Listen up, Readers!

One of the fun things about having a new book come out is that you learn about new media. Recently I received this email invitation:

"Join our collection so that students and teachers can hear from you when reading your books. You don't need to have a difficult name to participate—just a fun message to help readers get a sense of who you are."

To hear how your favorite fellow authors give their messages their own personal touch, see the entire collection of over 1,300 name pronunciations here.


I did record my own name to be posted soon. But first I took a few minutes to listen to the recordings of some of the Hamline faculty. Did you know that one is named after a game show host and when another one leaves a phone message people sometimes think that two girls have called?

Now I invite any of you out there with books to record your name, too. Or when you truly deserve a break from writing, check these recordings out.

TeachingBooks is an online database of multimedia resources about books and authors and is used in over 26,000 schools, reaching 13+ million students - pretty cool and a wonderful resource.

WHAT'S IN A NAME

For over a year now I've been planning to record my name on the teacher's guide author name pronunciation website (no kidding!) My name has plagued me ever since my first book. You see I was born Lisa Clough and then decided to change it to Jahn-Clough when I was eleven. Listen to the audio for the whole story: http://www.teachingbooks.net/pronunciations.cgi

The thing about the recording is this: 1. I needed to call from a landline. I gave up my landline when we moved to Savannah, and I have no friends in this town who have one (it's a transient place). So finally I got Ed to let me into his office one Sunday afternoon to use the phone there. 2. I need complete privacy for such a self-centered kind of recording--speaking on the phone to myself is not typical behavior. So I had to ask Ed to wait in the hallway, and still I know he could hear me. gag. 3. The recording time allotted is 3 minutes. I wrote mine out and practiced (just like a lecture)--it was a little over 1 minute. Turned out to be exactly 1:18 by the time I erased and re-recorded it ten times and finally did one acceptable. Fine. Or so I thought. 4. My big mistake was not to listen to all the others first. I'd listened to some a while back but had not remembered the average length. Turns out most of the authors on the site say all they need to in an average of 25-50 seconds. The rare few over one minute are long and tedious in comparison. Mine is now in that category. gag. Plus the sound of my own voice is excruciating. This is a hard lesson in cutting for me.

All this said. the site is a quirky kind of time-kill. Perfect for a Sunday morning. I suggest listening in to your favorite children's authors tell you a bit about their name. (some of your fine Hamline faculty are on there, too!) We all have interesting little tid-bits about our names, so find your favorites and then plan your own recording. However to save embarrassment I recommend that you keep it under 60 seconds. You can even try writing it out here!

once again the website is: http://www.teachingbooks.net/pronunciations.cgi

Brown Bear, Brown Bear, Who Owns the Means of Production?

The headline speaks for itself:

Board confuses children's author, Marxist when excluding schoolbook

In an incredibly freakish coincidence the children's book writer Bill Martin, Jr, shares the same name as another person, and this person wrote a book called Ethical Marxism: The Categorical Imperative of Liberation, and, well:

In their haste to sort out the state's social studies curriculum standards, the [Texas] State Board of Education recently tossed children's author Martin, who died in 2004, from a proposal for the third-grade section. Board member Pat Hardy, who made the motion, cited books he had written for adults that contain "very strong critiques of capitalism and the American system."

It's obvious that Martin is hiding some subversive tendencies. (Red bird, red bird!) Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See? is, at heart, a meditation on the power relations immanent in the authorial "Gaze." As one animal controls the gaze, he controls the narrative and constructs and defines identity for the "Gazed-At." The story proceeds in a stunning chain in which each animal gets to be both the "Gazer" and the "Gazed-At," a dialectic dance that seems to subvert the dominant narrative but really reifies it. It seems at first that Martin intends to expose the inevitability of participation in this eternal narrative, since the Gaze-discourse leads eventually to The Teacher. But Martin doesn't stop here--at the end the children topple the teacher/power structure/hegemon, and, instead of being products of the narrative, are shown to actually produce it themselves.

Brown Bear was obviously written to incite revolution, and I'm surprised it took anyone so long to realize it. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, will there be enough room, indeed.

I'm glad Texas is looking out for threats to capitalism, though this totally destroys my plan to write Llama Llama Bourgeois Mama.