Blast from the Past

Jen Robinson alerted me to the Amelia Elizabeth Walden Award for YA fiction, new to ALAN/NCTE but not to me. Years ago, Walden offered this award to YALSA, which turned it down because of her insistence that the winning book demonstrate "a positive approach to life." We (I was on the board then) didn't want to get into the position of deciding somebody else's road to happiness. That said, it's nice to see Walden get some recognition again--back in the 50's-60's she wrote several crypto-lesbionic sports novels notable for their fearless female main characters and basketball play-by-plays as exciting as anything penned by the boys.

Just one more musical moment

Gertrude Stein by Robert Indiana

Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera The Mother of Us All is a wildly fantasized biography of Susan B. Anthony, who, wondering and worrying over whether her celebrity has obscured her cause, asks of her supporters (in her tremendously moving final aria), "Do you know because I tell you so, or do you know do you know?"

You know. Go vote.

Lost in the 60s

and the 70s I've been, listening to Julie Andrews marvelously read her new autobiography Home: A Memoir of My Early Years (Hyperion) and reading Sheila Weller's Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon--and the Journey of a Generation. Forget the "You're So Vain" gossip--did you know "Car on a Hill" was about Jackson Browne? And J. T.'s "You Can Close Your Eyes"? Joni.

But, really, it's been like eating a whole plateful of madeleines. My baby-boomer cohort ( a word Weller uses way, way too often in an otherwise delicious book) will understand.

Star of the Day

I sang this song forty years ago on Community Auditions, a low-rent Boston precursor of American Idol. But Debbie makes me realize why I didn't win.

Forget Celebrity Writers . . .

. . . for Oscar Day, I present you with a celebrity reviewer, movie actress Saffron Burrows in the Guardian. Good job, too.

My Oscar hopes: No Country for Old Men, Coen brothers, George Clooney, Philip Seymour Hoffman, none of them*, Amy Ryan, Persepolis; don't care about the rest but think the un-nominated Eastern Promises shoulda won for Best Score.

My predictions: No Country for Old Men, Coen Brothers, Daniel Day-Lewis, Javier Bardem, Julie Christie, Ruby Dee (Richard's pick because I can't decide), Ratatouille. Atonement for Best Score although it sucks big bombastic rocks.

*I know this isn't an option. It's like the Newbery and Caldecott: once you've decided that "choosing the best" is a defensible activity, then something has to win. We're talking comparatives, not superlatives, a distinction not observed in Zadie Smith's recent short-story contest. So I guess I'll go with Julie Christie. She makes me go misty.

When Jane got a train

In one of the group homes I lived in after college (not like it sounds, but too haphazard to be a commune) one of my housemates had placed in the bathroom an oversized children's paperback book called What Is a Girl? What Is a Boy?, affixing to it a note that said something like "this is for all you losers who can't tell the difference." The book was a photoessay showing boys and girls engaged in all kinds of anti-gendered behavior, and the last two spreads showed a naked boy and girl, then a naked man and woman, explaining that genitalia was the only meaningful difference between the sexes. By Stephanie Waxman, it was published in 1976 by Peace Press in California . (It was republished in 1989 by T.Y. Crowell. Had Us become Them?)

K. T. Horning's post "Retro Reads: Before Heather" makes me remember those days. I'd love to have the Horn Book take a good look at this era of leftist small press publishing for children--any takers?

When Frog and Toad Are More Than Friends

Who needs old closet case Dumbledore when Claire has put together a first-class list of out-n-proud GLBTQ-and-sometimes-Y fiction?

I've got an editorial in the upcoming Horn Book about the outing of Dumbledore, who in fact joins a long line of characters who coulda-woulda-shoulda be gay if the reader so inclines--like Shakespeare in Susan Cooper's King of Shadows as we discussed here a few weeks ago. Or Harriet the Spy. (Or Sport, Beth Ellen, or Janie.) Betsy and Tacy! Frank and Joe! Nancy and George! Or not, too--the point is that characters become your imaginary friends whose lives, loves, and destinies can become what you need them to be.

I'm reminded of 1965, the momentous year when Barbie became flexible. Durable characters always are.

Developmentally Delighted

This Newsweek story about the over-diagnosis of developmental problems in kids reminds me of a discussion in my children's lit class in library school. We were all enthusiastically talking about Harriet the Spy until one student, an infiltrator from the psych. department, sputtered, "I can't believe you all are recommending children read this book about a sociopath."

Lesbolicious is the word

for this picture of dykon Louise Fitzhugh, looking like James Dean's love child on KT Horning's new blog Worth the Trip. The blog is going to be devoted to coverage of GLBTQXYZ books for kids and teens and with KT at the helm you know the thinking and writing are going to be first-rate.