Curved or flat?

Simon looked down at the pavement and tightened
the brim of his hat. He has quite a few tells; play him in
poker and you won’t regret it, I suspect. “Yeah?”

“Hi, Mr. Freeman.” I tugged at the brim of my hat,
tightening the curve and blocking my eyes, which must
have been pretty red and swollen. He just would have
thought I was high or something.

Steve Brezenoff’s The Absolute Value of –1 has loads of beautiful details. Steve’s eye for the meaning in a gesture or an object is one of the things that drew me to his writing, and I think his handling of the potentially explosive issue of baseball cap brims is a master class in how not to fall into the trap of a superficial interpretation of teen culture. As you see from the excerpts above, Steve’s character Simon wears his Yankees cap with a brim with a pronounced curve. This is viscerally pleasing to me because getting a good curve into a cap brim was a preoccupation of my own ball-cap-centric adolescence. At the left, Steve is modeling what I still consider near-optimal brim curvature. What made me think of Steve’s cap observations was a kid I saw on the bus. HE was wearing a cap with a brim that was absolutely flat. And it was clearly kept flat with all the love with which I kept mine curved. This is probably not shocking. If you’ve been anywhere around teenagers recently, you have noticed that, for a certain look, a completely flat brim is de rigueur.

So, Steve’s book is dated and will mean nothing to teens, the verisimilitude gang howls! Nonsense. I saw a flat cap and thought of my curved caps, and of Simon’s. I didn’t think, wow, that’s completely different and utterly alien. I thought, that looks completely different, but the meaning behind it is remarkably similar. The thing that matters in observing and reflecting any detail of teen culture is not the specifics of a gesture or an object. What matters is acknowledging and portraying that such things have meaning. Teens aren’t stupid. They understand that a signifier changes while the signified remains timeless.

Pew Social Networking Survey

The Pew Center has a very interesting study out now on Internet and social media use and it has lots of data on young people. It’s well worth reading in the original or in one of the many summaries from news outlets.

I suspect a couple of findings will be subject to some chin scratching. Here are my takes on these findings, from a kidlit perspective where possible:

First, the survey reveals “a decline in blogging among teens and young adults and a modest rise among adults 30 and older.” I wouldn’t be surprised if this trend applies to young adults who read YA fiction with some regularity, but I don’t take this as a sign of the decline of blogs for the future (and over 30s are blogging more, according to the survey). Rather, I see this as the novelty of blogging wearing off. That doesn’t mean the utility and value of blogging has worn off. Here’s the statistic that I think is more important (quoting The Guardian summary): “86% of social networking teens post comments to a friend's page or wall on a social network site and 83% post comments on friends' photos posted to an online social network.” I have said innumerable times that it’s not the posts but the comments that create a vibrant social network. Teens clearly get that better than anyone (adults comment at less than a third this rate). Authors, what can you do to make your blogging comment-attractive?

Next, apparently Twitter is not popular with teens. I can’t really articulate why, but I’m not surprised by this finding. Twitter just feels adult to me. Maybe it’s the way it can facilitate geography-defying, topic-focused conversations (# tags, etc.), which isn’t something I think resonates with the largely inward facing, small-community adolescent experience (Facebook is better in this regard, and teens love it). Regardless, I agree with David Carr: Twitter is plumbing. It’s not going away; just don’t expect it do things it’s not good at. I think many authors get that Twitter is for networking with colleagues and for news.

Finally, “Cell phone ownership is nearly ubiquitous among teens.” Is this the screen, now? Forget the TV or computer, is this the place for reading and for engagement with authors? I don’t know. It feels like it might also be reasonable to argue that reading on a cell phone screen—even a nice one—will very quickly drive you into the welcoming embrace of paper books. I don’t want to contemplate a third option.

The darker side of this I fear is a socio-economic gap built into cell phones in this country. There’s a big conceptual and experiential difference between the so-called dumb phone you get for free or for low cost with a contract (or the phones available on no-contract plans) and a high-end “app phone” like an iPhone, an Android phone, or a Blackberry, all which are expensive  and require very expensive plans. I have never seen anyone comment on this divide, but it feels like it might be important. If fluency with mobile operating systems becomes a modern skill as fluency with desktop operating systems has, have we created two lanes? In some ways, I fear cell phones might be distinctly less democratic than computers. A cheap  $299 netbook can still give you the experience of Windows. You’re going to need ten times that to get the experience of iPhone OS. At any rate, all are certainly less democratic than books.

 

iPhone photo:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fr3d/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

More on Salinger and YA.

The New Yorker is in full Salinger mode, and there’s some excellent stuff, particularly this exchange between Richard Brody and Wes Anderson, which touches on the “enduring importance of art made by grown-ups about young people.” Amen.

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Salinger

This was on the cusp of being an entirely different post, but then the news of J. D. Salinger’s death popped up on Twitter.

I must confess to not being a true Salinger fanatic. I’ve read and enjoyed the novel and most of the stories (A Perfect Day for a Banana Fish made a strong impression on me—maybe the first short story to do so). But I don’t generally feel compelled to reread them regularly (now I will). That being said, I know many brilliant people in this business for whom Catcher and Salinger are enormously important personally. And wherever you stand on his books, he permeates this wonderful world of YA we’re all occupying. An agent friend and I were exchanging emails about our Bologna Children’s Book Fair travel plans, and quite naturally, he referred to Holden (suitcases). I don’t hear “like Holden Caufield…” in queries much, but I think that’s mainly because everyone thinks it’s too obvious a comparison and/or it’s too presumptuous. And I have also been the bearer of bad news to authors frequently in this form: “I’m sorry, but Salinger never grants permission to use any part of his work. You’ll have to write out this quote.” I did it yesterday, in fact.

I don’t actually think it’s true that Catcher is the father of all YA. I don’t think that’s how influence works. This doesn’t diminish, though, how important Salinger is to writing about teens. Catcher isn’t a template; it’s a shared experience, a set of semi-secret passwords for the genre. I think Frank Portman sums it very well in his King Dork:

So this has been my dad’s copy of The Catcher in the Rye when he was (doing the math), um, twelve. My God, I thought: my dad had been one of those people who carried Catcher with him everywhere when he was a kid. He had been a member of the Catcher Cult.

We who work in YA are most of us initiated into the “Holden Caufield Mysteries,” as Portman’s narrator calls them.

Whether Catcher fans are a gnostic cult or not, the shadow of Salinger’s work is long. And, in this era of hyper-available authors (especially in YA), his model of his authorship stands as an uncompromised specimen of a path not taken. Over on Facebook, David Levithan put it well in in a status update: “David Levithan is glad J.D. Salinger eluded us 'til the end.” Truly.

Congratulations Vaunda Micheaux Nelson!

I like it when history works out well. One hundred years ago this month, Bass Reeves passed away in Muskogee, Oklahoma, bring to an end one of the most remarkable stories in African- American history and in the history of the American West. And today, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U. S. Marshal  by Vaunda Micheaux Nelson with illustrations by R. Gregory Christie has won the 2010 Coretta Scott King Author Award from the ALA.  Bass Reeves gets a gold medal to go with his gold badge. I like that.

I think I speak for everyone at Lerner in saying how proud we are of Vaunda and of the remarkable portrait of Bass she and Greg Christie created.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The cell-phone snap above is of the announcement from the ALA Midwinter meetings. (It’s probably the same cell phone that texted me at 5:20 a.m. Minnesota time to tell me Vaun had won. They ALA gets going early.)

Here, Kitty-Kitty…

Before I begin an unapologetically odd post, I want to wish all the authors at ALA this weekend good luck (I won’t be there, but many of my colleagues will). Carolrhoda has had some fantastically successful titles year, and I am very proud to have them mixing it up in what has been a distinguished crop of books for young readers industry-wide in 2009. Good luck, all!

On to the oddities …

As an editor, I consider myself a serious collector and student of cat-skinning methods. That is, even though I don’t write fiction myself, I always want to know about the many ways my authors do their work.

I’m not the only one thus obsessed. The Internet has been a great tool for turning spotlights on writers’ processes. For example, Carolrhoda author Blythe Woolston’s latest blog post is a reminder to herself about the importance of drawing. You should definitely take Blythe at her word about drawing and writing, but I think there’s more to this post than the explicit message. The medium—blog--matters. Blythe prefaces her post this way:

Note: This is mostly a message and reminder to myself about the importance of drawing. If the tone seems condescending or the content obvious, it is because my intended audience--me--is rather thick and easily distracted.

I suspect writers have been reminding themselves of stuff like this as part of their processes as long as there’s been creative writing. And writers have probably shared these reminders amongst themselves as long as writers have been gathering around campfires, on barstools, at cafe tables, etc. But now process isn’t the cultish concern of the relatively few; it’s the large scale obsession of a great many. For writers, you don’t need to look any farther than NANOWRIMO, and even that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Readers care about this, too. They have for at least as long as there have been mass media. There are plenty of stories about how Hemingway wrote. Kerouac's “process” for On the Road is legendary. And there are the contemporary antecedents: JK in her cafe; Stephanie and her dream. The processes of the famous have always been interesting. That’s why talk shows exist.

But here’s why I like anecdotes like Blythe’s better for my personal collection: you’ve likely never heard of Blythe Woolston. Only a few people have read her novel, The Freak Observer. To my knowledge, she’s never been on a talk show. In my imagination, Blythe still has cat blood on her hands, and she’s a little winded (there may be more than one way to skin a cat, but none of them are easy so far as I’ve seen). This isn’t a process made all clean and neat in hindsight by fame. The book was hard work. For people who care about the written word and the work behind it, this is fantastic. For me, a little peak into the real effort makes the fictive effortlessness so much more pleasing.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/grahford/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

Sally!

January has become Sally Walker month in my office. It’s also, by my declaration, editorial shoe disclosure month (precedent). Just wait and see how the two go together. First, as you might have heard, it’s insanely cold in Minnesota. Your humble blogger recently acquired a pair of Steger Mukluks (yes, that Steger), so he could feel his feet when he got to work. I find myself tempted to wear these not-so-fashionable boots at my desk (photo, left), when I’m working on the photos for Sally’s next book, which is about Antarctica. It is simply not possible to read about and look at photos of Scott, Amundsen, and especially Titus Oates and stay warm.

A Very Gallant Gentleman by John Charles Dollman.

The rest of you, however,  get to bask in the relative warmth of Sally’s latest published book, Written in Bone, for which the required accessories  might be a modern toothbrush. As librarian and Booklist Bookends blogger Lynn Rutan writes:

“I learned SO much with this book and it was filled with the most deliciously yucky facts! Who would guess you could die of a toothache?”

Written in Bone is one of five nominees for YALSA’s first annual Excellence in Nonfiction Award, to be announced at the upcoming Midwinter Meeting. You can read YALSA’s interview with Sally here.

Top photo courtesy of Subarctic Mama, a blogger whose review had made me buy my new boots.