Milo, the virtual boy, was introduced to the TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) conference in Oxford by UK games designer Peter Molyneux. Calling films and books a “sea of blandness” and “rubbish” because “they don’t involve me,” Molyneux has created what he calls a revolution in storytelling through a virtual boy who feels “real.” (I can’t help wondering if the name Milo was borrowed from Norton Juster’s Phantom Tollbooth, with a Milo who has always felt very real to me.)

Remember David in Steven Spielberg’s brilliant AI? That film also took up the question of becoming real (shades of The Velveteen Rabbit) and drew on the story of Pinocchio to flesh out (as it were) its premise. AI resurrected the cinematic fantasy of animating characters and giving them a soul even as it told a riveting story about the desire to become real.

Whatever Milo, the virtual boy, has going for him, it does not diminish the power of stories told on screen or in print. Most of those stories do not “involve me” (as Molyneux claims is the case for Milo) and instead create “what if”s” that take us into the lives of others. I’m not sure that Milo has much to do with storytelling at all. He is a virtual boy who has been programmed to respond to human inquiries and demands. He will grow, develop, and stretch, but I don’t see him becoming real in the same way that Robert Louis Stevenson animated Jim Hawkins, E.B. White gave Charlotte a soul, and Philip Pullman breathed life into Lyra.

The New York Times has a great new blog on school libraries: Do they need books? The commentators are, for the most part, wonderfully thoughtful about the subject, and I was especially impressed by William Powers, who will be publishing a book called “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age.” See his thoughts below, along with the link to the NYT blog.

The Kindle comes in a box with the words “Once upon a time” printed on the side. My own experience with the Kindle confirms what Powers says. Kindle is great for travel and when you carry it around with you, you are never at a loss for reading material. But trying to do anything like the deep read is–at least so far–really impossible. For my course on Childhood and Children’s Literature, I put at the very top of my syllabus the wonderful words of Tim Wynne-Jones about the deep read. I’ve quoted him before on this blog, and I wanted to quote him again, because his words resonate so well with what Powers has to say. I like the idea of considering reading as deep-sea diving–it captures the idea of immersion. But  I  tend to see reading as less oceanic than aerial, something akin to flying and soaring into a new world–you pass through a portal, get to Elsewhere, and inhabit a world of possibilities, living and breathing the air of the story world.

“The deep-read is when you get gut-hooked and dragged overboard down and down through the maze of print and find, to your amazement, you can breathe down there after all and there’s a whole other world. I’m talking about the kind of reading when you realize that books are indeed interactive. . . . I’m talking about the kind of deep-read where it isn’t just the plot or the characters that matter, but the words and the way they fit together and the meandering evanescent thoughts you think between the lines: the kind of reading where you are fleetingly aware of your own mind at work.”

–Tim Wynne-Jones, “The Survival of the Book”

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/10/do-school-libraries-need-books/

So it goes with books. What are often considered the weaknesses of the old-fashioned book are in some ways its strengths. For instance, a physical book works with the body and mind in ways that more readily produce the deep-dive experience that is reading at its best. When you read on a two-dimensional screen, your mind spends a lot of energy just navigating, keeping track of where you are on the page and in the text. The tangibility of a traditional book allows the hands and fingers to take over much of the navigational burden: you feel where you are, and this frees up the mind to think.

Moreover, I believe that in a hyper-connected age, the fact that books are not connected to the electronic grid is becoming their greatest asset. They’re a space apart, a private place away from the inbox where we can go to quiet our minds and reflect. Isn’t that the state in which the best kind of learning occurs?

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.

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

NYT, 6/15: Colum McCann writes movingly about meeting his grandfather at a nursing home in London–“for the first and last time.” Only when McCann read Joyce’s Ulysses later in life did he really get to know the grandfather, who “emerged” from the novel. McCann quotes Nabokov on storytelling (see below), but he draws some conclusions that move us away from the point made in the passage. Isn’t Nabokov telling us how words can turn into wands, transforming the ordinary into something exquisite, incandescent, and unforgettable? McCann tells us instead about how we can enter story worlds, breathing their air and inhabiting their reality.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/16/opinion/16mccann.html

Vladimir Nabokov once said that the purpose of storytelling is “to portray ordinary objects as they will be reflected in the kindly mirrors of future times; to find in the objects around us the fragrant tenderness that only posterity will discern and appreciate in far-off times when every trifle of our plain everyday life will become exquisite and festive in its own right: the times when a man who might put on the most ordinary jacket of today will be dressed up for an elegant masquerade.”

This is the function of books — we learn how to live even if we weren’t there. Fiction gives us access to a very real history. Stories are the best democracy we have. We are allowed to become the other we never dreamed we could be.