When Good Things Happen to Good Book Bloggers

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You probably already know the movie A Christmas Story, released in 1983 and based on the stories (and featuring the voiceover narration) of Jean Shepherd.

And if you’ve been hanging around here for a while, you may also know of my own childhood Christmas memories — and if so, you’ll know I share what seems to have been Shepherd’s take on Christmas.

To wit: holiday cheer, sentiment, wintertime hearths, great food, ornaments, family — yes, all that makes the holiday traditionally wonderful… but from the point of view of a kid, Christmas can elicit a certain hilarious cynicism.

It’s rather like that moment in A Christmas Story when Ralphie opens up the giftbox from Aunt Clara to find that she has sent him an oversized pink bunny suit. (“Aunt Clara had for years labored under the delusion that I was not only perpetually 4 years old, but also a girl.”) Ralphie’s Mom is delighted; Ralphie himself is horrified at the gift itself, and positively mortified when she insists that he try it on.

In this spirit of the dark, funny things underlying the sentimental, I’m excited to tell you of a book currently scheduled for release in 2012 by Candlewick Press, tentatively titled Wild Things! and subtitled The True, Untold Stories Behind the Most Beloved Children’s Books and Their Creators.

Especially, I’m excited to tell you about this because among its three co-authors will be friend of RAMH Julie Danielson, who comments here as Jules and, more importantly, curates the fabulous kidlit blog Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast.

Says Jules:

…sophisticated (and even jaded) adults to get sentimental and dewey-eyed at the mere mention of children’s books. Now, if they didn’t, we wouldn’t have a book to write, so we’re not exactly complaining. But it’s still a curious phenomenon to us, that, for many, the topic conjures up a world of gumdrops, rainbows, and fluffy little bunnies that love you forever and like you for always. Our book aims to debunk the notion that all children’s book authors and illustrators live in such a world.

Here’s how Betsy Bird, another co-author and a blogger for School Library Journal, describes the project:

…we take an irreverent, but affectionate, look at the world of children’s books, noting how this once niche market has, in recent years, achieved mainstream interest and appeal. The wide-ranging text examines the history of subversive books (sometimes it’s all about who gets to eat and who gets eaten), uncovers a few literary mysteries (what, exactly, is inside the real Winnie-the-Pooh’s gastro-intestinal tract?), and delivers the scoop on nasty little things that cagey writers have slipped right past their editors. We’ll also tell you which author murdered her mum and which one wrote hardcore porn. There are tales about famous feuds and lawsuits, information on banned books, and descriptions of titles that were quietly changed after publication to remove offensive stereotypes. Oh, and did you know that Courtney Love’s grandmother is an award-winning children’s writer?

No word on whether Jules, Betsy, and third co-author Peter Sieruta (of the Collecting Children’s Books blog) — cagey writers all — will be trying to slip any little nasties past their own editor.

But these three seem to have the collective sensibilities of Ralphie viewing his bunny suit for the first time and, in the image at the right (cribbed from Peter Sieruta’s announcement), of Ramona Quimby in pink-bunny slippers. So we can hope!

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Boyish Prankery

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Marta was wondering earlier this week about pranks, harmless or funny or otherwise. Coincidentally, at about the same time that she posted that, I received a funny reminder of a successful but harmless prank I’d been involved with from years ago. Thought I’d share the story with you (even though some of it, in retrospect, will embarrass me and make me wish that some things weren’t true).

Some background:

I attended a small high school in southern New Jersey in the late 1960s. Most school dances, at least back then (what do they do now, anyway?), were held in the gym, suitably transformed into romantic wonderlands by crepe paper and complicated lighting. But in our junior year, the prom — the Big Event — took place at a popular club some 10 or 15 miles away. Called the Latin Casino, it was a big deal, with big-name entertainers on the calendar, and at the time our prom took place the big name was big indeed: The Supremes, with Diana Ross.

So yes, we always got a rise out of telling people that we’d had The Supremes — The REAL Supremes — at our junior prom. We always got a rise out of that, even if we hadn’t gone to the prom ourselves. Which was the case with Yours Truly and most of his friends, none of us having yet fully (or at all) emerged from our cocoons of bachelor-boyhood.

(To be fair, it was a plain old economic calculation, too; two tickets to the Latin Casino cost a heck of a lot more than two tickets to the RHS gym. You practically had to believe you meant to marry the young lady in question.)

So that’s the background story. Now scroll the calendar forward, not quite a decade…

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Discoveries

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[Photo above taken by the Hubble Wide-Field Camera 3 and released a few days ago by NASA. Several thousand galaxies are visible in the original, “a peek at the universe as it looked about 600 million years after the Big Bang.” More info here and here.]

From whiskey river (which excerpted from this poem, in different words, via translation):

The startling reality of things

The startling reality of things
Is my discovery every single day.
Every thing is what it is,
And it’s hard to explain to anyone how much this delights me
And suffices me.

To be whole, it is enough simply to exist.

I’ve written a good many poems.
I shall write many more, naturally.
Each of my poems speaks of this,
And yet all my poems are different,
Because each thing that exists is one way of saying this.

Sometimes I start looking at a stone.
I don’t start thinking, Does it have feeling?
I don’t fuss about calling it my sister.
But I get pleasure out of its being a stone,
Enjoying it because it feels nothing,
Enjoying it because it’s not at all related to me.

Occasionally I hear the wind blow,
And I find that just hearing the wind blow makes it worth having been born.

I don’t know what others reading this will think;
But I find it must be good since it’s what I think without effort,
With no idea that other people are listening to me think;
Because I think it without thoughts,
Because I say it as my words say it.

I was once called a materialist poet
And was surprised, because I didn’t imagine
I could be called anything at all.
I’m not even a poet: I see.
If what I write has any merit, it’s not in me;
The merit is there, in my verses.
All this is absolutely independent of my will.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

…and:

Your beloved and your friends were once strangers. Somehow at a particular time, they came from the distance toward your life. Their arrival seemed so accidental and contingent. Now your life is unimaginable without them. Similarly, your identity and vision are composed of a certain constellation of ideas and feelings that surfaced from the depths of the distance within you. To lose these now would be to lose yourself.

(John O’Donohue [source])

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Superstar in the Making

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Regular whiskey river Friday post coming up shortly. In the meantime, in case you haven’t seen it already, another of those going-/gone-viral instant Web sensation videos to put a Friday grin on your face:

To begin, if you don’t already know of the songwriter/performer Jason Mraz and his song “I’m Yours,” you might want to watch this:

With or without watching that one, though, you need to watch this one:

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What’s in a Song: Cry Me a River (2)

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[This is Part 2 of a two-part series about the song “Cry Me a River,” made popular, originally, in a recording released in 1955. Part 1, about the song’s history, appeared a few days ago. As I indicated there, if you hope to learn anything from this about the Justin Timberlake song of the same title, you should proceed down the street and rattle the next doorknob.]

You hear the expression every now and then: Party A is complaining bitterly about the course his life has taken, or about the weather, or about the cancellation of a favorite TV show… whatever. The complaint falls upon the ears of Party B, an especially unsympathetic listener, who often has what B believes to be even sorrier woes. B sneers and says something like: Yeah, yeah — all right. Cry me a river, why dontcha.

One measure of the phrase’s popularity: the Urban Dictionary offers no fewer than three user-supplied definitions and colorful examples (not counting references to any songs by that title; the following is copied and pasted unchanged from the UD, so brace yourself for offenses to the Mother Tongue and good taste):

to tell a moaning person to shut up and that you dont care.
your cat got ran over and your giro is late, Cry me a river love!

…an expression that means i’ve been through worse, you’re being a drama queen

person: omg my chihuahua is sick
you: cry me a river loser both of my dogs are dead.

Said in response to some ones sob story. Shortened from the full statement of “Cry me a river, build a bridge and GET THE FUCK OVER IT!”

Very old saying predating any Justin Timberflake warbles or other pop culture references. Interestingly still in common use today.

Whinger: My cars broken down and Im poor and I lost my job and my wife left me and when she left, she ran over my dog.
Cold Hard Bastard: Cry me a river buddy, cry me a river.

Whatever the specifics: Isn’t that a great metaphor?

At the Yahoo! Answers UK site, one poster provided my favorite creative explanation (an example, btw, of a mondegreen) for the phrase’s origin:

It’s actually ‘Crimea River’. An English soldier was writing home during the Crimean war and wrote “It’s terrible being away from home. I miss you all. I hate this Crimea River, it’s so dirty and depressing, but it’s the only water we have”. When his wife read it out loud to his children, they mistook the words for Cry Me A River and not Crimea River.
Source(s):
My very own Great Grandpa.

As for covers of the song, other than Julie London’s, since its official publication in 1953…

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Navigating My Subconscious

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When I was a boy, among my adventure fantasies was being a fighter pilot. There was something tremendously exciting to me in the idea of traveling at superhigh speeds and concentrating not just on the flight path ahead, but on the split-second change in circumstances in all three dimensions at once. You’d have to keep looking up, behind, down, to both sides… and never, ever relax.

(One obvious fallacy seems never to have occurred to me: if Dad’s characteristic high-speed highway driving gave me the willies, as it did, in actual aerial combat I’d almost certainly bail out more often than not.)

Later, fresh out of college, I first worked not as the English teacher I’d been trained to become, but as a cab driver — a position for which, excuse the boast, I was eminently suited.

Two apparently unrelated factoids about my life, separated from each other (and from now) by decades. But if you let your conceptual vision blur just a bit, you might discern the connection: spatial relationships; geography.

For whatever reason, I’ve always been interested in, not to say obsessive about, how one gets from here to there. Even now, I can spend hours poring over maps and atlases; Google Maps (and its macro-offspring, Google Earth and Google Sky) would be like a crack pipe to me if I let it. Furthermore, I’m blessed (or cursed) with a good intuitive sense of direction, so after I’ve driven someplace once I can almost always get back to it without conscious thought. (I say “cursed” only because this sometimes makes me impatient with others’ reluctance to venture into unfamiliar territory.) I actually hold a mental map of the route, including landmarks, traffic bottlenecks, relationship to other routes to other nearby destinations, and so on.

This obsession extends, bizarrely, even into my dreams. I notice and generally remember how I’ve “gotten” from one place to another. As my dream life goes on over the course of years, I recognize intersections I’ve “been to” before (although I’ve never seen them in real life). And, what’s more, I sometimes record these routes — write them up the morning after, in the course of recording especially notable dreams.

(Yes, I’ve tried to keep paper and pen by the bedside so I can jot them down at the moment, so to speak. It never works for me: I’m too caught up in my dreams to want to wake up.)

The most recent such report took me about an hour to write on Saturday morning, when I should have been working on Seems to Fit instead. You can read it here (irrelevant, non-setting-related portions excised, and hyperlinks to real-world places added (because — ha ha — doing so gives me a chance to use Google Maps)).

In the meantime: how about you? Is there any ongoing thread to what happens between your ears as you sleep? Consider the common “Color or black-and-white?” question. Beyond that, though, think of your dreams as a very particular sort of fiction. Do you tend to remember the plots the next morning? or are you a character specialist? what about dialogue?

Have you had the deja vu moment in which you come to a real place for the first time… and realize you’ve already been there in your dreams? Do you find yourself dreaming about the same things, people, places, even in non-recurring dreams, even spread out over years or decades?

C’mon. Spill.

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What’s Your Story? (Are You Sure?)

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From whiskey river:

The Story, Around the Corner

is not turning the way you thought
it would turn, gently, in a little spiral loop,
the way a child draws the tail of a pig.
What came out of your mouth,
a riff of common talk.
As a sudden weather shift on a beach,
sky looming mountains of cloud
in a way you cannot predict
or guide, the story shuffles elements, darkens,
takes its own side. And it is strange.
Far more complicated than a few phrases
pieced together around a kitchen table
on a July morning in Dallas, say,
a city you don’t live in, where people
might shop forever or throw a thousand stories
away. You who carried or told a tiny bit of it
aren’t sure. Is this what we wanted?
Stories wandering out,
having their own free lives?
Maybe they are planning something bad.
A scrap or cell of talk you barely remember
is growing into a weird body with many demands.
One day soon it will stumble up the walk and knock,
knock hard, and you will have to answer the door.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

…and (italicized portion):

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience. Or at least we do for a while.

(Joan Didion, The White Album [source])

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What’s in a Song: Cry Me a River (1)

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[Another in a series of occasional posts about popular American songs with long histories. And if you are seeking information on the Justin Timberlake song by the same name, believe me, you are 100% in the wrong place.]

On paper, it doesn’t appear to be a “big” song. Nearly always, the arrangement features a single vocalist and one or two background instruments. The lyrics aren’t even all that special, in one respect: very simple words (with one exception), in a more or less conventional order. At that, the title itself appears six times over the course of the three stanzas, and a slight variation of it thrice more.

But given the right singer, oh, how loudly this song speaks…

(Who’s “the right singer”? Hard to say. Wikipedia lists a sample of about 150 of them. Amazon’s MP3 download store includes over 600 hits — many duplicates, of course, but still… And if you go rummaging around on iTunes and elsewhere on the Web, you can quickly fill your hard drive with unique versions.)

Here’s the story:

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Loitering in Mind

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A somewhat slapdash whiskey river Friday post this week, its author having been pretty much laid low by the stupidest of ailments — a cold — since Tuesday night.

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (a thematic archive):

Can You Imagine?

For example, what the trees do
not only in lightning storms
or the watery dark of a summer’s night
or under the white nets of winter
but now, and now, and now — whenever
we’re not looking. Surely you can’t imagine
they don’t dance, from the root up, wishing
to travel a little, not cramped so much as wanting
a better view, or more sun, or just as avidly
more shade — surely you can’t imagine they just
stand there loving every
minute of it, the birds or the emptiness, the dark rings
of the years slowly and without a sound
thickening, and nothing different unless the wind,
and then only in its own mood, comes
to visit, surely you can’t imagine
patience, and happiness, like that.

(Mary Oliver [source])

From whiskey river:

The time is ripe for looking back over the day, the week, the year, and trying to figure out where we have come from and where we are going to, for sifting through the things we have done and the things we have left undone for a clue to who we are and who, for better or worse, we are becoming. But again and again we avoid the long thoughts. We cling to the present out of wariness of the past. And why not, after all? We get confused. We need such escape as we can find. But there is a deeper need yet, I think, and that is the need — not all the time, surely, but from time to time — to enter that still room within us all where the past lives on as a part of the present, where the dead are alive again, where we are most alive ourselves to turnings and to where our journeys have brought us. The name of the room is Remember — the room where with patience, with charity, with quietness of heart, we remember consciously to remember the lives we have lived.

(Frederick Buechner [source: quoted many places online])

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