And how!

I was happy to see Debbie Reese confirm my impression of American Girl World as hostile territory. Why people continue to see this empire as good for children is beyond me. If you want to educate your children into the joys of brand loyalty and conspicuous consumption, at least Disney is more affordable. And the catalog? Yup, still porn.

Make it Stop!

SLJ, I love you. I happily worked with Lillian Gerhardt and Trev Jones for years, and I did some of my best writing in your pages. And Little, Brown, too, where I published my sole book for young people and whose upcoming offerings include the extremely terrific The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. Smooches to you both.

So my decision to no longer visit or link to anything on your websites is not personal. It's because of that fucking ad for some LB fantasy novel bouncing all over the SLJ site and ravaging my nerves. It will not be gotten rid of. It follows you as you try to scroll down the page. The whole page quivers with its movement. I am not at all opposed to nice, polite blog ads that stay in the margins where they belong. But advertising via animated stalking is really beneath both of you. I suppose valiant VOYA, whose name is the most persistent image in the ad (not exactly what LB had in mind, I'm sure, and it can't make SLJ happy, either) is the real winner here, but it's hard not to include them in my resentment, too. VOYA, however, is worth a link, and the only thing that bounces over there is the prose.

Brahma, mon dieux!

We saw one of my favorite operas on Sunday, Bizet's The Pearl Fishers, premiered in 1863 and putatively set in Ceylon. Its big tune, a duet for tenor and baritone, is apparently England's perennial number one favorite. The Opera Boston production we saw played the Orientalism up to the hilt, with shadow puppets, projections of many-handed (I'm guessing) Hindu gods, and sinuous dancing girls. I'm guessing it was no more "authentic" than the opera itself, which shamelessly indulges itself and the audience in exotica.

It made me remember a sumptuous picture book edition of Aida by Leontyne Price and the Dillons, trumpeted by the publisher as a retelling, via Verdi, as an African story. Nope, pure Italiano, based on a scenario by a French Egyptologist. And Turandot is about as Chinese as I am. These operas make me think about our own field's stern requirements for cultural authenticity and against Orientalism. Bizet, Verdi, and Puccini would be banished from the shelves. I guess I should be grateful they are operas, not books, and thus subjected to grown-up criteria that acknowledge the presence and even perniciousness of stereotyping without making it the trump card of evaluation.

Scaring me

What with avoiding writing and having a cold and pissing off bloggers left and right and all, I've been spending the last couple of days looking at a lot of book blogs. Many of them feature sidebar ads from Amazon.com, and while I have no problem with that, I've noticed that the books featured therein are based on the stuff I've been looking up at Amazon, not on the content of the blog I'm looking at. I assumed children's book blogs would have ads for children's books, but I keep seeing ads for Leon Uris's Trinity--and I was researching his Exodus the other day. It reminds me of my favorite book review line: "This book follows Linda, a sixteen-year-old stalking victim."

How long, asked George and Ira, has this been going on?

This is your library. This is your library hung over.

Actually, this is a photograph Lolly Robinson took of our "no shelf," the place where not-reviewed materials land. It's an old photo; the no shelf now retains some semblance of order despite its persistent spiritual kinship with the Island of Misfit Toys.

Being It

I've been taking this singing class--oh, let's just get it all the gay out there and say I've been taking this cabaret singing class, and at each session we begin with vocal warm-ups and some kind of improvisational exercise. Last night one of the members, a teacher, suggested a game of assassin, saying she played it with her students. The Wikipedia description linked above seems far more elaborate than what we played, which involved sitting in a circle with our eyes closed, and somebody tapping selected members on the head to designate them as assassins or victims. Then we would open our eyes and--well, I still can't figure out what was going on, with people asking each other random questions about daylight savings time until somebody either fell over in a dramatic "death" or somebody pointed a finger at somebody else saying "You're the assassin!" I felt like a visitor from another planet, as everyone else seemed to get right into the spirit of things while I sat clueless and In Hell. Can anyone explain?

I guess kids smarter than I could have a great time with this, but I kept thinking about what a handy vehicle it could be for playground victimization. (All together, sing: "Memories / light the corners of my mind . . . .") Better even than dodgeball, because Assassin seems to offer far more interesting opportunities for psychological torture. I guess any game that involves someone being it has that potential.

On a book-related note (heh), I was able to help another student who has a young child living temporarily in the Philippines and was trying to solve the problem of intercontinental bedtime stories. I suggested using the International Children's Digital Library, where electronic editions of books from around the world can be read in a variety of ways. I didn't know if it could work synchronously, but Jeff told me that he and his kid were able to log on at the same time and turn the pages together while talking on the phone. (I guess that should really be "turn" the "pages" "together.") All very Jetsons, yes?

One last thing: being in that class reminds me what a salutary experience it is for those of us who teach to be the student once in a while. You can forget how things look from that end.