The Three Little Pigs

Joab Johnson and Minnie McHugh Johnson were a young couple, newly graduated from college, who planned to be married in September and had a third addition, Little Jiminy Johnson, due in two months, just after the wedding. They were living together in their first starter home, a little two bed one bath located in the northwest part of town. It was small, quaint really, with off-green closer to blue siding and a well kept walkway free of weeds and erosion that led to their little stoop where they rocked in their wicker love swing drinking wine in the evenings. Having so recently graduated, with degrees in Nothing In Particular, they were still undecided as to their career choice (as though it must be absolute) and continued to work the same jobs they had in college, already in debt with over $90,000 in combined student loans. Fortunately, they had purchased their little abode, the “Chateau” as Joab like to call it, at an excellent, unprecedented, historically low sub-prime interest rate of 3%, adjustable after four years, after which the interest rate would adjust to prime. Well, the plan was, at least what Joe Crocker at the bank told them, was that in four years when they would most likely want to sell the house, and it would be worth thirty five percent more what they paid for it. But the times are different now, for the Johnsons and for the rest of America. Real estate values have dropped, it’s a buyer’s market and people are unable to sell their homes and pay their mortgage payments, which, for the Johnson’s, has gone up to 8%. They are unable to pay their mortgage payments of $800 a month on a $400 a month salary working for wages. So one fine Wednesday evening, when Joab and Minnie had gotten home from their respective jobs as a pizza maker and a barista, a knock came at the door (and not so unexpectedly). They opened it to see Joe Crocker, the short little bald man with circular glasses, standing on his custom orthodics near, but not on the welcome mat. And he was clearly not welcome here, at the Chateau, a home built with youthful exuberance and hopefulness, with the NOTICE OF FORECLOSURE in his hand. The thin veil of happiness covering them like a bubble had burst with the rest of American real estate.

Displaced from their homes, they were forced to move in with their closest relatives, Minnie’s brother, Len McHugh. Len was an aspiring Hollywood producer, living well beyond his means in the hills west of Beverly Hills in an exclusive subdivision known as “The Woods”. Joab and Minnie found their lives in The Woods quite lavish and full of wonder. Len was living in the nicest house either Joab or Minnie had ever been in, opulent really, but portraying all the characteristics of the “More-money-than-taste” disease . But Len’s wealth hypothetical—he was living off of borrowed hypothetical dollars, future potential earnings, and driving a BMW sports car off of them too. He took out a loan of $800,000 dollars on a $1,000,000 house; however, he did not have the $200,000 to put down on the house (which is to say he was flat broke, with no money) so he made a deal with Joe Crocker at the bank and Joe worked out an 80/20 loan—which is to say Len was charged 6% interest on the $800,000 dollars and %15 on the $200,000 loan. The home, of course, was expected to nearly double in value by the time it needed to be paid. And that little bald man of a banker, Joe Crocker, stood at Len’s doorstep, huffing and puffing after climbing the flight of marble stairs that led up to it, with a NOTICE OF FORCLOSURE in his hand. And on the front lawn, just beyond a fountain of three little angles peeing into the water was a NOTICE OF PUBLIC AUCTION SIGN. Len had purchased a bad mortgage with outrageously high and unfair interest rates from the bank, a mortgage he would never be able to make good on as an “aspiring actor”. The bank, Joe Crocker, had in turn sold it to the larger firm of Lehman Brothers who filed for bankruptcy because they could not collect the full value of the home because it’s value and depreciated instead of appreciated. This, of course, was happening all over America, and the Federal Government (who had appointed the people who approve these bad loans) is now using your tax dollars to bail these companies out who invested their money in loans approved by Joe Crocker!

And there they were, two college graduates and a pseudo-Hollywood executive, bums on the streets of Southern California, displaced from their own fairy tale lives. Together, the three of them went to Saul Goldstein’s house to stay in Mendocino County, California. Saul was a nervous, freckly-faced audio-visual expert in high school whom Len had somehow, by what was mishap and now seemed like a good stop on Fortuna’s wheel, a lucky deal of kismet, kept in touch with Saul over the years to make sure, if at the very least, he was not found as a windsock in a windless barn. Len had, when Saul opened the front door of his perfectly charming, viable and seemingly self-sustaining brick home to greet his houseguests, expected to see the too frail, too blemished, too self-destructive Saul he had remembered from high school. But Saul seemed to be doing just fine from what Len noticed at a welcoming glance. Saul had ameliorated his unsightliness (which had had him arrested a time or two on the streets for indecent exposure) to a degree of average, but what struck Len, especially amidst the social turmoil that had brought the trio of vagrants to his doorstep, was how well rested and calm Saul was. There were no Asian accents decorating his home, which would have led Len to believe Saul’s apparent wealth of inner peace had been a result of Eastern practices; in fact, Saul’s house reeked of simplicity, even parsimony, to Len. They drank tea together upon settling down, though, but it was not a potent blend of Oriental anything that might induce one into a deeper sense of self-awareness, just Lipton. The three little vagabonds each had a cup, but Saul had three or four, or five or seven, with each pour from the kettle in the kitchen reusing the tea bag. Minnie and Joab had noticed this and commented on this Saul’s slight idiosyncrasy, wondering if the tea loses its flavor.
“Waste not, want not, “ said Saul, tipping his chin up long before the teacup reached his lips.
“That’s an interesting saying,” Len said, with semi-childlike interest, “Do you have any others?”
“Nothing I’m sure you haven’t already learned,” Saul said, staring into the depths of his pale brown tea, dissolving into it another sugar cube.
“What is it that you do,” asked Minnie, leaning into the conversation.
“I’m retired.”
“Retired!” punctuated Len, “You’re my age, give or take, it’s only been twelve years, give or take, since we graduated together. You must have made a killing somewhere, was it the market? You must have an astounding portfolio, though if that’s the case your abode might look into the finer things, like a flat screen, a Porsche, and fine cigars!”
“No, no, wasn’t the market or anything that would encourage the cultivation of other such practices you mentioned,” Saul said, re-engaging himself into the conversation. “I made a modest earning buying and selling audio visual equipment. You make your money when you buy things, buy your straw hats in the winter, and you never make money working for wages, as my father always said. Anyways,” Saul carried on making eye contact with his three listeners, “I saved what I earned rather than spending it on expensive cigars and cheap women, lived beneath my means, not spending more than I earned, and paying with cash instead of credit. I’ve managed to stay out of debt by living simply, as though I were in The Woods. It may not be much, but everything I own I own free and clear, everything I’ve borrowed I’ve been able to pay back, and the investments I’ve made have been smart and intuitive ones, though my accountant and broker usually disagree.”
“I see,” said Len, trying to appear enlightened, “so what you’re saying is that, in life, the bulls make money, the bears make money, and the hogs get slaughtered!”

The Learning Curve

In class Dr. Sexson had mentioned this nation's aversion from smart people. "We want leaders who are just like we are...STUPID!" he exclaimed after lamenting the anger felt towards smart people. Dr. Sexson also jokes about losing friends when they catch just a whiff of your brilliancy and intelligence. This week I received in the mail Vol. 1, no.3 of Lapham's Quarterly. It is a publication that takes a general topic that has a great deal of influence in our lives, such as money or nature, and compiles, in about 300 pages, quotes, excerpts, and articles from a diverse selection of literature. This Fall the topic of choice was learning. The opening essay from the editor, Lewis Lapham, discusses the crisis of learning in our culture, and among this issues contributors on learning (and its efficacy, or lack thereof) are Thomas Jefferson, Sylvia Plath, F. Scott Fitzgeralt, Helen Keller, Carl Jung, Don Delillo, Descartes, Quintilian, and Buddah, to name a few. I'm about half way through and one excerpt, on children, is very relevant to our class. The except is from Maria Montessori's The Secret of Childhood, and was written in the Netherlands (where many fairy tales originate) in 1936. The piece essentially says that a child's mind is not inactive and in need of molding by adults, but very active, forming a potent psychic live within the child only waiting to surface. Adults and teachers take it upon themselves to manifest a child's imaginative capabilities before they have a chance to do so and adults "have looked upon such assistance as a personal responsibility and have imagined that hey were the molders of the child and the builders of his psychic life. In so doing, adults claim for themselves an almost divine power, making themselves gods to their children, and applying to themselves the words of Genesis: "I will make man in my image." Pride was man's first sin; his attempts to replace God have been the cause of the misery of all his descendants." These are awfully big words, but they have raised one of the more interesting points in all that I've read, except for maybe Booker T. Washington suggesting that slavery was, in a way, good for African Americans because it gave them an industrial education and a great deal of self-reliance. But, in postbellum America, African Americans started to receive a more liberal education. Motessori's main point is that adults need to allow a child, who "is like a soul in a dark dungeon striving to come out into the light, to be born, to grow, which slowly but surely animates the sluggish flesh, calling to it with the voice of its will", the time to externalize their internal, psychic self on their own. But things like fairy tales, which help a child to realize his imaginative capabilities through an agency created and passed on by man and not by the child himself, corrupt a child, Montessori argues. It is as if we force feed the child the apple!, corrput them before they have free will and are given to the mercies their instructors and teachers, made in their image and likeness! Like Francis Picabia said, "Knowledge is an ancient error reflectiong on its youth."

Shelly, Freud, Chomsky, Thompson

My approach this blog is to list some of the main points and seemingly random interjections and explamations in class, try to connect them and offer any further suggestoins or links to the material. Last Wednesday we learned that fairy tales have deep structures, or underlying structures that we all know and understand, regardless of how the fairy tale is written. The linguistic topic of surface and subsurface sentence structure was widely explored by Noam Chomsky in Syntatic Structures (. He is the antithesis of postmodernism in a very cynical world and believes that science and the technologies of today are a good way of understanding history and ourselves. Here is an example of two sentences that demonstrate his surface and subsurface (deep) structures as illustrated by Chomsky : "John pets the dog" and "The dog is pet by John." Both sentences have different surface structures but their deep structure is the same. This point was made by Dr. Sexson in class with his reading of Ladle Rat Rotten Hut and also James Joyce's Finnegans Wake. "riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs."— The opening line of Finnegans Wake, which continues from the book's unfinished closing line. For those of you in Dr. Sexsons Literary Criticism class, Structuralists and Psychoanalysts love the book. It works as the human unconscious works, that is to say, non-linear with cross references, making it hard to read. Although it is regarded as one of, if not the greatest, novel of all time, it met initial harsh criticism I learned. D.H. Lawrence even said of it "what old and hard-worked staleness, masquerading as the all-new!" But that is was Dr. Sexson says it is too...nothing is really new, everything repeats itself and is retold. We hear and use the same mythologies and fairy tales everyday, they permeate our lives and pulse through the circulatory system of our unconscious, the point of arts and literature, the reason for so many versions of the same fairy tale is to make our language new to us again. One of my favorite critical essays, and piece of literature on the whole, A Defense of Poesy by Percy Shelly, says that the entire point of literature and art is to rejuvenate old hackneyed metaphors and to make our language new to us again. This is the type of essay that explains why we are English majors! Some points read: "Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replensihing it with thoughts of ever new delight...", "We have more moral, political and historical wisdom, than we know how to reduce into practise...the poetry in these systems of thought, is concealed by the accumulation of facts and calculating process...", "Poetry is indeed something diving. It is at once the centre and circumference of knowledge; it is that which comprehends all science...", and "Poetry redeems from decay the visitations of the divinity in man...It makes us the inhabitants of a world to which the familiar world is a chos...and it purges from our inward sight the film of familiarity which obscures from us the wonder of our being." Isn't the great stuff!!!?

Other Vocab Words We Learned:
Dithyrambic=melodic, lyrical songs (originally sung for Dionysus
Didactic=Pedagogical=Intended to instruct
Interpolate=instert something between fixed points (as in the details for our fairy tale displacement)

Quotes from Dr. Sexson "You don't get to go back and be a child, but you must become as a child. You must achieve the condition of a child," and "Its not what does it mean, but how does it mean?"
We understand these quotes in the context of the psychoanalytic aspects of Fairy Tales. Freud called dreams the "royal road to the unconscious," and because fairy tales are so dream like and work subliminally on our minds so much so that they are dictating forces in our lives, we may approach them in the same way we do a dream. Freud believed that one cannot interpret one's own dreams, but should instead lay back on a couch facing away from Freud, who does it for you. It's all very complex and I am completely unable to do it, but if you're interested read Freud's The Dream Work, its also on the MSU top 100.

Dr. Sexson also talked about the Universal Quest (also known as a monomyth or the epic hero's journey) of Separation, Initiation, and Return. We are first separated from the familiar (our backyard, Kansas, or Troy), initiated into the unfamiliar (The land of bOZman, the land of OZ, The Sirens, for instance), and are returned and reunited (with a different perspective and possibly a new moral). This got me to thining back a couple of years ago to a social anthropology class I took. Rites of passage in all cultures are very similar, explained Dr. Carucci, in that they involve a separation and an initiation (into womanhood or manhood), with the exception that they have points of liminality in between. A waiting period, purgatory, or possibly a porthole of sorts. I think we can find the Universal Quest, which is very much like a rite of passage, in all of our lives. When we wean ourselves from our mother (I'll do it, one of these days), leaf the nest (Ha!) and strike out on our own, maybe one day to return.

Sam and Sutter sitting in a tree... Peter and Iona Opie are world reknowned folklorists and children's street culturalists who edited the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes as well as creating some of our favorite patty cake games.

Also in passing Dr. Sexson mentioned the Aarne Thompson Motif Index, or the ATU Classification system which contains over 2000 numbered and catalogued motifs for Folk and Fairy Tales and was first construed in 1928. Because there are so many different types of the same fairy tales (mostly due to geographical location) there needs to be a motif index to help classify different plot points of the same folk tale but for different folk. Snow White is listed as 580 or 709 in English versions (the numbers inbetween denot a subcategory which becomes too convoluted. Here is a list of some of the numbers I got from http://oaks.nvg.org/folktale-types.html to show you how this works:

ANIMAL TALES
Wild Animals 1-99
The Clever Fox (Other Animal) 1-69
Other Wild Animals 70-99
Wild Animals and Domestic Animals 100-149
Wild Animals and Humans 150-199
Domestic Animals 200-219
Other Animals and Objects 220-299
TALES OF MAGIC
Supernatural Adversaries 300-399
Supernatural or Enchanted Wife (Husband) or Other Relative 400-459
Wife 400-424
Husband 425-449
Brother or Sister 450-459
Supernatural Tasks 460-499
Supernatural Helpers 500-559
Magic Objects 560-649
Supernatural Power or Knowledge 650-699
Other Tales of the Supernatural 700-749

Once upon a time...

I was scanning through some books on children's literature, more specifically scholarship and criticism surrounding it, in the library this evening and found some interesting things. One book, Feeling Like a Kid, by Jerry Griswold, stated five main themes that coarsed through children's lit: Snugness (as in blanket forts and mole holes); Scariness (Little Red Riding Hood); Smallness (Stuart Little), Lightness (Peter Pan), Aliveness (Pinocchio). These, Griswold explained, are some emotions or observations that children associate with. One book, by Jack Zipes, said of Fairy Tales which completely, unequivocally disagrees with what I said below of the moral of the story being just that, "Fairy tales are not ageless, universal, and beautiful in and of themselves, and they are not the best therapy in the world for children. They are historical prescriptions, internalized, potent, explosive, and we acknowledge the power they hold over our lives by mystifying them." What I think he means by this is that, in another clarifying quote of his, fairy tales are "made to ligitmate or criticise the course of Western Civilizing process". Fairy tales change with the times, they are a type of subconscious social commentary (and I am sure we'll have plenty of Blog posts about Freud and the subconscious) which has a proufound effect on adult life, and they are ever changing, yet ever rendolent in our lives. As such, there are as we have seen, many different renditions of the same fairy tale in order to occupy a new and vacant social issue or more of present day. It, in a way, becomes a copy of a copy of a copy as in Plato's big problem with poetry as I mentioned below. We have Cinderella and we have the Gregory McGuire novels which have more socially pertinent plot points and endings, where maybe not everything happens happily ever after. Maybe someone has to die. There are movies where fairy tale figures are displaced into reality (Enchanted) and reality figures are placed into another world through some befuddling porthole (usually a Martin Lawrence film). Fairy tales (and other childrens media) are adapted to fit the social climate, and subvert it in many ways as well (Chicken Little "The Sky is Falling!!!). And why should this not somehow reach the adults? Over 90% of purchases made by parents are influenced by their kids. They are a marketing, money making jack pot (media wise)! And their attention span and reading level is comparable with that of most adults as well!

So tonight, Sam and I were walking around Movie Lovers and she suggested we get a fairy tale. We rented Penelope, with Christina Ricci and Drew Barrymore. I don't want to give any of it away and I highly suggest renting it. It had some great fairy tale puns in it; some political and social commentary; generic, repetitive, but lovable plot cliches; and it ended happily ever after! She used a two way mirror as her portal to see from inside of her fairy tale room to which she was imprisoned by her misguided mother to look out and view her possible suitors in a library/parlor filled with hundreds of first editions! And when it was over I wanted to watch it again. You also might want to read some reviews. There were some movie critics who were apparently upset by the fact that a "fairy tale" opened and ended with "once upon a time," and "happily ever after."

I had also read earlier today that fairy tales popularize the conflicts that we humans inherently have as moral animals. This got me to wondering whether or not the five main conflicts of Mythological Literature (learned from Dr. Sexson in Mythologies) can pertain, in some arbitrary way or another to children's lit. These conflicts are: woman v man, individual v. society, man v. god, young v. old, living v. dead. Can any one think of how these conflicts are embodied in children's literature? Who are the characters? Cinderella is young, and her step-mom is old, then you have the Fairy God Mother, the Society Ball which she must return from by the stoke of midnight, and the way she interacts with Prince Charming, and death is what presumably ensues if things do not work out "happily ever after". Can we add any other conflicts? Human v. Animal, perhaps?

What's any of this worth?

We talk about canonical literature as having literary value, or worth, in a scholastic environment, and more importantly, having a resounding impact on society. I like to consider myself a bit of a rare book collector, having a small library of first editions. So I started to look up book values on the internet for first editions of some of my favorite childrens literature. These prices are usually dictated by the condition of the book, it's popularity and importance, however, are what makes it worth collecting. For instance, the Magna Carta sold at auction this year for 38 million dollars. In the Auction business, most emphatically with art and collectibles, an items appraised and fair market value are heavily influenced by provenance, or where the item has been and where its going. What cultural significance does it import, and what will its significance presumably be sixty years down the road when you want to sell it for a profit. So what of childrens literature? Here are some values for first editions. We can ascertain from some of the prices that art makes its value and everlasting importance (like aurauchs and durable pigments)that much greater.

Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White, $2500.00
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, by Roahl Dahl, $17,000
Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak, $35,000
The Cat in the Hat, Dr. Seuss, $14,500
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien, $118,800
Beatrix Potter watercolors, $80,000 to $120,000 at auction

Moral or No Moral

In the introduction of our book we find that the principal difference amongst fairy tales is that there either is or isn't a moral. This reminds me of two things. I discovered in my 300 Lit Crit class that, according to Phillip Sydney in his Apology for Poetry, "Poesy therefor is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimeses, that is to say, a representing...a speaking picture; with this end, to teach and delight." Well, the same could be said for fairy tales, I think. Their aim is to both teach and delight, or maybe just one or the other, but these are its basic aims. Furthermore, fairy tales, to a more eccentric degree than poetry I would think, are a representation, but of what I might ask? Are they representations of the soul, or caricatures of reality, or of an idea? But once the idea or conception or what have you is represented through the art and language of the fairy tale, we see representations of it, and thusly its displacement. Its displacement becomes representation of a representation. This is Plato's idea of the three beds, each one being further from the truth (the idea, the actual, and the representation), but, in the case of a fairy tale, there may never have been a basic, conceptual truth to begin with, only an abstraction. How near or far it is from any truth or aspect of reality seems arbitrary in a fairy tale, as it might be in any sort of literature and poetry, as long as its intentions are to teach and delight.

On the other hand, let me suggest of fairy tales without morals. I was scrolling through my Mythologies blog from a previous class and I had written about how Nathaniel Hawthorne displaced certain stories from Ovid's Metamorphosis into two children's book with apparent morals. They were called the Wonderbook for Girls and Boys and Tanglewood Tales, respectively. Their intention was to teach a moral through the fantastic images and narrative style (a story within a story) of the fairy tales adopted from Ovid's stories. But as we learned from Dr. Sexson about The Metamorphosis, "There is no moral!", or, "The moral of the story is the story". It is not necessarily a life lesson or broad societal impacts that makes a fairy tale or story great, but it is the story itself, in and of its own beauty. And just the same, it's damn near impossible to extract an inkling of righteousness or morality from the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela as it is from the Juniper Tree (in both stories someone is chopped up and fed to a loved one). But both are great stories, beautifully imaginative and originally oral.

Memory

Memory and oral tradition plays a very important role, I think, the all of the foundational literature, especially mythical and whimsical. I thik this is primarily due to the fact that they were, and needed to be, comitted to memory. This is most especially true with those canonical texts that were contrived before the printing press. It seems interesting to me, though, that everything that is worth remembering is written down, and promptly forgotten because it has been written. Most of the fairy tales that I know (and not very well at that)I have never read but have remembered from my childhood. Incidentally, I was making enemies and losing friends the other day as I was explaining that Memory, or Mnemosyne to someone who wasn't particularly interested. I had recommended to her Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita and we were discussing it. Nabokov, I told her, was also a lepidopterist (butterfly enthusiast and collector) and discovered his own butterfly which is named after him. Nabokov has written several other books, including one entitled Speak Memory, which he was forced to title so because his original title, Speak Mnemosyne, would have been unprounancable by his readers. "I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita." Nabokov, Lolita. What Humbert Humbert is saying in the final lines of Lolita is that through the everlastingness of art, its durable pigments of paint and ink, immortlity may be had. The only way Humbert's love for Lolita may last forever is if he writes it down (while in jail). It seems that would be the same for the literature of our childhood. Had it not been written, and magically illustrated, it certainly would not have had the same effect, would not have been so salient in our imaginations and our sensibilities.