AliceBakerBlog

Word Spy

Helicopter Parent
Actorvist
BANANA
Vacation Hangover

And what do these words and expressions have in common?  They're all collected and explained at Wordspy, a website that tracks the elastic and inventive nature of the English language, noting new words and expressions.  If you're a word lover and a language afficionado, you really ought to bookmark this site   It's great fun.

Ivory-Bill

A truly cool tale.

The Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, thought to have been extinct since the 1940s, has been certifiably sighted in Arkansas.  After the first sighting reports in February of 2004, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and The Nature Conservancy have partnered in a year of expedition and bird-watching, capped by their announcement this week that the Ivory-Bill lives.

From The Onion

What?  You don't read The Onion????

Area Man Well-Versed in First Thirds of Great Literature.

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God's Politics

Powells.com offers an interview with Jim Wallis, author of God's Politics: Why the Right gets It Wrong and the Left Just Doesn't Get It.

Hope is a choice, a decision, not a feeling, a state of mind, or a personality trait. The Bible says, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." I love that. Or my paraphrase of that is, Hope is believing in spite of the evidence, and watching the evidence change.

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Guys Read

Courtesy of Kids Lit, here's a site dedicated to getting boys to read, and keeping them reading: Guys Read, offering ideas about books, book-related activities, and a list of ideas for summer reading.  This site would have been a godsend at my house.  Bet it will prove useful for lots of families.

Missing Persons

Young Adult fiction is just burgeoning these days--lots of good writers and good, thoughtful books for kids on the cusp of adulthood.  Here's an interview with Margo Rabb, the author of the Missing Persons YA mystery series.

“Since I started out as a literary short story writer, some acquaintances spoke to me as if I was crazy for writing for young adults in a commercial way, as if it’s a dishonor to my craft,” she writes. “But young adult novels, and mysteries, were so important to me as a kid and teenager. The books that I read at that age affected me very deeply, and I remember those books more vividly than some books I read last year.”

Any Nancy Drew fan will agree with that last statement, along with the Trixie Belden, Judy Bolton, Hardy Boys, Three Investigators and even the Tom Swift crowd. There is a resonance that these books carry into adulthood, a sensory memory that devotees of the genre cling to as much as baseball fans continue to root for their favorite team and a table-full of hungry holiday guests will demand the absolute same style stuffing that Grandma used to make… exactly. Whether or not we are all dwelling in some sort of childhood fantasy world is up for debate, but I happen to think that reading a good book, no matter the target age, is a good thing. And as Margo discovered, writing in this genre can also teach an author a thing or two about their craft.

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From Blog of a Bookslut.

Save Us, Oprah!

158 authors, including Amy Tan and Jhumpa Lahiri, have signed a letter to Oprah Winfrey asking her to bring back her Book Club.

"There's a widely-held belief that the landscape of literary fiction is now a gloomy place," Word of Mouth, a loose alliance of women's authors, wrote. It said fiction sales began to plummet when the The Oprah Winfrey Book Club went off the air in 2002 and stopped featuring contemporary authors.

"Book Club members stopped buying new fiction, and this changed the face of American publishing."

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Earth Day

Happy Earth Day!

There are loads of Earth Day resources on the Web.  There's the Environmental Protection Agency's site, sites with activities for kids, one that holds out for a different date designation, and still another government site.

If this blog were more politically oriented, I might have something to say concerning the present administration's perceived commitment to the environment in general, but this isn't, so I don't...

If you don't do any other Earth Day activity, take a moment to try the Footprint Test, and spend some time thinking about its implications.

Mudluscious

More thoughts on poetry for this National Poetry Month:

in Just
spring     when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles      far       and wee

That poem has introduced many a child to the fun of free verse, where the words run unleashed, punctuation runs amok, and the imagination follows.  And what is there not to love about words such as mudluscious?

Slate offers an appreciative essay on E.E. Cummings by poet Billy Collins:

In 1957, on television's Nitebeat, Mike Wallace asked William Carlos Williams if he thought that E.E. Cummings' poem "(im)c-a-t(mo) / b,i;l: e" was really a poem. (Television was different back then.) Williams said no. Maybe the question was too blunt; maybe the poet considered this print ideogram of a motionless cat too juvenile. But if William Carlos Williams, himself a leading experimental poet of the time, was not able to recognize that outburst of phonemes and punctuation marks as poetry, what hope was there for the average readers of the time—"mostpeople," as Cummings liked to call them—not to mention all the folks residing in Televisionland?

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Baghdad Burning

Blogs bring the world to us with marvelous immediacy.  Events on the other side of the planet are no longer far distant and unconnected to our daily lives.  People very like ourselves are going about their daily lives despite war and atrocities on their own soil.  And now they can bear witness with the world as an audience.

In August of 2003, a young Iraqi woman began blogging about her life amid war and occupation.  She calls herself Riverbend and her blog is called Baghdad Burning.  Her journaling has been compiled into a new book, also called Baghdad Burning.  Alternet offers an interview with Riverbend.

It has helped me realize that the many people all over the world (but especially in the U.S. and UK) are quite naive and uninformed. It was disturbing to see their emails making claims that simply weren't true. For example, the Western perception of women in Iraq prior to the war. Until I began writing the blog, I had no idea that many Americans thought Iraqi women were like Afghani women or Saudi women. I had no idea that many Americans thought their military had brought computers and internet into Iraq.

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