Can't wait to get my hands on a copy of Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama
AB: One of my earliest, most powerful memories of my mother is playing this game where I would be a crippled child like the kids I would see at the orthopedic wing of the hospital when I would go to get my fallen arches checked up on. I was just fascinated with these children, with their external signs of disability, their crutches and braces and big shoes. There was something about that that I needed to reenact, and my mother entered into that imaginary space so willingly with me and in such an encouraging way. Even though I knew there was something weird about having this fantasy about disabled children, she didn't sensor it. She encouraged me to go with it, and I feel like she probably did that with me in lots of imaginary games as a kid but for some reason this is the one that I remember the most vividly. And I speculate in the book that it's because it was a fantasy that she shared to a certain extent as well.
BNR: And when your OCD was making it really difficult to keep the diary, your mom would write down your entries. I remember that from Fun Home, too, and both times it gave me chills. The devotion implicit in it.
AB: Oh my God, that was another pivotal moment. She would sit there and write down everything I said. It was amazing. It also becomes weirdly this template for my relationship later with therapists, other women who would sit there and take down notes on what I was saying.
Image taken from here.
Happened upon this love poem to stationery yesterday, via Thomas's links list. It's from Sarah Salway's collection You Do Not Need Another Self-Help Book.
Love and Stationery
Tonight, women dream of stationery;
well thumbed catalogues hidden
in bedside tables, falling open
at filing solutions. Some promise
this will be the last time, one final look
at industrial size staplers, hole punches.
Others take it further. Post-it notes
edge their desire as they chase private
rainbows husbands don’t understand.
At lunchtime, propelled out by a need
for highlighters, their fingers brush
sellotape dispensers as they imagine
being held by paperclips,
protected by bubblewrap,
wiped clean with Tippex.
In quiet moments,
they will pull out new journals,
those blank, lined, empty pages waiting
to be filled; who knows what magic
will result from an organized life?
At bad times, when the ink runs dry,
you will find a woman standing in front
of an open stationery cupboard, the flutter
of her heart stilled by the solid weight
of correspondence quality paper.
Last night Luke asked me to read him a book he had picked out himself at the library called Harvey Potter's Balloon Farm
According to the publication date
You can see more of Harvey Potter's Balloon Farm here.
Although this is the finished print, if I were still teaching the first grade, I think I'd make up similar work sheets for my class to complete. They'd make a fun display. (See also Beckett for Babies, one of my own failure, of which there are many.)
Some months ago I did a little genealogical research and discovered that my children are descended from royalty. I wrote an article about it for the current issue of Brain, Child magazine:
Friedrich III, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire and his wife Eleanor of Portugal were, Ancestry.com told me, the thirteenth great grandfather and grandmother of my husband! There were even pictures of them—well, paintings. There was Great Great Grandpa Friedrich getting introduced to Great Great Grandma Eleanor by the pope, as painted by Pinturicchio. There was a portrait of Friedrich looking steely-eyed and a bit jowly, the way my husband sometimes looks while watching his favorite hockey team lose. And here was a portrait of Eleanor peering wistfully at a flower, something about her expression, the lines of her face, reminding me of my son’s when I told him enough with the video games.
Because excellent records are kept by royalty—in a sense their family history is everyone’s history—once you find a connection to a king, it is possible to go back for generations and generations. I surfed for hours, looking at photographs of a golden crown that had once rested on the head of the fifteenth great grandfather of my children. I started planning summer vacations to the palaces their ancestors had once lived in. I began researching language tuition in German and Spanish for the children, never mind the fact that their ancestors lived so long ago they would’ve spoken entirely different versions of those languages. Basically, I stopped just short of writing to request invitations to Prince William and Kate Middleton’s wedding.
With their bloodlines becoming clearer, some of my children's quirks began to make sense. The way my six-year-old son still wanted me to dress him in the morning, as if I were his valet. My two-year-old daughter's insistence on wearing a pair of golden slippers at all times and her particularly erect posture and imperious manner. ("Play cars, Mama!" she commands with a little wave of her hand and a slight, dignified inclination of her head. "Sit here!" she orders, pointing to a particular spot on the floor, her stern expression demonstrating that she will not tolerate dissent. "Dis one, Mama!" she says, handing me her preference when I pick up the wrong one. And then, "Vivi's turn first!")
This intriguing discovery was, for lack of a better word, brief. You'll have to get your hands on a copy of the magazine to find out the rest.
Trying to write but unsure where to go next? Why not refer to this Periodic Table of Storytelling. Click through for the large, much more readable version. Via Iris Blasi.
WARNING! Do not watch this book trailer with very small and/or easily frightened children! (I'm thinking, for example, of you, Kerry and Harriet. If you want to know why, read this old post about the time three-year-old Luke and I searched for mazes online and got rather more than we bargained for.)
Pat the Zombie
Now that I'm thinking of it, leave a comment if you want our copy of Pat the Husband
Parodies of Children's Books is going to be a new feature here, randomly updated. As someone with her own idea for a parody kids' book (see my post Beckett for Babies), my interest was sparked again recently by the phenomenal success of Go the Fuck to Sleep.
Let's compare: Right now, Pat the Zombie is ranked #5,108 in Books on the Amazon Bestseller list while Go the Fuck to Sleep is currently #1. 490 people like PTZ on facebook while 9,783 like GTFTS. PTZ received a favourable review on boingboing.net as did, of course, GTFTS.
On April 23, I saw a link to Go the F**k to Sleep
I thought the concept for the book was funny, yes, but I was perplexed by its popularity. If this little site was getting that much traffic from it, just imagine how many people were viewing it on large sites like boingboing or Cup of Joe, who featured it over the next couple of days. The book, not yet actually published, started climbing the ranks at Amazon and the New York Times remarked on its meteoric rise. (According to the Times, last June the author Adam Mansbach posted on Facebook to “Look out for my forthcoming children’s book, ‘Go the — to Sleep" and the reaction of his friends made him decide to turn his offhand joke into an actual book.)
Now I am an Amazon affiliate, which means that if someone clicks through to Amazon through a link on my site and buys something, I get a tiny percentage of that sale. Because my site is so small, this generally works out to me being able to afford to buy a couple of books or so for the kids every few months. After the frenzy of hits stopped, I noticed that of the thousands of people who visited here to see this book, eighteen of them purchased the book (or actually pre-ordered it, as again I must remark it has not yet technically been published). Eighteen! That has never happened before. Again, keep in mind that it's not the money I'll be rolling in that fascinates me -- I'll be making a few dollars out of this, perhaps 40 cents a copy -- it's the unpredictability of the book's sudden popularity. At that point, the book wasn't even due to be released until October. Th gleeful and surprised publisher, Akashic Books, has since moved the date up to June 14th.
Today, the book is the number one bestselling book on Amazon. This post on the New Yorker blog and this article in the Bay Citizen suggest that the popularity is due to the fact that a pdf of the book went viral. I think it was enough for the concept -- the title, that excellent cover image, one bit of verse -- to go viral. Macy Halford at the New Yorker says that bloggers who posted a verse from the book must have seen that pdf (which she rhapsodizes about). Perhaps they did -- but I got the sample verse straight from Amazon. I still haven't seen the pdf. And if I had, why would I, after enjoying the joke, then rush to buy the book? It's a joke. A joke that really resonates -- oh how it resonates!* -- but a joke nonetheless. After all, unlike at least some children's book parodies, this probably isn't one you will actually want to read with your children. Unless you want your two-year-old to tell the dolls at daycare to "go the fuck to sleep. " Many people, including Halford, have commented, however, that they plan to give it as a baby shower gift and I can certainly understand the temptation to do that. After all, everyone loves to terrify pregnant ladies. If not with frightening birth stories, why not with the suggestion she will soon be cursing at her darling newborn like a sailor?
*Pdf, schmdf. I'll hazard a guess that one reason this book is really resonating right now is that in addition to the normal difficulties infants and small children have falling sleep, much of North America is experiencing the springtime lengthening of the days, which makes falling asleep even more difficult than usual for kids and even more frustrating and exhausting than usual for their parents. Hmm, maybe someone should do a little research on whether frustrated and exhausted people spend more money on impulse purchases than well-rested ones...
