your ashtray is getting rather full

When all is said and done, it is bound to be rather quiet and boring.

I realized something yesterday.

This is a true story.

I received an email from Daniel Kraus, concerning this upcoming panel of speakers at the 2012 Booklist Youth Forum I will be a part of to kick off the American Library Association's Annual Conference in June.

The panel is moderated by Daniel Kraus, author of the book Rotters, which is one of my favorite books from 2011. The topic of the evening is: Men at Work: Guy Writers Talk Guy Readers.

I have an awful lot I could say about that. I may bring some puppets.

It has been more than a decade since Christina Hoff Sommers published her War Against Boys. Although she makes some valid points, I think the conclusions drawn from her work -- and where we have gone since that time in regimenting an expectation of failure when it comes to boys and literacy -- are mistaken and harmful.

But that's not exactly what I realized yesterday.

I realized this:

I am on this panel with Michael Grant, Jon Sciezska, and Daniel Handler.

Am I spelling Scieszka correctly? Nearly every time I see someone post something about him, they spell his name differently.

Maybe he has lots of email aliases.

That is not what I realized, either.

I realized that Michael Grant and Jon Scieszka both have "people" who answer their emails and make appointments for panels and shit like that.

Holy shit.

Not only that, but Daniel Handler wasn't even included on the email at all, even though he was spoken to in the body of the message.

Holy shit again.

Daniel Handler has a fucking INVISIBLE person who answers his email and makes appointments for panels and shit like that.

I am such a nobody!

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exile in eden

This is a true story.

My mother came from Italy.

I was the first in the family born in America.

My family is pretty much entirely Catholic.

Not me.

No.

Even though I write about Catholic stuff quite a bit. Never. No.

I am surrounded by them.

My kids are Buddhists. I am not making that up. Both of them. They have official Buddhist beads and certificates, and shit like that.

That proves it!

I have a godson in the Catholic church. I had to get special clearance, a full body probe, and a microscopic chip that produces searing pain implanted in my brain in order for the Catholic church to grant permission for me to be his godfather.

Because I am not one of them.

But there is a document!

I have kind of exiled myself from the past. Since I have four books out, though, people I have been lost to have found me. It is a remarkable thing.

It's not like I have been hiding or anything. You don't really need to hide when you are invisible.

The last time I saw my godson, he and his mother were moving somewhere far away. He was a baby.

I thought about the kid every day. Seriously. If the chip in my head ever went off, it would have been a sign from the Catholic church that I had to assume the responsibility of nurturing the kid's spiritual development.

Good thing he made it without me!

I could have singlehandedly initiated the collapse of one of the world's great religious movements.

Nobody would want that to happen.

His mom found me about a year ago, maybe more than that, because of Facebook.

I talked to the kid yesterday on the phone.

The kid is not so much a kid anymore. He is a fully-grown man.

It was nice to hear him articulate speech, as opposed to gurgling saliva and throwing up steaming baby formula on me.

I have a lot of questions about history for him.

As an exile, I am fascinated by history.

I will let you know.

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what made this country great

A while back, I mentioned something about a speaking engagement I had coming up in June at the American Library Association's Annual Conference, which will be held in Anaheim, California this year.

I'll be on a panel alongside Michael Grant, Daniel Kraus, Daniel Handler, and Jon Scieszka. The event is going to be a Friday evening gathering, and it is usually one of the most well-attended meetings at ALA. I'll post more details on the panel as June approaches.

At that conference, we are set to have Advance Copies of Passenger.

You know.

The sequel to The Marbury Lens.

I have been reading Passenger again this week, for, like, the 200th time.

I think there are only about three or four people on the planet who've read Passenger. Even my son is going to have to wait until the ARCs come out.

I am not entirely certain what this group of guy writers is supposed to talk about.

A natural assumption would be that we will share intimate stories about the burden of shaving and internalizing suppressed emotions.

If it has anything to do with being a guy, writing, and especially reading, then I will be prepared to put on a rock show.

I want to talk about a paper that was presented before the International Reading Association in 2010 about the panic over boys' literacy underachievement relative to girls. It seems that the majority of our most recent media-fueled attention has tilted toward some erroneous conclusions about boys and how they are genetically predisposed to failure.

This is what we've been teaching boys, after all, for the past 20 years or so.

The paper quotes J. Titus' study on the cultural politics of education (2004): "some learned behaviors can be deeply ingrained and difficult to modify."

It makes an interesting point, and you can bet I will be talking about this IRA paper here in the coming weeks and months.

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nobody would ever take an army of communists without balls seriously

I forgot to tell you.

I am opening a commune.

It will be a commune for artists -- writers, painters, musicians, poets -- my kind of people.

I am not sure if my commune will have electricity or not.

Every night, just after our mystical barbecue ritual, we will sit around drinking Absinthe.

Some of us will probably smoke cigarettes.

You know what's funny?

I kind of like the smell of cigarettes.

I do not smoke. I do not need to smoke. I still hack up streaming wads of lung diarrhea from all those years of driving in the backseat of a Ford Falcon station wagon while my parents smoked like fucking chimneys with all the windows rolled up.

Yeah.

We used to have to "roll" windows.

Can I tell you? I came to an epiphany yesterday.

I am not afraid to admit that I am wrong. Here goes: After all these years, I realize I have been doing everything wrong, wrong, wrong!

Who knew?

That is why I am opening my artists' commune.

I am also not afraid to admit I am a socialist.

Except I am kind of anti-social.

I will do almost anything to avoid going to a "party."

Or a get-together.

I have already received applications for membership at my commune.

I put the applications onto a number-2-pencil Scantron matrix and feed it into my admissions computer.

So far, my computer keeps generating the same form letter response.

The response is this:

No. We regret to inform you that you may not join our artists' commune. You are too much of a douchebag.

The wonders of technology!

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monsters to kill

I write long books.

Dear people who enjoy reading my books: Please. When this one arrives, try to not finish it in one sitting and then bang out an email asking when my next book is going to come out.

This was dropped off on my doorstep yesterday.

It is 536 pages long, the final copyedited version of Passenger, which comes out this October.

This is the copy Liz (chimes!), my editor at Feiwel and Friends, gave me to put on THE STACK.

THE STACK is now up past my knee.

I am not short.

Having worked with more than one major publisher, I can say this now: Each publishing house has its own method and timeline for getting things done.

Maybe a lot of that has to do with the author, I can't say for certain. I have never had to change thousands of words on any manuscript I've ever had turned into a book. In fact, I have a manuscript now that was just recently finished and despite it being over 100,000 words, I honestly believe there is not even one typo in it.

There probably is. Who knows?

In any event, Passenger didn't even get an editorial letter, just a few emails here and there and then notes written by Liz (chimes!) in the margins of pages she sent back to me at the end of summer.

I know some people who write (or receive) editorial letters that are like 20 pages long.

Now that's an editorial letter!

An editorial letter that long had better contain specifics for unraveling the secrets of the universe.

Assuming I could ever get through an editorial letter in excess of 20 pages in length without driving out to the desert and shooting myself in the head, I would probably first have to translate it into boyspeak by putting individual steps on numbered index cards.

Actually, this is what I always have to do with editorial letters.

They tend to be so rambling and holistic, and shit like that.

I am, after all, a boy, and therefore incapable of sitting still and paying attention to more than ONE THING at a time.

[that is a joke. see yesterday's post about brains and shit like that.]

Of course I can pay attention to more than one thing at a time!

You should see me text and drive!

Actually, the family in the crosswalk yesterday should have seen me text and drive.

Poor family.

Natural Selection favors distracted drivers!

Where was I?

So. Now I have to read through this 536-page monster and see all the red marks my favorite copyeditor  used to lasso the mutations of language that bubble to the surface of the simmering cesspool in my distracted brain.

At this point, the manuscript will go pretty seamlessly, like a greased cadaver on a pool slide, into the ARC production, and that will be that.

Oh... and, by the way, to those devoted readers who invariably will read this monster in one sitting: The NEXT book, Winger, will be out about 6 months after Passenger.

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the why chromosome [2]

Probably the most significant reason we began seeing a decline in literacy among boys during the 1980s and 1990s was that we expected that decline in performance to fit our understanding of the way boys' brains worked (or didn't work).

Lowering expectations on a group as an entity is one of the worst (and easiest) things you can possibly do as a teacher, but for some reason, the educational system has embraced this preconception regarding boys and literacy -- and the results have transferred erroneously onto popular culture, art, bookselling, and publishing.

In recent years, due largely to the popularization of theories that began circulating in the 1990s regarding the innate helplessness of boys when it comes to such things as mastering written and spoken language, as well as developing an enjoyment for reading, boys have been erroneously labeled as populationally -- as a culture -- less than literate.

The theory has caught hold and taken off running in education, publishing, and bookselling.

In a study published last July (2011) on neuroscientific analysis of literacy and gender, David Whitehead (English Teaching: Practice and Critique) points to the recent popular generalizations about brains, gender, and literacy which characterize all girls as being multi-taskers who can sit still and listen, and all boys as spatially-oriented whirlwinds who can't focus on more than one thing at a time.

Whitehead says of these assumptions (and he gives plenty of physiological evidence to criticize these generalizations): "At best, they seem misleading, at worst, they seem driven by a commercial imperative."

Among the consequences of the popularization of certain claims are what Whitehead calls "Unwarranted extrapolations":

Understanding that boys' brains have more testosterone than girls should not transfer into language policies that advocate boys should read action novels.

Very recent studies, published in 2009 in Brain and Language, seem to refute the popularly-held idea that girls and boys have significant innate and physiological differences when it comes to language abilities. Author M. Wallentin writes, " ...A careful reading of the results suggests that differences in language proficiency do not exist. Early differences in language acquisition show a slight advantage for girls, but this gradually disappears."

If modern neuroscience can show that gender-specific differences in language processing abilities disappear (by grade 6), and we continue to buy in to the notion that boys don't read, projecting such expectations onto a population of students is likely harmful.

This is probably why I have seen (in my own lifetime) the gradual de-evolution of literacy expectations and performance of boys as a population in public schools.

The harm, according to Whitehead, is that, since the 1990s, teachers and parents (and the broader community) have bought entirely in to the idea that anything appearing in popular media that was remotely "brain-based associated with boys' education had an unassailable empirical legitimacy."

There will be more on this...

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louis asks a rhetorical question

I wanted to talk about popular media and brains today.

I know that there is not too much evidence of brains in popular media, but I have a somewhat radical interpretation of what the popular media's misinformation has done to our beliefs about brains.

I have never eaten brains, by the way.

And all this teasing is actually leading nowhere, because I am going to write about brains tomorrow.

Except for one thing: I rather enjoy the way that Danny Marks' brain works.

He has good taste in books, and he put The Marbury Lens right smack next to one of my favorite writer friends on his Best Of list.

Enjoy this video posted yesterday from Danny Marks' Book Show Book Show:

...and tomorrow, unless something goes wrong with mine, I will talk about brains.

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