Annotated Peter Pan Event
The Annotated Peter Pan is now in bookstores and available on Amazon. I’m looking forward to talking about J.M. Barrie and Peter Pan on October 12 at the Harvard Bookstore. The 6pm event will be followed by a book signing and by a showing of the exquisite 1928 film, Peter Pan, at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
Nevermore Never Again: Sendak Has a New Book
Maurice Sendak has a new book: Bumble-ardy, and Terry Gross’s interview with him about the book is just incandescent. There are so many moving and revealing moments, and most of them are best left untouched by critical comment. In the interview, you will hear Sendak in deep confessional mode, and he is wonderfully open and unplugged about everything from a life dedicated to art and reading to why he feels himself unsuited to childrearing. His comments on “Never again” in Bumble-ardy reminded me of the multi-layered complexity of his “simple” stories. The phrase evokes the postwar response to the Holocaust, the impossibility of recapturing the past, the futile struggle against disappearance, the words of Poe’s raven, even as it resonates quietly with childhood experiences of loss.
http://www.npr.org/2011/09/20/140435330/this-pig-wants-to-party-maurice-sendaks-latest
I especially like the fact that Sendak has, like Lewis Carroll before him or Franz Kafka for that matter, embraced the poetry of nonsense, a move that has a certain inner logic when you are his age and trying to make sense of your life: “I’m writing a poem right now about a nose. I’ve always wanted to write a poem about a nose. But it’s a ludicrous subject. That’s why, when I was younger, I was afraid of [writing] something that didn’t make a lot of sense. But now I’m not. I have nothing to worry about. It doesn’t matter.”
Sendak, Seuss, Silverstein and the Shock of Subversion
Pamela Paul writes about the eccentric styles of authors whose work marked a seismic shift in picture books for children:
Once upon a more staid time, the purpose of children’s books was to model good behavior. They were meant to edify and to encourage young readers to be what parents wanted them to be, and the children in their pages were well behaved, properly attired and devoid of tears. Children’s literature was not supposed to shine a light on the way children actually were, or delight in the slovenly, self-interested and disobedient side of their natures.
Seuss, Sendak and Silverstein ignored these rules. They brought a shock of subversion to the genre — defying the notion that children’s books shouldn’t be scary, silly or sophisticated. Rather than reprimand the wayward listener, their books encouraged bad (or perhaps just human) behavior. Not surprisingly, Silverstein and Sendak shared the same longtime editor, Ursula Nordstrom of Harper & Row, a woman who once declared it her mission to publish “good books for bad children.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/books/…
I’d be curious to know what she thinks of Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwelpeter (1845) , subtitled Funny Stories and Droll Pictures. In it, the badly behaved, slovenly, and transgressive kids are mocked and punished (Konrad the thumb-sucker has his thumbs sliced off). Perhaps a bad book for good children?
And does Silverstein belong in this trio? Paul’s essay made me wonder if there might be a touch of irony to The Giving Tree, one of the most hated books in the canon of children’s books, right up there with Robert Munsch’s Love You Forever.
Fairy-Tale Films and the Dark Side
Emma Mustich interviews Jack Zipes on the recent turn to the dark side of fairy tales. I’m not so sure that Disney film lack the dark side to which she refers, although the Disney Cinderella is no match for the Grimms’ version, with blood dripping from the stepsisters’ shoes and eyes pecked out by doves. Remember Ursula, the Sea Witch, and her battle with Eric? And the transformation scene in Snow White, down in the cellar with the skulls and ravens? Emma Mustich writes:
These stories have entertained and comforted, spooked and delighted audiences for countless generations. Many who are alive today find Disney’s adaptations of these tales — from “Cinderella” to “The Little Mermaid” — familiar; children reared on the animation giant’s brightly-colored, upbeat and music-saturated films may view the glut of live-action fairy tale film adaptations headed our way — three new “Snow Whites,” two “Sleeping Beauties,” a “Beauty and the Beast” and a “Little Mermaid,” among others — with a curious sort of caution.
A number of these films (which are in various stages of planning and production) have been pitched as “dark” retellings of familiar tales. At this year’s Comic-Con, Charlize Theron likened her “Evil Queen” character in “Snow White and the Huntsman” to a “serial killer” (not a total departure for Theron); the new “Little Mermaid” is based on Carolyn Turgeon’s novel “Mermaid,” which Booklist reviewed using words and phrases like “dark,” “foreboding,” “heartache,” “misery,” “constant pain,” “catastrophic consequences,” “brooding,” “tragic” and “not exactly a cozy bedtime story.”
Does this “dark turn” in fairy-tale filmmaking represent a return to older, more forbidding versions of stories Disney gussied up for 20th-century kids? Or are these new movies simply cogs in the wheel of folk tale re-telling?
Here’s the link to the interview, and you will discover that Jack Zipes is no fan of Disney.
http://www.salon.com/entertainment/movie…
Adirondacks Library Loses Its Children’s Books, and You Can Help
This picture says it all.
To help, follow instructions in the link below:
Babar at 80 and Yoga
Here is a lovely interview with Laurent de Brunhof about the origins of Babar and the latest book in the series. Yoga for Elephants!
http://video.nytimes.com/video/2011/08/1…
Below you will find a link to my favorite analysis of the Babar stories: Adam Gopnik reads the first installment in the series as an allegory of French colonialism and its “civilizing” effects.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/…
Childhood in Crisis (Again)
Joel Bakan, a law professor at the University of British Columbia and author of “Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children” writes in the NYT about how new technologies, corporate greed, and the pharmaceutical industry are threatening childhood. Moral panic about childhood has a familiar face, and ever since Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent and his planned War on Children, we are right to be suspicious of those who crusade against new media and technologies “for the sake of the children.” What worries me most is the double standard in effect: we are tethered to our electronic devices, constantly texting and talking, yet we become upset when children mimic our behavior.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/22/opinion/corporate-interests-threaten-childrens-welfare.html?_r=1
There is reason to believe that childhood itself is now in crisis.
Throughout history, societies have struggled with how to deal with children and childhood. In the United States and elsewhere, a broad-based “child saving” movement emerged in the late 19th century to combat widespread child abuse in mines, mills and factories. By the early 20th century, the “century of the child,” as a prescient book published in 1909 called it, was in full throttle. Most modern states embraced the general idea that government had a duty to protect the health, education and welfare of children. Child labor was outlawed, as were the sale and marketing of tobacco, alcohol and pornography to children. Consumer protection laws were enacted to regulate product safety and advertising aimed at children.
By the middle of the century, childhood was a robustly protected legal category. In 1959, the United Nations issued its Declaration of the Rights of the Child. Children were now legal persons; the “best interests of the child” became a touchstone for legal reform.
A New Snow White from Disney?
Currently, there are three Snow White films in development. This new version is a “re-imagining” of the tale, and production has been delayed, perhaps because of the two other films coming out in the 2012, along with the television series “Once Upon a Time,” based on the Snow White story. Why has that particular story gone viral? The key element, a beautiful, seductive, evil woman who plots the death of her more beautiful, innocent, virtuous rival, does not resonate immediately with our cultural fears and anxieties. But I wonder if the rise of the “cougar” has anything to do with the resurrection of Snow White? And is it a stretch to consider the Casey Anthony story a grim, modern version of “Snow White”? Or more importantly, is our cultural obsession with Casey Anthony based to some extent on how she embodies childhood fears about maternal sexual envy turned murderous?
