Brown Bear, Brown Bear

Here's what has me all tickled pink today:

Google is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the publication of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

And! Eric Carle has a blog! It's sweet and simple and friendly, and he's got some great pictures. Lke what his shoes look like after he's been painting all day:

Carle and his wife run the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst. Road trip to Massachusetts, anyone??

Maybe I shouldn't have had that third cup of coffee

Trying to conserve writing skills for paper due tonight. Here is the last couple weeks in pictures.

What my paper is on! Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi. Raddest thing I've ever written 10 pages about.

Favoritest shot from my photography final!

Super-on-sale dress I ordered from J.Crew yesterday while I was at work!

Picture I took in Paris of Hemingway's first apartment when he was poor that I totally forgot about having seen which is now taped to my bedroom wall above the stack of Hemingway books I'm using for my thesis!

Ok. Writing now.

Getting Kids to Read More: Ur Doin' It Wrong

Oh noes! The interwebz is rottin' our brainz! College students today have the literary taste of wittle girls, apparently.

Since I've blogged about both Stephenie Meyer and Maya Angelou, I feel the need to comment on this latest iteration of the "Kids today" sentiment. Especially since my last post was all about my bookshelf. See, Washington Post?? At least one of us has read Plath and Ginsberg! I have pictures! See? See??!

Jeebus.

While just about every paragraph in this article annoys me to the point of wanting to go out and read more Meyer and Rowling just to piss off the condescening professors "in full tweed glory" of the world, it's that tone that annoys me the most. That "everybody she knew was reading 'Soul On Ice'" tone. The only real live college student they talk to in the article is a senior-English-major-history-buff-pants at Kent State--in Ohio--and says of his peers, "The one book that I know everyone has read is 'I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell.' "

Since when is reading about "everybody"? What does "everybody" even mean these days? Last time I checked, we lived in a nation that was becoming more heterogeneous by the second. Isn't the fact that Nobody Agrees on Anything Anymore our big problem? The article cites the fact that "two-thirds of freshmen identify themselves as 'middle of the road' or 'conservative'" as evidence that all college students care about is beer. Two-thirds of freshmen. Two-thirds. Of freshmen. Really? Didn't think to ask some graduating seniors whether their political views and reading lists had changed a bit over the course of four years and a college education? No? I can't think of a single book that I know everyone at my school has read. Not even Harry Potter. Know why? BECAUSE GENERALIZATIONS R DUMB. If they're looking for "the Germaine Greers, the Jerry Rubins, the Hunter Thompsons, the Richard Brautigans -- those challenging, annoying, offensive, sometimes silly, always polemic authors whom young people used to adore to their parents' dismay," why are they looking at best-seller lists and only talking to a college student who decided to go to school in a moderate state and then bitches about how his classmates are politically moderate? I don't have numbers here, but I'm guessing the erotic journal of Anais Nin was not a staple of every bedside table, even in 1969. It's called a counterculture for a reason. Besides not, you know, talking to students, does the article look at The Orphan or bookninja or any blogs? No. And that's what makes it more irrelevant than anything else.

Whatever though, what I really hate is that reading gets characterized here as this thing you do for other people, so you can tick off a few totemic names over cocktail weenies or something. Why read just to piss of your parents? How about reading whatever makes you really, really ridiculously happy, or whatever finds its way in front of your face?