Yay for water, nay for whimsy

Behold AQUARIUM: Fuselit's 13th issue of poetry, short fiction, artwork and musical trinkets from amongst the likes of Pomegranate’s Richard O'Brien, Steve Himmer, Chelsea Cargill and Brittle Star’s David Floyd.

So yes, it’s small and cute and oh so pretty, but do its lovingly bubble-painted pages caress innards of satisfying substance? It’s a worthy question, to which the heart warming answer is yes, yes, yes; this is a delightful collection of prose and poetry that also happens to fit neatly in the palm of one’s hand.

As you might hope to expect, the writers offer an impressive and diverse array of bite-sized slithers of word joy, varying from witty and absurd to slyly understated and sneakily sinister. You can but marvel at how this particular rabble of writers has taken the theme and run, rolled, skipped and swam with it. This really is a tiny chest of treasures just waiting to acquaint themselves with your trembling, greedy, grateful fingers.

This issue also comes with an equally dinky CD, as well as a super fun mix and match poetry booklet: the pages are cut into three, allowing the reader to mess up the various stanzas in order to create confections that the editors promise will vary from the ‘alarmingly incongruous’ to those which make ‘unexpected sense’ – and, of course, the best results will often be a heady combination of the two.

Just be sure not to spill coffee on it (or anything sticky/corrosive/stain-inducing, really).

Young? Adult? Literature?

My favorite comedian, the late Mitch Hedberg, once cracked: “Every book is a children’s book as long as the kid can read!”

Clearly, this statement is little more than an uninformed generalization with the singular goal of eliciting a chuckle. But, I must admit, as a card-carrying member of the “Make ‘em laugh any way you can” brigade, the silly one-liner actually gave me pause. Because, more and more, Young Adult Literature that I see as a middle school teacher is taking on content and themes that, often, is more “adult” than “young.” The ensuing internal debate has become a sort of “Chicken or The Egg” conundrum that I’ve yet to resolve.

Then, upon being invited to write for Fringe, I was referred to another column in a popular blog on YAL. And, I totally dug the snarky, “I love the 80’s”-style reviews of books from our collective childhood, having consequently been inspired to unearth lots of dusty paperbacks in my basement. And, while it’s most certainly been quite a trip to revisit these characters and stories through grown up eyes, as I read, something strikes me. Though I feel very close to these books out of nostalgia, I can’t remember ever being to relate to them as a moody, lower-middle class kid, coming of age in the neon nineties.

And so, it is in the same spirit with which I immediately removed the archaic Where The Red Fern Grows, and A Wrinkle In Time from my sixth-graders’ required reading curriculum, that I have decided--for the purposes of this column--to stick to YAL. and authors from the last two decades. But I promise—no annoying little wizards. Ever.

Be back in two weeks, with Laurie Halse Anderson’s Fever, 1793.

Feed the Hungry with Good Vocabulary

Over Thanksgiving weekend, I discovered a cool new site, via my aunt by way of my mother. It's called FreeRice.

The site gives you a vocabulary quiz that is quite hard -- my best level was a 46 -- and featured words like "scintilla," "veld," and "decollate". Word difficulty increases with every question you get right. For each correct answer, the site donates 10 grains of rice to a starving country via the UN -- site advertisers foot that bill.

FreeRice's sister site, Poverty.com keeps a grim death toll of people dying from hunger each minute.

Do something that's good for your vocabulary and for the starving -- check it out.