Maxfield Parrish Revived in Burton’s Alice in Wonderland

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Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland has many scenes of jaw-dropping beauty, and my favorite was an homage to Maxfield Parrish’s Daybreak, a painting that changes color depending on the time of day at which you see it.

I found it fascinating that Burton’s adventurous Alice becomes a Joan of Arc figure and a dragon slayer, who flees marriage to set sail on the high seas.

Larry Rohter quotes the screenwriter in a film review for the NYT:


Linda Woolverton . . . said that when she began her script, she “did a lot of research on Victorian mores, on how young girls were supposed to behave, and then did exactly the opposite.” As she put it, “I was thinking more in terms of an action-adventure film with a female protagonist” than a Victorian maiden.

“I do feel it’s really important to depict strong-willed, empowered women,” she added, “because women and girls need role models, which is what art and characters are. Girls who are empowered have an opportunity to make their own choices, difficult choices, and set out on their own road.”

Perhaps someone can weigh in one the ending and the trading post in China?


Can Kindle Take Us Back to the Power of “Once upon a time”?

Storytelling

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The New York Times has a great new blog on school libraries: Do they need books? The commentators are, for the most part, wonderfully thoughtful about the subject, and I was especially impressed by William Powers, who will be publishing a book called “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.” See his thoughts below, along with the link to the NYT blog.

The Kindle comes in a box with the words “Once upon a time” printed on the side. My own experience with the Kindle confirms what Powers says. Kindle is great for travel and when you carry it around with you, you are never at a loss for reading material. But trying to do anything like the deep read is–at least so far–really impossible. For my course on Childhood and Children’s Literature, I put at the very top of my syllabus the wonderful words of Tim Wynne-Jones about the deep read. I’ve quoted him before on this blog, and I wanted to quote him again, because his words resonate so well with what Powers has to say. I like the idea of considering reading as deep-sea diving–it captures the idea of immersion. But  I  tend to see reading as less oceanic than aerial, something akin to flying and soaring into a new world–you pass through a portal, get to Elsewhere, and inhabit a world of possibilities, living and breathing the air of the story world.

“The deep-read is when you get gut-hooked and dragged overboard down and down through the maze of print and find, to your amazement, you can breathe down there after all and there’s a whole other world. I’m talking about the kind of reading when you realize that books are indeed interactive. . . . I’m talking about the kind of deep-read where it isn’t just the plot or the characters that matter, but the words and the way they fit together and the meandering evanescent thoughts you think between the lines: the kind of reading where you are fleetingly aware of your own mind at work.”

–Tim Wynne-Jones, “The Survival of the Book”

 http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2…

So it goes with books. What are often considered the weaknesses of the old-fashioned book are in some ways its strengths. For instance, a physical book works with the body and mind in ways that more readily produce the deep-dive experience that is reading at its best. When you read on a two-dimensional screen, your mind spends a lot of energy just navigating, keeping track of where you are on the page and in the text. The tangibility of a traditional book allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden: you feel where you are, and this frees up the mind to think.

Moreover, I believe that in a hyper-connected age, the fact that books are not connected to the electronic grid is becoming their greatest asset. They’re a space apart, a private place away from the inbox where we can go to quiet our minds and reflect. Isn’t that the state in which the best kind of learning occurs?

Are Children Getting Older Younger?

Children's Literature

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Are kids tethered to electronic devices? Tarmar Lewin writes in the New York Times that the “average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/20/educat…

Here’s my question: are adults tethered to electronic devices? And why is there a sudden moral panic about children texting and talking on their cellphones when adults spend so much of their time doing the same thing? Are kids getting older younger? Are they exposed through electronic media to words and images that even they do not want to see? What is lost in the transition from print culture/books to Kindles, Nooks, and i-pads? Will children get lost in stories? Can they still practice what Tim Wynne-Jones calls the deep read?

“The deep-read is when you get gut-hooked and dragged overboard down and down through the maze of print and find, to your amazement, you can breathe down there after all and there’s a whole other world. I’m talking about the kind of reading when you realize that books are indeed interactive. . . . I’m talking about the kind of deep-read where it isn’t just the plot or the characters that matter, but the words and the way they fit together and the meandering evanescent thoughts you think between the lines: the kind of reading where you are fleetingly aware of your own mind at work.”

These are some of the questions we considered this week in my class on Childhood. For the first time, I began to have the feeling that the medium affects not only the message but also rewires our brains. Is there such a thing as deep reading in an age of electronic devices. When I read books on a Kindle, I have a slightly eerie sensation: the words seem to disappear as I “consume” them. But who knows–that may change over time as I become more adept at using the various features on the device.

The Velveteen Rabbit Gets Cameo in Up in the Air

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Why on earth is the runaway groom reading The Velveteen Rabbit in Up in the Air? “Very powerful,” George Clooney comments sardonically, paying little attention to the picture book that is evidently proving supremely comforting to the fellow whose impending wedding has just provoked a mortality crisis. As the groom points out, once you get married, you also have kids and then they grow up—and you die.
Why The Velveteen Rabbit? Margery Williams used the subtitle: How Toys Become Real for the book that she published in 1922. And that’s what Up in the Air is all about: becoming real. Ryan Bingham, the slick corporate undertaker who crisscrosses the country collecting frequent flier miles and firing employees, discovers just what it means to become real. A man who is most at ease when packing his suitcase and figuring out how to game long security lines, Clooney is presented as a man of machine-like precision and perfection who is missing a soul. He could have saved himself a lot of trouble by taking a closer look at the book in the hands of the man who will become his brother-in-law.

Cleaning Up The Lovely Bones

Storytelling

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Before he made the film M, Fritz Lang thought long and hard about the worst crime imaginable. He came up with the murder of a child, an answer so obvious that you wonder what took him so long. The Lovely Bones, directed by Peter Jackson and based on Alice Sebold’s novel, tips its hat on two occasions to Lang’s film, first with shots of the crime victim’s never-to-be-used place setting at the family dinner table, next when a rolling ball stands in for the murder of another child. As in M, the murders of children happen off screen. What we see in M is a balloon figure trapped in telephone wires, a rolling ball, a place setting, and a mother’s desperate cries for her child. In The Lovely Bones, we see Susie racing away from her killer, and for a moment we believe that she has escaped.

Representing the murder of a child seems to be one of our last cultural taboos. James Whale’s Frankenstein of 1931 is one of the very few film that actually shows a child being murdered, with the monster drowning the child named Maria. That scene was cut from the film and not restored until 1986.

The image above shows George Harvey (played by Stanley Tucci) surrounded by the dollhouses he builds. Tucci gives a magnificent performance in a film that creates gumdrop-colored versions of heaven and offers rainbow promises of redemption in a world so steeped in pathologies that even a serial murderer of children fails to be brought to justice in a meaningful way.

Taking the Magic out of College and Putting It Back In

Children's Literature

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Lauren Edelson worried last week about how college tour guides deliver condescending pitches about how their schools resemble Hogwarts. Not a bad thing in my book, especially when you have seen schools that bear no resemblance at all to Hogwarts. Still, she makes a good point about how high school students are longing to grow up and out of Hogwarts: Leaving home and beginning life in a new place is a nerve-racking experience, and nothing seems more reassuring than imagining that college will be the realization of a fantasy world I’ve been imagining since childhood. Obviously colleges have picked up on this. But they’re trying too hard. They’re selling the wrong thing. And my friends and I won’t be fooled. After all, Harry Potter is frozen in high school, and we’re growing up.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/06/opinion/06edelson.html

I was sold on her argument until Dani Duggan (Weston High School) weighed in: What I still don’t understand is why Ms. Edelson thinks “selling” Harry Potter is a problem. As my dad says, you’re old for a very long time. So what’s the harm in a little magic?

And apropos Harry Potter in College, CNN.com has an interesting piece on Pottermania in the college classroom and interviews students who are taking a range of courses in which J.K. Rowling’s series is read.

 http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/03…


Children’s Literature at Princeton

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Pat Buchanan was already annoyed that Sonia Sotomayor had the temerity to read the classics of children’s literature while a student at Princeton. He will have smoke coming out of his ears now that William Gleason is offering ENG 335: Children’s Literature. The Daily Princetonian reports that the course was capped at 450, making it the largest offered in the spring term of 2010.  I am looking forward to seeing the reading list.

Lois Lowry Collaborates with Bagram Ibatoulline

Children's Literature

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Lois Lowry’s picture book Crow Call may be set in November, but it makes a perfect Christmas gift. Illustrated by the Russian artist Bagram Ibatoulline (The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and Thumbelina, among others), it follows father and daughter on a hunting expedition that takes them from home, through the woods, and back again. In the middle of those woods (and in the precise middle of the book), Lowry describes, with characteristic understatement, an encounter that transforms both adult and child. It was fascinating to me how deeply Ibatoulline understood the story, turning to photographic realism on the very page that captures the fears of the father during his time in the combat zone and the anxieties of the daughter in times of peace.

Lowry alluded to “Little Red Riding Hood” in Number the Stars, and this story too reminds me of the power of a girl, a hunter, and an encounter in the woods. The elements of the fairy tale are configured here in an entirely new way and anchored in the mode of psychological realism. The relationship between father and daughter becomes poetically emblematic, revealing the “groping toward understanding each other” of parents and children (as stated on the last page) as well as the complexities of the human condition (our conflicted relationship to nature and to men and women from other nations and cultures).