Tidbits: Bitting the Tids, If You Will

Let me see.  Today I have pig bladders, movie dates and Enid Blyton on the menu.  Not a bad offering.

• Want to write your own graphic novel? The First Second blog offers some tips on the subject courtesy of one Mr. Grady Klein. "Beat Back the Beast with Beverages" could well become the rallying cry of artists everywhere.

• I’m yammer and jaw about Mock Newbery discussions, but what about the Mock Caldecotts out there? Well after my seeming inability to link things properly in yesterday’s posts (I’m still not entirely certain how I managed to gum that one up) I was pleased to find that the lovely Laura of the blog Pinot and Prose and posted the results of the first ever Queens Library Mock Caldecott. The winner? The Wall. The runner-up? The Chicken Chasing Queen of Lamar County. Fascinating stuff. I like Laura’s recap of the event particularly.

• Roger Sutton has published the five favorite fantasies of authors Susan Cooper and Gregory Maguire. The surprise from Ms. Cooper? The Mouse and his Child by Russell Hoban. I love that book but boy it is weird! A friend of mine wants to adapt it to the stage for his high school students but isn’t sure about how to get the rights to do so. If anyone has the inside track on that, let me know. And the surprise from Mr. Maguire? The Amazing Bone by William Steig. No… actually scratch that. I’m not surprised at all. The darker elements of that tale perfectly set up the terror of Wicked. Kudos to Maguire for thinking of it at all.

• Here’s your entertainment news of the day. Thanks to Dark Horizons I now know that J.K. Rowling has been mucking with people’s minds again by toying with the whole 8th Harry Potter book idea. Cut it out, Joanne! Let the people get some sleep before you toy with their lives in this fashion! And from Cynopsis Kids I found that the release date of the Inkheart movie is being pushed back. Reset your clocks, kiddies. No Inkheart in March for you.

• Knowing less than nothing about nothing I had never heard of the online blog Jezebel before.  If it doesn’t involve the reading tastes of people too young to drive then I usually ain’t interested.  However, this here Jezebel blog happens to have a regular Friday feature called Fine Lines.  Each Friday they, "give a sentimental, sometimes-critical, far more wrinkled look at the children’s and YA books we loved in our youth."  Sounds good to me.  Besides, it’s hard not to be intrigued by these titles.  All-of-a-Kind Family: Where I Would Put Something Yiddish If I Thought You Goyishe Farshtinkiners Would Farshteyn.  Or Island of the Blue Dolphins: I’m a Cormorant and I Don’t Care.  And then there’s my favorite, Little House in the Big Woods: "I Play With a Pig Bladder Like It’s a Balloon".  A series to watch.

• And I finally did it.  I figured it out.  How often have you wondered to yourself, "That’s all well and good, but what did Enid Blyton really ever do for the good of mankind?"  Why I bet you ask yourself that at least a hundred times a day, do you not?  Well I have good news for you, fellow citizens!  The answer is nigh.  Last night me husband and I were discussing stuff and for reasons that I will never be able to recall we started talking about The Land of Do-As-You-Please.  It’s a popular term for blog postings, appeared in the graphic novel V for Vendetta, and you may have heard it mentioned at some point in your life.  Then Matt says that it’s from a children’s book.  I am skeptical.  He says it’s from Peter Pan.  I deny the claim and counter with a possible inclusion in Pinocchio.  Well, it turns out that we’re both wrong.  It comes from the Enid Blyton book The Magic Faraway Tree.  One website described the different lands in the book thusly: "The lands at the top were sometimes extremely unpleasant (the Land of Dame Slap) or sometimes fantastically enjoyable (the Land of Birthdays, the Land of Take-What-You-Want)". Dame Slap?  Slapping Dames sounds fun to me anyway.  Anyway, say what you will about Ms. Blyton, she’s the one who coined that little ditty.  Make of it what you will.