Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.

The Masque of Anarchy
1819
Percy Bysshe Shelley

- - -

Grief

QUESTION AUTHORITY

great organic all-purpose cleanser

see: Howard Zinn and A People's History of the United States

one more thing...

with thanks to my daughter


"Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover."

Mark Twain

thank you

This class has been life-changing -- the works we read, the ideas we encountered, the discussions we shared, the work we did, the every day magic -- an unfolding revelation and joy.

I am so deeply grateful to each and every one of you and to Michael Sexson -- the Wizard, White Knight, Iorek, midwife and more ...

Lach Heim! To Life!

The path into the light seems dark,

the path forward seems to go back,

the direct path seems long,

true power seems weak,

true purity seems tarnished,

true steadfastness seems changeable,

true clarity seems obscure,

the greatest art seems unsophisticated,

the greatest love seems indifferent,

the greatest wisdom seems childish.


Tao te Ching

v. 41, trans. Stephen Mitchell

______________________________________________________

A. A violent order is disorder; and
B. A great disorder is an order. These
Two things are one. (Pages of illustrations.)

Connoeisseur of Chaos, Wallace Stevens


______________________________________________________


Death is the mother of beauty

Sunday Morning, Wallace Stevens


______________________________________________________

Pullman's Dark Materials is a work of complex beauty to which I know I will eagerly return -- and happily pass on to others. I found it profoundly moving and disturbing in the way writing should be.

I'm also very fond of his willingness to stand up to the prevailing winds of opinion, to fight the good fight for creating complex literature for people, young and old, who now, more than ever, need and deserve it.

two interesting interviews, chosen by Pullman himself
1."Everything that is Dust is the result of the amorous inclinations of matter (Blake: 'Eternity is in love with the productions of Time')."
2. "We're rightly concerned that children should learn to read and to write and to become literate, and so on, but in doing that, we sometimes forget that pictures can also tell stories, can inform us in ways that are not exactly parallel to the ways in which words do. They're different. They work differently. I think it important for us to help young people to gain that sort of literacy as well."
Pullman here also discusses narrative voice and metaphor/allegory and the nourishment stories provide -- fascinating!
"William Blake, of course: 'Show me a world where every particle of dust breathes forth its joy' "

Completed blogs due Monday

With special thanks to Taylor for letting me know!:

our completed blogs are due Monday, Dec. 8

How to Measure a Cheshire Grin?
“Lewis Carroll in Numberland”

.

Three degrees of happiness

NY Times: Good Cheer May Spread Itself

"A paper being published Friday in a British medical journal concludes that happiness is contagious -- and that people pass on their good cheer even to total strangers. [...] a 20-year heart study also found the transferred happiness is good for up to a year.

'Happiness is like a stampede [...] Whether you're happy depends not just on your own actions and behaviors and thoughts, but on those of people you don't even know.'

...Happiness spread outward by three degrees, to the friends of friends of friends."

notes and assigments and dates oh my!

HUGE thanks to Montana and Sam who posted on Wednesday's presentations

(I was having electrical problems w/ my car and driving over the pass without windshield wipers seemed foolhardy... )

group presentations begin Friday!! groups one and two I hear :)

Odetta

NY Times: Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77

there's a wonderful video tribute as well -- Last Word: Odetta

at Newport


Water Boy

Surreal: illustrating nonsense

Surreal: illustrating nonsense

My visual essay examines the illustration of nonsense: Lewis Carroll's own original illustrations for Alice and John Tenniel's adaptations of those from the 1860s, Mary Blair's adaptations for the 1951 Disney film, and selected works of Rene Magritte in the 1920s and 30s.

The soundtrack is Fantastic Dance #1 by Dmitri Shostakovich.

The two-minute Quicktime movie I made is here:

http://homepage.mac.com/lpd/2surreal.mov

_______________________________________________________

Surreal: illustrating nonsense

The yin-yang symbol symbol is an emblem of the Self. The dualities are not separate and distinct and forever warring; the opposites co-exist in shifting equilibrium, they live within one another, moving toward the balance of individuation which Jung espoused, the Self which is not the little self of the singular ego, but the large Self of the cosmic Soul. Myth and fairy tale examine this movement toward wholeness and a large part is played by shape-shifting: the fantastic, the ridiculous, the frightening. Lewis Carroll brought all this forward into the written and published children’s story set in the present day.

The Surrealist movement of the early twentieth century appears a natural bridge between the Alice of 1865 and the Alice of the 1951 movie. Lewis Carroll’s delight in nonsense and wordplay resurfaced in the Surrealists with their insistence on play and dream, the unconscious and the irrational, their transformation of the ordinary into the extraordinary. And when Mary Blair in her turn approached the Alice material for Walt Disney in 1950, she melded the absurdities of the original text and illustrations with the hallucinatory colors and forms of the Surrealists.

Carroll had a strong sense of how he wanted Alice illustrated; his own original drawings are both charming and grotesque and Tenniel’s subsequent translations are faithfully enhancing. I smiled at the uncanny resemblance of the White Knight to Tenniel himself and smiled again when I came across the photograph of Richard Burton as the Knight (in the 1983 PBS version, the year before his death, in which Burton’s daughter played Alice). From there it is not so far a distance to seeing the Knight again in the sly black and white reflective portrait of Rene Magritte in front of his own painting.

In comparing the Carroll drawings with the Tenniel engravings, one sees the tenderness with which Tenniel’s experience and natural talents amplify the originals. Alice confined within the bedroom was a favorite of mine as a child, illustrating as it does the constrictions and restrictions of childhood, and when I later came across Magritte’s paintings of the rose and the apple similarly confined, I was dumbfounded -- and thrilled, particularly because the rose and the apple are so recurrent in his work, as are the crescent moon, the mirror, the window (curtained like a stage), the bowler hat, the heads: empty or transformed, the blue sky with cottony clouds, the doubling, the unexpected emptiness.

The Cheshire Cat is one of Mary Blair’s most enduring gifts of illustration: what is he? where is he? who is he? this embodiment of playful, biting, whirling teasing and then the slow unraveling and dissolving into a crescent moon of grinning teeth.

In Blair’s work on the Tea Party, the Croquet Party, and the Walrus and the Carpenter, one sees again that she, like the Surrealists, is fearless and hilarious in confronting the silly, the dangerous and the macabre. Her oysters dance happily, without feet, toward their doom; a half-cup of tea both defies and obeys the laws of physics; flamingos and hedgehogs become human tools -- animals seriously under the subjugation of their human masters.

Paradox and ambiguity are met head-on in these works; in fact they are chief among the invited guests. The relations of opposites -- up/down, before/after, above/below, past/future, good/evil -- are whirled and twirled and looked at from any and every angle. And always with the potential laugh, though the subject may be grim and the humor gallows. What budding vegetarian has not seen an eye staring back from a slab of ham? What young woman in love has not seen the skeleton beneath her own flesh and her lover’s? As Magritte said, “I’m sure even Hegel enjoyed his holidays.”

Our vision, into ourselves and onto the world, is a false, a suspect, mirror/window. Our rationality is undercut by our irrationality -- we ignore that at our own, and our neighbor’s, peril. We need to remain aware that our creations are creations -- this is one painting of a pipe, this is one description of a reality -- and skeptical and open-minded and balanced enough to laugh heartily and often.



_______________________________________________________




Baum, L. Frank. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
Carroll, Lewis. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
Pullman, Philip. His Dark Materials. New York: Random House, 2007.
Sexson, Michael. The Quest of Self in the Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1981.
Talbot, Bryan. Alice in Sunderland London: Jonathan Cape Ltd, 2007
Tatar, Maria, ed. The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002.


General OneFile. Gale. MSU Bozeman Library.

Bernays, Anne, and Justin Kaplan. "REREADING. " American Scholar. 69.2 (Spring 2000): 138.
Buck, Joan Juliet. "On love, maturity, and happiness; an interview with Marie-Louise von Franz, Jung's foremost disciple. " Vogue. 176 (Nov 1986): 206(4).
Bush, Vanessa. "Cott, Jonathan. On the Sea of Memory: A Journey from Forgetting to Remembering. " Booklist. 101.19-20 (June 1, 2005): 1718(1).
Cott, Jonathan. "Forever Jung; a conversation with analyst Marie-Louise von Franz. " Rolling Stone. (Nov 21, 1985): 83(6).
Kepler, Cynthia. "The use of philosophy in children's literature: Alice and her adventures.(Critical essay). ." Questions: Philosophy for Young People. 7 (Summer 2007): 9(3).
Mallan, Kerry. "Reading(s) beneath the surface: Using picture books to foster a critical aesthetics. " Australian Journal of Language and Literacy. 22.3 (Oct 1999): 200.
Suarez-Toste, Ernesto. ""Which i's his I?": surrealist reflections in Elizabeth Bishop's Mirror (1). " Studies in the Humanities. 27.2 (Dec 2000): 103(20).
Tatar, Maria. "Art and Politics in the Weimar Period: The New Sobriety, 1917-1933. " The Art Bulletin. 80.2 (June 1998): 389(2).
Tatar, Maria. "George Grosz and the Communist Party: Art and Radicalism in Crisis, 1918 to 1936. " The Art Bulletin. 80.2 (June 1998): 389(2).
Walker, Joseph S., and Keith Perry. "Introduction: "If you think we're alive, you ought to speak".(Critical essay). ." Post Script. 27.2 (Wntr-Spring 2008): 3(5).
Walsh, Michael. "Conversations with Glenn Gould. " Time. 125 (Jan 7, 1985): 98(1).
"MODERN FOLK TALES AND ANCIENT STORIES: A CONVERSATION WITH BERYL KOROT AND STEVE REICH. " Afterimage. 27.3 (Nov 1999): 7.


http://acc6.its.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~phalsall/texts/taote-v3.html
http://bridgetothestars.net/index.php?d=encyclopaedia&p=alethiometer
http://classics.mit.edu/
http://edweb.tusd.k12.az.us/dherring/ap/consider/frye/indexfryeov.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/
http://www.luminarium.org/
http://www.alice-in-wonderland.net/
http://www.carrothers.com/rilke_main.htm
http://www.finnegansweb.com/wiki/
http://www.jungiananalyticpraxis.com/individuation_lecture.htm
http://www.magrittemuseum.be/
http://www.pangaea.org/street_children/world/sendak.htm
http://www.philip-pullman.com/
http://www.psychovision.ch/
http://www.randomhouse.com/features/pullman/
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/bulf/
http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/

December 1, 2008 presentations

ELVES WANTED!!
Sadie Fri at 1 Corona production History Dept conference room

Once again, a fascinating set of presentations ... how deeply exciting it is to hear and see such wondrous various curious responses to the themes of this class!!

Brandon -- The Hero Compared
children’s and adult lit
Byronic hero | Frontier/pioneer hero
near-mythological status
confidence | darkness | sensitivity
we’re all fascinated and can relate

Sutter -- PoMo and the Great Escape
escaping the metanarrative
the Simpson’s 
metanarrative of Macintosh Steve Jobs
children’s authors and postmoderns
simile becomes metaphor
Child as Recycle Bin

Emily -- The Arts of Love and Seduction
John Donne The Flea and Andrew Marvell To His Coy Mistress
Love and making love

Racquel -- Plagued By Nonsense
uses of language -- rhythm and cadence
can’t quite define how we are changed by nonsense
Glenn Gould, Goldberg Variations #29

Kayla -- THE STORY
history and Children’s Lit
history and portals
history and imagination
the STORIES

Brett -- Transformations
Jungian archetypes
James Paul Gee -- how words transform us , create and shape our identities
“humans not fully aware”
Dr. Sexton’s transformative impact upon us as a class and as individuals


Kalli -- The Tasks of Adolescence
Lyra/Alice/Dorothy
Erik Erikson, Carl Jung, Piaget
who am I? what is my destiny?
taking the journey, discovering friends, resilience, communication, self-esteem
apple-girls -- curiosity and knowledge

Stephanie -- Portals Real and Imagined
change coming, be open-minded, prepare for a different way of seeing
sprinklers
Portal to Pacific
Golden Gate Bridge
Yellowstone Park Arch
airplane boarding bridge
death | birth

Julie -- The Perception and Portrayal of Beauty in Fairy Tales

physical perfection as most important trait
impact on young girls
Purdue study
female/male definitions of femininity
relation to good and evil
real women cf. princesses

Ashley -- Time for New Tales
hidden lessons
relationship
the eternal story of two lovers
Prince Charming | Trickster |Beast

Kyle -- Dream Logic
lucid dreaming
the idea of the Self in Alice
a certain lack of awareness is necessary
dreaming | awakening