Year: 2009

The Velveteen Rabbit Gets Cameo in Up in the Air

Uncategorized

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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/03/25/cnnu.potter/index.html


Children’s Literature at Princeton

Uncategorized

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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).

“The Red Shoes” on Screen

Children's Literature, Uncategorized

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Here’s Maureen Dowd on the stunning film version of Andersen’s “The Red Shoes.” Pressburger and Powell’s brilliant film brings Andersen’s story into the twentieth century, with a doomed heroine torn between love and ballet. Here’s Dowd on the Andersen story:

“The Red Shoes” is based on a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale of the same name about a little girl who becomes vain about her red shoes and gets confused about her priorities. As in the movie, the shoes force the girl to dance day and night, and then she dies. But the fable has an even grimmer coda: The girl asks an executioner to cut off her feet.

Interesting that Dowd left out an important element in Andersen’s tale: the girl’s conversion experience at the end–her recognition that piety and prayer are superior to beauty and mobility.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/opinion/08dowd.html

Reading Faces and Minds

Uncategorized

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The image is unsettling, but more disturbing is the first paragraph, which tells us about “one ancillary benefit” of research carried out by Charles A. Nelson III at Harvard. Nelson evidently outfoxed a Boston car salesman by reading his facial expressions and discovering that he was bluffing. (When was the last time you figured out that a car salesman was “bluffing”? Did you have to watch his eye movements and facial features to figure it out?)
I suppose that research of this kind might be able to tell us about the workings of the child’s mind, but I wonder exactly to what end these children are being fitted with plastic-sponge sensors. And what about the question of consent? “Parents receive a nominal $10 fee, and each child receives a toy.”
http://www.boston.com/news/science/articles/2009/11/10/boston_lab_explores_childrens_complex_lessons_in_reading_faces/

Brother Blue Tells His Last Story

Storytelling

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The Boston Globe reports the death of Dr. Hugh Morgan Hill. I don’t think many locals imagined that Brother Blue had ever gone by any other name–he had become the spirit of storytelling, keeping traditional tales alive in a lively, street-smart way. I envision him now as one of those beautiful butterflies he wore when he told stories, and I feel sure that he is fluttering in the breezes of southern climes right now, returning north next summer in his new incarnation as the soul of storytelling. His last tale was a love story, told to his wife.
We will miss his broad smile, his warmth, his generosity, and his love of good stories.
http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2009/11/brother_blue_a.html