Dragon Hunters

By pure accident tonight, I watched Dragon Hunters, an animated French movie for kids which was released in America in 2008 with English voices, most notably that of Forest Whitaker as the hugely muscled, sweetly earnest Lian-Chu.

Based on a French TV series which I'd never heard of, the movie is a 3-dimensionalized story about two men, friends from their days in an orphanage, who work as dragon hunters, along with Hector, their blue... dog? dragon? rabbit?. Gwizdo, the unscrupulous brains of the outfit, is a fine foil for Lian-Chu's stolidly heroic personality, and though they never seem to get the money they need, they have each other. Their quest in life is to make enough money to retire to a little farm, where they will grow -- "sheep," puts in Lian-Chu, whenever it comes up: Lian-Chu is an avid knitter.

The two are discovered by Zoë, a young girl who lives in a vast castle with her blind dragon-hunter knight uncle, who doesn't appreciate her. She dreams of becoming a knight and dragon-hunter, and has left home to find knights who can help her uncle kill the "world gobbler" dragon who is coming, as it comes every twenty years, to wreak distruction and disaster.


This sounds like a normal fantasy, similar to many animated features churned out by Hollywood. Believe me, it's not. The art direction, the scenery, and even the premise is actually totally unique. The landscapes are an amazing fiddle of physics, requiring conceptual leaps which are both disorienting and wonderful, because they live in a floating world, made up of fragments of land which float and move, but nevertheless have their own gravity. Moving through this space consists, often, of stepping from chunk to chunk of ground which either floats near you by accident or is held in place by roots or other debris. The opening scene, where Lian Chu is trying to kill a slug-like dragon which drags him around and around a variety of little ball-like floating planetoids, scraping off the vegetation which takes to the air, floating all around them -- this is like nothing Hollywood would make. The whole thing has a non-American flavor, from the weirdness of the world to the odd details of character and humor.

It's these details that are wonderful, funny and awe-inspiring and vivid, like when Hector, in the middle of an action sequence, pulls a booger out of his nose, and in the next shot wipes it, unnoticed, on Gwizdo's sleeve. Or the passing moment when Zoe comes out from behind a pillar, pulling up her pants. Or when, as they come closer to the end of the world, they encounter the wreckage of some past civilization, looking like Prambanan and Palmyra, all taken apart and floating everywhere, filling space with lost chunks. Or the calendar Zoë's uncle makes to predict when the World Gobbler will return, which gives the inspiration for some of the best credits I've ever seen, full of awesome little clockwork devices that appeal to the deepest part of my clockpunk soul. The details fill out the movie, taking it out of the realm of mere kid's adventure and putting it up with Carl Barks' duck comics or the best of the Asterix books, an endlessly repeatable classic.

Oh, and did I mention the music? I noticed gamelon-ish music going by, as well as some sort of arabesque mix, and I believe there was a Cure song in there somewhere; quite a collection, and very un-Disney.

It was so engaging, so awesomely mind-bending and beautiful in its production, that I found myself looking around for more by the same people. But it seems to be a combined effort of several French cartoon directors and writers, and what they've done before is mostly for TV. However, make note of Guillaume Ivernel, who did the really beautiful backgrounds for the Dragon Hunters TV show and was the art director as well as co-director for the movie with Arthur Qwak, the creator of the series. So the luminous anti-gravitational universe through which the characters walk -- and which gives the whole thing its surreal style -- is his doing, though the original concept came from Qwak. It's clear that they had a blast doing this movie, and though it may be a one-off, one can't help hoping for more.


More details about the movie here.

The Many Personalities We Live With

This is Garky. Garky spent almost a whole day sitting in chairs with Younger Daughter, shooting down the vampires in the trees, and generally sharing many other adventures before geting injured and requiring bandages. Now she lives in this vase.

You might mistake her for some kind of Sogetsu Ikebana*, but you would be mistaken. Despite my daughter's belief that she can hold vampires at bay, she is really an onion flower (don't tell Younger Daughter).

This is the same daughter who personifies such characters as Snitch, Miru, Grumpo, Cute-o, Wadro, Sicko, and Happo.

They all talk in a strange way, saying "You too nice to me" instead of "You're too nice to me".

Snitch likes to eat hair and fingers, because it thinks they are worms. You must keep these things away from it, or it will grab and eat them.

Miru likes to eat fresh skulls with brain juice, as well as having a fondness for the flavor of cactus, and always hugs its pillow. If it loses its pillow it gets really sad and goes and looks for it. If anyone steals its pillow, it bites them.

Grumpo complains all the time, about everything, including nice things. If you're nice to it, for example, it says you're nice to it too much.

Cuto is incredibly cute, but loves to bite off your limbs, and can go for ages and ages without food or water.

Wadro loves its hole. Its hole is any area of water (other than the ocean). If you go in its hole it drags you under and drowns you. When there is no water, Wadro cries, "Hole! Where hole!" in a piteous voice.

Sicko barfs on you.

Happo is always happy and okay with everything. Even if you beat on it or say mean things. Happo is the teflon of characters, to the detriment of itself and everyone else's sanity.

Characters appear when Elder Sister bings them into existence with her invisible magic wand.

The term "characters" is not to be confused with Annoying Little Character, a hand-creature who is incredibly annoying and cheerful, singing its Annoying Little Character song and dancing until someone slaps it, whereupon it lies down and gets sick for awhile. Only time passing can improve its health.

These are not the only characters who appear. When Elder Daughter was three she became intensely enamored of a butternut squash that my father had drawn a cartoon face on with a Sharpie. She called it her "heavy baby" and carried it everywhere, in the car and into bed. We had difficulty with the gales of mirth trying to get out, but we bore with it until it got so shrunken that it had to be disappeared, whereupon she spent several weeks looking for it.

I remember reading an interview with Frank Zappa many years ago in which he talked about following his son Ahmet (aged perhaps three at the time) around trying to catch the lyrics to a song he sang called Frogs With Dirty Little Lips. It fascinated him, he said, because it was such a great concept, and because the words changed all the time, and it drove him crazy. Now I find, looking it up, that he actually did put the song (or some momentary version of it) on his album Them or Us. I need not mention how much I love how Frank Zappa's mind worked. It is a secret, or used to be.

So I suppose, despite our poor housekeeping skills, my household has its interesting moments. At least the Characters don't argue with me much.

An example of Sogetsu

*More on Ikebana and Sogetsu: "the great difference between the Sogetsu School and [traditional] Ikebana lies in the belief that once all the rules are learned and the techniques mastered, there is an unbounded field for freer personal expression using varied materials, not just flowers." [wiki] Curiously, I think the same kind of thing could be said about play. And about storytelling. Or even, perhaps, things like manners and who you feel like being, at the moment.

Here also, some Sogetsu masters' work. And a little about the man who started it. I think I might do a photo post about it, sometime...

Little Vampire (and Other Little Folk)

Just a brief post to say I love Joann Sfar. And possibly Emmanuel Guibert.

I first became aware of his work through, bizarrely, a little annual comic (a compilation of stuff put together for kids to read, in a cheap format similar to a TV guide) which my kids bought at a vide grenier (a village-wide garage sale) in France. Mostly it was full of fluffy kids' comics, but there was this one story which caught our attention, in which evil mermaids who make horrible honking and tooting noises (expressed in French as "Onk! Onk!" and "Tut! Tut!") capture a girl and boy. The kids fight the mermaids with a found sword, and then... well, the next frame is of them sitting around a table with a couple of huge fish skeletons on plates, looking very full. The annoying mermaids (sans tails) are left on an island, still alive and honking, to enrage a skinny guy and a superhero-type guy, while the two kids and their pirate friend fly off in a spaceship.

Now, first of all, the concept of cutting off (and eating) mermaid tails is wildly arresting. I was initially rather shocked, and then thought, "Wow, the French sure are open-minded!" But the whole thing - drawings and all - was weird: who was the guy in the superhero suit, and the skinny guy with the tall head and beak-like lips? And why are these kids flying around in a spaceship with a pirate guy? My French simply wasn't good enough to get my head round it.

But I also couldn't forget it.

Then one day I was in my local comic book store and there it was: a little comic called Sardine in Outer Space, by Emmanuel Guibert and Joanne Sfar. I couldn't believe my eyes: a whole book of that gross humor, drawn in hilarious style? I had to get it, and then I got the skinny: Sardine, a girl (or little witch?) whose black cat rides around on her hat, and her friend Little Louie, travel around space with Sardine's uncle, Captain Yellowshoulder (known as such, apparently, because of his ubiquitous shoulder-riding parrot), committing deeds of derring-do (and sometimes deeds of pure annoyingness) against the stupid President of the Universe, Supermuscleman (known by the same name in French) and his evil genius advisor/superior Doc Krok. The stories are unique, individually and as a collection. My daughters love them, particularly the younger, who likes funny stories with occasional gross jokes about badly-behaved people - and particularly if they are drawn as wildly as these.

Sfar has gained some fame in the U.S. with The Rabbi's Cat, which won an Eisner Award and has gotten excellent reviews. He also did the Donjon (Dungeon) series with Louis Trondheim, another of my favorite (very irreverent) comic people. Sfar's Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East sounds pretty fun, and The Professor's Daughter seems intriguing. I have to admit, though: I haven't personally read any of his adult stuff yet.


I did just get Little Vampire, which includes three stories about a, well, little vampire, the son of the man from the Flying Dutchman and his suicide bride. He lives in a haunted house with his horrific-looking but kindly father and his beautiful, but blue, mother, with a small red demon-like dog and a host of yucky monsters. When he makes friends with a human boy, these create some minor obstacles, being initially daunting for the boy; but the boy soon gets used to it. The stories are, in true Sfar style, truly unusual, though they have more structure and a little more empathy than the unapologetically bad-mannered Sardine books.

I really, really like them. Sfar has an unerring eye for what it's like to be a kid, and a certainty about a child's understanding of its place in the world: he understands the simple irritants of kids trying to deal with stupid adults, and finding ways to mess with their boring desire to control things; at the same time he knows that adults are not always bad, and that being a kid can be difficult and confusing. If his adult stuff is this spot on, I'm in.

Mr. Bowditch: Brilliance and Populism

I was looking through something the other day and I came across a reference to someone named Bowditch. Immediately, my mind was flooded with images from the life of Nathaniel Bowditch, a mathematical and navigational savant in the late 1700's and early 1800's, whom I read about at age 12 or so in a wonderful biographical novel for middle-graders called Carry On, Mr. Bowditch.

Bowditch was the son of a cooper in Salem, Massachusetts who left school at the age of ten to work for his father. At twelve he was indentured for nine years as a bookkeeping apprentice to a ship chandler. They were kind to him there and he was given access to the library; being immersed all day in numbers, and having a sharp brain, he became interested in some of the more complex ideas surrounding math, spending his days learning all about what it takes to outfit a ship and his nights studying.

"In 1787, aged fourteen, Bowditch began to study algebra and two years later he taught himself calculus. He also taught himself Latin in 1790 and French in 1792 so he was able to read mathematical works such as Isaac Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica. At seventeen, he wrote a letter to a Harvard University professor pointing out an error in the Principia... Serendipity aided Bowditch's self-directed study in as much as he found himself able to use the eminent Irish chemist Richard Kirwan's library: a privateer from Salem had intercepted the ship carrying the library between Ireland and England and brought the library back to Salem in June 1791." [wiki]

When he was twenty-two, Mr.Bowditch went to sea as a ship's clerk and captain's writer. Working from the error-prone navigational books of the day was so frustrating to him that by his fifth voyage, of which he was master and part owner of the ship, he "decided to write his own book, and to 'put down in the book nothing I can't teach the crew.' On that trip, it is said that every man of the crew of 12, including the ship's cook, became competent to take and calculate lunar observations and to plot the correct position of the ship." So in 1802 The American Practical Navigator, was published. It was such an accurate and useful book that it immediately revolutionized navigation, and is still carried onboard every commissioned U.S. Naval vessel today. The first edition of Bowditch's American Practical Navigator, which became the western hemisphere shipping industry standard for the next century and a half, and in 1866, the United States Hydrographic Office purchased the copyright. Since then the book, with appropriate revisions, has been in continuous publication, and to this day it is simply known as Bowditch.


Reading about him when I was a young person, I was struck mostly by the variety and extraordinariness of his experiences, and the fascinating idea that math had such concrete applications. It had never occurred to me to think of math the way Mr. Bowditch did, as a conceptual thing and a way of looking at the world. I never thought of myself as someone who was good at math, even though later in life I became adept at pattern-making (making 3D objects from 2D patterns) and had a keen mechanical understanding of math-related concepts, based more on intuition than education, which allowed me to do well in all sorts of arenas.

Nowadays, of course, children learn the beginnings of algebra in third and fourth grade. The more conceptual elements of math begin much earlier, and along with the usual times tables school children are taught to see math as a schema, a place to play around with numbers; the basic elements of math's abstractions are set in place in more malleable brains. Add to this the basic tenets of binary and hexidecimal systems, and you get some seriously young minds working on much more abstract levels than of old. ...At least, for those minds who are actually getting an education.

Which brings me to another point: this Bowditch person was pretty much self-taught. Remember, too, that calculus as a systemic study had only been fully developed a hundred years before, so when Mr. Bowditch found an error in Newton's masterpiece only three years into his study of higher math, it showed considerable brainpower. This is something I have only come to appreciate as an adult: both in terms of Isaac Newton and in terms of understanding Bowditch's learning rate. These, and the fact that such a brilliant man should go on to become an insurance actuary, a job which he kept until his death at the age of sixty-three, strike me strongly now that I have some perspective on them.

But what strikes me particularly, and what endears me most to the man, is his deep-seated belief that every man on a ship can and should be able to navigate, despite the mores of the day which would have it that men on a ship are expendable, and only the navigator has the knowledge (and only he should have the knowledge) to find the ship on a map - to navigate. His stubbornness on this point is legendary, and his willingness to prove it comes not only from a man who taught himself to be who he was, but from a time and a place: Massachussetts, in post-Revolutionary America. Best of all, he put his belief to work in writing, too - which is why his book is still relevant today, and why we have such people as Dee Caffari out there on the seas.

Well done, Mr. Bowditch.

Killing Wonder: Life in the Disaster Zone

I'm angry, so I am climbing on my soap box. Here I go: one foot, the other... If you aren't interested in a rant, you can skip this particular post - I won't be offended. But I have to say these things, for the sake of all the people yet to come, all the wonders yet to be made or found or rescued. And for my own peace of mind.

* * * * * * * * * *

Today the State Senate here in California cut the education budget by 8.4 billion dollars. We are already 50th in the nation for both quality of schools and (surprise!) money spent on education.

Here is the outcome, for many of our school districts:
- No more art.
- No more music.
- No more sports.
- No more libraries.
- It ceases to be cost effective to pay more teachers to keep the class sizes for the younger children small. Therefore, teachers will be fired and large numbers of children crammed in with fewer teachers, because it's cheaper - even with the paltry fines imposed for going too high on class numbers.

The people who hold the Senate hostage every year, the 34% minority who keep wealthy constituents happy and block the other 66% from running the budget in a sane manner, are some of the highest-paid legislators in the country. They believe that their constituents are only going to be happy if their taxes stay at the present rate, which is set somewhere around 1982, by my (admittedly top-of-the-head) reckoning. How does one run a big state like this one if the income is circa 1982, but the expenses are circa 2009, you say? Well, by keeping professors' salaries at 2/3 what they should be, so that working for a university becomes a losing proposition. Or by giving out IOUs instead of paychecks to their employees at budget time - never mind those mortgage payments, or that insurance. Or, by making the children suffer.


What I really want to know is, how will our children grow up knowing the wonders available to the mind without art, music, or libraries? Sports are important: the body is where we live, and we need to explore its capabilities. But sports are valued by even the most unimaginative members of any community. Sports will not die. Art and music -- they could, and they will. And without libraries, the children in impoverished communities will never learn to escape, never learn what other worlds are out there. How can someone in a small farming community ever get the chance to think broadly about ideas if they have no access to books? How will we raise literate, intelligent voters on such a meagre intellectual diet?

No Child Left Behind has been a horrible mistake. Children are evaluated, according to this plan, solely on their test scores. The schools must improve their scores over time (regardless of the level of their initial tests) or be stripped of control over their curricula and forced to institute state-mandated, test-oriented teaching programs. With these budget cuts, the time once taken to overcome this pressure and teach critical thinking skills will now become nigh on unreachable.

It's difficult not to believe these people have a goal: that of keeping our youth uneducated. The more uneducated a populace is, the more easy it is to direct them, the more they can be made to believe in concepts like a Fatherland, or a nationalist party. They're more likely to vote from their emotions, from their prejudices, rather than from their considered reflection of what is best for everyone. Without the perspective of learning, the sense of height and breadth one gets looking through the eyes of multiple authors, it becomes much more difficult to experience selflessness. For most people there can only be the one opinion, the one truth.

And the wonder! Children are supposed to be the ones who come up with crazy ideas. How many parents have had their child ask about something he or she has heard or read and processed? How many children each day hear a story and come home to tell their parents about it? Children are sponges, absorbing everything they come into contact with, and for this reason they are specially at risk. I can't and won't imagine the painfully dry desert the children here in California are about to experience. I can't and won't allow it to happen.


In our school, each class has a weekly Library Visit, where the children are taken into the library to return last week's book and to find a new book for this week. Some of the children literally don't know what to do with their books. They find something at random, check it out, take it away, and bring it back next time, without actually reading it much. But this is the thing: they are learning they can do it: they are learning the library routine. They love the fact that they get to keep this book for a week - all to themselves, not to share with anyone if they don't want to. It doesn't always matter if they read it: they get to have it. They have access. When I was in the bookmobile the other day, there was a kid there who didn't speak English so well but was watching all the people bringing in and taking away books. And get this: he had been trained since Kindergarten to do the same thing at the school library; he knew he too could do it if he wanted, he just had to figure out how it worked. While he stood there, watching, the librarian said to him, "You want a library card? Here, fill out this and this, and have your parent sign it there." The kid was back in 5 minutes, the form all filled out and signed. And he walked out with a book and his own card, back to the place he lives with six other people in two rooms.

You see, school is where we learn our options. In a perfect world, it's where we get to escape the confines of our income, our class, and our home life. We get to be, or learn to be, a different person when we are at school, for good or for ill, and in a perfect school system, it would always be for the better. If we take the options out of the school - if school becomes solely a place to go learn how to take multiple choice tests on the 3 R's and some science - what have we gained? What, in fact, is the point? Teaching kids to sit still and do what they're told for 6 hours a day? Where, in all those R's and xeroxed worksheets, do they get to try on all the other hats, to see if they can sing? Where is the wonder of discovery? How can schools which run on test scores and grim curricula ever teach our children to reach out, to flex their intelligence, to become the new explorers and inventors and artists, without which our world is merely a dim and wintry regimen?


I would argue that the most important thing in the world are those options, because that's where we find the tools to become someone who wonders about things, who creates things, someone who can make a new and meaningful world for themselves and others. If Einstein's lesson, when he got an F in math, was to shut up and sit still, where would we be today? There has got to be a place we can learn to go beyond our parents' ideas, beyond our station in life, beyond the expectations of those who would make us sheep. And schools should be the best place for it. I mean, really - where else are your kids going to spend days with someone trained in exactly that: the fostering of wonder?

So to those men and women dragging their feet and holding our children accountable for the financial greed of small-minded people: leave it alone. You will not bend us to your will. You will not make my children into sheep, nor the children around them. We will not allow it.

* * * * * * * *

"Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted counts." Albert Einstein

Some links for raising children with wonder and critical thinking skills:

- The always-fabulous Media Awareness Network, from (where else?) Canada
- The sprightly and jocular (to the point of condescension) Free Range Kids blog does still have good information on increasing kids' freedom in a world of safety-obsession and alarmism.
- The National Center for Fair and Open Testing's site The Case Against High Stakes Testing has a lot of information about combatting the testing mentality in educational institutions.
- Students Against Testing, a similar, more youth-oriented site


Some links about changing California:

- Wikipedia on how California has tried to divide before
- Census deepens racial divide, November 2006
- Three Californias: a sometimes blog
- Splitting California: a bibliography


Lastly, a letter to the President, from me.

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.

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.

Who Nose?

Younger daughter wants to be a giant nose for Halloween. That's right, a nose. I've been feverishly trying to sculpt one out of felt and padding for her (see above), but I worry that she is too short, and people, not seeing the nostrils, will think it is... well, some other fleshy part.

The idea came up when I decided to read her The Nose, a short story by Russian author Nikolai Gogol. Now, although it is couched in terms which might be normally difficult for a 6-year-old, the basic premise - that a man (an Inspector of Reindeer, no less) might wake one morning missing his nose, and subsequently see it walking and driving about the streets dressed as a "General and Glorious Governor of Games" - is exactly the kind of thing which appeals to a 6-year-old.

There is no description of how a nose, perhaps two inches long, might later be able to get about as a well-dressed dignitary (one can only imagine it changes size at will); but these completely surreal shifts never bother children. Which is one of the things I like about the way their little brains work.

Curiously, once I began telling people about her costume I found that no one in my community, as far as I know, has ever read Gogol. What a mistake! I am not a big fan of Russian authors, myself, but his short stories are great. Do try this at home, kids.

And, in case you want to innoculate your children at an early age, I find there is now a copy of The Nose specially translated and illustrated just for kids. Pass it on!

Another Sprog Blog

More of the Way Things Work, from the Dynamic Duo.

The Earth-Steerer: This is what makes the earth go round, literally. "It turns really, really slowly, which is why the earth moves so slow." (5-year-old)

Dreamweaver: "These things weave all the dreams in the world. Their fingers are long and skinny, and they weave dreams, which fly out the window to find the dreamers." (8-year-old)

The Earth Draw-er: "This thing is really tiny, and it goes around coloring in all the leaves and flowers and things. Because it's so tiny, it takes a long time to color things, which is why things are so slow changing color, like from Summer to Fall, or when the leaves change from Winter to Spring."