Nostalgia

As my eye wanders agross the late summer ruin of my garden I remember what it once yielded and remind myself that all we are is a sum of our cycles.

Why Oh Why?

I'm really going to try this challenge. I may be setting myself up for failure but hey! nothing ventured nothing gained. Besides, now that I mostly serve adult readers I may as well get with the program and read some big people books that I've been wanting to get to for a while.
Here are my first 3 of 12:
Matisse the Master by Hilary Spurling (Costa/Whitbread 2005)--This because I love this artist and because the subtitle the conquest of color just got my heart racing
American Gods by Neil Gaiman (Hugo Award 2002)--who needs an excuse to read Neil Gaiman?
Little,Big by John Crowley (World Fantasy Award 1982) I think fuse#8 or someone mentioned this one and I bought it in paperback. Now I have permission to read it.

I love you Esme

How many of you have worried and wondered about our extra special engaging entirely eminently epically epicentrally ebullient Esme? I have been checking on her for lo these months worrying and shredding napkins with my dog eared fingers until today when I see her finally and get the scoop on her Bookroom her new job and the future seeds of readiology. PlanetEsme Gingerbread Apartment will be the new incarnation of the Bookroom and will host the first annual Kidlitosphere blogger's convention. Can I lurk there? or better yet nibble there? Please? Anyway I just have to reproduce a Camus quote she uses in support of GENEROSITY and it's lasting legacy

Insane generosity is the generosity of rebellion, which unhesitatingly gives the strength of its love and without a moment's delay refutes injustice. Its merit lies in making no calculations, distributing everything it possesses to life and to living men. It is thus that it is prodigal in its gifts to men to come. Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present."

Esme you are truly an inspiration and a clear voice floating around in the literacy stew we librarians and teachers and parents slog through every day. I hope that I can take a piece of your "potato pedagogy" and feed whatever bodies will listen and hunger for the prodigious gifts of beautiful well written books.

Crossing the not-so-great divide

Well, I up and did it! I changed jobs and I am now an adult reference librarian in a different branch of the same library system. Mind you I still serve children and families I just do it from a different desk, and I have no programs to design and prep for. Why did I do it? I am a creature driven by instinct and intuition. I have a certain biological wiring that alerts me to danger and urges me move on and change my circumstance. I had been feeling beleaguered for some time about children's work and my role as a public librarian. The summer is always rough. I am not good at waiting out my peculiar ailment sometimes called restless head syndrome so I cut my hair, shed 2 lbs left the puppets, paper dolls egg shakers and flannel board behind and started to walk a new walk and let me tell you it's a very different rhythm. I still read children's books and check the blogs. What's up with Esme? So begins a new era of blogging. Bon chance!

Here is a picture my daughter sent me from Paris. She is living with a host family with trois enfants and here is one of their learning tools. Look familiar?

Michael Rosen scores big

Yipee! Michael Rosen, an extraordinary poet for children, has just been appointed UK's fifth Children's laureate. His mission for the next 2 years is to return books to the classroom. It seems reading has become detatched from books. His daughter brings home words from Gruffalo. but no Gruffalo book!
"Poetry, he says, is a great assistance in life." I would second and third that. I often tell children that poetry saved me from a life of chaos (that's the adult version) by lending it a living breathing structure of words I could comfortably and safely live inside and outside of. Here is the poem that got Mr. Rosen to grow those poetry wings:

Bat

At evening, sitting on this terrace,
When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara
Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ...

When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing
Brown hills surrounding ...

When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio
A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,
Against the current of obscure Arno ...

Look up, and you see things flying
Between the day and the night;
Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches
Where light pushes through;
A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.
A dip to the water.

And you think:
"The swallows are flying so late!"

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping
Yet missing the pure loop ...
A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight
And serrated wings against the sky,
Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,
And falling back.

Never swallows!
Bats!
The swallows are gone.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats
By the Ponte Vecchio ...
Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one's scalp
As the bats swoop overhead!
Flying madly.

Pipistrello!
Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.
Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;
And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags
And grinning in their sleep.
Bats!

Not for me!

DH Lawrence

A Bittner Brilliance

I want everyone who is invested in the world of children's literature, be you bookseller, librarian, teacher, parent, grandparent or aunt/uncle, to hightail it over to Reading Reptile and read this marvelous bit entitled:
TEN SECONDS: Running the Hurdles with Harry Potter
The sheer genius of its content and the structure of its delivery does my heart proud because once again I am reminded that I work in a field with smart people like this and I now count him and the Reptile family as my new family. How many of us have occupied that transcendent moment when trying to sell a book while mentally dodging all those commercial and social cliches that come flying at us like winged monkeys? I have spent the last week visiting close to 500 children in their classrooms trying to promote and sell the summer reading program at our public library. I tell them that it is my job to find them something they want to read and I mean that. I only hope that at least one of them will take me up on it.

tropism

This flower draws me out and in the way a gazing ball does. Books do the same. Two that I am reading now have a similar hypnotic affect. Something Invisible by Siobhan Parkinson and The Historian (audio) by Elizabeth Kostova. I have not finished either. Postponement is its own reward.