A Hairy Situation with Spiderwick

Fuse #8 alerted me to the new Spiderwick Chronicles movie trailer on Yahoo!, so I checked it out. "Wow, they're really playing up the darkness of the books," I thought, before realizing that for some cyberreason my browser wasn't showing me a picture.

So I sought out the same trailer on YouTube. This peek at the movie emphasizes the story of troubled twin Jared over nerdy twin Simon, to the extent that you'd have to read the books to know that Freddie Highmore is playing two parts. Perhaps special-effects shots of the two boys interacting are still being worked on.

As shown in the cover above, Tony DiTerlizzi drew Jared with a messy part in his hair, Simon with a neat one. In the movie, Jared has no part at all, just unflattering prepubescent bangs. Back in college my theatrical roommates called that sort of sacrifice "follicle realism." Judging by Highmore's own hairstyle at a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory premiere in Europe, however, he already understands hair as an artistic expression.

What Has She Got in Her Pocketses?

And the Oz and Ends Award for Best Use of an Inexplicable Trend in Kids' Clothing goes to...

The Game, by Diana Wynne Jones.

This brief novel is yet another of Jones's magical explorations of sibling relationships. At the start young Hayley, an only child who's been raised by strict, old-fashioned grandparents in the city, is suddenly sent off to a country house in Ireland that's buzzing with cousins.

To symbolize Hayley's initial isolation, Jones highlights the contrast between her clothing and how her cousins dress. On page 3 Hayley is wearing "her neat floral dress and her shiny patent leather shoes." Her cousins, she notes bitterly, wear "long baggy trousers with lots of pockets down the sides." But in chapter six we know Hayley can fit in with her family when an aunt supplies her with "shorts with pockets, trousers with pockets,...jackets with pockets, sweatshirts with both hoods and pockets..."

Yes, Jones manages to find meaning in what has struck me (and what I suspect has struck her) as an inexplicable fashion trend: cargo pants. Shorts and trousers with spacious pockets hanging off them like popped blisters. Given all the electronic devices we carry around these days, there may be a practical purpose for all those pockets. But how many kids actually use them all? Why are they there?

Leave it to Diana Wynne Jones to supply a masterly answer. The game in The Game is a cousinly competition to collect things in the mythosphere (I'll discuss later). Hayley has pockets to store golden apples so she can pull them out later. In other words, her pants with lots of pockets down the sides turn out to be significant both to revealing character and furthering the plot.

Making Off with The Lightning Thief

On Friday, Ann Giles devoted her blog on the Guardian's website to "The best Aspie fiction," meaning books about and for young readers who have been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

Giles included Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (the Potterian British title for The Lightning Thief) on her short list of "great Asperger's fiction" for young readers. Separately she lists "books that aren't openly Aspie, but that have a real Aspie feel to them," writing, "Kate Thompson's book [The Last of the High Kings] is really about Irish fairies, but I suspect they are closet Aspies, just like Rick Riordan's American half gods."

Yet Riordan clearly didn't write about young people with Asperger's syndrome. His narrator, Percy Jackson, is explicit about the diagnoses he's received: attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia. In addition, he's a world-class wiseass. All of which he traces back to being son of a Greek god.

This morning a commenter called Giles on her choice of Riordan's book, writing, "I would say that while Rick Riordan's LIGHTNING THIEF series is meant to show ADHD and dyslexia; I've heard him speak and he did not mention Asperger's as a part of his books." Indeed, on his website Riordan states, "Making Percy ADHD/dyslexic was my way of honoring the potential of all the kids I've known who have those conditions."

To which Giles replied, "I agree about the Percy Jackson book, but ADHD is close to AS and I think the way the half god children feel different fits in just as well with Asperger's. It's that outsider feeling, being different, that readers need." But Giles didn't include Lightning Thief in her list of "books that aren't openly Aspie"; she included it on the main list and confidently stated that its heroes are "closet Aspies."

I disagree with Giles's comment that ADHD is "close to AS." The two diagnoses can overlap and be confused, but the whole point of separate diagnoses is to recognize each in order to allow the best understanding and treatment. Dr. R. Kaan Ozbayrak's Aspergers.com website notes, "DSM-IV prohibits diagnosing ADHD when there is PDD [a pervasive developmental disorder such as Asperger's] since all the ADHD symptoms can be attributed to PDD. Clinicians who overlook other symptoms of PDD tend to diagnose these children as ADHD." In other words, assuming kids with Asperger's syndrome actually have ADHD is a common mistake, and it's a mistake for doctors to treat children with Asperger's as if they had ADHD.

Giles apparently feels that "that outsider feeling" is all that's needed to define "Aspie fiction." But that feeling isn't confined to children with Asperger's traits, nor would they necessarily see themselves in any character who feels like an outsider. Percy Jackson shows no hallmarks of Asperger's syndrome. To claim that Riordan wrote about "closet Aspies" looks like projecting one's own concerns onto his work, neither respecting his characterization nor the distinct qualities of young people with Asperger's.

Let the Wild Rumpus Begin

Here's the first production still released from Spoke Jonze's filming of Where the Wild Things Are, by Maurice Sendak, courtesy of Movieweb. A well-chosen image, I must say. Evocative, exciting, and yet unrevealing.

Almost enough to overcome my dread based on the track record for feature-length movies made from picture books.

Penguins of Doom—Tastes Like Barbecued Chicken!

I spent a very pleasant afternoon celebrating the official publication date of Greg Fishbone's epistolary farce for young people, The Penguins of Doom: From the Desk of Septina Nash. There was a catered cookout, lovely views of wedding and quinceanera parties getting their photos taken at the nearby pond, and good company of all ages.

The only problem was that the other guests of honor besides Greg--the Penguins of Doom themselves!--hadn't shown up. We had to make do with a Happy Feet balloon, some advance reading copies, and individually autographed limited-edition pages of the manuscript. Mine, shown above, is page 91. Yes, I'm that special. (Enter here for a chance to win your own!)

Penguins of Doom is being publishing by Blooming Tree Press, a young, small press that's conserving costs by printing books in Singapore. And that means they're subject to delays that don't affect books printed in North America, such as storms in the Pacific. So it all comes back to melting icecaps.

When Pigs Fly in The Baum Bugle

Yesterday I posted links to some images that supplement my article about John Dough and the Cherub (1906) in the latest issue of The Baum Bugle. Today I'm displaying another image from that magazine that got pixelated in the printing.

The small image to the right, which comes from Oz-Central.com, is a color plate from Ruth Plumly Thompson's The Wishing Horse of Oz (1935). It shows Pigasus, the winged pig, and Princess Dorothy trapped in the coils of a stretchable palace.

Who's the man poking his head out of his skylight? And how might he help Dorothy restore proper order to Oz? For answers you'll have to read the book. Fortunately, it's in print and available from the International Wizard of Oz Club, as well as other sources.

Also in this issue of the Bugle are Ruth Berman's discussion of some difficulties in mapping Oz, Atticus Gannaway's discussion of flying pigs in literature and life, the annual Oz trivia quiz, and many fine reviews and reports about recent Oz publications and news. The Baum Bugle goes free to all members of the Oz Club.

A Clearer Peek at John Dough and the Cherub

The latest issue of The Baum Bugle, dated winter 2006, includes an article from me analyzing L. Frank Baum's fantasy John Dough and the Cherub, published in 1906. (The Bugle, published three times a year by the International Wizard of Oz Club, is devoted to scholarship about the Oz books and related matters.)

Because of an error at the printer, some images in this Bugle were reproduced poorly. I'm therefore posting links to where I found two of the images that appeared with my article, for anyone who's interested.

The photo on top of page 9 shows the INFANT INCUBATORS building at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. That image and another from Buffalo appear on Dr. Ray Duncan's fine website Neonatology.org, which archives a great deal of material about the medical care of newborns.

At the bottom of page 9 is an illustration by May Wilson Preston from Ellis Parker Butler's "gently satirical novel" [did I write that phrase? I like it] The Incubator Baby. That was published in book form the same year as John Dough and the Cherub but had started to appear in a magazine a couple of years before. Here is a clearer image of spectators peering at the little baby at an exposition. Neonatology.org offers page scans of the entire novel.

I included links to other interesting Neonatology.org items back in this posting about John Dough. My article in the Bugle goes over some of the same ground as my introduction in the Hungry Tiger Press edition of Baum's book (hyped at right), but each version contains material not in the other. The book introduction, for instance, starts with how Baum started to write his story for Ladies' Home Journal editor Edward Bok, and how that relationship affected the story. The article has more to say about John R. Neill's art.

For another John Dough image, Jared Davis offers a comparison between Marcus Mébès's colorization of a Neill image for the cover of the Bugle above and the picture as originally printed in only three colors.

Recommendations for Revolutionary History

As an Independence Day special, Roger Sutton alerted us to The Horn Book's recommendations of illustrated books about the American Revolution.

On that topic, over at Boston 1775 I posted several articles exploring the sources (and lack of them) behind the 2006 picture book Hanukkah at Valley Forge, by Stephen Krensky and Greg Harlin. I think this book should be designated as a holiday fable rather than a fictionalized version of poorly documented history. There really are no reliable documents at all for its core story. The analysis starts here.

Here's the Boston 1775 commentary on:

• John, Paul, George, and Ben (with remarks from author-illustrator Lane Smith)
• Mr. Revere and I
• The Real Revolution
• George Washington, Spymaster
• A Travel Guide to Colonial Boston, at the bottom of the list in so many ways.

Stormbreaker and the Enemies of England

Just because I disliked Anthony Horowitz's Stormbreaker, the first Alex Rider thriller, doesn't mean I can't find significance in its literary influences. And I'm not just talking about the James Bond novels.

Rather, there's a history over a century and a quarter long behind this scene, on page 104 of the US edition:

Alex stared, unable to quite believe what he was seeing.

A submarine. It had erupted from the sea with the speed and the impossibility of a huge stage illusion. . . . The submarine had no markings, but Alex knew it wasn't English. . . . And what was it doing here, off the coast of Cornwall?

A hostile ship just off the British coast shows Horowitz's debt to what's become known as "invasion literature." This genre that began with The Battle of Dorking in 1871 and remained popular in Britain until World War I made thoughts of such warfare less entertaining. This field begat the British spy thriller through Erskine Childers's Riddle of the Sands (1903), so it's only fair for its echo to reverberate down through Stormbreaker. The invasion genre was also a major influence on science fiction via H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds (1898).

Two of my favorite authors even got into the act. In 1909, P. G. Wodehouse wrote a parody of invasion literature called The Swoop! In his Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz comic page of 1904-05, L. Frank Baum had his travelers from Oz spot a German naval ship off the US coast. (Nothing came of that.)

Usually the invaders in British invasion literature are Germans, though there's always the possibility of Russians and occasional Turks and Arabs as well. How does that change for Alex Rider's post-Cold War world?

Not much, it turns out. The bad guys in Stormbreaker are:

• Russian assassin Yassen Gregorovich
• Lebanese (in the UK edition) or Egyptian (in the US edition) computer genius Herod Sayle [Harrods sale, get it? aren't foreign names funny!]
• scarred circus performer Mr. Grin
• blonde-bunned assistant Fraulein Nadia Vole (as in rodent)

Vole's actually a triple threat because "Fraulein" is clearly German, but Nadia is a popular girl's name in both Slavic and Arabic cultures!

"Invasion literature" popularized the notion of an island surrounded and infiltrated by enemies, and Stormbreaker reinforces that world-view. The villain tells Alex, "You'd be surprised how many countries there are in the world who loathe the English. Most of Europe, just to begin with." The head of MI6 speaks of "China and the former Soviet Union, countries that have never been our friends"--WW2 alliances entirely forgotten.

There's no reason in Stormbreaker's plot for the villain to come from outside Britain, just as he doesn't have to be "so short that Alex's first impression was that he was looking at a reflection that had somehow been distorted" and he doesn't have to have "very horrible eyes." But he does, he is, and he has.

Sayle's stated motivation is that he was badly bullied at school because he was a small foreign newcomer:

"From the moment I arrived at the school, I was mocked and bullied. Because of my size. Because of my dark skin. Because I couldn't speak English well. Because I wasn't one of them. . . ."

To that Alex replies, "Lots of kids get are bullied and they don't turn into nutcases." Indeed, the book has already told us that Alex himself was bullied at a new school because of "his gentle looks and accent."

Of course, the book has also told us that Alex is "well built, with the body of an athlete"; English and white; rich; and highly trained in karate. So Alex was bullied only once. He acknowledges no difference between his situation and Sayle's, and the book implies that we shouldn't, either.

The succeeding books seem to extend this basic pattern. In the Main Criminals page of the Alex Rider website, five of the seven villains are foreign, three of those Russian. Only one, Damian Cray, is English. He's also (a) interested in India and Buddhism, (b) a crusader for environmental preservation and animal rights, and (c) linked by names and characteristics to certain gay British icons. Hmmm.

As it turns out, while I was cogitating this little essay Horowitz was writing on the same topic from another direction. In the 5 June edition of the right-wing Daily Mail tabloid he lamented that it's not so easy to be beastly to downtrodden groups these days. So where's a thriller writer to find scary villains?

Might I suggest exercising enough imagination not to rely on stereotypes that were cliché a century ago?

The Hype Is Rising

As Fox Walden prepares to release The Dark Is Rising later this year, it's starting to ramp up the on-set interviews, sneak peeks, and other publicity material. Already we have the new cover design with "Soon to be a major motion picture" at the bottom.

There are, of course, deviations from the book. Will is older by two years, and an American living in Britain. The Walker has a love interest. The Arthurian basis of the magic is gone. There are more action sequences, including one with lots and lots of snakes.

The filmmakers' changes seem to go well beyond what seems necessary for a commercial film, into inserting new themes into the book. Here's a passage from screenwriter John Hodge's interview at JoBlo.com:

He [Will] has to find these 6 signs which are hidden, restore the power of the light and than defeat the dark. He has to do this, and this is what I thought was interesting about the story, he has to do this at the same time as being a 13-year old boy and dealing with the issues that a 13-year old boy has to deal with. So, for example, he's the second youngest in a large family. He has older brothers who are picking on him and kind of trampling on him and ignoring him because he's at the lower end of the family. Also his parents don't seem to take much notice of him. . . .

For example, the opening of the film, Will arrives home with his twin older brothers who've been kind of persecuting him on the bus and then as he arrives home there's another brother who has been away at college and has arrived back. He's the kind of bohemian of the family and there's that tension there. Than we discover that the returning bohemian has taken Will's room and he says, well, I've got your room. There's just nothing Will can do about this. He goes to try and share with his other brothers and it's like 'King Lear' or something. Every door he goes to, he gets turn[ed] away from. He's offered less and less every time. So I put in stuff like that just to give it a personal note.

Much the same interview appears at Movieweb.

It's true that the notion of Will's family being "too big!" is in the very first line of the book. But that's not Will's feeling; that's a complaint from his next-older-brother James. The Stanton family is very supportive of Will, particularly on the matter of where he sleeps that first stormy night. The tension comes from Will not being able to tell his supportive family about his new mission.

And that's not the only sibling-based change Hodge made. In the words of Merriman portrayer Ian McShane's interview at Movieweb, "Of course [Will]'s got the twin who has been imprisoned by the Dark for all these years." (Remember that from the book? No? Perhaps I'm thinking of The Man in the Iron Mask.) So this movie isn't really about "the issues that a 13-year old boy has to deal with"; it's about sibling issues that Hodge wanted to write about.

JoBlo's interview with director David Cunningham says that most of those major changes had been settled by screenwriter and producers before he started work. It's disquieting that he seems already to be making excuses for the quality of the film:

We had three months to prep a movie that really needed six to eight months. I have three or four months to shoot a movie that really needed seven or eight months. I've got a few months to edit a movie that really needs five or six months. So that's my challenge as a filmmaker.

One of Cunningham's strategies was to shoot some scenes with several cameras simultaneously, to get the most footage out of a single effect or run-through. Again, McShane spoke candidly about what that meant for him as an actor:

I think he [Cunningham] has the toughest job. On this, he's always thinking about something else. So he tends to gloss over the acting. He has to trust the acting. To do what they do with that dialogue stuff? He's constantly walking around with, at the very least, three cameras at all times. Which can get very annoying. It sometimes gets in the way, I think. These are very big sets. It's very rare that we are in an intimate situation. It's hard when you find yourself in a one-on-one, and you don't know where he has the camera. I think he knew that the more natural it was, the better it was. Easier. More fluid.

As for novelist Susan Cooper's feelings about the adaptation, Cunningham suggests a lukewarm endorsement:

I don't want to speak on her behalf, but I think it’s mixed feelings. She's thrilled that it's being introduced to a new audience, but of course she would love it to be truer to the book and in many ways we would, but at the same time we needed to translate it. She’s also done screenplays so she understands the difference between books and screenplays and in her words there is violence done to the book to get to that point. So she's been supporting us and it's got to be a tough position to be an author and say, "Okay, let's make the movie version." Yikes I wouldn’t want to have to do that.

And McShane is once again more candid:

I don't think they've been very faithful to the book. I don't know how many of you've read the book. I know they sold a few copies, but I couldn't read it very well. It's really dense. It's from the 70s, you know?

Thanks to the Wild Hunt and authorblog for the links.

In other hype news, in the last hour two comments came into my original posting on The Dark Is Rising movie, both offering the same link to an MTV.com “reality” show about interns on the set. Both "ken" and "clayton" compared the behind-the-scenes footage to The Real World. Neither spelled correctly. Both declared the movie would be a big hit, though a connection between being used as the game board for a reality show and becoming a successful movie escapes me.