{"id":4880,"date":"2016-07-28T17:59:17","date_gmt":"2016-07-28T07:59:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/?p=4880"},"modified":"2016-12-16T17:04:27","modified_gmt":"2016-12-16T06:04:27","slug":"miscellaneous-memoranda-13","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/2016\/07\/miscellaneous-memoranda-13\/","title":{"rendered":"Miscellaneous Memoranda"},"content":{"rendered":"

– There\u2019s a great interview with E.B. White in this 1969 edition of The Paris Review<\/em><\/a>, which includes his thoughts on writing for children:<\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, and generally congenial readers on earth. They accept, almost without question, anything you present them with, as long as it is presented honestly, fearlessly, and clearly. I handed them, against the advice of experts, a mouse-boy, and they accepted it without a quiver. In ‘Charlotte\u2019s Web’, I gave them a literate spider, and they took that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

– I was also interested in this article<\/a> at The Guardian<\/em> about a new exhibition of Soviet-era children\u2019s books. \u201cThe idea was to abolish fantasy literature and illustration because they were seen as bourgeois and unhelpful to the revolution,\u201d says Olivia Ahmad, the curator of the exhibition:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn one cautionary tale called ‘Ice Cream’, by writer Samuil Marshak and illustrator Vladimir Lebvedev, a bourgeois capitalist eats too much ice cream and freezes to death. In ‘Red Neck’, a poem by Nicolia Aseev, a faithful Young Pioneer (the Soviet youth group) refuses to take off his red neckerchief even when attacked by a raging bull, thus demonstrating doughty revolutionary commitment even in the face of an unpleasant goring.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

– The Guardian<\/em> is also running a series about recipes for fictional food, including strawberry and peanut butter ice cream<\/a> from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets<\/em> and raspberry cordial<\/a> from Anne of Green Gables<\/em>. I also liked this blog post<\/a> at Pop Goes The Page<\/em> about a DIY Harry Potter party, complete with Hogwarts letters, house banners, snowy owl balloons, floating candles and of course, pumpkin pasties, chocolate frogs and butterbeer.<\/p>\n

– From the world of publishing, here\u2019s a depressingly accurate article<\/a> about how authors who are \u201chard to look at\u201d (that is, not conventionally attractive) are less likely to find a publisher for their work. This only applies to women writers, of course (as one commenter notes, \u201cOnly one name is needed to mention here: George R. R. Martin\u201d). And here\u2019s an essay by a New Zealand editor, Stephen Stratford, entitled \u201cThe book didn\u2019t sell and yes, I was mean-spirited enough to rejoice\u201d: An essay on the dark arts of book editing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

– Copyright protection<\/a> for creators has been in my thoughts lately, so I was interested to read this discussion<\/a> of the \u201cMonkey Selfie\u201d case, in which a US judge eventually ruled that \u201ca non-human was not capable of owning copyright under current US law\u201d. (It is<\/em> a great photo, though.)<\/p>\n

– Finally, for those students feeling stressed about school and exams, \u201cone Canberra school has invited a local kitten rescue to bring cats into the classroom in a unique bid to mitigate pre-exam anxiety<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"'The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

– There\u2019s a great interview with E.B. White in this 1969 edition of The Paris Review, which includes his thoughts on writing for children: \u201cAnyone who writes down to children is simply wasting his time. You have to write up, not down. Children are demanding. They are the most attentive, curious, eager, observant, sensitive, quick, … Continue reading Miscellaneous Memoranda<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,19,6,8],"tags":[31],"class_list":["post-4880","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1930s","category-animals","category-books","category-this-writing-life","tag-e-b-white"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4880"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4885,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4880\/revisions\/4885"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michellecooper-writer.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}