![]() ![]() ![]() Michael Thomsen, author of Levitate The Primateĭavid Moscovich writes flash fiction and performs his texts both live and on the radio, fragmenting, ricocheting, and refurnishing language until it meets its own devolution. ![]() Moscovich is a daring writer, and this book, both preposterous and beautiful, is an unusual demonstration of talent.” “A wild and enlivening collection of stories that capture the comedy, chaos and uncertainty of living as an alien in a place just beyond one’s understanding. Set in Southern Japan, it is a celebration of the beauty of misunderstanding and the inadvertent poetry of bad grammar. David Moscovich’s new book, You Are Make Very Important Bathtime (JEF Books Publishing), is about an expatriate in a foreign land and his failure to navigate the awkward seas of extreme culture clash. ![]()
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![]() “And she went back to her childhood and took the name of an imaginary friend, Clifford, and gave it to the dog.” 3. “Norma said, ‘Well, that’s a stupid name for a dog like that,’” Bridwell told NPR in 2012. Initially, Bridwell called his giant dog Tiny-but his wife, Norma, didn’t think that was right. Clifford is named after an imaginary friend. ![]() But Scholastic called just three weeks after he sent in the manuscript and ended up publishing Clifford the Big Red Dog in February 1963. ![]() After all, he’d never written anything before. “I never thought the book would see the light of day,” he told Boston magazine in 2012. One editor finally suggested that Bridwell create a story to go with his drawings of a little girl with pony-like dog (as a kid, Bridwell had wanted a dog he could ride).īridwell wrote the story in three days in 1962. Norman Bridwell was told over and over again that he was never going to make it as an illustrator his art just wasn’t good enough. Bridwell at the Clifford The Big Red Dog 50th Anniversary Celebration. ![]() ![]() ![]() I Must Have Bobo! restricts its text to dialogue and as children learn the text they can indulge in the gleeful pleasure of repeating the protagonist Willy’s simple but emphatic words. As my children (two and four years of age) quickly familiarized themselves with I Must Have Bobo! the book’s charm and immediacy became apparent. While an adult reader may be tempted, as I was, to lazily conflate complexity with quality, a clean minimalist visual text can assist younger children in accessing a narrative more autonomously. ![]() The page design could occasionally benefit from more balance between the negative space of the page and the illustrations’ carefully considered spatial dynamics and measured use of colour but it’s hard to begrudge more attention being drawn to the lovely, warm ivory paper on which the book is printed. I came to realize the effectiveness of I Must Have Bobo! lies in its light aesthetic touch and refusal to indulge in hectic retro-pastiche. Perhaps I was expecting something more giddily nostalgia-smitten because I initially found the page layouts of I Must Have Bobo! too sparse. ![]() |