We are peering into the gun barrel of time itself..."

A serendipitous signet of space-time and the body. 

For a while I had been eyeing this image by design artist Bruno Penabranca that I found randomly online. 

Strange, beautiful, and unique. Haunting. Not quite tribal. A diagram. It reminded me, and still does, of an open book, pierced through by ripples that ultimately would sink through what would be the book's spine. Or else, an arrow. An open V with a needle falling through. Letters. V. A. I. O. Rays of sunshine on water... the moon. Pages in flight. 

I loved what the artist named it: the "Event Horizon". Looking just a bit further, to Wikipedia and some other sites, I found out the meaning of Event Horizon:

The region where, once fallen through, things change and never are the same, no escape possible. Something within, completely mysterious. The image fascinated me more and more, and I finally decided to get it tattooed on my arm, EH towards me, the events leading outside, to where I point and stretch my arms and fingers:

As it turns out, the Event Horizon has never been seen. We've known its existence, but it has never been recorded. Until today. Today, the entire scientific world came out to announce that a real life photo was taken this month - April 2019 - by Event Horizon telescopes (eight total), and we now have an official recording of this phenomenon. This massive gravitational hole much bigger than our sun, that sucks in everything and never releases... here it is (bottom):

Maria Popova of Brain Pickings wrote early this morning:

"We are peering into the gun barrel of time itself..."

- F

Hints of Sabotage in Contemporary Literature

An Englishman is held captive by Somali Jihadists in Africa. They are on the outskirts, all trying to survive, not wanting to kill him just yet. 

Later, they gave him a plate of camel meat and rice and tea. The water was from a hole they had dug in the riverbed. It was not syrupy like the tea the others drank. He was beaten for refusing to collect firewood. It was part of his plan. By being selectively uncooperative, he could win favor by being unexpectedly cooperative. 

from Submergence by J.M. Ledgard (2011). Page 122. 

- F

A Counterpoint to the Argument Against Fairy Tales (I)

"I’ve been asked in interviews, in classrooms and by audiences, if I think fairy tales are feminist. I think they are, but not by our modern definition of feminism. Traditional fairy tales were created long before any such notion existed, and I’d say they help women, rather than lift up women. They warn, rather than extol. They’re useful, which is a much older kind of feminism.

That said, there are many modern writers who’ve taken traditional fairy tales and made something more explicitly feminist of them, in part by simply subverting expectations. Angela Carter and Kelly Link come to mind, as does Helen Oyeyemi, Molly Gaudry, Kate Bernheimer, and Matt Bell. These writers aren’t creating explicitly feminist fairy tales in the way that, for example, the film Frozen does. Instead, they take a hard look at the problematic nature of the stories they’ve laid open, and give us new perspectives, new ways to see. Often their retellings are even darker than the originals, in part because they invite a modern, feminist gaze, while pulling back the curtain to reveal the appalling lack of options our protagonists are faced with. There are no levers or buttons; just modern readers, seeing clearly (and uncomfortably) the parallels between the lives of these protagonists and women in our own time."

Full essay from Amber Sparks: The Useful Wisdom of Fairy Tales: Because Sometimes the Wolf Shows Up Uninvited

- F 

Fairy Tales & Folklore for Adults: An Introduction

(A photo of the materials cart I speak of in the above video, which is currently residing next to my desk at work.)

On magic & enchantment: I talked about the aesthetic of fairy-tales as being a sign (the semiotic sign) of the fairy-tale form. I didn't go much into specifics - I'm still working on building my knowledge on this subject - so - much of what I said was still in the abstract. But here is what I meant by an essential enchantment and magic within the fairy-tale.

If a cup talks, or a dresser, or if there are angels who whisper to you in the night: that's a form of enchantment. There is no known reason for it. It is just there, a cup or a dresser talking, angels who tell you things you don't quite remember when you wake up (see Robin McKinley's re-tellings of Beauty & the Beast: Rose Daughter & Beauty). It is accepted as such, as magic, and, although these give various emotional textures to the story and characters, there is no particular reason for it nor is there a reason for it to be understood scientifically, that is, logically and reasonably. It is understood as part and parcel of the fabric of reality within the story.

From the introduction to Victorian Fairy Tales from Oxford, Michael Newton describes the fairy-tale form further:

Some have decried the literary fairy tale as sentimental, escapist, and kitsch. Though much substandard work was published, in the finest examples there is a lot of tough-mindedness, wit and genuine humour, as well as cognizance of suffering, and traces too of the numinous. The literary fairy story involves the fantastic, a supernatural that is neither eerie nor horrific, but rather is whimsical, playful, or invitingly strange."

I always want to reiterate this point: That is not to say whimsy without madness, playful without darkness, strange without the uncanny. But all those nonetheless, with no bloodletting and ghost tremor chills, just plain enchantment. 

And so we have a father, lost in the woods with a sick horse in the deadest of winter, when he approaches a clearing full of the strong scent of thousand orange trees. A castle looms ahead of him with each one of its numerous rooms filled with the lights of candles and chandeliers, the doors and gates open for him as if to welcome him in, and he accepts it all. A stable for his horse, filled with fresh hay, and the horse revives into a complete state of health. It is madness, sure, strange, but he accepts it because he is starving, depressed beyond belief, cold almost to frostbite, and so he understands it for what it is, a gift, no explanations necessary.

I like what Padriac Colum states in his introduction to The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales: 

They put a thing in the center of the story and it gave a pattern. What an advantage it is to a storyteller to have a feeling for the value, for the uniqueness of a thing! Things remain real while mental states become doubtful to us... the golden slipper on the stairway is what the incidents in "Cinderella" lead up to and away from. And the gold of the slipper puts into greater obscurity the drably dressed girl crouched by the ashes. In "Snow White" there is the looking glass of the wicked queen which is doubled in the glass coffin in which Snow White is laid by the kindly dwarfs. In "Briar Rose" there is the spindle that is doubled in the thorns that hedge the castle. In "The Goose Girl" the horse's head that speaks is doubled in the hat the wind blows away, and in "King's Thrushbeard" the crockery which the king's daughter has to sell is doubled in the jars which, as the kitchen maid, she uses to bring the dinner leavings home, and which break, too. These correspondences are like rhymes which chance gives a poet and which, duly set down, gives his poem a happy completeness. Another kind of correspondence is in "Rapunzel": the maid has long hair and the witch confines her in a tower, and we do not know whether the tower makes it proper she should have long hair, or whether her long hair makes the tower part of the story." 

We could ask, when we happen upon a fairy tale, what is the magic object in this one and how is it enchanted? Further, what does it do? In Hans Christian Andersen's The Nightingale, as you might guess, the magic is not within a object as such but with the bird, the animal, the Nightingale, who has the most beautiful song anyone has ever known. How the bird came to have this song we don't know, but what we must think about is whether or not it is replaceable, its value, its worth: its enchantment.

- F

Pre-Raphaelite Resistance

For every locomotive they build, I shall paint another angel." 

- Sir Edward Burne-Jones

(The Beguiling of Merlin 1872 - 1877)

Preview of my Fairy Tales & Folklore for Adults Presentation

- F

freaking Fake News: edited 4/3/19

My co-worker shared this article with me because she knows I will be doing a one-hour presentation on Fairy-Tales for Adults for our all staff day conference this May. And because she knows I love fairy-tales! I'll be sure to share the presentation with you when I'm done: I'm planning on recording myself do a practice run and I'll upload it. Anyway, she sent me an article today that infuriated me. It's from a site called Book Riot, and here's the hyperlink: 

Fairy Tale Facts and Faux Pas

Here is my response - it's funny that the site makes it a little difficult to comment - you have to sign up for something to be able to do so. I was pissed off by the article and this is what I came up with when I wrote back. I'm hoping it sounds legit. I feel that it is. 

Hello. I'm a fairy-tale *lover*. I have studied a bit as well (two classes during graduate school at Dominican University and also during my own personal time after graduating in 2017).

To your first point - "You Know It When You See It": with fables, that's actually true. Almost all fables have animals as characters (there are rarely humans in older fables: see the French fables from the 17th century by Jean De La Fontaine from France or going back much further, the classic Aesop's Fables) so you literally can see the difference there. You know a fable because of the animals: The Tortoise & The Hare, for example. Or, The Fox & the Grapes. Fables usually, if not always, have a "point" or moral. This indeed does make them distinctive from other types of stories, particularly folklore and fairy-tales. Aesop made sure to include the point, or lesson, from the stories at the very end. And even with newer fables, such as W.S. Merwin's "The Book of Fables", the conclusion is still to an end. In each passage of the book, there is a finishing gloss over it, entire, that aims to say something to the reader, to have the reader contemplate a certain specific truth particular to that passage only, that story, that fable.

Though you say miscellaneous morals were "tacked" onto fairy-tales during the 17th century, and I'm guessing your talking about those tales written down in Italy and France? I would argue that these fairy-tales, which were literary, were not pointing to a lesson or moral. They were supposed to be, indeed intended to be, understood as a satirical and ironic abstraction of social reality under largely oppressive societies. The 17th century literary salons of France, for example, where groups of mostly women shared their constructed fairy-tales, were a subversive form of critique against the kings and royal etiquettes that they found confining. Men were drawn to these salons, too, but they were mostly comprised of women. So it is not the fairy-tale that asked for a moral to be "tacked" on to it, fairy-tales are usually finished with a pretty open-ended conclusion (despite the "happily ever after" misconception), a cyclical conclusion I might add. But surely, people will interpret how they will. 

Some things need to be clarified here. The difference between genre and form, for one. Is the fairy-tale a genre? Some say yes. A form? Some say yes. I think it is both and I can back this up with arguments for both, but let me me say this: I am very disheartened that you liken a fairy-tale to an internet meme. An internet meme is like mimicry, an imitation, an echo of the same. The whole difference between folktale and fairy-tale is that the literary fairy tale is known to be authored by a single individual, one who creatively "re-writes" a story from a previous form (in this case, from folklore) and completely changes its guise into something unique and new for the time that it emerges. Far from being a reproduction, it is a borrowing and an adaptation, and indeed a new interpretation to shed light on a grain of truth that was with it all along. 

And you say "Many of our favorite works were in print first" - but if you are to understand the fairy-tale you must understand that the nature of the literary fairy-tale is that it was collected by people from an oral tradition of tales from the lower classes and then written down. The written down version is not really "first": it is in actuality a folktale with a different kind of sensibility - a sensibility for those who had more money, and therefore more literacy. 

The Brothers Grimm were the first fairy-tale collectors to create their stories *explicitly* for children. Kindermarchen, Children's Household Tales, had the word "Children" in the title, whereas the literary fairy-tales from Italy and France before them never addressed children at all. Perhaps because there really wasn't a concept for the idea of a child. But also, the Grimms made sure Sleeping Beauty did not become pregnant while she was asleep and then awake by the suckling of her baby twins (see the original literary fairy tale from Italy). The creative liberties the Grimms took was in part to develop tales that reflected their country and nationhood at a time when Germany was struggling to identify its society. While France and Italy, and even England, had rich cultural histories, Germany did not. The Brothers Grimm wanted to create a new type of canon for their country - one that deviated from the traditional academic canon, and focused more on the peasantry.

Conte de Fees was coined by a French woman, true. I think it should be mentioned that the term fairy was important because many of the French tales included an actual fairy that helped the main character of the story surpass their struggle with the help of some wisdom and magic. The name stuck, though many fairy-tales after that ended up not having a fairy at all.

You cannot find an "original" version of the fairy-tale. It is a futile effort, I agree. However, if you look instead to collections of fables and folktales, and even mythologies from certain regions, you'll get a source of beginning. For example, Aesop, of Aesop's Fables, though only a man of myth, has a very specific story attached to him as a Greek slave who began telling stories orally to whomever he encountered. Whoever decided to keep sharing his stories, and finally to write them down, is a mystery. Look at other collections and anthologies and you will find that many times the they are attributed to one's nursemaid, guardian, servant, or great-grandmother. Where their storytellers received the tales is also a mystery. 

On the psychoanalysts thing... don't you think everyone is entitled to their own interpretation of art? Have you ever heard of "the death of the author"? Look it up - it's a book by Roland Barthes that explains that however we may wish to understand a work in it's proper historical context, as I try to do, there are always interpretations that run alongside this yet completely unconnected to it. Honestly, I think you'd be better off understanding the fairy-tale form as an anthropological perspective rather than finding an excuse to critique psychoanalysis. To look at fairy-tales through the anthropological lens is to understand these types of stories of as inherently and essentially about the study of human nature. What it is we do what we do and why we do it. Why we act how we act in certain situations.

Moving on, literary fairy-tales simply were not made for kids. The folktales that many fairy-tales began from were forms of gossip and rumor that spread throughout towns. When talking about hearsay on a daily basis, the act of sharing stories became an art form between adults who were basically sharing news. These were then formulated into the stories we know today.

I think you're right, in some respects, about censorship. When Hans Christian Andersen told the children his story about the little mermaid in Denmark, he made sure to tell them that she sold her soul and had to walk on legs that were in massive amounts of pain, and that in the end she did not get her prince but ended up having to watch him fall in love with another woman and ultimately become a fallen angel, with a soul, sure, but not with her true love.

Fairy-tales, I reiterate, can be understood as both a genre and form. I don't know how understanding them as a meme will help anyone. I highly doubt the wikipedia pages of today could be fairy-tales of tomorrow. Science/technology and magic/enchantment are two very different things, and I think it might do you well to begin from there. 

Much of your analysis can be stamped onto horror, say, or thrillers. But I'll leave you with this quote: The literary fairy story involved the fantastic, a supernatural that is neither eerie or horrific, but rather is whimsical, playful, or invitingly strange.

That is not to say whimsy without madness, playful without darkness, strange without the uncanny. But all those nonetheless, with no bloodletting and ghost tremor chills, just plain enchantment. 

Please let me know if you have any questions or you need references for what I've stated here.

Sincerely,

Felicia Edens

Librarian

Dead Eye Staring Up

For you, the one who likes gross things, odd things, ugly things...

This is a picture of the back of my eyes. Maybe you've gotten pictures taken of your eyes before. The ophthalmologist usually dilates your eyes with drops so a clear picture can be taken, like this one. However, there is something obviously wrong here. The two images don't match, as they should. The photo on the right - which is of my left eye - is healthy. The photo on the left - my right eye - is extremely deformed. Something that no one can really see now, except when my right eye becomes severely "lazy": when it wanders off and isn't in synchronicity with my left. 

I was born with this condition. It is called optic nerve coloboma: "Coloboma of the optic nerve is a congenital anomaly of the optic disc  in which there is a defect of the inferior aspect of the optic nerve. The issue stems from incomplete closure of the embryonic fissure while in utero. A varying amount of glial tissue typically fills the defect, manifests as a white mass."

This picture was taken ten years ago, but I've had this condition my whole life. What this means is that I am blind in my right eye. I can see shadows and light, but nothing clearly. I have some periphery, but not much. The images that hit my eye never reach my brain, so I cannot make anything clear out. My left eye, however, is fine. 

When I was younger, before I knew that without enough sleep and rest my left eye would wander, I was bullied - sometimes on accident through ignorance, sometimes not - for this. People could not discern what I was looking at when I was looking directly at them. I also had trouble playing sports. It is a source of pain for me and now, when I can, I let people know that I have this so they are not confused when speaking to me. 

All of us have conditions, seen or unseen, and I think it's important that we share them for a better understanding of the human body, the human psyche, and so we can move forward. I'm sharing this for blindness awareness.

You never really can tell. 

- F