More on Nonsense

Uncategorized

kafka2

This is how I imagine Kafka reading “How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect,” which appeared in the NYT on October 5. Here’s the link

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/health…

Benedict Carey gives the main features of Kafka’s “Country Doctor” and describes the boy in the story as having a “terrible toothache.” According to him, the country doctor reaches his patient’s house only to learn that the boy has “no teeth at all.” If you’ve read the story, you know that the boy is described as “critically ill” and turns out to have a wound in his side–a hideously revolting wound that opens up while the doctor is examining the patient. I’d describe the story as closer to the surreal than the nonsensical. What I’m wondering now: what did those research subjects in the study described by Carey read? a doctored version of Kafka’s story?

The Disappearance of Wonder?

Children's Literature

GC_01143.jpg__1254517426_9401

 http://www.boston.com/ae/movies/articles…

Ty Burr worries that children’s stories translated into the cinematic medium risk losing their “innocence.” He makes the point that successful stories for children “address profound aspects of childhood while seeming to look the other way.” Films, by contrast, refuse to look away and offer so much information that little room is left for the imagination. I was reminded of early anxieties about sound film. In an essay on the Culture Industry, Horkheimer and Adorno worried that film would leave “no room for imagination or reflection of the part of the audience.” The “victims” of sound film are so “absorbed” by what takes place on screen that they end up equating the cinematic spectacle with reality.

Looking at Burr’s inventory of cinematic adaptations that “work” or “don’t work,” it seems fairly obvious that the success of an adaptation has little to do with “too much information.” The MGM version of The Wizard of Oz is actually better than the book, and it is full of fanciful excesses. Or take Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Why does one work and the other fall flat?

Aladin in Bollywood

Children's Literature

aladin_l200909040708

Here’s Bollywood’s update of “Aladdin and the Magic Lamp,” a story added to the French translation of the Arabian Nights by Antoine Galland, who had the tale from a Syrian storyteller. Aladdin may have his origins in Arabic cultures, but he is actually Chinese, though living in an Islamic culture in China. Note that the press copy for this film describes India as the “land of myths and legends”–a not so subtle effort to claim that Aladin is really an Indian hero. Is the new spelling part of an effort to make Aladin native?

“A Tale of Secrets and Mysteries, Power and Passion, and a Loser”–the trailer reminds us that fairy-tale heroes often begin as simpletons, numbskulls, dummies, or, in today’s terminology, losers.

This is the second Bollywood production, the first going back to the 1960s. “Everything is possible. Look at this!” is spoken with a distinctly U.S. midwestern accent.

Thanks to Holly Hutchison for sending me a link to the trailer.

Here’s the website for the trailer and a press release follows:

 http://www.apple.com/trailers/independen…

From the land of myths and legends – India – comes a fantasy adventure for the entire family. Directed by Sujoy Ghosh, ‘Aladin’ is a modern re-imagining of the classic tale of ‘Aladin and The Magic Lamp’. Aladin Chatterjee (Riteish Deshmukh) lives in the city of Khwaish, an orphan who has been bullied since childhood by Kasim and his gang. But his life changes when Jasmine (Jacquiline Fernandes) gives him a magic lamp – because it lets loose the genie Genius (Amitabh Bachchan). Desperate to grant him 3 wishes and seek the end of his contract with the Magic Lamp, the rock-star Genius makes Aladin’s life difficult until the real threat looms on the horizon : the ex-genie Ringmaster (Sanjay Dutt). Why does Ringmaster want to kill Aladin? What is the dark secret about Aladin’s past that Genius is carrying? And what is Aladin’s destiny? Find out more in this swashbuckling fantasy adventure film from Eros Entertainment and Boundscript Motion Pictures.

Why Children Should Read Alice in Wonderland

Children's Literature

franz_kafkalewis carroll

Psychologists at UCSB and at the University of British Columbia make the following claim: reading texts that challenge our ability to make meaning also enhances cognitive mechanisms related to implicit learning functions. The researchers had their subjects read a story by Kafka, then tested them on detecting patterns and structures. Below is a link to a fuller report on the study in The Guardian. The findings remind me that nonsense and the surreal challenge us to do the work of creating meaning in ways that “realistic” narratives do not. Noam Chomsky’s “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” was constructed as a sentence that produces nonsense in semantic terms, yet the minute we read it, we work hard to make sense of it by turning literal meaning into figurative meaning. “Colorless” becomes “dull” and green becomes “immature,” and so on. Is there poetry in Chomsky’s “nonsense”? And what drives us to turn the nonsensical and surreal into something meaningful?

This week, in my course on the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, we read Bruno Bettelheim on the uses of enchantment and what he calls the “struggle for meaning.” Robert Darnton’s famous essay “Peasants Tell Tales” has the subtitle “The Meaning of Mother Goose.” The psychoanalyst and the historian provide competing models for constructing the “meaning” of fairy tales, with one arguing that children make psychological sense on their own of fairy tales, and the other making the case for the fairy tales as repositories of folk wisdom and programs for survival.

And to return to Kafka: his stories have often been compared to fairy tales. Patrick Bridgwater’s Kafka: Gothic and Fairytale elaborates on the fairy-tale quality of Kafka’s shorter narratives, pointing out resemblances to fairy tales and to what he calls the anti-fairytale.

Here’s to more nonsense in children’s books. And now, more than ever, I understand the importance–if not the meaning–of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.


 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/sep…

Do Fairy Tales Go Back to 600 BC?

Uncategorized

goblered

 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/scien…

The Telegraph reports that Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, claims that versions of “Little Red Riding Hood” have a “common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.” Tehrani will present his work on Tuesday at the British Science Festival.

The original ancestor is thought to be similar to another tale, The Wolf and the Kids, in which a wolf pretends to be a nanny goat to gain entry to a house full of young goats.

Stories in Africa are closely related to this original tale, whilst stories from Japan, Korea, China and Burma form a sister group. Tales told in Iran and Nigeria were the closest relations of the modern European version.

Perrault’s French version was retold by the Brothers Grimm in the 19th century. Dr Tehrani said: “We don’t know very much about the processes of transmission of these stories from culture to culture, but it is possible that they may being passed along trade routes or with the movement of people.”

Yes, it is a challenge to identify exactly how the tales were transmitted, but I can’t help wondering if Tehrani has read Alan Dundes on “Little Red Riding Hood” and whether he has consulted the work of folklorists, most of whom never embraced the view that Perrault “invented” the figure of Little Red Riding Hood. Here’s hoping that the lecture will appear in print soon.

Below is a link to Jamie Tehrani’s home page at Durham University.

 http://www.dur.ac.uk/anthropology/staff/…


More on Jonze and Where the Wild Things Are

Uncategorized

where-wild-things-are-tree1

The New York Time Magazine has a feature article on Spike Jonze’s film.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/magazi…

The reporter tells us that he saw, scrawled on a legal pad in Jonze’s office, the following note: “There is no difference between childhood and adulthood.” Not so sure about that one, and Martin Bashir’s interview of Michael Jackson made it fairly clear that adults should not deny the differences but rather learn to value what the child has that we are missing (imagination, creativity, energy, joy, and so on).    Still, this film will be worth seeing, although the reference to its “narrative shortcomings” seems a recurrent theme. My bet: the direct visceral hits will come from visual effects rather than from the power of the story–just the opposite of what gets us in Sendak’s book.

An implicit question precedes his artistic choices: Wouldn’t it be cool if . . . ? Wouldn’t it be cool if we made Christopher Walken fly? Wouldn’t it be awesome if we rigged a staircase with blast caps?That sensibility pervades “Where the Wild Things Are” too, in the monsters’ propensity for jumping 20 feet in the air and crashing into trees, in the astounding skyscraper fortress they build out of logs and branches. And for some potential viewers, the sheer coolness of those moments will likely be enough to transcend what others might see as the movie’s narrative shortcomings.

Karla Kuskin and Walt Whitman

Children's Literature

9e2ba4ba67ccdff5e661f2b3486333ca1

The New York Times reported the death of Karl Kuskin today. The link to the obituary is below. In rereading her poems, I was reminded of Whitman’s “There Was a Child Went Forth”–perhaps the most beautiful poem ever written about childhood.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/22/books/…

“There Was a Child Went Forth” by Walt Whitman

THERE was a child went forth every day;
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird, 5
And the Third-month lambs, and the sow’s pink-faint litter, and the mare’s foal, and the cow’s calf,
And the noisy brood of the barn-yard, or by the mire of the pond-side,
And the fish suspending themselves so curiously below there—and the beautiful curious liquid,
And the water-plants with their graceful flat heads—all became part of him.

Spring

by Karla Kuskin

I’m shouting
I’m singing
I’m swinging through trees
I’m winging skyhigh
With the buzzing black bees.
I’m the sun
I’m the moon
I’m the dew on the rose.
I’m a rabbit
Whose habit
Is twitching his nose.
I’m lively
I’m lovely
I’m kicking my heels.
I’m crying “Come Dance”
To the fresh water eels.
I’m racing through meadows
Without any coat
I’m a gamboling lamb
I’m a light leaping goat
I’m a bud
I’m a bloom
I’m a dove on the wing.
I’m running on rooftops
And welcoming spring!

Natural-born Philosophers

Uncategorized

baby2plato23

In her new book The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us about Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life, Alison Gopnik reminds us that adults are stubbornly incurious (thank you, Richard Rorty, for that term) when it comes to children. “We raise children, and live with them every day,” she said. “It always seemed to me, even growing up, that we should talk about babies with the same seriousness and importance as any other topic. I’m always surprised at parties that the conversation around babies is how to get them to sleep, and that’s it. Then it’s, oh, no, let’s talk about real estate or something grown up.”

She got that right. When my children were young, conversations with other parents often turned on sleep deprivation and on strategies for getting your children to bed before sunset and making sure that they slept well past dawn. Gopnik sees in parenting an opportunity to observe the mind at work. The child is not only a philosopher, but also an explorer, investigator, and, scientist. But the child’s curiosity and desire to make connection rarely finds its match in the adults around it.

Anthony Gottlieb writes in the NYT that our absorption in our children (or those related to us) is a “flimsily disguised form of narcissism.” He ends his review of Gopnik’s book with a deflating sentence, one that worries me about the adult capacity to recognize that The Philosophical Baby can make a direct cultural hit: “The notion that children’s minds have much to tell us about the meaning of life seems rather a fond exaggeration.” Sentences like that only strengthen Gopnik’s argument that we live in a culture that shows astonishingly little curiosity about the complexities of childhood and growing up.

P.S. Maybe I’m all wrong about adult curiosity. Alison Gopnik’s op-ed in today’s NYT was the most e-mailed article of the day.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinio…

Here’s my favorite part of the op-ed:

When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.

Continue reading →

Molly Ringwald on the Death of John Hughes

Uncategorized

hughesslidefirst2

At a conference last week in Hamburg, Karel Rose quoted Adam Phillips on how infants are born in love with the world. Remember the famous line from “The Breakfast Club”? “When you grow up . . . your heart dies.”

Molly Ringwald writes about her relationship with John Hughes and how he could not bear leaving the Neverland of the world he created in his films.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/opinio…

None of the films that he made subsequently had the same kind of personal feeling to me. They were funny, yes, wildly successful, to be sure, but I recognized very little of the John I knew in them, of his youthful, urgent, unmistakable vulnerability. It was like his heart had closed, or at least was no longer open for public view. A darker spin can be gleaned from the words John put into the mouth of Allison in “The Breakfast Club”: “When you grow up … your heart dies.”