Beautiful Things (Alice)

Was talking to a student today about the Alice Through The Looking Glass coming soon from Simply Read Books and now see Steph Aulenback talking about beautiful Alice images over at Crooked House.

So, I ask you. Is this not the most beautiful thing? (Note: click through for full effect.)



Through The Looking Glass as imagined by the brilliant Iassen Ghiuselev (dear lord! spelled that right on my first try!).

I really, really need a poster of this!

O Leerie, see a little child and nod to him to-night!

Robert Louis Stevenson is 159 years old. Or he would be, were he still with us.

Here he is, about 154 years ago:





And there is now a fabulous online archive of his work (ta to Maud for the link). You can read any number of things here including Child's Garden of Verse right here. You can actually flip the lovely, lovely pages one by one. There must be more beautiful editions of this book out there than practically any other.





My son used to go to sleep at night to this CD in which Ted Jacobs set some of the poems from Child's Garden of Verse to music. (In our house "The Lamplighter" always ran "O'Leary light the lamps again.") You can listen to the songs by scrolling down the Amazon page. I dare you to find a better bedtime album.

Henry on Facebook

I'd kind of forgotten that I'd made a facebook page for Henry awhile back. Just had a little look at it and see that he has friends that I don't even know. There's something rather touching about this.



Younger son and I had a long discussion the other day about whether he would ever sell the rights to Henry to the Disney Corp. (not that they've been banging the door down). We agreed that it really wouldn't be worth it ... particularly if they painted him orange and made him wear a shirt with his name on it.

Roald Dahl to Philip Ardagh

The Roald Dahl Funny Prize has gone to Philip Ardagh for his book Grubtown Tales. That was for the category of books for children ages seven to fourteen, while in the category of books for children six and under went to Sam Lloyd for his Mr Pusskins Best in Show.

My older son reviewed one of Ardagh's books for the Vancouver Sun a few years back (or at least helped me to review it) and we were both chuffed to meet Ardagh at a reading at the fabulous Kidsbooks ... I think he's one of the funnier people I've ever met and it's nice to see that publicly recognised and rewarded.

Gumby Does Dickens

Lately, my son and I have been very interested in the subject of adaptation.
Here is one of the odder Christmas Carols we have stumbled across:

What the Dickens

We want one of these:



And we are considering whether to go see the new film of The Christmas Carol and watching the Alastair Sim version while we consider.

We found the figure on the Archie McPhee site which boasts the slogan: "Slightly less disappointing than other companies." The Dickens figure comes with a quill pen and removable hat. He is also exactly the right size to go with the Christopher Eccleston Doctor Who figure and recreate "The Unquiet Dead" episode.

Update: We are now watching the episode of Doctor Who (favourite line by Dickens: "What the Shakespeare!") and bemoaning the fact that we can't get these figures shipped to Canada!

Unhomely

A very good piece about how scary children's books should be by Sam Leith in the Guardian:

Fear in children's books is more open, more ambient. Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are is a good example. It's unsettling rather than scary: it exists in its own world. The sound of it is spooky – those pregnant breaks that give its opening sentence the strangeness and gravity of poetry: "The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind . . . and another . . . " And that's even before Max sails off to where the wild things are, to join their savage carnival. "We'll eat you up, we love you so . . . "

Like Sendak's even stranger In the Night Kitchen, which has a naked toddler flying an aeroplane made of cake-mix through a kitchen filled with demented Oliver Hardy lookalikes, the story is unsettling – but it's better described by the German word unheimlich, meaning unhomely. That makes a sort of sense. These stories are a way of leaving the safety of home for a world created by someone else's imagination, where you are under their control. Suddenly, your bedroom is a forest. Suddenly, you are in a savage carnival. Of course it's scary.

Cut and Paste (Old School)

John McCrae

Linda Granfield will be in Montreal this week, launching her new book Remembering John McCrae, Soldier Doctor Poet.



And for those of you not sure of who John McCrae is, here's a gentle reminder:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.


Tuesday October 27th at 4 pm
Babar en ville, 1235 Greene Avenue, 514-931-0606.
This event is suitable for ages 8 and up.

Scrambled Humpty Dumpty

Oh, for the love of Old Mother Goose, do we really need such happily-ever-after endings for everything that it becomes necessary to have Humpty Dumpty end with all the King's men making "Humpty happy again?" Apparently somebody at the BBC thought so.

Here's a completely unreconstructed Humpty, courtesy of illustrator Rene Milot.



And here's a short story called "The Case of the Four and Twenty Blackbirds," by Neil Gaiman in which Humpty Dumpty is portrayed as a murder victim in sort of noir nursery fable.

Zombies 'r' Us

Zombies are for boys and vampires are for girls. So says writer Charlie Higson in a recent Guardian piece. He writes:

Vampires are the undead of choice for girls, and zombies for boys. Vampires are cool, aloof, beautiful, brooding creatures of the night. Typical moody teenage boys, basically. Zombies are dumb, brutal, ugly and mindlessly violent. Which makes them also like typical teenage boys, I suppose.

Charlie Higson's new book The Enemy is out this month and has a very spiffy website where you can read an extract or even zombify yourself.

The book is just out and the press release makes me wish we were going to be in Toronto this coming weekend:

In Canada, Puffin Books will be celebrating the release of The Enemy at the Toronto Zombie Walk on October 24th in full zombie attire, with wound tattoo giveaways for the walkers. Be sure to visit us at 3:00 pm at Trinity Bellwoods Park bordered by Dundas St. and Gore Vale Ave.

Of course, here in Montreal we can see zombies walking the street any night of the week.

And in Victoria, my brother Graham McDonald is directing a zombie-ful version of Mary Shelley's novel: Frankenstein in Oblivion (adapted by Graham McDonald & Kirsti Mikoda) which opens next weekend. So we also wish we were going to be in Victoria.



In one of my favourite family photos, our older son is dressed as a zombie (as he was every Hallowe'en over a span of years), and is standing next to his great-grandmother who has her arm around him and is beaming like she couldn't possibly have been prouder of this horrible-looking creature. Such is love.

From Time to Time

Looking forward to the new Julian Fellowes film From Time to Time, which stars young Alex Etel, a remarkable young actor who was shockingly good in the Cranford adapation.



The film is based on the novel The Chimneys of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston and was filmed in Dorset in a house that was once used to film a Tom Baker episode of Doctor Who. (Lately, all roads seem to lead to Doctor Who around here. That's what happens when you live with a little Whoovian.)

I wrote about Green Knowe here some time ago but forgot all about it until now. Must go and find the books as I do love a good ghost story. I'm also particularly interested in the process of adaptation right now as it is something I'm working on with my screenwriting students, and also has to do with a particular project I have in mind. There is an interesting article about the recent spate of adaptations of children's books here (with thanks to the ever informative Betsy Bird for the link.)