Where the wild things were

Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are might be the only book of my early childhood that I can recite word for word to this day. Its parable-like story and cross-hatched illustrations drew me in, but its language was like mother's milk, a primal comfort. I still love the way Sendak broke up and inverted his sentences, especially in the beginning: "That very night in Max's room a forest grew..." [page break] ..."and grew-" [page break]... "and grew until his ceiling hung with vines and the walls became the world all around."

"And the walls became the world all around." It still sends shivers down my spine and, for me, ranks high on the all-time list of best lines in literature. So, it was with a strange mix of nostalgia and skepticism that I watched the trailer for a movie based on the beloved book. This has happened before with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. In each case, the cinematic adaptations were both more and less than I wanted them to be. In the end, I think they fall short no matter how deftly realized or faithful to the original text. They replace whatever was in our imaginations with a new vision created by the director, actors, and computer animators. Gandalf didn't look like Ian McKellen when I read Fellowship for the first time, but he does now.

I'm looking forward to the movie, and hope I can hold on to the way I saw the world all around when I was five.

Going out in style

Woke up this morning to the sight of three elk grazing their way through my neighborhood and the news that Strunk and White's Elements of Style turned 50. The wandering wapiti reminded me of days spent in Rocky Mountain National Park with my grandparents. And the style guide reminded me of them too, in a weird sort of way. Until recently, Grandpa hammered out letters to me on an old IBM Selectric built sometime during the Johnson administration. His grammar was perfect; Strunk and White would've been proud. He almost never used any unnecessary words, was always avoiding the passive voice, and he learned to totally avoid split infinitives. And he never began sentences with "and."

As a professional editor and semi-pro writer, it's difficult to admit that while I own a copy of Elements of Style, I never use it. And I'm pretty sure I've got company. I'll stick to my trusty Chicago Manual and a good dictionary, thank you very much.

So on this momentous anniversary, I say good riddance to Strunk, White, and all of their elk.

"We got ourselves a writer here!"

Joe the Plumber just came out with a book.  No, wait, he didn't. Maybe there's justice in the world of publishing after all.

Everything I do makes me feel guilty...

So says Charlie Brown in "Snoopy Come Home," my youngest's favorite video for the moment. I feel like that all the time, especially when I contemplate my reading list. My current guilty pleasure is George R. R. Martin's A Game of Thrones. I wish I would have discovered his stuff long ago. It's the only fantasy writing I've encountered that even comes close to Tolkien. Though his Song of Ice and Fire series is much different from the Lord of the Rings, it rivals the grand daddy of 'em all in at least one way: Its imagined world is almost as fully realized as Middle Earth. 

I've thoroughly enjoyed the 800+ pages I've read so far, but there's this little voice in the back of my head that says, "You're wasting your time, fantasy isn't literature." Actually, I know exactly where the voice is coming from: one of my old creative writing professors from my undergrad days. She loaded us up on James Joyce, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike and the like. The only one I could stand to read was Updike, because he seems to have about ten times the amount of hangups I do (Joyce had his demons too; I just couldn't understand his writing). But none of them, including Updike, are fun. 

And what's wrong with fun books? So, I guess I'll just deal with my guilt as I plow through Thrones and dive into A Clash of Kings.

Obama rally at CSU

Obama rally at CSU, originally uploaded by bfogel.

Barack Obama visited Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado, for a rally nine days before the election. 45,000 people filled the Oval on a perfect fall day. I took this right after he spoke.

2008 Colorado Book Awards

I'm thrilled to announce that one of the Colorado Historical Society's books, The Life and Times of Richard Castro, won the Colorado Book Award in the history/biography category. Kudos to the author, Richard Gould, for producing what I think is a significant contribution to the field of Colorado history. I had little to do with the book (I just did a little proofing and promotion), but Steve Grinstead, my co-author on Walking Into Colorado's Past (2007 CBA winner), did a good deal of the editing. Congrats, Steve.

The Heart in Conflict

Just found the "Meet the Author" podcast, available on iTunes. In a recent episode, fantasy/sci-fi author George R. R. Martin quoted Faulkner, who said in his Nobel acceptance speech that the only thing worth writing about is "the heart in conflict with itself."  This idea made me stop and think, am I  doing this in my own writing? I certainly try. I've recently sent my first 6 chapters to a couple friends for comments and critique. My question to them is, "Have I done enough to make you care about the characters?" To care, you must empathize with their problems. And to empathize, the characters' problems must, as Faulkner also said, be universal. He named a few: love and honor, pity and pride, compassion and sacrifice. So, an adventure story will have a primary conflict between an antagonist and a protagonist. A good adventure story will have multiple levels of conflict as each character deals with her own heart in conflict. I think, ultimately, that that's the difference between an entertaining book and a satisfying one.