Ta-daaa!

I got my first copy of SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS this week, in a sumptuous package from my editor that also included chocolate. I have not been waving the chocolate around whenever anyone comes into the house. To be fair, I also haven't been eating the book.

In other news:

· It bucketed down rain and washed away the snow, then last night it snowed again, not enough to ski but enough to be pretty. Also enough to slick up the roads, so the morning neighborhood dog walk was conducted on a side road for fear that we would all slide out under the wheels of a fisherman. If the dogs only knew, they could buy their freedom just by taking off at a run when we're on an icy patch. But they never figure that out, which I guess is the secret to our long and friendly relationship.

· Our friend Lisa is here from Minnesota (she has a house in the neighborhood, usually inhabited only in summer), bringing with her a DVD of Toy Story 3, which Rob didn't see when the rest of us saw it last summer. My favorite part continues to be Mr. Tortilla Head. I am possibly influenced by the fact that, many, many years ago, I wrote an employee newsletter for Hasbro Toys, inventor of Mr. Potato Head, and I am the proud owner of two commemorative coasters, one devoted to Mr. PH and one to GI Joe. There was a rumor that Mr. PH was modeled after one of the brothers who founded the company, back when it made pencil cases. This rumor was hotly denied by all in authority, and yet it persisted. Much like Mr. Tortilla Head.

· As my frumious friend Bander noted in comments to the post below, the Kirkus review of SPWW is up online now. It's here .

Snow! Lights!

We're getting a bit of snow today. I am ecstatic, although skeptical that it will stay around for long. We may have eight inches or maybe even a foot by the time this ends. I clattered down cellar and dragged up my skis and poles, and have them chilling on the porch. (For non-skiing readers, warm skis turn the cold snow into an icy mound under your foot. It's a lot like those ancient Chinese platform shoes. And just about as easy to maneuver in. ) I plan to ski around the yard tonight (when I should be reading about ancient Celtic homelife, but who's watching?) to get my legs under me, and hope to head off into the woods tomorrow.


Here's what the house looked like after the first round of shoveling. (Probably more to come tomorrow morning, at which point maybe I'll be a little less enthusiastic.)

You will note that I got the lights up on the maple tree without the drama of procrastination and near death I went through last year.

And here are my skis. Thoroughly chilled. Waiting. *Looks furtively around for ancient Celts.* Guess I'll head out now.

P.S. I suppose I should mention that Publishers Weekly gave SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS a starred review. (Not sure the link will work, so I'll just say the reviewer called SPWW "wistful, humorous, and clever.") And we just heard that Kirkus Reviews did, too, although I don't think the review will be up on the web until the 15th. Yay team!

December Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

If you're reading this, you spend time on the Internet. Like me, you might even be an addict. Ever wonder about consequences, other than carpal tunnel syndrome and eye strain? Read on...

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The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains
By Nicholas Carr
W.W. Norton & Co, 2010

In a waiting room last week, I happened on a National Geographic story about how much market gardeners in Iceland are enjoying global warming. I didn’t get to finish the story, so I don’t know whether they saw any downside to their warmer climate. But what I did read sounded familiar—I’ve heard others in the chilly zones tout the advantages of climate change, ignoring the droughts and floods and weird weather systems elsewhere.

Is Internet use the new global warming? Could be, if this book by Nicholas Carr is any indication.
Carr’s thesis is that extensive browsing, tweeting, and link-clicking is changing our brains both functionally and physically, reawakening our earliest talents as hunter-gatherers but killing off the gains we’ve made as deep thinkers. He quotes some analysts—the “yay, it’s getting warmer” crowd—who think this is just another step in our evolution. That point of view gains support from the tale of Socrates, who decried the advent of writing as a blow against our ability to remember without taking notes. It’s hard to argue that writing and reading have been anything but good for us, so maybe this is another case where we should just relax and see where evolution takes us.

Carr doesn’t think so. “We shouldn’t allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to the possibility that we’ve numbed an essential part of our self,” he writes.

Whichever side you’re on, this book is fascinating. Starting with the 1964 publication of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, Carr traces the past half century’s astonishing explosion of electronic communication, dwelling particularly on the advent of Google. We’ve heard much of this before, of course, but not always coupled with current research on the ways our brain adapts to new tasks.

If we repeat a task often enough, apparently, our brains not only adjust the behavior of our existing synapses but actually build new architecture, abandoning the old digs for the new.

London cab drivers studied in the late 1990s had larger than normal posterior hippocampuses (hippocampi?). That part of the brain “plays a key role in storing and manipulating spatial representations of a person’s surroundings,” Carr tells us—in other words, knowing the fastest route from Bloomsbury to the City enhances part of your brain. The cabbies’ anterior hippocampuses had shrunk to accommodate the neighboring expansion, reducing their abilities in other memorization tasks.

The biggest difference between reading a book and reading on line is probably the hyperlinks. The act of deciding whether to click that link, and then the process of following it, reading what it offers, and making our way back to our original document, changes the act of reading into something else. We are problem-solving, using hand-to-eye coordination, sharpening our reflexes, processing visual cues, increasing the capacity of our short-term memory. But we’re not “deep reading,” a process that makes us calmly deliberative and helps to build our long-term memory.

The social implications, Carr says, could be massive. For example, becoming less deliberative may make us more likely to go with the status quo rather than engaging in original lines of thought. Shallower, shorter-term thoughts may even hamper our higher emotions, such as empathy and compassion.

Engagingly, Carr does not set himself up as our model. He starts out by describing his own evolution into a truly impressive Internet user, on here constantly for research, blogging, even drivers’ license renewal. Worried about his inability to concentrate, he moved to Colorado and cut most of his Net use in order to write this book. When the book was almost done, he started reconnecting again and even discovered new stuff he could do on line. “I have to confess: It’s cool. I’m not sure I could live without it.”

Reluctantly, I have to agree. The past couple of evenings I read a book instead of watching a movie or TV show on line. As I write this, the modem’s turned off. But I found that I missed the conviviality of spending my evening with my partner rather than alone in a book. And of course I’m about to turn the modem on to post this review.

Plus, I’d like to finish that story in National Geographic. The issue’s probably at the library, but it’s December and it’s chilly out. What do you bet it’s on line somewhere?

Let's try this again

I posted this yesterday, but apparently it wasn't an authorized version and YouTube took it down. The actual creators seem to have posted this one, so here's hoping. Enjoy!

The blogger plays catch-up

Hello. Remember me? I am Ellen the Freelance Ne’er-do-well, but other than monthly book reviews a more accurate description lately would be Ne’er-blog-well. Herewith, the harrowing yet somehow tedious history of the past four months or so.

I'll do it backwards. Not, however, in high heels. (If you're under, oh, say, 45--and therefore perfectly capable of reading tiny type--this is a reference to the dancer Ginger Rogers, who "did everything Fred Astaire did except backwards and in high heels.")

First, SMALL PERSONS WITH WINGS has a new cover. I say “new” because this is the third one I’ve seen, and I understand there was yet another that I never saw. This is, fortunately, the best of the bunch. See?

Gorgeous, right? Plus, I’m told there will be glitter. I’ve never been a glitter sort of person—more denim and fleece. But clearly fleece fairies weren’t going to cut it.

The book comes out January 20, so it’s a fair bet that it’s gone to press now. If I bolt upright at midnight and realize that something makes absolutely no sense, I’ll just have to live with it.

Working backward through the ages, we reach the cider-pressing at the John household. We all brought apples—I stole some from our summertime neighbors’ tree—which got dumped into a grinder and then squished so the juice ran into a bucket and the apples were a juiceless pulp. If you’ve never tasted minutes-old cider, I’d suggest you try putting yourself into that position next fall.

What you see below is Rob and Nathan John running around and around to wind down the squisher.*

Let’s see. Still earlier, there’s Labor Day Weekend's Blue Hill Fair, which we attended en mass with friends. What I always like best is the juxtaposition of large animals, kids (the one in the middle is trimming her goat's toenails*), tractors, and honky-tonk. Oh, and french fries.

In the “no fool like an old fool” division, Rob and our friend Michael spent all their free time last spring building radio-controlled model sailboats. They sailed the boats, fending off interested canines, when Michael and his wife Linda visited in August.

And, for truly heart-rending nostalgia in deepest, darkest November, here's Rob and our friend Lisa watching the Eggemoggin Reach Regatta the first Saturday in August—all wooden boats, many of them vintage. Every year we kayak out to an island to eat lunch and watch the boats go by. This year the wind was so good we actually watched the boats come back, too, which is what’s going on here.

And now it’s 4 p.m., cold and dark as a witch’s armpit. But I’m going to see the new Harry Potter film tomorrow night (speaking of witches), and Thursday we hobnob and eat and drink. So who’s complaining?

*Technical term.

November Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

We got our first killing frost last night at Castle Ne'er-do-well, so it's definitely time to hunker down. If you're already sick of the blip-bleet-blip of video games, try this one on your reluctant reader. Or grab it yourself for a laugh.

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Diary of a Wimpy Kid
By Jeff Kinney
Amulet Books, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-8109-9313-6

The Wimpy Kid series spawned a movie last spring that’s out on DVD now, but that’s not why I chose it for this month’s review book. I chose it because of Arthur (not his real name).

A student at our local elementary school, Arthur’s an imaginative, potentially talented kid who doesn’t like to read—not the first I’ve run into, I’m sorry to say. In Arthur’s case, the chief competition is video games, surprise, surprise. He and I worked together on a short story last year, and I tried like hell to get him to read a book that was kind of the same genre as the story he was writing. He politely took the book home and just as politely ignored it. He told me he’d never read a book outside of school. Not once.

This year, he said he’d like to write something funny. So we went to the library and found DIARY OF A WIMPY KID, the first book of what will be a five-book series as of November 9. I got my hands on a copy of my own, and we agreed we’d read a chapter a week and discuss it briefly when we met.

Last week, he announced that he’d finished the book ahead of schedule and wanted to start the second. He’d gotten bored on a Saturday and picked it up, he said, and all of a sudden he’d finished it. He suggested he might finish the second one by the time he saw me today. He’s not a fan of the movie.

Author Jeff Kinney was at the Boston Book Festival a couple of weekends ago, which I attended. I went to another panel instead of his, but now I wish I’d sought him out and kissed his feet. It’s not for nothing that this book has a “Maine Student Book Award Winner” sticker on the front—that award is voted by Maine school kids, and this is obviously a kid-friendly book.

I mean, just look at it. The typeface is fun but readable, and the cartoons are hysterical. I often managed to read through a scene without inhaling my hot beverage, only to choke half to death when I saw the drawing that accompanied the action.

This first book is the sad tale of narrator Greg Heffley’s first year in middle school, which he describes as “the dumbest idea ever invented. You got kids like me who haven’t hit their growth spurt yet mixed in with these gorillas who need to shave twice a day.”

In middle school, someone like Greg is acted upon more than acting. Parents, older brother, teachers, bigger or more popular kids—they’re the ones with the power. We share Greg’s abortive attempts to control his own destiny, whether by running for class treasurer (in a smear campaign involving head lice) or by joining the safety patrol in order to get hot chocolate and miss some pre-algebra.

The great thing about his odyssey is that Kinney allows us to see where Greg’s going wrong without one single word of preachiness.

At one point, Greg allows his dopey best friend Rowley to take the fall when one Mrs. Irvine reports a Safety Patrol member terrorizing the kindergarteners in his charge. He admits to Rowley that he was the culprit, having borrowed Rowley’s coat.

“Then I told him there were lessons we could both learn from this. I told him I learned to be more careful about what I do in front of Mrs. Irvine’s house, and that he learned a valuable lesson, too, which is this: Be careful about who you lend your coat to.”

To Greg’s indignation, Rowley turns him in. He loses Rowley’s friendship for a while, eventually gaining it back. We know he’s being punished for being evil, but Greg never admits to the connection. He’s a modern-day Tom Sawyer.

My friend Arthur thinks he’s awesome.

October Book Review Club

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@Barrie Summy

We had a spectacular summer here in New England, but now reality is closing in. The leaves are changing, the days are shorter, and there's a small evening fire in the wood stove. It's a funny time of year--we're sad that summer's over, a little worried about the darkness and the cold, but also looking forward to hunkering down by the fire and taking a break from the good times. No wonder Banned Book Week is in October--anybody who tries to take a book away from me right now gets whopped with an over-sized zucchini.

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The Catcher in the Rye
By JD Salinger
Little, Brown & Co, 1951

Last week was Banned Books Week, in which we pay particular attention to what seems to be a particularly American pastime: Trying to prevent other people’s children from reading books you don’t want your own kids to read. We spend a lot of time in this country arguing about “government interference in our lives.” Fairly often, it seems that those who argue against Big Government are the very same ones trying to control other people’s reading. Go figure.

Anyway, in honor of the season, last week I re-read JD Salinger’s THE CATCHER IN THE RYE in the battered 1961 Signet paperback I last opened in high school. (Book hoarder? Me?) CATCHER is number two on the American Library Association’s list of frequently banned classics, right after THE GREAT GATSBY. I’m baffled why GATSBY is so frequently targeted, but I certainly understand why CATCHER strikes terror into the ultra-conservative breast. Along with John Updike and John Cheever and a few others, Salinger helped to terrify me away from the buttoned-down, suburban, 2.5-kids lifestyle my parents would have preferred for me. They did the same for most of a generation.

To understand why, you have to understand the uneasy world we Baby Boomers shared with protagonist Holden Caulfield—no more terrifying than this one, but maybe a bit weirder because everybody was so intent on creating an illusion of regularity and safety. Our parents had kept Hitler and Emperor Hirohito from our shores, but now The Bomb defied armies and oceans. Our country was in what seemed like an endless war to contain the Communist Menace; meanwhile, unpleasant men with five-o’clock shadow tried to root the Reds out of our own society. It was important to keep reality at bay: Body odor of any kind was our enemy, euphemism was king, bellies were girdled, and heaven forbid that women’s breasts should sag or wobble or look anything like actual breasts.

Then along came Holden, a kindly, befuddled teenager trying desperately not to become a “phony” like the adults and most of the other adolescents in his world. He swears, drinks, and thinks a lot about sex—and of course real kids never did any of that. About to be kicked out of his umpty-umpth prep school, he sets out for a picaresque couple of days in New York City, its wet, cold streets teeming with pimps and whores and barflies and would-be pederasts.

The story’s told first person, from the mental hospital where Holden ends up. You don’t know what will happen to him—maybe he’ll avoid phonyhood, but maybe he won’t. The reason we care so much is Holden’s voice, because he’s us. Nowadays, we’re used to a narrator talking the way we do, with all the halts and repetitions and verbal ticks of real life. Back in the Sixties, when I first met Holden, his voice was a revelation. It was like reading somebody’s actual diary, except the writer was brilliant at story-telling.

I knew Holden was me and I was Holden. I suspect that at least three-quarters of the audience at Woodstock had exactly the same experience.

I’m not saying there would have been no hippies or back-to-the-landers or lifelong Democrats without Holden—there were plenty of other factors at work. All I’m saying is that I’m grateful Holden was there when I needed him, grateful my parents bought that book (and Updike and Cheever) even though it contributed to their daughter’s headlong flight from their lifestyle—and even though the climate of the times was such that my town’s school board banned THE SCARLET LETTER. (As Holden would say: Really. They really did.)

I’m grateful no one prevented my parents from letting me read whatever I wanted. Happy belated Banned Book Week, Holden.