway confessed: “You know, I’m an English lit major, but I’ve never loved any books like the ones I loved when I was 12 years old.” I fell slightly in love with her when she said that. It was so frank and uncool, and undeniably true.
Let’s all admit it: We never got over those first loves. Listen to the difference in the voices of any groups of well-read, overeducated people discussing contemporary fiction, or the greatest books they’ve ever read, and the voices of those same people, only two drinks later, talking about the books they loved as kids. The Betsy Tacy Books! I loved those books! The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet! I can’t believe you know that! The Little House on the Prairie books! Oh, my God–did you read The Long Winter? So good. Hey–does anyone else remember The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree?
Read the rest of the article here
By: Annie,
on 9/27/2008
Brian P Cleary and J.P. Sandy have written and illustrated (respectively) a marvelous science books for kids. Filled with mnemonic devices (tricks that help us remember facts), this book is chock full of poems and memory tricks for earth and space science, physical and life science, and the scientific method.
One year ago in a Meme post, I mentioned that something I knew that I would not blog about were the prepositions in alphabetical order to the tune of Yankee Doodle. That is a mneumonic device and a very successful one since I haven't gotten it out of my head since 5th grade.
The title "Mrs Riley Bought Five Itchy Aardvarks" is a mneumonic device to help us remember the six major animal groups: Mammals, Reptiles, Birds, Fish, Insects and Amphibians. Another terrific device ticks off the list of planets in our solar system in their order from the sun: "Mel's Very Excited Ma Just Served Us Nachos." This reminds us that the planets are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Pluto was demoted last year to dwarf planet status so is no longer part of the list.
My favorite item in the entire book (which is saying something as there is so much here) is a long poem about matter. Here are the first two verses:
Whether you hold it
or mold it or spin it
Whether you drink it
or mix something in it
Everything, everywhere's
one of these things:
a Solid, Liquid or Gas.
Whether it's floating
or streaming or gleaming.
Whether it's shedding
or spreading or steaming.
Everything, everywhere's
one of these things
a Solid, Liquid or Gas.
The humorous illustrations and rich saturated colors make this book a fun read. And, hey, you'll learn some great science facts as well.
By: Aline Pereira,
on 4/8/2008
I gobbled Naming Maya when I first read it, swept up by its story, its characters and its sense of place. I’ve reread it several times since that first rapid perusal, and with each new reading I find another facet of the story.
There are so many things about this book that I long to discuss with other people who have read it too. It makes me wish I had a daughter so I could talk it over with her – and that leads me to believe that it’s a perfect selection for a mother-daughter book group. What do people who have daughters think? Is this a book that you would choose to read with girls in your family?
“Language can make you a stranger in many places, but only if you let it,” Maya observes in a place where Hindi, English, and Tamil all compete for her attention. How does Kamala Mami bring Maya’s family together in spite of their differing languages and customs?
Shared history and memory both are unifying and divisive in this novel. How does Kamala Mami’s chaotic flood of memories help Maya to live with her own?
In an earlier PaperTigers post, Filipino author Lara Saguisag discusses how different values and different dreams lead to varying forms of childhood. How do cultural values and the protection that they can offer contribute to the differences between Maya and her cousin?
And perhaps most of all – did other readers immediately go out in search of Indian food when they finished reading this book? I certainly did!
so good to see and hear you 
If you don’t mind, I’ll be posting this in my own blog and I’ll link it to his, here.
I’ve so enjoyed your fab posts this week – definitely on a roll!!! And you make such a good point here!!! Why does a good book need an endorsement, especially from someone who is not even “in the field.” I guess because he is more of a brand… they are using his TV character rather than his expertise – really they could have any star up there to help market their book. Excellent point!!!
Thanks Se7en, I’ve had so much fun reviewing the shortlisted books and our whole family have learned lots of amazing things. It’s been a treat! I know Robert Winston has written other books for DK, and I believe one of his official roles here is meant to be engaging the public with science, so I guess that’s partly why he was chosen
We have this book, and yes it is awesome.
Which to choose of the lot?- tough Q!
Re Robert Winston – I guess same reason as why Carol Volderman endorses math books and Richard Hammond for some other titles under DK science books?!