First Page Excerpts from Signal #86, May 1998 [please, note that italics and other formats are not produced in this excerpt] _The Signal Poetry Award 1998_ BOB BARTON & LISSA PAUL The Signal Poetry Award for work published during 1997 has gone to Bad, Bad Cats by Roger McGough (Viking). The winner has been chosen by readers in Canada. The booklist appears on page 100. THE WINNER Unanimous decision: Bad, Bad Cats by Roger McGough. We agreed with the unsolicited judges, Lissa's sons Matthew, ten, and Jeremy, eight, who participated from the beginning. If we'd chosen anything else, the children threatened to report us to the Cats' Protection League. Matt and Jeremy got away with just naming the winner. We are responsible for explaining why we chose it over other books eligible this year. Midnight. A knock at the door. Open it? Better had. Three heavy cats' mean and bad. With this short sharp opening Roger McGough lifts offend we are transported smartly across a landscape of wordplay, parody, prosody, limericks, chants, running gags (in the form of self-help lists) and concrete poetry. From the initial 'Cats' Protection League' sequence, through an ironic look at lyric poetry ('Waxing Lyrical') to the final 'Carnival of the Animals', McGough is both funny in the broad defiant manner of playground humour (perfect for the elementary-school set) and intelligent. The poems are rooted in the anarchic wordplay of street games and in the more formal traditions of English literature, with special nods to Wordsworth and Ted Hughes. The 'Cats' Protection League' sequence joins the company of poetic cats with secret lives: Christopher Smart's 'My Cat Jeoffry', T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. McGough's cats are mavens in the underworld of protection rackets. They hint darkly at fates worse than that of the nursery kitten who ended up 'at the bottom of the well'. Lissa's children took the 'Mafia Cats' to heart at once, and began reciting ominously at odd moments: We always wear shades . . . ************************************** Having to Read to Learn MARGARET MEEK At no time in the past has there been such a degree of concern, as now, about children learning to read. Like 'information', literacy has become a commodity: something to be acquired for effective use. 'Information books' are mentioned in most official documents about children's reading, although the nature of this kind of reading is never adduced with any specificity. Like children's literature, information books are reading matter. It is more important now to estimate their relevance to a stage of development than to discuss the nature and form of the contents. It was this assumption -- that texts developed for the young are a kind of neutral substance to which reading is addressed -- that made me look at how authors and illustrations make books for the young in terms of their textuality, what they wanted readers to do as they learned to read. I decided that there are lessons that can be learned only by reading beyond the didactics of 'direct teaching'. For a long time I suspected that this is also true of the discourses of school subjects. Pupils are expected to read textbooks not only for the facts but also as one way to learn how to write answers in examinations. Just how, exactly, young people make sense of information books is still something of a puzzle. Is it different from reading newspapers, for example? Does narrative, common to all subjects, have a specific influence on learning beyond the conventions of subject presentation? Evidence is lacking that this is the case. I still believe that we have a great deal to learn about how children make sense of texts, yet they undoubtedly do so beyond the employment of unfamiliar skills that are often taught apart from any direct use of them. My preliminary findings come in Information & Book Learning. However, before I had properly begun my inquiries into the nature of book learning, I was already overwhelmed by the range and variety of information texts available to everyone. Every year I seemed to become more illiterate, certainly less knowledgeable, although the amount I read increased rather than diminished. I knew that children and students who take pleasure in reading about what interests them read more out of school than their elders are inclined to give them credit for. How could I take account of, let alone encompass in a study, their manifold preferences, interests and skills when my reading tastes do not . . . ************************************** C.Walter Hodges: Word Artist ELAINE MOSS I went down to Lewes in Sussex to meet Walter Hodges on 19 March 1998, the first day of his ninetieth year, a celebratory occasion. Although I had seen a letter of his, full of warm feelings exquisitely expressed in his immaculate handwriting, I was quite unprepared for the scholarly charm of this prolific illustrator -- and writer. As spry and energetic as they come, he had, in fact, walked from his enchanting part-sixteenth-century house to the station to meet me -- but we had missed one another. Back he came by taxi, jumping out, full of apologies but eager for the fray, grey hair bouncing on his forehead over light- framed spectacles. Illustrators, in my past experience of talking with creative people, are usually less articulate than authors. But here was a man for whom line and word were of equal importance and who, much to my surprise because he is art-trained and has been much in demand as both artist and designer, said more than once that if anything he felt at greater ease with words than with illustration. 'Basically I enjoy writing, I feel at home with writing much more than I do with drawing, which was always difficult for me. I had to work very hard with drawing but writing comes quite naturally.' From Dulwich College, at the age of sixteen , he went to Goldsmiths' College of Art where he trained to be a commercial artist, 'working to a trade', as he emphasized, adding with a twinkle that 'today this is known as graphic design and is considered highly distinguished!' But he found working for an advertising agency irksome, so became a freelance doing occasional line drawings and covers for Radio Times from 1931 over the next forty years; there he was one of a group of celebrated artists such as Eric Fraser, Edward Ardizzone and Ronald Searle -- 'what a brilliant lot. I learned so much from that experience, though I hated the time scale: commission on Thursday, finished work by the following Tuesday morning at the latest.' Hodges then went on to talk about illustration and why, in his opinion (a very modest self-assessment always), he is not an illustrator in the accepted sense. 'To be an illustrator you must be a popular artist who works for a great public and has a style to his work which is instantly recognizable. Except for comic artists, cartoonists and caricaturists I don't think illustrators exist today.' He admires greatly the work of . . . ************************************** Adventures among the Midrashim JAN MARK In an unguarded moment I once remarked to David Lloyd of Walker Books that I should like to see a particular artist illustrate the life of God. 'You of course would write it', said David with a light laugh. I replied that I thought it had been pretty comprehensively covered already, but for the next five years, every time I set foot in the building I was greeted with cries of 'When are you going to do God for us?' I perceived at length that the man was in the most profound earnest, and I personally had no objections to doing God, but very rooted objections to doing again what had been done before, many times. There seemed to be only one way to proceed. Instead of taking stories out of the Bible and retelling them I would take the stories out of the Bible and retell what was left. What I wanted to make clear to anyone who read the result was that this was not my 'version' but an account which drew exclusively on existing sources -- albeit unfamiliar ones -- so that anyone querying a particular gloss could be directed to the original; to which end I spent the best part of a year in the Oriental Studies section of the Bodleian Library studying the Midrash Rabbah. Like ballet dancing, the pain should never show. To produce a text of around fifteen thousand words I had to read several millions. This is an opportunity to share the pain, which was not in the reading but in the reduction. The working title was God -- the Novel, but the implication that this was a spin-off from God -- the Movie rendered it unusable. The final title, God's Story, referred to the guiding principle throughout, that whatever form the finished work took it would be the narrative thread of the Old Testament from God's point of view rather than man's. Biblical retellings tend to favour the human point of view, which is all very well in a narrative context, but from time to time runs into trouble when engaging -- or failing to engage -- with the inescapable conclusion that many of those involved behaved in a way that was indefensible from any angle. The Patriarch Jacob may have wrestled with an angel and founded a dynasty but he was nevertheless a compleat con-artist. Joseph, whose story is usually lifted out of its matrix, inevitably brings to mind the unfortunate phrase 'smug git', as admirably evinced by David Parkins's drawing of Jacob's twelve sons. David's own guiding principle, incidentally, summed up the whole enterprise for both of us: . . . ************************************** Books about Children's Books 1997 SHEILA RAY In the 1960s there was much discussion about the need to set up a centre for children's literature in Britain, to provide a focal point for the developments then taking place in publishing and book provision for children. An article in Growing Point by John Rowe Townsend(1) and papers given by J.A.B. Townsend of the British Library and Brian Alderson at a Library Association Conference(2) are documentary evidence of this. Thirty years later we still have no centre but we do have a series of small organizations of proven or potential excellence. The varied nature of these will emerge during this review of the books about children's books published in 1997. One of the original reasons for this interest was the emergence in the 1960s of new writers. An important landmark was the publication of Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen (1960) and it is with Alan Garner's The Voice that Thunders that I want to begin this survey. Produced between 1968 and 1996 for a variety of audiences in different parts of the world, the essays and lectures assembled in this collection are arranged in a logical sequence, providing a more powerful account of the influences that have shaped this author and his work than any conventional autobiography could do. The first essay describes his upbringing and how he became a writer, the last deals with his recently published adult novel, Strandloper. I reached the final page feeling that I had been given a privileged insight into Garner's mind; this is my book of the year, a jewel in the crown, particularly so as few of the essays are easily accessible in their original form. Another significant book of 1997 is Opening the Nursery Door, a set of essays by various hands, edited by Mary Hilton and her colleagues at Homerton College, Cambridge(3). In 1986 a shoebox, containing a collection of books and cards created in the eighteenth century by an English vicar's wife to aid her in teaching her own children the curriculum of the day, came to light in the United States. A description of its contents to an audience in Cambridge aroused immediate interest, and in the first essay Shirley Brice Heath communicates the excitement that must have been felt by her first listeners. I don't know what brief was given to the other contributors to Opening the Nursery Door, which looks at the role of women as educators of children between 1600 and 1900, but as an entity the book works remarkably well. . . . ***************************** © The Thimble Press, 1999 For further information about Signal, please, contact The Thimble Press, Lockwood, Station Road, Woodchester, Stroud, Glos. GL5 5EQ England phone: 01453 87 3716; fax: 01453 87 8599