EARonic for the iPhone

 EARonic gives your iPhone originality, even more than eggs , which are fastened to the body.

Such a thing is worth may be 20 bucks.  09 more images after the break...

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Soldiers from Around the World

South Korea

The soldiers in different parts of the world, 44 more after the break...

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And Then There Were Two Cinderella Movies....

From U taps scribe for Cinderella rethink: Peacock lining up for rewrite work by Justin Kroll:

Is Cinderella the next Snow White?

With a handful of new takes on the Snow White story actively in the works around Hollywood, Universal is looking to conjure a fresh take on the classic Cinderella story as well, with Ann Peacock in final negotiations to rewrite an untitled reimagining of the fairy tale.

Plot details are being kept under wraps. Michael Dougherty wrote the previous draft.

Bruno Aveillan is aboard to helm the pic, with Scott Stuber and Pam Abby producing through the Stuber Pictures shingle.

Project has been in development for some time, but given the rise in fairy-tale rethinks over the past year, U sees this as a perfect time to get the wheels in motion.

Though the iconic character isn't getting quite the attention Snow White has received, she is generating some heat on a couple of fronts. Disney brought on Mark Romanek to helm that studio's untitled Cinderella story.

And this is from last month: Mark Romanek to Direct Re-Imagining of CINDERELLA for Disney by Adam Chitwood:

Snow White isn’t the only Disney princess getting her big live-action update. In addition to the multiple Snow White projects currently in development, Disney is fashioning a live-action re-imagining of Cinderella. Deadline reports that the studio is courting Mark Romanek (Never Let Me Go) to direct the film, which has a script by Aline Brosh McKenna (The Devil Wears Prada). The Mouse House put the project into development last May, after Alice in Wonderland made a ridiculous amount of money.

The script is described as an update of the classic tale, as it finds the prince set up for a politically arranged marriage that is threatened when he meets Cinderella. I’m a big fan of Romanek. The director has been courted for a number of high-profile projects as of late (including The Wolverine), and if the deal goes through it’ll be exciting to see a director of his dramatic talents take on this fairy tale update.

New Book: Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment

Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment was released earlier this year. I haven't seen it. I hadn't heard of it until I read the title in the Call for Papers that is also being posted today on this blog. So I had to learn more and being generous with that knowledge, share with you.

From the introduction:

Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment is the result of a two day symposium which took place at the University of Glasgow, 12-13 August 2010. Scholars and practitioners participated from a variety of disciplines,geographic locations and stages of career. One aim of the symposium was to secure the term “anti-tale” more thoroughly in an international and interdisciplinary scholarship. It followed attempts to define this term, historically by Robert Walser (1910) and André Jolles (1929), later by Wolfgang Mieder (1987, 2008) and John Pizer (1990), and most recently in David Calvin’s forthcoming doctoral thesis “No More Happily Ever After: The Anti-Fairy Tale in Postmodern Literature and Popular Culture”(University of Ulster, 2011).

Book description from the publisher:

The anti-(fairy) tale has long existed in the shadow of the traditional fairy tale as its flipside or evil twin. According to André Jolles in Einfache Formen (1930), such Antimärchen are contemporaneous with some of the earliest known oral variants of familiar tales. While fairy tales are generally characterised by a “spirit of optimism” (Tolkien) the anti-tale offers us no such assurances; for every “happily ever after,” there is a dissenting “they all died horribly.” The anti-tale is, however, rarely an outright opposition to the traditional form itself. Inasmuch as the anti-hero is not a villain, but may possess attributes of the hero, the anti-tale appropriates aspects of the fairy tale form, (and its equivalent genres) and re-imagines, subverts, inverts, deconstructs or satirises elements of these to present an alternate narrative interpretation, outcome or morality. In this collection, Little Red Riding Hood retaliates against the wolf, Cinderella’s stepmother provides her own account of events, and “Snow White” evolves into a postmodern vampire tale. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, revealing the underlying structures, dynamics, fractures and contradictions within the borrowed tales.

Over the last half century, this dissident tradition has become increasingly popular, inspiring numerous writers, artists, musicians and filmmakers. Although anti-tales abound in contemporary art and popular culture, the term has been used sporadically in scholarship without being developed or defined. While it is clear that the aesthetics of postmodernism have provided fertile creative grounds for this tradition, the anti-tale is not just a postmodern phenomenon; rather, the “postmodern fairy tale” is only part of the picture. Broadly interdisciplinary in scope, this collection of twenty-two essays and artwork explores various manifestations of the anti-tale, from the ancient to the modern including romanticism, realism and surrealism along the way.

About the editors:

Catriona McAra is an AHRC doctoral candidate in History of Art at the University of Glasgow researching the work of Dorothea Tanning. She is particularly interested in intertextual theory, narratology, and the intersection between Surrealism and the fairy tale. Catriona organised the Anti-Tales symposium and is co-editor of this volume.

David Calvin is a doctoral candidate in the Languages and Literature department at the University of Ulster, Belfast. His PhD thesis is entitled “No More Happily Ever After: The Anti-Fairy Tale in Postmodern Literature and Popular Culture,” and has been instrumental in the reintroduction of the term “anti-tales” to current scholarship. He is co-editor of this volume.

Some blurbs:

“Books like Anti-Tales are important, taking a cold look at the complex, often dark affect at fairy tales and broadening the contemporary lens onto theories about their appearances in art, literature, film. The idea of anti-tale has been so important to me, and I’m delighted to see this volume enter the conversation and whisper its fragments of spells. The fairy tale is real; long live the anti-fairy-tale.”

—Kate Bernheimer, author of The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold and editor of My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me: Forty New Fairy Tales

“This valuable collection of essays, oriented around the idea of the ‘anti-tale,’ offers a much needed formal as well as analytic focus on the dark side of the fairy-tale genre.”

—Professor Aidan Day, University of Dundee


“The essays in this collection discuss an abundance of anti-tales from literature, film and art. Retellings, reimaginings and new tales from across centuries and around the world are all explored in relation to the critical term ‘anti-tale,’ uncovering new paths through the forest. Where the fairy tale leaves us with answers the anti-tale leaves us with questions and Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment is a valuable text for scholars, readers and writers who wish to engage with this wonderfully subversive form.”

—Claire Massey, Editor of New Fairy Tales

And a table of contents:

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction by Catriona McAra and David Calvin [1]

Part One: History and Definitions

The German Enlightenment and Romantic Märchen as Antimärchen by Laura Martin [18]

Reader Beware: Apuleius, Metafiction and the Literary Fairy Tale by Stijn Praet [37]

Some Notes on Intertextual Frames in Anti-Fairy Tales by Larisa Prokhorova [51]

Part Two: Twisted Film and Animation

Wonderland Lost and Found? Nonsensical Enchantment and Imaginative Reluctance in Revisionings of Lewis Carroll’s Alice Tales by Anna Kérchy [62]

The Forceful Imagination of Czech Surrealism: The Folkloric as Critical Culture by Suzanne Keller [75]

Bruno Schulz’s “Generatio Aequivoca”: Sites of (Dis)Enchantment in the Quay Brothers’ Street of Crocodiles by Suzanne Buchan [84]

Part Three: Surrealist Anti-Tales

“Blind Date”: Tanning’s Surrealist Anti-Tale by Catriona McAra [100]

The Luminary Forest: Robert Desnos and Unica Zürn’s Tales of (Dis)Enchantment and Transformation by Esra Plumer [115]

Paula Rego, Jane Eyre and the Re-Enchantment of Bluebeard by Helen Stoddart [130]

Part Four: Sensorial Anti-Tales

Visual Anti-Tales: The Phantasmagoric Prints of Francisco Goya and William Blake by Isabelle van den Broeke [142]

In the Realm of the Senses: Tomoko Konoike’s Visual Recasting of “Little Red Riding Hood” by Mayako Murai [152]

Part Five: Black Humour

The Phoney and the Real: Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes as Anti-Tales by Christina Murdoch [164]

“You Know How Happy Kings Are”: The Anti-Fairy Tales of James Thurber by John Patrick Pazdziora [173]

Landscapes of Anti-Tale Uncertainty: The Dark Knight by Deborah Knight [185]

Metamorphoric Enchantment in Rikki Ducornet’s Anti-Tales by Michelle Ryan-Sautour [203]

Part Six: Inverted (Anti-)Fairy Tales

Blood on the Snow: Inverting “Snow White” in the Vampire Tales of Neil Gaiman and Tanith Lee by Jessica Tiffin [220]

In Her Red-Hot Shoes: Re-Telling “Snow White” from the Queen’s Point of View by David Calvin [231]

In the Shadow of the Villain: Fairy Tale Villains Tell their Side of the Story by Mary Crocker Cook [246]

Exploding the Glass Bottles: Constructing the Postcolonial “Bluebeard” Tale in Nalo Hopkinson’s “The Glass Bottle Trick” by Natalie Robinson [253]

Part Seven: (Post) Modern Anti-Tales

A.S. Byatt and “The Djinn”: The Politics and Epistemology of the Anti-Tale by Defne Çizakça [264]

Margaret Atwood’s Anti-Fairy Tales: “There Was Once” and Surfacing by Sharon R. Wilson [275]

Modernism and the Disenchantment of Modernity in Katherine Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence by María Casado Villanueva [285]

Contributors [295]

The Fairy Tale Vanguard Conference Call for Papers

The Fairy Tale Vanguard

Conference Call for Papers

Ghent University, in collaboration with the University of Antwerp.

Saint Peter’s abbey, Ghent (Belgium), 20 – 22 August 2012.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Jack Zipes (University of Minnesota) – Ute Heidmann (University of Lausanne, European Institute of the University of Geneva) – Cristina Bacchilega (University of Hawai`i)

During the past decades, a lot has changed in the field of fairy tale studies: moving away from typological, structuralist and hermeneutically essentialist approaches, scholars today have again come to appreciate the specificity of individual fairy tale texts, the historical context in which they originated, and the many ways in which they have functioned. This general turn to history has brought about a variety of interesting new approaches, many of them focusing on questions of a social, political or ideological nature.

However, when it comes to the fairy tale’s functioning as a literary art form, i.e. as partaking in the dynamics of larger literary fields, research interests have been much more moderate. During the upcoming conference, we intend to re-examine the fairy tale in ways that will shed light on the genre’s position within the conservative and innovative forces that make up for the historical development of literatures. More specifically, we will take off from the idea that throughout its history, the fairy tale has provided authors with a space in which they could engage in literary experimentation and self-consciously reflect on contemporary trends in the literary field. As a result, it was often tied up with or even constituted literary vanguard impulses.

Examples of this are plenty, perhaps most obviously in postmodernist writings, but also in the Grimms’ careful construction of a national Natur/Volkspoesie, the exploration of mondain préciosité by the French salon writers, the Baroque textual games of Basile’s Pentamerone, etc. When we go back further into the genre’s prehistory, we encounter even more texts, both in “sacred” and vernacular languages, which display this same propensity for reflection and innovation.

We can at least partially explain this phenomenon by considering the general traits of the genre itself: as fantastic narrative par excellence, the fairy tale has tended to ostentatiously distance itself from more realistic modes of experience and representation. Though often engaged with very tangible historical realities, its general discourse is not so much characterized by faithful mimetic description as it is by creative fabulation – by the act of weaving language into unconventional textures.

The tale’s relatively short format only aids to heighten our awareness of its (sometimes intricate) architectural construction as a textual artifact – as Angela Carter once said: “The short story is not minimalist, it is rococo. I feel in absolute control. It is like writing chamber music rather than symphonies” (The Bloody Chamber, Vintage 2006, xix). It is exactly this kind of textual control which far exceeds the boundaries of more conventional mimesis that makes the fairy tale into a world of words, at least as much as of things. Not surprisingly then, authors have used this little world of words as a laboratory in which they could experiment with the art of literature, self-consciously explore its subjects, forms, aims and boundaries and comment on other literary forms and cultural debates (both in meaning and in form).

We welcome any proposals for papers regarding these ideas. Possible topics include:

• Theoretical and historical reflections on the literary discourse of the fairy tale genre
• The metaliterary use of fairy tales
• The programmatic paratextual framing of fairy tale collections
• Literary experimentation in fairy tales
• Fairy tales and the formation of national literatures
•The fairy tale’s response to and impact on developments within the larger literary field, e.g. its active participation in literary vanguards and movements, its shifting properties in globalized literature, its response to the introduction of new media

A three hundred word abstract and five line biography should be submitted to fairytale (a) ugent.be.

Abstract deadline: 1 March 2012

Notification of acceptance: April 2012

Organization:

Stijn Praet (°1986) is an FWO-funded doctoral researcher at Ghent University. He holds a BA in Latin and English, an MA in Comparative Modern Literature and a specialized MA in Literary Studies. He has recently published in Anti-Tales: The Uses of Disenchantment (Cambridge Scholars 2011) and is currently preparing his doctoral thesis on the Latin prehistory of the fairy tale genre. stijn.praet (a) ugent.be

Vanessa Joosen (°1977) is an FWO-funded postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp. She is the author of Critical and Creative Perspectives on Fairy Tales (Wayne State UP 2011) and has published in a.o. Marvels and Tales, The Greenwood Companion to Fairy Tales and Children’s Literature in Education. vanessa.joosen (a) ua.ac.be

More about Merrie Haskell's The Princess Curse

Yesterday's post for Merrie Haskell's The Princess Curse pushed live without the enhancing I had originally planned for it. I usually try to add some reviews or a little more commentary to the new book announcements. (Waving at Haskell who saw and commented on the post, too!)

So for your reading evaluation, the first few paragraphs are available for reading at Harper Teen. And Haskell's site has a page of review excerpts to read, too.

I do enjoy seeing how so many different authors interpret this once lesser known tale. I don't know if we can call it lesser known these days between Barbie and all of the recent books. Perhaps what fascinates me most is that this one wasn't used to inspire a classic ballet. Doesn't it seem just perfect for it, really?

   

Sharing a Review for Entwined by Heather Dixon

Entwined by Heather Dixon just got a stellar review from Bookshelves of Doom. Here's an excerpt:

Just when I thought I'd rather pull an Oedipus (the eyes, not the mom) than read yet another re-telling of "The Twelve Dancing Princesses", along came Heather Dixon's Entwined, which somehow managed to feel fresh and original and charming AS WELL AS adding humor and suspense to a story that we all know every in and out of WHILE STILL staying true to the original.

Seriously, I'm still not sure how she managed it. This book was pure enjoyment.

***

Awesome relationships and dynamics between just EVERYONE.

Have I used the word awesome yet?

If you dig the fairy tale books, be sure not to miss this one.

The review itself is much longer so click over to read it. So has anyone else read and loved this one yet?