through the looking-glass

2008-12-09T21:11:00.009-07:00

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

2008-12-08T23:31:00.002-07:00

great organic all-purpose cleanser

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

one more thing...

2008-12-08T22:50:00.001-07:00

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

2008-12-08T20:58:00.005-07:00

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!

2008-12-08T10:19:00.013-07:00

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

2008-12-06T12:54:00.002-07:00

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

2008-12-05T08:08:00.002-07:00

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!

2008-12-04T17:39:00.002-07:00

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

2008-12-03T15:41:00.004-07:00

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

2008-12-03T07:43:00.011-07:00

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

2008-12-01T17:26:00.005-07:00

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

November 26, 2008 presentations

2008-11-26T16:17:00.009-07:00

GREAT job everyone!
for those who missed it ... you did indeed miss it

YES you can bring your daemon to class!!
revisit Plato's Allegory of the Cave in light of Pullman

Taylor -- All the Skins of a Life
Molly the ball python
add/remove skin
JW Waterhouse
Keats: Le Belle Dame sans Merci
the animal and the human/ the wild and the civilized
wholeness

Hannah -- The Portal between Adulthood and Childhood
Carroll childlike /Dodson adult
puer aeternus
Peter Pan

Sadie -- Too curious?
Psyche, Bluebeard - desire that is dangerous AND essential

Jesse -- Illustrations
something we can’t do with words
Alice in Sunderland, pp 79 and 135
variations in Beast, Puss in Boots, Rumplestilskin
Lyra’s alethiometer
Picasso -- Gertrude Stein's portrait “it will...”
Calvino: The Castle of Crossed Destinies -- mute, Tarot cards

Ronnie -- The Power of Literacy
Greenblatt: Marvelous Possessions
Columbus and indigenous peoples
Frederick Douglass “the pathway from slavery to freedom”
Knowledge is Power
Lyra’s sacrifice -- what is lost, what is gained
the many different forms of literacy

John -- Transformation
surrounding ourselves with art
suspension of disbeliefs
Henry V opening soliloquoy

O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention,
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!

The Second Shepherd’s Pageant
Linfield Theatre Rm 125
Dec 3
7-9

plus

Raquel’s Recital
Howard Hall
Dec 6
7:30 pm

Ben -- Cannibalism
Tracy Willard -- Tales of the Border -- stepmothers
Margaret VanDyke “Horrid Warnings”
cf theme of resurrection
jack and tom thumb offer themselves to be eaten when they are hungry
the apple as evil, as a weapon -- YET “keeps the doctor away”
eat the body and drink the blood
the unconscious learns from the stories

Kathleen -- The Slanted Truth
all these questions and no answers
Emily Dickinson “dazzle gradually”
"...because truth is such a rarity today, it SHOULD be in children’s lit..."

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant---
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth's superb surprise
As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind---

Jill -- John Lennon
Lucy in the Sky + I Am the Walrus
dreams, shadows, mirror images
Revolution #9 and Revolution #9 Dream
layers
1964-65 A Spaniard In The Works and In His Own Write
Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll
Lear: The Owl and the Pussycat

The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.
...They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

John Cage
Jabberwocky "this nonsense reminds me of something..."

November 24, 2008 notes

2008-11-24T20:25:00.009-07:00

Presentations
begin Wednesday!

BE
SMART 
INFORMED 
ENTERTAINING 
RELEVANT
____________________________________________

divination: seeking knowledge of the future or the unknown OED
coincidence is not unusual
Charles Dickens’ final chapters full of coincidence -- NOT “too contrived” as some may claim
full of the dickens, euphemistically invoking the Devil OED

the metamorphosis of adolescence
Alice | Dorothy | Lyra and CURIOUSITY -- curator, museum

Sadie : Michael Chabon
Sutter: experience, knowledge, remembrance | ignorance, forgetfulness
to “know” have sexual intercourse with (someone). [ORIGIN: a Hebraism that has passed into modern languages; cf. German erkennen, French connaître.] OED [sorry, just can't resist the old Woody Allen joke: "Don't knock masturbation ... it's sex with someone you love."]
create | procreate
Beauty is truth
Meno’s Paradox

freedom
education/knowledge: submisson/ rebellion

The Grand Inquisitor (text) from Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov

knowledge is liberation
Ronnie: Frederick Douglass, Malcolm X, Richard Wright, James Baldwin

MS: DO NOT CONDESCEND TO CHILDREN

Baghdad Cafe ; Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida's Specters of Marx

Pullman
p. 864 “tell them stories, they need the truth”
Flannery O’Connor
Eliot’s “Four Quartets: Little Gidding”

ys.
Here, in the intersection of the timeless moment
Is England and nowhere. Never and always.

... We shall not cease from exploration 
And the end of all our exploring 
Will be to arrive where we started 
And know the place for the first time. 
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
 When the last of earth left to discover 
Is that which was the beginning;
 At the source of the longest river 
The voice of the hidden waterfall
 And the children in the apple-tree 
Not known, because not looked for
 But heard, half-heard, in the stillness 
Between two waves of the sea.
 Quick now, here, now, always— 
A condition of complete simplicity
 (Costing not less than everything) 
And all shall be well and 
All manner of thing shall be well 
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
 Into the crowned knot of fire 
And the fire and the rose are one.

Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love 1342 – c. 1416
"...All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well"

p. 926 Dame Hannah <--> Frances Yates “consciously / intuitively”
p. 911 other ways of travelling
p. 926 not pretending but seeing

The Tempest: Prospero

“But this rough magic
I here abjure, and, when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book.”

Blake The Marriage of Heaven and Hell “Eternity is in love with the productions of time”

Stevens: Sunday Morning "Shall she not find in comforts of the sun ...Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?"

Ram Dass: Be Here Now

Stephen Mitchell: Tao Te Ching "Some say that my teaching is nonsense. Others call it lofty but impractical. But to those who have looked inside themselves, this nonsense makes perfect sense." "True words seem paradoxical."

Rabbi Abraham Heschel: No Religion is An Island "No word is God's last word."
"Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy."

Quixotic Lennon

2008-11-23T14:43:00.005-07:00

from Sunday's Boston Globe:

No nukes
Once a quixotic slogan, the idea of actually dismantling every nuclear weapon is attracting mainstream policy thinkers

FOR MANY AMERICANS, the idea of a world without nuclear weapons is a bit like the idea of a world without war or disease - it would be nice, but, contra John Lennon, it's hard to imagine.

November 21, 2008 notes

2008-11-21T16:41:00.017-07:00

WEDNESDAY NOV 26 presentations:

Hannah
Sadie
Jesse
Jill
Ronnie
John
Taylor
Ben
Kathleen
Emily
Racquel
Cheryl

MONDAY DEC 1 presentations:

Sutter (rescheduled)
Brandon (rescheduled)
Kayla
Kyle
Brett
Lisa
Kalli
Danielle
Aaron
Stephanie
Julie
Jessi
etc. ...

please keep presentation to 3 minutes or less!
__________________________________

Trilogy -- why all 3?
the rarity of the length <--> the impact cf. Quixote (~900 pages)
the metaphor of starting afresh
the pain of endings, passing from innocence to experience

Roger Sales' "Fairy Tales and After" : Milne's "House at Pooh Corner"
“leaving childhood behind” “my tears are for the lost boy I am” "wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on top of the Forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing."

knighthood
cf. the ending of Cervantes' Quixote

Peter O'Toole and Sophia Loren in Man of La Mancha 1972

Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II

“...Into this wild Abyss the warie fiend 
Stood on the brink of Hell and look'd a while, 
Pondering his Voyage…”

intertextuality : in conversation w/ Blake, Dante, Milton

pro-temptation | pro-curiousity (Alice)
the story is born from doing what you’re told not to do
Milton and the temptation in the garden, “their eyes opened”
original sin <--> knowledge
The Fall as necessary

Blake: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true poet and of the Devils party without knowing it.” Marriage of Heaven & Hell
Blake Archive: Milton a Poem

Salman Rushdie
“the devil gets all the good tunes”

William Blake "A Little Girl Lost" Songs of Innocence and Experience

Children of the future age,
Reading this indignant page,
Know that in a former time
Love, sweet love, was thought a crime.

In the age of gold,
Free from winter's cold,
Youth and maiden bright,
To the holy light,
Naked in the sunny beams delight.

Once a youthful pair,
Filled with softest care,
Met in garden bright
Where the holy light
Had just removed the curtains of the night.

Then, in rising day,
On the grass they play;
Parents were afar,
Strangers came not near,
And the maiden soon forgot her fear.

Tired with kisses sweet,
They agree to meet
When the silent sleep
Waves o'er heaven's deep,
And the weary tired wanderers weep.

To her father white
Came the maiden bright;
But his loving look,
Like the holy book
All her tender limbs with terror shook.

'Ona, pale and weak,
To thy father speak!
Oh the trembling fear!
Oh the dismal care
That shakes the blossoms of my hoary hair!'

Heinrich von Kleist -- the Puppet Theatre -- a fighting bear

Pullman as a gnostic chooses wisdom not ignorance (historically, Gnosticism lost out)
Pullman thinks his own daemon a bower bird
(a female satin bowerbird !)

(a female satin bowerbird !)

(Peter O'Toole as Lawrence of Arabia !)

sources:

folk and fairy tale
myth
Bildungsroman
science fiction
and
the Helsinki phonebook -- Serafina

opens in sleep …

“some themes too large for adult fiction, therefore go to children literature to find them”

“stories are VITAL”

TRUE stories or true STORIES

p. 273 parents

cut away from daemon = extinction?
Lyra | Trinity | Eve Matrix
father needs child to sacrifice
rash promises
father reads King James chapter 3 Genesis with a twist
an alternate phrase in an alternate universe

ashes to ashes and dust to dust

Genesis 3:19 (KJV): "In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return."

from the current Anglican Burial Service: " 'You are dust, and to dust you shall return.' All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia."

sin and shame and death -- fixed daemons --
square root of one
unto dust????
from original sin to necessary rebellion

Sutter on daemons and "Philip Pullman had said of the Chronicles of Narnia that, if it is supposed to be a religious book, it is void of the single most important Christian value: love.”

Lord Asriel's daemon is a snow leopard !!!!!!!!!!

materialism matters

p.s. my shipment of the Pullman books was on my doorstep when i got home ...
my heroes? Betterworld.com the "online bookstore with a soul" and Biblio.com

The Moth: Storytelling Phenomenon

2008-11-20T11:35:00.002-07:00

“The success of The Moth is one example of
the phenomenon of storytelling that is gaining momentum
nationwide. In The Moth’s case, these narrative
sessions are fast becoming an institution.”
- The New York Times

11/19/2008 notes

2008-11-19T16:02:00.022-07:00

Assignment #16: what is your Daemon?????????
Term paper presentations begin next Wednesday Nov 26 ( Z to A : class roster by last name)

Lyra, Alice, Dorothy

myth | dream | coincidence | art | history
Talbot anchors everything in history

Pullman calls himself a “stark realist”
objects to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis fantasy

mulefa

p. 281 the idea of North 
metaphysical as opposed to geographical
the imagining of the North
frontier, edge, portal
"things as they are" not as we wish them to be...
“a mind of winter”...
"For among these winters there is one so endlessly winter
that only by wintering through it all will your heart survive."

p. 280 the ambiguity of Lyra’s parents

Ode on a Grecian Urn Keats -- can you hear the piper? the music of the spheres? John Donne
forever young Dylan 1973
read the Renaissance philosophers
assigning sentience to the inanimate

p. 364 “Dust knows we’re here”

misinterpretations of Christianity

the Daemon: in children, metamorphasis -- awareness of self, sexuality, experience, sacrifice -- fixed in adulthood? sacrifice -- begins to be more obvious in Subtle Knife
Will and Lyra both have to sacrifice their instruments

Eric Shanower + Skottie Young -- Marvel Comics -- The Wonderful WOZ Sketchbook

Taylor’s response --- no loophole -- saw it coming from far away -- “please don’t do that”
Aristotle’s theory of catharsis
Northrop Frye "depressing?" something wrong w/ the reader or the writer
exultant even tho filled with sorrow

TM: the selflessness is both realistic and Romantic
the romance of Quixote -- that they never meet
The Idealist and Realist, Andre and Wally, Quixote and Sancho Panza
Findhorn

divination, fortune cookies, horoscopes -- what you bring to the experience, the nature of the divining instrument, imaginative devices -- imagination is what makes things happen -- Northrop Frye -- literature is about the possible

"Even a broken clock is right twice"

TM: the Daemon paintings, (erotic) attachment
in Mongolia last summer she bought a beaded bag w/ sheep bones from an old woman

Dreams will come true
Weather will win

Ryan’s blog -- symbols on the Aleithiometer
Sam’s blog -- I Ching

Ronnie -- symbolic interactionism
what CONNECTS us, not what SEPARATES us from animals, daemons, anima

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Well. It was snowing as we left class.
And. As I drove into the canyon, the electronic billboard, which usually says "BUCKLE UP -- IT'S THE LAW" or "DIAL 511" or "ROADWORK AHEAD" was now saying

ANIMAL CROSSING
BE ALERT
USE CAUTION

By the time I got to the canyon, the snow was swirling round as tho I were inside that crystal ball with the little pine tree and little deer that my seven-year-old neighbor gave me for Christmas last year and the radio was playing "Man of my heart"

"More Than You Know"
Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson

In my enchantment, I didn't realize that I'd forgotten to stop for gas as planned ... coasted into Livingston on fumes. My dear departed lover Michael used to say that for a woman with such a fine mind, I was shockingly oblivious to the obvious at times...

p.s. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" was written by the incredible black-listed lyricist Yip Harburg who also ended up writing a significant portion of the film's dialogue ...

11/17/2008 notes

2008-11-17T16:06:00.013-07:00

The Pullman Trilogy
Assignment # 15: blog your reading in Pullman, a running commentary w/ page numbers

daemons -- must stay near

Pullman on the teaching of writing:

public and private payoff
discovered in the writing
willing suspension of certainty

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is: 
What if my leaves are falling like its own! 
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies  
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone, 
Sweet though in sadness.
Be thou, Spirit fierce, My spirit!
Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe 
Like wither'd leaves to quicken a new birth! 
And, by the incantation of this verse,
  Scatter, as from an unextinguish'd hearth 
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
 Be through my lips to unawaken'd earth  
The trumpet of a prophecy!
O Wind,
 If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

~ from Ode to the West Wind, Shelley, 1819
 

p. 363-370
Lyra has emerged into a new world
Mary Malone was a nun, studies shadows or particles of consciousness -- you can’t see them unless you expect to (Stanley Fish: "poetry’s eyes") [Plato’s] Cave=computer cf. Matrix Neo sees a cat and suddenly understands “deja vu” almost a remembrance
the Red Queen: "a poor sort of memory that only works backwards"

quoting Keats’ negative capability -- from his letters -- state of uncertainty and doubt -- Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief” -- a natural talent  of children

non-moralizing
nonsense clears the palate
uncertainty required

p. 379 cat on Sunderland Avenue

aleithiometer <->Lethe = river of forgetfulness<->lethal
Heidegger -- aletheia -- un-concealment, un-forgetting, we need to remember -- truth
"Martin Heidegger on Aletheia (Truth) as Unconcealment"
Francis Yates The Art of Memory
the magic eight ball
I Ching
the definition of Dust

Wallace Stevens poets.org uiuc.edu

32 short films of Glenn Gould
Bach's Goldberg Variations (Edgar Allen Poe The Goldbug) Goldbug Variations

haunted by ”the idea of North” -- central metaphor of the Northern Lights
281 colorful curtains and as a serpent

Wallace Stevens' Auroras of Autumn
stanza VI -- theatre -- the little blue book of Wallace Stevens (Major Author Fall '09)
northern lights as a metaphor of consciousness
cf: a scientific explanation "excreted waste of the sun" (thank you Chris :)

…. A capitol,
It may be, is emerging of has just
Collapsed. The denouement has to be postposed...

This is nothing until in a single man contained,
Nothing until this named thing nameless is
And is destroyed. He opens the door of his house

On flames. The scholar of one candle sees
An Arctic effulgence flaring on the frame
Of everything he is. And he feels afraid.

Novaya Zemlya archipelego Nova Zembla

Salman Rushdie book for children "Haroun and the Sea of Stories"
Zenda, Zembla, Xanadu

Nabokov Pale Fire
eclipse -- feeling of fear
Vonnegut Slaughterhouse Five (film)
Glenn Gould

I Ching

instruments for the imagination

storytelling: In The Tempest, Act I, as Prospero unfolds the truth of Miranda's history to her, he asks repeatedly, "Dost thou attend me ... Dost thou hear?" She answers finally: "Your tale, sir, would cure deafness."

Philip Pullman

2008-11-17T08:23:00.007-07:00

Pullman
I thought it would be hard to find an audience for this story, and I've been astonished and delighted by the reception it's had all over the world

The Science of Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials"
Religion: The religious impulse – which includes the sense of awe and mystery we feel when we look at the universe, the urge to find a meaning and a purpose in our lives, our sense of moral kinship with other human beings – is part of being human, and I value it. I'd be a damn fool not to.

But organised religion is quite another thing. The trouble is that all too often in human history, churches and priesthoods have set themselves up to rule people's lives in the name of some invisible god (and they're all invisible, because they don't exist) – and done terrible damage. In the name of their god, they have burned, hanged, tortured, maimed, robbed, violated, and enslaved millions of their fellow-creatures, and done so with the happy conviction that they were doing the will of God, and they would go to Heaven for it.

That is the religion I hate, and I'm happy to be known as its enemy.

From time to time I have a new thought on the subject. When I come up with something worth writing down, I'll put it here.

Snow leopardGranada Wild

on writing:

What qualities do you need to be a successful writer? Stubbornness, for a start. Pig-headed obstinacy. The capacity to sit still in front of an empty sheet of paper for hour upon hour and feel that your time is being valuably spent. Then I'd say an interest in the shapes of things. What shape is a story? Is a short story a different shape from a novel? What shape is a joke? Once you become interested in the structure of stories, you're well on the way.

The public doesn't know what it wants until it sees what you can offer. So follow the whole of your nature and write the book that only you can write, and see what happens.

The only duty [children’s literature] has is best expressed in the words of Dr Johnson: "The only aim of writing is to help the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it."

To tell someone else how to read your book is to fall into the temptation of fundamentalism.

on education (the Isis lecture, April 2003):

Stories are written to beguile, to entertain, to amuse, to move, to enchant, to horrify, to delight, to anger, to make us wonder. They are not written so that we can make a fifty word summary of the whole plot, or find five synonyms for the descriptive words. That sort of thing would make you hate reading, and turn away from such a futile activity with disgust. In the words of Ruskin, it's "slaves' work, unredeemed.”

  Those who design this sort of thing seem to have completely forgotten the true purpose of literature, the everyday, humble, generous intention that lies behind every book, every story, every poem: to delight or to console, to help us enjoy life or endure it. That's the true reason we should be giving books to children. The false reason is to make them analyse, review, comment and so on.  

But they have to do it – day in, day out, hour after hour, this wretched system nags and pesters and buzzes at them, like a great bluebottle laden with pestilence. And then all the children have to do a test; and that's when things get worse.

... as we know, these days editors are lower in the hierarchy of publishing than accountants, and teachers are less important than those who set the tests. We have let the wrong people take charge. [my emphasis - lpd]

on telling stories :

Well, one doesn't want to be patriarchal, authoritarian, imperialist, etc, perish the thought; but this question has always interested me from a storytelling point of view, because the rejection of the central directing consciousness, of the omniscient narrator, is exactly what happened to literary fiction in the twentieth century, to its eventual impoverishment. Novelists became fascinated by other things than telling stories, and in the process, the feeling seemed to grow that there was something wrong about telling a story from a single, central directing consciousness, because that act involved a narrative voice, and narrators were now notoriously unreliable. So more and more literary fiction became tentative, diffident, uncertain, openly self-contradictory, uncommitted, shifting, relative … and story, which is both events and the voice that tells us about them, was banished.   Where story went was into genre fiction – crime, romance, fantasy, and so on; and into children's books. And, incidentally, and increasingly, into non-fiction. You couldn't kill it; it's too healthy for that, and people have an insatiable appetite for knowing what happened next.

a culture of fear:

Shame on us, to be so timid. Shame on us, to be so mistrustful. Shame on us, to have so little faith in literature, in poetry and drama and story.

five steps we should take, starting right now:

Do away with these incessant tests; they only tell you things you don't need to know, and make the children do things they don't need to do.  
Abolish the league tables, which are an abomination.
  Cut class sizes in every school in the country. No child should ever be in a class bigger than twenty.  
Make teaching a profession that the most gifted, the most imaginative, the most well-informed people will clamour to join; and make the job so rewarding that none of them will want to stop teaching until they drop.  
Make this the golden rule, the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath: Everything we ask a child to do should be worth doing.

If we do those five things, we will not bring about a golden age, or an earthly paradise; there are more things wrong with the world than we can cure by changing a system of schooling. But if we get education right, it would show that we were being serious about living and thinking and understanding ourselves; it would show that we were paying our children the compliment of assuming that they were serious too; and it would acknowledge that the path to true learning begins nowhere else but in delight, and the words on the signpost say: "Once upon a time …”

Tristesses de la lune

2008-11-16T22:07:00.003-07:00

Tristesses de la lune
Sorrow of the moon
from Les Fleurs du Mal
Baudelaire

The Moon more indolently dreams tonight
Than a fair woman on her couch at rest,
Caressing, with a hand distraught and light,
Before she sleeps, the contour of her breast.
Upon her silken avalanche of down,
Dying she breathes a long and swooning sigh;
And watches the white visions past her flown,
Which rise like blossoms to the azure sky.
And when, at times, wrapped in her languor deep,
Earthward she lets a furtive tear-drop flow,
Some pious poet, enemy of sleep,
Takes in his hollow hand the tear of snow
Whence gleams of iris and of opal start,
And hides it from the Sun, deep in his heart.

at the gas station

2008-11-14T21:34:00.007-07:00

The morning after the election of Obama, I drove to Bozeman in a rain/sleet/slush nightmare. I laughed at how little the horrible conditions seemed to affect my mood this day. I stopped to get gas and the woman at the next pump had an Obama sticker on her car too. She pointed at mine as we stood in the rain and said, "It's a beautiful morning, ain't it?"

Today, one week later, I stopped to get gas at the same station. There was a four-year-old cherubim inside the door when I went in to pay. As she left with her dad, she held up a package of candy and said to me, "These are good -- sour and sweet at the same time!" The cashier said, "They're my neighbors. I watched her learn to ride a bike this summer -- no training wheels." I remembered my father standing behind me to steady the bike and then pushing me off. I remembered the smart of skinned knees. I remembered exhilaration.

11/14/2008 notes

2008-11-14T17:15:00.007-07:00

(click for details)
Assignment #14: Term paper presentation
Assignment #13: Corona boxes
Assignment #12: blog Pullman

Women in Black:
overview of the trilogy by Ronnie and Sam (thank you!)

both were introduced to the work around age 13
both have read and re-read it several times
both found it profoundly moving

innocence and experience
what is a child? what is the end of childhood? what is moral? what are morals? what is dust?
instruments: golden compass, subtle knife, amber spyglass
seeing
portals
Lyra, Will, Mary Malone

Ashley: Find Your Daemon
MS: soulmate Martha Stewart

portmanteaux

2008-11-12T21:36:00.004-07:00

damsel-in-distress-fly
delisherist: one who relishes the delicious
impursable: you can’t take it to the bank
mirtherous: killingly funny
tortle: to torture, in a slow and legal manner

ambiguous undulations

2008-11-10T22:30:00.014-07:00

I saw a young red fox running up through a young green field

Downward to darkness, on extended wings
Stevens, Sunday Morning

the handsome young man with the big vocabulary

2008-11-10T21:54:00.004-07:00

I once dated a handsome young man and I was sorely tempted to marry him. He was beautiful and a zoologist. I thought that meant he loved animals. But it meant he loved zoos! On a "field trip" we chanced upon dragonflies -- iridescent, humming, hovering, darting, disappearing, appearing, miraculous! But he was not captivated. No. He gave me a lecture on species, phyla and related taxonomic classifications -- and I -- and I -- and I -- escaped with my life!

seven ages of man...

2008-11-10T20:48:00.019-07:00

salmagundi: a salad of whatever is at hand [purportedly served on pirate ships] derived from the French salmigondis - disparate assembly of things, ideas, people, forming an incoherent [!] whole ...It seems likely that the name is connected with the children’s rhyme, Solomon Grundy. (wiki)

Solomon Grundy,
Born on a Monday,
Christened on Tuesday,
Married on Wednesday,
Took ill on Thursday,
Grew worse on Friday,
Died on Saturday,
Buried on Sunday.
That was the end of
Solomon Grundy.

"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;
And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lin'd,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well sav'd, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion;
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything."

As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII

Oedipus and the Sphinx

"What is the creature that walks on four legs in the morning, two legs at noon, and three in the evening?"

"Man"

Children picking up our bones
Will never know that these were once
As quick as foxes on the hill;

And that in autumn, when the grapes
Made sharp air sharper by their smell
These had a being, breathing frost;

And least will guess that with our bones
We left much more, left what still is
The look of things, left what we felt

At what we saw ...

Wallace Stevens, A Postcard from the Volcano

fox and grapes
Pompeii

The River

Toward the end
of its journey
the river
made its final bend.

Clouds of mist
pollen from pines
far above
descended dream like
upon our craft
and upon ourselves

The river flowed
and I flowed,
not only with it
but as it

Not only was I upon it
but it was upon me

And finally we were one

Michael Francis Doyle, 1948-2006

Questions for quiz #2

2008-11-10T17:20:00.004-07:00

Tatar book -- various endings

Snow White
Sleeping Beauty
Rapunzel
Rumplestilskin
Jack and the beanstalk
Frog Prince

Talbott pages

21
27-29
92
134
183 - 186
204-206 
290 - 298

My Book and Heart Shall Never Part

Alice chapters

Humpty Dumpty
Wool and Water
Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee
Caterpillar
Question of morals

QUESTIONS:

Classic illustrator of Alice: Tenniel

Last word in Beauty and the Beast (Tatar): Virtue

Who wins after death? the worms (we may yet triumph through Art (Groucho))

Oscar Wilde: "Life imitates art"

themes of the class:
myth | dream | coincidence | art | history

White Knight might represents? Carroll himself

Parodist’s counterpart to "How Doth the Busy Bee"? "How Doth the Little Crocodile"

The beautiful food of which the mock turtle sings? soup

Hatter's riddle: Why is a raven like a writing desk?

Most quoted author after Shakespeare? Carroll

___ is a depersonalized _____ and _____ is a personalized ___
(myth is a depersonalized dream and dream is a personalized myth)

Create your own portmanteau

Who is the rudest of all the flowers?

Animate | anima | soul

Who is the volcano? Alice

Where does Alice live? the collective unconscious | dust

Alice first growth change? shrinks to 10 inches

Title of the deleted chapter from Through the Looking Glass? A Wasp in a Wig

How does Alice offend the mouse? cats!

During the Protestant Reformation, what was the intent of children’s literature? to inculcate moral values to children

According to My Book and Heart, the first Bible published was in? Algonquin

Which two animals sparked curiosity re: evolution? the mammoth and the monkey

What invention influenced the Reformation? the Gutenburg Press

Why are hatters mad? mercury in hat bands (misplaced concreteness)

Create an anagram of _____ (MS torture)

What does White Rabbit drop? white gloves and a fan

In Cocteau's film Beaty and the Beast, Beauty's tears become? diamonds

D.H. Lawrence: “Never trust the teller, trust the tale.”

Lewis Carrol's nickname inspired which character? Dodo

Tautology: circular argument “I’m interested because it’s interesting.”

Goody-Two-Shoes is an emblem of _____ (perfection) which adults lack -- My Book and Heart

If Alice is a part of the Red King's dream, then what are Tweedle Dum and Dee? ditto ditto ditto

What causes Walrus and Carpenter to weep? they feel sorry for the wee Oysters they are gobbling down

Big theme of English classes? the Dark Side (Far Side? :)

Most prolific serial killer 19th century England? Mary Ann Cotton

Two primary ghosts in Talbot book? Sid James and The White Lady

Jabberwocky poem based on which legend? Lambton worm

Last line of Alice: "Life, what is it but a dream?" ACROSTIC

Walter Pater: “All art aspires to the condition of music”

My Book and Heart: “The text informs reality”

dream

2008-11-09T07:35:00.009-07:00

Dr. Sexson, looking like the Wizard, is telling me something important, but he is fading and I can't quite hear ... "pay more attention to..." I turn over and go back to sleep to try and hear the rest. I'm in the Beartooths with my father. We're grazing like bears on the huckleberries, stopping to listen for real bears, then clambering down to a small stream for a drink. He shows me the horsetails ! and how to use them to shave oboe reeds. He shows me the mayfly casings on the stone cliffs and tells me the story of their short lives.

I wake and weep. He's been gone ten years. I remember his anger at my grandfather, my husband. I remember my mother's fury when I got lost in a book or at the piano. I remember reading in the green chair near the window and his gentle hand on my head as he passed by.

favorite Alice

2008-11-08T20:58:00.005-07:00

more trouble! Every time I try to pick one, I think "But wait, what about..."

'There's no use trying,' she said: 'one CAN'T believe impossible things.'

And it certainly DID seem a little provoking ('almost as if it happened on purpose,' she thought) that, though she managed to pick plenty of beautiful rushes as the boat glided by, there was always a more lovely one that she couldn't reach.

from "Wool and Water", but then there's also chapter one, watching the snow kiss the windows and the drifting into sleep and the pondering of punishment ... and chapter three with everything "worth a thousand pounds" and chapter two "remembering one is a Pawn" and on the way to becoming a Queen!!! ... not to mention "Tweedledum and Tweedledee" and trying to get out of the dark wood and the incredible shocking mesmerising horror of "The Walrus and the Carpenter" !!!!!!!!! .... and Bob Dylan's "a childish dream is a deathless need  and a noble truth is a sacred creed" from Love and Theft released on 9.11.2001 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Still trying to choose ONE...

A boat beneath a sunny sky,
Lingering onward dreamily
In an evening of July—

Children three that nestle near,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Pleased a simple tale to hear—

Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise,
Alice moving under skies
Never seen by waking eyes.

Children yet, the tale to hear,
Eager eye and willing ear,
Lovingly shall nestle near.

In a Wonderland they lie,
Dreaming as the days go by,
Dreaming as the summers die:

Ever drifting down the stream—
Lingering in the golden gleam—
Life, what is it but a dream?

impossible

2008-11-08T20:52:00.003-07:00

I'm having trouble with this -- when I try to think of something impossible, I always come up with some way it could be possible -- my father used to say I was a classic case of someone who, coming upon a huge pile of shit, would think "there must be a pony here somewhere"

dream

2008-11-08T20:17:00.006-07:00

I'm trying to hide money from my mother ... bills ones and fives, I push them into crumpled newspaper and shove it all to the back of shelves stacked to overflowing with other papers. When I go to retrieve it, I can't find it. It’s gone. Madly searching. Gloria shows up and says not to worry, I should go with her to a party at Chico (only it’s not) It’s night, many people, all strangers, music, talk, labyrinthine halls and rooms. I'm sitting at a low table in a small room ... two women and myself smoking opium (only it’s not) ... small dabs like soft hashish but in odd colors like oil paints ... heated, inhaled, a slow smiling gentle floating high. A man behind me, his hands light on my waist, a great soft dark voice, whispering "do you want to dance" ...we do, close, erotic, delicious... “I don’t like cheerleaders” as he disappears ... hoping to find him among the rooms, but I'm in a crowded gallery with lots of small art on the walls that i do not like ... I see Gloria again, she laughs and says his name is Isaac ...

when I woke the Beatles' "Help" was on the TV ... PBS 3 AM

November 5, 2008

2008-11-08T19:24:00.016-07:00

DREAMS

dream language
dream logic
intensity
personal myth

"Nothing in his life became him like the leaving it."
Macbeth Act 1, scene 4

"We are such stuff  as dreams are made on; and our little life  is rounded with a sleep."
The Tempest Act 4, scene 1

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
Macbeth | Act 5, scene 5

"We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art."
Henry James

synecdoche
elegy
history| myth

Talbot
290 recurrent violence
 p.291 only immortality is Art
p. 294 immigration
p. 298 all our people

Lambton Worm

The worms crawl in,
the worms crawl out.
The worms play pinochle on your snout.

Mayflies Ephemeroptera

dragonflies and damselflies

My Dinner with Andre

Groucho

Duck Soup

November 3, 2008

2008-11-08T18:56:00.007-07:00

Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry 1821 published posthumously in 1840 by Mary

“But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. Hence all original religions are allegorical, or susceptible of allegory, and, like Janus, have a double face of false and true. Poets, according to the circumstances of the age and nation in which they appeared, were called, in the earlier epochs of the world, legislators, or prophets: a poet essentially comprises and unites both these characters. For he not only beholds intensely the present as it is, and discovers those laws according to which present things ought to be ordered, but he beholds the future in the present, and his thoughts are the germs of the flower and the fruit of latest time. Not that I assert poets to be prophets in the gross sense of the word, or that they can foretell the form as surely as they foreknow the spirit of events: such is the pretence of superstition, which would make poetry an attribute of prophecy, rather than prophecy an attribute of poetry. A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one
...It is impossible to read the compositions of the most celebrated writers of the present day without being startled with the electric life which burns within their words. They measure the circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit, and they are themselves perhaps the most sincerely astonished at its manifestations; for it is less their spirit than the spirit of the age. Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.”

Chris Clark’s synchronicity, coincidence, intention is secondary

Talbott
p. 28 “before Carroll, children’s lit was educational tracts”
p. 204 mass murderers
p. 21 Alice pervades Western civilization  
p. 29 John Lennon
 p.134 logic of the dream

Chuang Tzu, surrealism, Coleridge opium and Kubla Khan
Kafka, Nabokov, Joyce, Auden, Graves, Heinlein, Lennon, Monte Python 
Ernst, Jarry, Dali, Magritte   

Alice public domain ~1900

Alice's Adventures in Oxford -- Mavis Batey (Pitkin Pictorial Guides and Souvenir Books)
The Annotated Alice: The Definitive Edition by Lewis Carroll, Martin Gardner, and John Tenniel (Hardcover - Nov 1999)
Alice's Misadventures Underground: The Complete Annotated Oxford Text by Bradley E. Craddock
The Story of Alice and Her Oxford Wonderland by Christina Bjork and Inga-Karin Eriksson
Alice in Wonderland Pop-Up Book
Tenniel illustrations
Rackham illustrations
The Annotated Lolita Alfred Appel Jr.

Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

historical events become myth because they enforce the status quo?
the marginalized mythologized in kitsch?

epilepsy: Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin The Idiot

Northrop Frye: The Educated Imagination

Longinus Sublime: “not to persuasion, but to ecstasy ... bewilderment, surprise, fear”

November 4, 2008

2008-11-05T08:29:00.007-07:00

Bill Moyers: Forty years ago, in 1968, she was 19, and the mother of two, and she was shattered by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. ... "He was our everything ...He was our hope for the future." But after his death, she said, "We were afraid... like we would be killed if we stood up."

That was 40 years ago. Johnnie Marie Ross, now 59, says she has lived in fear ever since. No more. On Tuesday she voted and walked home with a flag in her hand and a song on her lips. Hallelujah, she sang, over and over. Hallelujah. All the way home.

Toni Morrison, Nobel Lecture December 7, 1993

Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. ...It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.

...[Language] arcs toward the place where meaning may lie. When a President of the United States thought about the graveyard his country had become, and said, "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here. But it will never forget what they did here," his simple words are exhilarating in their life-sustaining properties because they refused to encapsulate the reality of 600, 000 dead men in a cataclysmic race war. Refusing to monumentalize, disdaining the "final word", the precise "summing up", acknowledging their "poor power to add or detract", his words signal deference to the uncapturability of the life it mourns. It is the deference that moves her, that recognition that language can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never "pin down" slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity is in its reach toward the ineffable.

...We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.

"Curiosity did not kill this cat"

2008-10-31T18:55:00.006-06:00

Studs Terkel
May 16, 1912 - October 31, 2008

an American voice like no other (and a hero to some of us with long memories)...

"My epitaph? My epitaph will be 'Curiosity did not kill this cat' "

interviews at Amy Goodman's Democracy Now
studsterkel.org

Theme

2008-10-30T22:14:00.005-06:00

I'd like to explore the archetype of Self in Psyche and Cupid resurfacing in Beauty, Alice and Dorothy.

Who killed Cock Robin?

2008-10-30T21:41:00.007-06:00

Thank you all for your class notes! ...struggling with some sort of bronchial infection...

Deeply disappointed to read that I had missed Bach -- beloved companion of many years -- he will baffle and amaze and break your heart -- works you can dive into again and again...

yoyo ma

Finally realized | remembered what “Cock Robin” was reminding me of:

Who killed Cock Robin?
I, said the Sparrow,
with my bow and arrow,
I killed Cock Robin.
Who saw him die?
I, said the Fly,
with my little eye,
I saw him die.

Who killed Davey Moore, 
Why an' what's the reason for?
"Not I," says the referee,
 "Don't point your finger at me.
 I could've stopped it in the eighth 
An' maybe kept him from his fate, 
But the crowd would've booed, I'm sure, 
At not gettin' their money's worth. 
It's too bad he had to go, 
But there was a pressure on me too, you know. 
It wasn't me that made him fall. 
No, you can't blame me at all."

Bob Dylan, 1964

Book and Heart

2008-10-30T21:38:00.003-06:00

Beautiful night (that sunset!), lovely space (those lamps!), good company (Kayla and her mom), and a great “text” (old books, young people, sweet music)

I loved the themes:

children encountering the unknown, their shared explorations, their quick wits which foil the best-laid plans of those trying to guide/mold/constrain their adventures
the paradoxes of literacy: denial to some, forced feeding to others, its roles as cultural propaganda, subversive art
the way texts expand beyond themselves in their readers, especially children, who don’t hesitate to engage, become co-creators
books as objects which become tattered and torn as they age in the hands of those who love them (the Velveteen Rabbit)
books as rare objects to be saved and protected (libraries!)
the oral and the written and Fahrenheit 451!
the gorgeous simplicity and intricacy of woodcut printing
the role of the image in print and in film

The only sour note the empty beer bottle rolling and rattling down from behind us -- sophomoric moment -- we can all thank Kayla for her deft catch! i was distracted and plan to see this film again -- good texts always welcome you back for more :)

10/22/2008 notes

2008-10-22T16:30:00.014-06:00

My Book and Heart Shall Never Part
TOMORROW!!
Thursday Oct 23, 7 pm, Emerson
Colin McWilliams, Stuart Weber

the film runs ~ one hour
remain after for credits, acknowledgments and a drawing!!
be sure to bring your lovely tickets for the drawing...

* * * * * * *

taking notes is harder than i thought it would be...

our retellings of Cinderella moral:
+++ Ronnie
+++ Brandon

it ain't the meat, it's the motion
lamentation

Taylor's Mystery Men and Tangible Magic
Chris as Gilbert and Gubar's The Madwoman in the Attic
??? referenced by Tatar p. 80
the rose plucked by the father and Ben's portal
the laws of physics no longer apply
anima, animal, animate <--> ensoul

Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête
Criterion Collection
Janus Films
Surrealism

referencing classical works: Vermeer, Dore, Michelangelo's Pieta

Imogen Cunningham

Georgia O'Keeffe

Cinderella moral

2008-10-21T21:25:00.028-06:00

Martha Graham
"Letter to the World"

Barbara Morgan photographer

notes for girls:

beware mothers who are not mothers and sisters who are not sisters (and other women who haven't a clue, e.g. Sarah Palin, expensively-dressed*, nice-looking parrot tho she may be, i.e. one may attempt to enlighten, but do NOT vote for :)
have patience w/ same as you escape their clutches
know how and when to be less than totally truthful**
see the magic in the mundane
go to the ball!
dance!!
do NOT, i repeat, do NOT, torture your feet!!!

* Neiman Marcus Dallas, Texas: preferred shopping of oilmen's trophy wives ...
** "I am not one of those who in expressing opinions confine themselves to facts." Mark Twain

10/20/2008 notes

2008-10-21T19:01:00.009-06:00

"...how do I know what I think until I see what I say..." Forster
"...the poem means the poem..." Frye
"...I am that I am..." :)

tautology
circumlocution

transparent didacticism/moral earnestness
satire, irony, parody

rite of passage | the heroic journey
innocence/experience
a "small" crime, yet the world will be changed
thoughtcrime | crimethink
conformity | scapegoating | bullying

rebellion
the feral child

iconoclasm, graven images and Banbury Cross

Angela Carter: "The Tiger's Bride" collected in The Bloody Chamber and Burning Your Boats

limbo

Bluebeard's dog, cat, monkey

our retellings of Perrault's moral to Cinderella:
+++ Taylor
+++ Ashley
+++ Rebecca
+++ Brett
+++ Julie

10/17/2008 notes

2008-10-19T13:47:00.005-06:00

guest lecture by Lynda Sexson

film: My Book and Heart Shall Never Part

a visual essay
Thursday Oct 23, 7 pm, Emerson
Colin McWilliams, Stuart Weber

didactic
-- nature of God/divine --> speculative, playful
-- morals --> indoctrination
-- etiquette
-- pragmatic --> humor
-- what is nature

nostalgia
the Other

Literacy
literacy begets more literacy | reading is subversive

The Age of Enlightenment | Protestant Reformation | The English Reformation
Gutenberg and the printing press
Thomas Jefferson

Harriet Beecher Stowe

John Eliot 1650s
first Bible published in America was in Algonquin
oral language systems | written language systems
the way we read becomes the way we think
"why do Englishmen hate snakes?"
native Americans as children or targets
The New England Primer 1688
Noah Webster 1824 the "Blue-Backed Speller"
a nationalistic enterprise | standardisation

Applewood Books facsimiles

10/15/2008 notes

2008-10-15T16:52:00.003-06:00

don't miss class this Friday!!!

*** guest lecture by Lynda Sexson ***

***

10/08/2008 notes

2008-10-09T13:37:00.005-06:00

quiz review on Friday 10/10 -- everyone bring one question!

Tatar
p. xvii
p. 43

compare Perrault and Grimm endings for Little Red Riding Hood
(Pavarotti, Dickens)

beast groom (King Kong)
search for lost husband
coming of age (Pride & Prejudice, Bride & Prejudice)
marriage as rape | abduction | rescue
patriarchy and property
father | senex
wise man/ wizard
fool/fearsome (Cronus)

"Two stock characters of theater are the senex amans, an old man unsuitably in love with a much younger woman, and the senex iratus, an old man who irrationally opposes the love of the young couple." Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, p 172 (wiki)

psychic participation
magical listening

Manil Suri: The Age of Shiva

10/06/2008 notes

2008-10-06T20:19:00.006-06:00

Cheryl's wonderful response to "What is a child?"

reading from the Golden Ass by Lucius Apuleius, Robert Graves' translation

first romance cf. Cervantes' Quixote
only known source for Cupid & Psyche

Google Cupid & Psyche images

cf. Cupid <--> Eros

Mr. Ed <-- Francis the Talking Mule <-- Midsummer Night's Dream

storytellers as entertainers -- the responsibility of the teller

beauty
jealousy
ill-mannered
Soul | butterfly
invisible lover
"the cruel power of fate made a virago of her"

falling in love with love...
(Rodgers & Hart: The Boys from Syracuse 1938, Shakepeare's The Comedy of Errors)

Falling in love with love is falling for make believe.
Falling in love with love is playing the fool;
Caring too much in such a juvenile fancy.
Learning to trust is just for children in school.

two children searching
are you the reader, the character, the writer

Venus | mother-in-law
the impossible tasks
the helpers
Cerberus
the descent
the tower
sleep

Voluptas/Hedone/pleasure/bliss/joy

Cinderella cf. endings of Perrault and Grimms

Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder what you're at!
Up above the world you fly,
Like a teatray in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle little bat!
How I wonder what you're at!

Jack Ross
Spoonerisms

Dulac: Beauty and Beast

O'Keeffe: Lawrence Tree

What is a Child? What is a Book? What is Nature?

2008-10-06T09:30:00.003-06:00

A little girl lived with her family on the edge of town. In the evenings, her dear father would return and, over dinner, tell tales of his day’s adventures, some funny, some mysterious. Later, as they settled in their beds, he would play music or spin fabulous tales of the adventures they might have some day, she and her brother chiming in with the details of their own desires and dreams. But in the morning, her father was gone, her mother was busy, her brother had his own games. She had books, richly embellished in reds, blues, and golds, gifts from her gram who lived in a land far away. Her gram had been forbidden fairy tales, and still cherished the brief summer days spent with a great aunt near the sea, where she was allowed to read to her heart’s delight, as she sat on the rocky shore waiting for the tides to recede that she might gather the day’s mussels and Irish moss.

For the little girl, there was no sea, no tides, but she soon learned that, if she paid attention, she could sometimes find that moment in the day when she might quietly disappear for a spell and never be missed.

She had been warned not to go near the river; she compromised. She crouched down and crawled to the river’s edge, gripping the grass for dear life, her blood booming in her ears as the water rushed below. She backed down and away, then wandered further along the river through the meadow. Grasshoppers, butterflies, bumblebees, crows, magpies, bluebirds, mushrooms, thistles, wild roses, foxtail barley, the wind, the clouds. She came upon a little creek, placid with minnows and water-striders in the shade of a wizened apple tree. The tree beckoned, opening its arms to her, and she climbed right in. From there she could see further than she had ever seen: the rabbit-bramble and bitterbrush and cottonwood on the far side of the river, the dark little creek below, the sunny field beyond, and oh -- a burro grazing there! He was small, grey-brown, a white muzzle and round white belly, dark points accenting his soft eyes and ears, and a curious marking on his back: a thin dark stripe from mane to tail and then another, crossing the first, marking his shoulders. She said “hello” and he lifted his head to look over at her, then bent back down for more succulent grasses. She waited, remarked upon what a fine day it was. He grazed closer. The apple tree sensed her yearning, lifted her over the water and into the field. She reached out and caressed the burro’s warm back at the very place where the two dark lines crossed. She could smell him -- dusty, pungent as juniper. She leaned in, closer, closer and slowly, slowly lowered herself onto his back. He shivered once and began to walk with her round the edges of the field, stepping deliberately, swaying slightly beneath her, his ears turning back to catch her whispered “thank you, thank you.”

When they returned to the apple tree he stopped and she slid off, her arms round his neck. The day was hot, she took off her clothes, waded into the creek, lay on the the hot sand to dry. The burro came over and nuzzled her arm, licked her salty shoulder, wandered back to the shade.

She was home in time for supper. That night she hugged the story of her day to her breast, wanting to tell it, knowing she couldn’t.

10/03/2008 notes

2008-10-05T12:54:00.008-06:00

Sadie passed out beautiful tickets for "My Book & Heart"

Assignment #3-- post on blog and bring hard copy to class

the grim Grimms -- the kind of coincidence "poets love and logicians loathe" (Nabokov)

Urtext: "German origin; ur- means 'original' ...In the humanities, the word is often used in a metaphorical fashion to refer to a primitive, seminal, or prototypical example of an artistic genre or the basis of an ideological movement. In classical music, the term has a more literal meaning, namely the version of the music as it was created by the composer; see Urtext edition." (Wiki)

Kathasaritsagara: The ocean of the streams of stories

cognitive dissonance
Walt Whitman:
Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes.
Whitman Archive.org

John Millington Synge
Ashypelt from Sacred Text Archive

Joseph Campbell: The Hero with a Thousand Faces
Maria Tatar: The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales
Maurice Sendak, illustrator, Lore Segal,Randall Jarrell, translators: The Juniper Tree and Other Stories from Grimm

10/01/2008 notes

2008-10-03T06:59:00.004-06:00

Hans My Hedgehog
Henson/Minghella "Storyteller"

rash promise
transformation
passing of property
abduction
childless couple
monster baby
sacrificial child - enmity of parent
isolation
beast marriage

epithets
language rules/formulas

"...music both bitter and sweet, beginning in hello and ending in goodbye..."

We look before and after,
And pine for what is not;
Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught;
Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.
Shelley, To a Skylark

09/29/2008 notes

2008-09-29T21:13:00.018-06:00

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

2008-09-29T09:40:00.004-06:00

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

2008-09-24T16:27:00.010-06:00

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

2008-09-22T20:01:00.004-06:00

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

2008-09-19T17:34:00.008-06:00

09/17/2008 notes

2008-09-17T20:13:00.012-06:00

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

2008-09-15T18:56:00.014-06:00

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

2008-09-12T16:57:00.036-06:00

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

2008-09-10T17:11:00.035-06:00

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

2008-09-09T14:56:00.057-06:00

(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

2008-09-05T20:56:00.001-06:00

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...

2008-09-05T20:10:00.001-06:00

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

2008-09-04T23:26:00.003-06:00

"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

2008-09-04T22:58:00.002-06:00

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

2008-09-04T20:57:00.004-06:00

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

2008-09-04T19:51:00.001-06:00

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