International Grimm Award—Who Knew?

This morning, via the Child_Lit listserv, I read for the first time about the International Grimm Award for Research into Children's Literature. It was established in 1986 and is given every odd year, thus alternating with the Hans Christian Andersen Award.

The Grimm Award goes not to an author or illustrator, however, but to someone who's contributed to the study of children's literature:

One who has performed outstanding work in research into children's literature and picture books, or one who has contributed remarkably to such research and to the promotion of such research.

And where does this award, named for the brothers Grimm, come from? Japan.

Specifically, the International Institute for Children's Literature in Osaka grants the award, based on a fund established by the Kinran-kai Foundation, the alumni association of Osaka Prefectural Otemae High School. The prize is a million yen.

So now I have to revise two of my beliefs about the field of children's literature. First, that the US is unique in naming its major awards after people with no connection to the country. Second, that there's no money in it.

Incidentally, this year's Grimm Award winner is Prof. John Stephens of Macquarie University in New South Wales, Australia.

Getting the Details Right

Yesterday I attended a signing by Jacqueline Davies for her new middle-grade novel, The Lemonade War. Some other writing-group friends and I prevailed on Jackie to do a second reading even after most young customers had disappeared and the chairs were cleared away. Coming home, I got to thinking about the challenge finding the details of everyday life for kids today.

The Lemonade War was inspired by a lemonade-selling rivalry between two of Jackie’s own kids. During the reading, she mentioned how a passing episode that ends poorly for a bike helmet had really happened as well. She even named the perpetrator (so, kid, don't think you're getting away with anything; the grown-ups are onto you).

One of the novels I'm now writing is like Jackie's: set in the contemporary world that its young readers are supposed to recognize as their own. But I don't have kids, so not only am I not forced to know all about today's middle-school society, but I'm somewhat stymied at finding out the gloomy details.

Keeping up with technology is relatively easy because it's so new and obvious. I can pick up that some kids have cell phones and others want them, that the oral report is being replaced by the Powerpoint presentation, and so on.

But what about the minor but telling details of wardrobe? I must take care not to dress my young characters the way I dressed at their age. When I was a boy, all boys' socks were white, tubular, long enough to cover the calf, and striped at the top. The big choice was red stripes or blue stripes or, like the young gentleman to the left, a snazzy combination of both. As for shorts, they were short--hence the name.

Now boys' shorts are actually Capri pants, with extra pockets (for what?), and boys' socks have shrunk to hide inside shoes. Back in my youth, we had little socks, too, but they had pompoms at the back, and only girls wore them. (There does seem to be a conservation law at work here, though. Boys in shorts still bare the same amount of leg; it's just moved ten inches closer to the ground.)

So my hero wears little socks, and when his jeans get wet in the rain, they'll slap coldly against his shins. And he'll have to wear a bike helmet, right? My generation thought those were a good idea--in theory. Now kids actually seem to wear them.

Wrist bands? I grabbed that detail for another character when I met debut novelist Karen Day's son and realized he had more rubber on his arms than my old car had on its tires. Flip-flops? In my youth, kids didn't walk around in flip-flops unless they were actually in Hawaii or carrying a surfboard, but they seem ubiquitous now--and will no doubt spread further as the climate warms. But what other crucial details am I missing?

Prick'd Out for Women's Pleasure

After yesterday's grumbling, I might as well observe Poetry Friday with William Shakespeare's sonnet 20:

A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all “hues” in his controlling,
Much steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure.

Bardolatry

One of National Public Radio’s talk shows today had a discussion on Shakespeare in daily life, inviting people to share their favorite quotations from the bard. So I might as well express my gratitude for this most handy exchange from Henry IV, Part 1, act 3, scene 1:

OWEN GLENDOWER
I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HARRY HOTSPUR
Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?

Meanwhile, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has issued a report complaining that at some colleges English majors can graduate without having to study any Shakespeare. In the spirit of Hotspur, I must ask, But will they skip Shakespeare when they're allowed?

As someone who made a point of reading all of Shakespeare's plays in and shortly after college [The Two Noble Kinsmen is surprisingly good], I'm skeptical that anyone who wants a career in writing, criticism, drama, teaching English, etc. would actually never read Shakespeare. Of course, I suspect some English majors have no higher ambition than to go into public relations and issue dubious political reports.

ACTA, formerly the National Alumni Forum, is an offshoot of the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, founded in 1953 to give William F. Buckley, Jr., his first platform. ACTA last made headlines by issuing a report lambasting American academics who had dared to suggest that Osama bin Laden should be put on trial for the kamikaze terrorist attacks of 2001. That was back when the U.S. administration still appeared to be serious about trying to capture bin Laden.

ACTA has apparently moved beyond that matter as well to the burning issue of the modern English major. But I suppose it's good to find a conservative political organization insisting that undergraduates read some of the English language's finest poetic expression of homosexual love.

That's the Shakespeare they mean, right?

When My Name Was Ohkwa'ri

I read Joseph Bruchac’s Children of the Longhouse as part of a research project on Iroquois history. Bruchac is Abenaki (among other nationalities) in ancestry, but lives in the upstate New York region once inhabited by the Mohawks and thanks “Mohawk friends and neighbors” for their teaching and assistance with this story.

A map early in the book implies that Bruchac has set his novel in the “late 15th century”--i.e., in Columbus’s lifetime, probably before he sailed across the Atlantic from Spain. Europeans have no role in this story.

In reading the book, I was struck by Bruchac’s choices in presenting his characters’ names to readers. There are two young protagonists, girl and boy twins. The girl is called Otsi:stia, the boy Ohkwa’ri. The text doesn’t pause to translate those names or give us pronunciations, though we can find them in a glossary at the end.

The first chapter also introduces several older teenaged males as antagonists for the boy. Their names are presented as Grabber, Greasy Hair, Eats Like a Bear, and Falls a Lot. Only on page 64 does this 146-page novel state that those are “unfortunate nicknames they had earned” by their behavior.

So our heroes have untranslated, “real” Mohawk names while their rivals have English names, which seem less authentic without being any more familiar as proper names. Furthermore, those antagonists’ nicknames show them to be greedy, greasy, gluttonous, and clumsy. The moral lines are about as clear as in an episode of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

As Bruchac introduces adult characters in the following chapters, he usually presents their names in English, but those names are never as pejorative as the antagonists’. The twins’ mother is Herons Flying, their grandmother She Opens the Sky. Sometimes Mohawk and English names appear in parallel: “Shoskoharo’wane, The Big Tree”; “Dagaheo’ga, The One Who Has Two Ideas” (also called Two Ideas).

There’s some discussion on pages 112-3 of changing Otsi:stia’s name:

Big Tree laughed. “My sister’s daughter,” he said, “we are going to give you a new name. Otsi:stia, ‘The Flower,’ is not a good enough name. Maybe you should be ‘Watches Everything.’ What do you think, my sister’s husband?”

However, no one adopts this new name or nickname for Otsi:stia by the end of the book.

Ohkwa’ri’s name is never translated within the story at all, I believe. Only in the glossary can we learn that it translates as Bear. Which raises some questions since the story has several other bears as well:

• Ohkwa’ri and his sister are part of the Bear Clan.
• A visiting Anen:tak (Abenaki) healer is named Ktsiwassos, or Great Bear.
• Earlier, Grabber wanted to have the name Walks With the Bears.
• On the last page of the story, Grabber takes the new name Bear’s Son in Ktsiwassos’s honor.

So as far as I can tell, Ohkwa’ri is from the Ohkwa’ri clan; he meets a man whose name means Big Ohkwa’ri; his rival once wanted to be called Walks With Ohkwa’ri, and in the end that older boy takes the name Ohkwa’ri’s Son. And none of that overlap seems odd or confusing or psychologically loaded to him.

Does that pattern simply reflect how Mohawk attitudes toward names differ significantly from those we’ve inherited from British culture? Did Bruchac choose to use Ohkwa’ri instead of Bear throughout his story precisely to avoid such confusing perceptions?

London Scientist Finds Kryptonite?

According to this BBC report, a mineral found in a Serbian mine has been identified as "matching [the] unique chemistry" of kryptonite.

According to Dr. Chris Stanley, "Associate Keeper of Mineralogy" at London's Natural History Museum, he analyzed the chemical makeup of the white powdery crystal from Serbia and then (I'm reading between the lines here) Googled the result. The news report quotes him:

Towards the end of my research I searched the web using the mineral's chemical formula -- sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide -- and was amazed to discover that same scientific name, written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns.

The new mineral does not contain fluorine (which it does in the film) and is white rather than green but, in all other respects, the chemistry matches that for the rock containing kryptonite.

Hang on a minute there, doctor! A compound that contains fluorine is chemically different from a compound that doesn't. We don't say hydrogen gas "matches the exact chemistry" of water except that it's missing the oxygen--H2 and H2O are different chemicals that behave in different ways. And the color is usually a sign of some chemical differences.

Dr. Stanley and his colleagues seem to acknowledge that fundamental fact by naming the mineral "jadarite," after the region where it was found, in a paper to be published in a future issue of the European Journal of Mineralogy. They've tested the mineral under ultraviolet light, which makes it fluoresce, but I see no sign that they've exposed plants to it.

Why do I suggest that test? Superman fans know there are multiple forms of kryptonite: the original green (harmful to refugees from the planet Krypton), and several forms either altered by natural processes in space or created in laboratories. True white kryptonite harms plant life on all known planets.

Ladle Rat Rotten Hut

The Exploratorium shares this interesting version of a classic fairy tale as part of a lesson by language professor Howard L. Chace on how we communicate. You can read the text online, but you'll need RealPlayer to truly appreciate it. It begins:

Wants pawn term, dare worsted ladle gull hoe lift wetter murder inner ladle cordage, honor itch offer lodge dock florist.

For more examples of such writing, see Chace's Anguish Languish. And here's a bit of an interview with Chace about the genre.

Bunches of Carnegie and Greenaway Medals

Last month I wrote: “In 1993, the Booker organization in the UK designated a special award for the best Booker Prize-winner of the previous twenty-five years. That went to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, winner in 1981. . . . Would the same process work for Newberys? Of all the Medalists (and Honor Books, if one chooses) from 1983 through this year, which shows the most quality, influence, and staying-power? If you had to choose one title as the Newbery of Newberys in this period, could you do it?”

Unknown to me, the judges of the CILIP Carnegie and Greenaway Medals in Britain were working on a similar question, selecting the top ten winners of each medal over the past seventy or fifty years, respectively.

I can't help noting some patterns in the selection of some medal-winners for extra praise. The Greenaway Medal has been given for fifty years, yet half of the specially-honored titles come from one decade in that half-century: 1976-1985. There's no title chosen from the next ten years. Was that a golden age of picture-book art in Britain, followed by a period of scarcity?

In contrast, the Carnegie Medal choices lean toward recent years, with four of the ten nominated titles published since 1995. Otherwise, they’re spread out almost evenly across the decades. Does that reflect an increase in literary quality, or the influence of recent tastes?

The final selection process for the "Carnegie of Carnegies" and "Greenaway of Greenaways" seems to rest on an odd combination of professional judgment and popularity. Both the original awards and these shortlists were chosen by CILIP: the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, professionals applying their ideas of literary and artistic excellence. The British children's-publishing industry has other awards based on popularity, which is where we find the name "Rowling."

Yet the final choice of this process is open to anyone. With a click of a mouse I could vote without being British, without having read all of the books, in fact without having read any of the books. That sort of process seems to cast aside all the careful reading and evaluation that has led up to these shortlists. It's almost as if these lists were nothing but (gasp!) publicity efforts.

Whatever a Spider Can

Coinciding with a cover story on the new Entertainment Weekly and much other publicity for the upcoming third movie, Marvel broke silence today about a reading of a stage musical version of Spider-Man this July.

According to Playbill, Glen Berger will write the book (Neil Jordan having dropped out), and Julie Taymor will direct. Music is due from Bono and the Edge ("You know we're the talented ones because we don't use our real names") of U2.

All I can say is whoever remains with this project must understand that Spider-Man is not musical comedy material.

Spider-Man is opera.

Misha's Straight Talk for PW

I enjoyed this Publishers Weekly interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov about his new picture book, Because. Why?

Because he resolutely disavows much credit for the book, which has his name above the title, deferring all praise to nominal illustrator Vladimir Radunsky.

Because PW's earlier review of the book passed judgment on “Baryshnikov’s buoyant foray into picture books” and “Baryshnikov’s casual text.”

And because its interviewer shows a starry-eyed determination to maintain that illusion--

PW: I think you're being overly modest.

MB: No, I'm telling the truth.