Breezes from Wonderland

There is nothing like a royal wedding to revive faith in fairy tales.   Today’s ceremony enacted in symbolic terms everything we imagine to constitute happily ever after.   The royal groom, the bride of humble origins (well, sort of), the lengthy bridal test, and the magnetic beauty of the bride–it’s all there.  Along with a back story about what happily ever after meant for a royal wedding that took place not once upon a time, but almost three decades ago.  There we had the evil queen, the tortured princess, and the unfaithful husband giving us more of a taste of what happens in the fairy tales told long ago.  For that reason, I can’t help but feel some anxiety about the constant repetition in the news of the term “fairy-tale wedding.”  Let’s hope that Kate and William have lives that are anything but a fairy tale.

And here’s the link to Maureen Dowd’s compelling op-ed about the royal wedding.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/opinio…

You could sense a collective prayer among the spectators that Kate, with her Cinderella coach, Cartier tiara and satin slippers, was not a lamb being led to slaughter. Many assured the invading celebrity journalists that Kate was older and more grounded than the virginal and high-strung 20-year-old who married an older man who loved another woman.

And a sad postscript: Here’s Anne Sinclair, wife of former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on the royal wedding:

On April 30, Ms. Sinclair wrote about the wedding of Prince William. “I can understand those who didn’t miss a crumb. As if, quite simply, we were like children who, before going to sleep, want a tale, a story with a princess and a dream, because real life catches up with you soon enough. …”

Harvard’s Gregory Mankiw, Thomas Dingman, and David Ager read “this fabulous bedtime story” in a video designed to put their students to sleep.   I can imagine that, with a few changes in words and images, the story could be adapted for the college crowd.  Goodnight book full of mush . . . .

Lawrence Downes reports on Apple’s virtual bookstore, with its animated version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, designed to keep child readers from getting “sleepy and stupid.”  He raises some interesting questions about the migration of classic children’s stories into digital media.  These days, children have almost as much, if not more, exposure to media as adults.  He cites a study from the Joan Ganz Cooney Center on children’s media:

It was hard to give conclusive answers about children’s digital media, except that it’s vast. The report, a compilation of seven studies, found children swimming in a media ocean. Each day, it said, schoolchildren “pack almost 8 hours of media exposure into 5.5 hours of time” because they multitask with video games, music players and TV.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/22/opinio…

On a recent flight to Los Angeles, I witnessed a very unhappy three-year-old girl tortured by an e-book.  Her mother, desperate to keep her quiet, kept thrusting the animated device on her lap, with the hope that the kinetic energy of the book would distract her.  Sometimes less is more.  When it comes to picture books, and to Alice in Wonderland for that matter, the static page has real power to engage and to draw us into Elsewhere.  Still, I’m willing to try out Apple’s Alice in Wonderland, and I’m just hoping it’s not cluttered with merchandising platforms.  If it is, I’ll stick to Martin Gardner’s Annotated Alice in Wonderland.

Here’s Apple’s irresistible sales pitch:

 http://www.apple.com/ipad/built-in-apps/…

The postscript below was written after I had bought the ipad version of Alice in Wonderland.

P.S.  File this under one more huge advantage of the printed book: You can preview it at a bookstore, and, if it’s just a gimmick, you won’t buy it.  And you can return it.  This is not the case with  Alice in Wonderland for the ipad, which manages, despite its colors and animations, to be nothing more than a shadowy, anemic version of Lewis Carroll’s book.  Yes, it is true, when pictures dance, reading changes–not in a way that improves on the words in the story.  At least not so far.

Diana Wynne Jones died last week, and, rereading her novels, I’m reminded that she is one of the great under-rated authors of children’s books. Try Howl’s Moving Castle if you are new to her work. The New York Times captures the power of her writing and reminds us how her clever, curious protagonists navigate worlds of hyperdysfunctionality.
 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/books/…

Diana Wynne Jones has a moving account of her childhood and of what led her to become a writer on her website.
 http://www.leemac.freeserve.co.uk/autobi…

She tells us: “I get unhappy if I don’t write. Each book is an experiment, an attempt to write the ideal book, the book my children would like, the book I didn’t have as a child myself. I have still not, after twenty-odd books, written that book. But I keep trying. Nor do I manage to live a quiet life. I keep undertaking things, like visiting schools and teaching courses as a writer, or learning the cello, or doing amateur theatricals, or rashly agreeing to do all the cooking for Richard’s wedding in 1984. Every one of those things has led to comic disasters-except the wedding: that was perfect.” And so were her books.