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/arti…

“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/bo…

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/arch…

Rebecca Keegan captures many different angles on the film in the LATimes:
The juvenile slaughterfest depicted in the film and its source material, Suzanne Collins’ trilogy of bestselling young adult novels, may give audiences (particularly parents) pause — is this what contemporary entertainment has come to? But violence committed by and against children has a long, grisly tradition in literature — as an allegory for adult cruelty, a representation of the emotional volatility of adolescence and a tension-raiser for audiences.

 http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/new…

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/books/…

Harold Bloom reviews Marina Warner’s wonderful new Stranger Magic, and he is as much in awe of it as I am.  Below an extract from the book, which he includes in his review.

“It did not seem enough to invoke escapism as the reason for the popularity of ‘The Arabian Nights’ in the age of reason. Something more seemed to be at stake. Magic is not simply a matter of the occult or the esoteric, of astrology, Wicca and Satanism; it follows processes inherent to human consciousness and connected to constructive and imaginative thought. The faculties of imagination — dream, projection, fantasy — are bound up with the faculties of reasoning and essential to making the leap beyond the known into the unknown. At one pole (myth), magic is associated with poetic truth, at another (the history of science) with inquiry and speculation. It was bound up with understanding physical forces in nature and led to technical ingenuity and discoveries. Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act; it has shaped many features of Western civilization. But its influence has been constantly disavowed since the Enlightenment and its action and effects consequently ­misunderstood.”

Terrence Rafferty brings us up to speed on the latest film and television adaptations.

Fairy tales can come true, the old song goes; it can happen to you, apparently, if you’re young at heart. Whether one believes this hopeful sentiment, and regardless of the age of one’s internal organs, there’s no doubt that fairy tales have for the past couple of years — and into the foreseeable future — been coming pretty regularly to screens both big and small, achieving, you could say, at least the kind of quasi-truth that movies and television can concoct.

 http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2012/03…

 http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entert…

“He has already taken on the story of the New Testament in The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ (Canongate, £10.99); now, Philip Pullman is to rewrite 50 Grimm fairy tales, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of their first publication. Penguin Classics will publish the tales on 6 September. Pullman has long counted himself as a fan of the stories, and has been working on his own versions for some time. Last year, he told the fansite bridgetothestars.net: “This isn’t a book for children only. I’m telling the best of the tales in my own voice, and I’m finding it a great purifier of narrative thinking, rather as a pianist relishes playing Bach’s preludes and fugues as a sort of palate-cleansing discipline.”

Pinch me–this is too good to be true.

Below a link to David Denby’s review of The Hunger Games film in The New Yorker.  I’m waiting until Wednesday to see the film with my students.  Read the full review, and you will find that he pulls no punches in telling us how much he hates the movie.  Would he prefer Battle Royale?  I’ve posted the trailer for that film below, and, just a warning, it does not have a Pg-13 rating.

“The Hunger Games” is a prime example of commercial hypocrisy. The filmmakers bait kids with a cruel idea, but they can’t risk being too intense or too graphic (the books are more explicit). After a while, we get the point: because children are the principal audience, the picture needs a PG-13 rating. The result is an evasive, baffling, unexciting production—anything but a classic.

And even scarier (be warned):