wizard of oz – Further Annotations

GABBLER RECOMMENDS: BLA’s Twitter Rant about The Cursed Child

Posted on August 6, 2016 by blablablaandgabbler

Or, excuse me, it's *not* J.K. Rowling's. Not really. It's Jack Thorne's and John Tiffany's.

— B.L.A. (@CircoRingmaster) August 2, 2016

Indeed, why did J.K. Rowling not think that her screenplay for Fantastic Beasts would be enough to delight readers? We’ve waited this many years for something for her that is “Harry Potter” — that would have been enough. Why would she give up more of her rights and her story to a play that was so sub-par? Did Jack Thorne and John Tiffany blackmail her? Is she trying to prove to us that she isn’t perfect and makes mistakes? That the fanfiction community is her bitch? What?

Also:

Okay, but like, where's Teddy? #HarryPotterAndTheCursedChild

— Jess (@reads_dreams) August 2, 2016

Indeed, where is Remus and Tonk’s child? Clearly there were some characters Rowling didn’t allow Jack Thorne to touch.

[“BLA and GB Gabbler” (really just a pen name – singular) are the Editor and Narrator behind THE AUTOMATION, vol. 1 of the Circo del Herrero series. They are on facebook, twitter, tumblr, goodreads, and Vulcan’s shit list.]

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GABBLER RECOMMENDS: Why the British Tell Better Children’s Stories

Posted on January 15, 2016 by blablablaandgabbler

“If British children gathered in the glow of the kitchen hearth to hear stories about magic swords and talking bears, American children sat at their mother’s knee listening to tales larded with moral messages about a world where life was hard, obedience emphasized, and Christian morality valued. Each style has its virtues, but the British approach undoubtedly yields the kinds of stories that appeal to the furthest reaches of children’s imagination.

It all goes back to each country’s distinct cultural heritage. For one, the British have always been in touch with their pagan folklore, says Maria Tatar, a Harvard professor of children’s literature and folklore. After all, the country’s very origin story is about a young king tutored by a wizard. Legends have always been embraced as history, from Merlin to Macbeth. “Even as Brits were digging into these enchanted worlds, Americans, much more pragmatic, always viewed their soil as something to exploit,” says Tatar. Americans are defined by a Protestant work ethic that can still be heard in stories like Pollyanna or The Little Engine That Could.Americans write fantasies too, but nothing like the British, says Jerry Griswold, a San Diego State University emeritus professor of children’s literature. “American stories are rooted in realism; even our fantasies are rooted in realism,” he said, pointing to Dorothy who unmasks the great and powerful Wizard of Oz as a charlatan.

American fantasies differ in another way: They usually end with a moral lesson learned—such as, surprisingly, in the zany works by Dr. Seuss who has Horton the elephant intoning: “A person’s a person no matter how small,” and, “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.” Even The Cat in the Hat restores order from chaos just before mother gets home. In Oz, Dorothy’s Technicolor quest ends with the realization: “There’s no place like home.” And Max in Where the Wild Things Are atones for the “wild rumpus” of his temper tantrum by calming down and sailing home….

Even well into the 19th and even 20th centuries, many believed they could be whisked away to a parallel universe. Shape shifters have long haunted the castles of clans claiming seals and bears as ancestors. “Gaelic culture teaches we needn’t fear the dark side,” Bateman says. Death is neither “a portal to heaven nor hell, but instead a continued life on earth where spirits are released to shadow the living.” A tear in this fabric is all it takes for a story to begin. Think Harry Potter, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Dark Is Rising, Peter Pan, The Golden Compass—all of which feature parallel worlds.

These were beliefs the Puritans firmly rejected as they fled Great Britain and religious persecution for the New World’s rocky shores. America is peculiar in its lack of indigenous folklore, Harvard’s Tatar says. Though African slaves brought folktales to Southern plantations, and Native Americans had a long tradition of mythology, little remains today of these rich worlds other than in small collections of Native American stories or the devalued vernacular of Uncle Remus, Uncle Tom, and the slave Jim in Huckleberry Finn.”

Read the rest.

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On Magic in the American Myth:

Posted on March 12, 2015March 12, 2015 by blablablaandgabbler

“Representations of magic and witchcraft in American history and popular culture fall into two distinct and contradictory discourses of deviance and empowerment. In the first of these, magical ability is viewed as dangerous and monstrous, an unnatural power to be destroyed in conjunction with this approach to witchcraft as threat to the social order is the belief that such power should be domesticated, brought under forcible control if it cannot be utterly eliminated. In contrast, the second body of discourse addressing representations of witchcraft is one which views magical as a source of individual power and agency, usually feminine. From this perspective, witchcraft offers a means for expression of these aspects of identity negated by larger sociocultural structures, providing an alternative means of power, oftentimes fr otherwise disenfranchised women. Notions of performativity are central to this sense of empowerment, with women self-reflexively construction their magical identities as witches, as well as focusing on the physically and socially performative process of representing self and exercising change in the surrounding world. These two categories often overlap, and, regardless of readings of good or evil, power or performativity, both of these discourse meet in the representation of Otherness; as Emily D. Edwards argues, “The witch is someone strange, a curious ‘other’ who stands outside legitimate territories to intimidate the status quo.” Any representation of magic and witchcraft in American popular culture must necessarily negotiate the dual discourses of deviance and empowerment, as well as the engagement with Otherness, reconciling these differing perspective either by critiquing or negating one of the two, or by highlighting the problematic nature of their intersection. The discourse of magic in American myth differs significantly from those surrounding gender, race, and home because perceptions of magic have not undergone the dramatic challenges and changes faced by these other themes. However, the struggle between polarized notions of magic is indicative of cultural engagement with the supernatural and, more profoundly, anxieties surrounding the figure of the powerful woman.” – The Wizard of Oz as American Myth, Alissa Burger.

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