Fusenews: Now With a Poetic Twist!

• I saw this on my beloved BB-Blog and started tittering like a schoolgirl for a good 35 minutes.  It’s rather Poetry Friday/Poetry Month appropriate too.  My screenwriter husband who recently wrote a bio-pic of Alan Turing commented that this cartoon was very Turinesque.  Turing apparently speculated quite a lot about whether or not robots could write poetry.  Something to chew on, then.

• In case you missed it, editors Donna Bray and Alessandra Balzer just lit out from Hyperion books to start their own Harper Collins imprint called . . . . wait for it . . . . Balzer & Bray.  I like the name, actually.  It sounds like a drink I might order if I were in the mood to quaff something a little out of the ordinary.  "Oh, barkeep! I’ll have a glass of your finest Balzer & Bray.  Heavy on the Bray, and don’t spare the lemon".  Galleycat speculates that this may be a very bad thing for poor little Hyperion too.  "…after Balzer takes authors like Mo Willems and Eoin Colfer out the door with her, there isn’t going to be much for Hyperion Books for Children to do but publish Disney-branded book content."  Ach.  Did she have Kadir Nelson as well?  I don’t know enough of these matters to say.  In any case, we’ll all have to warily watch what happens.

• Diary of a Wimpy Kid books are being compared to Harry Potter . . . in that they both make a lot of money. And both boys and girls read them. Thanks to Chicken Spaghetti for the link. Incidentally I was speaking to an editor the other day and she told me that recently she’d been cleaning out her old e-mail folder.  And there, circa 2005 or so, was a message called "Diary of a Wimpy Kid".  Apparently they passed on a profitable thing back in the day.  Ouchie!

• Somehow or other I completely missed that Your Neighborhood Librarian was in the business of unfugging the overly fuggable/forgettable READ posters that adorn libraries all over the country.  She has a couple mots that are particularly bon.  Here’s a good example of her taking down Julia Stiles: "Me and my girls in the museum library in NYC used to dress like this Every Day in 1998. Long black skirts or knit pants, long black sweaters, black Dansko clogs… we looked like a murder of crows. Listen, Stiles: when the librarians wear your outfit and think it’s frumpy… it’s frumpy."  For the record, Julia Stiles is one of the few celebrities I have actually helped while working a reference desk.  And I had Hope Davis in a storytime.  God, I miss working in Greenwich Village sometimes.

• Oh me. Oh my. It’s a venn diagram t-shirt of vowels and consonants. 

I don’t even wear t-shirts with images or words on them, and yet somehow I really want this.  Thanks to Alison Morris for finding the link and, more importantly, coming up with the term "venn diagram".  Cause you know I sure as heck wouldn’t have been able to pluck it from the murky recesses of my own mind.

• Everyday blokes like myself hear about cool authorial opportunities in a rather roundabout way.  Last fall I discovered this interesting creature going by the name of the Rutgers One-on-One Conference.  People in the publishing industry offer their two cents to burgeoning authors and illustrators in a one day extravaganza.  Is fun. Is useful. Is on October 18th this year.  Just thought you might want to know.

• If you’ve noticed, I’ve been neglecting my podcast lately.  I’ve three speeches to give in two weeks at the SCBWI regional conference in Seattle (more on that later) and all my spare time has been devoted to them.  The weird side-effect is a reluctance to discuss anything that has to do with podcasts, but childrensbookradio.com sounds as if it might slake your thirst for news of this sort.  And though it has been mentioned on a number of different sites, thanks in this particular case to BookBuds for the link.

• Do I repeat myself?  Very well, I repeat myself.  It’s just because I never know who’s reading at a given time.  Well, if you’re a foodie or (at the very least) you like knowing that beautiful food arrangements can be made by librarians, please oh please go on over to Pinot and Prose.  Children’s literature and food is on the . . . see, I was going to end that sentence with the word "menu" but couldn’t make myself do it.  I still have some shame.

• And to finish, it doesn’t have anything to do with children’s literature, but I’m in an image-minded mood today. Look! It’s street art made out of plastic bags that spring to life every time the subway passes underneath.

Filed under: Fusenews