Endicott Redux

More catching up....

   

A couple of things of interest to catch in the NY Times: an article by Mireya Naverro on Reynas de los Angeles, a ground-breaking all-women mariachi band, and "It's Not You, It's Your Books" by Rachel Donadio, a light but amusing piece on dating and literature. I'm not so sure about the gender conclusion that Donadio draws, but I've certainly known people for whom a shared taste in books is an absolute romantic prerequisite (and I admit I wouldn't be entirely comfortable myself without some overlap in literary taste, nor could I imagine dating someone who didn't read fiction at all).

And on the Bookslut site, a good interview with Peter LaSalle, by Jeff Vandermeer. LaSalle is the author of Tell Borges If You See Him: Tales of Contemporary Somnambulism and other wonderful works of fiction which he describes as "realistic surrealism."

Catching up....

"April 1st: This is the day upon which we are reminded of what we are on the other three-hundred and sixty-four." — Mark Twain

      

First of all, our apologies for the erratic nature of this blog recently. Midori had to take time off from Endicott & JoMA over the last couple of months while she's back in the Midwest selling her old house, and I've been coping with health problems this winter, making my own work schedule unpredictable. Midori will be back to the Endicott office in Tucson soon, and then, between us, we should be able to return to a more regular schedule. (Many thanks to the other Endicott reviewers, who have been pitching in when they can.)

Here are some things to catch up on, a combination of recommendations sent to us and items that recently caught my eye:

* Our Monday Video this week (okay, it's Tuesday, nevermind) is "Achilles on Skyros Island," a short film about the mythological imagery on ancient Greek pottery (above). It was recommended by mythic artist and musician Catherine Crowe, whose beautiful work can be viewed over on Imago Corvi.

* The New Yorker Magazine recently published a fascinating article by Jill Lepore discussing fake memoirs, factual novels, and "the history of history" vrs. the history of the novel. ("Just the Facts, Ma'am" in the March 24th issue. You can read it online here.) "Historians and novelists are kin," writes Lepore, "but they’re more like brothers who throw food at each other than like sisters who borrow each other’s clothes."

* If you live in southwest England, there's an event here in Devon on Saturday night that promises to be terrific: "Stones and Spirit: An Evening of Music and a Visual Journey across the Steppes." Katy Marchant and Steve Tyler (from the fabulous Daughters of Elvin) will be performing Traditional and Early Music, and archaeologist Dr. Kenneth Lymer will give a talk on rock art discoveries in Kazakhstan. "During this talk we will take you on a journey through the steppes and mountains of Kazakhstan," they say, "not only in the exploration of ancient rock art images, but also to provide a poignant introduction to this fascinating land and its peoples." Where: Endecott House, Chagford, Devon. When: 7:30 pm, April 5. Tickets are £5. For more information: info@daughtersofelvin.co.uk.

* When I wrote about the Russian painter Viktor Vasnetsov in the March 19th post below, I didn't even realize that an exhibition of turn-of-the-century Russian art is currently running at the Royal Academy in London, featuring a large selection of paintings from the "Wanderers" (a.k.a. "Itinerants") movement. More information is here.

* Over at the Green Man Review site, they're honoring Peter Beagle (author of such fantasy classics as The Last Unicorn and A Fine and Private Place) with the "Oak King" distinction this year. The site will be offering four podcasts of Peter reading his work, one reading per season. The spring podcast--of a brand new story, "The Stickball Witch"--is online now.

* Here's a bit of interesting, and maddening, history: A rejection letter from the Disney Studios to a young woman who applied for a position at Disney's animation training school in 1938: "Women," they told her, "do not do any of the creative work in preparing the cartoons for the screen, as that work is performed entirely by young men. For this reason girls are not considered for the training school." The young woman in question eventually became an animator during World War II, working for the war effort.

* JoMA reader El Edwards has tipped us off to this little movie trailer, Wise Women Speak, from Cowgirl Films. Boy does it make me want to see more.

* Salon has an insightful article by Laura Miller on David Hajdu's new book,  The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How it Changed America. Interesting stuff.

* I've only recently become aware of the pudú, the world's smallest deer, and I'm utterly smitten by these magical little creatures, which are native to Argentina and Chile. You can find pictures, and the video of a pudú adoption, on the Fauna Andina website.

My recent infatuation with the pudú has led, in turn, to the webcomic Little Dee by Christopher Baldwin, in which a pudú is a recurring character. It's a charming comic about a little girl lost in the woods and befriended by animals. You'll find it online here. Or you can purchase print versions of Little Dee here.

* For those of you in the New York area: Howard Gayton and I will be doing a reading in New York on the evening of June 18, as part of the KGB Fantastic Fiction series. That's at the KGB Bar in the East Village (85 East 4th Street, just off 2nd Avenue), at 7 pm. We'll post about this again closer to the date, but I wanted to give you an early "heads up,"  as it would be nice to see some Journal of Mythic Arts readers there....And though it's April Fool's Day, I promise this isn't an April Fool's joke -- despite evidence to the contrary in the picture here! (It comes from a gig that Howard did as a Fool for Daughters of Elvin, as a matter of fact, just to tie some of these posts together.) The April reading at KGB, by the way, will be by P.D. Cacek and Jack Ketchum, on April 16 at 7 pm.

Happy April Fool's Day, everyone.

Speaking of fools...

Yesterday's post on the Fool-ish theatre company Maison Foo reminded me of a couple of interesting Fool articles out there on the web that you might enjoy perusing: "Fools are Everywhere" by Beatrice K. Otto, and "The Survival of the Fool in Modern Heroic Fantasy" by Roger Schlobin. (For more information on fools, clowns, and tricksters of all sorts, see the Winter 07 issue of the Journal of Mythic Arts.)

The Prophet

    

There's an interesting article by Joan Acocella on the New Yorker website about the Lebanese-American writer & artist Kahlil Gibran, who is the third best-selling poet of all time, following Shakespeare and Lao-tzu. Although it's deeply unfashionable to admit it, I was a fan of Gibran's The Prophet during my adolescence (probably the best time to read it), and despite the book's obvious flaws (as clearly outlined by Acocella) some of its lovelier passages stick with me to this day. Calling Gibran the Paulo Coelho of the 1920s, Acocella examines the author's complicated life, the on-going impact of his seminal book, and the life of Mary Haskell, the little-known woman who played a crucial part in both.

Yes, Gibran was another one of those writers with an uncredited mentor/editor/re-writer* who helped him hone his ideas and shape his prose...and, as was often the case in centuries past, that invisible mentor/collaborator was a woman. After publishing some early works in Arabic, writes Acocella, "Gibran made a serious decision: he was going to begin writing in English. To do this, he needed [Mary] Haskell’s help, and she rushed to give it. When they were apart, he sent her his manuscripts, and she sent back corrections. When they were together...he dictated his work to her. She wrote in her diary that if, during that process, 'we come to a part that I question, we stop then and there.' Who resolved the question? We don’t know. She said that 'he always gave every idea, and I simply found the phrases sometimes.' But finding the phrases is a large part of writing. For Gibran’s first English-language publication, a brief poem, Haskell sent him seven pages of proposed corrections....Until he died, she edited all his English-language books. With the third of these, The Prophet, he hit pay dirt." **

It's a fascinating story, and makes me want to read Robin Waterfield's Gibran biography, published in 1998. It also reminds me of a quote by Anais Nin that influenced me in my twenties even more than Gibran's The Prophet did in my teens:

"For too many centuries women have been being muses to artists. I wanted to be the muse, I wanted to be the wife of the the artist, but I was really trying to avoid the final issue -- that I had to do the job myself."

* The role of a mentor/editor in a writer's work can be a complicated and controversial one. For more on this, read "Rough Crossing: The Cutting of Raymond Carver" (also on the New Yorker website) about the working relationship between Carver and Knopf editor Gordon Lish.

** I don't mean to imply that there's anything wrong per se with this kind of aid and collaboration, even when it's as extensive as Haskell's contributions to Gibran's books. Indeed, I know many writers and artists today -- myself among them -- who are in relationships with other creative artists and who thrive on daily engagement with each other's work. What's notable here is that Haskell worked in the shadows, kept at a firm remove from Gibran's public life and literary persona.

The Reading Cure

   

In his article "The Reading Cure" (published in The Guardian), Blake Morrison reports on an interesting movement in the UK to use literature for healing illnesses both pyschological and physical in nature. In other words, the medical profession has caught up to what most of us readers have known all along: Stories are powerful; and fiction can change us, body and soul.

An excerpt from Morrison's article: " 'One sheds one's sicknesses in books,' DH Lawrence once wrote, and the people I met on Merseyside agree with him that books - good books, anyway - are a form of therapy. 'Prose not Prozac' is the prescription. Literature not lithium. A talking cure in the presence of Keats, Dickens or Shakespeare rather than a physician or psychiatrist.

"Bibliotherapy, as it's called, is a fast-growing profession. A recent survey suggests that 'over half of English library authorities are operating some form of bibliotherapy intervention, based on the books-on-prescription model.' That's to say, an increasing number of people are being referred by their GPs to the local library, where they'll find shelves or 'reading pharmacies' set aside for literature deemed relevant to their condition."

You can read Morrison's full article here. And for more on the relationship between stories and healing, try these pieces from the JoMA archives: "Story Telling and Healing" by Heinz Insu Fenkl, "Healing the Wounded Wild" by Kim Antieau, and my article "The Dark of the Woods."

Wild Child

   

The "wild child" of the forest has long been a staple of myth and folklore, and thus also of magical fiction ranging from Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book to Wild Boy by Jill Dawson (for young adult readers) and Alice Hoffman's Second Nature (for adults). Though some historical tales of actual wild children have turned out to be hoaxes, others have been well documented and the occasional case, surprisingly, still arises today, such as this recent account of a boy living with wolves in central Russia.

Perhaps the most famous historical feral child was Victor, the Wild Boy of Avignon, discovered on a mountainside in France in the early 19th century. His teacher, Jean–Marc–Gaspard Itard, wrote an extraordinary account of his six years with the boy — a document which inspired Francoise Truffaut's film The Wild Child and Mordicai Gerstein's wonderful novel The Wild Boy. In an essay for The Horn Book magazine, Gerstein wrote: "Itard's reports not only provide the best documentation we have of a feral child, but also one of the most thoughtful, beautifully written, and moving accounts of a teacher pupil relationship, which has as its object nothing less than learning to be a human being (or at least what Itard, as a man of his time, thought a human being to be). . .. Itard's ambition to have Victor speak ultimately failed, but even if he had succeeded, he could never know Victor better or be more truly, deeply engaged with him than those evenings, early on, when they sat together as Victor loved to, with the boy's face buried in the man's hands. But the more Itard taught Victor, the more civilized he became, the more the distance between them grew." (You'll find Gerstein's full essay here; scroll to the bottom of the page.)

In India in the 1920s two small girls were discovered living in the wild among a pack of wolves. They were captured (their "wolf mother" shot) and taken into an orphanage run by a missionary, Reverend Joseph Singh. Singh attempted to teach the girls to speak, walk upright, and behave like humans, not as wolves — with limited success. His diaries can be read online here, and are fascinating if occasionally horrifying. Several works of fiction were inspired by this story, but the ones I particularly recommend are Jane Yolen's novel Children of the Wolf and Karen Russell's story "St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves" (in her collection of the same title).

For more about wild children I recommend Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children by Michael Newton. You also might be interested in my article in the JoMA archives: Lost and Found: The Orphaned Hero in Myth, Folklore, and Fantasy. There's a reading list of recommended fiction on page 3 of the article.

Art credits: The drawing at the top of this post is by Tang Sin Yun; you can see more of the artist's work here. The second drawing is by Rudyard Kipling's father, John Lockwood Kipling.

Swan Maiden

I am currently finishing up an article for Realms of Fantasy's "Folkroots" column on Swan Maiden narratives. I have been astonished how rich and varied the world traditions of this tale are -- and yet how eerily similar. The Swan Maiden is of course another beastly bride (my favorite kind -- so difficult to pin them down and so impossible for any husband to actually control), but there are a couple of peculiar variations of her tale. The most interesting version has come from the nasty rumors detractors circulated after the death of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine (referred to as the "Demon Queen"), wife of Henry II and mother of Richard Coeur de Lion.

The story goes that Henry was to be married to a "beautiful stranger named Cassodorien, daughter to the King of Antioch." (Of course listeners of the tale were expected to "read" between the lines here and understand that the tale was really about Eleanor.) At the wedding ceremony, however, the bride swooned just before communion, thereby avoiding the sacrament. But fifteen years later, Henry insists that Cassodorien view the sacrament -- at which point the Queen wraps her daughter in her arms, and, sprouting feathers, flies out the roof, knocking then Prince John over and breaking his arm. It is also possible that the story -- while attempting on the one hand to find a derogatory explanation for a queen famous for her independence (and celebrated love affairs) -- was also trying to bolster the reputation of her son, Richard the Lionhearted, and give a heroic dimension to his prodigious feats. (More on this tale can be found in Modern Language Notes, Volume 70, No. 6 in an article by Robert L. Chapman.)

Along the way of my research, of course, my eye was drawn to Swan Maiden tinged-art. I especially love the painting above, "Swans" by Jeanie Tomanek. (Oh one day I will own one of these beauties!)

Shadows of the past....

Douglas Gresham has published a moving tribute to his stepfather, C.S. Lewis, in a recent edition of The Guardian -- timed to co-incide with a new London staging of William Nicholson's Shadowlands, the moving play about C.S. Lewis (known to his stepson as "Jack") and Gresham's mother, Joy Davidman.

"I think that in today's sad and dark world many people will have difficulty in believing in the real Jack," writes Gresham. "He was a man who had grown up with the thinking of the 19th century. He believed in honesty, personal responsibility, commitment, duty, courtesy, courage, chivalry and all those great qualities that society in its wisdom dispensed with in the 20th century on the grounds that they were somehow outdated, and now needs so desperately to recall and recover." (Read the full article here.)

For more information on Shadowlands, visit the Wyndhams Theatre website. 

From Asgard to Valhalla

From Asgard to Valhalla by Heather O'Donoghue is a truly fascinating look at Norse myths, and the ways they have influenced culture and creative artists from William Blake and Richard Wagner to JRR Tolkien and Neil Gaiman.

Reviewing the book in his article "The Eternal Lure of Guys and Trolls" (published Sunday in the London Observer), Peter Conrad writes: "The attraction of Norse lore, as O'Donoghue remarks in her summary of its development and its adaptation to the modern world, lies in its disrespect for the gods. Christianity and Islam have a mortifying reverence for divinities who are, after all, nothing but our inventions, or the projections of our cowardice. At least the gods of Olympus were no better than us, merely longer-lived and more powerful, more easily able to indulge their all too human vices.

"The Norse myth-makers actually deride their deities: Thor is a stupid blusterer, who in one of the poems collected in the 13th century Edda loses the hammer with which he confects the thunder and has to cross-dress in the feathery togs of the goddess Freyja to get it back. This is why Wagner took Norse myth as the source for his Ring, which concludes with the twilight of the moribund, powerless gods....The Ring treats the saga as a Freudian family romance, which concludes with the destruction of the paternal deity."  (Read the full article here.)

The paintings above come from Arthur Rackham's remarkable illustrations for Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung. You can see the rest of Rackham's Ring illustrations on the Art Passions website. The sculpture below, by my Tucson studio-mate Beckie Kravetz, depicts "Sieglund and Sieglunde" from the Ring Cycle. Visit the BK Sculpture Studio website to see many other wonderful works based on Wagner's Ring and other operas.

 

Dante's Self-Help Book

Here's a  fascinating article on Dante's The Divine Comedy, written by Harriet Rubin for the Arts and Leisure section of today's Wall Street Journal. (The daily paper is free online -- but after a few days it will only be available through subscription.)

Rubin begins with a very succinct explanation of Dante's life and the unusual circumstances which led him to write The Divine Comedy while in exile and, at times, on the run.

She then focuses her remarks on how the work became a transformative text: "Unlike most world's classics, The Divine Comedy is a self-help book. People read Shakespeare with no expectation that they will become Shakespeare. But many read Dante expecting to mimic his results and transform themselves from seekers, lost in their own questions, into poets, certain and transcendent."  It's really a terrific article -- whether you're familiar with Dante or not (in which case, the article might well inspire you to take a look).

The image above is by William Blake, a depiction of "Inferno 26"  -- the meeting with Ulysses.

On editing...

I've been an editor for almost three decades, first as a fiction editor for two large New York publishing houses, and now as a part-time freelance editor and anthologist. And yet, if I'm at a party and someone asks the standard question: So, what is it you do?, I hesitate to say that I'm an editor. It's a profession few people understand (outside the publishing industry itself), and is generally presumed to be a job in which one corrects a writer's spelling. The term "editor" does not begin to describe a job that involves (in my experience, at least) a deep, passionate engagement with stories and the writers who create them; with language, ideas, and the writing craft; and with the business side of publishing, a balancing act of art and commerce.

Except in certain cases (such as magazine or anthology editing), an editor who is good at his or her work is intentionally invisible; it is the writer of a book, not the editor, who is and should be celebrated. Yet in mythic and fantastical literature, a very small number of people whose names most readers do not know (Betty Ballantine and Jean Karl, for example) have had an enormous impact in shaping the field as we know it today. They didn't seek the limelight for themselves; the books, the authors, and the readers were what mattered.      

Greg Kimaya has published an article on editors in Salon magazine, explaining what the heck it is that editors do and exploring the unique dynamic of author/editor relationships. "Most writers," he says, "understand that their editor is not a half-literate, envious wannabe who takes perverse joy in mangling their prose, but a professional who is paid to make their work better. Still, the moment when you -- and now I -- open the e-mail your editor has sent you in response to your story is always fraught with anxiety. You've exposed your soul, or at least part of your brain, to another person. What will they do with it?

"The truth is, you have to learn how to be edited just as much as you have to learn how to edit. And learning how to be edited teaches you a lot about writing, about distance and objectivity and humility, and ultimately about yourself."

Kimaya goes on to look at the role of editing in the future, as self-publication and web publication become more and more common. I recommend reading the full article, "Let Us Now Praise Editors," which you'll find here.

In Praise of the Cook....

"A good cook is like a sorceress who dispenses happiness."
— Elsa Schiaperelli

"What does cookery mean? It means the knowledge of Medea and of Circe, and of Calypso, and Sheba."
— John Ruskin

Today's issue of Salon features a lovely article by Chitrita Banerji on the importance of fish in Bengali cooking, culture, and legends. She writes: "In Bengali mythology -- and in my mother's kitchen -- fish has always been a delicious symbol of prosperity, fertility and pleasure."

If this whets your appetite for more about food (and myth), try these two gorgeous articles: "In Praise of the Cook" by Midori Snyder and "The Lore of Simple Things: Milk, Honey, and Bread in Myth and Legend" by Ari Berk. You'll also find a post here from last February on The Fantasy of Food.

"The very best of cooks are sorcerers, wizards, shamans and tricksters," writes Midori. "They must be, for they are capable of powerful acts of transformation. All manner of life, mammal, aquatic, vegetable, seeds and nuts pass through their hands and are transformed by spells — some secret, some written in books annotated with splashes of grease and broth. For years after my father's death, I was convinced I could take his stained, handwritten recipes, dip them in hot water, and there would be enough residue of the dish on those pages to create consommé.

"Master cooks are alchemists, turning the lead of a gnarled root vegetable into the whipped froth of a purée, hazelnuts into digestive liqueur, a secret combination of spices and chilies into a mole paste that burns and soothes at the same time. From a bin brimming with hundreds of choices they can sense the ripe cantaloupe, the juicy peach and the blueberries that have lingered long enough on the bush to become sweet. I am in awe of their skill, their secret knowledge, the inexplicable way I can follow my father's recipe and not have it taste anything like his, missing that one secret ingredient, those whispered spells that transformed his dish into something sublime..."

The art at the top of this post is by the Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse. The second piece is a woodcut of a medieval kitchen. The third is a photograph by Patrick Manning; and the fourth is a photograph by Toby Froud of a house goblin sculpted by Wendy Froud, stealing bread from Wendy's kitchen.
 

A matter of class...

This is somewhat off the topic of mythic arts, but I'd like to mention an article some of you web-savvy people may find interesting: "Viewing American Class Divisions through Facebook and MySpace" by Danah Boyd. "Class" tends to be a taboo subject in America, where many people like to pretend we're a class-less society, and it's courageous of Ms. Boyd to take on the issue. I've been on panel discussions about "class in speculative fiction" which were so contentious that audience members nearly came to blows at the mere discussion of the subject.

Which authors do you think deal with issues of class well? In genre fiction, Charles de Lint's The Onion Girl comes to mind; in realist fiction, I'm a big fan of Dorothy Allison and Chris Offutt's work; and I'm really looking forward to One for Sorrow by Christopher Barzak, coming out in August.

Many thanks, by the way, to the fabulous Cory Doctorow over at boingboing for the link to the article. The drawing above is one of mine, titled "Trailer Park Cinderella."

Victorian Ghosts

Laura Miller has reviewed Arthur Phillip's new novel Angelica in today's issue of Salon. "For his latest effort," writers Miller, "Phillips has produced an elegantly sculpted psychological ghost story told from four different points of view; it's The Turn of the Screw crossed with Rashomon."

Miller doesn't find the book completely successful, noting: "The horror of the great psychological ghost stories -- Henry James' The Turn of the Screw and The Jolly Corner, and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House -- lies in the fuzziness of the line dividing the supernatural from the simply mad, the perils of the outside world from the dangers lurking within. Phillips grasps and articulates this principle flawlessly, perhaps too flawlessly, since a lot of the frisson -- the creepiness -- of the Jamesian ghost story resides in its vibrating inability to be certain about even its own uncertainty. This author knows how to draw that fuzzy line, but you don't get the sense he has ever walked it himself, so Angelica is always interesting, but never actually spooky. Still, Phillips has yet to write a bad -- or even a mediocre -- novel, and this one is so much better than the usual run of literary fiction, it seems ungracious to quibble." (Read Miller's full article here.)

I had less reservations about the book than Miller and can recommend it enthusiastically. But then, I'm a sucker for ghost stories in Victorian settings -- and Phillips is a terrific writer, no matter what genre he works in.

Back to Middle Earth

The Children of Húrin by J.R.R. Tolkien is a dark, Wagnerian tale of Middle Earth drawn from the author's unpublished manuscripts. The new book was compiled and completed by the author's son, Christopher Tolkien, and is gorgeously illustrated by Alan Lee.

"For more than 30 years," writes Andrew O'Hehir in today's issue of Salon, "Christopher Tolkien, who serves as his father's literary executor, has been bringing forth bits and pieces from the vault, rather like some Dwarvish smith trying to reforge a great Elven sword from discombobulated needles and splinters....

"Christopher Tolkien is now 81, the same age his father was when he died, and one supposes that The Children of Húrin is his last, best shot at telling one of Tolkien's great 'untold tales' in something close to a complete form. He has labored long and hard to patch together bits of manuscript that apparently go back as far as 1918, when Tolkien first conceived the tale, and continue to almost the end of his life....

"The Children of Húrin will thrill some readers and dismay others, but will surprise almost everyone. If you're looking for the accessibility, lyrical sweep and above all the optimism of Lord of the Rings, well, you'd better go back and read it again. There are no hobbits here, no Tom Bombadil, no cozy roadside inns and precious little fireside cheer of any variety found here. This is a tale whose hero is guilty of repeated treachery and murder, a story of rape and pillage and incest and greed and famous battles that ought never to have been fought. If Lord of the Rings is a story where good conquers evil, this one moves inexorably in the other direction." (Read O'Hehir's full article here.)

Here's a bit of Endicott Studio trivia: Endicott contributor Howard Gayton posed for the hero in the book's cover painting by Alan Lee. (He stood in my garden holding a broom for a sword and looking noble while Alan took photographs for visual reference.) You can read Howard's article on fairy tale theater here, and see more art by Alan here and here. To view a "video trailer" about the new Tolkien book, visit the Harper Collins UK website.

The Question of Copyright

As a follow-up to Jonathan Lethem's excellent article on creative influence and copyright issues in Harper's Magazine (which we discussed here on February 15), I recommend Amy Benfer's interview with Lethem published in Salon this week -- which ranges from copyright issues to discussion of Lethem's terrific new book, You Don't Love Me Yet. Regarding the relationship of a writer to his or her audience (and to the commercial marketplace), Lethem says: "I'm very persuaded by the image that Lewis Hyde offers of an artist who is, by definition, in whatever medium, or whatever level of success or whatever culture, in the practice of culture-making; participating in culture by making stuff is inherently a gift transaction and a commodity transaction. And it always will be. The question is how do we affirm and clarify this relationship? Because it's a very weird one -- making commodities that are also gifts."

You can read the full interview here.

The Magical Ballets of Matthew Bourne

The March 12th issue of The New Yorker magazine has a good article by Joan Acocella on the British choreographer Matthew Bourne, creator of the famous "all-male swans" version of Swan Lake, a ballet version of Edward Scissorhands, and other extraordinarily magical dance productions. "In the traditional Swan Lake," writes Acocella, "the Prince falls in love with a female swan. In Bourne's version, the beloved is a male swan. This was a big sensation, and it supplied every journalist covering the show with a ready-made lead. But what was important about the gender switch was that it made the old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous.

"To many people, of course, homosexuality is no longer a social danger, but Bourne restored it to that status. In the canonic Swan Lake, the lead Swan and her cohort are turned into swans by an evil sorcerer. In Bourne's ballet, the swans are swans -- they haven't changed into anything -- and, like real swans, they are ferocious. They swoop, they dive; the lead Swan fixes the Prince with a cold, glassy stare. In other words, this is romance not just between a male and a male, but between a human being and an animal -- a situation that, needless to say, would have no place in the modern, normalizing homophile plot....Fundamentally, Swan Lake is sincere, in the 19th-century sense, and about a 19th century subject: the idea that we all have souls that are bigger than the world, and that romantic passion reveals this to us, fatally. The love that kills still exists, and it still kills."  (Read the full article, in pdf format, here.)

For more information on Matthew Bourne, visit his website -- which contains a gallery of photographs from Swan Lake, Edward Scissorhands, Cinderella, The Nutcracker, and other productions. Swan Lake can be seen at the Lyric Theatre in Brisbane, Australia, after which it moves on to Melbourne. Edward Scissorhands can be seen at the Brooklyn Academy of Music until the end of March, after which it moves on to Toronto. The full schedule for both shows is on Bourne's website. You can also see Bourne's Swan Lake on video.

The Heroine of Crackpot Hall

Ysabeau S. Wilce's charming, lengthily-titled Young Adult novel Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House With Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog received a well-deserved rave in The New York Times this week. "The heroine is this novel’s strongest suit," writes book reviewer Kerry Fried. "Like Pullman’s Lyra Silvertongue or Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching, Flora Fyrdraaca is a descendant of Jo March rather than a fainting beauty who needs rescuing. These wayward, determined girls do the rescuing themselves, although not wisely or always too well."

You can read the full review here. And Ysabeau's blog, on writing and other topics, here. And an encouraging article about teens buying books in record numbers here. (With thanks to Gwenda Bond for the links.)

The Endicott mini-review of Flora Segunda can be found in the left-hand column of this blog.

More Books News

I am delighted by the news that this year's National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography went to James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips (St. Martin's Press). Click here to read the response to Phillips' book by Jennifer Reese, NBCC board member. For more about the biography, read the informative article by Laura Miller that appeared in Salon back in August, 2006.

And while you're at it, click here to see all the winners and nominees for the other categories, such as Best Fiction (Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss -- a poignant novel of post-colonial India), Autobiography, Nonfiction, Poetry, and more. And for a quick review and summary of the winners, read Hillel Italie's article in today's Washington Post online.

Bring On the Ghost Bunnies

I loved Audrey Niffenegger's novel The Time Traveler's Wife, and Kelly Link's story collection Magic for Beginners. So it was a pleasure to come across Niffenegger's review of Magic for Beginners in the UK's Guardian newspaper this past weekend.  She begins:

" I don't know about you, but I'm kind of fed up with realism. After all, there's enough reality already; why make more of it? Why not leave realism for the memoirs of drug addicts, the histories of salt, the biographies of porn stars? Why must we continue to read about the travails of divorced people or mildly depressed Canadians when we could be contemplating the shopping habits of zombies, or the difficulties that ensue when living and dead people marry each other? We should be demanding more stories about faery handbags and pyjamas inscribed with the diaries of strange women. We should not rest until someone writes about a television show that features the Free People's World-Tree Library, with its elaborate waterfalls and Forbidden Books and Pirate-Magicians. We should be pining for a house haunted by rabbits."

Agreed!

The pictures here are by the divine Julie Morstad. You can see more of her work on her website.

Un Lun Dun

In today's issue of Salon magazine, book critic Laura Miller reviews Un Lun Dun, the new YA fantasy novel by China Miéville:

"Writing children's fiction brings out the best in a certain kind of overfertile imagination. Neil Gaiman's pristine Coraline is by far his most perfectly realized and beautifully written book. Likewise, with Un Lun Dun -- a sooty, street-smart hybrid of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz and The Phantom Tollbooth -- Miéville's talents have been brought into focus under the restrictions of the form. Un Lun Dun is not only sleek of line and endlessly (but not needlessly) inventive, it also offers a nimble, undidactic antidote to all the dubious clichés of the genre. Sick of seemingly insignificant characters who discover they have a secret identity and a momentous destiny? Tired of stories that hinge on cryptic prophecies and the retrieval of magical talismans? Miéville dares to insist that nerve, heart and determination is all a hero(ine) really needs."  (Read the full article here.)

China Miéville is the author of four previous adult fantasy novels: King Rat, Perdido Street Station, The Scar, and Iron Council, as well as stories collected in Looking for Jake. He's critically associated with the "New Weird" fiction movement, and lives in London.

More on the Tucson Arts District

Following up on our previous post on the Tooleshed Building evictions in the Tucson arts district, Stu Jenks has written to tell us that the latest issue of the Tucson Weekly contains a cover story looking at the demise of Tucson's downtown arts district in more depth: "Cost Versus Culture". Discouraging, to say the least.

Speaking of Stu, he's posted some great new photographs in the "Biscuit Papers & BR-549" section of his new blog. The image here is called "Sasabe Altar Road, Sonora, Mexico". Perusing these images (ranging from mystical landscapes to women's roller derby) has cheered me up somewhat after that depressing Tucson Weekly article. Somehow, despite all the obstacles against it, there are still artists in Tucson making wonderful art.

Mythic Music of the Desert

Tinariwen are the creators of "ishoumar," a style of music melding the ancient rhythms of Tuareg tribal songs with contemporary rock influences. Initially, this form of music was created to express political themes of exile and resistance, but the style has evolved and broadened to include a range of songs evoking the daily lives and struggles of the Tuareg people. 

The Tuareg are descended from the Berbers, the original inhabitants of North Africa. For centuries they have lived a nomadic life in the southern Saharan desert, with freedom of movement essential to their cultural identity and survival. In the 20th century their traditional homeland was divided between the modern nations of Mali, Niger, Algeria, Mauritania and Libya. Unwilling to settle down and assimilate, the Tuareg became a stateless people.

In recent decades, the Tuareg have continued to rebel against assimilation and repression, partly through periods of armed conflict and partly through their music. (There are legends, apparently true, of Tinariwen band members riding into battle in the 1980s with Kalashnikovs in their arms and guitars strapped on their backs.) "I don't like the idea of being a soldier at all," says Ibrahim Ag Alhabib (one of the founders of the group), explaining his transition from resistance fighter to musician. "I realized I was a musician and poet, and that there were better weapons with which to achieve what I wanted....Also, the repressive regime that used to rule Mali has changed, and things are changing for the better."

 

British music critic Andy Gill, writing about Tinariwen for The Independent, describes the mythic quality of their music. "Ibrahim spends many nights alone in the desert, communing with the spirits, or djinns, who he says give him inspiration for his music. 'Alone in the bush at night, I sometimes get this powerful feeling of a presence around me, and I find I can create things more easily: images and music come into my head, like a muse,' he says. 'Ali Farka Toure claimed that his muses were the water spirits of the Niger river; and it's a similar thing for me in the desert -- there's this other world that is constantly present, and that's what I commune with out there.'

"The spirit world is very real to the Tuareg," writes Gill, "whose origin myth, according to the band's friend and adviser Issa Dikco, involves a sort of spiritual intercourse. 'The first Tuareg was a djinn who wanted to possess a woman,' Dicko explains. 'He was the son of a human and a supernatural being. The other African people are wary of the Tuareg because they know there is this supernatural origin, and they are fundamentally different.' " 

To learn more about Tinariwen and their music, read Andy Gill's full article on-line here, or visit the Tinariwen pages on the SASA music website.  The latter site lists tour dates and a discography of their music -- including Tinariwen's newly released CD, Aman Iman. There's a video clip of Tinariwen at the 2005 BBC Folk Festival here, and a list of other video clips available on-line here.

The art in this post is by Leslie Clark, an American painter who "travels widely and paints constantly, searching for new perspective and old wisdom." Lured by exotic cultures around the globe, she paints with the urgency of knowing they may be soon transformed by the intrusion of the modern world. Her subjects are alive and moving -- a Tuareg nomad astride his camel in the Sahara, a Bushman in a healing trance dance in the Kalahari, a Bhils tribal girl at a colorful marriage festival in India. 'I have come to realize,' says Clarke, 'that although I was initially drawn to them by our vast differences, I continue to be drawn to them because we are very much alike." To see more of her beautiful work, visit the Spirit of the Nomad website.

"The desert rules you, you don't rule the desert." -- old Tuareg proverb

The Ecstasy of Influence

 

The current issue of Harper's Magazine has a brilliant essay by Jonathan Lethem titled "The Ecstasy of Influence," discussing issues of artistic influence, inspiration, appropriation, and plagiarism...as well as the murky (and fertile) creative realm where these things can be hard to separate from one another.

"In a courtroom scene from The Simpsons that has since entered into the television canon," writes Lethem, "an argument over the ownership of the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy rapidly escalates into an existential debate on the very nature of cartoons. 'Animation is built on plagiarism!' declares the show's hot-tempered cartoon-producer-within-a-cartoon, Roger Meyers Jr. 'You take away our right to steal ideas, where are they going to come from?' If nostalgic cartoonists had never borrowed from Fritz the Cat, there would be no Ren & Stimpy Show; without the Rankin/Bass and Charlie Brown Christmas specials, there would be no South Park; and without The Flintstones -- more or less The Honeymooners in cartoon loincloths -- The Simpsons would cease to exist. If those don't strike you as essential losses, then consider the remarkable series of 'plagiarisms' that links Ovid's 'Pyramus and Thisbe' with Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, or Shakespeare's description of Cleopatra, copied nearly verbatim from Plutarch's life of Mark Antony and also later nicked by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land."

This is a particularly apt discussion for those of us writing fiction and poetry inspired by fairy tales, for very often the tales we are working with aren't anonymous folk stories passed down from the dawn of time, but stories penned by specific authors such as Hans Christian Andersen, Charles Perrault, Madame D'Aulnoy, etc. The power of fairy tale literature is rooted not in novelty and originality but in tradition and repetition. Our pleasure in it comes from re-discovering old, familiar stories made fresh and new by a particular writer's skill -- much as a piece of jazz improvisation is best appreciated if one has a familiarity with the music on which it is built. Although some contemporary fairy tale re-tellings are purely inspired by source material old enough to avoid charges of plagiarism and problems of copyright violation, other re-tellings bear the influence of fairy tales of more recent vintage, such as version penned by Anne Sexton, Angela Carter, and Walt Disney. At what point does it become as artistically permissible to re-work versions of Beauty and the Beast by Angela Carter or Jane Yolen (for example) as it is to re-work Madame de Villeneuve's original 18th century story? And at what point does a writer cross the line between being influenced by a previous work, and appropriating that work as one's own? If you think there are quick, easy answers to these questions, I highly recommend Lethem's essay, which contains much food for thought.

"Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master," he writes. "That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one's voice isn't just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing."

Lethem concludes his essay by looking at art as part of a gift exchange economy rather than the market economy. If the implications of this idea intrigues you, then I highly recommend Lewis Hyde's extraordinary book on the topic: The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property. For me, it was one of those formative texts that shaped the way I look at art, and life.

(Art in this post: The pencil drawings at the top are by Alan Lee; the two ink drawings are by John Batten.)

Tex Avery: The "Other" Animated Fairy Tales

Gary Morris at