CLAIRE, the CLAIRE Blog

Just a mini-rant. I promise.*

Let me state up front that I like LEGOs. I'm in favor of LEGOs. When my daughter was three years old, an astute grandma gave her a big set of LEGO blocks. They didn't have a theme or a movie tie-in; they were just random blocks with a couple of random LEGO people thrown in. They also came in a cool box with a sliding lid that doubled as a LEGO platform, with the little raised circles that LEGOs can bond to.

Genius. My kid played with that toy from age three till about age 13. No joke. Because there was no theme, no model to build, she used her imagination to create whatever she wanted. At age three, she made kitties (kind of weird-looking ones, to be honest). At 13, she was making whole scenes of stories from inside her head.

Later, we did get a couple of the Harry Potter-themed LEGO sets because she was wild about Harry and LEGOs, too. Those didn't have the long-term play value of the original set, but that was okay. I still approve of the idea.

What I don't get is how LEGO Harry Potter figures came to star in their own games. We have the original HP computer games. They're fun. The characters in the games look like Harry and Ron and Hermione. You can be Harry and learn spells and follow the stories. The wizards have more than two expressions on their faces. Fun.

And with the building sets, you can play with LEGO Harry and make your own scenes and stories. Fun.

But how does LEGO Harry branch off into his own animated world? And why does anyone care? I don't want to play a game in which Harry is reduced to a plastic block. And here's why this all came up: I don't get the LEGO movie, better known as The LEGO Movie. (Really? That's the title? Why yes, yes it is.) I love cool animation, whether traditional or computerized; I don't mind hearing Morgan Freeman's voice emerge from an animated figure. But an animated figure that's a representation of a toy figure ... I guess that's too far for my feeble brain to go. It's a layer of metareality I don't really understand, and frankly, I don't like it, either. We already dictate to kids how to play with their toys by making them more and more representational, and thus restrictive. A refrigerator box can be a rocket ship, a race car, a TARDIS, a clubhouse. But a race car is a race car. A LEGO Harry Potter is a LEGO Harry Potter. You can call him something else, but in your heart, you know what he is.

That said, I longed for representational toys when I was a kid. I wanted the "real" playhouse. My TV-fed brain would have eagerly lapped up toy versions of my favorite movie characters. But my imagination was better fed by the generic. And I'm glad now that it was.


And don't even get me started on the novelization of the film of the toys that don't represent anything real. And yeah, it's on the New York Times Best Seller List.

*SIGH*

*Yeah, I know. Promise broken. Sorry.

Fun Friday: Why Judy Sings It Best

Last month, you may remember (or not) that I wrote a gratitude post every Thursday to explain what I love about the writing life. Now that we've charged headlong into the holiday season, I'm going to share a bit of Christmas cheer every Friday of December. Yes, I said Christmas cheer, not holiday cheer. That's not because I don't honor Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Diwali, or Secular Commercial Month When You Plant a Tree Your Living Room and Snarl at the Nice Folks at Target. Those are all legitimate seasonal traditions too. But I grew up with Christmas, so that's what I'm celebrating.

Having invoked the phrase Christmas cheer, I may now confuse the issue by championing the original version of one of the most beautiful modern Christmas songs, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." If you don't know the words (really?), here they are:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year, all our troubles will be out of sight
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the Yuletide gay
Next year, all our troubles will be miles away

Once again, as in olden days, happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us will be near to us once more

Someday soon, we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.
(music and lyrics by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane)

Sound melancholy? Yeah. It is. The song was written for the 1944 film Meet Me in St. Louis. Judy Garland sings it to little sister Margaret O'Brien after the family learns that they'll soon be leaving not only their beloved St. Louis home, but also all their friends and the man Judy loves. So, yeah. She's sad.

This song perfectly captures the melancholy that often accompanies Christmas as well as the hope that things will get better. Never mind that Garland's beautiful, heartfelt rendition prompts Margaret O'Brien to burst into tears and knock down her snowmen in a fit of grief. No one can sing a song like Judy--just an opinion, but hey, I'm also right--and it galls me that we more often hear this hokey, cheerified version of her classic, which looks like this:

Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Let your heart be light
Next year, all From now on, our troubles will be out of sight
Have yourself a merry little Christmas
Make the Yuletide gay
Next year, all From now on, our troubles will be miles away

Once again, Here we are as in olden days, happy golden days of yore
Faithful friends who are dear to us will be gather near to us once more

Someday soon, Through the years we all will be together
If the fates allow
Until then, we'll have to muddle through somehow Hang a shining star upon the highest bough
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.

I'm all for Christmas glee, but not everything about Christmas is happy. It's an emotional time that often is tinged with wistful thoughts. I love the ambiguity of the original song, and again I say, nothing can touch Garland's tremulous vocals. If you've never watched this scene, do it now:




And have yourself a merry little Christmas.


Read more about this holiday classic here.

What's a "New Adult"?

cartoon (c) 2012 CM Caterer

Sorry, blogfrogs, but I'm behind the times. I've only recently heard about a new, frankly dorky genre called New Adult. But it's been around awhile, according to this interview from 2009. Let me state upfront that I am not dissing St. Martin's or Georgia McBride, who conducted the interview. In fact, it was helpful to me. I do bemoan my own lameness in not recognizing the NA genre before now.

Be all that as it may, I reiterate my opinion that creating yet another literary genre is wearisome. A writing friend of mine suggested that NA makes grown-ups feel better about reading what's essentially still YA. Maybe so. But I would suggest we all get over it and just read, I don't know, books.

I read and enjoy YA, but I also recognize that it's something of a marketing ploy. To Kill a Mockingbird did quite well for many years, thank you, as a book for adults. It was published in 1960, before the YA genre existed. And yet, sometimes now it's discussed as a YA book because it has a 9-year-old protagonist.  "People tend to dismiss books in which the centerpieces are children or young adults," author Anna Quindlen wrote on the occasion of the book's 50th anniversary. And by "dismiss," we mean, "throw it in the YA category." Doing that will certainly turn a lot of people off a book--people who think YA is lightweight fiction all about teenagers and their romances with werewolves and vampires. But it also will draw a certain audience to the hot young thing that is YA fiction.

Ditto Marcus Zusak's The Book Thief. In Australia, the novel was shelved with the adult fiction. But U.S. publishers didn't dare miss out on the chance to paste a YA sticker on it. Yes, the protagonist is young. Does that automatically make a book YA?

I think that's what's happening with the New Adult genre. The exploits and growing pains of twentysomethings aren't, apparently, the stuff of Real Adulthood. (That's the next genre coming down the pike, I guess.) No one, the market seems to be saying, is going to care much about what happens to people this age, so we'd better shut them off in their own genre where no one else has to look at them.

The life of a twentysomething doesn't have to be seen through a myopic lens that can't encompass the greater society. They're adults. Let their stories be told through adult books. I"m not trying to diss YA, but why extend its reach beyond its boundaries? YA does reach an adult audience, but some adults simply won't read a young adult title because "it's for kids." There comes a point when a book can graduate out of YA and just be shelved with everything else.

Shoehorning New Adults into their own genre is just a way of saying, You're not ready to play with the big kids yet. You know what? I think they are.

More on this topic: The Guardian weighs in

Tell me: Do you like the idea of a new genre? Or is it lame city?


Don't forget to get in on the goodies at the Countdown to Pub Day Party! Details about this month's giveaway are right here.