For those of my readers who might be attending the MLA in LA this week, I am posting all of the Children’s Literature sessions. Hope to see you there! Â (Well, except for the first one. Â MLA’s sessions are – for the first time that I’m aware – beginning before 3:30 pm. Â So, I won’t have
Yesterday, I sent off (what I hope is) the final revision of the manuscript for my biography of Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss. After I did, I began reading Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl (2010), which Donald Sturrock (the author) begins by describing his own relationship with his subject. It helped me understand
1. Best novel that I missed when it came out: Guus Kuijer’s The Book of Everything (Scholastic, 2006). Narrated by a nine-year-old, this is an all-ages book about love, faith, and growing up. It has a sense of humor, too. I devoted a post to this book earlier in the month. 2. Album of the Year:
According to iTunes, these are the songs released in 2010 that I played most in 2010. As such, the list is going to skew slightly towards the beginning of the year (since those songs have been in the playlist for a longer period of time).  The number at the far right is the number of
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Crockett Johnson worked with Lou Bunin on some television advertisements. Â But he had a hard time taking Madison Avenue seriously, as indicated by his parody of an ad for Bosco chocolate syrup (below). Â Though it’s undated, Johnson (known to his friends as “Dave” ) seems to have sent
As noted last month, a color Sunday Barnaby ran from 1946 to 1948 – apt, because the original Barnaby strip that helped Crockett Johnson sell the comic to PM was also a Sunday strip. Courtesy of the generous Colin Myers, here’s a Christmas Barnaby from 63 years ago – December 21, 1947. (Don’t forget: clicking
Quick post from Amtrak heading north. Â On the way back from the Diane Rehm Show (now archived on website), I passed the person at right, who was selling copies of Street Sense and who kindly granted me this photograph. Â I always enjoy spotting signs of Seuss in the world. Â And, here, I suspect that Seuss
A holiday classic for misanthropes: “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”
This post is for my fellow intellectual laborers – be you academics, teachers, authors, artists, carpenters, curators, architects, doctors, plumbers, web designers, or… well, any job that requires you to use your noggin’. Â If you think about it (and people reading this blog probably do think about it), intellectual labor covers many jobs – you
These days, I don’t talk much about my first book. I wrote it when I was 7 years old, in collaboration with Dr. Seuss and Roy McKie. As you can see, I improved upon their artwork with the aid of stickers from the United Fruit Company (of whose bananas I was then an avid consumer)