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For the New Year: "Finishing the Hat"

The title of this post relates to two things in my life in 2010. The first is that it's the title of the first volume of Stephen Sondheim's memoir, which is the book I'm most looking forward to reading (besides those I work on, of course) in the new year. And the second is that it's one of Sondheim's most rich and gorgeous songs, about making art, the sacrifices it can require, and yet its dizzying pleasure . . . the last two lines, sung right, always make me catch my breath for a moment. Here's good wishes and inspiration to all of us looking to start, create, or finish our own hats in 2010.



Finishing the Hat
from Sunday in the Park with George
by Stephen Sondheim
(sung above by Raul Esparza)

Yes, she looks for me--good.
Let her look for me
to tell me why she left me
As I always knew she would.
I had thought she understood.
They have never understood,
And no reason that they should
But if anybody could...

Finishing the hat,
How you have to finish the hat.
How you watch the rest of the world
From a window
While you finish the hat

Mapping out a sky
What you feel like, planning a sky
What you feel when voices that come
Through the window
Go
Until they distance and die,
Until there's nothing but sky

And how you're always turning back too late
From the grass or the stick
Or the dog or the light,
How the kind of woman willing to wait's
Not the kind that you want to find waiting
To return you to the night,
Dizzy from the height,
Coming from the hat,
Studying the hat,
Entering the world of the hat,
Reaching through the world of the hat
Like a window,
Back to this one from that

Studying a face,
Stepping back to look at a face
Leaves a little space in the way like a window,
But to see--
It's the only way to see.

And when the woman that you wanted goes,
You can say to yourself, "Well, I give what I give."
But the woman who won't wait for you knows
That, however you live,
There's a part of you always standing by,
Mapping out the sky,
Finishing a hat...
Starting on a hat...
Finishing a hat...

Look, I made a hat...
Where there never was a hat

A Thank You Speech, A Kidlit Drink Night, and My Current Favorite Video in Life

A Thank You Speech: At the ALA convention a couple of weeks ago, Arthur and I accepted the Batchelder Award for translation for my dear Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit. You can read the full speech (scripted by me and revised by both of us) here on Arthur's blog.

A Kidlit Drink Night: August 11th, 6 p.m.-ish, at our old favorite Sweet & Vicious in Soho.

My Current Favorite Video in Life: I love musical theatre. I love over-the-top power ballads. Therefore, I have watched this video of the cast of "Glee" singing Queen's "Somebody to Love" 47 times, and I don't think I'm exaggerating the number. SO. GOOD.

I have been half in love with easeful Death

I was looking at a New York Times bestseller list from a couple weeks ago today, and I noticed:
  • #2: Twilight: Directors' Notebook. A book about the making of a movie based on a novel about a girl in love with a member of the undead. (Twilight itself was on the series list, of course, along with House of Night, which is also about vampires.)
  • #4: Thirteen Reasons Why. A novel about a teenage girl who kills herself and thirteen people who influenced her to do it.
  • #6: If I Stay. A novel about a teenage girl in a coma, making the choice between living and dying.
  • #7: Wintergirls. A novel about a teenage girl whose best friend has died of an eating disorder, pushing herself to that same point.
And I thought: What is it with teenage girls and death? Why all these teenage girls at risk, on edge, and no boys? How would these books have been different if they showed the boy version of those stories* -- a boy who killed himself because he was harassed/teased/neglected, a boy in a coma, a boy whose competitive pathology puts him on the brink of collapse? How might the books have been differently received by editors and readers? And what does it say that these stories of girls in extreme situations are so popular now?

* I should add that I absolutely don't mean this to criticize any of the authors or editors involved for publishing these books just as they are, as they're all interesting and important books just as they are, and authors have to tell the stories that come to them as they come. I'm just interested in the what-if of switching the genders, and the why of books about this particular gender and death being so popular.

I thought all this just sort of as a thought experiment, and then I thought, Well, did I read any books like that when I was a teenage girl? And one title leapt to mind immediately: Love Story. I don't remember how I found that 1970s classic weepie during my freshman year of high school, but I know I adored the weepiness; I saw the movie once but read the book multiple times. I'm not sure that falls under the same rubric as the books above, though, except maybe Twilight. . . . What I loved about it was the romance, and the way the romance was sharpened by death, how much more sweet and sad the story became when Jenny died. (I read a couple of Lurlene McDaniels, too, until I figured out the formula and got bored with them.) But Wintergirls, Thirteen Reasons Why, and If I Stay aren't so much about a romance with a living, breathing boy as they are about a romance with death itself (as I understand them; I haven't read If I Stay), and in Twilight, of course, death and the boy are one and the same.

So this made me think of a brilliant passage late in Jaci Moriarty's The Murder of Bindy Mackenzie. Jaci puts these words in the mouth of a decidedly ambiguous character, so I'm not sure their wisdom gets recognized and appreciated, but the passage reads:
It is my belief that the teenager is a person with three main characteristics. . . . First, teenagers get caught up in their own heads. . . . teenagers think about themselves a lot. They obsess about what they look like, what people think of them, what the point of life is. So number one, too much introspection.

. . . Now, number two, the teenager needs excitement--it's a reaction, I guess, to the realization that life is ordinary. In childhood, it's fresh and exciting, but then you start to see that the grown-up world is boring. So you look for hysteria and drama. You scream at concerts, you shriek when you see each other, you ride on rollercoasters, you get into alcohol and drugs. All year I've been hearing you guys use words like conspiracy, compulsion, pathology -- you get post-traumatic stress from exams; you're always running from the cops. I mean, you guys are just desperate for excitement. You're looking for extremes. You're looking for a climax.

. . . And finally, teenagers lose their sense of perspective. They're stuck between childhood and adulthood so they don't know whether they're up or down. One day, they're dressing up to look old and get into a bar; next day, they're putting on their cute voice to get the child's fare on the bus. It's like they're in an elevator all the time, so they can't judge where they are." (p. 404-405)
Death's finality and hugeness feeds introspection. It is extreme and exciting -- the approach to it, anyway, and the dodging of it, or the struggle or choice to embrace it. And it provides an end, a certainty that has its own comfort (though also terror) in the up and down.

But that wouldn't explain why there are so few books about boys and death. So one other theory here (which I'm pretty sure isn't original to me): More than anything else, teenage girls want to be seen. Twilight is a story about how special Bella is, how she is an exception to Edward's rules about humans, how he sees her once and falls helplessly in love with her then. (Love Story = same thing.) Thirteen Reasons Why is about a girl claiming the attention she was denied in life; If I Stay about the people who gather around a girl's bedside, paying attention to her, asking her to stay in life; Wintergirls about a girl who wants to be the skinniest -- to have the least seen of her, actually, and having that be her victory -- until that desire consumes her. Death, in its extremity, promises and focuses attention in just the same way a love story does. And when the two are combined: teenage-girl bliss.

Your comments? Theories? Thoughts?

One last thing that has nothing to do with death but a lot to do with teenage girls and love: The video for Taylor Swift's "Love Story." I freely confess I'm fascinated by this video, partly because it seems to have been concepted after someone watched "Pride and Prejudice," the What the Hell??? version (but with eighteenth-century dress for the ladies), partly because it (and the song) pushes all my romantic buttons, partly because it pushes all my feminist ones at the exact same time, and then finally because the song is such a well-constructed piece of narrative craft, moving from first glimpse (being seen!) to forbidden love to marriage proposal with Daddy's permission in less than four minutes. As a friend of mine said, "It's total high-school English class crack," and the part of me that is still in Mrs. Markley's Honors English II class third period adores it. Well worth watching, for any of those partial reactions.

Salmagundi Thursday

  • You've got to see this awesome video of a crazy fish called the barreleye. It has a transparent head! And tubular eyes that can look forward or rotate up so it can look through its aforementioned transparent head! It is incredibly, delightfully strange.
  • I was much struck by this question for readers on Jennifer Crusie's blog: "On what do your base your expectations of what a book will be like?" Author, flap copy, cover, etc.? I'm working on my talks for the Missouri SCBWI retreat right now (as well as going through SQUIDs), and one of the things I'm thinking a lot about is how writers set up the reader's expectations for the book in the first chapter, and how that shapes everything that comes after. . . . If you have anything to add to the discussion, I'd be glad to hear it in the comments.
  • Editor Martha Mihalick has a wonderful blog: A Curiosity Shop.
  • And former Harper executive editor Alix Reid has a great, reflective blog called Delightful My House. I especially liked her post "Is it the editor's fault or the writer's?" ... I consider this question a lot when I read a book that I think could be better (most recently with Twilight), and the answer is usually: The ordinary reader can't know. We can guess, comparing it to other books the author has written or the editor has edited (if you go that inside-baseball), but even then only the editor, author, and maybe the agent know what happened on the page. I'm just grateful for the times this question doesn't come up.
  • Our church book sale raised over $15,000 -- thanks to any and all of you who came out and bought books!
  • The lovely Marcelo in the Real World has accumulated five starred reviews!
  • And Lisa Yee had a terrific Q&A in a recent issue of the PW Children's Newsletter.
  • Finally, I'm posting another video of a song I mentioned last year: "Die, Vampire, Die," from [title of show], this time in a Sims recreation of the original musical number. Again, this is the best creative expression of the varieties of artistic self-doubt I think I've ever seen, and the best musical encouragement to overcome them. (It rhymes "sock drawer" with "old French whore"!) Do check it out:


The Song in My Head This Week: "On the Radio" by Regina Spektor

(my 600th post)





The lyrics I love most here:

This is how it works
You're young until you're not
You love until you don't
You try until you can't
You laugh until you cry
You cry until you laugh
And everyone must breathe
Until their dying breath

No, this is how it works
You peer inside yourself
You take the things you like
And try to love the things you took
And then you take that love you made
And stick it into some
Someone else's heart
Pumping someone else's blood
And walking arm in arm
You hope it don't get harmed
But even if it does
You'll just do it all again

(ba dum, ba dum bum bum
ba dum, ba dum bum bum)

On Occasional Poems

First a small bit of doggerel -- bad, I admit -- for Betsy's and my own open occasion tomorrow evening:

Tomorrow night we come to drink
And argue, gossip, chat, and think
About the kids' books we love most
And which awards we'll jeer or toast.
We'll gather at the bar Gstaad,
In the back, where space is broad,
At Forty-three West Twenty-Sixth,
Just down the block -- it's right betwixt
Broadway and Sixth Avenue.
Half-past six. (Later will do.)
Come raise a glass! It's a good time.
(And I swear: No further rhyme.)

Then to continue the discussion of a magnitudes-superior occasional poem, I really enjoyed this clip of Elizabeth Alexander on the Colbert Report Wednesday night, particularly Stephen's concerns about J. Alfred Prufrock's mermaids and the difference between a metaphor and a lie. Highly commended to all those with an interest in poetry:

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Elizabeth Alexander

Isaac Hayes: Rolling in His Grave or Digging It?

I just finished writing an important e-mail, so, as I try to do whenever I have time, I clicked away for a quick mental distraction so I could come back and reread the e-mail with fresh eyes.

This may have been the best distraction ever:



The Ukelele Orchestra of Great Britain Plays the Theme from Shaft
(via Obsidian Wings)

The first minute is fun, but stick around for the whole thing. It's worth it.

My Man in Black

If you'll permit me a brief little proud personal post, here's my boyfriend James singing "Ring of Fire" last night with his class from the Brooklyn Guitar School (video and occasional voice accompaniment by me):



James is a professional video director and editor, and he gives wonderful gifts -- for instance, these two videos for birthdays past, one from 2006 and one for this year. (And yes, those are the real celebrities.)



The signoff line in the one above kills me -- the perfect example of someone living up to his own cliche.



(James got me to walk in front of the greenscreen for this one by telling me he needed to test out the focus depth of his camera. I do still trust him -- just not with a greenscreen.)

Lastly, I uploaded some photos from Election Night at Rockefeller Center and randomness throughout the year to my Facebook account.