"Three books that should be made into movies" is today's topic for the book list at Lost in Books, and I can't resist telling you about my choices. When I am in charge of the world, these are the three that I will assign to Hollywood directors:
The Borrible Trilogy by Michael De Larrabeiti. Like other books that have recently been made into movies (Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter), this one would have posed some technical challenges in the past, but we're capable of putting it on screen now. And it's such a good story; it deserves to be more widely known. The three stories would have to be filmed separately, of course. I'd like to see the Rumbles fight the Borribles in the first book, Flinthead's fight with Spiff in The Borribles Go For Broke, and how the horse is rescued in Across the Dark Metropolis.
My other two choices are similar: Un Lun Dun by China Mieville and Summerland by Michael Chabon. I would like to see these worlds visualized on screen, even if some of the copious detail has to be cut.
I would like to see the spider windows from Un Lun Dun, particularly the black window (even though some of the wordplay would be lost).
And I would like to see the "little giant" from Summerland, and the "big liars" playing baseball.
It's not an accident that all my choices are books aimed at a young audience; they would make good movies because so many of the scenes are plot driven and much larger than life.
What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Showing posts with label Michael Chabon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Chabon. Show all posts
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Monday, October 26, 2009
Manhood for Amateurs
Because I was going to my second weekend chess tournament requiring an overnight stay and at the first one I had read Ayelet Waldman's Bad Mother, I decided to read Michael Chabon's new collection of essays entitled Manhood for Amateurs this weekend. I find that parenthood memoirs are always good reading over a weekend you're dedicating to your child's enjoyment, and since I've already read Fred Waitzken's memoir of being a chess parent, it was on to more general topics.
The tournament went extraordinarily well. Walker played to the best of his considerable ability, winning all five of his games in the under-1600 division and walking away with first prize, which is a check for a thousand dollars (just to mislead him about how lucrative the world of chess really is).
And Chabon's book was just right for dipping into between people-watching and paper-grading. I found the first essay rather discouraging, however. He talks about how writing is like sitting in a room full of empty chairs waiting for someone to come and join your club, and says that, basically, a mother's encouragement doesn't count, that a person feels like a failure until other people come and fill up the chairs. Concluding that "a father is a man who fails every day, " Chabon's first essay sets up the idea that a father's encouragement actually can count.
His second one, though, reveals his experience with what counts about mothering:
"the daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush."
Personally, I've never been horrified by a child's breath, but think that snot should not have been omitted. Currently, my favorite billboard on the way to the next big city is one that reads "WE KNOW SNOT" and in smaller letters advertises an urgent care clinic.
The rest of the essays meander through various topics, from Chabon's entire family's love for the new Dr. Who series to how legos have changed to how hard it is to keep your kid reasonably safe while encouraging him to explore the outdoors. I particularly like his description of taking his four children on vacation and waiting "for them to fly out into the grass and sunshine....and they stand there on the doorstep eyeing one another, shuffling from foot to foot" like the "free-range" chickens described by Michael Pollan who are raised in confinement and so are afraid to venture outdoors.
I enjoyed his definition of a rogue, couched as part of a passing observation on why Jose Canseco, a baseball player who got caught using steroids, is admired:
"It's not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue--break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat--you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything's a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn."
Because Chabon is such a good writer, there are beautiful little phrases in these essays. My favorite is "the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day." He also talks about writing and how he turned from a self-consciously literary admirer of Henry Miller, a "callow", "misogynistic" "little shit", into a real writer. And at the end of that essay, entitled Cosmodemonic, he says:
"We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared."
So yeah, this is a book worth reading, and not only for men. It's for any contemplative person who wants some ideas presented in short bits, like little pieces of brain candy to pop in and suck on from time to time.
The tournament went extraordinarily well. Walker played to the best of his considerable ability, winning all five of his games in the under-1600 division and walking away with first prize, which is a check for a thousand dollars (just to mislead him about how lucrative the world of chess really is).
And Chabon's book was just right for dipping into between people-watching and paper-grading. I found the first essay rather discouraging, however. He talks about how writing is like sitting in a room full of empty chairs waiting for someone to come and join your club, and says that, basically, a mother's encouragement doesn't count, that a person feels like a failure until other people come and fill up the chairs. Concluding that "a father is a man who fails every day, " Chabon's first essay sets up the idea that a father's encouragement actually can count.
His second one, though, reveals his experience with what counts about mothering:
"the daily work you put into rearing your children is a kind of intimacy, tedious and invisible as mothering itself. There is another kind of intimacy in the conversations you may have with your children as they grow older, in which you confess to failings, reveal anxieties, share your bouts of creative struggle, regret, frustration. There is intimacy in your quarrels, your negotiations and running jokes. But above all, there is intimacy in your contact with their bodies, with their shit and piss, sweat and vomit, with their stubbled kneecaps and dimpled knuckles, with the rips in their underpants as you fold them, with their hair against your lips as you kiss the tops of their heads, with the bones of their shoulders and with the horror of their breath in the morning as they pursue the ancient art of forgetting to brush."
Personally, I've never been horrified by a child's breath, but think that snot should not have been omitted. Currently, my favorite billboard on the way to the next big city is one that reads "WE KNOW SNOT" and in smaller letters advertises an urgent care clinic.
The rest of the essays meander through various topics, from Chabon's entire family's love for the new Dr. Who series to how legos have changed to how hard it is to keep your kid reasonably safe while encouraging him to explore the outdoors. I particularly like his description of taking his four children on vacation and waiting "for them to fly out into the grass and sunshine....and they stand there on the doorstep eyeing one another, shuffling from foot to foot" like the "free-range" chickens described by Michael Pollan who are raised in confinement and so are afraid to venture outdoors.
I enjoyed his definition of a rogue, couched as part of a passing observation on why Jose Canseco, a baseball player who got caught using steroids, is admired:
"It's not enough to flout the law, to be a rogue--break promises, shirk responsibilities, cheat--you must also, at least some of the time, and with the same abandon, do your best, play by the rules, keep faith with your creditors and dependents, obey orders throw out the runner at home plate with a dead strike from deep right field. Above all, you must do these things, as you do their opposites, for no particular reason, because you feel like it or do not, because nothing matters, and everything's a joke, and nobody knows anything, and most of all, as Rhett Butler once codified for rogues everywhere, because you do not give a damn."
Because Chabon is such a good writer, there are beautiful little phrases in these essays. My favorite is "the life I was stuck inside felt like a house on a rainy day." He also talks about writing and how he turned from a self-consciously literary admirer of Henry Miller, a "callow", "misogynistic" "little shit", into a real writer. And at the end of that essay, entitled Cosmodemonic, he says:
"We are accustomed to repeating the cliche, and to believing, that 'our most precious resource is our children.' But we have plenty of children to go around, God knows, and as with Doritos, we can always make more. The true scarcity we face is of practicing adults, of people who know how marginal, how fragile, how finite their lives and their stories and their ambitions really are but who find value in this knowledge, even a sense of strange comfort, because they know their condition is universal, is shared."
So yeah, this is a book worth reading, and not only for men. It's for any contemplative person who wants some ideas presented in short bits, like little pieces of brain candy to pop in and suck on from time to time.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Bad Mother
I was a third of the way through the ARC of Ayelet Waldman's memoir Bad Mother (courtesy of the Kenyon college bookstore) before I realized--because she says it--that she's married to Michael Chabon, author of Summerland and therefore one of my favorite writers. So I continued reading with heightened interest.
Not that I wasn't pretty much absorbed from the first page, when she reveals "I busted my first Bad Mother in the spring of 1994, on a Muni train in San Francisco." How many times have we all done that? I think I busted my first Bad Mother in the fall of 1993, at 9 pm on an ordinary Wednesday night in Wal-Mart. I was buying disposable diapers, my own new baby safely at home in her crib with her father in the next room. The toddler in the cart ahead of mine was clearly tired, wailing and being ignored by her harrassed young mother. I will never do that, I thought. And then, like all mothers, I proceeded from the disposable diapers to even bigger maternal sins. Let she who is without sin cast the first vote for Bad Mother of the Year. Ayelet Waldman has twice the opportunity for Bad Mothering that I do, because she has two more children. No matter how bad your life as a Mother may have gotten, I can almost guarantee that reading about Waldman's experiences will give you the company that misery loves, as it did for me.
My experience of reading Bad Mother was fascinatingly illuminated by my surroundings; I was accompanying my just-13-year-old son to his first big chess tournament. As I opened my book and began reading during the "Simul," in which chess masters and grand masters play up to twenty challengers at one time, a woman I'd nodded to earlier as our sons struck up an acquaintance came over to me and told me what lovely manners my son has. As I beamed, she asked "is he home schooled?" and when I said no, she looked surprised, saying something about how home schooled children tend to be more polite than others. Strike one for me at the Bad Mother competition, with consolation points for the compliment.
The tournament weekend provided the right context for me to read this book. My husband had to be in Chicago and my son was missing a soccer game. The three-hour car trip to the city where the tournament was held had to be coordinated with my daughter's play rehearsal and set building schedule, her overnight with a friend, and care of all our pets. All of our trips necessitated fast food meals--Bad Mother points. But Waldman reminds me that "jugglers invariably drop balls, and no matter the persistent criticism of the Bad Mother police, balls do bounce. When they fall, all you need to do is pick them up and throw them back up in the air."
And Waldman reassures me that I'm not the only mother to ever do specific bad things to my children. How? By telling about all the bad things she's done! And they're not all minor, I assure you. The chapter about Rocketship is particularly brave, as I know of few other mothers who can compete with her in that particular mode of Bad Motherhood. One part I found especially reassuring is when she says "The capacity for extravagant emotion that Michael finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament." So was I, Ayelet, and I know exactly what you mean. Also I know a number of mothers who have said almost exactly what you say when they found out what was causing some problem for their child: "I felt so ashamed of all the times I had berated him...."
The chapter about homework was balm to my soul on a busy April weekend: "apparently, by slaving over homework with my son, I am expressing to him how important school is. (Of course, this rationale assumes that I'm not also expressing audible rage at his teacher, or muttering curses about the authors of his math textbook.)" I also loved her separation of little girls' Halloween costumes into two main categories: "cereal box" or "ho." And I enjoyed her common sense: "Because while I fear that making promiscuity sound beguiling and chic will lead them astray, I also know that the best way to ensure that your children dispense with your advice is to exaggerate the damage of the activity you want them to avoid." Kind of like the Health Teacher in the movie Mean Girls ("Don't have sex. You'll die."), or the reaction to the anti-gay-marriage "Gathering Storm" video that was taken off YouTube because everyone laughed at it (see the parody, "Gaythering Storm" here).
Bad Mother is scheduled to go on sale May 5, 2009. If you've ever busted a Bad Mother, you want to read it... and you want to tell me about your Bad Mother busts! Because we're all in this together, even if some of us are more polite about it than others.
Not that I wasn't pretty much absorbed from the first page, when she reveals "I busted my first Bad Mother in the spring of 1994, on a Muni train in San Francisco." How many times have we all done that? I think I busted my first Bad Mother in the fall of 1993, at 9 pm on an ordinary Wednesday night in Wal-Mart. I was buying disposable diapers, my own new baby safely at home in her crib with her father in the next room. The toddler in the cart ahead of mine was clearly tired, wailing and being ignored by her harrassed young mother. I will never do that, I thought. And then, like all mothers, I proceeded from the disposable diapers to even bigger maternal sins. Let she who is without sin cast the first vote for Bad Mother of the Year. Ayelet Waldman has twice the opportunity for Bad Mothering that I do, because she has two more children. No matter how bad your life as a Mother may have gotten, I can almost guarantee that reading about Waldman's experiences will give you the company that misery loves, as it did for me.
My experience of reading Bad Mother was fascinatingly illuminated by my surroundings; I was accompanying my just-13-year-old son to his first big chess tournament. As I opened my book and began reading during the "Simul," in which chess masters and grand masters play up to twenty challengers at one time, a woman I'd nodded to earlier as our sons struck up an acquaintance came over to me and told me what lovely manners my son has. As I beamed, she asked "is he home schooled?" and when I said no, she looked surprised, saying something about how home schooled children tend to be more polite than others. Strike one for me at the Bad Mother competition, with consolation points for the compliment.
The tournament weekend provided the right context for me to read this book. My husband had to be in Chicago and my son was missing a soccer game. The three-hour car trip to the city where the tournament was held had to be coordinated with my daughter's play rehearsal and set building schedule, her overnight with a friend, and care of all our pets. All of our trips necessitated fast food meals--Bad Mother points. But Waldman reminds me that "jugglers invariably drop balls, and no matter the persistent criticism of the Bad Mother police, balls do bounce. When they fall, all you need to do is pick them up and throw them back up in the air."
And Waldman reassures me that I'm not the only mother to ever do specific bad things to my children. How? By telling about all the bad things she's done! And they're not all minor, I assure you. The chapter about Rocketship is particularly brave, as I know of few other mothers who can compete with her in that particular mode of Bad Motherhood. One part I found especially reassuring is when she says "The capacity for extravagant emotion that Michael finds so attractive in me can be exhausting, especially to a child. My moods are mercurial, and this can be terrifying. I know, because I was a daughter of a mother with a changeable temperament." So was I, Ayelet, and I know exactly what you mean. Also I know a number of mothers who have said almost exactly what you say when they found out what was causing some problem for their child: "I felt so ashamed of all the times I had berated him...."
The chapter about homework was balm to my soul on a busy April weekend: "apparently, by slaving over homework with my son, I am expressing to him how important school is. (Of course, this rationale assumes that I'm not also expressing audible rage at his teacher, or muttering curses about the authors of his math textbook.)" I also loved her separation of little girls' Halloween costumes into two main categories: "cereal box" or "ho." And I enjoyed her common sense: "Because while I fear that making promiscuity sound beguiling and chic will lead them astray, I also know that the best way to ensure that your children dispense with your advice is to exaggerate the damage of the activity you want them to avoid." Kind of like the Health Teacher in the movie Mean Girls ("Don't have sex. You'll die."), or the reaction to the anti-gay-marriage "Gathering Storm" video that was taken off YouTube because everyone laughed at it (see the parody, "Gaythering Storm" here).
Bad Mother is scheduled to go on sale May 5, 2009. If you've ever busted a Bad Mother, you want to read it... and you want to tell me about your Bad Mother busts! Because we're all in this together, even if some of us are more polite about it than others.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Loving Laurie
I love most books written by Laurie King. Her wife-of-Sherlock-Holmes (Mary Russell) books are good enough to make me buy them as soon as they come out, because I know I'll want to reread them. And her Kate Martinelli mysteries have always been absorbing and well-written. So when her new novel, Touchstone, came out this winter, I ordered it from Amazon on my bed, waited anxiously for it to come, and began reading it as soon as my son brought it in to me. I was disappointed in it, and decided to take some time before I thought about why. Part of it is that it's a fairly gloomy book, and since I was recovering from a knee replacement and it was the dark month of February in Ohio, I was not in the mood for much more gloom.
Looking at it again, though, I find it weighted down by the enforced gravitas of the subject matter, the uneasy balance of international affairs in the time between the two world wars (after the War to End All Wars). Somehow this translates to the writing, which is as heavy and ponderous as the subject. Here's a sample, picked by opening the book to a random page:
"The following ten months had been fraught with the knowledge that time was short, that life would never be the same, that their friends and family were being swallowed up in the carnage across the Channel. And finally, in July 1915, Bennett had come to her house, wearing his uniform and an expression of manly apprehension. She had wept; he had laid his hand across her shoulders and pulled her to his woolen chest, then given her a clean handkerchief and vowed that he would come back to her."
I mean, really. You have to wonder if Laurie decided it was time for her to write a "serious" book after all those frivolous mysteries. Maybe getting the Lambda prize for the latest Kate Martinelli stirred it up in her. I don't know. But she needs to get back in the entertainment business, because this kind of writing does not become her.
I want the Laurie I love back. The Laurie who writes like this (the following is from the random page I opened to when I opened up the Mary Russell book The Moor):
"'Come along, Russell. You mustn't avoid your host simply because he is a rude old man. Besides which, he has quite taken to you.'
'I'd hate to see how he expresses real dislike, then.'
'He becomes very polite but rather inattentive,' he said, holding the door open for me. 'Precisely as you do, as a matter of fact.'"
Michael Chabon points out in his essay "Fan Fictions on Sherlock Holmes" (included in Maps and Legends), that "fans and nonbelievers alike seem to feel compelled to try to explain Sherlock Holmes' lasting appeal" and after his own (quite satisfactory) effort to explain it, he concludes that "all novels are sequels; influence is bliss."
That's what I'm missing from you, Laurie. Take yourself less seriously. Let me love you again.
Laurie King's Mary Russell books:
Looking at it again, though, I find it weighted down by the enforced gravitas of the subject matter, the uneasy balance of international affairs in the time between the two world wars (after the War to End All Wars). Somehow this translates to the writing, which is as heavy and ponderous as the subject. Here's a sample, picked by opening the book to a random page:
"The following ten months had been fraught with the knowledge that time was short, that life would never be the same, that their friends and family were being swallowed up in the carnage across the Channel. And finally, in July 1915, Bennett had come to her house, wearing his uniform and an expression of manly apprehension. She had wept; he had laid his hand across her shoulders and pulled her to his woolen chest, then given her a clean handkerchief and vowed that he would come back to her."
I mean, really. You have to wonder if Laurie decided it was time for her to write a "serious" book after all those frivolous mysteries. Maybe getting the Lambda prize for the latest Kate Martinelli stirred it up in her. I don't know. But she needs to get back in the entertainment business, because this kind of writing does not become her.
I want the Laurie I love back. The Laurie who writes like this (the following is from the random page I opened to when I opened up the Mary Russell book The Moor):
"'Come along, Russell. You mustn't avoid your host simply because he is a rude old man. Besides which, he has quite taken to you.'
'I'd hate to see how he expresses real dislike, then.'
'He becomes very polite but rather inattentive,' he said, holding the door open for me. 'Precisely as you do, as a matter of fact.'"
Michael Chabon points out in his essay "Fan Fictions on Sherlock Holmes" (included in Maps and Legends), that "fans and nonbelievers alike seem to feel compelled to try to explain Sherlock Holmes' lasting appeal" and after his own (quite satisfactory) effort to explain it, he concludes that "all novels are sequels; influence is bliss."
That's what I'm missing from you, Laurie. Take yourself less seriously. Let me love you again.
Laurie King's Mary Russell books:
- The Beekeeper's Apprentice (1994)
- A Monstrous Regiment of Women (1995)
- A Letter of Mary (1997)
- The Moor (1998)
- O Jerusalem (1999)
- Justice Hall (2002)
- The Game (2004)
- Locked Rooms (2005)
Kate Martinelli mysteries
- A Grave Talent (1993)
- To Play the Fool (1995)
- With Child (1996)
- Night Work (2000)
- The Art of Detection (2006)
Monday, July 21, 2008
Beach Reading
We have been goofing off in a big way. We went to the beach in South Carolina with a group of college friends and some relatives, and we all shared a couple of houses and several seafood dinners. I told my kids that they may be the only kids in Ohio who go crabbing more often than they go fishing--which is to say, once every two years. There were so many people to talk to and so much ocean to splash in and so many sand castles to build that I got very little reading done. We built a sand Bastille on July 14 and watched the waves storm it.
One afternoon I went back out to the beach with a book. We usually go out in the morning and come back in for lunch, because I have fair-skinned children. But the fair of skin were inside drawing pictures and watching YouTube videos, so I went out in the noonday sun ("do as I say, kids, not as I do"). As I walked towards the surf with my book and chair, I noticed a woman holding a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. So I asked her if she was enjoying it, and she said she hadn't started it yet. "I didn't like the ending," I told her.
"Well, maybe I won't start it then," she said.
I was nonplussed. I'd hate for anyone to judge Barbara Kingsolver novels by that one, and I do think the ending is significantly flawed. But did I mean to make her give up the effort entirely? I suspect the woman found it on a shelf in her rented beach house.
It's possible that you shouldn't ever read anything you find on a beach house bookshelf. Usually they're books that someone read and left, which tells you about all you need to know. Unless, of course, the other people who rent beach houses don't reread books. There's probably a reason that the book shelf in our house was below the television.
But I like what Michael Chabon says about the short story in his essay "Trickster in a Suit of Light," included in his volume Maps and Legends:
"Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle.... But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted--indeed, we have helped to articulate--such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment....Therefore I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature."
Except that I might quibble with the "attentive mind" part. I sometimes take pleasure from reading with about three-quarters of my attention on the book, and the other quarter on watching a child play or the waves crash on the shore. I have fond memories of books that I associate with what I was doing at the time--there's an entire series I read while nursing my firstborn, and often she and I have a soundtrack for a certain book after reading it once while listening to music (and yes, the soundtrack is sometimes replaced by the movie soundtrack).
Chabon points out that "the undoubted satisfactions that come from reading science fiction or mystery stories are to be enjoyed only in childhood or youth, or by the adult reader only as "guilty pleasures" (a phrase I loathe)." Of course, he's writing an essay, which is a serious form and suited to such statements. Many bloggers disagree that SF and mysteries are pleasures that you should feel guilty about. Certainly I disagree. And yet that does not detract from Chabon's point, which is that short story writers need to break away from "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." That's what worked yesterday. Tomorrow we need more experimentation between "the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore."
And when writers start playing around with those margins and borders, then maybe we'll get more good short stories, which are (like essays), good beach reading.
One afternoon I went back out to the beach with a book. We usually go out in the morning and come back in for lunch, because I have fair-skinned children. But the fair of skin were inside drawing pictures and watching YouTube videos, so I went out in the noonday sun ("do as I say, kids, not as I do"). As I walked towards the surf with my book and chair, I noticed a woman holding a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer. So I asked her if she was enjoying it, and she said she hadn't started it yet. "I didn't like the ending," I told her.
"Well, maybe I won't start it then," she said.
I was nonplussed. I'd hate for anyone to judge Barbara Kingsolver novels by that one, and I do think the ending is significantly flawed. But did I mean to make her give up the effort entirely? I suspect the woman found it on a shelf in her rented beach house.
It's possible that you shouldn't ever read anything you find on a beach house bookshelf. Usually they're books that someone read and left, which tells you about all you need to know. Unless, of course, the other people who rent beach houses don't reread books. There's probably a reason that the book shelf in our house was below the television.
But I like what Michael Chabon says about the short story in his essay "Trickster in a Suit of Light," included in his volume Maps and Legends:
"Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle.... But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted--indeed, we have helped to articulate--such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment....Therefore I would like to propose expanding our definition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature."
Except that I might quibble with the "attentive mind" part. I sometimes take pleasure from reading with about three-quarters of my attention on the book, and the other quarter on watching a child play or the waves crash on the shore. I have fond memories of books that I associate with what I was doing at the time--there's an entire series I read while nursing my firstborn, and often she and I have a soundtrack for a certain book after reading it once while listening to music (and yes, the soundtrack is sometimes replaced by the movie soundtrack).
Chabon points out that "the undoubted satisfactions that come from reading science fiction or mystery stories are to be enjoyed only in childhood or youth, or by the adult reader only as "guilty pleasures" (a phrase I loathe)." Of course, he's writing an essay, which is a serious form and suited to such statements. Many bloggers disagree that SF and mysteries are pleasures that you should feel guilty about. Certainly I disagree. And yet that does not detract from Chabon's point, which is that short story writers need to break away from "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story." That's what worked yesterday. Tomorrow we need more experimentation between "the boundary lines, the margins, the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore."
And when writers start playing around with those margins and borders, then maybe we'll get more good short stories, which are (like essays), good beach reading.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Child Heroes
Walker spent much of the weekend at tryouts for Peter Pan and then callbacks. They had him sing for John at first on the callback day, but the musical director kept calling him up to sing with the Peters, too. At worst, he'll get to be a lost boy. I think they're a bit reluctant to cast a 12-year-old as the lead of the annual community theater musical, especially one requiring deep enough pockets to rent "flying" equipment.
It was kind of a shame, I thought, that there were only three boys singing for Peter in the callbacks, and the other two were too old; their voices were deeper already. Obviously, someone was trying to hear males for the role, but I think it's probably going to be a Mary Martin-type show, given the number of girls who sang better and were older than twelve (one was 20, but a very small person). I did have a small revelation, sitting in the back row of the theater listening to Walker sing. We're always on him at home not to sing at the table, and not to sing right in our faces. That's because he has an increasingly powerful voice!
At any rate, it got me thinking about child heroes, and how often in YA fantasy literature, the adults are reluctant to entrust the fate of the world to one so young. (The first examples that come to my mind are: Lyra in The Golden Compass, the four children in Narnia, Artemis Fowl, Gregor the Overlander, Percy Jackson in The Lightning Thief, Lina and Doon in The City of Ember, Molly Moon, Roald Dahl's Matilda, Ethan in Summerland).
Deeba in China Mieville's Un Lun Dun is a child hero in a book that turns a lot of conventions on their heads in a thoroughly delightful manner. For the first 134 pages, it seems to be a traditional child hero tale--the "chosen one" is recognized by animals in our world and is subsequently transported to another world she has been chosen to save. But she is frightened and ultimately beaten, and goes back to her world, where she stays. Okay, maybe you guessed it from the title--the other world is a parallel universe--an Un-London--and the child who can actually save it is the Un-chosen one, Deeba, who no one has made much of a fuss over.
That's just the first delightful twist to this story. There are a lot of good word jokes that eventually degenerate into puns and actual characters (called "utterlings"). The chosen one from the first part of the book is referred to in Un Lun Dun as the "shwazzy" which we eventually learn is a version of the term "vous avez choisi." London's Royal Meteorological Society, abbreviated as RMETS, is referred to in Un Lun Dun as Armets, a magical society of "weatherwitches." And the mysterious thing that solved London's smog problem in 1952 is Un Lun Dun's magical talisman against the magically malignant smog that threatens their entire existence, the Klinneract.
There are wonderful and original details in this story, like a character who is a ghost (called a wraith), some very scary giraffes, and an army of animate umbrellas, plus a flying bus and a suspension bridge that moves around to evade people looking for it.
This is a book for book-lovers, but not too inaccessible for kids (like Summerland, you'll enjoy it more, the more other books you've read).
It was kind of a shame, I thought, that there were only three boys singing for Peter in the callbacks, and the other two were too old; their voices were deeper already. Obviously, someone was trying to hear males for the role, but I think it's probably going to be a Mary Martin-type show, given the number of girls who sang better and were older than twelve (one was 20, but a very small person). I did have a small revelation, sitting in the back row of the theater listening to Walker sing. We're always on him at home not to sing at the table, and not to sing right in our faces. That's because he has an increasingly powerful voice!
At any rate, it got me thinking about child heroes, and how often in YA fantasy literature, the adults are reluctant to entrust the fate of the world to one so young. (The first examples that come to my mind are: Lyra in The Golden Compass, the four children in Narnia, Artemis Fowl, Gregor the Overlander, Percy Jackson in The Lightning Thief, Lina and Doon in The City of Ember, Molly Moon, Roald Dahl's Matilda, Ethan in Summerland).
Deeba in China Mieville's Un Lun Dun is a child hero in a book that turns a lot of conventions on their heads in a thoroughly delightful manner. For the first 134 pages, it seems to be a traditional child hero tale--the "chosen one" is recognized by animals in our world and is subsequently transported to another world she has been chosen to save. But she is frightened and ultimately beaten, and goes back to her world, where she stays. Okay, maybe you guessed it from the title--the other world is a parallel universe--an Un-London--and the child who can actually save it is the Un-chosen one, Deeba, who no one has made much of a fuss over.
That's just the first delightful twist to this story. There are a lot of good word jokes that eventually degenerate into puns and actual characters (called "utterlings"). The chosen one from the first part of the book is referred to in Un Lun Dun as the "shwazzy" which we eventually learn is a version of the term "vous avez choisi." London's Royal Meteorological Society, abbreviated as RMETS, is referred to in Un Lun Dun as Armets, a magical society of "weatherwitches." And the mysterious thing that solved London's smog problem in 1952 is Un Lun Dun's magical talisman against the magically malignant smog that threatens their entire existence, the Klinneract.
There are wonderful and original details in this story, like a character who is a ghost (called a wraith), some very scary giraffes, and an army of animate umbrellas, plus a flying bus and a suspension bridge that moves around to evade people looking for it.
This is a book for book-lovers, but not too inaccessible for kids (like Summerland, you'll enjoy it more, the more other books you've read).
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