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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