Easy to be hard

There aren’t nearly enough books out there about reading comprehension. In fact, I always seem to wind up thinking about the same one. Whenever someone has obviously misunderstood something he’s read — or I’ve done it myself — sooner or later, I always think, “Dinner for two and a picture of King Kong — not dinner for two with King Kong.”

Arthur's Prize ReaderThat’s a tag line from one of the books I used to read my daughters, Arthur’s Prize Reader, one of a series of “I Can Read” books about a brash young chimpanzee whose unassuming little sister, Violet, is always stealing his thunder. The books are by Lillian Hoban, who started the series around the same time Marc Brown began his series of books about an aarvark named Arthur. Brown’s series went on to be the basis of a super-successful public television series.

Hoban’s Arthur is a lot of fun, too, though, and in Arthur’s Prize Reader, he sets out to win a contest sponsored by Super Chimp Comics, because according to his hasty reading of the rules, the prize, thrillingly, is dinner for two with King Kong. Violet keeps telling Arthur that’s not what the ad for the contest says — the prize is actually dinner for two and a picture of King Kong — but Arthur is certain she must be wrong, because she’s just learning to readWhat ensues is a wacky adventure on a rainy Saturday, as Arthur and Violet go door to door, trying to sell enough subscriptions to Super Chimp Comics to win the prize.

Meanwhile Violet, who’s in the first grade, has entered a reading contest at school. Arthur pooh-poohs her chances: “You can’t read hard words.” But Violet pays attention where Arthur does not, she talks back to her brother — “I can read hard words” — and she’s the one who wins a treat for the two of them, an outing to an ice cream parlor.

It isn’t always the hard words that are the problem. Sometimes even the easy words get away from us.

Your Inner Fish

A growing drumbeat in science these days involves the importance of communication: How can the people who do the work that is changing our world, and our understanding of it, get their message out to the public?

Your Inner FishNeil Shubin, a University of Chicago paleontologist and anatomist, is an excellent role model in this regard. Shubin was part of the team that in 2006 discovered Tiktaalik roseae, a so-called “fishapod” that might have been one of the first vertebrates to crawl out of the water onto dry land. He wrote a best-selling 2008 book, Your Inner Fish, about what Tiktaalik can tell us about evolution.

Now, Shubin has transformed the message of that book into a three-part series that begins airing on PBS  at 9 p.m. CDT on April 9. Not only that, but he appeared on Thursday at a Science on the Screen event at the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts on the U. of C. campus in Hyde Park to talk about Your Inner Fish. Science on the Screen is an occasional series the U. of C. sponsors that showcases its world-class scientists talking about feature and documentary films that deal with various aspects of science.

Shubin’s story is pretty thrilling. He and his colleagues spent four summers over six years searching in an exposed layer of rock in the Arctic that dates from the Devonian period, searching for fossils that could show how fish managed to adapt body parts that allowed them to walk out onto land. The researchers could only work during the few snow-free months of the summer, and they had to carry guns, because polar bears were a very real threat. Shubin told the Science on the Screen audience that his group found polar bear tracks in their camp when they got up in the morning.

A sizable chunk of the audience on Thursday was composed of children — I brought my younger daughter, a high school student. One of the fascinating bits we heard in Your Inner Fish is that Tiktaalik shared the basic limb structure (coming down from the shoulder, say) of “big bone, two bones, lots of little bones, digits” that various land vertebrates have diversified into wings, legs that end in paws and, in the case of primates, arms that end in hands.

The Pew Research Center recently found that about one-third of Americans reject the truth of evolution, often on religious grounds: The Bible says God created the earth in six days. Or, they buy the argument that evolution is just a theory about how the world began, of equal weight with creationism, say. One of the children in the audience asked Shubin how he feels about that. He said that what he likes about Your Inner Fish is that it presents evidence for evolution, and that evidence has the power to convince open-minded people of scientific truth.

Not every scientist has Shubin’s charisma — he is a lot of fun to watch in Your Inner Fish — but as I said above, he’s a great role model. The two other segments in the series are Your Inner Reptile and Your Inner Monkey, scheduled to air on April 16 and April 23. The series is part of Think Wednesday, a three-hour block of programming on nature, science and technology PBS began in January.

Alexandria Quartet villa may come down

Practically everything I know about Alexandria, Egypt, I learned from Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, so I am sad to see that the house that inspired the books is in bad shape, and may be coming down.

The Alexandria QuartetThe Guardian is reporting that the neglected Villa Ambron may be torn down to make way for a condo development. Durrell, a British writer who mostly lived in Asia and the Near East, lived in the villa in the mid-1940s with his girlfriend, later his second wife, Eve Cohen. Durell wrote Prospero’s Cell in a tower writing room in the villa, and  took notes for Justine, the first book of the quartet. The character of Justine was based on Cohen, and Durrell reportedly took many details for the quartet from his time at Villa Ambron. The other books were  Balthazar, Mount Olive and Clea. The Alexandria Quartet is Durrell’s best-known work.

The present owner of Villa Ambron has apparently intended to develop the property for years, but has been foiled repeatedly by preservationists and Durrell’s fans. It’s an unstable time in Egypt, though, and many of the old villas from Alexandria’s cosmopolitan past, which are supposed to be protected, are toppling.

I was taking night classes in Modern Greek at the University of Chicago when I read The Alexandria Quartet. At the time, I was interested in everything about that part of the world. I recall the books being lush and romantic, but ultimately preposterous, to me, anyway. I remember telling a friend the characters would have a lot fewer problems if they all just got jobs. (That says more about me than about the story, I know.)

Still, I wrote this passage from Justine down in a little notebook I kept at the time. I guess it’s set in Villa Ambron:

That was the first time I saw the great house of Nessim with its statues and palm loggias, its Courbets and Bonnards — and so on. It was both beautiful and horrible. Justine hurried up the great staircase, pausing only to transfer her olive-pit from the pocket of her coat to a Chinese vase, calling all the time to Nessim. We went from room to room, fracturing the silences. He answered at last from the great studio on the roof and racing to him like a gun-dog she metaphorically dropped me at his feet and stood back, wagging her tail. She had achieved me.

I still know some Greek, by the way. It’s a great language for a writer. I don’t have a Greek keyboard, so I’ll have to go with something I can paste in here. How about Καλή χρονιά! Happy New Year!

Junie B. Jones author Barbara Park has died

Sad news this week: Barbara Park, author of the Junie B Jones books, has died of ovarian cancer in Scottsdale, Ariz., at age 66.

Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly BusI interviewed Park in 2005, when I had an eight-year-old daughter, and had read all of Junie B.’s adventures to date, aloud, at bedtime. Park didn’t like to do interviews, but I caught her during a period when she was thinking she should get out there more, she told me. Park wrote 28 Junie B. Jones books in all, a total of 55 million sold to date just in North America. We were contemporaries, and as girls we both had cats named Pudgy and loved Scrooge McDuck comic books. Park was a lovely, funny, down-to-earth woman. Even though we only talked an hour on the phone, she was one of my very favorite interviews ever.

Here is that story from the Chicago Sun-Times, June 5, 2005:

An Endearing Little Troublemaker

By Delia O’Hara

When neither you nor your publisher are confident you can write a a series of four books for children just beginning to read, even though you’re a successful writer for kids who already can, what do you do? You invent a new authorial persona: the irrepressible Junie B. Jones, originally 5, now 6.

Her linguistically adventurous accounts of everyday exploits have vaulted to the top of the children’s-series best seller lists with the likes of Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket. A series of four books? Try 24 and counting, with 25 million copies in print, hardcover and softcover.

Barbara Park had made her mark with humorous books for middle-school children in the early 1990s when Random House asked her to create a series of four chapter books for the finger-paint set. So began the career of Junie B. Jones. And what a career it is! Junie’s readers “would like her story to be their story,” Park said in a recent phone interview.

On its face Junie’s life is ordinary. She’s an energetic kid with two working parents and a baby brother. Her maternal grandparents watch the children before and after school. Still, an ordinary day of Junie B.’s is often worth a book of its own — and a very funny book at that — because any unexpected development can set her off.

“Her parents don’t know what to do with her half the time,” Park said. The same could be said for the occupants of the pleasant school that serves as the primary setting for most of the books.

Junie B.’s adventures began on her first day of kindergarten, when she hid in a cupboard rather than face the homeward journey on The Stupid Smelly Bus. So far the highjinks have carried her through Halloween of first grade, when a classmate convinced her that some of the scary-looking trick-or-treaters were real witches and monsters (Boo…and I Mean It).  Boo, which came out last August, has sold 350,000 copies at $11.95 in hardcover.

While it may be Junie B.’s voice we hear in the books, Park already had figured out how to distill her own youthful class-clown experiences into print for her pre-Junie books. The strategy that paid off quickly with the publication of Park’s first book, Operation: Dump the Chump.  (Her own favorite is Mick Harte Was Here, a seriocomic book that, she says, took all the skill she possessed to achieve the right balance.)

But the Junie books are high in her estimation. “I like her independence,” Park said. “She’s always just a little off-center.”

Denise Brunkus’ illustrations in all the books have established Junie B. as a wiry, exuberant girl with a strong fashion sense and a good number of cowlicks.

As young readers might hope, “Junie B. is a lot like me,” says Park, who grew up in New Jersey. “I was not a shy kid.  I always thought I was a lot funnier than the teachers did.” Her experience as a parent of two grown sons also informs the books, but obliquely.  “Subconsciously, this is the way I parent,” she says.

Like much popular children’s entertainment — think of Finding Nemo — the Junie B. books are written on two levels, and parents may find themselves laughing as hard as the children, although perhaps in different spots.  When, because of Junie’s antics, her kindergarten teacher “has to take an aspirin, parents get it on a different level,” Park says.

Not every parent loves Junie B., though.  Not only does she mangle the English language, but she’s also “not cherubic in any sense,” Park says.  In Cheater Pants, Junie B. cheats not once but twice before she finally learns that the rule against cheating is more than a suggestion. And when she doesn’t like something, she “hates” it and calls it “stupid.”

Some parents won’t buy the books because of this attitude, Park says.  The Junie books are “pretty high up on the challenged-book list, although most of the time, it’s by one parent.”

But when it comes to the way Junie B. talks, “The teachers get it and the kids get it. She’s 5. It would be ridiculous for her to speak the queen’s English.”

The bottom line for Park is that the books are supposed to be fun. If they’re fun, she reasons, they will encourage children to read. And Junie B. is always a decent kid. In first grade she has already become more mature, more self-aware than she was in kindergarten — and more adept at getting her verb tenses lined up correctly.

“She is a work in progress,”  Park says. “I am not an author who believes in a big, heavy moral.  I think it’s a little insulting.”

How old will Junie B. grow during the series?

“I don’t know,” Park says.  “What we love about her is that she is so silly and spontaneous.  Some of that would have to go.  Children start becoming ‘cool’ in 5th and 6th grades.  I don’t want her to be cool.”

Junie B. is a hit with girls, but she also has many fans who are boys, Park says.  “She’s not a girly girl.  I could change her to Johnny B. Jones and the stories would not change that much.”

Park, who lives in Arizona with her husband, typically writes two Junie B. books each year.  She doesn’t do promotion tours and allows few interviews.  She does write the scripts for the wildly successful “Stupid Smelly Bus Tour,” a live traveling performance with New York-based actors conducted out of a hot pink bus at bookstores all around the country. The tour kicked off its secondyear at Borders bookstore in Geneva last month.

Park says she leads a boring life, even now that Junie B. has “improved my bank account.”  She still cleans her own house and works in the yard.  “I work at home.  I have a few hours.  I can tidy up,” she says.

She does have one dream, though.  While she became a book reader fairly late, in high school, she grew up reading comic books — lots of them. Disney’s Scrooge McDuck was one of her favorites. That wealthy miser had a money room, a vault filled with all valuables — money, jewels, gold bullion — where he liked to swim in his riches.

That sounds good to Park.  “I’d like to build a money room,” she said, laughing.

Photo by Pamela Tidswell

Happy Hobbit Day!

Sept. 22 is the shared birthday of Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, the hobbits whose big birthday party kicks off The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic tale, The Lord of the Rings.

Frodo and Bilbo Baggins

Frodo and Bilbo Baggins (Elijah Wood and Ian Holm)

At his lavish 111th birthday party, Bilbo Baggins gives his guests wonderful gifts, spectacular entertainments, and a colossal amount of food. Bilbo also gives his cousin and heir, Frodo, most of his possessions on that day, including the powerful and malevolent ring that precipitates the quest — to destroy it — that the trilogy relates.

I am just now reading The Fellowship of the Ring, for a Coursera course I am taking called “Online Games: Literature, New Media and Narrative.” With our instructor, Jay Clayton of Vanderbilt University’s English department, we’re considering LOTR and other stories as they migrate from book to film to video game. LOTR was written as a single book, but published as a trilogy in 1954 and 1955, to capitalize on the success of Tolkien’s 1937 book, The Hobbit. So we are coming up on the 50th anniversary of this influential, widely loved fantasy tale.

The Tolkien Society founded Hobbit Day in 1978. Fans of the book are presumably having parties this weekend, including the Society’s own “Oxonmoot” gathering at Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford College in Oxford, England. If you can’t celebrate this weekend, do remember to toast Tolkien at 9 p.m. your time on Jan. 3, his birthday.

My role model, Gidget

When my older sister Maryann was a teenager, she used to hide books she thought our mother wouldn’t approve of between her mattress and box spring. For me, that little space, which I discovered looking for something under Maryann’s bed one day, became my private cache of contraband. I found some of the most memorable books of my life there.

One I filched  to read was Gidget, by Frederick Kohner. I must have been about 10 at the time. Perhaps you have seen the 1959 movie, with Sandra Dee, or the TV series, with Sally Field. Gidget, the book and the movie, exposed mainstream America for the first time  to the surf culture of Southern California.

Kathy Kohner was pictured on the cover of this early copy of her dad's book

Kathy Kohner was pictured on the cover of this early copy of her dad’s book

The book was edgier than the movie, and the TV show was a wraith of the original story (though it did resurrect some characters from the novel). But even in the book, Gidget was a nice, middle-class girl. In fact, that was part of the story’s tension.

Gidget, subtitled The Little Girl With the Big Ideas, gave me some big ideas as well. The title character was an inspiration at a time when girls like me were growing up without many assertive role models.

Gidget was spunky and intense, and she made me want to get out there and pursue my dreams, which at the time I had yet to formulate. She hung out with the much older male surfers in Malibu, a pretty edgy crowd in the 1950s, because even though she was tiny, and a girl, she wanted to learn to surf. Gidget is a love story, yes, but for me, it was a thrilling coming-of-age tale about a young woman pursuing her passion for a sport and the bohemian lifestyle that surrounded it.

I learned recently Gidget is a real person, Kathy Kohner Zuckerman. “Gidget” really was her surfer nickname, combined from “girl” and “midget,” because she was short.

Frederick Kohner was a Hollywood screenwriter, a Czechoslovakian Jew who had begun his film  career in Germany and fled the Nazis in the early 1930s. Kathy, his daughter, started surfing in Malibu in 1956, when she was 15. She wanted to write about the exotic characters she was meeting, their lives and attitudes, and their distinctive jargon. Frederick Kohner told Kathy that, since he was a writer, he would tell her story for her, and he knocked out the book in six weeks. The Gidget books, all told, sold 3 million copies. At one time, Gidget was No. 8 on the best-seller list, just ahead of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Kathy Kohner recalled in a 2011 interview with 27east.com.

Kathy Kohner started surfing to escape the disconnect she was feeling at her high school at the time, but soon enough, she said, “I got crazy about the boys.” There were a few other girls at the beach, she said, but “basically there weren’t a lot of surfers, period.”

Surfing was a brief phase in Kohner’s life. After the first summer, her interest waned. By the time somebody pinched her board in Hawaii in 1959, she thought  “Well, I lost my board, but there are other things to do,” Kohner told interviewer Caillin Riley of 27east.com.

But Kohner, who in 1999 was No. 7 on Surfer Magazine’s “25 most influential surfers of all time,” had already had a huge impact on the sport. Wannabe surfers flocked to the beach, and the relatively few young women among them could say that they had a right to be there, enjoying a male-dominated sport, because Gidget had gone before them. In 2005, “One City, One Book — Malibu,” the local chapter of a popular national literacy program, selected Gidget as its book of the year. In 2011, a documentary called Accidental Icon told “the real Gidget story.”

Kathy Kohner Zuckerman is in her 70s now and still lives in southern California. She has been married for more than 40 years, she has two children, and grandchildren, but she still understands the siren call of Malibu. As for me, I think often of the simple but exotic world she found there, which I got to enter, too, because of her, and because her dad wrote a book.

Of “witches,” books and rocket science

I enjoyed reading Nadezhda Popova’s recent obituary in the New York Times. Popova was one of the Russian “Night Witches,” female pilots who flew bombers, flimsy former crop dusters, during World War II.

And Quiet Flows the DonIt was a dangerous mission. German pilots who shot down one of the Night Witches, so called because of the “whooshing noise” their planes made, which evoked for the Germans the sound of a witch’s broomstick, received the Iron Cross, according to the story.

I loved that the writer, Douglas Martin, included the fact that Popova noticed a wounded fighter pilot, Semyon Kharlamov, who would become her husband, “in a horde of retreating troops and civilians,” because he was reading Mikhail Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don.

That book made a big impression on me when I read it. Its story reminded me of Boris Pasternak’s Dr. Zhivago, in that it centers on a man who is married to one woman but desperately in love with another. Instead of wealthy Russians whose lives are torn apart by World War I and the Russian revolution, though, it’s about Cossacks whose lives are torn apart by World War I and the Russian revolution. Sholokhov won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1965, though there is some controversy about his authorship.

I also liked that Martin, who got smacked around in the press for focusing on Yvonne Brill’s home life in his recent obituary of the rocket scientist who invented the propulsion system that maintains the orbit of the communication satellites we rely on on a daily basis, was confident enough in his own approach, even after that rumpus, to dwell on Popova’s private life in this story.

Though as a science writer, I am sensitive to the need to give women full credit for their professional accomplishments — usually the reason the obituary is written in the first place — the fiction writer in me believes that after 80 or 90 years, a person’s life is bound to add up to more than his or her work.