Senor Parrot's Perch

My daughter should have been eating her supper, but she had gotten up to wander around the dining room. She saw an open flier from Linens & Things and started flipping through it. She saw a shower radio and really wanted it.

“Why”, I asked.

“Because its water-proof”, she said.

“Well so is a duck. And a duck is better than a shower radio”, I said back. “If you drop a shower radio, it breaks. If you drop a duck, it gets angry and starts quacking at you, but at least its still OK.”

I continued, “And if you throw your shower radio, it hits something and breaks. If you throw a duck, it just flies off. And if you drop your shower radio over the side of your boat it sinks. If you drop a duck it floats”.

She wasn’t convinced yet. I tried to explain to her that a shower radio doesn’t really play the guitar, it just plays songs where someone is playing the guitar. If you set your duck down on the strings of your guitar it sounds a lot like the guitarist from Iron Butterfly. Maybe she had me on that one.

After my 3rd grade daughter’s evening teacher’s conference I took the family out to dinner since it was a bit too late to whip something up and we were in a happy mood after what the teachers had to say. At a booth near us, four teenage girls were sitting to have dinner with each other. So, you know that there was a lot of talking.

Each one of them was talking on a cell phone. Four girls. Four cellphones. No one talking with anyone at the table. I suppose if one had wanted to talk with one of the others they could just call.

I’ll bet you thought that fairies, trolls, goblins and dwarfs were just children’s stories, no speck of truth and for entertainment purposes only? Not so. Once common sights and living alongside humans on this earth’s surface, they have retreated underground, where they have built themselves a great, technologically advanced civilization completely hidden from human knowledge.

And leprechauns? Well, stories get tangled with time and words morph many directions. No, there aren’t really leprechauns hiding their pots of gold at the end of every rainbow, but there is an underground organization called LEPrecon, a crack division of LEP, the Lower Elements Police. And what we simple humans know as leprechauns are really fairies, and over the millenia our knowledge of LEPrecon has evolved into the word and imaginary world of the leprechauns. But the gold – well, yes they do have gold, and plenty of it to be sure, but just not at the end of any rainbow.

So who is Artemis Fowl? A criminal genius with extraordinary mental abilities and only twelve years old. He has discovered the existence of the world of the fairies and he hatches a plan to steal their gold. Aided by Butler, his hulking and huge servant, bodyguard, and only friend, Artemis undertakes this dangerous scheme and …

This book is fun, fun, fun! It is full of surprises and humor. The characters are well developed. Its equal parts James Bond with its great gadgets and mega-criminal, and fairy tale with its mythical beings and magic. Agent Q, meet Foaly, the wise-cracking centaur! The writing is excellent, fast moving, and full of memorable lines. This is a book to own just so you can underline the fun, quotable passages and share them with your friends or use them on your enemies; you may want to keep track of details as the plot unfolds.

This book isn’t brainless, occultish drool where the writer uses magic to get him or herself out of a jam of bad plotting or to indulge in new-age frippery or some wacked-out will-to-power-through-magic, but a complete integration of magic into the rules of the world in which the book takes place. But really, the magic is mostly in the highly advanced and imaginative technology that the fairies have developed. Well, no, really the magic is all in the book that Eoin Colfer has given to us.

I’m behind in my reading, as usual. I had gotten a late start on the woeful tales of the Baudelaire orphans and this summer I had hoped to find the time to read the first 12 books as well as Snicket’s other books before the release of The End. No such luck. Vacations, outdoors fun, and work, a word which here means my own unhappy circumstances involving the activities that I should be doing right at this very minute that require me to poke around into millions of rows of data and arrange it in such a way that people will happily sign a check providing me with enough money to do and to have a few of the things I like.

I just finished book 10, The Slippery Slope. Aptly named, given the moral choices the orphans and their friend Quigley find themselves making in their attempts to stay alive and rescue Sunny. It got me wondering, just why does someone find some choices “wrong”? What is the basis for these assessments? Is right and wrong completely up to the individual, cultural, or are there universal determinants of right and wrong?

I’m looking forward to seeing if, as Snicket continues to conduct his research into the depressing lives of the Baudelaires, these issues are explored further. There are clear political references that he provides, as the Baudelaires struggle with moral and ethical questions, these are clearly all settled for Count Olaf and Esme Squalor, who justify everything they do by saying that it is for “the greater good”. Klaus, Violet and Quigley aren’t sure that this justification is sufficient for action.

Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1989, Isaac Bashevis Singer published his short book The Golem seven years earlier in 1982. The edition I read was illustrated by Uri Shulevitz, a winner of the Caldecott Medal in 1969. The story is set in old Prague, centuries ago and it brims with timeless lessons. Originally written in Yiddish, the author translated the text into English. This book is appropriate for anyone roughly aged 11 through adult reading levels.

Joseph, the Golem, a being created from clay and brought to life by the Cabbalist Rabbi Leib, is, at first, a great help from God, delivering a righteous jew from an unjust court where is being tried for kidnapping and murder. Rabbi Leib is careful to obey the direction and advice he had received from the saint who taught him how to build the man of clay, and he puts the giant clay figure back into sleep.

But humans are quick to rationalize and soon the giant is awakened again and put to work on difficult everyday tasks. As his waking hours stretch on and his own life experiences grow, so does his mind and soul, and so too his own yearnings, and he breaks free from the Rabbi’s control, refusing to obey him or to allow him to rub the name of God from his forehead. Not until the golem falls in love with a simple, kind-hearted servant girl and also develops a taste for wine is he undone, allowing the Rabbi put the creature back to sleep.

This is an amusing tale, full of jewish lore and references to Cabbalist magic. At first I was not impressed with Singer’s style, having expected something different, I suppose, but as I thought more about the story I could begin to see his method paying off, and ended up with a much stronger appreciation. The plot and movement of the story was strong and compelling, and I found myself reaching for it frequently over the three days I took to read it. Go look for this one. I think you’ll like it.

The Golem
by Isaac Bashevis Singer
Illustrated by Uri Shulevitz
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, New York, 1982.

Senor Parrot likes to read and he’s especially nuts about kids books. He frequently refers to himself in the third person. He speaks and writes in English but you might not notice that. His English is sometimes that bad. He�s also not a parrot. His name is Parrot, and that is why he is Senor Parrot. He�s really a macaw and he came to Wisconsin from Mexico. That is why he is Senor Parrot.

Of course this is all a lie.

So what is the truth about Senor Parrot? He’s really a guy in Wisconsin and his name isn’t Parrot and nobody calls him Senor. His name is Daniel Sharp. He loves children’s books and dreams of writing them and of opening a children’s bookstore someday. He read’s all the time and likes to write. Oh, and he came to Wisconsin from Iowa, to Iowa from Nebraska, to Nebraska from South Dakota, and before that he was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota a long, long time ago.

Senor Parrot started out as a parrot in a story Dan made up on the spot for one of his children to entertain her. He has forgotten everything about the story except that Senor Parrot was a parrot who talked to and taunted a scientific expedition that his child was leading in the jungle. Maybe the story will come back to Dan and he’ll write it down this time. In the mean time, Dan likes the character and he decided to use the name here.

Dan would be pleased if you would read and contribute to his blog. Tell me what books you’re reading now, or that you’ve liked, and comment on my reviews and contribute to them.

If you’re an adult, what do you like about children’s literature that still keeps you interested to this day? Do you read aloud to your kids, if you have any? Is there a difference between good read-aloud books and good read-to-yourself books? What do you think that difference is?

If you’re a kid, what are your favorite books? Who are your favorite characters? Who are your favorite writers? Do you have favorite illustrators, you know, the people who draw the pictures?

Other things about me that may prove significant are that I work at a large community college. I used to teach economics there and I still do research about students and student success and I think a lot about what is going on in the world of education today.

I’ve come into contact with many students fresh out of High School and I’m concerned with their futures. Why should I be concerned? Many are so immature and helpless that I fear that they won’t be prepared for the rapid changes taking place in the worldwide economic landscape. Thomas Friedman’s premise in his excellent book “The World Is Flat” is really true, the world is our neighborhood and its getting smaller every day. As far as getting our daily bread is concerned, the competition is fierce and its worldwide, not just in our own local hamlets-unless of course, you’re the voice behind the clown at the drive-through.

I have had students who could text-message and download tunes to their Ipods but couldn’t read a graph. Many were nearly incapable of thinking abstractly or making generalizations from facts or newspaper articles. This was always disappointing to me and I spent a lot of my time teaching them things I had learned in junior high school. These are students who will have to depend on others for their daily bread and not on themselves; if someone won’t hire them and tell them what to do, they won’t be able to take care of themselves. Will those employerss look elsewhere for the labor they hire? Of course, especially if they need workers who can read a graph. Its happening the world over.

So why kids’ literature and why write about it and why promote some of it and ignore the rest? Its because I think that what we read and believe is important. What we read and teach helps form our brains and feeds our imagination. It helps form our view of the world and it helps form our morals and character. Can any of you who have read Dickens forget the impact he has had to this day on our understanding of justice and love and character? Maybe you can, but I’m not able to.

I can still remember a story about the discovery of penicillin from my third grade reader and how it helped me learn to love science, and for a while I studied it in college, before going off into many other directions more to my liking. I also remember one summer reading Karl Marx and the Minor Prophets of the Old Testament. Was it Karl who said “you sell your neighbor for a pair of shoes”? No, it was the prophet Amos. These and many other books turned my interests towards economics, which is what I eventually settled on as my college major. I’m probably the last person you’d consider a marxist, nevertheless, I’m profoundly impressed by his moral vision and desire for economic justice.

So, what we read, what we learn, what we think, and what we believe all have endless impacts on our lives, their directions and their outcomes, and our happiness, too. I want Senor Parrot’s to provide a place to encourage a love for books, reading, thinking, and growing, and to be a help to anyone looking for it- to grow up bright, healthy, imaginative and creative.