Politics of the Nobel Prize
Venturing into adult literature, which is somewhere I rarely go (there’s just too much good kid lit out there). But this is an issue that turns over and over in my mind.
Peter Handke, who won the Novel Prize for literature this year, is…a pretty awful person. An apologist for genocide. A defender of a murderous dictator. They say he’s a very good writer and I’m not arguing; I’m sure he is. But should someone like this win the very highest prize we can offer?
Two editorials in the New York Times offer two different views. I was entirely convinced by both of them, which is kind of impossible.
Bret Stephens laments that “we live in an age that is losing the capacity to distinguish art from ideology and artists from politics” and affirms that Handke’s “art deserves to be judged, or condemned, on its artistic merits alone.” And I find myself nodding. Some people with vile beliefs have written excellent novels. I keep Roald Dahl’s work on my shelves, despite his anti-Semitism and his misogyny. I appreciate Laura Ingalls Wilder’s perfects turns of phrase and eye for landscape, even while I wince away from her views of Native Americans.
Aleksandar Hemon points out that a writer who denies genocide enables and upholds it and makes the next mass murderer that much easier. He asks us to consider whether “a page of Mr. Handke is worth a thousand Muslim lives.” How can I argue? Handke did not just vote for policies I dislike. He lied about slaughter. He lied about guilt and innocence. How can a man with no grasp of moral truth be even a decent writer, let along a great one?
If there’s a middle ground here, it’s a shaky one that I feel uneasy standing on. But let’s say there’s a line between censoring a writer’s work (nobody is advocating that, by the way, Bret Stephens, and you shouldn’t have implied it) and giving him the higher honor we can award. There also a line between being (say) a grumpy and unpleasant human being and enabling and applauding mass murder.
Those lines must cross somewhere. We won’t ever agree on exactly where. But it’s always my belief that there are multiple books and multiple authors, every year, who could win awards. The idea of the single best book of the year, of any year, is a fantasy. There are so many good books; there are so many great writers.
Do we have to give our highest award to one who can’t acknowledge that truth exists? That genocide happened? That Muslims died?
Really, there wasn’t anybody else?
Read MoreChicken Rescue
I am a DINOSAUR!
Normally I post about writing or books…but it’s summer and things are slow so I thought I’d treat you all to a chicken story.
Yesterday I was driving my daughter home from her grandmother’s house when she called out from the back seat.
“Chickens!”
“What?”
“Chickens! Over there! The chickens are out!”
About three blocks away from her grandparents’ house, five chickens live in a backyard coop. When she was four or five, it was an adventurous walk to go down and visit them and poke bits of grass through the wire for them to peck at. When she learned to ride a bike, she could zip down to check on the chickens and see how they were faring.
And now they were loose! Emergency!
I pulled over and we hurried back half a block to check. Sure enough, the two white chickens with red crowns were pecking happily outside the pen. The single brown one and two black-and-white speckled ones, apparently more peaceful, were still inside the coop.
My daughter went up to knock on the back door to let the owners know their chickens were out. No answer.
Okay. Chicken rescue was underway!
I thought I could just pick them up and toss them gently back into the pen. I edged toward one. It eyed me and edged away.
Now, I have just been listening to a podcast all about dinosaurs. And it was heavy on the “birds are really dinosaurs” thing. And this chicken was really giving me a very nasty glare. The closer I got, the more vicious its claws looked. Velociraptor vicious. Seriously. I inched a tiny bit near and it sprinted away on bright yellow legs that looked very muscular indeed.
No way was I going to be able to pick this tiny little T. rex up.
It led me on a chicken-chase around the coop twice before I had the bright idea of telling my girl to stand by the coop entrance. I shuffled behind the two chickens and waved my arms. She blocked them when they tried to dart to one side, and between us we whooshed them into the coop and shut the door smartly. The three in-coop chickens did not make a break for it. Success!
It’s not often that my work days are interrupted by chicken rescue. Very exhilarating, really.
We drove away quickly just in case they found whatever hole in the fence let them escape in the first place. It would just be too stressful to go through the whole thing again.
Read MoreWhy I Hate Reading Logs (and Natalie Babbitt Agrees with Me)
I have a fifth grader–okay, I used to. She graduated a few weeks ago. That means I’ve been a witness to six years of the current educational practices of northern New England. Specifically, six years of reading logs.
I do not like reading logs.
For the first few years, I just had to fill them out myself, which was not such a big deal. But then she hit third grade, and the rules started to rain down upon us.
She had to fill the logs out herself. She had to write the author’s last name, then first name. Then the full title of the book, even if it was (and it often was) Geronimo Stilton and the Mystifying Midadventure of Mumbling Mansion (with Cheese). She had to write the pages she started on, the page she stopped on, and the number of minutes read.
And there were so many ways to get it wrong. Reading more than two books at once was wrong. Reading a book and stopping halfway through was wrong. Skipping around in a book was wrong. Reading ten minutes Monday and an hour Tuesday was wrong, although reading twenty minutes on Monday and twenty on Tuesday was right.
It drove me nuts. I objected. Frankly, I should have told her teachers we were not filling in the silly logs, but my girl is a rule-follower and doesn’t tolerate civil disobedience well, and the very idea panicked her. (I was a teacher’s pet myself for many years, so I understood what she was feeling.) Doing the logs was anxiety producing, and having your mom call to say you would not be doing them anymore was even worse.
How could it be possible that all of this actually helped anyone develop a love of reading?
Now for a change of subject (bear with me, it’s related):
I’ve been thoroughly enjoying Barking With the Big Dogs, a collection of Natalie Babbit’s speeches and essays. It’s marvelous. She raised her children and did most of her writing before the advent of reading logs, but she had quite a bit to say about the way reading and the love of books are taught. So more on this next week….
Read MoreKorean Editions!
Where Do Polar Bears Live? Note the adorable polar bear face on the first character of the title.
Just before Christmas, the Korean editions of my two Let’s Read and Find Out titles arrived on the doorsteps (dropped by Santa’s sleigh, no doubt). Here’s what Where Do Polar Bears Live? and What’s for Lunch? look in their snazzy new Asian editions.
A translated title is always a kind of giddy and bewildering joy. It’s recognizably my book and yet I can’t read a word of it. I can’t even identify my own name. The title of Where Do Polar Bears Live? has transmogrified from a question to an exclamation–why is that? Who knows? It’s kind of fun to feel four years old again and primarily interact with a book through the illustrations.
What’s For Lunch?
Sarah L. Thomson
A children’s book author publishing award-winning nonfiction, poetry, picture books and novels including…
“Readers will treasure the blossoming friendship between opposites in this whimsically illustrated tale. Short chapters and plenty of action make for an accessible and appealing reading experience. . . . Touching and inspiring.”
—Kirkus Reviews