Annie Murphy Paul writes in the NYT about “Your Brain on Fiction”

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/opinio…

J.K. Rowling had that one figured out long ago:

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry’s ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure. “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean it is not real?”

As did Vladimir Nabokov

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/03/long-lost-fairy-tales.html#comments

Our own culture, under the spell of Grimm and Perrault, has favored fairy tales starring girls rather than boys, princesses rather than princes. But Schönwerth’s stories show us that once upon a time, Cinderfellas evidently suffered right alongside Cinderellas, and handsome young men fell into slumbers nearly as deep as Briar Rose’s hundred-year nap. Just as girls became domestic drudges and suffered under the curse of evil mothers and stepmothers, boys, too, served out terms as gardeners and servants, sometimes banished into the woods by hostile fathers. Like Snow White, they had to plead with a hunter for their lives. And they are as good as they are beautiful—Schönwerth uses the German term “schön,” or beautiful, for both male and female protagonists.

Next week, I’ll add my translation from one of the tales in Prinz Rosszwifl.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/mar/05/five-hundred-fairytales-discovered-germany

A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.

Last year, the Oberpfalz cultural curator Erika Eichenseer published a selection of fairytales from Von Schönwerth’s collection, calling the book Prinz Roßzwifl. This is local dialect for “scarab beetle”. The scarab, also known as the “dung beetle”, buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Eichenseer sees this as symbolic for fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

Here’s “The Turnip Princess”:

“Are Fairy Tales out of Fashion?” Libby Copeland asks in Slate, in response to a recent study by a British TV channel called Watch.

It’s no surprise that many parents have stopped reading fairy tales to their young children because they’re too scary, according to a new study by a British television channel. Why should they? Many were never really meant for children, not when the original folk tales were first gathered by collectors like the brothers Grimm.

It’s refreshing to discover a writer who has done the hard work of reading up on the tales and their histories.  Copeland understands the importance of preserving the versions told in times past when life was “nasty, brutish, and short,” and she also recognizes that Disney films, as appealing as they may be on many different levels, have created global master-narratives that may not reflect the values we want to impart to our children.  The stories were never written in granite, and we can make them our own by being irreverent about them.  There’s nothing wrong with editing, refashioning, and creating your own version for a child, or choosing a tale from the many different versions out there–one that is age-appropriate and also leaves something to the imagination–let’s you fill in the many blanks.  What I’ve always loved about fairy tales is that they are so compact and surreal—no one accepts the story at face value and we can’t help but react to the terms of the tale.  Fairy tales  get us talking about what you do when you meet a wolf  in the forest, encounter a beast at home, or find a talking frog in your backyard.  The story is just the beginning of a bigger conversation that continues over the years.   The best tales offer a worst-case scenario and provide a tool kit for surviving the great  “What If?”  And children have great instincts about stories–when it’s too much for them or too little and not just right, they let us know right away by turning away or falling asleep.

http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/02/why_i_don_t_want_to_read_fairy_tales_to_my_daughter_.html

 http://www.time.com/time/magazine/articl…

Pixar has a girl problem.

All 12 of its unfathomably successful movies—which have made more than $7 billion at the box office, not counting toys, clothes, Disney rides, video games and TV shows—have male leads. Very male leads: cowboys, astronauts, robots, cars, Ed Asner. Pixar has been aware of this problem since its first feature film, Toy Story, back in 1995. “After we made Toy Story, my wife Nancy said, ‘Can you make strong female characters for me and your nieces?’” says John Lasseter, Pixar’s chief creative officer. He, too, looks a lot like a 12-year-old boy, wearing his regular workday uniform of a Hawaiian shirt and jeans, sitting in his huge L-shaped office lined with shelf after shelf of toy cars and trains.

So Lasseter, who has five sons and no daughters, added the cowgirl Jessie as the third lead in Toy Story 2 and 3. He added a female spy as the fourth lead in Cars 2. But an idea for a story with a female lead never jelled. In 2003 he hired Brenda Chapman, who had been story supervisor on Disney’s The Lion King and was one of three co-directors of DreamWorks’ The Prince of Egypt, and asked her to pitch an idea for a film.

“She just pitched one story. Usually a director will pitch a bunch of stories, but John just glommed onto this right away,” says Steve Russell, who worked directly under Chapman on the idea that became Brave, Pixar’s 13th feature film (in theaters June 22). Lasseter made Chapman the first woman to direct a Pixar movie.

Chapman’s idea was a fairy tale about a princess, which wasn’t necessarily going to be exciting news for Pixar’s feminist critics. Or Pixar’s staff. “Brenda was telling me about it, and my eyes glazed over. Princess, king, mother-daughter, ancient kingdom—all words I didn’t like to think about,” says Steve Pilcher, the film’s production designer. Still, after hearing her full pitch, he signed on the same day. He liked that Chapman aimed to subvert the princess narrative in the same way Pixar’s The Incredibles tweaked superhero stories.

Brave’s medieval Scottish princess, Merida (voiced by Boardwalk Empire’s Kelly Macdonald), almost never wears princess clothes. Instead, she rides a horse and shoots a bow and arrow. Her mom Queen Elinor (Emma Thompson) insists she follow tradition and let the eldest sons of the heads of the kingdom’s clans compete in a series of games for her hand in marriage. But Merida doesn’t tell her mom that she’s going to pick her own husband, as princesses sometimes do in films. This is a fairy tale without a romance. Merida tells her that she isn’t marrying anyone. Then she fights bears. But mostly, like all teenage girls, she fights with her mom.

Chapman, who’s a redhead like Merida and part Scottish, took conflicts with her then 5-year-old daughter and fairy-tale-ized them. In one scene, which has since been cut from the film, Merida and her mother take a break midargument to hug and say good morning before they resume fighting, just as Chapman and her kid did. “I have this amazing daughter, and she is really strong-willed, and I’m strong-willed,” Chapman says. “She competes with me for her dad. I was thinking, What’s she going to be like as a teenager?”

Chapman isn’t worried that boys will shy away from a film about a princess, even though industry research indicates that boys have more influence than their sisters in convincing their parents which movies to see. “Back in my day, boys and girls both went to see Cinderella and Snow White and Sleeping Beauty,” she says. “It’s just a change in media and advertising.”

nbsp;http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/0…

nbsp;http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPQNQlMvr…

Nicki Richesin of the Children’s Book Review writes about academy-award-nominated  films based on books and notes the number of books this year that inspired nominated films. Below the trailer for The Bad Seed, which is not on her list.  But for now: The Yearling and many other surprises from her.

Many children’s books that have been adapted for film have been recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Hugo based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick and War Horse adapted from the children’s novel by Michael Morpurgo have both been nominated for Best Picture. Take a look back at some of the books that have inspired memorable films and been honored as nominees for Best Picture by the academy over the years.

 http://www.cntraveler.com/features/2012/…

The fact that the sucker punch of the Grimms’ stories could survive even Disney’s neutered translation suggests the way the tales can still throw down their own kind of curse. Sure, there is usually a happy ending. But before the wedding comes a cavalcade of our fears, marching out like the seven pitiless dwarfs: abandonment, infanticide, boiling cauldrons, chopped limbs, witches warped and creaking like old wood. And those missing children. Where did they go?

The fear was still haunting enough to make me pause before opting to drive the official Fairy-Tale Road. The route, often dismissed as the gooey epicenter of Teutonic kitsch, is worth reconsidering. Twisting approximately 370 pastoral miles north of Frankfurt, mostly through the back roads of Hesse and Lower Saxony, before petering out in Bremen, it reveals one of the most underrated pockets of a German dreamscape. And there is no better time to go: 2012 is the bicentennial of volume one of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Children’s and Household Tales, the collection that includes Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, The Pied Piper of Hameln, Snow White, and Rapunzel and which launched the Grimms’ lifework as aggregators of fables. The route follows both the trail of the brothers’ evolving careers and the tales themselves. If the villages and castles (some now converted, timed to the bicentennial, into chic schloss hotels) look twee enough to inspire fairy tales—the pitch made by every European pit stop boasting a thatched cottage or two—this time, at least, you know the claim is justified. That adds its own kind of gravitas. The winding backdrop for so many of our earliest shared stories and nightmares is an example of that thing travelers always hunt for: the place as bona fide muse.

GOODNIGHT iPAD is a gentle reminder to power down at the end of the day. It will make you laugh, and it will also help you wrest yourself away from your gadgets and put yourself — and your machines — to sleep. Don’t worry, though. Your gadgets will be waiting for you, fully charged, in the morning.

Above is the blurb that was presumably prepared for Youtube by the publisher, PenguinGroupUSA.  If you get the hardcover version of the book (and, yes, I admit that I own it), you will find the word “Humor” printed on the back cover.  That term protects the author from being sued for copyright infringement by the estate of Margaret Wise Brown.  How deeply ironic that there is an iPad version of Goodnight iPad. 

Can anyone solve the mystery: who is Ann Droyd?