Read Across America Day

Yesterday was Dr. Seuss's birthday and the official Read Across America Day.  It's become a day when kids walk around with silly paper hats like the Cat in the Hat wears and occasionally officials come to schools or libraries to read.  At least it's one day, when instead of villifying teachers we take the time to recognize the importance of teaching kids to read.  Begun to the National Education Association, Read Across America encourages children, along with their parents and caregivers, to read throughout the year. Here's a link to the NEA's colorful reading calendar to encourage kids to read throughout the year.  There's also a Top 100 List of books for children compiled by teachers.  And another Top 100 Kids Books list.  You can find several more book lists here. Here are links from the Reading Rockets website that include Lane Smith and Jack Prelutsky talking about Dr. Seuss, class room ideas for using Dr. Seuss books, and even incorporating service learning and Dr. Seuss books with older readers.

Even if you didn't wear a silly hat yesterday, today is as good a time as ever to read to kids and encourage the habit.  In our house, the popular series middle school literature has been The Hunger Games, so guess I'm going to have to read it, too.

Target's 26-foot Read sign in front of the New York Public Library

Book lists not yet ready

I'm working on preparing the book lists for the course I will be teaching this summer and those for next fall.  Still debating, a little, on the focus of the fall grad course. But I can tell you that the course will be interesting and timely with books and films to study. I'll have the materials available soon! 

Update:  Course descriptions are now available for the course I will teach in the first summer session and the two undergraduate-level courses I'll teach next fall.  Go to my blog post on March 7 for more info.

Update 2:  The course description for ENG 470 for Fall 2011 is available on my blog post for March 16, 2011.

Steve thinking on Blue's Clues

Carroll's possible thoughts as Alice in Wonderland film wins Academy Award

Tim Burton's dark Alice in Wonderland continues its success by winning last night's first Academy Award.  Robert Stromberg and Karen O'Hara accepted the Oscar for Art Direction for their work in Alice in Wonderland.  Later, the winner of the 2011 Academy Award for Best Costume was Collen Atwood for Alice in Wonderland.  She had certainly been heavily promoted as a possibility even before the film came out.

Great article in the Chicago Tribune on former Chicagoan Karen O'Hara on what was involved in Art Direction for Alice in Wonderland.  While art directors and producers used to get their actual objects on the set, in this CGI-enhanced Alice, O'Hara worked with the computer graphics people to take the images she had found and put them into CGI.

She explains:"There's a huge department on films nowadays that creates the environments in 3-D on a computer, based on paintings and other research that the production designer has put together," she said. "What I do is, I bring in all the items that are going to decorate those areas, just as they would be in a complete live-action movie. I photograph those items and then those get built in 3-D in the computer. Then I sit with the computer artists and place those objects in the environment. Everything that's in that rabbit hole that Alice falls through — and there were hundreds of items: a piano, pictures, pieces of jewelry, a large sofa, a bed — all those pieces need to be figured out."

In this backstage interview after winning the Academy Award, Robert Stromberg also explains that during his acceptance speech he put a little Mad Hatter hat on the Oscar.  Cute!

I am sure that Lewis Carroll would have been both appalled and intrigued by the Academy Award Show last night.  As a man who loved theatre, just being with all those actors would have thrilled him.  But he was more conservative than many assume and he might have found some aspects a little tawdry or risque.

Review Cech's great book on Weston Woods' history now on Project Muse

John Cech's new book Imagination and Innovation: The Story of Weston Woods is a particularly interesting history of this ground-breaking film company known for its amazing adapatations of children's literature.  My review of his book is now available in the Children's Literature Association Quarterly section on Project Muse.  If you want a print copy, it's in Volume 36, Number 1, Spring 2011, pp. 115-117.  I think this book is well worth reading for children's literature scholars, librarians, film scholars, and all of us who remember watching these films in school and on television.

The Witch House in Hollywood, from Weetzie Bat

The legendery witch house, familiar to YA readers from Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat series, is more charming and less frightening in real life.  Quirky, yes.  But sweet and intriguing. When we were in the LA area, we drove around Beverly Hills and easily found it off the main drag, not that far from Beverly Hills High School and Rodeo Drive.  The house is located on an extremely well manicured street filled with beautiful suburban-style houses that have clearly been well maintained and constantly upgraded.  There's something rather amusing that these buildings at first glance seem like typical (almost boring) suburban tract houses.  But then this is Hollywood, land of veneer, so on second glance it's clear that the homes are polished, refabbed to look like the dream of suburbs but better.  Every lawn is clipped perfectly.

The Witch House, in contrast, appears a little scraggly with its wild garden, craggy trees, stretching bushes.  Yet, this landscaping is clearly as well planned as the detailed lawns, just in a different way. In the front, behind the fence is a pleasantly landscaped area that features a pond surrounded by bushes, grasses and plants climbing to the sky.  The people who live here obviously adore their home, but like the messed up look, too.

Signs on the fence read "Keep Out" in typical hardware sign and then there's another one that's carved out of wood that also tells people to keep away, but it's artful, almost like an apology for the first sign.

According to several Hollywood blogs, the house was built in 1921 in Culver City where it served as offices and dressing rooms.  It was moved to this location in 1926 and is a private residence.  The house appears in Clueless.  Alicia Silverstone walks by it after flunking her driving test.  Architect Charles Moore as the "quintessential Hansel and Gretel house."   Aaron Betsky, an architecture critic for the LA Times, has noted that it, "It represents the skills of an experienced form-giver to fantasy more than the scrupulous translation of concerns about function and site into built form that an architect might offer."

The house design reflects the popularity of storybook type houses in the 1920s.  Their creators and owners must have yearned for a combination of European sophistication and mystery while still desiring modern updates.  The village of Riverside, IL, always strikes me as having some homes in that style as well and there's a fairy tale type cottage in Normal, too.

Ever since I read Francesca Lia Block's Weetzie Bat and her description of this unusual, legendery house, I have wanted to see it in person.  I'm glad I did. The Weetzie Bat series is an intriguing contemporary literary fairy tale about modern LA, as I wrote about in “The Rebirth of the Postmodern Flâneur: Notes on the Postmodern Landscape of Francesca Lia Block’s Weetzie Bat" in Marvels & Tales.

Unfortunately,  I didn't get to Amoeba Records as we couldn't quite figure out where that was.  The rest of my group found it a day later and said it was amazing.