Mekado Murphy writes about the fashioning of a new fairy-tale heroine. Don’t miss the slide show that accompanies the  article: I’m fascinated by all the fuss about Merida’s hair.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/movies…

“Brave,” set in medieval Scotland, is also the closest that Pixar has come to making a fairy tale. This one involves the headstrong princess Merida, above, who is more interested in archery and independence than in marrying and fulfilling royal traditions as dictated by her mother, Queen Elinor. The character and story were first developed by Brenda Chapman, the film’s initial director. She spoke by phone about what interested her in having Pixar’s first female-driven narrative be about a princess.

“Fairy tales have gotten kind of a bad reputation, especially among women,” she said. “So what I was trying to do was just turn everything on its head. Merida is not upset about being a princess or being a girl. She knows what her role is. She just wants to do it her way, and not her mother’s way.”

Ms. Chapman had ideas about how the character should look. “I wanted a real girl,” she said, “not one that very few could live up to with tiny, skinny arms, waist and legs. I wanted an athletic girl. I wanted a wildness about her, so that’s where the hair came in, to underscore that free spirit. But mainly I wanted to give girls something to look at and not feel inadequate.”

Click the link below to hear Sendak’s thoughts on his life as an artist.

Maurice Sendak

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazi…

How should adults respond to racial stereotyping when they are reading a book to a child?  Stephen Marche describes a moment of crisis in bedtime reading and sets forth three options:

“Dad, why do the pirates have a gorilla?” This unexpected question intruded on a recent intergenerational cultural exchange: I was introducing my 6-year-old son to Asterix the Gaul. The pirates in the “Asterix” comics don’t travel with a gorilla, of course. One of the pirate crew is a grotesque caricature of an African who does indeed more closely resemble a gorilla than a person. Freze-frame on this parenting situation. What am I supposed to do? I figure I have three options.

1) Explain that the gorilla is supposed to be a black person.

2) Try to explain the history of French colonialism, how the economics of exploitation in sub-Saharan Africa led to an ideology of racism, which survived in a ghostly transfer even after the conclusion of the French Empire, infecting even silly comics about ancient Gaul.

3) Say, “I don’t know why the pirates have a gorilla” and flip to the next page.

Marshe tells us that he chose the last option, perhaps because 1) it was late at night, 2) he was tired, 3) his son was clearly interested in what happens next.  Reading with a child, as I argue in Enchanted Hunters, provides us with opportunities to do more than utter the words on the printed page.  Having a conversation about that gorilla doesn’t have to be as stilted as option #2  suggests, nor does it have to be a conversation stopper, as option #1 is.   Trust the child, not the tale, and reading together can become all the more interesting.  It can even be an educational experience for the adult, in large part because, when we read a book to a child, we engage in bifocal reading, looking at the work through the lens of adult consciousness but also through the defamiliarizing optic of a child reader.

You can read more about Little Black Sambo and its afterlife on Wikipedia.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Story_o…

Here’s a link to my blog post about the film.

 http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/bo…

And here’s some additional commentary on the Grimms’ version from my Annotated Brothers Grimm:

More than Beauty in “Beauty and the Beast,” Snow White has become the quintessentially fair–both beautiful and just–heroine of fairy tales.  The innocent, persecuted heroine par excellence, she succeeds in living happily ever after despite the plots designed by her wicked stepmother.  Named after only one of the three colors that characterize her beauty (“skin white as snow, lips red as blood, hair black as ebony”), she is often connected with the purity and innocence that our culture associates with the color white.  But the term “snow” adds another dimension to her characterization, deepening the meaning of her innocence.  Snow suggests cold and remoteness, along with the notion of the lifeless and inert, yet it also comes down from the heavens.  And Snow White in the coffin does indeed become, not only pure and innocent, but also passive, comatose, and of ethereal beauty.

Bruno Bettelheim, in exploring some of the alternate versions of “Snow White” recorded by the Brothers Grimm, came to the conclusion that the story turns on “the oedipal desires of a father and daughter, and how these arouse the mother’s jealousy which makes her wish to get rid of the daughter.”  The oedipal entanglements, he argues, come to be disguised in the version chosen by the Grimms, which turns the biological mother into a stepmother and relegates the father to the judgmental voice in the mirror.

The many versions of “Snow White” heard by the Grimms suggest the richness of folkloric variation and remind us how we have allowed stories that once circulated freely to ossify into definitive versions.  The Grimms describe one version of “Snow White” in which a count and countess drive by three mounds of snow, and the count wishes for a girl as white as the snow.  After passing three ditches filled with red blood, he wishes for a girl with cheeks as red as the blood.  Finally, three ravens fly overhead and he wishes for a girl with hair as black as the ravens.  The couple discovers on the road a girl exactly like the one the count longs for, and they invite her into their carriage.  The count immediately has tender feelings for the girl.  The countess, however, cannot abide the girl and schemes to get rid of her.  She drops her glove and orders Snow White to retrieve it, and then orders the coachman to drive off as speedily as possible.  In a related version, the countess tells Snow White to gather roses, and then deserts the girl, leaving her to fend for herself in the woods.

            Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) has so overshadowed other versions of the story that it is easy to forget that the tale is widely disseminated across a variety of cultures.  The heroine may ingest a poisoned apple in her cinematic incarnation, but in Italy she is just as likely to fall victim to a toxic comb, a contaminated cake, or a suffocating braid.  Disney’s queen, who demands Snow White’s heart from the huntsman who takes her into the woods, seems restrained by comparison with the Grimms’ evil queen, who orders the huntsman to return with the girl’s lungs and liver, both of which she plans to eat after boiling them in salt water.  In Spain, the queen is even more bloodthirsty, asking for a bottle of blood stoppered with the girl’s toe.  In Italy, she instructs the huntsman to return with the girl’s intestines and her blood-soaked shirt.  The dwarfs are sometimes miners, but sometimes also compassionate robbers, thieves, bears, wild men, or ogres.  Disney’s film has made much of Snow White’s coffin being made of glass, but in other versions of the tale that coffin is made of gold, silver, or lead, or is jewel-encrusted.  While it is often displayed on a mountaintop, it can also be set adrift on a river, placed under a tree, hung from the rafters of a room, or locked in a room and surrounded with candles.

“Snow White” may vary tremendously from culture to culture in its details, but it has an easily identifiable, stable core in the conflict between mother and daughter.  In many versions of the tale, the evil queen is the girl’s biological mother, not a stepmother.  (The Grimms, in an effort to preserve the sanctity of motherhood, were forever turning biological mothers into stepmothers.)  The struggle between Snow White and the wicked queen so dominates the psychological landscape of this fairy tale that Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in a landmark book of feminist literary criticism, proposed renaming the story “Snow White and Her Wicked Stepmother.”  In The Madwoman in the Attic, they describe how the Grimms’ story stages a contest between the “angel-woman” and the “monster-woman” of Western culture.  For them the motor of the “Snow White” plot is in the relationship between two women, “the one fair, young, pale, the other just as fair, but older, fiercer; the one a daughter, the other a mother; the one sweet, ignorant, passive, the other both artful and active; the one a sort of angel, the other an undeniable witch.”

Gilbert and Gubar, rather than reading the story as an oedipal plot in which mother and daughter become sexual rivals for approval from the father (incarnated as the voice in the mirror), suggest that the tale mirrors our cultural division of femininity into two components, one that is writ large in our most popular version of the tale.  In Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, we find these two components fiercely polarized in a murderously jealous and forbiddingly cold woman on the one hand and an innocently sweet girl accomplished in the art of good housekeeping on the other.  Yet the Disney film also positions the evil queen as the figure of gripping narrative energy and makes Snow White so dull that she requires a supporting cast of seven to enliven her scenes.  Ultimately it is the stepmother’s disruptive, disturbing, and divisive presence that invests the film with a degree of fascination that has facilitated its widespread circulation and allowed it to take such powerful hold in our own culture.

Children reading this story are unlikely to make the interpretive moves described above.  For them, this will be the story of a mother-daughter conflict, which, according to Bruno Bettelheim, offers cathartic pleasures in its lurid punishment of the jealous queen.  Once again, as in “Cinderella,” the good mother is dead, and in this story the only real assistance she offers is in her legacy of beauty.  Snow White must contend with a villain doubly incarnated as beautiful, proud, and evil queen and as ugly, sinister, and wicked witch.  Small wonder that she is reduced to a role of pure passivity, a “dumb bunny” as the poet Anne Sexton put it.  In its validation of murderous hatred as a “natural” affect in the relationship between daughter and (step)mother and its promotion of youth, beauty, and hard work, “Snow White” is not without problematic dimensions, yet it has remained one of our most powerful cultural stories.  In 1997, Michael Cohn drew out the dark, Gothic elements of the story in his Grimm Brothers’ Snow White, starring Sigourney Weaver.

nbsp;http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/05…

Read Steven Heller on Sendak (“Kids need Kongs”) and be sure to look at the names of the artists below each image in the slideshow.  And here’s Tomi Ungerer’s winning post:

I visited Maurice last summer. It was joy and bliss under the pine trees. Cajoling the past and blasting the present — both roaring, eyes weepy, giving our emotions a free range of expressions. Maurice is now where the wild things are. Ursula Nordstrom, our editor, Edward Gorey, Shel Silverstein and many others are already there, now celebrating his arrival with a big-bang-binge among the restless natives. Feasting on taboos and dancing the mumbo-jumbo under the No No trees. His departure is an invitation! See you later perkolator!  

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/opinio…

http://www.google.com/ (only works today, May 13!)

And here are the 2 stories from the NYT:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/fashio…

 http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/tra…

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/books/maurice-sendak-childrens-author-dies-at-83.html?hp

He was larger than life and twice as natural.

Over a decade ago, Maurice Sendak came to Harvard to see the Emily Dickinson Room at Houghton Library, to read Keats’s manuscripts, and to give a lecture to the students in my course on childhood.  He referred to himself then as a “dinosaur” and worried about the decline in the quality of children’s books, though he conceded that he might also just be a “grumpy old man.” Over lunch, he was anything but, and, despite his stated aversion to signing books, he generously illustrated and signed title pages of all the books that the students had brought to class.  I always referred to his visit as a golden afternoon.

What he loved, others will love, and he showed us how.  When I think of Sendak, my first associations are to Mozart, Kleist, Melville, and Runge, the creative geniuses he loved and from whom he learned his art.  Who else could illustrate Penthesilea or Pierre?  In his talk at Harvard, he explained that his success as an author enabled him to work on projects that he did for love and that always lost money.

I love the photograph used by the NYT because there is Herman, one of the many dogs Sendak cared for, along with books and a reading chair.  Sendak was introspective by nature, but, there he is, gazing out the window at the beauties of nature.  I am sure that Mozart’s music is playing in the background.  The photograph is a preview of his heaven.

Margalit Fox writes, in the NYT obituary: He was also a mentor to a generation of younger writers and illustrators for children, several of whom, including Arthur Yorinks, Richard Egielski and Paul O. Zelinsky, went on to prominent careers of their own.

And Brian Selznik also belongs on that list.  His breakthrough came when Sendak told him: “Make the book you want to make.”  What followed was an apprenticeship with Sendak (without Sendak being aware of it) and The Invention of Hugo Cabret. 

Maybe Keats was not so wrong about truth and beauty.

Neil Gaiman has always been one of my favorite authors, and I am thrilled that he is also a fan of Harry Stephen Keeler (once recommended to me by Noah Silver).

Are you a fiction or a nonfiction person? What’s your favorite literary genre? Any guilty pleasures?

My guiltiest pleasure is Harry Stephen Keeler. He may have been the greatest bad writer America has ever produced. Or perhaps the worst great writer. I do not know. There are few faults you can accuse him of that he is not guilty of. But I love him.

How can you not love a man who wrote books with names like “The Riddle of the Traveling Skull”? Or “The Case of the Transposed Legs”?

I get into arguments with Otto Penzler, of the Mysterious Bookshop in New York, when I say things like that. “No, Neil!” he splutters. “He was just a bad writer!”

Otto still takes my money when I buy Keeler books like “The Skull of the Waltzing Clown” from him. But the expression on his face takes some of the fun out of it. And then I read a paragraph like:

“For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter’s ‘Barr-Bag,’ which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2,163 pearl buttons; nor of — in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel — or Suing Sophie!”

And then I do not give a fig for Otto’s expression, for as guilty pleasures go, Keeler is as strangely good as it gets.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/…

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…

 https://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/21/nyreg…

 http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/…