Aargh?

Do we think that the Somalian pirate drama is going to dampen the enthusiasm for "fun" pirates in children's books? Or for--oh Lord, please--National Talk Like a Pirate Day?

Elizabeth thinks not. We just talked and she opined that the pirate thing had already run its course anyway. But there was a sturdy tradition of jolly pirates in children's books before the current craze, all more or less dependent on the assumption that pirates were far enough removed from a reading child's reality to be practically folklore. Will the current situation, terrible but absorbing and updated in real time, put Captain Abdul (already unfortunately named) out of business?

We're still here . . .

But the Horn Book, Inc. has a new owner. See details on our website.

Here's one more.

Another classic gets re-envisioned for new media.

And would Jane Eyre Twitter?

Elizabeth sent me this link to the end of literature as we know it.

Add 'em up, Bobby

Could somebody do this math for me? If Sarah Palin did in fact receive seven million dollars for a book contract, how many copies would the publisher have to sell to recoup its cost? Would it be possible?

Yes, I intend to use song references for my blog headings until I get good and tired of it.

Fiction doing backflips

In watching the three Bourne movies in close succession over the past week, Richard and I spotted a neat thing we had missed when viewing them at the theater: the final scene of the second movie, The Bourne Supremacy, is also the climax of the third movie, The Bourne Ultimatum, with a completely different dramatic purpose. I asked Elizabeth if she could think of any books-in-series that worked this way, and she came up with two related but inexact examples: that it wasn't until Lloyd Alexander had submitted The High King to his editor Ann Durrell that she told him he had missed a book and sent him off to write Taran Wanderer; and that Jan Karon was forced after the fact by fans to plug a plot hole in her Mitford series. Any others?

Another Phone Call from the Past

I realized a forty-year-old dream last night when we went to see a community theater production of Hair. The Rent of its day--although far more transgressive--Hair was the Big Thing for little show-tune freaks, given even more appeal by the fact that we had to listen to the record (which was all we knew of the show, since we certainly wouldn't be allowed to see it. Nudes!) out of earshot of our parents. I remember clandestinely (I thought) listening to my older sister's recording and my mother overhearing "Happy Birthday Abie Baby" ("emanci-motherfuckin'-pator of the slaves") and pitching a fit. Has High School Musical ever occasioned such perfect drama?

Growing up in Boston added allure, too, as, when the show came to town in 1970, it was promptly shut down and banned for a month until the Supreme Court allowed it to reopen. I remember faking illness to stay home from school one day because the cast was going to perform on some local TV talk show. How ironic that "America's oldest community theater" (the Footlight Club opened in 1877) would be presenting it thirty-some years later without fuss, obscenities and (discreetly lit) nudity intact.

I didn't get half of the sex jokes back then, and certainly didn't recognize just how druggie it was--my exposure to illegal substances was then limited to the "awareness tablets" that a cop had brought into our junior high and lit in front of the classroom to demonstrate what marijuana smelled like so we would know when to blow the whistle on a party, I guess. Last night, at fifty-one, I had little patience with the show's loosey-goosey free-range dialogue that was supposed to convey the inspiration of drugs and wondered how anyone could have ever heard it as meaningful or even sincere.

But to think of drugs as "mind-expanding" is even more taboo today than in 1968, as is the show's gleeful employment of racial epithets. Forget getting banned in Boston; can it play in L.A.?

What I mostly thought last night, sentimentally and dolefully, is that now I'm the parents and, really, so is the show. I'm betting the sweet kids on stage were as bemused by the LBJ jokes they were spouting as I had been by "Sodomy."

Phone Call to the Past

Pursuant to my recent post about sequels, I see from A Chair, A Fireplace and a Tea Cozy that not only are Ellen Emerson White's old books about The President's Daughter being republished, she's rewriting them to bring them in line with the most recent book, Long May She Reign, which is set in the present day but picks up the action from the end of the last book, Long Live the Queen.

Phew. If only they could do this with the old Magic Attic books, which apparently invite readers to join a fan club by calling an 800 number which time and fate have transformed into a phone sex line. And I wonder what's happened to 537-3331, Amy's phone number in I Am the Cheese. If you figured out the area code you could find yourself talking to "Amy's father," aka Robert Cormier. Or so I was told.