Who Wants to be a Superhero? I do.

Who Wants to be a Superhero? (Official page | Wiki page) is a Sci-Fi Channel reality television show hosted by comics legend Stan Lee, in which costumed contestants vie to be America's next great superhero. The winner gets his or her character featured in a comic book written by Stan Lee, and an original movie about the character that will air on the Sci-Fi Channel.

And of course I'm sending in an application for the show.

I've been scrambling since I learned the deadline for Season Two is only a few weeks away, but much good work has already been done. It helps when one half of the Gratz Industries team (yours truly) is a writer, and can thus tackle the nine-page application form (requesting, among other things, a full back-story for the character), and the other half of the team (Wendi) can sew up a costume for me.

Oh yes, you must have a costume.

And no, I will not be in tights.

I am not at liberty to reveal my super-hero identity to you at present, but I should be able to say more soon. I'm also required to send in a ten-minute video as both myself and my super-hero alter-ego, and if I can summon the courage I will post the video here for public ridicule comment enjoyment.

Excelsior!

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Lots more scrotums

From Gelf Magazine, a list of youth books that make mention of scrotums. According to librarian Dana Nilsson of Sunnyside Elementary in Durango, Colorado, these novels - including James Herriot's All Creatures Great and Small - don't qualify as "quality literature" for children.

Fav author Neil Gaiman has also weighed in on his blog, stripping such dark Jedi of their librarian badges. Says he:

I've decided that librarians who would decline to have a Newbery book in their libraries because they don't like the word scrotum are probably not real librarians (whom I still love unconditionally). I think they're rogue librarians who have gone over to the dark side.

And there was a nice editorial in the New York Times about the flap. The link will probably require subscription after a day or so, but here's a couple of good graphs:

Speaking of Balzac, it seems a good time to remember that discomfort about words isn’t the fault of the words or of the authors who use them. And that plain old uncynical, workmanlike common nouns lose their naughty aura through unembarrassed use. The alternative — silent ignorance or the baby-talk slang that children acquire as surely as strep and ear infections — seems far less healthy.

With every generation, a new cohort of children begins the journey from ignorance to knowledge. Librarians help those children get there. Some barely make it, and end up toting ignorance as baggage, a sniggering puerility about body parts and functions. Those are the ones who will be drawn to shock radio — not children like the thoughtful, dauntless Lucky Trimble and those lucky enough to have read her book.

Hear, hear.

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Jersey Girl

Jo loves her Tennessee baseball jersey. If it's in her closet, it's what she chooses to wear. Alan and I were walking home the other day, watching Jo (in her jersey) walking in front of us and I told Alan that I'd like to make her another jersey or two. We were talking about what team or other image I could put on it and Alan had the idea to make it a fantasy baseball jersey. Genius!

I was going to do the Emerald City Wizards but Jo said she wanted a red jersey so it became the Wonderland Hearts. There's a heart-shaped patch on one sleeve that you can't see in this picture - but it's lightish pink to match the stitching on the jersey. I traced this pattern from her Tennessee jersey but I'd love to find an actual pattern so I can make one for myself too. Maybe I'll be the Oz Cyclones. Alan already has in a request for the Mad Hatters jersey.

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Gratz Industries - Now with Video!

Team Bonzai Special Agent "Sundance" has just sent in this belated - but priceless - demonstration of how to effectively face out Samurai Shortstop in your local bookstore! Enjoy:

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Delicious Scrotum!

There, I said it. Scrotum, scrotum, scrotum.

What's so wrong with that? A lot, apparently. The presence of the word "scrotum" - used in describing the place where a dog is bitten by a rattlesnake - features prominently on the first page of this year's Newbery Award winner, The Higher Power of Lucky by Susan Patron.

Jordan Sonnenblick, the author of Drums, Girls and Dangerous Pie and Notes From the Midnight Driver, started reading objections to The Higher Power of Scrotum on a librarian listserv, and brought the objections - and the noticeable lack of defense - to the attention of a children's lit listserv. The issue got picked up by PublishersWeekly online, and was then covered this weekend by The New York Times. (Who at the same time both fulfilled, and neglected to mention, Jordan's work in bringing attention to the whole fiasco.) The issue has since been blogged at AS IF ("Authors Supporting Intellectual Freedom"), a blog Jordan regularly contributes to.

Said Ms. Patron about her inclusion of the word:

The word is just so delicious. The sound of the word to Lucky is so evocative. It’s one of those words that’s so interesting because of the sound of the word.

Says Dana Nilsson, a teacher/librarian at Sunnyside Elementary in Durango, Colorado:

The inclusion of genitalia does not add to the story one bit and that is my objection. Because of that one word, I would not be able to read that book aloud. There are so many other options that the author could have used instead.

So, what, the area from our waist to our thighs doesn't exist? Ever?

What bothers me most about all of this - and there are a great many things that bother me - is that nowhere in all of this is there a real discussion of what is wrong with saying scrotum. Is there a better word to use here? Ah, but that seems not to be the issue. The woman above isn't protesting the use of the word, so much as the use of the area. The issue is the mention of genitalia. The question, it seems, is "Why go there?"

A sexual use of the scrotum in a book for 8-year-olds? No way. I would never argue for such a thing. A reference to pooping or peeing? Sure, I'd go to bat for that. Heck, I put scenes in Samurai Shortstop where kids pee out their windows. After all, excretion is maybe the one thing kids understand from the very start. It's an everyday fact of life. Like Taro Gomi says, Everyone Poops.

But this isn't sex, and it isn't even bodily functions. It's an anatomical description of where a dog was bitten by a rattlesnake. Is this seriously a reason to ban a Newbery-winning book from library shelves? In all this discussion, no one seems to be questioning why a reference to the scrotum is a bad thing. Americans are way too wound up about their bodies and nudity.

I blame the Puritans.

News bulletin to adults worried about the use of scrotum in The Higher Power of Lucky: I knew pretty early on that I had balls, and I knew way better words for them than "scrotum."

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Lots of Love

Jo was in full crafting mode as she made Valentines for everyone in her class. She has a heart-shaped paper punch that she used to make hearts to glue on to each Valentine - lots of fun. The gluing? Not so much. About halfway through the gluing she started telling me about her idea for a machine that has lots of little holes for the glue to squirt out onto all the Valentines at once, and then lots of pointy metal arms would come out and pick up the little hearts and stick them to the Valentines. My daughter the inventor.



She perked up again when we got to the red glitter glue and she carefully drew pictures with it on every Valentine. These may look like random squiggles, but she told me in some detail what was in every picture. One large blob of glitter was a cake, another was a pile of sand and mud. Her favorite (and the on she brought back home with her) was this one with "a balloon floating in the breeze."

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Books: The Book Thief

Yes, I'm the one who's had Markus Zusak's The Book Thief on the "What We're Reading" LibraryThing feature to the right for more than a month. Part of my defense is that The Book Thief is a long novel, clocking in at 552 pages. And while I'm not afraid of long books, I am, as I prefer to call it, a "deliberate" reader. (Okay, "slow.") But I was even slower than usual this time, as I spent many of my evenings writing and not reading, as I had back in the halcyon days of 2006. (Ah yes, those were the days.)

The Book Thief is the story of a German girl named Liesel growing up in Nazi Germany. Her story is wrapped up in those of her foster parents Rosa and Hans Hubermann, her next door neighbor and possible love interest Rudy Steiner, Jewish escapee Max Vandenburg, and the mysterious wife of the town's mayor. Liesel is the book thief of the title, as over the course of a few years she acquires quite a collection of books that don't belong to her. The most important book in her collection, however, is the one she writes herself, the one which recounts her life, and the one which the narrator, Death, comes to possess and treasure.

Many people, myself included, had The Book Thief pegged as this year's Printz Award winner. It ended up taking home a Printz Honor, with American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang beating it out for the top prize. The Book Thief is certainly deserving of a Printz Award of some kind, and I was glad to see it among the winners.

Wendi read or heard somewhere that Zusak, the author of Fighting Ruben Wolfe, Getting the Girl, and the very well-reviewed I am the Messenger, set out to deliberately outdo himself as a writer with The Book Thief. It shows. Almost no sentence in The Book Thief is a throw-away; at every turn Zusak tries to be clever or ironic or poetic, often times trying to do all three at once. The result is a bit wearying by the end, and toward the last two hundred pages or so I once or twice found myself reading a sentence and having absolutely no idea what he was trying to say.

That said, The Book Thief is a beautiful and tragic story, and I cried a few times toward the end. It certainly establishes Zusak as one of the pre-eminent storytellers in today's young adult market.

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Mmmmm. . .Strawberries. . .

It's been cold and rainy here lately. Not cold and crisp with a clear blue sky, but cold and gray and damp. A recent post at Soule Mama inspired me to to show some pictures of what we're doing to fight the February Funk. Jo asked for strawberries at the grocery store. I wasn't excited about off-season strawberries and we were going to dinner with friends, so we decided to dip the strawberries in chocolate to take them along for dessert. Yum. The bag of lemons in the background became sorbet. Fresh strawberries and lemon sorbet. I'm not thinking of summer at all. No. . . not me. Jo was just thinking about scraping every last bit of chocolate out of the dipping cup.

Want to make the sorbet?
2 c. sugar
1 3/4 c. water
1 1/2 c. lemon juice (that's about 12-14 smallish lemons)
2 T lemon zest

Mix the water and the sugar in a saucepan and bring it to a boil. Take it off the heat and set it aside to cool. Add the lemon juice and zest (and some of the pulp too) and pop it in the refrigerator to chill. Freeze it in an ice cream machine. Enjoy!

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February 3: Meiji Anniversary

Today's "On This Day..." feature for February 3rd on the Wikipedia home page features the anniversary of Emperor Meiji taking the throne in Japan. The "Meiji Restoration" is of course a major historical element in my young adult novel Samurai Shortstop, and precipitates much of the conflict between Toyo, his father, and the new Japan. The picture they feature (shown here) is the one Toyo sees hung on the wall of the ethics lecture hall at the beginning of chapter two.

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Uglies

Well, I finished Uglies and flew right through Pretties. I'm dying to jump into Specials but we don't own it yet and I'm not buying any more books until we move. We had to make our bookcases look nice and neat and that meant packing up all the books that were lying sideways and wedged into every free inch of space.

The premise of the series is terrific - a world where everyone has plastic surgery when they turn sixteen. Everyone is pretty - but they're also pretty vapid. There's definitely something sinister going on. But what I liked even more than the premise was the language. Scott Westerfeld manages to take a couple of words and give them new layers of meaning. Uglies who are tricky are especially clever at bucking the system. If you're feeling bubbly you're feeling excited and fully alive. But he also used a verb-as-adjective construction that felt immediately natural and easy to fall into. That leap was a little nervous-making. Snow would be totally pretty-making! This stunt is going to be famous-making! I loved it.

Now we just have to sell our house so I can read Specials, and then Peeps after that. It's a totally different kind of vampire book by the same author and it's been highly recommended by one of my favorite booksellers - Becca Wren at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Cleveland.

PS The Fabricationist writes in with a link to a very cool post on Scott Westerfeld's blog about naming the characters in the series. The link doesn't show as a link in the comments, so here it is for non-cut-and-paste-linking purposes. Alan and I always have really interesting discussions about the names of his characters and it was fun to see how another author approaches the same thing - very similarly, as it turns out.

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My Picture Pie Purse

I'm a huge Ed Emberley fan and we got Jo a couple of his Picture Pie books for Solstice. We made lots of pictures from construction paper - but the whole time I was thinking that these would make great applique patterns. We've been pretty busy lately getting the house on the market, but I did get this bit of crafting done.





















I made the mistake of using some fusible batting scraps and quilting the pieces before I did the satin stitching on the applique. My machine didn't like satin stitching through so many layers (especially since one of the fabrics I used was a thick upholstery fabric) but we survived and now this is my new favorite purse. I think these birds are from Ed Emberley's Picture Pie 2, but those books just got packed up so now I can't check to be sure.

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