The threesixty Theatre production of “Peter Pan” is now in Chicago.  It features “an ambitious hybrid of live theater, aerial arts, puppetry, and supremely advanced computer-generated visuals.”  The project was launched in London and is now on a US tour.  The show seems to have solved the Spiderman problem–kids stay in the harness and the computer images move!

Here’s an excerpt from a review of the show in the Chicago Sun Times:

Above all there is a breathtaking flight to Neverland that carries the audience on a vertiginous journey over London rooftops, through the Marble Arch, along the River Thames and high into the clouds before a rough landing on a Caribbean island where a pirate ship hovers.

If something is lost along the way in all this it is the clarity of the storytelling. For as it happens, Barrie’s story (and it’s all there in Tanya Ronder’s adaptation), speaks to children on one level, and adults on another, and it is a great deal more complicated than it appears on the surface. Unquestionably, the sheer sensation of flight has an endless allure, and there are other stunning sensations here, too, including being under water, on a pirate ship, or being surrounded by the dense vegetation of a tropical forest. But the intimacy and clarity of the human relationships, which is what ultimately makes any “Peter Pan” fully tick, sometimes gets blurred in this elaborate production.

I appreciate the reviewer’s understanding of the story’s complexities.  My Annotated Peter Pan will be published by W.W. Norton in October 2011–just in time for the 100th anniversary of Peter and Wendy. Writing that volume led me to discover just how weighty, packed, and fiendishly complicated the story really is.  And the backstory about Barrie and the five Llewelyn Davies boys is equally compelling.

There is nothing like a royal wedding to revive faith in fairy tales.   Today’s ceremony enacted in symbolic terms everything we imagine to constitute happily ever after.   The royal groom, the bride of humble origins (well, sort of), the lengthy bridal test, and the magnetic beauty of the bride–it’s all there.  Along with a back story about what happily ever after meant for a royal wedding that took place not once upon a time, but almost three decades ago.  There we had the evil queen, the tortured princess, and the unfaithful husband giving us more of a taste of what happens in the fairy tales told long ago.  For that reason, I can’t help but feel some anxiety about the constant repetition in the news of the term “fairy-tale wedding.”  Let’s hope that Kate and William have lives that are anything but a fairy tale.

And here’s the link to Maureen Dowd’s compelling op-ed about the royal wedding.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinio…

You could sense a collective prayer among the spectators that Kate, with her Cinderella coach, Cartier tiara and satin slippers, was not a lamb being led to slaughter. Many assured the invading celebrity journalists that Kate was older and more grounded than the virginal and high-strung 20-year-old who married an older man who loved another woman.

And a sad postscript: Here’s Anne Sinclair, wife of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on the royal wedding:

On April 30, Ms. Sinclair wrote about the wedding of Prince William. “I can understand those who didn’t miss a crumb. As if, quite simply, we were like children who, before going to sleep, want a tale, a story with a princess and a dream, because real life catches up with you soon enough. …”

Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw, Thomas Dingman, and David Ager read “this fabulous bedtime story” in a video designed to put their students to sleep.   I can imagine that, with a few changes in words and images, the story could be adapted for the college crowd.  Goodnight book full of mush . . . .

Lawrence Downes reports on Apple’s virtual bookstore, with its animated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, designed to keep child readers from getting “sleepy and stupid.”  He raises some interesting questions about the migration of classic children’s stories into digital media.  These days, children have almost as much, if not more, exposure to media as adults.  He cites a study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on children’s media:

It was hard to give conclusive answers about children’s digital media, except that it’s vast. The report, a compilation of seven studies, found children swimming in a media ocean. Each day, it said, schoolchildren “pack almost 8 hours of media exposure into 5.5 hours of time” because they multitask with video games, music players and TV.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/opinio…

On a recent flight to Los Angeles, I witnessed a very unhappy three-year-old girl tortured by an e-book.  Her mother, desperate to keep her quiet, kept thrusting the animated device on her lap, with the hope that the kinetic energy of the book would distract her.  Sometimes less is more.  When it comes to picture books, and to Alice in Wonderland for that matter, the static page has real power to engage and to draw us into Elsewhere.  Still, I’m willing to try out Apple’s Alice in Wonderland, and I’m just hoping it’s not cluttered with merchandising platforms.  If it is, I’ll stick to Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in Wonderland.

Here’s Apple’s irresistible sales pitch:

 http://www.apple.com/ipad/built-in-apps/…

The postscript below was written after I had bought the ipad version of Alice in Wonderland.

P.S.  File this under one more huge advantage of the printed book: You can preview it at a bookstore, and, if it’s just a gimmick, you won’t buy it.  And you can return it.  This is not the case with  Alice in Wonderland for the ipad, which manages, despite its colors and animations, to be nothing more than a shadowy, anemic version of Lewis Carroll’s book.  Yes, it is true, when pictures dance, reading changes–not in a way that improves on the words in the story.  At least not so far.

Diana Wynne Jones died last week, and, rereading her novels, I’m reminded that she is one of the great under-rated authors of children’s books. Try Howl’s Moving Castle if you are new to her work. The New York Times captures the power of her writing and reminds us how her clever, curious protagonists navigate worlds of hyperdysfunctionality.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/books/…
Diana Wynne Jones has a moving account of her childhood and of what led her to become a writer on her website.
 http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/autobi…
She tells us: “I get unhappy if I don’t write. Each book is an experiment, an attempt to write the ideal book, the book my children would like, the book I didn’t have as a child myself. I have still not, after twenty-odd books, written that book. But I keep trying. Nor do I manage to live a quiet life. I keep undertaking things, like visiting schools and teaching courses as a writer, or learning the cello, or doing amateur theatricals, or rashly agreeing to do all the cooking for Richard’s wedding in 1984. Every one of those things has led to comic disasters-except the wedding: that was perfect.” And so were her books.

“Little Red Riding Hood” is our cultural story about innocence and seduction, and the story about a girl, a wolf, and an encounter in the woods  has shape-shifted with surprising expressive intensity ever since it was first written down by Charles Perrault.  Perrault’s “Little Red Cap,” published in 1697 in a fairy-tale collection called Tales from Times Past, ended with the wolf swallowing the girl:  “Upon saying these words, the wicked wolf threw himself on Red Riding Hood and gobbled her up.”  End of story–no  huntsman, no opening up of the belly, and no rescue scene.  The Brothers Grimm arranged for the girl’s survival in 1812, and they added a coda in which the protagonist lectures herself about never again straying from the path “when your mother has forbidden it.”  They were aware of alternate versions, in which the girl outwits the wolf, and they offered a sequel in which Little Red Cap partners with her grandmother to outwit the wolf.  Since then, Little Red Riding Hood has found her way into works as varied as Tex Avery’s cartoon Red Hot Riding Hood, Angela Carter’s The Company of Wolves, and Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars.  In her latest incarnation, she continues to reverse the role of predator and prey, but, as the NYT review of Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood suggests, she seems to have lost some of her mythic power. She has become nothing more than the girl who “sighs” wolf.

Italo Calvino was right to emphasize how fairy tales are not just for the nursery.  Stories like “Little Red Riding Hood” enable us to talk about and work through cultural contradictions.  “Through the forest of fairy tale, the vibrancy of myth passes like a shudder of the wind,” he wrote.

 http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/03/11/mov…

On March 11, Red Riding Hood opens, and Beastly is in theaters now.  The Vancouver Post reports that there are currently three Snow White films in the works (one with Julia Roberts as the wicked queen), along with Hansel and Gretel, Jack the Giant Killer, as well as a “fantasy copy show” Grimm, in which fairy-tale characters turn real.

The reporter links the resurgence of interest in fairy tales to the success of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland film and to fact that producers do not have to pay for the rights to these stories.  I wonder if that’s all there is to it.  I think we may be giving these stories more air-time, letting them breathe as Arthur W. Frank puts it, in part because we need their power surges now more than ever.  The mythical always stages a comeback in times of high anxiety about technology and the atrophy of our affective life.

 http://www.vancouversun.com/Creepily+eve…

 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editor…

Lane Smith’s “It’s a Book” ends when a monkey, whose patience has been tested by a technophile donkey, uses the term  “Jackass” to describe his benighted companion.  Some parents have objected, and you can read about the controversy on Cape Ann in the Boston Globe.  Lane Smith defends himself with the claim that the book needed a punchline at the end, and he may be right.  I’m usually opposed to the language police, and I was on first reading the article.  Then I remembered “It’s a picture book” and imagined the two and three-year-olds I know gleefully embracing the word and the wild rumpus that ensues.  On second thought, maybe it’s not such a bad way to end a book.

Stuart Shieber uses It’s a Book as a point of departure for discussing the trade-offs between e-books and the printed codex.  You can hear him and Robert Darnton discuss old books and new media in the link below.  Shieber’s presentation begins at about 31:55.

 http://www.youtube.com/user/Harvard#p/u/…

Julia Lam, a former student of mine now working in DC, sent me the link below to a hard-hitting speech by Philip Pullman about the need to keep libraries open.

 http://falseeconomy.org.uk/blog/save-oxf…

I especially liked Pullman’s meditations on the space that opens up between book and reader:

I still remember the first library ticket I ever had. It must have been about 1957. My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that? Why did I read it over and over again, and borrow it many times? I don’t know. But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination.

And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

Somewhere in Blackbird Leys, somewhere in Berinsfield, somewhere in Botley, somewhere in Benson or in Bampton, to name only the communities beginning with B whose libraries are going to be abolished, somewhere in each of them there is a child right now, there are children, just like me at that age in Battersea, children who only need to make that discovery to learn that they too are citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.

Salman Rushdie’s new book is a potent cocktail of myth, magic, and mystery.  My favorite passage in it is Luka’s speech to the assembled figures of world mythologies.  He reminds them that it is “only through Stories that you can get out into the Real World and have some power again.  When your story is told well, people believe in you; not in the way they used to believe, not in a worshiping way, but in the way people believe in stories–happily, excitedly, wishing they wouldn’t end.”

On Monday evening, I will be discussing Luka and the Fire of Life with Rushdie at First Parish Church in Cambridge (corner of Church and Massachusetts Ave.) at 7pm.  Tickets are $10. and on sale at the Harvard Book Store.  Rushdie shows himself in this volume to be the powerful creator of a new syncretic mythology that offers an alternative to the clash of civilizations.  We encounter the Shah of Blah, Ra the Supreme, Queen Soraya, a Flying Carpet, Hathor, Elephant Birds, the Chinese Wind Gods, Oonawieh Unggi, and many others in this fast-paced, inventive narrative about a boy searching for a way to prolong his father’s life.