Breezes from Wonderland

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.

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.

 http://www.collegehumor.com/video:192555…

Colleges may be comparing themselves to Hogwarts (see post below), but here’s a high school that is the real thing.

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…

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’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).