The Weirdest Christmas Hiatus Post Ever

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Yes, normally I'm so driven I literally have Ambition** coming out of my armpits.**** But as of today, I am off for two weeks' vacation in California, Missouri, and Iowa, seeing many dear friends and family. I hope to get some good thinking and writing time in while I'm gone, so I may post again******, but in case I do not: I wish all of you readers a wonderful and blessed winter-solstice season, filled with all the things you love best, and I'll see you in 2009. Happy holidays!*******
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* I swear this is a real scent of deodorant and the photo has not been Photoshopped.
** Though it's still not the funniest scent name for a deodorant I've ever seen; that would be "Sweet Surrender" from Lady Speed Stick. A deodorant that shares a name with a Sarah McLachlan song*** -- good lord.
*** Admittedly, "Possession" would be worse. Though maybe not "Ice Cream."
**** I confess I bought this product solely for the opportunity to say that. But actually, Ambition doesn't smell very pleasant, and I've moved on to Wild Freesia.*****
***** I am laughing even writing this because this has to be the epitome of bloggy oversharing/navel-gazing. (Ooh look! Bellybutton lint!) But I trust you all will forgive me.
****** I finished Twilight, and I have some things to say about that.
******* And God bless us, every one.

"Ars Poetica #100: I Believe" by Elizabeth Alexander

In the midst of a news report about President-elect Obama's inauguration today, I saw a reference to poet Elizabeth Alexander, who will be performing at the ceremony (along with Aretha Franklin, which is awesome). Obama is reinstating the tradition of an inaugural poem after our esteemed current president dropped it. Anyway, I had never heard of Ms. Alexander, so I Googled around and found her website, and I quite like this:

Ars Poetica #100: I Believe

Poetry, I tell my students,
is idiosyncratic. Poetry

is where we are ourselves,
(though Sterling Brown said

“Every ‘I’ is a dramatic ‘I’”)
digging in the clam flats

for the shell that snaps,
emptying the proverbial pocketbook.

Poetry is what you find
in the dirt in the corner,

overhear on the bus, God
in the details, the only way

to get from here to there.
Poetry (and now my voice is rising)

is not all love, love, love,
and I’m sorry the dog died.

Poetry (here I hear myself loudest)
is the human voice,

and are we not of interest to each other?

My Man in Black

If you'll permit me a brief little proud personal post, here's my boyfriend James singing "Ring of Fire" last night with his class from the Brooklyn Guitar School (video and occasional voice accompaniment by me):



James is a professional video director and editor, and he gives wonderful gifts -- for instance, these two videos for birthdays past, one from 2006 and one for this year. (And yes, those are the real celebrities.)



The signoff line in the one above kills me -- the perfect example of someone living up to his own cliche.



(James got me to walk in front of the greenscreen for this one by telling me he needed to test out the focus depth of his camera. I do still trust him -- just not with a greenscreen.)

Lastly, I uploaded some photos from Election Night at Rockefeller Center and randomness throughout the year to my Facebook account.

Hooray for Elizabeth & A CURSE DARK AS GOLD!

I'm delighted to share the news that Elizabeth C. Bunce's A Curse Dark as Gold is one of five nominees for the ALA's William C. Morris Award, for a debut work of young adult fiction. Elizabeth and I are both pretty pleased, as you can imagine, though it's hard to find a book-specific way to celebrate . . . I mean, we could go out and buy ourselves dresses made from gold thread, but that seems a little creepy in context. (And Elizabeth would probably prefer to make her dress anyway!) So I simply lift a glass of cider to her across the states. The winner will be announced at the ALA awards ceremony in January.

• Elizabeth's website and LJ
  
• Q&A with Elizabeth here at Brooklyn Arden
  

The other nominees (and editors) are:

• Graceling by Kristin Cashore, edited by Kathy Dawson
• Absolute Brightness by James Lecesne, edited by my excellent friend (and an author herself) Jill Santopolo
  
• Madapple by Christina Meldrum, edited by Michelle Frey
  
• Me, the Missing, and the Dead by Jenny Valentine, edited by Stella Paskins of HarperCollins UK

Cheers to all!

HP, Jane Austen, Twilight, Recipes, LOST, Movie Pitches, Baseball, Cassons, Words, and Old Ladies/Politics.

In other words, everything ever in the history of the world! AND the results of the great Socks vs. Underwear debate.

• I had the great pleasure of being a guest on PotterCast this week for a live discussion of The Tales of Beedle the Bard at Books of Wonder. You can listen to the audio here. Thanks as always to the PotterCasters for having me on the show!
  
• During the discussion, I start to articulate a theory of what I think might be a personality test based upon which tale you like the best. "The Wizard and the Hopping Pot": You are cheerful and enjoy seeing justice done. "The Fountain of Fair Fortune": You're something of a romantic and probably supported Barack Obama (since we are the change we've been waiting for). "The Warlock's Hairy Heart": You have an unexpected Gothic streak. "Babbitty Rabbitty": You also enjoy seeing justice done, but by rabbits. "The Three Brothers": You like contemplating the big questions of life. (This is only the start of a theory, mind you . . .)
  
• A must-read if you're an Austen lover and/or Facebook member: AustenBook. (Thanks to Christina and Suzi for posting this on FB in the first place.)
  
• A very smart review of Twilight from the British newspaper The Guardian. I'm trying to read the novel this month (after not being captured by it back when it first came out), and so far this review seems spot-on. Do people who genuinely love the book and think it's good (as opposed to the legions who know it's bad but read it anyway) actually find Bella and Edward interesting as people? Hmm. (via child_lit)
  
• If you're having a holiday party, I highly recommend both this Hot Spiked Cider and the Caroling Wine.
• LOST fans, the videos posted beneath the comic here are hilarious, and for you.
• A list of Endangered Words (via Judith Ridge on child_lit). The voting on this is now closed, but the words are excellent: embrangle, nitid, skirr, fubsy . . .
• A seven-year-old plots Jurassic Park IV -- this time with Nazis!
• A fascinating essay about George Steinbrenner by my favorite sportswriter, Joe Posnanski.
  
• If you love the Casson books by Hilary McKay -- Rose has a blog! (via GraceAnne DeCandido on child_lit, which is where I evidently get everything)
• But this one is via Andrew Sullivan: Two old ladies, best friends for sixty years, blog about politics, Sarah Palin, family Christmas letters, and breastfeeding. Meet Margaret and Helen.
• Finally, I am very pleased to see that Underwear trumped Socks for both women and men in our highly scientific poll. Thank you for confirming my faith in humanity.
  

Silly Poll: Socks or Underwear?

While packing for my Thanksgiving trip home last week, I flashed back to a conversation held over the breakfast table on my junior-year study-abroad term in England. We students were preparing to head out for a week backpacking around Europe, and we were all trying to marshal our dwindling clothing resources in the most efficient manner possible. Thus the conversation turned to the following question: Which was the more essential item to pack: socks or underwear?

All of the girls at the table swore that underwear was by far the more essential -- two days in the same pair, ewww. But all the boys were equally vehement that a fresh pair of socks was required every day, and you could double up on underwear if absolutely necessary. I'm curious to know whether this division is a true reflection of gender attitudes, or whether I was just dining with some particularly granola-ish boys that day.

So, if you were forced to choose between taking a clean pair of socks or a clean pair of underwear on a trip, what would you do? Please read the poll choices carefully, and include not just your choice but your gender in your vote -- clearly an incredibly scientific and accurate polling method, as you can tell. And thank you for helping me to resolve this burning question, as I honestly have wondered about it occasionally for a whole ten years now: Socks? Really, guys? Hmmm.

Query Letter Cliche Alert: ". . . Or Did She?"

About halfway through a tall stack of SQUIDs today, my intern Jemma threw down her letter opener and said, "This is the tenth letter or novel excerpt I've read that uses the phrase '. . . Or did he?' I'm sick of it! Auggh!"

. . . Or did she?

I will verify her exclamation later this week, when I need a break from the -- good grief, is it five manuscripts I'm in the middle of editing, all at different stages? Yes it is. Goodness -- and go through the SQUIDs myself, since she's done the first triage. (I also owe some back responses from October/November, I know.)

Just to be clear about this: The thing that is unfortunate about the repeated appearances of this phrase is not that they all occurred in the same batch of SQUIDs, but that, like all cliches, they're evidence of easy, lazy thinking and writing rather than the freshness and originality that will truly make your work stand out. Find a new way of creating suspense within the letter and the chapters, and go forth and sin no more.

An Experiment

Testing, testing, 1 2 3.

Brooklyn Arden Reviews: Two Modern National Epics

This weekend I took in two epics of national creation and definition, spaced a hundred and sixty years apart in time and a good distance farther than that in the mentalities that created them; but each demonstrating a genius of sorts for its particular genre and style, and each recommended for the right frame of mind. I am writing these reviews late at night, and I'm going to do them rather stream-of-consciousness, with very long sentences; so please forgive any errors in style or fact, as I'm writing them for the mere pleasure of making them exist at all. And spoilers ahoy!

So, first, The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Part I: The Pox Party, by M. T. Anderson. This volume wae the National Book Award winner for 2006, but I had -- not avoided it exactly, but never made time to read it, until the recent CCBC discussion and Times review of Volume II prompted me to pick it up. More out of a sense of duty than anticipated pleasure: for while I very much admired M. T. Anderson's Feed (the only previous novel of his I'd read), and I knew from that and from reviews of Octavian that he could accomplish extraordinary feats of voice, emotion, imagination, and historical recreation, his temperament and view of humanity seemed rather darker and harsher than mine, almost on the verge of nihilism. And it is always hard for me as a quasi-optimist to read pessimistic works -- not only are the events described unpleasant, and realer than I daily care to look at, I feel like something of a fool as I read, for this, the pessimists are telling me, is reality, and why don't I just face that fact and get on with it? Additionally, I'd read so much about Octavian at this point that I felt it was approaching the category of books that the first chapter of If on a winter's night a traveler would call The Books One Never Needs to Read Because So Many People Talk about Them That It Seems Like You've Read Them Already.

So I took up Octavian knowing most of its big surprises -- the nature of the experiment, that he would at some point lapse into inkblots, the eventual escape. And at first I read with attention mostly for the undeniable genius of the thing -- the deep knowledge of history and science, the construction of the voice, the fascination of the situation. (Not to mention the incredible feat of copyediting this book must have been, to get the ampersands and the spellings and the historical references right and consistent.) And that awareness of genius was so strong, and the events described so deeply inhumane (to Octavian; all too humanlike in other ways) and yet true, that I found myself reading more with aesthetic pleasure than emotional pleasure -- that is, I took pleasure in the excellent aesthetics of the book, but I had no pleasure being with Octavian inside the world created by those aesthetics. About halfway through, I would have liked to stop reading.

And yet I could not, Mr. Anderson's aesthetic genius having caught me up in caring about Octavian and made his world sufficiently real that I had to see how the experiment played itself out. If readers usually identify with main characters and have the pleasure of sharing in their experience, the experience and pleasure here felt like that of martyrdom: intense pain and also nobility, the one increasing the other. But once I gave myself over to that and accepted it, about the time of the Pox Party, I found some pleasure in sharing Octavian's burden, like we had to go through these awful things together. And more than that, I realized that I had misjudged Mr. Anderson, because anyone who feels such sympathy for the suffering (as I think he must to portray suffering so accurately and acutely) cannot be a nihilist: because in nihilism nothing matters, and he clearly feels that human suffering does, and should be alleviated. That does not mean it WILL be in the course of the book, of course, but it's nice to have something to believe in as a reader, and not feel like the author is simply leading you toward fictional misery and pointlessness (the better to underline the misery and pointlessness of actual existence).

So, oddly cheered, I flew through the last third of the novel, marveling still at the brilliance of the historical writing and the turnabout of the usual patriotic story; and hoping now, hard, for Octavian to escape and all to be -- if not well, or even peaceful (which would be foolish in a novel chronicling the beginning of the Revolutionary War), more resolute still in favor of this sense of the possible goodness of humanity. And while I understand Volume II will test this hope even further, I look forward to getting and reading it after I return to New York. All of the best novels I've read this year have been YA: Paper Towns, Graceling, Suite Scarlett, The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks, The Hunger Games, the Attolia trilogy; and now I will set Octavian Nothing among that company, as, if not the most pleasurable, certainly the most distinguished in imaginative and historical accomplishment.

(It strikes me that this is less a review than an account of my reading experience with random, very possibly pretentious-sounding philosophical bits thrown in. Ah well, I'm enjoying writing the bloviation, and I hope you don't mind reading it.)

Australia. Baz Luhrmann pulls various pieces of his country's mythology and history -- the colonization by the English, the incredible beauty of the Outback, the romantic independence of the stockmen, the shame of the Aborigines' treatment by the whites -- into an ungainly film that, despite the history and the setting, is still much more a Baz Luhrmann movie than it is an Australian one. By which I mean: Baz Luhrmann loves drama and the dramatic arts, loves good production design, and loves Love above all, and all of these things are in their usual massive profusion here -- Australia just happens to be the latest backdrop for his inquiries. Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) travels from England to her late husband's cattle station in the Outback, where she meets "the Drover," a cattleman played by Hugh Jackman, and a half-white, half-Aborigine boy named Nullah (Brandon Walters), who might at any time be taken away for reeducation as a white at the hands of the Australian authorities. Lady Sarah's husband was killed by the overseer of a rival cattle station, a man named Neil Fletcher (Bryan Brown), who tries to blame it on Nullah's wholly Aboriginal grandfather. In the first half of the movie, Lady Sarah bonds variously with Nullah, with Australia, and with the Drover as they drive the cattle from the station to Darwin in 1939. In the second half, set in 1941, she wrestles with the implications of Nullah's race -- his desire to go walkabout, the authorities' capturing him -- as the Japanese approach and eventually attack Darwin.

That all sounds much too serious, though. Luhrmann gives the film a frantic opening much like those of Moulin Rouge! or Romeo + Juliet -- he's so eager to get to the meat of the romance that he rushes us through the introductions to his characters, making them look ridiculous, to early unfortunate effect. But as in those previous films, once those lovers are onstage and working together, he calms down -- overindulging his fondness for the closeup, perhaps, but developing the story at a more logical pace, and unfolding several glorious romantic set pieces. Here he also displays a strong hand for action sequences (which, I guess, aren't so different from dance numbers), particularly in a cattle stampede about a third of the way in.

Still, the most prominent feature of the film is his unabashed sentimentality -- and more than that, his reveling in it, in the long shots of Lady Sarah and the Drover embracing against a gorgeous Australian sunset. The Aborigines are all magical, moral beings in touch with the earth (though, to be fair, this is probably true, certainly compared with the white colonizers). Someone says something like, "As long as we have love, everything will be all right." We never learn the Drover's real name; indeed, the film never even acknowledges the idea he has a real name, or the silliness of his being always "the Drover," as that might taint his mythic stature. And here is a one-line summary of the climax: a noble Englishwoman hears her adopted half-Aborigine son playing "Somewhere over the Rainbow" on a dead man's harmonica as her horseman-lover pilots a boat full of other half-Aborigine children through a bay filled with burning debris after an attack by the Japanese.

So Australia is melodramatic and ridiculous. But it is also, if you're willing to wait through the opening and shut up the realistic side of your brain, quite, quite delicious -- gorgeous production design, gorgeous scenes of the Outback, gorgeous Hugh Jackman (though I kept hoping he would break out in song). If any Australians read this, I would be curious to know what the reaction has been Down Under to the film. And for Americans, I recommend it as a highly enjoyable evening at the movie theatre, especially as it's an epic not our own.

For the Fruit of All Creation

For the fruit of all creation,
thanks be to God.
Gifts bestowed on every nation,
thanks be to God.
For the plowing, sowing, reaping,
silent growth while we are sleeping,
future needs in earth's safekeeping,
thanks be to God.

In the just reward of labor,
God's will is done.
In the help we give our neighbor,
God's will is done.
In our worldwide task of caring
for the hungry and despairing,
in the harvests we are sharing,
God's will is done.

For the harvests of the Spirit,
thanks be to God.
For the good we all inherit,
thanks be to God.
For the wonders that astound us,
for the truths that still confound us,
most of all that love has found us,
thanks be to God.

-- Fred Pratt Green

To hear the music, click here.