First of all, everyone loves the Eloise books - the multi-volume story of the terminally obnoxious, presumably neglected, ultimate city child running wild in the Plaza Hotel and abroad. Eloise is equal parts demon and adorable, bane of waiters and lover (kind of) of animals and dolls. She is, quite simply, one of the best and most complex heroines of all time. Her author was a known character - what the Daily Beast terms "one of New York's great eccentrics" who'd made a career as a bonne vivante, actress and cabaret performer before she created the Eloise alter-ego. (She plays the larger-than-life, pink-thinking Maggie Prescott in Funny Face) By all accounts, she got very involved with Eloise, falling into her voice and her mannerisms pretty often - so it's not a shocker that she'd be proprietary about her creation. Hilary Knight, the books' illustrator, and Thompson butted heads - and continue to. Says Knight, still very much working, his involvement "was the best thing that ever happened to it, though Kay wouldn't ever say so."

Since her death, Thompson's estate has the books in something of a stranglehold. As he says, "Withholding is a nice way of saying what her estate is...But Kay would not be happy with the new book, or any of the re-printings. You see, she didn't want anything done. I know deep down that we will someday see more Eloise, and I hope I'm here to do them. I would love to see an animated movie, because live-action cannot capture how terrible she really is."

Knight has become something of a New York institution in his own right: active on the social and charity scene, he has recently started blogging for Vanity Fair (his whimsical "sketchbook" is, I daresay, a reason for VF's death-defying numbers.) He writes frequently about his favorite New York haunts and even name-checlks yours truly's favorite time-warp restaurant. He also has a tres chic Myspace page, and, currently, is working on a project that will thrill a certain segment of the population that may include me more than anything in the world possible could:

a new book with June Havoc, the 97-year-old sister of Gypsy Rose Lee ("Baby June" from the musical), creating an "adult graphic novel about her life in vaudeville in the 1920s when she was a huge star. It's quite grim."

But, quoth he, "They (Havoc and Thompson) are both Scorpios. And Eloise is a Scorpio, and I am too. I've always been drawn to these strong, captivating women." Us, too.

Hilary Knight's Sketchbook [Vanity Fair]
Hilary Knight.com
Eloise At 55 [Daily Beast]

According to this piece, "hate crushes" are all the rage amongst celebrities - I think Twitter was involved. Mine isn't just for one person - it's for a whole collective of enemies. Specifically, the neighbors who live in the house at the end of the block.

They look inoffensive enough: a rag-tag group of 20-something hippies whose numbers seem to ebb and flow with, one presumes, the vagaries of the pot harvest and the quality of the vibes. My ire was first aroused shortly after we moved in. A whole passel of them were lounging - insolently, in retrospect - on their porch, smoking. I greeted them. They collectively ignored me and, I was pretty sure, sneered.

"They were probably stoned," said my boyfriend consolingly, so I decided to give them another chance. Later that same week, I took a cab home from a late dinner. There they were - sneering at me as I alighted. I called out a cheery greeting and, once again, was stonewalled.

"I guess they think I'm a...a pampered bourgeoise, taking cabs," I said to my boyfriend. "I'm sure they'd never sully the environment with a cab - they're probably anti-cars. They despise me, do they? Well, two can play that game."

After that, I pointedly ignored them. At the same time, I became fixated on them. Where did they go, on their army of bikes? What job could possibly call for cut-off overalls? I came up with private names for them: "Snuffkin," "Old One," "Amazing Girl," and "the Guy with Plugs in His Ears." Collectively, they were, of course, The Magic Band. Sometimes at night when I took out the trash, I would wander, seemingly casually, towards their house and stare up at the lighted windows, where I could vaguely make out Indian bedspreads and African drums on the wall. Once, I could have sworn I heard someone playing a djembe.

"They're probably freegans," I said bitterly to my boyfriend, who was sick of talking about them. Sometimes, though, when we walked past their house, he'd indulge me. "You speak hippie," I'd urge. "What are they eating? What are they talking about? What are they listening to?" And he'd say "a casserole, probably involving yams" or "Noam Chomsky" or "Trinity, "Three Piece Suit,""just to placate me.

I had weird fantasies in which we triumphed over them - three-legged races, and cook-offs. I figured they had scorn for my "Zephyr Sophisticate" bicycle with its basket and bell, and the pots of herbs and flowers I'd placed on our steps. (They had what looked like a single stalk of corn and, visible from our back window, a scraggly marijuana plant.) One night they brought out instruments and jammed on the street. Others danced with abandon. One girl - I'm not sure she lived there - did a dance with torches. The neighbors seemed confused, and kept their distance. I wandered over and stood diffidently nearby, in a vintage dress and a pair of heels. Then I went home.

"I talked with those neighbors today," remarked my boyfriend one night. "They're really nice." He went on to detail them - a student, a non-profit worker, a busker, a couple who were transient. He hadn't seen the interior of their house, he said. They'd offered him a beer but he'd said no. He didn't seem to feel this was momentous, and I felt both curiously betrayed and let down. I had known, of course, that he spoke their language - a language of no judgments and playing by ear and smoking weed, a language I had no ear for. I knew equally well that my hard edges would only have beaten against their soft ones, if we ever did meet.

But when our block party came, I made a decision. I brought them a bundt cake. I had thought about this a lot, and this particular recipe, which I'd never made, and which involved instant pistachio pudding and chocolate syrup and was kind of disgusting in a mid-century way, had suggested itself to me as a peace offering. I dusted it with sugar and carried it over with ceremony. I knocked on the door, and finally one of them - the Old One - answered the door. "This cake is for you," I said formally. "Thanks," he said, taking it with the air of one not used to looking gift horses in mouths. "Did you guys just move in?" I stared at him blankly. He was one of the ones who'd snubbed me - once in a group and once while doing something with a saw to his bicycle chain, while wearing a leghorn hat. "No," I said slowly. "We've been here for a year."

"Cool," he said. "We'll hang out some time."

When I looked up "hate crush" I came across an article that claims that

Women, more than men, tend to form hate crushes. Why? Physiologically, women have a deeper limbic system in the brain which makes them feel things more intensely. Also, women are more relationship-oriented as they are the gender who tends and befriends.

It is true, these relationships have much of the unpleasant intensity of a crush, the element of obsession, the need to bring it up at all times - and, most important, next to nothing to do with the object thereof. A "hate crush" is about you, about projections and insecurities. If a crush is about seeing the best version of yourself as you envision it, a "hate crush" is about the worst. I know many a friend - male and female - who's fallen prey to the classic scenario, such feelings about an ex's new partner, something social networking, Twitter and Google help exactly not at all. It becomes a reciprocal relationship - comparing themselves to pictures and interests and resumes and musical tastes. One cliched quote can provide an unwholesome sense of validation, even as it feeds the mania. And as in many a crush, they don't always know you exist.

How To Get Over A Hate Crush [Examiner]

It's risky territory, as there's a fine line between crushing and actual jealousy. And Shafrir acknowledges that the cultivation of a girl crush isn't always simple. She writes,

[A]s we grow older, finding women to look up to becomes, like everything else, a trickier minefield to navigate. As a journalist in New York City, I've found that media is an especially fraught industry for these kinds of relationships. Looking for a formal "mentor" seems forced; worshiping someone from afar, creepy; deciding one of your friends or co-workers is really cool and doing everything she does, single white female-y. And frenemies and backstabbers lurk behind every door. The intern you thought was interested in learning the ropes from you is actually just interested in taking your job.

However, the bulk of her article turns out to be, not a Lucinda Rosenfeld-style envy-fest, but a sweet exploration of women's admiration for other women. She quotes attorney Jasmine Moy, who says, a girl crush is "pretty much any woman who is funny and smart and talented and successful and pretty. Crushes are the things you get if you're not the 'I'm jealous, therefore I hate them' kind of person." Several women she interviews report crushes on author/illustrator Luann Shapton. Shapton is an art director at The New York Times, a novelist, an Elle columnist, and the co-owner, with her fiance, of "a beautifully restored farmhouse in North Salem, N.Y." There are plenty of ingredients for haterade here, but Shafrir's interviewees offer only love. "She just seems to have a really lovely life," says one Shapton admirer.

Shapton, for her part, is gracious in crush-dom. She says,

I've received a few emails from younger women which is nice, but weird since I certainly don't feel like I have anything figured out. If they ask for career advice, I try to explain that I didn't really plan a career-I was able to make up my jobs along the way, and I advise them to do the same. I didn't ever decide on a single course of action. But that basically makes you-for a long time-broke, obscure, somewhat unreliable and scattered. Trying to answer the question 'What do you do?' would give me hives.

It wouldn't be that hard to make fun of this, to imagine Shapton lounging around her farmhouse, saying "oh, this old thing?" But one of the great canards of armchair sociology is the idea that women don't help each other, that the glass ceiling stays in place because women are busy catfighting each other beneath it. So it's nice to read about women being nice, and not fake-nice either, but actually sincerely in awe of and respectful of one another.

If I had to pick a celebrity girl crush, it would probably be Zadie Smith — fantastically successful young novelist, married to another successful young novelist, beautiful, likes Fawlty Towers, and once toured with They Might Be Giants. But one of my biggest girl crushes was not on a celebrity — it was on a girl who transferred to my college when I was a senior. She had complicated, impressive hair, dressed like a visitor from a more awesome universe, had her own website, published a zine as a teenager, wrote fiction, took photos, and after graduation moved into an apartment with her boyfriend (now husband), where they read Eliot to one another and covered the walls with art by their friends. I was sure she was too cool to ever be friends with me. Years later, after we'd already become close, she confessed she had thought the same thing about me. Now we both have our own websites, and although I think she still has better hair, I get to give her advice about teaching and making clam pasta. Sometimes the best girl crushes go both ways.

Fantasy Girl Crushes [Daily Beast]

I was recently sitting with a friend's 8-year-old for an evening, when she brought me to her room to show me a note a little boy in her class had sent her. "I know you have a boyfriend," he'd written in a large, childish scrawl, "but I need to have you in my life." He went on to say that her happiness was the most important thing to him; he'd included a flower, which she had thrown away. Maybe Alec Greven's on to something!

When some of us were in third grade, we were so tiny and borderline feral that romance was not really an issue: such interactions were limited to intense secret crushes, occasional haughty snubbings, and spelling competitions with flirtatious undertones. When one little boy did like me, I was so humiliated that I asked to be moved to a different desk group. One of my out-of-school friends lied about having an older 4th grade boyfriend, which made me very uncomfy. A few couples in my class 'dated,' which didn't mean that they went anywhere or actually acknowledged each other. And I have a very distinct memory of one little girl attempting to impress a boy she liked by bringing all her horseback riding trophies to school and casually arraying them atop her desk; she was regarded with pity by the rest of the class.

So, based on this, a perusal of old diaries and recent interaction with abovementioned babysittee, here is what our inner 9-year-old girl would advise with regards to dating boys:

-Always be nice. Even if you don't like someone back, never humiliate him and try to keep things private.
-Keep all notes.
-If you like a boy, don't bring all your horseback riding trophies to school and put them on your desk, because everyone will know what you are doing and you won't be able to open your desk.

Your turn, belles! If we want to compile something definitive here, we're going to need a lot of child-channeling and, more to the point, as much advice as you can get from real 9-year-olds. Sisters? Cousins? Pupils? Bring it on! We'll compile all the advice we get as a public service.

Earlier: The Book Of Love

P.S. No animals were drugged in the making of this video.