The butler did it

My father sent me the sad but not surprising news that the Murder Ink bookstore on upper Broadway is closing today, New Year's Eve. I still have, tucked away somewhere, my black gun-shaped Murder Ink bookmark/business card from the original store on West 87th Street.

I also remember the Bar-B-Queen and the candy and nut shop, both of which were a few blocks away from where I grew up. I passed by both daily on my home from high school, and my late grandmother must have bought more than her weight in walnuts from the nut shop.

For those of you lucky to be graced with a nearby independent bookseller, and it's not something to be taken for granted, please give it your support.

(I think at least one of the articles linked above is of the pesky Times Select variety; if you want the article, email me offlist at farmschool at telus dot net and I'll send it along.)

Updated to add that I was sorry to hear today, this time from my mother, that Coliseum Books is next on the chopping block. I have fond memories of my father stacking my arms with the books on my summer reading list, and just sitting in the aisles looking through books to decide which to purchase. As the website notes,

Dear Friends,

Since opening our store on 57th Street in July of 1974, it has been our pleasure to bring you the best selection of new and backlist books. After closing that store in January 2002, when the lease expired, we searched long and hard for a suitable new location and thought we had found one here on 42nd Street. Business started more slowly than we had hoped but continued to build until this year, when increased competition from discount stores and book chain stores and the internet started to take its toll. We are now trying to hold on as best we can, and any support you can give will be much appreciated.

Just in time for the holidays we are starting to sell off our entire inventory. You can get great bargains as you choose your holiday gifts and help us at the same time. Shop early before the good titles are gone.

Thank you all for your loyal support..

George S. Leibson
Founding Partner

The year-end list of "100 Cool Teachers in Children's Literature"

Mary Lee and Franki at A Year of Reading have posted their complete list of
the top 100 wonderful teachers in children's books. At this time of year, I tend to get listed out, but this is a fun one, and I'm happy to see so many of my favorites here, from Little Women's Jo March, Caddie Woodlawn's Miss Parker, Roald Dahl's Matilda's Miss Honey, and Great Aunt Arizona, to Nicholas Nickelby, Stuart Little, Anne Shirley, Miss Stacey, and Laura Ingalls.

A Christmas treasure in disguise

Karen at lightingthefires has a post with an absolutely lovely Christmas poem, A Merry Literary Christmas by Alice Low, which, since we're smack dab in the midst of thank you card season, is more than timely. And might be rather nice printed on a handmade card with all the books I give my nieces and nephews...

My favorite lines,

But every year when Christmas went
I'd read the book my aunt had sent,
And looking back, I realize
Each gift was treasure in disguise.
So now it's time to write her here
A thank-you note that is sincere.

So -- thanks for Alice and Sara Crewe,
For Christopher Robin and Piglet and Pooh,
For Little Nell and William Tell
And Peter and Wendy and Tinker Bell.

Thanks for Tom and Jim and Huck,
For Robinson Crusoe and Dab-Dab the duck,
For Meg and Jo and Johnny Crow
And Papa Geppeto's Pinocchio

For Mary Poppins and Rat and Toad
King Arthur and Dorothy's Yellow Brick Road,
For Kipling's Kim and tales from Grimm,
And Ferdinand, Babar and Tiny Tim.

Thank you, Karen for the gems you find, and post! My favorite gifts, besides the handmade ones from my children, remain books, especially the ones my parents send. Poor Tom, unfortunately, without a nearby bookstore or being able to use the computer just can't keep up with my ever-changing wish list!

Oh! Was just catching up on my blog reading and see that Mary Lee and Franki at A Year of Reading also posted the poem, earlier in the month on the other side of Christmas. I think I rather like the idea of it as bookends, to remind one about giving and receiving...

Made you look

Stocking up on reading material for the weekend at the library, I was rather startled to find the January 1st edition of Maclean's Magazine (at left) looking out from the shelves at me with the cover headline "Why do we dress our daughters like skanks?" over a girl about Laura's age dressed like a hooker. In case you can't read the sparkly writing, it says Made You Look.

I was startled not because of the question or the girl's attire but because Tom and I had just been discussing the very subject, after yet another extended family holiday gathering with a gaggle of underdressed young relations. The conversation regularly pops up here during holiday get-togethers, children's clothing shopping expeditions, and the obligatory cousins' dance recital, where students and teachers writhe around in suggestive clothes to suggestive music performing suggestive choreography; all that's missing, Tom has said more than once, is a pole. This time the conversation took place with the school photo variation, as in, why on earth were some of the girls allowed to pose for their school photos, invariably included in the Christmas cards, wearing tops that drew such startling attention to cleavage? Or what is supposed to be cleavage.

The Maclean's cover story was inspired, I learned, by the publication this fall of Southern humorist and syndicated columnist's Celia Rivenbark's book, Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank, and indeed the same issue of Maclean's features an interview with Ms. Rivenbark along with the cover story, "Why are we dressing our daughters like this?". But on this particular subject, and in this interview, Ms. Rivenbark leaves the humor behind: "I don't think it's harmless to wear a glittery shirt hanging off the shoulder when you're seven years old. I think that's just ridiculous, and borders on obscene. I'm a humour columnist by trade and this is probably the most strident thing I've ever written. I don't normally get so agitated over things, but this one, I'm just shocked about it." The newspaper column was inspired by a trip to the mall:

Well, I went shopping with my daughter, and I saw all these tween skank clothes, and one thing led to another. I just went off on the notion that these clothes are inappropriate, these hoochie-mama Las Vegas showgirl clothes marketed to kids who are as young as seven. There were all these sequined, sparkling midriff tops, lots of fishnet, shirts saying things like Jailbait, Made Ya Look or Juicy on the bottoms of the pants. Pretty disgusting. ...

Obviously the stuff sells because the stores are full of it. Parents buy it. They feel a lot of pressure -- particularly parents who work all the time -- to appease the kids by giving them what they want, so I think that's why so many parents just finally give in. They feel like this is a battle they don't want to fight. ...

I think sometimes, as parents, we get so conditioned to what we see in the stores it's almost like you get numb to it, and so this was for some parents, they said, a bit of a wake-up call, you know? If you're used to seeing ripped jeans and some questionable phrases on kid clothes, you roll with it. Especially when you see it in really nice department stores. You think, this is what they're selling and you almost get used to it and conditioned to accept it. I'm not a prude, by any means, but I just don't think there's any way you could possibly say that these kinds of clothes are suitable for anybody under, I'd say, 24. ...

Amen. Other things not meeting Ms. Rivenbark's parental approval for her nine-year-old daughter include the latest sex-sound stylings of Justin Timberlake and the loose and promiscuous not to mention Canadian Nelly Furtado. And once again I'm reminded that one of the things I appreciate so much about home education is that the conditioning about society's values and expectations just isn't a factor for our family, for the children or the adults.

More of Ms. Rivenbark's thoughts from the interview on modern, ahem, parenting:

... generally speaking, for whatever reason, kids tend to run over their parents a lot more than they used to. The whole child-centered thing is really big now. I see it over and over again just among the friends I have: the child makes the decisions on, for example, what kind of entertainment they watch, what they do on Friday night. Sometimes they need to realize that. But I think that when the kids are running the show it's not really a good thing. These are little kids, and if you give them that much power they're not ready for it. ...

We've lost the notion, as parents, that it's really okay to be the grown-up and say no. My daughter hears no all the time -- occasionally she hears yes, but a lot of no. There was a dress she wanted a couple of months ago, and she had a real meltdown wanting it, and I thought the dress was inappropriate, and we all survived it. Parents almost think that it's in their contract that they have to negotiate. Well, no, they really don't. Some things, maybe, but not everything. If your kid is trying to go out of the house looking like a mattress-back, then you just send the kid right back in there and try again.

But we're not talking about a "whole child-centered thing". The correct term is "wholesale absence of parental responsibility". Yes, it's easier to give in and say yes most of the time, and not to hang around the house long enough to monitor your child's attire and even, heaven forfend, send him or her back to changed into something appropriate when you could be picking up your daily coffee at Starbucks or slouching about the water cooler exchanging the latest adult conversation with your colleagues. But don't sugarcoat terms for "slacker parents" -- and I understand that Ms. Rivenbark has referred to herself as such at times -- who want to take the easy way out, to the detriment of their children and their futures.

Asked by the interviewer, "Do you think the kids are conscious of the meanings of what they're wearing? Does the fashion come with attitudes and behaviours?", Ms. Rivenbark replies,

That's a real good question. I haven't seen a correlation there. I think they just think it all looks cute. I don't see that it particularly changes their personalities. They think, "This is hip, I saw it on TV, this is kind of cool." It doesn't turn them into monsters. I'm more concerned about the perv who sees them at the mall. A little girl, if her parent is idiot enough to buy something that says Jailbait on it, goes to the mall -- it's the perv who sees that that bothers me.

I do see a correlation, and it's been there at least since I was in fifth grade about 30 years ago. Kids are indeed conscious of the meanings of what they're wearing, and they're conscious -- and more cavalier -- at ever younger ages. And while the threat from child molesters is not to be discounted, what of the threat of the warped attitudes and paucity of the imagination with which so many boys and girls are growing up? What sort of lives will they have, with friends (or, I suppose, "hook ups"), colleagues, spouses, and their own children? Do I really want my daughter, her cousins, and their friends to think that their bodies for a few drinks and some airtime on Girls Gone Wild is a fair trade? Sex even far from its best isn't a toy, a tool, or a joke, but the greatest expression of love between two people.

The Maclean's interview and article both mention Bob Herbert's October New York Times column (reprinted here since the original is behind the Times Select firewall), "Why Aren't We Shocked?", written after the Amish school shooting and inspired in part by an Abercrombie & Fitch t-shirt reading Who needs a brain when I have these?:

The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock. Guys at sporting events and other public venues have shown no qualms about raising an insistent chant to nearby women to show their breasts. An ad for a major long-distance telephone carrier shows three apparently naked women holding a billing statement from a competitor. The text asks, “When was the last time you got screwed?” ...

We have a problem. Staggering amounts of violence are unleashed on women every day, and there is no escaping the fact that in the most sensational stories, large segments of the population are titillated by that violence. We’ve been watching the sexualized image of the murdered 6-year-old JonBenet Ramsey for 10 years. JonBenet is dead. Her mother is dead. And we’re still watching the video of this poor child prancing in lipstick and high heels.

What have we learned since then? That there’s big money to be made from thongs, spandex tops and sexy makeovers for little girls. In a misogynistic culture, it’s never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.

What continues to surprise me is how many mothers around here, and remember, I'm far away from liberal east coast urban types, so your experience may be wide of my mark, are the ones who choose to pimp put their daughters in (often matching) stripper chic not because it's the path of least resistance but because it's the path to popularity, to approval, and -- hey, a bonus -- makes the mothers themselves look or at least seem hip and trendy and young. Well, younger at least. When Laura was in kindergarten and first grade at the local public school, one of her classmates was often dressed by her mother (who in the past few years decided to return to the classroom and now teaches first grade) in fashion-conscious "mini me" style -- feather boa trim on sweaters and matching short skirts and dressy suede boots. Not good for the playground at recess or those messy arts and crafts projects, but certainly eye-catching. And this classmate was in good company. As the Maclean's article notes,

We tell girls that, in wearing these things, they are somehow expressing themselves in an essential way. "If [T-shirts] expressed who a girl is," write [Lyn Mikel] Brown and Sharon Lamb [authors of Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes], "you'd think she'd be wearing the T she got at the summer camp she went to, the music festival she attended or the Humane Society where she volunteers to walk the dogs. But instead they express 'attitude' rather than interests, skills, concerns, and hobbies." Worse still, in their very construction, these clothes prescribe behaviours that are hard to describe as empowering. A micro-mini, for instance, is a great disincentive to playing on the monkey bars. A halter top and tight, low-rise jeans make it rather more challenging to run and jump. "Every message to a preteen girl," write Brown and Lamb, "says that it's preferable to pose on the beach rather than surf, to shop rather than play, to decorate rather than invent."

Now there's a challenge for the daughters of North America and their parents for the new year: step away from the fishnets and those size 2 stilleto heels and run, jump, play, and invent. Who needs a brain, indeed.

Poetry Friday: The New Year's edition

I rarely make resolutions, of the New Year's -- or any other -- variety, mostly because they seem to be a sucker's bet.

Though if one did want advice for a New Year, it's hard to top Kipling; among other things I rarely do is fret about the idea of mankind in general or the last line below in particular. The poem is grand counsel for girls as well as boys, women as well as men.

For a more traditional approach to New Year's poetry, try the Academy of American Poets or The Poets' Corner. And of course, for poetry throughout the (new) year, it's hard to beat Poetry Fridays!


IF.....
by Rudyard Kipling

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream -- and not make dreams your master;
If you can think -- and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings -- nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!

***

Updated to add that Liz B. at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy is looking after the day's round-up. Drop her a note in the comments section of her post if you have a poem for the day. Thanks, Liz, and a happy and healthy New Year to you, the chair, the fireplace, and the tea cozy! Indeed, warm wishes for a very happy New Year to all!

Christmas week reading: "lovely interesting discussions"

My Christmas week reading so far:

Through the Children's Gate: A Home in New York by Adam Gopnik (thanks, Mom and Pop); my Upper West Side past and rural Canadian prairie present run into each other:

In my experience, at least, it is liberal parents who tend to be the most socially conservative -- the most queasy at the endless ribbon of violence and squalor that passes for American entertainment, more concerned to protect their children from it. One migh have the impression that it is the Upper West Side atheist and the Lancaster County Amish who dispute the prize for who can be most obsessive about having the children around the table at six p.m. for a homemade dinner from farm-raised food. Morals and manners proceed in twisting spirals of contradiction more often than in neat sandwiches of sameness, and the attitudes of the prohibitive and the secular end up resembling each other. We try to find a way to say grace every night., too, although in our own way. We hold hands, and clink glasses.

The Making of Pride and Prejudice, found in the Deluxe Gold-Embossed Cloth Slipcase (wowee!) of the Pride & Prejudice 10th Anniversary Limited Collector's Edition (a gift to myself, double wowee!); from Chapter 5, Music, an interview with composer Carl Davis:

Q: What were you trying to say with the opening music?
A: There were two main things I wanted to communicate. The first was to pick up the essence of the book -- its wit and vitality, its modern feel, something of the character of Elizabeth and her family. I worked through something very lively and bright for this and then, without my being conscious of it, a slight hunting refrain crept in -- which, of course, echoes one of the main drives of the book, the hunt for husbands! And this was linked with my second theme, which was marriage and affairs of the heart. This is what the story is about. ...

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best Short Works of Richard P. Feynman (one of my presents to Tom, which I couldn't resist picking up before he did); from the title piece, the transcript of a 1981 BBC interview for the program Horizon:

Looking at a bird [my father] says, "Do you know what that bird is? It's a brown throated thrush; but in Portugese it's a . . . in Italian a . . . ," he says "in Chinese it's a . . . , in Japanese a . . . ," etcetera. "Now," he says, "you know in all the languages you want to know what the name if that bird is and when you've finished with all that," he says, "you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now," he says, "let's look at the bird."

He had taught me to notice things and one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around. It had a ball in it -- I remember this -- it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved, so I went to my father and I said, "Say, Pop, I noticed something: When I pull the wagon the ball rolls to the back of the wagon, and when I'm pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon," and I says, "why is that?" And he said, "That nobody nows," he said. "The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard." And he says, "This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it's true." Now that's a deep understanding -- he doesn't give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early. ... So that's the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions, no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.

Cool runnings

Though we don't have any sledding hills near the house, I'm told by those in the know that our snow-filled but otherwise empty silage pit at the corrals makes a dandy sledding hill and bobsled run. It also for some reason is amazingly effective at making the kids whiz through chores faster than usual. Santa has received much praise for his timely gift this snowy Christmas.

And the experiment for the day, the kids' idea, is seeing if they can sled the mile and a half home. Davy sounded rather doubtful, but the other two persuaded him to change his mind by offering to pull him home on the sled if he can't make it. And just in case they find the chest-deep stuff that almost defeated Tom the other week and none of them can make it, I promised to go looking for them in the next hour or so if they don't make it back before then.

Just spotted from the window: my three Olympians high-stepping through the high snow. Time to make hot chocolate, and I think they deserve some candy cane swizzle sticks.

Worth remembering

“The harder you work, the luckier you are.”

Gerald Rudolph Ford, 1913-2006

Happy Christmas wishes from Farm School and Thomas Nast

Christmas Eve: In appreciation of Dudley

(as well as Clarence) at Christmas, from Verlyn Klinkenborg, in today's Times,

We watched “The Bishop’s Wife” at our house the other night. Some years at Christmas we hang a wreath from the kitchen door, and some years we decorate a tree. But we always find an evening to watch “The Bishop’s Wife.” The camera hovers in the night over a lamp-lit city and descends onto its snow-fallen streets, which are thick with Christmas. Then comes Cary Grant, playing an angel named Dudley, the rather oblique answer to David Niven’s — the bishop’s — prayers. I suppose it is only natural for an angel in 1947, the year “The Bishop’s Wife” was released, to be supremely well tailored and to say, as a token of his celestial nature, that he never “uses” a hat. ...

Most Christmas movies are tales of redemptive hysteria — witness the stuttering ecstasy of Alastair Sim in “A Christmas Carol” or Jimmy Stewart’s desperate happiness in the last scenes of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I always wonder how the world looked to them a few weeks later, once the giddiness wore off. But “The Bishop’s Wife” is not about redemption. It is about understanding your choices or, perhaps, knowing the true implications of your desires. It alludes to the past but does not depend on recovering it. It looks around this grim world and sees that what it needs is not a cathedral but charity.

This is a modest movie, but it has its exaltations. One is a choir practice at an inner city church directed, angelically, by Dudley, a rehearsal that is as much a symphony in late-1940s plaids, worn by the choirboys, as it is a heralding of salvation. And I am always struck, every year, by the quiet way this movie addresses the atheism of an old history professor, played by the great character actor Monty Woolley. In the end, of course, he is led to church, but he enters quizzically, standing on the steps of St. Timothy’s in the falling snow and looking round as if to wonder what impulse could have brought him there.

You can never have enough angels at Christmas. Besides, as I learned from my mother many, many years ago, what could be better at Christmas than Cary Grant and David Niven, gift wrapped?

Jo on modern kids, classic poetry

Hop over to Jo at Tricotomania for a post on Accessible Poetry, part of a conversation Jo and I have been having about modern children and classical poetry, in part because her daughter's drama class just had an end of term performance that had included the recitation of the whole of The Lady of Shallot (Jo's link to "a fabulous illustrated edition" from Canadian children's publisher Kids Can Press).

This is a subject I've been considering, and passionate about, for years, long before we began homeschooling or a five-year-old Davy brought last year's Thanksgiving dinner discussion to a screeching halt with an account of Pyramus, Frisbee, and Puck.

I'd like to return to this post when I have some more time, probably after the holidays. And it would be wonderful if one of these days, also in the New Year when she has some free time just lying around waiting to be used, Lissa could share her thoughts on the subject, too. Right now I just wanted to link up to Jo's thoughtful post.

Christmas bestsellers in Britain

According to The Guardian, surprise Christmas hits at the bookstore this year include the Australian Where's Wally-inspired Where's Bin Laden? cartoon book, along with "Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion, Why Don't Penguins' Feet Freeze[: And 114 Other Questions, More Questions and Answers from the Popular 'last Word' Column], The Dangerous Book for Boys* and Stephen Fry's QI: The Book of General Ignorance**."


*Alternately, as mentioned before here, you might want to choose The American Boy's Handy Book by Daniel Carter Beard.

**Alternately, because Stephen Fry supplied only the foreward, you might want to substitute a 100 percent-Stephen Fry work, such as this year's The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within (mentioned before here and here). And while very, very funny in places, admittedly it doesn't have that pub quiz tone.

Off to make a Bûche de Noël, or at least the sponge cake jelly roll part of it...

Poetry Friday: Christmas Magic

When Laura was a wee babe, I discovered at our Goodwill shop the charming Random House Pictureback holiday anthology, Diane Goode's Christmas Magic: Poems and Carols. It was published in 1992 and is probably out of print but worth tracking down, especially because Diane Goode is the Diane Goode who did such a marvelous job of illustrating When I Was Young in the Mountains by Cynthia Rylant, and other delicacies. Ms. Goode also has excellent taste in children's Christmas poetry. Both of these poems can be found in Magic:

In the Week When Christmas Comes
by Eleanor Farjeon

This is the week when Christmas comes.

Let every pudding burst with plums,
And every tree bear dolls and drums,
In the week when Christmas comes.

Let every hall have boughs of green,
With berries glowing in between,
In the week when Christmas comes.

Let every doorstep have a song
Sounding the dark street along,
In the week when Christmas comes.

Let every steeple ring a bell
With a joyful tale to tell,
In the week when Christmas comes.

Let every night put forth a star
To show us where the heavens are,
In the week when Christmas comes.

Let every stable have a lamb,
Sleeping warm beside its dam,
In the week when Christmas comes.

This is the week when Christmas comes.


Under the Mistletoe
by Countee Cullen

I did not know she'd take it so,
Or else I'd never dared:
Although the bliss was worth the blow,
I did not know she'd take it so.
She stood beneath the mistletoe
So long I thought she cared;
I did not know she'd take it so,
Or else I'd never dared.

Merry Christmas to all from Farm School!

***

Liz B. at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy has some holiday lyrics and the Christmas weekend round-up. Thanks, Liz, and have yourself a Merry Little Christmas, too!

Solstice

Our resident snowy owl flew overhead this morning not once but twice as we did chores, a sign, the kid and I thought, of the day's importance. We celebrated by helping pack food hampers and toy bags at the local Santa's Anonymous effort, and now the kids are stringing up some extra outdoor lights they found in one of our outbuildings. If it doesn't move, it has lights on it now.

Winter weather has been here for a couple of months already regardless of what the calendar says, but today is special because the daylight hours begin to lengthen, an event worthy of great merrymaking and celebration for those of us northerly types who spend a fair amount of time outdoors. Today, for example, the sun rose just before 9 am and set just after 4 pm.

I like this time of the season, when winter isn't a new flirtation, thrilling and exciting, but an old steady, cozy and comfortable. I'm used to putting on the extra layers, to driving on the ice and snow, and that first day of the first as unpleasant as it is unexpected chill is just a a memory. And winters with snow, unlike last winter when the first snow came just before spring, are an extra delight; I was reminded today by a radio commentator that this time last Christmas the temperature was around 15C/60F, thoroughly unChristmassy.

I posted this last year for the shortest day, and I'm posting it again, because the lyrics remains my favorite bit of solstice song and poetry:

Ring Out, Solstice Bells
by Jethro Tull

Now is the solstice of the year,
winter is the glad song that you hear.
Seven maids move in seven time.
Have the lads up ready in a line.

Ring out these bells.
Ring out, ring solstice bells.
Ring solstice bells.

Join together beneath the mistletoe.
by the holy oak whereon it grows.
Seven druids dance in seven time.
Sing the song the bells call, loudly chiming.

Ring out these bells.
Ring out, ring solstice bells.
Ring solstice bells.

Praise be to the distant sister sun,
joyful as the silver planets run.
Seven maids move in seven time.
Sing the song the bells call, loudly chiming.
Ring out those bells.
Ring out, ring solstice bells.
Ring solstice bells.
Ring on, ring out.
Ring on, ring out.

Added later: Somehow forgot to mention that another one of our traditions on the first winter night is to read Happy Winter, written and illustrated by Karen Gundersheimer, which really, really should not be out of print (and would you believe our library discarded its copy several years ago, though their loss is our gain). A sweet winter story accompanied by charming illustrations and a crackerjack chocolate cake recipe (favored by Laurie Colwin, blessedly still in print, no less). And it closes with Mama's winter lullaby:

Hush and quiet, close your eyes,
The moon's a night-light for the sky,
Where sprinkled stars are twingling high
And far below, the deep drifts lie
'Til Northwind spins and flurries fly.
A snowy blanket's tucked in tight
And so are you, and now good night.
A happy winter day is done.
Now close your eyes and dreams will come.

What to get your favorite kidlit character for the holidays

Gregory K. at Gotta Book has a wonderful holiday list brewing, and better than all those "best books of the year" lists one gets as the year winds down: a list of gifts you'd get your favorite kidlit characters.

He starts off the list with

The Pigeon -- a ballpark dog with the works
The Baudelaire children -- a fortunate event
Charlotte -- a thesaurus
Charlie Bucket -- good dental insurance
Harold -- Crayola crayons (a 64 pack, at least)

and there are some more great ideas in the comments (my favorite so far is "The Elements of Style" for Junie B. Jones).

Greg adds, "The interesting thing on my list is how many characters I feel like EVERYONE would know, and how many would also need the name of their book(s) spelled out. OK, maybe that's not 'interesting' but keep it in mind as you leave your comments. Cheap shots are certainly allowed ('I hope the Hardy Boys get a clue,' for example)." Does one really need any more of an invitation?

A friend in need

My homeschooling friend Frankie over at Kitchen Table Learners, and her son Thomas, have the true spirit of Christmas. Frankie wrote a post the other day about a Pittsburgh, PA, home educating family with six children who last week lost everything, including Christmas presents and homeschool items, in a house fire, the result of an electrical malfunction. You can read the the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review article here. As the reporter wrote, father Ricco Brown said he is "especially concerned...because his wife home-schooled the children, and all of their books and a computer were lost in the fire". Of his children, Mr. Brown said, "They didn't just lose their house, they lost their school...I don't know what I'm going to tell them. Their whole world just got ripped away from them, right before Christmas. I just don't have words for this."

Frankie has words, including contact information where you can send donations (in care of the neighboring United Church, which also sustained damage). Thank you, Frankie, for your work in tracking down the information, spreading the news, and your big heart.

Christmas on Huckleberry Mountain

Roger Sutton, editor in chief of The Horn Book (HB), offers his blog readers a very fair, well-reasoned review by Melinda Cordell, of the new Charlotte's Web movie, over at the HB website.

While at the website, I happened to notice on the sidebar a link to a special Holiday Posting of Lois Lenski's memories, entitled "Christmas at Huckleberry Mountain Library", published by The Horn Book in 1946, the year Miss Lenski won the Newbery for Strawberry Girl:

Huckleberry mountain library — the only rural library in Henderson County, North Carolina — is open for two hours every other Sunday afternoon to the mountain children, and was to be open on December 23. Packages of books from three of my publishers arrived on the 22nd, just in time for library day.

The library is a small log building, with a rock chimney at one end, sitting at the foot of the mountain, shaded by long-leafed pines. There had been three deep snows — more than this locality experiences in an entire winter — so the low-hung branches of the pine trees and the roof were white and glowing in the bright winter sun.

The children always come early, the young librarian, an educated mountain girl, said. The hours are from two to four, but often they are there by one-thirty. She has to open the door as soon as she gets there and keep it open, even at the risk of being very cold because the open door is a sign of welcome. If the children see the door closed, they may turn around and go home!

Through the weekdays, the building is unheated. So we went over early, to put up some greens and a little Christmas tree, and to get a fire started. Some young pine trees had been cleared out of the woods near by, and these Stephen chopped up. We had brought some dry wood, kindling and newspapers with us. The fireplace was filled with snow, and the chimney was very cold, so in spite of all our efforts, we never did get what you would call “a roaring fire” or any noticeable amount of heat in the room.

Read the rest here. A warm holiday thank you to the folks at The Horn Book for rekindling and sharing the memories.

Digging out

We're in the midst of another snow storm, and we'd be in big trouble if it were any colder; luckily, the temperatures are right below freezing. It started snowing again yesterday, and the wind started yesterday evening, so by 3 pm Laura's voice teacher reluctantly decided to cancel the recital. They'll try again next month. Overnight the snow continued and the winds picked up, so this morning we treated to even higher and more amazing drifts than before. Snow and winds still falling and blowing, respectively, with whiteout conditions. Tom and the kids set out for the corrals with the pickup truck after breakfast to do chores and as expected couldn't go all the way with the truck. They set out on foot, but the drifts are up to Tom's chest so it was quite the quarter-mile walk. Davy had the easiest time, since he's the only one light enough to be able to walk on top of the drifts.

I stayed home, futilely shoveling in front of the house and probably equally futilely making meatballs for tomorrow's 4H Christmas party and potluck dinner, which will probably be canceled (but then I'll have some tasty last-minute meals in the freezer), and listening to An Oscar Peterson Christmas.

***

Digging out after a three-day snowstorm about 1913: "Standing on the roof of the James Ward home, Milton, North Dakota, Mrs. James Ward, Nellie Ward, James Ward, Hugh Ward"; photograph by John McCarthy from The Library of Congress

Ah, welladay

Trying to distract myself from the sparkly movie poster and today's, erm, grand opening (not unfavorably reviewed in today's New York Times, by the way), I've been rereading The Letters of E.B. White. Sometime during the week, while looking up something in the book, I stumbled across the new revised edition published under the direction of granddaughter Martha White, with a new selection of letters through Mr. White's death in 1985 (the original volume left off in May 1976, with a visit from, of all people, Bette Davis's former husband, actor Gary Merrill) as well as a new introduction by John Updike.

From my unrevised edition, worth pondering on this day when Oprah Winfrey and Cedric the Entertainer give voice to The Barn's geese:

• "I think The Second Tree will do all right without club sponsorship, and that there will be pleasure and profit in it for both of us. There are other things in life besides twenty thousand dollars -- though not much." (October 1953; White's book "The Second Tree from the Corner" was a collection of his essays. The club is the Book-of-the-Month Club.)

• "My secretary sent me only one disk [the LP record of Julie Harris reading Stuart Little], failing to notice they were in sets of two. So I still have the first half of the story to listen to. NBC, you may be amused to know, is at work on a television version of the story, and I feel in my bones that it will end with Stuart's finding Margalo -- thus bringing to an abrupt close the quest for beauty in America. As Don Marquis used to say, "Ah, welladay." (October 1965)

• "It is the fixed purpose of television and motion pictures to scrap the author, sink him without a trace, on the theory that he is incompetent, has never read his own stuff, is not responsible for anything he ever wrote, and wouldn't know what to do about it even if he were. I believe this has something to do with the urge to create, and the only way a TV person or a movie person can become a creator is to sink the guy who did it to begin with. I'm not really complaining about NBC [which developed a TV production of Stuart Little in 1965], because by and large they set out to be fairly faithful to the general theme of Stuart, and they did not try to corrupt or demolish it. But there were a hundred places that, if they had wanted to take me into their confidence, I could have bettered for them. It was their choice, not mine." (March 1966)

• From a letter to his lawyer representing White in negotiations with John and Faith Hubley, whose plans to make an animated version of Charlotte's Web ultimately fell through and gave way to the Hanna-Barbera version: "In [the contract's item] 4, I don't know what 'merchandising rights' means. Does this refer to my right, subsequently, to make other deals, or does it refer to objects of merchandise -- dolls, pigs, sweat shirts? Again excuse ignorance.
  There should probably be a clause somewhere prohibiting the publication in book form of the screenplay or any other adaptation of my book. When Disney made 'Mary Poppins' he got out a book, 'The Walt Disney Mary Poppins.' I'm against anything of that sort." (May 1967)
  

• From another letter to his lawyer: "The purpose of the 'right of approval' clause is two-fold: it should protect me from a motion picture version of 'Charlotte's Web' that violates the spirit and meaning of the story, and it should protect the Hubleys from obstructive behavior of an author." (May 1967)

Perhaps the best way to bring Charlotte's Web to life is the audiobook version recorded by E.B. White himself. Laura in particular has listened to the CDs so often that at times she's picked up his accent, and does an unnervingly good impression of the geese. (The link has that garish poster, which startled me, but I'm sure it's the audio CD edition from about five years ago).

Poetry Friday II: For Andy White, on a difficult day

One of E.B. White's favorite writers was Don Marquis, author of archy and mehitabel, 1927, from which:

pity the poor spiders

i have just been reading
an advertisement of a certain
roach exterminator
the human race little knows
all the sadness it
causes in the insect world
i remember some weeks ago
meeting a middle aged spider
she was weeping
what is the trouble i asked
her it is these cursed
fly swatters she replied
they kill of all the flies
and my family and i are starving
to death it struck me as
so pathetic that i made
a little song about it
as follows to wit

twas an elderly mother spider
grown gaunt and fierce and gray
with her little ones crouched beside her
who wept as she sang this lay

curses on these here swatters
what kills off all the flies
for me and my little daughters
unless we eats we dies

swattin and swattin and swattin
tis little else you hear
and we ll soon be dead and forgotten
with the cost of living so dear

my husband he up and left me
lured off by a centipede
and he says as he bereft me
tis wrong but i ll get a feed

and me a working and working
scouring the streets for food
faithful and never shirking
doing the best i could

curses on these here swatters
what kills off all the flies
me and my poor little daughters
unless we eats we dies

only a withered spider
feeble and worn and old
and this is what
you do when you swat
you swatters cruel and cold

i will admit that some
of the insects do not lead
noble lives but is every
man s hand to be against them
yours for less justice
and more charity

-- archy

White was especially keen on Marquis's "warty bliggens", which you can find here.

Update: Almost forgot to add that if you like your archy in audio, there's a little gem I found in my father's CD collection last year, "archy and mehitabel/echoes of archy & Carnival of the Animals". It's a two-part CD, the first with "archy and mehitabel: a back-alley opera" with Carol Channing, Eddie Bracken, and David Wayne, and "echoes of archy" with David Wayne; and the second with Saint-Saen's "Carnival of the Animals", with new verses by Ogden Nash, performed by Andre Kostelanetz and Noel Coward. The archy recordings were originally made in 1954, Carnival was recorded in 1949, and each released on LP. Do your favorite children a favor and stuff it in a stocking or two.

Poetry Friday I

Today, a poem for Hannukah, by one of Canada's foremost poets, A.M. Klein. Abraham Moses Klein was born in Ukraine in 1909 and emigrated to Montreal with his family the following year.

Heirloom
by A.M. Klein (1909-1972)

My father bequeathed me no wide estates;
No keys and ledgers were my heritage;
Only some holy books with yahrzeit dates
Writ mournfully upon a blank front page -

Books of the Baal Shem Tov, and of his wonders;
Pamphlets upon the devil and his crew;
Prayers against road demons, witches, thunders;
And sundry other tomes for a good Jew.

Beautiful: though no pictures on them, save
The scorpion crawling on a printed track;
The Virgin floating on a scriptural wave,
Square letters twinkling in the Zodiac.

The snuff left on this page, now brown and old,
The tallow stains of midnight liturgy -
These are my coat of arms, and these unfold
My noble lineage, my proud ancestry!

And my tears, too, have stained this heirloomed ground,
When reading in these treatises some weird
Miracle, I turned a leaf and found
A white hair fallen from my father's beard.

UPDATE: Kelly at Big A little a has the round-up here. Thanks, Kelly, and happy holiday wishes!

Goodbye, Garth

From Fuse #8, a link to the Publishers Weekly article, "Little House Under Renovation":

The prairie landscape of Laura Ingalls Wilder will soon be changing. HarperCollins, in an effort to keep the classic Little House on the Prairie series relevant to a new generation, is repackaging the paperback editions, and will replace the familiar covers by Garth Williams with photographic covers, and remove the inside art, starting in January. ...

...according to Tara Weikum, executive editor of HarperCollins Children's Books, sales of backlist properties in the competitive middle-grade market have been lagging. "For readers who view historical novels as old-fashioned," says Weikum, "this offers them an edition that dispels that notion and suggests that these books have all the great qualities of a novel set in a contemporary time."...

Kate Jackson, editor-in-chief at HarperCollins Children's Books, ... believes that Harper's responsibility is to keep the books "relevant and vibrant for kids today. A childhood book is an emotional, tactile object, and you want it to be as it was," she says. "But Laura Ingalls was a real little girl, not a made-up character. Using photographs highlights that these are not history but adventure books."

I had heard a bit about the changes afoot some time after I heard about the plans for Anne-before-Green Gables, and one has to think that the HarperCollins tag line "Come home to Little House" will probably be replaced too, no doubt with something more, erm, contemporary, relevant, vibrant, and adventurous.

I realize that Garth Williams wasn't the original illustrator of the Little House series. He was hired in the 1950's by Harper editor Ursula Nordstrom, who didn't think that the original illustrations, by Helen Sewell and Mildred Boyle beginning in 1932, suited the books; this page has an interesting comparison of the two styles, and I think an argument could be made that Williams's illustrations do have a, yes, vibrancy that Mrs. Sewell's lack, a vibrancy shared by the young Laura Ingalls herself. (Some might recollect Helen Sewell as the illustrator of two Alice Dalgliesh classics, The Thanksgiving Story and The Bears on Hemlock Mountain.)

Good habits and the historical mind

I've just started catching up on my blog reading, and one of the places I turned to first was J.L. Bell's Boston 1775 (and I hope to get caught up at Bell's Oz and Ends sometime soon), where I found the recommendation for this "damn good article": "Teaching the Mind Good Habits" by Sam Wineburg, originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education several years ago.

Wineburg is Professor of Education and History at Stanford University and author of Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past.

From the article:

When I've broached the topic of habits of mind with historians, I've often encountered an uncharacteristic reticence. Those who comment often refer to general critical-thinking skills that could apply just as easily to texts about astrophysics or wire-haired terriers as to historical documents. Yet across the many historians I've interviewed, from the most traditional diplomatic historian to the hippest adherent of the trendiest subfield, I've been able to discern the contours of a shared disciplinary culture. ...

For students, historical habits of mind constitute major intellectual hurdles. Students see their professors' thoughtsas finished products, tidied up and packaged for publicpresentation in books, articles, and lectures. Historians shield from view their raw thinking, the way they try to make sense of their subject.

We need to bring this messier form of expertise into the classroom. Students who believe that knowledge bursts Athena-like from the professor's head may never learn to think like historians, may never be able to reconstruct past worlds
from the most minimal of clues. We need to show students that the self-assured figure lecturing from the podium is not what a historian looks like in his or her office, puzzling through difficult texts.

In fact, the processes by which a scholar makes sense of material -- what I sometimes call the intermediate processes of cognition -- are powerful teaching tools. Historians can model in class how they read by having students bring in unfamiliar texts and demonstrating how to interpret and assess them. With a companion document, they can show the strategies they use to corroborate evidence and piece together a coherent context. Or professors could refer students to the useful Web site History Matters (http://www.historymatters.gmu.edu), whose section on making sense of evidence includes acclaimed historians' discussions of how they evaluate different genres of primary evidence.

Poetry Friday: The frolic architecture of the snow

The large, wild, and often impenetrable snow drifts produced by last week's wind reminded me of this poem.

The Snow Storm
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o'er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farmhouse at the garden's end.
The sled and traveler stopped, the courier's feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.

Come see the north wind's masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer's lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer's sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind's night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.

****

Updated to add that Susan at Chicken Spaghetti rounds up the usual suspects, most of them in a winter frame of mind, here. Thanks, Susan!

Relief

1) The cold snap seems to have snapped and we've enjoyed two days so far, with the promise of a few more to come, of very mild winter weather. Which here means around 32F, a far cry from the 0F to -40F we've had for the past month or so, along with howling winds and bitter wind chills. In fact, not only was it warm enough to do chores without gloves this morning, but the air was beautifully still. And we can even spend enough time outdoors to enjoy all the snow, an early Christmas present considering that we've had quite a few years of snowless Decembers, not to mention "brown (or green) Christmases".

2) I have a working keyboard. I still don't have my new Mac Mini hooked up (the blasted young salesboy neglected to advise that new Mac Minis don't have integral modems even though I told him I'm out in the boonies on dial-up, so now I'm waiting for a new modem to go with the new Mini, keyboard, and mouse), but even in my Luddition figured out that I could hook the new keyboard to the old ailing laptop. Ta-dah.

3) And we're going on a hayride tonight. Yahoo!

Great Science Books -- for adults and kids

Susan at Chicken Spaghetti has a post* with links to Discover Magazine's 25 Greatest Science Books of All-Time, what the magazine calls "the essential reading list for anyone interested in science"; at the Discover page, you can also find a link to an essay by Nobel laureate Kary B. Mullison on the greatest science books.

Worth mentioning that the books on the list are all for adults. Which makes me wonder about which titles you would put on a "Greatest children's science books of all-time" list? I don't know that I'd limit it to 25, or even "great" -- I'd settle for very, very good and either "favorite" or "most useful", especially for home education. I'm pressed for time right now (trying to get to a hay ride at 5 pm), so I'll post my suggested titles later.

*In the same post, Susan also offers a wonderful roundup of all the recent lists of the best in children's literature for 2006. Thanks, Susan.

* * * *

I'll go first:

How to Think Like a Scientist: Answering Questions by the Scientific Method by Stephen P. Kramer with illustrations by Felicia ("If You Give a Mouse a Cookie") Bond

Kitchen science

The guru of kitchen science Harold McGee writes about what happens when "When Science Sniffs Around the Kitchen" in a new occasional column, The Curious Cook, starting in today's New York Times:

It was 30 years ago in a university library that I first stumbled across the scientific approach to food in the pages of Cereal Chemistry, The Journal of Food Science and similar publications. As I browsed through a couple of issues I couldn’t help grinning at the incongruity of high scientific language and high-tech instrumentation being applied to utterly ordinary, everyday things. It was strangely exhilarating to see such intellectual firepower aimed at the kneading of bread dough or the grilling of a hamburger or the mitigation of the gassy effects of beans, to be confronted with startling scanning-electron-microscope close-ups of the bacteria in yogurt, the mold in blue cheese, the surface of cooked spaghetti....

This occasional column, the Curious Cook, will be a window on that big and busy world, on the endless intricacies of foods and the ingenuity of the people who make them and study them. The column is meant to share the buzz, to pass along news of interesting scientific research on food, cooking and eating. Because some of the larger issues are well covered elsewhere — nutrition, the influence of diet on long-term health, food production and the environment, genetically modified organisms — I’ll pay more attention to studies of particular foods, the kinds of subjects that originally drew me away from teaching literature and into the mysteries of emulsions and glutens and Maillard reactions.

Bibliographilia

from today's New York Times:

Readers are often impressed with his bibliography, Mr. Crichton added. “People will often say to me, ‘Oh my goodness, look how many books you’ve read,’” he said.

Which makes some observers suspicious that while a bibliography can appear driven by scrupulousness and politeness, vanity is the real culprit.

ooh

from the library’s Winter 2007 Canadian Family:

Mr. Smart, The Educated Monkey

Art Songs: Ten Songs about Artists by Agnes and Aubrey; from the Tate:

Do you know who dripped paint on to large canvases? Or which artist saw angels in the street? Can you explain what Cubism is? These quirky, catchy songs introduce listeners of all ages to fascinating facts about major artists. You will be intrigued by the variety of musical styles and inventive lyrics. A colourful illustrated booklet with full lyrics completes this unique collection.

Featured artists include William Blake, Frida Kahlo, Wassily Kandinsky, Jackson Pollock, Henri Rousseau and J.M.W. Turner.

CD with 24 page booklet, illustrated in colour throughout and packaged in a cardboard case.

Mary Agnes Richards is a musician, writer and editor.

David Aubrey Schweitzer has composed music and songs for numerous films and TV programmes including the Bafta-nominated BBC Series Charlie & Lola.

new computer on the way

phew

cutting and pasting getting very old

a few good and new things:

The Late Autumn Edition Field Day

The November edition of The Edge of the Forest

new blog from Susan Kapuscinski Gaylord, Making Books with Children; the first post is about constructing a medieval book. HT Chicken Spaghetti

tired now.

I triple-dog dare you

Just in time for Christmas, the cockles of my heart are warmed to learn that one of my favorite holiday movies has come to life:

Switch on your leg lamp and warm up the Ovaltine. The Christmas Story House and Museum will be ready for visitors starting Saturday.

Imagine being inside Ralphie Parker's 1940s home on Christmas Day. Stand on the staircase where Ralphie modeled his hated bunny suit. See the table where Ralphie's dad wanted to display his tacky leg lamp. Gaze out a back window at the shed where Black Bart hid out. ...

This past weekend saw the grand opening of The Christmas Story House. The house, used primarily for exterior shots in the 1983 filming, was renovated to look just like Ralphie's home in the movie by owner Brian Jones, a lifelong Christmas Story fan.

At the museum gift shop, you can buy a chocolate BB rifle or a replica leg lamp from Red Rider Leg Lamps, started by Jones in 2003. And, I hope, Jean Shepherd's In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash. Ho ho ho!

Poetry Friday: A magical thing and sweet to remember

I Heard a Bird Sing
by Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December
A magical thing
And sweet to remember:

"We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,"
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.