Out of all hooping

Tucson schools have just “shut down” all courses related to Mexican American Studies (in essence, banning Chicano authors). If you’re familiar with Tucson’s racial makeup, you know this means that literally thousands of Chicano students will no longer be allowed to see a reflection of themselves in literature. The teachers literally had to pack up the books and remove them from their classrooms.

Open Road Integrated Media has been signing up the authors of well-known older book titles for digital distribution, under the theory that the previous contracts didn’t mention digital rights, so they remain with the authors, who can sign new deals relating to them. The established publishers, who don’t want the competition for the same titles in print on their backlists, disagree.

A girl came home from her first semester at college. I am frequently amazed all anew at the fluidity of a concept like normal: one minute you’re lying in a hospital bed, holding a little red burrito which a stranger has just handed you and saying to yourself, “Just exactly what have I done to my heretofore agreeable life?” The next minute the burrito is calling you long distance to say that the philosophy final is over, and that the young man to whom she has become appended wants to leave Dallas by 6 the next morning to drive thirteen hours to Atlanta to his parents’ house, then four more the next day to bring her to your door, and you realize that there’s an entire world beyond the walls of your own house, and it’s not you rattling around in it footloose and full of a sense of infinite destiny, but the burrito. You, rather to your surprise, are the one in the house, waiting to open the door and let some of the infinite destiny back in, to grace you with its gilded presence for a few minutes, until the phone rings and something else claims its attention. And you may ask yourself, Well, how did I get here? And also, Was it ever really otherwise?

growing body of research concluding that what was once seen as an inevitable descent into the next ice age has been put off for a very long time by the building blanket of greenhouse gases generated by humanity’s burst of fossil fuel combustion.

“Well, first of all you need a band with a bow around the waist. and you need ruffels, too. Big, puffy slevves are good, and when it’s puffy it’s pretty. The design can be anything like this: (stars, hearts, diamonds, flowers) and it’s pretty when it’s short, like this: (on the back) THE END (via Mother Bird - Mother Bird - what I got for Christmas)

After giving the teacher kudos for dealing with a classroom full of children and acknowledging the difficulty of meeting all their needs, I tried to stand up for my child (although I felt like a mother bear defending her cub from nicely dressed predators). I said the behaviors she noted actually seemed normal for a six-year-old boy, after all, children are in the process of maturing and are not naturally inclined to do paperwork. The teacher shook her head and whispered to the principal. The counselor said first grade children have had ample time to adapt to classroom standards.

Shortlists of the best children’s and YA books of 2011. Whee!

“A few days ago, I posted some photos of what we used just call the Castle, a cluster of ruins up in the hills of my hometown. As a teenager, no one really knew anything about the ruins, which are on private property. I’d tried researching it online but to no avail. Turns out I was googling the wrong thing. The Castle was actually the Napa Soda Springs, a very fancy spa/springs resort as well as the home of Napa Soda bottling company. So, I was right when I said the rumors were that it was a spa and soda factory, but I didn’t have all the details. So, I asked the internet, and thanks to Robin Moore and my pal Rod Perry, the mystery was solved.” (via the Castle- redux)

“The baby woke up and there were more babies and more wakings. But I kept writing, two stories at a time, leaving pages empty to take care of kids — abandoning journals, abandoning this small extra step of clarity, learning to do it in my head and on scraps of paper, finding some small measure of time to write and write and write …”

Now PhoneDog wants its followers back, and it also wants a third of a million dollars in damages: $2.50 for every one of the account’s 17,000 followers, multiplied by the number of months since Kravitz left his job.