Via agent Janet Reid, whose taste in videos (even when she’s not sure what to call the thing video’d) is impeccable:
The poem, and I guess the performance, is by the poet (Taylor Mali) himself, although the video was put together by “student Robert Bruce.” As Mali’s site says:
I have no idea who he is (and he didn’t ask for permission), but what would you do when the result is so good?
I’ve activated a feature here at the site to let you subscribe via email to follow-up comments on a post. To do so, you’ve actually got to leave a comment yourself — including (duh) an email address; then check the little box labeled “Notify me of followup comments…,” which appears just above the reCaptcha form.
Background: Why do this? Because I’m posting less often, I (and other regulars!) are actually visiting RAMH less often. This means that conversations via comments tend to sprawl over the course of days, even weeks.
Also, I’ve been using my “smart phone” more often these days to access blogs blocked (for whatever reason) by my employer. Because the phone loads Web pages much more slowly than a real wired Web browser, constantly returning to a blog just to see if there have been more comments is a constant drain on my patience. Thus, I’ve come to appreciate the “subscribe to comments” feature on other people’s blogs: I need return to an earlier post only when I see a follow-up comment to which I want to reply.
We return you now to our regularly scheduled broadcast.
Chauncey Totman, the children’s-book author whose name I would least like to share, has done it again in his latest, Margarita, The Bearded Fox. The question for us to ponder, of course, remains (as always with Totman): What is it, exactly?
[Caution: spoiler alert! Do not read the rest of this review if you’d prefer being surprised! And/Or if you don’t know what a “spoiler” is!]
Margarita the fox lived — or so Totman would have his readers believe — deep in the wilds of New York City’s Central Park. She was a lonely sort of fox, and no surprise there, because her eyeballs bulged alarmingly, disproportionately large, at the center of apparently psychedelically-induced spirals. (A handful of mushrooms are growing under her in the cover, as if we needed the hint.) Or perhaps she’s just been spending too much time staring at the Sunday crossword, or sitting in an IMAX theater watching Avatar without the 3D glasses; it’s never made clear, exactly. (Totman has never been one for clarity.)
Anyway, she’s lonely, and she’s a fox. A fox of a fox, indeed, or so she believes. Yes, Margarita is a very vain little creature, proud of her tail, proud of her ears, her paws (at the end of those stumpy little pencil-stub legs), her pert little button nose, her nightmare eyeballs. Proud, even, of her pride:
It was such a good-looking sort of pride! A pride like no other fox’s!
But she forgets all about herself when she encounters the other fox, the fox of her dreams.
She first beholds him late one spring afternoon when she is standing on a rock looking out over a pond. She has never stood on this particular rock before. It is right at the water’s edge, and she spies him by — get a grip on the armrests of your chair — by looking straight down! How marvelous! She mistakes her own reflection for another fox! She thinks the mossy underside of the rock she’s standing on is the other fox’s beard! *giggle!*
Yes, gentle reader. I know, I know. You are not a child. You are sick unto death of authors plundering familiar mythology — like the Narcissus story, in this case — and tarting it up in cheap fabric for their own misbegotten ends. So am I. So am I.
But children will perhaps fall for it, especially very young children, especially if read to in that special tone of cloying adult condescension which, you know, children just love.
The crude illustrations are uncredited. My guess is that the illustrator requested anonymity once s/he found out with which author s/he’d been paired by the cruel machinery of kidlit publishing.
Careful readers will recognize in the tale of Margarita the plot — I nearly said the plight — of Totman’s previous title, Martini, The Mustachioed Owl. Curious readers, especially those who are themselves authors, may wonder how such a prodigiously unimaginative jackass as Totman keeps getting offered book contracts (not that I know anyone who wonders such a thing in so many words). Perhaps it was for just such circumstances that the cruel gods invented the notion of coincidence.
___________________
Note: Thanks for the inspiration to Tanita S. Davis, who in a blog post now a few months old introduced me to the general meme:
CREATE YOUR DEBUT PICTURE BOOK COVER
1 — Go to “The Name Generator: at http://www.thenamegenerator.com/
Click GENERATE NEW NAME. The name that appears is your author name.
2 — Go to “Picture Book Title Generator” at http://www.generatorland.com/usergenerator.aspx?id=243
Click CREATE TITLE! This is the title of your picture book.
3 — Go to “FlickrCC” at http://flickrcc.bluemountains.net/index.php
Type the last word from your title into the search box followed by the word “drawing”. Click FIND. The first suitable image is your cover. It will give you the option to go to Picnik.
4 — Use Photoshop, Picnik, or similar to put it all together. Creativity is, of course, encouraged.
5 — Post it to your site along with this text.
The “review” of the “book” so created? Not required. Just my penance, for jumping on the bandwagon so late.
[Looking back through this post, I see that I’ve used the word “you” a lot in passages manifestly instructional or outright didactic, especially the last section — as though barking orders at
you, the reader. Not so: it’s just me, talking to myself.]
Moonrat, God bless ‘er, last week resurrected the Write Your A** Off idea I had last year. (Not “my” idea, really — I’d sort of ripped it off and just adapted it for outside-NYC writers.) She jumped the gun by a few months, but that’s the sort of spontaneous combustion you get when you mix youth, exuberant personalities, and ideas, and it’s hard to fault her for it.
Several dozen people signed up in the comments to Moonie’s two posts, and we even set up a sort of interactive map so people can log their locations and select a preferred day of the week, and visitors can see who’s participating, on what day, and where. (There’s no real “day” set aside for this: you choose whatever day of the week you want, and do it annually, weekly, monthly, as you will.)
You can see and really interact with the map here, or — if you prefer — here’s a sort of quick-and-dirty read-only view:
[Read more…]
I’m really not a fan of the telephone: give me good-old when-I-get-to-it email any day, y’know? (People at work long ago got used to the idea that I intentionally sit with my back to the phone — so I never even have to see the red “voicemail message waiting” light. They all email me, even the ones who work in the next cubicle.)
Under the circumstances, it might surprise you that I signed up for Google Voice (even more assumption that I might use the telephone?!?)… at least until you learn that, among its other features, it includes a speech-to-text translator.
Closed captioning for voicemail messages — zowie!
Needless to say, it’s not perfect. So far the only person who’s left messages for me is my brother, whose voice sounds so much like mine that even I myself can’t tell the difference except by checking to see if my lips are moving.
Alas, this also means that his voice is husky — breath-driven rather than vocal-cord-driven — and this seems to confuse Google Voice quite a bit. In the most recent message, giving me a heads-up about videos from Conan O’Brien’s final show, the transcription software kept “hearing” the suddenly-former talk-show host’s name as “calling O’Brien.” Earlier, I was myself confused by a transcript in which he talked about his recent “conversation with Oscar.” Oscar? I kept asking myself. Who the hell is Oscar? I don’t know any Oscars!
Then I listened to the voicemail. Oh. He had a conversation with our sister.
Another cool thing you can do with Google Voice is get the transcript — and the recording itself — forwarded to you as email: invaluable if you get so few voicemail messages that you almost never visit your voicemail Inbox. (Like, oh, say… like me.) Here’s the text of Google Voice’s own welcome message:
Welcome to Google Voice! Google Voice gives you a single phone number that rings all your phones, saves your voicemail online, and transcribes your voicemail to text. Other cool features include the ability to listen in on messages while they are being left and the ability to make low cost international calls. To start enjoying Google Voice, just give out your Google Voice number. You can record custom greetings for your favorite callers or block annoying callers by marking them as SPAM. Just click on the settings link at the top of your inbox. We hope you enjoy Google Voice.
And here’s the message itself (which of course is perfectly accurate for this occasion, cough):
[Below, click Play button to begin. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is :29 long.]
You notice how the voice suddenly switched from that of a”normal” American to a sort of Central European sound over the course of the last couple sentences? I like to think the original transcription was accurate only for one half of the message, so they went back and re-recorded the other half.
For what it’s worth, the “voice of Google Voice” — the one which walks you through the menus, and such — is that of an actress and voiceover artist named Laurie Burke. What a… what a… what an interesting thing to have on one’s résumé. (Although personally, I’d much rather be known as the voice of the HAL 9000 computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Open my Inbox, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, David.”)
From my tech-writing agent, in an email message yesterday:
Did you want us to send you a check for the payment due, or did you want an electronic funds transfer to your bank acct?
It took 7½ years, but my last tech book finally brought in more for the publisher than the size of the advance.
(And no, I do not take this as a hint to return to tech writing. Heh.)
Woot!
P.S. To answer the obvious question: thirty-six dollars and change, after subtracting the agent’s commission. Of my five tech books (depending how you count), this is the only one to have crossed the magic threshold.
P.P.S. I’ll probably request payment by check; I have a feeling I’ll either want to frame it or (depending on circumstances at the time it arrives) maybe just frame a photocopy.
Okay, I know I’m at risk of exhausting your patience with all the recent round of congratulations, thanks, trophy-giving, and so on. I just want to point you in the direction of one more nice little feather in the cap of an RAMH regular. It’s especially nice to be able to do so via a post at Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast (a/k/a “7-Imp”) — whose innkeeper, Jules, also frequents the corridors here.
Sundays at 7-Imp are always special. Besides celebrating (as usual) the work of wonderful authors and illustrators of books for children, the blog also asks commenters to chime in with their own lists of seven impossibly great, hilarious, etc. things which happened to them in the previous week.
The first Sunday of each month focuses on an up-and-coming artist and illustrator (of kids’ books or otherwise) whose work has especially caught Jules’s eye, or outright dazzled her.
Which is why the 7-Imp post today is so cool, because it’s all about the artwork of Marta Pelrine-Bacon — RAMH‘s commenter with the longest tenure, having first shown up out of the blue a couple of months after I started the blog.
Very nice, Marta, to find yourself featured in the first post of the year at a blog which has also featured the work of the likes of Ed Young, Grace Lin, Daniel Pinkwater, et al…. what company!
Thank you for 2009 and best wishes for 2010 to all in the RAMH universe (both visitors and, uh… visitees?) — especially to the proprietors of the following blogs: you collectively and separately inspired me, awed me, made me laugh out loud and ponder, stopped my breath, wonder what the hell I was doing calling myself a “blogger,” and wait eagerly for your next post, way out of proportion to my ability to return the favor.
In alphabetical order:
(Note: Many of you talented, industrious folks work with more than one site or blog, and your other presences are often just as powerful/meaningful as their main ones. Thanks for them, too, folks — especially Maggie for Violence Unsilenced, Marta for Words Are Art (etc., etc.), Moonrat for The Book Book, and Froog for Barstool Blues.)
Heartiest congratulations to RAMH regular visitor and blog-friend Froog, who has performed the hat trick and then some in garnering — all at once — five best-of-the-year awards for his online presences:
It’s about time someone gave him his due!
I understand Joan Rivers has begun making plans for the presentation ceremony. If she can just find a red carpet in his neighborhood which isn’t fluttering from a flagpole, she should be all set.
…and probably always will. But this is a pretty damned impressive advertisement/trailer:
It sort of compresses all the memes from the SyFy cable network’s distinctive bumper spots into a big ol’ nearly coherent 2:40 whole (and avoids the corny-CGI temptations to which the network’s special-effects guys all too often succumb in the actual programs). Nice.
(Anybody know what song is on the soundtrack? Musically, it reminds me a lot of the song whose adorable video I featured in this post back in June, but the lyrics don’t seem the same.)
(Hat tip: Speak Coffee to Me)
