30 June 2010

Kalamazoo and waltzing and australopithecines, these are a few of my favorite things


According to my mother, my favorite word at age two was banister. Whenever going down stairs, I had to tell everyone that they had to hold on to the (big inhale to get ready for the word) banister.

A year later, having seen Anne of Green Gables several dozen times, my favorite word became chrysanthemum, mostly because I could spell it and no one else could. When my friends and I played school, I would give spelling tests that included words like cat, dog, no (I was also an expert speller of n-o n-a-p!), and, of course, chrysanthemum. It wasn't until I forced my sister to sit through the movie with me that someone else I knew finally figured out how to spell it. I didn't care that I hadn't the slightest idea what a chrysanthemum was, my ability to spell it clearly proved my superiority to other preschoolers.

There was a very long stretch of time in high school where my favorite words were Kalamazoo, willow, and waltz. My life got especially exciting every summer in high school when I'd go to Kalamazoo for an ice dance clinic, where I'd be working on dances like the Willow Waltz. And seriously, you need to cheer yourself up? Just say Kalamazoo once or twice, and you can't help but smile.

My favorite word since last fall has been australopithecine. I was required to learn all about australopithecines for my Anthropology class last fall, and about the only thing I remember is that australopithecine is really, really fun to say (it may or may not be the case that I remember nothing else because Karisa and I spent the entire semester doing sudoku, crossword puzzles, and making snide comments about how our professor knew nothing about linguistics).

Now comes the fun part: a linguistic analysis of favorite words! Feel free to skip the next two paragraphs if you, for some odd reason, don't want a short linguistics class. Several of my favorite words were my favorites simply because they were long and unusual. Okay, banister isn't super long or super unusual, but pretend you're three. There, now it seems a little more long and unusual. Unless you're a gardener, you don't go around talking about chrysanthemums, and you'd have to be a very single-minded anthropologist to find a way to use australopithecine in a regular conversation.

The second category my favorite words fall into is that of words with letters that are perceived as being interesting. Kalamazoo and waltz both have z in it, and even though that phoneme (or sound) is really frequent in the English language (you say it in houses, dishes, lads, and really most of the plurals out there where the singular form ends in a vowel or a voiced consonant), I for some reason see the letter as being really exciting. As for willow, the consonants are either liquids (l) or glides (w). Not a single stop in the word! Very exciting stuff.

So, what's your favorite word? Is it your favorite because of what it means, or because of how it sounds? Anyone adventurous enough to do their own linguistic analysis of their favorite words?

17 June 2010

Alice in Charge, by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor OR The Joy of Being an Anxiety-Ridden Senior in HS


I was getting a bit slacker-y with my YA lit reviews following my move and subsequent removal from the best public library ever (or rather, one that's better than my home town's public library). However, I made a return to my genre of choice for this week's release of Alice in Charge, the latest in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's Alice series. I've been reading these since fifth or sixth grade, and the last time I was this excited about the newest Alice book was when The Grooming of Alice came out when I was roughly twelve. After that, my tastes shifted to prefer the slightly more contemplative and reflective (and definitely more angsty) books by Sarah Dessen and Megan McCafferty. However, last summer I spent a week or so getting caught up on all the Alice books I'd missed, and I was hooked all over again.

I love the Alice books for the same reasons I love the Betsy-Tacy Series by Maud Hart Lovelace. They follow one main character and a close group of friends from a young age growing up, and as the characters get older, the writing styles get more complex and so do the issues addressed. This gives us a lot of time to see how the characters develop and change, and it also makes you feel like Betsy or Alice are your best friends, and that you've grown up with them, too. Both Betsy and Alice make mistakes, big ones, and that makes it even easier to imagine that you know them. Both series even share a weakness--they tend to be a bit didactic because of their protagonists' screwups. Of course, Betsy doesn't do nearly as much talking about sex as Alice does, and Alice doesn't worry about curling her hair or winning the Essay Contest each year, but they do both spend about 60% of their lives focusing on school dances, so it's really all the same.

Now moving on to this Alice book in particular. Naylor does an amazing job describing the absolute insanity of the first semester of senior year of high school, and she barely even talks about the stress of classes and homework. In fact, Naylor does such an amazing job getting this across that I started to feel anxious and like I should be doing homework just from reading it. From what I remember, this was what initially made me tire of the Alice books. I was plenty stressed enough in real life, so I didn't need to be stressed when I was reading for fun. I was all about escapism. And it appears I still am, only now that I'm no longer in school I'm looking to escape back to that chaos. Reading about Alice's college visits, her panic over leaving home, trying to do all her extracurricular activities so she'd look good when applying to college...it was enough to make me want to take a nap.

I do appreciate the number of controversial issues Naylor tackles; in this book it was racism and white supremacy. I think it's really good to discus these things in YA Lit, and I love that the book's message always advocates tolerance and open dialogue. In fact, Naylor doesn't even insist that the reader agree with Alice. Alice is so open to listening to other people's opinions that she doesn't isolate a reader who disagrees with her. That said, I worry at times that Naylor lets these issues take over the plot. It doesn't always feel like these issues are flowing out of the plot, but rather that they're forced so that Naylor can address the controversy. That's not a terrible thing, but it'd be nicer if there was a little more flow and it seemed more natural.

Honestly, that's my only real complaint. I do wish Naylor would write a little faster (there are three more books coming, but there's only going to be one published each year). Yes, she wants to write other stuff besides Alice books, but I'm looking at this from a purely selfish point of view, and I want to read the end of the series NOW (patience is not my strength, which is why I drove 15 miles yesterday to get to the closest store that had this book in stock).

And finally, I love Patrick Long. And he has red hair. If he and Alice don't end up together forever, the heart of my eleven-year old self will die all over again. Maybe real life couples don't work out, but honestly, fictional couples HAVE to work out. That's the point of fiction. The author can decide these things.

Dear Phyllis Reynolds Naylor,
Please consider the heart and soul of my eleven-year old self when writing the final Alice books. I need Patrick and Alice to end up together.
Regards, Katrine.

08 June 2010

In Memory: Jamie Salé and David Pelletier


Wait, who are they? They died?

Sigh. No, my friends, Salé and Pelletier are alive still. It is rather the heart of my eleven-year old self which has sadly perished. Farewell, heart. When my biographers look back to discover the point at which my heart vanished and any ideals of true love were crushed, they will surely decide that this moment was the turning point (yes, I will have biographers, and yes, I still had a heart until this point. Hush, all of you, I'm in mourning).

Yesterday I was made aware of the fact that Jamie Salé and David Pelletier (otherwise known as the Canadian pairs team from the Olympics who may or may not have been robbed of the gold medal, depending on the state of mind of one Marie-Reine Le Gougne, although either way they were given a set of gold medals) had filed for divorce.

This was not news to me or to anyone else who follows the skating world closely. Rumors have been swirling for quite some time (with good reason, as it appears the couple separated 18 months ago), but particularly since the Olympics. That said, I was perfectly content to deny, deny, deny. The 11-year old inside of me couldn't bear the thought of an end to such a perfect union.

I first discovered the two at 1999 Skate America when they debuted their now-famous Love Story program (that link is to a performance of the same program from two years later--it doesn't have the raw energy the '99 Skate American performance had, but it'll do). It was quite the performance, and Jamie and David went on to have an almost dream season until they just barely missed the podium at the World Championships when Jamie had a meltdown on her side-by-side jumps. It was a downer ending to the season, but they rebounded the next year with an even better program (in my opinion) to Tristan & Isolde (link is to the best performance they had of it all season).

It was during the 2000-2001 season that I really and truly became a fan of the two, and it didn't hurt for my romantic middle school self that there were various articles confirming that they were a romantic item. These rumors had started the year before, but apparently I was too young then to pay as much attention as I do now to skating rumors. Maybe I had more of a life then. Regardless. A skating team? Who had skated to, not one, but two romantic pieces of music for their long programs? Who were young and charismatic and good looking? And even better, David had a French accent! Sa-woooon. Clearly there was nothing not to love about this team, and if David wasn't going to fall in love with me, then I guess it was okay that he fell in love with Jamie. They won the World Championships in 2001, and I squealed gleefully in front of my computer screen, as there wasn't live coverage of it in the US, so I was following along online.

I could tell you about everything that followed--the coaching changes, the Orchid program that they totally should not have dumped, and some rumored trouble in paradise at the 2002 Canadian Championships, but I'm pretty sure none of you care about that, so we'll skip to that whole Salt Lake City Olympic-sized fiasco in 2002. Overnight, my favorite skating team was suddenly all over the newspapers, getting interviewed right and left, and suddenly people decided to give them another gold medal. When they announced that they would be retiring from competitive skating shortly after all this, I was seriously bummed, and thus ended my brief love affair with Jamie and David.

I still, however, followed their pro skating. I met them when they came into town, and I even got to see them skate live (which I had been trying but failing to do for several years). They eventually got married and had a son, and though by then a more realistic 17 years old, I thought this was all the proof I needed that love was true and fate had a hand in everything and we would all live happily ever after.

Sigh.

It would appear that none of this is true, for the two have parted ways. What with the rumors of cheating on Dave's part, I can no longer even dream of falling in love with a blue-eyed, figure skating, hockey playing, French accented man. And thus, with this news, my 11-year old self dies.

I leave you all with a fluff piece from happier days.