Thoughts for Your Weekend

Hopefully this weekend you are able to savor your coffee (or tea) slowly while sitting in one place instead of while you're driving to work or booking it across campus. Perhaps you'll even indulge in a stronger drink. Whatever beverage you choose to relax with, take the time to consider the following events, publications, and links.

• There will be a symposium titled "California Indian Oral Tradition and the Land" taking place at SDSU Tuesday, November 5th. If you've enjoyed hearing about the intersections of children's lit and Indigenous lit (Columbus Day blog, memory in Rabbit-Proof Fence blog), or if you've been interested in the interactions between narrative and place, you should consider attending. The symposium will take place in the Parma Payne Goodall Alumni Center from 10am-5pm and is free. 
• Neil Gaiman fans: Back in August Waterstones Oxford along with Oxford Playhouse hosted an evening with Neil Gaiman and Phillip Pullman. Thankfully they recorded it! You can download a podcast of the discussion. Gaiman also gave a talk earlier this month for The Reading Agency in London. You can read and watch the full speech here. 
• Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are was published in fall, 1963 making the book 50 years old! To celebrate the occasion a number of our favorite children's lit scholars have blogged about the book. Read posts by Phil Nel, Betsy Bird, Julie Walker Danielson, and Travis Jonker. I was tickled by the visual homages to Where the Wild Things Are in Bird's post. 
• Clementine Beauvais wrote an indignant blog post titled "The Argument from Parenthood." She addresses the troublesome phenomenon of parents defending problematic texts at academic conferences for the sole reason that their children enjoyed the text under discussion. Hmm, I didn't know this happened... 
• I also chuckled quite a bit while reading Beauvais's post "The Post-Doc Complex" in which she discusses the absurdity she's stumbled into upon finishing her PhD. Claiming she can now identify with Britany Spears' liminal state in 2001 of "not a girl, not yet a woman," Beauvais laments, "All I need is grants/ For conferences in France/ While I’m in-between… All I need is more/ Free access to JSTOR."