Lost and gone forever

When I went looking for the cover to Clementine on This Old Internet, I found this:

On January 25, 1994, the Deep Space Program Science Experiment (DSPSE) (better known as Clementine) was launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, California, on a mission designed to test lightweight miniature sensors and advanced spacecraft components by exposing them, over a long period of time, to the difficult environment of outer space. In addition to testing the various sensors, Clementine was given the complex task of mapping the moon. The mission results were spectacular.

Spectacular? I'll say. They've got the whole surface of the moon on the Internet for all to see. Have a look. You can browse it, zooming and panning, or you can get it to pinpoint lunar features for you. Kind of mind-blowing to see the lunar landing sites as cartoony red push-pins on a photo map of the moon.

Secrets of Dripping Fang by Dan Greenburg - review

Secrets of Dripping Fang by Dan Greenburg. Age 8-13. Oh there are totally kids for this series. You've got adventures and peril faced by a supportive family, each of whom has a defining characteristic... like, dad's a vampire, aunt is a giant spider, etc. There are some great funny moments, like when the sister appears to be dying of fever and dad wonders if it would be unethical to drink her blood, as doing so would clearly cause her no additional harm. No, seriously, in this goodhearted series, that's funny. Thumbs up.

Clementine by Sara Pennypacker - review

Clementine by Sara Pennypacker. Age 7-10. Loved this. Subtle and slapstick at the same time. I like the character: Clementine is the sideways-thinking sitting-still-challenged daughter of boho city dwellers - think Pippi's great-grandniece. I like the plot: she gets in trouble as a result of actions that seem perfectly logical from her point of view (which the reader shares). I even like the parents: they cherish her creativity and listen to her, but they react pretty convincingly when she cuts all her hair off and colors her head green with a Sharpie. Plus great illustrations. Happy it's a series. Thumbs up.

The Dream Stealer by Gregory Maguire - review

The Dream Stealer by Gregory Maguire. Ages 5-adult (really!). This is an older book, but I'd never read Gregory Maguire's kid books (he's the author of Wicked and Son of a Witch, both of which I found unexpectedly thoughtful - not your usual fractured fairy tales for adults, they incorporate a lot of political philosophy and behaviorist allegory, but don't manage to get boring) and I had heard that Dream Stealer was something special. Not disappointed. A simple but gripping fairy tale set in the Russian forest, this book is vivid, well-plotted, and suspenseful. I think it has just enough scare but not too much (but I should mention that I sometimes underestimate how scareable some kids are). Thumbs up.

Ivy and Bean by Annie Barrows and Sophie Blackall - review

Ivy and Bean by Annie Barrows and Sophie Blackall. Age 6-9. Another new series, this one about two girls who decide to be friends - kind of your standard mismatched buddy pairing. Like Lethal Weapon with worms instead of guns. There is teasing: there's an older sister that Ivy and Bean play tricks on, but I'm ok with that. Playing tricks up the power gradient is more fair than picking on a younger sibling (a la Star Jumper) in my opinion. Thumbs up.

Star Jumper by Frank Asch - review

With the kids in camp 3 days a week I've been doing some catching up on my reading. As a result, I got pretty far behind on my reviewing. So the other day, I wrote a bunch of little tiny reviews, and now I'm behind on posting! I swear, it's like housework - once you get the toilets cleaned you really should get going on the vacuuming.



Star Jumper: Journal of a Cardboard Genius by Frank Asch. Age 6-9. There's something to this new series - the reader can't tell whether young Alex's cardboard sci-fi inventions actually work or not, and that's pretty interesting - but Alex is such a little shit it would be hard for me to recommend this one. The whole reason the kid invents a spaceship is so that he can "put as many light-years between me and my little brother Jonathan as possible". Maybe as the series progresses Alex and Jonathan will join forces and the ugliness will dissipate, but for now: Thumbs down.

Must I paint you a picture?

Mom sends this along.



Someone has loaded a batch of canonical images of women from art history (i.e. Botticelli's Birth of Venus, Ingres's Princesse de Broglie, Rubens's wife) into an animation program and done morphing transitions between each. It's pretty neat.

This is later

Agnes Martin. Alexander Liberman (American, 1912–1999)
Gelatin silver print, 1973
22.5 x 33cm (8 7/8 x 13 in.)
2000.R.19

My boyfriend in college (Lance) and his two best friends (Mike and The Mayor's Daughter) were writers. Well, they wrote things. I'm not actually sure you can call a college student a writer - in fact, I'm never really comfortable calling anyone a "writer": there are questions of quality and professionalism, focus, output... I just don't know.

This deconstructivist tendency of mine is in fact a relic of that time. Lance and his friends had used drugs and a Lou Reed live album to re-teach themselves how to talk, and they talked about writing - and occasionally music - without cease. I loved it, but after a few years in their orbit, I distrusted words so thoroughly that it once took me nine excruciating pages of tiny handwriting to tell a guy that I was mailing his wallet back to him after it had fallen out of his pocket while we were making out on my couch. That was my first letter to Bob, and, amazingly, not my last.

So... writer? I don't know. Assembler of sentences. User of written language for the purpose of self-expression. Whatever it was, Lance, Mike and The Mayor's Daughter did it. Even then more of an editor and critic than writer myself, I read what they wrote, and I liked it. Lance once wrote a story so thwarted and incoherent, I think it might be the truest imprint of suburban white college boy I've ever held in my hands. I still have it around here somewhere.

Unfortunately, into their groping, doubt-full intellectual lives came a visiting professor, a published author there to teach creative writing. And if they (and I) didn't know what a writer was, by god Lee K. Abbott did.

Boy I hated that guy. He would use the word "evil" about stories that didn't adhere to his made-up guidelines. He denounced any writing that wasn't shaped like his. My friends would come back from class so fired up - suburban kids from Ohio, nobody had ever really judged their writing before and they were inclined to swallow his commandments whole. They were apostate from the culture of their youth and looking for a guide.

I probably shouldn't be so hard on Abbott. He wasn't a teacher after all: maybe all he knew how to do was to teach people to write like he did. And it's not like I was any less malleable. As they took him as their guide, I took them. Probably why I was so incensed when he tried to change them.

But no, I take it back. I sat in on a few of their classes, and that guy brooked no disagreement, he was his own cult. He used his charisma and his cachet as a published writer to bluster and to bully them and to stunt their trip.

So, how did (does) Lee Abbott write? Let's put it this way. Yesterday I read The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Dark. Amazing. Like an Agnes Martin painting, it's a landscape almost completely blank and yet it is so textured and deep you could fall in. As cadenced as a requiem, repetitive as a fugue, heartbreaking, thought-provoking. Gorgeous.

Lee Abbott doesn't write like that. His stories are like Southwestern Tom Waits songs minus the empathy. And I don't think any of my old friends writes fiction any more, though The Mayor's Daughter did a stint writing for TV and I wouldn't put it past Mike to have a blog.

Let your juvenile impulses sway

00028, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.

Gratuitous awesome picture of Stretch and Big Man on the beach at sunset by Dee Pipik.

Here's my Bitch of the Day:

Wow, how much can one person despise The Berenstain Bears? Joyless moralizing bullshit - today the episode was, coincidentally enough, the bears going to their rented beach house.

Went like this: as they packed the car, it was obvious that Mama and Papa had done all the preparation: the cubs pestered their parents with "Did you pack my goggles? Did you pack my jump rope?" etc. Then, when the family arrived at the beach house, Mama surveyed the joint and proclaimed that the place needed "a good tidying" before they unpacked the car. The kids complained that they would rather go straight to the beach.

Papa decides to teach the kids a lesson and invites his wife to take a load off in a deck chair instead of spending her vacation doing housework. After a couple of minutes, though, she sighs and says she just can't relax knowing there's work to be done. I'd say Ms. Mama needs a cocktail and a consciousness-raising session, but she seems to be satisfied with a smug reassurance from Papa that the cubs will come to the same conclusion on their own. I really hate that guy sometimes.

The kids then realize that their bathing suits are in the car, but Mama and Papa won't unload the car til the damn tidying is done. Bla bla, 2 + 2 = 4, everyone runs inside and cheerfully grabs the cleaning supplies. And what tidying! Mama sweeps, Papa shakes out the rugs, Brother and Sister WASH WINDOWS! Sweet crap, they're only going to be there for a week.

I am happy to report that while laundry may have been done and dishes washed, and although I even caught a couple aunties sweeping from time to time, nobody washed a single window on our vacation.

Road work ahead

05 16 07 026, originally uploaded by your neighborhood librarian.