Gin Phillips's Blog, page 6

The Lost Bliss of Saturday Morning Cartoons

I was not an early riser. Ever. One of my earliest memories is laying, wide-eyed, in bed after my mother had forced me there, and waiting forever until I heard Johnny Carson’s intro music from the den where my father was watching television. I’d wiggle off the bed, very slowly, toes dangling in mid-air, trying not to wake up my mother who’d fallen asleep next to me. After eons, I’d hit the ground and creep into the den, hoping my dad would let me stay up.

I liked to stay up until midnight or so. And I liked to sleep in. Unless it was Saturday morning, in which case I had to be up at precisely 7:30 a.m. to watch the Super Friends, my absolutely favorite television show. Anybody remember that? Wonder Woman and Superman (who I always thought should get together) and Batman and Aquaman. Sometimes Green Lantern and the now-vanished Apache Chief  and, of course, The Wonder Twins. I would plop myself on the floor with a bowl of cereal, and I’d watch cartoons until noon, but nothing ever approached the perfection of the Super Friends.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My son loves heroes and villains now, and last Saturday we rented the Super Friends on Amazon Prime. It made me think–for the thousandth time–how the bliss of Saturday mornings is lost now that you can watch anything anytime. Super Friends was so much better because it was only that one morning. And it required sacrifice–early rising, no spending the night out, no breakfasts that would require sitting in the kitchen. I had to want it. I earned my Super Friends.

I have not watched it in years, and it does not age particularly well.  It strikes me as occasionally sexist–for some reason, when Wonder Woman gives Aquaman a ride to the ocean to save a floundering ship, she lets him drive her Invisible Jet–and, you know, all the heroes are white people. Except for Apache Chief, who is probably not exactly evidence of racial harmony. But it makes me happy. There is no irony in it, and the superheroes are exceptionally cheerful. They laugh a lot–there is no inner darkness to them. And I can see in my son exactly why they worked for me–he was still laughing an hour later, chuckling, “She called him Wonder Mouth. Because he talks so much!”

High humor.

After the heroes finally captured The Power Pirate, my son asked me if we could watch another one, and I said, well, maybe it could be a special Saturday morning thing. Maybe on every Saturday, we’ll watch one Super Friends. And he was thrilled with my brilliant idea: “A special Saturday thing! Yes, let’s do that!”

 

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Coming Back to Real Life

It occurs to me that coming back from another country feels a little like closing your computer at the end of day when you’re writing a novel. It’s not that easy to turn off the other world—it’s still there, lurking, pressing in around the edges.

It’s been nearly three weeks since we got back from Ireland, where I lived for a year after college. We’re still clinging to it. (That’s like a novel, too—that you don’t want to let it go. That even as you’re happy in the present—in the real—playing superhero with your toddler or cooking dinner or snuggling on the sofa or any of the other small, happy moments that make up a day—you are also pulled back into the other world, wondering what’s happening there, wanting to stick your head in and take a peek.)

When you get back from another country, that other country stays so concrete for a while. I can still feel the wind on our balcony in our place in Kinsale and see exactly the route we’d walk to the playground at St. Patrick’s Park in Dublin and taste the Bannoffee pie we ate on a frigidly cold beach. And there’s such pleasure in feeling that world—in feeling this other me walking along the grassy trails of a ruined fort or ordering a small-batch whiskey in a warm pub or ignoring the ache in my calves as we hiked a beautifully, horribly steep path through the trees called Breakheart Hill. (Going up it breaks your heart.)

And so, as I was saying, we hold on to it. The places. Our other selves. My husband and I have bought an electric kettle and sip Barry’s tea every day. He’s reading James Joyce religiously. I’ve made two Bannoffee pies (which, by the way, are a delicious combination of caramel, bananas, and cream.) We call our son a whinge-bag when he whines.

When I’m in the middle of writing a book, it’s that exact same thing, only the other self that I’m holding on to is not really me. And the other place is not exactly a real place. But I’ll find that as I sit on my back porch and look at the tops of the hackberry trees, I’ll step for a second into the body of a girl in 1916, looking out at pine trees along the Mobile Bay. Or I’ll rub a blister on my foot and imagine it’s a woman hiking along the cliffs of Bar Harbor who’s worn the wrong shoes for her climb. Or I’ll see a man walking down the street with a hole in his pants, and instead it’s all of a sudden a teenager lost, wandering the streets of Cincinnati, who sees that same man.

It’s not a bad feeling, one foot in both worlds. It’s not great in terms of, well, concentration. Or getting a to-do list done. But it’s intriguing. And now I’m going to go make myself a tea.

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The Effects of a Siege

So my son used to have impressive obsessions–presidents, geography, the solar system–but now it is largely battles. Fights and weapons and warriors. Although at least it’s medieval battles that interest him. You could argue that it’s about history, not violence and mayhem.

You could, you know, argue it unsuccessfully.

So we build siege weapons and attack castles, trying to starve out the occupants. Sometimes people get thrown into dungeons and there are rats, which sometimes carry “THE BLACK DEATH,” which is always spoken in capital letters. (“Oh,” my son will yell in the voice of a captured knight, “the flea on that rat bit me. Oh, it had THE BLACK DEATH. IT IS A TERRIBLE SICKNESS THAT WE CALL A PLAGUE.”)

Most of that line was plagiarized from our favorite book these days–Why Did Castles Have Moats? (On another note, a history professor friend informs us that new research shows THE BLACK DEATH was carried not by rats but by Mongolian hamsters. Who knew there were wild hamsters? That apparently backpacked to Europe all the way from Mongolia?)

Anyway, sieges. We built a fine battering ram the other day, which is covered with a roof lined with bark to protect the men from arrows.

Battering ram (materials mostly collected from Avondale Park)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We also made this cardboard catapult….

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All advancing on this castle….

And this was the end result.

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New Kids’ Book

So A Little Bit of Spectacular was released yesterday, and tomorrow, May 7, 4:30 -6:30 p.m., we’ll have the book launch party at Trattoria Centrale in downtown Birmingham. For anyone who’s able to come, it’s worth it for a) free tasty scones, and b) checking out the bathroom walls where the main character in the book first discovers a strange message.

The book starts out with scones at Trattoria, and you’ll read about the bathroom walls by page 3. So, hey, come enjoy the visual aid.

I’ll also be at Capitol Book and News in Montgomery on May 11, 4 p.m.- 5:30 p.m.

Here’s my favorite review so far of the novel, from The Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books….

“We are Plantagenet. We are chosen,” says the bold writing on the bathroom wall of Olivia’s favorite coffee shop, and eleven-year-old Olivia is instantly intrigued. Soon she sees the message elsewhere in town, and she’s determined to find out its meaning. This pursuit provides a welcome distraction for Olivia, who’s ill at ease in her new school and her new home (she and her mother have moved in with her grandmother) and who’s worried about her mother’s recovery from recent illness and surgery. Phillips (author of The Hidden Summer, BCCB 7/13) writes with clar- ity and understanding of Olivia’s struggle to reboot herself in a new situation; it’s refreshing that Olivia is neither star nor outcast, just somebody who can’t remember the skills that got her friends before, so once she does get some age-mate contact she makes friends fairly readily. The Plantagenet explanation doesn’t live up to its initial mystery, but then that’s the almost inevitable fate of any such tantalizing hint; the underlying story of Olivia’s anxiety about her mother and difficulty in letting go of her caretaking role spools out subtly underneath the main plot and deftly intersects with it. Offering both accessibility and originality, this will enrich the middle-elementary shelves—and bump up the interest in restroom graffiti.

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Best Use for A Bundt Pan

I’ve had this bundt pan sitting around forever–I partly just like the word “bundt”–and my son’s newly discovered love of castles and knights and dungeons and moats has FINALLY made it indispensable.

 

 

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Why I Would Marry David Mitchell If I Were Not Happily Married and He Were Not Married and Living In Ireland

Occasionally, I fall head over heels in love with a new writer. New to me, at least. It’s a different feeling than only falling in love with a book itself–this is a fizzy-euphoric-buzz-bang of knowing, ahhhh, a writer I will love forever and grow old with.  It is the kind of passion that makes me search out reviews of the book I’ve just finished and then scream at the reviewer if they disagree with me over how brilliant and moving and astonishing the book is. (This is one of my favorite uses of book reviews, anyway.) It is the kind of passion that makes me write a blog.

When I finished The Bone Clocks, I was head over heels for David Mitchell.  There it is. The merging in genres, the phenomenally distinctive voices, characters who made me miss them when I was done. It reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s stunning Madd Addam trilogy–I would also marry Margaret Atwood–in the sense that a) it is genius, and b) it manages to blend that genius, that sense of awe at its concept and architecture, with a real gut connection and emotional power.

The Bone Clocks the kind of book that I think is almost impossible to end well—so many threads, so hard to tie together. The bit I keep repeating to myself and to others is the breathtaking overlap of the fantasy thread—where eternal beings are reincarnated in different bodies—with the much more mundane but equally powerful real-life sections. After a book where we see the eternals—good and evil—hop from body to body and wage a supernatural war, we get  a grandmother watching her granddaughter. She says “night night sleep tight” to the child, the same line she remembers her father saying to her when she was small. The same line she repeated to her daughter, who then repeated it to her own child.

“We live on,” the grandmother says, “as long as there are people to live on in.”

Still gives me chills.

And then I read Cloud Atlas, which was maybe so technically and intellectually amazing that it was not quite possible to feel it so powerfully in the gut.

Still, the man can write this line: “As many truths as men. Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simulacrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself and moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent.

And this line: “The sky is lemon blue.”

This one: “A trio of teenettes, dressed like Prostitute Barbie, approached.”

And this one: “We’d need a dammit diresome flashbang to get these off their hinges, yay.”

….all in the same book.

 

Love.

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