it's awards season!

I am a sucker for gorgeous gowns and weepy acceptance speeches and academy thanking and all the glamor of Hollywood as much as the next person, but I'm not talking about the Golden Globes or the Oscars or even the Grammys. I'm talking about the dozens and dozens of awarding that goes on in the YA/kidlit scene around this time of year. One of my long-time favorite bloggers, Susan at Chicken Spaghetti, is really good at keeping track of the huge amounts of awarding that goes on and without her I would be completely lost. So I've been reading, and looking forward to having time to read, a lot of newly-awarded books, such as the amazing 2010 Newbery Medal winner When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead or The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate by Jacqueline Kelly (which is one of the ones I'm looking forward to reading, because I've heard so many great things).

The really big reason that I love awards season is because--and I realize this probably makes me a less discerning and critical reader, but I will be a more critical reader once I'm not critically reading every day for school--I don't have enough time to read every book that looks interesting to me, so I sort of have to depend on other people's opinions to tell me what is really worth reading. The problem is that a) taste is subjective anyway, and to be honest, most things that win awards tend to be of a certain type--this is less evident, I think, in children's media than it is with, like, the Oscars (has a happy movie ever won an Oscar? the answer is no)--but it's definitely still there; and b) I miss a lot of great stuff. When I was in high school and it was slightly more acceptable for me to hang around the children's books section of bookstores I was able to pick up a lot of things that I would have otherwise missed, like The Tail of Emily Windsnap by Liz Kessler or even A Great and Terrible Beauty by Libba Bray (which, incidentally, is the first of one of my favorite YA lit series ever written--Victorian protofeminist teenage schoolgirls who can do magic and some of whom are even queer!! i.e. everything I have ever wanted from a book). If I had done this critically-acclaimed-only thing back in the day I would have missed out on Georgia Nicohlson, and thus a lot of joy and hilarity. These aren't award-winning, change-Roger-Ebert's-life kind of books, but they're special to me for a lot of different reasons.

I'm not saying I'm disappointed about the fact that I only read critics' favorites nowadays; in fact, I'm pretty happy that I've found time to read for pleasure in college at all, because I know a lot of my book-loving friends at Bryn Mawr don't have the time. And reading critics' favorites have led me to a lot of amazing things even just in the past year or two (which is more or less when I got a little more serious about the YA/kidlit thing)--I mean, here's a list of amazing books I've come across just in the past few months (YOU SHOULD READ THEM): When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead, The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm by Nancy Farmer, Graceling by Kristin Cashore, The Hunger Games and Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins, The Absolutely True Story of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart... and many many many more--all of which I found out about from some critic or reviewer of some sort, and most of which have received some kind of prestigious award. What I am saying is that I feel like I'm missing out on all those diamonds in the rough that don't get picked up or recommended just because there's not enough people who read them. Not to mention, reading those kinds of books, loving them, and sharing them gives you that unique pleasure that comes from helping someone else discover something that changes them.

SO long story short: I really, really, really want to be a critic of children's literature when I grow up (aka graduate, oh dear), because I want to be able to read all the critically acclaimed stuff in addition to the mediocre stuff, the gems, the guilty pleasures, and everything in between. If it were my job I would have the time! Right?

bsc #104: abby's twin

A lot of BSC blogs (because, believe it or not, there are more than one--there's a few in my blogroll if you want to check them out for some reason) are into reading the books chronologically. The way I've always read them, however, is to only read season-appropriate books at certain parts of the year; for example, I would only ever read Karen's Ducklings at Easter, and no time other than winter will I ever read Baby-sitters' Winter Vacation. Of course, not all the books take place in obvious seasons. When I decided to pick up Abby's Twin the other day, though, I got lucky--it's all about the BSC trying to host a winter carnival! (In my head, the dollar back in the early 90s was about ten times more valuable than it is today. I know this is patently untrue, but it is the only way all of those carnivals and parties and vacations the baby-sitters can afford make sense.)

I believe I may have mentioned that Abby is my favorite member of the BSC. Why is this? To be honest, I have no idea, since she didn't exist when I was at the peak of my obsession with the BSC (the first time around?), and didn't appear until book #89 (Kristy and the Dirty Diapers, which I have never read and judging from the title could be either hilarious or stupid--or both, as the BSC so often tends to be). She was basically a replacement for Dawn when Dawn went back to California, so I guess a lot of BSC fans don't like her very much for that reason. So while generally I do have opinions that are popular among older BSC fans (e.g. Mallory sucks, Kristy is probably a lesbian, the Pikes are the best, etc.) my love for Abby is actually pretty weird!

And I don't know why that is! She is unique, independent, awesome at everything, way less passive-aggressive than the rest of the club members, and she doesn't get crazy jealous when one of the BSC has--gasp!--other friends. Plus she has curly hair. Call me narcissistic but I think it is awesome when characters have curly hair. AND there will always be Abby's Un-Valentine, which I unfortunately do not currently own, where Abby and Kristy go to the movies on Valentine's Day in a plot twist that is SUSPICIOUSLY ROMANTIC or so I thought when I was thirteen or fourteen (I have not read it since then, but when I do, dear reader, believe me, you will hear of it). Greer of Stoneybrookite wrote about Abby in her blog and gave even more reasons why Abby is A+.

Abby's Twin makes me love Abby even more, just because it shows that Abby, while being AMAZING AT EVERYTHING, sometimes sucks. Like, in a realistic way. It is always great when that happens in children's books, because in some kidlit (and in other books and media) which I could mention but will not because I am gracious or something, the main character is all, like, "Oh, look at me, I am so smart and funny and pretty and independent and great! Don't compare yourselves to me, though, guys, I'm not that great. Sometimes I fall down stairs or say vaguely mean things which are actually just misunderstandings! P.S. don't you love how charming I am? :)"

But Abby has a buffer against being That Person!

Her sense of humor.

Like, I think she's funny, but I watch a lot of children's television and I laugh at poop jokes and my favorite joke doesn't make sense unless you've seen Finding Nemo. And I was just looking through Abby's Twin for proof that she is hilarious and then I found the following exchange, made after the BSC decides that in order to raise money they'll shovel snow for people in the neighborhood:

Kristy suddenly jumped up from her chair. She pointed toward the window with both hands. "There's our answer!" she cried. "Snow!"

"Uh..." I said, raising one eyebrow. "I don't think we can pay for supplies with snowballs. In the desert, maybe, but not in Stoneybrook."

Kristy laughed. "We'll shovel it! And we'll get or sitting charges to help us."

"Great idea!" cried Mallory.

"That is a good idea," I agreed. "You know what they say--there's no business like snow business."

So, yeah. Her sense of humor sucks. Or rocks, depending how you look at it. So... as far as character flaws go, Kristy is bossy, Stacey has diabetes, Claudia can't spell, Dawn is too much of a hippie, Mary Anne is too quiet, Mallory sucks, Jessi likes horrible pranks, and Abby sucks at telling jokes. These books really make you think about the human condition, you know?

To be honest, though, Abby's Twin is a lot about how because Abby thinks that because the way she sees things works so well for her, that she believes that's how it should work for everyone she knows. Obviously, that blows up in her face. I can relate to this a lot, being, unfortunately, one of those people who thinks she knows best, even when I know that I don't. Oh, Abby, how I know your pain... but I have learned from you that things could work out for the best! All you need is a snow-statue contest and a good hill to sled down.

what is a bizzer sign, anyway?

Thing the First

The Bizzer Sign was introduced in BSC #5, Dawn and the Impossible Three, which features BOTH of my favorite BSC families, the Pikes and the Barretts, and so makes this book one of my top five favorites (another post about that later). The Pikes are a family of ten, with eight children between the ages of five and eleven. They are frequently hilarious and always lovable--but, of course, their house is chaos. The Barretts (at least in this book; later Mrs. Barrett marries Mr. DeWitt and their family gets bigger/more chaotic) are three off-the-wall kids and their harried, frazzled, busy, harrassed, poor mother. Dawn gets stuck babysitting the Barretts when they first move to Stoneybrook, and because Mrs. Barrett is SO busy and tired, she never does any of the housework, and the kids are completely undisciplined, so Dawn basically hates her life for a few weeks. (It resolves itself and the Barretts realize how much they love being helpful! and Mrs. Barrett finds time for her kids! and Dawn saves the planet some more! so it all ends up okay.) Anyway, so one day when Dawn is hating her life at the Barretts' place, the Pikes and their two baby-sitters--there are so many Pikes that at any time when more than, like, five kids are around, there have to be two BSC members present--come and hang out, and teach the Barretts the Bizzer Sign. It makes everyone upset and Dawn is about thisclose to moving back to California. (Or is she? Or isn't she? She never really makes up her mind until the California Diaries are published.) The Bizzer Sign is VERY VERY VERY OFFENSIVE (not really, this is the BSC, after all) and every time any of the Stoneybrook kids do it to each other they get upset/angry/annoyed. Claire Pike always cries and Nicky Pike always tattles. Two-year-old Marnie Barrett just giggles, which makes me think she's going to be fantastic when she grows up. Ann M. Martin never really explained what the Bizzer Sign looks like, but after I found out how people in Europe flip each other off (two fingers, not one), I always imagined one of the Pike triplets had seen that in some naughty British film and appropriated it for themselves, their parents never realizing that, effectively, all of their children were constantly telling each other "fuck you." The Bizzer Sign was already really funny; but now because of this I think it's hilarious. Thus the name of my blog was born.

Thing the Second

Smith and Watson write in Reading Autobiography, "Readers often conceive of autobiographical narrators as telling unified stories of their lives, as creating or discovering coherent selves. But both the unified story and the coherent self are myths of identity. For there is no coherent 'self' that predates stories about identity, about 'who' one is. Nor is there a unified, stable immutable self that can remember everything that has happened in the past. We are always fragmented in time, taking a particular or provisional perspective on the moving target of our pasts, addressing multiple and disparate audiences. Perhaps, then, it is more helpful to approach autobiographical telling as a performative act."

I definitely agree! It's impossible to remember everything you ever did, perfectly, chronologically, exactly as it happened, and it's even harder to make those memories into an interesting and coherent story/narrative/text. Coherency is overrated, and, for me, quite rare. The self is a construction; the self's identity/ies are constructions; the actions of conveying those constructions must, then, be different kinds of performance--the performance of coherency, chronology, memory, etc. (Not even the performances can mesh together into c

As for "We are always fragmented in time, taking a particular or provisional perspective on the moving target of our pasts, addressing multiple and disparate audiences"--well, this blog has a very particular theme. Specifically, I am reading the Baby-Sitter's Club series and getting all introspective and personal with them (though, of course, I will only be as personal as I choose to be, so I guess that's a performance of personablity and introspection?); broadly, I'm talking about children's media. My life is about a lot more than BSC and children's media, although I'm sure it seems quite the contrary to people who don't know me well. I could have made this blog about being at Bryn Mawr! I could have made it about t-shirts or cranberry juice or queerness or my friends or about a conglomeration of all of those which would have then made up a blog which was mostly a performative act which is supposed to represent a coherent picture of my life, which of course it wouldn't have, because there would be no way for me to write about every single experience and thought and theme that pops up in my life. I would have forgotten to note things about what it was like having braces for six years or that time I threw up on my third grade best friend, which I'm not sure actually happened. The very fact that I'm coming at this whole blog thing in a very specific way is only more evidence of how we are fragmented in time.

wild rumpuses since 1989

School makes you so busy. I hate that.

So, because this blog is [going to be?] mainly about childhood anyway, and also because it's my blog and I get to say what I want, this is going to be about Where the Wild Things Are, the movie as directed by Spike Jonze in 2009 and not the amazing, long-beloved book by Maurice Sendak (who, incidentally, is one of my heroes).

Let's be honest, the fact that Maurice Sendak is one of my heroes means that I had a really strong opinion going in. I mean ,last semester one of my best friends and I got really excited about the fact that you can watch Really Rosie on youtube and now I'm listening to to Chicken Soup With Rice and I'm pretty hungry. So, I kind of wanted the movie to be great! and fantastic! and all those exclamatory praises!

I'd heard it was supposed to be nostalgic, reminiscent of childhood, etc. But you know what? I didn't really get that feel. Like at all. Mostly, I felt like I had absolutely no idea what was going on. Which, hey, is totally what childhood was like for me a lot of the time, so maybe that's exactly what Spike Jonze was trying to get across? But really I think he was trying to do this whole idealization of childhood thing, and that it didn't really work out. It's a trend, actually! I'm not the only twenty-year-old out there elongating and idealizing childhood to death. That is what I really want to talk about.

The trend of "childhood is AWESOME and we are going to sentimentalize it to DEATH" is not actually new or anything--I've already written, like, two papers for different classes about how the Victorians were all about putting childhood on a pedastal, and back before reading kidlit was childish and unclassy (so before young adult was a genre, probably), there were Victorian dudes with crazy mustaches going, "Oh, I say, Henry, have you read the new A.A. Milne yet? That Winnie the Pooh is such a jolly sort of fellow, wouldn't you say?" At which point, Henry, after taking a sip of tea, would reply, "Right you are, George, my friend! Ol' Tigger is quite my favorite, though--and did you know? The most wonderful thing about Tiggers is that he's the only one!"

I'm totally lying. Winnie the Pooh didn't exist until 1926. But Peter Rabbit? Man, that was, like, the pinnacle of all literature. Victorians dressed up in blue shirts and no pants for Halloween, except for the guy who dressed up like MacGregor. Everyone hates that guy, even now.

WHAT AM I EVEN TALKING ABOUT. Oh yeah. Nostalgia! Maurice Sendak! A lot of a very particular subculture of teenagers and twentysomethings have been all over this new movie version of this book that was ubiquitous when this generation were children. I remember the first time it was read to me. I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way. But you know the part of the movie that I liked best? The trailer. The trailer was great! The trailer made me cry, and it had a really great Arcade Fire song on it!

The movie? The movie itself, while being really delightful and funny at points, was weird and unintelligible and it was packed with so much over-your-head metaphor so that something that should have been dedicated to the nostalgia of lost childhood lost its innocence and I guess anything that could resemble sentimentality. And that could be okay! Not every piece of children's media has to be dripping with good morals and neat, saccharine endings where everyone gets a glass of milk to go with their square, balanced meal. God knows I've read His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) enough time to lose that idea of children's stories. But Where the Wild Things as written by Maurice Sendak, inasmuch as it was about anything, was about being angry, being so fully and completely angry and frustrated with the injustice of life that you want to run away and have a place where everything goes exactly the way you want it to... and then going home after realizing there is no place better than home, even when your mother thinks you're a wild thing.

The movie was so much unhappier and more unsatisfying than that. In the book, Max wants a place where everyone loves him best of all. K.W. ends up quoting the line "oh, please don't go, I'll eat you up, I love you so"--she and Carol are the ones who love him best of all, but he goes through so much trying to make everyone love him... and in the end, I don't know if the Wild Things really loved Max at all. They were trying to make Carol feel better.

The other day, in the class I'm writing this for, the professor noted that I really like juvenile fiction. I really do. I check out picture books from the public library, and I'm pretty sure the only books meant for adults on my bookshelf here at Bryn Mawr are books I had to read for class, and a Philipa Gregory book. Oh, and a non-fiction book called Sex With Kings, all about royal mistresses in history (i.e. awesome). But truthfully, I like ALL kinds of children's media. I like Disney Channel original movies and every now and then I watch an episode of Hey, Arnold! on YouTube. My favorite movie of 2009 was Disney's The Princess and the Frog (well, that, and Whip It). I used to work at Build-a-Bear. So I am all about the idealization of childhood, and I think it is fun, and great! But I would like for other people to think about the way I do--as something FUN, not something to be metaphorized and made dark with the tarnish of movies that I hate.