To London! With Snail and Spit.

Traveling with small children is not easy, especially if one of them--the six year old--has strep. But The One Recovering From Strep is also The One Who Is Beside Himself With Anticipation That He Will Be Traveling to London, England, Tomorrow Night. This is his first trip abroad. He now has a passport. So does the other one--The One Who Is Tonight Excited But Perhaps For Reasons He Does Not, Being Only Two, Understand.

We're going to London to help launch the hardcover UK edition of Moby-Duck, the inaugural title of Union Books. Its cover is pictured here.

For the last few weeks, I've been preparing six-year-old B. and two-year-old M. for their trip to London by resuscitating a bedtime tale that I first began to spin for B. back when he was a two year old. It's the tale of a squirrel named Snail, who lives in a hole in a tree in Washington Square Park. ("That's funny," M. said the other night. "'Snail' is a funny name"--for a squirrel, he meant.) Snail's best friend is a duck named Spit, who almost always goes by his full title, Spit the Bulgarian Wedding Duck.

(Long story, short version: The night the spinning of the tale began, there was a story about a Bulgarian wedding band on the radio. Spit plays the trombone, and any trombone player will therefore guess the provenance of the name Spit.)

Basically, the tale is a highly derivative remix of Milne, Graham, and Henson, but that doesn't make it any less effective as a soporific. Last weekend, Snail and Spit stowed away on a big old jet airliner bound for London. We'll be catching up with them there tomorrow evening.

Time to pack.

The Ruthless Imagination of a Child

As a few of my twitter buddies pointed out, this review of Steven Millhauser's new and selected stories by Salvatore Scibona is exemplary, an essay as much as a review, which is what the best reviews are. And it contains this exquisite little meditation on childhood:

Many of the stories are set amid the 19th century passion for sophisticated mechanical inventions that were revolutionizing daily life at the time. But for all the formal and historical erudition here, the stories maintain a saving innocence. They are immigrants from the country of childhood, where the imagination, seeing a thing repeated, wonders what would happen if it were repeated again, and another time, and again forever? What if the rain never stopped and it flooded the whole world?

They more or less beg you to ask them what they are about. They seem to follow an inverted motto: A story should not be, but mean. As to the aboutness, here's a stab: These are stories about the adult's experience of the life his childhood self continues to lead after he has grown up. The adult mind doesn't destroy the child's mind, but only subsumes it. The clockwork automatons in this book, and the ladders of light up which a character can climb into the sky, and the sometimes asphyxiating lack of adult passion - all draw the reader toward the ruthless imagination of a child. Everything moves very slowly. The future will never come. The speed of growing up, from the adult's vantage, is dizzying; from the child's it is glacial.

So while these stories don't aspire to the pleasures and agonies of a dramatic narrative - the tales of change within a comprehensible world that children ask adults to repeat for the same reason it comforts babies to be swaddled - they do aspire to that other moment of childhood: You were alone in the dark, your imagination demanding, What if ... and then what if ... and then what if?

Scibona was one of the fiction writers The New Yorker anointed in its 20 under 40 series last year. Read his story "The Kid"--available online to subscribers--and you'll see why he made the list.