Fusenews: Tomie/Tomi, Tomi/Tomie

• Things that I love: Blogging. My baby girl.  Seattle.  Two of those three things will be coming together on September 16th and 17th.  That’s when the 5th (five already?) annual Kidlitcon will occur!  It’s looking like a remarkable line-up as well with special keynote speaker YA author Scott Westerfeld and great presentations, as per usual.  Baby girl is keeping me from attending, which is awful.  I think I’ll have missed three out of five by this point.  That just means you’ll have to go in my stead.  For conference information, Kidlitosphere Central has the details.

• Speaking of conferences I could not attend (whip out your world’s smallest violins playing a sad sad song for me), ALA came and went.  Between reading Twitter updates of awesome people having post-Caldecott/Newbery Banquet parties until 5 a.m. and knowing that there’s a whole world of ARCs out there that I have not seen, I took comfort in SLJ’s very cool shots of the outfits at the aforementioned banquet.  Jim Averbeck, I await your red carpet analysis.  Oh, and allow me to extend my hearty thanks to Tomie dePaola for mentioning me as well as a host of other fine librarians in his Wilder acceptance speech.  Made me feel quite the top cat it did.

• Artist Adam Rex discusses the “Hogwarts for Illustrators” and gives us a sneak peek at a cover of his due out this coming February.

• There’s more Ungerer in the offering.  Tomi Ungerer got covered by the Times the other day with an interesting Q&A.   In it, at one point he happens to say, “Look, it’s a fact that the children’s books that withstand the grinding of time all come from authors who did both [writing and illustrating].”  J.L. Bell takes that idea and jogs on over to my Top 100 Picture Books Poll where, rightly, he points out the #2 on was old Margaret Wise Brown.  He then finds other books that have stood the test of time with authors who do not illustrate.  Well played, Bell man.

• Also at The New York Times, editor Pamela Paul shows off the new crop of celebrity picture books.  Normally I eschew such fare, but one book in the batch is of particular interest to me.  Julianne Moore has penned the third Freckleface Strawberry book called Freckleface Strawberry: Best Friends Forever.  I’m rather partial to it, perhaps because of this librarian character that artist LeUyen Pham included in the story:

• J.K. Rowling: Classy dame.

• Oh, man.  This is awesome.  Sure I’d heard that there was a Salon article about all the real world places featured in works of children’s literature and where you can go to see them.  But little did I know that somewhere out there in the world there is a REAL clockwork elephant that walks along the Loire River.  I didn’t quite believe it so I found a YouTube video to see if it was so.

It is so.  Thanks to Paul Schmid for the link.

• The Giver is just one of those novels for kids that never gets an even break movie-wise.  They’re always claiming they’re going to adapt it and they never do.  So when I heard that Jeff Bridges had “re-acquired the rights” I was surprised.  More so when it became clear that he wanted to play the part of The Giver himself.  Dude.  That’s pretty cool.  Read this article for more (and can someone explain to me why every middle grade novel that’s up for a cinematic adaptation is called “YA” by the press?).

• Harmed yet beautiful books.

• New Blog Alert: This is a cool one.  The Art Studio at The Eric Carle Museum has just started a blog of its very own, going by the name Making Art with Children.  So far they’ve a variety of posts, but I think my favorite (and the one that’ll be most useful to craft-hungry children’s librarians like myself) is the piece on How to Melt Crayons.  Pretty cool.

• LeVar Burton needs YOU to help him create a Reading Rainbow flash mob.  I’m in.  You in?  How ’bout you?  Thanks to Paul Schmid for the link.

• The winner of the LGBT Jewish Children’s Book Contest has been announced and it’s Elisabeth Kushner for The Purim Superhero.  Fascinating award, no?  Thanks to Marjorie Ingall for the link!

• Author Marc Nobleman has been penning some fun posts lately.  I liked the one about signing books at a local grocery store (particularly since it tapped into the fear of every author that no one will show up for a signing event). There’s also a nice tribute to Janet Shulman and many more goodies on hand.

• Daily Image:

Now that is neat!  BoingBoing recently highlighted some old Penguin audiobook ads that used children’s literary characters.  Here’s the one they did for The Wizard of Oz:

Check out The Jungle Book and The Pied Piper of Hamlin too.  Thanks to BoingBoing for the link.

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