Okay, guys, I am so wiped out. I’m having a Halloween party
tonight, kind of, so I’ve spent the entire weekend cleaning and baking and
shopping, and any spare time has been for writing, and somehow none of the
writing managed to be tonight’s blog.
I started a post on noses in the Grimm brothers, and another
one about the story “Donkey Cabbages,” and there’s still that final entry in
the Lindworm Series that I’ve been putting off, but I just haven’t had the
energy to get to the end of them, so enjoy a night of rambling, I guess.
Last Sunday I helped out with children’s church for the
first time at my new church, and, well. It was an experience. We learned about
Jonah, and then everyone in the room got sent home with a goldfish. Including me.
Look. I love animals. There are those who are concerned that
I may have a bit of a problem with spontaneous pet acquisition. (Spoiler alert:
we’re working up to the place where they might have a point.) But I didn’t really
want a goldfish at that moment.
However, having received said goldfish, I felt obligated to
provide it with the best quality of life possible. So I bought a tank, water
conditioner, and goldfish food. I named it Eunice. I got home, I set up the
tank, and the tank instantly sprung a leak. Back to the pet store. New tank,
bigger and sturdier.
Of course, by the time the poor thing got set up in a new
tank again, the stress was really taking a toll. Long story short, I kept
Eunice alive for slightly less than seven hours.
So now I have a beautiful tank set up, and no one in it. And
then yesterday I went shopping for Halloween party stuff. I couldn’t find any
caution tape, and I was sad. So I went to the pet store.
Meet my new friend. His name is Mars.
So now it’s me and my three boys in the tower here: Mars,
Helios, and Alfred Lord Tennyson.
I’ve been thinking lately about getting a hamster. His name
would be Icarus, of course. And I already have the cage set up for my future
guinea pigs, Perseus and Andromeda, who would of course produce more adorable
guinea pigs. And I really miss having hermit crabs. I’ve even worked out where
in my little apartment everyone would go.
Seriously, guys, I have a problem. An animal addiction. Send
help now.
-
On a completely unrelated note, I’ve been thinking again
about that stuff I was reading a while ago about oral traditions dying out. And
it wasn’t a problem I was really taking seriously at the time, because I
figured, well, we just read things now instead of listening to them. I hadn’t really
thought so much about how stories are very much falling out of the collective
consciousness of our community, and that does freak me out a little.
Last night I watched “The Swan Princess” with my ten-year-old
cousin. She’d never seen it before. She’d never even heard of it before. And
Odette, for my generation, was like, the ultimate princess. Sure, we were all
about the Disney, but when you got right down to it, we’d choose our bird girl
every time. I don’t think I know a single girl my age who doesn’t still want desperately
to have Odette’s hair.
A couple weeks ago, I found out my best friend had never
heard of “The Brave Little Tailor” before. So now I’m sitting here trying to
comprehend how one spends a full two decades without a picture of this
adorable, ridiculous little fly-swatter in their head, and, like, it does not
compute?
Once I mentioned “The Princess and the Pea” in passing, and
the person I was talking to was all, like, “What’s that about?”
I strongly suspect that there are a great many people in
this world who are unfamiliar with stone soup.
So I was thinking the other day about (of course) Beauty and
the Beast, and how I got to the early novel-length version that I frequently
rant about. It happened on a ballet website. The details are foggy—I think that
I was in the midst of one of my “Swan Lake” phases, and trying to track down
performance variants after learning about the version where all the swans are
boys.
Anyway, I ended up on this site for this fancy ballet
company or something, where they had the complete histories of all their
performances. And I guess there’s a ballet of Beauty and the Beast, because
this site detailed the entire history of the story, from that French novel
straight on up to Disney. And that was the only place I’d ever heard that first
story—it’s floating around all over the internet now, but back then it might as
well have not existed at all.
I know that I’m way more into fairy tales than the average
person. But I also know that a lot of
these stories are built into me, as old as any of my earliest memories, that
they’ve been shaping who I am since long before I started consciously seeking
them out.
A lot of kids aren’t going to be able to have that. Not with
the same stories, anyway, and not with the same kinds of stories—if we don’t tell
our stories anymore, if we just watch the movies of them like we mostly do,
everyone knows the same version. You lose what I think is the most beautiful
thing about folklore; the story never belongs to one person, because everyone
has touched it, but it belongs to everyone in a slightly different way. I can’t—and
don’t want to—imagine a world where fairy tales are like any other form of
story-focused media, where there’s just one, officially recognized version. I
can’t imagine many things more tragic than losing the unpredictable, ever-changing,
multifaceted beauty of a fairy tale.
So please, don’t let our stories die.
No comments:
Post a Comment