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With sweet-brier, and bon-fire, and strawberry-wire, and columbine
We had no construction this morning! Absence of it did not prevent me from waking like a shot around the usual hour of earth-moving and lying awake for as long as it took my body to believe physically enough in the quiet to fall back asleep, but the worst disruption we had on our street this afternoon came from the normal urban scourge of leafblowing. I slept far later in the afternoon than I had planned and am taking it as good for me, in the same way that yesterday I spent more than twelve hours in bed and as far as I can tell most of them asleep. Have some links.
1. The last time I walked around the reservoir, I passed a planting of new trees at the Lexington Community Farm. I was able to call across to a volunteer working on the far side of the nascent orchard who told me they were all fruit trees, of which the only species I can remember are elderberry, sour cherry, and pawpaw, which I expressed surprise would grow this far north, but she was from Virginia and assured me it was doing fine. I will have to remember in a few years to try the local pawpaws.
2. I decided I was not the ideal subject for this test of blue-green color categorization when after about two rounds I wouldn't have called the sample swatch either color as such and started mentally falling back on verdigris, turquoise, faience, and icebergs with blanket options on γλαυκός and glas. It isn't that I can't see the gradations. It's that I have trouble with the agreement to categorize them as just one or the other. I have taken it several times with about a ten-point spread in results. I understand that Basidium-colored is not in any case a registered number with Pantone.
3. The New Yorker's review of Katherine Rundell's Impossible Creatures (2023) has convinced me that I should seek her out her children's books, the entire catalogue of which had heretofore eluded me, and also that The New Yorker is about to receive a deluge of letters, possibly including from me:
Some years ago, Rundell published a slim little essay-as-book aimed at adults, "Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise." Musing and anecdotal in tone, it is basically an elaboration on a remark by W. H. Auden: "There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experience, but there are no good books which are only for children."
That's true as far as it goes, but it obscures an important point: good books for children, even outstanding books for children, are immeasurably better when you are an actual child. When I was a kid, books like "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Tuck Everlasting" upended my world, sliding me straight out of my bedroom and into eternity. When I reread them in adulthood, the flames had burned to embers; I could remember the fire but not feel it. That's often the case when you revisit books you loved in your youth or catch up on the ones you missed or were born too early to encounter at the intended age. As a grownup, you may enjoy such works, but you can no longer wholly enter them. You are, in an inversion of that childhood injustice, too tall to ride the ride.
Bzzt! No! Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not attempt to convince me that on revisiting children's books of my childhood I do not see more in the outstanding or even the good ones than I could when I was five or ten or fifteen years old or even thirty-five. Of course the angle is different, but to adapt an image from one of those multiply revisited books, Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), whose acute and numinous strangeness has not worn off in thirty-something years, it doesn't keep me from entering the door. What on earth would I revisit them for, if the experience were so much like peering through the dimmed glass of nostalgia? Was I just supposed to stop reading any new books from the children's section of the library, whose emotional boundaries are so traditionally porous with young adult and now middle grade literature that I can't even tell where the reviewer would draw the cutoff of the age of wonder? I haven't been a child since, ritually, the age of twelve, or more biologically, fourteen; most of my reading of children's books has perforce occurred beyond that at maximum window of a decade; regret inform that I still have unmanageable quantities of feelings about some of the characters encountered during that period or even after. I am talking as recently as last week. I believe in the reviewer's experience of embers, but to generalize it feels like some weird fetishization of the child's unfiltered eye or the literary equivalent of the anti-intellectual fallacy that knowing about Rayleigh scattering takes the beauty out of the sky's blue. I don't think I have ever had a book of incredible importance to me as a child fall out of meaning in adulthood, especially not because I had learned more about the world or writing or myself in the meantime. tl;dr what an amazingly silly thing to say in the middle of a review presumably intended to convince an adult audience to pick up a children's book. I am literally signing off this post to re-read some Eleanor Cameron.
1. The last time I walked around the reservoir, I passed a planting of new trees at the Lexington Community Farm. I was able to call across to a volunteer working on the far side of the nascent orchard who told me they were all fruit trees, of which the only species I can remember are elderberry, sour cherry, and pawpaw, which I expressed surprise would grow this far north, but she was from Virginia and assured me it was doing fine. I will have to remember in a few years to try the local pawpaws.
2. I decided I was not the ideal subject for this test of blue-green color categorization when after about two rounds I wouldn't have called the sample swatch either color as such and started mentally falling back on verdigris, turquoise, faience, and icebergs with blanket options on γλαυκός and glas. It isn't that I can't see the gradations. It's that I have trouble with the agreement to categorize them as just one or the other. I have taken it several times with about a ten-point spread in results. I understand that Basidium-colored is not in any case a registered number with Pantone.
3. The New Yorker's review of Katherine Rundell's Impossible Creatures (2023) has convinced me that I should seek her out her children's books, the entire catalogue of which had heretofore eluded me, and also that The New Yorker is about to receive a deluge of letters, possibly including from me:
Some years ago, Rundell published a slim little essay-as-book aimed at adults, "Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise." Musing and anecdotal in tone, it is basically an elaboration on a remark by W. H. Auden: "There are good books which are only for adults, because their comprehension presupposes adult experience, but there are no good books which are only for children."
That's true as far as it goes, but it obscures an important point: good books for children, even outstanding books for children, are immeasurably better when you are an actual child. When I was a kid, books like "A Wrinkle in Time" and "Tuck Everlasting" upended my world, sliding me straight out of my bedroom and into eternity. When I reread them in adulthood, the flames had burned to embers; I could remember the fire but not feel it. That's often the case when you revisit books you loved in your youth or catch up on the ones you missed or were born too early to encounter at the intended age. As a grownup, you may enjoy such works, but you can no longer wholly enter them. You are, in an inversion of that childhood injustice, too tall to ride the ride.
Bzzt! No! Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, do not attempt to convince me that on revisiting children's books of my childhood I do not see more in the outstanding or even the good ones than I could when I was five or ten or fifteen years old or even thirty-five. Of course the angle is different, but to adapt an image from one of those multiply revisited books, Elizabeth Goudge's The Valley of Song (1951), whose acute and numinous strangeness has not worn off in thirty-something years, it doesn't keep me from entering the door. What on earth would I revisit them for, if the experience were so much like peering through the dimmed glass of nostalgia? Was I just supposed to stop reading any new books from the children's section of the library, whose emotional boundaries are so traditionally porous with young adult and now middle grade literature that I can't even tell where the reviewer would draw the cutoff of the age of wonder? I haven't been a child since, ritually, the age of twelve, or more biologically, fourteen; most of my reading of children's books has perforce occurred beyond that at maximum window of a decade; regret inform that I still have unmanageable quantities of feelings about some of the characters encountered during that period or even after. I am talking as recently as last week. I believe in the reviewer's experience of embers, but to generalize it feels like some weird fetishization of the child's unfiltered eye or the literary equivalent of the anti-intellectual fallacy that knowing about Rayleigh scattering takes the beauty out of the sky's blue. I don't think I have ever had a book of incredible importance to me as a child fall out of meaning in adulthood, especially not because I had learned more about the world or writing or myself in the meantime. tl;dr what an amazingly silly thing to say in the middle of a review presumably intended to convince an adult audience to pick up a children's book. I am literally signing off this post to re-read some Eleanor Cameron.
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Amen I say unto you, that statement is perfection; yea, I could not say it more fully or better if I expended 5,000 words.
Also, I truly enjoyed the perusal through your back pages of all the links provided in the two sentences beginning with "I haven't been a child since..."
(I would love to try a pawpaw one day)
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Thank you! Two days in a row now, thanks to the weekend. I may begin to feel like a person if it keeps up.
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Thank you! You see why I am considering an actual letter.
Also, I truly enjoyed the perusal through your back pages of all the links provided in the two sentences beginning with "I haven't been a child since..."
I'm glad! I went for a roughly representative sampling.
(I would love to try a pawpaw one day)
Same! I've never had one. I only know what they look like.
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There's a New England Pawpaw Society! You may well have that chance.
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I tended to skew towards blue with that test but was grumpy teal etc. wasn't an option (which I know would defeat the purpose, but still).
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Thank you!
I tended to skew towards blue with that test but was grumpy teal etc. wasn't an option (which I know would defeat the purpose, but still).
Right! I feel like after a certain point, most people would just opt for teal and so forth.
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Thank you! I wish you no further earthquakes!
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*hugs*
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On the last subject of your post, the people I've seen describing this experience come from a particular direction. Lois Bujold talks about having read, as a child, a book about people travelling through a blizzard, and she remembered it as a thrilling multi-page adventure with many sensory details; but when she revisited the book as an adult, her entire recollection was a single sentence, and she had inserted the rest herself as an avid imaginative reader.
The same general direction produces people like me, who returned to favorite books in my twenties and found that they were much shorter than I had remembered, and that the parts I had found mysterious were now explicable. This did not happen with every book that I'd read. But I was indignant, and got rid of some of my books that disappointed me in this way. And I wrote the Secret Country books, a now maddeningly (as I write a sequel and need to remind myself what I was thinking) dense, multi-layered, detailed, complicated story that was like what I had thought those simpler books were when I was much younger.
In my thirties, I missed my books that I'd gotten rid of and had to go replace them all. They had not regained the glamor and mystery that they had in my younger eyes, but they were themselves and had many virtues and pleasures still to provide me with.
I think the person promulgating these experiences is over-generalizing and possibly feeling betrayed. I don't know how old they are, but they might learn better. I think that people who were intelligent readers from the first do not suffer these reverses, but I really wasn't: I was very literal-minded and not very observant as a young reader. But we can get better.
P.
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(looks them up)
Huh.
Not the illicit fairy fruit I was picturing (especially with the title of this blog entry to nudge me in that direction).
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Appearance-wise or for some other reason?
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I think you'd be interested in the book I'm currently reading, "Bleu: Histoire d'une couleur" by Michel Pastoureau (iirc it has been published in English as "Blue: history of a colour").
I've never seen faience as a colour term before! In French, "faïence" is a kind of ceramic.
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It sounds indeed relevant to my interests! Thank you.
I've never seen faience as a colour term before! In French, "faïence" is a kind of ceramic.
It's a kind of ceramic in English, too. I think the color word comes from Egyptian faience, which is a blue-green quartz frit. (William the hippopotamus is made of Egyptian faience.)
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I hadn't heard that about sleep debt! Thank you for telling me. It makes me feel much better about the last twenty years of my sleep.
And I wrote the Secret Country books, a now maddeningly (as I write a sequel and need to remind myself what I was thinking) dense, multi-layered, detailed, complicated story that was like what I had thought those simpler books were when I was much younger.
I'm just cheering the sequel part here.
I think the person promulgating these experiences is over-generalizing and possibly feeling betrayed. I don't know how old they are, but they might learn better. I think that people who were intelligent readers from the first do not suffer these reverses, but I really wasn't: I was very literal-minded and not very observant as a young reader. But we can get better.
*hugs*
I have to say that it doesn't sound at all to me like a problem of unintelligent reading when you describe it as an effect of imaginative investment in the story beyond the words, but I appreciate the explanation of the phenomenon. With books that I read very young, I have something similar in that the words themselves seemed to contain meanings beyond their function in the sentence, although never to the point of creating extra scenes that I can remember. The reviewer seems to be around my age; I agree that she sounds betrayed; I would not have had such a violently negative reaction if she had described her own experience without using it as a proscriptive warning. I believe that some books work better for younger readers! I just don't believe it for the reason she claims.
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thank you for this! i *knew* it!!! every time i see something about how you "can't make up lost sleep," my lived experience says, but i DO. all the TIME. i am forever getting 6 hours of sleep and then 9 hours, sometimes as often as weekly.
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i have had the experience of re-reading a childhood favorite (The Witch of Blackbird Pond comes to mind, and Island of the Blue Dolphins) and finding it precisely as rich and beautiful as i remembered, with perhaps more nuance to the adult eye. and I have had the experience of revisiting a childhood favorite and finding it smaller and the story rather thinner than i remembered - my child's imagination of it having colored my memory of it. and then the book feels rather pale in comparison to the remembered version.
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I keep telling people that no one will know that the book I have out on sub is cribbed from Prince Caspian, because it's the part with the giant magical orrery that no one else apparently experienced in Prince Caspian but me, so I do have a horse in this race. But I still would think so.
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Thank you!
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Was it how you read the conjunction of Tarva and Alambil or some other part of the book?
(Thank you for supporting my argument, especially since it is correct.)
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Yes, I didn't choose the best word. But it's perfectly possible to be an imaginative and avid reader and augment what you see on the page, without paying attention to everything and understanding enough that's going on not to be disappointed later when you do understand it. Maybe I meant a less mature reader. s
I agree about the reviewer's using her experience as a proscriptive warning. That is very seldom a great idea.
I'm very intrigued by your brief description of your youthful reading experience. I remember that everything was so NEW, including a lot of the words, and it was just so intoxicating.
P.
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It's possible that you can't make up all your sleep debt, but extra sleeping is really a good idea when possible; it all helps.
If I find the good links I'll come back and post them.
P.
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It is a real pity that there wasn't a magical orrery in Prince Caspian.
P.
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thank you! great news for everyone in this house! we are great fans of sleeping in. the cats encourage us.
also, are you the Pamela Dean who wrote a novelization of the ballad of Tam Lin? i love that book. 😊 i found the Child Ballads in high school, then found Terri Windling's series of retellings of them, and read them all, not long after they came out. yours and Ellen Kushner's Thomas the Rhymer have remained lifelong favorites.
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Thank you! The sleep has frankly felt miraculous.
i have had the experience of re-reading a childhood favorite (The Witch of Blackbird Pond comes to mind, and Island of the Blue Dolphins) and finding it precisely as rich and beautiful as i remembered, with perhaps more nuance to the adult eye. and I have had the experience of revisiting a childhood favorite and finding it smaller and the story rather thinner than i remembered - my child's imagination of it having colored my memory of it. and then the book feels rather pale in comparison to the remembered version.
I believe it. I have revisited books that didn't hold up! I have not found it to be the defining factor of my relationship with books of my childhood, though, which is what I was arguing with: the flat claim that the books are inexorably best in childhood. The outstanding ones have always gotten better for me.
I haven't read The Island of the Blue Dolphins in more than fifteen years, but the last time I checked in with it, I still loved the tide-flooded cave with the ancestors made of reeds and gull feathers and eyes of glittering abalone shell and the skeletal flute-player in their midst.
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I agree that the disappointment is an issue, but I don't think you will be able to convince me that the augmentation is unsophisticated per se. It's entering into the story. The reader's ability to pick up on more than the strict bones of the semantics is what this entire art depends on!
I agree about the reviewer's using her experience as a proscriptive warning. That is very seldom a great idea.
I feel she could have warned the adult reader to calibrate their expectations accordingly without going the extra mile that made me yell about her review on the internet.
I'm very intrigued by your brief description of your youthful reading experience. I remember that everything was so NEW, including a lot of the words, and it was just so intoxicating.
I wish I could remember the word I ran across the other day where I could remember exactly the context in which I had seen it for the first time as a child and had to buttonhole
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Please excuse this winter; I will be hibernating.
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I look forward to the orrery in your book.
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Whatever the reader does about that is a different issue, and I really do agree with you that the reviewer im question did very badly in that department. I'm afraid I jumped over that part.
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Understood. I feel strongly that people should not beat themselves up over their younger reading protocols and may have leapt unnecessarily at the shadow of you doing so.
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That makes sense to me! I even agree that there are ages at which a book can feel especially resonant, although like most people I jumbled a lot of the intended order of operations. I don't believe that kind of illumination only occurs in childhood—I don't think you are claiming it does, but I got a little of that sense from the reviewer. I read books in high school and college and grad school and after that took the top of my head off.
But that's not the same as the books not working at all when you revisit/first read them as an adult, and I agree that there's still a lot to see from that different angle! My reading would be much poorer if I didn't still read books written for children.
Amen. (Any recent recommendations?)
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Oh yes, very much that too!
(Any recent recommendations?)
Well, I was thinking of Alan Garner :) Also the various boarding school books I read, for instance, and the adventure novels aimed at children... not sure I've got any specific recs from recent stuff, though, sorry.
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However, it HAS been introduced here (and grows well) and I've had it: Somebody brought some to a dance I was at in I wanna say Fall 2019.** As the descriptions tell you: it does taste like some sort of tropical-fruit custard, and it is a LOT.
* what you have already looked up, namely
** And a friend-of-a-friend apparently wound up with a whole pile of 'em, so I may be getting to eat more tomorrow!
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That's so cool! How does it compare to the durian experience?