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Travis Jonker has a manifesto: All Middle Grade Novels Should Be 192 Pages. No Exceptions.  I like it. A lot. But still do have an exception.  Here’s my comment on his post:

Yes!!! I am with you on this with a caveat (see below). I have always tried to keep my read-alouds (to my 4th grade class) to as close to 200 pages as possible, but it has become harder and harder to stick to that what with many terrific mg books being way more than that. (One of my favorites from last year — Kathi Appelt’s True Blue Scouts — is 352 pages. On the other hand, Jennifer Holm’s forthcoming The Fourteenth Goldfish, which I read aloud to my class last year, is a just right 208 pages.) My reasoning is that I feel that if some of my listeners aren’t 100% into the book (and I can’t believe all of them are rapt no matter how great a reader I am and how great many of us think the book is — they have their own tastes after all), they aren’t stuck with it too too long. And I also think it applies so much to newly independent readers who can lose steam.

That said, I think there is a place for books like Andy Griffith’s 26 Story Treehouse (352 pages) and Stephen Patis’s Timothy Failure (304 pages), books that are light, easy reading for kids who may not gravitate to the arguably more literary titles along the lines of those you mention. They love the longer length of these sorts of books. Makes them feel they are there with those reading so many of the other  longer popular titles (e.g. Percy Jackson or Harry Potter).

Travis Jonker has a manifesto: All Middle Grade Novels Should Be 192 Pages. No Exceptions.  I like it. A lot. But still do have an exception.  Here’s my comment on his post:

Yes!!! I am with you on this with a caveat (see below). I have always tried to keep my read-alouds (to my 4th grade class) to as close to 200 pages as possible, but it has become harder and harder to stick to that what with many terrific mg books being way more than that. (One of my favorites from last year — Kathi Appelt’s True Blue Scouts — is 352 pages. On the other hand, Jennifer Holm’s forthcoming The Fourteenth Goldfish, which I read aloud to my class last year, is a just right 208 pages.) My reasoning is that I feel that if some of my listeners aren’t 100% into the book (and I can’t believe all of them are rapt no matter how great a reader I am and how great many of us think the book is — they have their own tastes after all), they aren’t stuck with it too too long. And I also think it applies so much to newly independent readers who can lose steam.

That said, I think there is a place for books like Andy Griffith’s 26 Story Treehouse (352 pages) and Stephen Patis’s Timothy Failure (304 pages), books that are light, easy reading for kids who may not gravitate to the arguably more literary titles along the lines of those you mention. They love the longer length of these sorts of books. Makes them feel they are there with those reading so many of the other  longer popular titles (e.g. Percy Jackson or Harry Potter).

This is awesome (and from 2012 — how did I miss it?). Via Elizabeth Law.

 

I believe in families, in the strength of families, and that the strength of a people can be determined by the strength of the families within that people. In December of 2015 the black family will have been established legally in the United States for 150 years. It was December, 1865, that the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery became part of the United States Constitution.

What I proposed to my family was an exhibit, to run in the fall of 2015 outlining the trials and triumphs of the American black family in documents….

Slave documents would constitute the first part of the exhibit, with the second part being a celebration of what marriage has meant to us over the years. It would be great if I could get Obama to declare November 1015 A Celebration of Black Families month. Anyone have his personal cell?….

It takes time to mount an exhibit…. It’s a great challenge but I love it. There’s work to be done.

Excerpts from “150 Years of the Black Family,” a May 2014 post on Walter Dean Myer’s blog.

I think my life is special. In a way it seems odd that I spend all of my time doing only what I love, which is writing or thinking about writing. If everyone had, at least for part of their lives, the opportunity to live the way I do, I think the world would be a better place.

I believe that everyone is intelligent. I believe that everyone can be creative. I like just about everyone I meet. For me, life has been good and it’s up to me to appreciate it. I hope that the next book, story or poem that I write will be worthy of the time the reader spends with it. If it is then my life is successful. If it’s not, then I’ll try again.

The above is from Walter Dean Myers’s website.

The world is a lesser place without this remarkable, brilliant, caring, and —yes— very special man who did seem to like everyone he met.  He touched so many through his books, his public appearances, his personal contacts, and so much more than most individuals can do. I think of him as a mentor as I’m sure countless others do too whether they met him in person or through his books and writing. I will treasure all of those always.

His life was successful. A million times over.

My sincere condolences to his family and friends.

We were somewhere around a fake white naked statue (or maybe it was a faux Roman mural or an ersatz Egyptian barge) on the edge of Caesars when the lack of sleep began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit light-headed; maybe you should take another look at your phone…it must be just past that guy in the diaper or the lightly clad girl dancing in a cage over there…” And suddenly we were outside and there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge white wet sheets, all swooping and screeching “Do It” and diving around  the taxi, which was going about a hundred inches an hour what with the Celine Dion concert getting underway.  And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn people?”

Then it was quiet again.  My colleague had taken her sensible sweater off and was pouring green tea from her flask down her gullet. “What the hell are you yelling about?” she muttered, staring up at the sun with her eyes closed and covered with pink publisher swag sunglasses.  “Never mind,” I said and grabbed my Iphone to do a quick Instagram before aiming us toward the not-the-Eiffel-tower Tower.  No point mentioning the sad women selling bottles of cold water, I thought. The poor thing will see them soon enough.

It was almost five, and we still had more than a hundred casinos to go.  They would be tough casinos.  Very soon, I knew, we would both be completely twisted. But then there was no going back and no time to rest. We would have to tough it out. The 2014 ALA Annual Convention Exhibits were already open and, for good or ill,  we had  to get there to get to grab as many ARCs as our rolling carts could hold.

Well, they won’t be “my” fourth graders after tomorrow. That is when we have our annual Arch Day when students go through an arch “and into the next grade.”  That said, today they are still fourth graders, great readers who, when I asked for some summer reading suggestions for their peers, had a great time.

The rules were the suggestions had to come from their independent reading choices; that meant they couldn’t list books I’d read to them or others they’d read for class projects.  Being avid readers, this wasn’t a problem. In fact, what was a problem for some was limiting their list to ten!  What I love is how the lists show what wide-ranging readers they are. You will see that one moment they are reading very sophisticated books and at the next something young and light.

Follow this link to my school’s open blog  to see some from each child’s list  to give you a taste of their wide reading range and to use when looking for books for children in your own environment.

Bank Street College Center for Children’s Literature‘s 2014 edition of their Best Children’s Books of the Year is now out. Here’s a description from their announcement:

The Best Children’s Books of the Year, 2014 Edition includes more than 600 titles chosen by the Children’s Book Committee as the best of the best published in 2013. In choosing books for the annual list, committee members consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Other criteria include credibility of characterization and plot, authenticity of time and place, age suitability, positive treatment of ethnic and religious differences, and the absence of stereotypes.

Here are links to their honorees in the different age groups:

• Under Five
• Five to Nine
• Nine to Twelve*
• Twelve to Fourteen
• Fourteen and Up

*Thank you Children’s Book Committee for including Africa is My Home on this list.

When online shopping offers choice, convenience and competitive prices, why would anyone go to an actual shop? To try on clothes, perhaps. To sit on sofas or lie on beds. But if you’re after music, film or books, you’re more likely to go straight to the internet. In the digital age, bricks-and-mortar shops have to work much harder to attract our attention, let alone custom. Brands rip out and refit their stores every few years: interior design is, clearly, already crucial to their fortunes. But could design go further, and lure us away from our tablets and back onto the high street?

Curious to explore this territory, we asked four leading architecture and design practices to create a shop. Specifically, in the age of Amazon and e-books, a bookshop to save bookshops.

Four British architect and design firms were invited to reinvent the brick and mortar bookstore. Read about their results here.

While I did not make it to the Javits itself this year to participate in the heady event that is  BookExpo (nor will I get there today for the associated Book Con), I did make it to some related events. (Warning: lots of name dropping and gushing follows.)

On Tuesday I went to Candlewick’s preview and got very excited with their enthusiastic presentation of their fall books. One faux pas on my part: when some Toon Books books were passed out for us to look at while Françoise Mouly spoke about them, I tweeted the following before I understood I couldn’t KEEP the one I had and then felt a little silly when I got a particular response to it. Ah well, I’ll get the book soon enough!

Wednesday was SLJ’s Day of Dialog.  The programming, as always, was fabulous.  Kudos to SLJ for keeping the numbers down. While this may frustrate those who are shut-out of going it makes for a relatively intimate event unlike BEA.  More about this year’s event here, here, and here.  And here are a few of my tweets and photos:

On Thursday I went to the Random House party where I had an interesting celebrity moment.  Now there were some awesomely famous writers at the event. It was fun, for instance, to catch up with Raquel (R. J. Palacio) and chat about the incredibly fun project she is doing with Tom Angleberger and Adam Gidwitz — the retelling the first three Star Wars movies. But first I made a bee line for the latest actress-turned-children’s-book-author, Jane Lynch.  Just because I watched the first few seasons of Glee mainly because of her wonderful portrayal of Sue Sylvester.  And so when I saw her iconic face I couldn’t resist talking to her and getting a photo (with my friend Roxanne Feldman).  She was, not unexpectedly, lovely. I hope her book is too!

After that I went to a very special dinner with Peachtree Publishers where I met Carmen Agra Deedy who, along with Randall Wright, wrote one of my absolute favorite books of 2011, The Cheshire Cheese Cat and the book’s illustrator, the incredible illustrator, Barry Moser.  Being able to talk at length  with these two and Peachtree’s fabulous publisher, Margaret Quinlin, (an Alice-phile, I discovered) was a complete thrill.

And last night, Friday, I went to a party for Candlewick staff, authors, and illustrators of which I’m now one (which I still can’t always believe!) at the very-appropriately-chosen Library Hotel. Had a great time chatting with various wonderful Candlewick folk. I have to admit being especially touched when Kate DiCamillo asked me how school was as she remembered our conversation at the same party last year when I was very glum about some tough social stuff that had been happening with my class. She has a remarkable memory in addition to being just incredibly empathetic in person as well as in her books.

So that is BEA for me this year. (It was unfortunately the same set of days as my 40th college reunion so I had to miss a cocktail party with Anna Quinlan — one of my classmates — on Thursday and a gala dinner last night. So today I’m catching up with an old friend in town for it.)

I am a lousy speller even in the best of times, but on a small Iphone with autocorrect my poor spelling and poor typing results in many errors. It is particularly vexing with twitter because tweets are so ephemeral and not easily corrected.  Yesterday I made one that gave me, a Lewis Carroll fan, some amusement. I was tweeting away at Candlewick’s fall preview when I did this one:

The correct title is Sam and David Dig a Hole and so first of all, my apologies to Candlewick, Mac Barnett, and Jon Klassen.  It is Dig not Fig and Dave not Dace. But I have to say this error for once made me smile as it made me think of this passage from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

`Did you say pig, or fig?’ said the Cat.

`I said pig,’ replied Alice; `and I wish you wouldn’t keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy.’

`All right,’ said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

 

Some of the most transformational learning experiences I have ever had occurred at the summer institutes held for years by CLNE (Children’s Literature New England).  I started going in 1999 and didn’t miss a single one until they ended in 2006. I was blown away by them. First of all, the speakers! Not only were they some of the biggest names in the field, but their speeches were amazing. All of them. This was because the organizers saw to it that those speaking knew their audience and prepared accordingly.  But then there were the discussion groups, focusing on a set of books we’d been required to read, field trips, informal times, and more. It was during those summers that I made some important and life-long friendships. CLNE took hold of me and never let go.  And so I can’t recommend enough their forthcoming symposium, “Writing the Past: Yesterday was Once Today” to be held at Vermont College of Fine Arts, November 14-16, 2014. It is bound to be amazing. Here’s the overview:

In the myriad ways the past is presented to young readers, including history, fiction, biography, memoir, poetry and historical fantasy, what questions are raised? For audiences with short personal histories, programmed to look forward, what is the point of looking back? How trapped are readers, young and old, in their own times? Can a novel be more authentic than an historian’s account of the same period? What are the demands of writing, illustrating and reading about our own past or a time before our own? At Writing the Past, we will explore such concerns as authenticity, intention, credibility and narrative voice. In recreating yesterday as today, how does the writer avoid the slippery wisdom of hindsight? Most importantly, by reaching into the past what do we reveal, deliberately or inadvertently, about ourselves?

Presenters at the Symposium will include: M. T. Anderson, Susan Cooper, Sarah Ellis, Shane Evans, Jack Gantos, Katherine Paterson, Elizabeth Partridge, Neal Porter, Leda Schubert, Barbara Scotto, Brian Selznick, Robin Smith, Suzanne Fisher Staples, and Deborah Taylor.

For more details and to register go here.

Chris Raschka’s The Cosmobiography of Sun Ra: The Sound of Joy is Enlightening.  I’m a Raschka fan from way back. The range and variety of his work is astounding. Among my favorites are three featuring jazz musicians: Charlie Parker Played Be Bop,  John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, and Mysterious Thelonious.  Now along comes Raschka’s appreciation of Sun Ra and it is marvelous as the others. Sun Ra was one wild dude and Raschka captures his originality in words and images. Not just his life, but the sense and feeling of his music. Gorgeous.

Jose Manual Mateo’s Migrant.  This is a remarkable book providing a highly original look at those migrating across our southern border.  This story of a young Mexican migrant is told in English and Spanish and spectacularly illustrated in the style of a Mayan codex, folding out in a frieze so that young readers can explore the story in a wide variety of ways. Spectacular.

Barbara Kerley and Edwin Fotheringham’s A Home for Mr. Emerson is a gentle and profound portrayal of a remarkable man. Kerley has managed to write in spare and poetic text a lovely view of Emerson in a way that is perfect for a young audience. Fortheringham’s illustrations provide a lighthearted and fond view that perfectly compliment the text.

Betsy Bird has a fascinating post up, “We Need Diverse Books…But Are We Willing To Discuss Them With Our Kids.”  Having recently read Po Branson and  Ashley Merryman’s Nurture Shock, Betsy considers in particular their chapter  “Why White Parents Don’t Talk About Race: Does teaching children about race and skin color make them better of or worse?” and what books are available to help with this conversation for very young children.  

First of all, my general feeling about introducing difficult topics with very young children is uneasiness.  I’ve been on record as not being a fan of Holocaust stories for the very young as I think the topic requires an ability to grapple with history and information in a way they are not ready for developmentally. More recently I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it in terms of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.  I wrote my book,  Africa is My Home, for many reasons, but one was to provide a way for children the age of my students, 9 and 10, to begin to consider this horrific time.  In addition to thinking about this for the book I’ve thought about it for years as I plan and teach a unit about this to my 4th graders.  How much information do they need, I wonder? How do I navigate one child’s readiness to know more and another child’s lack of readiness for the same?  I use a lot of picture books for the unit, poetry, and my own material. I ask children and parents to let me know if anyone is upset. So far, the children seem to know just how far they are ready to go. It seems a bit like sex — they know there is more to know, but they are not ready. Of course, each class responses differently as does each child. And Betsy is talking about parents taking these topics on, not classroom teachers. Yet we classroom teachers do take them on so her post spoke to me and made me wonder.

And a particular teacher came to mind as I thought about this, former kindergarten teacher, Vivian Paley, who often addresses race in her books. One in particular seems relevant to this topic, The Girl with the Brown Crayon, in which the books of Leo Lionni  become a springboard for the consideration of many important topics including race.  While I can’t say how much conversation my white students have with their parents about race, I can say they do come to my classroom having discussed it in school in previous years.  Of course they live (as does Betsy’s daughter) in a city where they see people of different races all the time and go to a school where they see it too. I wonder about this with very young white children in communities that are less diverse — if they aren’t seeing it in real life how do they consider it when they are seeing it just in the books Betsy suggests?

As a teacher, my interest is providing historical context for particularly difficult topics.  I think it is very difficult for all of us to understand the horrors of human behavior, but by learning the history that leads to it, we are helped I think. For one thing, it takes away the tendency to demonize and brings us to a place to think about how we can avoid more horror to happen. No doubt because of my personal history with the Holocaust and Sierra Leone, I feel it is very important to consider not just the facts of racism and other such horrors of human behavior, but to try to see what causes it and how we move past it. When children are ready to begin to do this, I’m not completely sure. I’m working my way through it and appreciate every opportunity to learn more on how to do it better.

Lovely reverie on life with dog by singer Nat Johnson (via Brain Pickings).

I just was listening to the BBC this early, early morning and they caught my attention by introducing a segment with a bit from one of the Freaky Friday movies. (For those who don’t know them, these are movies based on the Mary Roger’s book, Freaky Friday, where a girl and her mother swap bodies with somewhat predictable, but amusing results. The two movies reflect their time periods — might be interesting to do it again and see how it might look today. But I digress.)

The feature was about the BeAnotherLab in which a group of Spanish artists are trying to have people experience something of the body/mind swap that the mother and daughter in the Freaky Friday movies and books experience.  Using low tech equipment they have been doing this with as an art project rather than a science one.  Their goals being the laudable ones of encouraging empathy and the sense of literally being in someone else’s shoes.  On the site they describe it as:

an interdisciplinary art collective dedicated to investigate embodied and telepresence experiments. We believe that the understanding of the “self” is related to the understanding of the “Other” and that more than individuals, we are part of a broader system called humanity. Under this perspective, we search for innovative possibilities on the concepts of embodied interaction, extended body and extended mind by mixing low-budget digital technology with social relations, Web and also neuroscientist methodologies.

We develop Creative Commons tools based on OpenKnowledge and are collaborating with experimental psychologists and neurologists to develop usage procedures to ‘the machine’ as a low-budget rehabilitation system, and also as an immersive role playing system.

Intriguing. Here’s a video they made about it:

There has been a lot of attention recently being paid to the issue of diversity in children’s and young adult books.  Here are links to some of the many posts and articles responding to this:

• The We Need Diverse Books Campaign.  This took place over three days last week, but it is still going strong. Check out the #weneeddiversebooks tweets and the weneeddiversebookstumblr to see the incredible range of responses.
• SLJ’s dedicated Diversity Issue.  Articles include “Children’s Books. Still an All-White World?,” “The Publishing Perspective on Diversity,” and “Culturally Diverse Books Selected by SLJs Review Editors.”  (The last generated a lot of comments which are  well worth reading.)
• Salon’s “WeNeedDiverseBooks Goes Viral.”
• The UK Guardian also took note: “‘We Need Diverse Book’ calls for more representative writing for children.“
• Parade interviewed one of the campaign’s leaders, Ellen Oh.
• The LA Times also took note.
• Much of the recent advocacy was in response to the recent announcement of an all white male panel of authors for BookCon, BEA’s Consumer day.  More about that and the attempt to rectify it here.

SPARK: A New Conversation Series
Laurie Anderson,performance artist
Melanie Holcomb, curator in the Department of Medieval Art and The Cloisters, MMA
Rebecca Stead, author
SeungJung Kim,art historian, professor at the University of Toronto

We think we can measure time only in minutes and seconds, but artists and musicians can also play with, stretch, and compress it. Our awareness of the expanse of human time is shattered by our understanding of geologic time and the age of the stars. In this program, our sense of time is expanded and upended, as Met curator Melanie Holcomb describes how a whole day is compressed into a few square feet in a medieval frieze; astrophysicist-turned-art historian SeungJung Kim explores the double Greek notions of chronos and kairos; writer Rebecca Stead bends time in her novel When You Reach Me (2009); and performance artist Laurie Anderson meditates on time and space.

The Spark series explores vital ideas and issues through the lens of the Met’s collections. Each cabaret-style program gathers artists, thought leaders, and performers from theater, film, politics, literature, science, and pop culture to engage in wide-ranging, fresh conversations and performances. Spark is hosted by Julie Burstein, author and Peabody Award–winning creator of public radio’s Studio 360.

I don’t know about you, but this event at the Metropolitan Museum of Art next Wednesday, April 30th, looks incredibly cool to me.

Yes indeed. Adam Gidwitz had for some time been hinting to me about a big secret project. At one point I thought it was a video game…but now I have learned  just what it is and it is indeed big.  And wild. Adam and three other big name children’s book writers will be writing brand new retellings (Adam is indeed perfect for that!) tied to the first three Star Wars movies.  They are indeed arguably as awesome as those grim Grimm fairy tales. Joining Adam are Wonder‘s R. J. Palacio, Orgami Yoda‘s Tom Angleberger, and Spiderwick‘s Tony DiTerlizzi.  From PW:

The Adventures of Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight, a picture book encompassing all three films, written by DiTerlizzi and illustrated with Ralph McQuarrie concept art, will kick off the program in October. It will be followed by retellings of Star Wars: A New Hope by Palacio in April 2015, Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by Gidwitz in July 2015, and Star Wars: Return of the Jedi by Angleberger in October 2015; all three will be illustrated by Iain McCaig. McCaig and the late McQuarrie are well known for their work as Star Wars concept artists.

Wild and wonderful. Congratulations to all those cool authors. 

I’ve long been besotted with the story of the Cottingley fairies (those that two little girls supposedly photographed quite a while ago, one of which is above).  So, of course, was amused to see the most recent photographs of those little beings.  This time it is the Rossendale fairies as photographed by adult college lecturer John Hyatt. (One of his photographs is below).

While I don’t think I’m particularly fluffy-headed about fairies and such, I admit this lacks the magic of the Cottingley story. That one appeals to me due those two young girls’ imagination going hogwild.  This business by an adult is seems something else entirely.  (That said, I love to think what Elsie and Frances could have done with theirs using today’s technology!)

In Oxford, England, there is  a wonderful unique museum situated  blending art, performance, telling, viewing, and pretty much everything else story-related in imaginative ways. This is the Story Museum. Here’s a bit from my post  reporting my visit there a couple of years ago:

Yesterday, Philip Pullman who is, unsurprisingly, one of their patrons took me to the museum where we got a fascinating tour with co-director Kim Pickin.  The physical space is a remarkable warren of rooms of all sizes with a fascinating history and, if they do even a smidgen of what they dream to do, it will be extraordinary. They’ve got some massive Alice cut-outs peering out of the windows, a dinosaur, some scary vaults (part of the space used to be the post office and there are rumors that gold bullion was stored there at one point), some very old printing presses, and lots of energy .

I’ve followed  them on twitter ever since and have often wished I could go visit their unique exhibits.  The one that just opened, 26 Characters, looks absolutely wonderful. They invited a number of familiar children’s book creators such as Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett  to “transform themselves into the characters they most loved as children.”  The resulting exhibit of photographs by Cambridge Jones is  “a gallery of rogues and rascals, wizards, witches and wild things, which unfolds through the Story Museum’s atmospheric and unfinished buildings.

Highlights include:

- see portraits hung in interactive themed spaces

- Listen to story extracts recorded by award-winning actors Olivia Colman and Christopher Eccleston

- Hear new stories specially created by Jamila Gavin, Geraldine McCaughrean, Kevin Crossley-Holland and Alex Kanefsky

- Listen to authors talking about their choice of hero and why they love stories (you can also hear them online here)

- Browse through everybody’s books and discover more in our comfortable library

- Dress up and have your photo taken for our digital gallery

- Make friends with our talking throne

For a taste, here’s Neil Gaiman as a Badger. Sure wish I could go!

Ms. Trivas represents a new phenomenon: the professional book group facilitator. A writer with a master’s degree in English literature from Middlebury, she presides over three adult groups, for which she charges up to $300 per session. She also runs a group for children, who nestle under a tree with their parents and read books like “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”

“They felt empowered sharing their opinion of the book,” she told me. “I asked them who they would rather have a play date with: Veruca Salt or Augustus Gloop. And if they could make up a different ending.”

From the NYTimes piece, Really? You’re Not in a Book Group?.

Just to let the world know, I’d considered taking a bit  less than $300 an hour to “facilitate”  a children’s book group. After all, I’ve been doing it for around three decades. I call it  ”teaching.”

I’m German Jewish — my parents left Germany as teens due to the Holocaust, but my father then became a specialist in post-war German politics. As a result we visited and lived there a lot when I was a child. I’ve close family friends and third cousins galore there. (We also have the results of the Holocaust. My grandfather was deported and killed; my nationalistic great-aunts who couldn’t imagine what was happening commit suicide rather than being deported; others went to England and Brazil;and some ended up in, but survive the camps.) My mother cooked German food. We did Christmas and Easter. I wore dirndls. I was required to knix to adults when I shook their hands. And so I often returned to German as an adult.  I speak a messy childish German, but fairly fluently. If I lived there I’d quickly become truly bilingual.  But until last week I hadn’t been there for a long time — the last visit was with my father  in 2005 to his hometown of Frankfurt to celebrate my great-grandfather’s 150th birthday and his Edinger Institut.

Craving some time in Germany I went to Berlin last week. I’d been there three times before, the first in 1965 when I was eleven with my mother who was from there. She left in early 1939 and so I was absorbed during that visit seeing where the family home had been in the Tiergarten,  visiting to her school, seeing the Wall and having her tell me how different the streets were when the city was whole, going to East Berlin, and much more.  I first returned in 1992 and was amazed to get a sense of the whole city as that had not been possible with the Wall.  There were destitute former Soviet soldiers everywhere, I recall, and a strong sense of the differences between East and West. While less pronounced, that sense was still there when I went again in 1999.  This time though it seemed almost completely gone.

What struck me most was how similar Berlin now is to other big cities — so many of the stores and such are the same everywhere. Happily there were still aspects that were distinctly German — all the wurst, the afternoon tradition of coffee and cake, and so forth.  What also struck me was the incredible focus on the DDR as history. That was absolutely fascinating to me.

My excellent hotel was just down the street from Checkpoint Charlie. the best-known crossing point between West and East Berlin during the time of the Wall. When I was in Berlin in 1965 we traveled between the two parts of the city by subway so I had never even seen this bit of the city until last week. And found it to be a good example of the way the Cold War has become a tourist attraction, partly well–presented via thoughtful museum exhibitions and partly incredibly kitchy. The later absolutely fascinated me.

For example, you could get your picture taken (for a small fee) in front of a re-creation complete with sandbags and men dressed up as soldiers.

Or buy an “authentic” piece of the Wall. How these are certified as authentic I can’t imagine. Awfully interesting that all of them have color on them. The piece I have (given to my father right after it came down from someone who was there) is grey. After all, only some of the wall was graffitied and much of it was just plain concrete and brick like my piece. Say like this section below.

Lots of fake gas masks, helmets, and uniforms to buy.

Even the local MacDonald’s had a Wall graffiti decor. Outside on the terrace were khaki-colored umbrellas.

Also related to the Cold War, but in a completely different way was the abandoned amusement park at Spree Park. Tours (in German) are available on the weekend so I went on one. And I discovered that it is all about DDR nostalgia. The guide and many of the others on the tour had been to the park when it was open. So they were there to remember. Others were there because they are simply fascinated by DDR life. As far as I could tell I was the only non-German in the group.  Fascinating in two completely different ways.

Having just seen the Divergent movie and read the book at last, this now makes me think of that!

At the train station near the park we came across a Berlin St. Patrick’s Day celebration.  A bit odd to say the least.

Having been raised with German food and fond memories of it in Germany itself, I was glad to see many aspects of it still intact. For instance, German Starbucks, along with the usual global fare,  have German-specific cake for the afternoon ritual known as “Kaffe und Kuchen.”

And there is still loads of wurst everywhere!

At the wonderful 6th floor of the KaDeWe department store I discovered that Germans see candy canes as a yearlong delicacy.  (I should say I stocked up on Haribo, a beloved childhood treat, as the German-made bears taste very different from what is available in America.)

Fun to see the German editions of this. Translates as “The Tribute from Panem: Deadly Games.”

We spent the final day on a tour of Potsdam. I’d been there in  1992 when it was still full of destitute Russian soldiers selling whatever they had. (I’ve a couple of pins.)  The German government finally, a couple of years later, paid to send them home since Russia wasn’t about to.  This time the tour was about the Cold War and Kaisers (the Kalte Krieg and Kaisers of the post heading).  Our guide gave us this and told us to study up as there would be a test at the end. I actually found all the stuff about Fredrick the Great and his relatives to be completely fascinating. But the Cold War stuff was equal to that. Again, the tour seemed to be 99% Germans there for nostalgic reasons.

This was where the Potsdam Conference took place; where  Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt divided up Germany and sort of the first bit of what would become the Cold War. Check out the Soviet red star in this very old space.

Not the circus that was Checkpoint Charlie, but equally important — at the Gienicke Bridge, prisoner trade-offs occurred causing it be called “Bridge of Spies”.

Then there was the Kaiser part of the tour, focusing on Fredrick the Great and his summer palace, Sanssouci.  It is gorgeous, but my photos aren’t so I suggest going elsewhere if you want to get a feel for the place. I was again moved by his burial with his dogs. Those little things are potatoes because evidently he popularized them in Germany.

They are cleaning a lot of the statuary, but all I could think of seeing these was Dr. Who’s weeping angels.

We did a bunch of other fun things. Say attending  the Berliner Ensemble’s current production of The Three Penny Opera, directed by Robert Wilson. It was fabulous, but also — what a wonderful theater!  We had something to drink beforehand in the canteen and saw many of the actors in make-up scarfing down meals before starting.  There were photos in rooms around the theater including this one of their original production.

 And, most of all, it was wonderful to be with Hanne Pollmann, a very, very close family friend, someone I’ve known most of my life.  She was with me the last time I was in Berlin and it was wonderful to be back there with her again.

Keith Richards is penning a children’s book and  the Onion got some people-on-the-street reactions.

And then there is the successful children’s book author Rush Limbaugh turning up on the Author of the Year shortlist for the Children’s & Teens Choice Book Awards.

Since Author of the Year finalists  ”… are selected by the CBC from a review of bestseller lists with an emphasis on Bookscan” I wondered what Keef’s chances are once his book comes out.