Sad news: RIP James Brown

James Brown, the Godfather of Soul, died this morning at the age of 73. There is a nice obituary here.

I was a little surprised at how sad this made me this morning. Science Boy and I saw a screening of The TAMI Show a few months back. When James Brown came on, he electrified his audience and that little theater we were in. At the end of his performance, everyone in the theater burst into applause and James Brown got a standing ovation, some 41 years and many miles from that original performance.

Our local R&B station has been playing interviews, old and new, and lots of music. I will listen to his music and I think I will read Mr. Chickee's Funny Money by Christopher Paul Curtis and imagine that James Brown *is* the face on the extremely rare, government-denied quadrillion dollar bill...

In Memoriam: Philippa Pearce

Philippa Pearce, author of the perrenial favorite children's novel, Tom's Midnight Garden, has died at the age of 86.

From the obituary at the Independent Online:

Preferring to talk to children because, unlike adults when struggling to be polite, they "always yawn when they are bored", she combined a quizzical humour with a gentle but insistent honesty that won her many devoted friends at home and abroad.Preferring to talk to children because, unlike adults when struggling to be polite, they "always yawn when they are bored", she combined a quizzical humour with a gentle but insistent honesty that won her many devoted friends at home and abroad.

Tom's Midnight Garden was one of the books that has appealed to children everywhere I have worked. In one community -- a city with high crime and poverty rates -- 10-year-old Penny told me the book helped her feel better about all the "bad things" in her life. After that ringing endorsement, I read it, too. That magic that resides in very special books is there and so, as long as children love that story (which I predict will be for a very long time, indeed), a piece of Ms. Pearce shall remain with us, making lives the richer for it.

Shameless shilling

It's the holiday season -- don't you still have gifts to buy for Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Festivus, etc.? Consider a super cool shirt / tote bag / mug from Book-Kitten's Treasure Chest. (There's a slide show in the right margin of this very page for a preview.) I have mentioned the store before, but want to highlight it again, because a bunch o' new designs have been added, especially for kids. Much of the artwork is papercuts made by yours truly... Please, at least take a look and let me know what you think!

In Memoriam: Bebe Moore Campbell

The talented and lovely Bebe Moore Campbell has died at the way-too-early age of 56 from complications related to brain cancer.

The New York Times has a nice article remembering Campbell:

"Along with writers like Terry McMillan, Ms. Campbell was part of the first wave of black novelists who made the lives of upwardly mobile black people a routine subject for popular fiction. Straddling the divide between literary and mass-market novels, Ms. Campbell’s work explored not only the turbulent dance between blacks and whites but also the equally fraught relationship between men and women."

Honor her memory by reading one of her wonderful books.

And you are...?

What Classic Pin-Up Are You?

You're Brigitte Bardot!
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Drum Roll, Please

The Nobel Prize in Literature for 2006 has been awarded to a Turkish writer, Orhan Pamuk, "who in the quest for the melancholic soul of his native city has discovered new symbols for the clash and interlacing of cultures." You can see video of the announcement at the Nobel site.

Time Magazine named Orhan Pamuk one of the "Time 100: People Who Sahpe Our World" in May and their article about him remains on-line.

National Book Award Finalists Announced

The nominees for Young People's Literature are:

• The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing, Traitor to the Nation, Vol. 1: The Pox Party by M.T. Anderson (Candlewick Press)
• Keturah and Lord Death by Martine Leavitt (Front Street Books/Boyds Mills Press)
• Sold by Patricia McCormick (Hyperion Books for Children)
• The Rules of Survival by Nancy Werlin (Dial/Penguin)
• American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (First Second/Roaring Brook Press/Holtzbrinck)

I have only read the spectacular Sold thus far, but Octavian Nothing is sitting on my desk...

Winners of Quill Awards announced

The winners of the 2006 Quill Awards have been announced. I didn't vote for too many of the winners, but I did correctly chose the winner in the "Best General Fiction" category -- Congratulations to Chris Moore on his novel, A Dirty Job winning.

The awards show will be broadcast on October 28. I will watch, hoping the show isn't as dreadful as it was last year.

*HOW* many??

So, here I am, trying to decide if 3 jalapenos are too many for the delicious Mexican-Style Chicken Lime Soup I am making for dinner or if two will do and this fool's gulping down 247 jalapenos. 247!!! It's madness, I tell you!

Set your alarm...

... So you do not miss the announcement of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Thursday at 1:00 p.m. CET. So far, Americans have swept the Nobels, which makes me suspect that the Lit and Peace prizes will go elsewhere. Still exciting!

You know you want it!

I am finally getting some stuff together at the Book-Kitten Cafepress store. The main goal is to make some cool shirts for kids. I like the idea of making empowering shirts that the shorties can wear without being walking billboards for corporate America. I've already created a special shirt for some peace-loving twins I know and a shirt for Miss Lily-Belle as well as a few others. We'll see how it goes. In the meantime, here's a teensy preview:




If you'd like to buy something, I'd love to sell to you!

Be ye a-feared of me!

Okay, so don't ask, but I just found out my secret Pirate Identity. Arrrgh!

My pirate name is:

Dirty Charity Rackham

You're the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean -- not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!

Get your own pirate name from piratequiz.com.
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Not sure what to be for Halloween?

(This is killin' me!) Buycostumes.com has a "Naughty Librarian" costume for sale.

=:'-D

Baby Got Book tees

I have finally gotten a (very) few things up in a Book-Kitten store, including Baby Got Book shirts. I'll add more eventually, but it took almost all night to edit the mudflap girl for the graphic. I really wanted to get the tees done, though, so we could wear them on our Asthma Walk in a few weeks...

This is one of the saddest things I have ever heard...

From MSNBC: Staff at a zoo in southwest China are in mourning after a sleep-deprived panda dropped her two-day-old baby and crushed it to death, local media reported on Friday.

Poor Ya Ya!

Read the whole sad story here.

Is braiding someone's hair dangerous?

From The Reader: Black women have been braiding hair for generations, and until recently they didn’t need a license to do it for a living. Now the state requires braiders to spend thousands of dollars on beauty school, where they must learn to cut, dye, and perm--services they never wanted to provide. Instead they’re going underground.

Apparently, the cosmetology industry thinks it's not safe for an unlicensed woman to braid another's hair. How utterly ridiculous! This fascinating article in The Reader explores the issues of licensing for braiders and lockticians and examines the rifts between the communities of African-American and African natural hair-care practioners.

Read the whole article here.

Mold-a-Rama!

I *love* Mold-a-Rama. I love the way it smells, the way it is hot when it comes out of the machine, the way you can dent Lincoln's head if you push the hot figure ever so gently when it is freshly made. (NOT that I do that anymore...) On one of our first dates, Science Boy bought me a Mold-a-Rama space shuttle which now lives on our bookshelves.

Today's Chicago Tribune features an article on Mold-a-Rama and the guys who keep it running.

Comfort Reading

Science Boy and I are watching a heartbreaking documentary on Hurricane Katrina. Even among all the tragedy, my favorite Camus passage (from The Plague)comes to mind. pehaps I have blogged it before, but I feel a need to repeat it again, like a mantra:

Dr. Rieux resolved to compile this chronicle, so that he should not be one of those who hold their peace but should bear witness in favor of those plague-stricken people. . . and to state quite simply what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise.

for cryin' out loud

I don't even have words...

Congratulations, Kate!

Kate DiCamillo has won the 2006 Chicago Tribune Prize for Young Adult Fiction. There's a press release here. I *love* Desperaux.

(There's an article in the Chicago Tribune, too, but it focuses on Joyce Cariol Oates, winner of this year's Chicago Tribune Literary Prize.)