Jane Goodall books for kids

I love Jane Goodall. I really can't think of a better hero for a kids' book, which makes me very happy about Me...Jane by Patrick McDonnell and The Watcher by Jeanette Winter.

The video below, in which McDonnell says about Goodall, "She has the mind of a scientist but the heart of a poet," is a good intro to both books. You should buy them for me.

Breathe in the books

May 2011 be filled with the smell of books.

By the way, I am an avid book-smeller myself. Granted, I prefer the smell of new books, but still.

Via Book Fox, a blog I stumbled upon last night. Book nerds, rejoice.

Book to buy: Between Old Trees by francine j. harris

francine j. harris has a chapbook and you should buy it. Between Old Trees via Organic Weapons Arts can be yours for only ten cash dollars (or Paypal dollars, as it were). That is cheaper than so many things. And probably better than whatever else you were going to spend it on anyway.

Don't be a jackass

Lane Smith, my favorite childrens book illustrator, has a new book out. It's a Book is about a curious jackass friend who can't wrap his tech-geek brain around this strange thing in his monkey friend's hands. Moral of the story: read to your kid or he'll end up a jackass.

Monkey and Poetry Convergence: Rudyard Kipling edition

While this monkey and poetry convergence is Rudyard Kipling's, it is by way of Glenn Beck that I encountered it. Beck has a trailer for his new book The Overton Window (it's a thriller. Which you can obviously tell from the very thrilling title). Now, I don't really "get" book trailers, but hey, anything to get the word out, right? Because how else are you going to reach people who don't read? Obviously your target audience. But whatever. Make trailers for books. I don't care. What's really weird about Beck's trailer is that he the writing of another author in order to sell his writing. The trailer uses the last two stanza's of Kipling's "The Gods of the Copybook Headings". No words from Beck. Can you imagine a movie trailer that used footage from another movie entirely instead of clips from the movie being promoted? That would be weird. It would almost make it seem like whatever movie (or book) the trailer was for probably sucks. But who knows? Maybe Beck is better at writing books than making trailers (I am doubtful).

In any case, the monkey connection comes in stanza two:

We were living in trees when they met us. They showed us each in turn
That Water would certainly wet us, as Fire would certainly burn:
But we found them lacking in Uplift, Vision and Breadth of Mind,
So we left them to teach the Gorillas while we followed the March of Mankind.

Bee still my beating heart

I just finished reading I Know I Am, But What Are You? by Samantha Bee and have not laughed so much out loud while reading a book in a long, long time. While not the funniest part of the book, she does mention poetry in her essay about being a perfectionist when it comes to gift giving.

"I would be extremely happy if I came from a family that composed original poetry, or pulled names out of a hat to give one single gift as our preferred mode of holiday expression. But in our family, everybody has to get everybody else a present, and that's the way it goes. If you tried to give someone a poem instead of a present, you would find yourself on the receiving end of a clusterfuck of confusion, as the person repeatedly tried to dig through the envelope it came in to find the gift card for Best Buy that surely must have dropped out somewhere along the way."

I strongly suggest  that you read this book. In fact, I demand it. Because I have that kind of power.

That sneaky gorilla

Would you notice the gorilla in the living room (or, in this case, the gymnasium)? I've read about this study before. And I would have gladly volunteered to be the woman in the gorilla suit. Provided that the suit had been very, very carefully laundered and sanitized.

Le Divorce le sucks

It is no secret that I love Videogum and one of my favorite features is The Hunt for the Worst Movie of All Time in which Gabe Delahaye lambasts truly terrible movies. Here's how he describes it: "After watching Death Sentence, a terrible movie starring Kevin Bacon as a father in search of vigilante justice directed by Saw's James Wan, Gabe embarked on The Hunt For The Worst Movie of All Time. This is his sad journey." I have seen very few of the movies on this list, and after reading about each one I am so, so thankful for that. Also after reading I have laughed out loud at least once (on average) and am thankful for that, too.

The latest Hunt movie is Le Divorce and one of the main characters in the movie, played Naomi Watts, is a poet. I know the movie is based on the book, but I have never seen the movie or read the book. I have seen the book, however, as it was in my house for quite some time after my wife read it and, for reasons I don't fully understand, didn't see the need to part ways with it immediately.

In all honesty, Le Divorce isn't the best of Gabe's Hunt rants. But it is still good. Like when he writes in summation, "I don't particularly care about the lives of unsuccessful poets who don't need to be successful, or the sexual dalliances of their emotionally retarded (that might be Kate Hudson though, and not the character), equally unambitious siblings."

Man vs. Nature

Elizabeth Royte reviews Charles Siebert's The Wauchula Woods Accord: Toward a New Understanding of Animals in the New York Times. She identifies the book's "ultimate message" as “the degree to which we humans will finally stop abusing other creatures and, for that matter, one another, will ultimately be measured by the degree to which we come to understand how integral a part of us all other creatures actually are.” Word. Another to add to my reading list.

Also, check out Siebert's 2005 New York Times Magazine article "Planet of the Retired Apes."

Royte, by the way, is the author of the excellent Garbageland, a must-read book for anyone who has ever thrown anything away.

Love That Dog by Sharon Creech

Love That Dog (Harper Collins 2001) by Sharon Creech is a novel for kids in verse. It's written as a series of dated poems/letters from a grade school boy named Jack to his teacher Miss Stretchberry. You never see what the teacher is writing to him, but you can tell from Jack's responses that Miss Stretchberry is encouraging his poetic endeavors. In the book Jack learns to appreciate poetry, both the writing and the reading of it, and crushes out Walter Dean Myers. Reading Myers's poem "Love That Boy" inspires Jack to write a poem called "Love That Dog."

Most of the time Creech gets the voice of this grade school kid spot on, like on the book's opening page:

I don't want to
because boys
don't write poetry.

Girls do.

There are times, like the Walter Dean Myers crush-out fest, where Jack's voice and the short little lines he communicates in feel a bit less organic, a bit too "gotta move the story along." But the overall premise of the book is rather adorable. If only an elementary school teacher spent that much time teaching kids poetry. And if only more boys fell in love with it as a result.

Added bonus: Creech includes the poems that are referenced throughout the book at the end including "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams, part of "The Tiger" by William Blake, "Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening" and "The Pasture" by Robert Frost, and "Street Music" by Arnold Adoff. So should a kid read this book and be inspired to seek out more poetry, it's already in his or her hands.

Added bonus: Creech just published a followup, which I have not read, called Hate That Cat.

See it! Write it! It is what it is.

I just finished reading Lynda Barry's latest book What It Is. Part memoir, part creative writing text, part sketchbook/doodle pad, all awesome. Lynda focuses on the importance of image in writing, something I, too, focus on with my students, both in my creative writing and composition classes.

Barry uses a recurring image of a zen monkey throughout the book (like on p. 8, featured here). Also making an appearance is the Nearsighted Monkey, who, I am excited to find out, is the subject of Barry's next book due out in September by Drawn and Quarterly.

Proving once again that monkeys and poetry are never far apart from one another, Barry quotes William Blake's "Auguries of Innocence" on p. 28 ("Every night and every morn Some to misery are born. Every morn and every night Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night"). On p. 84 she quotes Emily Dickinson's Poem 937, (a.k.a. "I felt a Cleaving in my Mind"):

I felt a Cleaving in my Mind --
As if my Brain had split --
I tried to match it -- Seam by Seam --
But could not make it fit.

The thought behind, I strove to join
Unto the thought before --
But Sequence ravelled out of Sound
Like Balls -- upon a Floor.

NPR's Talk of the Nation did a great interview with Barry last June. In it she discusses going into a "cereal trance" as a kid: "Do you remember going into a cereal trance where you'd just look at the side of a box of cereal and every word on it looked like poetry? Like, 'Dextrose. I'm gonna name my first baby Dextrose'."

The awesomeness of Lynda Barry cannot be overstated. Neither can the feeling of having my 6 day old son sleeping in my arms even if that does mean I am typing this one handed and am not sleeping myself.