crooked house

The Joy of Books

Just watch: The Joy of Books, via Sara O'Leary and Nathalie Foy on facebook. Gorgeous. Someone commented "I want to like this more than once." Yes.

When I Was Small Giveaway

Sylvie and I just got the best package in the mail -- two copies of our favourite children's author Sara O'Leary's new book When I Was Small, illustrated by Julie Morstad. It is the latest in their lovely series of books about Henry, which include When You Were Small and Where You Came From. In When I Was Small, it is Henry's mother's turn to talk about the things she did when she was very, very small, including sleeping in a mitten:

This book is just as sweet, charming, and hilarious as the others -- it is the perfect bedtime book. And if you act! fast! you can win a copy. Just leave a comment and your email address below and we will choose a random winner next Monday, January 16th. The book is not yet readily available in the states so if you live there and just can't wait to get your hands on a copy, please do enter. I am happy to send it anywhere in the world.

You can see more pageviews of the book on the Buy Olympia site - Americans can certainly order it from there. And you could always order it from Amazon.ca or Chapters.

There are also more gorgeous images from the book at the publisher, Simply Read 's, blog. Love that daisy for a sunhat!

 

 

Not Entirely Lost

From Dana Spiotta's intriguing Stone Arabia,a novel partly about a very intense sibling relationship, this excerpt describes a memory of the narrator's father, who died when she was seven or eight years old:

I don't remember a single conversation I had with my father. I do remember, however, walking behind him on the street. He reached his hand back and opened it, then closed it and opened it without looking around for me. I ran up and pressed my palm into his palm. He closed his hand gently over mine, squeezed it. I remember how large his hand was, and how warm and heavy it felt.

...

Occasionally -- maybe three times it happened -- I get a sense of my father from other men. When I walk behind a certain kind of man in the street. It happened to me in New York City once. I was in a crowd and a man moved right in front of me. He brushed past me. He was wearing an overcoat. And because of his height, or maybe the way he carried himself, the way he walked, or the way his hair met the back of his collar. Or how his hand looked as he held his briefcase -- something brought back my father. A deep, intimate body memory came over me; I could see him -- somewhat -- but I could feel him, or recall feeling him, completely. I glimpsed this stranger through the crowd and I startled. A flood of recognition and longing. I hurried after him, even tried to catch up. And then he turned slightly and I saw his face. I felt, ridiculously, real disappointment when I realized he was not my father. He did not look at all like my father. The incident didn't make me feel sad, though, it made me remember my father in ways a picture never could. I felt the memory of my father on my body, the way you feel a breeze or the heat of the sun. He did not feel -- and so was not -- entirely lost to me.

Remakes

"Automata" remake by Or Eitan.

Hopper's "Automata."

Art students remake famous paintings with photography. Via A Cup of Jo.

 

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt. No, Really.

Image by colleendowd on flickr.

One of my New Year's resolution-ish thingys (I never keep New Year's resolutions but maybe I'll manage to keep them if I don't actually call them that) is to avoid as many dangerous chemicals as possible in food and household products, particularly where the kids are concerned. This morning, while sitting in the dentist's office waiting for the dental hygienist (when actually I was supposed to be sitting in the optometrist''s office waiting for the optemetrist's assistant, but that's another story) I happened upon this passage in  Slow Death by Rubber Duck: The Secret Danger of Everyday Things:

The creation of the first flammability regulations to protect consumers was brought about by a series of deadly fires caused by new ingredients in fabrics in the years following World War II. During the Christmas season of 1951, "torch sweaters" became all the rage. The sweaters were made of brushed rayon and in some circumstances would explode when a spark was dropped on them. Children were also affected. In one case young Michael Blessington was burned to death when his "Gene Autry" cowboy suit caught fire. It turns out that the chaps in the suit were made of flammable rayon. The worst and perhaps most bizarre incident involved a woman who was critically burned when the netted underskirt in her ball gown exploded. The underskirt was made from nitrocellulose (the basis of gunpowder) and ignited in a rather dramatic fashion at a New Year's Eve party.

I wonder if Aimee Bender, author of The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, had heard about that  woman in the exploding ball gown when she wrote her story.

Whatever Happened to A Very Young Dancer?

I vividly remember the first time I saw this book, A Very Young Dancer. It was a rainy October afternoon and I must have been about ten years old. I pulled it off the shelf in the Bookmobile, which was parked in its customary spot in the far corner of the Save-Easy lot, and sat right down on the floor of the bus there and then and read it all the way through. I didn't take it out, though. While it did make me yearn for a life of serious purpose and beauty -- and of course the applause of an appreciative audience in a fancy theatre -- I knew that ballet wasn't for me. I was already too old to ever learn it properly. And  even at that age I had an inkling that I had the wrong body type. (It wasn't until I reached adulthood that I realized I'm a total klutz anyway.) But it was a captivating, mesmerizing book of photography and it cast a spell on a lot of little girls who started ballet lessons in the 70s and 80s. The book catapulted its subject, the young ballerina Stephanie, into instant fame. That fame made things difficult for her when, at the age of 13, she was asked to leave the School of American Ballet. She has only now, at the age of 46, come to terms with it. Via A Cup of Jo.

Incidentally, Jill Krementz, is Kurt Vonnegut's widow, and she published a whole series of these A Very Young Whatever books. What happened to the rest of them?

Stephanie's story reminds me -- just a little -- of Emma Ridley's. Ridley played Ozma in Return to Oz, a movie that has been in constant rotation in this house, as the kids are fascinated with all things Oz. I knew that Fairuza Balk, who played Dorothy in it, continues to work as an actor as an adult but I wondered about Emma, who is startlingly beautiful in the film. Apparently she was a fixture on the London nightclub scene for six months in her early teens in the 80s, stripping on tables while carrying a teddy bear. She married a much older man at the age of 15 and then disappeared. She now lives on a farm in California with her two children, is an evangelical Christian like Stephanie, and has a dance fitness business.