Tag Archive for James Preller

Baseball, This Invisible Thread

August 4, 2008 / / 2 comments

I love baseball. It’s kind of ridiculous, I know. But it’s not like I had a choice.

As the youngest of seven children, I remember lying sprawled on the tiles of our playroom floor, the television turned to a ballgame, my mother moving from the washing machine to the dryer, bending, lifting, hauling, then over to the ironing board, then back, again and again.

At one point in her life, before I came along, before preschool was in vogue – this was the 1950s, deep in the post-war suburban dream – my mother had five children below the age of seven. It kept her busy. She was busy still in the 1960s, back when I was a pup.

So there she was, that white-haired mother of mine, rooting for her “Metsies.” I learned their names – Cleon Jones, Tom Terrific, Cool Koos and Eddie Kranepool. My mother, a good Irishwoman, showed a decided preference for Wayne “Red” Garrett, the young third baseman who was an average player on his best days, but handsome in that freckled, honest, Irish way. (It was only in later years, as baseball changed, when her crushes shifted to undersized Spanish-speaking shortstops like “little” Jose Oquendo and Raphael Santana.)

I also learned the names of the players on the other side, those Mets-killers who broke our hearts. Their names were Shannon and Perez, Clemente and McCovey, Banks and Aaron.

Today I still repeat my mother’s line, inherited and ingrained, whenever a tough batter steps to the plate: “Uh-oh, he’s trouble.”

In my heart, my mother is linked to the New York Mets, and there are times when I don’t know if my love for one is a confusion for the other; or if, in my affection for the Mets, I am only expressing that childlike love I once carried – and still carry – for my mother, the soft lap I once rested my head upon, her hand in my hair. There she is at the end of the couch, a glass of crushed ice on the table, from which she constantly bites and chews. And the game is on the screen, the announcers’ voices in my ears. I am content, I am at home: the game is on and I’m with my mom.

She taught me how to catch, my mother, how to play. That wasn’t Dad’s department. Blithely indifferent, or just otherwise occupied, he didn’t care about sports. We never played catch, or hardly ever. That’s okay, because Mom did. And I liked Mom, plenty. She had a good arm and soft hands.

I remember as a Little Leaguer asking, “Mom, am I graceful?”

She liked grace, my mother, the smoothness that certain outfielders had when they drifted back to the warning track, glove stretched out, eyes in the clouds, finally cradling that ball to the dull, soft slap of leather.

“Yes,” she’d answer. “Very graceful.”

And today, like her, like then, I still snap off the television in despair when the Mets play poorly. “I can’t watch anymore!” we’ll both exclaim across the years and miles, attached by an invisible thread.

Ten minutes later, both of us will again reach for the clicker, filled with the unquenchable hope that is at the heart of every game.

Now I can see that same sweet dynamic in my own children, particularly the two boys. They follow the game, just as they once obsessed over dinosaurs and super heroes, books and guitars. Now it’s baseball. All mixed up and confused with their love for me, I know.

After all, I should, I helped sew the blanket of baseball that wraps around us.

Sometimes I even hear them say it, when certain sluggers step to the plate, Chipper Jones perhaps, or the redoubtable Albert Pujols:

“Uh-oh, he’s trouble.”

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Category: Greatest Hits, New York Mets, Six Innings / Tags: , , , , , , ,

Is Google Making Us Stoopid?

July 30, 2008 / / 2 comments

I just read a great article in The Atlantic that has stirred up some passionate, thoughtful debate on the internet. The article was written by Nicholas Carr and explores — in very human, accessible terms — “what the internet is doing to our brains.” Or, as one observer put it: This-is-your-brain-on-the-internet.

Here’s the link to the full piece. I strongly recommend you check it out.

A brief taste:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

<snip>

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

In The Sunday New York Times, there was a front-page piece on a similar theme: “Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading?” It’s not that younger people aren’t reading, it’s that they are using the internet so much more, and books far less, to the point where the nature of reading itself has shifted. Some feel that the internet is the enemy of reading — a danger, a threat — while others are more optimistic.

What is lost? What is gained?

I don’t think anyone knows the answers, but something significant has changed. I suppose the publishing business is about to undergo the same kind of huge tidal shift that’s been ongoing in the music business, where all the old models of commerce no longer work, and where new delivery systems seem to alter the very nature of the content itself (and certainly the economics of art, and the survival, gulp, of artists).

Anyway, that’s what’s on my mind these days. Read and enjoy and, yes, comment if you wish.

Lastly, here’s another brief article, this one from Jim Trelease (of The Read-Aloud Handbook fame), who states “the news is far from gloom and doom.” He’s all about turning lemons into lemonade.

Final Comment: Obviously, I LOVE BOOKS. But maybe just as obviously, I LOVE THE INTERNET, TOO. Look at what this blog post accomplishes, and how it functions, how it delivers content in a choose-your-own-path, non-linear way. There are links on top of links, bringing the reader to direct source material, and live reader responses, and other blogs, all with their own myriad links for the reader to explore, in a flash that no book can possibly match. The Information Super Highway, Baby. Beep-beep!

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Category: Readings / Tags: , , , , , , ,

Fan Mail Wednesday #7

July 16, 2008 / / No comments

The Irish have an expression, “Flowers for the living.” Basically: You don’t have to wait for somebody to die before you say something nice about him, or her. It’s nice to be on the receiving end of the sentiment. Here’s a note I received from a reader named Kelly:

Dear Mr. Preller,

I just finished reading Six Innings and wanted to compliment you on a fine book. I am a retired elementary school teacher and children’s librarian, and I try to keep up with the latest juvenile books even though I don’t have much kid-contact any more. Six Innings is a wonderful read for adults, too, with lots of great nostalgia, but what I particularly admired about the book was the restraint shown in presenting the characters. We know a lot about each one through subtle hints and bits of dialogue. You didn’t beat us over the head telling us how each one feels–you just show us through their actions and thoughts. The old writing dictum “Show, don’t tell” was well-used here. I really cared about the characters. I am not a huge baseball fan–(other than following the Rockies to the World Series last year–I live in Colorado.)—but the suspense you brought to the little league game was great. Thanks for a good read.

* * * * *

Sometimes people will ask me if I like being an author. If it’s a “fun job.” I don’t know about that, exactly. Fun? Hmmm. But when I think of (rare) letters like the above, or complimentary notes I’ve received from parents, or simply a comment from a child telling me I wrote The Best Book in the World! — when I think of the rewards, of how much this job gives back — then it’s easy to say, “Yeah, I do like it. I really do.”

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Category: Fan Mail, Six Innings / Tags: , ,

Spider on the Blogs!

July 14, 2008 / / One comment

A fresh copy of my upcoming book, Along Came Spider (Scholastic, August), arrived in the mail last week. That’s a righteous moment for any author/illustrator: the first book off the presses! And always it’s the same story. Your editor tells you how she could only get one copy, purloined off somebody in marketing, but there’s surely more somewhere in the warehouse, and pretty soon (maybe) they’ll find them.

And nothing happens for a few weeks, while you cling to your sole copy of the book, holding it out to friends for a brief sniff and greedily pulling it back, like Gollum and his precious ring.

On the cyberfront, Spider has gotten a couple of reviews from blogs. So far, so good. I think the reviewers are right in that it’s a simply-written story about complex feelings. I guess it’s noteworthy in the sense that these kinds of stories — basically: friendship under duress — are more commonly written about girls, as if boys suffered none of these emotional/ethical conflicts, as if, in fact, boys had no interior lives at all. (We just like trucks, right? And noises that go BOOM.)

They are also correct in that I didn’t do anything flashy with the writing. It’s funny, I feel like my entire post-college writing career has been a long process of learning how to get out of the way. Or, that is, un-learning much what they taught me in college! I’ve come to increasingly admire restraint, simplicity and austerity, sentences like, oh, “A minute later he was snoring” (Steig, Doctor De Soto). Unadorned, absent of any look-at-how-clever-I-am writing. I suppose I’m sensitive to this aspect of writing because, as a particular brand of male ego, I’m so vulnerable to it. When I’m at my worst, I gild the lily. So I’ve come to perceive that trait as the Enemy Within, the danger I need to purge against: overwriting, AKA, showing off. That’s where revision comes in, pulling the purple prose off the bone, like picking cotton candy off the cardboard cylinder.

Anyway, here’s some links and money quotes from the reviews:

* * * * *

From Ignacio Guerra at Alan Online:

James Preller delves into the hostile and confusing world of adolescence and illuminates how yearning for acceptance and popularity can sometimes strain a friendship. This exposé on the complicated social dynamics of school is a fascinating joy to read with excellent readability and flow!

* * * * *

From Nan Hoekstra at Anokaberry:

Preller tells an everyday story with eloquence and empathetic grace. These ordinary (amazing) kids are growing up — daily making their own way, raised by parents, guided by teachers and events. Often in groups, always alone, trying to figure themselves and others out. No under or overstated angst here, the author just tells us about it, and lets the characters speak . . . Thanks James Preller, for (another) outstanding contribution to literature for precious children.

* * * * *

By the way, I’m amazed by book reviewers. How do they read so much?! You look at Nan’s site, or so many others, and it’s like, “Do they just read all the time? When do they eat?” I am genuinely grateful, and somewhat awed.

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Category: Along Came Spider / Tags: , , , , , ,

William Steig: An Appreciation

June 30, 2008 / / No comments

“The fact that kids like a book is not proof of its merit. They also like all kinds of dreck confections with names like yo-yos, and animation full of senseless violence. Every kid is a potential genius but also a potential yuckapuck.” — William Steig.

I love William Steig’s books, his picture books (Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, The Amazing Bone, Doctor De Soto) as well as his longer works, such as Abel’s Island and Dominic.

Amazingly, Steig published his first children’s book at the vintage age of sixty. I often think that’s what helped make his voice unique, singular. Like many people who reach that state of grace — I’m thinking of any number of old grandpas on the front porch, talking about how the world really works — Steig didn’t seem to care what anybody thought. He was free from all those concerns. Sure of himself, Steig worked to please himself, confident in the knowledge that by doing so, he would almost certainly please others. Or not — whatever!

I admire, too, his faith in his own imagination, his aspirations to make true, lasting Art. Yet he was never pretentious about the writing process. Said Steig, “I just ramble around and discover for myself what will happen next.” He also said: “I can’t truly say that I am ever inspired to write a book. It’s the last thing in the world I think of until I have to do it. And then I count on my imagination to make things happen.”

His artwork serves the text, and often sublimely, perhaps never moreso than in The Amazing Bone, which seems like it sprang from the palette of a French Impressionist. I’m staring at a two-page spread that depicts the book’s porcine heroine, Pearl, as she serenely settles amidst the wild flowers of a forest. She breathes in her surroundings, at one with nature.

Wrote Steig:

Later she sat on the ground in the forest between school and home, and spring was so bright and beautiful, the warm air touched her so tenderly, she could almost feel herself changing into a flower. Her light dress felt like petals.

“I love everything,” she heard herself say.

Despite the artwork, it was Steig’s singular use of language that separated him from the pack. He refused to pander to the perceived interests of young readers; instead, he lifted readers up, selecting the right word even if it wasn’t the easiest word, trusting in his readers’ intuitive intelligence. Children encounter rich, vivid language in his books, words like cantankerous and recumbent. As J.K. Rowling proved in the Harry Potter books, the grandiosity of the language did not turn readers away, but rather heightened the mystery and atmospherics of the telling. Steig’s books serve as an eloquent rebuttal to today’s misguided tendency of “dumbing down” children’s literature.

There’s also sensitivity in his stories, poignancy, a profound sense of wonder. The way Sylvester’s parents, heartbroken and unyielding, never stop searching for their lost child, never surrender hope. Or when Pearl in The Amazing Bone finds herself in the clutches of a cruel fox:

“Be brave,” the bone whispered. Pearl could only tremble.

Steig was a true believer in the immediacy of the creative impulse. He said, “It’s only when you’re consciously aware of what you’re doing in a book that you’re in trouble.” He followed, that is, his own muse. There is nothing cynical about his work, nothing deliberate. I believe he never once tried to figure out the market, never wrote simply to sell, never chased the latest trend, but instead followed his heart. It is why his books are timeless and enduring.

In Dominic, a dog sets out to see more of the world. Soon he must choose between two paths: a road with “no surprise, nothing to discover or wonder at,” or another road that promises to lead him to “where things will happen that you never could have guessed at — marvelous, unbelievable things.”

Like the book’s creator, Dominic chose the second path. Every reader who has opened one of William Steig’s books knows that feeling. For he invites us along on that same journey of surprise and adventure. And away we go, willingly, happily, in the hands of a master.

POSTSCRIPT: A librarian friend — okay, my ex-wife, Maria, who remains my friend — just sent me a cool link. There was a recent celebration of William Steig’s art at The Jewish Museum. To get more info, and to hear Meryl Streep read Spinky Sulks, just follow the link. This presentation of his work from The New Yorker is also awesomely cool.

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Category: Interviews & Appreciations / Tags: , , , ,
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