runnerland

In Runnerland, I use the idea of a new, imaginary world to represent Peter’s psyche. As he finds a new identity of his own choosing, he develops Runnerland in his own image. It’s a powerful image, the idea of world-building, and I think it really encapsulates the best and worst of adolescence.

I’ve just read a fascinating book by Alan Weisman about the world after human beings. The World Without Us imagines a planet where we’ve just…disappeared. And what would come next. A lot of it is scary (nuclear weapons won’t blow up without sufficient impact velocity, but the metal housing will rust and the radioactive elements will leach out for the next, oh, 100,000 years), but his failure walk-throughs are arresting. F’rinstance:

After we’re gone, nature’s revenge for our smug, mechanized superiority arrives waterborne. It starts with wood-frame construction, the most widely used residential building technique in the developed world. It begins on the roof, probably asphalt or slate shingle, warranted to last two or three decades–but that warranty doesn’t count around the chimney, where the first leak occurs. As the flashing separates under rain’s relentless insistence, water sneaks beneath the shingles. It flows across four-by-eight-foot sheets of sheathing made either of plywood or, if newer, of woodchip board composed of three- to four-inch flakes of timber, bonded together by a resin….

The resin in your cost-conscious choice of a woodchip roof, a waterproof goo of formaldehyde and phenol polymer, was also aplied along the board’s exposed edges, but it fails anyway because moisture enters around the nails. Soon they’re rusting, and their grip begins to loosen. That presently leads not only to interior leaks, but to structural mayhem. Besides underlying the rofing, the wooden sheathing secures trusses to each other. The trusses–premanufactured braces held together with metal connection plates–are there to keep the roof from splaying. But when the sheathing goes, structural integrity goes with it.

As gravity increases tension on the trusses, the 1/4-inch pins securing their now-rusting connector plates pull free from the wet wood, which now sports a fuzzy coating of greenish mold. Beneath the mold, threadlike filaments called hyphae are secreting enzymes that break cellulose and lignin down into fungi food. The same thing is happening to the floors inside. When the heat went off, pipes burst if you lived where it freezes, and rain is blowing in where windows have cracked from bird collisions and stress of sagging walls. Even where the glass is still intact, rain and snow mysteriously, inexorably work their way under sills. As the wood continues to rot, trusses start to collapse against each other. Eventually the walls lean to one side, and finally the roof falls in. That barn roof with the 18-by-18-inch hole was likely gone inside of 10 years. Your house’s lasts maybe 50 years; 100, tops.

Tempting to see the metaphors, no?

A way-otaku Gibson fan commented on yesterday’s post, pointing me in the direction of his fascinating annotated blog response to Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country. It’s full of images (and spoilers) relating to the book, an inside-the-eyelids look at one reader’s experience. I love it.

These images are from that blog (it could use some handier nav, btw) and both different from how I imagined the same items and eerily the same…

What does this have to do with kids’ books? Not much. Except I read Gibson books exactly the way I remember reading books as a kid: with a mixture of can’t-believe-I’m-this-lucky glee and a keen awareness that the end must come and the end is always a disappointment because it’s the end. Undoubtedly the Germans have a noun that encompasses all that (and probably takes as many characters).

PS. Sean, the poster, also pointed out a second Web site, the UK-based Memetic Engineer, for an English response to the book. Gibson, you’re one loved writer.

I’m reading William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country, out in a few weeks. And earlier today I was working on the proposal for my new novel, which I want to send in to the publisher in the next few weeks (fingers crossed).

Then those two things just…collided. I was reading William Gibson’s blog when I saw a post on his forum reprinting the Amazon.com interview between Amazon editor Tom Nissley (helluva nice guy) and WB, wherein Tom casually mentioned the big difference between the finished Spook Country and Gibson’s original proposal.

Sure enough, Amazon.com hosts the original PDF proposal, which is vastly different from the finished book but might contain a spoiler (I’m 50 pages from the end, so I’m not sure). What’s interesting is the ghostly reflections of people and actions that linger from the proposal in the novel. It’s like taking a bite of food and knowing that spice is one you’ve had before, it’s on the tip of your tongue but it’s overwhelmed by the other flavours and faint anyway and one’s memory is no longer what it was…

I wonder if the proposal I’m currently writing will stay better on track. It should stray so ably… 

This is my last censorship post. Really. Well, probably.

Rebecca Wigod, my counterpart at the Vancouver Sun, wrote up the SFU Symposium on the Book session that Ken Setterington and I did on censorship, and she did a lovely job. Read it - it’s like you were there. (Were you there?) I normally wouldn’t post an entire story this way - respect for copyright and all - but the Sun’s archives are so screwy they’ve really asked for this…

Again, thanks to Rebecca for such a clear and comprehensive summary.

Something to offend nearly everyone

Rebecca Wigod, Vancouver Sun

Published: Saturday, July 21, 2007

Superb writing is being done for teenagers these days, but praiseworthy books often contain scenes that raise a protective adult’s hackles. During a Vancouver panel discussion of censorship of young-adult literature, Ken Setterington gave Chris Crutcher’s 1989 novel, Chinese Handcuffs, as an example.

In it, a teenage boy is lifted out of his wheelchair and forced to participate in a gang rape. Afterward, he can’t live with what has happened and shoots himself dead. That is, as they say, gritty. But look on Amazon.ca and you’ll see that the novel has a 41/2-star (out of five) approval rating, with some of the warmest reviews coming from kids.

Setterington, the Toronto Public Library’s child and youth advocate, said the original publisher of Chinese Handcuffs was one known for its children’s books, so librarians mistakenly shelved it in the children’s department. Later, “we moved it to YA [young-adult]. I don’t consider that censorship.”

At Simon Fraser University’s downtown campus, where the Summer Publishing Workshops hosted a day-long symposium on children’s lit last Saturday, the Georgia Straight’s John Burns named a YA novel he won’t be sharing with his 11-year-old son — Retribution, by B.C.’s Carrie Mac (who has a piece on page C1 today).

Himself the author of a YA novel (Runnerland), Burns insisted he (a) disagrees with censorship and (b) greatly admires Mac’s writing. But he said the shooting-gallery scene made the decision for him. It’s like the way he feels about Quentin Tarantino’s movies: He’s welcome to make them, but I don’t have to go see them.

(I recognize the child-protecting impulse. A dozen years ago, I started reading American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis, while on a summer camping trip. I stopped early, at the point where Patrick Bateman disembowels a beggar on the street. I hid the book from my daughter and son, then about 8 and 11, and it’s been inside my night-table ever since.)

Susan Patron’s Newbery Medal-winning The Higher Power of Lucky (which got more than the usual amount of publicity because a dog’s scrotum is referred to as such in the second paragraph) inevitably entered the discussion. So did Scud, by Vancouver’s Dennis Foon, who was present. It contains no real swear words, but its fake ones are so realistic that they got parents’ backs up.

Author Kit Pearson recalled that when she was a children’s librarian, she and her colleagues wore T-shirts that said, “I have something in my library that will offend everyone.” Jo-Anne Naslund, an education librarian at the University of B.C., pointed out that the website of Parents Against Bad Books in Schools (Pabbis.com) carries the passages parents find offensive. So much for hiding them in the night-table.

Setterington stressed the importance of context. “Read the books that are challenged — not just the [parts in question], but the books in their entirety,” he said. He knows whereof he speaks: He’s the author of the children’s book Mom and Mum Are Getting Married!

I’ve just finished HP7 a couple of hours ago and I still feel like I’m half-enchanted.

They’re not perfect books, by any means. But they are perfect reads.

What really struck me as I re-read HP1 and HP6, in anticipation of No. 7, is how brave JK Rowling is. How fearless a writer. Not always in a good way - she bravely overuses adverbs and cliche, for instance. But she also bravely plumbs emotions, wringing real pathos out of situations that many writers would gloss over.

Dismiss her if you like, but she really has made something extraordinary.

PS. Check out this news story: it’s selling up to 20 times a second!

So I’m delighted to say that Susan has been re/dis/un/invited - or however you say that she’s back at the festival.

Remember earlier I said I wasn’t sure whether the folks at the Calgary Writers Fest, aka WordFest, are nice or not? Turns out they do really go the extra mile for their authors, and they’ve found a way to keep Susan in the lineup. I don’t have more details, except that I heard from Susan herself and from her publicist, who’d been in touch with the festival, and it’s all good.

Feels good, don’t it? Yeah us.

PS. Off to get Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows now… Yeek! 

Some breaking news here at Runnerland, rapidly becoming the clearinghouse for Cankidlit censorship news… This is from Susan’s Facebook yesterday:

Today I learned that I’ve been disinvited from the Calgary Writer’s Festival because a few teachers and librarians didn’t approve of the content of my new book. That’s code for they didn’t like the fact that the hero of my new book is a young gay man. I guess the festival was worried about losing its funding if I appeared with the other authors. (I should point out that I love the festival and its organizers but that doesn’t change the fact that I got booted to please a bunch of homophobes.)

It’s unbelievable that a book can get banned by a few bigots before it’s even freaking published.

I am devastated about this. But more important than how I feel, what kind of a sickening message does this send to the many gay and lesbian kids in and around Calgary (and elsewhere) who are under the control of these people?

I may have a protest festival at the Motel 6 in Calgary. I’ll read passages to the desk clerk. You are all invited.

B.C. author Karen Rivers replied to the censorship post with such a fantastic, thought-provoking reply that I wanted to bring it a wider readership, so I’m reposting it as its own item. (This is maybe cheating. Oh wait, there’s no cheating in blogging.)

I’m particularly struck by her image of kids wishing they could “un-see” images that overwhelm them. How come she’s got time to organize and express her thoughts so well? How come? If I had world enough and time, I’d make a list right now of the 20 top things I wish I could “un-see” in this world. And another of the 20 top things I’m grateful never to have seen - though everyone else has seen them, like the people jumping out of the World Trade Center towers, which I’ve managed to avert my eyes from now for six years almost… 

PS. I officially cry “Uncle” on the silence-from-the-audience thing; I’m neurotic and it never happened - or if it did, it didn’t mean anything. There - happy? 

John,

A quick note to say that although I wasn’t there and stumbled on this quite accidentally, I’m sure there was no silence. It’s all in your imagination!

Reading your posted words, your viewpoint sounds articulate and well-thought out. Censorship IS bad, obviously (see: Nikki Tate’s recent issue with a Saskatchewan school library who banned her book for the use of the word “bazoongas”), but that doesn’t mean that we as a society should inundate our children with terrifying imagery before they are ready. Does it? I don’t think many would disagree.

We protect our very young children. It’s our job and it’s our instinct. We shield their eyes from scenes containing gore, blood, or even a slightly scary monster face in a Disney flick. As a parent, it’s impossible to know when to stop. I suspect that when I’m seventy and my son is thirty-five, I’ll still be clapping my hand over his eyes when something scary comes on TV. When he’s big enough, he can pry my hand away or peek through my fingers. That is, if he really, really wants to. I believe that as a child, however, he’s grateful to be shielded. He wants to believe in the good and the happy and the non-bloody. One day, when he’s older, he’ll want to explore the darker side of humanity. I don’t doubt it, everyone does. It’s part of being human. But he can decide when.

I think the knee-jerk mass-reaction “Censorship is bad” is completely correct. And no one would likely advocate that removal of books or movies from the realm. But there is an equally compelling idea “Desensitizing people to violence and horror is fundamentally unhealthy”. Somewhere, there’s a balance that involves making choices for our families while it’s still our job to do so. I have no idea where the balance lies, I just know that I’m willing to bet that half the adults (at least) who were treated to Tarantino’s latest gore-fest were only pretending to find it entertaining to go along with the crowd. And I’m even more willing to bet that the kids in the audience weren’t exactly lapping it up, and wish perhaps that they could un-see it. And I wish, as a society, that we weren’t so disengaged and “cool” and detached that seeing someone’s limbs being ripped off on film is no longer even particularly surprising.

I love Carrie Mac. I think she’s adorable and funny and a lovely person. But last time I did a reading with her, I had to close my eyes and hum to myself so I didn’t faint during the decapitation scene. I don’t know what this says about me: I’m a wimp? My parents didn’t expose me to violence early enough to desensitize me? It certainly doesn’t say that I think her books should be banned, just that when I personally read them, I need someone to cover my eyes during the scary bits.

I’m sure there was no silence — or rather, if there was, it was the silence of a room full of people absorbing and processing ideas that they probably also on some level believe.

Best,

Karen Rivers