Midwestern cow college

I'm not a foodie at all, so I was unfamiliar with Anthony Bourdain until I saw an episode of Top Chef (season 2, the one where he mocked Mike's "Flintstonian execution" of a dish). Last week I'd just checked out No Reservations, and was planning to read it that night, when I saw a paperback of the revised edition of Kitchen Confidential for $1.00 in a book sale. So I bought it, read it, liked it, and started The Nasty Bits, a collection of his essays and articles.
In one of them, he refers to "Midwestern cow colleges", which is second only to "Flintsonian execution" in my list of favorite Bourdain phrases. See, I went to a Midwestern cow college, though usually we called it a "land-grant university". Same thing, though.

Peter Sis in a gossip rag

I can't tell you how strange it is to see Peter Sis's The Wall in Us magazine. Apparently, the US staff asked "experts at NYC's McNally Robinson" to recommend books for kids and adults, and this is one that they chose.
Mind you, I'm not criticizing the choice - I thought The Wall was quite good, and I hope it wins an award next month. It's just that I can't wrap my mind around seeing Peter Sis mentioned in US magazine!

omg! fanfic!!

A few weeks ago, I was doing a web search for something entirely different, and I happened to stumble on a long (over 100,000 words) fanfic (don't click on it if you don't like slash, which it turned out to be. Again - not what I was searching for!) about Miles Vorkosigan. As I've mentioned, I'm not a Miles fan - but the story also starred Gregor, and I do like Gregor, so damned if I didn't read all 100,000 words. And then, a few nights later, the 100,000-word sequel.
So now I've gone from avoiding fanfic entirely, to being fascinated by it. I still don't read much of it - really, very little that's not based on Bujold's books - and I skip right past anything that's capitalized or punctuated like my title today. I've been sticking to fanfiction.net, because I can't believe how much fanfic is there. There are categories I'd expect (a gazillion Harry Potter and Tolkien fanfics), but also some I wouldn't. I mean, there's Little House on the Prairie fanfic! And some is rated for adults! I can't bring myself to read any of it, because - however fictionalized the Little House books might have been, those were real people, for heaven's sakes. My SO and I spent about half an hour just looking at the different categories, and marveling at how much was there, without reading anything at all. It's surreal.

Excitements at the Chalet School

I was reading Elinor Brent-Dyer's Excitements at the Chalet School tonight (which doesn't live up to its title, btw), and thought to look at the cover art. As I've mentioned before, I'm not terribly visual, and I have to remind myself to look at images instead of words.
It turned out that this image was fascinating. There is a performance in Excitements, but it's a panto of Aladdin. So why are they dressed in coolie hats and classical tutus? Why are two dancers en pointe? It's often unfair to criticize book jackets too closely, because often the illustrator didn't have access to the text. But here, I can - and did - find the exact paragraphs that the cover is meant to illustrate.
It turns out that the coolie hats and the odd chinoiserie are Brent-Dyer's fault. Why on earth set Aladdinwith a Chinese background? No idea, but she did. But the illustrator took several characters off the stage for the scene on the cover, and made the Chorus (the ones in the coolie hats) have a very Balanchinian hip thrust to match their pointed front feet.
Brent-Dyer, with her usual clarity about ballet, described how the ballet dancers "swirled in a mazy dance." Clearly, her ballet dancers are not really ballet dancers - in The Chalet School in the Oberland (1952), Brent-Dyer gets quite enthusiastic about having two girls in the school who have actually had dance training. But they wouldn't still be there in this book. So how did Chaletians - even ones from the finishing branch of the school - wind up en pointe in the illustration? In a school where no one dances seriously at all, let alone en pointe? In dance clothes that not only don't match the panto's theme, but also would have been a bit daring for schoolgirls performing in public in Switzerland at that time?
Well, other authors were writing about ballet and horses by the late 1950s, because the market for school stories was dwindling (or was it? Check out Rosemary Auchmuty's A World of Girls and A World of Women, if you're curious about other reasons that publishers might have been less willing to publish books about all-girl schools).
So I suspect that the publishers - or the illustrator - saw that the panto included a ballet, and got excited. Even though the book really isn't about the ballet, or even the panto, the illustrator drew ballet dancers. I imagine there were some disappointed readers who'd bought the book for its cover!

emphasis on the wrong syllable

I've been enjoying this website lately. It has very short audio clips from quite a few children's authors. In each clip, the author tells how his or her name is pronounced. I'd mastered Scieszka, de Paola, Riordan and Patron years ago (or months, in Riordan's and Patron's cases), so I thought this would be agreeable filler for me. I clicked on a few authors whose books I enjoy: David Lubar, Tamora Pierce, etc. Turns out I've been mispronouncing some of these names! Sorry, Tamora Pierce!
Of course, my new knowledge will only serve to make me more pretentious. (That's why I avoid the word "forte" in spoken conversation - unless I'm with the few, the merry few, the band of brothers and sisters who pronounce it correctly).