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Morning, folks!  I do believe my comments feature is busted at the moment, so please don’t be alarmed if you can’t get anything to go through.  It’s frustrating for me as well.  Feels like an echo chamber in here.  Hm.

• Well, as you may have heard, A Chair, A Fireplace, and a Tea Cozy will not be continuing here on the SLJ blog network.  Liz Burns posted her final post just this past Friday.  But fear not!  This is not the end of Tea Cozy as we know it.  Liz has a new site so update those bookmarks and RSS feeds and get thee over there.  Her post on the We Need Diverse Books Campaign should start you out right.

• Speaking of fellow SLJ blogs, I admit that I don’t often read the excellent Adult Books 4 Teens since the topic isn’t really in my wheelhouse.  Still, recently Mark Flowers had a great post up on The Problem with Stories About Amnesia Solved by Robert Glancy and Jason Bourne.  He gave a nice shout out to my husband’s blog Cockeyed Caravan in the post saying, “Anyone who cares about narrative, movies, or both should be reading Matt Bird’s Cockeyed Caravan blog. He spends most of his time there deconstructing the narrative structure of Hollywood movies and explaining how and why movies do (and don’t) work. But while he only discusses movies (and usually big-budget Hollywood ones at that), his insights are invaluable for anyone interested in the way narrative works in any kind of fiction. I’ve cited his ideas many times over on my personal blog and in conversations with other book lovers.”  Love you, Mark!  Thanks!

• And since I’m just on a bloggers-discussing-bloggers kick, I was so pleased to hear that Sue Bartle, Mary Ann Cappiello, Marc Aronson, Kathleen Odean, and Myra Zarnowski are restarting the excellent Common Corps blog Uncommon Corps.  In an era where so many people are desperate for CCSS info, we’re all desperate for intelligent conversation on the topic.  This blog provides that, as well as amazing curricular tie-ins you might not have otherwise known about.  Read Compare & Contrast for a taste of what I mean.

• Awww.  The Moomin characters are now regular dining companions of lonely Japanese restaurant attendees.  I’d be game for eating with one.  Just don’t seat me with Little My.  I don’t trust that gal.  Thanks to mom for the link.

• Hm. Maybe it’s a good thing I’ll be missing out on this year’s Book Expo.  Granted, it’s exhausting even in the best of times, but I still get a bit of a kick out of it.  Of course, this year there’s been a bit of a brouhaha with BookCon (which I have never even been aware of before).  One of the problems with the internet is the fact that when controversies arise, few are willing to recap the troubles.  Fortunately the Melville House post Wear shades to BookCon, it’ll be blindingly white in there tells you everything you need to know.  And more!

• “When white writers come to me and ask if it’s OK for them to write about people of color, it seems as if they’re asking for my blessing. I can’t give them my blessing because I don’t speak for other people of color. I only speak for myself, and I have personal stakes in specific kinds of narratives.”  Since author Malinda Lo co-founded Diversity in YA she’s been getting a lot of these questions over the years.  Her piece Should white people write about people of color? is your required reading of the day.  Many thanks to Phil Nel for pointing it out to me.

• By the way, in the course of looking at Malinda’s work I discovered the blog Disability in Kidlit which, somehow, I’d never run across before.  Since it’s been around since June 2013 it’s hardly new, but I’m still going to call a New Blog Alert on it, since I’ve only just discovered it myself.  It’s a blog about “Reviews, guest posts, and discussions about the portrayal of disabilities in MG/YA fiction.”  There are a couple books out this year that I’d love their opinion of.

• Oh!  This happened.  So I’ll admit that I’m more of a podcast listener than a radio listener.  And when NYPL’s lovely PR department asked if I’d be interested in talking on the Leonard Lopate show, I confess I didn’t quite know who he was.  Fortunately I learned pretty quickly, and even was lucky enough to meet his replacement Andy Borowitz instead (whom I had heard of since he moderated the National Book Awards the year I got to go).  Our talk is up and it’s called Our Favorite Children’s Stories.  Mostly a lot of talk about classics, but I was able to work in some shout-outs for three more recent books.  The comments section is where the recommendations and memories are really hopping, though.  Good stuff is to be found there.

Take a gander at this article on WWI librarian uniforms and one thing becomes infinitely clear: Librarians during The Great War has it DOWN in terms of clothing, man.  Look at that style. That look!  That form!  Oh, what the heck.  Let’s bring them back!  At the very least I’d love an ALA-issued arm patch.  Thanks to AL Direct for the link.

Actually, this pairs rather well with that last piece.  Sayeth Bookriot, Enough With the “Sexy Library” Thing Already.  Amen.

That they are seriously considering making a film out of A Monster Calls is amazing enough to me as it is.  That it may potentially star Felicity Jones and Liam Neeson?  Having a harder time wrapping my head around that one.  Thanks to PW Children’s Bookshelf for the link!

In case you missed it the Américas Award for Children’s & Young Adult Literature was announced recently.  The winners?  Parrots Over Puerto Rico illustrated by Susan Roth and co-authored by Susan Roth and Cindy Trumbore won the award proper while Diego Rivera: An Artist for the People by Susan Goldman Rubin and Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote illustrated and written by Duncan Tonatiuh took home the honors.  Lots of great Honorable Mentions too, so check it out.

Whoo boy.  The term “mansplaining” just seems loaded to the gills.  That said, this piece from Inside Higher Ed tackles the definition itself with a look at the film version of The Wizard of Oz.  I always liked the Scarecrow best too, and assumed that when Dorothy grew up she’d end up with Hunk.  Feel free to pick apart the various ramifications behind that bit of childhood matchmaking, if you will.

I don’t usually quote from the Cynopsis Kids newsletters, and technically neither of these have much to do with children’s books, but there were two recent pieces that concerned children’s entertainment that I thought you might like to know about as much as I did.

Get ready for Hulu‘s first original kids series. Debuting this Friday is Doozers, the Fraggle Rock spinoff produced by the Jim Henson Co. that packs a full 52 episodes and will be available advertiser-free on both Hulu and Hulu Plus. The preschool series revolved around an animated gaggle of kids called The Pod Squad– Spike, Molly Bolt, Flex and Daisy Wheel–who learn to design and build different objects. Other Hulu Kids content includes Fraggle Rock, Pokemon and SpongeBob.

In a move more in line with kids’ bedtimes, beginning Tuesday, April 29, new eps of Syfy‘s original series Jim Henson’s Creature Shop Challenge will air at 9p vs. their current 10p Tuesday slot. The competition series features 10 aspiring creature creators competing to out-imagine one another in challenges where they will build everything from mechanical characters to whimsical beasts. The stakes are high. Winner walks with $100,000 and a contract working at the world-renowned Creature Shop.

• Daily Image:

I think my brother-in-law Steve sent me this one.  Don’t know where it’s from but I sort of adore it. Wouldn’t mind one of my own.

Comedian and author Andy Borowitz revealed today that The New Yorker has acquired his blog, The Borowitz Report. Starting today, readers will find his satirical pieces at the magazine’s website.

Borowitz joked that editor David Remnick will allow the humorist to write for the magazine as long as “I don’t make fun of Malcolm Gladwell.”

The announcement ended with a serious dedication to the writer’s mother. Here’s more: “if you’ll forgive me, I’d like to say one last thing that’s true. My mom, Helen Borowitz, who died this month at the age of eighty-three, loved The New Yorker all her life and introduced me to it when I was a little boy. Seeing the Borowitz Report at The New Yorker would have made her so happy. I dedicate all my columns to her memory.”

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

Looking at the comments section for our Should Authors Dance? post, it seemed like plenty of GalleyCat readers want to see their favorite writer appear on Dancing with the Stars. Now it’s time to do something about it.

Reader Michelle Gilstrap suggested Lotus Eaters author Tatjana Soli and proposed: “[Soli] is coming to Los Angeles for a special event on October 16th, I will ask her if she would like to do it. We should start a Facebook page for her, if she says yes. This is how they got Betty White on [Saturday Night Live].”

It’s a great idea. We’ll start by letting our readers pick the best writer to appear on Dancing with the Stars–we’ve collected ten suggestions from GalleyCat readers below.  Go to this Facebook link to vote for your favorite author. We’ll count the votes and build a special Facebook page to advocate for the winning author. The ten suggestions follow below…

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New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.

It seems that each day brings a new way to publish literature digitally. HarperCollins Children's bestseller "Into the Wild," the first in Erin Hunter's Warriors series, is one of the first titles that Harper is making available for free on their website. HarperChildren's Audio has produced some of the newer titles in the Warriors series as audiobooks but not "Into the Wild." Too bad - since a free download of an audiobook would also be a great sales boost for the entire series.

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I admire Jon Krakauer's book Into the Wild quite a bit, and so I was wary about seeing the movie. What I most like about the book is the interplay between Krakauer's sensibility and Chris McCandless's story -- Krakauer understands the mix of idealism, frustration, and foolhardiness that led McCandless to abandon as many of the accoutrements of civilization as he could, dub himself "Alexander Supertramp", and set out with very little preparation or knowledge, eventually heading for the wilderness of Alaska -- and yet Krakauer is also different enough in temperament from McCandless to be able to provide a counter-narrative through his wrestling with the implications of McCandless's actions, ideas, and mistakes. It's not as drastic a counter-narrative as Werner Herzog provides the story of a somewhat similar Alaskan dreamer, Timothy Treadwell, in Grizzly Man, but it's enough to make the book compelling and thought-provoking.

Alas, the movie Sean Penn has made is a sentimental and declawed version of Krakauer's book. I didn't really hate it -- Emile Hirsch gives a warm and dedicated performance as McCandless, which makes the movie generally pleasant to watch -- but every time I was about to fully surrender myself to the characters and events, something annoyed me, and the more I've thought about Into the Wild as a whole, the more I've been frustrated by its many lost possibilities.

A story like Chris McCandless's cries out for a visionary director, and I couldn't help wondering throughout Into the Wild what a director like Herzog or Terrence Malick or even David Lynch would have done with the material, because Penn is too pedestrian a filmmaker -- too given to visual, audio, and narrative cliches -- to do real justice to the source material.

The music for the movie consists mostly of songs by Eddie Vedder, and though I like some of the individual songs, they are used so obtrusively that they turn otherwise interesting scenes into banal music videos. At moments of emotional intensity, the score (by Michael Brook) reverts to strings, letting us know this is a place where we're supposed to feel. (There's a nice moment, though, when Hirsch and Kristen Stewart perform a pleasant duet of one of my favorite songs, John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery". It's contrived and obvious, but it's such a good song I didn't mind.) The editing and cinematography don't help -- each shot is designed for short attention spans, and much of the footage of wilderness looked to me like it could have been taken from any anonymous nature documentary. (For comparison, take a look at a masterpiece like Paris, Texas.)

And then there's the voiceover. Usually, the voiceover is of McCandless's sister, Carine, who yaks about Chris and about life after he disappeared from the family. It's at best unnecessary, at worst a clumsy reiteration of things we could figure out otherwise or decide for ourselves. (At the end, we get Chris himself taking over the voiceover.) Worse, though, are words from McCandless's writings occasionally scrawled across the screen in big, handwriting-style yellow letters that seem more appropriate to a show on Nikelodeon circa 1988 than to a movie such as Into the Wild seems to aspire to be.

The biggest problem I have with Into the Wild as a film, though, is that it presents McCandless as a holy fool. Wherever he goes, he makes people seek out what is meaningful in existence, he makes them recognize love, he helps them see beyond consumerism and materialism and other, like, bad stuff. So even though he might not, himself, have the best end, he nonetheless helps other people find meaning in their lives, repair their relationships, and dream. It's the sort of gooey, optimistic woo-woo appealing to everybody from people who use the word "spirituality" without a trace of irony to devout fundamentalists of various religions, and in that sense it's hardly different from the average feel-good movie or get-well card.

McCandless sought some sort of truth, and in seeking this truth he sacrificed absolutely everything. That's the sort of idealist I like, the sort of person who sticks to deep convictions and tries to build a life from them, even if they do so rashly or ignorantly. Herzog is attracted to this sort of figure, and has spoken of "ecstatic truth" as a goal of his films, and though this idea is a bit abstract for my tastes, nonetheless it leads Herzog to produce interesting work, and I wish Penn had been better able to aim for such a truth; instead, he emitted rote simulacra of ecstacy, reducing McCandless's quest for truth to, more often than not, comfortably familiar imagery and easy emotions.

There are, though, redeeming aspects to the film, including some of the scenes of McCandless's last days -- visceral scenes presented without bombast. There are some fine performances (especially by Hal Holbrook) that transcend the inspirational-movie-of-the-week situations the actors have been given for material. At brief moments, the music gets out of the way and we are allowed some choice and ambiguity in how we will respond emotionally. The attention to books throughout the movie, and McCandless's fascination with writers such as Tolstoy and Jack London, will please anyone who has carried books around as totems and companions.

I suppose, then, that my strongest feelings about Into the Wild as a film are feelings of disappointment -- disappointment at the lost potential to film the story as something unique and powerful, something that escapes received ideas and gestures; disappointment that the fleeting moments of real excellence couldn't be extended.