My new favorite bar in New York

Because they carded me tonight.

The Mozart Season rises again

Do you know about the Phoenix Award? I have to admit, shamefully, that I did not -- until tonight. Tonight, Virginia Euwer Wolff was named the recipient of the 2011 Phoenix Award for her glorious novel, The Mozart Season.

Could there ever be a better reason for giving a prize than this one? Here is the citation:

The Children's Literature Association Phoenix Award is presented annually to the author of a children's or young adult book, originally published in English twenty years earlier, that did not win a major award at the time of its publication. The award recognizes works of high literary merit and lasting significance.

Jinny Wolff is almost pathologically modest, so I will crow on her behalf. The Mozart Season is a book that bears reading and re-reading. (So great was my respect for her novel that I'd clean my apartment on druggy St. Mark's Place -- vacuum even! -- before I'd allow myself to open her manuscript and read her sentences.) Read it if you have a chance.

Hats off to the 2011 Children's Literature Association committee for their far-sighted choice; three cheers for the 17-year-old boy who composed that stunning violin concerto; and kudos to the brilliant Virginia Euwer Wolff for writing a book that will rise again and again.

Poetry Friday: What's truly English?

My walk to work takes me through Central Park. It's like walking through a picture book: dog-walkers, joggers, school children, the turning of the seasons. I passed a host of golden daffodils this morning and thought: Shall I use Wordsworth's well-worn chestnut for Poetry Friday today? Nah. Who can bear to read that one again.

Then came to mind "Oh, to be in England, Now that April's there!" a poem I once had by heart but which now mercifully is gone from memory.

No to Browning, no to Wordsworth, but England seemed to be in the air. Hence the below, from that great unsung Irish laureate, Spike Milligan:

TEETH

English Teeth, English Teeth!
Shining in the sun
A part of British heritage
Aye, each and every one.

English Teeth, Happy Teeth!
Always having fun
Clamping down on bits of fish
And sausages half done.

English Teeth! HEROES' Teeth!
Hear them click! and clack!
Let's sing a song of praise to them --
Three Cheers for the Brown Grey and Black.

Thanks again to the brilliant anthologist Wallace Tripp, in whose Marguerite, Go Wash Your Feet! I first found this poem.

Poetry Friday: Missing Bologna

Yesterday was the end of the Children's Book Fair in Bologna. Many have waxed lyrical about the beauties of the place, the bounty of the food, the flowing of the wine, the vaulting of the porticos. So I won't spend too much time on those. What I miss: the hardware store with its smaller-scaled Italian household goods; the candy/jam/grappa shop where I would have bought Easter chocolate; the mermaids; the waiters; the vacuum-packed parmigiano from Tamburini.

But to be honest, what I miss even more is the community. Many is the international dinner where you are seated next to someone whose language you do not share. It's hard to communicate, even if you're doing business in common. So what do you do? If you're very lucky, you're at a dinner where the guests sing or declaim or recite in their own language. Does it matter if you don't understand the words? It does not. What matters is the tone, the sound, the feeling, the surprise.

I hosted a dinner once where, after antipasta and pasta and carne and insalata and dolci and caffe and vino bianco e rosso and of course aqua minerale (gazata o non-gazata), I asked the participants if they would grace us with a little rhyme from their own country. It doesn't take much for Europeans to come up with poetry. We went around the table and we each recited a nursery rhyme. Some of the rhyming patterns were shared, country to country. Mostly we didn't understand the Swedes and Finns, but we all understood that we'd reached deep into ourselves to find first the cadence and then the words of an old rhyme. This was mine:

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross
To see a fine lady upon a white horse
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes
She shall have music wherever she goes.

When we're next in Bologna, what will be yours?

Poetry Friday: Wasn't today the quintessence of Just- spring?

in Just-

spring when the world is mud-

luscious the little

lame balloonman

whistles far and wee

and eddieandbill come

running from marbles and

piracies and it's

spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer

old balloonman whistles

far and wee

and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's

spring

and

the

goat-footed

balloonMan whistles

far

and

wee

-- E. E. Cummings

(And yes, I'm daring to use the capitals in his name: http://www.gvsu.edu/english/cummings/caps.htm)

The Bunny is coming out of hibernation

Soon, soon.

Eloise at the Library

Once there was a 6-year-old who lived not far from Central Park. She had a dog that looked like a cat and a turtle named Skipperdee. Her mother was mostly absent. Her nanny drank. She skibbled around New York like she owned the place. But there was one marble edifice whose door she was not allowed to darken: She was shut out of the New York Public Library.

That's why I was so delighted to see that the red carpet was rolled out this weekend at the NYPL for Hilary Knight, the man who created those perfect black, white, and red drawings of Eloise, the eternal bad girl. Hilary was named a NYPL Library Lion of 2009. He donated his papers -- the notes, sketches, and biographical outpourings of an artistic lifetime -- to the Library's collection on November 2 of this year, just a day after his 83rd birthday. When I opened the Style section of the New York Times today, there was Hilary in his impeccable black tie with a gorgeous crimson sash, taking up his rightful position as a Library Lion.

But where was Eloise? Oh, she's in the children's collection now, now that it's safe to have her there, nestled among Gossip Girl and Heather Has Two Mommies, fifty-four years after her conception. But when Eloise was first released by Simon & Schuster in 1955 Anne Carroll Moore, the redoubtable head of the library's Office of Work with Children, deemed her unworthy. Not because the book wasn't a good book, nor because it was "for precocious grown-ups," as Kay Thompson so brilliantly subtitled her work, but because it was a good book for bad children. And Miss Moore sanctioned only good books for good children. (Which is why Margaret Wise Brown's work didn't merit a place at the NYPL, either. Eloise, as always, was in the best company.)

All this I learned when I went on a hunt for original editions of Eloise, Eloise in Paris, Eloise at Christmastime, and Eloise in Moscow in 1998. That was the year Kay Thompson died, and her heirs felt that it was time to reissue all the Eloise books -- three of which Kay had decided, pretty much on a whim, to put out of print. My job was to match the reissues as closely as possibly to the original printings. I thought, maybe, there might be a few first editions squirreled away in the annals of the library. But did I find a first edition? No. Did I find any edition? Not one.

The Library had never added Eloise to their collection. She did not exist in the card catalog, on the shelves, or skittering through the hallways. (The irony is that she was in the Brooklyn Public Library's collection, but could not be found in any Manhattan branch. I don't think Eloise ever set foot in Brooklyn in her six-year-old life.) I ended up buying first editions on eBay, and Hilary and I worked on matching the new printings to those (though he liked the second printings of most of the Eloise titles better, but that's another story).

It was only after the resurgence of Eloise in the late 1990's and early 2000's that the NYPL finally and added these seminal New York books to its shelves. And now, the library will have the Eloise archive, too. Lucky them!

Here's the thing of it:
Saying no to Eloise is not allowed.

Oooooh I absolutely love a happy ending.