Michael Sims’s ode to the barn reminds me that it’s time to re-read Charlotte’s Web. 

Inevitably, though, the morality of farming troubled White, especially his betrayal of a pig’s trust when he suddenly turned from provider to executioner. In the fall of 1947, a pig he had planned to slaughter became ill, and White labored heroically but failed to save its life, a sad farce he immortalized in his 1948 essay “Death of a Pig.” In his animal-populated imagination, however, the pig lived on. White began to envision stories in which the poor animal’s life might be endangered — only this time it would survive.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/22/books/review/celebrating-60-years-of-charlottes-web.html

File this under: You can’t make this stuff up.

Below are links to the flap about a story that appeared on a standardized English test in New York State.  The entire controversy should remind us that literary texts in general do not lend themselves to multiple-choice questions. I’m waiting for “Jabberwocky” to appear on one of these tests or any passage from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, but especially the passage in which the king ponders the difference between “important” and “unimportant” or Humpty-Dumpty decides that a word can mean anything he wants it to mean.  I was fascinated by the observation reported below:

Deborah Meier, founder of the progressive Central Park East schools in New York City, who has lectured and written widely about testing, said the pineapple passage was “an outrageous example of what’s true of most of the items on any test, it’s just blown up larger.” In the world of testing, she said, it does not really matter whether an answer is right or wrong; the “right” answer is the one that field testing has shown to be the consensus answer of the “smart” kids. “It’s a psychometric concept,” she said.

Below the story as reported by NPR:

A reading passage included this week in one of New York’s standardized English tests has become the talk of the eighth grade, with students walking around saying, “Pineapples don’t have sleeves,” as if it were the code for admission to a secret society.

The passage is a parody of the tortoise and the hare story, the Aesop’s fable that almost every child learns in elementary school. Only instead of a tortoise, the hare races a talking pineapple, and the moral of the story — more on that later — is the part about the sleeves.

While taking the test, baffled children raised their hands to say things like, “This story doesn’t make sense.”

Antitesting activists have taken up the cudgel, saying that the passage and the multiple-choice questions associated with it perfectly illustrate the absurdity of standardized testing. And by Friday afternoon, the state education commissioner had decided that the questions would not count in students’ official scores.

Daniel Pinkwater, a popular children’s book author who wrote the original version of the passage, which was doctored for the test, said that the test-makers had turned a nonsensical story into a nonsensical question for what he believed was a nonsensical test, but acknowledged that he was tickled to death by the children’s reaction.

In the olden times, animals could speak English, just like you and me. There was a lovely enchanted forest that flourished with a bunch of these magical animals. One day, a hare was relaxing by a tree. All of a sudden, he noticed a pineapple sitting near him.

The hare, being magical and all, told the pineapple, “Um, hi.” The pineapple could speak English too.

“I challenge you to a race! Whoever makes it across the forest and back first wins a ninja! And a lifetime’s supply of toothpaste!” The hare looked at the pineapple strangely, but agreed to the race.

The next day, the competition was coming into play. All the animals in the forest (but not the pineapples, for pineapples are immobile) arranged a finish/start line in between two trees. The coyote placed the pineapple in front of the starting line, and the hare was on his way.

Everyone on the sidelines was bustling about and chatting about the obvious prediction that the hare was going to claim the victory (and the ninja and the toothpaste). Suddenly, the crow had a revolutionary realization.

“AAAAIEEH! Friends! I have an idea to share! The pineapple has not challenged our good companion, the hare, to just a simple race! Surely the pineapple must know that he CANNOT MOVE! He obviously has a trick up his sleeve!” exclaimed the crow.

The moose spoke up.

“Pineapples don’t have sleeves.”

“You fool! You know what I mean! I think that the pineapple knows we’re cheering for the hare, so he is planning to pull a trick on us, so we look foolish when he wins! Let’s sink the pineapple’s intentions, and let’s cheer for the stupid fruit!” the crow passionately proclaimed. The other animals cheered, and started chanting, “FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN! FOIL THE PLAN!”

A few minutes later, the hare arrived. He got into place next to the pineapple, who sat there contently. The monkey blew the tree-bark whistle, and the race began! The hare took off, sprinting through the forest, and the pineapple …
It sat there.

The animals glanced at each other blankly, and then started to realize how dumb they were. The pineapple did not have a trick up its sleeve. It wanted an honest race — but it knew it couldn’t walk (let alone run)!

About a few hours later, the hare came into sight again. It flew right across the finish line, still as fast as it was when it first took off. The hare had won, but the pineapple still sat at his starting point, and had not even budged.
The animals ate the pineapple.

And the two questions:

1. Why did the animals eat the pineapple?
a. they were annoyed
b. they were amused
c. they were hungry
d. they wanted to

2. Who was the wisest?
a. the hare
b. moose
c. crow
d. owl

“It’s a nonsense story and there isn’t an option for a nonsense answer.”

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2012/04/20/151044647/the-pineapple-and-the-hare-can-you-answer-two-bizarre-state-exam-questions

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/nyregion/standardized-testing-is-blamed-for-question-about-a-sleeveless-pineapple.html

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/20/nyregion/21pineapple-document.html?ref=nyregion

Lisa “You’re reading Gravity’s Rainbow?”

Two books on re-reading are reviewed in the TLS, and one of them looks at the classics of childhood reading.  What fascinated me about the review, among other things, was the invocation of an essay by Dickens (“Where We Stopped Growing”)  that celebrates the durability of childhood memories about books. Since the reviewer paraphrased rather than quoted, I went back to the original and rediscovered the passage in which Dickens reminds us that certain “nurse’s tales” can have a traumatic effect.

But, when I was in Dullborough one day, revisiting the associations of my childhood as recorded in previous pages of these notes, my experience in this wise was made quite inconsiderable and of no account, by the quantity of places and people utterly impossible places and people, but none the less alarmingly real that I found I had been introduced to by my nurse before I was six years old, and used to be forced to go back to at night without at all wanting to go. If we all knew our own minds (in a more enlarged sense than the popular acceptation of that phrase), I suspect we should find our nurses responsible for most of the dark corners we are forced to go back to, against our wills.

Here’s the link to the review of books by Patrician Meyer Spacks and Jonathan Yardley, and, below it, Spacks on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

http://www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article1014155.ece

“To see Alice as a Cartesian heroine may encourage us to discover her unexpected resemblance to some other figure from the works accumulated in that miscellaneous collection in our heads. To think of her as having identity problems makes her suddenly, comically congruent with a host of modern and postmodern characters. In other words, talking about such matters as pragmatism and identity in connection with a children’s book can heighten the reader’s consciousness, and to heighten consciousness enlarges the inlets of pleasure. The more I think about Alice, the more interesting she becomes to me. A book’s propensity to provoke thought, for me, stands high among its virtues.”

Here’s more on the 2 Snow White films: http://www.afi.com/drop/AF/cover.html

A recent post by Ryan Dixon on Scriptshark.com, a popular blog for television writers, calls updating myths and fairytales “one of the hottest trends in the search for the next…’tent-pole.'” Dixon points out that “one of the more popular devices is to tell these well-known stories from the point of view of another character” and attributes this technique to Gregory Maguire, author of the novel upon which the Broadway musical “Wicked” is based. Another explanation for fairytales’ popularity is the fact they are in the public domain – the perfect legal environment for a creative free-for-all.

It seems clear as a glass coffin that the Snow White story engages artists and audiences alike. And, while Disney and Singh and Sanders and Sondheim and Lapine and all the other artists who have offered their variations on this tale of good vs. evil may have something unique to share, perhaps the real basis for Snow White’s popularity is that millions more consider the work to be their own, the story their parents read aloud to them at bedtime, the one that filled their dreams.

In this digital age does Snow White’s return herald a new era of more intimate human connection? Or have social media created a new, exponentially greater oral tradition, where new Snow White postings on Facebook and Twitter become fair game for comment and new twists to the story emerge, recombine and go viral? Two explanations, both plausible. The Brothers Grimm would understand and, one suspects, approve.

The deaths of Charles Dickens’s Little Nell and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Little Eva enabled us to binge on pity and purge our fears even as we revelled in our ability to empathize with victims small and meek. Suzanne Collins has complicated this tradition: Rue’s death, too, is a beautiful one, and the process of mourning her is staged, however briefly, with seductive aesthetic effects. But her murder is also a potent little Molotov cocktail, fuelling rebellion rather than funding redemption. It warns us against sentimentalizing the deaths of innocents while also reminding us of the catalytic power of empathy.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/04/the-hunger-games-and-the-little-blonde-innocents-tradition.html#ixzz1rq2fLE9M

Here’s an excerpt from my New Yorker blog post on Erika Eichenseer’s archival find in Regensburg.  I went to the stories as a skeptic and returned from them as a true believer:

The briskness of Schönwerth’s style is clear in a tale like “King Goldenhair.” The adventures of the fair-haired prince bring together bits and pieces from “The Frog King,” “Snow White,” and “The Water of Life” to create kaleidoscopic wonders. The tale reminds us of the wizardry of the words in fairy tales, their worlds of shimmering beauty and enchanting whimsy. Who can avoid feeling the shock effects of beauty when Prince Goldenhair enters “a magical garden awash in sunlight, full of flowers and branches with gold and silver leaves and fruits made of precious stones”? Or when a dung beetle turns into a prince after a girl spares his life and invites “creatures small and large, anything on legs” to dance and leap at the wedding. Equally charming is the story about Jodl, a boy who overcomes his revulsion to a female frog and, after bathing her, joins her under the covers. In the morning, he awakens to find himself in a sunlit castle with a wondrously beautiful princess. Here at last is a transformation that promises real change in our understanding of fairy-tale magic, for suddenly we discover that the divide between passive princesses and dragon-slaying heroes may be little more than a figment of the Grimm imagination.

And for the full effect:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/04/barack-obama-reads-where-the-wild-things-are-the-animated-gif/255653/#