Tips on Catching A Rich Beast, by Belle

On your left is a video by Second City TV. This feminist commentary on Disney princesses is both funny and though-provoking. Remember, it's referring to the movie. What do you think? Does Second City get the message of "Beauty and the Beast" as envisioned by Disney?

This and That About Diamonds and Toads

ey, I know the site looks hideous, but trust me, it's going to look quite snazzy soon.

Also, I will be getting the teen writing contest winning entries up in the next week or two.

Finally, for those of you who remember me announcing that I was severing Diamonds and Toads from teaching -- well, that proved impossible. So please remember, even when you see student comments EVERYONE is welcome to comment year around!

Anti-Fairy Tales?

laire Massey is one of the best fairy-tale bloggers around. She is also a talented editor, writer and poet. On her blog, The Fairy Tale Cupboard, she reports on a recent event she attended that focused on "anti-tales." Claire does an excellent job of exploring what anti-fairy tales are, so I won't go into it here.

What she provides in the post is an excellent source for fairy tale fans and students of the tales. You definitely want to check out site.

Brothers Grimm Movie: Did You Like It? Update!

I keep up with what other bloggers write about fairy tales through an Igoogle app. Today, I ran across the blog "This Miss Loves to Read," which, naturally enough, is devoted to books and reading. It's a good blog and I encourage you to check it out. Like some other bloggers, she has a Fairy Tale Friday meme, but unlike this blog, hers is not largely about fairy tales.

What got my attention was that Irena, who manages the blog, wrote a positive review of The Brothers Grimm movie. I was surprised, because my students have panned it from class to class over the course of the last few years.

Because of this, I've never even tried to see the movie. So I ask, Did you see the movie? Did you like it?

On a completely different matter, I noticed that Irena uses Mr. Linky. I am sorry to say this, but I have been to Mr. Linky several times, but have yet to figure out what function it performs that is different from other functions like labeling and linking through the platform one uses to blog. Any explanations?

Image from movie, The Brothers Grimm. The late Heath Ledger is on the left and Matt Damon is on the right.

Update: I've wasted my time on movies with worse reviews than what you all have written here. So, I think I'll get it into my Netflix queue. Although we won't be seeing it too soon, as we have just purchased Dexter, Season Four, and are riveted. A dark tale of magical-seeming powers.

I pretty much hate gore and violence, but I love Dexter. Go figure.

Look What You Can Do Thanks to Graphics Fairy!

A little while ago, I posted on The Graphics Fairy. I decided to post again, to show the possibilities of the site. As I mentioned in my last post, the site is not dedicated to fairy tales, but it didn't take me long to find a delightfully awkward image from "Beauty and the Beast" on the site.

That wasn't enough, though, because I also wanted to show how, with just a little time and imagination, a seemingly non-fairy tale related image from The Graphics Fairy can be made to tie into a fairy tale. Initially, I cherry picked the fairy tale, "Godfather Death," so the skull image from The Graphics Fairy does not seem so random.

This site is used by students, so I challenged myself to come up with art that at first seems unconnected to any famous fairy tale, to show that thinking and synthesizing images and ideas can lead to creative choices and new thinking. (OK, that is such a teachery thing to say, but what can I do? It's who I am!)

I picked "Sleeping Beauty," as written by Perrault. Most people see the story as a "prince rescues damsel" story, but in fact, the story is riddled with death. The original curse promises death. The sleep makes Beauty dead to the world. Then, in this version, Beauty is taken into potential early (well, kind of) death because her mother in law wishes to eat her and her children (yes, there are children).

Death! Everywhere! So here's the skull and what I did to it as a potential "Sleeping Beauty" illustration. First, I put a nice, delicate pink frame around it using the matte application in Picnik. After all, "Sleeping Beauty" is associated with pretty roses and youthful prettiness.

Then, I used the focal black and white application to give it that, weird, streaky look -- like a dream skull.

Finally, I used a sticker from Picnik to jazz up the right corner. To remind readers that death and beauty and life and ugliness coexist.

It didn't take long, and it's not that great, given the fact that I am no good at anything art related. But I don't have to be.

A Big Thanks to The Graphics Fairy

There's a secret source to a lot of the images I use when blogging -- well, maybe not that secret, as The Graphics Fairy gets a lot of hits. But secret or not, The Graphics Fairy blog is where I get a lot of images, and I am full of gratitude and joy that the site exists.

As its name suggests, the site is dedicated to sharing clip art, illustrations and ephemera from bygone days. As such, the images are in public domain. Theoretically, I could find them without help from a fairy. I mean, isn't Google magic? Yet, in practice, I've found that finding truly useable clip art is difficult, because there is so much dreck to wade through. The Graphics Fairy does a lot of the slogging for the follower.

Items clearly connected to a specific fairy tale are not in abundance, but why should they be? It's not a fairy tale site. I find that this doesn't matter one bit. The site is well organized and seeing the pretty pictures provided helps spur my creativity in using and editing graphics on Picnik.

The crown image took me about 3 minutes, from locating it on The Graphics Fairy to using the vignette process on it in Picnik, to posting it here.

Thanks, Graphics Fairy!

Are Fairy Tales Largely Middle Class?

Do fairy tales and social class have much to do with one another, beyond the obvious connection, which is that marriage and money provide destitute but very special people with a shot at upward mobility?

Yes, they do. Social class is at the heart of fairy tales, but not, perhaps for the reasons we are taught to think about fairy tales and their origins. The commonly accepted wisdom on fairy tales is that they emerged from the bubbling stew of the peasantry, when, after a long day slogging in the fields, they huddled around the hearth, telling tales as old as time, with universal appeal to the hearts and minds of the young at heart all around the globe.

This version of the origin of fairy tales is enchanting not just because we all want to believe that human society has universal longings (and it probably does), but because, I think, the notion that fairy tales bubbled forth from the earthy masses allows middle-class 21st century types to enjoy the violence and cruelty in fairy tales and blame the origins of them on penniless dead people who didn't know better. The accepted truths on the origin of fairy tales allow educated,"civilized" people to enjoy them while still distancing themselves from responsibility for fairy tales.

Scholars have never fully swallowed the notion that fairy tales banged around in peasant versions for the last 2,000 years. Indeed, Ruth Bottigheimer, a fairy tale scholar at Stony Brook, created quite a stir last year with Fairy Tales: A New History, which questions the notion that the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault ( among others) more or less plopped fairy tales down on paper after gathering them from peasants. The Grimms clearly edited many stories. Charles Perrault, who wrote "Cinderella" and "Puss in Boots," and a host of other "ancient" fairy tales, was an educated man and a careful writer who lived in the 17th century. That's a long time ago -- but not that long.

I've summed the argument up far too quickly, and I urge reading the book, but based on what I've read in the last few years, the origin of fairy tales remains murky. In academic circles, the argument on fairy tales and their history remains lively, with Bottigheimer and many others dubious about the stories and their peasant origins.

It seems to me that many fairy tales celebrate values that remain enshrined in the middle classes, the most vital of which is that wealth should be derived from "merit," i.e., beauty, capitalistic risk taking, and more hard work than we usually acknowledge. After all, Jack does have to climb the bean stalk three times, he has to steal from the ogre and he's got to make it back alive. Cinderella serves a sort of apprenticeship before having to dress up, dance and risk the roof over her head to win her man. Beauty, from "Beauty and the Beast" also has to win her man, this time through patience and self knowledge. These are virtues that hearken back to the beginning of the European mass middle class. The aristocracy believed in inherited privilege, no matter how stupid and ugly their progeny might be, and the very poor probably didn't go much beyond wishing for unlimited food.

You can easily prove my assertions wrong. That's what makes fairy tales so interesting. But I would assert that in a lot of fairy tales, the heroines and heroines are people who have fallen on hard times, and are merely working to regain their past riches, with a whole lot of interest. The violence and terror are the price to be paid by anyone who is foolish enough to have parents who have fallen out of the middle class.

Image by Arthur Rackham.

What Would You Want to Learn In a Class About Fairy Tales?

People who comment on D&T provide some really great ideas for me. So I'm going to the well again and asking you this:

If you were taking a college course on fairy tales, what would you want to learn? Also, which tales do you think MUST be covered? I can't cover as many as I would like, but what would you pick?

Also, since I am a writing teacher, what aspects of fairy tales would be most fun to write about? We can't do retellings; we must give essay assignments.

Ideas? I need to shake things up!

Altered image by Fernand Khnopff

A Post On Grown Ups and Fairy Tales

ne of the pleasures of having a blog is finding other people's blogs and unearthing treasures. In this case, the blog is called Lemuria Bookstore Blog. The blog focuses on all kinds of books, but this particular post has a nice take on reading fairy tales as an adult and some interesting book suggestions.

Three Bonus Items On Enchanted Conversation!

As many of you know, Enchanted Conversation is the sister publication/'zine to Diamonds and Toads. We currently have "The Little Mermaid" issue going, and today, I posted three contest winners. The story and the poem are about the experiences of "the daughters of the air." For those of you who are not familiar with the original Hans Christian Andersen story of "The Little Mermaid," the heroine actually becomes a daughter of the air. (Note: The story link is from Sur Lal Lune Fairy Tales, a site I can't recommend highly enough.)

The third winner is a Mermaid Feast menu.

Please do check out these and all of the other fabulous stories and poems in Enchanted Conversation!

Who is Your Favorite Fairy Tale Villain?

Let's face it, a good villain is essential to the success of any story. Indeed, without the villain, you often have no story.

One of the reasons fairy tales endure is that they provide an extensive array of first class villains: Snow White's stepmother, the evil father in Donkeyskin, the cannibalistic stepmother in The Juniper Tree.

Of all the villains in fairy tales, my favorite is Rumpelstiltskin. I say this because he is totally misunderstood. He just wants a child and he really does give the miller's daughter help in a variety of ways. Rumpel is a complex, ambivalent villain.

Which villain do you like best? Why?

The image is from "Donkeyskin," and is identified as anonymous, but it kind of looks like the work of Gustav Dore.

Still Working On Design

So for now, at least, we are bringing back classic "Diamonds and Toads."

The Snow-Image, By Nathaniel Hawthorne

It's hot outside today, as is always the case in Indiana in July. July is much like January. The season is still relatively new, and yet, I find myself tired of the very qualities I yearned for six months ago -- heat and light. There is nothing that feels new about the season anymore and the delightful changeability of the previous and following months are not present.

In short, it will be July forever. I am bored.

I was noodling about on Google today -- although I should be gardening -- and thought about Nathaniel Hawthorne. You know, of House of the Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter fame. I always connect him with Herman Melville, the man who wrote Moby Dick, largely because they were both from New England.

I like Hawthorne much better. I've never gotten through Moby Dick, though God knows I tried in undergraduate school. Hawthorne's spooky imagination appeals to me far more. I've read a good number of his works voluntarily, but have enjoyed none like "Rappaccini's Daughter," a hauntingly magical, enchanting romance in which the girl in question has been raised in a garden full of poisonous plants, and -- I won't spoil it, but you should read it. It's a longish short story and as darkly magical as anything you will find in Andersen or the Brothers Grimm.

But since "Rappaccini's Daughter" is about gardens, another story by Hawthorne, "The Snow Image," which takes place during an afternoon in winter, is my recommendation today. It's a fairy tale of sorts and while didactic and highly sentimental, its magical elements lend it a early Victorian charm that make reading it a worthwhile on a blistering summer's day.

Snow image by Edward R. Hughes. Garden image by Eugene S. Grasset.

Dollhouse Update, Reminder For Blogging Friends

We've made much progress on the dollhouse. It's been sanded and is getting minor bits of construction. Here's a picture of it in our garden. Our garden is the perfect place for fairies and enchanted beings to hide, as it is a tangled mess, so who could possibly find a gnome or sprite in there?

We did see a teensy little frog in a day lily. We live at the edge of a protected wetland. At night, zillions of frogs sing us to sleep. Geese and ducks honk and quack all day long and every bee in the Midwest seems to hang out in our garden. It's all very messy and poorly groomed But we love it. Just like the little froggy in the day lily does.

Reminder to my blogging friends. I hope you will blog about the teen writing contest and send me a copy of your post or tweet. So far, I've received distressingly few inquiries about the contest. So I hope you will help me get the word out -- and try for the chance at an Amazon gift card!

First Enchanted Dollhouse Image

Well, here's the first image of my 40-year-old doll house, already being worked in my husband's shop in the basement. I plan to share the process while we are restoring, and hopefully, get ideas from my online fairy tale friends.

First question: Should we just paint exterior? If so, what colors?

I am also reminding both teen visitors and bloggers about the two contests. You can find information on both on this page.