This Gives Me Hope

No matter how many times it's said, I never tire of being reminded that writing is, above all else, a process. This in no way guarantees that everyone's process will ultimately pay off in publication, much less literary immortality, but it is a good reminder that these guys had drafts that looked like mine do now. And look at what we wouldn't have had if they had stopped short. 

Check this out if you need some of that reassurance yourself. I especially like Marcel Proust's graphic, random, method of organization.

New Blog to Follow in Light of "Cinderfella"

Somewhere in my virtual wanderings, I stumbled across Maria Tatar's blog, Breezes from Wonderland. Tatar is a professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures and Folklore and Mythology at Harvard, and is the author of huge amounts of approchable scholarship on fairytales and folklore. 

Needless to say, I think she's pretty great. 

Recently, she's been behind the translation of some of the newly rediscovered Bavarian folktales (as I mention below), collected by a scholar back when the Grimms were active, and it's worth a read. We don't often see a prince in distress around these parts, for starters. (Or "Cinderfellas," as she terms them.) The language is also still very close to a direct oral transcription--that and several story elements indicate pretty clearly that this piece hasn't been put through the literary filter that colors most of the stories we think of as fairy tales today. Don't let the awkwardness of reading (vs. listening to) an oral piece keep you from checking this one out.

What I really love about this whole 'rediscovery' thing, despite some of the strange elements to the story (apparently a copy of them, in German, had been in Harvard's Widener Library, among other places, the entire time), is that lack of literary and cultural filter. I'm not yet proficient enough in Swedish to check out their chidren's lit, but I definitely know that male characters in the Anglo-American fairytale canon are almost always female. Tatar theorizes in The New Yorker that this might be due, in part, to the storytellers themselves being female and therefore favoring the stories with female protagonists. I can't help but see another layer on top of that--namely, Disney's particular cultural (and gendered) take on the particular stories that were around for the taking.

All that said, check out Tatar's blog!

This American Life's retraction and the question that actually matters

I’m not a fan of This American Life. This will come as a shock to anyone (or any robot) crawling through this site gathering demographic information, because I fit the listener profile to a T: well-educated in the humanities, a writer, a liberal, a youngish white woman who listens to NPR almost constantly the rest of the time.

But the show just doesn’t do it for me. It’s a combination of things, I think. They tell a very structurally-specific type of story, one which, as they say on their website, centers around characters, conflict, and a universal takeaway. Clearly, I do love stories with characters and conflicts, but I find the ever-present universal takeaway on this show a bit too easy, something that allows listeners to feel as though they’re participating in the world simply by joining in the larger feelings-session. (More on this, specifically, later.) Also, I just don’t like Ira Glass’s delivery.

So when I realized last weekend that I was likely to be driving a uhaul truck over the Sunol grade from noon to one pm, smack in the middle of the This American Life broadcast on KQED, I was all set to bring my ipod and listen to another podcast. That is, I was going to listen to something else until I remembered that this weekend was Retraction Weekend, a one-hour show about a January episode entitled “Mr. Daisy Goes to the Apple Factory.” As I’m sure you’ve heard, Mr. Daisy was less than truthful about what he found in Shenzhen, and This American Life was retracting his piece and spending an hour talking about how and why this had happened. So I tuned in.

This piece encapsulates my impression of the general fact-checking failure; to put it briefly, Daisy told Glass that his translator, Cathy, could no longer be reached. That was that, until holes started showing after the original piece aired back in January. When Glass and his team started looking into things, Daisy said that, actually, her name was Anna, not Cathy, and he didn’t think she’d like to be contacted as she hadn’t known she was in a story at all.

Click to read more ...

Pretty awesome local news

The DREAM act gets some momentum. 

This is what I love about history

The world we have ended up living in, and the past that we think we understand, are so, so random. They tell you in elementary school that history is a fixed set of dates and names, when really it's far more akin to Dadaist poetry, the kind where you pull random words out of a bag. What survives and becomes significant may appear to be inevitable from our position at this late date, but in reality, it's all a bit of a fluke. (And the whole impression of living at a late date, well, that's another post.)

If things had gone slightly differently, we could have all been referring to, say, movie plots in a totally different way. You know, like that romantic comedy that is totally a Turnip Princess Story.

Five hundred fairy tales have been found in Germany, collected by local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth back in the 1850s. The volume didn't take off like that of his contemporaries, the Grimm brothers, but according to this article, they held him in high regard.

Until these things are all translated, I won't be able to weigh in on whether they were misplaced due to some ineffable quality they lacked or were a victim of some random event of the kind that often happened in the nineteenth century, like maybe an absentminded monk or a public that just wasn't into turnips. According to the Guardian, this should be soon, and I can hardly wait.