Tucker describes Bruno Bettelheim's take on Grimm's tales: "the horrors of wicked witches and candy houses allow children to process their darkest fears and greatest desires. Here, Freud's theories take center stage: Cinderella's shoe transforms into a symbol of female sexuality that, when lost, spells the end of virginity." Author Maria Tatar, meanwhile, has a feminist perspective on the fairy tale from the 16th century to the present. Tucker says,

She argues that the fairy-tale fear factor is less about cautioning children and more about the need to control the young adults that they become. Women in particular are meant to take notice. Gluttony, infidelity and arrogance are, she charges, all part of a "pantheon of female sins" that must be reined in at all costs. Fairy tales, according to Tatar, teach girls to accept their miserable fate so that they will become docile wives and mothers.

Jack Zipes, meanwhile, makes the hard-to-dispute claim "that fairy tales are above all products of specific cultural moments and have always been used to reinforce social norms as well as to subvert them." As these dueling analyses make clear, fairy tales have become something of an interpretive football in the past few decades, and remain so today — especially around Halloween. I've always been amused by the Freudian angle. The little mermaid's loss of her voice, for instance, is supposed to be a metaphor for castration, and when I lost my voice earlier this week, that felt pretty accurate (I also lost my keys, so I was doubly impotent). Of course, that very same tale is in a way a caution against female overreaching, since in the Hans Christian Andersen version she has to turn into a "spirit" while somebody else marries the prince. But neither Bettelheim's nor Tatar's interpretive lens quite jibes with my experience of fairy tales.

As a kid, I was obsessed with both Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre and Andrew Lang's Fairy Books. The former, for the unfamiliar, was a series of slightly wacked-out takes on popular Grimm and non-Grimm stories. One favorite of mine was "The Princess Who Never Laughed," which included a minor character named "Phlegmatic Jack." Another was the incredibly creepy "Rapunzel," starring Duvall herself, and, I'm pretty sure, a horrifying screaming radish. The Fairy Books, meanwhile, contained all the standard tales, but my favorites were somewhat off the beaten path. I remember trying to convince my dad that it was a Christmas "tradition" that he read me a story called "The Castle Kerglass," which was extremely long and involved (if memory serves) a mysterious gatekeeper holding a giant shot-put. Yelling vegetables and mystical shot-putters pretty much exemplify what fairy tales are about for me: how fucking weird the world is.

Yes, sometimes fairy tales reinforce social norms — but they almost always do it in a way that's bizarre. Outsized punishments are meted out for small sins. Fruits and vegetables are both weapons and vehicles. Lovers turn monsters and frogs into lovers. In their original versions, many fairy tales are downright terrifying, but I like them that way. Too often, contemporary children's books are meant to reassure or to teach kids an orderly view of the universe. But if there's anything I learned from Shelley Duvall and her demon-radishes, it's that the universe is disorderly and often batshit insane. No story can fully prepare you for life's disasters, heartbreaks, swine flu epidemics, and gradual pileup of family secrets and broken glassware, but fairy tales do a better job than most. So go ahead, scare your kids with the Grimms' Cinderella this Halloween. There's more where that came from.

Academic Studies Of Fairy Tales [Wall Street Journal]

According to this piece, "hate crushes" are all the rage amongst celebrities - I think Twitter was involved. Mine isn't just for one person - it's for a whole collective of enemies. Specifically, the neighbors who live in the house at the end of the block.

They look inoffensive enough: a rag-tag group of 20-something hippies whose numbers seem to ebb and flow with, one presumes, the vagaries of the pot harvest and the quality of the vibes. My ire was first aroused shortly after we moved in. A whole passel of them were lounging - insolently, in retrospect - on their porch, smoking. I greeted them. They collectively ignored me and, I was pretty sure, sneered.

"They were probably stoned," said my boyfriend consolingly, so I decided to give them another chance. Later that same week, I took a cab home from a late dinner. There they were - sneering at me as I alighted. I called out a cheery greeting and, once again, was stonewalled.

"I guess they think I'm a...a pampered bourgeoise, taking cabs," I said to my boyfriend. "I'm sure they'd never sully the environment with a cab - they're probably anti-cars. They despise me, do they? Well, two can play that game."

After that, I pointedly ignored them. At the same time, I became fixated on them. Where did they go, on their army of bikes? What job could possibly call for cut-off overalls? I came up with private names for them: "Snuffkin," "Old One," "Amazing Girl," and "the Guy with Plugs in His Ears." Collectively, they were, of course, The Magic Band. Sometimes at night when I took out the trash, I would wander, seemingly casually, towards their house and stare up at the lighted windows, where I could vaguely make out Indian bedspreads and African drums on the wall. Once, I could have sworn I heard someone playing a djembe.

"They're probably freegans," I said bitterly to my boyfriend, who was sick of talking about them. Sometimes, though, when we walked past their house, he'd indulge me. "You speak hippie," I'd urge. "What are they eating? What are they talking about? What are they listening to?" And he'd say "a casserole, probably involving yams" or "Noam Chomsky" or "Trinity, "Three Piece Suit,""just to placate me.

I had weird fantasies in which we triumphed over them - three-legged races, and cook-offs. I figured they had scorn for my "Zephyr Sophisticate" bicycle with its basket and bell, and the pots of herbs and flowers I'd placed on our steps. (They had what looked like a single stalk of corn and, visible from our back window, a scraggly marijuana plant.) One night they brought out instruments and jammed on the street. Others danced with abandon. One girl - I'm not sure she lived there - did a dance with torches. The neighbors seemed confused, and kept their distance. I wandered over and stood diffidently nearby, in a vintage dress and a pair of heels. Then I went home.

"I talked with those neighbors today," remarked my boyfriend one night. "They're really nice." He went on to detail them - a student, a non-profit worker, a busker, a couple who were transient. He hadn't seen the interior of their house, he said. They'd offered him a beer but he'd said no. He didn't seem to feel this was momentous, and I felt both curiously betrayed and let down. I had known, of course, that he spoke their language - a language of no judgments and playing by ear and smoking weed, a language I had no ear for. I knew equally well that my hard edges would only have beaten against their soft ones, if we ever did meet.

But when our block party came, I made a decision. I brought them a bundt cake. I had thought about this a lot, and this particular recipe, which I'd never made, and which involved instant pistachio pudding and chocolate syrup and was kind of disgusting in a mid-century way, had suggested itself to me as a peace offering. I dusted it with sugar and carried it over with ceremony. I knocked on the door, and finally one of them - the Old One - answered the door. "This cake is for you," I said formally. "Thanks," he said, taking it with the air of one not used to looking gift horses in mouths. "Did you guys just move in?" I stared at him blankly. He was one of the ones who'd snubbed me - once in a group and once while doing something with a saw to his bicycle chain, while wearing a leghorn hat. "No," I said slowly. "We've been here for a year."

"Cool," he said. "We'll hang out some time."

When I looked up "hate crush" I came across an article that claims that

Women, more than men, tend to form hate crushes. Why? Physiologically, women have a deeper limbic system in the brain which makes them feel things more intensely. Also, women are more relationship-oriented as they are the gender who tends and befriends.

It is true, these relationships have much of the unpleasant intensity of a crush, the element of obsession, the need to bring it up at all times - and, most important, next to nothing to do with the object thereof. A "hate crush" is about you, about projections and insecurities. If a crush is about seeing the best version of yourself as you envision it, a "hate crush" is about the worst. I know many a friend - male and female - who's fallen prey to the classic scenario, such feelings about an ex's new partner, something social networking, Twitter and Google help exactly not at all. It becomes a reciprocal relationship - comparing themselves to pictures and interests and resumes and musical tastes. One cliched quote can provide an unwholesome sense of validation, even as it feeds the mania. And as in many a crush, they don't always know you exist.

How To Get Over A Hate Crush [Examiner]

(When I began this essay, I realized I had a few things to say about boys' books and girls' books and how much I've had to talk about them AGAINST MY WILL, but I went on for 19 hours and decided to spare everyone who just wanted some turtle in their soup, many thanks. To read the official preface to the piece, click here.)

For a young reader, I found a surprising number of my books on airport and train station carousels. (See below for more on my status as a world traveler of note.) For this reason, I was introduced to the wondrous Roald Dahl not through the delightful Danny, Champion of the World, James and the Giant Peach, or, of course, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but by the truly demented Tales of the Unexpected and Switch Bitch. (Leave it to me to lead with leprosy.)

That's why when I espied Henry Sugar and Six More on the top shelf of the children's section — still can't decide if it belongs there — I spent my hard-earned budget on the hardcover although it cut out a good 5 paperback purchases. A) It was worth it. B) Henry Sugar is an odd duck of a book, and no two ways about it — the kind of hodgepodge collection you might acquire if you simply asked an author to turn whatever currently sat on the desk and one or two old published favorites from years past, then hurriedly asked for an essay "On Writing" to round out the page count. (For all I know, this is exactly what happened.)

It begins with the spooky and brief story of a boy who rescues a turtle from a terrible death, moves on to a delightful tale of a speeder and a pickpocket, shifts to a story of a trove of Roman silver uncovered in an English field, moves to "The Swan," one of the most terrifying stories about bullying ever written, segues into the fantastical title story about an Englishman who learns to see without his eyes, then takes a break for Dahl to talk about how he became a writer (he invented the word "Gremlin" and hung out with FDR!) before presenting the first thing he's ever published-an account being shot down over North Africa during WWII.

But for all that the collection could seem scattershot, it is not-because it is held firmly together by Dahl's enduring theme: The terrible power of the thick-headed bully, and the transcendence of knowledge and kindness in the face of meaningless cruelty.

Common to horror writers is this pitched battle of the good against the innocent, the moment of quivering uncertainty when we don't know yet whether something terrible is going to happen and won't be able to stand it either way. But what's particular to Dahl, and what I'd forgotten, is how much he associates evil with eating. Because, whether it's to chop up a turtle alive during Waterloo for a dinner course of soup, kill and hack apart a swan for play, or simply greedily hoard silver a stash of wondrous silver, evil in Dahl is associated with overfeeding, and if you need to know who the bullies are, look for close-set, glittering eyes; fleshy lips and a wet, open mouth; meaty arms and thighs; nuts stuck in teeth, or simply the overly oiled who seek only to pamper and increase their flesh.

A Freudian might point out-and might manage to actually be right-that Dahl's linking of evil bullies to food might easily be traced back to the days when he could be caned for leaving a burnt spot on a slice of bread. And in each story there is that horrible moment of non-control and terror when the turtle caught; when the swan is actually shot; the siren goes off; the yogi dies; the silver stolen outright.

But Dahl, for all that horror, is an absurd optimist, who always allows the good to prevail. (My personal favorite revenge on the greedy comes from his story "Lamb to the Slaughter", in which – spoiler – a woman kills her husband with a large frozen lamb, then feeds it to the policemen investigating the crime.) Without exception, the persecuted simply swim, fly, drive, or otherwise slip the grasp of the cruel world. Even Henry Sugar, who's only held back by his own greedy proclivities, winds up a globe-hopper creating homes for the fellow homeless orphans.

Each reader will forever keep the image that stays with her of how they've escaped the grasp of the gobblers of life. (Mine is always Peter from "The Swan" not flying away, but moving his head back and forth to gently make enough of a depression in the train tracks to not be killed when it passes over him. But what Henry Sugar reminds us is that although the world is ruled by the senses, there is more shoot or be shot, cane or be caned, eat or be eaten. While the greedy try to eat it all up, the good see right through them.

—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—-—--

Hello pretties! Very brief Plotfinder this week from a friend who IS DESPERATE to know. The only detail she remembers is that a black girl is told to put butter in her hair to calm it, and, lacking butter, uses ghee. Takers? I remember using butter as lotion which makes your hands smell rancid (Flowers, yes?) but am clueless on this one.

Answer in comments below or send to jezziefinelines@gmail.com. Winner gets FREE COPY.

Also have to relate brief story of what happened to me this morning, JUST BECAUSE I LOVE IT. I live in Jersey City and travel out of Newark Penn station 900 times a month to various places, supporting Amtrak as is my way. (I love trains.) The other day I was in Hudson Booksellers and started chatting with the clerk, and, since it was almost exactly the pub date of my book, told her all about it, and also that I would bring her a card and a copy the next week when I returned. So TODAY, I go in, w/card, and it turned out SHE'D ALREADY ORDERED IT AND THERE IT WAS ON THE SHELVES!



Since I discovered Roald Dahl en route (and contributor Jennifer Weiner, for what that's worth) I urge you — if you are in a place of transit and see a bookseller and you feel like it, tell them about this book! They seem like they'll order pretty much anything.

xoox
L

I was heavily influenced in my desire to can by two factors. One: The Butt'ry Shelf Cookbook. This curiosity, still widely available on the internet, was written in the mid-20th century by a New England eccentric and centered around her family's year as seen through the well-stocked "butt'ry" where she and her relatives industriously filled the shelves with homemade liqueurs, ripening fruitcakes, an ever-increasing store of foodstuffs and, of course, all the homemade jams and preserves a country housewife's heart could desire. It is not surprising that the book, already nostalgic at the time of publication, was illustrated by the author's neighbor Tasha Tudor. It's also not shocking that it was a major influence on my mid-childhood years (tweens didn't exist in the 1980s.) It was under its auspices that I attempted to "cure" meats in the playhouse in our back yard, have a taffy pull by myself, and churn butter in my dollhouse's 4" churn.

It will come as no great shock to regular readers of this space that these efforts met with sincere approbation by my grandfather, the family patriarch and eccentric, whose fear of a vague apocalyptic phenomenon known only as "The Bad Times" had led him to install an enormous deep freeze, build a makeshift compound, and melt and bury various metals under the house. "When the Bad Times come, they'll be eating each other," he'd say darkly, then go to a yard sale and buy another dozen pressure cookers. (Money bonfires also figured in the prognostications.) Some attributed his death to disappointment that none of this ever came to pass; had he but waited a few years...

Naturally, canning and preserving played no small role in our Bad Times Survival Guide. As such, my enthusiastic attempts at jam-making and pickling were encouraged. I didn't know what I was doing; I didn't really think about botulism or sterilizing or mold or recipes. All I knew was that we had to preserve as much as possible. I'd aid my grandfather in preparing the endless jars of nearly-inedible plum jam he distilled from the tree in the yard, or throw some herbs and vegetables in a can, add some salt water, and call it a day. (One particularly memorable jam involved pine needles.) Most of what I made molded before we could enjoy the fruits of my housewifery - despite the mysterious preponderance of pressure cookers, we never processed anything - but I was undaunted.

As I got older, I got keen on the notion of homemade jam as a gift. By 12 or so, I'd read up on procedure and had come to understand the two most important things about canning: 1) It's really, really expensive and 2) It's an enormous, horrible ordeal. Far from making practical use of the overflow of home-grown produce and ensuring a few vitamins through the long winter, for most of us, canning and preserving is an exercise in self-indulgent excess. If you buy farmer's market fruit, even the "damaged" varietal - and what's the point otherwise - it's exorbitant, and that's without even talking about the ready supply of ball jars you'll need. Once you've got your canner, your wide-mouth funnel, your selection of ladles, you're set for life (and those sales of the belongings of a dead old woman by her not-interested-in-canning boomer children are a boon in this regard) you're set, but it's an outlay. Then comes the actual process: whether it's stirring a kettle of jam in the summer heat or minding an insolent kettle of apple butter in the fall or just the sticky, messy ordeal of covering stuff with syrup or processing pickles, it's kind of nightmarish. (And the kitchen cleanup is second to none in its scope and difficulty.) The satisfaction of having that smug row of jewel-hued jars is, yes, almost worth it. But after the process, I find I am greedy: I don't want to give away my expensive, beautiful, labor-intensive preserves; I want to hoard them. If I can bring myself to give some away, I secretly want to ask for the jar back. Just last week I had to suppress a scream of wounded fury when I saw my boyfriend had opened a jar of rhubarb-and-onion relish (I specialize in the kind of thing no one actually wants to eat) to accompany a turkey burger. I guess this is a small taste of the pain of old-timey household drudgery: not just the labor, but the pain of seeing your laboriously-scrubbed floors muddied or hand-washed clothing soiled and the knowledge that you'll have to do it all over again, ad infinitum. In this regard, it really is a taste of the past.

And yet - or perhaps because of - the blatantly farcical nature of modern urban canning, it's becoming a thing. Like quilting, embroidery and all manner of DIY, canning's now the purview of the young, with more than half of enthusiasts, according to UPI, under 40. The "Recession" argument's obvious: we want to feel connection and security and the illusion of self-sufficiency. Maybe the general fuckwittery of the system has motivated a subconscious desire to live outside the grid - or at least cleave to the competence of another era. It makes sense in the scheme of eating locally and seasonally and there's also the little matter of avoiding corn syrup, a near-impossibility with anything mass-produced (and really, the good stuff's as pricey as doing it at home, albeit less of a headache.) As a result, we are seeing a rash of dubiously-spiced homemade jams in marketplaces and boutiques across the land. I succumbed to one amateur canner's "experiment" last week: peach jam with tarragon, for $10. I lived to regret it. But even so, I wondered that she was able to part with it: the sense of achievement, and the security of that store, is, for many of us, comforting in a way money never can be. And anyway, come the Bad Times, only gold will be worth anything.

Canning Not Just For Grandma Anymore [UPI]

While the essay covers pretty much every facet of girlhood - and does a good job of capturing a lot of adolescence's pain and rapture, Flanagan's ultimate take on Twilight's appeal is in some ways reductive:

If Edward fails—even once—in his great exercise in restraint, he will do what the boys in the old pregnancy-scare books did to their girlfriends: he will ruin her. More exactly, he will destroy her, ripping her away from the world of the living and bringing her into the realm of the undead. If a novel of today were to sound these chords so explicitly but in a nonsupernatural context, it would be seen (rightly) as a book about “abstinence,” and it would be handed out with the tracts and bumper stickers at the kind of evangelical churches that advocate the practice as a reasonable solution to the age-old problem of horny young people. ...That the author is a practicing Mormon is a fact every reviewer has mentioned, although none knows what to do with it, and certainly none can relate it to the novel...But the attitude toward female sexuality—and toward the role of marriage and childbearing—expressed in these novels is entirely consistent with the teachings of that church...The series does not deploy these themes didactically or even moralistically. Clearly Meyer was more concerned with questions of romance and supernatural beings than with instructing young readers how to lead their lives. What is interesting is how deeply fascinated young girls, some of them extremely bright and ambitious, are by the questions the book poses, and by the solutions their heroine chooses.

Flanagan is not the first critic to make the explicit link between Edward's self-imposed restraint (he is afraid, to the uninitiated, that if he loses control with Bella he'll be overcome by the temptation to drink her blood, killing her) and the loss of virtue. In several reviews, critics called this out as a transparent bit of moralizing; or a whitewashing of teen sexuality. At the risk of lowering the discourse, sometimes a vampire is just a vampire. To my mind, such simplification — and co-option — does a disservice to the story's elemental appeal. Whatever the author's own inclinations, the book's moral universe is not a didactic one (except in the good/evil way, of course.) Parents advise using birth control; in a later book, characters aren't adverse to abortion. If Meyer had wanted to impose her moral views; she could have — the book was hardly undertaken as a commercial labor. More to the point, were sex actually morally wrong in this universe, there'd be no real tension to the story. That's not to say that the lack of sex isn't a driving force —vampires by definition conflate seduction and death, hence: conflict. Rather, what some critics describe as chaste and Flanagan as essentially puritanical is a return to the basic principle of the page-turner: make them wait for it. I'm passionate about this because I went into the movie without any particular investment, and found myself so swept up in the maelstrom of teen emotion that I fainted. (Yes.) Had this been rooted in a deep-seated puritanism I don't think this would have been the case. More likely, it was the result of a drama that came from something much more fundamental, tension.

Flanagan feels Twilight succeeds because it taps into the innermost wishes of teen girls — for comfort, for love, for reassurance. While we might disagree on the particulars, I won't argue with that: what I will say is that (based on my own humiliating experience) people generally — not just young girls — are moved by simple stories, well-told, and that is not something anyone grows out of. (And it's a pet peeve when teens are treated as a separate species with unfathomable motivations.) Restraints make for good stories (see: the popularity of Jane Austen adaptations) but as society loses them, usually the fictional substitutes we come up with are too lcking in urgency to really command much interest. We've lost a lot of the tricks of good storytelling, and if vampire love is the only way to make people realize that, bring it.

What Girls Want [The Atlantic]
Twilight Is The New Breed of Chick Flick [AP]

Earlier: 7 Vampires Better Than Twilight's Edward Cullen
Twilight At Midnight: Smells Like Teen Spirit