verloren in vertaling

Which, in Dutch, means “lost in translation.”

While in Amsterdam I checked out a number of bookstores hunting down the impossible: a discovery. The art of discovering something uncommon (or at least uncommon in one culture that might be totally popular in another) carries a certain cache “That proves you were there/That you heard of them first” as John McCrea once sang. I always do this when I travel, keep an eye out for that one unique thing I can bring back and say “Looky what I found!”

This time I was on the lookout for children’s book authors whose primary language was not English. I had hoped to find some French editions of Polo books — because I knew they were out there — but frankly the French sort books on the shelves funny and the one person I tried asking about Regis Faller’s books looked at me like I was from Mars.

In Amsterdam I was casually not looking for anything specifically when I spotted a number of books by a gentleman named Toon Tellegen. At an Internet cafe I did a quick search and found a site that said he was an award winning poet and writer of children’s books. Good enough. Next time I was in a bookstore I checked out the poetry section and — holy macaroli! — the man has an entire shelf to himself! So then I’m back in the children’s section looking at his books, trying to get a bead on what he’s up to.

But I never studied Dutch, I took German in high school, and where there are a lot of words in Dutch that sound the same as their German counterparts they aren’t written the same and I felt totally lost. I debated with myself — do I get something her and look for a translation when I get home, or do I just wait until I get home? I finally decided I was going to pick up one of his books and, hang it, if they weren’t in translation I’d translate it myself for fun. I had Suze help me decide on a book based by it’s cover and that was that.

Information was scarce, scarce in English at least. And translations from various Internet sites proved rough at best. Here’s the summary of the book I purchased — Maar Niet Uit Het Hart — as I was able to translate it.

The squirrel must take farewell of the ant. And ‘ not with lamentation and what I your missing will rapidly return and and this way ‘, because to that the ant has a hekel. But that cannot promise the squirrel. He certainly that he will continue think of the ant and him might weet forget. In but from the heart the most beautiful animal tales concerning farewell have not been brought at each other. For the tales concerning squirrel, ant and other one the animals tone Tellegen was among other things rewarded with the Woutertje Pieterse price, gouden the owl and twice with gouden the griffel. In 1997, he received the Theo Thijssen-prijs for its complete oeuvre.

Okay, I get it. I think. It didn’t take long to discover that, to date, only one of Tellegen’s books has made into English translation, and it was a book of poetry. The poems I was able to track down were extremely interesting and I had high hopes for my translation because it was clear I was going to have to work the book out on my own.

One sleepless night I sat at the computer and tackled the first chapter — three published pages — of the book using on-line dictionary and translation site, Babel Fish, for better or worse. Within a few sentences I began to be reminded of all the German grammar I suffered through, all the strange little rules for verbs and those little things that change the meaning of words but have no direct translation themselves. I worked line by line, then broke down specific words or phrases when their meaning seemed jumbled.

The word stof, for example, came up as substance. But contextually the characters were looking through a window and everything was covered in substance. I took a chance that the word was dust and tried translating it back into Dutch to see if I was correct. I was, and then the game got more complicated. The word rozenstruik came up as shrubshrub shrub in translation. A simple phonetic reading of the Dutch word seemed to indicate that it was a rose bush but the word rose came up as nam toe, which translates as the past tense of to rise, or increase.

Then I tried something wacky: I tried a Google image search for rozenstruik and came up image after image of shrubshrub shrubs: rose bushes.

I never pretended to imagine the work of a translator to be an easy one, nor did I imagine that the Internets, in all their glory of tubes and whatnot, would make quick work of the subtleties of written translation. What I didn’t fully expect or appreciate until I spent the wee small hours of the morning at it was how much like a puzzle it was, like code-breaking, cryptography. Each sentence contains a literal translation, that in turn requires the reader to make an interpretative translation in order to recover the meaning, followed by a contextual translation that works with the author’s intended meaning for the whole. Awesome stuff.

It’s been a week or so since doing those first pages. I’m not on a deadline with this, it’s just something to do when I need a diversion. I sincerely doubt it will even find a state where it could be published; assuming it’s worth the translation for an English speaking market, I’m sure someone else will get to it before I could anyway.

But in an odd way it’s fun. One day I hope to discover what exactly the Ant and the Squirrel saw, and how farewell (which I suspect may be a euphemism for death) plays into it all. It’s certainly still a discovery for me as I unlock the mystery of what is written on the pages.

It feels like learning to read all over.

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& the critical essay, as submitted

As I mentioned, when I was originally putting my application package together I had finished the spit and polish on my critical essay and went back to check and make sure I didn’t screw up the page length requirement. It seems a small thing, but I really didn’t want to look like a dingledork chowdermonkey: I got the page count right but the focus of the essay was all wrong, wrong wrong.

See I was supposed to talk about a book in relation to the craft of writing, an analysis piece that showed I knew how to pick the meat from the bones and examine the undercarriage. Under the gun with only four days before I had to send off my application materials I decided against rewriting the essay I’d just finished and took the college at its word when they said I could submit something previously written.

And that meant finding something suitable.

A cruise through the archives of the excelsior file dragged me back to a review I’d done for a YA title called Joker. I liked something about the tone of the piece, and that it allowed for a direct comparison with that fluffy playwright Bill Shakes, so with my nose to the whetstone I hacked it to bits and made it fit Cinderella’s slipper.

Herewith is the souped-up final draft.

A Portrait of the Dane as a Young Adult Character
Joker
by Ranulfo, HarperCollins 2006

Shakespeare’s Hamlet contains all the elements necessary for great Young Adult fiction. There’s a remarried mother, a devoted-yet-tragic girl, a sadistically vengeful boy, the haunting of the dead, meddling friends and families, in-jokes and meta-drama, double-crosses and, yes, even multiple murders both accidental and premeditated. Perhaps murder isn’t a necessary element for Young Adult fiction when a good suicide will do (and Hamlet also has one of those) though it does add an extra jolt of drama.

But at it’s core Hamlet is the tragedy of an individual driven to self-destruction. Hamlet’s father is dead, murdered we later learn (from his father’s ghost) by his brother, Hamlet’s mother remarries said brother, and the young prince is urged onto a mission of revenge against all parties. Hamlet plays at madness as part of his vengeful scheme and though it pains him on some fronts to take down innocents along the way, the collateral damage is a necessary part of his single-minded determination. Hamlet correctly draws out the guilt of all parties, the bodies pile up, and he pays for all this righteousness with his own life.

No such luck here with Ranulfo’s Joker, and if that counts as a plot spoiler then it should also serve as a warning that the book isn’t so much the self-proclaimed adaptation of Hamlet as it is a relatively bloodless variation on a loosely-based theme.

It’s safe to say that wearing the skin of a bear does not make the person a bear, nor does wearing a necklace of sharks teeth give the bearer the bite or the ferocity of a killer. Assuming the audience isn’t familiar with the original it follows that fashioning a costume of modern dress over the amateurishly assembled fossil remains of Shakespeare does not necessarily guarantee a fully engaging tale of teen angst or feigned madness. To a modern audience familiar with the source material it seems fair to expect an updated version would provide new insights and relevance, otherwise why retell the story? The exercise then becomes one of appropriation with little to show for itself.

Particulars appear to be rearranged for our modern age. We teach school children the blood and guts of the original Hamlet but it appears we could never tell the same story in a modern setting for fear of appearing gratuitously violent or histrionic. Ranulfo opens with Matt – our modern Hamlet – reeling from his parents divorce. No, his father is not dead, just drunk and broken from having been fool enough to let this cypher of a Gertrude slip away from him. The interloper in this case isn’t even a relative but some smooth-talker from the sales department at dad’s company. The dead party is Matt’s best friend Ray who died off-stage in an arson fire set at a youth hostel. Matt may be feeling some guilt over this because it was a holiday trip he backed out of, but his feelings are a bit muddied here. Already, by splitting up the death-and-remarriage, and by making that death a random act on another character rather than a closely personal loss integral to the plot, Ranulfo has drained the original story of it’s potency and emotional center.

In an attempt to compensate Ranulfo has created the character of Joker to bring out Matt’s inner demons, an evil trickster of a free spirit who, if removed entirely from the book, changes nothing. Serving as occasional alter ego, the book’s title character does little to convince us of Matt’s madness, internal suffering, or of providing Matt much in the way of guidance. At best Joker seems a literary contrivance aimed at convincing readers of some dark, sinister force at work behind the scenes.

Ophelia – Leah here – is as much the clinging girlfriend as she is in Hamlet. There’s a lost opportunity in this where Ranulfo might have shown us the greater reason for her devotion, or better mirrored what Hamlet/Matt was once like before the great tragedy came. There’s a fine line between undeveloped and under-developed being trod here, neither being a great position to take.

And it continues. Hamlet’s journey abroad with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern becomes a mere blip of self-exile at a trailer parked along the beach, with the messenger’s bloodshed replaced by their dropping out of society to join the circus. The play-within-a-play is translated as Matt’s attempt at social commentary through artistic expression — an abusive retelling of the musical South Pacific — and not the thing wherein he captures the conscience of the step-dad from sales, much less a king. Finally, where emotions should be driving everyone mad and bodies should be piling up, Ranulfo has Matt running away to the big city for an encounter with anti-World Trade Organization protesters that leaves him feeling like he needs to return home.

But home to what? On the bus ride home Matt dreams all his possible futures (well, a handful at least, and only the most extreme versions), back to Leah, to his senses, and mostly to the conclusion that love triumphs over anger and vengeance any day.

That makes for a tidy little ending, almost trite, and with so much source material to work with therein lies the tragedy.

When she read it my Suze thought I spent a little too much time talking about the original Hamlet, but I maintained (and still do) that this great tragedy, properly handled, could yield an amazing YA novel. I’m not saying I’m the one to do it, but I think it’s out there.

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personal essay, as submitted

This is it, the one I finally settled on. The edit was a bloodbath — it was twice and long and four times as meandering as it needed to be originally. I think if I hadn’t been on a short deadline (of my own design) I’d have written at least 20 different versions, each with merit, and not be able to decide on which to go with. I’m the same way with opening chapters, by the way.

Without further ado, as submitted with my application:

The Personal Essay
of David Elzey

I published my first book in the fifth grade, co-written with my best friend Marc, entitled This Book Is Not Very Punny. Eight mini-sized mimeographed pages of illustrated puns, the book was poorly received, the criticism crushing; the boys were jealous because it made them laugh, the girls felt the humor juvenile and beneath them. Shortly thereafter I announced I would one day be an animator for Disney.

I wasn’t ready to be a writer.

I went to art school and learned that the history of art grew out of storytelling. The history of film taught me I had no stomach for Hollywood. French New Wave and German Expressionist movies spoke to my soul but I didn’t know how to decode the language. I graduated from college with a major in Experimental Film and Video and a minor in Confusion. I seriously considered becoming a Buddhist monk.

Instead I went back to school and became a junior high school teacher.

Little accidents began to take place. A friend’s daughter told me to read a book by Daniel Pinkwater called Fat Men From Space. The book was new to me but it reminded me what a joy the books of my past had been. I happened onto a bookstore reading by Francesca Lia Block for her debut Weetzie Bat and it was as if a window had been opened into my past. Childhood memories flooded my thoughts and I began to see my classroom experiences from a different perspective. A character sprang to mind, a series of stories, a young adult novel fluttered. I took ten vacation days from work and hammered out a rough draft. It had some fun, a smudge of promise, but I was uncomfortable with the novel format. Still, I was writing and that felt good.

I began working with screenplays, movies intended for adults, believing they were somehow more “serious” than books for kids. At the same time I volunteered at a radio station and began reviewing movies. I learned the art of writing the 20-second public service announcement and eventually taught courses in writing for radio. I also formed a writer’s group that met weekly to discuss and critique each other’s work. I felt like things were moving along. I also felt like I was running in place.

So I quit my job, liquefied my assets, and went to Europe. I didn’t intend to become the cartoon stereotype of the American abroad on a journey of self-discovery but, as is often case, the minute you stop looking for something is when you find it. I had been trying so hard to be a writer that I had forgotten what it was to enjoy the process. Worse, I had ignored my own instincts by abandoning children’s books when that was the very thing that sparked my writing in the first place.

I returned to the States and began by working in bookstores. I began reading and studying children’s books. I read the professional journals and joined the SCBWI, believing every time I renewed that “this year” would be the one I would be able to list the dues as a tax deduction.

It was only a year ago that my wife Suze delicately pointed out that her salary was three times the size of mine and, well, we could afford it if I wanted to take time off to write.

I supplemented my writing with an internship at the Horn Book where my education continued and I was asked to write reviews. Afterward I took up (and still maintain) a part-time position at a children’s book shop in town which provides me time to devote to my own writing. I’ve set up shop on the Internet reviewing children’s books in all formats and genres. Short of mimeographing my stories and handing them out to classmates, I feel I’ve come back to the point where it all began, to take on the revisions and suggestions of instructors and fellow classmates, to tell the stories I’ve been longing to tell.

I’m ready.

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acceptable

adjective capable or worthy of being accepted.

Which is to say, I got into grad school.

I started putting this blog together at around a month ago just after I applied. I had a September 1st deadline for a January start and I honestly didn’t expect to hear anything before the middle of October. In the meantime I pressed ahead with the idea that I wanted a place to lay down some of my non-review kidlit (and non-kidlit) related thinking. I also sort of envisioned this blog as an occasional diary of my progress through school and all the ways various aspects of my life intersect through it. On a larger scale, this blog will be a bridge between my quasi amateur kidlit blogger self and (hopefully) my full-on post-graduate published author self.

I am nothing if not a grand schemer.

Early on I put up the story of my personal essay hell from high school and one from a job.  I also tossed out the critical essay that I didn’t use because I screwed up on the requirements when I wrote it and tried something totally different at the very last minute.  I knew at some point I’d post the writing samples I sent, but I was just superstitious enough to hold off until I was sure I was in.  Later this week I’ll drop the personal essay that I used, this weekend I’ll follow up with the critical essay that I did send.

It hasn’t sunk in that I made it, or at least it doesn’t feel different.  Yet.  At some point it’s going to hit me that I got what I wished for and we all know how careful we have to be about these things we wish for.  Even when we earn them.  I’m looking forward to this with a mild glee now that I’m sure will become sheer terror come the first day of classes.  Or as I have to remind myself at times it’s not fear, it’s excitement!

I’ll be attending classes here, for those who are interested.   Yes, I’m excited!

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big stinky review fun

I just finished up my most recent batch of books to review and was thinking “Hmm, what should I read next?” when a ginormous padded mailer came from the nice UPS man filled with my next batch of books.

Wow. So many trees, giving up their lives so valiantly in the name of books that should never have been published.

I don’t have it worked out scientifically, but if I had to guess I’d say maybe 10% of what I read for review was worthy of the ink and the rest are not. I’m spared the truly dreadful self-published items (truly, truly dreadful, I must say) but occasionally a stinker lands in my lap and there’s nothing to do but hold your nose and dive in.

Out of kindness for all involved I am not revealing the title, but there’s a tiny little sticky note on one of my review books with a small handwritten “sorry” printed on it. It’s nice to know that my editor (or their assistant) cares enough to acknowledge the inherent pollution involved.

Sorry indeed.

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ant farm by simon rich

This collection of shorter humorous pieces — I hesitate to use the word story as so many are written only to hit a punchline — are either the first inklings of a major force in humor or the short, brilliant sparks of beer-infused talent at the cusp of spiraling into oblivion.

Personally, I’m hoping for the latter.

Simon Rich, with his Harvard degree and his being all Mr. President of The Harvard Lampoon, who does he think he is having his oh-so-clever little observations published just in time for graduation? Who the hell is this kid with testimonial from Jon Stewart on the front and back cover — what, you couldn’t find more than one person to say nice things about you? I noticed, Simon, that half of these little stories of yours (if you can call them stories, most are just little fragments of dialog) were previously published in that paragon of literary lights The Harvard Lampoon; were you unable to get anyone outside of your alma mater to give you a few inches of space in their journals and magazines? I bet you didn’t even try, I bet the whole thing is just a bunch of back-slapping good-ol-boys insider club wheeling-dealing. And as for the other half of the book, what was that, contractual filler that the publisher requested after you handed in a twenty-five page manuscript? Your success is a farce, my friend, your talent…

Actually, your stuff is pretty damn funny, I have to admit. I’m not going to say you hit it out of the park because there are a few items that do feel a bit like filler, where the humor is stretched a bit thin. Where you do hit, you hit well, strong and solid. The pieces are like finely crafted commercials, dialog and description succinct and powerful, and just like that on to the next.

“a conversation at the grown-ups’ table as imagined at the kids table” is nothing short of brilliant. It’s the kind of thing that The National Lampoon Radio Hour wished they’d written, the kind of thing the early Saturday Night Live might have tried, and exactly the sort of thing Hollywood would use to build a movie franchise out of… a bad movie franchise. Think Look Whose Talking meets Charles Bukowski. No, don’t think it, don’t even reread that sentence! Hollywood can hear our thoughts and that’s why they make the crap they do. That’s how they get away with saying “We’re giving the people what they want!” No! We don’t want it, we’re just joking! It’s a joke! Please, don’t make any more crappy movies! I beg you! Get out of my head!

This isn’t much of a review. Sorry about that. Let me rectify the situation here and now. Most of what Rich writes about concerns the life of children, kids of all ages, and those childhood perceptions that sometimes get in the way of our world view. There’s a short drama about what a third grader imagines the UNICEF headquarters are like (UNICEF is a tyrannical despot using kids to collect money to make himself rich), a seventh grade fantasy where all the jocks become slaves to the nerds, the best friend who has a sex-addicted fashion model girlfriend that clearly is a figment of his friend’s imagination, and a variety of other (57 in all) situations where things don’t go as planned. Simon writes what he knows, and at the age of 22 he still remembers vividly and painfully how unfair middle school was, taking the even-handed lack of justice from the principal’s office and applies it to the adult courtroom.

How was that, did that sound more like a book review? I tried to keep that paragraph factual without letting my bitter jealousy and rancor seep through.

What? No, I’m not jealous. Did I say that? I don’t think I did. No, no. Not at all jealous.

(Jerkwad.)

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the sweet spot

My blog subscriptions are a funny collection of who I am, what interests me. I’m sure everyone’s collection of interests has a few odd pieces.

One of the places I visit regularly is Seth Godin’s blog entitled, uh, Seth’s Blog. Seth is marketing guru, a guy who is constantly looking at and rethinking the ways business works (and doesn’t work) in this modern age. I like his approach, and I’ve found over time dozens of posts that bring up ideas that can be applied to *ahem* authors looking to increase their visibility in the marketplace.

A recent post, however, brings out a very interesting factoid about publishing and reviewing.

If you want to get reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, don’t even consider self-publishing. Don’t write a how to book. Don’t write something particularly funny, either. But it sure helps to be published by Knopf. Literary fiction by respected writers published by Knopf is the sweet spot (history comes in a close second).

He’s not reporting fact so much as he’s providing statistical documentation. Finding the “sweet spot” — that mythical place that allows for an extra advantage — often appears to be the analysis of practical data and applying it judiciously. The Writer’s Market books will tell you which publishers prefer what subjects, and in doing so indicate their bias in terms of interest which they can measure and calculate into earnings. Part of this equation also has to do with what can be generated from reviews, good press and exposure.

The bias probably isn’t so much intentional as it is institutional. Over the years the folks at Knopf have become close with the folks at the NYT Book Review and, naturally, those books gain favor as a result. Not as a favor, but by proximity and availability. A publicist builds a relationship with a particular critic or media host, that publisher gets more books in front of that one person, the scales are going to tip that way. I saw it happen at the radio station I worked at. It isn’t conscious, it just happens until one day someone goes “Say, we’ve seen a lot of people from Running Nose Press lately, let’s try and open things up a bit.”

That said, I’m now wondering how these things play out in children’s publishing. I’ve seen smaller houses with exceptional books get barely a sliver of the coverage that mediocre (and worse) books get from the bigger houses. It underscores how much harder smaller publishers have to work to get heard above the din, equally highlighting the fact that larger publishers can “take more chances” (i.e. be lazier about selecting better books) because in the end something is bound to hit. The old quality versus quantity thing again.

I don’t write with hitting a publisher’s sweet spot in mind, but I’m beginning to wonder if that isn’t how a lot of books get on the shelves.

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99 & 44/100% female

It was one of those things that came up in a conversation late at night while we were drifting off to sleep. I talked about how, in the bookstore, the adults who are shopping are 90% female. In fact, I said, you didn’t really notice that the clientelle was all women until you’d see the first guy of the day roll in sometime late in the afternoon, often after work.

“90%, really?” Suze asked. I thought a moment.

“Maybe more like 99% because some days you don’t see any males in the store over the age of 12.”

And here we have an interesting social commentary because the authors of the books being written aren’t represented by those numbers. In fact I’d say there were more men involved in writing and illustrating books then women.

Huh, that would be an interesting bit of data to ferret out. Just what is the breakdown in children’s literature between men and women? The stereotype of the editor is that of a male unless it’s in children’s publishing in which case it’s a female stereotype.

But what does all this say about a commodity like a book for a child, especially a boy, if the vast majority of those making the purchases are women and the editors deciding what to publish are predominantly women as well? (Can we throw in librarians as well?)

Hold on now, let’s think about this. There are all sorts of articles about the problems of getting boys to read, and to build active readers, but what adults are making these decisions for the boys? On the purely front line level I can tell you a boy would rather be thrown into a flaming pit surrounded by hungry tigers (there’s a boy image for you) than be dragged into a bookstore by his mother. And when mom is trying to find a book for her precious little boy, and she says “tell the nice man what you’re interested in” you might as well be telling him to stand naked in front of his classmates.

I can think of no less than three regulars who drag their sons into the bookstore and constantly — constantly and viciously — deny them any book that interests them. They’ll pick up a book that looks interesting to them, mom will read the back and hand it off to me saying “Nothing like this.” You won’t see a boy’s spirit crushed faster than when he’s told the one stinkin’ book he found interesting was casually tossed aside by his mother because it wasn’t something she’d want him reading.

The result: the boy has no interest in reading anything.

I had one mother ask for recommendations on “action and adventure books” for her son because that’s what he was into. He was 11 going on 12 and his interest was well beyond what was traditional middle grade readers. She even offered that his favorite recent movie was The Bourne Ultimatum. That would seem to indicate that he could handle something like Alex Rider series but we’ll never know because mom wrote those off as “too violent.”

Hello?

She also turned down the Young James Bond series for similar reasons. Sensing that mom was perhaps not interested in pushing her son out of middle grade fiction just yet I backed up and tried some Barbara Park books.

“Nope. Divorce. He doesn’t need to see that.”

I tried some Jerry Spinelli.

“He really isn’t a very good writer. Do kids really like that stuff?”

I thought Gary Paulson’s Hatchet would fill the adventure slot.

“Too violent. I don’t like it.”

That’s when she dropped the bomb and told me that she read all of her son’s books before letting him read them, and if they didn’t interest her then she wouldn’t pass them along. There’s a fine line between making a strong recommendation and questioning someone’s parenting choices, and when those situations arise I throw up my hands. In retail this means finding a nice quiet way to leave the customer on their own because they aren’t listening anyway.

That’s the problem isn’t it, listening to the boys?

The answers are simple and difficult at the same time. Boys need to go book shopping with their dads, and their dads need a crash course in shopping as it is. Parents need to do a little reading on some current trends and theories behind children’s literature and reading, much like the research they did when reading their baby and early childhood development books. And boys need to learn a bit about themselves, about the things they do and don’t like, they need to learn how to articulate those things so they can walk into a bookstore and ask for a recommendation without saying something like “You got anything with, I dunno, fantasy and stuff?”

Jon Scieszka has a good thing going over at Guys Read, and his recent conversation in The Horn Book with editor Roger Sutton might open a few eyes as well (the current issue is a special dealing with gender). Additionally School Library Journal has an article discussing this evergreen hot topic.

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let the book be a book

Historian and author Marc Aronson has a blog at School Library Journal called Nonfiction Matters. In his posts he regularly addresses the issues surrounding nonfiction and history as it’s presented in children’s books.

In a recent post he discussed the idea that a book be something more than just a book, that interactive media should be included and that publishers couldn’t be counted on to do this. This was in reference to his seven year old son who, in his words

“wants the book to include places for readers to come up with their own ideas, suggest their own theories, email the author, post to a blog, make discoveries. He wants reading to be active and participatory, like the video games he so enjoys.

In one way he is asking for a book to be a book plus a parent, a teacher, a librarian.”

What set me off about this was the idea that a book needed to do something more, that the book couldn’t be a book. I know sometimes I can come off as a naysayer about these things — I am not a technophobe — but I’ve long felt that the adoption of technology often swept people up in the “wow” factor, allowing for transgressions and blind acceptance where a good dose of skepticism and consideration is in order.

What his son wants is a video game, something that doesn’t have anything to do with reading, that offers the illusion of accomplishment (level 18, YES!) while offering nothing substantive. A book is hard to a modern reader because culturally we have moved away from the difficult and embraced the easy. We have moved away from encyclopedias and toward Wikipedia, away from critical thinking and toward multitasking, away from the time it takes to locate and discover sources in order to become expedient and easy.

If a book did all the things his son wanted — acting as parent, teacher and librarian — essentially what he has been conditioned to want is convenience at the expense of social networking. If a book leads to questions, and questions lead to a variety of sources, and that information needs to be synthesized then the child not only gains the information but the ability to learn how to process that information and, most importantly, learn to discern ideas and truths for him or herself.

If a child says they would like their vegetables better if they tasted like honey would we be so quick to add honey to everything and have them come to expect all vegetables be so doctored? If we answer their calls to make all books an interactive media experience that best simulate the elements of electronic games and the instant gratification of the Internet are we not creating a similar veil?

Let a book be a book, was the comment I left for Aronson. And to follow up, let’s worry more about teaching children how to read a book — not just the word and meanings, not just the standardized test version of comprehension, grammar and structure — let’s make sure they know how to take any book and use it to their advantage, the bend it to their will and make use of the knowledge it contains. Without computers, without technology. Let’s get back to what it means to read.

Amended to his post Aronson pointed to a film created by teenagers in Second Life, an interactive space where people can live alternate lives through avatars they control. To him this was a sort of proof as to the kind of things kids can do with technology today.

I guffawed out loud when I saw the piece. Not that the student’s efforts lacked sincerity or seriousness — they were discussing the child warriors in Africa — but because what they did could have been accomplished 30 years earlier with the available technology. I know, I was part of a group of kids who, in 1977, used what “cutting edge” video technology we had available to us to record a newscast of the future (the year 2000) based on scientific information at the time. Surprise! Our lead story was global warming (we called it the greenhouse effect) and it looks like we might have been onto something!

All that aside, the use of technology didn’t necessarily give our education a “value add” or any sort of edge over our ability to read and think and understand our subject better than a traditional book report. It may have held our interest better, pandered a bit to our desire to “play” at school and call it “work,” but I can’t say we necessarily benefited from it.

A few days later Aronson replied to my comment by conceding the point that revolutionary educational technology was, essentially, always just around the corner and that waiting on it would be erroneous. Later he countered my arguments against the adoption of external media by saying:

“I am suggesting that a teacher, librarian, or parent could well supply the kinds of questions and challenges my son is looking for in a book. But the reality is that in most cases that will not happen. This is not just a question of time and motivation, but, as I’ve often pointed out in this column, we cannot expect teachers to have sufficient background in all of the subject areas that inspire young readers’ curiosity. So the appeal of creating these digital echoes of books — should that ever happen — is that it will guarantee readers some way to act on the questions and ideas prompted by book.

Huh. Teachers have never been expected to be all things, and yet this hasn’t been an issue in the past. If the concern is that we’ve accelerated the culture to the extent that we cannot keep up, it is still erroneous to expect answers to come from the source. American technology has accelerated at the speed of commerce and is designed for a consumer market, not an intellectual one.

The answer then is we need to teach our children to be readers, critical thinkers, and moderate consumers. Yes, we want to encourage their thirst for knowledge, but we need to make sure they are consuming quality, not quantity, and that their consumption has a purpose. Asking books to include “echo websites” or interactive media only increases the expectation that a book be something more than what it is… a book.

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NSFK

Everyone’s acronym crazy these days, and text messaging seems to be a fact of life, so why not join in the fun!  NSFK now means Not Safe For Kids which I’m throwing out there for use however and whichever way it works you all.

Actually, I was surprised it hasn’t already come up. We’ve got tonnes of material out there marked NSFW (Not Safe For Work) but not everyone on a computer is at a job site, and certainly not everything is safe for kids!  One could argue that if it isn’t safe for work then ipso facto you wouldn’t want to check it out around kids, but that isn’t always true now, is it?

It’s like the MPAA movie ratings, where scenes of violence can earn a PG, violence and mild language can earn a PG-13, scenes with naked people and violence and language garner an R, and the act of love-making automatically throws down the NC-17.  NSFW could cover the last two (or three, depending on the office) on that list, but what about the children!

A quick check on Google and the Acronym Finder shows that NSFK has previously only been used for the Nationalsozialistisches Fliegerkorks, or the National Socialst Flyers Corps of Nazi Germany. While that makes its use a bit risky it isn’t really widely known and perhaps it’s time has come for a bit of appropriation and reassignment.

So there it is.

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accidental essay

When I was working up application materials I had a critical essay I needed to include. I really liked this book I picked up on my vacation and felt — aside from the essay — that I had something to say about the possible uses of historical non-fiction for teens.

When I was just about done with the spit-and-polish on the essay I went back to the application to double-check on the page count and noticed that they specifically requested the essay make reference to the writing process, the craft of writing, how writing can change the world and cure communicable diseases worldwide.

Okay, I made that last part up. But I realized that I had to start over with an entirely new essay. I dug up an old review from the other blog and got to work honing it into a piece of razor-sharp insights and literary combustification. This is not the essay I sent, this is the “wrong” one. I still like it.

A History of Second-hand Truths
Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants by Herodotus
reviewed by David Elzey

I hated history as a teen. As far as I was concerned history, the factual recounting of what had taken place in the world, was as dead as the trees it was printed on in textbooks. The word itself teases by containing the word “story” but what was offered up was an anemic tale at best, a neutered account of names and places in oversimplified contexts meant to impart a greater meaning.

What I needed – what is needed in general – was to go to the source. Young readers are constantly struggling to understand the world and their place in it and history, presented in an engaging manner, can provide that. By using historical documents and texts that speak of the world in a first-hand way, that show history as a raw tale of events, readers can filter and conceptualize within the context of their own personal truths and understanding.

For those who doubt this sort of thing can be done I only need point to the first book in the new Penguin Great Journeys series entitled Snakes with Wings and Gold-digging Ants, a selection from the writings of Herodotus. In a scant 115 pages we are treated to alleged first-hand accounts of the peoples and histories of the North African region as they existed 400 years B.C. by a man classically known as Cicero, The Father of History. With that little information alone as introduction the book plunges into some of the more extravagant histories ever recounted by an unreliable narrator.

Herodotus admits that he has heard fantastical tales of the people of the region but decides to limit his accounts only to those stories and events that he has witnessed with his own eyes… or second-hand from those he feels are reliable. A fair enough claim for a historian to make, but then he goes on to recount events from which he couldn’t have possibly been witness, and worse, claims to see things that we know to be patently untrue. He uses historical accounts from various peoples of the region to pick apart Homer’s account of the Iliad and provides an alternate interpretation. He notes, and approves of, the various polygamous tribes he encounters and makes many references of practices adopted by the Greeks that were clearly borrowed from others.

Things get trickier when he claims that no people live beyond the eastern edge of the great deserts of India (essentially all of Asia), or that there are tribes of native Indians whose semen is as black as their skin. To modern ears these claims smack of a blindness reminiscent of sailor’s tales that you could sail off the edge of the world (or presidents who insist on the presence of Weapons of Mass Destruction and that invading armies will be received favorably as liberators). It then becomes imperative that readers – and I’m speaking of young readers in particular – come to understand the historian within their times, in context, and to extrapolate from that how this “factual” information can be used to generate false assumptions. The Father of History suddenly looks to be nothing more than the gatherer of regional tales, the paterfamilias in a continuing line of storytellers.

It can be risky to introduce young adults to the idea that first-person history must always be viewed with skepticism as it opens the doors for micro-revisionism and unchecked bias, but as a tool for teaching critical thinking of what makes history meaningful the risk is worth taking.

Whether or not Herodotus’s errors were deliberate, they do still hold up as a window into what was popularly believed at the time. His reportage would leave something to be desired by modern standards, but that’s exactly the point in the study of history; the truth of the moment changes as it is understood from the standpoint of a later time.

There is a certain shrewd brilliance in this collection, pulling excepts that clearly read like an adventurer’s travelogue meant to tantalize. No doubt Penguin would like it if, their appetite whetted by the excerpts, readers went hunting down the larger editions within their back catalog. Where this smörgåsbord-style of study lacks the coherence of a traditional world history textbook its presentation makes up the difference by providing engaging historical documents – first-person accounts at that – with the promise of bringing history to life.

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