Books, music, who could ask for more?

This is what I want to do all day long. Anyone with me?

Lest you think I'm sitting around crying into my muffins, Part 1

Note:  This was supposed to be a recent picture of Sonar X8 in his Christmas getup.  For some reason that other one won’t load.  So instead you get this delightful substitute from five-hundred years ago.  He’s still this cute sometimes.  

Sonar X8 and his classmates have recently read The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo.  Lovely book.  Like many good books, especially ones for children, this one has been made into a movie, which opens in U.S. theaters today.  

Today also happens to be the last day of school before the two-and-a-half week Winter Holiday, and an early dismissal day at that.  The classes are having their holiday parties and puzzle exchanges and chaos-inducing whatnot.  

The third grade teachers decided that the coincidence of all of these things—book, movie, party day—was just too much to pass up and gave a call to our lovely, independently-owned, local movie theater and arranged a nine a.m. screening of The Tale of Despereaux for the entire third grade.  

To make this work, the third graders are having a holiday breakfast, and skipping the holiday assembly (a performance of Christmas standards by the fourth graders).  First thing this morning, they got hopped up on donuts, candy canes and cookies (and yes, milk, OJ, and pigs in a blanket), then 120 third graders and their teachers and aides boarded yellow dogs to drive a half mile to the theater.  

(I wonder about the choice to use buses for this trip, since the buses have to drive about a half mile from the school to the theater, but if the kids walked through the municipal park between the school and theater, they’d have to trek about a quarter of a mile.  Perhaps they were worried about the weather.  Or potential escapees.  No telling.)  

As we speak, Sonar X8 and his classmates are among the first children to see the new film, a fact that they giggled about so deliciously, as if they were getting away with something.  While at the theater, they’ll get a fresh injection of popcorn and soda and then go back to school for a nutritious lunch.  Ha.  

Supposedly the teachers are going to haul them all back to the classrooms after that for some kind of “Compare and Contrast” activity.  Should they attempt this activity (as opposed to sending them outside for recess for the rest of the day) I think they might need to be certified.  Should they succeed, I think I’ll have to send them a bottle of bourbon to sooth their frayed nerves.  

Luckily they’ll have sixteen, third-grader-free days to recover.  

My Weirdness This Week, and Shaun Tan's Gem

My toe is sore today.  Actually it’s been sore for a couple of days because I dropped a glass on it the other night.  I knew it the moment I set the glass down on the corner of my desk.  Actually thought to myself, ‘Don’t put it there.  You’ll knock it over.’  Pah on that inner voice.  I set the glass on the corner of my desk so that I could close the curtain to the right, and turn on the lamp to the left.  As I simultaneously pulled my hand gracefully away from the lamp switch and started to sit down in my chair, I caught the top edge of the glass with my hand and tipped it toward myself.  The contents of the glass splattered first against me (spraying in a sort of arc behind me), then after the glass hit my foot, it spun and sprayed more liquid around in front of me, before bouncing onto the tile and breaking.  

While I screamed ow ow ow ow standing in a glassy puddle on one foot, my lovely Partner got towels and brooms and ice.  I’ll be fine.  It was actually sort of funny.  Did I mention that it was a glass of wine?  Wine that I’d taken barely a sip out of before the spectacular spraying of wine all over the room?  Did I mention that it miraculously missed the computer on its track to soak the tile as well as a towel that has been wedged under the thousand-pound filing cabinet for the last year to keep the metal cabinet from scraping the tile?  Or that there is no way to remove this towel from under the cabinet without emptying the files out of it?  

The living room now has the lingering aroma (thankfully pleasant) of a 2005 Australian Shiraz Cabernet that I really liked and was disappointed to have dropped on my foot.  

Perhaps the fumes led to the next weirdness, which was measuring out a level teaspoon of salt to put in my tea yesterday morning.  No, I realized my mistake before I drank the tea, thank you very much.  

All of this should not, however, cause you to doubt my next enthusiastic endorsement.  We came across Shaun Tan’s The Arrival in the juvenile fiction section of the library last week.  I guess you’d call it a graphic novel, in that there are no words, only pictures.  Don’t assume though that the pictures and its location in the library make it kids’ stuff.  The word that comes to my lips anytime I try to describe it is ‘beautiful.’  

The Arrival tells the story of one man’s journey from his home country to make a new life, first for himself, and later for his family in a magical fictionalized world.  Each page, each panel is filled with magic.  You will choke up when the main character holds the hands of his wife and daughter before boarding the boat.  You will understand the awe, the frustration, the loneliness, the fear, the hope that immigrants must have felt when stepping off the boat at Ellis Island more than a century ago.  The pages are filled with fantastical elements meant to illustrate the foreignness, the exoticness, the seeming magic of this new place.  Also embedded in the pages is the generosity of the shared immigrant experience, the way in which one person helps another through the initial confusion, how each person has a different story that led him or her to this place at this time.  The pictures are shaped with subtle details, small beauties and wonders that you will linger over.  

While perfectly appropriate for young people, it should not be overlooked by adults, who will understand the complex choices we sometimes make to care for our families, who might see reflected, if not one’s own experience, then perhaps that of a parent or grandparent.  A great book to share in any language.

If you enjoyed The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, you’ll love this book.  (And if you’ve never read The Invention of Hugo Cabret, you should go find that one too.)  

Camera Camera !@#$%

Ok, the good news is that the digital camera has returned from its vacation in Illinois.  The nice people at the Canon Factory Resort claim to have returned it to its factory specifications.  And I believe them.  I’ve already taken a dozen pictures of things I’d been meaning to take pictures of and they’re sweetly uploaded onto the Mac here, and I’ve seen them and fiddled with them and they’re pretty.  

But I can’t show them to you because Blogger has a headache or something.  Try as I might, an “internal error” is preventing me from uploading any of these lovely new photos.  Or any lovely old photos.  

I’ll try again. 

!@#$%

One more time. 

*sigh*

I give up.  

So the fun post full of pictures that I had mapped out in my mind is sort of pointless right now, so I’ll try to distract you.  

Hey, my eight year old started reading the Aeneid tonight.  Yeah, the one by Virgil.  Only then I mentioned that the monsters in The Odyssey were way better, so he switched.  This was all prompted by these books.  We’ve been reading them out loud since we finished HP.  They are fun too.  Anyway, at a loss for what to read on his own before bedtime tonight, having finished this earlier today, I was browsing the bookshelves for something to suggest until we can get him to a library tomorrow.  The Aeneid sort of jumped out at me because of the Percy books, so I took it out and told him what it was.  “But it might be too hard, being this big, elaborate poem-thing and all,” I said.  He snatched it out of my hands before I could return it to the shelves.  Then I dug out the Odyssey and there was a discussion of Greek and monsters and prose and poetry and the prudent use of a glossary.  

They’re tough, but he likes them, and he immediately had an easier time with the Fitzgerald Odyssey than the Aeneid, whose translator I cannot remember right now and the book is in there with the sleeping child (Edit:  turns out it’s the Mandelbaum.  If you’ve ever ready Dante’s Inferno, or even the entire Commedia, there’s a decent chance you read Mandelbaum’s version.  Cream-colored covers with the black ink drawings of the torments of Hell.  Thank Barry Moser for those.)  Suffice to say it’s the one with the green cover and the pen and ink drawing of a person (also by Moser.  Dido?) bleeding to death.  I read The Odyssey for the first time in TWELFTH grade!!!  Who is this child I have spawned? 

One more try on the pictures.  

Gr.  

Next time:  Paint and hammers.

Stacked

From the top:
Clive Barker’s Mister B. Gone
Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little Town on the Prairie
Janet Evanovich’s Plum Lucky
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men
Michael Pollan’s Botany of Desire
James Burkes’ The Pinball Effect: How Renaissance Water Gardens Made the Carburetor Possible
J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Mercer Mayer’s What a Bad Dream
Jarrett J. Krosoczka’s Punk Farm on Tour
Lila Prap’s Daddies

Not Pictured:
Fred Rogers’ The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember
Alison Hansel’s Charmed Knits
Debbie Stoller’s Son of Stitch and Bitch

This is the stack of books I am reading or will soon read.

HP6 and Little Town are being read to the Sonars a few pages at a time at bedtime. We’ve read all of the HP’s so far, and we started this one back in December sometime. I marvel that I have chosen, as a parent to read such complex and sometimes horrifying books (bone white, dead bodies floating under inky black water, anyone?) to children age 3, 4, and 7, at BEDTIME no less. And I further marvel at the way they sit, completely absorbed and emotionally engaged with these books, yet somehow capable of leaving their feelings in the book when it’s time to sleep (if not when it’s time to play).

The three picture books on the bottom are Sonar X3’s to choose from for a bedtime story. Punk Farm is really fun (“Peace Out Colorado!”). I could add here another picture book that we have recently loved and read at least a dozen times: Woolbur by Leslie Kelakoski (“‘I know!’ said Woolbur. ‘Isn’t it great!”)

Mister B and Plum Lucky are pure escapism for me. I read and loved in a slightly twisted way, a couple of Barker’s books as a teen, and have perused his books for younger readers recently. This is his return to fully adult literature, and I was curious. It’s… ok so far. I am intrigued by the use of Gutenburg’s development of the printing press as a locus for an epic battle between heaven and hell. I accidentally discovered Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum books a year or so ago. And while I’m not normally ‘mystery’ kind of reader, I quickly fell in love with this quirky heroine and quickly devoured all twelve novels and two novellas that were available at the time (seriously, I think I read them all in less than three weeks, which is amazing considering the complete lack of free reading time that I have). Plum Lucky is the third of the so-called Between-the-Numbers stories (the regular novels all have a number in the title: One For the Money, Lean Mean Thirteen, etc.) that let’s Stephanie explore the not so down-to-earth potential of her life in the Burg. Really fun, funny, and sexy, even if they are a teensy bit predictable sometimes.

Partner is actually reading No Country right now, but I plan to steal it sometime soon. He’s read a few passages to me, and we’re both taken with the bizarre prose, though it is sometimes challenging to tease the meaning out from the unpunctuated passages. Not for the weak of stomach, this one.

The Pinball Effect is one that I pick up from time to time and read a few passages. It works that way. Letting us all be dilettantes of cultural history. Anyone familiar with Burke’s television show, Connections, will recognize the format here. Burke’s approach to history illuminates the fact that there was a world-wide-web of culture and influence well before the internet was even imagined.

Michael Pollan’s book is another that I want to get to. His writing never fails to remind me why I *want* to eat the way we do most of the time, providing many and varied reasons for thoughtful consumption of food.

In the background of the picture you can also see a tissue box, a pile of pink something, a domed plastic Krispy Kreme cup, and maybe the corner of the backup drive.

The pink something is the sweater I’ve finally sewn together, only to discover that it’s too short for me. I’ve embarked on an epic quest to Make It Fit, which I will blog another day.

The Krispy Kreme donut hole cup, purchased in a moment of weakness embedded in another moment of weakness (donuts, during a rare trip to Walmart), and now devoid of donut holes, is now a micro-greenhouse where we are trying to sprout Banyan seeds. (We like to watch It’s a Big Big World sometimes) Awesome, really, that a tree that big comes from something the size of a poppy seed.

The knitting books will soon be responsible for three small owls and one very large sweater.

And as for Mister Rogers. *happy sigh* Well, let’s just say he holds a special, if not schlocky place in my heart. The fortieth anniversary of Mister Rogers Neighborhood passed last week, and what would have been Fred Rogers’ 80th birthday is coming up next month. See more on this when I talk about Sweater Day.