Siren Sighting on So You Think You Can Dance (US)

And to demonstrate how the mermaid/siren trend is appearing in random places these days, last night's episode of the US version of So You Think You Can Dance featured a waltz choreographed to the story of a man falling under the spell of a siren until he receives a kiss of death. It was danced by Jordan Casanova and Tadd Gadduang and choreographed by Toni Redpath to "Nocturne" (from Secret Garden).



The introduction package showed Jordan saying, "Mermaid!" while Redpath says, "Not exactly." Semantics when it comes to mermaids and sirens which are closely related.

Mermaids, 2011 and Such

This article from Entertainment Weekly a few months ago had many interesting pieces in it for a relatively short article. But today I wanted to focus on the "mermaiding" aspect of it. From 2011: The year mermaids swim into movies, books, fashion, and maybe your local swimming pool by Stephan Lee:

Mermaid obsession definitely isn’t confined to the realm of fiction. While in mythology, mermaids are often portrayed as lonely, somewhat barbaric creatures, people incorporate the fantasy into their real lives because it makes them happy. You might have seen some “real-life” mermaids in The Simple Life 2, when Paris and Nicole visited Weeki Wachee Springs in Florida, where swimming, be-tailed merpeople put on a choreographed show in a giant tank. But “mermaiding” without an audience is a growing pastime and yes, a booming niche business. Hannah Fraser, a pioneering “professional mermaid,” loves the freedom she feels when she puts on her tail and does deep-sea dives alongside Great White sharks. One man in Pittsburgh’s need to mermaid (or merman?) is so great that he takes it to public pools, despite the stares he inevitably gets. There’s even an awards ceremony dedicated to the mythical creature: The first annual World Mermaid Awards — which will also act as a convention — will convene this August in a giant pool at the Mirage in Las Vegas.

Caroline Turgeon, author of Mermaid (a novel retelling of Andersen's Little Mermaid), has a blog--I Am a Mermaid--that is mentioned in the article and which I visited a few times while researching for Mermaid and Other Water Spirit Tales From Around the World. She discusses mermaids in many ways, but the primary focus overall has been on mermaiding--the folks who take on mermaid personas for personal and/or career choices. This is a fascinating culture of folks who love mermaids. In my research I didn't discover as nearly as much fascination with any other kind of water spirit other than perhaps sirens.

 

Grimm at ComicCon

From ‘Grimm’: Somewhere between ‘X-Files’ and ‘Buffy,’ and coming to Comic-Con:

JP: Where did the idea for “Grimm” come from?


DG: Well, our hero has the ability to see the big bad wolf in the child molester, and the three little pigs in the greedy people. He has the ability to see what others can’t. Much of the idea came from Mr. Jim Kouf …

JK: It was both of our idea.

DG: OK, it was both of us. But there was an original idea by Todd Milliner just to do a modern Grimm story. And this is what we came up with.

JP: The current “Grimm” references a longer history/mythology that we’ll learn more about, right?

DG: In the pilot, it comes out that the original Brothers Grimm were actually profilers. And what they were writing was all true — but it was handed down in oral tradition to warn people of certain kinds of creatures who live among us. Our hero, Nick Burkhardt [David Giuntoli], is a distant relative of the Brothers Grimm, and in the pilot discovers that he has this ability to see these creatures within certain humans — particularly when they are emotionally aroused or angered or frightened. His aunt, Aunt Marie, arrives in town to tell him that he’s getting this power because she’s passing out of this world. It’s also scary and funny. It’s somewhere between “X-Files” and “Buffy.”

JK: Our series should be something like the Grimm’s fairy tales. You open the book and you get a fairy tale every night.

Fairy Tales, Video Games and the Supreme Court

  

A small media frenzy has been centered around the Supreme Court's decision about regulating video games for children.

For example, from NPR, Weekly Standard: Violent Games Are No Fairy Tale by Jeffrey H. Anderson:

On Monday, in the case of Brown v. Entertainment Merchants Association, the Supreme Court struck down a California law prohibiting the sale of violent video games to children. In a 7-2 holding authored by Justice Antonin Scalia (with Justices Alito and Roberts concurring and Justices Thomas and Breyer dissenting), the Court ruled that video games enjoy essentially the same constitutional protection as books, with violent video games being, in Scalia's estimation, much like modern day Grimm's Fairy Tales.

Of course, there is very little similarity between reading (or, for that matter, watching film adaptations of) Snow White or Cinderella and deciding whether to murder, disembowel, or rape one's victim in a video game (all of which, as Justice Alito details, are features of some of these games). That the Court's majority fails to see this distinction shows how inapt it is to have that body engage in such line-drawing for an entire republic. Further demonstrating this, Scalia also compares such video games to The Odyssey, and he somewhat mystifyingly declares that literature and video games are similarly "interactive."

From the majority opinion by Scalia, available here:

Like the protected books, plays and movies that preceded them, video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world),” Justice Scalia wrote. “That suffices to confer First Amendment protection.”

Certainly the books we give children to read–or read to them when they are younger–contain no shortage of gore. Grimm’s Fairy Tales, for example, are grim indeed. As her just deserts for trying to poison Snow White, the wicked queen is made to dance in red hot slippers ’till she fell dead on the floor, a sad example of envy and jealousy.’ . . . Cinderella’s evil stepsisters have their eyes pecked out by doves. . . . And Hansel and Gretel (children!) kill their captor by baking her in an oven.

Some other links:

At PBS: Citing Violence in Fairy Tales, Justices Strike Down Calif. Video Game Law

At the New York Times: Justices Reject Ban on Violent Video Games for Children by ADAM LIPTAK

At the Miami Herald: Justices don’t live in the real world by Cal Thomas

And Maria Tatar also posted about this on her blog.


I'm not jumping on the opinion train here--although I admit I have one as someone who works with kids and it is about to become obvious anyway--but I find no end of amusement that centuries old literature is being used to defend a very recent invention which is rather unrelated. Yes, both are graphic, but their means of delivery are so very different in intent and impact that it is almost disturbing to compare them. In other words, I read and deal with fairy tales most of the hours of my life but I can't stand to watch the violence of many of these games. Yes, I had a nightmare when working on Bluebeard, but that is the exception not the rule.

And, no, parents in my experience aren't usually sharing the most violent versions of fairy tales with the kids anyway. It's the high school and college students who learn that the tales are much more violent than they knew and feel like another level of their innocence has been eroded away at the discovery. Then they either beg for the violent ones--I get emails!--or run for familiar relative safety of the Disney versions although I contend those are much more violent than we admit.

Practicing Medicine Can Be Grimm Work by Valerie Gribben

  

Last Thursday, there was an opinion piece in the New York Times about fairy tales: Practicing Medicine Can Be Grimm Work by Valerie Gribben. Gribben wrote a fairy tale trilogy--The Fairytale Trilogy: Fairytale, The Emperor's Realm, The Three Crowns--at the age of sixteen back when SurLaLune was new, too. Gribben is now a doctor of medicine and wrote an article about how fairy tales help her cope with the real life stories and strains of her chosen profession.

Here's an excerpt, but do click through and read the entire article while it is still free.

The practice of medicine bestows the sacred privilege to ask about the unmentionable. But what happens when the door to Bluebeard’s horror chamber opens, and the bloody secrets spill onto your aseptic field of study? How do you process the pain of your patients?

I found my way back to stories. The Grimm fairy tales once seemed as if they took place in lands far, far away, but I see them now in my everyday hospital rotations. I’ve met the eternal cast of characters. I’ve taken down their histories (the abandoned prince, the barren couple) or seen their handiwork (the evil stepmother, the lecherous king).

Fairy tales are, at their core, heightened portrayals of human nature, revealing, as the glare of injury and illness does, the underbelly of mankind. Both fairy tales and medical charts chronicle the bizarre, the unfair, the tragic. And the terrifying things that go bump in the night are what doctors treat at 3 a.m. in emergency rooms.

So I now find comfort in fairy tales. They remind me that happy endings are possible. With a few days of rest and proper medication, the bewildered princess left relaxed and smiling, with a set of goals and a new job in sight. The endoscopy on my cross-eyed confidante showed she was cancer-free.

How lovely. I so appreciate Gribben's words. Fairy tales help so many of us deal with the vagaries and unfairness of living. And that is why I'm here!

Cinderella, Max Luthi at Tales of Faerie

  

Another interesting post last week was on Tales of Faerie where Kristin discussed Cinderella and Max Luthi. Max Luthi is known for his fairy tale writings, especially Once Upon a Time: On the Nature of Fairy Tales and The European Folktale: Form and Nature (Folklore Studies in Translation).

Here's an excerpt from her post:

Cinderella is rejected by the people around her and helped by animals and/or (depending on the version) the spirit of her dead mother. Luthi writes, "Human society, even the family, appears as an enemy, nature as a friend. The child who hears this story feels: 'No matter how much I may be slighted by others, I can strust in stronger and kinder forces."

Luthi's words are very inspiring-he talks about the hardships people are inevitably to face, yet the possibility of hope coming from a variety of sources-our own qualities as well as outside help. "Man is cast into suffering and want, evidently destined to endure privation, misunderstanding, and malice, and yet summoned to a regal existence."

To read the rest, visit Kristin's blog.

Fairytale Reflections (25) "Weird Tales From Northern Seas"

With the holiday weekend, I didn't highlight many of the interesting news articles and blog entries from late last week and early this one. So today I will catch up a little. First, since we will get a new one tomorrow, I wanted to highlight Fairytale Reflections (25) "Weird Tales From Northern Seas" at SMoST.

Katherine went a somewhat different direction with this one. I'll let her explain:

I think it's time for some fairytale reflections from you, you lovely and talented and sensitive people who come and read this blog and sometimes comment! So I'm putting up an entire story from one of the wonderful 19th century collectors and retellers of folktales whom I’ve met on the road through fairyland: Jonas Lie, a celebrated Norwegian author.

Here's a little bit of background: he was a contemporary of Ibsen, born 1833 at Hvokksund, Norway, not far from Oslo; but he spent much of his childhood at Tromsø, inside the Arctic Circle. He was sent to naval college, but poor eyesight made him unsuited for a life at sea, so he became a lawyer and began to write and publish poems and novels which reflected Norwegian life, folklore and nationalism.

I confess I haven’t read any of Lie’s novels, as most of them don’t seem to have been translated into English. But I do have a collection of his reworkings of Norwegian and Finnish legends about the sea. It’s called ‘Weird Tales From Northern Seas’. My edition was published in English in 1893 and consists of eleven short stories cherry-picked from a volume called ‘Trold’- 'Trolls' - and another called 'Fortaellinger og Skildringer ', which means something like 'Tales and Depictions, or 'Stories and Portrayals' (translations courtesy of the Bookwitch). How I wish I could read the others.

Go through to her post to read the rest...