Breezes from Wonderland

What do you say to parents who think the Wild Things film may be too scary?
Sendak: I would tell them to go to hell. That’s a question I will not tolerate.

Sendak sounds off on overly protective parents and other matters in a Newsweek interview.  He also gives us his take on the MGM film Wizard of Oz and points out the irony of the phrase “There’s no place like home.”  You could say that about almost any place–there’s no place like it.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/216997/page/1

I’ve always had a private theory that when she gets home and she’s in bed, and Frank Morgan [the Wizard], at the window, says something like, “Is she all right?” And her uncle makes it clear that they might lose her. It goes by very quickly, but then she tries to tell them her adventure, she tries to tell them what it was like when she was in Oz, and her aunt says, “It’s all right, Dorothy, just lie down.” In truth, the grown-ups just don’t want to hear her death fantasy. They don’t want to think that Dorothy could be in so much trouble that she might not survive. And she lays back in bed and says, “There’s no place like home.” And there were people who were very critical of that—sentimental—but for me it was pure irony. There is no place like home. Where the hell else is she gonna go? It’s the opposite of sentimental—it’s the hard truth. Grown-ups are afraid for children. It’s not children who are afraid. That movie is unbelievably great.

Thanks to Claire Massey for sending the Newsweek interview my way.

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/16/the-reading-life-what-makes-a-childrens-classic/

Dwight Garner takes the film version of “Where the Wild Things Are” as his point of departure for a meditation on what makes a children’s classic. He invites readers to post titles of children’s books passed down through the generations.

The success of “Where the Wild Things Are” has led to a sharp spike in the number of articles and reviews of children’s literature. Why is the media suddenly paying attention?  I think it has something to do with the realization that picture books not only stay with us–we don’t discard them as we grow up but internalize their words and images. When we re-read them as adults, we feel a Proustian tug of involuntary memory but can also enjoy the story on an adult level, seeing and feeling things that we missed as a child.

Top 10 picture books, anyone?

Daniel Zalewski writes about children’s picture books in this week’s New Yorker. “The kids are in charge,” he tells us, and today’s picture books are full of anxious, apologetic parents who resort to canned psychobabble in an effort to get their kids to behave: “Use your words,” “Hands are not for hitting,” “Is there a nicer way to say that?”

We live in a “confrontation-averse age of parenting,” he writes, but many picture books have a strong disciplinary edge, no doubt a legacy of all those 19th-century tales about children burning to death when they play with matches or wasting away when they fail to eat their soup.

Below Zalewski’s description of a picture book designed to discourage gluttony:

One of the latest catchphrases to infect parental discourse is an admonishment against greed. A child who demands more Goldfish crackers is told, “You get what you get, and you don’t get upset.” (Despite the singsong rhyme, the phrase is rather grim—it could be a fragment from “The Collected Wisdom of Kim Jong Il.”) The precise origins of the phrase are elusive, but its surge in popularity—one can buy T-shirts emblazoned with it—derives from its inclusion in one of the more successful picture books of recent years, “Pinkalicious,” by Victoria and Elizabeth Kann (HarperCollins; $15.99).

“Pinkalicious” is a parable about gluttony. It begins, “It was a rainy day, too wet to go outside”—a limp echo of the couplet that opens “The Cat in the Hat” (1957). In Dr. Seuss’s book, disorder could reign only when the mother left the house, but in “Pinkalicious” anarchy erupts in full view of the parents. A little girl and her mother spend the rainy afternoon baking bright-pink cupcakes; the girl gobbles one after another, and in the throes of a sugar rush demands “more, more, more!” In Victoria Kann’s illustrations—computer-generated collages whose brittle sheen befits the protagonist—the girl swings upside down on a chandelier and sticks out her tongue.

The mother tries out the “You get what you get” line. Fans of the magic phrase seem to have forgotten that, in the book, it doesn’t work. “I got very upset,” the girl narrates. After a tantrum subsides, she is, inexplicably, given more cupcakes.

The next morning, the girl wakes up to discover that she is the color of “raspberry sorbet.” Thrilled, she anoints herself Pinkerella (and delights in her “pinktails”—again, this is not Dr. Seuss). Her mother, having “speed-dialed the pediatrician,” takes her to the doctor, who recommends a “steady diet of green food.” The girl’s reaction is, at least, direct: “YUCK!” After her parents go to bed, she steals some cupcakes that have been stashed atop the refrigerator, and turns fire-engine red. This hue not being to her princessy taste, she holds her nose and chokes down some vegetables; her skin regains its normal shade. By the final page, the girl has learned a lesson about healthy eating, and her parents have been thoroughly steamrolled.

http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/10/19/091019crat_atlarge_zalewski?currentPage=1

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblo…

The Guardian is featuring fairy tales for an entire week, with “booklets of our best-loved fairy tales”), all of which can be read on the web. The writers who selected the stories for publication provide a guide to each set of tales. On October 10, for instance, Hilary Mantel wrote about “Wicked Parents in Fairytales.” On October 12, A.S. Byatt offered an exquisite meditation on “Love in Fairytales.” Philip Pullman, Alison Lurie, Marina Warner, Salman Rushdie, oh my!  It doesn’t get better than that.

Here’s the promotional material:

Starting this weekend in the Guardian and the Observer, Great fairytales brings you the finest stories of morality, justice, triumph and enchantment from around the world, collected in seven themes: Wicked parents, Rags to riches, Love, Quests and riddles, Wisdom and folly, Justice and punishment and Beastly tales.

The stories are all nominated by a panel of critics, writers and experts on children’s literature: Anthony Browne, AS Byatt, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Robert Irwin, Alison Lurie, Adam Phillips, Philip Pullman, Salman Rushdie and Marina Warner.

Each collection is beautifully illustrated and includes an afterword from a range of leading writers exploring each theme.

Begin on Saturday with Wicked Parents which features Hansel and Gretel, Snow White and The Tale of the Juniper Tree.

Jack Schafer reports in Slate on Sendak’s reaction to Bruno Bettelheim’s 1969 critique of Where the Wild things Are in The Ladies’ Home Journal. He cites a 2005 NPR interview with Sendak:

Sendak: And that creep—oh, that creep, that psychiatrist, Bruno Bettelheim …
NPR: Who …
Sendak: … otherwise known by me personally as “Beno Brutalheim,” because he wrote a long article on Wild Things, which completely destroyed the book.
NPR: Bruno Bettelheim, when Wild Things came out, said that it might frighten children.
Sendak: [Adopts foreign accent] “Don’t leave the book in a room without a light, because the kid might die of a heart attack.” No, he didn’t say that, but you’ve got it.
[Soundbite of laughter]
Sendak: Mr. Brutalheim, may he rest in peace.

Did Bettelheim “completely destroy” the book? Sendak had already won the Caldecott Medal when Bettelheim wrote: “What’s wrong with the book is that the author was obviously captivated by an adult psychological understanding of how to deal with destructive fantasies in the child. What he failed to understand is the incredible fear it evokes in the child to be sent to bed without supper, and this by the first and foremost giver of food and security–his mother.” Shafer refers to Sendak’s “thin skin,” but I wonder if Sendak repeats this story because it’s, well, a great story. Never mind that it also reveals him to know more about children than a renowned child  psychologist.
 http://www.slate.com/id/2232550/

Don Haase, editor of Marvels and Tales, sent me the two covers (posted below) from The Economist and Der Spiegel, which he spotted in the airport last week. “Who Can Save the SPD?” is the caption in the image from Der Spiegel. Fascinating that fairy tales are invoked so often (to add a little color?) in stories addressing economic and political issues. The fantasy of a rescuer waiting in the wings endures into adult life even if the romance and magic are gone. Is there nothing left but parody?

In case you are wondering about the original of  the Sleeping Beauty on the Economist cover, above is Edward Burne-Jones’s exquisite painting. I can’t help but worry about another myth that is being invoked: Sleeping Beauty cast as Europe (Europa), with Tony Blair as an (unlikely) Zeus?

Neal Baer, Executive Producer of Law and Order spoke last week at the Harvard Graduate School of Education about stories as the “currency of our lives”

Showing clips from his popular crime drama, Baer discussed how the show’s themes often involve ethical dilemmas drawn from everyday life. By examining complex issues such as abortion, prison torture, and child immunization in compelling ways through sympathetic characters, Baer said, his stories often have the power to educate and inform better than simple statistics might.

“Fifteen million AIDS orphans, that [number] is hard to grapple with. But when you hear a story … stories move us,” he said. “Nothing is more liberating than telling a story, Baer added. “If it is honest, people will listen.”

http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2009/10/educational-merits-of-tv/

His words brought to mind a book that I was unable to put down last week–Uwem Akpan’s Say You’re One of  Them. Set in war-torn African, the heart-breaking tales in the collection are all told from the point of view of the child victims.  With unforgiving clarity, each child lets us into a world where quicksand opens with every step.

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?

 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?