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?

Does blogging about my bookshelf ensure impending Crazy Cat Ladyhood?

Fear not, loyal No Pantsers. I've been making up for my laziness on the interwebz by being super productive in real life.

Par example, last week I reorganized my bookshelf. It used to be laid out according to author and genre so there was a chunk of Neruda books on the poetry shelf and all the Salingers huddled together on one end of the fiction shelf. But that was stupid and neurotic and, as it turns out, problematic, because what do you do with something like The Journals of Sylvia Plath, which wants to be with the rest of her Plathiness on the fiction shelf, but is technically non-fiction? Also, I have begun amassing a fair amount of plays in the last couple years, which, to my mind, lie in some nebulous not-quite poetry, not-quite fiction zone, and there's only so much space in the Ikea Flarke bookshelf.

So! Here was my solution:

That's right. It is now organized by color. Books with covers that are primarily covered in warm reds, oranges and browns are at the top, cool hued blues and greens are second, and then I divided the rest into spines that were mostly black or mostly white.

This pleases me on several levels. First of all, it's just prettier. Second, it's deceptively neurotic. It might seem less organized, but this shit took me an hour and a half. And it requires a certain level of observational skill to notice the grand chromatic scheme--the Boy I Like Better Than The Other Boys came over after it was done and I giddily asked, "See what I did to the bookself?!" His best guess before I finally told was, "Uhhhh, you moved the picture of your dog?" My bookshelf is like a brain teaser.

Twinkle Toes

Anyone else notice how J. Crew totally went off its meds this year and the results are magical?

I've spent the morning at work compiling my Christmas list, and although I set myself a $40 Global Economic Collapse Christmas List Item Limit, I decided to take a peek at J. Crew to see what I can't afford. As a lazy girl who likes attention, I find that the quickest way to meet both demands is by always wearing one vibrantly colored piece of clothing. As a result, I'm usually not a fan of J. Crew's loafers, cableknits and twinsets in various pastel hues. And don't get me wrong, they still have all that shit. But now you can get them in like, hot pink!

OR! You can opt for these:

This looks like something I would have concocted when I was 10 by hotgluing fake feathers from Michael's to some shoes out of the Dress-Up Drawer! It's all, "Wait, am I trudging around rainy Seattle or have I somehow just stepped into Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium?"

There was a time in my life when pretty equaled sequins. J. Crew's totally traditional, staid old a-line skirt? HOW ABOUT COVERING IT IN SPARKLES:

Hey, model. You are wearing a skirt that looks like liquid gold. How about you cut the jaded nonchalance crap and rise to the occasion? There's even a huge bow attached:

I love that they put it with a thermal tee that looks snuggly enough to sleep in. Because isn't that sort of the whole ethos of style as a child? You're imagination is just like, out of control and you want to be the kid on the playground wearing the raddest shit, but, you know, nap time is also a consideration. That's why I hate the way Katie Holmes dresses Suri, except for those sparkly red Wizard of Oz flats she wears sometimes. What kid gravitates towards neutrals?

Of course all of this is well out of my price range. But it is nice to see that if J. Crew is going to charge a bajillion dollars for their stuff, at least they're serving it with a little 'tude.

I'll eclipse your new moon

Sorry I haven't blogged in a while, I've been a little busy lately.

With what, you ask? Papers? Finals? Work?

No.

This:

All you tools who think you're too good for this series can go cry and read whatever it is you read. I'll be on my couch eating pretzels, squealing over sparkly vampires in meadows and enjoying the deliciously terrible writing by the raddest Mormon since Brigham Young.

And the writing is bad. Meyer has these little descriptive catchphrases that she uses over and over and over, my favorite being "...said so-and-so, through unmoving lips." Jigga, what? I tried this, I tried talking without moving my lips. I worked at it for about 10 minutes before I realized that there are people in the world who dedicate their entire lives to perfecting this craft. They're called ventriloquists.

And of course the whole thing is a thinly veiled chastity lesson. Um, a 17 year old girl who will literally get the blood sucked out of her if she bones her boyfriend? Couple that with the cover of the second book in the series...

...and you realize that subtlety is not high on Meyer's priority list. But still! The...the...seventeen-ness of it all is magical. J.K. Rowling may have the upper hand when it comes to plot, narrative, blah blah blah, but homegirl wishes she could write unmitigated teenage angst like this.

I'm about to start the 3rd book in the series, Eclipse, and the inside flap is taunting me with the following sentence: "With her graduation quickly approaching, Bella has one more decision to make: life or death. But which is which?"

INDEED!

Yes we did

I'm an English major. Before that I was a kid who read like an insane glutton. The way words bounce off of each other is the shape my brain takes. When Barack Obama said, "If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible...tonight is your answer," I couldn't get this out of my head:

"It's vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory, enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."

And when he said, "It's the answer that led those who have been told for so long, and by so many, to be cynical and fearful and doubtful about what we could achieve to put their hands on the arc of history and bend it once more towards the hope of a better day," this was on my mind.

I first read both of these--Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby and Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise"--a few months before the '04 election when I was 17, just shy of being able to vote. Despite the fact that I felt an unnerving disconnect between the hope in those words and the reality I saw unfolding around me, both took hold of my imagination and haven't let go since. Four years later my hope is that I never, ever have to read them with cynicism or bitterness again.

We were dancing and setting off fireworks on the Hill last night, but they passed Proposition 8 in California. Let's all listen to some Sam Cooke and get to work.