Reading, Young and Old

I was just reading Ursula Le Guin's marvelousThe Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination this morning in an effort at delaying the approaching end-writing of one of my two unfinished novels (there are two finished ones, as well - anyone know a nice agent?). It's quite amazing what tactics one will employ not to do the thing one loves most; however, reading this book is much nicer than my other forms of procrastination (laundry, cleaning the chicken coop, etc). Ms. Le Guin is such a sage, intelligent, clear writer, she makes me happy.

The essay "Reading Young, Reading Old" is all about how we read at different ages, and how our perceptions change of old favorites over the years. It was odd that I opened the book here, because I've been thinking about doing a post on books that have made an indelible impression on my psyche; so now, as another form of procrastination, perhaps I can make a brief list and hope that others can enjoy these, too.


I think the single book I come back to again and again, in terms of consistently extraordinary ideas, was The Wind's Twelve Quarters (and a few stories from The Compass Rose, which I tend to conflate with the former). It is difficult to explain why the ideas in these books come back to me again and again, throughout my life, but I think it has to do with the way they go places - both in terms of interpersonal examination and intellectual exploration - that I wouldn't have ever gone otherwise. But perhaps it has more to do with the impressionable age at which I read them.

Interestingly, one of the things I most admire about Ursula Le Guin is the really rigorous social critique she brings to her books and stories. Not in a preachy way, mind, but in a way that makes you see what's possible; she has in fact said that one of the virtues of science fiction is its ability to make metaphors literal. This is a woman whose father was Alfred L. Kroeber, a man who had a huge impact on the development of social anthropology - and H. J. Muller, who won the 1946 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, was her cousin. Her mother was a noted biographer. In other words, she comes from smart people.


The thing about Leguin is that as she has grown older, she looks backward with increasing wisdom at the various stages of life and development. As a result, though her later works don't seem to get the same recognition as the earlier ones, I actually find many of them more wonderful, more gemlike; smaller but truer. There is a period, of which Four Ways to Forgiveness is a standard-bearer and probably my favorite, where her writing managed to achieve an awareness together with a beauty and simplicity which I feel is unparalleled. She has a real knack for showing us the visceral realities of hardship and oppression which is impossibly empathetic. As a writer, I find it nearly miraculous that she can get inside the heads of people who have, for example, been through wars similar to that in Kosovo, and write about it, without getting maudlin or harsh. ,,,And all in a science fiction environment, no less.

The Birthday of the World is an extraordinary short-story collection from this period, and Tales from Earthsea, Unlocking the Air (whose title story manages to be small but stunning) and A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, are all worthwhile. Believe me, they will leave you thinking.


An older favorite of mine is Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin, which manages to be historically accurate while creating a completely alternate history of Manhattan. The layers of image and storytelling in this book have stayed with me year after year, and I find myself going back to it just to remember things. My favorite notion is that of the Cloud Wall, which hovers over the water and swallows things. One of the characters, in order to go home to see her parents, must skate up the river through the cloud-wall to get there; but that is the mystery and magic of where she was raised - one can't reach it by normal means. Really, an excellent, stick-in-your-brain read, and a celebration of all the really magical bits of old Manhattan, to boot.


John Crowley's Little, Big has shaped a lot of how I think about universes within universes, and the way Faery should interact with our world. It manages to do some of what the things that Orson Scott Card's Seventh Son does, in terms of making magic a deeply folkloric and American thing, but it does it in a broader, more adult, more understated way. It's the story of a family's growth and change, their lives and loves; but - and it's difficult to describe how this works - they are no ordinary family. Their close ties to Faery are never explicitly explained, yet permeate all their interactions with the world, and make their lives, in some real way, much more difficult and complex. The scene where the changeling baby begins to fall apart is one which will haunt me for the rest of my days.


Diana Wynne Jones' The Dalemark Quartet are, I think, the widest of her books. I'm a great fan of Ms. Jones, but most of her books are very domestic, taking place in and around one building or sometimes one neighborhood; it's a hallmark of hers, to bring the magic into the domestic world. These books are much more sweeping - and yet they manage to be beautiful and odd at the same time. I really love her ability to make us feel what it's like to be wrapped up in a situation, the way we get to really feel what it's like to be in the thick of magic, either from one's self or from somewhere else. She has a way of making it terribly intimate. These four books take that intimacy into a broader context, and are wonderful for that. Of course, it could be that they were the first of her books I ever read...

Then there are some books I think people should read just because there is nothing else like them. Really. And, of course, because they're great. Here's a list:


Edward Gorey's Amphigorey is... well, if you haven't read any Gorey, and you like this blog, you really need to get this book. It's what being weird is all about - in a good way. And if you have any pretensions of wanting to be a writer, you must read "The Unstrung Harp," a story in Amphigorey which describes the writing process of novelist Clavius Frederick Earbrass: "He must be mad to go on enduring the unexquisite agony of writing when it all turns out drivel."

Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife is a relatively recent book, and absolutely beautiful in its conception and execution. I've known grown men to cry at the end of this book. Perhaps that's not a recommendation, but imagine how harrowing your life would be if you had a disorder that meant you were unexpectedly yanked from the present time into some other time during your lifespan, regardless of your present situation? The dangers, and an elegant time-crossed love story, are nicely thought out here.


The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is described thus: "...a thoughtful and powerful examination of cultures and the people who shape them. How might human history be different if 14th-century Europe was utterly wiped out by plague, and Islamic and Buddhist societies emerged as the world's dominant religious and political forces? The Years of Rice and Salt considers this question through the stories of individuals who experience and influence various crucial periods in the seven centuries that follow." Warning: this book contains extensive reincarnation - the characters get to live through the whole seven centuries, over and over. Really, a fascinating, well-researched and well-thought out read - and a great story, to boot.


Russell Hoban is a wildly varied and intriguing author. Not only did he do the plain-and-simple Frances books, which many children know and love, but he did the incredibly creative Captain Najork picture books, of which there are sadly only two. In A Near Thing for Captain Najork, for example (the second of the two books), one character invents a "two seater, jam powered frog" which he uses as a conveyance. The frog hops over walls and rivers and people, and is pursued by a vengeful-but-upright Captain Najork:

"'Follow that frog!' he shouted to his hired sportsmen as he leapt into his pedal-powered snake, and away they undulated. Captain Najork had not forgotten the time when Tom had beaten him and his hired sportsmen at womble, muck, and sneedball. 'I'd like to try some new games on him,' said the Captain. 'I'd like to see how good he is at thud, crunch, and Tom-on-the-bottom.'"

Captain Najork remembers how, in How Tom Beat Captain Najork and His Hired Sportsmen, Tom's fooling-around ways helped him win at some rather odd games. In the end, as the champion, Tom trades in his iron-hatted Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong for a new aunt, one who likes to sit in trees with a glass of wine: Aunt Bundlejoy Cosysweet.


Riddley Walker, also written by Hoban, is a post-apocalyptic (?) novel about life among the villages in England when it's no longer England, but a rural place with its own rituals and religion. Here is what one reviewer says:

"Here's the first sentence of this extraordinary novel: 'On my naming day when I come 12 I gone front spear and kilt a wyld boar he parbly ben the las wyld pig on the Bundel Downs any how there hadn't ben none for a long time befor him nor I aint looking to see none agen.' This is Riddley-speak and it's a sort of post-apocalyptic patois spoken by Riddley and the various peoples who live in a desolate Kent thousands of years after a nuclear holocaust. The tribes are living at an Iron Age level of technology and what they are allowed to think and do is shaped in part by the legend of St Eustace and controlled by leaders who use itinerant puppeteers to communicate their policies."

The language is difficult at first, but incredibly poetic in the end, ragged and beautiful. And the story is astonishing in its virtuosity.

On a different and more normal note, Harnessing Peacocks is where I first discovered Mary Wesley, who has her finger on the pulse of wartime (and post-wartime) characters in Britain. She also wrote The Chamomile Lawn, which is probably more well-known, but I like the protagonist of Harnessing Peacocks, which takes place in the eighties, perhaps. The premise of the story is very odd, that of a woman who works part-time as a special sort of cook and part-time as a prostitute - but a prostitute unlike any other - to support her son.

In a similar real-world vein, The Wasp Factory, by Iain Banks, is quite boggling, as well. Really a weirdie of a book. I liked it more as a young person than I do now, but I feel I really should mention it if I am writing of books that are unlike any other. It's a fast and interesting read.

Well. That was not a brief list. Now, I suppose, I shall have to actually get to work... wait, I'm hungry.

The Arrival Arrives

My daughter just gave me the novel The Arrival for Christmas ( or is it a graphic novel? A novel told in photo-like graphics? Graphic novel cum photo album?). This is the first time she has specifically found something to give me for Christmas - and orchestrated its acquisition - and I have to say she hit the nail on the head.


The book has been around for a couple of years, but I seem to have missed actually reading it until now. I have to say it's one of the best wordless books I have ever (and I mean that) read. The art is beautiful, the story interesting, and the depictions of the horrors which force immigrants to leave their own lands manages to be not only fantastical but also emotionally spot on. True, few people have actually experienced giants coming into their communities and vacuuming them up, but the impression of looming extermination tastes like real-world truths (and is much more interesting to look at).


And Tan manages to capture the feeling of being a new person in a new country, where you can't find anything, can't read, and don't understand any of the systems. There is a peculiar and wonderful combination of familiarity and weirdness here that I haven't seen before. I highly recommend it, if you haven't seen it - it's much more than a kids' picture book.

Borges: Pathways of the (Postmodern) Mind

I got an email from a reader recently asking me if I knew of a story that (s)he'd read in college, and was wondering if I knew it:

"...it's a passage about taxonomy, an inventory of posessions belonging to an emperor or king. The things are themselves fantastical, but are made all the more fantastical by the ways they are grouped. The collection is divided according to rules, but not consistent rules."

I wrote back to say that I didn't immediately know the passage (s)he was talking about, but I'd ask around.

Later that night I suddenly sat up in my chair and thought, "I'll bet that was a story by Borges." It had been years and years since I read anything by him - The Library of Babel being the only one I knew of, back then - but phrases of it still came back to me now and again, out of the blue. There is a rhythm and a meter to the story which cannot be shaken, imagery which boggles and sticks; and even though I found it a very difficult story to read, I'm thinking now that it was worth it. When, fifteen years after reading it, a student of mine did a very beautiful web-design project based on that story, the memorable-ness was enhanced: her choices of excerpt, combined with extraordinary graphics which she created specifically for the project, echoed and amplified Borges' own obscure qualities. It was an extraordinary effort. I wish now I could remember that student's name.

In any case, there was something lying beneath the email's words, some quality of rhythm or description, which stirred up that part of my brain where Borges lurked. So I started Googling "Borges" and "Collection," among other things, and came up with a possibility. I wrote the person back:

There is one story by Borges called The Analytical Language of John Wilkins, which I haven't read, but seems like a fake essay. It mentions a "certain Chinese encyclopedia" that breaks things into these categories: "a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies."

What a list! How fabulous! Grateful for the mind-bend, I sent the person a link to the full text.


The list continued to intrigue me, and I began to read about the piece, which does indeed appear to be an essay, written in impeccable academic style. The fact that John Wilkins and his Universal Language are real doesn't clarify exactly what the piece is, either. I was all question marks, trying to understand if it was a real essay, or a faux essay, or what? And then I came across the beginning of a serious academic article by Keith Windschuttle, adapted from his book The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering Our Past:

"MICHEL Foucault opens his book The Order of Things with a paragraph that has become one of his most famous. Foucault describes a passage from "a certain Chinese encyclopedia'' that, he claims, breaks up all the ordered surfaces of our thoughts. By "our'' thoughts, he means Western thought in the modern era. The encyclopedia divides animals into the following categories: "a) belonging to the Emperor, b) embalmed, c) tame, d) sucking pigs, e) sirens, f) fabulous, g) stray dogs, h) included in the present classification, i) frenzied, j) innumerable, k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, l) et cetera, m) having just broken the water pitcher, n) that from a long way off look like flies.'' Foucault writes that, thanks to "the wonderment of this taxonomy,'' we can apprehend not only "the exotic charm of another system of thought'' but also "the limitation of our own.'' What the taxonomy or form of classification reveals, says Foucault, is that "there would appear to be, then, at the other extremity of the earth we inhabit, a culture . . . that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think.'' The stark impossibility of our thinking in this way, Foucault says, demonstrates the existence of an entirely different system of rationality."

Weird. Foucault writing about Borges as if he was dead serious, all the way through? Both Borges and Foucault are marked for their love of words and play, so it seems odd. But it got better. Mr. Windschuttle goes on to say:

"In May 1995 I gave a paper to a seminar in the Department of History at the University of Sydney, Australia. Although most of the postmodernists in the department declined to attend, they deputized one of their number, Alastair MacLachlan, to reply and, they hoped, to tear me apart. My respondent opened his remarks by citing Foucault and the Chinese taxonomy. Didn't I realize, he chided, that other cultures have such dramatically different conceptual schemes that traditional assumptions of Western historiography are inadequate for the task of understanding them?

"There is, however, a problem rarely mentioned by those who cite the Chinese taxonomy as evidence for these claims. No Chinese encyclopedia has ever described animals under the classification listed by Foucault. In fact, there is no evidence that any Chinese person has ever thought about animals in this way. The taxonomy is fictitious. It is the invention of the Argentinian short-story writer and poet Jorge Luis Borges.

"This revelation would in no way disturb the assumptions of the typical postmodernist thinker, who believes that the distinction between fact and fiction is arbitrary anyway. Foucault himself openly cites Borges as his source. The example is now so frequently cited in academic texts and debates that it is taken as a piece of credible evidence about non-Western cultures. It deserves to be seen, rather, as evidence of the degeneration of standards of argument in the Western academy."

At first glance, I was fascinated by the idea of so many academics being fooled by a supposed misquote. But then I saw: in these three paragraphs there are multiple levels of story going on. First of all, academic infighting: "they hoped to tear me apart." Then the philosophical differences between Modernists and Postmodernists, which is interesting in itself, because really, their conflict is all about ways of thinking about reality. Which is, of course what Borges' works all played with. And this man Windschuttle wrote a book about (I'm guessing here) how Postmodern thinking is destroying academic culture. And on and on, subtexts spinning off in different directions like Borges' library.


You see, this guy is clearly a modernist of the first order. Modernists, to attempt a nutshell description, are all about the importance of authorship and individual owning of ideas and works. With this, of course, come such things as credibility and provenance - in other words, knowing where you got your facts, quotes, information, etc. and making sure to list them carefully so that credit is given where it is due. Copyright is an intensely modernist concept. Postmodernists, on the other hand, are more multivocal in their viewpoint, holding that the ownership of concepts and words is less important than their relevance to culture-making; in art, for example, postmodernists will "appropriate" from anywhere and everywhere, and by redefining the context of the works or snippets, create something new (Andy Warhol's soup cans, above: using "fine art" painting methods to appropriate canned soup). In postmodern ideals, this kind of appropriation is - well, appropriate, fitting, part of the continual process we all go through of assimilating culture and creating new culture based on that assimilation. Don't forget, postmodernists believe in the virtues of play, which means you can fool around with the stuff you find around you.

So in this context, Mr. Windschuttle is complaining about postmodernists' apparently slipshod authoring (using Foucault's fictional example to define a concept under discussion), while the postmodernists themselves are busy discussing, not the provenance of the quote, but how it captures some essence of the way cultures interact (in other words, the postmodernists are acting like postmodernists). If you read Foucault's introduction, you'll find that him referring to Borges' fictional categories this way: "where could they ever meet, except in the immaterial sound of the voice pronouncing their enumeration, or on the page transcribing it? Where else could they be juxtaposed except in the non-place of language? Yet, though language can spread them before us, it can do so only in an unthinkable space." In other words, what Foucault himself is interested in is the way in which the categories exist in our minds.

Modernist thinking: hard and fast lines

It's interesting, too, how Mr. Windschuttle has so missed the boat on the discussion surrounding Foucault's piece: I seriously doubt that this discussion takes Borges' enumeration as "real," in the sense of scientific proof. From what I have seen, the discussions address the interesting issues of language and the meaningfulness of traditional categorization. Foucault's quote, curiously, is exactly applicable to the situation between Mr. Windschuttle and his postmodern rivals: he is a person from a strong cultural tradition, having trouble understanding the language of another culture's logic - in other words, trying to apprehend "a culture...that does not distribute the multiplicity of existing things into any of the categories that make it possible for us to name, speak and think." A dinosaur, some might say; but though I think it is an issue of cultural evolution, it is also a matter of vision, of the flexible apprehension of a thing which is foreign to what we have been taught. The postmodernists, in other words, think sideways to Mr. Windschuttle, and he cannot (or will not) derail his thinking in order to go where they are going.

Postmodernist thinking: playful (image courtesy of Marian Bantjes)

This problem with misapprehension is very familiar, with overtones of those people (you know who you are) who think of the Internet as a bunch of "tubes," for example. It smacks of the tendency of those older people, who use email sparingly, to condemn young peoples' desire to publicly document both the internal and external parts of their lives. No sense of shame or privacy, the older people say, too much dependence on interactive devices and formats, never allowing themselves to be alone or silent. While I agree that there is too much chatter out there, too many dead Facebook pages and dull blogs about inane activities, and in the end, not enough silence, these artifacts are nothing more than virtual paper-piles with old scribblings on them, and can be ignored. But if you take this phenomenon as a whole, you will see there is the beginning of something new, a more fractured, yet curiously wholistic, perception of the universe. A more Postmodern sensibility, if you will. Something multivocal, multivisual, multilinear. A creation of new culture based on assimilation and re-definition. Something much more like Borges' library, which:

"...consists of an endless expanse of interlocking hexagonal rooms, each of which contains...four walls of bookshelves....Though the majority of the books in this universe are pure gibberish, the library also must contain, somewhere, every coherent book ever written, or that might ever be written, and every possible permutation or slightly erroneous version of every one of those books." [wiki]

Or, perhaps, it could be something like the way the brain processes information from the eyes: we glance, and glance, and in fact move our heads around; but the brain is able to take all these fractured, moving, disjointed parts and stitch them into a coherent reality in which we live quite happily, unaware of the complexities of its creation.


The cubists were aware of this, and tried to represent "true" reality in their paintings - the reality of motion and change - by painting in glances, fragments, the bits seen in all those quick takes of the world we look at. They were breaking with the tradition of perspective, which approaches an image as if the viewer is seeing it from one, and only one, point of view. In a way, then, perspective is the less realistic of the two, given that we have binocular vision and never sit still with our head glued to a point in space. And yet, though cubism is more like how we actually use our eyes to look at things, it can present a rather nightmare vision of the world.


The difference, I think, is in the incorporation. The views we get through cubism are solely visions from the eyes, without the magical intervention of the brain; while perspective is better at fooling us, giving us a semblance of the reality our brain creates for us, which is much more comfortable and familiar.

But what if our brains began to stitch things together differently? What if, instead of either discombobulated glances or falsely cohesive systemization, we saw something which no longer hid the multiplicity of our visual intake, yet made sense of it, unfolding our sense of sight into something huge, something we could not have imagined before?


What if all the devices in our lives were to help unfold our brains into something bigger? Louder perhaps, and busier, but potently dynamic? It is no coincidence that Postmodernism and technology's multiverse have developed hand in hand, nor that the same folks who are horrified at the lack of authorial stricture tend to be the same folks who don't understand what's happening with technology. And who, perhaps, might be horrified at Borges' irreverent use of academic style to toy with our understanding of reality.

...And the reader? Well, to my great joy (s)he wrote back to say:

"Yes, yes, yes!!! I half remembered it being Magic Realism and a depiction of something Asian although I misremembered it as a collection--this is definitely it. Thank you so much...How did you find it?"

How? Hmm. Perhaps the Internet is Foucault's 'unthinkable space,' after all.

Gecko's Feet, Redux

John Stevens sent me this fabulous video he took of a gecko moving its foot, after reading my old post on gecko feet. Please note the backwards arrangement of its joints, so that the gecko can change the angle that the setae (the tiny hairs on their foot) touch the surface with, helping to shift the way the Van der Waal's force holds them there, and thus peel their foot away. John actually posted it on YouTube at my request -- many thanks!

Quick Links: Coraline Boxes and the Antikythera Mechanism Reborn

In case you hadn't noticed, I don't always pay attention to publicity campaigns; so it was quite by accident that I came across two references to the movie being made of Neil Gaiman's chilling story Coraline, being made entirely by hand by an apparently very talented crew at LAIKA, an animation studio in Portland.

I had seen clips of the film and heard about it a little from Mr. Gaiman's own lips when he came to read on his recent journeys; but, well, as for publicity... I'm just dyslexic about things like that.

So I was very taken with the Coraline website's focus on things being made with peoples' hands, and the little vignettes of different people doing different tiny but important jobs made me very happy. So often you get someone working at Pixar or someplace whose whole world, for awhile, is to make fur moving in moonlight; but you never actually meet these people. It is nice to see the folks making this incredible stuff - in fact, it's nice to see people making, period. It gives me hope and joy. I can't help but think it must make Mr. Gaiman feel extraordinary, to be the spark at the beginning of such a creative fuse.


You can see "all the clips, trailers, and behind-the-scenes featurettes" at the official Coraline YouTube site (thanks to everyone who has helped me out on this).



On top of this, of course, there is the furor (a total unknown to me until yesterday) about the boxes which the crew of Coraline are putting together and sending to their favorite bloggers. These are real, actual boxes with real, actual stuff in them, being sent via snailmail. So, what we have is a crew of people who work with their hands sending love-letters of a very visceral sort to people whose work they access virtually; and the bloggers then turn around and blog about the boxes, creating viral publicity in a virtual medium about a movie which is all about being made by hand. I find this whole thing absolutely fascinating, because it underlines a point I've been trying to get my head around in the paper I've been writing: that certain blogs are about accessing a sort of truthful physicality which one might not be able to experience in the real world. It's away to access authenticness.

Like in the old age of Wunderkammern, explorers and adventurers went out into unknown parts and came back carrying artifacts from the places they'd been. These artifacts would find their way into the hands of collectors, who put them all together, showcasing their extraordinariness and trying to deconstruct what they were about.

Now there are bloggers, such as D and M, over at Curious Expeditions, who go out into the world and bring back oddities and wonders to their fellow bloggers, who collect their artifacts (pictures and words) so that others may see them and wonder. Some bloggers are more interested in made things, ideas, or ways of living; but they work to bring those realities to those of us who can't experience the things in context, and make our lives richer.

So it's a very interesting thing to see someone literally playing with this metaphor, sending physical, Wunderkammer-like artifacts to virtual Wunderkammer-makers. Who then turn them virtual in order to display them. A mobius strip of wonder, if you like.

My only question is - are they enclosing actual bits and pieces from the film-making process? Because that would take it to a sort of metalayer of mobius-ness.

---

The other thing I've come across just today [via Slashdot] is a nice article on a man who has now managed to recreate the Antikythera Mechanism more accurately than his previous attempt:

"The added details and precision of the new model are based on the breakthrough research by the The Antikythera Mechanism Research Project, a joint effort by researchers from Greece and the United Kingdom. They were able to plumb the depths of the device, comprised of 81 separate pieces (including several fused together over time), and decipher many more of the inscriptions by using high-tech hardware and software..." [find out more about this, and the hardware and software, here].

In other words, all the things we've been hearing for several years now, about new systems for seeing inside the mechanism, have been paying off splendidly in - you guessed it - physical form. Hooray! We get to see it in action!





You can also see a 2006 slideshow of the researchers actually using the equipment here, if you feel so inclined.

Goodbye, Oliver Postgate

Oh, oh.

Oliver Postgate, the creator of Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, the Clangers, and Bagpuss, among other television characters, has died.

The Clangers shared their hollow planet with the Soup Dragon (pictured right), while the Iron Chicken - modelled from Meccano [aka Erector Set] - lived in an orbiting nest made of scrap metal.

I'm a late believer, but have since come to appreciate the little singing mice in Bagpuss - and was really a goner once I had read the whole set of Noggin the Nog books to my elder daughter.


Here's a snip from his obituary in the Guardian:

"In 1957-58 he joined one of the new commercial television companies as a stage manager. But it was when he was assigned to children's programmes that Postgate was drawn to his true niche in life. He thought the youngsters were getting a penny-pinching deal, especially in the matter of storytelling.

"Marionettes on strings or glove puppets were all very well, but to keep pace with expanding young imaginations, he felt that fully animated cartoons or puppet dramas were needed. And these were far too expensive for everyday use.

"With an artist friend, Peter Firmin, he set up an independent production outfit called Smallfilms to see if they could turn out affordable animation. Their studio was a cowshed (later replaced by a row of converted pigsties) on Firmin's farm near Canterbury, in Kent. Postgate dreamed up the characters and stories and taught himself the laborious skills of frame-by-frame animation.


"Firmin drew the pictures or designed the sets and made the models when they switched to puppetry. The bassoonist Vernon Elliott came in to furnish the music. They began with a 10-minute cartoon series, The Saga of Noggin the Nog (1959), in which a stolid young Viking prince was up against an evil uncle and various Nordic monsters. By eliminating most overheads and taking little reward for themselves, Postgate and company were able to turn them out for a 10th of the going rate. They sold the series to the BBC."

It's a reminder of all the people who continue to try to make the world better, at little gain for themselves - who want to make people happy. I applaud them, and I applaud Mr. Postgate.


There is apparently still a pretty good DVD business for his odd little shows. Children love them, and they are just weird enough to appeal to adults, too. Check out the Dragons' Friendly Society, the center of all Noggin the Nog creativity and a nice example of good self-publishing working well.



More pictures of Mr. Postgate and his creations here.

PS. If you are interested in ordering Noggin the Nog stuff (or the DVDs of Bagpuss, etc) from within the US or other non-British countries, go here to their online eBay distributors, who will take actual plastic. The DFS themselves only take cheques.

...With Fairy Tales For All

Edmund Dulac - my favorite illustrator

I am, without remorse, a deep believer in, and collector of, fairy tales. In my life I have read hundreds, perhaps thousands; and they never cease to fascinate me, because they all intersect. Russian tales intersect with European tales and even Arab tales; Northern European tales migrate oddly down to Southern Europe. Details travel. There are any number of fairy tale themes that seem to show up in all different places: the stepmother, the witch, the son seeking his fortune, to name some obvious ones - but then there are the less obvious, still ubiquitous ones: the things thrown over one's shoulder to thwart a pursuer; the pursued transforming into something (eg. grain of wheat) which the pursuer then transforms to destroy (eg. hen); the place beyond the sun or the worlds' end or at the back of the ocean.

In any case, I seem to have put far too much money into fairy tale collections in my lifetime, and it occurred to me today that I could, in fact, blog about different collections in the interest of, well, interest - and possibly as an understated list for possible Christmas-like perusal. So, without further ado, here we go - the best as I know it.


First of all, let me plug Andrew Lang's Coloured Fairy Books. There are twelve of them, from green to red to lilac and violet and so on, and they are really classic. Though Lang wrote for a living, these were not written by him but edited - by which really we mean collected from other, often foreign, texts and sources - by him, and translated by several other people, most notably his wife, who had a far greater influence on the style of translation and (proof)editing than she was ever given credit for.


They are beautifully illustrated in period style by H. J. Ford, who is reminiscent of Arthur Rackham or Frederick Richardson. Lang is famous for despising Victorian attempts at fairy-tale writing:

"But the three hundred and sixty-five authors who try to write new fairy tales are very tiresome. They always begin with a little boy or girl who goes out and meets the fairies of polyanthuses and gardenias and apple blossoms: 'Flowers and fruits, and other winged things.' These fairies try to be funny, and fail; or they try to preach, and succeed. Real fairies never preach or talk slang. At the end, the little boy or girl wakes up and finds that he has been dreaming.

"Such are the new fairy stories. May we be preserved from all the sort of them!"



Despite Lang's sentiments on the matter of "new" authors, another favorite tome of mine is Hauff's Fairy Tales, now tragically out of print. These are some of the most wonderful and imaginative stories, told in a wandering style that encompasses, in some cases, an Arabic style of telling, while in others, a Black Forest location. The stories are long and complex and totally entertaining; it's hard to explain why they are so enjoyable, except that they have a lighthearted touch that seems to simply emanate from a joyfulness in the art of storytelling.


Wilhelm Hauff, a German of good family who was apparently largely self-taught from his grandfather's library, started writing these amazing tales from his own imagination when he was 22, and wrote prolifically for three years before his death of fever in 1827. He also wrote several novels, which I have not read or even seen in print (though his Memoirs of Beelzebub strikes me as intriguing).


And on the subject of someone sitting down and writing a fairy tale collection, let me say right now that I have almost never read any fairy tales as entertaining as ex-Python Terry Jones' Fairy Tales and Fantastic Stories. They manage to do a wonderful job with all the fairy tale elements, while somehow being terribly modern in their appeal - and have a wonderfully silly twist, as you would expect from their author. Just let me quote The Silly King, about a king who, with age, has become extremely eccentric:

"Nobody, however, liked to mention how silly their king had become. Even when he hung from the spire of the great cathedral, dressed as a parsnip and throwing Turkish dictionaries at the crowd below."

Of course, when the Princess (whom he named Fishy - although everyone calls her Bonito) has a suitor, the Lord Chancellor must find a way to make him acceptable to the suitor's father, who has come to arrange the marriage. A call is put out and numerous doctors provide numerous solutions:

"One eminent doctor had a lotion which he said King Herbert must rub on his head before going to bed, but King Herbert drank it all on the first night, and was very ill. So a second eminent doctor produced a powder to cure the illness caused by the first doctor, but King Herbert put a match to it, whereupon it exploded and blew his eyebrows off. So a third doctor produced a cream to replace missing eyebrows, but King Herbert put it on his teeth and they all turned bright green overnight."

Needless to say, I highly recommend this collection, especially for reading aloud.


Andrew Lang also did an abridged collection of Arabian tales called The Arabian Nights Entertainments, published (with more wonderful Ford illustrations) by Dover, as all the Lang books are. It's beautiful to look at and a great read for all ages. Less good for children, but a fascinating read, is The Book of The Thousand Nights and One Night, translated by J. C. Mardrus and Powys Mathers. This version is a relatively faithful translation of the original, complete with sort-of salacious bits, sexism, racism, and other biases of the original. It's a revealing peek into social politics in another place and time - and good stories, to boot.

If you're wanting the salacious bits pumped up a little, you should be looking for the Thousand Nights and One Night, by Richard Francis Burton, the gadabout adventurer who traveled in disguise to Mecca and was in the first trip by Europeans to visit the Great Lakes of Africa in search of the Nile. He worked for the East India Company and, later, the Royal Geographical Society as an explorer. And, apparently, he he liked unexpurgated books (he also did a translation of the Kama Sutra).


I heard about this version of the Arabian Nights first from something (I forget what) written by Diana Wynne Jones. As it happens, she also has edited a volume of (other people's) fantasy stories, called Spellbound; wherein one chapter is taken from a book called Hobberty Dick, written by distinguished folklorist and literary historian Katherine Briggs. Just the one chapter, though, was enough to really turn my head, because the world she describes, in 1652, is one of people living under siege from the fantastic folk populating the world all around them. I never before thought about what it might be like to look out from a position of extreme superstition, where everything must be done according to rules, and in every corner of the world are spirits who may or may not be friendly - or who might turn hostile at any moment for the slightest and most whimsical reasons. So, even though this is not really a collection, I would recommend it as being unusual and interesting.


In more specific arenas, we can refine by country and subject matter.

I have always loved my copy of French Fairy Tales (the one published in 1971 by the Hamlyn Publishing Group). The stories smack deliciously of peasant tales, being all about magic things which provide food and money, or stories of outwitting the Devil - rather than the usual Perault stories like Puss in Boots and Beauty and the Beast. Hamlyn also did an English Fairy Tales, which is similar, containing such lesser known stories as Molly Whipple and The Princess and the Hazelnuts. Both of these are illustrated wonderfully by Ota Janecek. I really cannot say how interesting it is to see stories that have the true flavor of the working people in them; most fairy tales have the quality of having been handed around and polished so much that any sense of the dreams and desires of the people from whom they came have been worn away a little. These, however, reflect a certain hungry gusto which I find refreshing.


Apparently, Hamlyn Publishing Group (as in Paul Hamlyn, who was later awarded the BCE for his publishing efforts and philanthropy) also did a Chinese Fairy Tales and a Persian Fairy Tales, which both sound fascinating. I am much saddened to see that I can't recommend a place to find any of these books except the English Fairy Tales (which you can find on Amazon used), but perhaps you will have better luck.

A small but worthwhile volume is Clever Gretchen and Other Forgotten Folk Tales, a compendium of stories about heroines: "Active, witty, brave and resourceful, these fair maidens can fight and hunt as well as any man, defeat giants, answer riddles, outwit the Devil, and rescure friends and relatives from all sorts of dangers and evil spells."

The illustrations by Margo Tomes are delicate and sometimes a little creepy, and if like me you wish there were more kick-ass fairy tale girls in the world, this is a book for you.


Another couple of small volumes are The Devil's Storybook and The Devil's Other Storybook, both by Natalie Babbit, are short, funny stories about the Devil trying to find ways to increase the population of his realm. The Devil in these books is a trickster and a cheat, always getting bored and restless and coming up to our world to see what kind of mischief he can stir up. They are comic and full of earthy gusto (but still suitable for kids):

"ONE DAY when things were dull in Hell, the Devil fished around in his bag of disguises, dressed himself as a fairy godmother, and came up into the World to find someone to bother."

They're simple, but I like them.


Lastly, I am sad to say the Journal of Mythic Arts, the voice of the Endicott Studio, "a nonprofit organization dedicated to literary, visual, and performance arts inspired by myth, folklore, fairy tales, and the oral storytelling tradition," has closed. This journal, and its attendant blog, was a great resource for all things literary and folkloric, and a place to see really worthwhile art as well. It will be mourned, but the archives remain online. You can read about it here (though I notice a picture by one of my own faves, Rima Staines, showcased on the Last Issue page, in the link above).


Other Links:

Artsy Craftsy has a wonderful selection of art prints, ecards and so on with images by Arthur Rackham, Edmund Dulac, Aubrey Beardsley, Kay Nielsen, and others. Truly worth looking at...Especially Dulac, of course; but also check out John Bauer, another fabulous illustrator.

Lisa Falzon has an interesting, introspective article here about illustrators John Bauer and Kay Nielsen and their influence on her imagination and her drawing.