Read the original in French (for Michial) or English (for the rest of us)
Tag: Bibliography
In listening to Belle sing “I want adventure in the great wide somewhere
I want it more than I can tell!” we can hear echoes of Lewis’ idea of our “desire for our own far off country” which he describes in The Weight of Glory:
“In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the inconsolable secret in each one of you—the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret also which pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth’s expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordsworth had gone back to those moments in the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things—the beauty, the memory of our own past—are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited.”
I pulled that quote from goodreads. You can support your local library through WorldCat or purchase the book at BetterWorldBooks.
“She would’ve been a good woman,” said The Misfit, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Flannery O’Connor
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Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.
Aristotle
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Screw your courage to the sticking place
Lady Macbeth (The Tragedy of Macbeth Act i scene vii)
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“Movies are our way of telling God what we think about this world and our place in it. . . . Movies can be many things: escapist experiences, historical artifacts, business ventures, and artistic expressions, to name a few. I’d like to suggest that they can also be prayers.”
Josh Larsen puts movies into the categories of: Praise, Yearning, Lament, Anger, Confession, Reconciliation, Obedience, Meditation and Contemplation, and Joy. I make the case for The Rescuers Down Under being a prayer of yearning.
Also, a couple Mea-Culpas: First, Josh Larsen was ” the film critic for the Chicago-based Sun-Times Media for more than ten years” not whatever I said on the show.
Second, I don’t think I actually have mentioned this book on Before They Were Live before. I believe I talked about it during the 2018 Christian Humanist Radio Network Halloween Crossover while discussing Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of A Doubt on Sectarian Review. Fun episode, and great show overall. You should check it out!
Finally, I probably should have mentioned that friend of the show Ethan McCarthy was instrumental in getting the book published. Nice job Ethan!
“Young Diane herself complained to her father that Bambi’s mother needn’t have died, and when Walt answered that he was only following the book, Diane protested that he had taken other liberties and that in any case he was Walt Disney and he could do anything he wanted.”
Sergeant Tibbs was a queen named Lieutenant Willow in the novel.
Is that considered a double demotion?
This book comes recommended by listener Anna Brandt, and I’ve referenced it several times. If you are interested, you can read the ever expanding list of passages I’ve highlighted on my goodreads profile.
An updated version of the Alice tale for a more modern audience. Recommended by Victoria. Scared the H – E – Double – Hockey – Sticks out of Michial when he was younger.
The little boy in this book, Digory Kirke, has his own “Wonderland” type adventure visiting another world. His is the happy ending of such adventures, growing up to encourage the next generation of children to have adventures of their own and to experience magic and enchantment of the best kind.
An analogue for the Good Samaritan parable told in The Gospel of Luke chapter 10. So, is Casey Jr. saying “I think I can, I think I can…I thought I could, I thought I could” meant to prime your thoughts to that story, so you can recognize the Samaritan in Timothy and the crows later, or am I just overthinking it as usual?
A story about a group of bums, not hobos. Hobos travel. But still Jiminy fits nicely into this American tradition.
I’m not a big Archie fan myself, so this collection seems as good a place as any to start to me, but if you have a better suggestion please join the conversation.
I do know that the series was rebooted. Although, if you ever need to fake your way through a conversation about comics a good starting point is “well what did you think of the latest reboot?” So, knowing that there was a reboot doesn’t mean much in itself, but the reason I know there was a reboot is because my current all time favoritest comic book writer, Ryan North, was writing on the rebooted Jughead for a little while. I haven’t read them yet, but I cannot recommend highly enough Ryan’s work on The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. I could gush for days, as evidenced by the fact that I really didn’t need to go down this tangent at all. Do yourself a favor and get started at the beginning.
The story of a dog becoming a wolf. Likely Sinclair Lewis was reacting to this story with his Bongo short story. Ironically, Disney fundamentally changed the Sinclair Lewis’ story and brought it much closer to Call of the Wild.
How one of Sinclair Lewis’s short stories ended up at Disney, and in a film called Fun and Fancy Free, when Sinclair Lewis himself was none of the above, is a great mystery. If you have any information, please join the conversation.
Sinclair Lewis is best known for three novels: Main Street (1920), about stifling conformity in a Minnesota town, Babbit (1922), about a morally bankrupt business man, and Elmer Gantry (1927) the original crooked telemarketer. He was the first writer from the U.S. to win a Nobel Prize in literature.
“Extreme busyness, whether at school or college, kirk or market, is a symptom of deficient vitality; and a faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity. There is a sort of dead-alive, hackneyed people about, who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation. Bring these fellows into the country, or set them aboard ship, and you will see how they pine for their desk or their study. They have no curiosity; they cannot give themselves over to random provocations; they do not take pleasure in the exercise of their faculties for its own sake; and unless Necessity lays about them with a stick, they will even stand still. It is no good speaking to such folk: they cannot be idle, their nature is not generous enough; and they pass those hours in a sort of coma, which are not dedicated to furious moiling in the gold-mill. When they do not require to go to the office, when they are not hungry and have no mind to drink, the whole breathing world is a blank to them. If they have to wait an hour or so for a train, they fall into a stupid trance with their eyes open. To see them, you would suppose there was nothing to look at and no one to speak with; you would imagine they were paralysed or alienated; and yet very possibly they are hard workers in their own way, and have good eyesight for a flaw in a deed or a turn of the market. They have been to school and college, but all the time they had their eye on the medal; they have gone about in the world and mixed with clever people, but all the time they were thinking of their own affairs. As if a man’s soul were not too small to begin with, they have dwarfed and narrowed theirs by a life of all work and no play; until here they are at forty, with a listless attention, a mind vacant of all material of amusement, and not one thought to rub against another, while they wait for the train. Before he was breeched, he might have clambered on the boxes; when he was twenty, he would have stared at the girls; but now the pipe is smoked out, the snuff-box empty, and my gentleman sits bolt upright upon a bench, with lamentable eyes. This does not appeal to me as being Success in Life.”
How one of Sinclair Lewis’s short stories ended up at Disney, and in a film called Fun and Fancy Free, when Sinclair Lewis himself was none of the above, is a great mystery. If you have any information, please join the conversation.
Sinclair Lewis is best known for three novels: Main Street (1920), about stifling conformity in a Minnesota town, Babbit (1922), about a morally bankrupt business man, and Elmer Gantry (1927) the original crooked telemarketer. He was the first writer from the U.S. to win a Nobel Prize in literature.
How one of Sinclair Lewis’s short stories ended up at Disney, and in a film called Fun and Fancy Free, when Sinclair Lewis himself was none of the above, is a great mystery. If you have any information, please join the conversation.
Sinclair Lewis is best known for three novels: Main Street (1920), about stifling conformity in a Minnesota town, Babbit (1922), about a morally bankrupt business man, and Elmer Gantry (1927) the original crooked telemarketer. He was the first writer from the U.S. to win a Nobel Prize in literature.
Carl Barks is a legend in the history of Disney and of comic books. As Michial mentioned, he’s particularly beloved in Northern Europe. For example, The Carl Barks Collection, is what looks to be a gorgeous academic set of his works, that was only published in Norway, Denmark, Germany, Finland, and Sweden. Too bad I only read English!
Thankfully, if you are an English reader like me there is Fantagraphics. They are putting out the complete Donald Duck and Scrooge McDuck works that were written and illustrated by Barks – although they are not releasing them in chronological order, which is a little confusing. Also, no commentary as far as I can tell.
And, in great news for me, they are now being released through kindle and comixology, so mea-culpa. Last I checked that wasn’t true, but I’m happy to be wrong on that one.
The story of the Fisher King, a wounded king whose suffering affects his kingdom and creates a wasteland, has parallels to Happy Valley becoming desolate with the loss of the singing harp.
Update 05.07.2020 – Michial pointed out similar parallels to the enchantment that turns the handsome young prince into the Beast along with enchanting his entire castle, particularly the turning of angels into gargoyles.
Do characters like Jiminy Cricket and Timothy Mouse, the kind guides and advocates who help our hero along, have a history in literature – or are they an invention of Walt Disney’s story team? Michial saw Dante, or perhaps Elizabethan fools. Victoria spotted some parallels with guardianship in Dickens.
“A younger character both sheltered from the world and brought deeper into subcultury dark places by characters who are more familiar with the subcultury underworld place.”
Do characters like Jiminy Cricket and Timothy Mouse, the kind guides and advocates who help our hero along, have a history in literature – or are they an invention of Walt Disney’s story team? Michial saw Dante, or perhaps Elizabethan fools. Victoria spotted some parallels with guardianship in Dickens.
“A younger character both sheltered from the world and brought deeper into subcultury dark places by characters who are more familiar with the subcultury underworld place.”
Do characters like Jiminy Cricket and Timothy Mouse, the kind guides and advocates who help our hero along, have a history in literature – or are they an invention of Walt Disney’s story team? Michial saw Dante, or perhaps Elizabethan fools. Victoria spotted some parallels with guardianship in Dickens.
“A younger character both sheltered from the world and brought deeper into subcultury dark places by characters who are more familiar with the subcultury underworld place.”
It took us four episodes, but I feel like we are finally a legitimate member of the Christian Humanist Network now that we have a Dante reference. And to think we could have had it back during Pinocchio if I’d only asked Michial the right question: do characters like Jiminy Cricket and Timothy Mouse, the kind guides and advocates who help our hero along, have a history in literature – or are they an invention of Walt Disney’s story team? (You may recall that the use of Jiminy was how Disney cracked the story of Pinocchio. Pinocchio is so unsympathetic in the novel that translating the book to screen was a challenge. Jiminy then became the prototype of a kind of character that we see throughout the Disney canon – including Timothy Mouse.) Michial sees a lineage all the way back to Virgil in Dante.
“The difference is Dante respects Virgil”
Kay Nielsen did the artwork for the Ava Maria sequence in Fantasia, which is one of my favorite moments in the Disney Canon.
“This finely crafted reprint restores the stunning detail and artistry of Nielsen’s images to their original splendor. Featuring 46 illustrations, including many enlarged details from Nielsen’s rare original watercolors, the book is printed in five colors with a lovingly designed slipcase. Three accompanying essays, illustrated with dozens of rare and previously unseen artworks by Nielsen, explore the history of Norwegian folktales, Nielsen’s life and work, and how this masterpiece came to be.”
The book Michial recommends for increasing your knowledge and appreciation of classical music.
Sure Michial says not to buy it and that he hates it – but Stravinsky was also busy selling the rights for Renard, Fireworks, and The Firebird to Walt Disney as he panned Fantasia – so, you know, words aren’t everything. As far as I’m concerned, it is THE book on John Updike.
Who knew that Marx was familiar enough with Fantasia to reference the Sorcerer’s Apprentice in his book? I’m not saying Marx was a time traveler, but I’m not not saying it either.
You could read this book critically, but if you really want it to shape your desires and imagination – read it for fun!
Magic that trains toward a Christian metaphysics.
The Professor is the happy ending to Alice’s story. The adult who experiences the magic of childhood, and then encourages it in the next generation of children.
“Logic!” said the Professor half to himself. “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools? There are only three possibilities. Either your sister is telling lies, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. You know she doesn’t tell lies and it is obvious that she is not mad. For the moment then and unless any further evidence turns up, we must assume that she is telling the truth.”
But how could it be true, sir?” said Peter.
“Why do you say that?” asked the Professor.
“Well, for one thing,” said Peter, “if it was real why doesn’t everyone find this country every time they go to the wardrobe? I mean, there was nothing there when we looked; even Lucy didn’t pretend there was.”
“What has that to do with it?” said the Professor.
“Well, sir, if things are real, they’re there all the time.”
“Are they?” said the Professor; and Peter did not know quite what to say.
“But there was no time,” said Susan. “Lucy had had no time to have gone anywhere, even if there was such a place. She came running after us the very moment we were out of the room. It was less than a minute, and she pretended to have been away for hours.”
“That is the very thing that makes her story so likely to be true,” said the Professor. “If there really is a door in this house that leads to some other world (and I should warn you that this is a very strange house, and even I know very little about it)—if, I say, she had got into another world, I should not be at all surprised to find that the other world had a separate time of its own; so that however long you stayed there it would never take up any of our time. On the other hand, I don’t think many girls of her age would invent that idea for themselves. If she had been pretending, she would have hidden for a reasonable time before coming out and telling her story.”
“But do you really mean, sir,” said Peter, “that there could be other worlds—all over the place, just round the corner—like that?”
“Nothing is more probable,” said the Professor, taking off his spectacles and beginning to polish them, while he muttered to himself, “I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.”
Is stubbornness a more accurate representation of childhood than naïveté? Does stubbornness provide more interesting moral quandaries?
Christianity Today subscribers can read an excerpt from Guroian’s chapter on Pinocchio here.
Read this, and then write that paper on how Jiminy Cricket as both conscience and narrator embodies Alasdair’s ideas of needing to know your place within a story to know the right way to behave.
One of the worst novels Michial has ever read. Get it for free and judge for yourself.
“The fox knows just when to to throw a knowing glance, and the cat is a malicious dolt with an instinct for mischief. Neither is subject to the eruptions of sheer evil that determine Stromboli’s personality; they are self made villains, he’s a force of nature.”
Is this the only 1000+ page novel worth reading? Michial thinks so.
Do the Dwarfs align with any of the Enneagram numbers? Is Grumpy an 8? Is Doc a 5?
A somewhat close retelling of the original. No dancing to death though.
The Victorians invented children and disturbing children’s novels.
The Victorians invented children and disturbing children’s novels.
I went ahead and included the annotated Martin Gardner version here as well, because as Michial rightly said – unless you’re a Victorian or Victorian scholar, there is a lot you will miss culturally just reading the Lewis Carroll text.
Civilizing affect of women in American literature exhibit C: Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom is fleeing south to get away of the choking northern cities full of women.
Civilizing affect of women in American literature exhibit B: Huck sails down the Mississippi because he doesn’t want to be civilized by Widow Douglass. But Huckleberry is also a bit of a layabout fitting into the line of noble hobos leading up to Jiminy Cricket.
Civilizing affect of women in American literature exhibit A: Rip Van Winkle goes off into the woods to get away from his horrible shrewish wife.
Michial traces the ideal of idleness that Jiminy Cricket and hobos fit into in American culture back to at least Rip Van Winkle.
This classic came out in 1937, just months before Snow White debuted. And the rivalry for who controls our imagination of Dwarfs has been raging ever since.
Sing to manage your fears, just like Sam Gamgee and Snow White.
Josh’s conception of pre-Tolkien and Pre-Disney dwarfs comes from this series of YA books. Even if that is a wildly inaccurate and ignorant assumption to make (probably) the story is still pretty fun.
Read along with the Christian Humanists at christianhumanist.org
It’s not a hagiography. Sorry I butchered your name Mr. Neal Gabler.
If you are interested, you can read the ever expanding list of passages I’ve highlighted on my goodreads profile.