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Apparently I'm walking to Mordor...
…with S…
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John Green's "Top Five Movies I Enjoy Watching"
(a list that can be found in this FIFA video)
5. The Sting - “The great con man grifter...
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It seems very strange to reblog someone reblogging me, but people have asked me to, as when I answer questions directly, as I did here, on Tumblr...
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Hey you! Yes, you! You with the rich parents who have made sure you had everything you ever wanted! And you, with the powerful parents who got you into the right school, the right university, and the right job, no questions asked! ALL OF YOU!
Guess what? My mum sent me a letter today containing a little mutant from the inside of a Dalek that she had knitted herself. So consider yourself trumped, because in the three seconds it takes to open an envelope my week was made.
That’s what love is people. It’s making a squishy thing with tentacles from a sci-fi show you don’t even watch because you know it’ll mean the world to someone else. It’s not what you have by circumstance, it’s what you give by choice, and I’m incredibly lucky to be surrounded by givers.
My kaled mutant agrees, and suggests you obey (he says that a lot).
Thanks Mum!
This is a piece I have written for the ENO Mini Opera Competition. It is a response to Neil Gaiman’s ‘The Sweeper of Dreams’, which you can read here. The writing phase of the competition closes tomorrow, but you can read more about the musical and video parts of the comp over at the Mini Operas website. My Mini Opera is called ‘Things Unswept’.
I hope you like it.
“Lyndon, do you know what the meaning of life is?”
“I’ve got an idea of what makes me happy mate, but I don’t think anyone knows the meaning of life, do they?”
“I do. It’s Chinese Checkers. And grapes.”
Whenever one of the students says something like this to me - something wild and surreal and impossibly funny - I write it down. Now I’ve got pages and pages of these hilarious anecdotes, some of which I could easily explain to you, like the Grade 2 who was mortified to find when playing a (very uniquely ruled) game of chess that his king had been taken, before he yelled triumphantly “OH YEAH? WELL I’VE STILL GOT ALL MY PRAWNS LEFT”; and some of which I could never paint a funny enough picture with words, like the two grade 4/5 girls doing their impersonation of The Voice, and slamming their desks to spin around on their chairs with huge dorky grins on their faces.
I have my suspicions that the kids have spotted me writing these things down, and sometimes - to their teacher’s frustration - are deliberately hamming up their behaviour because they know it gets my attention. But as a visiting writer I can’t help but get sucked in to these performances. While I’m here, these are my characters. And who could resist dialogue like this?
“I know! We should all get guns and shoot all the parents, and then we could take over the town!”
“I don’t know that I could shoot my parents. Could you?”
“Well they only gave me half a piece of toast this morning, so yeah…”
“…What I’d need is an army of me. Like, a million mes.”
“What would you feed them all?”
A pause.
“I suppose they’d have to be cannibals.”
It’s no wonder that shows like Kid’s Say The Darndest Things can survive as long as they have with little more in the way of content than children just talking. Kids see the world in a way that socialised adults have long forgotten how to comprehend. I’ve now started my first classes in the secondary area of the school, and while the comedy is different here - devious, organised, and more challenging to authority - the comments are no less funny. When the 9’s and 10’s were told that as a “special treat” they could sit on the floor to work if they wanted, they exploded into sarcastic cheering and adoration. One boy cried out: ”Oh Miss, thanks so much! That’s the best treat EVER!”
It would be tempting to think that the teachers are desensitised to this, with their chiding comments about ‘behaviour’ and ‘maturity’, but actually I suspect just the opposite. You can hear them occasionally turn phrases and comments that have been picked up from their students in everyday conversation, and the staffroom itself is not vastly different from the wider schoolyard - it is a playground of its own, and the stories that turn up there are no less dramatic or amusing. It’s been interesting to discover this side of St. Helens. I remember when I was at school that even the worst teachers seemed like figures of infallibility. I couldn’t imagine any of them with a life outside of the classroom walls - let alone homes, friends, families and the occasional hangover. But now that I’ve had a chance to sit, observe, and watch everyone in the school more closely, I realise that all of them have a part to play in its story.
The vision statement for St Helens is to be “a supportive community where learning flourishes, confidence grows, and difference is valued.” I love this statement, because I think that it’s actually acted upon here. These are no cookie-cutter children, and individuality is not stamped out of them in the name of obedience and simplified learning. They are who they are.
And as I fill up another page of my notebook with the scribble: “The thing me and tortoises have in common is that once we lie on our backs we can’t get up again”, I realise that simply being allowed to be themselves is exactly what makes them worth listening to.
AIR2012 is an artist in residence program developed and managed by arts@work in partnership with the Australia Council for the Arts. You can find out more about the program here.
Letters of Note collects Stephen Fry’s remarkable letter to a young fan suffering from depression.
This article by Colin Nissan on McSweeney’s, is both incredibly funny and incredibly true:
Mark Twain once said, “Show, don’t tell.” This is an incredibly important lesson for writers to remember; never get such a giant head that you feel entitled to throw around obscure phrases like “Show, don’t tell.” Thanks for nothing, Mr. Cryptic.
Tom Lehrer has made it to 84. How wonderful to think that we still live in a world with him in it. Happy Birthday, Tom.
I’ve been attending all the K-5 assemblies while I’ve been in my residency at St. Helens, to give me a chance to look at what the kids are doing, and to celebrate their achievements with them. In these assemblies the teachers give out a couple of certificates to students who cannot be awarded academically. I suppose you might call them ‘citizenship awards’, usually for un-instructed kindnesses of one kind or another.
I decided at the most recent assembly that I would hand out a couple of awards myself, to celebrate the efforts of two boys who had really stepped out of their shells during the program, and – regardless of quality – had worked really hard to produce something in the short time that I had with them.
But I didn’t want to just hand them an arbitrary piece of paper. It had to be unique: ‘Artist in Residence’ style. So I wrote both boys a poem each, drawing cartoons around the edges, and signing both of them with a dedication. The poems suited the boy’s interests. One had written a story about a dragon war, so he got a poem which imagined him as King of the dragons, struggling to train a dragon who will not fly straight. The other boy was well known in the school for calling everything ‘epic’. When I had him in a group one day I told him that I had been working with the Grade 2s, and he said: “Oh man! Grade 2 was epic!” I cannot know for sure that his Grade 2 was not vastly different from mine, but I am pretty confident it wasn’t THAT different. The Lord of the Rings is epic. Grade 2 is not epic. Knowing his fondness for the word, however, I wrote him an ‘Epic Poem’, which I am told contains no less than eighteen uses of the word ‘epic’, beginning:
“There was an epic boy,
Who kicked an epic ball,
And didn’t see the epic robots,
In the epic hall…”
These were really treasured by the boys, and were fawned over and coveted by their classmates. One of them said goodbye to me at the end of the day clutching his to his chest, and it was a real highlight of the residency to see this self-identified maths boy take so much pleasure in something from outside his discipline. My only regret is that I can’t do it for every student, though they’d certainly like me to try. At the end of the day several students attempted to force me into story-producing slavery like Kathy Bates in Misery, even going so far as to try to give me ideas for the poems that they wanted. One boy got on his knees.
I don’t have any doubts, but if I ever did have any doubts about whether my role at St. Helens is meaningful, important, or successful, I need only picture that young boy, holding his cap out like Oliver Twist’s bowl, and blocking my path out of the school, eyes wide, yelling:
“I’m begging you, Lyndon! I’m BEGGING YOU! Please! I just want a story!”
A.I.R is an initiative of arts@work. You can find out more about the program here.
Robert Krulwich (via Discover)
(via gracebello)
This post was written for the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Tasmanian branch, of which I am currently acting as judge. The organisers of their official blog have kindly allowed me to reproduce the post. You can find the original here.
A few weeks ago I received a package from America. I was rightly ecstatic, because it came from an independent bookstore in North Carolina, and it contained - amongst other things - two books: Why We Broke Up by Daniel Handler (a man who occasionally masquerades as the unparalleled Lemony Snicket) and John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars. Both had been signed in a recent author visit.
Let’s leave Why We Broke Up for today, which, for the record, remains a worthy and wonderful addition to Handler’s canon, and is gorgeously illustrated by Maira Kalman, who he collaborated with previously on 13 Words. Let’s get back to the other book. Because I have a confession to make. Not only was this not my first copy of The Fault in Our Stars, it wasn’t even my first signed copy. If you count the audiobook, which I purchased as an author-read limited edition box set (they only made a thousand copies of that one), I now had three copies of Green’s latest.
So why TFiOS? (Yep, the acronym is out. Let’s get heavy.)
Well, I think John Green is the best writer of Young Adult fiction alive today. When I first read Looking For Alaska I was - once the tears dried - nearly driven mad by its eloquence. John can achieve that - so often impossible - feat; he can write teen literature with intelligent characters that don’t sound like adults pretending to be children. Too often Y.A. writers leave their characters lifeless and vapid in an attempt to make them sound ‘street’, and they become an idiotic stream of text-speak and pop-culture gags. It’s a cut above but no small crime too, to go the other way, and leave your teens speaking in bizarre adult voices, like children dressing up in their parents clothes and playing their own farcical version of adulthood.
Green gets it. His characters in this novel are brutally intelligent without being ridiculous. On top of that, he’s hit a killer plot as well. TFiOS is your average boy-meets-girl love story, with a crucial twist: both its main characters, the narrator Hazel Grace Lancaster and her love interest Augustus Waters, meet in a cancer survivor support group. They live on borrowed time. It takes everything you know and love about Y.A. and turns the intensity up to eleven.
There is also no denying that John’s a great guy. Dismayed by the amount signed copies of his books went to desperate buyers for on the internet, he signed every single copy of the initial print run of TFiOS to even the odds - a mere 150,000 scribbles. His philanthropic work with his brother Hank as the YouTube duo VlogBrothers and the founders of ‘The Foundation to Decrease WorldSuck’ also leave plenty to be admired. I may come back to those on here another day.
In this book though; this remarkable, funny, heartbreaking, existentially fraught, wonderful, emotional and intelligent book, there is everything that could be hoped for from Green, or indeed any other author. I have a habit (I would suggest knack, but truthfully a habit) of announcing that a book is the next big thing, and waiting and watching as the movie rights get sold, the hype builds, the film gets made, and the book explodes into something more than words on a page in the hearts and minds of its captivated audience.
I’m calling it, folks. The Fault in Our Stars is the next big thing. Read it, borrow it, or steal it, but make sure you get a copy.
I might even get another one myself.
