I Need to Go Lie Down Now

At the barber's this morning, I heard a deejay talking about trying to buy a chaise longue. That term means, of course, "long chair" in French, and is properly pronounced shezz long.

For quite a while, however, English speakers and spellers have transposed a couple of letters and turned the phrase into "chaise lounge," pronounced shezz lownj. Which makes some intellectual sense, as a piece of furniture one lounges on. And it's common enough I've gotten used to that.

But this deejay was talking about a chayz lownj. Over and over.

And that's one reason I left the barber without getting my hair cut.

(Above, a "car chaise," crafted in 2004 by Jonathan Smith of the Urbanoia Design Group and Ryan Hagan of the University of Texas "from padded glove-box covers from Detroit autos of the 70s and 80s.")

Cybils Middle-Grade Fiction Nominees

So here's a list of the middle-grade novels I'll soon read as a judge in this category of the Cybils Awards. And here are all the lists of finalists.

Alvin Ho
written by Lenore Look
Schwartz and Wade Books

Alvin Ho is brave (as long as he has his Personal Disaster Kit), a gentleman (in training), a good friend (but NOT to girls), and an interesting kid (who doesn't talk in public). It's just that he's allergic to everything: girls, substitute teachers, airplanes, escalators ... and anything else that's even remotely scary (like leaving the house). However, he loves explosions, his dog Lucy, Plastic Man, Wonder Woman, the Green Lantern, Aquaman, King V, and all the superheroes in the world.

Oh, dear. Will I be able to relate?

Diamond Willow
written by Helen Frost
Farrar, Strauss & Giroux

Helen Frost tells the story of Willow, a young girl living in a remote Alaskan town. When Willow gets her first chance to mush the family dogs, everything changes. Told in a series of diamond-shaped poems, with sporadic prose every few chapters, Frost has woven a beautiful coming-of-age story fraught with realism and magic. Braiding the stories of Willow, her family, the dogs, and her family's ancestors, the story is simple and middle-grade students will easily connect with Willow and her family.

“Sporadic prose”--what a selling point.

Every Soul a Star
written by Wendy Mass
Little, Brown

Three middle school students are brought together along with thousands of eclipse-chasers to witness a rare full solar eclipse. Told in the three voices of Ally, Bree & Jack, the alternating narrations are beautifully written and increasingly weave together. Ally (short for Alpha) and her family own the Moon Shadow campground, and have been preparing for their eclipse-chasing guests for years. Bree's parents have bought the Moon Shadow and are dragging her from city life to try running a campground. Jack is along for the ride as his science teacher's assistant in an amateur astronomy experiment they plan to run during the eclipse.

Shooting the Moon
written by Frances O'Roark Dowell
Atheneum

Both the characters and the setting are fully fleshed out and believable in this Vietnam era novel. Born and raised in a career army family, 12-year-old Jamie explores her changing feelings as her brother enlists in the army and is sent far away to fight. While offering no easy answers, this is a thought-provoking page-turner that will have lots of appeal for kids.

Not one but two astronomically-themed titles!

The London Eye Mystery
written by Siobhan Dowd
David Fickling Books

This story has Ted and Kat searching for a cousin who disappears from the London Eye Ferris wheel. The two siblings must work together to solve the mystery. What's unique about this tale is how Ted's Asberger's doesn't stand in the way of him being active in solving his cousin's disappearance.

Which reminds me, I should post some of my dad's photos of our "flight" on the London Eye last summer.

Teen Titans Decompressed

The superhero world loves origin stories. That may seem obvious now, but comics creators didn't originally know it. The first appearances of Superman and Batman said nothing about how those heroes had come to be, and the earliest explanations of their powers and missions were cursory. But soon Kal-El's escape from Krypton and the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents became touchstones of their characters.

After the first Crisis in the DC Comics universe, the publisher took the opportunity to modernize aspects of its most lucrative trademarks' lives. George Pérez relaunched the saga of Wonder Woman from her start on Paradise Island. Under the pen of John Byrne, Superman's adoptive parents were suddenly alive again.

The company's editors didn't think the Batman myth needed any tweaking, but its milieu needed more grit and realism. Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One, published in 1987, is widely seen as a masterpiece in the superhero genre. It established a more realistic tone for the Batman series, as well as opening the door to more stylized renderings of superhero stories. That story arc, collected in a paperback, remains the model for DC's other Year One retrospectives.

One of the best Year One volumes retells Barbara Gordon's early outings as Batgirl. It reestablishes that character in Batman's post-Crisis history, adds depth to her personality, and fills out her relationships with other characters, particularly Dick Grayson as Robin. Less crucial but still interesting are Robin: Year One and Nightwing: Year One, about Dick's passages.

The latest volume of this sort is Teen Titans: Year One. It appeared in six magazines over the past year, followed by a paperback. The script is by Amy Wolfram, new to comics but the writer of some of the most popular episodes of the Teen Titans TV cartoon. The main artist is Karl Kerschl, whose style leans away from what Douglas Wolk calls the "default style of the superhero mainstream" toward a half-cartoony look.

The volume retells a handful of tales from the Teen Titans' pre-Crisis years. The first three chapters recount the team's origin: the young sidekicks must rescue their mentors from possession by a extradimensional monster called the Antithesis. (Confusingly, that story first appeared in Teen Titans, #53, the last issue of the original comic book, as a flashback.) Then there are three more chapters about the new Titans adjusting to fame, hormones, and the fact that Batman is the Worst Dad in the World. Each of those stories also reworks one of the team's adventures from the 1960s.

How does it all play out? Well, that brings me to another development in superhero comics since the early 1980s, when I last read them: "decompressed storytelling." This is an industry euphemism for spreading out a plot over more panels, pages, and issues of a magazine. The creative advantages of the decompression can include:

• More space to develop characters and mood through more realistic pacing, dialogue, and character reactions.
• Bigger panels to show off more detailed artwork.

But those are advantages only when the story becomes deeper, not just longer. Otherwise, decompression just lets the air out of a story and leaves it flat.

Wolfram's best use of the decompressed space is humorous interaction among the Titans. Aqualad was always a challenge for the comic's writers, for three reasons:

• His only established powers were being able to live underwater and communicate telepathically with marine life.
• He couldn't survive outside water for more than about an hour at a time.
• There are only so many ways a writer can justify having the group work near water so Aqualad can join in.

Not surprisingly, Aqualad was the first charter member of the Titans to be written out of the group.

In Teen Titans: Year One, Aqualad finally has a clear role to play. Unfortunately for him, he's comic relief, particularly when paired with Kid Flash. Still, that personality's not entirely out of line with how other writers have portrayed Aqualad. (Dissenting opinion from Tegan at Bloggity-Blog-Blog-Blog.)

But I was disappointed at the lack of new facets to the other characters, and the number of questions left unresolved, even unaddressed. We see Kid Flash wishing he could be in charge of the Titans, but nothing comes of that--nor can I connect it to what I've seen of Wally West's adult personality. Some panels note the contrast between his all-American middle-class upbringing and Robin's life with a billionaire, but nothing comes of that, either.

We see Wonder Girl and Speedy go on a first date that ends poorly. But we never see any fallout from that night. Is that why Speedy doesn't stick around in the group? Does that lead to his falling-out with the Green Arrow and, eventually, his heroin addiction? The drawn-out pages offer no clues. And Wolfram steers clear of Wonder Girl's incredibly confused origin.

As in many other Teen Titans tales, one unmistakable theme is that Robin's the most dangerous one of all. He takes down Wonder Woman with no help but the distraction Kid Flash and Aqualad provide by bickering. He puts on scuba gear and wrestles Aquaman's octopus to a standstill. He defeats a villain named the Ant who's beat up all his teammates handily.

But we see only one other side of Robin's personality: bat-whipped. In contrast, Robin: Year One shows a fun-loving kid learning that there's a deadly serious side to dressing up and fighting crime, and a deadly serious crime-fighter adjusting to having a boisterous adolescent in his life. In this volume, Robin has no fun when he's with Batman, but no fun with the Titans, either. Aside from getting to be the boss, it's not clear why he likes this team.

In the final story, Robin pulls his teammates out of a graveyard in his mind, then leads the on a charge against the Antithesis. They first sound their alliterative but not-particularly-easy-to-yell battle cry, "Titans Together!" And then...nothing. No images of the fight. No signs that they've learned how to work together. No examples of how Aqualad can actually be useful. Instead, the scene shifts to Batman trying to tell Robin that he's proud, screwing up with IM, and giving up.

So what does this volume tell us about the Titans' first year? Basically, that most fourteen-year-old boys are pathetic creatures: immature, boastful, competitive, shallow. They're scared of intense feelings, prone to burping contests, and more concerned with cars than with girls. The one possible exception is, of course, Robin. And for that we needed a whole paperback?

The Quiet of a Manual Typewriter

From the New York Times obituary for Donald E. Westlake, the talented writer of mysteries, thrillers, caper novels, and a lot of other genre fiction published since 1960:

Mr. Westlake resisted computers and typed his manuscripts on manual typewriters. “They came in perfectly typed,” Mr. [Laurence] Kirshbaum said [as his agent]. “You felt like it was almost written by hand.”

Otto Penzler, a longtime friend of Mr. Westlake’s and the owner of the Mysterious Bookshop in TriBeCa, said, “He hated the idea of an electric typewriter because, he said, ‘I don’t want to sit there while I am thinking and have something hum at me.’”

Mr. Westlake kept four or five typewriters and cannibalized their parts when any one broke, as the typewriter model was no longer manufactured, his friends said.

“He lived in fear that he wouldn’t have his little portable typewriter,” said Mr. Penzler, who once gave him a similar typewriter that he had found in a secondhand store.

(Penzler is also a mystery editor, and in 2000 he and Westlake co-edited a collection of Best American Mystery Stories of the year.)

The Times item is accompanied by a photo by David Jennings showing Westlake with two of his beloved machines in 2001.

A detail found not in the obituary but on Westlake's website: In 1970, the Signet paperback imprint published Comfort Station, by J. Morgan Cunningham, who was aiming to please the fans of Arthur Hailey. Westlake supplied a blurb for that previously unknown author: "I wish I had written this book!" In fact, he had--Cunningham was one of the many pseudonyms Westlake used over the years, and he was having a little fun.

The Belgian Boy Reporter

Last month The Economist published a detailed discussion of Tintin's place in European culture, in anticipation of a big-budget Hollywood adaptation.

Much of the article is about why Tintin books are supposedly unpopular in the USA. Not just less popular than in Europe, but practically unknown. Which just hasn't been my experience--I've seen Tintin books in American stores for decades.

I've already written about the comic's roots in the anti-Communist Belgian right wing, and how it reflects a colonialist outlook. The Economist article discusses another dimension of bandes dessinées politics, a couple of decades after Tintin's debut:

In 1949 France banned children’s books and comic strips from presenting cowardice in a “favourable” light, on pain of up to a year in prison for errant publishers. It was equally forbidden to make laziness or lying seem attractive. The law created an oversight committee to watch for positive depictions of these ills, along with crime, theft, hatred, debauchery and acts “liable to undermine morality” among the young.

Taken literally, the law suggests that an ideal comic-book hero would resemble an overgrown boy scout, whose adventures involve pluck, fair play, restrained violence and no sex. That is a pretty accurate description of Tintin, the Belgian boy reporter who enjoyed spectacular success in post-war Europe.

Given that Tintin books had been popular for years in neighboring, French-speaking Belgium, I suspect the character was already successful in France before that law. But the new content requirements may indeed have given him a boost by weakening competition.

Those 1949 restrictions came from all over the French political spectrum, the magazine says.

For all the talk about morality, France’s 1949 law on children’s books had ideological roots. It was pushed by an odd alliance of Communists, Catholic conservatives and jobless French cartoonists, determined that French children should be reading works imbued with “national” values. Pascal Ory, a historian at the Sorbonne university (author of “Mickey Go Home. The de-Americanisation of the cartoon strip”), writes that the main aim of the law—which, remarkably, remains in force today, tweaked in the 1950s to add a ban on incitement of ethnic prejudice--was to block comics from America.

Of course, around the time that France enacted this law, comics were becoming a political issue in America as well. In 1954 Sens. Robert Hendrickson and Estes Kefauver held their subcommitte hearings on the comic-book industry. Here too the result was strict guidelines on how mainstream comics depicted of crime, "debauchery," and heroism. But, as usual in America, the censorious authority wasn't the government but the industry regulating itself to preserve its market standing.

Kamitsuki versus Chomp

A helpful quote from Art of Drawing Manga, by Sergi Càmara and Vanessa Durán:

In Western comics sound effects are often seen accompanying sudden sounds, such as shots or explosions, or sounds that add something to the story, such as slowly opening doors, footsteps, and so on. In manga, sound effects are used, not only to represent all these sounds, but also for imperceptible sounds like breathing blinking, or smiling.

Sometimes, the definition of the action itself is used as a sound effect, so if one character bites another the word kamitsuki, which is "bite" in Japanese, is written instead of the classic sound effect "chomp," which we would use in English.

Showing the worldwide reach and cross-fertilization of comics, Càmara and Durán's guide to Japanese-style comics was written and published in Spain. (The US edition was translated by Michael Brunelle and Beatriz Cartabarria for Sterling.) And my "toss" example comes from Robot Dreams, by Sara Varon of Brooklyn.

Is Our Children Reading E-books?

The Los Angeles Times is one of a number of news outlets reporting how the sales of electronic books grew by a large percentage in 2008. Of course, sales had been so low that nearly any market penetration would have produced a large percentage rise. But between the Sony Reader, the Amazon Kindle, and other devices, the format seems to have caught on.

Some people fret predictably that this new technology will change reading habits (of course it will) in fundamental ways (not really). Good fiction makes readers so mentally involved in the fictional world that they stop noticing their real surroundings--including whether they're turning pages, clicking a button, or listening to a recorded voice.

In the LA Times article, the opening case study (shown above, photo by Stefano Paltera) is an eight-year-old named Skye Vaughn-Perling, who likes Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who in both printed and digital forms. Well, with a name like Skye Vaughn-Perling, he'd have to like Dr. Seuss, wouldn't he?

I always seem to feel rhymy toward the end of the calendar year, so I found myself summing up the LA Times article this way:

Skye Vaughn-Perling isn't heeding
Questions swirling over reading.
He has seen both printed matter
And a screen--so which is better?
Skye seems glad for either version
Since what matters is immersion.
What he looks for, he's surmised,
Can come in books or digitized.

I feel unseemly pride in the internal rhymes.

How Old May You Be?

Early this month the Telegraph and other British newspapers declared that a tortoise named Jonathan was the world's oldest living animal.

Jonathan had arrived on the island of St. Helena in 1882 as a mature tortoise (i.e., at least fifty years old), making him at least 176 today.

But now some high-school students in Banbury, Oxfordshire, have interviewed a visitor from St. Helena and raised doubts about that conclusion. As they reported to the BBC:

• big tortoises look a lot alike.
• islanders might well have given the name Jonathan to more than one tortoise.

It's not that the current Jonathan can't be 176 years old, or even older. It's just that the evidence about his longevity on St. Helena isn't so clear as when the photograph above (from the Boer War) was first noted in the media.

According to Tortoise, by Peter Young, the Jonathan alive today inspired the Rev. L. P. Walcott to write these lines in 1924:

Said I to the Tortoise, ‘How old may you be?’
‘Two hundred or so,’ said the Tortoise to me.
‘That’s a very long time,’ to the Tortoise I said.
‘Not so long,’ he replied, ‘for most was in bed.’

Not “Not Goofing Off!”

Last December I posted this image, taken from an online preview of the first issue of the comic-book miniseries Teen Titans Year One. The script is by Amy Wolfram, the art by Karl Kerschl.
That issue and the five that followed have now been collected in a paperback. But not every detail made it into that edition.

Robin's agitated speech balloon in the picture disappeared between the preview and the paperback. Twenty years ago, the likely explanation would have been that a balloon pasted onto the artwork at the last minute had fallen off on the way to the printer. But with the technology of that time, there was also no easy way to make one of Robin's words to appear in red.

These days, comics are assembled on computers. That makes lettering and coloring much more flexible. It also turns editing, moving, or removing an element inserted by the letterer a simple matter of finding the right level in the Photoshop file. So this was a deliberate change.

What could have been the reason? Kerschl's art makes clear that Robin is startled by Batman's comment, so a red-letter speech isn't necessary to show his emotional state. Still, he does have his mouth open. I suspect the explanation lies in how Robin doesn't talk back to Batman like this in the rest of the miniseries (more's the pity). Wolfram and her editors may have decided that even though there was enough space on the page for this balloon, it no longer fit the story.

Unreliable

Lisa Von Drasek began her NYTBR review of Knucklehead, a new memoir about boys behaving badly, this way:

I have been a fan of Jon Scieszka (rhymes with Fresca) since “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs” by A. Wolf was published 20 years ago. Can you name another book that introduces the unreliable narrator to second graders?

Well, yes.

• Let's start with Dr. Seuss’s And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street (1937). At the end the young narrator acknowledges that he got carried away. It was a plain horse and wagon after all.
• In Ellen Raskin's Nothing Ever Happens on My Block (1966), the narrator's complaints about living in a boring neighborhood are undercut by the illustrations of lots happening behind his back.
• And frankly I don't trust Rawli Davis, the narrator of Helen Palmer's Do You Know What I'm Going to Do Next Saturday? (1963), even if it's too early to say for sure he won't do all the stuff he describes, and even if there are photographs to back him up. And it looks like the little kid he's bragging to feels the same way.