I’ll be giving a talk this afternoon at 301 Herter Hall at 4 p.m.  Hoping to see old friends in the area!

From Hunger Narratives to Hunger Games:
The Ruses of the Female Trickster

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444223104578034692748437994.html

Philip Nel’s new book wins the award, hands down, for best title of the year Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss: How an Unlikely Couple Found Love, Dodged the FBI, and Transformed Children’s Literature. But more than that it gives us a narrative that hisses and crackles with energy, even with two subjects whose lives lacked the kind of intrigue and mystery that ordinarily makes for exciting biographical research and writing.  The first paragraph sets the scene: a knock on the door and two FBI agents, one interrogating Crockett Johnson, the other snapping photographs.

Here’s an extract from the review in the Wall Street Journal

“A small god in a white romper, Harold uses art to create the heavens and the earth,” observes Mr. Nel, a professor at Kansas State University. “There is no world except that which [Harold] makes.” White rompers aside, these ideas fitted a political agenda that sought to expunge tradition and to make man and society anew, though, as Mr. Nell cautions: “Harold uses his imagination to create new worlds but does so without causing harm. If the purple crayon is radical, it proposes a velvet revolution, not a violent one.”

Nel’s volume reminds us of how important books like A Hole is to Dig and Magic Beach were, not just for Maurice Sendak, but for countless other authors of children’s books:

Krauss and Johnson loomed larger in the last century than they do now, but Mr. Nel argues that it would be a mistake to miss the durability of their legacy. The petite and turbulent Krauss, who wrote more than 40 works for young readers, “helped pave the way for books that respect children’s tough, pragmatic thinking and unorthodox use of language,” he says. Of the wry and laconic Johnson, whose work is often cited by artistic sorts as a source of inspiration, the author declares: “He showed us that a crayon can create a world.”

Be sure to check out Philip Nel’s homepage, where you can wander around for hours in the world of children’s literature and try out “Nine Kinds of Pie.”

https://www.ksu.edu/english/nelp/

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2012/10/14/the-forest-beckons-the-magic-of-real-fairy-tales/?KEYWORDS=brothers+grimm

Adam Gidwitz captures, in ways that no child psychologist has managed, how children react to the dark side of fairy tales.  I so appreciate his wisdom about how children instinctively protect themselves from books that are too frightening for them:

Over the course of my career as a teacher and writer for children, I have become aware of one of nature’s greatest gifts to both to children and their guardians. Children know what they need. Not that they are errorless—we still have to grab their hands before they rush into the street; we still must help them overcome their fear of the first day of school. But children, much more than adults, are unconsciously in tune with the developmental needs of their bodies and minds. Their play is more educational and emotionally salutary than anything a teacher or psychologist could prescribe. When a child is reading a book that he finds upsetting, he closes it and puts it aside (this is one structural advantage of books over movies, which move so swiftly and are so hard to turn off). And when the book contains new and needed wisdom, he will demand it again and again, until its lessons are mastered (much to the chagrin of the sleepy parent).

And he ends with an encounter that reminds me of how children express their feeling, less with words than with actions.

One afternoon, I was working in the hallway outside of my classroom. Suddenly, a girl I did not know appeared and approached me. She asked, “Did you write that book with the fairy tales?” I smiled and said that I had.

She could have said a lot of things. She could have said, “That book was funny!” or “It was scary!” or “Why do you write such messed up stories?”

Or maybe she couldn’t. For what she did was throw her arms around my neck and squeeze me fiercely. And then, quite literally, she ran away.

I don’t know why. Perhaps the Grimm tales had spoken to her on a level too deep for words.

Or maybe the forest beckoned.

Tonight I’ll start reading a book that has been on my nightstand for several months.  Can’t wait for A Tale Dark and Grimm.

http://thepiper2012.tumblr.com/main

Today is the final performance of the workshop version of “The Piper”!  Go if you can.

The musical takes up the legend about the rat-infested village of Hamelin, and the Pied Piper, who rids the town of rats but fails to receive his reward.  With the seductive music of his lute and the beauty of his multi-colored costume, he lures the children of the village to another place, perhaps to their death, perhaps to a better life of music, color, and beauty.  “The Piper” ingeniously stages the story without showing us the horror of the rats and of the lost children.  But it takes us to the heart of the story–fear, betrayal, xenophobia, and unforgiving terror without the consolation of restitution.  The story does not give us the “happily ever after” of most fairy tales, but we take from it a reminder about the beauty of song and Elsewhere and the treachery of valuing affluence over fairness.

http://www.movieweb.com/news/beauty-and-the-beast-lands-vincent-cassel-and-lea-seydoux

Actors Vincent Cassel (A Dangerous Method) and Léa Seydoux (Mission: Impossible Ghost Protocol) have signed on to star in Beauty and the Beast, a live-action retelling of the classic fairy tale from director Christophe Gans.

No story details were given for this new production, which will be Christophe Gans‘ first movie since 2006’s Silent Hill. Here’s what the filmmaker had to say about this project.

http://www.google.com/

The link only works today, October 15, 2012, the 107th anniversary of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland.  Don’t miss it!  It’s a lovely tribute to both Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo and Maurice Sendak’s Mickey.  Without Sendak, McCay’s art might not have become a Google doodle.  Love the airplane hanging over the bed in both books, emphasizing children’s fearlessness and their love of flight.

Now available on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZRLNKF9lwo

I had The Son in my Amazon shopping cart yesterday, but after reading Robin Wasserman’s review in the NYT Sunday Book Review this morning, I’m going over to the Harvard Bookstore this morning to buy a copy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/books/review/son-by-lois-lowry.html

Wasserman writes:

It’s love, though, that proves the most dangerous, with its inevitable companions, obligation, sacrifice and loss. Lowry, who lost her own son in 1995, surely understands these dangers all too well, and she writes heart-rendingly about the agony of absence and the injustice of loss. But Lowry’s son Grey was an Air Force pilot who died while on active duty, and so Lowry also understands — and imbues her book with — the great capacity of youth to believe in transforming the world, in sacrificing for a greater good, in defeating evil — no matter the cost. Her characters carry their burdens without complaint, embracing any risk to save the ones they love. And as love threatens to destroy them, it’s only love that can save them, that particular love of humanity that manifests as empathy. A powerful theme that runs throughout the quartet, empathy here claims center stage. To be able to imagine, or even experience, the inner life of another: In Lowry’s world, this is the ultimate redemptive force, the gift that makes us human. In our world, it’s the gift this book — and every book — offers us.

And somehow Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s compellingly austere pictorial style (the image below accompanied the review of The Son) seems the perfect visual analogue for Lois Lowry’s spare yet lustrous prose.

Other images in the link are a great Sunday timewaster:

http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/disney/ozthegreatandpowerful/

Finally we are getting the back story for the Wizard of Oz.  James Franco appears to be playing a small-time illusionist who aspires to greatness–he wants to be more than a “good man.” Remember the great line from the book: “I’m really a very good man; but I’m a very bad Wizard”?  But the “very good man” turns out to be a serious magician, as we learn in Chapter 16 of the book (“The Magic Art of the Great Humbug”), when the Wizard uses the sorcery of words to give the Scarecrow brains, the Woodman a heart, and the Lion courage.

I’m wondering how much the success of Gregory Maguire’s prequel, Wicked (the first in his Oz series), had to do with the development of the script–a lot, I’m betting!  That the Wizard has very little on-screen time in the MGM film leaves much room for imagination.  The mimicking of MGM’s black/white frame for a film in color  looks great in the trailer and augurs well for the entire film.

“I think there is a through-line,” Rowling said. “Mortality, morality, the two things that I obsess about.” “The Casual Vacancy” is not a whodunnit but, rather, a rural comedy of manners that, having taken on state-of-the-nation social themes, builds into black melodrama. Its attention rotates among several Pagford households, in the Southwest of England: a gourmet-grocery owner and his wife; two doctors; a nurse married to a printer; a social worker. Most of the families include troubled teens.C

Barry’s civic influence is revealed by his departure, rather as George Bailey’s is in “It’s a Wonderful Life.” The story is driven by the long-standing frustration that some of Barry’s disagreeable and right-wing neighbors have about the town’s administrative connection to the Fields, an area of public housing and poverty on the edge of a larger, nearby town. Historically, children from the Fields have had the right to attend primary school in Pagford, a place of flower baskets and other middle-class comforts, and the town has also supported a drug-treatment clinic that serves the neighborhood. In the absence of Barry’s righteous influence, the anti-Fields faction sees an opportunity to rid Pagford of this burden. This is a story of class warfare set amid semi-rural poverty, heroin addiction, and teen-age perplexity and sexuality. It may be a while before we’re accustomed to reading phrases like “that miraculously unguarded vagina” in a Rowling book, and public response to “The Casual Vacancy” will doubtless include scandalized objections to the idea of young Harry Potter readers being drawn into such material. “There is no part of me that feels that I represented myself as your children’s babysitter or their teacher,” Rowling said. “I was always, I think, completely honest. I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.”