Kurtis Scaletta's Blog, page 10

Errata

In a recent post I spoke dismissively of the 2006 live-action and CGI adaptation of Charlotte’s Web, a movie I had judged harshly largely on the trailer, which made me think the movie had been commandeered by the celebrity voice talent. I also thought they’d loaded the movie with fart jokes. Neither fear was completely unfounded, but the movie is a million times better than I expected. In particular, Dakota Fanning (as Fern) and Julia Roberts (as Charlotte) give moving performances, while the writing and direction are true to the spirit and time of the book. Steve Buscemi’s Templeton threatens to steal the movie but the makers hearts were in the right place.

There are a few touches that they really appreciate the book, such as leaving in at least a glimpse of Fern on the rope swing, and including a compressed version of the doctor’s lecture, which didn’t make the animated movie from the 1970s. The crows, though a gratuitous addition, are named Elwyn and Brooks. Awwww.

Filed under: Miscellaneous, Reviews

Top Five of 2014: Number One

I told you there’d be a surprise, and here it is: the top-read post of the year is not from this year. It’s not even from last year. It’s from 2011, a parody of an infamous article in the Wall Street Journal about the darkness in young adult literature (I think I owe a lot of this long life to a much more popular blog that linked to it).

Here it is: “Brightness too Visible”

http://kurtisscaletta.com/2011/06/05/brightness-too-visible/

2014 was a rough year full of long nights at home and disappointment in my publishing endeavors. One silver lining is that I started writing here again regularly, grew my audience and, I think, did some good stuff. When I page back to the first few years of the blog I see how much I’ve grown as a writer even since I sold my first book. One goal for 2015 is to maintain it and cultivate it even more.

Thanks to everyone who reads, shares, comments on, and subscribes to this blog. Have a wonderful 2015.  

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: top five

Top Five of 2014: Number Two

The second top-read entry of the year is this one, following the viral outrage in the wake of…. oh, never mind. I try to stop myself blogging about topical stuff, and am often sorry I did when I do. I’m not sorry I wrote this.

http://kurtisscaletta.com/2014/09/13/on-the-way-i-was-raised/

Tomorrow comes the most read post this year. Did I tell you there’s a bit of a surprise? Expect the unexpected.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: top five

Top Five of 2014: Number Three

The third-place post of 2014 is a recent one: a revisit of Charlotte’s Web after reading it to my son. it is also my favorite of the year.

http://kurtisscaletta.com/2014/12/14/the-unreadable-sentence-and-other-thoughts-on-charlottes-web/

B. has since discovered the movie — the animated one form my own childhood, not the celebrity-choked travesty from a few years ago. He’s watching it as I write this. It’s the scene where Wilbur tries to spin a web.

Have I mentioned that there’s a bit of a surprise to the top post? Stay tuned.

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: top five

Top Five of 2014: Number Four

Yesterday I started counting down the top five posts of the year. The fourth top-getting post was one of many inspired by Beverly Cleary: On Spunky Girls.

http://kurtisscaletta.com/2014/09/25/on-spunky-girls/

In retrospect, I wish I had called the post “Spunky Girls,” having exhausted the “On ______________” and “In which the author ______________” post titles in the first few years of this blog. But it’s a small regret. Too small to mention, I might apophatically add.

 

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: top five

Top Five of 2014: Number Five

For the last five days of 2014 I’ll revisit the top hits-collecting posts this year.

Number five is “Some Things I Don’t Want to Tell My Son,” a short list of the crazy-making platitudes adults dispense to children. I’m glad to revisit the list because eight months later the “something I’m writing” is still being written, and I’ve been struggling with this character in particular. I think this is a good place to begin getting to know her.

http://kurtisscaletta.com/2014/05/29/some-things-i-dont-want-tell-my-son/

Filed under: Miscellaneous

Do you write middle grade fiction?

I am teaching an online class through the Loft Literary Center beginning on February 2, 2015. Here is the description:

Many consider ages 8–12, “the middle grades,” to be a golden age for readers. Their novels include classics like Charlotte’s Web, the Ramona series, and the earliest adventures of Harry Potter. Most Newbery winners also fall into this category. In this class, we will explore some of the qualities that make a book a hit with young readers, with an emphasis on developing a character-driven story. Topics covered include creating a main character kids want to chase through the pages of a novel, avoiding stereotypes and cliches, and being attentive to the inner life of a middle grade novel. Participants will have an opportunity to share their work and get feedback from their peers as well as from the teaching artist.

And here are answers to commonly asked questions:

The class is completely online and mostly asynchronous. We do have weekly live chats to check in but the meat of the class is in the online readings and discussion forums. (We use the Moodle platform, but don’t worry if that doesn’t mean anything to you.)
There is a chance to share works in progress with the rest of the class; you also get private feedback from me on about 10 pages of writing.
The class is listed as “intermediate” primarily because of the expectation that writers are familiar with (if not steeped in) middle grade books, but if you have not read a lot you can catch up by familiarizing yourself with at least some of the following books. Most are Newberry medalists or honorees, so look on that bookshelf if your bookstore or library has one! These are not assigned class readings, but I use them as examples throughout the class (this is a partial list):

Ramona Quimby, Age 8 (and others in the Ramona series) – Beverly Cleary
Bud, not Buddy – Christopher Paul Curtis
Harriet the Spy – Louise Fitzhugh
The Giver – Lois Lowry
Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH – Robert C. O’Brien
Hatchet – Gary Paulsen
From the Mixed Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler – E. L. Konigsberg
The Westing Game – Ellen Raskin
Holes – Louis Sachar
Maniac Magee – Jerry Spinelli
When You Reach Me – Rebecca Stead
Charlotte’s Web – E.B.White

We also all read one recent book recommended and voted on by the class, and I try to get the author to join us for a chat.

Sign up for the class here!

https://www.loft.org/classes/detail/?loft_product_id=96091

Filed under: Miscellaneous Tagged: middle grade fiction, online classes

The Unreadable Sentence and Other Thoughts on Charlotte’s Web

Note: This post is full of spoilers. On the off chance you have never read Charlotte’s Web, stop everything and go read it, then come back.

*

I just finished reading Charlotte’s Web aloud to my son, and was surprised how often I was choked up while reading it. I expected the final chapter to destroy me, but not so much in the middle chapters, even the quiet ones: Wilbur’s bucolic day-to-day existence and the charming banter of animals was as likely to make me swallow hard and take five (my son staring at me in confusion) as Wilbur learning his fate from the old sheep.

I think what gets to me is Charlotte’s and Wilbur’s platonic love. Maybe all great middle-grade books are essentially about friendship, but no friendship is more peculiar and perfect than Wilbur’s and Charlotte’s. All my childhood I waited for that little voice to whisper from the darkness that she was there for me, and would reveal herself in the morning.

But as I grow older, Charlotte is not the friend I aspire to have, but the friend I aspire to be. She reaches out to Wilbur when he is muddy and pathetic and hasn’t a friend in the world. Her friendship transforms Wilbur, just by holding up a mirror of her own admiration. Soon the whole barnyard is swept up by her enthusiasm. The old sheep and the geese and even the bratty lambs start treating Wilbur with more respect. In turn, Wilbur considers Charlotte’s myriad legs and plump gray body and bloodsucking lifestyle and pronounces her beautiful, an unshaken belief until the end.

It is Charlotte’s gesture of friendship upon which the entire book revolves. It is also the source of the inspiration for her own life-changing art.

*

I was actually less weepy at the end than I expected, perhaps because the boy was so squirmy and distracting (while also steadfastly insisting I keep reading). He was so blank-faced when Charlotte died I had to make sure he understood what just happened (he did). He was impatient through the next passages, but delighted by the baby spiders, and so eager to announce we were finished he missed the lovely “true friend and good writer,” bit at the very end. It was hard to be emotional with such an impatient audience.

However, there is one sentence I was unable to read. I saw it, knew I couldn’t read it, and simply turned the page. It’s the last sentence in the second-to-last chapter, and may be the saddest line ever to appear in a book for children. I won’t even put it here. It’s no better typing it than reading it aloud.

*

Perhaps the most curious aspect of Charlotte’s Web is that it never once mentions God, which leads to some confusion about the plot: why is Wilbur, and not Charlotte, the subject of praise and wonder? In an increasingly secular world, the disposition of rural folk to attribute the unknown to the hand of God is less and less obvious.

Mrs. Zuckerman more than once suggests that the spider is the real phenomenon, but her husband dismisses her. It’s just a plain old gray spider, he says. Mr. Zuckerman uses words like “wonder” and “miracle” to describe what happens, and consults his minister, who gives a sermon, but nobody uses the G word. I suspect that it is because White, or perhaps Ursula Nordstrom, felt that they were perilously close to mocking faith itself, or would be seen as doing so. They played it safe by alluding to miracles and wonders without naming their presumptive Source.

White was a skeptic, but a devout worshiper of nature, and his masterpiece is a statement of faith: we don’t need a celestial creator; the spider is miracle enough. White picks up the Emerson strand of enlightened animism that runs through the American canon (especially poetry). It’s a faith but not a religion, and captures my own faith better than any religious text.

The doctor serves as White’s mouthpiece, giving his lecture to Fern’s mother, in a scene I had completely forgotten and will probably forget again. (It has no children in it, and no animals. It made my son restless.)

*

Charlotte’s Web is beloved by writers for its smooth rhythms and pastoral descriptions, its epic catalogs of the humdrum. Reading it aloud tuned my ears to its stylistic mastery. There’s a reason the award for best read-aloud books is named for White. The style subsumes the story at times, as White patiently reels off the signs of seasonal changes, for example, or gives an exhaustive, almost ostentatious, list of things to eat at a fair or the contents of a junk pile. A certain type of children’s book reviewer is inclined to say they are “too much for children,” these languorous passages, just as critics have opined since its publication that Charlotte’s Web is too sad for children, that the sadness is ill-matched with the humor, that White bungled by establishing Fern as a main character just to demote her in chapter three. White’s children’s books do have structural peculiarities, but so do Andersen’s fairy tales. They defy our critical apparatuses. Children gleefully read, love, and cry over the book anyway, decade after decade.

When authors appeal to all ages they are said to appeal to the childlike hearts of older readers, but I think White appeals to the old souls in children.

*

Charlotte is also a writer, of sorts: literally spinning words that shine in the morning sunlight, transforming the lives of the ones she cares most about. And so I aspire to be a friend like Charlotte, and also a writer like Charlotte, with her tireless commitment to high-minded goals and no longing for personal reward. I more often feel like Wilbur, tying an old string to his tail and leaping off of a manure pile. Perhaps it is only by disappearing into the woodwork that a writer can see his or work work become, to those staring in wonder, divine.

Filed under: *All Time Favorite Posts, Miscellaneous, Reading Tagged: charlotte's web

“A Spider”

I have been reading Charlotte’s Web to my son. I began it on a bit of a whim, unsure if he was old enough, but he loves it — he was goofing off and naughty this evening, and promise of more chapters in the book about the pig turned him right around.

Anyway. Tonight, as Wilbur lay lonely and weeping in the rain, and as the voice of a friend called to him from the darkness, Byron sat up in bed and started guessing who it was. He thought it was the gander, which made no sense. He thought it was Fern. And when, in the next chapter, he saw who it was he said, in hush and awe:

A spider.

I cannot tell you how it was to re-experience that moment through him. I don’t even know if I experienced it; I think when I read this book for the first time I knew it would be about a spider. Also, I wasn’t as bug crazy as he is — if anything, if I was surprised by the voice from the shadows belonging to a spider, I was disappointed. But not Byron. He was thrilled, amazed, and delighted.

A spider.

His joy is my joy. And the joy carries with it a sense of gravity– knowing that this moment, like first steps and first words, is over in a heartbeat. Byron will never again reach chapter five not knowing that the voice belongs to Charlotte, a spider. He will never again, say in wonder: a spider.

Harry will get his letter from Hogwarts, and Ralph will ride his toy motorcycle, and who knows what else, but nothing will top that, ever.

 

 

 

Filed under: Reading Tagged: charlotte's web, e. b. white

Toy Story That Time Forgot

Last night Pixar aired their first television Christmas special, though it is only nominally about Christmas (and takes place two days later). It’s called Toy Story that Time Forgot, and hopefully will not be forgotten because one thing that Pixar quietly did was make a girl the lead this time, and shows everything to do right about creating girl heroes.

Girl? Woman? It’s a dinosaur, voiced by the bubbly Kristen Schaal (who usually plays, in her own words, “kooky sluts,” on shows like 30 Rock and Flight of the Conchords), and either way it’s a great character. She’s brave, smart, and she’s definitely a girl, but veers away from the “take a male hero and give him a female body” answer to “strong female characters.” I loved her small part in Toy Story 3 and was thrilled that she took the lead this time. Her heroism is both natural in this series and in character.

I don’t want to sell boys short by saying they can’t enjoy a female hero, and the boy fans of Brave and Frozen prove they can, but here’s a non-princess character who’s got personality and style and will appeal to all kids. I hope we see more of Trixie. I hope Trixie’s lead role in this special is a sign of things to come for girl heroes in children’s movies that aren’t geared exclusively or mostly to a girl audience. And I hope Kristen Schaal voices more characters; she’s great at it.

Filed under: Miscellaneous [image error]