- Do we teach about Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in American schools? Should we?
Remember, remember the fifth of November,
- The gunpowder treason and plot,
- I know of no reason
- Why the gunpowder treason
- Should ever be forgot.
And there is the great speech from V Is For Vendetta. My favorite quote, "Words will always retain their power."
LOOK! I buried the lead! WINTERGIRLS made the Publisher’s Weekly Best Books of 2009 list!
And from the Misc. List, Bookavore has a great idea for how to get the books you really want.
And the Office Mouse sends us to this video, because even though I loathe baseball, I love Philadelphia, and the city needs some extra hugs today.
Any rap song that can work in a reference to "Benjamin Franklin, 1776" is a good thing.
Ending with a bang and a rant
I’m pretty sure that tomorrow is the last day you can vote to put Zoe in a Cheerios box (until 11:59pm Central Time). It’s not looking so good for our girl, but the whole thing has been a lot of fun. I realized yesterday that all this blogging and thinking about Zoe has led me to dream up a number of new story ideas for her, and that might be the best prize of all.
I leave in a little bit for the airport because I’ll be speaking In Newark, DE tonight at 6pm. Can you come and see me?
If you can’t, be sure to tune in to the streaming, live video feed of the event, courtesy of Penguin’s Point Of View website!
I’ll be talking about Wintergirls tonight (a BIG change from Zoe), which makes it appropriate to point out this Book Recommendation Theme I Never Considered for Wintergirls.
BIG CHANGE IN TOPIC
I haven’t had a political rant in while, so I hope you’ll indulge me.
There was a time in America when education was totally private: people who wanted their children to go to school paid for it. Eventually, Americans decided that public education was such an incredible public good, i.e., something everyone benefits from, that we moved to a taxpayer-funded system of education, open to all. And, of course, there are still private schools for families who want to make that choice.
There was a time in America when clean water and electricity were available only to the wealthy. The poor pulled up water from wells or dipped buckets into dirty rivers, and lit their homes with candles and lanterns because they had no choice. (My father-in-law, who died in July, did not have electricity on his street until he was 10 years old.)
Our fellow citizens argued and grumbled, but eventually decided that it was a benefit to the entire nation if all Americans had access to water and electricity. So programs were put in place, funded in part by taxpayers and in part by consumers, to make that happen.
Now the debate has turned to health insurance. My grandparents did not have it when they were young. In the middle of the last century, it became a widespread job benefit, and programs were put in place to insure the vulnerable; elderly, poor and disabled people.
There has been a shift. In the past three generations, insurance has moved from the privilege of the rich to something that most Americans consider a basic part of life, like education, electricity, and water.
(Please let me know if you disagree with that.)
But I am confused. Why is it proving so hard to craft and pass legislation that will accomplish this? I think it’s because the chuckleheads in Congress – on both sides of the aisle – are puppets and the insurance companies are pulling the strings. Don’t get me wrong – I am all about capitalism. I love capitalism. I am a small business owner and so is my husband and it’s working for us. Almost.
The Fat Cats have made the playing field uneven. BH and I cannot join any kind of group insurance plan. (We’ve spent countless hours examining this.) We pay almost $20,000 a year in insurance premiums just for the two of us. I’ve thought about canceling the policy and setting that money aside for medical emergencies, but I’m a cancer survivor. If I had a recurrence of cancer without insurance, we would lose our house and retirement savings.
Am I pissed? Damn straight. One of my three adult kids doesn’t have insurance. My friends who have been out of work for too long have no insurance. People who might take the plunge into small business ownership don’t because they are afraid to leave their job and give up their health insurance. Americans die and suffer needlessly every day because health care in this country has become a trip to the roulette wheel.
The time has come for us to agree that all Americans deserve basic health care coverage – the same for all people in all states. If you want a fancier program with bells and whistles, you can pay extra. The insurance companies have to buck up. When your service is considered a public good – a public necessity – you have to trade in outrageous short-term profits for long-term secure cash flow.
If you have decent health coverage through your job, or your parents’ or spouse’s job, please stop and think. What would happen to your life if you had to pay 20 – 40% of your income for your insurance? How is that fair?
::wipes spittle from face:: I will rant about the evil doings of health insurance companies – denying coverage that people have paid for – another day.
What do you think about this? Is health care coverage the new rural electrification? Do we have a right to health care?
And now for the last beating of the drum to get Zoe in a Cheerios box:
You only have a day and a half or so to vote!!
2. In the bottom right corner, click on MORE BOOKS twice. (Yes, this is the tricky part. No, I don’t know why Zoe is buried at the absolute back of the pack. Kind of makes you feel sorry for her, huh?) That will take you to ZOE.
3. Click on the yellow box that says VOTE!
4. Notify every person you have ever met in your entire life to PLEASE VOTE FOR ZOE. I seriously mean that.
5. Do this every day until 11:59 pm Central Time, October 30. It’s almost over and then I will stop grovelling and pleading, I promise!
No worries, mate – Friday Five Plus One, turtle edition
I didn’t mean to alarm anyone by not posting for a week. Things have been a bit busy. Mostly with good stuff, but at such a fast pace I haven’t had blogging time.
First – A wee movie for your enjoyment. This turtle belongs to my daughter, OfficeMouse. When she got the turtle, it was smaller than a quarter.
The turtle thinks it is a cat. This is very confusing to the real cats.
Second – I have heard nothing from the Kentucky high school where TWISTED and other books still appear to be banned. I have no idea what is going on and hope that everyone down there is figuring out how to have constructive, professional conversations about the place of YA contemporary literature in the classroom.
Third – WINTERGIRLS is preparing to move to the world stage. I think the Australian edition will be the first one to go to press. Authors Melina Marchetta and Alyssa Brugman said very nice things about the book – thank you! As it stands now, WINTERGIRLS will be published in Australia, New Zealand, Portugal, Norway, Korea, Poland, Spain & Latin America, Italy, Germany, and Holland. And Great Britain, I think. This is all VERY exciting!!! As soon as I get cover images of these books, I’ll post them. It always fascinates me to see what images the non-US publishers choose to appeal to their markets.
Fourth – last weekend I got to speak to the lovely booksellers at the New Atlantic Independent Booksellers Conference. You can read Part One of Jennifer Brown’s conference coverage in today’s Shelf Awareness.
Fifth – I have been struggling a bit with some health issues. I added up the stress factors of the past year and everything suddenly made sense. In addition to the two deaths in the family this summer, and caring for a niece for a while, I was on the road for business for more than 100 days of the last year. That is officially Too Much Travel and explains many things. So please, if you have been trying to get me to come at speak at your school or conference, please understand why I am going to have to say no. I am already scheduled for 50 days next year and we’re going to try and limit it to that number.
Plus One – I’ve been sneaking into the cottageand writing amidst the power tools, but BH assures me we are days away from being able to clear out the equipment and handing over the keys to me. Some of the interior projects, like the wall of bookcase have been put on hold until I hit the road again. Next week I might make a video that shows the entire project. For now, here are a couple of recent shots.
A long weekend’s worth of links & deviled egg inquiry
I am slowly transitioning from insane farmer woman back to being a writer who gardens a little. By the end of the weekend, the new vegetable plots should be finished, seedlings in, and seeds sown. And it’s a good thing because I am itching to get back to writing. All the travel and work stress is almost gone, and being in balance again is now appearing possible.
The glass is now installed in the Magic Window, the walls and most of the ceiling are up, and the cool chimney pot we found at the salvage yard is in place on the roof.
Our friend Steve, a natural born Tinkerer, has been up here helping out. He’s our lead elf for alternative energy issues. (The goal is to keep the cottage completely off the electrical grid.) The small wind turbine came last week. At first they mounted it on the garage roof, but that was a bad idea. Then they put it on a 10-foot pole in the back meadow. Better. Now it’s on a 20-foot pole in the back meadow – MUCH better. They are still experimenting with the exact location to take the best advantage of the winds. The other piece of the electric system will be a solar panel that should arrive next week.
Just writing all of this down makes me tired.
Aside from gardening and hanging with friends this weekend, I am going to try and make yogurt in my crockpot, thanks to a tip from Bookavore.
Don’t know what you’re going to do this weekend? I have a few suggestions:
Change a life. Buy a book for a boy in prison (thanks to all at Guys Lit Wire!)
Read Jezebel’s review of Wintergirls.
Read this jaw-dropping interview with A. S. Byatt in which she discusses her new book, The Children’s Book, a novel set in Edwardian England that examines the destructive side of creativity. (For the record, I usually like her books a lot and am looking forward to this one.) In the interview she says some rather stunning things, such as, “Yes, because I noticed that there’s a high rate of suicide among the children of children’s book writers.”
And “I think that most of the children’s writers live in the world that they’ve created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children’s writers are the children.”
In the first comment, I believe she is speaking only within the context of children’s writers from the Edwardian era, but the second comment seems more general. Any thoughts on this, gentle readers? (The book is available in the UK and Australia now, comes out in the States in October.) (And thanks to Judith in Australia for the info about this!)
That ought to hold you for a couple days.
ONE LAST THING!!! Do you have any secret ingredients you put in deviled eggs? If yes, please tell me what they are!
PS – GoogleLitTrips has a very nice feature on FEVER 1793. Check it out, teachers!
Halfway through the garden
If you’ve been following me on Facebook or Twitter the past week, you’ve noticed I’ve spent a ridiculous amount of time in the garden. What’s up with that?
It’s my therapy.
After the insane amount of travel the past six months, my brain is fried and my soul is tattered. There was no earthly way I could dive back into writing. Many people take vacations when they get burnt out. Packing my suitcase to go away again was the LAST thing I wanted to do. So I pulled on my pink rubber boots, grabbed the shovel, and headed for the back yard.
The first order of business was the flower beds. Last year, they were home to both flowers and veggies, but this year all the beds we can see from the house are flower-based. (The beds we can’t see from the house get a little more sun, that’s why. And we have a short growing season, so we have to take advantage of whatever sun we get.)
It took about a week to get all the plants and seeds in. Our land is on top of a hill that is mostly glacial till. This means a large part of gardening means extracting large rocks and filling in the hole with imported dirt and/or homemade compost.
This is the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, of a boulder that was two feet tall and big enough around for me to just be able to get my arms around. Thankfully, it had the good grace to split into 5 manageable pieces when I finally removed all the surrounding dirt and smaller boulders. The extraction took two hours. My back is a little sore, but it was worth it!
This week I’ll be catching up on more correspondence and beginning to shift my brain back into writing mode. And – most importantly – I’ll be whipping the vegetable beds into shape. I am fretting because I am very late getting my peas in – that will be the first order of business.
A few book notes.
WINTERGIRLS made The New York Times Editor’s Choice List. As did CHARLES AND EMMA, by my friend Deb Heiligman.
Last Friday, we enjoyed the very last event on the WINTERGIRLS tour, at River’s End Bookshop in Oswego, NY. More than 100 people came out; one guy drove up from Philly, others came from Potsdam, Rochester, and Rome (NY, not Italy). It was a blast. Thankfully, the fire marshal did not stop in to count heads.
And finally, what do you think of The Happiness Project? Is it a load of manure or something worthwhile, useful, and life-altering?