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Have You Seen My Dragon is Steve Light’s ode to city living. A boy solicits help from readers as he searches for his slithery, green dragon. The dragon hops around the city and takes readers on a counting journey. Adults and children alike will love the detailed artwork touched by bursts of color! Don’t be afraid to count along as Steve reads Have You Seen My Dragon on Read Out Loud.
KidLit TV’s Read Out Loud series is perfect for parents, teachers, and librarians. Use these readings for nap time, story time, bedtime … anytime!
Enter a fascinating, ornately drawn cityscape and help a boy find his dragon while counting objects from hot dogs to traffic lights. In the heart of the city, among the taxis and towers, a small boy travels uptown and down, searching for his friend. Readers will certainly spot the glorious beast, plus an array of big-city icons they can count. Is the dragon taking the crosstown bus, or breathing his fiery breath below a busy street? Maybe he took a taxi to the zoo or is playing with the dogs in the park. Steve Light’s masterful pen-and-ink illustrations, decorated with meticulous splashes of color, elevate this counting book (numbers 1 20) to new heights. Maybe the dragon is up there, too.
ABOUT STEVE LIGHT
Steve Light is the author and illustrator of several books for children. When he isn’t writing, he’s teaching pre-k students in New York City. Steve is a collector of fountain pens; he has more than 80. When Steve isn’t writing and illustrating he can be found creating models — some of which are inspired by his books –, or carving storybooks; wood dolls and props that fit in a box, which can be used to tell stories. Steve lives in New York City with his wife.
Most people living in large towns and cities probably give little thought to soil. Why should they? At a first glance, much of the ground in towns and cities is sealed with concrete, asphalt and bricks, and most city-dwellers have little reason to have contact with soil. To most, soil in cities is simply dirt. But soil is actually in abundance in cities: it lays beneath the many small gardens, flower beds, road and railway verges, parks, sports grounds, school playing fields, and allotments of the city, where it plays many under appreciated roles.
Standing underneath the monstrous Soviet statue of “Motherland Calls” looking out over the mighty Volga River, I could understand why the city should have been renamed, rather unimaginatively, Volgograd “City on the Volga”. Between 1925 and 1961 it had been called Stalingrad, and was site of one of the most ferocious battles in the Second World War. By 1925, Josef Stalin was the Communist Party General Secretary, and the trend to rename cities and towns in his honor had begun. Since he had been chairman of the local military committee which had organized the defense of the city in 1919 against the White Russian armies, why not name this city after him? But in the years following his death in 1953, Stalin began to fall from grace and many places named after him were renamed. So what was Stalingrad called before 1925? Tsaritsyn. Something to do with the Tsar, probably, and given this name when it was founded as a fortress in 1589. This is a tempting assumption, but it is an assumption too far; toponymy is prone to such traps. Tsaritsyn is actually a Tatar name meaning “Town on the (River) Tsaritsa” from the Turkic sary su, “Yellow River.” It was given this name because of the golden sands of the Tsaritsa, at the point where it flows into the Volga.
So rivers have played a part in two of Volgograd’s names. Rivers attracted people because they provided fish to eat and water to drink, and facilitated movement and communication. People needed to differentiate between their settlements so they began to give them names: “river” (Rijeka in Croatia), “river mouth” (Dartmouth in England), “fast-flowing” (Bystrytsya in Ukraine and Bystrzyca in Poland), “white water” (Aksu in China, Kazakhstan, and Turkey), the “yellow river” (China).
In due course, something more creative was needed, and somebody trying to curry favor suggested naming their settlement after its leader. Leaders, at all levels, liked this idea and it spread rapidly. It helped to be royal (Victoria appears at least 31 times in 19 different countries), be a person of great power or influence (Washington), someone who had achieved some conspicuous feat (Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut), or explored new territory (Columbus). During the age of colonialism, some senior administrators and generals achieved comparative immortality by having places named or renamed after them, notably in the British Empire (Abbottābād).
A partial view of Aksu Stream nearby Waterfall Kuzalan in Dereli district of Giresun province, Turkey by Zeynel Cebeci. CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
Russian and Soviet leaders were keen to project power or to intimidate. So in 1783, Count Paul Potemkin built a fortress at Vladikavkaz, which he called Vladet’ Kavkazom (“To have command of the Caucasus”). The name is now taken to mean “Ruler of the Caucasus”. In the same way, Vladivostok, also founded as a military post, has the name “Ruler of the East”. Founded in 1818 by the Russians to spread fear amongst the Chechens, Groznyy, capital of Chechnya, was given the name “Awesome” or “Menacing”. As recently as 2008 Vladimir Putin, the present Russian president, conferred the name “Peak of Russian Counter-Intelligence Agents” on a previously unnamed peak in the Caucasus Mountains.
There is no shortage of saints’ or religious leaders’ names throughout the world, particularly in California, Central and South America, and the Caribbean as a result of the earlier Spanish and Portuguese presence. Some may have been founded or sighted on a saint’s feast day (St. Helena), because they were the personal saint of the founder (St. Petersburg in Russia). or because the saint was thought to have been martyred there (St. Albans in England).
Possibly the three most important elements of toponymy are languages — living and dead — history, and geography. Numerous modern names in Europe are derived from their Latin names, since they were within the Roman Empire, and some of these Latin names had Celtic origins (Catterick and Toledo). Many names appear to have barely changed over the centuries (Lincoln and Civitavecchia) and thus their meaning can be deduced with little difficulty. Others, however, might appear to have an obvious meaning, but in tracing their history, it may be found that the origin or present meaning is not as anticipated (New York). It is sometimes the case that the original and modern forms are almost identical, but the meaning of a word has changed. The modern “field” is taken to mean an “enclosed piece of land” whereas the Old English feld meant “open land”. Place names are a window on the past. For example, Scandinavian names in England indicate where the Norwegian and Danish population was concentrated a millennium ago. Birkby, from Bretarby “Village of the Britons”, shows that this was a village inhabited by Britons rather than Anglo-Saxons.
The descriptive element of geography has a role: points of the compass (West Indies, East Anglia), the presence of ports, bridges, or fords (Oxford), the color or shape of a mountain (Rocky Mountains), even market day (Dushanbe “Monday” in Tajikistan).
Toponymy is a bit like astronomy — there is always something more to discover. There is probably no inhabited place on earth without a name. Yet the origin and meaning of some of the best known names are unknown. London is a case in point.
Some places like to draw attention to themselves by having unusual names: Halfway, Scratch Ankle, Truth or Consequences, Tombstone (all in the USA); or by having a name so long that virtually nobody can either remember it or pronounce it. Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch in Wales has 58 letters, and the Maori name of a hill on the North Island of New Zealand, Taumatawhakatangihangakōauauotamateauripūkakapikimaungahoronukupōkaiwhenuakitanatahu, has 84 letters, the world’s longest place name. Bangkok makes do with Bangkok, but a native of the city might give you its full name, all 60 words of it in English.
Have you voted for Place of the Year 2014? If not, vote now, and follow #POTY2014 to find out which place wins on 1 December.
Here are some thoughts after reading Amit Chaudhuri's first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, which I read in the collection Freedom Song (which is what the page numbers below reference). I struggled with Chaudhuri — his goals for fiction are not mine. Nonetheless, I found it to be a productive struggle, and enjoyed writing about the book for a seminar on postcolonial fiction from Southeast Asia.
Over the next few days, I'll be posting here some of the material I came up with during that seminar that I doubt I'm going to develop into something more polished, at least immediately, but which seems worth preserving, even if my ideas are based on false premises, misreadings, or other potential pitfalls of quick apprehension...
ASSEMBLING THE INSTANT OF THE CITY
He did not know what to do with his unexpected knowledge. But he felt a slight, almost negligible, twinge of pleasure, as meaning took birth in his mind, and died the next instant. (117)
Here we have the protagonist, Sandeep, discovering the pleasure of meaning in a word and name (“Alpana”), but the moment could be extended to the novel as a whole and, in particular, its perspective on the city of Calcutta. If we accept Majumdar’s proposal that this novel presents a flaneur’s-eye-view of life and the city, then the cityscape of the novel is less a stable conglomeration of stone and steel than it is an ever-flowing multiplicity of sensations. It is a place full of objects, but the objects live in constant moments of being, and those moments of being are created within the perceptions of the people who come in contact with them. Thus, there is no one object, no one city; rather, there is a practically infinite field of encounters, and those encounters erupt and fall into memory within the space of an instant.
Gariahat Road and Rashbehari Avenue Crossing, 1993 (Wikimedia)
The city does not exist separate from its inhabitants, then: “they temporarily forgot their own lives, and, temporarily, their minds flowed outward into the images of the city, and became indistinguishable from them” (115). The images exist within their minds, and so the movement cannot be away from those minds (the mind cannot escape itself), but instead away from memory and toward present moments. The self, then, is something of the past — the self is created through self-reflection, and what is reflected is a body of memory from which the self is sculpted. The city offers a temporary escape from the self and its reflected past, a way to move into the present. The present, though, as Sandeep learns, is always fleeting. Once the present is noticed, it is past.
In that sense, the city allows a play of signifiers similar to the play Sandeep experiences when he looks at Bengali letters he can’t, formally, read. As Sandeep turns these letters into “‘characters’ in both senses of the word” (75), he does not attach some immutable meaning to them, but rather lets them mean what they seem to mean in the moment, much as he allows the images of the city to mean what they will in the moment of perceiving. The city is not, however, an illusion or a solipsism. It is an assemblage of systems and relations. Like an alphabet, its individual pieces can be put together in infinite series of meanings.
These insights are not merely the musings of a child. Chapter Thirteen moves us into Chhotomama’s point of view, and he has similar musings on the Bengali word sandeshin its Bengali letters:
The letters, curving, undulating, never still, curving into a kinetic life of their own, reminded him of Calcutta, of buying and selling, of people on the pavements, of office-goers in the mornings, and homecomings in the evenings, of children reading books, of arguments and dissensions in the tea-shops, of an unexpected richness of myriad rooms, all festivities of colour and light. He wanted to return to the city where all things curved and arched and danced like those letters… (111)
The letters evoke the city; the city mimics the letters. The letters, then, are the molecules of the city. This is perhaps, too, what distinguishes Calcutta for Chhotomama and, presumably, Sandeep — it is a city that resembles the letters of the Bengali alphabet (kinetic, curved, arched, dancing) rather than the letters of another alphabet, for instance the standardized, separated, impersonal alphabet they would associate with English texts. Such an alphabet might be more appropriate for Bombay.
The city is an assemblage, a text is an assemblage, and the city is a text.
Let’s consider, too, the ways that texts are structured alphabets. A Strange and Sublime Addressseems like an assemblage without a plot, a city without a story — and yet cities do not lack for stories. Sandeep feels that the “‘real’ story, with its beginning, middle, and conclusion, would never be told, because it did not exist” (54), and yet this is not exactly true; or, rather, it is true but not exactly useful as an insight, especially if we apply it to the text we are reading. A Strange and Sublime Addresshas a first word, a middle word, a last word, as it also has a first, last, and middle sentence, page, chapter. These linear arrangements allow patterns to become meaningful. Stories are told, and stories lead into other stories. This is much like a city. The concepts that we associate with the textual effect we call the character “Sandeep” are concepts that are advanced for a child’s mind, but not entirely unrealistic, and it seems to me that his perception that the “real” story of life could not be told because it is too big and overdetermined for narrative representation is unsatisfying. The desire for one story is the problem. Reality is not one story. Reality is an assemblage of infinite moments, actions, and perceptions. Reality is a system of relations. We can name some of these assemblages and systems — we can call them a city, a family, an object — and we can talk about the beginning, middle, and end of each. Calcutta began somewhere and sometime, and it will end somewhere and sometime. Calcutta cannot sufficiently be represented in a story, but it can be summoned in a million stories. Stories, like cities, are systems of instances. The fictive personality of Sandeep selects instances; the reader notes these selections, responds to them, assumes and imagines patterns of meaning from them, and thus keeps the textual effect we call Sandeep alive for the duration of the text. A fictional character is an assemblage just as a representation of a city is an assemblage: an assemblage of details within the text that are held in the reader’s mind and associated with each other. Sandeep is an alphabet interpreted. The patterns of that interpretation, that assemblage, can then form patterns with other interpretations, other assemblages of instants, other signifiers at play: ones called Chhotomamaand Abhi and the market and summer … and Calcutta. Letters lead to words which lead to sentences which lead to paragraphs. All lead toward and away from each other. Meaning takes birth in the mind, lives in the present, dies in the next instance, but the instances add up and echo, they curve and arch and dance.
0 Comments on Notes on A Strange and Sublime Address by Amit Chaudhuri as of 5/21/2014 8:58:00 PM
Title: City Cat Story by Kate Banks Art by Lauren Castillo Published by Foster Books, Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2013 Ages: 5-8 Themes: cat, travel, European cities 40 pages Opening Lines: Wake up, City Cat. It’s dawn. … Continue reading →
eBoy (“Godfathers of Pixel“) is a pixel art group founded in 1997 by Kai Vermehr, Steffen Sauerteig and Svend Smital.
Their complex illustrations have been made into posters, shirts, souvenirs, and displayed in gallery exhibitions.[1] They were founded on May 2, 1997. “We started working with pixels because we loved the idea of making pictures only for the screen. It’s the best way to get really sharp and clean looking results. Also, handling pixels is fun and you are forced to simplify and abstract things, which is a big advantage of this technique.” [1] eBoy is based in Berlin (Germany) and Vancouver (Canada).
Their influences come from: “Pop culture… shopping, supermarkets, TV, toy commercials, LEGO, computer games, the news, magazines…”[2] Kai grew up with Nintendo to inspire him, the rest of the eBoys lived in East Germany where video games did not exist.[3] Their work makes intense use of popular culture and commercial icons, and their style is presented in three-dimensional isometric illustrations filled with robots, cars, guns and girls. Now, most of their designs are printed and not used solely for computer screens, allowing images to get more complex with details.[1]“If we don’t work on other projects at the same time it takes about six to eight weeks to finish a very detailed cityscape, three eBoy’s working on it, nearly full time. But, if we have to do it in our spare time, which happens often, it could take years to finish a picture since we can’t spend so much time on it.”[1] Their style has gained them a cult following among graphic designers worldwide,[1] as well as a long list of commercial clients. Their latest project are plastic Peecol toys with Kidrobot, and a line of wooden toys are to be produced under their own label.
When I was growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, most of the children’s books I loved were set in the countryside, in villages or (at most) in small towns like the one where I lived. Yes, there were books set in cities too, but they tended to be the depressing, gritty realist ones, and I wanted adventure - and especially magical adventure. Magic, it seemed, was dispelled by petrol fumes.
There’s a long tradition dictating that the countryside is the natural home of both children and magic, no matter how few children actually live there. Maybe it goes back to Rousseau? Not only that, but in many of the classic books from my childhood there’s a gloomy sense that both magic and countryside are under threat from the creeping spread of urbanization, concreting over our imaginations and surrounding them with chain-linked fences and razor wire.
Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden (1958) is a good example. In that book, young Tom Long, staying with his childless uncle and aunt in a pokey flat with no garden, finds that he is able each midnight to travel back in time to a period some 70 years earlier, when the flat was part of a grand house, and what is now a back yard containing nothing more than a car on bricks was part of an idyllic garden backing onto fields and a river. There he is able to pass his days (or rather nights) playing happily with the garden's Victorian inhabitant, a girl called Hatty.
It’s a wonderful book, but like many others of that time it’s built on the assumption that the rural past is interesting, luxuriant, and beautiful, while the urban present is dull, sterile and ugly, and likely to become more so. And that, for a child destined to spend most of her life in the future and probably in a city too, was a depressing conclusion.
Things have changed a bit. Since the 1970s a genre of urban fantasy has appeared, written by people as diverse as Michael de Larrabeiti (whose Borriblesseries were a pre-Punk answer to the Wombles), Diana Wynne Jones, and more recently China Miéville and ABBA’s own Elen Caldecott. It turns out that, like foxes, magic can live quite happily in cities after all. All the same, I want to do something to put the record straight for my younger self. So here, with some small adjustments, is a passage from my rewriting of Tom’s Midnight Garden.
9 Comments on Hatty's Midnight Yard - Cathy Butler, last added: 6/2/2012
What wonderful sacrilege! And timely for me, as I am trying to pitch a quite tricky urban-magic story to my editor. Who has recently moved to the countryside...
Ah - I grew up in the country (the Australian "bush") and I have to admit things can happen there. I doubt we would have had the same freedom to roam in the city!
Excellent! I love it when really characters appear in stories. makes you feel so clever for recognizing them! And a very interesting point about the way we view cities and countryside!
Loved it! But could you do a whole novel about carburettors? Maybe you could...after all, they would want to test drive the car, at some point.
I remember a lot of books I loved with urban settings: Madeleine; The Family From One End Street (shame those books never lead to a genre); The Little Princess; Paddington; Diana Wynne Jones as you say - especially The Ogre Downstairs. One thing I notice is that when there is an urban setting it often seems to be London! Very hard to think of books set in Manchester, Leeds or most other British cities.
I've just written what might be termed an urban fantasy myself: "Wolfie", out in August - at least, it involves magic, and its set in an urban neighbourhood. Didn't know I was part of a trend! I was conscious though of wanting a certain kind of neighbourhood ...the sort of place I know well and which is also familiar to most children.
Love it! I also adored anything with an urban setting, The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright (New York) was a particular childhood favourite. The sequel (which I've forgotten the name of) where they move to the countryside was nothing like as good. I've always wanted to write a magical fantasy set in the 'burbs, the most common (yet sadly neglected by literature) geography of cildhood
This alphabet book, from the author of the musical In the Heights, takes a gritty and realistic look at urban life that will be familiar to many children while exposing other children to a new setting. Ava takes her friend on a tour of her neighborhood and many words in Spanish. She starts with a hug for her abuela and passes through G for graffiti, M for los muralistas painting murals on the walls, V for vegetables in what used to be a vacant lot, and ends at Z Street where the cars zoom past. Ava adds lots of small details to her alphabet tour that really show her enthusiasm for her neighborhood as well as giving the reader more details about her home. This is a tour worth taking!
This book does not sugarcoat what you will see in an urban neighborhood with abandoned cars, graffiti, and a burned building. But for children who see these things in their own neighborhoods, they will find a picture book that depicts their own world, something invaluable for a child. The Spanish words add a great rhythm to the book and another layer of information. Airhara’s illustrations use a lot of open space, emphasizing the stretches of blocks, the expanse of the city. They are simple and have a pleasant mix of bright color and earth tones.
A book that fills a need in children’s alphabet books for books set in urban locations, this will be welcomed on library shelves. Appropriate for ages 3-5.
Reviewed from copy received from Arthur A. Levine Books.
When you meet a bear on Broadway, you stick out your hand and ask them to stop. Then you politely ask what his business is there. He bursts into tears saying that he has lost his mother. The two of you think of how to find her together. Then you look uptown. And downtown. Along the river. Until you find a forest where the bear climbs a tall tree and shouts for his mother. But will a mama bear be able to hear him in the middle of a bustling city?
Though the styles are very different, this has the feel of Laura Numeroff’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie feel. It is the short lines and the repeating phrase of “When you meet a bear on Broadway.” Hest takes this form and creates a book about being lost, being helped, and being found. There is never any sense of panic about the child helping the bear. It is far more of a problem solving book about what to do when you find a bear on a city street.
The book has a nice bit of old-fashioned whimsy about it though the setting is modern. Savadier’s illustrations contribute to this with their gentle lines and watercolor washes. The little girl and the bear are often the only bright color on the page, magnifying their relationship rather than the largeness of the city itself.
Funny, quiet and very satisfying, this book would be nice paired with any of Numeroff’s If You titles. It also offers a nice change of pace for any bear-themed stories. Appropriate for ages 3-6.
The Architects Journal blog has a neat Top Ten list of cities in comics (posted by Rory Olcayto). Because it is obviously written for people who know nothing about comics, it probably doesn’t go in-depth enough for comics experts on Drawn, but it does provide some interesting extras like this pairing of Marlinspike Hall with its inspiration, from Herge’s classic Tintin series. There are also some amusing picky comments from architects in the comments: “Just to be pedantic – you are mixing up Aztec and Inca influences and how Herge used them,” writes Tintin buff Chris Tregenza, who made this map of Tintin’s voyages.
2 Comments on Top Ten Cities in Comics – chosen by an architect, last added: 8/3/2009
Have You Seen My Dragon?
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What wonderful sacrilege!
And timely for me, as I am trying to pitch a quite tricky urban-magic story to my editor. Who has recently moved to the countryside...
Ah - I grew up in the country (the Australian "bush") and I have to admit things can happen there. I doubt we would have had the same freedom to roam in the city!
Excellent! I love it when really characters appear in stories. makes you feel so clever for recognizing them! And a very interesting point about the way we view cities and countryside!
Brilliant and so clever. Thanks!
Loved it! But could you do a whole novel about carburettors? Maybe you could...after all, they would want to test drive the car, at some point.
I remember a lot of books I loved with urban settings: Madeleine; The Family From One End Street (shame those books never lead to a genre); The Little Princess; Paddington; Diana Wynne Jones as you say - especially The Ogre Downstairs. One thing I notice is that when there is an urban setting it often seems to be London! Very hard to think of books set in Manchester, Leeds or most other British cities.
I've just written what might be termed an urban fantasy myself: "Wolfie", out in August - at least, it involves magic, and its set in an urban neighbourhood. Didn't know I was part of a trend! I was conscious though of wanting a certain kind of neighbourhood ...the sort of place I know well and which is also familiar to most children.
A novel about carburettors? In Cambridgeshire? Haven't you read Fen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance?
I shall look out for Wolfie come August, Emma!
Love it! I also adored anything with an urban setting, The Saturdays by Elizabeth Enright (New York) was a particular childhood favourite. The sequel (which I've forgotten the name of) where they move to the countryside was nothing like as good.
I've always wanted to write a magical fantasy set in the 'burbs, the most common (yet sadly neglected by literature) geography of cildhood
Fen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Love that Cathy. With some Cambridge academic riding pillion, waffling on about Aristotle and classic vs romantic, while steams through fenland.
Thought of two more urban books I loved: Harriet the Spy and Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. Both Manhattan - neither of them fantasies, though.
Ah yes, Harriet the Spy is one of my all-time faves too!
Jongleuse, I quite agree about the suburbs - a much neglected territory.