Here’s my latest post on the New Yorker’s Page Turner Blog:

When Stieg Larsson’s girl with the dragon tattoo, Lisbeth Salander, encounters a man who regards her as “legal” prey, we quickly realize exactly what sets this skinny hacker apart from heroines of the past. Salander invites Advokat Bjurman into the bedroom, leading him to the bed, “not the other way around.” Her next move is to fire seventy-five thousand volts from a Taser into his armpit and push him down with “all her strength.” In a stark reversal of the nineteenth-century playwright Victorien Sardou’s famous formula for successful theatrics—“Torture the woman!”—Salander ties up Bjurman and tattoos a series of vivid epithets onto his torso. A sadistic sexual predator is transformed in an instant into her victim.

We’ve come a long way from what Simone de Beauvoir once found in Anglo-European entertainments: “In song and story the young man is seen departing adventurously in search of a woman; he slays the dragons and giants; she is locked in a tower, a palace, a garden, a cave, she is chained to a rock, a captive, sound asleep: she waits.” Have we kissed Sleeping Beauty goodbye at last, as feminists advised us to do not so long ago? Her younger and more energetic rival in today’s cultural productions has been working hard to depose her, but archetypes die hard and can find their way back to us in unexpected ways.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/03/sleeping-beauty-lady-gaga-hunger-games-heroines.html#

nbsp;http://www.buzzfeed.com/awesomer/the-bes…

And of the 30 sites, my favorite is still the Beinecke Library, which holds J.M. Barrie’s papers, and where I spent 6 glorious weeks, while working on Annotated Peter Pan.

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Once upon a time there was a little girl who had never known her mother. She learned the art of her father, a famous bullfighter, but was hated by her evil stepmother. One day she ran away with a troupe of dwarves, and became a legend. Set in southern Spain in 1920s, BLANCANIEVES is a tribute to silent films.

You can take the quiz here:

 http://www.ew.com/ew/gallery/0,,20483133…

We all know about that terrible Monster Book of Monsters in Harry Potter, but how many other literary books have magical properties?  Walter Benjamin tells us about one of those magical books in a short story by Hans Christian Andersen:

“In one of Andersen’s tales, there is a picture-book that cost ‘half a kingdom.’  In it everything was alive.  ‘The birds sang, and people cam out of the book and spoke.’  But when the princess turned the page, “they leaped back in again so that there should be no disorder.’  Pretty and unfocused, like so much that Andersen wrote, this little invention misses the point by a hair’s breadth.  Things do not come out to meet the picturing child from the pages of the book; instead, in looking, the child enters into them as a cloud that becomes suffused with the riotous colors of the world of pictures.”

There is also Lucy’s book in the Chronicles of Narnia–that intoxicating story in the Magician’s Book that she forgets as soon as she turns the pages–and she can’t go back!  Any others? Inkheart?

Dark Skies has a wonderful homage to E.T.A. Hoffmann’s “Sandman,” when we learn about a bogeyman who scratches out children’s eyes and takes them to feed his children, who live on the moon.

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Dwight Garner reviews Maurice Sendak’s My Brother’s Book, and quotes the author on his misanthropic tendencies:

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) cultivated an image as a curmudgeon. “I’m not Hans Christian Andersen,” he told Bill Moyers. “No one’s going to make a statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up me. I won’t have it.”

 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/15/books/…

Sendak actually had more in common with Andersen than he knew.  When a sculptor proposed to create a statue of the author, surrounded by children to whom he would be reading, Andersen protested: 

I pointed out that I could not bear anyone behind me, nor had I children on my back, on my lap, or between my legs when I read; that my fairy tales were as much for older people as for children.  The naïve was only a part of my fairy tales; humor was the real salt in them.

Sendak had more in common with Andersen than he realized. And the character of Jack in the new book must be modeled on Kay in Andersen’s Snow Queen:

Jack is catapulted “to continents of ice.” He is “a snow image stuck fast in water like stone./His poor nose froze.”

Poor Andersen: children today are now on his back, on his lap, and between his legs when they visit  statues of him in Copenhagen and in New York City’s Central Park.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130206-folktale-europe-human-culture-dna-geography-science/

Above a link to a fascinating new article about resistance to changing features of a story at a local level.  Improvisation is not necessarily all it’s cracked up to be, and I’m reminded of the cultural conservatism of folklore.  The upside to its conservatism is the preservation of tales from times past.

In a new study, evolutionary psychologist Quentin Atkinson is using the popular tale of the kind and unkind girls to study how human culture differs within and between groups, and how easily the story moved from one group to another.

Atkinson, of the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and his co-authors employed tools normally used to study genetic variation within a species, such as people, to look at variations in this folktale throughout Europe.

The researchers found that there were significant differences in the folktale between ethnolinguistic groups—or groups bound together by language and ethnicity. From this, the scientists concluded that it’s much harder for cultural information to move between groups than it is for genes.

In my course on fairy tales and fantasy literature, we had a session on “Little Red Riding Hood.”  I contrasted Dickens’ love of the girl in red ( “Little Red Riding Hood was my first love.  I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.”) with the anxieties of Freud’s Wolf Man (Sergei Pankejeff), who read the story as a child.  The Wolf Man, as Freud tells us, was haunted by a dream about wolves, creatures connected with the predator in “Little Red Riding Hood”:

He had always connected this dream with the recollection that during those years of his childhood he was most tremendously afraid of the picture of a wolf in a book of fairy tales.  His elder sister, who was very much his superior, used to tease him by holding up this particular picture in front of him so that he was terrified and began to scream.  In this picture the wolf was standing upright, striding out with one foot, with its claws stretched out and its ears pricked.  He thought this picture must have been an illustration to the story of Little Red Riding Hood.

I have always been on the lookout for that illustration, and I’m wondering if it might not be the one above.  I had always pictured the Wolf Man’s creature as full frontal, but now I realize that the description fits Dore’s illustration, even if the wolf has its back turned to us.

Any other candidates?