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I think the nicest thing about the internet, for me anyway, is that if you wait around long enough things that you’ve seen live will appear online and then you can let lots of people know about them.  For example, this video of Daniel Handler/Lemony Snicket and Maira Kalman is not new.  It does, however, contain the only known record (known to me) of them both talking about the photograph game they would play.  The photo involving the catapult and the giant ice cream is a bit dangerous as it makes me giggle for long periods of time.

Next up, the only thing better than bad lip reading of Twilight?  Bad lip reading of New Moon.  True fact.

Read a really good independently published children’s book this week.  Self-published and remarkably fun.  It even has one top-notch book trailer to accompany it.  Check it out, peoples.

If the author’s name sounds familiar, that would be Ms. Lynn Messina of Little Vampire Women fame.  On an unrelated note, she also owns awesome boots.

Big time thanks to David Maybury for directing me to his link to this video of Laureate na nÓg Niamh Sharkey working with students from Griffeen Valley Educate Together on a Christmas Window for Hodges Figgis Bookstore in Dublin.

I’m now harboring fantasies of some store in New York doing something similar.  Books of Wonder maybe, though Bank Street Bookstore would probably get more foot traffic watching.  I mean, if Dublin can do it, we can too, can’t we?

And finally, for the off-topic video sometimes you just gotta give cred to the science/digital geeks.  Serious cred.

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link!

'Twilight,' Miley top this year's 'Kids Choice' nominations (Plus CrunchGear highlights talkatoo from the Toy Fair, which records a parent's voice to sooth your child on the go. And Playthings has its roundup of Toy Fair buzz part one and two.)... Read the rest of this post

This is the best Twilight comment ever! (Or why I have to see New Moon; unfortunately I haven’t seen it yet.)  This is from the site My Life Is Average. Big thanks to Adrienne for the link!

“Yesterday I went to see new moon with my twilight crazy friends. Not being a fan of twilight, I felt like an outcast tagging along. When Robert Pattinson came on the sceen, a 8 year old girl got up and screamed; “Cedric Digory lives! I must tell Dumbledore!” She then proceeded to run out of the cinema along with half the cinema including me. I’ve never felt so included. MLIA”

Anyone want to go see New Moon with me so we can do this? (Then we’ll go to a different theater and watch it all the way through.)

Elvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relentless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below, he looks at The Twilight Saga: New Moon. See Lim’s previous OUPblogs here.

Children are, if they are lucky, taught at home and in schools. But they are also taught with books and movies, where retrograde social conventions and meanings are re-inscribed under the guise of good clean fun.

The Twilight Saga: New Moon is a romantic fantasy fusing teen lust and fantasy, but in the story of vulnerable girls swooning over powerful vampires, and rabid werewolves fighting the undead (who nevertheless retain their human form), we have a movie genre best reserved for Halloween.

Critics have been much better at picking up the retrograde gender subtext of the screenplay, at how it exploits the fine line between rape and lust, and how Bella Swan plays a terrible role model for teenage girls. Bella, the female protagonist, is portrayed as weak, vulnerable, virginal, and young, while Edward Cullen, her male vampire love interest is portrayed as supernatural, more powerful than he dares admit, 17 and yet over a hundred, young but wise. Throughout the first half of the movie, Bella is depressed because Edward has left her, and she ultimately attempts a pseudo-suicide by going cliff-diving and nearly drowns, but lucky for her, another supernatural male, Jacob Black, who plays a werewolf, swoops in for the rescue. Throughout the movie, young girls are comforted and encouraged in mixing sexual desire with sexual vulnerability, that to be loved is to be rescued. As a preview of the next sequel, we are tantalizingly promised the consummation of Bella’s and Edward’s love, that he will finally agree to change her into a vampire. He would then take everything that is hers, no less than her life and her soul, and shockingly, it is everything that Bella ever wanted.

If this is what causes teenage girls (and not a few self-confessed middle-aged feminists) to swoon at the movie, the unconscious racism in the movie takes us to a new league of egregiousness.

A google with the search terms “Twilight,” “full moon” and “racism” only turned out less than 10 germane hits, with one of them addressing the fact that some fans were agitated that the character, Laurent, was played by a black man. They charge that vampires, whose skin sparkle in the sun (according to author Stephenie Meyer) surely have to be white. These fans probably felt that fidelity to the book (or art) was sacrificed at the altar of political correctness. I’ll tell these fans to lighten up (no pun intended) though, since the author as well as the movie’s casting director is clearly on their side, because Laurent, the sole black vampire in the screenplay, was conveniently dispatched by the werewolves early on in the movie.

Laurent, in any case is just the side-show to the movie’s considerable moral insensitivity. The main battle in the movie is between the vampires and the werewolves, played by chara

I never thought I was going to have such a serious problem with a popular book that I almost didn’t put it on the shelves. I’m a cool, gay, sex-positive, pro-teen agency guy, I thought to myself when I was getting my MLIS, the parents may have problems with my selections, but too bad! I’m here to advocate for the students. And then I read Twilight.

I almost didn’t buy the Twilight books for my 7-8 school library. I don’t hate them because I’m a guy, or because of the excruciatingly bad prose, or the corruption of vampire mythology without acknowledging or commenting on the original, or even because Bella is such a waste of space. I hate them because of the sexual messaging they impart to teens, especially teen girls, robbing them of agency and normalizing stalking and abusive behavior.

Even if I hadn’t purchased the series (or is it a saga now?) for the library, it seems like every third girl in the school has her own copies, right down to the developmentally delayed girls who came in today toting matching copies of The Host. So I have to engage with it, and I’ve been trying to casually counteract the normalization when girls talk to me about their favorite book and movie of all time. (I am saying girls for a reason: Twilight seems to be universally reviled by the boys in my school, most of whom have not read it.) I don’t talk about hating the book, I just say I’m not a fan, and usually cite Edward’s stalking behavior as creepy. Sort of along the lines of this anti-text message harassment PSA. What Edward does is just not cool.

But a good (non-librarian) friend sent me this LiveJournal commentary on the movie adaptation of New Moon. The post has some NSFW language, but goes over the abusive red flags in Bella and Edward’s relationship, as laid out by the National Domestic Violence Hotline. It’s the first time I’ve seen it put so baldly, and it is shocking.

I no longer feel my casual, conversational undoing is enough. I’ve brainstormed with a Twilight-loving teacher about how to approach doing this anti-domestic violence education in a more formal way. I’ve got a call in to the dean of my school to see if I can link this in with the sexual assault education they get from the District Attorney later in the year. I couldn’t keep the books out of their hands even if I thought it was ethical to, but I also can’t sit by while a book with near-universal market penetration negatively shapes the social and sexual agency of the girls in my school.