A Post-Holden World?

Last week I mentioned a New York Times article, Get a Life, Holden Caulfield, in which Jennifer Schuessler claimed that today's teenagers may not be as taken with Holden as their elders were. She said, "What once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many of them as “weird,” “whiny” and “immature.”"

This week, I was reading Jon Meacham's column in Newsweek, Love Books? You're in the Right Place, which introduces the magazine's special issue on books. (I am a long, long way from finishing that, by the way.) Meacham said, "Many young people go through a Walden phase, believing that Thoreau and, in "Self-Reliance," Emerson saw through to the realities of life, past the "phoniness" that so obsessed Holden Caulfield."

Click.

All of a sudden, I experienced one of those flashes of insights that come upon me periodically and I thought, Phoniness is the key to why Holden Caulfield may be leaving today's kids cold.

Back in the fifties, when Catcher in the Rye was published, and the sixties and seventies and maybe even in the eighties, Holden's insight that the world was full of phonies may have been a revelation for young people. Not so much now. Young people today have grown up watching movie and TV special effects, reading about plastic surgery, and hearing about one crooked politician after another. (Just in my state, alone, we had at least three high-profile elected figures in prison at the same time. We've got two more right now whose ethics are questionable.) Today's young people aren't going to be wandering around all despondent over the phoniness of it all because, what with the famous twenty-four hour news cycle and classroom current events, they were never under any illusion about what was going on around them.

Remember Quiz Show? It was a very good movie about the game show scandals of the 1950s. I don't recall it doing particularly well in the theaters. My theory was that in 1994, when it was released, the movie-going public, which had grown up in a post-game show scandal world, had a hard time imagining a time when anyone believed that TV wasn't fixed in one way or another. They couldn't accept the basic premise of the movie, that all of America believed what was happening on TV and was distressed to find out that it was faked.

That's how I think kids today may be regarding Catcher in the Rye. Having grown up in a post-Holden world, they have trouble believing he didn't know better.

On top of that, Holden Caulfield inspired a long line of imitators. Kids may have already read books about angstie teenagers before they get to Catcher in the Rye, thus making the original seem derivative. Sad and unfair, but that's how I felt about the book when I first read it when I was in my thirties. Catcher may suffer as a result of its success.

I'm not a Catcher in the Rye expert, by any means. But I'm wondering how much it deals with the society of its time, versus books that deal with relationships between people. Societies may change over time more obviously than people do, so a book rooted in its social world risks becoming dated more quickly than one that relies on a relationship between characters.

Just a guess.

Read It And Weep

In a recent Glimmer Train Bulletin piece called Making Stories Out of Stories, author Randolph Thomas does an excellent job describing the excruciating torment that is writing. I'm impressed he was able to explain how his story evolved. By the time I've finished a writing project, I usually have only the vaguest idea how it happened.

I've Got My Boys

Work on the 365 Story Project has pretty much ground to a halt for three reasons:

One, the amount of time I've been spending with unhealthy family members these last two weeks. Yesterday I spent the day with a shut-in (and a laptop, but...), not the post-op patient I've been seeing nearly every day. Seriously, the older infirm relatives in the Gauthier family are piling up like cordwood!

Two, I had done over a hundred segments for the project and had no physical description for my main characters, not even in my head.

Three, I was concerned that even for an episodic story I ought to have something plot-like, if not a real plot.

Well, problem two is well on its way to being resolved. A couple of weeks ago, our sabumnim announced that for the summer our morning adult taekwondo class was going to turn into a morning family taekwondo class. That meant, of course, kids! As it turns out, it meant a great many kids and not many adults, since "family" appears to be being interpreted very loosely in this case. Nonetheless, after my very first family class I had my Tanner. I'll be able to modify him to create his older brother, Tristan, so that's a twofer. Today I found my Bodhi.

This week's classes were among the most brutal I can remember with both jump kick practice and sparring. If they're kicking up the intensity a notch to burn off the young'uns' energy, I'm going to have a very rough summer.

Trying To Manage Time

Teaching Authors has a post up called "Ideal" Life vs. "Real" Life: Where Does the Time Go?". It's about writing and time management.

Get ready for a laugh--I once taught a workshop on time management for secretaries and administrative assistants. This was decades ago, when I'd been working for an agency that did management development and personnel management training for state and municipal employees. My bosses did time management programs for managers. Those programs focused on delegating work as a way to manage your time. You don't have time to do something? Get someone else to do it! Problem solved!

Why anyone thought I was qualified to teach time management I no longer recall. And note that the people I was teaching the time management workshop for were at the bottom of the executive chain. They were the people work was delegated to. Delegating wasn't an option for them. What I focused on was using "forms." Creating templates (pre word processing) for anything you possibly could so that you didn't have to come up with a new letter, memo, etc., for every single occasion. My plan was to save as much time as possible by cutting down on decision making and avoiding having to reinvent the wheel.

I only taught the workshop once.

I still think that you can save time with routines--do the same thing at the same time on a regular basis so that you don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about what you're going to do. Send the same letter to as many people as possible. That sort of thing.

It doesn't help a whole lot with managing writing time, though.

In her post on time management at Teaching Authors, Carmela Martino says that she procrastinates because of perfectionism. That's a classic problem for writers, one that is sometimes referred to as an inner editor. When I first heard about inner editors, I thought the idea was laughable, some kind of touchy feely, navel gazing thing. (That was before I started dabbling in zen, of course.) Then, after struggling with some of my later books and finding myself reading anything, absolutely anything, so I could avoid working, I began to suspect that perhaps my problem was, indeed, that I had been invaded by an inner editor. My weak ego couldn't face the knowledge that the manuscript I was working on was going to need draft after draft after draft. It was just too soul-sucking. I could make myself feel better by reading--something someone else had written. It's good to get some in-depth knowledge about politicians, isn't it? There was always a chance that reading would lead me to come up with some brilliant idea. It wasn't really wasting time.

Hmmm. Perhaps there's medication for that?

My latest time management twist involves looking over a writing project in the middle of my morning workout. (I have little problem working out for close to an hour in the morning. Why should I? When I'm working out, I don't have to work! You'd think writers would be the most fit group on the planet because exercise is such a fine procrastination device.) Then, while I'm on the treadmill or whatever, the material I've just looked over is in the back of my mind, and I often come up with some satisfying tweak for it. This is what is known as forcing a breakout experience, by the way.

It's Here

Liz B. recently mentioned Jon & Kate (What do you mean, Jon & Kate Who?) at A Chair, A Fireplace & A Tea Cozy, which reminded me of something I was thinking about that show recently.

I've seen many bits and pieces of J&K episodes while channel surfing or ironing clothes because it's often on all the time. (Or it used to be.) I actually know who Aunt Jodi is. I read somewhere that what originally attracted viewers to this show was that Jon and Kate were just regular people, but they seemed very sitcom like--the all-knowing wife with the bumbling husband. We enjoyed seeing reality made unreal.

Over the last couple of months the whole Jon & Kate blow-up has made me think of some of the fifties and sixties science fiction I've read at times during my checkered past. I've always felt that some of the scifi writers of that era were a little freaked out by the concept of TV. (Or maybe they just held it in contempt.) Isn't there a character at the beginning of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? who spends all her time holding some device that provides her with TV-like images? I mean all her time?

The "all Jon & Kate all the time" thing seems to me as if it could have been torn out of one of those books. You've got these two young(ish) people who have been selected out of all America to come into our living rooms. They've become more and more physically beautiful over the the course of the show. They've been "groomed" to make them more attractive to their viewing public. They've moved into a bigger and better house, which is what we all want to do, isn't it? (I must admit, I missed most of that season, only seeing a few moments while Kate was cleaning the refrigerator in her new kitchen.) They go to the places we want to go and do the things we want to do. Jon snow boards and skis. Kate writes books and gets pedicures.

Then, just as it does in scifi books, things started to go bad. The boundary between J&K and their viewing public became blurred. When are they being watched? When are they "on?" Where are the cameras? What are J&K doing? What should they do?

The cameras are everywhere. J&K should do whatever we want them to. Or, better yet, they should do whatever we don't want them to because what we really want is to hate them.

They are being chased now so that the cameras can catch one of them yelling at one of their kids or kissing a college girl or maybe kicking one of those dogs. Seriously, doesn't this sound like a book plot?

A couple of weeks ago, I thought, Gee, this is The Hunger Games. Collins isn't writing about a dystopian future. She's writing about now.

Evolution? Right In Front Of Me?

I've got to get an agent before they evolve into something else.

Link came by way of the NESCBWI listserv.

And It's Coming To A Museum Near Me!

As I was reading Picture Perfect: Why Golden Books Are Golden, which is about the artists who created the artwork for the original Golden Books, I was thinking that I hadn't reached the point in Leonard Marcus's Minders of Make-Believe at which he might talk about that subject. Then I read that not only has Marcus written a book on Golden Books (which I'd heard before, though it never really registered), he's also the co-curator of a traveling exhibit of original Golden Book artwork.

So I started poking around and found that the exhibit is coming to the Eric Carle Museum this winter. I still haven't been there. According to MapQuest, it's only an hour and twenty minutes away from me.

One of my biggest Christmas memories is finding an array of Golden Books spread out under the Christmas tree. They weren't wrapped, they were arranged in an artistic arch. I was somewhere between three and seven years old.

So Long As I Get Paid...

If this is the future for bookstores, I can live with it so long as there's a way to determine royalties for authors. As a reader, I like the idea of being able to walk into a bookstore and truly be able to buy what I'm looking for.

Though I would miss being able to look through the book to make sure it's what I'm looking for. Once you've received a custom-printed book, I don't imagine the store will be eager to accept a return.

I was aware that Northshire Books was doing this, but hadn't heard much about how it was working out. Maybe next January on my trek north for retreat week, I can stop in Manchester to check the Espresso Book Machine out.

Pickings

While trying to catch up on some back listserv reading, I came upon a number of juicy bits.

I really don't know what to make of James Frey Collaborating on a Novel for Young Adults, First in a Series. I've never read any of Frey's books and didn't get all that emotionally involved in his past troubles. This article just seems odd to me for other reasons. The novel is being submitted anonymously, yet The New York Times is doing an article about it?If I understand this correctly, the film rights have been sold before the book has found a publisher. If it doesn't find a publisher, can the people who have the film rights simply arrange for a screen play and forget about the book stage?

I started shouting, "Yes! Yes! Yes!" and pounding my desk at the end of Buffy vs. Edward.

I think the actor playing Kyle in the film adaptation of Beastly looks too old for the part.

Julius Lester is also a photographer.

I've always wondered if I would have liked Catcher in the Rye more if I'd read it when I was a teenager instead of when I was thirty-something. Given when I was a teenager, maybe I would have. But I certainly have great sympathy with those teen readers today whose attitude is Get a Life, Holden Caulfield. Does this mean that we'll be seeing fewer Catcher in the Rye wannabes being published? Please?

I'm nowhere near done with my listserv reading, but it's time to call it a day. As with most activities in my life, I'll just have to accept that I'll never get to it all.

A Lost Week

Because I'm incredibly insensitive, I spent a little time working at home on Monday while a family member was going under the knife. (Come on. It wasn't brain surgery, and one of our nicer relatives was at the hospital with her.) Otherwise, I've been sharing post-surgical elder care this past week, including an overnight last night. I didn't get any other work done, but during those moments when I wasn't becoming incredibly friendly with a large number of residents of a senior housing complex, I did manage to do a little reading.

Among the books I completed was this year's Siebert Medal winner, We Are The Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, which was written and illustrated by Kadir Nelson. The images are eye-poppingly beautiful, and the unnamed first-person narrator who sounds like a player from the era makes this historical work very readable. And the book uses endnotes! I can never say enough about how much I love nonfiction that includes citations.

I am not a fan of baseball. Reading about it is one hundred percent better, as far as I'm concerned, when there is a historical element.

This book is deserving of every good thing that's been written about it. I do wonder, though, as I always wonder when I read these beautiful nonfiction books published in a picture-book format, who will read them? The text is way too sophisticated and lengthy for traditional picture book readers. We Are The Ship's publisher is marketing it to ages 8 and up, but will, say, intermediate and middle school teachers accept their students reading and reporting on it? Will the adults who might be very taken with it find it in the kids' section of libraries and bookstores?

Do books like this find their readers?

A exhibit of the original art work for We Are The Ship will arrive at the Eric Carle Museum in 2012. I hope I remember.