A little while ago, Marshal Zeringue (isn't that the best surname? No author could come up with a name that great) asked me to apply the page 69 test to Breathe, which I did and you can read my response here.
For those of you who don't do hyperlinks, the gist of the page 69 test is: is it representative of the rest of the book? would a reader skimming that page be inclined to read on? I don't think I specifically answered that second question in my response but hell yeah. It's about SEX isn't it? (Yeah, now you're linking). It's fascinating reading the responses by the way. Most people do seem to find that page 69 says something meaningful about their book. I wonder if that would apply to any page.
Marshal's website also gave me the idea for six word stories, I've been writing heaps - they're fun but quite tricky. Here's a sci-fi one I wrote in class the other day: "Came to earth. Met a girl."
More news on the 6 word story tomorrow. (I have an idea for a little competition).
Thursday, March 29, 2007
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
When I was one I was just begun
I just realised Eglantine's Cake, on the 8th March, turned one year old.
Happy birthday Eglantine. I should have baked you a cake.
Happy birthday Eglantine. I should have baked you a cake.
Coco and her dolly
This one was for a little girl called Ellie who recently turned 4. Martin & Fred found Ellie at the park round the corner one twilight.
Great news: kids in childcare are independent, social and playful - also know as disruptive
Day Care likely to cause disruptive beahviour
Well, duh. Stick 'em with their peers and they learn stuff, and it's not the stuff Baby Einstein wants to learn 'em, that's for freakin sure.
But what's so bad about disruptive anyway? I constantly struggle with the issue of words like disruptive, compliant (it rubs me up the wrong way), even the word behaviour...no one really calls what I do, what adults do, good or bad 'behaviour'. It's a way of talking about children and animals - it's a way of objectifying them, of somehow feeling that we have jurisdiction over their emotions.
Fred is wild and chaotic. If she was an element she'd be fire. Fire can be contained, and it's beautiful and essential and without it we'd die, but it burns and it can just as easily break containment and burn out of control. But even then, in the destruction there's renewal, there's regeneration. And you don't smack fire for being fire. Yes, she's disruptive. But disruption can be a strength as well as a weakness. I feel it's my duty as a parent to teach her how and when to use it for greater good. Yes, she needs to learn that there's a time to sit down and shut up and that some battles are pointless and a waste of her energy and talents. She also need to learn how and when to apply the kindness, compassion, bravery and empathy that she also has in spades, and she needs to learn that her imagination is one of the things that makes her human (not to mention fun and funny). So what if running wild with other kids (which seems to be at least 50% of the childcare day - or I hope it is...at least) makes her disruptive. Oh my god, could she be having...FUN? Stop the presses. Childcare may be linked to fun.
I am so over these articles and studies about whether or not child care is good or bad or indifferent. It is. Childcare is. Until the average houseprice in Australia comes down by a lot, or fully paid parental leave extends to four years per child, child care just is. So stop fartarsing about with your studies and fix the problem of lack of choice, lack of places in quality centres and lack of supportive encouragement for parents to choose the work balance they think suits their family best.
End rant.
Well, duh. Stick 'em with their peers and they learn stuff, and it's not the stuff Baby Einstein wants to learn 'em, that's for freakin sure.
But what's so bad about disruptive anyway? I constantly struggle with the issue of words like disruptive, compliant (it rubs me up the wrong way), even the word behaviour...no one really calls what I do, what adults do, good or bad 'behaviour'. It's a way of talking about children and animals - it's a way of objectifying them, of somehow feeling that we have jurisdiction over their emotions.
Fred is wild and chaotic. If she was an element she'd be fire. Fire can be contained, and it's beautiful and essential and without it we'd die, but it burns and it can just as easily break containment and burn out of control. But even then, in the destruction there's renewal, there's regeneration. And you don't smack fire for being fire. Yes, she's disruptive. But disruption can be a strength as well as a weakness. I feel it's my duty as a parent to teach her how and when to use it for greater good. Yes, she needs to learn that there's a time to sit down and shut up and that some battles are pointless and a waste of her energy and talents. She also need to learn how and when to apply the kindness, compassion, bravery and empathy that she also has in spades, and she needs to learn that her imagination is one of the things that makes her human (not to mention fun and funny). So what if running wild with other kids (which seems to be at least 50% of the childcare day - or I hope it is...at least) makes her disruptive. Oh my god, could she be having...FUN? Stop the presses. Childcare may be linked to fun.
I am so over these articles and studies about whether or not child care is good or bad or indifferent. It is. Childcare is. Until the average houseprice in Australia comes down by a lot, or fully paid parental leave extends to four years per child, child care just is. So stop fartarsing about with your studies and fix the problem of lack of choice, lack of places in quality centres and lack of supportive encouragement for parents to choose the work balance they think suits their family best.
End rant.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Three New Men in Fred's Life
1. Ralph Covert
Ages ago I stumbled across the Australian Ralph's World site (I think via the now defunct kiddley site) and clicked on the link that said 'sign up for the mailing list and get a free cd sampler' because I am not allergic to free, and then promptly forgot that I'd sent a whole bunch of intimately sensitive personal details through cyberspace. So flashforward to weeks, possibly months, later (I really have no real grasp of the passing of time) and a lovely big envelope arrives with a poster and a cd sampler.
Ralph's World is music for kids and it's GREAT! Burn the wiggles down, Ralph's World rocks! Fred loves it, Una loves it, I love it, Martin loves it. The five songs on the sampler have been in high rotation since they arrived. It's kind of poppy and folksy. Ralph Covert (I think that's his name) has a rich, sonorous singing voice which I could listen to all day. They're good for singing to, they're great for dancing to and all the songs are winners. Recommended. Martin said he saw a CD in Borders in Melbourne Central but you can buy them online too (there are heaps).
2. Mr Beast
Mr Beast is a picture book by James Sage, illustrated hilariously well by Russel Ayto. It's one you need to read a few times to 'get' what's happening - Mr Beast is actually the main character's dad, pretending to be a deliciously scary beast. It's great because you need to look at all the visual clues for the story to make complete sense, but they're not glaringly obvious - it's a book both Fred and I have really engaged with. It's a relationship a lot of kids can probably relate to - lots of dads seem to take on this 'pretend/safe scary role' in play. Fascinating really.
3. The Stinky Cheese Man
I first fell in love with this book when I was about eighteen and used to hang out in the picture book sections in Hobart bookshops and read all the books. The Stinky Cheese Man and other fairly stupid tales is metafiction, which means it's a book that constantly draws attention to the fact that it is a book, for example the table of contents is part of the story (it's what falls on chicken licken's head). There's quite a lot of metafiction in picture books, it's a genre that lends itself well to a discussion about the conventions of the book and subverting the relationship between reader and text, inviting children to 'enter the text' as if they actually might fall into bookworld (like Lauren Child's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book) and change the story. Metafiction is a great way to introduce kids to the power of stories. It also gives characters that are usually stuck in their own stories a chance to narrate their own version, to express their point of view, which I think could be empowering for kids. There are also some really funny rewritings of familiar stories (like the ugly duckling who just grows up to be a really ugly duck). I thought Fred might be a bit young for it and a lot of the metafiction elements goes over Fred's head, but she really wants to wrap her brain around it, so we've been reading it over and over. It's long, but she doesn't care and I don't really either, it's clever and funny and written in a romping style which makes it eminently readable.
Both these books are from our local library. Love the library.
Ages ago I stumbled across the Australian Ralph's World site (I think via the now defunct kiddley site) and clicked on the link that said 'sign up for the mailing list and get a free cd sampler' because I am not allergic to free, and then promptly forgot that I'd sent a whole bunch of intimately sensitive personal details through cyberspace. So flashforward to weeks, possibly months, later (I really have no real grasp of the passing of time) and a lovely big envelope arrives with a poster and a cd sampler.
Ralph's World is music for kids and it's GREAT! Burn the wiggles down, Ralph's World rocks! Fred loves it, Una loves it, I love it, Martin loves it. The five songs on the sampler have been in high rotation since they arrived. It's kind of poppy and folksy. Ralph Covert (I think that's his name) has a rich, sonorous singing voice which I could listen to all day. They're good for singing to, they're great for dancing to and all the songs are winners. Recommended. Martin said he saw a CD in Borders in Melbourne Central but you can buy them online too (there are heaps).
2. Mr Beast
Mr Beast is a picture book by James Sage, illustrated hilariously well by Russel Ayto. It's one you need to read a few times to 'get' what's happening - Mr Beast is actually the main character's dad, pretending to be a deliciously scary beast. It's great because you need to look at all the visual clues for the story to make complete sense, but they're not glaringly obvious - it's a book both Fred and I have really engaged with. It's a relationship a lot of kids can probably relate to - lots of dads seem to take on this 'pretend/safe scary role' in play. Fascinating really.
3. The Stinky Cheese Man
I first fell in love with this book when I was about eighteen and used to hang out in the picture book sections in Hobart bookshops and read all the books. The Stinky Cheese Man and other fairly stupid tales is metafiction, which means it's a book that constantly draws attention to the fact that it is a book, for example the table of contents is part of the story (it's what falls on chicken licken's head). There's quite a lot of metafiction in picture books, it's a genre that lends itself well to a discussion about the conventions of the book and subverting the relationship between reader and text, inviting children to 'enter the text' as if they actually might fall into bookworld (like Lauren Child's Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Book) and change the story. Metafiction is a great way to introduce kids to the power of stories. It also gives characters that are usually stuck in their own stories a chance to narrate their own version, to express their point of view, which I think could be empowering for kids. There are also some really funny rewritings of familiar stories (like the ugly duckling who just grows up to be a really ugly duck). I thought Fred might be a bit young for it and a lot of the metafiction elements goes over Fred's head, but she really wants to wrap her brain around it, so we've been reading it over and over. It's long, but she doesn't care and I don't really either, it's clever and funny and written in a romping style which makes it eminently readable.
Both these books are from our local library. Love the library.
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Reviewing? Or just a good bitch?
There's a bit of a blue happening over at the Sarsaparilla blog at the moment. To summarise, Kirsty put up a post about television reviewing in general but in particular reference to Ian Cuthbertson who writes for The Weekend Australian Review section. Basicaly she says he's not up to scratch because of his contempt for both television and its watchers. The comments generated by Kirsty's whinge quickly became split into two camps and turned into a bit of a 'journos vs the academics', which actually makes strangely compelling and amusing reading, if occasionally slightly undignified (a few times I felt sullied just reading it).
Anyway, it made me start thinking about television reviewing. I think there's two types of television review actually. There's the more considered and thoughtful engagement with the material and context (the kind of review I think Kirsty was hankering after), which is akin to other kinds of thoughtful reviewing - book, film, theatre music etc. But then there is a more informal commentary (really most suited to the more relaxed medium of television) in which the reviewer becomes your friend on the couch dissing popular culture with relish because one of the things Australians love is a good bitch and one of the safest contexts in which to do it is in front of the television. We see it, for better or for worse, as cathartic. We even call bitching 'venting' as if something dire might happen if we don't let it all out.
What's interesting about this though, as the Sarsaparilla post and the comments show, is that while Australians love a good bitch, we often don't deal with direct confrontation very well. When we bitch there is a usually a certain tacit complicity of agreement (whether you agree or not), which only enhances the pleasure of the bitch. Bitching isn't fun any more if someone actually calls you a bitch. I saw Kirsty's post as a bitch too, on the same continuum, the bitchiness of the reviews she was reviewing lured her into similar behaviour - serious critique doesn't usually allude to penis size. But my point is, it's not very nice to get caught bitching (in fact it's pretty mortifying) and that's what's happened here. Kirsty's been caught by another clique, equally articulate, equally righteous in their indignation. Sarsaparilla have to close their ranks - what choice do they have? Of course they have to support their writer. Everyone's defensive, everyone's feeling exposed, the moral ground is shifting and everyone's fighting to keep it. And perhaps this makes Kirsty's point for her - this is why commentary as bitching ends up not working out so well, because it divides, rather than creating an open forum and a thoughtful exhange of ideas.
I'm okay with my television commentators sitting back and having a bit of a bitch...to a point. I agree with Kerryn Goldworthy's point that Australia is a small industry and no one's really so uber famous and untouchable that being called Stoopid in a national weekend paper wouldn't be a bit ouchy. (I'd be pretty upset if I read a review of Undine in a major Australian newspaper saying it was stoopid.) There is a difference between harmless bitching (say, talking a bit snidely about the singing untalents of Aus idol contestants, since they put themselves on that line) and nasty bitching (like, say, saying in a national newspaper that someone on Aus idol has a fat arse or has an IQ smaller than a potato*). Actually an even better example is talking about Steve Irwin as a torturer of animals who deserved anything he got before he died and talking about him as a torturer of animals asking for the animal kingdom to enact its revenge hours after he died, as Germaine Greer did. There's a line that need not be crossed, and most people are smart enough to work that line out. (I'm not in a position to comment whether or not Ian Cuthbertson crossed the line since I haven't the faintest idea who he is.)
I do agree with Kirsty that there is a culture of derision in television commentary. But I think that culture of derision, of undervaluing the audience, of seeing them as 'the masses' and therefore somehow collectively stupid, goes way down deep into the whole industry. From the production of hugely cynical shows like Oprah, which plays on sentimentality and people's feelings of self worth, loneliness and lack of community to make a lot of money (okay, I'm saying that out my ear and I can't back that up with evidence, but this is my blog and I can generalise wildly if I want to) to 'reality' television that bears no actual resemblance to reality to that programming mentality that sticks the best shows on at some indeterminate time after 10pm on an indeterminate day, fiddling about with the order of the episodes to the hour after hour of Simpson repeats... We actually gave up on television with the concurrent emergence of reality tv and the release of every television show ever made on dvd - we still watch television, we still LOVE television, we just watch it on dvd. We rely heavily on word of mouth and criticism (usually user generated on Amazon or similar sites) to make our choices.
If you are going to pop into Sarsaparilla, read the post by Meredith on roadside memorials: All you hear is time stand still in travel. A beautiful and moving post, the kind of cultural commentary I adore.
---
*the iq of a potato of course being 3.
Anyway, it made me start thinking about television reviewing. I think there's two types of television review actually. There's the more considered and thoughtful engagement with the material and context (the kind of review I think Kirsty was hankering after), which is akin to other kinds of thoughtful reviewing - book, film, theatre music etc. But then there is a more informal commentary (really most suited to the more relaxed medium of television) in which the reviewer becomes your friend on the couch dissing popular culture with relish because one of the things Australians love is a good bitch and one of the safest contexts in which to do it is in front of the television. We see it, for better or for worse, as cathartic. We even call bitching 'venting' as if something dire might happen if we don't let it all out.
What's interesting about this though, as the Sarsaparilla post and the comments show, is that while Australians love a good bitch, we often don't deal with direct confrontation very well. When we bitch there is a usually a certain tacit complicity of agreement (whether you agree or not), which only enhances the pleasure of the bitch. Bitching isn't fun any more if someone actually calls you a bitch. I saw Kirsty's post as a bitch too, on the same continuum, the bitchiness of the reviews she was reviewing lured her into similar behaviour - serious critique doesn't usually allude to penis size. But my point is, it's not very nice to get caught bitching (in fact it's pretty mortifying) and that's what's happened here. Kirsty's been caught by another clique, equally articulate, equally righteous in their indignation. Sarsaparilla have to close their ranks - what choice do they have? Of course they have to support their writer. Everyone's defensive, everyone's feeling exposed, the moral ground is shifting and everyone's fighting to keep it. And perhaps this makes Kirsty's point for her - this is why commentary as bitching ends up not working out so well, because it divides, rather than creating an open forum and a thoughtful exhange of ideas.
I'm okay with my television commentators sitting back and having a bit of a bitch...to a point. I agree with Kerryn Goldworthy's point that Australia is a small industry and no one's really so uber famous and untouchable that being called Stoopid in a national weekend paper wouldn't be a bit ouchy. (I'd be pretty upset if I read a review of Undine in a major Australian newspaper saying it was stoopid.) There is a difference between harmless bitching (say, talking a bit snidely about the singing untalents of Aus idol contestants, since they put themselves on that line) and nasty bitching (like, say, saying in a national newspaper that someone on Aus idol has a fat arse or has an IQ smaller than a potato*). Actually an even better example is talking about Steve Irwin as a torturer of animals who deserved anything he got before he died and talking about him as a torturer of animals asking for the animal kingdom to enact its revenge hours after he died, as Germaine Greer did. There's a line that need not be crossed, and most people are smart enough to work that line out. (I'm not in a position to comment whether or not Ian Cuthbertson crossed the line since I haven't the faintest idea who he is.)
I do agree with Kirsty that there is a culture of derision in television commentary. But I think that culture of derision, of undervaluing the audience, of seeing them as 'the masses' and therefore somehow collectively stupid, goes way down deep into the whole industry. From the production of hugely cynical shows like Oprah, which plays on sentimentality and people's feelings of self worth, loneliness and lack of community to make a lot of money (okay, I'm saying that out my ear and I can't back that up with evidence, but this is my blog and I can generalise wildly if I want to) to 'reality' television that bears no actual resemblance to reality to that programming mentality that sticks the best shows on at some indeterminate time after 10pm on an indeterminate day, fiddling about with the order of the episodes to the hour after hour of Simpson repeats... We actually gave up on television with the concurrent emergence of reality tv and the release of every television show ever made on dvd - we still watch television, we still LOVE television, we just watch it on dvd. We rely heavily on word of mouth and criticism (usually user generated on Amazon or similar sites) to make our choices.
If you are going to pop into Sarsaparilla, read the post by Meredith on roadside memorials: All you hear is time stand still in travel. A beautiful and moving post, the kind of cultural commentary I adore.
---
*the iq of a potato of course being 3.
Friday, March 23, 2007
I'm in (professional) love
Anna Walker is the illustrator who's doing the cover illustration for my Aussie Chomp. Her stuff is soooo beautiful!! I love her.
Now I have to think of a title.
Poo.
Edited to say that Poo isn't the title. It is merely me being writerly and also expressive.
Now I have to think of a title.
Poo.
Edited to say that Poo isn't the title. It is merely me being writerly and also expressive.
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