The illustration is by Michael Sowa. Many of his paintings and illustrations remind me of Lewis Carroll.
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Who Are You ?
In the mid nineteenth century, the permissive world of Christ Church, Oxford, was home to many brilliant and eccentric scholars.
Mathematician, wordsmith, photographer and writer, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (1832- 1898), better known as Lewis Carroll, flourished there for many years. Volumes have been written about his unique books, his private life and his propensity toward and fondness for the world of children.
Dodgson composed a story, Alice in Wonderland, for young Alice Liddell, that became world famous.
Alice In Wonderland (1865), later followed by Through the Looking Glass (1871), are books credited with changing children's literature. They are both brilliant, imaginative fantasies that take place in an alternate reality. They were instant successes, both critically and in sales. They continue today to appeal to both children and adults.
They can also be frightening for children who read the books at a young age with no adult or older sibling to provide comfort and reassurance. Alice undergoes a disorienting ordeal in a surreal world of nonsense, parody, and danger where disturbing fantasies occur. Not every child is ready to encounter the madness of the queen ("off with her head") nor a life-size hookah smoking caterpillar resting on a hallucinogenic mushroom. Here is an excerpt about identity from Alice's off-setting encounter with the caterpillar. . .
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth, and addressed her in a languid, sleepy voice.
‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I—I hardly know, sir, just at present—at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’
‘What do you mean by that?’ said the Caterpillar sternly. ‘Explain yourself!’
‘I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’
Both the illustrations above are by John Tenniel who illustrated the original Alice books.
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The Identity of the Self
"A philosopher will ask how the identity of the self can be preserved amid the ceaseless flux of experience, but a child—especially a child who is growing so fast that she suddenly fills an entire room—will ask more urgently, as Alice does, 'Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different.' Children, viewed from one angle, are philosophy in motion." --Anthony Lane, Go Ask Alice, New Yorker
The photo of Alice Liddell, the inspiration for the Alice books, was taken by Lewis Carroll.
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Lewis Carroll Moved the Boundaries for Children's Books
"It is one of the ironies of our age that a true understanding of what children want in their books emerged from a pathologically shy mathematician who believed in rules, order, and limits for children but who overcame those convictions in order to produce a book that would entertain the seven year old girl with whom he was infatuated. He inadvertently revealed to us that Wonderland, like Neverland, is a great place to visit whether you are a child or an adult, but you really don't ever want to live there."
Maria Tatar, Enchanted Hunters -- The Power of Stories in Childhood
The illustration is by John Tenniel.
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Virginia Woolf observed that “these are not books for children. They are the only books in which we become children.”
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A Queer World
"We are in a queer world here, and the word (and its variants) appears more than twenty times in Alice In Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It is the defining word for the Carrollian experience, and it will become the term not just for eccentricity, but for the whole aesthetic experience of children's literary fantasy.
Queer comes from a word that originally meant off-center, diagonal, or askew. It appeared in the sixteenth century, denoting odd things or odd people, and by the nineteenth century it had become one of the most frequently deployed terms to define experience outside the strictures of Victorian propriety...Life lived on the diagonal or off-center, through the looking glass or upside down, is the world of nonsense imagination, and it is the world that so appeals to childhood."
Seth Lerer --Children's Literature, A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter
The illustration is by John Tenniel.
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"If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there."
Lewis Carroll
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Nonsense
In both of Lewis Carroll's Alice books, she is confronted by nonsense conversations, poems, and incidents. Here is an excerpt from the poem, The Walrus and the Carpenter, recited for Alice by Tweedledum and Tweedledee in the book,Through The Looking Glass.
"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."
The illustrations are by John Tenniel.
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The Masters of Nonsense
"The idea of linguistic nonsense takes hold as a force in children's literature in the mid-nineteenth century and never seems to let go. . . the idea of nonsense as a force of the imagination, of nonsense as a challenge to the logic of adulthood and the laws of civil life .. that was a new idea in Victorian England. The masters of that nonsense were, of course, Lewis Carroll and Edmund Lear." -- Seth Lerer, Children's Literature. A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter
The illustration is by Edward Lear.
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More Nonsense -- by Edward Lear
The Owl and the Pussycat -- An excerpt, Part III.“Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?” Said the Piggy, “I will.”
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dinèd on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.
The Poem is by Edward Lear. The illustration is by Leslie Brooke.
Here is a Gutenberg link to Lear's Poems.
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Edward Lear
In 1846 Lear published The Book of Nonsense, a volume of limericks which went through three editions and helped popularize the form and the genre of literary nonsense. In 1871 he published Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany and Alphabets, which included his most famous nonsense song, The Owl and the Pussycat, which he wrote for the children of his patron, Edward Stanley, 13th Earl of Derby. Many other works followed. Edward Lear Wikipedia
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The Jumblies
I have a book of The Jumblies, a wonderful poem by Edward Lear. The brilliant illustrations were created nearly 100 years later by Edward Gorey. The poem and the illustrations are a perfect fit. The book was published in 1963 by Young Scott Books. Here is an excerpt of the first two stanzas:
They went to sea in a sieve, they did,
In a sieve they went to sea;
In spite of all their friends could say,
On a winter's morn, on a stormy day,
In a sieve they went to sea.
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Here is a link to the Mad Hatter Dance from Tim Burton's film of Alice.
Here is a link to Grace Slick singing a timeless rendition of White Rabbit.
Here is a link to Christopher Wheeldon's Alice in Wonderland Ballet.
Here is a link to the highly regarded immersive theater version of Alice, Then She Fell.
Here is a link to the Walrus and the Carpenter scene from Disney's animated version.
The illustration is by Lisbeth Zwerger.
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Movies
Honeyland
Honeyland is an exceptional new crossover film.
Pat Mullen wrote a wonderful review in POV Movie magazine (Canada) of this Sundance prize winning movie: "Honeyland is a film of beautiful intimacy and tragedy, a rare glimpse at a dying way of life, and an observation of culture at a crossroads filled with heartache and humour." Here is a link to Mullen's Full Review…
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Disney Power Grows and Grows and Grows
2019 is a recod breaking year for Disney. . . over $7.61bn to date in 2019.
The following excerpts from an article by Brooks Barnes in the NY Times provide an awesome overview of Disney power. The article began with the title, 'Lion King' Remake Becomes Disney's Latest Box-Office Smash. . .
Disney’s domestic market share for the year stands at about 40 percent. On Sunday, “Avengers: Endgame” passed “Avatar” to rank as the No. 1 ticket-seller on record. . . “Avengers: Endgame,” released by the company’s Marvel division in April, squeaked past “Avatar” to rank as the highest-grossing movie on record, not adjusting for inflation. “Avatar” collected $2.79 billion by the end of its run a decade ago, or about $3.3 billion in today’s money. . . In the coming days, Disney’s remake of “Aladdin,” released in May, will cross $1 billion worldwide. “Toy Story 4,” which arrived in June from Disney’s Pixar division, is also approaching that threshold; its total now stands at $859 million, according to Comscore. . . And the barrage is nowhere near over: Still to come from Disney this year are “Frozen 2,” a “Maleficent” sequel( opening in mid-August) and “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker."
There is more information in Brooks Barnes article aboout this growing power, including the fact that Disney intends to stream and compete with Netflix and others.
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Goodbye Dick and Jane, Hello Dr Seuss
Until recently, I had no idea that Dr Seuss (Theodore Geisel) was a major factor in the demise of Dick and Jane in American classroom education. Dick and Jane have vanished from the teaching world following a change in academic pedagogy which occurred concurrently with the publication of the Cat In The Hat in 1957. I learned about this major turn of events in a New Yorker article by I-Huei Go: How Dr. Seuss Changed Education In America.This article, in turn, was precipitated by a new biography of Geisel by Brian Jay Jones: Becoming Dr. Seuss.
The illustrations for Dick and Jane were by Robert Childress.
Below are excerpts from How Dr. Seuss Changed Education in America...
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The Dullest Family On Earth
"For decades, schoolteachers had been parking their youngest students in front of basal readers or primers, exemplified by the Dick and Jane series. The pedagogical approach underlying these primers assumed that beginning readers learned new words best by associating them with pictures and memorizing them through dutiful repetition. By the middle of the nineteen-fifties, this “whole word” or “look and say” method was just starting to face pushback from proponents of phonics-based instruction, most visibly in Rudolf Flesch’s influential polemic “Why Johnny Can’t Read.”
It didn’t help that Dick and Jane belonged to what many have dubbed the dullest family on earth. The books were plotless, littered with mind-numbing, repetitious quasi-sentences. (“Look, Jane. Look, look. See Dick. See, see. Oh, see. See Dick.”) The illustrations were stodgy and bland. Flesch deemed the series “horrible, stupid, emasculated, pointless". . .
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And Then Came the Cat in the Hat"The head of Houghton Mifflin’s education division ( William Spaulding) took note. He challenged Geisel to write a primer that emerging or reluctant readers would actually enjoy, pleading, 'Write me a story that first graders can’t put down'. . . Nine months later, Geisel completed The Cat in the Hat, using 236 of the 348 words given to him. It retained the drawing style, verse rhythms, and all the imaginative power of Geisel's earlier works but, because of its simplified vocabulary, it could be read by beginning readers. . . In addition to stirring up a revolution in reading instruction, “The Cat in the Hat” was an immediate commercial sensation. 'By some accounts,' Jones writes,The Cat in the Hat was selling more than a thousand copies per day, on its way to selling 250,000 copies by Christmas of 1957, and more than three million copies within three years.' ”
Here is a link to read more of this fascinating Dr Seuss Article by I-Huei Go in the New Yorker.
The illustrations for Dick and Jane are by Robert Childress
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I Don't Patronize Children
“I think I can communicate with kids because I don’t try to communicate with kids. Ninety percent of the children’s books patronize the child and say there’s a difference between you and me, so you listen to this story. I, for some reason or another, don’t do that. I treat the child as an equal.” -- Theodore Geisel
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Sheldon Allan "Shel" Silverstein (September 25, 1930 – May 10, 1999) was a multifaceted American writer. His work ranged from travel articles and drawings for Playboy to writing popular songs for many singers including Marianne Faithful, Judy Collins, Dr. Hook, Waylon Jennings, and Johnny Cash. He also wrote wonderful children's books; they have been translated into more than 30 languages and have sold more than 20 million copies.
Silverstein’s first collection of poetry for children, Where the Sidewalk Ends, was released in 1974 to excellent reviews and became very popular with readers. He also created the illustrations. More illustrated books and poetry followed for many years
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"Throughout Where the Sidewalk Ends, there is wit and brilliant linguistic inventiveness, but there is also a strain of sentiment that makes clear that nonsense is but the flip side of desire. Silverstein's poems have an achiness about them, as the speaker longs to be part of everyday society and yet is constantly aware that he can never fit in. We feel this throughout Edward Lear, and we feel this, too, in Alice In Wonderland. And so the poet looks for places where acceptance comes: places of fantasy and freedom." -- This comment, is by Seth Lerer, from his book, Children's Literature. A Reader's History from Aesop to Harry Potter.
The illustration by Silverstein is for Ickle Tickle, a nonsense poem from Where the Sidewalk Ends.
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INVITATION from Where the Sidewalk Ends
If you are a dreamer, come in,
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
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SNOWBALL from Falling Up
I made myself a snowball
As perfect as could be.
I thought I’d keep it as a pet
And let it sleep with me.
I made it some pajamas
And a pillow for its head.
Then last night it ran away,
But first—it wet the bed.
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Here is a link to Johnny Cash singing A Boy named Sue, written by Shel Silverstein.
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LitWorld
"When I grow up I want to be an engineer and an honest man." These are the words of a young boy in Kenya in this excellent one minute videolink from LitWorld featuring moments of Kids Who Tell a New Story.
"Our programs encourage sharing stories, building community, and cultivating a love of reading and writing to help literacy skills grow stronger. Literacy for LitWorld means reading, writing, speaking, and creating. . .LitWorld has developed a model which taps into a strong network of over 50 diverse partner organizations, in order to train hundreds of mentors who reach thousands of children all over the world. . .
Here is a link to their site: LitWorld
The photo is from LitWorld in Kenya.
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Ariel Wulff's Misfits
"I was belly laughing on the first page. Lammy Lamb is a compulsive foot licker! This short book is so full of love and creative, tender animal care that I forgot I was reading a book. I felt like I was in the house with the dogs, at the Halloween Costume Contest and in every other scene. That's great writing, and great content too. The pictures are adorable."
Amazon review by MaryAnn Fry, Author of Going Naked Being Seen
Here is link to Parade Of Misfits
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K9s for Warriors
"K9s for Warriors is dedicated to providing service canines to our warriors suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Traumatic Brain Injury, and/or Military Sexual Trauma as a result of military service post-9/11. Our goal is to empower them to return to civilian life with dignity and independence. "
“I was a prisoner in my own life. I wanted a service dog to give me the chance to get out and feel safe, thus relieving my social anxieties and overcome my fear of crowds. K9s For Warriors provides a service member with the freedom to experience life and participate/integrate back into civilian life. It gives the warrior hope to push forward.”
The photo and testimonial is from Dion, shown here with his therapy dog, KC.
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More than 2500 children and teens die of gun violence every year in the USA.
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Save the Children
Save the Children has been responding to crises around the world for almost 100 years. Since the refugee crisis erupted, they’ve been doing whatever it takes to help them survive and thrive in multiple countries Here, for example, is some basic information on their efforts to help with the Syrian nightmare:
"As Syria’s conflict approaches its eighth year, Save the Children and partners inside Syria continue work tirelessly to reach Syrian children and families who have been displaced within their country. Our humanitarian teams and partners in Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, Iraq and Turkey are also present in camps and host communities, providing Syrian refugees and vulnerable children from these host communities with food, shelter, water and sanitary services, and access to medical care, education and child protection activities. We have delivered a wide range of aid to 2.8 million Syrians to date, including 1.9 million children."
Here is a link to their website: Save The Children
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Castle In The Mist
These books are great for dog lovers of all ages. I enjoyed them just
as much as my children and would not hesitate to give them as gifts to friends and family!" -- from a review by Dawn, MommyPR
We have free reader copies of all the books in the Planet Of The Dogs series for therapy dog organizations, individual therapy dog owners, librarians, teachers and independent bookstores. . . email us with a postal address at [email protected] and we will send you the books.
To read sample chapters or to read reviews of any book in the series, visit PlanetOfTheDogs
The Planet Of The Dogs series (including Castle In The Mist and Snow Valley Heroes, A Christmas Tale) is available from many Internet sources and through independent bookstores of all sizes.
The illustration from Castle In The Mist is by Stella Mustanoja McCarty.
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The Canine Therapy Corps of Chicago invites you to Docks and Dogs at the Freedom Boat Club for a fundraiser on Lake Michigan, on August 10, 2019.
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"The dog is a gentleman; I hope to go to his heaven, not man's". .. Mark Twain
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