09/29/2008 notes

Assignment #3: three questions


Banned Books Week: Celebrating the Freedom to Read

Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008)

"I was always a character actor. I just looked like Little Red Riding Hood."

ARCHETYPES
cf. Plato's Theory of Forms
tabula rasa

Carl Jung: the collective unconscious --

Self, Persona, Shadow, Anima/Animus, the family, the child, the wise elder
extrovert/introvert, thinking and feeling, sensation and intuition
differentiation and integration, transcendence
Individuation, Numinous
"If a man is contradicted by himself and does not know it, he is an illusionist, but if he knows that he contradicts himself, he is individuated."

dreams
Northrop Frye: theory of archetypes diagram

from Frye's "Anatomy of Criticism" p. 116
archetypes and myth associated w/ primitive and popular literature and their "unobstructed view of archetypes"
anagoge: interpretation of a word, passage, or text (as of Scripture or poetry) that finds beyond the literal, allegorical, and moral senses a fourth and ultimate spiritual or mystical sense
bowing to the divinity within one another
interpreter|translator
hermeneutics
reading is always reading into
reading the Times or the Eternities (Thoreau to Emerson)
the Fall
Eternal Return | Groundhog Day | Ouroboros | Mandala

Man Reading, Michael Sexson
Euripedes' Hippolytus

09/26/2008 notes

John: Chronicle Police Report | Bluebeard
Jill: Ernie Davis Obituary | Cinderella
Brandon: Book Review - Meridian | Beauty & the Beast
Jesse: Ben Miller 1935 | Little Mermaid
Hannah: Butte America | Little Red
Sutter: The Johnsons | Three Little Pigs

Mississippi Review: Man Reading, Michael Sexson (V 2 N 12, Dec 1996)

09/24/2008 notes

Brett: Hank Dempsey | Humpty Dumpty
Kyle: Who's Who | Princess & the Pea
Kayla: 1929 Germany | Sleeping Beauty
Cheryl: Jimmy the Bully | Hansel & Gretel
Raquel: John Kennedy Toole | Little Mermaid
Emily: Granite Gentleman | Little Mermaid
Ben: Computer World | Red Riding Hood
Taylor: Varg Industries | Red Riding Hood
Brittini: Valley Girl | Red Riding Hood
Katie?: Not a Fairy Tale | Rapunzel
Ronnie: Missouri River Drug Task Force | 3 Billy Goats Gruff

Humpty Dumpty --> All The King's Men --> All The President's Men

READ THIS
submmission deadline Oct. 1
msureadthis@gmail.com

MSU, The University of the Yellowstone's
Literature and Arts Conference 2008
Germinate and Cultivate
November 14 - 16, 2008
submmission deadline Oct. 20

09/22/2008 notes

Montana: Anne Frank | Red Riding Hood
Kathleen: Diana Spenser | Little Mermaid
Chris: Story about Gary | Goldilocks
Ryan: Climbing Trip | Bluebeard
Ashley: Laura | Little Mermaid
Julie: H.S. Diary | Beauty & the Beast
Stephanie: N.A. Testimony | Rumpelstilskin
Aaron: Saturday Night Fights | Beauty & the Beast
Danielle: H.S. Lab | Frog Prince
Kalli: Med Journal | Beauty & the Beast
Lisa: Pregnant w/ Twins | Hansel & Gretel

paparazzi
Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita

Our stories as displacement of fairy tales
Our lives as displacement of fairy tales

09/19/2008 notes

please feel free to correct me on these -- nervous notes ...

Adam: Living Arrangements | Three Little Pigs
Dustin: My Dog Fluffy | Beauty & the Beast
Cassi: Ignorant Bliss | Hansel & Gretel
Sam: Eli the Barrow Boy | The Little Match Girl
_______: Lab Report | Jack & the Beanstalk
Rebecca: The Walkers |
Katey: 1970s Lemon Grove CA | Sleeping Beauty
Aaron: 1937 Butte | Hansel & Gretel
Erin: Miss Manners | Little Mermaid
Lynn: Plaid Pants | Beauty & the Beast

09/17/2008 notes

Calendar update: October 6, 8 and 10

Kate Bernheimer, ed.:
Brothers and Beasts, Men on Fairy Tales

Robert Bly: Iron John, A Book About Men

Robert Graves: The White Goddess
tripartite goddess -- maiden|mother|crone
plants ; food and medicine
Persephone & Hades
Bruno Bettelheim: The Uses of Enchantment

Larry McMurtry: Terms of Endearment
cf Jurassic Park

Charlotte Brontë : Jane Eyre cf. Rapunzel

E.M. Forster “Only connect” (epigraph Howard’s End)

Cave painting, tapestry, illuminated manuscripts, woodcut, comic book, graphic novel

William Blake: Auguries of Innocence

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.


...Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born.
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

Morrison, Dylan, Ginsberg
Jim Jarmusch: Dead Man

Aladdin (Arabian Nights)/ Disney film

history | mythology
his-story | her-story
W.I.T.C.H.
hysteria | hysterectomy
plants: nourishment, food, medicine
asexual/sexual reproduction -- how one becomes two
stability/uncertainty
William Irwin Thompson: Imaginary Landscape
1. literal
2. structural
3. anthropological
4. cosmological

WIT.org
Lindisfarne
Esalen

Structuralism (post-structuralism, deconstruction, cultural studies)
Mircea Eliade, Claude Levi-Strauss
Foucault, Derrida


Dante Alighieri: The Divine Comedy the Love which moves the Sun

Mississippi Review: Man Reading, Michael Sexson (V 2 N 12, Dec 1996)

craving: a powerful desire for something : a craving for chocolate. ORIGIN Old English crafian (in the sense [demand, claim as a right] ), of Germanic origin; related to Swedish kräva, Danish kræve ‘demand.’ The current sense dates from late Middle English (OED)

ravenous: (of hunger or need) very great; voracious; starving, famished; insatiable; greedy ORIGIN late Middle English : from Old French ravineus, from raviner ‘to ravage’ (see raven).

09/15/2008 notes

Calendar review: all subject to radical change!!!

Margaret Atwood: “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales”

Anthony Minghella: with Jim Henson The_Storyteller
AM also Truly, Madly, Deeply, , The English Patient, The Talented Mr. Ripley

(Jack Zipes)

Beauty & Beast, Cupid & Psyche The Golden Ass
(The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius)
first century AD
Picaresque

SADIE...............................

Recipe for braided taffy
Newspaper front page


William Irwin Thompson: Imaginary Landscape
WIT.org
Lindisfarne
Esalen

Anne Sexton: Transformations
Stanley Kunitz "a wild, blood-curdling, astonishing book"
Anne Sexton poetry she found fairy tales a most potent source for material


Betty Crocker an invented persona (1921), cultural icon, brand name, trademark
actress A H Cumming played her on TV 1949-1964



Julia Child "Bon appétit!"
make an omelette







Patty Hearst
Persephone Queen of the Underwold
the narcissus














Danae

Klimt











Rembrandt












Tatar p 105: misplaced concreteness by an historian’s perspective
there is no original

bowdlerize: remove material that is considered improper or offensive from (a text or account), esp. with the result that it becomes weaker or less effective ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from the name of Dr. Thomas Bowdler (1754–1825), who published an expurgated edition of Shakespeare in 1818 (OED)

expurgate, redact, abridge, condense, censor

Decameron
Robert Penn Warren: All the King’s Men
(Zaillian)

Zauberen (German): sorceress, enchantress, magician

Sadie researched!!!!!

don’t give it away
rise to the occasion
be exemplary

09/12/2008 notes

Assignment #2: We're off the see the Wizard...

bOZeman

The Journey ...............................................

S    Separation
I     Initiation
R    Return/transformation

The Odyssey, Book XXIII (Butcher/Lang): ...in his heart she stirred yet a greater longing to lament, and he wept as he embraced his beloved wife and true. And even as when the sight of land is welcome to swimmers, whose well-wrought ship Poseidon hath smitten on the deep, all driven with the wind and swelling waves, and but a remnant hath escaped the grey sea-water and swum to the shore, and their bodies are all crusted with the brine, and gladly have they set foot on land and escaped an evil end; so welcome to her was the sight of her lord, and her white arms she would never quite let go from his neck. And now would the rosy-fingered Dawn have risen upon their weeping, but the goddess, grey-eyed Athene, had other thoughts. The night she held long in the utmost West, and on the other side she stayed the golden-throned Dawn by the stream Oceanus, and suffered her not to harness the swift-footed steeds that bear light to men, Lampus and Phaethon, the steeds ever young, that bring the morning.

cf. Butler: "And now would the rosy-fingered Dawn have arisen upon their weeping, had not the goddess, flashing-eyed Athena, taken other counsel. The long night she held back at the end of its course, and likewise stayed the golden-throned Dawn at the streams of Oceanus, and would not suffer her to yoke her swift-footed horses that bring light to men, Lampus and Phaethon, who are the colts that bear the Dawn."


"...the fictions of gossip -- as well as the facts -- act as compass roses, pointing to many possibilities." Marina Warner quoted in Tatar's Reading the Grimm's... xxxvi

Compass Rose, also know as a Rose of the Winds



Dreams | Interpretations ...............................................

Paulo Coelho: “The Alchemist”
Joseph Campbell: The Hero with A Thousand Faces

the journey, the road less traveled, the call to adventure, sex, the unknown (denied yet heard)

away from family, home, hearth, nest

go to the forest, meet the snake, eat the apple

DON’T talk to strangers





Margaret Atwood from “Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writers Explore Their Favorite Fairy Tales” : “...it’s our inner lives ... the 'dreaming self' as Margaret Drabble [sister of A.S. Byatt] says ... the mystery beyond the grasp of rational minds ... things just happen, like dreams ...”

O.W. Toad

tales as elusive as dreams -- even if we can’t remember them, they still color our days

"songs of the humpback whale..."
synchronicity
structuralism

“not what it means, but what it is”
“not what it is, but how it is”

more from Tatar's "Reading the Grimm's ..." xx
the A.S. Byatt introduction: "Vladimer Propp's analysis of the structural forms of the folktale is exciting because it makes precise and complex something we had already intuited -- that the people and events are both finite and infinitely variable. Another thing Luthi finely says is that these are forms of hope. ...Calvino knew a great deal about the workings of the stopped-off rule-constructed tale, but he also know that it is haunted by the unmanageable, the vast, and the dangerous."

Freud dreams the “royal road to the unconscious”
Erich Fromm
Aarne-Thompson classification of folktales
Peter and Iona Opie husband-and-wife team of folklorists
jump-rope rhymes
Sutter and Sam sittin' in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g ...
Cinderella, dressed in yella …

dream: his house,not his house, upstairs, family there but didn’t know them, into the bathroom, blood under door, grandpa in oven, cooked alive, uncle "get a shovel"


The epiphanic moment ...............................................

Kenneth Grahame: The Wind in the Willows
The Piper at the Gates of Dawn chapter 7
Pan


"...This is the place of my song-dream, the place the music played to me..."




to achieve the condition of being a child - MS

this class is intended to allow us to hear the Pipers at the Gates of Dawn

"And the light grew steadily stronger, but no birds sang as they were wont to do at the approach of dawn; and but for the heavenly music all was marvellously still.

...Never had they noticed the roses so vivid, the willow-herb so riotous, the meadow-sweet so odorous and pervading. ...in that utter clearness of the imminent dawn, while Nature, flushed with fulness of incredible colour, seemed to hold her breath for the event, he looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down on them humourously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips; saw the splendid curves of the shaggy limbs disposed in majestic ease on the sward; saw, last of all, nestling between his very hooves, sleeping soundly in entire peace and contentment, the little, round, podgy, childish form of the baby otter. All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered.

Sudden and magnificent, the sun's broad golden disc showed itself over the horizon facing them; and the first rays, shooting across the level water-meadows, took the animals full in the eyes and dazzled them. When they were able to look once more, the Vision had vanished, and the air was full of the carol of birds that hailed the dawn.

'Rat!' he found breath to whisper, shaking. 'Are you afraid?'

'Afraid?' murmured the Rat, his eyes shining with unutterable love. 'Afraid! Of Him? O, never, never! And yet -- and yet -- O, Mole, I am afraid!'

Then the two animals, crouching to the earth, bowed their heads and did worship.

As they stared blankly, in dumb misery deepening, as they slowly realised all they had seen and all they had lost, a capricious little breeze, dancing up from the surface of the water, tossed the aspens, shook the dewy roses and blew lightly and caressingly in their faces; and with its soft touch came instant oblivion. For this is the last best gift that the kindly demi-god is careful to bestow on those to whom he has revealed himself in their helping: the gift of forgetfulness. Lest the awful remembrance should remain and grow, and overshadow mirth and pleasure, and the great haunting memory should spoil all the after-lives of little animals helped out of difficulties, in order that they should be happy and lighthearted as before."

09/10/2008 notes

We set up our groups -- send lists to MS

Dates for exams, papers, etc
don't miss Maurice Sendak piece

Examples of displacement (“we know it before we know it”):

1. James Joyce: Finnegan’s Wake 1922-1939
“... Hadn’t he seven dams to wive him? And every dam had her seven crutches. And every crutch had its seven hues. And each hue had a differing cry.”
"... And the prankquean went for her forty years’ walk..."
"riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs. ... Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thous-endsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given ! A way a lone a last a loved a long the"


This is the farmer sowing his corn,
That kept the cock that crowed in the morn,
That waked the priest all shaven and shorn,
That married the man all tattered and torn,
That kissed the maiden all forlorn,
That milked the cow with the crumpled horn,
That tossed the dog,
That worried the cat,
That killed the rat,
That ate the malt
That lay in the house that Jack built
~Mother Goose


2. Corona: Barney Miller writer
"... my mother’s best friend’s daughter Debbie was ugly ..."


3. James Thurber: The Princess and the Tin Box
" ...kindly stay after class and write one hundred times on the blackboard, 'I would rather have a hunk of aluminum silicate than a diamond necklace.' "

4. Joyce Carol Oates: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
for Bob Dylan
"Her name was Connie. She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right. Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn't much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty?" she would say."

5. MS: Katie and Lisa
" ...Get your ass out of bed, [Red] -- Grandma needs ..."


Sam The Sham and the Pharoahs
Little Red Riding Hood
summer 1966
wolf whistle

Jon Scieszka: Three Little Pigs from wolf’s POV

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see an old lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers, and bells on her toes,
She will have music wherever she goes.

Hey! diddle, diddle ...
~Mother Goose

MSU Bookstore: Top One Hundred


didactic: intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive; in the manner of a teacher, particularly so as to treat someone in a patronizing way (OED)

dithyrambic: a wild choral hymn of ancient Greece, esp. one dedicated to Dionysus; a passionate or inflated speech, poem, or other writing (OED)

paean cf. dithyramb

09/08/2008 notes

(on the right you will find 304 CENTRAL : Assignments etc.) -->

( re: use of Wikipedia -- a valuable tool when used with caution :) Built upon the original intent of the internet -- to be a widely-available free source of information and exchange -- an ethereal library*! -- it's often a good portal to other non-commercial web resources; many fine folks (and the occasional miscreant) contribute -- volunteer monitoring helps, just beware recent unmonitored posts...

*ethereal: heavenly, spiritual; extremely delicate and light in a way that seems too perfect for this world (OED)

Little Goody Two-Shoes
Anguish Languish Howard Chace
Rumpole


Ovid's Metamporpheses
"a compendium of stories without which you cannot live" MS


Assignment #1 (due Fri Sept 19)
Retellings: the stories behind the story, fairy tales as degenerative/deteriorative myths


Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion
Jim Henson
the 1987 US/UK TV production The Storyteller: Hans My Hedgehog
Big Bird's tribute: Bein' Green
Harry Belafonte's tribute: Turn the World Around

Jean Cocteau's
Beauty and the Beast
( La Belle et La Bête 1946 series of video)

Orphee 1949 video
thru the looking glass...

La Belle et La Bête
a dream of stairs and locked doors and despair
the Look "your look burns like fire" 6/9
fathers/mothers, chess, illness/malady, promises/oaths broken/redeemed
magic, key, entrance, Trust, transport,death, Soul
"my rose, my mirror, my golden key, my horse, my glove ... the secrets of my power"
night/=day

mirror/reflection death/life

startle: to cause (a person or animal) to feel sudden shock or alarm (OED)
fear and sorrow
tears and diamonds
monsters and angels, invisible hands
the sisters
possession
rescue
torture
Diana
flight



Cupid and Psyche

Wolf
East of the Sun, West of the Moon



"you have brought such great joy into my life" BP

firebirds

My father would put Stravinsky's Firebird on for us to go to sleep by.

Marc Chagall designed the sets for the 1949 NYC production

bird song, flame, mystery, joy

(Ivan Bilibin folktale illustration)

On "Of Mere Being"

discussion of Wallace Stevens' 1954 poem at Modern American Poetry, UI-Urbana

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason

That makes us happy or unhappy.

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands at the edge of space.

The wind moves slowly in the branches.

The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

How doth the little busy bee...

How doth the little busy bee

Improve each shining hour

And gather honey all the day

from every opening flower.

~ Isaac Watts, Against Idleness and Mischief, 1715

How dothe the little crocodile

Improve his shining tail,

And pour the waters of the Nile

On every golden scale!

How cheerfully he seems to grin,

How neatly spreads his claws,

And welcomes little fishes in

With gently smiling jaws!

~ Lewis Caroll, Alice in Wonderland, 1865

Juniper tree

"The juniper tree began stirring. Its branches parted and came back together again though it were clapping its hands for joy. A mist rose from the tree, and right in the middle of the mist a flame was burning, and from the flame a beautiful bird emerged and began singing gloriously."

from the Kay Nielsen illustration





song: art as gift and truth

giving voice to the unspeakable

will not be repeated without reward/payment

in turn, payment provides tools for singer


story-telling, the oral tradition. song


phoenix: a unique bird that lived for five or six centuries in the Arabian desert, after this time burning itself on a funeral pyre and rising from the ashes with renewed youth to live through another cycle. (OED)

rebirth/return
destruction/creation


The Aberdeen Bestiary

shape-changing
trickery
non-recognition
hiding

butchery
flesh-eating
dismemberment
fragmentation

Isis
Black Madonna

fire
tears

journey
homelessness

wholeness
restoration

"Fairy tales are up close and personal, mixing fact with fantasy to tell us about our deepest anxieties and desires. They offer roadmaps pointing the way to romance and riches, power and privilege, and most importantly to a way out of the woods, back to the safety and security of home. Bringing myths down to earth and inflecting them in human rather than heroic terms, fairy tales put a familiar spin on the stories in our collective imagination. ...Cutting across the borderlines between high art and low, oral traditions and print culture, the visual and the verbal, they function as robust nomadic carriers of social practices and cultural values." Maria Tatar, The Hard Facts, xiv

centers

axis mundi
world tree
tree of life
Bodhi tree
tree of knowledge of good and evil

heaven/earth
seen/unseen

coupling
interdependence
entwining

parallel
mirror -- reflection
inversion
reversal

navel

hearth/altar

omphalos

omphalos: the center or hub of something ...a rounded stone (esp. that at Delphi) representing the navel of the earth in ancient Greek mythology. ORIGIN Greek, literally ‘navel.’ (OED)



Interesting that the Delphic oracles were women.

from DaVinci notebooks: the navel, the center, remains at the center



The original Delphic omphalos was placed there by Zeus in honor of his mother's wisdom, whose cunning saved his life. Rhea's bloodthirsty husband (and brother) Cronus (Saturn), in an attempt to maintain power, had castrated their father and eaten their first five children.



When Zeus was born, she hid him and fed Chronus (Saturn) a stone wrapped in swaddling cloths. Zeus returned as an adult and forced his father to vomit up the stone and the other children. Yet, when threatened by the birth of his own child prophesied to be greater than the father, he mirrored the paternal pattern and ate his wife Metis. She, another wise and cunning woman, saved Athena inside him until she would emerge full-grown from his brow.

Goya's Saturn Devouring His Children from the increasingly dark work of his final years

both mothers and fathers portrayed as dangerous, unwilling to be "overthrown"
displacement and scapegoating, projection

Zeus' erotic encounters with Mnemosyne gave birth to the Muses.
Mnemosyne (memory) also one of rivers in the unseen underworld, along with Lethe (forgetting, concealment) and Ameles (carelessness)
Nabokov Speak Memory

portals

doorway, gate, entrance, opening, access (OED)


Lion's Gate at Mycenae
Rhea's attendants were two lions

threshold, a sense of the liminal

the rite (site) of passage, womb (tomb)
narrow, defined
shield, safety, enclosure

dawn, twilight, solstice, equinox

obscurity, ambiguity, fear