Counting the days...

I can't wait. The shockingly talented folk at Pixar are finally making a movie (Brave) with a female protagonist. We are thrilled.

See the just released teaser trailer below:

Sarah Porter: Lost Voices

I've been reading a great deal of young adult fantasy recently, as it's the kind of work I enjoyed when I was a girl, and I've been curious to see what's out there. Overall, I've found my reading enjoyable, but nothing has really captured my imagination or really rented out space in my consciousness. With the exception of Carrie Ryan's intelligently and beautifully written zombie novels, I've been left a little cold. Don't get me wrong - I did love The Hunger Game books, but I began to feel a little emotionally beaten up by them, and I know if I had read them when I was, say, twelve, they might have been too much. But perhaps I'm projecting. I think I might be more sensitive now, than when I was actually in middle school.

Which brings me to Sarah Porter's Lost Voices. As always, my disclaimer: Sarah is a friend. But the rave you are about to read is genuine.

In this first book of what I happily understand is a trilogy, she tells the story of a girl named Luce who lives in a coastal fishing community in Alaska. Her parents are dead, her mother died years before and her father was lost at sea. After a peripatetic life with her beloved vagabond father, she lives with a drunken, brutal uncle and life is grim indeed. After a possible death (or something like it), Luce finds herself in the sea, a mermaid, along with a tribe of other young girls, all of whom have had ugly lives and even uglier deaths. They do what mermaids traditionally have always done: they sing, and they lure ships to their doom. Luce finds a place for herself with her fellow mermaids, whose queen Catarina becomes her friend, mentor and, subsequently, inadvertent rival.

There were so many things in this book that really hit me at a deep level, and I'll likely go into some of them in embarrassing detail in this post. Here's the thing: Sarah is a poet. She just is. Her prose is evocative and gorgeous, and emotionally this story just cut me to the bone. I think she pretty much did everything right. Luce felt very much like a real girl to me. In so many books for young people, the protagonist is portrayed as "loner" or an "outsider", as this is the way so many young people feel even if this wasn't so much the case. It's a little bit of a pet peeve of mine that fictional characters recover from outsiderhood with such apparent ease, their former loneliness not leaving any scars or behavior patterns. They change circumstance, suddenly find friends and they actually, like, know how. Luce is so much more herself than many fictional characters.

In school, Luce is quiet and finds herself nearly paralyzed with social awkwardness. Upon becoming a mermaid this doesn't precisely change. She is thrilled to find herself accepted and embraced by a tribe of other girls. She also finds she has a particular talent for singing: the beautiful, alluring and deeply treacherous voice of the siren. But Luce isn't particularly used to playing with others - she's a good person, just used to being alone, which as I've so often learned to my chagrin, is much, much simpler. But that's not the way the world works: there are so many complicated social nuances, and among the teenage, social rules are strict and harsh - and these mermaids are perpetually teenaged, a horror movie concept if I've ever heard one.

There are so many interesting facets to this story, and Sarah has them all covered. So many of them have to do with the very nature of both mermaidhood and femaleness and the places in which these things overlap. Essentially, mermaids are killers, mass murderers. This is monstrous and horrifying from a human point of view, but mermaids are out of the world, it doesn't mean the same thing to them. But, still. And this forms a large part of Luce's impossible dilemma. She also asks, "Why only girls?". There's also the question of outsiderhood, and damage which lies at the heart of the story. When the terrifying mermaid Anais joins the tribe, Luce's fragile place within her new family is snatched from her. Anais is an amazing creation. She might be the most realistic mean girl I've ever encountered in fiction. Just reading about her sent bolts of anxiety through me in a very deep place I didn't think even existed within me anymore.

There's a very long history of monstrous females in myth and fairy tales. Baba Yaga, Lamia, Medusa, all the wicked mothers and witches and scheming servant girls in stories like The Juniper Tree and The Goose Girl, and, of course, the sirens themselves. And there's Anderson's The Little Mermaid, a story that as a child I found so sad it was almost unbearable. This book knows all of this, and is informed and enriched by these universal tales that form so much of who we are as a people. All these strange and sometimes evil and outsider women beginning with Eve. Luce is essentially a gentle soul who is thrust into the role of siren which is heady and confusing and upsetting and, all things considered, maybe not all it's been cracked up to be.

Sarah Porter also blogs at YA Outside the Lines, and a while ago she posted a great piece about dark subject matter in young adult fiction in which she writes:

Why would I feel the need to protect kids from an awareness of that human darkness with which they are perfectly familiar already, which haunts their imaginations and in some cases their lives?

Instead I felt responsible to be as honest as I could about the ways of getting through the darkness. Young teens are often in the process of confronting the worst aspects of humanity, and of struggling to come to terms with what it means to be a part of a species that perpetrates cruelty so routinely. Only by regarding that horror directly can they begin to withstand it.

I think she answers a certain kind of critic very well. I've started to write a bit about how I've gotten tired of dystopia, but maybe what I'm tired of is how manipulated into feeling awful I am by cheap narrative tricks. I'm totally okay with the darkness, but I want it to be earned. Lost Voices isn't a dystopian novel, but it is very dark, but it feels achingly and wonderfully real, I swear I could taste the salt water as I read.

Lost Voices's official release date is July 4th. BREAKING: Lost Voices is apparently available NOW.

Her lovely website is Sarah's Watery Den.

Below, the preview video created by her publishers (fancy!)

The Remarkable Animation of Ladislas Starevich

I don't remember what circuitous route brought me to the gobsmackingly great animation of Ladislas Starevich, but it hardly matters. I watched his 1912 animated short The Camerman's Revenge on YouTube and was simply blown away. I mean this was 1912! And it's just lovely. As the description on the YouTube posting so aptly puts it, "[it] is about infidelity among the insects, a topic which I dare say has never before or after been attempted on film." Mr. and Mrs. Beetle are dissatisfied with their bourgeoise marriage, so they both embark on affairs - he with a glamorous dragonfly who dances in a nightclub, she with a local artist. Well, just watch. I promise you, it's not like anything you've ever seen:



Starevich began as a naturalist - he had been made director of the Museum of Natural History in Kovno, Lithuania and his first films were live action documentary shorts about insect life. After directing a few films for the museum, he wished to feature insect behavior that was impossible to film, as the creatures were nocturnal and wouldn't behave normally under the lights. After seeing a short film by Emile Cohl, he decided to try stop action animation using insect carcasses. He soon branched into narrative shorts and moved to Moscow, where he created a series of animated shorts using dead animals which were acclaimed all over the world. Some people apparently couldn't believe they were animated and assumed the animals had been trained somehow - which sounds ridiculous to us, but imagine how magical his work must have seemed at the dawn of moviemaking.

You can see another of his charming insect films, The Dragonfly and The Ant, below:

After the September Revolution he joined the Russian expat community in Paris and worked there for the remainder of his life. He continued to make strange and creative animated movies until his death in 1965. Terry Gilliam has said he is a huge influence on his work.

Arthur Rackham: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens

Arthur Rackham is one of the acknowledged geniuses of the Golden Age of illustration, and his pictures for Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens have long been some of my favorites.

To my absolute delight (and hopefully yours), I learned today via the always wonderful BibliOdyssey that all fifty of his illustrations are now available online via the Harvard University Library.

The Great and Wonderful L. Frank Baum

Yesterday, as reported elsewhere, the great and wonderful L.Frank Baum would have been 155 years old. 111 years ago, Mr. Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. He devised it because he thought the world needed an American fairy tale, one for the modern age, for modern children, that would leave out both the horrors and moralizing of Grimm. As we are all aware, he succeeded marvelously. He had the great instincts of a true showman, and he pleased his audiences beyond measure. So much so, thirteen sequels followed.

It's always seemed kind of unfortunate to me that most people, if they have read any of his books, have only read the first Oz book, the one on which the movie is based, as I think it is one of the weakest. Compared to the amazing flights of imagination in (my favorite) Ozma of Oz, or in The Patchwork Girl of Oz for example, it seems a little bereft of whimsey. I've mentioned Ozma of Oz elsewhere in writing about modern steampunk, as Mr. Baum presents one of the very fist literary robots.

I don't know if there is another author who has ever been as attuned to what children want as Baum was. Something about his stories goes right to the center of childhood itself. I think it has so much to do with friendship and animals and the fact that nearly everything talks. If there's one dream shared by many, many children it's that one's toys and pets would talk back. In Baum's invented universe, they most often do. One of my favorite bits of retconning is in (I think) The Lost Princess of Oz, when all the animals ask Toto why he didn't begin talking like all the other animals from our world do upon entering the Fairy Land of Oz, and he says he just didn't feel like it.

Baum reportedly wanted to cease writing Oz books, as he had other stories to tell, so he kept on introducing elements such as the spell Glinda cast that would make Oz appear to outsiders as just a continuation of the Great Sandy Waste that surrounds it. All of this is documented in his author's notes at the beginning of each volume. Inevitably, he will end a book with Oz being cut off from us (and thus, Baum, The Royal Historian of Oz, will be unable to write any more installments). He also, inevitably, reports receiving a letter from a little girl in which she asks "What about wireless?", and his writing about Oz continues, as it did until his death in 1919.

His influence upon my life is incalculable. We had a full set of the Oz books when I was growing up and I read them all repeatedly. W.W. Denslow, who illustrated the first book, is considered one of the great illustrators of the Golden Age. But, John R. Neill, who illustrated the other thirteen books has always been more to my taste. I grew up trying to draw as much like him as I could, and his massive influence is still visible all over my work. I was a strange and lonely child, likely with an undiagnosed case of OCD, prone to list making of all sorts (I swear, I spent at least half my childhood alphabetizing). At one point, I went through all of Baum's Oz books and made a list of all the characters. I (of course) alphabetized them and then drew each one. I also remember drawing each of Princess Langwidere's thirty heads.

I haven't reread them all in years and years. I think it may be time to do so again. I will, of course, share my findings here.

Yuriy Norshteyn: Glorious, Glorious Animation

I'm hoping one of my loyal readers who's knowledge of all things filmic and Russian far surpasses my own, will have some further information on Russian animation genius Yuriy Norshteyn (Fuzzy Bastard, I'm looking at you!).

His work is detailed and beautiful and charming - and unprolific. He is referred to in Russia as "The Golden Snail" for the slowness of his process - he has been working on his (yet unfinished) film The Overcoat, based on the short story by Nicolai Gogol, since 1981. The work by him that is available (on YouTube - the only Region 1 DVD I could find is a long out of print anthology of Russian animation) is beautiful. Below see the magical, toy theater-like Seasons:

And the unbelievably tragic My Green Crocodile. I'm not precisely sure what happens, as it is untranslated, but it's a simple story and I think I get the drift. The Green Crocodile falls in love with a beautiful cow. The other animals are jealous (I think) and it all ends in tears - which at least make flowers grow. It's stunning.



It is for work like this that I endlessly praise the internet. Such beauty, such genius - all at our fingertips, in our homes. It's not too easy, is it? I don't think so. With all this variety, most people still watch the same old corporate garbage to the exclusion of almost everything else. But there's so much to look at and listen to and to read and to watch. How could anyone ever be bored in this true age of wonders?

Ghosts and Fairies and Witches and Books: Jo Walton's Among Others

I think I've pretty much decided that the idea of dividing various books up into genres is essentially the work of marketers and not something that artists or writers should have to worry about. As one of my favorite and most world defining quotes puts it: "Humans like categories, nature likes a spectrum". That pretty much sums up my opinions on nearly everything. Taxonomy has taken over the world. Why does everything have to be one thing or another?

Which curmudgeonly paragraph brings me to Jo Walton. She's published by Tor, who publish SciFi and some fantasy. Walton's books include Tooth and Claw, a book about dragons that was greatly inspired by Trollope, and a trilogy of cozy mystery novels set in a alternative history dystopia. In other words, she's pretty much my sort of writer. Her most recent book, Among Others, is just as difficult to pin down. It's an autobiographical coming of age story. It's a boarding school book. It's about grief and loss. It's about fairies. It's about magic. It's about family. But more than anything else, it's about books. Books, books and more books.

The book is told through a series of journal entries (we are told they are written backwards, to keep people from reading them, something I used to occasionally do), written by Mor, fifteen. Her twin sister has recently died (either in a car crash or during a cataclysmic battle between good fairies and their evil witch mother or both - take your pick) and she's been sent to her father and his family who are essentially strangers to her. She misses her extended family and the Welsh valley in which she was raised. She's sent to boarding school, where she is bullied for her less than posh accent and for the cane she must walk with after the accident.

The narration is essentially unreliable and Walton's preamble just muddies the water further:

"So this is why you'll find there's no such place as the Welsh valleys, no coal under them, and no red busses running up and down them; there never was such a year as 1979, no such age as fifteen, and no such planet as Earth. The fairies are real, though."

And there are fairies, at least Mor can see them, or Mor writes that she sees them. I've seen one or two reviews of this book complaining about the magic. That they aren't able to tell what is real and what isn't. Does it matter? Or, possibly, that's the entire point. Walton has been awfully cagey in interviews (casting doubt on parts of her wikipedia bio, too), not giving much away, and good for her. It's funny, the parts that are about Mor going to school and dealing with her family (about whom we get a full but gloriously muddled history), and reading and making friends smack of complete documentary truth. They are immediate and detailed and interesting. The parts about magic and seeing fairies sometimes feel a little uncomfortable. But, the caginess feels intratextual. Mor worries people will think she's crazy or make fun of her more. She doesn't want something that means so much to her ridiculed. Or maybe she is making it up. But I don't think so. I think we should take Walton at her word: The fairies are real.

More about the books. Mor reads science fiction and fantasy with untrammeled abandon and concentration. She writes about what she reads constantly, and she longs for someone to talk about books with. This is a particular kind of loneliness that the existence of the internet has somewhat alleviated. No matter what you are a fan of, you can plug a few searches into google and likely find a few likeminded individuals. But back in the analog past it wasn't so easy. Mor slowly makes friends with her school librarian, finds a science fiction reading group at the local library, and the books are one of the few things she and her father have to talk about. Books are so important to lots of young people, more so to them than anybody. I remember so vividly the ache of it. She writes about reading Tolkien so eloquently and about the problem of Susan and about Heinlein and others. She picks up a copy of Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time and then four pages later apropos of nothing she says, "Who would have thought Richard the Third didn't actually kill the princes in the tower?", and I fear if you hadn't read Tey's book you wouldn't know what she was talking about.

But I haven't read much SciFi and I didn't miss alot I don't think (but I think I may have read more than I realize, particularly of the pre-80s books that Mor is reading). But Tolkien, I get. And lots more. It's a book about the lonliness of a particular sort of adolescence. An alienated book reading one, not the most original premise as so may of that sort of young person grow up to be authors, but they so rarely actually write about the books themselves and entwine it with the life stuff. Add that to the supernatural and there's something special afoot.

Among Others isn't perfect. It feels a bit unresolved and cagy to the very last. I have a feeling, upon reflection, this might be intentional. Mor is so smart and thinks about everything, maybe not giving feeling much of a chance. I think that might be because of the terrors inherent in feeling, maybe feeling is somehow akin to magic. There are tantalizing hints and bits of information about her mother's madness and about what happened, I mean with the devastation of Mor's sister's death. It almost feels unfinished, but I'm fairly certain Walton doesn't want us to know more. It's one of the strangest choices I've encountered in a book in this age of easy pleasures, I don't know whether it was very, very brave, or a complete failing of nerve. I actually don't know what to think. I really liked this book and so much of it made emotional sense to me with it's strange shying away from larger issues in favor of literature. The more I think about it, the more I think that may have been the point. Now all of you must read it so I have someone to talk about it with.

(This is my 300th post! Whee!)

Charles de Lint: The Newford Stories

I really have no business writing this at all.

I've barely dipped into Charles de Lint's loosely connected Newford stories, but having just finished his early short story collection, Dreams Underfoot, I thought "Why not"?

The phrase "urban fantasy" is being tossed around all over the place in these vampire ridden times, so I think the original impulse that created the genre has been somewhat diluted, or lost. To the point where I think the Wikipedia entry on the genre is kind of off. Currently, when the genre is talked about, what is usually meant is paranormal mystery or romance. Something like the Charlaine Harris Southern Vampire books or the Anita Blake series. That is to say, fairly traditional genre books (mystery, crime, romance, whatever) that just happen to have a vampire or a werewolf included. As most everyone knows, these books are unbelievably popular, but I'll leave looking at that particular phenomenon for another day. Some are very entertaining, and some are just awful. But, honestly, most just aren't very good or creative and special.

These aren't the books I'm much interested in writing about.

In the Wikipedia entry on the genre neither John Crowley or Charles de Lint are mentioned - which I think invalidates the whole thing. In 1981, Crowley's Little, Big was published. I have to re-read it before I write about it properly, but it's a book that I didn't precisely love when I first read it, but bits and pieces of it have been gnawing away it my brain ever since. It's a family saga and a fairy tale and part of it is set in a strange post-apocalyptic New York. It's not really like much else, and is one of those books (along with lots of Angela Carter, for example) that make you realize how deeply conservative most stories are. To leave him off any sort of list of Urban Fantasy authors is unforgivable, as he likely invented the genre. Of course, his book contains no vampire romance, so why would anyone care?

The other omission, that of Charles de Lint, is particularly shocking to me as I was under the impression that is was the absolute king of this genre. But, again, his books and stories sorely lack the vampire romance element, so I am clearly wrong.

For the past 20 years or so, de Lint has been writing books and stories about the fictional city of Newford. I'm not sure where it is, but I'm guessing somewhere in Canada, on one of the Great Lakes (de Lint hails from the great nation to our North). I'd read a smattering of short stories set in Newford over the years when I came across them in various anthologies, but I hadn't read any of the novels or collections. I had read his non-Newford novel, The Little Country, which I liked very much. As I have total completion mania, and like to begin things at the beginning, I'm finding the list of over twenty books somewhat daunting. I started with the early short story collection, Dreams Underfoot and I loved it.

He writes about poets and street kids and artists and buskers and musicians. He's not very interested in the middle class and the ordinary. He has a particular interest in traditional forms of music and in all sorts of folk tradition. Music has played a huge part in everything by him that I've read, and this anthology is no different (de Lint has recorded a couple of albums of folk and traditional music himself). The stories vary greatly in subject and tone, but there is a great deal of magic in all of them. There are fairies and mermaids and monsters. He intertwines these supernatural elements with the ordinary lives of the people who populate his city seamlessly. Some characters appear again and again, Jilly a former street kid turned painter most often. Many of the stories are romantic, in the old fashioned sense of the word, including a gorgeous mermaid story spun from the Anderson original. Like it (and unlike the Disney version), things end tragically. Though there is magic and one wishes with all one's being that Newford was real, he doesn't whitewash the horrors of poverty and runaways. Their lives are brutal, and the only reason anyone winds up on the street is because of poverty and abuse. His magic stories, like in the older fairy tales, are ways of showing and explaining people's lives, making something out of them, and as with lots of old tales, most often the lives of women or the poor.

Not to make his stories sound unbearably grim, because they're not. Even when they're sad (and at least three of them made me cry on the subway), there's always some sort of catharsis, nothing's ever a complete waste. He also has at least one or two horror stories. But, I think, it's his deep knowledge and love of folk traditions, both narrative and in music that give his stories their very special feeling. He knows what he's writing about and he rarely overplays his hand.

I'm trying to decide which one I should read next. It will likely be The Onion Girl as I already own it, and it's supposed to be something of a classic. But if anyone - human, fairy or vampire - has any other suggestions, I'll gladly listen.

Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books

Francesca Lia Block has an entry in the modern fairy tale book I'm still in the midst of reading. I haven't gotten to it yet, but with all this thinking about fairy tales, I've been thinking lots ablout Block's masterwork, the five short novels that are collected in the one volume omnibus, Dangerous Angels: The Weetzie Bat Books.

I don't see them brought up in discussions of fairy tales particularly often, which I think is a shame. I really believe they are some of the best YA books of the past few decades and I think in these dark and doomy times we are living in they need to be brought up more often. Sadly, I've seen them mentioned in the paper usually when these delightful and positive books are being challenged by some religious nut job. But, nut jobs aside, I know they're not to everyone's taste.

With the first book, Weetzie Bat, in 1989, Block invented a new literary genre: Los Angeles Fairy Tale Magic Realism. I know some people find them too twee, too glittery, too Californian and I have a tough time disagreeing, as they are all these things. I guess, as with all art, it comes down to whether they speak to you in a deep and real place.

I truly believe they are some of the few modern books that contain real magic. I first heard of them about a dozen years ago and looked at Dangerous Angels in Barnes & Nobel, but didn't have the money to buy it new. The very next day I was walking down Prospect Park West, and someone was having a stoop sale, and there it was with that pretty winged figure on the cover, on sale for $1 (my weird fixation on the image of pretty winged women is a discussion for a different day). I started reading right away.

The five Weetzie Bat books were originally published individually (Block subsequently published a sixth, which I have not read), but I think of them all as parts of a whole. The first book serves as an introduction of sorts. Weetzie is a teen girl living in a magical, now mostly lost, 1980s Los Angeles. Block's prose is simple and glittery, and it tells how Weetzie becomes best friends with Dirk, and cobbles together a family in her magical house (inherited from Dirk's Grandma Fifi) in the Hollywood Hills. The title comes from something Dirk says: "Love is a dangerous angel" (which, of course, it is). In it, all the main (and most of the subsidiary) characters are introduced: Weetzie's great love and life partner, My Secret Agent Lover Man, Dirk's boyfriend Duck, Their children Cherokee and Witch Baby, and Weetzie's parents: Charlie Bat and Brandy-Lynn (who met on the set of a Monster Movie in the '50s).

The books are filled with events, much in the way a fairy tale or an opera is. And like in all fairy tales the happy endings must be earned. The trials the characters go through are dark indeed: some people are dangerous and violent and not to be trusted, AIDS ravages the gay community, drugs dim the beauty and fire of some characters and destroy others: Charlie Bat, Weetzie's junky, ex-screenwriter New Yorker father finally takes too many pills and never comes back (except as a ghost). Depression and despair in the the face of the world's ills plague the characters occasionally. But, the most important thing in the book, and the thing that has gotten the religious nut jobs in such an uproar, is Block's magical vision of family.

Beautiful blonde Cherokee was conceived by Weetzie because she wanted a baby desperately, and so she Dirk and Duck all sleep together so that they would all be her parents. My Secret Agent Lover Man fathered Witch Baby with the wicked Vixanne. But she too was happily absorbed by Weetzie into he household. All of the above happens in the 70 pages that comprise the first book. It's all embedded deeply in Los Angeles with echoes of Marilyn and Jayne Mansfield and the Monster Movies of the '50s and especially of Charlie Chaplin. The soundtrack is likely X and The Blasters and The Cramps.

In subsequent books, Cherokee and Witch Baby become teenagers themselves and have to forge their own paths. We travel to NYC with Witch Baby as she is helped to find her beloved Angel Juan by the ghost of Charlie Bat, we learn more about Dirk and his Grandma Fifi and a genie in a bottle.

They're all pure magic.

I'm beginning to realize more and more, that when it comes to art I live in a place of metaphor. I don't feel super confident writing about the literal in my fiction. And sometimes naturalistic stories feel over-specific to me and therefore unrelatable. Most times they leave me cold. I think fairy tales tell a more truthful story.

The following are the final two paragraphs of The Weetzie Bat books, and they serve well as yet another light in the defense of stories as an essential part of the human psyche:

"Stories are like genies, Dirk thought. They can carry us into and through our sorrows. Sometimes they burn, sometimes they dance, sometimes they weep, sometimes they sing. Like genies, everyone has one. Like genies, sometimes we forget that we do.

Our stories can set us free, Dirk thought. When we set them free."

My Mother She Killed Me: An Introduction

"You think...that bad old science made the magic go away?" - Jenny Calendar, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 1

I've had my reviewer's copy of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me sitting on my bedside table, unread, for a shamefully long time. Part of the reason for this is that I wished so badly to have something to do with it. The editor, Kate Bernheimer, runs the Fairy Tale Review (along with being a teller of stories in her own right), and it's really no one's fault but my own that I haven't yet contributed. But on to my reading.

I've just begun, truth be told, and I've decided to make dispaches along the way. This is the first. It's going to be all about front matter.

The book is dedicated to Angela Carter as it should be. She is, in some ways, mother to us all. The brilliance with which she wrote both fiction and criticism, much of it pertaining to story telling of all different varieties is very nearly unparalleled. She influenced Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood, Kelly Link, Marina Warner, and on and on and on. Warner, formidable novelist and critic in her own right, first met Carter in the London Vogue offices in the 70s. She writes of Carter in her indispensable book From the Beast To the Blonde: on Fairy Tales and Their Tellers:

Her humor was of the unsettling variety, that made it necessary to examine one's own received ideas. It was so very impolite, with its particular idiosyncratic feminism, its blend of the irreverent and the gothic, its dazzling linguistic intricacy and relish for imagery...It is uncomfortable to list to the iambic distych, to know you are identifying yourself as an outsider by what you say, that all the disguises in the wardrobe will never fix identity, all the voices in the repertory will not tell the complete story.

She was a subversive and an intellectual and wore both on her sleeve. She, the greatest writer of the last half of the 20th century mostly worked in the form of the fairy tale. Carter's quote from the front-piece of this collection reads:

Ours is a highly individualized culture, with great faith in the work of art as a one-off, and the artist as an original, a godlike and inspired creator of unique one-offs. But fairy tales are not like that, nor are their makers. Who first invented meatballs? In what country? Is there a definitive recipe for potato soup? Think in terms of domestic arts. "This is how I make potato soup."

In other words fairy tales live in the realm of the folk, of the collaborative, of women and fools and children and magic. I've seen a few bits of writing (supposedly very clever) recently, where people (mostly boys) examine very finely the mechanics of magic. Sometimes there is talk of what could happen, what couldn't happen, and what is real. This, of course, is very stupid indeed, as none of it is real. It's a fun parlor game to wonder how things work, but I've so often seen these sorts of writing serve as a denial or a cursory dismissal of the fictional magical or divine. It's all fiction. The ordinary workaday waiter or firefighter or coal miner could just as easily sprout wings and fly away. The realms of the literal might be more real, but I very much doubt they are more true. Literal mindedness in the face of fictional magic is the province of petty minds.

Kate Bernheimer's introduction made me tear up. It's one of the most passionate and beautifully written defenses of the form that I've read. Her mission, to gather all different kinds of writers to tell fairy tales is a magnificent thing. Along with usual suspects such as Kelly Link and Neil Gaiman who work in the form constantly, she has drafted people like Michael Cunningham and Neil LaBute who seem to be rather unlikely participants in such a project. But then one thinks of that often repeated quote of Nabakov's (which Bernheimer repeats): "All great novels are great fairy tales" and you realize that maybe these unlikely writers aren't so unlikely as they first appeared.

The forward by Gregory Maguire reads as something of a clarion call as well. It calls up the ghosts of Tolkien and Emily Dickinson and Prospero himself; Star Wars and the pre-Raphaelites and nursery rhymes and Hollywood's current little girls lost; Elsinore and Marley's chains and the leopard and his spots; Kensington Gardens and spiderwebs and the illustrations in old psalters and Bob Dylan and Sherwood Forrest. Fairy tales are held as something lesser, partly as Carter says above because there is no clear author in our great age of the individual. As Maguire quotes Hans Christian Andersen's translator: "The fairy tale belongs to the poor. I know of no fairy tale which upholds the tyrant, or takes the part of the strong against the weak. A fascist fairy tale is an absurdity."

Folk tradition is egalitarian by nature, whether they be tales of Baba Yaga or the songs sung by Woody Guthrie or Foolish Jack or The Cat in the Hat - they are subversive by nature, and they are all worth listening to.

As I read my way through this book, I'll be back with more opinions and things to say.

FringeNYC 14: PigPen Presents: The Nightmare Story

I may not want to smooch this delightful (45 MINUTE!) show by PigPen Theatre, but I may want to adopt it. From the moment you enter The Club at LaMaMa you pretty much know you're going to have a nice time. The members of the cast are playing (something like) Ukrainian folk music on a guitar, accordion, fiddle, banjo and a drum made out of a wooden box. They joke around with each other, their door person and the audience in the most laid back and charming way possible. They are relaxed on stage in the way only the most confident of performers can manage. And they play very, very well. And there is table service in the venue, so you can have a drink.

The show itself is a made up Ukrainian folk tale told in song and puppets and story telling and theater. It weaves tales within tales and is incredibly funny and creepy and disturbing and true, like all the best fairy tales. A young boy's mother is dying from the dread Nightmare Disease and must travel to find the flower that will save her. The journey is full of monsters and death. And is hilarious and loose and genuine. The five young men who perform the piece seem to hardly break a sweat as they accomplish something that is so difficult to do, I've almost never seen it done right. Take a fairy tale, make it culturally specific (there were a couple of lines in Russian and my Russian speaking theater-going companion said they were funny, too), add songs, add several different kinds of puppetry, make it very, very funny, do it on a shoe-string, make it look beautiful.

PigPen Presents: The Nightmare Story
Writer: Alex Falberg, Arya Shahi, Ben Ferguson, Curtis Gillen, Daniel Weschler, Matt Nuernberger, Ryan Melia
The Club@LaMaMa, 74A East 4th Street
remaining performances: Wed 18 @ 9, Fri 20 @ 4:45, Sat 21 @ 7

FringeNYC 14: The Battle of Spanktown

The aforementioned Battle of Spanktown combines so many disparate elements, it shouldn't possibly work. It is a piece of Revolutionary War history, relating how a dispute betwixt a Mole and a Badger incites a series of events involving a young Hobbeldehoy who embarks on a classic Fool's journey encountering many Wonders and Adventures, including a dread Kobold and the freeing of the Winter Queen from the Nefarious Red Coats only to find himself assisting General George Washington himself in the Great War of Independence.

In other words, it is a delightful 18th century picaresque (a literary style which may be characterized as "one damn thing after another"). There are animals who are clearly important members of Spanktown society. There are fairy tale elements that are done extraordinarily well. In fool's stories, a younger son, usually poor, often considered stupid or foolish in some way, leaves home in search of a fortune and gets it after a series of adventures. Puss in Boots is the most famous of the genre. Here the Hobbeldehoy fills this function to a tee. The writer knows his tales.

Of course, the success of any theatrical enterprise is more in the how than the what. And the execution here is delightful. Jeffrey Pfeiffer's script is a wondrous thing. When one hears the word pastiche, one usually thinks of something derivative. But here, the odd disparate elements form a delightful and unique whole. Big kudos are due to Heidi Handelsman for her direction. The performances are all funny and distinct. The casting is marvelous, some of the actors looking as if they have stepped right out of the pages of Punch. The set pieces and costumes are simple and functional, look properly period without being too much. I don't think anything cost very much either, but clearly a great deal of thought went into all of it. Which is far more important than deep pockets in a fringe production.

Their website is worth a visit (or two). Included is a timeline of events in Spanktown's history. I was particularly glad to learn the about the (heretofore under-reported) importance of robots in the War of Independence. And I look forward to collecting my Animal Heroes of the Revolutionary War commemorative stamp series.

The Battle of Spanktown
Writer: Jeffrey Pfeiffer
Director: Heidi Handelsman
Dixon Place, 161 Chrystie Street
remaining performances: Mon 16 @2, Sun 22 @ 12, Wed 25 @ 10, Fri 27 @ 10:45


(Illustration: Jason Stefanik via battleofspanktown.com)

Black Thorn, White Rose

Ellen Datlow is one of those people whose elephantine output simply blows my mind. For twenty-one years she co-edited (for sixteen years with Terri Windling and for five with Kelly Link & Gavin Grant) the phone book sized and always great Year's Best Fantasy and Horror anthology. Each year she has also edited numerous other anthologies and has won more World Fantasy Awards than anyone else (she's tied with frequent collaborator Terri Windling). In 2009 and the first half of 2010 alone she has edited eleven anthologies. It's mind boggling. Just sitting on the adjudication panel for one measly gigantic theater festival for seven years nearly sucked me dry (rewarding as it was in many, many ways).

So, needless to say, I'm a little behind in catching up with the tomes she's put together. Like, decades behind. Seriously. I will be happily reading her anthologies until the day I die without ever running out even if through the miracles of modern science my disembodied head in a jar is reading her books 300 years from now. Among the series she has co-edited with Terri Windling is one with modern authors doing their own take on fairy tales which began in 1993 with Snow White, Blood Red. I just got around to reading the second entry in the series, Black Thorn, White Rose which was originally released in 1995 (we are nothing if not up to date here at the cabinet).

As with every anthology I've read, it's mixed bag, but with no real clunkers and with numerous standouts. The following are the stories I found to be of particular interest for one reason or another.

"Somnus's Fair Maid" by Ann Downer: This Regency-era romance adaptation of Sleeping Beauty was the first in the collection that really popped. She makes no attempt to infuse the tale with a dreamy, fairy-tale tone, which I always think is a good way to go. Downer is really comfortable in the period. As Datlow and Windling say in their (excellent) introduction:

"The literary fairy tale, like the music of jazz, is an improvisation on a theme. It eschews our modern obsession with novelty, our insistence on plots that surprise on every page and ideas that have never been uttered before. Like jazz, it is best appreciated by those with an ear for the original melody on which it is based. The pleasure lies in savoring the writer's skill as she or he transforms a familiar story."

"Ogre" by Michael Kandel is just a really good time. Kandel is one of the few writers in the anthology I had never heard of before, likely because he mostly writes science fiction, which I very rarely read. He also, however, serves as Ursula K. LeGuin's editor at Harcourt. So, like, wow. Even Datlow in her introduction seems skeptical about its fairy tale origins, though. It's about an amateur theatrical production in which an ogre (named Dennis) is cast. It's pretty much charm personified. Dennis accidentally eats one of the actresses hands and no one knows their lines and the director is a nightmare. You know. The usual.

The Goose Girl is an excellent fairy tale that is less well known to modern readers. It's about a young princess who is on her way to marry a prince sight unseen, and on the journey there, her servant effects a switch. So, for a short time, the servant winds up married to the prince and the princess works as a humble goose girl. When the false bride is found out, she is put naked into a barrel lined with sharp nails that is drawn through the streets by horses until she is dead. Tim Wynn-Jones's version is told from the point of view of the prince who in his telling, mixes the tale as he remembers it, with the version commonly told by an old story telling crone. All the narration is unreliable. It's such an interesting take because the actual events are precisely as they were laid out by the Grimms. The difference is in what the characters are like, and it changes the story completely.

In terms of Fairy Tale retellings, Jane Yolen is one of the best and one of the people most responsible for the genre being taken seriously. Most famously, she's the author of the Mythopoetic Award winning (and Nebula short listed) Briar Rose, a loose retelling of Sleeping Beauty set during the Holocaust. "Granny Rumple", the story included here, is a version of Rumpelstiltskin set in a Jewish ghetto in the Ukraine. Yolen demonstrates her rare ability to tap into history and myth while telling an entertaining and heartbreaking story with deftly drawn characters. She says at the top that the story is true, but the Yolens are notorious liars. And as for it's marked similarity to the famous Grimm tale:

"If Granny Rumple's story sounds a bit like another you have heard, I am not surprised. My father's father used to entertain customers at his wife's inn with a rendition of Romeo and Juliet in Yiddish, passing it off as a story of his own invention. And what is folklore, after all, but the recounting of old tales. We Yolens have always borrowed from the best."

Jane Yolen is always, always worth reading. If you come across a story of hers in an anthology or a magazine, or find a book of hers just sitting around: read it.

I've been hearing about Storm Constantine for a long, long time, but I'd always found her name to be a little pretentious and contrived so I discounted her (honestly, I have no idea if it's her given name or not). Fie on me, I say! Her offering here, "Sweet Bruising Skin" is a revelation. I've always thought The Princess and the Pea was a stupid fairy tale. I mean, who wants to have someone that finicky around the house? That's a good thing? This version of the tale is told by a wicked, Machiavellian queen. The pea business is just part of the queen's efforts to grab and maintain power via alchemy, drugs, poison, the law, or by any means necessary. It's completely entertaining, chilling, beautifully written and deeply strange.

Peter Straub and Roger Zelazny also have wonderful stories included. Black Thorn came out the year Zelazny died, so it was likely one of the last things he wrote: "Godson", a nice take on meeting the Devil on the crossroads is both funny and suspenseful. Straub, of course, has that terrific horror writer's ability to gnaw his way into the same ugly realities that fairy tales also dwell on. His take on the Grimm's "Ashputtle" (the German Cinderella) is desperately sad. His obese and lonely Mrs. Asch is filled with rage partially engendered from a complicated relationship with her stepmother. It's chilling from top to bottom and full of smart insights about how we treat people who are broken or grotesque in some way and the assumptions we make about them. Mrs. Asch is both a downtrodden step-daughter (in her telling of it, which seems far from reliable) and fairy tale ogre in the guise of a kindergarten techer. If you have a small child in school, this story will give you nightmares.

Those are just the highlights. I briefly met Ellen Datlow at a Terri Windling reading she was hosting at KGB Bar a couple of years ago. I am way to shy to be any good at meeting people I am that impressed by, though I told her a bit about "Antarctica" as I would walk across glass to have something included in one of her books.

I've said this elsewhere, but people tell fairy tales over and over again because they're true. They're resilient monsters that can hold up to anything, be set in pretty much any milieu and thrive. They've been denigrated, relegated to the children's section of the library and cheapened and simplified. But they are real.

(photo: copyright Ellen Datlow)

Le Cirque Féerique

I don't know anything about baroque dance, but I know a little about ballet and a lot about fairy tales, so I was pretty much thrilled to attend Company XIV's Le Cirque Feerique this weekend.

From what I understand (via Wikipedia, from watching the above show and from a fairly solid understanding of dance history), baroque dance is a mix of 17th century opera and social dance; the French forms of which are fairly well documented with more than a hundred dances preserved via notation. Austin McCormick, the choreographer and artistic director of Company XIV is a visionary of sorts. He has been a student of Baroque dance (and, clearly, classical ballet) since he was a child. He and the performers in his company dance exquisitely (McCormick dances briefly en pointe, only the second or third time in my life I've seen a man do so). But what I think makes his work special is his sense of theater and his aesthetic vision.

The form is simple. A story teller shares a series of tales with the audience. His style is loose and funny and distinctly American. While he talks, the dancers act out and dance the tales. They are accompanied by a rich, layered and varied musical score combining a gorgeous trio of singers, live instrumentation and recorded music. The set, including a slightly off-kilter tin proscenium, a rotating stage and a riotous and gorgeous accumulation of objects looks as if it were, along with the richly imagined costumes, designed by the bastard child of Edmund Dulac and Kay Nielsen (actually designed by Zane Pihlstrom, the co-conceiver of the piece). The court of the Sun King is suggested by all the design elements, but it doesn't feel as if we are watching a wax museum come to life. It's all fresh, alive and immediate.

They tell seven tales from various sources (including Charles Perrault, Munro Leaf, the Grimms and an uncredited Hans Christian Andersen). This might be more an issue of my personal taste, but I found the two Perrault tales - Red Riding Hood and Cinderella to be the best realized. This might partly be attributable to the effective marriage of a baroque literary source with baroque dance styles, but also because Perrault's tales are so resonant and layered. I will restrain myself from launching into a Perrault dissertation, but I think a few words are needed. Most people know the name Grimm, but not Perrault which is slightly bizarre as most people are (unbeknownst to themselves) far more familiar with his tales than they are with those of the Grimms'. Nearly every version we encounter as children of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast, Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard and Puss in Boots comes from Charles Perrault. Walt Disney mined his work shamelessly. He spent his professional life in the service of literature in the court of the Sun King and published his volume of stories for his own and his family's amusement upon his retirement. There was a fashion for fairy stories and they sold and sold and sold and are still selling today.

I've written elsewhere about wolf stories and their continued resonance. Red Riding Hood has always been one of the stranger fairy tales as it is so clearly about rape and murder. There is hardly any way to declaw it. There is a lovely pas de deux between Red Riding Hood and the Wolf which is both funny and creepy. Cinderella is a complete joy to watch without a single misstep. It's full of broad humor and grace notes with a surprise ending that feels completely right. There is a long duet between Cinderella and her Fairy Godmother set to a baroque version of Lady Gaga's Paparazzi, with brief choreographic references to Coppélia and probably a lot of other things I didn't catch.

The only remotely negative thing I have to say about the Le Cirque Féerique is that perhaps it could use a little editing and shaping. I could maybe have lived with one or two fewer tales and maybe a little tightening up of the structure over all. But those are really just quibbles. They advertise the show as being for all ages and they are right. There were small children in the audience at the matinee my charming escort and I attended, and they were quiet and attentive for 90 minutes. The show is also witty, sophisticated and layered enough for an adult audience. I also cannot emphasize enough how gorgeous the design is. It's the best looking show I've seen in a long, long time.

Le Cirque Féerique
Company XIV
303 Bond Street, Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn
May 8 – June 6
Saturdays 2PM and 7PM, Sundays 2PM and 5PM.
Adults- $30 Kids- $25
Buy tickets here.

(photo: Cristina Ramirez. pictured: (l-r): Austin McCormick, Laura Careless and Marisol Cabrera)