tuckova

The Mysterious Edge of (children's) historical fiction (and more)

Dear E.L. Konigsburg,

With all due respect to you for bringing Claudia Kincaid into the world, you need to either get a better editor or stop writing.

"The View from Saturday" had a few sloppy mistakes in it. I was mainly angry at the Newbery people for choosing the book, because it meant it would be read more than it deserves to be read. The Magical Indian thing was ridiculous; the "she knew that she knew but she didn't know how she knew but he knew that she knew before she knew that she knew" stuff was just... you know, if you can't figure out what a character's motivation is, that doesn't mean you should coat it in twinkling magic in order to get the reader to swallow it. I thought it was sloppy plotting, and I thought it was beneath you. And then on top of that, sloppy writing: "[she] was not sure how much the correct amount [of French cuff to show from beneath jacket sleeves] was, but she knew that if she put a spirit-level to his, they would be exactly right." A...spirit level (hint: not hyphenated)? To measure length? Ch-wha? And then, as a nit-picking pointy brain, it really irritated me that a piece of the story hinges on a student standing up to the adults for what he knows to be right, and the book implies that he is right, only... he's not. This sort of took the wind out of the book's sails for me.

But I had no idea what it was to fall out of love with a beloved author from my childhood until I read "The Mysterious Edge of the Heroic World" because... wow. And not a good "wow". First, the characters have no clear voices (one of the redeeming features of "The View from Saturday"). They have no clear voices because they have no clear characters, and I don't mean they're complicated, but that they're self-contradictory. Second, we've got the sleeping fact-checker again at the helm for the Degenerate Art facts. The book implies that the degenerate art that is in the exhibition is also the art that was in the exhibition in 1937, but Renoir was not in the Degenerate Art exhibition; neither was Braque, Picasso, or van Gogh. And... All the Impressionists had a disease of the visual cortex? Ch-wha-? See, and these are just things I KNOW are wrong. But worse, worse, is this Noble Goal to call attention to the homosexuals killed during the Holocaust. It's not a bad story, but it's better if it's told right: there is no way that Pieter came home wearing a pink triangle. Things like this are almost worse than not telling the story at all. If you want to slip a little fact into your fiction to spice it up, it is possible to find actual facts that will do that without leading people to misunderstand history any more than they are already inclined to do. As it is, you're doing the writerly equivalent of chewing scenery on your way to another children's book award show, and I loved you, I did, but you have to stop this. Sloppy writing makes the world an uglier place than it needs to be.

Please get a better editor. No, really. You owe it to the children. You owe it to yourself.

****
In other books, David Sedaris sure loves himself some David Sedaris; Polish surrealism is troubling and excellent the second time around; and Alain de Botton writes well but keeping up with the Joneses is the least of my interests and I think he's lost me here. Squire and I are plugging along through Huck Finn and loving it a lot, though it makes us talk funny.

sleeping alone

When you are not here
I slip my leg over to your side
just to remind you
that it was my bed
in the first place

and wake at night
telling you a dream
but even if you were here
you would have slept
slept through the story.

there's a King Missile song called Mystical S***

I got nothing, friends.

Well, wait: I've got some photos. Friar and Squire built a new compost bin cause we outgrew the little one, and we expected to just turn the compost into a larger container but no, in six months we've gone from "hehn, I dunno, toss it on the compost with the rest of the shit" for egg cartons, vegetable peels, weeds, etc., to the blackest loamiest lushest soil I could have imagined. Like, people would pay for compost of this quality, really. I don't know if anybody's interested in that sort of thing but I feel really like superwoman about it, because a job that does itself is the best job of all. Plus there is nothing more fun than fitting "shit" into conversations like "we moved some shit from one place to another" or "we turned that shit around" or "I was up to my knees in shit this weekend" etc. For your viewing, I've only posted pics of the bin construction, cause some people are afraid of dirt (?).

Oh, and also some good, non-composty shit: My sister came to visit and it was incredible. It was basically like a year's worth of crashing walls and ensuing revelations condensed into 10 days of awesome. I feel really clear on some things and I feel pretty good about others. Also I feel really lucky to have such a cool sister, which I always feel that way but now even more so. It was the first time she's hung with Friar, and the longest time she's hung with Squire like since he was born, and it meant the world.

At her suggestion, I moved my desk into the living room in the hopes of separating work from the central hub of the house, which is the kitchen, because it was messing me up to work when I wanted to eat and to be thinking about work when I wanted to be socializing. The central hub of activity now seems to be moving into the living room, which is funny. However, my keyboard doesn't smell like cooking oil so much, so there's that.

In other news, and there will not be photos, I'm signed up for a belly dancing class with my friend who runs the school where the class is, because they need students. I am curious.

sister

My sister is visiting and she is smart and beautiful and wonderful and all the good adjectives you can think of, basically. Shortly before she left, the woman compressed and fractured her vertebrae falling off a swingset that her husband built for her to scale (pause for a moment and think about how cool that swingset is), and I was afraid she wouldn't make it, but she's standing in the kitchen making banana bread with my son right now. Eventually I may get around to posting stories and pictures but at the moment I am theoretically working so that later we can head out to the beer garden. I am having too much fun.