Race, realism, problem novels, escapism

Two recent articles from the Horn Book website: Lelac Almagor's And Stay Out Of Trouble: Narratives For Black Urban Children and Sharon Flake's response.

I read one, and said, "Well, yes," and I read the other and said, "Well, yes, that too."

The interior lives of children are enormously complicated. We have the stereotype of the Mary Sue who has lavender eyes and a pet unicorn, but wish-fulfilment isn't the only possible kind of fantasy. I have never seen any scholarly research on the immense popularity of the book "A Child Called It," especially with the lower-income teens at my library, and when I try to talk about it with readers they're often embarrassed that they like to read about abuse, but it's not really so strange to have daydreams about life being much harder than it actually is: so that you can Triumph Heroically over it, so that you can garner pity from those around you...

As an adolescent I had a very strong prejudice against problem novels, and mostly I wanted to read about dragons. It's hard for me not to project that self onto other people and assume that they want to read for escapism, but I have had to keep reminding myself how self-centered and parochial that really is.

I do think that readers will gravitate toward what they need. But first, the books that they need have to be out there, and there is still a really narrow range of roles available for black characters in middle grade and YA literature. You can ask: If you try to provide good role models, do you risk going too far and presenting an unrealistic picture? If you try to be realistic, do you risk being bleak and depressing? And the answer to that isn't "yes" or "no," but "more." More books, so that you don't place the burden of doing everything onto just a few.

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Accomplished:

Sent e-mail to editor.
Sent e-mail to agent.
Paid rent.
Bought groceries.
Had a headache.
Vanquished headache.

Did not, notably, manage to get a single thing written yet, on top of a really lousy lack of accomplishment yesterday, and too many things to accomplish tomorrow and the day after that. Am trying not to panic about whether I have enough time to fix this book.

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Recent reading:

Novelette(?) about a young girl whose father gets drunk and beats her mother, and her mother works in a hostess club, and they always fight, and they don't have any money, and she's ostracized by her classmates. And she wants the zombies to bite her and turn her into one of them because then her family would all get along and be happy. I am not making this up. Oh, Japan. Overwrought family melodrama with zombies in it is still overwrought family melodrama.

Book about contemporary Japanese novels reminds me why I love Tawara Machi:
「嫁さんになれ」だなんてカンチューハイ二本で言ってしまっていいの
"Be my wife" -- can you really say that, after two cans of Chuhai?
(Chuhai being a Japanese alcoholic beverage, distilled liquor mixed with carbonated water and fruit-flavored. I have little experience with it, having left Japan a month after turning 20, but if I had two cans I'd probably be asking everybody to marry me.)

That's a tanka. That's a very traditional Japanese poetry form. And I still get a little frisson when I see Tawara kind of storming the gates of tanka with something so conversational and so everyday, but which is also a great poem in its own right--it captures a very precise moment of emotional realization. It's hearing what you want to hear, and realizing it will never mean what you want it to mean. All that in 31 syllabes. The book quotes an Asahi Shinbun column:

"It's huge to discover that you can write poems this way, but a great discovery alone doesn't make for a good poem. What's special about this poet is that she can capture so clearly, in 31 syllables, what people can't find the words to say, but want to say anyway."