Bothersome booths

I wanted to find a tongue twister about booths for something I was doing, but I couldn't find one, so I wrote my own:

Bartha bought a brace of booths - a blue booth and a brown booth - but both the blue booth and the brown booth were bothersome, and she bemoaned buying both bothersome booths.

Don't teach students to write poetry

I love poetry.

I love reading it, and I write it occasionally. I've never published anything (unless you count my out of office messages, which are usually either in poetry or short story form, and the occasional blog post), but one day I might - you never know.

I sometimes write poetry in a free-form diary-type stream-of-consciousness crap, and I sometimes write "proper" poetry - sonnets (Shakespearean, Italian and Spencerian), ballads, terza rima, trochaic tetrameter... The whole nine yards. I do it because I can, and I just love the game of it.

However, most importantly, I do read it. I borrow and buy collections and anthologies. In the past two months I've re-read Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats, read Chris Riddell's anthology Poems to Live Your Life By (which I found flummoxing - something I'll explain at another point) and Henry Treece's The Haunted Garden, and I've started on a collection of animal-themed haiku.

My love of poetry was formed in school - but not in English classes. Oh, no. English classes always had either exceptionally dire poems designed to teach poetry or decent poems that were dissected until they made your head hurt and you grew to hate them. And then they would make us write poetry.

Now, I wrote poems all through my schooling years. If you had asked me, in school, what I was going to be when I grew up, I would say "astronaut", because I was an idealist with little grasp of reality. But I would have also have sworn that I would make a living from writing poetry somehow. Note the comment made about being an astronaut.

Heck, I even won a poetry competition in high school (it was just one of the minor categories, but it counts).

And yet, I still say you shouldn't teach kids to write poetry in English class. No good comes of it. It just so happens that I was a poetry nut, which is why English classes didn't put me off poetry for life - otherwise there's every chance they would have.

I love poetry because I took private Speech lessons (what used to be called "Elocution" in the old days), and we read poetry.

We didn't study it. We didn't dissect it. We didn't get a steady dose of poems chosen specifically for school students. We read real poetry - the kind that used to be popular back in the days when poetry was the equivalent of rock music. Shakespeare, Coleridge, Tennyson, Poe. And we read it to read it.

That may sound strange, "we read it to read it", but that's what we did. We would read through dozens of the poems, pick the ones we love best, and read them out loud with all the nuance and passion that we could muster. Along the way we also picked up things like symbolism, rhyme scheme, major literary movements, history and the lives of the poets - but it was real and it was raw and we read poetry for the pure thrill of reading it.

All of that good stuff soaked into my brain and spilled out of my fingers. I write poetry because I read so much of it that it's in my blood. It comes out, if it's in you.

And really, that's what you need. The average poetry lesson in English class seems to be designed to tick a box and get something horrible out of the way, but poetry is like an infusion - you have to steep in it, get it to soak into you. Read the good stuff for the sake of reading it and for no other reason than that. Let people find what they love and what they hate. Let them read it out loud and read it quietly to themselves.

Then, if it seeps in deep enough, it will pour out of them. It's the only way it can be any good (even if it's terrible).

Book Reflection: You’re All My Favourites

You’re All My Favourites, by Sam McBratney, illustrated by Anita Jeram.

You may remember Sam McBratney and Anita Jeram from the classic 1994 picture book, Guess How Much I Love You (which is available in three thousand different iterations), or, as I know it best, Weißt du eigentlich, wie lieb ich dich hab? I read the book in German before I found a copy in English, and I’ve read the German version a few times but I’ve only read the English version once.

You’re All My Favourites, however, I have only read in English. Quite frankly I think I’d like it better if it was in German. It’s a nice enough book with a nice enough story (such as it is), and I’m sure there are kids out there who regard it as one of their favourites. I just thought it was lacking some of the pizzazz of the book with the hares. It’s not as playful.

There’s a nuclear family with a mother, father and three baby bears. The three siblings all wonder whether or not their parents like the other kids better than them – maybe the other two are the “favourites”? And, of course, by the end of the book, their parents reassure them that they are all their favourites. It’s a nice little book with a nice little message, and parents will no doubt jump at the chance to have a picture book that explicitly reassures small children that their parents don’t have a favourite (which is, of course, not at all true – although the same kid isn’t always the favourite kid).

And therein lies the rub, I think. I feel like this book was written specifically to give a message. Like those books that are designed to teach kids that pooping is perfectly natural (I still wonder why we need so many of those), or that blended families are “okay”. It’s not really a story, per se. That’s probably why it’s not as charming as Guess How Much I Love You, which had a lovely little story.

Also, don’t give this book to a kid who actually knows anything about bears. That whole nuclear family scenario is completely inaccurate for the species. It’s not unheard of for a bear to have three cubs, but two is more common, and the father certainly doesn’t stick around to help raise the kids. In fact, there’s an excellent chance he will try to kill them if he sees them, so it’s probably best if he’s out of the picture.

Book Reflection: Maudie and Bear

Maudie and Bear, by Jan Ormerod and Freya Blackwood.

Now, this book I loved. I read this book twice in one evening because I finished it, and then wanted to dive straight back into it again. I think I read it at least six times on the first weekend after I borrowed it, and I've gone back to it a few times since. I love it now, as a grown up fan of picture books, and I would have loved it as a child, when I used to deep dive into books like this and spend hours pouring over the pictures.

I think I loved this book from the moment I saw the bear riding the bicycle on the front cover – but not just because bears and bicycles are two of my favourite things. There was something highly evocative about the picture, and the book kept that magic going throughout the whole experience. There’s something entirely timeless about this book. It was published in 2010, but if I had found it back when I was a child in the 1980s, nothing would have seemed out of place to me at all. Maybe that’s why it appeals to me so much – because it feels like a book I did read and love when I was a child, even though it isn’t one.

The book is a collection of short stories (not something I often get to say when talking about picture books aimed at five-year-olds), which each feature lovely little vignettes about a girl called Maudie and the bear who appears to be her primary caregiver. It's unclear what the exact relationship is for the bear and Maudie, but if you replaced "bear" with "grandpa", the entire book would still make perfect sense. Not that a girl being cared for by a bear doesn't make perfect sense.

The book seems to me to be a bit like an alternate reality version of Little Dee – a comic strip by Chris Baldwin in which a lost girl is adopted by a kindly bear named Ted. It also has some similarities with the television programme Bear in the Big Blue House, which also features a kindly bear as the gentle head of the household (he spent his time patiently wrangling characters who were a lot like young children as well).

In Little Dee, the bear and his makeshift family (which includes a runaway dog and a vulture, for some unfathomable reason) live in a cave in the woods. In Maudie and Bear, the girl and her ursine guardian live in a lovely Federation style house in what is clearly an Australian country town. If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say somewhere in Victoria, although I’ve seen houses and buildings like that in Queensland, New South Wales and Tasmania.

The book never actually tells you or shows you where it is set, but I know that style of architecture so well that I can’t imagine the book could be set anywhere but “here”, if you know what I mean. Plus, there’s a scene in which a lorikeet is sitting on Bear’s head and a couple of currawongs are on the ground in front of him.

But, even without the birds, the illustrations are still so evocative of “place” that the book is endowed with a kind of magic realism that makes it seem perfectly natural that this is an Australian country town in which talking bears wear hats, rake leaves, wash floors, ride bicycles and raise human girls. Every now and then I find a book where I feel like I could take a vacation in the artwork – just jump into the pictures Mary-Poppins-style and have a lovely time there for a while. This is one of those books.

And the stories are all lovely, too. While Maudie could do with pulling her head in occasionally, the relationship between the girl and the bear is just charming. I particularly like the way Bear “thinks about” Maudie’s temper tantrum by leaving her to it while he has a cup of tea and a piece of cake. I would actually recommend this book for fathers, grandfathers or uncles of young girls. It’s exactly the kind of book that a kindly male role model should share with his three-to-five year old little girl.

This is one of those library finds that I wanted to buy for myself, but it's a little out of print at the moment (apparently the publishers aren't sure if it's worth reprinting - I would like to say to them that it most definitely is). Copies are currently selling for $80 in the few bookshops that have them at present, and while I can honestly say this is currently one of my favourite books, I don't love it that much.

I did track down a copy in German for less than $40, though, so that will be fun when it arrives. But the title of the German book is Marrietta und ihr Bär, which seems wrong to me. Bear isn't Maudie's bear - he's just Bear. And Maudie is as much his Maudie as he's her bear.

And I Fancy Myself a Poet

The call to write
Hits me now and then
And I fancy myself a poet.
A dozen notebooks
Or more
Filled over the years
(Well, partially filled)
With jottings that never see the light of day -
And probably never will -
Because I fancy myself a poet,
But I never assume
Anyone else will.
Is poetry a career or a vocation
In this day and age?
Or just an affectation?
Does anyone really read poetry now,
Apart from posers like me
Who fancy themselves poets?
And is a poet one who writes
Or one who is read - who publishes?
And yet, for many years now,
I've fancied myself a poet.

- "Karuke"

Book Reflection: The Great Bear

The Great Bear, by Libby Gleeson & Armin Greder.

On first reading, I did not like this book. I thought the illustrations were ugly and kind of disturbing, and I thought the plot was perfunctory and kind of depressing.

However, I was willing to concede that I hadn’t exactly given it the best of reading environments. I had been gathering books in my library for a display that had the theme “Religion and Philosophy”, and I was specifically looking for children’s books and picture books which could fit the theme (however loosely).... and I may have picked up a couple of books featuring bears while I was at it.

I’ll admit that the bear books were picked up more for me than for the display. One of them (which I will review later) had nothing to do with religion or philosophy at all, but The Great Bear looked like it might have a tangential connection to the theme, so I quickly read it to see if I had collected it for the display after all. A quick reading while standing next to a pile of books that I’d dumped on someone else’s desk wasn’t the best treatment, so I wasn’t sure if the book itself was perfunctory or just my treatment of it.

So I took it home and read it “properly”. As I read it, I realised that the illustrations were from the perspective of the bear (a dancing bear in a travelling circus who was used to people poking her with sticks and throwing rocks at her), so it made sense that they would be ugly and kind of disturbing. I started to think it was really quite clever.

But then, the plot was both too deep for most children, and not deep enough for grown ups. And half-way through the book the illustrations stopped being from the perspective of the bear, and the story stopped using words entirely – it’s like Gleeson and Greder set up one method of story telling but switched to another half-way through. And in the end I felt a bit let down by the whole thing (even though I’d come around to thinking the illustrations, while still ugly and disturbing, were also interesting and nuanced).

So, on second reading, I did not like this book. I wouldn’t buy it for any children I know, and I wouldn’t buy it for myself. But I might recommend it to an artist friend of mine who likes things I don’t like. She’d probably really enjoy it.

Bad Buddhist is the wrong book.

I try to make a point of buying new books at a physical bookshop on a semi-regular basis, just for the heck of it. Bookshops never have anything I need. I live in a library – sorry, work! I work in a library. I don’t live here, I just never leave. Anyway, I work in a library, and I occasionally visit the local public library as well, so 90% of my book “needs” can be covered for free. That last 10% is too old, weird or technical to be sold in a “real” bookshop, so I make most of my serious book purchases online.

Yet I don’t want to live in a world without a local bookshop. I want there to be shops outside of airports where people can go and browse books and buy them in person. So, even though I’m not a huge fan of wasting money on crap I don’t need, I buy new books at full price for the heck of it. I wander in, find something that strikes my fancy, and buy it. I often try to pick an author I haven’t read before or a genre I don’t usually read (but I have to admit that most of the time it’s holiday reading fare).

In my most recent excursion, I found a book by Meshel Laurie called Bad Buddhist. I’m familiar with Meshel Laurie from television (I still miss her early 2000s stand-up show), but I don’t read any of the magazines she writes for, so I’ve never read her work. Plus, this is (or appeared to be) the type of book I’ve been enjoying from the public library of late (personal reflections on Buddhism, perhaps from a woman’s perspective), so it seemed like a good choice.

This book is wrong. That’s the only way I can describe it. On a fundamental, publication level, as a book, it’s wrong. It has the wrong title, the wrong tagline, the wrong cover image, the wrong jacket blurb and the wrong structure – and it’s displayed in the wrong part of the bookshop.

I found this book in the Religion and Spirituality section of the bookshop (sitting next to Meshel’s earlier book, Buddhism for theUnbelievably Busy*). It’s called Bad Buddhist, the tagline promises “speed bumps and detours on the path to enlightenment” and features a picture of Meshel giving a Namaste-style salute.** All of these things, combined with the titles of the chapters and the blurb on the back, suggest it’s going to be in a genre I like to think of as “humorous anecdotes with faith-based reflections”. The genre probably has a different, much better name, but I’m an academic librarian so I’m not completely down with the terminology – I am, however, someone who has read several books that fit within this genre over the years, and I know what to expect.

Granted, I’m not familiar with this genre from a Buddhist perspective. Catholic, Anglican, or Presbyterian, on the other hand? Totally. Thanks to my mother’s and aunt’s bookshelves, I grew up with that stuff. Books like My Cope Runneth Over and The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass, Aged 37 3/4*** were in my space from an early age. Even if this book wasn’t necessarily in that genre, the next logical expectation would be what I mentioned above: personal reflections on Buddhism from a woman’s perspective. Either of which I was okay with – this is what I imagined I had signed up for when I bought it.

This book was neither of those things. It was an anthology of articles she had written for various publications that occasionally (very, very occasionally) mentioned something Buddhist. Most of the time, though, this was a collection of a comedian’s autobiographical writing, and it just so happened that the comedian was a practising Buddhist. I guess you'd say the book was about a Buddhist, but I was expecting more mentions of Buddhism within the book.

I also felt that, not only was the book itself not what the outside of the book implied it would be, but it wasn’t structured well for what it was. I don’t mind a good anthology, but I like to know that’s what I’m reading. An anthology doesn’t hang together the same way a book written as a single piece of writing does, so without knowing that I was reading pieces written for several different publications over the course of at least six years, I found it uneven and disjointed – not to mention oddly lacking much by way of “Buddhist” content.

At some point I flicked to the back of the book and noticed the “acknowledgements” actually solved the puzzle – it told me that “some” of the pieces had been published previously in a number of different publications (and by "some", aparently they meant over 80% of the book). Suddenly, the book actually made sense.

If, like a normal anthology, there had been an introduction where Meshel let us know we were surfing across several years’ worth of work, everything would have fit together nicely. If, as often happens in anthologies, we had some information at the start of every story that put it in context (like the date it was written), that would have made this a grand little trip through a jam-packed time in a Buddhist comedian’s life. If this book had been called Whatever Floats Your Boat**** and the cover picture was Meshel walking along a beach, then it would have been suitably neutral in its advertising of “Buddhist” content, and the fact that there wasn’t much of it wouldn’t be confusing. And if it had been shelved with the other autobiographical books written by comedians, then everything would make perfect sense and everyone would know what they were buying.

It wasn’t the book I thought I was buying. It’s not the book that was advertised. It’s not a bad book, it’s just wrong – and it didn’t have to be. A few simple changes would have made it more honestly what it is. Granted the book it actually is is not the book I wanted to read at that point in time, but that’s beside the point.

*I probably should have bought this book first, but I have an irrational distrust of books with “For Busy People” in the title. I should get over that, I suppose. Besides, it’s probably not what I think it is.

**Meshel has the same photo on the cover of most of her books published through Blank Inc. The front cover. Someone needs to quietly take her or her publisher aside and remind whoever is responsible for the cover design that the front of a book is not the place for the author bio pic. 

***It occurred to me, when I was thinking about this, that back when I read that book I thought 37 3/4 was definitely middle aged (of not heading towards old), and now I’m older than Adrian was. I should re-read it to see if he seems less like an old fart now.

****Naming an anthology after one of the stories inside it is fairly common practice.

On Magical Tidying, Or: Molly Vickers Wets Her Nickers

I'm currently reading Marie Kondo's book (which you may have heard of) about tidying up, largely because I recently bought a Kindle and I was looking for a few different things to load up before going on holidays.

Momentary digression to talk about eBook readers: 

I bought a Kindle partly to try this whole eBook reader thingy, and partly because I noticed a few books I was interested in reading were way cheaper and easier to obtain by Kindle than by traditional means (i.e., ordering it from the other side of the planet). However, I just remembered one of the reasons why I hadn't bought an eBook reader ages ago is the fact that I can't lend the books or give them away after reading them, and that sucks.

Back to rambling on about Kondo's book: 

So, this woman clearly has deep seated issues and probably should have had some sort of intervention when she was a child. She talks about how much "freedom" she had as a middle child, whose parents were busy looking after the youngest and whose brother completely ignored her to play video games, and how she used that freedom to develop an obsession for housewife magazines and form a life-long passion for tidying up - and yet spent most of her childhood and youth feeling that no matter how much she tidied, her room never seemed tidy enough.

Essentially, she's a person who was raised by Home Beautiful magazines and has developed a tidying mania as a way to exert some control over her life. And yet she's made a bucket load of money from her *ahem* "passion", so while she might be insane, she's certainly not crazy.

And that's how I'd some up her book really - insane, but not completely crazy. Reading her book is an interesting rollercoaster that goes a little something like this:

"This woman is nuts! Oh, actually, that's a really interesting idea. Nope, this is just loony. Oh, I can see how that would work. I should give that ago... aaand it just went seriously weird again."

For example, she suggests storing things vertically rather than in piles, because you can easily see what you have and how much you are accumulating. Interesting idea, and I could see how it would work. She suggests storing your laptop like it's an actual book - I hadn't thought of that before but I like it. And then she tells us she loves carrots to pieces and she stores them vertically in her fridge, keeping them in cup holders so they can stay upright.

Why? Why would you go out of your way to store carrots vertically? Why would you tell thousands of people that you store your carrots vertically? Surely this sort of thing is between you and your carrots?

I'm also concerned that there doesn't appear to be any kind of charity shop in Japan, because she spends a lot of time telling you to throw out clothes and books that don't "spark joy", but never once suggests donating items that are still in good condition to charity. It's straight into the bin bag, if you please. This seems strange, because surely it would be easier to let go of something that's "still good" if you knew someone else might appreciate it more than you?

Speaking of books, she clearly doesn't have the soul of a librarian or archivist. That's okay, not everyone does, but some people do and that's going to play havoc with her "if it doesn't spark joy, toss it out" approach to weeding your book collection or paperwork.

I used to be the kind of person who had to keep every book I've ever owned. When I moved to Tasmania, I took boxes and boxes of books with me - and left more at my family home because I couldn't part with them. And then I lumped them all back when I moved back to Queensland.

I'm getting better at this, and over the years I've weeded a lot of my collection. I'm planning another big cull shortly, where I'll be saying goodbye to quite a number of books that used to mean something to me, but don't belong to the person I am today.

We change a lot over the years, but we keep hold of things for older versions of ourselves because they meant something to us, once. But the truth is, we need to let go of what once mattered to us in order to have space in our lives for new things - or for nothing. Sometimes we need to simply take a break from having things and have a bit of free space for a while.

And yet I know there is one book I'll probably be keeping even though it doesn't "spark joy" and doesn't mean anything to me any more. I've tried to get rid of that book through several successive culls, but I keep fishing it out of the pile and putting it back in my bookcase.

It's called Voices: An Anthology of Poetry and Pictures, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield, and every time I look at it I wonder why I've kept it all these years. And then I remember. I've kept it because there's a poem in that book called "Child's Bouncing Song" written by Tony Connor.

This poem starts with the line "Molly Vickers wets her nickers" and the poem is burned into my brain for reasons I can't explain (we all have our childhood obsessions, mine was poetry - sadly I haven't worked out how to make a fortune out of that, yet). However, I keep stuffing up the two stanzas before the last one. I don't know why. All I know is, every few years or so I'll start reciting that poem in a moment of absent mindedness, and then I'll get to the point where I can't remember if the next line is "High and low and/ to and fro and/ down the street and up the hill" or "Mister, mister,/ Shirley's sister/ won a prize at Blackpool prom."

It will drive me nuts, until I find that blasted book and remind myself how the last half of that poem goes. So while the book doesn't "spark joy", and I'd happily part with it otherwise, I can't get rid of it.

Now, I know what you're thinking: "just photocopy that poem and keep it somewhere". Nice idea, but unfortunately my brain is now broken. Once upon a time I could "accidentally" memorise sections of poetry, and deliberately memorise passages the length of entire chapters. I can't do that any more - my brain elasticity has gone and lost its rebound. I can't remember where I move things to. I try to move them to a more logical place, but I may as well move them directly into a black hole.

So, maybe Konmari's method might actually work for that. A) have next to nothing in the first place, b) put everything in the same category together, so that you just need to go to the place where everything is and look for the scant few things that you still have.

Or, maybe I just need to leave Molly Vickers to dry off somewhere, and decide that I'm okay with never remembering the order of those two stanzas.

Book Reflection: Another Book About Bears.

Another Book About Bears, by Laura and Philip Bunting

It just so happens, when you’ve set yourself a mini-challenge of writing book reviews/reflections about books with bears in them, that you end up spending a lot of time talking about children’s books. Bears are very popular animals for children’s books, and they slowly peter out by the time you get to books for older readers, young adults or old adults.

It’s like that meme that was doing the rounds on the Internet a little while ago – when you’re a child people ask you what your favourite dinosaur is, but when you grow up they stop asking, like they don’t even care any more. For the record, I’m fond of the elasmosaurus – although technically the underwater critters aren’t dinosaurs, they’re marine reptiles. I don’t know why.

Anyway, the point is that kids books are rife with bears. And this is something that the Buntings point out (to great effect) in Another Book About Bears. The book begins with a typical story-book set up, “once upon a time there was a bear” sort of thing, but the bear in the book almost immediately interrupts the story to complain about how much work bears have to do because they’re in so many darn stories. They’d love to take a nap or eat dinner, but no – someone wants to read another book about bears, so they have to drop what they’re doing and “perform” the story.

Now, I’d really love to read the text behind the bear as he’s* interrupting said story.  There’s something about an Esquilax and a horse with the something of a rabbit and the body of something else. Anyhoo, that’s beside the point, as the rest of the book focuses on the bear and his fellow ursines trying to get out of being in another book by recommending a litany of other animals to replace them.

The book made me chuckle the whole way through – no problem engaging my inner four-year-old with this one.

It also put me in mind of the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde. In that series, characters in books have a life to live behind the scenes, but have to perform the story every time someone reads it – much like the bears in this book. It’s an interesting idea, and it’s interesting to encounter it again here.

Jasper Fforde, incidentally, wrote a book about bears that wasn’t a children’s book, and I’ll be looking at that little gem at some point in the future.

In the meantime, if you get the chance, do make sure you read Another Book About Bears. You’ll be glad you did.

*Have you ever notice that most of the books about bears where there is one central bear in the story, the bear is a “he”? I find that interesting, and if anyone can think of any books featuring an ursine central character who is a “she”, I’d very much like to hear about it.