Another Night
The Wife is out shopping, "Angel" went down like a dream again, "Josie" is visiting her mom and I'm home alone.The cricket-and-frog chorus is warming up in the swamp behind our house and dusk is falling. Time to step off the deck to our fire pit, burn some garbage, and reflect on things...beginning with the story I read to "Angel" tonight for bedtime.
The Plot: a man finds a carnivorous plant. He takes it home, pots it, and feeds it a weiner. A dog comes along and steals the weiner from the plant. The plant then bites the dog's freakin' tail off.
Do these children's books authors read the stuff they write? Do they know that children think about the stuff they read in these books? I caught "Angel" looking speculatively at Mitch yesterday and wondered what was going through her mind. Guess I can stop wondering now. That book should really go in the garbage, except that I really like the story about the giraffe and the nine monkeys.
posted by Dan @ 7:30 PM
2 Comments:
My father is a professor of English literature. He knew that you were supposed to read little girl's fairy tales, so he got his academic copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales out and read to me.
Did you know that Cinderella's step mother cut off pieces of her daughter's feet to make them fit into the glass slipper and that the idiot prince did not know he had the wrong woman (twice) until he saw the trail of blood?
How about that the evil queen in Snow White was made to wear iron shoes that had been put in the fire until they were red hot in order to make her dance at the wedding?
Or that the little mermaid did not marry the prince but lived miserably alone ever after...or turned into sea foam depending on which version you read?
I did...at four.
"Ah..." says Dan. "Now I understand how she turned out the way she did."
Well, yes, Grimm was pretty graphic...but then if memory serves, that wasn't so much Fairy Tales as it was Faerie Tales.
Ask any old Irishman about Faeries...they are quite a different thing from our conception of Fairies. They're typically dark, sinister, and in general not the sort of supernatural being you want to have show up in your house.
It wasn't really until Disney stood things on their head that Faeries became tiny people who sprinkled pixie dust all over the place and made people happy.
So no, though I haven't actually read many of the source stories like The Little Mermaid and so forth, red-hot iron shoes and the like don't really surprise me.
Also, as I recall, Grimm's Faerie Tales were aimed at much more of an adult audience. Not so with the dog getting his tail bit off.
But your comment does enlighten me as to who and what you are. Daughter of an English Lit professor...you must have been very naughty in a previous life.
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