Eulalia!!! Wiki on for Redwall!

According to my Old Farmer's Almanac , December hosts the feast day of St. Eulalia (you can look her up), December 10. To celebrate the publication of Eulalia!, here is an announcement of the Redwall Wiki! Have some fun and edit the pages. Add themes, character profiles, anything you like!

Yoga Adventures for Children

Yoga Adventures for Children: Playing, Dancing, Moving, Breathing, Relaxing by Helen Purperhart (Alameda, CA: Hunter House, 2007) is a terrific book for all ages. I received a free review copy by signing on to a publishers' review program through LibraryThing and am absolutely delighted with it. I will donate it to my daughter's school, where I'm sure they'll make much use of it. It's the approach to yoga that I enjoy, a playful yet serious introduction to exercises that are easy to remember through their connection to animals and nature. With lovely, simple illustrations by Barbara van Amelsfort, one can easily lead children through the basic postures of yoga, from simple neck stretches to the salute to the sun and cooperative games. Each exercise is presented with an illustration and easy-to-follow instructions. The approach makes it all fun and imaginative and still holds true to basic yoga postures and practices. There's an introduction, including "the Rules of Yoga" (such things as cleanliness, honesty, and other simple virtues), and then the exercises are divided into appealing sections: warmups, postures, games, breathing and on to stories and visualizations to help children internalize the practices. The illustrations clearly and playfully make the exercises easy to remember.
Now that yoga has become normal in mainstream American culture, guides like this are very welcome. A section near the end explains in simple, matter-of-fact terms some of the philosophy behind the practices, such as a simple introduction to the idea of chakras, with easy exercises for each one. A helpful last section groups the activities according to numbers of people needed or props which are useful
Highly recommended for anyone who works with children or any adults wishing a clear and easy introduction to yoga.

Female circumsc--- what??!?

I can't believe this. Yes, I can. The web which lets us all publish whatever we like (mostly), which allows me to natter on, also allows this example of non-thinking -- non-reading, really:

"If you decide that you do not want to support something like this, I suggest you boycott the movie and the books. I googled a synopsis of THE GOLDEN COMPASS. As I skimmed it I couldn't believe that in a children's book part of the story is about castration and female circumcision." A piece "collected from email" and quoted on Scopes.com.

Huh?? I can't even call this a misreading of the book -- the protester didn't even read the book! And as for the Amazon reviews, since they're usually halfway literate, I believe the "skimming" referred to was swift as a swallow bent on picking up the small insects.

Ooh, it's juicy -- and very misled.

Well, since this is a book blog, I have to show the book, in which the word "circumcision" DOES, in fact, appear, playing a very subtle, linguistically precise, and frightening role in the action of a quite different world. The horror, if that's what a reader experiences, is on a more spiritual plane than our physical lives.

Penelope Lively

It's time to catch up with a few books from the summer, all by the wonderful Penelope Lively, the English writer of novels for both children and adults and of memoir. Lively grew up in Cairo and then in England, and her adult novels have recurring themes and motifs which spring from her life. Her most famous novel is Moon Tiger, a Booker Prize winner. In it we experience the present and remembered life of Claudia Hampton, a historian and war correspondent, as she lies dying in a nursing home. As members of her family visit her, finding her sometimes alert and sometimes not, we enter into the mind of this passionate and brilliant woman as she recalls her life, and we also are given revealing glimpses of the thoughts of her misunderstood daughter and others near to her. As Claudia recalls her experiences in war-time North Africa, her brief and intense love affair with a soldier who died, and her subsequent life as wife, mother, and writer, we experience her life vividly and vicariously. Lively's prose is brilliant in its quiet way: sentences flow in artless variety, words are exactly right for their purpose. While not as elliptical as Michael Ondaatje's writing, Lively's novels are kin to his in their intelligence, excellent writing, and themes, especially the relationship of the individual to history and politics.

From Moon Tiger: She lies awake in the small hours. On the bedside table is a Moon Tiger. The Moon Tiger is a green coil that slowly burns all night, repelling mosquitoes, dropping away into lengths of grey ash, its glowing red eye a companion of the hot insect-rasping darkness. She lies there thinking of nothing,simply being, her whole body content. Another inch of the Moon Tiger feathers down into the saucer.

Tom stirs. Claudia murmurs, 'Are you awake?' (1987)

I'd previously read Moon Tiger and this summer enjoyed an excellent recorded version, which carried me easily down a few hundred miles of interstate highway.

Lively's 1977 novel, The Road to Litchfield, shows that even three decades ago she was a writer with perfect pitch for language, both dialogue and narrative. Themes of the role of history in our present day life and of marriage are operative in this early work. In addition, the thoughts and voice of the protagonist's father, dying in a nursing home, foreshadows the character of Claudia Hampton: in both we experience the frustration of a person who is incapacitated and sometimes speechless but whose intelligence is as sharp and fervent as ever.

It's also a very funny novel. Here is Anne, who's been teaching history to adolescents, taking with the headmaster of the comprehensive school:

'Do sit,' he said. Look, I'd better come straight to the point, I think. As you've heard, we're making quite a few changes in the school. To be frank, I've had to take a new broom to the curriculum. It just didn't stand up to inspection in this day and age. Far too much dead wood.'

He sat on the edge of the desk, looking past her and out of the window..... 'The fact is,' he said, ' that History's one of the things I've had to rethink.... [there's] a most interesting piece of research which proves fairly conclusively that children under fifteen just aren't ready for a chronological approach to history. And yet here we are teaching them history as narrative, one thing after another.'

'That's what it is. One thing does happen after another.'

'Yes, but that's a very sophisticated concept, Anne. They simply aren't ready for it at the O-level stage.'

Anne said, 'I entirely disagree.'

Cleopatra's Sister, a recent Lively novel, also plays on the theme of the entanglement of the personal and the historico-political in its story of two independent people, both unmarried, who meet and fall in love when their plane is forced to land in "Calimbia," an imaginary but very convincing country on the north shore of Africa, and the travellers are held hostage by a mad dictator who wants Britain to release some political prisoners. It's a tense thriller, a cautionary tale for the western world, and a terrific love story to boot.

Lively's 1994 memoir Oleander, Jacaranda tells of her childhood in Cairo and provides background for many of the themes and motifs in her fiction, including her fiction for children (see especially The House in Norham Gardens). She writes as well of the difference between the child's perception of the world and the adult reality:

[the child Penelope is observing a preying mantis] No thought at all here, just observation -- the young child's ability to focus entirely on the moment, to direct attention upon here and now, without the intrusion of reflection or of anticipation, It is also the Wordsworthian vision of the physical world: the splendour in the grass. And, especially, Virginia Woolf's creation of the child's-eye view. A way of seeing that is almost lost in adult life. You can stare, you can observe -- but within the head there is now the unstoppable obscuring onward rush of things. It is no longer possible simply to see, without the accompanying internal din of meditation. (Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived, HarperCollins, 1994)

A last note: My copy of Oleander... is the one with the dark cover, above. But the other cover, with the child jumping into the water, is so amazingly like that of this summer's other wonderful read: Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys. Curious and curiouser....

"The Little White Horse" is alive and coming to the screen!

I'm passing along a post from the wonderful 5th grade teacher, blogger, and child_lit notable Monica Edinger's blog "Educating Alice," about a very favorite book of my childhood, Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse, and the movie being made of it, due to be out in 2008. Dakota Blue Richards, who plays Lyra in the Golden Compass movie to be released later this year, has been cast as the heroine, Maria Merryweather. This was, in my life, the introduction to the magic and mystery of the Unicorn. Shel Silverstein's song came much later, and then in due time the tapestry in the Cloisters. Now unicorn images are ubiquitous, not least in the lead trinkets coming by the gross on container ships from the East to our discount outlets. But to be a child or pre-teen in the fifties, discovering the magic of Goudge's "little white horse," was to be truly enchanted by story,poetry,and legend.

One of the few poems I can still recite by heart is the title poem from the novel. Its magic still casts its spell as I walk down the street in my by the ravine at night and recite aloud to the air, "It was under the white moon that I saw him/ The little white horse,with neck arched high in pride...."

Don't miss Pullman interview!

Hot off the presses, or on cool cyberwaves, is a wonderful interview with Philip Pullman in the British journal, Literary Review. Read it now while it's available online, as you have to pay to subscribe online (but you can get a sample issue free). Pullman talks about education, religion, Blake and Milton, fantasy, and of course His Dark Materials, with a tantalizing mention of the book he's currently working on. Thanks to the wonderful Monica Edinger and the The Guardian blog for letting us know about this interview.

Tree is in park behind Silver Spring Elementary School, Riverside, RI

At Swim, Two Boys, by Jamie O'Neill

For one week while away this month I lived in Jamie O'Neill's At Swim, Two Boys, first published in 2001. My plunge into its world began with the cover image, and I dove into 1915 Dun Laoghaire and the telling of a story that began with words that cast a spell of language and narrative:

"At the corner of Adelaide Road, where the paving sparkled in the morning sun, Mr. Mack waited by the newspaper stand. A grand day it was, fair and fine. Puff-clouds sailed through a sky of blue. Fair-weather cumulus to give the correct designation, on account they cumulate, as Mr. Mack believed. High above the houses a seagull glided, gliding on a breeze that carried from the sea. Wait now, was it cumulate or accumulate he meant? The breeze sniffed of salt and tide. Make a donkey of yourself, inwardly he cautioned, using words you don't know their meaning. And where's this paper chappie after getting to?

In delicate clutch an Irish Times he held."

There's a lot here: a setting, a distinct character, and two distinctive voices, that of Mr. Mack and of the narrator. In time we meet Mr. Mack's teenage son, Jim, and another father-son pair integral to the plot, which interlocks romantic love, love of family, and love of country in a time of unrest.

Good fiction creates a world in which the reader lives for a spell. And a spell, an enchantment it is, one that deepens our knowledge of the world and the human heart and adds vicariously to our experience. In this book I have felt as a boy in the confessional, confessing he knows not what but that he is wicked. I've felt the mixed and unarticulated emotions of that boy as he prays on his knees beside a priest whose psychological power over vulnerable boys is almost unlimited. I feel the pride that enables another teenage boy to shovel dung and still dream and love the world. I enjoy the all male swims in the sea, and the boys' determination to swim out to the Muglins the next Easter. I've lived through the planning of an uprising among Irish citizens who are faced with involvement in a great war at the same time they want to wrest their independence from British rule.

A great writer puts us into the lives of other people while still allowing us the perspective of the writer/reader. In the dual vision we create meaning.

I emerged from this book, at p. 562, wanting to go back and start over. I know I'll go back.

For dessert there's O'Neill's website with links to a number of early reviews and a few pictures. The story of O'Neill's ten year process of writing the book is in itself a great struggling-young-writer story. The title was inspired by that of Flann O'Brien's At Swim--Two Birds. The American publisher of O'Neill's novel wanted to call it just At Swim (too vague, too dull). O'Neill added the comma, and literature was enriched once more. You can see very fine photographs of the bathing area at the Forty Foot at the website of the photographer Tom O'Doherty. You'll have to scroll down a few pages to the set of the baths at Dun Laoghaire.