All this talk about Where the Wild Things Are has me thinking about William Steig. I’ve gotten into it about children’s books before (see my “Children’s Books That Will Drive Your Shit Insane” list here). We have the power to make mental connections as children that we lose as we grow up and get ourselves socialized, and the pandering milquetoast garbage that gets called children’s writing today is a shame.
Most of the good stuff happened in the Golden Age, when characters were removing their faces and speaking truths about God and getting killed by cobras etc, but there have been a few greats in the picture book world since. Sendak was one but I always really liked William Steig. He wrote Doctor De Soto:
The story is about Dr. De Soto, a mouse-dentist who lives in a world of animals who act as humans. He and his wife, who serves as his assistant, work together to treat patients with as little pain as possible. However, they refuse to treat any patient who likes to eat mice. One day, a fox with a toothache drops by and begs for treatment. Mrs. De Soto convinces her husband that he needs to help the fox to get rid of his pain, so Dr. De Soto reluctantly agrees. They give the fox some anesthetic and proceed to treat the bad tooth. However, while under the effects of the anesthetic, the fox unknowingly exclaims how he would love to eat the mice, but also expresses his guilt for attempting to do such a thing.
Complex characters, drugged confessions and high-level dental work, and that’s just the first ten pages. This was one of the shortest books to win a Newbury Honor. He also wrote The Amazing Bone:
This happens after a bone speaks languages
Also he created Shrek. He attended the Yale School of Fine Arts for five days before dropping out because he didn’t need it. His son became a jazz flutist. Margaret Mead was his sister-in-law from 1936 until 1949. He lived to be 95 years old.
The Irony Inherent in Asking the Question, “Are You Avoiding Me?” When the Answer is Yes by Jamie Panzer
Local art man Jamie Panzer created the above from “22 eviscerated analog television sets hung like fruit from the branches of a huge pecan tree with live video signal from surveillance camera” as an installation for Austin’s local Art Outside festival. Jamie adds, “it’s harder than it looks to create something to look this crudely presented.” I think it turned out great. I would have liked to lie down below them. Click for bigger.
While I’m at it, check out Bobby McFerrin demonstrating the power of the pentatonic scale at the World Science Festival:
Bobby McFerrin is cool. I saw him conduct a rehearsal of “Porgy and Bess” in Charlotte probably twelve years ago.
Yesterday I ate three kinds of meat and set a new personal record for lat pulldowns. Today it seems that I have acquired a papercut that I feel only when typing the letter T. The days, they cannot all be winners.
Dang this is a cool article and a zinger, on neuroscience and the novel, via the GIANT. Zinger because I wrote a story once which featured a character with Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, which I had heard about from a friend and which held my attention for months. I kept thinking of how strange and disorienting it would be to have AIWS, and the lengths to which one’s mind would have to stretch to normalize itself, and the result of those thoughts ended up being kind of a big formal experiment.
Roth’s point that “the very act of medicalization marginalizes the experimental impulse” is true in the case of his neurological novels and I think it’s true in the case of the story I wrote, which would have been much harder to pull off, in my opinion, if Arnold didn’t have AIWS. It might have still worked if I had cut the numbered list in the opening which exists in part to explain the whole thing, but the reason why strange things happen is because of that strange condition, explained or otherwise. Half the point of Lolita is Nabokov making fun of how psychoanalysis utterly fails as a fictional device; perhaps the next great criticisms will be leveled at characters who operate as slaves to their genetic makeup, anomalous or otherwise.
Roth says, “Surely the way for a novelist to be a neuroscientist today is still to anticipate rather than follow the discoveries of brain science. It would be no surprise if a novelist could still describe and mimic traits of cognition that neurology can’t yet experimentally confirm.” Sort of why Alice in Wonderland is Great (not coincidentally, Lewis Carroll had migraines/auras and likely suffered from some form of the condition that was later named after his book) and my story is kind of funny and has some good lines but is not Great.
Anyway, it’s all another argument against using THE INTERNET (or any research tool, yeah yeah yeah) to look too closely at anthropological/neurological/historical concepts without allowing your creative mind to make its own connections. Now I have to just enjoy the pentatonic scale thing without looking up why a group of people share the same expectations of flaw in what otherwise seems like a simple set of ascending tones. (It is as if I have to not worry, to be happy.)
I’ve got meatloaf in the oven. It’s making the house smell nice.
The Chicago trip was crazy fun as anticipated. On Monday, I got in early and took one of those naps that divides one day into two. When I woke up, Blake was there and Zach took us to Mr. Pollo where we ate good chicken and two different types of plantains. We met Ally at No Coast and friends began to filter in, Angeline and Johnny and Jac and Mary and Lindsay among them. I met Kathryn Regina and Sam Pink, who each read funny and good words. It was a small room and a standing crowd, which gave it a party feel, like everyone just happened to stop talking to listen to someone tell a story. The mic was doing some reverb stuff the whole time, but my story was supposed to be kind of awkward and overloud so I tried to work with it. Blake read from “The Ruined Child,” one of my favorites from Scorch Atlas. A band played, a dance party broke out, a hole appeared in my jeans. We went to a late-night Mexican place that served a small plate of meat with a corn tortilla warm over top as an appetizer, and brought us a dish of limes when they saw we had beers. I leave Texas and eat nothing but Mexican food, go figure.
The next day, I went to H&M and Kyle Beachy‘s class at the Art Institute, where I read from AM/PM and a new story and his smart students asked me good questions. We talked about artists and the Internet, blogs, David Foster Wallace, Wittgenstein, and ritual. I could tell that Kyle is a smart teacher and a good one. Then I went back to H&M, then Angeline and Johnny took me to eat the greatest chicken pot pie made by human hands and then it was off to Quickies, where I read with a whole host of excellent folk and nearly all of the Dollar Store Tour roster, including Aaron and Caroline, plus Richard Thomas, who I had met the night before. Lindsay Hunter read a hilarious story and made everyone excited that Featherproof is doing her book next year. I read over the allotted five minutes and they whistled me off the stage but I fought hard and took Hunter’s whistle away and threw an elbow at Hamilton.
In the morning, I had brunch with Zach, Mary, Blake, and Aaron. I ate salmon and regretted it later when I sat on an airplane next to a man wearing a weightlifter’s tank top and shorts and smelling distinctly like a squat rack.
I’m glad to have an excuse to go to Chicago more often than once a year. I do think that if I lived there, I would spend all my money on good food and all my time at the gym, working it off. Speaking of, it turns out that cumin in the glaze is a nice touch for meatloaf.
A drum circle seems to have broken out under my window. I think it’s important for me to write some fiction tonight.
I’m sick today. That aching feeling where things could go either way. My body says don’t you dare step outside. I will listen. I need to finish writing a story. Unfortunately, writing is hard.
Do bean sprouts have any nutritional value? I am going to eat a bunch of them.
I’m pretty sure everyone gets sick from touching the handles of shopping baskets in grocery stores. When I worked retail, I was always bothered by the fact that my managers called the rolling carts, the carts on wheels, “baskets.” They would ask me to go get a basket and I would come back with an actual basket with two handles and they would look at me with pity and disdain.
you're right, this is obviously a basket
I had a conversation about many things with Molly Gaudry for Writers Respond. I finally reveal the world’s fastest land animal, which is a secret I was planning on keeping to myself until somebody asked. Thank you, Molly. I hope to see you in Chicago.
Speaking of, I will be reading in Chicago next week at the following events:
Brain-imaging studies of people evaluating anomalies, or working out unsettling dilemmas, show that activity in an area called the anterior cingulate cortex spikes significantly. The more activation is recorded, the greater the motivation or ability to seek and correct errors in the real world, a recent study suggests. “The idea that we may be able to increase that motivation,” said Dr. Inzlicht, a co-author, “is very much worth investigating.”
I got out of the house and enjoyed the whole of the Austin City Limits festival this weekend. Danced through Phoenix and Girl Talk, marveled at Ghostland Observatory’s lasers from a quarter mile off, stood hours in the weepy rain for Bon Iver. Ate maybe five chicken cones. The grounds turned to treated-sewage sludge by the third day, making the cross-park trip, as Sean O’Neal put it, “not unlike walking across a giant chocolate cake.” This morning I woke up early and shopped the MT Supermarket with twenty silent housewives. Organic soy. Fish heads.
More links: Three Guys One Book took a kind look at AM/PM and Lindsay Hunter’s fresh-to-death My Brother. M Review is live, kindly including the largest excerpt of AM/PM you will find on this Internet. Here’s a recipe for Thai spring rolls. I’m doing a panel at the Texas Book Festival called “Writing in the Shadows” that happens at the same time as an interview with the No Impact Man.
Also, excitement: I am doing a LITERARY DEATH MATCH with Kyle Beachy, Jeff Martin, and Jason Sheehan. The NYC show was part of the inspiration for Five Things and I’m excited it’s coming to town, more excited (impossibly excited) that I’m a part of it. It is happening in a church on Halloween. I am hopping from one foot to the other with excitement.
In closing: The marching band down the street is practicing late tonight with a loud metronome. My cat ate a housefly out of the air. I’m going to go watch the end of Monday Night Football because at first I was not ready but now I am ready. I am ready for some football.
ABOUT
Amelia Gray is the author of AM/PM (Featherproof Books) and Museum of the Weird (FC2). Her first novel, THREATS, is due March 2012 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. For other publications, see here. For upcoming readings, see here. For a big ol' picture of her face, see here.
