Do's and Don'ts of Sightseeing

Here are the things I did right and the things I did wrong in our tour of USC and downtown LA yesterday:

RIGHT:
1) Leave extra time for travel even though the man at the hotel desk says that you can drive from Santa Monica to USC in half an hour in rush hour traffic. Maybe you can, and maybe you can't. After all, he didn't know I would miss the turn into Gate 3 on Figueroa Street and have to drive all the way around the large USC campus for a second try at it.
2) Take your guidebook with you even though you hadn't originally planned to go directly from USC to explore downtown LA. It's lovely to have options.
3) Check out guidebooks from the public library rather than buying them - the library has heaps, and why pay money for a book you'll just use for a week and then never use again?
4) Take public transportation instead of driving. We decided to leave our car in the parking lot at USC - $8 paid already there - and take the DASH bus downtown - for a quarter! - and then take the USC shuttle bus back from Union Station - for free! It made us feel much more as if we were savvy locals.
4) Ask questions. Because I asked if we could go into Frank Gehry's magnificent Disney Concert Hall, even though it was closed and past the hour for paid tours, I found out that we could walk up to the rooftop gardens, where we could see the "Rose for Lily" fountain made entirely of bits of broken Delftware, my favorite sight of the day.
5) Pick out at least one unusual sight to see. I think Gregory's favorite may have been the CalTrans headquarters at 1st and Main, which our guidebook told us had been voted as the "ugliest building" downtown. We went out of our way to see it, and it was indeed gratifyingly ugly!

WRONG:
1) Don't follow the guidebook too slavishly. I made the mistake of setting my heart on doing the Fodor's walking tour in order from start to finish, which means that I was so bent on starting with sight number one on the list that I actually walked by sights six, seven, and eight, refusing to look at them because we hadn't yet gotten to them on the list. Alas, as we walked on, it turned out that it would take us too far out of our way to cycle back to those attractions, so we never saw them at all. I may now live the rest of my life without ever seeing the Millennium Biltmore Hotel (an "atmospheric 19290s stunner") or even worse, not seeing the Riordan Central Library of the same period - all because I was so determined to do the tour in order. Very foolish!

Still, it was a near-perfect day: DASH bus ride, Delftware fountain, and ugly building!

Greetings from Santa Monica

I'm in California for a week with Gregory and his girlfriend, Sierra, looking at some colleges, which seemed like the middle-class parent thing to do. Sierra brought her laptop with her, so I can still blog - hooray!

My thought today is how hard it is to be a grownup, to be the one who has to figure out where to pick up the rental car, has to stand in line to get the rental car (after being the one who reserved the rental car on the Internet in the first place), and has to drive the rental car. My dear friend, David, who is the chair of the Philosophy Department, has told me that one of the things he likes about being chair is getting to do grownup things. He said, when you're a kid, people tell you when the meeting is; when you're a grownup, you get to pick when the meeting is. But I'd rather be a kid. This grownup business has never suited me one bit.

Luckily, at the last minute I did find myself a grownup to help with at least the driving portion of the trip. I splurged and rented a GPS to go with the rental car. What a relief to have that capable, adult voice telling me to go 1.4 kilometers and then turn right. (Unfortunately, she is a metric-system grownup, and I don't know how to explain to her that I can't do the metric system.) I call her "Mrs. Lady" and it's so reassuring to be able to push the little button and have Mrs. Lady tell me what to do. She did have one small lapse at one point, where she had to pause and recalculate, so she isn't perfect, but heck, you don't have to tell me that it isn't easy being the grownup. It really isn't.

The Author's Perspective

Yesterday I had the enormous fun of speaking at Prof. Shelby Wolf’s children’s literature class at CU. I was invited because I’m contributing the chapter on “The Author’s Perspective” to the huge and fabulously ambitious Handbook of Research on Children’s and Young Adult Literature, which Shelby is co-editing with three other prominent scholars: Karen Coats of Illinois State University, Patricia Enciso of Ohio State University, and Christine A. Jenkins of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne.

The goal of this eagerly awaited, massive tome is to bring together research done on children’s literature from three different disciplinary perspectives: literature, education, and library science. All three fields study children’s literature, but seldom come into dialogue with one another, their scholars publishing in their own distinctive journals and attending their own distinctive conferences. The Handbook plans to survey research in children’s literature by focusing on the book (from the perspective of literature), AND on the reader (from the perspective of education), AND on the context that brings both together (from the perspective of library science).

Of course, I was thrilled when I was asked to contribute the voice of the author, though also daunted at the thought that any one author – me! – would be representing the voice of “the” author. So I tried to interweave my own experiences and insights with glimpses into the creative process provided by our profession’s most acclaimed authors in their Newbery Medal Acceptance speeches, published each year in The Horn Book. My new Horn Book just came, containing Neil Gaiman’s acceptance speech for the Newbery awarded to him this year for The Graveyard Book. I haven’t read the speech yet; I’m saving it for the annual read-aloud of the speech that my writing group does at our summer retreat up at Lake Dillon, scheduled this year for August 13-15. No fair peeking! I love any chance to look at how a fellow writer’s mind works. And now the editors of the Handbook have given me the chance to share how my writer’s mind works, as well.

Mozart vs. Rachmaninoff

Last night was the final night of the World’s Greatest Concerto series at the Colorado Music Festival at Chautauqua. It was an all-Mozart evening: the overture to Mozart’s last opera (La Clemenzia di Tito), Mozart’s last piano concerto (No. 27, in B-flat major), and Mozart’s glorious last symphony (No. 41 in C major, the Jupiter symphony). The pianist for the concerto, Orion Weiss, was wonderful, but he didn’t get the instant standing ovation that Natasha Paremski got for her Rachmaninoff: his was more the kind of standing ovation where one person stands up, then another, then another, rather than the kind where the entire audience leaps as one to its feet. He had played every bit as brilliantly as she had. But there weren’t as many big, thunderous, crashing sounds, just gorgeous cascades of notes, each one given its exquisite, meticulous, loving due.

I’ve judged quite a few book awards in my day, including the Golden Kite Award given by the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators and the National Book Award in the category of Literature for Young People. As a judge, it’s so hard to resist giving the award to a “big” book, one that leaves the reader shaken and sobbing, rather than a book that may be more exquisitely crafted but is on a smaller scale – and forget about giving awards to books that are funny. “Big” books just cry out, “Give me an award!”

As someone who writes “little” books, this irks me. There is really nothing little about “little” books! And there is definitely nothing at all little about Mozart! So I was one of the first to jump up after the concerto last night. As I walked down from Chautauqua to my car after that evening of divine music, it was with a grateful heart that I live in a world of such soaring, rapturous beauty.

Nice Things and Accomplishments

When my boys were younger, they both had music lessons in Lafayette, two towns over from Boulder, where we live (piano for Christopher, saxophone for Gregory). At first I dreaded Wednesday afternoons, when I would drive both boys there and back and have to kill time waiting for the hour-long lessons to finish. Then I discovered Cannon Mine Coffee on Public Road in Lafayette, my favorite café.

From that point on, I spent a wonderful hour every Wednesday afternoon lying on the comfy couch there, sipping my tea (or a glass of wine!), and working on lists in the little notebook in which I organize my entire life.

I love to make lists. I will share some of my lists in this blog from time to time: lists of books I have read, ways to earn money, ways to save money, ways to reduce stress in life, writing goals, and more. The very best list is my monthly list called “Nice Things and Accomplishments.” On this list I write fairly major things I’ve done and fairly major nice things that have happened to me. If I don’t do this, I look at my life and wail, “I have ten thousand things to do, and I’m behind on all of them! It’s already almost August and what do I have to show for my year? Nothing! Nothing at all!” But then I look at my list, and wow – I did all that? I have all THAT to be grateful for?

This is what I have so far on my July list of nice things and accomplishments:

1) Gregory took his first college class, an introductory computer science class at CU. (I count nice things that happen to the boys, too.)
2) Makeovers by Marcia was shortlisted for a prize in France.
3) I got back reviewers’ comments on a scholarly paper I wrote on Eleanor Estes’s book The Witch Family. The paper wasn’t accepted but I was invited to revise and resubmit. That counts! It’s progress!
4) Gregory and his girlfriend, Sierra, redesigned my website.
5) I created this blog.
6) I taught the SCBWI workshop in Colorado Springs, “Write It Right.”
7) I gave a talk at the Kerlan Collection at the University of Minnesota.
8) I had a blissful time at the Betsy-Tacy Convention in Mankato.
9) My scholarly paper on Eleanor’s Estes’s The Moffats and The Alley, which I had revised and resubmitted for the Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, was accepted.
10) I heard four of the world’s great piano concertos, by Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven, and Mozart.

Wow! I say to myself, as I read over this list. And I thought I had done nothing. Wow! I say to myself. My life is much more productive and wonderful than I had realized.

I bet yours is, too.

Born Too Late

Last night at the Colorado Music Festival’s series of the world’s greatest piano concertos, I heard 21-year-old Natasha Paremski play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18. The second half of the program was Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, his last major work. According to the program notes, Rachmaninoff wrote little in the last decades of his life; although he died in 1943, his was the passionate, romantic music of the 19th century, not the cerebral, avant-garde music of his contemporaries. He lived quietly in Beverly Hills, where he sometimes played two-piano arrangements of his work with his neighbor, Vladimir Horowitz. It would have been fun to hear that music drifting out over the neighborhood, no?

Sometimes I think that I, too, was born too late, or maybe, just that I’m stuck in an earlier literary era. I reread the children’s books of my childhood over and over again; the year I was a judge of the National Book Award in the category of Literature for Young People, I helped the award to go to the decidedly (and wonderfully) old-fashioned The Penderwicks by Jeanne Birdsall. Even though I love Mary Oliver as much as everybody else, my favorite poets are still Edna St. Vincent Millay, Christina Rosetti, and Sara Teasdale. Theirs are the poems I can – and do - recite by heart.

I write a poem now every Wednesday, free verse (though often with one rhyme that I can’t resist coming at the very end). But I haven’t written anything that I think is as good as the Sara-Teasdale-inspired poems I wrote in my youth, almost all songs of unrequited fourteen-year-old love.

Here’s one, dated October 3, 1968.

The leaves are bruised with scarlet,
The sky is seared with blue,
The hills are wrung in purple,
The grass is weeping dew –
To live with all that agony,
They must have loved you, too.

If only I had been born in 1880, what a poet I might have become!

The Imaginary and the Real

Of all the sights I saw in Mankato last weekend, during the Betsy-Tacy Convention, the one that touched and thrilled me most was this. In a display case in the Maud Hart Lovelace children’s reading room of the Blue Earth County Public Library sits a small glass pitcher. A sign tells us that it is the pitcher that real-life Betsy gave to real-life Tacy in the second chapter of Betsy-Tacy, the first book of the series, the chapter in which Betsy and Tacy begin their lifelong friendship at Betsy’s fifth birthday party. There it was. Here it is.

The whole weekend made me ponder our mania for finding out that something in a story isn’t made-up, but is real. Even as many of us prefer reading fiction to nonfiction, we want evidence that our fiction somehow is nonfiction, that it really did happen: hence, the craze for memoir, which straddles both domains. For some reason, it doesn’t diminish stories to find their kernel of reality; instead, it enlarges us, as their readers. For if all these narrated wonders – or at least some of them, or at least one of them – really did take place, well, then, maybe wonders can befall us in our ordinary, humdrum lives as well.

What if we could go on a literary pilgrimage and see, in a low case in a local library, the actual glass slipper Cinderella left behind her at the ball? The spindle on which Sleeping Beauty pricked her finger? A certain cloak with a familiar red hood? A few remaining bricks from the house of the third little pig?

You can see the real Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet and Eeyore; I saw them myself at the Donnell branch of the New York Public Library; they’ve now been moved to a new location in the Schwarzman Building at 5th Avenue and 42nd Street. There they were. Here they are.

"And in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing."