My Name is Kate

Early media influences .. exerting their power for over 40 years

The other day, Rosemary was doing the dishes and I was helpfully sitting at the dining room table keeping her company (hey, don't judge, I could have been playing Kingdom Rush (when, WHEN are you going to release the new version, Ironhide Games?!?!!)). She was drying a frying pan and I started singing "I'm gonna wash that man right out of my hair." [mp3 of my singing unavailable]

Rosemary looked at me quite quizzically. I realised that my possibly martini-addled brain had crosswired the visuals from Enjoli's "Bring Home the Bacon" and the soundtrack from the Clariol "Wash that man right outta my hair" commercial from my youth. Terrifying. And then I remembered my third ghost of TV-viewing past, Jordache's "You've got the look, I want to know better" commercial. My nostalgic shame trifecta was complete. You can see all three of the spots below. Now, I was raised in the US, so I'm not sure which of these aired up here. But all three of them (and their insidious sound tracks!) drift in and out of my consciousness more often than I'd like to admit.

You know what else has a stranglehold on my auditory cortex? After-school and Saturday morning interstitials. Surprisingly, not the well-known Schoolhouse Rock ones (though I love all of them and can sing most). No, the ones that rise unbidden to my lips are the Time for Timer series. My favourite was "Hanker for a Hunk of Cheese" though I think I probably hear "Don't Drown Your Food" more often. It is this one that I blame for my inability to truly enjoy any type of creamy dressing on my salad. The Time for Timer series (like Schoolhouse Rock) was created by ABC. Are there educational series like this now? The Saturday Morning Brain Food site does an amazing job of cataloging all these educational tidbits.

Finally .. there is one last set of auditory memories that still get dropped into my playlist of life - theme songs from TV Shows (of course!). But not your Brady Bunches or Gilligan's Islands. No .. the New Zoo Revue is what pops up occasionally. I watched a clip of an episode - it is actually pretty hilarious. And the theme song: INTENSE. And I'm pretty sure that this is where I acquired all my fancy dance moves. Other theme songs I hear rattling around: Electric Company and Zoom! (oh how I longed to be a Zoomer). And, of course, Land of the Lost. Poor Marshall, Will and Holly. Sid and Marty Kroftt did some pretty cool shows. I loved Sigmund and the Sea Monster - but I don't remember the theme song.

These are my recurring childhood earworms. Any favourites you'd like to share?

Revisiting Books from My Childhood - Taking the Shelf Discovery Challenge

I have always been a voracious reader.  Most of the summers of my youth I participated in our local library's reading challenge.  You know the one - it usually had some kind of cheesy theme like "Discovered Hidden Treasure through Books" to try to encourage kids to read. 

A number of books that I discovered in these tender years set my character and my expectations.  I took these books as realistic depictions of what I could accomplish as a young woman if I only had the right drive and curiosity.  And as both a guilty pleasure and the literary equivalent of comfort food, I have returned again and again to these books - to renew my inspiration, or to simply experience the litany of familiar words and their attendant emotions.

I was delighted to discover a new book Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading by Lizzie Skurnick.  So many of the books that she and her co-authors discuss fueled my hopes and dreams. 

From Publishers Weekly

Launched from her regular feature column Fines Lines for Jezebel.com, this spastically composed, frequently hilarious omnibus of meditations on favorite YA novels dwells mostly among the old-school titles from the late '60s to the early '80s much beloved by now grown-up ladies. This was the era, notes the bibliomaniacal Skurnick in her brief introduction, when books for young girls moved from being wholesome and entertaining (e.g., The Secret Garden and the Nancy Drew series) to dealing with real-life, painful issues affecting adolescence as depicted by Beverly Cleary, Lois Duncan, Judy Blume, Madeleine L'Engle and Norma Klein. Skurnick groups her eruptive essays around themes, for example, books that feature a particularly memorable, fun or challenging narrator (e.g., Louise Fitzhugh's Harriet the Spy); girls on the verge, such as Blume's Are You There, God? It's Me, Margaret or danger girls such as Duncan's Daughters of Eve; novels that deal with dying protagonists and other tragedies like child abuse (Willo Davis Roberts's Don't Hurt Laurie!); and, unavoidably, heroines gifted with a paranormal penchant, among other categories. Skurnick is particularly effective at spotlighting an undervalued classic (e.g., Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase) and offers titles featuring troubled boys as well. Her suggestions will prove superhelpful (not to mention wildly entertaining) for educators, librarians and parents.

I also discovered that Booking Mama is hosting a Shelf Discovery Challenge - to participate you pick six books that Skurnick covers and write your own review between now and April 2010 (essentially one a month). So, being in a nostalgic mood, I've decided to participate.  My six books are:

• The Westing Game
• A Wrinkle in Time
• The Long Secret
• From the Mixed Up FIles of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
• All of a Kind Family
• Little House on the Prairie

Remembering June 4, 1989 ... and seeing the way forward

Global Voices Online is an incredible site that "seeks to amplify, curate and aggregate the global conversation online - with a focus on countries and communities outside the U.S. and Western Europe."  Frank Dai, one of Global Voices Online's Chinese bloggers has an informative, link-rich and moving post on the 17th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.  We forget, I forget, and take for granted the freedom we have to post our thoughts, theories, rants, commentary and other fragments to the blogosphere. 

Dai quotes (in translation) Zheng, another Chinese blogger; it is a particularly forward-looking view of what we should commemorate today:

The thing needed to magnify is the voice, the continuity, not the boring and faded mourning and commemoration year after year. History won’t repeat. New questions are ahead in front of us, and it’s these new questions that make the voice resurrect.

So here's to the continued asking of new questions, and the preservation of the freedoms that allow us to do so.

Bonus Links:

1. Adopt a Blogger - put your extra blog space to work and adopt a blogger who cannot host their own.
2. Sinosplice, an amazing site by John (an American grad student living in China) that includes Chinese language resources, English & Chinese blogs, photos and other resources to offer a apolitical view of life in China.

Tags: china, 8964, freedom of speech, chinese bloggers, global voices

Thank you, Rosa Parks ...

For having moral courage in an uncertain time; for inspiring us to have moral courage now.

NY Times Obit

And, because I'm a blogger, Blogpulse's tribute.

First things first ... Remembering 9/11

I came across this on Friday via one of my feeds (I can't remember which one to give credit to).  It's a group in the US who wants 9/11 to become a national day of service.  From their website:

One Day's Pay: We're the national nonprofit working to establish 9/11 as a National Day of Voluntary Service, Charity and Compassion. This 9/11, take time out of your day to help a friend in need, give blood, donate to a charity, volunteer your time, or just be kind to others. That's all you need to do to participate.

It's a great idea.  Their site cross-lists some Canadian resources (e.g. Goodwill, under "Give away property")  Help to channel energy into a postive result.

New Orleans 2001: A very brief stroll down memory lane

I took this in February 2001.  It was just before Mardi Gras.  We had been in Houston at a friend's wedding.  Since we were coming down from Toronto, we made a holiday of it and took a side trip through Louisana, culminating in several days in New Orleans.  I don't have a lot of pictures from that trip .. mainly ones from the incredible swamp tour we took outside Baton Rouge.  This is one of the few of New Orleans I have.  I wonder what this looks like now.

Sense Memory and Typography

After Roro's recent binge on literature about the late 1800's, I, too, have been re-reading the "Little House" books.  For some reason, I didn't retain the whole series from my childhood (I only had By The Shores of Silver Lake and Little Town on the Prairie in my library; Roro contributed Farmer Boy and Little House in the Big Woods), so we ordered the rest from Indigo.  I had wanted to order used copies from Amazon, but none of the vendors who had them shipped from inside Canada -- so the shipping and duty would be $5 to $15 while the book itself cost $1.17.  Didn't make a lot of sense.

My re-reading of the books that I have in my library has been a wonderful experience.  I remember what it was like to read them as a young girl.  The emotions are as fresh as they were when I was 5 or 7 or 12.  I loved the same things and hated the same things -- some even more so now because I totally realise what a little priss Mary was.

Ahem.

Now I'm a bit of a cheapskate, so when I was ordering, I chose the least expensive copy of the four books we were missing.  Surprisingly, there were not pictures of these books but I figured, "Hey, they can't possible screen in every cover, can they?" and thought nothing more of it.

A few days later a package arrived from Indigo.  When I went downstairs to pick it up, it seemed very small.  Hmm ... the order confirmation said they sent them all at once.  But how did they fit 5 books in here (I also ordered a bio of Laura Ingalls Wilder written in 1977 by Donald Zochert.  It has this great back cover that shows Laura in her teen years looking like a romantic novel heroine with some pretty serious cleavage.  I believe it was this cover that precipitated my conversion to lovin' the ladies.).

Anyway ... trusting in the good people at Indigo, I opened up the package.  Out fell all 5 of my books, but they were pocket paperback versions, not the "kid size" paperbacks that we had of the others.  But more distressingly, they weren't illustrated! I love Garth Williams' illustrations of the Little House Series -- his sketches really made the books come alive for me.  But, I thought, "OK, no big deal.  You'll still enjoy the books.  In fact, look, the type is smaller and closer together -- it will probably be easier for you to read.  Besides, you're 36.  If you haven't figured out what Laura is trying to say by now, Williams' illustrations probably aren't going to help."

Comforting myself with these thoughts and some chocolate, I settled down to read On the Banks of Plum Creek.  What I realised that not only is the type smaller, but it is a totally different font. 

Now, this is no way impacts the readablilty of the books, but, the emotional recall and sense memory experience I have of reading these books as a child amd that I had been experiencing for the first few books has now been completely removed from my ongoing re-reading of them.

To the left are two images of the text from These Happy Golden Years (I have totally taken screen caps of Amazon's "Look Inside The Book" technology.  Thank you Amazon for allowing me to illustrate this point!)  The first is from the original "kid size" paperback (although this one is not the original cover that I have).  The ilustration is Williams'.  I don't know what font this is, but I find it very friendly and comforting.

The second is from the Pocket Paperback version (which is erroneously listed as being illustrated by Williams).  Aside from having a terribly cheesy romance novel cover, the font (to me anyway) is pointy and sharp.

Now I'm not a typographer (though I would love to play one on TV), so maybe there really isn't a difference in these (if you are a typographer and can tell me, that would be great; there isn't a colophon in the books, unfortunately).  But the visceral sense memory is completely non-existent when reading the second.

Which leads me to wonder about the future of books, of reading, of ebooks, etc.  Well, really, of the rendered word in general.  How many of you specify your font preferences in your browser?  I do.  And if so some reason My Yahoo appears in a different font, I get totally disoriented.  The information can be in the same locale, but the delivery mechanism -- the shape, size, curve of the letters -- when it's different, it's impact is felt.

GNE, Flickr Acquisition and Chicklets

So, two things I found today via Elise's "Learning MT" blog.

First, a quiz: Which Social Networking Software are You? (a question I often ask myself, my girlfriend and others). I have discovered that I am GNE: Game Neverending, the brain child of Ludicorp that is now indefinitely on hold.

I'm still trying to decide how I feel about Yahoo! acquiring Ludicorp and the much beloved Flickr. I'm sad that one of the great Canadian success stories will be heading south, but am very happy for Ludicorp. Tough.

The second thing I discovered today was Adam Kalsey's handy-dandy Button Maker (or Chicklet maker, as the pres of Feedburner told me when we were chatting at TED2005 -- those buttons are called "Chicklets"). I've been envious of these Chicklets for quite some time and am THRILLED that I now have a MNIK Chicklet. Ta-daa ...

Cool, eh?